The Quest for Power

Eight years ago, Mark Stegeman was elected to the Tucson Unified School District board. Before he had any experience there, he was tagged with the “power hungry” label. That was supposed to be his motivation. This go-round, he is again labeled as power hungry, a thoroughly groundless accusation.

Interestingly, any critical article on Mark Stegeman will contain some form of the “power hungry” accusation. It is as if a committee was formed to decide the best way to attack him and decided that the “quest for power” angle was sufficient to turn people off, and was non-specific enough to require a Devil’s Proof to defend against it. Yeah, let’s go with that.

Let’s say you knew nothing of Mark Stegeman or the TUSD board, and you were walking down the street with a friend who pointed out someone in the crowd and said, “See that guy there? He’s an associate professor at the Eller School of Business. He has a doctorate in economics from MIT. He’s on a quest for power. I know that because he ran for school board—get it?” You might then shake your head up and down in a display of agreement thinking that your friend must have forgotten to take his medication again.

The Quest for Good Schools

One thing that is true about Mark Stegeman is that he enjoys speaking with people. He actually likes going door to door as part of his campaign. When he is not campaigning, he visits a different TUSD school each week and spends three or more hours there. One of the ways he engages with the public is by appearing regularly on the Wake Up Tucson drive time radio talk show hosted by Chris DeSimone where he is interviewed and takes questions from listeners. I feel I should point out that Steve Farley is also a regular guest on the show, in case you were developing assumptions. He even spoke with me at length on two separate occasions!

After speaking in person with Mark Stegeman, and listening to more radio interviews with him than I can count (even if I take my shoes off), I am convinced that he, as Chris DeSimone put it, “is someone who wants to do the right things for all the right reasons.”

Mark Stegeman is also the least political person seeking elective office I have met. Even after speaking with him at length (on two separate occasions), I had to ask him about his party affiliation (Democrat). He seems to be preoccupied with helping TUSD become a great school district, he believes it has that potential. Unfortunately for him, the board majority has other priorities.

The Magic of Three

On governing boards composed of five members, whether they oversee school districts or county governments, can be commandeered if you own three or more of the members. Such is the case at TUSD where Adelita Grijalva, Kristol Foster, and Cam Juarez tend to vote as a block. These triumviri are often openly hostile to Stegeman and Michael Hicks, the other two board members. Hicks and Grijalva are not up for election, while Stegeman, Kristol Foster, and Cam Juarez, are—hence, the smearing of Mark Stegeman.

Full Disclosure: I support Mark Stegeman’s candidacy, and have made a monetary donation to his campaign. I am (along with Steve Farley) also a regular guest on the “Wake Up Tucson” radio program.

Jonathan Hoffman is the Weekly's libertarian columnist.

Formerly known as the Arizona Human Rights Fund, Equality Arizona has helped our state become a better place by making it more welcoming for everyone, but especially our LGBT community.

Help celebrate the organization's work and it's 25-year anniversary at the Arizona Inn on Friday, Nov. 4, 6 to 8 p.m. Tickets are $45/65 (purchased at bit.ly/tucsonsilver).

Besides celebrating equality and acknowledging the work that remains, Equality Arizona will also recognize some amazing Tucson people and organizations:

Long-time LGBT organizer and volunteer Miki Odawa will receive the William S. MacDonald Lifetime Achievement Award

St. Francis in the Foothills United Methodist Church will receive the Human Rights Local Corporate Award

Raytheon will receive the LGBT2 Rights National Corporate Award

For more information, go to the event's Facebook page.

Mark Stegeman doesn't want school closures to be an election issue. "Nothing to see here, folks, move along," he wrote Tuesday as part of a Q&A to the people on his email list. Well, that's not exactly what he wrote. Here's the passage in the email.

Are school closures on anyone’s agenda?
No one was even discussing closures until a few weeks ago. This ghost issue was apparently created for the election and will fade in a week, as quickly as it appeared. It is an artfully timed distraction from TUSD's genuine problems.

An "artfully timed distraction," not "on anyone's agenda"? I can understand why Stegeman might want voters to believe that. His campaign is built around spotlighting problems in TUSD and the board majority he holds responsible. School closures are a sticky issue for him. While he's been on the board, 20 schools have closed. If you look at his statements about further closures, you'll find out he's against them, except for what he calls "isolated further closures"—oh, and except for high schools where he wants to "study the potential costs and benefits of high school consolidation." Stegeman was for school closures before he was against school closures at the same time he's for school closures, or something like that. His stand is wildly inconsistent. No wonder he wants to convince people it's a non-issue, so he can go back to his aggrieved minority position. It's easier to ask hard questions of others than to answer hard questions about school closures himself.

Contrary to what Stegeman asserts, school closures are a genuine, relevant issue in the board election. The newly elected board members will serve four years, through 2020, and school closures will almost certainly be on the agenda at some point during their tenure. Four years is a long time. We're likely to see changes in population density, the ethnic makeup of the community and overall student enrollment, which means the board will be called on to consider how best to utilize school buildings and whether some of them should be closed. If TUSD history is a guide, the new board will probably find itself hiring a new superintendent. Each candidate for the job is likely to be asked the school closure question, and board members will have to weigh the answers. Voters have a right to know where candidates stand on this very real issue.

Austin’s James McMurtry writes songs with the richness of novels, his characters struggling through life’s trials in vignettes sculpted as vivid as the world in front of your eyes.

Touring in support of Complicated Game, his ninth studio album and his first in six years, McMurtry will perform at Club Congress on Thursday, Nov. 3. Doors open at 7 p.m. and tickets are $17 in advance and $20 day of show.

No stranger to Tucson, McMurtry attended the UA for a time in the 1980s, while his father, Pullitzer Prize-winning novelist Larry McMurtry, splits his time between Texas and Tucson.

At 54, James McMurtry remarkably is turning better with age, with Complicated Game garnering some of the best reviews of the celebrated songwriter’s career. It’s a record that revolves around relationships, a dense and thoughtful batch of songs that finds its characters in an array of familiar moods: hopeful, spiteful, perseverant, patient, thankful and ornery.

“The songs that I managed to get in time to make the record seem to be about relationships. The producer didn’t want to mess with political songs. Everybody loves women; everybody hates politics, so get away from that,” says McMurtry, whose best-known song, 2005’s “We Can’t Make It Here,” chronicled the miseries that George W. Bush’s failures inflicted on the country.

Complicated Game (released last February on the label of the same name) is filled with sharply observant story songs like "Copper Canteen," “These Things I’ve Come to Know” and “You Got to Me,” but McMurtry says changes in the music industry have him focused on touring more than ever.

How bad was 2014’s Ouija? It was so piss poor and forgettable that I had to actually look into my archives for a review to confirm I had actually seen the damn thing. I wasn’t sure. In short, Ouija was a deplorable shitshow. Ouija: Origin of Evil is a bona fide movie miracle in many ways.

Ouija was awful, but it was enough of a hit to warrant a sequel. Still, it shocked me to see the sequel had actually made it to movie screens rather than some direct-to-digital platform. The fact that Mike Flanagan, the director of the crappy Oculus, was at the helm did little to quash my skepticism.

After about 30 seconds of watching young Lulu Wilson as Doris Zander, I realized that Flanagan might to be onto something with this casting. This kid, with her authentic 1960s haircut and mature-for-her-years delivery, crafts one of the great horror film performances of all time.

Yes, I’m bestowing that honor on a performance that occurs in a sequel to one of the worst horror films ever made.

The film, set convincingly in 1965, follows right along with Wilson as truly inspired and creepy. The Doris character plays with a Ouija board, and soon has some pleasant conversations with her dead father. Then, very bad things start to happen.

Is it one of the best horror films ever made? No. A few missteps in the final act take it down a notch. Is it one of the best horror sequels ever made? You bet it is.

Are you an adult who supports youth education (specifically, helping young people get more careers in the STEM fields)? Yet for whom that certainly doesn’t mean you prefer your fundraisers to be lacking in the adult-beverage department?

This Saturday’s inaugural YESNET Block Party has you covered. This event is organized to raise money for the S.Y. STEM Coalition, a Tucson-based nonprofit working to steer kids toward work in science, technology, engineering and/or math—and it’s being held as an outdoor party in Three Wells Distilling and Ten 55 parking lot, with all the distillery’s deliciously alcoholic products available for consumption.

The event’s other sponsors, also offering their wares, are all likewise local: Ten 55 Brewing, Yellow Brick Coffee, Green Feet Brewing and Hamilton Distillers. (Besides promoting a local nonprofit, the event hopes to show off the area where it’s being held as the newly blossoming “craft-beverage district” it is, northeast of PaloVerde Road and Ajo Way.)

The UA's Mexican-American Studies students will be hosting this year’s Day of the Dead altar set up and showing on Wednesday, Nov. 2.

The date Nov. 2 is traditionally recognized to give tribute and honor the lives of the deceased. In Mexican Indigenous tradition, death is seen as natural part of life and not something to be feared. As a memorial to the deceased, altars are set up as offerings that display images, favorite foods, and other tokens that were personal to the deceased. Marigolds, candles, pan de muertos, and sweets are also offerings set on altars.

This all day affair will begin on 8 a.m. with the altar viewings open to the public. This years student altars are dedicated to both national and local figures in social justice struggle and popular culture and to the lives of migrants crossing the desert.

Display images, favorite foods, marigolds, candles, pan de muertos, and sweets as offerings on the altar to the Cesar E. Chavez building (1110 James E. Rogers Way) in room 205 at this free event.

Get more information about the event on the UA's website.

“When we first talked about doing this it was like five years ago. You can see that we're moving pretty fast,” says Mike Sydloski, frontman for The Dracula Kite: Songs of The Cure, early in the set. Replete with black eyeliner, de rigeur for a band paying homage to goth popsters The Cure, The Dracula Kite took the Surly Wench stage late Friday night to an enthusiastic crowd.

Their name's part of a lyric in the song “Perfect Murder” from the ’83 album Blue Sunshine by The Glove, a spinoff project featuring Cure man Robert Smith and Siouxsie & The Banshees guitarist Steve Severin.

The Dracula Kite is vet Tucson musicians Chris Callahan (guitar and keyboard), Mike Sydloski (vocals and guitar), Daniel Thomas (drums) and David Hostetler (bass). They are busy dudes, playing in Atom Heart Mother: A Tribute to Pink Floyd and involved individually in other local bands like Jillian & The Giants, Shrimp Chaperone and others.

“Mike and I have known each other since we were six or seven,” Hostetler says. "Our dads were in the Air Force and they were best friends. One of the reasons we started that band [Atom Heart Mother] was because our dads were huge fans of music, and big fans of Pink Floyd, so it was kind of a way of thanking our dads for turning us into music junkies.”

Need a little voting practice just before Election Day?

It can’t hurt, right? Well, in our opinion it can’t… as long as the practice activity is fun, meaning having nothing to do with the actual election—no politics allowed.

If you agree, and if you happen to be a fan of pizza—like, um, probably most people?—we have the perfect event for you: the Pizza Throwdown 2016, to be hosted by Fresco Pizzeria and Pastaria this Sunday, courtesy of Tucson Originals Restaurants, an alliance of independently owned local restaurants, food purveyors and others whose goal is to show off Tucson’s first-class culinary community.

Drop by the restaurant at 3 p.m. and enjoy three hours of handmade pizza from establishments across the city; then vote for your favorite. If you’re 21 or older, you can also enjoy samples of hand-crafted beer.

Of course, you don’t have to be any particular age to choose your fave pie. So this is especially good voting practice for 17-and-younger future president-pickers.

The only drawback? Well, you’ll want to be discriminating in your choice of best pizza—so you just might have to eat a lot of it. (Of course, there won’t really be any real-life consequences if you’re not discriminating… but it’s the principle of the thing! And what good will this practice voting be if you don’t take it seriously?)

So come on down to eat, drink and support local cuisine.  Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, this weekend you can be a member of what many would deem the best party of all: the Pizza Party.

The Pizza Throwdown happens from 3–6 p.m., Sun., Nov. 6, at Fresco Pizzeria and Pastaria, 3011 E. Speedway Blvd. Tickets are $20 at the door or $20 bought in advance.

In a weekend filled with sustainability initiatives, UNESCO will hold a conference in the UA North Ballroom (1303 E. University Blvd.) to address water scarcity and management as well as desert food systems on Friday, Nov. 4 and Saturday, Nov. 5 until 5 p.m.

Sustainability scholars from Oman, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe and Mexico will meet with UA researchers and Tucson community members to talk about climate change and the earth's environment.

According to UANews, conference organizers are expecting 230 community members to attend the conference including international dignitaries, students and faculty. This is a free, all-ages event and space is limited. Online registration is now closed but attendees are encourages to register in-person the day of the conference.

For more information click here.