Arkansas Times - July 20, 2017

NEWS + POLITICS NEWS++ENTERTAINMENT POLITICS + ENTERTAINMENT + FOOD / JULY + FOOD 20, 2017 / APRIL / ARKTIMES.COM 16, 2017 / ARKTIMES.COM

!

S E H S A E TH tle t i L d oye own r t s e rly d bar, Midt a e n e er ire v t f i r d a o r y p Afte legendar nd our re a ’s Rock s reopens a week. r rd Billia t there fo ou hung rg e b n e Ros b o c

by Ja

n e p O w o N

Put Agave’s Tequila Bar on your bucket list

Agave is a fresh new Mexican/American concept located in Benton, AR. Our menu focuses on traditional Mexican food, Traditional American food, and fusions of the two. We are a Chef-run kitchen, which we believe is unique to the area—Exceptional food, exceptional service in a polished upscale casual environment. Our motto is “Always say Yes!” Our bar is the highlight of the restaurant…

Fresh/Fusion/Friends.

17324 Interstate 30 N, Benton, Arkansas 72019 (501) 316-4227 . agavegrillbenton.com 2

JULY 20, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

ARKANSAS’S SOURCE FOR NEWS, POLITICS & ENTERTAINMENT 201 East Markham Street, Suite 200 Little Rock, Arkansas 72201

@ArkTimes

arktimes

arkansastimes

oldarktimes

youtube.com/c/arktimes

W: arktimes.com

RIVERDALE 10 VIP CINEMA

WE SPECIALIZE IN HUMAN CAPITAL

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

ELECTRIC RECLINER SEATS AND RESERVED SEATING

ASAP offers staffing solutions to clients looking for a consistent and competent workforce. Our approach to staffing is much more than placement, it’s a partnership that thrives on mutually beneficial results. We are intimately connected with our clients and fully understand the industries we serve. Our goal is to create a mutually beneficial long-term relationship that results in increased profitability and employee loyalty.

AUGUST IS

SHOW TIMES: FRI, JULY 21 – THURS, JULY 27 11:00 SHOW TIMES THURS-SUN ONLY DUNKIRK THE BIG SICK

PG13 | 11:00 1:45 4:00 6:45 9:15

R | 11:00 2:00 4:25 7:00 9:30

VALERIAN AND THE CITY SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING OF A THOUSAND PLANETS PG13 | 10:45 1:45 4:15 6:50 9:30 PG13 | 11:00 1:45 4:30 7:00 9:45 DESPICABLE ME 3 GIRLS TRIP PG | 11:00 2:00 4:15 7:15 9:15 R | 11:00 2:00 4:30 7:00 9:35 BABY DRIVER MAUDIE R | 11:15 2:00 4:20 7:15 9:35 PG13 | 11:00 2:15 4:30 7:15 9:30 WONDER WOMAN WAR FOR THE PLANET OF PG-13 | 10:45 1:30 7:00 THE APES WISH UPON PG13 | 10:45 1:30 4:15 6:45 9:30

E: arktimes@arktimes.com

PG13 | 4:15 9:45

PUBLISHER Alan Leveritt EDITOR Lindsey Millar SENIOR EDITOR Max Brantley

FROM LEFT: CHARLEY ROBERTSON AND KEVIN FAIR

10301 N. RODNEY PARHAM ROAD 501-537-2727 • ASAPWORKSFORME.COM

FULL FOOD MENU • SERVING BEER & WINE TICKETS & GIFT CARDS AVAILABLE ONLINE LUXURY LEATHER ELECTRIC RECLINERS WITH TABLES IN ALL AUDITORIUMS • RESERVED SEATING TICKET KIOSK IN LOBBY FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE

MANAGING EDITOR Leslie Newell Peacock CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Mara Leveritt

AUGUST IS

ASSOCIATE EDITOR David Koon COPY EDITOR Jim Harris ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR Stephanie Smittle EDITORIAL ART DIRECTOR Bryan Moats PHOTOGRAPHER Brian Chilson DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL STRATEGY Jordan Little

AUGUST IS IS AUGUST AUGUST IS

ADVERTISING ART DIRECTOR Mike Spain GRAPHIC DESIGNER Katie Hassell DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING Phyllis A. Britton DIRECTOR OF SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS Rebekah Hardin ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Brooke Wallace, Lee Major, Ashley Gill ADVERTISING TRAFFIC MANAGER Roland R. Gladden ADVERTISING COORDINATOR Jim Hunnicutt IT DIRECTOR Robert Curfman CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Anitra Hickman CONTROLLER Weldon Wilson BILLING/COLLECTIONS Linda Phillips OFFICE MANAGER/ACCOUNTS PAYABLE Kelly Jones PRODUCTION MANAGER Ira Hocut (1954-2009)

10

Riverdale

430

WEST

Heights

MIDTOWN

Hillcrest

DOWNTOWN River Market

10

Great Deals on Delicious Meals Each Week: 630

association of alternative newsmedia

Main Street Creative Corridor South Main (SoMa)

67

67

30

440

AIRPORT

5

30

67

SOUTHWEST

530

430

VOLUME 43, NUMBER 46 ARKANSAS TIMES (ISSN 0164-6273) is published each week

by Arkansas Times Limited Partnership, 201 East Markham Street, Suite 200, Little Rock, Arkansas, 72201, phone (501) 375-2985. Periodical postage paid at Little Rock, Arkansas, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to ARKANSAS TIMES, 201 EAST MARKHAM STREET, SUITE 200, Little Rock, AR, 72201. Subscription prices are $42 for one year, $74 for two years. Subscriptions outside Arkansas are $49 for one year, $88 for two years.

Foreign (including Canadian) subscriptions are $168 a year.

For subscriber service call (501) 375-2985. Current singlecopy price is 75¢, free in Pulaski County. Single issues are available by mail at $2.50 each, postage paid. Payment must accompany all single-copy orders. Reproduction or use in whole or in part of the contents without the written consent of the publishers is prohibited. Manuscripts and artwork will not be returned or acknowledged unless sufficient return postage and a self-addressed stamped envelope are included. All materials are handled with due care; however, the publisher assumes no responsibility for care and safe return of unsolicited materials. All letters sent to ARKANSAS TIMES will be treated as intended for publication and are subject to ARKANSAS TIMES’ unrestricted right to edit or to comment editorially.

©2017 ARKANSAS TIMES LIMITED PARTNERSHIP FOR SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE CALL: (501) 375-2985

• nJuly 31-Aug. 6: Downtown g i ept Great Deals Greaton Deals on Great Deals on Still acc nt 7-13: West • Aug. Delicious Meals Week: Delicious Meals Each Week: GreatEach Deals on Delicious Meals Each Week: restaura n all i n atio Meals Each Week: 14-20:••Delicious Midtown July 31-Aug. 6: Downtown • July 31-Aug. 6: Downtown k particip ttle R•ocAug. July 31-Aug. 6: Downtown f Li July 7-13: 31-Aug. 6:7-13: Downtown •••Aug. West West • Aug. parts o is limited.

7-13: West Aug. 21-27: Southwest and Airport • Aug. e c a 7-13: West •• Aug. •• Aug. 14-20: Midtown Aug. 14-20: Midtown but sp @ Deals on Aug. 14-20: Midtown yllisGreat h p l i a m eAug. • Delicious 8-Week's End: •Southwest Aug. 14-20: Midtown Ottenheimer Mall 21-27: Southwest and Airport •• Aug. 21-27: Southwest and Airport • Aug. NOW Meals 21-27: and Airport Aug. Each Week: es.com 30

produce, and a number of food, floral and art and craft vendors. The city has numerous neighborhood farmers’ and specialty markets throughout the city.

Creamery and Mylo Coffee Co. are focused on using the freshest and highest quality ingredients – locally-sourced as much as possible – to produce premium, small-batch products where the goal is quality over quantity. Many of the city’s restaurateurs work with local farmers, and use their best products to create farm-to-table menus – and in doing so, support the local economy and build strong communities.

The Little Rock Farmers’ Market is Arkansas’s oldest and largest farmers’ market, and features a variety of fresh, in-season

The new Urban Farm at Heifer comes complete with animals and gardens, and is a wonderful addition to Heifer International’s World Headquarters and its interactive Heifer Village. Heifer’s mission is to work with communities worldwide to end hunger and poverty, and teach sustainability while caring for the Earth. The new Urban Farm is a way to connect people with living things through environmental and practical approaches.

ALES, WINES AND SPIRITS WITH A SOUTHERN ACCENT

“It’s hard to imagine a more burgeoning food scene than what we currently have right here in Little Rock. New restaurants, brew pubs and eateries are popping up left and right, joining an already well-regarded list of entrenched dining establishments, to form a culinary community that’s worth getting excited about.”

Keep it local. That’s what we do in Greater Little Rock. If you love adult craft beverages, then using our Locally Labeled passport is a great way to explore our homegrown craft breweries, wineries and award-winning distillery. Here, you’ll taste the passion that goes into every drop. Here, you’ll experience commitment to quality libations. Here, you’ll drink like a local.

Kevin Shalin “The Mighty Rib” Blog · TheMightyRib.com

More than 10 craft breweries have opened on both sides of the Arkansas River. You’ll discover fun neighborhood watering holes

arktim 4

•• Aug. End: • •Aug. andMall Airport Mall Aug.21-27: 8-Week's End: Ottenheimer Ottenheimer Aug. 8-Week's 8-Week's End:Southwest Ottenheimer Mall Market Ottenheimer Hall 8-Week's End: Ottenheimer Mall 31-Aug. River 6:• Aug. Downtown 5

• July SEE WEEKLY LISTINGS IN SEE WEEKLY LISTINGS SEE WEEKLY LISTINGS IN THE SEE WEEKLY LISTINGS IN THE THE IN THE 7-13: West • Aug. ARKANSAS AND DINELR.COM ARKANSAS TIMES AND IN DINELR.CO SEETIMES WEEKLY LISTINGS THE ARKANSAS TIMES AND DINELR.COM ARKANSAS TIMES AND DINELR.COM ARKANSAS TIMES AND DINELR.COM • Aug. 14-20: Midtown • Aug. 21-27: Southwest and Airport arktimes.com JULY 20, 2017

3

COMMENT

Please vote no This is an open letter to Sens. Tom Cotton and John Boozman: On July 4, I turned 49 years old.

It wasn’t supposed to happen — many times over.

The day after I turned 15 years old in 1983, doctors discovered that I had two brain tumors. They operated for 10 hours and what were thought to be two tumors turned out to be six tumors. I was the first known documented teenaged patient to have suffered from intracranial histoplasmosis. Histoplasmosis had previously been diagnosed in middle-aged men, in their lungs.

I spent nine months on a drug called Amphoteracin — common name Amphoterrible.

When I was 34 years old in 2003, I suffered three heart attacks and had a triple cardiac bypass surgery. One graft failed and it was stented. Later that year, I had to have a right femoral artery bypass surgery because five inches of my femoral artery was closed. When this started, I worked out three times a day for a total of about four hours a day minimum. I was having blood tests and thorough checkups monthly because my husband and I were trying to have a baby. I have no family history of heart disease.

During the first heart attack, I was racing on my bike. I didn’t know it was a heart attack. During the second heart attack, I had just finished running eight miles. It was part of my training for a triathlon. A few months later, one of my grafts shut down and it was stented.

Two years later, a second graft shut down and I had my fourth heart attack.

That graft was stented.

In 2009, I learned that I was in stage III renal failure. I’m now in stage IV renal failure and am starting the process of a kidney transplant at the urging of the doctors of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. They say that I require a live donor.

What that also means is that I’m not just liable for my bills, but that of my donor’s.

I was forced to leave my job because I developed chronic angina and small vessel disease, causing me to have chest pain at my desk nearly every day, and not knowing which chest pain would lead to its final blow to my life. I suffer from depression and anxiety disorders because of my various illnesses.

In January, doctors at CHI St. Vincent Infirmary did a heart catheterization on me because of ongoing chest pain and other heart symptoms. They have found that both stents are now closed.

I stay in a state of flux because my kidney disease is wreaking havoc with 4

JULY 20, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

my body and I’ve developed an autoimmune disease in my eyes because of my chronic state of dehydration.

Please vote against the health care bill under consideration in the Senate. Please do not allow pre-existing conditions to be reinstated as a block to coverage. It’s discriminatory by nature. Please do not reinstate lifetime maximums. If that’s done, I’m done.

We have insurance through my husband’s employer. His employer, who self-insures, did not have to raise deductibles from $400 to $5,000 for each person on the policy, but did. If my

husband loses his job, I’m done.

The policy will not pay for any medication until the deductible has been met.

What this means is that I don’t take critical medication for my heart or kidneys because I simply cannot afford drugs that cost $600 to $1,400. What happens is my kidneys tank and my angina become more aggressive.

Sens. Cotton and Boozman, please vote no. I never thought that I would look forward to turning 50. But I hope to see that next year.

Lisa McDermott 1517 Linden Ave., Texarkana, AR 71854

enjoy a warm cookie welcome when you check in to one of our

newly renovated suites just m inutes from Cr yst al B r idges and A m azeum .

A sk about our Cr yst al B r idges Fam ily Package!

Repulsed I LOVE the Arkansas Times. When my brother was going through chemo he would bring issues home to Southeast Arkansas. I delighted in their arrival. I am grateful for the role of good journalism in bringing to the public an awareness of poor political policies, abuse of government and putting human faces to needed social reform.

I write this respectfully with the intention of giving you insight into how one of your readers felt as they flipped through your [July 6] magazine. I had a gut reaction to the portion of your magazine enclosed in my letter [The Inconsequential News Quiz]. I felt a repugnancy so deep on so many levels. Was this portion of the quiz aligned with the mission of the Arkansas Times? Regardless of the spectrum of your religious beliefs or lack of, does alluding to any religious icon or symbol of any religion [when writing of] the joys of double-finger penetration inspire any of your readers to any form of greatness? Where does one cross the line on issues of morality?

I do wish there was a mysterious monolith that would promote higherlevel thought not only in the members of the Legislature, but with respect to the members of the editorial staff.

Judy (name withheld) Southeast Arkansas

From the web In response to The Observer column in the July 13 issue, “-30-,” about the death of the Atkins Chronicle and newspaper struggles in general: The Observer never spoke more truth than today. It makes me so sad to see newspapers go under, and as The Observer noted, people will be sad some day that they did not support them when they had a chance. plainjim In response to the Arkansas Blog’s post on a refugee family from the Congo now living in Fayetteville, and their expressed hope to find work in poultry, construction or service industries:

301 SE WALTON BOULEVARD IN BENTONVILLE (479) 845-7770 | bentonvillerogerssuites.doubletree.com

Sounds like the Northwest Arkansas Christian corporati have found that refugees are the ideal disenfranchised blue-collar complement to their endless supply chain of yes-men white-collar corporate drones, the human capital coming out of the University of Arkansas and John Brown University. Wake up, Max. Mat Ram

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

• She must be an Arkansan.

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

• We welcome nominees who are LGBTQ.

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

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

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

OCTOBER 5, 12, 19, AND 26

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

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

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

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

A luncheon hosted by First Security Bank is planned.

First Security Bank and The Arkansas Times are not affiliated arktimes.com JULY 20, 2017

5

WEEK THAT WAS

Quote of the week

Cotton targets legal immigration More from Cotton: He’s working with President Trump aide Stephen Miller on legislation to slash legal immigration to the United States, Politico reports. Later this summer, Cotton and Sen. David Perdue (R-Georgia) plan to introduce a law that would, by 2027, cut the number of legal immigrants entering the country by half.

Around 1 million immigrants enter the country annually. “Sen. Cotton knows that being more deliberate about who we let into our country will raise working-class wages, which is why an overwhelming majority of Americans support it. He and Sen. Perdue are working with President Trump to fix our immigration system so that instead of undercutting American workers, it will support them and their livelihoods,” said Caroline Rabbitt, a Cotton spokeswoman told Politico.

Riverfest calls it quits The board of directors of Riverfest, Arkansas’s largest and longest running music festival, announced Tuesday that the festival has been suspended indefi6

JULY 20, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

nitely. Riverfest celebrated its 40th anniversary in June, but this year’s rainsoaked festival lost almost $300,000. At its height, the festival drew 250,000 people to Riverfront Park in Little Rock. A press release blamed competition from other festivals and the rising cost of performers’ fees for the decision.

“The industry has just changed,” DeAnna Korte, the nonprofit festival’s longtime executive director, said. When Snoop Dogg headlined the festival in 2012, his rate was $75,000, Korte said.

In advance of this year’s festival, the rapper wanted upward of $300,000.

Riverfest’s budget this year for some 30 bands was $850,000. Streaming music’s massive cut into album sales revenue has contributed to skyrocketing performer costs, Korte said.

Korte said she expected people to question the festival’s decision to move from Memorial Day weekend to early June and to move away from nostalgia acts. That transition came in 2016, following a $200,000 loss in 2015 and significant losses the four previous years.

In 2016, Riverfest spun off the familyfriendly Springfest and made Riverfest a music-only event with a lineup that included Chris Stapleton, Juicy J, Grace

Potter and The Flaming Lips — at an increased ticket price.

Riverfest broke even in 2016. “We felt like the changes we made were heading in the right direction,” Korte said.

Advanced tickets were selling better than last year’s before a bad weather forecast came out, Korte said.

Deseg saga continues The prospect of a dramatic conclusion to school desegregation issues in Pulaski County emerged Friday and then blew up 72 hours later.

A joint motion asking for a delay in the trial was filed in a pending lawsuit over racial discrimination in the quality of facilities in the Little Rock School District. The motion, joined by attorneys for the Pulaski County Special School District (not a party in the case), said talks were underway on a settlement of remaining issues in both the Little Rock case and the separate PCSSD desegregation case by lawyers including John Walker for black families and Allen Roberts of Camden, representing the Pulaski district.

A settlement would end all school litigation. But it would also clear the way

for the state Board of Education to consider something it has favored: a change in boundary lines in the PCSSD to a district south of the Arkansas River combined with Little Rock, and some different alignment north of the river ranging from three to five districts where Pulaski, North Little Rock and Jacksonville now exist as separate districts.

This brought unhappiness to a boil on the PCSSD board and a special meeting at press time about suggesting that Superintendent Jerry Guess no longer employ Allen Roberts. That, in turn, might prompt Guess to reconsider his own role as superintendent. He wrote the school board Monday saying he sensed a loss of confidence and said he and Roberts were prepared to depart if that was the case.

The Pulaski district has regained local control, passed a construction tax, fixed finances and undertaken a major construction program under Guess, with Roberts’ help, and made progress on getting out of the desegregation lawsuit. But that isn’t good enough for some school board members, particularly those loathe to find themselves hooked up with the majority black Little Rock School District.

ILLUSTRATION BRYAN MOATS

“I think it would not be the right path for us to repeal Obamacare without laying out a path forward. I think when we repeal Obamacare, we need to have the solution in place moving forward. ... I do not think we can just repeal Obamacare and say we’ll give the answer two years from now.”

— U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton in January on MSNBC. On Tuesday, the day after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell conceded that a Senate bid to repeal and replace Obamacare would not be successful, Cotton said on the “Hugh Hewitt Show” on radio that he would vote for repeal — to take effect in two years — without a replacement. Cotton, who was one of the 12 Republicans who met in secret to craft the Senate repeal-andreplace bill, had refused to make public his position on the bill.

ILLUSTRATION BRYAN MOATS

OPINION

Football for UA-LR

A

ndrew Rogerson, the new chancellor at UA Little Rock, has decided to study the cost of starting a major college football team on campus (plus a marching band). Technically, it would be a revival of football, dropped more than 60 years ago when the school was a junior college.

Rogerson says he’s a scientist and he wants to see some numbers.

No NASA engineers will be required to tell him the numbers will take some massaging to look good. They will have to be influenced by hard-to-quantify claims that football means an increased enrollment, greater college-directed philanthropy, community economic benefits and general enthusiasm for a popular sport.

The Arkansas experience provides contrary evidence. Only the Arkansas Razorbacks have a self-supporting athletic department, thanks to huge revenue from a football TV contract. Premium seat sales and big donors help.

Elsewhere in Arkansas, big-time

UA Little Rock is already tapping students for $3.8 million and general funds for $3.9 million to support the existing sports, with basketball the marquee sport in a department currently spending $11.4 million.

UA Pine Bluff plays Division I sports. It hasn’t been a ticket to community resurgence, such as Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola seems to believe is a byproduct. Its $7 million Athletic Department is almost wholly funded by students ($1 million) and university money ($5 million).

Up in Conway, the University of Central Arkansas has invested in stadium and coaches to go big-time. Its athletic department took in $12.7 million last year, $4.9 million from student fees and $4.5 million from school funds. It realized not even a half-million dollars in ticket sales.

Little Rock doesn’t have much room to grow revenue from students, though grow it must to finance football, the most expensive of all sports. The school’s state money is already tapped to the maximum.

It can pick up a couple of million by selling itself as a cupcake matchup to one of the handful of big-time schools that make money on athletics. But a tightening cable TV market plus evidence of

football burnout doesn’t offer much hope for TV revenue to make up shortages.

Is there a major philanthropist ready to pony up a huge gift to start football at a campus still striving to establish a residential identity to go with its long mission as a commuter school catering to a large number of so-called nontraditional students? Maybe Rogerson could pay a call on the Walton family. They owe UA Little Rock big time for giving them a piece of the campus for a Little Rock School District-damaging charter school. Maybe they’d offer a gratuity for a football team.

Little Rock won’t have to build a stadium. The state Parks and Tourism Department, which now controls War Memorial Stadium, is helping to pay for the football study in hopes Little Rock will produce a paying customer. The Razorbacks are down to a game a year there and it’s probably gone in a year.

Taxing college students with new fees to pay the rent on a football stadium will be a mathematical equation that Chancellor Rogerson might have a hard time selling — even to a remedial math class.

grew up without my father in my household. My mother passed away when I was 13. I have incarcerated family members and implies that vioI have lost siblings to gun violence. I lived lent crimes are in four different households all over Little not a “city tragedy” Rock and North Little Rock. Additionally, I know that my education was not much when they happen different than those so-called, stereotypion Baseline Road, cal gang members: I attended nine differColonel Glenn ANTWAN ent schools before graduating from John Road or Asher AvePHILLIPS nue. Unfortunately, L. McClellan High School. Now, when I’m these are not just words, but a sentiment not at work at Wright, Lindsey and Jenthat has guided how dollars are spent and nings, I’m sure that to some people I look policies are drafted. I understand that the just like those problem gang members. I’m Power Ultra Lounge mass shooting made not different, but my opportunities were. national news, but if we needed a story in My story — from McClellan to a topThe Washington Post to make us care about five-ranked liberal arts college to law all parts and all people of our city, then we school to partner at a prestigious law firm need to do some major re-evaluating.

— should not be a novel exception of some In another column, the Democrat- young black dude “making it.” Arkansas Gazette’s Nelson wrote, “Little Rock has Commitment, a leadership development a major gang problem, just as was the case program for academically talented black in the early 1990s. Most gang members are students, provided an opportunity for me young black males.” You do not have to dig to be exposed to a world that was mostly too deep to extrapolate from that assertion unknown to me. I was able to intern at local that black guys are the problem in Little businesses and build relationships that Rock. To be clear, I know Nelson, and I are lasting to this day. These experiences know that is not what he meant. Unfortu- were invaluable and have been critical in nately, I also know that some people saw my professional development. Arkansas the column as a means to reinforce the Commitment is an amazing program, but notion that “we need to get these black our community needs more programs like males under control.” it to provide opportunities and exposure I disagree with painting with such a to an even greater number of people who broad stroke because I’m not much differ- otherwise would not have it. ent than those “problem gang members.” I I’m sure my life would be different if

those opportunities were not afforded to me. People invested time and resources into programs and events that allowed me to become who I am today. We need more of that.

We need to invest in opportunities for all people in Little Rock, especially the perceived gang members or those from neighborhoods that have not received adequate capital investment. We need to be painstakingly deliberate about investing in mission-driven organizations to provide positive opportunities for middle and high school students, especially during the summer months, who do not have resources to take summer vacations or attend costly summer camps. We need to engage in intracity tourism to ensure that all citizens of Little Rock are invested in neighborhoods other than the neighborhoods where they live. We need to demand capital investment in the South End, on Asher Avenue and Geyer Springs Road; I’m sure investors can make a positive return on investment for projects in those neighborhoods. Problems such as the lack of civic, educational and social opportunities for people who live south of Interstate 630, in addition to the belief that Little Rock is becoming increasingly divided, have been at crisis stage long before July 1.

sports are costly and don’t produce attendance or private contributions to match.

Arkansas State MAX University in BRANTLEY Jonesboro keeps maxbrantley@arktimes.com adding to its stadium and raising coaches’ pay, running up $43 million in expenses last year according to a 2015-16 NCAA report. To cover the costs, it required $5 million in student fees and $8 million in school funds. Athletic spending has risen sharply the last five years on the ASU campus, according to the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, to more than $84,000 per athlete while academic spending on campus has held essentially flat over five years at $7,983 per student. The athletic department managed only $1.7 million in ticket sales for sporting events, enough to cover about 4 percent of athletic costs.

Other Division I schools struggle more.

Pay attention

“E

verything changed at about 2:30 a.m. July 1,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Rex Nelson wrote recently about the Power Ultra Lounge mass shooting. “Everything.

Nobody at Little Rock City Hall seems to understand that. The city sustained a body blow as a new month dawned.”

If anyone reading Nelson’s article thinks that a crisis began 2:30 a.m. July 1, 2017, then he hasn’t been paying attention to Little Rock. That’s not to diminish the severity and seriousness of the incident that occurred at Power Ultra Lounge. But our city has been experiencing challenging circumstances for a long time. It has been obvious to me and those who look like me, grew up where I grew up, or grew up in my economic environment that the city has sustained multiple body blows over recent years.

After the mass shooting, I recall a woman saying that she overheard someone say, “This was not supposed to happen [in] downtown [Little Rock].” In response to hearing this statement, she said, “Well … where was it supposed to happen?”

I also heard another Democrat-Gazette columnist, John Brummett, say recently that the shooting is “a city tragedy because it happened downtown.” Again, this sentiment, whether unintentional or not,

Antwan Phillips is a lawyer with the Wright Lindsey Jennings firm.

Follow Arkansas Blog on Twitter: @ArkansasBlog

arktimes.com JULY 20, 2017

7

Turn to baseball

W

presents…

Sean McGowan Thursday July 20 7:30 p.m.

The Joint

“A fingerstyle jazz guitarist who combines many diverse musical influences 301 Main Street with unconventional North Little Rock techniques to create a broad palette of textures” Tickets $25 Available at the door or online at www.argentaartsacousticmusic.com or www.centralarkansastickets.com

MICHEL LEIDERMANN Moderator

ENJOYING THE “NATURAL STATE” PARKS FRIDAY, JULY 28 AT 6:30 PM In Spanish with English subtitles aetn.org www.aetn.org/programs/ellatino 8

JULY 20, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

hen the world threatens to get you down, there is always baseball — an absorbing refuge, an alternate reality entirely unto itself.

To a person of my temperament, the MLB package on satellite TV constitutes the entertainment bargain of the century. A man can read and write only so many hours a day.

Sit down, put your feet up, turn on the Red Sox, Cubs, Dodgers, etc., and it’s certain that He Who Shall Not Be Named won’t be. Regardless of the follies and imbecilities on the news networks, the focus is on the never-ending narrative and deep minutia of the game.

There can be controversy, even fierce argument. How dumb were the Red Sox not to sign a power-hitter over the winter?

Can a third baseman be found to fill that void? Who to trade? You can’t get something for nothing.

To hear some people tell it, though, the sport’s in trouble. Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred worries that the pace of the game is too slow to tear millennials away from their iPhones. No less an authority than conservative columnist (and baseball savant) George F. Will complains that the games are too long: “This year the average nine-inning game is 3 hours and 4 minutes, up 4 minutes from last year and 14 minutes from 2010.”

Will also frets that there are too many walks, too many strikeouts, too few balls put in play, maybe even too many home runs. Too many relief pitchers over 6-foot-5 throwing 95 mph fastballs at batters swinging from their heels instead of bunting, executing hit-and-run plays, and playing old-fashioned, hit ‘em where they ain’t country hardball.

Few seasoned observers watching all those home runs flying out this season doubt that the baseballs have been “juiced” somehow — although people have been saying this since the 1950s to ritual denials.

If so, it surprises me that some enterprising physics professor can’t prove the contention one way or the other.

But hey, it beats arguing about steroid junkies and Pete Rose.

“MLB’s worsening pace of play,” Will warns, “will not attract generations shaped by ubiquitous entertainments.”

Problem is, nothing in the physical world will tear addicts away from their glowing screens. I sometimes used to tell people who find baseball boring that I found them boring. But the truth is that I became obsessed playing endless hours as a lad. If I’d been good enough I’d have kept playing until they retired my number.

My wife’s childhood friend Brooks Robinson did that, and I pretty much decided I needed to marry her when GENE he gave us World LYONS Series tickets one year. She shyly asked would I take her?

Um, yeah. I definitely will. Kids who play the game love the game. That’s basically how it goes.

OK, confession time: One reason I don’t care so much about long games is that the DVR is my friend. If the broadcast begins at 6 p.m., I begin watching around 7:30, giving me 90 minutes to burn.

I watch only commercials featuring Lilly, the endearing AT&T girl.

A reliever ambles in from the bullpen, takes eight warmup pitches, and then there’s a conference at the mound. I zip through the whole thing in maybe 30 seconds. Play ball!

On my TV, that three-hour game runs maybe 2:15. Doesn’t everybody do this at home? Why not?

That said, there are several simple rule changes that would definitely perk up the action. First, and most obvious, a 20-second clock between pitches. Some guys just work too slowly on the mound. It’d make them concentrate better, and keep infielders on their toes. It’s already working in the minor leagues.

Second, designated hitters in both leagues. A few pitchers, like San Francisco’s Madison Bumgarner, can hit. So let him hit every day. The rest are wasting everybody’s time. The DH extends player careers and makes for more offense.

Third, keep instant replay, but limit umps to 90 seconds. They’re not negotiating the Treaty of Versailles.

No to robo-umps calling strikes.

Humans play this game.

Fourth, and maybe most controversial, do away with formerly rare, now ubiquitous (and stifling) defensive shifts. You want more situational hitting? More singles, doubles, hit-and-run plays? I’m with Yankees manager Joe Girardi: The rule should be two infielders positioned on either side of second base.

Mets general manager Sandy Alderson has another idea. “I would require a pitcher to throw to three hitters,” he told the New York Post. “One, it would speed up the game. Two, and more important, it would change the dynamics of the game in the late innings.”

Boy, would it. Alas, too much to be acceptable to traditionalists like me.

Another Jesus

S

en. Jason Rapert (R-Conway) and the American History and Heritage Foundation, the nonprofit Rapert created to educate us about our “history” and “heritage,” have raised over $50,000 on the GoFundMe website to replace the Ten Commandments monument that was mowed down less than 24 hours after it was erected on the Capitol grounds.

If you follow the logic of Rapert and his supporters, God is very pleased so many have donated money to rebuild a giant stone slab with some rules on it. A few minutes on Rapert’s Facebook page (if he hasn’t blocked you yet) also shows his supporters believe that Jesus wants us to lock up more people in prison, close our borders to those in need and let poor Americans fend for themselves for food and health care.

Maybe Progressive Christians have it all wrong.

Maybe this Jesus, full of vengeance and fear, did anoint President Trump and handpicked him to be president. It wasn’t the Russians meddling in our election. It was GOP Jesus. A Jesus who would rather us give our money to build what could be argued is a graven image than donate to the number of heartbreaking GoFundMe accounts placed by parents of sick babies, families in danger of losing their homes after a medical crisis, or children trying to raise money to bury a parent. A Jesus who values winning over helping others cross the finish line, too. Forget the Jesus who was concerned about widows and orphans; we now have one who is smiling down on Reps. Steve Womack, Rick Crawford, French Hill and Bruce Westerman for their votes to cut Medicaid for women and children.

Of course, this Jesus who favors and blesses the United States of America over all other countries wants us to build a wall to keep out those fleeing their homes desperate for a new life and the safety of their children.

It makes complete sense that a God who favors a man who has admitted

to adultery and sexual assault would support policies limiting women’s access to health care AUTUMN and birth control.

TOLBERT This new Jesus is also surely pleased by any effort to keep foster children in institutions and group homes and out of any sort of stable or loving environment provided by unmarried couples or those who dare love someone of the same sex.

Arkansas is lucky to have Rapert and so many others to help us understand where we went wrong with our religion. How dare we think a man such as President Jimmy Carter, who nearly died from exhaustion building homes for the poor, would be a role model for our children? We should look to those such as Mike Huckabee so we can learn how to praise God and ridicule the less fortunate at the same time. Who needs policies and laws that benefit our fellow man when this new Jesus wants us to put ourselves and our families first?

Maybe instead of a Ten Commandments monument, the money should be spent on a stone statue of a white Jesus holding a gun in one hand and a “MAGA” sign in the other. Instead of the image of the old Jesus being surrounded by children and feeding the hungry or healing the sick, we can depict this new Jesus as a prison executioner or maybe an ICE agent rounding up undocumented families.

It would help to have an inscription on the base clarifying the definition of “neighbor” to exclude people from other countries, the mentally ill, addicts and those who are unable to meet any type of work requirement.

For good measure, we could build a wall around this Jesus to protect him from anyone who would try to hurt him or dare wash his feet. Sadly, we would then truly have a testament to what seems to be our values.

Maybe instead of a Ten Commandments monument, the money should be spent on a stone statue of a white Jesus holding a gun in one hand and a “MAGA” sign in the other.

JENNIFER LIND

AREA MANAGER

3000 locations 900 cities 120 countries 400 W. Capitol, Ste 1700

O +1501.374.4692 D +1501.492.3423 C +1501.502.4006

Pepperoni x 3 Introducing The Pepperonipalooza Math never tasted so delicious.

5103 Warden Road | North Little Rock | HideawayPizza.com

arktimes.com JULY 20, 2017

9

PEARLS ABOUT SWINE

Five big q’s

A

s August Razorback football practices loom closer, we proceed with the latest installment of FIVE BIG QUESTIONS™: 1. Can Austin Allen get a better handle on the job and rein in his emotions?

Last fall, in the games where the team faltered, Allen’s frustration was often visibly on display, and let’s not mince words here: When the senior-to-be was pissed off at the lackadaisical approach to the fourth-quarter playcalling as the team played from behind against Texas A&M, or when he was predictably irritable after protection broke down completely and imperiled him at Auburn and Missouri, he was fully justified, and it was a bit refreshing to see that kind of passion. We had heard for years that Austin carried a bit more of an edge to him than his even-keel older brother, Brandon. But as a senior leader, he simply can’t forsake composure in the tense moments, and that will be taxing considering the untested receiving talent with which he has to work. Allen had some fine moments throughout his first year as a starter, but also threw 11 of his 15 interceptions in losses, and many of those came at junctures where he was trying to shoulder too much of the proverbial load.

2. Will the offensive line revert to its 2015 form? Arkansas will necessarily be powered up front by road-grading, experienced run blockers like center Frank Ragnow, but pass protection was an obvious and repetitive deficiency.

Allen’s 34 sacks didn’t just come at the hands of the power programs like Alabama (recall that Louisiana Tech tormented him in the very first 60 minutes of the season), and his alleged mobility was often neutralized because inexperienced tackles simply missed assignments. Rawleigh Williams improved dramatically in picking up blitzing back-end players, so his early retirement will also put some heat on Devwah Whaley to be every bit as instrumental in the passing game as he expects to be on the ground. The real mystery, though, is whether the young linemen thrust into action last fall will now take charge after taking lumps, or if some newer blood will have to undergo trial by fire yet again.

3. What fresh hell will the kicking game put us through? Let’s see now …

Cole Hedlund lost his job last year after trying hard to lose it the year before, and Connor Limpert was only serviceable on kickoffs, logging a mere nine touchbacks out of 43 boots. Steady punter 10

JULY 20, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

Toby Baker is gone after two fine years handling that duty.

Hedlund probably has backed his way into being the BEAU placekicking frontWILCOX runner by default with Adam McFain now gone, and Blake Johnson should have the inside track on the punting job, but monitor this situation closely, because there’s a chance that either or both of the odds-on favorites to handle these chores will be dethroned at some point before or during the season.

4. Can somebody in that secondary actually snatch the damn ball out of the air? Through 13 games last year, the Hogs’ top ballhawk in the secondary was … hard to figure. Henré Toliver had two of the team’s moribund total of 10 interceptions, and so did Ryan Pulley and Josh Liddell, but that’s the number that paced the team: two. The best news is that this unit played inarguably better than it was expected to, thanks to now-defensive coordinator Paul Rhoads’ tutelage, and the aggregate experience of the defensive backfield is the best that it has been in several years. Toliver cut his teeth shutting down Amari Cooper as a freshman in 2014, and Pulley and Santos Ramirez both genuinely blossomed last year after having rocky times on the turf in 2015.

What once appeared to be a liability now seems like the outright strength of the defense, particularly because the Hogs’ pass rush has regressed slowly but markedly since the likes of Trey Flowers departed.

5. Will this be the year that Arkansas finally has a linebacking corps worth its salt? Long an Achilles heel, this unit has size, depth and athleticism, and is bolstered by the return of Dre Greenlaw and the maturity of Dwayne Eugene and Randy Ramsey, two skilled guys who had to take circuitous and arduous routes to find their playing time. The real gem of the bunch may be De’Jon “Scoota” Harris, who blew past a couple of higher-rated prospects to become a key cog and All-Freshman contributor.

The days of sub-6-foot, scarcely-twobills guys in the middle are gone, thankfully, and with no disrespect intended to the departed Brooks Ellis, this is going to be a much speedier and agile crew manning the second line of defense, and Robb Smith is no longer around to call and design creative plays that leave the entire center of the field exposed.

11200 W. Markham 501-223-3120 www.colonialwineshop.com facebook.com/colonialwines

THE OBSERVER NOTES ON THE PASSING SCENE

Dumb and smart, at the same time

T

he Observer spent the week at a bar and thought a lot about a joke and its writer.

Here’s that joke: Homer Simpson stands atop wooden barrels and addresses a crowd. “To alcohol!” he yells. “The cause of — and solution to — all of life’s problems.”

The joke was written by John Swartzwelder, but it does not feel like anyone penned it. This joke strikes The Observer as funny in such a clear manner that it rings as cliché. How could we, as a society, not come up with that joke earlier? No, there is no way he wrote it. No, it’s an old adage, one thinks.

The contradictory joke was Swartzwelder’s specialty. In the writer’s room at “The Simpsons” a high compliment was for your work to be called “Swartzweldian,” meaning it was “uniquely dumb and smart at the same time,” according to a former writer. These jokes, to The Observer, are also about sadness. They highlight futility.

Here’s another of his, and my favorite, to show you what is meant by this futility thesis. It is from a little-known but much-loved comedy magazine called Army Man that had many writers of “The Simpsons” as contributors before they joined the show. Swartzwelder wrote, “They can kill the Kennedys. Why can’t they make a cup of coffee that tastes good?”

Read it twice. The first time it’s a bit weird on the brain.

Here’s a breakdown from George Meyer, the editor of Army Man and the writer often given credit for making “The Simpsons” the show of the zeitgeist: “It’s a horrifying idea juxtaposed with something really banal — and yet there’s a kind of logic to it. It’s illuminating because it’s kind of how Americans see things: Life’s a big jumble, but somehow leads to something I can consume.”

Tons of those jokes made it onto “The Simpsons.” It is why, The Observer thinks, A.O. Scott got caught playing the contradiction game in trying to explain the sitcom. He called it “brainy and populist,

sophisticated and vulgar, gleeful in its assault on every imaginable piety and subversively affirmative of the bonds of family and community.” I’d just say Swartzweldian, and again add that show is often built on sad jokes — graveyard humor about alcoholics and the death of the American Dream. Life is much sillier than we give it credit for, Swartzwelder’s work says to The Observer.

Sitting in a bar alone for many nights, one has time to see the way life happens all at once in this ridiculous manner. People struggle, and yearn, but then they order too many shots and look like they might throw up. It’s funny and it’s not funny and often we have to choose how to view it.

For The Observer, Swartzwelder allows a bit of both. It’s amusing, but it does not lose its importance.

Swartzwelder now lives somewhere in the Pacific Northwest and is a legendary recluse, churning out short comedic novels out of a self-publishing press.

Not literary comedic novels — the ones where you sit in English 101 and someone explains to you where to laugh. Instead, these are genre-heavy, quick-driving books with tons of jokes. They usually, in as little words as possible, make a fool of human behavior. He used to tweet out lines from them. The Observer scrolled through them one of the nights in the bar.

They are reported as dialogue devoid of character titles, like this: “But, what about our convictions? Our personal honor?”

“We’ll have to set those aside until this money emergency is over.”

Maybe all those jokes mean nothing to you. To some whom The Observer showed this work there was ambivalence or even hatred. But that is life. One of the plain and unavoidable disappointments is people not loving what you love. The unnecessary hurt feelings from someone without the same preferences could probably be made into a Swartzwelder joke. The Observer will keep watching “The Simpsons” again to see if he’s already written it and report back.

7/19– 7/

25/17

IRISH – WHISKEY – VODKA – TEQUILA Jameson Irish Whiskey Everyday $52.99 $41.98

Mas Carlot 2016 Costieres de Nimes Rosé Everyday $10.99 $8.98

Jack Daniel’s Black Label Tennessee Whiskey Everyday $46.99 $39.98

The Seeker 2014 Central Coast Chardonnay Everyday $13.99 $9.97

Absolut Vodka Everyday $36.99 $29.97

Sauza Hornitos Plata, Reposado & Añejo Tequila Everyday $42.99 $31.97

CONNOISSEUR SELECTION (750 mL) Glenlivet 12yo Single Malt Scotch Everyday $46.29 $36.97

Gentleman Jack Tennessee Whiskey Everyday $33.99 $28.98 Herradura Silver Tequila Everyday $39.99 $29.98

Citadelle Reserve Solera Gin Everyday $39.99 $32.99

1.5 LITER WINE SELECTION Folonari Chianti, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir & Pinot Grigio Everyday $16.99 $11.98

La Crema 2014 RRV Pinot Noir & 2013 Los Carneros Pinot Noir Everyday $43.99 $31.98

Charles & Charles Cabernet/Syrah Blend & Merlot Blend Everyday $17.99 $13.98 Wild Horse 2015 Central Coast Pinot Noir Everyday $22.99 $18.97 Columbia Crest 2014 H3 Sauvignon Blanc Everyday $14.99 $11.97

Estancia 2013 Paso Robles Reserve GSM Everyday $23.99 $16.97

BEST LIQUOR STORE

3FOR THURSDAY – Purchase 3 or more of any 750ml spirits, receive 15% off *unless otherwise discounted or on sale.

TOP OF THE

ROCK.

Take advantage of one of the best rates in the market and if you add a Stone Bank checking account, we’ll even give you a raise.

% 1.358% 1.459 APY* APY*

12 Month CD • $5,000 minimum deposit Requires a Stone Bank checking account with at least one monthly automatic deposit or payment.

12 Month CD $5,000 minimum deposit

Little Rock 501.503.4242 • Harrison 870.280.5701 Mountain View 870.269.7311 • White Hall 870.247.9500 Limited time offer. Rate subject to change without notice. APY = Annual Percentage Yield. $5,000 minimum CD deposit.

Offer not applicable on public entities, financial institutions. Early withdrawal penalties apply.

Fees may reduce earnings. Interest compounded monthly. Other restrictions may apply. Call for details.

stonebank.com arktimes.com JULY 20, 2017

11

Arkansas Reporter

Dumping ground, again

A

“dumping ground” was how City Director Erma Hendricks recently referred to her east end Ward 1 city district. The occasion was a Little Rock City Board meeting, where plans were being discussed to establish a place for evening meals for the homeless beneath a tent on the grounds of a city homeless day care center on Springer Boulevard. This followed a proposed city ordinance that would make it all but impossible for church groups to serve meals to the homeless in the city.

The history of Ward 1, built and developed around Gillam Park, certainly bears Hendricks’ “dumping ground” comments out. In the 1930s, Gillam Park was purchased by the city specifically as a dumping ground for jobless and homeless people who were victims of the Great Depression. It then became the site of a segregated Jim Crow park. Later, it was the cornerstone of a multimillion-dollar slum clearance and urban redevelopment plan that looked to relocate much of the black population into that part of the city.

The purchase of Gillam Park was authorized by Mayor Horace A. Knowlton and the Little Rock City Council at a meeting on Nov. 22, 1934, with the approval and support of the Little Rock

12

JULY 20, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

Plan for the homeless echoes Gillam Park history.

BY JOHN KIRK

Chamber of Commerce. The purchase addressed two problems. The first was the growing transient population in the city, made up of jobless and homeless victims of the Great Depression who were being fed and sheltered by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Complaints from Little Rock residents about these people prompted the council to purchase the land to relocate the transients beyond the city limits. The removal of the transients intersected with a second problem, the lack of recreation facilities for Little Rock’s black population. Although the city funded six whites-only parks, it provided none for its black population, contravening the established segregation principle to provide “separate but equal” facilities.

By purchasing the land on the outskirts of the city, the mayor and council hoped to win federal funds for relocating and temporarily housing its transient population and for the longerterm development of a segregated black park. By the end of 1935 the City Council proposed a bond issue of $15,000 “to purchase, improve and to cover the city’s contribution for the development of the colored park.” The park bond issue was bundled with two other bond issues, one for $468,000 to build the segregated downtown Robinson

BRIAN CHILSON

THE

Auditorium, and another for $25,000 to construct and equip a segregated addition to the city library. The bond issue for the black park was added as a sop to win black support for the white projects and to encourage white voters to support the black park project. All three bonds passed in January 1937.

Although the whites-only projects quickly moved ahead, there was little action on developing the black park. In June 1941, the City Council discussed abandoning the park project altogether.

The proposed site was a long way out of town and difficult to reach. When members of the Parks Committee went to take a look at the purchased land they “quickly became discouraged with the Granite Mountain location,” the Arkansas Gazette reported. Several expressed “amazement that it had been bought by the city for a park” and one even suggested that the site was “more suitable for a concentration camp.”

It was not until after World War II that the city returned to the project.

When the black community began to protest, the city agreed to issue a bond for $359,000 to pay for the development of black recreation facilities at Gillam Park.

In doing so, the city fully expected it to fail, but at least it would show token good will. The bond issue went to the voters on Feb. 1, 1949. Then, as the black news-

paper the Arkansas State Press, owned by L.C. and Daisy Bates, described it, “the unexpected happened — the bond issue passed and has made the city the acme of deception and the laughing stock of the entire South.” It declared that, “$359,000 ... is entirely too much money to be spent upon Negro recreation in Little Rock” and predicted, “it is not going to be spent any time in the near future if there is any way for the present administration to stop it.”

Nothing did happen until the following year, when the city used the bond money as a lure for newly available federal money to instigate a comprehensive program of slum clearance and urban redevelopment that would involve the purposeful and premeditated development of segregated neighborhoods in the city. A special election in January 1950 mandated the city’s slum clearance and urban redevelopment plans and the black park bond issue was successfully used to secure a federal grant of $9,641,000.

With the urban renewal money, work at Gilliam Park quickly began. By August 1950, a swimming pool had been built and an opening ceremony held. The State Press confessed its bewilderment. “We are a little puzzled over the dedication of a new pool exclusively for Negroes,” ran its editorial. “We believe it came about twenty odd years too late for us to shout joy. In this day and time when the entire country is planning programs to stamp out segregation, it seems a little ironical that Little Rock Negroes should be dedicating the outmoded principles.”

Less than a year after opening, the Gillam Park swimming pool was reported leaking. Attendance was poor. The State Press observed, “That is no more than natural. People do not support the things they do not want. [Blacks] did not want a swimming pool built out of the city in an insect infested mountain.” Events came to a head in July 1954 when Tommy Grigsby, a black boy, drowned in the Gillam Park swimming pool. At the time, the pool was understaffed with lifeguards, it lacked a respirator that might have saved Grigsby’s life, and its remote location meant that a doctor and rescue squad could not reach the scene in time to resuscitate him. The State Press lamented, “the whole affair was a study in second class citizenship.”

Gillam Park became the focus of the

Tune in to our “Week In Review” podcast each Friday.

Available on iTunes & arktimes.com

city’s efforts to force the black population into the eastern part of the city. The city’s first segregated public housing projects under its urban renewal plans were the 400 units of Joseph A. Booker Homes built adjacent to Gillam Park at Granite Mountain. In 1952, Booker High School was built next to the Booker Homes. By a stroke of convenient racial gerrymandering, it emerged that although Gillam Park, Booker Homes and Booker High School all fell within the city limits and could qualify for federal funds for slum clearance and urban redevelopment, at the same time the Little Rock School District ended just short of the school so that it fell instead within the Pulaski County Special (Rural) School District.

When the school opened in September 1952 under chronically crowded conditions, there was still not enough room to accommodate all of the children of the black families residing at Booker Homes. Over a hundred black students were left stranded without provisions for their education. The city refused to take responsibility for them, with acting superintendent of Little Rock schools Dr. Ed McCuiston suggesting that they pay a private tuition fee of $12.50 a year to attend city schools. Such was the outrage among black and some white sections of the population in Little Rock that the Arkansas General Assembly was forced to rush through a “Booker Bill” that required Booker High School to be incorporated into the Little Rock School District.

In the 1990s, the Booker Homes were demolished due to rampant problems with crime and drugs, hardly surprising given the city’s historical desire to abandon its marginalized population in that part of the city. Mining and other industries have been located out at Granite Mountain and it is on the regular flight path for the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport, prompting allegations of environmental racism. The latest city flirtation with removing the homeless to the area brings it back full circle to the originally intended use of the site as a dumping ground for the jobless and homeless in the 1930s. The long and undistinguished use of the area by the city as a place to banish its undesirables appears to have changed little in the past 73 years.

THE

BIG PICTURE

INCONSEQUENTIAL NEWS QUIZ:

The Capulets and Montagues are ready to rumble edition Play at home, or I shall bite my thumb at thee!

1) UA Little Rock recently announced it’s conducting a feasibility study on a subject that’s bound to be controversial on campus. What is it studying?

A) Whether to start a football team.

B) Whether to institute a prohibition on live-ammo skeet shooting in dorm hallways, a rule change that has been ferociously opposed by the National Rifle Association.

C) Whether to move fidget spinners from the “lit” to “lame” list for 2018.

D) Whether to cut out the middleman and allow student loan providers to sell UALR freshmen into permanent chattel slavery.

2) An ad hoc committee recently presented its recommendations to the Little Rock City Board of Directors on how to regulate charitable feeding of the homeless in city parks. What was the centerpiece of its recommendation?

A) Liquifying the homeless to make a delicious energy drink for participants in this fall’s The Shoppes at Rue Chenal 5K Fun Run. B) Busing the homeless to a location 3 miles from downtown, where they will be fed inside a tent.

C) A billboard campaign encouraging homeless people to see starvation as a way to reduce their carbon footprint.

D) Construction of a giant cannon in Riverfront Park that will fire homeless people into Protho Junction after luring them into the barrel with the delicious smell of grilling burgers.

3) A proposal by Pulaski County Justice of the Peace Judy Green was shot down by the Quorum Court recently, with several critics present saying the proposal was unworkable. What did Green propose?

A) A 180-day moratorium on any entertainment that might “promote or incite violence,” which Little Rock City Attorney Tom Carpenter noted might prevent staging Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” because of the play’s depictions of bloody gang warfare.

B) Replacing all the streets in the county with an incline greater than 15 degrees with Slip ’N Slides.

C) That in addition to their ability to marry people, JPs should be given the ability to end marriages by pointing at any couple and saying, “I DIVORCE THEE!” D) Starting every Quorum Court meeting by busing the JPs to a location 3 miles from downtown and feeding them in a tent.

4) The state Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission recently filed formal disciplinary charges against Saline County Circuit Judge Bobby McCallister. Why, according to JDDC investigators, were the charges warranted?

A) He’s a grown man who still goes by “Bobby.”

B) He clearly saw the bumper sticker on Arkansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Dan Kemp’s van that says, “If This Van’s a Rockin’, Don’t Bother Knockin’,” but knocked anyway.

C) He has allegedly not paid income taxes for “most years” since 1995.

D) He was the voice in the video heard shouting “FREEDOM!” from the backseat of Michael Reed’s Dodge Dart as Reed allegedly mowed down the Ten Commandments monument on the Capitol lawn.

5) A new state law that will go into effect on July 30 includes provisions that have incensed supporters of abortion rights. What does the law require?

A) That all women seeking an abortion must first watch a secretly recorded, hour-long video of Rep. Bob Ballinger (R-Hindsville) worriedly picking at a weird mole near his left nipple.

B) Makes it illegal for a woman to have an abortion without first informing the man who impregnated her, with no exceptions for women who became pregnant through rape or incest.

C) That every pregnant woman must have her cervix fitted with a lock that can only be opened by a whispered voice command from Sen. Jason Rapert (R-1952).

D) That anye physician who wouldst performe the vile wykedness of abortion shall be dunk’ed thrice in yon river, with alle who doth survive the holy ordeale henceforthe declared a wytche.

ANSWERS: A, B, A, C, B

LISTEN UP

arktimes.com JULY 20, 2017

13

14

JULY 20, 2017

JACOB ROSENBERG SPENDS A WEEK AT MIDTOWN BILLIARDS

A week at Midtown Can a dive bar be reborn?

BY JACOB ROSENBERG PHOTOS BY BRIAN CHILSON

14

JULY 20, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

JACOB ROSENBERG SPENDS A WEEK AT MIDTOWN BILLIARDS JULY 20, 2017

15

THE CROWD RETURNS: During Midtown Billiards’ opening week.

M

idtown Billiards occupies the ground

floor of a red-brick two-story at 1316

Main St., just south of Interstate 630,

where downtown Little Rock splits. On the morning of Sept. 16, 2016, the building caught fire.

It started in the kitchen — located up front, behind the window that faces the sidewalk — and the flames burst through the glass. Smoke curled up the front exterior and billowed down the street.

Even with the broken window there was not enough ventilation to stop the rest of the bar from filling with hot smoke. It was not the fire, per se, but this smoke and heat inside— hot enough to melt the ceiling fans — that caused most of the damage. Outside, the blaze — a flickering orange in the window of a storefront on one of Little Rock’s main drags — caught eyes. Someone at the gas station across from Midtown called an employee of the bar, who called David Shipps, the general manager, and he was the one who told the owner, Maggie Hinson.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Hinson said when I asked her about the burning bar, “I was busy having a heart attack.” This is not a metaphor for being distraught; Hinson was recovering from an actual heart attack and was not able to go to Midtown to watch the Little Rock Fire Department do its work. “I’d just come from the hospital,” she said, “and I was still really very ill.” Plus, she did not have her car. A friend to whom she’d lent her Ford Mustang had called earlier that day.

“She told me she hit a deer,” Hinson said.

Trouble come in threes.

As word spread about the fire, most people assumed the culprit was grease.

A dive bar, perhaps the city’s most famous, Midtown is well known for its oleaginous burgers. Esquire magazine — in anointing it among the best bars in America in 2007 — wrote, “People arrive here drunk and leave wicked. But it helps that they have those hamburgers cooked behind the bar, coated so thickly with spices and so indulgent at 3:00 a.m. that you’ll see eyes rolling back in ecstasy with each bite.” Maybe this association of the griddle with the bar’s reputation is what propelled the narrative. Whatever the reason, it took on a

tragic tone: This hallowed dive could not sustain its run-down nature and had been bound to self-destruct. Icarus flew too close to that oily sun.

But, the grease story was a myth.

“There was no grease — I can’t express that enough — there was no grease involved at all,” Shipps said. It was actually a fridge’s motor that seized up.

From security camera footage, Shipps was able to watch the fire’s progression, beginning just as sparks. “A few minutes later a flame was right on top of the fridge, dancing back and forth,” he said. It caught onto the wall, then the drop ceiling. “And once it caught the drop ceiling — phom — it just spread,” he remembered. When, the next morning, Shipps began clearing the char with a shovel, he found the fridge in a “molten heap.”

Now, almost 10 months later, Hinson — who most people call Maggie and who has bright red hair that flows around her face — was standing in the front foyer, beside the kitchen, of an almost finished and refurbished Midtown. Her heart was working and out front was a red Mustang parked on the front curb.

Everything was back in shape, or at least getting there, she said. It was Wednesday, July 5, and Midtown was reopening the next day. ** Part of the reason it took Midtown so long to reopen was the reason Midtown was great: It was worn in. The saloon, for years, had opened each day at 3 p.m. and closed at 5 a.m., rarely shutting the doors even for holidays. During the afternoons it was known as a drowsy and calm place, haunted by the comfort of old regulars.

Then, after happy hour, the bar would clear out. “It could be a ghost town” during that time, Hinson told me, when other bars were packed. Midtown is one of the few places in Little Rock to have a

Class B private club license, allowing it to stay open until 5 a.m. It gets most of its customers from 1 a.m. to close, after other bars — each with different shades of late-night scene — shut their doors and push along their variegated patrons.

These folks combine with a steady steam of workers whose shifts end around the same time and beat the crap out of the property until early morning.

There was an almost constant fog of cigarette smoke. Someone described this dank, dark bar as like the comfort of an old shoe. Midtown was not, as you can imagine, exactly up to building codes.

After the fire everything had to be repaired, and some things would need to change: New, more spacious bathrooms would be installed; the drop ceiling would be taken out; a freshly stained wood bar was needed; the walls would get new paint; and the new cement floor would be squeaky-clean, neither black nor sticking to your boot as you stepped.

This all took time. And to pay for it meant dealing with insurance claims.

Shipps remembers cataloging an estimated 360 items, trying to find their exact price and date of purchase. Builders would sometimes have to suddenly stop — one time for a whole month — to wait on the paperwork.

For all that had to change, Shipps and Hinson have chiefly tried to preserve the bar as it was. It is still one room that stretches straight back, the walkway made skinny in the front by the bar on the right and by wood filing cabinets stocked with supplies on the left, before opening to pool tables and finally a dance floor with a stage. For continuity, Shipps put up a cut out rectangle of the old swamp-green wall from before the fire, covered in scribbling and beer labels. There was now a clear dividing line between the pre-fire hunk of wall and the newly painted Teenage-MutantNinja-Turtle-green interior.

“I think this is almost too fancy for us; it’s almost too nice,” Shipps worried, surveying the walls around him.

“But, it won’t last,” Shipps quickly added, with confidence. “It won’t last at all.” He was sure of the customers and, he added, “It seems like all these old buildings have ghosts to them anyways.” Hinson told me they were betting on when it’d get back to the state arktimes.com JULY 20, 2017

15

16

JULY 20, 2017

JACOB ROSENBERG SPENDS A WEEK AT MIDTOWN BILLIARDS

of necessary distress. She bet Sunday. ** I was giving it a full week, from Thursday to Thursday. My idea was to go each night to the bar, in a purely scientific documentation of Midtown’s descent into its former glory. “There’s a difference between a dive bar and just a shithole bar,” Conan Robinson, a longtime bartender at Midtown who now runs Four Quarter Bar in North Little Rock, had told me. I thought he was right, but how do you make a dive? The word had shifted over the years. Dive, as a word for a drinking-den, came up in the late 1800s as a name for lewd establishments in basements and cellars into which one would “dive” to join the seedy underworld, hopefully unseen. The physical element (to dive) is gone for most places we call dives now — Midtown is street level beside an artisanal pizza place and a respectful business. Yet, the key was still in the name, a good dive bar needs an element of “below.” You should feel as if you have cut through the cracks of everyday life. Most don’t get this through being dirty, but through history. A proper dive is not really nasty as much as eroded.

History had certainly done its work on the old Midtown, but the fire now wiped out fossils of good times. The new Midtown ran the risk of looking like a ripped Urban Outfitter jean: trying hard to come off frayed but actually faking it. At the same time, as Robinson said, it couldn’t just let things go to complete shit to reclaim its bruised past.

There had to be a certain something behind the damage. The challenge for Midtown in its first week would be to degenerate, but in a hard-to-pin-down authenticity. ** On Thursday, July 6, around 5 p.m., Midtown reopened not with a rush, but with a slow fill as people got off work.

The public would come tomorrow, but tonight was restricted to the regulars.

Most of them had been coming for years, were in their 40s and 50s, and of the happy-hour coterie. They would come in, find a friend, hug, order that friend a drink, and then begin chatting. I saw a cigarette hit the bar, maybe even leave a mark, as it hung on someone’s finger deep in a conversation. That’s how they happen: The infrastructure remembers even when the patrons don’t. I found a few other dents: One of the Blue Moon 16

JULY 20, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

lights over a pool table already had a large crack in it and there were some frantically drawn illustrations along the walls. A scribbled Dylan misquote stood out: “Those not busy being born are busy dying.” The smoke did not hang in the room tonight, but dissipated and the lights were somewhat bright.

I found Robinson — who was easy to spot because he has a giant graying beard halfway down his chest — and asked him how it felt to be back. “A bit like a parallel universe,” he admitted.

Things were all the same but totally different, like a dream. The slightness of the changes were almost stranger. For example, his muscle memory of pouring a shot now did not fit the altered landscape. He’d bang his arm or elbow.

He was hopeful though. “It’s getting there,” he said.

If anything could break this place in, it was an infamous Thursday night happy-hour game called bottle-toss.

Here’s the gist: You throw a bottle across the bar into a trashcan, and whoever is the last person to get the bottle into the can has to buy a round for the whole bar. The game can have up to 60 people. I did the math and the risk was close to half my rent. That’s why many stand on the wings and watch as bottles fly into the can or smash onto the ground.

I found its originator, Stephen Steed and asked if it was on for tonight. He pointed up to the new fans whisking away the smoke. “They’re too low,” he said. “Some people have a high arch.”

He was holding off until the following Thursday. But, he handed me a packet of all the old statistics on bottle-toss in a folder. Steed has kept an exhaustive “Leaderboard” for each year of the game: names of the players, a cheeky sentence bio, their “season” record, a special smiley face if they got the bottle in on the first throw. From these statistics he makes Harper’s- style indexes. Here are a few lines from the 2014 season: BOTTLE-TOSS INDEX • Number of years of bottle-tossing at Midtown in some form or fashion: 14 • Age of the oldest bottle-tosser: 84 • Number of the Little Rock Nine to toss bottles: 1 • Number of tossers this season: 1,119 I’d have to wait, but it’d be a good way to end my week here, even a test: Could the game transfer to the new Midtown? **

Around 9:30 p.m., a group circled around Hinson and began chanting her name with their hands in the air. “Maggie! Maggie! Maggie!” No one is more responsible for Midtown’s reputation than Hinson. She long has not just been an owner, but a kind of matron.

When she first got ownership of the bar, this meant caring for old men — a good bit of them holdovers from the previous owner. Midtown had originally opened in 1940 as Jimmy’s Midtown Billiards. Back then, the name made more sense: There was an eponymous Jimmy, it was his bar and it was located on Seventh Street, which was midtown at the time. Not until the 1970s did it move to South Main Street.

Under Jimmy’s reign, the bar would open at 6 a.m. and close at 6 p.m. It was a pool hall and a gambling spot. Older men would mix in the mornings with prostitutes who came from a safe house down the street to get coffee.

Near the end of the 1980s it was sold to Maggie and Jim Hinson. (She thinks; it was hard to pin down a date on the transaction, she said.)

Hinson had learned how to bartender when she was 18. On her way out to California, from her home in Stuttgart, she stopped in Oklahoma City and worked at a bar for two years called the Horseshoe Lounge. “It was shaped like a horseshoe,” she said, and she worked the entire bar and all the tables. Then, she finally caught that ride to California and, in her words, “hung out.”

“Where?” I asked “San Francisco,” she said.

I asked if she liked it and her reply was: “If you remember if you liked it there — during my time — you were not there.” It was the 1960s.

In San Francisco she got married.

She and this husband traveled the world, but eventually things fizzled.

In Hot Springs she met another man, Jim Hinson. “Oh, what year was that?

Good God,” she wondered. “Maybe, 37, 38 years ago?” They lived a good life together: She ran an accounting firm in North Little Rock and he was the deputy director of finance for the Department for Human Services. They had hobbies, too. “He was a gambler and he liked to gamble and that’s what he did.

And we got along great,” she remembers. When Jim retired he bought Jimmy’s. “When we bought this, my husband wouldn’t let me come in here because he said it was too rough,” she said. “But, then he changed his mind after he found out there was some domino players back there and he could play.

Somebody needed to work.”

Maggie Hinson ended up running the place. “I’ve worked the door, I’ve been a bartender, I’ve been a cook, I’ve been a plumber. Whatever it takes,” she said. “I breathed life into the place.” She would come and make a meal for everybody — whole hams, cornbread — no set menu. “It was kind of a nursery for old men. They’d come in and I’d feed and water them,” she said of the first years. “They were my kids, all those old guys. I just loved them to death.” She stopped for a moment. “And they’re all gone now,” she finished. Her husband, too; he died three years ago.

There were new regulars now — chanting around her as the bar reopened — and an employee walked past me and whispered in my ear, “See: Everybody loves Maggie.” The place closed up at 10 p.m., still pretty clean. ** Friday was the official kickoff and the live band did not start until well past midnight. Before then, it was mostly pool players in Midtown. A man with a loose fitting shirt, smoking a Cigarillo, played a guy in board shorts and a tank top; next to them, a mustachioed older guy wearing a tucked-in black polo, dangled a cigarette from his mouth as he beat back competitor after competitor. Circling around was a fella that looked like Tom Cotton on a bender, eyes hazed. As the evening stretched into the early morning, the walls started filling up, too. Customers had been given specialized Sharpies for Midtown’s opening imprinted “Fire Bad! Whiskey Good!” They put them to use. Some patrons wore red shirts with a drawing of Midtown on fire and the phrase “Smoking Establishment.” I saw someone ash on the floor, pause to wonder if it was wrong, and then do it again. A woman walked past with a walker.

By 2 a.m., the band was playing and the place was almost full. It was a motley crew. Preppy kids mixed with gothtypes who were close to some hipsters who bumped shoulders with some older men. I saw a white man with dreadlocks and, to his right, a black man with dreadlocks. Peeking out the window, I saw a guy leaned up against a tree, near the curb, being helped by friends. A few pool sharks were still around, too; they’d stayed through the rush. One guy would put his tall boy Miller Lite can into a corner pocket and then strike with power, offering an “excuse me” to people in his way. “There are some bars

JACOB ROSENBERG SPENDS A WEEK AT MIDTOWN BILLIARDS JULY 20, 2017

17

arktimes.com JULY 20, 2017

17

that cater to certain kinds of people,” Shipps said of Midtown. “We don’t do that — at 2 a.m., everyone’s the same kind.”

I headed for the bathroom. A woman near the door told me to “not freak out” because the men’s room “is not completely trash like it used to be.” She’d just come out of it. Hinson had said she was not worried about the walls becoming filled with words, letters and drawings again: “We have a lot of selfmade artists and poets.” But, to have the bathroom already covered surprised me. One person’s mark stood out. Loopy penises — looking like comical French-style twirly mustaches that had been scrunched in the middle, drawn in a single stroke — were everywhere. It was clear that a single artist had drawn all of them.

It was unique. Someone had probably come to Midtown and spent their entire first night holed up in this bathroom drawing dicks in a determined respect. I thought that was nice. ** If Thursday was about the longtime regulars, this weekend was about what Midtown had become.

Saturday night offered a similarly eclectic crew, but with a larger anchor of service industry workers. Bars open until 5 a.m. in Little Rock all cater to those who get off shifts late in the night (or morning), but Midtown, more than others, has become known for these clients. The word “home” came up more often than any other when I asked a random person about Midtown, but the second most common phrase was “service industry.” One person told me that during his shift at another restaurant the idea of getting off work mixes with going to Midtown.

“I can’t wait to go to Midtown,” they say to mean, “I can’t wait for the end of this shift.”

Not that this was always the plan.

When the Hinsons first bought the bar, they actually tried to fancy it up a bit, turning Jimmy’s into a martini and cigar bar. Maggie would come in with scrapers to try to get beer labels off the wall and just find more and more each day. After she inherited a 5 a.m. license, Midtown changed focus. “We’re going to be a 5 a.m. bar, it’s going to be a dive bar, we’re going to cater to people in the industry,” Shipps said of that transition.

MIDTOWN’S MATRON: Owner Maggie Hinson.

RETURNING TO A DIVE: After a few days, Midtown’s walls were already covered in graffiti.

18

JULY 20, 2017

JACOB ROSENBERG SPENDS A WEEK AT MIDTOWN BILLIARDS

‘WE’RE JUST PLAIN’: Midtown owner Maggie Hinson says of the bar’s appeal.

PHOTO BOOTH: Longtime employee Nola Nysten poses by graffiti.

18

JULY 20, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

This shift really took hold in the late 1990s and early 2000s, around when Robinson started working there. “Back then, Midtown was just sort of, I almost want to say, word-of-mouth; you didn’t really know about it,” he told me. “It was like this hidden oasis of like, ‘Hey I work here, I work there, and I got off work at 1 in the morning,’ or 1:30 in the morning and they’d all head over to Midtown. Have some drinks, eat a burger, play some pool.” Back then, “we had one of those Walmart electric griddles, you know, that you would plug into the wall,” Robinson said. “You could only cook about six burgers at a time and it would take sometimes up to 45 minutes to cook, because they are just sitting there slow-cooking in their own grease.”

Then Little Rock’s downtown started changing. “There weren’t as many bars back 15 years ago,” Nola Nysten, a longtime employee and bartender at Midtown, explained. “The River Market had two or three. So, when the bar industry started picking up here in Little Rock is when we got hit with late-night.” As the service industry grew downtown, so did Midtown’s late-night scene.

The major demarcation, the real turning point, was doing away with the 8 a.m. shift. For about the first decade under Hinson, Midtown had only closed for a few hours, between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. But, the old men of morning gambling and coffee were not the main customer-base anymore. They adjusted, and started coming in the evening. “They’d be back there playing dominoes and the band just a-blaring,” Hinson said.

On that first Saturday, most people I met were service-industry. And it showed. There was a healthy amount of respect and appreciation for the bartenders. There were out and out drunken folks, too, sure. But they were watched after.

When I was looking at the clock behind the bar, realizing it was 15 minutes ahead, and not 3:25, or so, but actually 3:10, a burly larger guy slid up to me.

“I fucked up,” he said, kind of giggling.

“What did you do?” I asked “I don’t know!” he yelped, and burst into a laugh, grabbing my arm and bent forward so low his head almost touched the bar. Then he rose and tried to order another drink. The bartender, kindly, told him he was probably OK for the night. I watched him walk away per-

JACOB ROSENBERG SPENDS A WEEK AT MIDTOWN BILLIARDS JULY 20, 2017

fectly fine with the decision, dancing a bit. Remember: A dive is not complete shit. That probably stopped the guy from puking. ** Sunday was proving comparatively calm, I was thinking, while a man in a black cowboy hat did karaoke. Behind him, the stage was now covered with graffiti. In an interlude, he asked the crowd, “Can I get a hell yeah?” and I expected the tepid response of most karaoke events.

“HELL YEAH!” the whole bar screamed. “Can I get a yee haw?” “YEE HAW!” they bellowed. Such a fullthroated response to karaoke I have never heard. The next person stepped up and a fellow bar mate told me this guy — now swaying and sort of singing in a mumble — had been one of the first to the mic almost four hours earlier.

Bubbling under the surface, even on Sunday, is the Midtown party. ** After the late nights on the weekend — almost until the crack of dawn — I took the early week to learn about evenings at Midtown. I drank beers in the afternoon.

I chatted. I met people getting off work or about to go in and I learned how to sit on a barstool and think about nothing. I tried to channel one of the newer employees, Brendon Holmes.

He is 23 and recently came back to Arkansas from California, where he served in the Marines. He is a bar back, which means he cooks the famous burgers and helps refill the stocks if they run out. At night, this can be an exhausting job as the drunken clamor for food and bartenders take order after order; persons gaming for attention as if they are the only one in the bar. But, Holmes is serene about the whole thing.

When I asked him about Midtown, he spoke of the joy of its solitude on evenings. “I usually go a lot of places by myself,” he said. “Part of the reason I come up here is I’m always cool to bring my sketch pad and just chill by myself and draw.” He wants to be a tattoo artist — he showed me an intricate series of sea creatures on his right arm painted from the elbow to the wrist, part of a larger piece. He also likes piercings: He has a nose ring and a stud on his cheek.

It’s not like Holmes does not enjoy fun.

I’ve seen him working late-night shifts and stop on the way back to dance after he delivered food. Late nights require

a still morning. ** On Wednesday, I overheard and wrote down: “Almost looks the same,” a man says to a woman as a half-way introduction.

“Pretty much,” she says back, and then orders a beer.

causing the bottle to roll down the wall and into the can.

As Midtown grew over the past 20 or so years, so has bottle-toss. Just to give an idea of the size: since 2015, on top of the bottle-tossing, a group plays its own game of betting who will lose. It’s the Midtown Pony Express, and they have 25 members. **

** Around 7:11 p.m. on Thursday, we were still waiting for bottle-toss to start up when the fire alarm went off. No firebreaking glass, no burnt-down building, no molten fridge; just a new system sensitive to smoke. Bottle-toss is supposed to start at 7 p.m., but it actually gets going whenever Hinson finishes playing dominoes in the back, so in the meantime, people prepared the field as the alarm went off. A white chalk line was drawn near the end of the bar, about 30 feet away from a trashcan that was placed against the wall. Right above the trashcan, someone drew a small arrow with the word “BOTTLE” in all caps.

A fire truck rolled up outside and then drove away.

The game was not always so intricately planned.

It started in 2000, when a group of Thursday regulars were trying to figure out who would pay the tab. Hinson had vetoed buying a dartboard and tried a few others games of chance to no success. “I had paper targets made and we had a drop ceiling, so I put those on the ceiling and they would shoot those long toothpicks out of a straw to see if they could hit the bullseyes. Well, that lost its glory real quick,” she said.

Then, someone put a bottle on top of his head and challenged one of the others to knock it off with a tossed bottle. In a heroic feat, the tosser hit the bottle off the challenger’s head and it landed in a trashcan. And — as it is written in the official history I was given — “ ‘There’s game in there somewhere,’ Steed said.

‘We need a different target.’”

They started by throwing from the bar to a can by the front door, but this had the danger of whacking a customer walking in, so they flipped the directions. The shot was taken at a slight right bend from the bar to a corner. Meaning, if you throw right-ish it’ll hit that wall and sometimes bank in. The old Midtown had a gold star in that spot where right-handers would often hit for the bank shot. It also had tarps up, which a crazy throw would sometimes land on,

Hinson stepped out from the dominoes and up to the mic around 7:30. “ARE WE READY FOR BOTTLE-TOSS?” she screamed. The toss lane was cleared and people got onto the stage or stood on benches to look down on the “field.”

Empty bottles lined the end of the bar, ready to be thrown.

During the game, Hinson emcees beside the throwing player, often chastising him or her for their attempts to get a free beer. Tonight, she was also the first to throw. She brought the bottle down to near her knees, rocking with it as if to flip it into the air underhanded, then, with sudden force, she cocked it behind her ear and tomahawked it. The bottle was sent in a looping dive toward the cement floor and crashed. “AHH!” a cheer rose up. The first bottle-toss. Two men with brooms began the process of pushing the debris to the side. Hinson grabbed the microphone and invited people to line up.

Misses were aplenty as the game began. Hinson used various phrases to describe these catastrophic throws, but there were a few common ones: “crashed and burned” for the bad ones and “Oh baby! So close!” for the OK ones. The most regularly used just a buzzer-like “EHH!” Brad Kimbrell, a former two-time champion of bottletoss, was the first to sink his bottle, and a loud roar rose up.

Then, at 7:31 p.m., the fire alarm went off again. “Hold on; there is no fire,” Hinson said. Another fire truck came — some firefighters came in, talked to Hinson and then left. The game started back up. Someone’s shot ricocheted every which way and Hinson told them to not mess up her bar. “All right? Everything is new and improved.”

By the time I made it up to the line, I cannot lie, I was nervous. There were 64 people playing bottle-toss this evening and the tab would be high. I took the neck of the bottle and sent it spinning in the air until it — bang — hit the fan and crashed on the floor. Steed was right when he said some players had high arcs and that it would be a problem.

19

In between turns, I went back to the few people I knew for advice and learned that there had always been obstacles: I could not blame the fan, only myself. An old gas line was up there before. Other throwers included a man with walker and a person with a cast on his arm; I hoped I could at least beat them.

Near the end of the first round, one of the sweepers of the broken glass, Duncan, stepped to the line and people shouted, “ONE SHOT DUNC!” He proceeded to live up to his name. Many regulars were getting it one-shot, including “Mr. Bottle Toss himself,” as Hinson called Steed. It was intimidating.

A little after 9 p.m., when there were only 23 of 64 tossers left and I was among them, came the real nerves.

I could understand the people who ducked out early — they were shamed and booed when called to the line only to be found absent, but they had ensured not having to pay the tab. I’d missed probably four times at this point and none of them were close. Then, I missed again — maybe the worst of the night — and it was down to 14. I learned later I was so bad that one of the Midtown Pony Express folks placed their gamble on me. Looking back, I can’t blame him.

At 9:14 p.m. I flipped an erratic one that banked and pinballed off too many surfaces to be anything but pure ugly before sliding into the can. Per custom, I went over and hugged Hinson. She nicely yelled at me: “Go get your free beer!”

The game went on, but not much longer; it ended around 9:34 p.m. Hinson and one other tosser had gone one-onone a few times and neither had made it in. After a quick discussion, they agreed to split the tab. She then called for silence and let the place settle. Hinson said, “We’ve been closed for a long time and I feel like I got my family back with me.” Another cheer.

A good amount of people shuffled out at that point, but even more stayed.

They did what people have always done in the rooms we call dive bars: smoke, drank, chatted, ate. It reminded me of earlier in the week, when I was trying to squeeze out of Hinson some reason her bar was so special and she was trying to help, but, eventually, she grew a little tired of it and stopped.

“We’re just plain,” she said. ** I did not have to — even planned not to — but Friday I went back to Midtown. arktimes.com JULY 20, 2017

19

Arts Entertainment AND

The edge of night Next month’s solar eclipse won’t be total in Arkansas, but it still will be a spectacle to behold.

BY DAVID KOON

O

n Aug. 21, Arkansas and most of the rest of the continental U.S. will bear witness to one of the solar system’s greatest light (or absence of ) shows: a solar eclipse, with the roughly 70-mile-wide “path of totality” — in which the sun is completely covered by the moon, turning day into night — stretching from Oregon to South

20

JULY 20, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

Carolina. It’s the first coast-to-coast eclipse in the U.S. since 1918.

Though the path of totality will just barely skirt the state, the vast shadow of the moon passing over St. Louis and Nashville on its way to the sea, almost 90 percent of the sun’s light will be blocked out for viewers in Arkansas, with only a sliver of the sun’s surface visible. In

Little Rock, the eclipse will begin at 11:47 a.m., reach peak darkness at 1:18 p.m. and end at 2:46 p.m.

There are a number of events planned around the eclipse in Arkansas, and the path of totality is easily within driving distance of most parts of the state. Darrell Heath, outreach coordinator for the Central Arkansas Astronomical Society,

said that because the event will be the first total eclipse in the U.S. in 38 years, it’s a big deal even for those who aren’t normally geeks.

“It’s one of nature’s grandest spectacles that you’ll ever see,” he said. “It can induce wonder, awe and even fear in people who see it, which is rare among the jaded public these days. It

ROCK CANDY

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

A&E NEWS still has that capability to induce a powerful wallop to anyone who sees it.”

Heath, who plans to travel to Nebraska to witness the total FOR ECLIPSE VIEWING: The Central Arkansas Astronomical Society says do not look at the sun even eclipse, said those in when it it is totally eclipsed by the moon’s shadow. the path of totality will see complete darkness, along with the sun’s corona, during the eclipse, Heath said viewthe wispy outer gasses of the sun, ers should never look at any stage radiating out from the black disk of the eclipse with the naked eye, of the covering moon. “Moments as even a sliver of the sun is bright before totality, you see the reducenough to cause damage to the eye. tion in light, you see strange shadow Normal sunglasses will offer no proeffects,” Heath said. “If you look tection either, Heath said. There around where the light is comare, however, ways to watch safely, ing in through the tree leaves, the including “eclipse glasses” with a gaps between the leaves will act special Mylar film that blocks the as pinhole projectors and can proharmful rays of the sun, homemade duce images of the eclipse on the pinhole projectors, or “Shade 14” ground or the side of the house.” welders’ goggles or welding helSome of those effects will be vismet lenses, which can be purchased ible in Arkansas as well, though the online or through welding supply light outside will appear dusk-like houses. during what will be a partial eclipse.

“If you go online you can find If Arkansans want to travel to instructions on how to make your the path of totality, Heath said, they own little pinhole projection boxes, should start making their plans now. but when you do that, the sun is just Most hotels and even campsites going to be a tiny little dot,” Heath within the path are already booked, said. “I really recommend getting Heath said, but those hoping to the glasses, or getting the welder’s view it should try to be in place at glass to look at it.” The Central least 24 hours before the eclipse.

Arkansas Astronomical Society is According to a NASA website on currently selling eclipse glasses for the eclipse, eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov, $3 at their website, caasastro.org.

12 million Americans live within “There’s a lot of places online where you can get the eclipse the 70-mile-wide path of totality, but that number could more than glasses,” Heath said. “You can get them from our website, and there double on Aug. 21 as visitors pour in, clogging roads with traffic. “Don’t are other companies out there. But wait until the day-of to try and get you need to act quick, because peothere,” Heath said, “because traffic ple are ordering these like hotcakes. is just going to be a living, breathThey’re hard to keep in stock right 3.5” x 2.5” | Maximum Font Size: 30 pt ing nightmare.” now.”

Even though the light from the One place to get a pair of eclipse sun will be lessened significantly glasses for free is through the

Central Arkansas Library System, which is hosting eclipse-themed events Aug. 21, including an eclipse watch party from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. that day in Riverfront Park. There also will be an eclipse watch party at CALS’ Roosevelt Thompson Library, 38 Rahling Circle.

Shani Atwood, who helps run the CALS telescope lending program, said that eclipse glasses are available free to those who attend eclipse events at CALS, part of a push to distribute 2 million free pairs to educators and libraries.

Atwood said a solar eclipse fascinates people because it is so rare.

She noted there are “eclipse chasers” who travel all over the globe just to catch a few minutes in the path of an eclipse. It’s a natural wonder that most people have never experienced, she said.

“It’s the kind of thing that in the past, people thought the world was ending,” she said, “so just being able to witness that firsthand is something maybe people take for granted or have trouble comprehending until they actually see it in person, and actually see that’s the way the universe works, and that’s the way planetary mechanics works.”

If you’re interested in witnessing a total eclipse, the nearest city to Central Arkansas that will experience totality is Cape Girardeau, Mo., which is 292 miles from Little Rock.

If you can’t make it this year, however, be patient. On April 8, 2024, Little Rock will be in the path of totality for another eclipse, with the eclipse visible across Arkansas on a northeastern arc from De Queen to Pocahontas.

DR. HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. and composer Tania Leon will come to Little Rock to take part in a series of events, “Imagine If Buildings Could Talk,” commemorating the 60th anniversary of the desegregation of Central High School. Events run Saturday through Monday, Sept. 23-25.

Gates and Leon will collaborate with the CORE performance company for “Civil Twilight,” a dance/spoken-word piece to be performed at 6:15 p.m. Sunday in the Central High School Commemorative Garden. At 7:30 p.m. Monday, “An Evening with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Tania Leon: Turning History Into Art” at the Reynolds Performance Hall on the campus of the University of Central Arkansas in Conway will feature a discussion and a preview of the upcoming opera based on the story of the Little Rock Nine.

Little Rock native Chris Parker’s commissioned work, “No Tears Suite” (based on Melba Patillo Beals’ memoir “Warriors Don’t Cry”), will be performed at 6 p.m. Saturday at the historic Mobil/Magnolia Service Station across from Central High. “Imagine the Inclusive School of the Future,” student artwork, will be on display during the month of September at the Central High School National Historic Site’s visitor center. Ninety-minute interpretive bus tours of key national historic sites will depart on the hour between noon and 4 p.m.

Saturday and Sunday.

Partners include the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, the Little Rock mayor’s office, the Little Rock field office of the FBI, Hearne Fine Art, the John Cain Foundation, the New Africa Alliance, Opera in the Rock, the Oxford American Literary Project and UCA. The project, organizers said in a press release, seeks to “bring together artists and the public to explore the dynamics of ‘otherness’ experienced by those who suffered the adverse effects of segregation and all those involved with the tumultuous events surrounding school desegregation in 1957” and to “engage in conversations about equity, inclusion, and healing, conversations that are often difficult but somehow mitigated by the transformative power of the arts.”

Knowing our clients personally is what we do.

Knowing our clients personally is what we do.

®, ADPA®, KELLY CFP®, AAMS Kelly RJOURNEY, Journey, AAMS®, ADPA®, ® ® CRPS CRPC®, CRPC

Financial Advisor .

10800 Financial Centre Pkwy Suite 270 Little Rock, AR 72211 501-455-5786 Kelly.journey@edwardjones.com www.edwardjones.com

Member SIPC

NOW TWO CONVENIENT LOCATIONS LITTLE ROCK • NORTH LITTLE ROCK

175ML 175ML 750ML 750ML 750ML 750ML 750ML 750ML

Every Day

JOHNNIE WALKER RED CAPTAIN MORGAN SPICED RUM GLENFARCLAS SINGLE MALT 12 YEAR DON JULIO BLANCO TEQUILA HENDRICK’S GIN JORDAN ALEXANDER VALLEY CABERNET SANTA MARGHERITA PINOT GRIGIO 19 CRIMES HARD CHARDONNAY AUSTRALIAN WINE

$39.99 $23.99 $50.99 $45.99 $29.99 $59.99 $24.99 $10.99

SALE!

$33.99 $21.99 $44.99 $41.99 $24.99 $49.99 $18.99 $7.99

ALL CRAFT BEER10% OFF EVERY DAY!

• WE GLADLY MATCH ANY LOCAL ADS TASTING TITO VODKA AND D’USSÉ COGNAC FRIDAY, JULY 21, 3-7PM AT OUR BROADWAY LOCATION. COME SEE US!

HURRY IN! THIS SALE EXPIRES JULY 26, 2017 WEDNESDAY IS WINE DAY 15% OFF WINE CASE DISCOUNTS EVERY DAY!

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

Follow Rock Candy on Twitter: @RockCandies

arktimes.com JUNE 1, 2017

21

MOVIE REVIEW

ALSO IN THE ARTS

THEATRE

“Sweet Charity.” Argenta Community Theater’s production of Cy Coleman’s Tony Award-winning musical. 7 p.m. Tue.-Thu., 8 p.m. Fri.-Sat., 2 p.m. Sun., through July 29. $30. 405 Main St., NLR. 501-353-1443.

“The Pervert and the Pentecostal.” The Main Thing’s summer musical comedy. 8 p.m. Fri.-Sat., through Sept. 1. $24. The Joint Theater & Coffeehouse. 301 Main St., NLR. 501-372-0205.

“Heathers: The Musical.” A musical adaptation of the 1988 film. 7:30 p.m.

Thu.-Sat., 2:30 p.m. Sun., through July 30. $16-$18. The Studio Theater. 320 W. 7th St. 501-410-2283.

“The Wizard of Oz.” Murry’s Dinner Playhouse presents the family classic. 7:30 p.m. Tue.-Sat., dinner at 6 p.m.; 12:45 p.m. and 6:45 p.m. Sun., dinner at 11 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., through Aug. 26. $15-$37. 6323 Colonel Glenn Road. 501-562-3131.

“Comedy Yet Magic: An Evening with Scott Davis.” A 90-minute family production from the Five Star Dinner Theatre. 7 p.m. dinner, 8 p.m. curtain Wed., Fri.-Sat., through Aug. 9. $17-$38. 701 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 501-318-1600.

CALL FOR ENTRIES

GUERRILLA WARFARE: Great visual effects, but little new otherwise.

Live and let die ‘Apes’ reboot is satisfying, if not daring.

BY SAM EIFLING

B

y now, you can read the rebooted “Planet of the Apes” trilogy in a couple of different ways. One is as parable that hinges on man’s hubristic belief that tech will lead to a brighter future. In the first two movies, an experimental dementia drug turns apes super-smart, while another version of the drug spreads around the world as a pathogen, killing 99.8 percent of humans. Apes seem content to live and let live, but both species begin to see one another as rivals as one rises and the other declines. In “War for the Planet of the Apes,” Earth appears to be up for grabs. So, of course, human soldiers are taking the fight to the apes, on the assumption that they’re going to come for us at some point. It turns out to be a recipe to get our human asses kicked.

Another way to read it is from the apes’ side: They’ve always been more worthy, more human, than we’ve given them credit for. This is the long arc that has to bend over the course of the films, and in “War,” the ape-ness has been reduced almost to a sidebar to an otherwise pretty conventional military revenge film. By now, writer/

22

JULY 20, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

director Matt Reeves has brought the apes to a level of humanity that essentially surpasses that of the humans, who are scared and cruel and making idiot decisions throughout. It’s still a hoot if you like seeing an orangutan ride a horse, or a chimpanzee throw a grenade, but otherwise the story has lost most of the motivating sci- in its fi-.

Andy Serkis is back again as Caesar, the hyper-intelligent alpha-ape whose overtures for peace have gone ignored.

After his ape clan now is a murderous colonel played by Woody Harrelson, steering his soldiers in a Machiavellian mission that lets him take on shades of Colonel Kurtz. (Lest the parallels escape us, a prominent piece of graffiti reading “APEOCALYPSE NOW” will drive it home.) In a raid on the apes’ Ewokian forest compound, the colonel kills Caesar’s wife and son, setting the level-headed ape leader on a mission of vengeance. While other apes relocate en masse, he and a small band go in search of the colonel. Along the way they find humans suffering from a mysterious ailment, including an orphaned girl (Amiah Miller) they adopt for the trek. A comic relief hermit ape (Steve

Zahn) rounds out the rag-tag group.

The apes’ kindnesses turn out to be strategic victories in the long run, in the tradition of a sports flick where even the clumsy kid winds up making a play in the big game. Those tedious touches wound an otherwise admirably patient film. By the time the story takes us to the colonel’s big snowy mountain compound, and the apes are going guerrilla (ha), “War” takes on the conventions of a feelgood prison break flick. The first of these movies (“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”) already pulled off a tighter escape sequence, and in a smaller space — apes cooperating in the most rudimentary ways to make a break from the monkey house.

The biggest flaw in “War” is that lack of discovery. If apes are equal to humans in their capacities to feel and learn and fire a rocket launcher, then what’s the attraction of watching them, instead of anyone else in particular, blow things up? But such a critique requires two caveats. The overheated, if satisfying, climax does require the apes to be apes in order to survive — it’s worth the wait. And the visual effects are so excellent that real pathos comes through in the performances. The demands of your usual Hollywood mega-franchise may have sucked some of the originality and daring out of this story, but it also pays you back in raw wonder. Just dim your higher mental functions a bit and you’ll have a blast.

The Arkansas Arts Council is accepting entries for the 2018 Small Works on Paper touring exhibition through July 21. Juror will be James Phillips, artist and associate professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Awards totaling $2,000 will be given. The show will open in January 2018 at the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center. Go to the programs link arkansasarts.org to find an online entry form or call Cheri Leffew at 324-9767 for more information.

FINE ART, HISTORY EXHIBITS MAJOR VENUES ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, MacArthur Park: 59th annual “Delta Exhibition,” through Aug. 27; “56th Young Arkansas Artists Exhibition,” through July 23; “Drawing on History: National Drawing Invitational Retrospective,” works from the permanent collection, through Sept.

24. 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 CENTER OF THE OZARKS, 214 Main St., Springdale: “Sensory Iconoclast,” paintings by chefs, through Sept. 10, reception 6-8 p.m. Aug. 8, to be followed Aug. 23 by a dinner prepared by painters, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sat. 479-751-5441.

ARTS & SCIENCE CENTER FOR SOUTHEAST ARKANSAS, 701 S. Main St., Pine Bluff: “Color in Space: The Art of Justin Bryant,” through Sept. 9. 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.: “Sammy Peters: Then and Now,” abstract paintings, through Aug. 26; “Historic Bridges of Arkansas,” photographs by Maxine Payne, through Aug. 26. 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: “Xtreme Bugs,” animatronic insects, through July 23; permanent exhibits on

the Clinton administration. 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.

CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, One Museum Way, Bentonville: “Chihuly: In the Gallery and in the Forest,” works by the glass artist Dale Chihuly, through Aug. 14, $20, ticket required (tickets.crystalbridges. org); “Animal Meet Human,” 16 works, including Adonna Khare’s 40-foot-long pencil drawing, “Elephants,” and Helen Frankenthaler’s “The Bullfight,” through Oct. 30; “Not to Scale: Highlights from the Fly’s Eye Dome Archive,” drawings and models of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, through March 2018; “Roy Lichtenstein in Focus,” five large works, through July; 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. 479418-5700.

ESSE PURSE MUSEUM & STORE, 1510 S. Main St.: “Take Your Purse With You: The Reimagined Work of Katherine Strause,” paintings, through Aug. 27; “What’s Inside: A Century of Women and Handbags,” permanent exhibit. 11 a.m.4 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Sun. $10, $8 for students, seniors and military. 9169022.

FORT SMITH REGIONAL ART MUSEUM, 1601 Rogers Ave.: “Carlos Luna,” mixedmedia on wood, paintings and Jacquard tapestries, through Sept. 18; “K. Nelson Harper: Lasting Impressions,” art of the letterpress, through Sept. 3. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 479-784-

2787.

HISTORIC ARKANSAS MUSEUM, 200 E. 3rd St.: “Gordon and Wenonah Fay Holl: Collecting a Legacy,” through Feb. 4, 2018; “Traces Remain,” installation

by Dawn Holder and works on paper

by Melissa Cowper-Smith, through Aug. 6; “Portraits of Friends” by Dani Ives, through Aug. 6. Ticketed tours of renovated and replicated 19th century structures from original city, guided Monday and Tuesday on the hour, selfguided Wednesday through Sunday, $2.50 adults, $1 under 18, free to 65 and over. (Galleries free.) 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): “Work, Fight, Give: American Relief Posters of WWII,” through Aug. 16; “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: “Not Forgotten: An Arkansas Family Album,” photographs by Nina Robinson; permanent exhibits on African-American entrepreneurship in Arkansas. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 683-3593.

MUSEUM OF DISCOVERY, 500 President Clinton Ave.: “Human Plus,” low and high-tech tools that extend human abilities, through Sept. 10; also interactive science exhibits. 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 CONTINUED ON PAGE 30

THE ARKANSAS TIMES GOES !

Coming Soon

BRAD PAISLEY

& WE'RE GOING MAD! STAY TUNED FOR BUS TRIP DETAILS.

“I DO SOLEMNLY SWEAR” STARTED WITH “I DO.” Before Bill and Hillary ever took an oath for public office, they took an oath to each other at their home in Fayetteville.

Now called the Clinton House Museum, you can even see a replica of Hillary’s wedding dress. Now with FREE admission, see where their life in public service began.

Then, enjoy the sights and sounds of the entertainment capital of Northwest Arkansas.

Clintonhousemuseum.org

arktimes.com JULY 20, 2017

23

THE

TO-DO

LIST

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE AND LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK

THURSDAY 7/20

THURSDAY 7/20

SEAN MCGOWAN

7:30 p.m. The Joint Theater and Coffeehouse. $25.

It’s gotta be tempting for a renowned acoustic fingerstyle guitarist to take all the liberties that come with playing alone — to indulge in florid, meterless cadenzas or to hold notes for eons, knowing the audience will wait it out breathlessly. Sean McGowan doesn’t seem to lean that way. Instead of enjoying all the freedoms he could be enjoying without the messiness of collaborators, he just plays as if he is the whole ensemble, dropping in walking bass lines and percussive downbeats, playing the part of guitarist and rhythm section. At times, the cohesion and polish of it all lends

McGowan’s studio stuff a “hold music” sort of feel, but definitely classy hold music — the kind that plays while you wait for a quote on a replacement rudder for your yacht. It’s not likely to come across that way live, though, especially when McGowan dips into his Thelonius Monk repertoire, which he tackled expertly (and notably, without recording any overdubs) on his 2011 album “Sphere.” He knows his stuff backward and forward, too; the Denver-based McGowan has studied “injury prevention and health education for musicians,” as his bio notes, and writes for Acoustic Guitar magazine about the ins and outs of block chords, fancy gear and Thelonius Monk’s guide tone voicings. SS

MARK CURREY

8 p.m. Stickyz Rock ’n’ Roll Chicken Shack. $10.

The list of instrumentalists who played key parts on Mark Currey’s first solo record, “Tarrant County,” is a formidable one: keyboardist Chuck Dodson, upright bassist Daniel Schoultz, playerof-all-stringed-things Matt Stone, drummer Bart Angel, vocalists Bonnie Montgomery, Mandy McBryde, Amy Garland Angel, Barbara Raney, Pearl Brick and Charlotte Taylor. Though some subtle piano work from Dodson and Rob Shirakbari and sustained string accompaniment from Geoff Robson and Ethan

Young would argue otherwise, it’s an album most would probably describe as Americana, with whiffs of Steve Forbert and an occasional dip of the toe into the blues (“Mid-Life Crises”) or into Texas swing, as on the standout “Genevieve,” a tale of incest and escape that — spoiler alert — stops just short of murderous revenge: “Tommy woulda killed him, but Ginny never told him, ’cause there’s things that you’ve just got to do yourself.”

Currey joins many of those musicians for the album’s official release at Stickyz this Thursday; all door proceeds go to support The Van. SS

THURSDAY 7/20

FRANCES & THE FOUNDATION

8:30 p.m. Vino’s Brewpub. $7.

‘NOTHING IS PERFECT, EVERYTHING IS FINE’: Nashville’s Frances & The Foundation land at Vino’s, with Notice to Quit and Jaymes Skott.

24

JULY 20, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

Follow us on Instagram: ArkTimes

In a video for the song “Hey Man,” bassist/lead singer Samantha Frances repeats a mantra that probably sounds familiar to anyone who’s been catcalled more than a handful of times: “Hey, girl, let me talk to you for a minute.” Though the song’s power-pop sheen makes for a pretty wry delivery, Frances said it was one of the more emotion-laden songs she’s penned lately. “I was filling up my car one day right outside the city and had a pair of men start yelling obscenities at me and screaming what they thought were compliments when in reality they were just disgusting slurs. I got so pissed that I went home and wrote that song that day, but I wanted to be tongue-in-cheek about it,” she told Substream magazine in April. “It frustrates me that we haven’t evolved past being inappropriate to one another.”

The Nashville trio — Frances, Nathan Zumwalt and Wes Cramer — just released its debut album, “Nothing is Perfect, Everything is Fine,” and they’re joined by Notice to Quit and Jaymes Skott. SS

IN BRIEF

ARSHIA KHAN

THURSDAY 7/20

JOHN DAVID PITTMAN

97 PERCENT: Kesha Lagniappe’s fiber installation, made from garments worn by women during a sexual assault, goes up at Bernice Garden Friday evening.

POPUP: Joshua Asante (Amasa Hines, Velvet Kente) performs for the launch of PopUp Argenta, a project of studioMAIN and Create Little Rock.

FRIDAY 7/21

THIRD FRIDAY ARGENTA ARTWALK / POPUP ARGENTA

5-8 p.m. (unless noted). Downtown North Little Rock.

PopUp Argenta and the Innovation Hub will add spring to Argenta ArtWalk stepping this week.

Sponsored by studioMAIN and Create Little Rock, PopUp Argenta features music by Joshua Asante (at 6 p.m.), a comedy performance by Red Octopus (7:15 p.m.), artist vendors, Etsy vendors, and food trucks at Fourth and Main streets, next to the Argenta branch of the Laman Library. The space, which includes a stage and seating, will be open to the public for two months. The Innovation Hub, 201 E. Broadway, invites ceramicist Lane Chapman to talk about her work and welcomes people who like to draw to its Community Art Night, where there will be a model (bring your own supplies). Mugs Cafe at 515 Main St. opens “Three Dollar Icon,” an exhibition of paintings by Melissa Wilkinson, assistant professor of art at Arkansas State University. Greg Thompson Fine Art continues the exhibition “Southern Abstraction,” featuring the work of Sammy Peters, Pinkney Herbert, Robyn Horn, Don Lee, Gay Bechtelheimer, Dolores Justus and others. “Three Stories,” mixed media work by Jeannie Fry, Suzzette Patterson and Barbara Rhodes, goes on exhibit at the library (420 Main St.). Across the street, Argenta Art Gallery (413 Main St.) opens “Requiem Dreams,” mixed-media work by Jessica Carder. LNP

The Creek Rocks play a free show at Four Quarter Bar, 6 p.m. The Arkansas Travelers face off against the Springfield Cardinals, 7:10 p.m. Thu.-Fri., 6:10 p.m.

Sat.-Sun., Dickey-Stephens Park, $7-13.

SinClare and Flashlight $lim join forces for “Family Binnis,” a jam session at the White Water Tavern, 8 p.m. Saline County rap duo 5:40 headlines “Riot in the Rock,” with Sikk and The Psycho, John Hustle, Stephan James, Klaun IV, 7 p.m., $15. The Velcro Pygmies take the stage at Cajun’s Wharf, 9 p.m., $5. Comedian Dan O’ Sullivan appears at The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m.

Thu.-Sat., 10 p.m. Fri.-Sat., $8-$12. Women in Architecture of Arkansas celebrate women business leaders for “Girls Rock SoMA,” 5:30 p.m., Loblolly Creamery, 1423 Main St. Arkansas State Parks interpreter Amy Griffin talks about the history of Toltec Mounds for the Old State House Museum’s Brown Bag Lecture series, noon, free.

FRIDAY 7/21

FRIDAY 7/21

“97 [A RECLAMATION OF BODY AND SPACE]” 6 p.m. Bernice Garden. $10.

The annual National Crime Victimization Survey of the Department of Justice estimates that 97 percent of rapists never spend any time in jail for their crimes.

In response, Kesha Lagniappe, a survivor of multiple rapes, decided to build a visual demonstration of that number: a 97-foot-long hand-stitched fiber installation in four segments, made of donated garments worn by victims of sexual assault during their assaults. “The significance of the garments is that we were wearing them during a horrible time in our lives,” Lagniappe told a blog called “Hidden Reality: the Truth About Sexual Assault.” “Using the garments to create awareness is a great way to make peace with the outfit while showing how ridiculous it is that most rapists never go to jail for their crimes.” The Forrest City native, a painter by profession, learned to sew in order to complete the project, which she felt “was the only way it could be done to get the point across.” It’s been photographed in locations meant to mirror the locations of the crimes the work symbolizes — a dumpster, for one, a reference to the high-profile Brock Turner case. “When a woman shares her experience with me,” Lagniappe told me earlier this week, “I go to a symbolic place to represent that experience. One woman told of how a co-worker walked her to her car late one night after working long hours, and then he forced himself on her in the parking garage. So, I photographed [the artwork] at a parking garage in downtown Little Rock to give that experience a visual voice.” “97” comes to the Bernice Garden Friday evening, with proceeds donated in gratitude to Bernice Garden for providing the space and to Lucie’s Place, Black Lives Matter and Arkansas Women’s Outreach as a show of support for black women and black LGBT women — those most vulnerable to “rape culture and toxic masculinity and patriarchy,” Lagniappe said.

“I am an intersectional feminist and firmly believe that the women that need our attention the most should also be brought to the forefront.” SS

Priscilla Rock’s House of Horrors turns Club Sway into a monster dance party, 9 p.m. Howard & Skye take the stage at Markham Street Grill & Pub, 8:30 p.m., free.

Magnolia Brown takes its rock set to Four Quarter Bar, 10 p.m., $7. Almost Infamous performs at Thirst N’ Howl Bar & Grill, 8:30 p.m., $5. Country radio staples Rascal Flatts perform at the Walmart AMP in Rogers, with Lauren Alaina, 7:30 p.m., $36-$81. The Little Rock chapter of the 48 Hour Film Festival screens its entries ahead of the “Best Of” screening in August, 7 p.m. Fri. and Sat., the Ron Robinson Theater. Brian Nahlen plays an acoustic set at Cregeen’s Pub, 8 p.m. Megan, Revenge Bodies, The Cunts and Quartz Prawl play a show at the White Water Tavern, 9 p.m. Ron Miller entertains at the Heights Corner Market, 8:30 p.m.

The Fuggins Wheat Band and Vanimal Kingdom share a bill at Smoke and Barrel Tavern in Fayetteville, 10 p.m., $5. Sam Mooney plays the happy hour set at Cajun’s, 5:30 p.m., free, followed by Nerd Eye Blind, 9 p.m., $5. Magic Springs Theme and Water Park in Hot Springs screens “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” above the wave pool as part of its Dive-In Movies series, 7 p.m., $35-$55. St. Louis string band Clusterpluck lands at Kings Live Music in Conway, with Caleb Martin, 8:30 p.m., $5. Mister Lucky performs at Oaklawn Racing & Gaming’s Silks Bar & Grill, Hot Springs, 10 p.m. Fri.-Sat. Free.

SATURDAY 7/22 DeFrance performs its Southern rock-influenced set at Kings Live Music, with Luke Smith, 8:30 p.m., $5. The Great Arkansas Beer Festival celebrates the craft of fermentation at the Statehouse Convention Center, 5:30 p.m., $30-$40. English rock trio Raveneye performs at Stickyz Rock ’n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 9:30 p.m., $10. Maxine’s in Hot Springs hosts a Songwriter’s Night

Follow Rock Candy on Twitter: @RockCandies

arktimes.com JULY 20, 2017

25

THE

TO-DO

LIST

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE AND LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK

SUNDAY 7/23

QUEEN ANTHONY JAMES GERARD

6 p.m. Sway.

In a 2015 performance at Miss Kitty’s Saloon (RIP), nee Easy Street (RIP), Queen Anthony Gerard performed Whitney Houston’s “I Look to You” as an ode to cigarettes and blow, donning a cig between her lips and puffing between phrases, then dousing herself in what was surely powdered sugar from a Ziploc bag. If that doesn’t

make Queen a perfect fit for the lead in The Studio Theatre’s upcoming performance of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” I don’t know what would.

Drag performances have a long history of love/ hate relationships with icons like Whitney and Britney, and John Cameron Mitchell’s “Hedwig” was brought to life at the Squeezebox parties in a tiny dive not at all unlike Miss Kitty’s. As Sway’s first resident drag artist, Queen has been at the helm of the club’s drag talent competition,

FRUNK MASTER: Painter, poet and seven-time winner of Austin Music Awards’ Musician of the Year title Bob Schneider performs at the Rev Room Friday night.

FRIDAY 7/21

BOB SCHNEIDER

About the time Bob Schneider began leaning away from his funk ensemble The Scabs and released an album called “Songs Sung and Played on Guitar at the Same Time,” people outside of Austin started to pay attention. Well, not exactly. First, they confused him with comedian/actor Rob Schneider.

But after that, they paid attention. And how can you not? The man is sort of a polymath. He’s radically spontaneous with his set lists (he’s written over 2,000 songs, and past bandmates have reported performing tunes they’d never heard before). He creates poems, paintings and collages prolifically and posts them on a blog called Stinking Hand. He makes videos to accompany his songs using aforementioned collage techniques, old Hollywood movies and found footage. Maybe more importantly, he’s also managed to abandon any fears that he’ll be perceived as “inauthentic” if he hops from genre to genre, project to project — one time around a sugary, autotuned R&B fireside serenade, the next a bluegrass jam, then a Peter Gabriel-esque new wave bop. If you’ve seen him before, you’ve got a pretty good chance that he’ll play absolutely nothing you heard last time, and if you’ve never seen him, check out his three-volume EP suite, “King Kong,” in which the tracks are interspersed with Schneider’s guileless, meandering conversation with himself — or with you, the silent partner. SS

26

JULY 20, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

ERIC LEVIN

8:30 p.m. Revolution. $15-$17.

‘CINCO’: Jim Gaffigan lands at First Security Ampitheater in the River Market on his “Noble Ape” tour.

SUNDAY 7/23

JIM GAFFIGAN

8 p.m. First Security Amphitheater. $24-$165.

Jim Gaffigan is a stand-up comedian who’s a Catholic and father to five kids. On his TV series, “The Jim Gaffigan Show,” canceled last August after two seasons, he played a stand-up comedian named Jim Gaffigan who is Catholic and a father to five kids. So, the man’s shtick is a little meta. Like Colbert and Carlin before him, he’s grappled with the idea of a standup comedian’s stage identity being inextricably tied to his own — the one he presumably dons when he’s at home with his family. In a January interview on

Follow us on Instagram: ArkTimes

the “Today” show, he went off script, overtly dodging the “now we promote your Netflix special” formula, stubbornly changing the subject to his “disgusting” mustache or his family who, he said, “understands that [he has] a family solely for material purposes.” He’s “not one of these people who, like, loves his family,” he said. “It’s business.” He claimed to be redoing “Magnum, P.I.” and a series of remakes of Wilford Brimley films. He deadpanned a sarcastic bit about believing women “shouldn’t have opinions.” (It bombed gruesomely. Gaffigan famously writes all his material in collaboration with his wife, Jeannie, but hey, maybe satire works differ-

ently before noon.) Things went a little more smoothly on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” where Gaffigan sat across the desk from a fellow Catholic comedian, father and smart-ass.

Colbert prodded Gaffigan about his gig opening up for the Pope at Philadelphia’s Festival of Families, and he lauded Gaffigan’s set for its ability to embody the Everyman, politically speaking.

“I happen to be liberal, but I look like a Republican senator from the ’50s,” Gaffigan explained.

Catch him at First Security, and if you got one of the fancy meetand-greet tickets, try to avoid hot-button subjects like Santa Claus. And Hot Pockets. SS

IN BRIEF

QC:

Live: 1.875" x 5.25"

CW: CD:

Trim: 2.125" x 5.5" Bleed: none"

AE:

Closing Date: 6/2/17

AD:

Publication: Arkansas Times

2015, Queen performed the lead in the club’s first production of “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” and the following year, Queen coached fellow Sway artist and “Fresh Fish” winner Symone the Ebony Enchantress to step into the role of Frank-n-furter, for which there was a sold-out run. This Sunday, she’ll headline the show at Sway, a new addition to the roster of places to daydrink on the Sabbath. SS

Brand: Shock Top Item #: OST2017001

PO:

MUST INITIAL FOR APPROVAL

Job/Order #: 294998 Operator: cs

PM:

“Fresh Fish,” and at the helm of some controversy, too — her Leo Anthony Gallagher Jr./Noxeema Jackson homage at Club Sway last April (the performer wore box braids and smashed watermelons labeled with the words “racism,” “transphobia” and “ageism”) sparked a clash between the club and members of the Little Rock chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement at the Central Arkansas Pride Festival. In

with Adam Faucett, Nick Brumley, Reece Sullivan and Brian Martin, 9 p.m. Phoenix “klezploitation” band Jerusafunk brings an unlikely blend of funk and klezmer to Vino’s, PRINT with Stays in Vegas, 9 p.m., $7. Last Chance Records’ Two Cow Garage takes its seventh release, “Brand New Flag,” to the White Water Tavern, with Colour Design, 9:30 p.m. Greg Madden performs a free show for happy hour at Cajun’s, 5:30 p.m., with Rock Candy taking the stage at 9 p.m., $5. Comedian Gary Owen performs at the Robinson Center, 8 p.m., $29-$50. Paul Grass and Phillip Dixon keep the tunes pumping in Discovery Nightclub disco-tech, with G-Force in the lobby, 9 p.m. Country star Travis Tritt takes the stage at Magic Springs’ Timberwood Amphitheater, 8 p.m., with an opening set from The Marshall Tucker Band, 7 p.m., $35-$55. If you’ve ever shaken your fists at the ancestry.com paywall, attend a free genealogy workshop from one of the company’s experts, Dr. Robin Hanson, at the Ron Robinson Theater, 10 a.m. Roxx performs for AMP Out ALZ6, a fundraiser for Alzheimer’s Arkansas, 7 p.m., $25-$75. Josh Stewart performs at Cregeen’s Pub, 8 p.m. Jet 420 returns to Thirst N’ Howl, 8:30 p.m., $5.

SUNDAY 7/23

BE YOURSELF: In partnership with Electric Ghost Screenprinting, photographer Brandon Markin created this image of Crystal C. Mercer to commemorate the Arkansas Women’s March.

Mercer emceed the march and will sign posters at the event.

TUESDAY 7/25

‘BE YOURSELF’ POSTER LAUNCH 6 p.m. The Root.

In support of the Women’s March in January of this year, Shepard Fairey revived the red, white and blue palette he’d used for Obama’s “Hope” campaign to frame the faces of Muslim, black and Latina women. The campaign, called “We the People,” made its way onto newspaper ads, giant banners and protest signs across the globe. To commemorate our own Women’s March here in Arkansas, photographer Brandon Markin collaborated with Electric Ghost to create a limited-edition screenprinted poster featuring the image of one of Arkansas’s own activists, Crystal

Drummers Chris Coleman, Calvin Rodgers and Brent Easton headline “Drummers in the House,” a percussion showcase at the Rev Room, with local drummers Jamaal Lee and Jarrod Ives, 7 p.m., $15-$30.

MONDAY 7/24 The Arkansas Travelers take on the Northwest Arkansas Naturals, 7:10 p.m. Mon.-Wed., Dickey-Stephens Park, $7-13. The next concert in Bluegrass Mondays by KASU-FM, 91.9, features Kenny and Amanda Smith, 7 p.m., Collins Theater, Paragould, $5 suggested donation.

TUESDAY 7/25 C. Mercer, who emceed at the Women’s March earlier this year. Now, Mercer will sign posters at the “Be Yourself” event; sales of the poster will benefit Lucie’s Place. Earlier this week, I asked Markin what inspired him to do the project. “My inspiration was the women who have stepped out of the shadows since Nov. 9, 2016 — many of them with no previous desire to venture into the poisonous arena of politics, and at great sacrifice and risk to themselves — who worked to try to stem the tide of antagonistic policies that prevent us realizing the vision of a true equality.” Amy Garland Angel, Phillip Rex Huddleston and Daniel Moody will provide the music. SS

ENJOY RESPONSIBLY © 2017 SHOCK TOP BREWING CO., SHOCK TOP® BELGIAN-STYLE WHEAT ALE, ST. LOUIS, MO

Tedeschi Trucks Band makes a stop at the Walmart AMP on its Wheels of Soul tour, with The Wood Brothers and Hot Tuna, 7 p.m., $31-$76. The All New Johnny Atomic Revue brings some “twang-a-billy” to White Water, $5. The Reverburritos take the stage at South on Main for Tiki Tuesdays, 8 p.m., $8. The Central Arkansas Library System screens the 1959 horror flick “Attack of the Giant Leeches” for its Terror Tuesday series, 6 p.m., Ron Robinson Theater, $2.

Call 501-242-4091 today to schedule your visit!

Andover Place Independent Retirement Living

Little Rock, AR 501-242-4091

WEDNESDAY 7/26 “The Magnificent Seven” goes up on the big screen at the First Security Amphitheater for Movies in the Park, 8:30 p.m., free. Oakland’s Don’t Ask and Mabs share a bill with Adam Faucett & The Tall Grass and Fiscal Spliff at the Cavern in Russellville, 8 p.m., donations.

andoverplace.net ©2017 HARVEST MANAGEMENT SUB LLC, HOLIDAY AL MANAGEMENT SUB LLC, HOLIDAY AL NIC MANAGEMENT LLC.

Follow Rock Candy on Twitter: @RockCandies

arktimes.com JULY 20, 2017

27

BELLY UP

Dining

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

WHAT’S COOKIN’

WE GOT A sneak peek at Kamikaito by Kiyen’s, chef Kiyen Kim’s long-awaited sushi and hibachi restaurant opening soon at the corner of Sixth and Main streets in Argenta, in the space previously occupied

by Good Food by Ferneau and Argenta Market before that.

If the food is as delicious as the decor is striking, Kamikaito will be a hit. Chef Kiyen (as he refers to himself) has done all the carpentry himself, building the white-washed walls demarcating a front dining area, where he will sell frozen yogurt of his own making; the bar, and the dining room. The restaurant is hung with dozens of blownglass light fixtures, a Chihuly-esque touch, and softly-lit panels of rice paper paintings are on the ceiling. Diners will be able to see the kitchen prep, which will take place behind glass walls. There will also be lounge seating by the bar. Chef Kiyen hopes to be open by the end of the month.

MATTHEW MCCLURE, THE chef at The Hive at 21c Museum Hotel in Bentonville, joins up with Ozark Beer Co. for a threecourse barbecue dinner July 26, part of the 2017 Fork + Bottle Dinner Series. For the $49 ticket, participants will dine on sweet potato profiteroles, fried okra, porchetta di testa with grilled peaches and pickled onions, slow smoked beef short ribs with beans and cabbage and an ambrosia dessert of peaches, sabayon and marshmallows. Each course will be paired with a different beer. The dinner starts at 6:30 p.m.

Upcoming Fork + Bottle meals include a Bourbon Heritage Month dinner Sept. 27 and another “indulgence-themed” meal Dec. 6. Reserve at 479-286-6518.

STARTING IN SEPTEMBER, owners hope, The WunderBus food truck will have a brickand-mortar companion, The WunderHaus.

Auguste Forrester and his sister, Jacqueline Forrester, are leasing the Central Station property at 900 Locust St. in Conway for the restaurant, which will be open for lunch only at first. They’ll serve a menu similar to the German/Eastern European fusion offered by the food truck, but will expand it to include other European dishes, Auguste Forrester said. The WunderBus will be doing mostly catering and wedding business until the restaurant is open.

AS PROMISED, SCOTT Hanayik and Ryan Brown’s Agave Grill opened Monday in Benton, at 17323 I-30 (about a mile and a half on the access road from the Congo Road exit), serving Mexican-American fusion cuisine. Mindy Mitchell is chef. Hours are 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. Monday through Saturday and 10 a.m. to midnight on Sunday.

There will be a Sunday brunch buffet.

28

JULY 20, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

SMASHING: The steakburger at Freddy’s is flattened on the griddle for a good crust; the frozen custard comes with a variety of accompaniments, like hot fudge, Snickers bits, gummy bears and more.

Ready for Freddy’s Smashing burgers, shoestring fries.

O

nce in a while, if you’ve been raised in America, you must down a greasy hamburger. For some people, it’s once a week; for us, once a month.

Then there are french fries. We like them, and we like them fat (if they’re cooked right, a la The Faded Rose), made of sweet potatoes (a la The Root) or skinny. Let’s talk about the skinny.

The shoestring fries at Freddy’s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers are the best chain restaurant french fries — or maybe anyone’s french fries — we’ve had (especially since McDonald’s cut out the lard). You get a nice pile of them with the combo meals or you can buy them on the side. Happily, we did not happen to have the to-go menu on hand when we ordered; otherwise we would have seen that the small order is 440 calories, and the big, which comes with the combo, is 520 calories.

But let’s put talk of calories aside. You don’t go to Freddy’s looking for kale or Omega-3 fatty-acid-laden mackerel.

Nutrition is not at the top of your list. You Follow Eat Arkansas on Twitter: @EatArkansas

go to Freddy’s for the smashed steakburgers, their lace-like slips showing on the sides of your bun. You go to Freddy’s for the frozen custard concretes and shakes and malts and the hot fudge toppings, and the Snickers pieces and, if you are still in short pants, Gummi worms, et cetera.

And the fries. Think of Freddy’s as an addition to the spectrum of candy-apple red nostalgia joints like Steak ’n’ Shake or the In’ n’ Out Burger, with a wholesome Colwich, Kan., origin story.

Four of us went for an early lunch — 11:15 a.m. — last week, and had to stand in a line about 10 deep to order. From a kitchen packed with no fewer than 15 employees in constant motion, the food arrived quickly and as ordered, though the place seemed to emanate more of a chaotic “opening week, still working out the kinks” vibe than the well-oiled machines it’s akin to. We blame some bad design — the huge menu sprawls overhead as you order at the counter, and the visual organization of the items isn’t exactly intuitive.

One of us went light on the steak-

burger, ordering only one patty, and heavy on the concrete, ordering the regular size, which, believe us, is as much ice cream as should be legal in the middle of a steamy, drowsy summer day in Arkansas. Let it be said that the steakburgers are delicious. According to the Arkansas Times’ Office of Food Research, the smashed burger offers that umami of hamburgerdom, the griddled crust, and Freddy’s smashes the bejeezus out of its burgers, which accounts for the meat lace around the edge. (If you’ve ever eaten a Florentine cookie — with its frilly, caramelized edges — you’ve got a pretty good idea of the Freddy’s Steakburger approach to beef patties.) How the hell the burgers —

Freddy’s Frozen Custard and Steakburgers

4305 E. McCain Blvd. (next to The Home Depot) 955-5577

Quick bite The custard cookie sandwich, made with Oreo or Nutter Butter wafers, looked mighty tempting. Also, you can buy the frozen custard by the pint for $3.50 or quart for $5.99. Freddy’s also sells custard cakes for $19.99.

Hours 10:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Sunday through Friday, 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Other info There’s a drive-through window, or you can order take-out inside. No alcohol, credit cards accepted.

Midtown Billiards is BACK, thanks for the love Little Rock!

The re-opening was a huge success and we are back in business. which they say are made from “premium, lean, American, 100% pure ground beef” — stay together is anyone’s guess, but as long as we’re guessing, we suspect they’re manning some seriously wide spatulas back there on the flat grill to keep the delicate steakburger patties intact. The fact that they are so thin is why most folks we saw ordering last week were going for Freddy’s Original Double or the Freddy’s Double California Style, which comes doused in what appeared to be a take on Thousand Island. You can get a triple, too.

One of our team ordered the Freddy’s Hatch Green Chile Double, a burger topped with chilies grown in the Hatch Valley of New Mexico (you can get the chilies on a hot dog, too). The Hatch must be new: The cashier was momentarily confused by the order — who wouldn’t be, since the burger appears only briefly on the ever-changing electronic menu board? — but was straightened out by an older head behind the counter, who also explained that it’s best to put your ice cream on hold — pay for it and ask for it later — so it doesn’t melt before you power your way through meat, bread, pickles, mustard and french fries.

Back to that nutrition thing: In a sop to those among us who try to eat healthy even in a den of deep-fried fat, you can order apple sauce or baked potato chips instead of the french fries. You can even order your Freddy’s steakburger in a lettuce wrap. This writer would wager that

the North Little Rock Freddy’s will get perhaps, at the most, two orders a year of a lettuce-wrapped burger with a side of apple sauce. If that. (This writer says that because we know someone who would do it, and that someone probably has a friend.)

And that’s not all! There are hot dogs on the menu, a combo hot dog and hamburger meal, a grilled chicken breast sandwich and, yes, a veggie burger. (May we suggest Big Orange if a veggie burger is what you’re looking for at lunch?) You can also add bacon to your sandwiches, chili to your dogs, chili to your fries.

Freddy’s accommodated our desire to have malt stirred into our vanilla concrete, which was nice of the folks in the kitchen to do. The Freddy’s regular among us goes for the turtle concrete, which, be still my heart, includes hot fudge, hot caramel and toasted pecans. Another of the team went for the vanilla custard with bits of chopped up Snickers inside; had this writer not been so thrilled to find malt on the menu (why are malts getting so hard to find?), we would have opted for the vanilla custard with bits of Heath bar, which alone adds 240 calories to the 900-calorie regular-sized concrete, but, like we said, you don’t go to Freddy’s seeking a grass smoothie.

Four of us ate about as well as we could and the tab came to $42, which isn’t bad. A second Freddy’s opens soon at The Promenade at Chenal shopping center.

We want to acknowledge all of our friends that contributed to the sur vival of Midtown, Little Rock’s Historic Late Night Bar: Thanks Area 51, Bernice Gardens (hosted by Brian Nahlen & Jason Hale), Ernie Biggs, Four Quarter Bar, Great Arkansas Beer Festival & Stickyz Rock’n Roll Chicken Shack for the Midtown Employee Benefit Fundraisers.

Thanks Ian Beard, Darren Houston & Mike Watson!

Finally we would like to thank our neighbors in SOMA and a special shout out to South on Main for the TLC.

We’re Back!

1316 MAIN ST. • (501) 372-9990

arktimes.com JULY 20, 2017

29

ALSO IN THE ARTS, CONT. and children under 1. 396-7050.

OLD STATE HOUSE MUSEUM, 300 W. Markham St.: “A Confused and Confusing Affair: Arkansas and Reconstruction,” seminar, 9 a.m.-4 p.m.

Aug. 5, with speakers Jay Barth, Carl Moneyhon, Ken Barnes, Col. Damon Cluck, Blake Wintory, Tom DeBlack and Rodney Waymon Harris, $15, registration deadline July 28, call 3240685 or email tanya.canada@arkansas. gov for tickets; “Cabinet of Curiosities: Treasures from the University of Arkansas Museum Collection”; “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.

SOUTH ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, 110 E. 5th St., El Dorado: “2017 Juried Art Competition,” 69 works by 47 artists chosen by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art curator Dylan Turk, through July 28. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri. 870-8625474.

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., noon5 p.m. Sun., closed Mon. $4 for adults, $3 for ages 6-12, $14 for family. 961-9442.

UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS AT LITTLE ROCK: “Nasty Woman,” work by 35 women artists from Arkansas and across the nation, including Heather Beckwith, Susan Chambers, Melissa Cowper-Smith, Norwood Creech, Beverly Buys, Nancy Dunaway, Margo Duvall, Melissa Gill, Mia Hall, Louise Halsey, Diane Harper, Tammy Harrington, Heidi Hogden, Robyn Horn, Jeanie Hursley, Catherine Kim, Kimberly Kwee and Jolie Livaudais, through Aug. 25, closing reception 5-7 p.m. Aug. 18.

Weekdays 10 a.m.-5 p.m. 569-8977.

WALTON ARTS CENTER, Fayetteville: “Glacial Shifts, Changing Perspectives,” large-scale paintings and photographs documenting glacial melt by Diane Burko, through September, Joy Pratt Markham Gallery. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. weekdays, noon-4 p.m. Sat. 479-443-5600.

WILLIAM F. LAMAN LIBRARY, 2801 Orange St., NLR: Arkansas League of Artists 2017 “Members Show,” through July 28. 416-4729.

SMALLER VENUES ARGENTA ART GALLERY, 413 Main St., NLR: “Requiem Dreams,” mixed media

by Jessica Carder, reception 6-9 p.m.

July 21, Third Friday Argenta ArtWalk, show through Aug. 5. @argentagallery.

ART GROUP GALLERY, 11525 Cantrell Road: “Pie in July” art sale, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. July 22. 690-2193.

ARTISTS WORKSHOP GALLERY, 610 Central Ave., Hot Springs: Jim Reimer and Caryl Joy Young, paintings, through July. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat., noon-6 p.m. Sun. 623-6401.

BARRY THOMAS FINE ART & STUDIO, 711 Main St., NLR: Paintings

by Thomas. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 3492383.

CANTRELL GALLERY, 8205 Cantrell Road. “Chasing the Light, from Arkansas to California,” photographs by Paul Caldwell, through Sept. 2. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Mon.-Sat. 224-1335.

CHROMA GALLERY, 5707 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Work by Robert Reep and other Arkansas artists. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sat. 664-0880.

30

JULY 20, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

CORE BREWERY, 411 Main St., NLR: “Faces by Chalino,” work by Luis “Chalino” Atilano.

COX CREATIVE CENTER, 120 River Market Ave.: “Kaleidoscope,” work by Sandra Marson. 8 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 918-3093.

DRAWL GALLERY, 5208 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Work by regional and Arkansas artists. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat.

NLR: Ceramicist Lane Chapman will talk about her work, Art & Design Studios will be open for Community Art Night with model (bring supplies), 5:30-8 p.m. July 21, Third Friday Argenta ArtWalk. 9076570.

JUSTUS FINE ART GALLERY, 827 A Central Ave., Hot Springs: “Summer Series II,” work by Taimur Cleary, Robert Fogel, Robyn Horn, Rebecca Thompson

p.m. Tue.-Sat. 831-6200.

MATT McLEOD FINE ART, 108 W. 6th St.: Work by Arkansas artists. 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Tue.-Fri., 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 725-8508.

MUGS CAFE, 515 Main St., NLR: “Three Dollar Icon,” paintings by Melissa Wilkinson, reception 5-8 p.m. July 21, Third Friday Argenta ArtWalk. 7 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 379-9101.

POPUP ARGENTA, 4th and Main, NLR: Music by Joshua Asante (6 p.m.), comedy by Red Octopus (7:15 p.m.), food by Katmandu MOMO, artist vendors, 5-8 p.m. July 21, Third Friday Argenta ArtWalk.

THE HOUSE OF ART, 108 E. 4th St.: Mixed media work by Kesha Lagniappe and Lilia Hernandez.

WALKER-STONE HOUSE, 207 W. Center St., Fayetteville: “Summer Art Exhibition,” works by Fenix artists Cindy Arsaga, Carol Corning, Michael Davis, Amber Eggleton, Jan Gosnell, Corey Johnson, Leilani Law, Ed Pennebaker, Meikel S. Church and Jason Sacran, through Aug. 5. Noon-7 p.m. Wed.-Fri., 10 a.m.-2 p.m.

Sat. @fenixfayetteville.

OTHER MUSEUMS

AT MUGS: “Three Dollar Icon,” an exhibition of paintings by Melissa Wilkinson, opens with a reception from 5-8 p.m. Friday, Third Friday Argenta ArtWalk, at Mugs Cafe, 515 Main St. in North Little Rock.

240-7446.

GALLERY 221, 2nd and Center Sts.: Work

by William McNamara, Tyler Arnold, Amy Edgington, EMILE, Kimberly Kwee, Greg Lahti, Sean LeCrone, Mary Ann Stafford, Cedric Watson, C.B. Williams, Gino Hollander, Siri Hollander and jewelry

by Rae Ann Bayless. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. weekdays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 801-0211.

GALLERY 26, 2601 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Recent works by members of the Arkansas Printmakers Society. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 664-8996.

GALLERY CENTRAL, 800 Central Ave., Hot Springs: Paintings by Janis Polychron and other artists. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.Sat. 318-4278.

GREG THOMPSON FINE ART, 429 Main St., North Little Rock: “Southern Abstraction,” works by Sammy Peters, Gay Bechtelheimer, James Hendricks, Pinkney Herbert, Robyn Horn and Don Lee, open 5-8 p.m. July 21, Third Friday Argenta ArtWalk. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 664-2787.

HEARNE FINE ART, 1001 Wright Ave.: “XXIX Prime,” anniversary exhibition, through Aug. 5. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sat. 372-6822.

INNOVATION HUB, 201 E. Broadway,

and others, through July. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Wed.-Sat. 321-2335.

KOLLECTIVE COFFEE + TEA, 110 Central Ave., Hot Springs: “Dreams and Shadows,” drawings by Kirk Montgomery, through Aug. 3. 7 a.m.-7 p.m. Mon., Tue., Thu., Fri., 7 a.m.-9 p.m. Wed., 8 a.m.-8 p.m. Sat., 9 a.m.-7 p.m. Sun. 701-4000.

L&L BECK ART GALLERY, 5705 Kavanaugh Blvd.: “The Wild Ones,” July.

10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 660-4006.

LAMAN LIBRARY ARGENTA BRANCH, 420 Main St., NLR: “Three Stories,” mixed media work by Jeannie Fry, Suzzette Patterson and Barbara Rhodes, open 5-8 p.m. July 21, Third Friday Argenta ArtWalk. 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 9 a.m.1 p.m. Sat. 687-1061.

LEGACY FINE ART, 804 Central Ave., Hot Springs: Blown glass chandeliers

by Ed Pennington, paintings by Carole Katchen. 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri. 762-0840.

LOCAL COLOUR GALLERY, 5811 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Artists collective. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 265-0422.

MATTHEWS FINE ART GALLERY, 909 North St.: Paintings by Pat and Tracee Matthews, glass by James Hayes, jewelry

by Christie Young, knives by Tom Gwenn, kinetic sculpture by Mark White. Noon-5

ARKANSAS AIR NATIONAL GUARD MUSEUM, Camp Robinson, NLR: Camp Pike exhibit grand opening, 10:30 a.m.-noon July 20, commemorating the centennial of Camp Pike/Robinson. 2125215.

JACKSONVILLE MUSEUM OF MILITARY HISTORY, 100 Veterans Circle, Jacksonville: Exhibits on D-Day; F-105, Vietnam era plane (“The Thud”); the Civil War Battle of Reed’s Bridge, Arkansas Ordnance Plant (AOP) and other military history. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon-Sat., 1-5 p.m.

Sun. $3 adults; $2 seniors, military; $1 students. 501-241-1943.

LAKEPORT PLANTATION, 601 Hwy. 142, Lake Village: Antebellum mansion; exhibits on plantation life from before, during and after the Civil War. 9 a.m.-3 p.m. weekdays. $5 general admission.

870-265-6031.

MUSEUM OF AUTOMOBILES, Petit Jean Mountain: Permanent exhibition of more than 50 cars from 1904-1967 depicting the evolution of the automobile. 10 a.m.5 p.m. 7 days. 501-727-5427.

MUSEUM OF NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY, 202 SW O St., Bentonville: Native American artifacts. 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Mon.-Sat. 479-273-2456.

PLANTATION AGRICULTURE MUSEUM, Scott, U.S. Hwy. 165 and state Hwy. 161: Permanent exhibits on historic agriculture. 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. $4 adults, $3 children. 9611409.

POTTS INN, 25 E. Ash St., Pottsville: Preserved 1850s stagecoach station on the Butterfield Overland Mail Route, with period furnishings, log structures, hat museum, doll museum, doctor’s office, antique farm equipment. 10 a.m.-4 p.m.

Wed.-Sat. $5 adults, $2 students, 5 and under free. 479-968-9369.

ROGERS HISTORICAL MUSEUM, 322 S. 2nd St.: “On Fields Far Away: Our Community During the Great War,” through Sept. 23. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.Sat. 479-621-1154.

SCOTT PLANTATION SETTLEMENT, Scott: 1840s log cabin, one-room school house, tenant houses, smokehouse and artifacts on plantation life. 10 a.m.-3 p.m.

Fri.-Sat. 351-0300. www.scottconnections. org.

JUL

20

The Joint

AAMS presents

Sean McGowan

UPCOMING EVENTS ON CentralArkansasTickets.com AUG

17 SEP

21 SEP

21

The Joint

AAMS presents Richard Leo Johnson Embassy Suites Hotel

Habitat for Humanity of Central Arkansas ReStore & After 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES MARKETPLACE TO ADVERTISE IN THIS SECTION, CALL LUIS AT 501.375.2985

A few tips to keep us all safe while enjoying the Arkansas River Trail!

When preparing to pass others, speak an audible warning in advance.

Always pass on the left side, while leaving two feet of clearance.

Cyclists and skaters should travel at safe and appropriate speeds.

Keep an eye on your children at all times.

Keep pets on a short leash and under control at all times.

Always clean up after your pets.

s Cy cli st s a lwa yet wea r th e ir h e lm s!

The Joint

AAMS presents ANDREW YORK

Look for more etiquette and safety tips at arkansasrivertrail.org

❤ ADOPTION ❤

Happily Married, Successful Executive & Loving Stay-Home-Mom yearn for first baby to devote our lives. Expenses paid. Marie & Stefan.

1-800-379-8418 ARKANSAS TIMES

Tweet

LOCAL

Go to CentralArkansasTickets.com to purchase these tickets - and more!

Arkansas Times new local ticketing site!

If you’re a non-profit, freestanding venue or business selling tickets thru eventbrite or another national seller - call us 501.492.3994 - we’re local, independent and offer a marketing package!

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

MICHEL LEIDERMANN, President LOCAL TICKETS, One Place

From your goin’ out friends at

(Minority Business - AR State Vendor) mleidermann@gmail.com • Mobile: (501) 993-3572 arktimes.com JULY 20, 2017

31

FAMILY OWNED AND OPERATED SINCE 1959!

Light Up your Grill

Make your summer sizzle with the Certified Angus Beef brand. ®

10320 STAGE COACH RD 501-455-3475

32

JULY 20, 2017

ARKANSAS TIMES

7507 CANTRELL RD 501-614-3477

7525 BASELINE RD 501-562-6629

www.edwardsfoodgiant.com

2203 NORTH REYNOLDS RD, BRYANT 501-847-9777