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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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CROSSWORD
ON THIS
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