City Weekly May, 6 2020

C I T Y W E E K LY . N E T

Those who staked out Utah’s wilderness, both in life and the printed word A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS

BY JOHN RASMUSON

JUNE 4, 2020 | VOL. 37

N0. 2

TALES for Road Warriors

CONTENTS COVER STORY

TALES FOR ROAD WARRIORS Those who staked out Utah’s wilderness—both in life and the printed word

15

Essays by John Rasmuson with margin notes

by Ken Sanders

5 PRIVATE EYE 8 A&E 10 DINE 22 MUSIC 28 CINEMA 29 COMMUNITY

2 | JUNE 4, 2020

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STAFF Publisher PETE SALTAS Executive Editor JOHN SALTAS News Editor JERRE WROBLE Arts & Entertainment Editor SCOTT RENSHAW Music Editor ERIN MOORE Copy Desk KARA RHODES Contributors KATHARINE BIELE, ROB BREZSNY, JOHN RASMUSON, MIKE RIEDEL, ALEX SPRINGER

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SOAP BOX It’s clear the People who have been unprotected by the excessive corruption in our government have had it. @SERENAHOLSEN

via Instagram

Dawn

Oh, say can you see? @IMAGINEYOURESTRANGE

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Life > property. Do not equate this to the violence black people are suffering in Utah and throughout the nation @emilie.jordao via Instagram

All the tagging and broken glass are due to white boys with skateboards. @LORDJONNEMORT

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What a sad world we live in today. @MY.ESH.A

via Instagram This did not solve anything. @LACEEKNOWLTON

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On the Protests

@SLCWEEKLY

Why are our cities crumbling just at the point they are supposed to be opening?

Our best efforts at home, school, work, and in the public square have produced a couple generations of youth who are brash, bored, self-centered, poorly educated, constantly entertained, inexperienced, recently unemployed, and largely disheartened with what little they know about rule of law.

And what is it that they do know about

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American law? They know that the justice system administers the law racially, not equally, and that police have been given a license to kill with impunity.

Urban protesters don’t trust moralist authority. They don’t believe in the religion of their ancestors. They have been invited by business advertisers, the sports and arts worlds, political parties and the media to worship celebrities, so that’s what they do.

In 2020, the rising generations are no longer rising. They have seen life cave in on them from all sides, setting off existen-

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tial insecurities they see no other way of handling than with collective anarchy.

KIMBALL SHINKOSKEY Woods Cross

Forgot One for Best of Utah Body and Mind

You unfortunately forgot one of the most important body workers in Utah: Mary Phillips, certified advanced rolfer (rolfingslc.com, 801-809-2560).

Get on it quick!

ARCHIE PHILLIPS Salt Lake City

THE BOX

What’s one thing you’re learning now, and why is it important?

Mikey Saltas

Through all of the protesting and rioting this week, I’ve learned who the real leaders are in our local and national communities. It’s important to weed out those in office who are silent and inactive through this ordeal from those who truly want civil and human rights change.

Joel Smith

While you may trust your instincts about the goodness of people—and if they stink, you can generally smell them out immediately—be wary and always give them a chance to join your circle, should they just be having a bad smell day!

Eric Granato

To limit my digital intake and smell more flowers.

Kelly Boyce

To take advantage of as many adventure opportunities as possible. It’s important to keep one’s sanity and not get stuck in the same old routine.

Sofia Cifuentes

I am looking for activities that connect me with the present and my own relationship with my body and my environments, such as gardening, skateboarding and the hula hoop.

Bryan Mannos

I’m learning how to shuffle. It’s not important, but will make me a lock at the next wedding I attend, which is important.

Paula Saltas

To trust scientists and not politicians.

It’s our lives at stake.

Bryan Bale

I’m learning the alarming extent to which bigotry is still embedded in our system of justice. I’m learning that, as a white man in the USA, I don’t truly understand how difficult it is for marginalized people to simply live a normal daily life, and it’s not my place to quote MLK at them or tell them how they should feel.

I’m learning that speaking respectfully to law-enforcement officers and complying with their demands is, too often, not enough to guarantee that one will survive an encounter with them. I’m learning that “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear” is a misguided, misleading mantra.

Derek Carlisle

I’m learning that some people buy skateboards just so they have a weapon at their disposal. I guess if you close the parks and won’t let them ride in groups of 10 or more that they will end up at the protest with something to bash. I remember when skaters were the best because they didn’t care about the rest.

PRIVATE EY My Tipping Point

I

@johnsaltas

handkerchief in his front vest pocket. He gathered with other immigrant Greeks and made his way to his voting district. Inside, he signed his name, took his ballot into the booth and proceeded to vote straight-ticket Democrat, a practice he strictly adhered to until he died in 1979. Voting was his way of getting even and doing his part for change.

When it came my turn to vote for the first time, he pointed his 90-year-old finger at me and said, “Vote for the Deemo-craats, sonny. Just the Deem-o-craats. They heppa the vorking man. They heppa the leetle man.” I’d heard that the whole time I knew him, so it was no surprise when he added, “Re-pooob-li caans are doorty no goot sons a ma beetches.”

Who was I to argue? I grew up in Bingham, a mining town of blue-collar immigrants who were probably all straight-ticket Democrats. Besides, he came by his strong views honestly—he and nearly everyone around him, in some measure, had been screwed over by the Republican establishment his entire life. If my grandfather wanted me to be a Democrat, then by god and by golly, I’m going to be a Democrat. It would kill him to know that over the years I’ve voted for a Republican here and there and today count a good many Republicans as friends.

Now, 40 years beyond my first vote, I’m being asked to switch parties long enough to vote in the Republican primary, then switch back to being a registered Democrat.

The reason there’s a push for that is that’s the Republican primary may very well be the election that settles who becomes our next governor. The Democratic challenger, Chris Peterson, has his work cut out for him. Much of Utah would vote for a Republican Judas before a Democrat Jesus, so Peterson has a real disadvantage. One thing he has in my book is that he’s pledged to privatize Utah’s liquor industry. No one else dares to say that, apparently.

However, I’m not going to switch parties for five seconds

unless someone gives me a good reason to—like pledge support for the causes I believe in. The crux of the party switcheroo gambit is I’m supposed to vote for anyone but Greg Hughes as he is seen as too extreme for Utah. OK, he’s an original Trumper. I’m not voting for him on that predication alone, but I need a reason to flip that’s better than, “anyone but Greg.” Also, I fear switching parties will be like when I sign up for a new app. If I forget to cancel in 30 days I’m stuck paying for it for life. I can’t be a Republican for life.

So, if it matters to the two Republican frontrunners— former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman and current Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox—please, give me a reason. I have three. Pick even one, guys.

One: Tell the Utah hospitality industry that you’ll get Utah out of the liquor business and you will be fair to the local distillers and brewers that mean so much to Utah’s economy and you will not target their products for delisting from liquor stores. Two: Disavow the divisive actions and debasing behaviors of President Trump. If he’s your leader, you’re not my governor. Simple as that. Three: George Floyd died over a week ago. What is your plan? Not words, not platitudes. What do you see? Riots or protests?

What will you specifically do to make Utah a better place?

And spare me talking about civility. Every Republican running today is holding a scale. My grandfather knew what that meant. He knew you could lie and cheat. Not all did.

Which are you?

If that doesn’t happen, then I’m sticking right where I am, in the Democratic party. Let the chips fall where they may. My grandfather became a Democrat because people literally tipped the scales against him. I’m not in a tipping mood right now. CW Send comments to john@cityweekly.net.

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’ve been a Democrat since before I was old enough to vote. At just 20 years old, my Greek immigrant grandfather came to the United States in 1906 from the island of Crete. In a few more years, he enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War I. If you’re ever in Vernal, you can see his name on the war memorial there—Emanuel Nebavlakis. Some years after that, he became a naturalized citizen, earning the right to vote for public officials for the first time in his life. The Crete he left behind was under Ottoman Turk dominion in 1906. He never had the chance to vote in Crete.

After his arrival here, my grandfather witnessed all kinds of bad behavior not usually found on the pages of American history books. He was victim to discrimination in the form of hiring practices, living quarters, pay disparities and full-on violence against his fellow Greeks. The Ku Klux Klan of the time burned crosses above immigrant homes in Carbon County where he lived. As an early union man, he was friends with a fellow Cretan and union organizer named Louis Tikas who was murdered (along with 25 others including 11 children) by the Colorado National Guard at Ludlow, Colorado, during the Colorado Coalfield War. He worked in the mines owned by such luminaries as the Rockefeller family where the company paid him in script, cheated him at the coal scale and priced the life of a mule over that of a human being.

So, when he did vote for the very first time, I’m sure it went something like this: He got a haircut, combed his hair perfectly, shaved, splashed on some Old Spice and dressed in his very best clothes. He put on his fedora and stuck a

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JUNE 4, 2020 | 5

LOVE

&

PRIDE

6 | JUNE 4, 2020

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PEACE

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HITS&MISSES

BY KATHARINE BIELE @kathybiele

Food Fail

Oh gee, it’s just too hard, whines our state government. No, we don’t want that $50 million in federal aid to feed hungry kids because the paperwork is really tough, and we don’t have enough time to get things right, notes The Salt Lake Tribune. The better idea is to let those kids go hungry. The Census reports that a third of Utah households aren’t getting enough to eat and one in eight are getting free food from pantries. Shouldn’t their parents—or single parent—be pulling themselves up by the bootstraps instead of depending on the socialist economy? Rip off your damned mask and get to work, you slackers. Maybe your kids could start a lemonade stand, or a GoFundMe campaign.

You know what Ronald Reagan said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Indeed, the government isn’t here to help anymore. Suck it.

Gubernatorial Switch

You may know Utah has refused to take federal dollars to feed hungry kids. Don’t think it’s a problem? Here’s what FeedAmerica. org says: “In Utah, 373,850 people are struggling with hunger—and of them, 135,940 are children.

One in seven children struggles with hunger. People facing hunger in Utah are estimated to report needing $179,279,000 more per year to meet their food needs.” Utahns Against Hunger is hosting virtual forums on this issue with members of Utah’s congressional delegation.

Submit questions here for events: https://bit.ly/2XbYcsE A Conversation with Sen. Romney’s Office on Facebook Live, June 8, 4-5 p.m., free. https://bit.ly/2ZQpGpA A Conversation with Congressman Ben McAdams on Facebook Live, June 12, 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. free. https://bit.ly/2ZYgX4o

Wear Orange Virtually

Gun violence has taken a back seat to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it hasn’t stopped. Recently, three people lost their lives in Philadelphia, Chicago lost two. And while AZcentral notes that public shootings have quieted down, gun violence is surging. Less than 1% of gun deaths are the result of a mass shooting, according to research by Everytown for Gun Safety. Domestic violence and accidental shootings continue to take lives. Join Utah’s Virtual Wear Orange Event on National Gun Violence Awareness Day when Americans and local community partners will band together. You can submit your “I Wear Orange Because ...” statements, stories and tributes at https://bit.ly/IWearOrangeBecause and check out the Facebook page for ways to participate. Saturday, June 6, 10 a.m.-11:30 p.m., free. https://bit.ly/3daGACZ

Vigil For Crime Victims

JUNE 4, 2020 | 7

—KATHARINE BIELE Send tips to revolt@cityweekly.net

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Few people were able to participate in the 2020 National Crime Victims’ Rights Week in April, but the pain continues. Not even a pandemic could stop this important event, which has been held every year since 1981. Join the 2020 National Crime Victims’ Rights Vigil for a Facebook Live event to honor all victims and survivors of crime. Organizers ask that you place a blue light and lawn signs/posters on your porch or window starting June 7 until June 13 in a sign of unity. Speakers include community leaders and survivors offering the power of their personal stories. Utah Capitol, 350 S. State, south steps with social distancing, Sunday, June 7, 5-7 p.m., free. https://bit.ly/2ZNZcF5

It’s too soon to claim victory after the racially charged Salt Lake and national protests of police killings, but they carried a strong message.

No, they were not the peaceful protests of the Gandhi era, but people are saying enough. If you wonder how they should get the attention of government officials, ask them. It has not been for lack of trying. Black Lives Matter is only the most recent outgrowth of the anger.

This time, there was massive collateral damage and many injuries. There were also racists and armed factions in the midst of the protesters. Young white men curiously smashing cars while young women gleefully took selfies. Then, following the protests, some 360 people signed up to help clean the mess. A curfew was put in place, protesters were scolded, and the president blamed Democrats and Antifa, which is an adjective for a movement, not an organization.

While the community grapples with the fallout, the hope—again—is that change will come. In the Los Angeles Times, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar quoted poet Langston Hughes. “What happens to a dream deferred? /… Maybe it sags / like a heavy load. / Or does it explode?”

Utah Delegation Talks Food

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Get the Message?

IN A WEEK, YOU CAN CHANGE THE WORLD

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Oh, the angst and the strategizing. What Michigan Radio calls “Operation Chaos” is alive and well in Utah. Democrats and independents are switching parties in hopes of influencing a primary election that typically parses Republican.

Dems are posting that that they are holding their noses or in need of a shower—but are registering as Republicans and voting for Huntsman or Cox for governor. The question is, however, just what the strategy is. The thinking is that Red Utah will never elect a Democrat, and polls/regular people don’t think former House Speaker Greg Hughes has a chance. Huntsman is running social media ads encouraging the switch. Grassroots organization Salt Lake Indivisible has a list of rationales. But will there be enough switching to tip the election, and will they all vote in concert for the same candidate, or will it split the vote and give Hughes the win?

Former Sen. Jim Dabakis and former BLM chief Pat Shea have both switched. In 1972, Democrats in Michigan went back to a caucus form of election when George Wallace won the primary there. Many Utah Republicans like that idea.

CITIZEN REV LT

projects for kids.

More programs in other areas are still to come, along with festival merchandise to help support the UAF mission. “The artistic coordinators have worked tirelessly since last October to develop their programs, artists were selected and contracts sent out when we had to make the decision not to hold the Festival this June,” UAF executive director Lisa Sewell said in a press release. “We were determined to find a way to honor the work of our coordinators and support the artists.” (Scott Renshaw)

It became a viral sensation when conservative gadfly Tomi Lahren snarkily tweeted about whether liberals would complain about the cancellation of Pride Month parades due to the pandemic, and was instantly smacked down with a history lesson about how Pride parades had already been cancelled, because LGBTQ people understood the realities of a deadly virus, and a government that didn’t act quickly enough to address it. So while the LGBTQ community and its allies will miss not having a live parade or festival to celebrate love and life this year, the celebrations of Pride Month that do take place will be showing a respect for that history in promoting safety and public health.

Accordingly, Utah Pride Center has moved its annual Pride Gala online. On Friday, June 5, from 5:30-7:30 p.m., you can join the virtual gala live from anywhere, for a night of entertainment (yet to be announced at press time) and support for the local LGBTQ

enough to continue getting funding. Neff delivers an entertaining spin on a familiar set-up, with an appealing cast providing energy to scenarios like a “scared straight” confrontation between a teen vandal and an overzealous actor pretending to be a convict, and a traffic stop of a driver who clearly—to everyone but the officer—has been doing more than speeding.

Both films are available through June 8 via ParkCityFilm.org. Curator Jill Orschel will facilitate a Q&A with both films’ directors June 4, 6 p.m., free with registration required. (SR)

The Beehive Live

community. For the first time, the Gala will also be offered free to all who are interested after registering online at UtahPrideCenter. org/spectacular. Those who are able to make a larger donation in support of the Pride Center’s programs are of course encouraged to do so.

If you’re looking for another way this week to support Pride Center activities, register online for the silent auction that launched May 27 and will be continuing through the end of the gala on June 5. It doesn’t require public events for you to fly your colors and show that the spirit of Pride Month exists somewhere besides a parade route. (SR)

Storytelling is a huge part of what defines us as human beings; we make sense of the world by creating narratives out of our experiences, and sharing those narratives with others. At this moment, the ways in which we can share those stories are more limited, but we also need to share them perhaps more than ever.

The Beehive—a local resource for podcasts, live events and more devoted to such storytelling—has increased its output during the coronavirus pandemic, including a now-weekly The Beehive Live vlog dedicated to local news. While early episodes were, understandably, devoted largely to coronavirus-related stories, “coronavirus wasn’t the headline every day, and people were getting tired of it, honestly,” says The Beehive editorin-chief Meg Walter, who co-hosts The Beehive Live with Clint Betts. “We found ourselves more interested in talking politics, doing deeper dives into other things. … There’s not really a singular place where people can get their local news.”

The result might range from exploring

VIA YOUTUBE

Utah Pride Virtual Spectacular

Quarantine has people watching plenty of streaming content, but it’s still possible to think local while doing so. This week, Park City Film hosts a “Made In Utah” filmmaker showcase, including two short films by local directors—one a documentary, and one a fake-umentary.

El Desierto (pictured), by Jared & Carly Jakens, chronicles the seasonal transition of sheep herding into areas where water can be found.

With a focus on one herd’s migrant worker caretaker, Francisco Llerena, the film captures the lonely work of watching the sheep in the middle of nowhere, as radio news provides reminders of ongoing drought.

Almost entirely dialogue-free, the impressionistic narrative gets a boost from the wonderfully restrained score by Jonny Stallings.

Director Drew Neff’s Cuffs—created through Park City High School’s film program—introduces the inept police force charged with serving and protecting the mountain community of Krime County. Shot documentary-style in the spirit of Reno 911! and The Office, the story follows several officers as they’re observed by a state inspector (CoCo Berwald) trying to determine if they’re competent

TDK

COURTESY UTAH ARTS FESTIVAL

Everyone can point to events they’ll be missing this summer as the result of pandemicrelated cancellations, but among the most disappointing was the loss of the annual Utah Arts Festival for 2020. While it won’t be possible to browse artist booths, listen to local music and enjoy the other artistic programs live and in person, UAF doesn’t want a June to go by without the community feeling that connection to the local arts scene.

“Festival Vibes” is a virtual program that will be hosted at UAF.org every Friday through the month of June, beginning June 4. The virtual Artist Marketplace provides an online gallery of work from the visual artists and craftspeople selected by festival organizers, including an opportunity to make purchases. In collaboration with KRCL, interviews and music by selected artists will run during each Friday’s Midday Show. A wide range of curated international short films come to viewers via the online Fear No Film program, while the Literary Arts program features poetry readings and live workshops. There’s even a virtual version of the Children’s Art Yard, with craft

Complete listings online at cityweekly.net

Park City Film “Made in Utah” filmmaker showcase

Utah Arts Festival “Festival Vibes”

CONNELL O’DONOVAN

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ESSENTIALS

the

ENTERTAINMENT PICKS, MAY 28-JUNE 3, 2020

the Utah gubernatorial race to discussing the “patriotic” art work of local conservative painter Jon McNaughton. Walter recognizes that there are particular challenges in this time of knowing what topics to cover while so much attention remains focused on the pandemic, as well as the technical challenges of podcasting from home.

But she believes that there’s a definite value in creating content that people can share at a time when they might feel isolated. “It’s nice to find camaraderie with people you don’t actually know, but whose voices you listen to,” Walter says.

“People are just looking for company, and podcasts are a way to offer that.” (SR)

A&E

VeronaVirus

SONDERimmersive turns Romeo & Juliet into live drive-in theater with Through Yonder Window.

BY SCOTT RENSHAW scottr@cityweekly.net @scottrenshaw

F

SONDERimmersive performers rehearse Through Yonder Window.

SONDERimmersive.

“With immersive theater, one of the key features of the work is the audience always has choice and multiple experiences; no two people have the same experience,” Brown says. “You’re in your car, which feels very safe, but we come quite close. We always like to put people just a little offguard.” CW

SONDERIMMERSIVE: THROUGH YONDER WINDOW

The Gateway North Parking Garage 400 W. 100 South June 4-6 & June 11-13 6 p.m. & 8 p.m. nightly $45 per car throughyonderwindow.com

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mersive settled on the parking garage after conversations with Utah Arts Alliance’s Jonathan King. The result is sort of a mix of a drive-in movie and theater-in-the-round, as the audience members’ cars are pointed at various angles towards a central performance space that Brown says creates kind of a “fishbowl” effect. “The transformation of the space—a big, kind of boring parking garage being turned into Verona—is a major part of it,” Brown says.

While Brown says that Through Yonder Window isn’t designed specifically as a family-friendly show, the logistics of the production make it easy for people to bring along children—both because they can feel safe, and because there’s no concern about youngsters disturbing the performance.

Yet he also wants to emphasize that, in a key way, this show really does continue the creative direction that has already defined

| CITYWEEKLY.NET |

or theater companies around the country and around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a need to think creatively about where and how it might be possible to produce live theater in this time, when most traditional theater spaces might not seem safe for potential attendees. According to Graham Brown—artistic director of SONDERimmersive, the company behind site-specific interactive theater works like Thank You Theobromine—they might have been just a little more prepared than most to figure out what comes next.

“I think creative problem-solving is one of our primary features,” Brown says. “The fact that we always make work in odd spaces entirely gave us a position to go, ‘Give us any parameter, and we can make it work.’”

SONDERimmersive puts that experience to the test with Through Yonder Window, a new spin on Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet conceived and designed specifically for this unique time. Making use of one of the parking garages at The Gateway, it offers a fully social-distance-friendly set-up in which groups of patrons pay by the car, and never actually have to leave their vehicles in order to enjoy the performance. During the one-hour show, cast members interact with the vehicles—and with one another— from a safe distance, without live spoken dialogue and accompanied by pre-recorded audio provided over FM radio.

The work on developing Through Yonder Window began shortly after the stayat-home period began, as the company

dealt with the realization that its planned production of The Chocolatier—which was to debut on March 13—would have to be postponed. “Everything pretty much went down on March 12,” Brown recalls. “It was a really tough moment. My creative partner, Rick Curtiss, and I sat down in March and went, ‘What do we do?’ So many [theater companies] were going digital, and we were thinking, ‘Do we do that, put our work online or something?’ But we concluded that so much of what we’re about is a live experience, so we tried to think of how we can make live experiences in this moment.”

It was Curtiss who first brought up how drive-in movie theaters were seeing a resurgence in popularity due to the closure of multiplexes, and wondered if there was a way to piggyback off of that idea. “That got all of us excited,” Brown says. He then followed up by suggesting that they use as the material for their production something that was really familiar, “like Romeo & Juliet. I was kind of kidding, but everyone said, ‘Let’s do that.’ It’s a really physical story, and there’s a lot of room to play with it.”

That flexibility within the text allowed for the development of a variation on that familiar story that would resonate with the specific dynamics of our pandemic moment, while digging deeper into the traditional play’s supporting characters in a way that gave, for example, Friar Lawrence an equal dramatic footing with the two young lovers. The production would also have to provide safety for the cast and creative team, in addition to that which is afforded to the audience by virtue of staying inside their cars.

“First of all, the show is a direct commentary on our COVID moment, in the sense that our performers themselves maintain social distancing and wear masks,” Brown says. “It makes for interesting performance parameters, because how do you tell Romeo & Juliet when people can’t touch each other? One of my hopes is that the audience almost forgets people aren’t touching.”

The physical space is another unique element of the production, as SONDERim-

GRAHAM BROWN

THEATER

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Slow Food Done Fast

Vessel Kitchen puts a healthy—and tasty—spin on fast casual

BY ALEX SPRINGER comments@cityweekly.net @captainspringer

T

hough our fast-food-driven dining culture has made it extremely difficult to hit the center of the “healthy,” “fast” and “affordable” Venn diagram, there are moments when I feel like we as humans are pushing the needle in the right direction. Consumers and restaurateurs are becoming more cognizant of the fact that junk food delivered at warp speed—delicious as it is—needs to make up less of our diets. It’s much easier said than done, however, when your only options for a quick, cheap meal are 10 places that sell the same burger and fries.

As this is the world we live in, watching a place like Vessel Kitchen (multiple locations, vesselkitchen.com) open its fourth location makes me feel a teensy bit more hopeful for the future of our eating habits. Vessel’s approach to fast-casual eating is based on sustainability, seasonal ingredients and local

partnerships—because those concepts yield tasty food. The Vessel team acknowledges the fact that putting in some extra work to prepare locally sourced, seasonal ingredients is helpful for several reasons, but it all comes back to making food that people will enjoy eating. The result is a fresh, considerate menu for those of

us who are after a good meal that we don’t have to cook without the buyer’s remorse of eating garbage.

After perusing Vessel’s menu, which changes every six months or so, it’s clear that you’re dealing with people who know how to blend and balance their ingredients for specific flavor profiles. The poke tuna bowl ($14) spruces up the fresh yellowfin tuna with a ponzu marinade and a spring roll slaw of veggies like jicama and snap peas tossed in sesame seeds and a Vietnamese vinaigrette.

It relies on Asian-inspired flavors as its basis, but the Israeli couscous and avocado pop in to add some creamy texture to the acidic flavors.

The paper-thin slices of pickled ginger send this dish over the top—they bite just hard enough to let that fresh ginger flavor take the lead.

Where most fast-casual places would just stick with one regional set of flavors, Vessel takes you all over the place with their menu.

In sharp contrast with the sharp, acidic and crunchy notes of the poke tuna bowl, the chicken and grains bowl ($11) mixes an herbed avocado salsa with micro cilantro and fireroasted pepper crema with shredded chicken on top of a basmati rice and quinoa blend. It’s a dish that could use some texture—it’s smooth on top of soft on top of pillow y—but the flavors are lovely. The herbaceous cilantro and avocado

salsa take their cues from Mexican cuisine, and the fire-roasted pepper crema livens things up with a decent amount of heat.

Leaning into the flavors of Central America while borrowing techniques from the Middle East, Vessel has a selection of flatbread tacos that are worth exploring. Each taco is served on a street taco-sized piece of naan, which is never a bad thing to include in a meal. The falafel tacos ($10) are great for those who want some traditional Middle Eastern flavors—the hummus, spiced tahini and Israeli salad work excellently with the crispy falafel.

While Vessel’s prices veer toward the higher end of the fastcasual spectrum, the portions are big enough that most of the signature bowls can be shared between two people. They even have family meals ($30) that let you pick a protein and three sides. According to the menu, the meal serves four, which feels about right since it fed me, my wife and my daughter for dinner and lunch the next day. We went with the braised beef, roasted Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes and ratatouille, and we were impressed by the speed and quality of our meal. Occasionally they leave roasted veggies like the Brussels sprouts and the sesame soy cauliflower under the broiler for a tad too long resulting in premature crema-

tion of the dish’s top layer, but the flavors are always on point. The carrot chermoula—a Moroccan-style relish—is the acidic soulmate to the roasted Brussels sprouts. As Vessel has a build-your-own bowl aspect to its menu, it’s fun to check out the list of ingredients in each dish to see what kinds of complementary flavor combinations you can create outside of their tried-and-true signature bowls. With the menu as vast and diverse as it is, this is a rabbit hole that would be all too easy to tumble down.

Indeed, it’s that rabbit hole that makes eating at Vessel so intriguing. The secret of their success is an encyclopedic knowledge of culinary tricks that get the most flavor out of their ingredients. It’s no secret that food from the good-for-you end of the pool isn’t known for fireworks of flavor, but a keen culinary mind knows how to get a bang out of ingredients like kale and snap peas.

Each item on Vessel’s menu has a thoughtful blend of seasoning, spicy heat or tangy acid, reminding us that it’s always possible to eat well without leaving our taste buds in the dust. CW

AT A GLANCE

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BY ALEX SPRINGER @captainspringer

Captain’s Boil Opens

CELEBRATE DIVERSITY

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ORDERS: 801-519-9595 DINING CONSULTANTS AVAILABLE 30 MINUTES PRIOR TO PICK-UP HOURS. SCHEDULE PICK-UP AT YOUR CONVENIENCE.

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The recently-opened Captain’s Boil(4121 S. Carriage Square, 801-999-4081, captainsboilutah.com) had me at “fried catfish po’boys.” Deeper perusal of their menu revealed a build-your-own seafood boil concept that sounds fantastic, and fairly user-friendly. Just select up to a pound of your preferred seafood, plus some extras like corn on the cob or sausage, then choose your seasoning and spiciness level, and you’re good to go. For those who can’t stand that kind of pressure but still want to feast on copious amounts of shellfish, you can check out their four Captain’s Boils that look like ridiculous amounts of food. And yes, they have all the varieties of po’boys that one could hope for.

Wheeler Sunday Market

The Wheeler Sunday Market kicks off on June 7 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Wheeler Historic Farm (6351 S. 900 East, 385-468-1755, slco.org/wheeler-farm).

This cozy, family-friendly market hosts all kinds of local vendors who will be selling everything from homemade kimchi to Bloody Mary mixes. The event will take place every Sunday until October 25, with new events and vendors being added throughout the market’s period of operation. According to Wheeler Farm’s website, the event will be following state-mandated guidelines with regards to COVID-19, and guests are encouraged to maintain social distancing practices while enjoying themselves.

Pig & A Jelly Jar Pays It Forward

Our resident comfort food and bacon jam enthusiasts at Pig & A Jelly Jar (multiple locations, pigandajellyjar. com) have started accepting meal donations for health care workers. When visiting their website, people can click on the “donate meals” button to send meals for one, two or five to members of our healthcare community. Their first food drive garnered enough attention to hopefully expand the program to other sites.

As one who can attest to the healing power of Pig & A Jelly Jar’s chicken and waffles, chipping in and donating some of this local favorite’s soulful food is a great way to support the restaurant and give back to a community that is doing so much for all of us.

Quote of the Week: “In a way that somebody else converts to Judaism or becomes a Hare Krishna, I belong to the church of fried chicken.” –Padma Lakshmi

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BEER NERD Silver Linings There’s a bright side to Southern Utah’s brutal heat

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body that tried to impress upon me something refreshing, like juice.

Quarantine Desirability Rating: This 5.0 percent session beer falls into that medium-to-light cloistering range. It reminds me of Charo: Just when you think you’ve got her all figured out, you hear her play flamenco and your whole world is upside-down.

You may be saying to yourself, “That dumbass beer nerd forgot to mention Silver Reef’s Color Country Red Ale,” but I actually profiled that one when it debuted in 2019. You can find all of Silver Reef’s beers at most grocery stores now, along with two higher-alcohol beers that are available at DABC stores. We’ll get to those in the coming weeks.

As always, cheers! CW

year

s!

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Silver Reef Fresh and Juicy: Hazy amberish-orange in the glass, it completely looks the part. The nose brings with it a bit of leathery citrus that plays off of the sweet malt; notes of melon, citrus and pine peek through towards the end of the whiff.

Flavor-wise, this is definitely part of the new school of juicy/fruity IPAs, but with an added distinction: melon. There is an earthy woodiness about this one, too, possibly derived from the grain bill that alters the juiciest aspect of the hops. The bitterness may be a little overdeveloped, which will make the kids wince a bit while we seasoned assholes nod approvingly. The bitterness gives way to herbal notes and a hint of super-bitter orange juice, or maybe it’s imagined due to the oddly quenching

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id you know St. George, Utah has its own brewery, too? It’s co-owned by Las Vegas’ Ellis Island Brewery and Casino, and has taken on the mantle of the official thirst-quencher of Southern Utah.

The Wasatch Front can now share in their glee, and I have a few tasting notes to help get you acquainted.

Silver Reef Amber Ale: This amber pours brilliantly clear. Malts commingle with hop aromas very well here, imparting a nice and sweet caramel note with suggestions of toffee, while earthy hops round out the nose. Their presence is marked by a big floral aroma with hints of pine and citrus.

The hops’ floral strength is undercut in the taste by earthy pine needles and uprooted clumps of grass. The malt holds its own, pushing back against the hops with sweet caramel and toffee, plus a freshlyopened loaf of white bread. This St. George brew is medium in body and a bit creamy,

finishing with a piney hop punch of moderate bitterness and a crisp carbonation bite to really round out the feel nicely. Better than the average amber.

Quarantine Desirability Rating: There is an old Vulcan proverb that says, “Only Nixon can go to China”—or something like that. Ambers have been the gateway beer for many, but have never gotten the street cred they deserve. This 5.0 percent ale scores high on the cloistering chart.

Silver Reef Mexican Style Lager: Pours pale yellow with a light fog tint to it. Aroma is clean, showcasing light notes of straw, raw grain, spicy and herbal hops and biscuity, bready malts.

The flavor profile is spicy, herbal and floral hops, with just a skosh of citrus. Bready, biscuity malts give it a yeasty, undercooked bread aftertaste. There are bits and pieces of toasty, wafery and crackery malts as well; it’s light and tight. Mouthfeel is crisp and focused, with fizzy effervescence that settles well on the tongue to complement the medium-thin consistency. Overall, it’s crisp, light and balanced, with favorable hops driving the bus. Easily crushable and very enjoyable.

Quarantine Desirability Rating: This 5.0 percent lager will keep you happy while shuttered, and possesses the magic ability to polish your palate. It took me from Chalupa madness to Ramone’s mole faster than a 14-year-old’s eye roll. Olé!

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Catching Up With Ken The meaning and the cleaning

K

en Sanders began working in the book business in the 1970s, founding Ken Sanders Rare Books in 1997. As one of a handful of Salt Lake’s much-loved independent booksellers, Sanders’ shop is a downtown watering hole for the literary West, with books on Utah and the Mormons, Western and Native Americana, travel and exploration plus rare maps and photographs. He is passionate about local arts and literature and has hosted countless book signings, art exhibitions and poetry readings.

And his bearded visage makes regular appearances on PBS’ Antiques Roadshow where he serves as a book appraiser.

Sanders bookstore has lately been the focus of news stories about downtown developments that will force him out of his 4,000-square-foot building within two years. Closing his doors this spring to slow the spread of COVID-19 also didn’t help, but Sanders ain’t down yet.

TALES for Road Warriors

W

both in life and the printed word A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS BY JOHN RASMUSON

The virus’ impact on Ken Sanders Rare Books

We have been closed since mid-March and have just started opening up by appointment last week. I have kept my entire staff on payroll as well. We are working twice the hours to make half the money. Business is off by half. I have worked seven days a week since mid-March. I go home at night to eat and sleep.

Cleaning and more cleaning at the newly opened shop

Everyone who enters the store must use hand sanitizer and wear masks. (Masks, gloves and hand sanitizer are available upon entry.)

Only six people at a time are allowed in the shop. There’s lots of cleaning, social distancing and a giant plexiglass plague wall surrounding the front counter to protect everyone. We have deep-cleaned the shop, and we sanitize all surfaces and handles after every use. The restroom is not available to customers. Customers must bag their own books.

What’s the outlook for Ken Sanders Rare Books—not only the pandemic but the shop’s impending move?

How to find books by the authors mentioned on the following pages

We have always championed Utah and regional authors and our stock is plentiful. Call, email us or visit us online:

Ken Sanders

JUNE 4, 2020 | 15

Ken Sanders Rare Books 268 S. 200 East, SLC 801-521-3819 KenSandersBooks.com

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I have always sold books. I will always sell books. I have been doing it for 50 years so far, and I have an inventory of over 100,000 books. We will find a way despite the uncertainty of the present, and the near future.

e get it. This “hunkering down” idea has you second-guessing all your summer plans. As the state’s coronavirus “colors” shift—from red to orange to yellow, to, what is it now, chartreuse?—and cases of COVID-19 continue to slowly rise, you may not be convinced that a road trip to small-town Utah and our national/state parks makes sense in these pandemic times. After all, it was recreational travel that imported the early cases of the virus from cruise ships and other ski resorts into Utah.

Not only that, but your bank account may be stretched a little thin right now with downsizing, layoffs and furloughs threatening like a dark cloud.

So, for this summer, if you can only access Utah’s backcountry via the printed word, you can take heart knowing you have rich literary options at your fingertips.

John Rasmuson—a longtime writer for City Weekly and magazines Devour Utah and Vamoose Utah—penned the following essays on Vladimir Nabokov, Bernard DeVoto, Everett Ruess and Edward Abbey for our outdoor/adventure journal, Vamoose Utah. We’re republishing them here along with reading recommendations by Utah rare book dealer, Ken Sanders, to guide you in your discovery John Rasmuson of these authors.

In March, I drove to Albuquerque to exhibit at the small regional antiquarian book fair there. On Thursday, March 12, after unloading my stock at the Albuquerque Balloon Park, I met a buddy for dinner and drinks at our hotel. During our dinner, the book fair promoter called to say the mayor had just shut down all the city’s public gatherings. And the book fair was canceled.

At breakfast the next morning, Friday the 13th, we contemplated our fate, prior to driving 600 miles home without a sale in either of our pockets.

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Those who staked out Utah’s wilderness,

How he become aware of the pandemic’s reach

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© JIM VARGO - MOTHPHOTOGRAPHERSGROUP

Eupithecia nabokovi : The pug that Nabokov found at Alta Lodge in 1943

ALEX BAKHAREV

The Vladimir Nabokov collection at Nabokov House in Saint Petersburg

In Pursuit of Butterflies Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov may be most famous for Lolita, but Utahns can thank him for their pug

F

or some, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is the greatest novel of the 20th century. For others, Lolita is an unredeemed story told by a pedophile named Humbert. The fact that the book has Utah roots is another story, but it’s more about road trips and butterflies than nymphets and illicit sex.

The back story is the novelist himself.

The son of Russian nobility who fled the Bolsheviks for Europe, Nabokov had published nine books in the Russian language before settling in Massachusetts in 1940 at the age of 44. He taught literature courses at Wellesley College, but his abiding interest was lepidopterology. Among his credits is the butterfly collection at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.

The pursuit of butterflies caused him to crisscross the United States 13 times between 1941 and 1958, logging 200,000 miles on two-lane highways like Route 89. According to Robert Roper’s Nabokov in America, he was drawn to “motor courts that cost a dollar or two a night, in towns so patly, Americanly themselves that a visitor had to smile.” Nabokov’s road trips brought him to New Mexico and Arizona in 1941 and to Utah for the first time in the summer of 1943 where he rented a room at the four-yearold Alta Lodge.

The road trip is an American tradition that has generated its own canon.

Think of writers John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac and William Least Heat Moon.

Journalist Charles Kuralt ran six RVs

into the ground while reporting from “On the Road” for CBS News. Nabokov’s road trips were devoted to hunting butterflies, but they were also the basis of the fictional travels through “the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country” in Lolita.

On a road trip from Massachusetts to California in 1941, Vladimir Nabokov lodged in Santa Fe’s el Rey Motel, a favorite of Nabokov’s as he crisscrossed the West and “frantically collected butterflies.” It remains in business to this day.

Some forgotten motor court is reimagined as “a motel called Poplar Shade in Utah, where six pubescent trees were scarcely taller than my Lolita,” reports Humbert. At least two of the motels Nabokov visited still operate: Corral Lodges in Afton, Wyo., and el Rey Court in Santa Fe, N.M. Nabokov’s sojourn in Little Cottonwood Canyon was significant for another reason. There, among the “marmots and the Mormons,” Roper writes, Nabokov realized a boyhood dream—to catch and name a theretofore unknown Common Pug moth (Eupithecia vulgata). On Aug. 1, 1943, using a light to

attract insects to the lodge windows, he caught a mottled brown one that now bears his name: Nabokov’s Pug (Eupithecia nabokovi.)

It was a “blessed black night in the Wasatch Range,” he wrote in his autobiography.

A writers’ conference brought Nabokov back to Salt Lake City in 1949. Ten years had passed since “the first throb of Lolita went through me,” and he had begun to draft the novel. He wrote in English as his wife drove the blue highways through the Western United States in pursuit of butterflies. The handwritten manuscript was finished in Ashland, Ore., in 1954. It was published in France in 1955 after being rejected by U.S. publishers.

Nabokov returned to Utah in 1956 to hunt butterflies and work on Pnin, his 13th novel. He rented artist Maynard Dixon’s cabin in Mount Carmel, 20 miles west of Zion National Park near the Virgin River. The log cabin is now part of the Maynard Dixon Living History Museum.

Lolita was finally published in the U. S. in 1958. It vaulted to the top of The New York Times bestseller list. Overnight, Nabokov became a well-to-do celebrity. He made no more summer road trips after 1958 and moved to Switzerland in 1961 where he died in 1977.

During his road trips to Utah over the

years, Nabokov estimated that he hiked 600 miles in the Wasatch Mountains while stalking moths and butterflies.

This summer, shall we take a cue from Azar Nafisi’s 2003 bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran, and make for Alta’s meadows and marmots, Nabokov’s masterwork in hand? ◆ —By John Rasmuson Published December 2018, Vamoose Utah Lolita author and butterfly enthusiast Vladimir Nabokov

Ken Sanders’ Margin Notes: Those who continue to seek out the mystery of Everett Ruess are pursuing a false trail, as misguided as those Carlos Castenada fans who consumed large quantities of hallucinogenic drugs and went to Mexico in search of Don Juan back in the ’60s. The only thing you need to know about Everett Ruess, who would be 105 now, is that he’s still missing and likely has been dead for 85 years. There is no 20-yearold male who does not consider himself invincible. He fell off a cliff into a crack or into a river and was washed away.

Everett Ruess: he dead.

Bud Rusho’s Vagabond for Beauty is still the definitive read. It’s available in a combo with Ruess’ previously unpublished wilderness journals, and contains Ruess letters, poetry, journal entries artwork and other writings. Ed Abbey even wrote a sonnet for Everett Ruess that ends with the lines “Whatever you were seeking, hunted, too/ And this is what found you.” And yes, Emmanuel Tellier’s film, The Disappearance of Everett Ruess, a one-hour documentary is now out on DVD. Ken Sleight and Ken Sanders are two of the talking heads. Original music by Tellier.

A very good film about young Everett.

Pioneer of Beauty The disappearance of Everett Ruess—Utah’s nomadic wanderer silent since 1934—tugs on our collective soul

—By John Rasmuson Published July 2019, Vamoose Utah

| CITY WEEKLY |

JUNE 4, 2020 | 17

of Arches National Monument as a government employee.

As Ruess traversed the sere, red-rock landscape, he transcribed his experience into words, watercolor sketches and woodblock prints.

Once accommodated to Stegner’s “pursuit of beauty,” you have to make a judgment about Ruess’s credibility. Was he an esthete, wise beyond his years? Or a poser, juiced-up by adolescence? The answer is “yes” to both. His sincerity is never in doubt, but some of what he wrote is lyrical; some gives pause. The problematical passages include this one: “But he who has looked long on naked beauty may never return to the world, and though he should try, he will find its occupation empty and vain. … Alone and lost, he must die on the altar of beauty.”

Ruess’ death was more likely an accident than a ritual sacrifice. His headlong pursuit of beauty may have led to a dark side, which Odysseus encountered on his way home from Troy. Hearing the seductively beautiful song of the Sirens, Odysseus evaded death because he was literally restrained. Ruess may have died because he was as incautious as Timothy “Grizzly Man” Treadwell, who was killed by a bear in 2003 after living among the grizzlies in Alaska’s Katmai National Park for 13 summers. Ruess was known to be reckless. “I have been flirting pretty heavily with death, the old clown,” he admitted in a letter. “In my wanderings this year I have taken more chances and had more wild adventures than ever before.” His last adventure played out in Davis Gulch, 50 miles south of Escalante, where search parties found his two burros in a makeshift corral, but no trace of him or his gear. Not even footprints.

Unresolved disappearances occupy a special place in the public consciousness. There is abiding interest in the fate of aviatrix Amelia Earhart, airplane hijacker D.B. Cooper, writer Ambrose Bierce and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Utah

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ike a Rorschach blot in shades of red ink, the Southern Utah landscape is subject to interpretation. Not everyone views it in the same way, but everyone sees opportunity there. Oilmen focus on its potential for profit. Landscape artist Maynard Dixon was drawn to its uncommon visuality. For Native Americans, the red rock represents a sacred ancestral home.

Slick-rock trails draw mountain bikers and four-wheelers.

Paleontologists imagine Jurassic reptiles. Edward Abbey described a “spiritual promise” so ineffable that perhaps only a few grokked it. “Ask Everett Ruess,” Abbey suggested in Desert Solitaire.

Unfortunately, Ruess didn’t live long enough to share whatever spiritual insight he had gained. He was just 20 years old when he disappeared. In 1934, he rode out of Escalante on a burro en route to Hole-in-the-Rock and was never heard from again. One of the books about him—Amazon offers 10—is A Vagabond of Beauty. The title is apt.

Ruess devoted the better part of two years to vagabondage in the Southern Utah and Northern Arizona wilderness.

His purpose, wrote Wallace Stegner a few years later, was the pursuit of beauty.

Some might object to Stegner’s phrase, “pursuit of beauty,” as being affected. But he was not romanticizing Ruess as a questing, Byronic figure. Rather, he was paraphrasing Ruess’s own words. In letters to his family, Ruess wrote explicitly and exuberantly about beauty: “I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear,” he wrote. “The country is fiercely, overpoweringly beautiful.”

That fiercely beautiful country encompassed Canyon de Chelley, Mesa Verde, Grand Canyon, Navajo Mountain and Zion National Park—and all points in between. Ruess was a traveler, not a tourist. He was exploring Monument Valley on foot years before John Ford made cowboy movies there, two decades before Abbey drove the unpaved roads

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L

Artist and adventurer Everett Ruess

has its own mysteries—the Rhoades Mine, the Ancestral Puebloans, the men who left John Wesley Powell on the Colorado River in 1869 never to be seen again. Montezuma’s treasure? Who’s to say it isn’t cached in a cave near Bluff?

What became of the Ancestral Puebloans has scientific import. The Ruess disappearance has none. Nevertheless, he has a place of prominence in Utah legends.

Walk into Ken Sanders’ bookstore, and you’ll find three books about Ruess next to the cash register. Chat up Sanders, a friend of Abbey, and he will tell you about a new Ruess documentary by French filmmaker Emmanuel Tellier. La Disparition d’Everett Ruess will be screened in Utah sometime soon, he will tell you.

What makes Ruess, a fresh-faced kid barely out of high school, such a compelling figure? Probably many reasons. Like an epistolary novel, the Ruess story spools out in letters and poems, embellished with sketches, photos and woodblock prints. It is the first-person narrative of a youthful adventurer, a self-styled artist, who walks the pristine wilderness with two burros, selling watercolor sketches along the way to buy food. By his own account, he lives in “dreamy intoxication from the serene beauty and perfect solitude.”

Ruess prefers the solitude of the desert to the cacophony of the city. “As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think,” he wrote to his brother in California from Escalante in November 1934. “I have not tired of the wilderness; rather, I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time.”

It may be that Ruess was reimagining his own life as a work of art—or art at work—but had not foreseen how it might finish. Perhaps he ventured beyond the point of no return on a haunted landscape. In 1776, Spanish explorers called the sheer-walled canyon country along the Colorado River Salsipuedes—meaning “get out if you can.” Either way, you can speculate over a campfire or write your own ending to the Ruess story as if you were back in sophomore English. Was he murdered?

Drowned? Killed in a fall? Bitten by a rattlesnake?

Stegner gets an A-plus for his concluding paragraph: “Everett Ruess is immortal, as all romantic and adventurous dreams are immortal, He is, and will be for a long time, Artist in Residence in the San Juan country.” ◆

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Bernard DeVoto, writer, historian and conservationist

Ken Sanders’ Margin Notes: Bernard DeVoto, along with Dale Morgan, Juanita Brooks, Will Bagley and Wallace Stegner himself are all among Utah’s finest historians.

Even Wallace Stegner admonished readers to stay away from Bennie’s fiction. His booklength essay, The Hour, written in tribute to “the Hour,” the only hour, the cocktail hour, is a must. His collection of essays, The Easy Chair contains some of his finest Western essays, including “The Second Rape of the West.”

His one-volume editing of The Journals of Lewis and Clark, stand alongside his magnificent three-volume history of the West: The Course of Empire, Across The Wide Missouri and The Year of Decision: 1846, as some of the finest Western writing ever. And as literary executor of the Mark Twain estate, his decades-long battle with Twain’s surviving daughter produced Mark Twain in Eruption, the first published of his socalled dark writings.

The Champion Of Echo Canyon As one of Ogden’s unsung sons, it’s time to give Bernard DeVoto his due Let’s begin à la Jeopardy. Category: Utah Literati. Here are five prompts: • One of his history books won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948; another, a National Book Award in 1953.

• He was a recognized authority on Mark Twain.

• He was the greatest conservationist of the 20th century, according to Wallace Stegner.

• He wrote a monthly column, The Easy Chair, in Harper’s Magazine for 20 years.

• The first of his nine novels, The Crooked Mile, drew upon his experience growing up in Ogden.

I

f you answered, “Who is Bernard DeVoto?” to all five, yours is an impressive sweep. Take a well-deserved bow!

Not one in five Utahns even recognizes the name of Ogden’s accomplished man of letters. That he is not widely known might indicate a deliberate rejection born of the caustic essays that he penned about Utah and Mormonism early in his career.

“Civilized life does not exist in Utah,” he wrote. The place is populated by “ruddy, illiterate, herd-minded folk” whose discourse is confined to “the Prophet, hogs and Fords.”

DeVoto was born in Ogden on Jan. 11, 1897. The town, Stegner has written, was split by “Homeric conflicts between the railroaders and the Mormons,” and DeVoto considered himself collateral damage. In seeking revenge, he disparaged the dominant religion in print: “These people are not my people, their God is not my mine.

We respect, hate and distrust each other.”

“Benny” DeVoto graduated from Ogden High School in 1914. He spent a year at the University of Utah and then transferred to Harvard. Although a born-and-bred Westerner, he eventually adopted New England just as Stegner had done with Utah. “An apprentice New Englander,” DeVoto called himself. Although he was grounded in the

Wasatch Front, “New England gave him a second belonging-place,” Stegner wrote.

He was a literary triathlete—novelist, journalist, historian. As a respected historian, his focus was the Rocky Mountain West. As a journalist, he practiced what Stegner called knight-errantry. DeVoto sallied forth from the pages of Harper’s and other national magazines to fight the firebreathing dragons of the age—Sen. Joe McCarthy, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the House Un-American Activities Committee. He wrote about censorship, civil liberty, isolationism and conservation.

He was a champion of national parks and public lands, and he battled the ranchers who coveted them as grazing grounds for their sheep and cattle. He was also instrumental in stopping the Bureau of Reclamation from damming the Green and Yampa Rivers in Echo Canyon. Without DeVoto, Dinosaur National Monument would have shared Glen Canyon’s watery fate.

His death in 1955—a year before Edward Abbey went to work in Arches National Monument and the year Terry Tempest Williams was born—ended a career that was “flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous … often wrong, often spectacularly right, always stimulating, sometimes infuriating, and never, never dull,” Stegner wrote in The

Uneasy Chair, his 1974 biography of DeVoto.

If you set out in search of more answers to the question, “Who is Bernard DeVoto?” a visit to his hometown will not be helpful.

His house at 2561 Monroe Blvd. has been supplanted by the sprawl of an elementary school. No one in the tourist office or the library has ever heard his name. Ogden High School’s commemorative plaques don’t include one for him, and the school library owns none of his 21 books. To find a memorial, you must drive 500 miles to Idaho.

There—on Highway 12, 42 miles west of Lolo, Montana—an old-growth stand of Western Red Cedars on the Lochsa River was dedicated in 1962 to Utah’s celebrated “conservationist and historian of the west.”

Perhaps it is time for Utahns to reconsider the cold shoulder turned on the man Stegner called “the most distinguished writer who ever came out of the state.”

DeVoto tried to make amends decades ago by recanting his criticism of Utah. His self-imposed exile from Ogden, which began at age 25, caused him to re-evaluate his first belonging-place. His denigration of Utah was “ignorant, brash, prejudiced, malicious and what is worst of all, irresponsible,” he concluded in his 50s. Nevertheless, his contrition fell on deaf ears. DeVoto’s legacy was sown with salt even as the sins of others like Edward Abbey were forgiven.

You would expect Ogden to favor reconciliation. It is no longer the rough-and-tumble railroad town that gangster Al Capone steered clear of. It has cultivated a “mountain-to-metro personality,” its website explains. The change seems a welcoming

development for DeVoto, himself a mountain-to-metro scholar and writer. Who’s to say that Ogden would not profit from another bronze statue on 25th Street? A DeVoto Center at Weber State University? A plaque in the library of Ogden High School? An exhibit at Dinosaur National Monument? Is there no place of honor for a 20th Century “public thinker” in a post-truth age?

Besides public thinking, DeVoto was an environmentalist before the word was coined. His activism stands him in good stead with like-minded Utahns in 2019, a validation of Stegner’s belief that his articles would be instructive to future generations. His issues, tenacious as Bull Thistle, are their issues. Sixty years later, water is no less valuable in the drought-prone West; wilderness is no less threatened by agents of commerce; politicians are no less venal, and no less than $11 billion is needed to fix the maintenance problems at Bryce, Arches and the rest of the national parks.

Good fortune has given Utah a landscape like no other. Even with the integrity of the state’s public lands in jeopardy in 2019—even as dams, pipelines, coalmines, ATV tracks and oil wells have tireless promoters—DeVoto is as instructive as Stegner hoped he would be. “One cannot be pessimistic about the West,” Stegner wrote.

“This is the native home of hope.”

Who is Bernard DeVoto, then? A distinguished Utah native whose legacy ought to be a source of hope—and pride. ◆

—By John Rasmuson Published January 2019, Vamoose Utah

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Arches National Park

Vanishing Solitude

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Ken Sanders’ Margin Notes: Edward Abbey wrote 21 books over his 62 years, beginning with Jonathon Troy in 1954 and ending with the posthumously published Hayduke Lives in 1990.

Ed hated the word “classic” and never wanted any of his books to become one. To Ed, that meant a book everyone talked about but never read. Sorry, Ed, but both Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, despite their modest beginnings, have now each sold millions of copies and have become classics. Generations now being born after Abbey’s death are discovering the raw power of this late author’s words. Don’t neglect his other novels, The Brave Cowboy, Fire on The Mountain or Black Sun. His finest essays are to be found in The Journey Home, Slickrock, and his last published collection, One Life at a Time, Please.

As Abbey himself said, “Wilderness needs no defense, only more defenders” and “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Imagining Edward Abbey’s response to today’s congested national parks

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

—Percy Bysshe Shelley “Ozymandias”

E

dward Abbey was hired as a seasonal park ranger at Arches National Monument in 1956. He was 29. Part of his job was to man the entry station. It stood alongside a dirt road 20 miles north of Moab, which was “the uranium capital of the world” at the time. On most days, no visitors showed up. By the end of the year, just 28,500 people had navigated rough roads for a look at some of the 2,000 red-rock arches they had heard about.

“Motorized tourists stay away by the millions,” Abbey wrote in Desert Solitaire, his classic memoir of the two summers he worked at Arches. “They stay away because of the unpaved entry road, the unflushable toilets in the three campgrounds and the fact that most of them have never even heard of Arches National Monument.”

But as every sandstone arch attests, change is as inevitable as it is consequential: Pave a road and they will come. The first nine miles of asphalt were laid at Arches in 1957. A visitor center with running water opened in 1969, a year after the publication of Desert Solitaire. By the time Arches be-

came a national park in 1971, more than 200,000 people a year were making the long drive to check it out. The park’s 18mile loop road was resurfaced in 2017, a boon to the motorized tourists who preferred to see the park’s treasures through the windshield.

Visitors to the park reached the 1 million mark in 2010. Nine years later, boosted by the Utah Office of Tourism’s Mighty 5 advertising campaign, more than 1.5 million people now visit annually. Some weekends, a line of idling cars back up on U.S. 191 as hundreds of tourists queue at the entrance. On Oct. 18, 2019, at 1 p.m., the National Park Service (NPS) had to close the door.

“Arches National Park is currently full,” it tweeted.

Abbey, who died in 1989, would have recoiled at motorized tourists gathering like barbarians at the gate. He would have fumed. Then despaired.

Then cussed. “Goddamned industrial tourism!” he would have ranted. In his mind, a cabal of car makers, road builders, developers, restaurateurs, hoteliers and gasoline retailers posed an existential threat to the national parks. The car-bound tourists he objectified were

at once “the consumers, the raw material and the victims of industrial tourism.”

Abbey would have also disparaged Utah’s tourism office as being a running dog of the soulless industrialists. Its $3 million promotion in 2013—featuring curated images of Arches, Zion, Capitol Reef, Bryce and Canyonlands—included TV commercials in Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle. Within five years, the number of visitors increased by 68%.

To protect Arches’ fragile landscape from the onslaught, Abbey advocated a ban on cars and a repurposed NPS to deliver the backpacks of walkers and cyclists to campgrounds. The radical plan won’t be adopted anytime soon, but the need to manage the growing, peak-season crowds is urgent. The NPS at Arches borrowed on the experience at Maine’s Acadia National Park to propose a reservation system and 2,000-cars-a-day limit between March and October.

The proposal was met with brickbats.

Should vehicle-entry reservations be required, critics said, the annual cost in lost tourist dollars would exceed $20 million. The NPS quickly withdrew the proposal and took up a study of mandatory shuttles and a second entrance to the park.

At the launch of the Mighty 5 campaign, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert said,

“Utah’s five stunning national parks contribute to Utah’s economy in a meaningful way by creating muchneeded jobs and impacting local economies in gateway communities and surrounding areas.”

Herbert, whose lack of support of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments caused the Outdoor Retail Association to take its business to Denver, made no mention of Abbey’s assertion that “wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit and as vital to our lives as water.” Neither did it come up in a recent letter to the secretary of the interior from the Utah congressional delegation about crowd management at Zion National Park. With its 4-millionplus visitors a year, Zion is one of the busiest parks in the country and “a pillar of the local tourism economy, helping support jobs and generate revenue.”

The letter, signed by Utah senators Lee and Romney and four congressmen, expressed “strong opposition to any reservation system” because it would “likely result in reduced visitation and negative economic impact,” they wrote.

“We strongly urge the department to find solutions that will preserve access to Zion National Park while enhancing the visitor experience.”

Abbey would have scoffed at the mere mention of unrestricted crowds en-

a verb of a plumber’s tool, the monkey wrench. In writing, he tapped the lexicon of lawyers to describe himself as Arches’ “usufructuary.” The word refers to the long-term use of someone else’s property with the proviso it remain intact and undamaged. Thus, the usufruct of another’s orchard requires care of the trees and replacement of any that die.

Hints of usufruct can be found in the Office of Tourism’s latest strategic plan. In privileging “the quality of visits rather than the quantity of visitors,” the nine-page plan promotes “responsible visitation” even in its avowal to leverage “the equity of the Mighty 5 brand” for statewide economic growth.

From the tourist office point of view, overcrowded national parks pose “a significant risk to the future of Utah’s tourism industry.”

For Abbey, the crowds at Arches are symptomatic of industrial tourism run amok. He would despair that “wilderness” was missing from the pages of Utah’s strategic tourism plan just as it is missing more and more from Utah’s red-rock landscape.

Abbey wrote Desert Solitaire as an elegy for wilderness lost, but the book is also intended as an enjoinder to us—usufructuaries all—to steward what wilderness remains for the benefit of those who follow. ◆ —By John Rasmuson Published April 2020, Vamoose Utah

Bryce Canyon National Park

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hancing a wilderness experience. Where is the point of diminishing returns? he would ask. Five million visitors annually at Zion?

Three thousand cars a day at Arches? At what point do parking hassles, toilet lines and congested trails dominate the memory of a sunset hike to Delicate Arch? How crowded does it have to get before visitors simply go elsewhere?

Motorists no longer stay away by the millions as they did in Abbey’s day. The Mighty 5 promotion has been mighty successful, no question about it; and no question that politicians side with the moneyed interests of industrial tourism.

The nascent interest in building a second entry to Arches found a voice in the 2020 legislative session. Proposed by Rep. Steve Eliason, R-Sandy, a new state park, named for the Utahraptor dinosaur, is configured such that access to Arches is possible. An investment of $10 million would fund roads, parking lots and restrooms on a 6,500acre site straddling U.S. 191, Eliason said at a press conference with a smiling Moab mayor. Besides the Dalton Wells Quarry, the source of the first fossilized bones of a Utahraptor, the terrain is crisscrossed with ATV and mountain bike trails, Eliason said.

Were Abbey alive, he’d be thinking about monkey-wrenching a project that would bring more vehicles into Arches.

In his famous 1975 novel, Abbey made

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hile many local venues—from the established to the tiny—face the problem of how to keep making rent while left without income from shows, that isn’t really the case for local DIY spot Gold Blood Collective. Even in the face of an eviction, this enterprising venue’s tough DIY spirit and long-held stakes in side-hustles has saved them some grief, turning a potentially paralyzing situation into one of opportunity for something better.

Co-owners Jack Harnick, Adrian Evans and Matthew Windsor all knew things were going to get bad in mid-March—about the same time that everyone in the nightlife world came to that conclusion. While at first receptive to working with them on deferral or partial rent payments on their Kensington Ave. space just off State Street, their landlord quickly changed his tune. “When she called me the first week of April screaming about not having her full rent, we knew it wasn’t going to work long term,” says Windsor. “We literally hung up the phone and started walking around our neighborhood and found three other places that were cheaper and would make a better venue.”

The old spot, for anyone who’s been, was definitely modest, and anyone who’s walked around knows the industrial-ish area just west of State is full of primo buildings; The Loading Dock had also relocated to a small warehouse space just around the block earlier this year. Quickly, they learned that they were barred from the property, and a mad dash to get all their stuff from Gold Blood and its sister business Flat Black (a coffee shop) ensued.

Flat Back wasn’t (and isn’t) their only side-hustle, which is what’s making the loss of their venue bearable. While COVID-19 rages and they’re spaceless and relentless, they’ve been pumping out more of their distinctive goth-kid merch than ever, including skate decks, tees, hoodies and masks, as well as a deal which includes a free tee and mask with each skate deck purchase.

“Without having shows we’ve been able to channel all our energy into cooking up new merch, and stepping up our printing game not only for us, but for a select group of artists here in SLC who have been kind enough to give us the profits from their merch sales so we can reopen ASAP,” says Windsor of Gold Blood’s relationship with local visual artists, a special relationship City Weekly covered several months ago. Windsor cites many locals as recent collaborators, including Crooked Clique, The Black Realm, Milk Money, Spirit Prison, Nick Simone, Mummy, future.exboyfriend, Cera Gibson and Cult Crew.

“We are definitely going to reopen a new space as soon as we reasonably can. But there’s absolutely no reason for us to rush out and pay first and last month’s rent, plus a security deposit, and then pay the monthly rent for who knows how long—with no show income—until we can have shows, you feel me?” Windsor explains.

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Gold Blood Collective Once it makes sense, though, they plan on a total return to form, including the same “venue/print shop/coffee shop” set-up they had working before at the Kensington spot. Their main interest is keeping Gold Blood’s status as “one of SLC’s most unique places to play” While some places like The Beehive are digging in their heels and relying on donations to save their very cool and well-loved spaces, Gold Blood’s desire for something better sets their situation apart. Windsor says, “Gold Blood is not a building, Gold Blood is a community, and that community deserves a nicer venue than what we had anyway.” He adds that they’d rather serve that community than ask their community to help them give money to a landlord: “None of us feel like it should be our responsibility to make sure that a landlord’s investment property remains profitable during a global pandemic.”

With their last experience ending how it did, it’s no wonder. But with their multi-faceted arts community helping them remain profitable and able to save, there’s no doubt that of all the local venues—from the DIY to the big-time—Gold Blood stands the best chance of hitting the ground running when they can indeed start letting hardcore kids mosh in the pit again. Their methods make one wonder if, as time goes on, other venues won’t also try to pivot to a foolproof community-and-arts-inclusive operation—where a venue is more than a venue, but perhaps also a label, a print shop or a record shop.

No matter what happens next, Gold Blood feels safe. “We would rather be a dope merch and screen-printing company for as long as it takes than rush into throwing some half-assed version of a show as soon as possible,” Windsor says. “We thrive on thinking outside the box and we’re always up to something—you will most definitely see us sooner rather than later.”

Follow the many things that Gold Blood is up to on Instagram @ goldbloodcollective and find merch, blogs and their virtual tip jar online at goldbloodcollective.com. CW

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The Underground’s Strong Streaming Game

While many local music venues have been hosting live streams, no one seems to be doing it with as much frequency as The Underground. Their Instagram page has been a constant source of live entertainment since April, with streaming content appearing multiple days a week. “I do see a lot of value in live streams. While I was out of work for the first month or so, I was finding as many to watch as I could. For me it was a way to maintain a sense of normalcy, which I hope to be able to provide for others when I host streams,” says Derek Wetenkamp, the main booker at The Underground. In addition to providing space for bands to promote what would have been released and played out these past few months, the streams provide for music connections and platforms across state lines, with performances by artists from Pittsburgh to Portland and many cities in between.

Most are bands that have rolled through The Underground before, but Wetenkamp says that some were just folks he asked cold if they were interested in playing the stream. “I think it’s always important to maintain a network of friends both near and far away,” he says. “It’s nice to be able to pass along contacts to friends who need help with shows in other states. I think right now it’s definitely important to stay social with any of your friends/colleagues.”

This is definitely true of their support for sister venue The Beehive. While The Underground is sitting comfortably rent free—having been permanent between venues since September— The Beehive is taking donations and hosting fests in order to keep their sweet spot on 666

Park 88 YouTube State Street open. Follow both for updates on how to support and enjoy local music, on Instagram @theundergroundSLC and at Facebook.com/thebeehiveSLC.

Park88 Goes Live

Park88 is the newest project of Utah’s musical power couple Rich Wyman and Lisa Needham. Both are prolific local musicians who have seemingly done it all during careers in music, occasionally apart but mostly together. After Wyman’s debut album in the early ’90s was released, a chance discovery by the one and only Eddie Van Halen led to a follow-up, featuring a lot of collaboration from Van Halen. Besides this prestigious early start, Wyman has gone on to craft many other albums over the years, and if that isn’t enough to grant faith in his abilities, his album of covers, Songs I Wish I Wrote, should do the trick.

His craftiness with both original compositions and translating others’ songs to his own style is not only impressive, but not to be missed, since he and Needham will be putting those skills on display during Park 88’s Live All-Request Concert. Park 88’s 2018 album, The Fearlessness, is piano-man meets rock ‘n’ roll all the way, and if their spirited and energetic live performances are anything to go by, their live-stream series will be a can’t-miss occasion. Shoot Park88 a request before the stream at facebook.com/PARK88OFFICIAL, and tune in on Sunday, June 7 at noon for a few hours of carefree tunes.

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UTAH PROUD! Idi et Amin album art for A Phone in Kyoto

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A review of Idi et Amin calls for a headline like the one above, to match their edge. The shoegaze maestros—noted in City Weekly’s 2020 Music Issue as one of the best new bands in SLC—are living up to the hype inspired by the release of last year’s dreamy, too-good-to-be-modern album Texas Rose.

They’re continuing in the same vein on their new release, the quickly crafted A Phone in Kyoto. The short EP is made up of two long tracks, starting with “Picture of Her (The Boy Mason’s Third Charm),” which jams and jams and jams before spiraling out at the very end in a brief, ping-ponging way.

It’s followed by “Japanese Sugar,” a delightful track with guitars twanging in a way that’s like a more down-home My Bloody Valentine. The duo of Rocky Maldonado and Catalina Gallegos has been teasing new material for a while, and this EP provides an appetizer for the release of their second album, Candy Suck, one gem-of-a-title that will be out in the next few months. Keep an eye out on their Instagram @idi_et_amin for info on streaming coming up on Bandcamp and Spotify; listen to the EP on Rocky Maldonado’s YouTube channel in the meantime.

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One local record shop is opening back up for business—though it’s down in Provo, where COVID-19 cases are (thus far) lower. The shop in question is 3hive Record Lounge, Provo’s hip spot to get new and used records, along with all the equipment any vinyl-head needs to enjoy music right. They’ve been peddling their records, equipment and merch lately in much the same way that others in their position have been forced to—through a combo of pick-up, delivery, mail orders and private appointment options. Now, with lifted state restrictions on operation, they’re allowing old friends (what they lovingly call their customers in recent social media posts) to trickle into their downtown Provo shop a little more freely, with a return to normal hours of noon to 8 p.m., albeit with the policy that visitors stay under groups of 10 and

Rest30’s Archive of old site pages

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If it’s SLC history you crave, look no further than Rest 30 Records, home to old recordings from Red Bennies, Jazz Jaguars and some sadly now-defunct SLC bands from as long ago as the early aughts. The archive is huge, and weird and interesting, and might just be the motherlode of local music from the past 20 years. Stewarded by Dave Payne, it’s the kind of website that’s now quite dated despite its functionality, and

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use sanitizer (either their own or the store’s) before and after leaving. Mask-wearing is at customers’ own discretion (but c’mon, just wear one). Even before re-opening, though, they kept up their reporting of new and cool music happenings both on their blog (3hive. com) and on their Instagram posts, remaining a touchstone for anyone who needs an ear to the ground regarding all things current. And though they’re back open for mostly-regular business again, it’s still worth heading to shop.3hive.com to check out their comprehensive online listings of vinyl, plus their super cool merch if you feel like being extra-supportive.

calls to mind a time not so long ago when the internet was a freer, more exciting place for creating spaces all one’s own. Pages are dedicated to old homemade music videos featuring Red Bennies songs filmed in venues that don’t exist anymore, as well as a documentary-style video detailing—in a halting, unrushed and music-dispersed way—a trip by Payne and his 20-plus year collaborator/friend Josh Stippich, who makes up part of his new band The 8eat1ful5. The video features cameos from other SLC bands like Hoofless and Durian Durian, as well as Payne and Stippich’s pet project, the portable arcade game bus dubbed the Gallery of Fine Hyper Art. An “About” page describes the origins of Rest 30 Records (less a record label, and more a name for Payne’s distribution of CDs from his old bands), while another page features podcasts from Twilite Lounge. But the best part is the huge collection of free downloads featuring dozens of bands from SLC’s past: Joshua Payne (of JPO, a now successful project out in LA), Heaters, Purr Bats and many more. If the world of right now is just too much, spend some time browsing the red-text-on-black blast-from-the-past that is rest30.com, or find more downloads at rest30records. bandcamp.com.

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Well-Crafted Theft

Shirley concocts a literary psychodrama from a multitude of familiar sources.

BY SCOTT RENSHAW scottr@cityweekly.net @scottrenshaw

NEON FILMS

A

t what point does nodding to a whole bunch of different influences become its own kind of originality?

That’s the intriguing question that might guide the experience of watching Shirley, as director Josephine Decker and screenwriter Sarah Gubbins—adapting the novel

by Susan Scarf Merrell—pull from a wide range of psychological drama forebears to build a portrait of creative madness.

At the center is Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss), the real-life writer best known for creepy tales like “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, circa late 1940s/early 1950s as she lives in Vermont with her husband, Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), a literary critic and faculty member at Bennington College. This fictionalized account finds their isolated world disrupted by the arrival of Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman), Stanley’s new teaching assistant, along with Fred’s pregnant wife Rose (Odessa Young), to live in Shirley and Stanley’s home. And as Fred becomes focused on his academic career, Rose becomes focused on helping care for the volatile Shirley.

“Volatile” probably isn’t quite the right mental-health terminology for whatever undiagnosed issues plague Shirley— Stanley refers to them with thinly-veiled frustration as “these … bouts”—as she struggles alternately with agoraphobia, depression, writer’s block and ultimately an obsession with the new project she pursues. Moss, not surprisingly, is dynamic as

she digs into Shirley’s mix of anxiety and a caustic sense of humor, although honestly after recent roles like Her Smell and The Invisible Man it would be refreshing to see Moss play a character who isn’t plagued by emotional demons. She’s also got a great foil in Odessa Young, who plays Rose as an open book of female sexual desire and curiosity during an era when such things aren’t exactly encouraged.

Gender roles are really at the heart of Shirley, both in the relationships between Shirley and Rose and their respective husbands, and in the story Shirley is working on—a psychological thriller inspired by a missing Bennington coed, and which seems to be the stuff of Shirley Jackson’s 1951 novel Hangsaman. As Shirely and Rose interact in ways that are at times playful, at times flirtatious, at times goading, the narrative explores the kind of female “hysteria” that’s exacerbated by living in the shadow of a man’s freedom—even, as in Shirley’s case, when she’s more famous than that man.

It is still a bit frustrating trying to sort through the many reference points that seem to be fighting for attention. What we’ve got is a little bit of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? in its theater of recrimina-

SLC

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28 | JUNE 4, 2020

CINEMA

FILM REVIEW

g yo u!

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SHIRLEY

ttt Elisabeth Moss Odessa Young Michael Stuhlbarg R Available June 5 via SLFSatHome.org virtual cinema Also New This Week

PAINTING THE MODERN GARDEN: MONET TO MATISSE

ttt The first in a series of Exhibition on Film

Elisabeth Moss in Shirley

features at SLFSatHome.org in June, this 2016 documentary from director David Bickerstaff launches from the exhibition of the same name at the Royal Academy of Arts, highlighting works from the late-19th and early-20th century that took gardens as their subject. As you might expect from a film of this kind, it’s likely to be of greatest interest to those who already have a fascination with art history, as the docents and scholars interviewed provide a framework for the represented artists within the movements of impressionism and modernism. Yet it also dips into intriguing historical tidbits about why gardens became such a common subject during this era—as recreational gardening became a more common hobby with a growing middle class and more imported plants—as well as the notion of gardens themselves as works of art. Though everyone will have their own limit as to when one more shot of bees humming around flowers or people looking at paintings becomes too much, this is a mostly satisfying way to get a little dose of cultural instruction. (NR) CW

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tions involving unhappy couples, a little bit of The Shining in its claustrophobic portrait of a writer’s breakdown, a little bit of Ken Russell’s Gothic in the florid fictionalization of a literary work’s creation, and even some of director Decker’s previous feature, Madeline’s Madeline, in suggesting the violation involved in using other people’s lives for one’s art. Shirley is always engaging and thought-provoking, even as it inspires complicated questions about the fine lines between inspiration and well-crafted theft.

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Audio horoscopes also available by phone at 877-873-4888 or 900-950-7700.

ARIES (March 21-April 19) Aries poet Paul Verlaine wrote “Autumn Song” in 1866. It became a well-known French poem and eventually played a role in history. In June 1944, a top-secret British spy organization used the poem as a code to communicate crucial information to the French Resistance, via BBC radio, about the allies’ upcoming D-Day invasion of Normandy. In the spirit of poetry being used to accomplish practical actions, I’m now sending out a burst of code to you, Aries. It’s adapted from another poem by Verlaine: “Delight in good-omened fortune, baptized by the bristling scents of mint, thyme, and clover on the wind of dawn.” Regard this as a signal for you to acquire a necessary resource, strengthen connections with key allies, and intensify your current quest.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22) Nobel Prize-winning Libran author William Faulkner was asked by a cousin if he was drunk when he dreamed up the imaginative stories and characters in his novels. The truth was that on occasion Faulkner did consume alcohol in excessive amounts. However, he rarely indulged while actually writing. His creative ideas mostly came from his fertile imagination, not an unhinged spirit. In the coming weeks, I hope you will be like Faulkner during the inventive phases he enjoyed while sober and disciplined and driven by focused intention. The astrological omens suggest that’s the best recipe for generating original ideas and productive visions.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21) “What use is this howling tenderness?” wrote eighth-century Tamil mystic poet Andal. My research on Google reveals that no TAURUS (April 20-May 20) Taurus philosopher Bertrand Russell observed, “The best life is one has answered her question until now. I decided you would the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the benefit from hearing my response, since you are in a chapter possessive impulses the smallest.” That is always an important of your life story when howling tenderness could work to your principle for everyone to embrace, in my opinion. But it will be an benefit. So, here’s my counsel: Howling tenderness is useful especially essential truth for you in the coming weeks. Your cre- because it has the power to shatter mysterious barriers that ative powers will thrive, even soar and generate blessings, to the have been at least partially obstructing you from exploring the degree that you downplay and outwit your possessive inclinations. frontiers of sacred intimacy.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) “The changes we dread most may contain our salvation,” writes author Barbara Kingsolver. Although I mostly agree with her conclusion, I’ll also suggest that we could come up with less melodramatic versions of it. For example, we might say, “The adjustments we’re resisting may actually be healthy.” Or “The uncomfortable transitions we’re avoiding might ultimately lead to a better version of comfort.” Or “The revelations we’re attempting to ignore and deny could eventually be the source of relief and release.” Do any of these work for you right now, Capricorn? I bet at least one does.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22) “Jacquemus Mini Le Chiquito” is the name of a tiny purse you can buy for $522. It fits into the palm of your hand and won’t hold much—maybe a single-use strand of dental floss, a shoe from a Barbie doll, a snippet of a loved one’s hair, an aspirin, maybe a few crumbs from a potato chip. In any case, I don’t recommend it for you. You should be surrounding yourself with symbols of capaciousness and roominess. You need influences that inspire you to be a spacious container. It’s time for you to welcome and receive an abundance of blessings, inquiries and invitations.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18) Some people seem to think of sacredness as being pristine and pious—an immaculate and orderly transcendence of earthly concerns. Author and minister Marilyn Sewell has a different perspective. “Who can order the Holy?” she asks. “It is like a rain forest, dripping, lush, fecund, wild. We enter its abundance at our peril, for here we are called to the wholeness for which we long, but which requires all we are and can hope to be.” I recommend Sewell’s version of holiness to you in the coming weeks, Aquarius.

You’re primed to upgrade and deepen your sacred lust for life.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22) “Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don’t,” writes author Rebecca Solnit. “And it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.” Your assignment in the coming weeks is to thoroughly incorporate Solnit’s wisdom—and then wield it with tender ferocity as you reshape your relationship with the future. See if you can manage, if only for 10 days, to fight off and dissolve the reflex to worry. Here’s a tip: Any time the agitated fantasy of an ugly scenario rises up in your imagination, remind yourself that it’s not objectively true and immediately replace it with a fantasy of a desirable scenario.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20) When Europeans arrived in the New World, the Iroquois Confederacy in what’s now northeastern North American had been practicing participatory democracy for 350 years. The visionary principles of these native people ultimately influenced the formation of the United States and its Constitution. Now would be a good time for you to be inspired by these facts. How? You could draw teachings from the past and use them to create your future. You could study the perspectives of indigenous people and incorporate their wisdom into the way you live your life. You could tune in to and explore the traditions of people you respect and adopt them for your own use.

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CANCER (June 21-July 22) I’m one of the lucky people who has never been addicted to alcohol or drugs. What’s the source of my great fortune? Two kinds of grace are key: I suffered no abuse and trauma when I was growing up, and my genetic make up doesn’t predispose me to selfmedicate with intoxicants. But I am indeed a bit addicted to other things, like fearful fantasies, sexual feelings and the urge to win arguments. So, I’m blessed in some ways, cursed in others—just like all of us! In honor of our season of introspection, my fellow Cancerian, I invite you to do what I just did: Count your blessings and curses. Doing so will bring you just the right kind of healing.

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SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21) Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield articulates the spiritual medicine I think you should seek in the coming weeks. You especially need it, and by happy coincidence, it’s likely to be available.

Kornfield writes: “When we have for so long been judged by everyone we meet, just to look into the eyes of another who does not judge us can be extraordinarily healing.” I urge you to identify the people who can perform this service for you, then ask them point-blank to perform this service, even if it has to happen over FaceTime or via Zoom. To generate the good karma that will ensure this happens in just the right way, offer to perform the same service for others.

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GEMINI (May 21-June 20) “It’s OK to live a life others don’t understand,” writes author Jenna Woginrich. That’s a healthy attitude for an eccentric person like her, who taught herself by trial and error how to run a small farm with a meager budget while all alone in the middle of nowhere. But does her advice apply to everyone? I say yes, it does. All of us have quirky behaviors and idiosyncratic ideas and odd feelings that other people find hard to understand, let alone appreciate. I bring this to your attention, Gemini, because the coming weeks will be a time when it’s best for you to emancipate yourself as much as possible from the need to be perfectly understood as you express your raw, pure, unique self.

Get Well Soon

© 2020

TRUTH HURTS

BY DAVID LEVINSON WILK

ACROSS

1. Big name in book publishing 2. Cheapskate 3. Vanzetti's codefendant in 1920s crime 4. Hipster beer, for short

G

Airport Rising

5. Japanese consumer electronics brand 6. Snowmobile brand 7. Flooring installer 8. "____ of discussion!"

9. Conk out 10. Enliven 11. "Oh, stop moping!"

12. Nominee for the first two Nobel Prizes in Literature (1901-02) 13. Medicine dispenser 18. To date 22. ____ Lingus 24. Rice-shaped pasta 26. A following?

27. They may come calling 29. The Brady Bill, e.g.

31. Their, in Spanish 32. Image on the back of a $50 bill 33. Annual June sporting event 34. Reactions at a petting zoo 36. Line part: Abbr.

39. "____ Is Betta Than Evvah!"

(1976 album) 40. McKinnon of "SNL" 43. Transfixed by 46. Infomercial knife brand 48. Yogi's sounds while meditating 49. He plays Steve in "Jobs"

50. City on the Missouri River 51. "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," e.g.

53. To the point 54. First Top 40 hit for Weird Al Yankovic 55. Tricks 58. "What have I done?!"

61. Pan Am rival 62. ____ Tin Tin 63. Hem's partner

Last week’s answers

No math is involved. The grid has numbers, but nothing has to add up to anything else. Solve the puzzle with reasoning and logic. Solving time is typically 10 to 30 minutes, depending on your skill and experience.

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Complete the grid so that each row, column, diagonal and 3x3 square contain all of the numbers 1 to 9.

1. Eur. distance measures 4. Placed text, perhaps 10. Went from 1 to 10, say 14. Actress Vardalos 15. It has a top and a bottom with nothing in between 16. Pixar clown fish 17. Fact! He wrote "There is no sin except stupidity" 19. "Can this be true?"

20. Bench presser's pride 21. Suffix for citrus drinks 22. Whac-____ (carnival game) 23. Ice cream alternative, familiarly 25. Fact! This spider is named after the oval shape of its webs 28. Thus 30. Explorer Hernando 31. "Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak" writer 34. Commotion 35. Greek god with wings 37. ____ port 38. Fact! It's a length of time equal to 604,800 seconds 41. Madagascar, par exemple 42. Heroin, slangily 44. They rank below capts.

45. Motley 47. Bobbing on the waves 49. Italian wine region 50. Fact! They were a series of historic conflicts that ended with 1842's Treaty of Nanking 52. Go in 56. Coal country workplaces 57. "Well, looky there!"

59. 12-time Pro Bowl linebacker Junior 60. Ever so slightly 61. 2019 #1 Lizzo hit suggested by the answer's initials in 17-, 25-, 38- and 50-Across 64. "NBC Nightly News" anchor Lester 65. "Stranger Things" star Ryder 66. "Sprechen ____ Deutsch?"

67. "Let's not forget ..."

68. "Presenting the next act ..."

69. UFO occupants

SUDOKU

| COMMUNITY | | CITYWEEKLY.NET |

30 | JUNE 4, 2020

CROSSWORD PUZZLE

Who woulda thunk that the coronavirus could save Salt Lake City up to $300 million in the next few years? Commercial airline transportation is at an all-time low these days. Few workers are needed at the airport to sell bottled water and fast food or be stationed at the many closed-down gates, stacking up lost luggage, washing and cleaning planes, etc. It’s a ghost town of transportation. With so little going on there, the new airport being built next door can be finished earlier and for less money.

The Department of Airports met on May 20, where Executive Director Bill Wyatt reported that only 1,900 passengers had passed through TSA that day, the lowest count in the airport’s history. Normally, the daily passenger volume is around 20,000. Only about 4,100 passengers traveled through the Salt Lake City airport this past Memorial Day. Flights have been reduced up to 90% depending on the airline. He also noted that after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, air travel was curtailed but it slowly came back to normal as security (TSA) stepped in and changed how we all travel. That isn’t happening at this time as folks are still avoiding flying.

Originally, the plan was to tear down the airport’s concourses B and C in an organized fashion as the first phase of the new terminals was complete in September.

With less activity and fewer people around, they can remove concourses B and C all at once, and they will not have to use the old airport after October. Then, they can move on to Phase 2 and finish the new airport three years earlier, in 2024 instead of 2027.

The time savings = money saved. Of course, this all will depend on activity and if people begin flying more. Salt Lake City airport received almost $83 million in economic relief from the federal government to help avoid laying off its workforce.

Ours is the only major U.S. airport being completely rebuilt right now, and when the construction is done, travelers will be amazed. Not only will it be larger but will feature 47-foot-high ceilings and enormous artwork, including an all-white piece by Gordon Huether called “The Canyon,” which will be the size of a football field and evoke the Salt Lake City landscape. Director Wyatt believes the new airport will also be a cleaner place because social distancing is easier to manage in large buildings.

Travelers utilizing electronic tickets and bag tags as well as phone apps with QR code-tickets reduce hand-to-hand touching and limit the virus’ spread. How long will airport workers wear masks? Who knows how long this pandemic will go on?

To follow the airport’s rebuild, visit SLCAirport.com/thenewslc n Content is prepared expressly for Community and is not endorsed by City Weekly staff.

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WEIRD

Fun With Mannequins n Some sports teams eager to return to the field have taken to placing cardboard figures of fans in stadium seats to enhance the experience for viewers, but the FC Seoul soccer club in South Korea was forced to apologize May 18 after propping up sex dolls in the seats for its match against Gwangju FC, The New York Times reported. “We had tried to add some fun in the no-spectator match,” the club explained. “But we have not checked all the details, and that is clearly our fault.” “Details” included the buxom physiques and obvious logos of sex toy marketers on the dolls’ clothing that fans watching quickly noticed.

“We had confirmed that although the mannequins were made to look just like real people, they had nothing to do with adult products,” the statement said, but the club admitted it had neglected to do a background check of the supplier, which makes sex dolls.

Inexplicable A Facebook group called “A group where we all pretend to be ants in an ant colony” began March with around 100,000 members, reported NBC. Then the world locked down, and membership soared to more than 1.7 million. Started by Tyrese Childs, 20, of Fargo, North Dakota, the group’s purpose is to serve their fictional queen and search out food for her, and it is one of roughly 70 roleplaying groups on Facebook. Members of the ant colony can post photos about being ants and others join in by commenting with terms such as “MUNCH” and “LIFT.” One post featuring a photo of ice cream with ants crawling on it invited members to deliver some of the sweet treat to the queen and got more than 18,000 replies. “I think people are searching for something to do right now,” Childs said. “You can only scroll so much on social media.”

Send your weird news items to WeirdNewsTips@amuniversal.com.

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The Passing Parade Police responding to a reported shooting in Poughkeepsie, New York, early on May 17, arrived to find a very drunk 35-year-old man from the Bronx who claimed he’d been shot in the buttocks, which caused him to fall and hit his head. The Hudson Valley Post reported the unnamed victim was taken to a hospital, where he was treated for his head injury, but doctors could find no evidence he’d been shot. There was no bullet hole in his buttocks, X-rays showed no bullet lodged inside his buttocks, and his pants had no holes in them, police said. Witnesses nearby were also intoxicated and unable to provide any clarification. When officers pressed the victim about his story, he became uncooperative and said, “I didn’t pull a gun.”

Homeschooling Gone Wild Parents have lodged complaints with the Archbishop Sentamu Academy in Hull, England, after discovering their seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders were sent an exercise asking them to define pornography, soft pornography, hardcore pornography and other sensitive subjects, such as human trafficking

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Just Funny University of Arizona wildlife biology professor Michael Bogan caught Saturday morning cartoons as they came to life in a video he recorded of a coyote chasing a roadrunner May 9 in downtown Tucson. Bogan could be heard on his recording saying, “There is literally a coyote chasing a roadrunner. I can’t believe it. That is a straight-up cartoon.” The reenactment of the classic setup between Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner caught Bogan’s attention near the Santa Cruz River, Fox News reported. And, as life often imitates art, the real roadrunner escaped unharmed from the wily coyote.

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n Dinner at the renowned three-Michelin-star Inn at Little Washington in Virginia can set diners back a pretty penny— unless they’re not eating. When the Inn opens on May 29, some of its patrons will be mannequins, reported the Associated Press, attired in fancy 1940s clothing and placed strategically at tables to help with social distancing. “We’re all craving to gather and see other people right now,” said Patrick O’Connell, the Inn’s proprietor and chef. “They don’t all necessarily need to be real people.”

Rebellion Served Cold An unnamed ice cream shop in Hong Kong is offering tear gasflavored ice cream in support of the region’s pro-democracy movement, reports the Associated Press. The shop’s owner explained he wanted “to make a flavor that reminds people that they still have to persist in the protest movement and don’t lose their passion.” “It tastes like tear gas,” said customer Anita Wong. “It feels difficult to breathe at first, and it’s really pungent and irritating. It makes me want to drink a lot of water immediately.” The owner tried several different combinations to achieve the flavor and found that black pepper came the closest.

Before coronavirus restrictions, he said the store was selling 20 to 30 scoops per day.

and female genital mutilation. Hull Live reported on May 19 that the assignments were made as part of the school’s sex education course, but one parent, identified as Mrs. Taylor, said if her daughter had searched these terms on the internet, the results would have “destroyed her mind” and “scarred her for life.” The school responded saying, “Students were not directed to research these topics themselves on the internet because all the answers ... were contained in the teacher-produced materials we shared.” Principal Chay Bell apologized: “I am genuinely sorry for any upset caused at this difficult time.”

Why Not? In Japan, people are enlisting the help of a long-forgotten mythical creature believed to ward off plagues in their battle against the coronavirus. Amabie, a mermaidlike being, first appeared in Japanese folklore in 1846, when she was reported to have appeared to a government official and predicted a rich harvest and a pandemic. She told the man the pandemic could be thwarted by drawing her likeness and sharing it with as many people as possible, BBC reported on April 23. Now, images of the spirit are appearing over five continents, and in Japan, face masks and hand sanitizer with her image are popular. One long-haul driver painted her on the side of his truck, saying, “I travel all over the country with my (goods) and Amabie to pray for the disease to go away.” Even the country’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has joined in, tweeting an image of Amabie and encouraging people to “prevent the spread of the virus.”

Going the Extra Mile A nurse in the western Russian city of Tula has been disciplined for “noncompliance with the requirements for medical clothing” after photos appeared on social media of her wearing only a bra and panties under transparent PPE on a COVID-19 men-only ward. The unnamed nurse told her superiors at the Tula Regional Clinical Hospital that wearing clothing under the PPE was “too hot” and that she didn’t realize the protective gear was seethrough. The Scottish Sun reported on May 20 that patients didn’t seem to mind, though one admitted there was “some embarrassment.”

Oops On May 15, staff at a Hamilton, Ontario, retirement home transferred all of its residents to a hospital because of an outbreak of COVID-19. That is, except for one. The following evening, after repeated alerts from the man’s family, he was discovered in his room at the Rosslyn Retirement Residence by a security officer who had been dispatched to look for him. He was “alert” and was subsequently transferred to the hospital, the CBC reported.

“This was clearly not something anybody would have intended to do,” and the lack of a master list of residents contributed to the snafu, said Winnie Doyle, executive vice president of clinical operations at the hospital where most of the residents were sent.

“This was ... extremely distressing.”

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