The Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville at age 16 is being called a relic in some (moneyed) quarters. Those quarters know it’s not old by civic center standards, and in the last year or so it got reupholstered. The quarrel is its size. The main auditorium has about 1,200 seats, and we’re a growing metropolis, […]
Dear Iowa: I know you a little. I’ve been visiting almost every year since 1991. You house my in-laws. A lot in common with Arkansas: Mainly rural. Your shape. A prominent capital city instead of a tucked-away one like Jeff City or Austin (that’s a little joke). You held on to your 19th-century populist style […]
Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock 1. For all of us who watch our weight, shouldn’t we followers of Agatston and Atkins continue to avoid refined flour and reduce processed food, though that might drive us nuts (which are excusably high fat only if you’re near zero carb). To do any diet right, you can’t eat […]
Driving home from work early Sunday morning, the radio was playing “It Ain’t Necessarily So” from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. The tenor’s voice was to-the-back-of-the-hall soaring, precise in enunciation and emoted with the sass the song demands but rarely gets. This was public radio’s Jazz Profiles with Nancy Wilson, who said it was Cab Calloway. […]
The week of October 21, 2002, was extraordinary in Fayetteville. This is a vibrant college town so prominent lecturers shouldn’t be that unusual but to have three in a week was special. Bill Clinton coming up was not unusual; he’s probably here about once a year. On Monday the 21st, though, he helped dedicate a […]
Two years ago I read a profile of Philip Pullman in The New Yorker (I don’t get this magazine for the articles but to look at the pictures, except sometimes) that inspired me to get the audio editions of the three volumes of the British children’s author’s His Dark Materials, a phrase from the Protestant […]