As the Dec. 31 deadline approaches, your trusty Times staff will continue to beat the old showcase drum. So here we go: You still have time to enter the 2012 Arkansas Times Musicians Showcase! That’s right, if your band has been playing for 17 years or 17 minutes, you can toss your hat in the ring for a shot at glory and approbation and a drink named after you or your band and a spot performing on one of the big stages at Riverfest and a spot playing at the Arkansas State Fair and more great prizes that we don’t quite have finalized yet, but which will, no doubt, be worth your time.
You can go to arktimes.com/showcase12 and upload your band info and tunes (we’ll need four). That’s probably the easiest way to enter. You can also fill out one of the handy entry forms that have been running in the Times print edition the last few weeks, clip it and send it to us with a CD.
The first film has been selected for the Little Rock Horror Picture Show, the gore-and-scares sister fest to the Little Rock Film Festival scheduled for February. It’s the Australian horror feature “The Tunnel.”
The low-budget 2011 horror film, directed by Carlos Ledesma, follows a faux-documentary crew as they descend into abandoned subway tunnels under Sydney, Australia, to find out what’s been killing transients there. Damn the luck, they find the culprit, with murderous consequences. The trailer (seen on Rock Candy) looks pretty damn scary.
The films selected for the Little Rock Horror Picture Show will screen Feb. 17-19 at Market Street Cinema. We’ll have more details in coming weeks.
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers will play Verizon Arena April 21. This, we feel fairly certain, is the band’s first concert in Arkansas. We’ll report on ticket information when we get it.