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TJ Deeter, the founder, publisher and sometimes editor of Localistmagazine.com, is retiring the local pub after a five year run.

In his farewell blog post, he wrote...


Localist was a unique project. Dozen of people, including me from 2005 to 2007, collaborated to publish it, first as a glossy magazine and later, as a webzine. No one got paid. In fact, a lot of people, TJ in particular, lost money. But everyone, all the people that worked in design, took pictures, wrote articles, copy-edited, sold ads and performed at benefit shows, believed in its mission, which, pretty simply, was to expose local culture that undeservedly existed in the margins. (That us-versus-them mentality was pretty sustaining, particularly, for me when I was working as a clerk at the Dem-Gaz and spending more than half of my time working on Localist.)

It's hard to quantify the pub's success, but today, topics that Localist built its name on, like local hip-hop and kick-ball, are way in the mainstream. Local acts, of all stripes, get regular coverage in the daily and in the Times. Local fashion, which Localist gave early, prominent coverage to, has become big business. And TJ's name or some event that he's sponsoring gets mentioned in print just about every other week, and with his continued interest in promoting local shows and shepherding hip-hop school, that doesn't seem likely to change.

In case you don't read the Arkansas Blog or somehow missed this item yesterday and have not yet read about it on websites like Vulture and the Smoking Gun, it seems likely that Sacha Baron Cohen, under the guise of his Bruno character, was in Fort Smith and Texarkana last month covertly shooting segments for his forthcoming film, reportedly called "Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt."

Promises of $1 beer, hot chicks and blood-sport lured locals to "Blue Collar Brawlin'" in Fort Smith and "Red, White and Blood Cage Fighting" in Texarkana. There a fighter billed as "Straight Dave" took on audience plants. Then things took an unexpected twist. In the ring, the two "fighters" stripped down to their skivves and kissed, passionately. Then the beer started flying.

More via the AP.