Classifieds
Call: #734-418-4115
Email: dailydisplay@gmail.com
By Bryant Shain
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
02/27/19
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle
Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
02/27/19
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
Release Date: Wednesday, February 27, 2019
ACROSS
1 Old Russian ruler
5 Landlocked
African nation
9 Wedding registry
category
14 Famous final
question
15 “Ducky” Mallard’s
alma mater, on
“NCIS”
16 Support people
17 Prefix in juice
names
18 Tends to the
lawn
19 ’50s four-wheeled
failure
20 Particular
23 Kitchen counter?
24 “__ thought”
25 Place to unwind
28 Hospital bigwig
31 Gig gear
34 Lessen
35 Tweak, as text
36 Some trucks
38 The North Pole,
for Santa
41 Opposite of endo-
42 Flat-bottomed
vessel
43 Daisy Ridley’s
“The Last Jedi”
role
44 Formally accuse
of wrongdoing
49 Blue Jays’ home:
Abbr.
50 Mimicked
51 Small lizard
54 Game played on
a floor or table,
and a hint to this
puzzle’s circled
letters
57 Fluffy-eared
“bear”
60 Hair-removal
brand
61 Vintage ski lift
62 Arouse, as wrath
63 Basic French
verb
64 Theta follower
65 Tank fish
66 “Keep it __”
67 Provide job
support for?
DOWN
1 __ support
2 Classic Fender
guitar, for short
3 Arcade pioneer
4 “Walk This Way”
rap trio
5 Many a D.C.
landmark
6 Perched on
7 Good-for-nothing
8 Mini-maps
9 14-Across
speaker
10 Go underground
11 Cards checked at
the door
12 French word in
bios
13 Syst. for the
hearing-impaired
21 Giggle
22 Sun Devils’ sch.
25 Passover feast
26 Self-assurance
27 On pins and
needles
29 Curvy letter
30 Berlin’s home:
Abbr.
31 Showing
mastery
32 Prefix with
brewery
33 Rocker Frampton
37 Scrubbing brand
38 Unlike this ans.
39 Technically
flawed comic
poetry
40 Nerdy sort
42 Tragic end
45 Much of North
Africa
46 PC brain
47 Noted bunny
lover
48 Nova __
52 Skewered meat
53 Give a political
speech
54 Put-down
55 Turkey bacon?
56 “Well, shoot”
57 Modeling
convenience
58 Tip jar bill
59 Perform
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PAGE.
DO
IT.
Not far south of the Michigan
border, near the Indiana Dunes
National Lakeshore, is a town in
northern Indiana called Dune
Acres. The town shares its
name with the newest piece by
composer Kristin Kuster, which
premiered just this past week
through the Detroit Symphony
Orchestra.
Of course, this is no coincidence.
Kuster, the chair of composition at
the University of Michigan School
of Music, Theatre & Dance, spent
many summers in Dune Acres
as a child, at her grandparents’
house. The new “Dune Acres”
piece isn’t the first she’s written
inspired by that setting — notably,
her 2013 vibraphone solo piece,
“Rain Chain,” was inspired by a
rain chain there — and it marks
a return to natural themes that
have long formed important
preoccupations in her work.
“I think I’m at my most calm
and focused when I’m looking
at trees,” Kuster said in a recent
interview with The Daily. “Or
looking at water, or looking at
nature. It’s a real inspiration
for me, because there’s so many
things that are so beautiful.”
This practice extends to her
work at the University, where
she says she sometimes gives
students assignments to set aside
an hour, go to the Arb, and stare
at a tree. The goal is to “notice the
branches and the leaves and the
way it looks, even if it’s winter and
it’s got snow and there aren’t any
leaves or whatever.”
“I think that it can rewire our
brains away from the kind of
chaos of the world,” Kuster said.
“We get an enormous amount of
input as we walk through the day.
Even just people on the street,
sights and sounds, conversations
and things, to-do lists ... It works
for me, anyway, to just relax. And
kind of find stillness in looking at
natural beauty around us.”
Kuster
has
long
been
accustomed to natural beauty,
through her childhood growing
up in Boulder, Colo., and her
experiences later on living in
San Diego and now Michigan.
This priority she mentions of
escaping from the “input” and
stress of the world, she said, was
a major element that affected her
approach to “Dune Acres.”
“Part of what prompted me
to go back to that space is that
I’ve been pretty torqued up and
upset with what’s happening in
the world,” she said. “I wanted
to get back to that kind of joyful,
childlike wonderment at the
world. This is the place where I
really started writing music as
a little kid, making up sounds,
running around the house and
running around on the beach.
I was so fond of the time that I
spent there that I really wanted to
tap back into that in this piece, as
a way to sort of cope with the state
of things.”
Many of Kuster’s goals — as
a chair of composition and, it
seems, as an active member of the
composing community in general
— align with this idea of addressing
recent political developments in
the world. She aims to advocate
for
underrepresented
groups
in composition, and believes
that this is work that the entire
classical music community needs
to undertake, particularly in large
and well-funded institutions such
as orchestra, opera, film music
and gaming music.
“All
of
those
institutions
have a problem with diversity of
representation,” Kuster said. “And
yes, it is better than it was five, ten
years ago, but we still need these
institutions to care, and to do
the work. And it really only takes
one person in an organization to
care, and spend fifteen minutes
Googling. It’s really not that
much work, but someone has to
care about putting forth art that
represents composers of color,
female composers, composers
who identify as female, trans
composers,
composers
with
disabilities ... We are seeing a little
bit of progress, and there are some
organizations that are better than
others. But until we do that, it’s
just going to stagnate.”
Some
of
the
social
and
environmental
problems
entrenched in the world are ones
that find their way into Kuster’s
music itself. When she wrote a
different nature-inspired piece,
“Devil’s Thumb,” in 2013, she was
thinking about the devastation
incurred by weeks’ worth of
wildfires in Colorado, as well as
the 2012 shooting at the Aurora
movie theater.
“We had been seeing this pain
in Colorado, and yet there’s so
much beauty around. So I guess
when I approach that musically,
you know, I can have sections that
are sort of dark and heavy and
powerful, with lots of percussion.
And then when there are beautiful
things, it can be maybe slower
and more lyrical, with longer
melodies,” Kuster said.
The new piece, “Dune Acres,”
also maneuvers through differing
melodies and musical sensibilities.
The piece is in three movements,
segmented
by
an
imagined
journey to the eponymous beach.
“The first movement is mostly
about my memory of being really
excited to go on this trip,” Kuster
said. “My two older sisters and
I would pile into the back of the
old station wagon with no air
conditioning, and drive for two
days to the northwest part of
Indiana, and just excitement and
the anticipation, and also just
watching the world go by through
Nebraska and Iowa and Indiana.”
The second movement she
describes as slower and sadder,
with
a
long
trumpet
solo
throughout to denote Kuster’s
memory of “fog rolling in over
the lake.” This is the movement
where
Kuster
begins
to
incorporate more environmental
preoccupations into the piece,
mirroring her fascination with
the natural world.
“We’re in danger of destroying
these Great Lakes right now,”
she said. “And Flint still doesn’t
have clean water, and we’re
surrounded by all this fresh water.
So it’s kind of a lament to the state
that we’re in now, and in concern
for where we’ll be in the future
with these Great Lakes.”
The third and final movement
brings the piece to a close on a
faster-paced note.
“It’s just this really pulsing,
happy, kind of wash of sound.
And that is, I think, just reflecting
my memory of jumping in a lake.
Whether it’s cold or warm, you
gotta get in there and splash
around when you’re a little kid,”
Kuster said.
Kuster on ‘Dune Acres’
COMMUNITY CULTURE REVIEW
What were Desus Nice and The Kid Mero up
to on the premiere of their new weekly late-night
talk show on Showtime? Oh, a little of everything:
comparing Barack Obama to a Dominican
grandfather at a wedding, parodying “Green
Book,” critiquing Vladimir Putin’s judo skills,
taking a jab at New York sports radio legend-slash-
irritant Mike Francesa and talking marginal tax
rates with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
So, no, it wasn’t a huge departure from what
the duo has been doing for the last two years on
Viceland, where their show aired four days a
week. And that’s precisely what makes “Desus and
Mero” a perfect, much-needed addition to late-
night TV — a genre now sufficiently haunted with
the ghosts of would-be revolutionaries who never
managed to crack the code.
The late-night problem, of course, is that the
format doesn’t allow for much creativity. The
attempts at departures from the White Man
Behind Desk Chatting With Guest on Adjacent
Couch™ trope have all felt fairly tepid and
uninspired: white man behind desk with no guests,
white woman on couch with guests, white woman
standing in front of a screen, brown man standing
in front of a screen (no disrespect, Hasan, big fan).
Much of the appeal of “Desus and Mero” is that it
isn’t explicitly promising to turn the medium
upside down or to be completely experimental —
the two just want to riff a little, laugh a little and
maybe talk to some interesting people along the
way.
The result is a show that’s completely free of
gimmicks or pretensions, essentially just two funny
people in freewheeling conversation. They’ve
foregone the clunky monologue and house band.
Instead, the two begin the show in armchairs on a
grunge-cool set, talking about the week’s news — a
healthy mix of politics, sports and bizarre internet
curiosities — with a few lively pre-taped bits
sprinkled in between. Desus and Mero launched
their comedy careers as Twitter personalities and
that rings true in their humor, which is biting and
goofy, manic and irreverent all at once. Clean,
smart editing helps the half hour move along at a
nimble but comfortable pace (though it does seem
a shame this only airs once a week).
That Ocasio-Cortez was the first guest on
“Desus and Mero” feels very fitting. The three
of them are all up to the same thing right
now: bringing their Bronx realness to stodgy
institutions and conventions we take for granted.
The conversation with her was fun, but sincere
and substantive. And with two comedians on
either side of her, the congresswoman more than
held her own in the laughs department. “How
do you have a computer that runs both Windows
’95 and Twitter at the same time?” she wondered
aloud about her antiquated meme-making Twitter
critics. Later, they played a pre-taped segment of
Desus and Mero’s visit to Ocasio-Cortez’s office
in Washington D.C. The two came bearing gifts,
some Fabuloso all-purpose cleaner, a copy of AM
New York and the pièce de résistance: a giant Cardi
B wall decal.
‘Desus and Mero’ breathes
some life into late-night TV
TV REVIEW
‘Desus and
Mero’
Showtime
Pilot
Thursdays @ 11 p.m.
Early in her latest thriller,
“The Lost Man,” Jane Harper
introduces a legend about
a
stockman.
It
goes
like
this: In the 1890s there was
a stockman, but he wasn’t
exactly a stockman. He was
a
cattle
rustler.
He would take his
horses in the wide,
empty space of the
arid
Australian
land
and
round
loose cattle to sell
them for cheap.
One
day,
the
horses
go
nuts.
Instead
of
continuing
to
herd
cattle,
the
stockman
stays
with
the
horses.
An
hour
passes
and he’s gone. The
campfire
is
still
lit. The horse is still tied. A
hundred kilometers south lies
his body. Dead. No injuries, no
water. According to the story,
he was found the same day he
disappeared.
In
the
stretches
and
stretches
of
hot,
barren
Australian land over a hundred
years later, Jane Harper’s
“The Lost Man” tells an eerily
similar story. This time, it’s
about three brothers: Nathan,
the oldest, ostracized from the
community and living three-
hours from the closest human;
Bub, the baby of the family,
separated by 12 years from
his oldest brother and Cam,
dead beneath their feet. Like
the myth of the stockman,
Cam had no injuries, no water
and was found only nine
kilometers from his truck.
Cam has breathed in the
barren Australian outback air
since birth. How did he die?
Nathan decides to return
to
his
smaller-than-small
hometown
to
investigate
his brother’s death with his
fifteen-year-old son in tow.
As
Nathan
examines
his
own regrets and past — his
relationship with his family
and the pieces of his brother
that were hidden in plain
sight — he stumbles upon a
disturbing string of family
mysteries. “The Lost Man”
never stagnates, the more
that Nathan uncovers, the
more it seems that the once
inconsequential
trivialities
prove to wield deeper and
darker implications. “The Lost
Man” forces you to question
parts of the story that you
accepted unequivocally and,
like Nathan, examine what’s
true, what’s not and the
blurred line between.
Jane Harper’s style is sticky
with the thick, Australian
heat. The sparse sentences
mirror the stretch and length
of blank and vacant land. The
weight of each page feels heavy
as if the heat was palpable. As
the tensions of the book rise,
so does the temperature. Like
Nathan sifting through more
and more answers of Cam’s
past, the reader must sift
through tumbleweeds of red
herrings. We’re parched for
more details — more answers
— and the book itself offers
no reprieve. It’s not until the
very last line that it feels like
you
can
finally
gulp mouthfuls of
water. For a novel
close to 400 pages,
it’s easy to zoom
through.
With
each page, there’s
a nagging thought
that
something
isn’t
quite
right.
Was Cam’s death
a murder, or was
it
suicide?
Jane
Harper
artfully
misdirects
the
readers so that by
the very end, the
twist is like a slap
in the face. It’s easy to think:
How could I have missed this?
As Nathan pieces together
more clarity about Cam, the
small-town
becomes
less
stifling. It reflects Nathan’s
trajectory
from
being
a
reticent and depressed man
to a relaxed and receptive
person. Instead of minimizing
the mistakes of his past,
Nathan is able to come to
terms with his own life and
mend rifts with his son.
“The Lost Man” is more than
a mystery. It’s a story about
family and the people that you
think you know. By the end,
you learn to appreciate how
a family isolated in a blanket
of nothingness manages to
survive by holding onto their
powerful thread of human
connection.
‘The Lost Man’ and ghosts
BOOK REVIEW
‘The Lost Man’
Jane Harper
Flatiron Books
Feb. 5, 2019
Read more at
MichiganDaily.com
LAURA DZUBAY
Daily Arts Writer
MAITREYI ANANTHARAMAN
Daily Arts Writer
SARAH SALMAN
Daily Arts Writer
Desus and Mero launched
their comedy careers as
Twitter personalities and
that rings true in their
humor, which is biting and
goofy, manic and irreverent
all at once
6A — Wednesday, February 27, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com