Arkansas Times - January 5, 2017

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LR native Nate Powell on cartooning, punk life, winning the National Book Award and creating a handbook for a new era of nonviolent resistance in the age of Trump

by David Koon

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JANUARY 5, 2017

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COMMENT

For gun sense Since the attack at Ohio State University, lawmakers have offered solutions they believe would prevent such scary events.

Recently, state Rep. Charlie Collins (R-Fayetteville) argued that all Arkansas colleges should be forced to allow the presence of loaded, hidden guns on campus, because shooters intentionally pick so-called “gunfree zones” like college campuses to wage attacks.

However, an analysis by Everytown for Gun Safety found that only 14 percent of mass shootings from 2009-2015 took place in so-called “gun-free zones.” Of the at least 133 mass shootings since 2009, only two occurred at a college or university.

Lawmakers like Collins are relying on this false notion of exaggerated vulnerability to carry out the gun lobby’s aim to allow guns into as many places as possible with no questions asked.

In 2013, our legislature passed a law allowing faculty and staff with concealed carry permits to be armed at our colleges and universities, with the condition that institutions could choose to opt out of the law annually. Three years later, every single Arkansas college has continuously chosen to keep guns off their campuses — and they have good reason to do so.

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ARKANSAS TIMES

While some may believe that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad one, the fact is most civilians have not received law enforcement training on how to respond to active shooter incidents and severely lack the expertise required to stop a shooter.

What’s more, allowing the presence of guns on campus would burden campus police and other first responders with the task of having to quickly decipher during a violent incident if a person holding a gun is a “good guy” or criminal.

If you believe our lawmakers should respect the decisions of our campus communities and ensure that Arkansas colleges continue to remain safe spaces in which to learn, I urge you to join Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

There is simply too much at stake to back down now.

Eve Jorgensen Little Rock

Congressional perks Did you know Congress works 10 months out of the year, taking the entire months of August and October off? Sixty days of vacation? Do you get that much? Did you know that in the 10 months they are in session they average three workdays a week? They get four-day

weekends every weekend. Do you get this?

Robert Johnston Little Rock

Lawn commandments Governor Hutchinson signed the bill putting the Ten Commandments on the Capitol lawn. He’s a lawyer and knew it wouldn’t pass the Supreme Court. But before he was a lawyer, he and his wife were graduates of the fundamentalist Bob Jones University. He won’t publicly admit that now, but it still compels him to sign bills by religious nuts that he knows to be illegal.

Sen. Jason Rapert (R-Conway) says the Ten Commandments are the basis of American law. Some questions: Please show me where the Ten Commandments made the genocide of the Native Americans OK? Where did it authorize the Trail Of Tears? Where did it make the Salem Witch Trials OK? Which commandment made slavery OK? Where did Jim Crow get authorized? Where did it make the internment of innocent Japanese Americans morally right?

For that matter, where did it say torture and secret prisons under George W. Bush was OK? The simple fact is that Rapert is a phony who is pushing his religion on us

with the lie that our government was built on the Ten Commandments. The above stated proves that!

And our governor is complicit in that effort because he signs such bills out of religious compulsion or to get the cooperation of his fellow fundamentalists in his “save the rich folks’ money” administration.

Time will bear out what I’m writing here, I believe. Not to mention the taxpayers’ money it will cost us in the courts.

Karl Hansen Hensley

From the web In response to Best and Worst 2016 Always the best read of the year.

Claude Bahls The best read of the worst year.

Yellowdogdaughter Rapert is gonna be pissed he did not get a mention ... or did I miss it?

Arbiter of All Things AOAT In response to an article in the Dec. 15 issue about the medical marijuana commission: I have some concerns about how a commission [whose members] voted against medical cannabis and were appointed by opponents of medical cannabis will be able to make fair, unbiased decisions that would best benefit and meet the needs of seriously ill patients. Alleviating unnecessary suffering is what this law is supposed to be about. It sounds like the commission still wants to continue the arguments for and against it. Dr. Ronda Henry-Tillman said “not everyone in the state voted for it and we have to be conscious of that.”

What has that got to do with anything?

The majority of the state voted for medical cannabis. Period. There wasn’t a rule that said you had to cater to the minority that was against it. Does this mean the commission is going to dilute the law and only halfway honor the “will of the people”? Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2 million people in the presidential election. Do you think Donald’s new Cabinet members are looking for ways not to offend or hurt those 2 million voters? I was wondering about the comment that the commission can also impose fees and receive revenue from other sources. Will these fees and revenue be available to the public? I have a hard time believing that Speaker of the House Jeremy Gillam did not receive any applications [for the commission] from attorneys who have experience in state rules and regulations. You would think Little Rock, the capital of Arkansas, would have an overabundance of them.

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BRIAN CHILSON

EYE ON ARKANSAS

FOGGY NEW YEAR: Visibility was low throughout downtown Little Rock on the first day of the new year.

WEEK THAT WAS what in regard to the new regulatory regime, and considering several of the commission’s five members have no past experience in state government (and were appointed just on Dec. 7), some fumbling is to be expected.

Stay tuned.

Tweet of the Week: Razorback Nation I reject notion the sky is falling! We are strong & will make changes to become stronger! We will fight we will #Neveryield!

— University of Arkansas Athletic Director Jeff Long, after the Razorbacks’ 35-24 loss to Virginia Tech in the Belk Bowl in Charlotte, N.C., on Dec. 29. In a pattern that’s become bitterly familiar to fans, the Hogs led 24-0 at halftime, only to collapse spectacularly in the second half. Best response to Long’s rosy outlook, from Twitter user @c0dy_richardson: “@jefflongUA need to change that never yield hashtag. We always yield in the 2nd half under the @BretBielema regime.”

Greenhorns The newly created Arkansas Medical Marijuana Commission held a series of meetings at the end of December as rule-making deadlines approached. Rules regarding the licensing of cultivation facilities and dispensaries must be in place

by March, according to the pro-pot amendment that voters approved in November. So far, the panel has decided to distribute licenses for five 6

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ARKANSAS TIMES

Gun deaths in Little Rock and around the state cultivation centers (the amendment requires four to eight), each of which will be assigned to one of the five geographic subdivisions drawn by the state Department of Health (Northwest, Northeast, Southwest, Southeast and Central).

Cultivator licenses will be limited to those with significant financial means: The application fee alone will be $15,000, with perhaps much larger licensing fees to be determined. The bar for dispensary licenses, of which there will be 20 to 40 statewide, will likely be much lower.

In its first few meetings, the commission also discussed issues such as lab testing of marijuana products, packaging restrictions and security requirements. However, it already may be overstepping its authority. According to Little Rock lawyer David Couch, who authored the amendment, such regulations are up to the health department and the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Division of the Department of Finance and Administration, while the commission’s authority is strictly limited to licensing. It may not be an intentional power grab, though: There’s much confusion about who exactly will do

Another young child was slain by gunfire in Little Rock in the final days of the year: On Dec. 17, 3-yearold Acen King was struck by a bullet fired into his grandmother’s vehicle by another driver in what police say was “a road rage incident.” Gary Holmes, 33, is accused of firing the shot after an exchange of horn honks at an intersection on Mabelvale Cutoff. He has been charged with capital murder.

In November, a 2-year-old child was shot to death in a drive-by shooting in Little Rock’s Oak Forest neighborhood; no arrest has yet been made in that case. On Dec. 22, a 9-year-old in Little Rock was fatally wounded in an accident while playing with a handgun.

And the state saw four gun homicides on Jan. 2, with a double murder in Fort Smith, one in Faulkner County and one in Pine Bluff, and another on Jan. 3, south of Little Rock.

John Schenck dies The founder of Arkansas’s longest running Pride parade and one of the state’s most visible champions of equal rights for LGBT people died last week.

In Conway, John Schenck was perhaps best known for the Pink House,

ON THE COURTHOUSE STEPS: Robert Loyd and John Schenck (right).

the large Victorian home in which he lived and worked with his husband and partner of almost 41 years, Robert Loyd. Loyd died almost exactly a year earlier, on Dec. 30, 2015.

A New York native, Schenck worked the bar during the 1969 Stonewall Inn riots in Manhattan, which launched the gay rights movement in America. He and Loyd moved to Conway in 1978 to care for Loyd’s ailing mother. The couple organized the first Conway Pride Parade in 2004 and later joined a lawsuit challenging Arkansas’s ban on same-sex marriage.

Although they were first legally married in Canada in 2004, Schenck and Loyd were among the first couples in the state to get a marriage license when the U.S. Supreme Court made same-sex marriage the law of the land in 2015.

OPINION

More on LRSD tax

W

hen the Arkansas DemocratGazette and a Walton Foundation-paid lobbyist, long devoted critics of the Little Rock School District, lead the messaging for a quarter-billion dollars in new tax debt for the district, it is cause for caution.

I wrote earlier about my reluctance to endorse a refinancing of existing school construction debt to require as much as $250 million in additional tax payments for new schools, repairs and interest. My fear is a Trojan horse strategy by the man in control of Little Rock schools, education commissioner Johnny Key — on behalf of minders at the Walton Family Foundation and the sympathetic owner of the daily newspaper — to upgrade Little Rock school facilities ahead of a takeover of their management by private charter school operators.

At a minimum, I’d hope Key would declare opposition to a renewed legislative effort to allow private takeover of school districts in “academic distress.” Little Rock meets that definition because five of its 48 schools fall short of test score proficiency.

(So, too, do some charter schools, but Key’s

department doesn’t seem to mind.)

Charter schoolers complain eternally that they don’t have construction MAX money as do local BRANTLEY school districts. maxbrantley@arktimes.com Nationwide, charter schools have difficulty selling bonds for facilities precisely because they lack a tax base. A takeover of taxpayer-financed, recently improved buildings in Little Rock thus would be a dream come true for the Walton gang.

There’s been speculation that the new borrowing is meant to drive Little Rock into financial distress. That would add another justification to continued state control. Little Rock already faces deep budget cuts because of the coming loss of state desegregation aid. It faces more problems because of declining enrollment (at a loss of $6,600 per student per year) linked to expansion of charter schools. The bond refinance would dig the hole deeper. Why? Because, thanks to a growing tax base, the 12.4 mills of bond-pledged property tax currently

ACA and the GOP

C

ongress and the new president in a matter of weeks will repeal big parts of the Affordable Care Act, at least nominally, but what will follow that wondrous event will not be the contentment that Republicans have long promised, but even more political tumult. This time, Republicans will have to man the ramparts.

It may not reach the intensity of the 2010 congressional recess when Democrats futilely and poorly defended themselves against charges that by passing Obamacare they had taken away people’s Medicare benefits, destroyed millions of jobs and businesses, ended doctor-patient relationships, endangered the health insurance of millions of people, caused medical spending to soar, signed the death warrants of frail grandmothers and sent the national deficit skyrocketing. None of that ever happened, but exactly the opposite, especially if you lived in Arkansas, and hostility to the law moderated.

Now, Republicans will be on the defensive and under pressure to find a way to avoid the loss of often life-saving health insurance for some 20 million Americans, nearly all of them working folks that Donald Trump said he was going to protect.

Not only that, but, depending on how Congress and the president configure the repeal, the national budget ERNEST deficit will immeDUMAS diately reverse its downward course and soar once again.

How will they explain and justify that?

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, now in the hands of Republicans, produced a study in September showing that Obamacare had steadily shaved the national deficit since it took effect and forecasting that the law’s repeal would add some $137 billion to the deficit over the next decade, largely because it would restore high Medicare payments to providers and end payroll taxes and a surtax paid by people with very high incomes and taxes on insurance companies and makers of brand-name drugs and medical equipment.

Congress could stall the repeal of the taxes to keep the money flowing and avoid the exploding deficit, but ending Obamacare’s taxes on the rich and drug manufacturers has been the biggest driver of the repeal movement. If nothing else, those

produces millions annually in excess of the amount needed to make bond payments.

State law allows capture of that money for operations, but not if it is repledged to construction debt.

A Little Rock School District expert told me: “The borrowing of $160 million at this point, without some accommodation for the cuts that are already necessary, the operations cuts needed to fund the additional debt service and the cuts from enrollment losses, seems to be fiscally dangerous.”

The Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce, which spearheaded the state takeover of the school district, is working to build support for a vote on bond refinancing. Some of its members aren’t wholly in the pocket of the Waltons’ “school choice” alliance. One, whose devotion to the schools I credit, said: “What are the options? We can turn the school district over to the charters, which I don’t want to do. I totally get what is happening with their drain of students, but I have to work with the hand I am dealt and I worry about the kids that will be left and I do not want to abandon them. They will still live here and need a boost.”

But this school advocate acknowledges a further drain of students is likely in the years ahead, maybe by 5,000 or so. Those remain-

ing, on balance, likely will be more difficult students — poorer and further behind.

The district needs more money — even a tax INCREASE, which I’d happily support if I didn’t fear state education leadership’s desire for the district’s constructive demise There’s little reason for trust. When not bitterly trashing Little Rock schools, Walton lobbyists and subsidized propagandists at the University of Arkansas pump misleading “research” into the pages of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The latest is that charter schools are responsible for only a small percentage of transfers out of the Little Rock School District. Others move or go to private schools, too.

This ignores a key fact. Expanding charter schools take children BEFORE they ever enter the Little Rock School District. And the state doesn’t apply the same accountability standards to charter schools that it applies to Little Rock schools. Furthermore, the researchers don’t talk about the success that many of those leaving the district have achieved in what the Waltonites love to brand as failures. Nor do they delve in any useful fashion into the impact of charters on the achievement of those taken away.

When they say it’s all about the kids, I’m more inclined to believe it’s more about the money.

have to go.

Republicans always promised that they would replace Obamacare with something better and find a way to keep some of the overwhelmingly popular parts of it, although none of the repeal bills carried provisions to replace or keep anything.

Republican strategists say the actual end to the big features of the law — expanded Medicaid coverage for the working poor and private and often subsidized insurance for people who do not have employer coverage — probably will be postponed until at least 2019 and perhaps even later. That will give them time to draft a new plan to provide some form of coverage for those 20 million people that will not be called Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act. It also will stave off outrage before the 2018 congressional elections. They don’t want a repeat of the 2012 and 2014 congressional elections, this time with Republicans on the receiving end of voter distemper.

The unexpected election of Donald Trump presents the congressional party with a dilemma. Two years ago, House Republicans sued in federal court to strike down the adjustable tax credits that form the basis of the Affordable Care Act. People with family incomes below 400 percent of the poverty line can get sliding federal tax credits to help them afford private insur-

ance premiums. The D.C. Court of Appeals postponed the hearing on the appeal until February, after the election. Presuming that, unlike President Obama, President Trump will not send lawyers to defend the constitutionality of the tax credits, the Republicans’ chances of winning the case in a now uncontested appeal go up. If they win the appeal, millions of working people could instantly lose their coverage, a crisis the party is not ready to confront.

No one watches the unfolding drama with more anxiety than Governor Hutchinson and forces in the Arkansas legislature from both parties who know what Obamacare has meant for the state’s economy and specifically the state budget. A sudden or even prolonged demise of the health program will wreck the state’s budget and legislative and gubernatorial tax-cutting ambitions, imperil community and state hospitals and stall the growth engine that the Medicaid expansion and premium subsidies created in 2013. The state’s unemployment rate plunged to one of the lowest in the country.

Aside from the budget and human implications of ending medical coverage for 400,000 Arkansans, there is the little calculus of what happens if they suddenly are confronted with the knowledge of who their real political friends are?

Follow Arkansas Blog on Twitter: @ArkansasBlog

arktimes.com JANUARY 5, 2017, 2016

7

Real America

F

ollowing the 2016 election, some readers have accused me of being out of touch with the Real America — that mythic locale inhabited by people who vote like them and watch the same TV shows they do.

“Duck Dynasty,” for example, a program that bears about as close a resemblance to the rural South as “Gomer Pyle” did to the U.S. Marines. Real Americans supposedly love that show, a cornball reality show about a family of heavily bearded children who get into harmless scrapes involving guns and explosives.

No thanks. My own children are grown.

So in an effort to measure my Real America quotient, I recently took a yearend celebrity quiz in the morning newspaper. You know, which celebrities got married, divorced, won awards, had children, got canceled, excommunicated or pistol-whipped during 2016?

Just kidding. To my knowledge, no red carpet habitues actually got shunned by the pope or beaten senseless, although somebody called Kim Kardashian apparently did get robbed of her jewels at gunpoint.

I believe she’s one of several sisters famous for having, well, massive personal assets that she displays as widely as possible. Or that may be one of her sisters. I can’t be sure.

Anyway, one of four fellow notables supposedly said, “I literally am thinking about her every day like she’s my friend, even though I don’t know her.”

I was confident it wasn’t Melania Trump, and I doubted Helen Mirren could possibly say anything so cosmically dumb. No, the correct answer wasn’t Lindsay Lohan. The culprit was Lena Dunham, who I’ve kind of heard of, although “Girls,” her HBO program, is like a Narcotics Anonymous meeting without the laughs.

That was as close as I got to a correct answer. My score on the quiz was a big fat zero. My Real America score is zip, zero, nada. Nothing.

Many celebrities I’d never heard of at all. Others, well, I recognized their names, but knew only that I had no ambition to know more.

Kanye West. Enough said.

And why did Justin Bieber quit Instagram? Who knew? Who cares?

Which of four “celebs was not at Taylor Swift’s Fourth of July beach bash?”

Never heard of any of them, sad to say. I guessed “Gigi Hadid,” because 8

JANUARY 5, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

that sounded like an exotic babe with Kardashian-esque personal assets, who’d attract too GENE much attention in LYONS a bathing suit.

Wrong again. Gigi attended, ginormous American breasts and all. (I Googled her).

“How did Ryan Seacrest sign off on the finale of ‘American Idol?’ ” No clue. Never watched it. Couldn’t pick him out of a police lineup.

Anyway, I’ve evidently disappeared completely over the celebrity event horizon. I fear there’s no coming back.

Indeed, I cherish the memory of a longago faculty party where a woman indignantly accused me of being “the kind of man who watches ‘Charlie’s Angels.’ ” “Never seen it,” I said.

I must have offended by indicating an appreciation of female beauty.

Never mind that Homer’s “Iliad,” the oldest narrative in the Western tradition, centers upon the intoxicating allure of Helen of Troy — “the face that launched a thousand ships,” as Christopher Marlowe put it. To a certain kind of professor, it’s nevertheless a forbidden theme.

She expressed incredulity.

My wife rescued me. “I don’t believe he ever has seen it,” she said.

It’s of such moments that enduring love is made.

Not that I’m above popular culture.

If challenged, I’m sure I could have named the entire Chicago Cubs roster. The Rolling Stones hadn’t made an album I didn’t own. We rarely missed an episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” My sons called “All in the Family” “the man-like-grandpa show,” based upon Carroll O’Connor’s uncanny impersonation of my New Jersey father.

But “Charlie’s Angels” was too vapid by half. To put it another way, Mary Tyler Moore, yes. Helen Mirren, definitely. Kim Kardashian? An airhead famous for being shameless. There’s an awful lot of that going around these days.

As for Real America, maybe if I’d ever seen a single episode of “The Apprentice” or “Celebrity Apprentice” I might have seen the preposterous figure of Donald J. Trump coming.

But I surely did not.

Did you?

PEARLS ABOUT SWINE

Changes needed

T

hose who have read this column with some degree of regularity know that I’ve held fast to the belief that Bret Bielema can and will revive the Arkansas football program.

I like the guy. He’s affable and selfeffacing, defers appropriately to his support staff, and is seemingly quite passionate about the job he holds and cognizant of the expectations (those unwieldy ones that the fan base foists on him) that it connotes.

Bielema was operating at a steady if somewhat listless pace getting toward his objectives. About six weeks ago, it looked like his fourth team at Arkansas would be his most accomplished, against long odds. With a first-year starting quarterback operating behind an incomprehensibly porous line, and with a defense that could be a sieve in a moment’s notice, he had an outside shot at taking this ragtag group to nine or 10 wins as recently as mid-November.

A funny thing happened on the way to Faurot (Field), though. When the Hogs arrived in Columbia to face East bottom-feeder Missouri in the season finale, they looked disturbingly lackadaisical in a game against the only team they were favored to beat in conference play. Even in the first half, when Arkansas built a 24-7 lead, there were leaks and problems afoot, and the emperor got disrobed in a big damn hurry over the final 30 minutes of play in a 28-24 loss that amplified all the lingering concerns about Bielema and his leadership of the program. The team stifled itself in the second half, a trend that has ensnared Razorback football mighty hard over those three prior campaigns and into this one, and had no roadmap for an escape.

So there was this nasty, foul taste heading to the Belk Bowl in Charlotte a month after that defeat, and it almost played out in a way that smacked of black comedy.

The team that can’t close builds a 24-0 lead on the strength of a really well-played first half, even against the backdrop of some questionable officiating, and then literally gags on every bite it takes after halftime.

And the scene worsened as the day progressed. The pregame disclosure that Jeremy Sprinkle was suspended due to an embarrassing shoplifting farce at, of all places, the local Belk, followed by Drew Morgan’s fumbles and boorish, ejectionworthy behavior as the game fell apart, led one to the natural conclusion that Bielema’s control of the program is loosening at a breakneck rate. Virginia Tech

was, of course, the favorite, and a competent team in all respects, so it took full advantage of all gaffes and missteps BEAU by its opponent.

WILCOX That means 2017 starts with a team in turmoil, just as reconstruction and expansion of Reynolds Razorback Stadium is in its full-throated, cash-snatching puberty. And for what? A stadium that will presumably seat another 10,000 fans in the fall is going to find no takers. Bielema’s teams are noted for playing hard, which is commendable, but also for giving ground in the second half at an alarming frequency. Arkansas has lost a dozen games in the last three years in which it led or was tied at halftime or thereafter. The team could have been so much better than 22-17 over that stretch.

For a while, the progress his teams had made was enough to offset this. There was comfort to be drawn from the fact that the Hogs were actually competing in these games, rather than just coughing them up minutes after kickoff. But in 2016, things were different. The Hogs lost six games, and the first four were of the quitbefore-you-start variety, then the final two reflected the old trend in full bloom again.

This, of course, has a chilling effect on recruiting, which Bielema cannot afford to flub, given that he’s not seen as some kind of tactician who can routinely outcoach the other guy. He has to have the proverbial horses, and the terminus of 2016 is so bad that it’s going to be hell trying to get top-tier talent into the stables. Robb Smith’s come under all manner of fire for the failings of the defense, but Dan Enos just captained an offense that, despite gobs of production on the surface, failed to breach the end zone in the second halves of four of the six losses.

The flaws are rampant and extreme, and they revealed themselves at the worst possible time.

Are changes, then, forthcoming? Let’s just say they’d better be, en masse and with conviction. There cannot be a repeat of this type of year in 2017, not because of the wins and losses, but because of the dearth of confidence in the direction of the program. Personnel corrections will ebb that angry tide somewhat, and Bielema, who came here four years ago on the promise of being able to hire and fire high-level staff, is again faced with that crossroads.

This time, though, it’s to save his own backside.

e n o d e v o l a r o Have you

THE OBSERVER NOTES ON THE PASSING SCENE

Resolutions

N

o more clinging to material things, unless those material things are life preservers tossed as I go down for the third and final time, the few remaining strands of my oncemajestic locks, or the skids of the last helicopter out before the fall of Little Rock. No more apologizing for anything, except my secret, shameful love of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” on Bravo. I’m sorry for anyone I have harmed with my addiction to Phaedra’s delicious cattiness, and believe I need help.

No more drinking in the morning, even though it’s beer o’clock somewhere. No more plotting after ways to get myself one of those medical marijuana cards, because that stuff always makes me feel like I’m watching the world through a hole excavated in the back of my own head.

No more reading deep and meaningful think pieces on how this election is proof that Yours Truly, as a latte-sipping libtard, must find ways to understand the tormented mind of hicks from the sticks who spent eight years calling a president who had previously been a constitutional law prof with a J.D. from Harvard an idiot, even as the stress of saving our sorry asses from Great Depression Part Deux aged him so much that 2016 Obama looks like 2007 Obama’s wizened old Paw Paw. Seriously, check the photos. The man is HIS OWN GRANDPA, and all he got in exchange is a Nobel Peace Prize and eight years of being told he’s a worthless Kenyan socialist. No more driving through the more rural environs, head out the window, yelling at the top of my lungs: “How about you dopes try understanding ME for a change?” No more denying that while we may win the battle against cancer someday, there is no cure for dumb. No more reading Dorito Mussolini’s loony 3 a.m. tweets first thing in the morning, because all that does is make me rage-shatter my sensibly-sized glass of grapefruit juice in one clenched fist, creating a hell of a mess that I then have to angrily sponge up while wishing plagues and tribula-

tions on 80,000 anonymous dipshits in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

No more standing in the way of the Ten Commandments Monument on the Capitol lawn, because approval will virtually guarantee the Satanic Temple will get to install its bitchin’ statue of Baphomet as well. Not only will it be a tourist draw like you won’t believe, the sight of Sen. Jason Rapert (R-Eally, this is the best you can do, Conway?) scurrying to his Ford Coal Roller 500 past throngs of nose-ringed kids waiting to shoot photos with Ol’ Splitfoot for their Instagram pages will almost be worth shredding the wall between church and state.

Most of all: No more denying that life is a magic garden of forking paths, each choice you make — each choice made for you by others, if you let them — causing those paths not taken to instantly seal over with impenetrable hedge so that you can never even glimpse where you might have gone had you cast your heel in the other direction. Choose wisely, traveler. No more sitting in the La-ZBoy in our fleece britches and “I Stand With Coach Petrino!” T-shirts, expecting others to clean up this godforsaken mess. No more letting others do the heavy lifting and guesswork, because those we trusted to handle it during “Orange Is the New Black” bingewatches have failed us horribly. No more using that little “crying” emoticon on Facebook, which the Quiz Kids in Palo Alto couldn’t have launched at a worse time for national morale. Put on your angry eyes if you want to turn this around. No more looking back wistfully at the past, sighing over that which might have been but now can’t be fixed. The overflowing outhouse of a year that was 2016 is in the books. Nothing to do now but toss in a scoop of lime and shut the door.

Nothing to do now except to show your war face and sound your barbaric yawp over the roof of the world. Nothing to do except to say: The past is full, so the only way open is forward to the dim and uncertain future. I will meet you there, brothers and sisters. Amen.

?

H T I W D E S O N G A I D N E E B NI A

E R H P O SC HIZ

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9

Arkansas Reporter

THE

A PIPE WILL RUN THROUGH IT: The route of the Diamond Pipeline, from Cushing, Okla., to Memphis.

Pipeline bill readied Sabin to reintroduce measure to protect landowners.

BY LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK

T

he Standing Rock Sioux aren’t the only people who don’t want their land and water exposed to crude oil from the Bakken Shale.

The Diamond Pipeline project, which is snaking a Valero oil pipeline across Arkansas from Cushing, Okla., to its refinery in Memphis, has also created unhappiness. But perhaps because it affects folk individual by individual, rather than the contiguous property of a tribe, public demonstrations against it have been few, and not well attended.

Rep. Warwick Sabin (D-Little Rock), who questions whether the pipeline meets the standard of public use that state law sets in granting the right of eminent domain to oil companies, is the voice of the disparate people affected by the Diamond pipeline. He will reintroduce his bill “The Property Rights Pro10

JANUARY 5, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

tection Act” in the 91st General Assembly that convenes Monday, Jan. 9.

Though conservative lawmakers usually seek to limit takings of private property, members of the House Insurance and Commerce Committee showed themselves in 2015 to be reluctant to place any burdens on the oil industry and did not give Sabin’s bill a “do pass” out of committee.

Arkansas allows oil and gas pipelines companies to exercise a right of eminent domain if property owners do not agree to grant them easements. Sabin’s bill, which addresses oil pipelines solely, would require that companies provide landowners better notice of possible taking, documents that spell out the landowner’s legal rights, make the oil company liable for damage done to a property, and require the company to

demonstrate to the state Public Service Commission the pipeline’s benefit to the public good.

Valero and Plains All American Pipeline’s $900 million project to transport crude oil through the state’s mid-section first became known in 2014, when Plains began surveying properties along the proposed path. The company began acquiring rights and clearing easements in 2015. The companies were required to get permission from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to cross the state’s streams and rivers, and did so in August. State agencies have little regulatory authority over the route.

Allison Millsaps, who lives near Dover, testified in 2015 before Insurance and Commerce about her family’s bad experience with Diamond Project surveyors.

Her mother-in-law, Clara Dotson, who lives on 80 acres outside Dover, received no prior notice about Diamond’s plans.

Instead, a surveyor just “knocked on her door,” Millsaps told legislators, and told her he was there to survey her land; when Dotson said no, he told her the company would just take it, which it did, by getting a court to grant a temporary taking.

Landowners are entitled to compensation for the taking of their property.

However, in one case, Plains/Valero offered one couple less than $5,000 for

an easement on a route that ran 24 feet from the foundation of their $200,000 home, a route they said would make it difficult to sell. They went to court and eventually settled with the company for an undisclosed sum.

Under Sabin’s bill, the company would have had to provide Dotson prior notice, explain the eminent domain law and inform her what her rights were regarding fair compensation for the taking. “We were left in the dark, we didn’t know what was going on, we didn’t know where on the property the line was going to be, we didn’t know if it was going to be above ground or below,” Millsaps told legislators. “They were not open with us at all. It was a horrifying experience.”

Rep. Mark Lower y (R-Maumelle) suggested to Millsaps that more regulation would add to people’s confusion. Millsaps rejected that, saying more information would be better. “We can’t protect ourselves and you can help protect us,” she told him.

To Rep. Charlie Collins (R-Fayetteville), who suggested that making oil companies be more transparent about their business would raise the price of gasoline, Sabin noted that he, like Collins, is a “free market capitalist,” and that the government shouldn’t “conspire” with private industry to keep

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prices below market rates. He also reminded Collins that he was before the committee representing Arkansas voters who want to protect their property rights.

The Clarksville City Council passed a resolution Dec. 12 endorsing Sabin’s bill. Clarksville residents were alarmed by the Diamond route’s nearness to its drinking water supply. After the city threatened to testify against the company before the Public Service Commission, Plains All American put $6.6 million into an escrow account for damage mitigation and relocation of the intake valve in the lake that supplies Clarksville and a large part of Johnson County its water. The escrow account can be raised to $8 million if other issues arise, Alderman Danna Schneider said. (The PSC’s regulatory powers over the pipeline are restricted to a determination on whether it would threaten public safety or violate state law on public use.)

Sabin, who says there is a “lot of interest on a bipartisan basis” and more awareness of the takings issue than there was two years ago, maintains that the Diamond Pipeline is not a public use. “No one in Arkansas is going to utilize the oil that is being transported across our state. If you believe in the free market, the company ought to find a way to convey its product across people’s property by negotiating a fair price instead of relying on the government to, in effect, condemn the property to give to a corporation. That is the opposite of capitalism and what we understand to be our private property rights,” he said in an interview.

Sabin also said he was concerned about the safety record of Plains All American, which was indicted in early 2016 in California in connection with an spill that covered Refugio Beach in Santa Barbara with 140,000 gallons of crude oil.

Protests against the pipeline continue. In December, two members of a group called Arkansas Rising chained themselves to a backhoe to stop construction of the line near Forrest City.

Frank Klein, 61, of Mount Ida, and Amber Stoelbarger, 24, of Jonesboro were arrested on charges of criminal trespass. They are scheduled to appear in court Jan. 18.

THE

BIG PICTURE

Inconsequential News Quiz: Bigly New Year Edition Play at home, while wondering what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born!

1) Razorback football player Jeremy Sprinkle was arrested and later suspended from the team just before New Year’s Eve. What alleged crime landed him in hot water with the police and kept the senior tight end from playing in the Belk Bowl in Charlotte, N.C.?

A) He was allegedly caught shoplifting $200 in merchandise.

B) From, amazingly, a Belk store.

C) Even though every player participating in the Belk Bowl had been given a $450 gift card to spend at the store, plus a 20 percent discount on all merchandise.

D) All of the above.

2) The Arkansas Medical Marijuana Commission recently set a crucial new rule governing those who wish to cultivate marijuana for the state’s voter-approved medical marijuana system. What was the rule?

A) Sets a fee of $15,000 for new cultivation center applications, with only $7,500 refunded if the application is rejected.

B) Marijuana must be tested to make sure it doesn’t transform users into iguanas, as seen in the 1991 Cheech and Chong film, “Nice Dreams.”

C) Ass, gas or grass, nobody rides for free.

D) Zero tolerance for reefer madness, reefer grumpiness and/or any reefer-related case of the Mondays.

3) KARK, Channel 4, reported just before Christmas that a Cabot father called police on his daughter because he didn’t like the present she gave him. What was the present?

A) Trump: The Game (now with nuclear annihilation bonus round!).

B) Home colonoscopy playset.

C) A prank package that sprayed glitter everywhere when the box was opened.

D) Remaindered copy of Gov. Mike Huckabee’s 2015 book, “I’m Fat Again, but It’s Obama’s Fault.”

USERNAME: saddog4U OCCUPATION: Drug sniffing K9

4) In December, the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office announced it had taken a surprising step to close a criminal case. What did it do?

INTERESTS: Sniffing for anything really, but you know, buttz and drugs mainly

A) Brought in ace gumshoe Berryville Finnegan to help solve the Case of the SOMETHING UNIQUE ABOUT ME: Purloined Pekinese.

I’ll love you long time for who you B) Set up a round of doggie speed are as a unique individual. dating for its lovesick drug dog, Bluto P. Crimehound.

C) Employed a psychic to help locate a truckload of interracial gay porn hijacked on the way to Harrison.

D) Paid $2,400 in Bitcoin to hackers to release its infected computers from the “ransomware” that encrypted its system, making all files unreadable.

5) Early in December, the Dallas Morning News reported that Arkansas had triumphed over Texas in the latest skirmish of a long-running battle. What’s the issue that was (momentarily) settled?

A) Arkansas cheese dip was declared superior to Texas queso during a blind taste test held by Republicans in the U.S. Senate.

B) Arkansas State Police foiled yet another attempt by Texas officials to smuggle a sedated Ted Nugent into Arkansas and leave him at a highway rest stop.

C) Texas dissidents successfully reached freedom by flying a crude hot air balloon over the fortified wall separating East and West Texarkana.

D) Texans have agreed to stop referring to Arkansas as “Louisiana’s hat” if Arkansans will stop calling Texas “America’s ballsack.”

Answers: D, A, C, D, A

LISTEN UP

arktimes.com JANUARY 5, 2017, 2016

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I

LEFT: A page from “March: Book Three.”

getting up to that kind of trouble for years, and shows no signs of stopping any time soon.

SOOPHIE

Little Rock native Nate Powell is the first cartoonist to win the National Book Award.

His graphic novel ‘March,’ the memoir of U.S. Rep. John Lewis, may well be the mother text for a new era of nonviolent resistance.

RETT PEEK

f you’ve followed the quality and depth of graphic novels over the past 20 years, you’ll know how odd it is to say that Little Rock native Nate Powell is the first cartoonist ever to win the National Book Award. That’s no knock against Powell, by the way.

As a longtime fan of the format, Powell admits it’s surprising to him, too.

At the National Book Award ceremony in November 2016, Powell shared the prize with writer Andrew Aydin and U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) for the “March” trilogy. Part memoir, part history, part handbook for a new generation of nonviolent social activists to which the books are dedicated, the series employs Powell’s black-andwhite imagery and a moving script by Aydin and Lewis to powerfully chronicle Lewis’ Alabama youth, his awakening to the injustices of Jim Crow, and his trial-by-fire young adulthood, when, as the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the future congressman helped spearhead the effort to break the back of institutionalized segregation in the South through nonviolent protest.

The award was a bright way station on a still-winding road for Powell, who has been playing in punk bands and writing and drawing underground comics and graphic novels of his own since he was a teenager growing up in North Little Rock. While the National Book Award is a silver feather in the cap of the 38-year-old artist, Powell sees the bigger accomplishment of the “March” trilogy — with its account of how patriotic Americans once met hate, police batons and fire hoses with love and open hands and somehow won the day — in what it may mean to readersturned-leaders in the next four years.

With President-elect Donald Trump ascendant and progressives warning that nonviolent protests of a size and vigor unseen since the 1960s are necessary if we are to preserve not only the nation’s social progress but perhaps the American experiment in representative democracy itself, Powell hopes “March” may someday be seen not just as a piece of history, but as one of the principal texts in the coming fight for the soul of the nation.

Lewis, repeatedly jailed, fined and beaten as a young man in his quest for equality, has called that kind of protest “good trouble.” Powell has been

POWELL: Shared the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature with Andrew Aydin and Rep. John Lewis.

Born in Little Rock in 1978, Powell grew up all over America. His father was career Air Force, and Powell’s boyhood included stints living near bases in Montana and Alabama. When he was 10, his dad retired from the military, and the family returned to Arkansas and settled in North Little Rock.

By then, Powell said, he’d been into comics for years, thanks mostly to 1980s TV shows featuring the Incredible Hulk, Wonder Woman and Spider-Man. He’s been drawing since he was a small child, and began to take seriously the idea of writing and drawing his own comics in the sixth grade.

Very much a part of the 1980s generation obsessed with toy-centric kids’ shows like “G.I. Joe” and “Transformers,” Powell soon started buying the comics associated with those brands, along with the early “independent, gravelly, black-and-white” incarnation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before the series hit the big time and became lunchbox worthy. Looking around in the local comic book store for another series in the same vein of “G.I. Joe,” Powell came upon “The ’Nam” by writer Doug Murray, a series that ran between 1986 and 1993.

“It was fiction, but it was more or less a realistic, unflinching account of drafted teenagers who were forced to serve in the Vietnam War,” Powell said.

“Growing up in a military family, being a G.I. Joe kid in the Reagan era, this comic, ‘The ’Nam,’ really opened a lot of doors to me to begin having real conversations with my dad, to understand stuff like cognitive dissonance, and to understand the moral and ethical quandaries of war and political structure.”

Powell said the comic book and the conversations it spawned with his father also opened his eyes to the idea that a lot of what he had read about war in “G.I. Joe” comics had nothing to do with the reality of war. Those realizations were soon buttressed by other, gritty titles in the more realistic comics of the late Reagan era. Soon, Powell was reading edgier underground comics by artists like Chester Brown, Geof Darrow and Frank Miller while expanding his artistic horizons through the well-stocked

BY DAVID KOON arktimes.com JANUARY 5, 2017, 2016

13

, cont.

IN BLACK AND WHITE: Pages from Powell’s books “Swallow Me Whole” and “Any Empire” (inset).

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JANUARY 5, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

Follow Nate Powell on Twitter: @Nate_Powell_ Art

Japanese anime section of a neighborhood video store.

“That kind of changed my path in life,” he said. Powell, along with his friends Mike Lierly and Nate Wilson, would go on to write and self-publish a comic book series called “D.O.A.,” with the first issue appearing in September 1992.

The same year, Lierly, Powell and other friends at North Little Rock High founded the pioneering and beloved local punk band Soophie Nun Squad, which didn’t formally call it quits until 2006. Part band, part arts collective, part performance art troupe, Soophie’s shows were an explosion of expression and creativity, with most songs driven by a chorus of voices. The band recorded almost incessantly, and after Powell graduated from North Little Rock High in 1996 — after which he attended George Washington University in D.C. before transferring to the cartooning program at the School of Visual Arts in New York — Soophie toured annually between 1997 and 2006, including three tours of Europe in 2002, 2003 and 2006.

In all, the band played over 400 gigs in the U.S. and 14 countries.

Powell remembers his time with Soophie fondly. During the latter half of the 1990s, he would work six months out of the year in different places throughout the country, then rendezvous with bandmates in Central Arkansas to record and plan the next tour.

Even as he was living the punk band dream with his friends, the urge to be a comic book artist never left him. Powell said that as high school came to a close, he took his cartooning to the next level by dedicating himself to art as a career. Powell remembered that his parents, while always supportive of his art, weren’t immediately on board.

“You’ve got to remember this was 1996,” he said. “This is peak Clinton era, middle-of-the-road, middle-class prosperity. There was definitely a comfort zone that I was in danger of violating by saying, ‘Well, I’m going to throw it all away and go to art school so I can be a comic book artist.’ There were definitely some intergenerational issues and some class issues there between my parents and I. It was a bit of a struggle to actually push my way through and convince them of my argument.” Powell said that struggle would continue to some extent until 2003, when his first commercially produced book, “Tiny

Giants,” a collection of his previously self-produced comics, was published

by Soft Skull Press.

“From my parents’ perspective, it was the first time they could have a tangible example of something they could be proud of,” Powell said. “I think once they got over that hump, by seeing a physical product that someone else had lent some approval by publishing, then they were like, ‘OK, this really is something that’s serious.’ ” From then on, Powell said, his parents were “staunch allies” of his cartooning career.

Maralie Armstrong-Rial became a member of Soophie Nun Squad in 1997, soon after starting at North Little Rock High in the ninth grade. Powell, she said, was one of the first people she met after moving to North Little Rock. She remembers Powell and the circle of friends who formed the core of Soophie as friendly and welcoming. “They were hilarious,” she said. “I didn’t like going to school, but I liked going because it meant I could see them and hang out.”

Soophie was like an extended family, Armstrong-Rial said. While every member had his or her own level of influence over what she called “the project” that was Soophie Nun Squad, she said, Powell was the one who pushed for action over talk.

“He helped organize all the energy people had,” Armstrong-Rial said. “We’d talk about a tour, about this, about that, and he would say, ‘Let’s get it done.’ He handled some of the nitty-gritty things people didn’t jump to so much.”

Armstrong-Rial said she was first exposed to Powell’s cartoons through his work as an illustrator with the North Little Rock High School newspaper. “I’d keep those,” she said. “They were very much in line with what he cared about in the world.”

Eli Milholland, an early member of Soophie who has been married to Armstrong-Rial for 15 years, said that Powell became a source of creative inspiration soon after he met the young Nate in elementary school. “He drew every day, every chance he could find, during school and at home,” Milholland said. “In the following summers, he and his other comic book friends started to flesh out what would become his first self-published comics. Throughout the next six years, he produced comic books, poetic and emotional zines, social and political cartoons for school newspapers,

and self-published cassettes and records of local bands.”

Milholland said the bonds of his Soophie family are still as strong as his blood family, even though they’re scattered across the country. That includes Powell, who now lives with his wife, Rachel, and two children in Bloomington, Ind. Like Powell, Milholland remembers the Soophie tours as a time of exuberant creativity.

“I recall being on what I imagine was our third European tour with Soophie

decision of his early life, he said, was structured around recording or touring with Soophie Nun Squad.

“One reason I think my comic career didn’t really take off until about 2008 was this structure built around Soophie Nun Squad,” he said. “Once we stopped being an active band in 2006, all of a sudden it became very clear to me that I was now free to structure my time any way I wanted. ... There is a part of me that wonders about that alternative timeline where I would have put every-

SOOPHIE TIME: One incarnation of the punk band Soophie Nun Squad.

and I looked over at Nate, gazing out of the window of the van at some mountains as we were driving across whatever country,” Milholland said, “and I saw him as the 12-year-old that I had met many years prior. I started to wonder how we got all the way across the globe in a van full of kids, performing music to strangers based on the desire alone. It was because of Nate. He had the drive and courage to contact strangers and set up those tours, the practical and the philosophical abilities to make them all run so smoothly. We all had the desire to see them happen, but it was Nate that made sure that they did.”

While Powell wouldn’t trade his time in Soophie for a different past, he said he can’t help but wonder how his present might have been different had he farmed all his creative energy into cartooning and building his comic book career, as did many of his classmates at the School for Visual Arts. Almost every

thing in the comic basket, but Soophie Nun Squad is a very special entity. It’s one that — especially in hindsight — is so centered around this familial bond that we all shared. The level of love and dedication and friendship among band members of Soophie is so strong.”

‘THE NINE WORD PROBLEM’ Powell graduated from SVA in New York in 2000 after winning awards and grants for his work as a student cartoonist. Having started work as a caregiver for the developmentally disabled the previous year, Powell would work in the field as his day job for most of the next decade, taking jobs all over the country for several months a year before regrouping with his bandmates for what he called “Soophie time.” Meanwhile, Powell continued self-publishing comics through his Food Chain imprint in the

early years. While at SVA, Powell had made contacts that would be crucial to his future career in the arts, including befriending Chris Staros and Brett Warnock, who would go on to become the founders of the small graphic novel publisher Top Shelf Productions, based in Marietta, Ga. Top Shelf would eventually publish Powell’s award-winning graphic story collections “Swallow Me Whole” in 2008 and “Any Empire” in 2011.

Powell quit his career as a caregiver in early 2009 and started working as a cartoonist full-time. It’s a job that requires him to constantly work on at least two projects to stay above water financially. Unbeknownst to Powell, by the time he dived into life as a full-time illustrator, the project that would eventually win him the National Book Award had been in the works for years.

Andrew Aydin is the digital director and policy adviser for Lewis, who represents Georgia’s 5th Congressional District. An avid comic book reader and collector since he was a youngster, Aydin was already working for Lewis when he came across a historical oddity that melded his interests in comics and the history of civil rights struggle, a title called “Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story.”

Long out of print, the short 1957 comic book played a crucial role in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s by telling the story of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56. Published on pulp paper by the hundreds of thousands, the comic was used as a teaching tool in the early days of the civil rights movement, handed out to young people who wished to join the struggle against segregation. Aydin would go on to write about the importance of the comic book to the movement in his graduate thesis at Georgetown University.

Spurred by the idea of teaching nonviolence through comic books, Aydin spoke to Lewis about doing a similar project: a graphic novel version of his story to help a new generation of activists. With some badgering, Aydin eventually convinced Lewis of the value of the project, and would later conduct over 30 hours of interviews with the congressman. He turned those interviews into the 300-page script for what would become the first book of the “March” trilogy.

With a draft of the script in hand,

arktimes.com JANUARY 5, 2017, 2016

15

cont.

,

MARCHING ON: (from left) Aydin, Lewis and Powell at the National Book Award ceremony.

Lewis and Aydin signed with Top Shelf Comics in late 2010, and the search was on for an illustrator who could strike just the right tone. Presented with the work of several artists who had previously worked with Top Shelf, Aydin and Lewis eventually settled on the art of Powell. Working in Powell’s favor was that he was then finishing up work on another graphic novel, “The Silence of Our Friends,” a fictional story of the civil rights movement set in Texas.

“We got the final versions back, and we were like, OK, that’s it,” Aydin said.

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ARKANSAS TIMES

“Maybe two or three of the pages that Nate did to try out for ‘March’ actually ended up in the final version of book one.” Powell formally signed on with the project in November 2011.

Like a lot of Americans, Powell said he had a bare outline of the history of the civil rights struggle but was light on specifics. It’s an issue that is so prevalent, Powell said, that the Southern Poverty Law Center calls it “The Nine Word Problem.”

“It’s the idea that most kids graduate from high school knowing nine words

about the civil rights movement: ‘Rosa Parks,’ ‘Martin Luther King,’ ‘I have a dream.’ That’s absolutely true, if your history class even gets to the movement, which mine never did.”

Armed with Aydin’s script, an original copy of the “Montgomery Story” comic Aydin had bought him on eBay, and a copy of Lewis’ best-selling 1998 autobiography, “Walking with the Wind,” Powell set about educating himself. Having spent part of his childhood in Montgomery, just 40 miles from the little farm in Troy, Ala., where Lewis grew up, Powell said many of the locations in the script and memoir were immediately familiar.

“The landscapes that he was describing from his childhood were things that I literally knew like the back of my hand,” he said. “A lot of the locations in the ‘March’ trilogy, I’d spent time there. I’d grown up down the street from them.

I was able to explore them in my own memory as much as I was able to explore them through the archives.”

Focusing mainly on Lewis’ Alabama childhood and coming of age in an era of unrest, the first book of “March” helped Aydin and Powell learn the collaborative process. “I was able to learn a lot about how Nate functions,” Aydin said.

“What his skills are, where he likes to put a splash page or things like that. I tried to write it best I could to fit with Nate’s talents.”

Aydin and Powell said that from the beginning, one of the main challenges of the trilogy was humanizing figures that have long since been enshrined as legends, including Lewis. “What we were trying very hard to show and to show fairly was, who were the real people in ’63, in ’64, in ’65?” Aydin said. “Not how they’re seen today, but who were they then based on their actions and words?

Who were they when they were on the front lines? They’re different people.”

Powell agreed. “We wanted to actively reject this urge to make the civil rights movement a story, in hindsight, of gods and kings,” Powell said.

“We wanted to try and illuminate the people who had been swept under the rug, like the Bayard Rustins and the entire female makeup of the movement.”

“Part of what helps people gravitate toward ‘March’ and feel a deep connection to it,” Aydin said, “was that we showed human beings before they’d been turned into gods. We need that.

Follow Nate Powell on Instagram: @seemybrotherdance

When we put them on a pedestal, we remove our own responsibility to be able to do something with hard work in the same way.”

“March” was initially conceived as a single, massive book, but a decision was made to split the project into a trilogy. Both Aydin and Powell agreed that worked to the benefit of the project as a whole. The first book of “March” was published in August 2013 to almost immediate critical acclaim. While Powell said graphic novels are a “small pond” where it’s hard to find either lasting success or failure, something was clearly different about the appeal of “March,” especially in the way it quickly made the jump outside normal audiences of the medium.

“Once that book came out,” Powell said, “the real game-changer was when we realized what it meant that teachers and librarians were incorporating the book into schools and institutional settings. English teachers were using “March,” but it was kind of a shock that history teachers were using “March” as history. It is history, that’s true. But it meant we had to give ourselves a crash course in what it meant to follow historical guidelines to make sure it stayed in history classes.”

That realization led to what Powell called “a radical shift” in the amount of research they did for books two and three. While book one, which mostly dealt with Lewis’ childhood and coming of age, could rely largely on Lewis’ accounts, as the focus of the trilogy pivoted toward well-known historical events, including the 1963 March on Washington and the Freedom Rides that challenged segregated interstate public transportation, Powell said he, Aydin and their editor at Top Shelf were forced to take on what he called the “second full-time job” of researching every aspect of the period and the events they were describing.

“It was this increasing shift by which the books were being taken more seriously as history, and as memoir, and as fine art, but then the responsibilities on the creative and editorial end were increasing radically. By the end of ‘March: Book Two,’ and during all of ‘March: Book Three,’ we were spending so much time digging into the rabbit hole of history and uncovering things [that it] was kind of like pushing along this giant snowball that was ‘March’ as

an entity.”

That quest for historical accuracy included not just reading every published book they could find about the movement, but digging into primary source documents as well. Doing so allowed ‘March’ to actually move the ball on the documented history of the time. In one case, Powell said, the minutes of a SNCC meeting held just before the first Freedom Ride in 1961 revealed that every other historical text available had erroneously named the wrong person as one of the original 13 participants. In another instance, a deep dive into FBI documents obtained by Top Shelf editors through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that Rosa Parks, whose simple act of defiance had sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, was a keynote speaker during an event on the steps of the Alabama Capitol after the bloody 1965 Selma to Montgomery march that spurred President Lyndon Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act. “If Rosa Parks decided to bookend the civil rights movement by speaking at this event on the Alabama state Capitol steps,” Powell said, “one would think history would have that well-documented. ... That’s a perfect example of how history is a living creature. We were actually able to find some photo stills that may have been FBI shots from observers in the crowd that actually showed what Rosa Parks was wearing. So ‘March: Book Three’ is the first book that actually transcribes and gets into Rosa Parks’ speech on the steps.

It’s transcribed from FBI surveillance documents, but it just got lost in the shuffle.”

TIME AND TIME AGAIN The second volume of “March” was released in January 2015 to huge critical acclaim, and went on to win the Eisner Award for the year’s best reality-based graphic novel. When the third book appeared on Aug. 2 last year, it immediately shot to the top of the New York Times’ best sellers list, where it and the other two books in the series stayed for six weeks. Nominated for the National Book Award for Young Peoples’ Literature, Book Three — which ends with images of Lewis attending the 2008 inauguration of Barack Obama — won the prize Nov. 16, a week and a day after

the surprise election of Donald Trump as president. Aydin sees that as the culmination of a trend that had dogged the publication of the three books, and which reveals their necessity.

“When Book One came out, the Supreme Court had struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act,” Aydin said. “When Book Two came out, Ferguson happened. And when book three came out, Donald Trump happened,” Aydin said. “I think what’s happening in our nation has been this steady progression toward a necessity for ‘March’ … .

There is immediacy to it that we didn’t expect. We always pitched ‘March’ as being a handbook. That was the idea.

But we’re lucky we had the idea when we did so it’s available and it’s out there. If we were just starting it now, it wouldn’t be there to help, or at least be a founding document in whatever this new struggle will be.”

“I felt increasingly, especially while we were making Book Three, that we felt like we were watching something unavoidable unfold, and we had to get in and push back against it,” Powell said.

“We had to push with a particular side of history to make a future that wasn’t as dark as maybe it appears to be right now. It’s been very intense.”

Powell, who is working on a new graphic novel of his own called “Come Again,” along with a project with writer Van Jensen called “Two Dead,” agreed that the “March” trilogy has a new power and relevance since the election.

America just made a collective choice to wind back the clock on social reform several decades, he said, but the books can serve as a guide to turn the nation away from the dark future he fears.

“It shows the successes and failures of a massive social movement to make the world more balanced and more just for everyone,” he said. “But particularly, it shows a roadmap by which people can learn from those mistakes, can adapt, with a lot of the successes, and push them in new creative ways. … We’re living in such an urgent, grave time. This is not a drill.

That’s where I kind of return to the recognition that ‘March’ is a tool. It’s personal, it’s political, it applies to all of us, but at the same time it’s the document of a group of young people and their experiences changing the world, as young people have done time and time again.”

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17

Arts Entertainment AND

CLUNK: How an electrician-turnedmusic-promoter shaped the Fayetteville scene at the turn of the century, one cut-andpaste flyer at a time.

Show times On the lasting ripple effect of Chris Selby’s Clunk Music Hall.

BY ROBERT BELL

I

n late October 2016, a seemingly unremarkable black-and-white Xeroxed flyer from way back in the fall of 2001 popped up in the Fayetteville Facebook nebula, with a subscript noting that it was an update sheet for forthcoming shows at Clunk Music Hall, an all-ages venue that operated in Fayetteville from 1998 to 2002. Unremarkable, that is, until you notice what those upcoming shows were: Modest Mouse and !!! (tickets were $13), Unwound, The Tight Bros and C-Average, Smog and Neil Michael Hagerty, The White Stripes, The Faint, The Fleshies, Har Mar Superstar, Ted Leo & The Pharmacists and The Dismemberment Plan, Les Savy Fav, American Analog Set, Mars Volta with The Anniversary.

Comments on the post were mostly along the lines of “That such-andsuch show was so good!” and “OMG! Can’t believe all those bands played here!” Both are understandable reac-

tions. They were great shows. To have bands of that caliber playing within a few weeks of each other in a smallish Southern college town that’s close to several larger markets was pretty unbelievable. And while that spate of shows was atypical in its concentration of soon-to-be hugely popular acts, it wasn’t unheard of. In that same span of years, the same promoter brought At the Drive In, The Make Up, Bratmobile, Melt Banana, Delta 72, Murder City Devils, Black Heart Procession, The Shins, Trail of Dead, Death Cab for Cutie, Enon and many more. Chris Selby was the guy who made most of those shows happen. Besides booking shows at the music hall and a handful of other spaces, he also sold records and CDs of the sort you weren’t going to find at Sam Goody — or even Hastings, which had a surprisingly good selection back in the early and mid-’90s. (Obligatory acknowledgement: Yes, there were

and continue to be great all-ages shows, venues and record stores in Fayetteville, before and after Selby’s arrival. But this story is about Clunk.)

For many Northwest Arkansas natives of a certain vintage, Selby had a big role in shaping musical tastes, as well as the town’s all-ages live music scene. It seems hard to imagine here in 2017 — in this insane world where we walk around carrying glass and aluminum boxes that put all the world’s information at our fingertips — but for the longest time, if you wanted to find out about new music, or just about anything else outside of your own cranium, you had to leave the house. When I was 17, I’d drive from Berryville once or twice a week to Fayetteville, where Selby sold records and zines out of his uncle’s newsstand. I’d spend 100 percent of my earnings from Taco Bell (no relation) on punk rock LPs and 7-inches and copies of Maximumrocknroll.

Those records and zines were the gateway to a wider world of underground music and politics, and they absolutely altered the course of my life. I’m sure the same could be said by many other people. That business — initially just a few pieces of vinyl and newsprint propped up on a magazine display — would morph over the years into a live music venue and several iterations of a record shop, one that was consistently ahead of the curve until it closed for good in 2005.

Another relic of that bygone era is that one person’s tireless promotion could gin up enough interest that 200 people would show up to see a band that typically played to 40 or 50 people in much bigger cities. Case in point: Back in the summer and fall of 1999, if you walked into Clunk Records, odds were good he would’ve played you Les Savy Fav’s anthemic post-punk single “Our Coastal Hymn.” I must’ve heard that song 500 times, and I’m not alone. So, when the band came to play its first show in Fayetteville later that year, it was to a packed house with a couple hundred people singing along.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 27

18

JANUARY 5, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

ROCK CANDY

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

A&E NEWS PLAYWRIGHT LAUREN GUNDERSON, winner of the Lanford Wilson Award and the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award, has waived the fee for the rights to perform her work “The Taming” (informed by Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew”) to anyone who will perform the play on Inauguration Day. One such Jan. 20 performance will be put on by ArkansasStaged at Bentonville’s 21c Museum Hotel, 7 p.m., with a suggested donation of $5 to benefit Planned Parenthood. The self-described “all-female political farce” tells the story of Katherine, a winner of the Miss Georgia pageant who “locks herself in a hotel room with two captive political opposites — one ultra-conservative senator’s aide on the cusp of a career breakthrough and one bleeding-heart liberal blogger who will do anything for her cause — and coerces them to jump-start a movement to rewrite the Constitution.”

Gunderson said in a press release that she wrote the play in 2013 “to unpack the deep frustration of a divided and obstructionist patriarchy ... to laugh with the painful truth about extremism on both sides, to toy with our country’s history and wrestle with its foundational imperfections, and to make manifest a dream of reason and understanding prevailing in America.

That feels more necessary now than three years ago.” University of Arkansas theater instructor Jenny McKnight will direct the ArkansasStaged production. “Transfers of political power are always fraught with a measure of uncertainty, never more than this year,” McKnight said. “We’re hoping to have some laughs, illuminate some truths and find a hopeful and uplifting way to end a momentous day.”

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19

THE

TO-DO

LIST

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE AND LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK

FRIDAY 1/6

SUMOKEM, HEADCOLD, TERMINUS

ARKANSAS DEPARTMENT OF PARKS & TOURISM

9 p.m. Vino’s. $7.

THE HARAHAN GOES LIVE: The quarterly Bicycle Advocacy of Arkansas meeting features talks from Joe Jacobs and Rex Nelson on cyclist-friendly developments in Bentonville, at the Clarendon Bridge and at Memphis’ Big River Crossing, The Oyster Bar, 6:30 p.m., free.

THURSDAY 1/5

BICYCLE ADVOCACY OF ARKANSAS: JOE JACOBS AND REX NELSON

6:30 p.m. The Oyster Bar. Free.

The International Mountain Biking Association no doubt raised some eyebrows when it announced that its 2016 World Summit would be held in Bentonville. The organization’s been promoting cycling culture and smart, low-impact trail development and management since 1988, and it’s bestowed likely suspects like Colorado and California with “epic trail” designations, attracting spandex-clad tourists to the paths in droves. Now, Arkansas is tied with Colorado in its number of so-called “epic trails,” and as a result of a $275,000 grant from the Walton Foundation, is the only state with a full-time crew dedicated to maintenance of those trails, which collectively stretch over 200 miles. The summit in Bentonville sold out, an indication of the growing interest from the tourism industry to promote the state’s status as a cycling destination. On a local level, the Bicycling Advocacy of Central Arkansas works to bring about public policy that encourages bicycle-compatible means of transportation and leisure, whether that’s on the trail or in the city streets. For this quarterly BACA meeting, Joe Jacobs of Arkansas Outside reports on the IMBA summit and how Central Arkansas might benefit from the strategies explored there. His report will be followed by a talk from Rex Nelson, senior vice president at Simmons First National Corp. and author of the blog Rex Nelson’s Southern Fried, from which he’s dispatched news about cyclist developments at the White River Bridge at Clarendon and Memphis’ Big River Crossing, which allows pedestrians and cyclists to cross the Mississippi River. If you’ve been curious about the state of cycling in Central Arkansas and want to get involved, or if your New Year’s resolutions included increasing your physical activity by way of two wheels and a handlebar, grab a beer and a dozen on the half shell and check out what BACA’s up to at this informal quarterly meeting. SS 20

JANUARY 5, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

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Sumokem’s “The Madness of Lu Shen Ti, Vol. 1” is accompanied by the story of “a revered and powerful Chinese Emperor” so overcome by the death of his mother that the doctor tasked with curing him ends up recruiting a witch to help out, who succeeds in healing him by way of a secret ingredient, “an ancient, magical plant called marijuana.”

There’s a generation of tragedy, a “turtle of enlightenment” and a secret stash involved, and the moral of the story is that marijuana will either help you cope with adversity or transform you into a “great and wondrous

dragon,” or possibly both. That said, the label “stoner rock” was already a pretty likely one to attach to Sumokem’s sound, so three cheers for the band for going ahead and embracing that fact with style and fabulous myth. The group was founded in 2013 by Jacob Sawrie, Drew Skarda and the late Josh Ingram, and happens to share a hometown and a general milieu with Pallbearer, giving two solid points of evidence that Little Rock doom metal is in a golden age. Sumokem’s joined

by Conway punk rockers and manic rhythmshifters Headcold, and Terminus, a polished Fayetteville-based quartet distinguished by frontman Sebastian Thomas’ vocals, which recall Geddy Lee at his grittiest. SS

FRIDAY 1/6

STEPHEN NEEPER & THE WILD HEARTS

9:30 p.m. White Water Tavern.

In a photo on the band’s website, Stephen Neeper is wearing a faded white T-shirt with the Arkansas diamond logo forming the tongue from John Pasche’s famous Mick Jagger lips logo, and that’s not an entirely inaccurate emblem of what you hear from the band — a trio these days — in live performance. Glen Rose (Hot Spring County) brothers Stephen and Zeke Neeper have been at this thing a while, and they look like they might have just fallen out of a customized

van containing everyone who appeared in Leon Russell’s 1970 “Homewood Session” TV special (except that redhead with the rolling pin; she’s in a league of her own). With drums from Evan Barr, the three have honed their Southern swamp rock sound on ballsy unison riffs that smell like testosterone and Natty Light. They play relentlessly here and elsewhere, and the precision they’re locking into lately certainly shows it. Check out the sessions they taped at Springdale’s Red Barn Studio, and go hear them live, especially if the likes of Skynyrd or Dirty Streets are anywhere on your playlist mix. SS

SATURDAY 1/7

NEWBIE COLLEGIUM: THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE SCA

8 a.m. Peace Lutheran Family Center, Conway. Free-$8.

That New Year’s Eve party you attended may have been one for the books, but did it inspire an entirely new system for measuring time, as in “time elapsed since this party?” Did it end in a parade of people with fencing foils singing “Greensleeves” in the streets? If not, it probably wasn’t as fun as author Diane Paxson’s graduation party, the backyard shindig that spawned the Society for Creative Anachronism. The SCA is a merry band of over 30,000 paid members, organized into 19 kingdoms — and even smaller principalities, regions, baronies, and provinces, cantons, ridings, shires, colleges, strongholds and ports — and its members make it their business to celebrate and re-

enact the customs of medieval European cultures. They measure dates in the society in relation to the date of that first party in 1966, now called “The Year of the Society.”

To help acquaint newcomers with the finer points of heraldry, the Shire of Lagerdamm — part of the kingdom of Gleann Abhann that encompasses most of Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi — is hosting a day of Renaissance Faire-style classes, feasting and fighting with segments on herbalism, belt pouches, the rules of fencing, scrollmaking and Celtic knot design. Admission is free for children under 6 and for newcomers for whom this is the first SCA event, although you’ll need to have $8 on hand for anyone who wants to dine at the midday feast, featuring cuisine from Israel, India and, as the Shire of Lagerdamm states on the event’s Facebook page, “lasagnas, 1400s-style (no tomato sauce here).” SS

IN BRIEF

THURSDAY 1/5 Levels joins Vermont rockers Voices in Vain, Sine Cura and Crystal World at Vino’s, 8 p.m., $7.

Stephen Winter plays the happy hour at Cajun’s, 5:30 p.m. Loony Bin holds a triple feature show with A.J. Finney, Darryl Felsberg and Henry Coleman battling for a spot as a headlining comic, 7:30 p.m. Thu.Sat., 10 p.m. Fri.-Sat. ArkConsas kicks off a four-day “fairy tail”themed convention for fans of anime and anthropomorphic cosplay at the Embassy Suites by Hilton. See arkconsas.com for registration details.

FRIDAY 1/6 Almost Infamous takes the stage at Cajun’s, 5:30 p.m., free, and later, the Ghost Town Blues Band performs, 9 p.m., $5. Ben and Adam play at Markham Street Grill & Pub, 8:30 p.m., free. The Spa City Youngbloods, a Hot Springs youth blues band, host a fundraiser for its trip to the International Blues Challenge, Doc n’ Maggie’s Pizza Pub & Grub, 4330 Central Ave., 7 p.m. DeFrance brings tunes from its latest, “Second Wind,” to Four Quarter Bar, 10 p.m.

Hot Springs party band Hooker Red plays live at TC’s Midtown Grill, Conway, 9 p.m. Nashville’s The Cerny Brothers perform at King’s Live Music, Conway, with Russell Corbin, 8:30 p.m., $5. Hoodoo Blues Revue plays at Dugan’s Pub, 9 p.m.

BRIAN CHILSON

SATURDAY 1/7

JANUARY JEWEL: Low Key Arts’ Arkansas Shorts Festival celebrates its 10th anniversary with a filmmaker’s panel discussion featuring writer Graham Gordy (pictured, of “Quarry” and “Rectify”), actor Natalie Canerday (“Sling Blade”) and director Daniel Campbell (“Antiquities”), 2:30 p.m., Arlington Hotel Crystal Ballroom, $5-$15.

SATURDAY 1/7

10TH ANNUAL ARKANSAS SHORTS FILM FESTIVAL

2:30 p.m. Arlington Hotel’s Crystal Ballroom.

If you’ve been keeping up with “Quarry” on Cinemax, you’re already familiar with two-thirds of the “Made in Arkansas” panel that headlines Low Key Arts’ Arkansas Shorts Film Festival in its 10th year: Conway native Graham Gordy, “Rectify” writer and “Quarry” creator; and Natalie Canerday, a Russellville-born actor whose credits include “Quarry,” “Sling Blade” and “October Sky.” Canerday and Gordy

join Daniel Campbell, the director with whom they’ve been filming “Antiquities,” the feature-length film expanded from Campbell’s short of the same name and shot in Arkansas in less than a month last fall. The panel discussion, followed by a reception with Nashville photographer Thomas Petillo, kicks off four blocks of films under 10 minutes long: a 6 p.m. international block and a 7 p.m.

North American block, followed at 8 p.m. by a juried selection of “Arkansas Shorts,” films up for awards from the festival, including Donavon Thompson’s “Policy;” Geenah Krisht’s “Pepper Spray;” Chris Churchill’s “Set Pickup;”

Jeff Rolzen’s “Up On A Cloud;” Hunter Bay’s “Frail;” Dan Anderson’s “Majestic, ’o to Thee;” Phil Chambliss’ “The Dale Story;” Coty Greenwood’s “Throwers;” Whitney Butler’s “Mud Bugs;” “Kelly Griffin’s “Sector 7,” which won Best Film at 2016’s 48 Hour Film Project; and “Expecting” from Jen Gerber, who curated the block of films for the third year in a row. Saturday night’s festival after-party will be held at Low Key Arts, and if you’re in town, stop by there the Friday night before, when there will be a gallery installation called “Inception to Projection,” featuring a fourth block of shorts from film students. SS

Beebe hometown hero Cody Belew croons at Stickyz with Brian Mullen, 8:30 p.m., $10-$12. The Rev Room hosts “One Night in Vegas,” featuring giveaways and Elvis impersonator Matt Joyce with a full band, 8:30 p.m. (also 6 p.m. Sun.), $10-$25.

Magnolia Brown plays at King’s Live Music, Conway, with an opening set from Jamie Lou Connolly (of Jamie Lou and the Hullabaloo), 8:30 p.m., $5. It’s Rumba Night at Senor Tequila, Conway, with bachata lessons from Al Rivera at 10:30 p.m., followed by open dancing to beats from DJ Nica, 11 p.m. Hoodoo Blues Revue takes the stage at Four Quarter Bar, 9 p.m. Henna Roso, a Tulsa jazz ensemble that dedicates much of its time to food drives and hunger relief efforts, plays at Smoke & Barrel in Fayetteville, 10 p.m., $5.

Klubhouse and Bad Boyfriends share a bill at Vino’s, 9 p.m., $8. Rob & Tyndall play for happy hour at Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 p.m., followed

by Pamela K. Ward at 9 p.m., $5.

At Discovery Nightclub, Ewell DJs in the “disco-tech” and G-Force keeps the beats going in the lobby, 9

Follow Rock Candy on Twitter: @RockCandies

arktimes.com JANUARY 5, 2017, 2016

21

THE

TO-DO

MONDAY 1/9

TOMES + TEA BOOK CLUB 6:30 p.m. Arkansas Yoga Collective. Free.

It must be that books are too damned reliable. Multilevel warehouses full of them are open for extended and weekend hours, offering them in meticulously organized multitudes for free. Books never give you a 404 error message. They never have other plans, they are never “not really in the mood to be read right now, sorry,” and they never set an out-of-office reply pronouncing themselves unavailable. They sit there waiting, seemingly content to be taken for granted in favor of media that requires less of us: quote memes, reruns of “Roseanne.” Then, when the shit really hits the fan and they start showing that season where Blues Traveler performs the theme song and Dan and Roseanne win the lottery, we imagine what it would be like to read a whole, actual book, and then maybe talk about it with other people who read that same book.

(Like college, but with tea instead of Papa John’s, and you really do read the book!) If that sounds like a breath of fresh self-discovery — or maybe if self-discovery is already at the forefront of your mind, as it is for so many of us this time of year — sit in with Samantha Harrington, Claire Hodgson and Kayce Johnson for what the group calls “a free, open-to-all community call to unite those who ask: ‘Who am I?’ “ For their first book club meeting, they’ll be discussing Michael A. Singer’s “The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself,” which the Oprah-approved author says on his website is intended to help the reader “put an end to the habitual thoughts and emotions that limit your consciousness … by tapping into traditions of meditation and mindfulness.” The group’s organizers note that though the event takes place in a yoga studio, yoga practice is not a prerequisite, that tea will be provided and that “finger foods and other beverages of your choice to share are welcome but not necessary.” SS 22

JANUARY 5, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

LIST

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

TUESDAY, 1/10

CHAD YOUNG

6 p.m. Arkansas Arts Center. Free.

The architect who designed the American Taekwondo Association’s world headquarters on Riverfront Drive will be the

first speaker of the year in the Architecture and Design Network’s “June Freeman Lecture Series: The Art of Architecture.”

Chad Young is a principal in the Wittenberg Delony & Davidson architectural firm.

The ATA, which holds its World Expo

tournament every June in Little Rock, received city and state grants totaling $1.2 million for the $13 million, 45,300-squarefoot building, which opened in November. There will be a reception at 5:30 p.m. before the lecture. LNP

SHELTER IS ILLUSORY: Portland duo The Body plays a show at the White Water Tavern with Aziza in support of “No One Deserves Happiness,” which it hoped would be “the grossest pop album of all time,” 9 p.m.

TUESDAY 1/10

THE BODY

9 p.m. White Water Tavern.

Portland duo The Body, composed of native Arkansans Lee Buford and Chip King, is traveling in support of its latest album, “No One Deserves Happiness,” and the merch lineup for the tour includes a patch depicting a cartoon gentleman perched upon a toilet labeled “music journalism.” The whole affair sounds like 45 minutes of sinister communication between vultures in some evil electronic vulture language, Follow us on Instagram: ArkTimes

and I love that it came out in the spring, because it is the musical opposite of everything springtime represents. The lyrics on “Adamah,” which Buford told Fact magazine represent “the first time you can tell what any lyrics are on any Body record,” were written and sung by Maralie Armstrong (formerly of Soophie Nun Squad), who gave a compelling and theatrical performance last year at the White Water Tavern as part of her project “Valise.” Listening to The Body live — especially in a smaller space, where your body physically reverberates from

the decibel level — one gets the sense that the equipment they use to produce their sound might go into overdrive and disintegrate at any performance. (If you got a pair of good earplugs for Christmas, this is an ideal time to test their mettle.)

It’s expansive, spectacularly physical, and performance art you should witness even if you’re someone who routinely avoids anything referred to as “metal.” The Body is joined by Minneapolis’ Aziza, who reports on its Bandcamp page that it plays “buttrock for the thinking man’s metal head.” SS

IN BRIEF p.m. Brian Nahlen brings his warm bass-baritone to Cregeen’s Pub with Stephen Winter, 9 p.m. Dirty Lindsey plays at TC’s Midtown Grill, Conway, 9 p.m. Blackbird Academy of Arts presents “The Little Mermaid: The Ballet” at UCA’s Reynolds Performance Hall, Conway, 7 p.m.

Sat., 2 p.m. Sun., $10-$20. Jet 420 plays at Thirst N’ Howl, 9 p.m. JJ’s Grill hosts an Arkansas Razorbacks vs. Kentucky Wildcats watch party, 7 p.m. Mid-America Science Museum hosts Girls in STEM, a workshop for young women on basic coding principles, 10 a.m., $5.

SUNDAY 1/8 Dr. Carl Moneyhon and Philip McMath lead a discussion on the “life, death and myth” of David O. Dodd, 2 p.m., MacArthur Museum of Military History, free. John TwoHawks plays a “native flute harmonics” concert at Hilton Garden Inn, 7 p.m., $20-$55.

MONDAY 1/9

HOOVERVILLE ON FIRE: The MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History screens the PBS documentary “March of the Bonus Army,” depicting the violent 1932 confrontation between the U.S. Army and thousands of unemployed and homeless veterans, 6:30 p.m., free.

TUESDAY 1/10

‘MARCH OF THE BONUS ARMY’ 6:30 p.m. MacArthur Museum of Military History. Free.

With the support and partnership of Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights, Amnesty International and the NAACP, the Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21 — the day following the inauguration of President-elect Trump — is expected to draw over 200,000 participants, and dozens of “sister marches” across the country will march in the name of protecting human rights. The spirit of protest is at high tide after a year of divisive politics, and so it was in the summer of 1932, when around 43,000 demonstrators confronted police and government forces and set up a makeshift camp in what is now Anacostia Park in Washington, D.C., until their demands were met: the imme-

diate cash payment of $1,000 bonus certificates the government had issued in 1924 to veterans of World War I, many of whom had since lost their jobs in the Great Depression. In a violent eviction attempt that would prove disastrous for President Hoover’s reputation, soldiers serving under Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Maj. George Patton charged on the veteran protestors with tear gas and bayonets, burning the shanties in the encampment, killing two men, injuring 55 others and arresting 135 people.

The PBS documentary telling the Bonus Army’s story kicks off the MacArthur Museum of Military Museum’s “Movies at MacArthur” series — the second Tuesday of each month, 6:30 p.m. — and comes at a time rife with struggles that parallel the conflict between vets and the governments that sent them to war a hundred years ago. SS

Comedian Ronel Williams joins Summer Vega, Clint Jackson Travis, Devincey Chopz Moore and more for Cajun’s Wharf’s first comedy event of the year, 7 p.m. The Central Arkansas Library System hosts a onehour meditation in the Main Library with Morgan Holladay of Compassion Works for All, noon. The Little Rock chapter of the Nashville Songwriters Association International hosts its first songwriting round at Khalil’s Pub, 7 p.m. Presagers, Omerta, Inrage and Squatch Dweller put on a metal show at Hot Springs Village’s The Building, 5836 State Highway 7 N., 6:30 p.m., $7.

TUESDAY 1/10 Riverdale 10 Cinema screens the Steve Martin classic “The Jerk,” 7 p.m., $8-$9. Skinny J’s in Argenta hosts a shuffleboard tournament, 7 p.m.

WEDNESDAY 1/11 The Argenta Branch Library explores “The Appeal of Coloring” in an adult coloring program, 10 a.m., free. Hot Springs Jazz Society hosts “Give My Regards to Broadway” at the Garland County Library Auditorium, 6 p.m., free. Todd Rexx (a.k.a.

T-Rexx, not the “Jeepster” author or the dinosaur) goes for laughs at the Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m., $8. Colonial Wine & Spirits and Chef Shuttle Central Arkansas host an evening of beverages and board games for Game Night, 2100 Brookwood Drive, 4 p.m., free.

North Little Rock 501-945-8010 Russellville 479-890-2550 Little Rock 501-455-8500 Conway 501-329-5010

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arktimes.com JANUARY 5, 2017, 2016

23

MOVIE REVIEW

ACANSA Arts Festival

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A spitfire prequel ‘Rogue One’ trades mysticism for momentum.

HT EH E A AR RT TS S R U O G U HG H T T HT R H O R U OG UH G TH H ET H A E R T AS R T S H H TE H EA T D H RT OH UR O G U H G T R AT R S T S T H R O U G H T H E A R T S D T RH OR UO GU HG H T H T E H E A R A T R S T S T H D T H R O U G H T H E A R T S

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G A C A N S A … D O I N G G O O D T H A Cwww.centralarkansastickets.com.

A N S A … D O I N G G O O D T H Tickets:

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HARBINGER: AT-AT walkers on the tropical planet Scarif protect the Empire’s developing Death Star in the first stand-alone Star Wars film, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.”

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he ”Star Wars” franchise has typically existed more within the realm of fantasy than of science fiction, an Arthurian tale thrown into space with its messiah-like characters and a clear good-versus-evil dichotomy. Honestly, the muddled mysticism underlying the movies usually left me cold, and I never experienced anything approaching the collective obsession over all things “Star Wars” — until now.

“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” is the first in a series of stand-alone films set inside the “Star Wars” universe.

Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), a prisoner of imperial forces, is en route to a labor colony when freed by a group of Rebel Alliance fighters, including the droid K-2SO (Alan Tudyk). But this is not a mission of mercy. The Rebel Alliance has received information about a powerful weapon, the Death Star, being developed by the Empire and wants Jyn to discover what she can about it, given that the head engineer is her father, and imperial collaborator, Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen). Teaming up with K-2SO and Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), Jyn soon learns that the Death Star has a fatal flaw, unknown to imperial leaders, and, joined by other renegades and

misfits, she helps to lead a mission to track down the secret plans that could give the Rebel Alliance a new hope in their struggle.

“Rogue One” improves vastly upon the original trilogy by making the rebellion richer and more realistic. As Robert Gildea noted in “Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance,” the French Resistance of popular celebration is a lie — the real resistance encompassed a multitude of groups all across France and Europe, some of whom opposed each other, such that the broader anti-Nazi movement at times bordered on civil war. Likewise, this movie highlights factions among the resistance, including one Saw Gerrera (a tragically underused Forest Whitaker), who leads a splinter group dubbed “extremist” by the mainstream Rebel Alliance. No savior figures here — only damaged people trying to make the future better through imperfect and debatable means.

Some reviewers have criticized “Rogue One” for poor characterization, not exploring the motivations behind people’s actions. Indeed, Jyn Erso herself goes from well-nigh feral at the beginning to rousing speechmaker

ALSO IN THE ARTS 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.

UPCOMING E VENTS ON CentralArkansasTickets.com

THEATER

“A Fertle Holiday.” The Main Thing’s holiday production. 8 p.m. Fri.-Sat. through Jan. 14. $22. 301 Main St., NLR. 501-372-0210. thejointargenta.com.

“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.”

The touring production of Robert L. Freedman’s Tony Award-winning musical comedy. 7 p.m. Jan. 10-12, 8 p.m. Jan. 13-14, 2 p.m. Jan. 14-15. $21-$65. Baum Walker Hall, Walton Arts Center, 495 W. Dickson St., Fayetteville. 479443-5600. waltonartscenter.org.

VISUAL ARTS, HISTORY EXHIBITS near the end. However, with regard to the other characters, it must be noted that, unlike the original trilogy with its hero’s journey, this is a war movie, at times even echoing “Saving Private Ryan.” And war throws together different people regardless of their motivations, people who must decide very quickly whether they are willing to die for each other. The movie’s spitfire pacing makes us invest in these characters on the spot and, consequently, feel exactly how high the stakes are.

You might remember it being said in a Rebel Alliance meeting in Episode IV that the plans for the Death Star came at great cost. Now we learn just how true that was.

And we also experience more directly the Empire’s evil. While the original trilogy treated technology like magic, “Rogue One” acknowledges the horror underlying the Death Star’s operations, drawing visceral parallels between it and the atomic bomb. Too, Darth Vader makes a few small appearances that finally restore to him the mantle of true menace, long diminished by the reduction of him in the prequels to an insufferable brat.

And though it perhaps ranks as a spoiler, I should note that Princess Leia Organa (a role immortalized by the late Carrie Fisher) makes a brief appearance that links this movie closely to Episode IV. Princess Leia was always the moral center of the original movies, and it’s gratifying to see another female lead who stands on her own two feet and confronts the world with grit and determination. I may not yet be a total “Star Wars” fan, but I am, most definitely, a “Rogue One” fan.

MAJOR VENUES ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, MacArthur Park: Architecture and Design Network lecture

by Chad Young, designer of the Taekwondo world headquarters, 6 p.m. Jan. 10, reception at 5:30 p.m.; “Collectors Show and Sale,” through Jan. 8. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 10 a.m.5 p.m. Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sun. 372-4000.

ARTS AND SCIENCE CENTER FOR SOUTHEAST ARKANSAS, 701 S. Main St., Pine Bluff: “Exploring the Frontier: Arkansas 1540-1840,” Arkansas Discovery Network hands-on exhibition; “Heritage Detectives: Discovering Arkansas’ Hidden Heritage.” 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 1-4 p.m. Sat. 870-536-3375.

BUTLER CENTER GALLERIES, Arkansas Studies Institute, 401 President Clinton Ave.: “Once Was Lost,” photographs by Richard Leo Johnson, through March 18; “Fired Up: Arkansas Wood-Fired Ceramics,” work by Stephen Driver, Jim and Barbara Larkin, Fletcher Larkin, Beth Lambert, Logan Hunter and Hannah May, through Jan. 28. 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 3205790.

CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL MUSEUM VISITOR CENTER, Bates and Park: Exhibits on the 1957 desegregation of Central and the civil rights movement. 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. daily.

374-1957.

CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL CENTER: “Ladies and Gentlemen … the Beatles!” Records, photographs, tour artifacts, videos, instruments, recording booth for sing-along with Ringo Starr, from the GRAMMY Museum at L.A. LIVE, through April 2. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun., $10 adults, $8 seniors, retired military and college students, $6 youth 6-17, free to active military and children under 6.

ESSE PURSE MUSEUM & STORE, 1510 S. Main St.: “A Walk in Her Shoes,” women’s footwear from the beginning of the 20th century, through Jan. 15; “What’s Inside: A Century of Women and Handbags,” permanent exhibit. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 10 a.m.-3 p.m.

Sun. $10, $8 for students, seniors and military.

916-9022.

HISTORIC ARKANSAS MUSEUM, 200 E. 3rd St.: “Eclectic Color: Diverse Colors for a Diverse World,” portraits by Rex Deloney, through March 5; Kimberly Kwee, multimedia drawings, and David Scott Smith, ceramics, through Feb. 5; “Tiny Treasures: Miniatures from the Permanent Collection,” through Jan. 9; “Hugo and Gayne Preller’s House of Light,” historic photographs, through Jan. 3; ticketed tours of renovated and replicated 19th

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Argenta Arts Acoustic Music Series AAMS Presents Michael Chapdelaine

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ACANSA ACANSA Arts Festival Fundraiser with Finger Food Performing

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Centers for Youth and Families

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Wolfe Street Foundation Red Carpet 2017

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EVOLVE 2017: Rooted in the South

Go to CentralArkansasTickets.com to purchase these tickets!

BARD BALL 2017 SATURDAY, JANUARY 21 AT 6:30 PM ONSTAGE & BACKSTAGE REYNOLDS PERFORMANCE HALL CONWAY, ARKANSAS

At Bard Ball 2017, you’ll hear stories of actors, staff, and supporters whose lives and careers were changed by Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre.

Join emcee DAN MATISA for: • Special performance by AST alum JACOB KEITH WATSON, soon to be back on Broadway in Amélie!

• Live music • Heavy hors-d’oeuvres and complimentary wine/beer • Live and silent auctions BUY TICKETS AT ARKSHAKES.COM $75 a ticket/$750 per table of 10 COCKTAIL ATTIRE For more information, contact Geneva Galloway at 501-852-8223 or ggalloway@arkshakes.com THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS

CONTINUED ON PAGE 31 arktimes.com JANUARY 5, 2017, 2016

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Dining WHAT’S COOKIN’

PLANS TO OPEN a dog-friendly bar in downtown Little Rock appear to be padding forward. Plumbers for the owners of Bark Bar have been approved for a permit for the project, at 1201 Spring St. Owners Cara Fowler and Elizabeth Michael, who have raised more than $3,500 toward a goal of $5,000 through the Kickstarter crowdfunding website, plan to open the bar in a vacant church that has been home to the Dreamweavers Outlet. There’s a side yard for outdoor dog play; dogs will be welcome inside as well (once their papers are on file). They’re shooting for a spring opening. Those who donate will receive T-shirts, memberships, koozies and photos of their pets on the wall, depending on the gift (for $1,000, the bar will name a drink after your dog).

A COOKING SHOW featuring a Bella Vista cook debuts Saturday, Jan. 7, on AETN. “Cook with Brooks” features chef Steven Brooks, corporate executive chef at Tankersly Foods, who came to Northwest Arkansas in 2000 to work at the Market at Pinnacle and later was executive chef at Blessings Golf Club, Soul Restaurant and Lounge and the Springdale Country Club. Brooks, whose job it is to connect Arkansas farms to restaurants that serve local foods, will tour Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s Eleven Restaurant while chef William Lyle creates a coq au vin; visit Tri Cycle Farms community garden in Fayetteville and attend a fundraiser for the farm at Greenhouse Grille; talk with Jerrmy Gawthrop, owner of Greenhouse Grille and Woodstone Pizza in Fayetteville; visit White River Creamery in Elkins; meet with the owners of the Vanzant Fruit Farm in Lowell; make tacos at the Black Apple Crossing cider brewery in Springdale; and go on a hayride at McGarrah Farm in Pea Ridge. The weekly program will air at 5 p.m. and run for seven weeks. Episodes and recipes will be available at aetn.org/ cookwithbrooks.

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JANUARY 5, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

FRIED RIGHT: Chicken strips, catfish and a crawfish po-boy all impressed at Eat My Catfish.

Eat their catfish Local chain lands in Little Rock.

W

e long for the South Arkansas catfish joints of our youth.

You know the ones: the ramshackle old houses with low ceilings, wood paneling and family photos on the wall. Where grease has long since left its mark on kitchen ceilings and ketchup bottles. Where the fish comes only two ways (fillets or whole) and is served with complimentary sides.

Those places are getting harder and harder to find as restaurants tend toward sleek design and the price of catfish creeps ever upward.

Eat My Catfish is not one of those places, but it’ll do in a pinch. The new Little Rock location follows successful openings in Benton (2012) and Conway (2014). Owner Travis Hester has

Follow Eat Arkansas on Twitter: @EatArkansas

watched his enterprise grow from food truck to franchise in a little over eight years. And the product is impressive.

The well-seasoned fried catfish fillets are thin; we prefer these smaller fillets to the bigger variety served up at, say, the Flying Fish (although we’d give the latter a better grade on atmosphere).

Smaller fillets mean more seasoning and cornmeal per bite and are less likely to taste fishy. They’re also easier to handle and you can eat a bunch of ’em. Who among us doesn’t feel some sense of pride for downing a few pieces of catfish in one sitting? We don’t go out for it often enough and there’s something special about nicely fried fillets that invites a bit of overindulgence.

Choosing what to order can be a bit

daunting — there’s more than just catfish — and diners order upon arrival.

For the indecisive, go with the “try-itall,” the chicken, catfish and shrimp combo ($14.89). It’s heaven for fried finger-food lovers. This basket comes with two pieces of catfish, two chicken strips (although we swear ours had at least four), six pieces of fried shrimp, a side dish and hushpuppies. It’s a tall order, but share this and one other plate with your partner and you get to taste just about everything in one go.

The presentation isn’t much — everything comes crammed in a basket. But as our mother used to say, “It ain’t the Four Seasons.” It’s worth noting that the chicken strips are pretty exceptional. We consider ourselves a chicken digit connoisseur and these hit a lot of marks. The meat is good: big breast strips, breaded in what seems to be a cross between cornmeal batter and a more flour-based coating. It works. Catfish places often have great chicken strips, and Eat My Catfish is

SHOW TIMES, CONT.

BELLY UP

Check out the Times’ food blog, Eat Arkansas arktimes.com

Eat My Catfish

10301 N. Rodney Parham (Breckenridge Village) Suite A-4 Little Rock 501-222-8055 1205 Military Road No. 7 Benton 501-909-2323 2125 Harkrider St. Conway 501-588-1867 eatmycatfish.com QUICK BITE If you’re looking for lighter options, there aren’t many, but Eat My Catfish does serve up peel-and-eat boiled shrimp. Try an order as an appetizer before all the fried stuff hits the table. Another pro tip: The restaurant caters, so if you’re looking to not do all the cooking for your next party, there’s nothing Eat My Catfish offers that wouldn’t be a crowd-pleaser.

HOURS 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

OTHER INFO Beer and wine. Credit cards accepted.

no exception.

The fried shrimp were also quite good. The batter was light, well seasoned (if maybe a bit salty), and the shrimp were cooked perfectly. It’s easy to over-fry shrimp but these gave way easily to the teeth and held on to their flavor. It says something for the cooking that one can eat all these fried things at once and not leave feeling greasy and gross, which we didn’t. Everything is tastefully done and light, as far as fried stuff goes.

Tossed in beer batter and fried up to a golden orangey hue, the fries are a solid side. We wish we could say the same for the coleslaw. A good catfish joint needs good coleslaw. This dish was of the chopped variety and just lacked that fresh, tangy crunch you look for as a complement to fried fillets. It’s passable, but it’s just not up to snuff with the other offerings.

A recent trip to south Louisiana spoiled us on po-boys but we thought we’d give one a shot. The crawfish poboy ($8) is tasty, though a bit different

from what we’re used to. Instead of lettuce, tomato and mayo, it’s topped with coleslaw and the restaurant’s Fire Cracker sauce (which seems to be a cross between remoulade and tartar sauce). It’s creamy, pink and has a hint of spice. Eat My Catfish serves up these seafood sandwiches on porous French bread (toasted just right). The fried crawfish were everything they’re supposed to be: rich, crispy and a tad spicy. This sandwich is a winner. All the ingredients work well and the portion size is near perfect — satisfying, but you won’t have to take a nap after.

Just about everything at Eat My Catfish is well executed. The menu has enough variety that there’s something for everyone. The atmosphere is bright, clean and new. The staff is super friendly and the prices are reasonable for the quality of the food. It’s not going to blow your mind, but it’s not going to give anyone much to complain about either. We’d call it unremarkable if the fish weren’t so good.

The band seemed genuinely shocked at that reception in such an obscure place, one where they’d never played before. I’d bet they’ve still got a bigger following in Fayetteville than in many other similar-sized college towns. I saw Les Savy Fav several more times in the years after that, including a sold-out show at the Bowery Ballroom in New York in 2002. But that first Clunk show was electric, the band was taut, on-edge, wide-eyed. It’s still among the best live shows I’ve ever seen, and it happened at a squat cinderblock building that was previously a gym, tucked behind a Chinese restaurant and a strip club.

At some point, the name of Selby’s businesses became his nickname, and so we all call him Clunk now. He calls himself Clunk. After ending his valiant-if-not-exactly-super-lucrative run as a record store owner and show promoter, he was an electrician. He’s made a couple of political campaigns, one for the office of Fake Mayor of Fayetteville and most recently a gutsy campaign for Vice President of the United States (he was not elected).

For the last few years his main gig has been delivering food from restaurants directly to people’s homes and offices under the banner of C.H.E.W. (Clunk’s Hungry Express Wagon). He drives a pink scooter with a big cooler strapped on the back and wears a sparkly gold helmet. He’s a hilarious mainstay on social media. He also makes and sells bracelets called — what else? — Clunklets. They’re made of leather straps and square letter beads separated by stars, and they sport messages that read like Dadaist marketing slogans written by Andrew Dice Clay if he were from Bull Shoals and had taken too much acid in high school: “FLAVOR*BLASTED *THINKING,” “BIG*DANG*DICKS,” “BABY*GOT*SUMMONED,” “ELKINS*AFTER*DARK,” and my personal fave: “DEPRESSED*AND*LOVING*IT.” On the night before November’s electoral disaster, I went over to Clunk’s house to catch up. We shot the breeze about old times and watched election coverage on CNN, the bizarreness and vulgarity of the whole affair providing a disorienting counterpoint to our talk of old times and how much everything has changed: How different the town looks now. The proliferation of food trucks and boxy luxury student apartment housing. The Great Texan Influx of the 2010s that spawned jokes about changing the UA’s name to the University of Texas at Fayetteville. For better or worse, Fayetteville is not the sleepy, low-rent,

charmingly grubby college town it was 15 to 20 years ago.

There are still good shows and record shops in Fayetteville, of course.

Block Street Records is well-stocked for seasoned crate-diggers and newbies alike. LaLaLand and Backspace host DIY all-ages shows, and folks like Samantha Sigmon and Roger Barrett are carrying the torch, booking the next generation of up-and-coming indie rock acts. Honestly, though, it’s never been quite the same as it was from 1998-2003 or so in terms of shows. Perhaps I’m falling into the trap of “It-Was-All-Better-Back-inMy-Day” thinking that so many of us have rightfully rolled our eyes at. Some of the younger, more active folks certainly would say so. Still, I think those years Clunk was booking shows constituted the type of lightning-in-a-bottle time period that is hard to recreate.

People still press Selby from time to time, trying to get him to toss his hat back into the live music promotion ring. Don’t hold your breath — economic realities come into play at a certain point, and you can’t expect people to keep up those kinds of profitagnostic endeavors forever.

“That poster?” he said of the aforementioned jam-packed flyer. “When it all came down to it, I bet I didn’t even break even on all that. I’d bet I lost money, even when you add it all up.” And that was Selby’s financial reality: Even though the Modest Mouse show killed, the Unwound concert the very next night was sparsely attended, and there was still a sizable guarantee to pay. Multiply that formula a few times over and the venue eventually became unsustainable. In late 2002, Selby closed the music hall and moved into a 100-square-foot record store we affectionately called The Fish Bowl. By 2005, downloads had altered the calculus for record store owners, and Selby and his then-business partner Charlie Porter decided to close the doors.

I think a lot of us didn’t realize how good we had it back then. We took it for granted that there would always be someone like Selby, willing to lose money over and over to bring in the bands they loved and believed in. And who knows? Maybe things will change and it will be even better in the future, and someone will figure out the formula for consistently bringing great live bands to Fayetteville and making it work financially. Perhaps that person is plotting right now, someone with the right combination of an ear for great music and a willingness to put it all on the line. You never know. arktimes.com JANUARY 5, 2017, 2016

27

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LIVE YOUR BEST IN THE NEW YEAR A

s we turn the calendar to 2017, it’s the perfect time to take stock and decide what we want to do more of, what we want to do less of, and how we want to live well this year.

Shop these local retailers to find the perfect tools and resources to help you stay on track.

A Stay healthy

this year with help from these products available at Tanglewood Drug SStore: Clear Nicotine Patches to help you kick the habit, habit an automatic blood pressure monitor, and flu shots and vaccines, including Prevnar, for pneumonia.

Newbie!

The Low Back Sweater is soft and a fun way to show off that cute bralette. Get both at Maddox, located in Pleasant Ridge.

Healthy gets

more delicious with a Vitamix blender from Eggshells Kitchen Co.

Get a new look for the new year at 7th Street Salon, where a talented team of stylists can give you the color and cut you want!

Slice your

way to healthy eating this year with this spiral slicer from Krebs Brothers Supply Company.

28

JANUARY 5, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

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JANUARY 13

THE 2ND FRIDAY OF EACH MONTH 5-8 PM

A special tour of 75 Years of Historic Arkansas, live music by Charles Woods and the Element, plus Arkansas Made beer by Stone's Throw Brewing

300 Third Tower • 501-375-3333 coppergrillandgrocery.com

The UALR Community Orchestraa presents a New Year’s “Surprise” with selections by Haydn and Holst — plus —

don’t miss our new exhibit

“True Faith, True Light: The Devotional Art of Ed Stilley” 300 W. Markham St.

SUBTLE AND BOLD

www.oldstatehouse.com

AN EXHIBITION OF ARTWORKS BY SUSAN CHAMBERS AND SOFIA GONZALEZ

CURATED BY ROBERT BEAN

108 W 6th St., Suite A (501) 725-8508 www.mattmcleod.com

These venues will be open late. There’s plenty of parking and a FREE TROLLEY to each of the locations.

Don’t miss it – lots of fun!

JANUARY 5, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

Every person riding a bicycle or an animal, or driving any animal drawing a vehicle upon a highway, shall have all the rights and all of the duties applicable to the driver of a vehicle, except those provisions of this act which by their nature can have no applicability.

OVERTAKING A BICYCLE

The driver of a motor vehicle overtaking a bicycle proceeding in the same direction on a roadway shall exercise due care and pass to the left at a safe distance of not less than three feet (3’) and shall not again drive to the right side of the roadway until safely clear of the overtaken bicycle.

Your bike is a vehicle on the road just like any other vehicle and you must also obey traffic laws— use turning and slowing hand signals, ride on right and yield to traffic as if driving. Be sure to establish eye contact with drivers. Remain visible and predictable at all times.

COME IN AND SEE US!

30

USE OF BICYCLES OR ANIMALS

AND CYCLISTS, PLEASE REMEMBER...

200 RIVER MARKET AVE. STE 400 501.374.9247 WWW.ARCAPITAL.COM

Free parking at 3rd & Cumberland Free street parking all over downtown and behind the River Market (Paid parking available for modest fee.)

DRIVERS PLEASE BE AWARE, IT’S ARKANSAS STATE LAW:

FREE TROLLEY RIDES!

ALSO IN THE ARTS, CONT. century structures from original city, guided Monday and Tuesday on the hour, self-guided Wednesday through Sunday, $2.50 adults, $1 under 18, free to 65 and over. 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 324-9351.

MacARTHUR MUSEUM OF ARKANSAS MILITARY HISTORY, 503 E. 9th St. (MacArthur Park): “Waging Modern Warfare”; “Gen. Wesley Clark”; “Vietnam, America’s Conflict”; “Undaunted Courage, Proven Loyalty: Japanese American Soldiers in World War II. 9 a.m.4 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-4 p.m. Sun. 376-4602.

MOSAIC TEMPLARS CULTURAL CENTER, 9th and Broadway: Permanent exhibits on African-American entrepreneurship in Arkansas.

9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 683-3593.

OLD STATE HOUSE MUSEUM, 300 W. Markham St.: “True Faith, True Light: The Devotional Art of Ed Stilley,” musical instruments, through 2017; “First Families: Mingling of Politics and Culture” permanent exhibit including first ladies’ gowns. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 324-9685.

MUSEUM OF DISCOVERY, 500 President Clinton Ave.: “Wiggle Worms,” science program for pre-K children 10 -10:30 a.m. every Tue. Hours: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 1-5 p.m.

Sun., $10 ages 13 and older, $8 ages 1-12, free to members and children under 1. 396-7050.

TOLTEC MOUNDS STATE PARK, U.S. Hwy. 165, England: Major prehistoric Indian site with visitors’ center and museum. 8 a.m.-5 p.m.

Mon.-Sat., noon-5 p.m. Sun., closed Mon. $3 for adults, $2 for ages 6-12. 961-9442.

UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS AT LITTLE ROCK: “I wish I would have hugged them more,” digital images by Carey Roberson, Jan. 10-Feb. 26, Maners/Pappas Gallery, reception 7-8:30 p.m. Jan. 13. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri.,10 a.m.-1 p.m. Sat., 2-5 p.m. Sun. 569-8977.

MAJOR VENUES AROUND ARKANSAS CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, One Museum Way, Bentonville: “The Art of American Dance,” 90 works spanning the years 1830 to now, through Jan. 16; “Shaking Hands and Kissing Babies,” campaign advertising artifacts, through Jan. 9; American masterworks spanning four centuries in the permanent collection. 11 a.m.-6 p.m.

Mon., Thu.; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Wed., Fri.; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sat.-Sun., closed Tue. 479-418-5700.

REGIONAL ART MUSEUM, 1601 Rogers Ave., Fort Smith: “Liv Fjellsol: Art Says,” representational works on paper accompanied by poems and other writings, opening reception 5-7 p.m. Jan. 12 ($5 nonmembers), show through April 2. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 479-784-2787.

LITTLE ROCK AREA GALLERIES ARGENTA GALLERY, 413 N. Main St. Art in all media by gallery members Sue Henley, Dee Schulten, Suzanne Brugner, Ed Pennebaker and others. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Sat. 258-8991.

BARRY THOMAS FINE ART AND STUDIOS, 711A Main St., NLR: Works by impressionist artist Thomas.

CHROMA GALLERY, 5707 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Work by Robert Reep and other Arkansas artists. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-3 p.m.

Sat. 664-0880.

COX CREATIVE CENTER, 120 River Market Ave.: “Art from the Row,” paintings, drawings, sculpture and models by men on Arkansas’s Death Row. 918-3093.

DRAWL GALLERY, 5208 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Southern contemporary art. 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Tue.-Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 240-7446.

GALLERY 221, 2nd and Center Sts.: Work by

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ARKANSAS TIMES

MARKETPLACE TO ADVERTISE IN THIS SECTION, CALL LUIS AT 501.375.2985

PANAMERICAN CONSULTING, INC. Interpretation and Written Translations (Spanish – Portuguese - French) Latino Cultural and Linguistic Training

Call Cindy Greene Satisfaction Always Guaranteed

MOVING TO MAC

www.movingtomac.com

cindy@movingtomac.com • 501-681-5855

William McNamara, Tyler Arnold, Amy Edgington, EMILE, Kimberly Kwee, Greg Lahti, Mary Ann Stafford, Cedric Watson, C.B. Williams, Gino Hollander, Siri Hollander and jewelry by Rae Ann Bayless. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 801-0211.

GALLERY 360, 900 S. Rodney Parham Road: “Deviant,” Shane Baskins, M. Crenshaw, House of Avalon, Mark Monroe, Myriam Saavedra and Michael Shaeffer, through Jan. 7.

GREG THOMPSON FINE ART, 429 Main St., NLR: “William Dunlap, Landscape and Variable: Recent Works,” through Feb. 11. 10 a.m.5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 664-2787.

HEARNE FINE ART, 1001 Wright Ave.: “Divine 8,” graphics on canvas by A.W. the Artist, through Jan. 28. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sat. 372-6822.

L&L BECK ART GALLERY, 5705 Kavanaugh Blvd.: “Landscapes,” paintings by Louis Beck, free giclee giveaway 7 p.m. Jan. 19. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 660-4006.

LAMAN LIBRARY, 2801 Orange St., NLR: “Dia de los Muertos,” work by members of the Latino Art Project, through Jan. 6. 9 a.m.-8 p.m.

Mon.-Thu., 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Fri.-Sat. 758-1720.

LAMAN LIBRARY ARGENTA BRANCH, 420 Main St., NLR: “Women to Watch,” Arkansas Committee of the National Women in Art exhibition of work by Katherine Rutter, Dawn Holder, Melissa Wilkinson and Sandra Luckett, through Jan. 6. 687-1061 M2 GALLERY, 11525 Cantrell Road: “Holiday Art Sale,” work by Neal Harrington, Phoenix Murphy, Maddox Murphy, Cathy Burns, Dan Thornhill and others. Noon-5 p.m. Mon., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 225-6257.

McLEOD FINE ART GALLERY, 108 W. 6th St.: “First Anniversary and Holiday Show,” works by gallery artists. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 10 a.m.4 p.m. Sat. 725-8508.

MICHEL LEIDERMANN, President (Minority Business - AR State Vendor) mleidermann@gmail.com • Mobile: (501) 993-3572

PASTURED OLD BREED PORK Our hogs are a cross between Large Black and Berkshire, old 19th century breeds. They are raised on our pasture and forage in the forest that adjoins our fields. They are never confined like industrial hogs. We do not use any kind of routine antibiotics. Our hogs live ARKANSAS GRASS were FED LAMB like they meant to.

PRICE LIST FRESH RAW HAM $7 lb.

PORK LOIN $8 lb

HAM BREAKFAST STEAKS $7 lb

BREAKFAST SAUSAGE $9 lb

We offer first quality one-year-old lamb raised on our farm in North Pulaski County. Our meat is free of steroids or any other chemicals. The only time we use antibiotics is if the animal has been injured which is extremely rare. All meat is USDA inspected.

PORK BRATWURST $10 One pound package

You can pick up your meat at our farm off Hwy 107 in North Pulaski County (about 25 miles north of downtown Little Rock) or we can meet you in downtown Little Rock weekdays.

All meat is aged and then frozen.

PORK STEAKS $10 lb PRICE LIST: RIB ROAST TESTICLES contains about eight ribs (lamb chops) $17 lb.

$10 lb

WHOLE LEG OF LAMBPORK BUTTS TANNED SHEEPSKINS, $10 lb SHOULDER (about 4 to 5 lbs) $12 lb.

(bone in, cook this slow, like a pot roast. Meat falls off the bone). $11 lb.

HEARTS, LIVERS, KIDNEYS, $5 lb

$100-$150

(Our sheepskins are tanned in a Quaker Town, Pa. tannery that has specialized in sheepskins for generations.)

PORK TENDERLOIN BONELESS LOIN $12 lb TENDERLOIN $8 lb

$20 lb

LAMB BRATWURST LINK SAUSAGE

(one-lb package) $10 lb

NECKBONES

(for stew or soup) $5 lb

SPARE RIBS $9 lb BABYBACK RIBS $12 lb

India Blue F a r m

12407 Davis Ranch Rd. | Cabot, AR 72023 Call Kaytee Wright 501-607-3100 alan@arktimes.com

12407 Davis Ranch Rd. | Cabot, AR 72023 Call Kaytee Wright 501-607-3100 alan@arktimes.com arktimes.com JANUARY 5, 2017, 2016

31

2017

ROX

DON’T BLINK, MY FRIEND

AND EMBR ACE THE FEAR .

HEARTS N BRO K E

M I N DS N B LOW

Psych your mind!

New deadline for entering:

January 8, 2017 32

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ARKANSAS TIMES

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