Arkansas Times - August 10, 2017

NEWS + POLITICS + ENTERTAINMENT + FOOD | AUGUST 10, 2017 | ARKTIMES.COM

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COMMENT

Aims of the religious right The religious right isn’t satisfied with its constitutional right to speak out against ideas with which it does not agree. The religious right wants no less than to possess the legal means by which to condemn and punish those with whom it disagrees. The exercising of First Amendment rights, such as marching in protest or publishing articles as a means to influence others, is not enough. The religious right wants to take it to another level

and bring about the means to legally sanction and penalize any beh avior not in line with its own dominionist worldview. This can only be accomplished through establishing some form of theocratic government. This is the dream of the religious right: a country with laws that are based on its interpretation of an ancient religious text. In this sense, the religious right is not different from ISIS. R.L. Hutson Cabot

From the web In response to Max Brantley’s Aug. 3 column, “Crisis at 60” about the 60th anniversary of the desegregation of Central High, the state takeover of the Little Rock School District and the threat of charter schools to schools like Central: You are definitely making me think.

Now if we could just get this story covered by “60 Minutes,” “20/20” or some other national program.

Bow ties are back in style

Have we learned anything from the 1957 crisis in Little Rock?

Coreen Frasier There is nothing cathartic about the 60th anniversary of Central High. The de jure and de facto laws that attempted to maintain segregation at Central High and schools in the U.S. are not anachronistic; the rules are revised modern warfare to have more devastating effects.

Phyllis Brown In response to Benjamin Hardy’s Aug. 3 article, “State still holds reins over youth lockups”: This is a good article, as always, by Benji. I have always been an opponent of the state privatizing correctional or juvenile services. This is a responsibility of government to see it is done correctly, and state government is dodging its responsibility in putting the responsibility in the hands of for-profit corporations, which are more interested in the bottom line than they are in rehabilitating youth or criminals. plainjim

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In response to the Aug. 6 Arkansas Blog post, “Cotton figures in New York Times roundup on 2020 presidential race”:

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Please explain to me this: A Republican governor promises to streamline state government starting with the largest state agency, the Department of Human Services. Under Governor Beebe, the director made around $150,000 and had one, sometimes two low-level communications staff. The new Republican governor hired a director at over $200K and the communications staff has increased from 1 to 10!

The newly created chief of communications, who by the way is the same person to whom John Selig wouldn’t pay a mid-level salary, now earns $100K a year. She has also hired 10 staff for her new communications team, most at salaries much higher than existing employees with years more experience.

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Here goes the failed N.Y. Times masturbating over some fantasy they conjured up.

Typical of the fake news articles they pump out day after day in their battle with The Washington Post to see who can be the most outlandish.

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The Arkansas Times, in partnership with First Security Bank, will honor its fourth class of Women Entrepreneurs this October, and we want to know who you believe should be in the spotlight. Here’s what to keep in mind: • Your nominee must be a woman who started her own business or took over a business and is still the owner/operator.

• She must be an Arkansan.

• She must be in business currently and have at least one year in business by the time of your nomination.

• We welcome nominees who are LGBTQ.

• She must fit in one of these industry categories: food, professions (teachers, doctors, attorneys, financial advisors, etc.), nontraditional, retail and design, and two new categories - trailblazers (women who do not have their own business but have led their profession to success – pastors, teachers, CEOs, writers, etc.), and those women entrepreneurs outside of Pulaski County.

NOMINEES WILL BE ACCEPTED UNTIL SEPTEMBER 1, 2017 Submit your nominee and her contact information to Kelly Jones, kelly@arktimes.com, and we will announce our honorees in September.

A panel of judges will determine the finalists, and they will be announced by industries in the following issues:

OCTOBER 5, 12, 19, AND 26

PAST HONOREES: WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS CLASS OF 2016 COMMUNITY BUSINESS Heather Smith Mary Jo Siikkema Javonne Jordan Lindsey Gray Bernice Osei-Danquah Lisa Marshall Rene Hooper Collin McReynolds

PROFESSIONAL & DESIGN Sarah Catherine Gutierrez Erin Eason Brittany Sanders Amy Milholland Gina Radke Kristi Dannelley Amy Denton Mary Nash

TRAILBLAZERS Sarah Anne Vestal Maggie Young Erma Jackson Jan Ham Berlinda Helms Nicole Hart Mireya Reith Supha Xayprasith-Mays

ARTS & EDUCATION Tina McCord Helen Scott and Cindy Scott Huisman Kristy Carter Vicki Farrell Nicole Winstead Bess Heisler Ginty Shamim Okolloh Kathryn Tucker

A luncheon hosted by First Security Bank is planned.

First Security Bank and The Arkansas Times are not affiliated arktimes.com AUGUST 10, 2017

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WEEK THAT WAS

Quote of the week “For decades, our immigration system has been completely divorced from the needs of our economy, and working Americans’ wages have suffered as a result. Our legislation will set things right.”

— U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), pitching a modified version of a bill he and Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) introduced in February to create a “meritbased” immigration system instead of one that emphasizes family connections. The legislation, which the senators presented alongside President Trump in a press conference last week, would slash the annual distribution of green cards awarding permanent legal residence in half, from 1 million to just over 500,000. The legislation would consider immigrants’ education, English ability, investments and achievements (Olympic athletes and Nobel Prize winners in particular).

The bill is not thought to have much chance of advancing.

Tucker understaffed, under siege The security staff at the Arkansas Department of Correction’s Tucker Maximum Security Unit, where inmates twice have overpowered guards in the last 16 days, is about 24 percent below its authorized force.

Solomon Graves, the prison spokesman, said Tucker Max is authorized to have 208 security positions, but there are 49 vacancies — 45 correctional officers, three sergeants and one major.

Six inmates at Tucker took control 6

AUGUST 10, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

managed to escape from locked individual holding pens in a recreation area July 22. Prison officials at the time did not disclose to State Police officers who arrived to investigate that shots were fired. That came out only after the Arkansas Times inquired.

Ascent GRAVES: Tucker Max has 40 vacancies.

of keys and doors of a recreational unit of the prison, in Jefferson County, on Monday, holding three corrections officers in the area with the inmates for several hours. The officers were released without any serious injuries and the inmates involved in the incident were transferred to the Varner Supermax Unit.

The Arkansas Times’ Arkansas Blog reported last week that two corrections officers were assaulted and warning shots were fired by a guard when at least three Tucker inmates

Ascent Children’s Health Services is under investigation again by the Arkansas Department of Human Services after a child was left unattended on a playground at a North Little Rock daycare center last week.

Ascent fired two employees of the daycare after the incident. Two other employees were fired after a similar incident at the North Little Rock facility on June 28. A 5-yearold West Memphis boy died after he was left inside an Ascent van for almost nine hours on June 12.

State Rep. Dan Sullivan (R-Jonesboro) is the CEO of Ascent and has declined to comment on the North Little Rock incident.

New phase for Delta trail The Delta Heritage Trail, which when complete will be an 84.5-mile pathway for pedestrians and cyclists along former railroad lines in East Arkansas, moved into a new phase last week as construction began on the southernmost trailhead facility, at Arkansas City.

The trail, of compacted crushed rock, is on former Union Pacific rightof-way from Lexa (six miles west of Helena-West Helena) to Rohwer and then the Mississippi River levee to Arkansas City. Arkansas State Parks is developing the trail in phases, and has completed 35 miles of the corridor: 20.6 miles on “rail-trail” from Helena Junction to Elaine and a 14.4-mile shared-use roadway from Rohwer to Arkansas City.

The trailhead building at Arkansas City is being designed to resemble a train depot and will include a bathhouse, pavilion and office. There will be information about the historic river city and two sites for tent camping.

OPINION

Mayoral thoughts

I

took a few days off last week to attend a music festival outside Cooperstown, N.Y. We flew home from Albany, where our stops included Sunday brunch at a cafe so popular we had a 45-minute wait for a table. We plunked down on a bench outside, fired up our cell phones and learned of Albany Freenet, a free Wi-Fi service provided in various parts of the city through a deal struck by city government with a local company. Why not Little Rock?

Perhaps this could become a promise in the 2018 mayoral race, which so far includes incumbent Mayor Mark Stodola and state Rep. Warwick Sabin (D-Little Rock). Those reported by various sources to be in the “thinking it over” stage include state Rep. Clarke Tucker (D-Little Rock), banker Frank Scott and former Arkansas Baptist College President Fitz Hill.

Hill is on my mind because of the high profile afforded him last week as he announced a program to bring foot-

ball back to sixthgraders in the Little Rock School District with private financial contributions and volunteer help.

MAX I’m all for sports, BRANTLEY maxbrantley@arktimes.com if not quite ready to believe that football is the cure for what ails the Little Rock School District or that young women are doing so well that a program targeting primarily males with a dangerous sport makes a lot of sense as the first team sport available to Little Rock sixth-graders.

But back to politics. At Arkansas Baptist, Hill won some big contributions, notably from Scott Ford, the former Alltel CEO. But it turns out Hill left the college in a tight financial situation and, as yet, I haven’t seen a public accounting of his fundraising prowess at the college charitable foundation where he was placed.

Hill has succeeded in building value of his personal stock. The former foot-

Happy at defeat

A

fter all the hydra heads of Trumpcare had been chopped off in one roll call after another, the Affordable Care Act and the health care system still lay in peril this week, subject to the whims of a vindictive president. But humiliating as it was for Republicans and scary for the 400,000 Arkansans and 20 million other Americans who had gotten health insurance, the ugly congressional battle did one wholesome thing.

It stripped away the political pretenses that all sides had conjured up for either defending or killing the 2010 health-insurance law that Republicans dubbed “Obamacare.” It left standing the real issue from the health care debate’s beginning in 2009 until today: whether people have a right to medical care. If they do, then the government is obliged to find a way to provide it for everyone.

That is what the Affordable Care Act, with all its interlocking and often confusing parts, was designed to do and what all the amendments and “replacement” bills set out to undo. They stripped away one or all the Affordable Care Act’s mechanisms for helping people with incomes under 400 percent of the poverty line pay for coverage and to make it more affordable for those above the line. Every

bill sank when the Congressional Budget Office and other analysts supplied the ERNEST numbers: Millions DUMAS would lose access to health care.

Although polls have long shown that most Americans think everyone should be insured, it is not a one-sided theoretical debate. Libertarians like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and the so-called Freedom Caucus are frank about it: The government has no business subsidizing anyone’s medical care. If a person can’t afford it, she shouldn’t get it. The whole safety net, from Social Security to Medicaid, creates a nanny state that whittles away at the liberties of people who are better off.

President John Quincy Adams said the great object of government was “the progressive improvement of the condition of the governed,” but the contrary view is now in charge of all three branches — or at least it was before the actual voting on various Obamacare replacements, which would take insurance away from 15 million to 30 million people. Depending on the variation, from

ball coach has an afternoon sports radio talk show, sponsored by Bear State Bank.

He is on the board of the bank. The bank is a sponsor of the LRSD football initiative. Scott Ford is a major stockholder in the bank. Other football backers of Hill include Bill Dillard III and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette publisher Walter Hussman.

None of these had been known before as supporters of the LRSD. But it’s an intriguing political profile for a mayor’s race. Hill is black, as are more than 40 percent of Little Rock voters. Racially identifiable voting patterns are typical here. He could provide the rare combination of black voter appeal with an appeal to the business Republican sector that is large enough to elect at least one city board member every year.

Frank Scott, also black, is a banker and a former highway commissioner. His resume would appeal to establishment types, too, particularly his advocacy for the Interstate 30 Concrete Ditch project through downtown.

I’d like to hear them all talk about schools, ignored if not directly harmed in years past by city policy and leaders.

Hill’s advocacy of football will win some

friends, but only if they don’t look closely at support from people who’ve backed district-damaging charter school expansion, not to mention Hill’s vote as a state Board of Education member against a return of the Little Rock School District to local voter control.

The most interesting thing about all the talk of a 2018 mayoral race is the presumption that the three-term incumbent is in peril. Maybe not. Name recognition counts for a lot. So does money, and Stodola should have plenty. The Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce and its network owe him for $22 million in taxpayer money for the Little Rock Technology Park, a taxpayer-paid bailout of the elite-beloved-and-controlled Arkansas Arts Center, and resumption of taxpayer subsidies for the chamber of commerce executive payroll, not to mention his advocacy of the I-30 Ditch.

Many solid issues — public infrastructure, schools, the city’s failing hybrid government and crime — should make for a great race for mayor. Particularly if a candidate emerges whose words hold promise of delivery. I’d start with some free Wi-Fi.

three to nine Republican senators voted against them and many others voted for them only on private assurances that the bills would not become law and expose them to the consequences.

Trump himself embraced the Adams theory. He always insisted that his plan (it was always near completion) or the bills he endorsed would cover every American with better benefits than Obamacare.

CBO forecasts were fake news.

The repeal debates stripped away all the political shams that had made Obamacare so unpopular: that the government would decide if old people got medical care, that the government instead of doctors and patients would dictate care, that millions would lose health care rather than gain it, that Medicare would be bankrupted (Obamacare extended its solvency by 10 years), that it would bankrupt the country (it reduced budget deficits) and that it would close businesses and slash jobs (it did the opposite).

The defeat of all the bills left governors everywhere, including Governor Hutchinson, happy because it left intact the whole Medicaid program, a budget saver and economic boon for the states.

Trump, whose mere election after promising to kill Obamacare, rattled the insurance industry and began to drive carriers out of the market, threatened to destroy the whole scheme in retaliation for the defeat of the repealers. He can do

it by stopping the federal subsidies to the carriers to cover the out-of-pocket medical expenses of low-income people. Next week, insurers will have to set their premiums for next year and they will have to guess what he will do and decide whether to raise their premiums sharply, shift the costs to others like your employer health plans, or just get out altogether.

But there was an amazing development last week. A half-dozen GOP senators, led by John McCain of Arizona and Lamar Alexander from Tennessee, decided to try in September to solve the problem like Congress had done the previous 225 years: by legislating with both parties. They would amend the law to make it clear that out-of-pocket costs, which were built into the act’s subsidy schedule but not clearly spelled out, were a government obligation. They were talking about making other changes in the law, perhaps even including Democrats’ own thoughts about fixes to the law they would have made if the filibuster threat had not blocked all alterations in the conference process in 2010.

In the House, a bipartisan group of 23 congressmen calling itself the Problem Solvers Caucus talked about the same thing.

Partnership? Compromise? Don’t count on it. Disunity, hate and revenge are still the ruling passions of civil society. Just catch any day’s presidential tweets.

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Bad reality show

A

s reality TV programs go, the Trump administration is a badly scripted muddle. How much longer will loyal viewers stick around? Just the other day, the president reached out to the influential Imaginary-American community. He dashed out a tweet thanking one Nicole Mincey, supposedly a conservative black woman enthusiastically posting praise of Trump himself.

Except, uh-oh, the photogenic Mincey appeared not to exist. Pictures of her wearing Trump paraphernalia turned out to be photo-shopped screen-grabs of African-American fashion models. Twitter suspended the @ ProTrump45 account after concluding that it was a phony, perhaps originating (where else?) in Russia.

Since then, a real Nicole Mincy (note alternate spelling), has emerged, claiming that she’s a victim of identity theft.

Twitter estimates that slightly more than half of Trump’s approximately 30 million followers are “bots,” i.e. fraudulent accounts, many (again) Russian.

Almost simultaneously, Trump lashed out at his favorite whipping boy, the so-called “mainstream media”: “Hard to believe that with 24/7 #Fake News on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NYTIMES & WAPO, the Trump base is getting stronger!”

Is it even necessary to point out that the president’s approval rating in opinion polls has sunk to record lows?

But polls come and go. What’s really alarming are Trump’s efforts to depict the news media as united in a neartreasonous conspiracy against him and his supporters. Or would be if they weren’t so clearly born of desperation.

He repeatedly lashes out at the “failing NY Times,” another falsehood.

In fact, while the newspaper business in general has suffered of late, a few big national imprints are doing well. The Times’ public relations people counter- tweeted: “That is incorrect. NYT’s business is thriving. Most ever paid subs: 3.3 million; and growing profit, income and revenues.”

Almost needless to say, it won’t be long before Trump sits down with the Times’ Maggie Haberman for an unscripted interview. A New Yorker, he craves the establishment’s imprimatur.

Posturing before a cheering crowd at a campaign-style rally in West Virginia, however, the president took it

to the next level.

He called independent counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian medGENE dling in the 2016 LYONS presidential election a “witch hunt” and a “total fabrication.” He accused Democrats of seeking “an excuse for the greatest loss in the history of American politics.”

Then he went there: “They can’t beat us at the voting booths,” Trump charged, “so they’re trying to cheat you out of the future and the future that you want. They’re trying to cheat you out of the leadership you want with a fake story that is demeaning to all of us, and most importantly, demeaning to our country and demeaning to our Constitution.”

The good news, I think, is that Trump hasn’t got the courage of his fabrications. Nor have his most enthusiastic supporters. That West Virginia audience was basically a pro-wrestling crowd, easily titillated and vastly entertained by the president’s antics.

There’s a big opening here for that very funny wrestler working the Appalachian small-town circuit who styles himself “The Progressive Liberal” — the guy with photos of Hillary Clinton on his shirt. “I understand now why you all identify with country music,” Dan Richards tells audiences. “It’s slow and it’s simple and it’s boring, just like each and every one of you.”

If only the dude had wrestling moves commensurate with his wit.

But I digress. As shocking as it may have been to hear accusations of treason out of the president’s mouth, along with calls to have his 2016 Democratic rival jailed (“Lock her up!”), Vladimir Putin he ain’t.

“I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” boasts Owen Glendower in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part I. “Why, so can I, or so can any man,” Hotspur responds. “But will they come when you do call for them?”

In Trump’s case, no. This president hasn’t got the self-discipline to lead a coup, and the great majority of his followers are far too comfortable watching the televised spectacle in their recliner chairs to take to the streets.

Only a steadily shrinking minority believes the president’s “witch hunt” rhetoric, and not very strongly. As I say, it’s poorly scripted melodrama.

Times a-changin’

A

s one who greedily and geekily James Mattis, consumes public opinion data, I’m who would have rarely truly surprised by polling to implement the results. However, the ice-cold reaction policy change, was of the American public to President on summer vacaTrump’s directive to ban transgender in- tion showed the JAY dividuals from service in the armed forces, impulsiveness of BARTH evidenced by recent polls, is startling the action. Several indeed. It suggests fundamental shifts days later, Gen. Joseph Dunford, the are underway on opinion regarding one chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, of the most vibrant civil rights issues of who like Mattis was caught off guard by our time. the sudden announcement, wrote that A Quinnipiac University national sur- there would be “no modifications” to vey released last week showed that over the standing policy unless and until the two-thirds of Americans support allow- White House developed a formal direcing transgender soldiers to serve in the tive for a policy change. Americans have military. This strong majority is in direct grown tired of the president’s Twitter conflict with Trump’s announcement of habits in general and haphazardly maka policy reversal via a series of tweets ing policy change via tweet serves Trump two weeks ago. An analysis, reported even more poorly. in The Washington Post, by a group of However, this growing support for the political scientists who have done work rights of transgender Americans is not on the topic shows the breadth of this just about the rash behavior of Trump on pro-transgender-rights view across the the topic. As has been the case with other country. Their analysis of recent polling sexual minorities, we know that intersuggests that support for allowing mili- personal contact matters enormously in tary service by transgender individuals creating changes in attitudes. While the is a majority perspective in all 50 states sheer number of transgender persons is and the District of Columbia. Only in five smaller than those who identify as gay, culturally conservative states does sup- lesbian or bisexual, they represent an port fall below 60 percent of the elector- increasingly visibly population. Second, ate, according to this analysis (Arkansas, generational change is also a key part of naturally at the more conservative end of the story. Those who are under 30 are the spectrum, shows right at 60 percent most likely to have persons in their life support for transgender service). who identify as trans.

Several dynamics are likely driving Finally, it’s also important to recogthese results, which indicate dramatic nize that transgender individuals are now shifts on attitudes toward protections for thought of as being part of the broader transgender Americans. (As recently as LGBTQ community in a way that was 2005, the average “feeling thermometer” not the case a decade ago. As late as 2007, rating of transgender individuals in a even gay, lesbian and bisexual activists national survey — with 0 equaling abso- showed a problematic willingness to lute negativity toward the group and 100 throw the less understood transgender the most positive rating — was a mere 32.) community overboard in the heat of politOne force behind the striking oppo- ical battles. When the Employment Nonsition to the policy change may well be Discrimination Act was being considered the man who proposed it and how he by Congress in 2007, certain groups — led announced it. The growing toxicity of by the large Human Rights Campaign — President Trump as a political leader were willing to exclude gender identity bleeds over onto the policy stances with from the legislation’s coverage if it meant which he is connected. The Quinnipiac successful passage of the legislation. Soon survey in which the question regarding thereafter, however, the LGBTQ moveTrump’s policy proposal on military ser- ment determined it would only operate as vice was included also found that 55 per- a transgender-inclusive movement. The cent of the national sample “strongly” Quinnipiac survey shows — by an overdisapprove of the president’s job perfor- whelming 89 percent to 8 percent margin mance. Polling from a variety of outlets is — that Americans believe workers should showing how deeply personal this nega- be protected from job discrimination tivity toward the president has become. based on sexual orientation. Over time, In addition, the fact that Trump’s transgender rights has come to benefit announcement on this policy shift came from the national consensus that emerged via a flurry of tweets on a Wednesday regarding civil rights protections for their morning while Secretary of Defense LGB political allies.

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ARKANSAS TIMES

T

he second leg of the 2017 Arkansas football season is no picnic, metaphorically or otherwise.

The fourth game of the year represents a cushy opportunity to push the September record to a spotless 4-0, and a chance to beat Aggies in consecutive weeks, which is an oddly pleasurable distinction for longtime Razorback fans.

The Las Cruces, N.M., version is abjectly terrible year in and year out. Head coach Doug Martin is 10-38 in four years there and “boasts” a career ledger of 39 wins against 91 losses, which makes him a mystifying choice for continued employment.

Then again, New Mexico State football has never flourished under anyone’s direction. This program is annually good for two to four wins, and always a choice patsy for power conference schools to pick on. The Hogs feel emboldened by the chance to finish out the first month unbeaten and in the rankings, and do not waste time dispatching these Aggies. This is where Cole Kelley gets his first extended work at quarterback and he doesn’t disappoint with a couple of third-quarter touchdown throws in relief of Austin Allen, who barely breaks a sweat in throwing three first-half scores of his own. Arkansas 55, New Mexico State 17.

October starts the real season in earnest for the Hogs, with the first two true road games back to back. The first one is at Columbia, S.C., and for as flawed as the Gamecocks appear to be, as with most East Division teams, they will be pesky and problematic because Will Muschamp does know how to construct an attacking defense even if his acumen elsewhere is subject to derision.

The Cocks had a bit of an overachieving first year under his direction in 2016 and do return some potent players. Linebacker Skai Moore is coming off a major injury and had an offfield scrape this spring but is a proven playmaker, and Carolina’s tight end/ receiver combination of Hayden Hurst and Deebo Samuel is well established.

The Hogs will struggle to contain quarterback Jake Bentley and their historical struggles at Williams-Brice Stadium will reveal themselves again, as the Cocks use a balanced attack to take down the Razorbacks and pin them with their first overall and conference loss in a game that goes back and forth until the waning minutes. South Caro-

lina 34, Arkansas 24.

Unfortunately, Arkansas could’ve used the momentum and inherent prestige of a 5-0 start because the following week, the Hogs head to Tuscaloosa.

The CrimBEAU son Tide will be WILCOX unbeaten and No. 1, as is local custom, when this game is played on Oct. 14. They will also ostensibly be coached by Nick Saban, barring some kind of fall from grace, tragedy or impromptu retirement decision from the reigning lord of the sport. Quarterback Jalen Hurts is being heavily hyped as a Heisman contender for good reason, what with all the weapons and protection he could want at his disposal and another pro-caliber defense getting him and his skill people back on the field quickly by tormenting offensive linemen across the greater South.

Here’s the funny thing, though: Arkansas seemingly limped into BryantDenny Stadium two years ago and pushed the Tide into a four-quarter game. Ultimately it was a loss but one that gave the Hogs a shot of adrenaline for the remainder of the season, as they won six of seven after bowing to the Tide in a respectable dogfight. Bielema’s charges provide a similar effort here in 2017.

Allen stays composed and measured against the Tide secondary that bedeviled him a year ago, and manages to become the first Hog quarterback in seemingly ages to not cough up a turnover against Bama. His direction and some steady running from freshman Chase Hayden have the Hogs smelling a massive upset well into the second half, with Arkansas taking a slim 20-17 lead into the final period.

Ultimately, the Alabama defense buckles down and forces two three-andouts, and Hurts throws for one score and sprints off right tackle for another, and the Tide get away clean. Alabama 31, Arkansas 20.

The first half of the season down, and the Hogs at 4-2 and 1-2, everything then tilts on a home game against Auburn and an opportunity to atone for a Defcon 5-level embarrassment on the Plains the year before. We will break that one down as well as the ensuing trip to Oxford and homecoming against Costal Carolina next week in the third part of a four-part season projection.

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THE OBSERVER NOTES ON THE PASSING SCENE

True Observer

T

he Observer reveres the One True Observer, who lives in the wires of the West and in the Great Cloud.

Facebook (and probably Google, too, but let’s focus on Facebook) knows everything about you. Anywhere there is a little Facebook button on a page, it tracks all your clicks on that page — combining this with data purchased from offline credit firms and adding in the tracking of your phone ID (which it has) — and creates a detailed report of your life. This newspaper’s simple Observer, a humble servant of looking, pales in comparison to the mighty power of Facebook and yet … what is Facebook doing with all this knowledge? At least The Observer gives you a weekly article.

A better way of asking that is: What is Facebook selling? It is certainly not the experience for users of being on Facebook. Studies show that Facebook makes you feel bad — and not just when you see posts with negative content. “The more people use Facebook, the more unhappy they are,” wrote John Lanchester in an article for the London Review of Books, summing up a study of Facebook use over time. No one would pay to be on Facebook, The Observer hopes.

The problem, Tim Wu argues in his book “The Attention Merchants,” is that you cannot think about the users of Facebook as the buyers at all because the users are actually the product being bought.

Your observation, our observation, is what is being sold by the One True Great Observer (Facebook Inc., hovering at $170 per share while this was being written). You are laboring with your attention and that is sold to advertisers. We, as in Facebook users, spend a collective 39,575 years on Facebook each day. And our collective effort, this great focused attention connected across the world, is not for something grand. “All this information is used for a purpose which is, in the final analysis, profoundly bathetic,” writers Lanchester, after recounting the myriad ways that Facebook knows everything about you. “It is to sell you things via online ads.”

You should probably be upset at being

observed and that a company knows your entire life. But, in all honesty, we lost the fight long ago. You likely cannot un-sell yourself from these companies. Maybe we can just agree on something much more juvenile: the utter lameness of this as the collective accomplishment. We toiled away as a global community to look at ads and a few people got very rich from it. Moreover, it made us all sad.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg spins this accomplishment as “connecting communities” — zipping around the United States in a compassion tour that seems aimed at eventually running for president. The Observer is sure he will come to Arkansas and take a picture in a field and talk about the “heart of America.” But, do you feel connected by Facebook to the rest of America? Or, do you feel sold?

It reminds The Observer of Richard Rorty, a philosopher who wrote an essay in which he imagined himself a fake academic in the year 2096. Looking back on the United States, Rorty argues that economic inequality of the 21st century caused a lack of “fraternity” and that “everything depends on keeping our fragile sense of American fraternity intact.”

Facebook pretends to pedal this connection — fraternity among all of us — but it is actually the opposite. It sells companies a direct connection to you masked as friendship.

The Observer can see the eyes rolling.

It is fine. You don’t care. After all, I’ll see you on Facebook tonight. The Observer is actually going to post something good: a Don DeLillo story that just came out called “The Itch.” The post will probably quote a part in which a few people are eating brunch and they’re discussing the deluge of knowledge they now have about the world. One character asks, “What do we do with this information?”

And, in a jump that is unsettling and does not make sense for the reader, the next paragraph begins, “Three or four commercials every two or three minutes.

Commercials in clusters.” Jumping time in the story, but answering the question.

Hopefully the post gets a few likes.

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/17

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Arkansas Reporter

THE

BABIES IN PRISON CAMP: A photograph

by Paul Faris in “The Art of Injustice.”

Not all black and white Butler Center’s photography show provides context to Japanese American internment.

BY LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK

C

amellias are carved into the small doors of the Buddhist shrine, a lotus blossom is carved under the shelf inside, and doves are carved above the shelf. That’s what you can see in the photograph in “Beauty Behind Barbed Wire,” a survey of art objects made in Japanese internment camps during World War II published 65 years ago by Allen Eaton.

But to Paul Faris, the photographer, and Ann Faris, his wife, the altar was more than an example of “excellent design and craftsmanship,” as the book describes it. It embodied the grief of a couple who, arriving at Rohwer, 12

AUGUST 10, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

Ark., on Sept. 30, 1942, lost a 1-day-old baby boy on May 3, 1943. The Farises — described as a “journalistic team” by the curator of the exhibit “The Art of Injustice,” opening Friday, Aug. 11, at the Butler Center’s Concordia Hall — recorded life, in addition to beauty, in an internment camp.

Paul Faris took photographs; Ann Faris took notes. So we know more than that Heishiro Otani carved and varnished a shrine. We know that he was a native of Tokyo, had lived in the United States since 1930, and learned to carve wood while interned at Rohwer with his wife, Chisato, and baby girl, Keiko.

The shrines, known as a Butsudan, were created to help families deal with the death of a loved one.

“The Art of Injustice” includes 40 photographs made by Faris at Rohwer and includes the couple’s notes on their subjects. The black-and-white photographs are extraordinary in their own right, artistically capturing bewildered children, artists and artisans creating under difficult circumstances and Noh masks. But they also tell a story of how Americans of Japanese descent, some of them parents of American servicemen but nevertheless uprooted and deprived of their worldly possessions and transported thousands of miles across the country, transformed their rough camp in the Arkansas Delta as best they could.

And there is yet another story the show’s curator, Dr. Sarah Wilkerson Freeman, professor of history at Arkansas State University, hopes to tell: how the internment itself provoked a “crisis of conscience” among Arkansans and impacted thinking during the civil rights crises of the 1960s.

The genealogy of “Art of Injustice” begins in the 1940s with a Hendrix College art professor who, as a student of Japanese culture and a collector of Japanese art, decided to visit the internment camps that housed nearly 16,000 Japanese Americans, many of them American citizens, at Rohwer and Jerome.

Floy Hanson was teaching in Memphis when Hendrix began to lose its male professors to the service in the war, Freeman said. An artist herself, Hanson knew Arkansas artists Elsie and Louis Freund and in 1943 traveled to the camps with Elsie Freund. According to a note written later by Louis Freund, Hanson wanted to meet Henry Sugimoto — an artist of some renown before his incarceration at Jerome — and went to the camps with Elsie Freund to meet him.

Sugimoto, secretively at first, had painted huge murals of camp life on sheets, the only material available. The camp administration, learning that, was impressed rather than offended, and allowed him to teach art at Jerome High School, according to accounts in

the Densho Encyclopedia of Japanese Americans during World War II. Seeing Sugimoto’s work, Hanson and Elsie Freund agreed: Hendrix should put it on exhibition, and the college did, in 1944. The War Relocation Authority allowed Sugimoto and his wife, Susie, to leave the camp — he’d been moved to Rohwer by then — to attend the Conway college’s reception for the exhibition.

Enter Paul Faris, a Hendrix professor of English and photography, who shot a photograph of the Sugimotos standing with the Freunds and Floy Hanson at the reception.

There was yet another Hendrix connection: Nat Griswold, a former professor of religion at the college, was the superintendent of community activities at Rohwer, and as such supported Sugimoto and other artists and artisans in their work. So in 1945, when Allen Eaton was looking for photographers for “Beauty Behind Barbed Wire,” Griswold recommended Faris, and Faris and his wife began their trips to Rohwer.

Move forward 67 years.

In 2012, Paul Faris’ son and daughter, Tim Faris and Mary Ann Thurmond, asked Freeman to look at their collection of his negatives to help them decide what should be done with them. (Freeman had previously curated an exhibition of photographs by New Orleans shooter Jack Robinson.) Among the negatives were shots of Rohwer.

“Of all the things in the collection I felt needed to be brought to public attention, these jumped out at me,” Freeman said.

Included in the collection was the picture Faris shot at the reception. Freeman recognized the Freunds and the Sugimotos. But who was the woman?

“That set me on a hunt,” Freeman said, and when she identified Hanson, she was able to flesh out the story of how Sugimoto came to be known at Hendrix, and why, in turn, Paul and Ann Faris came to photograph and write about the internees at Rohwer.

And how that experience affected their feelings about the future crisis of a mistreated people.

“That’s what’s different about the show,” Freeman said. “It’s not just photographs, but the story, with very rich content and heavy narrative.” Free-

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man enlisted her history students at ASU to research the images and the manuscript left behind by Ann Faris; some of the texts that accompany the photographs in “Art of Injustice” will reveal what became of the subjects of the photographs.

The show, which Freeman has likened to “walking through a book,” has been exhibited previously at ASU, Hendrix and the Military Intelligence Service Historic Learning Center in the Presidio of San Francisco, but the exhibition has grown for the Butler Center, with 12 additional photographs.

Since meeting the Faris children, Freeman uncovered additional Faris photographs, including shots of the 1957 crisis at Little Rock Central High School. Griswold, the man who recommended Faris for the photography job, was the executive director of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations during the crisis and active in civil rights efforts across Arkansas.

Freeman had an “epiphany,” she said, realizing that the exhibition could illustrate how the treatment of Japanese Americans helped “expand the thinking of some people” when it came to the general injustice of racial segregation and bigotry.

The closing wall of the exhibition, then, will include a print of a photograph made at Central by Faris along with a painting by Louis Freund, “Hiroshima,” from the Butler Center’s collection, and a poem by John Gould Fletcher inspired by Sugimoto’s painting “When can we go home?” The show will also include pieces created by the internees at Rohwer.

Freeman will give a talk about the photographs at 7 p.m. opening night, which is also 2nd Friday Art Night downtown. She’s hoping there will be a sake bar.

Thanks to the donation to the Butler Center of art and artifacts collected

by Rosalie Santine Gould, who lived in McGehee during the internment and was dedicated to preserving the story of Rohwer, and Mabel Jamison Vogel, who taught art at Rohwer, the Butler Center has been able to host two previous exhibitions related to the camp: “The Art of Living,” in 2011, and “The American Dream Deferred,” which closed July 29.

THE

Inconsequential News Quiz:

BIG Emotionally rich images edition PICTURE

Play at home, while rubbing itch cream on your fire ant bites.

1) For its inaugural festival Aug. 24-26, the Arkansas Cinema Society is planning to hold a special event in Little Rock. What is it?

A) An appearance by actor Adam Driver, who plays (SPOILER!) Han Solo-killer Kylo Ren in the latest installment of the “Star Wars” franchise.

B) World premiere of the new documentary by state Sen. Jason Rapert (R-Ezekiel), titled “Everybody Thinks I’m an Ass Except Jesus, and I’m Not So Sure About Him.” C) Nekkid free-for-all in a hot tub full of movie theater popcorn butter.

D) “Clockwork Orange”-style rampage of ultraviolence by area screenwriter Graham Gordy, with Moog synthesizer accompaniment.

2) The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences recently received a $422,000 grant to study something. What will UAMS researchers be studying?

A) “Larger Thigh Circumference Potentially Related to Degree of Soullessness In Human Females,” a joint project with the Robert Plant Institute in London.

B) Why dogs hang their heads out car windows. (Current theory: You’re really boring on road trips.)

C) How mentally healthy adults respond to “emotionally rich images.”

D) Whether a submarine and crew can be shrunk small enough to go into Donald Trump’s brain and see what the hell has gone wrong in there.

3) According to police, an 18-wheeler that recently overturned on Interstate 40 in Lonoke County, fully blocking the westbound lanes, was carrying cargo. What was it?

A) Thousands of king cobras, anacondas and black mambas. Have a great week, Lonoke County!

B) Hundreds of gallons of bottled whiskey.

C) An estimated 61,000 slightly used “Make America Great Again” hats donated to Goodwill and on their way to the incinerator.

D) A truckload of Coors eastbound from Texarkana to Atlanta, with Jackie Gleason in hot pursuit!

4) At the recent 2017 Arkansas Rice Expo in Stuttgart, keynote speaker Charlie Stenholm, a former Texas congressman who once served as the ranking member of the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture, doled out an uncomfortable truth to attendees.

What was it?

A) That mashed potatoes are always going to be better than rice as a side dish to Salisbury steak.

Just sayin’.

B) That the political system in Washington is “absolutely broken,” with most in Congress unable to even consider the compromise necessary to pass a bill.

C) That the email chain about birds exploding after eating rice thrown at weddings is not only a myth, it’s a dumb myth. The stuff grows outside where birds live, you know?

D) His suspicion that rice pudding contains neither rice nor pudding.

5) University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service offices in Southwest Arkansas are trying a surprising new tactic in the ongoing effort to stop the spread of the red fire ant, a stinging invasive species from South America that has infested large portions of the state. What is it?

A) A sit-down with the fire ant queen over coffee and bagels to see if a compromise can be reached.

B) A six-inch wall around Clark County, which the Trump administration promises will be paid for by the ants themselves.

C) Releasing two new species of the phorid fly, a natural predator that lays its eggs in an ant’s body, which eventually causes the ant’s head to fall off.

D) The Pentagon’s $60 billion plan to arm local hives of native ants with thousands of tiny assault rifles, fighter jets and tanks, then just hope for the best.

Answers: A, C, B, B, C

LISTEN UP

arktimes.com AUGUST 10, 2017

13

The fight over the herbicide dicamba has cost one man his life and turned neighbor against neighbor in East Arkansas.

BRIAN CHILSON

BY DAVID KOON

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AUGUST 10, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

BRIAN CHILSON

IN MONETTE: Karen Wallace (left), widow of Mike Wallace, wants to see the pesticide dicamba banned. A Bradford pear tree near her husband’s grave (above) shows the damage dicamba causes to vegetation, including crops.

At the peak of summer in the little town of Monette in Craighead County, the

soybeans and cotton in surrounding fields a jealous green, the pear tree that stands 20 feet from the grave of Mike Wallace looks like it has been blowtorched, every leaf blighted, curled and black at the edges. It’s the ugly residue of drifting dicamba, the herbicide for which Wallace literally gave his life.

According to investigators, on Oct. 27, 2016, Wallace, who farmed 5,000 acres of corn, soybeans and cotton near the Arkansas/Missouri border, arranged by phone to meet a farmhand named Allan Curtis Jones, 26, of Arbyrd, Mo., on West County Road 38 north of the Mississippi County town of Leachville to discuss Wallace’s suspicions that the farm where Jones worked was the source of drifting dicamba that had damaged some of Wallace’s crops. Wallace, who had been vocal in his opposition to the herbicide, had been quoted in an August 2016 story in The Wall Street Journal, telling the newspaper that at least 40 percent of his soybean crop had been damaged by drifting dicamba since June.

He’d filed complaints twice with the Arkansas State

Plant Board, the state agency that oversees claims of crop damage, about damage from drifting dicamba and had encouraged other farmers to report their damage as well.

When Wallace and Jones met outside of Leachville, Jones brought along his cousin and a gun. According to statements issued by Mississippi County Sheriff Dale Cook at the time of the shooting, Jones told investigators that an argument had ensued. In the midst of it, Wallace, who was not carrying a weapon, grabbed Jones by the arm. At that point, investigators say, Jones pulled away, pulled his pistol, and fired into Wallace’s body until the magazine was empty. Wallace, a father of two who’d farmed in Mississippi County since he was a boy, was hit at least four times, and died in the dust on the south shoulder of the county road, with Jones’ cousin using his shirt in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding. Jones soon was arrested on a charge of first-degree murder, and later released on $150,000 bond.

Whether the shooting was self-defense or homicide will be up to a jury. Jones is scheduled to go to trial Sept.

11. A spokesman for the Mississippi County Sheriff’s Office referred all questions about Wallace’s murder to the prosecutor for Mississippi County. The prosecutor handling the case did not return a call seeking comment

at press time. Calls to the Blytheville defense attorney representing Jones also went unreturned at press time.

However the case against Jones turns out, Wallace’s family has been working since his death to see justice done in another way: by trying to get the use of dicamba banned statewide. A 120-day ban was put in place in early July, the fine for illegal spraying of the herbicide increased 25-fold on Aug. 1, and a task force was established to look for solutions.

But a permanent ban on dicamba would run afoul of the needs of farmers, who are facing a shrinking pool of options in the fight against herbicide-resistant weeds, and of corporate investment in genetically modified, dicamba-tolerant crop technology that is easily worth billions. It’s a quest that has put Wallace’s family at odds with many of their neighbors and, in some ways, even their own best interests as farmers. But they say it is a fight Mike Wallace would make if he were alive.

ON THE WIND Developed in 1958 by the German-based chemical company BASF and first used on corn crops in the mid-1960s, dicamba is a plant-hormone-mimicking herbicide that’s deadly to a host of weeds and other plants, including many common vegetable crops and species of ornamental flowers and trees, like the

arktimes.com AUGUST 10, 2017

15

Bradford pear that stands near Wallace’s grave. While it works like gangbusters against pigweed, which has been a bane of row crop agriculture long before the plant began developing a stubborn genetic resistance to glyphosate-based herbicides like Roundup, cotton and soybean farmers in East Arkansas didn’t use it because dicamba is highly lethal to those crops, which have long been the lifeblood of the area. Even a light dose of dicamba on those crops can cause curled leaves, stunted plants and a reduction in yield. A medium-toheavy misting can kill them outright. That, combined with dicamba being prone to drift if applied improperly and its “volatility” — the tendency to change back to a vapor, lift off of crops and float away to neighboring fields under the right atmospheric conditions — would have made the idea of Arkansas farmers spraying large amounts of dicamba in high summer unthinkable 10 years ago, not to mention illegal. Until this year, spraying dicamba beyond April 15, after vulnerable crops had emerged from the soil, was against the law in Arkansas, with violations carrying up to a $1,000 fine. When it was used, dicamba was mostly employed as a “burn down” herbicide to clear an agricultural slate in preparation for planting, before the plants it might harm had sprouted or leafed out.

But that was then. This is now.

In 2015, the Missouri-based agricultural giant Monsanto released its Xtend brand cottonseed. A year later it put out Xtend soybeans. Both are genetically modified to be tolerant of dicamba. Potentially worth billions, the GMO technology promised to be a new weapon in farmers’ ongoing fight against several stubborn weed varieties, including pigweed, resulting in higher yields and incomes. To farmers stretched thin, it must have sounded like a godsend.

The new dicamba-tolerant seeds hit the market quickly, and more cotton and soybean farmers began to plant them. But they could not yet use a legal dicambabased herbicide on their crops, because one was not available. BASF’s Engenia, advertised as being less likely to drift off target, was not approved for use in the state until fall 2016, and another low-volatility dicamba formulation, Monsanto’s Xtendimax with Vapor Grip, is still not approved for use in Arkansas.

Early adopters who had purchased dicambatolerant seed with the expectation they’d soon be able to spray their fields with reformulated dicamba and watch weeds melt away were disappointed with the progress of getting the lower volatility formulas approved. Whether out of greed, historically tight financial margins or desperation at out-of-control weeds, some farmers became outlaws in 2015 and 2016, spraying older, more drift- and volatility-prone formulas of dicamba on their dicamba-tolerant crops, knowing that even if they got caught, the $1,000 fine amounted to a speeding ticket when compared to the increased profits they stood to reap. In the same August 2016 Wall Street Journal article that featured Wallace speaking out about dicamba damage, an assistant director of enforcement with the Arkansas State Plant Board was quoted as saying she’d been openly told by farmers spraying dicamba in violation of the law: “We’ll write you a check.” If a farmer has 5,000 acres or more under cultivation, all planted with dicamba-

16

AUGUST 10, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

tolerant seed, it’s not hard to divide by $1,000 and do the financial math.

With some farmers planting dicamba-tolerant crops in proximity to their neighbors’ dicamba-susceptible crops and then spraying the older formulations of dicamba, the result in recent years has been like dropping a bomb on East Arkansas agriculture.

According to a report released July 25 by a scientist at the University of Missouri, 17 states have received reports of dicamba-related crop damage since the dicamba-tolerant seeds were introduced, with an estimated 2.5 million acres affected. Arkansas was the hardest hit by far, according to the report, with an estimated 850,000 acres of crops in the state damaged.

As of early August, the State Plant Board had received over 840 complaints of suspected dicamba-related issues. Gardens and landscaping, some of it miles away from the nearest dicamba-tolerant fields, were scorched and stunted. In a moment that might be funny if it wasn’t so indicative of the chaos that’s been sown in East Arkansas, the damage this year included 100 acres of soybeans unexpectedly whacked by drifting dicamba at the University of Arkansas’s Northeast Research and Extension Center in Mississippi County. A June press release on the damage noted ironically that the damaged soybean plots, which had to be plowed under and replanted, were to be used in research on dicamba drift and volatility. In another irony that might be shocking if it weren’t so sad, members of Mike Wallace’s family, who have every reason in the world to hate dicamba and what the controversial herbicide has done to relationships in the close-knit farming communities of Northeast Arkansas, planted a sizable part of their acreage this year in dicamba-tolerant crops, solely in self-defense. Tales of defensive planting of dicamba-tolerant seeds have become common, with a kind of forced monopoly-by-attrition taking hold.

According to Monsanto, 18 million acres of dicambatolerant soybeans were planted in the U.S. this year, including 1.5 million acres in Arkansas — about half the total estimated soybean crop in the state.

Having approved the use of BASF’s Engenia in the fall of 2016 over the objections of the Wallace family, the State Plant Board reversed itself on June 23 and voted to recommend a temporary ban on the “in-crop” use of dicamba-based herbicides, a decision that soon received the approval of Governor Hutchinson. A statement released by Monsanto after the Plant Board’s vote said the board didn’t allow farmers who had already planted dicamba-tolerant seeds to describe how a ban would affect their operations. “Instead,” the statement read, “the Board based its decision on offtarget movement claims that are still being investigated and have not been substantiated. … Arkansas farmers should not be forced to continue to operate at a disadvantage to farmers in other states where bans like the board’s current proposed action do not exist.”

The issue was referred to a joint meeting of the state House and Senate committees on agriculture, economic development and forestry on July 7. By the time the joint committee meeting started at 9 a.m. that day, the room’s large, curved gallery was packed, legislators in suits shoulder to shoulder with farmers in plaid shirts and mesh trucker caps who’d driven

through the dawn from East Arkansas to be there.

The public comment period was crowded and divided: farmers talking about their extensive dicamba-related crop damage vs. farmers talking about the need for the new technology to help solve their herbicideresistant weed problems. A representative from a small poultry producer told the committee that his niche business model of selling non-GMO chicken was being threatened by damage to the soybeans his business grows for feed. Weed scientist Dr. Ford Baldwin, who called dicamba the biggest train wreck to ever hit agriculture, told the assembled legislators that the day before the meeting, a farmer in that very room had been involved in a fistfight with another farmer over crop damage. He didn’t say whether the farmer in question was for or against the ban.

As it has been at every state-level meeting on dicamba that’s been held since October 2016, Wallace’s family was there, pushing for a ban. Kerin Hawkins, Wallace’s sister, addressed the committee. The month after her brother’s death, she and other members of her family had pleaded with the Plant Board to ban dicamba, but BASF’s lower-volatility formulation Engenia had been approved with restrictions, including a quarter-mile buffer zone between dicamba spraying and non-dicamba-tolerant crops. Hawkins appeared again in July to ask the joint committee to support the ban. She said that in addition to damage to her family’s peanut crops, their 10-acre garden patch inside the city of Leachville, which she said is over a quarter mile from any dicamba spraying, had also been damaged by drift.

After the joint committee voted to recommend the ban, an eight-member subcommittee of the Arkansas Legislative Council officially took no action on the plan, which allowed the 120-day ban on in-crop dicamba use to go into effect on July 11. A $25,000 fine for illegal spraying of the herbicide went into effect last week.

AN ACT OF MAN State Rep. Joe Jett, a Republican who lives at Success in far Northeast Arkansas, is a retired farmer and looks the part. A supporter of the temporary ban, Jett attended the July 7 meeting and invited Baldwin to speak. Jett said heavy rains in Northeast Arkansas this spring helped keep dicamba damage from being worse this year, simply because farmers couldn’t get into the waterlogged fields to spray. “Had it not been for that,” Jett said, “I think the atmosphere would have really loaded up with dicamba and you would have seen a lot more widespread damage than what we saw as it was.”

Jett said he is in favor of advanced technology to help farmers, including genetically modified seeds, but wouldn’t use dicamba himself “in good, clear conscience” given the damage he’s seen in Northeast Arkansas. “Knowing that we’re going to go out here and hurting people and putting ourselves in front of our neighbors? I can’t get my head wrapped around that,” he said. “Obviously you’re always going to have some folks out there who don’t care what’s right and who are going to take care of themselves. But I think a lot of it is that the margins are just so tight [in farming], and farmers need every break they can get. They’re

UA DIVISION OF AGRICULTURE

BRIAN CHILSON

MISSISSIPPI COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE

Arkansas was the hardest hit by far, according to the report, with an estimated 850,000 acres of crops in the state damaged.

KNOWING THE KILLER HERBICIDE: Karen Wallace (from left), widow of farmer Mike Wallace, shown here pulling pigweed, and weed scientist Dr. Ford Baldwin. At right, a soybean field damaged by dicamba.

willing to look the other way and be more worried about themselves surviving than they are about their neighbors surviving. I think that’s a lot of it.”

Asked whether members of the legislature have discussed a way to financially assist farmers in the state hit by dicamba-related crop loss, Jett said the state is on a tight budget and will be unlikely to help. “I don’t know how you could ever get into that,” he said. “Farmers have insurance, but [the damage] can’t be manmade.

It has to be an act of God. To answer your question: No, I think that’s probably beyond the state. We don’t have the means to help in that regard.” Federal crop insurance only covers losses due to drought, flood or natural disasters. The only remedy for those farmers whose incomes were damaged by dicamba may be to sue, and some are doing that. There are at least two civil suits against Monsanto and BASF over dicamba use in Arkansas, one representing farmers who planted non-Xtend crops and suffered losses due to dicamba drift, and another by farmers who planted Xtend seeds expecting to be able to use the lower-volatility formulations of dicamba but can’t because of the ban.

Both lawsuits are seeking class-action status.

Terry Fuller, a member of the State Plant Board who runs Fuller Seed and Supply in Poplar Grove in Phillips County and farms 3,000 acres near the Indian Bay community, spoke in favor of the ban at the July 7 meeting. While he said farmers in his area appear to be abiding by the dicamba ban for the most part, he believes the reduction in yields to non-dicamba resistant crops caused by damage early in the season could be severe.

“It’s going to be dire because we didn’t ban it sooner,” Fuller said. “It’s crazy how much damage we’ve got, and it’s going to be real damage. It’s going to amount to millions.” Fuller, who told the joint committee in July

that he couldn’t leave his house in any direction without In his testimony before the joint committee in seeing extensive crop damage caused by dicamba, said July, Baldwin spoke of his suspicions that even the he believes the companies behind the dicamba-tolerant new, officially less-volatile formulation of dicamba seed and low-volatility herbicide are engaging in “a is moving from field to field or even traveling miles strategy to force everybody to plant” the dicamba- away due to volatility and temperature inversions tolerant seed. While the chemical companies have that pull the chemical off sprayed crops and into tried to put at least some of the blame for damage the air at night. Ford talked of farmers inadvertently in Arkansas this year on misapplication of Engenia, “loading the air” with dicamba, which then floated Fuller said he doesn’t buy it. “I contend that we’ve around in the atmosphere like invisible smoke until got world-class farmers; the best there are anywhere temperature fluctuations forced it down on farms and in the world,” he said. “I don’t just believe they were yards, decimating crops and ornamental plants almost applying [Engenia] right, I absolutely, positively know as if it was sprayed there on purpose. that a lot of it was applied exactly right.”

Baldwin said he never believed he’d see farmers The sad part, Fuller said, is that some of those world- show such disregard for each other as they have class farmers are the ones getting the black eye. “We’re since dicamba-tolerant crops were introduced. He trespassing on our neighbors, and we’re trespassing called the murder of Wallace “the low point” of his on our neighbors in town,” he said. “It’s not just our career. “I never dreamed I would see farmers show neighbor farmers. There’s a lot of damage in yards. You the insensitivity toward each other in some cases,” hate to say that and call attention to it, but it is a reality.” Baldwin said. “That doesn’t apply across the board.

Baldwin agrees, and has similar concerns about But you know some farmers just have the attitude: ‘My how the dicamba damage will play to a public already neighbor knew I was planting Xtend crops, so it’s his spooked about herbicides. A respected weed scientist own fault that I damaged him. He should have planted who worked for the University of Arkansas for 27 years, Xtend crops, too.’ Well, hell, he’s got a right to plant Baldwin retired in 2002 and now runs a consulting anything he wants to plant and not have it damaged.” business, Practical Weed Consultants, with his wife.

Though the less-volatile forms of dicamba seem Baldwin has been something of the Paul Revere of like a solution to the drift problems being experienced the chaos dicamba-resistant-seed technology could by farmers, Baldwin said the science of the herbicide potentially bring to agriculture. seems to show that dicamba’s volatility may be a “I said four years ago that dicamba would drive very difficult problem to solve — one he believes the a wedge between farmers, which it has,” Baldwin companies have downplayed. “The problem is there’s told the Arkansas Times. “You’ve got 50 percent that a difference between less volatile and nonvolatile,” wants the technology and 50 percent that doesn’t want Baldwin said. “It’s my understanding that there were the technology and don’t want the dicamba sprayed some totally nonvolatile dicambas developed back in on them. And it’s going to drive a wedge between the early days of the herbicide. The problem was that agriculture and nonagriculture. I’m not being critical the weed-control efficacy declined as the volatility of anybody or slamming anybody. It’s just the way it is.” declined. … That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be revisited,

arktimes.com AUGUST 10, 2017

17

BRIAN CHILSON

‘THEY TOOK MIKE FROM US’: That’s what Mike Wallace’s sister Kerin Hawkins said, referring to Alan Curtis Jones (above). Wallace sits in the BRIAN CHILSON

middle of his family (top left) in his cotton field; Karen Wallace and her husband’s sisters, Hawkins and Pam Sandusky, visit Wallace’s grave (left ).

but the best information we have right now is there is a relationship between volatility and weed control efficacy [in dicamba].”

Baldwin doesn’t believe operator error in spraying BASF’s less-volatile version of dicamba and scofflaws continuing to spray older, cheaper formulations of the herbicide in violation of the law account for all the damage he saw early in the 2017 growing season.

“If you go east to Crowley’s Ridge, every single field that’s not a dicamba [tolerant] crop is basically damaged, and has the same level of damage,” he said.

“A lot of these fields are several miles away from where any dicamba was applied. You can’t do that with physical drift. Drift is the blowing of physical spray particles, and you can’t blow those as far as a lot of people think before you blow them completely away.

Now you can do a lot of damage close to the source, don’t get me wrong. But when you go in areas where every field looks exactly the same over a countywide area or multiple county area, common logic tells you that you’re getting the same dose rate of a herbicide spread over a vast number of acres. The only way you can do that is to load the air — load stable air masses during temperature inversions and move it that way.”

From the beginning, Baldwin said, everybody knew dicamba-tolerant crops had to be an “all or nothing technology,” which will have to be planted on 100 percent of acres before damage to nontolerant crops will cease. But even if farmers plant every acre of cotton

18

AUGUST 10, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

and soybeans in the state in dicamba-resistant seeds, of elderly folks who’d plowed their lives into the soil Baldwin notes, that still doesn’t solve the problem of Craighead and Mississippi counties. of damage to landscaping, trees, ornamental plants, “He wasn’t a farmer that farmed out of the seat of vegetable gardens and other vegetable crops. He his truck,” Karen said. “He was a hands-on farmer. believes that aspect will be bad for agriculture as a He was in the field daylight until dark. That was just whole. his life.” Which is, of course, what makes his death so “You get into the horticultural crops, then you get hard to understand. into the home gardens and you get into the trees in Karen said that in 2015, Mike attended one of the town,” he said. “To me, the more dicamba we put in first meetings in the area about the introduction of the air, the more you’re going to affect these other dicamba-resistant seed at Delta Crawfish in Paragould. types of vegetation. You might solve the soybean issue “At the meeting, Monsanto just kept discussing that they short term, but you’re going to get this thing outside were going to release the seed, though the herbicide of agriculture. All of a sudden, when peoples’ gardens had not been approved yet, but kept telling farmers are affected, when the trees in their yards are affected, that by growing season it would be,” she said. “We then they’re going to start asking the questions: ‘Is this didn’t plant any dicamba [tolerant] cotton that year, stuff safe for me to eat? Is it safe for me to breathe?’” but we had neighbors that did.” Wallace estimates they suffered $150,000 worth of crop damage from THE LONG ROW dicamba that first year. The issues in the area have In a house at the edge of a cotton field in Monette, only accelerated since then. the crops stretching away to the edge of the world in all “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this that directions, Karen Wallace talked about the husband she has turned farmer against farmer,” Mike’s sister, Pam has to go on without. He was born within three miles Sandusky, said. “They’ve always been there to help of the spot, and started his first crop at 17. Married her each other do whatever.” Karen Wallace agreed that at 18. Put her through college so she could realize her dicamba-tolerant crops have turned the ethics of own dream of being a teacher. Raised two kids and farming topsy-turvy. “It was like the farmers who saw them have children of their own. He was, she turned their neighbors in [for illegal dicamba use], said, a man always thinking of the community, the they’re the bad guys,” Karen said. “It was like, ‘You’re kind of guy who would go around town with his own causing something we really need to be taken away.’ equipment after rare snowfalls and clear the driveways It’s just crazy to me.”

The day her husband was killed, Wallace said, she’d run an errand in Kennett, Mo. The harvest done, he was leveling ground. Though she knows now that Mike had gotten a number for Allan Curtis Jones from an acquaintance, she said he’d never mentioned the name to her or their son, Bradley, and didn’t tell either of them he planned to meet outside of Leachville.

“He told me, ‘I’ll be right back,’ ” Wallace said, “and that was that. I never talked to him again.”

As soon as her husband was killed, everybody seemed to know it immediately. Word got back to her quickly. Not knowing what else to do, she and several family members met at the gin in Monette, which is run by Mike’s cousin. She called her sister in Jonesboro, pleading with her to get to her daughter, Kimberly, who was attending an event at Arkansas State University. By the time she did, Kimberly had already heard through a post on Facebook.

“This man is probably going to claim self-defense,” Karen said. “Mike is 56 years old. This man was 26. He’s 30 years younger than him, probably 50 pounds heavier. He went and got his cousin. Mike never carried a gun.

We don’t know why he decided to shoot him.”

There were over 1,000 people at Mike Wallace’s funeral, the line to pay respects stretching out the door of the First Baptist Church and into the parking lot. When he was buried in the little cemetery in Monette, the farmers for miles around brought their tractors, a burbling second line, and ringed the paved lane around the graveyard. “I knew Mike had a lot of friends,” Karen said. “But for that many people to pay their respects to Mike was just unbelievable. It was overwhelming.”

The death has been hard on the whole family. Kerin Hawkins, another Wallace sister, displayed two photos.

One is of their mother, Mary, standing in deep cotton with son Mike two weeks before his death. Another shows Mary, at least 30 pounds lighter, surrounded by family at this year’s Fourth of July celebration.

“I didn’t even realize it until we took this picture in July,” Hawkins said. “I thought, ‘We’re losing her.’

“They took Mike from us. They took Mike from his family, from his grandchildren. He had a grandchild born this year, his first grandson with the Wallace name. His grandson will never know him.”

Still, both Wallace and Hawkins say they joined many of their neighbors and planted dicamba-tolerant crops in self-defense, knowing they might take a hit bad enough to wipe them out if they didn’t. “That’s what my husband and my sons did this year,” Hawkins said.

“We’ve got all dicamba cotton. … We were afraid of what would happen to us. It wasn’t that we necessarily wanted to plant it. It’s that we had to.”

Mike Wallace was more than a brother to them, Hawkins and Sandusky said. Abandoned by their biological father when he was a teenager, Mike Wallace stepped up, becoming a father figure, protector, counselor and friend.

“One of the first things I said to my husband whenever I found out what happened and that Mike was gone, was, ‘I feel like an orphan,’ ” Sandusky said.

“I never realized how much I looked to him, because our dad kind of walked out of our lives. I never realized how much I looked to him for answers, for help, for everything. He took over, and I never realized it until we lost him.”

Farming has changed since Wallace started, Karen Wallace said, and not for the better. “I think we’re in a society where we want the easiest way out,” she said. “The easiest way, the fastest way, regardless of who it hurts or what happens. But farming is not like that.

Farming is hard work. Mike was willing to put out the work.” There’s work to be done now, and Wallace is not here to do it, so Sandusky, Hawkins, Karen Wallace and other family members will keep making the long drive to Little Rock any time there’s a meeting on dicamba. They want to see the state’s temporary ban made permanent.

“We were raised to be there for each other,” Hawkins said. “If one person was hurting in the family, you were there for them. You were there to back them up. You always had their back.

It didn’t matter. He would have done the same for us. He would be there fighting for us, and we’re not going to let him down. We cannot let them get away with what they’ve done and what they’ve taken from us.”

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Arts Entertainment AND

CAROLINE M. HOLT

GUMMI BÄRCHEN: Brittany Sparkles (left) and Anthony James Gerard (right) star in the Studio Theater’s production of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”

Gender of one The Studio Theatre takes on ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch.’

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

F

or some people, the soundtrack to “Rent” can deliver a dizzying cocktail of endorphins and a corresponding emotional hangover. For others, it’s “Les Miserables.” Or “Fiddler on the Roof.” And, for many, this listener included, it’s usually just a resounding “Ew, Broadway. No. Turn it off.” John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” is a rock musical about a genderqueer “slip of a girlyboy” from East Berlin who — spurred onward by the promise of discovering the elusive “other half” he heard about from Aristophanes in Plato’s “Symposium” — ends up divorced and broke in Junction City, Kan., after a botched sex reassignment surgery. It’s part glam rock a la Bowie and Mott the Hoople, part Greek philosophy circa 385 B.C. and part low-rent drag club comedy, and it’s the first musical I ever 22

AUGUST 10, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

loved. This weekend, The Studio Theatre begins its run of the queer culture classic with a bare-bones but vivacious ensemble: actors Anthony James Gerard and Brittany Sparkles, director Sheridan Posey, assistant director Ben Mills and music director John Willis.

From the very first lines of the play, we the audience are privy to the fact that Hedwig (played by Gerard) and her bandmate Yitzhak (played by Sparkles) have a history. For Gerard and Sparkles, that sense of familiarity won’t need to be feigned under the spotlight; the pair have been best friends for eight years. Both regulars on the theater scene in Little Rock for as long as they can remember, Gerard and Sparkles have shared stages together. They’ve waited tables in restaurants together. While on vacation in Gulf Shores, Ala., in 2014, they got matching

gummy bear tattoos (or, for fans of the “Hedwig” feature film version, “gummi bärchen”). Sparkles was the first one to put makeup on Gerard, who’s been performing as a drag queen under the name Queen Anthony Gerard at Club Sway and the nascent Miss Kitty’s Saloon for nearly five years. “She’s always been a natural performer,” Sparkles said of Gerard. “Always been an amazing actor, singer, dancer. Then, as soon as she figured out she could throw some makeup on, it became performance art, and it’s been awesome to see.” And, when the two then-roommates caught the film version of “Hedwig” on LOGO TV (and held subsequent repeat viewings on VHS) they were enamored. “This was actually when we first started envisioning that this could be us, should be us,” Sparkles told us.

“A two-person show,” Gerard said.

And that’s what audiences for The Studio Theatre’s production should expect. Excepting musical director/keyboardist John Willis and the band members (Luke Johnson on guitar, Logan J. Smith on bass and Svyatoslav Bolubah on drums), all the personalities in Hedwig’s story (and there are many) are played by Gerard and Sparkles. That, by Mitchell’s

design, requires some flexibility when it comes to gender expression. Sparkles, who in her everyday life, is nearly always wearing a dress, vibrantly colored accessories and glitter on her face — goes full leather-and-spikes butch for the part of Yitzhak, as her predecessors Lena Hall and Miriam Shor have done. And for Gerard, the role is a dramatic departure from the drag persona he adopts as Queen Anthony. “As a drag queen, in the pageant-y Bible belt of drag, there’s that diamond polisher,” Gerard said. “You gotta at least polish it up and make it look good. You can’t be a mess. With Queen, when she comes out on stage, people know that she’s got her shit together.

With Hedwig, we don’t necessarily know how much she has it together. She literally has a breakdown in front of a live studio audience.”

Symbolically speaking, it’s fitting that the story of Hedwig Robinson, nee Hansel Schmidt, will unfold at a scrappy, underdog community theater spot and not, say, at a bigger, sleeker venue like Pulaski Tech’s CHARTS or The Rep. The original 1998 off-Broadway production of “Hedwig” took place at the dingy 280-seat Jane Street Theatre in New York City’s West Village — formerly the Riverview Hotel, the spot that housed the survivors of the RMS Titanic while the U.S. Senate conducted its inquiry into the ship’s sinking. (Shor, who originated the role of Yitzhak, told Rolling Stone that before one early performance, a hotel resident had overdosed on an upper floor, and the body bag had to be wheeled past the line of incoming audience members.)

The script, heavily ad-libbed at that time, broke the fourth wall, referencing the theater space’s, um, quirks, in real time and positioning Hedwig as the “internationally ignored song stylist” whose former lover, Tommy Gnosis, had made off with all her good songs — and was ostensibly performing them that same evening to throngs of delirious fans under the bright lights at the nearby Giants (now Metlife) Stadium.

“The story to me overall,” music director John Willis told the Arkansas Times, “is a huge moment of forgiveness for all

ROCK CANDY Check out the Times’ A&E blog arktimes.com

A&E NEWS the stumbling and flailing around we do as people trying to find who we are, who we can love, and who will love us. It’s a love story where our main character, Hedwig, learns to love themselves. The show itself is such a LGBTQ-plus milestone to me because the character of Hedwig is so multidimensional compared to previous representations of queer and trans people in theater and film.”

The space between one’s biological sex and one’s gender identity is where Hedwig’s story takes place and, ironically, it’s the specificity of Hedwig’s misfit body that allows her to be a symbol for the universal; as she sings in the titular number “Angry Inch,” “My sex change operation got botched/My guardian angel fell asleep on the watch/Now all I got is a Barbie doll crotch/I got an angry inch.”

Or, as Mitchell told The Toronto Star, “She’s more than a woman or a man. She’s a gender of one and that is accidentally so beautiful.”

For fans — Willis, Gerard, Sparkles and a legion of others — it’s a show that’s especially prone to forging memories and cementing personal connections. Willis recalled his own introduction to the tale.

“It is not a coincidence to me that the person who helped me the most in coming out myself,” he said, “my beloved friend Gregory D. James, shared the movie version of Hedwig with me a week before he died, 16 years ago this August. Gregory was someone like Hedwig, larger than life, and like one of the songs in the show says, ‘So much more than any god could ever plan, more than a woman or a man.’ I am so honored and so humbled to be able to remember Gregory into life in this way.

I dedicate the show to him.”

“Hedwig and the Angry Inch” opens Thursday, Aug. 10, at The Studio Theatre, 320 W. Seventh St. Performances are 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday, through Aug. 20. Tickets range from $20-$25 and are available at eventbrite.com.

Gurdon is the latest addition to a list of locations filmmaker Darren Aronofsky (“Pi,” “Requiem for a Dream,” “Black Swan”) has featured on his Instagram feed in anticipation of his newest film, “mother!” The film stars Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem and Michelle Pfeiffer, and its Sept. 15 theatrical release has been shrouded in mystery. The series of photos on Aronofsky’s Instagram account features the word “mother!” in various languages, superimposed over landscapes and buildings in Indiana, Kentucky, Wisconsin and — in the last two days —Gurdon’s Main Street and a logging site just outside of the Clark County town.

Actor Adam Driver (“Girls,” “Paterson,” “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”) and director David Lowery (“Pete’s Dragon,” “A Ghost Story”), will headline the Arkansas Cinema Society’s three-day film event, “Premiere,” at the Ron Robinson Theater, Aug. 24-26. The festival kicks off Thursday with Noah Stahl’s Sundance hit “Patti Cake$,” about a plus-size rapper; Jeff Nichols and Stahl will talk about the film afterward. Friday’s screenings are “Paterson” and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” to be followed by a Q&A with Nichols and Driver. On Saturday, Lowery will be on hand for the screening of “Pete’s Dragon (2016)” and “A Ghost Story” starring Casey Affleck, which premiered this year at Sundance. Tickets for each film, $35, include admission to the post-screening talks and afterparties at Cache Restaurant Thursday night, Lost Forty Brewing Friday night (with Amasa Hines) and at Damgoode Pies in the River Market Saturday night (featuring an arcade from Z82).

The Arkansas Cinema Society was created by Arkansas’s own bright lights in the film industry, Nichols (“Mud” and “Shotgun Stories”) and Kathryn Tucker (“Glee,” “This is 40,” “Oblivion”), to foster a film culture in the state.

Tucker, a Little Rock native, is executive director; she returned to Arkansas in 2012 and produced Josh and Miles Miller’s film “All the Birds Have Flown South.” Nichols is chairman of the nonprofit’s board of directors. “A thriving film organization that unites Arkansans through their common experience of film and bridges filmmakers to the larger industry is essential to the health of the filmmaking ecosystem in our state,” Tucker said in a news release announcing “Premiere.”

She said the event “is only a taste of what’s to come.” For tickets, go to the society’s Facebook page.

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BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE AND LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK

THURSDAY 8/10

TYRANNOSAURUS CHICKEN 9 p.m. White Water Tavern. $10.

Since “psychedelta” purveyors Rachel Ammons and Bob Lewis teamed up with The Ben Miller Band, chances to see the 2011 Arkansas Times Musicians Showcase champions have been few and far between. They are here to remind us all that their band is still making its mad science, deconstructing the Delta blues and putting it back together with electric cactuses, kick drum rigs and whatever other instruments they’ve conjured up from the lab. This one’s probably gonna get weird, and you’re best advised to just give in and get weird right along with it. SS

PSYCHEDELTA: Tyrannosaurus Chicken brings its deconstructed blues to the White Water Tavern Thursday night, 9 p.m., $10.

THURSDAY 8/10

FRIDAY 8/11

CALEB ELLIOTT

tive ones, washing away the ’90s pop sheen and revealing an intense, plaintive sound. If you’re Maxine’s in Hot Springs has been making asking me, skip that early stuff and check out a habit of putting wildly talented touring acts his more recent work: “Don’t Go Losing Your on stage unceremoniously on a Thursday night Head” or “Get Me Out of Here” on YouTube, and not charging anyone for the privilege of for starters, recorded earlier this year at Shrevehearing them. This concert follows suit. Last port’s Foxtrot Studios. If it sounds like his guitar up is Caleb Elliott, a guy who’s probably got arpeggios have some classical training behind every right to look at Jason Isbell playing to a them, they do; Elliott’s a talented cellist, which crowd of thousands and think to himself, “Hey, you can hear on a scant few Spotify offerings in I could do that.” The Lafayette, La., guitarist’s French — a collaboration with Ann Savoy and songwriting sensibility seems to come easily; Jane Vidrine. Elliott’s stop in Hot Springs is one it’s never overwrought, always finessed, and the of a few he’s sharing with fellow Secret Stages five years elapsed since his 2012 album “Where performers Della Ray (Natalie and Adam MorYou Wanna Be” have clearly been transforma- row); the show opens with Joe Sundell. SS 9 p.m. Maxine’s. Free.

FRIDAY 8/11

SPOONFED TRIBE

9 p.m. Stickyz Rock ’n’ Roll Chicken Shack. $8.

Spoonfed Tribe is drums, drums and more drums, with some horns and bass guitar peppered in, and it’s proof that a band can fit loosely into the “jam” category without sacrificing an ounce of precision. The band’s become known in its native Texas for involving the audience in its show dynamic, because evidently there’s a lot less chance of some sloppy handclaps mucking things up if you’ve got an army of percussion instruments to drown it out. If you have ever owned a Trey Anastasio album and played it more than twice, this show is a pretty safe bet. Conway quartet Motherfunkship, which self-describes as a band that “sounds like the love child of Umphreys McGee, TAUK, Phish, Papadosio and RHCP [Red Hot Chili Peppers],” opens the show. SS 24

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2ND FRIDAY ART NIGHT

5-8 p.m. Downtown art galleries. Free.

You’ll have to act fast Friday to take in all of the offerings for this month’s 2nd Friday gallery walk: There are several new exhibitions, lots of music, a fundraiser and a gallery talk.

The Butler Center Galleries, in the Arkansas Studies Institute building at 401 President Clinton Ave., opens “The Art of Injustice,” and its curator, Dr. Sarah Freeman, will talk about the show at 7 p.m.; read more about it on page 12. “Jim Nelson: Abstractions and Color” also opens at the Butler Center Galleries. The Historic Arkansas Museum (200 E. Third St.) opens “Danny Campbell and Winston Taylor,” sculpture by University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff professor Campbell and ceramics by Taylor, the 2011 Arkansas Living Treasure; there will also be Arkansas brew and music by Ten Penny Gypsy. At the Cox Creative Center (120 River Market Ave.), see paintings by North Little Rock artist Theresa Cates; at the Old State House Museum (300 W. Markham St.), hear the music of Runaway Planet and check out exhibits “Cabinet of Curiosities: Treasures from the University of Arkansas Museum Collection” and “True Faith, True Light: The Devotional Art of Ed Stilley.” Head to the “Summer Shindig” at Bella Vita (523 Louisiana St., in the Lafayette Building) for a fundraiser — lubricated by beer by Lost Forty — for The Van, which assists the homeless. There’s one more stop to make: Matt McLeod Fine Art (108 W. Sixth St.), to see “Intersections,” multimedia work by Marianne Fairbanks, assistant professor in design studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and textiles by Little Rock designer Leigh Jacobs.

McLeod will host a reception for “Intersections” on Thursday evening as well, same hours; make that one if your Friday night is too crowded. LNP

IN BRIEF

THURSDAY 8/10

FRIDAY 8/11-SATURDAY 8/19

KALEIDOSCOPE FILM FESTIVAL

Various times. Argenta Community Theater, South on Main, Argenta Gallery, Flyway Brewing. Free$350.

If you were in the crowd at last year’s Kaleidoscope Festival, you may have marveled that the dazzling movie “White Nights” was made by Mark Thiedeman — a local, someone whose house you may have driven past, who might have been next to you at the grocery counter. You may have heard Miss Major GriffinGracy school everyone in the room with her ability to simultaneously be Queen Bestower of Side-eye and 100 percent Bottomless Well of Empathy. You might have experienced all of that — or just a slice of it — and thought the festival’s second year just happened to be a really, really good one. You wouldn’t be wrong.

This year, though, Kaleidoscope is going even bigger. First, there’s the reason for it all: the film screenings, many of which will be attended by the director or lead actor. Opening night features, appropriately, “Hello

Again,” which Thiedeman, now director of feature film programming, describes as a “wild, funny, shape-shifting musical that bounces from decade to decade — and bedroom to bedroom — in its depiction of 10 steamy love affairs.” There’s “Saturday Church,” a film based on director Damon Cardasis’ personal experiences volunteering at a homeless LGBT youth outreach program; “The Untamed,” a “bold, creepy melodrama drawn from actual headlines,” Thiedeman notes, and “The Wound,” in which South African singer Nakhane (formerly Nakhane Toure) — who was recruited to help score the film and ended up as its lead actor — plays a factory worker overseeing a Xhosa circumcision ritual. There are short films, comedies, movies made in Arkansas, documentaries (if you’ve not seen it, don’t miss “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson”), a campy web series about living with HIV, hallmark films by openly gay directors (“Scorpio Rising,” “The Watermelon Woman,” whose screening will be attended by director Cheryl Dunye), movies about drag culture,

festival darlings and underdogs. To complement the screenings, Kaleidoscope is holding several auxiliary events at South on Main: Patrons can have dinner and conversation with the venerable Armistead Maupin, who’s to be presented with the Kaleidoscope Career Achievement in Literature Award, 6 p.m. Monday, Aug. 14, $45; a meal with Crystal “Chef Pink” Delongpre and Courtney Rae of Solvang, Calif., restaurant Bacon & Brine, 6 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 13, $100; and a Drag Queen Brunch featuring Rhiannon Cortez, 10 a.m.

Saturday, Aug. 19, $17-$20. Also, catch “Film Flash Focus Record: A Glimpse into Queer Cinema,” works on paper by Michael Shaeffer at Argenta Art Gallery, which will host a reception for the artist from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Friday, Aug. 11, and “Songs of Ourselves: A Queer Literary Salon,” for which Sibling Rivalry press has invited Arkansas LGBTQ writers to share their own work and the work of those who influenced them, 7 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 16, Flyway Brewing. For passes and a full schedule, visit kaleidoscopefilmfestival.com. SS

TRAILBLAZER: Cheryl Dunye, director of the 1996 landmark film, “The Watermelon Woman,” will receive the Kaleidoscope Film Festival’s Trailblazer Award at this year’s festivities.

You may have caught comedian Andy Woodhull on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” and this weekend you can catch him at The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m. Thu.-Sat., 10 p.m. Fri.-Sat., $8-$12. Flint Hill, Va., quartet Grass Fed brings its funkreggae blend to Four Quarter Bar, 8 p.m., free. Jay Jackson hosts the Comedy Cage Match at The Joint Theater & Coffeehouse, with comedians Rachel Mac, Aaron Sarlo, A.J. Marlin, Dee SoFunny, Ian Redford and J.P. Padgett and musical guest Hot Glory, 8 p.m., $5. The Arkansas Repertory Theatre hosts Arkie Pub Trivia at Stone’s Throw Brewing, 6:30 p.m., free. Bigfoot researcher Robert Swain discusses his work at the Central Arkansas Library System’s Terry branch, 6:30 p.m., 2015 Napa Valley Drive, free.

Buh Jones brings his eclectic acoustic mix to Cajun’s Wharf for happy hour, 5:30 p.m., free, and later, Mayday by Midnight takes the stage, 9 p.m., $5.

The Arkansas Travelers wrap up a three-game series against the Frisco Roughriders at Dickey-Stephens Park, 7:10 p.m., $7-$13.

FRIDAY 8/11

The Funkanites make good on their band name at the White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m. Richie Johnson holds down the happy hour set at Cajun’s, 5:30 p.m., free, with LLC on the main stage at 9 p.m., $5. Jam House Collective hosts a show at Zaza’s Fine Salad + Wood Oven Pizza in Conway, with sets from Cosmic Farmer, Alive Alive Giant and Andrew Raines, 10 p.m., free. The Arkansas Travelers take on the Midland Rockhounds in a three-game series, 7:10 p.m. Fri., 6:10 p.m. Sat.-Sun., Dickey-Stephens Park, $7-$13. DJs The Sleepy Genius, JJ Wilson, Paul Grass, Mondragon and Big Brown celebrate the life of Lucy Enloe with “A Dance for Lucy,” 9 p.m., Revolution, $5 suggested donation. The Karla Case Band performs at Thirst N’ Howl Bar & Grill, 8:30 p.m., $5. Duo Howard & Skye plays a happy hour set at E.J.’s Eats & Drinks, 6 p.m., free. Ship of Fools performs at Hibernia Irish Tavern, 8 p.m.

Deadbeat Beat and Vegas Verdes share a bill at Maxine’s in Hot Springs, 9 p.m., $5. Little Rock’s Chimp Chimp Chimp brings tunes like “And That’s How Babies Are Made” and “Grilled Cheese” to Vino’s, 8 p.m., $8. Chris Long plays an acoustic set or two at Cregeen’s Irish Pub, 7:30 p.m., free.

The Cody Martin Band performs at Kings Live Music in Conway, with an opening set from Kassi Moe, 8:30 p.m., $5. Hwy 124 entertains at Oaklawn Racing & Gaming’s Silks Bar & Grill in Hot Springs, 10 p.m. Fri.-Sat., free. Critical Mass makes a debut performance at Markham Street Grill and Pub, 8:30 p.m., free. American Lions fire up a rowdy rock set at Midtown Billiards, 2 a.m. Sat., $5.

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FRIDAY 8/11

ROUTE 358

8 p.m. The Undercroft, Christ Church. $10.

JOSHUA ASANTE

This little Fayetteville-based quartet is a true family band — the bass player, Jodi Mears, is married to the banjo player, Derrick Mears, and their daughter and sonin-law, Jade and Grant (who took his wife’s name), add the guitar and percussion to the mix. They’ve diversified their portfolio; initially, every single member played ukelele, as they shared on the KUAF-FM, 89.1, show “Ozarks at Large.” Since their early gigs at the likes of Springdale’s Sassafras Winery, they’ve released an album, “One Street Town,” and made their way around Northwest Arkansas farmers markets and breweries. They’ve got an easy “Prairie Home Companion”-ready sound, all strings and soft percussive brushes and harmonies. Check out “Watch It Burn,” recorded at Red Barn Studios in Springdale, and if you like what you hear, catch them in this brewery/church basement hybrid of a venue. SS

#HERROYALDOPENESS: Jazz/soul singer Bijoux takes center stage at South on Main Saturday night.

SATURDAY 8/12

BIJOUX

9 p.m. South on Main. $15.

FAMILY BAND: Fayetteville’s Route 358 takes its bluegrass-influenced sound to The Undercroft Friday night.

FRIDAY 8/11

YOUTH PASTOR

Ween’s “A Tear for Eddie” with gobs of vocal harmony.

A random drawing placed the quartet in the same round as champions Dazz & Brie in the 2017 Arkansas Times This band, formed from the members of Fayetteville’s Musicians Showcase, and judge’s comments included the Comfortable Brother, comes to the show in character and following: “ELO vibes, kind of?! But like David Lynch at stays there, peeling out fake Bible verses and pastorly admo- the same time” and “I just watched them play for half an nitions in between songs like kids who had been at church hour and I don’t know what genre they are.” I don’t want camp enough times to know what an altar call sounds like. to speak out of turn here, but if you show up in a T-shirt They’re good enough at it that you have to remind yourself that says “Praisin’ and Blazin’,” I think you’ve got a pretty that there’s music involved and, as far as that goes, think: good chance of being invited on stage. SS 10 p.m. Four Quarter Bar. $7.

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If, like me, you’ve seen Bijoux work her vocal magic mostly in the periphery — as the secret weapon to outsized musical personalities like Rodney Block or Big Piph — imagine what Her Royal Dopeness can do when she’s front and center. The woman has stage charisma for days, and she emotes like the jazz greats did, and do; even when the words are all in French, you can’t help but understand exactly what she’s singing. She’s joined at South on Main by bassist Corey Harris, drummer Jonathan Burks and Andre Franklin on keys. Also, she’s hinted that some “Love Is a Battlefield” may be involved. SS

IN BRIEF

SUNDAY 8/13

BASS PLAYERS BALL

7:30 p.m. Revolution. $15-$30.

Anyone who heard the svelte Duff McKagan alongside Axl and Slash Saturday evening at War Memorial Stadium will tell you: The bass player can make a pretty OK song into a riotous or revelatory one. As bass players go, the two headlining this early Sunday showcase are at the top of the game: Sharay Reed’s been a Fender-toting staple of gospel jams across the world and part of rhythm sections for Aretha Franklin, Branford Marsalis, Patti LaBelle and Chaka Khan. Robert “Bubby” Lewis’ style mixes slapping, Weather Reportstyle jazz musings and actual chords (why not? There are six strings on his custom “Haki” bass). For guitar nerds, check out the spacing between Lewis’ strings, seemingly miles-wide even for the giant-handed among us. He’s played in bands backing Lupe Fiasco and Snoop Dogg, and you can catch him at this show, which includes a cameo from Little Rock’s own Joel “Jammin JC” Crutcher. SS

TUESDAY 8/15

THE ILLUSIONIST

7 p.m. Riverdale 10 Cinema. $8.50.

First things first: This is not the 2006 Edward Norton/Jessica Biel, scored-by-Philip Glass film. That one’s undoubtedly delightful, as Roger Ebert assures us with his 3.5 out of four stars, though he reserved top honors reserved for the other “The Illusionist,” brought to us by Sylvain Chomet, the genius behind “The Triplets of Belleville.” Evidently, the famous French actor, director and mime Jacques Tati had written the script as a love letter to his estranged daughter Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel, intending to make it a live-action

piece that would serve as a token of reconciliation. Tati’s semi-autobiographical script remained unproduced, and Tati’s youngest daughter, Sophie Tatischeff, passed the script to Chomet, noting that she didn’t want to see an actor portray her father. Sophie died two years later and, under Chomet’s direction, 80 animators brought the story to life and it premiered at the Berlinale International Film Festival in 2010, losing at that year’s Oscars and, in the process, generally flying under the radar for American audiences (thanks, “Toy Story 3”). Luckily, Film Quotes Films and the Arkansas Times Film Series are here to make sure you get a chance to see the film in all its hand-drawn glory. SS

Stone’s Throw Brewing hosts a Vinyl Brunch in partnership with Arkansas CD & Record Exchange, with “beer brunch cocktails” and food from SoGo Bistro available for purchase, 11 a.m., free. The Fat Soul Band plays a free show at the Faulkner County Library in Conway as part of the library’s summer concert series, 2 p.m., free. The Big Band era gets a nod at the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, with a concert from the Stardust Big Band in the Crystal Ballroom, 3 p.m., $10. The Witt Stephens Jr. Central Arkansas Nature Center pays homage to the native Pawpaw tree with “Way Down Yonder in the Pawpaw Patch,” 2 p.m., free.

TUESDAY 8/15

You’ve heard country pioneer Moot Davis’ songs in the movies “Crash” and “The Hills Have Eyes,” and he’s headed to Little Rock for a show at Stickyz, 8 p.m., $5. CALS’ Terror Tuesdays series brings a B-movie classic to the screen at the Ron Robinson Theater with the 1962 film “Carnival of Souls,” 6 p.m., $2. Height, A Scrips and Revenge Bodies share a weeknight bill at E.J.’s Eats & Drinks, 9 p.m., $5. The self-described “dirty old one-man band,” Scott Biram, performs at the White Water Tavern, 9 p.m., $10.

QC: CW: CD: AD: AE: PM:

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SUNDAY 8/13

FRIENDSHIP

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You can count the number of solar-powered FM radio stations in the country on one hand, and one of them is sitting on Ouachita Avenue just off Bathhouse Row. KUHS-LP (low power) is turning 2 this year, and they say they’ve got “some big announcements to make about improving their signal to better serve the listeners of Hot Springs and streamers around the world.” On top of that, Station Manager Zac Smith and his wife, Cheryl Roorda, have been laying the groundwork and renovating the historic building that houses KUHS for an adjacent microbrewery and pizzeria, SQZBX. They’re showing off some of that progress at this anniversary event. “Jimmy Daddy” Davis inaugurates the SQZBX stage, and we hope that somewhere in the crowd there will be that guy who blessed last year’s party with a magnificent top hat, its apex adorned with a meticulously sculpted replica of the station’s radiating tower. SS

Publication: Arkansas Times

KUHS: SECOND BIRTHDAY PARTY

6:30 p.m. KUHS-LP, 97.9 FM, 236 Ouachita Ave., Hot Springs. $25.

Job/Order #: 293027 Operator: cs

SATURDAY 8/12

PRINT

Wilmington, N.C.’s Weedeater, Birmingham, Alabama’s Beitthemeans, Iron Tongue and Tempus Terra make for a heavy show at the White Water Tavern, 8 p.m., $15. The annual Miss Gay Arkansas Pageant takes place at Discovery Nightclub, 8 p.m., $20. Heifer Village and Urban Farm hosts kid-friendly crafts and activities all day, 9 a.m.-5 p.m., with a Beekeeping and Honey Extraction Workshop at 10 a.m., 1 World Ave., donations accepted. DeFrance returns to Markham Street Grill and Pub, 8:30 p.m., free. Nashville rockers The Dead Deads return to Little Rock, armed with lots of distortion, 9 p.m., Stickyz, $6. Vocalists Nicky Parrish and Star open a show for soul singer Bigg Robb at Club Envy, 8 p.m., 7200 Colonel Glenn Road, $20-$30.

Blues-funk trio Greasy Tree returns to the Four Quarter Bar, 10 p.m., $7. Three Doors Down closes out the summer concert series at Magic Springs Theme and Water Park’s Timberwood Amphitheatre, 8 p.m., $35-$55. The Brandon House Cultural & Performing Arts Center, in partnership with the Victory Over Violence campaign, hosts a “Rock the Block” End of Summer Celebration, 4 p.m., 3802 W. 12th St., free. Rustenhaven performs at Fox & Hound in North Little Rock, 10 p.m., free. Canvas returns to Thirst N’ Howl Bar & Grill, 8:30 p.m., $5. David & Sarah duet at Cajun’s for happy hour, 5:30 p.m., free, and Just Sayin’ performs at 9 p.m., $5. Clear Channel Metroplex hosts the Buzzball All-Star Beer Festival, 6 p.m., $30-$40.

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SATURDAY 8/12

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WEDNESDAY 8/16

EyehateGod, Terminal Nation and Negative Approach make for a heavy night at Vino’s, 7 p.m., $20.

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Dining WHAT’S COOKIN’

Starting Aug. 4, the state DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH began posting RETAIL FOOD OUTLETS INSPECTION INFORMATION on its website, and has posted a video on its Facebook page explaining its food inspection program and how to use the online search form.Here’s how to find the inspection information: Go to healthycarkansas.gov and click on the Environmental Health box found under Health and Safety Topics, which is under Top Stories. From the Environmental Health page, click on the Food Protection link. The link to the Food Inspection Portal is found in the narrative under Food Protection. You can search for inspection data by business name or by date range. If you search by name, you’ll get an inspection history of that business; by date range, you’ll see all businesses inspected within the range and the observations of violations made, if any, on the inspection date, and past inspections. For example, a reporter searched for all inspections since Aug. 1 (the information predates the Aug. 4 upload) and found that the health department had inspected 223 businesses, among them Happy Feet Learning Care in Ash Flat, which did not have its health permit posted. The portal includes information dating to July 1, 2016; to get older data, ask the Health Department.

LITTLE ROCK RESTAURANT MONTH, with enticing deals on meals, etc., continues: From Aug. 10-13, you’ll find the deals in West Little Rock, like the $2 off the Cajun Shrimp Dinner at Corky’s BBQ; a sandwich and a draft beer at Grumpy’s Too for $6.95; a free iced latte with any purchase at Honey Pies. Those are just a few of the offerings at the more than two dozen participating restaurants. Restaurant Month moves to midtown Aug. 14-20, where a soup and salad combo at Boulevard Bread Co., for instance, will be $8.75; Heights Taco and Tamale will present you with a free cheese dip with a purchase of an entree or salad; Leo’s Greek Castle will offer a gyro platter for $9.99; and District Fare will knock $2 off the $5 pastrami cones (meat and breadsticks in a paper cone instead of a sandwich). There are many more deals; check out the LR Restaurant Month Guide in this issue.

JOHN DALY’S STEAKHOUSE in Conway has a new tee time: Sept. 1, according to the Log Cabin Democrat. This time it looks like the Gold Lion (the nickname Daly has given himself and the golfing gear he sells, as well as the logo on the steakhouse’s Facebook page), who announced in 2015 plans for the restaurant, is going to make it to the 19th hole. The restaurant will have a 5,000-squarefoot dining room on the ground floor at 912 Front St. The second floor will feature “The Lofts” furnished living spaces.

THE HEIGHTS CORNER MARKET’S RESTAURANT AT THE MARKET at 5018 Kavanaugh Blvd. is now open for lunch from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. The menu includes BLTs, chicken salad (curried and not curried), turkey on rye, Caesar salad, spinach salad, soups, soft drinks and wine. The restaurant, which includes a full bar at night, has been serving a Southern-themed dinner for a month or so; happy hour is 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Tuesday through Saturday and there is live music on Fridays. The restaurant replaces the cafe that was on the south side of the building when HCM first opened in the old Terry’s Finer Foods.

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H.B.’S BEST: The barbecued chopped pork, like the barbecued beef, is succulent.

A throwback H.B.’s barbecue stands out; the rest, not so much.

H

.B.’s Bar B.Q. is not of this century: · Credit cards, debit cards and checks aren’t accepted. It’s a cash-only place, a fact that sent two would-be diners back out the door to head somewhere else before the waitress noticed them. (Hello! It’s 2017!) · It’s open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays. No weekend barbecue for you. Hours 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. might make more sense, as few people take 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. as their lunch hour, and it would be nice to be able to go by and grab some ’cue after getting off work at 5 p.m. · It’s in a residential neighborhood. Guess zoning in 1961 was a little different proposition. But with GPS it’s no longer hard to find. · Though eight menu items include chili, you may or may not get chili. A batch is made on Monday. When it runs out, it runs out, and by 11:55 a.m. last Wednesday, it had run out. Why not make chili every day? Who knows? · Ribs are available only on Tuesday. Why? Our waitress told us H.B.’s owners worry that they’d

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get dried out if they sat overnight. But then she told us they almost always sell out of ribs each Tuesday. So … maybe they’d sell out other days if H.B.’s offered them. · Best we can tell, H.B.’s has no Facebook page or website. (Hello! It’s 2017!)

If the food was fabulous, we probably could get past the quirks. But, it’s not, with the exception of the barbecue, which was by far the best thing we tried. Both the beef and pork — served chopped or sliced — were smoky, tender and succulent. A regular sandwich is $4.40, a jumbo $6.20. Add two sides and those move to $7.15 and $9.25. (So those two sides cost you 30 cents more when you get a jumbo sandwich; add that to the “weird” list.)

We like the sauce, too, which is peppery with a bit of vinegar zing. The fried pies ($2.50), which are fried to order, are more than decent. There are nine fillings; we chose apricot, chocolate and coconut, and each was the favorite of one in our party. They come dusted with cinnamon sugar, the

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H.B.’s Bar B.Q.

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Quick bite Cash only. So hit the ATM before you go.

Hours 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. weekdays.

Other info No alcohol.

SIDE SHOW: The beans and slaw at H.B.’s (left) don’t measure up to the barbecue sandwiches at this neighborhood eatery (above).

crust is light and crisp, and there is wich without hitting meat. ample filling. For only 25 cents more The side items are all clearly foodyou can get a small cup of vanilla ice service products and mediocre at best cream with your pie.

— mustard-based potato salad that was Otherwise, everything we had Kroger deli-esque; beans that seemed ranked between run-of-the-mill and like canned ranch style with barbecue abysmal. The grilled cheese ($3.10) sauce added; boring slaw; and, oddly, is a slice, maybe two, of pasteurized one of the sides is shredded cabbage, processed, straight-from-the-plastic straight up; and that’s what comes on cheese griddled on Texas toast, which the barbecue sandwiches. Who would makes the bread-to-bad-cheese ratio pay $2.50 for a cup of cabbage? Not us. way too high. The patty melt ($4.25) HB’s is a small place — eight tables also suffers from the same mis-pro- and maybe 40 seats. We got one of portion of patty (an OK, somewhat the larger tables, and we’re glad it juicy patty) to huge Texas toast. You took us a while to notice the two could take a decent-sized bite all the dead flies on the windowsill. And the way all around the edge of the sand- random rusty bolt resting there.

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415 Main St North Little Rock • (501) 313-4704 • fourquarterbar.com arktimes.com AUGUST 10, 2017

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BRIAN CHILSON

NOT IN THIS LIFETIME: A reunited Guns N’ Roses packed War Memorial Stadium with 23,973 fans Saturday night, and they did not disappoint.

Freakishly heavy Guns N’ Roses ran a rock marathon at War Memorial.

BY CHRISTOPHER FARRIS TERRY

S

aturday, Aug. 5, 2017: “Guns N’ Roses Day” in Little Rock.

I started the day off completely biased and fully ready to rock for the concert. I’d been to hundreds of big rock shows in Arkansas and all over, but I’d never been to War Memorial Stadium and never seen GnR. Just a few numbers shy of 24,000, most of the available seats were filled up.

Parking was pricey, but easy to get in and out of. There was some complaining from smokers who weren’t allowed to smoke, and as far as I know there was no smoking area. There was some confusion going on, too; the printed ticket read 7:30 p.m. as the concert’s start time when, in fact, it started an hour earlier, with long lines on the left and right of the east side of the sta-

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AUGUST 10, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

dium. (Because of the parking setup, people approaching those lines weren’t able to see the middle lines, all of which were moving much faster.) Luckily, we noticed them and waited in a line for less than five minutes. Unfortunately, the other two lines took about an hour and, as a result, lots of people missed opener Sturgill Simpson.

That said, the weather was perfect, and it was incredibly beautiful seeing so many Arkansans out in numbers for a rock concert. Sitting in the top rows of the stadium with friends was the perfect atmosphere for this show; there was space enough between seats to move around freely. (My 11-year-old daughter and I had good “reviewer” seats on the floor, but kept finding ourselves back in the stands with our friends.)

Sturgill Simpson’s sound harkens to the outlaw country of the 1970s with some country soul in the mix. I’m honestly not a fan, but only because I haven’t found the time to get into his music yet. He started with a humble dedication to Maxine’s in Hot Springs, and played to a crowd of around 12,000-15,000 folks. By the time he was done, the stands were full and the sun was hidden behind the press box.

We ran to the restroom during the set change, and you could feel excitement in the air — a series of GnR-inspired animations on the jumbotron were acting as a sort of countdown to the show, and folks were rushing to get back to their places before the announcer yelled (surreally): “Hello, Little Rock, from Hollywood, Guns N’ Roses.” Axl Rose walked slowly to the front of the stage. Duff McKagan ripped into “It’s So Easy,” and everyone sang along for the entire song. This was real, and we

couldn’t believe it was actually happening to us in our own hometown.

The entire show was gold. The crowd never let up as the band relentlessly tore through the opening numbers. I remember looking at my daughter when Axl screamed “That’s right, Arkansas, you’re in the jungle, baby!” Her face was completely startled, and she yelled right back to him. For some context: She is exactly one year younger than I was the first time I heard “Welcome to the Jungle” on MTV’s “Headbangers Ball” in 1987. There’s no real way to explain what I was going through.

The set was filled with hits and many deep album cuts. Slash did his traditional “Godfather” theme guitar solo and the band was in tip-top shape. Axl barely talked between songs except to introduce the band. He just smiled and kept in great spirits all night.

Some highlights: “Double Talkin’ Jive,” because the band really seemed to lock in on this song. Like a well-oiled rock train.

Like they were back in the day, one of the best bands out there and ready to prove it. The extended jam at the beginning of “November Rain” was a take on Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” mashed up with the piano ending of “Layla” — completely epic and perfectly connected.

Paying tribute to Chris Cornell by covering “Black Hole Sun” was special, and the AC/DC cover, “Whole Lotta Rosie,” was insanely fun.

Strangely enough, my other favorites were a few from “Chinese Democracy”: “Better,” “This I Love” and especially “Sorry,” all freakishly heavy. In fact, “Sorry,” which I was barely familiar with, was the re-entry song after the encore and ended up being one of my favorites that night.

I was sent a copy of the set list for purposes of this review and noticed the band added a few songs. I think the band knew that 23,973 was a big crowd for the Little Rock market, and that mostly everyone there likely worked very hard to buy tickets. After three hours without a break, the band looked like they were still having a great time, like they could’ve easily played more for their Arkansas fans. It didn’t hurt closing the show out with “Paradise City” and having a massive fireworks display in GnR colors: green, red and orange.

My dreams were fulfilled. I saw a band I’ve always wanted to see with an opener of the same caliber of talent, and I had a moment that I will never forget, all at War Memorial Stadium.

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It’s the Party to the Party!

On October 7th Ride the Arkansas Times Blues Bus to the King Biscuit Blues Festival! It’s the Biscuit, Baby! And we can’t wait!

King Biscuit turns 32 and we are going to see Government Mule!

P E H T P S E ' H T I T $109 PER TICKET O T

INCLUDES: Transportation provided by Cline Tours (let’s go in style y’all), Entrance to the Blues Festival, Lunch at the Hollywood Café, Live Music on board the bus by Bill “Bluesboy” Jagitsch, and adult beverages.

Tickets available on centralarkansastickets.com BUS TRANSPORTATION PROVIDED BY CLINE BUS TOURS.

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JUNE 1, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

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