Arkansas Times - August 7, 2014 by Arkansas Times

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August 7, 2014

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August 7, 2014

COMMENT

In regards to Max Brantley’s editorial on the issue of after-hours clubs (“LR’s nannies target clubbing,” July 31), I would like to defend Mrs. Joan Adcock as one of the hardest working public servants I have ever met. I have personally worked with her on several occasions. Every year she is an active representative at our neighborhood associations’ annual meeting. She informed me of a grant that is available to improve neighborhoods in the city and encouraged our association to apply. She is a constant supporter of the Animal Village and personally volunteers there. She is a vibrant member of Neighborhoods USA. She always returns citizens’ emails. These are just a few examples of her commitment to our city. My point being that she does not deserve the scorn of Mr. Brantley. I don’t agree with her on the issue of forcing after-hours clubs to close early. That does not diminish my regard for her as a representative of this city. I am glad she is available for all wards. Although I take a keen interest in local politics, I personally couldn’t pick my specific ward representative out of a lineup. I feel Mrs. Adcock is one of the good guys who may not always be on our side of the argument, but she does not deserve to have her reputation maligned simply because she disagrees. Michelle Noto Little Rock

In praise of teachers I really enjoyed the interviews in your “LR Confidential” issue. I learned a good bit. The transgender woman was especially enlightening, but the teacher really hit home with me. I taught for many years and even then it was a struggle to teach and keep peace with the administration. I dearly loved the kids and most of them S became fine citizens — many are state and ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHER

o you want to know what it is like being an ping for the tests, all instruction stops. I feel like elementary school teacher in the public I have almost no control now about how I plan schools? I’ve been teaching for 27 years, for instruction, teach or help students. Everything 15 of them in Little Rock. I love it. I’m is planned and laid out for us. Very cookie cutter there for the kids. But. without regard for what kids need or the style and I’ve been through about five superintendents personality of the teachers. Teaching is an art and in the past 15 years. They all added programs and a craft. Let us teach! No Child Left Behind has left pet projects, and nothing ever got taken away. I us in a tailspin. It’s ruined us. fill out forms for a superintendent that was here Kids are very verbal these days, and their attenthree superintendents ago. It just goes in a file. tion spans are so diminished. The number of stuYou learn to triage, which forms to spend a lot of dents with attention deficit disorder has exploded time on, which will never be looked at. You’ve got — I’d never even heard of it when I started teachto, because there’s never enough time to teach. ing. They don’t know how to settle themselves. We spend too much time testing kids. It’s one Recess has been cut drastically. At home they thing for kids to know the content and another are constantly entertained with computers, TV to be able to regurgitate the information on a and video games. That’s tough to compete with! bubble sheet. All the tests are in a different form. So I make learning as active and positive as I can Students have to learn how to take the test. It’s with small group teaching and with instruction like basketball. Players may know how to dribble that meets individual differences. Then for a week and shoot, but not the rules of the game. We take right after spring break, we sit them in a chair and three to four weeks or more just prepping kids for tell them they have to be still and silent for an hour the rules and formats of the tests. If we’re prep- and a half to three hours three to five days in a

JULY 17, 2014

row to take a test. Sometimes it feels like child abuse. No matter ... the little ones work so hard and they want to please their teachers and their parents, but the tests are too far above their level. Kids who’ve made remarkable progress are still labeled and told they’re not good enough. It breaks my heart. Why am I, a professional with a master’s degree in my teaching area, required to take 60 hours of professional development every year? That’s twice what doctors are required to have! And why are all those 60 hours taken from instructional time BEFORE the test? Why don’t we do that before school? In summer? They tell us everything. “I love you.” “Mommy and Daddy had a fight last night and the police came over.” One little girl in class wouldn’t stop crying. She told me, “The police came and took my mom, and I don’t think I’ll see her again.” Neither she nor I got much teaching or learning done that day. I held her in my lap most of the day. They all call me mom at some point. There’s always one who hangs on. There’s always one I just want to take home with me. CONTINUED ON PAGE 17

ARKANSAS TIMES

August 7, 2014

ARKANSAS TIMES

licans would make the cuts. I have relatives who worked every day of their lives and still ended up on Medicaid and food stamps in their old age just to survive. Contrary to “wealth mgmt.” commercials, everyone does not have a million-dollar retirement fund and a Wall St. broker on speed dial. Razorsmack

Meh…

From the web In response to David Ramsey’s story “Is Tom Cotton too extreme?” in the July 24 issue: Cotton subscribes to the extreme right-wing agenda. Anyone who advocates a federal balanced budget amendment wants to see the country implode. It’s a nice thought and an admirable goal, but such immediate and drastic cuts would decimate poor and lower middle class Arkansans, while simultaneously shredding safety-net programs and essential services for the entire country. Why? Because I KNOW where Repub-

Not a fan of either Cotton or Pryor. Cotton is way too conservative and out of touch. Plus his affiliation with “extreme” conservative groups is very troubling. It also seems like there is no genuine personality there. Has the persona of an automaton who regurgitates the conservative doctrine. Pryor I feel has sold out based on fear of political survival. He has embraced conservative views including the installation of the Keystone

pipeline and pro-NRA agendas. To me this is a dangerous sign of personal weakness. For me it will come down to voting for the lesser of two evils, Pryor in this case. Only in Arkansas We worked out at the same gym in Russellville during his campaign. He came in, exercised and left in maybe 30 minutes. Rushed through his sets like someone was chasing him. Didn’t speak, didn’t even make eye contact. It was so odd, I asked if anyone had looked him in the eye or exchanged a word with him. Not a one. Mudbone In response to David Koon’s story “Don’s Weaponry, small gun shop since 1986” in the July 31 issue: Good story. Sometimes we forget there are reasonable people who like guns, and there is nothing wrong with that. plainjim BEsT oF ARkAnsAs 2014

HavE guns, will not travEl Don’s Weaponry has called Rose City home since 1986. By DaviD Koon

here’s something happening in America, and it’s been happening for a long time. The last of the mom-and-pop operations are disappearing, plowed under by the acre-square monoliths on the edge of town, so big they’ve got their own horizon, often staffed by people whose know-how is limited to how to get to the bathroom. There are, thankfully, a few survivors. One of those in North Little Rock is Don’s Weaponry, your friendly neighborhood gun store in Rose City. Love ’em or hate ’em, guns are beautiful little gadgets, oiled and machined and gleaming, designed to make what’s essentially an explosion in your hand no more painful than smacking your ﬁst into your palm. They’ve got a lot of guns at Don’s, everything from tiny Derringers to the political football AR-15 rifles to giant military machine guns displayed (though not for sale) up next to the ceiling. Unless you’re a nervous sort when it comes to ﬁrearms — and we don’t blame you if you are, as the philo-

july 31, 2014

sophical weeds on the subject are deep and getting deeper by the year — browsing through the wares, hunting trophies, antiques and accessories on display and for sale at Don’s is a good way to spend an afternoon. They even let a reporter from the local lefty rag do some looking, and were very nice about it. Don Hill is the owner and proprietor of Don’s Weaponry, and has been in business at 4116 E. Broadway since 1986. Hill said he’s been fooling around with guns since he was a kid but really became interested in ﬁrearms during a stint in the Army. A lifelong hunter, he was in the medical business for over 30 years, but when a conglomerate bought his employer and his division was phased out, he took it as a sign he should open his own gun shop. He started with a small store behind his house in 1973, selling to friends and via word of mouth. Forty-one years later, he’s still selling shooting irons. Hill said that the big-box stores like Bass Pro and Gander Mountain

brian chilson

In defense of Joan Adcock

local leaders. As she said in the end, sometimes you just have to say to hell with it and do your job. I would be hard-pressed to teach today. I don’t know how the young ones are keeping their sanity. Unless the public can can see the light and then put their experience to the boards to put the burden of learning back on the student and not on the teacher, our system is going to keep going downhill. God love them all, the teachers in the trenches and all the kids. Evelyn Nelsen Jonesboro

sTill PacKinG: Don hill has sold guns for 41 years.

have killed off many small gun shops, but he usually beats them on prices and always beats them in service. “Their prices are quite a bit higher than mine,” he said. “We have been a customer-oriented store ever since the day I opened. We’re going to give a customer the best price we can and still make a living. We’re going to give you good values on your trade-in. We buy estates. We buy bankruptcies. I’ve bought out seven other gun shops since I’ve been in business. … My people here are all highly knowledgeable. I don’t hire kids off the street. With my guys, I think the least any of them have been with me is probably 10 years.” Hill said that when people come in looking to buy a gun, his staff tries to guide them to what they need instead of what they think they want. That starts

with asking them what they plan to do with it: home protection, hunting, target shooting or concealed carry. Then, Hill said, come questions like the buyer’s familiarity with ﬁrearms, whether they have children in the house, whether they live in an apartment, and the surroundings of their home. “If a guy comes in off the street and says, ‘I want that gun right there,’ I usually stop him, and say, ‘Whoa.’ As a general rule, he’ll buy it and then come back in two weeks and say, ‘I don’t like it.’ ... We try to sell a person what they need. A lot of the time, we end up having to sell him what he wants, but we try to guide you in the right direction.” Helping narrow down the choices is a full-service ﬁring range in the basement, which allows prospective buyers to rent and try any of over 50 handguns

ARKANSAS TIMES

In response to the Arkansas Blog item about the Razorback football team excluding all but the SEC Network from covering practice: If the newspapers and the Arkansas Press Association refuse to run any of their press releases and just didn’t cover them at all, they might get the message. They need to be reminded that we pay for that bunch of buildings next to the glorified sports complex and that without that part, they would just be a bunch of neighborhood kids playing on the street. And cover the ASU, UAPB and the other colleges and fill the paper up. The smaller schools would love to see more fans and certainly the Foundation won’t miss all of that parking, seat bribes and other corrupt cash they hide from the public. couldn’t be better

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August 7, 2014

week that was

EYE ON ARKANSAS

In an interview with Arkansas Business, John Correnti, the chief executive of Big River Steel and other ventures, said that, despite the massive amount of welfare the state is providing Big River in Mississippi County, the government should stay out of the private sector. “Is it better for the state to invest in a company like Big River? Or is it better to invest in more SNAP cards and more welfare? The governor and [Arkansas Economic Development Commission Director] Grant Tennille — they didn’t give away the whole candy store. They used Amendment 82 the way that the citizens of Arkansas intended them to use it. But as far as government is concerned, they should stay out of private industry.” The brass of this blowhard. He’s received tens of millions in direct handouts and tax giveaways. The Arkansas Teacher Retirement System, funded by taxpayers to pay teachers’ pensions, has invested $125 million in Big River. Those same venture capitalists — Arkansas taxpayers — have put $18 million in another Correnti project, an electronics recycling business. Stay out? If government stayed out of John Correnti’s business, he’d have no business.

Tweet of the week “I pray for a cure for Ebola, but it is ludicrous to introduce this disease on American soil, maybe even treasonous.” — Sen. Jason Rapert, reaching a new nadir, in expressing outrage to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and President Obama, for the government’s role in transporting a U.S. doctor, Kent Brantly, from Liberia to a unit in Emory University Hospital after he contracted Ebola. Brantly worked at a treatment center operated by two U.S. faith-based organizations. Question to Rapert: Would Jesus establish border limits on his ministry? “I was sick and you looked after me,” the Bible says. It didn’t come with an asterisk — Not Operative in Egypt.

Heartless Every member of the Arkansas House delegation voted last week for Tea Party-driven anti-immigrant legislation that would effectively require the deportation of everyone in the U.S. illegally, including those brought as children. The measure is dead on arrival in the Senate. How cynical is it to serve up red meat like this knowing that it’s only symbolic and, if it were possible, would blast the U.S. economy even as it blew up the lives of millions of families? Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights hero and a Democrat from Georgia, had it right in a fiery floor speech when he asked, “Where are our hearts? Where are our souls?”

August 7, 2014

ARKANSAS TIMES

Paul Barrows

Hypocrite of the week

SUNSET: On the Broadway Bridge, scheduled for replacement next year. Photo by Paul Barrows. From the Eye On Arkansas Flickr page.

The scaredy-cat party The agenda of the rising Republican Party reflects the close of Carl Sandburg’s poem about exceptionalism (and ignores the hubris). We are “the greatest nation. Nothing like us ever was.” But if we are so great, why are they so scared? Many of the American exceptionalists fear diversity of religion — particularly, but not only, Islam. They root blasphemy out of textbooks and demand recitations to their favorite deity in public assemblies. They fear the small minority whose hard-wired sexual preferences differ from their own. Why else oppose equal legal rights for this little group? They fear foreigners, particularly those with yellow and brown skins. Nordic people don’t seem to cause as much alarm, but Swedes aren’t massing at the border either. State Sen. Bart Hester, a Republican Cave Springs dweller, sounded the alarm last week about Central American children seeking refuge. The border must be secured against them, he said, even as he acknowledged the horror of their young lives. He demanded to know if the Arkansas legislature had been asked for permission by the federal government to allow 166 children to cross our borders for temporary shelter with friends and relatives. The mostly imaginary threat of disease powers hysteria about immigrant children. The same group of objectors seems less fearful of the poisons injected into Arkansas air and water by corporate polluters. The panicky exceptionalists fear, in general, for their safety. Thus, they pressure for still more guns — in homes, schools, churches, bars and parks. Once, they clamored for concealed weapons. They also said safety demanded that the public not know who was armed. Now many of them argue that only open carry of weapons — including semi-automatic rifles designed for mass killing — guarantees true peace of mind in a Starbucks or Walmart. But they remain easily spooked even when armed. Open carry demonstrators in Austin, Texas were flum-

moxed last week by two topless women who counter-protested the gun display with nothing more than bared breasts and signs proclaiming “Boobs for Peace.” The First Amendment won the max standoff with the Second Amendbrantley ment, it seemed to me. Mighty maxbrantley@arktimes.com weaponry couldn’t silence two middle-aged topless women, much less a world full of asymmetrical threats to order. For fear run rampant, it was hard to top Republican State Sen. Jason Rapert last week. He said it was “ludicrous” and “maybe treasonous” to allow the return of a U.S. medical missionary to a hospital in Atlanta for treatment of Ebola. Let the U.S. citizen stay in Africa, he said, or on a military ship where the risk of exposure would be limited to U.S. military men and women. Rapert, an alleged minister of the Gospel, was not alone in finding a waiver from Christ’s call to welcome the sick. A Times Facebook post on the episode drew 40,000 readers and dozens of comments, most critical of Rapert. But not all. One defender suggested it was safe for Jesus to treat lepers because he was the Son of God and imbued with superhuman powers. The rest of us mortals are right to insist that an ocean separate us from the sick and those brave enough to treat them. This is the same variety of American exceptionalism that hungers to commit American volunteers and rockets to world trouble spots, so long as there’s no draft for the timid and no tax exacted for the expenditure of American lives and resources. Join me in a modest counter-demonstration. For the 42nd year, I intend to go to work in downtown Little Rock without a gun. I’ll buy a meal from a Latino immigrant. I’ll scan the legal filings for advancement of equality for gay people. I’ll happily pay my taxes. And I will not fear the consequences.

OPINION

Big bucks, evil ads for Pryor-Cotton race

iven much of a chance to know them personally, any Arkansas voter would almost certainly like both Mark Pryor and Tom Cotton well enough to vote for them, although perhaps not with a lot of excitement. Not many ever get the chance for more than a casual and fleeting encounter with the people who would represent them; but now, thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, they are apt to make their decisions based upon an even more capricious factor — a malignant image of both as cunning men bent on harming you and your values. Campaign advertising, always tacky, has been getting meaner and more prolific every season, but nothing has come close to the Pryor-Cotton campaign or the campaigns in other battleground states like North Carolina, Georgia, Colorado and Alaska, which have never seen money in such multiples dumped into congressional campaigns. The Arkansas Senate race will set all kinds of records but in ways that should

not make anyone proud. Although the real campaign presumably doesn’t begin until Labor Day, the money ERNEST spent on media DUMAS advertising for and against the two candidates already exceeds the record spent in the long 2010 campaign when Sen. Blanche Lincoln was buried in part by a blizzard of attack ads. The Phillips County farm girl was characterized as the puppet of the Muslim-loving socialist president. Arkansas has already set one record that isn’t likely to be matched. By midJuly, 21 separate groups had bought TV commercials attacking one or the other candidate, mainly Pryor. A handful of corporate-fed groups like Americans for Prosperity account for much of the money behind the attack ads across the country, including Arkansas, but the sheer number of outside groups investing in the Arkansas race sets it apart.

Divining Professor Obama Judging by the way he holds his cards Senate Intelligence so close to his vest, President Obama must Committee staffers be an awfully good poker player. Here we investigating what are halfway through his second term, and the Bush adminfew observers can claim to know with any istration eupheprecision exactly what he thinks about mistically called GENE “enhanced interrocritical matters of war and peace. LYONS Or what he might do if push came to gation.” shove, an eventuality he appears entirely “Even before I came into office,” determined to avoid. Obama said “I was very clear that in the Obama often appears disdainful of the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we did some theatrical aspects of the presidency. He things that were wrong. We did a whole lot avoids playing dress-up. No aircraft car- of things that were right, but we tortured rier landings or make-believe ranching for some folks. We did some things that were him. Pretty much all the time, the presi- contrary to our values.” We tortured “folks?” dent carries himself as the middle-aged husband, father, former law professor and Mr. President, you invite folks to picnics professional politician that he is. He avoids or welcome them to Jimmy Buffett shows. confrontation whenever possible. You torture “terrorist suspects,” “prisoners” Even when he speaks out on issues of or “captives.” Calling them folks makes it sound like no big deal. critical national importance, Obama can sound kind of dorky. Witness last week’s Which may be exactly what Obama qualified endorsement of CIA Director intended. Because the other folks he talked John Brennan. Brennan had been forced about were the CIA agents who did the to apologize to Congress because (appar- waterboarding. ently unknown to him) agents spied on “It’s important for us not to feel too sanc-

A representative of Kantar Media, the marketing research firm that monitors media spending on congressional elections, said 21 groups was an “unbelievable” number, far surpassing any other state, and that it was more surprising because Arkansas is a smaller, poorer state than most battleground states. A rich Little Rock industrialist learned last month from the media that the ads in which he criticizes Pryor were actually paid for not by a small-business group, but by a lobbying arm of the insurance industry that wants to remove insurance taxes and consumer protections in the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare. They have starkly different life narratives — the shy, aw-shucks Pryor, who never evidenced a political doctrine except to emulate his dad and push the government to help people, and the earnest and driven Cotton, whose sterling Ivy League schooling vested him with a burning zeal to turn the country into the libertarian utopia that Ayn Rand dreamed of, where government does not interfere with markets and the important work of industrialists or do favors for the unaccomplished and unmotivated of society. It is not hard to support either man or oppose the other for his political record—

Cotton for his nearly unwavering opposition to almost any government activity outside war or Pryor for voting for some Democratic programs but wavering on others. But it would be hard to hate either man for what he has tried to do with his life or his earnest motivations, including Cotton’s boasting about his military record and Pryor’s testaments to his deep religious impulses. But hatred and fear are the goals of millions of dollars of TV and online ads by corporations and independent groups that were liberated by the Citizens United ruling, which said Congress could not place monetary limits on their right to destroy politicians who earn their disfavor. Pryor in the ads is a lackey doing the bidding of the socialist black president instead of taking care of Arkansans, and Cotton is set on taking food from the mouths of the poor or aid from the thousands whose lives are wrecked by hurricanes, tornadoes and floods. There is real hatred in the letters to newspapers about the two men and behind the shaking fists of drivers who spot the wrong bumper sticker. Although more outside groups are investing in the Arkansas Senate race, the state actually lags other battleground Continued on page 36

timonious in retrospect about the tough job he said, “the notion that they were in a posithat those folks had,” the president said. “A tion to suddenly overturn not only Assad lot of those folks were working hard under but also ruthless, highly trained jihadists if enormous pressure and are real patriots, we just sent a few arms is a fantasy.” but having said all that, we did some things “Folks” again. But almost cynical this that were wrong.” time. Just not wrong enough to get too upset Then soon afterward, Obama asked about. Congress for $500 million to arm and train Even Obama’s closest aides, it appears, “appropriately vetted” Syrian rebels. often can’t tell what he’s thinking. AccordSo was the president craftily calling ing to David Remnick’s vivid account of Republicans’ bluff, as he’d done by asking Vladimir Putin’s metastasizing authori- Congress’ permission to bomb Bashar altarianism in the New Yorker, former U.S. Assad’s regime in 2013? Permission Obama ambassador Michael McFaul still can’t didn’t really want and knew he couldn’t figure out if the president’s a “realist” or get, given public resistance to yet another an “internationalist” in foreign policy. That Middle Eastern war. is, should the United States favor national If so, why repeat the gesture? Could self-interest or promote democratic values Obama be hearing footsteps, as they say around the world? in the NFL? That is, listening to the risBoth, basically. Obama gives ringing ing chorus from New York Times columspeeches endorsing democracy, but in nist Maureen Dowd to Darth Cheney that practice acts with cool calculation. McFaul wants a manly, decisive president who’s himself made a show of meeting publicly more enthusiastic about starting wars? with anti-Putin activists. He lasted only Indeed, before that drunken cast of Dostwo years in Moscow. toyevsky characters under Putin’s sponsorAnother example: A while back, the ship shot down a Malaysian passenger jet in president explained to “CBS This Morn- eastern Ukraine, murdering 298 innocent ing” why arming “moderates” in Syria’s civilians, it had become common to hear civil war was a bad idea. GOP partisans wish we had a president “When you get farmers, dentists and more like the virile Russian. folks who have never fought before going “Putin decides what he wants to do up against a ruthless opposition in Assad,” and does it in half a day,” Rudy Giuliani Continued on page 39 www.arktimes.com

August 7, 2014

pearls about swine

Razorback football preview

SEHABLAESPAÑOL El Latino is Arkansas’s only weekly circulation-audited Spanish language newspaper. Arkansas has the second fastest growing Latino population in the country, and smart business people are targeting this market as they develop business relationships with these new consumers.

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August 7, 2014

ARKANSAS TIMES

n what is becoming a Pearls preseason rite of summer, we’re going back to a full-tilt weekly dissection of all things porcine up in the Ozarks, and that starts with breaking down the 2014 football schedule into three parts: At Auburn, Aug. 30: This game was announced in such a way that it reeked of SEC schadenfreude. The ailing Hogs and the surging Tigers were moving toward opposite ends of the football Earth last year and then Arkansas fans got this whack in the gourd. Not only does Arkansas not get the usual luxury of a mid-major (or lesser) opener of prior years, but the whole effort to climb out of last fall’s smoking crater starts on the road, against the near-defending national champs, against the onetime state golden boy Gus Malzahn. As such, the nasty aftertaste of the 2013 season has given Razorback legions a poor chaser to begin anew. But let’s not forget two abundantly obvious trends. One is that the Hogs started last season in very promising fashion with a dominating win over Louisiana-Lafayette, which ended up being a nine-win bowl team, and the offense clicked almost flawlessly that afternoon. Bret Bielema teams, in fact, have a fair history of opening well, and he’s never lost the first game of a season in eight years as a head coach. Perhaps most inspiring, though, is that Jordan-Hare Stadium is one place the Hogs have never shown much fear of, and in 2002, 2006 and 2012, the Hogs won there in impressive fashion. And the pressure squarely resides on the home team, which has a suspended starting quarterback (the length of such benching is unknown right now, but likely not long), the great burden of trying to replicate its success a year ago with some personnel changes on the offensive line and in the backfield, and a defense that still doesn’t elicit fear in its opponent. Auburn fans are going to be happy to win this one and start off 1-0, and ironically, it’s also going to be the catalyst for a better than expected year for the Hogs, too. Jonathan Williams has a career rushing day in this one and Brandon Allen performs competently, but the Tigers pull away late. Tigers 37, Hogs 27. Nicholls State, Sept. 6: This is the lesser opener mentioned above, delayed by a week, but don’t necessarily discount Nicholls. The Southland Conference

squad jumped from one win in 2012 to four wins last fall, which certainly qualifies as improvement, BEAU and Arkansas had WILCOX so much difficulty with Samford and lowly Southern Miss before the bottom fell out last year that easy triumph cannot be presumed here. Arkansas won’t be too sharp in this one either, actually unveiling some flaws in coverage that weren’t as prevalent against Auburn. But the Hogs’ offense will be buoyed by the strong first game showing and Allen has a career passing night in only three quarters of action before giving way to his little brother, Austin. Hogs 44, Colonels 17. At Texas Tech, Sept. 13: The real nonconference curiosity of this season is this jaunt down to Lubbock, where Arkansas hasn’t played in a quarter-century, to play Kliff Kingsbury’s feverish passing attack. Last year, the Red Raiders started mightily under the rookie head coach, winning seven straight against clearly softer competition, then faded badly in a five-game skid that exposed the Raiders’ sieve defense (they surrendered 243 points over five games) and finished up all right with a win over Arizona State in the Holiday Bowl. Tech is so bad defensively that even in those victories there were serious deficiencies, and that’s what Jim Chaney will be trying to exploit in a variety of ways. It’s your quintessential Big 12 team, with lots of decent athletes on the defensive side, but not enough general depth, discipline or stamina in place to stymie a wellorchestrated scheme. Chaney can put that together and should be able to capitalize on the weakest aspects of Tech’s back seven with short throws and zone blocking runs. This game strikes fear into Hog fans’ hearts but we’ll take the Razorbacks against this kind of squad. Alex Collins has a field day, and it’s the best day of Hunter Henry’s young career, too, with each scoring twice. Hogs 38, Red Raiders 31. Northern Illinois, Sept. 20: If the Razorbacks caught Auburn at the worst time, they’re getting the MAC’s onetime Continued on page 36

THE OBSERVER NOTES ON THE PASSING SCENE

Nightwise The Observer, Arkansas Times shutterbug extraordinare Brian Chilson and newsroom FNG Benjamin Hardy slunk from our bedchambers over the weekend to hit the late-night bars like Midtown Billiards, Discovery and Electric Cowboy for an upcoming cover story in advance of a City Board vote on whether to shutter the Class B permitted clubs at 2 a.m. instead of 5. Mr. Hardy and The Observer’s sometime frienemy David Koon will be making the case that the 5 a.m. clubs are actually a good thing for Little Rock. Keep an eye out for that next week. While Yours Truly used to be quite the night owl, shutting down some of those same 5 a.m. clubs, we’ve now entered the Sargasso Sea of Old Fartdom. We’re usually sawing sequoia logs by 2 a.m., dead to the species until our eyes fly stubbornly open at dawn. Our body seems to have found its happy place at around six hours of sleep these days. Back when we were Junior’s age, 14, we would blissfully sleep a number of hours that would make a housecat say, “Damn, he sleeps a lot,” and were content to sleep anywhere. Bed of a speeding truck, mound of leaves, school desk (all too frequently), stretched out on hard concrete, all soft and comfortable as featherbeds to our young and supple bod. We miss those days. We have become a near-insomniac Princess and the Pea as the years have burned on. Lay a nickel on the box springs and The Observer’s shoulder blade can read “In God We Trust” through the sheets and stuffing and pillow-tick. Ditto with any noise louder than a mouse belch. Something in the house goes “plink,” and our eyelids roll up like old-timey shades. Light sleeper, like our father before us. And once we’re awake, we’re awake, end of story, six hours of sleep in the bag or not. It’s bitterness and reruns of “The X-Files” for the rest of the night, and the next day feeling like we’ve been beaten with a rubber truncheon. But we digress, as we often do. Brian picked The Observer up at 2 a.m. Saturday morning at The Observatory,

The Master of the Chateau having been forced to down two cups of coffee and three Aleve just to get our britches on and buttoned, shirt on right side out, and shoes on the right feet. Though we weren’t happy about being out at that hour, there was still a loveliness to it, Brian’s headlights swimming up Maple Street in the cool, dewy night like a phosphorescent jellyfish. In the car, both of us commented on the idiocy of being out that late, and commiserated on the things we do for this job. We breathed how we were too old for this shit. And then we launched into stories of how we weren’t once. Lost nights, lost bars, spilled beer, American history and the deep dark of our youth. The sleeping city slid past the windows, full of yellow light. We told the stories we could tell. We both thought, but didn’t speak, of those we couldn’t — no less fondly regarded, but which we wouldn’t admit to anyone should we be dangled over the rim of the Grand Canyon by Russian gangsters. Night, when you’re young, is for choices, and we have made them. Some of them we made wrong, there in the velvet pocket of 4 a.m. — or close enough to wrong to make us wonder all these years later. Those are the ones you don’t speak of. Those are the stories you’ll take to your grave, furrowing a brow and smiling a wistful smile that’s bound to make all the damp-eyed kin crowding around your deathbed puzzle over what Great Grandma is thinking. If midnight is The Witching Hour, then 2 a.m. and beyond are named as well, my friend. Call them: The Hour of Questionable Decisions. The Hour of the Longest Kiss. The Hour of Boldness Born of Desperation. The Hour of the Busted Lip. The Hour of Trading the Morning for One Moment in the Dark. We remembered all those hours that we couldn’t speak, the memories we dare not say. And so, instead, we rode in silence, in a drowsy, wakeful dream of the past, and the city slid by and by the windows on our way to meet Mr. Hardy.

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August 7, 2014

Arkansas Reporter

the

in s id er

Smarter than the rest of us

Rowe mounts campaign Mike Rowe, the comedian famous as the longtime host of the cable series “Dirty Jobs,” has announced that he’s going to move to “Lafayette, Arkansas” and run for county judge. It’s a little late for a legit candidacy, but still ... “Now it’s true, I hold no law degree and no political experience,” Rowe writes on his Facebook page. “But from what I’ve seen from recent court rulings, a basic understanding of the Constitution has little to do with education or a prior political record. And though I have no current ties to the great state of Arkansas, I once collected dung beetles at the University, and got along very well with the locals. More importantly, I served as The Grand Marshal of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Hot Springs back in 2008, which I’m told went very well.” Joking aside — and coincidentally — the race for Lafayette County judge has already been controversial. One candidate in the race, Deputy Sheriff Barry Reeder, was slapped in the face by a woman who alleged he’d molested her as a child in Louisiana. The woman and others were protesting outside his office. He said the charge was untrue. He was tried and acquitted in 1997 in Claiborne Parish, La., before moving to Arkansas. Reeder, a Democrat, 10

August 7, 2014

ARKANSAS TIMES

brian chilson

Another writer, Jon Swaine from The Guardian, has taken a crack at profiling the race between Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor and Republican challenger U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton. It’s familiar ground by now. Huge outside money. Comfortable old-shoe candidate versus brash ultra-conservative challenger. The Kochs. Cotton’s many votes against popular programs. His ideological zeal. His personality. Then there was this quote, styled as unapproved but given Cotton’s rigid message control, almost certainly the person quoted was approved to speak to a reporter at some level, even if his specific words weren’t: “ ‘He’s had kind of a bad press for being unapproachable and rigid,’ ” one member of Cotton’s entourage, who was not authorised to speak to the press, said at the church bazaar. ‘I don’t see that. Maybe he’s a little on a different intellectual level. But I don’t see he’s unapproachable.’ ” See? Cotton is not a bad guy. He’s just smarter than the rest of us dumb Arkies. LEADER: UALR’s Amber Smith.

Motivate and remediate Deseg lawsuit money lifts Pulaski County Special School District students out of remedial college courses. By Benjamin Hardy

When Chris Foy graduated from Mills University Studies High School in the Pulaski County Special School District this spring, he wasn’t particularly interested in going to college. He has a good head for math and as a selfdescribed “game nerd,” he knows his way around technology, but he kept falling asleep in class. Then there was writing, a subject Foy hated. His ACT score indicated he’d have to take remedial composition as a freshman. Paying an extra $2,000 for the privilege of sitting through a rerun of high school English? It seemed unappealing, to say the least.

At a luncheon for a small group of entering freshmen on the UALR campus recently, Foy spoke to the Times with a polite, quiet zeal about the change that happened over the summer. “I didn’t apply myself in high school,” he said, semi-apologetically. “But now I’ve got my priorities right.” He’ll enter the university as a full-time student in two weeks, and not only has he now tested out of that dreaded remedial comp class, he’s also boosted his score on the math entrance exam so substantially that he can leapfrog over College Algebra (the typical ground floor math course) and

go directly into Trigonometry. Foy spent most of July living in the UALR dorms with 57 other recent graduates from PCSSD high schools in a new program called the Charles W. Donaldson Scholars Academy, named for UALR’s recently retired vice-chancellor of student services. All were kids whose ACT scores would have forced them to take at least one remedial class, in math, comp or reading. That’s if they entered college in the fall at all, which many of them weren’t necessarily planning on doing. Most, like Foy, were African American, and almost all come from lower-income backgrounds. After three marathon weeks of 12-hour instructional days with campus faculty and UALR student coaches, all 58 of the Donaldson Scholars Academy students are now planning on attending college at UALR or another school. Over half of the students who needed remedial math or developmental reading at the beginning of the program successfully tested out of those courses by summer’s end, and 60 percent bypassed remedial composition. Six students Continued on page 12

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Favorite Little Rock concert memories

For our annual Music Issue, the Times asked a handful of local musicians to describe their favorite memory of a concert in Little Rock. See more entries and contribute your own on Rock Candy at arktimes.com.

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Insurance reformer dies 4

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Arkansas Times readers’ choice for best DJ I’m not sure of the exact year, but my best guess is that this occurred during the summer of 1989: I attended a rap concert at Barton Coliseum featuring Steady B, Kid ’n Play, Too Short and Sir Mix-A-lot 1 as headliner. His biggest song at this point was “Posse on Broadway.” Only the oldest of hip-hop heads will remember Steady B. He was first up to play and had a hell of a performance, but the major thing that stood out was his DJ. DJ Tat Money from Philadelphia broke into a routine of Rob Base’s “It Takes Two” that was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. I thought for sure the night was only going to get crazier as the DJs for the other acts took the stage. Unfortunately none of the other groups had a DJ. Perhaps a smart move since Tat Money had been crowned the New Music Seminar DJ Battle Champion that same year.

Joshua Asante

Amasa Hines, Velvet Kente Steel Pulse 2 at Revolution some years back. It’s surreal the way they replicated the studio versions of their songs. Blood Feathers at White Water. Made me seriously re-evaluate my live performance. Before seeing them I focused way too much on restraint and not enough on execution and release. I also might have teared up a bit seeing Van Hunt at Stickyz in 2011. He’s been a longtime inspiration for a multitude of reasons.

John Miller

Big John Miller Band, Arkansas Sounds Music Festival coordinator In the early ’80s, I saw CeDell Davis 3 at a Juneteenth celebration downtown on the river. Seeing a guy in a wheelchair wedge a butter knife in his polio stricken hands and use it as a slide so he could play the guitar affected me profoundly. This was the real deal. Happy, sad, lonely and lovely — this was the blues. While his technical prowess wasn’t exactly the best, he more than made up for that with his grit, spit and passion for getting his point across. Even as a young boy, the blues seeped deep into my soul that day. And thanks to that concert, CeDell helped put me on my lifetime musical journey.

Rod Bryan

Ho-Hum Last summer, The Geto Boys, with all the original members, played Discovery. Bushwick Bill was wearing a camouflage Razorback ball cap and a Yoda backpack. They faked him having an attack and death in the middle of the show. The show started at 3 a.m. Others: The Ramones at Asher and University (Midnight Rodeo?). The Rolling Stones at War Memorial. Violent Femmes 4 at Riverfest. Uncle Tupelo at Juanita’s. American Music Club at Sticky Fingerz. Alex Chilton at Juanita’s.

607

Solo rapper, Ear Fear I remember the Tech 9 5 show at The Village in 2009. He had the stage set up like a scene from “Mad Max” with tombstones and macabre chup-

pahs. He was energetic and incorporated some aggressive choreography. I’m still trying to put on a show as good as that one.

Sammy Williams

Futuro Boots, Midwest Caravan I moved to Little Rock in 2005, and I have been to Riverfest every single year since then. My favorite memory is of climbing over and through a sea of middle-aged women waiting to see LL Cool J to get on the front barricade for Soul Asylum. I remember catching the eyes of the few other diehard fans that were singing along to every word, those who had also braved the hordes of horny women. As soon as they hit their last note, I was immediately tossed aside as rabid females positioned themselves for a better view of the shirtless James Smith. A few years later, I was part of a small crowd once again singing along to every Soul Asylum song at Revolution. Despite the small crowd, Dave Pirner 6 still threw his rippedjean-clad form all over the stage as if “Runaway Train” was still the biggest video on MTV.

TJ Deeter

Founder of Localist I was at Barton Coliseum for Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chili Peppers in 2000. I got thirsty during Foo Fighters and headed to the concession for a drink. I was in line and looked up and saw Dave Grohl 7 come running by playing guitar. A crowd followed as he made his way back into the stadium and back on to stage. He never missed a lick.

Retired Batesville lawyer, judge and Rockefeller-era reformer John Norman Harkey died Aug. 1. He was 81. Republican Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller appointed Harkey, a Democrat, Arkansas insurance commissioner in 1967. His job was to clean up the sewer of corruption created by the Faubus administration. Arkansas had more insurance companies than New York with 30 times the population, books on the Rockefeller era recount. In a year, he set up a meaningful regulatory agency and forced dozens of the operators out of Arkansas. Harkey was a founding member of the Arkansas chapter of the ACLU and had a role in public interest litigation, particularly related to municipal bond financing for private projects. He very nearly upended a Little Rock convention center bond issue in this challenge. Ernest Dumas, who reported on Harkey over the years, said he would “have preferred that his death go unnoticed by the newspapers.” “He never cared for publicity, perhaps after the episode when he tossed policemen through the plate-glass window of a Hot Springs nightclub after they came to arrest him for excessive drinking and carousing. He was prosecuting attorney for Independence County at the time. He must have learned to cherish brawling when he fought with the Marines in Korea. “As Rockefeller’s insurance commissioner he shut down hundreds of fly-by-night insurance companies in 1967-69 and helped shutter Arkansas Loan and Thrift Corp., the bogus savings bank that Faubus cronies and the Arkansas attorney general, Bruce Bennett, used to fleece west Arkansas people out of millions in the late ’60s. He was later a juvenile judge.”

Beware of turkey thieves There’s a turkey rustler on the loose. On Aug. 1, The Baxter Bulletin reported news of a turkey kidnapper driving a Dodge Charger. It happened July 31. The car — bearing a conservation license tag — roared up to Gaston’s White River Resort bird sanctuary at Lakeview. A passenger hopped out, grabbed a turkey, hopped back in and the car roared off. Value of turkey? About $40. A run of the partial license tag seen by witnesses came up with nothing. www.arktimes.com

August 7, 2014

Re port er, Cont . needing math, comp and reading remediation tested out of all three. Such rapid gains require close scrutiny, but they are cause for excitement among educators searching for solutions to close the achievement gap between black and white students. Despite decades of litigation and over a billion dollars in payments from the state to PCSSD and the Little Rock and North Little Rock school districts to remedy persistent racial disparities in the educational opportunities Central Arkansas offers its children, African American students are still less likely to graduate from high school, less likely to attend college and more likely to require remediation of core courses should they make it to a postsecondary institution. In January, a settlement in the convoluted desegregation suit was finally agreed upon, which will end Arkansas’s payments to the three Pulaski County districts in three years. The deseg money will soon be gone, but the achievement gap remains nearly as wide as it was 30 years ago. In the eyes of John Walker, the veteran attorney representing the black families who brought the lawsuit, the settlement was hardly a victory for minority students. “The only thing that’s been achieved

here is that the laws are gone,” he said in January. Walker’s grudging endorsement of the settlement was a matter of pragmatism: He knew the suit would likely soon be ended by order of presiding federal Judge Price Marshall if a negotiation wasn’t achieved. The creation of the Scholars Academy is similarly pragmatic. The program is the product of a plan created by Walker in partnership with PCSSD Superintendent Jerry Guess, who was appointed to head the district following a state takeover in 2011. Judge Marshall approved the plan in June, paving the way for this year’s summer remediation camp. “My notion was [the K-12 schools] hadn’t taught these kids,” Walker said. “The best thing they could do for them would be to at least find a way to increase their options outside the [school] system ... so it began as an effort to find a way to make up for the education lost by inattention to the needs of minority students.” PCSSD will end or scale back several programs it has previously funded with the deseg money and instead direct $10 million over the next three years into a fund to help students graduating from the district attend UALR or Philander

Smith. The immersive, three-week summer experience is only one component of the Scholars Academy; students will also receive mentoring and support after they enroll in college and will be eligible for a $2,500 scholarship renewable for four years. Perhaps most importantly, in the coming 2014-15 school year, the program will begin targeting ninth-graders in PCSSD schools, pairing them with mentors from the university, educating them about career options, and nudging them into an abbreviated summer program at UALR to spark an early interest in college. Although this year’s summer cohort was small due to the rushed time frame (Marshall approved the academy’s plan only two months ago), Walker said he hoped that at least 4,000 students would participate over the next five years. “My opinion is, it’s spot on,” Guess said. “The most powerful part of this program for me is the awakening of kids when they’re still in high school. “I’ve spoken to my secondary principals, and they’ve spoken to their counselors. There’s a great sense of excitement about it. I haven’t seen many efforts that have generated this much enthusiasm.”

FULLY IMMERSED: Donaldson Scholars at work.

The wages of remediation

The optimism is at least partly backed by experience and data. The Donaldson Scholars Academy is modeled on a pilot program launched by UALR in 2013 called the Summer Bridge Academy, the brainchild of vice-chancellor Donaldson himself. Last summer, UALR invited its incoming freshmen who needed math remediation to attend a free immersion course (funded in part by aid from several charitable foundations). It drew 43 participants from around the state. Remarkably,

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August 7, 2014

ARKANSAS TIMES

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every student in 2013 tested out of at least one remedial course by summer’s end. “Ninety-five percent of them had bypassed remedial math by the end of the program. Seventy-five percent of them bypassed English,” said UALR’s Brad Patterson, who oversees data collection for the program. Remediation is a necessity for students who enter college behind — but it’s also a good predictor of who succeeds in college and who drops out. For UALR, which has among the lowest year-to-year retention rates of Arkansas’s public universities, a program that helps students who are academically behind is a program that helps the school. “Across every institution in the state and the country, students who require remediation are much less likely to succeed in college,” Patterson said. “Students who need all three — math, reading and writing — have less than a 10 percent chance of graduating in four years.” One way to explain away the success of the Scholars Academy is that the students spent three weeks learning how to take a test rather than genuinely absorbing the material. But data from fall classes shows that the gains didn’t evaporate. “We found that the success rates of the 2013 Summer Bridge cohort was equivalent to that of students who weren’t prescribed remedial classes,” said Amber Smith, who directs both Summer Bridge and the UALR component of the Donaldson Scholars Academy. “They also had a 10 percent higher retention rate from the fall semester to the spring semester than other students. Attorney Walker saw that data, and that’s what led to the Scholars Academy this summer.” Smith said the Summer Bridge students performed better than the Donaldson Scholars Academy students this summer because they’d already been admitted into UALR. In contrast, “the Scholars Academy kids are not filtered

at all,” she said. “They weren’t collegeadmitted.” Both programs’ successes, Smith said, are the result of tremendously hard work on the part of quality educators who know their stuff and are given the resources they need to be effective. Chane Morrow, who teaches math at the program and also mentors UALR freshmen throughout the school year, emphasized the importance of tailoring instruction to individual student needs. “We use all different methods — small group, lecture, computer-based instruction, manipulatives, one-on-one tutoring,” Morrow said. “We test throughout the summer. Out of each test, we refine our approach — which students should go where, which need heavy help.” (Though more commonly known around town as the rapper Epiphany, Morrow obtained a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Stanford before launching his music career.) That requires plenty of staff. For every four or five students, there’s either a faculty member or a UALR student coach. The high ratio also creates a sense of support and community, which instructors said is crucial to infusing students with an understanding that their life goals are obtainable with sufficient work, and that their academic deficiencies are just that — gaps in knowledge, not gaps in character or inherent ability. “These students are probably working harder than they’ve ever been asked to work in their lives,” said Sherry Rankins Robinson, the program’s director of composition and the chair of UALR’s writing department. “They’re asked to do three major writing projects in this three-week program. They’re producing texts they’d produce on a college level.” Indeed, on the last week of the summer program, the sense of accomplishment among Scholars Academy students was palpable. Some of the program’s academic coaches are rising UALR sophomores

who participated in last year’s pilot Summer Bridge Academy program and can testify to its success. One such coach is Laura Montalvan, a graphic design major from Hope who was one of the 43 students in last year’s summer cohort. The first person in her family to go to college, Montalvan has no doubt that the Summer Bridge Academy made the difference between success and failure during a difficult freshman year. “That’s why I’m in college now,” she said. “I had to leave my family to come to UALR, but I have a new family here.”

“Despite the failures of the system”

It remains to be seen how the Scholars Academy will perform when it’s scaled up next summer. Walker estimates some 400 to 500 PCSSD students will be eligible to attend the immersion course. Can the program replicate its gains with a community of students that could be nearly 10 times as large? Even then, a three-week program can’t fully compensate for deficiencies in the K-12 system, Walker said. He sees the Scholars Academy as a crucial safety net, not as a panacea. “The point is to motivate and stimulate these students — to cause them

to want more and to do better despite the failures of the system,” Walker said. He sees those failures as self-evident, a result of both continued bias and the inherent disadvantages faced by kids from poorer households. Providing early childhood education and reforming the school disciplinary system are necessary next steps, he said. But Chris Foy, the student from Mills, considers himself fortunate to have received the high school education he did. “I was really lucky to go to Mills and Fuller [Middle School], because this summer I’ve tutored people who have slipped through the cracks. Maybe they had bad teachers.” He recounted a story from this summer about helping a fellow Scholars Academy student who was struggling to solve an algebra problem. It was only when he told his classmate to puzzle through the math without using her calculator that Foy realized his classmate had never learned her multiplication tables. “This girl didn’t know six times seven,” he said, looking troubled. “That impacted me hard.” Funding for special education reporting provided by the Arkansas Public Policy Panel.

www.arktimes.com

August 7, 2014

Land of the Pharoah I

The early years of a Little Rock legend. Will Stephenson

n March, in a conference room at the former Peabody Hotel, Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola stood up to address a small gathering of mostly out-of-town academics. He cleared his throat, thanked everyone for coming. To the mayor’s immediate left was seated Pharoah Sanders, the pioneering avant-garde saxophonist who Ornette Coleman, no amateur, once called “probably the best tenor player in the world.” “I want you all to know,” said the mayor, looking out at the sparse crowd, “I come from a musical family.” Sanders, 73, wore a long, loose-fitting white shirt that fell far below his waist. He kept his eyes closed while the mayor spoke, facing down into his lap as if meditating or in great pain. “I was very pleased to hear about all the talent that Pharoah has exhibited over the years,” the mayor continued, not hiding the fact that he knew very little about the man sitting next to him. Sanders hung his head even lower, which hadn’t previously seemed possible. The speech went on for a few more minutes and ended with the mayor proclaiming that day, March 8, “Pharoah Sanders Day here in the city of Little Rock.” Light applause, and then Sanders finally opened his eyes, stood and shuffled over to the podium. His beard was jagged, white, Zeus-like. He threw up his hands, the international sign of speechlessness. “God bless everybody, all of you,” he said very slowly, his voice almost inscrutably deep. There was silence for a while, but for the awkward hum of an AC unit. “I don’t know what else I can really say,” he said. “I will remember this day my whole life.” Maybe you were there that day at the Peabody, but I doubt it. Not many were. I wasn’t. The moment is preserved on an old VHS tape somewhere deep in the catacombs of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. I visited the Center not long ago and met with John Miller, coordinator of the concert series Arkansas Sounds. Miller was there, he introduced Sanders and he remains visibly shaken by the encounter. “He’s got this weird, heavy presence,” he told me, sitting in his office surrounded by stacks of local cultural debris. “It was like I could walk into a room, and I’d just know, ‘He’s here.’ Then I’d look around and there he’d be. You could feel that heaviness.” Why weren’t we there? Consider that there is arguably no musician more influential or interesting, no one more central to the story

August 7, 2014

ARKANSAS TIMES

‘HEAVY PRESENCE’: John Coltrane said Sanders “helps me stay alive sometimes.”

of the development of music-as-art, to grow up and develop creatively in Little Rock than Pharoah Sanders. This is the man who, at 25, was handpicked by John Coltrane to join his band, and who Coltrane would go on to say, “helps me stay alive sometimes.” The man who the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka wrote “has produced some of the most significant and

moving, beautiful music identified by the name Jazz.” If there is a Pharoah Sanders Day, then, why does nobody celebrate it? I’ve been asking that question of a lot of people lately, and the best answer I’ve gotten so far was from John E. Bush IV, great-grandson of the John E. Bush who founded the Mosaic Templars in 1883. Bush is younger than Sand-

ers, but he’s met him a few times, even played with him some out in Oakland, Calif., decades ago. (When they were first introduced, in the ’60s, Sanders asked him if he had a saxophone mouthpiece he could buy, then lost interest and walked off.) “Little Rock has never accepted him,” Bush said, sounding defeated, flustered. “With Pharoah, it’s like the story of Jesus. When he went home, they said to Jesus, ‘Ain’t you Joseph’s son? The carpenter? We know you.’ And Jesus knew then that he couldn’t work no miracles there. He was just Joseph and Mary’s boy. That’s the feeling Pharoah has about Little Rock. People here don’t know Pharoah Sanders. They’ve just heard the name.” Back before they called him Pharoah, after he’d fled Arkansas and was living broke and routinely homeless in Oakland and New York, he had another name. Back then they called him “Little Rock.”

rell, a name that’s oddly appropriate considering the atavistic, primal, feral imagery that early critics would resort to years later in describing his sound. Whitney Balliet of the New Yorker referred to his “elephant shrieks” in 1966, while the jazz historian Eric Nisenson, confronting one his solos, wrote, “One is reminded of a child having a tantrum, who begins by whining and complaining and builds to out-of-control howls and shrieks.” Picture young Farrell out on his porch at night with his sax, a child hav-

system that some called “Little Harlem” and others called simply “The Line.” It meant twofor-one dances at Club Morocco, where the house band was Ulysses S. Brown and The Castlerockers. Glance through the listings in any given issue of the Arkansas State Press, the black newspaper of record, and every week is a blur: Ella Fitzgerald and B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf and Redd Foxx. At Robinson Auditorium there would be Little Richard or Fats Domino or Bo Diddley. Lil’ Green and the Jumping Jive Maestro. There was “Kan Man,” who threw saddlebags bulging with concert flyers over his bicycle handlebars and rode around both sides of the river pasting them to trees or streetlamps. At night he played a Prince Albert can as if it were a harmonica. There was Lloyd Armon, host of “Lloyd’s Midnight Ride” on KGHI (and later KOKY) and proprietor of Lloyd’s Cafe, Lloyd’s DriveIn and the Hotel Del Rio, featuring the ever-exclu*** sive Ebony Room. There Whenever Sanders talks were racketeers, pool halls, about his upbringing in intersecret societies and driveviews, which isn’t often, he by shootings. Club 67, The never fails to mention Jimmie Casablanca, The Twin City Cannon. A Korean War vet Club, The Magnolia Room. from Oklahoma, Cannon was At the center of it all, there was Taborian Hall, the band director at Scipio A. Jones, the black high school the heart of Ninth Street in segregated North Little with its classical architecRock, where Sanders lived ture and ever-shifting clubs with his mother and father on all three floors. Sanders SHEETS OF SOUND: Sanders “advanced the science of breathing” with his playing, picked up early gigs at the in the 1940s and ’50s. Cannon according to Amiri Baraka. played tenor sax and spent second-floor Waiters Club, his nights out on an endless opened in 1955 and manstring of gigs across the river aged by a man named Booin downtown Little Rock, a Boo Douglas. There was an lifestyle that seems to have old wooden piano in the appealed to Sanders right corner, and every night a away. “Say what you got to dice game that seemed to say, then shut up,” was one of never end. He also played ing a tantrum. his maxims, and that seems to have appealed the Flamingo Club across the street; it had a Cannon went on to play with Count Basie’s to Sanders, too. more modern vibe and a younger crowd. He Sanders’ lifelong introversion, his deeply Orchestra, as did his friend, the Little Rock-born backed Junior Parker there, and Bobby “Blue” felt inner solitude, is fundamental. Going by trombonist Richard Boone, who would often Bland. On a good night, he could make five sit in on Sanders’ band classes. In this way, he the accounts of those who have known him, it dollars. learned how professional musicians — adults is one of his most notable qualities: He hardly Around this time he met York Wilborn, who speaks. On the other hand, all he ever did was — spoke and joked with one other, how they was a couple of years older and who had a car. make noise. His parents, by all accounts musicarried themselves. By the time he was 15, he They bonded immediately over music and quiet. was sneaking into clubs across the river. In a cal themselves, didn’t approve of music as a “If he wasn’t saying nothing, I wasn’t saying career route, and so as a boy, living in a small mid-’90s interview with Down Beat magazine, nothing,” Wilborn told me. “We’d just play house on Hazel Street across the street from a he remembered dressing up in a suit, wearing and practice, try to figure stuff out.” Wilborn, drive-in movie theater, Sanders would stand dark shades and a fake, drawn-on mustache, who lived with his mother on Louisiana Street, outside on the porch and practice his scales slipping past the bouncers into the darkness would regularly make the drive across the river for hours. Out in public, he was rarely seen of a nightclub. to pick up Sanders so the two of them could liswithout a neck strap. Little Rock nightlife in the postwar years ten to records and try their best to play along. In those days he went by his given name, Farmeant West Ninth Street, a dense, vibrant ecoContinued on page 16

He said he took his saxophone with him everywhere, even kept it in his lap in the car. He told Stewart, “I don’t want it to fall over.”

www.arktimes.com

August 7, 2014

Sylvia “Sy” Smith

HOMECOMING: Sanders on Hazel St., where he grew up.

Their favorite was John Coltrane’s “Blue Train.” He played too fast for them, so they’d always have to slow it down, but that was no good either, because it changed the key. Wilborn led a locally adored rhythm and blues band in those years called The Thrillers, and Sanders frequently sat in on sax. Henry Shead, who would go on to a celebrated career as a Las Vegas lounge act, played piano. The name Thrillers came from an audience call-in contest on a public access “American Bandstand”-type TV show called “Center Stage.” They played Ninth Street and anywhere else that would have them. They once backed Minnijean Brown Trickey, not yet famous as one of the Little Rock Nine, at the Dunbar Community Center. She sang “Love Is Strange.” The band recorded one single, billed for whatever reason as O’Henry, for the Memphis label Fernwood: “Wanna Jean” backed by “Why Do I Love You.” Wilborn’s name is misspelled on the record, and he never received any royalties. Sanders wasn’t there at the session, but these are the songs that he played. Harmless, boogie-era dance numbers with a rolling sax-and-piano backbeat. Listening to them now, it’s hard to imagine Sanders committing to this stuff. He has been abrasive and cosmic and spiritual and esoteric, but he has rarely been danceable. Sanders went on tour with the Thrillers in 1958, the summer before his senior year. A former bus driver named Andy had offered to manage the group and they’d agreed, on account of some connections he had to a resort in Idlewild, Mich. The plan was to play a series of gigs before heading to the resort, where they’d audition for the resort’s owner and spend the summer there playing for rich people and getting rich themselves in the process. They made it as far as Norfolk, Va., before realizing they were broke. (They’d purchased their matching suits on credit.) Andy pawned a typewriter, and the crew advanced to Philadelphia. That’s where things really went downhill. It turned out Andy had been mishandling their finances, essentially robbing them, and nobody 16

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ARKANSAS TIMES

could pay for their hotel, which promptly kicked them out onto the street. Wilborn fired Andy, then Shead contracted jaundice and was hospitalized. They spent the rest of the summer playing at a bar in Philadelphia, trying to earn enough to make it back to Little Rock. The Idlewild resort gig ended up going to a young vocal group from Detroit called The Four Tops. Any relief at returning home must have been tempered by the fact that they were walking into what the historian Grif Stockley has described as “the ugliest period in Little Rock’s history,” aside from the Civil War. The integration crisis of the previous year had resulted in an atmosphere in which, as Daisy Bates wrote in her autobiography, “hysteria in all its madness enveloped the city.” In an old interview with a public access TV show in Brooklyn, Sanders was asked if racism was ever a problem growing up in Arkansas. “When I had to go to the grocery store,” he said, “I had to fight going and coming.” You can see him considering it, turning it over in his mind. “Yes,” he said finally, “there was a lot of racism, a whole lot back there at that time.” Everyone knows what happened to the students who tried entering Central High in 1957, but there’s less attention given to the similar showdown that occurred at North Little Rock High. It’s there on the front page of the Arkansas Gazette: Sept. 10, 1957. Six students from Scipio A. Jones, Sanders’ classmates, walked up the steps to the public high school and were swarmed and blocked by hundreds of their repulsed, snarling white neighbors. The photo caption reads, “This Time It’s Across The River.” “The Negroes were shoved and pushed but not struck,” wrote the Gazette’s Roy Reed. “They did not resist.” By 1959, Club Morocco had gone bankrupt. For that matter, so had the Arkansas State Press. That was the year Sanders left for California. As to why exactly he left, there is no definitive answer. Maybe it was because his own city made very clear the notion that it did not want him, his family or his peers. The local trumpeter Walter Henderson, who played with Sanders as a 17-year-old and later met him a few times in Chicago, thinks it might have been something else, too. “There is a certain kind of complacency here that stops people from following their dreams,” Henderson told me. “And maybe the only way you can follow them is to get the hell out.” *** York Wilborn and The Thrillers became York Wilborn and The Invaders became York Wilborn and The Psychedelic Six became Classic Funk. York Wilborn became a band director in Marianna. After Sanders moved away, Wilborn saw him a few more times. Once, in the ’60s, he brought one of his albums home so that his mother could hear it, and Wilborn dropped by to see his old friend. By then, he was already playing with Coltrane, the musi-

cian they had imitated as kids, and Wilborn asked him how he played all those “long lines and crazy stuff.” Sanders told him, “Music is just like a circle,” which he didn’t understand. He said, “Well, OK.” Charles Stewart, founder of the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame, which inducted Sanders into its ranks in 2004, remembers spending time with Sanders before and after the ceremony. He said he took his saxophone with him everywhere, even kept it in his lap in the car. He told Stewart, “I don’t want it to fall over.” Watching him perform at the Statehouse Convention Center, Stewart said, “He did something I’ve never seen anyone do before. He blew so much air — and I don’t even know how you do that — but he was able to take his mouth away from the reed and still play it for several minutes.” One of the most unusual and physically difficult techniques associated with Sanders over the course of his career is called circular breathing, in which, by inhaling through his nose and keeping stores of air in his cheeks while still blowing on his instrument, he can create the impression of a continuous, unbroken breath. There’s a 1982 video you can find online of him playing his song “Kazuko” in an abandoned tunnel, accompanied only by a hand-pumped harmonium. Near the middle of the 10-minute song, the camera zooms in on his face as he begins playing a series of quick and sharp arpeggios. His cheeks inflate and deflate rapidly, and because of the acoustics of the tunnel, it sounds for a while as though he’s doing something actually impossible. It sounds like a choir of saxophones, but it’s just him. It’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen. Amiri Baraka, always Sanders’ most acute listener and maybe the most important real-time chronicler of the free jazz movement (“New Black Music is this: Find the self, then kill it,” he once wrote), claimed that Sanders in particular standardized the technique, claimed even that he “has advanced the science of breathing.” Baraka described Sanders’ implausible strings of notes beautifully, as “long tissues of sounded emotion.” In his book “Black Music,” Baraka includes Sanders in his pantheon of musicians who are also “God-seekers.” In his history of the saxophone, “The Devil’s Horn,” the writer Michael Segell goes to see Sanders play and speaks to him briefly after the show. They talk about what he learned from Coltrane. “He often said the saxophone is not completed,” Sanders says. “He heard something else in it; he thought there was more there but it hadn’t been heard yet. So that’s my mission, that’s what I’ve been looking for the past forty years. I think he would be pleased with all the new sounds I’ve discovered.” Then, after hesitating for a while, he seems to reconsider. “Except, of course, they’re not new sounds,” he says. “They’re very old sounds.” What he means, I think, is that music is just like a circle.

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August 7, 2014

Sense of place Matt White’s ‘Portraits in a bar.’

att White might be the most widely beloved figure in the Central Arkansas music scene. The co-owner of White Water Tavern is only 31, but he’s been booking and promoting concerts for almost half his life. Where most promoters book shows with an eye toward the bottom line, White has always sought out bands and performers that, first and foremost, he admires — often willing them into popularity through repeat bookings and promotion. That — along with his gentle demeanor and willingness to stand in front of the stage while everyone else lurks in the back — has made him a friend, and White Water a home, to musicians across the country.

August 7, 2014

ARKANSAS TIMES

Last year, he took a picture of someone in the bar’s entryway and liked the way it looked. It dawned on him that it would make a good spot to stage a series of portraits of those who perform and hang out in the bar, “a kind of running document of a particular era in the bar’s history.” The candid shots, which number more than 100, are wonderfully expressive. White captures flirty eyes, sly grins and stoned impassivity. A couple furtively making out. You can almost hear the shit-talking and yelps of laughter in a few of them. They make you want to head to the bar. Someday, White hopes to put them together in a book. Until then, find them on Facebook and Instagram.

SHUFFLE DOWN TO 7TH STREET: Opposite page (clockwise, L to R): Gerald Johnson, Jimbo Mathus and Carl “Stud” White, T-Model Ford’s grandson and drummer. On this page (clockwise from bottom left): Charles Woods, Ron Eoff, Laura and Lydia Rogers of The Secret Sisters and Billy Joe Shaver.

Continued on page 20

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August 7, 2014

MORE WHITE WATER PORTRAITS: (clockwise from top left) Richard Buckner, Jamaal Lee from Velvet Kente, Nightflying’s Peter Read and Chanticleer from Magic Mouth.

August 7, 2014

ARKANSAS TIMES

Best of Reynolds

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August 7, 2014

Arts Entertainment and

A song that’s happy and sad After years of struggles with addiction, Christopher Denny is back with his first album in seven years. By David Ramsey

ore than 10 years ago, I was at a house party in Little Rock. Don’t recall quite where it was, or who was throwing the party, or who I was with. But there’s one thing I remember, and will never forget. I was wandering around outside in the yard and thought I heard an old record I wasn’t familiar with. For just a moment I thought it was Bessie Smith, but no, the sound was too crisp. I just couldn’t place it one way or the other — man or woman, black or white, country or gospel. I walked toward what I thought were the speakers and it wasn’t a record at all: There was Christopher Denny, no more than 20 years old at the time, sitting in a lawn chair, playing guitar and wailing out songs. Who was this? It’s too obvious to say the kid sounded like he was from another time. Hell, he sounded like he was from another planet. Denny, a North Little Rock native, gets compared to all sorts of things: Roy Orbison most commonly; Bob Dylan is also sort of a fit; Jeff Buckley (Denny was a big fan growing up); a little bit of Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s high lonesome trill; plus gospel, blues, old-time country, soul. National Public Radio called his voice “an androgynous, time-jumping instrument.” But the thing about Chris Denny is 22

August 7, 2014

ARKANSAS TIMES

ONE OF A KIND: Chris Denny has come back after nearly wrecking his life.

that he sounds like nothing so much as Chris Denny, an American one-of-akind. His voice is a singular instrument: a cinematic warble that veers between sorrow and joy, between Sunday morning and Saturday night. Years later, I saw Denny play again, this time in New Orleans, in 2008. He was the drunkest person I’ve ever seen perform. Maybe just the drunkest person I’ve ever seen. “I was out of my wild, fucking mind,” Denny said, remembering the show now. He strolled through the bar, veering between flirting with women and cussing at men. Later, he threw wine glasses against the wall until he was asked to leave. His performance was beautiful at times — there were still those moments when songs seemed to

leap out of the crackle and hiss of an old 78. But he was too much of a mess to sustain the magic. Denny and his then-band, the Old Soles, were the opening act, and when the bar manager began signaling that their time was up, Denny refused to leave the stage. There was shouting back and forth. He began jam-band noodling on his guitar in protest, an endless and unwanted encore. His bandmates, one by one, walked off the stage. Shortly thereafter, they walked away from playing with Denny for good. “That was close to the end,” Denny said. Over the years, there have been more than a few fans that worried that this would be the story of Denny — an undeniable talent and a train-wreck life. So it was welcome news last May

when Partisan Records announced the coming release of “If the Roses Don’t Kill Us,” the first new album from Denny in seven years. Denny is clean and sober and playing music again. “I got a song that’s happy and sad,” he bellows to open the new album. After all these years, unmistakably him. *** Denny grew up poor in North Little Rock, a self-described “Levy rat,” and bounced around more elementary schools than he could count. When he was 12, his uncle and aunt adopted him, giving him a more stable home life. “I was upset and disappointed in my mom when I was that age,” he said, “but she made the best decision that she’s Continued on page 36

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DEPARTED: Sax man Gerald Johnson.

Gerald Johnson, a tenor saxophone player and Little Rock music scene mainstay, died Monday after suffering a heart attack at the Arkansas State Library on West Capitol Avenue. He was 56. A Little Rock native, Johnson was the son of Thomas Johnson, a local carpenter and owner of the El Dorado Club. A substitute teacher for the Little Rock School District and the longtime host of a morning jazz program for KABF-FM 88.3, Johnson was also a founding member of groups such as First Impressions and Afrodesia, and played saxophone for countless artists of various genres. His first band was the local funk and soul outfit Portrait, which recorded originally for Lee Anthony’s True Soul label. “He used to play for my brother and I when we were in the talent shows around town,” said Tim Anthony, Lee’s son and a longtime collaborator. “Gerald was the one who came through every time. He is the reason I’m doing music in the first place. That’s my man.” KABF Program Manager John Cain remembered meeting Johnson when the latter was 5 years old at his father’s club. “He knew practically everybody playing music around here,” Cain said. “He was a versatile, creative person.” As a radio host, Cain said, Johnson was more than just a DJ. “He knew enough about the music and could research and bring all of that in,” he said. “The time, place, era, all of it. He did a good show.” Tim Anthony last saw Johnson perform last Thursday night at the Afterthought, at the tribute to Art Porter held as part of Jazz Week. After the set, Johnson and several other musicians went to Anthony’s studio and “just played up until like 4 o’clock in the morning.” “He was one of my best friends,” Anthony said. “And I’m sure I was one of his, too, but I think I was one of many.” www.arktimes.com

August 7, 2014

THE TO-DO

LIST

BY Clayton Gentry, LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK and Will Stephenson

FRIDAY 8/8-SATURDAY 8/9

SHAKESPEARE AT THE SHELTER

7:30 p.m. Our House Shelter. $20.

The playbill for this weekend’s third annual performance of Shake-

speare by residents and alumni of Our House includes bits from “Othello,” “Julius Caesar,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” “The Comedy of Errors” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Proceeds will go toward purchasing new

appliances and kitchenware for the shelter’s kitchen, which serves about 77,000 meals to working homeless men, women and their children every year. A news release about the show notes that the program builds fellow-

ship within the shelter: “The Shakespeare at the Shelter program began in response to residents’ needs for community and productive projects during their down-time at the shelter, and Our House staff are aware of the therapeutic benefits of creative endeavors and community-building projects.” A beginner’s Shakespeare workshop in June launched this year’s program, which will lead up to the two public performances next weekend. Our House Grants Manager Joy Ritchey noted in an email the significance of the venue itself: “The same space where residents come in through intake, often with all of their worldly possessions in tow, often downtrodden, unemployed and afraid, is transformed into a space full of hope,” she said. “We have a stage, a set, a curtain and professional lighting. An audience made up of curious community members, Our House supporters, board members, friends and family shows up to bear witness to the hard work, commitment and talent of a group of people who are very often overlooked completely.” CG

FRIDAY 8/8

STOOGES BRASS BAND

9:30 p.m. Stickyz. $8 adv., $10 day of.

SWEET BABY JAMES: James Taylor will be at Verizon Arena 8 p.m. Friday, $78-$99.50.

FRIDAY 8/8

JAMES TAYLOR

8 p.m. Verizon Arena. $78-$99.50.

I remember noticing, when I was finally old enough to steal my parents’ records, how strange it was that my mom had so much James Taylor. She had multiple copies of the same albums. Some still looked brand new, like she’d bought them just in case, as backups. Sometimes I’d find something I actually wanted, only to pull out the sleeve and find another James 24

August 7, 2014

ARKANSAS TIMES

Taylor record inside. There was something almost pathological about it: Nobody needs more than one copy of “Sweet Baby James.” I was so young. What I didn’t realize then — and I see this now — was that James Taylor is a treasure. Dismissing his stuff as softrock or glossy folk is pure genre parochialism. Taylor spent the mid-’60s in a mental hospital and much of the next decade addicted to heroin (“It’s really not so bad to be fading away,” as

he sang in 1974). The “authenticity” of a singer-songwriter is always a scam, but if anyone is authentic, James Taylor is. He’s said that he writes “spirituals for agnostics,” and that seems about right. Leonard Cohen was being ironic when he sang, on “Tower Of Song,” “I was born like this, I had no choice/I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” This is James Taylor’s burden, though — his unhappiness always sounded beautiful. WS

If you’ve only heard of one contemporary New Orleans brass group, it’s probably Rebirth Brass Band. Stooges Brass Band, on the other hand, is the group that, in 2010, turned its horns around and challenged Rebirth to a street fight mid-parade. That’s not exactly an endorsement, but it gives you a sense of Stooges’ headspace, I think. It’s a competitive circuit, and these guys have distinguished themselves over the past several years as standouts in a city tough to stand out in, winning the prestigious Red Bull Street Kings showcase, working with Mannie Fresh, touring Pakistan. Their local classic “Why’d They Have To Kill Him?” was written after former trombonist Joe Williams was shot and killed by the NOPD on his way to a gig. Band leader Walter “Whoadie” Ramsey was there at the scene and, as reported in the newspaper the following day, asked the police, “Why?” WS

in brief

THURSDAY 8/7

FRIDAY 8/8

SATURDAY 8/9

POTLIKKER FILM FESTIVAL 6 p.m. The Hive, Bentonville.

BLACK COUNTY: Bonnie Montgomery will be at the White Water Tavern 9:30 p.m. Friday.

BONNIE MONTGOMERY

9:30 p.m. White Water Tavern.

Bonnie Montgomery, who you may recognize either as the composer of that Bill Clinton opera a few years ago (covered by The New Yorker) or as a beloved local country singersongwriter (she’s released two EPs, “Cruel” and “Joy,” via Fast Weapons Records), released her fulllength self-titled debut July 29. After a series of dates out west, she’s coming home to the White Water Tavern for her official album release show, featuring opening act Fret and Worry (Joe Meazle and RJ Looney). If you haven’t heard

the album, seek it out — Montgomery is a gifted songwriter with good production instincts (every guitar sound seems distinct and distantly familiar, and the orchestration is admirably subtle for someone with a composition background). “But I Won’t” is a honky-tonk dark comedy (“I could publicly ruin you, but I won’t”) and “Take Me Or Leave Me” is an Outlaw Country epic (“I don’t want to grow old”). “Black County” seems like it should be a standard by now. Her persona is part Lucinda Williams and part Joan Crawford in “Johnny Guitar,” jaded and haunted and unrepentantly cool. WS

Food, food films, foodies and fiddles: That’s what the Potlikker Film Festival, an annual event of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi’s Southern Foodways Alliance, is all about. For Arkansas’s first Potlikker festival, the Foodways Alliance has asked 21c Museum Hotel chef Matt McClure, South on Main chef Matt Bell and Butcher and Public’s Travis McConnell to pool their considerable talent to make a great local-food meal; foodstuffs will be supplied by Falling Sky Farm, Armstead Mountain Farm, Cedar Creek Farms and Rios Family Farms. Ozark Beer Co. and Mountain Valley Spring Water will quench thirsts. The two films on tap celebrate Southern cooking: Joe York’s “Fish Ribs in Little Rock,” about the Lassis Inn, and “Ovens Are for Pies,” about McClard’s Barbecue. (York’s also made films about Southern characters: Arkansas Living Treasures Dallas Bump [“Bump”] and Violet Hensley [“74 Fiddles”.) There will also be bluegrass provided by Foley’s Van out of Fayetteville. The Southern Foodways Alliance has held Potlikker film fests across the South since 2007. The festival will run from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at 21c Museum’s restaurant and bar The Hive (200 N.E. A St., off the square). LNP

SUNDAY 8/10

DOUBLE FEATURE: ‘DEAR GOD NO!’ AND ‘PENTAGRAM’ 9 p.m. Riverdale 10. $7.

“Dear God No!” is a grindhouse throwback about “cop-killing lawhaters” and “white trash,” focusing on a Georgia motorcycle gang billed as “the sickest sicko gang to ever terrorize a town.” They call

themselves the Impalers. Don’t bring your kids. In true exploitation movie fashion, it’ll screen as part of twisted double feature, followed by “Pentagram: When The Screams Come,” a concert film highlighting the great Virginia metal pioneers Pentagram. The group was started in 1971 and — following a thousand incremental changes in lineup and a gradual

aesthetic evolution that has mirrored the changing definition of the term “metal”— still exists, thanks to their late career rediscovery and to their inimitable wild-man singer Bobby Liebling (the only original member, technically), who stills favors gold lamé and huge hair. The only doom metal band to ever collaborate with Hank Williams III. WS

The Joint will host the Finger Food Concert Series, featuring guitarists Danny Dozier, Steve Davison and Micky Rigby, 7:30 p.m., $10. L.A. alt-rock group ACIDIC will be at Juanita’s at 9 p.m., $8 adv., $10 day of. Mulehead will be at the Afterthought with Fitra at 9 p.m., and St. Louis “noir blues” band Kentucky Knife Fight will be at White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m.

FRIDAY 8/8 Old State House museum will screen James Bridges’ 1977 film “September 30, 1955” (set in Conway) as part of its Second Friday Cinema series, 5 p.m., free. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art will host the Ozarkumentaries Outdoor Film Festival, featuring short films by Arkansas filmmakers about the Ozarks, 8:30 p.m., free. Lulav will host “Divas in the Rock,” featuring Tawanna Campbell, Jeron Marshall, Bijoux Pighe, Dee Dee Jones and Latricia Rucker, $15-$20. Jonathan Tyler (formerly of Jonathan Tyler and the Northern Lights) will be at Revolution with The Soft White Sixties, 8:30 p.m., $10 adv., $12 day of. Josh the Devil and the Sinners will be at Vino’s with Secondhand Cannons, 9 p.m. $5.

SATUDAY 8/9 The South Main Vintage Market will be held at Bernice Garden, 9 a.m. The Ozark Folk Center will present an evening concert highlighting female performers Bette Rae Miller, Bess Kelly, Ruby Pines, Crystal McCool and Twang, 7 p.m. Christian alt-rock group Switchfoot will be at Magic Springs’ Timberwood Amphitheater with The Fable and Fury, 7 p.m., $49.99-$54.99. Austin-based country singer-songwriter Bart Crow will be at Revolution at 9 p.m., $8 adv., $10 day of. Grateful Dead tribute band The Stolen Faces will be at Stickyz at 9:30 p.m., $5. American Aquarium singer B.J. Barham will be at White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m.

TUESDAY 8/12 “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” will screen at Riverdale 10 as part of its classic movie series, $9, and Vino’s will show “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” at 7:30 p.m., free. The Joint will hold its Stand-Up Tuesday comedy night at 8 p.m. hosted by Adam Hogg, $5. Era 9 will be at Juanita’s at 9 p.m., $8 adv., $10 day of.

www.arktimes.com

August 7, 2014

after dark All events are in the Greater Little Rock area unless otherwise noted. To place an event in the Arkansas Times calendar, please email the listing and all pertinent information, including date, time, location, price and contact information, to calendar@arktimes.com.

Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 9 p.m., free. 111 Markham St. 501-374-7474. www.capitalhotel.com/CBG. Third Degree. West End Smokehouse and Tavern. 215 N. Shackleford. 501-224-7665. www.westendsmokehouse.net.

THURSDAY, Aug. 7

John Wesley Austin. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., $10. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-228-5555. www.loonybincomedy.com.

Comedy

Music

Acidic. Juanita’s, 9 p.m., $8 adv., $10 dos. 614 President Clinton Ave. 501-372-1228. www. juanitas.com. Finger Food Concert Series. Featuring guitarists Danny Dozier, Steve Davison and Micky Rigby. The Joint, 7:30 p.m., $10. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com. “Inferno.” DJs play pop, electro, house and more, plus drink specials and $1 cover before 11 p.m. Sway, 9 p.m. 412 Louisiana. 501-907-2582. Jim Dickerson. Sonny Williams’ Steak Room, 7 p.m. 500 President Clinton Ave. 501-324-2999. www.sonnywilliamssteakroom.com. Kentucky Knife Fight. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. www.whitewatertavern.com. Krush Thursdays with DJ Kavaleer. Club Climax, free before 11 p.m. 824 W. Capitol. 501-554-3437. Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 Clinton Ave. 501-372-4782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com. Michael Eubanks. Newk’s Express Cafe, 6:30 p.m. 4317 Warden Road, NLR. 501-753-8559. newks.com. Mulehead, Fitra. Afterthought Bistro & Bar. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-1196. www.afterthoughtbar.com. Open Jam. Thirst n’ Howl, 8 p.m. 14710 Cantrell Road. 501-379-8189. www.thirst-n-howl.com. Open jam with The Port Arthur Band. Parrot Beach Cafe, 9 p.m. 9611 MacArthur Drive, NLR. 771-2994. RockUsaurus. Senor Tequila, 7-9 p.m. 10300 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-224-5505. www. senor-tequila.com. Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 7:30 p.m., free. 111 Markham St. 501-374-7474. www.capitalhotel.com/CBG. Tim McGraw, Kip Moore, Cassadee Pope. Walmart AMP, sold out. 5079 W. Northgate Road, Rogers. 479-443-5600. www.arkansasmusicpavilion.com.

Comedy

John Wesley Austin. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m.;10 p.m., $7. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501228-5555. www.loonybincomedy.com.

Events

Geocaching. The Witt Stephens Jr. Central Arkansas Nature Center, 8:30 a.m. 602 President Clinton Ave. 501-907-0636. www.centralarkansasnaturecenter.com. Hillcrest Shop & Sip. Shops and restaurants offer discounts, later hours and live music. Hillcrest, first Thursday of every month, 5 p.m. P.O.Box 251522. 501-666-3600. www.hillcrestmerchants. com.

Sports

Arkansas Travelers vs. San Antonio. DickeyStephens Park, 7:10 p.m., $6-$12. 400 W. Broadway St., NLR. 501-664-1555. www.travs.com.

August 7, 2014

ARKANSAS TIMES

Dance

Ballroom Dancing. Free lessons begin at 7 p.m. Bess Chisum Stephens Community Center, 8-11 p.m., $7-$13. 12th & Cleveland streets. 501-2217568. www.blsdance.org. “Salsa Night.” Begins with a one-hour salsa lesson. Juanita’s, 9 p.m., $8. 614 President Clinton Ave. 501-372-1228. www.littlerocksalsa.com.

Events

BEAUTIFUL LUMPS OF COAL: Plumb will be at Magic Springs’ Timberwood Amphitheater 8 p.m. Friday, $49.99-$54.99.

FRIDAY, Aug. 8

Music

Bonnie Montgomery album release. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-3758400. www.whitewatertavern.com. Club Nights at 1620 Savoy. Dance night, with DJs, drink specials and bar menu, 10 p.m.–2 a.m. 1620 Market St. 501-221-1620. www.1620savoy. com. Divas In The Rock. Featuring Featuring Tawanna Campbell, Jeron Marshall, Bijoux Pighee, Dee Dee Jones and Latricia Rucker. Lulav, 9 p.m., $15-$20. 220 A W. 6th St. 501-374-5100. www. lulaveatery.com. Divorce Horse, Junk Machine, Fucktards. The Lightbulb Club, 9 p.m., $5. 21 N. Block Ave., Fayetteville. 479-444-6100. Donny Edwards, “A True Tribute To Elvis.” Also featuring Dion Pride. The Center for the Arts, 7 p.m. 2209 S. Knoxville Ave., Russellville. 479-4986600. www.russellvillecenter.net.

James Taylor. Verizon Arena, 8 p.m., $78-$99.50. 1 Alltel Arena Way, NLR. 501-975-9001. verizonarena.com. Jonathan Tyler, The Soft White Sixties. Revolution, 8:30 p.m., $10 adv., $12 day of. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. revroom. com. Josh the Devil and the Sinners, Secondhand Cannons. Vino’s, 9 p.m., $5. 923 W. 7th St. 501375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub.com. Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 Clinton Ave. 501-372-4782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com. Plumb, The Autumn City. Magic Springs’ Timberwood Amphitheater, 7 p.m., $49.99$54.99. 1701 E. Grand Ave., Hot Springs. Route 66. Agora Conference and Special Event Center, 6:30 p.m., $5. 705 E. Siebenmorgan, Conway. Stooges Brass Band. 18+ Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 9:30 p.m., $8 adv., $10 dos. 107 Commerce St. 501-372-7707. www.stickyz.com.

Fantastic Friday. Literary and music event, refreshments included. For reservations, call 479-968-2452 or email artscenter@centurytel. net. River Valley Arts Center, Every third Friday, 7 p.m., $10 suggested donation. 1001 E. B St., Russellville. 479-968-2452. www.arvartscenter.org. Geocaching. The Witt Stephens Jr. Central Arkansas Nature Center, 8:30 a.m. 602 President Clinton Ave. 501-907-0636. www.centralarkansasnaturecenter.com. LGBTQ/SGL weekly meeting. Diverse Youth for Social Change is a group for LGBTQ/SGL and straight ally youth and young adults age 14 –23. For more information, call 244-9690 or search “DYSC” on Facebook. LGBTQ/SGL Youth and Young Adult Group, 6:30 p.m. 800 Scott St. Spann Vineyards Wine Dinner. Seating is limited. Reservation only. Sonny Williams’ Steak Room, 6:30 p.m. 500 President Clinton Ave. 501-3242999. www.sonnywilliamssteakroom.com.

Film

Ozarkumentaries Outdoor Film Festival. Short films made by Arkansas filmmakers about the Ozarks. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 8:30 p.m., free. 600 Museum Way, Bentonville. 479-418-5700. crystalbridges.org. “September 30, 1955.” Second Friday Cinema. Old State House Museum, 5 p.m., free. 500 Clinton Ave. 501-324-9685. www.oldstatehouse. com.

Sports

Arkansas Travelers vs. Corpus Christi. DickeyStephens Park, 7:10 p.m.; Aug. 9, 5:30 p.m. $6-$12. 400 W. Broadway St., NLR. 501-6641555. www.travs.com.

SATURDAY, Aug. 9

Music

Bart Crow. Revolution, 9 p.m., $8 adv., $10 day of. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. revroom.com. Bette Rae Miller, Bess Kelly, Ruby Pins, Crstal McCool, Twang. Ozark Folk Center State Park, 7 p.m. 1032 Park Ave., Mountain View. BJ Barham. Solo show from American Aquarium singer. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. www.whitewatertavern.com. Bombay Harambee, LLinda. The Lightbulb Club, 9 p.m., $5. 21 N. Block Ave., Fayetteville. 479-

AE CD

John Wesley Austin. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., $7-$10. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-228-5555. www.loonybincomedy.com.

Dance

Little Rock West Coast Dance Club. Dance lessons. Singles welcome. Ernie Biggs, 7 p.m., $2. 307 Clinton Ave. 501-247-5240. www.arstreetswing. com.

Events

Little Rock Farmers’ Market. River Market Pavilions, 7 a.m. 400 President Clinton Ave. 3752552. www.rivermarket.info. Argenta Farmers Market. Argenta Farmers Market, 7 a.m. 6th and Main St., NLR. 501-8317881. www.argentaartsdistrict.org/argenta-farmers-market/. Falun Gong meditation. Allsopp Park, 9 a.m., free. Cantrell and Cedar Hill roads. Geocaching. The Witt Stephens Jr. Central Arkansas Nature Center, 8:30 a.m. 602 President Clinton Ave. 501-907-0636. www.centralarkansasnaturecenter.com. Hillcrest Farmers Market. Pulaski Heights Baptist Church, 7 a.m.-2 p.m. 2200 Kavanaugh Blvd. Historic Neighborhoods Tour. Bike tour of historic neighborhoods includes bike, guide, helmets and maps. Bobby’s Bike Hike, 9 a.m., $8-$28. 400 President Clinton Ave. 501-613-7001.

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Arkansas Travelers vs. Corpus Christi. DickeyStephens Park, 5:30 p.m. $6-$12. 400 W. Broadway St., NLR. 501-664-1555. www.travs.com.

SUNDAY, Aug. 10

Music

folksmile. Faulkner County Library, 2 p.m. 1900 Tyler St., Conway. 501-327-7482. www.fcl.org. Karaoke. Shorty Small’s, 6-9 p.m. 1475 Hogan Lane, Conway. 501-764-0604. www.shortysmalls.com. Karaoke with DJ Sara. Hardrider Bar & Grill, 7 p.m., free. 6613 John Harden Drive, Cabot. 501982-1939 ‎. Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 Clinton Ave. 501-372-4782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com. Michael Eubanks. Lone Star Steakhouse and Saloon, 7 p.m. 10901 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-227-8898. www.lonestarsteakhouse.com. Successful Sunday. The Italian Kitchen at Lulav, 8 p.m., $5-$10. 220 A W. 6th St. 501-374-5100. www. lulaveatery.com.

Events

Bernice Garden Farmer’s Market. Bernice Garden, 10 a.m. 1401 S. Main St. www.thebernicegarden.org. Geocaching. The Witt Stephens Jr. Central Arkansas Nature Center, 1 p.m. 602 President Clinton Ave. 501-907-0636. www.centralarkansasnaturecenter.com. “Live from the Back Room.” Spoken word event. Vino’s, 7 p.m. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. www. vinosbrewpub.com. Wetland Walkabout. A guided walk. Clinton Presidential Park, 2 p.m. 1200 President Clinton Ave., NLR. 501374-4242.

Film

“5 Broken Cameras.” Presented by the Arkansas Coalition for Peace and Justice. Vino’s, 6:30 p.m., free. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub.com. Double Feature: “Dear God No!” and “Pentagram: When The Screams Come.” Riverdale 10 Cinema, 9 p.m., $7. 2600 Cantrell Road. 501-296-9955.

Sports

Arkansas Travelers vs. Corpus Christi. DickeyStephens Park, 6:10 p.m., $6-$12. 400 W. Broadway St., NLR. 501-664-1555. www.travs.com.

MONDAY, Aug. 11

Music

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 Clinton Ave. 501-372-4782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com. Continued on page 29

Publication: Arkansas

Trim: 2.125x5.5 Bleed: None Live: 1.875x5.25

Film

Potlikker Film Festival. Presented by the Southern Foodways Alliance and Chef Matt McClure of The Hive. The Hive, 6 p.m., $75. 200 N.E. A St., Bentonville. 479-286-6575. www.thehivebentonville.com.

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Comedy

Pork & Bourbon Tour. Bike tour includes bicycle, guide, helmets and maps. Bobby’s Bike Hike, 11:30 a.m., $35-$45. 400 President Clinton Ave. 501-613-7001. South Main Vintage Market. Bernice Garden, 9 a.m. 1401 S. Main St. www.thebernicegarden.org.

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444-6100. Club Nights at 1620 Savoy. See Aug. 8. Composer’s Showcase. George’s Majestic Lounge, 8 p.m., $25-$35. 519 W. Dickson St., Fayetteville. 479-442-4226. Hell Camino, Dose. Vino’s, 9 p.m., $6. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub.com. Karaoke at Khalil’s. Khalil’s Pub, 7 p.m. 110 S. Shackleford Road. 501-224-0224. www.khalilspub.com. Karaoke. Casa Mexicana, 7 p.m. 6929 JFK Blvd., NLR. 501-835-7876. Karaoke with Kevin & Cara. All ages, on the restaurant side. Revolution, 9 p.m.-12:45 a.m., free. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. revroom.com. K.I.S.S. Saturdays. Featuring DJ Silky Slim. Dress code enforced. Sway, 10 p.m. 412 Louisiana. 501492-9802. Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 Clinton Ave. 501-372-4782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com. MellowDee Grove. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 9 p.m. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-1196. www. afterthoughtbar.com. Mother Hubbard and The Regulators. West End Smokehouse and Tavern. 215 N. Shackleford. 501-224-7665. www.westendsmokehouse.net. Pickin’ Porch. Bring your instrument. All ages welcome. Faulkner County Library, 9:30 a.m. 1900 Tyler St., Conway. 501-327-7482. www.fcl.org. Singer/Songwriters Showcase. Parrot Beach Cafe, 2-7 p.m., free. 9611 MacArthur Drive, NLR. 771-2994. The Stolen Faces. All ages Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 9:30 p.m., $5. 107 Commerce St. 501-372-7707. www.stickyz.com. Switchfoot, The Fable and Fury. Magic Springs’ Timberwood Amphitheater, 7 p.m., $49.99-$54.99. 1701 E. Grand Ave., Hot Springs. Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 9 p.m., free. 111 Markham St. 501-374-7474. www.capitalhotel.com/CBG.

Exhibit by Artist LudmiLA PAwLowskA

Now - August 17 Free & open to the Public tue, wed, thu 10–2pm · wed 6–8pm sun 1–3pm Exhibit will be closed July 13–19 Art for sale & percentage of proceeds go to the Artists-in-residence Program at Arkansas Children’s hospital. donations received go to ACh as well.

1000 N mississippi · Little rock 501.225.4203 · st-marks.com

www.arktimes.com

August 7, 2014

MOVIE review

‘GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY’: Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista and Chris Pratt star.

Better than the rest ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ outdoes competition with superheroes no one has ever heard of. By Sam Eifling

“G

uardians of the Galaxy,” the funniest and most satisfying of the 10 movies so far in the Marvel cinematic universe,

3501 Old Cantrell rd

501.916.9706

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August 7, 2014

ARKANSAS TIMES

for average children and dim adults, here we have one for bright children and average-to-bright adults. Over its first weekend it made more money than any other movie released in any August. This is a remarkable feat considering no one outside a handful of ink-stained geeks could name a single Guardian before the trailers started popping up six months ago. The ads promised a romp that didn’t aim lofty, and when, during the title sequence, we find our hero, Peter Quill, skipping across a hostile alien landscape punting savage little monsters as he grooves to “Come and Get Your Love” on his headphones — well, something here feels authentically playful in a way that “Thor,” for instance, struggles to match. Chris Pratt, heretofore a pudgy doofus on “Parks and Recreation,” is a spot-on pick to play Quill, an Earthling who prefers to be known as Star-Lord, even if both names are equally obscure to the folks he meets. Quill might as well be Lone Star from “Spaceballs,” a small-time hustler on the edge of the law, scooting around the universe running errands for rich aliens. His mission in the early going here is to retrieve an ornate orb and deliver it to a broker; for some reason, he decides this is a perfect moment to cut out his longtime partner-in-crime Yondu Udonta (Michael Rooker, in blueface) and try to peddle the thing solo. This triggers a series of unfortunate

events. The original buyer, a fanatically sinister warlord named Ronan (Lee Pace) sends one of his minions, Gamora (Zoe Saldana), to fetch the orb. She crosses paths with a couple of thugs out to collect the bounty Yondu put on Quill’s head: the trigger-squeezing, super-intelligent Rocket Raccoon (a fantastic piece of digital art voiced by Bradley Cooper) and the mighty yet sensitive tree creature Groot (Vin Diesel, with one piece of gravelly dialogue to repeat: “I am Groot.”). They all get swept up by the law (John C. Reilly here is a non-jerk cop) and thrown into a drifting space prison. There, they meet Drax (former housesized pro wrestler Dave Bautista, still house-sized) and after convincing him not to take out his Ronan grudge on Gamora, the lot of them escape to try and fence the orb, which turns out to be a bit more ominous than they’d realized. Laid out in print, it sounds more complicated than it feels on screen. Director James Gunn brings along the introduction of the five heroes naturally, giving them all distinct personalities (aided, surely, by the fact that one is a walking tree, one is a talking raccoon, one is a green Zoe Saldana and one is house-sized, blueskinned and engraved with an all-body tramp stamp). Gunn also leverages the most cheery retro soundtrack maybe since “The Big Chill” to add familiarity to exotic deep-space shenanigans. It amounts to an assault on the senses, yes, but a strangely smooth one. “Guardians” works largely because it snaps out of this spell that comic book movies have adopted, as victims of their own laborious mythology. The X-Men flicks (which don’t quite take place in the Avengers-based universe that “Guardians” inhabits) made the choice to see themselves as high art, and they’ve mostly pulled that off, at the risk of veering into pretentiousness. In that sense, “Guardians,” a much younger series of comics, gets to have it both ways. Gunn’s script is sassy, light and snortand-sputter funny, giving viewers the feeling they’re in on the joke. In the moments when he does pull out some genuine emotion — sacrifice, grief, loss, heroism, companionship — the punches come apparently from nowhere. Ah, but the ’70s dance rock, the jaundiced mercenary dialogue, the dazzling explosions were just a setup, you see. Someone took a goofy hodgepodge of not-all-that-super heroes and managed to sneak a real movie in with them.

Mannequin Pussy, Pagiins, Resin Hands. The Lightbulb Club, 9 p.m., $5. 21 N. Block Ave., Fayetteville. 479-444-6100. Monday Night Jazz. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 8 p.m., $5. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-1196. www.afterthoughtbar.com. Rhino House Band, Radradriot, The Casual Pleasures. Pizza D’Action, 9 p.m. 2919 W. Markham St. 501-666-5403. Richie Johnson. Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf. com.

Events

Tales from the South. Featuring Tommy Stephenson and Phil Brown, with live music from Kevin Kerby. The Joint, 5 p.m., $20-$35. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

Classes

Finding Family Facts. Rhonda Stewart’s genealogy research class for beginners. Arkansas Studies Institute, second Monday of every month, 3:30 p.m. 401 President Clinton Ave. 501-320-5700 . www.butlercenter.org.

TUESDAY, Aug. 12

Music

Brian and Nick. Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf. com. Era 9. Juanita’s, 9 p.m., $8 adv., $10 dos. 614 President Clinton Ave. 501-372-1228. www. juanitas.com. Irish Traditional Music Sessions. Hibernia Irish Tavern, second and fourth Tuesday of every month, 7-9 p.m. 9700 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-246-4340. www.hiberniairishtavern.com. Jeff Ling. Khalil’s Pub, 6 p.m. 110 S. Shackleford Road. 501-224-0224. www.khalilspub.com. Jim Dickerson. Sonny Williams’ Steak Room, 7 p.m. 500 President Clinton Ave. 501-324-2999. www.sonnywilliamssteakroom.com. Karaoke Tuesday. Prost, 8 p.m., free. 322 President Clinton Blvd. 501-244-9550. Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 Clinton Ave. 501-372-4782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com. Music Jam. Hosted by Elliott Griffen and Joseph Fuller. The Joint, 8-11 p.m., free. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com. Tuesday Jam Session with Carl Mouton. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 8 p.m., free. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-1196. www.afterthoughtbar.com.

Comedy

Stand-Up Tuesday. Hosted by Adam Hogg. The Joint, 8 p.m., $5. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

Dance

“Latin Night.” Revolution, 7:30 p.m., $5 regular, $7 under 21. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501823-0090. www.littlerocksalsa.com.

Events

Little Rock Farmers’ Market. River Market Pavilions, through Aug. 26: 3-7 p.m. (some vendors come early). 400 President Clinton Ave. 375-2552. www.rivermarket.info. Geocaching. The Witt Stephens Jr. Central Arkansas Nature Center, 8:30 a.m. 602 President Clinton Ave. 501-907-0636. www.centralarkansasnaturecenter.com. Little Rock Green Drinks. Informal networking session for people who work in the environmental field. Ciao Baci, 5:30-7 p.m. 605 N.

Beechwood St. 501-603-0238. www.greendrinks. org. Trivia Bowl. Flying Saucer, 8:30 p.m. 323 President Clinton Ave. 501-372-8032. www.beerknurd. com/stores/littlerock.

Film

“Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.” Vino’s, 7:30 p.m., Free. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub.com. “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.” Riverdale 10 Cinema, 7 p.m., $9. 2600 Cantrell Road. 501296-9955.

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 13

Music

Acoustic Open Mic. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 8 p.m., free. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-1196. www.afterthoughtbar.com. Bijoux featuring Onyx. South on Main, 7:30 p.m., free. 1304 Main St. 501-244-9660. https://www. facebook.com/SouthonMainLR. Jim Dickerson. Sonny Williams’ Steak Room, 7 p.m. 500 President Clinton Ave. 501-324-2999. www.sonnywilliamssteakroom.com. Karaoke at Khalil’s. Khalil’s Pub, 7 p.m. 110 S. Shackleford Road. 501-224-0224. www.khalilspub.com. Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 Clinton Ave. 501-372-4782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com. Open Mic Nite with Deuce. Thirst n’ Howl, 7:30 p.m., free. 14710 Cantrell Road. 501-379-8189. www.thirst-n-howl.com. Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 7:30 p.m., free. 111 Markham St. 501-374-7474. www.capitalhotel.com/CBG.

Comedy

The Joint Venture. Improv comedy group. The Joint, 8 p.m., $7. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

Dance

Little Rock Bop Club. Beginning dance lessons for ages 10 and older. Singles welcome. Bess Chisum Stephens Community Center, 7 p.m., $4 for members, $7 for guests. 12th & Cleveland streets. 501-350-4712. www.littlerockbopclub.

Events

Geocaching. The Witt Stephens Jr. Central Arkansas Nature Center, 8:30 a.m. 602 President Clinton Ave. 501-907-0636. www.centralarkansasnaturecenter.com.

Poetry

Wednesday Night Poetry. 21-and-older show. Maxine’s, 7 p.m., free. 700 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 501-321-0909. maxineslive.com/shows. html.

Camps at Rohwer and Jerome,” through Aug. 23. Open 5-8 p.m. Aug. 8, 2nd Friday Art Night with featured artist Michele Cottler-Fox and musicians Kit and Kaboodle. 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 320-5790. COX CREATIVE CENTER, 120 River Market Ave.: A Thousand Words Gallery features artwork by CALS employees, open 5-8 p.m. Aug. 8, 2nd Friday Art Night. 918-3093. HISTORIC ARKANSAS MUSEUM, 200 E. 3rd St.: “The Great Arkansas Quilt Show 3,” juried exhibit of contemporary quilts, opening reception 5-8 p.m. Aug. 8, 2nd Friday Art Night, with silent auction, awards presentation and music by GentlemenJazz, show through May 3; lecture by quilt show juror Pam Holland, 3 p.m. Aug. 8, free; workshop with Holland 9:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Aug. 9, $50 plus $20 for materials; “Kateri Joe: Thank Your Lucky Stars,” mixed media, through Sept. 7; “A Beauty on It Sells: Advertising Art from the Collection of Marsha Stone,” 13th annual Eclectic Collector exhibit, through Jan. 1; “So What! It’s the Least I Can Do …,” paintings by Ray Wittenberg, through Sept. 7, “Arkansas Made,” ongoing. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 324-9351. OLD STATE HOUSE MUSEUM, 300 W. Markham: “September 30, 1955,” film starring Richard Thomas and Lisa Blount,” 5 p.m. Aug. 8, 2nd Friday Art Night; “Lights! Camera! Arkansas!”, the state’s ties to Hollywood, including costumes, scripts, film footage, photographs and more, through March 1, 2015. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 324-9685. THEA FOUNDATION, 401 Main St., NLR: “John Harlan Norris: Cast,” artist’s take on occupational portraiture, part of The Art Department series of works by young professionals, reception 6:30 p.m. Aug. 8, $10 ($7 with event password to be unveiled on Thea’s Facebook page at 5 p.m. Aug. 8), live music and open bar. 379-9512. Eureka Springs EUREKA FINE ART GALLERY, 63 N. Main St.: “The Art of Negative Thinking,” photographs

Fayetteville THE DEPOT, 549 W. Dickson St.: “Water, Rust, Reflection,” photos by Mike Price, through Sept. 1, opening reception evening Aug. 7. 479-443-9900. Yellville P.A.L. FINE ART GALLERY, 300 Hwy. 62: Photographs and drawings by Mary Nida Smith, through Aug., reception 4-6 p.m. Aug. 8. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-noon Sat. 870-405-6316.

Call for artists

Gallery 360 at 900 S. Rodney Parham Road is looking for art made from found, recycled and repurposed materials for its show “Artists Scrounging,” to run Sept. 20-Nov. 1. Artists interested in participating should call Jay King at 993-0012 or email audiolingo@gmail.com. StudioMAIN is taking applications from artists for sculpture to be placed in three areas of Main Street between 12th and 17th streets. For more information contact James Meyer, southmainpublicart@gmail.com or 374-5300, or go to www.southmainpublicart.com. Proposals are due by Dec. 15. ArtsFest is now taking applications for booths for the “Art in the Park” event set for Oct. 4 in Conway’s Simon Park. Prizes will be awarded to non-student and student artists. For more information, contact kathrynoneal@gmail.com.

Continuing gallery exhibits, Central Arkansas ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, MacArthur Park: Continued on page 30

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New museum and gallery exhibits, events ARKANSAS CAPITAL CORP. GROUP, 200 River Market Ave., Suite 400: “Bold Contrasts: Works by Tod Switch, Matt McLeod and Robert Bean,” reception 5-8 p.m. Aug. 8, 2nd Friday Art Night. 374-9247. BUTLER CENTER GALLERIES, Arkansas Studies Institute, 401 President Clinton Ave.: “Quapaw Quarter: Where Little Rock History Lives,” blueprints and photographs; “Home Demonstration Clubs or How Women Saved the South,” paintings by Katherine Strause, through Sept. 11; “State Youth Art Show 2014: An Exhibition by the Arkansas Art Educators,” through Aug. 30; “Drawn In: New Art from WWII

paired with negatives by Ron Lutz, through Aug. 29, reception 6-9 p.m. Aug. 9; new work by Diana Harvey through the month. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. daily. 479-363-6000.

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“12th National Drawing Invitational: Outside the Lines,” through Oct. 5; “Inspiration to Illumination: Recent Work by Museum School Photography Instructors,” through Oct. 26, Museum School Gallery; 56th annual “Delta Exhibition,” works by 65 artists from Arkansas and surrounding states, through Sept. 28, “Susan Paulsen: Wilmot,” photographs, through Sept. 28. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sun. 372-4000. BOSWELL MOUROT, 5815 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Grace Ramsey, paintings. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.Fri., 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Sat. 664-0030. CANTRELL GALLERY, 8206 Cantrell Road: “The Places in Arkansas That Keep Calling Me Back,” photographs by Paul Caldwell, through Aug. 14. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 224-1335. CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, 509 Scott St.: Paintings by Dee Schulten, Dr. Lacy Frasier and

Sue Henley. 375-2342. CHROMA GALLERY, 5707 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Work by Robert Reep and other Arkansas artists. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sat. 664-0880. ARKANSAS CAPITAL CORP., 200 River Market Ave., Suite 400: “Bold Contrasts,” paintings by Matt McLeod, sculpture by Tod Switch, high contrast ink drawings by Robert Bean. THE EDGE, 301B President Clinton Ave.: Paintings by Avila (Fernando Gomez), Eric Freeman, James Hayes, Jerry Colburn, St. Joseph Thomason and Stephen Drive. 992-1099. ELLEN GOLDEN ANTIQUES, 5701 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Paintings by Barry Thomas and Arden Boyce. 664-7746. GALLERY 221 & ART STUDIOS 221, Pyramid Place: Arkansas artists’ cooperative, with galleries on first and second floors. 11 a.m.-6 p.m.

Central High School

Forest Park Elementary

It’s Back to School Time !

First day of school: August 18 for students (except McClellan

9th grade students).

Dads Take Your Child to School Day: August 18

Enter the Facebook Photo Contest for a chance to win great prizes!

Here’s how the Dads Take Your Child to School Facebook Contest works: 1. Dads and father figures take your child 2. 3.

(Pre-K -12th) to school on the first day of school, August 18 Snap a photo with your cell phone or camera of you with your child at school (photo must be taken on school grounds) Upload your photo onto LRSD’s Facebook photo contest page by midnight August 18, 2014. Invite your Facebook friends to vote for your photo before the contest closes on Friday, Aug. 23.

6th Grade Orientation: August 14 at 9:30am for all middle schools. 9th Grade Orientations

Central: August 14, 3:30pm J.A. Fair: August 6-8, 1-4pm Hall: August 8, 9-11 am OR August 14, 6-8pm (Parents choose either: Aug. 8 or Aug. 14) McClellan: First Day of School will be August 11 (9th Grade Only) Parkview: Friday, August 8, 9am-12noon

Grandparents Day Sweepstakes Contest Sept. 8-12, 2014 Enter the Grandparents Day Facebook Photo Contest for a chance to win great prizes. facebook.com/mylrsd Little Rock School District

The NEW Little Rock School District Where WE Put Children First

August 7, 2014

ARKANSAS TIMES

PERFORMANCE WORKPLAN

lrsd.org

NCE FOR TOMORR

CREATING EXCELLE

Mon.-Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 801-0211. GALLERY 26, 2601 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Recent works by Marcus McAllister and Laura Fanning, through Sept. 6. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 6648996. GREG THOMPSON FINE ART, 429 Main St.: “Summer Show,” works by artists from Arkansas and the South, including Glennray Tutor, Kendall Stallings, Sheila Cotton, Robyn Horn, Ed Rice, Joseph Piccillo, William Dunlap, Guy Bell, Sammy Peters and others, through Aug. 9. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 664-2787. GINO HOLLANDER GALLERY, 2nd and Center: Paintings and works on paper by Gino Hollander. 801-0211. LAMAN LIBRARY, 2801 Orange St.: “Alert Today, Alive Tomorrow: Living with the Atomic Bomb,” objects, film, graphics about American culture of 1940s, ’50s and ’60s and the bomb, through Aug. 11. 758-1720. LAMAN LIBRARY ARGENTA BRANCH, 420 Main St., NLR: “Quiltmakers in Contemporary America,” 15 quilts, through Aug. 16. 687-1061. L&L BECK ART GALLERY, 5705 Kavanaugh Blvd.: “Impersonating the Impressionists,” paintings by Louis Beck, through Aug., free giclee giveaway 7 p.m. Aug. 21. 660-4006. LOCAL COLOUR, 5811 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Rotating work by 27 artists in collective. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 265-0422. MUGS CAFE, 515 Main St., NLR: Quapaw Quarter Figure Drawing Group exhibit, work by Tim Ellison, Judith Faust, Jennifer Freeman, Jeannie Hursley, Marty Justice, Bonnie Nickol, Diana Shearon and Dominique Simmons, through Aug. 24. 379-9101. ST. MARK’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH, 1000 N. Mississippi St.: “Icons in Transformation,” 100 expressionist works by Ludmila Pawlowska, through Aug. 17, percentage of sales proceeds to Artist-in-Residence program at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. 225-4203. SIXTH STREET LIBRARY, Christ Church, 509 Scott St.: “Common Ground,” ceramics made from Arkansas clay paired with sites of origin by Fletcher Larkin, Beth Lambert and Jaman Matthews, through September. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Thu., 9 a.m.-noon Fri. sixthstreetlibrary. tumblr.com. STEPHANO’S FINE ART GALLERY, 1813 N. Grant St.: New work by John Little, Andrea Peterson and Lisa Ruggiero. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 19 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat. 563-4218 STUDIOMAIN, 1423 S. Main St.: “Community Center Design Competition.” www.facebook. com/studio.main.ar. Benton DIANNE ROBERTS ART STUDIO AND GALLERY, 110 N. Market St.: Work by Dianne Roberts, classes. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Wed.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat. 860-7467. England TOLTEC MOUNDS STATE PARK, U.S. Hwy. 165: Major prehistoric Indian site with visitors’ center and museum. 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., noon-5 p.m. Sun., closed Mon. $3 for adults, $2 for ages 6-12. 961-9442. Hot Springs AMERICAN ART GALLERY, 724 Central Ave.: Works and demonstration by basket weaver Valerie Hanks Goetz. 501-624-0550. ALISON PARSONS GALLERY, 802 Central Ave.: “Art and Architecture in the Spa,” through Aug.. 501-655-0604. ARTISTS WORKSHOP GALLERY, 610 A Central Ave.: Paintings by Linda Shearer, pastels by Caryl

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August 7, 2014

ARKANSAS TIMES

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August 7, 2014

Dining What’s cookin’ The owners of the Sushi Cafe are ditching the Cafe 5501 concept for their space at 5501 Kavanaugh Blvd. and going for the delicious with Oishi Hibachi and Thai. Oishi means fabulously delicious, and hibachi, in this case, means teppanyaki, a smokeless grill so versatile, co-owner Robert Tju said, that you can cook everything from popcorn to crepes on it. Popcorn is not going to be on offer, but you’ll be able to order seafood, chicken, beef, salmon and other fish cooked teppanyaki-style on the four grills to be placed in the center of the dining area. The Thai food will be served at tables, and the decor will be contemporary with Thai touches. Oishi Hibachi and Thai will have a new patio — an indoor-outdoor space at the entrance to the restaurant that can be used year-long — and a private dining room in what Tju called the “glass room.” Fifty people will be able to sit around the grills; the restaurant will seat 200 in all. Tju said Oishi Hibachi and Thai will appeal to family dining and prices will be affordable. Soon, Oishi’s Facebook page will feature a video showing what to expect at the restaurant. Tju said the chefs have been hired and the restaurant plans a soft opening Aug. 15.

dining capsules

Little Rock/North little Rock

American

4 SQUARE CAFE AND GIFTS Vegetarian salads, soups, wraps and paninis and a broad selection of smoothies in an Arkansas products gift shop. 405 President Clinton Ave. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-244-2622. BLD daily. APPLE SPICE JUNCTION A chain sandwich and salad spot with sit-down lunch space and a vibrant box lunch catering business. With a wide range of options and quick service. Order online via applespice.com. 2000 S. University Ave. No alcohol, All CC. $$. 501-663-7008. L Mon.-Fri. (10 a.m.-3 p.m.). ARKANSAS BURGER CO. Good burgers, fries and shakes, plus salads and other entrees. Try the cheese dip. 7410 Cantrell Road. Beer, Wine, All CC. $-$$. 501-663-0600. LD Tue.-Sat. BELLWOOD DINER Traditional breakfasts and plate lunch specials are the norm at this lostin-time hole in the wall. 3815 MacArthur Drive. NLR. No alcohol, No CC. $. 501-753-1012. BL Mon.-Fri. THE BLIND PIG Tasty bar food, including Zweigle’s brand hot dogs. 6015 Chenonceau Blvd. Full bar, CC. $-$$. 501-868-8194. D: Tue.-Sun., L Sat.-Sun. BONEFISH GRILL A half-dozen or more types of fresh fish filets are offered daily at this upscale 34

August 7, 2014

ARKANSAS TIMES

A chain worth trying BJ’s pub grub stands out.

ecause of our focus on homegrown dining options, we don’t review many chain restaurants here, but we decided to make an exception in the case of BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse. BJ’s comes to Arkansas with a large menu of house beers at a time when interest in craft beer is growing, and while nothing we tried at the large Shackleford Crossing restaurant will turn us away from local options like Diamond Bear, Vino’s or Core Brewing, we were pleased with both the food and the drink that the California-based chain is serving. The BJ’s menu is big, with page after page of beer, drinks, appetizers, main courses and desserts — so big, in fact, that we were a little intimidated when it came to ordering. We decided on a beer flight of four 5-ounce tasters ($6.50) and the BJ’s Frito Nachos ($7.25), because what better way is there to prepare for a beer-drinking session than scarfing down a glorified Frito chili pie? Did we say glorified? We meant glorious — a piled-high combination of chili, cheese, Fritos, sour cream and bacon (yes, bacon) that is not cardiologist-approved, but certainly tasted good. As for the beer, we were particularly fond of the Harvest Hefeweizen, a light, crisp wheat beer that went down smoothly, with a bright citrus flavor. The other beers in our flight, the LightSwitch Lager, Jeremiah Red and Brewhouse Blonde were all decent, if not memorable, although fans of Bud Light or Coors will find a lot to like here. After the massive Frito concoction and our first four tasters, we were already getting full, and our next dish, BJ’s Favorite Pizza ($15.25 for a 9-inch) sealed the deal. This deep-dish pie was piled with meatballs, pepperoni, onions, Italian sausage, mushrooms and black olives, all resting atop a crisp, buttery crust and served in a deep-dish pan. We’re not normally fans of deep-dish pizza, but this was a tasty pie, with the Italian sausage coming in as our favorite ingredient. We paired the pizza with

WON OUR HEARTS: The jalapeño burger

BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse 2624 S. Shackleford Road 404-2000 QUICK BITE Our server told us that a quirk in Arkansas law means that BJ’s can’t actually brew its own beer on-site until the restaurant has been open for two years. House brews are being shipped in from Colorado. HOURS 11 a.m. to midnight Sunday through Thursday, 11 a.m. until 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday. OTHER INFO All major CC, full bar

the HopStorm IPA ($2.25 for a 5-ounce taster), and were impressed by the malty richness of the beer, but we feel obligated to tell certified hop-heads that this is perhaps the mildest IPA we’ve ever tasted. In addition to the pizza, we wanted to try another bar classic, so we ordered a Crispy Jalapeno Burger ($10.25), and were again impressed with the food from the brewhouse. This was a large burger with pepperjack cheese and crisp-fried jalapenos, but where BJ’s really won our hearts was with the perfectly cooked medium-well patty, something we can’t normally get on a consistent basis from even our best Little Rock burger joints. The thin french fries served with the

burger were mostly forgettable, and our beer pairing, the Tatonka Stout, was our most disappointing brew of the day. We liked that the stout was poured from a nitro tap, because we’re big fans of the creaminess that nitrogen adds to beer, but this beer was a one-note song, and that song consisted of overwhelming notes of sweet chocolate and burnt coffee — things that are good in moderation but here took over. Our final verdict? After going into this review somewhat suspicious of a chain restaurant with such an extensive menu, we have to admit that we very much enjoyed BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse. As at other chain breweries we’ve visited, the beer at BJ’s isn’t all that challenging, but that can be a bonus for beer lovers who want to introduce friends and family to the world of craft beer. The food, while fattening, was really good, and we were particularly impressed with the restaurant’s skill with cooking our burger the way we like it and getting the pizza crust just right in terms of the balance between crispy and chewy. The place stands out from similar chain restaurants like Applebee’s, TGIFriday’s or Chili’s, and will be our go-to restaurant of choice for whenever we have a diverse group of people with varying tastes who need a place to eat.

Information in our restaurant capsules reflects the opinions of the newspaper staff and its reviewers. The newspaper accepts no advertising or other considerations in exchange for reviews, which are conducted anonymously. We invite the opinions of readers who think we are in error.

chain. 11525 Cantrell Road. Full bar, All CC. $$$. 501-228-0356. D Mon.-Sat., LD Sun. BRAVE NEW RESTAURANT Chef/owner Peter Brave was doing “farm to table” before most of us knew the term. His focus is on fresh, highquality ingredients prepared elegantly but simply. Ordering the fish special is never a bad choice. His chocolate crème brulee sets the pace. 2300 Cottondale Lane. Full bar, All CC. $$-$$$. 501-663-2677. LD Mon.-Fri. D Sat. BRAY GOURMET DELI AND CATERING Turkey spreads in four flavors - original, jalapeno, Cajun and dill - and the homemade pimiento cheese are the signature items at Chris Bray’s delicatessen, which serves sandwiches, wraps, soups, stuffed potatoes and salads and sells the turkey spreads to go. 323 Center St. Suite 150. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-353-1045. BL Mon.-Fri. BUFFALO WILD WINGS A sports bar on steroids with numerous humongous TVs and a menu full of thirst-inducing items. The wings, which can be slathered with one of 14 sauces, are the starring attraction and will undoubtedly have fans. 14800 Cantrell Road. Full bar, All CC. $$. 501-868-5279. LD daily. BY THE GLASS A broad but not ridiculously large wine list is studded with interesting, diverse selections, and prices are uniformly reasonable. The food focus is on high-end items that pair well with wine - olives, hummus, cheese, bread and some meats and sausages. Happy hour daily from 4-6 p.m. 5713 Kavanaugh Blvd. Beer, Wine, All CC. $$. 501-663-9463. D Mon.-Sat. CAFE@HEIFER Serving fresh pastries, omelets, soups, salads, sandwiches and pizzas. Located inside Heifer Village. 1 World Ave. No alcohol, All CC. $. 501-907-8801. BL Mon.-Fri. CAPITAL BAR AND GRILL Big hearty sandwiches, daily lunch specials and fine evening dining all rolled up into one at this landing spot downtown. Surprisingly inexpensive with a great bar staff and a good selection of unique desserts. 111 Markham St. Full bar, All CC. $$-$$$. 501-374-7474. LD daily. CAPITOL BISTRO Serving breakfast and lunch items, including quiche, sandwiches, coffees and the like. 1401 W. Capitol Ave. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-371-9575. BL Mon.-Fri. CATERING TO YOU Painstakingly prepared entrees and great appetizers in this gourmetto-go location, attached to a gift shop. Caters everything from family dinners to weddings and large corporate events. 8121 Cantrell Road. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-614-9030. Serving meals to go: LD Mon.-Sat. CATFISH HOLE Downhome place for wellcooked catfish and tasty hushpuppies. 603 E. Spriggs. NLR. Beer, All CC. $-$$. 501-758-3516. D Tue.-Sat. CIAO BACI The focus is on fine dining in this casually elegant Hillcrest bungalow, though excellent tapas are out of this world. The treeshaded, light-strung deck is a popular destination. 605 N. Beechwood St. Full bar, All CC. $$$. 501-603-0238. D Mon.-Sat. CRAZEE’S COOL CAFE Good burgers, daily plate specials and bar food amid pool tables and TVs. 7626 Cantrell Road. Full bar, All CC. $-$$. 501-221-9696. LD Mon.-Sat.

B Breakfast L Lunch D Dinner $ Inexpensive (under $8/person) $$ Moderate ($8-$20/person) $$$ Expensive (over $20/person) CC Accepts credit cards

CUPCAKES ON KAVANAUGH Gourmet cupcakes and coffee, indoor seating. 5625 Kavanaugh Blvd. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-664-2253. LD Mon.-Sat. DEMPSEY BAKERY Bakery with sit-down area, serving coffee and specializing in gluten-, nutand soy-free baked goods. 323 Cross St. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-375-2257. Serving BL Tue.-Sat. DIXON ROAD BLUES CAFE Sandwiches, burgers and salads. 1505 W. Dixon Road. Full bar, All CC. $-$$. 501-888-2233. D Fri.-Sat. DOE’S EAT PLACE A skid-row dive turned power brokers’ watering hole with huge steaks, great tamales and broiled shrimp, and killer burgers at lunch. 1023 W. Markham St. Full bar, All CC. $$-$$$. 501-376-1195. LD Mon.-Fri., D Sat. DOUBLETREE PLAZA BAR & GRILL The lobby restaurant in the Doubletree is elegantly comfortable, but you’ll find no airs put on at heaping breakfast and lunch buffets. 424 West Markham St. Full bar, All CC. $$. 501-372-4371. BLD daily. EJ’S EATS AND DRINKS The friendly neighborhood hoagie shop downtown serves at a handful of tables and by delivery. The sandwiches are generous, the soup homemade and the salads cold. Vegetarians can craft any number of acceptable meals from the flexible menu. The housemade potato chips are da bomb. 523 Center St. Full bar, All CC. $-$$. 501-666-3700. LD Mon.-Fri. FILIBUSTER’S BISTRO & LOUNGE Sandwiches, salads in the Legacy Hotel. 625 W. Capitol Ave. Full bar, All CC. $$. 501-374-0100. D Mon.-Fri. FIVE GUYS BURGERS & FRIES Nationwide burger chain with emphasis on freshly made fries and patties. 2923 Lakewood Village Drive. NLR. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-246-5295. LD daily. 13000 Chenal Parkway. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-225-1100. LD daily. FLYING FISH The fried seafood is fresh and crunchy and there are plenty of raw, boiled and grilled offerings. The hamburgers are a hit, too. It’s counter service; wander on through the screen door and you’ll find a slick team of cooks and servers doing a creditable job of serving big crowds. 511 President Clinton Ave. Beer, Wine, All CC. $$. 501-375-3474. LD daily. GINO’S PIZZA AND PHILLY STEAK 8000 Geyer Springs Road. 501-562-0152. LD daily. GRUMPY’S TOO Music venue and sports bar with lots of TVs, pub grub and regular drink specials. 1801 Green Mountain Drive. Full bar, All CC. $-$$. 501-225-3768. LD Mon.-Sat. GUS’S WORLD FAMOUS FRIED CHICKEN The best fried chicken in town. Go for chicken and waffles on Sundays. 300 President Clinton Ave. Beer, CC. $-$$. 501-372-2211. LD daily. HOMER’S Great vegetables, huge yeast rolls and killer cobblers. Follow the mobs. 2001 E. Roosevelt Road. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-374-1400. BL Mon.-Fri. 9700 N Rodney Parham. Full bar, All CC. $$. 501-224-6637. LD Mon.-Sat. IRONHORSE SALOON Bar and grill offering juicy hamburgers and cheeseburgers. 9125 Mann Road. Full bar, All CC. $. 501-562-4464. LD daily.

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LITTLE ROCK’S MOST AWARD WINNING RESTAURANT 1619 Rebsamen Rd. 501-663-9734

SHRIMP & GRITS

Continued on page 39 www.arktimes.com

August 7, 2014

Dumas, cont.

hearsay ➥ Vesta’s is having a moving sale – $10 jeans, 75 percent savings on spring/summer, new markdowns at 35 percent, fixtures, mannequins, furniture, frames, candles, cards, napkins, lamps, and odds and ends, all priced to sell. In late August, Vesta’s will be taking up residence in a new space across the parking lot from their existing location at Pleasant Ridge Town Center. Help make their move easier by scooping up some great deals beforehand. ➥ Now is the time to stock up on outdoor gear: the summer sale at Ozark Outdoor is underway. Select summer apparel, sandals and more are marked down 25-50 percent off. ➥ Save the date for the Fashion on Main event, which will feature Hilton Hollis’ fall 2014 collection. The show is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Aug. 26 at South on Main. Tickets are $125 and proceeds from the event will benefit the UAMS Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute. To purchase tickets, call 501-244-9660. If you can’t make the event, B. Barnett will host a Hilton Hollis trunk show at the store Aug. 27-28. ➥ If you’re the parent of a cross country runner, it’s time to get them fit in spikes at Go! Running. They have the newest Nike and New Balance spikes in a selection of sizes for all ages, and they offer a discount for high school track team runners: a 10 percent discount for spikes or racing flats or a 20 percent discount on a shoe and spike combo purchase. ➥ Cantrell Gallery is pleased to present an exhibit of new paintings by John Deering, “Arkansas Traveler”. There will be a preview party from 6-8 p.m. Aug. 22; admission is free. This will be a great opportunity to meet the artist and view his latest works. The exhibit will continue through Oct. 18. ➥ Make sure to remember that Aug. 26 marks the end of the River Market Tuesday night farmers’ market for the 2014 season. The Saturday farmers’ market continues through to the end of October.

August 7, 2014

ARKANSAS TIMES

Senate states in the sheer volume and in some cases the viciousness of the independent campaigns. Overall TV spots at this point are 70 percent higher than in the last midterm election, in 2010. The number of TV spots from outside groups in Senate races is nearly six times the number in 2010. More ads ran this summer alone, through midJuly, than the whole two-year election

in 2010. More than $33 million has been spent in the North Carolina Senate race. The biggest PAC backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, Cotton’s main supporters, had poured $44 million into congressional races by midJuly and they had barely begun. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has pitched in big. Democratic congressional PACs have tried to keep pace with attack

ads against Republicans but they’ve fallen short. Party loyalists are unfazed, as always, by the attacks, but swing voters who ordinarily pay scant attention until the election are swayed. The best you can hope for is that most will be sickened by the display and search on their own for a ray of honesty.

Pearls, cont. elite Huskies at a much better juncture. All-everything quarterback Jordan Lynch is gone and there’s been another coaching change at the top, so UNI has the look of a team in transition rather than a juggernaut in the making. That’s not to dismiss the value of the skill players they return on both sides, or the fact that they’ve been a paragon of consistency in recent

years despite numerous personnel changes, but Arkansas gets the nod here because the Huskies will still be finding out about themselves. It’ll be relatively close, but the Hogs are starting to see conditioning pay off in these hot early games. The sizzling turf in Fayetteville doesn’t faze Korliss Marshall, who scores on a long run and a kickoff return, and it winds up

being Arkansas’s best performance of the first one-third of the year. We won’t call it an unqualified rout, but thanks to a turnover-free effort and a healthy crowd that’s been motivated to attend by the first three performances, Arkansas punctuates this portion of the season nicely and Trey Flowers gets his first career TD on a fumble return to close it out. Hogs 34, Huskies 17.

A song that’s happy and sad, cont. ever made concerning me, which was that she couldn’t handle it.” Denny now considers her one of his best friends. “I love her to death,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of her in me. We’ve got the same demons we’re struggling with.” Denny was drawn to music as long as he can remember. “Even when I was a little bitty kid, there’s videos of me beating on a guitar, all dressed up like a cowboy,” he said. “At 4 years old, I knew the words to tons of songs.” He would sing for his greatgrandmother, who refused to wear a hearing aid. “She would always tell me to sing louder. I got to this point one night where we were singing really loud. It was like I was practicing projecting, and over time, this natural vibrato thing developed and I learned to control the volume.” Denny sang in church and played in the youth group band. When he was 14, he got a guitar. A neighbor showed him some power chords; other than that he was largely self-taught. As a freshman in high school, he played a solo acoustic version of U2’s “With or Without You” at the homecoming assembly at North Little Rock High. The nearly 2,000 students in attendance gave him a standing ovation. “People were freaking out,” he said. “That’s when I knew, this could work.” His friends called him a human jukebox. “Before I kind of burned a lot of brain cells doing drugs, I must have known 500 songs or more,” he said. “I

just played everything.” After high school, Denny spent time busking across the country, including Chicago, New York and California, as well as all over Arkansas. It’s all a little hazy now. “I’ve done a lot of traveling,” he said. “I can tell you all of the places, but I can’t exactly tell you when I was there.” By 2005 Denny had become a fixture in the music scene in Central Arkansas. The Arkansas Times’ Rock Candy Blog described the early Denny performances as “just a rumor, a whisper of a performer who swept into town from nowhere. First he was the ‘crazy-voiced kid,’ the prize of the local scene, playing Beesonville block parties and small house shows. As his cult grew, and he performed regularly not just at White Water, but just about every venue in town, he became the ‘kid with the golden voice.’ ” Denny put out a self-titled debut album on a local label and then a more polished version, “Age Old Hunger,” came out in 2007 on the Brooklyn label 00:02:59. His talented and rollicking backing band, the Old Soles, helped give some punch to Denny’s old-timey crooning. The result was a soulful honky-tonk record that indie kingmakers Pitchfork called “sincere and even daring,” writing that Denny’s voice “would sound right at home on a low-signal Ozark radio station 40 or 50 years ago.” The Rock Candy Blog was thinking big: “With

the backing of a powerful PR agency and rumors of an opening slot with a major touring act, Denny might be on the precipice of fame.” But struggling with dependence on booze and pills, Denny was also on the precipice of disaster. Things fizzled out and fell apart. The Old Soles split in 2008. “They were 10 years my senior,” Denny said of his bandmates at the time, Chris Atwood and Marcus Lowe. “They weren’t going to put up with my shit forever. Here now I’m 30 — I wouldn’t be in a band with the old me either.” Denny ended up reconnecting with some old high school friends — Jesse Bates, Ryan Hitt, Joshua Spillyards and Judson Spillyards — who became his new backing band, the Natives. In 2009, they signed with Partisan, another Brooklyn-based label (the label has a good reputation in indie circles and now includes Deer Tick and Heartless Bastards in its stable). The influential magazine CMJ named Chris Denny and the Natives one of the 10 best bands CMJ discovered in 2009, writing, “His voice sounds like something that should have first been recorded on a slate record, but the vintage sound pairs beautifully with unadulterated electric guitar and organ.” Denny and the Natives headed to upstate New York to record an album. Yet again, Denny appeared on his way to a big break. But he was a wreck. “When we were up there, I just lost it,” he said. “I flipped my wig. One of the things that came with my severe alcoholism was

A song that’s happy and sad, cont.

after dark, cont.

clean for another six months before the album would be released. “What Tim is doing is what a label should do for people,” Denny said. “Make sure someone’s healthy. If they don’t even know the meaning of it, which I didn’t, help them learn that.” The album came out Tuesday. “He’s unearthly gifted,” Putnam said. “I think he’s one of the truly great American living songwriters right now. Time will tell what he does with that. But I’m very proud, and I’m very proud of Chris. This has been an allconsuming process, but the fact that this record exists — the fact that I get to see Chris perform again — it’s unbelievable.” TIME: Denny lost seven years of his life to addiciton. Now he plans to release an album per year.

really bad anger problems.” “He was in a bad way at that time,” said Partisan co-owner Tim Putnam. “It was challenging to say the least.” They completed an album (made up of nearly all of the songs that eventually made it onto “If the Roses Don’t Kill Us”), but “it just felt wrong,” Putnam said. The music had an angry edge that reflected Denny’s mood at the time. “What was coming out of Chris on the record was not Chris,” Putnam said. “I don’t know how else to put it. You get one chance to put out songs and that was not the proper way to do it.” Moreover, Denny was in no shape to promote the record. “He was in such a bad way at that point that I felt like putting out the record could actually harm him,” Putnam said. The album was scrapped. Denny kept playing with the Natives from time to time, but things were going from bad to worse. He came back to Arkansas to take care of his dying father. He started using drugs more heavily — and using heavier drugs. “Drugs did not do me right,” he said. “I just couldn’t be a good person.” The band fell apart. “Same reason I lost my first band,” he said. “You know, things have worked out, everything has happened for a reason — but a lot of the reason was drugs.” Denny was still playing music, writing songs and occasionally recording. But he played out less and less. He spent time in Conway, Maumelle, San Francisco, New York. He was homeless at times. He and his girlfriend, Tiffany, were using heroin. They were often broke, and getting desperate. “I was on a destructive path,” Denny

said. “Eventually it came down to me calling and asking for money from the label. Just some cash. I was hard up. Finally, they wouldn’t answer my calls. They told me, ‘We’re not dealing with you until you get sober.’ When I say sober, I was on the hard shit. I was on dope, junked out.” In late 2011, Denny found out he was set to receive $20,000 from Marlboro, which had used his songs for promotional videos. With the check on its way, Denny and Tiffany were at a crossroads. “Twenty thousand dollars worth of dope would have killed us,” he said. “We would have died. We literally said to each other, ‘What are we going to do here? We can live or die. If we’re doing dope when this check gets cashed, we’re going to die.’ So we decided to get cleaned up.” There was another motivating factor: “We fell in love, too. There’s no life in being on dope together.” They got sober, and in July of 2012, they got married. They settled in Austin, where they still live. Once clean, Denny got back in touch with Putnam at Partisan, sending along letters from his nurse and counselor at an outpatient treatment center — a prerequisite before Putnam would work with him again. “It’s hard to see somebody totally destroying themselves — anybody, let alone somebody who has such rare gifts, to see them just totally disintegrating in every way,” Putnam said. “Chris came as close to being gone as anybody I’ve ever known.” They began recording “If the Roses Don’t Kill Us” in Austin in 2012, finishing the album in late 2013. Putnam told Denny he needed to stay

*** “When you get sober,” Denny said, “you can sit there and say, ‘Oh man, damn it, I lost this much of my life. Oh man, I ruined that relationship and that friendship. My health is bad.’ It’s easy to do. I’ve done it. But you know, that sort of thinking leads to, what do I have? What can I do? I fucked up seven years, but I can still have an OK life.” Denny said he hoped to put out an album a year from now on. Here’s hoping. In June, at Juanita’s, Denny played in Little Rock for the first time in years. Instead of the preternaturally talented kid, he was a 30-year-old survivor. He looks a little older than that. He’s already packed a lifetime’s worth of hard living in. He still has the same sheepish grin. And he still has the golden voice. During the show, my wife would periodically point to her arms while he sang — goosebumps. Denny was gracious and humble on stage, eager to put some distance between himself and years of bad memories. “This has been a dangerous place for me, but it’s been a good place,” he said. “Man, I’m so happy to be here.” When Denny launched into one of his early songs, the majestic “Time,” everyone sang along — family, old friends, old fans: “I couldn’t stop thinking about time, time, time/Ain’t it funny how it controls my life?” It’s hard not to think about all the time that Denny has lost, but it feels like something close to a miracle that he has more time yet. In church, it’s the true believers that sing loudest, and that’s a little how it felt at the bar that night. Everyone was thankful to hear Christopher Denny play music again.

Joy Young, through Aug.. 50-623-6401. BLUE MOON GALLERY, 718 Central Ave.: Work by Randall Good and studio artists, through Aug.. 501-318-2787. FINE ARTS CENTER, 626 Central Ave. and Prospect: “Hot Springs Regional Art Competition,” through Aug. 9. 501-624-0489. JUSTUS FINE ART, 827 Central Ave.: Exhibition of new work by gallery’s stable celebrating the gallery’s 10th anniversary. 501-321-2335. Jacksonville JACKSONVILLE MUSEUM OF MILITARY HISTORY, 100 Veterans Circle: Exhibits on D-Day; F-105, Vietnam era plane (“The Thud”); the Civil War Battle of Reed’s Bridge, Arkansas Ordnance Plant (AOP) and other military history. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. $3 adults; $2 seniors, military; $1 students. 501-241-1943. Pine Bluff THE ARTS AND SCIENCE CENTER, 701 Main St.: “I Come From Women Who Could Fly: New Work by Delita Martin,” through Aug.; “Shaping Our World,” science exhibit on acts of nature, through Aug.. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 1-4 p.m. Sat. 870-536-3375. Scott PLANTATION AGRICULTURE MUSEUM, U.S. 165 S and Hwy. 161: Artifacts and interactive exhibits on farming in the Arkansas Delta. $4 adults, $3 ages 6-12. Open 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 501-961-1409. SCOTT PLANTATION SETTLEMENT: 1840s log cabin, one-room school house, tenant houses, smokehouse and artifacts on plantation life. 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Thu.-Sat. 351-0300. www.scottconnections.org.

Continuing museum exhibits, Central Arkansas CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL MUSEUM VISITOR CENTER, Bates and Park: Exhibits on the 1957 desegregation of Central and the civil rights movement. 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. daily. 374-1957. CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL CENTER, 1200 President Clinton Ave.: “Chihuly,” studio glass, through Jan. 5, 2015; permanent exhibits on the Clinton administration. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. $7 adults; $5 college students, seniors, retired military; $3 ages 6-17. 370-8000. ESSE, 1510 S. Main St.: “What’s Inside: A Century of Women and Handbags (1900-1999),” purses from the collection of Anita Davis, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tue.-Sun., $10-$8. 916-9022. MacARTHUR MUSEUM OF ARKANSAS MILITARY HISTORY, MacArthur Park: “American Posters of World War I”; permanent exhibits. 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-4 p.m. Sun. 376-4602. MOSAIC TEMPLARS CULTURAL CENTER, 501 W. 9th St.: “Arkansas’ African American Legislators,” permanent exhibits on black entrepreneurship in Arkansas. 683-3593. MUSEUM OF DISCOVERY, 500 President Clinton Ave.: “Wiggle Worms,” science program for pre-K children 10 a.m.-10:30 a.m. every Tue., 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun., $10 ages 13 and older, $8 ages 1-12, free to members and children under 1. 396-7050. WITT STEPHENS JR. CENTRAL ARKANSAS NATURE CENTER, Riverfront Park: Exhibits on wildlife and the state Game and Fish Commission. 907-0636. www.arktimes.com

August 7, 2014

Celebrate Arkansas Artisans! Beautiful handmade quality products by Arkansas artists!

DIY Scrimshaw Knife Kit

No Place Like Home Tee

WooHoo! Snacks

Boxley Buffalo River Shirt

Mollyjogger Fayetteville, AR

ShopELL Little Rock, AR

Woo Hoo! Little Rock, AR

Mollyjogger Fayetteville, AR

Build something practical with this DIY Scrimshaw Knife Kit. The kit includes everything you need to create a one-of-a-kind pocket knife. It’s a perfect starter introduction for scrimshaw. Add a family name, original design or an organization’s symbols to the classic trapper-style pocket knife.

No matter where you go, your home town is always close to your heart. The No Place Like Home Tee is a super soft, relaxed fit grey tee, with “there’s no place like home” boldly printed in black letters. This unisex shirt is perfectly low-key and begging to be your new go-to shirt.

A perfect afternoon pick-me-up. An accompaniment to your favorite adult beverages. A near-sinful pleasure for any time of the day. Blah tasting snacks chock full of unhealthy ingredients are being overtaken by by this salivating recipe made with incredible ingredients. WooHoo!

The Boxley Buffalo River Shirt has been appropriately named after the scenic Boxley Valley, also known as “The Big Buffalo Valley Historic District,” in the Buffalo River National Park. The vintage charcoal print on green was designed by Arkansas native Bryce Parker Harrison and we think it makes for the perfect summer shirt.

Handmade Girls Dress

PK Grills – The King Of Charcoal Cooking

Junior League Cookbook

Tea Cookies in Lemon, Key Lime and Raspberry

Kayla J. Rose Designs Jonesboro, AR

PK Grills Little Rock, AR

These beautiful, expertly-crafted Handmade Girls Dresses are the perfect, easy go-to summer outfit for your favorite southern girl. She’ll love putting on either of these fun numbers from Kayla J. Rose. This Handmade Girls Dress is full of color and complete with ruffle sleeves and a simple and stylish drawstring waist.

PK Grills are the shizzz. Smokes as well as it grills. Superb temperature control, 4 vents. Heavy cast aluminum construction that will never rust. Reflected heat allows for more even cooking. Hinged grid allows easy refueling, without removing food.

More at:

ArtisanArkansas.com 38

Order online today! ARKANSAS TIMES

August 7, 2014

Junior League of Little Rock Little Rock, AR

The Junior League of Little Rock’s newest fundraising cookbook, “Big Taste of Little Rock” received high praise. You’re sure to find something to tempt your taste buds with over 250 recipes in six chapters, and filled with gorgeous photography, it’s a treat for the eyes as well. It is sure to be a treasured kitchen companion.

ARTISAN ARKANSAS By Arkansas Grown Products

J&M Foods Little Rock, AR Delicate and sweet, these tea cookies are the perfect way to satisf y your inner sweet tooth. Made with only the finest natural ingredients like creamer y butter, chocolate, raspberries, real lemon and lime juices, cinnamon and nutmeg. Enjoy them with your favorite cup of tea, cof fee, ice cream or all by themselves!

arkansas times

Pet Obits Your Pet Passages Issue Dates: Thursdays Material Deadline: Mondays, same week of publication.

Feature your pet with a photo. Ad Size 1/16 1/8 1/4

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Rate $70 $150 $300

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Dimensions 2.12 W x 1.18 H 2.12 W x 2.62 H

Rate $35 $70

ARKANSAS TIMES

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“Providing Care, in a Caring Way” “Providing Care, In A Caring Way" Activity Director: The Highlands of LPNs: have active LPN license • Must possess good knowledge of the The Highlands of• Must Heber Heber Springs • Must possess ASN or be a graduate of an LPN organization and the techniques of a diversified Springs is currently program program of meaningful, appropriate leisure time is currently hiring • 2-5 years experience in supervision within a activities in a residential healthcare facility. hiring for the following • Demonstrates good knowledge of activities for the following healthcare setting program direction positions:CNAs: positions: • Must possess a high school diploma or GED

Activity Director: • Licensed CNA

LPNs:

• Must possess good knowledge of the organization and the techniques of a diversimed The Highlands of Heber Springs | 1040 Weddingford Road program of meaningful, appropriate leisure Heber time Springs, AR 72543 activities in aDrug residential health free workplace · EOE/M/F/D/V care facility. • Demonstates good knowledge of activities program direction

• Must have active LPN license • Must possess ASN or be a graduate of an LPN program • 2-5 years experience in supervision within a healthcare setting Lyons, cont.

aPPLy in PerSon

Part-Time

declared. “He makes a decision and executes it quickly and everybody reacts. That’s what you call a real leader.” Dowd even wrote a snarky column about Obama the girly-man based on a

remark he’dCNAs: made about hitting singles requires patience. Nobody can hit threeMaintenance Assistant: • Must possess a high and doubles in foreign policy instead• Must of possess run bombs a highunless somebody gets on base. school diploma or GED school diploma GED more masculine (to Dowd) three-run Theor problem, of course, is that foreign • Licensed CNA • Related experience preferred home runs. She appeared not to grasp policy isn’t poker, football or baseball, and APPLY IN PERSON the metaphor: Like baseball, foreign policy it has a definite theatrical aspect whether

Professor Obama likes it or not. Perceptions of character have a way of becoming reality; and the perception of weakness can become the most dangerous reality of all.

The Highlands of Heber Springs | 1040 Weddingford Road Heber Springs, capsules, AR 72543 dining CONT. Drug free workplace • EOE/M/F/D/V J. GUMBO’S Fast-casual Cajun fare served, primarily, in a bowl. Better than expected. 12911 Cantrell Road. Beer, All CC. $-$$. 501-916-9635. LD daily. JIMMY’S SERIOUS SANDWICHES Consistently fine sandwiches, side orders and desserts for 30 years. Chicken salad’s among the best in town, and there are fun specialty sandwiches such as Thai One On and The Garden. Get there early for lunch. 5116 W. Markham St. No alcohol, CC. $-$$. 501-666-3354. L Mon.-Sat., D Mon.-Sat. (drive-through only).

K. HALL AND SONS Neighborhood grocery whether Italian, Spanish or Arkie. “Gourmet store with excellent lunch counter. lunches” #CON949643 (2col, 3.29in x The 4in)cheese07/22/2014plate 13:38 EST are good, as is Sunday brunch. burger is hard to beat. 1900 Wright Ave. No 3519 Old Cantrell Road. Full bar, All CC. $$-$$$. alcohol, CC. $. 501-372-1513. BLD Mon.-Sat. 501-663-4666. BR Sun., LD Mon.-Fri., D Sat. (closes at 6 p.m.), BL Sun. THE MAIN CHEESE A restaurant devoted to KRAZY MIKE’S Po’boys, catfish and shrimp grilled cheese. 14524 Cantrell Road. Beer, Wine. and other fishes, fried chicken wings and all $-$$. 501-367-8082. LD Mon.-Sat. the expected sides served up fresh and hot to MILFORD TRACK Healthy and tasty are the order on demand. 200 N. Bowman Road. Beer, key words at this deli/grill that serves breakAll CC. $$. 501-907-6453. LD Mon.-Sat. fast and lunch. Hot entrees change daily and LOCA LUNA Grilled meats, seafood and pasta there are soups, sandwiches, salads and killer dishes that never stray far from country roots, desserts. Bread is baked in-house, and there

are several veggie options. 10809 Executive Center Dr., Searcy Building. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-223-2257. BL Mon.-Fri., L Sat. NATCHEZ RESTAURANT Smart, elegant takes on Southern classics. 323 Center St. Beer, Wine, CC. $$-$$$. 501-372-1167. L Tue.-Fri., D Wed.-Sat. OYSTER BAR Gumbo, red beans and rice (all you can eat on Mondays), peel-and-eat shrimp, oysters on the half shell, addictive po’ boys. Killer jukebox. 3003 W. Markham St. Beer, Wine, All CC. $-$$. 501-666-7100. LD Mon.-Sat. www.arktimes.com

August 7, 2014

Central Arkansas Sprinkler Smart

Inspect. Connect. Direct. Select. Inspect your system for clogged, broken, or missing sprinkler heads.

Connect a rain sensor to your irrigation system to avoid watering when raining.

Direct sprinklers to apply water only to the landscape and avoid watering the driveway, house, or sidewalk.

Select a sprinkler time that avoids afternoon watering, as well as watering during the peak water usage time of day from 5:30 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 7:30 am.

Scan this QR code or call 501.340.6650 to learn more about this important program.

carkw.com 40

August 7, 2014

ARKANSASâ&#x20AC;&#x2C6;TIMES

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