Arkansas Times - May 19, 2016 by Arkansas Times

MAY 19, 2016 / ARKTIMES.COM | NEWS + POLITICS + ENTERTAINMENT + FOOD

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MAY 19, 2016

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MAY 19, 2016

COMMENT

Disappointed in the governor

An open letter to Gov. Hutchinson: I am writing you to express my disappointment in your response to the letter sent by the federal government as guidance to the school districts of this nation regarding the fair and equal treatment under the law of transgender students. You stated that you found the letter “offensive, intrusive and totally lacking in common sense.” The guidelines the federal government made explicit to the school districts in the state of Arkansas and throughout the country may be different than what you are speaking out against and opposing. When the state of Arkansas took federal money tied to Title IX, the state signed a contract with the federal government that explicitly agreed to not discriminate on the basis of gender identity. The Republican majority in the United States Congress in 2013 actually defined “gender identity” and set the standard for nondiscrimination that is now part of the contractual agreement the state entered into when receiving funds for programs tied to Title IX and the Violence Against Women Act. I am concerned that you do not fully understand the peril you are putting transgender students in when you come out in opposition to this letter. Ensuring a safe and healthy environment in Arkansas schools requires that you are aware that data from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey show a direct correlation between the high suicide rates of teenagers and bathroom restriction of transgender teens. Please look at whose lives you are putting in jeopardy when you refuse to acknowledge the students in Arkansas schools whose safety is in danger daily. Perhaps you do not have experience or previous relationship with a member of the transgender community. Let me for a moment be their voice. I am the president of Arkansas Transgender Equality Coalition (ArTEC). There has been a lot of misinformation about our community. I would appreciate an opportunity for a direct, non-confrontational conversation. I invite you into this conversation as soon as possible so that together we can build a stronger, safer Arkansas for all Arkansans. Sincerely, The Rev. Gwen Fry President of ArTEC 4

MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

From the web In response to the May 12 cover story Benjamin Hardy, “Life Saver,” about AIDS activist Eric Camp. This story brought back so many memories — sad, joyful and poignant. It was a beautiful tribute to a beautiful person. Eric deserves to be lauded. His work touched many and saved many lives. It is also a tribute to all the beautiful people of courage who are no longer with us and to all the brave and compassionate people from congregations of many denominations who got involved with RAIN at a time when ignorance and fear prevailed. Yesterday, I did a grief and loss workshop for health care workers. In every workshop I facilitate about grief, or about death and dying, I begin by saying that I learned everything I know from the CareTeams and CarePartners in Arkansas. I often tell their stories. Thanks to Benjamin for writing this great piece. Trudy James I am thankful to see AIDS being discussed because it hasn’t been wiped out. Education needs to continue. I was a RAIN team member in the ’90s. Sadly, we lost a number of partners (people with AIDS who were assigned to our team for support) over the years, but I was thrilled to run into a former partner earlier this year. She is doing well and back to working full time. As effective treatments became more readily available and the families and public became more educated on the modes of transmission so fear diminished somewhat, the need for RAIN teams declined. It was wonderful to catch up on Eric’s life through this article. Trudy, Eric and their brave speakers saved countless lives and the impression they made on those teens continues to shape their sexual behavior today. Thank you! Kay Ekey I knew and worked with Eric back in the day and I am very glad to see this article on his contributions to public health and the people of Arkansas. I remember Eric as focused, clear thinking, selfless, intense and tireless. I agree with the article that his actions saved countless lives and in my book he is a hero. There are people who will not like this article and show their dislike in these comments, but those people have

never dissuaded Eric from doing what he knows to be right. BThomasson

In response to Gene Lyons’ May 5 column about Donald Trump and the media: Note to Republicans: The world is watching. And laughing. You know, Don Rickles puts on a better show. He’s much funnier than Trump, I can tell you that. Maybe you should consider drafting Rickles as your candidate. You know, kinda class up the joint. Tony Galati Tony, you and I run with different people from other nations. The ones I know are puzzled, concerned, mystified and more than a little terrified. They view the possibility of a Trump presidency as unimaginably bad. I tell my foreign friends that I don’t think that possibility is all that likely, but I openly confess that Trump’s success thus far speaks poorly for the intelligence of an unacceptably large fraction of the American voting public. However, I persist with the interpretation that Trump’s appeal is not based on the angry white male, but on the scared white male. The decades of privilege that have benefited white males in the U.S. are going away and they are smart enough to see that happening. Trump offers the promise that if they join his gang, or tribe, they can “make America great again” and restore privilege by bluster and bully. I guess to many that sounds like a better plan than the option of being smarter and working harder to compete in the global economy. Cruz’s appeal might have been that his God will make things all better, if you just sign on and trust her, or him. deadseasquirrel In response to Gov. Hutchinson’s outrage over the federal order to allow people to use the bathroom of the sex they identify as: I personally wouldn’t want to share a restroom with Asa or our skanky attorney general. That’s no more ridiculous than this whole bathroom issue. So many are hung up on who can use the restroom with whom that it is just laughable. It is sad commentary indeed that with all the challenges and issues facing this country we just can’t quite conquer that whole bathroom issue. In many parts of the world there

are no men’s restrooms and there are no ladies’ rooms. There are just restrooms and we all share them and absolutely nobody gets all worked up about it. Americans are way too hung up on bodily functions. I once met this girl in a restroom in Tokyo and … well, that’s a story for another thread. HolyGuano

We must understand that everything that goes through Asa’s mind and comes out of his mouth is first filtered through his Bob Jones University indoctrination, the NRA, Walton and Koch influences and his desperation-fueled craving to die a wealthy man. You know, the kind of man the Bible says has terrible odds of getting into Heaven. The turning worm just might roll over Asa in the coming year … GOOD! President Obama is clearly enjoying his last months in office and I fully expect after the November elections he’s going to go wild with the good stuff like the directive sent out for the protection of transgender students. Buy your ringside tickets now in order to have a great view of Republican skin sizzling for the next four to eight years! Deathbyinches

In response to Arkansas Blog reporting on the possibility of stopping the proposed widening of Interstate 30 by lawsuit: Pissed-off downtown resident here who also happens to be a real estate lawyer. I am happy to offer my assistance to an effort to get a federal suit going … if it comes to that. While we are not in the same federal circuit as Alabama (and thus aren’t benefitted by any direct precedent being set in the case), I will still be watching it in interest. In the interim, I am being cautiously optimistic about the process. The public outcry has been impressive and has already resulted in some substantive changes and actual improvements — the downtown interchange reconfiguration and added parks. If we can get the number of lanes down to a reasonable eight or so, I might actually consider the project a net win, though obviously not as big as outright removal or the boulevard option would be. Thanks to the Times for your frequent reporting on this. superdan

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MAY 19, 2016

EYE ON ARKANSAS

WEEK THAT WAS board meeting last week, Dianne Zook, a charter-sympathetic board member, announced LR Prep was withdrawing its request for expansion (though it’s still asking to move to the new location).

Quote of the Week: “Please look at whose lives you are putting in jeopardy when you refuse to acknowledge the students in Arkansas schools whose safety is in danger daily.” — Rev. Gwen Fry, an Episcopal priest and president of the Arkansas Transgender Equality Coalition, in a letter to Gov. Hutchinson regarding his stance on the issue of gender identity and public restroom usage. Last Friday, Hutchinson sharply criticized the Obama administration’s new guidelines stating public schools must allow transgender students to use bathrooms that match their gender identity.

Mad as hell The state Board of Education got an earful last week from those upset with the Education Department’s handling of the Little Rock School District, which it has controlled since January 2015. The firing of LRSD Superintendent Baker Kurrus — almost certainly due to Kurrus’ vocal opposition to charter school expansions — continues to fuel outcry in the city. State Sen. Joyce Elliott (D-Little Rock) demanded to know why the department keeps giving charters permission to expand when their performance often lags those of LRSD schools, at least according to the state’s own measures. “Why is it that Little Rock keeps getting beaten down, and this other parallel school system keeps getting exception after exception?” Elliott asked. Kurrus himself delivered his monthly report to the state board wearing a sticker saying “Keep the public in public schools.” For what it’s worth, the heat may have slowed one small charter expansion: Little Rock Preparatory Academy, a school serving almost entirely low-income and minority students, had sought to move to a new campus and increase its enrollment to 120 students. Education Commissioner Johnny Key had fast-tracked LR Prep’s request previously. But at the state 6

MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

Suing the attorney general After multiple attempts to gain approval for a proposed constitutional amendment to tighten state ethics law have been rejected by Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, Little Rock lawyer David Couch is now suing the AG herself. Couch says Rutledge’s refusal to proposal an alternate ballot title for his proposal — which he wants to put before voters this November — is against the law. He’s asking for an expedited hearing from the Arkansas Supreme Court on his suit, given the tight timelines involved: After a proposed amendment is approved by the AG, organizers still must collect almost 85,000 valid signatures from registered voters by July 8 to qualify for the November ballot.

Another UA campus? In recent years, Pulaski Tech has struggled to cope with declining enrollment and an accompanying loss of revenue as its student population has dropped from around 12,000 students in 2011 to under 8,000 in 2015. That’s why the two-year school’s board of trustees voted unanimously last week to join the University of Arkansas system. The merger still requires the approval of the UA System’s board.

Easy money Consider the strange case of Guillermo Espinoza, who in 2013 was stopped by state police in Hot Spring County. The cops found and seized $19,894 in a computer bag in his vehicle, but no drugs or other contraband were discovered and prosecutors never charged Espinoza with a crime. Prosecutors initially filed a complaint to forfeit the cash, but later decided to drop the matter. Nonetheless, a trial judge rejected the state’s motion to dismiss and ordered the civil forfeiture anyway in September 2014. Espinoza fought back — but, incredibly, he lost again last week at the state Court of Appeals. Why? The appellate court said the rules of civil procedure

SOUTH ON MAIN LAST SET: Alternative country musicians Jay Farrar (right) and Gary Hunt closed out Oxford American’s 2015-16 concert series. The next season begins Aug. 25 with Amy Helm and the Handsome Strangers.

allow only 10 days after a judgment to file a motion challenging it. Espinoza’s motion was “untimely,” the Court of Appeals said, and so dismissed his appeal. That means his $20K remains in state hands.

Keep on surviving Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign (remember that old thing?) has evidently agreed to a settlement of a copyright infringement suit for playing “Eye of the Tiger” at a 2015 campaign event featuring Kim Davis, the Kentucky

county clerk who became a symbol of resistance to marriage equality last year. Huckabee was sued by Frankie Sullivan, a founding member of the band Survivor, which recorded the hit theme from “Rocky III.” Federal court records don’t state the terms of the settlement.

OPINION

Toilet terrorists

resident Obama gave Republicans vidual-user options a gift last week. His administration available to all stureminded school districts that the dents who volunlaw requires that students be allowed to tarily seek addiuse restroom and locker facilities that tional privacy.” My emphasis. match their gender identity. MAX The president did no more than state Republicans BRANTLEY maxbrantley@arktimes.com controlling statute, rule and legal prec- already were using edent, including a recent decision of the bathroom hysteria 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He as a wedge issue in massive resistance to was prompted by actions in North Caro- equal rights for lesbians and gays. A black lina, particularly, to require students to president edges into sexual matters? Strike use restrooms that comport with their up “Dixie” and put a 1950s newsreel on the genitalia at birth, not their gender identity. projector. Justice Jim Johnson would have (It’s unclear what North Carolina would admired how Arkansas politicians rushed require of the small number of children to boil race and sex into a hateful stew. born ambiguously on the biological specGov. Hutchinson said the president’s trum. Do it in the road?) announcement was “offensive, intrusive The president’s announcement and lacking in common sense.” Lt. Gov. included this important phrase: “A school Tim Griffin called it “ridiculous.” Attormay not require transgender students to ney General Leslie Rutledge called it an use facilities inconsistent with their gen- “abuse of power.” And they claim to be der identity or to use individual-user facili- lawyers. Only in the GOP is obeying the ties when other students are not required law an abuse of power. to do so. A school may, however, make indiThe average child is at greater risk

Even Trump for restroom rights

t seems almost biblically decreed that the great culture wars that define our age have, in the most farcical political year in our history, come down to this farcical conclusion — a public hysteria over female restrooms. It is the burning issue of where a transgender child or adult or any other sexual minority can go for relief when nature calls away from home. At the risk of adjective surfeit, let it be observed that the most farcical major political candidate in history delivered one of the sanest, kindest verdicts in this searing debate: Let them use the toilet where, following their biological, genetic or emotional drives, they feel most comfortable. That is Donald Trump, the presumptive nominee for president of the United States for a party that finds itself beset by the complexities of sex, reproduction and ethnicity upon which it has built its modern power. Trump would leave the status quo alone since there is no history of a transgender person harassing anyone in a restroom or locker room, though plenty of history of their being harassed and bullied. The real abuses have come not from transgender youngsters but from priests,

coaches and conservative politicians and judges. The old showboat, who built his business, enterERNEST tainment and now DUMAS political career on conspicuous sex, would not, at least yet, go as far as President Obama, whose administration last week let schools and other federally funded institutions know that denying sexual minorities the right to use the bathroom of their perceived gender violated both the Violence Against Women Act and Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972. The law really is pretty specific, although Gov. Hutchinson, pushed to respond because other Republican governors and politicians were having to take a stand, said the Justice Department was being nonsensical and overreaching. The furor followed North Carolina’s passage of a law allowing discrimination against sexual minorities — gays, lesbians, transgender people, transsexuals, intersexuals and, one assumes, the whole catalog of discrepancies from the sexual normals of male and female found in

from a priest, Baptist minister, teacher or coach than a transgender person seeking a public bathroom stall. See: just about any daily newspaper. The Republican outcry raised two essential questions: 1) Do Republicans believe there is such a thing as gender dysphoria — the feeling that one’s sex is different from one’s biological sex? Science says it’s real, but Republicans aren’t strong on science. 2) Have the protestors ever knowingly met a transgender person? One study says about three-tenths of 1 percent of people are transgender, or about 1,500 of Arkansas’s public school children, an average of one per school. But the number that has made the transition is almost certainly smaller. Personal confusion, fear and fallout — beginning at home — discourage it. The Republicans are preying on fear about a problem that doesn’t exist. There IS evidence, however, of cruelty against trans people, and demagoguery will only encourage more. I was told recently of a woman who tried to enter a Capitol women’s restroom. She was challenged by a toilet vigilante because of her slender, boyish build and clothing. She fled rather

than drop her trousers. My trans acquaintances include someone I knew as a child as, let’s say, Maxine. Maxine is now a handsome adult named Max, with a neatly trimmed beard. Do Asa Hutchinson, Tim Griffin and Leslie Rutledge really want Max to use the little girls’ room? No, what they really want is to discriminate. Thanks to them, we have two state laws aimed at discriminating against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The Constitution’s equal protection clause means little to them. They want to protect legal discrimination against LGBT people in employment, housing and public accommodations, from restaurants to photo studios. The desire to discriminate — whether against gays, women, immigrants or black people — is a far bigger threat to individual well-being than the rare trans person hoping to perform a bodily function in a closed bathroom stall. An acute observation I saw on the Internet: Those accustomed to privilege see equality as oppression. I’d add: The corollary for those without privilege and equality should be obvious.

the anatomies or mentalities of children. The law makes people use the bathroom designated for the gender on their birth certificates. It is an absurd, unworkable and cruel law, but politically inevitable. It captured the imagination of those who still cling to the ancient trope that everyone is born either a male or female and never the twain shall meet. Pediatricians and endocrinologists have long known better. The rest of society has been learning on a fast curve since the 1970s, when young people began coming out to their families and friends about their sexual or gender proclivities and feeling healthier for it. The practical result of the North Carolina law and any others that follow is that a transgender person cannot use a public restroom if they start requiring a birth certificate for admission to the potty. Burly, bearded men who were born female, like the once-daughter of a Republican congresswoman, could not legally use the men’s room but would cause some hysteria if they entered the girls’ room that they were legally mandated to use. If there are victims in this ridiculous crisis, it is not the young woman who suspects that the person in the next stall was registered as a male at birth but the millions of youngsters who, as always, hide their shame over their anatomical or mental condition in private or else bear the humiliation that being open still brings.

But times are changing, as even Republicans, like Donald Trump, acknowledge. Take the case of right-wing Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida. One day she and her husband found a note from their daughter Amanda on their bed. It revealed that she had become a man and was changing her name to Rodrigo. Rodrigo had packed his bags and left, unsure whether his parents would welcome him any longer. Rep. Ros-Lehtinen and her husband accepted him, although they were concerned that the harassment she had experienced as a youngster would only increase. Ros-Lehtinen is as far right as a Republican can go on just about everything else, but she is an eloquent champion of equal rights for gays, lesbians, transgender people and other sexual or gender minorities. She was the first Republican in Congress to espouse marriage equality. A study by the Rand Corp. commissioned by the defense secretary, leaked this week, found that some 2,450 of the 1.2 million active-duty members of the military are transgender and that each year about 65 transition to the other gender. Allowing them to serve openly would cost little and have no impact on readiness. It said that if the Pentagon did not accept them and cover medical procedures like hormone therapy and surgery they would seek medical care on their own and suffer higher rates of substance abuse and suicide. www.arktimes.com

MAY 19, 2016

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MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

Back off the saddle again

hat do Genghis Khan, William the Conqueror and Geronimo all have in common? Mighty warriors, they died not in battle, but by falling off horses. The list of historical notables who got killed on horseback includes kings, queens, prime ministers, Pope Urban VI and Emperor Theodosius of Rome. I’ve long insisted that my plan was to die in a fall from a horse at age 88 — suitably remote as to make it a joke. A smug, stupid joke. I’ve also argued — as friends’ broken shoulders and fractured pelvises accumulated — that riding bicycles in traffic is a damn fool thing for mature citizens to do. Challenged, I’d say I never rode horses in traffic or on pavement. One virtue of our Arkansas farm is that it’s river bottomland. There’s not a rock on the place. Besides, I hadn’t been dumped in 15 years. Ever the pedant, I’d say that two of my personal heroes, Thomas Jefferson and Jonathan Swift, rode horses into their 70s. Jefferson designed a portico at Monticello allowing him to step down onto a horse’s back after he could no longer mount from the ground. Swift kept fit on rainy Dublin days by running the bell tower steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He built a walled pasture nearby so he could visit his horses every day. It’s not for nothing that the final voyage of Swift’s masterpiece “Gulliver’s Travels” was to the Houyhouyhnms, a kingdom of philosophical talking horses. Pronounced “win-ums,” it’s the sound horses make deep in their throats when they’re glad to see you. My large friend Mount Nebo has always been happy to see me. He hustles into the barn, bobbing his head and nickering. “Houyhnhnm,” he says. “Got any carrots?” In a joke photograph I made of me in a cowboy hat scowling squint-eyed like Clint Eastwood, Nebo spoils the effect by gazing at me like a lovelorn teenager. Ah, but here’s the thing: I’m confident that all of the above — from Genghis Khan to Jefferson — were my superiors as horsemen. I took up riding at age 50, after giving up ball sports. Friends generously offered to stable Rusty, a quarterhorse gelding, in return for help around their barn. The first time Rusty dumped me wasn’t on purpose. An experienced animal, he could tell I didn’t know what I was doing. Horses are very acute about that. Somebody’s got to be in charge, and if you’re not

decisive, it’s every horse for himself. I had no business riding outside a fenced enclosure. A deer hunter in a GENE tree stand waved, LYONS and we were off to the races. I’d lost a stirrup at his first jump, and did an emergency dismount before he really got rolling. It’s one thing falling on your face from a horse’s back — quite another if he’s running 35 mph. I was lying face down in the dirt taking an inventory of moving parts, when I felt Rusty’s breath on my neck. My instructor said she’d have made me sell him if he hadn’t come back. Rusty was too much horse for a novice, but I was stubborn. We aged into each other. There were fewer hairy moments and no serious injuries. Besides a degree of athleticism, my greatest equestrian skill is a low center of gravity. Unless the horse is trying to buck me, I tend to stay on. Mount Nebo, a well-trained Tennessee walking horse of appropriate maturity, replaced Rusty five years ago. Too welltrained, I fear. One way horses differ from, say, dogs, is that the less work they get, the less they want. As I began to ride less frequently — I blame cow work — Nebo developed avoidance techniques. If he saw a lead rope, it was nothing doing. To catch him, I had to trick him with baling twine. Then he’d swell up like a toad to keep the cinch loose. Instead of moving forward when I’d try to mount, he’d back up, leaving me with one foot in the stirrup, hopping. He developed strong opinions about when it was time to head home. We bickered. No rough stuff, just stubbornness. Then last weekend came the parting of the ways. I never saw what spooked him, but we were trotting through my neighbor’s pasture — headed toward home actually — when Nebo suddenly jumped sideways, bucked once, and galloped off at a right angle. Totally unprepared, I hit the ground hard. The ground’s a lot harder 20 years on. Although I could hardly walk for two days, I have no serious injuries except maybe a broken rib or two — painful, but not lifethreatening. Well-intentioned friends insist that I need to get back on the horse. No, I don’t. I’ve had my last rodeo. Nebo, see, didn’t come back.

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A Fascinating History of Arkansas’s 200 Year Battle Against Disease and Pestilence This is a great history of Arkansas that tells how public attitudes toward medicine, politics and race have shaped the public health battle against deadly and debilitating disease in the state. From the illnesses that plagued the state’s earliest residents to the creation of what became the Arkansas Department of Health, Sam Taggart’s “The Public’s Health: A Narrative History of Health and Disease in Arkansas” tells the fascinating medical history of Arkansas. Published by the Arkansas Times.

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MAY 19, 2016

PEARLS ABOUT SWINE

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MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

ave Van Horn’s performance as Arkansas’s baseball coach is beyond reproach. The program was respectable, if flatlining a bit, under longtime head coach Norm DeBriyn. Van Horn was the popular selection to succeed DeBriyn when he retired. He was a scrappy former Hog player, and a fast-rising coaching prospect after he took a mostly moribund Cornhuskers’ program to new heights, with the Huskers’ first two trips up the road to the College World Series coming in 2002. Unlike Mike Anderson, Van Horn has validated the choice (ironically, Van Horn’s successor in Lincoln was a fella named Mike Anderson, who was solid but underwhelming) with nothing but unparalleled success the past several years. Arkansas has been to Omaha four times in the 13 seasons that “DVH” has patrolled the dugout, and made the NCAA Tournament every year. That streak is not only imperiled but all but foreclosed upon as this Hog team has scuffled mightily, and for a change, can’t seem to snap out of it. Over the weekend at Baum Stadium, the Razorbacks faced a fairly tall order to try to snap out of a horrible late-season funk. Alabama is perfectly average this year, and it was the final home series for the hosts, but the whole three-game set essentially confirmed that 2016 is simply not the season for Arkansas to do one of those nifty about-faces that have become pretty commonplace over the years. Friday night was the can’t-quite-get-it-done, 8-6 game where the late-inning rally fell just short. Saturday brought on the perfunctory six-run rout that was never in doubt for the visitors, and Sunday’s finale was that grim reminder that this team’s Achilles heel — a pitching staff with a team ERA hovering beyond the ugly five — is one that can even show itself with all of one strike separating it from a win. If anything, pitching coach Dave Jorn has been the unimpeachable rock over the years, while the hitting and defense has been mercurial. For a Razorback arsenal of arms to have this much trouble establishing consistency is so frustrating because it’s so rare. And it figured that this was going to be a relatively steady rotation and bullpen based upon last year’s returnees, but all of the linchpins — Dominic Taccolini, Keaton McKinney, Zach Jackson and James Teague — have really floundered in a bizarre fashion. Nobody has been there to lift Taccolini after any of his plentiful rough Friday

nights, and the bullpen hasn’t locked down leads at all. The upside? Well, save for two BEAU steady middle WILCOX infielders and a couple of little-used relievers, there’s cause to anticipate that the rough ’16 is going to help solidify what comes back in 2017. Taccolini, Jackson, and Teague are still imminently draft-worthy even after down years, but obviously their stock has suffered. The lineup should remain generally intact with Luke Bonfield guaranteed to come back and Carson Shaddy and Clark Eagan still possible returnees. The defense will need stabilizing up the middle. Neither Van Horn nor Jorn will permit the pitching woes to continue, either. Recruiting world-class arms has been the hallmark of this era of Hog baseball, what with the likes of Dallas Keuchel winning a Cy Young and Drew Smyly and Mike Bolsinger turning into highly competent major leaguers. The young guys who took a few licks this year have immense promise, especially righties like Isaiah Campbell, Blaine Knight and Barrett Loseke. It’s a staff that hasn’t suffered due to a paucity of talent, but because of a tendency to lose command and trust in the fielders at inopportune moments. The Hogs’ arms have not yielded an obscene number of hits or longballs, but the combined effect of the second-most walks in SEC play and a strangely high number of hit batsmen has exacerbated the lack of experience coming out of the pen. It’s been a bad enough season that the Hogs may well find themselves finished completely after this weekend’s last road series against No. 4 Mississippi State, because they stand on the outside looking in with respect to the conference tourney’s 12-team format in Hoover, Ala. And maybe after the brutal, 0-for-May stretch in which they are still mired, closing up shop for 2016 is the best avenue. Bottom line: Van Horn, unlike some of his forbears on the gridiron and hardwood, has earned the right to have one rotten year after 13 pretty stellar ones. And there’s no domineering sense of apprehension about the future, either. That’s a great, and culturally unique, thing among Hog athletics. You can bet that Mike Anderson and Bret Bielema aren’t in a position to pass off a down year as an anomaly at this point.

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THE OBSERVER NOTES ON THE PASSING SCENE

Reboot

he Observer’s office computer took a powder this morning, displaying only a black screen and an ominous, geek jargon message when we sat down at our desk. We’ve had that rig for six years that we can recall, at least, and so when it went to computer heaven, it took down most of our professional life with it: audio recorded on interviews all over the state, quotes from people dead or far enough out of the public eye they don’t matter any more, pictures taken in far-flung corners of Arkansas with a succession of cell phones, from our earliest potatocam to our current Buck Rogers-grade device that shoots pics like the Hubble Space Telescope and which could probably make cold brew coffee if we could find the app for that. The death of our old friend also took down The Observer we’d been working on the previous day, which is why you’re reading this one, dear friend, a last-minute standin. We hope we can do you proud on short notice. The Observer is old enough to remember the days before personal computers, kids — or at least before the days when our clinging-to-middle-class-by-the-fingernails family could afford one, which would have been about 1993. Come with us to the thrilling days of yesteryear, when photos were kept in dusty albums in the closet or in Grandma’s old cedar chest, ready to be grabbed and stuffed into a tow sack for quick skedaddling if the house caught on fire, the Huns came over the hill and descended on the farmstead, or the shit otherwise hit the fan. That’s the way it was with all kinds of things back then: If you wrote something, it was on paper. Deleting it meant wadding it up and tossing it bitterly into the fire, burning your fingers and cussing if you wished to make a last- minute data recovery. Otherwise — as long as you kept the rats from getting at it or the kids from making a paper boat for the bathtub out of it — it would be around for your grandkids’ grandkids to handle with white gloves, marveling over how boring the folks of yesteryear were.

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Not so these days. One ghost in the machine, one computerized gremlin, one critical system hard-drive error, one mistake, and the whole of your past can go up in a puff of ones and zeros, only to ever be recovered — if at all — in part, so it never makes sense again. These are the days of our lives, we suppose, and the price we all pay for living here in the future. The Observer, for example, is mighty glad we’re not wrasslin’ with a 20-pound typewriter right now, squinting at a curl of white bond paper, leaning in with the tiny brush full of WiteOut to carefully paint and obliterate solely the word “White” in the name of Wite-Out, which we just misspelled. It’s kinda nice here in the future, even if it can sometimes be a pain in the ass. When we started writing as a lad, too broke to afford a computer, we were on a boat-anchor Underwood. We can tell you from experience that The Good Old Days weren’t all that good. If our resident computer wizard can’t roll the computer generated bones, sacrifice a virtual dove to Steve Wozniak and come up with some kind of electronic ju-ju to retrieve our lost life, The Observer knows we’re going to have to sadly shuffle through the deepest of electric hells: the hell of trying to remember, forever, exactly what was on that damn computer that we might need in the future. Years from now, we’ll go looking for a family photo we loved or a poem we wrote while we were supposed to be working, or an Observer we tinkered with but eventually abandoned but which might deserve a second look, and realize that it went down in May 2016 with the good ship U.S.S. Dell. That’s a genuinely crummy place to be, and makes us pine for the days when the desk of every writer was stuffed to bursting with paper and pamphlets and photos and everything else. We’re never going to miss that Underwood, though. Any amount of meandering through Dante’s Digital Inferno is worth it if it means we never have to touch another typewriter ribbon again between now and the day they lay us in the clay.

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MAY 19, 2016

Arkansas Reporter

BRIAN CHILSON

THE

72204

72202

72209

ZIPCODES OMITTED: Principal Luanne Baroni (inset) said LISA will now send out recruitment letters to people in 72202, 72204 and 72209.

Mailout mistake, charter says LISA Academy recruiting skipped minority zip codes. BY MAX BRANTLEY AND LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK

recruiting mailout from LISA Academy that omitted zip codes from heavily black and Latino neighborhoods (72202, 72204 and 72209) did so by mistake, LISA middle school principal Luanne Baroni said last week. LISA is an open-enrollment charter school, meaning it is supported by public dollars but operated by a private nonprofit. In March, it won the state Board of Education’s approval to

MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

increase its enrollment cap from 1,500 to 2,100 so it can add an elementary school in the higher-income neighborhood near Chenal Parkway and Bowman Road. The board approved the expansion over the objections of Little Rock School District Superintendent Baker Kurrus. Since the vote, Kurrus got his walking papers; he’ll be replaced by Bentonville Public Schools Superintendent Mike Poore at the end of June. LISA’s initial mailout of 69,975

letters went to 743 addresses in the 72201 zip code (downtown Little Rock); 12,173 in 72205 (the Hillcrest and Stifft Station neighborhods, stretching west to Interstate 430 and the Baptist Medical Center area); 5,620 in 72207 (the Heights and Cammack Village); 6,827 in 72201 (west of I-430 and south of Colonel Glenn Road); 11,211 in 72211 (west of I-430 along Chenal Parkway); 5,219 in 72212 (west of I-430, including Pleasant Valley); 11,864 in 72113 (Maumelle); 10,579 in 72223 (Chenal Valley, between Kanis Road and Highway 10); and 5,738 in 72227 (Robinwood and River Ridge to Rodney Parham). LISA paid $17,295 for the mailout. LISA Superintendent Atnan Ekin responded May 10 to the Arkansas Times’ inquiries about the targeted mailout by saying that LISA was more diverse than many schools and was growing in diversity. State enrollment data says LISA

Academy, which was founded by a Turkish charter school movement, is 37 percent black, compared with 65 percent in the Little Rock School District. Its percentage of students qualifying for a free or reduced price lunch based on family income is 43.48 percent, compared with 80.9 percent in the LRSD. LISA this year is also 32 percent white, 12 percent Asian and 16 percent Hispanic; 41 students are two or more races, Native American or Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. Baroni responded the following day, saying the school intended to reach minority populations with digital, radio and TV advertising. However, she characterized the failure to send mailouts to largely black and Hispanic neighborhoods as a mistake and apologized. She said the school would send mailers to the three omitted Little Rock zip codes and 72103 (a piece of east Saline County includ-

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ing Shannon Hills), and would hand out flyers in those neighborhoods in coming days. Baroni said LISA was using radio ads (on Power 92.3 KIPR-FM and Alice 107.7 KLAL-FM) and targeted digital advertising through KATV, Channel 7, to reach zip codes including 72202, 72204 and 72209, as well as digital advertising on KTHV, Channel 11, and KARK, Channel 4. LISA also advertised digitally and in print with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Baroni said the zip code producing the highest number of applications for LISA for 2016-17 was 72204 (central Little Rock south of I-630). At the March 31 meeting of the Board of Education, Kurrus read from a Jan. 14, 2004, article that stated that LISA was envisioned as serving 200 to 400 students, mostly black and low income. “That’s where we started. … Now we’re talking about a unified K-12 system,” he said. Kurrus told the board that data shows that LISA and eStem Public Charter Schools, which also receied state board approval to expand, tend to draw students from the LRSD who are mostly higher-performing: 81.9 percent of the students who left the LRSD to go to eStem and LISA were proficient or advanced in literacy, and 77.2 percent were proficient or advanced in math, according to Kurrus’ data. The superintendent called “nonsense” the idea that the charters’ primary role is to help students “escape out of violent environments” at troubled traditional schools. “I will tell you this,” Kurrus said, “I don’t see a bright future for the LRSD if it continues to increase as far as its level of poverty because ... students are moving into other environments. “ Together, the proposed LISA and eStem expansions will add almost 3,000 new seats, meaning the district may lose a significant number of students to the charter operators (the LRSD serves around 25,000 students). Voting against LISA’s expansion were state board members Mireya Reith, Vicki Saviers and Jay Barth. Susan Chambers, Brett Williamson, Charisse Dean, Diane Zook and Toyce Newton voted yes. Joe Black was not present.

SEVEN

Preserve Arkansas, the statewide nonprofit formerly known as the Arkansas Historic Preservation Alliance, has released its annual list of Arkansas’s Most Endangered Places — places with historic and architecturally significant features that are deteriorating or otherwise being neglected or in danger of demolition or being inappropriately developed. Preserve Arkansas also once again billed the George Mann-designed Worthen Bank/KATV building, which could figure into the evolving plans of the Little Rock Technology Park, as “One Worth Watching.” The Mosaic State Temple Building, the former state headquarters of the Mosaic Templars fraternal organization, got the same designation. It’s for sale and would be a fitting addition to the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center next door, but the state has been unwilling to purchase it.

THE

BIG PICTURE

TO SAVE

Goodwin Field Terminal El Dorado, Union County Built in 1948 The El Dorado Airport Commission has already approved demolition of this hybrid Art Deco/Art Moderne air terminal, which is in need of repairs and updates. The final decision rests with the El Dorado City Council.

Slack/Comstock/Marshall House Built mid-1890s Uniontown, Crawford County This home, located near the Oklahoma border, was built in phases, first as a rectangular singlestory. Later, a new owner added three rooms, one and a half stories, a crossgable roof and a wraparound porch. The Marshall family, which acquired the house in 1918, added yet another porch. Marshall descendants want to preserve the house, but need help.

Sweet Home Chapel Built 1907 Mount Ida vicinity, Montgomery County

Ray House Built 1917 Little Rock, Pulaski County Gloria Ray, one of the Little Rock Nine, grew up here as the daughter of the first two African-American employees of the Arkansas Agricultural Extension Service. Two adjacent homes have been demolished and the Ray House has been vacant for many years.

The roof and foundation have deteriorated on this 100-year-old chapel. Its owners hope to preserve it, but lack the required resources.

Warren and Ouachita Depot Built 1909 Warren, Bradley County This rail depot was served by the shortline Warren and Ouachita Valley Railway, which carried logs, lumber and passengers. Deeded to the city in 2014, the long-inactive building has been vandalized and much of it has rotted. The local Chamber of Commerce would like to restore it, but funds are limited.

Union Chapel Community Center Springfield, Conway County Built 1929-1938 This stone-clad building in Conway County started its life as a threeteacher school associated with Union Chapel, a church founded just after the Civil War by African Americans. Later, it hosted picnics, fish fries and such as a community center. It’s since fallen into disrepair.

National Guard Armory (Sonny Alston Youth Center) Built 1930 Clarksville, Johnson County After the Clarksville City Council voted not to pursue funding through the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program to maintain this armory-turned-youth center, public outcry encouraged the mayor to appoint a committee to study funding options.

www.arktimes.com

MAY 19, 2016

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FRIDGE OF THE FUTURE: Sue Sedberry demonstrates the latest from Samsung.

MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSASâ&#x20AC;&#x2C6;TIMES

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Th e

MUSEUM OF YET TO COME At the University of Arkansas’s McMillon Family Retail Innovation and Technology Lab, students and faculty are creating a space that will give both visitors and companies a vital glimpse of the stores, products and consumer habits of the future. BY DAVID KOON

s the rain came down in Fayetteville on a recent dreary Monday, students under umbrellas and rain jackets scurried past a wall of windows at the front of a nondescript space in a very nondescript public parking garage on Harmon Avenue. Inside, the future sat quietly in the middle of the tiled floor in the gray light, antennas up, waiting with perfect patience for a command and a task to perform. The robots, C7 and C9, are each about the size of a cooler you might take full of sodas to the lake. Even with their black plastic tops open, you’d be reminded of a cooler: Nothing in there but open space, though these will probably never see a bag of ice and a 12-pack of Coors. Created by the Estonian tech company Starship Technologies — a company associated with the founders of the online calling service Skype — each of the boxy little robots squats on six saucer-sized wheels, like a lunar rover. Known as terrestrial drones, they are designed to solve the problem of the

“last mile” — the final leg of every delivery, which is the most expensive mile when delivering something bought online. Each of the robots can travel along the sidewalks of Fayetteville at about walking speed, and can carry in the neighborhood of 25 to 30 pounds. They’ve been trundling up and down the hills of the campus for a few months now, their cameras capturing every crack in the sidewalk, followed closely by a student handler in case the little bots get confused or run into trouble, and controlled by a student operator sitting at a console blocks or miles away. If you deliver anything for a living, from pizzas to flowers to takeout Chinese, here’s the part that should make you seriously start con-

sidering going back to college yourself: By next fall, after the two earthbound drones have successfully learned the sidewalks and crosswalks and street corner hazards of Fayetteville, the plan is to have them start delivering packages from the university bookstore and the on-campus Walmart. They will do so autonomously, with no outside intervention or direction, other than a location to deliver to and a bit of human help if they run into op bo ! p p t rouble. In oo bee pb o Estonia, robots bo much like these are already delivering pizzas. In not too many tomorrows, there may well come a day when the sidewalks of any city will be full of them, fa it hf ully deliver ing everything

from books to pharmacy prescriptions to birthday cakes like efficient little bees. That’s right: The future is coming, very slowly, on six little wheels. Right now the robots are the star attractions of what is officially named the McMillon Family Retail Innovation and Technology Lab, but what is known on campus as the McMillon Innovation Studio. Funded with a portion of a 2014 contribution of $1 million from Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart, the studio won’t officially open until October, but it’s already a fascinating place to visit, even as it comes together. The plan is for the space to be a kind of curated museum of future technologies, products and retailing, with rotating exhibits that showcase what our homes, stores, closets and pantries will look like a few months or years from now. It’s not just some Disneyesque exercise to provoke a “gee whiz,” however. The plan is to eventually make the Innovation Studio a moneymaker and creativity magnet for the university by giving companies big and small the opportunity to let the customer

MULTI-DIRECTIONAL: Tomorrow’s grocery store scanner from Digimarc. www.arktimes.com

MAY 19, 2016

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of the future — all those millennials rushing past the windows through the rain — come in, sample and test latestage products so they can be tweaked before they hit store shelves, giving a vital thumbs-up or thumbs-down before millions of dollars are spent on packaging and marketing. Someday, a hungry freshman might get to wrinkle her nose at a spicy Thai chicken strip dipped in wasabi-flavored ketchup, and Heinz, Kraft or Tyson Foods will get a vital glimpse over the horizon at future trends, what works, what doesn’t, and how they might shape their products and marketing to best meet demand. Sue Sedberry is the managing director of the McMillon Innovation Studio. A former consumer researcher, Sedberry began her career looking for new technologies for shopping malls before moving into primary market research. From there, she got a job with Nielsen, the consumer research company best known for TV ratings, but which looks into all aspects of consumer habits. Her work there brought her to Northwest

MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

Arkansas, where she helped Walmart and Sam’s Club learn how to use syndicated research data. She was hired by the university two years ago to create a retail lab for the Center for Retailing Excellence in the Sam M. Walton College of Business. Her first lab, she said, was “one closet and about eight computers” running software that could create interactive virtual reality shelving and displays, allowing companies to try out store designs and layouts before putting money into real-world fixtures. Then, last fall, The Parking Spot, a convenience store and T-shirt shop in the Harmon parking deck on the south side of the UA campus, closed. The minute the sign went up announcing the shop’s last day in operation, Sedberry said, campus message boards lit up with people saying the location, featuring big windows and lots of sidewalk traffic out front, would make a perfect spot for her retail lab. “Some people started sending emails around Walton College saying, ‘Give

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KAYLA BRUSKAS: Student volunteer and robot handler and operator.

the space to Sue! Give the space to Sue!’” she said. “So I met with students and said, ‘Hey, if you want this space, what do you want to see done there?’ ” Sedberry said it took about four months for the university to decide to give her the space for the lab. “We decided to try what’s called pop-up retail,” she said. “It could be something for two to four weeks and that goes away, something else comes in for two to four weeks and that goes away. We decided to make it more like a museum. Some things stay a year, some things stay a few months, some things stay a few weeks. That way, we can get students in and out of here to give us opinions on whether that technology is cool or that technology is worthless.” For example: If you’ve ever experienced the frustration of rolling around a heavy box of cat litter or a gallon of milk on the bar code scanner at the grocery store self-check, trying to get it to read the UPC code, you’ll want to see new technology from the company Digimark. The technology can read a code from packaging no matter how an item is placed on the scanner, decreas-

ing the amount of fumbling a clerk or shopper has to do to get that elusive bar code to read. It accomplishes that by way of having the UPC code printed invisibly on every surface of the packaging, undetectable by the naked eye, but visible to lasers in the scanner. How does it work? “I have no idea,” Sedberry said with a smile. “It’s part of the magic of it.” In the studio’s “Kitchen of the Future,” which is coming together thanks to help from Lowe’s Home Improvement and Samsung, Sedberry showed off a $6,000 refrigerator with most of the door occupied by a large flat-screen display full of apps that can be manipulated by touch, like those on a smartphone. There’s a white board that can be written on with a finger, a dropdown shopping list that can be synced to automatically update on your phone, a Pandora station to listen to music and other virtual gizmos. Any time the door opens and shuts, the fridge takes a picture of the shelves inside. You can see what’s inside by touching the screen. You might be asking, “Why not just open the door?” Here’s why: You can pull up that picture on your synced cell phone. If you’re at the grocery store, worried you’re out of something because your teenager has been at home emptying the fridge all day, all you have to do is take out your smartphone, pull up the picture taken the last time the door was shut, and check the level of the milk in the jug or the number of olives in the jar. “If I’m in a high-end house and have a lot of kids running around,” Sedberry said, “I would certainly interact with this thing, just because it cuts down on the amount of paper and grocery lists and consolidates it all in one place.” Looming over the kitchen space is a large, flat-panel TV that’s Rokuenabled, a nod to students telling Sedberry and others that cookbooks are so 20th century. Instead, they prefer to watch online videos to learn how to cook. Even the stove, crock-pot and coffeemaker in the kitchen can be controlled by cell phone. Worried you left the coffeemaker on? Check your cell phone. Bought a take-and-bake pizza? Turn on and preheat the oven while sitting in traffic on your way home. The so-called “Internet of Things” is coming soon to a kitchen near you. Most consumer research is done on the East or West Coast, Sedberry

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MAY 19, 2016

5/5/16 11:06 AM

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THE INTERNET OF THINGS: The starship robot along with cell phone connected appliances.

says, but testing on the UA campus will give companies a look at the preferences of the region. Though Walmart is neither sponsoring nor getting an inside look at the research that will be conducted at the studio, Sedberry said, it helps to have the 500-pound gorilla of retail in the neighborhood, given that over 1,200 companies, most of them Walmart suppliers, have offices in Northwest Arkansas, including Kraft, Pillsbury, Procter and Gamble, and others. The Starship robots p o ! came to town thanks bo p p boo e to a conference call be op o Sedberry was on with b representatives of the company after they had demonstrated the technolog y at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last January. During the call, Sedberry said, r epr e s entatives of St a r sh ip were talking about testing in the snows of Estonia and in the United Kingdom when she recognized there was something missing from their test locations: hills. “I asked them if they’d consider testing in Arkansas,” she said, “because I had hills, and if they were truly interested in testing reliability and performance, they really needed to bring it to the University of Arkansas, where the students could interact with the robots up and down the hills. They didn’t know where Arkansas was, but they agreed [that] on their way from Atlanta to San Francisco that they would stop here. We got them some meetings with people at Walmart to see if there was any interest there.” The engineers were so impressed with the location that they left one of their robots behind for testing. Later, they delivered another. Operators and handlers have almost completed phase one, teaching the robots the sidewalks 18

MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

of Fayetteville. The St a r sh ip robots will then go on the road to other places in the state, including Little Rock, w h e r e they’re schedu le d t o test near the River Market the week of May 23. On the Universit y of Arkansas campus in the fall, the drones will begin delivering packages, mostly autonomously. Student Kayla Bruskas has been a volunteer with p! bee the project about a month, and has worked as a robot handler and operator. She also helps do basic maintenance on the two terrestrial drones. Currently studying accounting and supply chain management, she said that the robots have created a buzz on campus. “There’s a lot of students who know what we’re doing right now,” she said. “To see how the robot works, they’ll actually jump in front of it. Or there’s a car that might not be looking, and they get close to it. The robot actually senses that and stops immediately.” Bruskas, who plans to stay on as a volunteer after the robot testing is done, likes that the students contributing to the direction and focus of the Inno-

rp! blu g! zin

vation Studio come from diverse academic disciplines. “For me,” Bruskas said, “it ’s rea lly interesting to have a group of eng ineers a nd business st udents coming together on projects. Normally on campus, the business students stay on one side of the school and engineers on the other side. So it’s been really cool for me to maybe show them a thing or two about business … . They’ve showed me a thing or two on how to fix this and really understand the mechanics behind it.” D r. Joh n Kent is t he director of the Supply Chain Ma nagement Research Center at the UA. A professor of supply chain management, he has worked closely with Sedberry in the creation of the McMillon lab. “When we think of a museum, we think of a curator,” he said. “We think of someone who is organizing the things that are displayed in a museum. But in our case, Sue and I think it’s our role to curate what’s going to happen in this lab in the future. We have ideas and are working with companies on aspects that, if you come in October or November, you wouldn’t have seen

NOW PRE-LEASING OPENING SUMMER 2016 Contact Rachael Scott • (501) 376-6555 • rscott@mosestucker.com •

if you were here this week.” The location of the Innovation Studio — in a high-traffic area on campus, with plenty of windows — makes it perfect for drawing in people, he said. Like Sedberry, Kent said the value of the lab won’t be in testing top-secret products or tech, but in getting a last-minute, real-world look at how products might perform, and how consumers might react, just before the products go to market. The Starship delivery robots are a good example. “With the robots, they’re still in early development, but they’re not top secret anymore,” he said. “They want as much press as they can get for their potential new product. Now, is it ready to be sold and to autonomously go around campus delivering products yet? No, but that will happen this fall. The fourth quarter is a good way to think a b o u t it : r ig ht before we’re ready to go and put it in the market. As opposed to first quarter stuff, which would be in a basement somewhere, instead of sitting in a fishbowl for everybody to see what’s going on.” Sedberry plans for the Innovation Studio to never be stagnant, with students working with companies big and small to bring in the latest products and technologies, showcased in displays that help put those items in a realworld context. Right now, for example, students studying fashion merchandising who were impressed by the Kitchen of the Future are working on creating a “Closet of the Future,” which — once it evolves beyond pieces of colorful tape on the floor — will show how technology will shape the high-end clothes closet of tomorrow. This summer, Sedberry is considering turning the Innovation Studio into a showcase for foods grown, cooked or packaged in Arkansas, with free samples of items by companies big and small. A lot of

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ARKANSAS TIMES small food businesses in Arkansas, she said, don’t have any consumer insight at all. “It would be great fun to use the Kitchen of the Future and some demo carts and invite people in on their tours of the campus and say, ‘By the way, did you know we make this barbecue sauce [in Arkansas]? We make this mueslix, we make fermented okra, mashed cauliflower. We have a lot of things we make right here in Arkansas, and it would be great to give them visibility.” Sedberry said she wants the students coming in the fall semester to set the agenda for what’s next, and for the buzz! McMillon Innovation Stuboop! dio to constantly be in flux. Come back in a few months, she said, a nd the space might be remade as a bedroom, or a grocery store checkout. “I’m t r y ing really hard to have this be a st udent-led initiative,” she said. “Things t hey ’ ve read about, things they think would be cool. That’s the shopper of the future, right? That should be of interest to a lot of people … . It’s not build it once and you’re done. It’s constantly changing exhibits or thoughts or processes or services. That’s the fun about being able to innovate. You’re not done. Just because [you] visited this once doesn’t mean you can’t come back in three or four months and find something completely different.” A reporter, excited with the heady whirl of the future all around him, at last pointed to something he’d puzzled over: the bicycle leaned against one wall, clearly on display, the handlebars crowned with a crate. What, pray tell, could be the high-tech, futuristic secret of that seemingly ordinary item? “That’s just a student’s bicycle,” Sedberry said with a smile. “The bike rack is outside in the rain.”

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MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSAS

Join us as we salute Arkansasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s veteran Arkansa entrepren neurs. After forging a path to freedom m overseas, many brave veterans came back home to Arka ansas to become leaders in the business world. The start-up p endeavors these veteran entrepreneurs brought to our sta ate stand as a driving force in the growth and prosperity o of our communities today and in the ffuture.

MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSASâ&#x20AC;&#x2C6;TIMES

★★★

CELEBRATING VETERAN ENTREPRENEURS ENTREPRENEURSHIP PLAYS SPECIAL ROLE IN MANY VETERANS’ PASTS, FUTURES BY DWAIN HEBDA

he American entrepreneur is the bedrock from which our nation draws its physical and economic sustenance. More jobs and economic strength have been generated on Main Street by small- and medium-sized businesses than through any other segment of the American economy. Given the nature of the business world, it would seem one for which veterans are uniquely suited. Setting goals, identifying objectives, hard work and mobilizing others to collective success are as fundamental on the battlefield as the board room. However, as with many aspects of returning to civilian life, the transition is often not as smooth as it would appear to be. As Shaun So, veteran and consultant, writes for Forbes magazine: “I’ve been interacting with veterans from all over the country that are at various stages in the entrepreneurial ventures. Many ask advice on how to get their own startup off the ground and what things they can do to enter this wildly unstructured world of entrepreneurship. I stress ‘unstructured’ because I’ve found that the only fixed rules of entrepreneurship are state and federal laws; other than that, anything goes. “Operating in an unstructured environment is different for us military folk. We may enjoy our freedoms; however, we’re so ingrained with process and procedure that we’re often unaware of how regimented we are. Just ask any military person for directions. Do they point with their index finger? No, they’ll hold their hand with their fingers together, their thumb tucked to the side and throw their arm in a direction with the hand acting as a spear point. That’s what we do.” Add into this mix the physical, emotional and mental wounds many veterans bring home with them and the equation becomes decidedly more complex. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are more likely to be unemployed than the civilian population, and often suffer higher rates of divorce, depression and suicide than previous generations (although, to be fair, many veterans of earlier conflicts operated in a time before post-traumatic stress disorder was widely in the public consciousness).

Fortunately, there are many outlets and opportunities today for service men and women to re-enter society as entrepreneurs in the field of their choosing. In the field of agriculture, organizations such as Farmer Veteran Coalition introduce veterans to agricultural work, Congress granted new avenues to startup capital through the 2014 Farm Bill, and many states have adopted the marketing campaign “Homegrown by Heroes” to help vets market their goods. The U.S. Veterans Administration devotes an entire portal to entrepreneurship and, in partnership with BusinessUSA, connects vets to best practices, information, resources and guidance for starting their own business. The Small Business Administration likewise directs dedicated resources specifically to helping returning veterans tackle this next chapter in their lives. The list of similarly focused state- and universityaffiliated programs is long. It should be noted that little, if any, of this was in place when many of our trailblazer veterans came home. Yet come home they did to farms and small towns, main streets and public office. The yield of their service was a stronger Arkansas — and nation — in more ways than one. It’s not an easy road, of course, but as Al Hodge, executive vice president of lending for Arkansas Capital Corporation Group noted, military service provides key elements that most veterans can apply to great effect in establishing and growing their own business. “Veterans have a loyalty to a mission and a strong work ethic that isn’t found in typical civilian culture,” he said. “They quickly discover that others do not share this disciplined attitude in the workplace and, as a result, a farm or a business that is owned and managed by a veteran has a higher success rate than others.” It is to our collective shame that not all were hailed as they should have been when returning at points during our history, but the steps that have been made since those days demonstrates how far we have come as a people and a republic. Arkansas Times is today singularly privileged to profile a few of these heroes in the pages that follow.

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MAY 19, 2016

CELEBRATING VETERAN NE ★★★

RETAIL GIANT, U.S. ARMY INSPIRED NOAH JOHNSON TO LAUNCH COMPANYBY DWAIN HEBDA M

aybe it’s the Texan in him, but Noah Johnson has always thought big. At just 41 years of age, the entrepreneur from Sulphur Springs has conquered West Point, Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and international retail power Walmart. “One of my strengths is being able to connect disparate dots,” he said. “My passion is to help people; that’s why I went into the military, that’s why I’ve done most things in my life.” While at West Point, Johnson earned a degree in systems engineering and was ascending through the ranks when 9/11 occurred. Noah was selected to be part of the first Immediate Response Groups for possible deployment from Ft.Hood, Tx following the attack. Shortly after being relieved, Johnson developed a series of health problems that cut his career short. He spent two years post-Army earning his M.B.A. at Stanford and sorting out his future. “The reason I came to a company like Walmart after Stanford, rather than going into consulting or banking was first, I really believed in the mission of helping people,” he said. “I also realized I needed to learn more of the rudiments of biz. I hadn’t had a civilian job and most of the time it’s better to get in and do rather

than consult.” His time with Walmart was marked by the same achievement as his time at West Point. As a member of the corporate strategy team, he was responsible for managing the largest potential risks to the business worldwide and as regional general manager for South Carolina, he led a team of 10 market managers, 78 store managers and roughly 26,000 associates, to name just two roles. Yet, he always knew his future rested elsewhere. “I came to a crossroads,” he said. “I had a health issue moment and I took some time for my faith and just trusting the Lord was going to guide me, and he did. He opened a door.” Johnson left the company and, with a business partner, launched Bentonville-based AIM Brands last year, a retail services company that identifies and develops promising companies. He said his three most significant experiences thus far — military, big business, graduate education — coalesce perfectly in getting

a business off the ground. “My background is in engineering so I want to know how things fit together and question how they fit together. Layering that with an M.B.A. from a pretty good school, I’m always thinking about return on investment,” he said. “[At Walmart] I was part of a program that was rotating to different areas, so I was able to get exposure to all different portions of the business. “People don’t need companies; people need leaders. I learned early on in my military career that most people want to be valued and they take on more for those they care about, whether that’s the Army or family or church or friends or work. Understanding this in people helped me excel in the military and I brought that with me to the business environment. Together, those things allow me to connect the dots and get people motivated and have them feel appreciated while doing their best.”

★★★

JEFF AMERINE HELPS STARTUP JUNKIE CLIENTS REALIZE THEIR DREAMS BY KIMBERLY DISHONGH S

erving in the U.S. Air Force taught Jeff Amerine that leaders must take the blame and pass on the credit to build a great team. “I love helping our innovator, entrepreneur and small business owner clients realize their dreams,” says Amerine, founder of Startup Junkie Consulting. “I’m a coach, mentor and connector at heart. When we see our clients’ success, it is amazingly gratifying. Our business model is unique. All of our services are completely free to our clients. We are able to do that due to the federal, state and foundation funding we have. Our objective is for our services to always be free, so our clients can focus on their customers, product development and team without worry about consulting fees.” Amerine graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1984, and was one of only four midshipmen selected for an interservice transfer to the U.S. Air Force. For the next five years, he served as Intercontinental Ballistic Missile launch officer, followed by another year working to modernize the ICBM force. Since 1990, he has held senior executive positions in three Fortune 500 companies, founded eight startups, made more than 70 angel investments and worked as associate vice provost for research and economic development and director of technology ventures at the University of Arkansas. He remains an adjunct faculty member for entrepreneurship in the university’s Walton College of Business, but his focus these days is on helping others start businesses — and on creating cultures around the world that foster and support such ventures. Startup Junkie Consulting was up and running about three years before he left his full-time position at the university, initially 22 22

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as a contracting vehicle for work he was doing for Winrock International on the Innovate Arkansas program. The company secured several Small Business Administration contracts as well as funding from the Walton Family Foundation to expand the Northwest Arkansas venture ecosystem, which took it to another level and demanded that Amerine give it his full attention. “Our clients range from fast-growing, branded omnichannel brands like Lauren James to industrial Internet of things companies, like Little Bird Systems, to world-class corporate water quality tech companies like Phigenics and awesome social ventures like Kyya Chocolate and everything in between,” he says. “We had more than 900 one-on-one mentoring sessions with diverse entrepreneurs in Q4 2014 to the end of 2015. We enjoy working on all of the programs, events, networking and mentoring. We really enjoy helping build the innovation and entrepreneurship community.” The “we” Amerine refers to includes his wife, Phyllis, and his son, Brett, both of whom have been involved with the company for the last several years.

“Both have strong and diverse backgrounds that were crucial to building the business. I hired Brett away from the Air Force where he was a contracting officer buying billion-dollar space launch vehicles. I needed a chief operating officer and he was the right guy for the job,” he says. “Since that time we’ve added some real rock stars like Jay Amargos, who has an incredible background in startups, commercial banking, and nonprofits; Haley Cleous, who has an engineering background and is finishing up her M.B.A.; Michael Iseman, who has experience at Cerner and is working on multiple startups; and Jessica Boyd, who is the Executive Director of our 501c3, the Community Venture Foundation. Jessica is a dual Clinton School MPS and Walton College M.B.A. with amazing nonprofit and social venture experience.” Amerine’s goal is to build a company that could operate without him. He delegates tasks and takes steps to develop and empower his team — and he compliments their individual talents, hard work and success. “To build a great team, the leader must always take the blame when things go wrong, and always pass along the credit to the team when things go well,” he says. “It is simple and it always works. Leaders are nothing without their teams.”

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★★★

PATRICK FLEMING LIVES LIFE ON THE EDGE, PUSHES ART TO THE EXTREME BY KIMBERLY DISHONGH P

atrick Fleming moved into the second round of his first career about three years ago, and he’s pretty sure it’s his best work yet. “I like the expression, ‘If you’re not living life on the edge, you’re taking up too much space,’” says Fleming. About three years ago, after 35 years in the advertising business, Fleming waltzed into his boss’ office and gave 30 days’ notice. Some of his friends and co-workers were aghast that his plan called for, not another job and not retirement, exactly, but a recreation. “I finally decided that if I’m going to be an artist, I can’t just sit and talk about it, I need to do it,” he says. “I basically gave my furniture away for two bottles of wine and I loaded up my motorcycle and clothes and art supplies and headed to Little Rock.” He moved from Milwaukee to Arkansas, home of one of his biggest advertising clients and the land of milder winters, where he bought a 3,500-square-foot warehouse in Roland to use as a studio, with sculpting space downstairs, a painting loft away from the dust and dirt, and separate living space. Fleming has always been an artist, but he pushed aside that aspiration when life began to require more financial stability than a budding artist’s career would provide. Fleming was drafted in the early 1970s. “I was an electronics technician in the Navy. I spent most of my time in the jungles of the Philippines, doing ship-to-shore communications and communications with Vietnam to the United

States,” he says. When he made it back to the United States in 1975, he enrolled at Loyola University in Chicago with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist. “I saw all these people burning out as social workers between their bachelor’s and master’s degrees and Ph.D.’s/doctorates,”he says.“I decided if I’m going to go broke I’m going to do it in something I like, so I decided to be an artist instead of a social worker.” With a degree in fine arts, Fleming learned to cast bronze from an old Italian sculptor, Mario Spampinatio, for the city of Chicago and for the Art Institute of Chicago, and pursued his own creative designs as well. “Then I got married and had kids and I needed a real job, so I worked in point-of-purchase advertising for 35 years or so,” he says. His advertising job involved creating merchandise displays: beer clocks, paddy wagon and cable car whiskey decanters and more. “In that realm I used a lot of my three-dimensional talents. I would build a lot of things. It was kind of engineering but artistic. I learned to work with acrylics, polycarbonates, sheet metal work. I created vacuum form molds for plastic companies out of wood

and cast in aluminum,” he says. “We would do distortion printing where we would print something on a piece of plastic styrene, and then because it would be in vacuum form it would be all distorted, but then when they formed it over the tool it would look like it was supposed to look.” He hasn’t used many of those techniques in his personal artwork yet, but he is moving in that direction. “I am working on a metal sculpture that will have clear polycarbonate on it. It will be routed out and sprayed translucent on one side and various colors to work with the metal,” he says. “It’s in the back of the brain and I’m starting to move back in that direction again.” He envisions creating a three-dimensional canvas — sculptural paintings, more or less, working with positive and negative space. “You have to have a foundation to be an artist. But I think the true artist comes out when he takes that next step, when he takes that foundation and he pushes it to the edges, to the extremes. I’m taking what I know and I’m going to push it beyond what people think it should be or see it as,” says Fleming. “I’m doing what I want to do in my artwork, and it just seems little by little things are beginning to take hold and that I’m moving forward.”

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

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Surviving gay conversion therapy A Q&A with Garrard Conley, author of ‘Boy Erased.’ BY BRYAN BORLAND

arrard Conley grew up in North Arkansas, in Cherokee Village and then Mountain Home, where his father, a Southern Baptist preacher, would scour the morning headlines for evidence of the coming rapture to use in his sermons. So when Conley was outed as gay to his parents at 19, things didn’t go well. In his just-published memoir, “Boy Erased” (Riverhead Books), Conley writes of his self-awakening and the moments leading up to his outing, events that ultimately landed him in “treatment” at a Memphis branch of Love in Action, the largest “ex-gay” therapy organization in the country. Garth Greenwell, who recently visited Arkansas for the Literary Festival, says that Conley’s story is “an urgent reminder that America remains a place where queer people have to fight for their lives.” Conley, who teaches English literature at the American College of Sofia in Sofia, Bulgaria, returns to Arkansas to read from “Boy Erased” at the Clinton School for Public Service at 6 p.m. Tuesday, May 24. To prepare for his homecoming, we asked him a few questions.

MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

You’re embarking on a book tour that will take you from New York to San Francisco to Chicago and other cities all over the country, but one of your first stops will be Little Rock. What does it mean to you to come back to Arkansas to tell your story? Telling my story in Arkansas is important for me both symbolically and politically. Symbolically, because the book in many ways is about facing history and coming to terms with where I grew up and how I have made a life for myself both inside and outside of the state. I tend to enjoy grappling with hard truths, perhaps because I ran away from them for so long. For about eight years I didn’t even want to speak about my experience of growing up in Arkansas. I felt deeply ashamed of how ignorant I had been as a teen. What kind of 19-yearold agrees to attend “ex-gay” therapy? But now I love the liminal spaces that make up so much of my presence in Arkansas. I’m both queer and Southern, Christ-haunted and nonpracticing. I believe that doubt (I mean the doubt we encounter in religious texts) is an extremely important element in religious experience, and I prize it above

USHERING IN DOUBT: Garrard Conley has a story to tell on his return to Arkansas.

most other worldviews, so one of my goals is to help usher in more doubt in the Arkansan communities where I grew up. Despite the difficulties you’ve faced, you’ve written of a strained fondness for your hometown. What was beautiful about growing up in Arkansas? My teen years were spent in Cherokee Village, home of several beautiful lakes, once referred to as the “Mecca of the Ozarks.” My parents owned a house on Lake Thunderbird, and on weekends my parents and I would board our pontoon boat and speed across the lake and relax in the sun. Afternoons after finishing homework, I would walk trails through the hills around our house, where I spent much of my time thinking about life and

love and God and sexuality. I believe those moments on the trail could be considered a form of meditation, and this practice later helped me reach a kind of mental stability in the years after “ex-gay” therapy. A common thread of successful writers across multiple genres is the ability to turn what might be the detriment of geography into a benefit or a selling point. How has being from Arkansas impacted your career as an author? I don’t know if I’ve ever been good at selling myself. My father was a car salesman before he became a preacher, and I suppose I learned a few things from him in terms of charm. But most non-Southerners who first meet me, when I tell them I’m from Arkansas, usually say something along the lines

A&E NEWS TOO OFTEN, BRILLIANT musicians who are capable of suffusing comedy into their work are marginalized, taken less than seriously, as if their ability to make you laugh is somehow mutually exclusive from their sincerity about their art. (See: Ween, Andy Warr, Frank Zappa.) Deemed “the most sex-positive show on TV” by Salon, “Bob’s Burgers” is an easy Netflix rabbit-hole to disappear into, and fans of the Belchers may experience some of this cognitive dissonance upon discovering that the Gunbunnies’ Chris Maxwell, who charmed the audience at South on Main with songs from his album “Arkansas Heat,” is the same Chris Maxwell behind lines like:

“Pulling down the pants of the night, look at those tight pants, don’t laugh, it’s not right, to make fun of the night,” and “Butts, butts, butts, butts ... our butts are beautiful.” Maxwell, who records with partner Phil Hernandez as Elegant Too, has been shelling out a steady supply of these tunes custom-made for Linda Belcher (voiced by John Roberts) and her family to croon. The Elegant Too is also responsible for the music for the “Inside Amy Schumer” parody song “Milk Milk Lemonade,” which has 7.3 million views on YouTube. NEW YORK’S OPERA ITHACA premiered Bonnie Montgomery’s one-act

opera, “Billy Blythe,” a snapshot of a day in the life of a teenage Bill Clinton (sung by baritone Garrett Obrycki). The opera was staged in Ithaca’s Kitchen Theatre. Montgomery was joined by cellist Sera Smolen for the parlor music that served as the opera’s prelude. Counterpunch Magazine’s David Yearsley described the scene: “The multi-threat Montgomery at an upright piano whose clangorous sound and poor tuning was perfectly curated (by neglect) for the white trash arias, soaked in alcohol and sex.” Dawn Pierce, Yearsley wrote, gave “an unforgettable performance” as Virginia Clinton, Bill’s mother, and the libretto by Britt Barber was

well-received as notably able to convey something much more than just a plot: Bill’s resilience in the face of the pathos and dysfunction that characterized his adolescent years. AFTER NEARLY 40 YEARS of hosting jazz jams, open mics and shows from bands whose music might not have fit readily into the bar scenes elsewhere in town, The Afterthought Bistro and Bar closed its doors Wednesday evening. A series of parties before the closing bid farewell to the longtime champion of chill vibes at the corner of Beechwood and Kavanaugh. Adieu, Afterthought.

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of, “I’m so sorry.” It’s incredibly condescending to be told this. I want to teach the culture at large that there are other types of diversity in the South. Sure, there can be horrendous violence against queer bodies and shocking anti-LGBTQ legislation, but I can name hundreds of individuals living in the South who fight for LGBTQ rights every day of their lives. Take a place like Lucie’s Place, the only operating LGBTQ homeless shelter in Arkansas. Watching someone hold their own and fight for trans rights in this state, to name only one example, can be incredibly inspiring and is doing the good work of bringing real equality to this country. You’ve said that literature saved you as a closeted youth. What writers and works rescued you? What did you find in these books that spoke to you? Were there any other outlets that provided relief and escape? I’ve always been an avid reader. Each summer of my elementary school days I would read about 100 R.L. Stine books. I couldn’t get enough murder plots. Then, as I grew older and started to understand that I had an attraction to other men, I felt a bit disconnected from traditional narratives. That’s when I started playing video games like “Final Fantasy VIII,” with narratives and characters that felt very queer. “Final Fantasy VIII,” which features in my book as a kind of escape for my closeted self, contained a spiky haired character wearing a fur jacket and a beautiful

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MAY 19, 2016

THE TO-DO

LIST

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

FRIDAY 5/20

CELEBRATE THE GRAPE

6 p.m. Argenta Plaza, 520 Main St., NLR. $30 adv., $40 day of.

The Internet is awash with articles with titles like “how to impress your friends when ordering wine,” and studies showing that almost half of all wine consumed in the United States is consumed by millennials. That is to say, wine is most definitely “back,” if indeed it ever left in the first place. This weekend, the Arkansas Times’ annual Celebrate the Grape Wine, Food & Jazz Festival returns, with an array of wines so staggering, it’s difficult to believe they all come from a single fruit. Our preview last week included incorrect info about who will be providing food. Our bad. Here’s the real deal: Whole Foods is providing some al fresco-style delights with which to test your pairing skills — shrimp cocktail; vegetable crudités with dip; ciabatta; cranberry cheddar; house-made beef picnic sticks; sustainably produced dark and milk chocolates; charcuterie; and seasonal melons and berries. The Funkanites will be providing some killer vibes and Joshua Asante (Velvet Kente, Amasa Hines) will be spinning a DJ set. All proceeds benefit the Argenta Arts District, and tickets can be purchased at bit.ly/grape16.

HELLENIC HAPPENING: The Greek Food Festival features an Old World Market, demonstrations of Greek, Irish and Mexican dance forms, and plenty of pastitsio.

FRIDAY 5/20-SUNDAY 5/22

INTERNATIONAL GREEK FOOD FESTIVAL

11 a.m. Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church. Free.

“Liturgy” is a strange word. When it strikes the ear, we may hear all sorts of things: cathedral bells, Anglican chants, scriptural incantations. As defined by the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church on the website for this year’s International Greek Food Festival, it means simply “the work of the people,” which is a perfect way

to describe what one would observe if she were to stand in the epicenter of the celebration: the buttery smell of pastitsio, the whirling palette of hues on a group dancing the Kalamatianos, the crowd noise from folks perusing the goods in the Old World Market. The schedule of entertainment and vendors makes clear that the festival’s focus goes well beyond the Hellenic: There are Irish cloggers, wooden tools fashioned in the Ozarks, hand-painted Russian nesting dolls and Mexican folkloric dance groups. The festival takes place

SATURDAY 5/21

FRIDAY 5/20-SUNDAY 5/22

BALLET ARKANSAS: ‘UNDER THE LIGHTS’

7:30 p.m. Friday, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday. Arkansas Repertory Theatre. $35-$40.

Johnny Cash’s “Walk the Line” and “Jackson” seem about as far from Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring” as one can imagine, but whether it’s plunked by a Martin dreadnought or a Maggini double bass, a beat’s a beat. With the help of live accompaniment by Nashville neo-rockabilly 28

MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

in and around the dome-topped building on Napa Valley Drive, a destination you can reach by car (parking is free), by foot or by the trolley, which will run every 10 minutes from the parking lot across the street at Agape Church. If your goal is to score some falafel and skedaddle, though, they’ve also set up a drive-through pickup line; you can download the menu ahead of time at greekfoodfest.com and call in an order via Chef Shuttle.

band Sugar + The Hi-Lows, the dancers at Ballet Arkansas are going to demonstrate that universality with a nod to the Man in Black, in pirouette form. Choreographer Chris Stuart’s portfolio is filled with classical appearances in “The Nutcracker” and “Romeo and Juliet,” but he began to push the envelope with “American Dreams,” a contemporary piece set to music by Peter Schickele (aka P.D.Q Bach, an alias under which Schickele developed a set of satirical, often outright slapstick works that parody the symphonic canon).

DUNBAR GARDEN PIG ROAST 6:30 p.m. Dunbar Garden. $50.

The lunar calendar suggests there may be newborn goats to coo at (or Instagram, whatever floats your boat) at this year’s Dunbar Garden Pig Roast. If the kids appear — or even if they don’t — the dinner will honor life in all stages of its cycle: an organic pig cooked on site for the waiting plate, the scent of seasonal flowers wafting across the garden, and the com-

post pile that will take any food waste from dinner and transform it into rich, black fodder for next season, when the whole beautiful mess starts over again. Grab a signature cocktail and take a tour of the garden, where the soundtrack for this idyllic scene is two-pronged: the Wildflowers Revue (Mandy McBryde, Bonnie Montgomery and Amy Garland) and the Catholic High School Jazz Band. (In the event of rain, the roast will be rescheduled to May 28.)

IN BRIEF

THURSDAY 5/19

SUNDAY 5/22

FRANK TURNER AND THE SLEEPING SOULS

6:30 p.m. Clear Channel Metroplex. $17-$20.

You’d never know it after having your self-composure hung out to dry by the lyrics of “I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous,” but Frank Turner was once in a post-hardcore punk band called Million Dead. Then, a friend gave him a cassette of Bruce Springsteen’s

“Nebraska,” which he cites as a turning point in his musical direction. Springsteen’s influence (and Billy Bragg’s) is intrinsic to Turner’s 2008 album, “Love Ire and Song,” and like his professed heroes, his politics have often come to the forefront. After a series of quotes published by The Guardian yielded him a stream of hate mail and death threats (he’d described himself as “pretty rightwing,” a statement he later said he wished he could retract), he’s since

been asked to clarify his positions again and again. (What did he expect after he wrote “Thatcher Fucked the Kids”?) The songs on his 2015 release, “Positive Songs for Negative People,” could stand alone with only guitar accompaniment, but with the help of his full band, his songs become rollicking anthems with lush, open-tuning chords underpinned by drone notes. Two Cow Garage and Homeless Gospel Choir open the show.

TUESDAY 5/24

‘PURPLE RAIN’

7 p.m., 7:15 p.m., 7:30 p.m., 9 p.m. Riverdale 10 Cinema. $7.50.

LOOKING YOU IN THE EYE: D.C. art-punk quartet Priests comes to Vino’s with their new album, “Bodies and Control and Money and Power.”

SUNDAY 5/22

PRIESTS

7 p.m. Vino’s. $5.

Bikini Kill made statements that demanded the listener to question; Priests asks questions that demand a response. The D.C. punk band joins locals Bombay Harambee, RadRadRiot and Sad Magick for an early show on a Sunday night, and the songs from its 2014 release, “Bodies and Control and Money and Power” (a split release on Sister Polygon and Don Giovanni Records) will illuminate exactly why the comparison to Kill Rock Stars artists is so ubiquitous, but also how the quartet is accomplishing something totally different from “Rebel

Girl” or “Suck My Left One.” Its early work is full of repeated chants, like “Watch You,” which forces catcalling to look itself in the mirror: “I’ve got tits but I’ve also got eyes, and baby that ass got me mesmerized. I’m gonna watch you … I’m a pervert, I’ve got the gaze.” Priests’ latest release is lyrically broader, less art-punk criticism of the outside world, more biting psychoanalysis turned inward: “I’m trying to understand, trying to explode the upper hand, trying to procreate without fucking and breeding.” Priests gravitates toward playing allages shows in a spirit of inclusiveness, and this Sunday evening’s show is no exception.

Since Prince’s untimely passing to the next realm (although arguably, he was never quite of this realm to begin with), I’ve heard the song “Purple Rain” in the following ways: blasted several times in a row from a maxedout car stereo in a park cradled between the Mississippi River and the Confederate cemetery in Helena, weaved seamlessly into David Gilmour’s guitar solo in a live performance of “Comfortably Numb,” and emanating loudly from the house of a longretired neighbor who’s never mentioned an affinity for music of any kind, let alone that of The Purple One. If, like so many, you’ve gone searching in vain for Prince’s songs on YouTube in hopes that you might blast out a similar tribute, here’s a chance to pay homage to one of his weirder (but nevertheless, terrifically popular) ventures: “Purple Rain,” a groundbreaking rock musical filmed in 42 days under the direction of Albert Magnoli. “Purple Rain” has swept into movie houses in the wake of Prince’s death, and Riverdale 10 will be among them. Pull up a cushy theater recliner (and a box of Kleenex, if you suspect you might need it) and thank the stars the movie executives didn’t get their way when they wanted to replace Prince with John Travolta.

John Knowles, one of five guitar players in the world playfully designated by Chet Atkins as a “CGP” (Certified Guitar Player), finger-picks at The Joint, 7:30 p.m., $20. Film-a-clef musical “Dreamgirls” finishes its run at the Studio Theatre through May 22, 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, $20-$25. ASU alums, pledge your allegiance: The UALR Trojans are up at bat against ASU’s Redwolves at Gary Hogan Field, 6 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 1 p.m. Saturday, $6-$10. Memphis’ country-blues rambler Grace Askew plays Stickyz, 8:30 p.m., $7 adv., $10 day of.

FRIDAY 5/20 Hill Country combo Opal Agafia and the Sweet Nothings takes the stage at Four Quarter Bar in Argenta, 10 p.m., $7. The Uh-Huhs, winners of the 2016 Arkansas Times Musicians Showcase, join forces with newly formed trio Daughters of Triton, along with fuzzed-out Nashville rockers Idle Bloom, at Pizza d’Action, 9 p.m., $5. Charlie Rich Jr. performs a tribute to his father, joined by Rockabilly Hall of Famers Sonny Burgess and the Legendary Pacers, at the Ron Robinson Theater, 7 p.m., $15. Things are going to get very doomsday at Vino’s: Sheridan’s All Is at an End hosts an all-locals show with Izuna, Throne of Pestilence and Conviction, 8:30 p.m., $5. Sultry New Orleans songstress Maggie Koerner comes to King’s Live Music in Conway, 8:30 p.m., $5. The Oxford American and Drawl Southern Contemporary Art host the opening reception for The Gun Show, a juried art competition exploring the role of the firearm in Southern culture, Cache Restaurant and Lounge, 6 p.m., $50-$75.

SATURDAY 5/21 The Acro Van, an old technicolorpainted touring van outfitted with harnesses, Cyr wheels (large rings that acrobatic people roll around in) and all manner of acroyoga equipment, rolls into Hot Springs at 211 Lost Lake Drive for a two-day workshop, 10 a.m., $149. Sarah Stricklin’s whip-smart, keyboardforward ensemble Bad Match joins doom rockers Sumokem and Deadbird at the White Water Tavern, 9 p.m., $7. Head for the hills for Spa City Blues Society’s Hot Springs Craft Beer Festival at the Hot Springs Convention Center, 6 p.m., $30. While you’re there, keep the party going and catch a powerful lineup at Maxine’s (complete with a Lost 40 takeover at the taps): Duckstronaut, Ginsu Wives and Androids of Ex-Lovers, 9 p.m., $5. Roots rockers DeFrance take the stage at the Markham Street Grill and Pub, 8:30 p.m., free.

www.arktimes.com

MAY 19, 2016

AFTER DARK Maggie Koerner. Kings Live Music, 8:30 p.m., $5. 1020 Front St #102, Conway. 501-205-8512. kingslivemusic.com. Mandy McBryde. Kent Walker Artisan Cheese, 6 p.m., free. 323 S. Cross St. 501-301-4963. kentwalkercheese.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. Salty Dogs, Anna Vogelzang. South on Main, 9 p.m., $10. 1304 Main St. 501-244-9660. southonmain.com. Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 8 p.m., free. 111 W. Markham St. 501-370-7013. www. capitalbarandgrill.com/. The Uh-Huhs. With Idle Bloom and Daughters of Triton. Pizza D’Action, 9 p.m., $5. 2919 W. Markham St. 501-666-5403. Upscale Friday. IV Corners, 7 p.m. 824 W. Capitol Ave.

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

THURSDAY, MAY 19

MUSIC

Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, Something “Blue.” Christ Episcopal Church, 7 p.m., $25. 509 Scott St. 501-375-2342. Baker, Eric Moggridge. Vino’s. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. vinosbrewpub.com. Brian Ramsey (happy hour), Mister Lucky (headliner). Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 and 9 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf.com. Charlotte Taylor and Gypsy Rain. Laman Library, 7 p.m. 2801 Orange St., NLR. 501-758-1720. www. lamanlibrary.org. Grace Askew. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 8:30 p.m., $7 adv., $10 day of. 107 River Market Ave. 501-372-7707. www.stickyz.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. Jason Aldean. With Thomas Rhett, A Thousand Horses, Dee Jay Silver. Walmart AMP, 7:30 p.m., $35.50-$350. 5079 W. Northgate Road, Rogers. 479-443-5600. arkansasmusicpavilion.com. Jeremiah James Baker, Aerial Ruin, Justin Bratcher. Vino’s, 8 p.m., $5. 923 W. 7th St. 501375-8466. www.vinosbrewpub.com. Jim Dickerson. Sonny Williams’ Steak Room, 7 p.m. 500 President Clinton Ave. 501-324-2999. www.sonnywilliamssteakroom.com. John Knowles. Grammy-winning thumbpicker plays The Joint’s Argenta Acoustic Music Series. The Joint, 7:30 p.m., $20. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0210. thejointargenta.com. Karaoke. Zack’s Place, 8 p.m., free. 1400 S. University Ave. 501-664-6444. Laser Background. Maxine’s, 9 p.m. 700 Central Ave., Hot Springs. www.maxinespub.com. Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com. Open Jam. Thirst n’ Howl, 8 p.m. 14710 Cantrell Road. 501-379-8189. www.thirst-n-howl.com. Open jam with The Port Arthur Band. Parrot Beach Cafe, 9 p.m. 9611 MacArthur Drive, NLR. 771-2994. RockUsaurus. Casa Mexicana, 7:30 p.m. 7111 JFK Blvd., NLR. 501-835-7876. Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 8 p.m., free. 111 W. Markham St. 501-370-7013. www. capitalbarandgrill.com.

COMEDY

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

EVENTS

Antique/Boutique Walk. Shopping and live entertainment. Downtown Hot Springs, third Thursday of every month, 4 p.m., free. 100 Central Ave., Hot Springs. #ArkiePubTrivia. Stone’s Throw Brewing, 6:30 p.m. 402 E. 9th St. 501-244-9154. Taste of the Rock 2016. River Market pavilions, 5:30 p.m., $15 adv., $20 day of. 400 President 30

MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

COMEDY

STOMP AND HOLLER: Austin Lucas and Little Rock’s own wayfarer Adam Faucett split a bill at the White Water Tavern at 9 p.m. Wednesday, $7.

Clinton Ave. 375-2552. www.rivermarket.info. “The Sustainable Development Goals and What They Mean for Africa.” A talk by Robin Sanders, CEO of FEEEDS Advocacy Initiative. Sturgis Hall, noon. 1200 President Clinton Ave. 501-683-5200. clintonschool.uasys.edu.

POETRY

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

KIDS

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

FRIDAY, MAY 20

MUSIC

All In Fridays. Envy. 7200 Colonel Glenn Road. 501-562-3317. All Is At An End, Izuna, Conviction. All-local show, all-ages. Vino’s, $5. 923 W. 7th St. 501375-8466. vinosbrewpub.com. American Lions, Black River Pearl. Revolution,

9 p.m., $5. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-8230090. www.rumbarevolution.com/new. Big Piph and Tomorrow Maybe, SA, Curtis Rice. Maxine’s, 9 p.m., $5. 700 Central Ave., Hot Springs. www.maxinespub.com. Charlie Rich Jr., Sonny Burgess & the Legendary Pacers. Ron Robinson Theater, 7 p.m., $15. 1 Pulaski Way. 501-320-5703. www. cals.lib.ar.us/ron-robinson-theater.aspx. Ellie Goulding. 6:45 p.m., Walmart AMP, Rogers. $41-$55.50. 479-443-5600. arkansasmusicpavilion.com. Goon Des Garcons, Pearl Gang, Yung Kiri, Solo Jaxon, DMP Jefe. Revolution, 8 p.m., $10. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. www.rumbarevolution.com/new. Jason Hale (happy hour), Third Degree (headliner). Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 and 9 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www.cajunswharf. com. Joey Kneiser and Kelly Smith. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m., $7. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-3758400. whitewatertavern.com. Joey Kneiser, Kelly Smith. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m., $7. 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.

TUESDAY WINE DAY

15% OFF

Excluding wines already on sale!

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“Rednecks in Spandex.” An original production by The Main Thing. The Joint, 8 p.m., $22. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501-372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com. The Sandman. The Loony Bin, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., $12. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501228-5555. www.loonybincomedy.com.

DANCE

Ballet Arkansas: “Under the Lights.” Arkansas Repertory Theatre, May 20-22, 7:30 p.m., $35. 601 Main St. 501-378-0405. www.therep.org. Contra Dance. Park Hill Presbyterian Church, 7:30 p.m., $5. 3520 JFK Blvd., NLR. arkansascountrydance.org.

EVENTS

Celebrate the Grape. An evening of wine, food, and jazz, catered by Whole Foods, with music from The Funkanites and a DJ set by Joshua Asante. $30 adv., $40 day of. Argenta Plaza, 6 p.m., $30-$40. 502 Main Street, NLR. Fantastic Friday. Literary and music event, refreshments included. For reservations, call 479-968-2452 or email artscenter@centurytel. net. River Valley Arts Center, Every third Friday, 7 p.m., $10 suggested donation. 1001 E. B St., Russellville. 479-968-2452. www.arvartscenter.org. Flying Saucer’s 18th Anniversary Party. 18 rare beers, special tappings, and live music by Rob Moore at 9 p.m. Flying Saucer. 323 President Clinton Ave. 501-372-8032. www.beerknurd.com. International Greek Food Festival. 32nd annual festival includes an Old World Market, drive-thru food pickup, live dance and music. Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, May 20-21, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; May 22, 11 a.m.-3 p.m., free. 1100 Napa Valley Drive. 501-221-5300. greekfoodfest.com. 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.

SPORTS

Arkansas Travelers vs. Springfield. DickeyStephens Park, 7:10 p.m., $7-$13. 400 W. Broadway, NLR. 501-664-1555. www.travs.com.

FILM

“Grease.” Ron Robinson Theater, 2 p.m., $5. 1 Pulaski Way. 501-320-5703. www.cals.lib.ar.us/ ron-robinson-theater.aspx. “Weekend at Bernie’s.” Ron Robinson Theater, 7 p.m., $5. 1 Pulaski Way. 501-320-5703. www. cals.lib.ar.us/ron-robinson-theater.aspx.

SPORTS

Arkansas Travelers vs. Springfield. DickeyStephens Park, 7:10 p.m., $7-$13. 400 W. Broadway, NLR. 501-664-1555. www.travs.com.

SUNDAY, MAY 22

MUSIC

Frank Turner and the Sleeping Souls. With Two Cow Garage and Homeless Gospel Choir. Clear Channel Metroplex, 6:30 p.m., $17-$20. 10800 Col. Glenn Road. 501-681-7552. metroplexlive.com. 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. Priests. With Bombay Harambee, Radradriot, and Sad Magick. 7 p.m., $5. 501-375-8466. vinosbrewpub.com.

QC:

Live: 1.875" x 5.25"

CW: CD: AD:

Trim: 2.125" x 5.5" Bleed: none

The driver of a motor vehicle overtaking a bicycle proceeding in the same direction on a roadway shall exercise due care and pass to the left at a safe distance of not less than three feet (3’) and shall not again drive to the right side of the roadway until safely clear of the overtaken bicycle.

AM:

Closing Date: 3/18/16

overtaking a bicycle

yoUr cycling friends thank yoU!

http://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/ Go to “Arkansas Code,” search “bicycle”

NOW TWO CONVENIENT LOCATIONS

BENEFITS

POP! Beaux Arts Ball. Arkansas Arts Center, 7:30 p.m., $150. 501 E. 9th St. 501-372-4000. www.arkarts.com.

Pub: Arkansas Times

Every person riding a bicycle or an animal, or driving any animal drawing a vehicle upon a highway, shall have all the rights and all of the duties applicable to the driver of a vehicle, except those provisions of this act which by their nature can have no applicability.

PM:

Use of bicycles or animals

PO:

drivers Please be aWare, it’s arkansas state laW:

Job/Order #: 279609 QC: cs

Ben Gipson. Vino’s. 923 W. 7th St. 501-375-8466. vinosbrewpub.com. Brian Nahlen. Kent Walker Artisan Cheese, 6 p.m., free. 323 S. Cross St. 501-301-4963. kentwalkercheese.com. Charlotte Taylor and Matt Stone. Skinny J’s, 8 p.m. 314 Main St., NLR. 501-916-2645. skinnyjs.com. Deadbird, Bad Match, Sumokem. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m., $7. White Water Tavern, 9:30 p.m. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. www.whitewatertavern.com. DeFrance. Markham Street Grill And Pub, 8:30 p.m., free. 11321 W. Markham St. 501-224-2010. markhamstreetpub.com. Duckstronaut, Ginsu Wives, Androids of Ex-Lovers. Plus, Lost 40 takeover at the taps. Maxine’s, 9 p.m., $5. 700 Central Ave., Hot Springs. 501-321-0909. maxineslive.com. Ginsu Wives, Androids of Ex Lovers, Duckstronaut. Maxine’s, 9 p.m. 700 Central Ave., Hot Springs. www.maxinespub.com. The Irie Lions. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 9 p.m., $6. 107 River Market Ave. 501-372-7707. www.stickyz.com. Karaoke at Khalil’s. Khalil’s Pub, 7 p.m. 110 S. Shackleford Road. 501-224-0224. www.khalilspub.com. Karaoke. Zack’s Place, 8 p.m., free. 1400 S. University Ave. 501-664-6444. Casa Mexicana, 7 p.m. 7111 JFK Blvd., NLR. 501-835-7876. Karaoke with Kevin & Cara. All ages, on the restaurant side. Revolution, 9 p.m.-12:45 a.m., free. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-823-0090. www.rumbarevolution.com/new. Kevin Gates. Clear Channel Metroplex, 8 p.m., $40-$125. 10800 Col. Glenn Road. 501-681-7552. metroplexlive.com. 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. Six Mile Creek. Hibernia Irish Tavern, 7:30 p.m. 9700 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-246-4340. www.hiberniairishtavern.com. Some Guy Named Robb (happy hour), Pamela K. Ward (headliner). Cajun’s Wharf, 5:30 and 9 p.m. 2400 Cantrell Road. 501-375-5351. www. cajunswharf.com. Ted Ludwig Trio. Capital Bar and Grill, 8 p.m., free. 111 W. Markham St. 501-370-7013. www. capitalbarandgrill.com/.

EVENTS

Bridge to the Future Festival. A childrens event to promote summer reading. Clinton Presidential Park, 10 a.m., free. 1200 President Clinton Ave., NLR. 501374-4242. 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. International Greek Food Festival. See May. 20. Little Rock Farmers’ Market. River Market pavilions, 7 a.m. 400 President Clinton Ave. 375-2552. www.rivermarket.info. Pork & Bourbon Tour. Bike tour includes bicycle, guide, helmets and maps. Bobby’s Bike Hike, 11:30 a.m., $35-$45. 400 President Clinton Ave. 501-613-7001.

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MUSIC

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COMEDY

DANCE

Ballet Arkansas: “Under the Lights.” Arkansas Repertory Theatre, through May 22, 7:30 p.m., $35. 601 Main St. 501-378-0405. www.therep.org.

DANCE

Ballet Arkansas: “Under the Lights.” Arkansas Repertory Theatre, 7:30 p.m., $35. 601 Main St. 501-378-0405. www.therep.org.

EVENTS

Artists for Recovery. A secular recovery group for people with addictions, open to the public, located in the church’s Parlor. Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church, 10 a.m. 1601 S. Louisiana. Bernice Garden Farmer’s Market. Bernice Garden, 10 a.m. 1401 S. Main St. www.thebernicegarden.org. International Greek Food Festival. See May. 20.

OFFICE INTERIORS

Pettus Office Interiors is proud to announce our partnership with Kimball Office. Come visit our furniture showroom at 2 Freeway Dr. Little Rock, AR 501-666-7226 · pettusop.com www.arktimes.com

MAY 19, 2016

AFTER DARK, CONT.

SURVIVING GAY CONVERSION THERAPY, CONT. sword, and he was absolutely beautiful to a young me. In terms of books that helped me both during and after my time in Love in Action, I can very firmly say that Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” was the book that first taught me how bigotry operated. I remember reading about Hester Prynne, who’s forced to wear a scarlet letter “A” to stand for the “shameful” adultery she committed, and I had such a shock of recognition I began to sob. I used that book as a kind of Bible to get me through the tough times. “Boy Erased” is the latest in a highprofile list of well-received books that have LGBTQ themes, coming on the heels of Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life” and Garth Greenwell’s “What Belongs to You.” The timing of your book’s release seems right both critically and commercially. Why do you think that is? Why is there a public hunger for these books now, and what’s driving their publication? I think a certain number of erudite queer readers are championing queer books in intelligent ways — through social media and word of mouth — and people are listening because these tastemakers make good cases for reading these books. Hanya’s book is in many ways a success because queer readers taught nonqueer readers how to recognize the coded queer traditions within the text. We’re having this conversation the week of your book’s release. How have you prepared your family and friends for this moment? How have you prepared yourself? I haven’t done much preparing. Before I wrote the majority of the book, I spent many nights worrying about how I was going to portray my family. As you probably know, spilling your family secrets makes you a very bad Southern boy. I am breaking a taboo by writing this book. Certain inevitable frustrations are going to occur. But I wrote this book out of love. I love my family, and in fact I dedicated this book to my parents, but I am also concerned with the culture at large, and the culture at large needs to know what goes on in a family like mine, what could possibly make a family want to send their child to conversion therapy. I am in a unique position to explain liberal and conservative camps to each other. “Boy Erased” contains some tender moments of love and kindness between you and your family, includ32

MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

ing your parents and your grandparents, none of whom are portrayed as pure antagonists, and, in fact, they are often, right through the book’s final pages, shown as navigating personal struggles that are parallel and tied to, in many ways, your own. In addition to the hardships, you also write about some very happy moments from your childhood, and your book is dedicated to your parents. How important — and how difficult — was it for you to show that balance of love and struggle? It was extremely important to demonstrate the love I share with my family. I believe this is a key ingredient in why I was able to successfully recover from my therapy sessions. In the only writing workshop session where I shared a chapter of the book, I had only one guiding question for feedback: Did you see my father as a three-dimensional character? When I heard that the answer was yes, I knew I could go about writing the rest of the book. I knew the story wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t try to address the question of why we do harmful things to the people we love, often out of love. You write that the only openly gay person you’d met before college was your mother’s hairdresser. Outside of church, what else informed your perception of what being gay means? I didn’t have many LGBTQ influences when I was growing up. Most people in my hometown believed that gay people ended up dying of AIDS in some gutter somewhere. I also didn’t want to look on the Internet for the answers, because I believed I might be possessed by a demon if I did this. There just weren’t any outlets for expression. Who do you see as the target audience for “Boy Erased”? The book has connected well with teens and college students, though I hope the book also speaks to both liberal and conservative audiences of any age, because I wanted this book to be a document of our times, a kind of reflection of what our country does to its people and why it operates the way it does.

KUAR Pub Quiz. American Pie Pizza (NLR), 6 p.m. 4830 North Hills Blvd., NLR. 501-753-0081. www.americanpiepizza.net.

SPORTS

Arkansas Travelers vs. Springfield. DickeyStephens Park, May 22, 2:10 p.m.; May 23, 7:10 p.m., $7-$13. 400 W. Broadway, NLR. 501-6641555. www.travs.com.

BOOKS

“Notable Women of Arkansas.” Nancy Hendricks will sign her new book. WordsWorth Books & Co., 4 p.m. 5920 R St. 501-663-9198. www.wordsworthbooks.org.

MONDAY, MAY 23

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.

LECTURES

“The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It.” A talk by Leonard Cassuto, graduate education columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education and professor at Fordham University. Sturgis Hall, 6 p.m. 1200 President Clinton Ave. 501-683-5200. clintonschool.uasys.edu.

SPORTS

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

TUESDAY, MAY 24

MUSIC

Cosmocean, Open Fields, Becoming Elephants. White Water Tavern, 9 p.m., donations. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. whitewatertavern.com. Cosmocean, Open Fields, Becoming Fields. White Water Tavern, 9 p.m., Donations. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. www.whitewatertavern.com. Jeff Ling. Khalil’s Pub, 6 p.m. 110 S. Shackleford Road. 501-224-0224. www.khalilspub.com. Jim Dickerson. Sonny Williams’ Steak Room, 7

Artists.

EXCEPTIONAL EXCEPTIONAL EXPERIENCES .

p.m. 500 President Clinton Ave. 501-324-2999. www.sonnywilliamssteakroom.com. Karaoke Tuesday. Prost, 8 p.m., free. 322 President Clinton Blvd. 501-244-9550. willydspianobar.com/prost-2. Karaoke Tuesdays. On the patio. Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, 7:30 p.m., free. 107 River Market Ave. 501-372-7707. www.stickyz.com. Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com. 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.

EVENTS

Little Rock Farmers’ Market. River Market pavilions, 7 a.m. 400 President Clinton Ave. 375-2552. www.rivermarket.info. Trivia Bowl. Flying Saucer, 8:30 p.m. 323 President Clinton Ave. 501-372-8032. www.beerknurd. com/stores/littlerock.

FILM

“Purple Rain.” Riverdale 10 Cinema, 7, 7:15, 7:30 and 9:15 p.m., $7.50. (Sold out.) 2600 Cantrell Road. 501-296-9955.

BOOKS

A Conversation with Garrard Conley. Clinton Presidential Center, 6 p.m., free. 1200 President Clinton Ave. 370-8000. www.clintonpresidentialcenter.org.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 25

MUSIC

Acoustic Open Mic. Afterthought Bistro & Bar, 8 p.m., free. 2721 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-1196. www.afterthoughtbistroandbar.com. Adam Faucett, Austin Lucas. White Water Tavern, 9 p.m., $7. White Water Tavern, 9 p.m., $7. 2500 W. 7th St. 501-375-8400. www.whitewatertavern.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.

OXFORD AMERICAN

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CONCERT SERIES

What would you say to your 16-year- P R E S E N T S PRESENTS 2016 old self? To any 16-year-old growing 2017 up in a rural setting and struggling with sexuality or identity? C A L E N D A R ★ D O N AT E ★ S H O P ★ T I C K E T S Hold on. Keep reading. Keep learning. Some day you will make it out. But All tickets are sold through Metrotix.com or by calling (800) 293-5949. don’t forget where you came from. There Visit SouthOnMain.com/events to see the full lineup. PRESENTS are people like you who haven’t made it out, and these people need your help. South on Main | 1304 South Main Street | Little Rock, AR 72202

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MOVIE REVIEW Jim Dickerson. Sonny Williams’ Steak Room, 7 p.m. 500 President Clinton Ave. 501-324-2999. www.sonnywilliamssteakroom.com. Karaoke at Khalil’s. Khalil’s Pub, 7 p.m. 110 S. Shackleford Road. 501-224-0224. www.khalilspub.com. Karaoke. MUSE Ultra Lounge, 8:30 p.m., free. 2611 Kavanaugh Blvd. 501-663-6398. Live music. No cover charge Sun.-Tue. and Thu. Ernie Biggs. 307 President Clinton Ave. 501-3724782. littlerock.erniebiggs.com. Open Mic Nite with Deuce. Thirst n’ Howl, 7:30 p.m., free. 14710 Cantrell Road. 501-379-8189. www.thirst-n-howl.com. RockUsaurus. Senor Tequila, 7 p.m. 10300 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-224-5505. Stitched Up Heart. Revolution, 8 p.m., $8 adv., $10 day of. 300 President Clinton Ave. 501-8230090. www.rumbarevolution.com/new. Whiskey Shivers. South on Main, 8:30 p.m., $10. 1304 Main St. 501-244-9660. southonmain.com.

COMEDY

Jason Russell. The Loony Bin, May 25-28, 7:30 p.m.; May 27-28, 10 p.m., $8-$12. 10301 N. Rodney Parham Road. 501-228-5555. www. loonybincomedy.com. The Joint Venture. Improv comedy group. The Joint, 8 p.m., $7. 301 Main St. No. 102, NLR. 501372-0205. thejointinlittlerock.com.

DANCE

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

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

Arkansas Festival Ballet: “Peter Pan.” Arkansas Arts Center, May 20-21, 7:30 p.m.; May 21-22, 2 p.m., $15-$20. 501 E. 9th St. 501-372-4000. www.arkarts.com. Dreamgirls. Thurs., Fri., Sat., 7 p.m. Sunday 2 p.m. The Studio Theatre, through May 22, $20-$25. 320 W. 7th St. 501-374-2615. www.thestudiotheatre-lr.org/. TheatreSquared: “Murder For Two.” Walton Arts Center’s Nadine Baum Studios, through May 29: Wed.-Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sat., Sun., 2 p.m., CONTINUED ON PAGE 35

CLOONEY AS CABLE FACE: He’s with Julia Roberts again in “Money Monster.”

‘Monster’ misses Narrative problems plague Jodie Fosterhelmed movie. BY SAM EIFLING

n its opening moments, “Money Monster” seems primed to rip into a twin set of fat, deserving targets: Wall Street and the cable TV hype men who pump it. George Clooney is Lee Gates, a dapper gasbag whose gimmickladen personal finance show is like the unholy offspring of Jim Cramer and a late-’90s Mase video. With a gold top hat and backup dancers, Gates picks stocks and cracks wise, while his director in the booth, Patty (Julia Roberts), steers the show and gamely tries to keep him from chasing smug tangents on-air. Their working relationship seems authentic, a contrast to the chipper bloviating of their product. A would-be guest CEO

cancels on them, so they improvise, and the show goes on. Then: A scrubby dude with a gun and a bomb vest meant for Gates and for the absent CEO breaks onto the show and demands to know why a supposedly ironclad stock pick cratered. This guy, Kyle (Jack O’Connell, of “Unbroken”), lost his life’s savings when this company, Ibis, incinerated $800 million overnight, due to what the CEO (Dominic West, forever Jimmy McNulty of “The Wire”) had dubbed a glitch in the high-frequency trading algorithm. Kyle wants answers, and he’s ready to blow up himself and the rest of the studio to get them. It ain’t a bad premise to work from, for a hostage movie: a desperate but ultimately relatable blue-collar type holding the media captive and interrogating capitalism. Better movies have taken smaller bites and at least drawn blood; “The Big Short” is the current standardbearer, but even a farce like “The Wolf of Wall Street” had a discernible moral core. Trouble here is, director Jodie Foster and the screenwriters are eyeing such a large target (The System, man) that they forget to truly aim. “Money Monster” leaves the cabin loaded for bear and returns with half a rabbit pelt. Even while propped on a too-broad indictment of trading culture, you’ve got the elements, sometimes success-

ful, of a decent potboiler. Clooney and Roberts have broken in and out of multiple casinos together; even as they’re connected by headsets only, you trust them to work their way out of a TV studio. And O’Connell, playing an outsider to the culture and to the workplace, feels authentically as if he stumbled into the movie from another plane of existence. He commands the momentum of the narrative, partly by squeezing off rounds, partly by continuing to ask the questions that the show’s producers adopt: To hell with the glitch, how does a company lose such a vast fortune for its investors without any accountability? Kyle actually brings an arguable point to his tirade that sounds like a thesis for a thoughtful movie. He tars big trading houses, and, again, the televised buffoons who carry their water, as a greater threat to America than foreign terrorists. That’s a bold thesis! But it gets discarded as “Money Monster” sets about solving the mystery at the heart of its plot, and pulling in an Ibis executive (Caitriona Balfre) in some race-against-the-clock sleuthing. There, the movie runs into a narrative cul-de-sac. Namely, that while it proclaims to be railing against the wider economic exploitation that Wall Street represents, it needs a sui generis financial crime to move the events of the story. So are they all bums and crooks? Or is this one uniquely crooked company we’re auditing on live TV? There’s enough action and energy to keep you hoping they can pull out a good answer, but the conclusion of “Money Monster” seems to work as a mini-review of the movie itself: business as usual, nothing much to see here. www.arktimes.com

MAY 19, 2016

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$10-$45. 505 W. Spring St., Fayetteville. 479-4435600. theatre2.org. “A Piece of My Heart.” The Weekend Theater, through May 21: Fri., Sat., 7:30 p.m., $16. 1001 W. 7th St. 501-374-3761. www.weekendtheater.org.

NEW IN THE GALLERIES

ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, MacArthur Park: Renoir’s “Madame Henriot,” loan from the Columbus Museum of Art, May 24-Sept. 11; “55th Young Artists Exhibition,” work by Arkansas students K-12, through July 24; “Miranda Young: A Printed Menagerie,” museum school gallery, through May 29. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sun. 372-4000. ARGENTA GALLERY, 413 Main St., NLR: Paintings by Cindy J. Holmes, reception 5-8 p.m. May 20, Argenta ArtWalk. 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 258-8991. CACHE RESTAURANT, 425 President Clinton Ave.: Opening reception and awards presentation for “The Gun Show,” with exhibition juror Chad Alligood, 6-8 p.m. May 20, $50 ($75 V.I.P. tickets for 5 p.m. reception); portion to benefit Oxford American magazine, show to continue at Drawl Southern Contemporary Art Gallery, 5208 Kavanaugh Blvd. 680-1871. CORE BREWING, 411 Main St., NLR: “Salud! A Group Exhibition,” opening reception 6-9 p.m. May 20, through July 10. corebeer.com. GALLERY 26, 2601 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Paintings by Michael Lierly, ceramics by Donna Uptigrove, May 21-July 9, opening reception 7-10 p.m. May 21. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 664-8996. GREG THOMPSON FINE ART, 429 Main St., NLR: “Magical Realism,” work by Dolores Justus, Rebecca Thompson, Mark Blaney, Ray Parker, Donald Roller Wilson, Gary Bolding, Bill Dunlap, Kendall Stallings, James Bonner and others, opening reception 5-8 p.m. May 20, Argenta ArtWalk. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 664-2787. LAMAN LIBRARY ARGENTA BRANCH, 420 Main St., NLR: “Family Portrait,” paintings by Kesha Stovall, reception 5-8 p.m. May 20, Argenta ArtWalk, talk by the artist noon May 21, show through June 10. 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.Fri., 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Sat. 687-1061. L&L BECK ART GALLERY, 5705 Kavanaugh Blvd.: “Backyard Birds,” month of May, free giclee drawing 7 p.m. May 19. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Sat. 660-4006. MUGS CAFE, 515 Main St., NLR: “Renee Williams, New Works,” opening reception 5-8 p.m. May 20, Argenta ArtWalk. 7 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 379-9101. BENTONVILLE CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, One Museum Way: “The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip,” 100 images by 19 photographers of America from 1950 to today, through May 30, “Photo Salon: Route 66 with Greg Disch,” 6:30-8:30 p.m. May 20, $10 (free to members); “Performance Lab: Nels Cline and Norton Wisdom present ‘Stained Radiance,’ ” improvisational guitar and painting, 7-8 p.m. May 20; “The Open Road Film Series”: “45 RPM,” with prescreening talk by filmmaker Juli Jackson, artist Mandi Maxwell and actor Jason Thompson, 8:30-10:30 p.m. May 26; American masterworks spanning four centuries in the permanent collection. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon., Thu.; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Wed., Fri.; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sat.-Sun., closed Tue. 479-418-5700.

NEW IN THE MUSEUMS

OLD STATE HOUSE MUSEUM, 300 W. Markham: “Cabinet of Curiosities: Treasures from the University of Arkansas Museum Collection,” May 20-May 20, 2017; “Lost + Found: Saving Downtowns in Arkansas,” photographs of eight projects completed or renovated by Cromwell Architects Engineers. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 324-9685.

CALL FOR ENTRIES

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

MAY 20 IN THE

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ONGOING GALLERY EXHIBITS

ARKANSAS CAPITAL CORP., 200 River Market Ave., Suite 400: “Naturals,” work by Virmarie DePoyster, Heidi Hogden, Logan Hunter and Anna Sheals. www.arcapital.com. BOSWELL MOUROT FINE ART, 5815 Kavanaugh Blvd.: New paintings by Hans Feyerabend and Elena Petroukhina, clay sculpture by Diana Ashley, through May 28. 664-0030. BUTLER CENTER GALLERIES, Arkansas Studies Institute, 401 President Clinton Ave.: “Culture Shock: Shine Your Rubies, Hide Your Diamonds,” work by women’s artist collective, including Melissa Cowper-Smith, Melissa Gill, Tammy Harrington, Dawn Holder, Jessie Hornbrook, Holly Laws, Sandra Luckett, Morgan Page and Rachel Trusty, through Aug. 27, Concordia Hall; “Twists and Strands: Exploring the Edges,” ceramics by Barbara Satterfield and jewelry by Michele Fox, through May 28; “Jeanfo: We Belong to Nature,” sculpture, through June 25. 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 320-5790. CANTRELL GALLERY, 8206 Cantrell Road: “Black Box,” paintings by Kae Barron, through July 2. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 224-1335. CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, 509 Scott St.: “Interconnections,” paintings and drawings by Maria and Jorge Villegas, through June 30. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Thu., 9 a.m.-noon Fri. and Sun. 375-2342. CHROMA GALLERY, 5707 Kavanaugh Blvd.: Work by Robert Reep and other Arkansas artists. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sat. 664-0880. COX CREATIVE CENTER, 120 River Market Ave.: “Little Rock Young Artists,” through May 25. 915-3093. GALLERY 221 & ART STUDIOS 221, Second and Center streets: “William McNamara,” watercolors, through May 21, “The Literary Muse,” group show. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 801-0211. GINO HOLLANDER GALLERY, 2nd and Center: Paintings and works on paper by Gino Hollander. 801-0211. HEARNE FINE ART, 1001 Wright Ave.: “Off the Page: Illustrations from Nikki Grimes’ ‘Danita Brown’ Series and Other Titles,” watercolors by E.B. Lewis and mixed media by Floyd Cooper, through June 3. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sat. 372-6822. HISTORIC ARKANSAS MUSEUM GALLERIES, 200 E. 3rd St.: “Fucoid Arrangements” by Robert Lemming and abstract drawings by Louis Watts, through Aug. 7; “Hugo and Gayne Preller’s House of Light,” historic photographs, through October. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 324-9351. CONTINUED ON PAGE 38

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PRESENTS

SET TO THE MUSIC OF JOHNNY CASH

ALSO FEATURING GEORGE BALANCHINE’S GLINKA PAS DE TROIS THANKS TO OUR 2015-16 SEASON SPONSORS

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MAY 20-22 • ARKANSAS REPERTORY THEATRE

FOR TICKETS: BALLETARKANSAS.ORG • 501.378.0405 www.arktimes.com

MAY 19, 2016

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Dining

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

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

WHAT’S COOKIN’ IT WILL SOON BE A DARK day for lovers of fine gourmet baked goods in Little Rock — Silvek’s European Bakery, which has occupied premium space just inside the doors of Kroger in the Heights at 1900 Polk St., will be closing at the end of the month. Owner Silvek Pupkowski announced his retirement late last year, saying that his contract with Kroger would expire in March. Though Silvek initially told reporters that he might be interested in selling the business and possibly training a baker to take over, pastry chef Chelsea Dawes said the last day for Silvek’s will be May 31. She said she has heard several things about what might move in to occupy the space, including a Starbucks coffee shop or an expanded floral department for the store. IT’S ANOTHER BIG WEEKEND for food and drink festivals. The Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce sponsors the annual Taste of the Rock (5:30-7:30 p.m. May 19), featuring more than 30 restaurants and other vendors in the River Market pavilions. Tickets are $15. Arkansas Times Celebrate the Grape (6-9 p.m. May 20) returns to the Argenta Plaza with more than 300 wines, food from Whole Foods and music from The Funkanites with a DJ set from Joshua Asante. The annual Greek Food Festival (May 20-22) happens at the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church; entry is free. A number of local chefs and brewers team up for a hog roast (6:30-9:30 p.m. May 21) at and benefiting Dunbar Garden. Tickets are $50. A slew of local burger joints will participate in the Arkansas Times’ Burger Week (June 6-12). Restaurants around town will be serving low-priced burger specials. Among others, the participants include @ the Corner, Arkansas Burger Co., Big Orange, Big Whiskey’s, Boulevard Bistro, The Box, Doe’s Eat Place, Four Quarter Bar, Homer’s West, Lazy Pete’s, The Main Cheese, Midtown Billiards, Old Chicago NLR, Rebel Kettle Brewing Co., Revolution Taco & Tequila Lounge, The Root, Skinny J’s, Stickyz Rock ’n’ Roll Chicken Shack, The Tavern Sports Grill and the Town Pump. If you would like to participate or have a favorite burger you’d like to see included, let us know at phyllis@ arktimes.com. 36

MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

WELL PREPARED: Behind the counter or among the tables, service is strong at Le Stick Nouveau.

Wine dining Chef shows out at Le Stick Nouveau.

ureka Springs is a weird place, right? We recently went with our out-of-stater spouse, her first trip to the magical, enchanted/haunted, gay- and biker-friendly hiccup in the northwestern fabric of Arkansas and had a lovely time. Her most astute observation: “It seems you’re somewhere other than Arkansas yet simultaneously surrounded by Arkansans.” We think she meant it in a nice way. Le Stick is a solid addition to the food scene in Eureka. The dining room is nice and dim, peppered with neon here and there and facing a beautiful bar backed by blue neon and lit with tiny, tasteful chandeliers. The ladies on staff, servers

and cocktail conjurers, wore corsets on top of their black blouses. We thought it bold, if a little outre. The wife wasn’t as impressed. The overall mood inside is of a Las Vegas recreation of what a New Orleans restaurant might look like. But they make it work. It’s comfortable, with a gothic glow. We happened to dine on a night when the menu was set for a special occasion ($68 per fixed course meal). So we can’t speak to the regular offerings, but we can speak to the competency of the chef and serving crew, who shone throughout each of the six courses. There were a couple of minor disappointments, but nothing that can’t be overlooked with an

DOE’S KNOWS LUNCH & DINNER Lunch: Mon- Fri 11am-2pm Dinner: Mon-Thur 5:30-9:30pm • Fri & Sat 5:30-10pm FULL BAR & PRIVATE PARTY ROOM 1023 West Markham • Downtown Little Rock 501-376-1195 • www.doeseatplace.net

impressive wine list and a strong finish. The first two courses paled in comparison to the following four. Our first bite of the mousse-like salmon brandade with caviar struck us as a bit fishy, but not in the way, we think, Chef Donny Cummings intended. This was followed by a gazpacho soup garnished with a spare stalk of bib lettuce, cucumber and a single grilled shrimp. The gazpacho was thick, but tasted fresh. It was well seasoned, even spicy. The shrimp was spicy, too, and quite tasty. We just found the offering a bit stingy. An oaky Edna Valley Chardonnay and a dazzling white Barons de Rothschild Bordeaux smoothed the rough spots of these first two courses. Our server said she didn’t know much about wine before starting at the restaurant. She said she was much more comfortable making suggestions now — and has even become quite good, we’d add — after sitting down with the owners for a tasting course complete with descriptions of subtle hints and faint notes. We enjoyed a Grenache/Syrah blend and a Bila-Haut Cotes du Rhone with later courses and, though wine by the glass sets you back $10, the wine list is well curated. We didn’t have one glass that wasn’t well paired and delicious. We were also offered a taste when unsure, which is very kind of busy servers. The next course featured an arugula

BELLY UP

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

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

REGENERATION FITNESS KATHLEEN L. REA, PH.D.

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

SPLENDID PRESENTATION: The pork medallions wow.

Le Stick Nouveau

63 Spring St. (below the Hotel New Orleans) Eureka Springs 479-981-3123 QUICK BITE Anything on the wine list is sure to be a winner. If you’re not sure what bottle or glass lines up with your tastes, the staff is knowledgeable. They’ll point you in the right direction. After having the vol-auvent, we’d trust this chef with any dessert on the menu, so save room. HOURS 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday, closed Monday and Tuesday. OTHER INFO Credit cards accepted, full bar.

salad with walnut-encrusted goat cheese and a semisweet and tart orange vinaigrette. The arugula was fresh, crispy, clean and peppery. The cheese was so buttery, sweet and delightful that even our cheese-hating spouse liked it. We love a salad that’s not an afterthought and this is one of the best around. The next course — champagne-fried lobster tail with a sparkling rosé beurre blanc sauce — makes us weak just writing about it. It was better than wonderful, delicately done, a four-star dish. And there’s good news! The owners told a very pleased crowd at the end of the night that it would soon become a regular on the menu. We always thought it a

tad lavish to fry lobster. Why mess with something that is going to be good just by being on a plate, boiled? We’re happy to say we were presumptuous. The batter was light and provided the faintest crust. This fried, beautiful meat sat atop a wonderfully indulgent, buttery sauce that was perfectly complementary. We can’t say enough about this dish. Really. Another standout was offered as an “intermezzo.” Our server placed a small spoon before us. In it sat a lovely ginger and jalapeno sorbet, dolloped into a bit of cucumber vodka. This was literally one bite of food, but not one we’re likely to forget soon. The punch of flavor was phenomenal, heightened by alcohol and smoothed by its own coolness. Next came pork medallions seasoned with a cocoa and coffee rub. The potatoes and asparagus were solid sides, but the pork was beautiful. The seasoning, which promised by its own description to be overpowering, was tastefully done. The meat itself was tender and perfectly cooked. We were looking forward to the dessert from the moment we booked the reservations: a strawberry vol-auvent, or puff pastry, stuffed with Grand Marnier custard cream. “Light” doesn’t quite cut it. It was airy, buttery, creamy, orange-tinged and all-around delicious. A delectable end to a meal served and prepared well. www.arktimes.com

MAY 19, 2016

AFTER DARK, CONT.

Social Media We can help you use it.

MATT MCLEOD FINE ART GALLERY, 108 W. 6th St.: “New, Fresh, Vibrant,” paintings, sculpture and jewelry by David Clemons, Jude Harzer, Wayne Salge and Jeremy Couch. 725-8508. PULASKI TECHNICAL COLLEGE, 3000 W. Scenic Drive: “Merging Form and Surface,” sculpture by Robyn Horn and Sandra Sell, Windgate Gallery, Center for the Humanities and Arts. 812-2324. THEA FOUNDATION, 401 Main St., NLR: “Succinct,” collages by Michael Church. 379-9512. WILLIAM F. LAMAN LIBRARY, 2801 Orange St., NLR: “Inked Arkansas,” exhibition of work by Arkansas printmakers Melissa Gill, Catherine Kim, DebiLynn Fendley, Kristin DeGeorge, Warren Criswell, Daniel Adams, David Warren, Nancy Dunaway, Neal Harrington and Tammy Harrington, through July 1, reception 6-8 p.m. May 27. 771-1995. RED DOOR GALLERY, 3715 JFK, NLR: Work by new artist Jeff McKay; also work by C.J. Ellis, TWIN, Amy Hill-Imler, Ellen Hobgood; new glass by James Hayes and ceramics by Kelly Edwards. 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat. 753-5227. STEPHANO AND GAINES FINE ART, 1916 N. Fillmore St. Work by Arkansas artists. 563-4218. BENTON DIANNE ROBERTS ART STUDIO AND GALLERY, 110 N. Market St.: Work by Dianne Roberts, classes. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Wed.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat. 860-7467.

Small businesses across Arkansas use social media to connect with customers and sell their products and services. Do you want to connect with your customers on social media? Let’s get started.

EL DORADO SOUTH ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, 110 E. 5th St.: “Common Ground,” paintings by Rebecca Thompson, through May 26. 870-862-5474. FORT SMITH REGIONAL ART MUSEUM, 1601 Rogers Ave.: “The Life and Art of Mary Petty,” works by New Yorker cartoonist, through June 30; “Beverly Conley: Photographic Journeys,” through June 26, closing reception June 24. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 479-784-2787. UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS AT FORT SMITH, 510 Grand Ave.: “Sammy Peters: Then & Now,” Windgate Art & Design Gallery, through May. 479-788-7530. HOT SPRINGS JUSTUS FINE ART, 827 A Central Ave.: “Natural Design,” paintings by Thomas Green and Tony Saladino, steel sculpture by Robert Fogel, through May. 501-321-2335.

NELMS GALLERY, 107 Church St.: Work by Don Kitz, Don Nelms, Pamla Klenczar, Scott Baldassari and others. 870-446-5477. MORRILTON RIALTO GALLERY, 213 E. Broadway St.: “Art for the Birds 2016,” through June 19, reception 3-6 p.m. June 11 with music by violinist Bill Thurman. 501-288-9259. PERRYVILLE SUDS GALLERY, Courthouse Square: Paintings by Dottie Morrissey, Alma Gipson, Al Garrett Jr., Phyllis Loftin, Alene Otts, Mauretta Frantz, Raylene Finkbeiner, Kathy Williams and Evelyn Garrett. Noon-6 p.m. Wed.-Fri, noon-4 p.m. Sat. 501-766-7584.

HISTORY, SCIENCE MUSEUM EXHIBITS ARKANSAS INLAND MARITIME MUSEUM, North Little Rock: The USS Razorback submarine tours. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Fri.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. 371-8320. ARKANSAS NATIONAL GUARD MUSEUM, Camp Robinson: Artifacts on military history, Camp Robinson and its predecessor, Camp Pike, also a gift shop. 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Mon.-Fri., audio tour available at no cost. 212-5215. ARKANSAS SPORTS HALL OF FAME MUSEUM, Verizon Arena, NLR: 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Mon.-Sat. 663-4328. CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL MUSEUM VISITOR CENTER, Bates and Park: Exhibits on the 1957 desegregation of Central and the civil rights movement. 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. daily. 374-1957. CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL CENTER: 2nd annual “Bridge to the Future” family festival, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. May 21; “American Champions: The Quest for Olympic Glory,” photographs, film and memorabilia from athletes, through Sept. 11; permanent exhibits on the Clinton administration. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun. $10 adults; $8 college students, seniors, retired military; $3 ages 6-17. 370-8000. ESSE PURSE MUSEUM & STORE, 1510 S. Main St.: “Changing Tides: 100 Years of Iconic Swimwear,” 20th century swimwear from the collection of the Fashion History Museum in Cambridge, Ontario, through Aug. 7; “What’s Inside: A Century of Women and Handbags,” permanent exhibit. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sun. $10, $8 for students, seniors and military. 916-9022.

JASPER

FULL AND PART TIME OPPORTUNITIES ARE NOW AVAILABLE AT LITTLE ROCK LOCATION. • Housekeeping • Kitchens • Front Office • Management • Transportation

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

laurenbucher@arktimes.com 38

MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

EMBASSY SUITES - LITTLE ROCK CAREER FAIR Thursday, June 2nd, 2016 2:00pm-5:00pm 11301 Financial Center Parkway Little Rock, AR 72211

MUST BE ABLE TO PASS A DRUG TEST AND BACKGROUND CHECK ALL EMPLOYEES ENJOY TRAVEL DISCOUNTS AND OPTIONAL PARTICIPATION IN THE MEAL PROGRAM. FULL-TIME ASSOCIATES ALSO RECEIVE: • Medical, STD, LTD, life, dental, and vision insurance • Paid Time Off • Bonus potential for management • And more! If you can’t attend, please apply online at Hcareers.com and search for Embassy Suites - Little Rock EEO/AA/M/F/V/D Employer

Stress Engineer sought by Dassault Falcon Jet Corp. in Little Rock, AR. Perform comprehensive stress analysis, write stress notes; act as point of contact for all tech’l stress activities of a specific aircraft model; ensure certification & acceptance of all structural substantiation reports for aircraft interiors of a specific aircraft model; create & review structural substantiation reports for EASA/FAA certification of a specific aircraft model; act as stress signature authority; perform FE analysis on metallic & composite structures using CATIA Elfini Solver; support outside vendors through tech’l discussions; support tech’l discussions w/ certification teams; coord w/ Dassault Aviation stress team; perform bid/workload estimation for Exotic Customer Specification Request of a specific aircraft model. Reqs Bach’s or higher deg in Engg, +2 yrs of stress engg exp. Exp must incl 1 yr w/ composite material mechanics & stress substantiation using Elfini, NASTRAN, ALGOR or Industry Accepted Finite Element S/ware. Must have skills in CAD & knowl of CATIA V5. Submit application at www. dassaultfalcon.com/ARjobs.

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EDUCATION POLICY DIRECTOR ARKANSAS ADVOCATES FOR CHILDREN AND FAMILIES, a nonprofit advocacy organization, is looking for a driven individual to lead the fight to improve quality early childhood education and K-12 education opportunities and outcomes for Arkansas’s low and middle income children. Must have track record of analysis in education policy and education finance. Master’s degree or the equivalent in education, public policy, or related field and 5 years of experience working on education issues. Send cover letter, resume, references, and writing sample to cneal@aradvocates.org. Competitive salary and benefits. AACF is an equal opportunity employer.

Closed for Renovation June-July-August 2016

We will be closed for renovation and will re-open in Mid-August. Please visit us then. We apologize for the inconvenience and look forward to serving you in our newly renovated location. – Management (501) 661-0600 www.arktimes.com

MAY 19, 2016

CRANK IT UP AT

Jamey Johnson

Saturday, June 11 | SOLD OUT

Joan Jett & The Blackhearts

Saturday, July 2 | Tickets starting at $49

CENTERSTAGE

Tickets available ChoctawCasinos.com, Ticketmaster.com or charge-by-phone at 800.745.3000.

LIVE AT GILLEY’S SHOWS START AT 10PM

THE TIPTONS FRIDAY, MAY 20

HEATH WRIGHT & THE HANGMEN

BO PHILLIPS BAND

WHISKEY RANSOM

JASON BOYD BAND

LARRY B. & THE CRADLE ROCKERS

ASPHALT COWBOYS

SARA LYONS BAND

JARED MOURAD

FRIDAY, JUNE 3

T. J. BROSCOFF SATURDAY, MAY 21

JILLIA JACKSON FRIDAY, MAY 27

BIG JOE WALKER

SATURDAY, JUNE 4 FRIDAY, JUNE 10

SATURDAY, JUNE 11

FRIDAY, JUNE 17

SATURDAY, JUNE 18

SATURDAY, MAY 28

800.590.LUCK (5825) | 3400 Choctaw Road, Pocola, OK 74902 Minutes from Fort Smith, AR | I-540, Exit 14 Management reserves all rights. Subject to change.

MAY 19, 2016

ARKANSAS TIMES

FRIDAY, JUNE 24

SATURDAY, JUNE 25