The latest Oxford American — the first since the embezzlement drama — is on newsstands. Continuing a recent trend of releasing theme issues, this is the Home Issue.

Here's the teaser:

I've only had a chance to flip-through it and catch a bit in Marc Smirnoff's editor letter about misreading the embezzler's "essence," former Times staffer Warwick Sabin's steely publisher's photo and that sometimes Times contributor and OA editor at large Paul Reyes has a piece on the "life (and death by fire) of a historic home" here in Little Rock (1020 Rock St.) Below: a capsule preview of the article.

There's a fundraiser in Little Rock coming up on May 29. Details.

White Water hosts a powerhouse bill featuring hook-y, Americana-inflected pop-rockers Big Silver and Spa City's finest swingin' blues band, Brian Martin and the Circulators, 9 p.m., $5.

If you like your old-time a little zanier, Vino's hosts Fayetteville's Cletus Got Shot, who do a kind of unhinged psychobilly bluegrass, and local standbys the Damn Bullets, 8:30 p.m., $7.

The Big John Miller Band is at the Afterthought, 9 p.m., $7.

Zodiac Taurus is in effect at Revolution, with DJ Mea, Chaos, Ska-T and Zodiac Aries spin-off winners Blake Taylor and Jordy, 8 p.m.

Uglistick plays the Peabody's RiverTop party, 8 p.m., $5.

Improv Little Rock pits two teams against one another in “The Comedy Throwdown” at the Public Theatre, 10 p.m., $7.

If the rain goes away, the Travs continue their home stand against the Drillers, 7:10 p.m., $6-$10.

More.

‘BRUNDIBAR'/‘CONTACT WITH THE ENEMY'
7:30 p.m., the Weekend Theater. $14-$18. 

The Weekend Theater concludes its 2007-2008 season with a World War II-themed double bill. The opera “Brundibar” was originally performed by the children of the Theresienstadt concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia, using only the instruments available to them at the camp. Reminiscent of “Hansel and Gretel,” the opera follows the travails of two fatherless children who're trying to earn money for their sick mother in a marketplace controlled by an evil organ grinder, Brundibar. The second half of the bill features “Contact with the Enemy,” a one-act play about two World War II vets who meet by chance in front of the Holocaust Museum and realize that they once knew each other, giving rise to conversations and recollections of long suppressed events. The double bill runs through May 18.

COOL SHOES
10 p.m., Downtown Music. $5. 

In the grand tradition of localizing popular culture that's given us Little Rock Star and Belvis the Black Elvis, local promoter/roustabout TJ Deeter offers up his version of “Club MTV” (which, of course, was modeled on “American Bandstand,” which, in turn, had its own Little Rock version, “Steve's Show”). As Deeter envisions it, Cool Shoes will bring dancing, jams, live performance, art and video together in a package that, when edited down, will make for a nifty webisode for his localistmagazine.com and his homeboy Rod Bryan's anthro.tv. Sadly, Deeter will not be filling the Downtown Julie Brown role. No one will. But back to the pressing matters: Friday night is all about dancing, to jams provided by Deeter and Casey Stuart, looking at cool art by Ike Plumlee and Cameron Holifield, and head nodding to a one-song live performance by Rockst'r, who'll be unveiling a new single. Deeter didn't see a need to extend a special invitation to folks to wear their spiffiest kicks. “Everyone already wears cool shoes.”

Be warned. John Brandon's “Arkansas” (McSweeney's Rectangulars, $22, cloth) is not your Arkansas. Or any Arkansas rooted in history or geography or reality. In an online interview with identitytheory.com, the first-time novelist said that he likes to write about places he's only visited briefly. “Arkansas is a hard place to pin down,” he said, “so anything seems possible.”

There is, of course, a counter-argument easily made: Arkansas is not hard to pin down. It's a real place, where there are no hills, “cut off” or otherwise, in Union County, where you would never travel through Jonesboro heading north to Memphis, where Pine Bluff could never be described as “craggy.” For Brandon, these details are secondary. His Arkansas is somewhere cast apart and away, a stand-in for nowhere, an indistinct purgatory of a place, where someone could just as easily stay forever as leave tomorrow.

Get past that blurred approach — and rare specifics, like “Little Rock is a rotten maze”— though, and “Arkansas” is a fine read, an existential crime tale, more picaresque than noir, packed with tight prose, plenty of pathos and a plot that roils along.

Yeah, they've got Lou Reed, Betty LaVette, Cat Power, the Roots and the Black Crowes (also coming to the Arkansas Music Pavilion in Fayetteville at the end of the summer), but aside from the cost ($60-80) and the miserable bottleneck that is Tom Lee Park and the hours you'll spend waiting in line to use the john, here's a good reason not to make the trek to Memphis in May this weekend: Festival organizers administer a radius clause in performers' contracts that prohibits them from playing Riverfest, too, according Riverfest's DeAnna Korte.

"We don't feel threatened by it, but we don't think the two events conflict," she says. "I think their rationale is, 'If Jonny Lang is the only person you care about at Memphis in May and you can see him in a couple of weeks in Little Rock for $10 versus $60 in Memphis, then you're likely to skip Memphis in May in favor of Little Rock.'"

Pretty chickenshit, I say. And bully-ish.

As spinsouth suggests and Alltel's Michael Marion confirms, the radius clause is standard procedure, employed by just about every major festival. Bonaroo's radius is apparently really wide.

So maybe not chickenshit or bully-ish. How bout just frustrating? More in the comments below.

So the finalists for the Little Rock Film Festival's Arkansas Music Video competition  have been announced. (Full disclosure: I was a judge. Maybe once this is all finished, we can post em all for you to supply your own Beavis and Butthead commentary. There were some funny ones.) Out of 15 or 16, these got the most votes: Epiphany- "Can't Tell," the Moving Front "Zombies," Bryan Frazier "Unwise" and Ace Spade and the Whores of Babylon "Ice Crystals."

Saturday, May 17, at Revolution, all those videos will screen, then all those bands, plus 607, will perform. Then Techno-Squid Eats Parliament, a local power-pop force in the 90s, reunite to headline. At some point in the night, the winners will be announced.

Sadly, I don't have the Ace Spade video. It's awesome. And about meth cooking.

Whadda y'all think of the other three finalists?

 

Epiphany- Can't Tell (Jordan Atwater)