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ACROSS
1 Alan of “Tower
Heist”
5 Partridge family
tree?
9 Eliot’s Bede
13 He shared the
AP Driver of the
Century award
with Andretti
14 Consumed
16 Con __: tempo
marking
17 Museum figure
18 Chat at the
supermarket
checkout?
20 Bigelow offering
22 “Utopia” author
23 Request on “ER”
24 Marsh bird with
uncontrollable
urges?
28 Oldest Japanese
beer brand
29 Discounted by
30 Cut out
31 Trivial amount
33 __ science
37 Paella veggie
38 Way into Wayne
Manor?
41 “Eureka!”
42 Legendary first
name in skating
44 Northwest
Passage 
explorer
45 Cinco times dos
46 Noodle bar order
49 Fulfill
51 Work of a major
opera house
villain?
55 Animal house
56 Pertaining to
57 SHO-owned
cinematic
channel
58 Attract ... or, as
three words,
sequence
change with a
hint about 18-,
24-, 38- and 51-
Across
62 Not at all tough
65 Skye, for one
66 Card worth a
fortune?
67 Stir up
68 Slender
swimmers
69 Sweet tubers
70 Winter coat

DOWN
1 Laughlin in Tex.,
e.g.
2 He often batted
after Babe
3 Like “The Hunger
Games” society
4 Tackle
5 Wood fastener
6 Ringing organ?
7 Physics class
topic
8 Cringe
9 Youngest of the
“Little Women”
10 Article of faith
11 Arcade giant
12 Exxon follower?
15 Guts
19 Giant in little
candy
21 GI’s address
24 Typical Hitchcock
role
25 Celestial bear
26 Take from a job
27 Johannesburg’s
land: Abbr.
28 Finishes (up) the
gravy
32 Former SSR
34 Go ballistic
35 Taking something
badly?
36 Unclear

38 Mismatch
39 __ Coast
40 Repeated word in
the Beatles’ “She
Loves You”
43 National Ice
Cream mo.
45 Aids for romantic
evenings
47 Hedger’s last
words
48 42-Across’
homeland

50 Vietnamese
holiday
51 __ Bauer
52 Part of a song
53 Collectively
54 Anne of comedy
59 Director Craven
60 Danube Delta
country: Abbr.
61 Drying-out 
hurdle
63 __-mo replay
64 Taxus shrub

By Mark McClain
©2017 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
09/15/17

09/15/17

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

RELEASE DATE– Friday, September 15, 2017

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

xwordeditor@aol.com

Classifieds

Call: #734-418-4115
Email: dailydisplay@gmail.com

6A — Friday, September 15, 2017
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

CLASSICAL MUSIC COLUMN

Music as a members 

only club

It’s really not controversial 

to say that classical music has 
a PR problem. As one might 
imagine to be the case for a 
genre several centuries old, 
it’s managed to acquire quite 
a reputation over the years, 
baggage 
generally 
having 

something 
to 
do 
with 
its 

perceived elitism and general 
snobbery. Some of which is 
valid, of course, but mostly 
it’s wildly overblown in the 
popular imagination: At least 
in today’s classical world, for 
every 
tuxedo-toting, 
nose-

thumbing type there’s an equal 
number of open and laid-back 
individuals who just want to 
relax and enjoy making music. 
Naturally the two groups are 
locked in a sort of eternal battle 
for the soul of the genre, and 
invariably the demographics 
of the latter group tend to 
skew younger and the former 
older (though obviously with 
exceptions). 
Much 
of 
this 

isn’t readily visible to large 
segments of the public — 
the days of classical music’s 
skirmishes being fought across 
the culture pages of your 
local newspaper are largely 
over — and honestly it isn’t 
nearly as dramatic as I make 
it sound, but nevertheless this 
vague ideological conflict is 
important, because while the 
genre is nowhere near death 
(no matter what the histrionics 
of the would-be horsemen of 
the cultural apocalypse might 
lead you to believe), its growth 
and appeal are both limited by 
the way it’s perceived.

Sometime in the past (I don’t 

remember where) I referred 
to the programing practices 
of 
most 
major 
orchestras 

as being demonstrative of a 
sort of “antiquated museum 
culture” with a stranglehold 
on the art form — which I 
largely still believe — but that’s 
only part of the problem. Of 
course it’s an issue that most 
orchestras 
overwhelmingly 

program music by mostly male, 
mostly white and mostly dead 
composers. And of course this 
has a lot to do with the culture 
in which the genre developed, 
and it’s been said many times 
before (at this point as almost a 
sort of mantra among the woke 
of the classical community), 
but 
it 
remains 
almost 
as 

relevant as upon its 
first 

utterance. This programing 
disparity is a problem in-and-
of-itself, but one of the other 
issues involved has to do with 
the appearance this reality 
projects. 

Classical 
music, 
perhaps 

more than most genres, suffers 
from being a kind of members-
only club. Or, at least it suffers 
from those who would make 
it so. There is a particular 
demographic who would pick 
up my column, read “classical 
music is elitist,” and respond 

“good.” For a variety of reasons 
— its long history of patronage 
by European aristocracy, the 
expense involved with large-
scale musical presentations, 
dependence 
on 
wealthy 

donors, etc. — classical music 
has a strong association with 
the 
economic 
and 
societal 

elite, and for those who might 
seek to somehow differentiate 
themselves 
from 
everybody 

else, it can serve as a useful, 
class-marked area of interest. 

Consequently, 
concert 

production can often take on a 
character of conservatism and 
passive exclusion. Usually it’s 
small things, like dirty looks 
directed at someone who claps 
between movements, a mild 
distaste for the neophytes who 
haven’t learned the rituals, 
but cumulatively it creates an 
atmosphere that isolates the 
art form from the world at large 
and stifles its engagement with 
contemporary society. More 

often than not it seems that 
the musicians themselves (at 
least in my experience) are 
discontent with this state of 
affairs, and it’s more a product 
of the patrons and/or donors, 
but the developments in this 
war of ideas will likely provide 
the future direction of the 
genre.

Part 
of 
this 
ideological 

combat broke out into the 
foreground of a few very 
particular and niche online 
communities 
last 
weekend. 

Two Facebook groups, one 
the much older “Pretentious 
Classical Music Elitists” and 

the other the younger “Prelude, 
Fugue, 
and 
Shitpost,” 
got 

into a little scuffle over the 
stuffiness of classical music. 
Doubtless you can sort out 
where the battle lines were 
drawn. But these two groups 
are 
fascinating 
because 

they serve as almost perfect 
archetypes of the two schools 
of thought. The former’s name 
was originally meant to be 
tongue-in-cheek, but over the 
years it seems as if many of 
its members didn’t quite pick 
that up. There is plenty of 
valuable musical discussion 
to be had there, and there are 
lots of subsections within it 
of interest, but on the whole 
its tastes tend to constitute 
a 
staid 
and 
conventional 

veneration of the Classical and 
Romantic eras, coupled with 
an embrace of the “elitist” title 
and a certain looking-down 
on other musical genres. This 
rubbed the vaguely anarchistic 
members of PFS the wrong way, 
and they began a campaign 
inside PCME to shitpost in 
exaggerated, imitation PCME 
manner in order to knock the 
other group down a peg. 

PFS is a curious bunch: 

Mostly students at university or 
conservatory, they constitute a 
kind of anti-elite elite, that is 
to say, they’re not not elitists, 
but their elitism is directed 
towards the breaking down 
of old systems of thought, and 
their musical tastes tend to be 
an aesthetic free-for-all. In a 
certain sense they remind me 
of some of the American and 
British communists of the ’30s, 
the anti-bourgeois bourgeois 
intellectuals 
common 
at 

literary cafés and universities 
before everyone realized that 
Stalin was a homicidal maniac 
who only cared about his own 
power.

The meme war was brief, 

and retribution was swift: 
deletions, bannings, the lot. It 
was mostly over in a weekend. 
Ridiculous as it was, though, 
the 
event 
says 
something 

interesting about the place 
that classical music culture 
(particularly among the young) 
is in today. If the young in PFS 
are any indication, the genre 
is due for its own Glasnost 
and Perestroika, and perhaps 
this will lead to a wider 
appeal. In certain modes of 
thinking, there is a conflation 
of seriousness of the self with 
seriousness of the art. If you 
hold yourself too cheaply, the 
thinking goes, then the art 
you make will come out cheap 
as well. And perhaps there’s a 
certain truth in that, but at the 
same time, if you take yourself 
too seriously in any art form 
there’s a very real danger that 
it will implode in on itself and 
become 
directionless. 
And 

that’s the quickest path to 
irrelevancy.

DAYTON 

HARE

‘Marie Curie’ is not as 
inspiring as its subject

FILM

“Marie Curie: The Courage of 

Knowledge” is all grace. Filled 
with soft colors, a delicate 
score and a subtly compelling 
lead performance by Karolina 
Gruszka 
(“Salvation”), 
the 

story drifts gently through 
the brilliant scientist’s life, 
floating along through her 
most intimate moments. We 
follow Curie through the death 
of her husband, her greatest 
discoveries, her eventual affair 
and her lifelong struggle to 

be recognized by the brutally 
male-dominated 
scientific 

community. Gruszka’s Curie 
is icy, her face impassive 

and unreadable but for a few 
moments of raw emotionality 
that 
peek 
through 
the 

necessarily 
hard 
facade. 

There’s a quiet vulnerability 
to 
her 
performance 
that 

grounds the otherwise airy 
and ethereal film. But there’s 
a fundamental dissonance at 
the heart of the movie. “Marie 
Curie” has a lot it wants to say 
about love, curiosity, science 
and life’s trials — but it’s so 
self-consciously artful that it 
ends up saying very little at 
all. It’s a very pretty film, but 
its substance is lost in all the 
paper-thin, gossamer beauty. 

ASIF BECHER
Daily Arts Wrtier

There is a 
particular 

demographic who 

would pick up 

my column, read 
“classical music 
is elitist,” and 
respond “good”

“Marie Curie: 
The Courage of 

Knowledge”

Society for Arts, 

The

Michigan Theater

‘Marie Curie’ is a film that attempts to say a lot but fails 
in doing so, coming off as self-absorbed and insubstantive

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

It was recently announced 

that 
Nike 
would 
be 

collaborating with Off-White, 
one of the hottest streetwear 
brands 
around. 
This 

collaboration comes only a few 
weeks after Nike ended their 
partnership 
with 
VLONE, 

another popular streetwear 
brand, after sexual assault 
allegations 
surrounding 

its co-founder, A$AP Bari, 
surfaced. 
The 
collection 

will feature familiar Nike 
sneaker silhouettes with an 
added twist from Off-White 

mastermind, 
Virgil 
Abloh. 

None 
of 
the 
designs 
are 

particularly groundbreaking: 
The shoes are simply popular 
models (Jordan 1s, Blazers, Air 
Prestos, etc.) with the word 
“AIR” printed on one side and 
the branding “OFF-WHITE 
for NIKE / (Insert Model 
Name 
Here) 
/ 
Beaverton, 

Oregon USA / c. 2017” on the 
other.

Collaborations like this one 

help draw attention to existing 
Nike models, an initiative 
that’s extremely important as 
Nike continues its competition 
with other sneaker brands. 
Even though these sneakers 
will be released in scarce 

numbers, 
the 
collaboration 

will bring consumers’ eyes to 
the existing shoes that Nike 
offers as an alternative for 
those who fail to cop. Soon 
you’ll 
see 
people 
wearing 

Nike’s VaporMax or Air Presto 
sneakers as a “poor man”’s 
Nike x Off-White.

If 
you’re 
interested 
in 

picking up a pair of the 
sneakers, good luck (unless 
you’re willing to pay $1000+). 
These sneakers are guaranteed 
to sell out instantly and be 
resold at 5-10 times the price. 
If you somehow manage to 
get a pair, consider buying a 
lottery ticket, because you 
must be quite lucky.

NARESH IYENGAR

Daily Arts Wrtier

STYLE

OFF-WHITE

Nike releases sneaker 
collab with Off-White

HEY YOU.

ARE YOU A NERD WITH AN 
UNHEALTHILY LARGE VINYL 

COLLECTION?

If you are, join arts!

Email arts@michigandaily.com for more info

