As I was about to say last week before I got too windy ... much has been said about the "creative corridor" that is doing its part to reshape Main Street and redefine Little Rock.
Soon, the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra and Ballet Arkansas will make their headquarters there. The Arkansas Repertory Theatre will expand catty-cornered from its main performance venue.
The ASO will have space where it can perfect its performances and have offices for running the organization. The ballet will have a swell space to rehearse, in public view, and the Rep will have a dandy black-box theater for experimental and children's productions. Throw in the Little Rock Technology Park, an excruciating exercise in creativity by committee, and you will indeed have a new Main Street.
News flash. The South has been lagging behind the rest of the country for the past century and a half in education and wages.
But any Yankee by now knows that the the South has a lot going for it. The flip side of the coin is that it's much cheaper to live here than, say, in Cherry Hill, N.J. And the livin's easier.
News flash number 2. Our region has made strides in the past couple of generations.
Back in 1920, H.L. Mencken wrote his infamous essay called "The Sahara of the Bozart."
The journalist, essayist and cultural giant wrote that the South had become bereft of intellectual and artistic ferment in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Fair or not, it fit nicely with what was left of the region's economy after the dismantling of the slave-labor market, even 55 years after the war.
His neologism bozart, of course, was a slam since few Southerners could pronounce, much less spell beaux-arts (French for fine arts), or so the Sage of Baltimore reasoned.
Of the South, Mencken wrote:
It is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally as the Sahara Desert. ... There is not a single picture gallery worth going into, or a single orchestra capable of playing the nine symphonies of Beethoven, or a single opera house; or a single theater devoted to decent plays, or a single public monument that is worth looking at, or a single workshop devoted to the making of beautiful things. ... You will not find a single Southern prose writer who can actually write ....
And on and on he wrote in the lengthy brutalization. Then, of course, he later took responsibility for goading the sleeping giant into the Southern Renaissance, primarily writers such as William Faulkner; the Fugitives, a writers group based at the South's answer to the Ivy League, Vanderbilt; black writers such as Richard Wright; and so on.
In Atlanta in the middle of Marietta Street, in the heart of the city, is a statue of Henry W. Grady.
A boy of 10 when the war broke out, Grady later became managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution. A gifted writer and orator, he coined the term "the New South" and preached the gospel of the region's economic regeneration and social reinvention -- more wishful than hopeful at the time -- in the investment halls of the North until his premature death at 39.
Even early in my lifetime, Grady's term still seemed shiny and new, though it is becoming more and more worn by changing hands so many times in the astounding success of the region.
Here is an idea for the Downtown Renaissance in our state capital.
Commission a monumental sculpture of George R. Mann, the architect who did more than anyone else to shape the look of the city and the image of the state with his early 20th-century designs.
These include the Boyle Building, which will become home of the Aloft Little Rock hotel; the state Capitol, which will not, last we heard, become a mixed-use facility like so much of the regenerate downtown, including the former Gus Blass Department Store, which is now the Mann on Main, a multiuse project; the Albert Pike Hotel; and Arkansas Gazette building, now home to the eStem charter school.
Place it in the intersection of Main and Capitol. In the intersection, just like the Grady statue, so we will have to slow down, navigate around it, and maybe reflect for a nanosecond. After all, the renaissance is not about moving traffic.
(Meantime, you will be able to read about Mann and many others in Little Rock Architects 1833-1950 by practitioners Charles Witsell and Gordon Wittenberg, to be released on May 27 at a lecture and signing at the Historic Arkansas Museum at 5:30 p.m.)
Or perhaps a statue of our greatest writer, Little Rock's Charles Portis, would be more fitting.
His fiction and nonfiction take us back and forth across Arkansas -- from Fort Smith in True Grit, to the border with Memphis and beyond -- to all regions of the sad, comical heart.
Let's see: Theater: Check. Symphony: Check. Opera: It's being worked on. Public monuments: Check. Art galleries: Check. Great writer: Check.
Sahara of the Bozart indeed.
Sunday Business on 05/18/2014