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starstwinkleplanetsshine · 4 months ago

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Daughter of the Sea

This one is dedicated to @aswallowssong. Thanks for being the Cady to my Angie, and thanks for trusting me with your beloved daughter of Apollo. It's been a blast getting to know her <3

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Drachma for Your Thoughts (Read on AO3)

“Drachma for your thoughts?”

Cady’s voice pulled me out of my swirling head and back to where we were sitting on the beach. It was well past curfew, but Percy had left earlier that evening with Nico to finally start the plan that the son of Hades had suggested almost a year ago now. A plan so dangerous, so insane, that the mere thought of my brother going through with it meant I had been on the verge of a total breakdown all day. So when I showed up to the infirmary well past midnight, my eyes bloodshot and my hands trembling, I didn’t argue when Cady suggested we take a walk to the beach.

The harpies hadn’t been very active this summer, anyway.

“I’m just thinking about how in a week all this will be over.” I kept my eyes on the dark waves in front of me, but I could feel that Cadys’ were trained on me. I wished I could just walk into the sea and run away from it all, but I knew things weren’t much better under the waves.

“Four days until your birthday.” Her voice was more somber than I had ever heard it. What she should’ve said was “four days until Percy’s birthday.” It didn’t matter that we were twins. His was the one that counted.

“Four days until the end of the world.” I was trying to make a joke, but Cady didn’t laugh.

“Do you ever think about the mortals?” I asked after a couple minutes of the waves being the only sounds between us.

“What?”

“They have no idea their whole world is hanging in the balance right now. They have no idea what's going on, the war we’re fighting, the battle that will determine the fate of…everything. They have no clue what we’re about to do for them. They just think there’s some really bad storms.” My words spilled out and I didn't try to stop them. There was no point censoring myself with Cady.

She was quiet again before chuckling lightly, which caught me by surprise. “I think about them all the time. I think…I think that’s who we’re really fighting for.”

I finally turned my head towards her, and I could see a look of resolute determination on her face in the pale moonlight.

“We have to fight for those who can’t fight for themselves,” she continued, “whether that’s the gods who are too busy or mortals who can't know the danger they’re in.”

I let her words settle on me as a smile crept onto my face. I thought about how much older she looked in the shine of the silver moon, and how much she had taught me about the world we shared in the past year. So much of the half blood I was, or was becoming, was thanks to her, Percy and Annabeth.

“That’s very heroic, Cady.”

She shrugged, her expression unchanging. “It’s our job.”

I had never thought of it that way before, but as soon as she said it, I knew it was true. If demigods had one purpose in the world, it was to span the gap between the gods and mortals—to fight both of their battles. It always had been.

My gaze wandered from the waves to the sky above and I began absentmindedly searching for stories in the sky, the ones that Annabeth had taught me—anything to get my mind off everything that had happened that day. My eyes landed on a new constellation, the form of a hunter who seemed to be a little older than a girl—Zoë. Percy had told me about her, how she was a Huntress of Artemis who had died fighting the Titan Atlas while defending him and, ultimately, the gods.

Her place was in the sky now, as Beckendorff’s was underground. Along with Lee Fletcher. And Castor. And so many others that had been lost in the past year.

Would I, too, find my own place amongst them soon? Would I join my namesake in the sky with my brother close behind as our souls found their way, hopefully, to Elysium?

“I only met her once.” Cady’s voice once again saved me from my thoughts. I peeled my eyes off the sky and turned to her.

“The Hunter?”

She nodded. “I saw you looking at her. She was strong, and brave, and very wise.”

“Do you think we’ll end up there someday?” The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop them, and Cady furrowed her brow.

“Angie…”

“I guess there’s already an Andromeda constellation, so probably not—”

“Angie!” Cady cut off my pathetic attempt to downplay my question. “Why would you say that?”

I met her eyes and immediately wished I hadn't. Something about them made me drop the walls I always had up. Maybe it was because I was so close to the sea, which always made me feel more honest. Or maybe it was the inherent vulnerability of being under the night sky after midnight. Or maybe it was just because Cady had become the closest thing to a sister I had in the past year.

But whatever it was didn’t matter as I let out a heavy sigh and took a deep breath.

“I don’t think I’m walking away from this, Cady.”

Her eyes got sad.

“You’re gonna be okay.”

I started getting flashbacks to my conversation with Percy just the night before that had sounded a lot like this. I heard his words echoed in my own.

“I wish I could trade places with him. Take what is supposed to be his.”

The words were a lot harder to say than I thought they would be. Cady was quiet, but I knew she understood who I was talking about.

“It should be me, anyways.” I finally got out.

“Why would you say that?”

“Can you imagine a world without Percy?”

Her eyes fell to the sand and she took a deep breath before answering. “No.”

I wondered if she was remembering those awful two weeks last summer like I was. The time we feared we had lost him for good.

“Me neither. I don’t…I don’t think I’m supposed to live in a world without him. I don’t know how to explain it, but I just know. So if that means I give my life so he lives, it’s what I’ll do.” I had never been more sure of anything in my entire life.

“Angie—“

“No, Cady. I’m serious.” I met the girl's eyes, and all I saw staring back at me was fear. And pain. And heaviness. Eyes that were usually as bright as the sun, kind and shining with her father’s light, were as cold and dark as the moon.

“It should be me.” I kept talking in the heavy silence. “Percy’s the hero, he’s the one everyone needs. If he was gone, camp would never be the same. You know it’s true, you felt it last year. Everyone would be…lost.”

Cady looked like she wanted to say something, but stopped herself.

“No one needs me that way. Maybe…” tears filled my eyes as I started to verbalize the one thing I had known for so long, but could never utter, “maybe that’s why I was sent here so late. Maybe that’s my destiny. To save my brother, the real hero, so he can fulfill his purpose. Fulfill the prophecy. Maybe I’m supposed to be the spare. And—” my voice broke— ”maybe that’s not a bad thing.”

“Angie, we’ve talked about this.” Cady’s eyes were filled with exhaustion.

“I know! But this time…this time these thoughts aren’t coming from Kronos. It’s not because I don’t think I’m good enough. It’s because I think I am. Just maybe. Maybe I’m enough to save him. To give him a future. To give everyone a future.” I watched as Cady's eyes filled with tears, her shoulders slumping even more. She stayed silent, as if she could tell there was more I needed to say, and I took a deep breath.

“For my whole life I never knew where my place was. It took me fourteen years to find it, to be shown it. And I know I haven’t been a part of this world for very long, but from the second that trident appeared over my head, I stepped into a shadow I didn’t even know was there. And I spent a long time resenting that shadow, even if I wouldn’t admit it. But the past few months, few weeks really, I realized—maybe that’s the point. Maybe if I can be a shield for Percy, somehow, that will be enough. Maybe I was brought here—“

“You weren’t brought to camp just to die.” Cady's words were sharp, cutting like the knives she loved to throw.

“But what if I was?”

Cady just sighed. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“What?”

“I can see it in your eyes. There’s something you’re not saying”

I took a deep breath, wondering if I was that bad at hiding my feelings or if she was just that good at reading them.

“Hestia visited me this afternoon.”

“Hestia?”

“Ya, like the goddess.”

“I know who Hestia is. But why did she visit?”

“She…” Now that I had to put it into words, I was having a hard time making sense of it. Between helping Percy prepare to leave, and feeling the need to be strong for the other counselors and younger campers after Beckendorff’s funeral, I hadn’t had much time to process her words. I told Cady everything the goddess said—the parallels between the original Andromeda and myself, the way that the fates of my brother and I were tied just as Perseus and Andromeda’s had been. I told her about the warning she gave me, how I shouldn’t fight Percy's battles.

“She said that learning to yield is powerful, and sometimes more important than fighting.” She was quiet for a while, probably trying to untie all the words I had laid in a tangled mess at her feet.

“What does that even mean?”

“I have no idea.” I began tracing my fingers in the sand, doodling seashells that didn’t hold their shape.

“There’s more, isn’t there?”

I let out a sigh—keeping any secrets around Cady was hopeless.

“I told you she warned me. But what that warning was…I’m really scared, Cady.”

My best friend's eyebrows pulled together as a concerned frown grew on her face. She reached a hand over and gripped mine tightly, the feeling grounding me and giving me the strength to continue.

“She said that I needed to learn to control myself, learn to yield, or I would ‘doom us all.’ Those are the words she used. ‘Doom us all.’”

“That’s encouraging.”

Cady’s words were so dry, I burst into laughter. She quickly joined me, both of us unraveling as we howled into the night. It must’ve been a ridiculous sight—and we were getting too loud, I knew it. Soon the harpies would find us, but we didn’t stop. We laughed until tears pooled in our eyes and our sides hurt.

It felt strange. There was nothing to be laughing at, really. Percy was gone. We were at war. The titans were getting closer by the day. But even so, we were laughing. It was almost as if we could forget it all, even just for a moment.

But then that moment ended.

Our laughter died and soon the sound of the waves was once again the only thing between us. The air grew heavier, and with it, my heart. The lightness the laughter had brought flew away on the wind, and we were left alone in the black night once again.

“I wish I knew what she meant.”

“I think…” Cady hesitated, as if she was afraid to keep going. “I think she was pretty clear, actually.” She turned to face me again, and her eyes were that mixture of gentle and serious that I had only ever seen her pull off. “You can’t fight Percy’s battles for him. When the time comes…maybe you step aside.”

I shook my head. “I can’t do that. Maybe…Maybe that’s not what she means.”

Her eyes got sad. “You need to realize that you’re not Percy.” Those words would’ve been harsh coming from anyone else. “You don’t need to be Percy. You said it yourself—ever since you got here, you’ve been living in his shadow, a shadow you didn’t even know was drowning you. And sometimes I wonder if you stay there because you think you have to. Because you think you’re not worthy of the sun.”

Tears rushed to my eyes quickly as her words knocked the air out of my lungs.

“But believe me when I say this, Angie—everyone is deserving of their place in the sun.” She managed a smile, and I swear the stars shined brighter. “You don’t have to live in Percy’s shadow. It’s like the myth—your destinies are intertwined, Percy’s success is yours. That means that you can do different things, be different people, and still stay connected. You don’t need to stay in his shadow for that.”

“But what if—” my voice caught and I couldn’t stop the tears from falling onto my cheeks. “What if I don’t do enough, and he dies. What if I don’t try and protect him, and we lose him.”

Cady took a deep breath as if the very thought pained her. “If Percy is…fated to die, there’s little we can do. But we don’t know that. Prophecies are tricky, and hard to understand. And the more we try and change them, or work against them, the quicker we make them come true.” She looked into the sky before continuing. “What if you interfere and that ends up causing more harm?”

A sense of hopelessness washed over me. “I don’t want to live without him.”

I saw a tear streak down Cady's cheek. “I know. But someone has to keep on living when others die.”

I felt my eyebrows pull together as a terrifying thought crossed my mind. I had never considered that I would live past this week, past my sixteenth birthday. I had made up my mind that Percy was the one walking away from this, not me, and I was determined to do anything I could to make that happen.

I hadn’t considered other people might be thinking the same thing, might be making those choices, too—regardless of what other people wanted.

“You don’t think you’re walking out of this either, do you?”

Cady dropped her head, staring at the sand. “I know I’m not.”

“Cady—”

“You’re not the only one who wants to protect people.” Her head snapped up, and I saw a harshness in her eyes. “This is what I’ve been trained for. My siblings walk away from this. You walk away from this. Gods willing, Percy walks away from this. But not me. Not if I can save them.”

My head felt like it was spinning. No no no, it screamed. This isn’t right. It as to be me, it has to—

“They need you, Cady.”

She shook her head. “Nobody needs me. They'll miss me, sure. But they’ll be alright. They’re strong.”

“I need you.” Desperation and fear were swelling in my chest as I choked back a sob. “I can’t do this alone.”

“You’re not alone, Angie. You never have been. And even when I go, you never will be.”

Her words weren’t making sense to me, and panic rose in my stomach as I thought about the very real possibility of losing Cady and Percy within the next week. And Annabeth. And Rosie. And—

I was about to break into hysterics when I felt Cady's hand on my arm, with it the familiar feeling of her magic spreading across my nervous system. Usually I didn’t like when Cady used her gifts on me without asking, but in this moment, I was glad. I couldn’t go down that spiral. I would be falling and falling into the darkness for days—that was a bottomless pit I knew I would never be able to climb out of.

“Thanks, Cades.” I breathed out as her healing touch calmed my anxiety. I took a deep breath, my first one all day, and met her burdened eyes.

“You’re gonna be okay, Angie. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe we all walk away from this.” But I could tell she didn’t believe her words. “But even if we don’t, you’ll still be okay. Maybe staying behind is what you were sent for—if there’s still a Camp Half Blood in the next week, they’ll need someone to turn to. They’ll need a leader. They’ll need you.”

I shook my head instinctively. “I’m not—”

“But you are, Andromeda. You’re Percy’s sister. You’re Poseidon’s daughter. Whether you like it or not, that power is already within you. Everyone else sees it. It’s about time you start seeing it, too.”

It was all too much. I clenched my eyes shut and forced myself to listen to the waves, to think of nothing else but the sound as they crashed onto the shore. No more wars, or battles, or prophecies, or doomed brothers, or self-sacrificing best friends. No more gods and titans and doomsdays. Just the sand under my fingers and the sea in front of me.

It didn’t work.

“I’m not who everyone thinks I am. I can’t be what everyone needs me to be.”

I was on my feet and sprinting away from the water before Cady had time to call my name, and I didn’t stop running until the door to Cabin 3 was slammed shut behind me.

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thebigqueer · 4 years ago

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lee fletcher, ethan nakamura, alex fierro, sadie kane, pre-toa Apollo and post-toa apollo

Push off a cliff: PRE-TOA APOLLO 100% LMAO

Kiss: hm. probably alex my beloved

Marry: lee cuz idk where else to put him

Set on fire: sadie beacuse i feel like she’d be the one to peer pressure me into doing it but like only cuz she has a cool magic trick to show me and id be terrified and think i killed her but joke’s on me cuz she had some kind of magic spell LMAO she’d prank me into it

Wrap a blanket around: ethan nakamura for sure

Be roommates with: probably post-toa apollo because i feel like we’d get each other

send me 6 characters!

#WAIT THAT MOMENT WHEN YOU REALIZE YOU AND ALEX ARE LIKE LITERALLY AROUND THE SAME AGE LMAO #she seems so much older than me but she #she isn't???#my-o-my-what-a-horrible-day tag #asks #ask game

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dannyreviews · 6 years ago

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Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

We are about 4 days away from knowing what films and actors will receive Academy Award nominations. My fingers are officially crossed that a wave of 1970s rock and roll will fill up as many categories as possible. Bryan Singer and Dexter Fletcher’s biopic of the band Queen, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is one of those epics that has Oscar written all over it. Every technical tactic and nuance goes off in sync and in turn the music and legacy of Freddie Mercury and Queen are on full display.

The film starts in 1970 where we meet young Freddie (or what he was known as before; Farrokh Bulsara) (Rami Malek) working as a baggage handler at Heathrow Airport. He has high hopes of making it as a rock singer, to the disapproval of his traditional parents. At a local nightclub, he meets Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) and two members of the band performing that night; Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy). Along with John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello), the four guys become Queen and take the world by storm. Through the fame and the prestige, Freddie’s personal life takes a toll, from his sexual identity and deciding between Mary and manager Paul Prenter (Allen Leach), all the way to his destructive and partying ways, which threaten to destroy the band.

When the film was first released, I was wondering what was up with the mixed reviews from the critics. Perhaps they saw a different film, because what I saw was nothing short of a masterpiece. Sure, there were several anachronisms in the chronology and the events unfolded seemed to go one on top of another, but the execution of the story and the homage to the music couldn’t have been any better. The time devoted to the genesis of the group’s most famous songs gave the viewer a fly on the wall experience of the sessions. For example, the scenes where the group is mixing the vocals of “Bohemian Rhapsody” with more than 20 overdubbed tracks in the famous operatic interlude and the idea that “We Will Rock You” would be written as an audience participation piece. For people that are familiar with the band, but not the way the songs originated, it gives fans a new perspective on the music and its impact on the world.

Rami Malek was born to play Freddie Mercury. Everything from his stage presence, to his speech made it look as if Freddie had come back from the dead. Some would say that Malek’s best scenes were the performing ones, but for me, he shines best during the scenes detailing his privacy. Especially, when Freddie is trying to make a life with Mary, but is more tempted by the company of other men. It’s at that point that Freddie the rock star becomes Freddie the conflicted human being. As for the rest of the band, the respected actors paid homage to their roles. Gwilym Lee matched Brian May’s manner of holding the guitar and even got his high pitched voice down to a T. The same also applied to Joseph Mazzello in becoming John Deacon down to the way that his legs were spread apart as he played. As for Ben Hardy, he didn’t look a lot like Roger Taylor, but his performance was just as stellar as the other 3. My impressions also spread to Downton Abbey actor Allen Leach’s performance as Paul Prunter, which transcended between the subtle and somewhat provocative.

Technically, Bohemian Rhapsody should do a clean sweep of the sound and editing awards at the Oscars and the reason lies with the scene at Live Aid. The manner in which the music was flawlessly edited made the concert come to life as well as the close up shots and quick cuts between the band and the audiences in the stadium, backstage and bar. I don’t think I have seen a biopic that turned one of the key moments into a full fledged recreation. There’s retelling and then there’s the replication of the stage moves and camera shots from the original broadcast. If it fails to receive a nomination for either Cinematography, Editing, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing or Visual Effects, then there’s definitely something wrong with the voting committees at AMPAS.

It is important that Rami Malek wins the Academy Award as a truthfully portrayed Freddie Mercury as opposed to Christian Bale for playing an exaggerated Dick Cheney. Mercury is a legend beloved by all and Cheney is a fool that has left nothing of high achievement in his life. Best Actor is pretty much a two man contest between these unlikely figures and while Bale’s performance and appearance as Cheney seems impressive, Malek looked, sounded, moved and just outright became the figure he was portraying. These performances come once in a blue moon and the Academy needs to take advantage of the moment and honor Malek with the top prize. As for Best Picture, it seems like a long shot, but like “Dunkirk” (which should have won last year), “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a through recreation of past events that shaped the world. Even if some of the bad reviews, such as the one from New York Times critic A.O. Scott state that the film was “a baroque blend of gibberish, mysticism and melodrama”, it resonates with fans of cinema and rock music and should be represented as such at the Academy Awards.

9.5/10

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pain-is-too-tired · 3 months ago

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BLOOD/ICHOR TW

Last days of Sparta, follow Him down to meet Apollo And he'll brace for battle in the night He'll fight because he knows he cannot hide He's never gonna make it, all the Poor people he's forsaken, karma Is always gonna chase him for his lies It's just a game of waiting from the Church steeple down to Satan karma There's really no escape until he dies

Outrunning Karma by Alec Benjamin

I know shocker shocker another angst art for them.

I do stand by that Luke should receive some punishment/consequences for his actions. But I also don't want it be something the gods inflict, because Luke's choices hurt other demigods more than the gods( main reason he shouldn't be forgiven immediately-)

So, Lee/image of Lee taking over that role just seems fitting. He was one of the first camper deaths.

Retribution and acknowledgement of mortal guilt is also something Apollo is often connected to. As well as protection of youth.

Lee is the son of the god who rained plague on the Greeks for the taking of one of his priest's daughter, in many versions assisted in the death of Achilles for the death of one or more of his sons. Slaughtered Cyclops more ancient then his own father out of anger and grief of lost of another son.

Absolutely Lee's gonna make sure Luke fully understand the effects of what he's done.

#mine #pjo #percy jackon and the olympians #percy jackson and the olympians #my art #lee fletcher #luke castellan #tw blood #unrealistic blood #golden blood #leeluke #i know he had to deal with Kronos taking over his body and all-#but I'm talking about consequences that isn't just him dealing with his own pain #but acknowledgement of what he's done to others #how many kids did he send to their death #we know he was offering payment for anyone bringing him demigods for his army #how many of those did he send to their death for a cause that never truly wanted or understood #how many of those were 10-12 like the di angelos?#just. him having to acknowledge the destruction outside of his bubble #interesting to think about #i swear I'll draw lee in a less angsty way at some point #i just have too much fun drawing him like this #Lee Fletcher my beloved #Apollo is a brutal god i seriously can't believe that's forgotten about or played lightly in both canon and fandom #i would've loved if he had been turned mortal for losing it in grief after BoM #Zeus using Giant War as way to keep him from going too far

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mediumgayitalian · 9 months ago

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Hi! I really like all the stuff you write, I think when I found your account I read most of your ao3 in a night :)

Do you have a favorite character to write besides Nico and Will?

that is FLATTERING i appreciate that very much. mwah <3

and YES do i ever. naomi solace my beloved. as of writing this answer i’ve written just under 8000 words of her. by the time this posts it will be more. i also love writing for lee fletcher and although i have not posted it yet, the rest of the (dead) apollo siblings

#considering also writing a bianca fic?? altho i haven’t come up w anything yet #if i do write it it will be PREEEEEE canon like pre pre canon #maybe even lotus casino #ask

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lastsonlost · 7 years ago

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LEAN ON ME (1989)

ROBERT GUILLAUME AS NATHAN DETROIT IN THE BROADWAY REVIVAL OF THE MUSICAL GUYS AND DOLLS (1976)

(Original Caption) NEW YORK: Robert Guillaume took a long time to learn how to get along with people. Some of that abrasiveness remains in his witty and memorable performance as Nathan Detroit in the current Broadway revival of the musical, "Guys and Dolls." Here he appears with Norma Donaldson in a scene from the show.

He garnered a Tony nomination for his portrayal of Nathan Detroit in the Broadway production of "Guys and Dolls" and received rave reviews during his run as the star of the Los Angeles production of "Phantom of the Opera."

It was as the irascible Benson DuBois that Guillaume won his two Emmy Awards. The first for Best Supporting Actor on "Soap" in 1979, the second for Best Actor in 1985, after the Benson character moved on to the series bearing his name. He guided the character through the positions of butler, state budget director, and finally Lieutenant Governor, a transformation that is rarely seen in characters on television today. Raised in St. Louis by his maternal grandmother, Jeannette, Guillaume interrupted his education with a stint in the United States Army. After his discharge, he attended St. Louis University as a business administration major, and Washington University as a voice major; for a while suppressing his true ambition of becoming the first Black tenor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Born with the makings of a brilliant classical voice, Robert's talent was recognized by Washington University's Leslie Chabay, who arranged a scholarship for him to the Aspen (Colorado) Music Festival. This appearance led to a major turning point, Guillaume's apprenticeship at Cleveland's Karamu Theatre. There, under the tutelage of Russell and Rowina Jellife, he made his semi-professional debut in both opera and musical comedy. It wasn't long after Guillaume moved from Cleveland to New York City that he became one of the stage's best-reviewed young actors. His critical triumphs included "Kwamina," "Bambouche," "Tambourines to Glory," "Othello," "Porgy and Bess," "Apple Pie," and "Jacques Brel." He went on to even greater acclaim playing leads in "Purlie" and "Golden Boy;" and, of course in "Guys and Dolls," for his Tony-nominated performance as Nathan Detroit.

Actor Robert Guillaume, actress Sheila Frazier; actors Ron O'Neal and Roscoe Lee Browne in a scene from the Paramount Pictures movie 'Super Fly T.N.T.' circa 1973.

Guillaume has starred in theatrical films, including "The Lion King," "Meteor Man," "Wanted: Dead or Alive," "Seems Like Old Times," "Lean on Me," and "Death Warrant." His work in television has included "John Grin's Christmas" (which he also directed), "The Penthouse," "The Kid with the Broken Halo," "The Kid With the 200 IQ," "Greyhounds," "Children of the Dust," "Panic in the Skies," "His Bodyguard", "Silicon Towers," and “North and South.”

As a television performer on 'Soap,' 'Benson,' 'The Robert Guillaume Show,' and 'Pacific Station,' I sought consciously to avoid the stereotypical sociological traps," says Guillaume.

"I always wanted kids of any background to understand the characters I've portrayed were real, that the solutions they found were true and possible. It has always been important to me to stress that there was no diminution of power or universality just because my characters are African-Americans." Guillaume has also been the recipient of the prestigious Grammy Award for his reading of "The Lion King" book (on audiotape) in the voice of the beloved character, Rafiki. In 1992, Robert and his wife Donna Brown Guillaume, a producer, founded the Confetti Entertainment Company. The company publishes read-along books and tapes, and inspired the award-winning animated HBO television series, "Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child". The series showcases traditional fairy tales, with characters voiced by a multi-ethnic cast of celebrities. Robert's voice is featured as the narrator of each episode.

Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The FRESH PRINCE OF BEL-AIR, THE -- 'You'de Better Shop Around' Episode 19 -- Pictured: (l-r) James Avery as Philip Banks, Robert Guillaume as Pete Fletcher, Will Smith as William 'Will' Smith

Guillaume has recorded three CDs which are available on iTunesand soon can be purchased on through this website: Robertguillaume.com. Classic songs from “Phantom of the Opera” as well as many beloved standards are on his collections. In addition to his work as a performer, Robert Guillaume has generously given both time and resources to numerous charitable and social organizations, among them, TransAfrica, AmFar, Sickle Cell Disease Association of America, the Special Olympics, and is a founding member of Artists for a New South Africa. TV audiences enjoyed Guillaume every week for two seasons as "Isaac Jaffe," executive producer of a national cable sports news show, on the ABC series "Sports Night." He was featured in the 2003 Tim Burton film “Big Fish” starring Albert Finney and Jessica Lange, where he played a small town Southern doctor and was seen in the drama “Century City,” which aired on CBS. Recently Guillaume directed a one-man show, “Looking Over the President’s Shoulder,” at the American Negro Playwright Theatre at Tennessee State University and recently completed shooting an independent film, “Jack Satin” . He played a wheeling-dealing gambler last season on CSI: Crime Scene Investigations, recently spoke at a conference in San Jose, California on behalf of the American Stroke Association and was featured in a May 2010 issue of Jet magazine.

Robert Guillaume Sighted at Spindletop Recording Studio LOS ANGELES, CA - JUNE 22: Robert Guillaume and Webster Lewis sighted on June 22, 1983 at Spindletop Recording Studio in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Ron Galella/WireImage)

Robert Guillaume Pictures and Images

#robert guillaume #MORE THAN JUST THE LION KING

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kelleypataki-blog · 4 years ago

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From her first early morning

I like Scrivens, and my guess is Chuck Fletcher had conversations with the Kings, too, about Scrivens nfl jerseys. The price wasn expensive. But with the Wild goaltending situation in a state of flux with Niklas Backstrom under contract for three years and Josh Harding uncertain health situation, it hard for Fletcher to proceed with any certainty.

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templeofgeek · 5 years ago

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Portrait of a Fangirl is a web series created by Monica Duarte and Emily Schuck. At the core of the project is the importance of telling the stories of women who have found inspiration, growth, and power through fandom.

Episode Four – Tiffany Michelle Cagle

In this episode, we talk to Tiffany Michelle Cagle, previous head baker at Calvary Christian conference center. She explains how fans can build each other up and enhance their own expressions. Tiffany tells us about her fandoms and how she expresses them, debunks the practices of gatekeeping, and tells us how fandom has changed her life for the better.

youtube

Portraits

This project began as a photography project with the goal of capturing the rich and diverse manifestations of fangirling. The idea was to take portraits of geeky women as a way to celebrate their fandoms. We soon came to realize that, even though a picture—as the cliché goes—is indeed worth a thousand words, these women have stories to tell that require a more robust mode of storytelling. Our photos hope to break the stereotype and their stories meant to praise their vast and unique expression—from sports to music, movies to books and history, and countless other fandoms.

Tiffany was the first person we interviewed for this project and she was a huge part of the original inspiration. Her stories and her perspective needed to be told in more than just photos. But nonetheless, the photos, to us, are extremely important in capturing who she is. In Tiffany’s portraits, we can see how creatively her vintage style and fandom heart align. (I mean, check out these tattoos!!!)

She’s drawn to creative and bold expressions of her fandoms. Her buttons on her jacket are a nod to her father’s jean jacket that he wore in the ’80s that she has adopted as her own.

She incorporates fandom into all aspects of her life, baking unique original creations such as Gryffindor butter shortbread, butterbeer fudge, and mind-if-I-Slytherin whoopie pies, among others.

“Mind if I slytherin” whoopie pies

The Nightlock White: chocolate blueberry and ginger cookie

Hogsmeade weekend butter beer fudge

English toffee coffee snickerdoodle for my Ravenclaws

Gryffindor butter shortbread “Golden trio short bread”

Harry Potter House Banners for Golden trio short bread

Tiffany has reminded all of us at Portrait that fandom is a shared experience that has the potential to connect us with one another in a way that nothing else can. Her passions for fandom have introduced her to some of the most important people in her life. It has influenced where and with whom she wants to spend her life. It is safe to say that her introduction to the fandom community has given her a new view of what life should look like and a compassionate and empathic look at people around her. Thanks to the power of community and social media, she had found her place in all of this.

Tiffany has a passion for the Harry Potter Fandom, and especially drawn to the character of Snape. Photo by Sarah Bliss

Tiffany is a big fan of the television show ‘Doctor Who’. Photo by Anne Reed

Lee Payne, Cat Fletcher and Tiffany during her trip to London wearing Harry Potter inspired cosplay and fashion

Tiffany at a Doctor Who and Harry Potter crossover meetup at Gallifrey One 2020

Tiffany holding 9th Doctor fan art from the TV show ‘Doctor Who”. Photo by Anne Reed

Ravenclaw group from a murder mystery group at Geeky Teas and Games in Burbank, CA.

Karen Elva, Cat Fletcher, Tiffany, Lou Woods, and Lee Payne

Tiffany and her dear friend Sarah Bliss

Follow Tiffany on social media:

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“…But times change and so must I. We all change, when you think about it. We are all different people all through our lives and that's okay, that's good you've got to keep moving so long as you remember all the people that you used to be. I will not forget one line of this, not one day, I swear. I will always remember..”-The Doctor Today, I said goodbye to my beloved bakery. I packed up my mugs, my cookbooks, wore my favorite Tardis apron, and whispered my goodbyes. I whispered about the good memories, and of the lessons. The midnight shifts, the bake sales, creating one of kind recipes. I also whispered of the thousands upon thousands of loaves of bread, plates of cookies, and of cake. Within these beautiful walls, a passion was found, a dream was realized and a mad scientist with a whisk was born. She will always have a special place in my heart. From lowly assistant to head baker, she will always be considered one of my greatest accomplishments and chapters in my life. The Lord gave me a beautiful season here and I will never to be able to thank him enough! Thank you to all the people who have been on this journey with me. It’s been one wild ride and i am excited to continue on with you all to my next chapter. I guess there’s only one thing left to say…See you when I see you!💙💙💙 #handsupgirlenjoytheride #daydreambeliever2020 #goodbye #endingofanera #newchapter #tardis #baker #nerdygirl #timetomoveon #lastdance

A post shared by Tiffany C. (@adventuresofthecheekybaker) on Apr 23, 2020 at 7:26pm PDT

More episodes

https://templeofgeek.com/portrait-of-a-fangirl-utahime-cosplay/

https://templeofgeek.com/portrait-of-a-fangirl-episode-two-jordan-ellis/

https://templeofgeek.com/portrait-of-a-fangirl-episode-three-victoria-male/

Check out more on our website, the Portrait of a Fangirl Instagram, Temple of Geek’s Instagram, or on Twitter.

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Tiffany wears her fandom with her wherever she goes! Her tattoos tell a special story about her life, her journey and her love for fandoms. Please share your tattoo stories with us. Tag us in photos or tell us your story in the comments. #portraitofafangirl #fandom #fandomtattoo #geekytattoo

A post shared by Portrait Of A Fangirl (@portraitofafangirl) on Mar 28, 2020 at 6:13am PDT

Video by Monica Duarte Edited by Emily Schuck Produced by Monica Duarte, Emily Schuck, and Danniel Slade

Photography by Monica Duarte

Music: “Girls Say” by Coyote Hearing “Run Until Your Wings grow” by Late Night Feeler “Please” by Wayne Jones “A Quiet Thought” by Wayne Jones

Portrait of a Fangirl: Episode Four - Tiffany Michelle Cagle #portraitofafangirl #geekchic Portrait of a Fangirl is a web series created by Monica Duarte and Emily Schuck. At the core of the project is the importance of telling the stories of women who have found inspiration, growth, and power through fandom.

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jillmckenzie1 · 6 years ago

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Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me

Hearing the right song at the right moment can be life-changing. It can put the love of your life into hyper-focus, pull you back from the abyss, and give you the confidence to stand up to someone twice your size. The right song can feel like it was written just for you, yet millions of people can relate to it.

Those kinds of songs are not easy to create, much less perform in a way that feels heartfelt. Elton John has been in the business of creating precisely those kinds of songs for decades. Fine, maybe his stuff isn’t necessarily for you, but whether you like his music or not is almost irrelevant. John and his work have permeated our culture so deeply that it’s become iconic, omnipresent.

It’s not only his music, but it’s also John himself that contributed to the myth-making. The man has performed thousands of concerts in scores of countries wearing some wild-ass outfits. He’s consumed gallons of alcohol and ingested a galaxy of drugs. He’s proudly out despite having struggled with his sexuality for decades. My dude has done a lot.

That all means that, sooner or later, somebody would make an Elton John biopic. Not just because he led a technicolor life in drab, grey times, but also because movies about rock stars make frickin’ bank. Last year’s Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody wasn’t very good and still made over $800 million at the box office. Should we expect Rocketman, the new film about Elton John, to be a similar financial juggernaut? Probably not, but pound for pound, it’s a better film.

There’s a somewhat clever notion of introducing us to Elton John (Taron Egerton) as he storms off the stage in a spangly devil costume, marches imperiously down a hallway…and enters an AA meeting. It’s here that he’ll regale us about his life and times.* We see the sub-optimal childhood of Reginald Dwight (Kit Connor and Matthew Illesley). His father Stanley (Steven MacIntosh) is distant and seems to have close to zero interest in him. His mother Sheila (Bryce Dallas Howard) isn’t much better, and she deals with the bitterness of her life through promiscuity and sarcasm.

As much as that all sucks, young Reggie has a few things going for him. The first is that he has the ability to intuitively understand music and copy it on the piano. The second is his grandmother Ivy (Gemma Jones) who believes in him. She encourages him to apply to the Royal Academy of Music. The third is, as a young man, his meeting with budding songwriter Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell).

Taupin’s lyrics are clever and emotional, and Reggie puts his nearly mystical ability to work in creating musical arrangements. Their partnership is fruitful. So much so that Reggie’s career starts to explode. Perhaps realizing that the masses aren’t going to rapturously chant, “WE WANT REGINALD DWIGHT,” Reggie changes his name to…drum roll…Elton John.

From there, we see Elton play his legendary show at The Troubadour in Los Angeles. Spinning headlines and glittery montages show us Elton sprinting up the charts. He earns gold records, buys lots of stuff, and descends further into drug use. Will his new manager John Reid (Richard Madden) provide him with the love and acceptance he craves? Oh, absolutely not. Can he pull himself out of the abyss in time? Obviously, he’s still alive!

Ready to play the Rock Star Biopic Drinking Game? Take a drink when (insert rock star) demonstrates preternatural musical skill during childhood! Take a drink when (insert rock star) has their big break! Take a drink when (insert rock star) inhales a mountain of cocaine and acts obnoxious! Take a drink when (insert rock star) is told by their friend/lover/spouse/manager/bandmate that, “Maybe you need to slow down.” On second thought, don’t play that game during Rocketman, because if you do, you’ll die.

I used to think that audiences would immediately see through the pandering checking of boxes in so many music biopics and respond with scorn. I’ve since learned two things. First, by and large, audiences don’t care, since they’re showing up to tap their feet along to the greatest hits. That’s why they call it a “jukebox musical,” right? Second, maybe that’s okay if the biopic in question is made with at least a bit of creativity.

Director Dexter Fletcher had a couple of well-played opportunities recently. The first was developing a positive professional relationship with Taron Egerton in 2015’s Eddie the Eagle. The second was saving Bohemian Rhapsody after the firing of disgraced filmmaker Bryan Singer. Together, those got Fletcher the job directing Rocketman. He’s made a great-looking film filled with eye-popping costumes and lush sets. On the one hand, Dexter wisely chose to make a good chunk of the movie a musical, and the moments where the cast spontaneously breaks into song and dance are daring. Additionally, an R-rating allows Dexter to be more open about John’s life and sexuality.**

On the other hand? For every moment where an entire fairground sings “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” we have three or four moments that seem to be playing my beloved Rock Star Biopic Drinking Game. I know that, as a critic, I’m only supposed to review what’s on the screen and not pine for what could have been. But when Fletcher makes a film that lurches between a strong union of filmmaking and music, then awkwardly downshifts to a narrative that’s annoyingly predictable, I’m gonna be a little wistful for what might have been. Could you imagine a full Elton John musical? I can, and that’s a little tragic.

Speaking of music, you’ll remember that Bohemian Rhapsody concluded with Queen’s triumphant live performance at Live Aid, and that decision served to propel the audience out on a high note. Here, the film somewhat obviously ends with “I’m Still Standing.” It’s a pretty good song, but admit it — it’s not your favorite Elton John song. Rocketman needs to end powerfully, instead of merely satisfactorily. Besides, as my wife put it, “I’m Still Standing” isn’t even as good as “Benny and the Jets,” for God’s sake.

The screenplay by Lee Hall doesn’t help much. Much like Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman requires exactly zero heavy lifting from the audience. Over and over, the film hammers us with the point that Elton’s self-destructive tendencies come from a desire to be loved and gain approval. That’s fine, and from a psychological approach, that’s probably quite accurate. But instead of spoon-feeding the audience, why couldn’t the script display more sophistication? There’s even a scene during Elton’s AA session that’s so obnoxiously obvious, it took a certain kind of demented courage to make it in the first place. As I’ve said before, and to steal an appropriate line from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the subtext has become text.

You’re probably wondering how the cast manages with such a weird fusion. For the most part, they’re solid. Let’s first talk about Bryce Dallas Howard as Sheila. Howard is a genuinely talented performer, and I’ve seen her do good work, particularly in the lovely Pete’s Dragon. I’m telling you that because she’s extremely miscast here. God knows she tries, but her dodgy English accent and distracting performance don’t do her any favors.

However, she and everyone else is overshadowed by Taron Egerton’s explosive performance. I know, Egerton doesn’t quite look like or sound like Elton John. However, he captures the essence of the man, the brassy confidence used as a shield, the temper tantrums, the moments of artistic genius. It also helps that Egerton did all of his own singing and dancing, and whether he’s pounding away at the piano or quietly walking through a party while singing, he’s magnetic.

As far as I can tell, Rocketman is going to be a success. Since fewer people than ever are physically going to the movies, I’ll take it as a good thing that a quality non-franchise film aimed at adults is doing well. Rocketman is a solidly good film, but Elton John has lived a life of gigantic peaks and valleys. He deserves a film that compliments his life.

*I desperately wanted one of the other members of the AA group to be pissed off that they didn’t get a chance to talk about their problems.

**Unsurprisingly, that artistic honesty isn’t going over well with everybody. You can read more here about Russia censoring five minutes of the movie due to “homosexual propaganda.”

from Blog https://ondenver.com/dont-let-the-sun-go-down-on-me/

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weekendwarriorblog · 6 years ago

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WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND November 2, 2018 - Bohemian Rhapsody, Nutcracker and the Four Realms, Nobody’s Fool

It’s November…hurray! Usually, this would mean the end of the slower fall months (not this year!) and the start of the profitable holiday movie season (ditto!), but we’re going to start off a little slower with a couple medium-profile films before building to the more anticipated holiday tentpoles over the next couple weeks.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY (20thCentury Fox)

Probably the most high-profile release this weekend is this biopic about Freddie Mercury and ‘70s/’80s rock legends Queen, which has been anticipated by so many of the band’s fans but has also been plagued from the early days of development with actors and writers on then off the project, plus even bigger problems once it started shooting.

Director Bryan Singer took over the project a few years back as his follow-up to his recent X-Men sequels, and Singer’s involvement is part of the controversy surrounding the film since he was fired halfway through filming for vague reasons involving his private life. A few years earlier, Singer was accused of sexual assault long before the #MeToo movement that took down his good friend and collaborator Kevin Spacey, but Eddie the Eagle director Brendan Fletcher took over the project. Only Singer received directing credit, and you have to assume that even some of the critics who saw the movie might have watched the movie with the above in mind. There’s also been rumors that there will be a new exposé about Singer published this week, which will bring these things back to the forefront. (Other movies where directors were replaced like Justice League and Solo also received mostly negative reviews.)

There’s so many things to consider for this movie but the first and foremost is that it’s the most high-profile leading role for Rami Malek, the Emmy-winning actor who broke out from playing the lead in USA’s Mr. Robot. Malek has serious Oscar chances for his portrayal of Freddie Mercury – a role that was once going to be played by Sacha Baron Cohen – and even the critics who panned the film have said that he’s the best part of the movie. The movie also stars Lucy Boynton (Sing Street, Apostle), Ben Hardy, Joseph Mazzelo, Aidan Gillen and Gwilym Lee as Brian May, but no one is really talking about them much.

There’s an interesting dichotomy about Queen in that it’s considered hard rock or even metal but it was a rock band with a predominantly gay lead singer, which likely helped them acquire some level of gay audience. That audience might also be interested in seeing how Freddie’s sexuality is handled, because there were a lot of concerns that that side of Freddie’s lifestyle and his death from AIDS has been softened up for the movie.

But will the macho guys who chant “We Will Rock You” and sing “We Are the Champions” at football games and generally love Queen��s music go out to see a movie about the band’s openly bisexual frontman that includes a number of strong homosexual scenes (as much as PG-13 will allow). Equally, there are worries that Freddie’s gay side and other debauchery has been softened up in the movie for that very reason.

At one point, I thought this could match the opening of A Star is Born, but with the mixed reviews so far and the potential backlash against Bryan Singer, that could keep it somewhere in the mid-$30 millions, possibly even lower. We’ll have to see how audiences react before determining if it could be another $100 million plus grosser or falls just short.

If interested, you can also read my positive review of Bohemian Rhapsody RIGHT HERE.

NUTCRACKER AND THE FOUR REALMS (Walt Disney Pictures)

What kind of world are we living in where the “sure-fire” Disney holiday movie based on one of the most beloved ballets ever, could possibly bomb? That’s the question that some might be asking on Monday as the Mouse House releases one of its weakest movies in years, because this spin on the Tchaikovsky ballet. I haven’t seen the movie yet, because just like every Disney movie for the last two years, I haven’t been invited to attend a press screening, so I’ll have to just assume the movie is bad because the trailers look like shit.

Of course, there have been other Nutcracker movies, but you assume that when Disney takes over a property (like The Muppets), it will automatically attract an even bigger family audience, since they have marketing to family audiences down to a science.

This film was originally directed by Swedish filmmaker Lasse Hallström, but Joe Johnston (Captain America: The First Avenger) took over as a co-director to finish the movie when Hallstrom wasn’t available for reshoots, and they’re both credited.

The film does have a great cast surrounding young Mackenzie Foy (no relation to Claire), which include Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and Richard E. Grant, but the movie is being promoted by those from other avenues of art including ballet dancer Misty Copeland and Andrea and son Matteo Bocelli from the world of opera doing the original song “Fall on Me*” for the film. (*Mark my words: this song will get nominated for an Oscar.)

In previous years, a family film kicking off November would do well since there’s a lack of family films in theaters, but this year is different, because we’ve already had The House with a Clock in its Walls, Goosebumps and Smallfoot, so kids probably won’t be driven to go to the movies for this one.

My first instinct is that there’s no way this movie makes $20 million, but this is Disney, a company that has the family audience wrapped around its corporate finger, so it’s likely to make more than $20 million only because Disney will saturate theaters with the “Nutcracker” name-brand helping to bring in important family business.

NOBODY’S FOOL (Paramount Players)

The other bit of cross-programming from the kiddie film and the all-white Queen biopic is the latest movie from Tyler Perry, as he shifts his deal over to the newly-formed Paramount Players. This is the second film of the year from the popular playwright, although his thriller Tyler Perry’s Acrimony was one of his lower money makers, grossing just $43.5 million, which is on the lower end for his films. Before that, Perry had slightly more success with last year’s Boo 2! Which grossed just $47.3 million compared to the $73.2 million grossed by Boo!A Madea Halloween a year earlier.

Nobody’s Fool is one of Perry’s first comedies not starring his cross-dressing character Madea, who seems to be the primary draw for many of his bigger films, so it will be interesting to see how this will fare without Madea. For this one, Perry is joined by the ever-popular Tiffany Haddish, coming off the success of Night School ($70 million grossed so far)and Ike Barinholtz’s indie The Oath. She plays a woman released from prison whose sister (Tika Sumpter, who appeared in the hit Ride Along movies) has been in an online relationship with a man who Haddish’s character believes isn’t real. Hilarity ensues.

The movie also stars Omari Hardwick from Power, who recently appeared in the Sundance hit Sorry to Bother You, as well as veteran Whoopi Goldberg, who appeared in Perry’s adaptation of For Colored Girls. Even with an impressive African-American cast, much of the film is riding on the recent success and popularity of Haddish.

The premise and marketing for the film has been fairly spot-on, not bad for Paramount, who haven’t had many hits with African-Americans in recent years other than maybe Denzel Washington’s Fences, which rode its Oscar buzz to $58 million from a mid-December limited release. The only other African-American targeted film from the studio was Chris Rock’s Top Five, which wowed critics at Toronto but only grossed $25.3 million domestically.

In most cases, I could see this movie opening with $20 million based on the combination of Perry and Haddish’s popularity, but I feel this is coming into a market with other options including Fox’s The Hate U Give and that might keep it just below. Having not seen the movie and there being no reviews, it’s hard to tell whether Perry’s fans will help give it legs over the rest of the month or it will get swallowed up by stronger films (like Steve McQueen’s Widows).

A couple wider expansions this weekend include Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake going into 250 theaters and the family drama Beautiful Boy expanding into 350 theaters, although it’s hard to think either will make more than $2.5 million, which would be required to break into the top 10. After last week’s surprise expansion of Jonah Hill’s Mid90s, I’m not sure what to expect from either of these films that have done just as well in their platform releases.

Considering that two or three of the new releases will dominate, this week’s Top 10 should look something like this…

1. Bohemian Rhapsody (20thCentury Fox) - $37.5 million* N/A 2. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (Disney) - $21.3* million N/A 3. Nobody’s Fool (Paramount) - $18 million N/A 4. Halloween(Universal) - $14.1 million -55% 5. A Star is Born ��(Warner Bros.) - $9.5 million -32% 6. Venom (Sony) - $5.5 million -48% 7. Goosebumps: Haunted Halloween (Sony) - $4 million -45% 8. The Hate U Give (20thCentury Fox) - $3.3 million -35% 9. Hunter Killer (Lionsgate/Summit) - $3 million -55% 10. First Man (Universal) – $2.5 million -49%

* A couple minor changes with the updated theater counts for the weekend, although I’m not going too crazy with either movie, since they both have things working against them.

LIMITED RELEASES

The good news this weekend -- especially if you have no interest in any of the wide releases above and are in a big city -- is that there are a lot of great specialty options, and actually three movies I highly recommend.

First up is Joel Edgerton’s second film as a director BOY ERASED (Focus), based on Garrard Conley’s memoir and starring Lucas Hedges as Jared, a boy with a preacher father (Russell Crowe) and worrying mother (Nicole Kidman) who is sent to conversion therapy under the tutelage of Victor Sykes (played by Edgerton) in hopes of “curing” his gayness. This powerful and timely drama opens in New York, L.A. and San Francisco this Friday and then expands to other cities on Nov. 9. I was really impressed with Edgerton’s adaptation of a book that I’ve yet to read, but also, Lucas Hedges proves that he’s the real-deal with a performance that bolsters his Oscar nomination for Manchester by the Sea a few years back. You can read my interview with Joel Edgerton over on NEXTBESTPICTURE.com.

Rosamund Pike gives a similarly compelling performance as war journalist Marie Colvin in A PRIVATE WAR (Aviron), directed by Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land, City of Ghosts), as it follows her daring exploits trying to get exclusive stories in the Middle East that eventually led to her death in Syria. Pike is fantastic in the film, really embodying Marie Colvin, particularly her heavy Long Island accent that really adds to the illusion. Jamie Dornan from Fifty Shades of Grey is also good as Marie’s photographer Paul Conroy, and the film also stars Stanley Tucci and Tom Hollander. It opens in select cities, but I’m hoping it will expand wider this month.

Over a year since it debuted in Toronto’s Midnight Madness section where it won the People’s Choice Award, BODIED (YouTube Originals/Neon) from Torque (and music video) director Joseph Khan will open in select cities. It stars Calum Worthy as Adam, who becomes interested in battle rap as a thesis subject until he becomes obsessed with it and starts taking part in them himself. I loved this movie when I saw it at Sundance earlier this year and sadly, I didn’t have a chance to see it a second time before its release but hopefully Neon will help get it out into theaters before it ends up on YouTube’s premium streaming network.

Tying into their streaming releases, Netflix will give Orson Welles’ long-lost and unfinished The Other Side of the Wind and Morgan Neville’s related doc They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. Apparently, Welles was filming this over the course of fifteen years in what would have been the precursor for all those found footage movies I hate so much. The late John Huston plays a filmmaker throwing a party to show a rough cut of his latest “masterpiece” – and it’s obvious that whatever Welles was going for did not translate well into whatever was put together (by the likes of producer Frank Marshall and others) after his death. You can read more about the former in my New York Film Festival coverage, but both will stream on Netflix as well as get a nominal New York (IFC Center) and L.A. release.

Although Halloween is almost over (depending on when I get this posted), that doesn’t mean there won’t be a few more indie horror/thrillers this weekend.

For those who didn’t get enough creepy nun horror with The Nun, there’s Tommy Bertelsen’s Welcome to Mercy (IFC Midnight) starring Kristen Ruhlin (also the screenwriter) as a single mother named Madaline, who is struck with stigmata (essentially bleeding on the palms), so she’s sent to a remote convent where her and her friend August must confront the demons trying to possess her. It will get the typical limited run and VOD release of most IFC Midnight films.

The absence of the impending Halloween is also not gonna stop Chris von Hoffman’s horror/thriller Monster Party (RLJE Films), which stars Julian McMahon and is about three thieves who post a daring heist posed as waiters at a fancy Malibu dinner party only to learn that the dinner guests are not what they seem, forcing them to fight a desperate battle to escape.

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Opening at the Metrograph Friday is Shevaun Mizrahi’s Distant Constellation (Grasshopper Film), a cinema-verité doc filmed in a Turkish retirement home where the inhabitants talk about their lives and two of them ride an elevator up and down. This really wasn’t my kind of doc, although I’m sure others will find it compelling.

German filmmaker Margaret von Trotta pays homage to the Swedish filmmaker that inspired her with Searching for Ingmar Bergman (Oscilloscope Labs), which opens at the Quad Cinema on Friday. Co-directed by Felix Moeller and Bettina Böhler, the documentary is made-up of interviews with his collaborators like Liv Ullman, as well as other filmmakers he’s inspired such as Olivier Assayas. It will open in L.A. on Nov. 9 and other cities to follow.

A little mix-up last weekend, because I thought the documentary Maria by Callas (Sony Classics) from filmmaker Tom Volf opened last weekend, but it actually opens in New York and L.A. on Friday. Its title is fairly self-evident… that is, if you know opera (as I do).

I also somehow didn’t include Texan filmmaker Patrick Wang’s two-feature film A Bread Factory Part One and Two last weekend, but his second film The Grief of Others (In the Family LLC) will follow them at the Village East Cinema in New York and Laemmle Monica in L.A. (You can still see both parts of A Bread Factory starring Tyne Daly and Elisabeth Henryin those cities Weds night and Thursday.) The Grief of Others deals with the death of a baby mere days after its birth and how the parents and family try to get back to their previous lives.

South African director Nosipho Dumisa’s thriller Number 37 (Dark Star Pictures) will open in L.A. at the Laemmle’s Glendale and on Nov. 9 in New York at the Cinema Village. Set in the down-and-out neighborhood of Cape Flats, the film (based on Dumisa’s short of the same name) looks at the residents of one block of apartments filled with all sorts of criminals, low-life as well as a few cops. One drug trafficker has lost the use of his legs so he gets out to the rest of the world using his binoculars but before you can say, “Hey, this is the same plot as Hitchcock’s Rear Window!” he’s hatched a get-rich blackmail scheme after witnessing a crime. Dumisa is one of South Africa’s first black female feature directors and her film won the Cheval Noir at Fantasia in Montreal over the summer after premiering at SXSW.

STREAMING

As mentioned above, Netflix will start streaming the long-lost unfinished Orson Welles film THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND as well as Morgan Neville’s related doc They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, which is about the making of that movie. The family holiday comedy The Holiday Calendar stars Kat Graham as a photographer who discovers an advent calendar that might be telling her future. Also, streaming Friday is House of Cards Season 6… I haven’t even watched the first five seasons and not sure if I should bother at this point.

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

Spring Dreams: The Cinema of Huang Ji & Yang Lina features four movies from the two woman directors from China, including Egg and Stone (2012), Foolish Bird (2017), Looking for the Rain (2013) and Old Men(1999) – I have never seen (or even heard) of any of these films but I trust the Metrograph’s programmers/curators. This weekend’s Playtime: Family Matinees is the animated The Secret of Nimh, showing on Saturday and Sunday at 11AM.

FILM FORUM (NYC):

Visconti’s Senso continues to show as well as the American remake The Wanton Contessa on Sunday afternoon.

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):

Although it’s already sold out, the 50thanniversary of the Monkees concert movie Head with Mike Nesmith and Micky Dolenz in person takes place on Thursday night.

AERO (LA):

Charlize Person will be there on Thursday night to show a double feature of her recent film Tully and Patty Jenkins’ 2003 movie Monster, for which Theron won an Oscar. Friday sees a double feature of Harold Becker’s thrillers Sea of Love and Malice, and he’ll be there in person as well. Krasinski will show A Quiet Place on Saturday night… yeah, I know it only came out six months ago.

QUAD CINEMA (NYC):

In conjunction with the release of her new doc Looking for Ingmar Berman (see above), the Quad will have a special Margarethe von Trotta: The Political is Personal retrospective that includes most of her films like Rosa Luxemburg, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (on a special imported 35mm print), Sheer Madnessas well as some of the films she’s appeared in like Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore and The American Soldier. I have not seen a single one of these.

IFC CENTER (NYC)

I just realized this past week the connection between the IFC Center’s Coen Brothers and Shaw Brothers retrospectives… it wasn’t so obvious until I saw both names on the marquee. The Coens’ Weekend Classics this week is the Oscar-winning Fargo (1996) – both at 11AM and at midnight Friday and Saturday --while the Shaw Brothers offering at midnight Friday and Saturday is Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (1972). Directed by Orson Welles ends on Thursday with Chimes at Midnight (1965)andF for Fake(1973).

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART (LA):

The 1979 doc The War at Homewill open here with director Glenn Silberg in person doing Q&As on Friday and Saturday night.

FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER (NYC):

A new addition to this section! The beloved uptown theaters of the Film Society of Lincoln Center! Okay, there’s nothing repertory starting this week but next week, for sure.

BAM CINEMATEK (NYC):

Another new addition! On Friday, they’re screening Ousmane Sembene’s 1966 film Black Girl with shorts Fannie’s Film and Fucked Like a Star. It kick-offs BAM’s program Women at Work: The Domestic is Not Free, a series that includes Todd Haynes’ 1995 film Safe, starring Julianne Moore, as well as the amazing Brazilian film Good Manners.

MOMA (NYC):

Modern Matinees: Vincent Price is over but Catalan Cinema’s Radical Years continues through Nov. 10

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):

The self-explanatory The Coen Brothers Go West runs from Friday to Nov. 18, including Blood Simple, No Country for Old Men, True Grit and more, leading up to their Western anthology The Ballad of Buster Skruggs, which is released on Nov. 16.

#WhatToWatchThisWeekend TheWeekendWarrior BohemianRhapsody BoxOffice Movies Reviews Nutcracker NobodysFool BoyErased

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newyorktheater · 7 years ago

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This seems the right day to feature Ann Harada, in the original cast of Avenue Q, as a character named Christmas Eve.

Today, we look back at 2017, with the top New York theater stories of 2017, including details on 25 of the people the theater community lost this year. We look ahead with the Broadway Spring 2018 Preview Guide: A Season of Strong Women And we look at the present too — Christmas week Broadway schedule, including 11 Broadway shows with matinees on Christmas Eve.

Week in New York Theater Reviews

What the British critics thought of Hamilton – and specifically King George III

Favorite New York Stage Performers of 2017

Week In New York Theater News

Summer: The Donna Summer Musical — @DonnaSummerBway — will open at the Lunt Fontanne on April 23, 2018 – with the songs she made famous, such as “Hot Stuff,” and book by Colman Domingo, Robert Cary and Des McAnuff, who’s also directing (pic from La Jolla Playhouse production.)

The New Tax Law and The Theater

The new tax bill includes one provision that helps Broadway, and others that hurt

According to an analysis by @ActorsEquity last week, reported by @THR: some working actors would see their taxes almost quadruple as a result of new tax plan https://t.co/hrHiSNc27C

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) December 20, 2017

How will the final tax plan (soon to be passed into law) affect the arts. @Americans4Arts weighs in: Charitable giving expected to take a hit.https://t.co/ZBn6Jpb9S7

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) December 20, 2017

Marin Ireland, who’s been working for 3 years (way pre-Weinstein) to help the theater community respond effectively to sexual harassment, will launch in January the “Theatrical Community Sexual Harassment Education and Mediation Pilot Project”

We are thrilled to have @johnlegend join us as Jesus for @JCSTheMusical Live! this Easter #TeamALW https://t.co/dvTmlhgMCC

— Andrew Lloyd Webber (@OfficialALW) December 19, 2017

Joining the cast of @OnceIslandBway on January 8: @normlewis777 as Agwe & @tamyragray as Papa Ge, while 2 regular cast members on leave (@MerleDandridge to shoot TV series @GreenleafOWN)https://t.co/UQX5aI4XHy pic.twitter.com/bJ4jsOdJc6

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) December 19, 2017

Grateful & Excited to say the great Ms. Phylicia Rashad will be directing Our Lady of 121st in the Spring at The Signature Theater. #NYC #Theater pic.twitter.com/G2ujFY7rTc

— Stephen Adly Guirgis (@CookieRiverside) December 18, 2017

Abrons Arts Center, Spring 2018 season:

In Pollock, written by Fabrice Melquiot and directed by Paul Desveaux, the beautifully tragic relationship of infamous artists Jackson Pollock (Jim Fletcher) and Lee Krasner (Birgit Huppuch) is rendered on stage. (February 15–25)

Writer and actor Modesto Flako Jimenez conjures his beloved borough in ¡Oye! For My Dear Brooklyn, a bilingual elegy, told through poems, projections, and music. (March 15–31)

In The Wholehearted, from co-creators Deborah Stein and Suli Holum, spectators have a ringside seat for a blood pumping revenge tragedy and intimate tribute to lost love. (March 16-April 1)

In Aloha, Aloha or When I Was Queen, playwright and performer Eliza Bent uses the creation of a childhood home movie to lead audiences on a journey that grapples with personal history, legacy, and cultural appropriation. (April 4-21)

Written by Kate Scelsa for Elevator Repair Service and directed by John Collins, Everyone’s Fine with Virginia Woolf features veterans of the ensemble. In this parody of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, no one is left unscathed by Martha’s feminist ambitions. (June 1–24)

Just minutes from Downtown Manhattan, Awesome Grotto from the Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble endeavors to serve all New Yorkers as a site for reflection on the spiritual potential of digital connectivity. (June 7-30)

.@reneesmusings sang inside an MRI machine at @NIH (here she is looking at her brain scan) to help scientists figure out how to use music not just to comfort the sick, but to heal them.https://t.co/golzb4sllo pic.twitter.com/6zjWqsXb2y

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) December 22, 2017

RIP 2017

Christmas Week Schedule. Lost in 2017. Week in New York Theater This seems the right day to feature Ann Harada, in the original cast of Avenue Q, as a character named Christmas Eve.

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oselatra · 7 years ago

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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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