Injections & Icestorms

Posted on by Dave Maass

Cohost Connie Wright of All Life is Precious Ministries during the station’s pre-execution show for Johnathan Moore.

This piece originally appeared in the San Antonio Current on January 23, 2007. Republished with permission. 

Tread carefully up frozen stairs onto a frozen porch, where an overweight cat is mewing to be let in. Enter the front door of the house off Drew Street in downtown Livingston into a smoke-filled radio studio. Survey the walls decorated in a mosaic of photographs and greeting cards from death-row inmates — smiling faces and warm wishes from clean-shaven men in white jumpers. Notice first the portrait of Johnathan Moore and a short-haired girl, posed gleefully on opposite sides of a glass partition. Note the photograph a few feet above it: Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker.”

On Sundays, from 1–6 p.m., All Life is Precious Ministries broadcasts a “Shout-Out” radio show on KDOL 96.1 FM, preaching the gospel to the 2,900 inmates at the nearby Polunsky prison unit and providing a venue for supporters to communicate with the incarcerated. The night before an execution they broadcast a special show dedicated to the condemned inmate.

Moore’s death sentence was handed down 12 years earlier when Moore, then a 19-year-old goth kid, was convicted of killing off-duty SAPD officer Fabian Dominguez during a home burglary. Putting together a radio-friendly playlist of Moore’s favorite artists wasn’t easy since Ministry and Nine Inch Nails aren’t really Christian-radio friendly. As a compromise, Mazzy Star, The Cure, and themes from Twin Peaks played as the phone bleeped with calls from as far as England to wish Moore goodbye.

Moore couldn’t hear it.  Continue reading →

Romney Who

Posted on by Dave Maass

So, I wrote a script for a Mitt Romney – Doctor Who crossover sketch.

BBC Radio 4 Extra airs  a weekly, 30-minute topical sketch comedy show called Newsjack. What’s special about Newsjack is that the program has an open submission policy, which means on Mondays, writers can send in short, unsolicited sketches and one-liners for consideration.

Those who know me are well aware of my obsession with radio theatre and, as evidenced by my spelling of the word,  fixation on the British variety. So, I decided to give it a shot. Two shots actually.

Both missed.

I’ve decided that, considering my workload at CityBeat plus the other endeavors I’ve agreed to, there really isn’t much point in these attempts. If you get accepted for the show: Hooray! Fame and a fee.  If you don’t, well, there’s no shelf life for topical, political sketches. They go stale instantly. It’s not like there’s any kind of demand for them since, you know, Newsjack’s pretty much the only open-submission, British political sketch comedy show on the radio. If I spent the time to write a  work of short fiction for a contest, and I lost, at least I could submit it somewhere else.

All that said, I was actually kind of pleased with how the second one came out, even if the punchline is a bit cheap. I thought I might share it so it’s not all for naught.  Enjoy:

Romney Who

(Quick context: The sketches on the show are extremely short, very dry and silly and usually begin with a jokey monologue-style introduction. Also, Newsjack only has two male actors and two female actors and they won’t consider anything that does not fit those casting limitations. That explains why I wrote Rory out of the sketch.

Also, major props to Mother Jones magazine for publishing the Romney video in the first place.)

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Project White House debates!

Posted on by Dave Maass

For the second time, I helped Tucson Weekly recruit dark-horse presidential candidates to run in the Arizona primary election, since it’s amazingly easy to get your name on the ballot. The candidates compete forTW‘s endorsement in a “reality journalism” experiment that we call Project White House. This weekend, I actually hosted two live debates on Access Tucson.

Here’s the highlight reel from really great, official debate:



And if you want to see the whole, hour-long special, follow this link.

Here’s what Phoenix New Times had to say about it:

Judging from our fairly rapid scan-through of the debate videos, the nine Arizona “dark horse” candidates are thoughtful citizens with a lot to say about America’s problems and potential solutions. But presidential material? Um, not quite.

At least the weekly knew how to set the proper tone for the lesser debates, with California journalist Dave Maass guiding the panel through questions both serious and silly, and University of Arizona journalism student Amanda Hurley preventing things from getting too out of hand with her stoic countenance.

One of the Green Party candidates, Michael Oatman, has a super-low-budget show called Illegal Knowledge, and we threw together a second, slapdash debate. It’s got a lot of technical problems, so it’s a bit difficult to watch in full (link here). However, I did edit together this hilarious clip where, in my first question, I ask the candidates to chime in on the news that Mitt Romney’s Arizona committee co-chair, Sheriff Paul Babeu came out as gay after his ex-lover alleged he threatened to deport him. You’ve never heard the word “penis” so many times in a debate.

9.11, 10 years later

Posted on by Dave Maass

The Santa Fe Reporter asked me to contribute 150 words about where I was on 9.11. Here’s what I wrote:

I’d quit my job as a reporter covering state government in Phoenix two weeks before. The morning of 9.11, a girl I was seeing called to wake me. She said we were under attack. I did not know what that meant. I was lying in an underinflated, inflatable mattress on the floor. I reached over and turned on the radio. NPR made no sense. I went downstairs and my roommate and I watched it unfold on a portable TV with rabbit ears. It wasn’t so shocking on the three-inch screen. I don’t think I’d ever seen the World Trade Center before. That night, the city sky was silent except for helicopters. A lot of businesses were closed, even the Chinese restaurants. Our favorite coffee shop was open, so that’s where we went. Sitting outside, smoking cigarettes, I said to myself, “You picked the wrong time to quit your job.”

Moog hero

Posted on by Dave Maass

Recently, I had the stupidest idea: A few of the switches on my* Moog synthesizer were broken, so I thought I could open the thing up and repair it myself.

Not only was I unable to fix it, I was unable to put the Moog together again. I was so sad. I’d destroyed something beautiful.

I put a call for help on Twitter and suddenly, Mattzog, a local lover of synthesizers, got in touch. He told me he had a Moog Rogue and wanted to compare it to my Realistic Concertmate MG-1. And sure enough, in less than an hour he had it back in one piece.

Here’s a short video from the moment Mattzog turned the Moog back on.

* Not actually my Moog, but my father’s, which I have come to claim as my own over the years.