NEWS + POLITICS + ENTERTAINMENT + FOOD / MAY 18, 2017 / ARKTIMES.COM
THE DELUGE Hope, help and a whole lot of water in flooded Northeast Arkansas BY DAVID KOON
ONE ROUND ONLY!
NOW THROUGH
June 15
2017
VOTE
today!
arktimes.com/best2017
2
MAY 18, 2017
ARKANSAS TIMES
ARKANSAS TIMES
Tweet
ARKANSAS’S SOURCE FOR NEWS, POLITICS & ENTERTAINMENT 201 East Markham Street, Suite 200 Little Rock, Arkansas 72201
@ArkTimes
arktimes
arkansastimes
oldarktimes
2600 CANTRELL RD 5 0 1 . 2 9 6.9 955 | R I V E R DA LE1 0.CO M
ELECTRIC RECLINER SEATS AND RESERVED SEATING
SHOW TIMES: FRI, MAY 19 – THURS, MAY 25 11:00 SHOW TIMES FRI, SAT & SUN
NORMAN
EDITOR Lindsey Millar MANAGING EDITOR Leslie Newell Peacock CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Mara Leveritt ASSOCIATE EDITOR David Koon COPY EDITOR Jim Harris ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR Stephanie Smittle EDITORIAL ART DIRECTOR Bryan Moats PHOTOGRAPHER Brian Chilson DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL STRATEGY Jordan Little ADVERTISING ART DIRECTOR Mike Spain GRAPHIC DESIGNER Katie Hassell DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING Phyllis A. Britton DIRECTOR OF SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS Rebekah Hardin ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Brooke Wallace, Lee Major, Ashley Gill, Stephen Paulson ADVERTISING TRAFFIC MANAGER Roland R. Gladden ADVERTISING COORDINATOR Jim Hunnicutt IT DIRECTOR Robert Curfman CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Anitra Hickman CONTROLLER Weldon Wilson BILLING/COLLECTIONS Linda Phillips OFFICE MANAGER/ACCOUNTS PAYABLE Kelly Jones PRODUCTION MANAGER Ira Hocut (1954-2009)
DRIVERS PLEASE BE AWARE, IT’S ARKANSAS STATE LAW:
USE OF BICYCLES OR ANIMALS
Every person riding a bicycle or an animal, or driving any animal drawing a vehicle upon a highway, shall have all the rights and all of the duties applicable to the driver of a vehicle, except those provisions of this act which by their nature can have no applicability.
OVERTAKING A BICYCLE
The driver of a motor vehicle overtaking a bicycle proceeding in the same direction on a roadway shall exercise due care and pass to the left at a safe distance of not less than three feet (3’) and shall not again drive to the right side of the roadway until safely clear of the overtaken bicycle.
association of alternative newsmedia
VOLUME 43, NUMBER 37 ARKANSAS TIMES (ISSN 0164-6273) is published each week by Arkansas Times Limited Partnership, 201 East Markham Street, Suite 200, Little Rock, Arkansas, 72201, phone (501) 375-2985. Periodical postage paid at Little Rock, Arkansas, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to ARKANSAS TIMES, 201 EAST MARKHAM STREET, SUITE 200, Little Rock, AR, 72201. Subscription prices are $42 for one year, $74 for two years. Subscriptions outside Arkansas are $49 for one year, $88 for two years. Foreign (including Canadian) subscriptions are $168 a year. For subscriber service call (501) 375-2985. Current singlecopy price is 75¢, free in Pulaski County. Single issues are available by mail at $2.50 each, postage paid. Payment must accompany all single-copy orders. Reproduction or use in whole or in part of the contents without the written consent of the publishers is prohibited. Manuscripts and artwork will not be returned or acknowledged unless sufficient return postage and a self-addressed stamped envelope are included. All materials are handled with due care; however, the publisher assumes no responsibility for care and safe return of unsolicited materials. All letters sent to ARKANSAS TIMES will be treated as intended for publication and are subject to ARKANSAS TIMES’ unrestricted right to edit or to comment editorially.
©2017 ARKANSAS TIMES LIMITED PARTNERSHIP FOR SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE CALL: (501) 375-2985
SNATCHED
R | 10:45 1:30 4:00 6:45 9:20
R | 11:15 2:30 4:30 7:20 9:20
ALIEN: COVENANT
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY 2
R | 11:00 1:45 4:15 7:00 9:30
E: arktimes@arktimes.com
SENIOR EDITOR Max Brantley
PG13 | 10:45 1:30 4:00 6:45 9:30
ALIEN: COVENANT
W: arktimes.com
PUBLISHER Alan Leveritt
KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD
R | 11:00 2:00 4:30 7:00 9:25
AND CYCLISTS, PLEASE REMEMBER...
Your bike is a vehicle on the road just like any other vehicle and you must also obey traffic laws— use turning and slowing hand signals, ride on right and yield to traffic as if driving. Be sure to establish eye contact with drivers. Remain visible and predictable at all times.
LOCAL
DIARY OF A WIMPY KID: THE LONG HAUL PG | 11:15 2:00 4:25 6:45 9:00
PG13 | 10:45 1:30 4:00 6:45 9:30
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY 2 PG13 | 11:00 1:45 4:15 7:00 9:45
EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING PG13 | 11:15 2:15 4:20 7:15 9:30
GIFTED
PG13 | 11:00 2:00 4:30 7:15 9:25
GIFT CARDS AVAILABLE ONLINE • TICKET KIOSK IN LOBBY
NOW SERVING BEER & WINE • FULL FOOD MENU • GIFT CARDS AVAILABLE
WE SPECIALIZE IN HUMAN CAPITAL ASAP offers staffing solutions to clients looking for a consistent and competent workforce. Our approach to staffing is much more than placement, it’s a partnership that thrives on mutually beneficial results. We are intimately connected with our clients and fully understand the industries we serve. Our goal is to create a mutually beneficial long-term relationship that results in increased profitability and employee loyalty.
10301 N. RODNEY PARHAM ROAD 501-537-2727 • ASAPWORKSFORME.COM
FROM LEFT: CHARLEY ROBERTSON AND KEVIN FAIR
A R K A N S A S F E S T I VA L B A L L E T Rebecca M. Stalcup, artistic director, p r e s e n t s
The Adventures of
o n W d erlan n i e c i d Al © Copyright Lyuba Bogan 2017.
youtube.com/c/arktimes
RIVERDALE 10 VIP CINEMA
May 19-21 Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theatre T I C K E T S > A r k a n s a s D a n c e . o r g 501-227-5320 • info@arkansasdance.org arktimes.com MAY 18, 2017
3
COMMENT
From the web In response to the May 8 Arkansas Blog post, “Charter assault, fueled by Walton money, continues on Little Rock School District”: I see that one proposed charter is to occupy a school building leased from the Waltons, a return on a real estate investment, unless the building was given to them — then it’s a gift that keeps on giving. A charter school proposed for Wiener. For 400 students, this must be a total public school conversion that would push the current system into bankruptcy. Who thinks this is a good idea? Going for the record What is the Walton/Hussman/Murphy endgame? Kill universal manda-
4
MAY 18, 2017
ARKANSAS TIMES
tory public education and replace it with “privatized” for-profit schools with their company in charge? I just want to know, because their cheerleading for the death of public education puzzles me. Claude Bahls A “college prep” K-5? So they’re gonna enroll ’em in college at about age 12? (Yeah, I know on exceedingly rare occasions that’s happened here and there, if not in Arkansas to my knowledge.) So what’s wrong with building a good educational foundation for this age group and getting them ready for junior high and high school? Doigotta Profit centers expanding in Little
Rock. Name them after Einstein, Tesla, etc. They are still profit centers with an education component/distractor. Maxifer Look, Little Rock, the only way you are going to get your school board back is by reaching out to the surrounding populous areas of Central Arkansas and voting out the governor. Sure, increase the turnout in NLR/ LR, but get out and support progressive networks in Saline, Faulkner and Perry counties. Offer to help those networks. After losing quite a few elections, they need a boost for 2018. It will flip AR2 and flip the governor. jj In response to the May 5 Arkansas Blog post, “Federal health bill would under-
cut governor’s plan for altered Medicaid expansion”: What a convoluted mess the “Obamacare Repealers” or “Freedom for Males Caucus” have made out of their GOP NoHealthCare Plan. They should have expected Donald to be unpredictable and screw up their greedy, revenge plan. These people have lost their moral compass and their humanity if they can purposely let people die earlier than they need to. I am going to push the Arkansas Legislature for “Death with Dignity, or medical aidin-dying” statutes that would allow certain terminally ill adults to request and obtain a prescription for medication to end their lives in a peaceful manner. That is why I think it would be illogical for the state to spend any more money on stopping the opioid
epidemic. It would be the height of cruelty to pass terrible health care plans that will purposely kill off poor and sick people, because you think they are a liability, then sadistically make those people suffer in pain until the end. One good thing the GOP Slash, Cut, and Kill NoHealthCare Plan will do is help Democratic women win more seats in 2018. ShineonLibby If the families of !A!S!A!, Rotten Tommy Cotton, Miz Leslie and the like had to endure the same level of health insurance/care that the least among Arkansas Doesn’t Work recipients did, that s**t would come to a screeching halt. Sound Policy Trump has promised better health care and lower premiums for all. Why isn’t he being held to this? The plan of the Regressive Party will raise premiums on the elderly and the poor (they’re not called Regressive for nothing). Obama got barbecued for promising something about his plan (keep your plan if wish). But his statement was largely accurate. The criticism was due to people wanting to hold on to their cheap paperthin plans. Far from being accurate, Trump is just out and out lying. Why is it only the Democrats who are held accountable? Slithey Tove In response to the May 5 Arkansas Blog post, “Judge Griffen responds to judicial disciplinary complaint”: So, Sen. Jake Files for a second time makes the news for some questionable loans, not to mention being sued by multiple parties, including the City of Fort Smith, yet no action is being taken by the legislature to look into his conduct? Wendell Griffen exercises his right to free speech and he is the one impeached by our state legislature? And if you ARE going to impeach a judge, why this judge? If anyone should have been impeached it should have been Mike Maggio. He admitted he took a bribe. I bet he will still get to receive his retirement. So let’s see, what is different about Griffen and Maggio? Well, they are both male. They are both lawyers. They are both judges. They are both black. Oops, not correct. Maggio is white and Griffen is black. They both took bribes under the
S PO N SO RE D BY
table from Michael Morton. Oops, wrong again. Only Maggio has taken a bribe from Morton. He admitted as such in open court. Griffen has no such stain on his judicial record. I give up. You all need to figure out why our supermajority Republican House of Representatives is persecuting Griffen, but remained silent during the entire Maggio scandal. People need to call the legislature and ask them when are they going to hold themselves and their members accountable when they do these bad things. These guys know no shame. Poison Apple
FOOD TRUCKS, BEER, MARGARITAS, WINE, LOCAL VENDORS & MORE!
LIVE MUSIC ON THE DOGTOWN SOUND STAGE!
Caleb Valesquez: 5-5:45pm Gil Franklin Band: 6:15-7pm Dazz & Brie: 7:15-8pm Brian Nahlen Band: 8:15pm-close MUSIC IN THE BEER GARDEN
I do not think there is any chance at all that Judge Griffen will be impeached. The hotheads like Sen. Trent Garner (R-El Dorado) will make a lot of noise, but the reasonable Republicans, and there are several of them in the legislature, know that there is no way an impeachment of someone because of their ideas (or in this case, I guess his ideals) would ever succeed, not even in the poison, racist climate we are currently seeing in Arkansas. plainjim In response to the May 11 Arkansas Blog post that Circuit Judge William Pearson of Clarksville, who pleaded guilty to drunk driving and was given a six-month suspended sentence, was reinstate to the bench: Judge convicted of a DWI — no problem letting them continue to be a judge. Judge accidentally forgets his child who dies in a hot car and eventually gets to go back to judging. Judge exercises his First Amendment right of free speech and religion must be impeached and removed from the bench. In this you see the true illustration of Arkansas “values.” couldn’t be better In response to an Arkansas Blog post on the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department’s proposal to widen Interstate 30: A good conservative government should be limited to the minimum necessary to 1) tax the people, 2) redistribute their money to corporations, 3) receive contributions from the lobbyists of those corporations, and 4) portray opponents as hippy liberals. Ivan the Republican
Joe Darr 5PM - 9PM IN THE
L AKEHILL SHOPPING CENTER ON JFK IN NORTH LITTLE ROCK!
$1 ENTRY FEE
FREE TROLLEY RIDE
to Patio from Park Hill Baptist Church parking lot on C street and JFK! 4:30-9:30pm
Kids 12 and under are free. Benefiting PHBMA (501 Non Profit) Helping to grow and enhance the Park Hill Community! FOR MORE INFO, VISIT PARKHILLBUSINESS.COM
RUNNER UP BEST NEIGHBORHOOD FESTIVAL
21ST ANNUAL NIGHT AT THE REP FOR WOLFE STREET FOUNDATION Join us Tuesday, May 30th, from 6 - 7 pm for a Recovery Resource Fair in The Rep lobby highlighting area resources for alcoholism and substance abuse immediately followed at 7 pm by the premiere of Godspell, the musical.
TICKETS: $ 25 RESOURCE FAIR: 6 - 7 PM • GODSPELL: 7 PM • THE REP: 601 MAIN ST, LITTLE ROCK Purchase tickets at centralarkansastickets.com
PRESENTED BY:
arktimes.com MAY 18, 2017
5
DAVID SNODDY
EYE ON ARKANSAS
IN TROPICAL LITTLE ROCK: Photographer David Snoddy reminds us this week that there is cool stuff to see at the Little Rock Zoo, including this peacock pheasant.
WEEK THAT WAS
Vote of the week
Quote of the week
Triple homicide in Yell County
Voters overwhelmingly defeated the Little Rock School District tax proposal to refinance existing bonds and extend 12.4 mills of property tax for 14 years, at a cost that could have approached $1 billion. A total of 7,067 voters, or 65 percent, opposed the tax; 3,938, or 35 percent, supported it. LRSD officials had promised to spend the money on a range of school facility improvements, as well as building a new high school in Southwest Little Rock. Proponents, primarily from the business establishment, outspent opponents 10-1 with a message that the vote was “for the kids.” Opponents, energized by the state takeover and removal of the majority black school board, called it a vote for taxation without representation. They and former Superintendent Baker Kurrus questioned long-term financial planning for the district, which faces a continuing loss of students to charter schools.
“With all due respect, I’m tired of hearing about the Little Rock School District. I’ve had it, OK? — State Board of Education member Brett Williamson of El Dorado, speaking during a public comment period at a meeting of the State Board the day after the LRSD millage election, when a number of LRSD supporters asked the board to return the district to local control. The state took over the district two years ago, ostensibly because six of its 48 schools were in academic distress.
Three people were killed in Yell County on May 11. James Bowden, 42, of Dardanelle is in custody after allegedly fatally shooting Rita Miller, 61, and Cierra Miller, 17, in rural Yell County. Bowden is also accused of killing Yell County Sheriff’s Deputy Kevin Mainhart during a subsequent traffic stop. Bowden later held Haley McHam, 31, hostage for about five hours. Rita and Cierra Miller were McHam’s mother and daughter. McHam told KTHV, Channel 11, that Bowden said he killed her mother and daughter and kept her hostage because she did not want to date him anymore. Bowden left the house where he held McHam without resistance about a half-hour after McHam walked out.
6
MAY 18, 2017
ARKANSAS TIMES
Uuuuugh, you guys. I’m so bored of it. Say other things now.
Football freebie a violation Sgt. Michael Gibbons, head of the North Little Rock Fraternal Order of
Police, accepted a state Ethics Commission finding that acceptance of free trips for cops to Dallas Cowboy football games provided by Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones was a violation of a state ethics law. The settlement agreement provided neither a punishment nor a warning. It says Gibbons had “good cause” to think the gift was proper because the North Little Rock City Council had passed a resolution deeming the gift government benefits for police service. State law prohibits gifts worth more than $100 to public servants for doing their jobs. Statutes also prohibit public servants taking anything but government benefits for their work or from using their positions to gain special privileges. Jones grew up in North Little Rock. Some 120 of 178 officers took the trips, along with family and friends, at a total value of at least $300,000, well more than $100 each.
OPINION
You want tort reform? Try this.
T
he nursing home industry and the chamber of commerce finally defeated the trial lawyers in the 2017 legislature. The Republican-dominated body approved a constitutional amendment for voters in 2018 that they’ll depict as close to motherhood in goodness. If approved, they’ll tell you, greedy lawyers will still be able to dream up nuisance suits against saintly doctors and pristine nursing homes, but their contingency fees will be limited and strict caps will be placed on both punitive and “non-economic” damages. Non-economic damage? That’s pain and suffering, even death. Children and the elderly who can prove no loss of income from neglect and abuse are entitled to little for their torment because, really, what are they worth? The trial lawyers will spend plenty to
stop what amounts to stripping the Arkansas Constitution of the right to a jury trial for damages. But perMAX verse Arkansas — BRANTLEY maxbrantley@arktimes.com though no home to runaway juries or financially strained nursing home owners or doctors — is inclined to buy propositions that the chamber of commerce declares good for business. (If being hospitable to business and inhospitable to workers was a ticket to economic Glory Land, Arkansas would be Silicon Valley, the Research Triangle and the Johnson Space Center rolled into one.) Alas, you know the reality. But some hope emerged this week. The Arkansas Bar Association is work-
Goodbye, Mr. Trump
I
t is hard to escape the feeling that the fortunes of President Trump and the country took a decisive, and for Trump a fatal, turn May 9-10, when the president fired the director of the FBI over its investigation of Russian efforts to swing the presidential election to him and the very next day shared top-secret intelligence with Russian officials in an Oval Office meeting closed except to a Kremlin press aide toting electronic gear to capture the intimate session for Russians but not Americans. In the McCarthy era and maybe during the Nixon siege, 1972-74, conservatives and most others would characterize those shocking events as little short of treasonous, particularly if you link them to 30 years of Trump toadying to the Russians, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Vladimir Putin. But absolutely no one, not even his worst enemy, suspects Trump of trying to harm America. Democrats, probably most Republicans in Congress and many in Trump’s Cabinet and officialdom know the president’s problems, and they are not about his patriotism. They are deeply personal, psychiatric and longstanding. Donald Trump views the presidency and all
of government as extensions of himself, just as he did his business empire. Government must be wholly dediERNEST cated to advancing DUMAS and protecting his image, and nothing else. He had repeatedly demanded a vow of loyalty from the FBI director, who is sworn to look out for the country, not any politician. Not getting them, Trump fired James Comey and, after putting out lies about it, finally admitted he had fired him for the Russian investigation. Everyone in his circle, including loyal members of Congress, knew the president’s peccadilloes — his naivete about the Constitution and government, his nutty obsessions like tweeting his fleeting thoughts to the whole world, his penchant for lying and standing behind his lies forever while insisting that his underlings support them until he says the opposite or something else. People looked upon them as refreshing, quaint, a good distraction from Washington’s stuffy protocol — or a dangerous psychic disorder.
ing on a constitutional amendment. It doesn’t have endorsement of its governing body yet. But it would force the nursing home titans and chamber executives to double their spending to pass one amendment and beat another. The bar amendment does more than nullify the damage limits proposed by the legislature. The marquee provision would shine light on “dark money,” undisclosed independent spending in political races that played an enormous factor in recent races for Supreme Court and attorney general. Contributors would be disclosed and, in the case of judicial races, held to normal campaign spending limits. The amendment also would finally end legislative pork barreling, in which legislators defy the constitution and divvy up state surplus for personal projects. The practice has turned felonious at times. Some recent legislative mug shots taken following bribery arrests could serve as campaign material. The amendment also would restore balance of power. The courts would continue to be responsible for court rules, if not substantive law. The legislature
could override a gubernatorial veto, but only with a two-thirds vote, not a simple majority. The amendment would overturn a legislative initiative that put control of executive agency rules in the hands of a legislative committee. The legislature tried to discourage such popular initiatives with a punishing new law for people who pay to gather signatures on amendment petitions. The bar association hopes to rely on volunteer labor and thus avoid the new rules on paid canvassing.
“With all due respect, I’m tired of hearing about the Little Rock School District. I’ve had it, OK?” Solutions for Williamson: 1) Give Little Rock its school board back and 2) resign from the state Board of Education.
It would only take this weird blowhard perhaps a little more time to learn how to govern effectively than it did politicians who came up through the political process, like Clinton, the Bushes and Reagan. Wary Republicans like Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and 2020 presidential hopefuls like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz would stand behind him through this process so they couldn’t be accused of disloyalty before the president brought himself down. But May 9-10 introduced a dilemma — not a new one but a heightened realization of it — to everyone. The president’s bumbling on one thing after another — the Muslim ban, health care reform, his absurd budget, the border wall, his spurious charges that Obama wiretapped his offices, his endless attacks on old foes and the press — all occurred during nearly four months of peace and quiet for the country. The economy continued to hum like no other in the world. The crazy North Korean dictator kept doing the same nutty things he and his daddy had done for 16 years, but there’s been no crisis. Trump’s self-inflicted wounds — not a real crisis — have kept his national approval ratings at the abysmal level. But these are dangerous times. What if there is a real national security crisis, as every modern president has faced? Will the president act with the same stupid judgment he used to get his Justice
Department toadies to craft the firing excuse that Comey had mistreated Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election or in hosting a cozy chat with Russian officials in which he buttered them up by sharing a powerful secret that will allow Russia and its brutal ally, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, to disrupt U.S. intelligence operations? What kind of mess, what potentially fatal dilemma, could he blunder the country into, not out of malevolence but out of childish spite or ignorance? What Republican cannot wonder, and shudder? On Tuesday, the president was back at his old stand, saying the wrongdoer was not he who had leaked national secrets to the enemy, but whoever had leaked knowledge of it to the American people. From Election Day, Trump has attacked people for leaking stuff about his dealings. He wants them prosecuted. Every president — chiefly Bill Clinton — has endured the scourge of leaking aides. It is a natural phenomenon. As an old government reporter, I know. Who leaked the president’s leak to the Russians? It’s just a guess based on personal experience, but my money is on Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s stern national security adviser, who sat in on the Russian tête-à-tête and who had to be horrified. McMaster manfully came out and inartfully tried to explain away his boss’s mistake (“it was wholly appropriate”) and took a public beating for it. That’s what a patriot would do.
UNRELATED SUBJECT: Brett Williamson, a hired hand for the Murphy Oil fortune, gave a poor illustration of public service last week. Four Little Rock School District supporters made a heartfelt plea before the Board of Education that the board return the district to local control. Board member Williamson’s response:
Follow Arkansas Blog on Twitter: @ArkansasBlog
arktimes.com MAY 18, 2017
7
Trump unfit
E
ven as an oligarch, President Trump turns out to be breathtakingly incompetent. Is there any reason to suppose he’s even loyal to the United States? Does he even understand the concept? Trump is loyal to Trump, and to his absurdly swollen ego. Nothing and nobody else. How long before the president appears on a White House balcony dressed up like a Third World generalissimo, wearing mirrored sunglasses and gold-fringed epaulets the size of football shoulder pads? Hosting Russian diplomats in the White House just one day after boasting on national TV that he’d fired FBI Director James Comey to shut down the “fake news” investigation of his presidential campaign’s dalliance with Vladimir Putin’s spies can only be understood as an oligarch’s gesture of contempt. Contempt for the truth, of course, which almost goes without saying. As if the initial cover story — that Comey got dumped for mistreating poor Hillary Clinton — weren’t insulting enough on its face. But also contempt for the American news media, who Trump barred from the meeting in favor of photographers from Tass, the Russian state news agency. As should have been predictable, that backfired badly. Photos of the president yukking it up in the Oval Office with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak turned up in Moscow news media. If you didn’t know better, you’d think Trump was bragging about his sexual exploits. Also contempt for the anti-Trump majority. Here’s how that great American Rush Limbaugh saw it: “So he fires Comey yesterday. Who’s he meet with today? He’s meeting with the Soviet, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov! I mean, what an epic troll this is.” (Republicans of the Limbaugh persuasion long ago chose party over country. In their minds, all competing values are subordinate to making Nancy Pelosi unhappy.) But, no, Trump wasn’t talking dirty to the Russians. We should be so lucky. Instead, he appears to have been expressing his contempt for the U.S. intelligence services, by recklessly boasting about top-secret information regarding an ISIS terror plot that had been shared with the CIA by an ally. That ally (probably Israel) will now be forced to reconsider whether or not the U.S. government can be trusted to keep a secret. 8
MAY 18, 2017
ARKANSAS TIMES
Certainly not as long as Trump’s in office. See, people get murdered when spy networks get GENE blown. PainstakLYONS ingly cultivated sources flee for their lives. Hasn’t Trump even read a John Le Carré novel? Almost certainly not. Even a movie like “The Bourne Identity” might give the president a clue if he were capable of learning anything not directly related to his ego or his pocketbook. Yet again the White House sent out respected advisers — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster — to issue carefully worded nondenial denials. Trump undermined them in early morning tweets boasting that he had the unquestioned power to do what they’d just finished claiming that he hadn’t done. The psychological subtext is unvarying: big me, little you. Trusting this bombastic faker with sensitive national security intelligence is like trusting a basset hound with a ham sandwich. See, a real dictator like Vladimir Putin can pull off these contemptuous gestures. Besides being infinitely smarter and more self-controlled than his American apprentice, Putin’s also utterly ruthless and doesn’t care who knows it. Trump is merely egomaniacal and amoral. “If [Putin] says great things about me,” Trump said during the 2016 campaign, “I’m going to say great things about him. I’ve already said, he is really very much of a leader. I mean, you can say, ‘Oh, isn’t that a terrible thing’ — the man has very strong control over a country.” Russian dissidents fall off balconies or succumb to poison. Putin skates in exhibition hockey matches, where he scores seven goals. There’s no sign Trump has the chutzpah for that kind of thing. Nor is the United States by any stretch of the imagination Russia — where autocratic governments, secret police and prison camps have been the rule for centuries. We may be saved by the fact that the feckless Trump is often the authoritarian Trump’s worst enemy. If we’re lucky, Trump’s astonishing indiscipline will be his undoing.” But only if the Republican leadership begins to say publicly what some confide privately: Trump is congenitally unfit for power and growing more so daily.
Factions
W
ith only a few inflections of genuine partisan conflict, factionalism has been the defining dynamic in Arkansas politics since the Civil War. Debates over public policy have rarely been between closely matched political parties; instead, the defining forces in those disputes have been factions within political parties. For almost all of that period, of course, those meaningful factions existed within the Democratic Party. One clear takeaway from the 2017 legislative session is that, for the first time, stark factional divisions within the state’s Republican Party are now shaping the winners and losers in Arkansas’s public policy debates. V.O. Key, the chronicler of Southern politics at the middle of the past century, argued that “fluid” factions defined the politics of the “pure one-party politics” of Arkansas. These “transient and amorphous” factions within the state’s Democratic Party were typically tied to potent personalities rather than anything that smacked of ideological coherence. Because Arkansas remained overwhelmingly Democratic later than any other state in the South, factionalism continued to dominate in the state, although, over time, a more coherent conflict between “modernizers” (who supported educational advancement and civil rights) and “traditionalists” (resistant to such change) began to emerge. During the Obama era, of course, Democrats’ stark advantages in Arkansas electoral politics faded and — for several legislative sessions — the two parties were closely matched in the legislative arena. The result was a unique period in which partisanship drove debates as members of the two parties’ legislative caucuses rarely veered across partisan lines on high-profile issues. Thanks to the GOP’s supermajority status in both houses of the General Assembly following the 2016 election sweep and a handful of party switches, however, factionalism within the Republican Party is now the most important force in Arkansas’s public policy debates. Factionalism deepened as the session progressed. While the lines of division vary a bit according to the policy issue being debated, the most consistent divide is one between the GOP establishment and the conservative populists. The establishment, led by Governor Hutchinson, has a deep history with the GOP and practices a form of “do no harm” conservatism that follows the traditional rules of the game in carrying out the duties of gov-
ernment. Although the establishment is certainly conservative on social issues, for instance, it becomes deeply JAY concerned when BARTH “bathroom bills” or anti-immigrant proposals threaten the business climate in the state. Populists see themselves as activists rather than party loyalists. Indeed, some populists — like Sen. Linda Collins-Smith (R-Pocahontas) — are actually fairly recent converts to Republicanism. This faction is impatient and wants to get immediate results on their priority issues, such as gun deregulation or religious freedom, even if it means blowing up the traditional norms of how government operates. In many ways, of course, this factional division replays the 2016 GOP presidential nomination battle with Hutchinson standing in for the Jeb Bush wing of the national GOP and the populists playing the role of Donald Trump. The divide takes on a clear geographical dimension as the establishment hails primarily from the suburban areas of Central and Northwest Arkansas (where Marco Rubio outperformed Trump in last spring’s presidential primary) while the populists are primarily rural in their origins. The populists see the establishment as privileged and elitist, and the establishment views the populists as bombthrowers who aren’t ready for prime time. The establishment won most of the big legislative battles during what was a very successful session for Governor Hutchinson’s limited agenda, but this factional battle will show itself in the legislative sessions and GOP primary battles of the next decade. All signs are that this division will be the key political battle in the state in the coming years, and those Republicans who find a way to bridge it will have distinctive power. The upside for progressives is that divisions in the GOP ranks create a space for the dramatically outnumbered Democrats to have a voice in the legislative process. Most often this comes by working the establishment Republicans to block more radical legislation. However, on occasion — such as on the criminal justice reform legislation championed by Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson (R-Little Rock) and Rep. Clarke Tucker (D-Little Rock) — bipartisan work in which Democrats and establishment Republicans come together can still produce progress on key issues.
Cigarette waste accounts for 38 percent of all litter, making it the country’s most-littered item. In our mission to protect our planet, we’re hoping to change that. Join the movement to keep cigarette butts off the ground. To learn more and request your free cigarette butt pouches,* visit AmericanSpirit.com** Promo Code: FIGHTLITTER
*While supplies last **Offer and website restricted to age 21+ smokers
CIGARETTES ©2017 SFNTC (2)
arktimes.com MAY 18, 2017
Arkansas Times 05-18-17.indd 1
9
5/12/17 10:36 AM
BOOKS FROM THE ARKANSAS TIMES
THE UNIQUE NEIGHBORHOODS OF CENTRAL ARKANSAS presents…
Clive Carroll Thursday May 18 7:30 p.m. The Joint
Clive’s debut album, Sixth Sense, was deemed by 301 Main Street English guitar legend John North Little Rock Renborn as “a milestone in the journey of the Tickets $25 steel-string guitar.” Available at the door or online at www.argentaartsacousticmusic.com or www.centralarkansastickets.com
Full of interesting voices and colorful portraits of 17 Little Rock and North Little Rock neighborhoods, this book gives an intimate, block-by-block, native’s view of the place more than 250,000 Arkansans call home. Created from interviews with residents and largely written by writers who actually live in the neighborhoods they’re writing about, the book features over 90 full color photos by Little Rock photographer Brian Chilson.
Also Available: A HISTORY OF ARKANSAS A compilation of stories published in the Arkansas Times during our first twenty years. Each story examines a fragment of Arkansas’s unique history – giving a fresh insight into what makes us Arkansans. Well written and illustrated. This book will entertain and enlighten time and time again.
ALMANAC OF ARKANSAS HISTORY This unique book offers an offbeat view of the Natural State’s history that you haven’t seen before – with hundreds of colorful characters, pretty places, and distinctive novelties unique to Arkansas. Be informed, be entertained, amaze your friends with your new store of knowledge about the 25th state, the Wonder State, the Bear State, the Land of Opportunity.
Payment: CHECK OR CREDIT CARD Order by Mail: ARKANSAS TIMES BOOKS 201 EAST MARKHAM STREET, STE. 200, LITTLE ROCK, AR, 72201 Phone: 501-375-2985 Fax: 501-375-3623 Email: ANITRA@ARKTIMES.COM Send _____ book(s) of The Unique Neighborhoods of Central Arkansas @ $19.95 Send _____ book(s) of A History Of Arkansas @ $10.95 Send _____ book(s) of Almanac Of Arkansas History @ $18.95 Shipping and handling $3 per book Name _________________________________________________ Address _______________________________________________ City, State, Zip ___________________________________________ Phone ________________________________________________ Visa, MC, AMEX, Disc # ________________________ Exp. Date _______ 10
MAY 18, 2017
ARKANSAS TIMES
1% Money Market Account with $100,000 minimum deposit
THE OBSERVER NOTES ON THE PASSING SCENE
More bad news
A
s we write this, the Little Rock City Board is readying an ordinance to make it exponentially harder for charities to feed poor and homeless people in city parks. The proposed ordinance would require a permit for those who want to feed more than 25 people in a public park, demand a cash deposit be made to the city before doling out loaves and fishes, and institute other requirements meant to discourage filling hungry bellies. The city has already spent months scouring the thickets and thorny brambles around town in order to serve eviction notices on the hidden camps of homeless people who are bothering absolutely nobody other than those who might be bothered by the idea of a destitute person drawing breath in a makeshift shelter. We’re expecting the city next to make a run at mandatory indentured servitude for the homeless, or maybe an ordinance that allows city employees to stalk, net and mulch the poor so their remains can be spread on flower beds in the Heights. That’ll show ’em. In other news: Three asshats are still on the loose after an April 30 romp in which they busted into the fenced and gated Devil’s Hole, a spring-fed pool in Death Valley National Park, and proceeded to skinny dip in the lastknown habitat of the last 115 Devil’s Hole Pupfish — tiny, critically endangered creatures that have lived there for tens of thousands of years. They managed to kill one of the fish before leaving behind what investigators say were beer cans, spent shell casings, a pair of boxer shorts and a sizable amount of vomit in the water. For chrissakes, these FISH that live in the middle of the gatdamn DESERT. Don’t you think their lives are hard enough without somebody throwing a kegger in their living room? A $15,000 reward is being offered for the trio of idiots, who were caught on camera. Next up: As The Observer writes this, we are almost exactly 8 whole percent through the presidency of Don-
ald J. Trump, and that’s if the American people aren’t dumb enough to re-elect this flaming dumpster full of rotting mangos. Eight percent! We’ve got, like, 30,000 unhinged tweets and at least a hundred more Comey-firinglevel scandals to go! Sure, with Dorito Mussolini’s support at 39 percent — and only a few more Russkie-related FUBARs away from falling so low that it forms a dim, incredibly dense singularity that spawns a black hole — you might ask yourself: How could Trump NOT lose in 2020? But if you’re saying that, you’re drastically overestimating the rationality of the American people when herded into large groups, and you’re titanically underestimating the ability of the Democratic Party to pound the square peg of defeat firmly into the Holland Tunnel-sized round hole of a Sure Fire Thing. The Observer lived through the narrow defeats of Gore, Kerry and now Hillary by vastly inferior opponents; so, friends and neighbors, we can say without reservation: If anybody can lose to Donald “I Get Bigly Great Intel, Comrades!” Trump, it’s [insert name of whatever Democrat runs for president in 2020]. And finally, from the world of high fashion: Someone has started a Kickstarter fundraising campaign for the RompHim, which is a stylish romper for dudes. You know, for when you look at your man and think: I sure wish there was some way to upsize this snap-crotch onesie I bought for my 4-month-old and stretch it over the stringy body of a hipster. Promotional photos for the RompHim show coiffed young men in sunglasses laughing up a storm while partying in their shirtshorts, but The Observer is not swayed by slick marketing campaigns. While our desire to be one of the Cool Kids is vast, we’re firm on the fact that the only way you’re going to get us into a RompHim is if we’re issued one at gunpoint after delousing in the gulag. (At this rate, we’re genuinely worried it might come to that.)
1.409% APY 18 month CD $10,000 minimum deposit 1.56% APY 24 month CD with $10,000 minimum deposit
1
%
1.409% % 1.56
ROCK SOLID RATES
Limited time offer. Requires a Stone Bank checking account with at least one monthly ACH deposit or withdrawal
Little Rock 501.503.4242 • Harrison 870.280.5701 Mountain View 870.269.7311 • White Hall 870.247.9500
Limited time offer. Rate subject to change without notice. APY = Annual Percentage Yield. $10,000 minimum CD deposit. Offer not applicable on public entities, financial institutions. Early withdrawal penalties apply. Fees may reduce earnings. Interest compounded monthly. Other restrictions may apply. Call for details.
stonebank.com 11200 W. Markham 501-223-3120 www.colonialwineshop.com facebook.com/colonialwines
5/17– 5/
23/17
IRISH – WHISKEY – VODKA – GIN Jameson Irish Whiskey Everyday $52.99 $41.98 Evan Williams Black Label Bourbon Everyday $23.99 $20.99 Absolut Vodka Everyday $36.99 $31.97
Tanqueray London Dry Gin Everyday $46.39 $39.97
CONNOISSEUR SELECTION (750 mL)
Campo de Borja 2014 Borsao Garnacha Everyday $9.99 $6.99
Mirassou 2015 California Pinot Noir Everyday $11.99 $8.97
Seven Hill Vineyard 2014 Walla Walla Merlot Everyday $48.99 $37.98
Baker’s Bourbon Everyday $50.99 $39.98
Two Arrowheads 2013 Viognier/Marsanne White Blend Everyday $17.99 $13.98
Square One Organic Botanical Vodka Everyday $35.99 $26.99
Five Row 2015 Marmont Vineyards Chardonnay Everyday $16.99 $13.98
Monkey Shoulder Blended Scotch Whiskey Everyday $34.99 $28.99
Hendrick’s Scottish Gin Everyday $32.99 $25.99
1.5 LITER WINE SELECTION Fetzer Anthony’s Hill All Varieties Everyday $13.99 $10.99
Francis Coppola Directors’ Cabernet, Chard, Merlot & Pinot Noir Everyday $17.39 $13.98
Cline 2015 Ancient Vine Mourvedre Everyday $19.39 $13.97
BEST LIQUOR STORE
3FOR THURSDAY – Purchase 3 or more of any 750ml spirits, receive 15% off *unless otherwise discounted or on sale. arktimes.com MAY 18, 2017
11
Arkansas Reporter
THE
E
ven the word “tick” is icky. It conjures up disgusting leggy creatures, fat with blood hanging on your dog’s ear or tiny, itchy and in intimate areas of your own body. But what is really icky about ticks are the illnesses they can cause, and if you live in Arkansas, congratulations: There are more tick-borne illnesses here than almost anywhere. Which is why the University of Arkansas began the Arkansas Tickborne Disease Project, research not confined to ivory towers but reaching out to citizen scientists. The university wants your ticks, and within a couple of weeks you, too, can help its researchers learn more about ticks and the pathogens they carry by going to your local Extension Service office and getting a tick kit. Researchers in the Dowling Lab — named for the UA’s Dr. Ashley P.G. Dowling — will take the ticks you turn in, chop them up, and study their DNA. Krista Garner, who is getting her doctoral degree in what is called medical and veterinary entomology, the study of insects that cause diseases in people and animals, said the project’s goals are to collect insects from all over Arkansas to learn where the species concentrate, screen them for the bacteria they carry, and make people — including physicians — more aware that tick bites may be the cause of symptoms they’re seeing in their patients. Arkansas has at least five tick species: American dog ticks, brown dog ticks, Gulf Coast ticks, lone star ticks and black-legged ticks. If you are like this writer, you call those engorged gray ticks you see on Fido “dog ticks” and those little buggers “seed ticks.” Garner set us straight.
Ticks
12
MAY 18, 2017
ARKANSAS TIMES
wanted
UA lab is researching pathogens, raising awareness. BY LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK
QUEST FOR BLOOD: Ticks crawl to the top of a blade of grass or leaf edge and smell with their feet to find a meal.
The big fat gray ticks are females, not necessarily dog ticks, and they are chowing down to feed the “thousands of eggs” they are carrying within them, Garner explained. When they are “replete” — filled with blood — the tick drops off and lays the eggs. “Seed tick” is just a life stage, Garner explained. Ticks feed on blood in all stages, from egg to adult, and they can bite in the larval stage. They look like a tick in this stage, but if you happen to have a microscope on you at the picnic, you’ll see the larval tick only has six legs. The other two legs grow in the nymph stage (and now you can see all eight with your naked eye, should you so choose.) The tick finds its host by crawling to the top of a blade of grass, Garner said, or bush or branch and “questing”: By sticking its legs into the air to smell
untreated for a Rickettsia bacterium, which made her blood vessels leaky, lost her arms and legs. In 2016, state Department of Health records indicate, two people in Arkansas died of erlichiosis. There were 1,129 confirmed or probable cases of tick-borne diseases, including spotted fever Rickettsiosis (896 cases), erlichiosis (192), tularemia (32 cases) and anaplasmosis (15 cases). Sixty-eight of the state’s 75 counties reported diseases; Northwest Arkansas had the highest number of cases and North Arkansas had the highest numbers per 10,000 people. Southern Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma have the highest rates of erlichiosis and spotted fevers in the country, Garner said. Lyme disease, also a tickborne illness, is rare in Arkansas, though two cases have been reported this year. Since the start of the project, 1,607 ticks have been collected by the lab, provided by citizen scientists and Dowling lab researchers both. Of those, 1,245 were lone star ticks, 272 were American dog ticks, 48 were black-legged ticks (also known as deer ticks), 27 were Gulf Coast ticks and 15 were brown dog ticks. The species counts and reported cases of illness in Arkansas do not match up, which is another reason why the Dowling lab’s investigation into pathogen DNA is important. Though spotted fevers are the most reported diseases, the ticks associated with them — the American dog tick (carrier of Rickettsia rickettsia) and the Gulf Coast tick (Rickettsia parkeri) — are not greatly represented in the lab’s collection. Erlichiosis is associated with the lone star tick, the most common tick in
— its legs are like noses — for carbon dioxide and other chemicals that say animals are near. It uses vibrations on the grass to orient itself toward the host and grabs on as the host walks by. The reason you may not find ticks on you until after they’ve begun to feast is that their feeding apparatus “is like a two-way straw,” Garner said. “One way is bringing blood up and the other way, they’re essentially throwing up into you,” injecting saliva with anticoagulants and antihistamines, so you don’t scratch them off right away. Their mouths, Garner said, are like little saws. But read on anyway. Not all ticks are infected with pathogens, but when they are, and they stay on your body long enough to transmit them, you can become very ill, even die. Garner said a woman in Oklahoma,
LISTEN UP
Tune in to our “Week In Review” podcast each Friday. Available on iTunes & arktimes.com
THE
Inconsequential
PICTURE
News Quiz:
BIG
THE ‘YOU’RE OUT OF YOUR ELEMENT, JASON’ EDITION
Play at home, if you have secured the necessary permits from the city. 1) The town of Damascus is suing Faulkner County Prosecutor Cody Hiland. What’s the issue? A) Hiland’s ongoing attempts to officially change the name of the town to “Butthole of the Universe.” B) Hiland’s unorthodox “full contact” Little League coaching style, which has resulted in seven hospitalizations and two deaths. C) Hiland forbade the Damascus Police Department from enforcing traffic laws along U.S. Highway 65, after determining the town qualifies as a “speed trap.” D) Hiland’s insistence on trying to use dark magic to wake the vast, slumbering hellbeast created by the 1980 Titan II missile explosion. 2) Little Rock’s cruelty and indifference to the poor seems to know no bounds, a fact most recently displayed by a new ordinance under consideration by the City Board. What would the ordinance do? A) Force homeless people to fight bears and tigers at the Little Rock Zoo for entertainment, while armed with only sharp sticks and trashcan lids. B) Makes it illegal to feed free meals to more than 25 people in a city park without a permit, with groups barred from serving such meals more than two times a year at any park. C) Requires poor children to immediately surrender their candy to anyone carrying a Prada bag. D) Requires that soundproof fiberglass “Dignity Domes” be placed over the head of every Little Rock resident who earns less than 110 percent of the federal poverty level. 3) Travis Scott, a rapper who is apparently the boyfriend of professional attractive person Kylie Jenner, was recently arrested in Rogers. What was the charge? A) Inciting a riot and disorderly conduct after he allegedly encouraged concertgoers at the Walmart AMP venue to rush the stage, resulting in the injury of a security guard and a Rogers police officer. B) Gratuitous autotuned dickbaggery. C) Refused to let Rogers Mayor Gregg Merkin take the stage to “rap with the hip-hoppers for a minute about abstinence.” D) A completely trumped-up charge, with the goal of holding him hostage until the entire Jenner/Kardashian clan agrees to go away and never return. 4) Sen. Jason Rapert (R-Conway) recently took to Facebook Live to complain for over 20 minutes about a billboard put up near Toad Suck by the group ARrevolution.org that encourages him to resign. In the video, Rapert held up his phone several times to show the names of people associated with AR Revolution, saying, “We want to make sure these people get all the publicity they want.” One of the names he displayed is likely familiar to most everyone but Rapert. What was the name? A) Jesus H. Christ. B) Jacob Rapert, Jason’s non-evil identical twin. C) Walter Sobchak, John Goodman’s character in “The Big Lebowski.” D) Dr. Jacques P. Thiroux, author of the book “Ethics: Theory and Practice.” 5) A Centerton woman was recently arrested and charged with felony aggravated assault after she allegedly did something that some might consider heroic. What, according to investigators, did she do? A) Reported to police that she had looked out her window and witnessed a 14-year-old boy allegedly sexually assaulting her neighbor’s dog, only to be told by cops that he would have to be caught in the act. B) Saw the same kid allegedly sexually assaulting the dog again, and this time tried to effect a citizen’s arrest. C) Allegedly fired a warning shot into the ground as the boy — who was later charged as a juvenile with two counts of bestiality and one count of criminal trespassing — fled the scene in only his boxer shorts. D) All of the above. Answers: C,B,A,C,D
Arkansas and also the most “aggressive,” Garner said. The lone star also is associated with “Southern tick-associated rash illness,” though the cause is not yet known. Anaplasmosis and Lyme disease are transmitted by the black-legged tick. Tularemia, or rabbit fever, can be transmitted by both dog and lone star ticks. Because ticks lay so many eggs, mutation among the species is quick, Garner said, and there may be bacteria species and subspecies in ticks whose pathogenic nature is unknown. In the next couple of weeks, 3,000 tick kits will be distributed. They include a baggie, a card on which to record the date and place the ticks were collected, and five preservative-filled vials in which to put the ticks. You can take a vial out on a jaunt and fill it up with as many ticks as you find. Once you’ve filled five vials, enclose them in the baggie and either take it to the local extension office or mail to the UA. The data is put on a map at comp.uark. edu/~adowling/ARTicks/. The high number of tick-related illnesses could be related to Arkansas’s heat and people’s unwillingness to wear long sleeves and pants on a typical summer day, when it’s 100 degrees and humidity is 90 percent. To remove a tick that has bitten, Garner said, pinch it close to the skin and pull. Do not squeeze it, so the pathogens within aren’t squirted into you. Tick pliers, which come with little magnifying glasses, and tweezers are good tools. Skip the lit-match idea. Garner, whose fascination with arthropods began when she was only 8 and started raising tarantulas, plans to spend this week catching up on testing all the ticks from last year. The research, which is funded by the Arkansas Biosciences Institute, will be published in a science journal.
arktimes.com MAY 18, 2017
13
Black River
On higher ground in Pocahontas as residents pick up the p BY DAVID KOON
THE INLAND SEA: U.S. Highway 67, near Shannon.
14
MAY 18, 2017
ARKANSAS TIMES
r
BRIAN CHILSON
Y blues
he pieces after record flooding.
ou can love a river. Love the birds that glide just above the water in the morning. Love the commerce and beauty and grandeur of it,
the hidden bounty, the river simultaneously a kind of clock that counts the years and a brown thread that
binds those who live along it to the past and future.
But loving a river is and always has been tempered with the knowledge — as old as mankind’s tendency to found civilization on any bit of higher ground — that, sooner or later, the rain is going to come and not stop for hours or days. When it does, that tranquil, lazy flow that you love will be transformed into a beast with an unending appetite for sullying the best laid schemes of mice and men. The rains came to Arkansas in early
May. By the time the sun returned, according to preliminary estimates by the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, 937,000 acres of farmland had been inundated across the state, at a time when almost 90 percent of the state’s crops were already in the ground. Rice will reportedly be the hardest hit, with an estimated 156,000 acres — and $29.9 million in revenue — feared lost. According to the UA, total financial losses to farmers in the state arktimes.com MAY 18, 2017
15
due to impacts from the floods will top $64 million. The town of Pocahontas in Northeast Arkansas’s Randolph County was hard hit by the flooding, boxed in as it is by five rivers that are, in normal years, celebrated as tourist attractions for fishermen and canoers: the Black, the Current, the Elevenpoint, the Spring and the Fourche, along with dozens of creeks and streams and sloughs, unnamed and named, in the woods and fields around. The old-timers founded the town proper on high ground that sits above the Black, the city shelving down from the old courthouse to a sharp bend in the river that snakes past the bounds of Pocahontas and out of sight. Subsequent generations built on lower-lying land in east Pocahontas, on the other side of the river. Flooding wasn’t really a problem until recently, people in town will tell you, but this is the third time the waters have risen and smote the low-lying areas of Pocahontas since 2008. Something is wrong with the weather, people say. When the rains came, the Black River rose and drowned the Walmart store and whole neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city to a depth of 3 feet or more in some places. A mandatory evacuation order was issued for east Pocahontas on May 2. The river was scheduled to crest at over 31 feet, which would have been an even bigger disaster, but only managed 29 before the levees broke. Media reports said it was the levee breach that flooded portions of the town, but it was actually the opposite, according to the mayor. With the levees protecting the city to only 27 feet in some places, there was already widespread flooding by the time the levee broke. The breach siphoned water out of flooded stores and neighborhoods at the rate of two inches an hour once the levee failed and set water pouring into the fields to the south. Talking to people in Pocahontas about the levee breach, you find a strange mix of relief and sadness, the city mouse knowing that he or she had been spared some unknowably worse measure of calamity at the expense of country cousins downstream. Everybody knows everybody in Pocahontas, which means that everybody seems to know somebody who lost everything. Days after the Black began to recede, Stan Vinson was working at stripping 16
MAY 18, 2017
ARKANSAS TIMES
sodden carpets out of the home of his sister, Cleva Dean, near the corner of Old Country Road and Knott Street, more than half a mile east of the river. His clothes were covered in mud from his waist down to the soles of his shoes. Across the way, a commercial building sat surrounded by a hastily constructed dirt berm. After a final, desperate attempt to sandbag the house and move the appliances and furniture to higher ground as the rain came down, Vinson and Dean had been forced to evacuate to Vinson’s home in Corning. They hadn’t been able to get back to the house until days later, and found a mess. A friend had scared up some help to get the carpet and carpet padding out. It lay in soggy heaps on the lawn. “We knew that if [the Black River] went to 31 and a half, there wasn’t any hope,” Vinson said. “Then the levee broke. The water went down, but we still got the carpets wet. We could have done a better job at sandbagging, and we will if we have to do it again.” Inside, Cleva Dean stood in her dark and empty kitchen. The house smelled of dank river water, the air conditioner and gas heaters running full blast to try to dry things out. With the carpet stripped away, the bare plywood sheathing was spongy underfoot. Dean has lived in the house since 1972, and said flooding had never been a problem until recently. She’d evacuated to her brother’s house during a flood in 2011. Water didn’t get into the house that time. This time, she was not so lucky. She seemed always on the knife-edge of tears, speaking like a woman who was expecting to wake up in her dry house at any moment. She doesn’t have flood insurance, she said. “I’ve lived here for years without it doing anything,” she said. “I didn’t think it was worth it, but I guess it was. Flood insurance is pretty high and then it doesn’t pay off nearly anything. … You just have to roll with the punches. You don’t have any idea when FEMA is going to be around, do you?” Her brother has told her they should be able to get things righted and have her moved back in in about six weeks, but who knows? A little further into east Pocahontas on Redbud Street, Cody Grice was standing in front of the peeling white frame house he shares with his father. Nearby, just on the other side of a
crooked line of traffic cones, Redbud Street disappeared into murky brown water like a boat ramp. What looked to be a small brick church stood flooded just up the block. As the Black River rose, Grice’s house was saved by a neat, 3-foot wall of white sandbags surrounding the house; the product of a 13-hour, all-day thrash by Grice and his friends. They brought in at least 10 truckloads of sand donated by the Highway Department, he said, and then worked in the pouring rain with shovels to get the job done. Though the water got high enough to overtop the sandbag wall near the back porch, Grice said no water got into the house. “If it wasn’t for all my friends coming out and helping us, man, we would have been under water. It got up to almost the floorboards in the back,” Grice said. “Friends are great. If it wasn’t for them, we’d probably be sitting somewhere else right now. Might not be talking to y’all.” After the mandatory evacuation order came down, Grice and his father had fled with their dogs to his mother’s home on the other side of the river, then spent several nail-biting days not knowing whether their efforts to keep the house dry had paid off. “My mom’s house was the only place we had to go. We were lucky we had that. Our neighbors didn’t have that. They were asking us for help and we couldn’t do nothing for them. We were worried about our house,” Grice said. Some of his friends lost everything in the flood, he said. He’s given others money for food. It hurts, but he’s happy that his home was spared, and for the friends who helped. “Everybody came together when we needed it,” he said. “It’s hard to get people together when they’re getting paid, let alone just to help. Maybe America will take a note from smalltown Arkansas.”
The Sea of Arkansas South of town, the day after the Black River crested at Pocahontas, state troopers and National Guardsmen manned a roadblock, the Guardsmen in the cab of a brontosaurus-sized high-water truck with a tall air-intake snorkel that could, theoretically, allow the truck to drive underwater. Beyond them, the great Sea of Arkansas stretched to the horizon over what had been fields in the
midst of planting season a week before. In the distance, the water was dotted with flooded grain silos, churches and houses. Near Shannon, U.S. Highway 67 was submerged for at least five miles toward Walnut Ridge, the water reportedly 7 feet deep in places. Just up from the roadblock, the water caught the light as it gurgled over the shoulder of the highway, as if over a spillway. Nearby was a soaked house and a car sunk to the axles in the saturated ground. Even where the water had receded, yards and houses and barns had been buried in corn stalks and shucks, washed up from the fields in brown drifts. Closer to Walnut Ridge, it was even worse, the land flatter and lower and more populated, multiplying miseries. One of those helping lead the Arkansas National Guard’s operations in town in the days after the flood was First Lt. Ryan Jones, with the 875th Engineer Battalion. By the time we talked to him, Jones had been on the ground in Pocahontas for almost a week. From a base at the Pocahontas Community Center, his soldiers had worked pretty much around the clock helping the Randolph County Sheriff’s Office with evacuations and cleanup while spending their nights on the hard gym floor. A native of Jonesboro, Jones looked young enough that he probably couldn’t buy a beer without getting carded. But there he was, marshaling forces with crisp efficiency. “We’re here to help our community,” Jones said. “At the end of the day, the Arkansas National Guard is made up of people from this community. We have people in our National Guard unit right now who just live a couple miles down the road. It’s neighbors helping neighbors the best they can.” The mission in Pocahontas, Jones said, is exactly what the National Guard is all about. While there’s not a lot you can say to people who have lost everything, Jones said, he tries to stress that it will get better. “We try to reassure people that they will make it, and they will be OK,” he said. “I know it’s really hard. It is. They’ve lost a lot. But we’re trying to the best of our ability to get them comfortable and give them some hope that it will be OK. Maybe not at this time. But it will be OK eventually.” Pocahontas Mayor Kary Story, reached by phone the week after the Black receded, said the city is trying
BRIAN CHILSON
BACK HOME: Stan Vinson stripped sodden carpets out of his sister’s flooded home in east Pocahontas.
arktimes.com MAY 18, 2017
17
to get back to normal operations. The flood heavily damaged an estimated 50 homes and had soaked countless others to the point of requiring extensive tear-out. There was no good estimate, he said, of the number of businesses that took water, but it was substantial. Story said that at the time the levee system along the Black was constructed in 1938, east Pocahontas was a lowlying wetland that wasn’t really inhabited. Over the years, however, the area has slowly filled in with homes and businesses, development receiving a boost after Walmart built a store there in the 1990s. In the intervening 79 years since the levee along the Black was built, Story said, the landscape has been changed drastically by precision land leveling, further levee construction and dredging of drainage ditches. This year’s deluge could have been much worse for the city, Story said, if the levee hadn’t breached. “When it did, we watched the water go down two inches per hour. It just sucked it out of here. I was wanting it to be breached, but I don’t have any control or authority over that levee system so I can’t do anything to it. But, yeah, it was definitely a relief.” Though the city secured and spent $250,000 in grant money to raise certain portions of the levee after the 2011 floods, Story said that he doesn’t want to propose a “kneejerk reaction” solution now. A town hall meeting is in the works, with representatives from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers scheduled to be in attendance. “I want to wait until emotions cool down and we can start talking about solutions to this problem,” Story said. “I don’t want finger pointing and whose levee is high and whose levee costs what. Nobody won in this thing. The people that the levee protected, it didn’t protect them well. The farmers to the north suffered losses because of it, farmers to the south suffered losses, and east Pocahontas suffered.” Story said that he’s been proud of the reaction by the city and how the townspeople have come together for the good of their neighbors. Like Lt. Jones, he said that the best thing to tell people is, it will get better. “It’s hard for me to say much to them,” he said. “I haven’t been in their shoes of losing everything, so I don’t know how they feel. I know that they’ve got to keep their heads up. … We’ve just got to hold our heads high and fix our lives the best we can.”
18
MAY 18, 2017
ARKANSAS TIMES
SAVED BY SANDBAGS: Cody Grice said had it not been for the help of friends, “we would have been under water.”
Happy camper Up the hill from Black River Overlook Park, where the water still stood high enough to almost touch the nets of basketball goals two days after the worst of the flooding, the former Randolph County Nursing Home was a hive of activity. Closed in 2016, the nursing home had been reopened as a shelter as the storm bore down on the city and the river rose. The day we visited, the parking lot was full, National Guard Humvees sharing space with tractor-trailers rigs, compact cars and good ol’ boy lifted trucks. Legions of volunteers streamed in and out, hauling bleach and Bibles, shovels and rakes, pallets of bottled water and cardboard boxes of wrapped ice cream cones to hand out to evacuees and the all-volunteer staff. There were still over 50 people seeking refuge at the shelter
the day Arkansas Times visited, some arriving with not much more than the clothes on their backs. Outside, at the end of the long covered walkway leading to the door, Arthur Scroggins and Michelle Erickson were sitting in lawn chairs in the sun. Residents of Hardy, they’d been stuck in Poplar Bluff, Mo., for days after the flood, only coming south after the water receded enough to open the roads. They were going to wait another day at the shelter in Pocahontas to let the water go down a bit more, then make a try for their cabin on the Spring River. “We know the cabin hasn’t been touched or anything, Scroggins said. “It’s just getting there. Hopefully this rain is going to lay off for a while.” It was good to be back in Arkansas, they both agreed. Nearby was Kenny Garrett, a Pocahontas resident who stayed at the shelter for five days after the mandatory evacu-
ation, until the streets to his house were passable. “I checked out this morning, and came right back with some supplies I’d bought out of my own pocket,” he said. “Donated them. I know they’re shorthanded here.” Garrett, who works as a landscaper, said he’d had a total of 12 hours sleep during the previous week. Anytime you see him, he said, you can be sure there’s a coffee cup somewhere nearby. “I’m here until it’s over,” he said. “I’ve got a regular job I’ve got to go back to, but I’ll come up here at night. My pockets ain’t that deep, but I’ll do what I can do.” As we were chatting, Paula Ricker walked up in her scrubs and asked if we knew when the government was coming to help. A home health nurse who lives in Pocahontas, she was there to check on a patient, a man in his 70s whose home had been totally flooded. “He’s lost his house,” she said. “He’s going to have to
BRIAN CHILSON
replace floors and walls and everything, and he’s on oxygen 24/7. His daughter is supposed to figure out what to do so he can go back home.” As she spoke, two workers in heavy gloves wrestled a gleaming panel of sheet metal from the back of a nearby truck, the metal booming like vaudevillian thunder. “I feel so bad for him,” she said. “I’m really close to him because he reminds me of my dad. I’m hoping he can get everything fixed.” Just inside the doors of the shelter at a desk, Marti Little, the volunteer coordinator for the operation, rarely put down her phone. She’s a schoolteacher by day, but necessity had turned her into the Decider of this place, part general and part traffic cop, her attention pingponging from phone to volunteer and back to phone as she directed resources and guided worried people through the maze of flooded roads that stood between desperation and shelter. She
was wearing a T-shirt that said “Happy Camper.” She’d been there almost a week by then, working 16-hour-plus days. Asked how much sleep she’d managed to get during her time volunteering there, she could only smile and shake her head. “We have volunteers working around-the-clock,” she said. “Twentyfour hours a day, we have people working here, people working elsewhere, people helping. We’re taking donations at any hour.” Even after she starts back to school, she said, every waking hour she can spare will be spent at the shelter, until the need there is gone. As she spoke, someone in the lobby’s phone rang, and the ringtone was Alanis Morissette singing: “It’s like raaaaaiinnnn, on your wedding day … .” If she noticed it, Little didn’t smile. “In this community, we do all we can,” Little said. “A small town is different from Little Rock. Here, most of us know each other. People will open their homes. We’ve had people come in and say, “If you have anyone who needs a place to stay … .” We have people staying in churches, in peoples’ homes, trying not to take up a bed here.” Then somebody came in requesting phone chargers and Little told them there were none to be had. Then somebody came in with a handful of religious tracts and she pointed him to a table where they could be placed. Then a bin full of fresh laundry rumbled through and she pointed the way. Then somebody came in with a cardboard box full of stuffed toy mooses donated by the local Moose Lodge, and she directed him to people sitting nearby. Then her phone rang and she spoke into it, saying: soap, cleaning supplies, storage tubs, 50-gallon trash bags, nonperishables, socks for the National Guard, crackers are good. Then her phone rang again and she started giving, for the thousandth time, the long and involved directions to come overland from Imboden while dodging the frustrating labyrinth of flooded roads between points A and B, speaking soothingly, a beacon of hope to someone far away. She turned back to my recorder, but then her phone rang again. Little listened, muttered a hasty apology, then literally ran out the door, phone pressed to her ear, to catch a truck bound on some mission of mercy before it could pull out of the parking lot. And down the hill, out of sight, the swollen Black River poured on toward the sea.
MICHEL LEIDERMANN Moderator
THE BEST EDUCATION FOR YOUR CHILDREN FRIDAY, MAY 26 AT 6:30 PM In Spanish with English subtitles aetn.org www.aetn.org/programs/ellatino NOW TWO CONVENIENT LOCATIONS LITTLE ROCK • NORTH LITTLE ROCK Every Day
SALE!
175ML JACK DANIELS BLACK $42.99 $38.99 175ML TITO’S HANDMADE VODKA $32.99 $28.99 175ML CAPTAIN MORGAN SPICED RUM $23.99 $20.99 JOIN US FOR FOOD TRUCK WEDNESDAY AT OUR LITTLE ROCK LOCATION WITH 750ML BAKER’S BOURBON $44.99 $37.99 S&J MOBILE KITCHEN 11AM-7PM. 750ML MARTELL VS $29.99 $25.99 WINE TASTING 4-7PM: LA CREMA PINOT NOIR AND MARCO NEGRI MOSCATO. 750ML KENDALL-JACKSON $18.99 $14.99 COME SEE US! 750ML GABBIANO CHIANTI, PINOT GRIGIO $9.99 $7.99 • WE GLADLY MATCH ANY LOCAL ADS 1.5L MERIDIAN WINE $14.99 $9.99 WEDNESDAY IS WINE DAY 15% OFF WINE CASE DISCOUNTS EVERY DAY! HURRY IN! THIS SALE EXPIRES MAY 24, 2017
ALL CRAFT BEER10% OFF EVERY DAY!
LITTLE ROCK: 10TH & MAIN • 501.374.0410 | NORTH LITTLE ROCK: 860 EAST BROADWAY • 501.374.2405 HOURS: LR • 8AM-10PM MON-THUR • 8AM-12PM FRI-SAT •NLR • MON-SAT 8AM-12PM
May
18 Ballast Point Lainch Partyw/ Trey Johnson 19 Legends in Argenta Pre Partyw/ Mountain Sprout & Big Still River 20 Creek Rocks 26 58 Del Rays 27 Squarshers
June
2 Kris Lager 3 Cosmocean
Open until 2am every night! 415 Main St North Little Rock • (501) 313-4704 • fourquarterbar.com arktimes.com MAY 18, 2017
19
Arts Entertainment AND
Rock polishing John Burnette’s debut album casts a wide net.
AN ‘ARKANSAS RECORD’: John Burnette’s self-titled debut — recorded in bathrooms, closets, and at Fellowship Hall and Capitol View Studios — gets a release party at South on Main at 8 p.m. Wednesday, May 24, $10.
I
t’s hard to imagine John Burnette “rage quitting” anything. He’s unshakable, even-keeled, with a hushed voice that’s equal parts honey and velvet, the kind of voice you lean in to hear more closely. Still, he claims, he was near fits with an inauspicious fishing trip in the fall of 2012 to Mirror Lake, near Burnette’s native Mountain View. “The otters were stealing fish, the blue herons were out, and you had to watch close for deer on the highway,” he recalled. It was overcast, and the clouds had dissuaded all but Burnette and an older man fishing nearby. As Burnette was about to throw in the towel, the old-timer beckoned to him, evidently witness to one fruitless cast after another. The two ended up talking for hours, mostly about the old man’s recently deceased wife, a topic he returned to between mini-tutorials on fishing techniques and an artificial fly called a Woolly Bugger. Burnette ended up catching his limit that day. He also ended up writing a tearjerker of a waltz called “She Called Him Jim,” the
sixth track on Burnette’s self-titled debut album. It’s a work years in the making, and he’ll celebrate its completion with a show at South on Main on Wednesday, May 24. Burnette’s in Charlotte, N.C., now — his wife, Lacey, landed a job there, and they relocated. It’s a city whose growth, he says, is fueled by transplants like him, from all over the U.S. “It’s not like Austin or Portland or Seattle, where there’s a built-in identity. It’s a bunch of transplants kinda getting together, trying to make it a cool place to live.” He’s carved out a creative spot in Charlotte, most recently as an extra in Evan Peters’ film “American Animals,” which tells the true story of the 2004 Transylvania University book heist. (Burnette responded to a casting call requiring a musician for a club scene, but when the filmmakers saw his headshots, they decided he looked too young and cast him as a beer-soaked college student.) Despite the move, Burnette said, “Arkansas is home.” Burnette’s history here — musical and familial — made it a natural
BRANDON OTTO
BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE
place to celebrate the release of his first album. “It does feel like a very Arkansas record,” he said. “Some of my family is from Memphis, so there’s a little Memphis soul. It’s got some Ozark kind of stuff, a little bit of a Tulsa sound to it, some New Orleans horn, a little bit of bluesy Delta type stuff.” There’s a Dixieland brass band breakdown in “Mona, Fiona and Me,” a tongue-in-cheek take on love across the Kinsey scale. There’s a flamenco-style guitar introduction to “Chulo Says Sancho,” a song Burnette wrote about political spectacle after reading David Foster Wallace’s “Up, Simba!” There’s an oceanic-6/8 sailor’s rhythm to the expansive opener, “Fever Dream.” “The only way I wrote those songs was to kind of let all that blow across me,” Burnette said. “And the only way to let it blow across me was to have been in Arkansas.” Because Burnette wasn’t certain he’d be able to hire a band, the album was recorded piecemeal: part of it at Fellowship Hall Sound and part of it at a nascent
Capitol View Studio, when it was little more than a garage adjoined to an apartment. Burnette, engineer Mark Colbert and others “tried a little bit of everything,” Burnette said. “Threw down every idea and just kind of peeled it back. What’s that they say? ... ” He hesitated, evidently weighing whether or not decorum permitted him to say the word “bullshit” in an interview. “B.S. makes the best fertilizer,” he said. “It took a while, but I’m glad we took our time with it and were able to shape it the way we wanted to,” he said. “Kind of like rock polishing.” Burnette laid down tracks in closets, bathrooms and other borrowed spaces. He eventually began trying to mimic other instruments on his guitar. “A couple years ago,” he said, “my wife, as a hobby, thought, ‘Oh, I’m gonna learn to play the violin.’ So we bought a cheap violin, and just kinda threw it in the closet. I found the bow and thought, ‘I wonder if I can mimic some string sounds.’ ” He did, and he mimicked horn sounds, too — “a loose interpretation,” he said. Although he eventually brought in some jazz-minded colleagues — saxophonist and clarinetist Matt Schatz, trombonist Jeff Woodward, trumpeter Guido Ritchie and multi-instrumentalist Matt Stone — to fill things out, most of Burnette’s instrumental impersonations ended up on the album anyway, and that arsenal of timbres lends a depth to the 11 tracks that doesn’t necessarily come with standard instrumentation. “Once we mixed it all together, it sounded really cohesive,” he said. (That happened last year, but Burnette still seems a little surprised.) “So there’s a lot of interplay between me trying to mimic the instrument and the actual instrument happening. A happy little accident, I guess.” Burnette’s performance at South on Main is part of the venue’s “Sessions” series, curated in May by Capitol View Studio owner and founder Bryan Frazier. The show starts at 8 p.m. and tickets are $10. You can reserve a table by calling 244-9660.
P RE S E N T E D B Y
WIZ KHALIFA JUSTIN MOORE CAGE THE ELEPHANT BILLY CURRINGTON GROUPLOVE MORRIS DAY & THE TIME COLD WAR KIDS COLT FORD JON BELLION CODY JINKS MOON TAXI CRAIG CAMPBELL THE JOY FORMIDABLE CODY CANADA AND THE DEPARTED DYLAN SCOTT AND MORE!
ADVANCE TICKETS ON SALE NOW AT RIVERFESTARKANSAS.COM OR AT SELECT MURPHY LOCATIONS! 20
MAY 18, 2017
ARKANSAS TIMES
“ f “ H b a N o T 2 l a “ w r “ o p
W a a p L b fi P t J n
P “ c t s J N a K s a t T A d s t t A v
L a c f A e p C W N a a
ROCK CANDY
Check out the Times’ A&E blog arktimes.com
A&E NEWS “DAMNATION,” the Depression-era drama from University of Arkansas graduate and “Longmire” writer Tony Tost and “Hell or High Water” director David Mackenzie, has been ordered to series by USA Network, and is expected to premiere in October. Netflix, now a co-producer of the series, has obtained first-run rights outside the U.S. Tost, whose first book of poetry received a 2003 Walt Whitman Award (judged by the late Arkansas poet C.D. Wright), is also the author of the 33 1/3 book series’ treatise “Johnny Cash’s American Recordings.” Tost will serve as executive producer of the series along with James Mangold (director of “Walk the Line”), Guymon Casady (“Game of Thrones” producer) and Daniel Rappaport (“Office Space” producer). WALDRON NATIVE JAYME Lemons has announced the launch of a partnership with actress Laura Dern on a film and television production company, Jaywalker Pictures. Lemons produced director Daniel Campbell’s short film “Antiquities,” and one of the films slated for development by Jaywalker Pictures suggests she’ll keep her Arkansas ties at the forefront: Graham Gordy and Jay Jennings’ adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel, “The Dog of the South.” PAULA MARTIN, WHO produced the “Tales from the South” radio show for a decade, will act as producer and creative director for a storytelling series, Potluck and Poison Ivy, to launch Thursday, May 25, at The Joint Theatre & Coffeehouse, 301 Main St., NLR. Hosted by Traci Berry, LGBT advocate and host of “The T with Traci and Angie” on KABF-FM, 88.3, the opening night features stories from Kevin Kresse, Tyler Thompson and Susan Elder, as well as live music from the Papi Band, featuring Heather Smith. Tickets for the event, a benefit for the ACANSA Arts Festival, are $100 and include dinner. A cash bar is available. Admission for subsequent Potluck & Poison Ivy events, like the June 22 installment featuring “Chewing the Fat” podcast hosts Rex Nelson and Paul Austin, will be $35. For more information, visit potluckandpoisonivy.org. LITTLE ROCK-BASED composer, artist and educator Phillip Rex Huddleston has created a “Southern Writers” series of prints featuring portraits of Eudora Welty, Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, Mark Twain and others. The series, available in bundles of five prints (Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Charles Portis, Alice Walker and Tennessee Williams in one and William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Eudora Welty and Richard Wright in another), is available at etsy.com/shop/PhillipRexHuddleston.
ARKANSAS TIMES
OXFORD AMERICAN PRESENTS
explore
T HE 2 01 7–2 01 8
LOCAL
at South on Main
All tickets are sold through Metrotix.com or by calling (800) 293-5949. Visit OxfordAmerican.org/events to see the full lineup. New subscriptions on sale May 12.
1304 South Main Street | Little Rock, AR 72202
YEARS
LEASE AN OFFICE WITH A VIEW
The Tower Building 4th and Center in the Heart of Little Rock’s Financial Quarter From $14 PSF - Full Service Powered by Fiber-optic T1 DSL 400 to 40,000 Square Feet Available Full Floors Available • Within Walking Distance: Restaurants, Courthouses, River Market • Two Restaurants, Barbershop, Convenience Store and Cleaners On Site • Parking Available
Brenda McKown (501) 725-8465 • bmckown@catlett.net Brokers Protected
www.catlett.net/tower-building.html
Follow Rock Candy on Twitter: @RockCandies
arktimes.com MAY 18, 2017
21
MOVIE REVIEW
‘FROM STONE TO THE THRONE’: Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) pulls the storied sword from a river stone in Ritchie’s reimagining of the Arthurian legend.
Medieval melee Guy Ritchie’s take on ‘King Arthur’ is deft, if not sublime. BY SAM EIFLING
T #
Tweet shop LOCAL ARKANSAS TIMES 22
MAY 18, 2017
ARKANSAS TIMES
o date, the best movie incarnation of Arthurian legend might have been Disney’s 1963 animated “The Sword in the Stone.” A 2004 adaptation starring Clive Owen was panned, but at least recouped its investment. Now we get the 2017 edition, “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword,” in which Charlie Hunnam (“Pacific Rim,” “Sons of Anarchy”) plays the titular Art and pulls the legendary Excalibur. Guy Ritchie directs, bringing his signature sheer edits and stylized gangland patter: The Middle Ages never seemed so frenetic. With “Game of Thrones” delayed till mid-summer, this “Arthur” should’ve caught fantasy-inclined audiences at a point of maximum swordthirst. Instead, a film that’s clearly positioning itself as a franchise — gentle spoiler, the final scene includes a round table in progress — could barely limp through the weekend for $15 million, a disaster for a film that cost a dozen times that to make. We may not get another swing at Arthurian legend for a while, so if you want to see what one looks like in the latter half of the 2010s, as some Ph.D. candidate surely will 100 years from now, have a look. Best I can tell you, it’s “Lord of the Rings” fed through a Marvel movie, with perhaps a dash of “The Matrix” and Ritchie’s “Lock, Stock and
Two Smoking Barrels.” In the cast you’ll notice veterans of “Gladiator” and, yep, “Game of Thrones.” Naturally, an adaptation of a centuries-old legend is going to be, at some level, derivative. Of the four dudes who wrote the story and script, three, Ritchie included, are Brits. Certainly they were digesting the many layers of Arthur stories (and stories, like the “Narnia” tales, that trace back to them) they’d collected over their lives. What they came out with tossed off a great deal of that orthodoxy — yet arrives in many ways as a seemingly fungible action movie, bound not to geography or history, but scantily supported by them, either. Arthur is just a boy here when his rad dad King Eric Bana — in shades of “Troy” — helps to thwart an invasion by armies riding on elephants the size of soccer stadiums. He’s then slain by some kind of flaming Skeletor horseman as he’s helping Arthur escape a coup by Jude Law, Arthur’s uncle, who is bitter and power-mad but not otherwise particularly interesting. Child Arthur escapes Baby Moses-style in a boat (though, despite a series of flashbacks, it’s never exactly clear how he managed this). He survives in the arms of kind people downriver who take him in and raise him as a brothel orphan.
Haunted by nightmares of his parents’ murder, he trains and saves and lives like a monk with killer lats, unaware of his royal provenance. Yet his return is foretold, and outside his evil uncle’s castle the river recedes to reveal a broadsword stuck in a big ol’ stone. Events conspire to place him within sword-yanking distance, and then it’s game on. His evil king uncle wants him dead; a deep-woods resistance force (including hot/powerful mage Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) wants him to lead it; and Arthur himself plunges into an identity crisis. Is he indeed royalty, ready to ascend to the throne? Can he handle the vast power of the sword? Can he stomach the toll of war? And can he ever keep his shirt on for longer than 10 minutes at a stretch? To Ritchie’s credit, the story stays fleet and, for the most part, pretty fun; Hunnam is at turns glib and charming and makes a convincing fighter. Sequences that other directors would’ve let bog down 15 minutes or more he resolves in a compressed, flipbook style, ducking quickly through time, letting one scene narrate a second or a third, till you arrive through a 2-minute wormhole to the end of a key plot point. It all works insofar as it needs to, but without ever touching the sublime. The possible exception is the soundtrack, where British folk musician Sam Lee finds the jangly, dirgelike, haunting, spot-on treatment for the tone Ritchie’s reaching for. This version of Arthur’s legend is thus best read as an accompaniment to another format that keeps adapting: the music video.
U2 • RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS • THE WEEKND • CHANCE THE RAPPER MAJOR L AZER • FLUME • LORDE • THE XX • TRAVIS SCOT T CAGE THE ELEPHANT • MARSHMELLO • THE HEAD AND THE HEART BIG GIGANTIC • GL ASS ANIMALS • FUTURE ISL ANDS • TORY L ANEZ TOVE LO • CRYSTAL CASTLES • UMPHREY’S MCGEE • PORTUGAL. THE MAN
TEGAN & SARA • MILKY CHANCE • YELLOW CLAW • COLD WAR KIDS • KALEO • SUPERJAM RUSS • JON BELLION • ROYAL BLOOD • THE STRUMBELLAS • D.R.A.M. • CAR S E AT HE ADR ES T M I C H A E L K I WA N U K A • S K E P TA • G A L L A N T • M AT O M A • L O U I S T H E C H I L D BORGORE • SHPONGLE (SIMON POSFORD LIVE) • DUA LIPA • NGHTMRE • GET TER SNAILS • JAMES VINCENT MCMORROW • JOSEPH • ILLENIUM • FLATBUSH ZOMBIES • BELLY AMINÉ • CLAUDE VONSTROKE • WARPAINT • FRANCIS AND THE LIGHTS • MARGO PRICE BADBADNOTGOOD • THE FRONT BOTTOMS • G JONES • PRESERVATION HALL JAZZ BAND STICK FIGURE • GREENSKY BLUEGRASS • CAM • BAD SUNS • COIN • ALLAN RAYMAN MANDOLIN ORANGE • EDEN • RAINBOW KITTEN SURPRISE • OOKAY • HEROBUST • KEVIN MORBY G OL DF IS H • NONAME • L É O N • BLUEG R AS S SI TUATI O N S UPER JAM HO S TED BY ED HELMS AND FRIENDS • ALBIN LEE MELDAU • SAN HOLO • AND 100+ MORE!
TICKETS ON SALE AT
BONNAROO.COM
arktimes.com MAY 18, 2017
23
THE
TO-DO
LIST
BY LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK AND STEPHANIE SMITTLE
THURSDAY 5/18
ALLEY PARTY
5:30 p.m. Central Arkansas Water. Free.
Downtown Little Rock Partnership’s mission with its Alley Party series is pretty straightforward: Find an out-of-the-way corner in downtown Little Rock — a spot you
might only notice when you’re walking or riding your bike — and throw a party in it. The April 27 party in the East Village went off without a hitch, reportedly, so the DLP is doing it again. This time, Fayetteville’s Randall Shreve brings his cabaret-tinged rock to the mix, with brews from Stone’s Throw Brewing and food from
a new food truck, promisingly titled Count Porkula. (Reviewers say try the ribs and the chicken thighs.) “We are excited to show off another side of Little Rock, the Little Rock tuckedaway, off the beaten path. By bringing music and fun and life to new areas we will hopefully spark people’s imagination of what else might be possible,”
DLRP’s Executive Director Gabe Holstrom said in a press release. To that end, this throw-down takes place in the alley that runs between Central Arkansas Water and Christ Episcopal Church, between Fifth and Sixth and Scott and Cumberland streets. If you can’t make this one, mark your calendars for the next one, June 15. SS
THURSDAY 5/18
MOST ENDANGERED PLACES BICYCLE RIDE
6 p.m. Bobby’s Bike Hike, 400 President Clinton Ave. $25.
Every May since 1999, in keeping with Arkansas Heritage Month and National Preservation Month, Preserve Arkansas has announced a list of places that are in danger of demolition across the state. The goal is to spark appreciation for those pieces of Arkansas history and encourage funding for site rehabilitation. As any hiker or biker will testify, the view from two wheels or two feet is a little more conducive to awe and appreciation than the one from inside car windows, so Preserve Arkansas is hosting this tour at a cyclist’s pace. Your ticket gets you a special edition T-shirt from Rock City Outfitters and a pint of Stone’s Throw Brewing beer at the end, and if you’re inclined to support the mission further, an extra $25 gets you membership to the organization. The ride is 6 miles long, and the organizers stress that it’s a leisurely one, suitable for cyclists of all ages and skill levels. Bring your own bike if you like, or if you’re without wheels, Bobby’s Bike Hike is donating a limited number of bikes for the ride. Reserve your spot at preservearkansas.org. SS 24
MAY 18, 2017
ARKANSAS TIMES
LIFE IN COLOUR: Guitarist Clive Carroll gives a concert at The Joint Theater & Coffeehouse Thursday evening as part of Argenta Arts Acoustic Music Series.
THURSDAY 5/18
CLIVE CARROLL
7:30 p.m. The Joint Theater & Coffeehouse. $25.
Chelmsford, England, native Clive Carroll is an anomaly for many reasons. For one, he plays with slivers of ping pong balls underneath his fingernails, a process he says allows him to play “with the glue,” as he told Guitar Player magazine last year, instead of against it, as most finger-style gui-
Follow us on Instagram: ArkTimes
tarists do when picking strings with acrylic nails. His composition process is also a little unusual. Instead of writing solo guitar pieces — oh, say, on the solo guitar — he goes old school and gets out the pen and paper, writing chord progressions and countermelodies according to the sorts of strict music theory rules he learned at Trinity College of Music in London, fingerings be damned. Then,
he adapts the piece for solo guitar, changing the tuning if what he’s written proves impossible to play. His repertoire ranges from 16th century lute tunes to his own version of the “Mississippi Blues,” and his four solo albums have earned admiration from Madonna and Tommy Emmanuel alike. He performs in Little Rock as part of the Argenta Arts Acoustic Music Series. SS
IN BRIEF
THURSDAY 5/18
THURSDAY 5/18
CHARLOTTE TAYLOR
8 p.m. South on Main. $10.
In a video of Charlotte Taylor and her longtime band Gypsy Rain performing T-Bone Walker’s “Stormy Monday” at Thirst N’ Howl in 2015, an audience member can be heard behind the camera answering an inaudible question with “That’s Matt Stone!” The stellar
guitarist, also of string band Runaway Planet, has been part of blues siren Taylor’s fold for a while. And, though she’s an undeniably generous frontwoman (she’s prone, for example, to inviting friends onstage to back her up on “Chain of Fools,” and then letting one of them take a line or two themselves) the band ethos seems to be: Say what you need to say when you need to say it, and then
get the hell out of Charlotte Taylor’s way. She’s a seasoned blues rock wailer and a guitarist herself, and if tunes like John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” and Little Walter’s “My Babe” are your kind of party, catch Taylor with Stone, saxophonist Dave Williams II, bassist Bruce Johnston, keyboard player Stuart Baer and drummer John Roach at South on Main. SS
Canvas plays the happy hour at Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 p.m., free, followed by Raising Grey, 9 p.m., $5. The Old State House Museum’s Seersucker Social benefits the museum’s School Bus Fund, 7 p.m., $50. Finger-style guitarist Kevin Blake Goodwin performs as part of the Live at Laman series, 7 p.m., William F. Laman Public Library, 2801 Orange St., NLR, free. Charlie Weiner goes for laughs at The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m. Thu.-Sat., 10 p.m. Fri.-Sat., $8-$12. Trey Johnson & Jason Willmon take their stomp-box blues set to Four Quarter Bar, NLR, 8 p.m. Brooklyn quintet Yarn brings its self-described “roots music from the shadows of skyscrapers” to Stickyz Rock ’n’ Roll Chicken Shack, with Love and a Revolver, 8:30 p.m., $10-$12. Guitarist Cary Hudson (formerly of Blue Mountain) performs at the White Water Tavern, 9 p.m.
SABINE SCHMIDT
FRIDAY 5/19
‘BLUE GOOSE STATION, GOTEBO’: “We’re Not Telling You Everything: Images from the Wichita Mountains,” an exhibit from photographers Sabine Schmidt and Don House, is featured at Laman Library’s Argenta branch, which will be open 5-8 p.m. Friday for Argenta Artwalk.
FRIDAY 5/19
ARGENTA ARTWALK
5-8 p.m., downtown North Little Rock. Free.
For this month’s after-hours gallery stroll on Main Street in Argenta, you can start in the 400 block with photographs of Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains paired with poetry by a Native American poet and end in the 700 block with a sculpture demonstration and a display of handmade knives, making for a hearty sort of art night. Laman Library’s Argenta branch features photos by Sabine Schmidt and Don House and poetry by Sy Hoahwah in “We’re
Not Telling You Everything: Words and Images from the Wichita Mountains.” The three artists will return to the library on Saturday at noon for a walk-through and poetry reading. Across from the library, Core Brewery will present “Faces by Chalino,” showing the work of Luis “Chilino” Atilano, as part of the Latino Art Project of North Little Rock. Next door, StudioMAIN will host a “show-and-tell” at 6 p.m. and serve local beer, and Claytime Pottery will show work by Gailen Hudson of Springdale and new work by Larry Pennington. A few doors down, Greg Thompson Fine Art continues its
spring exhibition of works by Southerners, including new gallery artists Jed Jackson and Alan Gerson. In the 500 block, Mugs Cafe shows “Nightflyers,” paintings and drawings by Greg Lahti and Robert Bean inspired by things that happen in the dark. In the 700 block, you’ll find the art demonstration at Barry Thomas Fine Art & Studio, where the artist will sculpt and show paintings, and his brother, Bob Thomas, will show his knives. Off Main Street, S.W.A.G. (Southern Women Artisans Guild) will host the Local First Social Hour for local business owners and art walkers. LNP
Steven Winter plays the happy hour at Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 p.m., free, followed by Mister Lucky, 9 p.m., $5. The Hot Springs Jazz Society presents “Arkansas Jazz Experience” in Whittington Park, with performances from Shirley Chauvin and saxophonist Gary Meggs, 6 p.m., $5-$15. Legendary jazz pianist and “Schoolhouse Rock!” composer Bob Dorough, profiled in last week’s issue, performs with the Ted Ludwig Trio as part of the Arkansas Sounds Series, 7 p.m., the Ron Robinson Theater, $5-$15. Arkansas Festival Ballet presents “The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland” at the Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theatre, 7:30 p.m. Fri.-Sat., 2 p.m. Sat.-Sun., $15-$20. Highland Valley United Methodist Church is screening “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” on its lawn, with free popcorn and peanuts for attendees in exchange for nonperishable food donations, 15524 Chenal Parkway, 8 p.m. Almost Infamous performs at Thirst N’ Howl, 8:30 p.m., $5. Big Red Flag takes the stage at Dugan’s Pub, 8:30 p.m., free. Rodney Block, Bijoux, Ramona Smith and Nicky Parrish are among the performers for “For the Love of the Berrys” at Revolution, 8 p.m., $15. Kris Pierce hosts an evening of music and comedy at Vino’s with Heels, Josh McLane, Ozzy Jackson and more, 9 p.m., $7. Austinites Mike & The Moonpies play a country show at White Water, 9 p.m. It’s a straight-up rock ’n’ roll show at Stickyz with the Quaker City Night Hawks and DeFrance, 9 p.m., $10-$12. Josh Powell & The Great Train Robbery play a show at Maxine’s in Hot Springs, with Dead Soldiers and Brian Martin, 9 p.m., $7. Big Shane Thornton performs at West End Smokehouse & Tavern, 10 p.m., $7. The John Calvin Brewer Band takes the stage at Oaklawn Racing and Gaming’s Silks Bar & Grill, Hot Springs, 10 p.m. Fri.-Sat., free.
SATURDAY 5/20 The Central Arkansas Library System hosts CALS Con 2017, a multigenre, mini-comic convention, Main Library, 9:30 a.m., free. The Clinton Presidential Center hosts “Bridge to the Future,” offering resources for parents and students to reduce learning loss during the summer, 10 a.m., free. The Museum of Discovery hosts Messtival, with mud pies, a confetti cannon and more, 10
Follow Rock Candy on Twitter: @RockCandies
arktimes.com MAY 18, 2017
25
THE
TO-DO
LIST
BY LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK AND STEPHANIE SMITTLE
FRIDAY 5/19, SUNDAY 5/21
‘THE BARBER OF SEVILLE’
7:30 p.m. Fri., 3 p.m. Sun. UA Pulaski Tech’s Center for the Humanities and Arts, 3000 Scenic Drive, NLR. $10-$50.
About 30 years after Mozart topped the charts with “The Marriage of Figaro,” Rossini stuck his nose in with another Figaro, the titular “Barber of Seville.” With it, he scored what is quite possibly the best-known (and probably most parodied) baritone aria
of all time, “Largo al factotum.” Essentially, it’s an exercise in narcissism. Rossini’s Figaro was the predecessor to Disney’s Gaston: “Everyone asks for me, everyone wants me: ladies, children, old men, the young girls … Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!” Warner Brothers released a short called “Rabbit of Seville” in 1950, complete with the time-honored arms race (axes, then shotguns, then cannons) between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. The aria’s a beast to sing. Sher-
wood native/Tulsa resident Darren Drone has his work cut out for him, but his comedic timing, animated face and warm, rich tone are perfect for the part. Mezzo-soprano and Searcy native Alice Ann Light sings the part of Rosina; David Malis, the first American to win the prestigious Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, sings the part of Dr. Bartolo; Dover native Jonathan Ray is Count Almaviva; Dallas native Andrew Simpson sings Don Basilio;
Ferris Allen sings the role of Fiorello; and Suzanne Loerch adds her velvety mezzo soprano to the cast as Berta. Basso buffo David Ward directs, and Louis Menendez conducts members of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra. The opera will be sung in Italian, but English supertitles will appear above the stage to help out during all the parts where Figaro isn’t just repeating his own name over and over in selfadmiration. SS
FRIDAY 5/19
DITCH THE KEYS KICKOFF: RIDE TO WORK DAY
Various times, for rally at 7:30 a.m. at the Old State House.
OPA!: Ballet Quetzalli, the Dabkeh Middle Eastern Dancers, the Greek-American Folk Dance Society and the O’Donovan School of Irish Dance are among the performers at this weekend’s International Greek Food Festival.
FRIDAY 5/19-SUNDAY 5/21
GREEK FOOD FESTIVAL
11 a.m.-9 p.m. Fri.-Sat., 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Sun. Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, 1100 Napa Valley Drive. $3 or three canned goods.
The time has come again for Little Rock to consume more phyllo dough in three days than it does the entire remainder of the year. Admission to the 33rd annual International Greek Food Festival will cost you $3 or three canned goods, and will get you the following: access to performances from Abigail Pappas; Acapella Rising; a ballet and Mexican Folkloric dance group called Quetzalli; Dabkeh Middle Eastern Dancers; the Greek-American Folk Dance Society; I Can! Dancers; LTD Edition Cloggers; O’Donovan School of Irish Dance; and more. Also: evening performances from the Donna Massey Band and the Big John Miller Band; an indoor Old World Market featuring Greek coffee, tahini sauce, halvah (honey sesame paste), pasteli (sesame candy), imported cookies, falafel, Greek olive oil, hummus, dolmathes (stuffed
26
MAY 18, 2017
ARKANSAS TIMES
grape leaves), and the Orthodox Church’s own Pete’s Famous Salad Dressing; tours of the Byzantine iconography inside the church; a kid’s area with activities like frame making and face painting (and hot dogs, if your kid wrinkles her nose at the word “tzatziki.”) The food, of course, is what we all drive over to Napa Valley Drive for, and new this year is the “My Big Fat Greek Platter,” which organizers say includes “generous helpings of pastitsio, long macaroni layered with seasoned ground beef and topped with a thick cheese sauce; spanakopita, filo dough layered with feta cheese, spinach and herbs; Greek chicken; and Greek salad.” Onsite, they’ll sell souvlaki, Armenian pizza, tabouleh salad, loukanikos sausages, Greek fries, calamari, lamb burgers and other delights. Or, you can skip the festivities and order in the drivethrough for lamb or gyros chicken platters, chicken kebobs, hummus, baklava and more. See greekfoodfest.com for a full schedule and menu. SS
Follow us on Instagram: ArkTimes
Ozone Action Days’ eight-day “Ditch the Keys” event gets in gear Friday with a Ride to Work Day, in which volunteer cyclists will lead convoys of bike riders from eight locations in Little Rock and North Little Rock to the Old State House Museum for a 7:30 a.m. bike rally. Registrants will get digital coupons for discounts at event sponsors, including retail stores (Box Turtle, Domestic Domestic, the Green Corner Store, etc.), eater-
ies (South on Main, River City Coffee, The Pantry Crest, The Root, Boulevard Bread, etc.), bike stores (Arkansas Cycling & Fitness, Angry Dave’s Bicycles, Chainwheel, etc.) and other venues (Esse Purse Museum, Flyway Brewing, Stone’s Throw Brewing, The Joint Theatre & Coffee House, etc.). The event, to encourage clean air and better health, continues through May 26 with days devoted to biking to play, carpooling, walking to work, telecommuting and taking the bus (free Friday, May 26). Register and find the convoy information, event schedule and discounts at ditchthekeys. com. LNP
SATURDAY 5/20
LEGENDS IN ARGENTA
6 p.m. Argenta Plaza, 520 N. Main St. $5.
Susie Cowan, executive director of Legends of Arkansas, created the event in 2013 to foster community through music. That seemed a good enough reason, but in a conversation with us last August, Cowan said LOA revelers often asked what particular cause the event was benefiting. She and her colleagues decided to answer that question this year by partnering with Aaron Reddin’s The One Inc., best known for its out-
reach efforts to Central Arkansas’s homeless community with The Van. The Van will receive 100 percent of proceeds from the LOA fall show, which will be funded by Saturday’s events. Rain or shine, organizers say, the Argenta Plaza will host art vendors; music by Bonnie Montgomery, The Salty Dogs and Zakk & Big Papa Binns; and food trucks and beer from the Arkansas Brewers Guild. If you’re out the night before, catch the official pre-party with Mountain Sprout at Four Quarter Bar, 10:30 p.m. SS
IN BRIEF
QC:
Live: 1.875" x 5.25"
CW: CD:
Trim: 2.125" x 5.5" Bleed: none"
Brand: Bud Light Iconic Item #: PBL2017
AD: PO:
MUST INITIAL FOR APPROVAL
Job/Order #: 293027 Operator: cs
PM:
Ozark folklore, by definition, was outsider culture. Crafts, songs and stories were often created in isolated places and, if they were passed around at all, it was mostly in tighter circles and often by word of mouth. That might be part of why it’s hard to appreciate it until it comes back around in another form, as the collections of folklorists John
Quincy Wolf and Max Hunter have been revived by Cindy Woolf and Mark Bilyeu of The Creek Rocks. The last time I saw the band, they were peeling out tunes like “Missouri Girls” and “Muskrat Song” in someone’s backyard. That’s unquestionably the best way to hear them, but excepting that opportunity, go check them out at Four Quarter Bar, and take a friend that knows how to two-step. SS
FRIENDSHIP BY THE BOTTLE.
AE:
10:30 p.m. Four Quarter Bar. $10.
Closing Date: 3.3.17
THE CREEK ROCKS
Publication: Arkansas Times
SATURDAY 5/20
a.m., $8-$10. The Spa City Blues Society presents PRINT the Hot Springs Craft Beer Festival at the Farmers & Artisans Market Plaza, 4 p.m., 121 Orange St. $35-$55, $10 for designated drivers. Lavell Crawford and Corey Holcomb headline “Comedy’s Most Wanted” at Ron Robinson, 7:30 p.m., $54. The Parlor hosts “Good Day for Goon Des 2017,” featuring sets from Young Gods of America, Solo Jaxon, Hector $lash, Tan the Terrible and Terminal Nation, 7 p.m., 4603 E. Broadway, NLR. Argenta Community Theater hosts the Fine Tex-Mex Comedy Tour, 8 p.m., $24-$44. Maumelle’s NewTown Blues Band takes the stage at Markham Street Grill & Pub, 8:30 p.m., free. North by North, Dangerous Idiots and Stalker share a bill at Vino’s, 9 p.m., $7. SeanFresh performs at South on Main with Big Piph, Asylum the Crow, King Tower, Bri Ailene, Faron Rochelle and more, 9 p.m., $15. The Rev Room hosts “Take Action: A Fundraiser for Suicide Awareness,” featuring sets from Sychosys, 3 Miles from Providence, Eddie & The Defiance and Sidechain, 9 p.m., $20. Adam Faucett & The Tall Grass, Mobile Home, Fort Defiance and William Blackart share a bill at Maxine’s, 9 p.m., $7. Pineapple Beatz & JJ Wilson pump out tunes at Discovery, with G-Force in the lobby, 9 p.m., followed by The House of Cortez’s tribute to Studio 54, 12:30 a.m., $10. Jason “Jelly Roll” DeFord raps at Stickyz, with an opening set from Table of Mahogany, 9:30 p.m., $12-$15.
ENJOY RESPONSIBLY © 2017 A-B, Bud Light® Beer, St. Louis, MO
JOSHUA ASANTE
SUNDAY 5/21
MILLER TIME: Off the Cuff features bassist Joel ‘Jammin JC’ Crutcher in a tribute to Marcus Miller and Miles Davis at 109 & Co. Saturday night.
The Little Rock Wind Symphony showcases its smaller ensembles in a concert at St. Paul United Methodist Church, 3 p.m., $8-$10. Immanuel Baptist Church hosts a concert from the Natural State Brass Band, featuring Welsh folk songs, British marches and Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” 3 p.m., free. Atlanta comedians and hosts of “The 85 South Show” bring their comedy set to the Rev Room, 7 p.m., $40-$60. Psych rockers Ancient River land at Stickyz, with opening sets from Tvveeds and Open Fields, 8 p.m., $6.
TUESDAY 5/23 SATURDAY 5/20
MILES DAVIS/MARCUS MILLER TRIBUTE 9:30 p.m. 109 & Co. $10.
Miles Davis fans might foist “Kind of Blue” or “Sketches of Spain” on a new listener as a primer, and rightly so. His catalog is deep, though, and the members of Off the Cuff looked to Davis’ later catalog for inspiration when they wanted, as trumpeter and bandleader Jose Holloway told us, to “electrify the scene at 109 & Co.,” the speakeasy on Main Street just south of the Statehouse Convention Center. Holloway says the show will pay tribute to the collaboration between Davis and bass guitarist/ composer Marcus Miller. “Many people
do not realize that Marcus Miller composed many of Miles Davis’ biggest hits in the ’80s,” he said. “In an effort to preserve the unique trumpet and bass duo between these men, I could not think of a better bassist than my cousin Joel ‘Jammin JC’ Crutcher. No one sounds more like Marcus Miller than Jammin JC, so I decided it was time to have a musical family reunion as we paid homage to one of the most electrifying jazz ensembles the ’80s had to offer.” Crutcher and Holloway are joined by Off the Cuff vocalist Lasheena Gordon, saxophonist Dr. Danny A. Fletcher, keyboardist Tim Anthony and drummer Darius Blanton. SS
Science Cafe Little Rock hosts “Indwelling Gut Bacteria and You,” a discussion on microbiomes, 7 p.m., Whole Hog Cafe, 12111 W. Markham St., free. Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Buddy Guy performs at the Walton Arts Center, Fayetteville, 7 p.m., $41-$75. The Arkansas Travelers take on the Midland Rockhounds at Dickey-Stephens Park, 7:10 p.m. Tue.-Thu., $7-$13. Bright Eyes front man Conor Oberst performs at George’s Majestic Lounge, Fayetteville, 8:30 p.m., $26. The Vandoliers bring their “Tejano and Telecasters” sound to White Water, 9 p.m. Tvveeds plays a show at Bear’s Den Pizza, Conway, 9 p.m.
WEDNESDAY 5/24 Bluesboy Jag and The Juke Joint Zombies host the Arkansas River Blues Society Jam at Thirst N’ Howl, 7 p.m., free. BJ Barham (American Aquarium) performs at White Water, 9 p.m.
Add a spring to your step at Holiday!
Call 501-242-4091 today to schedule a personal visit and complimentary meal!
Andover Place Independent Retirement Living
Little Rock, AR andoverplace.net ©2017 HARVEST MANAGEMENT SUB LLC, HOLIDAY AL MANAGEMENT SUB LLC, HOLIDAY AL NIC MANAGEMENT LLC.
Follow Rock Candy on Twitter: @RockCandies
arktimes.com MAY 18, 2017
27
Dining WHAT’S COOKIN’
MAGGIE HINSON, OWNER of Midtown Billiards, the late-night burger, billiards and bottle-toss establishment, says the restoration of the fire-damaged venue at 1316 Main St., is progressing and she hopes she can open by the first of June. She’s waiting on her draft boxes and refrigerators and the city’s inspectors to check out the bathroom. To recreate Midtown’s ambiance, Hinson said she plans to give everyone a Sharpie pen on the bar’s opening night “so they can mark their territory.” Midtown, which has a 5 a.m. liquor license, is a favorite with night owls and service industry workers who pile in after their shifts are over for big ol’ juicy hamburgers. SPEAKING OF BOTTLES, lift a cold one or two this Saturday, May 20, at the third annual Hot Springs Craft Beer Festival, and you’ll be supporting the Spa City Blues Society. Brewers from Little Rock, North Little Rock, Fayetteville, Bentonville, Springdale, Rogers, Benton, Cabot, Bonnerdale, Paris, Paragould and, yes, Big Flat will be supplying the craft suds along with out-of-state vendors; Hot Springs eateries will supply the grub. (The Hot Springs Young Professionals Group will throw in pretzel necklaces.) The festival starts at 4 p.m. at the Hot Springs Farmers & Artisans Market Plaza, 121 Orange St. General admission is $35. VIP tickets, $55, provide access to VIP areas and a special sampling glass. The $25 earlybird tickets are sold out. Designated drivers can get in for $10. (A Five Beer 5K, with stops in the Spa City for beers, is 6-9 p.m. Friday evening; registration ends at noon Thursday, May 18.) SALTGRASS STEAKHOUSE, A Texasborn chain with locations in several states, will open a restaurant at 6040 Warden Road in Sherwood. The restaurant design firm ID Studio 4 took out a plumbing license last week. LEWIS HALL AND family will open Rector’s Restaurant at 538 W. Grand Ave. in Hot Springs, where they will serve soups, salads, sandwiches and “weekly Southern comfort specials.” The Halls have applied for a mixed-drink permit. Rector’s will also deliver. A grand opening will be announced at Rector’s Facebook page (@Rectorshotsprings). 28
MAY 18, 2017
ARKANSAS TIMES
THE BLUE SAIL POUR-OVER: Barista Stormie Perry demonstrates.
Coffee, coffee everywhere At Zeteo and Blue Sail, lots to drink.
T
hough we may be premature, given that another coffee shop is to open in the summer in the River Market district, our jittery staff could not wait to say a few words about downtown’s two new java joints, their origins not in Seattle but Conway. That would be Zeteo, in the former Clinton Museum Store space on President Clinton Avenue, and Blue Sail Coffee Roasters, in the Little Rock Technology Park on Main Street. Both are do-good, millennial-appealing, sharp-looking, succulent-tabling shops. Zeteo donates 5 percent of its profits to Living Water, which helps bring fresh water to impoverished communities. Blue Sail touts the fact that it roasts its own “ethically-sourced” coffee — it’s in direct trade with Long Miles Coffee — and claims to “passionately reach out to help local artists, entrepreneurs, farms and nonprofits.” The bright,
Follow Eat Arkansas on Twitter: @EatArkansas
forward-looking cafes are peopled with computer-carrying twenty- and thirtysomethings, with long couches available to folks at Zeteo, leather chairs and window seats to those at Blue Sail, and long tables for the caffeinated exchange of ideas at both. Chubby Echeveria and sedum plants adorn the tables. Zeteo is owned by Jon and Trina Mitchell; Blue Sail by Conway native Kyle Tabor. The Arkansas Times has some serious coffee lovers, the kind that pay attention to the country of origin of the brew they’re tossing back. One java-jonesing colleague headed over to Blue Sail and noted he chose the Burundi beans for his pour-over. Blue Sail grinds each order’s beans, weighs the coffee and pot to achieve precise caffeine nirvana and then drizzles in the hot water. The result: good strong coffee, not too acidic, doesn’t taste burnt, $4. The latte, made with whole milk, is (we think) the best
in town. Thanks to the meticulousness with which the coffee is made, you’ll have to wait a minute for your cuppa. If you see someone carrying a cup of what looks like purple milk, it’s the white blueberry tea. Blue Sail’s eats include pastries — muffins, scones, donuts, etc. — from a bakery in Conway and Little Rock’s Honey Pies. Since it’s on the ground floor of the tech park, Blue Sail’s vibe is start-upbusiness busy, but a few older folks (mentors!) will be found there. Blue Sail’s merch includes heavy coffee cups featuring the mythological kraken, which is Blue Sail’s mascot and also the name of an espresso drink made with milk and brown sugar. Perhaps the sea theme is a wink at Starbucks. The equally stylish Zeteo (“to seek” in New Testament Greek) — its globe light fixtures glowing with exposed filaments — also uses state-of-the-art delivery systems to make a precise cup of coffee. Here, one of our coffee mavens chose the Rwanda Gishamwana Island brew (notes of citrus, lemongrass and brown sugar, we’re informed), a lightbodied brew vast oceans away from that Seattle-based company’s smoky offerings. We have made our feelings known on the lattes; Zeteo’s is a tiny bit stronger than Blue Sail’s.
BELLY UP
Check out the Times’ food blog, Eat Arkansas arktimes.com
Little Rock’s Most Award-Winning Restaurant 1619 REBSAMEN RD. 501.663.9734 thefadedrose.com
THE ZETEO POUR-OVER: Barista Lauren Howell uses a combined faucet and filter device.
Zeteo offers more in the way of food than does Blue Sail. Besides morning pastries, there is a lunch menu. The portions aren’t big, but adequate: A salad of strawberries, pecans and chicken cubes over baby greens with a warm dressing was fresh and fine. The avocado toast came on a cartoonishly golden slab of bread and included flecks of feta and bacon and loads of sunflower seeds. The chicken salad on croissant would have
Blue Sail
417 Main St. No phone yet QUICK BITE Pastries only, so far. You can get a $2 cup of coffee here, brewed in batches and available immediately. You’ll wait a bit for a pour-over. HOURS 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
Zeteo Coffee
610 President Clinton Blvd. 376-3227
QUICK BITE Bigger menu here, including oatmeal for breakfast and pastries, sandwiches, snacks and Loblolly ice cream. HOURS 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday.
been improved by a nonrefrigerated croissant. The smoothie was OK, but it came from a premade mix and $4.75 seemed like a steep price to pay. Because parking in the River Market district is a pain in the ass, the folks you’re rubbing shoulders with at Zeteo are most likely Clinton Schoolers or local business folks. The menu says there is curbside pickup, but it turns out that’s only for folks who can find a parking space in front. Good luck with that. For drivers, Blue Sail has the advantage here in that you can usually find a place to park on Main. But coffee is what Blue Sail and Zeteo are about; the food is, like their behemoth competitor’s (there are two Starbucks within five blocks on Markham/ Clinton), not the focus. Rather, these locally owned coffee shops are all about variety, both in beans and process, from cold brews to pour-overs to lattes to aeropresses to steamers, with teas thrown in for good measure. Distinctive drinks: “Up All Night” at Zeteo is two espresso shots plus Coca-Cola. (The menu says Coke, but we are assuming here that the jittershots are legal.) For wide-open eyes and a racing heart at Blue Sail, go with the Buffalo River cold brew, which is infused with house-made mocha and cream.
TURNKEY FITNESS/GYM FOR SALE, $15,000
Owner retiring. 3000 sq.ft. rented space includes gym, restrooms, shower, kitchen area, spacious front office and five smaller offices / exam or therapy rooms, large classroom, gym equipment including ellipticals, treadmills, weights. Well-established business in a great downtown location in NLR close to River Trail, open since 2008. Perfect for personal training or physical therapy business. Email regfit@att.net to schedule viewing.
arktimes.com MAY 18, 2017
29
Saturday, June 24 ALSO IN THE ARTS
THEATER
UPCOMING EVENTS ON
CentralArkansasTickets.com The Joint
MAY
AAMS presents Clive Carroll
18
Godspell: A Night at the Rep for Wolfe Street Foundation
30
The Joint
JUN
AAMS presents Justin St. Pierre
15
Four Quarter Bar
JUL
Black Oak Arkansas w/ Framing the Red
1
Go to CentralArkansasTickets.com to purchase these tickets - and more!
LOCAL TICKETS, One Place
MAY 18, 2017
FINE ART, HISTORY EXHIBITS
ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, MacArthur Park: “56th Young Arkansas Artists Exhibition,” through July 23; “Drawing on History: National Drawing Invitational Retrospective,” works from the permanent collection, through Sept.
Arkansas Repertory Theater
MAY
30
“Rough Night at the Remo Room.” The Main Thing. 8 p.m. Fri.-Sat., through June 17. $24. The Joint Theater & Coffeehouse. 301 Main St., NLR. 501-372-0210. “Life is Short.” Short plays from Craig Pospisil. 7:30 p.m. Thu.-Sat., 2:30 p.m. Sun., through May 21. $14-$16. 320 W. 7th St. Community Theater of Little Rock. 501-410-2283. “The Dingdong.” Mark Shanahan’s adaptation of Georges Feydeau’s French farce “Le Dindon.” A TheatreSquared production. 7:30 p.m. Wed.-Sat., 2 p.m. Sat.-Sun., through June 4. $15-$45. Walton Arts Center’s Nadine Baum Studios, 505 W. Spring St., Fayetteville. 479443-5600. “In the Blood.” Suzan Lori-Parks’ adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” 7:30 p.m. Thu.-Sat., 2:30 p.m. Sun., through May 21. The Weekend Theater. $12-$16. 1001 W. 7th St. 501-374-3761. “Southern Fried Funeral.” J. Dietz Osborne and Nate Eppler’s comedy. 7:30 p.m. Tue.-Sat., dinner at 6 p.m., 12:45 p.m. and 6:45 p.m. Sun., dinner at 11 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. through June 3. Murry’s Dinner Playhouse. $15-$37. 6323 Colonel Glenn Road. 501-562-3131. “The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland.” Arkansas Festival Ballet. 7:30 p.m. May 19, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. May 20, 2 p.m. May 21. Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theatre. $20 adults, $15 students and children, arkansasdance.org/ performances-and-events/tickets. 501-2275320.
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. BUTLER CENTER GALLERIES, Arkansas Studies Institute, 401 President Clinton Ave.: “Historic Bridges of Arkansas,” photographs by Maxine Payne; “ “Bruce Jackson: Cummins Prison Farm,” photographs, West Gallery, through May 27, “The American Dream Deferred: Japanese American Incarceration in WWII Arkansas,” through June 24. 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 320-5790. CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL CENTER: “Bridge to the Future Festival” (rescheduled), “Lemonade War” celebration, for students, families and HIPPY participants, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. May 20, “Xtreme Bugs,” animatronic insects, through July 23; permanent exhibits on the Clinton administration. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun., $6-$10. ESSE PURSE MUSEUM & STORE, 1510 S. Main St.: “Take Your Purse With You: The Reimagined Work of Katherine Strause,” paintings, through Aug. 27;. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tue.Sat., 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Sun. $10, $8 for students, seniors and military. 916-9022. HISTORIC ARKANSAS MUSEUM, 200 E. 3rd St.: “Traces Remain,” installation by Dawn Holder and works on paper by Melissa Cowper-Smith; “Portraits of Friends” by Dani Ives; “The Great War: Arkansas in World War I,” study gallery; “All of Arkansas: Arkansas Made, County by County”; “A Diamond in the Rough: 75 Years of Historic Arkansas Museum.” 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 324-9351. MUSEUM OF DISCOVERY, 500 President Clinton Ave.: “Human Plus,” low and hightech tools that extend human abilities, May 27Sept. 10. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun., $8-$10. 396-7050. OLD STATE HOUSE MUSEUM, 300 W. Markham St.: “6th Annual Seersucker Social,” 6-8 p.m. May 18, $50. 324-9685.
ARKANSAS TIMES
From your goin’ out friends at
ABANDONED PUPPY This little guy has come up to our farm looking for a home. Very friendly and very frightened. We have five large dogs and they will not accept him. He is about 30 to 40 lbs and looks to be six to eight months old. He is male. Call Kaytee at 501-607-3100 or kaytee.wright@gmail.com.
Project Administrator
ARKANSAS TIMES MARKETPLACE
(Engineering) Assists Engineering supervisor in developer-funded and capital construction projects. Particularly interested in candidates who hold a BS in civil engineering, environmental engineering, construction management, construction engineering, or civil/construction engineering technology and want to learn water reclamation. Looking for 3 years of experience (cumulative) in sewer system construction, surveying, and/or CAD software. Note: formal post-high school education combined with related experience will be considered. Deadline to apply Friday 06/02/17. Visit www.lrwu.com for detailed job posting and employment application.
TO ADVERTISE IN THIS SECTION, CALL LUIS AT 501.375.2985 PART-TIME ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT
AT KILL SHELTER. NEEDS HOME. 870-917-5245
Equal Opportunity Employer
Meet your new best friend Cora! Cora is a sweet 6-month-old lab mix puppy who is looking for her forever home.
Find out more information on Cora and other pets available for adoption at careforanimals.org, 501-603-CARE. You can apply online.
ARKANSAS TIMES
bike
LOCAL
Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, is seeking a part-time Administrative Assistant in its Little Rock office. 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 jvazquez@aradvocates.org. AACF is an equal opportunity employer.
PASTURED OLD BREED PORK Our hogs are a cross between Large Black and Berkshire, old 19th century breeds. They are raised on our pasture and forage in the forest that adjoins our fields. They are never confined like industrial hogs. We do not use any kind of routine antibiotics. Our hogs live ARKANSAS GRASS were FED LAMB like they meant to. PRICE LIST FRESH RAW HAM $7 lb.
PORK LOIN $8 lb
HAM BREAKFAST STEAKS $7 lb
BREAKFAST SAUSAGE $9 lb
We offer first quality one-year-old lamb raised on our farm in North Pulaski County. Our meat is free of steroids or any other chemicals. The only time we use antibiotics is if the animal has been injured which is extremely rare. All meat is USDA inspected.
PORK BRATWURST $10 One pound package
You can pick up your meat at our farm off Hwy 107 in North Pulaski County (about 25 miles north of downtown Little Rock) or we can meet you in downtown Little Rock weekdays. All meat is aged and then frozen.
PORK STEAKS $10 lb PRICE LIST: RIB ROAST TESTICLES contains about eight ribs (lamb chops) $17 lb.
$10 lb
WHOLE LEG OF LAMBPORK BUTTS TANNED SHEEPSKINS, $10 lb SHOULDER (about 4 to 5 lbs) $12 lb.
(bone in, cook this slow, like a pot roast. Meat falls off the bone). $11 lb.
HEARTS, LIVERS, KIDNEYS, $5 lb
$100-$150
(Our sheepskins are tanned in a Quaker Town, Pa. tannery that has specialized in sheepskins for generations.)
PORK TENDERLOIN BONELESS LOIN $12 lb TENDERLOIN $8 lb
$20 lb
LAMB BRATWURST LINK SAUSAGE
(one-lb package) $10 lb
NECKBONES
(for stew or soup) $5 lb
SPARE RIBS $9 lb BABYBACK RIBS $12 lb
India Blue F a r m
12407 Davis Ranch Rd. | Cabot, AR 72023 Call Kaytee Wright 501-607-3100 alan@arktimes.com
12407 Davis Ranch Rd. | Cabot, AR 72023 Call Kaytee Wright 501-607-3100 alan@arktimes.com arktimes.com MAY 18, 2017
31
S)
K
B U RG
E
WE R E
ROCK(
JUNE 3–10, 2017 (2 WEEKENDS!) WHO DOESN’T LOVE A GOOD BURGER?
From beef or turkey to portabella or veggie—or even with a gluten-free bun!—we really know how to ROCK burger week in central Arkansas. This event gives readers a chance to taste all of the best burgers that the Rock has to offer. The best part? Optional burger pricing: $5 to $8. WHAT ELSE DO READERS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT BURGER WEEK ROCK(S)? Restaurants WILL run out, so: get there early, have a backup plan and maybe try again the next day. There will be a wait, since we’ve been talking about delicious burgers for the entire month of May. You will tip as though the burger is regular price. This should go without saying, but step up to the plate with a 20% tip, and say “Thank you” for the sweet deal. Buy a beverage and maybe some other delectable food to enjoy with your burger. So, when appropriate, have a beer or cocktail. Stay updated with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and (of course) arktimes.com
PARTICIPATING RESTAURANTS
@ the Corner Big Orange Big Whiskey’s Black Angus Bleu Monkey Grill – Hot Springs Boulevard Bistro
Buenos Aires Grill and Café Capital Bar & Grill Crazee’s Cool Café Doe’s Eat Place Dugan’s Pub Green Leaf Grill Homers West Lazy Pete’s
Old Chicago, NLR & Conway Rebel Kettle Revolution Taco & Tequila Lounge Skinny J’s Sticky Fingerz Taco Mama – Hot Springs
Four page section in the June 1 issue. The event is limited to 30 participating restaurants. Posters and social media promotional materials will be provided.
DEADLINE IS MAY 24.
Let’s show off that delicious burger. FAMILY OWNED AND OPERATED SINCE 1959!
www.arktimes.com • 201 E. MARKHAM, SUITE 200 • LITTLE ROCK, AR 72203 • (501) 375-2985 32
MAY 18, 2017
ARKANSAS TIMES