Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

KUSP is very proud to have helped “The Sound of Young America” move from a local Santa Cruz show (starting on KZSC while host Jesse Thorn was a UCSC student) to national distribution via PRI. We currently carry the show on Sunday evenings at 8:00, right after “True Fiction” and right before “The Poetry Show.”

Jesse is now at the helm of the maximumfun.org media empire (multiple podcasts, listener events, live comedy shows, TV, you name it). And he’s now a dad: as he posted on his blog, Simon Thorn came into the world on August 5. Obligatory cute family photo follows:

Congratulations to the Thorn family!

(Jesse says to expect a few weeks of guest hosts on “The Sound of Young America” while he hones his newfound dad chops… )

I am sorry to report that, about an hour and 45 minutes into our live broadcast of “Mysteries of Light,” the opening night concert of the 2011 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the AC power feed to our production truck went dead. We went back to the main studio for about 10 minutes while the ever-resourceful Larry Blood (who produces all of our major live music events) retrieved our backup power cable from the storage bin on top of the Sturgeon (our nickname for the production truck) and we got it connected. Everything powered up and ran all right the rest of the night.

Our listeners missed the very end of Mason Bates’ “Desert Transport” and the first part of Christopher Rouse’s “Odna Zhizn” (both of which received their west coast premieres tonight).

We extend sincere apologies to all our listeners worldwide who were tuned in (over the air or on our live Internet stream). The live Cabrillo opening night broadcast is one of our most-listened-to music programs of the year, especially on-line.

While we don’t have the performance rights to archive our Cabrillo concerts, watch our Cabrillo Festival page in the coming days as we post some of our interviews, photos, and so on from tonight’s performance. On that page you can also see the broadcast schedule for KUSP’s remaining Cabrillo concerts, which air on a delayed basis beginning August 16.

This Sunday KUSP debuts a new program, “True Fiction.” Our hosts and producers are Santa Cruz Sentinel arts writer Wallace Baine, and Richard Stockton, writer, comedian, and man-about-town. Richard created “The Planet Cruz Comedy Hour” for KUSP (you can find all the episodes on our web site here). Their new adventure in radio will be heard on KUSP every Sunday at 7:30 PM.

“True Fiction” is a 30-minute weekly program consisting of what the producers term “authentic lies,” as told by Monterey Bay area writers and performers. The program has been in development by the KUSP programming team for most of a year. Back in May our arts reporter, Kirby Scudder, interviewed Wallace and Richard about the program as its developmental stage was winding up. This link will take you to the audio of that interview.

A change in format for “Talk of the Bay” will make room for the new show. The new 30-minute TOTB format will have more of a “magazine” structure, with somewhat shorter pieces rather than the one or two extended studio interviews we’d had in recent years. We’ll invest more of our resources into stories about local and state politics/government – a principal mission of TOTB, but not one we have delivered on with high quality and consistency in the past few years.

Sean Rameswaram will take over as producer of the program and will be joined by multiple contributors from the KUSP volunteer and paid staff. The magazine structure of TOTB should also lend itself more readily to access through kusp.org – on the web site, you’ll be able to select specific stories you’re interested in and have time to hear, and we’ll be working to make Internet access easy and quick.

Big thanks go out to the many volunteers who have worked hard on the various iterations of Talk of the Bay since it first aired in 1996… in particular Rick Kleffel and Kelly O’Brien, who have been helming the show for the past year.

We’re hoping for improved audience service both over-the-air and on-line with the new TOTB format — and we’re interested in your feedback about it, and “True Fiction,” once we get started!

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