Arkansas Times - January 21, 2016

JANUARY 21, 2016 | NEWS + POLITICS + ENTERTAINMENT + FOOD | ARKTIMES.COM

Let’s rebuild our Arts Center

BY LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK

An argument for the bond issue, even if you think the AAC is snooty

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ENDS JANUARY 31 2016 marks 35 years that the Arkansas Times first started the Restaurant Readers Choice Awards. You can walk in some restaurants and see a wall full of posters.

Voting is all online - arktimes.com/restaurants16 - and the final round ends January 31.

Final Round January 7 through January 31.

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Pulaski Technical College Center for Humanities and Arts 3000 West Scenic Drive • North Little Rock, Arkansas Join us for an evening with one of America’s greatest musical treasures. Mavis Staples is a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, NEA National Heritage Fellow, 2016 Grammy nominee and named one of Rolling Stone’s Top 100 Greatest Singers of All Time.

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COMMENT

A circus The recent Republican debate was an absolute farce. Donald Trump and Ted Cruz battled it out like guests on Springer, Jeb Bush looked like the kid that didn’t get picked for the kickball game, Ben Carson appeared to be napping on stage and Rand Paul flipped the bird at the media and refused to participate in the kiddie debate. It’s disheartening to think the Republicans have come to this. But more than that, it’s disturbing to see so many Americans cheer on this circus that is the Republican primary race. I guess P.T. Barnum’s words were true. There really is one born every second.

Richard Hutson Cabot

What if?

Dale Bumpers was one of the first persons I met when I came to Arkansas.

Martin Borchert, who lived next door, invited me over to meet him. He was then a low-ranked candidate for governor.

I was totally impressed.

I have also crossed paths with Mr. Clinton.

Both wanted to be president. Dale deferred.

How much better a president would Dale have been? We’ll never know. But I think Dale also could have been elected.

And I think he would have been better remembered historically.

History can’t tell.

Edward Wooten Little Rock

Funding the Arts Center Here’s another idea to put “on the table.” What about selling the Arkansas Arts Center building to the Arts Center Foundation for some nominal sum, execute a long-term, mutually favorable ground lease, let them finance whatever improvements they wish with their vast personal resources and business contacts, exit a moneyeater and create a money-maker for the city? Many wonderful museums in the U.S. are privately owned by affluent private foundations, so the precedent certainly exists. Also, it strikes me as odd to maximize our local hotel tax to, essentially, benefit only one entity. Where is the “public good” in that? And, finally, to impose this tax at the very time there are other local tax increases on the horizon seems overwhelming, as Arkansas already 4

JANUARY 21, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

has the highest sales and excise tax rate in the nation.

Just thinking out loud.

Larry Lichty Little Rock

From the web In response to the Jan. 18 Arkansas Blog post, “A cold King Day in Little Rock, but plenty to do and think about”: It’s funny how personal opinions can change over the years. I was prejudiced in my early life because that’s how I was raised by my entire village growing up. Not lynching prejudiced, just whites are better than blacks prejudiced. There were no daily lessons at my father’s knee or neighborhood meetings on how to keep the black race down; it was pretty much a normal childhood for most kids raised in the South of the 1950s and ’60s.

Twenty-nine years ago tomorrow our oldest daughter was born, and probably not on that day, but soon afterward I learned she was born on Robert E. Lee’s birthday. Something I was proud of, small P, and I remem-

ber being thankful, small T, that our daughter wasn’t born on Martin Luther King’s birthday. I put no real thought into all of that and I didn’t worry that if she had shared King’s birthday her skin would darken or hair would be kinky.

My thoughts reflected my upbringing and after all, Mag and I are white people, you know.

But I finished growing up, and years before today I began feeling guilty for even worrying whose birthday she was born on. I share Julia Child’s birthday but our only connection is that I have set fire to tea towels a time or two while trying to fix supper. Why did I spend a second being proud of her sharing Robert E. Lee’s birthday? Didn’t I have better things to do in 1987?

At that late date when I would have sworn I had conquered my medium racist upbringing, there I was, glad my baby hadn’t been born on a famous black man’s birthday! I don’t know what was wrong with me. I guess I hadn’t evolved and civilized myself enough, damn me.

Again, I remember my thoughts when I accidentally attended the first King parade back in the late ’80s. It wasn’t well organized and amounted to

10 or 15 carloads of black people waving homemade signs as they passed my business after dark with a police escort going about 40 miles per hour, honking their horns down our main street.

I stood with six or seven other white guys and we laughed and shook our heads and thought the whole thing was pretty silly. Shame on me! Why did I join in mildly disrespecting the celebration of the most important modern man in black history? What did I gain? How did that make any human life better?

Well, at least after 50-plus years of living, I finally became civilized, I’m guessing, in the early 2000s. I’m still proud that I was in Little Rock the night Barack Obama was elected our first black president and that my family got to witness the unbridled jubilation of thousands of black residents of Pulaski County.

You know, my kids showed me the way by not seeing race. Mag and I raised them that way despite daddy’s private slowness in coming around. It’s the best thing Mag and I have pulled off as parents. Happy birthday, Dr. King!

DeathbyInches In response to the Jan. 15 Arkansas Blog post, “Jury finds Arron Lewis guilty of capital murder and kidnapping in the death of Beverly Carter”: Aaron Lewis is a horrible, worthless, disgusting excuse for a human being.

No one should ever suffer like that helpless lady did, and I would have had no problem with the death penalty in this situation.

Bill James is one of the best criminal defense attorneys in the state. But what he put Beverly Carter’s family through, trying to taint her memory while trying to save this piece of shit, went beyond human decency.

Mountaingirl Bill James didn’t have much to work with as his client confessed to the crime to a TV reporter (in addition to being an evil scumbag, Lewis is obviously dumb), so his only option was to throw whatever he could at the wall and see what might stick. But still ... .

Christopher Diaz I realize that my support for the death penalty doesn’t have a lot of approval.

I strongly think that it is overused by overzealous prosecutors. However, sometimes it’s called for. It would not have bothered me a bit had Lewis been sentenced to death. This is the sort of defendant that calls for death. He

knew what he was doing. He planned to do it. And he did it without remorse.

He may not have initially planned to kill, but he knowingly made a conscious decision to kill. Yes, [Crystal] Lowery was an accomplice, but she simply does not show the inherent evil that he does.

Vanessa Vanessa, I’m inclined to think Lowery is as evil as Lewis is. She seems to be slightly more sensible, but I can’t accept that she was incapable of seeing that Beverly Carter’s death would be the only way she and Lewis would have a chance of getting away with this horrible crime.

I suppose it will be “he said, she said” from now until the end of time, but her presumed lesser culpability — at least in terms of sentencing — bothers me.

Then again, I wonder at her acceptance of and marriage to a man who surely displayed aberrant behavior (to put it mildly indeed) early on.

I can only shake my head ... .

Doigotta

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, posted Jan. 19 on the Arkansas Blog and appearing on page 7 of this paper: When David Brooks appears somewhat sane, that means somewhere hell is freezing over. This is what happens when pizza guys and witches are pandering to people who want government out of their Medicare. Own it, GOP. You created it ...

Now Brooks is boo-hooing because “center-right” Republicans, of which there are very few, are irrelevant ...

Maybe I’m crazy (no, I am crazy)

but my fear is a Kasich/Fiorina ticket.

That sounds like what Brooks is talking about. The GOP convention is going to be a mess. We’ll see how much clout the establishment really has when they try to boot Cruz and Trump ...

Rosso Brooks’ fantasy is predicated on the erroneous premise that the GOP “establishment” has any control over the cryptoFascists who are leading the base in this terrifying political year.

Claude Bahls

In response to an Arkansas Blog post on the Jeopardy contestants who wagered all and lost because they couldn’t identify the city in which an important event occurred in 1957 and the president whose library is in that city: Most Americans are woefully ignorant of history and geography (as evidenced by the current crop of Republican presidential candidates and their followers) but it does surprise me that not a single Jeopardy contestant knew the answer.

NeverVoteRepublican

I don’t know why the prosecutor waived the death penalty in this case, given the total depravity of the crime. Granted that the likelihood of a death penalty ever being carried out again in Arkansas seems pretty small now. plainjim The prosecutor waived the death penalty because the Carter family requested that he do so. He was honoring their wishes. Otherwise, the case being such a slam dunk, I think he would have asked for it.

Imjustsayin Bill James, in some part, did us all a favor. He put on a defense with zeal so that there is little hope for a successful appeal down the road for Lewis. In some ways, his actions were the equivalent of throwing away the key after the prosecution locked the door.

AA5B Tiger Glad to see that justice was done without resorting to the insane use of statesanctioned murder. The guy is going to get back what he gave for the rest of his days. Let him live the consequences, and spare us the dehumanizing impacts of having to live in a state where the antiquated form of retribution masquerades as “justice.”

Black Panthers for Open Carry In response to Ernest Dumas’ column on mainstream Republican columnist David Brooks’ fears about presidential hopefuls

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5

EYE ON ARKANSAS

WEEK THAT WAS

Quote of the Week:

—Carl Carter Jr., son of slain realtor Beverly Carter, in a Facebook post to his mother after the conclusion of the trial of her killer, Arron Lewis. Carter also thanked the prosecutorial team and others involved in convicting Lewis, who was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole; the jury took less than an hour to return a guilty verdict. Lewis’ estranged wife, Crystal Lowery, earlier pleaded guilty and testified against Lewis at his trial. She will serve a 30-year sentence for her role in the murder.

Damn that effective diplomacy Over the weekend, Iran freed four Americans it had been holding prisoner — including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian and a Marine Corps veteran — in exchange for seven Iranians the U.S. had detained on violating economic sanctions. The swap followed the quick resolution of a potential crisis last week, when Iran briefly held and then released 10 U.S. sailors whose Navy vessels had drifted into Iranian waters.

Sounds like a victory for the diplomacy set in motion by the nuclear deal the U.S. and other nations struck with Iran last year. But to Arkansas’s junior senator, the war-hungry Tom Cotton, it’s a mixed blessing. “President Obama 6

JANUARY 21, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

BRIAN CHILSON

“WE GOT JUSTICE FOR YOU, MAMA! These past 16 months have been pure hell, but we made it through! …

The trial may be over, but the journey is just beginning. We will give your grandbabies the best life we can, and I pledge my life to raising safety awareness to keep others from similar senseless tragedies.”

UNION STATION TIMES: A freight train gets a green light to pass behind the once-busy, now quiet Union Station.

has appeased Iran’s terror-sponsoring ayatollahs,” Cotton said in a statement.

“While we exult in the return of American hostages, one must also wonder how many more Americans will be taken hostage in the future as a result of President Obama’s shameful decision to negotiate with these terrorists.”

Layoffs at Walmart

Arkansas’s retail behemoth announced last week that it would close 269 stores worldwide, 154 of which are in the U.S. The list includes 11 Walmart locations in Arkansas, mostly in small towns. Some 10,000 employees will be affected, Walmart said. But don’t get any ideas about an imminent decline: The company still operates more than 11,000 stores around the globe.

No thanks On Tuesday, as expected, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a

lower court decision that struck down an Arkansas law banning most abortions past the 12th week of pregnancy.

This means that the law, sponsored by state Sen. Jason Rapert (R-Conway), is permanently blocked from being enforced. (A different state law limiting access to medical abortions is awaiting a hearing in a federal district court later this year.)

An odd goodbye to Jim Hannah Former Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Jim Hannah died last week at 71. Hannah served as chief justice for 10 years before stepping down last fall due to health issues, and news of his death prompted laudatory statements from a host of former colleagues and Gov. Asa Hutchinson.

But the statements issued by some of Hannah’s fellow justices were, well, less fulsome. Toward the end of Hannah’s tenure, it was a badly kept secret that the seven-member court

was acrimoniously split over the question of same-sex marriage. When Hannah retired, a majority on the court resisted issuing a per curiam order in praise of the chief, according to a recent interview Justice Rhonda Wood gave to the Arkansas DemocratGazette. Those bitter feelings seem to have lingered — just consider the tepid words offered by Justice Jo Hart on the occasion of her colleague’s death: “The opportunity to serve as an elected constitutional officer is a privilege known only to the citizens of a democracy. As a member of the Arkansas Supreme Court, Retired Chief Justice Jim Hannah enjoyed that privilege for fourteen years. His work during those years is embodied in the published opinions of the court. Those opinions are left as his legacy. The court has extended our condolences to the family and I add that I will keep them in my prayers.”

OPINION

Smart growth?

Not in LR

I

t MIGHT be that a 10-lane Interstate 30 through Little Rock is the best alternative for moving traffic through the state’s capital, continuing the ill-chosen design of the 1950s to have interstate highways course through major cities, leaving destruction, decay and fractured neighborhoods in their paths.

We will never know for sure, because the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department and its enablers are uninterested in serious consideration of alternatives to the widening they prefer. The recent emergence of a brilliant idea from the Fennell architecture firm for a grade-level, tree-lined thoroughfare through town, with intercity traffic moved to ring interstates, seems unlikely to get any but a passing acknowledgment. Scott Bennett, the state highway director, laughed at just such an idea on social media early in the debate on the highway plan.

The Highway Department is one thing. It builds freeways. Alternative roadways, bike lanes, pedestrians and

mass transit are low on its priority list. But you’d hope for better from Little Rock leaders.

The Little Rock MAX Regional ChamBRANTLEY maxbrantley@arktimes.com ber of Commerce has preemptively declared the issue closed and the insider talk is that they are correct. It announced support for a 10-lane freeway before any meaningful discussions were held on alternatives. The same for steel magnate Tom Schueck and banker Frank Scott, Little Rock residents who hold seats on the state Highway Commission. Scott has bought into Sen. Linda Chesterfield’s unsupported notion that people in Hensley or in Southwest Little Rock face interminable commutes made a minute or two slower by occasional rush-hour traffic pileups. No need to refer them to numerous traffic studies that say widening roads merely induces new traffic demand and often produces

Learn to love the Donald?

T

hat vast sigh that swept over the land last weekend was not the latest El Nino manifestation, but the collective realization by the great Republican establishment that at long last it must learn to love Donald Trump.

It will be easier than the alternative, which is endearment for Ted Cruz, who has become after the last debate before Iowa the only other plausible option. You can run with anyone except someone you find incredibly smart but personally detestable. Cruz had that effect not only on his Republican colleagues in the Senate, except Tom Cotton, but on his college roommate, who said you could find a better president than Ted Cruz by picking up any phonebook in the country, turning to any page and putting your finger at random on any name.

But who can hate Donald Trump unless, of course, like with Carly Fiorina, he tells the nation that your face is too

hideous for tasteful men to countenance? He is often illogical, always outrageous, maddeningly evasive, ERNEST impossibly vain DUMAS and a buffoon as if by plan. But hate him? A playful poke in his ribcage is a more likely impulse.

Unless you begin to think he might actually be president or, if you’re a mainstream Republican, the party’s nominee.

That contemplation brought one of the more amazing columns of our time Tuesday from the New York Times’s house intellectual, David Brooks, sometimes known as the thinking man’s conservative or, as he imagines himself, the conscience of the Republican Party. Brooks called upon all mainstream Republicans — county committeemen, legislators, members of Congress, billionaire donors, “the

even slower commutes.

The most discouraging performance came at last week’s City Board meeting, thanks to City Directors Lance Hines and Dean Kumpuris, who strongly oppose a milquetoast resolution politely asking the highway department to do a little more study. Hines expressed disdain for smart growth. He also characterized a freeway expansion as the free market at work. It is anything but. It is a subsidized roadway that subsidizes suburban development, on top of other subsidies given commuters such as free parking for many state employees and the unpaid toll they put on city services (fire, police, parks, planning, streets).

Kumpuris thinks the freeway is necessary to continue the revival of downtown, a cause he’s championed. But the revival has come despite the disruptive I-30 and 630 freeways, not because of them. Just now, with downtown revival leaping the Berlin Wall of interstate concrete to the east side, he and Hines and the state think we should throw up still more concrete.

Jim Lynch, a smart growth activist, chimed in with a reminder for Lance Hines, who lives in West Little Rock, that we went down this road as Little Rock sprawled westward. (Hines also said he likes sprawl.)

Lynch wrote for the Arkansas Blog about how the city annexed 9 square miles

of mostly raw land over a 10-year period ending in 1999, resisting in each case a call for analysis of the cost of extending city services and the potential impact on neighborhoods left behind. As now, city officials saw no need then for studies.

The cost of expansion was huge and added less in benefit than predicted because we mostly shifted, rather than grew population and shifted businesses and churches and homes to new locations, with rot and segregated schools left behind.

Lynch notes that Kumpuris was around for all those annexation decisions.

He said, “Dean Kumpuris was wrong in the 1990s on annexation, in my judgment, but he has toiled for the last 15 years to clearly help downtown and older LR. Why would he jeopardize his success by ignoring a simple study of 30 Crossing alternatives?”

Why? Because city leaders too often make decisions on faith, not facts. Hines simply KNOWS the 10-lane plan is better.

He even sent around a memo making fun of those who say self-driving cars could change transportation in years ahead.

Self-driving cars? Next thing you know somebody will say Dick Tracy was right.

We may someday wear two-way wristwatch TVs. Or that there’s a better way to advertise a used car than a newspaper classified section.

Republican governing class” — to unite after the silly Iowa caucuses on the best of the “good” Republicans and stick with that man through the convention in one valiant effort to save the party and the country from Trump or Cruz.

Either Trump or Cruz would deliver the presidency to the Democrats, Brooks wrote, but he thought it even more frightening to imagine one of them as president. Few presidents are so bad that they endanger the country, he said, but either Cruz or Trump would be such a president.

Brooks catalogued the arguments against a Trump nomination, all the reasons that his candidacy seemed so absurd at the start and so certain to collapse once angry, unlettered voters got the facts. The problem is that they seem to have engorged the facts and it made no difference.

• Trump was not so long ago a liberal’s liberal, like the lamented Mitt Romney, and at heart he still may be, as Romney himself sort of confessed recently. Trump and Bernie Sanders are the only presidential candidates who have favored a Scandinavian-style government health care system for everyone — Medicare

for all, as Sanders calls it. Trump was a passionate advocate of choice for abortions until he contemplated a race for president. He, his family and his business interests lavished hundreds of thousands of dollars on Hillary Clinton’s campaigns and the Clinton family foundation, and he called her “a fantastic senator.” He advocated the legalization of marijuana and illegal drugs and denounced lawmakers who didn’t have the guts to do it. He called for banning assault weapons. But who cares? People change. Occasionally, even while denouncing President Obama for weakness, he evinces an understanding of the Middle East’s root problem of sectarianism and, like Sanders and the GOP’s Rand Paul, suggests that we should just stay out and let his pal Vladimir Putin police things over there.

• He is a throwback to the racist George Wallace — all those side-by-side quotes and video snippets — and to the dark right-wing authoritarian movements in Eastern and sometimes Western Europe that periodically raise fears and then subside. The weighty tomes making that analogy weren’t devoured

by Iowa Republicans, but some of the mainstream opponents have delicately CONTINUED ON PAGE 30 www.arktimes.com

JANUARY 21, 2016

7

Rainbow stew

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npack your old tie-dyed Tshirts, roll yourself a fat doobie, and warm up the ancient VW bus. We’re going to do Woodstock and the 1972 presidential election all over again. And this time, the hippies are going to win! Four years of peace, love and single-payer health care.

But do take care to clear the path for Bernie Sanders. Because if he steps in something the dog left behind, he’s going to blame Wall Street and start yelling and waving his arms around.

And you know how much that upsets Republican congressmen who are otherwise so eager to oblige his plans to soak the rich and give everybody free college, free health care, free bubble-up and rainbow stew — as the old Merle Haggard song had it.

OK, so I’m being a smart aleck. I was moved to satire by a couple of moments from last week’s Democratic and Republican presidential debates.

First, Sen. Sanders, boasting about a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that shows him beating Donald Trump by 15 points — 54 to 39. Hillary Clinton tops Trump only 51-41.

Both would be huge landslides. In 1972, Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern 61-38. The Democrat won only Massachusetts.

The part Sanders left out and that Hillary was also wise enough to leave unmentioned is that the same poll shows her leading him 59 to 34 percent in the Democratic contest nationally. Twenty-five points.

She’d have to be a fool to take that to the bank, although it does demonstrate why a lot of the racehorse commentary has it upside down. See, unless Bernie manages to prevail in the Iowa caucuses, his campaign pretty much goes on life support. A New Englander nearly always wins in New Hampshire, and rarely goes anywhere after that.

Almost needless to say, all polls are individually suspect. Also, the national media gives far more play to surveys depicting a close contest. They’re better for journalists’ careers.

That would be true even if you didn’t know that bringing Hillary Clinton down has been an obsessive quest in Washington and New York newsrooms for 24 years.

During most of which time it’s been “Bernie who?” That Vermont socialist who’s all the time yelling? That guy?

Yeah, him. The guy with the Brook-

lyn accent and the Wacky Prof look who says “billionaire” the way some people say “ebola.”

Not that GENE LYONS there’s anything wrong with that.

The same guy Ohio Gov. John Kasich boldly predicted would lose all 50 states if Democrats were foolish enough to nominate him.

Actually, I’m confident Sanders would carry Vermont and probably Massachusetts against any Republican nominee. New Hampshire and Maine could be out of reach.

Even against Trump? Well, theoretical matchups mean next to nothing this far out. Also, I suspect that Bernie’s big advantage — hard for politically active readers to believe — is that most voters know almost nothing about him.

Only that he’s neither Hillary nor The Donald.

I also suspect that a Trump vs.

Sanders matchup would bring a serious third-party challenge. Anyway, let the GOP attack machine get to work on Sanders, and I’m guessing we’d soon learn that there’s no great yearning among the electorate for socialism — democratic or not.

Did you know, for example, that Sanders took a honeymoon trip to the Soviet Union in 1988? George Will does.

Does that make him disloyal? Of course not, merely a bit of a crank. As Sanders loyalists are quick to remind you, President Reagan went to Moscow to negotiate nuclear arms reductions with Gorbachev that year.

Anyway, as a personal matter, I got my fill of Marxist faculty lounge lizards back in the tie-dyed, VW bus era. Disagree, and you’re an immoral sellout.

That gets old really fast.

Writing in Washington Monthly, David Atkins does a manful job of trying to explain away a Gallup poll showing that while 38 percent of Americans say they’d never vote for a Muslim president, and 40 percent wouldn’t support an atheist, fully 50 percent said no socialists need apply.

Can Bernie persuade them otherwise?

I don’t see how. Most Americans don’t actually hate the rich, and his despairing portrait of contemporary American life doesn’t square with most CONTINUED ON PAGE 30

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JANUARY 21, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

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Lazy Goat String Band

The long view

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H

ard to fathom that losing by two, with said margin being established on a fortuitous putback with four seconds left, would be deemed satisfying to an Arkansas Razorback fan.

That said, the Hogs basketball team went nose to nose with an LSU team flecked with NBA potential, and played a nip-and-tuck one at the Maravich Assembly Center on Saturday night.

Yes, Craig Victor’s bucket decided the game in the Tigers’ favor, 76-74, but even in defeat this Razorback team amply proved just how far it has come in short order.

One, the Hogs opened up a sevenpoint first half lead, then largely weathered the LSU storm after halftime, never trailing by more than five. On the one hand, it ended up being the eighth loss in 17 games for a squad that has gotten awfully accustomed to ending up on the short end. The other, longer view?

Arkansas is one of the best 9-8 teams you’ll ever see, pushing the Ben Simmons-led Tigers all the way to the end and nearly mustering an upset on Anton Beard’s final 22-foot heave, which was on line but about a foot short.

The second substantial accomplishment was taking Simmons, the splashy Australian-born phenom, virtually out of the game for lengthy stretches. He ended up with 16 points and 18 rebounds.

Those figures might suggest he was in his customary groove, but the visual evidence was different. The rangy freshman blocked no shots, committed five turnovers, and shot poorly, and even his prodigious rebounding wasn’t enough to give his team an edge on the boards: The Hogs actually finished with a 40-37 edge on the glass, because four of its players went to the rack to corral at least five rebounds each.

Simmons and Victor, in fact, were arguably the only reason the Tigers stayed afloat at all, combining for 32 points and 30 rebounds. If anything, Josh Gray was the team’s unsung star on this night, with the 6-1 transfer point guard accounting for 15 points and taking prudent shots.

Beard nearly answered Gray, scoring 11 off the pine and grabbing five boards, but he’s still showing rust in his free throw stroke and his decision-making.

Those are two components of his game that should improve as the sophomore rounds back into the form that made him a late-season hero last spring. There’s

a lot of Kareem Reid in Beard — from that funky southpaw push shot to the occasional maddening BEAU choices in traffic WILCOX — but that augurs well for the next couple of seasons.

Reid matured to such an extent that he became a steady on-court leader and contributor by the time his eligibility was exhausted.

Yet again, Moses Kingsley validated his standing as the most improved player in the conference with a balanced night at both ends. His 11 points, eight rebounds, and four blocked shots stood out on this night because, in all of 33 minutes, he only missed four attempts from the floor and coughed the ball up once. For a guy who had no confidence with the ball for two solid years, the Nigerian-born project has the sudden swagger of a savvy longtime post scorer.

Most of his buckets are at close range, but he’s clearly adept with the midrange jumper, and now he’s doing more defensively than just flailing away at shots in the paint.

It’s strange to feel so invigorated by a team that is just a notch above .500 and has lost to the likes of Mercer, but there’s a growing and obvious reflection of Mike Anderson’s coaching really resonating with this crew. Kingsley, Anthlon Bell and Dusty Hannahs (who, admittedly, was off the mark in Baton Rouge) are putting up nearly 50 points per game, an unfathomable sort of happening, and they aren’t doing it on sheer shooting volume. All three are comfortably over 45 percent from the floor, indicia of quality shot selection begetting the kind of output they’ve generated.

That’s been facilitated thus far by Jabril Durham taking command of the point, which further liberates Beard to develop his offensive game. Depth, which looked to be a problem, is now an outright boon: All 10 Hogs who played in the loss scored, and even lesser contributors are still putting a stamp on the game.

Thursday night, Arkansas hosts Kentucky, and it’s a potential catapult game for the program. If the Hogs can beat a Wildcat team that has had an uncommon struggle finding cohesiveness, then the 10-8, 4-2 record in the aftermath almost becomes an afterthought. The schedule ahead provides a fairly welCONTINUED ON PAGE 30

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JANUARY 21, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

A Stronger Workforce.

THE OBSERVER

Throughout central Arkansas, many students rely on the affordable transportation of Rock Region METRO. With major routes to some of Arkansas’ most popular academic institutions, our buses provide students the access needed to advance their learning and better prepare for their future careers.

NOTES ON THE PASSING SCENE

The trial

T

he Observer took our bag and pen and notebook and shuffled down to the courthouse last week for the trial: a young man driven by greed; a woman who never deserved the fate she met; a roll of duct tape used to suffocate the life out of her; a shallow grave shoveled out in the dead of night; a body dumped into the hole, where she lay until the police found her. Later, police would come for the young man who put her there as well, and last week, the evidence they collected helped prove him guilty, to be shipped off to the penitentiary where he will die someday, having been given a life sentence plus another life sentence, life on life, as if even his soul will not even be allowed to slip through the bars. Given the crime a jury of 12 regular men and women decided he was guilty of last week, that would probably serve him right.

The haunted reasons that usually bring The Observer to the Pulaski County Courthouse notwithstanding, we like walking down from Scott and Markham for a trial. The old church pews that line the galleries are hard on our narrow rump and the long intervals between breaks make us starve for water, but Yours Truly never feels as much like a real, shoe-leather reporter as we do when we’re sitting there in Lady Justice’s marble and oak-paneled barn, making every attempt to jot down all the puzzle pieces the prosecutor hopes will add up to a picture of guilt and the defense hopes will amount to reasonable doubt. It’s a lovely pageant in its way, full of drama and pomp. But during a murder trial, there is the added weight of the proceedings being hovered over by the ghost, one that’s usually the product of a death most wouldn’t wish on an enemy.

Last week, the ghost was that of a woman named Beverly Carter, a real estate agent who was kidnapped while showing a house. The medical examiner testified she was smothered by having her face wrapped tightly in duct tape, after the half-assed plan hatched by two married idiots from Jacksonville didn’t turn out as they’d planned. We’ll not further trouble the dead by writing their names. Let their names be forgotten.

It is tempting, in the wake of a terrible crime, to talk about “monsters” — in this case, to say that those who conspired to kill were two monsters who found each other in the dark, then later ended the life of Beverly Carter. In the end, though, they turned out to not be monsters at all. Instead, they were just the product of what it often turns out to be when someone kills another for gain: a stew of fear, ego and greed that, in this case, resulted in an innocent woman losing her life by way of intolerable cruelty.

As The Observer wrote in our trial coverage last week, to call her killers monsters is to flatten the roundness of evil. In hindsight, we suspect it might also be a little insulting to monsters.

The Observer, during testimony that’s repetitive, sometimes picks up details during a trial that other reporters don’t seem to catch. We’ve been told that’s part of what makes us a good courthouse reporter, though we’d never want to do it for a fulltime job like our buddy John Lynch from the Dem-Gaz, a fine journalist whose butt must be as tough as his boots by now from riding those gallery benches for years.

Last week, on the second day of the trial, the thing The Observer noticed and noted was the screen, 4 feet by 4 feet, where the attorneys projected their photo exhibits. It had been set up against the rail of the courtroom, with its black back to the gallery.

Even with the blackout cloth backing, the images prosecutors projected there for the jury showed through like ghosts throughout the trial. An elbow and fingers jutting up from the ground. The body when investigators dug Beverly Carter from the hole. Finally her tapewrapped face and head. From the gallery, Your Correspondent, along with Carter’s friends and family, sat and looked for days into the shapes revealed, horrors on horrors, all reversed as in a mirror in hell, just indistinct and vague enough through the screen that one really had to stare and squint to make them out, like finding the image of Death in a summertime cloud.

The Observer has been at this long, but we’ve never been so ready for a trial to end, so we could finally stop staring into that abyss.

THERE’S A LOT RIDING ON PUBLIC TRANSIT.

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JANUARY 21, 2016

11

Arkansas Reporter

BRIAN CHILSON

THE

PENELOPE POPPERS: “I always tell people, ‘This space is for you.’ All I need is a desk and a chair.”

Lucie’s Place is their place Center serves LGBT youth.

BY BENJAMIN HARDY

L

ast spring, Quenisha McGee, a 24-year-old native of Lonoke, found herself homeless and living in a shelter in Little Rock. Then things got worse.

“I was kicked out for being gay,” she recalled. “They let me know they didn’t want me there because I made the other

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JANUARY 21, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

girls uncomfortable.” She began sleeping in a parking garage and spent her days at Jericho Way, the city’s resource center for the homeless. That’s where a social worker told McGee about Lucie’s Place — a nonprofit with the specific mission of serving homeless LGBT people between the ages of 18 and 25. As of

December, she now has her own apartment and is in the process of turning her life around, with help from Lucie’s Place Executive Director Penelope Poppers.

“I come by here almost every day,” McGee said one afternoon in December, sitting in the organization’s drop-in center in downtown Little Rock. “Penelope has really been a wonderful help in my life. Everybody else gave up, and she didn’t. I just thank goodness that she’s around with Lucie’s Place to help people like us.”

Poppers, 29, founded Lucie’s Place in 2012 with the dream of eventually opening a shelter for LGBT young adults struggling with homelessness in Little Rock. After years of unpaid evening and weekend labor, she finally raised enough

funds last May to quit her day job at the Arkansas Arts Center, becoming the first full-time employee at Lucie’s Place. In August, the nonprofit found a space of its own on the eighth floor of a downtown building; the three-room suite at 300 Spring St. serves as both office and drop-in day center. Sometime this year, if all goes as planned, the shelter will become a reality.

“The big thing we’re trying to build here is just a sense of community so that people feel comfortable,” Poppers said.

“I always tell people, ‘This space is for you.’ All I need is a desk and a chair.”

At first, the target demographic of Lucie’s Place may sound curiously niche: How many homeless LGBT people in their late teens and early twenties could

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help, just know that there are rules that come with it. [At Lucie’s Place], they are pretty simple: Put 10 job applications in a week. Go to the Women’s Center.

Please try and find a job. Please try and find a house. Stay out of jail — none of that. Make sure you’re doing stuff to get you out of your situation.”

Poppers organizes a free mental health program in partnership with local counselors who contribute their services. She also works directly with clients to find housing, develop resumes, fill out job applications and seek out other assistance, essentially acting as case manager for all 70 clients last year.

“I sort of serve as a database for understanding what programs exist in town, what services they offer and whether our folks qualify,” Poppers explains. “I keep track of the religious affiliations of these various programs, so I can tell people, ‘You can go there but you can’t be open about your sexual orientation or gender identity.’ A lot of the shelters are run by private religious institutions, and a lot of them have open anti-LGBT policies, and those trickle down to other programming.” McGee’s experience of discrimination is not uncommon.

One exception, Poppers says, is Our House. “They actually allow transgender people to stay in the dorm [corresponding to] the gender they identify as, which is huge. There’s nowhere else in town where that is an option. They’re great.

They’ve invited me there to do trainings in working with trans folks and LGBT folks, and I feel really comfortable sending clients there.”

But even the most inclusive shelters can’t meet the specific needs of young adults, she continued.

“What we’re realizing is the services here in town really are not good places for young people in general, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. Even in places that are accepting and affirming of LGBT people … most young people are not going to thrive in an environment with a bunch of 50-plusyear-olds.” Homelessness is an especially lonely ordeal for young adults, she said. “You’re not in high school anymore, you can’t afford to go to college, you can’t afford to go to clubs or bars, and so there are very few spaces for homeless young people to meet peers. There really is this

feeling of loneliness and a lack of community. We hear this recurring theme of, ‘I want to find people my own age.’ ” Little Rock needs more services for homeless young people in general, Poppers says, including heterosexual youth.

However, Lucie’s Place will continue to work exclusively with LGBT individuals, both because preserving a safe space for

Poppers said. “That’s what gave us the final kick we needed to hire me on as a staff member, and subsequently open the space.”

In 2015, Lucie’s Place won a $20,000 grant from Tom’s of Maine that Poppers called “the light at the end of the tunnel” toward the goal of opening a shelter. Although Poppers sometimes

BRIAN CHILSON

a mid-sized Southern city really hold? A lot, as it turns out. In 2015, Lucie’s Place served 70 clients — twice as many as in the previous year — and Poppers said the organization may work with 100 in 2016. Those numbers are borne out by national statistics: A 2012 report by the Williams Institute, a think tank at the UCLA School of Law, found that 40 percent of youths served by agencies that work with the homeless are gay, bisexual or transgender. Many LGBT teenagers run away after being rejected by their family; others are fleeing sexual abuse. The True Colors Fund, a national nonprofit working to end homelessness among LGBT youths, estimates that up to one in four teenagers who come out as LGBT are forced out of their homes by their parents.

Poppers is concerned that well-publicized victories for LGBT rights — such as last summer’s U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage — may actually make such problems worse in the short term.

“I worry what’s happening is that kids all over the place, including Arkansas, feel safe and empowered to come out, because they think the world is changing for the better … and their parents aren’t [always] going to react in the way they thought they were going to,” she said.

“I’ve heard from other places across the nation that they’ve seen spikes in clients after big victories. I want people to be able to come out, but a lot of our clients are homeless because they came out at a point when they were still underneath the rule of their parents, and their parents still held the keys to the house.”

The drop-in center at Spring Street is open 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. weekdays (Poppers hopes to extend the hours eventually). The center provides bus passes, clothing, toiletries and cell phones and minutes. Those basic items can make all the difference to someone living on the streets, McGee said.

“Restaurants won’t let you use their bathrooms. They’re afraid you’re going to scare the customers. … People take stuff for granted, like having your own restrooms and tissue paper. The clothes, the simple stuff. It’s really been a blessing to us.

“There are rules with everything, and if you have to ask somebody for

QUENISHA MCGEE: Lucie’s Place helped her find a home and turn her life around.

clients is top priority and because there’s much more work to be done within that population.

“We stick to that pretty solidly, because this is often the only space where our folks feel truly comfortable. … We’re [still] not meeting every need of the homeless LGBT young adult population.”

Thus far, Lucie’s Place has been funded mostly through local grants and individual donations. The Darragh Foundation provided the initial support to get the organization off the ground. In late 2014, the nonprofit got an unlikely fundraising boost when an online LGBT activist, Scott Wooledge, created an image juxtaposing Lucie’s Place with the anti-LGBT messaging of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar (of TLC reality show fame), who at the time were organizing Northwest Arkansas conservatives to defeat Fayetteville’s civil rights ordinance. The Internet campaign took off in a huge way.

“We ended up securing $32,000 from people literally all over the world in response to all the Duggar business,”

finds herself at odds with socially conservative churches, she says that some of the organization’s strongest supporters have also been in the religious community.

“The Episcopalians have been amazing to us, and the Presbyterians have been great. And there’s the Unitarian Universalists, of course,” she said.

“Starting next year, we’ll have a Friends of Lucie’s Place program: Each month we’re looking for a new religious congregation to sponsor the space for a month … [it’s] $600 a month for rent, utilities, phone and everything.” The less time she has to spend raising money, she says, the more she can work one-on-one with clients like Quenisha McGee. McGee, for her part, credits Lucie’s Place for getting her back on her feet and into a home.

“I’m off the streets. Before I met Penelope I thought I’d never [be],” she said. “You know how you always expect bad stuff to happen? You sort of get tough and prepare for it. [But] now I’ve got the right people in my life.” www.arktimes.com

JANUARY 21, 2016

13

THE

BIG PICTURE

A healthy boulevard, At

the Nov. 16 public hearing at the Clinton Presidential Center on the widening of Interstate 30 to 10 lanes, 30 Crossing project director Jerry Holder said he and the state Highway and Transportation Department would get together with StudioMain to hear some of the design collaborative’s ideas to improve connectivity between the east and west sections of downtown that the highway slices through.

Christopher East, an architect with the Cromwell Architects Engineers firm and a member of StudioMain, said he and others with the collective did meet with Holder. Once.

StudioMain hasn’t heard from them since.

In theory, Holder was to take StudioMain’s ideas to the HNTB civil engineering firm in Dallas that Holder once worked for, and get back with them. Didn’t happen.

Enter Tom Fennell, of Fennell and Purifoy Architects. Fennell opposes the widening. At the Clinton Center hearing, Fennell noted that the Highway Department had given no thought to reducing demand and was aware that widening will create more. In turn, more vehicular traffic will cause damage to the environment and public health, not to mention the negative impacts on downtown that a wider gash will mean.

“It’s hard to argue with the highway department unless you have something to show them as an alternative, and there wasn’t an alternative out there,” Fennell said last week after passing out copies of his plan for what he calls Arkansas Boulevard. The alternative, by Fennell and architects Baxter Reecer, Ben Hartter and Ed Sergeant, would change Interstate 440 to Interstate 30 and route traffic to the loop system around Little Rock. It would add a new bridge across the Arkansas River connecting Pike Avenue to Chester Street.

That would allow I-30 from I-630 to I-40 to be transformed to a sixlane, at-grade boulevard that would handle low- to medium-speed through traffic. On either side of the boulevard would be low-speed lanes for bus and bicycle routes.

The boulevard, which would have a green buffer down the middle and on either side, would be attractive to retail development,

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JANUARY 21, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

and reconnect downtown; unimpeded views of the Clinton Center and Heifer International from the west and new high-rise residential development from the east would make downtown of a piece.

The plan creates a “net 30 acres of developable commercial and or

A CLOSE-UP: Of the proposed tree-lined boulevard.

parkland downtown by taking in frontage roads,” Fennell said.

The design, he added, “wouldn’t cost any more than what they are proposing for the 10-lane [design]. … The beauty of this is you don’t have to keep building freeways; you live with what you have. And I believe this is not going to affect commute times and may even improve them.”

d, not a concrete wound

www.arktimes.com

JANUARY 21, 2016

15

A bigger, better Arkansas Arts Center

It will take public money; needs public’s voice, too.

BY LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK

A WINDOW ON THE WORLD: Educator Louise Palermo and teenagers talk about art, society and social issues at the Arts Center.

O

n Feb. 9, residents of Little Rock will vote on whether to issue bonds to renovate and enlarge the Arkansas Arts Center in MacArthur Park. The 30-year MacArthur Park Improvement bonds, which will be paid off by 2 new cents added to the hotel tax by the City Board of Directors in December, are expected to produce around $37.5 million.

The Little Rock Advertising and Promotion Commission and the City Board were persuaded by the promise of a match in private funds to use the last two hotel tax pennies the law allows to be levied. The increase brings the tax on gross hotel, motel and short-term stay rentals receipts to 15 percent.

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JANUARY 21, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

It is a truism that all great cities have great cultural institutions. There are mountains of studies showing that cultural opportunities are necessary for city vibrancy and growth, that museums encourage tourism and business besides elevating the quality of life for residents.

Particularly with the opening of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, the Arts Center has begun to look shabby. The city of Little Rock and its philanthropic support will never reach the $1 billion-plus invested by the Walton Family Foundation in Crystal Bridges, but Arkansas’s capital city needs to fix up and put a shine on what is the state’s largest museum outside Bentonville. The Arts Center is a

city property, though it exists because of philanthropy and grants rather than public tax support, and by ordinance the city is obligated to maintain the building. To keep its accreditation, the Arts Center, according to its board of directors and a consultant brought in to inspect the physical plant, must replace its obsolete gallery lighting system; upgrade and integrate its heating and air conditioning systems; replace the breaking seats, lighting, sound and riggings in the theater (they are original to the 42-year-old theater); expand the vault for its art holdings; and improve its classroom space, also original to the 1963 Arts Center. No accreditation, no loaned exhibitions.

The Arts Center also wants to increase its gallery space and change its orientation to MacArthur Park to create a more welcoming entrance. Its Commerce Street orientation, created with the addition of a new wing in 2000, is a mistake long overdue for a fix.

Part of the proceeds from the bond issue will provide $1 million for fixes to the MacArthur Museum of Military History, which is an agency of the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, and improvements for the park itself.

So what’s not to like? A potential $60 million investment (a number that has been bandied about for renovation), without a tax increase on residents, in a facility that holds an outstanding collection of works on paper, offers art and theater classes and special summer theater programs, monthly art events for children and parents and a special program for teenagers, one where people go to learn the tango and hear live poetry and see children’s theater. And admission is free.

But despite its offerings, the Arts Center still struggles against a perception that it is run by well-heeled snobs.

To be a member of the Arts Center Board of Trustees — a city commission — you’ve got to come up with a yearly donation of $5,000 and another $5,000 “give or get.” (Nominees are selected by the board’s governing committee and their nominations are rubber-stamped by the City Board of Directors.)

The private, nonprofit Arts Center Foundation, which endows the Arts Center and owns the permanent collection of artwork, also contributes to the Arts Center’s rarified reputation. The foundation did not do the Arts Center a favor when it secretly approached North Little Rock Mayor Joe Smith in early 2015 with a deal that would have moved the Arts Center to the north

BRIAN CHILSON

shore of the Arkansas River if voters there would enact a half-penny tax increase to pay for a new building and its maintenance. When the survey that the foundation was using to test those waters became public, Mayor Mark Stodola and even some members of the Arts Center board were shocked.

The move was instantly seen as a scheme by the foundation to get Little Rock to pony up, though Arts Center Director Todd Herman and foundation Chair Bobby Tucker denied that, saying that had North Little Rock voters shown interest in taxing themselves to pay for a new Arts Center, the move would have been hard to pass up. “If they [North Little Rock] could have done $100 million. … It would have been something to seriously consider,” Tucker said. (He added, however, that the consultant, visiting the north shore, wasn’t impressed by the location.)

That the foundation would consider moving the Arts Center to North Little Rock — which, as the holder of the Arts Center’s art collection, it could have forced — was seen by longtime supporters as a slap in the face to Little Rock; to the MacArthur Park location; and to the enormous effort put forth in the 1950s by the Junior League of Little Rock and other Little Rock leaders, along with Winthrop and Jeannette Rockefeller, to raise the funds to build the Arts Center. Their campaign added the theater, classrooms, new exhibit space, a gift shop, restaurant and outdoor reception space to the 1937 WPA-built Museum of Fine Arts in 1963. (In the late 1990s, the Arts Center raised $22 million (only $1 million of which came from the city) to open a 32,000-square-foot wing in 2000, bringing the total square footage to 110,000 square feet.)

Insincere ploy or not, it worked: The city increased its annual giving to the Arts Center to $700,000 (it had been $550,000 in 2014 and lower in recent years), and Stodola began to pursue the idea of a 2-cent increase in the hotel tax dedicated to the Arts Center.

Once the tax got the OK from the A and P and the City Board, a private campaign, the Committee for Arts and History, seemed to come from out of nowhere. It was formed, committee chair Gary Smith said, at the request of the mayor. It was announced at a news conference at the Arts Center by a group including co-chair Chauncey Holloman, retiring Central Arkansas Library System head Bobby Roberts, military museum board chair Ron Fuller, Clinton School Dean Skip Rutherford,

RAISING ELECTION MONEY: Gary Smith is co-chairman of the Committee for Arts and History, which will pay for the special election Feb. 9 and promotional mailouts.

foundation chair Tucker and Arts Center stalwart Jeane Hamilton. The group will raise money to pay for the special election — which will cost about $115,000 — and another $50,000 for publicity materials, which they chose the Markham Group to produce. Smith has pledged that the committee will be “totally transparent” in its fundraising and expenses, and has filed with the state Ethics Commission. The lack of public knowledge beforehand that such group would form rankled some (not even Arts Center board chair Shep Russell knew of it in advance), and a fundraiser held Wednesday was by invitation only, but Smith said nearly 400 people are part of the effort and provided a list of their names; they are all considered “honorary co-chairs.” «·»

A

public/private partnership to expand a museum is not unusual (this year, the Museum of Natural History in New York is getting $44.5 million from the city toward its new

$325 million building and the Minnesota Children’s Museum in St. Paul is getting $14 million from the state for its $23 million expansion.) When the Milwaukee Art Museum’s leadership decided to renovate its galleries and create a new entrance, it went to Milwaukee County for $10 million.

There are several parallels between the MAM and the AAC: Milwaukee County owns two of MAM’s buildings, and had let them fall into disrepair, though it provides annual program support from property taxes and pays utilities. The museum had actually put drip pans in the ceiling to catch roof leaks, Museum Director Daniel T. Keegan said.

The museum and the county reached an agreement: The county would raise $10 million through bonds and the museum would contribute $15 million from private fundraising. Then, Keegan said, “our $15 million became $24 million.” The museum is now 365,000 square feet and connects with the Lake Michigan waterfront; its dazzling suspension pedestrian bridge, designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, connects

the museum to downtown.

Like the board of every cultural institution, Milwaukee’s raises significant funds from members as well as those raised by museum development staff.

“Our board has to be composed of people who have the horsepower and connections in the community [needed].

We’re often misconstrued … as being elitist,” Keegan said. “We have 400,000 visitors a year and 30 to 40 members on our board, so we are hardly elitist. We are the only institution in many miles that offers free admission to children every day.”

A great museum is “critical” to the community, Keegan said. “It is the cost of doing business. Without it, you might as well roll up the sidewalks.”

There are significant differences between Milwaukee’s fundraising and the Arts Center’s: The county got a promise up front. The museum also owns its collection.

Here, while the money the bonds will provide is a known quantity — at least as well as bond revenues can be estimated — the private money is not.

When Arts Center Director Herman and foundation chair Tucker use the word “match,” they aren’t promising a dollar-for-dollar match. They are waiting to see what happens in the bond vote before deciding a goal and starting a capital campaign.

Mayor Stodola says voters shouldn’t worry about that. “I am confident that significant” donations will be made, he said, based on “conversations” he’s had with foundation members.

Tucker said the foundation’s purpose is to support the Arts Center, so the collection isn’t going anywhere. Nor is it in danger of being sold off, as was the city-owned collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum when the city went into bankruptcy, which, according to a history of the Arts Center, is the reason why the foundation was created in the first place.

Stodola is indifferent to the notion that the Arts Center board should include among its membership people who don’t have the means to come up with $10,000 a year. (He is an ex-officio, nonvoting member, as is North Little Rock Mayor Joe Smith and representa-

ON THE COVER: “Study for Painting — The Builders,” by Jacob Lawrence, American (Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1917–2000, Seattle, Washington), 1985, Crayon on paper, from the Arkansas Arts Center Foundation Collection: Purchase, Tabriz Fund. © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. www.arktimes.com

JANUARY 21, 2016

17

A bigger, better Arkansas Arts Center, cont. tives from both cities’ Junior Leagues and the Fine Arts Club; they don’t have the same donation requirement.)

Herman says the governance committee of the AAC board has discussed ways to seat someone who can’t fork over the first $5,000. But he’s talked to other arts facilities, he said, and has learned that their experience that board members excused from donating are “uncomfortable,” that they do not feel a full member of the board.

Trustees of the Museum of Discovery, which also gets city funding and which is located in a building refurbished with city dollars, are also required to make a contribution, though it’s not as large as the Arts Center’s and can take many forms, such as membership purchases, MOD Director Kelley Bass said.

“Every museum faces charges of elitism,” Herman said. But the Arts Center’s hundreds of thousands of visitors (338,776 in 2014-15 and nearly double that when outreach is included) “are not a small cadre of elites.”

Herman said he was once asked by a fundraising consultant who the Arts Center’s audience was. “The answer is everybody,” Herman said. And with a bigger and refurbished Arts Center, “we are looking to open the doors even wider.”

The Arts Center “holds a mirror up to the world” for patrons; it offers not just entertainment but “cultural literacy,” Herman said.

The Arts Center’s lineup of exhibitions in the past several years has indeed held a mirror up to the world. There was an exhibit of Mark Perrott’s larger-thanlife photographs of people with elaborate

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN: The Museum of Fine Arts opened in 1937; the Arts Center has added on to it over the years, and the facade above now forms the wall of a gallery.

tattoos in 2012; the city’s tattoo parlors created work for the exhibit as well and the Arts Center’s former director of education got a tattoo herself for the exhibit.

The façade of the Arts Center and trees on the grounds were yarn-bombed by knitters in 2013. The “30 Americans” exhibit featured great contemporary African-American artists last year; “Our America: The Latino Presence in Ameri-

can Art” just finished its run.

There are scholarships for kids to take art and theater lessons. There is “The Gathering” for teenagers co-sponsored by Just Communities of Arkansas that blends art-viewing, art-making and a discussion of “issues of class” related to the art (the next will focus on the Dorothea Lange photography exhibit opening in February).

What other programming and art events might come to the Arts Center if the board had someone on it whose riches weren’t monetary but creative?

In a discussion on board membership by the Institute of Museum Ethics, Steve Lubar, director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University, said that museums “help shape us as a nation, as a society. They tell us who we are, and a diverse board, selected for more than their fundraising prowess, can help hold museums to their highest aspirations.”

Shep Russell, the chair of the Arts Center Board of Trustees and a public finance lawyer at the Friday, Eldridge and Clark law firm, said the board “will probably have to work on the makeup of the board” and that the governing committee would discuss it “now that we have the city’s support.” Russell said he could understand why some members in the past may not have understood the board was public “because of all the private funds they have to raise.”

In fact, when the Arts Center board was struggling with its debt from the 2009-10 “World of the Pharaohs” exhibition, their lawyer, Phil Kaplan, had to tell them, and staff, that they were public and their records subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Russell said he wouldn’t be surprised if there were still members of the board who join without knowing it’s a public board.

Russell said the City Board could weigh in on membership.

Tucker said he would also “like to see

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ARKANSAS TIMES

BRIAN CHILSON

DIRECTOR TODD HERMAN: If bonds don’t pass, it’s “back to the drawing board.”

some diversity on the board,” which is now all white, though it hasn’t always been.

If the public approves the bonds, Russell said, the city “can set whatever terms and conditions they want on issuing those bonds. … Ultimately, the board has to be satisfied that whatever is being built is what is envisioned. … The City Board can say, ‘What are you going to build?’ before they issue the bonds. I don’t know if the board wants to say, ‘Go out and do the best you can,’ or if the board is going to want plans approved as to what’s going to be done. Whatever,” he added, “those plans are going to take a certain amount of money.”

Besides the private match for public investment, money will also have to be private money raised to endow the expanded and improved building. Any excess raised by the bond issue will go to city parks, the Little Rock Zoo, the Museum of Discovery and cultural activities as directed by the Advertising and Promotion Commission.

Stodola and Tucker say they expect an ad hoc committee, appointed by the city, will make decisions on an architect and approve contracts. Tucker said whoever makes the “lead gift” may want to be on the committee.

Right now, Little Rock is making the “lead gift.” Which, if you think about it, is perhaps better than having a multimillion-dollar gift from a private individual who then expects to have an inordinate say in what goes on at the Arkansas Arts Center.

A big private gift caused a ruckus in Miami: When trustee Jorge M. Perez

gave the museum $35 million for its new home, the board voted to rename the taxpayer-supported museum for him. It is now the Perez Art Museum Miami. Four board members who voted against the renaming quit in protest: Miami gave the land for the new museum and the city and MiamiDade County provided capital. (By contrast, when Townsend Wolfe launched the 1990s campaign for an expansion, Jackson Stephens pledged $5 million so the Arts Center could turn down a similar monetary offer that came with renaming strings.)

The Arts Center ran into financial difficulties in the 1960s, thanks to budget overruns on its BFA program and the restaurant, and the Rockefellers, who’d been footing the bill, said it was time people understood it was the Arkansas Arts Center and not the Rockefeller Arts Center. They told trustees they would pay bills for one more year, but the Arts Center needed to raise $150,000 and meet its budget. In 1968, Jeane Hamilton, a member of the Committee for Arts and History and a trustee emeritus of the Arts Center, called a press conference with fellow trustee Sam Strauss to announce the Arts Center’s situation, saying, “The Board thinks it is neither desirable nor proper that the institution be financed any longer by any one family to the extent the Winthrop Rockefellers have supported it thus far.”

Townsend Wolfe was brought in to lead the Arts Center in its new direction, and one of the first things he did, in 1968, was to make a motion that the Board of Trustees appoint three African-American members, which they did. In 1969 he brought the first exhibition of African-American art to the Arts Center. Wolfe could see that public support meant public inclusiveness.

What if the public decides not to support the board issue? The Advertising and Promotion Commission will continue to collect the tax, which should produce $2 million a year, but is not obligated to spend the proceeds on the Arts Center. The proceeds from one penny will go to parks; the rest will be spent how the Advertising and Promotion Commission sees fit. “We’ll go back to the drawing board,” Herman said.

“I hope people realize that what we are trying to do is create something really wonderful for this community,” Herman said, “without placing a burden on people.”

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JANUARY 21, 2016

19

1/11/16 10:20 AM

Arts Entertainment AND

SHE STOOD ALONE: Famed poet and Arkansas native C.D. Wright.

Remembering C.D. Wright The poet and Mountain Home native died last week.

BY MATTHEW HENRICKSEN

C

.D. Wright could be two things at once. In her poetry, she was a voice from very far away that spoke directly and intimately to our secret interiors. In her life, she was a venerable genius who shocked younger generations of poets by constantly championing our work and encouraging us to write ferociously on our own terms.

The poet and the person were not separate, but I struggled to understand where exactly they conjoined.

When I first met her I had already 20

JANUARY 21, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

read her work closely and knew quite a bit about her life. She grew up in Mountain Home and attended the graduate program in creative writing at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where I received my degree almost three decades after her. We had studied with some of the same professors, who were very traditional and formalized in their visions of poetry, and we had both taken those lessons and gone in the opposite direction with our own writing.

But it would be more accurate to say

that Wright always went in her own direction. She absorbed the canon, as well as the various manifestations of the avant-garde, but was never part of any group — her singular, ever-evolving vision of poetry and its possibilities stood alone.

Despite the fact that she published with Copper Canyon, the largest poetryonly press in the country, taught at a top graduate creative writing program at Brown University, and had won a Guggenheim, her name was never uttered, not once, in a single class I attended at the University of Arkansas. I always had the sense that she was not discussed because she had surpassed her peers and teachers there so quickly and unequivocally.

Nevertheless, as graduate students somewhat stifled by our coursework, a few of us discovered her poems, which miraculously spoke from the place where we were living and showed us how to transcend that place through poetry, by unhinging our voices on our own terms.

My classmate, Tony Tost, whose first book, “Invisible Bride,” Wright selected for the Walt Whitman Award in 2003 and who now writes for the television series “Longmire,” describes the kinship we felt to her work. “I think it’s because the language claimed a self in its usage, but that self kept using language to transform itself,” he said. “The language was always surprising and fresh, but it wasn’t just words on a page. There was some kind of real need driving the poetic invention.”

After graduate school, while teaching middle school in Harlem, I saw the need that drove her poetry translate into the minds of my students. They immediately connected with Wright’s early poem, “Tours,” which, with taut, matter-of-fact language, described a young girl at the periphery of her parents’ abusive relationship: “A girl on the stairs listens to her father / Beat up her mother.” The frank declaration of the brutality made my students believe in Wright’s voice, and the girl’s watchful and fearful distance from the violence presented my students with a mirror of their own realities. They immediately saw what I have seen graduate students struggle to see: that poetry can hold our existences up in front of our faces, so

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

that we can better understand who we are and what we are up against.

In her 2005 essay-poem “Cooling Time,” Wright declares that she looks “to poetry for supernatural help.” Aware of the contradiction that she is at once rooted in place while also attempting to expand the self through the possibilities of poetry, she says: “Whether I can get away with what I write and withstand the vicissitudes and contradictions of my own character, I can’t forecast. If I don’t, better writers than I definitely will.”

In looking beyond herself, Wright often turned to younger poets, particularly her students. Claire Donato, who studied with Wright at Brown University and now teaches at the Pratt Institute, explained that in her teaching Wright “invested in genealogy, the exchange of ideas and tenderness between people who had passed through the same regions (not only topographic but also of the mind), not to mention mutual support. Her spirit links us.”

In “Cooling Time,” Wright humbly defines this type of unguarded self, certain of her starting points and roles but relinquishing control: “I poetry. I

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A&E NEWS CONGRATS TO THIS YEAR’S Arkansas Times Musicians Showcase semifinalists. This year’s semifinal rounds will be held at Stickyz on Jan. 28, Feb. 4, Feb. 11 and Feb. 18. The winners of those rounds will compete in the finals, which will be at the Rev Room on Friday, Feb. 26. All shows this year will begin at 8 p.m.

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JANUARY 21, 2016

21

THE TO-DO

LIST

BY WILL STEPHENSON

ARKANSAS TIMES PRESENTS: The U.S. premiere of Tav Falco’s “Urania Descending” is at the Ron Robinson Theater at 7 p.m. Thursday, free.

THURSDAY 1/21

‘URANIA DESCENDING’

7 p.m. Ron Robinson Theater. Free.

We’re thrilled to be teaming up with Arkansas Sounds to host the U.S. premiere of Tav Falco’s ambitious and fascinating new film “Urania Descending.” Falco was born on a farm in rural Arkansas and today lives in Vienna, where he writes books, directs films and records music with

the cult art-rock band Panther Burns, whose most recent album, “Command Performance,” was released in March.

For many years, Falco lived in Memphis, where he befriended and collaborated with a cast of now-iconic characters that included the producer Jim Dickinson, the photographer William Eggleston and Big Star front man Alex Chilton.

THURSDAY 1/21

FUTUREBIRDS

9 p.m. Stickyz. $10.

Athens, Ga., has a long, fruitful history associated with college rock, but its alt-country lineage is equally impressive: It’s where Uncle Tupelo recorded its seminal third album, and where Drive-By Truckers have been based for most of their existence. More recently, it’s become the home of Futurebirds, the countryinflected indie-rock group that has 22

JANUARY 21, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

Influenced by the German Expressionist cinema of Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, the film follows a young woman in Little Rock who travels to Vienna, where she “becomes embroiled in an intrigue to uncover buried Nazi plunder.” Part fable and part tone poem, it’s an eerie and powerful experiment from one of Arkansas’s most distinctive native

artists. The film, Falco’s first fulllength feature, has been screened at David Lynch’s club Silencio, in Paris, but Falco has held off on American showings until he could premiere the movie in his home state. Falco will attend the premiere and participate in an audience discussion after the screening, which is free and open to the public.

THURSDAY 1/21 recorded three albums since it formed in 2008. Futurebird’s music is moody and atmospheric and Southern, with steel guitar repurposed as a psychedelic instrument — recommended for fans of My Morning Jacket and stuff like that. Also, as a Little Rock connection, they recently recorded a version of the song “Midnight” — a country standard made iconic by Ray Charles — for the Oxford American magazine’s Georgia Music Issue.

VICTOR GOINES

8 p.m. South on Main. $20.

Victor Goines is a New Orleansborn saxophonist, clarinetist, composer and professor. He began his career in the 1980s as part of Ellis Marsalis’ quartet. In the ’90s, he joined up with Ellis’ famous son Wynton, performing on a wildly successful string of jazz records that won Grammys and, in the case of 1997’s “Blood on the Fields,” a Pulitzer Prize. He’s played with Bob Dylan, B.B. King, Eric

Clapton, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, Willie Nelson and Diana Ross, and appeared on film soundtracks, NBC’s “Today” show and at Lincoln Center.

As a bandleader himself, he’s recorded eight albums, and was commissioned by the Juilliard School to compose a work for its 50th anniversary. Since 2007, he’s been director of jazz studies at Northwestern University. The New Orleans Times-Picayune calls him “laconic yet agile, serious yet playful, studied and still hip.”

IN BRIEF

THURSDAY 1/21

SATURDAY 1/23

SONGS FROM ‘THE LAST WALTZ’ 9 p.m. White Water Tavern. $5 donation.

RUM, SODOMY & THE LASH: The Pogues' Spider Stacy performs with the Lost Bayou Ramblers and Ben Nichols at the White Water Tavern, 9 p.m. Friday, $20.

FRIDAY 1/22

SPIDER STACY & THE LOST BAYOU RAMBLERS 9 p.m. White Water Tavern. $20.

Spider Stacy cemented his persona in a mid-’80s appearance on the UK’s Channel 4, on which his band, The Pogues, played a traditional Irish folk song called “Waxie’s Dargle,” while Stacy accompanied them on tin whistle and beer tray. The whistle he played expertly — particularly for a grimy punk band. The tray he smashed repeatedly into his forehead — effective as percussion, but even more so as pure atmosphere. This was the kind of band, it established, that would play folk songs and kill brain cells at the same time. Stacy started the band with Shane MacGowan after the two of them met in the bathroom at a Ramones concert in 1977. Their music was unhinged and traditional and work-

ing-class and self-destructive — nobody’s ever recorded better songs to drink to.

They opened for The Clash, were championed (and produced) by Elvis Costello, and broke through on pop radio in the late ’80s with a record called “If I Should Fall from Grace with God,” featuring the greatest Christmas song ever recorded, “Fairytale of New York.” MacGowan sang lead until he was thrown out (long story, I guess), after which Stacy fronted the group for the better part of a decade. Stacy’s lived in New Orleans since 2010, and Friday night he’ll be performing Pogues songs backed by Louisiana’s great Lost Bayou Ramblers, the Grammy-nominated Cajun band known for its contributions to “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” etc. As if we needed further incentive, Lucero front man (and Little Rock native) Ben Nichols will open the show.

SUNDAY 1/24 & WEDNESDAY 1/27

‘THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE’ 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Cinemark Colonel Glenn 18. $5.25.

“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” is one of the best films ever made about greed and hope and capitalism and rural desolation.

It’s one of the great American artworks of the 1940s, the only movie I’ve ever stolen from a Blockbuster Video. It’s got one of Humphrey Bogart’s best leading roles, and is one of the earliest Hollywood films to be shot on location (in northwest Mexico) — an unmistakable fact, because the film radiates heat and sand and authenticity. John

Huston directed it after getting out of the Army, adapting the script from the classic novel by the enigmatic, presumably German anarchist B. Traven (whose identity — his most basic biographical details — remain the subject of heated scholarly debate).

A story about shady gold prospectors in Mexico who hit the jackpot only to confront their own sins and nightmares, the film combines elements of the Western and film noir. It’s a kind of desert noir — the director Paul Thomas Anderson has claimed he watched it every night while writing “There Will Be Blood.” You’ll have four chances to see it this week; I recommend you go at least twice.

In early 1976, Richard Manuel, deep in the throes of a monumental addiction to cocaine and Grand Marnier, hurt his neck in a boating accident near Austin, Texas, leading his band — The Band — to cancel all remaining tour dates. The idea had been suggested before. Guitarist Robbie Robertson wanted out anyway. He figured this was a good opportunity to leave the road for good; they could be a studio-only group, he thought, like The Beatles. They planned a final concert at Winterland Ballroom, a former ice-skating rink in San Francisco. On the day, 5,000 people showed up and were served turkey dinners, followed by opening acts the Berkley Orchestra and a group of poets that included Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The Band went on at 9, along with a guest list that ranged from Arkansas legend Ronnie Hawkins to Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Neil Diamond, Van Morrison and the group’s occasional front man, Bob Dylan. Martin Scorsese filmed it, obviously, a decision for which — he’s since made clear — we can also thank cocaine. The late Levon Helm called the film “the biggest fuckin’ rip-off that ever happened to The Band,” but even he’d probably admit it had its charms. The only way to pay tribute to “The Last Waltz” would be to recreate its sense of overwhelming celebrity participation — the concert to end all concerts — and that’s just what KABF, 88.3 FM, has planned, in Little Rock terms, for its fundraiser this weekend: Amy Garland, The Wildflowers, The Salty Dogs, Isaac Alexander, Bluesboy Jag & The Juke Joint Zombies, Fret & Worry and many others will take the stage.

The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra performs “Something New” — a program featuring Terry Riley’s “In C” and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 1 — at St. James United Methodist Church, 7 p.m., $25. Richard Smith performs at The Joint, as part of the Argenta Acoustic Music Series, 7:30 p.m., $20. Comedian Tracy Smith is at the Loony Bin at 7:30 p.m., $7 (and at 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, $10). Nashville swingand-ragtime group Woody Pines performs at the White Water Tavern with local country singer-songwriter Bonnie Montgomery, 9 p.m. Eureka Springs jug band Sad Daddy plays at Maxine’s in Hot Springs, 9 p.m., $7. Southern rockers Jeff Coleman and The Feeders play at the Afterthought, 9 p.m., $7.

FRIDAY 1/22 The Clinton School for Public Service hosts a panel discussion on the Arkansas Repertory Theatre’s new production of “Peter and the Starcatcher” at Sturgis Hall, noon.

The Monterey Jazz Festival, featuring Nicholas Payton, Ravi Coltrane, Gregory Clayton, Raul Midon and others, is at UCA’s Reynolds Performance Hall, 7:30 p.m., $27-$35.

Comedy troupe The Main Thing premieres its new production “Little Rock and a Hard Place,” 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, $22. Local rap collective Young Gods of America — Goon Des Garcons, Cool Chris, Fresco Grey, Taylor Moon and more — performs at Vino’s. Nashvillebased Little Rock native Elise Davis performs at South on Main, 9 p.m., $10. With the closing of Juanita’s, that venue’s Friday night Salsa dancing group has relocated to the Clear Channel Metroplex, 9 p.m., $5-$10.

SATURDAY 1/23 The propulsive and brilliant instrumental funk group Funkanites play at the Afterthought, 9 p.m., $7.

Tragikly White plays at Stickyz, 9:30 p.m., $10. The Protomen, a fascinating band that is known for “composing original concept albums loosely based on the popular video game series ‘Mega Man’ ” (per Wikipedia), plays at Vino’s with Brit Brigade and Madman Morgan.

SUNDAY 1/24 Local favorites Adam Faucett & The Tall Grass, Bad Match and Bad Boyfriends perform at Vino’s in a benefit for KABF 88.3 FM, presented by KABF’s “Over/Underground,” 3 p.m., donations. www.arktimes.com

JANUARY 21, 2016

23

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

2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf.com.

Route 66. Agora Conference and Special Event Center, 6:30 p.m., $5. 705 E. Siebenmorgan, Conway.

Salsa Dancing. Clear Channel Metroplex, 9 p.m., $5-$10. 10800 Col. Glenn Road. 501-217-5113. www.littlerocksalsa.com.

Spider Stacy (The Pogues) & Lost Bayou Ramblers, Ben Nichols. White Water Tavern, 9 p.m., $20. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. www. whitewatertavern.com.

Tawanna Campbell. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 9 p.m., $7. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-1196. www.afterthoughtbistroandbar.com.

Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 8 p.m., free. 111 W. Markham St. 501-370-7013. www. capitalbarandgrill.com.

Upscale Friday. IV Corners, 7 p.m. 824 W. Capitol Ave. Young Gods of America. Vino’s. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub.com.

THURSDAY, JAN. 21

MUSIC

Almost Infamous (headliner), Trey Johnson (happy hour). Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 and 9 p.m.

2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf.com.

Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, “Something ‘New’.” St. James United Methodist Church, 7 p.m., $25. 321 Pleasant Valley Drive. 501-2257372. www.stjames-umc.org.

Funeral Horse, Apothecary. Vino’s. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub.com.

Futurebirds, Susto. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 9 p.m., $10. 107 River Market Ave. 501372-7707. www.stickyz.com.

“Inferno.” DJs play pop, electro, house and more, plus drink specials and $1 cover before 11 p.m. Sway, 9 p.m. 412 Louisiana.

Jeff Coleman and The Feeders. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 9 p.m., $7. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd.

501-663-1196. www.afterthoughtbistroandbar.com.

Jim Dickerson. Sonny Williams’ Steak Room, 7 p.m. 500 President Clinton Ave. 501-324-2999. www.sonnywilliamssteakroom.com.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501372-4782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

Open Jam. Thirst n’ Howl, 8 p.m. 14710 Cantrell Road. 501-379-8189. www.thirst-n-howl.com.

Open jam with The Port Arthur Band. Parrot Beach Cafe, 9 p.m. 9611 MacArthur Drive, NLR. 771-2994.

Richard Smith. Part of the Argenta Acoustic Music Series. The Joint, 7:30 p.m., $20. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

Sad Daddy. Maxine’s, 9 p.m., $7. 700 Central Ave., Hot Springs. www.maxinespub.com.

Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 8 p.m., free. 111 W. Markham St. 501-370-7013. www. capitalbarandgrill.com.

Victor Goines. South on Main, 8 p.m., $20. 1304 Main St. 501-244-9660. southonmain.com.

Woody Pines, Bonnie Montgomery. White Water Tavern, 9 p.m. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-3758400. www.whitewatertavern.com.

COMEDY

MONTEREY POP: The Monterey Jazz Festival tour comes to UCA’s Reynolds Performance Hall, with an ensemble featuring Nicholas Payton, Ravi Coltrane, Raul Midon and more. 7:30 p.m. Friday, $27-$35.

5703. www.cals.lib.ar.us/ron-robinson-theater. aspx.

POETRY

POETluck. Literary salon and potluck. The Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow, third Thursday of every month, 6 p.m. 515 Spring St., Eureka Springs. 479-253-7444.

SPORTS

Horse Racing. Oaklawn, through April 16: 1:30 p.m., $2.50-$4.50. 2705 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 501-623-4411. www.oaklawn.com.

FRIDAY, JAN. 22

Fabulous Finds Antique & Decorative Mall

COMEDY

501-614-8181

Minutes from downtown Little Rock • fabulousfindsantiques.com

FILM

“Urania Descending.” U.S. premiere of Tav Falco’s new film, followed by a post-screening discussion with the filmmaker. Ron Robinson Theater, 7 p.m., free. 1 Pulaski Way. 501-32024

JANUARY 21, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

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Every Day 1800 SILVER TEQUILA $27.99 19 CRIMES, RED BLEND, CABERNET $10.99 CUPCAKE MOSCATO D’ASTI $13.99 FREIXENET BRUT, DRY $13.99 BOAR BREWING COCO STOUT $10.99

EVENTS

34th Annual Arkansas Marine Expo. A showcase of boats and fishing supplies. Statehouse Convention Center, 10 a.m., $5. 7 Statehouse Plaza.

LGBTQ/SGL weekly meeting. Diverse Youth for Social Change is a group for LGBTQ/SGL and straight ally youth and young adults age 14 to 23. For more information, call 501-2449690 or search “DYSC” on Facebook. LGBTQ/ SGL Youth and Young Adult Group, 6:30 p.m.

800 Scott St.

“Peter and the Starcatcher” panel discussion.

Sturgis Hall, noon. 1200 President Clinton Ave. 501-683-5200. clintonschool.uasys.edu.

2905 CANTRELL ROAD •TUES.- SAT. 10-6 & SUN. 12-5

EVENTS

DANCE

Ballroom dancing. Free lessons begin at 7 p.m.

Bess Chisum Stephens Community Center, 8-11 p.m., $7-$13. 12th and Cleveland streets.

501-221-7568. www.blsdance.org.

Contra Dance. Park Hill Presbyterian Church, 7:30 p.m., $5. 3520 JFK Blvd., NLR. arkansascountrydance.org.

LECTURES

CUSTOMER APPRECIATION DAYS Storewide Sale January 8-24 Tue-Sat 10-6 • Sun 12-5

Tracy Smith. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m., $7. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-228-5555. www. loonybincomedy.com.

Antique/Boutique Walk. Shopping and live entertainment. Downtown Hot Springs, third Thursday of every month, 4 p.m., free. 100 Central Ave., Hot Springs. #ArkiePubTrivia. Stone’s Throw Brewing, 6:30 p.m. 402 E. 9th St. 501-244-9154.

MUSIC

All In Fridays. Envy. 7200 Colonel Glenn Road.

501-562-3317.

Elise Davis. South on Main, 9 p.m., $10. 1304 Main St. 501-244-9660. southonmain.com.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501372-4782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

Monterey Jazz Festival. Featuring Nicholas Payton, Ravi Coltrane, Gregory Clayton, Raul Midon and more. Reynolds Performance Hall, UCA, 7:30 p.m., $27-$35. 350 S. Donaghey, Conway.

Pamela K. Ward (headliner), Richie Johnson (happy hour). Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 and 9 p.m.

“Little Rock and a Hard Place.” An original production by The Main Thing. The Joint, 8 p.m., $22. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

Tracy Smith. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., $10. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501228-5555. www.loonybincomedy.com.

SALE! $24.99 $8.99 $10.99 $9.99 $9.99

• WE GLADLY MATCH ANY LOCAL ADS HURRY IN! THIS SALE EXPIRES JANUARY 27, 2016

WEDNESDAY IS WINE DAY 15% OFF • WINE CASE DISCOUNTS EVERY DAY

LITTLE ROCK: 10TH & MAIN • 501.374.0410 | NORTH LITTLE ROCK: 860 EAST BROADWAY • 501.374.2405 HOURS: LR • 8AM-10PM MON-THUR • 8AM-12PM FRI-SAT •NLR • MON-SAT 8AM-12PM

SPORTS

Horse Racing. Oaklawn, through April 16: 1:30 p.m., $2.50-$4.50. 2705 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 501-623-4411. www.oaklawn.com.

SATURDAY, JAN. 23

MUSIC

Canvas (headliner), Brian Ramsey (happy hour). Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 and 9 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf. com.

Funkanites. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 9 p.m., $7. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-1196. www. afterthoughtbistroandbar.com.

K.I.S.S. Saturdays. Featuring DJ Silky Slim.

RIVERDALE 10 VIP CINEMA 2600 CANTRELL RD 5 0 1 . 2 9 6.9 955 | R I V E R DA LE1 0.CO M

RESERVED SEATING

Dress code enforced. Sway, 10 p.m. 412 Louisiana. 501-492-9802.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501372-4782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

Pickin’ Porch. Bring your instrument. All ages welcome. Faulkner County Library, 9:30 a.m.

1900 Tyler St., Conway. 501-327-7482. www. fcl.org.

The Protomen, Brit Brigade, Madman Morgan. Vino’s. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub.com.

Songs from ‘The Last Waltz’: A Benefit for KABF. With performances by Amy Garland, The Wildflowers, The Salty Dogs, Isaac Alexander and more. White Water Tavern, 9 p.m. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. www. whitewatertavern.com.

Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 8 p.m., free. 111 W. Markham St. 501-370-7013. www. capitalbarandgrill.com.

Tragikly White. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 9:30 p.m., $10. 107 River Market Ave. 501-372-7707. www.stickyz.com.

The Whole Famn Damily, Manchild. The Lightbulb Club, 9 p.m., $5-$10. 21 N. Block Ave., Fayetteville. 479-444-6100.

COMEDY

“Little Rock and a Hard Place.” An original production by The Main Thing. The Joint, 8 p.m., $22. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-3720205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

Tracy Smith. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., $10. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501228-5555. www.loonybincomedy.com.

EVENTS

34th Annual Arkansas Marine Expo. A showcase of boats and fishing supplies. Statehouse Convention Center, 10 a.m., $5. 7 Statehouse Plaza.

Falun Gong meditation. Allsopp Park, 9 a.m., free. Cantrell and Cedar Hill Roads.

Hillcrest Farmers Market. Pulaski Heights Baptist Church, 7 a.m.-2 p.m. 2200 Kavanaugh Blvd.

Historic Neighborhoods Tour. Bike tour of historic neighborhoods includes bike, guide, helmets and maps. Bobby’s Bike Hike, 9 a.m., $8-$28. 400 President Clinton Ave. 501-6137001.

Pork & Bourbon Tour. Bike tour includes bicycle, guide, helmets and maps. Bobby’s Bike Hike, 11:30 a.m., $35-$45. 400 President Clinton Ave. 501-613-7001.

SPORTS

Horse Racing. Oaklawn, through April 16: 1:30 p.m., $2.50-$4.50. 2705 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 501-623-4411. www.oaklawn.com.

SUNDAY, JAN. 24

MUSIC

Adam Faucett & Tall Grass, Bad Match, Bad Boyfriends. Presented by KABF’s “Over/ Underground.” Vino’s, 3 p.m., Donations. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub. com.

Irish Traditional Music Session. Hibernia Irish Tavern, 2:30 p.m. 9700 N. Rodney Parham Road.

501-246-4340. www.hiberniairishtavern.com.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-

372-4782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

EVENTS

34th Annual Arkansas Marine Expo. A showcase of boats and fishing supplies. Statehouse Convention Center, 10 a.m., $5. 7 Statehouse Plaza.

Artist for Recovery. A secular recovery group for people with addictions. Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church, 10 a.m. 1601 S. Louisiana.

FILM

• BIGGER • SOFTER

• S w i v e l F o o d & B e v e r a g e Ta b l e • Cup Holder for Each Seat

HELP WANTED. NOW HIRING.

NOW SERVING BEER & WINE • FULL FOOD MENU • GIFT CARDS AVAILABLE

“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” Cinemark Colonel Glenn 18, Jan. 24, 2 p.m.; Jan. 27, 2 and 7 p.m., $5.25. 18 Colonel Glenn Plaza Drive. 501-687-0499.

SPORTS

Horse Racing. Oaklawn, through April 16: 1:30 p.m., $2.50-$4.50. 2705 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 501-623-4411. www.oaklawn.com.

MONDAY, JAN. 25

MUSIC

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501372-4782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

Monday Night Jazz. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 8 p.m., $5. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-1196. www.afterthoughtbistroandbar.com.

Open Mic. The Lobby Bar. Studio Theatre, 8 p.m. 320 W. 7th St. Richie Johnson. Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf. com.

sip LOCAL ARKANSAS TIMES

TUESDAY, JAN. 26

MUSIC

Jeff Ling. Khalil’s Pub, 6 p.m. 110 S. Shackleford Road. 501-224-0224. www.khalilspub.com.

Jim Dickerson. Sonny Williams’ Steak Room, 7 p.m. 500 President Clinton Ave. 501-324-2999. www.sonnywilliamssteakroom.com.

John McAteer and Gentleman Firesnakes.

White Water Tavern, 9 p.m. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. www.whitewatertavern.com.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501372-4782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

Music Jam. Hosted by Elliott Griffen and Joseph Fuller. The Joint, 8-11 p.m., free. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

Tuesday Jam Session with Carl Mouton.

Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 8 p.m., free. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-1196. www.afterthoughtbistroandbar.com.

UALR Department of Music Faculty / Student Recital. South on Main, 7 p.m., free. 1304 Main St. 501-244-9660. southonmain.com.

COMEDY

Stand-Up Tuesday. Hosted by Adam Hogg.

The Joint, 8 p.m., $5. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

EVENTS

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

FILM www.arktimes.com

JANUARY 21, 2016

25

AFTER DARK, CONT. “Dirty Dancing.” Ron Robinson Theater, 7 p.m., $5. 1 Pulaski Way. 501-320-5703. www. cals.lib.ar.us/ron-robinson-theater.aspx.

WEDNESDAY, JAN. 27

MUSIC

Acoustic Open Mic. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 8 p.m., free. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd.

501-663-1196. www.afterthoughtbistroandbar.com.

Austin Jones. Revolution, 8 p.m., $12 adv., $15 day of. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501823-0090. www.rumbarevolution.com/new.

Brian and Nick. Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 p.m.

2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www. cajunswharf.com.

David Wax Museum. South on Main, 7:30 p.m., free. 1304 Main St. 501-244-9660. southonmain.com.

Drageoke with Chi Chi Valdez. Sway. 412 Louisiana.

Jim Dickerson. Sonny Williams’ Steak Room, 7 p.m. 500 President Clinton Ave. 501-3242999. www.sonnywilliamssteakroom.com.

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

Open Mic Nite with Deuce. Thirst n’ Howl, 7:30 p.m., free. 14710 Cantrell Road. 501379-8189. www.thirst-n-howl.com.

COMEDY

Dan O’Sullivan. The Loony Bin, Jan. 27-30, 7:30 p.m.; Jan. 29-30, 10 p.m., $7-$10. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-228-5555. www.loonybincomedy.com.

The Joint Venture. Improv comedy group.

The Joint, 8 p.m., $7. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock. com.

DANCE

Little Rock Bop Club. Beginning dance lessons for ages 10 and older. Singles welcome. Bess Chisum Stephens Community Center, 7 p.m., $4 for members, $7 for guests. 12th and Cleveland streets. 501350-4712. www.littlerockbopclub.

FILM

“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” Rave Motion Pictures Colonel Glenn 18, 2 and 7 p.m., $5.25. 18 Colonel Glenn Plaza Drive.

501-687-0499.

LECTURES

“Historical Significance and Current Trends in the Iowa Caucus.” A presentation by Steffen Schmidt, author and professor at Iowa State University. Sturgis Hall, noon. 1200 President Clinton Ave. 501-6835200. clintonschool.uasys.edu.

POETRY

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

ARTS

THEATER

“Kinky Boots.” Walton Arts Center, 7 p.m.; through Jan. 23, 8 p.m.; through Jan. 24, 2 p.m.; Sun., Jan. 24, 7:30 p.m., $25-$70. 495 W. Dickson St., Fayetteville. 479-443-5600.

“Peter and the Starcatcher.” Arkansas 26

JANUARY 21, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

Repertory Theatre, through Feb. 14: Wed., Thu., Sun., 7 p.m.; Fri., Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat., Sun., 2 p.m., $45. 601 Main St. 501-378-0405. www.therep.org.

Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays. A collection of monologues and short stories about the fight for LGBT marriage rights. The Weekend Theater, through Jan. 30: Fri., Sat., 7:30 p.m., $12$16. 1001 W. 7th St. 501-374-3761. www. weekendtheater.org.

NEW GALLERY EXHIBITS, EVENTS ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, MacArthur Park: “Life and Light: “Nathalia Edenmont: Force of Nature,” 10 large-scale photographs, through May 1, talk by the artist 6 p.m. Jan. 21, with book signing to follow; “Photographic Travels through Latin America with Bryan Clifton,” through Feb. 14. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sun. 372-4000.

GALLERY 360, 900 S. Rodney Parham Road: “Ice Box II,” work by Shane Baskins, Mathew Bivens, LONER, Madeline Long, Rayna Mackey, Vaughn Mims, RobotBlood, Derek Simon, Kesha Stovall and Allison Traylor, opens with reception 8-11 p.m. Jan. 22, show through Feb. 19.

L&L BECK ART GALLERY, 5705 Kavanaugh Blvd.: “Landscapes,” by Louis Beck, January show, giclee giveaway 7 p.m. Jan. 21.

660-4006.

CONWAY UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL ARKANSAS: “Finding Shelter: An Exhibition of Contemporary Fiber Art”; “Maggie Steber: ‘Madje Has Dementia,’ ‘Rite of Passage’ ”; “Mike Jabbur: Point/Counterpoint,” all Jan. 21-Feb. 18, Baum Gallery, reception 4-6 p.m. Jan. 21. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Wed., Fri., 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Thu. 501-450-5793.

EL DORADO SOUTH ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, 110 E. 5th St.: “Nature and Still Life,” paintings

by Judy Falkoff, “Photography by Del Pagan,” both through Feb. 5. 870-862-5474.

FAYETTEVILLE LOCAL COLOR STUDIO GALLERY, 275 S. Archibald Yell Blvd.: “Expressive Exhibition,” paintings by Wendy Newsam, through January. 5:30-8 p.m. Mon.-Fri. 479-461-8761.

NEW MUSEUM EXHIBITS, EVENTS CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL CENTER, 1200 President Clinton Ave.: “Coca-Cola Collectors Convention,” with appraisers from Coca-Cola Co., Great Hall, 10 a.m.12:30 p.m. Jan. 23, with family activities; “Coca-Cola: An American Original,” the art and history of Coca-Cola advertising and bottles, antique CocaCola delivery truck, artist’s installation of 3D-printed bottle designs, through Feb. 15; Anne Frank Tree, new installation on the grounds; permanent exhibits on the Clinton administration. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. $10 adults; $8 college students, seniors, retired military; $3 ages 6-17. 370-8000.

THE LEGACY OF C.D. WRIGHT, CONT.

write it, study it, read it, edit it, publish it, teach it … Sometimes I weary of it. I could not live without it. Not in this world. Not in my lifetime. I also arkansas. Sometimes these verbs coalesce. Sometimes they trot off in opposite directions.”

With each new book, she redefined her poetry. Her poem “Like Something Flying Backwards” in the 2009 collection “Rising, Falling, Hovering,” reflects her slow but forceful process of personal creative evolution: “Her vocabulary refined by years of looking through the screen at the lilac that absorbed her witness.”

Moving from the visceral images of her early books to the luminous, lyric observations in “One Big Self” and “Deepstep Come Shining,” Wright’s poems always remained clearly her own. Devotion to observation, to language, and to poetry as a source of promise never left her work. Each poem, from the first book to the last, carries with it an admission of pain and a resilience to continue through it. In “Deepstep Come Shining,” she writes, “See this hand. See this. Come shining. / The hand that peeled the bark from my birches. / The hand that stirred the pencil of my life.” Then, in constantly facing the pain, she finds relief in acknowledging it and moving forward: Place yourself inside the damage Lights approaching top speed Blur in, blur out A need for linear relief Everything going awful fast Trees agitated by wind Keep the setting simple A bowl of sugar on a table Separated by a chair Not an inkling what it means Urge to withdraw Pull the ladder up after Every time I met her, I was intrigued by her investment in my poetry and in the communities I built with my magazine and reading series, which seemed to come from a completely different person than the lonely seer who wrote those poems that spoke to me so directly from so far away.

Joe Morra, a friend of Wright’s and the president of the Boomerang Fund for Artists, on whose board Wright served with her husband, Forrest Gander, said, “She recognized that a writer’s life is often by design solitary, and that of a poet, even more so. And she never lost track of the fact that

there are many, many fine writers who live challenging lives, often in obscurity, but whose work is extraordinary and worthy of recognition. She had a special spot in her heart for unsung poets who create communities in areas that do not necessarily have a thriving arts scene.”

Perhaps that insurmountable loneliness I found in her poems drove her to reach out to us as she did. But along with reaching out to younger poets, she reached back for poets who were lost. She championed Arkansas poet Frank Stanford’s poetry for over 30 years after his death — keeping his poems in print on Lost Roads, the press they had founded together, and eventually seeing his works collected in a massive volume from Copper Canyon last year. She handed Lost Roads off to a former student, Susan Scarlata. Naming their book prize after another under-recognized Arkansas poet, Besmilr Bingham, they publish books by women from nonurban areas. Scarlata says that Wright “gave so much to so many and shown an authentic spotlight on writers like Besmilr Brigham whose work may have otherwise languished. Writing was a vocation for her and she influenced humans of all variety with her laser-focused dedication to the word and the art.”

In another evolution of her own work, Wright’s 2010 book-length poem “One with Others” brings the documentary elements of her poetry into focus. The book tells the story of her mentor, a civil rights activist who was disowned by her husband and expelled from her home. Wright combines her own memories, interviews with people connected to her story, and historical documents — churning and repeating these materials, fuguelike, into brilliant lyricism: “You have your life / until you use it. You forfeit the only life you know / or go to your grave with the song curled inside you.” The documentation of another became the assertion of a larger self.

For Wright, there was no decision, just an outpouring of poetry until it ceased when she ceased. There is silence now, but there is also the work, an endless system unto itself, the outline of her vision.

When I shyly told her about my first book’s acceptance by a small press, she said, gleefully and assertively, “That’s fantastic — what’s next?”

The arc of her work shows the triumph of that mantra.

BETH HALL

THEATER PREVIEW

N A URm by T

STARCATCHING: Steve Pacek (Peter) and Faith Sandberg (Molly) in The Rep’s new production.

Return to Neverland ‘Peter and the Starcatcher’ comes to The Rep.

a Fil

BY JAMES SZENHER

T

he essence of the Peter Pan story is simple: There’s a special power associated with imagination and play, and most adults have either forgotten or rejected it. “Peter and the Starcatcher,” the new production from the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, opens with a sort of invocation from the ensemble, asking audiences to join in using their imaginations to explore the origins of the Pan universe and all its inhabitants.

“It’s a communal experience in storytelling and imagination,” says Patrick Halley, who plays the classic henchman Smee. “It’s the same world you know, but a different doorway into it.”

Faith Sandberg, who plays Molly (a character who takes on a role similar to that of the original Wendy), compares it to how “Wicked” explored the “Oz” characters in greater depth.

“This is the story of love, adventure and how people find themselves in the face of adversity,” says Bruce Warren, who plays Molly’s nanny as well as a few other characters. “The play will turn some of the things you thought you knew about these characters on their head.”

“When we play it for big houses, it’s a thrill ride,” says Hugh Kennedy, who plays Black Stache, a pirate who hasn’t yet earned his more well-known nickname. “It’s a testament to the cast and to how well written the play is.”

Warren described the play as using a unique form of storytelling. Halley adds, “Imagine a group of kids who come across a shipwreck, and they utilize anything they can to play and create this story, and the audience is invited to join.”

Here, in place of the expansive sets of last year’s “Little Mermaid,” you have a simple stage and basic props, ropes, ladders, sort of like an old playground that your imagination transforms into whatever you want — in this case, a

pirate ship.

“There are magical moments built right into the set,” Sandberg says, describing the detailed carvings on the proscenium, made from real valentines mailed out by sailors in the 19th century. “Some of the wood is reclaimed from a barn built in the early 1800s,” she added. “There’s so much history just in the set itself.”

In line with the themes of several of the Rep’s plays this season (“Spelling Bee” and “Little Mermaid,” notably), this is a story for both children and adults to appreciate. Some of the humor and references might be lost on younger kids, but they’ll certainly love the make-believe aspects and, of course, the pirate action.

“For Molly, it’s her last adventure before she goes home and grows up,” Sandberg says, “so she’s learning lessons about love, about what is home, and if some things are worth what you’re willing to give up for them. We all start with a sense of play and imagination, and when you learn loss along the way, you can either choose to keep that sense of play or not.”

“Starcatcher” is pretty big at the moment; it’s the second-most produced play in the country this season, according to the folks atThe Rep. It’s also being read by many students across the country and locally as well, so this is a great chance for them to get to see literature come alive onstage.

“It’s a love letter to the theater, coming from our hearts, and so much of us is going into this, ” Sandberg said.

“Yes, and if people don’t come see it, we’ll feed them to the crocodile,” Warren joked.

arkcatfish.com t-shirts, back issues and more

vP T hu

7 P.M. THURSDAY, JANUARY 21

$5

RON ROBINSON THEATER

100 RIVER MARKET

WE’RE SHOWING

tav falco’s “urania decending”

U

FOLLOWED BY POST-SCREENING Q&A WITH TAV FALCO

“Peter and the Starcatcher” opens Friday, Jan. 22, and plays through Sunday, Feb. 14. More info is available at therep.org/attend/productions/ peterandthestarcatcher. www.arktimes.com

JANUARY 21, 2016

27

T

Dining

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

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

WHAT’S COOKIN’

Pie Five Pizza Co.

IT’S A LITTLE LATER THAN hoped, but construction began Monday on Bruno’s Deli, the lunch takeout place to be opened next door to Bruno’s Little Italy at 310 Main St. The construction schedule is 60 days. Owners hope to beat it.

Plans were announced last summer for the storefront deli, at 308 Main in the former Dundee’s menswear space. Co-owner Gio Bruno said at the time that he’d offer Italian sandwiches, with some limited stool seating for eat-in and a takeout window. He plans to stock meat, cheese, pasta, sauces, olives and other items.

THE LEADERS OF THE 1836 Club, the new private club that Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson (R-Little Rock) and others hope to open in the former Packet House on Cantrell Road, have announced that veteran chef Donnie Ferneau will head the restaurant operation.

Ferneau has been involved in a number of restaurants over the years, most recently Good Food Ferneau on Main Street in North Little Rock, which will close.

The club is styled as a place for business professionals. It will have a $250 monthly membership fee and offer a restaurant, bar, humidor room and lounge. It will be rented for special events.

In a release, Ferneau said he was sad to leave Good Food, but “the opportunity to be the executive chef for The 1836 Club was an offer I simply couldn’t refuse.”

Ferneau moves into a space recently renovated for a restaurant that failed to make a go of it. The house, which dates to 1869, has 12,000 square feet of space.

BOULEVARD BREAD CO. PLANS to open a new location on Feb. 1 in the Baptist Health Medical Center Tower 1 in Little Rock.

Boulevard currently sells its soups, salads, sandwiches and bread at locations in the River Market, on South Main Street and in the Heights, at the flagship, which includes a full-menu bistro. The local bakery and sandwich shop operated a now-closed satellite location at UAMS for a number of years.

28

JANUARY 21, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

20770 I-30 N., Suite 150 Benton 794-4900 piefivepizza.com

QUICK BITE If you’ve got room after downing a pizza of your choice, Pie Five offers several very tasty-looking dessert choices for $1.99 a slice. On the day we visited, these included a thick turtle brownie pie.

HOURS 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily OTHER INFO All credit cards accepted. No alcohol.

THE ATHENIAN: It’s on the Take Five menu, but you can add or subtract to make it your own.

Take Five Pie Five serves build-your-own pizza fast.

U

nless you’re doing time in the Ironbar Hotel, choices are everywhere these days — from nine kinds of mustard at the grocery store to 500 styles of shoes at DSW to the seemingly limitless swirl of information, stupidity, opportunity and pornography on the Internet. Grandma and grandpa were content choosing between Ford vs. Chevrolet and NBC vs. CBS. Here in the future, though, we’re choice junkies, liable to get cheesed if there are not at least 10 options for every possible decision, from socks to soccer balls.

That desire for limitless variety has spilled over into restaurants in the past decade, with sneezeguard-protected, pick-your-goodies style restaurants serving up everything from custom burritos to build-your-own stir-fry. Now, Pie Five — a chain that recently opened an outlet off Alcoa Road in Benton — has

brought the fast and for-you concept to pizza, allowing each member of a dining party to pick from dozens of toppings to create a sizable personal pie. While a Pie Five pie isn’t exactly the greatest pizza in the world, any pizza is better than no pizza, and the pizzas at Pie Five are lightning fast, fresh and almost as cheap as those cardboard “hot and ready” pizzas you’ll get at the low-rent chain down the street.

Every pizza at Pie Five (other than plain cheese, which is $5.49) is just $6.99. We’re not talking about a Ritz cracker with some cheese on it, either.

These are substantial pizzas, about as big as a good-sized dinner plate and loaded with as many toppings as you want. They also offer several varieties of very tasty salads, served in edible bowls, for $6.99, with the ability to “bundle” a pizza, side salad and regular drink for

$10.99.

Though there are a number of preordained pizzas on the menu — including a chicken carbonara, Margherita, “Farmer’s Market” veggie and other classics — they’re happy to make you a custom pie, starting with one of four crusts: thin, pan, whole grain thin or gluten free.

The gluten-free option is $2 more. From there, they offer six sauces: marinara, spicy marinara, Buffalo ranch, Alfredo, plain olive oil and barbecue. On that foundation, you are welcome to build your own personal masterpiece, choosing from five kinds of cheeses, seven meats and over 15 fresh veggies. Onto the conveyor belt of a very hot oven it goes, and out comes a steaming hot pizza. If you don’t spend too much time deciding between meatballs and bacon, it really does take five minutes or less from the first smear of sauce to piping hot and on your plate. You’re just not going to get that at most pizza joints.

Fearful of subjecting our taste buds to a mad scientist’s laboratory concoction, we ordered off the menu, with the reviewer going for the Five Star (marinara, cheddar, pepperoni, beef, green olives, red and green peppers and red onion, on a deep dish pan style crust), while our companions tried the Athenian (olive oil, feta, grilled chicken, garlic Kalamata olive and sun-dried tomato on thin) and the Farmer’s Market (marinara, mushroom, red onion, spinach, bell peppers and roasted tomatoes on whole grain). We also selected an Italian side salad with a balsamic glaze and the house vinaigrette.

Sharing and sharing alike, the trio along on our trip to Pie Five agreed that the deep dish crust bordered on the

STEAK BBQ CATFISH $ 99

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flavorless, though the freshness of the toppings and the sweet marinara largely filled the gaps. The toppings and cheese were generous and tasty, especially on the Farmer’s Market veggie pie. The clear standout, however, was the Athenian, with the thin crust working perfectly with the tartness of the olives and the feta cheese. Another winner was the salad, which was very nice indeed with the Balsamic drizzle and a tangy dressing. While all three of the pies we sampled would have likely been a horrific affront to your average pizza snob, they were fast, cheap and large enough that we all had slices to take home. Flavorwise, everything we tried was miles

beyond what you’re going to get at any of the other fast-food joints in the area.

The best compliment we can give Pie Five is we wish there was one in downtown Little Rock, because — with Yours Truly perpetually short on time and cash — it would surely be a regular lunchtime haunt for this impoverished scribbler.

Choices are good, and if you’re not too picky about your pizza, Pie Five is a good option if you need something fast and hot. With loads of toppings and decent crust and sauce choices, all adding up to a tasty meal that goes from menu to face in less time than it would take you to read this review, you could definitely do worse.

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DINING CAPSULES

AMERICAN

CATFISH CITY AND BBQ GRILL Basic fried fish and sides, including green tomato pickles, and now with tasty ribs and sandwiches in beef, pork and sausage. 1817 S. University Ave. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-663-7224. LD Tue.-Sat. CHICKEN WANG & CAFE Regular, barbecue, spicy, lemon, garlic pepper, honey mustard and Buffalo wings. Open late. 8320 Colonel Glenn Road. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-562-1303.

LD Mon.-Sat. FORTY TWO Solid choice for weekday lunch, featuring entrees and sandwiches from around the world. 1200 President Clinton Ave. Full bar, All CC. $-$$. 501-537-0042. L Mon.-Sat. MIMI’S CAFE Breakfast is our meal of choice here at this upscale West Coast chain. Portions are plenty to last you through the afternoon, especially if you get a muffin on the side.

Middle-America comfort-style entrees make up other meals, from pot roast to pasta dishes.

11725 Chenal Parkway. Full bar, All CC. $$-$$$.

501-221-3883. BLD daily, BR Sun. MORNINGSIDE BAGELS Tasty New York-style boiled bagels, made daily. 10848 Maumelle Blvd. NLR. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-7536960. BL daily.

WHITE WATER TAVERN Good locally sourced bar food. 2500 W. 7th St. Full bar, All CC. $-$$.

501-375-8400. D Tue., Thu., Fri., Sat.

ASIAN

BENIHANA JAPANESE STEAKHOUSE Enjoy the cooking show, make sure you get a little filet with your meal, and do plenty of dunking in that fabulous ginger sauce. 2 Riverfront Place.

NLR. Full bar, All CC. $$-$$$. 501-374-8081. LD Sun.-Fri., D Sat. IGIBON JAPANESE RESTAURANT It’s a complex place, where the food is almost always good and the ambiance and service never fail to please. The Bento box with tempura shrimp and California rolls and other delights stand out.

11121 N. Rodney Parham Road. Beer and wine, All CC. $$. 501-217-8888. LD Mon.-Sat.

NEW FUN REE Reliable staples, plenty of hot and spicy options and dependable delivery. 418 W. 7th St. No alcohol, All CC. $. 501-664-6657.

LD Mon.-Sat. P.F. CHANG’S CHINA BISTRO Nuevo Chinese chain food in swank surroundings. 317 S. Shackleford Road. Full bar, All CC. $$-$$$.

501-225-4424. LD daily.

THE SOUTHERN GOURMASIAN Delicious Southern-Asian fusion. We crave the pork buns. Made the transition from food truck to brick-and-mortar in 2015 to rave reviews. 219 W. Capitol Ave. Beer and wine, All CC. $-$$.

501-313-5645. LD Mon.-Sat.

BARBECUE

CAPITOL SMOKEHOUSE AND GRILL Beef, pork and chicken, all smoked to melting tenderness and doused with a choice of sauces. The crusty but tender backribs star. Side dishes are top quality. A plate lunch special is now available. 915 W. Capitol Ave. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-372-4227. L Mon.-Fri. FATBOY’S KILLER BAR-B-Q This Landmark neighborhood strip center restaurant in the far southern reaches of Pulaski County features tender ribs and pork by a contest pitmaster.

Skip the regular sauce and risk the hot variety, it’s far better. 14611 Arch St. No alcohol, All CC. $$. 501-888-4998. L Mon.-Fri. MICK’S BBQ, CATFISH AND GRILL Good burgers, picnic-worth deviled eggs and heaping barbecue sandwiches topped with sweet sauce.

3609 MacArthur Drive. NLR. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-791-2773. LD Mon.-Sun.

EUROPEAN / ETHNIC

ALI BABA A Middle Eastern restaurant, butcher shop and grocery. 3400 S University Ave. No alcohol, All CC. 501-379-8011. BLD Mon.-Sat. BANANA LEAF Tasty Indian street food from the former food truck. 425 W. Capitol Ave. No alcohol, CC. $-$$. 501-227-0860. L Mon.-Fri. KHALIL’S PUB Widely varied menu with European, Mexican and American influences.

Go for the Bierocks, rolls filled with onions and

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29

DINING CAPSULES, CONT. beef. 110 S. Shackleford Road. Full bar, All CC. $$. 501-224-0224. LD daily. BR Sun.

ITALIAN

DAMGOODE PIES A somewhat different Italian/pizza place, largely because of a spicy garlic white sauce that’s offered as an alternative to the traditional red sauce. Good bread, too.

2701 Kavanaugh Blvd. Beer and wine, All CC. $$-$$$. 501-664-2239. LD daily. 6706 Cantrell Road. Beer and wine, All CC. $$-$$$. 501-6642239. LD daily. 37 East Center St. Fayetteville.

Full bar, All CC. $$-$$$. 479-444-7437. LD daily.

500 President Clinton Ave. 72201. Full bar, CC. $$-$$$. 501-664-2239. LD daily.

VESUVIO Arguably Little Rock’s best Italian restaurant. The cheesy pasta bowls are sensational, but don’t ignore the beef offerings.

1315 Breckenridge Drive. Full bar, All CC. $$$.

501-246-5422. D daily.

LATINO

CASA MEXICANA Familiar Tex-Mex style items all shine, in ample portions, and the steak-

centered dishes are uniformly excellent. 7111 JFK Blvd. NLR. Full bar, All CC. $$. 501-835-7876.

LD daily.

EL PORTON Good Mex for the price and a wide-ranging menu of dinner plates, some tasty cheese dip, and great service as well.

12111 W. Markham St. Full bar, All CC. $$.

501-223-8588. LD daily. 5021 Warden Road.

NLR. Full bar, All CC. $$. 501-753-4630. LD daily.

ELIELLA You’ll find perhaps the widest variety of street-style tacos in Central Arkansas here — everything from cabeza (steamed beef head) to lengua (beef tongue) to suadero (thin-sliced beef brisket). The Torta Cubano is a belly-buster.

It’s a sandwich made with chorizo, pastor, grilled hot dogs and a fried egg. The menu is in Spanish, but the waitstaff is accommodating to gringos. 7700 Baseline Road. Beer, All CC. $.

501-539-5355. LD daily.

THE FOLD BOTANAS BAR Gourmet tacos and botanas, or small plates. Try the cholula pescada taco. A good variety of specialty drinks, too. 3501 Old Cantrell Road. Full bar, CC. $$-$$$. 501-916-9706. LD daily.

Test one out on our sales floor!

DUMAS, CONT. made the comparison. “Neo-Nazi” has sometimes sneaked into the dialogue.

• He isn’t a real evangelical, like the Republican base in Iowa and much of the South, although he has made some clumsy attempts, like his laughable attempt at citing Scripture at the Biblethumping Liberty University. A good Christian to Donald Trump is a member of a mainline Protestant church. But a clumsy effort at belonging seems to be good enough.

• His vanity and greed are not good Christian values. Rick Santorum and another candidate or two raise the point, but that is a questionable course in today’s Republican Party.

Trump has touted his book “Art of the Deal,” ghostwritten for him by journalist Tony Schwartz, as the best-selling book of all time, bigger even than the Holy Bible. “Art of the Deal” fulfills the great quest of modern conservatism, which is the search for a superior moral justification for greed, but it isn’t even the best-selling book on business. But exaggeration is a human foible.

• He admires Putin and is personally fond of him, and vice versa. That, Brooks thought, ought to make him a nonstarter.

But Brooks misses Donald Trump’s

secret. He is the world’s greatest showman. He is ebullient, confident to the point of pomposity, and we love that in politicians on the rare occasions we get them. He raises our fears and feasts upon them.

The other great showman of modern times was Ronald Reagan. Establishment Republicans were at first horrified at the prospect of his being nominated but grew to love him. He negotiated a treaty to greatly reduce our strategic weaponry with “the evil empire,” which he had said could not be trusted; slashed taxes, ran up the largest deficits in history before the crash of 2008 and then spent seven years raising taxes to make up for it; endured the deepest, longest recession since the Great Depression that followed his tax cuts by telling us that it was “morning in America”; and survived a bumbling secret missile giveaway to the nutty, untrustworthy Iranians to become the Republican Party’s most sainted figure ever.

Donald Trump has all the makings of another Reagan. The Republican establishment may be coming around, reluctantly, to accepting the rationale.

Brooks warned that they were no better than deserting rats.

LYONS, CONT.

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people’s experience.

“Against these liabilities,” writes Jonathan Chait, “Sanders offers the left-wing version of a hoary political fantasy: that a more pure candidate can rally the People into a righteous uprising that would unsettle the conventional laws of politics.”

Meanwhile, not only has Sanders presented no realistic political scenario for enacting his vaunted reforms, serious observers also question their sub-

stance.

Liberal MVP Paul Krugman: “To be harsh but accurate: The Sanders health plan looks a little bit like a standard Republican tax-cut plan, which relies on fantasies about huge supply-side effects to make the numbers supposedly add up.”

During the recent debate, Bernie accused Hillary of failing to take his candidacy seriously. Fair enough. But has he?

PEARLS ABOUT SWINE, CONT.

January is...

Win Little Rock Trojans basketball tickets, support the Arkansas Foodbank and win cool prizes all month – just by enjoying a meal at any North Little Rock restaurant. #EatNLR NLRRestaurantMonth.com 501-758-1424 30

JANUARY 21, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

coming mix of matchups given the home/road analysis, and this is the sort of league where a dozen wins in conference play is likely to set the table for great positioning in the SEC tournament. The drawback, of course, is that Arkansas came into conference play with a pedestrian 6-6 mark, and thereby minimized its margin of error greatly.

For the Hogs to get into the postseason discussion, and we’re not excluding an NIT berth as part of the overall calculus, pinning a loss on Kentucky in front of a huge home crowd before the weekend is basically a base-level requirement. Losing doesn’t kill the whole season, but it does shift momentum in an undesirable way, one that likely can’t be overcome.

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By Mo Gaffney, Jordan Harrison, Moisés Kaufman, Neil LaBute, Wendy MacLeod, José Rivera, Paul Rudnick, and Doug Wright CONCEIVED BY BRIAN SHNIPPER January 22, 23, 29, 30, 2016 DIRECTED BY DUANE JACKSON 7:30 pm Friday and Saturday TICKETS: $16 Adults • $12 Students & Seniors

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Support for TWT is provided, in part, by the Arkansas Arts Council, an agency of the DAH, and the NEA.

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ARKANSAS TIMES

THE UNIQUE NEIGHBORHOODS OF CENTRAL ARKANSAS

ADVERTISING SALES

Full of interesting voices and colorful portraits of 17 Little Rock and North Little Rock neighborhoods, this book gives an intimate, block-by-block, native’s view of the place more than 250,000 Arkansans call home. Created from interviews with residents and largely written by writers who actually live in the neighborhoods they’re writing about, the book features over 90 full color photos by Little Rock photographer Brian Chilson.

Payment: CHECK OR CREDIT CARD Order by Mail: ARKANSAS TIMES BOOKS 201 E. MARKHAM ST., STE. 200, LITTLE ROCK, AR 72201 Phone: 501-375-2985 Fax: 501-375-3623 Email: ANITRA@ARKTIMES.COM Send _______ book(s) of The Unique Neighborhoods of Central Arkansas @ $19.95 Send _______ book(s) of A History Of Arkansas @ $10.95

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The SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS division of the ARKANSAS TIMES has a position open in Advertising Sales with opportunity for advancement to management. If you have sales experience and enjoy the exciting and crazy world of advertising then we’d like to talk to you. We publish 4 publications: SAVVY, AR WILD, FOOD & FARM and SHELTER as well as corresponding websites and social media. What does all this translate to? A high-income potential for a hard working advertising executive.

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CHEER ON THE SEMI-FINALISTS IN THE 2016 JAN 28 ARKANSAS TIMES FEB 4 MUSICIANS SHOWCASE 8PM 9PM 10PM 11PM

CALEB VELASQUEZ A ROWDY FAITH SOULUTION DEFRANCE

8PM 9PM 10PM 11PM

SEA OF ECHOES GALAXY TOUR GUIDES COLLIN VS. ADAM SEANFRESH & THE NASTYFRESH CREW

BANDS PERFORM 30 MINUTES OF ORIGINAL MUSIC. THE WINNER FROM EACH NIGHT WILL ADVANCE TO THE FINALS ON FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 26 AT REV ROOM.

FEB 11 8PM

TREY JOHNSON & JASON WILLMON 9PM ODDY KNOCKY 10PM LOVE AND A REVOLVER 11PM THE UH HUHS

FEB 18 The next highest scoring band from ALL semi-final rounds will be included in the Finals.

8PM 9PM 10PM 11PM

SATTAKOTA JAY JACKSON VINTAGE PISTOL THE WHOLE FAMN DAMILY

SEMI-FINAL ROUNDS ARE AT STICKYZ EACH WEEK.

Judging Process: Three (3) regular judges plus one (1) guest judge will score each band on the following criteria - Songwriting (1-30 points), Musicianship (1-30 points), Originality (1-30 points), Showmanship (1-10 points) for a total of 100 possible points per judge. The lowest overall judge’s score is dropped. A crowd vote (based on a percentage) is also added to each bands’ final score from the judges.

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JANUARY 21, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES