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Call: #734-418-4115
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ACROSS
1 Temporary
shelter
5 Boeing product
8 Blue hue
13 Decor finish?
14 Mediocre
15 Stuffy-sounding
16 Comparatively
frugal
18 Apple products
19 Prepares to sail,
maybe
20 Common fall
hiree
22 Extinct emu-like
bird
23 Campus military
org.
25 Member of the
flock
29 Word with light or
shade
31 Idle
33 Tavern offering
34 For example
36 Baldwin of
“Beetlejuice”
37 Go beyond
fudging
38 Same old same
old
39 Tussaud’s title:
Abbr.
40 Tried to outrun
42 Poetic
contraction
43 NFL sportscaster
Collinsworth
45 Sticks for drum
majors
46 Mo. or Miss.
47 Rwanda native
48 Desktop graphic
49 “Word Freak”
author Fatsis
51 President
between Tyler
and Taylor
53 To boot
56 More than
annoys
58 Name of 14
popes
60 Mimicry
63 Sign, as a
contract
65 Actress
Zellweger
66 Looked at
67 Store in a hold
68 Finishing nails
69 Poll fig.
70 “Around the
Horn” channel

DOWN
1 Jazz pianist Art
2 Prefix with
musicology
3 Bell-shaped
graphic
4 Charlie’s Angels,
e.g.
5 Support beam
6 L.A.-to-Tucson
dir.
7 Legal wrong
8 Treat in a box
with a circus
wagon design
9 Speedy
10 “Force Behind
the Forces” tour
gp.
11 “Totally cool,
dude!”
12 Raised railroads
14 Barbershop
bands?
17 District attorney’s
filing
21 Couture
magazine
24 Figuratively,
stops talking ...
or, literally, what
are hidden in this
puzzle’s four
longest answers
26 Dissatisfied sorts

27 Not of this world
28 Prerequisites
30 “Caught you!”
32 Spanish cheer
34 Plaintiffs
35 Start of a fitness
motto
39 Cambridge univ.
41 Words on Volume
One, maybe
44 Mystic character
45 Handed the
check, say

50 Cited, in a way
52 4-Down plus five
54 In first place
55 “All or Nothing”
boy band
57 Leak slowly
59 __-en-scène:
stage setting
60 Wall St. trader
61 Pricing word
62 __ nutshell
64 Home of LGA
and JFK

By Lonnie Burton and Nadine Anderton
©2016 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
11/23/16

11/23/16

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

RELEASE DATE– Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

xwordeditor@aol.com

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6A — Wednesday, November 23, 2016
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

The 
year 
is 
2100. 
After 

discovering 
the 
root 
of 

intelligence, 
humans 
have 

created 
not 

just 
artificially 

intelligent 
androids, 
but 

truly 
intelligent 

androids.

Not only that, but 

these androids, like 
ourselves in the current day, have 
begun to struggle with cell-phone 
addiction and an obsession with 
social media. A small subset of 
these anthropomorphic, sentient 
robots have begun making music 
as a way of both embracing and 
denouncing the reliance of the 
general populace on technology.

This is the music that London-

based 
label 
PC 
Music 
has 

produced since its founding in 
2013. The formerly independent 
label, now “partnered” — the 
nature of this partnership hasn’t 
been clarified to the public — with 
Columbia Records, is fueled by 
absurdity. It is the manifestation 
of pop taken to its logical 
extreme, making it, in some ways, 
more social experiment than 
sonic experiment, if the two can 
be separated.

Sonically, 
the 
PC 
Music 

mindset 
is 
one 
that 
aims 

for 
instant 
gratification 
and 

more-or-less 
unprecedented 

experimentation 
in 
equal 

measure. 
The 
immediately 

melodic, dance-floor-ready beats 
of A.G. Cook and label-member 
Danny L. Harle juxtapose the 
abrasive 
electro-grunge 
of 

Felicita, 
whose 
most 
recent 

EP feels more like a discarded 
Oneohtrix Point Never release 
than anything else the label has 
released to date.

Though tracks vary widely in 

terms of melodic accessibility 
and the particular organization 
of sound, the sound itself has 
remained constant through PC 

Music’s brief lifetime. Every song 
has a distinctly plastic finish, and 
synths reign supreme, with songs 
generally featuring pitch-shifted, 
heavily auto-tuned, and usually 
female voices; however, PC Music 

has become less 
insistent on these 
features 
with 

the singles on PC 
Music, Vol. 2.

If 
PC 
Music, 

Vol. 1 was a work 
of 
introduction 

and self-discovery, 
then 
PC 
Music, 

Vol. 2 is label-founder Cook (and 
company) in full stride. With 
features by Noonie Bao and Carly 
Rae Jepsen — neither aggressively 
auto-tuned — it feels now more 
than ever as though PC Music is 
on the cusp of breaking into the 
pop mainstream.

The irony of this, of course, 

is 
that 
PC 
Music 
serves 

fundamentally as a criticism 
of pop music, the genre it 
simultaneously and unashamedly 
channels. 
From 
the 
self-

indulgent, overtly sexual work of 
GFOTY (Girlfriend of the Year) 
to 
Hannah 
Diamond’s 
more 

introspective singles, it’s clear 
that PC Music is aiming to craft 
some sort of cultural and social 
criticism. Like the initials “PC” in 
the label’s name, however, we the 
listeners are left more or less in 
the dark as to “what it all means.”

While the mystery surrounding 

the label’s name itself seems 
more or less purely aesthetic, 
PC Music is truly enigmatic in 
nature. Early in the collective’s 
lifetime, there was significant 
media speculation about whether 
Hannah Diamond was and is 
a real person, rather than just 
a 
hyper-polished 
computer-

generated avatar. Many of the 
label’s 
contributors’ 
identities 

— such as Felicita, easyFun, and 
Life Sim, just to name those on 
this particular compilation — are 
left ambiguously up in the air 
and, especially early in the label’s 
existence, Cook was notoriously 
stingy about giving interviews.

Perhaps 
this 
reluctance 

to engage and interact with 
the media was just one more 
contributor 
to 
some 
yet-

unclarified statement. Perhaps 
Cook simply wanted to be sure 
the project had secured itself 
before exporting anything other 
than music. Whatever the case 
may have been, on Vol. 2 this label 
seems either more self-assured 
or more aware of its goals. With 
the 
respective 
successes 
of 

Harle’s “Broken Flowers” and 
Cook’s “Beautiful,” PC Music was 
forced to open itself up, and its 
recent collaboration with Charli 
XCX and current partnership 
with 
Columbia 
Records 
are 

strong indications that they are 
ready to do just that. Now, PC 
Music is balancing accessibility 
— “Supernatural,” “Monopoly,” 
“Broken Flowers” — with more 
pointed commentary such as 
“Fade Away,” “Poison,” “Hi.”

On “Fade Away” and “Hi,” the 

most lyrically valuable tracks 
of PC Music, Vol. 2, Hannah 
Diamond reflects on relationships 
in the modern day and age. On 
“Fade 
Away,” 
she 
questions 

whether “it’s me you like / Or the 
way I make you feel / Alive / But 
so dead inside,” while “Hi” finds 
Diamond playing one half of a 
relationship conducted purely 
over the internet. Here, in some 
of the most poignant lyrics in 
a PC Music song to date, she 
questions how people choose to 
portray themselves in a certain 
way online: “Feels like I miss you 
/ But is it really the real you? / You 
say you’re as real as it gets / What 
do you mean?”

PC Music is still young, and it’s 

difficult to say with any degree 
of certainty who the producers 
behind the music — Harle, Cook, 
GFOTY and Diamond — really 
are, but with the release of PC 
Music, Vol. 2, one thing is certain: 
these young Londoners either 
embody the future of pop music 
or are the earliest heralds of its 
demise as we know it. Whichever 
turns out to be the case, it’s hard 
not to be excited.

‘PC Music’ is the sound of 
futuristic, pure pop power

SEAN LANG

Daily Arts Writer

The London-based label aims for both satire and pleasure

ALBUM REVIEW

FILM REVIEW

Sometimes it can feel like 

moviegoers 
are 
divided 
into 

two camps: the 
casual viewer and 
the 
enlightened 

critic. 
Popular 

knowledge tells us 
viewers hate the 
pretentiousness 
of the critics and 
critics turn their 
noses down at the 
crass sensibilities of the audiences. 
Wars have raged (okay, not really, 
but many angry articles have been 
written over this, so the point still 
stands) over who movies are truly 
made for — the analysts or Joe 
Normal.

At their worst, most strawman 

form, 
casual 
viewers 
deride 

any form of analytic thought 
or 
non-mainstream 
cinema 

as 
pretentious, 
and 
critics 

dismiss popular movies at the 
outset simply because of their 
widespread appeal. 

This problem comes to a head 

with foreign films. Derided as 
boring and deeply depressing, 
they’re often thought to cater 
only to the tastes of the most 
pretentious of moviegoers, critics 
and that one dude in your English 
class who insists on calling movies 
“films” and has really strong 
opinions about how music died 
the day Britney Spears released 
her first single. Some aspects of 
this perception are fairly earned. 
Captial-F 
Foreign 
Films 
can 

very easily be dull, meandering, 
pretentious and sad. But of course, 
so can American films. 

No matter where the film 

originated, though, the idea that 
a movie is somehow more artful 
or important just because it’s sad, 
slow or subtitled is mostly just 
nonsense. Genre is irrelevant. It 
can be an action movie, a rom-
com or a character drama — as 
long as it’s genuinely empathetic 
and engaging to its audience, the 

movie is functioning in exactly the 
way it’s supposed to.

This being said, the Polish 

film “America” is, at first glance, 
a 
compilation 
of 
everything 

pretentious and grating about 

foreign 
films. 

Directed 
by 

Aleksandra 
Terpinska 
(“Czech 
Swan”), 

“America” 
tells 

the story of two 
teenage girls, Anka 
(Marta Mazurek, 
“Warsaw 
by 

Night”) and Justine (Aleksandra 
Adamska, “Miasto 44”). They 
live in a small Polish town called 
America, 
where 
they 
spend 

their days making up dances 
to American pop songs and 
reenacting scenes from “The 
Matrix.”

Fed up with their negligent 

parents, the girls decide to run 
away from home. They hitchhike 
and are picked up by a series of 
increasingly scummy men, to 
the point where Justine is nearly 
raped in a truck stop motel called 
“The Las Vegas Hotel.”

Make no mistake, this is a heavy 

and dark film. Within the first 
three minutes, we learn that Anka 
and her mother frequently have to 
clean her father up after he’s made 
a drunken mess of himself, and 
that he comes into Anka’s room 
every night and sexually abuses 
her. 

So yes, “America” certainly 

fits the notions most apply to 
foreign films: painful and sad 
against a bleak grey setting. 
And yet, “America” is entirely 
unpretentious, 
lovingly 
made 

and tells a genuinely engaging — 
even haunting — story. Terpinska 
clearly understands that heavy 
subject matter on its own doesn’t 
make a movie meaningful, so 
every frame in the film is carefully 
considered for creating maximum 
emotional effectiveness. In other 
words, “America” is not for critics 
or average moviegoers — it’s for 
everyone.

Movies like “America” (or 

at least, movies that deal with 
such weighty subjects) are often 
voyeuristic and detached, almost 
clinical in their portrayal of 
horrific events. It’s the idea of 
filming a “low” subject matter 
in a highfaluting way, making 
violence, 
pain 
and 
suffering 

appear beautiful and digestible 
by virtue of emotional distance 
between the audience and what is 
happening on screen.

This isn’t necessarily a bad way 

to approach a story, and it works 
really well in a lot of movies — it’s 
essentially the thesis statement 
that 
drives 
David 
Fincher’s 

filmography. And yet, it’s a breath 
of fresh air to find a movie that 
places the audience directly in the 
minds of the characters so that we 
feel what they feel. 

The empathy comes through 

the details of Anka and Justine’s 
friendship. 
The 
outer 
space 

posters in Anka’s bedroom, the 
galaxy print of Justine’s jacket, 
the familiar way they shove each 
other around, the gangster rap 
they listen to — these details are so 
delicate and precise that you can’t 
help but hope for the best for Anka 
and Justine. We see every nuance 
of their jittery excitement when 
they’re standing at the bus stop 
about to leave America; we feel 
every spark of their fear at their 
betrayal. There’s no pretension 
here and no exploitation. Just the 
characters, their feelings and our 
feelings.

“America” is a movie about 

yearning. Justine and Anka want 
more than anything to leave their 
world and live better lives, but 
their hearts are broken over and 
over by all the people they thought 
they could trust the most — their 
parents, the nice young man who 
took them in and even each other. 
It’s such an intimate, personal 
story, but in a way, it’s not unlike 
our country’s, still reeling from 
the events of the last few weeks. 

They wanted the world, and all 

they got was America. They’re not 
the only ones.

ASIF BECHER
Daily Arts Writer

Polish ‘America’ is artful, crushing

Statistically 
speaking, 
Joe 

Jonas has had a pretty good 
year. 
After 

brainstorming 
dance-rock band 
DNCE with now-
drummer 
Jack 

Lawless, 
Jonas 

has become the 
front 
man 
of 

the 
four-person 

group. 
Joined 

by guitarists Cole Whittle and 
JinJoo Lee, DNCE released its 
debut single “Cake by the Ocean” 
in September 2015. Since then, 
DNCE has performed during 
FOX’s television special “Grease: 
Live” and opened for Selena 
Gomez during her Revival Tour.

DNCE’s 
self-titled 
debut 

album showcases 14 tracks that 
range from slow acoustic ballads 
to pop-infused dance anthems. 
Opening 
with 
aptly 
named 

“DNCE,” Jonas chants “D-N-
C-E” a cappella before launching 
into a groovy, funky dance 
vibe. Making good use of their 
branding, the bulk of the song 
consists of the lyrics, “Won’t you 
come on D-N-C-E with me.”

“Doctor 
You” 
focuses 
on 

bass guitar and quick lyrics to 
emphasize its sexy club sound. 
But the song speeds up as it 

progresses and falls into a rut of 
sounding extraordinarily similar 
to all the others on the album. 
The chanting in the background 
of the chorus, “Who call the doc? 
/ Said you gonna call the doc?” is 

the only thing to 
distinguish it from 
the rest.

“Blown” 

featuring 
Kent 

Jones, 
continues 

the same musical 
themes, 
building 

up an intensity 
until 
the 
beat 

drops to make way for Jonas’s 
lyrics: “I’ll never let you go / My 
sweet tooth is too strong.” Jones’s 
rap verse adds a new dimension 
to an otherwise cliché sound, but 
it still sounds like a song from the 
closing scene of a Disney Channel 
original movie.

Segueing into “Good Day,” 

the track starts simple and 
acoustically with just claps and 
the mantra that “Today is going 
to be a good day.” The whole song 
stays fairly low and monotone 
throughout the verses, failing to 
progress beyond a happy song to 
wake up to in the morning.

“Almost” is the first slow song 

of the album, transitioning it to 
more introspective and relaxed 
lyrics. Jonas showcases both his 
emotions and his vocal range as 
he sings, “Baby, we were good / 
We were almost perfect,” while 

light vocalizations harmonize in 
the background. “Almost” never 
strays too far from the baseline 
set early on, but gives the listener 
something other than upbeat 
dance hymns to enjoy.

“Naked” 
opens 
with 
an 

aggressively 
electronic 
intro 

and continues to maintain the 
dance-based electric tones. Jonas 
speaks the verses’ lyrics and 
shows off his impressive falsetto 
in the chorus when he sings, “I 
wanna be naked with you / At 
least I’m telling the truth.”

The second acoustic track, 

“Truthfully,” 
tugs 
at 
the 

heartstrings and narrates the 
ups and downs of falling in love 
again. It’s full of cliché metaphors 
and simple phrases such as, 
“Speaking truthfully, I love you 
more than you love me. As DNCE 
channels its inner Taylor Swift, 
“Truthfully” recounts universal 
feelings of love and loss.

Closing 
with 
“Unsweet,” 

DNCE ends the way it began. 
With a few flashes of greatness, 
DNCE never strays from what it 
knows best. As the songs begin 
to blend together, the album 
starts to sound like one long 
dance hymn. With a little more 
initiative and experimentation, 
DNCE could have set itself 
apart from the rest but instead 
falls short of groundbreaking 
and leaves the listener feeling 
slighted.

CATHERINE BAKER

Daily Arts Writer

A-

PC Music, Vol. 2

Various Artists

Columbia Records

C+

DNCE

DNCE

Republic Records

A-

“America”

Michigan Theater

Polish Film Festival

REPUBLIC

Time to get a new watch.
DNCE’s debut can’t fulfill potential

Joe Jonas hates variety in his music almost as much as vowels

ALBUM REVIEW

