City Weekly February 4, 2021

FEBRUARY 4, 2021 | VOL. 37 N0. 36

Power

Players Utah’s influx of new residents doesn’t mean the GOP supermajority will be loosening its grip anytime soon.

By Benjamin Wood

CONTENTS COVER STORY

POWER PLAYERS Utah’s influx of new residents doesn’t mean the GOP supermajority will be loosening its grip anytime soon.

By Benjamin Wood

9

Cover art by Derek Carlisle

5 PRIVATE EYE 14 A&E 17 DINE 22 MUSIC 28 CINEMA 29 COMMUNITY

2 | FEBRUARY 4, 2021

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OPINION

Check out weekly columns Smart Bomb and Taking a Gander at cityweekly.net. facebook.com/slcweekly

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STAY INFORMED! Want to know the latest on coronavirus? Get off Facebook and check out these three online resources: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov World Health Organization: who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019 Utah Coronavirus Task Force: coronavirus.utah.gov

STAFF Publisher PETE SALTAS Executive Editor JOHN SALTAS News Editor JERRE WROBLE Arts & Entertainment Editor SCOTT RENSHAW Music Editor ERIN MOORE Listings Desk KARA RHODES

Contributors KATHARINE BIELE, ROB BREZSNY, MIKE RIEDEL, ALEX SPRINGER , BENJAMIN WOOD Production Art Director DEREK CARLISLE Graphic Artists SOFIA CIFUENTES, CHELSEA NEIDER

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Salt Lake City Weekly is published every Thursday by Copperfield Publishing Inc. We are an independent publication dedicated to alternative news and news sources, that also serves as a comprehensive entertainment guide. 15,000 copies of Salt Lake City Weekly are available free of charge at more than 1,800 locations along the Wasatch Front. Limit one copy per reader. Additional copies of the paper can be purchased for $1 (Best of Utah and other special issues, $5) payable to Salt Lake City Weekly in advance. No person, without expressed permission of Copperfield Publishing Inc., may take more than one copy of any Salt Lake City Weekly issue. No portion of this publication may be reproduced in whole or part by any means, including electronic retrieval systems, without the written permission of the publisher. Third-class postage paid at Midvale, UT. Delivery might take up to one full week. All rights reserved.

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SOAP BOX Encourage the Good Decisions

I disagree with the notion that less government control equals less to fight about (see “Political Unity Is Not the Goal,” Jan. 28 Soapbox column). The things we fight over will still exist.

The role of government should be to help protect those who can’t protect themselves.

Human nature lends itself toward greed. Might does not make right. Free speech doesn’t mean you can say anything you want, especially if it threatens, intimidates or harasses someone else.

Government should even the playing field so that the game is fair. The market should be

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free, but this is not King of the Hill.

Individuals are mostly capable of regulating themselves, but individuals tend to lose themselves in a crowd, as evidenced by recent mob rioting and violence.

People should always be allowed to make their own decisions and never be forced.

I’m just not sure we can always make good ones without some encouragement.

RICHARD GREEN Ogden

“Bottoms Up,” Jan. 28 Cotton Bottom review

Ah, the Cotton Bottom!

Damned best food ever. What a food hangout! Awesome. Glad

@SLCWEEKLY they are open again after renovation—nice and cool in the summer.

JUDI WITTMAN-LARSEN via Facebook

Glad to hear this review was awesome!

TERRI LEDDING via Facebook

“Shot in the Arm” Jan. 7 Private Eye column

Don’t do it. No need to.

LORINDA JUDKINS BLAHA via Facebook

Loved reading about your sweet momma. Tell her hello.

KAREN JOHNSON via Facebook

Loved everything about this article!

ANIZA M. BROWN

They did a great job with keeping this iconic burger the same. Like exactly the same.

Some new items on the menu look good, too. And yes, there are now fries!

via Facebook

via Instagram

KAREN ANASTASOPOULOS

I think they taste better than before!

Tell her hello.

@INFINITYPHOTOROB

@JETERLUVR via Instagram

Get the shot, Aunt Stella.

JOANNE SALTAS via Facebook

Great article. via Facebook

Lorinda Judkins Blaha: As the article states—“To the back of the line with you.” I hope if this virus hits ya, you aren’t wishing anything different and take it happily with a smile. I hope that you don’t request any help from anyone or use any of the resources available to you if it gets bad— because in your mind it’s all a hoax, right? But it’s not. This isn’t a joke, and attempting to protect the most vulnerable in our community should always be priority.

ELI GERMAN Via Facebook

AHMED ALGEBREE via Facebook

THE BOX

What is your favorite board game?

Kelly Boyce

Boggle. Challenge me at your own risk. Technically, it’s not played on a board, so Sequence would have to fill in as my favorite board game.

Benjamin Wood

Dark Tower, which I’ve only ever heard of because my uncle owned it and would bring it out every Christmas Eve when I was a young buck.

Chelsea Neider

Monopoly. I get scary manipulative and competitive, though.

Katharine Biele

We like to play bridge, cribbage and I used to play mahjong, but I can’t find people who do. We have tons of different Monopoly games, but they are tiring. Clue used to be fun.

Is Scrabble a board game?

Carolyn Campbell

It’s a tie beween Monopoly and Clue. They’re both still fun.

Tom Metos

Mouse Trap. The actual game is kind of lame, but putting together all of the stages is the fun part.

Eric Granato Mancala

Patty Pecora

Lolz. The game of laughter. You wear a mouthpiece and read what is on a card; people have to guess what you are saying. It is hilarious.

Paula Saltas

Backgammon. Anyone ready for a backgammon tournament?

B Y J O H N S A LTA S

PRIVATE EY

Don’t Wilt, Mitt I

took it upon themselves to upend the price of GameStop shares by shopping it up ever upward to their benefit and at the expense of traditional Wall Street that prefers to keep such rewards in their own dominion.

This is where Mitt Romney comes in. For all his bopping back and forth on issues, for all his flopping in the wind, for all his timidity, the Utah Republican senator doesn’t have a fully developed Wall Street conscience. He has a pretty steady moral compass. I don’t agree with where it often leads him, but I do believe, inside him, a real heart beats.

Mitt is no Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio or even Mike Lee, for that matter. Each of those so-called men are fast becoming known for their consistent cowardice. Each of that trio is a bit “C-3PO”—afraid of anything that is counter to selfpreservation—and in the case of Cruz and Rubio, also embraces a dash of Ephialtes—the infamous traitor to the 300 Spartan Greeks who fought the Persians to a standstill at Thermopylae. For the past 2,000 years, no Greek mother has named her child Ephialtes. No future American mother should name her child Rafael (Ted’s Christian name) or Marco. Mike is a hard name to shun—I even have a son named Michael. Therefore, we should ban the name Lee. The name Mitt is safe, for obvious reasons. Mitt needn’t worry, though, as he is not a traitor, despite what some people in the deep, dark recesses of Utah’s GOP currently claim. His crime apparently is that he is the bipartisan mediator between his party and the agenda of President Biden. Forget the past. All of our shared past has led us to the juncture at which Biden and Mitt are sharing center stage. What happens in the next couple of weeks, as the Senate hears prosecution witnesses (there better be witnesses!) in the House impeachment case against Donald J. Trump, will set the course for our democracy for generations to come. Either we save democracy, or we don’t. Mike

Lee has already decided we don’t even have one now. Mitt believes otherwise.

I’ve nothing in common with Mitt. I met him once, but he wouldn’t remember, because it was only a nod on my part. I only remember because Mitt returned with that befuddled look of his—the one that posterized him when the photographer caught him eating frog legs with Donald Trump. On the other hand, I also recall that George Romney was not a disgusting name where I grew in Bingham Canyon—a community of union men and multi-ethnic immigrant laborers.

George, born a Mexican citizen, would have made a pretty good Democrat today. He was a strong advocate of the civil rights movement and a staunch moderate in a party that was beginning the glacial shift to the far right. He grew the Michigan state government that runs counter to what is left of today’s GOP—which may help explain Michigan being a blue state. The senior Romney also had a failed run at the presidency, a run upended, in part, due to his opposition to the Vietnam War. He had been a former supporter of the war, though, and attributed his about-face to having been “brainwashed.” Take solace, George—many of your once-proud party also have been brainwashed.

Mitt knows that. Mitt knows Americans share a middle and common ground. Erase the stigmatizing issues of the fringe, left or right, and you find the real essence of the American state. Mitt can encourage others to have courage, if nothing else. In a couple weeks, a new GOP will emerge. Perhaps Mitt will become an independent. There is no going back to what used to be the GOP for Mitt, not so long as Donald Trump leads that flock.

The question is, will Mitt be the “White Horse”? Or will he wilt? His dad didn’t wilt. CW Send comments to john@cityweekly.net.

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can barely imagine what it would be like to have lived Mitt Romney’s life. As son of the former governor of Michigan, George Romney, his childhood was far different than mine. That’s easy to measure since I don’t even fully own a single home, let alone several, and I’m yet to bank my first billion. As well, I’ve done my damnedest not to become a politician nor benefit from the financial loss of others—a certain consequence of hedge-fund ownership that makes tons of money for a measurable few at the losing expense of an unmeasurable many. Mitt made lots of dough—billions—via his position in Bain Capital, with a goodly sum of the Bain portfolio being dedicated to hedge funds.

An easy example of how a hedge fund works is this: For more than 100 years, The Salt Lake Tribune was locally and privately owned. It employed hundreds of people, owned property in the city, kept politicians on their toes and orchestrated changes to our city and state. Fast forward to the past couple decades when, after all measure of jumps and starts, the Tribune fell into the hands of Alden Global Capital. Alden then began to disassemble the Tribune’s assets to the benefit of Alden but to the detriment of Tribune employees and this community. Somewhere, in the fancy gin joints of Manhattan, the Alden Global team was sucking cigars, toasting Gibson martinis and eating fat steaks.

This is a fundamental flaw of the Wall Street investment community. It has no conscience, and it cares not if what they do creates jobs or destroys them so long as a buck is made. A consequence of that happened recently when private individuals motivated by user communities on Reddit

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Two realities. This is the world we live in. And if you’re from Utah, it becomes even more curious. It’s no longer about Donald Trump’s malignant delusions.

Now, it is an American affinity for magical thinking to justify loss and portray infallibility. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that four years of hearing about fake news and the radical left would give rise to a radical right and deflate confidence in fact-based reporting.

Now we hear about Deseret Nation or #DezNat, a hashtag throwback to the Wild West days when Mormons drank heavily and fought their enemies righteously. The Salt Lake Tribune found it easier to call it what it isn’t (i.e., altright extremists) than what it is (a troubling reflection of conspiracies gone wild). The New York Times revealed that the Trump administration ignored the threat from conspiracists by focusing on the imagined terror from the left.

This is how Congress got the demonfighting, QAnon-loving Marjorie Taylor Greene and Burgess Owens.

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The attack on the U.S. Capitol didn’t make waves in Utah. The state is so monolithic that it’s just unthinkable that anyone would target one of our fine legislators with violence. Maybe if we had more representatives of color or even—pause for effect—more Democrats, that might activate the state’s white supremacist cabal. And so, the Legislature is marching righteously to expand Utah’s Second Amendment rights by tossing concealed carry permits. I mean, who needs them? Certainly, our rural-rooted governor doesn’t think we do. The Salt Lake Tribune’s Robert Gehrke listed the many reasons to retain the permits: training, criminal background checks and things like protecting women from abusers and cutting down on suicides. Apparently, it doesn’t matter that law enforcement opposes the bill, because in Utah, if it ain’t broke, better fix it.

HIT: Paused for the Cause

Here’s one for the environment—at least for the moment. President Joe Biden hit pause on more oil and gas leasing on public lands. Of course, that has given rise to a lawsuit and much righteous indignation on the part of our congressional delegation, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. Utah’s senators are suddenly aware that presidents can do things—at least temporarily—without Congress, so they have legislation to put a stop to that nonsense. It’s interesting that there is so much angst, given the fact that almost 2 million acres of land sits unused, even after being leased. Could it be that energy companies are stockpiling land for some future digging projects—perhaps underground bunkers? Meanwhile, General Motors will be going all-electric in the future, sending oil and gas into a death spiral. No one wants to see jobs lost, and the state should be preparing an alternate economic plan.

CITIZEN REV LT IN A WEEK, YOU CAN CHANGE THE WORLD

What About the Electoral College?

The past two elections have given rise to questions and concerns about that inscrutable Electoral College. Five of our presidents won election without winning the popular vote, and the jury is out on whether that was a good thing. The Founders could not have imagined a world tied together by technology and where you could cross the country in a few hours. Learn about The Electoral College: Past, Present and Future. “More than 159 million Americans voted for president in 2020. However, those votes didn’t select who the next President of the United States would be—at least not directly,” says the Hinckley Institute of Politics. Instead, 538 mostly unknown electors made that important decision. Join the panel discussion.

Virtual, Monday, Feb. 8, 12 p.m., free. http://bit.ly/36oKRRR

The Black Church

PBS will screen the upcoming documentary The Black Church and conduct a panel discussion with pastors and Black cultural leaders in Utah. Don’t miss The Black Church Virtual Screening and Panel discussion about the influence of the church, its challenges and future. “Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. takes viewers on a journey through the rich and complex history of the Black church to reveal its profound impact on our nation’s culture and history. Explore the untold story of this uniquely American institution and its lasting influence on nearly every chapter of the African American story,” organizers say.

Virtual, Tuesday, Feb. 9, 7 p.m. RSVP: http://bit.ly/39mQUrV

Feed the Homeless

No matter how we try, our politicians have been unable to crack the nut that is homelessness. “As of January 2019, Utah had an estimated 2,798 experiencing homelessness on any given day,” according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. But you can help. On the first Saturday of each month, volunteers bring food donations, help box up meals or help deliver the meals to those in need at Dinners of Hope. Do what you can. John’s Place, 133 E. 4800 South, Murray, Saturday, Feb. 6, 3-6 p.m., free/wear masks. https://fb.me/e/YC72RhWs

Native American Tales

One of the best ways to understand a culture is through the stories they tell. For Native Americans, legends and storytelling are deeply imbedded in their traditions as they recount the history of the people, tell where they came from or relate the exploits of a particular hero. These stories are often told to educate children about cultural morals and values. You’ll hear stories from Utah’s native elders at Wintertime Native American Tales, featuring Larry Cesspooch (Ute), Eleanor Tom (Paiute), Gaylene Dawes (Dine’), Antonio Williams (Northern Rapaho, Wyoming), and Rose Jakub (Dine’).

Virtual, Thursday, Feb. 4, 6 p.m., free. http://bit.ly/3pkNYSl

—KATHARINE BIELE

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I

A Little Bit Country

FEBRUARY 4, 2021 | 9

During the 1970s, Utah was home to just two congressional districts, with the dividing line largely splitting the Beehive State into east and west halves. And after the 1980 census, Utah gained a third seat that was placed largely in and around Salt Lake County.

That donut-hole map stuck around when districts were updated after the 1990 census.

But a new millennium brought with it the mantra of an “urban-rural blend,” a thinly veiled justification for cracking Utah’s capital city into pieces and diluting the power of urban voters.

With the 2010 census came Utah’s longdesired 4th Congressional District and new calls to simply draw a circle around Salt Lake City and avoid the fight. But Republican lawmakers resisted that push, reiterating that every congressional district in Utah should be a little bit country—and a little bit rock ’n’ roll.

“Everybody knew what they meant,” Brown said. “They wanted every seat to have the same balance of Republicans and Democrats

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the state’s dividing lines will have to change in response to shifts in population. And since the next chance to fix mistakes won’t arrive until 2030, Republican lawmakers must place bets on where voters will choose to live—and what type of candidates they’ll prefer—over the next 10 years.

That forecasting creates a choice of strategies for Utah Republicans. Either they draw a so-called “donut hole” district around Salt Lake City—effectively ceding one congressional seat to the Democratic Party—or they continue to slice and dice the capital city and hope the new decade maintains their margins of victory statewide.

And there are competing schools of thought—inside and outside the Legislature— for how to approach the maps for state House and Senate. Some say priority should be placed on preserving cities and counties intact, to the degree possible, while others insist on making districts as equal in population as possible, necessitating a more surgical approach.

“At some point, they’re going to have to get things a little bit more in line,” said Utah State University associate professor Josh Ryan, “or they risk losing seats or making Utah a very, very gerrymandered state.”

[Disclosure: The author of this article submitted his name to legislative leaders for consideration of appointment to the redistricting commission.]

n November, roughly one out of every three Utahns voted for a Democrat to represent them in the state and federal Houses of Representatives.

But up at the Utah Legislature, only one-fifth of the House chamber are members of the state’s minority party. And following January’s swearing-in of Congressman Burgess Owens, Democrats are completely shut out of the state’s federal delegation.

The disparity is nothing new. For the last decade—if not longer—Democratic candidates have regularly received around a third of the state’s votes while winning considerably fewer than a third of Utah’s electoral districts.

And that’s unlikely to change when new districts are drawn this year, according to local political scientists, even with the unknown variable of a new independent redistricting commission that will recommend maps to lawmakers in what is ostensibly a check on “gerrymandering,” or the strategic and intentional grouping of voters to induce an electoral outcome.

“What districts do is distort the ratio of votes to seats,” said Adam Brown, an associate professor of political science at Brigham Young University. “If you win 60% of the vote, you can expect to win 70% or more of the seats without any gerrymandering at all.”

But Utah’s majority party can’t necessarily skate through the upcoming redistricting process. Many of

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Utah’s influx of new residents doesn’t mean the GOP supermajority will be loosening its grip anytime soon.

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Power Players

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Adam Brown, BYU professor of political science

Josh Ryan, Utah State University political science professor

as the state. And that’s going to give you four Republicans if you do it right.”

And while it’s generally accepted that Utah’s congressional districts are gerrymandered to help Republicans, the state-level maps that relegate Democrats to an exaggerated “superminority” status in the Legislature are more ambiguous. Notably, those maps earned the near-unanimous approval of state lawmakers across party lines.

But that’s not to say state maps were free of calculated tweaking. Brown said Utah’s legislative maps were drawn to minimize the number of incumbents who would have to compete to retain their seats—an approach all-but-confirmed by legislative leaders at the time—which led to some high-growth areas around Salt Lake and Utah counties being awkwardly lumped under representatives who lived elsewhere.

“That’s a different kind of gerrymander that people don’t care about as much,” Brown said.

Brown didn’t give any specifics and may disagree with this author, but the representation of Park City/ Summit County, the fracturing of the Daybreak community, and the little scoop of Rose Park/Swede Town added to a south Davis County milkshake—currently represented, ostensibly, by Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross—come to mind.

Brown said that type of voter finessing is the most likely to be mitigated by the new redistricting commission, which presumably would not be working with a list of lawmakers’ addresses and would be less concerned with the doubling-up of incumbents.

The Legislature will have the final say on new maps, but Brown suggested there may not be as much of an appetite to overturn a map that threatens individual lawmakers.

“You might get some legislators grumpy about it,” he said, “but that would be a much harder fight to pick, perhaps, and maybe not worth it as much as the congressional map is.”

Fred Cox, a Republican former member of the Utah House, said he would be surprised if lawmakers ac-

cept the boundaries proposed by the redistricting commission.

Cox drew a number of maps during the last round of redistricting, designed around the stated goal of splitting up as few cities, counties and communities as possible. That meant stretching the limits on how many more or fewer voters a district could have compared to its neighbors, which prompted opposition and threats of legal action against the state if his maps were approved.

But Cox notes that while boundary lines are set based on a snapshot of yesterday’s population numbers, they remain in place for a decade as voters ebb and flow around the state.

“You can get congressional districts down to, maybe, one person. But by the time you pass it, it’s changed,” Cox said. “So, leave a little flexibility and keep communities together.”

The Map Is Not the Territory

USU professor Ryan and a colleague published research in 2014 that looked at how maps drawn by independent commissions differ from those drawn by lawmakers.

After looking at several states before and after the creation of such a commission, they essentially found that there was no difference at all.

“Using the statistical methods we were using, we just couldn’t find any results,” Ryan said. “They don’t really seem to be doing much differently than traditional Legislature-drawn districts.”

Ryan said his work received some criticism for treating all commissions as equal, regardless of their structure or authority. But he added that as a researcher, there was not a clear, objective way to distinguish a “good” panel from a “bad” one.

He said it’s likely a question of when, not if, Utah Republicans will opt to create a safe Democratic con-

COURTESY PHOTO

COURTESY PHOTO

COURTESY PHOTO

Fred Cox, former member of the Utah House

gressional seat, rather than trying to hold on to all of them. The more a party strains to gerrymander its opposition into oblivion, he said, the more they’re forced to spread their own voters thin.

“The disaster scenario [for the majority party] is instead of drawing one toss-up district or one strongly Democratic district, they make two Republican districts competitive,” he said, “and now you have to fight for two seats.”

And while the next decade’s maps may very well stay the same or similar to what they are now, continued population growth could pose real redistricting challenges after the 2030 census.

“If they added a fifth seat, they’d almost certainly have to just create a Democratic district,” he said.

“They’re just not going to be able to get around it if trends continue.”

Cox said party leaders at the time opposed his maps for allowing a left-leaning congressional district, but he added that he didn’t look at any partisan data and certainly can’t stop like-minded voters from clustering together, as they are naturally prone to do.

He said the maps that were ultimately approved were unnecessarily confusing, particularly the 4th Congressional District that zigzags through a bizarre tract of Salt Lake, Utah and Juab counties. Cox said he personally lives near the meandering dividing lines in Salt Lake County, a stone’s-throw from different representation in nearly any direction.

“It doesn’t make any sense. People can’t remember which district they live in and that, I think, is a problem,” he said. “We probably would have had betterlooking districts if they had just left them the way I had drawn.”

When the population size of districts is prioritized over common-sense boundary lines, Cox said, that means dividing neighbor from neighbor in order to land at an instantly outdated magic number.

“You end up going across a street and picking up a fourplex, which is really stupid,” Cox said. “But that’s exactly what they did to avoid getting sued.”

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Partisan Ways Die Hard

In December, Brown posted an analysis of the state’s election results looking at the performance of President-elect Joseph Biden, particularly in the greater Ogden and Provo areas.

Other media had noted Trump’s improved numbers in the Beehive State compared to 2016, but Brown suggested an overlooked story was that a Democratic presidential candidate had secured the highest share of the Utah vote in a generation.

Those results don’t necessarily suggest a surging Democratic Party, he said.

Yes, Biden flipped several states back to the blue column and overperformed in Utah. But those gains were limited to the top of the ticket, Brown said, with Democrats losing ground in the U.S. House and failing to flip state legislatures and governor’s offices.

“I think what we really saw in 2020 is what Utah might have looked like four years ago if not for [independent presidential candidate] Evan McMullin,” Brown said.

The 2020 election suggests voters reacted to Trump’s personality while otherwise sticking to their partisan habits, Brown said, undermining Democratic progress in Utah and highlighting a potentially tough road for Trump should he choose to run again in 2024—something the outgoing president has repeatedly talked about doing.

“A major reason Trump got the nomination [in 2016] is because those opposed to him all held out hoping to be the anti-Trump winner,” Brown said, “and instead they split the never-Trump vote.”

Utahns anxious for the “purple-ing”—or even “blue-ing”—of the state should manage their expectations, Brown said. Even with changing demographics, he said it would take more than 10 years for any significant realignment to occur.

But the state is changing, Brown acknowledged, making it harder to justify the “urban-rural blend” strategy of mapping out four mini-Utahs dominated

by Republicans. That approach has largely worked up til now, he said, but if the Republican majority were to slip from its current 66% of the vote to something closer to 55%, there would be risk of districts swinging toward the Democrats over a span of 10 years.

“Over time, the percentage of voters in Utah who

identify as active [Latter-day Saints] is gradually declining, and that’s the most Republican part of Utah,” Brown said. “If that trend continues, you might have more parts of the state getting somewhat more competitive.”

The first whack at new maps will be performed by the commission, structured by law to include a mix of Republican and Democratic members and at least two unaffiliated commissioners.

Cox was skeptical that the redistricting panel could be free from partisanship. Its members will have their personal biases, he said, including the nonpartisan appointees.

He opposed Proposition 4, the 2018 ballot initiative that created the independent redistricting commission. He said he agreed with the general principles of the campaign—that voter representation should take precedence—but he objected to creating another unelected, quasi-governmental body to make decisions affecting the state.

“Do we want another [Utah Transit Authority]?” he said.

He was one of the few state lawmakers who was drawn into the same district as a competing incumbent. Cox voted in favor of that map and ultimately lost reelection, but he said he would’ve cast the same vote even knowing it would cost him his seat.

“If I’m going to have to run against somebody, fine,” he said. “That isn’t the voters’ fault.”

ONLY once IN a decade

Just empaneled to set off the map-drawing process is the seven-member commission, announced Feb. 1, that includes former Republican Congressman Rob Bishop; two former state senators: Republican Lyle Hillyard and Democrat Pat Jones; former Utah Supreme Court Justice Christine Durham; former Utah District Judge William A. Thorne Jr.; data analyst N. Jeffrey Baker; and commission chair—appointed by Gov. Spencer Cox—Brigham Young University professor Rex Facer.

If past is prologue, that will likely mean town halls and public arguing over draft maps before Republican lawmakers huddle behind closed doors to set the playing field that will govern Utah politics for the next decade.

And even if the Legislature adopts a nakedly partisan map, there’s little recourse to challenge it beyond electing new members of government. A disparity between votes cast and seats won is insufficient to demonstrate malfeasance, and attempts to argue a more nuanced measurement of gerrymandering in court have been dismissed by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts as “sociological gobbledygook.”

“Every political scientist in the country, whether we were doing that research or not, all collectively groaned and slapped our foreheads,” Brown said of Roberts’ critique.

Without an amendment to the Utah Constitution, the power of the redistricting commission is, at most, advisory. And Brown said it would take a vocal push by influential Utahns—along the lines of the party nomination fight that led to SB54—to preserve the commission’s map should lawmakers opt to reject them.

“The question then becomes how much flack are they willing to take for overruling the commission,” Brown said.

Cox said the same arguments from 10 years ago are likely to resurface, like whether voters are better represented in the Legislature by having their community scattered among several lawmakers or consolidated under a couple of directly accountable proxies.

There’s also the question of urban-vs.-rural representation, he said, with different approaches to map drawing favoring candidates who live in less or more populated areas.

“You still have those differences of attitude, with some of the same players,” Cox said. “I think that is going to be interesting to watch.”

Ryan said Utahns who attempt to observe the mapdrawing process should perhaps focus on the 4th Congressional District—currently held by the majority party after pingponging since its creation.

“How much do they change that?” Ryan said. “Because it’s getting tight, probably too close for comfort for [Republicans].”

And for Democrats anxious for representation that approaches proportionality, the new decade may be a waiting game for new voters to come of age or relocate to the state.

“The more districts you have,” Brown said, “the harder it gets to win all of them.” CW

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FEBRUARY 4, 2021 | 13

buried? I’m just trying to get to my car, Ghost of Christmas Future.’ … What everyone forgets about your 20s is you were garbage. Thinner garbage, but garbage. … Your 20s are an opportunity to fish trash out of the lake before it freezes over.”

Tomlinson visits Wiseguys Gateway (194 S. 400 West, wiseguyscomedy.com) for five performances, Feb. 4-6. Tickets are $25 per person, and seating remains limited to allow for social distancing between audience groups.

Check the website for additional COVID protocol information. (Scott Renshaw)

After relocating to Utah in the late 1990s, theater veteran Edward Lewis—in conjunction with University of Utah Theatre Department faculty member Richard Scharine—revived People Productions, the theater company Lewis had launched in California in 1971 to focus on providing theater opportunities for Black actors and creative artists. A production of James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner in summer 2000 launched People Productions in Utah, and the company continued mounting productions for years. But when Lewis died of pancreatic cancer in 2009, there was a question of how Lewis’s legacy of supporting Black theatrical voices might continue.

What ultimately followed was the Edward Lewis Theatre Festival, launched in 2010 with the support and participation of multiple local theater companies that were all planning around that time to produce work on AfricanAmerican themes. Now in its 12th year, the festival again brings together several companies for a presentation of scenes from recent productions. People Productions stages a locally-set adaptation of David Hare’s

like Polaroid cameras, offering a sense of the passage of time from the children who once played with these troubling representations of the Old West.

Other participating artists include distinctive landscape painters Jennifer Nehrbass and Kevin Kearns; Nate Ronniger, capturing the fascinating textures of folded and curled paper; and Brian Blackham offering still-life objects radiant with light. Visit julienestergallery.com to view represented artists, or for viewing hours at 1280 Iron Horse Dr., Park City. (SR)

Scott Silven’s The Journey

Knuckle; Salt Lake Acting Company offers an excerpt from the recent Four Women Talking About the Man Under the Sheet (pictured); Pygmalion Production presents scenes from Catherine Filloux’s White Savior; and Wasatch Theatre Company brings a scene from local playwright Jim Martin’s Teacher Truths.

The festival will be presented virtually for 2021 on Sunday Feb. 7 from 2 p.m. – 4 p.m. in collaboration with the Salt Lake City Public Library, taking advantage of the virtual productions that many companies have been recording throughout the past year. Visit events.slcpl.org/events to find out how to join in via Vimeo link. (SR)

At just 30 years old, Scott Silven has the smoldering good looks of a pop idol and the casual, commanding stage presence of a performer twice his age. But he’s been studying the art and craft of illusion since he was just a teenager, headlining his first gigs in the U.K. by the age of 21, so the Scottish native isn’t so much a precocious genius as he is a hard-working entertainer who only makes his trickery look easy.

Silven previously visited Utah in 2018 for his intimate Wonders at Dusk show, and the kind of magic he prefers might actually by ideal for a circumstance in which he needs to perform while people are watching him up close on their computer screens. Silven’s virtual, interactive production The Journey finds him offering up his magical mentalist trickery from his home in rural Scotland, bringing audience members directly into the show. This is no pre-recorded show where any of the illusions could be tweaked, but a real-time experience of the talent that has made him an international sensation, working specifically from the information and participation provided by his audi-

DAVID WILKINSON EMPIRICAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Edward Lewis Theatre Festival Virtual

Representational artworks may in many ways be more accessible than abstract pieces, but that should never be interpreted to mean that representational works are less complex, or reveal less about the artist. In the group exhibition In Plain Sight at Julie Nester Gallery—running now through Feb. 23—several artists offer a case study in how many different ways there are to capture a person, an object or a place.

The subjects in Chad Little’s oil on canvas paintings, for example, are quite recognizably human, yet he presents a style of portraiture that’s more candid than you’d expect from a posed work. “I paint to create a connection with those that appreciate the absurd and smile when they see their own stories in my paintings,” Little says in an artist statement. “Capturing the unrehearsed compositions and offhand smiles between family and friends.”

Brad Overton, meanwhile, turns his gaze to a subject as seemingly trivial as vintage toys (“The Crossing” is pictured). Cowboysand-Indians figurines often interact with other, more contemporary objects,

TDK

NETFLIX

For decades, women have struggled to be taken seriously in the world of stand-up comedy. It can be even harder when you’re a young woman, and harder still when you have the pixie-ish looks of Taylor Tomlinson.

Yet despite becoming a headliner around the country when she was barely 25—and a top ten finalist on the ninth and final season of Last Comic Standing when she had only just become old enough to drink legally—Tomlinson has become a distinctive voice in the stand-up world.

That voice is at the forefront of her 2020 Neflix comedy special Quarter-Life Crisis, in which the California native takes the subject of her youth head-on. “People get upset when I complain about being young,” she says. “I had a woman come up to me after a show, furious: ‘You should really appreciate this time in your life, because some day you’re going to have a family like me, and you’re really going to miss it.’ I’m like, ‘Where are your kids

Complete listings online at cityweekly.net

Julie Nester Gallery: In Plain Sight

Taylor Tomlinson @ Wiseguys

SALT LAKE ACTING CO.

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14 | FEBRUARY 4, 2021

ESSENTIALS

the

ENTERTAINMENT PICKS, FEBRUARY 4-10, 2021

ence members.

Kingsbury Hall and Utah Presents host the latest performances of The Journey specifically for Utah audiences, Feb. 9-14, with only 30 households/devices permitted for each show. Tickets are $59 per household group; visit utahpresents.org for showtimes and purchasing details, and take advantage of this opportunity to be transported through Silven’s mesmerizing gifts without even having to leave your home. (SR)

Pandemic Games

A&E

BIG SHINY ROBOT

Enjoy safe game-playing gatherings through these virtual platforms.

Boardgamearena

Dungeons and Dragons Online

Diplomacy Map

Jackbox Games

BY BRYAN YOUNG

I

domination of the map, collecting enough supply centers to achieve victory. The appeal is that there are no dice or elements of chance in this game; it is entirely dependent on how well you’re able to convince your neighbors to do your bidding (hence the name.) Lies are not only permissible, but practically required. And you will have to apologize for telling lies a lot. That’s just the way Diplomacy works.

Get six other friends together and head to www.playdiplomacy.com, sign up for a free account and start a game. It’s addictive. And since it’s all digital, the chances of getting into a fistfight with your friends over the game (a distinct possibility in person) is next to none.

Jackbox Games: Jackbox Games are the lowest common denominator of online games. They’re fun and mindless party games that everyone plays with the app on their phone. You just set up a room in Zoom

to play with everyone in a group while everyone participates with their phone.

Throw booze into the mix, and it’s a great way to spend an evening with your friends, and replicates that drunken night playing Cards Against Humanity pretty well.

Board Game Arena: This service (www. boardgamearena.com) allows you to sign up and play digital versions of more than 200 popular board games with your friends. It works best when one of you has a paid account, but it’s cheap enough to not be a burden. Pair it up with a Zoom room or Google hangout, and you’ve got the makings of a classic game night from before the dark times.

Hopefully, you’ll take this list and start some safe and responsible gaming with your friends. Because if you don’t take this COVID-19 thing seriously, we’ll never be able to have an in-person game night again. And no one wants that. CW

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than ever. If you’ve got your own books— and every player has their own dice—the only thing you really need is a Zoom account or a Google hangout to gather all the players. If you’re feeling more adventurous and digitally savvy, you can use services like D&D Beyond (www.dndbeyond.com) to track rules and your character. Roll20 (www.roll20.net) is a great interface for video chat that also lets you roll digital dice and create maps and spaces to visualize your playing. However you decide to do it, the online element diminishes none of the fun of hanging out and playing with your friends.

Diplomacy: Diplomacy is a game that’s been around for a long time, and it’s long been played by mail. It’s said that John F. Kennedy even played by post during his time in the White House. In it, you take on the role of one of the great powers prior to the first World War, and your goal is

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don’t have to tell you things are bad.

Everyone knows they’re bad. It’s a pandemic. Those of us who are responsible adults have spent almost an entire year leaving home as little as possible, only going out for the necessities. Frivolities like casual social gatherings are literally lethal, so the smartest of us avoid those, too.

But how do we maintain that human connection with each other as we’re locked up in our bunkers thanks to a year of Donald Trump’s limp response and Gary Herbert’s lack of political courage?

Games are a great way to do that. Board games are a big thing for me. I miss hosting these drunken gaming nights, but, as a responsible adult, they just have to be put on hold. After a year of this disaster, though, and no signs of the threat abating in the near term, I’ve learned quite a few ways to play with my friends in their physical absence.

Dungeons & Dragons: The classic fantasy roleplaying game is literally more popular now than it’s ever been. And let’s be honest: Who doesn’t want to take on the persona of a Halfling Bard that can insult creatures to death with a strum of their lute? Or a barbarian who can go into a frenzy, felling bad guys with the swing of a sword? Or a wizard, casting magic missiles at their enemies left and right?

Well, online options have made it easier

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FEBRUARY 4, 2021 | 15

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Takeout-only ChaiYo Thai Togo serves up Thai favorites with a twist.

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FEBRUARY 4, 2021 | 17

Open: Mon.-Sun., 4 p.m.-9 p.m.

Best bet: Can’t go wrong with the curry Can’t miss: The ChaiYo Fried Rice

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AT A GLANCE

BURGERS AS BIG AS YOUR HEAD!

e’ve all had to do our best to adapt while caught in the throes of this hellish pandemic, but restaurants have really had their work cut out for them.

Traversing the land for takeout has been an eye-opening experience, as I’ve seen many places either buckle under the strain or innovate their concept and approach to take it to new heights.

One of the most interesting developments comes from a little Thai place in Milcreek called ChaiYo Thai Togo (3804 S. Highland Drive, Ste. B2, 801-890-0036, chaiyotogo.com). For starters, ChaiYo is takeout-only. Fond as I am of our Thai restaurant community, this is a new concept for me. I think packaging takeout-friendly Thai food is a good call even when we’re not living in a crushing pandemic.

It was an idea that caught the attention of owners Prae and Kris Jones, who had been longing to open a restaurant of their own. In doing so, the pair has been able to cut overhead costs and redirect funds into excellent ingredients. It’s a risky move, but it seems to be working well given our current circumstances, and I expect that popularity to sustain itself. That tends to happen when your food is amazing.

I’m prepared for a slight backlash of skepticism from those who roll up to Chai-

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BY ALEX SPRINGER comments@cityweekly.net @captainspringer

think of to the party, while dangerously toying with that rice-to-soy-sauce ratio until every bite is drenched in umami bliss.

The ChaiYo Garlic Steak ($15) is also a great bet for those who like the sound of sirloin steak stir fried with copious amounts of oyster sauce and garlic. The sirloin soaks all that salty, garlicky flavor up nicely, creating tender bites that explode with savory sensation. If you’ve ever ordered beef and broccoli, you owe it to yourself to give this one a try.

If you’re after something sweet to finish off the meal, the traditional favorite of mango sticky rice ($7) is here to soothe your Thai comfort food cravings. Don’t ignore the chocolate mousse ($6) or the coconut pudding ($4), however. Topped with whipped cream and fresh raspberries, the mousse is rich, creamy and loaded with enough dark chocolate flavor to hold its own after such a savory dinner menu.

Those who like something a bit lighter for dessert will enjoy the coconut pudding. It’s not overly sweet, and is possessed of a flanlike texture that tickles the tongue while refreshing the palate.

After ruminating on my meals at ChaiYo, I thought about how hard it is to stand out in Utah’s Thai restaurant scene. Most— if not all—of the Thai places in town are not only delicious, but they manage to set themselves apart in some way. I was curious to see how ChaiYo would add to this community of greatness along the Wasatch Front, and by damn, they’ve done it. A solid menu of Thai favorites, plus a few surprises, and an exclusively takeout approach make this place one to keep an eye on. CW

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Thai Rollers

Yo’s digs on the basement level of a slightly Lynchian office complex on the shoulder of Highland Drive. However, I also expect that skepticism will dissipate once the heady aromas of curry and stir fry hit your nose. Take it from me, the best restaurants are those that cannot be seen from the window of your car in transit, and ChaiYo is no exception.

A lot of ChaiYo’s menu will be recognizable to Thai food enthusiasts—citrusy pad thai ($11), savory larb ($13), basil-infused pad par gow ($11) and all the colors of Thailand’s curry rainbow are present. The recipes are courtesy of Prae’s upbringing in Thailand—she learned everything she knows from the years spent cooking and eating with her family. She adds her own little flourishes to each takeout box; I dare you not to be charmed by the carrot and daikon sliced into heart and flower shaped garnishes.

Fans of Thai food will be pleased with whatever they order up, because Prae is not messing around. As I’m partial to massaman curry ($12), that’s where I started.

It’s a fantastic specimen for those who like their curry with a tinge of peanutty flavor— the potatoes and carrots are cooked to perfection, and the peanut ration adds just the right amount of crunch to the whole dish.

I definitely favor the massaman, but curry fans of any stripe will not be disappointed.

There’s a calculated consistency present in each dish that gives each individual flavor and texture a moment to shine before blending together in all that savory sauce.

Veering away from the curry section of the menu isn’t a bad plan either. The unexpected hit of my few visits was the ChaiYo Fried Rice ($15), a mosh pit of chicken, beef, pork, shrimp and egg combined with onions, carrots and cherry tomatoes. It’s like taking the universal deliciousness of ham fried rice and then adding every other meat you can

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onTAP BEER TO-GO AVAILABLE! SUN - THU: 11AM – 9PM FRI - SAT: 11AM – 10PM

2 Row Brewing 6856 S. 300 West, Midvale 2RowBrewing.com On Tap: Feelin’ Hazy

Moab Brewing 686 S. Main, Moab TheMoabBrewery.com On Tap: Bougie Johnny’s

Silver Reef 4391 S. Enterprise Drive, St. George StGeorgeBev.com

Bewilder Brewing 445 S. 400 West, SLC BewilderBrewing.com On Tap: Oat Pale Lager

Mountain West Cider 425 N. 400 West, SLC MountainWestCider.com On Tap: GULB 2020

Squatters 147 W. Broadway, SLC Squatters.com

Bohemian Brewery 94 E. Fort Union Blvd, Midvale BohemianBrewery.com

Ogden River Brewing 358 Park Blvd, Ogden OgdenRiverBrewing.com

Bonneville Brewery 1641 N. Main, Tooele BonnevilleBrewery.com On Tap: Peaches and Cream Ale

Policy Kings Brewery 223 N. 100 West, Cedar City PolicyKingsBrewery.com

Desert Edge Brewery 273 Trolley Square, SLC DesertEdgeBrewery.com On Tap: Fresh Brewed UPA

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A list of what local craft breweries and cider houses have on tap this week

Epic Brewing Co. 825 S. State, SLC EpicBrewing.com On Tap: Chocolate Raspberry Big Bad Baptist Imperial Stout Fisher Brewing Co. 320 W. 800 South, SLC FisherBeer.com On Tap: Red Ale Grid City Beer Works 333 W. 2100 South, SLC GridCityBeerWorks.com On Tap: Extra Pale Ale Hopkins Brewing Co. 1048 E. 2100 South, SLC HopkinsBrewingCompany.com On Tap: Raspberry Gose Hoppers Grill and Brewing 890 E. Fort Union Blvd, Midvale HoppersBrewPub.com Kiitos Brewing 608 W. 700 South, SLC KiitosBrewing.com Level Crossing Brewing Co. 2496 S. West Temple, South Salt Lake LevelCrossingBrewing.com On Tap: Level Crossing Brown Ale

AVAILABLE THROUGH

Proper Brewing 857 S. Main, SLC ProperBrewingCo.com On Tap: Brunch Beer: Grapefruit Wheat Ale Red Rock Brewing Multiple Locations RedRockBrewing.com On Tap: Secale RoHa Brewing Project 30 Kensington Ave, SLC RoHaBrewing.com On Tap: Coconut Porter Roosters Brewing Multiple Locations RoostersBrewingCo.com On Tap: Cosmic Autumn Rebellion SaltFire Brewing 2199 S. West Temple, South Salt Lake SaltFireBrewing.com On Tap: Jeneviere Gin Barrel Aged IPA Salt Flats Brewing 2020 Industrial Circle, SLC SaltFlatsBeer.com On Tap: P1 Pilsner Shades Brewing 154 W. Utopia Ave, South Salt Lake ShadesBrewing.beer On Tap: Pina Colada Sour Ale

Strap Tank Brewery Multiple Locations StrapTankBrewery.com Springville On Tap: PB Rider, Peanut Butter Stout Lehi On Tap: 2-Stroke, Vanilla Mocha Porter TF Brewing 936 S. 300 West, SLC TFBrewing.com On Tap: Imperial Schwarzbier Talisman Brewing Co. 1258 Gibson Ave, Ogden TalismanBrewingCo.com On Tap: Udder Chaos Chocolate Milk Stout Toasted Barrel Brewery 412 W. 600 North, SLC ToastedBarrelBrewery.com Uinta Brewing 1722 S. Fremont Drive, SLC UintaBrewing.com On Tap: Was Angeles Craft Beer UTOG 2331 Grant Ave, Ogden UTOGBrewing.com On Tap: Son of a Peach Vernal Brewing 55 S. 500 East, Vernal VernalBrewing.com Wasatch 2110 S. Highland Drive, SLC WasatchBeers.com Zion Brewery 95 Zion Park Blvd, Springdale ZionBrewery.com Zolupez 205 W. 29th Street #2, Ogden Zolupez.com

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FEBRUARY 4, 2021 | 19

slick, mildly chewy and roasty, while the carbonation generates a smooth silkiness for a complimentary mouthfeel. Body is medium for the style, and 6.6 alcohol presence is low.

Overall: A great “food beer” that pairs as well with sweet chocolate-based desserts as it does with roasted meats. Brewed in the style of an English Brown Ale, it’s most certainly worth a try for those who haven’t yet found their “winner” Brown Ale. Proper - Carroso: This is Proper’s Gruit (beer bittered with herbs and spices rather than hops) that has been aged in Pinot Noir barrels. The barrel-aging definitely takes this ancient ale style to a whole different palace. An amber-hued beer that takes on some red highlights from the barrel, it features a white foam that builds but doesn’t have much staying power. The nose has a barrel presence—a light funk with some wooden aromas. The botanicals come through as well, as the beer has some floral aspects. There are some juniper scents that may not be real, but are pleasing nonetheless. Otherwise, the perfume of the alcohol from the barrel is absent.

A moderately tart opening shares with, then ultimately yields to the malt; apricot and nectarine come to mind. A light draw on the tongue gets released as the floral aspects emerge, and the beer seems to sweeten slightly into more of a peachy flavor. There’s a little numbing action in the back that resembles mint, but it’s not actually minty—more like anise. The ending is similar to what I get in the lingering flavors of a well-made fortified wine.

Overall: This 9.5 percent ale is another hit for me from Proper from an enjoyment point of view. The Pinot Noir barrel provides a nice accent, and the flavors all work well together. The beer isn’t bold, but also not weak. I’m actually a little annoyed at seeing the bottom of the glass, and might grab another after I finish this one.

Both of these beers would have done well over the holidays, but I’m glad they weren’t ready until now. The classic and complex flavors are perfect now that we’re finally getting our first real taste of 2021’s winter.

As always, cheers! CW

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W

hen a brewery finds success with any given beer, the natural inclination is to build upon that progress by enticing existing costumes, while still trying to woo others. Whether it’s alcohol, augmented flavors or a simple hop rearrangement, challenging the customer really helps define what a brewery is capable of. This week, we have a pair of ales that are enhanced versions of their former selves—and they have taken very different paths.

Grid City - Extra Brown Ale: No drastic changes have happened to this ale; the brewer simply added more of everything that was already there. Yet the result is a much different beer. The Extra Brown pours a thick, crispy chocolate cream head over a deep burgundy brown body, with ample carbonation. Retention is average at best, and lacing is light and spotty. T The aroma is sweet, roasty and creamy altogether. Medium roasted brown malts, creamy molasses, caramel and toffee build a complex, moist and sweet body, while hints of chocolate, dark roasted coffee linger in the back. A nutty, sweet malt character emerges, with the potency mediumhigh.

Upfront with the taste, molasses malts, a pinch of smoke and some mild earthy sweetness form a deep, complex malt body.

The finish is accentuated by an earthy hop blend, featuring a subdued bitterness. This has quite an enjoyable and complex flavor, with hints of caramel, toffee, chocolate and espresso all on display in this complex but approachable brown ale. The texture is

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Pop-up Pickups by Cannella’s

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La Hacienda recently opened its fourth location in South Jordan (11718 S. 3600 West, 801-559-7374), adding to its well-established empire. La Hacienda started back in 1996 when Esther Ornelas and her family opened its first location in Salt Lake’s Glendale neighborhood. Since then, this local favorite for traditional Mexican eats now has two Salt Lake locations in addition to the restaurant in Draper. The South Jordan location looks to have adopted the modern, gastropubinspired aesthetic of their Draper location while serving up the Ornelas family’s signature tortas, enchiladas and burrito plates, but their real specialty is seafood. Come for the enchiladas, stay for the camarones a la diabla.

One Dude’s Cupcake Kiosk Opens

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Though Downtown Italian favorite Cannella’s closed its doors a few months ago, the Cannella family has been offering a variety of pop-up pickups via their Instagram page (@cannellasrestaurant). Items like turkey tetrazzini, rigatoni and homemade meatballs are up for grabs; they’re currently offering plates of meatballs and pasta in time for Super Bowl Sunday. If you had the pleasure of dining at Cannella’s during its time near Library Square, you know that this local family can serve up the goods. Check them out on the ’gram for more details—the menu changes up from time to time, but it’s always packed with traditional Italian flavor.

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Busy Be the Hiveminded

No pandemic can get in the way of Salt Lake’s new hip hop-centric recording studio.

BY ERIN MOORE music@cityweekly.net @errrands_

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hether at home or through studios, local artists have kept writing music and recording it through the pandemic. And there’s one local studio that’s become quite the hub for helping to produce all this new music. Hiveminded Studios was new on the scene to begin with before the pandemic hit, yet despite that newness they’ve seen success and growth they never anticipated when first endeavoring to start a hip hop studio in Salt Lake City.

Three years ago, co-founder of Hiveminded Studios Dustin Perry was just a guy who wanted to get into more music, more seriously. A drummer who plays casually with a band of friends, he was wanting to make music into something of a career, whether it was offering lessons or offering gig services.

Just as he began to learn to record music for himself, he had a conversation with his cousin, Tristan “Slapfarmer” Axworthy, that changed his course. The Bay Areabased Axworthy had been running a hip hop studio there for about a decade, and had been looking for ways to move on to something new.

“I said, what do you think about coming out here?” Perry recalls asking him. “Initially, we didn’t know if we’d be able to really cater to hip hop specifically. That’s the

majority of what he has experience in.”

Though Salt Lake was not known to them (or generally, really) as a “hip hop town,” it turned out that as soon as they started offering services as Hiveminded, the huge demand for properly-engineered hip hop music in Salt Lake became all-tooapparent. With Perry handling most administrative duties and Axworthy taking on technical work in their 300 square foot “boutique” studio in a basement apartment in Sugar House, the two have built over the last two-ish years what Perry describes as almost “a community center in a way for people who are like minded—like our name, Hiveminded. Almost completely through word of mouth, we’ve built our clientele, and we’ve maintained steady work for just about a year now.”

With Axworthy being a mostly-Californian who spent time in Utah as a kid, and Perry being new to the recording industry, the two have been pleasantly surprised by all the great artists they’ve made connections with at Hiveminded. “We’ve just run into some immensely talented people that we never thought would be in Salt Lake, for hip hop specifically. A lot of ‘em are transplants and about half of the others are born and raised here,” Perry says.

Their popularity may have something to do with Axworthy’s creds: While in the Bay, he worked with Grammy Award-winning artists like Childish Gambino and Whiz Khalifa. There’s also the fact that the Bay, Perry points out, is one of the most diverse places in the world, which leaks into the hip hop made there too. The point is, Axworthy can do it all, Perry notes: “It’s one thing to know how to do it, it’s another thing to be able to provide an environment that has a proper engineer vibe for people to feel comfortable to create what their uniqueness is, right?”

If you think the pandemic might have held them up, it didn’t. Rather, after the initial lurch of March and April of 2020, they saw a boom in business. “We gained three or four clients who had never recorded,”

Hiveminded Control Room Perry says, “had never taken their art seriously but had decided because of the pandemic that they wanted to give it a go. And since then, they’ve been steadily working at it.” One client named Alvi has released three albums, finished a fourth and is working on a fifth, despite just starting with Hiveminded in the spring of last year.

The pandemic also provided the opportunity to do a full-scale production of a Hiveminded cypher—a hip hop tradition of a group of artists taking turns freestyling over the same beat. But the cypher project would quickly find a more serious purpose: Just four days after floating the idea, George Floyd died. “Everything just got flipped upside down on its head,” recalls Perry. “I remember a very clear moment when I read Donald Trump’s tweet that said ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts,’ and that really just sparked a fire in me.”

The cypher became an opportunity for a core group of Hiveminded clients to develop socially-conscious raps, about Black Lives Matter and other issues. The pandemic’s waylaying of all sorts of creatives, including those in film and production, also made it possible for talented industry friends of Perry and Axworthy to come out to Utah, to create a three-part video series for the cypher. A full-scale production commenced out on the Salt Flats, highlighting locals including LaneCobain3, Osiris801, T. James, APaulloN9X, Blacc E, Unknown The Real Da Vinci, Alvi, Nia and King Ronin Da Scholar. The videos were released in parts through late summer 2020 as “The Reckoning,” and are up on the hivemindedstudios. com.

“There, and at @hiveminded studios on Instagram, you can keep up with the growing creative hub as they work on a compilation of local artists, for release in February.

That, and as Perry puts it lightly, “staying out of our own way so we don’t mess this up!” CW

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Courtney Isaiah Smith

Honoring Courtney Isaiah Smith

Despite the strange reality of shows-duringCOVID, it somehow is still a shock when members of the local music community are affected by or lost due to the pandemic.

That unfortunately now includes the recent loss of one of Utah’s most prolific musicians, Courtney Isaiah Smith, who died after a battle with COVID on Monday, Jan. 25.

A Salt Lake City native, Smith was born in 1983, and grew up in our community with an affinity for the piano that started at the age of three—he was playing church songs by the age of five. His talent was fostered

by Christy Anderson at the Calvary Baptist Church, where he furthered his learning on a Hammond Organ, and where he would later, at the age of eight, go on to be a tenured musician. He continued that role throughout his life, all while becoming a brilliant composer in his own right. After studying composition at the University of Utah, Smith would go on to teach jazz piano at most of Northern Utah’s major colleges and universities: Utah State University, The University of Utah, Weber State and Westminster College.

Besides teaching his craft to scores of students at those schools, Smith was a pillar of the local jazz community, playing and collaborating with many, including Jazzy Olivo, and also playing with his own Courtney Isaiah Smith Quintet—notably in 2020 on the stage for Excellence in the Community’s celebration of Black History Month. Beyond his well-known abilities when it came to piano, composition and jazz, Smith also experimented in beat making, releasing playful and diversely-influenced tracks on SoundCloud that ventured from his jazz roots to the likes of warped funk, psych, loops of rock ‘n’ roll riffs and samples from ’90s cultural touchstones. That is all to say, Smith was an artist and a person with talent to spare, but also with a clearly multi-faceted approach to creating art—and showing up as an invaluable teacher, entertainer and friend to so many others in the process. To lose any member of this tight-knit music scene is a heartbreak, but to lose one of the best is a different loss altogether. Rest in Peace, Courtney Isaiah Smith.

To Go Out or To Not Go Out?

DAVID HALLIDAY

BY ERIN MOORE

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Every few months it feels apt to do a little check-in—a surveying of the grounds if you will—when it comes to where we are and how we are handling COVID in our music scene. As we enter the second month of 2021, things don’t seem to be much different from—or indeed better than—they were last year, despite all the “good riddance” vibrations we collectively sent off on December 31, 2020. A positive note is that musicians seem to be continuing the roll-out of new music while they’re stuck at home with few opportunities to perform safely—City Weekly is tracking around five locals with albums or EPs on the way in the coming months. But on the negative side is the looming threat of—shudder—new strains of the virus. On top of the now-officiallyspreading U.K. variant, we now have one that’s developed exclusively in California, the state that’s been booming with cases in the last month, and which, as of press time, found Southern California at 0% availability for ICU beds. Now, anyone in the entertainment industry knows how much movement there is between California and Utah, even with COVID restrictions in place. Utah has always been a hot spot for out-of-state creatives to come do their thing on the cheap, and that hasn’t changed with the pandemic (your editor may or may not know a few people in the film, photo and production world). What I’m getting at is, the likelihood of new variants reaching Utah is probably pretty high, and so the question arises—is there another all-venue shutdown coming soon? Most venues that closed in 2020 haven’t re-opened at all, but a few have. Will the many different social-distancing models developed by these few venues hold up against a more contagious virus, as the UK strain is purported to be? Even with a new President in office, will the federal government come through for small businesses in time for those that have reopened to close their doors before the new COVID storm hits? These are questions this little writer doesn’t have the answers to, but ones that I think we should all be considering as we decide “to go out, or not to go out?”

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Idi et Amin

Idi et Amin release singles for Candy Suck

Wilma Archer

Sweetheartz DIVAZ asks “Be Mine?”

Song of the Week: “Cheater” by Wilma Archer

With local music news a little shriveled up this dry COVID winter, your music editor thought it would be a fun idea to reserve this last spot of the music section for a new weekly tradition that’s easygoing and honestly, a little self-indulgent for your grumpy, moody, live-musicmissing editor. Introducing Song of the Week, a new minifeature that will persist till the end of the pandemic, whenever that might be. Our first entry will sit well for fans of Kanye-era R&B production, the electronica-luv of Caribou and or the jazz-rooted, collaborative experimentalisms of BADBADNOTGOOD. “Cheater” by Wilma Archer hails from a delightfully unpredictable album, 2020’s A Western Circular, which follows the 2019 debut by Archer and his collaborator Wilma Vritra, Burd. Criminally underreviewed in the U.S. at least, the U.K.-based Archer uses a handy cast of well-known names like the late MF DOOM and Future Islands’ Samuel T. Herring to add extra flair to his pile of lackadaisical funk ‘n’ jazz, which flits from dense yet atmospheric gloom to bright catharsis from track to track. While most of the album relies on plucky upright bass to create its wash of emotions, “Cheater” is the song that will make your ears truly perk up. The song ripples with a linty, persistent beat on which brass instrumentation marches along with an irresistibly sexy swagger, one that finds a perfect partner in Sudan Archer, the song’s vocal feature. The drama of “Cheater” makes it hard to place within the dull days of COVID, and while I usually queue it up while I’m slinging beers at my bar job, I think it warrants putting on repeat while you mix an ice-cold cocktail in low light on some otherwise mild night, then letting the rest of the album play out after it while you sip the whole thing down at your kitchen counter. Cheers to “Cheater.” Stream it wherever you stream.

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Don’t have a date this Valentine’s day? Well, luckily it’s never seemed like a more appropriate time to be single, and to instead turn to your squad—or, as it’s called more often these days, your pod. There’s also no better space to go with your closest besties than the wild’n-out friendly space of a local drag show, so if you don’t have plans for V-day yet, you have them now. Swing by the Metro Music Hall for a night of fabulous drag drama put on by the one and only DIVAZ. The theme-maniacs are taking on the season of love this time around, and their over-the-top antics will feature covers and costumes referencing all sorts of maestros of love—“I Love Lucy,” Elvis, Lady Gaga, Tina Turner, Neil Diamond, Bette Midler and of course, Dolly Parton. Anybody ever notice that “Parton” could be an anagram for “Patron?” As in, “Patron of the Drag Arts,” “Patron of the COVID vaccine Moderna,” etc. There are also some newcomers to the DIVAZ’s campification of icons, including Lizzo—the voice of confidence in modern America—and, in a way that feels a long time coming, Taylor Swift. Now, maybe queens have been parodying Swift for some time already, but now feels like the most timely moment for Swiftian interpretation, since she has recently become a queen of sorts herself by way of her wave of quarantine releases. But Swift is also obviously the modern queen of heartbreak and love songs alike. Her repertoire is perfect fodder for the DIVAZ, and the only question left is which of Swift’s hits will the audience be graced with? “Wildest Dreams,” “Love Story,” or the tumultuous “Blank Space?”

My money’s on the high-drama of “Blank Space,” since rage over heartbreak may well resonate with an audience full of people still navigating a rather heartbreaking pandemic. If this sounds like the perfect Valentine’s date to you and yours, visit thevivaladivashow.com for more info on their COVID protocols and tickets, which are discounted for groups.

| CITYWEEKLY.NET |

Shoegaze is the kind of music that gives and gives—reverb-erating, one might say (that’s a pun about reverb pedals). And the shoegaze of local couple and musical power duo Idi et Amin keeps giving and giving, too. After their 2019 release Texas Rose quietly established them as one of the better bands exploring the sound—which, with all its guitar layers, is difficult to perfect and very easy to get lost in—they released the pandemic EP A Phone in Kyoto, all while prepping for another full-length release in this year’s upcoming Candy Suck. While those two prior releases perfectly balanced glittery, crunchy, punchy noise with saccharine guitar melodies—Texas Rose truly feels like something that would have found a home at Creation Records during their heyday—their new singles, released as the EP The Remedies for Violations on Jan. 21, are altogether more chill. Guitars don’t wail here as much as they saunter along merrily, under a quite sunny disposition. The vocals of Rocky Maldonado and Catalina Gallegos are the same as they have been on past releases—perfectly subtle delivery of incomprehensible lyrics that are a wash of soft sound, meant basically to contrast with the roughness of the guitars. “Rain Brunette” and “Porcelain Boy” are honeyed tracks that fit well together, though almost too similar in pacing to notice there’s been a switch when the first cedes to the second. While listening, one feels slightly nostalgic for the aggressive melodicisms and more freely noisy production from past releases, but it also feels nice to catch a glimpse of Idi et Amin’s softer side. And that’s not to say that these new songs are necessarily soft—they still hammer slowly—but “Porcelain Boy” really is a gentle ride. The songs are up on YouTube as what Maldonado calls an “analogue release,” but one that shouldn’t be too much of a hassle for fans of vintage music who already use YouTube to listen to music. The new full-length Candy Suck will be out later in February, along with a collection of singles from their last releases and a few pieces of unreleased material. Visit the YouTube page of Rocky Maldonado to listen to The Remedies for Violations, and follow @idi_et_amin on Instagram for updates and news on the upcoming releases.

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CINEMA

FILM REVIEW

Shouting Match

Malcom & Marie offers slick but wearying “theater of recriminations.”

I

t’s always wise for a critic to fess up to their peculiar irritants, so here goes: I can’t abide “theater of recriminations.”

That’s hardly a genre as easily definable as a superhero movie or a romantic comedy, but I know it when I see it. It’s one of those stories predicated entirely on the drama of people—usually in some kind of established relationship, whether romantic or familial—letting loose with inflamed speeches about what they can’t stand about one another, how one has done the other wrong, and so forth. At their best—Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? is perhaps the archetypal version—I can find them tolerable if the performances are strong enough. At their worst … waiter, check please.

There’s really no other way to describe Malcolm & Marie except as theater of recriminations. It’s a movie that, despite its provenance as a story designed specifically as a movie during the pandemic, feels like an adaptation of a two-hander stage play with two marvelously showy roles. And despite the presence of two talented actors giving their (alternately) can-you-hear-mein-the-balcony and furiously quiet best, it can never get past the structure that

NETFLIX

BY SCOTT RENSHAW scottr@cityweekly.net @scottrenshaw amounts to “hey, fuck you,” followed closely by, “oh yeah, well fuck you.”

Set over the course of a single long night, it opens with a couple returning home after a big event. Malcolm Elliot (John David Washington) is a filmmaker who has just premiered his potential breakthrough, a drama about a recovering addict; Marie (Zendaya) is his girlfriend of five years, whose experience at least in part inspired the story. While Malcolm tries to process this potentially career-defining evening, it soon becomes clear that Marie has something on her mind: Malcolm forgot to include her in his “thank you’s” during his introduction to the film. And thereby is opened a whole-ass can of worms.

As it happens there are a whole lot of issues these two have to work out, or at least that one of them believes the other has to work out. Is Malcolm unsure how to navigate the filmmaking world as a person of color, wondering if the expectations surrounding his work will always be that it’s “political”? Is Marie insecure about having given up on her one-time aspirations of being an actor? Writer/director Sam Levinson (creator of Zendaya’s Emmy-winning Euphoria) isn’t about to leave any doubt about

what exactly is going through these characters’ heads, as they trade monologues, pause occasionally to make up and make out, then return to the arguments, all while navigating the fraught territory of a white filmmaker trying to tease out the challenges of being a Black filmmaker.

And it’s not all terrible, especially with these actors doing great work. Zendaya captures Marie’s mix of determination and fragility, while Washington rips into Malcolm’s ego-driven tirades. But even when the arguments are pitched softly rather than aggressively, there’s no restraint to anything.

Theater of recriminations, at its most frustrating, isn’t a problem because people never argue like this; it’s a problem because it suggest that these people have never argued previously, and that every last ounce of accumulated crap between them is going to be blasted through a firehose for 90 minutes.

The same of it is, Malcolm & Marie feels more like a well-composed movie than stories of this kind generally do, and not just because it’s shot in a glossy black-andwhite. Levinson captures some wonderful images, from a montage of the couple’s pillow talk to its final shot. But eventually and inevitably, it returns to being a grievance

John David Washington and Zendaya in Malcolm & Marie

delivery system, and it grows almost immediately wearying.

It would be disingenuous for a film critic not to mention that one of Malcom’s extended screeds in Malcolm & Marie is directed at an unnamed Los Angeles Times film critic—one who is actually raving over Malcolm’s movie—for her lack of insight.

There’s evidence that a specific real-life individual might be the target for this animus, which makes it hard for the movie not to feel petty, yet in a sense, that would just be an appropriate emotional register for theater of recrimination. Rather than indicating an attempt to fix something that’s broken, it’s mostly about a shouting match with the goal of determining who gets the claim the mantle of victim. CW

MALCOLM & MARIE

BB John David Washington Zendaya R Available Feb. 5 via Netflix

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ARIES (March 21-April 19) Herman Hesse’s novel Siddartha is a story about a spiritual seeker who goes in search of illumination. Near the end of the quest, when Siddartha is purified and enlightened, he tells his friend, “I greatly needed sin, lust, vanity, the striving for goods and the most shameful despair, to learn how to love the world, to stop comparing the world with any world that I wish for, with any perfection that I think up; I learned to let the world be as it is, and to love it and to belong to it gladly.” While I trust you won’t overdo the sinful stuff in the coming months, Aries, I hope you will reach a conclusion like Siddartha’s. The astrological omens suggest that 2021 is the best year ever for you to learn how to love your life and the world just as they are.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20) Taurus physicist Richard Feynman said, “If we want to solve a problem we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.” That’s always good advice, but it’s especially apropos for you in the coming weeks. You are being given the interesting and fun opportunity to solve a problem you have never solved before! Be sure to leave the door to the unknown ajar. Clues and answers may come from unexpected sources.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20) When we want to get a distinct look at a faint star, we must avert our eyes away from it just a little. If we look at it directly, it fades into invisibility. (There’s a scientific explanation for this phenomenon that I won’t go into.) I propose we make this your metaphor of power for the coming weeks. Proceed on the hypothesis that if you want to get glimpses of what’s in the distance or in the future, don’t gaze at it directly. Use the psychological version of your peripheral vision. And yes, now is a favorable time to seek those glimpses.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21) “The past is never finished,” writes author Karen Barad. “It cannot be wrapped up like a package, or a scrapbook; we never leave it and it never leaves us behind.” I agree. That’s why I can’t understand New Age teachers who advise us to “live in the now.” That’s impossible! We are always embedded in our histories. Everything we do is conditioned by our life story.

I acknowledge that there’s value in trying to see the world afresh in each new moment. I’m a hearty advocate of adopting a “beginner’s mind.” But to pretend we can completely shut off or escape the past is delusional and foolish. Thank you for listening to my rant, Scorpio. Now please spend quality time upgrading your love and appreciation for your own past. It’s time to celebrate where you have come from—and meditate on how your history affects who you are now.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21) Luisah Teish is a writer and priestess in the Yoruban Lucumi tradition. She wrote a book called Jump Up: Seasonal Celebrations From the World’s Deep Traditions. “Jump up” is a Caribbean phrase that refers to festive rituals and parties that feature “joyous music, laughter, food and dancing.” According to my reading of the astrological omens, you’re due for a phase infused with the “jump up” spirit. As Teish would say, it’s a time for “jumping, jamming, swinging, hopping and kicking it.” I realize that in order to do this, you will have to work around the very necessary limitations imposed on us all by the pandemic. Do the best you can. Maybe make it a virtual or fantasy jump up. Maybe dance alone in the dark.

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FEBRUARY 4, 2021 | 29

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) “Perhaps we should know better,” wrote poet Tony Hoagland, “but we keep on looking, thinking and listening—hunting that singular book, theory, perception or tonality that will unlock and liberate us.” It’s my duty to report, Capricorn, that there will most likely be no such singular magnificence for you in 2021. However, I’m happy to tell you that an accumulation of smaller treasures could ultimately lead to a substantial unlocking and liberation.

For that to happen, you must be alert for and appreciate the small treasures, and patiently gather them in. (P.S.: Author Rebecca Solnit says, “We devour heaven in bites too small to be meaLEO (July 23-Aug. 22) “Judge a moth by the beauty of its candle,” writes Coleman sured.” I say: The small bites of heaven you devour in the coming Barks in his rendering of a poem by Rumi. In accordance with months will ultimately add up to being dramatically measurable.) astrological omens, I am invoking that thought as a useful metaphor for your life right now. How lovely and noble are the AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18) goals you’re pursuing? How exalted and bighearted are the Aquarian author Alice Walker writes, “In nature, nothing is perdreams you’re focused on? If you find there are any less-than- fect, and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in beautiful aspects to your motivating symbols and ideals, now is weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.” In the coming weeks, I hope you’ll adopt that way of thinking and apply it to every aspect a good time to make adjustments. of your perfectly imperfect body and mind and soul. I hope you’ll give the same generous blessing to the rest of the world, as well.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22) I invite you to try the following experiment. Select two situ- This attitude is always wise to cultivate, of course, but it will be ations in your world that really need to be reinvented, and let especially transformative for you in the coming weeks. It’s time to every other glitch and annoyance just slide for now. Then medi- celebrate your gorgeous idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. tate with tender ferocity on how best to get the transformations done. Summoning intense focus will generate what amounts to PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20) magic! P.S.: Maybe the desired reinventions would require other “Though the bamboo forest is dense, water flows through it freepeople to alter their behavior. But it’s also possible that your ly.” I offer that Zen saying just in time for you to adopt it as your metaphor of power. No matter how thick and complicated and own behavior may need altering. impassable the terrain might appear to be in the coming weeks, I swear you’ll have a flair for finding a graceful path through it. All LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22) Author Marguerite Duras wrote these words: “That she had so you have to do is imitate the consistency and flow of water.

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CANCER (June 21-July 22) If the apocalypse happens, and you’re the last human left on earth, don’t worry about getting enough to eat. Just find an intact grocery store and make your new home there. It’s stocked with enough non-perishable food to feed you for 55 years—or 63 years if you’re willing to dine on pet food. I’m joking! Just kidding! In fact, the apocalypse won’t happen for another 503 million years.

My purpose in imagining such a loopy scenario is to nudge you to dissolve your scarcity thinking. Here’s the ironic fact of the matter for us Cancerians: If we indulge in fearful fantasies about running out of stuff—money, resources, love or time—we undermine our efforts to have enough of what we need. The time is now right for you to stop worrying and instead take robust action to ensure you’re well-supplied for a long time.

completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her.

One should never be cured of one’s passion.” I am spiritually allergic to that idea. It implies that our deepest passions are unavailable unless we’re insane, or at least disturbed. But in the world I aspire to live in, the opposite is true: Our passions thrive if we’re mentally healthy. We are best able to harness our most inspiring motivations if we’re feeing poised and stable. So, I’m here to urge you to reject Duras’s perspective and embrace mine. The time has arrived for you to explore the mysteries of relaxing passion.

© 2021

SILENT NIGHT

BY DAVID LEVINSON WILK

ACROSS

1. ____ fatigue 2. Ye ____ Shoppe 3. Real estate claim 4. Red or black insect 5. Deep divide 6. “Why do the French have only one egg for breakfast? Because one egg is an ____” (old joke) 7. Rebellion leader Turner

G

Safe Cities

8. 1989 play about Capote 9. You can bank on it 10. Singer Lauper 11. Rain on one’s parade?

12. Anxiety 13. To the greatest extent 18. The O in “Jackie O” 23. Biological immunity agent 24. Places to lie low 25. “Harrumph!”

26. Lorre’s “Casablanca” role 27. MacFarlane or Meyers 28. WNBA official 29. “What have we here?!”

30. Recovery 31. Dominating, in gamer lingo 35. “No prob!”

37. Greek earth goddess 39. “Star Wars” character Kylo ____ 40. What directors sit on: Abbr.

42. Pittsburgh-toBuffalo dir.

44. Award show hosts 45. Went for in an auction 49. Painter’s base

50. Prefix with galactic and spatial 52. Speakers of Quechua 53. Cry after a hectic week 54. Only state with a nonrectangular flag 55. Singer Redding 58. “Bleah!”

59. El Al hub city 60. Chemical ending 61. Post-op locale

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.

DOWN

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WITH BABS DELAY Broker, Urban Utah Homes & Estates, urbanutah.com

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

1. Nominee for the first two Nobel Prizes in Literature (1901-02), but never won 5. Popular cold and flu medicine 11. There is a “super” one every four yrs.

14. “Thirtysomething” actor Ken 15. Like some laughs and stews 16. Bookkeeper’s mailing: Abbr.

17. Keats poem that opens “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” 19. Artichoke heart?

20. “It’s Raining ____” 21. Check bouncer’s letters 22. Westernmost capital in mainland Africa 24. Meat in many an omelet 25. Word after funny or serious 28. Indian flatbreads 31. Leaf (through) 32. iPhone alternative, once 33. Israel’s Barak and Olmert 34. Thingamajig 36. Like some accents 38. Tart pie filling 41. One who’s morally flawed 43. Cordoned (off) 44. Twin of Jacob in the Bible 46. Cousin of -trix 47. Blissful areas 48. Monopoly deed figure 50. More than unfriendly 51. Finalize, as a deal 52. Celebrity chef Garten 53. Overly 56. Howard’s end?

57. Classic hymn ... or what the five circled letters represent 62. Caesar’s end?

63. Ornamental light fixture 64. High fever for Caesar?

65. Avg. 66. “Yes, honey” 67. Usually fuzzy tabloid pics

SUDOKU

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30 | FEBRUARY 4, 2021

CROSSWORD PUZZLE

Are you afraid to go out of your nest because you might get the ’rona? A recent Gallup Poll found that almost 50% of all Americans are worried about getting the damnable virus.

I see that there are four types of folks right now: those who have not left their abodes since March 2020; those who only go out to the grocer and doctor appointments; those who go out to shop, eat but don’t travel; and those who act like nothing is going on and do whatever they want, where they want, when they want to.

WalletHub just compared more than 180 cities across 42 key indicators of safety. Their data set ranged from the number of COVID-19 cases in the past seven days per 100,000 residents to assaults per capita on individuals, the unemployment rate and road quality. The top safest cities found were: Columbia, Maryland; South Burlington, Vermont; Plano, Texas; Nashua, New Hampshire; and Lewiston, Maine. Salt Lake City came in 76th on their survey of 180 cities. The other interesting results found that Salt Lake City had the highest percentage of households with emergency savings at hand over all other cities.

Cities with the fewest traffic fatalities per capita include: Bismarck, North Dakota; New York City; Boston; Yonkers, New York; and San Francisco. The city with the most traffic fatalities per capita? Little Rock, Arkansas.

Cities with most law-enforcement employees per capita are Washington, D.C.; New York City; and Chicago. Cities with the fewest law-enforcement employees per capita include Raleigh, North Carolina, as well as Fontana and Fremont, California.

Baltimore, Maryland, has the fewest hate crimes per capita while Newark, New Jersey, reports the highest hate crimes per capita.

New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago had the highest unemployment rates while Lincoln, Nebraska; Bismarck, North Dakota, and Boise, Idaho, had the lowest rates.

And finally, the survey found that the cities with the lowest natural-disaster risks were Dover, Delaware, and Texas towns Brownsville and Corpus Christi. Cities at highest risk for a natural disaster were all in California: San Jose, Huntington Beach and Garden Grove. Those disasters could be earthquakes, floods, hail, hurricanes or tornados.

I’d have thought Salt Lake City would have been higher on the scale of natural disasters after we suffered through a scary earthquake in 2020 and even scarier 100 mph winds on Labor Day weekend. My wife and I lost power after the windstorm, so I borrowed a generator from a friend. It was stolen the same day, so I found one to buy that got us through the week we were without electricity. After our power was restored, I loaned the “genny” I bought to the neighbors across the street who didn’t get service for another three days.

The whole experience prompted us to invest in a permanent household generator powered by natural gas. Should an earthquake damage the gas line, we can use propane. It kicks on regularly so if needed, it’s ready to go. And good old Murphy will rule: Now that we have one, we won’t need it! n Content is prepared expressly for Community and is not endorsed by City Weekly staff.

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conviction for meth possession. Notably, however, when Robles was arrested, he was wearing a T-shirt with the message, “Don’t Do Drugs.” Do as I say, not as I do.

Least Competent Criminals n On Jan. 7, police received a call from a 7-Eleven store in Lehi, Utah, where earlier in the day a man wearing a “sheriff’s deputy” jacket stole a doughnut, then left in a white pickup truck. KUTV2 reported that Lehi police examined surveillance video and tracked the truck to a nearby motel parking lot, where they knocked on the door of 47-year-old Daniel Mark Wright, who was staying there. As officers spoke with Wright, they saw a Salt Lake County Sheriff’s jacket hanging in the room’s closet.

They arrested Wright for impersonation of an officer and theft, along with receiving or transfer of a stolen vehicle in relation to the truck. Wright, his companion, Christian Olson, and another accomplice are also under investigation for racketeering.

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n Leobardo Hernandez, 32, of Pomona, California, went to extraordinary lengths on Jan. 16 to evade police after allegedly stealing a car. As Hernandez ran from officers, he entered an apartment complex and found an unlocked door, the Daily Bulletin reported. The apartment residents were not at home, so Hernandez moved right in, shaving his face, changing clothes and even cooking tortillas to make it seem as if he lived there. Unfortunately, he also burned the tortillas, summoning the fire department. Hernandez eventually surrendered and was charged with burglary and possession of a stolen vehicle among other offenses.

Awwwwww Russell Jones of London couldn’t figure out why his dog, Billy, was favoring one of his front paws while walking. He took the pet to the veterinarian to have X-rays, United Press International reported, but the vet found nothing wrong. Jones, however, had recently broken his own ankle and was wearing a cast and limping.

At the $400 vet visit, the doctor suggested that Billy was simply imitating his owner. Man’s best friend, indeed.

What’s in a Name?

Before social distancing and masks became the world’s norm, CBS News reported on Jan. 12, Paul O’Sullivan of Baltimore was noodling around on Facebook one night, searching for other Paul O’Sullivans. Several of those who accepted his friend request were musicians, just as he was. Baltimore Paul, as he’s known, reached out to others, and eventually he and three others formed the Paul O’Sullivan Band. Manchester Paul plays bass; Pennsylvania Paul is the percussionist; and Baltimore Paul and Rotterdam Paul play guitar and sing. They recorded a single at the beginning of 2020, but when COVID hit, they thought it was a great opportunity to make a whole album. “It feels great to be able to contact people on the other side of the world when you’re in lockdown because you don’t feel alone at the moment,” commented Rotterdam Paul. “If you learn to play an instrument, it can help you through some dark times,” said Manchester Paul.

Government in Action Bigfoot hunters in Oklahoma will be happy to know that their pastime could get its own season, KOKH reported. State Rep. Justin Humphrey introduced a bill on Jan. 20 asking the Oklahoma Wildlife Commission to establish a Bigfoot hunting season, “set annual season dates and create any necessary specific hunting licenses and fees.” Southeastern and south-central Oklahoma is infamous for Bigfoot sightings, including a large festival (canceled this year because of COVID-19). If passed, the bill would become effective in November.

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

Babs De Lay

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Too Hot to Handle The Sun reported on Jan. 18 that a woman in the United Kingdom suffered an “inferno” in her living room after a candle exploded as she was lighting it. Jody Thompson, 50, won the candle, labeled “This Candle Smells Like My Vagina,” in an online quiz from Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop website. “The candle exploded and emitted huge flames,” Thompson said, “with bits flying everywhere. The whole thing was ablaze, and it was too hot to touch.” Thompson and her partner “eventually got it under control and threw it out the front door.”

In Plane Sight On Jan. 16 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, two employees of United Airlines approached a man and asked for his ID. Aditya Singh, 36, of Orange, California, produced an employee badge, but it was not his: Another employee had reported it missing on Oct. 26, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Authorities said Singh had arrived at O’Hare on Oct. 19 from Los Angeles and was too afraid to fly back home because of COVID19, so he hid in a secured area of the airport for three months, living off food given to him by strangers. Singh is unemployed but has a master’s degree in hospitality and doesn’t have a criminal background. He was charged with felony criminal trespass.

The Devil Made Them Do It Members of Poughkeepsie, New York’s Church of Satan are down in the dumps this week after someone torched their gathering place, known as “Halloween House,” on Jan. 14. According to the Poughkeepsie Journal, video footage shows a person carrying two gas cans, splashing liquid on the front porch, lighting it and running away. Two people who were inside at the time escaped unharmed; the arsonist has not been caught. “Sadly there are some ‘people of faith’ who are intolerant, and typically ignorant, of other belief systems,” noted Church of Satan high priest Peter H. Gilmore. Church member Isis Vermouth called the arson a “terror attack. Whoever did this is going to be hexed by all of us,” she said. “I just don’t understand why anyone would want to piss off Satanic witches. ‘Cause now there’s going to be hell to pay.”

Unclear on the Concept Nicholas Debetes, 18, was finally placed in handcuffs in Titusville, Florida, on Jan. 14, after Brevard County officers chased him as he drove “at an extremely high rate of speed” to his mother’s trailer. Debetes, Click Orlando reported, had a unique excuse: “If I would have tried to stop quicker, I would have crashed the vehicle,” he told police. He went on to say that his mother wanted him home for an unknown reason. Debetes had an outstanding warrant and was driving a stolen Hyundai Elantra.

Police Report In Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Curtis McCoy, 46, and his husband of 10 years got into a spat “that escalated since they have been drinking alcohol” on Jan. 17, police reported. The argument got out of hand when McCoy “brought up how the victim has only one testicle which caused the victim to get upset,” according to The Smoking Gun. When the victim pointed his finger at McCoy, he grabbed and twisted it, “causing him pain.”

McCoy was arrested for domestic violence; his criminal history includes shoplifting, disorderly conduct, assault, larceny and other offenses.

Irony Esequiel Robles, 40, was caught after a traffic stop in Williston, North Dakota, with methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia on Jan. 14. The Smoking Gun reported that Robles was on probation for narcotics possession at the time, following a 2019

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