6 — Tuesday, February 26, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

By Peter Koetters
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
02/26/19

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

02/26/19

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Tuesday, February 26, 2019

ACROSS
1 Brewery in 
Golden, Colorado
6 Fast-food 
package deal
11 Color variant
14 Gelatin garnish
15 French word of 
farewell
16 24-hr. cash 
source
17 *Wonderland 
feline known for 
disappearing
19 Nonstick spray 
brand
20 “Hints from” 
columnist
21 Weaken from 
disuse
23 Manhattan area 
to the right of 
Central Park, on 
maps
25 __ a soul
26 Corp. symbols
27 Stopgap remedy
31 Small jazz 
groups
34 “Designing 
Women” actress 
Delta
35 Senate approval
36 One of a bath 
towel pair
37 Rocky 
outcroppings
38 Capone facial 
mark
39 Prefix with dermis
40 Laundry slide
41 7-Down and such
42 Virus-transmitting 
insect
44 __ Francisco
45 Sting or smart
46 Musical wrap-ups
51 Free sample 
restriction
54 Title savant in 
a 1988 Oscar-
winning film
55 Invest in
56 *Da Vinci’s “La 
Gioconda,” to 
some English 
speakers
58 Scratch (out)
59 Dog-__: folded at 
the corner
60 In finer fettle
61 “Absolutely”
62 Swiped
63 Gothenburg 
native

DOWN
1 Secret stash
2 “Straight Outta 
Compton” actor 
__ Jackson Jr.
3 Some German 
cars
4 Italian rice dishes
5 Religious rifts
6 Gave a darn
7 Neruda wrote 
one to common 
things
8 Layered mineral
9 ’50s-’60s 
nonconformists
10 Run faster than
11 *“Have a nice 
day” graphic
12 Great Salt Lake 
state
13 TV award
18 Egyptian fertility 
goddess
22 “Mork & Mindy” 
planet
24 Largest ring of 
latitude
28 Hard-to-ignore 
impulse
29 Start of Popeye’s 
existential 
maxim
30 Gen-__: post-
boomers

31 The bad guys
32 Auctioned auto, 
perhaps
33 *Celtic peepers 
of song
34 Champagne 
choice
37 Idle talk
38 Kin by marriage
40 Oversees, as a 
gallery collection
41 Social outcasts
43 “__ Sera, Sera”
44 Stretch across

47 Slowly wear 
down
48 Expression 
shared by the 
answers to 
starred clues
49 Relaxed, as 
rules
50 Hunter’s trap
51 Do as you’re told
52 Zap for dinner
53 Courageous one
57 Country singer 
Tillis

Saturday night and Sunday 
afternoon the Detroit Symphony 
Orchestra brought to a close 
their 2019 midwinter festival, 
“American 
Panorama,” 
with 
a program of music by three 
American minimalist composers, 
Steve Reich, Philip Glass and 
John 
Luther 
Adams. 
Aptly 
titled “Maximum Minimal,” the 
program embraced one of the 
defining currents in American 
classical music of the last half 
century.
It’s 
an 
interesting 
theme, 
and one that is ripe with both 
possibilities 
and 
challenges. 
Minimalism, after all, is a term 
that emcompasses a wide swath 
of 
composers 
and 
aesthetics, 
and programing a single concert 
dedicated to it would necessarily 
require the omission of some of 
the most interesting and evocative 
music to fall under that category. 
To do true justice to the theme one 
would really need to dedicate an 
entire festival to minimalism itself, 
rather than one concert as part of 
a larger festival — but under the 
circumstances the DSO and Music 
Director Laurate Leonard Slatkin 
have done reasonably well with 
the programming, in the sense 
that the three pieces selected for 
the performance touch on some of 
the most prominent trends within 
minimalism.
The 
“American 
Panorama” 
festival itself, of course, was quite 
an undertaking.
“This is the sixth (midwinter 
festival) that I’ve done,” Slatkin 
told me when we spoke over 
the phone last week. Initially 
conceived as a way to draw in 
audiences during a traditionally-
lean 
month 
for 
orchestra 
attendance, the DSO began with 
endeavors such as performing all 
nine of Beethoven’s symphonies 
over the course of a few weeks. 
Last year the orchestra undertook 
a French music themed festival. 
And this year, American music — 
a longtime interest of Slatkin’s — 
came to the fore.
“What we have learned is that 
this period of time, these three 

weeks in February, have proved 
to be both artistically satisfying 
and very lucrative in terms of 
being able to attract an audience,” 
Slatkin said.
This year’s festival will likely 
be the last midwinter festival with 
Slatkin at the helm, as he has been 
stepping away from his duties as 
music director.
“I’ll be 75 soon, and it’s a lot of 
work,” Slatkin said. “(But) I wanted 
(my last midwinter festival) to 
be dedicated to American music, 
which makes sense, because it’s 
been one of my passions for years.”
The 
opener 
of 
Saturday’s 
program 
was 
Steve 
Reich’s 
“Clapping 
Music,” 
a 
short 
1972 
composition 
performed 
entirely by clapping. Written for 
two people, “Clapping Music” 
serves as an excellent example 
of rhythmic minimalism, and 
also an early example of Reich’s 
technique of “phasing,” which he 
developed further in subsequent 
compositions. 
Throughout 
the duration of the piece, one 
performer claps a single rhythmic 
line over and over, while the 
other performer claps this same 
rhythmic line except offset by 
one eighth note every eight or 
12 bars. This process continues 
until the performers are once 
again clapping in unison, as in the 
beginning of the piece.
For being such a far cry from 
what one generally expects to 
hear at an orchestral concert, 
the audience received the piece 
enthusiastically, 
many 
people 
leaping to their feet at the end 
of Joseph Becker and Andres 
Pichardo’s 
performance 
on 
Saturday night, which was tight 
and controlled.
The Reich was followed by 
a lessor-known work of Philip 
Glass’s, the “Concerto Fantasy for 
Two Timpanists and Orchestra” 
(which, as an aside, often bears 
striking 
similarities 
to 
music 
from “Mission Impossible”). The 
choice of a timpani concerto is 
somewhat odd, but also bold, 
given the relative historical lack 
of music in that genre. The playing 
on Saturday night’s performance 
was skillful and well-executed, but 
some of the inherent difficulties of 
performing a timpani concerto 

nevertheless shown through. The 
balance between the orchestra and 
soloists was a constant challenge, 
and often it was a strain to hear 
the orchestra over the sheer force 
of the timpani banging away at 
the front of the stage. Which isn’t 
to say the banging wasn’t exciting, 
and indeed the timpani cadenza in 
the third movement was probably 
the most compelling part of the 
piece, as the listener stopped 
being distracted by the fact that 
they couldn’t hear the orchestra 
and could focus on the thrilling 
technique and sensitive touch 
displayed by soloists Jeremy Epp 
and James Ritchie.
Far 
and 
away 
the 
most 
compelling 
performance 
of 
the night, however, fell to the 
last piece of the evening, John 
Luther Adams’s “Become Ocean,” 
a 
meditative 
and 
immersive 
42-minute work for full orchestra 
which, when I spoke with him in 
2015, Adams described as “the 
culmination of years of work 
… (where) the music has been 
leading (him) ... for decades.” Kept 
at a single tempo for the entire 
duration of the work, the orchestra 
is divided physically into three 
groups on stage — the strings, 
the woodwinds and the brass. 
Throughout the course of the 
piece, each of these sections slowly 
fades in and out of prominence, 
each 
playing 
slow, 
repetitive 
patterns and swelling chords that 
imitate the movement of waves in 
the open ocean. Listening to it, one 
feels submerged in the texture, 
floating in its resonance, borne 
aloft by the slow-moving mass of 
its sound. The DSO augmented the 
meditative nature of this listening 
experience 
with 
the 
tasteful 
application 
of 
stage 
lighting, 
applying a separate soft-hued 
color to each orchestra section and 
intensifying or dimming the light 
in accordance with the section’s 
change in volume.
It was a satisfying end to the 
“American Panorama” festival, 
and all the more so because it was 
a concert featuring exclusively 
living 
composers. 
“American 
music,” it seemed to say, “is a thing 
that is alive and among us.” Let’s 
hope that programing like this 
continues to come to the fore.

DSO takes on 
‘Become Ocean’

DAILY CLASSICAL MUSIC COLUMN

DAYTON HARE
Daily Classical Music Columnist

Since her successful 2017 debut 
with SweetSexySavage, Kehlani’s life 
has shifted into the media spotlight. 
From a (disproven) cheating scandal 
involving 
ex 
Kyrie 
Irving 
and 
PartyNextDoor to scrutiny over her 
sexual orientation, Kehlani’s love life 
has garnered particularly invasive 
attention. She’s faced a lot of love and 
a lot of heartbreak over these last few 
years, and none of it was private. For 
these reasons her announcement of 
her pregnancy in October came as a 
shock. “i don’t want to hide,” she wrote 
in her twitter announcement. “i want 
to walk around belly out everywhere.”
A lot of these ideas manifest 
themselves into her most recent release 
While We Wait. If SweetSexySavage 
introduced her as a strong-willed, 
sexy and intelligent woman to the 
world, 
her 
sophomore 
attempt 
destabilizes this immaculately cool 
image. A nine track mixtape, half of 
it collaborations, shows a less self-
assured Kehlani, more vulnerable. But 
she’s okay with that. And whereas the 
ambition with SweetSexySavage was 
to churn out confident, radio-friendly 
bangers, While We Wait is less lavish, 
making greater use of negative space 
and sparse, wispy instrumentals. It 
feels more genuine this time around.
Sonically, the album is dynamic, 
with its tone, pace and energy scaling 
the board. It finds cohesion in its 
ability to strip away layers from songs 
just as fast as it builds them. It starts 
with the sound of trickling water in 
the intro track “Footsteps” and builds 
from there, a soothing, whimsical 
backbone to every song. This adds 
more character to Kehlani’s artistry, 
providing a greater sense of character 
to her musical identity; despite some 

trivial, superficial ’90s R&B worship, 
tropey genre conventions aren’t too 
prominent.
There’s an elegant deliberation 
to the sound of this album. The 
instrumentation perfectly parallels 
the lyrical content at some points. The 
trickling water from the beginning 
actually ties to a metaphor of a 
relationship slipping away like cupped 
water. There are also points where 
the sounds change the meaning of the 
songs. This is most prominent in “Love 
Language,” a song that details a desire 
to better understand a new partner. 
However, the song carries the cadence 
of a nursery rhyme, suggesting it 
references her situation as a new 
mother.
More than anything, While We 
Wait serves as a snapshot to the 
emotions that tag along the turmoil 

of new changes. Songs like “Nunya” 
are scathing, challenging a former 
lover. “Why you worried ’bout who 
was fuckin’ me?” Yet more endearing 
and personal cuts like “RPG” coexist, 
admitting “you told me I’m beautiful/ 
‘cause I told you you don’t tell me 
enough.” But the album far from 
veers into extremities; it captures the 
elegance of lingering between security 
and doubt despite its meager tracklist. 
“Morning Glory” is a quirkier track, 
with lyrics like “this ain’t BK, you 
can’t have it your way,” dedicated to 
a male partner who may judge her 
appearance 
beneath 
the 
morning 
makeup glam.

That 
being 
said, 
the 
album, 
from a thematic viewpoint, is a bit 
derivative. “Morning Glory,” despite 
its charm, isn’t at all profound in the 
sentiments it conveys. The same goes 
for much of the rest of the album; it’s 
ideas surrounding romantic love are 
shallow and redundant, with constant 
iterations of “take it or leave it” and 
“I’m sorry” attached to nearly every 
song. Despite the length, the concepts 
explored by the album stale not too far 
into it, the second song “Too Deep” a 
subpar echo of “Footsteps.” This isn’t 
to say Kehlani’s ideas and the way she 
expresses them aren’t original — they 
are — she simply misses the mark in 
expressing anything we haven’t heard 
before.
Characteristic for mixtapes — and 
not Kehlani — are the number of 
features on this album. Surprisingly, 
they dodge the trap of cheapening 
the content or serving as any sort of 
promotional boost for any of the artists 
involved (not to say the potential isn’t 
there). The inclusion of Ty Dolla $ign 
on “Nights Like This” adds a duality 
to the album, emphasizing the role of 
bisexual love in Kehlani’s life, as both 
artists croon to the story of a mutual 
female lover. Jazz icon Musiq Soulchild 
on the other hand, is deterministically 
in his element throughout “Footsteps,” 
adding a slick, buttery quality to the 
smooth track. Nonetheless, this isn’t 
to say all collaborations on the album 
proved necessary. Dom Kennedy on 
“Nunya” is forgettable, his verse void 
of the artistic and emotional energy of 
the song.
Overall, While We Wait serves as a 
strong follow up to the brilliance that 
is SweetSexySavage. Despite veering 
away from her traditional sound, her 
sophomore attempt conveys more 
personality and shows potential for 
even more growth as her life and 
understanding of it changes.

‘While We Wait’ redoes Kehlani

DIANA YASSIN
Daily Arts Writer

‘While We 
Wait’

Kehlani

Atlantic

There’s 
something 
wonderfully 
charming 
about 
that perfect cup of coffee. 
For so many of us, coffee is so 
much more than a drink — it’s 
a stirring inside our chest, the 
first taste that graces our lips 
every day, waking us with the 
sun. It is common ground for 
conversation, 
for 
overcoming 
challenges, for wordless displays 
of tenderness and exhausted 
gestures of affection. Coffee is 
not a beverage; it is a necessity, 
it is a tradition, it is a heritage. 
We drink coffee for the jolt and 
the ritual of it all, not just for its 
lovable, distinct flavor. No matter 
how ever changing our worlds, 
coffee is a tradition. Above all, 
coffee is a staple of American 
culture and lifestyle.
For the many who don’t rely 
on a Keurig or, perhaps, a fancy 
espresso machine to bring us a 
morning, mid-afternoon or oh 
shit I’m pulling an all nighter cup 
of Joe, the places that we choose 
to go for coffee, for convenience 
or preference, become part of the 
daily sacrament of java as well. 
There aren’t many strangers 
in our lives that we feel like we 
know as much as local baristas. 
My mom gave me my first cup 
of coffee when I was 12 — a 
sickly sweet, half drunk decaf 
caramel 
macchiato 
handed 
over on a Washington D.C. 
metro, and I’ll never forget that 
moment: the paper cup to my 
lips, the lukewarm temperature, 
that 
masked, 
deep 
flavor. 
I’ve graduated from caramel 
macchiatos and decaf coffees to 
develop a more mature, grown 
up palate for the flavors that can 
be garnered from stand alone 
plain black coffee.
When I’m staring at the menu 
in a coffee shop, I generally 
prefer a single espresso or an 
almond milk cappuccino. I like 
my coffee dark, strong and in 
steady supply, but not unpleasant 
and bitter. I like a cup of coffee 
that cuts to the chase, is poignant 
in flavor and aroma, and leaves 
me feeling warm and bright. 
Sometimes that means walking 

the line between too dark and 
just right, and anyone who can 
fill my mug with that happy 
medium is added to my list of 
favorites. In New Jersey, I have 
two go-to coffee shops, both with 
their own personalities, and they 
always welcome me back with 
open arms and caffeine abound. 
Both shops have a feeling akin 
to coming home, and I always 
gravitate toward them when I’m 
lucky enough to have a break 
from school.
Few 
places 
can 
compare 
to the first coffee shops that 
compelled me to fall in love with 
coffee — not just the beverage, 
but the culture behind it. The 
places where we go for coffee 
say so much about who we are 
as people. They reflect us in our 
most vulnerable form: Monday 
morning pre-coffee, Saturday 
morning post-night out coffee or 
the Tuesday afternoon cup just 
because. Within coffee shops, 
we suddenly feel comfortable 
having serious conversations, 
rekindling relationships, writing 
our deepest prose or most 
enlightening 
poetry. 
Coffee 
culture is one thing, but coffee 
shop culture is another beast 
entirely. Coffee shops need a few 
things: a distinct personality, a 
potential for shared experience 
and a comforting space. On an 
Ann Arbor coffee tour, few spots 
can even compare to the nostalgic 
emotions that fill the cups that 
have warmed my palms in New 
Jersey; however, one settles right 
alongside my beloved hometown 
coffee shops, and takes the cake 
as the best coffee in Ann Arbor.
Comet Coffee, run by Ann 
Arbor’s own java wizard Jim 
Arborio, is a small, independently 
owned coffee shop that has made 
home in Nickels Arcade, a stone’s 
throw from the diag. Arborio 
has his own coffee origin story, 
as so many of us do, dating back 
to 1992, when he was a barista 
as a senior in high school. From 
there, his passion for the bean 
grew.
“I was always involved with 
coffee, roasting at home when 
I was growing up in Saline, 
Michigan,” 
Arborio 
said, 
in 
an interview with The Daily. 

“I moved back to Ann Arbor 
in hopes of opening my own 
business in 2001, and I knew it 
was coffee.”
Comet Coffee is small but 
mighty, with few tables and a 
bit of counter space, warm with 
light green walls and a handful of 
golden suspended lights. To the 
left of the register is the espresso 
machine in all its glory, and to 
the right is a case of perfectly 
handcrafted French pastries and 
the pour-over station, where the 
baristas master the art of the 
perfect cup.
Comet Coffee was born of a 
cocktail of experience with heart 
and sentimentality.
“The shop is sort of named 
after the guy who taught me 
to make drinks on an espresso 
machine,” Arborio said. “My 
experiences in my favorite coffee 
shops tend to be places that 
gather people, shoot them far 
away some place, and bring them 
back slowly, like a comet.”
Comet 
Coffee 
certainly 
provides somewhat of the same 
experience, 
taking 
students 
and professors away from the 
stressors of their individual lives 
and providing them with a space 
to enjoy conversation.
“People find a lot of identity 
in the place they get coffee, so 
we cultivate this space so that 
it feels relevant to the people 
who constantly frequent here,” 
Arborio said in referencew to 
that special coffee shop culture.
Comet Coffee is different in 
the midst of hundreds of coffee 
shops in Ann Arbor because it are 
centered and focused on human 
connection, reserving half of 
their tables for “non-electronic” 
patrons. I’ve made good use of 
those conversation-only tables, 
constantly gravitating toward 
them with a friend of mine as 
tradition to get tea after weekly 
hot yoga. Many other customers 
have similar attachments to 
the electronic-free area of the 
intimate space, a rare find in 
this technology-obsessed 21st 
century.

Hearty joe at 
Comet Coffee

DAILY FOOD COLUMN

ELI RALLO
Daily Food Columnist

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

MUSIC REVIEW