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
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6 — Friday, February 1, 2019
Arts
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