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lodelss · 4 years

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 | 9 minutes (2,261 words)

The image that struck me most was the empty piazza. That Italian square — I believe it was in Venice — with no one in it. Maybe a bird or two. It looked inviting but also wholly unnatural. A city square is made for people, lots of people, people from everywhere. If people aren’t there, does it cease to be a square? I wondered the same thing about the Louvre and its tens of thousands of objects with no one to look at them — is it still a museum, or is it just a warehouse? I wondered about all those Berlin concert halls with no one to hear their music, all those Indian cinemas with no one to watch their films, all those crumbling ruins everywhere, standing there with no tourists to behold them or to record that beholding for everyone else. At this particular point in history, does art exist if we aren’t sharing it?

By sharing I mean not only sharing a moment with the art itself, but also sharing the space with other people, and more literally, sharing all of that online — posting updates on Facebook, photos on Twitter, videos on TikTok, stories on Instagram. This kind of “sharing” is constriction rather than expansion, regressing back to the word’s etymological root of “cutting apart.” This contortion of a selfless act into a selfish one is symptomatic of a society that expects everyone to fend for themselves: Sharing online is not so much about enlightening others as it is about spotlighting yourself. It’s impossible to disconnect the images of those now-empty spots from the continuous splash of reports about the coronavirus pandemic gouging the global economy. In America, the economy is the culture is the people. Americans are not citizens; they are, as the president recently put it, “consumers.” And on the web, consuming means sharing that consumption with everyone else. That the images suddenly being shared are empty exposes the big con — that in reality, no one has really been sharing anything. That social distancing is nothing new.

* * *

Even before Hollywood started postponing all of its blockbusters and talk shows started filming without audiences and festivals started to dismantle and bands canceled their tours and sports seasons suspended indefinitely, the public was turning on cultural institutions run by a subset of morally dubious elites. In December 2018, protesters at the Whitney Museum of American Art burned sage (“smoke that chokes the powerful but smells sweet to us”) and forced the departure of the board’s vice chairman, Warren Kanders, the CEO of the company that manufactures tear gas that has reportedly been used at the border. Two months later, artist Nan Goldin, who had a three-year opioid addiction, led a “die-in” at the Guggenheim over the museum’s financial ties to the Sackler family, the Purdue Pharma founders who many hold responsible for the opioid crisis. In the U.K., the Tate Modern and Tate Britain also dropped the Sacklers, while climate activists pulled a Trojan Horse into the courtyard of the British Museum to protest the sponsorship of an exhibition by oil and gas company BP. As performance artist Andrea Fraser, known for her institutional critiques, wrote in 2012, “It is clear that the contemporary art world has been a direct beneficiary of the inequality of which the outsized rewards of Wall Street are only the most visible example.”

If that recent exhibition of impressionist paintings seemed oddly familiar, or that ballet you just saw appears to keep coming back around, or that one classical musician looks like he’s hired nonstop, it’s not your imagination. It’s a function of that exclusive control, of the same artists, the same works, the same ideas being circulated (“shared”?) by the same gatekeepers over and over and over again. “Far from becoming less elitist, ever-more-popular museums have become vehicles for the mass-marketing of elite tastes and practices,” wrote Fraser in Artforum in 2005. Which is why certain names you wouldn’t think would cross over — from contemporary artist Jeff Koons to art-house filmmaker Terrence Malick — are more widely known than others. According to The New York Times in 2018, only two of the top 10 all-white art museum chairs in the country are women. And almost half of the 500-plus people on the boards of the 10 most popular American museums have become rich off the finance industry, while many others owe their wealth to oil and gas; the small group that is responsible for exploiting the world is the same group that is responsible for its enlightenment. They determine which pieces of art are bought, how they are curated, and how they are disseminated — theirs are the tastes and practices we are sharing.

With this “increasingly monopolized market and increasing parochialism,” German artist Hito Steyerl explained last year, “a sense of international perspective gets lost, which is a wider sign of rampant isolationism.” And this doesn’t just apply to high arts, but “low” arts as well; movies, music, television, theater, books have all been corporatized to the extreme, with huge amounts of money going to a few while the majority lose out. This is how you get a never-ending Marvel Cinematic Universe, but Leslie Harris — the first African American woman to win a Dramatic Feature Competition special jury prize at Sundance for writing, directing, and producing her 1993 film Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. — still can’t get a second feature off the ground.

While public funding for the arts has plummeted since the ’80s, however, the web has increasingly encouraged public sharing of its consumption on social media. Online, we look more traveled, more cultured, more inclusive than ever before. And it’s difficult to argue that wider access to art, that our increasing proximity to foreign cultures, could be wrong. But if you look closer, you notice that all this connectivity is largely superficial — it is heavily prescribed and strongly overlaps. The latter-day bourgeoisie all travel to Portugal at the same time, all visit the same Marina Abramovic exhibit, all watch the same Agnes Varda films, attend the same Phoenix tour. They clamor less to immerse themselves than to record and reproduce everything they have experienced, their distraction expressed by the ever-growing collection of imagery memorializing all the different experiences they’ve had — the same kind of different as everyone else’s.

“An idea of progressive internationalism,” Steyerl told Ocula magazine, “is progressively abandoned or gets snowed under constant waves of affect and outrage manipulated by monopolist platforms, and solidarity is swapped for identity.” In other words, all of this supposed sharing is really a tech-sanctioned performance of capitalism to showcase one’s value in a toxic din of competing consumers. The more photogenic the better, which means the less nuance, the better; think the Museum of Ice Cream, which costs almost 40 bucks for access to photo-friendly adult playgrounds — “environments that foster IRL interaction and URL connections” — like a “Sprinkle Pool” of multi-colored biodegradable bits you can’t actually eat. And the more recognizable the look (see: the retro aesthetic of any teen Netflix show), the more heady words like “nostalgia” become a proxy for depth that isn’t actually there. As we speed online through Steyerl’s distracted fragmentary so-called “junktime,” we quickly compound what she dubs “circulationism,” propagating images with the most power, giving them even more power. Standing next to the Mona Lisa, for instance, offers greater token currency among a wider set than standing next to anything by Kara Walker, who speaks to a more immersed but smaller audience. Either way, online, currency is king.

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Culture has, above all, become a mark of personal wealth. When Americans share their experiences on social media, they are sharing their cultural capital with a neoliberal society that defines them by it. This is a result of the culture war Fraser recognized several years ago, which “has effectively identified class privilege and hierarchy with cultural and educational rather than economic capital.” But, again, economics ultimately rules. While the poor may be allowed to briefly occupy the space of cultural capital, it is the rich who own it, who offer it up for limited consumption.

Yet the desperation to share, to express one’s value in a world that is so intent on devaluing us all, is deeply human. Which is why you get people Photoshopping themselves onto famous backdrops, which, from a cultural capital perspective, is no different from being there — on social media a photograph is a photograph, and the real Sistine Chapel looks the same as the Etsy wallpaper reproduction. People have always consumed art partly for the cultural capital rather than just the personal enrichment, but now the goal is to broadcast the enrichment itself to the public: sharing one’s consumption of the aura has priority over one’s actual consumption of the aura. Though a hierarchy persists even here. The authentic art consumer, the one who actually experiences the work in person, looks down upon the forger. As Walter Benjamin wrote, the aura of a piece of art is tied to its presence, which can’t be replicated. Which is to say the essence of art can only be experienced through the art itself — a picture can’t recreate it, but it does make its shared image more valuable.

It’s apt that right now, in the midst of a pandemic, the popularity of a cultural site can kill and that virtual tours are being encouraged over actual ones. What better way to illustrate that our increasingly insular art world has not in fact connected us at all, but has done the opposite? As Steyerl noted in e-flux magazine in 2015, the Louvre, that model of national culture, was a “feudal collection of spoils” before revolutionaries turned it into a public museum, “the cultural flagship of a colonial empire that tried to authoritatively seed that culture elsewhere, before more recently going into the business of trying to create franchises in feudal states, dictatorships, and combinations thereof.” Those with the means flock to symbols of elitism like this, not to widen their perspective in solidarity with the world, not to connect with a community of strangers, but to bolster their own value locally by sharing the encounter online. This is not globalism; this is the neoliberal stand-in for it.

All of that foot traffic, all of that online diffusion, is an expression of how we have commodified the individual consumption of art to the point that it looks like we are sharing it with others. We aren’t. We are instead dutifully promoting ourselves as valuable consumers in the capitalist community we are complicit in perpetuating. “It’s not a question of inside or outside, or the number and scale of various organized sites for the production, presentation, and distribution of art,” wrote Fraser in Artforum. “It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution.”

* * *

One of the last movies I saw in the cinema before they started closing down was The Invisible Man. It was a perfect example of how a public screening can tell you what streaming cannot — in real time, you can gauge by the reactions around you whether or not it will be a hit. As with certain art installations, you are experiencing not only the art, but also simultaneously others’ experience with it. In that theater, we screamed and laughed and sat agog together. It was a spark of community that extinguished the moment the lights lifted. A few weeks later, these same strangers who shared that moment of emotion together, headed to supermarkets to empty out toilet roll aisles, buy up all the disinfectant, and clear out the fresh meat despite a collective need for it. These same strangers who in concert cheered on an oppressed heroine, went on to unashamedly side-eye the Asians in their community. Individuals in North American society can occasionally partake in a cultural experience with their neighbors, but in the end it’s to exhibit their own counterfeit edification. It’s telling that the big tech these individuals ultimately share their consumption on — Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Tumblr, Instagram — rarely funds the arts.

Which brings us back to those empty images from the start of this essay. Proliferating photographs of abandoned culture, of objects ignored, confront the hollowness of online sharing. Social media implies connection, but the context of its shares is as important as the context of art’s production and neither can be divorced from the hierarchies in which they reside. No wonder our meagre individual expressions of value dictated by capitalist enterprise fit perfectly within a capitalist enterprise that profits off our inability to ever sate ourselves. The only way to really share — with art, with each other — is to remove sharing from this construct. The only way to really connect — to support a collective of artists, to support a collective of human beings — is to distance ourselves from the misguided values we have internalized.

“At its most utopian, the digital revolution opens up a new dematerialized, deauthored, and unmarketable reality of collective culture,” writes Claire Bishop in Artforum. Under a worldwide pandemic, we see a move toward this — individuals freely leaking their cultural subscriptions, artists offering performances for nothing, even institutions waiving fees for access to their virtual collections. While the vulnerability spreading across America right now is ordinarily framed as weakness in the landscape of capitalist bravado, it is central to real sharing and offers a rare chance to dismantle the virulent elitism that has landed us here. It’s unfortunate that it takes a dystopia, a global interruption of the systems in place, to see what a utopia can be — one in which sharing is about the creation and cultivation of community, a reality that only exists outside the one we have built.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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itsworn · 6 years

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Backstage Past Part 2: 1955

Pivotal.

A year that opened brightly with unprecedented prosperity, new-car horsepower, and interest in auto racing closed darkly in the wake of James Dean’s fatal highway crash and a rash of on-track tragedies. Newfound concern about vehicle safety would shape the American automotive industry in general, and motorsports in particular, in ways unimaginable before two-time-defending-champ Bill Vukovich died while leading the Indy 500 and a Grand Prix car mowed down more than 80 fans two weeks later in France. Future installments of this series will recall scrutiny by politicians and law enforcement, an industry-wide racing ban, secret factory skunkworks, and other effects felt well into the 1960s.

Magazines published by Trend Inc. had been documenting high performance on black-and-white film since Robert “Pete” Petersen and Bob Lindsay hatched HOT ROD in January 1948, followed soon by Motor Trend. Not until this year, though, did Pete—by now a sole owner—ask photographic director Bob D’Olivo to start retaining and organizing employees’ negatives after developing. The company’s early 1955 acquisitions of competitors Motor Life and Hop Up and absorption of their respective photographers instantly spiked the volume of incoming film. The simple logging-and-filing system D’Olivo implemented on March 27, 1955, grew into the vast photo archive that uniquely enables HOT ROD Deluxe to serve up so many milestone images. Oftentimes, we’re afforded the additional luxury of choosing an outtake to the published shot that some editor with the same choice—but far less time—picked, instead, in the heat of the moment and a deadline.

How telling that the first batch of film ever entered into the photo lab’s handwritten log book, director D’Olivo’s work at an amateur sports-car race, included four action frames of a Porsche Speedster that rated no picture or mention in Motor Trend’s event coverage. It would be another half-century before company archivist Thomas Voehringer came along to wonder, investigate, then confirm that the young driver smacking a hay bale in his competition debut was a little-known actor awaiting release of his first feature films, East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. Countless such surprises are sprinkled amongst approximately 3.5 million black-and-white needles in Robert E. Petersen’s photographic haystack. Unknown numbers of worthies will be discovered or rediscovered as our archive research progresses through the 1950s and into the ’60s. Whether by lucky chance or dogged digging, to unearth some previously unpublished image of lasting significance is to strike gold. We’ll be sharing that ore as we shovel it up, one year per episode.

Backstage Past follows the pictorial-heavy format of HRD’s preceding historical series (Golden Age of Drag Racing, 2014-’15; Power Struggles, 2015-’17), with some added value: personal snapshots taken by and of Petersen staffers roaming America with cameras, free film, and virtually unlimited access. Adult beverages might’ve been involved, too. Readers of a certain, ahem, maturity who followed their journeys once before will surely enjoy the shenanigans. You kids will want an app for traveling back in time. Don’t leave home without the magic Trend Inc. business card that seemingly opened every gate and door.

(Photo: Wally Parks)

Everything went Chevrolet’s way this year. The all-new, V8-equipped, hot-selling Chevy was selected to pace the Indianapolis 500, and the superstar nicknamed “Miss Chevrolet” was Indy’s most famous race queen ever. If your house had a TV set or even a radio in the 1950s, there was no escaping Dinah Shore singing, “See the USA/In your Chevrolet ….” Starting in 1951, she sang the so-called “Chevy Jingle” to a loyal audience of millions at both the beginning and end of her Emmy-winning NBC variety show, the first network show hosted by a female. Backed here by the Purdue University Band, she belted out “Back Home in Indiana” before the race, inviting the crowd to sing along to a second chorus, and gamely stuck around to kiss Bob Sweikert in the winner’s circle. (Photo: Ray Brock)

Yup, that thing’s got a Hemi in it: Tony Capanna’s Wilcap Co. swapped a little Red Ram Dodge into the Dean Van Lines Special (left) that finished second in the previous Indy 500 with Jimmy Bryan and an Offy aboard. Bryan and Bob Christie alternately practiced at qualifying speeds before blowing engines in the Hemi car that Motor Trend proclaimed “unmistakably the people’s choice.” The ambitious effort ended up against the wall on the warm-up lap for Christie’s lone qualifying attempt. When the fuel motor exploded, the rear wheels locked up and spun him into the wall. Bryan had slightly better luck in Al Dean’s conventional Kuzma-Offy (right), finishing 24th after dropping out with fuel-system problems. HRM photographer Eric Rickman’s regular “circuit” of L.A. shops gave him the familiarity that enabled such a candid shot of champ-car legends like (from left) engine builder Capanna; Hall of Fame chief mechanic Clint Brawner; sponsor Al Dean, who owned Dean Van Lines; and car builder Eddie Kuzma. Rick’s future road roommate, Tex Smith, wrote in his book that Rick enjoyed back-door access wherever he roamed, working quickly without wasting film. (See Inside Hot Rodding: The Tex Smith Autobiography; June ’55 HRM; Aug. ’55 Motor Trend, HRM, & Motor Life.)

Three rolls that Rickman logged into Petersen’s in-house lab on May 9, 1955, as “Thrifty Drug NHRA Show” mystified archive divers for decades. In our July 2010 issue, founding HRD editor David Freiburger published six pages of parking-lot pictures, including one showing NHRA’s third employee and Drag Safari organizer, Chic Cannon, with an L.A. sheriff’s deputy. Left unexplained were who organized the event, and why, and how a gathering of so many famous hot rods, race cars, sport specials, and especially customs apparently never made HRM or its sister magazines. In 2013, Cannon’s autobiography answered the first two questions: “Since I had some experience organizing car clubs, Wally gave me the position of [NHRA] National Club Advisor. My cousin, Art Crawford, was in marketing … and had Thrifty Drug Stores as a client of his. They were developing new shopping centers all over Southern California, and Art asked me to help promote the grand openings…. So in 1954 and ’55, I organized about a dozen car shows.” As for why at least two were thoroughly photographed on Petersen film but never made print, Chic’s insight leads us to suspect that Rick’s assignment came from NHRA president Wally Parks—not his HRM boss and editor, also named Wally Parks. Possibly the photo lab supplied sets of prints, only, to NHRA and/or Chic’s cousin for promotional purposes, while the negatives were filed, as usual, with the publishing company. Historian Greg Sharp recognized the Barris-built ’51 Mercs of Bob Hirohata and Dave Bugarin alongside Bob Dofflow’s ’50 Ford, all magazine-cover cars. Adds Sharp: “Dave Bugarin was from San Pedro, where I grew up. In the early 1960s, it sat forlornly in primer at a Signal gas station on Western Avenue. I wanted it in the worst way and could have bought it for $300. My dad simply said, ‘You’re not buying that car because I don’t want people to think that hoodlums live here!'” (See Chick Cannon’s Gone Racin’: From Horseback to Horsepower.)

Bill Vukovich, Indy’s two-time-defending champion (1953-’54), was a runaway favorite to three-peat right up to his fatal accident. He held the lead in 50 of the race’s first 56 laps and was cruising at a record average speed of 136-plus, 17 seconds ahead of his closest competitor, before the crash. Vuky led 486 of his last 800 laps at the Brickyard and an incredible 71.7 percent from 1952 to 1955. During time trials, tech editor Ray Brock took advantage of HRM’s pit-row access to capture a relaxed team of Jim Travers (leaning on windscreen), Jim Naim (in T-shirt), and Frank Coon (obscured behind them). Chief mechanics Travers and Coon, previously lakes racers with the Low Flyers of Santa Monica, partnered as the “TRA” and “CO” in TRACO Racing Engines. We can’t identify the onlookers on either end.

Attempting to avoid a multicar wreck on the backstretch, Vukovich clipped rookie Johnny Boyd, catapulted over the wooden rail, and plowed into a parked truck, Jeep, and safety-patrol car. From all reports, he likely died before the flames erupted—one of six open-wheel AAA driver fatalities this year alone. HRM editor Wally Parks arrived with his camera right after the firemen. The American Automobile Association soon ended its long association with auto racing, creating a vacuum hastily filled by USAC the following year. (See Aug. ’55 Motor Trend, HRM, & Motor Life.)

Los Angeles engine-builder Tony Capanna brought two baby Hemis to Indy, a nitro version for qualifying and a more-durable methanol combination for race day. Going by the severe destruction, we’d guess this to be the fuel motor that exploded on the warm-up lap leading to Bob Christie’s aborted qualifying attempt. Since Hemis were restricted to the same 270 ci as the powerful, race-bred Offys, Capanna rightly figured that the only replacement for displacement was nitromethane, and lots of it. Whereas an Offy team might add 10-to-15 percent to enhance qualifying chances or position, then run the race on straight methanol, Capanna calculated that his stock-block Dodge wanted 85-percent “pop” to produce comparable power. His autopsy determined that oil starvation, not “liquid horsepower,” was this engine’s downfall. (See June ’55 MT; July ’55 HRM; Aug. ’55 Motor Trend, HRM & Motor Life.)

It’s been said that Robert E. Petersen eventually launched magazines about all of his hobbies. Two favorites were firearms and fishing, as illustrated by a sequence that Bob D’Olivo captured from a second boat. Lacking any back issues of Water World, we can’t say whether our gunslinging, shark-spearing leader subsequently showed up in print.

Eric Rickman tripped his shutter just as everyone turned to check out the chopped coupe rumbling into the classic scene. The Drag Safari’s Deer Park, Washington, NHRA regional meet brought Petersen’s imbedded photographer into Spokane and the original Thrifty Auto Supply. Magnifying the background of this scan revealed two bystanders to be Safari leader Bud Coons (right) and announcer Bud Evans.

Not many hot rodders have influenced the hobby as much as the late Norm Grabowski, whose revolutionary roadster pickup costarred in the hit TV series 77 Sunset Strip and, together with Tommy Ivo’s much-publicized imitation, ignited the T-bucket craze. This B&W outtake from HRM’s Oct. ’55 cover story shows the reversed ’40 Ford spring hangers that pushed the ’37 Ford axle forward to clear the radiator. Norm also stretched the frame 5 inches in front to accommodate an Olds V8 boosted by a GMC supercharger, a rare sight on daily drivers of the era.

Besides being a brilliant engineer and technical writer, the late Racer Brown possessed a photographer’s eye. The relatively few rolls cranked through his futuristic 35mm Leica after D’Olivo started the archive contain clever compositions like this illusion of two guys working inside the engine compartment vacated by a severely set-back engine. Racer exposed three rolls on this July day at Paradise Mesa Drag Strip, near San Diego, but we’ve seen no magazine coverage.

So, your kids and grandkids think that selfies were invented after the phone camera, huh? Rather than leave his last couple of frames blank, freelance contributor Ray Brock finished off a roll labeled “Installing Duals on a Chevrolet” with two mug shots sure to entertain the lab technicians back home. Photographers were known to prank one another by discreetly grabbing the other guy’s camera and capturing entertaining, if not downright embarrassing, subjects that only came to light during developing. Sometimes, mischievous lab workers secretly make prints that circulated through Trend Inc.’s internal mail system before the camera’s owner ever saw an image attributed to him. (The late Brock became HRM’s invaluable Detroit connection, officially joined the staff in late 1956 as research editor, and ultimately rose to the top of the masthead as publisher, twice.)

One of the rolls that Rick submitted from the Drag Safari’s stop in Elizabeth City, N.J., included the earliest image we’ve seen of the new or near-new ’55 Corvette that would become as familiar to HRM readers as any rod, custom, or race car. Sixty-three years later fellow travelers Bob D’Olivo and Chic Cannon both drew blanks about the purchase circumstances. So did Rick’s son, then living in Texas with his mother and sister. “Unfortunately, he never related the story of how or where he found it to me,” e-mailed Michael Rickman. “He looks so happy.”

Would you believe a Cadillac with two billet Engle cams rotating inside aluminum castings bolted onto stock heads? When Ray Brock visited Tom Cobbs in July, the homemade combination was said to be fresh from spinning 6,000-plus rpm on Hilborn’s dyno. The crafty lakes racer proclaimed this to be the primary engine for his (ex-Pierson brothers’) fuel coupe at the upcoming Bonneville Nationals, backed up by a couple of proven Merc flatheads. However, we’ve found no published evidence that the OHC conversion ran there, or anywhere. (See Sept. ’55 HRM)

Either the OHC Caddy was merely a sophisticated diversion (unlikely) or Stu Hilborn changed Cobbs’ mind just before Bonneville by offering the Chevy V8 that Hilborn had been secretly developing for land-speed racing since receiving one of the earliest assemblies in 1954. Since touted as the first small-block modified specifically for record setting, the blown 265’s debut was spoiled by insufficient spark from three different magnetos. Racer Brown reported that high cylinder pressures produced by the 15-psi huffer overwhelmed the ignition above 4,500 rpm. Cobbs would hang onto the whole, historical setup for the rest of his life. His family sold the complete engine to collector Ralph Whitworth, who displayed it for several years in the office of his stillborn museum in Winnemucca, Nevada. Its whereabouts since Whitworth’s 2016 death are unknown. (See Nov. ’55 HRM; Dec. ’55 CC.)

Carl Kiekhaefer’s Hemi-powered heavyweights dominated both major stock-car circuits this year. While teammate Frank Mundy (not shown) was winning the AAA crown, NASCAR champ Tim Flock (right) was racking up a record 18 Grand National wins and 15 placings in 45 events, leading fully 40 percent of his laps. He and big-brother Truman Fontello Flock (left) are pictured in Darlington’s pits prior to the Southern 500 (Nov. ’55 MT). “Fonty” had taken the Grand National title in 1947, the final season of Bill France’s National Championship Stock Car Circuit. Their older brother, Bob, had a brief-but-spectacular career (36 starts, four wins, 11 top fives, 18 top 10s) that was ended by a broken back. All three siblings are NASCAR Hall of Famers. A sister, Ethel, also made history by running more than 100 Modified events, including two NASCAR shows. In a July 1949 race on Daytona’s beach course featuring all four siblings, she finished 11th in a ’49 Cadillac, ahead of both Bob and Fonty (Tim was second). All told, the family started 379 NASCAR races and earned 230 top-10 finishes.

Whoever aimed Rickman’s camera at Petersen’s crew certainly caught Bob D’Olivo (left) and Wally Parks (center) by surprise, while Rick himself (second from the left) looks bemused. Car Craft editor and future PPC executive Dick Day is on the far right. Wally evidently gathered the all-star editorial team to present HRM’s huge Sportsmanship Award to Don Schleicher for doing an unknown good deed during the Kansas portion of NHRA’s rain-interrupted National Drags.

The little kid dressed up like an airman and pretending to accept the NHRA Nationals Top Eliminator trophy is none other than LeRoi “Tex” Smith, USAF fighter pilot. Subsequent civilian careers with HRM and NHRA started with flying into bases near Drag Safari meets and assisting track setup and tech inspection. An appreciative Safari team affectionately dubbed the volunteer “Boy Lieutenant” and “Lieutenant Fuzz.” After separating from the service, he was recruited for HRM by editor Parks in 1957. He remained at the forefront of hot rodding and automotive publishing right up to his death in 2015, the same year that his long-awaited life story appeared (Inside Hot Rodding: The Tex Smith Autobiography).

Drag racing’s first national showdown and NHRA’s first four-day event was less the overnight success that the Trend Inc. monthlies would have readers believe than an “overnightmare” in Kansas. Drag News reported that the bumpy tarmac of Great Bend Municipal Airport caused so many drivetrain failures during the September 29-30 time trials that NHRA officials spent Friday night supervising a partial repaving. Overnight Saturday and throughout Sunday, the meet was drowned by what HRM called the area’s “worst rainstorm in 30 years.” Faced with an extended forecast for more of the same, and with only the Dragster class winner and overall Top Eliminator yet to be determined amongst all-Western cars, Wally Parks made the controversial call to postpone the meet’s conclusion to November 19-20—in Arizona, 1,000 miles away (thus the two-part event coverage in the Dec. ’55 and Feb. ’56 HRM).

If the facade seems familiar, yet you never saw this massive Los Angeles building, close copies of its tailfin-inspired towers greet visitors to Disney parks in both Florida and California. Inside the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, this Olds-powered custom won the Street Roadster class at Bob Petersen’s 1955 Motorama. Greg Sharp advised that owner-builder Hanky Rootlieb became a pioneer manufacturer of reproduction sheetmetal for early Fords. The company still operates in California. Not so the Pan-Pacific, whose 100,000 square feet made it the world’s largest inhabited wooden structure. The building was L.A.’s main venue for indoor events from 1935 until 1972, when it was displaced by a bigger convention center and abandoned by all but squatters. For the next 17 years, the property’s fate was debated by politicians, developers, and preservationists. Nothing got resolved until May 1989, when a fire blamed on a transient consumed the 54-year-old building. The site ultimately became Pan-Pacific Park, instantly identifiable by a scaled-down tailfin tower atop its recreation center. (See Aug. ’56 HRM.)

If this outtake seems familiar, it’s because the frame is similar to others on possibly the most-reproduced, most-ripped-off roll of images in an archive bursting with approximately 8.5 million individual negatives and transparencies. Adding insult to personal injury, Bob D’Olivo’s portraits of Kenneth Howard, aka Von Dutch—with and without a flute—in this goofy setting are too often either uncredited or miscredited to D’Olivo’s internal, eternal arch-rival, Eric Rickman.

Rickman got Von Dutch to strike a variety of poses in front of L.A.’s Competition Body Shop, wherein the cantankerous artist had set up shop. Humorous images from Rick and his boss, photographic director Bob D’Olivo, were combined in the Feb. ’56 CC, a package that began with editor Dick Day’s humorous column about assigning the accompanying interview to unsuspecting writer Jack Baldwin, who’d never heard of Von Dutch—and never got a straight answer to his prepared questions.

The late Racer Brown never left home without his Cross ballpoint pen and a slide rule, recalled D’Olivo, his colleague, close pal, and soon-to-be racing partner in Corvette’s first national-championship season (see July ’16 HRM). Few folks outside of the company suspected that HRM’s longtime tech editor belonged to an extremely wealthy family and never needed to work. After leaving the publishing business, he found more success as a racing camgrinder.

New-car road tests don’t always end happily. Incriminating evidence occasionally turns up in the archive (though never in back issues). HRM’s Brock raced fast American iron on the sand in Florida, on the salt flats, and on dragstrips without crashing, but he met his match in this 11.7ci (191cc), 9.9hp Messerschmitt. The German wartime aircraft manufacturer’s tricky, airplane-style steering bar swiveled side to side to turn the 4.00-8 front tires. These tandem-passenger three-wheelers weighed just 507 pounds and became fairly common in Competition Coupe/Sedan classes, whose liberal rules allowed any production body, imports included.

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my-life-in-a-year-2018-edit-blog · 6 years

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January 14th

Hello, friends!

So, I am the person who wrote @my-life-in-a-year-2016. I took some time off and a lot has changed. I no longer go to Purdue University, I go to Ball State University. I met someone wonderful and now live with him, his name is Nick. Okay, there’s a lot... Let me fill you in.

So, I left Purdue last semester after 3 semesters because of my mental health(mainly). I got very low and attempted suicide approximately two distinct times and came very close to self harm again. I decided I needed a major change and to be in a better place for me. Ball State has a better program for my major and everything has been so much better so far. I have to thank Nick because he has really been there this whole time and it’s so important to me.

However, in my last semester at Purdue, I did Box Band, Marching band (who I got to travel to California with), and continued with KKPsi and much more. There’s a lot that I do miss about Purdue, specifically band and some people, but this place is so much better for me.

I’ve completed my first week here at Ball State and it has been great. I love my professors, I have a job interview on Tuesday, and I got an internship with an advertising agency. I joined the American Advertising Federation and I’m really excited to work with them this semester.

I’m also looking to maybe joining another club or activity, but I don’t want to overwhelm myself this semester which I’m always prone to doing. My mental health feels so much better here overall, even though I slip up sometimes. For instance, I had flash backs and a break down last night, but I’m better now. I’m really thankful that Nick is here and he helps a lot. I honestly just don’t know how to deal with emotions.

Speaking of Nick, this is our 6 month anniversary today. Which is pretty lit, but I fully believe that I’m going to marry this person. My gut just knows that this is the person for me. I’ve never felt this way about anyone ever before, I thought I knew love but I was so wrong. I’ve never felt so deeply for another person.

In regards to Cole and Michael(if you followed the previous story), Michael and I still kinda keep in touch. We have a really long snap streak, I believe he’s seeing someone else which makes me really happy for him. He sat me down this summer (right before Nick and I started dating) and told me he was still in love with me; so I’m very happy he has moved on because I told him there were no feelings there...and that it’s been that way for a long time.

As for Cole...he and I almost got back together this summer before I met Nick. I had to tell him that I met someone else and it was just a really painful experience. It was like breaking up again, for a second time, and it was just a wave of nothing but pain. I feel awful for hurting him because I still do love him as a person, I always will. However, I don’t love him romantically anymore, as you can already tell. I just...feel awful for hurting someone that I care about. I still have a lot of problems because of our relationship, mainly the way it ended, but I don’t regret it at all. It’s still very important to me, it’s just that the pain sticks.

I occasionally hear from Cole and I do check on him sometimes too. As I said, I still care for him as a person and I still want him to be alright. I know when we broke up that he struggled emotionally, which makes sense. However, I was still in his life. We talked everyday still and...it’s not like that anymore. It’s not my responsibility to take care of him anymore and honestly, being with Nick, I was miserable in our relationship. Nick has shown me everything I had been giving up/missing out on. This is not to bash Cole, obviously, but we were just such vastly different people that our parting really was for the best. I wish him the best and I hope that he does well and finds someone who completes him.

Well. That’s a loooot of information. It feels as if I’ve barely told you anything, so I wonder how this year will go. Life is very interesting when a person never stops, so stay tuned 2018.

Be Kind,

Sarah

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oselatra · 7 years

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Visionary Arkansans 2017

A celebration of Arkansans with ideas and achievements of transformative power.

It's time again for our annual Visionaries issue, a celebration of Arkansans with ideas of transformative power. This year's class is filled with people who are devoted to making Arkansas better. They’re working to understand the social media forces that may have helped tilt the presidential election for Donald Trump (Nitin Agarwal), advocating on behalf of the most vulnerable homeless population (Penelope Poppers) and investing in projects that make Northwest Arkansas a healthier and cooler place to live (Tom and Steuart Walton). They’ve ensured the preservation of the heritage of the Arkansas Delta (Ruth Hawkins), been at the vanguard of an electronic music subgenre (Yuni Wa) and made solar work for Arkansas municipalities and companies (Bill Halter). Craighead County Judges David Boling and Tommy Fowler took on a predatory private probation company that was putting citizens of their community in a cycle of debt. Joshua Asante is simultaneously the leader of two of Little Rock’s best bands, a sensitive portrait photographer and a budding filmmaker. All 20 are people with bold visions.

Jason Macom Paralympic hopeful

The story of Jason Macom's career as an internationally ranked cyclist began at the moment a lot of other athletes' careers would have ended: with the amputation of his leg below the knee. A BMX bicycle racer since he was young, Macom took a tumble while playing bike polo in the summer of 2009 and shattered a bone in his right ankle. Over the next six years, he would endure several surgeries to try and correct the issue, leaving him in near constant pain. In the summer of 2015, however, a bone infection led to a long-delayed decision to amputate. Macom took what could have been seen as a devastating blow as an opportunity.

"I remember just trying to create a file in my head of all the things I could be able to do once we swapped over and I was able to get a prosthetic and start using that," Macom said. "What could I do? Bike racing was back on the table as something I could do. I started looking into that more and more." During the three-month recovery time following the amputation, Macom dove headlong into researching all he could about para-cycling: prosthetics, record times and the top-ranked disabled cyclists in the world.

"I sort of made it a mission to figure it out: looking at all the world record times, learning who the competition guys are, really getting into it from all those different angles. As soon as I got a prosthetic, I went straight home and put on cycling shoes and jumped on my bike."

Macom soon realized that the walking prosthetic with which he had been fitted wasn't right for cycling. After reviewing video of his "good" leg as he worked the pedals of a bike on a stand, Macom got to work developing a series of ever-more-sophisticated racing prosthetics, eventually working with friends in the local cycling community and a Little Rock machine shop to get the parts and pieces right on both the leg and his specially modified bike. These days, his racing leg looks a lot like a carbon fiber fan blade. "It's very aero," he said.

When he spoke to the Arkansas Times in October, Macom had just received his 2018 contract to join the Team USA Paralympic cycling team, and was practicing for December's Para-Cycling National Championship in Colorado Springs, Colo. Though he has a contract with Team USA, he doesn't have a spot on the Team USA roster yet.

"I have to race for that spot," he said. "Everything is earned on Team USA. It's all based on previous results. It's all, 'If you're fit at the time and the weeks leading up to the big race, you have to prove it and earn your spot on the roster.' That's the goal at the moment: to earn a spot on the roster to go to the world championships." The selection race will be in held in February, with the World Championships in Rio next March. If he makes the Team USA roster, he can compete in what are known as World Cup events in countries around the world, including Japan, New Zealand and the U.K. The results of those races will determine which Team USA members will represent the United States in the 2018 Paralympic Games, which will be held in Tokyo in 2020.

"A lot of racing has to be done between now and then," he said.

—David Koon

Tina and Trina Fletcher One plus one, working for better schools in the Delta.

Twins Tina and Trina Fletcher were raised in Morrilton by their single mother. "We did not have the easiest childhood," Trina said. "We were poor, working-class, living check to check. Most days when we came home from school, there was no one there; mom was working until 7 p.m."

That history helps Tina and Trina relate to many of the students they meet in their work in the Delta with Forward Arkansas, an education initiative created by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and the state Department of Education. They tell the students they meet, you can be like us. You can be first-generation college students. You can go on and get graduate degrees.

The Fletcher twins, 31, did: Tina holds a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Arkansas and a master's degree in secondary teacher education from Harvard University. Trina holds a bachelor's degree in applied engineering from UA Pine Bluff, a master's degree in operations management from the UA, a second master's from George Washington University and a doctorate in engineering education from Purdue University. Tina interned with programs in the office of first lady Michelle Obama. Trina interned with Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar and Kellogg's. One could go on; their accolades are many.

Here's what happened to bring them to work together: About 10 years ago, Tina said, Morrilton High School invited them to speak to students about their success. "After that experience, we said, 'We have really interesting stories. We think we could be valuable, to kids like us, first-generation college students, [from homes] with single parents,' " Tina said.

The twins joined up to become inspirational speakers, going to high schools, nonprofits, churches, telling kids to "take advantage of opportunities" offered by education. They are "blunt and honest," Trina said, about their own struggles. They also talk about beloved teacher mentors who made the difference in their lives.

Then, last January, Forward called, asking Tina and Trina, now incorporated as Fletcher Solutions, to work with Crossett and Lee County as they talk about what they want their school systems to look like. Their job is to help bring people together to talk about what they want from their schools.

"A lot of it is just connecting the dots," getting the community together. "There are resources right in the towns, like access to grant money," Trina said.

For example, Trina said, on her visit to Crossett last week, a meeting brought together folks who may not have been in the same room before: parents, the mayor, the president of the bank, a representative from the community college, all asking, "How do we improve our partnership?"

"It's fascinating, the work that these communities are doing," Tina said.

Trina and Tina hope to improve students' motivation to get an education, to help "plant a seed." To that end, they connected students from Lee County with the UA's Skilled Trades Camp. The students learned about careers in welding and HVAC, for example; they got to drive 18-wheelers. They also went to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Trina's hope was that they would then share their experiences with friends back home: There is a big world out there.

Forward "is not the magic dust," Trina said. But she and Tina are helping people in the communities write down what they want to achieve, how they can achieve it and how they can sustain the achievement.

Talk about buy-in: The Fletchers provided to school administrators in Crossett and Marianna surveys including 35 questions about what goals for education should be. The surveys, posted on the Crossett school website and distributed on paper in Marianna — with students inputting the results into a computer — elicited 400 responses from Lee County and 375 from Crossett. It's not known how many downloaded the surveys or were provided the surveys, but the number appeared substantial to the Fletchers.

"Even though Forward is education-focused, it's really an initiative in building community," Tina said. Noting that Lee County schools have lost 1,000 students in the past 10 years, Tina said she's discovered a passion for rural education, and is considering pursuing a doctorate in education, studying the impact of consolidation on small communities — an impact that can kill small towns.

Trina's passion is to get students — girls and students of color especially — interested in STEM studies. And so a future chapter in the twins' lives: "The 12th Street Collab," a co-working space for people of all ages to grow their businesses. "That's a wild animal of its own," Trina said. The dream has foundations: The twins have bought property on 12th Street in Little Rock zoned commercial.

Stay tuned.

— Leslie Newell Peacock

Bill Halter From political to solar power.

When Clarksville Light and Water Co. decided to think about powering the city-owned utility with solar energy, it first looked to Missouri municipal systems. It next investigated the Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp.'s solar power purchasing agreements.

Then, in early 2016, CLW General Manager John Lester said, the utility started talking to Scenic Hill Solar's CEO Bill Halter. Halter, the former lieutenant governor of Arkansas (2007-11) whose political career included challenges to former U.S. Rep. Blanche Lincoln and his position as COO of the Social Security Administration, incorporated Scenic Hill Solar in 2015.

"Bill was more flexible, which accommodated our needs better," Lester said. Scenic Hill's solar panel technology was another attraction: Like the compass plant, a prairie sunflower, Scenic Hill's solar panels follow the sun as it moves across the sky, rather than staying in one position. How the panels move is determined by weather stations that compute the positions in which the panels can best absorb the sunlight.

Halter's firm was based in Arkansas, as well. "We do business locally, if not with the state, whenever we can," Lester said. And because Halter is well known in several circles, technological as well as political, some 300 nationwide periodicals wrote about Clarksville's contract with Scenic Hill, Lester said, giving the town a great "bang for our buck" in public relations.

The solar plant, being built on 42 acres owned by the city, will when complete in the middle of next year provide 5 megawatts of alternating current, enough to power 25 percent of Clarksville's households, Lester said.

The biggest splash Halter's company, which does commercial work only, has made was in September 2016, when international cosmetics company L'Oreal announced it was partnering with Scenic Hill to build solar power plants at the Maybelline plant in North Little Rock and another L'Oreal plant in Kentucky. The Kentucky plant is the largest commercial solar array in that state. Maybelline's is the third largest commercial project in Arkansas. The North Little Rock project, which took only 49 days to construct, covers 8 acres and provides 10 percent of the overall energy needs.

The projects are like "bookends," Halter said. Scenic Hill designed and built the solar plant for L'Oreal, which the company then bought. Scenic Hill owns the plant in Clarksville, which is buying power from Scenic Hill at a fixed rate of 5.5 cents per kilowatt-hour for 30 years. It can lower that price by purchasing the plant from Scenic Hill in seven years, when Scenic Hill's tax credits expire.

The reasons companies are turning to solar power are many, Halter said. They can save money by owning their own plants or entering long-term contracts at fixed prices and not being vulnerable to the vagaries of electric grid price volatility. There are environmental reasons, because sunlight is a sustainable source of power. There are multiple tax incentives. There are public benefits, too, in the form of property tax revenues.

But more than the power of the sun or the declining cost of solar plants, a factor that determines how much a state turns to this cleaner, sustainable energy source is policy. North Carolina for example, which produces 2,000 megawatts of solar energy (compared to Arkansas's 20 mw), requires utilities to produce a fraction of their electricity from renewable sources and awards state solar tax credits.

Solar power growth in Arkansas could be affected by two policies being debated at the state and national level.

The Arkansas Public Service Commission will hold a hearing Nov. 30 on its net metering rules that regulate the price utilities pay when they buy excess energy produced by independently owned solar power plants. Entergy wants to pay at a lower rate that Halter says would reduce the benefit — but not zero it out — of generating solar power.

In September, the International Trade Commission ruled that Chinese solar panel imports are a threat to American manufacturers, which would allow the U.S. to impose tariffs on the panels, making the panels more costly to purchase. That might benefit U.S. solar panel manufacturers but harm the industry as a whole.

Still, thanks to New Market Tax Credits available from the federal government, Halter and Clarksville Water and Light are making plans for the future, Lester said. "It's highly likely we're building a second solar facility on a different property," Lester said, thanks to the credits, created to stimulate the economy.

— Leslie Newell Peacock

Penelope Poppers Helping the most vulnerable.

From a new office and drop-in center on the seventh floor of a building at 300 Spring St. downtown, Lucie's Place director Penelope Poppers can see the streets where many of the clients who come to her organization for help are forced to live.

Lucie's Place — named in memory of Little Rock transgender resident Lucille Marie Hamilton, who died in 2009 — was established as a nonprofit in 2012 to provide services for some of the state's most vulnerable homeless people: LGBT youths, the majority of whom were kicked out of their homes by religious parents.

"There are still a lot of religions that have very anti views on LGBT folks," Poppers said. "Parents here in Arkansas might hear from their pastors that their LGBT kids are going to hell, or shouldn't deserve to exist or whatever they say from the pulpit. The parents hear that and they repeat the same things to their kids. A lot of times, they either end up kicking their kid out of the home for being LGBT, or the parent ends up making it so bad that the kid just has to leave."

Since starting the nonprofit, Poppers has learned the harsh reality of life on the streets for LGBT youths. Though some shelters in town will accept LGBT people, Poppers said others that are connected to churches with anti-LGBT views won't. In the past, she's been forced to tell kids looking for shelter to hide the fact they are gay — no rainbow T-shirts, no mentioning a boyfriend or girlfriend — just so they can find a dry place to sleep.

The organization got a big publicity and fundraising boost in 2014, after a #DoubleTheDuggars campaign against the Duggar family's $10,000 donation toward repealing Fayetteville's LGBT civil rights ordinance went viral, including a mention by national syndicated columnist and LGBT activist Dan Savage. The group has raised $24,000 because of the Duggars' anti-gay efforts.

Lucie's Place recently moved into the larger, 1,000-square-foot office and day center. It's also earned tentative approval to open a group home on Main Street. It expects to close on the property in a month. In the new Main Street home, Lucie's Place will have 12 beds where young people can stay for up to six months before transitioning to a longer-term independent living home or their own apartment. The process of getting those beds hasn't been easy, however. An earlier attempt to establish a home in the Leawood neighborhood was met by protest from a neighbor, leading Lucie's Place to withdraw the plan. Poppers said the backlash was "disappointing, but maybe not surprising."

"People still have these sort of backward ideas about LGBT people," she said. "It was just a couple loud people. But that leaves me feeling very positive about the state of things. There weren't a hundred people saying, 'No, we don't want this.' It was just one or two. That's not my favorite thing, but it's better than it could be. We could have a hundred people saying they don't want this."

While Poppers said that attitudes are changing, she hopes a generation doesn't have to pass away for life to get truly better for LGBT youths. Whatever the case, she believes she's part of that change, and necessary for now.

"My concern is that it's just not getting better quick enough for the people that we see that need things right now," she said. "That's why we exist: to catch them when we need to, when the world has been terrible to them." — David Koon

Ruth Hawkins Heritage champion.

The Arkansas Delta would be a much less interesting place without the almost two decades of work put in there by Arkansas State University's Ruth Hawkins. Director of ASU's Arkansas Heritage Sites program since it started in 1999, Hawkins has been instrumental in spearheading ASU's efforts to save, renovate and preserve historically important sites all over East Arkansas, including the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center in Piggott, where the writer Ernest Hemingway wrote sections of "A Farewell to Arms"; the Southern Tenant Farmer's Museum in Tyronza; the Rohwer Relocation Camp, where over 8,000 Japanese-American citizens were incarcerated during World War II; Lakeport Plantation in Lake Village; and the recently restored Johnny Cash Boyhood Home in the town of Dyess.

An employee of ASU for 39 years, Hawkins was originally a vice president for institutional advancement in the late 1990s, when the university turned its attention to preserving the heritage of the area. "We were looking at ways to match up the needs of the Delta region with education programs at the university," Hawkins said. "One of the things we became aware of was the National Scenic Byway program. We felt like creating a route along Crowley's Ridge, starting up in Clay County and going down to Phillips County, would be a way to link a number of the assets in the region together." Working with mayors, county judges and volunteers in the eight counties Crowley's Ridge passes through, Hawkins and her team eventually succeeded in getting the National Scenic Byway designation. Once that was accomplished, however, they were faced with another problem: What could they direct people to see along the route?

"We knew we had the Delta Cultural Center anchoring the southern end [of the scenic byway, in Helena/West Helena]. We had Arkansas State University in the middle, and we had five state parks and a national forest along the route," she said. "But the problem was, when you got up to the north end, up near Piggott, there wasn't really a developed attraction up there." At that point, Hawkins began looking at the ties writer Ernest Hemingway, who married into the Pfeiffer family near Piggott, had to the region. Eventually, ASU was able to acquire and restore the barn Hemingway sometimes used as a writing studio, as well as the home that belonged to his in-laws, and turn them into a museum.

From there, the Heritage Sites program has seen a whirlwind of activity, including the full restoration of Lakeport Plantation. Students use the projects as a kind of laboratory to learn about the restoration and research that goes into historic preservation. It is the restoration of the Cash boyhood home, however, that Hawkins is maybe most proud of. Hawkins said the leaning and neglected house, which the Cash family moved into in 1935, sent a mistaken message to visitors.

"People were driving by that and thinking that was what Johnny Cash lived in. They thought he'd lived like that," she said. "The truth of the matter is that when he lived there, it was a brand-new house. ... I really wanted it restored back to the way it looked when the family actually lived there. His mother was very proud of that house. It was the first new house she'd ever lived in."

Purchased by ASU in 2011 and opened to the public in 2014, the Cash house now sends a more correct message about the efforts of FDR's New Deal in the area, providing visitors with what Hawkins called an "authentic" experience. That authenticity is what restoring old places can provide all over the Delta.

"To the extent that a structure can help tell a story, to me, that's what's important about preservation," she said. "That's true particularly here in the Arkansas Delta. For some reason, the stories are not recorded. We're beginning to lose so many stories from the Great Depression and the New Deal, the era the Johnny Cash house represents and the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum represents. Many of those people are no longer with us, and the ones who are with us were children when a lot of this happened. So, to me, preservation is important in being able to utilize a structure to help tell the stories that would be lost otherwise."

— David Koon

Maria Meneses DREAMER, fighting.

Maria Meneses is counting on the idea that America will keep her promises.

Brought to the United States from Guatemala at age 2, Meneses, 19, who formerly served as chairwoman of the Progressive Arkansas Youth PAC and works as the United Arkansas Community Coalition's Central Arkansas Organizer, is a beneficiary of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows undocumented people brought to the United States as minors to stay and legally work. Meneses said the election of Donald Trump has brought a wave of fear in the state's community of approximately 5,000 DACA recipients, both that the program might be abolished and that the information they gave the government might be used against them and their families.

"It's very worrisome," she said. "You don't know what ICE is going to do with all the information, what the Department of Homeland Security is going to do. They know where we live, where we work, they know where we go to school. We are Americans, and we have dreams of wanting to better ourselves and wanting to better the United States."

In her work with the UACC, she has talked to Arkansas lawmakers tasked with coming up with a replacement. Sitting in a coffee shop near downtown, she cried as she described her frustration.

"I'm a 4.0 [GPA] bio-chem pre-med student," she said. "I want to be a doctor. There's many people like me who want to be nurses, police officers, teachers. They want to contribute. I know this. I've spoken with them. I told [Arkansas 1st District U.S. Rep.] Rick Crawford that I wanted to be in the Navy. He said, 'We'll help you in your case.' I said, 'What about the other [DACA recipients]? Why don't you help them as well?' He is supposed to represent the masses, not just one person."

Meneses resigned as chair of Progressive Arkansas Youth PAC to serve on the campaign of Democrat Gwendolynn Combs, who is running against Rep. French Hill in the 2nd District. She's also going to college full time and working a waitressing job while continuing her outreach efforts with the UACC. If DACA recipients are forced to leave the country, Meneses said, we will all be poorer.

"I know one DACA recipient who is the mother of a U.S. citizen — a toddler," she said. "Let's say she was to be taken away? What happens to that child if she's not prepared? He goes into the foster system. Things like that. Not only does the removal of DACA affect the recipients and their families, but it also indirectly affects American citizens as well. We pay taxes, none of which we can receive back in return, or any of the benefits they provide."

As for herself, Meneses is at a dark crossroads, having to imagine two futures simultaneously: one in which she serves as a doctor in Arkansas, and another in which she could be deported to a country she can't remember. Either way, she said, she will face the future with the adaptability immigrants show every day.

"Wherever I end up going, whether it's here in the United States or back to Guatemala, I know that as an immigrant I can adjust quickly and get it together," she said. "If I can do it here in the United States, I can do it anywhere in the world, as long as I'm willing and dedicated to do it for myself and for those I care about."

— David Koon

Joshua Asante Multihyphenate talent.

It seemed like Joshua Asante became the closest thing Little Rock has to a rock star almost overnight. Or maybe you saw it coming. Maybe you saw him nine years ago when he was relatively new to town, tall and taciturn and hanging out at open mic nights. That's when he says he started singing out loud again for the first time in decades. (He'd stopped when he was 5 or 6; his father and he had fought about him singing. "I was/am stubborn," he says by way of a partial explanation.) The poems he'd been delivering in front of the mic morphed into songs that his friends cheered. Before long, he'd cut an EP and started Velvet Kente, a band full of accomplished players who synthesized a broad swath of black music — '70s-era funk/soul, West African chants, electric blues. The 2009 Arkansas Times Musicians Showcase was the first time many in Little Rock had seen Velvet Kente, and that battle-of-the-bands served as a sort of coronation for Asante and his soul-stirring vocals, powerful enough to quiet a noisy bar. Velvet Kente won handily and went from a band that few people knew to the most in-demand one in town, the rare local act capable of consistently filling Little Rock venues. Then in 2010, Asante joined up with another group of veteran Little Rock musicians and formed Amasa Hines, a similarly genre-bending unit that pulls as freely from sprawling psychedelic rock as it does Afro-beat. As Velvet Kente began to play out more sporadically, Amasa Hines took its place as the band Little Rock celebrated above all others.

Now, almost seven years later, Amasa Hines has done all the things a promising band does en route to broader success: It's toured the country widely, playing the likes of SXSW and the Newport Folk Festival. It cut an excellent debut LP, "All the World There Is," in 2014. It secured a national booking agent and management company based in New York and Nashville. That none of that has translated into broader fame or significant remuneration doesn't strike Asante as a reason to hang it up.

"I feel like a lot of bands don't make it. That five-year mark is like, 'Whoa, man, we've been at this for a long time.' " But if you have been making good moves and good music, you should be patient with it." Success in music is like making a half-court shot, Asante added. "But I've made a few of those," he said with a smile. The band just completed a new EP that Erik Blood, a Seattle producer/engineer most known for collaborating with Shabazz Palaces, is mastering. Asante expects the band to shop it to national labels for release next year. (Meanwhile, Velvet Kente continues to play Little Rock shows sporadically, often with a massive ensemble, including multiple horn players and percussionists on stage. Velvet Kente is slated to play South on Main on New Year's Eve, debuting many new songs.)

But music is only part of Asante's creative life. He's long been an accomplished photographer and his reputation has grown in recent years. His tender treatment of his subjects, especially of black women, often accented by shadows or resplendent in colorful dresses or jewelry, has earned him empathetic praise: Consistently, the people he shoots tell him, before he took their picture, no one had ever photographed them the way they saw themselves.

Hearne Fine Art has hosted an exhibition of his photographs, the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center has acquired several shots, Coulson Oil commissioned a series of cityscapes from him, and next year, Little Rock's Et Alia Press will publish a book of his photographs. See his work @joshua_asante on Instagram or at churchofchaos.com. Moreover, he's been able to carve out a meaningful revenue stream from his work. Despite never advertising himself as a commercial photographer, he shoots portraits for pay about three times a week.

"I've been obsessing over photography way before I ever picked up a guitar or started writing songs," he said. "I've always been more confident as a photographer. For one thing, I'm framing photographs and portraits in my mind's eye all the time. It never turns off."

His creative work extends further. He's laying out a book for celebrated artist Delita Martin, formerly of Little Rock and now of Hufffman, Texas. And he's the sound engineer on a documentary about the Elaine massacre. Asante, who had a peripatetic childhood throughout the Delta and South, had not visited Elaine in 20 years before going along on the shoot earlier this year. "The black people were terrified that we were there, and the white people were incensed that we were there," he said. The filmmaker, Michael Wilson of the San Francisco Film Institute, told Asante about a new initiative at the school to recruit nontraditional students into the film program. "I had film school in my 2025 plan," Asante said. But he said he might jump on the opportunity if it emerges earlier. It's all part of a broader goal of doing meaningful and financially sustainable work, Asante says.

"I want to be in those conversations along with the people I admire, eventually, and I want a level of comfort that comes from my own creative output, rather slaving for somebody else."

— Lindsey Millar

Laura Shatkus Spearheading experimental theater in Benton County.

The last time this reporter spoke with Laura Shatkus, she was holed up in preparation for an adaptation of "1984" by Lookingglass Theater Artistic Director Andrew White. She included the following dispatch: "Just survived my first hurricane by sleeping inside a movie theatre inside a theatre-theatre in Florida. For my job. Life is an adventure!" It is, particularly if you're an actor and the founder of the Northwest Arkansas-based theater group ArkansasStaged. The floating theater collective kicked off the year with an Inauguration Day reading of Lauren Gunderson's "all-female political farce" ("The Taming") and ended its 2017 lineup with a fully staged Halloween performance of "Empanada Loca," a macabre take on the legend of Sweeney Todd starring Guadalupe Campos, with the occasion marked by specialty empanadas courtesy of famed chef Matt McClure of The Hive restaurant.

Shatkus described the women at that "theatre-theatre in Florida," The Hippodrome, as "scrappy, strong" and "badass," and the Arkansas Times couldn't help but think, upon hearing those words, that she must have fit right in. An aspiring English teacher who jumped ship on her career plans when she discovered she hated student teaching, Shatkus dove headlong into the Chicago acting world without any formal theater training — and actually managed to get work. For a whole decade, even. "I used to joke," she said, "if somebody said something technical to me in a rehearsal, I would say, 'Oh, I don't know what that means. I didn't go to theater school.' Brought down the house." Though her M.F.A. in acting from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville means she's had to put that quip on the shelf, Shatkus still embraces the idea of demystifying theater-speak in favor of connecting with an audience — and, despite the title of "artistic and managing director" that precedes her name these days, erring on the side of uncertainty. "I love saying, 'I don't know. What do you think?' " she said. "And giving people permission to say that, because this art form is totally collaborative."

Collaboration is exactly how ArkansasStaged got going — and how Shatkus ended up at its helm. The company was founded in 2013 by Sabrina Veroczi and Kris Stoker, and after founding a longform improv troupe, made up mostly by women and called 5 Months Pregnant, taking over ArkansasStaged was a natural fit for Shattkus. "In some ways, I was functioning as an artistic director of that little improv group, and I really liked it. And I was pretty good at it! So, when I graduated and started looking at my opportunities it wasn't a strange fit to go, 'Hey, here's a company that has a little bit of some traction already, and a name. And I took over and I started doing the work."

That work includes stagings of "everything from Pulitzer Prize-winning contemporary American plays to the poems of Baudelaire and the absurd musings of Gertrude Stein," it says on the company's 2018 season fundraising website. The ArkansasStaged performance of Lauren Gunderson's aforementioned political farce (which generated $1,000 in proceeds for Planned Parenthood) opened at 21c Museum Hotel with a note from the playwright, who waived her royalties for any companies that would perform "The Taming" on President Trump's Inauguration Day. It ended as follows: "Theatre isn't supposed to be a safe place, it's supposed to be a brave place, so let's be brave together." As if in accordance with that mantra, ArkansasStaged has made the most of being without a brick-and-mortar performance space, transforming rooms at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and 21c into sites for George Brant's "Grounded," UA professor John Walch's "Craving Gravy," Steve Martin's "Picasso at the Lapin Agile," Donald Margulies' "Collected Stories" and David Ives' "Venus in Fur," an erotic two-person comedy.

"I'm very interested in telling stories that are not being told here," Shatkus said. "Stories about women, very contemporary theater. Not to say that The Rep [the Arkansas Repertory Theatre] and TheaterSquared aren't doing that, too, but maybe being independent means I can take more risks," a couple of those, she said, being "Empanada Loca" and the S&M-heavy "Venus in Fur." "It's definitely an R-rated play," Shatkus told me, "but some of my oldest patrons, who I was afraid were going to be horrified by it, were like: 'That was the best play ever. I love that woman. Where is she? How can I tell her I love her?"

For Shatkus and ArkansasStaged, who are devoted not only to producing plays that amplify and explore the stories and voices of women, but to doing so with a donation-based admission, it turns out that not being beholden to the trappings of a facility (or a board, or a historic legacy) comes with its own set of challenges, but also its own freedom. "I'm just adding to the conversation," Shatkus said, "with my unique background of appreciation of theater in Chicago, appreciation of experimental theater, appreciation of site-specific theater — using the site to inform the play. And really just giving opportunities to wonderful people that I know are capable of doing the work." A lot of what's been done at ArkansasStaged, she said, was a matter of good timing. "Part of being a producer is seeing who should be put together, who makes sense together. How can you bring these forces together to make something good?"

— Stephanie Smittle

Tom and Steuart Walton Heirs with a vision.

As a kid growing up in Northwest Arkansas in the era of bike-centric movies like "Rad" and "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure," there weren't many places to follow up on that cinematic inspiration in real life. In fact, there weren't any bike shops at all. There was the flagship Wal-Mart in Bentonville, where you could stare at rows of Huffy cruisers hanging from hooks in neat rows overhead, adorned with the essentials: Disney-themed decals, handlebar streamers, neon plastic spoke beads. Now, though, over a dozen high-end cyclist outfitters dot a curve along Interstate 49 between Bella Vista and Fayetteville. Thanks to networks of bicycle trails like Slaughter Pen, piloted by Walmart heirs Steuart and Tom Walton, the area has become a darling of a destination for cyclists around the world. The brothers, grandsons of Walmart founders Helen and Sam Walton, are expanding on the company's mid-aughts recruitment efforts with a network of stellar singletrack bike trails and projects like the Momentary, a 63,000-square-foot arts space in a defunct Kraft cheese factory.

"Cultural experiences are not isolated," Tom Walton said in an Aug. 31 announcement on the Walton Foundation's website. "With its proximity to the Razorback Regional Greenway and the recently opened culinary school, Brightwater, the Momentary will be a space where cyclists, foodies, artists and the entire community converge." Under the direction of Lieven Bertels, formerly the director of the Sydney Festival in Australia and the year-long Leeuwarden-Fryslân 2018 European Capital of Culture in The Netherlands, the industrial space — slated to open in 2020 — will be repurposed to house art that might not fit so neatly into the fine-art focus of the nearby Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, its exposed pipework and warehouse walls in keeping with the contemporary, experimental nature of the art within its walls.

"Art is transforming lives in Northwest Arkansas," Tom Walton said. Before projects like the Momentary can make a life-changing impact, though, people have to be able to get to it. And, by way of another one of Tom's experiments, residents won't necessarily have to do that by car. The Momentary sits at 507 SE E St., about a mile south of Crystal Bridges and right on top of the Razorback Regional Greenway, a 36-mile off-road, shared-use trail that stretches from Bella Vista to south Fayetteville. According to data the Walton Family Foundation collected in 2015 by placing pneumatic tubes and pyro counters along its pathways to calculate cyclist and pedestrian traffic, Northwest Arkansas residents have taken to it in droves. Pretty quickly after the development of Slaughter Pen, Steuart Walton told Bike Magazine, "Tom was thinking about how we go from 5 to 15 miles and then from 15 to 50 miles, so it was a progressive effort."

As it stood in 2015, pedestrian and cyclist activity peaked in the late afternoon and early evening on weekdays, suggesting that use was primarily recreational. Still, the per capita usage of the paved trails clocked in at rates comparable to cities with much longer histories of trail development, like San Francisco and Portland, and it's not far-fetched at all to imagine once-sequestered corners of Bentonville connected to one another. In fact, a Google Maps search will tell you that it only takes about five minutes longer to bike between Crystal Bridges and the Momentary than it does to drive, and future trail networks are bound to narrow that gap even further.

As for Steuart Walton, when his focus isn't on the trajectory in front of the handlebars, his thoughts lean skyward. Game Composites, an aircraft company founded in England in 2013 by Walton and Phillip Steinbach, finished construction on its Bentonville production facility in August 2016. There you can take entry-level classes in aerobatics — or, if you've got an extra $400,000 kicking around, customize your own brand-new GB1 Gamebird, a sleek two-seat monoplane that cruises at around 230 mph.

For those of us with shallower pocketbooks, we'll settle for enjoying the fruits of the efforts that earned Tom Walton the title of 2016's Arkansas Tourism Person of the Year: world-class museums and green spaces to be enjoyed by everyone — even those of us who aren't heirs to a dime-store fortune.

— Stephanie Smittle

Cheryl Roorda and Zachary Smith Sunny entrepreneurs.

You might call Cheryl Roorda and Zachary Smith Hot Springs' low-power couple. That would describe the solar-powered radio station, KUHS-FM, 97.9, that Smith directs and Roorda is involved with in her role as president of the board of Low Key Arts, the licensee of the nonprofit station.

But you wouldn't call Roorda and Smith low power. The couple, also known as the polka duo The Itinerant Locals, has invested lots of wattage into their adopted home of Hot Springs. Since moving to the Spa City 14 years ago, they have fulfilled Smith's longtime dream of creating a community radio station, rehabbed a building at 240 Ouachita Ave. that Roorda says was on its last legs, and are finally on the verge of opening their own restaurant, SQZBX (Roorda plays the accordion), where they'll serve beer they've brewed in their spare time while running a radio station, rehabbing a building, playing every Friday night at the Steinhaus Keller restaurant and beer garden and raising two children.

Smith said he was "underemployed and hanging out in a coffee shop talking philosophy with other underemployed people" in Seattle many years ago when he began to think about creating a radio station that would give musicians and artists access to media. But he didn't have the resources. In 2013, when the Federal Communications Commission finally promulgated its rules for such low power stations, all the elements were in place: Smith, Roorda, a nonprofit to hold the license — Low Key Arts — and the experience of broadcast engineer Bob Nagy. The community rallied around, especially after it was decided the station would be solar-powered, Smith said, participating in Kickstarter and other fundraisers. The station, which has a license for low power FM, with an equivalency of 100 watts, went online in August 2015.

KUHS has 70 volunteers a week — including Smith — who run the station and DJ. The volunteers are from all walks of life — from Karl Haire, a sales rep at Car-Mart, who DJs the "Dad's House" program (playing "music I would hear when I spend time with my dad just talking or sharing our life experiences"), to Jane Browning, executive director of the United Way, who DJs "the Heart Beat" ("exploring our community's needs, challenges and solutions, pulling resources together in volunteer service"), to pastor Mark Maybrey, who DJs the "Blues and Roots Review" ("featuring blues music of all types, roots of rock 'n' roll, Americana and a special interest in the grooving, soul, bluesy sounds from Muscle Shoals both past & present.") The station's reach is 5.6 miles (though there are gaps), but its programing is streamed online. The station will move up the dial next year, to 102.5, which has less interference.

The couple hopes to open the SQZBX restaurant and brewery, in the same building as KUHS-FM, in a month to six weeks. The restaurant will feature six of the Roorda-Smith family brews and cider on tap, along with pizza, sandwiches and salads. "We're keeping it real simple," Smith said. The beers will be German-style, "easy to drink" beers "that let you get up and go to work the next morning," he said.

That puts the opening at just about the time that Smith and Roorda will be honored at Preserve Arkansas's 2017 Arkansas Preservation Awards dinner with the Excellence in Personal Projects — Commercial award for their work on the Ouachita Avenue building. The event is scheduled for Jan. 19 at the Albert Pike Memorial.

— Leslie Newell Peacock

Onie Norman Delta activist.

Onie Norman doesn't tell her age, but her career of public service in the Delta does. A resident of Dumas, Norman traces her community work back to the 1980s, when she won a Volunteer of the Year Award from Gov. Bill Clinton. In the 1990s and early 2000s, she worked with the Kellogg Foundation on community-building and get-out-the vote programs. She served as a justice of the peace in Desha County for eight years, and ran for mayor twice and once for county judge, winning neither seat but showing, she believes, that an African-American woman has every much right to seek office as a white person of any sex. She ran a childcare center for 27 years to earn her living, but volunteered, then and now, with the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences' College for Public Health and the Delta Citizens Alliance. In 2009, she won an Arkansas Democratic Black Caucus President's Award for her activism.

"She's unabashed. She'll ask questions of anybody. She may make people in power uncomfortable, but she's not intimidated," said Bill Kopsky, executive director of the Public Policy Panel.

"I'm just trying to make a difference in my community," Norman said.

Recently, Norman worked with the mayor of Winchester to bring attention to the town's sewage problems. Residents of the tiny town of 167 or so who either couldn't afford to install or keep septic systems in good repair were piping their sewage straight into neighborhood ditches, Norman said. The soil of Winchester, a nonporous clay, also made septic systems problematic. The problem has been long-running; help from the state has been expected for years. Mayor General Alexander told Norman he'd "run up against a brick wall" after a grant in 2016 did not get funded, and took Norman on a tour of the town, where she learned the smell was so bad that people were being made nauseous; they could not even sit outside. Norman started making phone calls and writing emails. The state Department of Health, legislators from Drew County, Governor Hutchinson, U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford, the Arkansas Economic Development Commission. No luck.

Then, she said she thought, "We've got to bring this to the public." TV stations KLRT, Fox 16, and KARK, Channel 4, took up the cause in August, shooting footage of the raw sewage and interviewing residents. In September, the deputy director of the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission announced the commission would provide Dumas with $3.9 million to bring Pickens and Winchester into the system and another $2.3 million to connect to Dumas' drinking water system. The towns are still working out the agreement.

Norman also serves on the Housing Authority for Dumas, which recently opened The Woodlands, a renovated apartment complex in an area Norman described as previously blighted. She is pushing for the creation of a Boys and Girls Club in Dumas that would serve the children of Gould as well. "She has good ideas," Dumas Mayor Johnny Brigham said. "Sometimes she gets in a little bit of a hurry" to see them funded, he added.

Tangible results of Norman's activism, like an apartment building or a sewer project, may be limited, but she believes simply bringing the problems of the Delta to light — its lingering "Jim Crow" mentality that has kept the African-American residents, which represent more than half the population, impoverished; fear of a change in the status quo by decision-makers; laws in the legislature on food stamps and the like — is accomplishment in itself. She is proud of her work with the Public Policy Panel, helping people understand how the political system works, that the public has a voice and should use it. "When I served on the Quorum Court, I tried to empower people. People would say, 'You can marry people now.' She told them that there was far more to being a justice of the peace than that.

Her unsuccessful runs for mayor — the first black woman to run — and for county judge "opened doors and minds for people. I did it to show that any African American can do this."

Norman said people from the community have helped outsiders — "we've trained the researchers" — to understand to whom they should be talking to address needs, and it's not just the entrenched power structure. For example, the efforts to promote tourism, like creating the bike trail down the Mississippi levee, are fine, she said — but most people who actually live in Delta towns won't be enjoying those trails.

"I think our elected officials let us down," Norman said. "I would like to see people hold them accountable. ... We've had people on the Quorum Court for 30 or 40 years. Now look, let's be real. That's a long time. ... You don't have that energy anymore. They're good people, but once they get in, they don't have an opponent."

— Leslie Newell Peacock

Nitin Agarwal Researcher studies how social media legitimizes disinformation.

The same day the Arkansas Times spoke to Nitin Agarwal in his office at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, three major Internet media companies — Facebook, Twitter and Google — testified before Congress. Each company was grilled on its failure to regulate a massive disinformation and misinformation campaign committed by Russia during last year's presidential election on their platforms.

While some questions veered into the political milieu of the point of the cyber deception (to elect Donald Trump, according to U.S. intelligence), it was also a much broader moment. An "initial public reckoning," according to The New York Times, as a question, and fear, lingered over the preceding: How does democracy work in a world dominated by social media?

Since 2009, Agarwal, professor of information sciences, has been paid by, among others, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and now the Department of Defense — with a massive $7.5 million, five-year grant — to study the dissemination of information on social media. He's looking at the effect of social media on human behavior, human behavior on social media and then how that new social media affects ... well, it just keeps going. "It's kind of a co-evolution, how the behavior is changing and how the social media platforms are changing," he said, creating a cycle of influence. His research tries to suss out this push and pull to create a "sort of a digital ethnography" of information online.

In creating these ethnographies, Agarwal said his team looks "at that from the entire range of good, bad and ugly."

But, lately, it's been the ugly: how bots help cloud and haze messaging to dismantle truth; the way radicalization works in online communities, especially with ISIS; how fringe narratives go from blogs to mainstream sources.

For someone tasked with picking at the things that keep some of us up at night, Agarwal was surprisingly chipper, and positive, when a reporter walked into the office; offering him almond chocolates from a recent trip to Turkey because, he said, he's been "going through them faster than I should."

Agarwal came to studying social media before the doomsday proclamations of the death of truth were infused into the zeitgeist. In 2003, when he graduated from the prestigious Indian Institute of Information Technologies and began applying for graduate programs in the United States, Mark Zuckerberg had not yet created Facebook. By the time he graduated six years later with a doctorate from Arizona State University, "social [media] was just gaining momentum," he said.

His background and work had largely been in investigating large sets of data from a mechanical background. He looked at the burgeoning internet as a "viable data collection platform" to harvest huge amounts of information about "how human behavior in society evolves," he said. With this in mind, in August 2009, Agarwal came to UALR as a professor and "found a home here," he said.

After a few years studying blogs, Agarwal started seeing the effect of tweets and bots on human behavior.

In, 2013 Russia annexed Georgia and waged "regular warfare as well as cyber warfare ... disseminating false narratives ... trying to inject this narrative so that they can influence the local population and the local people are thinking," he said. The Russian government, just as governments have done for years, hoped to use propaganda to legitimize the effort. "This is not a new problem. Look at what happened during WWII. Instead of pamphlets being dropped from the airplanes, now it is tweets," Agarwal said. "[Social media] has made the dissemination much faster, the content travels much faster."

In part, this speed was because of the new "menace of the bots," another weapon in cyber warfare's arsenal.

Agarwal has a large graphic of a group that uses bots on social media: ISIS. The swirling graphic depicts 80,000 to 100,000 Twitter account estimated to be linked together to spread a certain message.

Whereas ISIS may use a chatroom to recruit users, bots help distort truth. Users will program bots to, for example, pick a certain hashtag and flood it with tweets, often coded with misinformation from both sides of the issue. "The goal is not to have a certain outcome — the higher goal is to create divisions in the society, to polarize discussion in society; to unravel the fabric of democracy in the free world," Agarwal said. This deluge of mass information muddles the truth. "Social media has done tremendous damage in that aspect," he said.

But, Agarwal and his group COSMOS — Collaboratorium for Social Media and Online Behavior Studies, composed of graduate students from around the world — see a system that has been created and can be changed.

"The entire goal is to find out what kind of models can be used to counter this information," he said.

"We can take one of the two paths. We can just completely ignore, deny what is out there. Which," he says immediately, "is not an option." Or, "we get involved in these discussions," he continues, "and the community can rally around this issue."

— Jacob Rosenberg

Sens. Joyce Elliott and Jim Hendren Making a rare bipartisan case for considering race in policy.

In September, state Sens. Joyce Elliott (D-Little Rock) and Jim Hendren (R-Sulphur Springs) proposed an eight-member bipartisan panel — composed equally of Republicans and Democrats — to discuss how race affects policy and life in Arkansas and look for ways the legislature could work to address race relations in the state. The Arkansas Legislative Council soundly rejected their proposal.

But Hendren and Elliott say they want to continue to discuss race, because of the unrecognized role it plays in politics and Arkansans' lives, including their own. They talked about their proposal and their desires to keep talking about race relations at a recent Political Animals Club meeting in Little Rock.

Growing up in South Arkansas, "I was uncannily aware of the savage inequalities," Elliott said. "I loved hanging around the old people and listening to what they were saying. That's when I learned so much about people being afraid and knowing things just were not equal. And, eventually knowing it was all embedded in race." She recalled going to a school that was not integrated and saying the Pledge of Allegiance or reading the founding documents "knowing it was not true" based on her experiences with racism. "That just became part of a bedrock for me, of knowing someday I'm going to do something about race. Because it shouldn't be this way. And I was a child, but I never lost that desire," she said.

As a legislator, Elliott has been a dogged champion for policies that push back against structural racism. Especially in recent years, with Republicans in control of the legislature, that has been an uphill battle.

Hendren said he grew up going to a school that was "100 percent white" in Northwest Arkansas.

"I guess I would say I was naive and uninformed about the world that many people live in," he said, "and also, even our own history." After college at the University of Arkansas, Hendren joined the Air Force and "that's where I really started to have my eyes opened."

"I can tell you, I may have been taught the Little Rock Nine and what happened at Central High, but it certainly didn't sink in and I didn't understand it," he said. "As a National Guardsman for 15 years, to think that the governor would activate the Guard to come and keep kids out of the school. ... And then to have the president nationalize them and say, 'No you're not, you're going to protect those kids.' That's such an amazing thing.

"I think so many kids — all across our state — don't fully understand the period from 1865 to the present and what happens in our country with regard to race relations," he said.

For Elliott, racism is structural. She pointed to a structural column in the room where the Political Animals were meeting. "It's like it's embedded in that column, you don't know what's holding that column up and something is. You take for granted it's going to stand. You don't go around wondering what's holding it up," she said. "It's structured into the systems we have."

Hendren said he agreed that bias was built into some systems and they "need to be fixed." But, Hendren said he did not want to discuss the "abstract" nature of racism. He wanted "facts and figures." And, he added, "What I will not agree is that there is a unanimous effort to be racist."

"I don't just have the time and desire to do that, if we're just going to talk about stuff, if things are not going to change," he told the Arkansas Times. "Let's look at the facts, let's define that problem. Then, how do we fix it?" he said.

The idea of considering these issues is not an unusual idea — or a new one — to deal with a country's "original sin," Elliott said. She talked about South Africa's reconciliation councils after apartheid and the commissions established after genocide in Rwanda. "That is a beacon of an example of how you confront tough issues and do something about [them]. When something becomes unacceptable, you do something," she said.

Hendren and Elliott promised to continue the discussion and will push the committee forward in the future.

— Jacob Rosenberg

Judges Tommy Fowler and David Boling Taking on a private probation company.

When Tommy Fowler and David Boling ran for separate district judge positions in 2016, both talked about a problem in Craighead County District Court: The Justice Network. The for-profit, Memphis-based organization had run probation services for more than 20 years in the county and had been known to keep people convicted of misdemeanor offenses locked in a cycle of debt fueled by high fines and fees.

"In our courts, we have three options we can do," Boling told The Jonesboro Sun in 2016 during his campaign. "You can do probation, you can do community service and you can do fines. And I think one of the mistakes that is occurring is that oftentimes people are being caught up in the cycle because they are being hammered with all three ... . Oftentimes these people ... they're the working poor, that are on the margins."

Fowler also talked to the Sun about the company. "It's not a money-making arm of the government ... . If it's privatized, that's what's left. It's to make sure enough people are coming through to meet the bottom line."

An Arkansas State University student researching the subject told the Sun about a man who was selling his plasma each day to afford the fines. Another probationer, after not paying a $25 seatbelt ticket, saw the charges blossom to $2,400 in fines, 40 hours of community service and 10 days in jail, the Sun reported.

In January 2017, both men took office and promised to kick The Justice Network out by July 2017. In the meantime, they have worked on stopgap amnesty programs to help people pay fines or have them waived. It was a move meant to fundamentally change the court system in Craighead County for the better. To give an idea of scale of the problem, according to the nonpartisan news organization The Marshall Project: In August 2016, Boling had 34 people come before him; only six were accused of crimes while the rest were there to address issues stemming from The Justice Network.

The Justice Network sued the judges in June. It said it was contractually obligated to receive the money from the imposed fines and fees. No court date has been set for the lawsuit. (Fowler and Boling declined to be interviewed by the Arkansas Times, citing the pending lawsuit.)

— Jacob Rosenberg

Yuni Wa Producer trying to make sense of a digital world.

In YouTube comments for Yuni Wa's "So 1989" (which had 998,858 views in early November), no one talks about Little Rock, or the legacy of the Stifft Station neighborhood where he lives with his grandmother in a house across from the old Woodruff Elementary School, making beats on a Dell Inspiron desktop computer. The commenters do not try to guess his real name (which is Princeton Coleman; he chose Yuni Wa because it means "universal" in Japanese in a shortened form, and "it's a cool language, literally an artform," he said). They don't call him, at 20 years old, a wunderkind. And they don't talk about how he has already put out 25 "projects" — LPs and EPs mostly, some beat tapes. Instead, they write things like, "I need a 10-hour version of this," and "I'd rather live in this video than my own life" and "I'M IN LOVE."

Yuni Wa is a sound and force from their computer. "It's very personal and impersonal at the same time," the soft-spoken Wa said of his music.

As Wa, he has jam-packed his consciousness into his music. "It's a lot of emotion," he said. "Because, I grew up in poverty and ... ." He trailed off for a moment. Then Wa began to discuss a few things vaguely, including, but not limited to, absent parents and lost siblings. "I really speak with my music," he said. "Because technology can allow for people like me ... I just think about sound. I just know sound. You know when you know what you're doing? You can't always conceptualize it in words."

Wa's songs don't have specific references to personal tragedies. Instead, he conveys his emotions through elegant electronic pulsations. His music has been called Vaporwave, though thinks he's more expansive.

Vaporwave is an attempt at nostalgic reconstruction of consumer-first music from the '80s and '90s. It's a sub-sub-sub-genre of electronic music. Imagine remixed Muzak into a slow, smooth heartfelt jam.

Unlike the classic model of local sensation, who climbs the ladder of the scene, he went global before going local.

"My relationship with Little Rock isn't too, too good," he told me. Mostly he's achieved success online. His album covers are made by a guy who lives in the Netherlands, he said. His 20,000-plus monthly Spotify listeners, 9,336 followers on SoundCloud and the 233,587 who have viewed his YouTube channel are not concentrated in Little Rock. Sometimes he even struggles to book shows. "We're still facing the local gatekeepers now," he said.

The "we" is a growing creative collective that regularly meets at Paramount Skate Shop in North Little Rock, trying to create an "in-house society of creatives," he says, so they can photograph and film and produce away from the current structures of art in Little Rock. The group includes rappers Goon Des Garcons, Solo Jaxon and Fresco Grey. Wa creates beats for them. Sort of like BROCKHAMPTON, they've revolted against joining other scenes or systems, creating their own instead. Some of them have moved to Los Angeles, and Wa said he's considering moving, too.

— Jacob Rosenberg

Visionary Arkansans 2017

#Visionary Arkansans 2017

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tumsozluk · 2 years

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Indianapolis 500 Purdue Mark

For more than a century, Purdue University has welcomed race fans home again for the Indianapolis 500. From the “All American” marching band playing in the iconic brick yard to the Purdue engineers in the pits, we’ve been helping fans welcome back to Indiana for over 100 years. In 1919, Purdue’s “All-American” Marching Band became the first band to perform as part of the day’s ceremony. Their…

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canvas-bird · 7 years

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Part of His Plan

People won't always understand you. And that's ok. In my testimony, you won't find a white picket fence, wedding bands or $$$ (not yet, He's not done with me here). When if comes to worldly standards, I've failed time and time again. Many things that people count as success have been different for me. But my testimony shows my failures and God's promises. It shows his will in my life may be the unconventional path but I'm excited to see where this roller coaster goes. In high school, I saw a band play at one of my band competitions. Purdue's All-American Marching Band. I instantly fell in love. This led me to applying to Purdue University. I prayed that God would let me go there, major in engineering and be in the band. At least one of those things happened. I got accepted but he had other plans for my major and my extra time. But here's the catch. I was just an average lower middle class girl with no college savings and no idea how to pay for it. But God allowed me to go. So I took out loans. He blessed me with grants and scholarships but loans would be high. When I spoke to other people they had trust funds and dad's checkbook. They would have zero debt leaving school. Many of them dropped out because life didn't require they get a degree. Well I was different. The second to graduate from college out of dozens of extended family members. Many of them are doing well without degrees but many of them struggle. I wanted to go to college more than anything. I knew God would make a way. People will say that I am a fool for dreaming big. But I believe in my heart that this was the right path. Yes I could've stayed home, worked at the grocery store and never accrued an ounce of debt. But when that little girl prayed and asked God to send her, he did. He knew there would be near misses of her not having enough money at the start of the semester. He could've sent me home anytime. But every fall He made a way. So I stayed. Through tears and judgemental looks at the financial aid office I stayed. I believed that I had to graduate because it was a part of His plan and so important for my life. My faith was confirmed one day in the spring. I was alone walking down the stairs of a campus building when a nearly audible voice startled me. God told me in that empty stairwell "I'm going to do great things with you." I just stood there because I've never heard Him before and I wasn't sure what to do. But I smiled and I believed Him. After years of searching for my purpose I'm closer to an answer. I know that I have student loans to pay. But I dream big. One day they'll all be paid. And maybe I can be that trust fund that my little cousins need. God's will be done.

#godswill #yourwillbedone #godsplan #faith #college #debt

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jazzworldquest-blog · 7 years

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USA:Brent Laidler- No Matter Where Noir (2017)

Album Notes “Hello?” “Oh Good, you’re still there!” Her voice was a well modulated but somewhat breathless alto with an accent I couldn’t place. “So what can I do for you?” “Your ad in the phone book says you specialize in missing persons, are you good at it?” “I’d like to think so. So who’s missing and how long have they been gone?” “Me. I mean… I don’t know.” Most ‘Persons’ cases start out pretty simple. This didn’t seem to be one of them... I’m often inspired to write music – even if I don’t have something specific to write for. So I usually have a few tunes floating around unused. One fateful day I decided to write a dark ballad for fun. “No Matter Where Noir” was the result. Wow. We knew it was going to be a ‘Title Track’ from the first time Ned played it – he OWNED it! Then it grew into a Concept. Then we played with ideas for a back story… I chose “Southern Gate” and “Meet Me at the Havana Hilton” from earlier projects and set the stage for a whole Noir World in Miami. It fit really well. We needed a nightclub – so the hip swing tune I was working on became “Jamie’s Joynt.” It needed a piano melody and I’m not a piano player, so I asked Jamie to give it a go. He forgot about it for a while and then stuck a hand written chart in my door two days before the session. It’s fantastic! So how should the story begin? Pulled an unused tune out of my pocket, changed the groove, rewrote the melody and it became “Downtown By Nine.” It’s much better this way. Cool. “Sixth Sense” was inspired by Lee Morgan’s “Sidewinder.” It’s something every good detective should have. I love blending voices together. Flugelhorn and guitar are nice. Sax and trumpet particularly are Very Hip – like another of my heroes, Horace Silver used. Vibes are sweet with anything! Honestly? I’d be bored to death if I could only write for guitar. Every Noir Story also needs a nemesis. One night Scott called off “Have You Met Miss Jones” – it was noisy and I mis-heard it. I laughed, thinking that “Heavy Memphis Jones” sounded like a bad dude. Had to do it! Took a long time and several tries to write, but I finally managed the right blend of Killer Joe style and homage to Rogers and Hart in an almost completely original piece. The Mystery Woman and the Intrepid Gumshoe usually develop a romantic involvement – so I needed “Law of Attraction” to indicate that she’s starting to have some feelings. It’s the only contrafact on the disk, but I’m keeping the secret for now. See if you can guess. I’d written “Not Just Another Waltz” a year earlier. It dropped right into the story and we laughed that the existing title fit the narrative on more than one level. Perhaps the Hero has already been around the block a time or two but considers maybe this time could be different. Now - what if they decide to run away together and keep the money? That’s where “Meet Me at the Havana Hilton” was perfect! “Keep Me In Mind” was written for Mark to take us home when things inevitably don’t work out - creating the image of our Leading Man strolling off into the night under the street lamps… I love them all, but if I had to pick a favorite – this was the one that gave me goose bumps during the first playback. I hope you have at least half as much fun listening as we did playing! Brent Mark Buselli (trumpet, flugelhorn) is Director of Jazz Studies at Ball State University and Co-Founder of The Buselli – Wallarab Jazz Orchestra. He has won numerous awards and recognitions, including top 100 CD of the Decade from Downbeat Magazine, and has over forty arrangements published for big bands, brass ensemble, and piano/trumpet. He has nine recordings out as a leader on the Owl studios and OA2 record labels. He has performed with artists such as Bobby McFerrin, Slide Hampton, Jimmy Heath, Slam Stewart, Natalie Cole, The Four Tops, The Temptations, Ben Vereen and has played for four former U.S. presidents. Ned Boyd (saxophones) has been teaching for 25 years. He earned his Bachelor of Music Degree in saxophone performance at the North Carolina School of the Arts and MM in Education from the Eastman School of Music. He has recently appeared with Aretha Franklin, George Benson, Wayne Brady, Michael Feinstein, the Four Tops, Ben Folds and The Indianapolis Symphony. He has also performed with Barry Manilow, Wayne Newton, The Temptations, Rosemary Clooney, Liza Minelli, The Spinners, Don Rickles, Bernadette Peters, and the big bands of Guy Lombardo, Lawrence Welk, the Dorsey Brothers and the Buselli-Wallarab Jazz Orchestra. Mitch Shiner (vibraphone) drummer and vibraphonist, graduated from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music with a Bachelors degree in Jazz Studies. Currently based in Milwaukee, Mitch is an in-demand performer, active educator, and award winning composer. He performs with groups of all genres and styles, appearing with Tad Robinson, Christian Sands, Arturo Sandoval, John Clayton, Emmet Cohen, Meloney Collins, Everett Greene, Michael Spiro, The Leisure Kings, The MidCoast Swing Orchestra, The Milwaukee Jazz Orchestra and The PostModern Jazz Quartet. Jamie Newman (piano) lives in West Lafayette. He has degrees from Reed College and the Boston University School of Law. He is the accompanist for Purdue University's Dance Division. He also plays jazz piano and organ with various groups in and around Central Indiana, and as a soloist. He used to practice law. Those days are over. Scott Pazera (bass) is currently the Jazz Band director at Wabash College as well as a motivated private instructor, clinician and spirited performer with 30 years experience. He performs publicly with his own ensembles and has appeared and/or recorded with artists such as Rich Little, Veruca Salt, Ce Ce Peniston, Med Flory (Supersax), Fareed Haque, Henry Johnson, Dave Douglas, Byron Stripling, Rachel Yamagata and many others. He has Bachelor's and Master's Degrees from Indiana University and most recently completed a second Master's Degree in Music Technology from IUPUI. Richard “Sleepy” Floyd (drums – tracks 1,2,4,9,10 & 11) is a drummer, composer, and producer known for his versatility and high level of musicianship. In a playing career spanning more than 24 years, Sleepy has performed and recorded with artists across several genres including 112, DJ Logic, Nicolay, Phonte of Little Brother, Black Milk, Mayer Hawthorne, Rob Dixon, Mystikos Quintet and Fareed Haque. Ultimately a love for hip-hop, jazz, and beat production led to co-founding The Native Sun www.thenativesun.org – who strives to keep the fundemental elements in hip hop alive. Kenny Phelps (drums – tracks 3,5,6,7 & 8) is a self-taught and highly sought after percussionist and an adjunct jazz percussion instructor at Butler University. In 2015, he was inducted into the Indianapolis Jazz Hall of Fame. He has a regular traveling gig with internationally renowned singer Dee Dee Bridgewater - an annual feature of his schedule, including extensive European engagements. Performances include Wynton Marsalis, Eartha Kitt, Michael Brecker, Slide Hampton, Wycliffe Gordon, Chuchito Valdes, and the New York Voices. In 2012 he became Owl Music Group sole CEO, turning the company into a humanitarian arts organization reaching out to young musicians and community organizations who aid victims of sexual assault, domestic violence and the homeless. Brent Laidler (composer, guitar) attended Western Michigan University, majoring in Music Education with a minor in Composition. He owns and operates a band instrument repair business with endorsements from many area universities and symphonies, world class professionals, and three DCI Corps. www.brentsbench.com Brent is a Jazz Clinician, a member of the Indiana Jazz Educator's Association, former President of the Songwriter’s Association of Mid-north Indiana and served as the Choir Director at University Church - Purdue University. He has performed with Broadway artist Michael Mandel, Comedian/Impersonator Rich Little, The Lafayette Symphony, Jazz legend Tony Zamora, Brazilian artist/composer Felipe Viera – as well as vocalists Kirby Shaw, Regina Todd-Hicks, Ly (Tartell) Wilder and Amanda Overmyer from American Idol. Brent has been a staff arranger for two competitive marching bands, written music for commercials, video games and independent films. Working with TMG/5 Artists and Westlake Signal Group, he now has five film scores to his credit – having been seen and heard on Los Angeles Cable Television, the Pan-African Film Festival, and the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. "Then and Now - Single Engine Stations, Volume II" won a Telly Award in the Documentary Category. Dedications Objectively speaking, I’m a composer and then a player. It’s really fun to write songs specifically FOR the people you know will play them and I’m also honored and blessed to have such amazing friends whose talent and input bring out the full potential in the Music. It’s unbelievable… So thank you Everyone who helped to make this project happen! Scott and Jamie are long time friends who teach me something new every time we play. Scott got us in and out of several tunes with awesome suggestions from his vast experience in multiple genres and mastery of groove. Jamie agreed to take the part of noir club owner and band leader and wrote “the melody no one can play.” You can’t ask for a better soloist or accompanist. I mean, just listen. Seriously. Listen. I met Sleepy and Mitch at an open jam session! Not only are they fantastic musicians, but the chemistry was instant. They are reactive, responsive, and know instinctively when to lead and when to follow. From the first time we played, I couldn’t imagine recording this CD without them. It’s been a blast. We definitely need to do it again. What are you guys doing next Thursday? Ned has worked with me for ages. He is simply astounding. It’s a special privilege to work with him on stage – his Love and Joy performing live music is infectious. You really need to feel the energy to appreciate it, and the best part is you never leave a gig without a big smile! Mark has been lots of things – a customer, a friend and now I’m thrilled to share a bandstand with him. He is truly gifted, loves music, loves teaching and is one of the most supportive and encouraging people I know. His solo on the last track transported me back to college when I first discovered Freddie Hubbard’s album “First Light.” You know – one of those jaw on the floor moments… Kenny is my hero. I’ve always loved watching him play – he has so much fun! The couple gigs we’ve done together were a real treat. But when Sleepy had a last minute conflict and couldn’t make the session - Kenny was available and saved the day! He’s a world class musician with international tours, a heavyweight discography, and now dedicates his time and energy to students and education. Amen! Now I know why Everyone recommends Michael Graham at The Lodge Studios! He gets interested and involved in making your project a success. He also makes it look easy – a true sign of mastery. He’s been available sometimes on short notice, but everything is always smooth, relaxed and purposeful. Thanks also to Steven Byroad – it’s been a great experience all around. Special thanks to voice actors Sara Mummey and Dustin Hopkins! http://ift.tt/2sP7E3Y via Blogger http://ift.tt/2sfyO77

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nubands · 4 years

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Sousas Making Sousa Proud

The Northwestern University 'Wildcat' Marching Band and Purdue All-American Marching Band perform at Ryan Field in Evanston, Illinois, as Northwestern Football competes against Purdue University on November 9, 2019.

Photo by Lukas Gladic '19.

Support the Northwestern Bands: Buy Photos and Gifts

#music #education #sousaphone #tuba #Purdue AllAmerican Marching Band #school #expression #instrument

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lodelss · 4 years

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Performance Art: On Sharing Culture

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 | 9 minutes (2,261 words)

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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#IFTTT #Blogger

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