By David Alfred Bywaters
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
02/01/19

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

02/01/19

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Friday, February 1, 2019

ACROSS
1 They may be 
scraped off in 
bars
6 Hamlet’s “A little 
more than kin, 
and less than 
kind,” e.g.
11 Cut short
14 Atlas box
15 Got a lode of
16 Half a pair
17 Up-tempo music 
lover’s aversion?
20 Tune
21 Pond fish
22 Sticks in
23 Meeting 
organizers
27 Belg. neighbor
29 Oil-yielding Asian 
tree
30 Large garlic 
relative?
36 Striped animal
38 South side?
39 Time to mark
40 Employed
41 Negative prefix
42 Amazon business
44 Disney Store 
collectible
45 Weakling’s lack
47 Performed well 
enough
48 Classical dance 
minus the lifting, 
throwing, and 
such?
51 Sign of 
elimination
52 Wise __
53 Matured
55 Siamese, 
nowadays
58 One seen on 
most 46-Down
61 Bar valve
62 Genetic 
determinants 
of Southern 
linguistic 
variations?
68 Vietnamese soup
69 Irritant
70 Drudges
71 Polish off
72 Good thing to 
have
73 Totally 
committed, and a 
hint to four puzzle 
answers

DOWN
1 It’s petty but 
misleading

2 Brahms’ 
“Variations 
__ Theme of 
Paganini”
3 Comm. system 
with hand 
motions
4 Mixtures
5 Serious
6 “Moi?”
7 Set, as the sun
8 Collection of 
spies?
9 Make happy
10 Email suffix
11 Investor’s 
alternative
12 Like most 
’80s-’90s 
commercial music
13 Winged collectors
18 Uninteresting
19 Countess’ 
spouse, perhaps
23 Storage areas
24 Old U.K. coin 
worth 21 shillings
25 Swallow up
26 Lighthouse output
28 Facilitated
31 Unhappy 
utterance
32 Everyone, to 
some believers
33 Oppressively 
heavy

34 Colorful songbird
35 Rapped
37 Hasidic teacher
43 Quahog’s 
quarters
46 58-Across homes
49 Oscar winner 
Jannings
50 Puente of 
mambo fame
54 Noodles
55 Class
56 “Yeah, that’s 
funny”

57 Tons
59 Tram loads
60 Masterminded, as 
a complex plan
63 Many an IRS 
employee
64 Made the 
acquaintance of
65 Thickness 
measure
66 __ Gold, Alan 
Cumming’s “The 
Good Wife” role
67 U.S. ID

For as long as I could 
listen to my own music, 
I have loved rock. It all 
began one fateful night 
in seventh grade when I 
discovered the wonders 
of Pandora Music, a free 
radio 
service 
online 
that has since devolved 
in light of giants like 
Spotify. Despite this, the 
website will always hold 
a special place in my heart 
for gifting me a love of 
indie rock and dozens of 
artists that I still listen 
to today. Pandora was 
my constant companion: 
In the obnoxious red 
headphones I carried with 
me everywhere, on the 
shotty Mac desktop that 
sat on my dresser at home, 
blasting 
Grizzly 
Bear 
until the dogs came home. 
It’s where I discovered 
The 
Strokes, 
Feist, 
Interpol, everything that 
has shaped the seemingly 
eternal angst that fuels 
my love for rock. But most 
of all, what I found with 
Pandora’s help was music 
that I could really call 
mine for the first time.
I grew up in a musical 
household, 
my 
dad’s 
baritone echoing through 
the house as he practiced 
his own songs, my mom’s 
soprano yelling lyrics to 
Duran Duran and Roxy 
Music. My sister and I 
watched Shania Twain’s 
“Up” 
tour 
DVD 
an 
estimated million times 
between the ages of five 
and 10. It’s the reason 
I have such a love for 
folk music, for ’80s pop-
rock, for classic bands 
like The Beatles and 
soul artists like Donny 
Hathaway. I am eternally 

grateful to my parents for 
giving me such a crack 
education on what makes 
a good song good and a bad 
song bad. But as much as I 
love that music, as much 
as it has colored my life 
with joy and connection, 
it was never truly my 
own. I never felt the same 
sense of delight that came 
with the discovery of 
contemporary artists I 
loved, ones that I knew 
would keep making music 
for me to enjoy for years 
to come. My first concert 
without adult supervision 
was 
Arcade 
Fire’s 
“Reflektor” tour for my 
15th birthday, a fact that 
I will always be proud of. 
It was my choice, after all, 
even though my mother 
claims that she knew 
their music before they 
broke out of Canada.
And in this feeling of 
ownership over my own 
music taste, the happiest 
surprise I could have 
found was the world of 
women who rock. A few 
months ago, I was given 
Evelyn 
McDonnell’s 
anthology of women in 
music 
titled 
“Women 
Who Rock” by a mentor, 
and it immediately threw 
me back to that moment 

in middle school when 
I realized how big the 
world was for a girl who 
loved music. We tend to 
think of rock, especially 
classic rock, as a huge 
boys club full of illicit 
sex, drugs and thrashing 
drummers. I was afraid 
to go to a punk show until 
just last summer for this 
very reason. But through 
music 
journalism 
and 
books like “Women Who 
Rock,” it’s plain to see 
that this just isn’t the 
truth. Sure, women have 
a harder time breaking 
into the business and 
definitely did in the past 
more so than today, but 
they are there. They’re in 
the crowds at every show 
I go to, in the bathrooms 
of dingy clubs reapplying 
lipstick 
and 
shooting 
smiles to other girls. I 
have made some great 
friends avoiding mosh pits 
at concerts, as we huddle 
on the sides together as 
hyped-up teenage boys 
ram into each other in the 
center of the pit.
It’s 
the 
sense 
of 
togetherness that really 
catapulted 
me 
into 
wanting to write about 
music in the first place, 
as I explored the world 
of rock and slowly began 
to notice just how many 
incredible women painted 
the genre’s history and 
future. There are so many 
women who will forever 
be credited with creating 
rock as it is: Patti Smith, 
Siouxsie Sioux, Joan Jett 
and hundreds more.

DAILY GENDER & MEDIA COLUMN

CLARA 
SCOTT

To women who rock House of Vans quite impressive

Vans: the quintessential skater shoe, 
and a co-opted staple of “alt” kids for 
the last few decades. When one thinks 
of Vans they’re likely to think of the 
angry kid in high school who listened 
to too much A Day to Remember and 
Man Overboard. OK, fair enough, I’m 
just describing my own past, but to the 
company’s credit, they know how to 
put on a damn good pop-up concert/
art installation/skate park hybrid that 
offered Detroiters something a little 
new from the stream of performances 
at the city’s prototypical clubs.
This past weekend (Jan. 24 through 
27) Vans put together a wide variety 
of artists to perform at The Jefferson 
School in Midtown Detroit, which 
featured not only a stage for the 
artists but also classrooms filled with 
art installations and an entire skate 
park set up in the gymnasium on the 
third floor. Have I mentioned that the 
entire experience was free if you took 
the time to snag an RSVP online?
The first night began with sets from 
Detroit’s own Protomartyr and master 
of funk R&B Thundercat, which my 
coworker Jack Brandon covers below.
Friday night featured a private 
after party at Third Man Records for 
VIP ticket holders with DJ sets from 
the University of Michigan’s very 
own Matthew Dear and his label-
mate Shigeto (also from Ann Arbor). 
Attendees didn’t really start to stream 
in until 11:30 p.m., but the artists kept 
a steady stream of their widely praised 
house music during our entire stay. 
Yet, it seemed to function as more of 
a social function for the VIPs, whose 
interest in the beats was transient at 
best. 
Nonetheless, 
the music was killer, 
the bar was open 
and the Third Man 
Records 
storefront 
has always been one 
of the best and most 
unique spots to catch 
live music in Detroit.
Saturday 
brought 
the all-star combo 
of Detroit’s Danny 
Brown 
and 
LA’s 
Joyce Manor. In what 
can either be a stroke 
of luck or genius by 
Vans, the two artists 
were a match made 
in heaven for the alt/
punk crowd — Joyce 
Manor being one of 
the scene’s biggest 

pop-punk bands today and Danny 
Brown’s upbeat, biting hip hop being 
some of the most widely beloved 
among this crowd.
Joyce Manor, whose tracks average 
approximately a minute and a half in 
length, was able to rip through over 
20 songs during their 45-minute set, 
keeping small talk to a minimum and 
the snare drum on blast. As a band that 
started with loveable, albeit messy 
melodies, their growth has begun to 
leak into their back catalogue, opening 
with fan favorite “Heart Tattoo” 
and then deep cut “Derailed,” both 
of which have truly never sounded 
better. They only tossed in a couple 
of newer tracks from 2018’s Million 
Dollars to Kill Me, balancing their set 
with aggressive older tracks among 
the more pop-inflected new ones. 
Since their inception, Joyce Manor 
has been an unstoppable force in pop 
punk, and Saturday’s performance 
absolutely cemented them as some of 
the genre’s greatest.
After my few days at the pop-up, 
I can only hope Vans returns next 
year (hopefully in warmer weather 
as well), taking advantage of all the 
ways Detroit has begun to thrive as 
a cultural center for art and music. 
Transforming 
a 
Midtown 
school 
into a small artsy haven proved to be 
an incredible experience, bringing 
together artists of multiple genres 
and mediums without pretentiousness 
or inaccessibility. With so much to do 
in Detroit now, House of Vans offered 
a small glimpse at everything this city 
has to offer.

— Dom Polsinelli, Daily Arts Writer

In the gym of The Jefferson 
School, Protomartyr’s maturity and 
aggression juxtaposed with a space of 
youth and insecurity recontextualized 
the sound of Protomartyr’s music. 

When I saw them back at The Blind 
Pig a few months ago, I had thought 
them noisy, past prime, but in a 
high school gym, I understood them 
better. So many teenagers want to 
converge with the assertiveness that 
Protomartyr exhibits. The group was 
relentless, enduring. Lead singer Joe 
Casey stands on stage like he’s pissed 
off at you, barking and singing, and 
I could only share that confident, 
this-is-how-I-feel-so-you-will-too 
energy he radiated. Putting this 
post-punk outfit on the stage of the 
gym, performing without any fright 
or indecisiveness turned me into a 
believer. There’s virtue in being strong 
willed. Protomartyr ended their set 
by reminding the audience to be kind 
to those left out in the cold, which 
resonates with truth in this current 
weather. Despite the nostalgia of the 
high school, Protomartyr didn’t let 
the audience indulge too much.
The sobriety of Protomartyr was 
dispelled, 
however, 
the 
moment 
Thundercat 
and 
company 
took 
the stage. He sauntered on stage, 
effortless, bathed in colorful light and 
behind a set sunglasses. They started 
to jam, and the intensity of the first 
set melted away, and the atmosphere 
of the gym felt permeable; so much so, 
actually, that a few members of the 
audience felt it acceptable to heckle 
the House of Vans sound engineers 
during the set. Thundercat paid it 
no mind. The compassion that comes 
with jamming and solos won out, 
in the end, and by the time closers 
“Friend Zone” and “Them Changes” 
played, I felt like I had experienced 
the ends of an extreme: Protomartyr’s 
shouts of self and Thundercat’s easy 
connectedness.

— Jack Brandon, Managing Arts 
Editor

CONCERT REVIEW

DOMINIC POLSINELLI
Daily Arts Writer

Sally Wen Mao’s second poetry collection, 
“Oculus,” looks like an Instagram post. 
The cover of Mao’s new book features a 
mysterious woman hiding behind a Nikon 
and a conveniently in-the-way bunch of lilies, 
a DSLR mirror selfie covered by one of those 
white, centered, all-caps sans-serif titles that 
apparently aren’t out yet.
At first glance, it’s a too-cool-for-chroma 
feat of millennial eye candy. If you find enough 
interest to linger on the image, however, it 
grows ominous. The lens of the camera is nearly 
indistinguishable from its body, swallowing 
up the face of its owner and creating a gaping 
black hole in the focal point of the piece. The 
photographer is distanced from us by the black 
hole of the Nikon, the flowers, the title and the 
supposed mirror, which we can’t even see. The 
disproportional, gaping expanse of gray-blue 
above her head practically yawns “absence.” 
There’s a woman in this image, but it’s hardly a 
portrait.
The poetry in “Oculus” operates like the 
collection’s smart cover design. Mao’s poems 
are front-loaded with detail, flashing handfuls 
of hot topics, aesthetic trends and buzzwords 
that capture the attention of a particular 
audience (millennials and their apologists) just 
enough to create some interpretive distance 
between the reader and the more sinister forces 
at work underneath their poetic Instagram 
filter. In “Mall of the Electronic Superhighway,” 
the “makeup made of mica” and holographic 
guest-star appearances by James Baldwin, 
Whitney and Prince act as a sort of techno-
sensational gloss for what’s actually unfolding 
throughout the poem: The electronic mall is 
“curat[ing] an apocalypse / into a beautiful, 
fashionable memory the texture of the silk 
/ you can’t afford.” In another poem, the 
whitewashing of Asian roles in cinema is 
encoded in a “cyberpunk heaven” where an 
“investigator cyborg” reports a crime: 
 
“someone has implanted Scarlett Johansson’s
face onto mine; hacked my ghost, installed 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
an imposter’s memories, reprogrammed
my optic nerves, diluted my brain into a white
projection…” 

Mao is lifting contemporary tech-jargon 
keywords out of their comfortable Silicon 
Valley context and manipulating their excitable 
aura to illustrate high-gravity social concerns 
for an audience susceptible to the technical. 
The difficult distance between language and 
theme is intentional. Its unsettling affect, Mao 
seems to say, is the consequence of prioritizing, 
entertaining and investing in such flashy 
gadgetry — the consequence of spectacle.
Spectacle, it seems, is the unifying theme 
throughout “Oculus,” and one that Mao 
traces back from the Instagrammable cover 
and glittering technical jargon to cinema; 
specifically, early 20th century Hollywood and 
Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American 
movie star. Wong appears throughout “Oculus,” 
travelling through time and space to reckon 

with her career. Particularly, her work in the 
’20s and ’30s is cast again and again as “the 
strumpet, the starved one” in “nacre and 
chignon,” always fated for “deception, despair, 
death,” roles objectifying and typecasting the 
Asian woman as a sexy cinematic disposable in 
the American imagination.
In “Oculus,” Wong is free. In a Vonnegutian 
feat of imagination, Anna May Wong is unstuck 
in time: She “fl(ies) the hell out in (her) Chrono-
jet,” makes out with Bruce Lee at a space bar 
and talks shit with Josephine Baker in Paris, a 
place to where both movie stars fled to escape 
Hollywood racism.
Almost a third of Mao’s collection is devoted 
to freeing the memory of Anna May Wong. Her 
liberation, however, is necessarily bittersweet. 
While travelling through time, throwing back 
space shots and attending Fashion Week, Wong 
meditates on the portrayal of East Asians in 
the American spectacle of her wake, from 
Long Duk Dong in “Sixteen Candles” to Gwen 
Stefani’s Harajuku Girls.
Through Wong, Mao traces the development 
of the spectacle and its nefarious encryption 

of stereotype from the the big screen to the 
little, merging effortlessly with the collection’s 
simultaneous preoccupation with gadgetry. 
The passive-oppressive power of spectacle is 
now in the hands and pockets of billions, across 
the globe, all the time. It’s exponential.
“Oculus” is brimming with information. 
Beyond her lyric biography of Anna May Wong, 
Mao conscientiously works modern-day media 
and current events into nearly all her poems, 
enough research to necessitate a section of 
explanatory notes at the end of the book, akin to 
an Oxford World Classic. Few volumes of poetry 
boast such backmatter — flipping back and forth 
between text and notes is a style of reading I 
figured highly academic and contained to, say, 
John Whittier-Ferguson’s Joyce class.
But this slim volume of contemporary poetry 
warrants it, too. Prior to discovering the notes 
(my first mistake was assuming they weren’t 
there), I went around telling too many people 
that Mao’s poems had the contemporary 
tendency to come off as handfuls of tasty 
language stylishly cast upon a page, free-verse 
style boo-rah. What I had initially written 
off as ornament, though, is actually far more 
calculated. Entire lines in “The Toll of the Sea” 
are lifted from 1922 silent film of the same 
name, the first Technicolor film ever made, and 
the self-titled “Oculus” is based on the story of 
a young woman in Shanghai who documented 
her suicide on Instagram in 2014. My favorite 
poem in the collection, “Lavender Town,” is 
named after the town in “Pokémon Red and 
Blue” where all the dead Pokémon are buried. I 
was deeply affected by it, even as someone who 
didn’t completely understand the reference 
having not played the games, which suddenly 
cast the poem in a more complex, melancholy 
light.
In this manner, the poems in Mao’s 
collection execute a deft two-punch maneuver. 
They first generate internal spectacle on the 
line, distracting from their local plot with flashy 
words and glittering gadgetry. Then, with this 
in mind, “Oculus” as a whole starts to look 
like spectacle, unveiling the artistic distance 
between the poetry and the very real, very 
serious topics and themes it comments on (the 
text and the notes, if you will). Mao’s poems 
don’t just comment on spectacle — they literally 
perform it, unveiling its subtle machinery and 
complicated network of repercussions right 
there, right on the page.

BOOK REVIEW
‘Oculus’ made me a 
luddite in the most 
wonderful few ways

“Oculus”

Sally Wen Mao

Graywolf Press

Jan. 15, 2019

VERITY STURM
Book Review Editor

JACK BRANDON
Managing Arts Editor

HARDLY ART

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

6 — Friday, February 1, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

