COYOTE CAROL

posted by James Reel

    A few years ago I heard a pack of coyotes howling on Christmas Eve, and was pleased to think of them as wild carolers, going wash to bosque with their own seasonal greetings. But what, exactly, would coyotes, good pagans all, sing about at this time of year? Here’s what I came up with, sung to the tune of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”:

God bless you, hairy cattlemen,
and hirsute shepherds, too.
More meager would our mealtimes be
Without the likes of you,
Who’ve introduced into our realm
That tempting baa and moo.
Oh, thank goodness for human fools who keep
cattle and sheep.
All we ask is:
Please don’t shoot us from your Jeep.

CHILDREN OF THE CORN

posted by James Reel

    My contribution to the current Tucson Weekly:

    Kevin Johnson, the man who has produced local performances of such socially deviant musicals as Assassins (about president-killers) and Ruthless! (about a little girl who tries to murder her way to stage stardom), wants to get his clutches on your children.
    Yes, as an offshoot of Arizona Onstage Productions, whose idea of a fundraiser is a screening of an opera inspired by trash-TV host Jerry Springer, Johnson has formed Arizona Youth Onstage. And the group's first show this spring will be ... Annie.

    You’ll find the full explanation here.

MEME OF FOUR

posted by James Reel

    Every so often, a “meme” infects the blogosphere; bloggers provide personal responses to a list that's floating around, with one blogger often tagging another to keep the meme going. Our Girl in Chicago has effectively tagged everyone, so I have no choice but to participate.
    First, some caveats and elaborations. This was an incredibly difficult task for me, starting with the movie and television questions. I tend not to watch or read anything more than once, so there’s really no such thing as a movie I could “watch over and over.” But let’s pretend. The first and fourth movies I list are big epics that deeply reward all the time you have to invest in them; the second has scene after scene of little acts of decency that manage to choke me up; the third and fourth are visually inventive and full of remarkable atmosphere. Two of them are in French, which makes me look either smart or unpatriotic.
    As for the TV shows, I watch almost nothing (I use my big plasma screen for movies), and I just don’t watch reruns. So I listed the one program I do watch, and those that reliably snag my attention when I’m channel-surfing in a hotel.
    So here we go:
    Four jobs you've had in your life: record store clerk, theater critic, newspaper editor, webmaster.
    Four movies you could watch over and over: The Godfather (Parts 1 and 2, but not 3), La Gloire de mon père, City of Lost Children, Lord of the Rings trilogy.
    Four places you've lived: Yuma, Arizona; Midland, California; Prescott Valley, Arizona; Tucson, Arizona.
    Four TV shows you love to watch: 24. And if I watched reruns, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Babylon 5, The Twilight Zone.
    Four places you've been on vacation: Chaco Canyon, Prague, Fez, San Francisco.
    Four websites you visit daily: Salon, About Last Night, Arts Journal, Dilbert.
    Four of your favorite foods: anything involving pasta, palak paneer, green salads with berries or citrus, wine (which I consider a component of a meal, not an intoxicant).
    Four places you'd rather be: Provence, San Francisco, southern Utah, an adobe house in Tucson’s Barrio Viejo.

WHAT CLASSICAL RADIO CRISIS?

posted by James Reel

    The Hartford Courant is running an interesting article surveying the wide availability of classical music (not just wall-to-wall Vivaldi) on the Connecticut airwaves, and wondering why people are wringing their hands about the sad state of classical radio. One of the story’s sources is Bob Goldfarb, that rare radio consultant who understands and likes classical music, and has his head affixed to the proper end of his body. (I’d often encounter him at concerts when he lived in Tucson, briefly, about 15 years ago.) Says Goldfarb, who has worked for Teldec and run the commercial classical station in Seattle and should know what he’s talking about:

"There is a belief in the public-radio station system that growth is good, and total revenue is more important than net revenue. By those measures, classical music doesn't stack up well. … But one of the things that has been remarkable is that when public radio and TV was conceived in the late '60s, it was understood that being a public service meant filling in gaps of conventional programming. Public service now has morphed into reaching to more listeners."

    In other words, many of the people who run public radio stations, in pursuit of bigger and bigger audience-fundraising goals, have abandoned their mandated audience. The true crisis in classical radio is this betrayal of the American public.

SHEPHERDS AND ZANIES

posted by James Reel

    Two new plays opened in Tucson last weekend. Well, actually, they’re old plays, with a twist. First is Borderlands Theater’s annual update of the old Latin American pastorela, which somehow in the Tucson Weekly editing process got turned into “pastorella”:

    So you walk into this family theater show, and they hand you a glossary so you'll understand all the references. Right after Harry Potter comes Pol Pot; the last few items, in order, are Idi Amin, Randy Graf, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Paris Hilton and FEMA. On your way out, after the cast of shepherds and angels and devils has sung Christmas carols in Spanish and kids in the audience have whacked candy out of a piñata, the ushers try to give you a yard sign that says "Humanitarian aid is never a crime."
    It's right-wing talk-radio's worst nightmare: A Tucson Pastorella, telling the shepherds' role in the Christmas story while exposing children and adults alike to 90 minutes of cockeyed liberal outrage and frisky community activism. The shepherds are undocumented Mexican migrant workers, and God is on their side.

    You’ll find the full review here. Meanwhile, a group new to me takes up an old script:

    Tucson Theatre Ensemble, just launching its third season, had evaded my attention until now. I wasn't sure what to expect when I was invited to its production of Carlo Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters, but suspected I'd be seeing the work of a dedicated but amateurish community group.
    The good news is that the company's Goldoni show is thoroughly respectable and generally enjoyable. It isn't as polished as productions by the likes of Invisible Theatre or newcomer Beowulf Alley, but there's some good talent at work here, especially in the principal roles. The main problem, aside from some stiffness in the minor parts and a few awkward interactions, is something that could afflict any company: an uneven tone, an uncertainty at the ensemble's various creative levels about exactly what sort of comedy this should be.

    The remainder awaits you here.

LEARNING TO SAY "MAYBE LATER"

posted by James Reel

    When bloggers blog about being too busy to blog, I wonder why they didn’t take the time instead to blog about something other than not blogging. But now I understand; I feel that I owe you an explanation of why my blogging is so spotty these days. (Sorry; that sounds like a medical problem.)
    The trouble is, I’ve been busy. My work at KUAT constitutes only about 45 percent of my income; the rest flows from my work with the printed word. As the Tucson Weekly’s arts editor, every week I write one or two articles (mostly reviews of plays) and do light editing on one or two other stories. I contribute 1,000 words a week to the All Music Guide (mini-bios of composers, and program notes on compositions). I’m billed as a “contributing editor” to Strings magazine, which means I have one or two or three or maybe even four articles plus a couple of CD reviews in every issue of that monthly magazine. I write longer reviews and features for the bimonthly Fanfare magazine. Once or twice a month I do a couple of hours of proofreading for Madden, the company that puts out glossy magazines and visitor publications like Tucson Guide. About once a month I proofread and sometimes index a book for Rio Nuevo, a local publisher of books of regional interest. And during the downtime from all this, I write for other publications.
    I never have to pitch story ideas to editors. At the Weekly, I do whatever I want. Otherwise, editors e-mail me or call me with assignments. I’m not in prestigious magazines like the New Yorker (I wonder why they never call), but it’s an easy and reasonably lucrative life, and laziness and greed are my two strongest motivating forces. This may be the only profession that makes them compatible.
    Last month, the assignments started piling up. It happened around the time I was appearing in a short-run play at Invisible Theatre, essentially portraying myself as a heckler in Susan Claassen’s A Conversation with Edith Head. I had maybe 30 lines scattered through the show, but rehearsals and performances kept punching holes in my schedule for a week, and I never quite regained my equilibrium. By the beginning of this month, I had a pile of assignments that I really needed to finish off, but were showing no signs of coming to completion. I’d already done the research and interviews for several pieces, but hadn’t found the right time to sit down and write the articles. (Most of these things I can toss off in no more than two hours, once the interviews are done, so it isn’t as if I have to struggle with the muse for days on end.)
    Finally, last weekend, I sorted out my schedule and figured I could easily finish off several pieces already in the works this week, pull together by the end of the month/year two or three other articles they’ve been waiting for at Strings, make substantial progress on a book about the Navajo reservation I’m doing some heavy editorial work on for Rio Nuevo, fulfill all my usual weekly commitments, and start fresh in January with a couple of big pieces on the Bach cello suites and violinist Kyoko Takezawa. After devoting most of Saturday to household stuff, all I’d have to do on Sunday would be skip the concert being presented by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music (of which I’m vice president), stay home, polish off a piece for Strings on adding pizzazz to your viola playing, complete a potential February cover article for Stage Directions on the new Mesa Arts Center (that’s where I was last Wednesday, instead of on the air), and write two theater reviews for the Weekly. Which I did.
    But then I got a call from the editor of Fanfare, who announced that the magazine’s Webmaster had just died; would I take over the job? OK, fine, even though that means learning new software and having one more little thing to do every two days and something big to do every two months. On Monday, an editor from a local publication I haven’t written for before called to ask me to do a particular story, due the middle of next week. Sorry; no time for what would amount to a little investigative piece with so short a deadline, given everything else I was up to. I recommended another writer, and the editor said she might check with her, but she might also just hold the assignment until I had more time. Gee, thanks. Not this year.
    Then the editor at Rio Nuevo e-mailed me, asking if I could come in the next day to do the final proof on a new little book about poisonous critters, then compile the index. Sorry, no time this week. Well, what if I did the index over the weekend? It’s just a little book. OK, OK, I’d do the index, later, but not the proofing.
    Then late yesterday the editor of a local publication for which I’ve written fairly regularly called with an assignment, due early next week (he always calls about a week before something is due). This would require less work than the piece I’d turned down the day before, a couple of phone interviews, a little Internet research, maybe a drive by a building downtown rather than actually venturing inside it if I’m going to keep my time down. The whole thing, including the writing, would take only two or three hours. OK, but no way could I turn it in by Tuesday, since I wouldn’t even be able to think about doing this until about then. So I got an extra day. Thrilling.
    My problem, obviously, is that I’ve never learned to say “no,” but I am apparently getting better at saying “later,” which is fine until “later” becomes “now.”
    So there you have it, my too-busy-to-blog post. Probably the first in a series.