Almost exactly five years ago, I called your attention here to a brouhaha in the small town of Kanab, Utah, over the adoption by the city council of a non-binding resolution defining the family as "one man, one woman" with a "full quiver" of children. A few months later, Laura and I visited Kanab (a town founded by Mormon polygamists), where we were pleased to see many businesses opposing the resolution with "Everyone Welcome Here!" stickers in their windows.

I wish I'd known sooner, but I've just learned that there's a documentary out about the whole controversy:

Natural Family Values

I can't vouch for the quality, not having seen it yet, but you can be sure I'm ordering a copy and will watch it with interest.

I note also that major funding for Natural Family Values was provided by the B.W. Bastian Foundation, an organization that supports issues of LGBT equality.

The B.W. Bastian in question is my former boss Bruce Bastian, co-founder of WordPerfect Corporation. I like what he's been doing with his fortune in the days since WordPerfect Ruled The Earth. Another documentary that Bastian produced is 8: The Mormon Proposition, which I watched recently. It's an investigation into how the LDS Church secretly led the successful effort to pass Proposition 8 in California, which outlawed gay marriage, and, more generally, into the hideous ways gays have been treated by the Church. It's an excellent film, and is available to stream from Netflix, but be sure to have a box of Kleenex and a punching bag handy when you watch it.

I want to say more about 8, but I'm still trying to calibrate the shotgun blast that post will be.

I have my breakfast stop to thank for another little gem this morning. The 31-year-old father at the booth next to mine (I know his age because it came up in his conversation) was summarizing news stories from the Sun-Times for his two young daughters, and I was listening in with half an ear over my eggs and coffee as I read Then We Came to the End.

Both my ears perked up when he mentioned Brigham Young University. You may have seen this A.P. story already:

Apostles, not apostates: BYU paper's ungodly typo
Thousands of issues of Brigham Young University's student newspaper were pulled from newsstands because a front-page photo caption misidentified leaders of the Mormon church as apostates instead of apostles....

The caption called the group the "Quorum of the Twelve Apostates." The mistake happened when a copy editor ran a computer spell check and apostate was suggested as the replacement for a misspelling of apostle....  [full article]

"No, honey, it was just a mistake."

A delightful mistake. I wish I had a copy of one of those recalled issues. I think I'd like to be a founding member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates.

Epidode #51 of "ShunnCast" is now available, in which Donald William Shunn II remembers the original model (1936-2008).

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?id=51

See also shunncast.

One of the stranger things about Utah fast-food joints is the ubiquity of a condiment known simply as "fry sauce." I didn't exactly realize how strange it was, though, until I moved out of Utah.

An alert reader (sadly anonymous) of this blog brought a recent Associated Press article about fry sauce in Utah to my attention:

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,650220850,00.html

It seems to have awakened a craving in me for the pinkish stuff, which I rarely think about unless I'm actually in a Utah fast-food joint. Fortunately, the craving can be overruled and outclassed by a visit to that Belgian frites joint on Second Avenue that has fifty varieties of mayonnaise, but fry sauce remains a weirdly compelling taste sensation, not just for me but for people all over the West, it now seems.

What is wrong with us?

This tune is narrated by a clerk at a 7-Eleven, selling generic cigarettes to lowlifes in the wee hours:

It's not that I don't like them And I feel all right to sell it But I'm scared when 20 guys are buying GPC's And not one of them can spell it

Insatiable is a ska band I used to go see at the Dead Goat Saloon in Salt Lake City, way back in the early '90s. (My friend Mike and I went thirsty through those shows because we were too embarrassed to ask the bartender for a pitcher of root beer.) I'm not aware of any album Insatiable has cut, but I was delighted to find two tracks by them on the second volume of Ska: The Third Wave, which I picked up a few years back on eBay.

The city council of Kanab, Utah, has unanimously endorsed a non-binding "Natural Family Resolution" that promotes the claustrophobic values of '50s America. You know, that nice women-belong-in-the-kitchen morality that had grown across the nation like kudzu on a railway trestle, smothering everything underneath, and which was soon to be sprayed with a liberal dose of '60s-era Weed-B-Gone. Everywhere but rural Utah, that is. Yeah.

Here's the Salt Lake Tribune:

Carol Sullivan voted for the resolution - pitched by the conservative Sutherland Institute - last week when it was introduced by Mayor Kim Lawson. But the council's sole woman did so with some reservations.

"I saw no reason to vote against it because it is nonbinding," she said, noting that no one spoke out against it. "But I did wonder why it should be a government issue."

Sullivan also sees some of the resolution's language as "chauvinistic."

"It kind of made me feel like the odd one out ... the square peg in a round hole. But that's how it is when you're the only woman on an all-male council."  [full article]

One wonders how the Bionic Boy (1976, made-for-TV, filmed near Kanab) would have fit into a "natural" Kanab family.

Someone on my CD mix club mailing list posted a story this morning about how she ran across a stoop sale over the weekend which turned out to be John Wesley Harding's! (His real name, btw, is Wesley Stace, and under that byline he will be reading from his novel Misfortune this evening at Housing Works Used Book Cafe on Crosby Street. [Damn polymath!] Check it out, but show up early.)

Anyway, that post prompted me to post a story about the time I met JWH, which I reproduce here:

I met him several years ago when I worked for an online music company and he came to our offices to do a hosted chat session. I told him that I remembered when he was in Salt Lake City to play a show at the Zephyr Club in 1992, and how I won a copy of Why We Fight that morning from a radio station where he was doing an interview because I knew that all his albums thus far had taken their names from Frank Capra movies. He reminisced about that Zephyr Club show in great detail, and offered to send me a copy of a bootleg video that had been taped that night. "You might even be in it!" he said.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that I hadn't actually gone to the show.

Between me, safe in my seat on this bus,
And the decadent majesty of the salmon-red cliffs of eastern Utah,
A ghost landscape stands sentinel,
As if etched into the glass by a cadre of capering goblins.
The residue of a hasty window washing—
Loops and whorls of dirt left untouched, uncleansed,
Unrepentent, at the bottom of the glass on each fluid upstroke—
It sparkles, gritty and salt-sharp in the oblique sunlight,
Like a series of pearly solar flares,
Or a graph of the desert's pulsebeat,
Or spectral negatives of a washed-out sandstone arch,
Photographed in stages over eons of time—
Snapshots from a child-god's flip-book—
Frothing, leaping, peaking, then falling back into the ground
Like fountains of earth,
A time-lapse planetary signature
That will melt and return to dust
With the next unlikely rain.

Originally published in Sunstone, February 1994