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CELEBRATING THE ARTS IN ARKANSAS

FILMISSUE

The FEATURINGThe Miller Brothers Matthew WolfeDaniel Campbell Kathryn TuckerGraham Gordy Gabe MayhanColley Bailey Marlane BarnesDrive-in Speakerbox Matt Owen

Illustration by Beth Post

38 good golly, miss bonnieSinger/songwriter Bonnie Montgomery talks about writing and recording her new EP.

MUSIC

26 reinventing the familiarLittle Rock artist Matt Owen puts a new twist on our favorite film posters. It’s a hobby that’s quickly becoming a vocation.

ART EVENTS32 angels at crystal bridges

Crystal Bridges hosts “Angels & Tomboys” exhibit on girls in 19th century art. Explore the changing depictions of girls in art.

DRINK40 beer gets crafty

Northwest Arkansas is gaining steam as the craft brewery capitol of the state.

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idleclassmag.com 3

A PUBLICATION OF RIOT ACT MEDIA, LLC

P.O. Box 4853Fayetteville, AR 72702

editorial@idleclassmag.comEDITOR/PUBLISHER

Kody Ford

MANAGING EDITORAndrew McClain

CONTRIBUTING EDITORSMarty ShutterKatie Wyatt

EDITOR-AT-LARGEJeremy Glover

CONTRIBUTORSMelissa ArensJoshua AsanteColley Bailey

Schuler BensonClaire BrankinVikram Desai

Taylor GladwinTaraf Abu Hamdan

Nick HolmesJade HowardSteve Hintz

Gerard MatthewsAddison Morgan

John David PittmanBeth Post

Dero SanfordLance St. LaurentKathryn Tucker

Katherine WhitworthJessica Williams

Cover by Matt Owen

Film is a complex medium. As a viewer, we analyze it as a piece of entertainment. Did we laugh? Did we cry? Did we jump? It’s the sum of its parts - the images, the acting, the story, the music. We often forget that the movie, whether its a $200 million comic book epic with gunfire, explosions and flying men in tights or a simple, character-driven indie feature, is the result of teamwork. It started with a writer’s idea before moving up the chain to the direc-tor, the producers, the actors, even the sound engineer. Film is truly a collaborative effort. All of these people work together to tell a story and, for better or worse, create a product for us to enjoy. It’s a lot like creating a magazine. The Idle Class would be nothing without the writers, photogra-phers and artists who work together to make this happen. Just like in filmmaking, we have to seek funding. And, as always, we thank the businesses who believe in what we are doing and want to sup-port the arts in Arkansas. Please support them. This issue is dedicated to the people who make the movies we love. And on a more personal note, to Dr. Thomas Frentz, who taught a grad student at the University of Arkansas to look beneath the surface of a film and find the true meaning of a story. We hope you like our third issue. Thanks for reading.

Kody FordEditor/Publisher

EDITOR'S NOTE

Photo by Vikram Desai

FOLLOW US:

4 idleclassmag.com

A PUBLICATION OF RIOT ACT MEDIA, LLC

P.O. Box 4853Fayetteville, AR 72702

editorial@idleclassmag.comEDITOR/PUBLISHER

Kody Ford

MANAGING EDITORAndrew McClain

CONTRIBUTING EDITORSMarty ShutterKatie Wyatt

EDITOR-AT-LARGEJeremy Glover

CONTRIBUTORSMelissa ArensJoshua AsanteColley Bailey

Schuler BensonClaire BrankinVikram Desai

Taylor GladwinTaraf Abu Hamdan

Nick HolmesJade HowardSteve Hintz

Gerard MatthewsAddison Morgan

John David PittmanBeth Post

Dero SanfordLance St. LaurentKathryn Tucker

Katherine WhitworthJessica Williams

Cover by Matt Owen

idleclassmag.com 5

JOSH & MILES MILLER say the burgeoning Arkansas film scene is legit as billed. They also don’t care if their movies creep you out a little.

The Arkansas

New WaveWORDS / GERARD MATTHEWS PHOTOS / KATHRYN TUCKER

THIS EARLY IN THEIR CAREER, THERE’S A LOT ABOUT the Arkansas born and bred Miller Brothers that makes you think of that other fairly famous filmmaking fraternal duo that goes by the name of Coen. Their first short film, Pillow, spun a haunting little yarn about a pair of seemingly ne’er-do-well brothers on an endless quest to please their bed-ridden mother. The film was practically dialogue-less, using dead air, knowing glances, eerie tunes, and a sparse landscape to tell a story at once familiar and impossibly fantastic. The brothers Miller, Josh and Miles, are now setting off on their second endeavor, a full-length feature titled All the Birds Have Flown South. It’s been billed by the Millers as “a con-temporary Southern Gothic psychological thriller set against the frigid winter of the American South.” The Idle Class caught up with Josh and Miles to talk about mood, “mak-ing it,” and what it means to be part of the Natural State’s burgeoning film scene.

IC: I just finished watching Pillow and the best word I can come up with to describe it is “unsettling.” Was that the intended emotion you wanted folks to leave with? What were you guys trying to say with that short film and will you be exploring the same kind of themes or motifs in your upcom-ing feature?

JM: “Unsettling” is music to our ears. That’s really just the kinds of stories we’re interested in telling right now. Pillow does have a comedic undertone that will not be found in our feature, All the Birds Have Flown South. Pillow is a fantasy piece, where ATBHFS is grounded in reality. We wanted to talk about some of the same stuff: control, death, and the cycle of violence will be found in both, as well as elements of magic realism.

MM: Southern Gothic is what we are about, and then we add a dash of magic. Everything we write seems to naturally fall into that kind of world. We’re really products of the South and will continue to explore its unique history, religions, superstitions, and traditions. There will always be a flavor in the themes/motifs of our films. I guess you could say that flavor is dark.

IC: Pillow made the rounds and won some awards at various film festivals. Has that success made it easier to get going on this next project?

JM: Yes and no. Pillow served its purpose in showing that we could execute a vision from concept through production and marketing. In that regard, it’s helped us grow as producers and directors. We learned a lot making it. In terms of helping secure funding for our feature, it hasn’t helped on a signifi-cant level. Raising money for the “next film” will always be a challenge. That seems to be the nature of the business.

MM: It really had an amazing run in the festival circuit. Awards were won for not only the whole, but for many de-partments of the project as individuals. I’m very active in the festival world and have participated in it to the extreme. It‘s been an education and it has completely changed my life. I’ve become close friends with many of the people I’ve met

over the last couple of years and I have seen their support benefit us in ways that are pretty unimaginable.

IC: Where are you at with All the Birds Have Flown South? At what stage in the process are you? Will you be filming it here?

JM: The script is complete and we’ve started casting. We’re also in the process of raising money. Our plan is to shoot around central Arkansas in January.

MM: It’s ready. We have been working on it for years now. It’s all about funding at this point. I would love to shoot everything we do in Arkansas. It has everything natural or manmade that we need. The state really becomes a character, and has a huge influence that adds gravity – a weight – to our stories.

IC: The Arkansas film scene has grown over the years. The Little Rock Film Festival is more and more popular and the success of names like Jeff Nichols has been great. There also seems to be more buy-in from the state. Is the “scene” really on the up-and-up as it seems or how would you characterize the state of Arkansas film at the moment?

JM: The film scene in Arkansas is, without a doubt, the healthiest it’s ever been. Jeff [Nichols], Courtney Pledger, the Renaud brothers and [the state] film commissioner, Chris-topher Crane, have all made huge impacts on the commu-nity. A lot of other folks have been instrumental as well. Jeff choosing to come back home to shoot Mud is a monumental moment for film in Arkansas. The Renaud brothers starting the Little Rock Film Festival in 2007 was a watershed mo-ment, too. We’re also very lucky to have Courtney Pledger in Little Rock running AMPI (Arkansas Motion Picture Institute). Another milestone happened earlier this year, when the Arkansas legislature amended the 2009 law increasing film incentives. It feels like the puzzle is coming together.

MM: Arkansas has a great reputation at the moment for great stories, high production value, and a great film festival. I’ve been to many festivals that had multiple Arkansas films. I call it the Arkansas Invasion. It makes me really, really happy to see the community getting the recognition they’ve earned. I hear positive interest from coast to coast.

IC: Earlier When people talk about “making it.” What would that mean for you guys? What would that look like?

JM: Honestly, we just want the opportunity to tell our stories. But it would be kind of nice to make enough money to pay our bills while doing it.

MM: I think for me it just means having the luxury of creat-ing, supporting oneself through this passion, and just having total freedom to do the kinds of projects we want to do.

VISIT: FACEBOOK.COM/THEMILLERBROS

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DON’T KNOCK

HUSTLEAt age 30, Matthew Wolfe, wrote, co-directed & starred in an award-winning independent feature. He’d never made a film in his life. A few years later, with a buzz-worthy sports documentary under his belt, he’s ready for the next step.

WORDS / STEVE HINTZ PHOTO / JADE HOWARD

THE

idleclassmag.com 9

MATTHEW WOLFE IS THE TYPE OF GUY WHO’S GOING to get it done, one of those guys who has an idea and gets to work on it. His debut film, Left/Right, co-directed with his brother Todd, about the angst of a brazen, young execu-tive in big city Atlanta, GA, who returns home to small-town Danville, PA, to finish up college, won awards - best actor, best screenplay, best film - at almost every festival that he entered. Did I mention he had never acted, written, or shot a film in his (at the time) 30 years on the planet? And he got Dan the Automator to do the soundtrack! Dan the Automator! Google him, then listen to his music. Hailing from Danville, which serves as his muse in the film, Wolfe started shooting movies at a young age. “I remember in 7th grade, I asked for a Fisher-Price PXL2000 for Christmas. It was a real video camera that re-corded onto audio cassettes. It was ahead of its time. Black and white, pixelated video. I would take it to school and shoot in the hallways and in the classroom and stuff. “But then, as you grow up, you have guidance counsel-ors that tell you need to go to college, because you need to earn a living. So you put the camera down and you take the safe path. So yeah, after I learned how to earn a living, I took a stab at the camera again,” he explained. Like the Coens and the Hughes brothers, two siblings working on a film seems to create movie magic, and Wolfe and his older brother Todd are no exception. “When I’m able to work with my brother, it’s easy to pull off the good cop/bad cop thing,” Matthew said. “And we can pretty much read each other’s mind, like those Crimson Twins from G.I. Joe.” Although he has had success with his brother, he de-cided to fly solo on his most recently completed project. Having called Fayetteville a second home for the past ten years, Wolfe found himself intrigued by the controversy surrounding the University of Arkansas’ courtship of Spring-dale wunderkind Mitch Mustain and his dramatic departure. Over the years, it became a story he wanted to explore. Be-ing the kind of guy that he is, he went for it. The Identity Theft of Mitch Mustain, his documentary on the former Razorback quarterback and his fall from being “the closest thing Arkansas has had to a Lebron James type

talent” into obscurity, debuted at the Little Rock Film Festi-val. The film, narrated by coaching legend Nolan Richard-son, is currently going up the food chain at ESPN and has created quite a buzz with local sports aficionados. Wolfe said he likes to make movies that he’d want to see. “I know, personally, that if I try to create a story for someone else or try to make someone else happy, I’m not going to get past page one; it’s not going to happen. Is that a gamble? Sure. Does everyone want to see a documentary on Mitch Mustain? Probably not, and I get that. But I find that if I put myself in motion towards a film I would want to see, I can power through it. But again, only if it’s a story I would want to see myself,” he reiterated. Wolfe hasn’t lost the acting bug. The talent he displayed in his inaugural project caught the eye of Philadelphia rap-per Meek Mill, who was preparing to shoot the film Streets, and in need of an antagonist. Matt’s brother Todd shared his film reel with the rapper’s production team in hopes of scor-ing an editing credit, when they noticed Matt and had to have him. The film is currently making the rounds on B.E.T. and Wolfe even received a ringing endorsement from Will Smith at the film’s premiere. Perhaps inspired by his work with the young rapper Meek Mill, Wolfe has gone on to direct some pretty dope music videos, as well. Fayetteville crooner Randall Shreve’s “The Ghost” got the special treatment in a whimsical, very 16 mm-esque music video shot in Fayetteville and he has continued to do work with Dan the Automator, who makes his music available for Wolfe’s other projects. When asked about what he’s working on now, he told me “I’m not touching another documentary for a couple more years. This (last) one beat the shit out of me. The next film I’ll be making is Gordon Winchester’s Pattern of Pessi-mism, a narrative feature.” He sounds pretty excited, and by the looks of things, he’ll have it done in short order. Wolfe has put his 10,000 hours in the industry so he’s definitely paid his dues. And though he’s tasted success early, the best seems yet to come. At least he’s getting it done. You have to respect his hustle.

VISIT: VIMEO.COM/INCOGNITOMOSQUITO

THE DISCONTENTMENT DANIEL CAMPBELLArmed with a bootstrapping sensiblity, a relentless drive & versatile gift for storytelling, the young director won’t stop until he hits the big time. That might not be far away.

WORDS / KODY FORD PHOTO / JOHN DAVID PITTMAN

OF

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING A DIRECTOR AND A filmmaker is a subtle, yet definitive one. A director serves as the captain or CEO of the project; yes, a vision certainly exists, but the role is quite utilitarian - think Michael Bay. But the filmmaker is a different beast. The filmmaker sets out to create something that reso-nates deeper than mere entertainment—a lasting, emotional experience. Some filmmakers, like Martin Scorsese, can take other people’s stories and filter them through their perspec-tive to create something uniquely their own. Others, like Rian Johnson, prefer to write their own material and see it through until the end. Daniel Campbell is the latter type of filmmaker. A rising star in the film community, he has won the Charles B. Pierce Award for Best Short Film at the Little Rock Film Festival three times, which is quite an honor. However, none of this would have been possible without Daniel’s ability to maximize his creative abilities on a tight budget to make the best film possible. His journey as a filmmaker began in 2009 when he wrote a short film called Antiquities. He began writing the film while working in sales at a radio station. His inspiration grew from the cast of eccentric co-workers he encountered on a daily basis. Such individuals fill the antique mall featured in Antiquities, which tells the story of a lovestruck employee who wants to ask a woman out on a date the day she’s shut-ting down her booth while his co-worker tries to sabotage his attempts at courtship. With only $1,200, he shot the short film about five days, calling in many favors along the way. The production of Antiquities served as an unofficial se-mester of film school for him. Before that, he had never spent much time on set, but the shoot taught him a lot about the basics of filmmaking, more than he feels he’ll ever learn from making another film. Daniel’s love of film can be traced back to his childhood; however, the thought of becoming a filmmaker never crossed his mind until he assisted casting director Sarah Tackett on the film Nothing But The Truth. Soon after, he wrote Antiq-uities and things began to snowball. Besides winning the Charles B. Pierce Award for the first time, the Oxford Ameri-can Magazine named Daniel their filmmaker for the month. His film began to get accepted into festivals, but it was the 2010 Little Rock Film Festival that led to a meeting that would change the trajectory of his career. During the festival, Daniel met screenwriter Graham Gordy and they struck up a friendship. He approached Gra-

ham about developing Antiquities as a feature script. With the help of an investor, they wrote the script, which they hope to begin shooting within the next year. Daniel’s follow-up to Antiquities was an unorthodox road trip film called The Orderly. With the vibe of a Coen Broth-ers film, it was a convincing period piece about a hapless orderly who must take two mental patients to a new hospi-tal. Unfortunately, these patients come with more instruc-tions than a mogwai. The idea sprung from a road trip to a film festival that Daniel had embarked upon with two of his friends. They spent much of their journey hopped up on Skittles and Red Bull. The sugar buzz powered them through several calamitous events including the car breaking down in the 100-degree weather. After it was over, all in attendance agreed that a film had to be written in the spirit of their trip. For his next film, Daniel decided to tell the story of a middle-aged man caught in the grips of disillusionment, depression and paranoia, but with a few laughs. The Discon-tentment of Ed Telfair won big at the Little Rock Film Festival and played at the Rhode Island International Film Festival. The creative process for some writers is a lonely period marked by isolation, frustration and perhaps the occasional mind-altering substance. When Daniel envisions a film, he bounces the idea off of his family and friends to get their reactions. He credits much of his creativity and drive to his wife, Becky, who is always willing to be an honest critic throughout production. As he writes the script, he directs the film in his head so when pre-production rolls around he has a good idea of what he wants the film to be. He feels that the final result is often quite similar to the original idea. “It’s always strange to me to see the finished product,” he says. “It’s usually pretty close to what I had imagined, but never exactly the same. I like how the vision changes, though. It’s always fun to see an actor/actress do something differently than you visualized the character would. To me, getting to collaborate with the creative people involved in making a movie is the best part of filmmaking.” For aspiring filmmakers, Daniel has a simple piece of advice. “Just make your movie,” he says. “Find a really good group of people that you trust and that share your interest in filmmaking and make your movie. I make so many mistakes on set and every time I do I try and learn from them. In my opinion, the only way to get better as a filmmaker is to make movies. So make movies.”

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WORDS / KATHERINE WHITWORTHPHOTOS / COLLEY BAILEY

Having built up an impressive resume as an assistant director in L.A., KATHRYN TUCKER returns home to make her own films.

PLANNING BACKWARDS

Wardrobe: Black Cherry Vintage Hair: Brittnee Linker

Location: Maxine’s Tap Roomin Fayetteville

idleclassmag.com 13

NOT TOO LONG AGO, LITTLE ROCK NATIVE KATHRYN Tucker found herself riding in a helicopter to the top of an Icelandic mountain in order to brief approximately 50 people, one of whom happened to be Tom Cruise, on moun-taintop safety. This despite the fact that she had never been in a helicopter and was surrounded by stunt guys and safety coordinators who no doubt already knew a lot more about safety than she did. Furthermore, it wasn’t even technically her job—greeting the cast and crew of the film Oblivion as they landed at Earl’s Peak and going over safety protocol was the first assistant director’s job. But because the first AD was sick, the responsibility fell in part to the second second as-sistant director, who, in this case, was Kathryn Tucker. Oblivion is just the most recent credit on Tucker’s resume (a.k.a. her IMDB profile), which includes a dozen major motion pictures and three times as many episodes of net-work television, representing a decade of dogged labor in an industry she didn’t even know she wanted to be in to begin with. “I’ve always loved films, obviously—who doesn’t?” says Tucker, who cites Gone with the Wind as an all-time favorite. But Tucker’s first love was photography. Her parents gave her a Nikon FM2 for her 15th birthday, inciting a passion that led her to major in photography and communications at the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania. Upon graduation, in an act marked by the unflagging determination that would prove to be a hallmark of her work ethic, she moved to New York, “made up” a resume, and began visiting the studios of her 50 favor-ite photographers. One of them, Timothy White, happened to be in the lobby when she arrived. He needed a personal assistant. Kathryn said yes. This was by all measures a dream job for Tucker. White was at the top of his game—as a photographer doing movie posters, working primarily for Miramax, he earned tens of thousands of dollars a day and worked with major celebri-ties. But in that time, Tucker realized that she didn’t want to be a photographer. “It just didn’t appeal to me,” she says. “Tim was at the highest level, and it felt sort of lonely to me. It was a lonely craft. So I thought, ‘What’s like this, but not lonely?’ And it’s film.” Tucker landed a job as a photo assistant in marketing at Miramax in 2002, and was in short order promoted to photo editor for independent films—another dream job for a film-

loving photography nut—and worked on campaigns for films such as Chicago, Kill Bill, and The Station Agent. After two years in marketing, Tucker knew she wanted to be in produc-tion. When a friend and colleague from Miramax, Tim Kirk-man, asked her to be his assistant on a film he had written and was directing called Loggerheads, Tucker abandoned an obvious trajectory to success for the second time in as many years. She and Kirkman both quit their jobs in New York and headed to North Carolina in Kirkman’s Subaru. “He paid me $400 a week. My parents thought I was bonkers.” Bonkers? No. Tucker was just creating her own trajectory. She worked as a production assistant for two years, and the closer she got to filmmaking, the closer she wanted to get. Having set her sights on becoming a director, Tucker ap-plied for the Director’s Guild of America’s two-year Assistant Director Training Program. “It was like The Apprentice or something,” she says of the 8-month application process, which included batteries of written and oral tests, essays, background checks, and group challenges. Tucker says that out of the hundreds of applicants for her class, only 13 were accepted. The program functions as a sort of assistant director’s boot camp—or “total hell” in Tucker’s words: Trainees are on call 24 hours a day and must be no more than an hour away from set at all times. Days are anywhere from 16 to 20 hours long. There’s little sleep, and even less sitting down. “I was a slave for two years,” says Tucker. “But you get through it and then you’re in the DGA, and it’s a great union.” Tucker wears a gold charm that reads “Fin 2008” in commemoration of the accomplishment. Since then, Tucker has worked steadily in both television and film, assisting on a season of Glee and on films such as Drag Me to Hell, Just Go with It, and Gangster Squad. Tucker describes her role as second second assistant director this way: While the director works with the actors and sets the frame on the camera, someone has to run the set. For exam-ple, if the director wants 50 red cars in a scene, someone has to inform transportation, get the cars appropriately into the scene, and tell them when to move or not move—that’s the first assistant director. “Then there’s my job,” says Tucker. “I stand next to the director and the first AD all day long. They get this stuff and give it to me, and I disseminate things,” to the appropriate crew members. “Then it’s ‘Next!’ And you get

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no credit when it goes right, and you get blamed when it goes wrong. It’s a stressful job.” It’s also a job that has given her deep reverence for the entire process of filmmaking and everyone involved in it, from the director with his vision all the way down to the guy who brings coffee to the cast and crew every day. This attitude is something Loggerheads director Tim Kirkman has witnessed firsthand and that he places high on his list of Tucker’s many admirable qualities. “Kathryn, more than anyone I’ve ever worked with, un-derstands the necessity of the film hierarchy in the creative process, this top-down mentality, and abides by it, but somehow makes everyone on set understand how impor-tant they are and in doing so elevates the entire project,” says Kirkman. “Film crews are my favorite people on the planet,” Tucker gushes. “They’re smart, they’re creative, they’re hard-working, and they’re fun. They want to live life. They’re great humans.” Perhaps most important, the job has prepared Tucker for what she set out to do nearly a decade ago, something she might have done already had she not been mired in a brilliant, albeit unintended, assistant-directing career: direct. “So, I’ve done Plan B first, and Plan B has been very successful. Now I have to go back to Plan A. I can go back to Plan B at any point, but Plan A has to come into effect.” Plan A is a screenplay Tucker wrote in 2005 entitled But-tercup, about a young woman whose small-town Southern roots and big-city upbringing are at odds within her, a

struggle that plays out in her major life decisions. She’s revisited the screenplay nearly every year since then, and has finally come home to pick up where she left off. Now, to borrow a phrase from Christopher Guest, Tucker is what you might call “bi-coastal”—if you con-sider the Mississippi River one of the coasts. She divides her time between Hollywood and Little Rock, where she bought a home not far from her parents’ in 2010 (Tucker’s father, Rett, is the Tucker of Moses Tucker Real Estate). While not working on set elsewhere, she’ll be working on plan A (plan Arkansas, if you will). First, she’ll test the directorial waters with a film currently titled Barista, which she describes as “Reality Bites or Singles, but in Little Rock in 2013” (the film is in the financing stage and, full disclo-sure, was written by this magazine’s founder and editor, Kody Ford). In the meantime, she’ll be preparing to make her debut as a writer-director with Buttercup. “What I would really love to do is be like the Coen brothers, but a girl, and have the movies be just a little bit more romantic,” says Tucker. They’re brilliant stories, but they’re boy stories; they’re stories that boys would tell. So I want to be like the Coen brothers but a girl, and telling, kind of love, stories that are funny, Southern, but dark...a little bit dark.” Nothin’ comes with a guarantee, but if her track record thus far is any indication, Kathryn Tucker will do exactly that.

Kathryn and Key 2nd Assistant Director Conte Matal (left) on the set of Oblivion with Tom Cruise. Photo courtesy of Kathryn Tucker

idleclassmag.com 15

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GABE MAYHAN found his calling behind the camera without a day of film school.

the accidentalcinematographer

WORDS / JEREMY GLOVERPHOTO / ADDISON MORGAN

CINEMATOGRAPHER GABE MAYHAN EPITOMIZES THE passion, enthusiasm and DIY ethos that radiates from the burgeoning community of filmmakers in Arkansas. An aim-less undergraduate unsure of what he wanted out of life until he stepped behind a camera, Mayhan quickly learned he knew nothing and that he wanted to know everything he could about a craft he would pursue the rest of his days. Over the past decade, this drive to learn and grow as a filmmaker has led Mayhan to take on any project he could shoot, working with many local filmmakers on shorts and features as well as projects for PBS and The Military Channel. Last year he shot two award-winning documentaries: a por-

trait of former Texas Governor Ann Richards in Ann Richards’ Texas, and a film on mid-century modern architecture, Clean Lines and Open Spaces, a winner of three Emmy awards. His work has been shown at national and international film festivals, including Cannes Film Festival. In talking to Mayhan, it doesn’t take long to appreciate the fact that he is an artist who’s found the perfect medium to express his ideas.

IC: Was there a point where a particular film or scene made you think, “that’s what I want to do” or has filmmaking/cinematography been something you have always gravitated toward?

GM: Not really. Honestly, I started thinking about it, and it really comes from when my mom used to always tell us when we would drive anywhere or take road trips to take a picture in your mind. And the earliest memory I have is being at a theater in East Texas and seeing Empire Strikes Back. The town I grew up in was like 6,000 people, and all the kids roamed the town and there was a mission-style theater that showed two movies and that’s all there was to do. Then moving to Arkansas and living in small towns, I was always daydreaming and listening to music and thinking of situations in my head where ‘this would be good if this was happening, but this would be even better.’ So I constantly had my head in the clouds, which my grades and everything suffered. But at the same time, I always had that thing of ba-sically being a daydreamer - someone whose imagination is constantly running wild. Living in a small town where there was absolutely nothing to do and nothing to see except go to theaters. When I started to go to college, I wanted to go for pho-tography, which I didn’t even want to go to college, but was forced to go to college. Everyone in my family and everyone that had an influence on me said “that was the stupidest thing you could possibly go to school for.” I had no idea so I said, “How about history?” I wandered around and did absolutely nothing, f—ed off and wasn’t doing very well in school and finally was getting ready to graduate with a degree in history. I was like, “I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to teach history.” I had always had an affinity for the arts and structure and organization, and putting all that together you come to a place where that’s exactly what a cinematographer does: organization, structure and telling stories. I always loved people who could tell stories and I’m not gifted in the way of writing to tell stories narratively that way. I guess I’m gifted in the way of seeing things and painting with light and moving cameras and making things happen cinematically.

IC: So you saw in cinematography a natural way in which your mind already worked?

GM: Yeah, it did. The very first film I shot - at that point I hadn’t read any cinematography books, I hadn’t talked to any DPs (director of photography), went in absolutely blind. It was very strange because my mind already worked like that. There was a lot of rules I didn’t know about or didn’t

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adhere to but with some of them it automatically just made sense to me to work that way. Some of them I’d break and I learned more later down the road. That’s all I could eat, breath, think - all I wanted to do was watch movies, read about how to work the camera, how to work lighting. Once you start using cameras and lenses and learn how to force perspectives and tell stories, then it all turns into a thing where you have a lifelong pursuit of honing your craft of cin-ematography, which is lighting. That’s what a cinematogra-pher is known for - his style and all that stuff is lighting. The thing about lighting is that no one has ever mastered it, be-cause it’s constant, it’s ever-changing, it’s everything around us. I hope the last time I’m on a set I almost get it right.

IC: After that first film you knew what you wanted to do and you were hooked?

GM: I basically would shoot anything and everything any-one would allow me to shoot. I started off at Channel 4 and shot news, then somehow I got a job with P. Allen Smith. He saw a demo reel I had put together that was atrocious. I went all over the United States with Allen to all these gar-dens. Looking back, that’s where I really started to under-stand the way he would design gardens and compositions that draw in the eye and color combinations, which are all things down the road that I use day in and day out. The first thing that got me more work was a film I wrote and directed, which was atrocious, but it looked good. It was called Cosmic Legos and it was terrible. It played at the Little Rock Film Festival and people saw it, namely Daniel Campbell and Josh and Miles Miller. Daniel and I have done three or four shorts together and hopefully we will be shooting his feature, Antiquities. I shot Josh and Miles’ Pil-low, which was a highly successful short film, and they are getting ready to their first feature, All The Birds Have Flown South. Through all those connections, I met other people from Los Angeles and started building out from there. It’s been kind of a wild ride and I’m still on it.

IC: So the whole process has been kind of strange for you - the path this has led you down?

GM: Absolutely. Some country bumpkin from Arkansas shooting movies. It’s weird in itself but at the same time, why

not? You have a different voice than anybody else. You didn’t grow up in an artistic community and you didn’t go to a traditional film school. But I have something different to say. My affinity for Southern Gothic literature creeps through, and sometimes I’m allowed to shoot that way, and hopefully I’ll be able to more and more. That’s the kind of stuff I like. I like dark, macabre type things. I find beauty in the decrepit and downtrodden. That’s why I like to go shoot in the Delta as much as possible.

IC: What have you been working on recently and what’s on the horizon?

GM: I just finished Greater, which is the Brandon Burls-worth story. Then I’m going down to Louisiana to work on a horror film anthology, it’s called Bayou Belt. There are some other things out there. I’m working with other native Arkansans like Chris Hickey, he’s shooting a film here in September. Another native Arkansan, Eric England, who shot Madison County, he talked to me about shooting Madison County 2. So there’s just stuff popping up here and there so we’ll just see what happens. It’s all moving more toward features. I work with a lot of Arkansans, which I love doing. I think there’s something here. There’s some kind of energy. I’m also working with this director out of New Orleans, David DuBose. He’s fantastic. Just trying to get it going with-out having to move to L.A. I never wanted to move to Los Angeles or New York. I think it’s been good for me to stay here. It’s been a won-derful training ground because there was no one to tell me I was doing it wrong, which sucks, but it’s also awesome.I will tell you this about Arkansas: I think there is a very unique and talented group of people here that’s very strange. It’s something that should be fostered more. I’m not trying to get on a soapbox here, but the quality of films that’s been done here are not normal. It’s not normal for a bunch of people who didn’t go to film school to create stuff like this with basically no money. It’s a small group, but the people are unbelievably talented. Being someone who travels and shoots in Los Angeles and places like that, you come back to Arkansas and are like, “Holy sh-t, these writer-directors are head and shoulders above anything I’ve worked with out there.” I hope at some point investors around the state will get behind what’s going on here.

Bringing It Back Home

Having racked up starring roles in independent features, COLLEY BAILEY makes his way as an Arkansas actor.WORDS / LANCE ST. LAURENTPHOTO / JESSICA WILLIAMS

FOR ACTOR COLLEY BAILEY, THE same sense of self-reliance and de-termination that allowed his family to thrive in Arkansas has guided every step of his burgeoning film career. Born in Mountain Home and raised in the tiny town of Flippin, Colley is an Arkansan whose bona fides lead all the way into the Ozarks. Despite these humble roots, Bailey has found success as an actor both in background work for major films and as a star of two independent features. With his third starring role imminent, Colley sat down to talk with The Idle Class about his process, his career, and his roots.

IC: First off, how did you get started acting?

CB: I did a high school play, which was Rebel Without a Cause. I did my best James Dean impersonation. (laughs) I

ended up doing it for all of high school in Flippin, Arkansas, and I really con-nected to it. It was something I really enjoyed doing. Then I went to Univer-sity of Central Arkansas in Conway, and there I took several semesters to con-vince myself that I could do something other than that (acting). Well, let me rephrase that; I took several semesters of various courses that were completely different majors, and I just really fell in love with the theater department, and decided to do that.

IC: You’ve come quite a long way since then. Can you talk to me a little bit about your process as an actor?

CB: My process is always changing, as I suspect is true for most actors. But I was heavily influenced by one of my acting coaches in L.A. named Greg Bach. He taught me that the hard-

est skill in acting is stillness. It’s the hardest thing to do for most people: to just exist in front of the camera. You constantly feel you have to “do some-thing.” But in reality, you just have to be there, do what the character is sup-posed to do, and say what the character is scripted to say. Sounds simple, but its the hardest thing to do. But to me, there are only three fundamentals of acting: Acquisition, Alignment, and Accuracy. Acquisi-tion involves figuring out who and what the character is, what the writer is trying to accomplish, kind of what the goal is. The best way to do that is to read the script, and read it again, and then again, and again. I typically like to read a script at least 50 times before filming. You’ll discover things you completely missed the first time you read it, and maybe even things the director (or even the writer) didn’t see.

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Alignment involves aligning who you are as a person with who the character is: so, deciding in what ways you are alike and what ways you are different. If the character is different from you, then you need to do some-thing to correct that problem. It could involve dialect coaching, or becom-ing a bodybuilder for four months, or doing emotional exercises, or being homeless for a week. Then Accuracy is simply being true to all that prepa-ration when the cameras are rolling. That’s where stillness comes in. You just have to let all the preparation fill you up to the point that you have to be that person, with those feelings, those words, and those actions in that exact moment.

IC: You’ve got two features to your name, Madison County and Donner Pass. How did you get hooked up with these directors?

CB: Both of those were through an audition process. On Donner Pass, I knew the casting director. I had taken classes with him, and he thought of me for this role and brought me in. Actually, he brought me in for a differ-ent role, but they had me read for the role of Mike, so I ended up landing that one. For the other, it was just a really quick audition and callback, and we were shooting very quickly

after that.

IC: You have an upcoming project called Valley Inn. Could you tell me a little about that?

CB: Yeah! We will be filming on Val-ley Inn in July, and it is a feel-good, coming-of-age story about a big city girl who comes to the country and ends up falling in love with the towns-people and I play her love interest.

IC: And is this being filmed in Arkan-sas?

CB: Yeah, it will be filmed around Hindsville, which is where the Valley Inn is located.

IC: In our conversations before the interview, you mentioned that you were living out in Los Angeles, but I understand that you’re back in Arkan-sas now.

CB: Yeah, I lived there for about a year and a half. I did a lot of work for casting directors and I did a lot of background work. It’s not very glam-orous, but it was a lot of fun, and I got to be on set with tons of people. I was on every studio lot in LA doing background work. I worked on Glee, I was on Hot Tub Time Machine, and that Adam Sandler movie with Jennifer

Aniston.

IC: Just Go With It?

CB: Yeah! It wasn’t even called that at the time; they were gonna call it something else. Adam Sandler’s really cool, and I met Nick Swardson. We had a conversation and everything.

IC: I’ve just got one more question. I was hoping you could speak about how Arkansas or being an Arkansan has influenced your work and your career, however you might want to interpret that.

CB: So I grew up in the Ozarks, and my entire family…let me think how I want to say this. Both of my grandpas ran their own businesses, my mother and my father have both run multiple businesses, so there’s kind of a do it yourself, pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality that comes with being an Arkansan. There’s a self-reliance instilled in you when you grow up in a place like that. And I’ll carry that with me the rest of my life. It influences everything that I do, and it influences my belief in what is pos-sible.

“You constantly feel you have to ‘do something.’ But in reality, you just have to be there, do what the character is supposed to do, and say what the character is scripted to say. Sounds simple, but its the hardest thing to do.”

idleclassmag.com 19

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ON THE BRINK

Having landed roles in everything from Breaking Dawn to Mad Men, Fort Smith native MARLANE BARNES is an actress on the rise.

WORDS / LANCE ST. LAURENTPHOTO / NICK HOLMESMARLANE BARNES’ LARGE, EXPRESSIVE EYES SUGGEST an Old Hollywood stardom, something akin to Bette Davis or Claudette Colbert, before she even mentions her acting career. “Period stuff is the kind of stuff I lean toward - that sort of look,” she says. It’s this look (along with her considerable acting talents) that has made her a perfect fit for two of her most recent high-profile roles, in Breaking Dawn Pt. 2 as an ageless, immortal vampire and in the most recent season of Mad Men, where she put her period-appropriate looks to use in the tumult of 1968. Like the bulk of prospective actors, Marlane currently resides in Los Angeles, but her career began in Fort Smith. “I did theatre in high school. I did Fort Smith Children’s Theatre. I started doing independent film in college, and then I moved out here about three year s ago,” she says. For Marlane, graduate school was where she truly had the time to hone her craft. “It was a nice opportunity to try new things and learn from your peers. We had a big class, I think like 14 people, so it was nice to have a big group of people to draw from.” When she arrived in Los Angeles, the roles came quickly. With the Twilight sequel, Marlane got to work not only with a cast of A-listers, but with Oscar-winning director Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, Kinsey). “With Bill, the thing about him that makes him special, is that he’s very interested in an actor’s

input and talking to everyone and making everyone feel included in the process. He has a very quiet way about him. He’s very soothing to be around; we benefited a lot from that as a cast and crew.” Despite her recent success, though, Marlane acknowledg-es the difficulty of being a new actor in a city full of them. “There are little blips, but it takes a long time to build credits, to show that you are consistent and that you have a good reputation for showing up on time and doing your work.” This necessary hard work does not seem to be a problem for Marlane. Speaking about her process as an actor, she said, “I start by reading the script, naturally, and I usually take some notes on what I got from it. But sometimes it’s just a vibe, a character will remind me of somebody I know and I’ll get a flash of what this character is to me. After that, I’ll read the script again and try to fill in the details of that character. On the day of my audition, I’ll even usually make a Pandora station that I associate with the character.” Marlane Barnes will next be seen in theaters in Somebody Marry Me, set to premiere at the Manhattan Film Festival and in Sake Bomb, which has just been picked up for distribu-tion in the UK. She’ll next be seen on television in a recur-ring role on Showtime’s Masters of Sex, which premieres this September.

VISIT: MARLANEBARNES.COM

idleclassmag.com 21

MOvies on the radioKXUA’s DRIVE - IN SPEAKER BOX mixes music, humor & film theory to create pure entertainment.WORDS / SCHULER BENSON

IN 2005, BO COUNTS LAUNCHED THE DRIVE-IN Speakerbox, a radio show that, at the time, consisted of Counts “just playing movie scores for two hours.” As of summer 2013, the passing of eight years and three co-hosts have seen The Drive-In Speaker Box morph into a combina-tion podcast/radio show that airs Monday at 8PM on KXUA 88.3FM and www.kxua.com. Counts and his partner, Philip Stephens, also known as Boom Operator and The Gaffer, host the show with the two-pronged approach of entertainment and education. “We make a nice balance of silly, light-hearted fun and serious/heady critique,” Counts says. “The show has always been about entertaining ourselves, but we try to educate people on the history of films, a little film theory and of course a heapin’ helpin’ of movie reviews. We want people to be able to laugh at our ranting and goofy conversations, but at the same time reflect on what they watch and how they watch it.” “The show should be palatable to people who aren’t just interested in the subject. We’re smart when we want to be but generally prefer puerile infantilism, as that tends to make the show entertaining and immediate,” Stephens adds. It’s clear by the content that Drive-In Speaker Box is a labor of love for the co-hosts. “I got a quasi-professional gig as a paid critic after college and discovered how quickly the dream can die: ‘Wow, I can get paid to do something I like!’ Funny how those scenarios only include you watching and writing about films you al-ready like,” Stephens says. “In my opinion, to be a film critic, there has to be a cer-

tain simple enjoyment that comes from watching a movie no matter how pitifully awful or amazingly profound they may be,” Counts says. In addition to the weekly podcast, the two maintain a blog that covers all their happenings between shows, as well as what doesn’t make it to the air. Counts and Stephens also host weekly trivia nights at two Fayetteville bars, Smoke and Barrel and The Apple Blossom Brewery. “Trivia has been a really interesting and fun experience for us,” Counts says. “It started a little over a year ago as something for us to do instead of going to other, less en-tertaining trivia nights. We’ve had people from all over the country come out and enjoy our trivia, be they tourists or performers from the WAC, and every time we hear that our trivia is one of the most unique and fun bar trivia nights they have ever been to. We intend to keep it that way. We are branching out and hosting another night at the new Apple Blossom Brewery in Fayetteville later this summer.” Stephens says the questions are a mixed bag and not just film-related. “[They] often have a humorous, crude, or sarcastic bent. The $50 bar tab for first-place doesn’t hurt, either,” he said. Tune in to KXUA and kxua.com Mondays from 8 to 10 p.m. to catch The Drive-In Speaker Box and find them on Facebook and Twitter (@boomoperator) for more information about the show and trivia nights in Fayetteville.

VISIT: DRIVEINSPEAKERBOX.BLOGSPOT.COM

Photo courtesy of Bo Counts

Stronger Broken PlacesScreenwriter GRAHAM GORDY talks about his pilot for Cinemax & finding hope among the ruins.WORDS / KODY FORD PHOTO / JOSHUA ASANTE

at the

idleclassmag.com 23

ON AUGUST 6, 1945, THE ENOLA GAY, A BOEING B-29, Superfortress bomber, flew across the Pacific Ocean in the morning light. It carried with it a force that the world had yet to witness, a force constructed by the most intelligent scien-tists in the Western Hemisphere under the greatest shroud of secrecy in history. This force with its deadly payload had been dubbed “Little Boy.” At 8:15 A.M. (local time), the bomb bay doors opened and Little Boy fell for 43 seconds to the detonation point of 1,968 feet above the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In a brilliant and destructive flash, the atomic energy unleashed by the fis-sion within eradicated an area of about one mile with a force equal to 16 tons of dynamite. The newspapers declared “The Beginning of the Atomic Era!” But this dawn of a new age of man brought with it fear and, in Graham Gordy’s opinion, marked the end of some-thing precious that had comforted the American conscious-ness through the American Revolution, the Civil War, even the Age of Expansion. America had lost its faith in God. “During WWII everybody ‘lost’ God because of geno-cide, because of the threat of nuclear annihilation,” Graham says. “We invented a bomb that can destroy everything else on Earth. [People felt that] if there’s a God, wouldn’t he inter-ject and tell us we can’t do that? Obviously, most people still believe in God, but as a culture it was a great kind of spasm.” A dark and poignant thought, no doubt, but for Graham, a screenwriter by trade who studied Philosophy and Eng-lish at the University of Central Arkansas at the dawn of the “post-9/11” era, these thoughts are connected to a deeper meaning that manifests itself in the creative consciousness of entertainment. The vacuum left by the threat of nuclear destruction during the Cold War led the American people to follow the wayward path of the early Israelites—constructing false idols to worship. First, politicians inspired the masses to greatness, but the heroes of the ‘60s fell, only to be replaced by jour-nalists who found themselves brushed aside for the Invisible Hand of the Free Market. However, the Financial Crisis of 2008 saw that golden calf melted and sold for scrap. In a country with such a crisis of faith, to whom does society look to? Enter the Antihero. Tony Soprano, mafia boss and anxiety-ridden paternal figure, set the standard for the next decade of vicarious living through a flawed individual who veers from sociopathic to sympathetic. When The Sopranos ended its run on HBO, people tuned into Don Draper’s web of deceit on AMC’s Mad Men. However, Mr. Draper quickly found himself sur-passed by the nefarious dealings of chemistry teacher-turned-meth-kingpin Walter White on Breaking Bad. The story of the antihero is quickly becoming ubiquitous in dramatic storytelling on television these days. When Gra-ham and writing partner Michael D. Fuller began searching for source material for a show to shop to the major networks, they turned to a period noir, a novel called Quarry by Max Allan Collins of Road to Perdition fame. Quarry is a series of

novels set in the early 1970s and tells the story of a Marine who returns home from Vietnam, only to be shunned by his loved ones and demonized by the public. His emotional vulnerability and war-forged instincts lead to his recruitment into a network of contract killers and corruption spanning the length of the Mississippi River. The move pulls him into the shadows where crime and govern-ment collide to shape a torrential period of our nation’s history. Cinemax has commissioned a pilot of Quarry produced by Steve Golin and Anonymous Content, which is working on True Detective with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson for HBO and Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick with Clive Owen, also on Cinemax. Graham will spend August shooting in North Mississippi. What attracted him to the story is that, while on the surface, the protagonist fits the mold of a Walter White, he is really a man searching for his place in society, for a conscience lost in the service of his country, or as Graham succinctly stated, “...someone who is breaking good.” For Graham, the opportunity to tell a long-form story on a major network is the culmination of years of labor and learn-ing. After graduating from UCA, he moved to Manhattan to study playwriting at New York University. Writing had moved to the top of Graham’s agenda only a few years before when he took comedy-writing classes at The Groundlings in Los Angeles during his brief flirtation with the idea of acting professionally. Fast forward a few years and a few stage productions at UCA, Graham now had a world of opportunity opened to him and he seized the moment. After graduating from NYU, he had a play running off-Broadway and a friend brought an-other friend to see the show. This other friend just happened to be Austin Powers himself, Mike Myers. Myers needed a writing assistant and he was impressed with Graham’s acumen and abilities. Graham took the job and worked with Myers for the next five years, writing on both the second and third Shrek films and The Love Guru. “I had come to New York to write stage plays, so writ-ing broad comedy isn’t something I aspired to, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity that was being given to me,” Gra-ham says. “I learned a good bit about screenplay structure and how the business works. It was a baptism by fire in that regard.” Family beckoned Graham back to Arkansas and he settled in Little Rock in 2008. Here he found himself faced with the daunting task of working as a professional writer in a place that had little connection to the movie business at the time. He wrote smaller, character-based features such as War Eagle, Arkansas, did “punch up work” on other screenplays and sold a few spec scripts that were never produced. After coming back home, Graham partnered with former Arkansas resident and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Ray McKinnon for a series of hilarious short films. In The Spanola Pepper Sauce Company, Graham sports a seer-sucker suit, a boater hat and a mean moustache to play the

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lead (and only) character, an owner of a Louisiana hot sauce company who loves his mother and recently lost his wife to a vampire. Their other film is the infamous Dwight David Hon-eycutt for Conway School Board. Starring Graham’s former boss at UCA, David Parker, Dwight shares his penchant for scotch, crossbows and sunburnt girls as he solicits votes. It was featured on FunnyorDie.com. Their collaboration led Graham to a new job as a staff writer on McKinnon’s critically acclaimed new show Rectify, which premiered on the Sundance Channel this past spring. While Ray had served as a mentor for Graham during the previous few years, working on Rectify taught him what it takes to be the creator of a cable television show. “Feature films are a director’s medium, but cable TV is an area where the writer-creators are deferred to the most creatively because they may be the only ones who have the vision for what happens at the end of this season, or in sea-son three, or four, or five,” Graham says. “It’s a tremendous amount of pressure and I admire how Ray handled it all. He went through Rectify doing those six episodes exactly as he envisioned them, without much concern of getting more seasons. “In a world where commerce nearly always trumps art, and one where a lack of commerce has nearly destroyed us all, that’s an exceptionally courageous way of running a show. I hope Michael and I can be so courageous.” Serving as a staff writer was not Graham’s first foray into television. The jump from the big screen to the small screen had been on his mind for a while. “Feature films are becoming either a giant, tent pole, 3D superhero film that’s $150 million or more or a film that’s $500,000 or less,” Graham says. “Those are the two types of films that you can make these days. The fact that I was inter-ested in [films that fell in between] was becoming problem-atic. That’s when I started to see that more filmmakers were interested in television.” A few years prior, he and Fuller had created a show called The Wreck, which he intended to be a character-driven, corporate style drama set in the world of college football. The Wreck explored complex themes such as income inequality and the class system in the South. He says, “Arkansas - like most places now - has extreme wealth and extreme poverty. The only place they seem to come together is in Razorback Stadium on Saturdays in the fall.” He and Fuller wrote a pilot and pitched the idea to several networks before AMC signed on. The network put

the show into development, but shortly before the pilot was to film, they placed an embargo on any new programming following tense and expensive negotiations with Matthew Weiner (Mad Men) and Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad). De-spite the setback, Graham is optimistic that one day the show will make it on the air. After licking their wounds, Graham and Michael decided to follow the cable television trend of adapting known source material into a show. This formula had brought HBO success with True Blood, Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones and it now seemed like the logical path if Graham wanted to get a show on television. Fuller found the Quarry novels and it fit their idea to write a period show on crime in the South. To create the pilot and “show bible” for the show, Graham and Michael spent weeks on the phone and Skype discussing what they wanted to write about and how to say it themati-cally before putting anything on paper. They did a lot of re-search to provide a backdrop of political and cultural events of the time period. Then they outlined everything together to have an overarching idea of what would happen in each act of each episode and the season as a whole by looking for the major moves, plot points and reversals to ramp things up. Quarry opens in 1973, after America awoke to reality that our politicians were not the noble standard bearers we had hoped for. Graham cites the era, which starts a few years af-ter the ending of Mad Men, as the next great stage after “the bomb” of American desperation. The nation had just walked away from a divisive war with an ambiguous conclusion and was suffering from a vicious hangover courtesy of the Sum-mer of Love. “Decades don’t always start and end right on the year they’re supposed to, culturally,” he says. “The ‘60s began with the death of JFK and ended with Watergate. In those 10 years, all that transpired was amazing. The ‘70s were differ-ent. They were great for music and for movies but it was just a terrible time for people. We’re interested in the wake of that time and trying to ascribe some meaning to an era that’s always seemed pretty undefinable.” Who we were as a people was on everyone’s mind and Graham believes the parallels to modern times are eerily similar. Having lost trust, the ‘70s ushered in an “anything goes” era of debauchery and anxiety. Disaster films such as The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure and The Omega Man (later remade in 2007 under it’s original title I Am Legend) rocked the box office. The pattern can be seen today in shows like The Walking Dead and this summer’s

“All these movies are $200 million orgasmic, special FX-laden films about the annihilation of everybody on Earth. There’s a release that comes from seeing ourselves destroyed as a race of people. We’re at a point where we’re looking

up at the sky and saying, ‘We’re out of moves. Can anyone else save us?’”

films like Pacific Rim. “There’s something weird happening with movies right now,” he says. “I watched World War Z and the 20 minutes of trailers beforehand and there’s a death wish going on. All these movies are $200 million orgasmic, special FX-laden films about the annihilation of everybody on Earth. There’s a release that comes from seeing ourselves destroyed as a race of people. We’re at a point where we’re looking up at the sky and saying, ‘We’re out of moves. Can anyone else save us?’” There is something uniquely American about the concept of regeneration through violence. Whether it is embodied by Dirty Harry or Rick Grimes, who struggles between being the archetypical cowboy and the antihero, the notion that a lone hero must take on the weight of the world and vanquish evil and corruption before disap-pearing into the sunset provides us with a catharsis, like embodiment of the wrath of a vengeful God, only modern and more palatable. So perhaps when Little Boy exploded that day over Hi-roshima, we didn’t awake to a crisis of faith, but to the real-ity of our innermost fantasies and its chilling consequences.

See Graham’s short films at IdleClassMag.com/GrahamGordy

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ART

reinventing

familiarHAVING WORKED WITH EVERYONE FROM YOUNG ADULT DIRECTOR JASON REITMAN TO THE OSCARS, MATT OWEN IS BECOMING HOLLYWOOD’S GO-TO GUY FOR SMART, MINIMALIST POSTERS. AND HE’S DONE IT ALL WITHOUT LEAVING LITTLE ROCK.

WORDS / STEVE HINTZ PHOTO / DERO SANFORD

the

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AT FIRST GLANCE, THE MINIMALIST ARTWORK OF MATT Owen might seem doable. Like walking into an art museum and upon observing the splash art of some modernist savant, declaring, “I could do that.” Easy. That’s how you know you’re dealing with a professional. Unlike the trained eye of the curator, who could expound on the meaning of the yellow streak when it crosses the red, one needs only let their eyes linger a bit longer on the film poster. A feeling will arise. The feeling that you try to describe when recounting the film to your boys after a night at the movies with your wife. The feeling that let you know that you got what the filmmaker was shooting for when he revised the nuances of the script late into the night during pre-production. Matt Owen has a knack for getting it. After choppin’ it up with Matt last week, I was able to delve into the head of a man who is getting some big name attention for his craft. Art came about because he couldn’t cut it in his business classes at Harding University (“Don’t hold it against me,” Matt says when revealing his alma ma-ter). He wanted a job that would let him come to work with-out his shirttail tucked in. His girlfriend at the time suggested he talk to her mom, who worked in the art department. He did and he liked what he saw. Fast forward a few years and Matt had a job as a graphic designer at a firm in Little Rock. He had some free time and threw together a movie poster of Top Gun and sent it to his buddy. Purely out of boredom, he did a few more and before you know it, at the urging of his friend, he had started a blog and jumped on Twitter and was doing a poster a week. His love of movies fueled his passion. “Films are an awesome escape,” he says. “No matter what kind of day I’ve had, I can pop something on and enjoy it for a couple of hours.” Just a few months after he started, and with the help of some serious social networking, Ruben Fleischer, the director of Zombieland and Gangster Squad, reached out to him and

asked him to do a poster for his upcoming movie 30 Min-utes or Less. Matt agreed and turned one in. Fleisher liked it, but the producers hated it. No actors, no guns blazing, no catchy taglines, how the hell will this sell our movie? As quickly as the dream began to take off…it sputtered. Thankfully, Jensen Karp, the owner of Gallery 1988, invited Matt to participate in the Crazy for Cult show where Matt put his Ghostbusters poster on display. Jason Reitman saw the poster and had to get it for his dad, Ivan Reitman (director of Ghostbusters) as a birthday present. “I could have died right there,” Owen recalled. So Jason Reitman asked Matt to create a limited print for his newest film, Young Adult. He sent Matt a private link to view some footage of the film. He watched it along with the trailer several times. One particular scene stood out. “There’s all of these scenes with Charlize Theron talking about how her life is a mess and everything’s in shambles,” Matt said. “Then at the end, she spills wine on her blouse and makes a mess. I felt like that was a metaphor for her entire life. So I ran with that.” Afterwards, Reitman recruited Matt for assistance with a series of live reads of classic film scripts at the Los Ange-les County Museum of Art in a star-studded affair. It’s not uncommon for Steve Carrell or Natalie Portman to read the characters of some script. It’s a one-night affair that strictly prohibits recording devices of any kind. During six months, Matt designed posters for classics like Reservoir Dogs, The Apartment and Glengarry Glen Ross. Those in attendance re-ceived a signed and numbered print of Matt’s original poster, of which only 100 were printed for each performance. Every once in awhile, Jason will send him a poster he’s done, signed by whatever big celebrities did the reading for the night, which Matt always saves. He keeps pretty much ev-erything that he’s done. I asked Matt about the copyright issues surrounding his works. “I guess technically it’s illegal but most of these post-

ers are for classic films and all they do is enhance people’s love for these films,” he says. “They’re not harming anyone, just elevating the films towards cult status.” However, Matt didn’t work outside of the law for long. Paramount Pictures called and gave him two days to come up with a poster for the fourth Mission: Impossible movie. They loved it. Printed a million of them. If you saw the IMAX version of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, you got a free poster. Universal Pictures asked him for a special Comic Con print for The Bourne Legacy, which had a limited edition print run of 200 posters. Earlier this year, Matt got to be one of nine artists from around the world to participate in the “For Your Consid-eration” art show presented by the Academy. The artists included Matt’s peers (and heroes) such as Olly Moss, Tom Whalen and Anthony Petrie. They gave their take on the year’s Best Picture nominees such Django Unchained, Lincoln and Amour, the latter being Matt’s assignment. He found it to be a challenge, but he and the Academy were pleased with the result. “I got the call and we talked about it for a few minutes,” he says. “We hung up and I just sat there for about 30 minutes, partially freaking out, partially frightened. There’s a certain level of skill and elegance that’s expected with the Oscars and that was extremely intimidating. I’d done stuff on a larger scale before but this was something different. Just the name ‘Oscars’ is intimidating when you hear it. They usually go to the best people, so that’s why it wracked my nerves.” While Matt usually gets contacted to do projects, he recently sought one out to great success. As a kid, he loved Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451. As the anniversary of the publication approached, Simon & Schuster decided to crowdsource the new cover. They sought out designs from the online community. A friend called Matt and suggested he enter. Competition was fierce; he faced 360 other entries. The publishers, editors and art directors at Simon & Schuster along with the Bradbury family viewed all of the designs and settled on Matt’s design. “That was the most fun project for me,” he says. “I’ll do things and people will say that they like them but, to really test yourself as a creative person, putting yourself out there against other people keeps you current and motivated and keeping up with cool kids.” For Matt’s most recent project, he designed a limited edi-tion print of The Princess Bride for a special live commentary and Q & A with Rob Reiner, Carey Elwood, Robin Wright and the other actors. Not bad for a guy who only got into art because he was bombing his business courses. Sometimes you’re just the guy that gets it.

See more of Matt’s posters at IdleClassMag.com/mattowen.

VISIT: BRICKHUT.WORDPRESS.COM

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CRYSTAL BRIDGES hosts Angels & Tomboys: Girlhood in 19th Century American Art exhibit, which lasts through Sept. 28.

Angels & TomboysPHOTOS / TARAF ABU HAMDAN

Bottom photo courtesy of Crystal Bridges

TWO TEMPORARY EXHIBITIONS OPENED ON JUNE 29 AT CRYSTAL BRIDGES Museum of American Art will feature different subjects and eras in American his-tory, yet both shed light on important time periods that changed the way Americans viewed themselves and their futures. Angels & Tomboys: Girlhood in 19th-Century American Art focuses on the period following the Civil War in which artists began to emphasize the importance of children, and particularly young girls, as the symbol of hope for a nation damaged and divided by war. Works by John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, together with those by leading women artists, such as Cecilia Beaux and Mary Cassatt, reveal a new, provocative psychological element not found in early Victorian portraiture; while the mischievous tomboys in Lilly Martin Spencer’s paintings and the pure angels in the works of Abbot Handerson Thayer underscore the complexity of girlhood. Angels & Tomboys is organized by the Newark Museum and was previously ex-hibited at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. It is sponsored at Crystal Bridges by Boyce Billingsley, Greenwood Gearhart Inc., Meza Harris, and NWA Media/Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Exhibited concurrently, Surveying George Washington features an assortment of historical documents on loan from The Harlan R. Crow Library in Dallas, TX, includ-ing documents written by Washington himself, or by contemporaries who knew him. A touch-screen kiosk accompanying the exhibition will offer guests the opportunity to virtually handle a few key documents in the exhibition. Both exhibitions will be on view through Sept. 28. Tickets are $5 for adults. Thanks to their sponsors, tickets for youth ages 18 and under are free. Museum Members receive free admission to all exhibitions. Tickets may be purchased online or at Guest Services.

VISIT: CRYSTALBRIDGES.ORG

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fashion

ART AMISS RECENTLY STARTED A PROJECT ALONG with local artists to create its own exclusive apparel line. Fashion director Melissa Arens will be choosing comfort-able stylish cotton clothing to display many talented local artists work onto the Apparel. These items will be available at Artamiss.org (along with other Art amiss merch) and Mayapple Boutique, located at 600 West Center Street in Fayetteville. Artists participating in this project thus far include, Jane Kang, Sarah Creasman, Whitney Allen Johnston and Sara Levine. Art Amiss is happy to be involved with so many artistic people in our community and to be able to continue to

Be your own canvasFayetteville artist collective ART AMISS launches new t-shirt line to promote local artists.WORDS / MELISSA ARENSPHOTOS / QUENTIN DANIEL

write grants for the much talented local arts needs. Art Amiss is a local non profit that’s has been a part of Fayetteville’s underground art scene for more almost 10 years. Art Amiss has four categories; visual arts, litera-ture, music and fashion. It throws art related events in the community and uses profits to provide grants to local artists.

VISIT: ARTAMISS.ORG

Hair & Styling by Melissa Arens

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WHALE FIRE

MUSIC

Little Rock band mixes lush instrumentation with pop melodies for musical gold.

WORDS / TAYLOR GLADWIN FANS ARE SINGING A HIGH NOTE FOR WHALE FIRE,the Little Rock band who recently released their first full-length album, Before You Run. The album paints a portrait of the journey we take on the way to the place where we want to be in life, naturally obtaining whatever particular treasure we want out of life, however enlightening or comforting. That’s the translated, interpretable skeleton to do with what you will. Here’s the soul: the nine-song LP uses lush melodies, airy background vocals, heightened percussion, and the right dose of reverb guitar to dream away the day. Before You Run is a metaphorical, or not-so-metaphorical journey of “ques-tioning everything you go through as an adult,” says co-vocalist and guitarist John Steel. The album was recorded at a friend’s house in Little Rock. The album begins with a hypnotically bouncy strum of the guitar in the song, “Dream of Me” and the passionately theatrical high and low vocals of Steel. The lyrics in the band’s latest single, “Wild-Eyed Mistake,” pay tribute to the moments when we act without thinking. When it comes to writing songs, Steel starts with a nonfictional event. As he keeps writing, fiction and imagination play a greater part in what the song becomes. “I imagine a character who doesn’t look before they leap, doesn’t always think things through,” John says about “Wild-Eyed Mistake.” It has since become a favorite of college radio stations. After the release of “Wild-Eyed Mistake,” Whale Fire released a 7-inch record last September featuring “Dream of

Me” and “The Fabric,” both of which are on the album While the four Little Rock boys agree that the three singles are a few of their own favorites, “Wild-Eyed Mistake” is the song they feel represents them best as a band. “It has a feel-ing of adult angst. The feeling like you’re not quite there yet with life,” Clay said. Whale Fire create an atmosphere where each song on their album has room to grasp a musical idea and run with it. No song sells itself short. In fact, the longest song is over nine minutes and comes equipped with a funky sci-fi mix right before it opens back up with that dreamy guitar, slightly reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here.” Whale Fire is Matthew Steel on backing vocals and bass guitar, Will Vick playing drums and percussion, and John Steel and Clay Grubbs as co-lead vocalists and guitarists. The four mainly agree on their taste in music, such as early-eighties bands and The Beatles, but when it comes to their own music, they want to be the biggest influence you hear pacing through the speakers. The individual tracks are bold with spontaneous percussion and guitar breakdowns. Vick’s bongos and Matt Steel’s backing vocals on “U Will Find” add to the “beachy” feel that carries throughout the whole album. Wherever they’re going, we’ll still be listening.You can find the entire album Before You Run on iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon.

VISIT: WhaleFireMusic.com

Photo courtesy of Whale Fire

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THE STOLEN GLASS

WORDS / ANDREW MCCLAIN

BONNIE MONTGOMERYreleases new EP Joy, strengthens her reputation as a songwriter on the rise.

Good Golly, Miss Bonnie

IF YOU’RE NOT FAMILIAR WITH THE ORIGINAL Cotham’s location in Scott, just imagine an old house, the back half of which is situated precariously on stilts, backing up off a hill and into a small bayou. This piece of hap-hazard architecture houses Central Arkansas’ most famous burger joint, just far enough outside of North Little Rock on Highway 165 to look properly rural, is where Bonnie Mont-gomery wanted to meet. Bonnie has a gig in Scott this evening at an Arkansas Times “Farm To Table” dinner event, so Cotham’s seemed like the logical choice. I pick a two-top by the door and Bonnie walks in not a minute later, looking at home in the Americana atmosphere in her signature dress-and-cowboy-boots combo. In the last several years, Bonnie has become a promi-nent figure in Arkansas’ live music scene, giving her steady work and making her the go-to gal for an event like to-night’s Arkansas Times dinner, bringing her in from her farm outside of Searcy. She has a remarkably gracious demeanor - an uncommon trait for a musician. “I’ve actually always dreamed of being a regional artist,” Bonnie laughs “like Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins all traveling together in a Cadillac to Texarkana, Dallas, El Dorado, Shreveport - that circuit really sparked my imagination.” Indeed, Bonnie has artfully put a pin through the late-’50s rockabilly and classic country that dominated this region and preserved it in a way that relies neither on kitsch nor nostalgia. Over the past few years, Bonnie has released several EPs, singles, and a live album, but never a full LP, though she has ample material for one. She’s established her presence in Arkansas and, with some help from her fel-low Searcy natives, Gossip, also tours a small circuit in the Pacific Northwest. Bonnie is about to release her new EP, Joy (which will have been out for a while at print date) on the Portland-based Fast Weapons label, run by fellow Searcy native (and member of Gossip) Nathan Howdeshell, who also played guitar on the two-song EP, which was recorded at The Fel-lowship Hall, Jason Weinheimer’s Little Rock studio, and Bonnie couldn’t be more thrilled with the way it turned out. “This is the first time I feel like my voice has really been captured... accurately,” she says, after gushing about the string arrangements.

The first track, “Joy,” (named for Joy Mountain, a large hill in White County) is an upbeat, tenacious song with a rockabilly edge, written from the perspective of Bonnie’s grandfather, a prominent figure in White County in the early ‘60s. The song follows his personal ambitions from a child-hood trauma, to a brief move to California, back to White County where he found success. “My grandfather kept journals from 1948 until he died - like, every day - and they are amazing and hilarious and beautiful. They’re on these old ledger books that he had and his handwriting is all there,” Bonnie explains, “I just started picking out phrases from these journals - he was very poetic - and just wove them together. In that sense, it’s completely different than anything I’ve ever written.” “Daddy’s,” has been kicking around for a little bit, though, Bonnie says, “I wrote it when my father was really sick in 2007, so I’ve been playing that one out for a while... when I did it on tour it really seemed to stay with people. It’s slow, it’s a tear-jerker, classic country sad song.” Bonnie’s music is firmly rooted in classic country, and she’s classically trained to sing opera. She writes simple folk melodies that can trick you into thinking you can sing along, because they instantly sound familiar. But if you try to sing along, you’ll find it difficult because of the way she runs over these melodies with her powerful voice; no two phrases are expressed with the same melodic flourishes. Lyrically, she breaks the mold whenever possible; “Joy” exhibits an energy of brash ambition and braggadocio that is arguably more characteristic of hip-hop than country, and “Daddy’s” deals openly but tenderly with substance abuse and grief. I note the memorable opening line: Smokin’ dope on the way to daddy’s, and Bonnie laughs sheepishly, “I changed that line many times before I decided to keep it, but I wanted to stay true to what I was feeling when I wrote it. Plus, the tide is turning in our state and in our country around that issue... I usually keep my political views close to my chest, but I’m also a songwriter, so I gotta be true to myself, too.” Bonnie’s trepidation on the topic is a telling microcosm of her work: modern American honesty carefully packaged in traditional American music.

VISIT: BONNIEMONTGOMERYMUSIC.COM

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idleclassmag.com 39

BEER GETSCRAFTY

WORDS / MARTY SHUTTERPHOTOS / TARAF ABU HAMDAN & MARTY SHUTTER

NORTHWEST ARKANSASis ground zero for the state’s craft beer explosion

Photo by Taraf Abu Hamdan

WHEN KODY FLOATED THIS STORY, HE WARNED ME against my recent trend of attempting to trace everything within modern sight to its primeval rooting. It’s a type of nostalgia for every bygone era I never hung out in that is, of course, completely unsatisfiable and a furnace of near constant existential consternation and endless “‘whatevers.” But life has its salves, which for me are shaped like beer and music, whose magic lie in what transcends their utterly com-mon components. Hops, grain, water, yeast. Guitar, drums, bass, voice. Simple, tested, yet from them wholly different styles, concertos, breweries, devoted followers, Mozarts and Princes too! Beer itself is a symphony of ancient instruments - com-mon grains, hops, water and that mysterious creature, yeast - harmonizing sometimes deeply, sometimes fruitily, strongly, lightly, sweetly, bitterly and so forth. She is known through-out the world, time, and culture, and I promise I won’t write you an article about Egyptians ‘discovering’ her, or the more recent guess that the original crops that settled societies were in fact grown for booze, not food. When I was a stupid kid, my dad started a home brewery.

What he really did was give a name to the complete rear-ranging of my mother’s escape hatch - the utility room. He brought in jugs, pots and boilers, and crates holding buckets of soaking bottles. The name was “Shutter Brothers Brewery,” blaming my brother and I - four and seven - for the opera-tion. It was the dusty late ‘80s and American craft brewing had begun. Men mostly like my father, maybe bearded, in garages and sheds around the country began tooling with hu-man history’s nectar, sharing their recipes in newsletters (the first internet) and then sending those beers around in ‘Beer of the Month’ clubs. We haven’t looked back and now craft beer is an industry.

APPLEBLOSSOM BREWERY

“[T]here’s something like eight breweries opening up in Northwest Arkansas in the last four years,” said Ching Mong, part owner of Apple Blossom Brewery, located on Zion Road on Fayetteville’s north side. “What the hell took Fayetteville so long?” I asked him, “I’ve been going on brewery tours since I was a child.”

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Photo by Taraf Abu Hamdan

“I don’t know…Well, the bank actually called us.” Ching explained how the business partners behind one of Fayetteville’s newest breweries were approached by the banks for their startup money. They had tried several times to get a loan from different banks who had all said no between 2007 and 2012. Apple Blossom Brewery is the story of friend power. Six restaurant and bar owners from Fayetteville, each with differ-ent talents, and each knowing they needed a brewer, began a search. They had been asking the bank for five years to help them start a brewery, pointing at a glaring national trend. “Why do you think they didn’t help you out?” “Economy.” “Why do you think they helped you out?” “Economy.” Which apparently is getting better alongside the popu-larity of better beer. Now they had the money, so they flew a beer-brewing yacht captain into town. He seemed too transient: he had to get to Florida, probably wouldn’t conduct operations from Fayetteville and they sensed his twitchiness. Then they flew in the guy who wanted way too much money but had a decent set of slacks. Finally they flew in and hired the guy who had roots in the area and would grow with the company and who’s dedication to craft shone through. “He got full control, started the day the tanks arrived.” Ching said.“[Now] a lot of people want to come work for us, it’s a real association of friends.” My favorite beer of theirs was their porter. I usually turn to porters when there’s talk of more snow, when I have time to sit or I’m stuck 30 lines into another poem about a woman. It was 90 and raining outside, I had to be somewhere else, and this porter couldn’t have cut through the afternoon any clearer. It was alive, brown with high notes of sweet barley. It was damn joy.

SADDLEBOCK BREWERY

Steve Rehbock, of Saddlebock Brewery, stood before seven or eight people sitting in his taproom. It was sunlit, new and only a fraction of this tall red barn’s floor space. “I’ve been brewing beer for a while at home, forming recipes, sending them off to competitions. We bought this horse farm, realized there was room for a brewery up here, we’d been talking about it for a long time and decided that we wanted to do really good beer and I felt comfortable with that, and the recipes.” A keg blew in a show of foam. “Surprise!” he said, as he turned his back to the crowd: some city kids and a few very leathered bikers - each behind a pint. “We had to get good equipment for it and make it affordable; that was kind of the market plan.” He took us into the cellar of what was the ‘greenest’ brewery I toured. “We have no trash pickup.” Rehbock led us through the order of stainless steel tanks. Mash, to boiler, to fermenter. He pointed from the barn’s basement to its ceil-ing nearly three flights up. Room for expansion, which is a common theme at the breweries in Northwest Arkansas. The source of confidence is real. “This is the first year that Ameri-can beers are rated the highest quality in all the world, it’s the first year that Germany didn’t win,” Steve said, though for

now his beer is a community thing. “We’re going off the tap tap with this stuff, so it’s got to be local. It’s got to be fresh.”The Arkansas Farmhouse, one of two farmhouse-style beers Saddlebock brews, was by far my favorite from their tap. The farmhouse style is unique, and so often (to me) mud-died up with unnecessary distortion so that what brought you to the style in the first place is rendered just a footnote in the overall taste. Saddlebock’s farmhouses, brewed in a barn on a hill, start and finish beautifully. They’ve got a guy growing hops twenty feet into the air out front. “He works for beer,” Steve said, showing us the new growths on their plot. The deck, two floors above, was chattering with strang-ers mingling. It was becoming common to find large crowds of people in off beat places, when that place was a brewery. From a strip-mall in Fayetteville, to a barn out of town, to industrial Springdale, the beer is magnet to all kinds.

FOSSIL COVE

At each brewery I was confronted - in a large steel mass - by the starkness of the operation. Only giant kettles, boilers and fermenters, grain, yeast. Yet, in each taproom a very dif-ferent flavor from each personality conducting the operation. At Fossil Cove, off Poplar Street in Fayetteville, I didn’t meet the owners or brewers, though I flew through their beers. The beers stood in and alone by themselves and led me to the personality of Ben Mills of Fossil Cove, who learned to brew at UC Davis. The La Brea Brown is a nod west and named for the famed tar pits. Anyone who has seen that scream-

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Photo by Taraf Abu Hamdan

ing baby mammoth on the bubbling shores of that oil pond would be prepared for a more viscous brew, you know, like one that would trap a woolly mammoth. But the brew wasn’t. It was a dark and seductive, smoothly carbonated and began with a roasted banana-like approach and dark, grainy finish. It was so much better than dying in a tar pit. The Whizzle, a white IPA at Fossil Cove, whose name arbitrarily scared me, was hopped expertly; it is a new favor-ite - fresh and refreshing in every way a beer can be those things. It was surprisingly light throughout, and the hops, though bright, were tuned much more to their fruit than their bitterness. Something I learned at Core Brewery in Springdale is that the timing of the placement of the hops is actually quite an integral, manipulatable part of the rhythm of beer making, and the hop is expressed differently depending on when it is used in the process.

CORE BREWING COMPANY

Core was the furthest north I went from Fayetteville and is, “the largest-capacity brewer in Arkansas and Oklahoma,” according to Jesse Core, the owner. Chris, the assistant cellar-man, took me on a tour. I had arrived a few minutes earlier and stepped into a very crowded tap room. Uncle Kit was behind a small bar. Colorful chalkings of beer names and designs are chalked onto the board behind the taps.

“Is there something special happening? Or is this just a regular crowd?” I wondered aloud to Chris, again, forgetting that good beer is enough to make people congregate almost anywhere. I asked this because the room was so small, and we were in an industrial part of Springdale. To my interna-tional readers, I should explain this is not a remarkable strip of street and aluminum warehouses. Surely they must be here for a reason. “Just the beer.” Chris said. Of course. The day I stopped by they had just installed ten more fermentation tanks to quadruple the size of their taproom. Core does public pilot batches. They brew small batches of beer and sample them in their taproom. A restaurant nearby features a rotating tap of their pilot brew. By crowdsourcing the input on their beer, they are able to gauge interest and re-fine the recipes before fully committing to a full batch. They also run a “guest tap,” an inclusive nod to the widespread growth of small-batch brewers in the area. The brewers at Core are brewing a wheat beer when I tour. The smell was a humid, hot-grain joy. We watched as wet, steaming wheat is shoveled into barrels. Hops are added in another tank to the now boiling mix. Jon, operations manager, had only a second to speak as he had to go brew and the band was at work. I tried their double black IPA first. Its dark hop bitter-ness soars across a malty undercurrent. It is a truly unique beer, unlike other double IPA’s I’ve tried, and I honestly can’t determine the best time to drink it. Winter? Summer? After or

idleclassmag.com 43

before dinner? I tried their red IPA, a sweeter, caramel-like version of an IPA, and also their American Wheat, which was so much more drinkable than the popular wheats, gummed up with bunk crop. Then my life changed a little with the Bohemoth, a Bohemian Pilsner, the all-star of the article. If ever there was ever a simple, beautiful song of a beer that lingers sweetly with you throughout the day, it is this one. This is a beer you must seek, even if it means visiting indus-trial Springdale. It is a crisp, slightly roasted flavor above an absolutely clear and neatly carbonated grain finish. Oh, boy. I asked Chris about working in an industry that deals di-rectly in the community and about growing in the company and community. After some thought, he replied, “if [Core Brewery] was already established, like Coors, we might not care as much day-to-day,” which is what “matters.” Consum-ers create a community of wants and culture, and in that you have competition. “Not a worry,” he said “If you can top us, try. If anything, that pushes us to better our product.” That will always win over Happy Meal monotony and its synthe-sized collaboration of banality. Cheers to good beer done right! They were my last stop on my mini micro brewery tour. I had managed not to mire myself in the ancient connections to today’s modern brewery, but I was struck by a contrast - not in methods or ingredients - those remain the same. It was in the contrast a brewery presents to our traditional business run for-a-profit. Stores are more and more just the tip of a long corporate chain, staffed robotically and mechanically managed from afar, outlets spewing plastic nonsense mold-ed across bitter seas. Fast food “restaurants” bore us with unchanging formulas of flavors focus-grouped to death. In a time of this boring global food chain, what sets craft brew-ers apart are their aspirations. None spoke of making more money. That American holy word “profit” wasn’t spoken once to me, but passion was repeatedly.

The breweries see their capacity for growth as a function of the communities’ quickly growing demand for something good done right. They are making beer for their community. Their pursuits, labors and inventions are tuned to the better-ing of product, not profit. The result is undeniably superior to the alternative, and here’s to the bettering of humanity’s best beverage. Water + grain + hops + yeast, however you rock it.

APPLE BLOSSOMPorter: A well-hopped beer made from brown malt. Light roasted sweetness. Cool carbonation, faint nut. Brown, alive!

FOSSIL COVEWhizzle White IPA: Most commonly an IPA brewed with the wheat or spices similar to a Belgian wit beer. This beautiful beer is clean, hopped perfectly to be juicy and not bitter, and the wheat in this one knows its place.

CORE BREWERYBohemoth Bohemian Pilsner: A golden Czech lager. This beer was on my palate and mind all day and has been since. It is a lightly roasted grain flavor on a cool stream of grainy carbonation.

SADDLEBOCK BREWERY Arkansas Farmhouse: A ‘Saison,’ which is a French/Bel-gian style noted for its yeasty and spicy notes. This crisp, bright, beautifully spiced Saison is the perfect summer dinner table beer.

BEST OF THE BREWS

(BELOW) CHING MONG OF APPLE BLOSSOM BREWERYPhoto by Marty Shutter

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The FAYETTEVILLE LITERARY FESTIVAL unites national & local authors to explore storytelling through literature, poetry & music.

TRUE LIT

Featured writers Jack Gantos & Molly Giles

FAYETTEVILLE HAS LONG HAD A STRONG LITERARY TRADITION with writers like Miller Williams, Ellen Gilchrist and the late Frank Stanford calling the Ozarks home. Now, True Lit: Fayetteville’s Literary Festival hopes to capitalize and expand that tradition. The inaugural event takes place at the Fayetteville Public Library from Sept 5 to 8. Some events will take place at other locations such as Fayetteville High School and Nightbird Books on Dickson Street. The four-day festival includes many events that are free and open to the public. Events include a writing workshop taught by University of Ar-kansas Creative Writing Professor and Pulitzer Prize nominee Molly Giles; a poetry workshop with Sibling Rivalry Press publisher and Pushcart Prize nominee Bryan Borland; and lectures by best-selling young adult writer Jack Gantos. Other talented national and regional authors will participate in the festival. True Lit’s partners are the Friends of the Fayetteville Public Library, the Fayetteville Montessori School, Fayetteville Public Library, Fay-etteville Public Schools, Fayetteville Public Education Foundation, and the University of Arkansas and College of Education and Health Professions. These organizations embraced the opportunity to create the festival to inspire all ages to embrace writing and reading and to foster the appreciation of regional literature. The goal of the festival is to help encourage people to tell their stories. “From the first meeting in August 2012 we discovered all the part-ners shared a similar goal,” commented Lolly Greenwood, Director of Youth Services at Fayetteville Public Library and event organizer, “We were all conducting separate literary events throughout the year and the idea of literary festival helped create a synergy to bring them all together to ignite a love of literature.”

VISIT: TRUELITFEST.COM

allInclusiveFayetteville artist collective GOOP TROUPE launches new zine to showcase members’ eclectic creative endeavours. WORDS / KODY FORD

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TOO OFTEN IN LIFE, COMPETITION REIGNS. THE VICIOUS bloodsport of the daily grind from the closing bell of the Stock Exchange to the final buzzer of the NBA Playoffs is a zero sum game. However, something about the creative spirit typically seeks the opposite. Throughout history, artists, writers and, most obviously, musicians have come together to collaborate, encourage and inspire. Such is the nature of Goop Troupe, a new assemblage of artists, writers, musicians, and creative thinkers in Fayette-ville. Jon Peven started Goop Troupe as an online group to discuss share and discuss art. Like most cre-ative endeavors, evolution occurred naturally and rapidly. Last year, the group hosted a Halloween show featuring 20 artists at Nightbird Books on Dick-son Street. The shows have continued, followed by weekly meetings at 7:30 on Tuesdays at Nightbird. They even have a curated art show hanging at the University of Arkansas through August 29. “Goop Troupe is all-inclusive and we want to

interact with other [arts] groups in the area,” Jon says. “It also fills in the gap for people who want to be involved, but don’t know what they want to do.” Aside from creative networking and events, Goop Troupe recently launched their own zine featuring work from its members. Inspired by punk zines of old, the magazine’s DIY aesthetic showcases a medley of local art and writing. Goop Troupe member Elizabeth Sharpe said, “[The zine] mimics who is involved in the group and what they bring to the table. It’s a mix and match thing that reflects the group’s interests.” Copies can be purchased for $15 at Nightbird Books. Goop Troupe can be contacted via their Facebook group.

Cover art for the latest issue of the Goop Troupe zine

My siamese twin has no arms. She has no head, and she has no shoulders. She lives in my bed. She does not like to be touched, but it is a small bed. When I am angry, I use her as a pillow. I eat her like an apple, and I tell her all the things she can't have. I hold her and tell her she will never be held. I kiss her and talk about falling buildings. I pick at her scales, and I cut her open. I take her insides, and I want to press them into my own. They slide against my torso like spaghetti on a balloon. My siamese twin has two teeth, but no mouth. When my siamese twin is angry, she grinds her two teeth, and the violent gnashing reverberates like the leaving of Christ.

This Bodies Words & Illustration by Claire Brankin

My siamese twin has no arms. She has no head, and she has no shoulders. She lives in my bed. She does not like to be touched, but it is a small bed. When I am angry, I use her as a pillow. I eat her like an apple, and I tell her all the things she can't have. I hold her and tell her she will never be held. I kiss her and talk about falling buildings. I pick at her scales, and I cut her open. I take her insides, and I want to press them into my own. They slide against my torso like spaghetti on a balloon. My siamese twin has two teeth, but no mouth. When my siamese twin is angry, she grinds her two teeth, and the violent gnashing reverberates like the leaving of Christ.

This Bodies Words & Illustration by Claire Brankin

(Matt Owen)