Arkansas Times - April 14, 2016 by Arkansas Times

MAY 13 Argenta Plaza 5th & Main, North Little Rock

BEER & FOOD Eight local restaurants will be serving including

Friday, May 13, 2016 - 6 - 9 pm

Arkansas Ale House, Damgoode

RAIN OR SHINE

Pies, Old Chicago Pizza, Skinny J’s, @ the Corner, and Zaffino’s.

Purchase tickets early $35, at the door $40 TICKETS: http://bit.ly/firkinfest16

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.

PARTICIPATING BREWERIES Abita Carson’s Core Damgoode Brews Diamond Bear Founders Hacker-Pschorr Lazy Magnolia Lost Forty

Plus more being announced soon!

APRIL 14, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

Mother’s Paulaner Public House Pulaski Tech Fermentation Science Dept Rebel Kettle Sponsored Tallgrass The Dudes

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

We'd love to have you.

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Looking for 36 men who have sung in High School choruses between 1980-1990 and would like to audition to join a competition Acapella group. Acapella Rising, Little Rock’s premier Acapella Chorus, invites you to their open house on Monday, April 25, at 7:00 pm at the Cornerstone Bible Church, 7351 Warden Road, Sherwood, AR Members will be required to join the national society.

SENIOR EDITOR Max Brantley

Five scholarships will be available for the first year’s dues.

MANAGING EDITOR Leslie Newell Peacock CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Mara Leveritt

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® ®, CRPC®, CRPS® AAMS Kelly R, ADPA Journey, AAMS®, Financial Advisor

. Financial Advisor ADPA®, CRPC® 10506 Stagecoach Road Suite C Financial Advisor 10800 Financial Centre Parkway, Ste. 270

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Call 501-791-7464 (SING) to RSVP and we will send music and learning tracks to you.

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ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR Will Stephenson EDITORIAL ART DIRECTOR Bryan Moats PHOTOGRAPHER Brian Chilson ADVERTISING ART DIRECTOR Mike Spain GRAPHIC DESIGNER Kevin Waltermire DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING Phyllis A. Britton DIRECTOR OF SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS Rebekah Hardin SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE Tiffany Holland ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Brooke Wallace, Lee Major, Ashley Gill ADVERTISING TRAFFIC MANAGER Roland R. Gladden ADVERTISING COORDINATOR Jim Hunnicutt SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING DIRECTOR Lauren Bucher IT DIRECTOR Robert Curfman CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Anitra Hickman CONTROLLER Weldon Wilson BILLING/COLLECTIONS Linda Phillips OFFICE MANAGER/ACCOUNTS PAYABLE Kelly Lyles PRODUCTION MANAGER Ira Hocut (1954-2009)

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VOLUME 42, NUMBER 32 ARKANSAS TIMES (ISSN 0164-6273) is published each week by Arkansas Times Limited Partnership, 201 East Markham Street, Suite 200, Little Rock, Arkansas, 72201, phone (501) 375-2985. Periodical postage paid at Little Rock, Arkansas, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to ARKANSAS TIMES, 201 EAST MARKHAM STREET, SUITE 200, Little Rock, AR, 72201. Subscription prices are $42 for one year, $74 for two years. Subscriptions outside Arkansas are $49 for one year, $88 for two years. Foreign (including Canadian) subscriptions are $168 a year. For subscriber service call (501) 375-2985. Current single-copy price is 75¢, free in Pulaski County. Single issues are available by mail at $2.50 each, postage paid. Payment must accompany all single-copy orders. Reproduction or use in whole or in part of the contents without the written consent of the publishers is prohibited. Manuscripts and artwork will not be returned or acknowledged unless sufficient return postage and a self-addressed stamped envelope are included. All materials are handled with due care; however, the publisher assumes no responsibility for care and safe return of unsolicited materials. All letters sent to ARKANSAS TIMES will be treated as intended for publication and are subject to ARKANSAS TIMES’ unrestricted right to edit or to comment editorially.

providing complete cancer care Celebrating survivorship with the Seed of Hope ceremony In Arkansas, there’s only one place that provides complete cancer care. It’s where you’ll find 9 out of the 10 Arkansas physicians named to Newsweek’s Top Cancer Doctors’ list. Plus, you will have access to more clinical trials, the newest technology and genetic testing for personalized treatments. At the UAMS Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, the state’s top minds work side by side with patients and their loved ones to ensure caring and compassion — from diagnosis to survivorship. We are UAMS, and we’re here for a better state of health. UAMShealth.com

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APRIL 14, 2016

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COMMENT

Equality and Greenberg The state’s other newspaper recently ran a piece by longtime laissez-faire champion Paul Greenberg entitled “Down with equality.” Mr. Greenberg suggests in his column that the meaning of the word “equality” has been changed since the time of our founding fathers. A word once meaning “equality only before the law” and “equality of opportunity,” as Greenberg says, has undergone a profound transformation and now means “material equality — an equality of income, of property, of spoils,” as he puts it. What Mr. Greenberg is saying is that founders like Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith envisioned a level playing field where attributes like integrity and determination could win for one a position of power and material wealth within society. Or as he puts it, “an aristocracy of merit arising out of an equality of opportunity.” Wow, by using the word “aristocracy,” Mr. Greenberg doesn’t even hide the fact he believes in a ruling class. To put it plainly, Greenberg believes in a free market utopia where

honest and hard-working individuals are rewarded for their efforts. Yes, the political right has its dreamers, too. This all sounds good, but the fair and free market of opportunity so desired by Greenberg is only possible if everyone involved starts at the same level materially and educationally and conducts themselves morally while participating in the market. This, however, is not the reality of the situation. We don’t all start life with the same opportunities laid before us. There’s a lot of hard-working and honest people out there struggling, and with few, if any, prospects of doing better. And there are members of a ruling elite that seek to profit off the misery of the struggling masses. If we truly want to achieve a free market of equal opportunity, as Mr. Greenberg says he wants, then we must acknowledge the playing field is not level and consider measures to even it a little. As most Americans know, freedom comes with a price. If we want more freedom of opportunity among the masses, then the privileged few may have to give up some free-

dom — at least the freedom to benefit disproportionately from the labors of others. Richard Hutson Cabot

On ‘Nowhere Man’ To Will Stephenson: Wow! What a joy to read your superbly composed feature [“The Ballad of Fred and Yoko,” March 31]. As a veteran DJ and vinyl lover and a lesbian, I was deeply moved. What a great tribute to a tragic soul. Thanks. Alicia Banks Little Rock

From the web In response to an Arkansas Blog post by David Ramsey on state Sen. Terry Rice’s statement that Medicaid expansion to cover health care costs for the poor would be “enslaving” future generations, a term that state Sen. Stephanie Flowers, who is black, took exception to: David, less than a year ago, your

paper published an article by Ernest Dumas entitled “Slaves to the past.” The force of the metaphor in Dumas’ title is that we are, sometimes and to some extent, controlled by things that happened long ago. You can fight the metaphor all you want, but I find it hard to believe that a smart, well-read guy like you really finds its use all that unusual — apparently other Arkansas Times staffers do not. I think a more sober analysis of the metaphor is that, if anything, its use approaches a cliche. I appreciate that there are some members of the legislature with an almost entrepreneurial talent for taking offense, but this is a pretty slim reed. Thanks for the link to the Arkansas Project — I think if you go back and read it, you’ll see that there is a pretty strong argument that the .0004 percent figure is not the relevant one. Medicaid expansion on a national basis is very, very, very expensive. Dan Greenberg Hi Dan! The argument that the .0004 percent figure is not the relevant one is not strong, but silly, as I already addressed in the post: “The Arkansas Legislature has no control over whether or not other states accept the Medicaid expansion.” The Arkansas Legislature’s decision on Medicaid expansion has an impact on the debt so trivial as to be meaningless. You are well aware of this, but my understanding is that you oppose the state’s decision to move forward with the Medicaid expansion for other reasons. David Ramsey Dan Greenberg, for your enlightenment, my husband might have died seven years earlier than he did had he not had Medicare. As it happens, he was treated and remained in reasonably good health for most of the rest of his life. I might now be in a nursing home because of increasing blindness with a resultant inability to drive. Or I might have developed another malady that could have led to my death, had it not been found and treated early, all with the assistance of Medicare. I’m not about to deny anyone else the opportunity to have decent medical care on the basis that it’s going to cost too much. That you would shows what kind of person you are. Doigotta

APRIL 14, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

We’re encouraging environmentally friendly lodging and dining establishments across the state to keep Arkansas natural and beautiful, inside and out. Many Arkansas businesses are committed to green efforts that are good for the

Make every day (and night) Earth Day

environment and for business. More and more travelers are making green choices around The Natural State. To help attract them, download materials at GreenTravelArkansas.com to promote your location’s sustainable practices.

THE ARKANSAS HUMANITIES COUNCIL presents... ARKANSAS AND THE PULITZER PRIZE Celebrating 100 Years of the Pulitzer Prize

From the Pulitzer Prize Campfire Initiative The Arkansas Humanities Council will celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize with four lectures focusing on winners of the prize with Arkansas connections. John Gould Fletcher Lecture • April 14, 2016, 7pm Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1939: Ben Johnson, Southern Arkansas University Professor of History and biographer of John Gould Fletcher will give the lecture at the Ron Robinson Theater during the 2016 Arkansas Literary Festival. The lecture will be followed by a discussion of Fletcher and his poetry.

Ernest Hemingway Lecture • June 23, 2016, 7pm Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1953: Alex Vernon of Hendrix College will give the lecture at ASU Jonesboro.

The Arkansas Gazette Lecture • October 4, 2016, 7pm Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Service and Editorial Writing 1958: Ray Moseley will give the lecture at the Ron Robinson Theater.

Paul Greenberg Lecture • Fall 2016 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing 1969. The lecture will be at the Ron Robinson Theater.

ArkansasHumanitiesCouncil.org

Funded in part by the Arkansas Humanities Council, The National Endowment For The Humanities and The Pulitzer Prize Campfire Initiative. www.arktimes.com

APRIL 14, 2016

EYE ON ARKANSAS

WEEK THAT WAS

Quote of the Week “We’re playing some pretty hard chicken right now with both people’s feet on the accelerator. I think the only thing that’s going to bring resolution to this is a crash.” — State Sen. Bart Hester (R-Cave Springs) last week, promising to shut down funding for every Medicaid program in the state if the legislature refuses the demands of a small minority of tea party Republicans to end the private option (a.k.a. “Arkansas Works”). Hester and his allies want to reverse the Medicaid expansion made possible by Obamacare, which now provides insurance to 267,000 low-income Arkansans, and they’re willing to accept the end of medical services for the elderly, the disabled and hundreds of thousands of children as collateral damage. (See Reporter, page 12.)

Remember HB 1228, Arkansas’s “religious freedom” bill aimed against LGBT people, which sparked protests at the Arkansas Capitol one year ago? Republican legislators in North Carolina and Mississippi have pushed the envelope even further. In North Carolina, a new law restricts transgender individuals’ use of public restrooms and prevents local governments from creating civil rights ordinances that extend protections to LGBT people. The text of Mississippi’s new law says it’s intended to protect “sincerely held religious beliefs” against not only samesex marriage, but also “sexual relations” outside of marriage; it details a broad roster of religious activity that it says should be exempt from state purview. As in Arkansas and Indiana last year, the backlash has been intense. Business groups have spoken out against the bills, performers have canceled concerts in both states, and PayPal has reversed plans to open an operations center in Charlotte, N.C., that would have created 400 jobs. Let’s be thankful the Arkansas legislature won’t go into regular session until 2017.

Word games After some previous resistance, the state Medical Board last week voted to comply with a legislative committee’s orders to modify the language in new regulations related to abortion, changing the word “fetus” to “unborn child” and “unborn human individual.” The board in January presented language that used “fetus,” since that’s the accepted medi6

APRIL 14, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

DAVID SNODDY

Anti-LGBT laws on the march

NATURE TAKES A BRIDGE: The Springfield-Des Arc Bridge by David Snoddy from our Flickr Eye on Arkansas page.

cal term used by doctors, not “unborn child.” But doctors be damned — the Arkansas Legislative Council told the board to make the change anyway.

New blood in Little Rock politics? Molly Miller, a Clinton School of Public Service student, announced this week she will challenge Little Rock City Director Joan Adcock for the at-large seat that Adcock has held since 1992. In her press release, Miller called herself “a pro-growth progressive” and said she supports considering alternatives to the “30 Crossing” downtown highway expansion and rebuilding the Little Rock School District. Miller will face an uphill battle against Adcock, a veteran campaigner, but this could be an election cycle that favors insurgents. (Meanwhile, the two other citywide seats on the City Board are also up for election. Might at-large incumbents Gene Fortson and Dean Kumpuris draw challengers, too?)

Arkansas’s budget without the private option, by the numbers A group of 10 state senators are vowing to block renewal of Medicaid expansion, thus removing $142.7 million (at least) from the state’s budget. House Speaker Jeremy Gillam (R-Judsonia) is one of those who supports Medicaid expansion, and this week he offered members a look at likely cuts — totaling 3 to 5 percent across every state agency — if Arkansas loses the increased federal funding made possible by the policy. Among the losses:

$10.9 million $7.4 million from the Division of Children and Family Services, which handles foster care, adoptions and the rest of the state’s already overloaded child welfare system.

from the Department of Correction, the state prison system.

$9 million $5 million $18 million from stipends given to National Board Certified teachers.

from the state’s prekindergarten program, Arkansas Better Chance.

from various other K-12 education programs.

OPINION

Bootstraps for me, not thee

ean spirit, hypocrisy and misinformation abound among the rump minority threatening to wreck state government rather than allow passage of the state Medicaid appropriation if it continues to include the Obamacare-funded expansion of health insurance coverage for working poor. Rep. Josh Miller (R-Heber Springs) is in a tight race to the bottom with the mean-spirited Sen. Bart Hester (R-Cave Springs). I first wrote about Miller in 2014. Left paralyzed by an alcohol-fueled wreck 13 years earlier, he was helped back to a productive place in society by significant government and charitable help. Medicaid paid most of a $1 million hospital and rehab bill. Miller was uninsured (a condition that had forced him already to go untreated from injuries in an earlier fist fight). His disability means he’s a continuing beneficiary of government health

people health coverage. This, remember, is the same kind of health coverage that Miller enjoys as the result of a drunken joy ride that turned tragic. He need not work nor submit to job training to receive it. He wrote a post on his Facebook page defending his opposition to Medicaid coverage and other expansion, even with the governor’s amendments to make the poor more assistance, including daily personal “accountable.” The private option has been a “disascare. Now, in addition to taxpayer ter,” Miller wrote. He claims it has made payments of his it more difficult for recipients of tradiMAX legislative salary tional Medicaid to get services. BRANTLEY maxbrantley@arktimes.com and federal benGov. Hutchinson’s idea to make ableefits, he’s in the bodied recipients go to job training is no rental real estate business, where his cli- comfort to Miller. He said it will probents have included people who receive ably just amount to passing out a “pamfederal rent subsidies. Also, in 2013, one of phlet.” He wrote: his few legislative accomplishments was legislation to insure the disabled (such as “I’m sure this training will include Miller) would continue to receive Medinstructions like these: icaid benefits regardless of income and would not have to undergo an asset test. A. Set your alarm B. Get out of bed You might think Josh Miller would be C. Get dressed more sympathetic. But he’s one of two D. Go look for a job dozen or so in the House willing to see an E. If offered a job, take it end to all Medicaid services — benefiting F. Do you best to do your job everyone from children to the elderly in G. Repeat steps A, B, C and F every nursing homes — rather than accept the day of your employment. federal dollars that have given 267,000

God and bigotry

less her heart, Mississippi has bested us again and the rest of the South, too, in a predictable venue — enshrining religion-based bigotry in state law. But the Magnolia State has to compete for the world’s attention with states like North Carolina and Georgia with bigger bullhorns than its own or Arkansas’s. Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signed into law a bill allowing government workers and businesses to deny services to gays and lesbians based on the workers’ or business owners’ religious beliefs. Billy Graham’s son Franklin promptly thanked Bryant for striking a blow for religious freedom. But the Georgia and North Carolina governors grabbed all the attention. Georgia’s Nathan Deal, a conservative Republican, vetoed his legislature’s religious liberty bill. “I do not think we have to discriminate against anyone to protect the faith-based community in Georgia,” the old Baptist deacon said. North Carolina’s governor, Pat McCrory, signed a similar bill, earning praise from many conservatives and vows from the

National Football League and national business concerns to avoid the state. State religious-liberty laws are supposed to preempt cities like Little Rock and Eureka Springs that enact their own laws forbidding disERNEST crimination based DUMAS on race, sex or any other human condition. The real purpose of the state laws is to declare homosexuality and same-sex marriage still officially evil in their states no matter what many other state and municipal laws and the U.S. Supreme Court have decreed. Arkansas passed a religious-liberty bill last year and Gov. Hutchinson signed it with little fanfare, but we are assured that our version only mirrors the empty slogans in a federal statute signed by Bill Clinton. The Arkansas law may still give you the state’s blessing if you refuse to sell a wedding cake to a lesbian or refuse a transgender person a restroom at your filling station without a birth certificate and a full-body inspection.

Mississippi comes to this gay question with a richer history than the rest of the South. Slogans there are followed by deeds. The state for a long time tried to enforce and advertise religion’s sanction of slavery and then segregation as God’s commandment. At my South Arkansas church in the 1950s we were told about the Curse of Ham. Noah’s grandson and Ham’s son, Canaan, had black pigment (thus, he founded the black race) and was banished by Noah to become a slave, along with all his progeny. See, God intended blacks to be forever inferior and separate. When the Supreme Court declared separate schools to be unconstitutional, Southern states set up state sovereignty commissions to protect segregation and the freedoms of the faithful. The Arkansas legislature created the sovereignty commission, but Gov. Orval Faubus wouldn’t appoint its members until a lawsuit made him do it. Then he staffed it with do-nothings. Not Mississippi. The commission’s investigators went to work. One target was tiny Rust College, a Methodist school set up after the Civil War to educate freedmen. Rust’s president, Dr. Earnest A. Smith, had allowed the professors, including two or three known to

I am not kidding about this. My feeling is that these adults (who are able bodied and healthy but are earning $00.00 don’t want a job. Many of them have it figured out that they can stay unemployed and have their needs met by those who do believe in the principles of hard work. I’m sure that their lifestyle isn’t what they might want it to be but, hey — they don’t have to work 40+ hours a week to make ends meet like the taxpayers do. I honestly don’t mind helping people who are trying to help themselves but I have a hard time giving the fruits of hard labor to those who CHOOSE to sit at home and do nothing. Many people who get this insurance DO work, by the way. A $19 monthly premium for recipients, as the governor has proposed, also doesn’t assuage Miller. He thinks they won’t pay. It’s the old story. A fellow who got a substantial hand up the ladder to selfsufficiency wants to tromp on the fingers of the people coming up behind him. He knows at least one who’s deserving (Josh Miller), but he’s convinced 267,000 are not.

be gay, and civil rights activists to converge on the campus in the summer of 1964 to organize black voter registration. The commission’s sleuths investigated sexual proclivities on the campus. Its report, the contents of which became public after a judge in 1996 opened its archives to the public, was filled with innuendoes from anonymous sources about rampant homosexuality and just plain old sex among Dr. Smith, his faculty and students. Smith had hired “oddballs and homos” and “white beatniks” to teach English and other subjects and to stir up blacks, the report said. A female professor was suspected of actually being a man. The commission’s report told the college’s trustees to fire Smith immediately and they complied. He spent the next 13 years in exile as director of human relations for the United Methodist Church of America. The commission’s work protecting segregation and religious piety left a stain on Mississippi. The files documented the commission’s complicity in the murder of the three freedom workers at Philadelphia, Miss., and the protection of the assassin of NAACP president Medgar Evers. Mississippi may not have the heart to give the same force to the religious liberty act of 2016. www.arktimes.com

APRIL 14, 2016

Bill & black lives

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APRIL 14, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

atching Bill Clinton bickering with Black Lives Matter activists in Philadelphia recently, I had several conflicting, and not entirely praiseworthy responses. One was that the longer an American political campaign continues, the dumber and uglier it gets. That woman who shouted that Bill Clinton should be charged with crimes against humanity? He probably should have let it go. Bickering over a 1994 crime bill has little political salience in 2016, particularly since Hillary’s opponent, the sainted Bernie Sanders, actually voted for the damn thing. She didn’t. Instead, Clinton briefly lost his cool. The next day, he said he “almost” wanted to apologize, which strikes me as slicing the bologna awfully thin even for him. You’ve probably seen the 10-second clip on TV. “I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out on the street to murder other African-American children,” Clinton said angrily. “Maybe you thought they were good citizens, [Hillary] didn’t. You are defending the people who killed the people whose lives you say matter! Tell the truth. You are defending the people who caused young people to go out and take guns.” Many Democratic-oriented pundits found this shocking. Evidently political journalism is where Freudianism — or Maureen Dowdism anyway — has gone to die. Even as astute an observer as Slate’s Michelle Goldberg went all psychoanalytical on Clinton. “It is somehow only when he is working on his wife’s behalf that he veers into sabotage,” she wrote. “What is needed here is probably a shrink. … Either he doesn’t want her to overtake him, or he doesn’t want her to repudiate him. Regardless, Hillary should shut him down. She can’t divorce him, but she can fire him.” Fat chance. Anyway, who says the outburst hurt her? Sure Bill Clinton can get hot defending his wife. I suspect more voters find that admirable than not. It’s also unclear whom Clinton’s tantrum offended. “If you read some intellectuals on the left, they’d suggest there should be a grudge against the Clintons,” Michael Fortner, a professor of urban studies at the City University of New York told the Christian Science Monitor “but I think the primary results show there isn’t a grudge at all.”

Fortner, author of the book “Black Silent Majority,” argues that contrary to Black Lives GENE Matter activists, LYONS many in the African-American community understand that the tough-on-crime aspects of the 1994 law weren’t foisted upon them by white racists. Devastated by a veritable tsunami of violence and gang warfare, “political leaders, mayors, and pastors played an important role in pushing for these policies.” In Little Rock, where I lived, it was common to hear fusillades of gunfire in black neighborhoods at night. During Clinton’s first term, the city’s homicide rate was nearly triple today’s — the vast majority of victims young black men. Teenagers I coached on Boys Club basketball teams needed to be careful what color clothing they wore en route to practice. People got shot to death for wearing Crips blue in Bloods neighborhoods. Businesses closed, jobs dried up; anybody with the means to get out, got out. Including, one suspects, the parents of some Black Lives Matter activists. There’s a reason two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus joined Bernie Sanders in supporting the 1994 legislation. Clinton told them about all that, along with a recitation of the bill’s Democratic virtues: a (since rescinded) assault-weapons ban, the Violence Against Women Act and 100,000 new cops on the beat. Then he made some probably insupportable claims about the crime bill’s good effects: “A 25-year low in crime, a 33-year low in the murder rate — and listen to this, because of that and the backgroundcheck law, a 46-year low in the deaths of people from gun violence. And who do you think those lives were, that mattered? Whose lives were saved, that mattered?” But then it’s also a stretch to say the bill’s responsible for America having more citizens in prison than Russia and Iran. Eighty-seven percent are in state, not federal lockups. Fifty-three of those for violent crimes. Those numbers Clinton didn’t dwell upon, although he did in a speech last year. “The bad news,” he said “is we had a lot of people who were locked up, who were minor actors, for way too long.”

The South and LGBT rights

wo remarkable movements are underway across the South right now. First is a tide of state legislation intended to counteract progress on LGBT rights. Second, and even more remarkable considering the political history of the region, is strong economic pressure fighting these legislative efforts. Considering the extraordinary â&#x20AC;&#x201D; indeed, arguably unmatched â&#x20AC;&#x201D; attitudinal transformation on LGBT issues that Americans have undergone in recent decades, it is clear how this war will ultimately play out, but in the shorter term the battle for the heart and soul of the South is an unpredictable contest. Following last summerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Obergefell decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court enshrined marriage equality in American law, some expected a backlash in public attitudes about LGBT individuals and LGBT-related public policies across the nation. Such a backlash has indeed emerged, but only within a certain political niche: Republican Party elites in the reddest of states, most prominently in the legislatures of the South. The actions of these Southern elected officials exemplify the traditionalism that has defined the political culture of the South for most of the regionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history. Such traditionalism resists social and political change in all its forms because of the comforting stability the status quo provides, particularly to those at the top of the power structure. Some Southern governors have agreed to sign anti-LGBT legislation pushed by their legislative majorities. In North Carolina, Gov. Pat McCrory signed HB 2, which both bars localities from protecting groups not covered by the stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s civil rights law (in essence, a less sloppy version of an Arkansas law now being tested in court) and places an explicit ban on individuals using public bathrooms not corresponding to the sex they were assigned at birth. This means that localitiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity have been struck down across the state. Last week, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signed an act to â&#x20AC;&#x153;protect freedom of conscience from government discrimination.â&#x20AC;? HB 1523 allows public officials and private parties to refuse various services to individuals based on their marital status, sexuality or gender identity if doing so violates their reli-

gious conscience. Although Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal is of a similar ideological ilk, he made a JAY different decision BARTH when faced with a â&#x20AC;&#x153;religious freedomâ&#x20AC;? bill like the one in Mississippi. Deal did so because of business interests who contended the law would stifle economic opportunity in Georgia, including making it unlikely that the NFL would pick Atlanta as a future Super Bowl site. These arguments were an excellent example of the entrepreneurialism that analysts of Southern politics have highlighted as the competitor to traditionalism in the region since the 1970s. Entrepreneurialism says that even more important than holding on to traditional values and power structures is the promise of economic growth in the â&#x20AC;&#x153;New South.â&#x20AC;? It is one thing for economic forces to oppose anti-LGBT legislation, but it is even more interesting that those interests are not giving up even after bills become law. In North Carolina, PayPal has already stopped plans to bring 400 high-paying jobs to the Charlotte area; the NBA has said its 2017 All-Star game will not take place in Charlotte unless the legislation is revisited; a major Internet porn company has barred North Carolina IP addresses from accessing its sites; and Bruce Springsteen last week canceled a Greensboro concert, saying â&#x20AC;&#x153;some things are more important than a rock show.â&#x20AC;? The backlash in Mississippi has been similar. Perhaps most startling to Mississippians, Southeastern Conference officials said that they would take the legislation into account in the siting of future conference events. All these examples dramatize the fundamental nature of the attitudinal shift on LGBT issues in contemporary America. Some see such aggressive threats and actions as economic â&#x20AC;&#x153;bullying.â&#x20AC;? (Having seen Springsteen in Portland a few weeks back, I agree that denying anyone access to â&#x20AC;&#x153;The River 2016 Tourâ&#x20AC;? is indeed pretty ghastly.) But, that description is driven by the reality that such interests will ultimately prevail on this issue, as they did in Arkansas during the debate over HB 1228 last year.

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APRIL 14, 2016

Humane Society of Pulaski County’s 70th Anniversary Celebration & 70’s Style

CONCERT TIMES

PRESENTS

Sunday, April 17 @ 3 pm Monday, April 18 @ 7 pm Thursday, April 21 @ 7 pm

FUR BALL

Friday April 29th, 2016 7 PM-11 PM Next Level Events in the Historic Union Station

waters MIGHTY

HSPC Cat “Blythe”  

LITTLE PONDS

  

All performances are free and open to the public. Trinity United Methodist Church 1101 N. Mississippi | Little Rock 501.377.1080 | rivercitymenschorus.com

HSPC Dog “Curly Sue”

A disco inFURno with 70’s decorations and themed food Come dance to the classic 70’s sounds of rock & disco Live band (popular local band “Just Sayin”) and a DJ Silent auction of dog & cat bowls & treat jars created by professional artists Guests are encouraged to dress “Old School” 1970’s or in whatever makes you feel “Groovy!”

Individual tickets: $46 in advance, $53 at the door Sponsorships available: From $270-$7000 Purchase tickets and sponsorships at: www.warmhearts.org

70 Years of Saving Lives is Something to Celebrate!

7 P.M. TUESDAY, APRIL 19

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presents…

Pierre Bensusan Thursday April 21 7:30 p.m. The Joint

BY WILLIAM FRIEDK IN

301 Main Street North Little Rock

Tickets $20

A true global diplomat of the guitar, Pierre was voted “Best World Music Guitar Player in 2008” by Guitar Player Magazine Readers Choice.

Available at the door or online at www.argentaartsacousticmusic.com

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APRIL 14, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

THE OBSERVER NOTES ON THE PASSING SCENE

The art of the fold

he Observer is still learning, in our decrepitude, one of the hardest lessons there is to learn: when to stop putting chips on the table and fold. You tried to teach us, Kenny Rogers! Why didn’t we listen? Giving up on a thing — a dream, a desire, a want, a need, a person, a life, a relationship, whatever — is hard as hell, and knowing when to say when is even harder. It’s especially hard for Yours Truly. We, the less-than-fortunate son of a country that regards dying for your own personal Alamo as virtue and in a state where many otherwise sane folks are still raising toasts, rah-rahing and flag-waving over the second-place ribbon the Confederacy received in the Civil War, were raised to never give up. Americans are a people, by and large, that know how to win, know how to lose, but don’t know how to quit. That trickles down to a lot of our citizenry and makes more of us miserable than you’d think: All those people who have held on to their cupcakeries and scrapbooking stores and back-of-a-cocktail napkin ideas to make a cool million long after the Invisible Hand of the Free Market has reared back and slapped them upside the head. All those people who cling to relationships, blood and love, long after it’s become clear that whatever made them worth a damn has long since flown. All those people who cling to jobs that make them wish for the zombie apocalypse so they might actually feel useful to mankind. All those people who cling to people, even as their bodies sprout tubes and wires like mechanical kudzu up at the hospital. “Quitter” is a curse word. “Failure,” meanwhile, is an epithet reserved for your direst enemy, or — more often — one’s own self, deep

down in the stygian depths of the night. The Observer, as we grow older, is trying to do all we can to let go of that. We’ve been doing a lot of soul searching on the subject of late. Such things happen when you grow older, kiddies. As the gray in our hair slowly drives the brown from the world map of our noggin, we’re coming to recognize that, contrary to what you may have heard, the road to hell isn’t paved with good intentions. It’s actually a cobblestone lane bricked in regret, most of those bricks indelibly and maddeningly stamped with all the ways you contributed to the things that went sideways. And so we are letting that go as much as we can. The Observer would submit that there is something worse than failure, and that’s lingering too long, overstaying your visa in that land that once blossomed for you, but now bears only thorns, in the false hope that it will blossom again. Like a friend said to us once: Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is to buy a bus ticket. These are the thoughts that come to The Observer more and more often these days, friends, consuming The Grand Old Insomniac of Maple Street while our Beloved sleeps and Junior sleeps and Netflix comes up empty and the cat does her best to destroy The Observatory one blind and decorative pillow at a time. Not because The Observer is unhappy with where we are or the choices we’ve made, but because time is a river that is always sweeping us toward the sea. Cruising into middle age soon, and many of those we care for even older, we are trying to find the Zen of “when” — how to fold while we’re still ahead. We believe that will be of good service to us someday, and especially when it comes time to cash out.

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APRIL 14, 2016

Arkansas Reporter

THE

HESTER: Angling for a crash.

Hard chicken and the Tea Party 10 A minority threatens a shutdown over Medicaid expansion. BY DAVID RAMSEY

funding fight looms as the fiscal session begins this week: A rump group of tea party legislators are threatening to hold the entire Medicaid budget hostage in order to try to end the private option. A Medicaid shutdown would immediately end funding for some of the state’s most vulnerable citizens on July 1, including the aged, disabled and the blind; people in nursing homes; children on ARKids; and foster kids receiving medical care. The private option uses money available via the federal Affordable Care Act to purchase private health insurance for low-income Arkansans. It’s the state’s unique version of Medicaid expansion, which expands coverage to adults who make less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level (around $16,000 for an individual or $33,000 for a family of four). Gov. Hutchinson’s plan to continue the policy, now renamed “Arkansas Works,” easily passed both houses of the legislature last week with enormous bipartisan majorities — 70-30 in the House and 25-10 in the Senate, with a majority of Republicans in each chamber joining all Democrats in backing the measure. The private option provides health insurance to more than 267,000 low-income Arkansans, projects to save the state budget hundreds of millions of dollars, saves billions in uncompensated care costs for state hospitals, and pours billions in federal money into the state’s

APRIL 14, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

health care system and economy. The governor signed “Arkansas Works” into law on Friday. However, the appropriation for the Medicaid budget — that’s not just the private option but all Medicaid services — is generally thought to require 75 percent approval in both houses. Theoretically, just nine senators (or 26 in the House) could shut down the entire Medicaid program if the overwhelming majority didn’t give in to their demands to rescind “Arkansas Works.” With tensions flaring at the Capitol, Sen. Bart Hester (R-Cave Springs) made a chilling statement, published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette last week: “We’re playing some pretty hard chicken right now with both people’s feet on the accelerator. I think the only thing that’s going to bring resolution to this is a crash.” If Hester makes good on his threat, a humanitarian disaster would follow. Hutchinson expressed confidence that the nightmare scenario threatened by Hester could be avoided. “My objective in the coming days is to win the funding for the Department of Human Services that would include the Arkansas Works legislation that has been adopted,” Hutchinson said. “It is my responsibility as governor to avoid what some have described as an inevitable crash. I want, as governor, to avoid that crash. I want to keep the wheels of gov-

ernment on the road, and progressing and working for the people of this state. I’m confident that this can be done.” Most observers at the Capitol believe that the governor will be able to find the needed supermajority in the House. Rep. Laurie Rushing (R-Hot Springs), who voted against “Arkansas Works,” said that she had no intention of playing shutdown games with the appropriation. “The people of Arkansas have spoken through their representatives,” she said. “There’s no reason to hold up the whole DHS budget when the majority of Arkansas wants Arkansas Works.” Rushing said that six other House members who had voted against the legislation felt the same way. The Senate is another matter, where nine to 10 senators, led by Hester, are digging in their heels. What happens if the Tea Party 10 make good on their threat and drive the state over the cliff? At the end of June, all funding would end for the following: • Medical care for the aged, disabled and the blind, covering 142,077 people. This includes the elderly in nursing homes and people with severe disabilities. • ARKids, providing coverage for almost 400,000 low-income kids. • Home and community-based services for 11,000 elderly people and people with severe physical disabilities. • Medical services for nearly 5,000 foster children (the Division of Children and Family Services is not part of the relevant Medical Services appropriation, but medical care for many foster children is funded via the Medicaid budget). • TEFRA, a Medicaid program that provides care to disabled children in their homes. Funding that helps thousands of families with children with severe health challenges such as cerebral palsy and wheelchair-bound children would halt. • Coverage for around 1,000 developmentally disabled patients receiving care at the Human Development Centers. • Funding to help more than 60,000 elderly Medicare beneficiaries with care and costs not covered by Medicare. • Coverage for more than 10,000 extremely poor parents of depen-

dent children. • Coverage for more than 10,000 lowincome pregnant women who are not otherwise covered by the private option. • Closure of the 250-bed Arkansas Health Center, a public nursing home that takes patients that few or no other nursing homes will take, such as patients on a ventilator and patients with severe cognitive dysfunction. • State hospitals that provide care for civilly committed patients having acute and severe behavioral health crises would lose 30 beds. These Arkansas patients and families would have funding for their medical care evaporate if Hester makes good on his threat of a “crash.” (This is not an exhaustive list.) Most would find themselves without good options for access to medical care that they desperately need. On top of that, billions of dollars in Medicaid payments to providers, hospitals, nursing homes and clinics would immediately halt. And DHS would face massive layoffs, likely with unforeseen consequences throughout the department. Just to be clear, all of this is on top of the more than a quarter-million lowincome Arkansans in the Medicaid expansion population who would lose their health insurance if Hester achieved his aim of ending the private option. Hester’s real goal is to end their health coverage; he’s merely using the elderly, disabled, kids and others in the traditional Medicaid program as hostages to try to get his way via a game of “hard chicken.” When the Times asked Hester about his statement last week, he said, “We have until the end of June to work something out. I don’t think we’ll have to have a shutdown.” However, Hester promised to make good on his threat and go through with a full Medicaid shutdown — immediately ending all of the funding described above for the state’s most vulnerable citizens come July 1 — if the governor and the legislative majority didn’t cave to his demands and end the Medicaid expansion. “I would,” he said, but added that he hoped the legislature would come up with a creative solution to avoid that scenario. Hester’s hope is that the aginners can pass a Medical Services appropriation

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with “Arkansas Works” stripped out — in other words, it would fund the traditional Medicaid services described above, but would eliminate Medicaid expansion. The problem is that Hester’s group is a tiny minority. The legislature just voted overwhelmingly to approve “Arkansas Works.” Hester’s small group of aginners doesn’t have anywhere close to a supermajority to pass an appropriation that kills the Medicaid expansion. They don’t have anywhere close to a simple majority. They don’t have anywhere close to the votes to even get an amendment out of committee. “There’s a fundamental principle of government that we need to deal with, and that is that the minority should not derail the expressed will of the majority,” Hutchinson said. The governor posed a question for Hester and company: “Will the Democrats, and the Republicans who have supported Arkansas Works, will they vote for an appropriation bill without Arkansas Works?” In other words, Hester, for now, has the votes to block Medicaid expansion, and the entire Medicaid budget — but to actually pass something, he would have to change the minds of 17 senators and 45 members of the House. This seems unlikely. Instead, the only tool that the Tea Party 10 have is a threat, which Hester promises they will make good on: to crash the government and unleash an unimaginable nightmare on the state of Arkansas and its neediest citizens. “If he’s really willing to run into a wall instead of solving problems, that’s unfortunate,” said Minority Leader Michael John Gray (D-Augusta). There is no sign that the majority will simply fold because of Hester’s threats, leaving the fate of the Medicaid budget uncertain. The fiscal session can last up to 45 calendar days, with the final possible day in late May. That would leave just a month to come up with a resolution, with the entire state budget in limbo. “You could have a standoff,” Hutchinson said. “That’s what leads to government shutdowns in Washington. We’ve never had that in Arkansas. I don’t expect to have that under my watch.” Support for special health care reporting made possible by the Arkansas Public Policy Panel.

THE

BIG PICTURE

Inconsequential News Quiz: Oh, Christ, Edition 1) Recently, a 10-year-old Hot Springs Village boy, who had been saddened when none of his classmates responded to invitations to attend his birthday party, was delighted two days later with a surprise. What was the surprise? A) The skulls of his enemies, polished and arranged on the sidewalk outside. B) In the night, elves made all the shoes he’d been too heartbroken to cobble. C) Four uniformed Arkansas State Troopers, who, hearing about his plight, surprised him with gifts and a cake, let him run the lights and sirens on a cruiser, and introduced him to a police dog. D) Directorship of the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism, based on his having donated $6 to the campaign of Gov. Hutchinson.

2) Last week, an unsigned editorial from the historically right-leaning editorial page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the state’s largest newspaper, advocated for the abolition of a certain practice for the first time. What was the editorial about? A) That whoever keeps cooking chili in the D-G break room microwave without putting a paper towel over the bowl should cut that shit out IMMEDIATELY. B) Abolishing the death penalty. C) A principled stand against the longstanding contention that he who hath smelt it, surely hath dealt it. D) An impassioned, primal cry for the return of the funk. 3) A teacher at Mills High School in Pulaski County was recently recommended for firing after he did some questionable things during a U.S. history class. What was the issue? A) Showed the gory, R-rated film “The Passion of the Christ,” complete with a handout asking questions about Jesus’ suffering for the salvation of mankind. B) Went on a rant, captured on audio and forwarded to the ACLU, against liberalism after someone complained about the showing of “The Passion of the Christ.” C) Told the class at the majority black high school during that rant: “I’ll never understand how blacks can support the Democratic Party. It just blows my mind. All they do is convince y’all that whoever the Republican nominee is, is going to take away food stamps and all this stuff, put you in chains and send you back to Africa.” D) All of the above. 4) Last week, a group of protesters shocked motorists near the corner of Markham and University. What were they protesting against? A) The phrase “So crowded you couldn’t swing a dead cat.” B) Male circumcision, while wearing white jumpsuits with splotches of bright red at the crotch. C) They were counter-counter-protesting the counter-protest of the protest across the street, which was actually just a guy spinning a sign for a mattress store. D) The fact that there are two damn Markham Streets in Little Rock that do not connect. 5) Recently, the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office announced it had spent over $26,000 on a wardrobe change that Sheriff Doc Holladay said was designed to make deputies look more professional. What was the addition to their wardrobe? A) Batsuits. B) Cowboy hats. C) Chrome-plated codpieces. D) Scottish kilts “with freeballin’ downstairs.”

I dropped my bat-citation pad, you guys.

Answers: C, B, D, B, B

LISTEN UP

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APRIL 14, 2016

Readers get ready Lit Fest brings in your favorite authors.

pril is the coolest month for bookworms, because that’s when the Arkansas Literary Festival returns. This weekend, April 14-17, authors will read, lecture, answer questions and (most likely) party. Novelists, screenwriters, actors, cooks, poets and artists will talk about how they do what they do at venues throughout downtown and midtown Little Rock (and in Conway, at Hendrix College). In short, the Lit Fest is taking over, and you won’t be able to escape it. To set the mood, the Times offers Q&As with several writers: Alex Mar (“Witches of America”), Angela Flournoy (“The Turner House”), Peter Guralnick (“Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll”), Adam Hochschild (“Spain in Our Hearts”), Chris Offutt (“My Father, the Pornographer”), Kiese Laymon (“How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America”) and Kevin Young (“Blue Laws”).

2016 Arkansas Literary Festival Schedule THURSDAY 4/14 7 p.m. “John Gould Fletcher Lecture” by Ben Johnson (Ron Robinson Theater). 7:30 p.m. Reading by poet Kevin Young (Reves Recital Hall, Hendrix College).

Library).

SATURDAY 4/16 10 a.m. Central Arkansas Escape Rooms (Main Library, West Room).

FRIDAY 4/15

10 a.m. Angie Macri, Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis and George David Clark, poems (Arkansas Studies Institute, Room 124).

Noon. Rien Fertel on barbecue (Whole Hog Cafe).

10 a.m. Celeste Fletcher McHale and Suzi Parker (Cox Creative Center).

Noon. Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre Sneak Peek (Cox Creative Center).

10 a.m. Linda VanBlaricom and Maysa Sem, adult coloring books (Main Library, Fribourgh).

Noon. Reading by Philip Martin (Main Library, East Room). Noon. Central Arkansas Escape Rooms (Main Library, West Room). 5:30 p.m. “Scars: An Anthology” (MacArthur Museum). 5:30 p.m. Author Nikki Grimes and illustrator E.B. Lewis reception (Hearne Fine Art). Nikki Grimes is a poet, journalist and best-selling (and award-winning) author of children’s and young adult fiction. E.B. Lewis is a renowned book illustrator who has collaborated with Grimes, among many other successful authors. He is on the board of the Hall of Fame of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. 7 p.m. “Author! Author!” party (Main 14

APRIL 14, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

10 a.m. Jacob M. Appel, Jeffrey Condran and Tyrone Jaeger (Historic Arkansas Museum). 10 a.m. “How The Camel Got His Hump” (Children’s Library). 10 a.m. The Kinders, music (Main Library, Youth Services). 11 a.m. Steve Biernacki, “Rock the Block” (Children’s Library). 11 a.m. Peggy Reiff Miller (Heifer Village). 11:30 a.m. Kathryn Budig (Main Library, Darragh). 11:30 a.m. Kiese Laymon and Jose Orduna (ASI, Room 124). See Q&A with Laymon on p. 18.

11:30 a.m. Adam Hochschild (MacArthur Museum). See Q&A on p. 21.

1 p.m. Andy Warner, Sonny Liew and Cole Closser (Main Library, Darragh).

11:30 a.m. Ashley Warlick and Keija Parssinen (Cox Creative Center).

1 p.m. Elias Weiss Friedman, a.k.a. The Dogist (Witt Stephens Jr. Nature Center).

11:30 a.m. Angie Macri, Tyrone Jaeger, Suzi Parker (Historic Arkansas Museum). 11:30 a.m. Daniel Black (Mosaic Templars Cultural Center). 11:30 a.m. Tom Wilhite (Witt Stephens Jr. Nature Center). Noon. Alan Cumyn, Janet B. Taylor and Jeff Zentner (Main Library, Level 4). 1 p.m. Gregory Pardlo and Kevin Young (Christ Episcopal Church). 1 p.m. Nathalia Holt, Julie Checkoway and Mary Pilon (Ron Robinson Theater). 1 p.m. Chris Bachedler and Steve Stern (ASI, Room 124). Memphis writer Steve Stern studied writing at the University of Arkansas under C.D. Wright and Lewis Nordan before going on to considerable success as a fiction writer, hailed by critics like Susan Sontag and Cynthia Ozick as a worthy successor to Isaac Baschevis Singer. His latest book, “The Pinch,” was published last year by Graywolf Press. Chris Bachedler is a novelist — his latest book is “The Throwback Special” — and a frequent contributor to McSweeney’s and The Believer. 1 p.m. John H. Johnson (Historic Arkansas Museum). 1 p.m. Ken Liu and V.E. Schwab (Cox Creative Center).

1 p.m. Nikki Grimes (Children’s Library). 1 p.m. Gabrielle Simone (Main Library, Youth Services). 2 p.m. 3D Printing (Clinton Children’s Library). 2:30 p.m. Chris Offutt and Harrison Scott Key (Main Library, Darragh). See interview with Offutt on p. 22. Humorist Harrison Scott Key is the author of the acclaimed memoir, “The World’s Largest Man.” 2:30 p.m. Kevin Brockmeier and Jedediah Berry (ASI, Room 124). Little Rock native (and current resident) Kevin Brockmeier is among the most distinguished and celebrated writers of his generation, crafting awardwinning literary fiction out of sci-fi and other genre influences. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker and the Oxford American, and he’s among the Lit Fest’s most beloved and entertaining readers. Jedediah Berry grew up in the Catskills and won wide acclaim for his 2009 debut novel, “The Manual of Detection,” which also shows a marked genre fiction influence. 2:30 p.m. Christian Appy (MacArthur Museum). 2:30 p.m. Toni Tipton-Martin and Meredith Abarca (Mosaic Templars Cultural Center).

2:30 p.m. Andrew Malan Milward and Ed Tarkington (Cox Creative Center). 2:30 p.m. Clara Bensen (Witt Stephens Jr. Nature Center). 3 p.m. Snacktivity (Children’s Library). 3 p.m. Drum Circle (Main Library, Youth Services). 3 p.m. Fast Food Fun (Main Library, Level 4). 4 p.m. E.B. Lewis, DJ Stout and Mick Wiggins (Main Library, Darragh). 4 p.m. Alex Mar (Cox Creative Center). See Q&A p. 20. 4 p.m. Rob Spillman and Rashod Ollison (ASI, Room 124). Rob Spillman is the editor of Tin House, one of the country’s most prestigious and consistently fascinating literary magazines. His new book is “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” a memoir about coming of age in Berlin. Rashod Ollison, a Little Rock native and onetime Arkansas Times Academic All-Star, is a pop critic for the VirginianPilot. His new memoir, which the Times excerpted earlier this year, is “Soul Serenade: Rhythm, Blues & Coming of Age Through Vinyl,” about growing up an outsider in rural Arkansas and turning to his parents’ record collections for guidance. 4 p.m. Melissa Ginsburg and Nina Sadowsky (Historic Arkansas Museum). 4 p.m. Sanderia Faye and Phyllis R. Dixon (Mosaic Templars Cultural Center). 4 p.m. Teen Poetry Competition (Main Library, Level 4). 4:30 p.m. The Root Cafe’s 2nd Annual Traditional Pie Bake-Off and Recipe Swap (The Root Cafe). 5:30 p.m. Garth Greenwell and Karan Mahajan (Main Library, Darragh). Kentucky native Garth Greenwell is a fiction writer, poet and critic, whose debut “What Belongs to You” is one of the year’s best-reviewed novels. “He seems to have an inborn ability to cast a spell,” New York Times critic Dwight Garner wrote in his review. Karan Mahajan, a contributor to The New Yorker and The Believer, is the author of one of the year’s most widely acclaimed novels, “The Association of Small Bombs,” which the New York Times called “smart, devastating, unpredictable and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout.” 5:30 p.m. Peter Guralnick (Oxford American Annex). See Q&A p. 24. 7 p.m. Pub or Perish (Stickyz).

8 p.m. Anna Drezen and Todd Dakotah Briscoe, “How May We Hate You” (Ron Robinson Theater).

SUNDAY 4/17 Noon. Angela Flournoy and Arna Hemenway (Ron Robinson Theater). See Q&A with Flournoy, this page. Noon. Oliver Roeder (Sturgis Hall). Oliver Roeder is a senior writer at FiveThirtyEight.com, a former Economics Fellow at the Brennan Center’s Justice Program, and the author of the article “Gridgate,” which made considerable waves in the crossword puzzle community and which he’ll discuss before Arkansas Puzzle Day begins at the Clinton School for Public Service’s Sturgis Hall. 1 p.m. Arkansas Puzzle Day (Sturgis Hall). 1:30 p.m. Sloane Crosley (Ron Robinson Theater). Sloane Crosley is the New York Times best-selling author of the essay collections “I Was Told There’d Be Cake” (optioned recently for a series by HBO) and “How Did You Get This Number.” She has been a columnist for the New York Times and the Village Voice and a contributor to GQ, Spin and Esquire. She once appeared as herself in the TV show “Gossip Girl.” 3 p.m. Gregg Hurwitz (Ron Robinson Theater). Gregg Hurwitz is an accomplished writer of crime novels, screenplays and comics, having scripted successful runs of Marvel titles “Wolverine,” “Punisher” and “Foolkiller” and the DC series “Batman: The Dark Knight.” His latest novel, “Orphan X,” published in January, has already been optioned by Warner Bros. (with Bradley Cooper attached to direct and star). 4:30 p.m. “Classic In Context: ‘Anna Karenina’ “ (Ron Robinson Theater). 5:30 p.m. “Anna Karenina” (1948) screening. (Ron Robinson Theater).

Ghosts of the Great Migration A Q&A with Angela Flournoy. BY BENJAMIN HARDY

ngela Flournoy’s first novel, “The Turner House,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. It tells the story of an African-American family facing the question of whether to sell their childhood home in Detroit after discovering a reverse mortgage has left the house underwater. Your novel is primarily set in Detroit in 2008, but Arkansas haunts the book. There are occasional flashbacks to the 1940s, as young Francis and Viola Turner (who will become the patriarch and matriarch of a sprawling family) journey north from rural Arkansas to seek their fortune. How closely does this mirror your own parents’ families’ stories? My family from my father’s side is from Arkansas, from a town near Pine Bluff (and one of my uncles used to live in Little Rock when I was younger). One of the things that I found in my research was that during the Great Migration there were channels that people followed from various Southern states to corresponding Northern states. So, a lot of people from Arkansas did end up in Detroit and other parts of the Midwest — whereas, for example, a lot of people in California came from Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana, like my mother’s side of the family. Some of it was just train lines: People in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana ended up on trains running west, people from Alabama and Arkansas

ended up on lines that took them more directly north. But, also, like when immigrants from different countries come to the U.S., it’s who comes to a place first and brings others along. Two years into writing my novel, Isabel Wilkerson came out with this amazing, Pulitzer Prizewinning book about the Great Migration, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” and it sort of confirmed this idea, which had been a suspicion of mine. It was sort of like a gift, because when I started the novel, [Wilkerson’s] book didn’t exist — and then it did. I had all these ideas about the past, all of these things I researched, but being able to hear these real-life oral testimonies gave me a little bit more confidence about how this wasn’t a oneoff trend. This was something that was happening on a large scale, with hundreds of thousands of people. And now, a couple of generations later, we’re seeing in some places a return of African-American families to the South. No doubt, it’s a trend. You have both baby-boomer retirees and younger professionals moving back to the South. Culturally, even in my own family, our ways of being still remain very Southern, even though we’re three generations now in California. … And while there wasn’t the same Jim Crow domestic terror in the North, there definitely wasn’t the www.arktimes.com

APRIL 14, 2016

open-armed embrace that some had expected. Though your dad’s family is rooted in Detroit, you grew up in California. Did you know from the beginning you wanted this novel to be set in Detroit? Yeah, the book was always going to be set in Detroit. I started writing this book in 2009, and the earliest points of origin were my own feeling of frustration and disappointment in the national housing crisis that we were a part of, which really disproportionately affected black homeowners. In some ways, it kind of set black homeownership back a generation. Like, the sort of gains that had been made during the civil rights years — you saw all of these people losing their homes. But in Detroit, depreciation of housing values was something that had been happening on a local level for several decades and had not been getting a lot of national attention. And it’s something that could have been avoided, but it was a compounding of civic decisions and government decisions and also individual prejudices being played out on a large scale. I was always interested in that, and I was just fortunate enough that some characters came along to help me give those gripes some shape, to make it feel like it’s not just a Facebook rant. Your book also calls to mind “The Case for Reparations,” the landmark Atlantic piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates about black homeowners in Chicago. Like a lot of people, it made me aware of something I didn’t really understand before — the huge financial burden that racially discriminatory housing policies have placed on black families. Although that article must

have appeared after you’d written most of “The Turner House,” right? I think that’s what’s really the most exciting thing about writing a book. It seems like you’re in the dark and you’re alone — and once you start working on it, it seems like there are signs everywhere. So, I just remember — it must have been 2014 — when I read that, I was like, “YES! Where was this a couple of years ago?” [Laughs] Not that I was the only one thinking about it, because there have certainly been academic studies, and I have a lot of very smart friends that helped me through thinking about the role that housing segregation has played generationally as far as black wealth-building is concerned and so many other things that trickle out from there. But, yeah, when that [article] came out — that’s one of the magical things that comes from being obsessed with something for a while. You start to see it everywhere. In 2008, the Turner family is composed of 13 adult siblings and an army of children and grandchildren. Why did you want to write about such a big family? I come from a big family on all sides. My father is one of 13, my mother was one of four or five, and I have, like, two adopted families I grew up in. I think being a part of a large family really did shape my sense of self, and my ability to become different people depending on where I am. Every family has its own communication style — things you can and can’t talk about — and I’ve always found that fascinating. So I wanted to have a really big family [in the book] to not only show how a lot of people have interacted with the same space over 40 years, but also to show how familial expectations can be a real kind of bless-

ing or a burden in your life, depending on your individual place within that family and your personality. Your two main protagonists, ChaCha and Lelah, are 64 and 40. You’re in your early 30s. What made you choose to write from this perspective of a 64-year-old man? Well, you know, I’m a 64-year-old man on the inside. [Laughs] They were just the characters that were interesting to me. I didn’t really think about how there aren’t any main characters my age. I’ve always been a person who likes to listen in on the stories of my elders, and I have a pretty casual and friendly relationship with my mother and my aunt, so I hear a lot of stories about people around their age, like ChaCha. I don’t know. I didn’t think about it as that much of a leap at the time. The Turner family mythologizes their parents, Viola and Francis, but in the flashbacks to their own youth we see them demythologized — as flawed young people making mistakes. Did you have a similar matriarch or patriarch figure in your life? They’re not very similar to my own grandparents. [The flashbacks] came from my interest in what it took to make a life in Detroit — coming without a lot of money and trying to make a home. It seemed really exceptional that anyone ever did it. I just wanted to explore those challenges, and to explore the story of Detroit it seemed really necessary to include that generation. It was something that was kind of nagging on me — that I couldn’t have a complete story if I didn’t have sections in the past, which meant I had to fully commit to the parents and making them real characters. I wrote those sections of the book

last, and I was anxious to write them because they were, you know, a departure. I wanted them to feel rooted in history, but not like I had just dumped Wikipedia information, so I put them off until the end. I was struck by a line in one of those vignettes, in which Francis is drifting into a kind of degeneracy after arriving in Detroit alone, and he’s in danger of forgetting about his teenage wife back home in Arkansas with their infant son. You say, “Here’s the truth about self-discovery: It is never without cost. Not now, in the age of create-your-own college majors, the Peace Corps, and yoga retreats, and definitely not during World War II for a young black father newly migrated to a strange city.” Tell me about the costs imposed by self-discovery. I think one of the tensions that can arise if you’re part of a big family, is, “How do I define myself out of this sort of pre-described role that I have? If I have always been this way to these people, how do I find out if this is actually the way that I am?” And to figure that out usually requires some sort of disappointment, either for yourself or for someone else. I think that’s something that some characters do more concretely in the book than others, and something that some characters struggle with deciding if they even have a right to do. Flournoy and author Arna Hemenway will speak at the Arkansas Literary Festival at noon Sunday, April 17, at the Ron Robinson Theater.

The personal in the historical A Q&A with Kevin Young. BY JAMES MATTHEWS

evin Young’s official job title is longer than some of his poems. In addition to being the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing and English at Emory University in Atlanta, he is also curator of both Emory’s Literary Collections and the 16

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Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, a 75,000-volume library with the herculean task of archiving every edition of every book of poetry published in English worldwide during the 20th century. Young’s first book of poetry, “Most Way Home,” was selected for the

National Poetry series in 1993. His 2003 book, “Jelly Roll,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. “Book of Hours” (2014) was winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets. Young’s nonfiction book “The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness” was a New York Times Notable Book for 2012. His latest book, “Blue Laws,” is a collection of work from the past two decades. Young is sponsored by HendrixMurphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language. Your new book is a selection of poems from your first 10 books, as well as a number of uncollected poems. Why the title “Blue Laws”? I was thinking a lot about those outmoded laws all over the country, but especially in places I have lived, like the South and New England. Sunday sales of drinks is one, but also, “You can’t shoot across the river on a Sunday.” There are all sorts of funny, obscure laws. But I was also thinking about the blues and their influence, which is something I write a lot about. Did you select all the poems yourself? Yeah. I talked with friends and my editor about what to leave in here or there, but I went through the selection. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, to have something portable [containing] the different sides of my work. But also I want to honor that blues tradition and blues through-line and how some of those uncollected poems and outtakes fill in between the books.

books. But I also wanted this book to have its own integrity and own completeness. There are more than a dozen poems included from your first book, “Most Way Home,” written when you were still a student. Can you tell me about the writing and reception of that first book? I wrote it as an undergrad mostly. I think I wrote three more poems afterwards. So I wrote it pretty young. But I also was very much not writing about my life then; I was writing about my parents

I know a lot of people don’t love their first books anymore — they’re embarrassed of them or something — but it’s a different book for me. It was pretty tight and taut, and I felt like I was channeling these voices of my family. It was nice to see those alongside my more recent poems.

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You went to Harvard, where you studied under Seamus Heaney. How did he influence your writing? I have an elegy for him in the book in “Blue Laws.” I feel like his biggest influence had to do with how to be a poet in

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What was that process like? It can be kind of strange. It’s sort of looking through old photos; you recognize yourself but sometimes you look different. But also I was pleased to see the ways in which there were continuities and things I recognized. Some books, it’s harder than others because I have some long poems, like “To Repel Ghosts,” which is about Jean-Michel Basquiat, and “Ardency,” about the Amistad rebellion. It’s pretty hard to show what those books are like because they’re kind of wild, long books on purpose. Those have a different second life than a book like “Black Maria,” which has a theme but is a kind of film noir in verse, and it turns out that having 20 of those is really interesting, at least to me; it tells a kind of story within a story. Different books do different things, but hopefully it’s a good introduction and makes people want to read the other

and my grandparents and life in the rural South, and the way of life they lived — which I had grown up seeing and visiting them in southern and northern Louisiana, but which was disappearing in some ways. So I was trying to capture that. I don’t know if I could have said that then, but I was trying to capture that before it changed. It very much was about the foodways and folkways and the way of talking that were there. And then it also had poems that were about this more modern eye walking around and driving around the country and seeing what was there.

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the world and how to be generous and allow yourself that space to write. That a “poet” is something you could be. I didn’t know that firsthand, and to see it up close was really wonderful. I think that was his biggest influence on me. Looking back, too, he wrote in his first book, “Death of a Naturalist,” about rural Ireland and growing up on a farm. And so for me, there was this kind of “put your bucket down where you are” quality that helped me understand you could write about your life and your family and your past, and that this could be noble and the stuff of poetry. You don’t only write poetry. Your nonfiction book “The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness” was widely acclaimed. Are there things you can get at in prose that you can’t in poetry? I think so. You can write about ideas in a different way. I think poems do contain ideas, but they also contain music. For me, “The Grey Album” was a way to explore music from the other side — music as an idea — and trace that through time, through the centuries. It took a long time for me to write that book. Early parts of it were from many, many years before. It took about 10 years. It was a way of getting at some of the concerns I’d had and that come up in my poetry, but also a way of talking about these broader ideas and talking about Langston Hughes and a poet named Bob Kaufman. All of this makes me wonder: Did you come from an especially literary family? No, not really at all. I came from Louisiana roots. (That’s my grandfather’s fiddle on the cover of the book.) I came from a very musical family on my father’s side and then preachers on my mother’s side. I usually say that between the two is poetry, to me. My parents read and were the first in their families to go to school. They instilled that in me. But it was not at all literary. It was only when I got to college that I knew people could be poets or that people had parents who were poets. That really blew me away. To me, that was all new. You recently had a poem printed in the New Yorker, “Money Road.” It described a trip through the Mississippi Delta, through the landscape in which Emmett Till was murdered. Tell me about that trip. I’ve been to Mississippi a number of times, but I don’t know if I’d been to the 18

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Delta proper. I was writing about the Delta in part for an oratorio I wrote for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s actually going to be [presented] at Carnegie Hall on April 4. It’s called “Repast,” like the meal after a funeral. I was thinking a lot about justice and loss in a different way, a more historical way. Then to drive that landscape — it was so visceral. If you’ve been there, you can see that it’s not just a question of history, it’s a question of the present. Emmett Till’s death resonated historically but it still resonates now. I guess that’s what struck me and what I was trying to capture in that poem. History is still with us, the past isn’t even past. But also, that landscape feels very haunted. Is that poem indicative of what you are working on these days? Yeah. I have poems that return to the South, but also return to the landscape and to history with a capital “H.” But I’m always interested in exploring the personal in that sense. I find that when I’m writing about the historical, it becomes very personal; and when I’m writing about the personal, it becomes historical. That’s kind of the dance the work tries to do. One last question, since this is leading up to the Literary Festival: Some poets prefer not to read their poems aloud, but you seem very engaged in giving readings. Why are the performative and oral aspects of poetry important to you? I think that’s where poetry starts; it’s where it started. To me, a poem comes alive when it’s read. It needs breath to fully embody itself. I think that’s the one thing I miss about people not memorizing poems the way they used to. You would carry that in your body, and that’s where it lives. It becomes a physical thing. Young and poet Gregory Pardlo, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, will appear on a Literary Festival panel at 1 p.m. Saturday, April 16, at Christ Episcopal Church.

Writing as survival A Q&A with Kiese Laymon. BY JAMES MURRAY

ississippi is steeped in a long and rich literary tradition, but for Jackson native Kiese Laymon it was hard growing up to find depictions of the lives he and his family had lived in the canonical novels from and about the area. His recent literary accomplishments (and great acclaim) have been a testament to his abilities to successfully carry on that tradition on his own distinctive terms. In recent years, the young writer has earned a number of awards and plaudits for his novel “Long Division” and his essay collection “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America.” Ahead of his appearance at this year’s Arkansas Literary Festival, I spoke with Laymon about his influences, growing up in Mississippi, racism and his forthcoming projects. I recently finished reading your collection of essays. In the book’s author’s note, you said that you put everything into your first novel, originally titled, “My Name Is City,” because you couldn’t see yourself living past the age of 32. What exactly was going on in your life that led you to think that way? Well, a lot of my friends had died. I talk a lot about that in my book. Half of the boys that I was in seventh grade with didn’t make it to 32. Another part of it was that there were no men in my family other than my uncle Jimmy. He had been unhealthy his whole life, dealing with all kinds of addictions. You know, life was just starting to weigh in on me a little bit, man. I just wasn’t sure that I was gonna make it; I hoped that I was gonna make it, but a lot of people who I considered friends and family didn’t make it, so I just worried about it a little bit. I’m interested in hearing your response to this as a Southerner myself, growing up here in Arkansas: What exactly was it about your background in Mississippi that helped cultivate your writing? Well, that one is pretty easy. My mother had me when she was 19. She was a student at Jackson State and went on to graduate school. She had been a teacher ever since I was 3 or 4. She was just one of those moms that like, I had to read before I could do anything —

anything I wanted to do. I had to read when I woke up. I had to read before went to bed. I had to read before I could go outside. I had to read the books she wanted to me to read before I could read what I wanted to read, so I kinda sorta resented her for all of that, but in the long run it helped me not be intimidated by books at all. And a lot of those books I didn’t really like, but it just let me know that writing wasn’t this mysterious thing that only a few people in the world could do. And coming from the South, coming from Mississippi, too, because I had to read so much, I realized that I came from a home of American literature. Faulkner and folks like that? Yeah, Faulkner, Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, Margaret Walker Alexander. Alice Walker spent some time down there, Eudora Welty. I just knew that I was from a place where a lot was expected of you if you chose to be a writer. What were some of the books your mom had you read when you were younger? See my mom, she only wanted me to read “classics.” We had a ton of books in our house and in her office, but mom wanted me to read stuff like, “Treasure Island,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Silas Marner,” she wanted me to read Shakespeare. She was of the belief that you needed to read these white canonical books. The Western canon, right? Yeah, the Western canon. Because she thought that would protect me somehow. And whatever, I read those books, but real talk: Those books didn’t interest me in the same way as the other books she had in the house, like “The Bluest Eye,” “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” this book called “For My People” by Margaret Walker Alexander. Those were the books where I felt like the authors were imagining my life and the life of grandmother and my mom. What did your mom think these books or a particular education would shield you from? She thought that kind of education,

growing up in Mississippi, would make white people less likely to target me. She thought it would make me less likely to end up in bad situations, whether that be prison or jail. In your essays, there seems to be conflict between you and your mom. Your mom was concerned about your survival and you wanted not only to merely survive, but to construct a life for yourself. Speaking for yourself, how does a young black male find the will to live in an environment of white supremacy? One way you find will is by listening to will, and reading the will of other people who’ve done it before you, right? So that’s why reading was so important to me. You can see and hear and imagine the lives of people who were sort of like you and survived long enough to write it down; music is kinda that way, too. Our history has shown that you have to organize; you often have to get with communities of people who are interested in more than surviving, too. You find communities in the world somehow that are committed to life. I think that’s hard, but it’s not impossible. And it’s really the only reason a lot of us are still here: We weren’t brought here to survive and love and have vitality. We were brought here to be machines — machines that work for a particular class of white folks. We’ve made it this far, and you know, some people question how far we’ve made it, but I know we’ve made it further than people thought we would. You connect with people and you fight and you love each other. That fight and love can be manifested in the civil rights movement, the Black Lives Matter movement and local movements.

something like writing and you’re black, black families are often trying to tell you to get a real job. And people don’t see writing as a real job, so that external validation validates you in the eyes of your family, so it means a lot. Which genre do you prefer, fiction or nonfiction? Man, they’re just different. When you’re writing a novel, you never know if anybody is ever gonna read it. The audience is so far away. But when you’re writing nonfiction, especially for me now because I do a lot of stuff online, I just

know people are gonna read it. Sometimes that immediate pressure from writing stuff that people are gonna read immediately is overwhelming, but most of the time it makes it easier, because I’m writing to a specific group of people and I know some people in the world care about this. Yeah, novels are harder for me to write. Any advice for aspiring writers? I would encourage them to never stop revising. And the other thing is, it’s more important to be a better person. I think you can you use your writing to help yourself be a better person, to be better

at relationships, loving yourself and loving your people. So, I think I would just encourage them to use their writing to make them and their communities better, but also: Never stop revising. What’s your next project? I’m working on this memoir called “Heavy,” and I’m working on this novel called “And So On.” Laymon and author Jose Orduna will speak at 11:30 a.m. Saturday, April 16, in room 124 of the Arkansas Studies Institute.

When did you realize that you had some kind of gift for writing? I realized that I really loved to write in high school when I was writing for my newspaper. The stuff I was writing felt good and then I won some kind of Mississippi journalism award, and that was so unexpected. And that made me think maybe I could make this into some kind of career. But when I started winning shit and getting into programs and stuff, I thought I could actually eat off of this. How important is that external validation for you? I wish the answer was that it’s not that important, but when you’re doing www.arktimes.com

APRIL 14, 2016

The seeker A Q&A with Alex Mar. BY RACHAEL BORNÉ

n “Witches of America,” Alex Mar chronicles her five-year exploration of modern-day pagan-practitioners across the United States, weaving a narrative that is at once cultural ethnography, historical retelling and personal journey. Mar self-identifies as a skeptic and a seeker, someone most pulled to those living and believing on the hem of society. She writes, “I’ve always been drawn to the outer edges, the fringe — communities whose esoteric beliefs cut them off from the mainstream but also bind them closer together.” Mar captures a panorama of covens and clans, cults and communities. She traces the origins of the Wicca movement to 1950s London, communes with goddesses at a Pagan Spirit Gathering, attends a gnostic mass of the Ordo Templi Orients in the Bywater of New Orleans, and trains under a teacher in the Feri tradition of witchcraft. In her telling, Mar serves as a compassionate and witty interloper to the vast world of occultist believers all around us. “Witches of America” documents the many everyday Americans who lead secret lives of magic and mysticism all around us. I’m interested in how you identified the people you wrote about in the book. How did you find them? I made a documentary called “American Mystic” about six years ago. It’s a documentary that intertwines portraits of three different people from different parts of the country who are all members of some kind of fringe or minority 20

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community. I knew that in making that documentary, I wanted one of those individuals to be someone who considers herself a witch, but I had no idea at the time what that might really mean. In the process of exploring that and traveling around the country for months and months trying to find the right people for the documentary, I ended up spending time with a number of different covens and meeting a lot of people who call themselves pagans and, in many cases, witches. The first person I focus on in the documentary is a woman named Morpheus. We were around the same age, I found her incredibly funny and interesting — a really no-nonsense-straighttalk kind of person who happened to live this very serious, fully immersed life as pagan priestess. It was through that whole casting process that I ended up meeting an entire network of people around the country who practice witchcraft very seriously. I knew once I was done with the documentary that my friendship with Morpheus had hit a nerve, and I wanted to go back and try to understand her magical practice. As a result I started to get to know even better the people in her circle and started reaching out. It kind of spread outward like that, where different clusters of people would put me in touch with other clusters of people. How were your personal perceptions of witches turned upside down? What surprised you most? I think the biggest surprise over the years of working on this book was the sense that you just can’t make assumptions about people. Again and again I was meeting people who were introduced to me as a serious shaman or the high priestess of some witchcraft group or a very serious occultist. They would

turn out in person to be a soccer mom in a little town in Massachusetts, or someone running a tech startup, or a yoga teacher. It really ran the gamut and made me all the more aware that you can’t judge people by appearance, even though that’s something we’re so trained to do. I met over and over again these Americans who led a double life that their many co-workers or neighbors had no idea of. Were you ever frightened, during the most intense moments of your research? By the practices you witnessed? I wouldn’t say that I was ever afraid. I wrote about people who I found really fascinating as individuals. They are the equivalent of a local Christian pastor, or a very devout rabbi or a very serious Buddhist monk. In some cases I met people who were very flamboyant in their practices, and certainly there’s a chapter very late in the book that is about a particular black magician who I met in New Orleans (“Sympathy for the Necromancer”). That’s a very extreme, very dark chapter that stands apart from the rest of the book. What about by your own experience of these rituals? Did it ever feel too real? Sometimes there’s this shock of the new, you know. There’s the shock of having a new experience. But I very quickly saw a relationship between what was going on in these different occult rituals and witchcraft ceremonies and my own Catholic upbringing. Catholic mass is a very high mass and a very elaborate form of drama — to be inside of a cathedral is an incredible, moving experience. For someone who’s a skeptic and who is constantly asking herself a lot of questions about whether or not there is some kind of god out there, whether or not there is some sort of meaning to our lives, I would say that any sort of intense religious ceremony is going to be a little bit intimidating. It’s a question of whether or not it’s alienating or if there’s a personal connection to be found there.

How has the pagan community at large reacted to the book? Has there been any pushback? I’m really grateful for how the book was received critically. It’s been very well reviewed. In terms of the pagan community, it’s been very controversial, online and in different chat forums and blogs. I think a big part of that is how sensitive it is to write about any religious movement whatsoever, because you’re talking about very closely held personal beliefs. And in some cases there’s a little discomfort with the fact that I’m someone who is searching and who is a skeptic. Even if at a certain point in the book, I am personally becoming involved and I’m studying and I’m participating and I’m asking myself whether or not these magical traditions have something in service for me. I think some people feel that only a longtime devotee has a right to write about a particular faith, and I just fundamentally disagree with that. I think it’s really important to make a space in which we can acknowledge that there’s a gray zone. There’s a lot of doubt involved in faith. And for myself and most of the people I know well, that’s actually more the area in which we live. “Witches of America” is as much a work of cultural ethnography as it is a chronicle of your own quest for spiritual meaning. You are present each step of the way. How will this project shape your voice in the future? The book is a literary nonfiction account of a community right now, a new religious movement, but it’s also very much a memoir. In general with my magazine stories, I do tend to use the first-person in a much gentler way, as a way to lead the reader in. This memoir element is really new for me. As I move forward I think I will maintain that balance. It really depends on the material, how much of myself I’m going to put on the page. My next book will have nothing to do with religion, so I’m excited to dive into a new territory in the next couple of years. Mar will speak at the Arkansas Literary Festival at 4 p.m. Saturday, April 16, in the Cox Creative Center.

The good fight A Q&A with Adam Hochschild. BY BENJAMIN HARDY

he author of acclaimed histories of Belgian colonial atrocities (“King Leopold’s Ghost”), Stalinist terror in Russia (“The Unquiet Ghost”), the British anti-slavery movement (“Bury the Chains”) and much more, Adam Hochschild teaches narrative writing at the graduate school of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. His most recent book is “Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.” Your previous book, “To End All Wars,” drove home the pointlessness of World War I, and it’s hard not to come away from it feeling

like a pacifist. But “Spain in Our Hearts” tells the story of a war that seems anything but pointless: a democratically elected government struggling against Fascist forces backed by Hitler and Mussolini. Did that contrast between a “bad” war and a “good” war inform your writing? Have your own perspectives changed regarding pacifism, nonviolence and the concept of a just war in the course of exploring these histories? I don’t think I’ve ever been a complete pacifist — always about a 90 percent pacifist. That is, I think neither side is worth risking your life for in about 90 percent of all wars. The First World War

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is definitely in that category: It remade the world for the worse in every conceivable way. But in the Spanish Civil War, I wish the Spanish Republic, whatever its faults, had won. Spain’s people would have been spared a 36-year dictatorship — and Hitler would not have had a de facto ally in the larger war to come. I admire the courage of those, both Spanish and foreigners, who fought for the Republic. Your books are compelling in part because you give such weight to the emotional lives of your subjects and you craft such seamless narratives between human stories and macrolevel events. How do you achieve that balance? Do you generally know when an anecdote is going to be included in your book when you first read the primary source material? Sometimes, yes, I do come across a revealing personal detail about someone and my radar goes off and I know this quote or anecdote or whatever is going to make it into my book. But often you don’t see the revealingness, so to speak, of some detail until you get to know the person well. In large part, I choose the members of a book’s cast of characters based on the richness of information they left behind: letters, diaries, reports by people who knew them. All the time, I wish I had more information. Everyone should do future historians a favor and keep a diary! So much of your work involves framing particularly dark chapters of history through the story of dissenters and crusaders. What draws you to those figures? Do you see common threads running through their stories? Are there shared personality traits or formative experiences that pushed them onto that path? I’m attracted to writing about times and places when people felt themselves engaged in a moral or political struggle. Sometimes you can see what are the early experiences that led someone to take a strong moral stand. Other times, it’s a complete mystery, and I find myself wishing for a diary or set of early letters that isn’t there. As a historian, how do you navigate the tension between faithfully representing events with a detached, objective eye and editorializing about the stark moral dimensions of your subject material? Has that tension evolved over time for you as a writer? As a historian you’re not allowed to 22

APRIL 14, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

make anything up. So, I have to faithfully represent events, and if I say a character felt something at a particular time, I can only do so if he or she wrote it down, or told someone. But to me there’s not really a tension between being faithful to the facts this way and showing the moral dimensions of history. Some things are so terrible — slavery, the worst of colonialism, Fascism, Stalinism — that the moral quality speaks for itself. It’s the same thing when people act courageously. You don’t have to editorialize. Facts speak for themselves. I am intrigued by the international perspective of the leftists you profile in both of your last two books. Whether it’s British and German socialists finding solidarity in opposing WWI or Americans fighting Franco in Spain, there was a zealous internationalism in the early 20th century that seems to be lacking today. The contemporary American left’s singular focus on domestic issues gives rise to what is effectively a mild form of isolationism. That’s understandable, given a history of catastrophic interventions from Vietnam to Iraq — but when you look at mass murder in places like, say, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it also seems unconscionable to shrug and say, “Well, we can’t be the world’s policeman.” What’s to be done? What should we advocate for when it comes to atrocities happening outside of our national borders? And when, if ever, should we literally fight? Good question. I’m definitely against America — or anyone else — assuming the right to be the world’s policeman. But I do think there are good things that can be done internationally. I respect greatly the work of some international nongovernmental organizations, like Human Rights Watch and Partners in Health. And I think the United States, and other countries, can sometimes help, in a modest way, by supporting regimes that are trying to do something decent and by not funneling huge amounts of aid and arms to tyrannical or oppressive governments. We have such a long string of dictatorships we supported for decades in the name of anti-Communism, and we now have a similarly unsavory list of allies — Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and more — in the name of fighting terror. Hochschild will appear at 11:30 a.m. Saturday, April 16, at the MacArthur Museum.

An awkward reunion A Q&A with Chris Offut. BY DAVID KOON

hile most people would probably rather poke their eyes out with a knitting needle than take a long, in-depth look into the most intimate details of their parents’ sexual desires, writer Chris Offutt not only did that, he did it voluntarily. In his most recent memoir, “My Father, the Pornographer,” Offutt chronicles his two-year effort to catalog and make sense of the artistic output of his late father, Andrew, who, under 17 pseudonyms and writing from the family home in rural Kentucky, quietly had a career as one of the world’s most prolific authors of pornographic novels before his death in April 2013. After starting out as a writer of science fiction, Andrew Offutt published his first erotic novel in 1968. He would eventually quit his job selling insurance to write full time, going on to publish over 400 pornographic novels. All were written using a unique method of prefabricating descriptions and sections that could then be plugged in as he was writing, a system his son likens to Henry Ford’s assembly line. His record was 91 pages in a single day. With that kind of output and the topics his father was writing about, it’s no surprise the Offutt home was, in many ways, a house of secrets when Chris was a boy, the household headed by a father who could be, by turns, both as distant as a stone totem and wildly imaginative. Tasked with cleaning out his dad’s paper-drifted office when Andrew died, Offutt resisted his siblings’ calls to pile up the family secret and set a match to it. He would eventually comb through and catalogue over 1,800 pounds of his father’s manuscripts, books, drawings and correspondence before turning it into a memoir that’s a minor triumph. Chris Offutt is the author of seven books. He currently teaches at the University of Mississippi. Your father often comes across as a very distant figure in the book. He was a distant figure. He was distant from his family, the world, I think he was distant from himself. But the

flip side of that, particularly when you are a kid, is that any little breach in that distance is a gift. Those things would come along. They were rare. Dad was also charismatic and very funny, and made things fun. He had that ability. His imagination was always at the forefront, and especially when we were children, he could make whatever the situation was fun, even cutting weeds. If I had to cut a bunch of weeds coming up the hill to the yard, it was turned into a battle against a formidable foe. We were having swordfights and combat. Things like that, that was awesome, because there were plenty of other fathers around who’d say, “Go out there and cut those damn weeds, kid.” You turned out to be a writer, he was a writer, his father was a writer, I understand. Do you think without that role model putting seat of pants to seat of chair every day, you’d be a writer? I don’t know. I’ve thought about that a lot. It’s hard to analyze it too much. Is there a genetic component? My dad was a writer, my grandfather had literary aspirations, but he gave it up during the Depression to really save the farm, and he did. Or, is it just because dad was a role model? But the fact is, I didn’t really want to be a writer. I never wanted to be a writer, partly because of Dad. Dad just stayed at home. He didn’t seem to really do much, and we lived out in the woods. I wanted a more adventurous life, of being a detective or a paratrooper or a racecar driver or a movie actor. That was what I aspired to be, but despite that, I always wrote. I started keeping a journal when I was 8, and I wrote short stories when I was little. So how I was responding to the world was through writing, even though what I wanted to be in the world was anything but. Even as a young guy in my 20s, I wanted to be a photographer, I wanted to be a painter, a stage actor. There was still this desire to be something else, while I was really putting a lot of time into writing. At a certain point, I realized, wow, this is what I’m doing. I think I was about

23, 24. I bought a camera, took up photography. I’d read Hemingway, and I realized that Hemingway wrote about hunting and fishing. These were, in a way, his hobbies. And I realized that I didn’t have any hobbies. I thought I don’t have any hobbies, so I’ll try photography. I liked it. I loved it. I got a job in a camera store and I took a lot of pictures. I still like it. And then I started writing essays about photography. At one point, I wrote an essay about why photography was a better medium of expression than prose. I finished it, and then I thought, OK, look at what you’re doing, Chris. You’ve used writing to successfully talk yourself out of writing. You’re not out there taking pictures. That’s when I thought, fuck it. I’m just going to embrace this a little more. I remember the moment. I was living in a rooming house, and I just had this big moment of clarity of, “Holy shit, I’ve used writing to successfully talk myself out of writing.” [Laughs.] I was like, OK, you’re a moron. I grew up in the boondocks here in Arkansas with one fuzzy TV channel, and a lot of my early writing was just about boredom. I don’t know how anybody becomes a writer these days with so many distractions coming at them all the time. That’s a good point. I think that part of the reason I started doing it was because I was bored. I wrote in school. From the fourth grade on, I spent a lot of my time in school reading books and writing and drawing, because I was bored, and because if I didn’t do that, I would get in trouble. I’d talk too much, mess with somebody, and then they would beat me. I didn’t want to get beat, so I thought, they leave me alone if I write and draw. [Laughs.] One of the things that comes out of that book is this sense of growing up in a house full of secrets. So much about writing fiction is about exploring secrets in peoples’ lives. How much of growing up in that situation was farmed into your writing later on? I don’t know. When you’re growing up, you’re not aware of circumstances. I think there’s an assumption that every

family is like every other family, and you see their good sides. I don’t think growing up in a house full of secrets was good for me. It probably led to a lifelong interest in espionage and the clandestine services. That’s my favorite genre to read. I wanted to be a CIA agent and a spy. I think that may have been motivated by that in a way. But at the same time, I’m 57 and this is my third memoir, which is kind of embarrassing, and memoir could not be more opposite than secrecy. The bad side of the whole thing had to do with communication. There was so much that didn’t get talked about, and that still influences my relationship with my mother and my siblings. We’re still trying to learn to talk openly with each other, and we can now. But we’re still very much trained not to. It’s still in us to keep stuff to ourselves. If genre fiction is your favorite thing to read in your spare time, why are you more of a literary writer? I don’t know. I suppose it’s early designation. I thought that I would be a crime writer. I knew plenty of criminals, and also law enforcement. Where I grew up, there weren’t many options. You can be a criminal, you could be a cop, you could be a preacher, or you could get the hell out of there. There’s law enforcement in my family and criminals. So I thought, this is what I’ll do. I know this world and what I’m interested in. I know it well enough that I can write about it, so I thought I’d try it. You liked “Out of the Woods.” That is a story about cops. There are at least two stories in there about police officers, and then there are criminals. These are all petty criminals. I didn’t choose the designation. I think it possibly just had to do with publishing a book of short stories first. “Kentucky Straight” was set in a place that the world had not read too many books about. At the time I published it, most of the books I’d read were about the earlier times. None of them were post-war on Poverty Appalachia. I just think it was designated. I’d still love to write a spy novel, but I just don’t know how to get into it. I think about it, though. One of these days.

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Offutt and Harrison Scott Key will make their Arkansas Literary Festival appearance at 2:30 p.m. Saturday in the Main Library.

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APRIL 14, 2016

Arts Entertainment AND

His latest book, “Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll,” is a project that has been in the works for decades, and it only further confirms Guralnick’s importance as a guide to the ineffable power and strangeness of American popular music. Ahead of his appearance at the Arkansas Literary Festival, we spoke about Phillips, Charlie Rich, the art of biography and more.

Lost highways and careless love A Q&A with Peter Guralnick. BY WILL STEPHENSON

GURALNICK: He had a “front-row seat” with Phillips.

n the world of music journalism — a not exactly rarefied community, but one that has managed to produce its share of real artists over the last few decades — there is no figure more widely respected or rightly acclaimed than Peter Guralnick. In his essay collections and biographies, he has chronicled the twisted histories

of blues, country, soul and rock ’n’ roll, and has done so in prose that has earned him a permanent place among the first rank of American cultural critics. Greil Marcus called his first essay collection, “Feel Like Going Home,” “the most loving book I have ever read about American popular music.” Of

his two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, the New York Times wrote that it was “not simply the finest rock-and-roll biography ever written. It must be ranked among the most ambitious and crucial biographical undertakings yet devoted to a major American figure of the second half of the 20th century.”

I was surprised to learn, in the introduction to the new book, that you’d known Sam Phillips and had been friends for years. That isn’t always the case with biographies — you hadn’t been longtime friends with Elvis or Sam Cooke, for instance. How did that relationship make this book different than your previous biographies? I think in some ways it didn’t make it all that different. I would say that all the people I’ve written about are people whom I’ve admired. I’ve never written about anyone or anything on assignment — I’m not saying that as a boast, it’s just the truth. They’ve all been people I’ve chosen to write about out of admiration. And there have been others — Charlie Rich, Solomon Burke — with whom I’ve become friendly in much the same way as I became friendly with Sam. And I knew Sam for almost 25 years, so we went through stages. At the end, he said to me, “My son Knox loved you from the minute he first met you. But I didn’t.” It was really when I was working on the Elvis books, on which he was so helpful to me, that we became friends. What I’ve always aimed to do with whatever I’ve written is to write from the inside out — not to write an external view or a record of accomplishCONTINUED ON PAGE 26

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SINGER JANET JACKSON, who was to appear May 31 at Verizon Arena, has canceled all her “Unbreakable Tour” dates but is expected to reschedule. Tickets purchased for the May performance may be used for the rescheduled date or refunded at the point of purchase. APRIL IS SEXUAL ASSAULT Awareness Month, and to mark that the MacArthur Museum of Military History is exhibiting the “Clothesline Project,” T-shirts that tell stories of sexual assault, through May 7. This iteration of the “Clothesline Project” focuses on abuse in the military. The Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System is co-sponsoring the display of the T-shirts, which provide a canvas for abuse survivors, both male and female, to tell their stories and bring public awareness to the issue. ELEANOR LUX, THE EUREKA Springs weaver and bead artist, has been named the 2016 Arkansas Living Treasure by the Arkansas Arts Council. The award recognizes the state’s artisans who have contributed to the perpetuation of their craft over the course of their careers. Lux will be honored at a reception from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. May 12 at the Crescent Hotel in Eureka. To reserve a seat, call 501-324-9766. The Arts Council has recognized a Living Treasure for 15 years.

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APRIL 14, 2016

LOST HIGHWAYS AND CARELESS LOVE, CONT. ments but to write about the world as they saw it. For Sam Cooke and Elvis, it was a matter of getting that perspective from the people who were close to them. For Sam Cooke that was his brother L.C., for instance, or Bobby Womack. And with all those people, they were all extremely astute, extremely observant. They weren’t on the same page, but when they described Sam Cooke, they spoke in the same voice. But with Sam Phillips I had this front-row seat.

You once quoted Mark Twain in saying a real biography is impossible because “every day would make a whole book.” How do you find the story or thematic through-line in a person’s life? Is that something you have to know in advance? I think it has to be by feel. That’s why even if you had access to the exact same facts and documentation as I had, your book would be entirely different — the selection would be different. With Sam Phillips, what I chose to do was to see that in the

second half of his story, I had to use myself; not to burnish my own selfimage but to reflect who Sam was, to reflect that front-row seat I had. Because that gave a kind of window into who he was. Being there at the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame ceremony in Cleveland, say, when Sam was inducting Carl Perkins and just could not help himself, and had to bring up the fact that the Hall of Fame should be in Memphis. And watching the way the room just turned on him. Being a witness to that firsthand gave me

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a unique perspective. Your biographies are often considered the definitive portraits of the artists they’re about — what are the necessary pre-conditions of writing a good biography. What do you need, or what are the things you couldn’t do without? With Elvis I didn’t get access to the archives at Graceland — all of his papers and Col. Tom Parker’s papers — until after the first volume was published. And in fact I only later got the access because of that first volume. I think patience is the main thing. You can’t expect people to fall all over themselves because you’ve shown up to write about them; it’s not like they’ve been waiting for you. In the case of the Graceland papers, I think it was beneficial in some ways to not have all that documentation and papers for the first volume. It was a story that had to play out more simply — almost a dream sequence. The extra stuff would’ve weighed the story down. With this kind of writing, you can’t take offense if somebody turns you down. With [Elvis’ longtime girlfriend] Dixie Locke, I went to her church every week for a really long time. It’s a privilege if people talk to you — they don’t owe you anything. The other thing is total immersion. Teaching creative writing, they all talk about craft; but I don’t believe in craft, really. I believe in passion, commitment, just going all out and the idea of total immersion. Essentially it’s what Sister Rosetta Tharpe sang, that “99 1/2 Won’t Do.” I’m not going to write any more biographies. I’m not giving up writing in any way, but I’ve been doing this for 28 years, I guess; I’ve written three biographies. And I wouldn’t do it again without throwing myself into it totally, and it isn’t what I want to do anymore. At the end of your book “Feel Like Going Home,” you wrote that it marked a “swan song to my whole brief critical career.” It hasn’t worked out that way. Have you ever resented writing about music, or wanted to escape it — to write about something else? A friend of mine, Jim Miller, who later edited “The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock ’n’ Roll,” kept trying to lure me back to music writing after that. Because I did take a break — I wrote a novel during that period. My fifth novel, actually. He

got me to write a column and said, “How about Waylon Jennings?” And I think “Honky-Tonk Heroes” had just come out. And I was just completely knocked out. And the second column I did was about Bobby “Blue” Bland. It was around 1973, I was going down to this soul club called the Sugar Shack every night — a real wonderful den of iniquity — and I’d been teaching classics at the same time, though I thought I had to get another gig to support myself. I knew a guy who was a headmaster at an elite private school, and we met up with the head of the English department. We talked about the kinds of books I was most enthusiastic about teaching — “Tristram Shandy,” “V” by Thomas Pynchon, stuff like that — and that night I went down once again to the Sugar Shack. It was supposed to be a horn rehearsal, must have been like 3 in the morning. And I’m hanging around and I had this epiphany: I realized that, really, I would rather stay out until 3 o’clock waiting for a Bobby “Blue” Bland horn rehearsal that never happens than spend the rest of my life teaching English to privileged kids. Because this is Arkansas, I wanted to ask about your relationship with Charlie Rich. Could you tell me a little about getting to know him and working with him? I met Charlie out at the Vapors [Club], in Memphis, back in 1970. He was fairly obscure. So I go out there and I met Charlie and his wife, Margaret Ann, and I just never met anybody who I liked more on first acquaintance. I just loved them both — one of those things where you feel like you’ve really connected. Between sets Charlie would tell me about growing up outside of Forrest City and growing up in the church; the guilt he felt and the depression he suffered, his drinking. Charlie was not an “up” person. He once said, “I don’t know what it is, I just don’t dig happy songs.” And Margaret Ann, during the sets, would tell me the same stories but in a more rounded, expressive way. She was a brilliant woman as well. Then I wrote it up for that book “Feel Like Going Home,” and nobody had done any interviews with Charlie at that point. And as I wrote it, I had the terrible feeling that these two people who I’d really liked so much, that I was never going to see them again. The chapter seems mild by today’s standards, but I had to tell the truth, and it was terrible. Shortly after it was published, the secretary

of the publisher called me up and said Charlie Rich just called and ordered 35 copies, one for everyone in his family. Not long after, Charlie told me, “The thing about it was, it was the truth. It hurt, it really hurt, but it was the truth.” A couple of years later he invited me to New York. I hadn’t seen him in a while and he was playing at Max’s Kansas City. “Behind Closed Doors” had just come out and he was on a publicity tour. And he says, “I got a surprise for you, man.” And I said,

“Great, I love surprises.” Which is not at all the case, but what are you gonna say? And so he played the song “Feel Like Going Home” for the first time. And he told me, “I wrote this out of the feeling I got from reading the book.” That’s incredible. I always thought the book was named after the song. No, no. And a few years later, he sent me a 7-inch reel-to-reel of the piano demo. And as far as I know,

that’s the only copy. That’s the sole basis for all the releases of that demo. Roland Janes later told me, “That’s such a great song, Peter, is the book anywhere near as good?” And I said, “Nope.” It’s no big deal, really, but I mean can you imagine a greater thrill? Guralnick will speak about his book “Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll” at 5:30 p.m. Saturday, April 16, at the Oxford American Annex.

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APRIL 14, 2016

THE TO-DO

LIST

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

THURSDAY 4/14

SING INTO SPRING: ARKANSAS CHAMBER SINGERS

6:30 p.m. Governor’s Mansion. $65.

John Erwin is a college-level choral director, but many junior high and high school choristers in Arkansas know his name well before they ever fly the nest. Through sheer skill or, quite possibly, through some sort of choral voodoo, he can unify a patchwork of different voice types into a single musical organism — one that emits the purest of vowels and the sweetest of tones, one that bears an undying allegiance to the precise placement of his downbeat. If your pocketbook allows for a contribution to Erwin’s auditioned group of 50-plus voices, consider attending a posh evening of hors d’oeuvres and cocktails at the Governor’s Mansion to the ensemble’s benefit.

THURSDAY 4/14

BLESS THE MIC: ALICIA GARZA

7 p.m. Philander Smith College. Free.

RITES OF SPRING BOUND: Shawn James and the Shapeshifters play Vino’s on Saturday. Sunday James will perform solo.

THURSDAY 4/14-SATURDAY 4/23

RITES OF SPRING FESTIVAL Various times. Vino’s. Free-$10.

In keeping with a recent uptick of powerful events happening in the back room at Vino’s, the Rites of Spring Festival is a confluence of poetry, art, comedy and music that spans 10 days and nights. On the first weekend of the festival, you’ll find five local artists taking over the back room: Erin Pierce, Matthew Castellano, John 28

APRIL 14, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

Lucas, Kurt Lunsford, William Farrell and Laura Terry, and yet another sonic challenge to the structural integrity of the beloved pizza joint: a show from mostly bearded Fayetteville rockers Shawn James and the Shapeshifters, joined by local supergroup Bad Match. Rumor has it that Shawn James may stick around for a solo performance that Sunday afternoon, during which there will be readings of poetry and prose, and a book/merch swap

between local musicians and artisans. The second week of the festival is full, too: Johnny Cash devotees can dig their heels into a film and discussion of the icon’s work, UALR hosts its endof-the-year literary party, and finally, Little Rock is graced with a roaring visit from Tenacious D’s Kyle Gass and his “otherworldly superteam of badass dudes,” joined by local Southern sludge rockers Iron Tongue. See vinosbrewpub.com for details.

On July 13, 2014, George Zimmerman smiled and shook the hand of his lawyers after being acquitted for shooting unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Jarred by the televised outcome, longtime San Francisco activist Alicia Garza, along with collaborators Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, leapt into poetic action. Garza ended a carefully composed response to the verdict on Facebook with the words “Black Lives Matter,” and Cullors added a hashtag. The three words resonated immediately, as Garza says, as “an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression,” and came to symbolize the movements protesting police action that led to the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and Freddie Gray. You’ll need no reservations or tickets to hear Garza speak; simply go and be present.

IN BRIEF

THURSDAY, APRIL 14 FRIDAY 4/15

JEFF FOXWORTHY AND LARRY THE CABLE GUY 7:30 p.m. Verizon Arena. $59.50.

Like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Jeff Foxworthy’s literary catalogue numbers nearly 40 books. (Imagine, if you will, being a freshly caffeinated Barnes and Noble employee in 1996, head full of dreams and backpack full of Sartre, clocking in to discover that your first task of the

day is to find a suitably prominent way to display the skyrocketing “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem.”) In a recent interview with Houston Press, Foxworthy fondly remembered a segment on “The Larry Sanders Show” during which the late Garry Shandling (R.I.P) asked him to write down on a notecard “how much money [he’d] made off those redneck books,” an amount which elicited exple-

tives from Shandling’s mouth which, had the show not been on HBO, might have been bleeped out in the name of decorum. If you’re a person whose hard-earned $14.99 has ever bolstered that dizzying profit (or even if you’re not), you can catch Foxworthy with longtime friend Larry the Cable Guy (Dan Whitney) for a performance of new material on their “We’ve Been Thinking” tour.

SATURDAY 4/16

ARKANSAS DERBY DAY

12:30 p.m. Oaklawn Racing & Gaming. $2 parking.

Saturday is the culmination of the year’s racing season at Hot Springs’ Oaklawn Park, and that means it’s last call for those sumptuous corned beef sandwiches they serve, too. Weather permitting, the gambling mecca will open up its grassy infield to those inclined to dig the races “from the inside out.” It’ll include a craft beer garden, bouncy houses, a petting zoo and exhibits from the nearby Mid-America Science Museum. You’ll find the old-school racing devotees elsewhere, though: Look for the cocktail crowd in the windowed boxes that hover above the track (once filled with the smoke from fine cigars, but smoke-free as of 2006’s Clean Air Act). The patrons there will be dressed to the nines, already well acquainted with the season’s equine favorites, calculating their chances at a piece of the $1 million kitty. SLIME SEASON: Young Thug comes to the Metroplex on Friday.

WEDNESDAY 4/20 FRIDAY 4/15

YOUNG THUG

10 p.m. Clear Channel Metroplex. $43-$80.

After releasing his mixtape trilogy in 2010, “I Came From Nothing” 1, 2 and 3, Atlanta-born rapper Young Thug caught the attention of trap music pioneer Gucci Mane, and quickly made his way into the cadre of artists under the umbrella of Gucci’s 1017 Brick Squad Records. With several mixtapes, Young Thug remains prolific, collaborating with Gucci Mane, as well as Rich Homie Quan, Birdman and Kanye West. In a 2013 interview for Fader Magazine, Arkansas Times’ former A&E editor Will Stephenson described his flow thusly: “In a typical Young Thug verse, he slurs, shouts, whines and sings, feverishly contorting his voice into a series of odd timbres like a beautifully played but broken wind instrument.” Young Thug’s Little Rock appearance comes on the heels of his “Slime Season 3” mixtape release, and is part of a long-awaited rollout of his debut album, “HiTunes,” or “Hy!£UN35.” The album tour was announced a few weeks ago in a surreal promotional video, which featured Young Thug riding around Atlanta, atop a gorgeous black horse with hooves covered in the same shade of red glitter as Dorothy Gale’s magical ruby slippers.

MOVIES AT MACARTHUR: ‘WAR LETTERS’

6:30 p.m. MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History. Free.

“But what about the wounds you can’t see? The phantoms, the nightmares, the ghosts in your head?” One would be hard-pressed to find a more chilling portrayal of war than the one contained in the correspondence penned by the men and women fighting it. In this 2001 PBS documentary, the stories of American wars are told exclusively through these letters. The viewer, robbed of the comfortable distance afforded while reading broad, sweeping overviews of war in school textbooks, is placed squarely in the middle of the daily routine of battle, experiencing the simultaneously monotonous and horrific: “Please don’t send me any more underwear, socks, or candy. The milk of magnesia was absolutely unnecessary,” and, only a sentence or two later: “They teach us how to withdraw our bayonets in a certain manner, because steel sticks to warm human flesh.” We have writer Andrew Carroll to thank for the preservation of the papers, of which thousands are compiled as part of an all-volunteer initiative called The Legacy Project.

2016 Arkansas Times Musicians Showcase finalist Sean Fresh & The Nasty Crew bring their contemporary soul to The Joint, 7:30 p.m., $10. Singer/songwriters Daniel Markham and John Calvin Abney of Denton, Texas, and Norman, Okla., respectively, come to White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m. You can watch it at home now, but if you’re looking for a cheap opportunity to see it on a big screen again, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” screens as part of the new Dogtown Film Series at the Argenta Community Theater, 7 p.m., $5. Party band Tragikly White plays Cajun’s Wharf at 9 p.m. Barry Estabrook, author of “Tomatoland,” presents a lecture entitled “Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Guide to Sustainable Meat” at the Clinton School of Public Service, 6 p.m., free (reservations requested).

FRIDAY, APRIL 15 Beloved Memphis rockers Lucero and Tulsa singer/songwriter John Moreland share a bill at Maxine’s, 9 p.m., $20 adv., $25 d.o.s. Rising country singer Cody Jinks plays Revolution, 9 p.m., $15. Electronic producer Psymbionic headlines a benefit for The Van and Kathryn’s House at Stickyz, 8 p.m., donations. Local trumpet talent Rodney Block and friends will cover pop, rock and hip-hop songs from the ’80s at South on Main, 9 p.m., $15. The Main Thing performs its latest comedy show, “Rednecks in Spandex,” 8 p.m., $40 at The Joint. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack speaks at the Clinton School, 6 p.m., free (reservations encouraged). More than 100 wines will be paired with food from the likes of Cache, Kent Walker, One Eleven, The Southern Gourmasian and more at the Wine & Food Festival at Wildwood Park for the Performing Arts, 6:30 p.m., $75; The Itinerant Locals and Rodney Block will provide music. “Driving Miss Daisy” continues at The Weekend Theater at 7:30 p.m., $12-$16.

SATURDAY, APRIL 16 The live version of Travis Pastrana’s MTV stunt show “Nitro Circus” comes to War Memorial, 6 p.m., $19-$79. Multi-talented singer/ songwriter Isaac Alexander shares the stage at White Water Tavern with Nashville power-pop heroes The Nobility, led by Sean Williams, who grew up in Searcy with Alexander, 9:30 p.m. Contemporary blues legend Keb’ Mo plays the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, 8 p.m., $27-$47. The Ultimate Earth, Wind & Fire Tribute Show comes to Revolution, 9 p.m., $20. www.arktimes.com

APRIL 14, 2016

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.

$40. 10800 Col. Glenn Road. 501-217-5113.

COMEDY

Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy. Verizon Arena, 7:30 p.m., $59.50. 1 Alltel Arena Way, NLR. 501-975-9001. verizonarena.com. “Rednecks in Spandex.” An original production by The Main Thing. The Joint, 8 p.m., $22. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com. Skip Clark. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., $12. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-2285555. www.loonybincomedy.com.

THURSDAY, APRIL 14

MUSIC

Arkansas Chamber Singers. Benefit, with hors d’oeuvres and cocktails. Governor’s Mansion, 6:30 p.m., $65. 1800 Center St. 501-377-1121. Daniel Markham, John Calvin Abney. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-3758400. www.whitewatertavern.com. “Inferno.” DJs play pop, electro, house and more, plus drink specials and $1 cover before 11 p.m. Sway, 9 p.m. 412 Louisiana. 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. Modern Language, Big Papa Binns. Maxine’s, 9 p.m., free. 700 Central Ave., Hot Springs. www. maxinespub.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. Possessed by Paul James, Grief Brothers. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 8:30 p.m., $7. 107 River Market Ave. 501-372-7707. www. stickyz.com. RockUsaurus. Casa Mexicana, 7:30 p.m. 7111 JFK Blvd., NLR. 501-835-7876. Sean Fresh & The NastyFresh Crew. The Joint, 7:30 p.m., $10. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com. Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 8 p.m., free. 111 W. Markham St. 501-370-7013. www. capitalbarandgrill.com. Tragikly White (headliner), Fire & Brimstone (happy hour). Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 and 9 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf.com.

COMEDY

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

EVENTS

Arkansas Literary Festival. A diverse roster of authors will participate in panels at various venues in Little Rock. Main Library, free. 100 S. Rock St. www.arkansasliteraryfestival.org. Arkansas School for the Deaf 2016 Spring Carnival. Arkansas School for the Deaf, 5 p.m., $5. 2400 W. Markham St. 501-324-9543. www. arschoolforthedeaf.org‎. #ArkiePubTrivia. Stone’s Throw Brewing, 6:30 p.m. 402 E. 9th St. 501-244-9154. Rites of Spring Festival. Poetry, art, comedy and music. Vino’s. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. www. vinosbrewpub.com.

FILM

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Argenta Community Theater, 7 p.m., $5. 405 Main St., 30

APRIL 14, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

DANCE

GET DOWN FOR A GOOD CAUSE: Local promoter Mike Brown has organized a benefit for The One Inc., the nonprofit behind The Van and the homeless shelter Kathryn’s House, at 8 p.m. Friday at Stickyz. Electronic producer Psymbionic (above) headlines. According to his bio, he “enjoys turning non-traditional sound design and infectious rhythms into dancefloor heat, while also maintaining his history in the downtempo, emotive side of the electronic sound.” Chat Room and Justin Wells also share the bill and local DJs Joel Allenbaugh, Big Brown, Justin Ewell and Sleepy Genius will spin on the patio. A $5 minimum donation is requested.

NLR. 501-353-1443. argentacommunitytheater.org.

LECTURES

Alicia Garza. A talk by the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. M.L. Harris Auditorium at Philander Smith College, 7 p.m., free. 900 W Daisy L. Gatson Bates Drive. “Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Guide to Sustainable Meat.” A talk by Barry Estabrook, author of the bestselling book “Tomatoland.” Sturgis Hall, 6 p.m. 1200 President Clinton Ave. 501-683-5200. clintonschool.uasys.edu. “Redeeming Lights: The Remarkable Political Lives of Arkansas’ Redeemers.” Old State House Museum, noon, free. 300 W. Markham St. 501-324-9685. www.oldstatehouse.com.

SPORTS

Horse racing. Oaklawn Park. 1:30 p.m., $2.50$4.50. 2705 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 501-6234411. www.oaklawn.com.

FRIDAY, APRIL 15

MUSIC

All In Fridays. Envy. 7200 Colonel Glenn Road. 501-562-3317. Canvas (headliner), Richie Johnson (happy hour). Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 and 9 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf. com. Cody Jinks. Revolution, 9 p.m., $15. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. www.rumbarevolution.com/new.

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com. Lucero, John Moreland. Maxine’s, 9 p.m., $20 adv., $25 d.o.s. 700 Central Ave., Hot Springs. www.maxinespub.com. Mike and The Moonpies. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m., $7. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. www. whitewatertavern.com. Psymbionic, Chat Room. A benefit for The One, Inc., the nonprofit behind The Van and Kathryn’s House. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 8 p.m., donations. 107 River Market Ave. 501372-7707. www.stickyz.com. Rites of Spring Festival: John Lucus, Matthew Castellano, William Farrel. Vino’s, 7 p.m. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub.com. Rodney Block Does the ‘80s. South on Main, 9 p.m., $15. 1304 Main St. 501-244-9660. southonmain.com. Route 66. Agora Conference and Special Event Center, 6:30 p.m., $5. 705 E. Siebenmorgan, Conway. Salsa Dancing. Clear Channel Metroplex, 9 p.m., $5-$10. 10800 Col. Glenn Road. 501-217-5113. www.littlerocksalsa.com. Tawanna Campbell. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 9 p.m., $10. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-1196. www.afterthoughtbistroandbar.com. Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 8 p.m., free. 111 W. Markham St. 501-370-7013. www. capitalbarandgrill.com. Upscale Friday. IV Corners, 7 p.m. 824 W. Capitol Ave. Young Thug. Clear Channel Metroplex, 8 p.m.,

SANTA MARGHERITA PINOT GRIGIO Normally $29.99

Special $19.99 Growlers Available

2516 Cantrell Road Riverdale Shopping Center

366-4406

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

EVENTS

Arkansas Literary Festival. See April 14. 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. Rites of Spring Festival. Poetry, art, comedy and music. Vino’s, through April 16. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub.com. Wine & Food Festival. More than 100 wines paired with food from The Southern Gourmasian, Cache, Kent Walker, One Eleven and more. Music by The Itinerant Locals and Rodney Block. Wildwood Park for the Performing Arts, 6:30 p.m., $75. 20919 Denny Road.

LECTURES

Tom Vilsack. U.S. agriculture secretary will give the Frank and Kula Kumpuris Lecture. Reserve at 501-748-0425. Clinton School of Public Service, 6 p.m., free. 1200 President Clinton Ave. 501-6835239. www.clintonschool.uasys.edu.

SPORTS

Horse racing. Oaklawn Park. 1:30 p.m., $2.50$4.50. 2705 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 501-6234411. www.oaklawn.com.

SATURDAY, APRIL 16

MUSIC

Ginsu Wives, My Empty Phantom. Maxine’s, 9 p.m., $7. 700 Central Ave., Hot Springs. www. maxinespub.com. The Heat. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 9 p.m., $7. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-1196. www.afterthoughtbistroandbar.com. Isaac Alexander, The Nobility. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. www.whitewatertavern.com. Keb’ Mo. Walton Arts Center, 8 p.m., $27-$47. 495 W. Dickson St., Fayetteville. 479-443-5600. 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. 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. RVS (headliner), Brian Ramsey (happy hour).

Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 and 9 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf.com. Rites of Spring Festival: Shawn James & the Shapeshifters, Bad Match, I Was Afraid. Vino’s, 8:30 p.m. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. www. vinosbrewpub.com. Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 8 p.m., free. 111 W. Markham St. 501-370-7013. www. capitalbarandgrill.com. The Ultimate Earth, Wind & Fire Tribute Show. Revolution, 9 p.m., $20. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. www.rumbarevolution.com/ new.

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. Skip Clark. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., $12. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-2285555. www.loonybincomedy.com.

EVENTS

Arkansas Literary Festival. See April 14. 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. Nitro Circus Live. War Memorial Stadium, 6 p.m., $19. 1 Stadium Drive. 501-663-0775. 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. Rites of Spring Festival. Poetry, art, comedy and music. Vino’s. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub.com.

SPORTS

Horse racing. Oaklawn Park:1 p.m., $2.50-$4.50. 2705 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 501-623-4411. www.oaklawn.com. Rocket 5k, 3K and Kids’ Rocket Dash. Catholic High School, 8 a.m., $25 adv., $30 day of. 6300 Father Tribou St. 501-664-3939. www.lrchs.org.

SUNDAY, APRIL 17

MUSIC

Andy Mineo, Propaganda. Revolution, 7 p.m., $25 adv., $27 day of. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. www.rumbarevolution.com/new. Irish Traditional Music Session. Hibernia Irish Tavern, 2:30 p.m. 9700 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-246-4340. www.hiberniairishtavern.com. Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com.

EVENTS

Arkansas Literary Festival. See April 14. Artists for Recovery. Located in the Wesley Room, a secular recovery group for people with addictions, open to the public. 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. Rites of Spring Festival: Merch Swap. Vino’s, noon. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub.com.

FILM

“Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning.” Arkansas Arts Center, 2 p.m., free. 501 E. 9th St. 501-372-4000. www.arkarts.com.

MONDAY, APRIL 18

MUSIC

Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com. Monday Night Jazz. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 8 p.m., $5. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-1196. www.afterthoughtbistroandbar.com. Open Mic. The Lobby Bar. Studio Theatre, 8 p.m. 320 W. 7th St. Richie Johnson. Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf. com.

EVENTS

Tales from the South with Kevin Delaney. Rock Town Distillery, 5 p.m., $15 adv., $20 at the door. 1216 E. Sixth St. 501-907-5244. arkansaslightning.com.

Shop shop LOCAL ARKANSAS TIMES

LECTURES

“Lessons from Traveling to Zika, Ebola, MERS, FLU and SARS Pandemics.” A talk by Daniel Lucey, senior scholar with the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Sturgis Hall, noon 1200 President Clinton Ave. 501-683-5200. clintonschool.uasys.edu.

TUESDAY, APRIL 19

MUSIC

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. Joe Buck. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. www.whitewatertavern.com. Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com. 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.

COMEDY

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

Arkansas, Premier FEAST ival 18th Annual

WINE&FOOD

Festival

Friday, April 15 6:30 – 9:00 pm $75 per person More than 100 specially selected wines are paired with artful edibles created by central Arkansas’ finest chefs and restaurants. Roaming musicians, a dance band and exquisite atmosphere bring the culinary arts to life at Wildwood.

Southern Gourmasian – • Cache So Kent Walker Artisan Cheese Chenal Country Club Bravo! • Bar Louie Lemon Cakery Blue Cake Company Bistro Catering One Eleven Bonefish Grill

For tickets visit wildwoodpark.org or call 501.821.7275

EVENTS

2016 Spring Job Fair. Statehouse Convention Center, 10 a.m. 7 Statehouse Plaza. Trivia Bowl. Flying Saucer, 8:30 p.m. 323 President Clinton Ave. 501-372-8032. www.beerknurd. com/stores/littlerock.

20919 DENNY ROAD LITTLE ROCK 72223 www.arktimes.com

APRIL 14, 2016

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

WINE

RAIN OR SHINE

FOOD

JA Z Z

CATERED BY

for a

TASTE OVER 300 WINES

SPRING EVENING

5 tents serving wines from all over the world.

with

THE FUNKANITES w/ DJ Set by Joshua Asante of Amasa Hines & Velvet Kente

Make plans to attend this enjoyable spring evening event celebrating Wine, Food & Jazz in the beautiful Argenta Arts District. Go To:

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

http://bit.ly/grape16

for tickets! Print your tickets and present at the door.

APRIL 14, 2016

ARKANSASâ&#x20AC;&#x2C6;TIMES

SEPTEMBER 11-27, 2015

AFTER DARK, CONT.

“Johnny Cash! The Man, His World, His Music.” Part of the Rites of Spring Festival, to be followed by a Q&A. Vino’s. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub.com.

LECTURES

Sir John Leighton. A talk by the Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland and author of the new book “100 Masterpieces of the National Galleries of Scotland.” Arkansas Arts Center, 5:30 p.m. 501 E. 9th St. 501-372-4000. www.arkarts.com.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20

MUSIC

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. Drageoke with Chi Chi Valdez. Sway. 412 Louisiana. Jazz in the Park: Off the Cuff. Riverfront Park, 6 p.m. 400 President Clinton Avenue. Jim Dickerson. Sonny Williams’ Steak Room, 7 p.m. 500 President Clinton Ave. 501-324-2999. www.sonnywilliamssteakroom.com. Jim Mize. South on Main, 8:30 p.m., $5. 1304 Main St. 501-244-9660. southonmain.com. Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com. Open Mic Nite with Deuce. Thirst n’ Howl, 7:30 p.m., free. 14710 Cantrell Road. 501-379-8189. www.thirst-n-howl.com. Rivers and Rust. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 8 p.m., $10. 107 River Market Ave. 501372-7707. www.stickyz.com. RockUsaurus. Senor Tequila, 7 p.m. 10300 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-224-5505.

COMEDY

The Joint Venture. Improv comedy group. The Joint, 8 p.m., $7. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com. Mike Merryfield. The Loony Bin, April 20-23, 7:30 p.m.; April 22-23, 10 p.m., $8-$12. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-228-5555. www. loonybincomedy.com.

DANCE

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

FILM

“War Letters.” Part of the Movies at MacArthur series. MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History, 6:30 p.m., free. 503 E. 9th St. 376-4602. www.arkmilitaryheritage.com.

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

“Driving Miss Daisy.” The Weekend Theater, through April 17: Fri., Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sun., 2:30

p.m., $16. 1001 W. 7th St. 501-374-3761. www. weekendtheater.org. “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare’s play will be presented in the new Center for Humanities and Arts. 10 a.m. April 20 performance is free. Pulaski Technical College, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., $10 ($5 students). 3000 W. Scenic Drive, NLR. “Rapture, Blister, Burn.” Walton Arts Center’s Nadine Baum Studios, through April 24: Wed.Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Fri., Sat., 2 p.m., $15-$45. 505 W. Spring St., Fayetteville. 479-443-5600. theatre2.org.

IN THE GALLERIES ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, MacArthur Park: “Feed Your Mind Friday,” talk by curator Ann Prentice Wagner about Charles Burchfield’s paintings of industrial scenes in the Port of Buffalo, noon-1 p.m. April 15; screening of “Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning,” 2 p.m. April 17; guest lecture by Sir John Leighton, director general of the National Galleries of Scotland and author of “100 Masterpieces of the National Galleries of Scotland,” 6 p.m. April 19, wine reception 5:30 before, booksigning after, free to members, $10 to nonmembers; “Dorothea Lange’s America” and “Industrial Beauty: Charles Burchfield’s ‘Black Iron,’ ” through May 8; “Miranda Young: A Printed Menagerie,” museum school gallery, through May 29; 46th annual “Mid-Southern Watercolorists Exhibition,” through April 17; “Admiration,” painting by William Adolph Bouguereau, on loan from San Antonio Museum of Art, through May 15; “Life and Light: “Nathalia Edenmont: Force of Nature,” photographs, through May 1. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sun. 372-4000. GALLERY 360, 900 S. Rodney Parham Road: “Shrunken,” more than 150 small works by 30 artists, through May 15. 663-2222. 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. Reception 5-8 p.m. April 15, Argenta ArtWalk. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 664-2787. HEARNE FINE ART, 1001 Wright Ave.: “Off the Page: Illustrations from Nikki Grimes’ ‘Danita Brown’ Series and Other Titles,” watercolors by E.B. Lewis and mixed media by Floyd Cooper, April 15-June 3; book-signing and reception 5:30-7 p.m. April 15, talk by Lewis 2 p.m. April 17, both part of the Arkansas Literary Festival. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sat. 372-6822. LAMAN PUBLIC LIBRARY, 2801 Orange St., NLR: “Abandoned Arkansas: An Echo from the Past,” photography by the Abandoned Arkansas photographers group, through April 19, talk by Atlanta photographer and videographer Michael Schwarz 2-4 p.m. April 16. 9 a.m.-8 p.m. Mon.-Thu., 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Fri.-Sat. 758-1720. 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, opening reception 5-8 p.m. April 15, Argenta ArtWalk; “Meet the Photographers” program noon-1 p.m. April 16. 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Sat. 687-1061.

BEER NIGHT

Come try a sampling before the show!

ARKANSAS ARKANSAS RREPERTORY EPERTORY T H E AT R E THEATRE Sponsored By

Joan Hess (Francesca) and Michael Halling (Robert) in The Rep’s production of The Bridges of Madison County. Photo by John David Pittman.

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Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown Book by Marsha Norman Based on the book by Robert James Waller

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ARKANSAS TIMES

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MOVIE REVIEW

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APRIL 14, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

BY SAM EIFLING

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‘Hardcore Henry’ does something new with action genre.

he streaking comet that is “Hardman lightning storm who can levitate his core Henry” raises a question: victims. He does some killing, but Henry Where have the Russian action and his lady flee to an escape pod (oh, films been this whole time? The nation didn’t realize we were in some whackedthat has given us the greatest dash-camout lab miles above the earth, eh? Well, get used to this sort of thing) that crashera YouTube moments and that by its lands into a city. There the wife is capvery inhabitance radiates a sense of “no tured by machine-gun thugs and Henry half measures” has just inflicted one of the most lunarealizes he’s a nigh-invultic, innovative nerable killshoot-’em-up ing machine romps since the early who’s going to Bourne flicks, die soon but or maybe “The needs revenge. Raid,” or, if F r o m you want to go there, “Hardback to mid- HUSTLING WITH ‘HENRY’: There are 90 minutes of core Henry” hustles you ’90s PC games, mayhem in this Russian action film. through tun“Quake.” Everything about the setup of “Hardnels, into gun battles, up the sides of core Henry,” in fact, makes it sound like buildings (more parkour!), through a hot garbage in the making: a feature in brothel, into the woods. It’s chaos. There which the mute protagonist, who’s some isn’t a surplus of plot to keep up with, but as you can imagine, when you’re a kind of cyborg experiment in general ass-kickery, films the entire movie from cyborg whose vocals didn’t have time to his vantage point. It’s the apex of video boot, other people have to do the talkgaming and cinema merging, fulfilling ing. Most of those people are played that longstanding suicide pact that genby Sharlto Copley (villainous in “Elyerally produces utterly disposable movsium” and “Chappie”). At first it seems like a running gag, an endless series of ies. Instead, it succeeds as exactly the various dudes named Jimmy, but even rush that director Ilya Naishuller set out that eventually comes to have a bizarre to make. You’ve got no idea who he is, payoff. Most of the surprises of “Hardbut you might have logged one of the 33 core Henry” hit you in the guts and the million views of a 2013 music video he directed for his band Biting Elbows (the glands. A few, though, arrive as wry song: “Bad Motherfucker”). It featured feints, gonzo twists or one-liners. Copa similar first-person point-of-view and ley, meanwhile, contains all of these, a madcap action sequence of fighting, in one multivarious action/comedic shooting, stunts and under-explained performance. There are, it turns out, a whole lot of Jimmys to play. tech/magic, as if you were seeing through the eyes of a parkour-runner Jason StaCleverest yet may be the jump-cut tham character. editing style that Naishuller uses to proThat laid the groundwork for 90 pel the action ever forward. There is no down time in “Hardcore Henry” — it’s minutes of that same sort of mayhem the contra-“Revenant.” Instead, it skips in “Hardcore Henry,” which was shot forward clippity-clip, stitching all sorts with custom facemask-mounted GoPro 3 cameras. A team of quasi-actors, defiof mayhem in the tiny gaps that, perhaps nitely stuntmen, wore this rig to tell the because we all spend an hour a day with our eyes shut during blinks, we unconstory: Henry (you, seemingly) waking in a lab getting artificial limbs screwed on sciously smooth out into a single runby a foxy science woman (Haley Benning shot. In all, it’s quite the trip. It’s not often nett) who says she’s Henry’s (your) wife. Then a bad guy (Danila Kozlovsky) blows that a movie drops you into a first-person into the lab with a telekinetic flourish view and then dares you, against all odds, straight out of “Dragon Ball Z,” a oneto possibly keep up with yourself.

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APRIL 14, 2016

Dining WHAT’S COOKIN’ LA MADELEINE COUNTRY French Cafe, a bakery and eating establishment, will hold its grand opening Thursday, April 21, in the Rock Creek Square Plaza Shopping Center at 12210 W. Markham St. The Chi restaurant family owns the Arkansas franchise for La Madeleine, which was founded in 1983 in Dallas as a bakery by Patrick Esquerre. The Chis say they will open four other La Madeleines in Arkansas over the next few years. To celebrate the grand opening, the first 50 guests in line at 6:30 a.m. will win a weekly supply of La Madeleine’s breads for a year. (They will receive certificates for pickup weekly at the restaurant.) The 5,500-square-foot restaurant will have a large covered patio for year-round use, a double-sided fireplace, French country decor and a view of the bakery kitchen. Besides pastries (including a Strawberry Napoleon), the menu includes quiches, omelets, soups, salads, sandwiches and entrees, including paella, salmon, beef bourguignon, chicken and pastas, specialty coffees and a small wine list. The restaurant will be open for breakfast, lunch and dinner from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily. WE NOTICED A LOT OF CONSTRUCTION activity at The Root Cafe (1500 Main St.) recently and called owner Jack Sundell to get the lowdown. After winning a $150,000 grant from JPMorgan Chase Bank and $25,000 from the HLN show “Growing America: A Journey to Success” last year, Jack and his wife, Corri Bristow Sundell, decided to expand — using shipping containers. Four of the eight containers the restaurant plans to use are now on site and are being connected to the restaurant. Three will be used as new dining space with six windows along the front and two large doors at the end. Another three will expand the kitchen by three-and-a-half times and one will be used for a new walk-in cooler. The Sundells, who are serving as their own contractors, have to complete the whole project before the restaurant can occupy the new space, per code requirements. They hope to be finished this calendar year. In the meantime, The Root is offering a five-course ticketed dinner every second Friday of the month and a counterservice dinner every fourth Friday. Also, Sara Slimp, the founder of the Fayetteville food truck Chunky Dunk, has joined The Root as head pastry chef. She plans to continue the Chunky Dunk cookie sandwich line in coordination with Loblolly in Little Rock, too. 36

APRIL 14, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

Coby’s

Inside the Arkansas Heart Hospital 1701 S. Shackleford Road 219-7551 QUICK BITE Enter the hospital and take a left at the reception desk to get to the cafe. It’s counter service. Chef Coby Smith will plop your uncooked noodles in boiling water as soon as you walk up and order the ramen and have you dished up in a matter of minutes. The cafe is clean, modern looking and bustling, with a long bar along one side that’s ideal for solo diners. Smith said he and the hospital are thrilled to have people who aren’t staff or patients or family members of patients come to eat. HOURS 7 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. daily. (But ramen is only available 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday.)

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

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

BELLY UP

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

HURRAH FOR RAMEN: Three days a week at lunch, you can get delicious Japanese noodle soup.

Finally, ramen! Coby’s at the Heart Hospital gets the Japanese mainstay right.

nstant ramen can be delicious. Discard the flavor packet; make a broth with instant stock, hoisin, soy sauce, sesame oil and Sriracha; hard-boil an egg; and throw in whatever leftovers you can find in the fridge. That’s good eating. Tasty enough that we regularly crave the real version — fresh noodles and a broth made delicious by hours of cooking and all sorts of pork parts — which is hard to find around here. The Southern Gourmasian’s excellent pulled pork ramen fits the bill most of the time, but we’ve longed for diversity, lobbying restaurateur friends to open up shop and giving our pro chef brother-in-law a ramen cookbook, to no avail. So we were thrilled to hear that Dr. Bruce Murphy, CEO of the Arkansas Heart Hospital, shared our craving. As the hospital prepared to reopen its cafe in November 2015, Murphy sent hospital cook Coby Smith to Tokyo for a crash course on ramen. With Murphy’s Japanese-born assistant as a guide, Smith sampled nearly 20 ramen shops over the course of a couple of days. With that experience, a lot of Internet research and surveying all the ramen cookbooks he could find, Smith arrived at his stock. While it’s pork based — he cooks pork butt, pork bones, chicken bones, ginger and bay leaf overnight; strains and adds soy sauce, ginger and onion; reduces it; then strains and reduces it again — it’s much less fatty than a lot of traditional ramen. This is the cafe at the Heart Hospital after all. But that’s no criticism. On Monday of this week, we were happily slurping every last bit of the delicious broth and toothsome noodles. Smith rightly views his base and the fresh noodles he imports from

Dallas as a foundation for experimentation. On Monday, aside from the pork broth, it was all veggies: caramelized onions and peppers, avocado, spinach, roasted and sliced portobello mushrooms, carrot, shredded squash and zucchini, bamboo shoots, basil and cilantro. On Wednesday, it was more traditional: pulled chicken, green onion, carrot, sesame oil and a soy-marinated hard-boiled egg. Friday, he’ll go way far afield from traditional ramen with a Cajun variation, with smoked sausage, roasted corn, garbanzo beans, egg, red onion and jalapeno. The cafe, named Coby’s after the remodel last year, is designed with convenience and affordability in mind. Every day of the week there’s a blue plate special ($4.50) — comfort food like pot roast, blackened tilapia and roast pork loin served with two veggies — available at lunch and at dinner. On weekdays, there’s also a gourmet sandwich ($3.75) and a dessert of the day ($2). Recent offerings included a muffuletta panini, a turkey Rueben, an Italian cream cake and a red velvet cake. There’s a salad bar and breakfast, too. Ramen ($4.50) is an experiment, Smith says. It’s only been underway for a month. He figures dashi, a stock usually made with fermented fish shavings, wouldn’t go over well among his typical client base, but he might try it sometime. For now, because his broth requires such laborious prep, he’s planning on continuing to offer ramen only on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at lunch. Come summertime, who knows? He might try cold noodles. Check out the Heart Hospital on Facebook. He said its social media team would likely be posting specials soon.

4310 Landers Road • North Little Rock, AR 72117 (501) 687-1331 • www.krebsbrothers.com • M-F 8-5 Sat. 9-5

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APRIL 14, 2016

RSON N PATTE N I T S U J SIA CHEF GOURMA

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For more info, visit www.pulaskitech.edu/diamondchef or call 501.812.2387. Proceeds benefit the programs and students of Pulaski Technical College. 38

APRIL 14, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

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FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT DAVID KOON AT DAVIDKOON@ARKTIMES.COM Pub or Perish is a related event of the Arkansas Literary Festival.

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APRIL 14, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES