ALT WEEKLIES THRIVE EVEN WITHOUT ME

posted by James Reel

Hi! Remember me? Don’t tell me you didn’t notice I was gone. I took a long weekend to spirit my wife away to California to visit friends and guzzle Napa Valley wine. Now I’m back and settled in, but because I was away I didn’t contribute anything to the latest Tucson Weekly, so I won’t even post a link to that publication because why would you want to read it if I’m not in it?

More seriously, I ran across an interview with Dan Savage, the editorial of an alt weekly in Seattle and the author of the notorious sex-advice column “Savage Love,” which is carried by many alt weeklies, including Tucson’s. Most of the interview concerns his work as a sex columnist, and you should not click on that link if you are proudly prudish. But toward the end, Savage offers some provocative commentary on the advantages of alt weeklies over mainstream dailies. Here’s the essential stuff, but be forewarned that he uses the f-word:

I think alt-weeklies have more and more of a role to play—particularly as dailies continue to try and swim around with an anvil under each arm. One anvil is objectivity and the other is "family newspaper." Alt-weeklies have the luxury of publishing writing by adults, to adults, and for adults. And that's a real advantage. It's a style advantage, it's an attitudinal advantage, and it's also an urban advantage. … Alt-weeklies are really just about advocacy journalism and truth-telling, and they engage in arguments and throw bombs in the way that daily papers can't allow themselves to. I mean, daily newspapers all need to put "fuck" in a headline above the fold one day—it'll solve all their problems. That's my prescription. And then in one fell swoop they'll get rid of all those 80-year-old subscribers who won't let them drop "Blondie." Catering to the 80-year-olds? Where's that getting newspapers? Making sure there's nothing in your paper that's inappropriate for an eighty-year-old to read?

THE LOST AND THE DEAD

posted by James Reel

In the latest Tucson Weekly, I review very good productions of newish plays with local connections. First, what you might call a “found” work:

Two years ago, after viewing a video of a New York production of the musical stage work _Lost_, I peered into my crystal ball and declared, "Arizona Onstage Productions could surely do a brilliant job with the material." (See "Finding 'Lost,' Nov. 9, 2006.) I was right. The company has mounted a heartfelt production of this dark fairy tale, scored by former Tucsonan Jessica Grace Wing. In her 20s, Wing moved to New York, where she directed short films and wrote off-Broadway theater scores. In 2003, barely into her 30s, she succumbed to colon cancer, but not before completing _Lost_; she worked on it until literally hours before she died. Less than a month later, _Lost_ was mounted in New York to highly favorable reviews, but it seems that it had not been performed in the intervening five years. The available libretto and lyrics didn't reflect changes made for the New York International Fringe Festival production, and the orchestration, which Wing didn't have time to complete to her satisfaction, needed work. Arizona Onstage's Kevin Johnson and his team fashioned a new edition, polishing the orchestration until the afternoon of last week's Tucson opening. Now the work is in shape to travel from one company to another, and it certainly deserves to.

You can read the full review here, and then proceed to my evaluation of a new play by Tucsonan Gavin Kayner:

Are we defined by our stories, or by our actions? That's a question posed by a character in the new Gavin Kayner play _Noche de los Muertos_, set toward the end of the Mexican revolutionary period. The storytellers are adherents to the Catholic church; the men and women of action are the secularists behind the revolution. Which of those two forces, incompatible when pushed to their heights of fervor, would set the course for 20th-century Mexico? _Noche de los Muertos_ is the latest offering from Beowulf Alley Theatre Company, and it opened just in time for the Day of the Dead, a time to honor one's ancestors, who are said to visit the altars we prepare and nibble on the snacks we leave, although, unlike Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, they leave nothing in return; having given life to us some decades before seems a sufficient enough gesture. _Noche_ is set on the Day of the Dead in 1927 in the town of Magdalena, not far south of Nogales. A young schoolteacher and her entourage have arrived to take over public education from the local priest, one of only about 40 in Mexico who have not yet been killed or driven from their posts by the post-revolutionary government and its supporters. But Catholic partisanship remains strong in rural areas and frontier towns like Magdalena, and the priest refuses to give up his post. In his opinion, and that of supporters like the woman who runs the local cantina, it's the teacher who must be driven out.

Learn how Kayner develops his themes and what the Beowulf Alley team does with them here.

CENTRIST MEDIA

posted by James Reel

I haven't blogged in the past few days because the temptation has been too great to make some sort of political comment, and this is not a political blog. You can probably guess where I stand on many issues from the mere fact that I write for an alternative weekly--but it's not safe for you to make assumptions about anyone's politics just because they work in public broadcasting. Here at KUAT radio, I'd guess that the liberals and conservatives are pretty evenly balanced. (I count Libertarians and their sympathizers as conservatives: free-market Republicans who lean liberal on social issues.) So don't let me hear you complain about the "liberal media." What's the most talked-about cable news network? The arch-conservative Fox News. Which direction do almost all the talk-radio hosts you're likely to hear lean? Right. Have the nation's major newspapers gone easy on the Bush Administration after having obsessed over trivial and non-existent issues during the Clinton Administration? Obviously. There is a very strong, loud conservative voice in the American media, and only in comparison to that does centrist public radio seem to skew to the left.

SHELKO VS STAR

posted by James Reel

The Arizona Daily Star has been slamming the downtown Rio Nuevo project pretty heavily this year, documenting huge expenditures with few results. Now Greg Shelko, the director of the project, is fighting back with a response to the most recent Star article (now gone from the free part of the Web site). I don't know how much play Shelko's response will get, so I'll post it here (distributed by Ward 1 City Council member Regina Romero):

Many of you have read recent coverage by the Sunday, October 27, 2008 Arizona Daily Star of the City’s Rio Nuevo project has been inaccurate, misleading, biased, absent essential facts and fraught with the selective use of others to support the reporter’s opinions about the redevelopment of downtown. There are (4) key areas of concern. False Reports of Audit Activity The City’s financial management systems meet all professional governmental accounting standards (GASB; http://www.gasb.org/), withstand annual independent audit scrutiny, and are always deemed proper. The Star’s assertion that it has performed “the first public audit” (July 27, 2008) is false. The Star’s Arbitrary and Misleading Accounting The Star reports Rio Nuevo expenditures in ways that do not accurately reflect how funds were spent. The amount spent on construction is around $30 million- nearly twice what was reported by the Star! That’s a big difference and seriously misinforms the readers. The Star made much ado about “public relations” expenditures, implied wrongdoing and solicited harsh comments from members of the public. The Star failed to report that those “public relations” expenditures included legally required public notices published in the Star, neighborhood notification mailings, Spanish language materials, and workshops for Citizen Advisory Committee members- expenditures that are necessary to keep the public informed of meetings and enable public participation in the process. This reporting is dishonest and a disservice to the public. Biased Allegations and Purpose of the District The Star reported that we are spending money on “things that while not prohibited, aren’t what excited voters” in 1999. This recurring theme is simply not true. The stated purpose of Rio Nuevo tax increment multipurpose facilities district is to support multifaceted development including cultural and recreational amenities and improvements, historic recreations, new and expanded museums, mixed use development, and the Tucson Convention Center (TCC) Arena. These are quite clearly the purposes for which the money has been used and how bond authorization requires future funds to be spent. Lack of Information about Progress: The Star never reports in any meaningful (quantifiable) detail what private activity is taking place, the time it takes to revitalize a downtown, or the impacts of the financial markets and state of the economy on those efforts. We have spent $37.1 million on design and construction. We have spent $11.3 million on real estate acquisition and archaeological and environmental clearances. We have spent $3.6 million on planning activities. These are necessary predevelopment investments the City must make if it’s going to realize $2 to $3 billion invested in downtown over the years and decades to come. Although the Star repeatedly wants to use the 1999 vote as the starting line for measuring performance, (1) tax increment revenue (money) to support projects and planning did not start accumulating until 2004. (2) without the revenue extension approved the State Legislature in 2006, the City would not have the financial capacity to deliver on museums and other cultural attractions, hotels, an arena, and the infrastructure necessary to leverage private sector reinvestment. As we all know, the challenges to downtown revitalization are extraordinary and complex. The Star’s routine visitations to the past, and its consistently biased reporting on downtown affairs, are a disservice to the community, financially harmful to downtown stakeholders, and undermines years of planning and investment. The Star’s irresponsible journalism is not only replete with violations of the Star’s own ethical code. It is also a disservice to the community. And it is also financially damaging to property owners, businesses and investors in the downtown.

CD REVIEW: MUSICA SONORA/DIA DE LOS MUERTOS

posted by James Reel

The Day of the Dead is upon us, a fine time to call to your attention a CD by the local early-music vocal ensemble Musica Sonora. The group has available a CD recorded during a 2006 concert featuring Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Officium Defunctorum, or Requiem Mass, and it’s a perfect tie-in with Day of the Dead activities in the Spanish-speaking New World.

For a bit of background, let’s turn to the program notes distributed at the concert:

Día de los Muertos [is] a tradition celebrated particularly in Mexico and parts of Central America and the United States, in which the souls of the dead visit the living for a short time to eat favorite foods and commune with the living. In pre-Columbian times, the festivities were held for a month, but after the advent of the Spanish in the New World, the tradition was blended with elements of Catholicism and restricted to two days. Dead children return to their families on Nov. 1 (All Saints’ Day) and deceased adults visit on Nov. 2 (All Souls’ Day). Family graves are cleaned and altars prepared, decorated with marigolds, copal incense, candles photographs of the deceased, and special food. Children (living but perhaps dead, as well) eat sweets in the shape of skulls and _pan de muerto_ is found in local bakeries. To honor the dead and their living loved ones, we offer a performance of this Requiem Mass. In the Catholic tradition, the Office of the Dead is said on All Souls’ Day for the benefit of souls in purgatory and at other times for a particular dead person, and dates from the eighth or ninth centuries, actually predating the Requiem Mass itself. It includes psalms, passages from scripture and other elements, divided into Vespers, Mass, Matins and Lauds. The Mass for the Dead, also called the Requiem Mass after the first words of the introit (“Requiem aeternam”), dates from the 14th century. Unlike the usual sort of Mass of the Catholic liturgy, in which the lectionary changes with the church calendar, the Requiem Mass is fixed, with texts specific to the form. More joyful Mass elements, such as the Gloria and Credo, are omitted. With Victoria’s Officium Defunctorum as a centerpiece, our program extends back in time to include works from Requiem Masses by Cristobal de Morales and forward to instrumental composers of the 17th century.

One of those other composers is Francisco de Peraza (1564-1598, making him about a generation younger than Victoria and two generations the junior of Morales). This program includes two short organ tientos of Morales, played by Jeffri Sanders; the music sounds a bit exotic, suggesting at least a faint Middle Eastern influence (don’t forget the centuries-long Moorish domination of Spain, which had ended less than a century before this music was written). As for the Victoria Mass, it includes a great deal of lovely, smoothly flowing polyphony, as well as some segments of plainchant—including the famous Dies Irae, the “Day of Wrath” motif that would later find its way into several Romantic-era works, including nearly every major composition of Rachmaninov.

The Musica Sonora performances under the direction of Christina Jarvis are quite fine; I only wish that the group had been able to include program notes, rather than just track listings, in its four-page CD booklet. I assume the disc is available only at Musica Sonora concerts and through its members and director; you’ll find contact information at the group’s Web site.

ADVICE COLUMNS AND CHINESE MENUS

posted by James Reel

Time for links to my latest contributions to the Tucson Weekly. First, some advice about the latest ATC production:

Be honest: Would you really want to spend an evening with an advice columnist? By definition, she would be a know-it-all and maybe even a scold, dispensing opinions in such a steady stream that somehow, the whole encounter would revolve around her, rather than the people she would advise. Yet Ann Landers, or at least the version of her onstage courtesy of Arizona Theatre Company, turns out to be a more than tolerable companion. She's frank and extroverted and funny, but never so full of herself that she forgets that her job is to provide comfort and guidance to other people--people whose troubles may initially seem peculiar, but who have a great deal in common with each other, and with Landers herself. The famed, deceased advice columnist, whose real name was Eppie Lederer, is the subject of a one-woman show by David Rambo. ATC's production, which opened last week, is deftly directed by Samantha K. Wyer and boasts a splendid scenic design by Tom Burch, but the prime attraction is the woman on stage, Nancy Dussault. The term "veteran actress" is too often merely a euphemism for "old-timer," but Dussault is a veteran in the true sense: a deeply experienced performer who can slip into a role like this and bring it fully to life without displaying a single little actorly trick. Dussault is so engaging and believable that the play, _The Lady With All the Answers_, often seems more substantial than it really is.

The full review is here. Meanwhile, over in the Chow section, I scout out a Chinese restaurant:

I'd heard mixed reports about Ba-Dar Chinese Restaurant on East Broadway Boulevard. Ten years ago, Rebecca Cook, then the Weekly's able restaurant critic, paid one quick visit to the place and remarked, "On first impressions, the restaurant maintains a solid 'as it should be' with something extra in terms of variety." Since then, I've come across comments declaring that Ba-Dar offers the best Chinese food in Tucson, and that it offers the worst. Ethnic restaurants usually go wrong when they pander to bland middle-American tastes, so on a recent visit to Ba-Dar, my dining group (including a China-born friend) pretty much shied away from the standard menu (fairly extensive, but not overwhelming) and instead ordered items mainly from the Chinese menu, which is available only by request.

Find out what happened here.