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By David Alfred Bywaters
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
03/29/19

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

03/29/19

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Friday, March 29, 2019

ACROSS
1 Result of littering, 
maybe
4 Recipe direction
8 Round paths
14 Airport info
15 Minorca, por 
ejemplo
16 Promote
17 Frantic activity at 
a clothing sale?
19 How some insults 
are veiled
20 Luster
21 Electric guitar 
effect
23 Meh
24 Comedy bit
26 Wooden bird 
sculpture?
28 Recreational walk
31 European relative 
of aloha
32 Financial claim
33 Heroic poetry
35 Scheming wife of 
Augustus
40 With 42-Across, 
white-collar 
crime ... and 
a hint to four 
Across answers
42 See 40-Across
44 Mongol invader
45 “__ Tired”: 
Beatles “White 
Album” song
47 Long-gone time
48 Plant with 
therapeutic sap
50 Ball VIPs
52 Cereal maker’s 
storage building?
56 Longtime NBC hit
57 Drive-in need
58 Ivan IV, from 
1547 to 1584
60 Passageway
64 Theater company
66 Dispassionate 
bivalve?
68 Fairy tale sibling
69 Logician’s adverb
70 “Really? Me?”
71 Tired
72 Precious
73 Favorite

DOWN
1 Coat holders
2 Wasatch Front 
state

3 Opposite of 
embiggen
4 Traffic stopper, 
perhaps
5 Leb. neighbor
6 Diamond 
concern
7 Spicy sauce
8 Capital NNW of 
Albany
9 Cheer syllable
10 Euphoria
11 “You don’t need 
to tell me”
12 Home of the 
Drillers of Class 
AA baseball
13 Watch 
surreptitiously
18 Colorful tropical 
flower
22 Middle 
management 
issues?
25 Cheer
27 Satchmo’s 
birthplace, briefly
28 Narrow opening
29 Turner with 
numbers
30 Enjoy an easy 
chair
34 Monastic leaders

36 Charmingly 
pastoral
37 Member of a 
Baroque consort
38 Memo heading
39 Survey range 
components
41 Meh
43 Takes badly?
46 Threatened
49 These days
51 Charm
52 Spa features

53 Like much of 
Oregon
54 Make amends
55 “I give up!”
59 Uncommon
61 Open-handed 
blow
62 Unconvincing, as 
an excuse
63 Put out
65 Energy
67 NY airport named 
for a mayor

FOR RENT

SERVICES

have 
fun 
doing 
the 
sudoku.

xoxo

“Gloria 
Bell” 
isn’t 
your 
typical 
coming-of-age 
movie, 
and 
its 
titular 
character 
certainly 
isn’t 
your 
typical 
coming-of-age protagonist. In 
a standard coming-of-age film, 
the protagonist is most likely a 
teenager or a twenty-
something, 
with 
the bulk of their 
life ahead of them. 
They 
experience 
a major life event, 
like a relationship 
or 
a 
death, 
that 
changes them. All 
loose ends are tied 
up by the end, and 
the viewer is left to 
assume that, after they’ve been 
affected by this life-altering 
event, there’s no changing left to 
be done. However, “Gloria Bell” 
understands that this is anything 
but true. People never stop 
changing and people never stop 
growing. In other words, people 
never stop coming of age.
Gloria, played brilliantly by 
Julianne Moore (“Still Alice”), 
is a fifty-something divorced 
mother of two living in a less-
than-ideal apartment. In fact, 
mostly everything in her life 
is less than ideal — her adult 
children no longer need her the 
way they used to, her job leaves 
something to be desired and 
her relationship with her new 
boyfriend is dysfunctional, to 
say the least. Whether we are 
aware of it or not, the reality of 
Gloria’s life is uncomfortable for 

a lot of us. We like to believe that, 
by the time we’re Gloria’s age, 
we’ll have our lives “figured out.” 
The hard, confusing parts of life 
will be behind us. Gloria’s life is 
an example of a life that doesn’t 
go as planned, and the prospect 
of things not going as planned 
is unpleasant to think about. 
Nevertheless, it is the truth. 
“Gloria Bell” is unafraid to bring 

awareness to it through the lens 
of Gloria’s experience.
While 
the 
middle-aged 
focus of “Gloria Bell” may feel 
unapproachable 
to 
younger 
audiences, the film is dedicated 
to creating a universal appeal 
in order to counteract this. For 
one, dating, apartment living and 
partying — all things we associate 
with youth — are significant 
parts of Gloria’s life. The film 
shows that these facets of life are 
in no way restricted to people in 
their twenties and early thirties. 
Additionally, the movie is quite 
funny, largely due to Moore’s 
relentlessly charming on-screen 
presence. Michael Cera (“Scott 
Pilgrim vs. the World”), a well-
known millennial icon, makes a 
few appearances as well. “Gloria 
Bell” also avoids isolating its 
younger viewers by bridging the 

generational gap between older 
and younger people. Although 
the film showcases undeniable 
cultural 
dissimilarities, 
like 
differences in music taste and 
attitudes toward smoking and 
technology, what each generation 
values at its core — family, love 
and human connection — is 
essentially the same. Gloria’s 
desire for meaningful connection 
is at the root of nearly 
all her actions, as 
it is for most of us, 
regardless of age.
All in all, “Gloria 
Bell” is a celebration 
of life’s uncertainty 
in all its stages. It 
knows that nothing 
is 
certain 
and 
that 
everything 
is 
susceptible 
to 
change. In the final shot of the 
movie, Gloria is shown dancing 
fittingly to Laura Branigan’s 
triumphant 
’80s 
anthem 
“Gloria,” with an appearance 
of happiness and freedom on 
her face the audience has never 
seen from her before. She dances 
with her arms outstretched, 
open to all possibilities. Instead 
of wallowing in fear of life’s 
perpetual flux, Gloria basks 
in it and opens herself up to it. 
And while she will inevitably 
continue to change and “come of 
age” after the credits stop rolling, 
it’s clear that the growth she 
has undergone over the course 
of the film is monumental. Her 
personal growth and ultimate 
acceptance of it inspires viewers 
to not only accept the change that 
will certainly come their way, but 
to welcome it with open arms. 

‘Gloria Bell’ rejuvenates

FILM REVIEW

ELISE GODFRYD
Daily Arts Writer

Gloria Bell

Michigan Theatre

A24

Robert Mapplethorpe is an 
enormously complicated figure — 
that’s no less true today than it was 
30 years ago when the attention of 
the art-consuming world was rapt 
with the progress of the Cincinnati 
obscenity 
trial 
surrounding 
his work. Born in 1946, the 
photographer rose to fame in 
the 1970s as an unabashed and 
celebratory visual documentarian 
of New York City’s gay community, 
one of the first prominent artists 
to elevate to the level of museum 
gallery depictions of a group many 
Americans still regarded with 
hostility. Later in the decade, he 
gained still more attention — and in 
the eyes of his detractors, notoriety 
— for often-explicit depictions 
of 
his 
friends 
in 
the 
City’s 
underground BDSM community, 
bringing his technical mastery and 
fascination with classical forms to 
bear upon subjects some welcomed 
and others would have prefered 
were left unaddressed.
In 
the 
midst 
of 
all 
this, 
Mapplethorpe was delving deeply 
into the genres of self-portraiture, 
still life, portraits and the nude, 
honing his craft. In this latter 
category he often foregrounded 
the Black body, cherishing it for its 
beauty and comparing it to bronze 
sculpture. But this treatment of 
his Black subjects (particularly his 
omission of their faces) sometimes 
came under scrutiny: Famously, 
the poet Essex Hemphill offered a 
withering critique of what he saw 
as Mapplethorpe’s fetishization 
of Black men and the museum 
world’s embrace of it. He wrote 
in his essay “Does Your Mama 
Know About Me?” that “what is 
insulting and endangering to Black 
men is Mapplethorpe’s conscious 
determination that the faces, the 
heads, and by extension, the minds 
and experiences of some of his 
Black subjects are not as important 
as close-up shots of their cocks.”
But by the time of his death in 
1989 as a result of complications 
from HIV/AIDS, Mapplethorpe 
had developed into one of the most 
significant photographers of the 
late-20th century. That same year, 
and spilling over into the next, 
Mapplethorpe 
was 
catapulted 
into household-name status when, 
first, the Corcoran Gallery of Art 
cancelled a planned exhibit of 
his series “Robert Mapplethorpe: 
The Perfect Moment” following 
political 
pressure 
from 
social 

conservatives, and then when 
the Contemporary Arts Center in 
Cincinnati and its director, Dennis 
Barrie, were brought to trial on 
charges of obscenity due to their 
booking of the same series. While 
Barrie and the museum were 
ultimately acquitted by jury, the 
trial 
nevertheless 
represented 
a crucial moment in the fights 
surrounding 
artistic 
freedom, 
censorship and funding for the 
National Endowment for the Arts 

that raged throughout the decade. 
Caught up in the vicious opening 
salvos of the culture wars that were 
to consume much of the ’90s, in 
the eyes of many Mapplethorpe’s 
work came to occupy a social 
place similar to Serrano’s “Piss 
Christ” — provocative, stirring, 
simultaneously 
revered 
and 
reviled.
So how do we reckon with an 
artistic legacy like that?
Two weeks ago, the University 
Musical 
Society 
presented 
a 
performance 
attempting 
to 
get at that very question. The 
world premiere of the fully-
staged 
version 
of 
“Triptych 
[Eyes of One on Another],” a 
new work co-commissioned by 
UMS, the performance aimed to 
re-contextualize 
Mapplethorpe’s 
work 
by 
juxtaposing 
his 
photographs 
with 
words 
and 
music in a theatrical context. In so 
doing the creators of “Triptych” 
demonstrated for the millionth time 
the power of collapsing the barriers 
we have erected between art 
forms, and how interdisciplinary 
art opens up fruitful aesthetic and 
social dialogues.
Directed 
by 
theater 
artist 
Kaneza Schaal, and with music 
by Bryce Dessner — a composer, 
performer and curator many know 
as a guitarist in the rock band 
The National — and a libretto by 
multi-disciplinary 
artist 
Korde 

Arrington 
Tuttle, 
“Triptych” 
doesn’t cohere into a narrative 
in the traditional sense. Instead, 
the performance was structured 
(as the name implies) into three 
principal sections, interweaving 
texts 
from 
numerous 
sources 
— including the obscenity trial, 
Mapplethorpe’s close friend Patti 
Smith and Essex Hemphill — into 
a series of songs held together by 
Dessner’s polyglot musical style. 
Throughout the course of all this, 
Mapplethorpe’s photographs were 
projected, 
massively 
enlarged 
and sometimes rapidly changing, 
onto screens above and around 
the performers as lighting effects 
swept across the stage and at times 
even illuminated the audience. This 
interplay of movement and light 
sustained the emotional state of the 
show throughout: A particularly 
striking effect featured a bar of 
searing white light descending 
from the ceiling, as if for a moment 
heaven opened up. In lieu of an 
overt narrative arc, the audience 
was thus presented with fleeting 
impressions 
and 
emotionally 
resonant scenes which feel as if 
they lead naturally from one to 
another but are difficult to string 
together into a plot.
The performance relied upon 
the formidable artistic talents of 
the vocal ensemble Roomful of 
Teeth (who by now certainly needs 
no introduction from me), as well 
as two additional vocalists, Alicia 
Hall Moran and Isaiah Robinson, 
and 
instrumentalists 
affiliated 
with the School of Music, Theatre 
& Dance. The vocalists, in addition 
to singing Dessner’s score, took 
on a semi-dramatic role as well, 
repositioning themselves on the 
stage throughout the course of 
the performance, equipped with 
rolling music stands.
“It’s a wonderful and rich 
score,” Brad Wells, the director of 
Roomful of Teeth, told me in an 
interview the afternoon before 
the performance. As I learned 
from him over the course of our 
conversation, the project has been 
in the works for quite a while — the 
possibility of the Teeth and Dessner 
collaborating on a Mapplethorpe 
work was first broached around 
four years ago — and the piece 
finally materialized into a complete 
work in the last several months.

DAYTON HARE

DAILY CLASSICAL MUSIC COLUMN

Musings on Mapplethorpe

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

As 
someone 
who 
grew 
up in Silicon Valley during 
its 
most 
profitable 
boom, 
I still have a soft spot for 
it. One thing Silicon Valley 
is brilliant at is wrapping 
capitalist ventures in a shroud 
of idealism and “changing the 
world” (hilariously skewered 
by the creators of the HBO 
show “Silicon Valley”). We 
all wanted to grow up and 
create the next startup. Forget 
working for the government, 
or for a university. The best 
way of improving the world is 
through private venture. It’s 
hard to deny that the Valley 
has had its successes. Its very 
nature has made it susceptible 
to fraud of various degrees, 
and 
the 
most 
egregious, 
absurd and horrifying fraud of 
them all is Theranos.
The story of Therenos is 
inseparable from the story of 
its founder Elizabeth Holmes, 
and 
recent 
documentary 
“The Inventor” places her at 
the forefront. Starting from 
her first days at Stanford, 
the documentary paints a 
portrait of a young woman 
who had a precocious talent 
to mesmerize. So talented, 
in fact, she could convince 
established 
scientists 
and 
investors ranging from Henry 
Kissinger 
to 
prominent 
venture 
capital 
firms 
to 
fund her fledgling company 

whose aim was to create a 
small device that could run 
hundreds of blood tests with a 
small prick of blood.
From 
its 
inception 
in 
2003, 
Theranos’s 
only 
trajectory 
was 
upward. 
Magazine profiles, glowing 
endorsements 
from 
former 
presidents: Elizabeth Holmes 
was a bona fide goddess. 
However, the main problem 
was 
that 
her 
company’s 
product 
never 
worked. 
And nobody could find out. 
“The 
Inventor” 
interviews 
several 
former 
employees-
turned-whistleblowers 
who 
describe the chaos within. A 
chemist describes having to 
reach 
into 
malfunctioning 
machines containing disease-
ridden blood with his bare 
hands. Others describe Sunny 
Balwani, one of Theranos’s 
leading men and Holmes’s 
former 
lover, 
monitoring 
their 
every 
move. 
Blood 
tests supposedly ran by the 
Theranos 
Edison 
machine 
were simply run on Siemens 
machines.
Theranos 
is 
ultimately 
a story of tragedy on too 
many fronts to count. Ian 
Gibbons, 
an 
extremely 
qualified biochemist brought 
on to be chief scientist of the 
company, committed suicide 
days before having to appear 
in 
a 
deposition 
regarding 
patent theft. Tyler Shultz, a 
former research engineer, and 
grandson of Theranos investor 
and former Secretary of State 

George 
Shultz, 
describes 
essentially 
being 
thrown 
under the bus by his own 
grandfather. Whistleblowers 
were 
followed 
by 
private 
investigators and feared for 
their lives.
“The Inventor” uses footage 
from famed documentarian 
Errol Morris’s interview with 
Holmes. As she looks directly 
into the camera, wearing a 
black turtleneck she used 
to wear to emulate her hero 
Steve Jobs, and speaking in 
her artificial baritone, it’s 
difficult to ascertain whether 
she is lying to our faces, 
or whether she genuinely 
believes her innocence.
Dan Ariely, a professor 
of behavioral economics at 
Duke University, points out 
the unique ethos of Silicon 
Valley, in which people put 
out flag posts miles away and 
confidently proclaim “we are 
going to reach it,” without 
ever figuring out how. People 
who don’t believe it are pushed 
aside 
as 
“old-fashioned,” 
needing to be “disrupted.” 
But perhaps disruption isn’t 
all that it’s panned out to be. 
Perhaps forethought, research 
and genuine understanding 
are actually more valuable. 
One can only hope that the 
story of Theranos teaches 
everyone 
who 
works 
in 
technology the lesson that 
“build fast and break things” 
is not always the answer.

Theranos documentary is
is pure terror and tragedy

TV REVIEW

The 
Inventor

HBO

Streaming Now

SAYAN GHOSH
Daily New Media Editor

As she looks directly into 
the camera ... it’s difficult 
to ascertain whether she is 
lying to our faces, or whether 
she genuinely believes her 
innocence

6 — Friday, March 29, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

