PLUTO

posted by James Reel

    If the new definition of “planet” just devised by the International Astronomy Union (IAU) is ratified next week, Pluto will retain its status as a planet after all. A diminutive planet, though; a new category, “pluton,” is being created for Pluto and three other bodies in the solar system that are just a bit undernourished to count as full-strength planets. (“Pluton” sounds more like a particle than a planet, doesn’t it?)
    I have nothing against Pluto itself, but I was hoping that it might be downgraded simply so we could divorce British composer Colin Matthews’ “Pluto” movement from Holst’s The Planets. Around 2000, conductor Kent Nagano unwisely asked Matthews to “complete” Holst’s suite with a piece depicting the one planet that hadn’t been discovered when Holst wrote the original work. This was a very bad idea for several reasons. First, The Planets has nothing to do with astronomy; as I’ve been belaboring for years, and as Tim Mangan pointed out in a recent concert review, The Planets is about astrology. That’s why, for example, Mars is presented as “The Bringer of War”—that’s the planet’s astrological association. (If Holst had intended a tour of the physical solar system, wouldn’t he have written an “Earth” movement?)
    So not only is Pluto conceptually out of place, but tacking anything onto the end of The Planets is a horrible idea; extra music ruins that long, ethereal, death-haunted fade-out of the women’s chorus at the end of “Neptune.” Besides which, Matthews’ music sounds nothing like Holst’s. Matthews’ “Pluto” deserves to be heard, but only as an independent piece.
    If you want to learn about the solar system, turn not to music but to various reader-friendly books by my astronomer friend William K. Hartmann.

UNASKED QUESTION

posted by James Reel

    I should turn this into a recurring feature: What important question has a reporter failed to ask? Here’s the latest example.
    The story of the poor dog found stuck up to his neck in a muddy wash after the recent heavy rains has ended sadly. The dog, called Clay by his rescuers, has apparently died from tick fever. He received good care at a private facility for the last week of his life—after having been rescued from the pound, where he’d been taken after passersby pulled him out of the muck.
    According to the Arizona Daily Star, “Clay was taken to the Pima Animal Care Center but did not receive veterinary treatment for three days.” What? Here was a dog whose plight had been highly publicized, languishing with baseball-sized mats in his fur and a vicious tick infestation, vomiting mud and too weak to stand, and he did not receive medical attention? The Pima Animal “Care” Center may have reasons or at least excuses for the neglect, but they’re not detailed in the article, and there’s no sign that the reporter or her editors even thought to ask. This is going to be another public-relations disaster for the pound, and the Star should have looked into it before readers write angry letters calling for an investigation.

DRESSED DOWN

posted by James Reel

    The Tucson Symphony has sent its subscribers some pointers on concert deportment. One item:

Concert Dress: Wear what makes you feel comfortable! According to a recent survey, 70% of men wear open shirt and slacks, 30% wear a jacket and tie. Of the women surveyed, 60% wear dresses and 40% wear slacks.

    Orchestras and opera companies, attempting to make their fare more accessible, have been getting the word out that there’s no dress code, implied or otherwise, at the concert hall. This is good insofar as starving students and fixed-income seniors needn’t stay home for fear they’ll be ridiculed for not being able to afford fancy dress. Still, I think people should dress as well as they can when they go to a concert. If the best they can really do is a clean button-front shirt and jeans, fine. But a lot of orchestra patrons can do better than that. Why, I wonder, would a guy who has a halfway decent wardrobe want to show up for symphony in a grubby sweatshirt? Never mind showing respect for the musicians, who are required to dress to the nines for our benefit; what about having enough self-respect to clean yourself up before you go out in public?
    Concerts shouldn’t be exclusive events that bar the “wrong” kind of people—those who haven’t reached the upper rungs of society. But concerts are big productions, with dozens of exceptionally talented people working hard (and usually for insufficient compensation) to make the best case they can for some exceptional music. Shouldn’t audience members acknowledge what special occasions these are by fixing themselves up to the best of their abilities?

THE PLOT THINS?

posted by James Reel

    The only amusing thing about yesterday’s rout of two dozen people accused of planning to blow up airliners headed for America is that newscasters refer to an “alleged plot.” OK—journalists are trained not to prejudice a case in their reporting; news reports should not refer to “perpetrators” or “robbers” or “murderers” unless and until they have been convicted. Meanwhile, they’re just “suspects.” (But please, not “alleged suspects”; arrest doesn’t prove guilt, but it does officially place someone under suspicion.) Still, there’s something odd about hearing newscasters talk about an “alleged plot.” I’m not sure why, especially since there’s a long history of officials fabricating conspiracies in order to discredit their opponents, or shift attention away from a real problem. And, of course, our own FBI has great trouble distinguishing ordinary artists from bioterrorists, so I suppose “alleged plot” is, indeed, the best way to phrase it.
    I do wonder, though, why the British roundup of all those suspects sent the U.S. Department of Homeland Security into Keystone Kops mode at American airports. According to Michael Jackson, the deputy director of Homeland Security, “the conspiracy was directed at airlines with direct nonstop flights from the United Kingdom to the United States, including American Airlines, United Airlines and Continental” (that’s not a direct quote; it’s how a news service phrased it). So if planes leaving the U.K. were being targeted, why the contrived chaos at American airports?
    I hope the system is running smoother by September, when I’ll travel to Italy and back … via London. I have no desire to be blown up in midair, so I value reasonable and effective security protocols, but much of what goes on at airports looks like bureacratic bluster and macho posturing. Why weren’t any reporters yesterday asking if these measures were truly relevant to legitimate security concerns? Proper journalistic skepticism should go beyond using careful phrases like “alleged plot.”

SCREENWRITING 101

posted by James Reel

    In today’s Tucson Weekly, I interview Blake Snyder, author of the latest book that tells you how to write a commercially successful Hollywood screenplay. He seems like an exceptionally nice guy, but I fear my inner snark emerged once or twice early in the article. Here’s the beginning:

    Fifty years ago, anybody with any intellectual ambition spent odd stolen hours writing the Great American Novel. Of course, the novels usually weren't so great, rarely got finished and almost never got published.
    Today, everybody's working on a screenplay. These supposedly fabulous movie scripts rarely get finished and almost never get turned into movies. But that doesn't stop everybody from wanting to be a screenwriter.
    "It looks easy," says screenwriter Blake Snyder. "And guess what? It is easy. My earliest inspiration was seeing movies that were not very good and thinking, I could do that."
    Write a movie that was not very good? "No, I mean I could do better."

    Read the rest here.

GLASS HOUSES

posted by James Reel

    The Big Boss here at KUAT is campaigning to beautify and professionalize the appearance of the spaces where civilians are likely to pass by, including the corridor that skirts the KUAT-FM booth and the radio newsroom. As of yesterday, beautification and professionalization have come to mean, in part, opening the vertical blinds that shield us from the gaze of passersby. This is fine with me; I started opening the blinds during my shift a few weeks ago. Since all the work spaces were shifted around during the big remodeling in the 1990s, the FM booth hasn’t had a window to the outside world. True, when we were positioned along an exterior wall, our sole window was way up just below the ceiling (our floor is half underground) and looked out upon a typical UA red brick wall, with a fringe of greenery along the bottom. But it was something. Now, with the blinds open, I can look out into the corridor in front of me, which doesn’t produce any natural light, but at least it does reduce the claustrophobia.
    Naturally, some employees are not happy with this decision. One guy used to be harrassed by a stalker, and he’d prefer not to be on display should the malefactor ever return. Another hates the way people make monkey faces as they pass by on the other side of the glass. Yes, that can be annoying, but I’ve found that over the past few weeks those people have gotten used to the open blinds during my shift, and now all I get is the occasional friendly wave. (The sole remaining offender is my immediate supervisor, a notorious prankster.) As for students and other strangers walking down the hall, they do everything they can to avoid eye contact, although many of them are legitimately curious about what a radio station looks like.
    I probably have far fewer problems being on display than most of the other people around here. Radio is a very private profession; we speak to thousands of people, but we do it in physical isolation. Me, between my two stints in the radio biz I spent several years working at the morning paper, in a big open newsroom similar to what you see in movies like All the President’s Men. There’s no privacy at all in such places, and there’s always somebody sitting six feet away from you, not even in a separate cubicle, who can see and hear everything you’re up to. You get used to it, and start to ignore each other’s activities, or stop caring that you’re surrounded by potential eavesdroppers. Here at the radio station, we continue to have a measure of privacy insofar as a double-pane window still separates us from co-workers and gawkers. I predict that most of my colleagues will get used to the new open-blinds policy in a couple of weeks. The toughest thing will be remembering not to scratch themselves in an unseemly way.