Tag: utah

Ten Years of Arts and Cultural Criticism in the American Southwest (2015-25)
I get older; the art stays new.

This year marks ten years of writing arts and cultural criticism in (and around) Utah. It’s been a long, slightly chaotic labor of love, and it’s given me more than a publication list. Writing became a way into rooms I didn’t yet know how to enter—openings, rehearsals, studios, back corners of galleries, community meetings—and, over time, it gave me people too: friends, collaborators, and others who cared enough to keep showing up. In a place where arts infrastructure is often held together by duct tape and determination, the work mostly looked like paying attention, writing things down, and trying to help hold space where the official record thins out.

One stat that sticks with me: Utah has fewer museums per capita than any state except West Virginia, an unglamorous fact that explains a lot about why cultural memory here can feel so easily misplaced. I thought about that again while reporting on the B’nai Israel Temple’s next life as the Salt Lake Art Museum (SLAM), a project led by Micah Christensen and slated to open in 2026. The building’s survival is, in many ways, a case study in how rare cultural preservation can be in practice. (Read more here: “The Salt Lake Art Museum (SLAM) Finds Sanctuary in the Temple”.)

What follows is a year-by-year chronicle pulling a few representative pieces per year and the themes that kept returning: meaning-making and collective rupture; heritage and community memory; abstraction and early modernism’s long shadow; and the ongoing work of paying attention to people and places that get minimized, misread, or politely ignored.

2015 — War, Memory, and the Theater of Trauma

My earliest arts writing was already circling questions that would stay with me: how societies remember violence, how trauma echoes across generations, and how performance becomes a space for processing what cannot be easily narrated. In 2015, I found myself repeatedly drawn to work shaped by war—sometimes historical, sometimes contemporary, often refracted through humor, ritual, or psychological displacement. Even then, criticism felt less like judgment than like translation: an attempt to make visible the emotional labor embedded in cultural production.

What interested me most, even then, was not spectacle but aftermath: how violence lingers in bodies, language, and staging long after the event itself has passed. I was beginning to understand writing as a form of witness—one that sits with discomfort rather than resolving it—and that orientation quietly shaped everything that followed.
Together, these pieces trace an early interest in how art metabolizes collective violence—whether through solemn memorial, absurdist comedy, or intimate portrayals of PTSD—an interest that would later expand beyond war into broader questions of community trauma and historical inheritance.

2016 — Objects, Pilgrimage, and the Weight of Time

By 2016, my writing shifted decisively toward material culture and deep time. Across exhibitions of painting, sculpture, photography, and mixed media, I became increasingly attentive to objects as carriers of memory—whether geological, cultural, or spiritual. This was also the year I began writing more explicitly about heritage without nostalgia: how artists engage with tradition, ritual, and landscape without romanticizing them. I became less interested in artists’ stated intentions and more attentive to what objects themselves seemed to remember—how time presses into form, and how place leaves a residue that can’t be fully aestheticized away.
These essays mark a growing preoccupation with duration: fossils, pilgrimage routes, Indigenous histories, and sculptural forms shaped by both Eastern and Western traditions. Rather than treating art as isolated expression, I increasingly approached it as evidence—of time passing, of belief systems persisting, and of place exerting quiet pressure on form.

2017 — Abjection, Abstraction, and Cultural Hierarchies

By 2017, my writing had turned more directly toward questions of cultural value: what is permitted to count as “serious” art, what is dismissed as decorative or domestic, and how those judgments intersect with gender, labor, and popular culture. Alongside a growing interest in abstraction and contemplative withdrawal, I began interrogating hierarchies that shape both artistic production and reception—particularly where animation, illustration, and domestic narratives are concerned. I was also becoming more conscious of how criticism participates in gatekeeping—how language can reinforce or challenge the invisible borders between “high” and “low,” public and private, serious and sentimental.
Across these pieces, decay and accumulation sit beside care, repetition, and craft. Whether addressing refugee loss through mass-produced objects, challenging the exclusion of animation from “high” art discourse, or examining domestic life as a site of artistic rigor, this year marks a clear shift toward analyzing how cultural systems assign meaning—and whose work is allowed to carry it.

2018 — Abstraction and the Edges of the Built World

In 2018, my writing narrowed its focus rather than expanding it. Instead of surveying many threads, I spent more time with abstraction and with environments that sit just outside formal boundaries—urban margins, hybrid spaces, and visual languages that resist narrative explanation. This was a year of thinking about structure: how meaning emerges when stories recede and attention shifts to form, material, and spatial tension. Abstraction became a way to think spatially rather than narratively: to read environments, surfaces, and systems without forcing them into story.
- “Urban Nature in Flux: ‘Ditchbank’ | Library Square”
- “UMOCA’s Survey of Utah Artists Explores the Possibilities of the Abstract”
Both exhibitions investigate what happens when order breaks down or gives way. In Ditchbank, the overlooked wilderness at the edge of the city becomes a site of negotiation between human control and organic persistence. UMOCA’s survey situates abstraction as a deliberate refusal of inherited narratives, emphasizing instead the artist’s creation of personal systems and visual codes.

2019 — Systems of Meaning: Vision, Myth, and Inherited Structure

By 2019, my writing had moved decisively toward systems—how meaning is produced, transmitted, and disrupted across families, myths, technologies, and landscapes. Rather than focusing on isolated works, I became increasingly interested in how artists construct visual languages: photographic processes revived and altered, myths reassembled, family narratives fractured and reconnected. This was a year defined less by subject matter than by structure—how stories are built, and how they fail. I was increasingly drawn to artists who treated myth and family not as origins to be honored, but as structures to be tested.
Across these pieces, vision is never neutral. Alternative photographic processes foreground the mechanics of seeing itself; family relationships become the syntax through which reality is interpreted; myth operates as both inheritance and provocation; and landscapes are rendered not as scenery but as lived systems shaped by labor, memory, and movement.

2020 — Collective Rupture and Marginalized Realities

In 2020, my writing became inseparable from collective rupture. The pandemic did not affect communities evenly, and much of the cultural work I was drawn to that year confronted this imbalance directly—foregrounding voices, experiences, and realities that had long been present but were now impossible to ignore. Criticism shifted from interpretation to accountability: paying attention to who bears risk, who is seen, and how art registers unequal pressure. The urgency of 2020 stripped criticism of any pretense of neutrality; to document art honestly required acknowledging the unequal conditions under which it was made, shown, and received.
Across these pieces, art functions as a record of strain rather than escape. Screendance reframed movement through mediated formats at a moment when access and visibility were uneven. Luxor traced the emotional residue of humanitarian labor and prolonged conflict. Virtual public art initiatives revealed how civic meaning could be sustained while public space itself became contested.

2021 — Care, Heritage, and Cultural Survival After the Pandemic

In 2021, my writing remained shaped by the aftershocks of the pandemic, particularly its uneven impact on marginalized communities. Rather than moving on from crisis, much of the cultural work I engaged with that year confronted its residue: who had been asked to absorb loss, who stepped into care roles, and how art and community organizing became tools for survival, memory, and resistance. What emerged most clearly was care as cultural infrastructure—often improvised, frequently under-resourced, and rarely celebrated.
Together, this writing reflects a year focused less on recovery narratives than on cultural endurance—how communities protect meaning, memory, and space when institutional support proves unreliable.

2022 — Violence, Land, and the Limits of Inheritance

By 2022, my writing confronted the accumulated pressures that had been building across the previous years: violence embedded in land use, gendered vulnerability, nationalist mythmaking, and the ongoing consequences of colonial and migratory disruption. Rather than focusing on recovery, this work stayed with what remained unresolved—asking how history, ideology, and environment continue to shape whose lives are protected and whose are exposed. This year solidified my understanding of land as an active force rather than a backdrop—history continuing to structure belonging, vulnerability, and risk.
Across these pieces, land and identity are inseparable. This writing stays with structural violence—how it is inherited, normalized, and resisted—without forcing closure where none exists.

Interlude — Stepping Away from the Page (2023–2024)

After 2022, my public-facing arts criticism paused. This was not a retreat from cultural analysis, but a redirection of labor into professional writing, institutional work, and foreign exchange–focused research that sharpened my understanding of systems, power, and narrative framing in different registers. The questions driving my criticism—how meaning is produced, who bears risk, and how communities survive long pressure—did not disappear. They moved into other forms.

When I returned to long-form cultural writing in 2025, it was with a clearer sense of synthesis: how a decade of arts criticism in the American Southwest had quietly become a foundation for broader historical, cultural, and interdisciplinary work.

2025 — Return, Synthesis, and the Quiet Work of Community

When I returned to publishing arts criticism in 2025, it wasn’t a restart so much as a re-entry—with sharper tools and a clearer sense of what I’d been tracking all along. After years of professional writing centered on systems, risk, and institutional language, I came back to art with an increased sensitivity to structure: how communities preserve memory, how spaces accrue cultural meaning, and how abstraction and design can carry ethical weight without announcing themselves. Returning with distance made visible what had been there all along: the most durable cultural work often happens without fanfare—through stewardship, sanctuary, and consistency rather than spectacle.
Together, these pieces mark a mature phase of my criticism: attentive to marginalized histories and cultural preservation, alert to the ways identity and expectation shape perception, and drawn to practices where clarity and reduction become forms of seriousness. If earlier years were about locating the stakes—rupture, myth, power, inheritance—2025 is about mapping what endures: the institutions that create refuge, the artists who make perception strange enough to see it, and the quiet organizers who turn community into something tangible.
December 13, 2025
Born Into a Spoiler Alert: Notes from a Macbeth Descendant

Today is December 7th, 2025, the day after my mom’s and brother’s birthdays, and I’m back in one of my favorite places: the Marriott Library. I got my lucky spot, the exact one I used to sit in, like it had been waiting for me. In terms of lucky coincidences, things like this happen more than they should.

My mom used to say, “A golden cloud follows you around.” However, other sayings exist too, like: “She’d lose her head if it wasn’t attached to her body.” The combination captures the polar quality of my luck—weirdly good, and then a pendulum swing to weirdly bad.

Before I get too far into family legends, I keep thinking about a recent piece I wrote—“Fairytales We Tell Ourselves: The Utah Pantages Theater and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona”—and about my friend Michael Patton, who works under the name Michael Valentine. Michael is a direct descendant of General George S. Patton, a fact he acknowledges with a mix of irritation and resignation. He chose “Valentine” as a protest against war culture, a way of stepping sideways out of the mythology he inherited.

Good Luck / Bad Luck: Growing Up in the Shadow of “Greats”

It hit me while writing that earlier essay that both Michael and I grew up with blood-soaked ancestors—his, the general who carved his way through Europe; mine, the doomed Scottish king whose story ends in a battlefield death every time it’s told. There’s an odd magic to that, the kind that looks enviable from a distance but comes with expectations no one volunteers for. Patton and Macbeth: two figures shaped by violence, ambition, and myth—men who loom so large that their descendants end up negotiating not just lineage, but full-fledged Western narratives.

In the Pantages essay, I wrote about how spaces like that theater hold our personal myths in place—how they give people like Michael, and honestly people like me, a place to set down the stories we inherited and pick up new ones. The demolition of the Pantages in 2022 felt like a symbolic rupture: a place where stubborn idealists once found refuge was flattened, and with it went the kind of civic imagination that makes room for oddball lineages and myth-haunted people.

All of this is to say: some of us are born into stories much louder than we are. You spend your adult life deciding which parts you’re willing to keep.

Call Me Locks: Lady Macbeth Was My Grandmother!

All the relatives on my mom’s side are McBeth or MacBeth or some variant of the name. The eccentric streak runs deep enough that the spelling seems to shift with personality, era of life, or whatever the family mood was at the time. You can see the whole taxonomy laid out in the Payson, Utah graveyard where my ancestors are buried.

It’s always interested me that some cultures routinely give their kids names tied to frightening or controversial figures. Not because people secretly want a little villain in the family, but because naming a child something heavy forces them to reckon with it early. Kids will tease them, question them, make them explain it long before they’ve even learned the history behind their own name. Maybe that’s the point: you get all the shadow-work done in childhood. You learn early not to flinch at darkness, not to identify with it. Sometimes you even outgrow the propensity for villainy before you’ve had a chance to try it on.

Maybe because of that, I always had a low, reflexive cringe around the overbearing, over-ambitious persona of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. When I lived in Cambridge, I’d occasionally end up in small Shakespeare chats with baristas or grocers, and some of them made truly awful faces when the play came up. I’d laugh and tell them I didn’t actually read it until college—and did end up liking it—but for a long time I avoided English literature altogether because it felt too on-the-nose; almost like declaring myself an English major would read as a horrible gimmick.

And yet, despite all my attempts to outrun the melodrama of the name, I somehow drifted straight into the territory I thought I’d avoid—history, archives, Scotland, the whole ecosystem of stories that orbit the Macbeth myth. It’s ridiculous, but also very “family legacy” in the mythic, Oedipus kind of way: the more you sidestep something, the more directly you walk into it.

Because of that, I have a deep sympathy for celebrity kids and for anyone saddled with a complicated or suddenly loaded name. Think of people named Isis, who now share their name with a terror organization, or girls named Katrina who were born before the hurricane. In the era of the internet, your name becomes a label that precedes you everywhere, a magnetic force field you never asked for. While I love memes and jokes and occasionally peeking into gossip culture, I have a complicated relationship with what it means to be defined—lightly or heavily—before you even arrive.

The Worst Cringe I’ve Ever Felt

Perfectionists learn to metabolize embarrassment early. You practice smoothing over mistakes, pretending nothing happened, moving on. Yet as you get older and more competent, the mistakes grow sharper teeth. They wait for you in the places you least expect, like tiny traps set by the universe just to keep you humble.

I loved ancient languages and museums, so I applied for a master’s with the full, naïve conviction of someone who has no backup plan. I didn’t scatter applications across a dozen programs; I chose one, gave it everything, and hoped. Getting accepted was one of the happiest moments of my life. Even with the bare-minimum funding, I packed up and moved to England in 2013 with a kind of reckless gratitude. I had arranged a student room, memorized the streets on Google Maps, and rehearsed my own arrival like it was a scene in a film.

Before I got there, the university assigned me my email and login credentials. Seeing the “@cam.ac.uk” address made everything feel both official and impossible. There I was: walking off the train dragging my 80lbs suitcase over the uneven pavement, unlocking the rented room I’d only ever seen on a screen, and feeling—briefly, miraculously—like the version of myself I’d always hoped I would become. Even the silence of the first night, sitting on the narrow bed with the radiator clanking to life, felt like prophecy coming true.

I glanced at the autogenerated email username; apparently, there were quite a few students with my initials who came before me—so many shoes to fill! I thought. The number embedded in my unique Cambridge identifier was the number 33. I like multiples of 11. November baby. Grew up near 3300 South and St. Mark’s Hospital (I almost got a winged lion tattoo; maybe I still will). This gemmatria-esque-hippie-numerology detail registered as a tiny wink from the universe; everything is sure going my way, I thought.

For weeks, I floated. I went to induction sessions, bought my first British groceries, tried not to look like an overwhelmed American. I signed emails automatically with my new Cambridge address, barely thinking about the random “33” tacked onto it. It was just another institutional quirk, like the fact that no one ever explained how the dining hall seating worked.

Then—months later, at the Hughes Hall bar, half-drunk with a pack of French classmates—the brakes hit. Someone asked a simple question about how Cambridge generates its usernames. I answered without thinking, rattling off mine and mentioning the “33” as casually as noting the weather. The reaction was immediate. A full-body groan from one side of the table. Explosive laughter from the other. Someone actually slid off their chair.

Only then did they manage to explain to me—between gasps—that “33” is used as a white supremacist code. And that “HH,” the abbreviation for Hughes Hall, is another one. I stared at them while they howled with the kind of laughter that makes strangers turn around. I was actually holding back tears of horror.

I replayed every email I had ever sent. Every form submitted. Every professor addressed. Me, earnestly signing off with a digital calling card that, out of context, looked like a secret handshake with the worst people alive. It was—without exaggeration—the purest cringe of my adult life. Thankfully, Cambridge changes your email when you graduate. I shed the cursed numerology and emerged simply as hannah.mcbeth. A clean slate; a merciful reset.

In one of my favorite films 500 Days of Summer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character asks Summer (played by the immortal Zooey Deschanel) if she ever had a nickname in school. She deadpans: “They called me Anal Girl because I was so neat and tidy.” He spits out his drink.

I think “Hitler Girl” might even be worse.

On Luck, Names, and Everything We Don’t Choose

Sitting here today in my old lucky spot at the Marriott Library, I keep thinking about how wildly inconsistent luck can feel when you grow up inside a name, a story, a family mythology you never exactly signed up for. Some people inherit money or land or a family business; others inherit legends, curses, punchlines, or—if they’re especially unlucky—an email address that accidentally signals extremism. The older I get, the more I realize the shape of your inheritance matters less than the way you learn to carry it.

Some of us get the blood-soaked ancestors, the melodramatic surnames, the oddball reputations that precede us into rooms. Some of us get the tiny mortifications that knock the wind out of us in foreign bars. Some of us, if we’re really paying attention, also get the golden-cloud moments—the quiet return to a library desk that feels like a portal back to the versions of ourselves we’ve been building, fleeing, or reinventing for years.

Maybe that’s the real trick of growing up in the shadow of “greats,” whether real or imagined: eventually you stop trying to outpace the story and start editing it. You keep the parts that still feel alive, you leave behind the parts that were only ever projections, and you learn to laugh—properly, deeply—when life hands you the kind of cringe you’ll be telling forever.

Names, myths, coincidences, curses, blessings: they all get folded into the same narrative eventually. Somehow, here I am again, in December light, at the desk that always seems to be waiting for me—proof that sometimes the pendulum swings back toward the good, weirdly and without warning, just when you need it most.

December 7, 2025
Eleanor Rigby Weather
I genuinely cannot be in a bad mood when Monty Python starts whistling at me. “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” is somehow powerful enough to override both rejection emails and Utah politics. Two notes and I’m cured. It also happens to be sung by men being crucified, which feels like an appropriate motivational model for writers.

I try to remember that feeling when a literary magazine informs me—very politely—that I am not among the anointed ones (I am, unfortunately, not Brian). But unlike most magazines, Strange Pilgrims did something humane: they told the truth. More than 7,481 submissions landed at their virtual doorstep.

That’s not a slush pile; that’s a full-scale literary migration. Entire ecosystems of poems, essays, experiments, and genre-adjacent apparitions. The editorial equivalent of having 7,481 feral kittens suddenly show up on your porch, each insisting it’s special. No one can read that many pieces without caffeine, spreadsheets, and a durable spirit. The breakdown:
- 46% Short Stories
- 29% Flash Fiction
- 16% Creative Nonfiction (my corner)
- 9% Flash CNF
I’m one bright dot among thousands of people writing through whatever strange seasons they’re in—grad school recoveries, heartbreaks, quiet epiphanies, late-night typing fits.

Because today arrived wrapped in steady rain, Salt Lake City drifted into an accidental British mood. On days like this, almost without thinking, I reach for British things—Beatles albums, Monty Python sketches, small scraps of comedy that work better than meditation apps. The rain, the rejection, the nostalgia: they braid together and pull me back toward the younger versions of myself who hadn’t yet been asked to have a future.

Drifting Toward Whatever Color Glowed Brightest

At seventeen I watched Yellow Submarine for the first time—unwrinkled, teenage-thin, balanced at the threshold of everything unnamed. My sense of self then was more of a faint outline than a shape. “Me” was still in beta. No degrees, no acceptances, no promotions. I was essentially an amoeba, soft and curious, drifting toward whatever color glowed brightest.

Me as an amoeba.

The film hit me the way certain things do when you’re still mostly potential: a psychedelic cartoon, strangely beautiful like fine art. I remember showing my boyfriend the “natural born lever-puller” scene—a joke that works on a few different levels if you notice the wordplay. The Beatles are from Liverpool, which makes them Liverpudlians, not lever-pullers; John delivers the line while literally pulling a lever on the submarine, grinning in a way that makes the implication unmistakably physical (to my hormonal teenage brain).

And then came the Eleanor Rigby overture, with its lonely drawings of Liverpool rendered in muted grays and anonymous faces, the whole city walking beneath a private weather system. That rich animated sequence became my internal shorthand for England, more than landmarks, more than anything literal. The only other thing that captures that mood for me is “Kathy’s Song”, the way Simon sings about moving through rain and realizing that love, or longing, or some interior truth is the only thing that holds steady.

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On this rainy day—when my unemployment is hanging in the air like a stalled pressure front—I sit by the window and watch raindrops slide down the glass. The Wasatch Range disappears into fog and for a moment the valley feels like I’m at a different latitude.

The Long and Winding Road from Reviewer to Artist

A moment of clarity in the British drizzle reminded me of this: for six months I’ve been writing every day and learning new ways of making art. Some of that work has helped me understand my own life; some of it feels like it might matter to others who are trying to make sense of theirs. I keep writing about Utah artists and musicians because they deserve more light than they get. It’s the work that feels worth doing, and the hope that it might ease someone’s path the way other people’s art has eased mine.

Being a magazine reviewer and corporate writer has meant most people don’t think of me as an artist. But in terms of writing, what I do is a kind of reduction and abstraction—paring language down, stripping away the unnecessary, following something like Hemingway’s discipline and something like what Dan Evans does visually in his cut-paper work (read my profile for 15 Bytes here). My writing isn’t really “content” anymore; it has form, created from writing, rewriting, and using words and semiotic chains like a material you can shape and manipulate.

I didn’t expect visual art to open up for me during this unemployment stretch. AI video, especially—something about pairing music with moving images unlocked a kind of emotional processing I hadn’t been able to reach through writing alone. It feels closer to fine art than anything I’ve ever made: color, timing, rhythm, atmosphere. I can take the grief, the weirdness, the nonlinear memories, and shape them into something that moves—literally moves—in a way prose can’t. I’ve started thinking about these pieces the way I think about essays: structured, intentional, built from feeling rather than performance. It’s strange to say, but for the first time, I actually feel like someone who makes art, not just someone who writes about other people making it.

A video animation created with AI based on original artwork

Because I’m trying to hum on the bright side of life, I can admit this: I’ve made more progress in these months—more growth in understanding how I write and why—than I ever managed while employed. I’m finally submitting to magazines like Strange Pilgrims. Finally imagining myself as someone allowed to be there. Even if it feels like showing up scandalously late, something essential has shifted in how I make things.
December 2, 2025
Can’t Step in the Same River Twice
On Blue-Light Rooms & Other Gateways

There’s a kind of current that runs through the blue-light rooms where things are made, the backstage corners of plays, the band rooms humming after hours, the improvised studios where people gather around something still taking shape. It’s the same current that moves through any space where people are building worlds together, whether out of plywood, choreography, fabric, or light. These places feel rare, almost set apart from the rest of life, and the people drawn to them are often those who never quite fit the usual shape of things. They feel most themselves in the charged, half-chaotic atmosphere of a room in the middle of making something new.

A Place Built Without a Nightlife Vocabulary

Growing up in Utah, I gravitated toward the rooms where things were being made—the art classrooms, the wings of the stage, the band rooms buzzing after dark. Those were the spaces that felt alive. But as you grew older, the world around you encouraged a kind of narrowing. Creativity was tolerated in childhood, yet adulthood was expected to look settled, orderly, and suburban. There wasn’t much of a tradition of going out dancing or spending time in bars, and alcohol made so many people uneasy that some wouldn’t attend a wedding if there was a bartender. It always struck me as ironic in a religion built around a figure who turned water into wine.

In Utah—or at least the version I grew up in—not everyone avoided play, but there was a strong puritan reflex that regarded vigorous dancing, costumes, and nighttime gatherings with suspicion. Dressing up could be dismissed as childish or inappropriate. My father was convinced for years that Halloween had demonic origins and refused to celebrate it.

That way of thinking leaves little space for adults to experiment with identity or enjoy even modest forms of theatricality. The cultural instinct tilted toward self-containment rather than expression, toward seriousness rather than imagination.

Discos & Study Abroad

When I think about my first real encounter with dancing, I always return to that scene in Hanna, the Amazon series, where the girl who has grown up hidden in the woods ends up in a tourist disco for the first time. She isn’t scared; she’s fascinated and a little stunned people get to live this way.

When I went to study abroad in Madrid when I was 20, I’d never been into a bar before, but Spain operated on a completely different logic. Kids start drinking at 16, so the whole culture around bars and discos is less anxious and more woven into everyday life. People danced because the music was playing or because their friends pulled them into the rhythm, not because the moment was supposed to signify anything. Flamenco classes, crowded bars, and late-night discos slowly demystified it for me. A drink or “chupitas” helped, but what really changed things was watching people move without apology or self-surveillance. Movement made sense there in a way it never had before, and for the first time, dance started to feel like an essential part of who I could be.

The Quiet Rebellion of Fancy Dress

England added another layer I didn’t expect. After Spain, I assumed the ease around dancing and nightlife might be tied to Southern Europe, but then I moved to another very Anglo, very orderly country and found that a different kind of playfulness lived there as well. I first heard the phrase “fancy dress parties” and imagined formal clothing, only to learn that in British English it simply means costumes, usually chosen with enough enthusiasm to make the whole thing feel delightfully absurd. Someone would announce a theme, people would make quick charity-shop runs, and by evening the bar would be full of whatever interpretations they could assemble. During my master’s year those nights became a kind of punctuation between lectures and libraries — small, collective acts of imagination that gave the term “student life” a broader range.

Fancy dress is a faint descendant of older revels and masquerades where people were given a little room to slip outside the roles they held during the day. The modern version doesn’t carry the weight of those older traditions, but the instinct is the same: a simple, generous permission to become someone else for a few hours. Creativity and imagination need small departures from the everyday. Being someone else for an evening, or even just exaggerating one aspect of yourself, has always lightened the existential load. It creates a pause in the linear story of your life, a moment where you’re allowed to play rather than perform.

The instinct behind fancy dress — that willingness to step outside yourself for an evening — extends into festival culture, but in a different register. Glastonbury is the version most Americans have heard of. For a few days, ordinary life expands. People build temporary worlds in fields by hauling in scaffolding, generators, speakers, tents, sequins, and a small nation’s worth of waterproofs.

Crossing Back to the Western Desert

The jump from that environment to the western United States is a kind of cultural whiplash. Once you’re back in Utah and Nevada, the landscape is huge but the places where you can actually move in public shrink to almost nothing. Spain covers about 195,000 square miles (505,000 km²) and holds roughly 47 million people. Utah and Nevada together span almost the same area—about 210,000 square miles (543,000 km²)—but have fewer than 9 million people combined. It creates a strange paradox: two states the size of a European country, but with almost no public spaces where adults are expected to gather, move, or experiment with identity. Outside a few country bars, and the singular outlier of Las Vegas, there isn’t much of a nightlife vocabulary across all that space.

Electronic dance music, house, bass—anything with a subwoofer and a color palette beyond beige—triggers immediate suspicion. And not the vague moral kind. In a culture that is otherwise intensely materialistic, the suspicion turns strangely supernatural. In Mormon thought, “Satan” isn’t a metaphor; he’s a literal figure whose primary task is to lure people into drugs, sex, and what gets categorized broadly as “bad choices.” Unfortunately for anyone who likes a kick drum, electronic dance music falls neatly into that category. Add strobe lights, fog machines, or—heaven forbid—darkness punctured by red lighting, and the entire scene reads as a recruitment center for degeneracy.

The irony is that the desert is perfect for building temporary worlds. Salt flats, canyons, old mining land, vast empty valleys — the West is designed for large-scale gatherings. But mainstream Utah culture treats underground dance events the way small towns treat UFO sightings: something is happening out there, and it’s definitely not good. (But I mean, how can you blame them if you know anything about “alien cattle mutilations?”)

I’m not tracing the full socio-cultural circuitry here, and don’t even get me started on aliens — that can wait for another essay — but this section needed grounding. England showed me that dressing up and being out at night doesn’t require a moral preface; it’s simply part of how people live. And historically, when a government or an authoritarian religion feels threatened, the first reflex is always the same: impose a curfew. Control the hours, control the movement. The underlying question doesn’t change: Who gets to be out after dark?

That became obvious during the pandemic, when a statewide shutdown and a curfew — for a respiratory virus you couldn’t catch outside, of all things — sparked a ridiculous, primal urge to leave the house. One night I grabbed my friend Lamb, a skateboarder with no interest in rules, and we ran around the empty playground at Liberty Park like kids who’d slipped the perimeter. We climbed the tops of the tower slides to scan for cops. It’s still one of my favorite memories from those years. Here I am “hanging out” in a hammock illegally in Liberty Park during lockdown, 2020.

Utah taught me how many people think the answer to “who gets to be out at night?” should be tightly controlled — and how intoxicating it feels to ignore that for even ten minutes.

The Edge of the Known World

If there’s a thread that connects Utah art rooms, Madrid discos, English fancy dress, and the temporary worlds built from plywood and light, it’s novelty. I’ve always been drawn to the moments when something unplanned rises up and changes the temperature of a life, when you feel more awake simply because you weren’t expecting what arrived. When I was little, that feeling lived in stories. Pocahontas was the one I returned to again and again, not for romance but for the idea of a girl who stepped toward change rather than away from it. She moved into the unknown because it lit up something inside her, something the familiar world couldn’t reach.

There’s a shot of her standing at the cliff’s edge, hair blown sideways, looking out at a world she doesn’t fully understand but wants anyway. For a certain kind of girl — the restless, the observant, the ones born into cultures that value obedience over curiosity — that image is a blueprint. It tells you that stepping outside your prescribed path might be the only way to find out who you are.

The Color of a Moving River

Heraclitus said you can’t step into the same river twice. The river moves; so do you. It’s the simplest description of what novelty feels like when it lands: a shift, a current, something that interrupts the default settings of ordinary life. That runs through the creative rooms I loved as a kid and the dance floors I found later—the sense that you’re stepping into a moment that didn’t exist ten seconds ago and won’t exist again.

Novelty isn’t decoration. It’s a physiological event. Wonder tightens the chest; surprise pulls the breath in; adrenaline flickers at the edges of perception; the world you thought you understood rearranges itself for a moment. Creativity depends on those physiological rearrangements. So does joy.

Novelty interrupts routine and reminds you that the world is wider and stranger than the narrow structures you were handed; it opens doors in the mind. For people who never felt entirely at home inside the expected structures, novelty is the moment where you remember that change is not only possible but natural, and that moving toward the unknown has always been where the story becomes interesting.

But novelty is only one face of change. Most of the time change arrives without excitement: jobs shift, people leave, landscapes alter, seasons tilt. What you crave in one moment—movement, unpredictability—becomes something you brace against in another. The same current that delivers the jolt of possibility also carries away what was stable a moment before. Heraclitus wasn’t describing thrill-seeking; he was naming the underlying condition. Whether or not you want it, the world is already moving.

On Arising and Passing Away

Early Buddhist thinkers approached the same truth differently, not as an argument but as a quality of experience. Things arise, change, and pass—not tragically, not triumphantly, simply because that is what things do. Hesse’s Siddhartha takes this and turns it into a story, letting the river become a companion rather than a symbol. From here, the ideas meet in color.

Blue is the shade most often given to water in motion—not because rivers are actually blue, but because the mind recognizes the mix of depth, shadow, and reflection as something that can’t be held. Blue is a color defined by scatter and movement. In painting, in stage lighting, in the natural world, it is the hue that recedes even as you look at it. Theaters rely on that property. Blue backstage light is meant to be seen without being noticed. It reveals just enough for the next action to take place while allowing the rest to fall back into near-invisibility:
- Audience visibility: blue falls off quickly over distance, so the audience can’t see backstage movement even as crews work a few feet away.
- Night vision: blue interferes least with the eye’s rod cells, which lets stagehands keep their sense of darkness while still navigating safely.
- Cues and markings: spike tape and backstage markers glow cleanly under blue without disrupting what’s happening onstage.
There’s a quiet philosophy in that. Change often announces itself the same way—low-intensity, peripheral, easy to overlook until it has already rearranged the edges of things.

And then there is the river’s color, which isn’t really color at all but the result of light passing through depth, sediment, air, and constant motion. The blue we assign to rivers is a metaphor we keep returning to because it captures something about impermanence better than language can. Blue is the visual form of transience: the distance inside the present moment, the shimmer between what is and what is becoming.

You can’t step into the same river twice, not because the river has changed or because you have changed, but because the meeting point is always new—the water, the light on its surface, the air moving above it, the moon tugging at every tide, including the ones inside your own body.

The Blue Flower of Enlightenment

There’s a plant I keep on my windowsill with the cultivar name Hana Aoi. The name simply means “blue flower” in Japanese, a phrase that has appeared for centuries in poems, paintings, and seasonal imagery. In Buddhist art, the blue lotus—the utpala—carries its own long history. The Lotus Sūtra notes that the Buddha’s radiance is “blue as the utpala, fresh and pure,” a color linked to clarity and the difficulty of awakening. In later iconography the blue lotus is often shown half-open, a form that suggests insight arriving gradually rather than all at once. It is a flower you glimpse rather than grasp.

Japanese poetry adds a quieter note. Edo-period poet Chiyo-ni (加賀千代女, also known as Kaga no Chiyo), wrote around the 18th century:

朝顔や
つるべ取られて
もらい水

asagao ya / tsurube torarete / morai mizu

Morning-glory blue
has taken the well-bucket—
I ask next door for water.

Chiyo-ni’s poem turns on a small domestic moment: a morning-glory vine has curled itself around the rope of the well-bucket, and rather than tear the bloom, she simply walks next door for water. The haiku isn’t symbolic in the Western sense, but its clarity comes from the way it treats a minor inconvenience as something worth accommodating. The blue morning-glory is held in place for a single interval between dawn and heat, and the poem catches that brief suspension—the stillness of a flower that won’t last, and the world adjusting itself around it. It’s an image of transience without drama, the kind of quiet impermanence that sits beneath so many Japanese seasonal poems.

Across these traditions, the blue flower echoes the same intuition found in rivers and backstage light: things change shape, appear and vanish, and part of their meaning lies in that movement. It is not a symbol of permanence, but of passage—a reminder that the world doesn’t hold still, and that our lives don’t either.
November 28, 2025
The Day After My Birthday

“As a solid rock is not shaken by the wind, so the wise are not moved by praise or blame.”
— Dhammapada, Chapter 6 (The Wise), Verse 81

The day after my birthday always feels like a boundary post—an invisible marker I step over each year, taking stock of who I’ve become and who I’m still trying to be. This year, what keeps surfacing is how much of my adulthood has felt like stepping into a role meant for an oldest son or parent rather than a daughter. Responsibility has its own sense of direction; it settles where it wants, not where tradition says it should.

I think about my mom, unexpectedly pregnant with my youngest brother, Ethan—a one-night-stand baby conceived after she’d already been divorced for several years and was raising two kids as a single mom. It was a “red letter” episode in a devout religious community like ours; every family member had an opinion.

Ethan was due on my birthday, November 22, 1998, but stayed put for two extra weeks so he could be born on my mom’s. On my eighth birthday, while everyone was waiting for his arrival, I went with friends to the Anastasia movie premiere. I remember being excited for the new baby brother who was supposed to show up any day—imagining he’d make our little family feel even more complete. He finally arrived late, but perfect in the way babies feel when you’re young enough to believe they can fix things just by existing. After that, my mom, Seth, Ethan, and I were “the four amigos.”

Salt Lake City in the 1990s

Before my parents were divorced, our family had been a very devout Mormon household. But as the early ’90s went on, my dad became more ideological and rigid, and what had once been ordinary Mormon family life tightened into something narrower and more punishing. My mom left him in 1994, when I was three and Seth was still a baby.

She later told me how my father controlled all the money, didn’t want to celebrate holidays or birthdays, and insisted his tithing be calculated before taxes—a huge financial strain for a family that already had next to nothing. The closest I ever got to a Halloween costume in those years was a shirt with a leaf pattern; I was, as my mom said, “a personification of the harvest season.”

The breaking point came when he tried to neuter our German Shepherd in the house. (What a bizarre thing to type.) My mom walked in—holding me and my infant brother—to a home covered in dog blood. That was it. She left.

After the divorce, my mom, Seth, and I moved into a red-brick house in Millcreek near St. Mark’s Hospital, where police sometimes chased “suspected gang members” through our backyard and cars idled outside what people then called “crack houses.” It wasn’t dramatic; it was simply the texture of life in the late ’90s in a city working very hard to appear cleaner than it was.

My dad went on to work exclusively for the LDS Church for the next thirty years. There was limited contact after the divorce, mostly fighting between my parents, and once I reached my teens and stopped participating in the religion, he chose the simpler route: pretending we didn’t exist.

Tearing Myself Away from Europe

In 2017, when I was living in France and in a long-term relationship with the French boyfriend I’d met in graduate school, Ethan became addicted to benzos and attempted suicide. I listened to my mom cry on the phone every weekend, and I began studying psychoanalysis and therapeutic methods, trying to help from afar. I flew back and forth between Europe and Utah—ten- to twelve-hour trips, multiple times a year—struggling to build the life I wanted while feeling guilty for leaving my family behind.

Ethan descended into heroin addiction during the years I was working for a Cambridge tech startup—a real turning point in my career—and the stress of it all began hollowing me out. I became thin in the way actresses and models are thin, which felt like the lamest possible exchange for the inner anguish I was living with. On the surface, I looked polished and enviable; inside, I was collapsing under the pressure of financially supporting my PhD-student boyfriend and arranging any and every vacation around long-haul flights home, hoping my youngest brother wouldn’t overdose before I could get back to Utah to say goodbye.

By 2019, my relationship had begun to collapse too. The gender reversal—me as the breadwinner, him unable to take even a single trip back to Utah to meet my family, unable to ask me to marry him after years together—destroyed me in more ways than I can ever fully explain. My deteriorating health forced me to leave Cambridge and return to Salt Lake in the summer of 2019.

As I was trying to cope with the culture shock and just after my thirtieth birthday, the pandemic hit. As 2020 kicked off, I took a Marketing and IT Manager job at a bookstore/warehouse and hired Ethan so he would have structure, a paycheck, and someone who cared watching out for him. I also wanted to build a relationship with him before he died—a real possibility for years, which became a more immediate threat as fentanyl started pouring across the Southern border and into Utah. I automated the bookstore’s e-commerce operation so the store could survive the pandemic and so could my family.

Just Another Episode of Breaking Bad

While I worked at the bookstore, I went to my mom’s house every day at lunch to check the property. One afternoon I pulled up to see the back window of Ethan’s car smashed out—his crack dealer teaching him a lesson over money owed. My mom and I just stared for a moment and laughed: another day, another episode of Breaking Bad. Each night, she slept with her two standard poodles barricaded in her bedroom. I seriously considered buying a gun.

I watched my baby brother, six-foot-two, waste away to 130 lbs. It was one of the worst kinds of grief: the slow kind, the kind that sits beside you at work. My boss, usually hands-off, told me I had to fire him, which I did, after crying and begging him to get clean yet again.

Then everything snapped at once. Ethan went on a crime spree, robbing several 7-11s and ending up on the evening news across the West. Since 2021, he’s been in and out of jail. He’s totaled more cars—his own and my mom’s—than I want to tally. Recently, after getting almost clean, he was picked up on a minor traffic charge and, amid conflicting police accounts, was sentenced to five years in prison.

I feel like I helped raise him. I feel like I’ve been both sibling and parent in the same exhausted body. And I’m not sure I ever had the emotional infrastructure for the job.

My other brother, Seth, mirrors our father: a near-religious refusal to mention us. He’s built a life that pretends his mother, sister, and younger brother simply evaporated. And still—I go on. Because that’s what I was taught to do, and because stopping has never felt like an option.

“If it is endurable, then endure it.” — Marcus Aurelius

Some days I feel like the rock; other days I feel like the storm. But adulthood, I’m learning, isn’t the clean, upward trajectory I imagined. It’s a series of roles we never asked for but carry anyway. Another year older. Another year still standing.

November 23, 2025
Fairytales We Tell Ourselves: The Utah Pantages Theater and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona

The intricate designs of my lethal lines, criminal rhymes
From the mind of a thug shaking state time
Take it to the next phase you had your time to talk sh*t
Now b*tches bustas getting checkmated
…

To all the players on the Westside
We’ll still be ballin’ on these b*tches when the rest die
Players on the Westside

— 2Pac

2020–21 was an oddly energetic, almost enchanted time to live in downtown Salt Lake City. After moving back from England to my hometown in June 2019, I rented a small apartment behind Dolcetti — the gelato shop founded by Mark and Kari England in 2004, known for its 150 rotating, small-batch flavors (Dolcetti). Inside, the place looks like the I Spy books and Wes Anderson had a baby and then coated everything in thrift-shop gold: curiosities on every shelf, saturated colors, odd treasures arranged with the confidence of someone who knows exactly where beauty hides. I loved sitting next to the window to write and observe passersby.

My apartment was a tight 900 square feet for me, my cat, and a plant collection increasingly convinced it could overthrow the living room. But it sat at the center of a downtown that felt, even in the quietest moments of the pandemic, strangely evolving. I watched George Floyd marches move past my corner, mourned the independent shops that couldn’t survive the shutdowns, and nurtured a growing affection for the Criterion Collection as if it were an underground library I’d smuggled back from another life.

It was in the middle of all this that I met Michael Patton, who works under the artistic name Michael Valentine. Patton is a direct descendant of General George S. Patton — a lineage he acknowledges even as he rejects its militaristic implications. He chose Valentine as a kind of ongoing protest against war culture, a refusal to be defined by the mythology of battle. And yet, his ancestor’s grit runs straight through him, whether the peace-loving activist in him likes it or not. Once, when I was interviewing him for an article for SLUG and we were driving around looking for a place to get lunch, he said, almost resigned and almost proud, “Yeah, I know where the grit comes from. I can’t pretend I didn’t inherit it.”

Valentine hosted a weekly vintage-film gathering outside the shuttered Pantages Theater on Main Street, and I hadn’t even noticed the building until I wandered across a cluster of folding chairs, a projector, and a rotating cast of people keeping cinematic vigil. He and Casey O’Brien McDonough — the Irish preservation activist who later ran for governor — were partners in the fight to save the building, a kind of two-person engine powered by research, outrage, and sheer stamina. Their efforts were widely documented, including in a 2023 Utah Stories report (saving the Pantages) and by archival groups like Preservation Utah (Pantages archive). Together, they welcomed every rag-tag citizen of downtown Salt Lake — film geeks, artists, unhoused neighbors, accidental passersby, and the rest of us drifting through pandemic-era loneliness — into the Pantages film club.

Two Bloody Characters

It occurs to me now that both Valentine and I grew up in the shadows of men known for bloodshed: his, the general who charged across Europe; mine, the mythic king who dies in every retelling. Patton and Macbeth — tactician and traitor, hero and villain, depending on who’s telling the story. Maybe that’s why we both gravitated toward fairytales, and toward the Pantages, which offered its own kind of mythic refuge.

As I wrote in my last blog, the Pantages didn’t survive. The campaign to save it ended in a brutal civic heartbreak in April 2022: Valentine’s hunger strike, a lawsuit filed against him by the mayor, and eventually his decision to run for mayor himself in an attempt to protect his ability to protest. None of it was enough. The building was demolished, and with it went a strange but vital axis of the downtown arts ecosystem — the kind of space where eccentricity, history, and stubborn idealism could still sit side by side.

The demolition unfolded under the administration of Salt Lake City’s mayor, Erin Mendenhall — a Democrat who branded herself as a progressive environmentalist while advancing some of the most aggressive pro-development and anti-preservation policies the city had seen in decades. Mendenhall’s office not only dismissed community objections to the demolition but actively escalated conflict with activists; at one point her administration filed a lawsuit against Valentine, alleging he was “stalking Erin” while the Mayor’s office was also obsessively following everything Michael did. The gap between her public rhetoric and her actual governance was so wide it felt like its own kind of theater — a performance of civic virtue masking a pattern of decisions that consistently favored developers over communities.

She even contacted SLUG to ask who had anonymously published the story about the Pantages — a moment that made the whole situation feel less like civic governance and more like an administration unusually preoccupied with controlling the narrative. When my article on the Pantages came out, it was hit by the publication’s most intense troll attack in recent memory — an onslaught that many in the local arts and activist community speculated was coordinated, possibly even by people aligned with her PR team. Whether that rumor was true or not, the effect was clear: the piece struck a nerve inside the machinery of power.

But the back-and-forth between Valentine and Salt Lake City didn’t not stop there. In June 2025, through his cider company Six Sailor Cider LLC, he filed a lawsuit in 3rd District Court against the tyrannical Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Services (DABS) and the commission that oversees it. The complaint argues the commission violated Utah’s Open and Public Meetings Act when it voted on May 29 to deny a liquor license to his bar, Apparition. The suit asks a judge to void the vote, overturn the decision, or send it back to the commission with instructions to grant the license. It’s another chapter in the same long narrative: one man insisting that institutions should follow the rules they claim to uphold. But Michael’s not a saint: He also garnered controvery for saying Zionists weren’t welcome at Apparition (which I publically condemned).

Telling Ourselves What’s Really Real

And maybe that’s where the fairytale really begins — not the sweet, storybook kind, but the darker kind we use to warn ourselves, to name what’s broken, and to survive contradictions we can’t fully articulate. That’s actually what Zionism is: a fairytale told to keep people from losing hope after they lost everything else. Valentine has his fairytale of the Pantages. The city has its fairytale of progress. We all carry narratives like that: simplified, hopeful, a little irrational, just coherent enough to hold back the chaos. The truest fairytales are the ones that don’t quite make sense, because they tell the truth slant — they let the light and the darkness sit in the same room without resolving anything.

Which is maybe why Persona hit me the way it did. I think it’s the best film ever made — Citizen Kane be damned — and in 2021 I watched every Bergman film in chronological order. Nothing prepared me for Persona. It’s the rare work of art that doesn’t just tell a story but exposes the narratives we use to protect ourselves: the ones that collapse under scrutiny, the ones too sugary to be real, the ones that turn toxic when we mistake them for truth. It’s a film that diagnoses the human condition by peeling back the performances we cling to and showing what happens when they finally split.

The Plot of Persona (Briefly)

A famous stage actress, Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann), abruptly stops speaking during a performance. Nothing is physically wrong with her — she simply refuses to talk. A young nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), is assigned to care for her, and the two retreat to a remote seaside cottage. There, with Elisabet silent and watchful, Alma begins to fill the quiet, confessing her insecurities, affairs, fears, and buried shame. Slowly the boundary between them dissolves. Elisabet studies Alma; Alma imitates Elisabet; their identities merge, fracture, and reassemble. By the end, it’s unclear whether two women exist — or one consciousness split across two bodies.

The Psychological Terrain

Bergman uses this plot as a kind of Freudian X-ray. The entire film is built around the terrifying simplicity of a question: Who are you when you stop performing? Alma is the “good girl” who has spent her life being pleasant, compliant, socially acceptable — a mask so airtight she doesn’t realize she’s wearing it. Elisabet, the actress, stops speaking because she can no longer tolerate the falseness of her own public self. Her muteness is a rebellion against the “theater” she was born into, professionally and socially. She opts out.

Put them together and the film becomes a study in identity erosion: the psychological cost of pretending, the masks we inherit and the masks we craft, the social demand to always perform the self people expect, the way silence can be a weapon, and the way speaking can expose more than it protects.

Alma’s breakdown is essentially the collapse of a persona she can no longer hold upright. Elisabet’s silence is the collapse of a persona she refuses to uphold any longer. They meet in the wreckage. And Bergman’s point, delivered through a surreal, self-reflexive film that literally breaks apart on screen, is that when the performance becomes unbearable, the self starts to disintegrate.

Pretty on the Outside

In Salt Lake City, this idea of crafting a perfectly managed self takes on its own regional flavor. There are plenty of people who look beautiful, polished, virtuous — people from the right families, with the right social networks, projecting the right kind of civic goodness. And yet, time and again, you discover just how many of them are “two-face,” switching between public benevolence and private ambition with unsettling ease.

The politicians and employees inside the city and state government — some truly are good people. But many mistake their own checklist of credentials, connections, and cultivated traits as proof of who they are on the inside. They forget that outward virtue is not the same thing as inner integrity. And some of them, make no mistake, are rotten to the core.

We should all remember where we came from.

November 19, 2025