MEDIA MONOPOLY

posted by James Reel

    Seems like I wrote about half of the latest Tucson Weekly, and I’m not confined to the arts section. Oh, sure, there are two theater stories, including a review of a very good Borderlands show …

    Let's dispense right away with the silly question of whether an Anglo should write about characters of other ethnicities. Of course she should; it's the business of writers who aren't trapped in autobiography to imagine and understand other lives, lives of people necessarily much different from the writers.
    And if we enacted some foolish no-imagination rule, we'd lack Dust Eaters, Julie Jensen's fine drama about four generations of Goshute Indians and their white Mormon neighbors.
    Borderlands Theater is presenting the play in a marvelously acted production that maintains narrative and emotional coherence even though each scene brings a substantially different cast of characters.

    … the rest of which you can read here, before continuing on to a preview of a comedy ripped from today’s … er … e-mail:

    It's the inescapable "4-1-9" scam (named after the Nigerian statute that, ineffectively, outlawed it), a descendant of the good old "Spanish Prisoner" con. A few people fall for it and get bilked out of hundreds or thousands of dollars; one or two have even been murdered. Most of us just delete the messages ... day after day after day.
    Not Dean Cameron. He wrote back and scammed the spammers.

    Find out what happened next here. Then, if you’re so inclined, find out what I think about Jennifer Lee Carrell’s Shakespeare thriller, Interred with Their Bones, in the book-review section, and my opinion of Mona Lisa Corleone Sicilian Restaurant back in the Chow section.
    While you’re doing that, I think I’ll go take a nap.