Arkansas Times - June 16, 2016

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Investigators say Judge Joseph Boeckmann Jr. of Wynne abused his position to serve his sexual desires.

Power, truth, justice and whispers in a Delta town.

BY DAVID KOON

Early Muhammad (left) and Richard Milliman say Boeckmann made overtures to them after they were arrested.

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JUNE 16, 2016

3

COMMENT

Asa and Trump Asa Hutchinson called Donald Trump’s remarks about the judge overseeing the case against his phony university as “antithetical” to what America stands for. However, that won’t stop Hutchinson from supporting Trump as the GOP’s nominee for president. In recent comments regarding his support of Trump, Gov. Hutchinson said, “Yes, I will support the nominee of the Republican Party because the Republican Party is the best framework to improve our economy, protect our freedoms and assure a strong defense.”

Improve our economy? Really? Has the governor noticed what Republican policies have done to our economy over the past 30 or so years? All the GOP has in terms of economic policy is “Reaganomics.” That’s it! And we see where that approach has led us. As far as protecting our freedoms, the only freedom we see the GOP trying to protect these days is the freedom of some to legally discriminate against others. Asa also thinks the GOP is better at maintaining a strong defense.

Well, we spend more than every other country combined on our national defense, and have been doing so for decades. However, our list of enemies and their potential for doing us harm seems to be increasing.

Also, I thought Republicans were against simply “throwing money” at a problem.

Go figure.

Sorry, Asa, your stated reasons for sticking with Trump don’t hold water.

At least be honest about your real reasons for supporting him.

Rich Hutson Cabot

run every lever of power in this country, including the electoral process.

And the voters smell it. They know something’s really wrong with the system itself. That’s why they seek someone willing to institute radical change like Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. It’s a last ditch attempt to initiate change from the top down.

Both parties have contributed to an economic decline that’s seen wages for the working class stagnate for the last 30 years, while the uber-rich are enjoying a new gilded age. The military gets a $600 billion budget and half of all discretionary spend-

ing, while college students are strapped with a whopping trillion-dollar debt.

Crass partisanship is the real “children’s crusade” because it only perpetuates this sad state of affairs. It plays right into the hands of the corporate state, which actively seeks a divided, polarized citizenry.

The Alcoholics Anonymous definition of “insanity” is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

Such are our elections.

So, yes, we need a revolution. The only real way to get corporate and special interest money out of government and return

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JUNE 16, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

From the web: In response to last week’s cover story, “A mother and child disunion”: The Adoption and Safe Families Act needs to be abolished. It incentivizes removing children from families instead of providing services, traumatizing parents and the children it’s supposed to be helping. It also incentivizes adoption over family preservation. [Lisa] Rushing’s treatment at the hands of children’s services is common even for parents who aren’t in prison.

States are making money off of children in foster care and even more money from severing parental rights and getting kids adopted. Many social workers deliberately interfere with parents’ efforts to regain their children (many of whom should never have been taken in the first place) by placing insurmountable barriers, endless hoops to jump through and refusing to grant even a smidge of leeway for things like having to miss a class or court appearance in order to keep the job the parent is required to have.

Abolishing the Adoption and Safe Families Act would be a great first step in fixing the horrendously broken foster care system.

LisaC In response to Gene Lyons’ June 11 column, “Democratic endgame”:

Sanders was for democracy Last month, Gene Lyons feigned nonchalance about the election season, claiming he wasn’t “angry enough to participate fully in the festivities.” This month, he suddenly goes postal on Bernie Sanders, hurling invectives every which way: “Trotskyite,” “damned fool,” “children’s crusade,” “poisonous,” “crackpot opinions,” etc. He even throws in some sexual innuendo for good measure.

Yes, Mr. Lyons, you’re engaging in McCarthyism. You’re also completely ignoring the fact that the real centers of power in this country are corporate entities and moneyed special interests, not the government. They call the shots.

We don’t. That’s what Sanders is trying to fix. It’s not “Trotskyism” he’s fighting for. It’s democracy.

Both mainstream parties have become just one: the Business Party. And the stench of corporate corruption has over-

power to the people is by mass revolt and sustained acts of civil disobedience.

So rant all you want, Mr. Lyons. In the end, change will come from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Brad Bailey Fayetteville

Well, another doozy! The Donald has nothing over Gene Lyons. Sure, free speech is priceless, whether practiced by progressives like Bernie Sanders, hypocrites like Hillary Clinton, or by McCarthyites like The Donald and Gene. Gene really does not like anyone who disagrees with him or, God forbid, anyone on the left. Or who is an intellectual. Brainy folks.

He literally believes that red-baiting is legitimate behavior in a democracy! Any discussion of economic and social equality makes Gene sick.

Citizen

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Citizen: Do you realize that every one of your statements about Lyons is false?

You’re just pissed because you don’t agree with him. Lyons loves to point out pointless behavior. It’s just one of his many qualities that keeps me read-

ing. This week, it happens to be Bernie being skewered. Next week, it might be Trump, or some dumb-ass cattle ranchers.

In my opinion, there are three great political columnists working today: Gene Lyons, Roger Simon and Joe Klein. All straight shooters. None of them would write anything that they didn’t believe. None of them allows anger to dictate his writing.

Lyons writes from the heart. If you don’t agree with him, that’s fine. I’m sure he doesn’t mind.

Tony Galati

His name is Ray Wills.

A shameful article, full of vitriol, language that would suit a Trump. Like many others, I find Bernie Sanders’ views not only refreshing, but necessary in the political oligarchy the Republicans and Democrats are expecting us to believe is a modern, viable democracy. And, like most of my ilk, I will hold my nose and vote Democratic in November, simply because not doing so will benefit Trump. peterjkraus CORRECTION An actor who plays Glenn Brannon in the Arkansas Repertory Theatre’s production “Windfall” was misidentified in a cutline that ran with his photograph last week’s issue of the Arkansas Times.

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JUNE 16, 2016

5

EYE ON ARKANSAS

WEEK THAT WAS

“Everyone get out of pulse and keep running” — A message posted to the Facebook page of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., early Sunday morning soon after a 29-year-old man named Omar Mateen began shooting into the crowd and taking hostages. By the time police stormed the building and killed Mateen, 49 people were dead and over 50 wounded, most of them members of the city’s Latino LGBT community. Mateen, a U.S. citizen, claimed allegiance to the Islamic State when he spoke by phone to law enforcement officials during the standoff, but there’s no evidence he was ever in contact with the terrorist group itself. Mateen legally purchased the AR-15 rifle he used to carry out the massacre.

Exploiting calamity For those whose political brand thrives on fear and division, the mass killing in Orlando represents an opportunity.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump wasted no time in renewing his call for a temporary ban on all Muslims entering the United States and appeared to accuse President Obama of being complicit in terrorist acts such as the one committed

by Omar Mateen. “Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind,” Trump suggested ominously during an interview with Fox News on Monday. “There’s something else going on.”

Such comments raise the question once again of whether Arkansas Republican leaders such as Gov. Hutchinson will stand behind their party’s man no matter what he says. Last week, after Trump impugned the impartiality of a federal judge because he is of Mexican descent, Hutchinson said “trying to dis6

JUNE 16, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

BRIAN CHILSON

Quote of the Week:

A PATRIOTIC VIEW: The Main Street Bridge was lit up in rainbow colors Sunday night in honor of the 49 people massacred at an Orlando, Fla., gay nightclub by a loan gunman. The towboat Patriot is moored on the north shore of the Arkansas River.

qualify a judge because of the judge’s ethnic heritage is antithetical to everything that is true and good about America,” but that he would nonetheless “support the nominee of the Republican Party.” How far down the rabbit hole will pragmatic conservatives like Asa let themselves be led?

Change coming to DHS Cindy Gillespie, the new director at the Arkansas Department of Human Services, announced last week that she will centralize many of the vast agency’s business functions — such as finances, procurement and information technology — in a handful of new “chiefs” who will report directly to her.

DHS is composed of a thicket of subdivisions with over 7,000 statewide employees, a sprawling mandate (the agency handles everything from foster care to Medicaid) and a record pockmarked with scandal. Centralizing control of business functions under the director could result in greater efficiency and accountability, two things DHS sorely needs. Or, it could be a pointless reshuffling of bureaucracy; only time will tell. Gillespie next turns her attention to a review of the agency’s programs and personnel.

Tackling teen tobacco The HelenaWest Helena City Council last week

passed an ordinance to increase the legal age for tobacco purchases from 18 to 21; it takes effect Sept. 1. Nationwide, 134 other cities — and two states, Hawaii and California — have passed such laws, but the ordinance will be the first of its kind in Arkansas. It was forwarded by Keisha Grigsby, the program coordinator for an anti-smoking advocacy group based in Helena-West Helena, who noted that public health statistics show the average life expectancy in Arkansas Delta towns is almost 10 years lower than it is in Northwest Arkansas.

Big bucks to zoo The Little Rock Zoo has received the largest donation in its 90-year history: a trust worth almost $3 million established by Jayne Granoff Jackson, an animal and zoo lover who died in December. The trust establishes the Jayne and Fletcher Jackson Foundation to benefit the nonprofit Zoological

Foundation, which underwrites various displays at the zoo. An estate sale to be held at Jackson’s home at 1 St. Charles Court on June 16-18 will also benefit the zoo. Jackson cared for eight Yorkshire terriers and two dozen birds until her death, according to the Arkansas Zoological Foundation.

JJ no more The Arkansas Democratic Party has landed former President Bill Clinton to speak at the party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner, the last to be named for the former presidents because of objections to their legacies (including slave-owning and the Indian Removal Act). Many other state Democratic Party offices across the country have made similar moves. This year’s event — to be held Friday, July 15, at Verizon Arena — is billed only as the “35th Annual JJ Dinner.” Tickets range from $200 to $1,500.

OPINION

God, guns and gays

T

he Sunday morning slaughter at a about gay people gay club in Orlando, Fla., had all — Mike Huckathe elements of the three-legged bee, for example — were quick to stool of contemporary Dixie politics.

A professed follower of a fundamen- post the now-clitalist religion who was said to be repelled ched “thoughts MAX by gay men and who possessed a con- and prayers” on BRANTLEY cealed carry permit used legally obtained social media. But maxbrantley@arktimes.com weapons to shoot more than 100 people the strident antigay politicians provided no words of before police finally killed him.

Invocations of God, unfettered access comfort about, much less acknowledge, to guns and discrimination against gays the special terror that the attack held for are popular political themes in Dixie.

LGBT people.

The wrinkle in Orlando was that the President Obama did. But Gov. killer, Omar Mateen, was a different sort Hutchinson did not, nor did any of Arkanof fundamentalist — Muslim. He also said sas’s Republican congressmen. Sen. Tom he swore his allegiance to the militant Cotton offered prayers for victims and Islamic State (relatives said he was more thanks to first responders, for example, mentally unbalanced than devoutly reli- but no mention of gay targeting. At least gious; he also claimed ties to various radi- he didn’t repeat the cold comment he cal groups viewed as enemies of ISIS). once uttered on CNN in defense of the Gun control and the peril of Islamic Arkansas legislation to allow discriminaimmigrants dominated the immediate tion against LGBT people in the name political discussion. The third leg of the of (his) religion. Gay people should get Dixie political triad — gays — was harder some perspective, he declaimed. “In Iran to find. they hang you for the crime of being gay.”

Politicians who’ve said ugly things Rep. Bob Ballinger, a Republican leg-

Judicial sunshine

S

ome 47 years ago, my newspaper, on the advice of its senior counsel, scuttled a story of mine about a trial judge’s role in a famous corporate scandal that sent three businessmen to prison and disgraced one of the state’s most colorful politicians.

I still disagree with the lawyer’s advice and the paper’s following it, but over time I developed at least some appreciation for the lawyer’s point of view. He said the facts in my story, all from public records, cast such a dark shadow over the integrity of the court that to publish it in the statewide newspaper could destroy public confidence in the independence and impartiality of the judiciary. I thought, so what?

I bring up that old grievance because a task force of the bar association has come up with better remedies to the peril of judicial corruption and favoritism than my newspaper counsel’s, which was to keep knowledge of scoundrelry from the public unless there was clear evidence a judge had broken the law. The bar group wants to make influence-buying either illegal or fully transparent and to find a way besides elections to choose judges, at least for the Supreme Court.

Judicial independence, the great doctrine of the Founders that was supposed to be the key to preserving ERNEST democratic instituDUMAS tions, has become an urgent issue in Arkansas this year. The genius of the founders was to distribute power among two political branches of government and a third branch that was to be insulated from politics so that it would be faithful only to the Constitution and the laws. If people discovered that laws could be subverted by pressure on judges, the social fabric of the country would break down.

The appearance of huge bundles of money in Supreme Court races starting in 2010, the decisive “dark money” drops in three state Supreme Court races, and the bribery of a trial judge who was running for the Court of Appeals raised the appearance that special interests could buy what they wanted with gifts and election money not just from the legislative and executive branches, but from the independent branch as well.

The task force recommended return-

islator, tweeted: “That evil man needed a good God who would have changed him into a person whose love forbids such evil acts.” This rang a bit hollow from a man who’s led the fight for legal discrimination against gay people.

Frank Bruni, a gay man who writes a column for the New York Times, said it was not a time for identity politics (indeed, the story grew still more complicated by reports that the shooter might himself be a conflicted gay man.) But he also wrote: “… Orlando is an understandable prompt for questions about our own degrees of inclusion and fairness and whether we do all that we should to keep L.G.B.T. people safe. We don’t.”

Amen to that. In Arkansas, we encourage a poisonous atmosphere toward gays.

The governor and most of the legislature support legal discrimination in hiring, housing or even feeding a gay person.

They also favor legislation to prevent cities with a fairer outlook from promoting inclusiveness on the local level.

The slaughter in Orlando occurred not long before Texarkana voters will decide whether to repeal a unanimously approved city ordinance to prohibit discrimination in city personnel practices on account of sexual orientation or gen-

der. The ordinance is being fought on the familiar, and specious, “boys in the girls bathroom” argument, but also on a broader desire to discriminate against gay people.

Dennis Young, a former Texarkana legislator, sent me a photo of people demonstrating in favor of repeal Sunday afternoon, while bodies still lay in the blood-soaked Orlando club. The protestors, he said, included the Fayetteville lawyer Travis Story, who is a partner in legal practice with Rep. Bob Ballinger.

Story led the fight against the Fayetteville nondiscrimination ordinance. He’s been close to the Duggar family, which poured money into legal discrimination in Fayetteville (even as they coped with messy problems of their own at home.)

Young wrote, “ It is absolutely, totally revolting that they are doing this at all, but certainly even more repugnant that this comes less than 24 hours of the worst mass murder in the history of our country. God save our country if people like these ever gain control.”

Sorry, Dennis, but they ARE in control in Arkansas. No roadside signs are necessary to spot them. By their silence in the face of horror you may know them.

Thoughts and prayers, y’all.

ing to the Founders’ plan for choosing judges, at least for the tribunal of last resort. Instead of electing them, the governor would appoint justices from a short list of qualified and virtuous lawyers provided by an independent commission.

Arkansans are unlikely to vote to give up their power to elect justices, even if they find a satisfactory way of choosing the judicial commissioners.

But the other reforms, which strengthen the loophole-ridden campaign finance and disclosure laws and the ethical canons for judges, are doable — by initiative if the special interests beat them in the legislature and the Supreme Court. Many are in a campaign-reform bill by Rep. Clarke Tucker (D-Little Rock).

The dark-money campaigns of 2014 and 2016 would be illegal. Every group that spends money to influence a judicial election would have to fully disclose its members and the sources of the money.

More importantly, the monied interests, whether corporations, lobbying groups or just very rich people, would be subject to the same restrictions as individuals who support a candidate. They would be identified on public reports, and if the limit for an individual supporter of a candidate is $1,000, that would be the limit as well for each of the Koch brothers. Under a progeny of decisions by the Antonin Scalia Supreme Court, corporations and the very

rich who want to buy public offices have rights not accorded to ordinary individuals, which include anonymity and unlimited spending privileges. But the court did imply that states might impose some restrictions in special cases like judicial elections.

The bar task force also wants to tighten gift rules. Trial and appellate judges could not accept gifts from anyone but a close relative. The lavish gifts that Supreme Court Justice Courtney Goodson received from her lover, a prominent lawyer with much at stake before the appellate courts, would be illegal, even though she would later divorce her husband and marry him.

Judges and candidates could not solicit, accept or use the support and endorsement of political and lobbying groups, such as the Republican Party and the National Rifle Association. It implies favoritism, forbidden by the doctrine of judicial independence.

Judicial canons would force disclosure of election funds and relationships with lawyers and clients so that the rules would be clearer for judges to recuse in cases where there is a suspicion of partiality.

But the laws also must impose stiff and certain punishment. As the courts of Alabama proved last week when they convicted the House speaker for violating laws he had passed, the laws then must be enforced. We’ve had problems there, too. www.arktimes.com

JUNE 16, 2016

7

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JUNE 16, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

t’s been 20 years since I started hearing alarming tales from a friend who supervised a daycare center for hospital employees’ children. She said that for the first time in her considerable experience, the preschool children of medical professionals were pitching full-scale hissy fits — hitting, kicking and even biting their parents, without being effectively disciplined.

She said it was common to see grown men and women — doctors, nurses and technicians — on their knees reasoning with 3- and 4-year-olds going ape over stuff like juice boxes and peanut butter sandwiches. My friend said the same kids most often settled down and behaved as soon as their parents were out of sight.

When it’s naptime, it’s naptime.

Now reasoning with a 3-year-old is pretty much like bargaining with a cat. If you’re lucky you might eventually bore the little scamp into submission. Thankfully, this particular folly has been largely confined to the educated classes. Truck drivers and short-order cooks know better.

More recently, however, police in posh communities have begun arresting parents for crimes like allowing their children to frequent playgrounds on their own. Apparently my entire childhood, and that of my 40-something sons, was one long serial crime. I used to cross them at the corner and let them walk several blocks to the Billy Mitchell Boys Club on their own. They learned a lot down there, not all of it on the daycare curriculum.

Judging by the popular press, it appears that many of those toddlers, coddled and cosseted all their lives, have now enrolled in college, where confusion reigns. It appears that the faculty and administration of some of our most esteemed institutions of higher education have found themselves pleading with the little beggars on their knees.

Item: At Brown University last year, administrators fearful that student anxieties might be “triggered” by a debate about campus “rape culture” set up a “safe space” to recuperate from the stress of hearing heterodox opinions. According to Judith Shulevitz in the New York Times, “the room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, PlayDoh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.”

Evidently a couple of dozen students hid out there during the debate — the wonder, I suppose, being that the event took place at all.

Item: At Emory University, students pronounced themselves traumatized by “TRUMP 2016” GENE chalked on campus LYONS sidewalks. Demonstrators chanted “Come speak to us, we are in pain!” until the university president agreed. Emory, incidentally, is located in Atlanta, a state likely to be carried by Trump come November.

Item: English literature majors at Yale University objected that a required class in “Major English Poets … creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color.” Reading Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and T.S. Eliot was deemed oppressive.

“We have spoken,” they demanded.

“We are speaking. Pay attention.”

My response would be simple: You don’t want to read Shakespeare, then find another major. What did you think English Literature was going to be?

Item: At the University of Arizona, the “Marginalized Students,” a coalition of “self-described oppressed” young scholars — black, Latino, Native American, Asian, LGBT, etc. — have basically called for re-segregation, with “safe spaces” for each group. The black kids want their own dorm.

Then go back home to Mommy, would be my attitude. Maybe universal military service would be a good thing after all. Tell it to the Marines.

No snarky newspaper column, however, could possibly prepare you for Oberlin College as depicted in a fascinating piece of long-form journalism by Nathan Heller of the New Yorker.

Displaying more patience and curiosity than a person of my inclinations could muster, Heller depicts a campus with an admirable history of social activism in perpetual turmoil from ethnic and sexual controversies so arcane and selfreferential as to defy parody.

A sophomore demands a trigger warning on Sophocles “Antigone.” (Suicide.)

Asian students object that the Chinese food is “inauthentic.” (Imagine that. Second-rate Sichuan cuisine in small-town Ohio!)

Among black students’ 50 “non-negotiable demands” is instant tenure for a writing instructor who says that Jews are responsible for 9/11; also that the college free itself of all remnants of “imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy.”

Ain’t that a mouthful?

The fragility of the gay body

T

he most important American book of the last couple of years is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me.” It’s imperfect, but Coates’s argument that the “black body” (especially the black male body) is under constant threat in white America because of its use and abuse dating back to slavery has helped provide a theoretical structure for understanding the egregious rates of violent death (including, of course, police shootings) and mass incarceration of African Americans a century and a half after Emancipation. As Coates puts it in the letter to his son: “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”

It is that argument that has helped build the foundation for the Black Lives Matter movement and other similar grassroots efforts across the country. In his work, Coates also celebrates the “Meccas” — places of black empowerment like Howard University — which he identifies as models for the spaces that need to become more common so that African Americans can be truly safe in a nation where the evils of slavery will never be fully exorcised.

The shootings at Pulse nightclub early Sunday morning remind us that the “gay body” is also under continual threat in America (and, indeed, across the world).

This threat is grounded not in an institutionalized system like slavery, but instead in other social structures that can lead individuals to unpredictable acts of fanaticism: religions that occasionally lead “true believers” to violence (as was the case with Christian extremist Eric Rudolph, who bombed a lesbian bar in Atlanta soon after he perpetrated the Olympic Park attack in 1996) or undergird hostile legal frameworks (including the 10 countries — mostly Muslim majority — in which homosexuality is subject to the death penalty), as well as gender norms that too often create psychosexual chaos in individuals who can cannot abide violations of such social “rules” (including those who hate themselves for failing to fit within socially entrenched categories).

In the case of the Orlando killer, it may be that these two powerful forces intersected with easy access to high-powered weaponry to create the combustible force that killed dozens.

Even for someone with the privilege of living and working in relative Meccas where LGBT folks are accepted, this realization that there are many around

me who threaten to do harm to LGBT bodies is an ongoing part of being gay in America. (Federal hate JAY crime data shows BARTH that such fears are not irrational ones.) Partly because I’ve come of age during a period in which high-profile assaults on the gay body have taken place (from the assassination of Harvey Milk, to the torture and death of Matthew Shepherd, to the indifference toward HIV/AIDS in the years where its primary victims were gay men), such fears are part of my subconscious. Without being overdramatic, those fears do regularly migrate from the subconscious to the conscious at times (when I reach out to hold my husband’s hand when walking down the street or when driving alone at night on a rural road with a pro-equality sticker on my car). Aside from lingering concerns over a threatening email when I was appointed to the State Board of Education, I am rational enough to know that such fears are not a legitimate source of worry and they quickly fade as I return to one of my Meccas.

And that is what is most disconcerting about the Sunday morning deaths at Pulse: The murders occurred within one of these gay Meccas. While all LGBT bars serve as safe zones (although bar culture has its own damaging impact in perpetuating ageism and body image issues for gay men, but that’s another column), all signs are that Pulse was a truly special place.

A memorial to a man who had died of AIDS, Pulse was a place where issues of age, gender and gender identities that too often divide the LGBT community were buried, making everyone feel welcome and safe. Then a killer invaded that space.

One of my recently graduated students voiced his sense that Pulse might well become his generation’s “Stonewall.” The events at the Stonewall Inn, of course, are the symbolic start of the modern gay civil rights movement, which has seen tremendous victories. However, as the events of Sunday morning show so clearly, the removal of those legal barriers does not provide true freedom. That freedom includes the absence of fear that one’s body might be damaged just because of who one is. The Pulse killings will ideally be the start of a path to that true freedom for LGBT Americans.

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JUNE 16, 2016

9

PEARLS ABOUT SWINE

Don’t put too much stock in SEC rep

T

his column has long leaned upon a stubborn, almost curmudgeonly position regarding the myth of conference supremacy, and more specifically what bearing it has on the fate of Arkansas athletics generally.

The Southeastern Conference is really super good at sports overall. No more, no less. It was ludicrous to extrapolate some kind of higher meaning from the league’s string of BCS titles. It was similarly not too prudent to draw any dramatic conclusions from the league’s alleged deficiencies in men’s basketball that persisted for a few years.

Arkansas baseball just suffered its worst overall season in the Dave Van Horn era, losing every game in May and ending up below .500 after a promising jaunt through some pretty staunch nonconference opposition. The conference schedule got the best of the Hogs, but was it genuinely because the broadbased quality of the SEC presented substantially tougher obstacles? Hard to figure.

Four of the eight “national seeds” in NCAA Super Regional play hailed from the conference. Mississippi State and LSU choked away their shots at Omaha in two games, Texas A&M went out in three and Florida survived only after being blanked in its opening game with Florida State. This came on the heels of Vanderbilt and Ole Miss flaming out early.

The upshot of all of this is that regular season performance in any sport truly cannot elicit much from a postseason perspective. The conference tournaments or championship games take a lot out of teams potentially, and success there can in fact doom a team to failure in the larger picture. It’s true in other power leagues, too, where even lower-tier squads are capable of winning enough to be disruptive to a team’s mojo.

Arkansas, therefore, cannot glean much from being the cellar-dweller in this strange, pitching-poor season. The SEC was indeed a vicious league, as it always is, on the diamond. But nobody can lay the blame there for a bad year.

And the same is true in football, where the excuse has been particularly and dishonestly employed, most notably by the likes of Houston Nutt, who often lamented the strength of schedule as the impediment to his predestined greatness.

10

JUNE 16, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

It’s not enough for Bret Bielema, Van Horn, Mike Anderson, Jimmy Dykes, et al. to deflect anymore, BEAU to say that they WILCOX all start behind an eight-ball from the outset. The league is hard but it is also balanced. Its collective power is a product of its financial resources and nationwide, if not global, exposure. But it isn’t unique, either. The power brokers of the Big 12, Pac 12, Big Ten and elsewhere believe that they can stake the same claim to superiority, and not without merit or support.

Arkansas is a beneficiary of the conference’s reputation and is also a victim of it. The programs that have been the wealthiest haven’t necessarily been those that won the most or racked up the most accolades. The Hogs’ best basketball team of the current century wasn’t demonstrably more attractive to fans, based on attendance numbers; one of the Razorbacks’ most memorable runs to Omaha on the baseball field (2009) was by a team that had a losing league record. Being in a vigorously competitive conference is virtuous and damning, and it’s hard to project which fate will befall which team.

All of this is said for one reason: to not draw much from the preseason football projections that alternatively say Arkansas lost too much offensive skill to compete for a title this year or that the Hogs will be too overwhelmed by the schedule, you know, the one that basically changes very little from year to year save for venues and directional designations for outof-conference teams.

The Hogs will be as capable of faltering against Toledo as they are of beating Ole Miss. Because of the nature of sports and the fallibility of projecting how individuals of that age will come around and when, the fall will be as wildly volatile as spring. Nobody likely thought that Arkansas baseball would slog to a 7-23 SEC record even gauging the league as a whole. Nobody likely projected Arkansas to win eight football games after three straight losses in September, either. The key for the average fan is to remember that as “tough” as the SEC may appear to be, that’s a reputation constructed on utter subjectivity all the way.

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THE OBSERVER NOTES ON THE PASSING SCENE

The bench

T

he Observer has spent the past few weeks doing the backstroke in the poo lagoon of another terrible tale. Read on in this issue for more, if you dare, and if your heart can stand it. It’s the job, sons and daughters, and we’re happy to do it. Keeps us off the streets, with three hots and a cot. That ain’t chickenfeed.

The story, as you’ll soon read, is about a judge who has been accused of doing terrible things — of allegedly twisting Lady Justice’s arm behind her shapely back to get what he wanted from defendants who came into his court. Uncle Max taught us to never assume anything, up to and including our dear ol’ mother’s love, but it looks pretty bad when seen in the whole.

Swimming once again in Turd Cove got us thinking quite a bit about justice and the law. The Observer spends quite a bit of time in courtrooms, All Rising and Being Seated, watching attorneys approach and pass the witness. We know and count as friends quite a few lawyers, who always manage to tell the best lawyer jokes. There was a time when Yours Truly thought seriously about putting a couple of suits on the credit card, taking some night classes, and joining the world’s second oldest profession, but that impulse soon passed.

We are smitten with the law, but not enough to marry — unwilling to spend the late nights and bouts of heartburn, to fail, to plow through legalese. All that’s beside the fact that some judge would have long since thrown us in the slammer for pulling stuff like dragging in mail sacks full of letters to Santa Claus to prove our batshit crazy client right and springing surprise last-minute witnesses to put the SYSTEM on trial, man!

That said, it is the judges who have most impressed The Observer over the years — those plain ol’ human beings who we have given power that would likely turn your average person into Voldemort, without even having to invest in a robe. As proud as The Observer is of the people who sit on the bench, while working on the story

that follows, we often thought: Maybe what we need is some kind of judicial supercomputer, installed in a lovely marble hall somewhere, camera-eyed and microphone-eared, before which lawyers can lay out the bare facts of each case; a judge of wires and flashing tubes which never tires, never gets cranky before lunch or sleepy afterward, and never, ever has to thread the needle between what is legal and what’s right, between the law and the unique freight of passions and prejudices every one of us clings to in our heart, whether we know it or not. A black box of impartiality! One that can mulch confusing testimony, hard evidence and the law together and spit out neat, individually wrapped cubes of justice, devoid of all the troubling humanity we are heir to.

Or maybe, we thought, not. Maybe it takes a human being to sit in judgment over other human beings, because only another person can ascertain that rare and delicate moment when two wrongs do, in fact, add up to a right.

One of the voices we didn’t use in the story was from our friend, Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen.

If ever a man was wise enough to be a judge, it’s probably him. He’s reliable for a solid quote, too, which warrants him gold star status in our Rolodex. In the midst of our wilderness of doubt, The Observer called him up and asked him the hardest question: How should we as a people carry on in faith in the wake of terrible accusations like this?

He, of course, had the answer.

“We need to keep in mind that this is one grievous incident in a statewide judiciary that has district judges and circuit judges in every county and every jurisdiction of the state,” Hizzoner said. “These folks, every day, do their jobs with impartiality and dignity and responsibility. … We take the trust that the public has given us seriously.

We’re human beings, and we’re certainly as susceptible to human foibles as everybody else. But we try to do our job responsibly.”

You’ll hear no objection from us.

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JUNE 16, 2016

11

Arkansas Reporter

THE

Zika is coming It’s just a question of when, say state health experts.

BY TOM COULTER

nered with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Department of Biology to do surveillance on mosquitoes.

Undergraduate students, along with program leader and UALR biology professor Carl Stapleton, primarily use oviposition and gravid traps to collect data. Oviposition traps collect eggs to estimate the wider mosquito popula-

T

he mosquito-borne Zika virus, which can cause serious birth defects in infants, has yet to develop a significant presence in Arkansas.

Only five cases of the virus have been diagnosed in Arkansas, and all of those were in women who had recently traveled from South or Central America.

No one has been infected with Zika by a mosquito in the continental United States.

Zika is carried by Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes, and is transmitted to humans either directly through bites or by sexual contact with infected persons. Infected humans may also transmit the virus to uninfected Aedes mosquitoes. While most Zikainfected mosquitoes are in South and Central America, health experts expect the virus to spread to North American Aedes species; the only question is when, Arkansas Department of Health epidemiologist Dr. Dirk Haselow says.

“I imagine [the number of cases] will increase significantly,” Haselow said.

“We are preparing for an increased burden of cases.”

To fight the virus will require mosquito control, which over the past 50 years has shifted from being a federal responsibility to a local one. There is no statewide office for mosquito control in Arkansas. Instead, city governments are left to develop their own programs.

In total, 16 municipalities have mosquito control programs around the state, mainly in the urban areas of Central and Northwest Arkansas and farming areas of Southeast Arkansas.

A majority of the programs focus on preventing “nuisance mosquitoes,” an umbrella term for the roughly 30 species in Arkansas that don’t carry Zika, by using trucks to spray chemicals at night. However, this prevention method doesn’t work well for the Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus species, because they tend to breed around houses in 12

JUNE 16, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

THE CARRIER OF ZIKA: The Aedes aegypti (above) and Aedes albopictus, mosquitoes that live close to houses, in pooled water.

places like flowerpots or plugged drains.

Aedes mosquitoes travel only roughly 250 yards in their lifetimes.

“Essentially no one around the country has recent experience doing major control efforts for Aedes mosquitoes,” Haselow said. “It requires very laborintensive efforts.”

The species is common along the Gulf Coast and in Florida, and as summer begins, they awake from hibernation in places like Arkansas. The health department is collecting data of every county’s mosquito density to pinpoint Arkansas’s densest Aedes populations.

AHD workers have placed 20 mosquito traps throughout the state, and 45 more are coming soon. The research will be finished sometime this winter.

“We’re focusing now where we have the highest human populations, because Aedes mosquitoes are urban mosquitoes,” Haselow said. “As we branch out, we’ll try to get a comprehensive picture of what mosquitoes we have and where.”

For the past 13 years, Little Rock’s Public Works department has part-

tion, and gravid traps collect live mosquitoes. The project was developed to test for West Nile virus; it has set traps at 10 sites around Little Rock.

“The whole idea is about capturing the kinds of mosquitoes, the numbers of mosquitoes, and getting an indication so that we can go back to the city and say, ‘Hey, you need to do some more targeted spraying in this area,’ ” Stapleton said.

When citizens call and ask the city of Little Rock for truck spraying, Stapleton and his students go to their neighborhoods to find which species are present. Educating callers about the dangers of disease-carrying mosquitoes and what preventive steps can be taken is an important part of the program.

Due to the risks of Zika for pregnant women, testing humans for the virus through blood samples has been prioritized over testing mosquitoes.

Despite Florida’s 132 travel-related Zika cases — the second most in the country, second to New York — that state has only one lab equipped to test mosquitoes. Arkansas doesn’t have any. Stapleton says he will test mos-

quitoes for Zika once an affordable test is available.

Research has yet to reveal all of Zika’s effects. The virus stays in blood for seven days after infection, and could remain in pregnant women’s blood for longer periods. Some data has shown the virus lingering in semen for two months after infection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends infected males avoid unprotected sex for six months. Zika is the first virus in 50 years associated with birth defects and the first mosquito-borne virus to ever be sexually transmitted. Scientists have confirmed the virus can cause microcephaly, a birth defect that causes newborns to have smaller heads.

“We believe that microcephaly may only be the tip of the iceberg of what’s really going on,” Haselow said. “There are likely to be many other problems, whether they be cognitive, developmental or physical, that aren’t apparent early in infancy.”

Insufficient government funding could perpetuate the disease’s spread.

The Obama administration asked for $1.9 billion in funding from Congress to fight the virus. The U.S. Senate then approved a $1.1 billion measure, and in turn, the House approved a $622 million measure that requires all money to be reallocated from existing programs, including funding to fight Ebola. Senate and House negotiators have yet to reach an agreement on a final version of the bill.

“When we talk about expanding our efforts to improve mosquito control efforts around the state, even the budgets being considered are woefully inadequate,” Haselow said.

While nobody has contracted the virus from mosquitoes located in the continental United States yet, health experts expect that to change.

“If we get a home-grown case of Zika and a newborn baby with microcephaly, you watch how fast the funding will flow,” Stapleton said.

While research depends on government funding, everyone can take to avoid contracting the Zika virus by repeatedly using repellents and emptying standing water around their homes.

“We’re not powerless in reducing our risk,” Haselow said. “We can make these changes and protect our loved ones.”

THE

BIG

A look inside Robinson Center

THE CONSTANT FLURRY OF ACTIVITY at the corner of Markham and Broadway can seem a little underwhelming if you drive by it often enough. The whirling clouds of concrete dust, the orange plastic mesh demarca-

est architectural update to the facility in history, the result of a $70 million investment.

The Arkansas Times recently got a tour of the construction, one of the last peeks until the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra’s Opus Ball on Nov. 12, which will serve as a sort of grand reopening for the auditorium. Here are some of the highlights:

BRIAN CHILSON

PICTURE

tion of the construction zones and the temporary fencing have started to seem right at home at Robinson Center, despite the fact that the Art Deco exterior of the building seems to have changed relatively little. Don’t be fooled, though. The signs of activity outside the building’s perimeter are only a hint of what’s happening inside: the larg-

NEW ORCHESTRA PIT. The exhibition hall is gone, and in its place is a cavernous auditorium with an orchestra pit that can float at the conventional level (below the stage) for an operatic or ballet performance, or can be lifted up to the seating level for performances that highlight the orchestra itself. It can even be extended outward by 5 feet, putting the orchestra right in front of the audience.

BETTER SEATS. Speaking of the audience, it’s safe to say you’ll have a much better chance of getting a “good seat” than you did in the old space.

The seats are graduated at an incline, reducing your chances of missing out on the action because the person sitting in front of you is especially tall or fond of elaborate hats.

NEW VERANDA. As most of the former structure’s footprint was dedicated to expanding the performance hall itself, it was necessary to break 5,800 square feet of new ground for the facility’s new conference hall and adjoining terrace. This vast veranda overlooks the Arkansas River, and provides a great view of Dickey-Stephens Park — but why watch the Travelers when there’s Mahler happening inside? The veranda also adjoins the Doubletree Hotel, and though it’s rough rooftop to stand on now, it’ll soon be finished out with lovely limestone pavers and a glass railing from which to view the river.

BRIAN CHILSON

NEW STAGE. An astonishing 36 feet above your head, you can see the spot where the stage floor once was, marked conspicuously by the painted outline of the former location of the backstage fire extinguisher. It’s a major shift, and is probably the main reason why the drastic nature of the developments isn’t particularly evident from the exterior.

Instead of building up, they excavated downward, and to great effect.

www.arktimes.com

JUNE 16, 2016

13

KARK 4 NEWS

JUDGE BOECKMANN: Resigned from the bench after the state judicial review board said he allegedly used his position to procure sex from young men.

I

t’s a testament to how many wholly fallible human beings don a judge’s robe and manage to do things right day after day that the allegations against former Cross County District Court Judge O. Joseph Boeckmann Jr. of Wynne rippled through the state, national and even international news when the story broke last November.

The case laid out in pieces by investigators with the state Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission is anybody’s definition of damning, drawing on often graphic interviews with young men who came to Boeckmann’s court, hard evidence in the form of checks Boeckmann paid to some of those young men and others, and a trove of over 4,600 digital photos recovered from Boeckmann’s computer, ranging from the suggestive to the pornographic. Investigators with the JDDC say it adds up to an abuse of judiciary power that’s almost unthinkable: that Boeckmann used his position on the bench to procure both fetishistic photos and sexual and sadomasochistic partners, preying on poor and vulner14

JUNE 16, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

The boys Investigators with the Judicial Disability and Discipline Commission say former Cross County District Judge Joseph Boeckmann Jr. systematically used his office to prey on young men for years, even as rumors swirled in Wynne. If true, how did it go on for so long?

BY DAVID KOON

able defendants who couldn’t afford to pay their fines.

Just as disturbing was the fact that as the case unfolded, investigators with the JDDC began hearing from men who had dealings with Boeckmann when he was a deputy prosecutor in the area, includ-

ing allegations that he was secretly asking for sexual favors in exchange for prosecutorial leniency as far back as the late 1970s. Some of those who claim they turned down Boeckmann’s offers as young men still sit in prison today.

Boeckmann, who stepped down from

the bench May 9, hasn’t been charged with any crime. Through his attorney and in JDDC filings, he has repeatedly denied the allegations made against him.

In Cross County, however, people say rumors of what was allegedly going on swirled for years, which raises the obvious question of why it took so long for it all to come to light.

‘Tell me about the boys’

Just how rarely an Arkansas judge gets into truly hot water is probably best revealed by the Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission’s miniscule staff, which consists of executive director David Sachar, deputy executive director Emily White, one investigator, the occasional “undercover” (dispatched to sit in on and report back from far-flung courtrooms where judges have been accused of bizarre behavior or sniping disrespectfully at defendants or attorneys), an occasional law clerk and a fiscal officer who writes the checks. Though they’ve made some big cases in recent years, the JDDC is pretty much the definition of a bureaucratic backwater, and

a normally becalmed one at that. Still, as Sachar says, unlike other states where judicial discipline is either neutered or a tool for political witch-hunting, the JDDC in Arkansas is an independent, nonpartisan agency, free to follow the truth where it takes it — or at least as far as its budget will stretch.

Joe Boeckmann’s latest troubles were not his first brush with the JDDC. On the bench as a part-time district court judge in the First Judicial District since January 2009, Boeckmann — part of one of the old-line German families that go back to the beginning of Wynne, with business interests including farming, rental property and a law practice — had received a letter of admonishment in March 2011 relating to incidents in which his employees and associates, when pulled over by the Wynne Police Department, had phoned Boeckmann while being detained and put the police officer on the line with the judge. In another incident, the JDDC letter of admonishment claims: “You also helped return stolen goods that were taken by one of your family’s part-time employees. This led to a sitting judge handling stolen property, albeit in an effort to turn the property over to authorities.”

The letter concluded by saying that the public admonishment was adequate discipline, but warning that further discipline might occur if the violations were repeated.

Boeckmann once again landed on the JDDC radar in September 2014, when an investigator with the Arkansas Department of Human Services filed a complaint with the JDDC, alleging that Boeckmann had reduced a $50,000 cash bond against a woman who had been charged in Cross County with six felony counts, including three counts of theft of property and three counts of abuse of an endangered or impaired person, to an “own recognizance” bond that allowed the defendant to get out of jail immediately with no bond required.

The defendant, the JDDC later noted in its statement of allegations against Boeckmann, was the sister of a former sexual partner of Boeckmann, as well as the mother of Boeckmann’s niece, and was employed by Boeckmann’s sister, who is the manager of Wynne Elder Care LLC, a nursing care company to

BRIAN CHILSON

JUDGE WANTED HIM TO POSE LIKE ‘DAVID’: Says Richard Milliman, who has filed a civil suit.

which Joesph Boeckmann was, according to the JDDC, “a financial contributor … regularly writing checks in excess of several thousand dollars each year.” The JDDC also said that Boeckmann served on numerous occasions as the officiating judge in cases involving his family members, including two cases involving his nephew. Yes, the business, personal and familial kudzu can get a little tangled in a small town like Wynne.

Beginning in October 2014, JDDC Deputy Executive Director Emily White started looking into the case, first bringing it for approval by one of the JDDC

investigation panels. Almost immediately, she began hearing troubling rumors about Boeckmann.

Eventually, still believing she was investigating a conflict of interest case in spite of the rumors, White worked her way around to interviewing Boeckmann’s court staff. Appreciating how difficult it can be for a judge’s staff to talk about their boss, White had saved them for last. It was only when she interviewed the clerk who had been in the court the longest, a woman whose employment predated Boeckmann’s time on the bench, that the case broke

open. In the middle of questioning, there was a pause. Then the clerk asked, “Do you know about the boys?”

“I would say the course of the investigation shifted a bit,” White said. “I said, ‘Tell me. Tell me about the boys … .’ They actually had lists. They’d been keeping very good notes for quite some time.

They said to me, ‘There’s something odd, we think, because he’ll grant community service to young men between the ages of 18 to 35 approximately, where a woman will come before him on the same charge and get slammed with the maximum fine.’ ” Once the clerk started talking, other court staff followed. “Their first red flag, to their credit, was him giving his number [to defendants] across the bench,” White said. “That’s how it started with me, really. They said, ‘He hands his number to them over the bench. His cell phone number.’ ” As detailed in the JDDC statement of allegations against Boeckmann, the judge often awarded “substitutionary sentences” to male defendants, who were told they would be able to have their fines waived by performing community service picking up cans. The standard practice, according to White and Sachar, was for Boeckmann to have some of the male defendants who appeared before Boeckmann on minor charges like traffic violations to wait until after court, at which time Boeckmann would give them a piece of paper with details of when and where they were to report with bags of aluminum cans they had collected as part of community service. The address was sometimes that of Boeckmann’s private residence in Wynne.

After they arrived at the location, Boeckmann would allegedly stand nearby and take photographs of them from behind, instructing the young men to bend over as if picking up a can and telling them how deep to bend and sometimes telling them to spread their legs wider apart. According to the JDDC, Boeckmann allegedly told them the photos would be used to document that they had performed the requirements of their community service. In the trove of thousands of digital photos obtained from Boeckmann’s private computer and handed over to the JDDC www.arktimes.com

JUNE 16, 2016

15

BRIAN CHILSON

by an agency Sachar refused to name on the record, there are hundreds of photos of young men bent over, picking up cans.

One of those who was allegedly photographed by Boeckmann was Little Rock resident Richard Milliman, who appears anonymously in the JDDC’s amended statement of allegations against Boeckmann only as “Victim No. 4 (R.M.)” Formerly a resident of Memphis, Milliman — who has since become part of a group of several men who have filed a civil lawsuit against Boeckmann through Little Rock attorney Gary Green — was returning to Tennessee after visiting a friend in Heber Springs on July 28, 2014, when he was stopped in Cross County for speeding. Initially told he 16

JUNE 16, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

could go after a check of his license, Milliman put his car in gear and started to pull away only to have the officer pull him over again after a short distance and write him a ticket for expired tags. After forgetting about the ticket and missing his original court date, Milliman, then 21, eventually appeared before Boeckmann in early November 2014.

“What you would see in a movie where there’s an old Southern judge?

That was exactly the same vibe I got,” Milliman said. “The judge was very stern. He seemed really rough. Really abrasive. He even told me at one point when he was questioning me, he said, ‘Well, you know, I don’t believe you, but I’m going to give you an opportunity.’ ”

BRIAN CHILSON

JUDGE MIKE SMITH: Video recording system in court will bring transparency, accountability.

EMILY WHITE: investigated the case for JDDC.

Milliman said the opportunity was the same given to another young man appearing before Boeckmann that day: Stay after court to receive information on completing community service rather than pay a fine. Milliman was given a piece of paper with a phone number and an address, and told to collect two bags of aluminum cans for charity. When he arrived at the address he’d been given, he said, it turned out to be Boeckmann’s private residence.

“I thought it was going to be a building, and it ended up being a house,” Milliman said. “That was a red flag. Then, right when I pulled up, the garage door was open and here comes the judge walking out. I was like, OK. I guess it

is what it is.”

Milliman said he got out and followed the judge inside. When he walked in, he said, there was a bottle of liquor on the counter. Milliman said Boeckmann repeatedly offered him drinks while having several himself. While chatting with him, Milliman said, Boeckmann “kept saying, several times, ‘Aren’t you glad that you didn’t have to pay the $500 for this fine?’ As we’re talking in the kitchen, he said, ‘Let me get a picture of you outside so I can have it for the charity. Hold up the bag of cans.’ I did that, once again thinking nothing of it.”

Once they were outside, Milliman said, Boeckmann asked him to put a can on the ground and bend over as if he

BRIAN CHILSON

SHELBA WARD: People in town knew about Boeckmann.

were picking it up. “I didn’t think anything of it. What got me nervous was he was taking the picture from behind,” he said. “Then he asked me to bend lower and spread my legs further apart. … It’s a pretty awkward situation. As we’re walking back into the kitchen, he said once again, ‘Aren’t you glad you didn’t have to pay the $500?’ ” Once back inside, Milliman claims, Boeckmann asked him whether he had any tattoos. When he said he did, Milliman said, Boeckmann asked to see them.

After he displayed the tattoos on his arms, Milliman said, Boeckman asked if he had any others, and asked to see the ones on his chest.

“Once again, I’m apprehensive about it, but once again, it’s a judge, so I showed him,” he said. “Then he asked if he could take pictures, and I told him I didn’t feel comfortable with that because of my job.”

Milliman said that Boeckmann

started talking about himself, saying he had a friend who lives in France with whom he had a yearlong wager.

“This year,” Milliman said Boeckmann told him, “the bet is to see who can get the most amount of people in pictures to be in [Michelangelo’s] statue of David pose. He didn’t come out and say ‘naked.’ He said ‘statue of David pose.’

There was an amount of money that was offered, which was $300. Once again, trying to mediate the situation, I said, unfortunately I can’t because of work.”

After Milliman suggested he might mention the offer to an artist friend who might want to pose, he said Boeckman told him, “I don’t know your friend. I know you, and I trust you.”

After approximately 45 to 50 minutes, Milliman said, Boeckmann had him sign a form, then asked Milliman to write him a letter thanking him for the opportunity to do community service. “Once I did that,” Milliman said,

“he would wipe [my record] clean. He said, “Feel free to give me a call any time if you ever get in a bind in the area, or if you just want to stop by and hang out.’ ” After leaving, Milliman told only close friends about the incident. He said he didn’t come forward because his mother lives in Memphis and, “I don’t know how far this judge’s reach goes.”

Then, back in October 2015, one of his friends who had heard the story contacted him after seeing a report about the allegations against Boeckmann on the news. The next day, he called Little Rock’s KATV, Channel 7 and appeared in an anonymous interview. Since then, he said he has been interviewed by both state and federal investigators, including the FBI. He decided to speak to the Arkansas Times, he said, in the hope that it would help other victims come forward. Even though Boeckmann has stepped down from the bench, Milliman said the inci-

dent rattled him enough that it was part of the reason he moved to Little Rock, and bought a new car. Even now, when he drives to Tennessee on business or to visit his mother, he said he’s still uneasy when he passes through the Delta.

Click

Once the information about the questionable community service sentences came out, Sachar and White realized they were onto something much bigger than a simple conflict of interest. Early on, Sachar said, they were able to use the JDDC’s subpoena power to get access to Boeckmann’s bank account records, and then were able to cross-reference checks paid out to the names of defendants who appeared in court. “We pulled docket sheets and were able to show, let’s say, Guy A through J appear in court … then A through J start getting checks from the judge. Then A through J wound up with community service and dismissal of

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JUNE 16, 2016

17

a marijuana charge, over officer’s objections.” White and Sachar said the phrase “over officer’s objections” cropped up repeatedly in court records, with Boeckmann dismissing or reducing charges so often that arresting officers felt compelled to speak out about it.

Wynne Police Department Chief Jeff Sanders, while initially reluctant to comment for this article, said that dismissed charges in Boeckmann’s court became “just the normal routine.”

“It was frustrating,” Sanders said.

“Our officers would get down. They’d say, why should we do anything if he’s not going to do anything? I’ve been down that road before when I was on the streets. It was frustrating.”

Sachar and White said they eventually ended up identifying 30 to 35 young men who had appeared before Boeckmann and later received payments from checking accounts associated with Boeckmann or his businesses. “We probably had 50 we were looking at, just from how curious the documentation looks,” Sachar said, adding that they still don’t know exactly what most of the payments were for.

From August 2015 to when the first public statement of allegations against Boeckmann was released in November, White pretty much lived in Wynne, beating the bushes for leads. “At some point,” Sachar said, “the people in Wynne started referring to ‘the blonde investigator who is out there all the time.’ She was out there so much. She was in the jail. She was meeting with people. They knew we were investigating.”

As someone who grew up in tiny Poyen (Grant County), White said she understood the small town mentality and what she was up against. “I knew that it was going to be difficult for the victims to tell me the truth. But I came from a small town. So I thought, if anyone can convince these guys to tell me the truth, I would think it would be me.

I kind of had a mother bear mentality, for lack of a better word. I’m here to help you, not to hurt you. I really believe my years as a sexual assault prosecutor here in Little Rock helped with that.”

When the photographs from Boeckmann’s computer came in, Sachar said, it was a “game changer.” As described in 18

JUNE 16, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

BRIAN CHILSON

LIFE: Tucker inmate Early Muhammad said Boeckmann propositioned him, saying, “I could help you or I could hurt you.”

letters from the JDDC to Boeckmann’s attorney, the 4,600-plus photos — which Sachar would only say were provided legally from Boeckmann’s computer via “a cooperative effort with another agency” — include photos “showing acts of masturbation [and] naked young men bent over a desk or bar,” as well as pictures described by the JDDC as “numerous photos of naked young men from behind bending over after an apparent paddling.”

As seen in JDDC filings, one of over a dozen alleged victims who came forward is a young man identified in docu-

mentation only as J.M. He told White that after being arrested, Boeckmann told him that they could “handle this outside of the courtroom.” Upon arriving at a prearranged meeting with Boeckmann, J.M. told White, Boeckmann drove him to the Cross County Courthouse at night, took him inside a courtroom there, and order him to strip.

“J.M. went down to his underwear,” JDDC filings in the case say, “and Boeckmann said, ‘underwear too.’

J.M. removed his underwear and was completely frightened. He was told to put his hands behind his back and then

was handcuffed. J.M. heard a few snaps of the camera and then was told to bend over. The pictures were taken from the rear.” Sachar and White have since identified dozens of young men from the photos, though others remain unknown. “[The photos] were depressing,” Sachar said. “They were a step up from dungeon pictures. You could see guys with horrified looks on their faces about what they’re being made to do.

You can see some guys who are obviously intoxicated or high just to get to the point where they can do this. Some are smiling. Some are indifferent. But it looked like a collection of someone who was a deviant. We spent a week looking at that and it hurt my brain. …

There were several of them [White] went to, and when she showed them [the photos], they didn’t know those pictures had been kept. They would either break down and cry, or have the usual reaction that you can expect, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do now?

Those pictures are out there.’”

White said that getting some of the victims to talk was a process of building a relationship of trust with them. Slowly, a pattern emerged. Those for whom things went further than picking up cans were often local, often repeat criminal offenders whose credibility might be questioned, often too poor to pay their fines. While Sachar and White said they never found a case where Boeckmann had allegedly threatened a stiffer penalty to those who didn’t cooperate, young men who appeared before him most often, and who owed the most fines, were those who often allegedly accepted an arrangement to pose for photos or more.

“Some of these guys, it took them a long time to talk to us,” Sachar said.

“Others had drug problems and wouldn’t talk to us because they were strung out.

Others were in rehab, and when they got out, they told us, ‘I’m going to tell you the truth now that I’m square.’ ” “We talked to a lot of wives,” White said, “I talked to many wives who would tell me, even sometimes before their husbands would tell me the truth.

They would say, ‘Look, I don’t know the details, but I know that my husband will get a phone call, he’ll say, “I’m leaving, I’m going over to Joe’s.” He’ll come

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19

back in an hour or two hours, and he’s got $1,000 cash in his pocket and he doesn’t touch me for a month. I know something’s wrong.’ It ruined their marriages.”

‘God is God’

On Nov. 17, 2015, the JDDC publicly released its allegations on how Boeckmann violated several sections of the Code of Judicial Conduct. Boeckmann was suspended with pay, and a special state prosecutor was named to look into the case. JDDC executive director Sachar took the unusual step of holding a press conference to discuss the allegation, banking on the fact that publicity would bring other alleged victims out of the woodwork.

One of those who started talking was Early Muhammad, who has since been interviewed by the JDDC. An inmate at the Tucker Unit maximum security penitentiary, Muhammad said he was sitting in his cell watching television in the fall of 2015 when a familiar face came on the screen: Joseph Boeckmann, who had been the prosecutor on the case that sent him to prison for life. In a recent interview with Arkansas Times, Muhammad claimed that in 1979, after being arrested for aggravated robbery in Wynne, he was being held at the Cross County Jail when a deputy came to his cell and told him that the prosecutor in his case wanted to speak

with him. Muhammad said that he was taken to a small conference room, where Boeckmann was waiting. Once inside, Muhammad said, the deputy who had brought him there stepped out and shut the door. After asking him a few preliminary questions, including whether he’d ever been to prison, Muhammad said Boeckmann told him, “You know that I can help you out and you won’t have

“We talked to a lot of wives,” White said, “I talked to many wives who would tell me, even sometimes before their husbands would tell me the truth. They would say, ‘Look, I don’t know the details, but I know that my husband will get a phone call, he’ll say, “I’m leaving, I’m going over to Joe’s.” He’ll come back in an hour or two hours, and he’s got $1,000 cash in his pocket and he doesn’t touch me for a month. I know something’s wrong.’ It ruined their marriages.” to go to prison.” After that, Muhammad said, Boeckmann came around the table and sat beside him, then began asking him about homosexual experiences.

“He put his hand on the inside of my leg,” Muhammad said. “He said, ‘Well, I can help you. All you’ve got to do is coop-

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ARKANSAS TIMES

erate with me.’ At that time, I pushed his hand away from me and got up from the table and stood up by the door.”

Muhammad said he asked to be taken back to his cell. He didn’t tell anybody, he said, because he didn’t know whom he could trust. “I’m going to be blunt with you,” Muhammad said. “So many things happen to people in jail. By being a black person in that county alleging

something that a prosecutor — a powerful person — had did, I didn’t feel safe.

Really I didn’t have anyone I could count on to trust.”

Muhammad was eventually convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison, with 15 years suspended. He was out on parole by 1984, when he was picked up for another aggravated robbery in Wynne. Taken back to the Cross County Jail, Muhammad said he was summoned to the same conference room again. Once again, he said, Boeckmann was waiting inside. Muhammad said Boeckmann again talked about homosexuality, then came around the table and tried to touch him.

“I pushed him back,” Muhammad said. “He told me again, ‘You remember I’m the prosecutor. I can help you or I can hurt you.’ He said, ‘No one will know.’ Then he started asking me different things. … Stuff that’s really embarrassing to even discuss, even at my age.

It’s embarrassing.”

Muhammad said he rebuffed Boeckmann. Later, without offering a plea deal, Boeckmann took the case to trial before what Muhammad said was an

all-white jury. “He told the jury that he wouldn’t ask them to give me nothing else but life in prison,” Muhammad said. “He was like a vicious attack dog.”

Found guilty and painted as a continuing danger to the community, Early Muhammad was sentenced to life. He’s been locked up since 1984 and — unless there’s a drastic change in his case — will likely die in Tucker Max. “He made sure that, by him being the prosecuting attorney, [I received] life in prison,” Muhammad said. “I killed no one. I hurt no one.

No weapons or nothing was found. I had an all-white jury. There wasn’t no justice for me.”

Muhammad, a devout Muslim and member of the Nation of Islam, said that even knowing he’d spend the next 32 years in prison, he wouldn’t change the way things allegedly went at the Cross County Jail in 1984. “God is God,” Muhammad said, and He will eventually “situate” everything. What does eat at Muhammad, however, is his guilt at not coming forward back then.

“I feel like I’m responsible for what he did to those other young guys,” he said. “The reason I say that is because I didn’t speak out. I didn’t have no one to turn to, I didn’t have no one to trust.

But I still carry that burden like I was actually the person who was doing it to those kids. That’s a burden I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life. I feel like I should have spoke out to somebody.

Maybe we wouldn’t be going through this right now.”

As a former prosecutor, White said she would normally be very skeptical of anything told to her by an inmate serving life without parole. The Boeckmann case, however, is different. Muhammad is not, White said, the only case they have uncovered where a young man was locked up for a long stretch after allegedly rebuffing Boeckmann when he was a prosecutor.

“I’ve talked to a lot of guys through this process,” she said. “But [Muhammad] was one who, immediately when I hung up with him, I thought, I believe every word that came out of his mouth.

I did. I believed every word that comes out of his mouth.”

First Judicial Circuit Prosecuting Attorney Fletcher Long, who has been in his position since 1993, hired Boeck-

mann twice as a fill-in deputy prosecutor and knows him personally. He said he never received a single complaint against Boeckmann as a prosecutor and said he never heard even a rumor about sexual improprieties involving Boeckmann.

“Joe is a good person. Whatever his problems with this conduct otherwise, he has been widely known as a good person,” Long said.

Asked whether he believes the allegations against Boeckmann, Long would only say, “I neither believe or disbelieve them. I believe we’ll find out.”

Order in the court

By early May, as the case hurried toward an October JDDC trial, Sachar and White were shipping almost daily rafts of new allegations to Boeckmann’s attorney, including graphic descriptions of the photos they intended to introduce as evidence and a list of 55 witnesses they planned to call, including police officers, investigators, Cross County political figures, Boeckmann employees and family members, and over a dozen former defendants who had appeared before Boeckmann in court. On May 9, Boeckmann submitted a letter of resignation to the JDDC, saying that he would never again seek employment “as a local, county or state employee or public servant in the state of Arkansas.”

The Arkansas Times reached out to Boeckmann’s attorney, Jeff Rosenzweig, who said his client would have no comment on the case. Rosenzweig did say that Boeckmann “decided to resign from the judgeship not as any concession that anything happened, but that it didn’t make any sense from a stress, financial or any other standpoint to go through a hearing with regard to an office that he was going to vacate anyway.” Rosenzweig noted that Boeckmann was not running for re-election, “so why go through a hearing in the fall when the only issue is continuation in an office in which his term was expiring two months later? It didn’t make any logical sense to do that, particularly at his age, which was 70, approximately.”

In Wynne, where things can get so tangled with regard to a powerful person like Joseph Boeckmann Jr., it’s still hard to find people willing to talk about

BRIAN CHILSON

MAKING THE CASE: Notes on glass made as the JDDC investigation came together.

him, pro or con, even though his time on the bench is done. Walking the streets, you get a lot of “no comment” from people, after they chuckle at the thought of being asked for their opinion by a reporter from way yonder.

Shelba Ward has been a Wynne resident all her life, and was shopping in a thrift store downtown on a recent Friday. Ward, 75, said she has known

eventually come to light. It was a long time coming, however. “The best thing to ever happen to the court system in Wynne is that Boeckmann is no longer on the bench,” Hill said. “He was a danger to society and he was controlling. People were fully aware of it, and nobody said [anything]. I’m a minister, and I call right right and wrong wrong, and there’s no right way to do wrong.

“All proceedings in the courtroom are now taped, so there’s no question of what was said by either a judge or a participant,” Smith said. “We have an absolute record of it that’s archived. We can go back.

It opens up transparency to the system. All of our actions are subject to review, which they should be.

We’re public servants.”

Boeckmann since they were both young, and has hired him a few times as an attorney. She said many in town knew what was allegedly going on in Boeckmann’s court, but didn’t come forward.

“Everybody in this town knew,” she said. “They knew what he was. Everybody here knew. I can’t tell you why they didn’t [come forward]. It’s just like a lot of other things: They know it and keep it quiet. They’d rather not get into it.”

Over at the Cross County Special Workshop, an agency that helps developmentally challenged residents find work and develop job skills, Executive Director Donell Hill, who lives in nearby Cherry Valley, said that the Arkansas Delta has long been a place where political corruption reigns and is presided over by powerful families that he likened to the Mafia. Hill said he believes Boeckmann’s “brand name” helped him get by for years, despite persistent rumors around town about goings on in his court.

“I have clients who went before him who said that in court it was like a TV show,” Hill said. “Judge Joe Brown, Judge Judy. He’d talk to them like a dog, degrading them and stuff like that.

I said man, how’d he get by with that?”

The case, Hill said, is one of the worst he’s ever seen, but he knew it would

There are people right here in Wynne, Arkansas, who were afraid to come out.”

At City Hall, Wynne Mayor Bob Stacy said while there have long been suspicions about Boeckmann’s behavior, they were just rumors that didn’t rise to the level of being reported or investigated.

“There’s been suspicions about maybe people he had acquaintance [with] or who worked with him getting special

DONELL HILL: Boeckmann’s name helped him get by.

treatment or that kind of stuff, but nothing toward the sexual kind of behavior,” Stacy said. “I’ve not heard of that or witnessed that.” Though some are sure to suggest that there was a broad coverup of Boeckmann’s alleged behavior in Wynne (something Sachar and White both said they found no evidence to support), Stacy said it was simply a case of unsubstantiated rumors. “As with all levels of politics, there’s levels of protections built in,” he said. “You can’t address every rumor that comes down the pike and have drastic reactions to it.”

Stacy said the press coverage of the case has been embarrassing. Around town, he said, many people know Boeckmann, his family and the alleged victims.

“We’re sad for the family, and sad for him, sad for the victims and sad for the town,” he said. “It’s not the kind of publicity you want and not the way we try to carry ourselves around here. In small towns, everybody is related to everybody, so you just don’t have the big public outcry. Their family has been around here for years and has been prominent.

You just really kinda hate to talk about it, really. It’s sad to talk about.”

One silver lining for Wynne has been that fines collected in Boeckmann’s former court have skyrocketed since he was suspended from the bench last November. Stacy said in April, for instance, the amount of fines collected was literally

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DAVID SACHAR: Executive Director of the Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission.

double what it had been in April 2015.

“We’d already collected two-thirds of [the amount] we had anticipated collecting this year,” Stacy said. “Our projections had been lowered because we’d been in a downward trend. We collected

twice as much in the same four-month period as last year.”

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bench early. On the bench less than a week when we spoke with him, Smith’s first full, four-year term will begin in January. A former Wynne Police Department investigator who also has a law degree, Smith said he decided to run for the office before the allegations against Boeckmann came out. While he said it would be improper to speak about any pending investigation in the Boeckmann case, he said that he and the judge who had formerly been assigned to cover the court quickly took steps to provide public accountability, including installing an audio-visual camera system in the courtroom.

“All proceedings in the courtroom are now taped, so there’s no question of what was said by either a judge or a participant,” Smith said. “We have an absolute record of it that’s archived. We can go back. It opens up transparency to the system. All of our actions are subject to review, which they should be. We’re public servants.”

Any person who is a party to a case will have access to the recordings, Smith said, and they will also likely be available via the state Freedom of Information Act, except in cases involving juveniles.

Smith said he’s talking to the Wynne Police Department and the Cross County Sheriff’s Office about expanding the system to include cameras to record suspect interviews and allow for video appearances. Asked whether the recording system is a direct response to the allegations against Boeckmann, Smith said: “I will say that it will be a preventive measure to make sure there’s no further allegations of anything going on in court. … A lot of things would not have happened, possibly, if they’d had cameras before.”

Smith says he believes recording public hearings and trials to be a “wonderful idea” and should be expanded to courtrooms far beyond Cross County.

“I think the courts ought to be held to a high standard,” he said. “We are servants of the public, and I think the public has a right to know what goes on in the courtroom. It’s a wonderful protection for both the court personnel and the litigant.”

As for the JDDC, neither White nor Sachar would comment about whether Boeckmann’s alleged behavior warrants criminal charges. A section of

their amended complaint against Boeckmann, released in January 2016, cites several criminal statutes, including felony abuse of public trust, sexual assault in the third degree, forced labor and coercion, and Sachar said he and White will continue to investigate the case to assist agencies still working on the matter. In addition to the civil suit filed against Boeckmann and the ongoing work of Jack McQuary, special criminal prosecutor in the case, Sachar suggests there may be other legal entanglements for Boeckmann as the case unfolds. “I wonder how the IRS will take it if he was paying people for deviant acts, but writing them off as a business expense?” Sachar said.

“I have a hard time believing that he was writing them out of his business account and not calling them business expenses. … If the feds aren’t handling that angle, we will at some point refer to the IRS. So we still have some work putting this to bed. We believe we have a responsibility to make sure that if there’s any other agency out there that needs to know, we can do that.”

Special Prosecutor McQuary declined to be interviewed, saying he couldn’t comment on a pending investigation.

Asked whether the case makes her think differently about justice and the idea that Arkansans can get an impartial day in court no matter where they live, White said she’s an optimist who believes that the vast majority of the judges in the state do the right thing. Boeckmann, she said, was an exception to the rule.

“I don’t want any citizen of this state, much less [someone in] Cross County, to go into court ever again and be fearful of what sits across the bench from them and what wears the robe,” she said. “I don’t want that. If any good came out of this case, it’s that it exemplifies that. The citizens of Cross County are much better off with him off the bench.

And if there’s any other judge across this state doing something similar that I don’t know about yet, the citizens of that county are going to be much better off when that person is off the bench. I hope it gives them some hope.”

Tom Coulter provided additional reporting.

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23

Arts Entertainment AND

CROONERS IN KITH AND KIN: Minneapolis brothers Page Burkum (left) and Jack Torrey bring their rockabilly counterpoint from the headwaters of the Mississippi to its southern shores, stopping in Little Rock on June 16. 8:30 p.m., Stickyz, $10.

A Q&A with The Cactus Blossoms Ethereal sibling harmony.

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

M

other Maybelle and the Carter Sisters, The Louvin Brothers, The Blue Sky Boys: music born of Appalachia bears a long tradi-

tion of siblings singing together, locking into that otherworldly realm of harmonization that mostly shared DNA can produce. The Cactus Blossoms, a duo

of brothers Jack Torrey and Page Burkum, tap into that tradition on their new album, “You’re Dreaming,” which they call “the culmination of several years of songwriting and the kindness of thousands of miles and friends.” It evokes the most angelic aspects of the repertoire of Don and Phil Everly, to whom they are most often compared. I asked Page about The Everly Brothers, among other things, from his van on the band’s way from Minneapolis, Minn., to the Blue Ox Music Festival in nearby Eau Claire.

Your lyrics talk of waltzes, the Hill Country in Texas, New Orleans, the

Mississippi River. Where did your affinity for the South come from?

Well, the Mississippi River starts up here in Minnesota, and goes through Minneapolis, so I think that’s how that got into a song.

For us, we never listened to what you’d call pop-country, so we kind of came in from the other side. We kind of started at the beginning and worked our way forward, instead of growing up listening to new country and diving backward. So, for us, our sound came out of hearing classic country and old blues and folk music, and people like Bob Dylan really had a big effect on us, too. He’s from MinneCONTINUED ON PAGE 27

24

JUNE 16, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

ROCK CANDY

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

A&E NEWS THOUGH IT LOST OUT TO “The Color Purple” in one of a handful of 2016 Tony Awards not swept up by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton,” Jeffrey Richards’ “Fiddler on the Roof” was nominated for Best Revival of A Musical, and Little Rock fans were thrilled to spot native son Will Trice on camera during the awards ceremony.

In addition to his work on “Fiddler,” Trice produced three other Broadway plays this year, including “Sylvia” starring Matthew Broderick, “China Doll” starring Al Pacino and “American Psycho” starring Benjamin Walker and Alice Ripley.

DONOVAN SUITT AND BYRON Werner, the masterminds behind a decade of weirdness known as Rural War Room, announced the release of their album “Timothy Rah Rah: A Tribute To Dr. Timothy Leary” on the 20th anniversary of the guru’s departure from this worldly realm. Recorded in three countries over the course of six years, the 16 tracks include excerpts from Leary speeches and “sound sources” such as “Casio SK-1 to MiniMoog; micro-cassette backstageimprov, VHS party tapes, Korg Karma to bowl-of-water ... using cybernetic aural techniques, and audio ergot, a fungus grown on musical notes,” according to the duo, and is meant to uncover ways in which sound triggers responses in the human brain. Test it out on your choice of platforms (iTunes, Soundcloud, Amazon), or find out more at ruralwarroom.com.

AFTER NEARLY TWO DECADES of recording Arkansas musicians, East Hall Recording’s Chris Moore has released a five-volume compilation and retrospective, which he calls “some of the cream of a very large crop,” and which he’s made available for the public to download for free. The seeds for the cozy Fayetteville studio began “with a 4-track cassette player in a dorm room over 20 years ago,” as Moore says on the studio’s website.

“Since then, it has grown through a series of dorm rooms, bedrooms, and garages, and has been in the current custom built building for the last 10 years.” Moore has recorded over 400 artists, including Ten High, May the Peace of the Sea Be With You, The Inner Party, 1 oz. Jig, Pagiins and Shawn James and the Shapeshifters.

The recordings on this compilation date back to 2004, and a great number of the bands featured are still playing live shows; Catch them locally, or visit East Hall’s Bandcamp page to download the entire compilation. (Each of the volumes fits onto a single CD, if the automobile is your version of a headset.)

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JUNE 16, 2016

25

1/8/16 11:28 AM

MUSIC REVIEW

Watch the throne Erykah Badu channels Prince at Verizon.

BY JOHN TARPLEY

W

BRIAN CHILSON

hen E r yk a h Badu f ina lly sauntered onto the dank green and mournful purple Verizon Stage last Saturday night, a lady in the next row down trying her best to Periscope our lady’s grand entrance was burned by her app’s signal notification: “Your connection is weak!”

It didn’t take a practitioner of Baduizm to read those tea leaves. After all, we’re here to see The Singular Godmother of Soul in the flesh, the woman so woke it’s a joke, “so deep it gives me the creeps,” the one-and-only Lo Down Loretta Brown whose off-handed mixtape last year, “But You Caint Use My Phone” (with its incredible cover of the artist as a cellular communications Kali with an 8-track yoni) was an extended funk incantation, turning those little black mirrors into their true forms and then charming those transmuted elephants out of the room. So, y’know, all eyes on the queen, please, when her highness is approaching the court.

Anyway, back on stage: Badu, looking fly, comfy and commanding all at once in a pointy Kenzo sweatsuit, flicked out a classroom desk beat on a pair of Akai drum machines to open the show with an extended maximalist jam of “World Keeps Turning,” whose stomp eventually undressed into the feather-light, tongue-twisting (“I’m a recovering undercover over-lover”) ballad “Out My Mind, Just in Time.”

By the time the band slid into the ’90s standard “On and On,” a group of a dozen or so young women had formed an adoration of girls around her feet. As a couple of security guards slipped in from the rear, Badu, mid-song, snapped the band to quiet and hushed her voice to that universal mother tone of sharpfanged politeness: “Excuse me. Let them stay. I need that. It’s important.” The

BADU: She brought the Afrofuturist jams to Verizon Arena on June 11.

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ARKANSAS TIMES

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guards retreated from the Badu Mind Trick, our lady glowed at her musical daughters, the crowd went wild, and a rim shot opened the band right back into the chorus as Erykah’s “cypher [kept] moving like a rolling stone.”

That was absolutely the magical high point of the night, even as Badu and her band — including Steven “Thundercat” Bruner handling bass — spent the next two hours melting down and recasting her deep catalogue. As in her albums themselves, swatches of lyrics from her own and other folks’ songs foamed over into the most unexpected places, like one giant slipstream of black and American music.

“20 Feet Tall” took on an extra layer of dissonance; a nostalgic jam on “Friends,” “La Di Da Di” and “Gangsta Gangsta” could shake a smirk out of even the most diabolical haters; she bore through a double-feature of the silky “Other Side of the Game” and its classic-banger sequel, “Danger,” Erykah’s own “The Godfather I” and “II,” which casts herself as a long-suffering, then complicit, Kay Adams-Corleone. In between, Badu and company laid down some of the wildest, most challenging musical spectacle you’ll ever see in a major arena in the Bible belt, with generous bars of echo-laden Robert Ashley-styled electronic word art and chugging Can-worthy skronk bubbling out of the speakers.

The night closed with a straightforward recitation of what else but the impeachable “Tyrone,” a song so universally loved that it even lit my own mom onto her feet, all burst in song and wagging her finger at all the invisible Tyrones around the room.

As the purple lights went down and the houselights went up, this brutal year’s most recent Great American Tragedy was still, until we all woke up to Sunday morning’s news, the tooearly death of The Purple One, whose spirit was present in the room, as it has been in every room like this since, this time amplified by Badu, that incredible Afrofuturist conduit.

Q&A WITH THE CACTUS BLOSSOMS, CONT. sota as well — not that that gives us any Bob Dylan powers, but it was inspiring to have someone from where we live who kind of knew no bounds with what he’d write about.

I want to ask you about your backing band. They play incredibly tastefully, keeping things very sparse. How’d you develop the sound so that the harmonies could stay out front?

Yeah! I’m glad you say “sparse,” because that’s what we were going for.

We had to have great players with us to be able to play the right parts, to enable us to be sparse. If you don’t have a good bass part, or a good enough drum sound, you want to cover them up with a lot of other stuff, you know? We’re really lucky to have these guys from Chicago who we recorded with. Alex Hall recorded the album and also played drums on it.

Joel Paterson played a lot of guitar on the record; my older brother played some guitar on it.

We should talk about that comparison, because it’s so natural, and the first thing people tend to say when they hear you. How do you feel about it?

Well, I think it makes total sense, but we were listening to all sorts of stuff when we were making this record. I definitely love the Everlys, but I think part of it is just what happens when you sing country songs together and are going for a more sparse sound. They took that country sound and made it a bit more poppy and polished, and added a little rock ’n’ roll to it, and I think that has to

do with the time that they were playing together. Before, with the Louvins, you had dobro and mandolin.

There’s an album called “Live at the Turf Club” that all but disappeared for a while. Was it intentional that some of your earlier work sort of drifted off the map when you were making “You’re Dreaming”?

It’s funny that you notice that. The funny thing was that we’d made the CDs on our own before signing with the record label, and we decided to redo a few of those songs, and didn’t want any

confusion out there about which one was our current recording. I think we let it fade off, but actually I just found a box of “Live at the Turf Club,” so I put it up for sale on our website. Maybe we’ll press it again, who knows?

Last thing: It’s pretty remarkable that you all don’t have beards.

I know, I know. They’re everywhere these days, aren’t they?

The Cactus Blossoms play at Stickyz Rock ’n’ Roll Chicken Shack Thursday, June 16, 8:30 p.m., $10.

I did notice you share a last name with the electric guitar player. That’s your older brother — does he sing?

Yeah, he’s a really good singer, but at the time Jack and I started doing our own thing, he was busy playing electric guitar, so this is our first time getting him involved in what we’re doing.

It sounds very much as if you and Jack have been singing together since childhood, but you took divergent paths for a while, musically.

Yeah, we started out because Jack got a guitar and started playing solo shows around town, and I wasn’t exactly an accomplished drummer or anything, but I got a drum set, and eventually we tried singing some songs together. We played a show together and it turned into … this.

In a lot of classic country music duos, the harmony’s almost always in intervals of a third, but the harmonies you and Jack sing together are very different. It’s gorgeous. It strays, wanders, comes back together. Is it a gut thing?

Yeah, for me, it’s totally a gut thing.

I couldn’t even explain that part of it.

(Laughs.) Other people probably understand what I’m doing more than I do. I think I just follow the chord of the song and sing whatever feels right. It’s just kind of intuitive.

On that note, I’m almost 15 minutes into this interview, and I haven’t said the words “The Everly Brothers.”

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27

THE TO-DO

LIST

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

THURSDAY 6/16

STEPHEN BENNETT

7:30 p.m. The Joint. $20.

A note from Stephen Bennett on his website gives newcomers an idea of where he is in the arc of an illustrious career: “My career goals have always been relatively modest … to earn a good reputation among my peers

— first, as a good player of the various guitars I use — and secondly, as a composer of quality music for them.”

Bennett plays a variety of stunning instruments: a 1930 National Triolian Resonator, an Italian six-string made of rosewood and a Canadian baritone guitar, but he is known primarily as

a master of the massive “harp guitar” — a six-string with an extended, arching sound chamber above it. The additional strings have no frets and can either be plucked directly to add a bass element to a piece, or can be left to ring sympathetically with the guitar strings, which they do without being

touched. Bennett is the founder of the annual Harp Guitar Gathering, being held this year in Milford, Conn., and composer of the six-part “Powhatan Suite,” an orchestral work based on the interactions between tribal leader Powhatan and English settlers in Virginia, where Bennett lived for 30 years.

Tulsa, Okla., brand of rockabilly, Russell is the subject of a documentary, “A Poem Is a Naked Person,” which was created on a floating lakeside shack between 1972 and 1974, but premiered only last year at Austin’s South by Southwest after a tortured 40-year delay born of creative and legal disputes. If you’re new to Russell’s work, it’s as good a place as any to start — a hefty dose of the rowdy

vibe that characterized most of Russell’s prolific career. Russell’s behind a boogie-woogie piano shaking the plate of mostly eaten barbecue sitting atop its lid, he’s behind reflective Aviator sunglasses singing “A Song for You,” and he’s behind the “unrehearsed and spontaneal” (Leon’s words) “Homewood Sessions,” in which Russell and a raucous band of musicians (including

Furry Lewis) took over Hollywood’s Vine Street Theatre for a one-hour special in 1970. He’s 74 now, and he’s been playing in clubs since he was 14. The sum of all those years is in his snowywhite beard, and though he may not be climbing atop grand pianos anymore, or telling tales with eyes gone squinty from overindulgence, he remains an electrifying rock pianist.

FRIDAY 6/17

LEON RUSSELL

8:30 p.m. Revolution. $25.

A whole slew of souls were disappointed last October when Leon Russell’s tour van broke down, forcing a highly anticipated show to be rescheduled. The day has come for his return, though, and the Rev Room will honor any tickets purchased for last October’s show. Instrumental in creating the

CELEBRATE FREEDOM: Big Piph moderates Friday evening at Mosaic Templars Cultural Center’s Juneteenth celebration in “History and Hip-Hop: Panel Discussion and Mix DJ Battle,” and performs with his band Tomorrow Maybe on Saturday’s musical lineup.

FRIDAY 6/17-SATURDAY 6/18

JUNETEENTH CELEBRATION 6:30 p.m. Fri., 11 a.m. Sat. Mosaic Templars Cultural Center. Free.

In 1882, two former slaves, John Bush and Chester Keatts, founded the Mosaic Templars of America, a fraternal organization dedicated to offering insurance to African Americans at a time when white-owned insurance companies denied fair coverage. With counsel from friend Booker T. Wash28

JUNE 16, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

ington, Bush and Keatts’ organization spread across 26 states and six foreign countries, and in 1911, the MTA purchased land at the corner of Ninth and Broadway and built a three-story office building topped by a performance hall.

Nearly 100 years later, Juneteenth in Little Rock took a turn, and relocated to that very site. With the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center at the helm of the celebration (formerly a late-night con-

cert by the river), there’s still a focus on live music, but the event’s scope has been expanded to include elements of education, history, food, theater and conversation. On Friday night, the MTCC and Philander Smith College hold a discussion led by educators and activists Big Piph (Epiphany Morrow), Ron MC and Marquese McFerguson on the social impact of hip-hop, followed by a Mix DJ Battle. On Saturday,

the museum hosts tours of the exhibition “African American Treasures from the Kinsey Collection” and holds a block party featuring food trucks, children’s activities and live music from Anthony David and Algebra, Big Piph and Tomorrow Maybe, Butterfly and Irie Soul, Acoustix featuring Rod P., Billy Jones Bluez, Jules Bartholomew and Judacamp, The Big John Miller Band and Gloryland Pastor’s Choir.

IN BRIEF

THURSDAY 6/16

MONDAY 6/20

THE REP: INAUGURAL OPEN HOUSE

4 p.m. Arkansas Repertory Theatre.

Free.

If you’ve been to a show at The Rep for any of the last 17 seasons, you’ve seen the work of Bob Hupp. Hupp, who succeeded Cliff Baker as the producing artistic director at the theater in 1999, embarks on a new career as artistic director at New York’s Syracuse Stage, beginning in July. In honor of his service to the artistic community over the last couple of decades, The Rep is hosting an open house during which the public can tour the theater’s costume shop, the prop shop, rehearsal spaces and meet the creative team behind Jason Alexander’s (of Seinfeld) “Windfall,” right there on the set. Ben Brenner, a board member at The Rep, will provide live music in the lobby, and Loblolly Creamery will offer their small-batch sweet treats out front.

JEREMY SAYRE

TUESDAY 6/21

PLAYING WITH FIRE: The dancers of Arkansas Circus Arts twirl on the shores of Wildwood Park for the Art’s Swan Lake for “Enchanted Flame: Summer Solstice Fire Show.”

SATURDAY 6/18

ENCHANTED FLAME: SUMMER SOLSTICE FIRE SHOW 6 p.m. Wildwood Park for the Arts. $10-$20.

Arkansas has a professional circus troupe, in case you didn’t know, and it is a tight-knit, nature-loving and absurdly flexible group of individuals for whom standing around contemplating the arc of a cyr wheel or hanging suspended from a silk scarf sounds like a perfectly pleasurable way to spend a Friday night. Plus, they like to play with fire. Acrobat Samuel Pettit told us his crew’s routine “combines fire and acrobatics, which requires a lot of training, trust, skill and mutual cooperation. …

It’s an amazing feeling working like this with your best friends.” On the eve of

the summer solstice, the members of Arkansas Circus Arts will perform a full-length aerial arts and fire dancing show on the shores of Wildwood’s Swan Lake. The performers will be surrounded on the last light of spring by an array of local food trucks (Loblolly Creamery, The Southern Gourmasian, Nate’s Hot Dogs, Twiggy’s Treatery, Katmandu Momo, Le Pops, Southern Salt and Agrilla the Bun, to name a few) and will host a dance party after the show. The show itself starts at 8:15 p.m., but gates open at 6 p.m. so attendees may enjoy live music, arts and crafts, and local libations beforehand. Bring a lawn chair or a blanket, and write to arkansascircusarts@gmail.com if you have any needs that require reserved seating.

BEN NICHOLS

7 p.m. Ron Robinson Theater. $20.

Before moving to Memphis and founding Lucero, native son Ben Nichols was big in Little Rock. He fronted a heavily melodic punk outfit called Red 40 with Colin Brooks and Steve Kooms, of which Soophie Nun Squad’s Nate Powell has said: “I think it’s safe to say that over half of mid-’90s Little Rock punks either fell in love or out of love at a Red 40 show.” Powell described Nichols’ ability to make teenage girls swoon, a tradition that continues, as evidenced by the diary-like entries on websites with titles like “Fuck Yeah Ben Nichols.”

More local connections: Ben has provided music to several of his acclaimed brother Jeff’s films. Mary Chamberlin, longtime Little Rock champion of DIY literature and founder of Tree of Knowledge, sells merch for Lucero and stars in the band’s new video for “Can’t You Hear Them Howl,” where she’s on the run from an ambiguous predator in a vast, snowy tundra. In keeping with Nichols’ solo acoustic set, electric guitarist Jeff Coleman (of Jeff Coleman and The Feeders) unplugs to open Tuesday evening’s show.

A trio of trios plays the White Water Tavern: Atlanta’s The Head brings guitar riffs evocative of Weezer’s heyday, with The Dangerous Idiots and Midwest Caravan kicking off the evening, 9 p.m., $7. If you’re a fan of the podcast “Invisibilia,” head over to the studios of UALR Public Radio (Suite 400 of the University Plaza Shopping Center) for the Invisibilia Listening Party, with a conversation led

by KUAR’s Jacob Kauffman, 7 p.m., free.

Acclaimed wind quintet Windsync plays a chamber concert at Wildwood Park for the Arts, 7:30 p.m., $15. The Eureka Springs Blues Festival kicks off with highlighted acts playing through the weekend downtown and at Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge, $10-$150.

FRIDAY 6/17 The Whole Famn Damily play at King’s Live Music, 8:30 p.m., $5. Eureka Springs’ Opera in the Ozarks opens its 66th season with Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” 7:30 p.m., Inspiration Point, $10$30. Elsewhere in Northwest Arkansas, Widespread Panic jams at the Walmart AMP, 7:30 p.m., $36-$56. Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre continues its 10th season with “West Side Story,” Reynolds Performance Hall, Conway, 7:30 p.m., $25-$32, and the Arkansas New Play Festival runs through June 26 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville and at the Walton Arts Center’s Nadine Baum Studios in Fayetteville, $40-$45. Rodney Block hosts the “80s Icons” concert and dance party at South on Main, 9:30 p.m., $15. Color Design, R.I.O.T.S., and Attagirl take the stage at the White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m., $5.

SATURDAY 6/18 The Jimmy Doyle Country Club turns 42 years old, and holds a celebration featuring dance lessons, food and music from Steve McCann and the New Age Outlaws and The Arkansas River Bottom Band, 6 p.m., $8-$15. Mandy McBryde plays a set at Kent Walker Artisan Cheese, 6 p.m., free. The Baton Rouge rapper formerly known as Lil Boosie hosts “Boosie Badazz and Friends: A Juneteenth Concert” at the Metroplex Event Center, 10 p.m., $50-$112. Shawn James and the Shapeshifters celebrate the release of a new album at Stickyz, 9 p.m., $8-$10. Contemporary Christian band MercyMe plays Timberwood at Magic Springs, 8 p.m., $8-$10. Jam House Collective hosts a metal show at Zaza’s Fine Salad + Wood Oven Pizza in Conway, featuring Iron Iris, Esc and Amonkst the Trees, 10 p.m.

TUESDAY 6/21 The Arkansas Times hosts a screening of the 1950 film noir starring Humphrey Bogart, “In a Lonely Place,” 7 p.m., Riverdale 10 Cinema, $8.

www.arktimes.com

JUNE 16, 2016

29

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

THURSDAY, JUNE 16

MUSIC

Buck Bell. Faulkner County Library, 7 p.m., free.

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

Cactus Blossoms. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 8:30 p.m., $10. 107 River Market Ave. 501-372-7707. stickyz.com.

Concert for James Ballew. Tragikly White, Canvas, Michael Shipp, The All-Starz Members of The 17th Floor. Revolution, 8 p.m., $10. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. revroom. com.

Drageoke. Hosted by Queen Anthony James Gerard: a drag show followed by karaoke. Sway, 8 p.m. 412 Louisiana. clubsway.com.

Eureka Springs Blues Festival. At Turpentine Creek, Chelsea’s, Pied Piper, Rowdy Beaver, Rockin’ Pig, New Delhi, and Barefoot Ballroom.

Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge, $10-$150.

239 Turpentine Creek Lane, Eureka Springs.

479-253-5841. eurekaspringsblues.com.

The Head. With The Dangerous Idiots and Midwest Caravan. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m., $7. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. whitewatertavern.com.

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

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

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

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

RockUsaurus. Casa Mexicana, 7:30 p.m. 7111 JFK Blvd., NLR. 501-835-7876.

Stephen Bennett. Part of the Argenta Arts Acoustic Music Series. The Joint, 7:30 p.m., $20. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0210. thejointinlittlerock.com.

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

Windsync. A chamber music concert, with a free reception at 6 pm. Wildwood Park for the Performing Arts, 7:30 p.m., $15. 20919 Denny Road. wildwoodpark.org.

COMEDY

STAY THIRSTY: Memphis soul trio Dirty Streets comes to Hot Springs for a show with Brother Andy and His Big Damn Mouth and Chief White Lightning, 9 p.m., Maxine’s, $7.

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

SPORTS

Arkansas Travelers vs. Tulsa Drillers. DickeyStephens Park, through June 18, 7:10 p.m., $6-$12. 400 W. Broadway, NLR. 501-664-7559. milb.com.

BOOKS

Shakespeare First Folio Exhibit. University of Central Arkansas Baum Gallery, through July 12: 12:30 p.m. 201 Donaghey Ave., Conway. arkshakes.com.

KIDS

Garden Club. A project of the Faulkner County Urban Farm Project. Ages 7+ or with supervision. Faulkner County Library, through Aug. 31: 3:30 p.m., free. 1900 Tyler St., Conway. 501-3277482. www.fcl.org.

FRIDAY, JUNE 17

MUSIC

The 80s: ICONS-Pop, Rock, & Hip Hop Concert and Dance Party. South on Main, 9:30 p.m., 501-244-9660. 1304 Main St. 501244-9660. southonmain.com.

BT. With Dusty Slay and Hannah Hogan. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m., $8. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-228-5555. loonybincomedy.com.

EVENTS

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

POETRY

POETluck. Literary salon and potluck. The 30

JUNE 16, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

RED - DARK - CRUSH - WHITE

$9.99

2516 Cantrell Road Riverdale Shopping Center

366-4406

All In Fridays. Envy. 7200 Colonel Glenn Road.

501-562-3317.

Brent & Tara. Pop’s Lounge, June 17-18, 5 p.m.

2705 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 501-623-4411. oaklawn.com.

Dirty Streets. With Brother Andy and His Big Damn Mouth, plus Chief White Lightning.

Maxine’s, 9 p.m., $7. 700 Central Ave., Hot Springs. maxineslive.com.

Don Giovanni. Opening night of Opera in the Ozarks’ 66th season. Inspiration Point, 7:30 p.m., $10-$30. 16311 Hwy. 62 W., Eureka Springs.

479-253-8595. opera.org.

Eureka Springs Blues Festival. See June 16.

HWY 124. Silk’s Bar and Grill, June 17-18, 10 p.m.

2705 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 5016234411. oaklawn.com.

JD Wilkes and the Legendary Shack Shakers.

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

John Kay and Steppenwolf. Finish Line Theater, 7 p.m., $50-$60. 2705 Central Ave, Hot Springs.

501-623-4411. oaklawn.com.

Leon Russell. Revolution, 8 p.m., $25. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. revroom.com.

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

DANCE

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

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. First Presbyterian Church, 6:30 p.m. 800 Scott St.

LECTURES

Lunch and Learn: Bernard Kinsey. A presentation by the owner of the Kinsey collection. Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, 11 a.m., free. 501 W. 9th St. 501-683-3593. mosaictemplarscenter.com.

SPORTS

Arkansas Travelers vs. Tulsa Drillers. DickeyStephens Park, through June 18, 7:10 p.m., $6-$12. 400 W. Broadway, NLR. 501-664-7559. milb.com.

BOOKS

Shakespeare First Folio Exhibit. University of Central Arkansas Baum Gallery, 12:30 p.m.

201 Donaghey Ave., Conway. arkshakes.com.

KIDS

Walking in Shakespeare’s Shoes. Part of the Shakespeare Folio exhibit. Faulkner County Library, 3 p.m. 1900 Tyler St., Conway. 501327-7482. arkshakes.com.

SATURDAY, JUNE 18

MUSIC

Albert Herring. At the Opera in the Ozarks Theater. Inspiration Point, 7:30 p.m., $10-$30.

16311 Hwy. 62 W., Eureka Springs. 479-253-

COMEDY

BT. With Dusty Slay and Hannah Hogan. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., $12. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-228-5555. loonybincomedy.com.

“Rednecks in Spandex.” An original production by The Main Thing. The Joint, 8 p.m., $22.

301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

EVENTS

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

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

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

Juneteenth Celebration. A free street festival commemorating emancipation and celebrating African-American culture. Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, 11 a.m., free. 501 W. 9th St. 501-683-3593. mosaictemplarscenter.com.

Little Rock Farmers’ Market. River Market pavilions, 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.

QC:

Live: 1.875" x 5.25"

CW: Trim: 2.125" x 5.5" Bleed: none

CD: AD: AM:

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Pub: Arkansas Times

PM: PO:

Job/Order #: 279609 QC: cs

Shop shop LOCAL

Brand: Bud Not Ponies Item #: PBW20167305

COMEDY

BT. With Dusty Slay and Hannah Hogan. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., $12. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-228-5555. loonybincomedy.com.

“Rednecks in Spandex.” An original production by The Main Thing. The Joint, 8 p.m., $22.

301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

8595. opera.org.

Brent & Tara. Pop’s Lounge, 5 p.m. 2705 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 501-623-4411. oaklawn.com.

Color Design. With R.I.O.T.S. and Attagirl. 9:30 p.m., $5. 501-375-8400. whitewatertavern.com.

Eureka Springs Blues Festival. See June 16.

Foul Play Cabaret Burlesque Show. Maxine’s, 9 p.m., $10-$12. 700 Central Ave., Hot Springs. maxineslive.com.

HWY 124. Silk’s Bar and Grill, 10 p.m. 2705 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 5016234411. oaklawn.com.

Lil Boosie. Boosie Badazz and Friends: With DJ Exklusive and DJ Deja Blu, hosted by Playamook, Geezy All Star, and Freebandz Gang Trill. Metroplex Event Center, 10800 Colonel Glenn Road, 10 p.m., $40-$100. lilboosielr.com.

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

Mandy McBryde. Kent Walker Artisan Cheese, 6 p.m., free. 323 S. Cross St. 501-301-4963. kentwalkercheese.com.

MercyMe. Magic Springs’ Timberwood Amphitheater, 8 p.m., $8-$10. 1701 E. Grand Ave., Hot Springs. magicsprings.com.

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

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

Shawn James and the Shapeshifters. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 9 p.m., $8-$10. 107 River Market Ave. 501-372-7707. stickyz.com.

Superkiller, Wild Yam, Good Morning. Vino’s, 8:30 p.m., $6. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. vinosbrewpub.com.

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

MUST INITIAL FOR APPROVAL

372-4782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

Muneshack. Vino’s, 8 p.m., $5. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. vinosbrewpub.com.

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

Steve Gunn and The Outliners. With Promised Land Sound. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 9 p.m., $10. 107 River Market Ave. 501372-7707. stickyz.com.

Steve Talent. Kent Walker Artisan Cheese, 6 p.m., free. 323 S. Cross St. 501-301-4963. kentwalkercheese.com.

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

Upscale Friday. IV Corners, 7 p.m. 824 W. Capitol Ave. Widespread Panic. Walmart AMP, 7:30 p.m., $36-$56. 5079 W. Northgate Road, Rogers.

479-443-5600. waltonartscenter.org.

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JUNE 16, 2016

31

MOVIE REVIEW

AFTER DARK, CONT.

SPORTS

Arkansas Travelers vs. Tulsa Drillers. DickeyStephens Park, 7:10 p.m., $6-$12. 400 W. Broadway, NLR. 501-664-7559. milb.com.

BOOKS

Shakespeare First Folio Exhibit. University of Central Arkansas Baum Gallery, 12:30 p.m.

201 Donaghey Ave., Conway. arkshakes.com.

KIDS

Super Summer Saturday. Sporting and Olympic-themed programming for kids. 10 a.m. Saturdays through June 25. William J. Clinton Presidential Library, free. 1200 Clinton Avenue. 501-374-4242. clintonfoundation.org.

SUNDAY, JUNE 19

MUSIC

ROMANCE IN DYSTOPIA: Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz flee a world of institutionalized coupling and navigate the forest of fugitive loners in Yorgos Lanthimos’ dark satire.

Matchmaking dystopia In ‘The Lobster,’ being single is criminal.

BY SAM EIFLING

I

t’s only once you’ve seen “The Lobster,” and tried to explain it to someone else, that you realize: Yes, the world was so ready for a romantic comedy imagined as a dystopian sci-fi.

Greek director/writer Yorgos Lanthimos’ tone translates immediately from its European roots (the movie, in English, possesses the same droll humor you’ve noticed in the occasional Northern European condom ad that makes the rounds online). He directs his cast with the overt stiffness you find in victims of a surveillance state, which, in effect, they are. But it finds a dark, hilarious overtone when you recognize their pained mannerisms as your own. Everyone, it seems, is acting like the sort of idiot robot you become when you’re on a stiff first date, or perhaps when you finally meet the parents for the first time.

Colin Farrell, still possessed of the mustache that got him through “True Detective,” plays David, who willingly checks into a countryside resort hotel for 32

JUNE 16, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

singles looking to mingle. Yet this one comes with a couple of off-ramps that ratchet up the stakes. If, after 45 days at the hotel, you fail to match with another guest, you’re obliged to be turned into an animal — of your choosing, it happens. David signs up in advance for a lobster; he has always liked the sea, he explains, and lobsters live a very long time. He checks in with his brother, who by now has been turned into a dog — the most popular animal that guests choose, apparently, because it’s the first animal they think of.

Courtship at the hotel is dreary, and tends to fall along the lines of the sort of superficialities that appear, at first glance, to be absurd: People who share a tendency toward nosebleeds pair off, for instance, even as one of them has to surreptitiously break capillaries to keep up the facade. Hotel staff enforces rules meant to prod guests into courtship with a strictness — David fails to match, so a maid begins starting his day by flip-

ping up the back of her skirt and grinding on his lap. His amiable wallflower friend John C. Reilly is discovered to have masturbated, and his punishment underscores the stakes of the retreat.

The one way to earn more days at the hotel is to excel at a routine pursuit: Guests load up a bus to tote rifles with tranquilizer darts into the forest. There they hunt down people who huddle like gypsy refugees in the woods, fiercely single, living by a code of self-abnegation that makes middle school dance rules look permissive by contrast. To roam freely in town, the feral loners need to appear matched, as cops ask for papers. When one of their ranks (Rachel Weisz) catches David’s eye, they both find trouble with the band’s militant leader, Léa Seydoux.

The singletons’ lot is the anti-hotel life, in which love is seen not as an obligation to be foisted onto everyone under penalty of transmogrification, but a crime that must lead to excommunication. So, yes, basically every authority figure in “The Lobster” is darkly, deeply warped, perfect for an allegorical treatment of dating at large. But this is allegory without the preaching, and full of the sort of twists and visual treats (dispossessed animals wandering into the frame) that will either have you pulling away from your date or snuggling up closer. There’s nothing so reassuring as feeling deeply unsettled together.

Eureka Springs Blues Festival. See June 16.

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

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

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

Prince Tribute: Encore. Revolution, 8 p.m., $10-$15. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-8230090. revroom.com.

EVENTS

Artists for Recovery. A secular recovery group for people with addictions, open to the public, located in the church’s Parlor. Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church, 10 a.m.

1601 S. Louisiana.

Bernice Garden Farmer’s Market. Bernice Garden, 10 a.m. 1401 S. Main St. www.thebernicegarden.org.

Father’s Day Crawfish Boil. Kent Walker Artisan Cheese, 1 p.m., $35. 323 S. Cross St. 501-301-4963. kentwalkercheese.com.

Pride Crawfish Boil. Kent Walker Artisan Cheese, 5:30 p.m., $35. 323 S. Cross St. 501301-4963. kentwalkercheese.com.

MONDAY, JUNE 20

MUSIC

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

EVENTS

Arkansas Jazz Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony. To induct Junie Cobb, Alex Hill, Ted Ludwig and Clark Terry into the Arkansas Jazz Hall of Fame. Capital Hotel, 8 p.m., $20.

111 W. Markham St. 501-374-7474. arjazz.org.

The Longest Day. All-day bridge marathon benefiting The Alzheimer’s Association.

Curtis Finch Bridge House, 7 a.m., $3-$50.

7415 Indiana St. 501-666-9841.

TUESDAY, JUNE 21

MUSIC

Ben Nichols. With Jeff Coleman, as part of the Arkansas Sounds Monthly Concert Series. Ron Robinson Theater, 7 p.m., $20. 1 Pulaski Way. 501-320-5703. arkansassounds.org.

Il Tabarro and Pagliacci. Part of Opera in the

Ozarks’ 66th season. Inspiration Point, 7:30 p.m., $10-$30. 16311 Hwy. 62 W., Eureka Springs.

479-253-8595. opera.org.

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.

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

COMEDY

Stand-Up Tuesday. Hosted by Brett Ihler. The Joint, 8 p.m., $5. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

EVENTS

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

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

FILM

“In a Lonely Place.” Riverdale 10 Cinema, 7 p.m., $8. 2600 Cantrell Road. 501-296-9955. riverdale10.com.

BOOKS

Shakespeare First Folio Exhibit. University of Central Arkansas Baum Gallery, 12:30 p.m.

201 Donaghey Ave., Conway. arkshakes.com.

CLASSES

Garden Sketch Hour. Faulkner County Library, free. 1900 Tyler St., Conway. 501-327-7482. fcur-

banfarmproject.org.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22

MUSIC

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

Don Giovanni. Part of Opera in the Ozarks’ 66th season. Inspiration Point, 7:30 p.m., $10-$30.

16311 Hwy. 62 W., Eureka Springs. 479-2538595. opera.org.

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

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

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

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

Sessions: Doug Duffey. June’s Sessions concerts curated by KABF’s Deb Finney. South on Main, 8:30 p.m. 1304 Main St. 501-244-9660. southonmain.com.

DANCE

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COMEDY

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

Todd Yohn. With Nate Abshire. The Loony Bin, June 22-25, 7:30 p.m.; June 24-25, 10 p.m., $10$15. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-2285555. loonybincomedy.com.

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Beer Dinner

Social Media

Here’s what we will enjoy, featuring lots of goods from Little Rock Urban Farming!

1ST

aNOnion Creme Fraiche, Pickled Green Garlic siCharred maChips, TUESDAY uthern gourCauliflower so Tuesday Weisse inner Ich Bin Berliner D r ee B 2ND sept. 29

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Thai Beer Battered Shrimp with Mango Two Timin’ American IPA

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Homemade Noodle Salad, Garden Veggies, Sesame Dressing Trappist Single

6 30 p.m.4TH

at the southern gourmasian

Tomato Salad, House Burrata, Roasted Beets & Carrots 219 W. Capitol Fr. Marquette Biere de Garde

To find out more, contact Lauren Bucher, Director of Arkansas Times Social Media

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5TH

Chocolate “Ding-Dong”, Honey & Bourbon Ice Cream Kupfer Munich Dunkel www.arktimes.com

JUNE 16, 2016

33

AFTER DARK, CONT. 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.

JUNE 21 – JULY 16

The year is 1932. Irving and his daughter are preparing for the opening of their gourmet restaurant in Niagara Falls. Their plan to feature a famous French chef turns into a recipe for disaster when he fails to appear.

JULY 19 – AUG 27

Millie is a young bride living in the 1850’s Oregon wilderness. Her plan to civilize and marry off her six rowdy brothers-in-law backfires when they kidnap six women from a neighboring town to be their brides.

murrysdp.com

562-3131

FILM

Movies in the Park: Brewster’s Millions.

Riverfront Park, 8:30 p.m., free. 400 President Clinton Avenue.

POETRY

Wednesday Night Poetry. 21-and-older show.

Kollective Coffee & Tea, 7 p.m., free. 110 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 501-321-0909. maxineslive. com/shows.html.

BOOKS

Shakespeare First Folio Exhibit. University of Central Arkansas Baum Gallery, 12:30 p.m.

201 Donaghey Ave., Conway. arkshakes.com.

ARTS

THEATER

JUNE 7 –JULY 12

Arkansas New Play Festival. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, June 17-18 , $40$45. 600 Museum Way, Bentonville. 501-4435600. arkansasnewplayfest.com.

“Camelot.” A Lerner and Loewe musical based on the legend of King Arthur. Royal Theatre, through June 19, $5-$12. 111 S. Market St., Benton. 501-315-5483. theroyalplayers.com.

“Grey Gardens: The Musical.” Thu.-Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sun. 2:30 p.m. The Weekend Theater, through June 19; through June 26, $16-$20.

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

“The Last Potluck Supper.” 6 p.m. Tue.Sat.; 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. Sun. Murry’s Dinner Playhouse, through June 18: Tue.-Sun.., $23$36. 6323 Col. Glenn Road. 501-562-3131. murrysdinnerplayhouse.com.

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Reynolds Performance Hall, UCA, Sun., June 19, 7:30 p.m.; Thu., June 23, 7:30 p.m.; Thu., June 30, 7:30 p.m.; Sun., July 3, 7:30 p.m.; July 8-9, 7:30 p.m., donations. 350 S. Donaghey, Conway. arkshakes.com.

“West Side Story.” Reynolds Performance Hall, UCA, Fri., June 17, 7:30 p.m.; Sat., June 18, 2 p.m.; Sun., June 19, 2 p.m.; Sun., June 26, 2 and 7:30 p.m.; Tue., June 28, 7:30 p.m.; Sat., July 2, 2 and 7:30 p.m.; Wed., July 6, 2 and 7:30 p.m., $25-$32. 350 S. Donaghey, Conway. arkshakes.com.

Windfall. Written by Scooter Pietsch, directed

by Jason Alexander, Wed.-Thu., 7 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.; Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m. Arkansas Repertory Theatre, through June 26, $20-$40.

601 Main St. 501-378-0405. www.therep.org.

NEW IN THE GALLERIES

AT THE BAUM GALLERY, UCA, CONWAY 34

JUNE 16, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

ARGENTA GALLERY, 413 Main St., NLR: Paintings by Cindy J. Holmes and Theresa Cates, reception 5-8 p.m. June 17, Argenta ArtWalk.

11 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 258-8991.

GALLERY 360, 900 S. Rodney Parham Road: “Outsiders,” large scale abstracts by Anthony Samuel-Lopez, narrative paintings by Rachel Dziga, opening reception 6 p.m. June 21, show through July 8. 663-2222.

GREG THOMPSON FINE ART, 429 Main St., NLR: “Magical Realism.” Reception 5-8 p.m.

June 17, Argenta ArtWalk. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Tue.-Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 664-2787.

HEARNE FINE ART, 1001 Wright Ave.: “AfriCOBRA NOW: Works on Paper” featuring Akili

Ron Anderson, Kevin Cole, Adger Cowans, Michael D. Harris, Napoleon Jones-Henderson, Moyo Okediji, James Phillips, Frank Smith and Nelson Stevens, June 16-Sept. 3, artists reception 5:30-8 p.m. June 24 and Sept.

9, tours and discussion 3-5 p.m. June 25 and Sept. 10. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Sat. 372-6822.

L&L BECK ART GALLERY, 5705 Kavanaugh Blvd.: “Go West, Young Man,” paintings by Louis Beck, month of June, free giclee drawing 7 p.m. June 16. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 660-4006.

LAMAN LIBRARY ARGENTA BRANCH, 420 Main St., NLR: “Family Portrait,” paintings

by Kesha Stovall, reception 5-8 p.m. June 17, Argenta ArtWalk. 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Sat. 687-1061.

THEA FOUNDATION, 401 Main St., NLR: “Delta des Refuses,” artworks rejected from the Arkansas Arts Center’s “Delta Exhibition,” through June 22, opening reception 5-8 p.m. June 17, Argenta ArtWalk.

UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS AT LITTLE ROCK: “Traditional Arts of the Bedouin,” ExhibitsUSA/Mid American Arts exhibition, June 16-Aug. 5. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri.

CALL FOR ENTRIES

The Arkansas Arts Council is taking applications from teaching performing, literary or visual artists who would like to join the Arts in Education Roster. Deadline to apply is July 8. Applications are available at arkansasarts.org. For more information, call the Arts Council at 501-3249769 or email cynthia@arkansasheritage.org.

The Arkansas Arts Council is seeking submissions for the 2017 “Small Works on Paper” exhibition. Artwork must be no larger than 18-by-24 inches and only members of the Arkansas Artists Registry may enter. (Membership to the registry is free and open to all Arkansas artists.) David Houston, executive director of the Bo Bartlett Center, will be juror.

Deadline is July 22. For more information about how to enter and fees, contact Cheri Leffew at 324-9767 or cheri@arkansasheritage.org.

ONGOING GALLERY EXHIBITS

ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, MacArthur Park: 58th annual “Delta Exhibition,” through Aug. 28; Renoir’s “Madame Henriot,” loan from the Columbus Museum of Art, through Sept. 11; “55th Young Artists Exhibition,” work by Arkansas students K-12, through July 24. 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Tue.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sun. 372-4000.

ARKANSAS CAPITAL CORP., 200 River Market Ave., Suite 400: “Naturals,” work by Virmarie DePoyster, Heidi Hogden, Logan Hunter and Anna Sheals. www.arcapital.com.

BOSWELL MOUROT FINE ART, 5815 Kavanaugh Blvd.: New works by Louis Watts. 664-0030.

BUTLER CENTER GALLERIES, Arkansas Studies Institute, 401 President Clinton Ave.: “School’s Out: An Exhibition of Student Work,” organized by Arkansas Art Educators, through Aug. 27; “Culture Shock: Shine Your Rubies, Hide Your Diamonds,” work by women’s artist collective, including Melissa Cowper-Smith, Melissa Gill, Tammy Harrington, Dawn Holder, Jessie Hornbrook, Holly Laws, Sandra Luckett, Morgan Page and Rachel Trusty, through Aug. 27, Concordia Hall; “Jeanfo: We Belong to Nature,” sculpture, through June 25. 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.Sat. 320-5790.

CANTRELL GALLERY, 8206 Cantrell Road: “Black Box,” paintings by Kae Barron, through July 2.

11 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 224-1335.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 38

ART NOTES

“Delta”: A fine mix Two-headed calf brings home bacon.

BY LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK

T

in on itself will have to do. These are surprisingly fetching works, thanks their mysterious abstract form and use of glaze. It easier to create compelling abstraction in three dimensions than in two, as Stamps’ work illustrates.

Much of the two-dimensional abstract work in the show, with the exception of Toler’s and a few others’, is more decorative than meaty.

Again, a medium more known for its decorative and functional qualities — quilted fabric — combines representation (hive cells in orange thread and

he “Delta Exhibition,” the Artle Rock artists. The Contemporaries kansas Arts Center’s annual Group of young Arts Center supportshowcase of art being made in ers chose the Norman Rockwell-like our middle part of the country, is deep but non-nostalgic “Portrait of Gabriel in its offerings of good works this year.

Sword” by Lawrence McElroy of AlexBeside the top three prize winners — a ander. In McElroy’s 78-inch tall painting photograph by Tim Hursley, a charcoal depicts an older African-American man

by David Bailin and an installation by Katherine Toler — are other standouts, including a quilt that hovered between automatic drawing and representational stitching, ceramics that defied the ceramic form and a Rockwellian painting devoid of sentiment.

Hursley’s chromogenic print — of highly saturated colors — of a stuffed two-headed calf, a paean to roadside America, won the top prize. Hursley bought the calf from a man in Pocahontas, which is what the photograph is named; he made the photograph in the cluttered storefront in which he found it, with other discarded odds and ends, including a scale that purports to tell your fortune (“your wate and fate”) and ‘POCAHONTAS’: Tim Hursley’s photograph of his two-headed calf won the Grand Prize. framed squirrels.

“Pocahontas” is about the material; David Bailin’s “LAMP,” on the other hand, is a representation of leaning against a brick wall and holdclouds) with abstract linear stitches memory — ghostly, blank in places, faces ing a piece of cardboard with “change” to come up with something beyond you can barely make out. With his deft written on it. His shadow reveals the craft that you can sink your teeth into. charcoal line and draw-you-in large bricks; the rest of the wall is painted in University of Arkansas at Little a pale yellow to create the hot light the Rock artist in residence Heidi Hogscale “LAMP” (and other piece, “SOFA,” featuring a trace of a remembered blanman in which the man is posed. His cane den’s masterful and enormous pencil drawing of a tangle of vines, which is ket pattern, a car, Devils Tower in the rests against the wall and a valise is at his feet. He can be read as a beggar, but background), Bailin again proves he combined with tree stumps of concrete better as a figure warning us to change. can erase and create at the same time. (“Detached”), is another high-caliber It’s a very fine painting. work. For fantastic trompe l’oeil, see Toler’s installation “Hush/Flux” feaIn his ceramic pieces, Kentucky arttures small crocheted cups, stitched Anne Greenwood’s “Ecosystem” and paper and fabric pieces pinned to a wall. ist Hunter Stamps has worked clay like “Stag Beetle Specimens,” paintings on It is paired, smartly, with her painting thick folded fabric or rubber or skin. board of insects and brooches and a “Isle,” a two-dimensional work of the “Vicissitude” is drooping tubular shapes string that appears so real you’ll want same aesthetic, with ovoid shapes and in dusty red stoneware; “Metamorphoto touch it (but don’t). For narrative large white spaces, very Noguchi-like. sis,” its glaze a cracked yellow matte, is fantasy, see Little Rock artist Anais Toler, Bailin and Hursley are Lithard to describe — an octopus collapsed Dasse’s large charcoal “Kids are Ter-

rible People Too,” featuring people in fantastic garb — a beak hat decorated with Mesoamerican drawing, a coat printed in guns — observing a cock fight.

Two seems to be a theme: Along with the two-headed calf, many artists are represented by not one but two of their Delta entries. In this way, Juror Elizabeth Garvey, owner of GarveySimon Art Access Inc. in New York, made a more emphatic statement about the quality of their art-making. That has been a boon for this “Delta,” as has the wide variety of media selected, from quilts to clay forms, to large-scale drawing and lots of photographs, including Honorable Mention winners by Pokey Alrutz of Springfield, Mo. (“Swamped” and “2121”), and Michael Elliott Smith of Alexandria, La. (“Megan Visits the Sanctuary” and “Juniper and Moon”).

It’s a good “Delta,” and not to be missed. The show runs through Aug. 28.

In North Little Rock, the second annual “Delta des Refuses” provides those artists whose works were rejected from the Arts Center’s show some gallery time. My favorites in that show include Barbara Satterfield’s ceramic rock, which would have made a nice counterpoint to Stamps’ ceramic abstraction; James Volkert’s “Uncertain Sun Shot: After Homer,” a framed painting of seafarers who you can make roll on the waves by turning a small brass crank; Spencer Zahrn’s unusually composed work “All My Dreams are Dragons”; Alex Moomey’s long horizontal photograph of frolicking beach people “Finding Bright Places”; and some nice sketchy pieces by Jason McCann (a streetscape) and Tanya Hollifield (a portrait). The show is at the Thea Foundation, 401 Main St., and is organized

by Rachel Trusty, who has also created a website, deltadesrefuses.com. The show runs through July 17; there will be a reception 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Friday, June 17, as part of the monthly Argenta ArtWalk after-hours gallery event. www.arktimes.com

JUNE 16, 2016

35

Dining

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

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

WHAT’S COOKIN’ KENT WALKER ARTISAN CHEESE is hosting a Father’s Day Crawfish boil at its space at 323 S. Cross St. at 1 p.m.

June 19. Tickets are $35. With a tap takeover, Diamond Bear will supply the beer. The Crawfish Boil will be repeated at 5:30 p.m. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the PRIDE scholarship fund provided by Central Arkansas Pride. Buy tickets at kentwalkerartisancheese.com or by emailing gwen@ kentwalkercheese.com.

OISHI HIBACHI AND THAI CUISINE at 5501 Kavanaugh Blvd. is closed, but will reopen in mid-July as Chi’s Sports Bar. The bar will serve hamburgers and other typical bar food along with some of the Thai dishes served at Oishi; the sushi and hibachi are being dropped from the menu. A circular bar being built in the middle of the restaurant replaces the hibachi tables, and televisions will be installed throughout. Andrew McDonald, manager at Lulu’s Crab Boil, another Chi family venture in the Heights, said the new restaurant will be one of the few bars in the Heights neighborhood, with the exception of By the Glass. The Chis first opened R.J. Tao’s at the location, which was replaced by Cafe 5501 and then Oishi.

STEPHANOS MYLONAS, owner of Mylo Coffee Co., confirmed rumors that he and his team have purchased the former location of The Afterthought Bistro and Bar, adjacent to the existing coffee shop. Mylonas and his wife, Monica, plan to expand the coffee and bakery enterprise, and to re-establish the space next door as a music venue, with a cocktail and wine program. To that end, they’ve recruited several family members to co-own the new venture, including Stephanos’ brother Markos, his brother-in law Aaron Madey, and his sister-in-law Jessica Lauren Mylonas. Jessica, who sings regularly with The Rockets and The Hendricks-Marchese Project, will be the venue’s events manager.

IN OTHER NEWS: Old Mill Bread and Indian Feast have signed leases for their eateries in the River Market’s Ottenheimer Hall: Old Mill Bread will open in three weeks; Indian Feast will open July 5 or soon after. Also, the Root Cafe has applied to the Arkansas Beverage Control for a license to sell wine.

36

JUNE 16, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

COLOSSAL CREATION: The halibut with polenta and vegetables was a perfectly cooked dish, and too generous to finish in one sitting.

Luna Bella wows Hot Springs fine dining some of the best around.

D

id you ever have one of those days when nothing goes right?

One of those days where all hope of anything even remotely redeemable happening left long ago? Well, we were having one of those days. And then we walked into an unassuming little place in Hot Springs called Luna Bella.

Our day turned around.

The bar and dining room are cozy.

Low ceilings and candlelight create an inviting and romantic ambiance that says, “Have a seat, everything’s going to be OK.” The decorator clearly has a fondness for Marilyn Monroe; large photos and paintings of the movie star were hung throughout the restaurant.

We started with a couple of Knob Creek Manhattans, served “up,” no rocks. The bar, by the way, is beautiful.

The shelves are lined with a good selec-

tion of bottles, backlit with warm yellow light. And we could tell just by the looks of the whole operation the bartender knew what he was doing. The drinks came out beautifully done, chilled, and with just the right amount of vermouth.

The only possible improvement could come in the choice of cherry. We’d prefer a darker, maybe-even-brandy-soaked variety over the standard, syrupy maraschino. After the first round, we cared very little about what kind of cherry was in it. Or anything else for that matter.

This put us in need of some food, and the complimentary basket of homemade bread arrived at just the right time.

Fresh, warm focaccia and a couple of slices of a bouncy French loaf topped with soft herb butter hit all the right spots as we perused the menu. There’s plenty here, with a healthy list of appe-

tizers, salads, pasta, seafood and meat dishes. So we started working backward.

As the restaurant filled with patrons, our very kind and accommodating server let us know that dishes were prepared when ordered, so to expect a wait of around 45 minutes as the kitchen got busier. We don’t like getting in too big of a rush anyhow, and actually welcome a wait. Warnings of this nature are the mark of a professional server.

We thought a pair of appetizers were in order. We chose the Boursin Crab Cakes ($10) and the Endive and Pear Salad ($8). The crab cakes were of what we like to call the Gulf variety (some good crab meat, but mostly stuck together with filler) as opposed to, say, the Maryland variety (mostly crab hinged together with just enough filler to stick it together). The filler, however, was extremely pleasant. The creamy Boursin cheese added a smooth texture and that herb kick. The outer crust was fried up just right and provided a nice, textured package for what came inside.

The cakes sat in a lovely tomato beurre blanc that was at once tart and smooth.

A perfect complement to the rich cakes.

BELLY UP

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

DESSERT DONE WELL: Strawberry Shortcake was a perfect capper to a great meal.

The endive salad was an absolute treat. Regular leafy salads get a little boring, do they not? Belgium endives and Bartlett pears came sliced thin and stacked haphazardly on the middle of the plate, coated in a champagne vinaigrette and topped with walnuts and Gorgonzola cheese crumbles. The endive and pear were crisp and sweet, which paired nicely with the creamy tangy dressing. It was everything we didn’t know we loved in a salad: a pale yellow hue, starch and cheese.

We had time to settle in, chat and down another couple of pieces of bread before our Penne Alla Vodka ($19) and Pan-Seared Halibut (market price, in this case $30) arrived. The pasta dish was a dream. Lump crabmeat, pancetta and sweet peas were right at home in a vodka-tomato cream sauce. We generally don’t get sold on straightup pasta dishes. The description set our expectations high, and we were not disappointed. All the ingredients worked together, creating a taste that was creamy, pleasantly tart, hearty and satisfying.

The generous portion of halibut was perfectly cooked with a crispy, buttery top and moist, flaky center. The pistachio basil butter was rich but not overpowering. The mushroom polenta was a bit creamy, and the vegetables — broccolini, green beans and carrots — were fresh and still somewhat crunchy. The

Luna Bella

104 Grand Isle Way Hot Springs 501-520-5862 lunabellahotsprings.com QUICK BITE We’re suckers for red wine. Luna Bella had a wine special featuring a glass of Renteria Cabernet Sauvignon that was terrific.

We’re sure this glass would pair well with the Arancini: flash fried balls of risotto, prosciutto and fresh herbs. They came highly recommended by our server.

HOURS 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday; 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Closed Tuesday and Sunday.

portion was healthy. As much as we wanted to, we just couldn’t finish it all.

The dessert menu changes daily, so there’s no way to tell for sure if you’ll be able to enjoy the Strawberry Shortcake ($7), as we did. It’s a beautiful dish, topped with a healthy dose of whipped cream — which we’re a sucker for, just by itself. The strawberries were fresh and the biscuit at the bottom was a nottoo-sweet, buttery, delicate, crumbly shortbread. This final course hammered home the main theme of the evening: Everything at this restaurant is done well. There are plenty of varied dishes to choose from, each is apparently cooked well and with ease, the portions are sizable without overdoing it, and there’s very little fuss: just really good food.

WORK OUT WITH AN EXPERT Kathleen Rea specializes in helping men and women realize their physical potential, especially when injuries or just the aches and pains of middle age and more discourage a good work out. With a PH.D. in Biomedical Engineering, Kathleen understands how your body works and how to apply the right exercise and weight training to keep you fit and injury free. Workout in the privacy of a small, well equipped gym conveniently located in Argenta with one of the state’s best private trainers. For more information call Kathleen at 501-324-1414.

REGENERATION FITNESS KATHLEEN L. REA, PH.D.

(501) 324-1414 117 East Broadway, North Little Rock www.regenerationfitnessar.com Email: regfit@att.net www.arktimes.com

JUNE 16, 2016

37

AFTER DARK, CONT. CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, 509 Scott St.: “Interconnections,” paintings and drawings

by Maria and Jorge Villegas, through June. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Thu., 9 a.m.-noon Fri. and Sun. 375-2342.

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.

CORE BREWING, 411 Main St., NLR: “Salud!

A Group Exhibition,” through July 10. corebeer.com.

DRAWL SOUTHERN CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY, 5208 Kavanaugh Blvd.: “The Gun Show.” 680-1871.

GALLERY 221, 221 W. Second St.: Chuck Blouin, paintings, through June 28. 11 a.m.-6 p.m.

Mon.-Fri., 1 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 801-0211.

GALLERY 26, 2601 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Paintings by Michael Lierly, ceramics by Donna Uptigrove.10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 664-8996.

GINO HOLLANDER GALLERY, 211 Center St.: Paintings and works on paper by Gino Hollander. 801-0211.

HISTORIC ARKANSAS MUSEUM GALLERIES, 200 E. Third St.: Illustrations by Sally Nixon; “Fucoid Arrangements” by Robert Lemming and abstract drawings by Louis Watts, through Aug. 7; “Hugo and Gayne Preller’s House of Light,” historic photographs, through October.

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

LAMAN LIBRARY, 2801 Orange St., NLR: “Inked Arkansas,” exhibition of work by Arkansas printmakers Melissa Gill, Catherine Kim, DebiLynn Fendley, Kristin DeGeorge, Warren Criswell, Daniel Adams, David Warren, Nancy Dunaway, Neal Harrington and Tammy Harrington, through July 1. 771-1995.

M2 GALLERY, 11525 Cantrell Road: “Unwrapped,” paintings by Robin Trevor Tucker; “Dressed,” new works by Lisa Krannichfeld; also new works by Bryan Frazier, John Sadowski and Charles James. 225-6721.

MATT MCLEOD FINE ART GALLERY, 108 W. Sixth St.: “Art • Craft • Art,” jewelry, tapestries, felt, ceramic, glass, paper, metal and mixed media sculpture by James Hayes, David Clemons, Sage Holland, Tom Holland, Lucas Strack, Beau Anderson, Louise Halsey, Barbara Cade, McLees Baldwin, David Scott Smith, Susan Campbell, Leandra Spangler and Carrie Crocker. 725-8508.

MUGS CAFE, 515 Main St., NLR: “Renee Williams, New Works.” 7 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 379-9101.

PULASKI TECHNICAL COLLEGE, 3000 W. Scenic Drive: “Merging Form and Surface,” sculpture by Robyn Horn and Sandra Sell, Windgate Gallery, Center for the Humanities and Arts. 812-2324.

RED DOOR GALLERY, 3715 JFK, NLR: Work by new artist Jeff McKay; also work by C.J. Ellis, TWIN, Amy Hill-Imler, Ellen Hobgood; new glass by James Hayes and ceramics by Kelly Edwards. 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 753-5227.

STEPHANO AND GAINES FINE ART, 1916 N. Fillmore St. Work by Arkansas artists. 563-4218.

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 CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, One Museum Way: American masterworks spanning four centuries in the 38

JUNE 16, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

IN THE ‘DELTA DES REFUSES’: Steven Rockwell’s “Sentinel (Melissa)” is one of dozens of works of art that did not make the cut in the Arkansas Arts Center’s “Delta Exhibition” competition. The “Delta des Refuses” is on exhibit at the Thea Foundation, 401 Main St. in Argenta, through June 22. There will be a reception for the show from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Friday, June 17.

permanent collection. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon., Thu.; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Wed., Fri.; 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

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

EL DORADO SOUTH ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, 110 E. Fifth St.: “Familiar Spark,” works by Heather Griffin and Abigail Syltie, through June 25, Price and Merkle galleries. 870-862-5474.

FORT SMITH REGIONAL ART MUSEUM, 1601 Rogers Ave.: “The Life and Art of Mary Petty,” works by New Yorker cartoonist, through June; “Beverly Conley: Photographic Journeys,” through June 26. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 479-784-2787.

UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS AT FORT SMITH, 510 Grand Ave.: 479-788-7530.

HOT SPRINGS JUSTUS FINE ART, 827 A Central Ave.: “Family Exhibit,” paintings by Laura Raborn, Rebecca Thompson and Emily Wood, through June 29.

501-321-2335.

JASPER NELMS GALLERY, 107 Church St.: Work by Don Kitz, Don Nelms, Pamla Klenczar, Scott Baldassari and others. 870-446-5477.

MORRILTON RIALTO GALLERY, 213 E. Broadway St.: “Art for the Birds 2016,” through June 19. 501-288-9259.

PERRYVILLE

SUDS GALLERY, Courthouse Square: Paintings

by Dottie Morrissey, Alma Gipson, Al Garrett Jr., Phyllis Loftin, Alene Otts, Mauretta Frantz, Raylene Finkbeiner, Kathy Williams and Evelyn Garrett. Noon-6 p.m. Wed.-Fri, noon-4 p.m.

Sat. 501-766-7584.

PINE BLUFF ARTS AND SCIENCE CENTER FOR SOUTHEAST ARKANSAS, 701 S. Main St.: “Here.

African American Art from the Permanent Collection,” through Oct. 15; “Pine Bluff High School Annual Exhibition,” through July 3. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 1-4 p.m. Sat. 870-536-3375.

YELLVILLE PALETTE ART LEAGUE, 300 Hwy. 62 W: Work by area artists. Noon-6 p.m. Wed.-Sat. 870656-2057.

HISTORY, SCIENCE MUSEUM EXHIBITS ARKANSAS INLAND MARITIME MUSEUM, North Little Rock: The USS Razorback submarine and tugboat Hoga tours. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Fri.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 371-8320.

ARKANSAS NATIONAL GUARD MUSEUM, Camp Robinson: Artifacts on military history, Camp Robinson and its predecessor, Camp Pike, also a gift shop. 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Mon.-Fri., audio tour available at no cost. 212-5215.

ARKANSAS SPORTS HALL OF FAME MUSEUM, Verizon Arena, NLR: 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 663-4328.

CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL MUSEUM VISITOR

CENTER, Bates and Park: Exhibits on the 1957 desegregation of Central and the civil rights movement. 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. daily. 374-1957.

ESSE PURSE MUSEUM & STORE, 1510 S. Main St.: “Changing Tides: 100 Years of Iconic Swimwear,” 20th century swimwear from the collection of the Fashion History Museum in Cambridge, Ontario, through Aug. 7; “What’s Inside: A Century of Women and Handbags,” permanent exhibit. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sun. $10, $8 for students, seniors and military. 916-9022.

HISTORIC ARKANSAS MUSEUM, 200 E. Third St.: Refurbished 19th century structures from original city and galleries, guided tours Monday and Tuesday on the hour, self-guided Wednesday through Sunday, $2.50 adults, $1 under 18, free to 65 and over. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 324-9351.

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

Mon.-Sat., 1-4 p.m. Sun. 376-4602.

MOSAIC TEMPLARS CULTURAL CENTER, Ninth and Broadway: “Foot Soldiers for Freedom: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Arkansas,” through July 13; “African American Treasures from the Kinsey Collection,” through July 2; permanent exhibits on African-American entrepreneurship in Arkansas. 683-3610.

MUSEUM OF DISCOVERY, 500 President Clinton Ave.: “Wiggle Worms,” science program for pre-K children 10 -10:30 a.m. every Tue. Hours: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun., $10 ages 13 and older, $8 ages 1-12, free to members and children under 1. 396-7050.

OLD STATE HOUSE MUSEUM, 300 W. Markham St.: “Different Spokes: Bicycling in Arkansas,” through July; “First Families: Mingling of Politics and Culture” permanent exhibit including first ladies’ gowns. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 324-9685.

WITT STEPHENS JR. CENTRAL ARKANSAS NATURE CENTER, Riverfront Park: Exhibits on fishing and hunting and the state Game and Fish Commission. 907-0636.

CALICO ROCK CALICO ROCK MUSEUM, Main Street: Displays on Native American cultures, steamboats, the railroad and local history. www.calicorockmuseum.com.

ENGLAND TOLTEC MOUNDS STATE PARK, U.S. Hwy. 165: Major prehistoric Indian site with visitors’ center and museum. 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., noon-5 p.m. Sun., closed Mon. $3 for adults, $2 for ages 6-12. 961-9442.

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

10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. $3 adults; $2 seniors, military; $1 students. 501-241-1943.

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

501-727-5427.

Computer Programmer/ Software Developer

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

(Job location: Little Rock, Arkansas) Anlyz, architect, dsgn, dvlp, config, deploy & maintain SharePoint infrastructure incl cust ECM solutns, multi-tiered enterprise web applics/portals & doc mgmt systs; Performance monitorg, security & config settings – cloud, active directory, user accts, authenticatn, version upgrades/ migratn in .NET environmt, troubleshootg us’g best practices for availability & reliability; Leverage SharePoint out-of-box functionality to conceptualize, redsgn & deliver now solutns w/deep knowl of InfoPath forms srvce, SharePoint wrkflow, dsgnr, etc. Assist standardizatn & optimizatn of data storage & retrieval. Bach’s deg in Comp Sci or MIS w/Certificatn in Microsoft SharePoint Srvr Applic Dvlpmt +5yrs of exp in SharePoint architecture, dsgn, dvlpmt, migratn, config & mainten suppt of lrge implementatns using SharePoint 2010 & higher. Any suit comb of exp of edu, traing or exp is acceptable. Exp w/ OOAD, dsgn patterns, SOA architecture, UML technology; SharePoint Wrkflow, Dsgnr, InfoPath Forms Srvces, BDC & BCS, rcrds mgmt, SharePoint Collaboratn Sites, Enterprise search, Metadata Srvce Dsgn, Content Type Hub Dsgn, Web Parts, Forms Based; Doc Mgmt Portals; Dvlpmt background in SharePoint 2010 & higher versions, .NET 4.5 framewrk, ASP.NET, C#, InfoPath, MVC, XML, XSLT, JavaScript, JQuery, Scripts, Web srvces, Metalogix Migrator, AvePoint Collaboratn tools DocAve, Bus Connectivity Srvce, Java, CSS, HTML, TFS, PwerShell, MS SQL Srvr 2012/2008R2, Oracle 10g, PL/SQL and TSQLs; Wrkg in agile dvlpmt environmt.

Some travel.

Mail resume to: Attn: HR Mgr-IPCS, 600 S Hwy 169, Ste 1595. Mpls, MN 55426

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

POTTSVILLE POTTS INN, 25 E. Ash St.: Preserved 1850s stagecoach station on the Butterfield Overland Mail Route, with period furnishings, log structures, hat museum, doll museum, doctor’s office, antique farm equipment. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Wed.-Sat. $5 adults, $2 students, 5 and under free. 479-9689369.

June 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25, 26, 2016 Thu, Fri & Sat 7:30pm, Sun 2:30pm $20 Adults • $16 Students & Seniors $2 off “Date Night Discount” on Thursday, June 23rd performance!

For more information contact us at 501.374.3761 or www.weekendtheater.org

1001 W. 7th St., LR, AR 72201 On the corner of 7th and Chester, across from Vino’s.

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

MANAGEMENT ANALYST Provide advice and technical assistance with cost analysis, fiscal allocation, and budget preparation. Perform cost-benefit analysis to develop operational policies to improve project performance and efficiencies. Prepare annual and special reports and evaluate budget proposals. Analyze data to determine the costs and benefits of various projects and recommend funding levels based on findings. Utilize cost-benefit analysis to review financial requests, assess program tradeoffs, and explore alternative funding methods.

Analyze financial and other data, including revenue, expenditure, and employment reports by building and using sophisticated mathematical models. Examine historical data and research economic and financial developments for acquisition and green field plans. Assist top managers analyze the proposed plan and recommend new systems, procedures, strategy, implementation or organizational changes. Master’s degree in Business Administration. Experience in and/ or knowledge of corporate financial planning, decision making accounting, managerial economics, marketing strategy, organizational behavior, corporate strategy, human resource management, information system management, quantitative methods, business statistics, business finance, business strategy, and consumer analysis/behavior.

Resumes to job loc: McLarty Company Attn: Sandra Bradley 425 W. Capitol Ave Suite 3600 Little Rock, AR 72201

SUBSTANCE ABUSE COUNSELING

DOT SAP Evaluations Christopher Gerhart, LLC

(501) 478-0182

sip LOCAL ARKANSAS TIMES

Elementary School Special Education Teacher (Maumelle, AR and client sites) Educate and teach special education students who have an Individualized Education Program. Provide special education students with appropriate learning activities and experiences designed to fulfill their potential for intellectual, physical, and social growth. Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in Special Education and 2 years of work experience required. Must possess a valid SC Teacher’s License in Special Education (2H). Mail resume to Global Teachers Solutions LLC, 11901 Crystal Hill Road, Maumelle, AR, 72113

PART-TIME ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT ARKANSAS ADVOCATES FOR CHILDREN AND FAMILIES

is seeking a part-time Administrative Assistant. 15 hours a week, 3 days a week including Fridays. Requires general office skills and proficiency in Microsoft Office programs and database programs. 5+ years of experience required. Salary based on experience ($11 to $14/hr). Send cover letter, resume, and references to cneal@aradvocates.org or 1400 West Markham St., Ste. 306, Little Rock, AR 72201.

AACF is an equal opportunity employer.

GROW grow LOCAL ARKANSAS TIMES

www.arktimes.com

JUNE 16, 2016

39

TO ALL OUR SPONSORS AND VOLUNTEERS FOR MAKING

A HUGE SUCCESS!

Alecia Castleberry, Riverfest 2016 Festival Chairman Stephen Bentley, Riverfest 2016 Chairman of the Board Lisa Krannichfeld – 2016 Festival Artist • Riverfest Committee & Board of Directors The Little Rock Parks & Recreation Employees • 1500 Festival Volunteers

PRESENTED BY

105.1 The Wolf 3M ABC Enforcement ACOSTA Foods Acxiom Corporation Air Magic Fireworks Alecia & Mike Castleberry Alice 107.7 FM ALPS – Laminate.com Angie & Jordan Johnson Ann Lewis Ann Portis April & John Findlay Arita & Tom Jewart Arkansas Army National Guard Arkansas BlueCross BlueShield Volunteers Arkansas Cancer Coalition Arkansas Children’s Hospital Arkansas Craft Distributors Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Arkansas Dentistry & Braces Arkansas Department of Health.HIV/STD Arkansas Federal Credit Union Arkansas Game & Fish Commission Arkansas Garden Center – Sherwood Arkansas Graphics Arkansas Department of Health Arkansas Highway & Transportation Department Arkansas Portable Toilets Arkansas Rice Council Arkansas State Chamber Of Commerce Arkansas State Fire Marshall Arkansas State Police Arkansas Times Arkansas Trailer Arvest Ashley & Jason Parker Ashli Ahrens & Kelley Bass AY Magazine B98.5 FM BAGGO, Inc. BancorpSouth Bank of America Bank of The Ozarks Barbara Daugherty Barbara Jean Ltd. BAT Farms Bath Fitter BearCom Bemberg Iron Works Ben E. Keith Company Beth & Charlie Porter Beth & Ted Rice BIG 94.9 Bobby’s Bike Hike Brandon Company Bray Gourmet Deli and Catering Bray Sheet Metal Company Brenda Majors’ Catering Britton and Drew Lott Broker Solutions

By Invitation Only Bubba Mahan Capital City Traffic Capital City Traffic Control Cardinal Health CARTI Catering to You Catfish Farmers of Arkansas Catherine and Robbie Cole 40

JUNE 16, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

Cathe Talpas Cathy and Al Alexander Catlett Law Firm CED/Consolidated Electrical Distributors Celebrate! Arkansas CenterPoint Energy Central Arkansas Library System Central Arkansas Transit Authority Central Arkansas Water Central Moon Distributing CHI St. Vincent Charles A. Wigginton, PA Cheers In Maumelle Chester Phillips CHI St. Vincent Chris King Chuy’s Circumference Group City of Little Rock City of North Little Rock Clinton Foundation & Presidential Center Coca-Cola Bottling Company Comcast Connie & Ed Staley Coulson Foundation Courtyard by Marriott Downtown Cross, Gunter, Witherspoon & Galchus, P.C. CW Arkansas D.J. Williams Daddy’s Deli Damgoode Pies Dancin Dog Productions Datamax David Duke David Shindler Debbie Shock & the Clinton Center Staff Delta Dental Deltic Timber Democrat Printing & Lithograph Company DICHOTOME Donna Bressinck DoubleTree Hotel Downhome Restaurant and Catering Downtown Little Rock Partnership Downtown Riverside RV Park Dugan’s Pub & Stratton’s Market East-Harding Construction, Inc. Edwards Food Giant Elite Protection Group Entergy Eric’s Elite Guide Service Eric Rob & Isaac – Eric Lancaster, Rob Bell, Isaac Alexander Everett Buick GMC Eve Yancey Fast Signs First Security Bank Flavorus Ford Motor Company Fox 16 News Frank & Paula Parke Friday, Eldredge, & Clark LLP Frio Light Garth Martin Gay and Randy Wyatt Go! Running Golf Cart Headquarters Graham Catlett Greenway Equipment Hardee’s

Heartland Bank Heights Neighborhood Association Hilburn, Calhoon, Harper, Pruniski & Calhoun, Ltd. Holiday Inn Presidential Holy Souls CYM Homewood Suites Hot Legs Crew Horton Brothers Printing Company Hudson Cisne Hugg & Hall Equipment Hugg & Hall Mobile Storage Image One Imperial Ice Company Inviting Arkansas Iriana’s Pizza J & M Foods James “Bushy” Johnston Jeffery Sand Company Jennifer and Robert Forrest Jeremy Cobb Jerry Cohen J. Kelley Referrals Jill & Ted Penick Jimmy John’s Jodiane and Jamie Tritt Jody Veit-Edrington John David Pittman Joe Strack John Antle Johnson & Vines, PLLC Julie & David Shindler Junior League of Little Rock KABZ – 103.7 The Buzz KARK-TV Channel 4 KARN News Radio 102.9 FM Kathleen & Steve Joiner Kathryn Pryor Kathy Perez KATV Channel 7 Kaufman Lumber Company Kawasaki Sports Center KB’s Outdoor Power Sports KDJE – 100.3 The Edge KHLR – The Ride- 106.7 FM Kim & Courtney Swindler Kingsford Charcoal KIPR-FM “Power 92” JAMS KKPT - The Point 94.1 FM KOKY 102.1 FM Krista and Keri Thomas Kristi and Brian Clark KSSN – 96 FM LaHarpe’s Office Furniture Lake Liquor Landers Ford Legacy Termite & Pest Control Linda and Rush Harding Lindsey Hastings Lisa Krannichfeld Little Rock Climbing Gym Little Rock Convention & Visitors Bureau Little Rock Fire Department Little Rock Parks & Recreation Department Little Rock Police Department Little Rock Public Works Department Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce Little Rock Sanitation Department Little Rock Traffic Engineering Louisiana Hot Sauce Loris and Jay Fullerton

Lydia and Bobby Bemberg Magna IV Marilyn and Dr. Robert Porter MarketPlace Grill Marriott Little Rock Martha & Warren Stephenson Mary Jo Bevis Mary Storey Mary Lee & William Knoedl Max Cleaners Mayor Joe Smith, City of North Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola, City of Little Rock Meadors, Adams & Lee Insurance Meadors, Adams & Lee Insurance Volunteers Media Star Promotions MegaLight, Inc. MEMS MEPS Metro Builders and Restoration Metropolitan Fire Extinguisher Co., Inc. Michael Hickerson Mid-South Ford Dealers Moses Tucker Real Estate Mountain Valley Water MSI Lodging Murphy USA Museum of Discovery Nabholz, Inc. Nan & Matt Tucker Natural State Distributing Neden Yacine Nestle Water Newks Catering North Little Rock Advertising & Promotions North Little Rock Fire Department North Little Rock School District North Little Rock Visitors Bureau Oak Forest Cleaners Oaklawn Racing and Gaming Ottenheimer Brothers Foundation Papa John’s Pizza Party Time Rental and Events Patrick Henry Hays Senior Center Patrick Wilson Penske Truck Rental Perks.com PK Portable Kitchen PlayStation Popeye’s Fried Chicken – Broadway, North Little Rock Potbelly Prairie Implement Company Praise AM/FM PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLC Privacy Star PWC Pulaski County Sheriff’s Department Pulaski County Sheriff’s Department Day Work Program Pulaski County Solid Waste Management QualChoice Randi Guillory Remedy Drug Company Renay & David Dean Rev 365 Riggs CAT River City Recreation World River Market District Neighborhood Association River Market Staff Rizon Media Road Runner Robert Derryberry

Robert Thomas Rock City Staging Rock Region Metro Roger Glaude Rowing Club Sandy and Tod Alstadt Scarlet Shannon Harris Sharon Heflin Shelia & Larry Vaught Sherry & Harrigan Wortsmith Skinner Pasta Snell Prosthetic & Ortho Lab Sonic Drive-In Southern Office Services Staley, Inc. Stephen Bentley Steve Nipper Stickyz & The Rev Room Stuart Cobb Stuart Vess Sunbelt Convention Services Super Retriever Series, Shannon Nardi & Staff Susan and Van Parker Suzon Awbry Sweet Baby Ray’s System Scale Corporation Taggart Foster Currence Gray Architects TCPrint Solutions The Catering Company The Lasik Vision Institute Thomas & Thomas LLP Thomas & Thomas LLP Volunteers Thompson Electric THV Channel 11 Texas Roadhouse The One (The Van) Tiffany and Daniel Robinson Tim Heiple Tod Williams Tom Spinnato UAMS – Children’s Nutrition Center United States Army United States Army National Guard United States Marines University of Central Arkansas Foundation Valerie & Art Kellam Value Stream Environmental Services Velva French Verizon Arena Vestcom Vickey & James Metrailer Vickie & Greg Hart Walter Coleman Walter Hussman War Memorial Stadium/AT&T Field Waste Management Wendy & Ted Saer Whole Hog Café Whole Hog Café, North Little Rock Wigginton & Associates Windstream Witt Stephens Nature Center Women To Women Wright Lindsey & Jennings LLP Xtra Lease