Yesterday my name was wandering with the wind.

Today my name is trying to bleed.

Tomorrow my name will be “Open Eyes”

The fires float like little red ghosts above little white lakes.

The bright darkness of the church only makes their light glow a little stronger.

In that little fire, I see the glimmer of my father’s eyes, as he lit candles just like this in churches still hundreds of miles away.

I see the shine of my sister’s grin as she tells me about her troubles, laughing at herself. Maybe a little too much.

I see the bleach of my brother’s hair, as he sweeps it from one side of his head to the other. The lights of the stage reflecting of it.

Then again, my mother’s eyes. As she lights a virgin de Guadalupe candle in our home, now thousands of miles away.

I clasp my hands together and pray about something else, but feel the candles’ warmth, stretched out before me.

So, today was surprisingly busy and thus I have nothing prepared for the column as the end of the day approaches, so I’m going to write v loosely and call it good. Part of the exercise of publishing more on this blog is being more okay with just letting garbage that I write float on the internet. 

The motorcycle scene in Creed absolutely rules. It’s the kind of earnest goofiness that is absolutely earned, but it also ties Adonis’s journey to a community. He becomes a symbol of all these boys. This is an important beat for him.

Creed is a movie about a lot of things: the inevitability of decay and death, the usual sports movie inspirational stuff, but it’s also about privilege. Adonis didn’t have to fight, he chose to. The movie’s asking if he can uphold the legacy of his father and of Rocky, who both started at the bottom.

This scene is the movie’s implicit answer. Adonis could have chosen an easy life, but he wants a hard one and making that choice makes him a kind of hero. These motorcycle riding youths all run with him claiming him as one of them. 

I don’t know if I have more profound thoughts about this, but it feels absolutely triumphant and exhilarating. 

This is a curiously conflicted album. On the one hand, the 1975 are fully embracing their reputation as a slightly edger boy band. They indulge, writing songs about cocaine addiction, lost love, and sex (including an instrumental entitled Please Be Naked.) It’s the perfect album for feeling moody after a brake-up, because it is glittering and poppy, while longing for love in that boy bandish way. 

But, it’s torn up about it. This sophomore effort brags about wealth and fame while lamenting the distance they provide. The band writes moody pop songs about love, but also try to write about god, capitalism, politics, and real loss. “I’m trying to progress… Instead of selling sex.” Matty Healey sings on “Love Somebody.” He’s caught between the reputation of his band and what he might want it to be. He knows just as well as we do that one of the hit songs from their debut album is straight up called “Sex.” This conflict to its benefit. Anything other than this weird blending of dualities would have come off as dishonest. This album is instead painfully earnest. Especially as it has what is quite possibility one of the worst names of all time (I imagine it is not only your legal right, but your moral obligation to punch anyone who would say the name in full.) 

It’s also too damn long. What would be a solid effort at 40 minutes stretches out over 17 tracks and 74 minutes. Still, even this feels appropriate. It’s a record with the drawn out rambling of a real confession. It’s a album that attempts to paint a real picture of a life and a worldview, rather than putting together a solid wall of impressive tracks. I don’t know if that makes it great, or even good, but it is impactful. These are songs that have stuck with me for over a year and will likely stay in my head for much longer.

I guess what I am saying is, as conflicted as this album is, and as conflicted as I am about it, it won’t leave me alone. It’s messy and longwinded and silly like I am, and it resonants despite everything.

Also UGH is an absolute BOP.

Falling, they wake alone not forgotten.

Called in cages, left for some kind of dead.

Television screams from children sought in

fields and the backs of trucks. They were fed

with the same earth as those that guard here,

under shadow of the same eagle wings,

born into the same catholic fears.

Their cries are met with silence from new kings

of small kingdoms build with blood and toil.

The little tyrants rule over square feet

and call it power. Our blood will boil

over. Redemption will eat you all neat

and clean. Crosses may burn to ash and dust,

but human souls never decay or rust.

Like silken rain

And falling embers

And endless drives.

Like reading next to you

And some empty sky

and old, old days.

*SPOILERS*

Infinity War is a movie about nothing.

Obviously it’s big and bold, with dozens of characters and emotional threads. It’s the culmination of 10 years of tentpole, blockbuster filmmaking. That doesn’t make it about anything more than itself.

For those who haven’t seen it, here’s the gist. Our big bad Thanos is trying to collect all six infinity stones, magic macguffins that will allow him to control everything in the universe. He believes there is a shortage of resources, that will inevitably lead to total destruction. The only way to stop all life from killing itself is to kill half of it. So Thanos traipses around the galaxy collecting each infinity stone, as an assortment of Marvel characters attempt to stop him. Eventually, he collects each one and kills half the universe. We watch as many of the Marvel characters die, including most of the Guardians and Peter Parker. Roll credits.

There are a lot of reasons this doesn’t work, but let’s begin with Thanos. He has some kind of moral justification, a thing that constructs his worldview, that makes him who he is. The film goes to great lengths to humanize him. He is the real protagonist of the film. However, this construction is nakedly artificial. Thanos just says that there’s a scarcity and we have to just take that at face value. As if the thinnest suggestion of logic or a moral compass makes a character meaningful. The Avengers fight because they have to and they have no opportunity to voice any kind of dissenting opinion. There is no dialog, nor any comprehensive or understandable worldview from anyone. My politics are showing, but Thanos makes no mention of class or race or gender and how those things could affect the spreading of resources. His immediate solution is indiscriminate violence. Partway through the film, Thanos sacrifices his daughter Gomorra, the one being he loves, in exchange for one of the infinity stones. This is supposed to be an emotional moment and Josh Brolin certainly sells it. But all we know about this relationship is that Thanos abused and tormented her, to make her into a tool. He even says at one point, “I saved you.” But we know it was only from her own species’s imminent genocide, caused by him. Both within the events of the film itself and in events mentioned, he is frequently needlessly violent and cruel, which feels excessive given that he wants to kill half of the universe. Whatever humanity he is given is not grounded enough to provoke a response.We have no reason to care for Thanos, except for that the film tell us to, with musical cues and plot-points.

This gets into another problem: there is not a female character that is given any reasonable amount of screen time that the film is not cruel to. Gamora dies, Nebula is tortured, Wanda is forced to choose between her lover and the universe and then dies anyway. They have no time to be alive, before they are killed or pushed out as part of a man’s narrative. The film’s other women are barely present. They are weightless, just like the film’s violence. There is so much death in this movie, Thanos’s destruction of untold trillions is mentioned throughout, but none it has any weight. These characters do not die because of the foolishness of pride, the inevitably of violence, or anything else, they die because of the will of some cosmic being far off from them. Admittedly, this could an interesting thematic through-line. There’s a entire subgenre of horror based around this very idea. But the movie doesn’t explore that at all, because that would kill the surprise emotional gut punch at the end. The result is a movie that is almost entirely about itself, about the shock of seeing beloved characters die for no reason, merely to drum up interest for another film that is yet to come.

What really damns this film though, is that it has no worldview. There is no counter to Thanos, no ideological means of resisting him. There are plenty of good character moments in isolation, but they cannot build to anything coherent without an emotional through-line and without concrete ideas of what they are fighting for.

There’s a Kafka quote I’m thinking of, “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it… what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen within us.”

That image of the ax breaking the ice has stuck with me for a long time. Art can bring us something new and shake us from our comfort zones, it can make us more, make us act, make us change. Not all art has to do so, but the best art does it. And in some ways Infinity War clearly wants to. It is so dramatic, kills off so many, makes such a fuss, it wants to mean something! But after all its noise, how does Infinity War want us to act or what does it want us to contemplate? What can we do after Infinity War? The only answer is to buy another ticket.

For a church history project, I have researched a lot about my great-great grandmother, Effie. The book I am reading, compiled and written by my great-uncle Steven, focuses a great deal on how great of a mother and grandmother she was. She and her husband Henry had nine children and treated them with love and affection, following the spirit. There are tales of her humor and love that have moved and surprised me. Her story, beautiful and full as it is, will continue to be told.

Effie also had a sister, Nan. Her story, at least in this telling, is mostly restricted to the early years of Effie’s life, when they traveled and worked together. After Nan found an opportunity to teach in Nevada and they both sold their home to pay for the train costs, there are only two more paragraphs that mention Nan.

They speak for themselves.

“From that time on, Nan and Effie chose very different paths for their lives. Nan was intent on becoming college educated and refined. She worked hard and was later admitted and graduated from Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio (the first college in the country to admit women and black students). She became an excellent teacher. In the process, however, she abandoned her testimony and left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Marriage and children were not her ambition. She didn’t marry until age 31 and left no posterity.

Even though the two sisters loved each other, Nan was vocal in her criticism of Effie’s choice to marry and have a family throughout the rest of their lives. She hurt Effie’s feelings by her proud and poignant rebukes almost every time they met. She was particularly sharp and vocal in her criticism of Effie’s final pregnancy at 41 years of age. (She was too old, had too many children already, etc.) Ironically, it was Effie’s children, mostly the last one, LaVae and her husband Bus, who tenderly cared for “Aunt Nan” in her old age and settled her estate when she passed away.”

To be clear, it is natural that this account focus on Effie, mostly about the author’s grandparents as it is. But the details chosen of Nan’s life paint a picture that is very flattering to Effie, at the expense of Nan. Her independence and life are flattened to be only relevant to Effie. To be fair, the account does praise Nan’s teaching ability and her work ethic, but it also discusses nothing of her inner world. Her friendships, her students, her writing or anything else are not mentioned and her worth is determined in comparison to Effie’s. The nail in the coffin in the last sentence, proving Effie right for having a family, because her children cared for Nan in her final years.

Despite the words about criticism of Effie, Nan has no presence in these paragraphs. We have no words from her to defend herself or to explain the life she lived. Even the phrase, “abandoned her testimony,” is an attempt to flatten and discredit her experience. She is full of blame, and the church or its members hold none at all. In an attempt to find out more about her, I looked her up on family search, there was only one memory. A photo of her as a young woman.

Where is Nan’s voice?

This is a microcosm of much of the problems in LDS culture and organization. Stories that are inconvenient or complex get pushed out, reduced, or erased, whereas stories that fit our narrative is raised up, exemplified, immortalized. We can and we should let the contradictions and problems of our lives out to breath. Nan and Effie chose different lives and most likely hurt each other with their choices and their words. Did Effie ever say the wrong things to Nan? What was their relationship actually like? And was it really defined by Nan’s criticism? The only other thing we do know is that they stayed friends into late in their lives and that they loved each other.

That should be the focus of such discussions. Life is no a contest of wills between who was right and wrong, rather it must be a journey of finding love, charity, and joy. That does not mean erasing hurt or flattening difference, but seeing God’s beauty in it. Ashley Mae Hoiland describes a similar situation in her wondrous book One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly.

“For too long I did not know that my sister had been writing her own spiritual narrative in the place beyond her Mormon upbringing. Too often I had been so intent on helping her reclaim and fix the old one that I did not stop to consider that she was continuing to do new and exciting work on her own story… there was no insistence that each had to be an active church member to feel the way that God love us all - we felt that love in the space not where religion meets religion, but in the space where our stories unfold to each other. My sister has a story she also wants to tell. One that I want to hear.”

Rather than rebuking or fighting difference, can we embrace it? Can we accept God’s plans for us and make something more out of them? I hope that, in whatever way they could, Effie and Nan did this for each other. Grateful for the love they showed and sacrifices they made, and forgiving of the hurt they caused each other. Whatever happened, Effie and Nan were there for each other. Effie passed her love onto her children, who helped Nan through and beyond the end of her life.

That work, the work of love, is God’s work. And love transcends boarders and boundaries, opens the doors of death, makes who we are. People who truly love, no matter how or whom, are worthy of our trust and our help. Their stories should all be told.