Arkansas Times - July 23, 2015

NEWS + POLITICS + ENTERTAINMENT + FOOD / JULY 23, 2015 / ARKTIMES.COM

NO END IN SIGHT Arkansas’s prison population has grown 700 percent in 40 years. Can reformers on the right turn back the tide of mass incarceration?

BY LINDSEY MILLAR

1975

2015

Celebrate American Style Wyeth

ON 9/11

Warhol

with a trip to

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art on the Arkansas Times ART Bus

FRIDAY, SEPT. 11, 2015

for three exhibitions featuring the distinctively American art of Jamie Wyeth, Andy Warhol and Frank Lloyd Wright

“Jamie Wyeth” features work by the third generation of Wyeth artists, paintings of the people of the Brandywine Valley and the coast of Maine the artist made over six decades. “Warhol’s Nature” exhibit features the pop artist’s natural turn, including

119

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per person

lithographs of poppies and other flora and fauna.The BachmanWilson house, the Frank Lloyd Wright design in his “Usonian” style for everyday Americans, is being reassembled on the grounds after its move from New Jersey.

Price includes: Round-trip Tour Bus Transportation Light pastries & hors d’oeuvres Beer/Wine en route Ticket into both the Jamie Wyeth and Andy Warhol exhibits Dinner at Eleven, the restaurant at Crystal Bridges

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Admission into Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is free.

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COMMENT

SCOTUS and the Gospel Most of us know by now. SCOTUS has struck again. This time the Supremes are letting gay folks get married in every state.

Of course, religious folks in Arkansas are upset, but why get so bent out of shape when we can take comfort in the perspective of Jesus of Nazareth? Let us review Jesus’ attitude toward marriage and family.

It all started some time after Jesus’ baptism. Mother Mary was with Jesus and a few disciples at a wedding celebration and Mary complained there was no wine, so Jesus made wine. That is about the extent of the story.

Later when Jesus was traveling, Jesus told a disciple, “Let the dead bury the dead,” so the disciple would not return home to bury his father and lose the nerve to follow Jesus. Since the disciple’s family was not followers of Jesus, they would all eventually perish. Disciples do not spend time on spouse and house.

Just think, according to “The Revelation of Saint John the Divine,” Jesus is probably on his way back here right now with an armada of angels to destroy our world so the Father may create a new world. The time to marry is finished. Besides, Jesus is the only groom, and Jesus’ church is the only bride.

The Supremes have read the Gospel.

They know what marriage is. Let the dead marry the dead.

Gene Mason Jacksonville

that newspaper: “Negro” got mentioned a lot that day. Once upon a time, having the word “negro” anywhere in your human pedigree could get you sent back to your Southern slave masters. In 1922 it got a man lynched. And for the last century and a half, it has kept people from voting, and relegated them to second-class schools and second-class jobs and secondclass justice.

Funny thing about human pedigrees: They’re mostly just made up. There’s a fascist impulse that still rages in too many of us. It whispers that my race, my ethnicity, my religion, my skin color, my civilization, my heritage — they’re all superior to yours. Surrender to that impulse has invented pedigrees that justified centuries of slavery and cleansed the American landscape of its first peoples. The Germans used theirs as an excuse to exterminate millions of Jews. Funny thing is, now even Israel peddles imaginary pedigrees to perpetuate its occupation of Palestine. I’ve seen Glenn Beck weep crocodile tears as Israel’s frothy prime

minister, always itching for Armageddon, revealed an ancient artifact inscribed with “Netanyahu.” Clear evidence of an anointed pedigree reaching all the way back to the bloody Old Testament’s glory days.

Funny thing about facts, though. Bibi’s daddy was one Benzion Mileikowsky.

From Warsaw. His “chosen people” pedigree points to Poland, not the Promised Land. Awkward, and yet our obeisant Congress still fawns over Netanyahu so much it’s just plain embarrassing. For them, “Bomb Iran” Bibi is our latterday Joshua, reborn in the nick of time to smite today’s philistines. Huzzah, huzzah! Facts be damned, preach our hyperbolic, gilded evangelists, we must stand with Israel no matter what.

So stand with Israel if you must, and wave your flags if you must. These, too, are funny things. Deep and wide, deep and wide, there’s a fountain flowing deep and wide.

John Ragland Hot Springs

Funny things This is a letter about funny things.

Seemingly random funny things, yet a fountain of flummery, deep and wide, flows through them all.

Funny thing about that young bigot who slaughtered Charleston, S.C., churchgoers a few weeks ago: Suddenly there’s a surge of patriotism right here in Hot Springs. Grown men and women are waving flags and honking horns as they circle an 80-year-old statue dedicated to the memory of a 150-year-old war. Funny thing about that “civil” war: Lots of Americans were butchered on the altar of states’ rights. Seems like the most important state right was to keep right on allowing human beings to be bought and sold like cattle and farm implements.

Funny thing about that statue, too: It’s across the street from where the Como Hotel used to be, on a patch of land called Como Triangle. In 1922, a dozen years before the statue was erected, 28-year-old “negro” Gilbert Harris was politely taken from the city jail and hanged on this spot by a mob of 500 “very orderly” men. You can still read all about it in the Hot Springs New Era’s archives. Funny thing about 4

JULY 23, 2015

ARKANSAS TIMES

A M R E A I Y V A I R DISCOVER REAL MEXICAN FOOD

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On the Arkansas Times’ July 16 cover story about gang wars in the 1990s: I’ve never understood the fascination that the AR Times has with the glorification of gang violence in Little Rock. It was ugly, it’s still ugly, and they love it when you give them air time.

This is a story that doesn’t need to be told over and over again.

Arkansas panic fan On Wesley Clark’s call for interning “disloyal” and “radicalized” Americans: Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.

Yes, Wackadoo Clark, FDR interned the American Japanese when WWII started and since the war has ended, everyone of the correct brain wiring has condemned that move, and only those of the wrong brain wiring still think it’s a great idea. We used to own black people too, but now at least 50 percent of living Americans think that was a horrible idea. …

There is a way to chill the radical Muslims. The way has nothing to do with war or interning them. Only through negotiation and concessions can we make peace with them. Mostly they want us OFF THEIR LAND. We could start with that point first. America is involved in the business of the Middle East for ONE THING … OIL. They can pretend we’re there for humanitarian purposes but that is 100 percent bullshit. Peace through war has only worked for us two times … the Revolutionary War and WWII. After WWII we waged a cold war with the U.S.S.R. and China for nearly 50 years. Yes, we did win in Grenada, though does anyone remember what we won? But we’ve lost all other wars since the end of WWII. Lost to countries a fraction of our size, with very little wealth or weapons … better write that down. …

We’d be far better off building internment camps for Fox News watchers … but, but, but … thanks to FDR we’re supposed to quit doing that crap! Oh, but clearly America would be a better place if we locked up every single Trump supporter by supper time tonight. But …

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In last week’s cover story, “Bangin’,” an entry in an accompanying timeline said that Nicole Chunn was permanently paralyzed in a drive by shooting in 1992. Contemporary news accounts said she was disabled after the shooting, but she was not, in fact, paralyzed.

The Arkansas Times is launching its second annual Women Entrepreneurs issue in October, and we want to know who you think we should feature. Here is 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 4, 2015.

Submit your nominee and her contact info to Kelly Lyles, kelly@arktimes.com and we will announce those selected in September.

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

OCTOBER 1, 8, 15, 22 AND 29 WOMEN ENTREPRENEUR CLASS OF 2014 FOOD

Capi Peck, Jan Lewandwoski, Kristi & April Williams, Faith & Sharon Cabin, Alexis Jones, Mary Beth Ringgold, Diana Bratton, Kavion Wang, Judy Waller

NON TRADITIONAL

Dee Sanders, Sarah Tackett, Marla Johnson, L. Elizabeth Bowles & Jennifer Peper, Beth Killingsworth, Jana Cohen, Jennifer Heron, Natalie Canerday, Robyn Connell.

RETAIL & DESIGN

Cynthia East & Terry Dilday, Joyce Holt, Korto Momolu, Meredith Hamilton Ranouil, Tanarah Hayne, Jean Cazort, Garbo Hearne, Melissa Tanner.

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES

Kay Bona, Michele Towne, Joyce Fowler, Mary Parham, Gloria Lawson, Cindy Minor, Carol Ann Hicks

ASSETS INDUSTRY

Cindy Conger, Charlotte John, Janet Jones, Elizabeth Small, Cara Wilkerson Hazelwood, Anne Powell Black

A luncheon hosted by First Security Bank is planned.

www.arktimes.com

JULY 23, 2015

5

EYE ON ARKANSAS

WEEK THAT WAS

would you rather have negotiating against Mexico, [Jeb] Bush, Hillary or Trump?” he asked the crowd. He also called for an end to “gun-free zones” and called Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post has announced it will only cover Trump in its entertainment section, “a terrible woman.”

Duggars can stop counting

“If these people are radicalized and they don’t support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States as a matter of principle, fine. It’s their right and it’s our right and obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict.”

— Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, during a July 17 appearance on MSNBC to discuss the deadly shootings at two military sites in Chattanooga, Tenn. He did not explain how “radicalized” people who have not committed crimes would be identified so they could be put in camps, such as the two Japanese-American internment camps in his home state during World War II, at Rohwer and Jerome.

Unqualified to judge Last August, as he was quietly working on a race for the Arkansas Supreme Court, Circuit Judge Shawn Womack was asked to hear a criminal case in Boone County. It seems the defendant, Phillip Engles, accused of shooting the proprietor of Unique Treasures in Bellafonte (Boone County) during a 2012 robbery, didn’t want Circuit Judge John Putman to hear the case, since Engles’ lawyer was also representing another defendant accused of threatening Putman. Womack recused, however. In a letter to Judge Putman, Womack’s assistant wrote, “He believes that this case would require a more experienced judge with a greater criminal background.”

Perhaps unknowing that he’ll have to rule on criminal cases as a member of the Supreme Court, Womack, a former Republican senator, announced this year he was running for Justice Paul Danielson’s 6

JULY 23, 2015

ARKANSAS TIMES

BRIAN CHILSON

Quote of the Week

TRAVELLING: Rest stop of Interstate 55 in Arkansas

seat. He has no opposition. Let’s hope he’s boning up on the law. Womack, the author of a bill that would have made it illegal for gay people to adopt, knows one thing that should be criminal: homosexual acts.

Hillary looks forward At the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, a fundraiser for the Democratic Party, in Little Rock on Saturday, headliner Hillary Clinton proclaimed the Democratic Party as the party of the future and Republicans the party of the past. She took Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump to task for his astoundingly stupid remark that Sen. John McCain was not a war hero and got some laughs at his expense, saying, “Finally, a candidate whose hair gets more attention than mine.”

The event at Verizon Arena, attended by 2,000, raised about $450,000 for the party. An afterparty at South on Main was spoiled, however, by a gun-toting robber who stuck up several people as they left the restaurant.

Armed and calling the Hogs Prior to his campaign-killing attack on McCain in Iowa, The Donald posed with a rifle at last Friday’s Reagan-Rockefeller Dinner in Hot Springs to raise funds for

the state Republican Party, called the Hogs and declared, “I love the Mexican people,” though he characterized some of them as rapists in a speech in June. He added at the Hot Springs event that he will win the Mexican vote because he’ll be so successful at bringing back jobs to the United States — including those going to Mexico. “Who

TLC network has officially canceled “19 Kids and Counting,” the reality show featuring the Duggar family, pulling the reruns it was showing after the revelation about Josh Duggar’s molesting of his little sisters and other young girls when he was a teenager. In response, the Duggar family issued a statement: “Our desire in opening our home to the world is to share Bible principles that are the answers for life’s problems.”

Correction In the June 25 Week That Was column, we mistakenly said that the Arkansas Department of Correction took in 1,633 parole violators in 2012 and 3,671 in 2013. Those numbers just represented the number of male parole violators.

The total numbers were 1,726 in 2012 and 4,005 in 2013.

By the numbers

The Annie E. Casey Foundation released its Kids Count report for 2015. Casey, using data from 2013, now ranks Arkansas as 44th in child well-being. Some other numbers:

202,000 The number of children living in poverty, or 29 percent — a worsening from 25 percent in 2008. The national percentage is 22.

55 The percentage of children not attending preschool, a worsening from 52 percent in 2007-09. The national percentage is 54.

245,000 The number of children whose parents lack secure employment, or 34 percent — a worsening from 32 percent in 2008. The national percentage is 31.

10 The percent of teenagers who are not in school and not working, an improvement over 12 percent in 2008.

The national percentage is 8.

68

72

The percent of fourth-graders who are not proficient in reading, an improvement over 2007, when it was 71 percent. The national percentage is 66.

The percentage of eighth-graders not proficient in mathematics, an improvement over 2007, when it was 76 percent. The national percentage is 66.

OPINION

No comment, supply your own.

S

ometimes direct quotes and a bit Jefferson-Jackof context are all that’s necessary son Day Dinner. for commentary on news events. • “Judge Womack See what I mean: ask [sic] that • “Dinner & Reception SOLD OUT to he be recused @realDonaldTrump.” Twitter post by from the above MAX Doyle Webb, Arkansas Republican referenced case, BRANTLEY Party chairman, on the enthusiastic due to the natmaxbrantley@arktimes.com response to Trump’s appearance at a ural [sic] of Republican Party fundraiser in Hot the case. He believes that this case Springs. would require a more experienced • “He is not a war hero. … He is a war judge with a greater criminal backhero because he was captured.” ground.” From a letter by an assistant Republican presidential candidate of Circuit Judge Shawn Womack of Donald Trump, speaking in Iowa, Mountain Home last August. Womhours after his July 17 stop in Arkanack didn’t want to hear a pending robsas, about U.S. Sen. John McCain, bery case. Womack is a candidate for who spent five years as a POW in the Arkansas Supreme Court, which Vietnam. hears many criminal cases. He is so • “Democrats are the party of the future far unopposed.

• “Law clerks for the Court of Appeals … Republicans “may have some fresh faces, but they are the party of the shall receive the same salaries as past.” Hillary Clinton, 67, during Supreme Court law clerks.” Arkanremarks Saturday at Verizon Arena sas state law, quoted in an article on to the Arkansas Democratic Party’s the Arkansas Blog about pay raises

The U.S. and Iran

S

o we begin another furious debate over war and peace in the Middle East, this time over the nuclear nonproliferation agreement with Iran, and it is foreordained to look and sound just like the last big one, in 2002, when we went to war with Iraq and, before that, in 2001, with Afghanistan.

It will be waged upon fear and loathing of cutthroat Muslims, not the logic of whether it is the best hope for peace and safety and the avoidance of another nuclear-armed country in the Middle East.

Nearly every Republican in Congress and many timid Democrats will condemn the agreement — they already have — as a surrender to the devilish Iranians that will put Americans in peril of annihilation. The mushroom cloud that Condoleezza Rice and Benjamin Netanyahu envisioned in 2002 if we did not invade

Iraq will appear metaphorically again above the halls of Congress.

We bought Afghanistan and ERNEST Iraq, neither DUMAS of which had threatened us, at a price in blood and treasure so steep that it cannot be calculated for another quartercentury. At least we may be fairly sure that another attack, this one on Iran, will not happen, under President Obama anyway, because nullifying key features of the nuclear agreement and opening the portals of war will require a supermajority to overcome his promised veto. The veto threat allows everyone in Congress safety to go with the forces of fear without owning the consequences of the agreement’s failure.

Arkansas’s Sen. Tom Cotton has

awarded to Arkansas Supreme Court clerks effective July 1. Arkansas Court of Appeals law clerks got 1 percent pay raises, in line with COLAs received by 28,000 state employees, their first general raise in several years. Of the 14 Supreme Court clerks, two got 5 percent raises and the rest got 9 percent or more. One working for Justice Rhonda Wood got a 23 percent raise; a clerk for Justice Karen Baker got a 36.8 percent pay raise.

More than half the 24 Appeals Court clerks make less than the lowest-paid Supreme Court clerk.

• Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Jo “Hart said the Supreme Court had a heavy workload and tried hard to decide cases speedily.” News coverage of the appearance by Hart and Justice Karen Baker before the independent citizens pay commission, which had recommended an 11 percent pay raise for the justices to $166,000. The justices said it wasn’t nearly enough. Baker and Hart successfully blocked a decision in the same-sex marriage case, which finally was dismissed without an opinion by the Arkansas Supreme Court after eight months, though it had been granted “expedited” status.

• “I will restore your trust in the trea-

surer’s office.” Campaign slogan of Arkansas Treasurer Dennis Milligan. He has illegally hired a cousin.

He got new job qualifications set by the legislature waived so he could hire a former TSA agent, Jim Harris, as his chief of staff and just gave him a whopper of a raise to $105,000 a year though he and Harris remain defendants in a lawsuit (state is paying legal expenses) by an already disgruntled former employee of the office. Taxpayers have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle claims and pay legal fees arising from Milligan’s actions as Saline County circuit clerk. The American Cancer Society has confirmed that one of its employees campaigned on its time and equipment for Milligan, in violation of the agency’s rules. Allegations over improper and unreported campaign expenditures have been made.

The Jefferson County Republican County Committee has called for his resignation.

• “Term limits are anti-democratic.

The vote is an effective term limit.”

Columnist Max Brantley, when Democrats were the majority party in Arkansas and Republicans were leading the charge for term limits.

been the fiercest critic of the nuclear deal, although every member of the delegation has joined him. Here is the narrative behind Cotton’s efforts to torpedo the agreement: We cannot trust terrorist Iran, the foe of Israel and our Sunni allies like Saudi Arabia, even though, like us, Iran is at war with the Islamic jihadists in Syria and Iraq. Even this week, the supreme leader calls America the Great Satan and encourages more of the street chants “Death to America.”

The antidote to such hysteria is an account of American relations with Iran, for it is a microcosm of 65 years of well-meaning but blundering policy in a giant region governed by ancient religious and ethnic passions that we never grasped.

Indulge this brief history, shorn of its many farcical and tragic details. It sheds some light on Iranian passions about America.

1953: The CIA implements a plan ordered by the new president, Dwight Eisenhower, to overthrow the elected Iranian government of Mohammed Mosaddegh and give dictatorial power to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. President Truman had opposed British policy, which had

blockaded Iran after Mossaddegh had wrested control of the Iranian oil industry from British Petroleum (BP), but Winston Churchill persuaded Ike to oust Mosaddegh because he might fall under the influence of the Soviet Union. To win over the timid shah for the plot, the CIA bribed his sister, Ashraf, with a mink coat and money; CIA Director Allen Dulles had allotted $1 million for the plan.

(See the CIA document “Clandestine Service History: Overthrow of Premier Mosaddegh of Iran, November 1952-August 1953.”)

1979: Amid massive strikes and demonstrations, the unpopular shah flees and the Ayatollah Khomeini takes power under a referendum establishing the Iranian Islamic republic. Students chanting revenge for Mosaddegh’s overthrow seize the U.S. embassy and take 52 U.S. citizens hostage. When President Carter refuses to return the ailing shah for trial, Iran keeps the hostages. The appearance of weakness crashes Carter’s popularity, and backchannel negotiations on behalf of his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan, keep the hostages imprisoned until the exact moment Reagan is sworn in.

1980: Saddam Hussein, the dictator CONTINUED ON PAGE 30 www.arktimes.com

JULY 23, 2015

7

Obama takes long view

R

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ight now, it’s beginning to look as if President Obama will end up deserving the Nobel Peace Prize he was so prematurely awarded in 2009.

Perhaps you recall how, during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Obama’s opponents treated his expressed willingness to speak with the leaders of unfriendly countries such as Cuba and Iran as a sign of immaturity.

“Irresponsible and frankly naive” was how Hillary Clinton put it.

Joe Biden said it was important for an inexperienced president not to get played by crafty foreigners.

Obama was unrepentant. “The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them — which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of [the Bush] administration,” he said, “is ridiculous.”

And so it was. Only ridiculous people talk that way now. With hindsight, it’s become clear that Obama wasn’t simply repudiating the GOP’s melodramatic “Axis of Evil” world view, but expressing his own considerable self-regard.

Also he was expressing his confidence in America as he sees it through his unique personal history as a kind of inside-outsider, capable of being more than ordinarily objective about our place in the world.

When you’re the most powerful economic and military power on the earth, he keeps saying with regard to the Iran deal, it’s important to act like it: strong, calm and confident. Able to take risks for peace because your strength is so overwhelming.

If Ronald Reagan could reach verifiable arms agreements with the Soviet Union, he told the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman, a country that posed “a far greater existential threat to us than Iran ever will,” then dealing with the Iranians is “a risk we have to take. It is a practical, commonsense position.”

As we saw in 2003, any damn fool can start a Middle Eastern war. And while hardly anybody in the United States wants one, even Iranian hard-liners should have no doubt who would win such a conflict.

“Why should the Iranians be afraid of us?” Friedman asked.

“Because we could knock out their military in speed and dispatch if we chose to,” Obama said.

That’s the same reason Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (and his U.S. congressional allies) need to cool it with the Chicken Little rhetoric. Obama thinks

it’s “highly unlikely that you are going to see Iran launch a direct attack, state to state, against any of our allies in the GENE region. They know LYONS that that would give us the rationale to go in full-bore, and as I said, we could knock out most of their military capacity pretty quickly.”

Of course, Netanyahu knows that perfectly well. But here’s the kind of thinking he and his allies on the evangelical right really object to: “Even with your adversaries,” Obama said,“I do think that you have to have the capacity to put yourself occasionally in their shoes, and if you look at Iranian history, the fact is that we had some involvement with overthrowing a democraticallyelected regime in Iran. We have had in the past supported Saddam Hussein when we know he used chemical weapons in the war between Iran and Iraq, and so … they have their own … narrative.”

Demonizing Iran serves Netanyahu’s short-term political purposes. Ditto Republican presidential candidates. But Obama had a wider audience and a longer view in mind. GOP war-talk makes it easier for Democrats to support him, anyway. Therefore, much of what he said was directed over the heads of his domestic audience.

“Iran will be and should be a regional power,” he told Friedman. “They are a big country and a sophisticated country in the region. They don’t need to invite the hostility and the opposition of their neighbors by their behavior. It’s not necessary for them to be great to denigrate Israel or threaten Israel or engage in Holocaust denial or anti-Semitic activity.

Now that’s what I would say to the Iranian people.”

He also focused upon the common enemy: “Nobody has an interest in seeing [the Islamic State] control huge swaths of territory between Damascus and Baghdad … . That’s not good for Iran.”

Indeed not. More than the Turks, more than Saudi Arabia, more than anybody but the Kurds, Iranian forces are fighting ISIS on several fronts.

The president’s words were grudgingly noted in Tehran. In his own carefully crafted speech expressing guarded blessings for the arms control agreement, CONTINUED ON PAGE 9

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JULY 23, 2015

ARKANSAS TIMES

Root out hate

T

his week, a KKK organization called the Soldiers of the Cross is hosting a white supremacy training camp in the hills outside of Harrison.

This is not new; “Klan camp” has been around since at least 2013, a significant year in the timeline of recent black uprisings and movement building. It was in 2013 that George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin, the year that the Dream Defenders took over the Florida Capitol in protest of the state’s “stand your ground” law, and the year in which national conversations about racial injustice blossomed into the #BlackLivesMatter movement of today.

The KKK saw an opportunity to welcome white people who fear that the extension of their rights to others in society will result in their loss of power. Unless we offer a counter narrative and wage a campaign for the hearts and minds of our white communities, we risk abandoning people to the culture of silence and fear that protects and swells these extremist groups.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been tracking hate group activity in the U.S. for many years. It reported an increase in instances of violent vigilante acts and more organized plots starting in 2010. An official within the Department of Homeland Security warned of a similar spark in white supremacist recruitment and Klan growth after Obama’s presidential win. History shows that these spikes occur as a backlash to periods in which large numbers of marginalized people are on the move to shift power dynamics. It can be in the form of racist symbols and institutions, such as the “rebel”-themed high school built in Fort Smith to accommodate white flight after school desegregation began, or unjust policies such as voter ID laws that tend to disenfranchise poor communities of color.

Domestic terrorism — the FBI’s term, not mine — since the Charleston, S.C., shooting, including at least seven arson attacks on black churches, appears primed to increase. Folks who harbor beliefs about racial cleansing and the superi-

ority of the white race have become emboldened to endanger the lives of our neighbors, friends and fellow citizens of color.

Whether or not ACADIA groups like SolROHER diers of the Cross publicly promote violence, their rhetoric speaks to the Dylan Roofs of the world and seeks to justify the intimidation and destruction that we are seeing.

Black organizing is gaining a momentum that hasn’t been seen in decades, enough to spark the latest wave of repression and anti-black violence across the country. While we are outraged, there’s little room for surprise. Arkansas has one of the highest numbers of hate groups per capita in the United States. White supremacists thrive on the culture of silence in places like Harrison.

It’s time for us to stand up and reject our current status as an incubator for domestic terrorism. Those of us in Little Rock, Fayetteville and other urban areas are called to support the efforts of rural white communities in our state who are standing up to the hate groups that have nestled into their towns.

It might be daunting or even terrifying to consider speaking out about the KKK. But there is a growing effort across the state and the region to make the South a much harder place for them to carry out their mission.

Join a social media campaign this week while the Klan trains leaders in the Ozarks.

Use the hashtag #theotherarkansas and put your voice out there with a selfie or message about rooting out hate. The time is right to dismantle cultures of silence that protect white supremacy and to build new futures not just for ourselves, but for the generations to come.

Acadia Roher is an organizer with Little Rock Collective Liberation and other social justice groups in Central Arkansas.

LYONS, CONT. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei assured hard-liners that he hadn’t gone soft on America.

However, he also alluded to Obama’s conciliatory remarks.

“He mentioned two or three points, but did not confess to tens of others,” Khamenei complained.

Which is how conversations begin.

This deal isn’t the end. But it’s an excellent beginning — of what remains to be seen.

Iran has essentially purchased anti-invasion insurance, while the U.S. and its allies have bought relative stability in the Persian Gulf.

Could things go wrong? Things can always go wrong.

But there’s always time to start a war.

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THE OBSERVER NOTES ON THE PASSING SCENE

Art appreciation

I

t was The Observer’s birthday and anniversary over the weekend.

Why Spouse and her man decided to get hitched in the sweaty season of mid-July, we’ll never be able to fathom.

That’s a decision 23-year-old Us made, so Old Us has to live with it. Them’s the breaks. It’s a lesson everyone who is fortunate enough to live into adulthood eventually discovers: that we are the slave of the idiot we used to be, the softheaded ninny who made decisions based on coin flips and whether the car would start and whether we had enough money for both beer and getting a suit dry-cleaned for a job interview. The beer usually wins when you’re that age.

We did what we usually do for the Birthiversary, which is to get the hell out of Dodge, heading up to Eureka Springs and the Crescent Hotel for some much needed time outside the bubble of responsibility. Compared to Thunderdome: Little Rock, NWA is like some Star Trekian pacifist planet, ripe for plucking by the Klingons. In Eureka, a visitor drunkenly getting on the wrong bike and pedaling it for two blocks before abandoning it in a bush would likely be front-page fodder. We, meanwhile, came home to the news of yet another senseless homicide and reports that, over the weekend, a guy had tried for some kind of world record rob-a-thon by holding eight poor souls at gunpoint in the same parking lot at 13th and Main over the course of 30 minutes, relieving them of their valuables and a bit of their peace of mind. The latter is probably going to hurt more in the long run.

While in NWA, The Observer finally bit the bullet and headed out to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. Like a few people we’ve talked to, The Observer has mixed feelings about that joint. We won’t get into it here, lest we descend into spitting, impotent fury about the decline of Mom and Pop America.

So, we went. And it was beautiful.

We guess. Harrumph.

OK, it was beautiful. Unequivocally beautiful. Awesome, to use the overused word once again, this time without hyperbole. The building and grounds are a work of art in their own right. Once inside, our inner Che Guevara melted away in appreciation of the stunning treasures there. We stared at the smallish Jasper Johns’ flag for a good 10 minutes, drinking in the chaotic brush strokes that dissolved into order as you backed away.

In the center of one hall is a marble sculpture of the poet Sappho by William Wetmore Story, her fingers so carefully wrought that you can see her cuticles, the moons of her fingernails, the tented arch of her index finger resting gently on her arm, so light and delicate, and all carved from a gatdamn rock. We paid our four bucks to see the “Warhol’s Nature” exhibit, and were simply poleaxed at the loveliness and humor of an artist we’d long since — we must admit — written off as a wise ass whose patrons had more money than good sense.

Rosie the Riveter. Rothko. O’Keeffe.

Maurer. Calder. Lichtenstein. Even the big, mirror-polished Jeff Koons heart hovering at the end of pink ribbons over the dining hall. It was enough to make The Observer long for a paintbrush in our hand; to feel the longing to try, to create, to find the strings of our heart and attempt to pluck them into something beautiful and meaningful and pure, the effort itself worth any failure. That, of course, is the goal of any museum: to make the observer feel slotted into The Grand Try of Humankind — the singular need of our species, even when the clock is ticking on these mortal lives, to sing one more song.

The Observer found that in Bentonville over the weekend. We’ll leave the socio-politico-economic bickering for another day, and just say: Thanks for the memories, Miz Walton. You definitely helped make it a birthday to remember.

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11

Arkansas Reporter

THE

IN S IDE R

Signs of internal friction continue to surface at the Arkansas Supreme Court.

The latest was evidenced by a round of pay raises given to Supreme Court law clerks and administrative assistants effective July 1.

Though state law says that the staffs of the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals are supposed to draw essentially the same pay, Supreme Court staff members got some major increases July 1 while Court of Appeals staffers all got the 1 percent COLA given 28,000 other state employees.

A controlling bloc of the court — led

by Justice Karen Baker — overrode veteran Chief Justice Jim Hannah and Justice Paul Danielson to depart from equally distributed raises to give select employees extraordinary raises. Clerks for Courtney Goodson and Robin Wynne got 19 percent raises; new Justice Rhonda Wood gave one of her clerks a 23 percent raise; and Baker gave one of her clerks a 36 percent raise. Baker argued that existing pay differentials were unfair, but they stemmed from accumulated higher pay for long-tenured career clerks of longer-serving justices. Baker swung votes for a plan to give each of the seven justices $16,000 to apportion as they chose.

The money came in part from the firing of a Supreme Court communications counsel engineered earlier by the same judges who pushed for the pay raise. A memo by Baker seemed to predict more departures of existing staff and perhaps still more money for the insurgent justices to pass around.

Lawyers fear that the internal divisions on operational matters — Baker at one point talked of lie detector tests to find the source of leaks to the Arkansas Times — will find their way into Supreme Court decision-making. Personal animosity apparently runs high.

Rapert on warpath Sen. Jason Rapert (R-Conway) and other members of the Senate Republican caucus were not happy that Rapert’s angry comments about Gov. Asa Hutchinson relative to the U.S. Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling found their way onto the Arkansas Blog.

On July 3, the Arkansas Blog reported that Rapert had sent a tirade to other senators because the governor had said county clerks had no choice 12

JULY 23, 2015

ARKANSAS TIMES

BRIAN CHILSON

Supremely unhappy

REDUCING THE WORKLOAD: Governor aims to drop individual caseload numbers to 20 over next three years.

$8 million for caseworkers pledged But governor says he’ll turn to faith-based groups to address other deficiencies found in DCFS study.

BY DAVID KOON, MAX BRANTLEY, KATHRYN JOYCE AND BENJAMIN HARDY

G

ov. Asa Hutchinson said last week that he will work to address shortcomings in the state’s child welfare system — including committing $8 million in state dollars to hire more caseworkers to lower their workload — that were identified by a consultant who studied the Division of Children and Family Services of the state Department of Human Services.

Hutchinson commissioned the study,

by Paul Vincent, director of an Alabama nonprofit, after the Arkansas Times reported on state Rep. Justin Harris’ moving his two adopted children into the home of a sex abuser and identified various problems in the agency that oversees the state’s foster care and adoption services.

Among the findings in Vincent’s

there was no foster home available to accept them.

“Whenever you look at the fact that there’s been an increase in the need for placement over the last two months from 3,800 in need of placement to over 4,300,” Hutchinson said, “that illustrates the challenge we face.” He added the finding that 55 percent of the state’s placements for protective services are outside the county where the child resides.

Vincent’s report found that the percentage of children that DCFS places with relatives — only 14 percent — is far below that of neighboring states.

According to the report, in the second quarter of 2015, Arkansas gained 122 foster families but lost 138. Foster beds are so few that Arkansas is 13th in the nation in placing children in nonfamily settings, including group homes and mental and behavioral health care facilities. The report also notes that only 16 percent of children who’ve been in foster care in Arkansas for at least two years or longer have been in stable situations, placed with two or fewer families.

Vincent’s report also recommends that the state spend more money on its mental/behavioral health services.

However, the governor said the state would turn to its “faith-based partners” to help address the “challenge of placement of those in need of protective services and foster care” and would seek other “private partners” to “make sure our children are not spending the night in a DHS office.”

The legislature decided to give substantial income tax cuts in the last session to high-wealth persons; Hutchinson has called a summit in August to ask faith-based groups to fill in the gaps in the state’s social services because the state lacks the resources to meet all needs.

Vincent’s report makes passing reference to successful class-action suits against Oklahoma and New Jersey over their child welfare systems — states that have a far better case-to-caseworker

report — many previously reported in the Arkansas Times — are that state caseworkers have an average caseload of 29, compared to 15 nationally. “That is a strain on the caseworkers, it leads to increased turnover, it leads to bad morale, it leads to bad decisions and bad performance,” Hutchinson said at a press conference last Thursday to announce the report’s findings. “So, our objective is to reduce the caseload for those caseworkers in the field.” He said the state will work to reduce the caseCONTINUED ON PAGE 30 load to 20 over the next three years.

Hutchinson also cited a section that said that in the past four months, 22 chilan Arkansas Times special investigation dren had to sleep at their local DHS office because

CHILDREN IN CRISIS:

THE

BIG PICTURE

Rally round, designers For a new Little Rock flag.

Phillip Scholtes and Jordan Little say it’s not a grand old flag, Little Rock’s banner, and they want folks to pitch in to design a new one.

?

The Little Rock flag — in case you, like everyone else, didn’t know Little Rock had a flag — sort of looks like the top of a wrapped birthday present. A horizontal ribbon of blue and yellow intersects a vertical ribbon of green and yellow, and at the intersection where the bow would go is a yellow seal showing a rock, a drawing of the state with a star in it, a couple of oak leaves and the words City of Little Rock Arkansas. It was adopted in 1988.

Scholtes, 32, a programmer at Inuvo who has lived in Chicago, and Little, 29, a professional designer, say it’s just too busy to be a good brand for the city.

“I lived in Little Rock my entire life,” Little said, “and never thought about a flag until Phillip started showing me Chicago’s [flag].” Chicago’s flag is simply four red stars between two pale blue stripes, symbolic of places and events in Chicago history. The word Chicago does not appear on it. The North American Vexillological Association (vexillology is the study of flags) has ranked the Chicago flag second out of 150 U.S. flags (the Washington, D.C., flag is ranked first).

Though it appears as spare and modern as a 21st century logo, the flag dates to 1917. It’s so popular, Little said, that people tattoo it on their bodies.

Scholtes and Little say a Little Rock flag of good design would create unity among the residents of Little Rock, give them something to rally around.

On their webpage, littlerockflag.com, Scholtes and Little say Little Rock is a great city and deserves a great flag, and it’s their mission to create one. “The current flag is outdated and elicits no feelings of civic pride,” their statement there says. “There are too many colors, the lettering and images are too detailed for a flag design, and will you get a load of that rock?”

The website also includes a link to a petition drive to tell Mayor Mark Stodola that it’s time to adopt a new flag “that shows where we’ve come while breathing life into where we’re heading.”

It also includes a video of a Ted Talk by Roman Mars on bad flag design and provides the “Five Principles of Good Flag Design”: Keep it simple. Use only two or three colors. Be distinctive. Use meaningful symbolism. Use no lettering or seals. Scholtes and Little have also created a Facebook page, facebook.com/littlerockflag.

So, what comes next? “We’d be lying if we said we knew how this was going to unfold,” Scholtes said. The duo hopes to raise awareness, get the city’s backing, and encourage submissions of designs to the city, which would own the design. They’ve created a new flag themselves, but, to encourage other people to submit, they aren’t releasing it.

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INSIDER, CONT. but to issue marriage licenses, no matter how much he might dislike the Supreme Court’s decision extending marriage rights to same-sex couples.

Then, it published another Rapert letter in which he said the governor should follow the hard-line resistance message put out by Arkansas Baptist preacher Ronnie Floyd, president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Rapert’s subsequent eruptions made clear his displeasure. They included some veiled threats about a legal reaction to those who’d publish his private communications without his permission.

Welcome to the world of public service.

Rapert did not let it die. He’s still mad at Gov. Hutchinson. After all, Rapert voted for Obamacare from beginning to end, giving Hutchinson the extension of the private option he needed for his budget. Rapert apparently thinks he should get a lot in return.

Last week, we learned that Rapert had insisted that other members of the Republican caucus agree to release their emails so Rapert can attempt to find a leak. Unbelievably, the caucus was apparently willing to go along with the Bully of Bigelow’s witch-hunt. Need we say that allowing any hothead to order up invasions of privacy of others’ communication is a bad precedent?

The irony is rich. Rapert thought HIS privacy was violated by the release of his letter to 24 senators and others on a public policy dispute with the governor.

Now he’s given state employees and his designated henchmen the ability to paw through communications to senators from their constituents, perhaps on highly sensitive personal matters. Talk about an invasion of privacy.

Huck, schooled Mike Huckabee, on the campaign trail in Iowa, was confronted, very politely, by a questioner, Rod Webber, who challenged the candidate on how his campaign pronouncements squared with Biblical encouragement to help the poor and not kill and — here comes Leviticus — why he shaves.

From Raw Story: “Webber reminded Huckabee that he is breaking Biblical law by shaving, quoting the Book of Leviticus: ‘You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard.’ “ ‘There’s more passages about shaving being a sin than there is about homosexuality,’ Webber said.” www.arktimes.com

JULY 23, 2015

13

MASSIVE

INCARCERATION Arkansas’s prison population, and related expense, is exploding.

Can tough-on-crime conservatives truly embrace reform?

BY LINDSEY MILLAR

T

here are murders the basic facts of which survive one news cycle before they’re relegated to just another statistic for all but the families of the victim and killer. Then there are what David Simon, the journalist-turned-TV-producer, once called “murders that matter,” those that find their way into the media day after day and that politicians point to as a sign of a larger problem.

The killing of Forrest Abrams, an 18-year-old who was carjacked at a Little Rock convenience store and then shot in the back four times in May 2013, became a murder that mattered soon after Darrell Dennis was arrested for the crime.

Dennis had a long criminal history and an extensive track record of flaunting the conditions of his parole. The list of his arrests and parole violations, from when he was released on parole from prison to four and a half years later when he was arrested for murder, goes on for more than three pages. Thanks to his almost canny ability to exploit the system and bureaucratic bungling on the part of the state parole system, he had managed to remain out of prison despite absconding from parole seven times, being arrested nine times and being charged with 21 new crimes (though all were nonviolent offenses).

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which first revealed Dennis’ history, published more than a dozen stories about him in the summer of 2013.

It and other local media, with many politicians joining the chorus, cast a deficient parole system as an accessory to Abrams’ murder. That Abrams was white and Dennis was black may have contributed to the uproar. “[Forrest Abrams] apparently put himself in the wrong place at the wrong time,” DemocratGazette columnist John Brummett wrote on June 18, 2013. “But you could make an argument that the state of Arkansas helped dump his murdered body at 11th and Woodrow … .”

The consequences were swift. The state Board of Corrections enacted a sweeping series of policy changes meant to tighten parole. David 14

JULY 23, 2015

ARKANSAS TIMES

Eberhard, the director of the Arkansas Department of Community Correction (ACC), which supervises parolees, retired abruptly. (Dennis was convicted and sentenced to life without parole in May of this year.)

By end of the year, another consequence became apparent: The number of people imprisoned by the Arkansas Department of Correction (ADC) had increased 17.7 percent in a year, which made it the fastest growing prison population in the country in 2013, more than seven times the national average.

In 2014, it cost an average of $23,000 to incarcerate someone, as much as one year’s cost to attend the University of Arkansas.

The policy changes the Board of Corrections implemented in the wake of the Dennis revelations included requiring parole revocation hearings for all parolees merely charged — not convicted — of any felony or violent or sex-related misdemeanor, a policy possibly unique among states with parole. As a result of that and stricter controls on evading supervision, parole violators flooded back to prison, driving the number of those in state custody to an all-time high. By the end of 2013, ADC had taken in 4,005 parole violators — an increase of almost 2,300 from the previous year.

“I can’t stress how substantial [of an increase] that is,” Wendy Naro-Ware, a criminal justice analyst with JFA Associates of Colorado, told a state legislative task force on criminal justice last month. Every year for the last 20, she has analyzed and provided projections of

the prison populations of Arkansas and other states. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my career,” she said.

The trend has continued. In 2014, state prisons took in 4,490 violators. Based on further growth through the first quarter of 2015, some 5,700 violators could return to prison this year, according to Naro-Ware’s projections.

Most people probably think of incarceration rates and crime rates as running in tandem, twin lines always climbing upward. But the crime rate in Arkansas and the country at large has been in decline since the early 1990s.

Still, because of tough-on-crime laws and the so-called War on Drugs, more people are behind bars in Arkansas than ever before: Arkansas’s prison population has grown by 700 percent in 40 years. In 1975, there were 2,352 people incarcerated in state prisons. On July 10, there were 18,843 under ADC jurisdiction (that number included 2,677 who were housed in county jails because the ADC did not have room for them in its facilities). By 2025, according to projections from Naro-Ware, there will be more than 25,000 incarcerated in Arkansas prisons.

Because of reactionary policymaking in the wake of a sensational murder, Arkansas’s prison population is expanding faster than nearly all other states’. Such growth is expensive. Even when adjusted for inflation, the average annual financial cost of incarcerating someone more than doubled over the last 40 years. In 2014, it cost an average of $23,000 to incarcerate someone, as much as one year’s cost to attend the University of Arkansas.

Y Perhaps the remove of prison, how it vanishes lawbreakers from society, has made it easier for us not to question the humanity of caging our fellow citizens for long stretches of time. But there is little in the history of incarceration in Arkansas to commend our increas-

nearly inedible food, but no steps were taken to improve conditions. A State Police finding from 1966 told of 14-hour workdays and the infamous Tucker Telephone, an old-fashioned crank telephone used in the Tucker State Prison Farm that had been modified to send an electric shock through electrodes attached to a prisoner’s big toe and genitals.

Five years later, in 1971, a federal judge ruled that the entire Arkansas prison system violated the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. It was the first time a state’s entire prison system came under federal supervision. It remained under court oversight until 1982.

By the early 1970s, many criminologists had come to believe that prisons did not work and should be phased out. They found no evidence that sending more people to prison decreased crime. “The American correctional system today appears to offer minimum protection for the public and maximum harm to the offender,” read a 1973 report from the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, which recommended a 10-year moratorium on new construction of prisons throughout the country and suggested that sentences for all first-time offenders, regardless of the crime, be capped at five years, and sentences

for repeat offenders be no more than 25 years.

In 1972, fewer than 350,000 people were held in prisons and jails in the U.S. Today, there are more than 2.3 million. “Supporters of the moratorium effort can be forgiven for being so naïve,” Marc Mauer writes in his book “Race to Incarcerate,” “since the prison expansion that was about to take place was unprecedented in human history.”

Y On a blisteringly hot Saturday afternoon in June, Lisa Wiley passed out watermelon and cold drinks and hot dogs to a crowd gathered under a pavilion at Burns Park in North Little Rock for a reunion of women who were incarcerated together in the ADC. The mood was celebratory. There were balloons and streamers and hugs and laughter.

Before long, Wiley led the crowd in a sing-along of “Happy Birthday.” Then came raffle prizes, followed by a series of impromptu speeches. A young black woman with close-cropped hair tried to get the crowd to join in on a Sister Sledge song: “We are family, I got all my sisters with me,” she halfheartedly chanted, before giving up on her singing voice.

“I’m so excited and glad to see everybody,”

WORKING ON RE-ENTRY: Former inmates Lisa Wiley (left) and Jena Moorhead at a reunion of women incarcerated together in the ADC, sponsored by a nonprofit they co-founded that plans to open a transitional home for women leaving prison.

BRIAN CHILSON

N

ing reliance on it.

Like many attempts at social engineering gone awry, the idea of prison in the United States was born of good intentions. Instead of physically punishing lawbreakers — flogging, branding and whipping were common methods up until the early 19th century — reformers successfully argued that criminals should be confined in penitentiaries — places to be penitent, or made to feel regret for their crimes. But those redemptive notions soon collided with the reality of the cost of wholesale confinement and government’s reluctance to bear the expense.

The solution, in Arkansas and elsewhere, was to put prisons or prisoners under the control of private contractors. In 1880, under private supervision, 20 percent of state inmates died. An Arkansas House of Representatives committee called “the contract system cruel, barbarous and inhuman and totally at variance with the civilization of the age,” but, because of “the present embarrassed financial condition of the state,” it made no recommendation for change.

The convict lease system remained in place in Arkansas until 1913, but conditions did not improve. A state House committee in 1941 reported that prisoners were beaten and tortured, insufficiently clothed and served

www.arktimes.com

JULY 23, 2015

15

THE CONVERTED?: Despite his long tough-on-crime resume, Gov. Hutchinson now says we should reform the criminal justice system. But will he push far enough?

the woman said. “I’m just glad we made it.

It hasn’t been easy for any of us … . But just remember, whatever you’re going through, you’re going through, you’re not here to stay.”

A middle-aged woman with heavy makeup and a smoker’s husk to her voice echoed something oft-repeated at the reunion: Only through God’s grace can one be free.

“Forgiving yourself is the most important thing,” she said, “because until you get rid of that, until you give that all to God, you’re not going to make it. You’re going to live in guilt and fear and that’s what the devil wants us to do … . But he ain’t the winner; we know he’s not the winner.”

Jena Moorhead split time with Wiley playing emcee. The two became friends at the Wrightsville Unit and, after they got out, they and others started Sisters of Strength, S.O.S., a Christian nonprofit that had organized the reunion. S.O.S. is fundraising while it negotiates to purchase a building in Southwest Little Rock, where it hopes to open a transitional shelter for women leaving prison.

Like most of the women at the reunion, they had gone to prison on drug charges. From 2004 to 2014, the number of incarcerated women in ADC increased 64 percent, more than two and a half times the rate of newly incarcerated men over the same period.

Moorhead, 36, had been in prison twice for drugs: She went once for nine months and

then, after three years out, a relapse landed her charges that sent her back for three years.

By her own admission, Wiley, 44, spent more than 20 years addicted to crack cocaine doing whatever she needed to do to get her fix. By the time she was sentenced to prison in 2006 for drug-related crimes, her long record as a habitual offender netted her a 35-year term, of which she did six and a half years in prison.

She’ll be on parole until 2041.

Moorhead and Wiley credit God for their recovery and for guiding their lives, and acknowledge the corrosiveness of addiction; but as much as they talk about faith and personal accountability, they can’t shake the sense that the criminal justice system is unfair.

“We hear so much about re-entry, re-entry,” Moorhead said at the reunion. “But where are the resources, really?”

“I can’t imagine how much it costs to incarcerate someone for six years,” Wiley said.

“Instead of sending them away and spending that much money to keep them locked up, why not spend that money to rehabilitate them? The prison system is not rehabilitation.”

Wiley paroled out of prison in 2012 to her family. For her, that meant living near drug users. Within six months she had relapsed. She absconded from her parole for four months and was arrested in December 2012 on felony possession of drug paraphernalia, tampering with physical evidence and misdemeanor drug

possession. Had her arrest happened seven months later, after the parole policy changes were put in place in the wake of the Dennis case, it would have automatically triggered a parole revocation hearing, which likely would have sent her back to prison.

Instead, Wiley was sent to Pulaski County Circuit Judge Mary McGowan’s drug court.

“I loved it,” Wiley said. “It helped me so much. For drug addicts and alcoholics, we need accountability. I got my mind right and started learning things about addiction: ‘I’m not that person. I’m not a bad person, I just make bad choices.’ ” She completed drug court last fall. She says she’s been sober for two and a half years.

“I live in a beautiful home. I have a car. I have a job. My kids are back in my life. Those are things that I never had before. Until this time, I never had my own home. I never had my mind right where I can be the parent that my children deserve, where I can be the grandparent that my grandchildren deserve. My heart goes out to the people that don’t have that opportunity or aren’t getting the assistance they need when they get out.”

That’s why she and others in S.O.S. want to open a place for women to go after they leave prison. Already, mostly through Facebook and phone calls, Wiley helps direct people leaving prison to housing and employment opportunities.

“The most challenging thing for an addict is to get out and try to do things different without real avenues for how to do that,” she said.

“There’s no re-entry program once you are out.

To help you get a job. To get housing.”

BRIAN CHILSON

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ARKANSAS TIMES

Sending people who abuse or sell drugs to prison in vast numbers is a relatively modern development. In 1980, according to the Sentencing Project, there were only 19,000 people in state prisons on drug charges. In 2013, there were 210,000.

What happened? One explanation is that crime spiked in the late 1960s and continued to rise throughout the ’70s and ’80s, when crack took hold of inner cities across America. The public demanded action, and conservatives and some liberals banded together to put more police on the streets and more lawbreakers behind bars for longer terms.

Beginning in 1977, the Arkansas legislature tightened parole laws and forced habitual offenders to serve longer sentences. In 1993, with prison numbers swelling and crime, if beginning to decline from record highs, still a hot-button issue, state lawmakers created the Department of Community Correction as a means of easing overcrowding through probation and parole, while again tightening habitual offender laws.

The ACC has grown in step with the ADC. As of May 31, there were around 29,500 people on probation, who had been directed away from

incarceration as long as they fulfilled certain conditions. While probation numbers have remained steady, the state’s parole population has quadrupled since 1997. Nearly 22,000 were in the system as of May 31. Indexed to population, Arkansas had the second highest number of people on parole in the country in 2013 .

A sentencing grid put into effect in 1994 and still in use takes into account the seriousness of an offense and the offender’s criminal history: A score below a certain level allows an inmate to serve one-third of his sentence in prison, minus any time knocked off for good behavior, and complete the rest on parole. A score above a certain level raises the threshold to half the sentence, minus good time.

If an inmate receives no disciplinary infractions, he earns good time credit for every day he is incarcerated, which means he can serve as little as one-sixth or one-fourth of his sentence, depending on where his sentence falls on the grid.

But in the years that followed the introduction of the grid, lawmakers carved out exceptions to the sentencing levels, making certain crimes eligible for parole after an inmate served 70 percent of his sentence, creating two- and three-strikes laws that eliminated parole for certain repeat offenders and enacting laws that especially targeted methamphetamine charges for long sentences. Those changes massively expanded the state prison numbers. Since 1997, ADC inmates’ average time served has risen from 30 months to almost 53 months.

“You declare a war on something, whether it’s drugs or gangs or whatever, you’re going to see that portion of population that is involved in that kind of activity flooding to the prison system,” said Dr. Mary Parker, head of the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and a longtime member of the state Board of Corrections. “The more you criminalize, the larger your prison population grows.

“What happens when you do a major change … is you pass a plan that’s pretty well thought out and balanced, and then in successive legislative sessions people begin to tinker with it and they throw it out of balance. The 1993 legislation did not immediately cause the tremendous increase in the prison population.”

The tinkering did.

Parker said she was speaking only as a criminal justice professor, not as a member of the Board of Corrections.

Y In March 2011, two years before he announced his campaign for governor, Asa Hutchinson traveled to Canada to deliver a surprising message to a public safety committee of the country’s parliament: He warned the Canadians not to repeat the United States’ tough-on-crime mistakes. He talked about how federal mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine had disproportionately affected

African Americans. He spoke of the need to treat problems of addiction with treatment rather than incarceration. He told the committee that, despite having only 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. housed 23 percent of the world’s prisoners (25 percent is estimate President Obama used last week when he became the first sitting president to visit inmates in a prison.). He lamented the cost of incarcerating so many people.

“Not only do I not think we can afford [a new $100 million prison], I don’t think it’s good policy. … We’ll never build enough prison space to lock up every bad person, nor should we.”

—Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson (R-Little Rock)

Hutchinson spoke with experience. He had a lengthy resume of creating, enforcing and expanding tough-on-crime laws. He was picked

by President Reagan to be a federal prosecutor in the Western District of Arkansas in 1982, the same year the president announced his War on Drugs. While he was in Congress in the late-’90s, Hutchinson resisted calls to do away with harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders, before leaving to run the Drug Enforcement Agency and serve as an undersecretary in Homeland Security in the George W. Bush administration.

Today, Gov. Hutchinson deflects the idea that his thinking on criminal justice represents a conversion.

“I think that’s part of making the system of justice work properly,” he said in an interview.

“You have to consistently re-evaluate it and make adjustments that are needed to reflect fairness.”

The most obvious outward sign of Hutchinson’s re-evaluating the system came in 2010, when he was one of the first signatories to Right on Crime, a conservative initiative to reconsider incarceration policies. The group began in the Lone Star State, where the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Austin, helped convert Gov. Rick Perry into a believer in prison reform. In 2007, Perry supported state legislators’ decision to cancel plans to expand the state’s prisons, instead using the savings to support programs that diverted drug offenders into treatment.

The early success of those reforms inspired the Texas Public Policy Foundation to spin off a

nationally focused prison reform advocacy arm in 2010. Right on Crime began as a statement of principles: The criminal justice system should be about transparency and accountability, prioritizing victims’ rights, reforming the willing and cost-effectiveness. Some 70 conservatives signed the statement, including Hutchinson, Jeb Bush, Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed.

The conservative embrace of criminal justice reform has continued to pick up momentum.

For perhaps the first time ever, candidates running for the Republican presidential nomination have been talking about keeping people out of prison. In 2012, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing coalition of state lawmakers (including many from Arkansas), disbanded a public safety task force that had championed harsh sentencing laws and stand-your-ground legislation in favor of a new project aimed at expanding community corrections efforts and combating “overcriminalization.” The libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch, who bankroll ALEC, have begun a multimillion-dollar justice reform effort as part of an unlikely coalition that includes the Center for American Progress, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Tea Party-oriented FreedomWorks.

Meanwhile, change is already happening.

Under the leadership of Republican governors, conservative states with long law-and-order traditions such as Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky and Mississippi have enacted major laws aimed at slowing prison growth and helping offenders re-enter society, some of which have already made an impact.

“Texas closed three prisons in the last several years,” said Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson (R-Little Rock), the governor’s nephew and a champion for conservative criminal justice reforms in the state legislature. “They’re not soft on crime.”

Y Last July, Benny Magness, the chair of the state Board of Corrections, told a legislative panel that the state needed to build a new $100 million prison that would hold 1,000 beds and cost around $25 million a year to run.

Instead of funding the new construction, the legislature overwhelmingly passed an omnibus bill it called, perhaps hopefully, the Criminal Justice Reform Act. To be sure, the package contained many measures for reformers of all stripes to cheer, or at least nod approvingly toward: It created access points at nearly every stop along the way for offenders in the ACC or the ADC to apply for Medicaid, since a healthier population is less crime-prone. It established task forces to consider a wide variety of criminal justice innovations, including expanding and standardizing specialty courts, where the likes of addicts, veterans or the mentally ill who commit crimes might be diverted away from prison.

The legislature also authorized funding for www.arktimes.com

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JULY 23, 2015

500 re-entry beds, where soon-to-be paroled ADC inmates can acclimate to life outside of prison. The ACC has an RFQ out for private contractors to operate the re-entry centers, but no contracts have been signed. Once they’re available, beds will be turned over to new inmates every six months, so in a year, they could serve 1,000 soon-to-be paroled offenders, said Dina Tyler, a spokesperson for the ACC. The state could probably use 2,000 reentry beds, but 500 would work as a start, Tyler said.

The General Assembly also authorized the ACC to hire 47 new parole officers. Caseloads, depending on the area, range to as many as 118 per officer, Tyler said. Forty-seven officers over two years won’t make much of a dent in that high ratio.

The ADC is also focusing on helping inmates successfully transition into the free world. A legislative appropriation covered the cost of the first two phases of construction of the Ester Unit in Pine Bluff, a new ADC re-entry center.

Already, 183 inmates reside there. By early next year, the ADC anticipates being able to house 356 prisoners, all of whom will be within 18 months of parole. The goal, ADC spokesperson Cathy Frye said, is to get them ready for the free world through job training and counseling. “When people get out, we need to keep them out,” she said.

But for every two steps forward, the legislature took at least one step back. It made residential burglary a violent crime as far as habitual offender sentencing goes, which means two convictions for breaking and entering without a weapon would net someone with an otherwise clean record at least five years without parole and a third conviction could earn someone at least 30 years without parole. Life for parolees is already hard — ex-cons routinely have difficulty securing housing and finding work (Gov. Hutchinson said their unemployment rate in Arkansas is 47 percent), on top of the hurdles of adjusting to a world that may have changed substantially since they left for prison.

Now, because of the new crime law, they and probationers are subject to search by any law enforcement officer without a warrant. The new act did not reduce sentences for any crimes.

Meanwhile, in March, Gov. Hutchinson used $2.65 million in Rainy Day funds to transfer 281 inmates to a private facility in Bowie, Texas.

The ADC plans to ask for $2 million in funding to extend the contract through June 30, 2016, Frye said.

Asked to comment on the crime package, Marc Levin, policy director for Right on Crime, said, “Clearly, significant work needs to be done in Arkansas’s adult justice system to implement policies that will improve public safety, reduce recidivism and save tax dollars.”

In other words: Keep trying, Arkansas Republicans.

Sen. Hutchinson carried the crime package for his uncle, the governor, as lead sponsor.

He admitted that Arkansas was 10 to 15 years

ARKANSAS TIMES

BRIAN CHILSON

LAGGING: Arkansas is 10 to 15 years behind other states with regard to criminal justice reform, Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson says.

behind other states with regard to criminal justice reform. Catching up should not involve the same build-more-beds philosophy, he said.

“Not only do I not think we can afford [a new $100 million prison], I don’t think it’s good policy,” he said. “If we get our probation and parole system working correctly, I don’t think we’d need a new prison. … We’ll never build enough prison space to lock up every bad person, nor should we.”

The governor, in customary form, was more circumspect about the future.

“It’s too early to tell,” he said of whether a new prison will be required.

“I have an analogy I use a lot,” said the ACC’s Tyler, who has worked in and around prisons for two decades. “If you go in your bathroom and the water is on your sink and the sink is overflowing, you have three choices: You can either get a bigger sink, get a bigger drain or affect the flow of the water.

That’s it. Same thing with us: Get more institutions, let more people go or lessen the flow in the first place. That’s it.”

Those three options come with high costs, either in money or political capital.

Gov. Hutchinson has apparently decided to ask God for a fourth option. He recently announced a faith-based summit scheduled for August to discuss solutions for providing more re-entry services to felons on parole as well as ways to aid the growing number of children in state foster care.

“When you look at the resources of the state, the capacity of the state, you can’t get the job done ... simply as a state government,” Hutchinson said at a news conference announcing the event. “We need to enlist partners to accomplish this mission. ... We need to enlist the help of the faith community, the nonprofit community.”

In other words: Together with the Republican-controlled legislature, I decided to give

a massive amount of tax revenue back to wealthy and middle-class Arkansans, leaving us unable to pay for what we need to get the job done.

Meanwhile, as enlightened as some Arkansas politicians have become about criminal justice, reform is not without risk. In 2011, aided by the Pew Center on the States, the legislature passed a sweeping reform package aimed at curbing prison growth. It reduced sentences for some drug and theft crimes and added several measures to expand parole and probation. As a result, Arkansas’s prison population dropped in 2011 and again in 2012.

Tyler said that decline was misleading as too many parolees and probationers who should have been revoked were not.

But Sen. Joyce Elliott (D-Little Rock), a longtime crime reform advocate, said the 2011 reform policies were not sufficiently funded.

“We never hired enough parole officers for the policy to be successful. If you don’t fund, it’s going to be tough to make it work.

Then something catastrophic will happen, and we will react in a way that sets us up down the road for filling the prisons as if everyone is as bad a guy as that person. We make policy based on the very worst, almost singular instances.”

Sen. Hutchinson acknowledged the difficulty of getting politicians to embrace reform.

“The default position [for Arkansas politicians] has been, ‘I don’t want to put my political future in the hands of felons. It’s far safer to lock everybody up,’ ” Sen. Hutchinson said.

“But we’re not going to allow those bad feelings and fears to dictate public policy. We’re going to not be reactionary.”

The study groups created by the new crime omnibus law are expected to deliver their findings before the next general session of the legislature in 2017.

IT'S THE PARTY TO THE PARTY!

Ride the Arkansas Times BLUES BUS to the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena

It's the 30th Anniversary and we're bringing the partY with us!

Join us 0ct. 10 for featured headliner

Taj Mahal $109 per person

PRICE INCLUDES: Round-trip tour bus transportation Tickets into the gated concert area Lunch at a Delta Favorite Live blues performances en route to Helena Plus Beverages on Board

CHARGE BY PHONE All Major Credit Cards 501-375-2985 OR MAIL CHECK OR MONEY ORDER TO: Arkansas Times Blues Bus 200 E. Markham, Suite 200 Little Rock, AR 72201

Bus transportation provided by Arrow Coach Lines www.arktimes.com

JULY 23, 2015

19

Arts Entertainment AND

DRESSED TO KILL A Q&A with Lita Ford

BY KAYA HERRON NOT RUNNING AWAY: Rock ’n’ roll star Lita Ford appears in Hot Springs.

L

ita Ford rose to fame as the lead guitarist of The Runaways in 1975, and after their break-up in 1979 she went on to enjoy com-

mercial success and stardom as a solo artist. Her

hits “Close My Eyes Forever,” “Kiss Me Deadly” and “Shot of Poison” all charted in the United States, solidifying her status as a rock icon. She is the mother of two boys, a female rock ’n’ roll pioneer and the baddest chick in heels you’ll ever meet. Ford performs at Magic Springs’ Timberwood Amphitheater at 8 p.m. Saturday; tickets are $54.99. We spoke this week about women in rock and the recent accusations of sexual assault by her former Runaways bandmate Jackie Fuchs.

What initially got you interested in music?

It was just something I wanted to do. There wasn’t really one thing that 20

JULY 23, 2015

ARKANSAS TIMES

triggered me wanting to play guitar. It was just something I had in my blood; I wanted to play. I went to a Black Sabbath concert when I was 13 years old

and that’s when I said, “That’s what I want to do, Mom, Dad, that’s what I want to do with my life. I want to be a rock star.” By then I had been playing for two years so I could already really play, I knew all the Black Sabbath licks and Deep Purple licks, I was a big fan. I started playing when I was 11 years old and learned to play by listening to my favorite songs and records.

Why do you think there aren’t more women in rock?

I don’t really know. I think there are probably a lot more than we realize. They’re just very young, up and coming so to speak. I’m sure over the next few years we’ll being seeing more women in rock ’n’ roll. It is a very aggressive male-dominated style of music but there are still women out there banging around, they’ve got their Marshall’s, BC Rich’s, out there banging around with whatever they play.

I think at my age, being a young girl, I had no female role models to look up to and since the early days of The Runaways, we became role models for the next generation of rock ’n’ roll.

So I know that there are females out there and pretty soon, I’m sure, there will be quite a lot.

How did you meet Kim Fowley, manager and producers of The Runaways?

Kim actually heard about me. I had done a show with a local band where I lived. They didn’t have a bass player for the night. I don’t remember who these guys were; they were just friends of a friend, and their bass player bailed on them. “I can’t play tonight, my mom won’t let me out of the house,” or something like that. And they said “Lita, you do it,” and I said, “I don’t play bass.”

They said, “You can do it, it’s just two less strings.” I thought, “OK, I’ll try it,” so I gave it a shot, picked up the bass — they loaned me a bass — I started learning the songs and I did it. I made it through the show with no problems and word got out that there was a female bass player.

It got back to Kim Fowley. I don’t know how he got my number, but he called me: “We’re putting together an all-girl band, teenage all-girl band, and we need a bass player.” I told him that’s great, but I don’t play bass, I play guitar. He said, “Oh, well, we need one of them, too.” So I went and auditioned, got it instantly.

It was a gift from God and meant to be.

In one of your interviews, you called The Runaways music “jailbait rebellious teenage rock.” That’s pretty powerful. How difficult was it being a young female rocker in a male-dominated industry?

We had to have attitude, and we wore it like a badge. We just had this rebellious attitude everywhere we went — radio interviews, television interviews, stage performances. We stuck together as a team. We were before our time, something that people were blown away by and really weren’t sure what to think. “Is there somebody playing behind the curtains or is it really them? Do they have a guy standing off to the side of the stage?”

It was frustrating and, to tell you the truth, I still get it. Sometimes people will say something like, “Great band, he’s a great guitar player.” And it’s like, OK, do you think he played those solos or do you think I played those solos? [Laughs.] “Well, of course he did.” No, he didn’t: I did. I still get a little bit of that every once in a while.

But then I was awarded the Legend Award from Guitar Player Magazine.

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

A&E NEWS

LEGEND: Lita Ford

Only four people have been awarded that so far, which were Les Paul, Joe Perry, Jeff Beck and myself. I was the fourth person, and the only female, to get one of those beautiful medals they had made. It was such an honor to get that from them because I had never really felt like I had been given credibility as a guitar player. I mean, to be in the company of people like Les Paul and Jeff Beck and Joe Perry.

That was beyond awesome.

What did you think of “The Runaways” movie?

Honestly, I didn’t watch it. [Laughs.]

It was more about Cherie [Currie] and Joan [Jett]. I’d say it was more about Joan, and Cherie was on the back burners there. It was supposed to be a movie about The Runaways, but because it was put on by Cherie and Joan it was more about them. I didn’t want to be in it because I knew they wouldn’t portray me in a proper light, that they would make up stories, which they did. They made up stupid stuff, like Joan Jett saying, “Fuck you, Lita, fuck you!” If she ever spoke to me like that I would put my foot in her mouth. She never spoke to me like that, ever. We had always been friends. We’ve grown apart over the years but we never argued back then.

not just music. The cars you drive, the way you fly on airplanes, everything has changed. It’s a whole completely different world now. The amount of money we’re dishing out for stuff, just taking your dog to the vet or anything like that.

I feel like I’m being ripped off. They tell you to pay taxes, and then they take that money to build things to rip you off even more. Now they’ve got lights at the traffic signals, where if you accidentally run a red light, which people do, they take a picture of your license plate and send you a ticket. We’re paying for those lights and we’re paying for the ticket, so we’re just paying for the government to rip us off some more.

That kind of stuff just burns me up.

There was a big article in the Huffington Post recently about former Runaways bass player Jackie Fuchs. She claimed that Kim Fowley sexually assaulted her when she was 16 years old in a hotel room while others watched. Did you witness it or hear anything about it at the time?

No, I did not. She says herself that I wasn’t there. And I didn’t witness it or hear about it. I don’t know a damn thing about it.

What are you working on these days?

We’re writing a new album and we’re working on a book. We should have everything out by the spring of 2016. The book is an autobiographical story of a chick growing up in a rock band. It’s pretty cool.

BURIED IN A NEWS ITEM LAST week about the movie “Lego Batman,” The Hollywood Reporter mentioned offhandedly that actor Michael Cera has acquired the rights to “Masters of Atlantis,” the brilliant, absurdist cult-farce by Little Rock author Charles Portis. “Cera aims to write the adaptation as not only an acting vehicle but a directing project as well,” they report. Depending on your opinion of Cera, this seems like grounds for cautious optimism. His roles in films like “Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus” probably prove he can handle the kind of offbeat, uncomfortable humor and tone that make the book great — either way, it’s another advance in the ongoing Portis renaissance.

THE SCHEDULE FOR THE FIRST-ever Kaleidoscope LGBT Film Festival has been released and is available at kaleidoscope2015.sched.org. The festival will be held July 30 through Aug. 2 at the Studio Theatre in downtown Little Rock, and will include screenings of 10 features and over 30 shorts, plus filmmaker panels and parties.

Festival passes, $30, are available at their site (kaleidoscopefilmfestival. com), as are a limited number of VIP All-Access passes, $100. Individual tickets will be on sale as well, $8. The festival will present awards, including the Cheryl Maples Rainbow Award (to the film which “best represents the courage and struggle for equality”) and the Center for Artistic Revolution (CAR) Student Film Prize, the winner of which will receive $500 and a copy of Final Draft.

COMING UP IN THE AUGUST LIVE

music calendar: At the Walmart AMP in Rogers, Whitesnake (Aug. 15) and Hank Williams, Jr. (Aug. 22); at The White Water Tavern, Amasa Hines (Aug. 7), the Techno Squid Eats Parliament reunion show (Aug. 15) AND Graham Wilkinson; At South on Main, Katmandu (Aug. 5) and Pokey LaFarge (Aug. 27); at various venues in Fayetteville, the Fayetteville Roots Festival, featuring Punch Brothers, Watkins Family Hour, Fiona Apple and more (Aug. 27-29); at Revolution, Trapt (Aug. 6), Andy Grammer (Aug. 18) and Diarrhea Planet (Aug. 21); at Juanita’s, comedian Kurt Braunohler (Aug. 2), Old Salt Union (Aug. 15) and Canopy Climbers (Aug. 22); at Stickyz, The Stolen Faces (Aug. 1), Grace Askew (Aug. 8) and The Suffers (Aug. 27); at the Ron Robinson Theater, The John Bush Quintet (Aug. 7).

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SPECIAL SHOWING! THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) FRIDAY 8/7

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You’ve been in the business for over 30 years, took some time out to take care of your family and have recently come back. How has the industry changed? Is there anything you miss about the old days?

I miss the way we used to record — I’m not so big on the digital recordings.

I liked the analog recordings, they were always fun. Everything has changed, www.arktimes.com

JULY 23, 2015

21

THE TO-DO

LIST

BY LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK AND WILL STEPHENSON

THURSDAY 7/23-SATURDAY 8/1

‘MRS. MINIVER’

7 p.m. Argenta Community Theater. $30-$60.

Winston Churchill said that “Mrs. Miniver,” the 1942 film about an

English family at the start of WWII, “did more for the war effort than a flotilla of destroyers.” What the Argenta Community Theater is doing is putting it on stage for the first time

ever, with the permission of Warner Brothers and author Jan Struther’s estate. In the play, Mrs. Miniver (portrayed by Greer Garson in the Oscar-winning movie) must deal

with an escaped German flyer who makes his way to her village after her son has joined the Royal Air Force and husband (Walter Pidgeon in the movie) has gone to Dunkirk. LNP

camo and called himself a soulja not only because he was signed to No Limit Records, but because he was a soldier; he was a combat engineer in the U.S. Army during the Gulf War, stationed in Saudi Arabia (“That was some puthair-on-your-chest, disgusting shit that you had to take like a man,” he once told Vibe). Grow up poor and dancing in second lines in New Orleans and go to war in a desert across the planet, and see what your music sounds like after. For Mystikal, it sounded unpre-

dictable and voluble and nervy, full of sudden surges of loudness and energy.

On tracks produced by Beats by the Pound or The Neptunes, he sounded like Swamp Dogg in space, a hundred years in the future. The enormous success of his music — of “Y’all Ain’t Ready Yet,” “Shake Ya Ass,” “Danger (Been So Long)” — meant that the most adventurous and unrelentingly experimental hip-hop could still ascend the pop charts, one of those great, groundbreaking instances of the cream rising to

the top. How else do you explain making a celebrity out of a man who once recorded a whole song about being on fire? And then called it “I’m On Fire” Incidentally, it’s one of the most desperate, vicious songs I’ve ever heard.

Not his best, but maybe his most characteristic: “I’m steamin’, sweatin’, tossin’ and turnin’,” he raps. “The whole house on fire, and I can’t stop it from burnin’. The curtains and the walls all indulged in flames. I yell, ‘Somebody help me,’ but ain’t nobody came.” WS

Catholic iconography and Yes’ “Close to the Edge.” Their music could have soundtracked “Aguirre, the Wrath of God.” Or the New Horizons flight past Pluto into the endless black space beyond. This stuff is scary — there’s an

edge to it. It’s not for dabblers or lightweights or minors or Christians. It’s like that scene in “Moby-Dick” where the cabin boy falls overboard and is driven insane by the immensity of the ocean. I think so, anyway — I’ve never

actually read “Moby-Dick.” Pinkish Black probably has, though. If there has ever been a band whose members seem like they’ve all read “Moby-Dick,” it is Pinkish Black. That’s what Pinkish Black is like. WS

BAYOU B-BOY: Mystikal is at Revolution at 10 p.m. Friday, $20 adv., $25 day of.

FRIDAY 7/24

MYSTIKAL

10 p.m. Revolution. $20 adv., $25 day of.

Mystikal always presented himself as an unhinged lunatic, appearing straight-jacketed in the “Bouncin’ Back” video, which was staged in a white padded room. He was the return of James Brown — depending on his mood, he used his voice as either a percussion instrument or a baritone sax over loopy brass band funk. He wore

SATURDAY 7/25

PINKISH BLACK 8 p.m. Vino’s.

Pinkish Black’s brand of metal is for fans of underwater caves and “Twin Peaks” and existential theater and 22

JULY 23, 2015

ARKANSAS TIMES

IN BRIEF

THURSDAY 7/21

SATURDAY 7/25

‘JAMIE WYETH’

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Jamie Wyeth, son of painter Andrew Wyeth, nephew of surrealist Carolyn Wyeth and grandson of illustrator Newell Convers Wyeth, has carried on his family’s artistic tradition.

Like his father’s work, he is a realist inspired by subjects close to home: the Brandywine Valley in Pennsylvania and the coast of Maine. This exhibit, from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, features more than 100 works Wyeth created over 60 years, including his childhood drawings. The artist

once worked with Andy Warhol at the Factory; “Warhol’s Nature” is also on exhibit at Crystal Bridges. Wyeth is speaking at the museum July 24, the night before the opening, with MFA Boston curator Elliott Davis; the event is sold out. The show runs through Oct. 5. LNP

Comedian Steve McGrew is at the Loony Bin at 7:30 p.m., $7 (and at 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, $10). Tyler and the Tribe are at Stickyz, 8:30 p.m. Local band Sea Nanners plays at the Afterthought with American Lions, 9 p.m., $7.

Jacob Powell is at Juanita’s, 9 p.m.

Instrumental funk group Funkanites perform at The Joint in Argenta, 9:30 p.m., $7. Eureka Springs string band Sad Daddy is at The White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m., $5.

FRIDAY 7/22 TEDxMarkham St., a local iteration of the international speaking series, is at the Ron Robinson Theater, $20-$30 (registration begins at 8 a.m.). Austin EDM group The Nadis Warriors perform at Stickyz, 9 p.m., $8 adv., $10 day of. Bijoux performs at the Afterthought, 9 p.m., $10-$15.

Local dance punk band Collin vs.

Adam is at The White Water Tavern with The Seratones, 9:30 p.m.

SATURDAY 7/23

LONG ROAD OUT OF EDEN: The Eagles are at Verizon Arena at 8 p.m. Monday, $54.50-$176.50.

MONDAY 7/27

THE EAGLES

8 p.m. Verizon Arena. $54.50$176.50.

The Eagles are always associated with California, but it’s a fact that Don Henley grew up in Texas. This is important because the band itself was birthed from a very specific cultural context, namely the collision between country culture and the counterculture.

Or maybe it was less a collision than a cross-pollination, one that resulted in nudie suits on the West Coast and Bob Dylan’s cowboy hat and “Wild Horses”

and so on. Bernie Leadon resulted, too.

Leadon was in Dillard & Clark and the Flying Burrito Brothers (redneck rock at its most affected), and one day in 1971 he was stoned off peyote and tequila in the Mojave Desert and lecturing Texas transplant Henley on the Hopi Indians and their reverence for the eagle — the Hopi would wash them and feed them rabbits and dance for them and sometimes ceremonially suffocate them. And Henley was high, too, so they started a band and named it The Eagles (or just “Eagles,” if you care about that distinc-

tion, which I don’t). What I mean is that Don Henley was basically Gram Parsons, just a little less talented and a lot less interesting. Things only got good when he dropped the pretense and started making yacht rock. How good is “One of These Nights”? Really fucking good. It’s right up there with Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat” and Gerry Rafferty’s “Right Down the Line” in the list of songs that validate the casual social use of cocaine. Though, I guess, don’t do drugs. Or listen to The Eagles.

WS

Florist’s “CF-2” — is the new self-titled release by Midwest Caravan, a local indie rock band fronted by Louisiana native Sammy Williams. Full disclosure: I’ve only heard two songs from the album, which won’t be released until July 28 (look for it at midwestcaravan.bandcamp.com). But those two

songs were great. One of them is named after a font and the other is named after a rollercoaster. Smart, dry, wellproduced pop-punk: You’ll like them if you like Weezer. They’re playing a record release show at White Water on Tuesday with locals The Uh Huhs and Shreveport’s Ghost Foot. WS

TUESDAY 7/28

MIDWEST CARAVAN

9:30 p.m. White Water Tavern.

One of the really memorable Little Rock albums of the summer — so far a relatively small stack that includes Cool Chris’ “Trap Conversations 2,” Headcold’s “Awkward Tape” and Country

Kingsdown plays at Stickyz, 9 p.m., $8. Eighties rock group Loverboy (“Turn Me Loose”) is at Magic Springs’ Timberwood Amphitheater with Lita Ford at 8 p.m., $54.99. Shoog Radio presents Fayetteville’s High Lonesome and locals Swampbird and Michael Leonard Witham, White Water, 9 p.m. Austin country singer Kyle Park is at Revolution, 9 p.m., $10 adv., $12 day of. Ramona Smith, Butterfly and Jeron perform at the Afterthought, 9 p.m., $10-$15. Made in Sabbath, Savage Spawn and Antarctichrist play at the Lightbulb Club in Fayetteville, 9 p.m. “American Idol” season nine winner Lee Dewyze is at Juanita’s with Leslie Dinicola, 9 p.m.

SUNDAY 7/24 The Harry Potter Marathon, in which all eight “Harry Potter” films will be screened over seven days, begins at the Ron Robinson Theater, 6 p.m., $7 (or $40 for a week pass).

Synth-pop band LANY is at Juanita’s with Brothers & Company and Alan Thomas, 8 p.m., $8. Kinto Soldado is at Revolution with iWrek, 5:40, Brutha Mac, Charmz and D-Ray, 8 p.m., $10.

MONDAY 7/25 The “A Work of Art” Jazz Festival begins and runs through Aug. 1 at various venues around Little Rock, including Riverfront Park and Wildwood Park for the Performing Arts (check artporter.org for details). www.arktimes.com

JULY 23, 2015

23

AFTER DARK THURSDAY, JULY 23

800 Scott St. TEDxMarkham St. Ron Robinson Theater, 8 a.m., $20-$30. 1 Pulaski Way. 501-320-5703. www.cals. lib.ar.us/ron-robinson-theater.aspx.

MUSIC

Arkansas River Blues Society Thursday Jam. Revolution, 7 p.m., free. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. www.rumbarevolution.com/ new.

Chris Long. Kent Walker Artisan Cheese, 6 p.m. 1515 E. 4th St. 501-301-4963. www.kentwalkercheese.com.

Funkanites. The Joint, 9:30 p.m., $7. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

Greg Madden (happy hour), Ace’s Wild (headliner). Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 and 9 p.m.

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

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

Sway, 9 p.m. 412 Louisiana. 501-907-2582.

Jacob Powell. Juanita’s, 9 p.m., $10. 614 President Clinton Ave. 501-372-1228. www.juanitas.com.

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

Karaoke. Zack’s Place, 8 p.m., free. 1400 S. University Ave. 501-664-6444.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

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

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

RockUsaurus. Senor Tequila, 7-9 p.m. 10300 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-224-5505.

Sad Daddy. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m., $5.

2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. www.whitewatertavern.com.

Sea Nanners, American Lions. Afterthought Bistro and Bar, 9 p.m., $7. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd.

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

Sun Riah. Vino’s, 8 p.m., $6. 923 W. 7th St. 501375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub.com.

Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 7:30 p.m., free. 111 W. Markham St. 501-370-7013. www. capitalbarandgrill.com/.

Tyler and the Tribe. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 8:30 p.m. 107 River Market Ave. 501-3727707. www.stickyz.com.

COMEDY

Steve McGrew. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m., $7.

10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-228-5555. www.loonybincomedy.com.

BENEFITS

Cystic Fibrosis Fundraiser. Flying Saucer, 5 p.m.

323 President Clinton Ave. 501-372-8032. www. beerknurd.com/stores/littlerock.

FRIDAY, JULY 24

MUSIC

All In Fridays. Club Elevations. 7200 Colonel Glenn Road. 501-562-3317.

Bijoux. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 9 p.m., $10$15. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-1196. www. afterthoughtbistroandbar.com.

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

24

JULY 23, 2015

ARKANSAS TIMES

SATURDAY, JULY 25

MUSIC

REBIRTH: Austin EDM group The Nadis Warriors perform at Stickyz 9 p.m. Friday, $8 adv., $10 day of.

Collin vs. Adam, The Seratones. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. www.whitewatertavern.com.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

Mystikal. Revolution, 10 p.m., $20 adv., $25 day of. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. www.rumbarevolution.com/new.

The Nadis Warriors. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 9 p.m., $8 adv., $10 day of. 107 River Market Ave. 501-372-7707. www.stickyz.com.

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

Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 9 p.m., free. 111 W. Markham St. 501-370-7013. www. capitalbarandgrill.com/.

Upscale Friday. IV Corners, 7 p.m. 824 W. Capitol Ave.

COMEDY

“HOGNADO!.” An original production by The Main Thing. The Joint, 8 p.m., $22. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlit-

tlerock.com.

Steve McGrew. The Loony Bin, through July 25, 7:30 p.m., $7. The Loony Bin, 7 and 10 p.m., $10.

10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-228-5555. www.loonybincomedy.com.

DANCE

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

Bess Chisum Stephens Community Center, 8-11 p.m., $7-$13. 12th and Cleveland streets. 501221-7568. www.blsdance.org.

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

“Salsa Night.” Begins with a one-hour salsa lesson. Juanita’s, 9 p.m., $8. 614 President Clinton Ave. 501-372-1228. www.littlerocksalsa.com.

EVENTS

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

Brian Ramsey. Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf. com.

Karaoke at Khalil’s. Khalil’s Pub, 7 p.m. 110 S. Shackleford Road. 501-224-0224. www.khalilspub.com.

Karaoke. Casa Mexicana, 7 p.m. 7111 JFK Blvd., NLR. 501-835-7876. Zack’s Place, 8 p.m., free.

1400 S. University Ave. 501-664-6444.

Karaoke with Kevin & Cara. All ages, on the restaurant side. Revolution, 9 p.m.-12:45 a.m., free. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. www.rumbarevolution.com/new.

Kingsdown. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 9 p.m., $8. 107 River Market Ave. 501-372-7707. www.stickyz.com.

K.I.S.S. Saturdays. Featuring DJ Silky Slim. Dress code enforced. Sway, 10 p.m. 412 Louisiana.

501-492-9802.

Kyle Park. Revolution, 9 p.m., $10 adv., $12 day of. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. www.rumbarevolution.com/new.

Lee Dewyze, Leslie Dinicola. Juanita’s, 9 p.m., $17-$50. 614 President Clinton Ave. 501-3721228. www.juanitas.com.

Leta Joyner. Kent Walker Artisan Cheese, 7 p.m. 1515 E. 4th St. 501-301-4963. www.kentwalkercheese.com.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

Loverboy, Lita Ford. Magic Springs’ Timberwood Amphitheater, 8 p.m., $54.99. 1701 E. Grand Ave., Hot Springs.

Made in Sabbath, Savage Spawn, Antartichrist.

The Lightbulb Club, 9 p.m. 21 N. Block Ave., Fayetteville. 479-444-6100.

Pickin’ Porch. Bring your instrument. All ages welcome. Faulkner County Library, 9:30 a.m. 1900 Tyler St., Conway. 501-327-7482. www.fcl.org.

Pinkish Black. Vino’s, 8 p.m. 923 W. 7th St. 501375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub.com.

Ramona Smith, Butterly, Jeron. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 9 p.m., $10-$15. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-1196. www.afterthoughtbistroandbar.com.

Shoog Radio Presents: High Lonesome, Swampbird, Michael Leonard Witham. White Water Tavern, 9 p.m. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-3758400. www.whitewatertavern.com.

Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 9 p.m., free. 111 W. Markham St. 501-370-7013. www. capitalbarandgrill.com/.

COMEDY

“HOGNADO!.” An original production by The Main Thing. The Joint, 8 p.m., $22. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

Steve McGrew. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m., $7.

10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-228-5555. www.loonybincomedy.com.

EVENTS

Antiques Roadshow Appraisal Event.

Statehouse Convention Center. 7 Statehouse Plaza.

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

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

Historic Neighborhoods Tour. Bike tour of historic neighborhoods includes bike, guide, helmets and maps. Bobby’s Bike Hike, 9 a.m., $8-$28. 400 President Clinton Ave. 501-613-7001.

Little Rock Farmers’ Market. River Market pavilions, through Oct. 31: 7 a.m. 400 President Clinton Ave. 375-2552. www.rivermarket.info.

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

Third Annual Vintage Military Vehicle Show.

MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History, 9 a.m., free. 503 E. 9th St. 376-4602. www.arkmilitaryheritage.com.

SUNDAY, JULY 26

MUSIC

Al White. Kent Walker Artisan Cheese, 4 p.m.

1515 E. 4th St. 501-301-4963. www.kentwalkercheese.com.

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

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

Karaoke. Shorty Small’s, 6-9 p.m. 1475 Hogan Lane, Conway. 501-764-0604. www.shortysmalls.com.

Karaoke with DJ Sara. Hardrider Bar & Grill, 7 p.m., free. 6613 John Harden Drive, Cabot.

501-982-1939.

Kinto Soldado, iWrek, 5:40, Brutha Mac, Charmz, D-Ray. Revolution, 8 p.m., $10. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. www.rumbarevolution.com/new.

LANY, Brothers & Company, Alan Thomas.

Juanita’s, 8 p.m., $8. 614 President Clinton Ave. 501-372-1228. www.juanitas.com.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

EVENTS

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

FILM

Harry Potter Marathon. All eight “Harry Potter” movies screened over seven days. Ron Robinson Theater, July 26-Aug. 1, $7-$40. 1 Pulaski Way. 501-320-5703. www.cals.lib.ar.us/ ron-robinson-theater.aspx.

MONDAY, JULY 27

MUSIC

The Eagles. Verizon Arena, 8 p.m., $54.50-$176.50.

1 Alltel Arena Way, NLR. 501-975-9001. verizonarena.com.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

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

Open Mic. The Lobby Bar. Studio Theatre, 8 p.m. 320 W. 7th St. Richie Johnson. Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 p.m. 2400

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

A Work of Art: Jazz Festival. Wildwood Park for the Performing Arts, July 27-Aug. 1. 20919 Denny Road. https://www.facebook.com/ ArtPorterMusic.

FILM

Harry Potter Marathon. All eight “Harry Potter” movies screened over seven days. Ron Robinson Theater, through Aug. 1, $7-$40. 1 Pulaski Way. 501-320-5703. www.cals.lib.ar.us/ ron-robinson-theater.aspx.

SPORTS

All American Food & Great Place to Party On The Patio!

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

TUESDAY, JULY 28

MUSIC

Jake E. Lee’s Red Dragon Cartel. Revolution, 8 p.m., $15. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-8230090. www.rumbarevolution.com/new.

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

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

Karaoke Tuesday. Prost, 8 p.m., free. 322 President Clinton Blvd. 501-244-9550. willydspianobar.com/prost-2.

Karaoke Tuesdays. On the patio. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 7:30 p.m., free. 107 River Market Ave. 501-372-7707. www.stickyz.com.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

Midwest Caravan, The Uh Huhs, Ghost Foot.

White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. www.whitewatertavern.com.

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

Tuesday Jam Session with Carl Mouton.

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

A Work of Art: Jazz Festival. Wildwood Park for the Performing Arts, through Aug. 1. 20919 Denny Road. https://www.facebook.com/ ArtPorterMusic.

#

COMEDY

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

DANCE

“Latin Night.” Juanita’s, 7:30 p.m., $7. 614 President Clinton Ave. 501-372-1228. www.littlerocksalsa.com.

Tweet shop LOCAL

EVENTS

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

FILM

Harry Potter Marathon. All eight “Harry Potter” movies screened over seven days. Ron Robinson Theater, through Aug. 1, $7-$40. 1 Pulaski Way. 501-320-5703. www.cals.lib.ar.us/ ron-robinson-theater.aspx.

ARKANSAS TIMES #ErniebiggsLR www.arktimes.com

JULY 23, 2015

25

AFTER DARK, CONT. Springs. 501-321-0909. maxineslive.com/shows. html.

SPORTS

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

WEDNESDAY, JULY 29

MUSIC

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

Adelitas Way, Bad Seed Rising. Juanita’s, 9 p.m., $10. 614 President Clinton Ave. 501-372-1228. www.juanitas.com.

Brian and Nick. Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf. com.

Drageoke with Chi Chi Valdez. Sway. 412 Louisiana. 501-907-2582.

Iwrestledabearonce, Within the Ruins.

Revolution, 8:30 p.m., $15. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. www.rumbarevolution.com/ new.

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

Karaoke at Khalil’s. Khalil’s Pub, 7 p.m. 110 S. Shackleford Road. 501-224-0224. www.khalilspub.com.

Karaoke. MUSE Ultra Lounge, 8:30 p.m., free.

2611 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-6398.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

Nan Maureen. South on Main, 7:30 p.m., free.

1304 Main St. 501-244-9660. southonmain.com.

Open Mic Nite with Deuce. Thirst n’ Howl, 7:30 p.m., free. 14710 Cantrell Road. 501-379-8189. www.thirst-n-howl.com.

Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 7:30 p.m., free. 111 W. Markham St. 501-370-7013. www. capitalbarandgrill.com/.

A Work of Art: Jazz Festival. Wildwood Park for the Performing Arts, through Aug. 1. 20919 Denny Road. https://www.facebook.com/ ArtPorterMusic.

COMEDY

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

DANCE

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

FILM

Harry Potter Marathon. All eight “Harry Potter” movies screened over seven days. Ron Robinson Theater, through Aug. 1, $7-$40. 1 Pulaski Way. 501-320-5703. www.cals.lib.ar.us/ron-robinsontheater.aspx.

Movies in the Park: “The Incredible Hulk.”

First Security Amphitheater, 8:15 p.m., free. 400 President Clinton Ave.

LECTURES

Brown Bag Lunch Lecture: The Quest for a Municipal Auditorium in Little Rock. Old State House Museum, 12 p.m. 300 W. Markham St. 501-324-9685. www.oldstatehouse.com.

POETRY

Wednesday Night Poetry. 21-and-older show.

Maxine’s, 7 p.m., free. 700 Central Ave., Hot

26

JULY 23, 2015

ARKANSAS TIMES

ARTS

THEATER

“American Idiot.” The Weekend Theater, through Aug. 9: Fri., Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sun., 2:30 p.m., $20.

1001 W. 7th St. 501-374-3761. www.weekendtheater.org.

“Hairspray.” Murry’s Dinner Playhouse, through Aug. 29: Sun., 11 a.m.; Tue.-Sun., 6 p.m., $34-$36.

6323 Col. Glenn Road. 501-562-3131. murrysdinnerplayhouse.com.

“Mrs. Miniver.” Argenta Community Theater, through Aug. 1. 405 Main St., NLR. 501-3531443. argentacommunitytheater.org.

Summer Musical Theatre Intensive Young Artists Junior Showcase. Arkansas Repertory Theatre, Mon., July 27, 7 p.m., $5. 601 Main St. 501-378-0405. www.therep.org.

NEW GALLERY EXHIBITS, EVENTS

New shows in bold-face

BOSWELL MOUROT FINE ART, 5815 Kavanaugh Blvd.: New works by Louis Watts, opens with reception 6-9 p.m. July 25, show through Aug. 8. 664-0030.

CURRAN HALL, 615 E. Capitol Ave.: “Fine Art Repair and Appraisal Workshop,” with Laura Bryan and Jennifer Carman, to coincide with Antiques Roadshow on July 25, 5:30 p.m.

July 27, free, beer and wine provided.

Bentonville CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, One Museum Way: “Jamie Wyeth,” retrospective of the artist’s career over 60 years from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, July 25-Oct. 5; “Keynote Lecture: Conversation with Artist Jamie Wyeth,” with Elliott Davis of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Wyeth, 7-8 p.m. July 24, $10 ($8 members), register at crystalbridges.org or 479-657-2335; “Warhol’s Nature,” from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, through Oct. 5, $4; “American Encounters: The Simple Pleasures of Still Life,” 10 still life paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries from the High Museum, the Terra Foundation, the Louvre and the Crystal Bridges collection, through Sept. 14; “Fish Stories: Early Images of American Game Fish,” 20 color plates based on the original watercolors by sporting artist Samuel Kilbourne, through Sept. 21; American masterworks spanning four centuries. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon., Thu.; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Wed., Fri.; 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Sat.-Sun., closed Tue. 479-418-5700.

CALL FOR ENTRIES

The Arkansas Arts Council is seeking submissions for the juried “2016 Small Works on Paper Exhibition.” Juror Kati Toivanen of the University of Missouri-Kansas City will select entries and purchase award winners. The show travels to 10 venues across the state. Deadline to enter is July 24. Entry forms are available at www.arkansasarts.org or by calling 501-3249766; for more information call Cheri Leffew at 501-324-9767.

The Arkansas Arts Council is accepting nominations for the 2016 Governor’s Arts Awards recognizing Arkansas artists, arts patrons, educators and corporations for their contributions to the arts. Deadline for nominations is Aug. 7.

Nomination forms are available online at www. arkansasarts.org or by contacting Cheri Leffew

at 324-9767 or cheri@arkansasheritage.org.

The MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History and the Arkansas History Commission will hold a half-day symposium on researching modern military records from 10 a.m. to noon Aug. 1. Deadline to register is July 29.

CONTINUING GALLERY EXHIBITS

ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, MacArthur Park: 57th annual “Delta Exhibition,” 88 works by 84 artists from Arkansas and surrounding states, juried by George Dombek, through Sept.

20; “54th Young Artists Exhibition,” art by Arkansas students grades K-12, through July 26. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sun. 372-4000.

ARKANSAS CAPITAL CORP. GROUP, 200 River Market Ave.: “Different Landscapes,” paintings by Greg Lahti, photographs

by Brennan Plunkett, drawings by Robert Bean, woodwork by Steve Plunkett.

ART GROUP GALLERY, Pleasant Ridge Town Center, 11525 Cantrell Road: Work by Diana Shearon and other gallery members.

11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-6 p.m. Sun. 6902193.

BUTLER CENTER GALLERIES, Arkansas Studies Institute, 401 President Clinton Ave.: “Weaving Stories and Hope: Textile Arts from the Japanese Internment Camp at Rohwer, Arkansas”; “State Youth Art Show 2015: An Exhibition by Arkansas Art Educators,” Underground Gallery, through Aug. 29; “Human Faces & Landscapes: Paintings by Sui Hoe Khoo,” Butler Center West Gallery, through July 25; “White River Memoirs,” artwork collected by canoist and photographer Chris Engholm along the White, Concordia Hall, through July 25.

9 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 320-5790.

CANTRELL GALLERY, 8206 Cantrell Road: “A Range of Options,” collages by Eric Spann, through Sept. 4. 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. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sat. 664-0880.

COX CREATIVE CENTER, 100 River Market Ave.: “Hotel Pines: Light through the Pines,” photographs by a dozen art photographers of abandoned Hotel Pines in Pine Bluff, through August. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 918-3093.

GALLERY 221, 221 W. 2nd St.: Works by gallery members. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 801-0211.

GALLERY 26, 2601 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Recent works by Julie Holt, John Kushmal and James Hayes, through Sept. 12.10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.Sat. 664-8996.

GREG THOMPSON FINE ART, 429 Main St., NLR: “Southern Abstraction,” work by Dusti Bongé, Ida Kohlmeyer, Andrew Bucci, Wolf Kahn, Sammy Peters, Robyn Horn, James Hendricks, Pinkney Herbert and Gay Bechtelheimer, through Sept. 12. 664-2787.

GINO HOLLANDER GALLERY, 2nd and Center: Paintings and works on paper by Gino Hollander. 801-0211.

HEARNE FINE ART, 1001 Wright Ave.: “Beautiful Influences,” ceramic sculpture and mixed media paintings by Chukes, through Sept. 3. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sat. 3726822.

HISTORIC ARKANSAS MUSEUM GALLERIES, 200 E. 3rd St.: “Art. Function. Craft: The Life and Work of Arkansas Living Treasures,” works by 14 craftsmen honored by Arkansas Arts Council; “Heather Condren and Miranda Young,” repurposed books by Condren, linocuts and ceramics by Young,” through Aug. 9; “(Everyday) Interpretations: Cindy Arsaga,

Joe Morzuch and Adam Posnak,” through Aug. 9; “Suggin Territory: The Marvelous World of Folklorist Josephine Graham,” through Nov. 29. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 324-9351.

L&L BECK ART GALLERY, 5705 Kavanaugh Blvd.: “The Wild Ones,” July exhibition. 6604006.

LAMAN LIBRARY, 2801 Orange St., NLR: “Spirited: Prohibition in America,” through Aug. 7. 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Mon.-Thu., 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Fri.-Sat. 758-1720.

LOCAL COLOUR, 5811 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Rotating work by 27 artists in collective. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 265-0422.

M2 GALLERY, 11525 Cantrell Road: “Mikesell and EMILE,” new paintings by Michelle Mikesell and Jennifer Freeman; also work by V.L. Cox, Bryan Frazier, Spencer Zahm and others.

10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 2256257.

MUGS CAFE, 515 Main St., NLR: “Movement and Sound,” paintings by Emily Wood, photographs by John Sykes Jr., through Aug. 19. 7 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 960-9524.

RED DOOR GALLERY, 3715 JFK, NLR: Paula Jones, new paintings; Jim Goshorn, new sculpture; also sculpture by Joe Martin, paintings by Amy Hill-Imler, Theresa Cates and Patrick Cunningham, ornaments by D. Wharton, landscapes by James Ellis, raku

by Kelly Edwards and other works. 7535227. 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. ST. JAMES UNITED METHODIST CHURCH, 321 Pleasant Valley Drive: Exhibition by members of Co-Op Art, through Sept. 7.

STEPHANO’S FINE ART, 1813 N. Grant St.: New work by Jennifer Wilson, Mike Gaines, Maryam Moeeni, Ken Davis, John Kushmaul and Gene Brack. 563-4218.

BATESVILLE BAAC GALLERY ON MAIN, 226 E. Main St.: “White Noise & Black Lines,” work by Holly Laws and David Bailin, through Aug. 1.10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Sat. 870-793-3382.

BENTON DIANNE ROBERTS ART STUDIO AND GALLERY, 110 N. Market St.: Work by Dianne Roberts, classes. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Wed.Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat. 860-7467.

BENTONVILLE 21c MUSEUM HOTEL, 200 NE A St.: “Duke Riley: See You at the Finish Line,” sculpture, and “Blue: Matter, Mood and Melancholy,” photographs and paintings. 479-286-6500.

TWO 25 GALLERY, 225 Main St.: “Conversations,” oils by Carole Katchen, through Aug. 1.

479-464-9463.

CALICO ROCK CALICO ROCK ARTISAN COOPERATIVE, 105 Main St.: Paintings, photographs, jewelry, fiber art, wood, ceramics and other crafts. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tue.-Thu., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Fri.-Sat., noon-4 p.m. Sun. calicorocket.org/artists.

CONWAY ART ON THE GREEN, Littleton Park, 1100 Bob Courtway: Paintings by Eldridge Bagley, Marty Smith, Sheila Parsons, Don Bingham, Haley Proctor, Patricia Wilkes, Mary Ann Stafford and others. 501-499-3177.

HEBER SPRINGS BOTTLE TREE GALLERY, 514 Main St.: Fine art and jewelry. 9:30 a.m.-4 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 501-5908840.

‘ANT-MAN’: Paul Rudd stars.

MOVIE REVIEW

Small world Paul Rudd goes subatomic in Marvel’s ‘Ant Man.’

BY WILL STEPHENSON

T

he graphic novelist Alan Moore granted a rare interview last year that he promised would be his last. Densely bearded and reclusive, with a surly mystic persona that’s part Rick Rubin and part Aleister Crowley, Moore has long been canonized for writing books like “Watchmen” and “V for Vendetta” and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” — classics of the medium later adapted into dull movies. He had emerged from his proud silence for this one last public pronouncement in order to warn against the zeitgeist’s zombielike preoccupation with the same old Marvel and DC comic book franchises, the ones he’d grown up with and which we’ve never been able to shake. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man — they just won’t go away. And far from being an innocuous phenomenon, Moore said, this was serious. It could be, he wrote, “culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting posses-

sively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.”

For now, though, we have “AntMan.” He’s a superhero who can shrink. And control ants. Marvel’s latest addition to the profitable cinematic universe of “The Avengers,” the film stars Michael Douglas and T.I. and Paul Rudd, described in a recent New York Times Magazine profile as “the MSG of actors.” “Ant-Man” in some ways bends over backward to engage with the political moment, to speak to our “unprecedented era.” Squint at it from a distance, and it’s a story about the difficulties convicted felons face re-entering society post-incarceration. Or maybe it’s about the military-industrial complex in the digital age — did you know that another name for a male ant is a drone?

Sure, but what’s really admirable about this movie is its strangeness.

“Ant-Man” embraces the tradition of kitsch-surrealism that most comic book movies try and shrug off in the sanctimonious Christopher Nolan era. There are jokes about Mark Rothko and the infinite vastness of the quantum realm.

There is a fight staged in a briefcase and soundtracked to The Cure’s “Disintegration.” There is an army of glowing fire ants that coagulates into a psychedelic bridge. There is a bald villain who spends much of the film decimating baby lambs with a broken shrink ray.

When the shrinking technology fails, it reduces its target to a viscous pink glob.

There are times, in other words, when it feels like you’ve wandered into a David Cronenberg remake of “Mystery Men.” And I mean that as a compliment.

The movie is being billed for its sense of humor, but it’s only occasionally, lightly funny. More impressive is its sense of wonder. The premise of the story — that there exists a bright red formula for altering the “distance between atoms” — is a gift that allows for some of the summer’s least sophisticated and most entertaining visual gags. Rudd falls through a crack in the floor onto a turntable in the middle of one of those giant tenementhouse raves that only exist in movies. He clings to a groove in the vinyl as the giant

needle approaches. Toying with scale like this is one of the movie’s strongest tools: The microscopic perspectives transform everyday environments into science-fiction landscapes. A bathtub becomes a porcelain desert. A patch of grass becomes Mars. The real horror of the film doesn’t come from some shady super-villain syndicate but from “going subatomic,” which in this case means disappearing into pure visual abstraction.

Still, I suspect Moore would hate this film and he’d probably be right. “AntMan” was introduced as a comic book character in the 1960s and I’m sure he has his fans — plenty of them — but his following is not so impressive or timely that it necessitated a Hollywood film.

It’s not so brilliant or inimitable a story idea that it needed to be revived in this way. I understand the cutthroat capitalist logic of pre-sold franchises, that the only movies that can be allowed big budgets (or any budgets) these days are the ones based on pre-existing material audiences might recognize, whether it’s best-selling erotica, board games or other movies. But “Ant-Man” seems like the bottom of the barrel, or close to it.

Marvel’s shareholders are just laughing at us now. Cede the stage, folks. Or tell me how I can invest.

www.arktimes.com

JULY 23, 2015

27

Dining WHAT’S COOKIN’

Cajun’s Wharf

THE SOMA PIZZERIA PIRO BRICK Oven & Barroom has changed its name to Raduno Brick Oven & Barroom so that it won’t become confused with the small Pyro’s pizza restaurant chain in Tennessee. Pyro’s Fire Fresh Pizza has two locations in Memphis and another in Cordova, Tenn.

The Italian word “Raduno” means a place of meeting or gathering. The pizzeria, which opened in February at 1318 Main St., is co-owned by Bart Barlogie, Eric Nelson and chef Jason Neidhardt.

A press release issued Monday said Piro would become Raduno “in order to prevent confusion now or during potential expansion into new markets at a later date.” The restaurant’s menu and hours will remain unchanged, Barlogie said. The name change to Raduno’s officially took effect July 21.

STONE’S THROW BREWING WILL hold its second annual Block On Rock Birthday Bash at 3 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 1, in the 800 block of Rock Street, immediately west of the Stone’s Throw brewery. The event will feature 15 food trucks and products by local distillery Rock Town and local breweries Ozark Beer Co., Diamond Bear, Lost Forty, Bubba Brew’s Brewing Co. and Stone’s Throw. The Stone’s Throw taproom, near the corner of Ninth and Rock streets, will also be open during the festival.

Proceeds will go to support the charity Preserve Arkansas and dozens of other local and worthy causes. Vendors have been asked to donate their event fees to the charity of their choice.

Admission is $5. Discounted armbands can be purchased beforehand for $3 at the Stone’s Throw taproom. Last year’s event drew over 1,200 people and raised more than $3,000 for charity.

Entrance gates will be located at Ninth and Rock streets and Eighth and Scott streets. For more information, visit the Stone’s Throw website at stonesthrowbeer.com or go on Facebook at StonesThrowBrewing.

DINING CAPSULES

AMERICAN

1620 SAVOY Fine dining in a swank space, with a menu redone by the same owners of Cache downtown. The scallops are especially nice. 1620 Market St. Full bar, All CC. $$-$$$.

501-221-1620. D Mon.-Sat., BR Sun. ADAMS CATFISH & CATERING Catering company in Little Rock with carry-out trailers in Russellville and Perryville. 215 N. Cross St. All CC. $-$$. 501-336-4399. LD Tue.-Fri. AFTERTHOUGHT BISTRO AND BAR The 28

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ARKANSAS TIMES

2400 Cantrell Road 501-375-5351 cajunswharf.com

QUICK BITE Wine Spectator for years has recognized Cajun’s Wharf for the excellence of its wine program, and the bottles are reasonably priced. We enjoyed a $15 half-bottle of Alexander Valley Chardonnay. Several selections are only $5 a glass during happy hour on “Wine Down Wednesdays.”

HOURS 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekdays, 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

OTHER INFO Full bar, credit cards accepted.

CAJUN’S: The delicious Six and Six.

Coming back to Cajun’s It’s still good.

U

nless you count Red Lobster, there are hardly any true seafood restaurants in Central Arkansas. There are restaurants that serve seafood, of course, and some serve truly excellent fish and shellfish (the fish special at Brave New Restaurant is always a winner, for example). And there are more than enough catfish houses.

And then there’s Cajun’s Wharf, the king and granddaddy of local seafood spots for decades. Other than a few ill-fated years when it was part of the Landry’s chain, Cajun’s has been locally owned since 1975. Back when the local restaurant scene was less competitive and less crowded, it was the must-visit spot for occasions (I ate there before

my senior prom in 1977) and with outof-town visitors.

But while still popular, it’s not the spot anymore. We must admit that our recent lunch was our first at Cajun’s (lunch has been served for more than a year), and our dinner was probably our first in 15 or 20 years. We’re not sure why. We love Capers and Copper Grill, Cajun’s owners’ other two restaurants.

And we’ve been to Cajun’s for drinks and to catch live music pretty regularly over the years.

It won’t be nearly so long before we’re back there to eat. We didn’t love everything we tried, but there certainly were plenty of highlights. Let’s start with those. Two appetizers that have

likely been on the menu since day one are still stars: crab au gratin and oysters Bienville (both $9.95). There are more discernable shards of crab than might have been expected in the au gratin, the dish is perfectly creamy, the mushrooms add a nice taste complement, and the cheddar blanket brings it all together.

Oysters Bienville is a great choice for folks who can’t quite deal with raw oysters on the half-shell. These are served on the half-shell but are broiled. The oysters impart a great seafood flavor, but the main taste is the white wine-infused cream sauce and the melted, crusty, salty Parmesan. One odd and really inexcusable detail here: Both accompanying packs of crackers we opened were tragically stale.

Two more stars: the coconut cream pie and the chocolate creme brulee (both homemade and both $5.25). This is no normal coconut pie. The filling’s texture is more like cheesecake and is studded with coconut. The graham cracker crust was perfect, and the whipped cream was covered in toasted and untoasted coconut. Don’t miss it. The brulee is denser, thicker and less smooth than most, but it’s very rich and chocolatey.

We walked into our Monday lunch to find the hostess stand abandoned. In a couple of minutes, the one overworked waiter — the only front-of-house employee we saw — arrived to seat us.

There were about five tables of folks at 12:40, all seated along the windows with a great view of the river. Our cup of etouffee was decent but more than a bit steep at $6.50, particularly since it

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

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

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

DINING CAPSULES, CONT. included only four tiny cocktail shrimp and two crawfish tails. We expected the barbecued shrimp ($12.95) to be New Orleans style with a thin sauce that is primarily butter and Worcestershire with garlic, scallions, lemon juice and some spices to provide a bit of heat. But it wasn’t. Five excellently prepared shrimp — firm and plump — were topped with a sauce that reminded us a lot of the etouffee. The shrimp sat atop some fairly spicy grits; unfortunately, about a quarter of them weren’t cooked enough, and crunchy grits are no fun.

We did get a side salad (only $2.25 when you have an entree), and it was excellent — tomato, mushroom, cucumber, pine nuts and goat cheese on a spring mix with a sweet, tangy house champagne vinaigrette.

We returned for dinner on a Thursday night (which is when we had the Bienville and the brulee) and the joint was jumping. At about 8:15 p.m., the large dining room was about three-quarters full; there were still about 15 tables’ worth of folks on the deck, and about a dozen tables more enjoying the happyhour guitarist in the bar as the headline band was setting up.

We chose the “six and six” ($22.95) and the coconut-pecan encrusted tilapia ($21.95). The former included tender grilled scallops that could have used a bit more herbs/spices but were still very tasty. Crispy bacon offset the creamy seafood-based filling in the shrimp. The tilapia fillet was huge, moist and tender. The coconut added crunch and a hint of sweet, and the scoop of fruit/ tomato salsa was both sweet and savory.

This was one good piece of fish. And the white cheddar grits were creamy and cooked perfectly.

The look and feel of Cajun’s Wharf hasn’t changed much over the years, though the place certainly has been kept clean and in good repair. The decor is definitely evocative of its name and true to what one would find smattered along the Louisiana Gulf Coast — but condensed into varying, textured vignettes featuring pier posts, boat oars, crab traps, weathered siding and tin roofs. Not surprisingly, there are fish tanks.

It was good to be back in the Cajun’s Wharf dining room. We will be back soon.

restaurant side of the Afterthought Bar (also called the Afterthought Bistro and Bar) features crab cakes, tuna tacos, chicken tenders, fries, sandwiches, burgers and, as entrees, fish and grits, tuna, ribeye, chicken and dumplings, pasta and more. Live music in the adjoining bar, also private dining room. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. Full bar, All CC. 501-663-1196.

ALL ABOARD RESTAURANT & GRILL Burgers, catfish, chicken tenders and such in this trainthemed restaurant, where an elaborately engineered mini-locomotive delivers patrons’ meals. 6813 Cantrell Road. No alcohol, All CC. 501-975-7401. LD daily.

ALLEY OOPS The restaurant at Creekwood Plaza (near the Kanis-Bowman intersection) is a neighborhood feedbag for major medical institutions with the likes of plate lunches, burgers and homemade desserts. Remarkable chess pie. 11900 Kanis Road. Full bar, All CC. $-$$.

501-221-9400. LD Mon.-Sat. ASHER DAIRY BAR An old-line dairy bar that serves up made-to-order burgers, foot-long “Royal” hot dogs and old-fashioned shakes and malts. 7105 Colonel Glenn Road. No alcohol, No CC, CC. $-$$. 501-562-1085. BLD Tue.-Sat. ATHLETIC CLUB SPORTS BAR & GRILL What could be mundane fare gets delightful twists and embellishments here. 11301 Financial Centre Parkway. Full bar, All CC. $$-$$$.

501-312-9000. LD daily.

B-SIDE The little breakfast place in the former party room of Lilly’s DimSum Then Some turns tradition on its ear, offering French toast wrapped in bacon on a stick, a must-have dish called “biscuit mountain” and beignets with lemon curd. 11121 Rodney Parham Road. Full bar, All CC. $$. 501-716-2700. B-BR Sat.-Sun. BAR LOUIE Mammoth portions of very decent bar/bistro fare with an amazingly varied menu that should satisfy every taste. Some excellent drink deals abound, too. 11525 Cantrell Road, Suite 924. Full bar, All CC. $$-$$$. 501-228-0444.

LD daily, BR Sat.-Sun. BIG WHISKEY’S AMERICAN BAR AND GRILL A modern grill pub in the River Market District with all the bells and whistles - 30 flat-screen TVs, whiskey on tap, plus boneless wings, burgers, steaks, soups and salads. 225 E Markham St. Full bar, All CC. $$. 501-324-2449. LD daily.

BOBBY’S COUNTRY COOKIN’ One of the better plate lunch spots in the area, with some of the best fried chicken and pot roast around, a changing daily casserole and wonderful homemade pies. 301 N. Shackleford Road, Suite E1. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-224-9500. L Mon.-Fri. CAFE 201 The hotel restaurant in the Crowne Plaza serves up a nice lunch buffet. 201 S. Shackleford Road. Full bar, All CC. $$. 501-2233000. BLD Mon.-Fri., BD Sat., BR Sun. CATFISH CITY AND BBQ GRILL Basic fried fish and sides, including green tomato pickles, and now with tasty ribs and sandwiches in beef, pork and sausage. 1817 S. University Ave. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-663-7224. LD Tue.-Sat. CHEERS IN THE HEIGHTS Good burgers and sandwiches, vegetarian offerings and salads at lunch, and fish specials and good steaks in the evening. 2010 N. Van Buren. Full bar, All CC. $$-$$$. 501-663-5937. LD Mon.-Sat. 1901 Club Manor Drive. Maumelle. Full bar, All CC. 501-851-6200. LD daily, BR Sun. CHICKEN WANG & CAFE Regular, barbecue, spicy, lemon, garlic pepper, honey mustard and Buffalo wings. Open late. 8320 Colonel Glenn Road. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-562-1303.

LD Mon.-Sat. COLD STONE CREAMERY This national chain takes a base flavor (everything from Sweet Cream to Chocolate Cake Batter) and adds your choice of ingredients or a combination of ingredients it calls a Creation. Cold Stone also serves up a variety of ice cream cakes and cupcakes. 12800 Chenal Parkway. No alcohol, All CC. $. 501-225-7000. LD daily.

THE EVERYDAY SOMMELIER Your friendly neighborhood wine shop. #theeverydaysommelier

KRUPP BROTHERS STAGECOACH VINEYARD CHARDONNAY 2013 ELSEWHERE $64.99 - SPECIAL $49.99 From hillside fruit on one of Napa’s most important vineyards (Stagecoach Vineyard), our friend Jay Buoncristiani has created a beautiful wine that exhibits aromas of pineapple, guava, ripe pear, jasmine, vanillin, crème brulee and candied apple.Bright fruit, butterscotch, roasted marshmallow and integrated oak lead to flavors of lemon cream pie coupled with minerality and vibrant acidity. Only 285 Cases produced.

Rahling Road @ Chenal Parkway 501.821.4669 • olooneys@aristotle.net • www.olooneys.com

DAVE AND RAY’S DOWNTOWN DINER Breakfast daily featuring biscuits and gravy, home fries, sausage and made-to-order omelets. Lunch buffet with four choices of meats and eight veggies. 824 W. Capitol Ave. No alcohol. $. 501-372-8816. BL Mon.-Fri. DAVID’S BURGERS Serious hamburgers, steak salads, homemade custard. 101 S. Bowman Road. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-227-8333.

LD Mon.-Sat. 1100 Highway 65 N. Conway.

No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. (501) 327-3333 4000 McCain Blvd. NLR. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$.

501-353-0387. LD Mon.-Sat. FLIGHT DECK A not-your-typical daily lunch special highlights this spot, which also features inventive sandwiches, salads and a popular burger. Central Flying Service at Adams Field.

Beer and wine, All CC. $-$$. 501-975-9315. BL Mon.-Sat. FORTY TWO Solid choice for weekday lunch, featuring entrees and sandwiches from around the world. 1200 President Clinton Ave. Full bar, All CC. $-$$. 501-537-0042. L Mon.-Sat. HILLCREST ARTISAN MEATS A fancy charcuterie and butcher shop with excellent daily soup and sandwich specials. Limited seating is available. 2807 Kavanaugh Blvd. Suite B. No alcohol, All CC. $$-$$$. 501-671-6328. L Mon.-Sat. JASON’S DELI A huge selection of sandwiches (wraps, subs, po’ boys and pitas), salads and spuds, as well as red beans and rice and chicken pot pie. Plus a large selection of heart healthy and light dishes. 301 N. Shackleford Road. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-954-8700. LD daily.

LASSIS INN One of the state’s oldest restaurants still in the same location and one of the best for catfish and buffalo fish. 518 E 27th St. Beer and wine, All CC. $$. 501-372-8714. LD Tue.-Sat. LINDA’S CORNER Southern and soul food.

2601 Barber St. 501-372-1511.

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

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

ASIAN

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

NLR. Full bar, All CC. $$-$$$. 501-374-8081. LD Sun.-Fri., D Sat. PANDA GARDEN Large buffet including Chinese favorites, a full on-demand sushi bar, a cold seafood bar, pie case, salad bar and dessert bar. 2604 S. Shackleford Road. Beer and wine, All CC. $-$$. 501-224-8100. LD daily.

PEI WEI Sort of a miniature P.F. Chang’s, but a lot of fun and plenty good with all the Chang favorites we like, such as the crisp honey shrimp, dan dan noodles and pad thai. 205 N. University Ave. Beer and wine, All CC. $$. 501-280-9423.

LD daily.

P.F. CHANG’S CHINA BISTRO Nuevo Chinese from the Brinker chain. 317 S. Shackleford Road.

Full bar, All CC. $$-$$$. 501-225-4424. LD daily.

SUPER KING BUFFET Large buffet with sushi and a Mongolian grill. 4000 Springhill Plaza Court. NLR. Beer and wine, All CC. $-$$.

501-945-4802. LD daily.

THE SOUTHERN GOURMASIAN Delicious www.arktimes.com

JULY 23, 2015

29

DINING CAPSULES, CONT.

$8 MILLION FOR CASEWORKERS PLEDGED, CONT. ratio than does Arkansas.

The report also discusses in detail the widespread sense of tension and mistrust between DCFS workers and their extra-departmental counterparts, particularly in the Administrative Office of the Courts, which runs the attorney ad litem program that assigns lawyers to represent foster children. Vincent recommends that the DCFS-AOC relationship be strengthened.

The Times reported in its July 9 cover story on the crisis in the children’s welfare system in Sebastian County that poor DCFS-AOC relations were a significant issue there, where one ad litem said DCFS attorneys routinely impede communication between DCFS caseworkers and ad litems; caseworkers say they fear ad litems are out to “get them in trouble”; and there are rumors of a DCFS “blackball list” of ad litems who have embarrassed the department in court.

The report makes nine other key recommendations other than the three-year plan to reduce caseloads and repairing the DCFS-AOC relationships. It calls for the state to: • Designate a staff member in the gov-

ernor’s office to coordinate interagency planning and system collaboration for Children, Youth and Family Services.

• Build DCFS capacity to partner with stakeholders.

• Address the shortage of placements.

• Create a DCFS county-central office task force to address local administrative flexibility.

• Expedite the process for filling DCFS vacancies.

• Develop and implement a “Principle-Based DCFS Model of Practice.”

• Strengthen DCFS assessment and family engagement skills.

• Expand the availability of intensive home and community-based mental health services.

Positives in Vincent’s report: Child maltreatment has declined. But fatalities are the third highest in the U.S. It also reports that the prescribing of antipsychotic drugs to children is down and the adoption rate is up.

Funding for part of this reporting was provided by people who donated to a crowdfunding campaign on ioby. com and the Arkansas Public Policy Panel.

DUMAS, CONT. in neighboring Iraq, invades Iran.

Although Reagan apparently had wished for warmer relations with the Iranians who had helped him win the election, he decides by 1982 to support Saddam with military intelligence and materiel support and by pressing the ExportImport Bank to give Saddam financing for the war. The eight-year war costs more than a million lives, many from Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons.

The U.S. never condemns Iraq’s use of the weapons.

1986: A disgruntled Iranian leaks the story of Reagan’s shipment of missiles to Iran (the U.S. eventually admitted sending 2,530) in exchange for Iran’s help in freeing seven hostages in Lebanon. Reagan’s national security adviser famously flies to Tehran bearing a Bible with a personal inscription from Reagan and a cake baked in the shape of a key to persuade the Iranians to help. Reagan’s office diverts some of the proceeds from the arms sales to revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, thus violating both the law and American policy on negotiating with terrorists.

Reagan apologizes and President George H.W. Bush pardons administration officials accused of violating the law.

Iran executes the leaker for humiliating the government.

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JULY 23, 2015

ARKANSAS TIMES

1988: The U.S. Navy ship Vincennes fires two missiles into a civilian Iranian airliner bound for Dubai, killing all 290 passengers and crewmen, and explains that it mistook the giant airbus for an Iranian fighter jet. Iran convinces itself that it is a signal that the U.S. intends to take a more active role for Saddam Hussein and bring down the Iranian government and two months later accepts a U.N. ceasefire.

1988: The scientist who developed American ally Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal sells atomic secrets and a partially developed centrifuge to Iran and the same secrets to North Korea, which would develop its own nuclear arsenal during the administration of George W. Bush. (North Korea is a thousand miles nearer U.S. shores than Iran.)

2003: The international atomic agency confronts Iran with evidence it has a clandestine nuclear program, but the Bush administration is passive.

2009: President Obama, citing an international atomic agency’s findings, reveals that Iran has built a centrifuge facility under a mountain near Qom and in 2011 gets Russia and China to join international sanctions, which brings Iran to the bargaining table.

With a record like that, critics of the deal ask, how can you trust the nutty Iranians?

Southern-Asian fusion. We crave the pork buns.

Made the transition from food truck to brickand-mortar in 2015 to rave reviews. 219 West Capitol. Beer and wine, All CC. $-$$. 501-3135645. LD Mon.-Sat. VAN LANG CUISINE Terrific Vietnamese cuisine, particularly the way the pork dishes and the assortment of rolls are presented. Great prices, too. Massive menu, but it’s user-friendly for locals with full English descriptions and numbers for easy ordering. 3600 S. University Ave. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-570-7700.

LD daily.

BARBECUE

CAPITOL SMOKEHOUSE AND GRILL Beef, pork and chicken, all smoked to melting tenderness and doused with a choice of sauces.

The crusty but tender backribs star. Side dishes are top quality. A plate lunch special is now available. 915 W. Capitol Ave. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-372-4227. L Mon.-Fri. SIMS BAR-B-QUE Great spare ribs, sandwiches, beef, half and whole chicken and an addictive vinegar-mustard-brown sugar sauce unique for this part of the country. 2415 Broadway. Beer, CC. $-$$. 501-372-6868. LD Mon.-Sat. 1307 John Barrow Road. Beer, All CC. $-$$. 501-2242057. LD Mon.-Sat. 7601 Geyer Springs Road.

Beer, All CC. $$. 501-562-8844. LD Mon.-Sat.

EUROPEAN / ETHNIC

ALI BABA A Middle Eastern restaurant, butcher shop and grocery. 3400 S University Ave. No alcohol, All CC. 501-379-8011. BLD Mon.-Sat. BANANA LEAF INDIAN FOOD TRUCK Tasty Indian street food. 201 N Van Buren St. No alcohol, CC. $-$$. 501-227-0860. L Mon.-Fri. KHALIL’S PUB Widely varied menu with European, Mexican and American influences.

Go for the Bierocks, rolls filled with onions and beef. 110 S. Shackleford Road. Full bar, All CC. $$. 501-224-0224. LD daily. BR Sun. STAR OF INDIA The best Indian restaurant in the region, with a unique buffet at lunch and some fabulous dishes at night (spicy curried dishes, tandoori chicken, lamb and veal, vegetarian). 301 N. Shackleford. Beer and wine, All CC. $$. 501-227-9900. LD daily.

ITALIAN

CHUCK E. CHEESE’S Games, rides, prizes, food and entertainment for kids, big and small.

2706 S. Shackleford Road. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. 501-225-2200. LD daily.

DAMGOODE PIES A somewhat different Italian/pizza place, largely because of a spicy garlic white sauce that’s offered as an alternative to the traditional red sauce. Good bread, too. 2701 Kavanaugh Blvd. Beer and wine, All CC. $$-$$$. 501-664-2239. LD daily. 6706 Cantrell Road. Beer and wine, All CC. $$-$$$.

501-664-2239. LD daily. 10720 Rodney Parham Road. Beer and wine, All CC. $$-$$$. 501-6642239. LD daily. 37 East Center St. Fayetteville.

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

NYPD PIZZA Plenty of tasty choices in the obvious New York police-like setting, but it’s fun. Only the pizza is cheesy. Even the personal pizzas come in impressive combinations, and baked ziti, salads are more also are available. Cheap slice specials at lunch. 6015 Chenonceau Blvd., Suite 1. Beer and wine, All CC. $-$$. 501-868-3911. LD daily.

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

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

501-246-5422. D daily.

LATINO

CANTINA CINCO DE MAYO Friendly, tasty American-ized Mex. 3 Rahling Circle. Full bar, CC. $$. 501-821-2740. LD daily.

CASA MANANA Great guacamole and garlic beans, superlative chips and salsa (red and green) and a broad selection of fresh seafood, plus a deck out back. 6820 Cantrell Road. Full bar, All CC. $-$$. 501-280-9888. LD daily 18321 Cantrell Road. Full bar, All CC. $-$$. 501-8688822. LD daily 400 President Clinton Ave. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$. (501) 372-6637. BL Mon.-Sat. CASA MEXICANA Familiar Tex-Mex style items all shine, in ample portions, and the steakcentered dishes are uniformly excellent. 7111 JFK Blvd. NLR. Full bar, All CC. $$. 501-835-7876.

LD daily.

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

LA CASA REAL 11121 N Rodney Parham Road.

Full bar, All CC. 501-219-4689. LD Mon.-Sat. LA VAQUERA The tacos at this truck are more expensive than most, but they’re still cheap eats. One of the few trucks where you can order a combination plate that comes with rice, beans and lettuce. 4731 Baseline Road. No alcohol, No CC. $. 501-565-3108. LD Mon.-Sat. MEXICO CHIQUITO Some suggest cheese dip was born at this Central Arkansas staple, where you’ll find hearty platters of boldly spiced, inexpensive food that compete well with those at the “authentic” joints. 13924 Cantrell Road. No alcohol, All CC. $-$$.

501-217-0700. LD daily. 1524 W. Main St. Jacksonville. No alcohol. $$. 501-982-0533. LD daily. 4511 Camp Robinson Road. NLR. Full bar, All CC. $$. 501-771-1604. LD daily. 11406 W. Markham. No alcohol, All CC. $$. 501-2170647. LD daily.

MOE’S SOUTHWEST GRILL A “build-yourown-burrito” place, with several tacos and nachos to choose from as well. Wash it down with a beer from their large selection. 12312 Chenal Pkwy. Beer, All CC. $-$$. 501-223-3378.

LD daily.

SUPER 7 GROCERY STORE This Mexican grocery/video store/taqueria has a great daily buffet featuring a changing assortment of real Mexican cooking. Fresh tortillas pressed by hand and grilled, homemade salsas, beans as good as beans get. Plus soup every day. 1415 Barrow Road. Beer, No CC. $. 501-219-2373.

BLD daily.

SUPERMERCADO SIN FRONTERAS Shiny, large Mexican grocery with a bakery and restaurant attached. 4918 Baseline Road. Beer, All CC. $$. 501-562-4206. BLD daily.

TAQUERIA JALISCO SAN JUAN The taco truck for the not-so-adventurous crowd. They claim to serve “original Mexico City tacos,” but it’s their chicken tamales that make it worth a visit. They also have tortas, quesadillas and fajitas. 11200 Markham St. No alcohol, No CC. $. 501-541-5533. LD daily.

TAQUERIA SAMANTHA On Friday and Saturday nights, this mobile taqueria parks outside of Jose’s Club Latino in a parking lot on the corner of Third and Broadway. 300 Broadway Ave. No alcohol, No CC. $. 501-5685264. D Fri.-Sat. (sporadic hours beyond that).

TAQUERIA Y CARNICERIA GUADALAJARA Cheap, delicious tacos, tamales and more.

Always bustling. 3811 Camp Robinson Road.

NLR. Beer, All CC. $-$$. 501-753-9991. BLD daily.

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ARKANSAS TIMES MARKETPLACE www.2KKARZ.com We sell CASH CARS for around $2,000 We can also sell your car for you!

Go to Website for details (501 ) 503-0525

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

www.movingtomac.com

Protech Solutions Inc (Little Rock, AR)

Sr. Systems and Network Administrator (#2560) Sr. Programmer Analyst (#2564) Programmer Analyst (#2565) Apply online w/Job ID above www.protechsolutions.com

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HEIFER INTERNATIONAL FINANCE OFFICER LITTLE ROCK, AR

HEIFER INTERNATIONAL ADMINISTRATIVE SPECIALIST LITTLE ROCK, AR

Technical skills in risk management, compliance, finance, & accounting. BA in Acct/Finance + 5yrs exp. CPA & MS Office Suite exp. preferred.

Coordinates daily operations, communications, policies & procedures, & legal issues; facilitates all admin activities for Asia Program.

Excellent organization & communication skills. Must be fluent in English; Gen. office skills + Microsoft Office; HS/ GED+6yrs exp. req.

BEAUTIFUL make HAPPY PEOPLE!

Children and Adults

We accept: AR-KIDS, Medicaid, Care Credit and all types of insurance.

PAYMENT PLANS AVAILABLE

ACCEPTING NEW PATIENTS

Gentle Teeth Cleaning • Tooth Extractions • Ceramic Crowns & Bridges Tooth Colored Fillings • Implants • X-rays • Root Canals • Orthodontic Braces • Sleep Apnea (OSA)

Faith Dental Clinic

Apply at

WWW.HEIFER.ORG/ CAREERS. Heifer International is AA/EOE.

Apply at

WWW.HEIFER.ORG/ CAREERS. Heifer International is AA/EOE.

7301 Baseline Rd · Little Rock Monday–Saturday

OUR DOC TOR DR. CHRISTOPHER LARSON, D.D.S.

(501) 565-3009 (501) 562-1665

www.faithdentalclinic.com www.arktimes.com

JULY 23, 2015

31

ANNOUNCING THE 2015 ARKANAS TIMES WHOLE HOG ROAST benefiting

WHOLE HOG

Argenta Arts District

SATURDAY, AUGUST 29 Argenta Farmers Market Events Grounds 5 until 9 PM

Arkansas Times and the Argenta Arts District are now accepting both AMATEUR and PROFESSIONAL TEAMS to compete in our 3rd annual Whole Hog Roast

WE ARE STILL ACCEPTING:

AMATEUR TEAMS are considered individuals or businesses not connected to any particular restaurant, food truck or catering companies. Amateur teams will be preparing at least 30 pounds of pork butt. Amateur teams wanting to enter our People’s Choice “Anything but Butt” will need to provide 30 pounds of options such as chicken wings, thighs, ribs, goat, stuffed jalapenos, anything besides pork butt - be creative. This is a separate award for amateurs only. Edwards Food Giant is offering 20% discount on meat purchases. Entry fee: $150

BEER & WINE GARDEN Gated festival area selling beer & wine ($5 each)

PROFESSIONAL TEAMS are considered restaurants, catering companies and food trucks. Professional teams will be preparing a whole hog from Ben E. Keith Company Entry fee: $500 and includes the whole hog, pick up by Aug. 26

Each team must provide two sides serving at least 50 people each.

• TICKET HOLDERS WILL CAST ALL THE VOTES VIA “TOKENS” • THREE TOKENS WILL BE PROVIDED TO ALL TICKET HOLDERS, ADDITIONAL TOKENS ARE AVAILABLE FOR SALE • THREE WINNERS WILL BE CHOSEN: PEOPLE’S CHOICE FOR BEST PROFESSIONAL TEAM, BEST AMATEUR TEAM AND THE BEST AMATEUR “ANYTHING BUT BUTT” TEAM.

ARKANSAS ALE HOUSE • COUNTRY CLUB OF ARKANSAS MIDTOWN BILLIARDS • SCHLAFLY - ST. LOUIS BREWERY &RESTAURANT SIMPLY THE BEST CATERING • SO RESTAURANT-BAR To enter, contact Drue Patton dpatton@argentadc.org or Phyllis Britton phyllis@arktimes.com 32

JULY 23, 2015

ARKANSAS TIMES

ONL PLEASE V