Taste or Schlock

 When did we lose the ability to differentiate between Tasteful and Schlock.  Back in the day we had taste and we approved Deer Valley and kept our eye on Park West and K-Mart, we buffed out Main Street and kept our eye on Park Avenue and Swede Alley, we built the Muni, Nicklaus, Promontory, Glenwild and Tuhaye GC and kept an eye on Hideout and Wohali.  We had professional architects and planners, engineers and designers on the city and county commissions who knew good from bad, right from wrong, taste from schlock and new how to say NFW.  They respected zoning and codes, setbacks and height limits and made exceptions only for taste and not for the developers’ bottom line.  We didn’t need a bunch of consultants, accountants, economists and lawyers to tell us what we can do.  We could see it. 

Take, for example, the proposed twisted Scandinavian design of the Kimbal Art Center for Main Street that was unique and stylish but was rejected for height limits while across the street they made the old Utah Coal and Lumber building into a ten-story monstrosity.  That proposed creation could have been an anchor on Main Street like the Gehry Museums are for Cleveland, Seattle or Bilbao Spain.  It just takes a little vision. 

Instead, Kimbal sold out and promised to do something classy on the new City Art Parcel along with Sundance.  Then Sundance and Kimbal fled because of the price tag and delays.  Fair enough.  So now we are looking at schlock affordable housing with a postage stamp dog run park in the middle and a hotdog stand on the corner because that’s what the developer wants and the city wants to recoup some of the money they spent on the parcel. 

Forget the money, it’s gone, move on.  Let’s do something nice and tasteful, useful and practical on this parcel that we can all enjoy in perpetuity.  Like Olmstead built Central Park, for example, or the Rockefellers donated Teton NP and the UN Plazza in NYC.  How about a few small apartments on a big lawn, like Tomas Jefferson built at UVa, with a few coffee and sandwich shops like the Seattle Seaport, and a rail trail connecting to uptown like the Highline in Hell’s Kitchen and Hudson Yards.  Hide a parking, bus-transit center underground like Cleveland or add gondola to the skiing like Telluride and Whistler.  

Let’s get creative with our landmarks and allow them to build something striking at the Yarrow Crossroads or ingenious like cantilevering 448 over the adjacent wetlands like the road to Aspen or Glenwood canyon Colorado.   Let’s put 224 underground like the Big Dig in Boston and build people and wildlife crossings on top with some stores and houses, so we don’t become a freeway town like Vail.   Let’s build tunnels instead of endless cut and fill sections for our roads or lets pull our streams out of their pipes and make them part of our landscape instead of a nuisance.  Lets make walkable and bikeable districts instead of shopping mall parking lots, with Daytripper parking on the outskirts and busses to the CBD.

This isn’t rocket science and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but we shouldn’t ask a third-party developer what he thinks. I realize it comes down to money but we’ve got plenty of that and the second homeowners pay for most of it anyhow.   We can raise enough money for a $100 million climbing wall and pool, if we include open space and trails, so let’s focus this kind of energy on finishing this town with style and grace.  It’s only a dollar a day per home.   I just takes a little inspired foresight and proactive creativity to keep Park City Cool, reject the schlock and imagine something new and different and tasty. 

BalletNext

 On a quiet Thursday afternoon, I took a gander at the Park Record list of things to do for that night and saw a BalletNext posting of a Beethoven and Grateful Dead ballet recital that night.  I love ballet with its strength and stability, movement and balance, grace and beauty, lithe limberness.  Besides those are two of my favorite bands, so I rode out to Stein Ericksons old house in Thayne’s Canyon where Michele Wiles lives and runs the BalletNext Company.  Michele is the real deal and was a star with the American Ballet Company in New York for 13 years.  Now she is sharing her talents with the community, performing and teaching, interpreting and inspiring.

Well, she blew the doors off her small studio with her dance partner Matthew Helms and with her small troupe of pre-professional students and visiting artists.  They virtually went through the roof with lifts and throws, spins and twirls, dips and doodles that would make a true Deadhead envious.  The choice of music and choreography was impeccable starting with Althea (Honest to the point of recklessness) and finishing with Dancing in the Streets, with some Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd quartered in between.  I just couldn’t believe there was this much talent stashed away in our little town, to be enjoyed on a whim, with so little fanfare and flourish.  This is the kind of thing that keeps Park City Cool.

Luckily, they will reprise this Echoes of Time performance Tuesday, August 25, 2026, at 6:30 PM at the Rose Wagner Black Box Theatre in Salt Lake City.  This will feature a bigger stage and more explosive performance that will surely rock your socks off.

Locals’ Art Festival – Park City 2026

It was locals’ night at the Art’s Festival in Park City, an annual event when we all pretend to be shoppers and connoisseurs of large and expensive art.  Instead, we walk up main street to see our old friends we haven’t seen since ski season and ask each other, ‘who are these people’.  There are more and more second homeowners joining the parade with their dogs and strollers, old baseball hats and new style coiffeurs. 

There is Charlie showing off his new knee and improved range of motion, Contrarian John walking down the upside of the street saying last year was the best ski year ever, and Nicolette styling her new blonde curls and pickleball outfit.  Contrast that with all the fancy young girls in their summer clothes, with new boobs and leather fringe motorcycle outfits, cowboy hats and chaps.  Or the ubiquitous parade of bridesmaids, in their matching blue-brown dresses behind the bride-to-be dressed in off white and pink.  It is a warm night with monsoons lurking by Sunday, so we take our time and enjoy the spectacle.

All-and-all, it makes for a slow, scenic stroll up Main Street to the brewpub parking lot for a Pusillanimous Pulverized Pale Ale and some Nepalese Nepotic Nachos.  When the band and the crowd up there get too raucous or rambunctious we turn tide and walk back down Main, faster yet more determined to chat up old friends, artists, volunteers and the polite police department.  Time is spent at nature photo booths, guessing where obscure shots were taken or discussing grizzly bears with the photographer.  Suddenly a large brass bison looks interesting, and a 3D wood carved map of NYC looks compatible with your current log cabin decor.  We all shop at a different pace, so we phase in and out of each other’s orbit to meet at the bottom of the street.  Anything is possible after a few beers and the gummies kick in. 

Finally, washing out at Low-Main where Fat Paw or another Grateful Dead cover band is playing and the real heart of the town is hanging.  There is our old Mayor twirling with the new County Commissioner, surrounded by millionaires and billionaires in pre-torn dungarees and Deadheads in training, just learning how to sing and dance.  Old ski bums exchange hugs with new adventure athletes and keep score by how many months off, days skied, adventures survived or exotic vacations enjoyed.  The vibe of false bravado prevails from living in an Olympic town and never quite being the best at anything.  Is all good since we did not invent this lifestyle, but we have perfected it.

So, another PC tradition prevails, handed down from old to new timers, each putting their own sash and flash on it as we differentiate the generations.  Our strength is our diversity with new people and different ideas, yet similar sensibilities.  We all want to keep Park City kind, Mountainkind as the Chamber says, and we want to keep Park City cool, despite climate change.  We strive ‘to be more and appear less’ as Ira said a long time ago.  Locals’ night seems like a slow, annual passing of the torch, from wisdom to beauty, experience to grace, sense and sensibilities, with hope for the future.

The Odyssey – Homer 1026 BC – Christopher Noland – 2026 AD

 We all know the blind poet Homer’s story of the Odyssey.  It is a story about going home, like; “Oh Brother, Oh Brother”, “The Wizard of Oz”, “The Martian”, “Garden State”, and almost every other story ever told.  But we have been told that ‘you can never go home’, just like ‘you can never step in the same river twice.’  That’s because you are always changing and the river and home are always different and besides that, the road is long and home is far.  Therefore, there are tremendous trials and tribulations in these stories preventing us from actually going home. 

When Homer wrote this epic story 3000 years ago, about Odysseus (nick-maned Nobody) going home to Greece from his success in the Turkish Trojan Wars (outlined in his earlier best seller The Iliad), he threw in everything but the kitchen sink.  There are savage storms and hairy seas, Cyclops monsters and man-eating giants, sexy Sirens and ugly witches, generous gods and gorgeous goddesses with navigationally insane trips to Africa, France and Italy.  Meanwhile every stud rich guy in Odysseus’s Greek hometown of Ithaca, (near Corfu and Albania) is chasing his wife so they could be king, much to the chagrin of his son who would like the job, if his mom would just give up on Odysseus.  ‘Out of sight, out of mind’, said Homer.

This begs for this epic tale to be re-sung, as Christopher Noland sings in his latest cinematic rendition of the tale, since ‘songs are the poetry of our history and if this history is forgotten, it is repeated’.    While sticking to the original poem and ‘feeling free to add some good stuff’ with modern affections, historical humor and gratuitous F-bombs, Noland has created a masterpiece of the much maligned and misused, modern day multi-media.  Every scene has a zinger line or two to sum up all the heroism and hubris, but most adventures ultimately wind up in a comic, Pythonesque ‘Run Away’ resolution.

Odysseus laments shooting the Cyclops in the eye and angering both Cyclops and the god Poseidon, for which he suffers 20 years of ruthless weather and ferocious seas.  When asked by a soldier why Cyclops did not talk to him, he haughtily asks, ‘Do you talk to ants?’  When the sexy Sirens told him he sacrificed his ability to go home for ‘all the promises he failed to keep’ he finally admits that the ‘clearest view of man is from below’.

In the end it is a film about upholding god Zeus’s law, even before Hammurabi’s ‘eye for an eye’ or Jesus’s ‘turn the other cheek’.  Zeus said you should treat others as they should treat yourself, because they might be gods.  That means kindness to strangers and hospitality for guests and don’t look a gifted Trojan Horse in the mouth.  Odysseus felt bad for giving the Trojans a trick gift horse and then jumping out of it and destroying their entire civilization, ‘breaking Zeus’s law forever’.  Like fellow Noland hero Oppenheimer, he has become death.  He questioned the wisdom and usefulness of ego, greed and war, and for that he was banished for 20 years.  When told that the gods dictate that all his troops will be lost and only he can go home, he says that ‘I will defy the gods’.  It is almost like Negro Jim said in Mark Twain’s great American novel ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ that if he did the right thing he would go to hell and he famously replied, ‘then I will go to hell’.

This movie will be on TV forever but go see it now, while you can, on the big screen, or better yet in the IMAX format it was painstakingly filmed on.  Go for the big picture but stay for the details.  The story is as old as civilization but nonetheless, resonates today.

River Deep by Bryan Gruley

 

It’s curious that good writers often are drawn to the Mystery format to tell their stories, while great writers can just tell great stories, no-holds-barred.  I suppose the structure is reassuring and can be written backwards or forwards with twists and tangents from premeditated outlines or divinely inspired stream of consciousness.  It is no surprise that Bryan Gruley employs this structure to tell his latest scintillating story of murder and mystery, sprinkled with hockey and high jinx.  I put down several books of literature to read this Mystery story and could not put it down.  Ther-in lies the rub.

I have read all Gruley’s novels and short stories and know him to be a fine writer and stand-up guy, if not a sensitive new age family man of the 1970’s.  He hides that well with his gruff, beat-reporter and crude hockey room persona.   We all write what we know and it is apparent that he loves the fun and diversion of this genre after being an award-winning journalist for years. 

He sometimes distracts us from our manly fixations by writing from the point of view of women.  Jack Nicolson famously said that this is done by ‘writing as a man and then removing any semblance of reason or logic’.  But that is just a movie punch line since Jack’s favorite writer, Jim Harrison, excelled at this craft.  Tana French can also write the opposite sex merely by including episodes of burping, scratching and fraternal inebriation. 

Brian also employs hockey references and metaphors to make his point, humorously at first but effectively in the end.  It is a tool he is committed to and he makes it work.  Like the ‘prosecutor sizing up the defense, like a forward going to the corner deciding whether to hit or out skate his opponent’.  It is as Springsteen often dismisses his own profound or sensitive comments when saying something like ‘God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of’.

Gruley’s characters are attractive and likable, to a point, and human in the end.  Attorney Devyn is a swarmy babe and a hockey stud with needs and desires like the rest of us.  Ex-cop Willie Hooper has a pirate eye patch and a dilapidated minivan but checks himself into jail for a few days of R&R.  Bryan writes about real people with real dialogue, motivations and insecurities, because he knows people.  Things are tied up in a nice bow by the end, leaving enough ragged edges for a sequel or two.  We never find out how deep the river actually is, but sense things often aren’t as they appear or as we wish they would be.

I will spare you the details but in summary; Gruley’s story is about revenge and redemption, community and team, nice small towns and big bad cities, family, fraternity and friendship.  Bryan shines with his experience in journalism and the process, police work and its limitations, court proceedings and their distance from truth, justice and the American way.  It’s all part of the cloak and dagger muse to tell his own story of hockey obsession, journalistic excellence, self-doubt, and finally; the acceptance of self with what we really are and really want.

Good stories go viral and great ones become universal.  My only hope is that this unique Gruley Hockey Mystery genre catches on to the masses and becomes part of our culture like so few varieties do.  Bryan can then keep pumping these stories out, make piles of money and ride off into the sunset, secure in the fact that he had something to say and someone who wanted to read it. 

From Park to Pickleball

 

Late last spring, while I was staying at my cousin’s swanky Park Avenue apartment, I went down early to the East River to play Pickleball at the courts near Gracie Mansion, out of the wind, where ocean freighters could still be seen chugging down the river.  The Mayor was not there that day so I started playing with some nice ladies in tennis dresses who were both sporty and sociable.  We made instant connection and one gal even grew up a block away from me on Long Island and dated one of my childhood friends.  Small world. 

They told me that the good players usually show up at noon, and they did.  I tried to get into their game but was informed by an agro-aggressive, rasta-bloke in a Bob Marley T-shirt, that these were good players and I had no chance.  I patiently bided my time and found an opening with the good group with rasta man as my partner.  We started slow and polite and quickly degenerated into the bashing game of intermediates.  Trash talk was rampant, even between partners, as I spurred my slacker agro-man to bone up and contribute more.  One of the players was an NFL referee who made definitive line calls loudly and with confidence, even if he didn’t see them. I asked for video review.

We finally settled into an advanced game at the net with dinks and angles, topspin and head-fakes.  I have to say I held my own on the court and in the trash talk, having been raised in the milieu.  The New Yorker came out in me and my appreciation for it deepened.  After five hours I was knackered, without food or water, and crawled the eight blocks home.  Who knew it was eight blocks from First to Park 4^th Avenue?

Drought and Bob Dylan

I participated in a panel discussion last month, with some of our biggest retail and wholesale water providers, presented flawlessly by the Summit Health Department.  Everyone had the proper astonishment of the general, regional and the latest climate conditions, where it is getting warmer and dryer at increasingly rapid rate.  We may have been preaching to the choir or talking to the wrong people.  Conservation is a battle of economic will that should not be foisted on the wholesalers and retailers of water but on the political will of the people.   But as Bob Dylan said, “The pump don’t work since the vandals stole the handle.”

 But these speakers pay their bills by selling water and they can only afford to bang the conservation drum so hard.  They do a pretty good job at seamlessly making our water plentiful and cheap and not privy to the slings and arrows of outrageous climate.  But they sugarcoated our Severe Drought as Moderate and called for El Nino to save the day, the Great Salt Lake and the Colorado River.  It’s all good, till it isn’t. 

 We figured out years ago; that runoff from the Weber and the Provo rivers peak now in May, instead of June, has done so since 2000, and this year it peaked in April.  Both similar river basins deliver 321 acre-feet per year less, above diversion points, and have been for 120 years.  That is enough water for 1 million people, or one big lake.  We knew this was coming, we saw this happening, but we do not act until it is a crisis.  We are looking optimistically at our exponential climate and water issues with linear solutions.  “We don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

 Isn’t it ironic that our second most valuable natural resource, behind air, which belongs to everybody and nobody, is being squandered because demand is high, supply is low, and the price of it is too cheap.  Water is distributed by the state, in a socialized manner, to those who want and need it first. The commodity is actually free! So, people are growing hay in Utah at 8000 feet, cotton in Arizona and rice in California, because they were first, while downstream users go thirsty.  The original system was set up to promote western growth and dependable economic development, order and certainty through the beneficial benevolence of the State Engineer.  It worked.

 Now the only way to really influence water use, human nature of fear and greed, or Game Theory and the Tragedy of the Commons is to charge what water is worth, not what it costs.  The capitalist system and market economy is needed to promote conservation and wise use of our water resources, where the age-old system of Prior Appropriation cannot.  It’s contradictory that we need capitalism to justly distribute a social resource for the public good. 

 Things are changing faster than we thought.  The Great Salt Lake and our regional rivers are drying up.  But the State did away with the Public Welfare requirements of Water Rights this year, so they can build more data centers and shirk responsibility for shrinking lakes and rivers.  That clause may have allowed or forced them to give every water user a haircut and devote enough water or the public good of avoiding toxic dust storms.  But eventually the State and the Feds will come in and buy up water they already own and control or direct it to where it will do the most public good.  We are capitalizing personal profits and socializing public expense. 

 Perhaps farmers can use less water to grow hay and sell that saved water for the lake.  Dry farming does not have to be binary, yes or no; it can be a scaled usage and maybe we just buy the anemic third crop water. I don't know whether the Feds or State could afford all that saved water for the lake.  Or as the price goes up, market forces could make water too valuable to squander on low-income crops.

 I would call our water situation Severe instead of Moderate now and impose the preordained 40% restrictions because of our physical predicament and to impress upon the public the severity of our situation.  My position may seem harsh, but I feel the middle is defined by the extremes in these situations and we can no longer afford to be naive or cautiously optimistic.  Appropriate cutbacks should be then enforced because it is better to ere on the side of conservation than profligate use.  “Even a blind man knows when it’s not raining.”