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By Parikshit S. Bhat
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
03/26/19

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

03/26/19

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Tuesday, March 26, 2019

ACROSS
1 Captain Sparrow 
portrayer Johnny
5 Exam for jrs.
9 Indy 500 family 
name
14 Rio contents
15 Machu Picchu 
builder
16 Loud salute
17 Beethoven’s birth 
city
18 *Evaluation by 
one’s colleagues
20 Colorful carp
22 “Born Free” 
lioness
23 Skin woe
24 *1984 Prince 
classic
27 Razz
28 Like plagiarized 
work, say
29 Focus and Fiesta
30 Office asst.
31 Spectacles on 
one’s nose
36 “That isn’t nice”
37 Intensive goodwill 
campaign, briefly 
... and a hint to 
the answers to 
starred clues
38 Except for West 
Wendover, 
Nevada summer 
hrs.
41 Sicilian seaport
42 Hard to come by
43 Glossy finish
46 Harsh critic
48 Very fancy
49 *Region 
bordering the 
world’s largest 
ocean
53 USA part: Abbr.
54 Whirl around
55 Drink from leaves
56 *Yellowstone VIP
59 French movie
62 Like much bar 
beer
63 Make, as money
64 “In your dreams!”
65 Abodes for birds
66 Liberal or martial 
things
67 Tenant’s payment

DOWN
1 Pat softly
2 Locker room 
issue

3 *Green Day 
genre
4 Impressive 
collection
5 Spot on a die
6 Derisive look
7 Amtrak high-
speed train
8 Ankle bones
9 Function
10 Four Corners 
natives
11 Sandwich 
maker’s aid
12 Smoothed
13 Sculls 
competitors
19 Took off in a 
hurry
21 Percent suffix
24 Attention-getting 
sound
25 Four Corners 
natives
26 Some MIT grads
29 Tasseled hat
32 Scale units: Abbr.
33 Baba among 
thieves
34 Confession 
disclosure
35 Work support 
group
37 Cross product
38 *Union demand

39 Eins und zwei
40 Educational 
period
41 Mongoose family 
member that 
uses its tail to 
stand erect
42 9-Across vehicle
43 Apply hurriedly
44 Showing 
compassion
45 Applies, as 
pressure

47 On fire
49 “Don’t text and 
drive” ad, briefly
50 Snorer’s disorder, 
perhaps
51 Groucho’s 
smoke
52 Like noble gases
57 Rotation meas.
58 IV league?
60 Diarist Anaïs
61 Amphibian 
youngster

FOR RENT

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

Comedian 
Amy 
Schumer 
(“I 
Feel 
Pretty”) 
returns 
to stand-up with a run-of-
the-mill performance in her 
latest Netflix comedy special 
“Growing,” shot in Chicago. 
Unlike the majority of other 
comedy specials, the camera 
never panned to the reactions 
of 
any 
audience 
members, 
instead 
holding 
the 
focus 
on 
Schumer 
for 
its 
entirety. 
Similar 
to 
comedian 
Ali 
Wong’s 
Netflix 
comedy 
specials, 
Schumer performs 
this special while 
heavily 
pregnant 
(about 
five 
months 
along), 
resulting in more 
trite jokes about 
pregnancy 
than 
a non-pregnant person can 
handle. She reveals that she 
has suffered from hyperemesis 
throughout 
her 
pregnancy, 
which 
for 
her, 
manifested 
itself in the form of constant 
vomiting and nausea.
These vivid jokes that she 
makes about her pregnancy and 
its symptoms are lackluster at 
best and end up sounding more 
like sporadic rants rather than 
segues into her other bits. Her 
typical off-color toilet humor 
takes no breaks throughout the 
special, especially prevalent 
when she talks about her 
struggles with pregnancy. To 
her credit, she keeps it candid 

about the physical hardships 
she’s endured with pregnancy, 
but this kind of content is 
only relatable for someone 
who’s experienced a difficult 
pregnancy as well. 
Although Schumer’s style 
of humor has always been 
relatable for only a specific 
demographic, in “Growing,” 
her 
humor 
is 
even 
too 
fragmented to appeal to her 
base in full. 
For the first half of the 

special, 
Schumer 
only 
made 
brief 
passes 
at 
her 
political 
stances, 
but 
her 
casual demeanor completely 
diminished as she talked about 
politics at full force toward 
the second half of the special. 
She begins by sarcastically 
referring to her future child: 
“I don’t know what I’m having. 
I hope it’s a girl. But really 
just because it’s such a scary 
time for men.” From there, the 
progression of her political 
commentary only increased. 
She mentions the time she got 
arrested in Washington, D.C. 
for a protest against Brett 
Kavanaugh’s appointment to 

the Supreme Court, saying, 
“Men, you can clap too” when 
the audience burst out in 
applause. 
For the first time, Schumer 
discloses information about 
her husband Chris Fischer 
and his diagnosis with Autism 
Spectrum 
Disorder. 
She 
introduces 
the 
topic 
with 
sincerity and genuine love 
for her husband and their 
relationship. Schumer’s open 
expression of appreciation for 
Fischer is evident 
in the tact and care 
clearly put into the 
jokes, which reflect 
on 
her 
personal 
experiences 
with 
her 
husband 
rather than offend 
those 
who 
live 
with the disorder. 
Her stories about 
her husband are 
refreshing 
and 
easily 
the 
most 
entertaining 
part 
of the comedy special. They 
display her transition from 
a comedian who only makes 
empty jokes about sex and 
food to a comedian who draws 
stories from a more mature 
place. 
Schumer has always been 
very straightforward with her 
views, as many comedians are, 
which is why people find her 
off-putting. But if her comedy 
continues to expand from her 
constant quips about being 
a single woman to what she 
gave us a brief sample of in 
“Growing,” she might be able 
to find a more loyal and niche 
audience to support her. 

Schumer grows herself, if 
only a little, with ‘Growing’

SOPHIA YOON
For The Daily

TV REVIEW

NETFLIX

Growing

Netflix

Now streaming

Let’s get this out of the way: 
I’m a poser of a Senior Arts 
Editor for the Book Review. 
I applied to Daily Arts with 
music and film as my top 
preferred beats, but I was 
sorted into books (the reason 
for which was that I was one 
of only two people in that fall 
semester round of applicants 
who had even a mere mention 
of books somewhere on their 
application). I didn’t know any 
upcoming books to request for 
review copies, choosing new 
books to review at Sunday 
meetings made me anxious and 
when it came time to submit 
blurbs for end-of-the-year lists, 
I had nothing because I had 
only read two books that were 
published in 2017, and they 
weren’t that great.
A year passes, and although 
my confidence grows slightly, 
I still have the same anxieties 
about my ability to be a 
confident books writer. I found 
myself recently hired as the top 
books brass and it’s now my 
turn to help coordinate end-of-
the-year lists. I still had nothing 
to 
write 
about 
for 
blurbs 
because the few books I read 
over the year still weren’t that 
great. For the more personal 
end-of-the-year retrospective 
we published, I sealed my 
resolution in ink to attack my 
books backlog methodically. 
But, surprise surprise, it’s still 
as clogged as it was four months 
ago, except it’s only partly from 
my laziness. There’s a new 
obsession stacked ever-high on 
that Bed Bath & Beyond cart of 
mine: graphic novels.
***
Cut back to mid-December 
darkness 
— 
my 
editor-in-
crime, Verity Sturm, wants me 
to write a blurb for our Top 10 
list, despite my having read 
nothing worth blurbing. We 
had sent out a Google Form to 
all our writers earlier polling 
their best books of the year, 
and Verity was hard at work 
collecting all these responses 
and creating a cohesive and 
unanimous 
ranking. 
One 
afternoon, as I was piddling my 
winter break away, she sends 
me a PowerPoint presentation 
of the 10 books she wants on 
the list, unranked. We start 
assigning blurbs based on who’s 
read what. We can only assign 
so much, and three blurbs go 
unclaimed — Verity, the saint 
she is, offers to do all of them.
Of course, I won’t let her 
take this much work on herself, 
so I offer to take any one of the 
books off her hands. A lightbulb 
must’ve turned on in her head, 
because Verity told me to take 
“The Pervert,” supplying a 
glowing recommendation to go 
with it. I look it up on the ol’ 
information superhighway and 
find terse synopses: The back 
cover reads, “A surprisingly 
honest and touching account of 
a trans girl surviving through 
sex work in Seattle.” Oh. OH. 
I scurry down to the nearest 
Barnes & Noble and buy the 
damn thing.
At this point in my life I’ve 
only come out to a handful of 
friends and my mom that I’m 
transgender. I make steps like 
buying new clothes or changing 
my email accounts, but I still 
get called my deadname by 
people that don’t know better 
and even sometimes by people 
that do. You would have to pay 
a random stranger a million 
dollars to refer to me as “she” 
or “her,” apparently. It is 
suffocating.
***
In 
my 
Spanish 
Gender, 
Sexuality and Culture class 
the other day we learned 
of 
a 
Peruvian 
artist 
and 
travesti (roughly translated, 
it 
means 
crossdresser, 
but 
it conveys so much more) 
who was once photographed 
vested in garb reminiscent 
of Latinx depictions of the 
Virgin 
Mary. 
His 
costume 
bears a jeweled heart pierced 

with seven swords. To co-opt 
some religious imagery (and 
I mean, after being shunned 
by most religious members of 
my family, I deserve it), that is 
how I felt every day, except the 
swords piercing my heart were 
invisible. Yet they hurt all the 
same.
While only understanding, 
acceptance and time can pull 
those knives from my heart, 
sitting down to finally read 
“The Pervert” (after it sat 
intimidatingly on my desk for 
a few days) was a well-needed 
reminder that among trans 
people, this pain is universal. 
We may differ in the number 
of swords impaling nuestrxs 
corazones, or how deep they are 
driven, but we are stabbed all 
the same. We transfix others as 
we are transfixed ourselves.
My 
first 
read 
through, 
I tried to accompany “The 
Pervert” with music. It has a 
certain grunge vibe to it, being 
in Seattle and all, so I put on 
Sonic Youth’s sprawling opus 
Daydream Nation with hopes 
it would match the graphic 
novel beat for beat. (And to 
those about to complain in the 
comments, “B-But Sonic Youth 
isn’t grunge,” don’t, I don’t 
care.) “The Pervert” oscillates 
in moods and content as freely 
as Daydream Nation does, but 
its stream of consciousness 
was 
inexplicably 
clashing 
with the music. The only 
song that fit, funnily enough, 
was “Providence,” a sparse 
interlude with no lyrics, only 
a voicemail from a man named 
Watt asking frontman Thurston 
Moore if “(he) found (his) shit.”
Like 
“Providence,” 
“The 
Pervert” 
is 
something 
surprisingly beautiful, a whole 
greater than the sum of its 
parts. It’s ghastly, but also 
serene and undeniably funny. 
It’s 
a 
raunchy 
throwaway 
voicemail achieving a loving 
melody. It’s the beautiful piano 
paired with the ugly sound of 
an amplifier frying out.
***
I don’t want to go into plot 
details of the graphic novel 
because the point of “The 
Pervert” isn’t the plot. It’s the 
experience it conveys, and the 
specificities of that experience 
sketched to strike a chord 
with people like me. Even 
though I am not a sex worker, 
the reality undercutting trans 
sex work — that of it being an 
object filtered through the 
heterosexual, cisgender male 
gaze — is intimately familiar 
to all of us. There are multiple 
wordless moments where the 
main character is afraid and 
ashamed to live in her own 
skin: It hit me blindsided, like 
a blurry truck driving down a 
rainy highway. It’s strangely 
personal for me, even ending in 
Michigan of all places.
As I mentioned in my Top 
10 blurb, the watercolors are 
perfect and they are so, so 
goddamn real. The illustrations 
of 
“The 
Pervert” 
are 
not 
forcefully tailored for any gaze. 
There’s a wonderfully explicit 
two-page spread with no words, 
only twelve squares displaying 
the varying dimensions of trans 
sex. I got incredibly defensive 
when my mom approached 
me about the copy sitting in 
my room, as she had flipped 
through it earlier in the day 
only to tell me I was practically 
reading porn. However fuming, 
I 
quickly 
dismissed 
the 
argument and gave up because 
I knew she could never fully 
get it. I think this anger came 
from me unfairly and suddenly 
being forced not only to defend 
this “porn,” but to defend the 
reality of trans bodies, MY 
body, from heteronormative 
distortion. We exist and that’s 
not wrong.
All 
the 
characters 
are 
cartoonish 
animals, 
so 
unfortunately the uncensored 
sex scenes might remind you 
of frightening furry Rule 34, 
but 
their 
human 
qualities 
remain the most important. 
In a certain way, that’s the 
trans experience, appearing 
as human but other people 

seeing you as a totally different 
species.
If you’re not trans, you will 
probably find “The Pervert” 
confusing 
or 
not 
easily 
understandable but that’s okay 
because 
the 
graphic 
novel 
isn’t exclusionary. It’s not just 
“for trans eyes only.” Reading 
it does not mean immediate 
allyship, but it illustrates a 
certain 
unseen 
dimension 
of the trans experience that 
cisgender people almost never 
know because they will never 
feel it. Simply read it, then turn 
inward instead of demanding 
elaboration 
on 
the 
more 
nuanced panels.
For one of my personal essays 
for an English class this year, I 
wrote about the formation of 
my trans experience through 
a few specific anecdotes, and 
I feel like a plagiarizing hack 
that I did this, but I ended 
my paper with a scene ripped 
straight from “The Pervert,” 
because it has happened to me 
almost 
word-for-word 
more 
than once. I wrote it like this:
“Is that all, sir?” says the 
cashier behind the counter, the 
rehearsed response to my order.
Oh God, I hope so.
I felt this a thematic cap 
to all the anecdotes in my 
essay (which were connected 
through the common theme of 
pain), but I got a comment back 
from my professor saying the 
short vignette was unclear and 
the reader wouldn’t know what 
I was referring to. While I don’t 
want to whine that this was 
an unjust comment because 
it makes sense in the context 
of a workshop-heavy class, I 
took this one personally, just 
like my mom’s comment about 
“The Pervert.” Again I felt 
this necessity to defend it and 
defend myself, asserting that 
I don’t have to make sense for 
you — fuck making it easy for 
the reader. But I let the anger 
blow through me, and I let it go.
***
Returning to the Top 10 
blurb for the nteenth time, 
after I submitted it to Verity 
for editing purposes, she was 
jazzed about it, but also worried 
that 
my 
explosive 
rhetoric 
could backfire on myself. I 
wasn’t ready to come out to the 
wider world, and publishing 
this would maybe thrust me 
into that process unhealthily. 
I took her concerns to heart 
and 
considered 
taking 
my 
tongue down a notch, but after 
some deliberating I told her to 
publish it as is. Even if it outed 
me, like “The Pervert,” I was 
unapologetic in saying what 
I wanted to say. Retooling my 
short blurb would be violence 
to myself, like Remy Boydell 
and Michelle Perez trying to 
remake “The Pervert” for a PG 
audience.
I think deciding to publish 
that blurb was one of the 
first times where I started to 
prioritize my own comfort 
rather 
than 
stress 
about 
whether 
other 
people 
are 
comfortable with me or not. 
And fuck you if you aren’t. 
“The Pervert” left an indelible 
mark on my soul in the form 
of a watercolor . It opened the 
gates for me to further dive into 
the world of graphic novels, 
especially 
the 
challenging, 
weird and queer ones. After 
fangirling with Verity about 
“The Pervert” and my newfound 
love for visual literature, we 
decided to capitalize on not 
only my enthusiasm, but the 
found enthusiasm of many 
other Daily Arts writers.
Graphic Content, the series 
that this piece is launching, is 
the product of that enthusiasm. 
Credits to the ever-lovely Verity 
for the name. It’s a celebration 
of going against the grain and 
rejecting the literary tradition 
for the purpose of innovation, 
personal 
and 
universal. 
I 
hope it to be as irreverent and 
wonderful as the works we 
plan to cover. Keep an eye out 
for more Graphic Content every 
Tuesday for the rest of this 
semester. Until then, to thine 
own self be true. This, above 
all.

Graphic Content: A new 
dawn with ‘The Pervert’

CASSANDRA MANSUETTI
Senior Arts Editor

GRAPHIC CONTENT SERIES

