Arkansas Times - May 5, 2016

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COMMENT

Think of the future The Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department sponsored its sixth informational meeting about expansion of I-30 last week. After short speeches by representatives of contracting firms (Garver Engineering, StudioMAIN, and Nelson\Nygaard), we were invited across the hall to see maps, charts and video simulations. All were very impressive to the eye. Each member of the audience was given a full-color handout and the opportunity to fill out a “Citizen Comment Form.”

The only options under consideration were no construction, 6 lanes (“collector/distributor lanes and single point urban interchange”), 6 lanes (“collector/distributor lanes and split diamond interchange”), 8 lanes (“general purpose lanes and single point urban interchange”), and 8 lanes (“general purpose lanes and split diamond interchange”). The scenarios were imaginary and presumed that traffic will increase in a foreseeable way. It was taken for granted that these changes must happen.

But nothing in any of the material presented so much as mentioned a light-rail system or how the atmospheric effects of increased traffic will be absorbed. Furthermore, nothing was said about that 900-pound gorilla in the room: economic development of downtown Little Rock and beyond.

It was as if the problems of carbon emission and climate change do not exist.

Funding for the 30 Crossing project is to be from a hodgepodge of revenue streams. Interestingly, what was completely absent was any presentation of how much each contracting firm stands to profit. A general figure of $631.7 million was thrown out, though. Of course, in the budgetary agenda of our times, numbers like this will always rise. But one thing that will remain constant is that the people of Arkansas will have to bear the cost, directly or indirectly.

Furthermore, more lanes will bring more pollution, more congestion and more dangerous driving conditions. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out. While six lanes or eight lanes might be better than 10 lanes, it’s still an increase in the number of lanes!

No amount of rhetoric about “split diamonds” and “green spaces” will make that fact go away.

What is the point of having bicycle paths in an empty city? Assuming that we want the space we live in to be more than a highway interchange.

The 30 Crossing plan is either 4

MAY 5, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

designed to accommodate interstate commerce or to meet some perception of “convenience.” But we must remember that this is not a matter of convenience for commuters. More lanes lead to more congestion, more pollution, more complaints about convenience, and more frustration, to say nothing of other “retail” effects. Instead, we should be looking for true convenience and true community. That comes with a transportation infrastructure that accounts for the health of all people in greater Little Rock and the surrounding environment.

Except for a few vested interests that stand to profit, how can the present 30 Crossing scheme benefit a struggling city like our own?

Anthony Newkirk North Little Rock

Not buying story on Kurrus firing I am a retired educator who worked in four public school districts, including for 25 years in the Little Rock School District as a coach, classroom teacher, principal and director of secondary edu-

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cation. My four children received an excellent education in the LRSD. I join the long list of knowledgeable people expressing their displeasure with the underhanded, ill-timed firing of LRSD Superintendent Baker Kurrus. Former state Sen. Jim Argue, former LRSD school board member Nancy Wood, Max Brantley and others hit the nail on the head when they said that Kurrus’ firing was caused by his truthful testimony about the harmful impact charter schools have on public education in Little Rock. Gov. Hutchinson and Education Commissioner Johnny Key’s excuse that they wanted a professional educator shows what hypocrites they are. The governor had to get the legislature to pass special legislation to give Key, who lacked an education background, the job. We must save our public schools.

J.D. McGee Little Rock

From the web In response to Max Brantley’s April 27 column, “Low tactics every day: Walmart education”: Had the governor and the Education Commissioner been paying attention to LRSD for decades, as I have, they would know that the highly respected Baker Kurrus did NOT go rogue. He has always been a man swaddling in facts, not feelyfeely talk. He has opposed charter schools that he thought were harming LRSD since he was a school board member. I think he embarrassed them with their own statistics because he thinks charters should also be accountable to the state. (What a concept!)

CGB In response to Bill Kopsky’s April 27 guest column, “Rigged system”:

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“Rigging a system as Key has done corrodes the credibility of the whole institution of public education.”

That’s their goal, unfortunately. So, this column only shows them how well they are doing. Although many may be outraged at these poor decisions, those in charge are quite happy with them and see no problems. I suspect this plan has been in the works for years and years, and they are more than prepared to succeed, as Republicans control the state and Democrats in Arkansas are incapable of rising to the occasion.

I’ll add yet another layer: Not only are Republicans attempting to destroy public education in Little Rock, thereby

damaging it economically and socially, they are also behind the coming of the new 10-lane bridge and roadway that will decimate the River Market District and the new revitalization of downtown and downtown neighborhoods.

Republicans are specifically attacking Little Rock for some unknown reason, and the damage they are doing is incalculable. spunkrat In response to Gene Lyons’ April 27 column, “Get real,” commenting on Atlantic magazine contributor Neal Gabler, who wrote about being broke at age 66, and the “American Dream”: Gabler is probably an extreme example, but his blunders are emblematic of Americans’ general sense of entitlement.

Gabler’s American dream is, simply put, the American nightmare. Living above your means, buying more than you can afford to pay for, is not “the dream,” it’s a personality disorder, not unlike gambling, and it’ll put you in a hole so fast you won’t know how deep it is till you hit the bottom. Then you look around for a shovel to dig your way out. Stop digging!

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EYE ON ARKANSAS

WEEK THAT WAS

“I won’t fight to keep this job, but I will fight for our school district. … I don’t want a role until I know where we are and have a sense of where we’re headed. If the policies are right — yes, I’m willing to play a role. ... [But] I need indication about the policies and direction before I sign up.”

—Little Rock School District Superintendent Baker Kurrus at a legislative hearing on Monday, May 2, answering a question about whether he’d consider staying with the district in a different role after his contract expires this summer. It’s widely assumed that Kurrus was fired because he and his boss, Education Commissioner Johnny Key, disagreed over the expansion of charter schools in Little Rock.

The new man in charge While public anger continues to build regarding the firing of LRSD Superintendent Baker Kurrus (see item above), his replacement was in town last week doing his best to build bridges. Bentonville Superintendent Mike Poore faces an uphill climb, given the long history of turmoil and broken promises in the district — the Kurrus firing being only the latest example — and it remains to be seen whether he’ll build on the tentative stirrings of trust established by his predecessor. But give Poore points for reaching out to a broad range of political, community and business leaders recently, along with the Little Rock teachers’ union president and local media (including the Arkansas Times).

Governor’s top aide departing Michael Lamoureux, chief of staff to Gov. Hutchinson, will be leaving the staff at the end of May, the governor’s office announced. It’s not immediately clear why Lamoureux is stepping down or what he’ll be doing next.

He said in a statement only that he’s found “another professional opportunity.” Before joining the Hutchin6

MAY 5, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

BRIAN CHILSON

Quote of the Week:

CARRIES HIS WEIGHT: Former Beatle and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Sir Paul McCartney, 73, played like a much younger man for more than three hours in front of 15,000 fans at Verizon Arena last Saturday night. It was his first-ever appearance in Arkansas.

son administration, Lamoureux was president pro tem of the state Senate.

Nice work if you can get it Last week, Benton County Sheriff Kelley Cradduck pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of records tampering and received six months’ probation; in return, the special prosecutor in the case dropped a related felony charge.

Cradduck was arrested by State Police in January on charges stemming from his alleged instructions to jail staff to backdate the hiring paperwork of an employee (thus giving the employee additional compensation).

Strangely, the Benton County Quorum Court agreed in mid-April to pay Cradduck around $80,000 for salary and health insurance for the rest of the year; only then did he resign. The members of the quorum court framed the compensation as a “buyout.”

Zoning out with Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson A compromise was struck this week on a fight over abolishing the Capitol

Zoning District Commission, the tiny state agency that regulates land use in neighborhoods around the Capitol and the Governor’s Mansion. Last week, state Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson (R-Little Rock) forwarded a “special language” amendment that would end the CZDC and transfer its budget of about $240,000 to the Arkansas Department of Heritage. Hutchinson argued that having a separate zoning agency for the historic neighborhoods is unnecessary. Separately, Rep. Nate Bell (R-Mena), who’s long held a peculiar grudge against the CZDC, also proposed his own amendment to kill the commission.

The proposals ran into opposition from neighborhood groups, some Little Rock legislators and city leadership. Little Rock, which would have inherited responsibility for land use regulation in those areas under CZDC purview, said it didn’t want to take over such duties.

After the amendments failed to gain approval in the Joint Budget Committee, the agency’s budget was preserved, with one caveat: Property owners whose applications to the CZDC are denied may now appeal directly to the Department of Heritage

director, rather than to circuit court.

Living legends Unsurprisingly, Paul McCartney’s visit to Verizon Arena in North Little Rock on April 30 sold out completely.

Less expected was the picture that Verizon Arena posted on Facebook the next day, showing the former Beatle meeting with Thelma MothershedWair and Elizabeth Eckford, two members of the Little Rock Nine. McCartney has said the 1957 desegregation of Central High helped inspire the lyrics of “Blackbird,” which he performed at Saturday evening’s concert.

OPINION

Trump: The Obama of 2016?

C

onner Eldridge, the Democratic challenger to incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. John Boozman, launched an assault on Boozman Monday morning rich with irony and opportunity.

In short, he wants to hang Donald Trump on John Boozman, just as every Republican candidate from U.S. Senate to Big Rock constable has hung Barack Obama on Democratic opponents for eight years now.

Boozman isn’t black. He doesn’t have a Kenyan father. He lacks an exploitable middle name. But he also lacks a high public profile. He also has been dodging an explanation for how he can both repeal Obamacare and support Republican Gov. Hutchinson’s Arkansas Works program that relies on Obamacare billions to insure working poor and also prop up the state budget.

And then there’s Trump. Asked if

he’d support the Republican nominee — increasingly likely to be Donald Trump — Boozman told the Associated MAX Press Managing BRANTLEY Editors convention maxbrantley@arktimes.com last weekend: “...., I will support our nominee. Anybody is going to be better than Hillary or Bernie.”

That means even Donald Trump.

Eldridge jumped into the opening with an ad made for Facebook distribution that compiles some of the worst things Donald Trump has said about women in a boorish career unrivaled on the U.S. political stage by a serious national candidate. Eldridge called it “lurid and harassing” language. The video speaks for itself, with Trump cracks about boobs and women on their knees. It also includes

A leg up for the Chinese

Y

ou can be sure that President Richard M. Nixon would be proud of the Arkansas segment of his legacy, a huge subsidy from Arkansas taxpayers for a company in communist China that will build a wood-pulp factory in South Arkansas. But what will President Trump, our leading Sinophobe, say?

We may never know, but he would be apt to say from personal experience that whenever the government gives a leg up to a corporate titan, even a wily Chinese communist, it has to be a good thing. The bio of Li Hongzin, the president and founder of Shandong Sun Paper, boasts that he is a member of the Communist Party and the 993rd richest person in the world.

One hundred million dollars from Arkansas’s taxpaying sons and daughters of toil ought to raise Li in the wealth rankings at least a few notches. A good result from a toughly negotiated business deal, Trump might say, though he would also say he would have struck a far better deal with the commies than Gov. Hutchinson and Clark County did.

But what do the taxpayers who are

footing the bill say? They had no role, unless you count the Clark County voters who approved a halfERNEST penny sales tax DUMAS in 2007 to build a fund to supply cash subsidies to companies that will open a plant there, or the elected lawmakers and governors who offered up the package of state cash incentives and $50 million of collateralized loans to the paper company. The mill will hire up to 250 people, building it will employ others, and big landowners in the area will reap wealth from the sale of their standing pine saw wood.

The Shandong deal, like others that depend upon huge subsidies and tax forgiveness from government treasuries, is built solely upon the trust that the subsidies will produce lucrative jobs for hungry Arkansas laborers. The pulp deal will cost taxpayers about $400,000 for each of the 250 jobs, based on the few details gleaned from the announcement, but someday the salaries paid those work-

audio of Boozman’s implicit endorsement of Trump.

A senator should condemn such language, Eldridge said.

“Instead,” Eldridge continued, “Senator Boozman is an enabler of Donald Trump’s reprehensible conduct. For John Boozman to unequivocally state that he would support Donald Trump for President speaks volumes about Senator Boozman’s willingness to put political parties and partisan politics ahead of common decency toward women.”

“As a U.S. Senator, John Boozman is rarely seen in Arkansas. And now his judgment and humanity have gone missing, too. One cannot look at this collection of statements by Donald Trump and not be appalled. But it would appear Senator Boozman is the exception to the rule.”

If the November election does match Trump against Democrat Hillary Clinton, there will be a gender gap. Women will favor Clinton and not only on account of Trump’s sexism. But there’s still the question of the male gender gap. In Southern climes, Trump likely will enjoy a male gap — in part for talk of women supplicating themselves to

men. There are even some women in the Bible Belt who endorse that kind of talk.

Regional differences aside, running against Trump is easier for Eldridge than running against a mushy candidate whose name is unfamiliar to many voters. Boozman is hard to defend on his record, but he’s also hard to attack.

There’s just not much there there.

Trump is another matter. He will revel in being at the center of every race on the ballot. Other Republicans might not feel so confident about the association with him.

If gender differences don’t help Clinton against Trump, his unrelenting coarseness will. She’s not a candidate viewed sympathetically by many, but Trump tirades could inspire a backlash. The negative of partisan association with Trump could prove a useful tool for many other Democratic candidates, particularly outside the South.

Instead of mailboxes stuffed with black men in surgical scrubs to illustrate the evils of the Democratic presidential candidate, we might just get a glossy card with a photo of an orangehaired reality show actor spouting misogyny.

ers and the taxes they pay are supposed to offset the investment. Shandong will get a 65 percent discount on property taxes on the plant and equipment for 20 years but they can argue that the county wouldn’t have collected those taxes anyway.

Jobs became the magic talisman for economic development a couple of decades ago. You sell or oppose any idea, like tax cuts or health care, for what you claim it will do to or for jobs.

I have mentioned communists way too often, because the ideology of the principal beneficiary of the pulp deal should have no bearing on its wisdom or value. But it helps divert our attention for a change to the other side of the equation: the case for the corporate beneficiary and not just for the new workforce.

In the case of the two biggest beneficiaries of Arkansas’s corporate welfare — Big River Steel and Lockheed Martin — their side got little mention in the hurrah over the jobs that the taxpayer subsidies would bring to Arkansas.

In a moribund steel market, Arkansas welfare and tax write-offs give Big River a competitive advantage over Nucor Steel, a taxpaying Arkansas corporate citizen a few miles away. One or both now may not survive in a tightening steel market dominated by China.

A year ago, the legislature approved an $87.1 million bond issue and other subsidies for Lockheed Martin if it won a

government contract to build a light military vehicle at its Camden missile plant.

What the state did was assure Lockheed Martin somewhat better profits if it had to submit a really competitive bid. Alas, a competitor still got the contract. Was fattening a company’s profits a proper role for the state government? No one would argue seriously that it was, except for the jobs.

Thanks to Nixon, we no longer dwell much on the fact we are helping communists. Nixon liked to call his dramatic 1972 visit to China and the brutal Mao Tse-tung “the week that changed the world.” Indeed it was, for Mao helped him keep his campaign promise to exit Vietnam without admitting defeat, it awakened the Soviets to the need to salve relations with the United States, and it began a dynamic economic relationship with China that thrives today.

Mike Beebe was governor nearly five years ago when the Chinese first said they were interested in striking a deal to build a plant in Arkansas’s piney woods to convert cellulose from timber to pulp, which workers back in China would convert to soft paper products — perhaps for export back to the U.S. someday to compete for the Koch brothers’ big market share.

Americans for Prosperity, the Kochs’ big front, was the only strenuous critic of the deal. Almost like health and food assistance for the poor, you see, corporate welfare is unholy. www.arktimes.com

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Trump fantasies

F

or argument’s sake, let’s say you ran into this Trump character in a bar. First off, he’s boasting about how incredibly smart, rich and good looking he is. He’s a big, big winner. He’s even got his own TV show, and you don’t.

Trump says you wouldn’t believe how many supposedly happily married wives he’s debauched. Top women, Trophy Wives, not that flat-chested specimen with “the face of a dog” sitting with you.

Next he tells you about his hot daughter, the one with the amazing body whom he’d probably date if his super model wife wasn’t even hotter.

OK, enough.

In actual life, most people couldn’t get away fast enough; they’d flee the orange-haired ape as if he had Ebola.

And yet millions are thinking about voting for Trump for president — essentially because television news networks now depict U.S. political contests as the biggest “reality TV” show of them all.

And the last thing people expect of reality TV is well, realism. What’s wanted is spectacle, illusion and melodrama. Less C-Span than pro wrestling. And in that arena, a figure like Donald J. Trump can be made to appear almost normal.

On CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and the rest there are now only three big news stories: the 2016 presidential election, terrorism, and sporadic natural disasters — tornadoes, floods and earthquakes. It’s been that way pretty much since Trump declared his candidacy last June.

It follows that broadcast ratings, broadcasters’ careers and many millions of dollars depend upon keeping people entertained. That, in turn, depends upon suspense. To keep viewers watching, the election needs to be depicted as a cliffhanger. So far, so good.

However, there should be limits. Also in everyday experience, people who brag a lot also tend to lie a lot. What then if large numbers of voters figured out that Trump’s proudest boast of superior political judgment turned out to be pure fiction — the one about how he alone among Republican presidential candidates recognized the folly of the Bush administration invading Iraq in 2003, and spoke vigorously against the war?

The myth making began during a televised GOP debate last September.

“I have to say something because it’s about judgment,” Trump said. “I am the only person on this dais, the only person that fought very, very hard against

us … going into Iraq. Because I said going into Iraq — That was in 2003, you can check it out, I’ll GENE give you 25 difLYONS ferent stories — What I said was you’re going to, you’re going to destabilize the Middle East, and that’s what happened.”

Bob Somerby checked it out on Nexis.

No evidence of a single story, much less 25, could be found. Trump alibied that the press failed to record his opposition because he wasn’t then in politics.

Yeah, well neither were the Dixie Chicks. Many of the same people currently attending Trump rallies were busy burning the group’s CDs back then.

Had Trump said a single word against George W. Bush’s folly, torch-bearing mobs would have marched on his casinos like Transylvanian peasants in a vampire movie.

If you recall, France’s ambassador did say in the United Nations essentially what Trump now pretends he said. As a result, french fries temporarily became “Freedom Fries.” Indeed, I cherish a photo of an Arkansas truck stop vending machine offering “Freedom Ticklers” for 50 cents.

Then last fall, Trump began claiming that the Bush White House had actually dispatched emissaries begging him to tone his criticism down. Washington Post fact checkers could find no evidence that ever happened either.

Quite the opposite. History records that Trump was an Iraq war hawk, full stop. BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski obtained an audio recording of a March 21, 2003, Fox News interview where he declared the invasion “a tremendous success from a military standpoint.” As a result, Trump predicted, “Wall Street’s just gonna go up like a rocket.”

In short, Trump made the whole judgment thing up. Unless, that is, you read the increasingly laughable New York Times, where the candidate’s fantasies drew the attention of Clinton-hating columnist Maureen Dowd.

She invited readers to envision “a foreign policy debate between Trump and Clinton that sounds oddly like the one Obama and Clinton had in 2008, with Trump playing Obama, preening about his good judgment on Iraq.”

So the question becomes, can he get away with it?

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9

PEARLS ABOUT SWINE

NFL baffling for Hogs

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MAY 5, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

ach year, the NFL Draft’s escalation/descent toward a more audacious and ludicrous spectacle becomes more obvious, but amid this backdrop of pomp and bluster is a troubling, inane trend.

Hunter Henry predictably left Arkansas after three solid years in which everything that made him one of the country’s most coveted prep tight end prospects was enhanced. Statistically he was easily the best in the nation in 2015, and the Mackey Award went to him almost by default. But the subtle upticks from year to year in every measureable were in play. Henry’s junior year revealed a much different, hungrier player than the one who had been an appreciable asset over 2013-14. He was more aggressive and versatile as a route runner, better in the blocking phase, and far more visible at crunch time.

Ergo, it made perfect sense for the former Pulaski Academy product to go 35th overall to the San Diego Chargers.

The choice had “logical fit” all over it: entrenched Antonio Gates is winding down his Hall of Fame-caliber career and the second option, LaDarius Green, capitalized on free agency to sign with Pittsburgh. Henry will produce immediately, barring injury, and should theoretically thrive early for the Chargers’ ingrained tradition at that position.

The rest of the Draft, though, was baffling if you were tracking the Razorback prospects. In the fifth round, a running back who just lost his entire senior season to injury (Jonathan Williams) went ahead of his early entrant compatriot whose third 1,000-yard season was easily his best to date (Alex Collins). As the first four rounds went by without Collins’ name being called, many wondered if he had made a mistake declaring early.

Some even could muse similarly about Williams’ decision to bolt, considering he could have redshirted and returned for 2016 healthy and energized.

But those decisions weren’t made in a vacuum. Collins had just run for nearly 1,600 yards against the most vicious array of defenses in the country, and scored a single-season school record 20 touchdowns. When Williams took an August practice foot injury, that put the onus on Collins to handle more touches and produce better against SEC competition: He answered that with 10 games of 100 yards

or more, and five contests in which he logged 25-plus carries. After taking some knocks for a perceived BEAU lack of breakaway WILCOX speed, he tore off a 70-yard run against UTEP in the opener and ripped off a brilliant 80-yarder in a road demolishing of LSU. Collins falling to the fifth round would’ve made more sense had Ohio State’s mercurial Ezekiel Elliott not been taken by the Dallas Cowboys with the fourth overall selection. Sure, Elliott was regarded as the genuine can’t-miss guy at the position, but he also made some questionable comments last year after Ohio State got bounced from the national championship picture by Michigan State.

Thereafter, several running backs with arguably lesser credentials than Collins went — DeAndre Washington, Wendell Smallwood, Jordan Howard and Paul Perkins all went in the fifth round ahead of both Collins and Williams — and it seemed so bizarre to think that a shifty, proven and durable guy would find himself lagging behind that company.

Conventional wisdom of late is that running backs must be rare talents to be taken that high. Yes, the Cowboys demonstrate a general sense of teeming illogic when it pertains to personnel decisions; but my goodness, Collins and Williams, two guys who have generated five 1,000-yard rushing seasons between them against the fastest and hardesthitting defenders in the country didn’t merit anywhere near the plaudits that were extended to other guys with arguably lesser credentials. Is Ezekiel Elliott going to be a full four-plus rounds better as a pro than Collins or Williams?

It’s a rhetorical question because, well, he likely will be if for no other reason than he’ll be afforded the requisite latitude. The fourth overall pick will have the leash to succeed or fail, and this is not to denigrate Elliott at all, but to note that Williams and Collins fell victim to the malaise that now plagues this damnable three-day exercise. If you grade out as an nth-round product by scouts, then that information is every bit as useful to you as a potential draftee as advice on what watchband best complements your suit.

THE OBSERVER

Here.

NOTES ON THE PASSING SCENE

Summertime

S

omebody informed The Observer vertible or better, big as parade floats, that we’ve been on kind of a string coal-fired and whitewall-tired, full of of downers recently, something murderous muscle-car vroom-vroom we’re going to pin on the weather. Not like the Duzie beast that (SPOILER the rain. We actually LIKE the rain. We’re ALERT!) mowed down poor Myrtle in talking about the copious sunshine. The “The Great Gatsby.” Only the shiniest Observer, being a July-hater of some sharkskin suits, too; reflectorized shades, longstanding renown — never one to patent loafers, platinum watches with rejoice over all the sweat and bugs and mirrored faces, all surfaces save our ass-on-hot-car-seat sizzle of summer in skin reflecting back the scowls of The Haters drowning in the syrup of envy, Arkansas, even back when we were young our strut so deep you might think our enough to get the whole cotton-chopping bunion was giving us fits if not for the season off from skool — is convinced that there’s something about all the springing Trumpian smirk. From now on, only the forth of springtime that drives a lot of finest champ-pang-knee, brothers and people, including Yours Truly, halfway sisters, popped corks all around, and no, around the bend. It’s like that Facebook that’s not a euphemism for something else, as much as we want it to be.

Depression Syndrome we heard about The everyday price on the Abbeycourt is $13.99 Themight sale price is $9.98 in the Best Wines Under a few years back, where people$10 looking At the very least, no more swilling from at all the great wonders and wild cua paper sack on the stoop while wailcumbers their family, friends and frening on the harmonica. No more doomemies were posting to Dr. Zuckerberg’s shouting, no matter how many tornaElectromatic Lifemulcher sometimes does blow through trailer parks up in felt like their own lives were boring and White County between now and the incomplete, even though only the creamy heat, sucking little old ladies’ poodles nougat of peoples’ existence winds up right out of their loving arms. Gonna on social media in the first place. Hell, if be all hot tubs and hunnert dollar bills you looked at The Observer’s Facebook this July, cousins, The Observer takpage right now, you’d think that all we ing our pick of the finest and most corruptible college dropouts for company, did, 24/7/365, was hike picturesquely, right up until the leaves go orange and eat foods exotic enough for the deserty scenes on “Game of Thrones,” and paw the Hogs are called up in Fayetteville through world literature for deep and again. Might buy a party barge and name particularly soul-touching quotes about her “50 Shades of DeGray.” Maybe a the nature of human consciousness. Same new shotgun to waste all empty beer thing with springtime, kids. When the bottles and the occasional within-range little birdies are singing and the eggs are water moccasin. Then again, probably more financially realistic to just buy a hatching, when the flowers are blooming and the air is full of the smell of freshbananahanger Speedo, hit the public mown grass, to look upon one’s own deswimming area, and blow the money cline or even one’s own serious lack of on a styrofoam cooler and Coors in cans. meaningful self-improvement can make Whatever the case, it’s time to let The Observatory air a bit, shake out the bufa body feel like you’re shuffling off to The falo robe, cap the chimney, and splash Land From Whence None Shall Return.

Of course you are, ye mortal. But there’s a little cold water onto our top-n-tail. no sense feeling that way all the time.

Time to find our bliss again, if we ever Now that we’ve identified the probhad such a thing. Oh, bliss? Are you lem, The Observer is going to perk up there, bliss? Earth to bliss? Hope we and get shipshape right now, just in find it soon. Summer is nearly upon us, and if we don’t start getting stoked for time for swimsuit season. Get our self it now, we’ll wind up riding the couch some sprayed-on abs. A drink served in a coconut. Something like that. Only in the AC for three months, just like we yellow cars for us from now on! Condid last year.

African American Art from the Permanent Collection of the Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas

Reception & Book Release for Here. African American Art from the Permanent Collection

May 12, 5–7 p.m.

Book Discussion 5:30 | Gallery Talk to follow Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas 701 S. Main Street | Pine Bluff | asc701.org Free event sponsored by Simmons Bank

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MAY 5, 2016

11

Arkansas Reporter

THE

A split diamond engages fans The 10-lane I-30 plan wins support by moving exit to Fourth Street.

BY LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK

W

ith groups like the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce, the Little Rock Downtown Partnership and the Clinton School of Public Service won over, it looks like a 10-lane (and, in places, 12) Interstate 30 through downtown Little Rock is inevitable.

But others, like architect Tom Fennell, creator of a boulevard plan; urban design consultant Norman Marshall, hired by the Arkansas Public Policy Panel to give an independent review of the highway plan; and commenters on the Improve 30 Crossing Facebook page are likely to continue to bring a halt to the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department’s plans to widen I-30 to 10 lanes. The highway department says widening is needed for reasons of safety and congestion, but opponents argue that their reasoning is based on outdated ideas of traffic management and design that are being jettisoned elsewhere in the country.

The seven-mile 30 Crossing project stretches from the I-30 intersection with I-40 on the north to its intersections with I-530 and I-440 on the south, and includes rebuilding the bridge over the Arkansas River. That the bridge needs rebuilding is not in dispute: It was built to last 50 years and is 66 years old, and its piers intrude on the main shipping lane of the river.

Though the highway department prefers the 10-lane plan — which it now refers to as 6 lanes with 4 collector/ distributor lanes — it was compelled to come up with an 8-lane alternative, which it opted to design as general purpose, without collector/distributor lanes.

The highway department’s first design, presented last year, replaced the cloverleaf that channels inter12

MAY 5, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

state traffic to Second or Cumberland streets with a “single point urban intersection” (or SPUI) underneath the interstate. That plan was met with objections by Stephens Inc., the Central Arkansas Library System and Mayor Mark Stodola, among others, because it would allow for increased traffic on Second and do nothing to alleviate the problematic four corners intersection of Cumberland, Markham Street, President Clinton Avenue and LaHarpe Boulevard. The new idea of a “split diamond” that would move the southbound exit of I-30 to Fourth Street, thus creating a 17-acre green space, has pacified groups that previously objected, including the Downtown Partnership. Stodola was a vocal proponent of moving the exit.

However, the AHTD drew some heat at a well-attended public hearing last week for including in the event a PowerPoint presentation by StudioMAIN. The PowerPoint showed computer-generated images of the 10-lane plan with parks — including one that bridged the interstate for three blocks — featuring biking and hiking trails, children’s areas and other amenities, even a rowing club at the river. At the AHTD’s request, StudioMAIN developed a design to improve connectivity between the east and west areas of downtown bisected by the interstate, a major sore point with supporters of downtown development. Cromwell architect Chris East, who presented the PowerPoint, noted that his firm has purchased property in what is being called the “East Village” east of I-30 and sees the importance that the new highway “be done right.” He did not express approval of the 10-lane plan

SEEING OPTIONS IN 3D: Members of the public who attended the AHTD’s 30 Crossing hearing last week got to see videos showing how traffic moved under the various alternatives.

outright, but StudioMAIN’s drawings do presume a 10-lane plan.

Downtown resident Paul Dodds and others said the AHTD was fooling people into thinking that the parks were part of the highway department’s plan, when in fact they would require millions of dollars from the city to build. There is nothing wrong with the plans, he said, but they aren’t part of the 30 Crossing project. Architect Fennell also found fault with the designs themselves, because, unlike his atgrade boulevard plan, they do not allow for new development.

In a letter to the Times, Dodds wrote, “I am sure Chris East was not in the least trying to deceive the public, but I had no idea that implementing the Studio Main vision was not part of the AHTD plan till he mentioned almost in passing at the end of his long talk that funding was not in place, and city and private money would be needed. I thought — what??? Are we supposed to fund this with bake sales?

“If a public highway department gives so much precious stage time in a huge public hearing to an attractive plan they don’t back, they really need to make the lines known. I have learned since the hearing that the

Amendment 91 money paying for most of I-30 Crossing could allow the AHTD to include much of the Studio Main vision into its budget under a broad ‘improvements’ spending authority. Sadly, the several department reps I spoke with after the hearing all repeated that the Studio Main improvements were too expensive.

Green, other than a little astroturf, is not their thing.”

Amendment 91, enacted in 2013, allowed the use of a half-cent sales tax after a 2012 referendum in which voters approved the tax for a “four-lane highway system statewide.” That language has been cited by opponents to the 30 Crossing plan.

City Director Kathy Webb also found it inappropriate that a representative from Nelson\Nygaard, hired by the city as an independent analyst of the highway plan, also presented at the AHTD hearing, though the representative, Paul Moore, said little other than the firm would present its work to the City Board in late May. East, in an interview Monday, said he believed he had made clear in his presentation that StudioMAIN’s ideas were unfunded. He said StudioMAIN and the highway department “met half-

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BRIAN CHILSON

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way,” and their collaboration could produce such benefits as persuading the AHTD to build the interstate in such a way that it could support a deck park.

No, the AHTD won’t build a deck park, but a concession to build the highway to support a deck could considerably cut the cost to the city in the future. Besides, he said, “I’m not sold that they’re not going to spend any money” on any of StudioMAIN’s ideas, though he said it was not the design group’s idea to mislead anyone into thinking that it was a “voice” for the agency.

Little Rock “needs a long-term master plan,” East stressed, and said he expects that he and others, like Fennell, will bring the community together to advocate for such a plan.

The AHTD sought to make its case against the 8-lane plan with videos showing in 3D what traffic on Interstate 30 would be during the evening rush hour in the year 2041. The videos show badly bottlenecked traffic on the 8-lane plan and zero bottlenecks on the 10-lane (6-plus-4) plan.

AHTD Design Build Project Manager Ben Browning said last week that the data that went into making the videos presumed that Interstate 30 would be widened from I-440 and

I-530 to 65th Street. That widening is not included in the 30 Crossing project or, Browning said, the highway department’s Statewide Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) for 2016-2020, but there “is a likelihood that widening could happen in the future.” Unless I-30 is widened to 65th Street, he acknowledged, there would be “significant” congestion on the 10-lane plan as well.

It has been the contention of Central Arkansas planning agency Metroplan that the 30 Crossing project will require the eventual widening of the entire interstate system in Pulaski County, at a cost it’s calculated at $4 billion.

The 6 + 4 plan also calls for auxiliary roads alongside the four C/D lanes and the six general purpose, which is why at certain points the interstate (including the C/Ds) will have more than 10 lanes: There will be 12 over the Arkansas River, where the bridge will be 231 feet wide. At East Roosevelt Road, counting the exit lanes, there will be 14 lanes.

Mayor Stodola has begun to call the green space created by the removal of the cloverleaf at the Second Street exit “Central Park.” The 17-acre park (not counting the finger of green that will replace the ramp entering Second Street) will be roughly 960 feet east to west and 700 feet north to south.

About a fourth of it will be covered by the interstate. The highway department will still own the land, but will have a memorandum of understanding with the city that it may be used as a park, so long as no revenue-producing activities occur there. Spokesman Danny Straessle said the department will level and seed the area; it will be up to the city to develop it.

Will it be more than a weedlot?

Absolutely, says the mayor. “I’m totally committed to developing it,” Stodola said last week. “We’ve got a four- or five- year process to develop a design and we’ll have partners on it, too, whether it’s an NGO or others.”

Stodola said “one family” has already committed to support the park and he has no doubt there will be other private commitments as well. “I am an optimist about this and I think others should be as well.”

THE

Ask the Times:

BIG I.D. BLUES PICTURE

Q.

I recently went to the Department of Motor Vehicles office on Reservoir to replace my lost driver’s license, and though the clerk could see my license and photograph on her computer, she declined to reissue me a new license without further identification. After I complained to the main office, she finally did issue the license. Have I.D. requirements changed?

A.

State rules, ostensibly to protect against identity theft, could make life harder for people with no driver’s licenses or state identification cards.

Registered voters don’t have to show a valid I.D. to cast their vote, thanks to a court ruling that a law passed in 2013 by the state legislature violated the state Constitution. But if you have lost a valid driver’s license, you won’t be able to get a new one without showing certain forms of I.D., despite the fact that the state Revenue Department has your driver’s license and photograph in its database.

If you have lost your valid license or state I.D., you must produce a primary document (original birth certificate, passport, a Homeland Security photo I.D., U.S. Visa or immigration document) or two secondary documents (out-ofstate license, unless expired; out-ofstate I.D., unless expired; concealed handgun license; pilot’s license; vehicle registration and title; certified school transcript; prison release form; Bureau of Indian Affairs card, but not tribal I.D. card; military I.D. or discharge papers; court order, health insurance card, marriage license; or financial responsibility form.

Getting a birth certificate may seem simple enough — if you live in Arkansas — unless your name has changed, as are many women’s names. If you are using your birth certificate, but your name is different from the name on the certificate, you must also bring in proof of name change, such as a marriage license, divorce decree or court order.

The state’s online license record doesn’t count, according to Department of Finance and Administration spokesman Jake Bleed, because someone could merely look like the person whose photograph appears in the computer record but still not be the person.

Holly Dickson, legal counsel with

the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, said she was not familiar with the regulations but that it sounded like homeless people or people without resources to get around town to get documentation might be put at a disadvantage by the I.D. requirements.

Bleed said the drivers’ license rules were promulgated under the Driver’s License Security and Modernization Act of 2005, but the Revenue Office computer program was not modified in 2014 “to require the Revenue Office service representative to indicate what documents they accepted as proof of identity. This was done to stop incidents of identity theft. The State Revenue Offices were reminded of this policy again on November 13, 2015.”

There is also a new request from the state to provide your driver’s license or state identification number on your state tax return if you are filing online.

This is to prevent fraud, workers in the income tax division told the Times. So if you don’t have a driver’s license or state I.D. number, you must mail your tax return in.

DFA spokesman Bleed said that returns that do not include the numbers will be processed anyway. “At this time, DFA has no plans to require driver’s license or state identification data on income tax returns,” he wrote in an email.

Bleed said request for the identification numbers was “at the recommendation of a national organization the Federation of Tax Administrators,” to protect Arkansas taxpayers.

www.arktimes.com

MAY 5, 2016

13

The wizard of Wilson A wealthy farm magnate has poured millions into the tiny town, bringing renewal and progress. Not many are complaining. But some would like a better sense of the motives of the man behind the curtain.

BY DAVID KOON

A NEW TOWN: The Lawrence Group, led by Gaylon Lawrence Jr. (center), bought most of the commercial property in Wilson and all of the surrounding farmland in 2010. It’s since invested heavily in the community, with town planner John Faulkner (left) overseeing the revitalization, including the reopening of The Wilson Cafe.

14

MAY 5, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

N

o matter which side of the Mississippi River you’re on, the Delta has never been

a place where good news was in heavy supply. For all but the wealthiest, fortunes

mostly peaked there around the time mule teams were replaced by chugging tractors, and

have been on a steady slide since. These days, the small Delta towns that once bustled

Since 2012, however, something fairly amazing has been taking place in Wilson, a town of just over 900 on U.S. Highway 61 in Mississippi County. On a recent Friday, excavators and dump trucks trundled back and forth at sites all over town, moving dirt in preparation for new construction. At the Wilson Cafe on the town square, new forks and spoons clinked on new plates, the food prepared by a young chef uprooted from a ritzy restaurant in Memphis and repotted here, the dining room tiled and painted and polished until it looked like something out of Architectural Digest.

Near the center of town, an organic garden pushed into the damp April daylight, overseen by a young, never-slowing idealist and her staff, the operation spinning out from a new classroom/concert space/demonstration kitchen meant to resemble a tin barn, but which is decidedly not a tin barn. On the outskirts of town, in a restored mansion that might remind one of Harry Potter’s alma mater inside and out, 45 kids attended the private Delta School, where a lesson on photosynthesis might be taught with a trip to the garden and physics might be demonstrated by building a go-kart, under the watchful eye of a brilliant, Ivy League-educated teacher whose groundbreaking ideas once landed her on the bestseller list.

In town, property values have doubled, with houses that go on the market routinely selling in fewer than four days. Residents out for a walk are getting used to being stopped by drivers who ask if they know of property in town, any property, that’s for sale. The town’s movie theater, which screened its last film around the time Raquel Welch was a big deal, will soon flicker to life again

as a modular space that can host stage plays, concerts and films. Unseen in the air, the town’s free Wi-Fi waits for someone strolling along Park Street to get a hankering to watch a cute cat video on her cell phone. Last spring, when the mosquitoes got out of hand, a crop duster buzzed the town twice a week, spraying, and a pickup truck with new fogging equipment in the back purred up and down the quiet streets. In the shadow of the flagpole dedicated to Robert E. Lee Wilson, builder and founder, the grass on the square is manicured, pushmown weekly, the clippings bagged, not a blade out of place. Down the street, dirt work has started for the new Hampson Museum, built to house a unique collection of Late Mississippian Period Native American artifacts unearthed in the area.

It’ll be open later this year. And every once in a while, a private helicopter hops the Mississippi River from Memphis and whirs to a touchdown in Wilson, depositing the man most responsible for it all: Gaylon Lawrence Jr. Since 2010, The Lawrence Group, a company founded by his late father, Gaylon Lawrence Sr., has owned all the farmland around Wilson for miles in every direction, along with 90 percent of the commercial real estate in town.

It was the latest jewel for an agri-based empire that controls farming operations in five states, huge citrus groves in Florida, several banks, and USAir Conditioning Distributor, the world’s largest privately held distributor of heating and air conditioning equipment.

Though many residents feared what might become of Wilson once the Wilson family sold the town they had owned since the 1880s, since 2012 Lawrence has poured untold millions into Wil-

BRIAN CHILSON

with scrubbed up field hands on weekend nights are well on their way to ghostly.

son, bringing in fresh faces with new ideas, bankrolling passion projects like the resurrected and meticulously renovated Wilson Cafe, and generally putting his money where his mouth is when it comes to revitalizing one little corner of the Delta. That includes moving the world headquarters of The Lawrence Group to the renovated former offices of Lee Wilson and Co., just off the town square, bringing in over a dozen executives and support personnel who live and work in town full time.

With Big River Steel going in just north of town, Wilson finds itself in the enviable position of being poised for great things in an area where great things are almost unheard of. Even those who questioned all the changes Lawrence brought to town in the beginning will tell you now that the Lawrence era, less than five years old at this point, has been a boon.

AN ENGLISH VILLAGE IN THE DELTA: Many of the buildings in Wilson, including the Wilson Cafe, are Tudor-style.

www.arktimes.com

MAY 5, 2016

15

ers — reportedly over 11,000 at one point — including farm hands, school teachers, doctors, dentists, carpenters, mechanics, electricians and the employees of a fully staffed veterinary clinic to care for the thousands of huge plow mules required to work the land in the days before mechanized agriculture. Uptown in Wilson, workers could spend company-printed scrip in the town’s barbershop, beauty shop, dry cleaner, grocery store, gas station, clothing stores, movie theater, tavern or cafe. From their wood-paneled headquarters on Park Street, just off the town square, the Wilson family owned and ran everything, lock, stock and barrel, until Wilson was incorporated in 1959.

in the Tudor style, including the bank, post office, cafe and gas station. The rest of the buildings received Tudor-inspired brick facades, with arched colonnades and steep-sloped wood shake roofs. To come upon an English village sweltering a half-mile from the Mississippi River levee can be a little surreal.

That’s the way it was until 2010, when the Wilson family announced it had reached a deal to sell its holdings in the area, including the town and one of the last great sections of contiguous farmland in the Delta, to The Lawrence Group.

Steve Wilson is the great-grandson of town founder R.E.L. Wilson. Now 68 and living in Memphis, Wilson said that the

BRIAN CHILSON

Still, given that most of the eggs in Wilson are resting in the basket of Gaylon Lawrence Jr., some people puzzle over his motives. The theories as to why he’s spent so much time and treasure on the town are numerous, even among those who work for him: maybe altruism, maybe a desire to give back to the region, maybe a tax write-off, maybe some life-altering moment of clarity about his own mortality and legacy after his father’s death in July 2012. Whatever the truth of it, several people we spoke with are a little perplexed by the question that seems the most obvious: Why Wilson?

ORGANIC GARDENER: Leslie Wolverton first said she wasn’t interested in starting a farm in Arkansas. After a visit, however, she started Wilson Gardens.

16

MAY 5, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

Company town Wilson was unique long before The Lawrence Group came to town. Founded

by Robert E. Lee Wilson in 1886 to support a sawmill operation, Wilson eventually grew into the greatest of the great “company towns.” As Lee Wilson and Co. drained the swamps, cleared the stumps and pivoted to agriculture on an epic scale, the town of Wilson soon became the hub of a spoked wheel of activity and influence, perched at the center of over 60 square miles of rich farmland in Mississippi County. At one time, Lee Wilson and Co. was the biggest cotton producer in the whole South. Production on that scale required an army of work-

Even after that, the family retained the vast majority of the town’s commercial real estate, and a near Yoknapatawphian level of control. A member of the Wilson family or a close associate, for example, was always the mayor.

The town looks like no other place in Arkansas as well. According to family lore, family scion R.E.L. “Roy” Wilson II went to England for his honeymoon and came back crazy for English architecture, soon constructing the magnificent Tudor-style mansion called Wildwood House, completed in 1928, on the edge of town. After Wildwood was finished, every commercial building built in Wilson for the next 40 years was constructed

decision to sell was made because more recent generations of the Wilson family were increasingly disinterested in living in Wilson, investing in the upkeep on the town and running the family farm.

Rather than allow their holdings to eventually be sold by those who knew nothing about farming, Wilson said, the decision was made to sell while his generation was still able to do so.

Wilson said that while he had an asking price in mind — the former holdings of Lee Wilson and Co. reportedly sold to The Lawrence Group for $110 million — he was also mindful about the fate of the town. The Lawrence family, he said, vowed that they would look after Wilson.

years, he said, have been about near constant upkeep.

That includes efforts to reach out to locals and keep the community informed about changes. His approach, he said, has always been that it’s much easier to partner with the town than to surprise. With the City Council, he’s helping craft a master plan for development, and he oversaw the installation of the town’s free Wi-Fi, a low-cost system using repurposed servers that he said could easily serve as a model for other struggling communities looking to bring Internet service to their citizens. In partnership with the Malco Theaters chain, he’s overseeing the renovation of the Wilson Theater, which will

vision for The Delta School to picking the green paint for the town’s trim.

“I am a visual arts person, so I’ve always been a project-related kind of guy,” he said. “I’ve often told people that I was born a mechanic and became an artist. So I have some understanding of how things are built and made. I wasn’t completely a fish out of water that way. Being a visual artist and working in ceramics and woodworking and metalworking, I respect the trades and sort of knew how to do that.”

Faulkner said that when he first came to town, Wilson was physically in bad shape, with many of the buildings there shot through with rot. The past three

be a multipurpose space that can host meetings, films, concerts and stage plays.

Even though the accelerating change is reaping rewards for locals, there was some anxiety about it in the beginning.

“The people who love Wilson and love the history, they support it, because it’s very logical to see that more activity and more renewal in a little town means growth and prosperity,” he said. “If you ask the landowners about their housing and the value of their housing, they’re very thrilled.”

As for why Lawrence is putting so much into Wilson, Faulkner said that when the purchase of the land was made, it was simply about getting a large piece

BRIAN CHILSON

“[Gaylon Lawrence Sr.] said there’s nobody in this world that is going to take care of what you’re entrusting us to take care of,” Wilson said. “And, by golly, he told it like it was. I have never seen a Delta town become resurrected like that town has.”

A big part of that resurrection has been the work of town planner John Faulkner, who Lawrence brought in to oversee the revitalization. Formerly an educator who taught art and theater to the children of Gaylon Lawrence Jr. at the private Ensworth School in Nashville, Tenn., Faulkner has had a hand in shaping nearly everything that has happened in Wilson since 2012, from crafting the

of contiguous farmland for cultivation.

“I think at first he thought of the village and all those buildings and all that real estate was a liability, but he’s changed his thinking about all that,” Faulkner said. “He knows that Wilson itself, the village, is an asset to the land around it, particularly if you improve it in terms of housing and infrastructure, the arts, education and all that.”

Wilson Mayor Becton Bell agrees that the changes in town have been positive.

Bell, the first Wilson mayor who was not a member of the Wilson family or one of their close associates, has served since the fall of 2013. He said people in town were worried about the future from the moment they heard the Wilson family planned to sell, fearful they might wind up with an absentee landlord with no interest in keeping up Wilson.

“I thought, big investment group coming in here to buy the farm, and there goes the town,” he said. “But it’s really been the opposite. Gaylon and [his wife] Lisa both fell in love with the town, and they’ve really been a blessing to Wilson.”

Bell’s children attend The Delta School. “They’re not just sitting at a desk, looking at a board,” he said. “Through all these processes, they’re learning math and science, but they’re learning it with their hands. My kids don’t even want to come home at the end of the day when we go to pick them up. It’s pretty amazing.”

Bell says many suspect that The Lawrence Group “pulls the strings” at the Wilson City Council. Most city employees, including the waterworks crew and the garbage crew, are employees of The Lawrence Group, contracted to the city. “But typically,” Bell said, “we don’t even see anybody from The Lawrence Group at our City Council meetings. We’re pretty independent, and have gotten more independent since I became the mayor.”

With the town growing and Big River Steel being constructed seven miles north, Bell says, he could see Wilson going from a population of 900 to 1,500 or 2,000 in coming years. In a grove of trees near a man-made lake on the edge of town, ground is being broken for luxury home lots, apparently in hopes of attracting executives from Big River or attendant businesses. As for Gaylon Lawrence, Bell said he’s never found him to be anything other than kind, generous and wholly invested in bringing about a bright future for Wilson.

“He’s really wanted to be a part of the community,” Bell said. “He doesn’t want to control the community. He’s mindful about anything he does, and about making sure the City Council and myself are on board with their plans. For the most

LUNCH AT THE DELTA SCHOOL: Experienced school administrator Jennifer Fox (standing in blue) was recruited to start and run a new “hands-on” private school in Wilson. Forty-five students are currently enrolled.

www.arktimes.com

MAY 5, 2016

17

part, it’s been a pretty pleasant experience.”

There is a moment in the stories of all the newcomers brought into Wilson when they deftly sidestep the issue of what they must have been offered, in either salary or creative freedom, to get them to uproot their families and move to a tiny Delta town in the middle of nowhere. Talking to those brought in since 2012 to help lead a cultural renaissance, you learn to listen for the beat when they go from skeptical or an outright “no damn way” to loading the moving truck, bound for Mississippi County.

Joe Cartwright, who runs the Wilson

able house in Southhaven, Miss., “with a big yard, a nice garden, a swimming pool and two dogs,” and his dream was to run a small cafe in a small town.

“I had assumed that it would remain a dream,” he said. “Being able to support yourself at a small-town restaurant and live in the country, they’re almost mutually exclusive desires. A restaurant needs volume. It needs clientele. It needs people to support it. And where I wanted to live was not necessarily in a very densely populated area.”

He and Shari say they’re invested in Wilson for the long haul and hope to raise a family there. Part of the reason, no doubt, is the cafe itself. We’re comfortable in saying there’s nothing like it

Cafe with his fiancee, Shari Haley, was working at the upscale Memphis eatery The Elegant Farmer in 2012 when a call came in on the answering machine, saying there was an opportunity for a young chef over in Wilson. With family in nearby Turrell, about 10 miles south of Wilson, Cartwright figured it had something to do with reopening the Wilson Cafe. Built in the town’s ubiquitous Tudor style, the cafe had been shuttered for 10 years by then. Still, Cartwright was immediately interested.

After a 15-year career in high-end Memphis restaurants, he and Shari had settled in what he described as a comfort-

east of Little Rock or west of Memphis.

The building is not just spiffed up, but painstakingly renovated inside and out to an amazing degree of detail, every fixture and cup, chair and napkin, lamp and sink meant to evoke a classic smalltown diner while being a study in simple, understated class. The bar in the back is a watering hole worthy of a swanky Memphis hotel. Even the restrooms are a marvel of low-key elegance. One person in town we talked with heard the tab for the cafe renovation alone was north of $600,000. That’s hearsay, but one might well believe it when he walks in.

Open since December 2013, the cafe

BRIAN CHILSON

‘What have I done?’

WILSON GARDENS: The metal building serves as office, test kitchen and exhibition hall.

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MAY 5, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

has shown a profit in recent months, Cartwright said, but it took a long time to get there. Part of that, Cartwright admits, had to do with his trying to start out with a menu that was something of a shock to local systems, both in terms of complexity and price. He’s passionate about his food, sourcing premium ingredients like certified Angus beef, organic produce and choice domestic seafood.

The kitchen makes everything, from the hush puppies to the whipped cream on the bread pudding, from scratch. We can attest, the food is delicious, consisting mostly of upscale takes on classic diner fare. The fried catfish and fries, in particular, were perfect and delectable.

Still, convincing locals about his style, philosophy and price point — he’s got a $9 cheeseburger and an $11 chef salad on the lunch menu, for example — has been a chore, one that initially required both some education and some scaling back of aspirations on Cartwright’s part.

“It was hard to convince people that what we’re trying to get you to buy is worth what we’re asking you to pay for it,” he said. “When we opened, we came in with this menu, and it was a midtown Memphis menu. We were going to crush it! Man, we had to start backpedaling immediately. That’s not to say we had to dumb anything down, but we had to adjust to the regional demand.”

Cartwright said that breaking even has been validating, adding that he knew from the start that he couldn’t lean on the financial backing of The Lawrence Group forever. The mission has always been to be self-sustaining, he said, even though it has undoubtedly been nice to know there’s a safety net should the cafe hit a rough patch, something unheard of in the restaurant industry. He has a staff of 20 people working for him these days, all of them making a living wage.

The steady paychecks have helped at least two of his employees get off public assistance.

Most every day Lawrence is in town, he comes in and eats lunch there, receiving a ticket at the end of his meal just like everybody else, paying just like everybody else, along with a handsome tip. Why wouldn’t he? Cartwright said.

He’s just a guy. Cartwright said we’d just missed him, in fact, when the reporter and photographer for the Arkansas Times came in for lunch. Given that our request for an interview with the Wizard of Wilson was gently declined

by Lawrence’s PR team, that was frustrating. Asked why he thinks Lawrence is spending the amount of money and energy he has around town, Cartwright, like most, can only speculate.

“He has said that he’s a farmer,” he said. “Not to speak in cliches, but he really considers all this as planting seeds for the future. He wants us to be leaders of the community. He wants us to be integrated into what’s going on here. I guess you could say that he didn’t make any obvious mistakes with the people he brought to town. I think there’s a reason for that. I think he wants kind of on the younger spectrum, people who have creative vision and share his vision for what this place can be. I think when it comes down to it, that’s all he wants: what’s best for everybody.”

Across the street from the cafe is Wilson Gardens, the organic produce farm centered around The Grange, the artful, gleaming metal building meant to suggest a tin shed. Built on the site of Lee Wilson and Co.’s vast former mule barns, the garden is in its second year, and will have over 20 acres in production by the time the tomatoes are ripe in July. They’ve been given over 100 acres, so there is plenty of room for growth.

The garden is the domain of farm director Leslie Wolverton, 31, a nearblur of constant movement, perpetually crowned with a canvas ball cap that says: “Make Cornbread, Not War.” Two years ago, Wolverton was living in Oxford, Miss., working on an established organic farming operation there, when she got a text from her old customer Joe Cartwright asking if she would be interested in starting a farm in small-town Arkansas.

“I thought, ‘No,’ ” she said. “I was in Oxford. We had art galleries and sushi and movies and music.”

Even so, she was eventually persuaded to come take a meeting with John Faulkner on a bitterly cold day.

Her story takes a deft little jump, and then she’s suddenly in Wilson, breaking ground for Wilson Gardens. These

days, she’s got a staff of 12, a new Ford farm truck, a nice office and educational space in The Grange, and near-total freedom to plant, experiment or try anything she wants as long as it’s delicious and innovative. Though Wilson Gardens launched a well-received produce subscription program in its first year and is expanding its acreage to meet demand from restaurants in Memphis and elsewhere, she said the garden has been running in the red since the beginning.

“A lot of farms don’t [make a profit] their first couple years,” she said. “We’re just over 2 years old, not even planted.

We’ll be 2 years in the ground this August. We’ve grown at a tremendous rate. If this were me and my little chunk of change starting a farm, I wouldn’t do it this way. But we’re lucky we’re in the position we can. But, no, we don’t break even yet.”

Like Cartwright, Wolverton said that coming into the small town with new ideas was an interesting experience, especially so because she was bringing new farming concepts to an area built on agriculture. Having been born in a town smaller than Wilson, she knew there was a fine line to walk.

“You never want to seem as if you’re pointing a finger,” she said. “This whole region has built its livelihood in a large part on commodity, conventional agriculture. So when somebody comes in to say there’s a different way to do it, you want to be very careful not to say, ‘There’s a better way to do it.’ You have to be sensitive to what people have known their entire lives.”

Her goal, she said, is to promote agritourism, commerce and education in Wilson, while doing what she called “meaningful work” in the area of organic farming. Like Joe Cartwright at the cafe, she knows that Wilson Gardens has to eventually be economically self-suffi-

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cient, though — also like Cartwright — she’s been given no timeline for when that has to happen. This year’s growing season, she says, will be a strong indicator of economic viability in the short term.

Wolverton said that while Lawrence could have left Wilson to die on the vine like so many small towns in the Delta, he has clearly invested what she called an incomprehensible, astronomical amount of money into the town and ideas like hers. Whatever’s driving that investment, she said, she doesn’t believe it’s the hope for a return on investment, at least not in the financial sense.

“Far be it from me to be a business whiz, but I don’t see how,” she said. “Some people want a legacy. Who knows?”

The most surprising transplant brought in to Wilson is probably Jenifer Fox, who oversees The Delta School.

Formerly a school administrator whose specialty was turning around failing private schools, the Harvard-educated teacher worked all over the U.S. and overseas before spinning the things she learned over 30 years in education into a career as a speaker and author. Her 2008 book, “Your Child’s Strengths: Discover Them, Develop Them, Use Them,” has since been reprinted in six languages. Fox was living in Dallas when she got a call from a consultant for The Lawrence Group, who was looking for someone to build a new kind of school from the ground up in Wilson.

“They told me about it, and I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m going to Arkansas.’ ” Fox said. “They ended up getting me to come out here and have a look. There was nothing here. Having a look was like, ‘great.’ But the vision and the excitement and the energy around the people who were working on this project was captivating to me.” Like the rest of the

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newcomers, her story takes a little jump and she’s moving to town.

Now finishing up its first year, The Delta School has an enrollment of 45 students ages 4 to 13. It’s aiming to double enrollment next year, with plans for further growth, including a high school. A proponent of “strengthsbased,” education, Fox has built The Delta School as a model of hands-on learning. Out on the broad front lawn of Wildwood House, there are two beautiful, long-roofed classrooms now, where kids learn by doing.

“Mostly what is happening is people in school taking in a lot of information and then spitting it back, saying they understand it,” she said. “Our model is to take the knowledge and then apply it to how you’d actually use it. We have two important spaces for doing that. One is the school farm, and one is our makers’ program. Of those two programs, we have all the classes doing projects.”

As an example, Fox said, the kids might decide to do a study on water quality in Wilson. From there, the kids will sample the water, possibly bringing in experts from the local waterworks to talk about what goes into making clean drinking water before reaching conclusions.

“They learn what it takes to run a water system in a town,” she said.

“They’re learning what it takes to clean that system. They’re learning about the water table. You can start to imagine.

It brings all the knowledge in, and now they’ve got a real problem to solve.

They’re engaged longer, and they can make an improvement in the town.”

The student body at The Delta School, Fox said, is economically diverse, thanks to a scholarship program spearheaded by Lawrence, which calls on wealthy Delta farm families to sponsor students’ $10,000 yearly tuition. Fox said the average cost to educate a student at the school per year is $25,000. She said over the next 10 years — and she is, she says, willing to stick it out in Wilson for that long — she hopes to prove there’s a way to educate kids other than having them sit at desks and read textbooks.

“I’ve been given an opportunity to do what I want without the worries of money,” she said. “I’ve gone to sleep every night for 30 years worrying what was going to happen because we couldn’t afford it. Schools don’t ever make money. I never worry about that anymore, and I’m free to create the kind of educational program I believe in. I have the best school administra-

BRIAN CHILSON

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SEEDS OF WILSON: The company town was founded by the Wilson family in the 1880s.

tor job in the country. I’m convinced of that.”

Fox said she has found Lawrence to be a man with a genuine love of learning and a thirst for knowledge.

She believes Lawrence is sinking so much money and human capital into the town for purely altruistic reasons, a notion that squares with the quote Lawrence gave the New York Times for its story on Wilson in January 2014, with Lawrence telling a reporter: “At first you are thinking, ‘How can I get this off my back?’ But then you look around and think, how can I be a catalyst?”

“I think what happened was they weren’t interested in this town,” Fox said, “but in the middle of the land deal, his father died. I think he thought, and I’ve heard this, he thought, ‘What have I done? I’m just inheriting my father’s hard work,’ which he contributed to, so I don’t want to say that. But I think his dad died and he thought, ‘What’s my life about? What am I doing? I’ve got all of this.’ So he found this way to make a legacy for himself.”

How to make a meatloaf Though the fruits of Gaylon Lawrence’s investments in Wilson are impossible to deny at this point, that doesn’t mean everybody in town is completely on board, even now.

Change is worrisome, especially in small towns. Talking to folks who grew up in Wilson, even those who knew it when it was a company town, there’s often the nerve-wracking question of the larger plan, which nobody but Lawrence seems to be able to see.

Runella Clemons, the assistant

superintendent of Rivercrest Public Schools, has lived in Wilson for over 50 years. She said that while some of those brought in by Lawrence have been friendly and eager to become a part of Wilson, others have been more aloof.

“Some of those people I have never met,” she said. “I’ve tried to make connections. I remember when I first came here, I made my connections through being involved in things in the community, such as at the churches and different activities in the schools. That hasn’t happened … .

You never want things to be an us and a them. You want it to be a ‘we.’ And it’s a little more difficult to do that when you’re not in the same realm of everyday life.”

As a lifelong educator, Clemons said she wishes there was a stronger connection between The Delta School and the local public school system. She knows children who attend The Delta School, and has heard their excitement about the hands-on teaching style there. Beyond that, however, she only knows what she’s read in various articles that have appeared about the revitalization of Wilson. Clemons said that she has a sense Lawrence fell in love with Wilson and the area, and hopes his commitment to the town remains strong.

“I was up at the park this morning, early, and looking at the dates when the original Mr. Wilson came,” she said. “I wondered, what in the world did people here think when he came in and started cutting the cypress trees and getting rid of the swamps? I wonder if they went through these same thoughts? This isn’t the way we’ve lived! What is this man doing? It’s

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somewhat of that type of change in a different century.”

Next door to The Lawrence Group at the Wilson Public Library, librarian Linda Dawson is another who wonders what the future will look like.

A friend of the Wilson family whose mother met her father while working as a waitress at the Wilson Cafe, Dawson’s lived in the area most of her adult life, and serves as the recorder/ treasurer on the Wilson City Council.

Like Jenifer Fox, she saw a change of direction once Gaylon Lawrence Sr. passed away, something she believes is somehow tied to Lawrence Jr.’s interest in revitalization.

LEARNED TO COOK GREEN BEANS: Wilson Cafe chef Joe Cartwright, here with his fiancee Shari Haley, had to change his cooking style a bit to please Wilson palates.

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ARKANSAS TIMES

“From talking to some of the other business people here in town, they said that Gaylon Sr. came and talked to them, and his concern was: I’m in farming. Having a pharmacy and a grocery store are not as important to me, so I’m going to talk to you, maybe, about how we’re going to handle that,” she said. “But after he passed away, Gaylon Jr. became like, let’s put a coat of paint on everything. Let’s get the restaurant open.”

Around the same time, she said, there was a town hall meeting with over 100 residents in attendance, where Lawrence invited residents to share what they would like to see happen in town. Though a lot of the ideas

put forth probably sounded like pie in the sky at the time, like reopening the Wilson Cafe and the movie theater, Lawrence listened, got to work and quickly came through on many of the things discussed that night, apparently with money as no object.

Still, change has not come easy.

Dawson said that when Fox and her team first came to town, they were prone to telling locals, “We’re here to create brilliant minds.” That stuck in a lot of peoples’ craws: What did our minds ever do before you came?

Dawson said she had to correct a newcomer who came into the library talking brilliant minds one day, pointing out that the local school district was already creating brilliant minds long before, including doctors, judges, educators and a couple of NASA engineers.

“That was kind of the philosophy when they first came in here: We’re going to save you,” Dawson said. “It’s always been, as I’ve grown up here, that everybody’s welcome in Wilson. We love for new people to move here. But you’re coming here to join us. You’re not coming here to save us.

That’s kind of the philosophy that we got in the very beginning. You’re going to run into a few people that are still going to feel that way.”

Dawson, jovial and prone to dropping sly winks as she talks, laughed as she recalled the early days of the newly reopened Wilson Cafe. Though Joe Cartwright has since become a friend and has learned to meet local palates in the middle, she says it took an intervention.

“We finally had to say Joe, you’ve got to change your menu,” she said.

“Nobody is going to come back and eat with you if you don’t change your menu. He did. He made a change.

But, yeah, some of his cooking during lunch? People would come back and say: ‘We need to teach that boy how to cook green beans! Those beans weren’t done. I’d have people come in the library and say, ‘I just had lunch at the cafe, and honey, we need to teach him how to make a meatloaf.’ I’d say, ‘He’s a chef! He’s not a cook!’ “ Dawson’s property values have doubled, and nobody can complain about that. She’s glad to have a place to eat in town again, even if it’s out of the price range of some, and she’s excited about the influx of new people into town. But she can’t help but be concerned. With property in demand and the steel mill soon to open, gentrification is on her mind. Too, though

she hasn’t seen anything that would lead her to question Lawrence’s commitment to Wilson, she wonders what would happen if his enthusiasm for the town wanes.

“If he gets tired and wants to move on somewhere else, I’ve thought about that,” she said. “I hope it never happens. But it’s something you have to think about. What if Mr. Lawrence decides, well, I’ve done all I can do here. Let’s move on now, back to Florida. Let’s move on to California.”

It would help, she said, if he’d just put his cards on the table and share his reasons for betting so much on Wilson, along with letting more longtime residents be a part of the big picture.

“I think a lot of people feel like they’ve been left out of what’s going on,” she said. “What are you building over here? Why are you doing this? … If he’d just say: ‘This is my plan.

This is where I’m going.’ It would help. ‘I’m putting all this money into this community because it’s where I’m going to make my home.’ But he doesn’t officially live here. He pays taxes, but he doesn’t vote here. It’s like he wants to be able to do what the Wilson family did, but when the Wilson family was in control, they’d always been in control. Nobody told them no, either.”

Postscript We were not granted an interview with Gaylon Lawrence Jr., but his staff did forward a single question to him on our behalf: “Why have you invested so much time, money and manpower into Wilson?”

The day after we returned to Little Rock from visiting the town, we received the following reply: “In 2010, when we were afforded the opportunity to acquire the historic Lee Wilson & Company, what came with that was a significant part of the town of Wilson itself. We were therefore confronted with the challenge of moving forward as stewards of the physical buildings in town and a very unique legacy — but over time, and through many discussions with the local community, development experts, and folks across the state, we understood a very real chance to make a positive difference. I’m from the boot heel of Missouri and have lived most of my life in and around the Delta, so reinvesting in Wilson not only makes business sense for the farming operation, but it will also hopefully help build a renewal model for the entire region.”

( FROM ABOVE )

SHIVE

ONE-OF-AKIND BEER

THE TOOLS OF A TAPPER SPILE

ANATOMY OF A FIRKIN

TOWEL

MALLET

KEYSTONE

FIRKIN FEST TIPS Every firkin is a brewer’s creative endeavor, unique unto itself. Ask them about their creation!

SPIGOT (OR SPEAR)

FIRKIN & STILLAGE

Firkin Fest preview It’s coming May 13. But what’s a firkin?

BY SCOTT PARTON

G

et ready for a new kind of beer festival for Arkansas.

On Friday, May 13, the Arkansas Times holds the inaugural Firkin Fest, benefiting the Argenta Arts District. The event starts at 6 p.m. at Argenta Plaza, 520 Main St. in North Little Rock. Tickets are $35 in advance (via bit.ly/firkinfest16) or $40 at the door. That covers more

than 15,000 samples of beer, music from talented local pop singer/songwriters Isaac Alexander and Jason Weinheimer, and food from eight local restaurants: Arkansas Ale House, Damgoode Pies, Old Chicago Pizza, Skinny J’s, @ the Corner, Cafe Bossa Nova and Zaffino’s by Nori.

For the uninitiated, a firkin is simply a unit of measurement describing

A ferkin fest is a boisterous event! Join in on the ceremonial cheer when the firkins are tapped!

Make sure to eat while you drink, get some water, and have a blast.

a vessel containing cask-conditioned ale, or beer that has not been cold-filtered, pasteurized or carbonated. Firkins are often used by brewers to experiment with new flavor combinations — they take an established beer and add flavors that might range from fruits, nuts or berries to herbs, spices and coffee. This approach often leads to surprising results, which makes tapping the firkin all the more exciting.

I recently attended a cask-conditioned ale class at Pulaski Technical College’s fantastic classroom and brewery located in its Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management Institute building. Students learned the history and process for packaging and serving traditional cask-conditioned ale from Mike Byrum of Fermentables and special guest Josiah Moody from Moody Brews. We also learned to fill casks with beer. We put a traditional English-style pale ale into three 5.2-gallon “pins” (smaller firkins) and conditioned these to serve at the festival, adding a little something different to each one.

You’ll be able to taste these three variations and plenty more from not

just local breweries, but breweries from across the country and as far away as Germany. It’s a great chance to try some unique beers.

Due to the nature of firkins, the list that follows might change, but here’s what I’ve been told at this point we can expect to find at the inaugural Arkansas Times Firkin Fest:

ABITA BREWING CO. Located 30 miles north of New Orleans in Abita Springs, La., this regional favorite has grown to become the 15th largest craft brewery in the country.

Extra Hopped Shotgun Double IPA: A version of Shotgun Double IPA that has extra hops added and is caskconditioned. The beer is produced in the brewhouse, dry hopped, and aged in the same manner as Shotgun Double IPA. After aging, even more Citra, Centennial, Simcoe, Amarillo and Cascade hops are added to the cask.

Cask-Conditioned Citrus Louisiana Spiced Ale: www.arktimes.com

MAY 5, 2016

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TENT 2

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TENT 1

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Abita Diamond Bear Hacker-Pschorr Paulaner A cask-conditioned version of Louisiana Spiced Ale that has citrus peels added. The beer is produced in the brewhouse and aged in the same manner as Louisiana Spiced Ale. After aging, lemon and orange peels are added and the beer is cask-conditioned.

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ARKANSAS TIMES

Vanilla Coffee Brown Cow: An American Brown Ale with real coffee and vanilla beans added.

CORE BREWING CO. The Springdale-based brewery recently opened a pub in North Little Rock, adding to Fayetteville, Fort Smith, Springdale and Rogers locations as part of seemingly endless growth.

Damgoode’s River Market brewpub, which supplies beer to all the Damgoode locations.

Elderflower IPA: A hop-forward Glacier Smash IPA with elderflowers added.

DIAMOND BEAR One of Arkansas’s oldest breweries, it’s still going strong with a vibrant brewpub in North Little Rock.

Transportation Triple: A tripel aged in bourbon barrels along with Arkansas grown strawberries added.

Passport Porter: A medium-bodied vanilla porter.

THE DUDES’ BREWING COMPANY This Torrance, Calif.-based brewery specializes in unique takes on classic styles, which sounds like a recipe for success at Firkin Fest.

Citrus Honey Kolsch: A blend of orange blossom honey, fresh grapefruit zest and the brewery’s light and crisp Koschtal Eddy.

Peanut Butter Mocha Brown Ale: A rich blend of locally roasted coffee, chocolate and peanut butter in a smooth, toasty brown ale.

FOUNDERS BREWING CO. Always ranked among the top breweries in the world by ratebeer. com, beers from this Grand Rapids, Mich., brewery have been available in Central Arkansas for two years.

Dirty Bastard: Made with seven varieties of imported malts, this beer gets vanilla beans and bourbon-soaked oak chips added.

Jalapeño ESB: Jalapeños are added during secondary fermentation and to the firkin as well.

HACKER-PSCHORR This Munich, Germany, brewery was created out of a merger between Hacker (founded in 1417) and Pschorr (founded in the late 1700s), so it knows a little something about brewing beer. No word on the details of its offering.

DAMGOODE BREWS Brewer Josh Quattlebaum, formerly of Boscos, now heads up

LAZY MAGNOLIA BREWING CO. Mississippi’s first package brewery since Prohibition, Lazy Magnolia is

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JOIN THE HERD! LET US HELP YOU MAKE YOUR HOBBY MORE FUN! Coming this Summer 2016…Buf falo Brewing Company!

Our own onsite brewery at The Water Buf falo store. Stop by and have a pint or get a growler to go. Also new extended hours.

We will open on Sunday and serve beers from Noon-6:00.

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MAY 5, 2016

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steadily expanding its reach throughout the South with beers like Southern Pecan, Lazy Saison, Southern Hopspitality and Jefferson Stout.

Backwoods Belgian with Peaches: An 8.5 percent ABV Belgian-Style Golden Ale brewed with an infusion of honeysuckle flowers.

Black Creek with Peaches: An 8.5 percent ABV Southern-style Imperial Stout.

LOST FORTY Little Rock’s fastest growing and perhaps most active brewery will have four firkins, including one still to be determined.

Graham Cracker Barrel Aged Baltic Porter: A dark, robust beer with notes of coffee and chocolate.

Coffee Love Honey Bock: Lost Forty’s beloved bock made with Arkansas honey gets an infusion of coffee.

Grapefruit Radler Rockhound IPA: Beer, plus grapefruit soda? Sign us up.

MARSHALL BREWING Brewmaster/founder Eric Marshall apprenticed at breweries throughout Germany and served as a brewer at Victory Brewing Co. before starting his own outfit in 2008 in Tulsa.

Arrowhead Pale Ale with Peaches: Marshall’s pale ale has a little citrus taste to it.

PUBLIC HOUSE This Rolla, Mo.-based brewery was founded in 2010.

Barrel Aged Rod’s Cream Ale: This golden ale with prominent malt flavors has been aged in a used wine barrel.

Barrel Aged Revelation Stout: A stout with the aroma of dark chocolate. It has been aged in a used wine barrel.

PULASKI TECHNICAL COLLEGE The product of a cask-conditioned ale class at the college.

Cask-conditioned English Style Pale Ale Cask-conditioned English Style Pale Ale with U.S. Golding hops Cask-conditioned English Style Pale Ale with U.S. Golding hops and French Light toast oak

REBEL KETTLE Central Arkansas’s newest brewpub already has a well-earned reputation for quality beer and a willingness to experiment.

Firkin No. 1: 100 percent Brett Pale Ale aged on a tropical fruit medley and chocolate habaneros.

Firkin No. 2: Double Brown Ale aged with lactose, coffee, cacao nibs, cinnamon and vanilla beans.

Sundown Wheat with Tangerines: An excellent wheat beer plus citrus.

MOTHER’S BREWING CO. This Springfield, Mo., brewery produces beers like the Towhead American Blonde, Oktoberfest and Chocolate Thunder porter.

Imperial Three Blind Mice: A brown ale with mint and oak chips soaked in whiskey added.

PAULAUNER This Munich-based brewery has been in business since 1634. Its firkin will be a surprise.

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MAY 5, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

TALLGRASS BREWING CO. You’ll recognize this Manhattan, Kan., brewery at the liquor store by its wildly illustrated tallboy cans.

Top Rope IPA: A hop heavy beer with citrus flavors gets the addition of Columbus, Chinook, Cascade, Amarillo and Bravo hops along with grapefruit.

Half Pipe Tart Pale Ale with Blood Orange: A pale ale soured with Lactobacillus, it’s twice kettle- and dry-hopped to balance the tartness with bright hop character.

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Arts Entertainment AND

THIS PL ANT WILL GROW ART Another Walton project for Bentonville.

BY LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK

grown: First envisioned to include American art only up to the 1950s, the museum evolved to accommodate Alice Walton’s interest in later 20th century work. In 2015, guided by former Director Don Bacigalupi, the museum curated the “State of the Art: Discovering American Art” exhibition of contemporary artists, which is now traveling. The new facility gives Crystal Bridges room to breathe.

I

f you’ve been to MASS MoCA, the 110,000-square-foot visual and performing arts space in North Adams, Mass., you will have some idea of what is coming to Bentonville.

Right now, for example, MASS MoCA — the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art — is showing the “acid-hued” and neon-lit installation of pop artist Alex Da Corte, tile works by abstract artist Sarah Crowner, and the group show “Bibliothecaphilia,” which asks, “What defines a library in the contemporary world?”

The experimental visual and performing arts space that will open in 2018 about a mile and a half south of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, just a few blocks south of the square, won’t be as big as MASS MoCA, but it will share an aesthetic philosophy: Give artists some space and see what they do with it.

Tom and Steuart Walton are two young Walmart heirs behind this latest family effort to bring fine art to Bentonville (and heartland America), and they will consult with MASS MoCA on programming for the 63,000-squarefoot former Kraft cheese factory. The empty factory, a huge industrial space, is divided into rooms according to their former cheese factory uses. Here, visual artists will be set loose to create installations inspired by the soaring ceilings or vast rooms or echoes or old tanks and tubes and pipes. There will be film, music, theater, dance and dining, a continuously changing schedule of events in a mercurial environment.

Like Crystal Bridges, founded by Tom and Steuart Walton’s aunt, Alice Walton, the facility will be supported by the Walton Family Foundation and a “mix of funding sources, including possible sponsors and donors, community collaborations, memberships and more,” Crystal Bridges public relations 28

MAY 5, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

A PLACE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART: The unfinished look will complement experimental nature of exhibits.

manager Beth Bobbitt said. She said it was too early to know what the total investment would be.

So far, the facility is just being referred to as “the plant,” Crystal Bridges Chief Engagement Officer Niki Ciccotelli Stewart said. The Waltons will come up with a name that reflects the purpose of the building, she said.

Stewart squeezed in a tour with a reporter between meetings with representatives from Wheeler Kearns Architects of Chicago, who’ve been hired to turn the plant into an experimental arts venue.

Crystal Bridges’ own mission has

Architects have made 3D computer images of the plant that include all details “down to every pipe,” Stewart said. The Waltons’ idea is to keep the building’s industrial, unfinished look and make use of its fixtures — like tanks and drains and bricks and signage that says “Fermentation Room” — so that it “feels like a place where you could be making art and experimenting,” Stewart said. “Our mantra is anything that might be interesting or inspiring to an artist of any kind we would like to preserve.”

Kraft Foods built the plant in the 1940s and kept adding on to it, sort of the way caves grow in the karst landscape

of Northwest Arkansas. It offers more space than its footprint of 63,000 square feet, Stewart noted; a second story could easily be incorporated into the building.

Stewart compared the curves of Crystal Bridges, a glass and arching wood structure set around the stream that bisects 100 acres of ravine, to the “blocky” and mostly windowless concrete, brick and stainless steel buildings that make up the plant, with their exposed ammonia pipes, vats and vintage “torque-a-matic” doors and nary a tree in sight.

But Stewart, who is perfectly effervescent when she talks about potential in the plant (and says she now knows more about the making of cheese than she ever thought she would), looks into one space and sees a black box theater; into another room with an astounding reverberation and envisions experimental music. She is intrigued by the notion that a factory that once turned out thousands of identical blocks of cheese will celebrate the creative and iconoclastic instead. It is a perfect complement to Crystal Bridges, she said; Alice Walton’s museum has too much natural light to show films midday and is too finished to be able to hang moveable spotlights or other ceiling fixtures. The ceiling of the plant already has tracks for winching heavy objects from room to room.

The community will be able to use the spaces for musical and other performances; the Bentonville Film Festival, which will use portable trailer/theaters when it opens this week, could perhaps make a home in the plant, Stewart said.

It will be a place not just for fans of contemporary, sometimes mind-blowing, art, but families as well.

It’s hard to visualize how the plant will be incorporated into Bentonville so that folks will find it — it’s at 507 E. E St., with a neighborhood on one side and J Street on the other, and access from the square is on “wiggly streets,” as Stewart put it. But we don’t have to visualize it, because the Waltons already have: Part of the development will be to extend the “market district” — around the square — to the plant, with wider streets and new parking for visitors to the contemporary space. By 2018 (if work goes as planned), Bentonville’s spruced up downtown — where Sam Walton opened his first 5 & 10 — will have undergone even more change.

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

A&E NEWS IN ONE FASHION OR another, Little Rock native Nate Powell has always worked in narratives. His origins in Little Rock’s long-lived band Soophie Nun Squad (a consortium of artists with a theatrical bent that helped define the Little Rock music scene during its “Towncraft” period), don’t seem entirely distant from the work that just earned him three nominations for the Eisner Awards, the gold standard for awards in the comics industry. “March: Book Two,” the most recent chapter in a trilogy of graphic novels that Powell has illustrated with meticulous care, tells the story of civil rights activist Congressman John Lewis, a heroic leader known for his passionate participation in the movement’s sit-in demonstrations, Freedom Rides and voter registration drives. Powell’s highly charged and painstakingly crafted cover for the upcoming final installment (co-written by Lewis himself, with Andrew Aydin) was previewed last month on the 51st anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” it depicts: the standoff at the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Ala. “March: Book Three” is due in August.

ELSEWHERE IN THE list of Eisner-nominated works is “Long Walk to Valhalla,” a literary comic by Adam Smith and Jacksonville native Matt Fox, conceived after the pair met in an Arkansas comic book store. The story, up for Best New Graphic Album, meshes Southern tropes with Norse mythology, and begins when its main character, Rory, encounters a young woman who calls herself “the Valkyrie of Arkansas” and informs Rory it is his time to go to Valhalla.

FELLOW SOOPHIE Nun Squad veteran and Little Rock native Dustin Clark has been hard at work, too: After joining forces with another Little Rock native, Jason White (Green Day), and Adam Pfahler (Jawbreaker) to form the intentionally difficult-to-Google band California, the trio has released its debut album: a self-titled, energetic, breezy pop-punk record that calls to mind Green Album-era Weezer more than any of its members’ particular past projects, and which features cameos from Rachel Haden (That Dog) and Alfredo Ortiz (Beastie Boys).

THE DIXIE CHICKS RETURN to Verizon Arena on Friday, Sept. 9. The trio made headlines this week after defending (and covering, at that) Beyonce’s controversial new “Daddy Lessons” against criticism from a critic at CMT. Tickets, which range from $53.50 to $119, go on sale Saturday, May 7. Elle King, whose trailer-park-glam video for her charttopping “Ex’s and Oh’s” looked as if Divine (of John Waters’ “Pink Flamingos”) might appear in the background at any moment, opens the show.

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ARKANSAS TIMES

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THE TO-DO

LIST

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

THURSDAY 5/5

RON FOURNIER

6 p.m. Clinton School of Public Service, Sturgis Hall.

Free.

BENTONVILLE BOUND: Rebecca Miller’s “Maggie’s Plan” stars Ethan Hawke and Greta Gerwig.

TUESDAY 5/3-SUNDAY 5/8

BENTONVILLE FILM FESTIVAL

Various times. Downtown Bentonville. $10$750.

Twenty-five years after the film “Thelma and Louise” was released, the uphill battle to tell more women’s stories onscreen is still being waged: Studies estimate that the ratio of men to women in G-rated films is somewhere around 3 to 1, and the disproportionate representation of men to women in production roles is even greater. Geena Davis, half of the beloved film’s radiant duo, is working to make a serious dent in those trends with her Institute on Gender and Media, an initiative that seeks to “engage, educate, and influence the need to dramatically improve gender balance, reduce stereotyping and create diverse female characters in entertainment targeting children 11 and under.” To that end, the foundation launched a large-scale, multi-venue film festival in Northwest Arkansas last year featuring films germane to the mission.

The 2015 inaugural festival saturated downtown Bentonville with screenings, discussions, a marathon of live music put together by cinema gurus Joey Lauren Adams and Mitchell Crisp, and even a baseball game featuring Geena Davis and

Rosie O’Donnell as captains of opposing teams with rosters populated by their fellow castmates from the film “A League of Their Own,” which is to be reprised this year. Bolstered by the success of its 2015 debut, Davis expects this second iteration to double last year’s attendance, and with AMC among the festival’s nearly 60 corporate sponsors, it’s now the only film festival in the world to guarantee theater and retail distribution to its winners. Among the films to catch is “Citizen Soldier,” which tells the true story of the Oklahoma National Guard 45th Thunderbirds Brigade on its tour of duty in Afghanistan. The documentary includes real footage shot on helmet cameras, and was created under the advisement of Hendrix alum and former Department of Defense analyst Wendy Anderson, who left her work with the government to join a media group dedicated to telling the stories of men and women in uniform. If you’re inclined to catch something a bit lighter, go see Rebecca Miller’s star-laden “Maggie’s Plan,” a romantic comedy about a woman (Greta Gerwig) who has fallen out of love with her husband (Ethan Hawke), and decides to reunite him with his ex-wife (Julianne Moore). See bentonvillefilmfestival. com for a schedule of screenings.

National Journal writer Ron Fournier’s Arkansas connections are deep. He got his start at the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record, and after a stint at the Arkansas Democrat, followed a newly elected President Clinton to the Associated Press’ Washington bureau. His coverage has earned him the White House Correspondence Association’s Smith Award three times and the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2000 Sigma Delta Chi Award, but after winning a Harvard Institute of Politics fellowship he turned his attention to writing books. In 2006, he penned “Applebee’s America,” a study of how politicians can earn votes and loyalty from a public from which they are so often

disconnected, with Republican strategist Matthew Dowd and Democratic strategist Douglas Sosnik. Written at the behest of his wife Lori, Fournier’s latest work, “Love That Boy: What Two Presidents, Eight Road Trips and My Son Taught Me About a Parent’s Expectations,” details the ways in which he’s struggled with the impossibly grand expectations parents can unwittingly impose on their children, and how he’s learned to embrace his role in raising his son, Tyler, a child who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at age 12, and whose love of presidential history is so intense that he once bonded with Bill Clinton in a lengthy conversation about the virtues of Theodore Roosevelt. He’ll talk about his new book at the Clinton School.

FRIDAY 5/6

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ARKANSAS: 10TH ANNIVERSARY

5 p.m. Arkansas Studies Institute, Butler Center Galleries. Free (donations accepted).

Anyone who’s ever peeped at the Popeye statue in Alma, dipped her hands in the healing waters of Hot Springs National Park or stood humbled in front of the Little Rock Nine Memorial at the state Capitol can attest to Arkansas’s complicated, rich and often bizarre nature. So it’s appropriate that we should

have our own Wikipedia-style catalog of this state’s culture and history. Thanks to the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the Central Arkansas Library System, such a reference work exists, and it’s a behemoth: 4,300 entries intricately cross-referenced with 5,800 pieces of media, including maps, photos, vintage advertisements, letters and music. This week, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas celebrates 10 years of diligent and collaborative work from some of the passionate folks who have dedicated their careers to preserving this lore. Come raise a glass.

PRESENTED BY

Advance tickets on sale now at RiverfestArkansas.com!

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MAY 5, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

IN BRIEF

THURSDAY 5/5

FRIDAY 5/6

LANDREST

9 p.m. Maxine’s. $7.

Hot Springs’ Landrest is, at its core, a duo: Rebecca Stone, an innovative visual artist (Landrest’s 2010 video for the song “Rescue” is shot with Stone’s hands covering part of the lens, improvising a pinhole camera effect) and powerful vocalist whose often-jarring lines

climb and cut through a crowd, and David Stone (also of Bryan Frazier’s The Alpha Ray), a nimble bass player who peels out effortless, driving riffs above which Rebecca can wander and soar.

In recent years, they’ve expanded their sound with spooky keys by Matt Waller, surf-rock guitar by Jerry Matlock and drums by Justin Hickman to great effect:

Their 2014 release, “Mysterious Fires,” is full of densely interlocked rhythms and lovely, catchy countermelodies from the voice and bells hovering above. Landrest is joined by Fayetteville’s Galaxy Tour Guides, a self-described “highenergy, futuristic party band,” and The Manateees, a heavy, rhythm-forward punk trio from Memphis.

SATURDAY 5/7-TUESDAY 5/10

TRAVELERS VS. NATURALS

7:10 p.m., (Sunday only) 2:10 p.m. Dickey-Stephens Park. $7-13.

Despite having been present for an entirely unexpected moment in early April when, with the bases loaded and two outs in the ninth inning of a tied game, Ryon Healy of the Midland Rockhounds secured a victory against the Arkansas Travelers, I wasn’t drawn to the ball field on a Saturday night by the promise of wild, 11th-hour sorts of moments. Instead, it’s the utterly predictable things that lure me into the diamond and its periphery, the measured, intentional pace of the game, the Hammond organ that accompanies the action in real time, the secure knowledge that a hot battered corn dog and a Pabst tall boy will be deemed “dinner.”

This week, the Travelers face off against their Texas League in-state rivals, the Northwest Arkansas Naturals, in a string of four games that may or may not include a thrilling play or two. Even if all you find there is the familiar, it’ll likely be enough.

‘LIKE HE’S LIVED A LIFETIME’: That’s how James McMurtry writes songs, according to John Mellencamp.

SATURDAY 5/7-SUNDAY 5/8

FRIDAY 5/6

QUAPAW QUARTER SPRING TOUR OF HOMES

JAMES MCMURTRY

8:30 p.m. Stickyz Rock ’n’ Roll Chicken Shack. $16 advance, $20 day of.

Most people would name novelist Larry McMurtry’s accomplishments by noting his authorship of “Lonesome Dove,” or more recently, for his work on the screenplay for Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain,” but we also have him to thank for having put a guitar in the hands of his son, James McMurtry. McMurtry was only 7 at the time, and to fans of his work, the fact that he was ever 7 years old might stretch the imagination: According to John Mellencamp, “James writes like he’s lived a lifetime.” McMurtry’s 2005 tale of war-weary disenchantment and poverty, “We Can’t Make It Here,” sharply criticized the George W. Bush administration and is, perhaps, second only to John Prine’s “Sam Stone” in its ability to break your heart and inspire you to join an anti-war demonstration in the same moment. That said, it would be difficult to program a more fitting opening act than one by poet Kevin Kerby, whose often acerbic, perpetually honest lyrics ring clearly above his lean guitar chords so that they might more easily make their way into your veins.

Hillcrest Historic District. $20 advance, $30 day of.

Since 1963, the Quapaw Quarter Association has been elevating our collective architectural savvy by opening historic homes to the public. This year, the walking tour takes place in the Hillcrest neighborhood, and includes Pulaski Heights Elementary and Middle schools. Students will be on hand to show you around their schoolhouses; many of them have conducted research on their own homes, nearly 100 of which will be marked with signs posted throughout the neighborhood. If you’re inclined to support the efforts of the Quapaw Quarter Association’s future endeavors, you can make an evening of it: Saturday’s Candlelight Tour includes “special additions of the house at 319 Midland, a champagne stop at the Storthz House at 450 Midland, and the chapel at Pulaski Heights Presbyterian Church, followed by a party in the church’s fellowship hall.” To reserve a ticket or to volunteer, visit quapaw. com or call 371-0075.

The gentlemen who make up Little Rock’s Runaway Planet have been playing bluegrass together since 2001, and that level of polished collaboration is evident in their crisp, fiery live performances. Catch this traditional string band at the White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m. Disney on Ice’s “Frozen” continues at Verizon Arena through May 8 (7 p.m., plus 11 a.m. Sat. and 3 p.m. Sat.Sun.) Trey Johnson plays “aggressive folk” with Jason Willmon at happy hour at Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 p.m. The Second City improve group out of Chicago begins its “Hooking Up” run at The Rep, 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., $35 (through May 15; May 14 last 9:30 p.m. show).

FRIDAY 5/6 Little Rock Parks and Recreation presents a Therapeutic Recreation Arts Festival at the Clear Channel Metroplex, a day of hands-on activities with a joyous mission: “to enrich the lives of people with disabilities and their nondisabled peers by encouraging creativity through the arts,” 10 a.m., free. Songwriter Brian Nahlen plays a set at Kent Walker Artisan Cheese, 6 p.m., free. Long-haired Southern rockers The Cadillac Three join Texas boogie band Quaker City Night Hawks at Revolution, 9 p.m., $20. Benton rockers Just Sayin’ play Cajun’s, 9 p.m.

National Theatre of Scotland wraps up its five-day run of the award-winning new show, “The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart,” at the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, 8 p.m. Fri.-Sat., 2:30 p.m.

Sat.-Sun., $25.

SATURDAY 5/7 Film music composer John Williams’ work distills dramatic bits from predecessors Erich Korngold, Richard Wagner and Bernard Hermann, and the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra will interpret his scores for “Star Wars,” “Jurassic Park,” “Jaws” and “E.T.,” among others, 7:30 p.m. Sat., 3 p.m. Sun., $19-$58. Amy Garland, host of KABF’s “Backroads” and one-third of the mellifluous trio The Wildflowers, brings her band to White Water, 9 p.m. Learn how to operate a printing press, keep a beehive and start a fire with a bow at the Historic Arkansas Museum as it revives life as it was during Arkansas’s territorial era at the 42nd Annual Territorial Fair, 10 a.m., free.

SUNDAY 5/8 Sunday is Mother’s Day, and The Empress of Little Rock is doing a heightened version of its weekly high tea ceremony in honor of the day, featuring specialty tea and “Downton Abbey”style delicacies: clotted cream, lemon curd and cucumber sandwiches, 3 p.m., $45. 374-7966. www.arktimes.com

MAY 5, 2016

31

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

EVENTS

17th Annual Therapeutic Recreation Arts Festival. Clear Channel Metroplex, 10 a.m., free. 10800 Col. Glenn Road. 501-217-5113.

Encyclopedia of Arkansas 10th Anniversary Celebration. Butler Galleries, Arkansas Studies Institute, 5 p.m. 401 President Clinton Ave. 501320-5792. www.arstudies.org.

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

800 Scott St. MacArthur Park 5K Run and Dog Jog. MacArthur Park, 5 p.m. 503 E. 9th St.

THURSDAY, MAY 5

MUSIC

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

Sway, 9 p.m. 412 Louisiana.

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

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

Mayday By Midnight (headliner), Trey Johnson (happy hour). Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 and 9 p.m.

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

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

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

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

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

COMEDY

The Second City: Hooking Up. Arkansas Repertory Theatre, 7 p.m., $35. 601 Main St. 501-378-0405. www.therep.org.

Tim Gaither. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m., $8. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-228-5555. www. loonybincomedy.com.

EVENTS

#ArkiePubTrivia. Stone’s Throw Brewing, 6:30 p.m. 402 E. 9th St. 501-244-9154.

Hillcrest Shop & Sip. Shops and restaurants offer discounts, later hours and live music. Hillcrest, first Thursday of every month, 5 p.m. 501-6663600. www.hillcrestmerchants.com.

FILM

Bentonville Film Festival. Downtown Bentonville, through May 8, $75-$750. Main Street, Bentonville.

LECTURES

“Love That Boy: What Two Presidents, Eight Road Trips and My Son Taught Me About a Parent’s Expectations.” A talk by journalist Ron Fournier. Sturgis Hall, 6 p.m. 1200 President Clinton Ave. 501-683-5200. clintonschool.uasys. edu.

FILM

HOOKING UP: “The Second City” improv comedy troupe makes light of modern romance at The Rep in its revue, “Hooking Up with the Second City,” 7 p.m. Thursday through Sunday, May 5-8, and Tuesday through Sunday, May 10-15, also 9:30 p.m. performances Friday and Saturday, May 13-14. $15-$35.

FRIDAY, MAY 6

MUSIC

All In Fridays. Envy. 7200 Colonel Glenn Road.

501-562-3317.

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

The Cadillac Three, Quaker City Night Hawks.

Revolution, 9 p.m., $20. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. www.rumbarevolution.com/ new.

James McMurtry, Kevin Kerby. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 8:30 p.m., $16 adv., $20 day of. 107 River Market Ave. 501-372-7707. www.stickyz.com.

Just Sayin (headliner), Charlotte (happy hour).

Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 and 9 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf.com.

Landrest, Galaxy Tour Guides, Manatees.

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

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

OT and DJ Swift 720. Vino’s, $6. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub.com.

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

Runaway Planet. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m.

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

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

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

That Arkansas Weather. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 9 p.m., $7. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501663-1196. www.afterthoughtbistroandbar.com.

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

COMEDY

“Rednecks in Spandex.” An original production

by The Main Thing. The Joint, 8 p.m., $22. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

The Second City: Hooking Up. Arkansas Repertory Theatre, 7 p.m., $35. 601 Main St. 501-378-0405. www.therep.org.

Tim Gaither. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., $12. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501228-5555. www.loonybincomedy.com.

DANCE

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

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

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

SPORTS

Arkansas Travelers vs. Tulsa. Texas League baseball. Dickey-Stephens Park, 7:10 p.m., $7-$13.

400 W. Broadway, NLR. 501-664-1555. www. travs.com.

KIDS

Disney on Ice: “Frozen.” Verizon Arena, 7 p.m.; May 7, $26-$76. 1 Alltel Arena Way, NLR. 501975-9001. verizonarena.com.

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MAY 5, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

SANTA MARGHERITA PINOT GRIGIO Normally $29.99

Special $19.99

2516 Cantrell Road Riverdale Shopping Center

366-4406

Bentonville Film Festival. Downtown Bentonville, through May 8, $75-$750. Main Street, Bentonville.

LECTURES

Steven Barnett. A talk by the Center on Community Philanthropy Scholar in Residence.

Sturgis Hall, noon. 1200 President Clinton Ave. 501-683-5200. clintonschool.uasys.edu.

SPORTS

Arkansas Travelers vs. Tulsa. Texas League baseball. Dickey-Stephens Park, 7:10 p.m., $7-$13.

400 W. Broadway, NLR. 501-664-1555. www. travs.com.

KIDS

“The Adventures of Peter Rabbit.” Arkansas Arts Center, 7 p.m., $12.50. 501 E. 9th St. 501372-4000. www.arkarts.com.

Disney on Ice: “Frozen.” Verizon Arena, 7 p.m., $26-$76. 1 Alltel Arena Way, NLR. 501-975-9001. verizonarena.com.

SATURDAY, MAY 7

MUSIC

Amy Garland Band. White Water Tavern, 9 p.m.

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

Arkansas Symphony Orchestra: The Movie Music of John Williams. Connor Performing Arts Center, Pulaski Academy, May 7, 7:30 p.m., $19-$58. 12701 Hinson Road.

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

Chris Knight, Dylan Earl & The Reasons.

Revolution, 9 p.m., $15 adv., $18 day of. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. www.rumbarevolution.com/new.

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

501-492-9802.

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

Patrice Pike Trio. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 8:30 p.m., $8. 107 River Market Ave. 501372-7707. www.stickyz.com.

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

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

FILM

Bentonville Film Festival. Downtown Bentonville, through May 8, $75-$750. Main Street, Bentonville.

SPORTS

Arkansas Travelers vs. NW Arkansas. Texas League baseball. Dickey-Stephens Park, 7:10 p.m., $7-$13. 400 W. Broadway, NLR. 501-6641555. www.travs.com.

BENEFITS

5th Annual Race to Remember. War Memorial Stadium, 4 p.m. 1 Stadium Drive. 501-663-0775.

KIDS

“The Adventures of Peter Rabbit.” Arkansas Arts Center, through May 8: 2 p.m., $12.50. 501 E. 9th St. 501-372-4000. www.arkarts.com.

Disney on Ice: “Frozen.” Verizon Arena, 11 a.m., 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., $26-$76. 1 Alltel Arena Way, NLR. 501-975-9001. verizonarena.com.

SUNDAY, MAY 8

MUSIC

Arkansas Symphony Orchestra: The Movie Music of John Williams. Connor Performing Arts Center, Pulaski Academy, 3 p.m., $19-$58.

12701 Hinson Road.

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

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

FILM

Bentonville Film Festival. Downtown Bentonville, $75-$750.

SPORTS

Arkansas Travelers vs. NW Arkansas. Texas League baseball. Dickey-Stephens Park, 2:10 p.m., $7-$13. 400 W. Broadway, NLR. 501-6641555. www.travs.com.

KIDS

“The Adventures of Peter Rabbit.” Arkansas Arts Center, 2 p.m., $12.50. 501 E. 9th St. 501372-4000. www.arkarts.com.

Disney on Ice: “Frozen.” Verizon Arena, 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., $26-$76. 1 Alltel Arena Way, NLR. 501-975-9001. verizonarena.com.

MONDAY, MAY 9

MUSIC

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

Marquis and Mood. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 8:30 p.m., $5. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-6631196. www.afterthoughtbistroandbar.com.

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

Open Mic. The Lobby Bar. Studio Theatre, 8 p.m. 320 W. 7th St. Richie Johnson. Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf. com.

FILM

“Blazing Saddles.” Riverdale 10 Cinema, 7 p.m., $7.50. 2600 Cantrell Road. 501-296-9955.

SPORTS

Arkansas Travelers vs. NW Arkansas. Texas League baseball. Dickey-Stephens Park, 7:10 p.m., $7-$13. 400 W. Broadway, NLR. 501-6641555. www.travs.com.

QC: CW: CD: AD: AM: PM:

Live: 1.875" x 5.25"

EVENTS

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

Little Rock Green Drinks. Informal networking session for people who work in the environmental field. Ciao Baci, 5:30-7 p.m. 605 N. Beechwood St. 501-603-0238. www.greendrinks. org.

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

PO:

Trim: 2.125" x 5.5" Bleed: 1none

COMEDY

The Second City: Hooking Up. Arkansas Repertory Theatre, 7 p.m., $35. 601 Main St. 501-378-0405. www.therep.org.

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

MUST INITIAL FOR APPROVAL

12th Annual Buzz-B-Q. An outdoor BBQ festival featuring live music and more. North Little Rock RV Park, 11 a.m., $10. 250 S. Locust St., NLR. Falun Gong meditation. Allsopp Park, 9 a.m., free. Cantrell and Cedar Hill Roads.

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

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

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

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

Quapaw Quarter Association’s 52nd Spring Tour of Homes. Curran Hall, May 7-8, $20 adv., $30 day of. 615 E. Capitol. 501-370-3290.

Viva Mothers! Fashion Show and Vendors Showcase. Statehouse Convention Center, 10:30 a.m., $50. 7 Statehouse Plaza.

EVENTS

Closing Date: 3/4/16

EVENTS

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

1601 S. Louisiana.

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

Quapaw Quarter Association’s 52nd Spring Tour of Homes. Curran Hall, $20 adv., $30 day of. 615 E. Capitol. 501-370-3290.

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

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

Tim Gaither. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m., $8-$12.

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

COMEDY

Pub: Arkansas Times

COMEDY

The Second City: Hooking Up. Arkansas Repertory Theatre, 7 p.m., $35. 601 Main St. 501-378-0405. www.therep.org.

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday Jam Session with Carl Mouton.

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

Job/Order #:279607 QC: cs

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

Brand: Ritas Item #: PBW2016003

capitalbarandgrill.com/.

The Woodpeckers (headliner), Alex Summerlin (happy hour). Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 and 9 p.m.

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

NOT EASY. © 2016 ANHEUSER-BUSCH, BUDWEISER® BEER, ST. LOUIS, MO

ARKANSAS TIMES

explore

LOCAL

WEDNESDAY, MAY 11

MUSIC

Aaron Lee Tasjan, Dylan Earl. White Water Tavern, 9 p.m., $7. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400.

SPORTS

Arkansas Travelers vs. NW Arkansas. Texas League baseball. Dickey-Stephens Park, 7:10 p.m., $7-$13. 400 W. Broadway, NLR. 501-6641555. www.travs.com.

CLASSES

Finding Family Facts. Rhonda Stewart’s genealogy research class for beginners. Arkansas Studies Institute, second Monday of every month, 3:30 p.m. 401 President Clinton Ave. 501-320-5700 . www.butlercenter.org.

TUESDAY, MAY 10

MUSIC

The Hooten Hallers, The Whole Famn Damily. www.arktimes.com

MAY 5, 2016

33

FRIDAY, MAY 20 | 6-9 P.M. at the ARGENTA PLAZA

WINE

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Go To:

Purchase tickets early: $30, $40 at the door

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Print your tickets and present at the door.

34

MAY 5, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

AFTER DARK, CONT.

COMEDY

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

Sean Kent. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m., $8. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-228-5555. www. loonybincomedy.com.

The Second City: Hooking Up. Arkansas Repertory Theatre, 7 p.m., $35. 601 Main St. 501-378-0405. www.therep.org.

DANCE

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

POETRY

Wednesday Night Poetry. 21-and-older show.

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

ARTS

THEATER

“A Piece of My Heart.” The Weekend Theater, through May 21: Fri., Sat., 7:30 p.m., $16. 1001 W. 7th St. 501-374-3761. www.weekendtheater.org.

“The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart.”

Walton Arts Center, May 6-8, $22.70-$25. 495 W. Dickson St., Fayetteville. 479-443-5600.

ica” and “Industrial Beauty: Charles Burchfield’s ‘Black Iron,’ ” through May 8; “Miranda Young: A Printed Menagerie,” museum school gallery, through May 29. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sun. 372-4000.

ARKANSAS REPERTORY THEATRE, 601 Main St.: “ArtWorks XXVII,” auction of artworks

by Central Arkansas artists to benefit The Rep, 6:30 p.m. May 7, music by the Funkanites, $50.

378-0405.

ART GROUP GALLERY, Pleasant Ridge Town Center, 11524 Cantrell Road: “Art of the Horse Race,” paintings by Bob Snider, May 6-8. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-6 p.m. Sun. 690-2193.

BOSWELL MOUROT FINE ART, 5815 Kavanaugh Blvd.: New paintings by Hans Feyerabend and Elena Petroukhina, clay sculpture by Diana Ashley, opening reception 6-9 p.m. May 7,

BENTONVILLE CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, One Museum Way: “Distinguished Speaker Series: Thom Mayne,” winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, 7-8:30 p.m. May 12, $8 ($10 nonmembers), reserve at 479-657-2335 or online; “The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip,” 100 images by 19 photographers of America from 1950 to today, through May 30, photograph Chuck Davis to give a lecture 1-2 p.m. May 7; American master-

ARKANSAS REPERTORY THEATRE PRESENTS

NEW IN THE GALLERIES

ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, MacArthur Park: Tintype portraits by Keliy Anderson-Staley, by reservation May 5-7 (May 8 sold out), $15 per sitting for digital scan ($20 nonmembers), portraits to be used in Anderson-Staley’s photographic project, reserve at 396-0375; “55th Young Artists Exhibition,” work by Arkansas students K-12, May 6-July 24, family festival and awards ceremony 11 a.m.-2 p.m. May 7; “Edward Durrel Stone: American Modernist,” Architecture and Design Network lecture by son Hicks Stone, principal, Stone Architects, 5:30 p.m. reception, talk 6 p.m. May 10, lecture hall, “Admiration,” painting by William Adolph Bouguereau, on loan from San Antonio Museum of Art through May 15; “Dorothea Lange’s Amer-

show through May 28. 664-0030.

THEA FOUNDATION, 401 Main St., NLR: “Succinct,” collages by Michael Church, opens with reception 6:30-9 p.m. May 6 as part of The Art Department series of works by emerging artists, with music by Rowdy Faith, $10. 379-9512.

works spanning four centuries in the permanent collection. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon., Thu.; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Wed., Fri.; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sat.-Sun., closed Tue. 479-418-5700.

COTTER 8TH ANNUAL PLEIN AIR ON THE WHITE RIVER: Artists will paint along the shore of the White River, through May 7, quick draw competition 4:30 p.m. May 6, award presentation 1-3 p.m. May 7, works for sale. 870-656-2057.

EL DORADO SOUTH ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, 110 E. 5th St.: “5X5 Art Dash” fundraiser, 55 works of art to be sold when bell rings, 5:30-6:30 p.m. May 5, 50 tickets only, $50, see artists and art at saccCONTINUED ON PAGE 46

The cast of Hooking Up With The Second City. Photo by Todd Rosenberg.

www.whitewatertavern.com.

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

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

Def Leppard, REO Speedwagon, Tesla. Verizon Arena, 7 p.m., $50-$120. 1 Alltel Arena Way, NLR. 501-975-9001. verizonarena.com.

Drageoke with Chi Chi Valdez. Sway. 412 Louisiana.

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

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

Mark Currey. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 5:30 p.m. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-1196. www. afterthoughtbistroandbar.com.

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

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

Hooking Up With The Second City makes mirth out of missed connections, girls’ night out adventures and all the crazy things we do for love!

May 4 - 15

TheRep.org | (501) 378-0405 Sponsored by

www.arktimes.com

MAY 5, 2016

35

MOVIE REVIEW

KITTY LOVE: Jordan Peele (left) and Keegan-Michael Key hit the big screen in “Keanu.”

Key and Peele and a cat Comedy Central vets move to the big screen.

BY SAM EIFLING

T

he sketch-comedy breakouts from Comedy Central of the past five years have blessedly come from the nonwhite male persuasion, and good on them. The fastest-rising, Amy Schumer, practiced a sort of scorched-earth feminism that nailed a certain zeitgeist in the everyone’s-a-little-bit-sexist 2010s. For that, she got a feature film last year, “Trainwreck,” that felt dimmer and flabbier than her best sketch work, even if it did trump 90 percent of “Saturday Night Live” movie spin36

MAY 5, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

offs.

Then there is the pair behind “Key & Peele,” Keegan-Michael Key (the tall one) and Jordan Peele (the stocky one). Though not exclusively about race, the best “Key & Peele” sketches were often about race, and subversively so. (Think back to the postapocalyptic alien invasion in which they could only tell human from replicant by asking white businessmen questions like, “Would you let me date your daughter?”)

They’ve got their own feature out

now: “Keanu,” a good-hearted romp about pursuing a kitten through a violent gangster underworld, with shades of “John Wick.” The good news is, it feels like a series of “Key & Peele” sketches quilted into 98 minutes of stoner gags and slo-mo gun battles.

And with that, you already know the bad news. Key and Peele are more accustomed to making a single note or character last for three minutes, maybe four. Whether you think “Keanu” is a mini-classic or just a solid comedy will depend on how charming you find the inevitable saggy stretches and the repetition. But, ultimately, “Keanu” represents a strong leap to longform from the sketch team.

Peele, who also co-wrote the screenplay with “Key & Peele” collaborator Alex Rubens, plays a layabout pothead creative named Rell, whose girlfriend, we learn early, has just broken up with him. At that bleak moment, there comes a scratch at the door, and a little tabby kitten (the

lone survivor of a gangland massacre moments earlier) mewls up at him.

Rell names him Keanu — “I think it means ‘cool breeze’ in Hawaiian” — and like that imprints on him as a therapy pet. A few short weeks later, he’s shooting a calendar of Keanu reenacting famous movie scenes (adorably chopping through a door for “The Shining,” e.g.) and is treating him like a son.

Meanwhile, Key’s character is a husband and father so square that his name is Clarence, a real paint-bynumbers sort who gets the weekend to hang when the family goes out of town.

The buddies see a Liam “Neesons” flick (inside joke from the show) and return to find Rell’s house broken into and the cat missing. Rell’s pot-dealer neighbor (Will Forte) tips them to a gang called the Blips who might have the kitty, so the two regular joes barge into the strip club lair of the gang without so much as a costume change and pretend to be a couple of icy assassins in disguise, to

ARKANSAS TIMES

READ read

LOCAL

blend in and try to get Keanu back. Elsewhere, those two actual assassins, also smitten with Keanu (and also played by Key and Peele), are stalking Rell and Clarence for the cat.

What you get is a clever bit of code switching and playing against type, as two regular guys have to adopt the manners of the street. Clarence, a corporate team-building type, falls into his role as an organizer and facilitator who talks a vanload of gangsters into getting onboard with his George Michael fandom. Rell can drop his voice a couple of octaves and pretend to be good at wasting dudes but he’s really there to talk his kitty back from gangster-kingpin Method Man. This sort of thing was the premise for dozens of Key and Peele’s bits (they’re inveterate chameleons), and even if “Keanu” plays like a sketch that ran a bit long, it also includes a drug trip with George Michael’s jeans and the film’s namesake making an uncredited cameo as the cat’s voice. Now bring on their next one.

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37

Dining

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

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

WHAT’S COOKIN’ LAST WEEK, SKYE WARD, daughter of Don Dugan and Tasha Stratton, joined her parents on the 400 block of East Third Street when she opened Skye’s Little Bistro in the storefront between Stratton’s Market and Dugan’s Pub. The bistro serves European fare “with an Arkansas touch,” Stratton’s assistant Angel Ford says.

For example, among the four charcuterie boards is the Arkansas Love, which features fried catfish strips, pork shoulder torchon (cooked in cloth), sweet cornbread, Kent Walker cheeses, local pepper jelly and bread and butter pickles, served with a white barbecue sauce. The charcuterie boards are served every Friday during Stratton’s wine tastings (4 p.m. to 8 p.m.). If French food is what you want, go for the croque monsieur sandwich, duck confit, rotisserie chicken served with potatoes seared in duck fat and garlic, or pain au chocolat. There’s Italian, too, like the vegetarian lasagna served with bechamel sauce and mozzarella cheese at dinner.

Skye’s is open 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. weekdays and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday for brunch, when crepes are served. Because Skye’s is connected to Stratton’s, the only alcohol you’ll get is in the form of half-ounce tasting sips, but that and the woven French bistro furniture strike a sophisticated note, and besides, you can get a drink before or after at Dugan’s. Skye’s offers takeout and does catering, as well.

Telephone is 791-6700; you can also find Skye’s on Facebook.

ANOTHER LITTLE ROCK FOODIE startup is making the jump from food truck to brick and mortar storefront: gourmet pie shop Honey Pies, which will open in a 600-square-foot pie, ice cream and coffee shop at 315 N. Bowman Road in the next month or so.

Sharon Woodson, owner of Honey Pies, says the cozy space is being renovated, with a target opening date sometime in late May or early June. “We’re still waiting on some plumbing plans, and I’m not sure how long the work will take,” she said. “Our goal is Memorial Day weekend.”

Woodson said Honey Pies will offer drip coffee, pies by the slice, whole pies for walk-in purchase (any whole pie is $24) and ice cream from Little Rock’s Loblolly Creamery. There will be a small dining area and bottled beverages. Woodson wants to have an ice cream “dipping counter” eventually. “But that’s a plumbing project 38

MAY 5, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

BASIC BRUNCH: The fare at Delicious Temptations is solid, but not exciting.

Same ol’ In other words, not exactly delicious or tempting.

W

alking through the doors of Delicious Temptations, a familiar small-town dining scene is set.

Artwork and the accompanying price tags hang from the walls. A middle-aged diner tells what appears to be her mother, “I like my coffee sweet, just like Daddy did.” A group of older men, some ready for business, some ready for golf, heckle each other as they wait on their food. A chalkboard sign boasts of Bourbon Pecan Pie. The air smells like coffee and biscuits.

In all our years in Little Rock we’d somehow managed to never eat at Delicious Temptations, off Rodney Parham, even though we had heard good things, and the restaurant has a long history. It’s the type of place that surely has a loyal following. And the food is fine. It’s sufficient, palatable and recognizable to anyone who’s had breakfast in an Arkansas diner, but it’ll have a hard time winning over folks who have become used to the

solid and inventive offerings on other brunch menus in Little Rock.

We started off with the special bread of the day, looking for something to nibble on while we waited. The lemon coconut fruit bread ($1.99) served this purpose and then some. The lemon butter pound cake was a great combination of sweet and tangy. The flavor condensed along the bottom edge of the crust in nice, dense, lemony bites. The coconut icing was a bit too sweet for our taste. But overall, the flavor combination was nice.

Unsure of what to order, we tried one of the highlighted items on the menu, the California Benedict ($4.99 for a half-order with one egg or $7.99 for a full order). It sounded promising — an English muffin stacked with a tomato slice, avocado, Canadian bacon, and a poached egg (though we opted for over-medium) covered with hollandaise sauce. The tomato was surprisingly juicy and tasty consid-

ering it’s not quite that time of year yet.

Everything else was just passable, including what should have been the star of the dish, the hollandaise sauce. It fell flat. It may be unfair that our last taste of hollandaise came from the stunning Atchafalaya restaurant in New Orleans. The Delicious Temptations version is definitely buttery, but otherwise lacked the integral hints of pepper, lemon juice or anything else you might find in a memorable version of the sauce. It also didn’t help that the dish was served room temperature. We were happy to have a side order of shredded potato hash browns ($2.99), which were hot, crispy and delicious.

The Old Fashioned Breakfast ($7.99) seemed a safe bet. Toast, sausage, two fried eggs and a side of potato casserole came out only mildly warm. After a long wait, it was a bit disappointing. Many others had the same idea to come in for breakfast — unusual for a Monday, we were told. The rush put quite a strain on the kitchen, leaving one pair of diners with no other option than to leave hungry in order to catch a flight. Nothing stands out on this dish except for the potato casserole — and for all the wrong reasons. It is lumpy and dull, flecked with orange bits of what

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

we assume to be powdered cheese. This overly creamy casserole needs reworking.

A side of biscuits and gravy ($4.99) went down easy enough. The two biscuits were fluffy and good. The sausage gravy seemed more like a mix than homemade. Which is fine by us, having grown up on the stuff, but our partner was not impressed. It’s a solid offering that satisfies, and even looks nice, sprinkled with flecks of chopped parsley.

Breakfast was redeemed by a blueberry yogurt pancake ($2.79 for one, plus an additional $0.49 for the topping), which was light and fluffy, not overly sweet or buttery. It was served with “regular syrup” (code for corn syrup with flavoring). The real stuff will cost you. A side order of maple syrup can be had for 99 cents.

Make no mistake, the offerings at Delicious Temptations are passable. They get

Delicious Temptations 11220 N Rodney Parham Road 225-6893

QUICK BITE Delicious Temptations does more than just breakfast. Try it at lunch. The fruit bread is a winner and makes for a good breakfast appetizer. The pancakes, served in a variety of ways, are hard to beat.

HOURS Open daily 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

OTHER INFO Credit cards accepted. No alcohol.

the job done. They’re familiar and recognizable. And the prices are reasonable.

There’s just nothing stellar. The list of restaurants in and around Little Rock that serve killer brunches is growing. And this stand-by will have to serve a better one to keep new diners coming in the doors.

WHAT’S COOKIN’, CONT. we’re working on, so I don’t know if that’s going to be a day one event or a phase two.” While Woodson is a one-woman show right now, she says her plan is to eventually bring in more help and expand Honey Pies into a full-service bakery, ice cream parlor, restaurant and coffee shop.

“But that’s a long-term goal,” she said. “Day one is: pie, ice cream, coffee.” Honey Pies is taking orders for Mother’s Day pies, with pick-up available at the future location on Bowman.

For more information about Honey Pies, visit facebook.com/myhoneypies.

Experience the joys and hardships felt by generations of service men and women – in their own words – through this powerful traveling exhibit that’s on display for a limited time only. Sponsored in part by the Arkansas Humanities Council.

Special exhibit: May 9 - June 1 503 E. Ninth St., Little Rock • 501-376-4602 • arkmilitaryheritage.com

www.arktimes.com

MAY 5, 2016

39

ARKANSAS

Join us as we e salute Arkansas’s v veteran farmers.

After helping to grow a strongerr nation overseas, many veterans returned to Arkansas to grow a stronger state by contributing to our economy and h heritage through farming.

The lasting impact that these and all other veterans have made on our lives and communitiess will never be forgotten.

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★★★

CELEBRATING VETERANS IN AGRICULTURE ENTREPRENEURSHIP PLAYS SPECIAL ROLE IN MANY VETERANS’ PASTS, FUTURES

BY DWAIN HEBDA

T

he American entrepreneur is the bedrock from which our nation draws its physical and economic sustenance. More jobs and economic strength have been generated on Main Street by smalland medium-sized businesses than through any other segment of the American economy.

Given the nature of the business world, it would seem one for which veterans are uniquely suited. Setting goals, identifying objectives, hard work and mobilizing others to collective success are as fundamental on the battlefield as the board room.

However, as with many aspects of returning to civilian life, the transition is often not as smooth as it would appear to be. As Shaun So, veteran and consultant, writes for Forbes magazine: “I’ve been interacting with veterans from all over the country that are at various stages in the entrepreneurial ventures. Many ask advice on how to get their own start-up off the ground and what things they can do to enter this wildly unstructured world of entrepreneurship. I stress ‘unstructured’ because I’ve found that the only fixed rules of entrepreneurship are state and federal laws; other than that, anything goes.

“Operating in an unstructured environment is different for us military folk. We may enjoy our freedoms; however, we’re so ingrained with process and procedure that we’re often unaware of how regimented we are. Just ask any military person for directions. Do they point with their index finger? No, they’ll hold their hand with their fingers together, their thumb tucked to the side and throw their arm in a direction with the hand acting as a spear point. That’s what we do.”

Add into this mix the physical, emotional and mental wounds many veterans bring home with them and the equation becomes decidedly more complex. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are more likely to be unemployed than the civilian population, and often suffer higher rates of divorce, depression and suicide than previous generations (although to be fair, many veterans of earlier conflicts operated in a time before Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was widely in the public consciousness).

Fortunately, there are many outlets and opportunities today for service men and women to re-enter society as entrepreneurs in the field of their choosing. In the field of agriculture, organizations such as Farmer Veteran Coalition introduce veterans to agricultural work, Congress granted new avenues to start-up capital through the 2014 Farm Bill, and many states have adopted the marketing campaign “Homegrown by Heroes” to help vets market their goods.

The U.S. Veterans Administration devotes an entire portal to entrepreneurship and, in partnership with BusinessUSA, connects vets to best practices, information, resources and guidance for starting their own business. The Small Business Administration likewise directs dedicated resources specifically to helping returning veterans tackle this next chapter in their lives. The list of similarly focused state- and university-affiliated programs is long.

It should be noted that little, if any, of this was in place when many of our trailblazer veterans came home. Yet come home they did to farms and small towns, main streets and public office. The yield of their service was a stronger Arkansas — and nation — in more ways than one.

It’s not an easy road, of course, but as Al Hodge, executive vice president of lending for Arkansas Capital Corporation Group noted, military service provides key elements that most veterans can apply to great effect in establishing and growing their own business.

“Veterans have a loyalty to a mission and a strong work ethic that isn’t found in typical civilian culture,” he said. “They quickly discover that others do not share this disciplined attitude in the workplace and, as a result, a farm or a business that is owned and managed by a veteran has a higher success rate than others.”

It is to our collective shame that not all were hailed as they should have been when returning at points during our history, but the steps that have been made since those days demonstrates how far we have come as a people and a republic. Arkansas Times is today singularly privileged to profile a few of these heroes in the pages that follow.

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CELEBRATING VETER RA

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MILITARY HITCH PREPARED ROBERT MOORE JR. FOR ARKANSAS STATEHOUSE BY DWAIN HEBDA T

he epitome of the hometown boy done good, Robert Moore Jr. never forgot where he came from. War vet, legislator and longtime farmer, Arkansas City’s favorite son has also been a leading voice for boosting tourism to his beloved Arkansas Delta.

“Arkansas City, we’re on life support but we ain’t dead yet,” he said. “That’s been my passion the last 25 years, and the older I get, the more it becomes my passion trying to do things to rejuvenate our areas down there.”

Moore didn’t grow up on the farm, but thanks to his grandfather, on whose place he’d spent many hours in his youth, he developed a passion for agricultural life.

“My grandfather he was an old dirt farmer back when,” he said. “I remember I was about 6 years old when my grandfather got his first Ford 8N tractor. He had mules out there and, boy, he was proud of that tractor and I was proud with him.”

Moore earned his degree at Ouachita Baptist University in 1966 where he was in ROTC. He chose infantry, attended officer training school and jump school at Ft. Benning in Georgia and was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division.

It was during night jump training in a cold rainstorm when he noticed pilots practicing nearby and had a military epiphany.

“Ft. Stewart, Georgia, happens to be the fixed-wing Army

training center,” he said. “So we’re in and I’m cold and I’m watching these guys doing their night landing touch and gos and thinking these guys are going back to the O Club tonight, man. They ain’t gonna be out here, they’re gonna be drinking cold beer in a little while.

“And I thought, you know, jumping out of these airplanes is fun but I think flying them might be more fun.”

Moore completed the flight program, then flew Bird Dogs and Otters in Vietnam. He described his five years in the Army as a transformative period.

“Vietnam was one of the astounding experiences that I have had in my life,” he said.“ I wouldn’t want to do it again, it wasn’t that kind of experience. I lost my very best friend over there and other very good friends. But to have lived through the experience and learned what I learned. I went over with one ingrained philosophy and I came back with another. It was that profound.”

In the years to come, he’d serve three terms in the Arkansas House of Representatives and as Speaker of the House for the 88th General Assembly. Among his other roles of service was Assistant Attorney General, Chairman of the Arkansas Transportation Commission and two decades as Director of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board.

Along the way, he settled into Moore Farms, growing rice and soybeans and spending time and energy to promote tourism in the Arkansas Delta. Today, he remembers the past fondly, but relishes the present.

“I love living out on the farm,” he said. “You kind of make a full circle in life. When I was a younger man living in Little Rock, I would go down to Arkansas City to take care of business on the farm and couldn’t wait to get back to Little Rock. Now I live on the farm in Arkansas City, come to Little Rock to take care of business and I can’t wait to get back to the farm.”

★★★

BOB BARNHILL: HAPPY TO BE GROUNDED

BY KIMBERLY DISHONGH

W

hen Bob Barnhill retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1980, he and his wife, Carlotta, were eager to find a permanent residence.

“We had moved 17 times in the 28 years I was in the Air Force,” Barnhill says.

He graduated from Arkansas State Teachers College in 1952 and accepted a direct appointment as a second lieutenant in the Air Force. He was assigned to graduate school in meteorology at New York University and then sent to the European forecast center in Germany.

He later went to pilot training in Texas and Kansas and then flew nuclear weapon-equipped intercontinental bombers in Missouri as a co-pilot and then as aircraft commander. Next he was sent to the University of Chicago for graduate work in satellite orbitry, which prepared him for an assignment at the Global Weather Center in Nebraska, followed by weather reconnaissance in the Hurricane Hunter Squadron in Puerto Rico.

After that, he was sent to South Carolina to transition into a new bomber that he would fly in 157 combat missions in Vietnam before going stateside again, this time to Illinois. After a two-year stint as commander of weather operations in the Philippine Islands, he completed his final posting in 1980 as weather assistant to the strategic air commander in Nebraska.

He retired as a lieutenant colonel.

Barnhill didn’t have agricultural aspirations when he and his wife found the 60 acres in Cabot that now make up Barnhill 42 42

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Orchards, even though he grew up in a farming family.

“No one had farmed on it for years and it had gullies and ravines and thickets and that sort of thing on it. But we saw a future for us right there on that place,” he says.

They moved in, cleaned up and began growing cantaloupes and watermelons. A couple of years later they realized there was a market for vegetables, berries and nuts, so they started growing those as well.

“We planted blackberries and strawberries and that just sort of spread on,” he says.

“Things will just gradually grow on you, so to speak. We see a need and try to move into that area. That’s what we’ve always done.

We try to have satisfied customers all the time. That’s one good thing about the whole works, having happy people eating fruits and vegetables that are grown right here.”

The Barnhills have five full-time employees, and their son, Rex, and daughter, Ekko, recently returned to help with the family business as well.

Customers can buy their goods from the farmstead or from farmers markets in Cabot, the Dogtown Farmers Market in North Little Rock, and the farmers markets at Pulaski Heights Baptist

and Westover Hills Presbyterian churches in Little Rock.

Carlotta Barnhill enjoys canning and preserving, baking and candy-making and she often whips up treats that her husband sells in those venues, too.

“I really like to talk to satisfied customers, or even unsatisfied ones, because if you talk with someone who’s had an unsatisfactory experience, well, that’s a learning thing and you take that with you and see if you can’t improve on it,” he says.

Agriculture is a tough business, says Barnhill. Land and equipment are expensive, weather is fickle and can make or break a harvest and a customer must be identified for all crops before they are grown, lest it go to waste before one is found. The variables involved have made agriculture less and less popular for young people over the years.

“Most of the farmers in the United States are 60 years old or older. There just aren’t many young farmers. It’s a difficult thing to do to be a farmer. It isn’t an easy life at all. You have to have a passion for it,” he says. “I have a passion for it.”

RA ANS IN AGRICULTURE

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★★★

DANNY WILSON: FAMILY, MILITARY FORGED DISCIPLINE TO WEATHER TOUGH TIMES BY DWAIN HEBDA F

or Danny Wilson, the military and early family life were two sides of a very instructive coin that prepared him for a long and successful career in agriculture.

In the U.S. Army, Wilson learned discipline to weather the challenges that would lay ahead of him once he returned from Vietnam in 1971.

“One thing that the military will teach you is some discipline, and self-discipline is something that will teach you that you can do more than you think you can do,” he said. “It’s kind of a mindset and that’s what they’re trying to get through to you — you had to know how to buckle down. You just had to do what you had to do.”

From his family, and particularly his mother, he learned organization that went beyond even that of Uncle Sam. Given the hand that Jesse “Cricket” Wilson was dealt, it’s not hard to understand why.

“I had nine sisters and eight brothers; there was 18 of us, if you can believe it,” he said. “I had a mother who married a man who had seven kids already. She just fell in love with the man is all there was to it, till the day he died.

“This is a woman who could work a young mule to death.

I’m telling you, it’s unbelievable what effect that woman had on my family. She was just a rock, a rock of Gibraltar. She was real organized, because she had so many kids it couldn’t be any

other way. That’s one of the reasons it wasn’t such a big transition to the military.”

The time period during which Wilson served, and immediately after, was a topsy-turvy one. He learned to be grateful for what he had in America by seeing the poverty of Southeast Asia, only to have many Americans show him hostility and bitterness when he got home.

“When I got out, I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do and really, I just didn’t care,” he said. “I had a ‘don’t care’attitude about some things because whenever we come from over there, we weren’t received like you think that a person woulda been received, back from serving your country.

“We were actually run down, spit on, everything else during those times because there was such opposition to that war. And you know things like that you don’t get over with anytime soon.”

Wilson bumped around a while after coming home, unsure of anything except wanting to steer clear of the

public. Then an opportunity to go into farming with one of his brothers presented itself and his life turned a corner.

“It was the best move I ever made in my life,” he said.

Soon to turn 67, his subsequent life in agriculture, the sturdy years as well as the slim ones, is recalled fondly. With his wife ,Theta, he’s raised three children and he now revels in being a grandfather and coaxing cotton, soybeans and a little corn out of 1,800 acres of Delta ground around McGehee that’s always been home.

“Well, it has been tough at times, but it has been a good life,” he said.

“I’ve had to overcome some adversity in life like everybody does; we went through some of the years in the ‘80s that just sucked the life out of us. But we’ve just overcome things, me and my wife.

“It’s been rewarding. I wouldn’t trade anything for my military experience and my farming experience. And I’ve got regrets, you know, hindsight is 20-20, but still, life’s been very good, I’ve been blessed. God’s been good to this ol’ country boy.”

★★★

JESS WALT BANKED ON BUSINESS OF FARMING

BY KIMBERLY DISHONGH

A

griculture hasn’t always been Jess Walt’s focus, but it has always been part of his life. The Altheimer farm where he’s lived most of his years once belonged to his father, and it is now run by his sons.

The only times he didn’t call it home himself were during the time he attended military school in Sewanee, Tenn., when he served in the U.S. Navy and while he was studying business at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

He went to the Sewanee Military Academy in hopes of gaining entrance to the U.S. Naval Academy, but his vision wasn’t strong so he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and boarded a destroyer escort instead, much to the chagrin of his father, who would have preferred he stay in Altheimer and help on the farm.

At the University of Arkansas, Walt was named editor of a business publication but was chastised by the college’s dean for dedicating too much print space to agricultural topics.

“But still, agriculture is one of the biggest businesses in Arkansas and that was one of my reasons for being favorable to agriculture,” Walt says.

The First National Bank of Altheimer was organized not long after Walt graduated from college and he was invited to serve on the bank’s board of directors.

He served in the state House of Representatives for 12 years.

He served also on the boards of Jefferson Regional Medical Center and Stuttgart Drying Cooperative for 18 and 22 years,

respectively. He was chairman of the hospital board for two years and president of the cooperative board for two years.

“When the opportunity came, the president of that bank left and I asked them if they would let me give it a try, and they did,” he says. “I got a chance to try it and I enjoyed it and I worked there for about 33 years. The Bank of Altheimer is very small. At that time it had about $3 million in total assets. We didn’t have any industry here to draw from. I just had to make do with what we had and we finally worked it up to about $13 million.”

Working as president of a bank, even a small one, was too demanding a job to allow him enough time to run the farm at the same time, so he hired someone to help with that.

“When the boys came out of school, I turned it over to them and I stayed at the little bank out there. It has changed as much in the last 15 years as it had the 15 years before that,” he says. “Machinery has been improved so much in a technical way. And I used to raise a whole farm for what the seed costs now.”

One simple-yet-genius technological improvement he notes is the addition of GPS features on tractors.

“You’ve got a GPS and when you line it up you can throw a straight row from here to New York. What that does is make your rows uniform so you don’t have wide rows and narrow rows. It improves your operation,”he says.

“We only had one tractor at that time and I used to drive all summer long every summer but it wasn’t anything like the ones we have now with GPS. I was the GPS and it was crooked.”

The farming operation has changed a bit, too. The farm doesn’t grow cotton anymore, focusing its growing potential on rice, soybeans and corn instead.

“I call it Chan-Page,” he says of the farm, explaining that the letters in his preferred name for the place represent all of his and wife, Katy’s, children — Chase, Page, Annalisa and Georgiana.

Over the years he has noted that it’s often not possible for families to pass farms down through the generations as his has been able to do. He feels fortunate.

“My boys do an excellent job of running this place,” he says.

“I am really proud of them.”

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AGRICULTURAL ROOTS RUN DEEP FOR LOUIS SHACKELFORD

BY DWAIN HEBDA

ARKANSAS CAPITAL CORPORATION and SIMMONS BANK proudly support Veterans “CELEBRATING VETERANS IN AGRICULTURE“ SPONSORED BY:

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L

ouis C. Shackelford recalls his military service fondly, both for the skills it honed and for the parts of the world it took him to, far from the fields of the Arkansas Delta.

“Well, I think I enjoyed all of it,” said the 70-year-old. “I liked Germany and I traveled to Greece and different places and then when I went to Vietnam I got to go to Australia and Thailand. I liked it all.”

But even as he arrived home with the rank of captain and a few years abroad under his belt, there was little doubt where his future lay.

“I have to tell you the truth; I really didn’t have anything in mind [after the Army],” he said.

“You know, we always had this family business back here and I was raised from an early age that that was my lot in life, to get back to the family business.”

The family business was agriculture, and its roots run deep under Shackelford’s family tree. His great- grandfather owned land around Hamburg, and his current operation got its start with his grandfather Sam Wilson, who braved the mosquitoes and malaria that came with farming what locals called “the swamps” back then.

Shackelford didn’t technically grow up on the farm, but given the size of his hometown of Montrose, Arkansas, it was never very far away.

“It was a little town of 344 at the time,” he said nonchalantly.“Besides my family’s business, there wasn’t much else down here.”

The world got a lot bigger when Shackelford graduated high school, and headed to the University of Virginia where he studied English and art history. With the draft looming, he decided to enroll in the campus’ two-year ROTC program, extending it for an additional year after

he graduated with the rank of 1st Lieutenant.

After a European deployment, he landed in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, where he served as a military historian.

“I think being in the Army will help anybody’s career, and I think it was especially helpful to me in learning how to get along with all kinds of people,” he said. “Military service was invaluable, and I think our country has lost something by not having the draft anymore.

“Although I gotta tell you,”he added, “I didn’t think much of it at the time.”

The family farm was waiting for Shackelford when he got back with its fields of cotton and soybeans as well as a small stand of timber.

“We had a cotton gin and we merged with some other families and had a little bit bigger cotton gin,” he said. “As things would have it, I sort of liked running the gin. I guess the most I ever farmed was around 5,000 or 6,000 acres. It was a family operation and we farmed primarily cotton, and back in the ‘70s we started farming some rice when the rice allotments opened up.”

These days, Shackelford sits at the head of the family business, nestled into the quiet, familiar surroundings that have been his home these many years. With his wife, Ann, he’s raised three children — one of whom has followed in Shackelford’s footsteps in agriculture while the other two frequently stop by for family dinners.

“I like where I live really, you know, we don’t have much bothering us here,” he said.

“I’ve always enjoyed [farming] even in the lean times, and there have been some lean ones. It’s just the history of taking care of my business for all these years and hopefully making things better. I like it because it’s been good to me.”

SUPPORT FARMER VETERANS HOMEGROWN BY HEROES is a marketing tool for Arkansas farmers that have served in any branch of the United States military. This distinct logo tells consumers that the product was grown in Arkansas and that it was grown by a veteran that has helped defend our country and our way of life

LEARN MORE AT ARKANSASGROWN.ORG

The Arkansas Times, along with Arkansas Capital Corporation and Simmons Bank are pleased to support our Veterans this entire month of May. Meet more of Arkansas’s distinguished veterans in profiles like these in every issue this month.

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MAY 13

AFTER DARK, CONT.

THE 2ND FRIDAY OF EACH MONTH 5-8 PM NATURALS

Gourmet. Your Way. All Day.

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

Opening reception for

AN EXHIBITION OF ARTWORKS BY VIRMARIE DEPOYSTER, HEIDI HOGDEN, LOGAN HUNTER, AND ANNA SHEALS

200 RIVER MARKET AVE. STE 400 501.374.9247 WWW.ARCAPITAL.COM ROBERT BEAN, CURATOR

Live music by Marchese Hendricks Project, featuring Jessica Lauren Arkansas-made beer from Bubba Brew’s Brewing Co.

COME IN AND SEE US! 108 W 6th St., Suite A (501) 725-8508 www.mattmcleod.com

These venues will be open late.

There’s plenty of parking and a FREE TROLLEY to each of the locations.

Don’t miss it – lots of fun!

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MAY 5, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

HOT SPRINGS 2ND ANNUAL ARTS AND THE PARK: 10 days of performing, visual and literary arts events in various venues in town through May 8, including “All Things Fiber,” demonstration by weavers, spinners and dyers at the Fine Arts Center 10 a.m.-1 p.m. May 5. For schedule, go to hotspringsarts.org. 501-321-2027.

JUSTUS FINE ART, 827 A Central Ave.: “Natural Design,” paintings by Thomas Green and Tony Saladino, steel sculpture by Robert Fogel, through May, talks by Fogel and Saladino 6 p.m.

May 6, Hot Springs Gallery Walk. 501-321-2335.

NEW IN THE MUSEUMS

Robert Lemming & Louis Watts

FREE TROLLEY RIDES!

arts.com. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri. 870-862-5474.

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

CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL CENTER: 2nd annual “Bridge to the Future” family festival, rescheduled 10 a.m.-2 p.m. May 21; “American Champions: The Quest for Olympic Glory,” photographs, film and memorabilia from athletes, through Sept. 11; permanent exhibits on the Clinton administration. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. $10 adults; $8 college students, seniors, retired military; $3 ages 6-17. 370-8000.

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

HISTORIC ARKANSAS MUSEUM, 200 E. 3rd St.: “43rd annual Territorial Fair,” living history, blacksmith demonstrations, dancing, games, letterpress demonstration, beekeeping demonstrations, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. May 7; refurbished 19th century structures from original city and galleries, guided tours Monday and Tuesday on the hour, self-guided Wednesday through Sunday, $2.50 adults, $1 under 18, free to 65 and over. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 324-9351.

MacARTHUR MUSEUM OF ARKANSAS MILITARY HISTORY, 503 E. 9th St. (MacArthur Park): “War Comes Home: The Legacy,” correspondence from major U.S. conflicts reveals effect on lives, families and communities, May 9-June 1; “Clothesline Project,” T-shirts that tell stores of sexual assault in the military, through May 7; “Waging Modern Warfare”; “Gen. Wesley Clark”; “Vietnam, America’s Conflict”; “Undaunted Courage, Proven Loyalty: Japanese American Soldiers in World War II. 9 a.m.-4 p.m.

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

CALL FOR ENTRIES

The 2nd annual Delta des Refuses, an exhibition of work not accepted into the Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center, is accepting entries through May 15. The exhibition will be held at the Thea Foundation, 401 Main St., North Little Rock. Entry forms are available at the Delta des Refuses Facebook page. Rachel Trusty is organizer.

The Arkansas Arts Council is taking applications from teaching performing, literary or visual artists who would like to join the Arts in Education Roster. Deadline to apply is July 8. Applications are available at arkansasarts.org. For more information, call the Arts Council at 501-324-9769 or email cynthia@arkansasheritage.org.

ONGOING GALLERY EXHIBITS

ARKANSAS CAPITAL CORP., 200 River Market

Ave., Suite 400: “Complete Spaces,” sculpture

by Marianne Hennigar, jewelry of Christie Young. www.arcapital.com.

BUTLER CENTER GALLERIES, Arkansas Studies Institute, 401 President Clinton Ave.: “Culture Shock: Shine Your Rubies, Hide Your Diamonds,” work by women’s artist collective, including Melissa Cowper-Smith, Melissa Gill, Tammy Harrington, Dawn Holder, Jessie Hornbrook, Holly Laws, Sandra Luckett, Morgan Page and Rachel Trusty, through Aug. 22, Concordia Hall; “Twists and Strands: Exploring the Edges,” ceramics by Barbara Satterfield and jewelry by Michele Fox; “Jeanfo: We Belong to Nature,” sculpture; “Painting 360: A Look at Contemporary Panoramic Painting,” Underground Gallery, through April 30. 9 a.m.-6 p.m.

Mon.-Sat. 320-5790.

CANTRELL GALLERY, 8206 Cantrell Road: “Beyond the Photographs,” paintings by Daniel Coston, show through May 7. 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

Mon.-Sat. 224-1335.

CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, 509 Scott St.: “Interconnections,” paintings and drawings by Maria and Jorge Villegas, through June 30. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Thu., 9 a.m.-noon Fri. and Sun. 375-2342.

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

Sat. 664-0880.

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

A Group Exhibition,” through May 20. corebeer.com.

COX CREATIVE CENTER, 120 River Market Ave.: Arkansas League of Artists, through April 30. 918-3093.

DRAWL, 5208 Kavanaugh Blvd.: New work by Emily Galusha. 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 240-7446.

GALLERY 221 & ART STUDIOS 221, Second and Center streets: “William McNamara,” watercolors, through May 21, “The Literary Muse,” group show. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 801-0211.

GALLERY 26, 2601 Kavanaugh Blvd.: “Edges,” photography by Rita Henry; also drawings and pastels by Dominique Simmons and David Warren, through May 14. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.Sat. 664-8996.

GALLERY 360, 900 S. Rodney Parham Road: “Shrunken,” more than 150 small works by 30 artists, through May 15. 663-2222.

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

GREG THOMPSON FINE ART, 429 Main St., NLR: “21st Anniversary Exhibition,” works by John Alexander, Walter Anderson, Gay Bechtelheimer, Carroll Cloar, William Dunlap, John Ellis, Charles Harrington, James Hendricks, Pinkney Herbert, Robyn Horn, Clementine Hunter, Richard Jolley, Dolores Justus, Henri Linton, John Harlan Norris, Sammy Peters, Joseph Piccillo, Edward Rice, Kendall Stallings, Rebecca Thompson, Glennray Tutor and Donald Roller Wilson. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.

Sat. 664-2787.

HEARNE FINE ART, 1001 Wright Ave.: “Off the Page: Illustrations from Nikki Grimes’ ‘Danita Brown’ Series and Other Titles,” watercolors

by E.B. Lewis and mixed media by Floyd Cooper, through June 3. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sat. 372-6822.

HISTORIC ARKANSAS MUSEUM GALLERIES, 200 E. 3rd St.: “Hugo and Gayne Preller’s House of Light,” historic photographs, through October 31; “A Diamond in the Rough: 75 Years of the Historic Arkansas Museum,” works from the

ARKANSAS TIMES MARKETPLACE ADMINISTRATIVE DIRECTOR Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, a non-profit advocacy organization, seeks an Administrative Director. Hours are 30 to 40 hours a week depending on applicant’s needs. Bachelor’s degree with experience in daily operations of a nonprofit including book-keeping and database management. EOE. Send cover letter, resume, and S T . J O or S E1400 P HWest CENTER references to cneal@aradvocates.org Markham St., Ste. 306, Little Rock, AR 72201.

MECHANICAL ENGINEER

Spring Festival

(Maumelle, AR) Evaluate, select and apply standard engineering techniques, procedures and criteria, using judgment in making adaptations and modifications. Design/draft/solid model prototype drawings from customer/sales information. Analyze test results in relation to design or rated specifications, test objectives and modify or adjust product to meet specifications. Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in Mechanical Engineering or related field and one year of work experience required. Must understand industry standards (SCTE, SBCA, ANSI). Must be proficient in CATIA V5, ENOVIA VPM and AutoCAD. Mail resume to Tecsource International LLC, 11901 Crystal Hill Road, North Little Rock, AR, 72113

6800 Camp Robinson Road, North Little Rock

permanent collection; “Arkansas Contemporaries: Then, Now and Next,” through May 8. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 324-9351.

J.W. WIGGINS CONTEMPORARY NATIVE AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, UALR Sequoyah Center, University Plaza: “Return from Exile: Contemporary Southeastern Indian Art,” through May 6. 658-6360.

L&L BECK ART GALLERY, 5705 Kavanaugh Blvd.: “Backyard Birds,” month of May, free giclee drawing 7 p.m. May 19. 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Tue.-Sat. 660-4006.

LAMAN LIBRARY ARGENTA BRANCH, 420 Main St., NLR: “Visual Anthropology: Welcome to Our Neighborhood,” 55 photographs by 11 members of the Blue Eyed Knocker Photo Club. 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Sat. 687-1061.

M2 GALLERY, Pleasant Ridge Shopping Center: “Manscape,” paintings by Charles Henry James, through April 29. 225-6257.

MATT MCLEOD FINE ART GALLERY, 108 W. 6th St.: “New, Fresh, Vibrant,” paintings, sculpKaren Briscoe ture and jewelry by David Clemons, Jude Harzer, Wayne Salge and Jeremy Couch. 725-8508.

MUGS CAFE, 515 Main St., NLR: “Networks,” paintings by Kasten Searles. 7 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.Sat. 379-9101.

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

812-2324.

RED DOOR GALLERY, 3715 JFK, NLR: New work by Matt Coburn, Paula Jones, Theresa Cates and Amy Hill-Imler, new glass by James Hayes, ceramics by Kelly Edwards, sculpture by Kim Owen and other work. 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.

Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 753-5227.

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

UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS AT LITTLE ROCK, 2801 S. University Ave.: “B.F.A. Senior Exhibition,” Gallery I, through May 12. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturday, 2-5 p.m. Sun. 569-3182.

BENTON DIANNE ROBERTS ART STUDIO AND GAL-

Saturday, May 7, 2016 – C3 Ep.m.

S T.11 J Oa.m.

SEPH NTER

Spring Festival

$5/person (max $20/family) 6800 Camp Robinson Road, North Little Rock

PLEASE CONFIRM THIS ORDER WITH COST (GROSS/NET) BY EMAIL OR FAX TO

May 7, 2016 Art Show –Saturday, Lettuce Stroll/Walk – Food Trucks 11 a.m.Activities – 3 p.m.– Craft Beer Music – Children’s (max Shelter $20/family) Games –$5/person NLR Animal – Hayrides

Magician Show at 12:30–p.m.

Art Show – Lettuce Stroll/Walk Food Trucks

410-580-5417

Music – Children’s Activities – Craft Beer

Games – NLR Animal Shelter – Hayrides St. Joseph Farm Stand will be open!

Magician Show at 12:30 p.m.

St. Joseph Farm Stand will be open!

presents

www.stjosephcenter.org

www.stjosephcenter.org

St. Joseph Center of Arkansas, Inc.

Lettuce Grow

Lettuce Grow

All proceeds help save this historic property!

All proceeds help save this historic property!

LERY, 110 N. Market St.: Work by Dianne RobSPONSORS erts, classes.

10 a.m.-9 p.m. Wed.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 CITY OF NLR U.S. PIZZA CO. Hogg’s Meat Market Hal & Vicki Matthews New Opportunities, Don Streit Stanley Hardware p.m.

Sat. 860-7467.

FAYETTEVILLE MAMA CARMEN’S COFFEE, 2850 N. College St.: “In Her Shoes,” exhibit on sex-trafficking by Helen Taylor, through May 14. 479-521-6262.

UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS: “2016 Small Works on Paper,” Fine Arts Gallery, through April.

JONESBORO ARKANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY: “Spring 2016 Senior Exhibition,” through May 14. 870-9723687.

FORT SMITH REGIONAL ART MUSEUM, 1601 Rogers Ave.: “The Life and Art of Mary Petty,” works by New Yorker cartoonist, through June 30; “Beverly Conley: Photographic Journeys,” through June 26, closing reception June 24. 11 a.m.-6 p.m.

Tue.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 479-784-2787.

UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS AT FORT SMITH, 510 Grand Ave.: “Sammy Peters: Then & Now,” Windgate Art & Design Gallery, through May. 479-788-7530.

Union Pacific

May 6, 7, 13, 14, 20, 21, 2016 A powerful true drama of six women who went to Vietnam $16 Adults • $12 Students, Seniors & Military (Active, Retired & Veterans) 7:30 pm Fridays and Saturdays For more information contact us at 501.374.3761 or www.weekendtheater.org

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

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

www.arktimes.com

MAY 5, 2016

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MUSIC BY

MAY 13

THE LIBRAS AND

ISAAC ALEXANDER

at the Argenta Plaza

5th & Main, North Little Rock PARTICIPATING BREWERIES Abita Carson’s Core Damgoode Brews Diamond Bear Founders Hacker-Pschorr Lazy Magnolia Lost Forty Marshall Mother’s Paulaner Public House Pulaski Tech Fermentation Science Dept Rebel Kettle Tallgrass The Dudes Vino’s

Friday, May 13, 2016 - 6 - 9 pm

RAIN OR SHINE

Purchase tickets early: $35, at the door $40

TICKETS: bit.ly/firkinfest16

OVER 15,000 SAMPLES! 30 Vessels (15 Firkins, 13 PINs & 2 Casks)

JOIN US FOR THE FIRST FIRKIN FEST, a continuation of our Craft Beer Festival tradition but with a cool twist! One big night of fun, food, entertainment & tasting fine beer!

WHAT THE FIRK IS A FIRKIN?

Firkins are basically smaller kegs where beer which has not been cold-filtered, pasteurized and carbonated by outside equipment can continue to ferment and change. Many brewers get

creative by adding flavors to it in the firkin, ranging from fruits, nuts, or berries to herbs, spices, and coffee.

It’s old school methodology meets new world creativity for often unpredictable results.

BEER & FOOD

SPONSORED BY

8 local restaurants will be serving including: Arkansas Ale House, Damgoode Pies, Old Chicago Pizza, Skinny J’s, @ the Corner, Cafe Bossa Nova, and Zaffino’s

HEY, RESTAURANT OWNER!

Interested in serving your food at the beer festival? Contact phyllis@arktimes.com!

#firkinrad

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MAY 5, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

We’d love to have you.