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By Kevin Christian and Jules Markey
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
04/03/19
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle
Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
04/03/19
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
Release Date: Wednesday, April 3, 2019
ACROSS
1 Specially formed
6 Suffix with Jumbo
10 Outback
14 Avian crops
15 Disney film set in
Polynesia
16 “Fancy meeting
you here!”
17 When the
dot-com bubble
began
19 Prompted on
stage
20 Energy Star
co-mgr.
21 Backless slippers
22 Country’s
Haggard
23 Form of the game
of tag
27 River formations
29 Kiwi-shaped
30 Eye-opener?
31 Aplomb
34 Hieroglyphics bird
38 Court figs.
39 Small Apple tablet
42 D-Day vessel
43 Uninvited picnic
arrivals
45 Short or tall thing
(and neither
refers to height)
46 Zany
48 Soupçon
50 Acme’s best
customer?
51 Ad boast for
a relaunched
product
57 Hoover rival
58 Patterned fabric
59 Fuel for the fire
62 Almond __
63 Trait for an evil
genius ... and a
hint to what can
literally be found
in 17-, 23-, 39-
and 51-Across
66 Censorship-
fighting org.
67 __ Hawkins Day
68 Ancient Greek
region
69 Abrasive tool
70 Proof word
71 Itsy-bitsy
DOWN
1 Pinnacle
2 Water waster
3 Whooped it up
4 Dominate
5 Forensic TV
spin-off
6 Carved emblem
7 Mrs. Gorbachev
8 Number of gods
worshipped in
Zoroastrianism
9 “Stillmatic” rapper
10 Italian tenor
Andrea
11 Swahili for
“freedom”
12 Walmart stock
holder?
13 HDTV part, for
short
15 Mix together
18 Many “Call
the Midwife”
characters
22 CFO’s degree
24 USPS unit
25 Private reply?
26 “Frozen” reindeer
27 Bit of baby talk
28 Pizazz
31 Start of a series
32 A little bit off
33 “__ Mine”:
Beatles song
35 Sequence of
direct ancestors
36 “Freedom __
free”: salute to
military sacrifice
37 Ocular malady
40 Spot for a koi or
a decoy
41 “That was
awesome!”
44 Move in together
47 “Listen up,” to
Luis
49 Pen filler
50 King with a pipe
51 SportsNet
LA analyst
Garciaparra
52 Writer Jong
53 Water sources
54 Crete peak:
Abbr.
55 Put forth
56 Solemn
ceremony
60 “Come __!”
61 Outback
greeting
63 Mao __-tung
64 “__Games”:
1983 Matthew
Broderick film
65 Curly associate
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IT.
What is a man to do after he kills off his friend and former fellow
Marine, most of the leaders of a Chechen crime ring and (probably)
the cop who was dating his acting teacher? These are just some of
the questions that the titular protagonist faces in the early episodes
of season two of “Barry.” They’re also some of the many questions
Bill Hader (“Saturday Night Live”) faced in his development of the
second season, as writer, director and star of the show.
Hader and Alec Berg (“Silicon Valley”) created “Barry” as a dark
comedy about a Midwestern hitman who travels to Los Angeles,
where he finds himself joining an acting class and beginning to
question the nature of his profession. By the end of season one,
Barry (played by Hader) knows he wants to leave his violent past
behind him, but can’t seem to escape his entanglements with
criminals like his handler, Fuches (Stephen Root, “On the Basis
of Sex”), and Chechen mobster NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan,
“Gotham”). In the second season, these conflicts are only going to
ramp up, as well as the internal moralistic conflict that Barry now
has to address head-on.
“In the first season, he would have these daydreams about what
he wanted, and what he thinks his life could be,” Hader said to The
Daily in a group interview. “And we were thinking, in season two,
instead of daydreams about what his future could be — in order to
have those things, you have to kind of reconcile your past.”
For Barry, this means looking back to his time spent as a Marine
in Afghanistan: the place where he learned how to kill. Barry’s
approach to remembering the war seems to carry traces of post-
traumatic stress disorder, but Hader says the writer’s room was
more focused on Barry having to confront his current relationship
to killing.
“It was more about Barry’s current position as a contract killer,
and him realizing, ‘Oh, I actually, the first time I killed someone,
at war, was the first time I ever felt any sense of community in my
life,’” Hader said. “It was less about PTSD, and more about this
question of, ‘What happens when I get angry, and am I evil?’”
Barry isn’t the only one forced to reflect on his past in season
two. In fact, it seems poised to become one of the season’s central
trends.
The violence of Barry’s past and the tension of his present
collide in his acting class, taught by Gene Cousineau (Henry
Winkler, “Arrested Development”). At the end of season two, Gene
has to deal with the mysterious disappearance of his girlfriend,
Detective Moss (Paula Newsome, “Chicago Med”). According to
Hader, we can expect Gene to “look inward” in the episodes to
come and consider whether he is really “just a narcissistic idiot.”
Meanwhile, the nature of Moss’s disappearance — other than that
Barry had a hand in it — is still unresolved.
“We had no idea what happened to her,” Hader said. “That was
the very first day of writing season two. I said, ‘What do you guys
think happened to Moss?’ and everyone started laughing.”
Whatever direction the show takes with Moss, we can expect
it to be deeply significant for Gene’s development as a character
— as well as for Barry, who we know is responsible for whatever
happened to her.
After his military friend Chris (Chris Marquette, “All Wrong”),
Moss marks the second major character that Barry has unwillingly
attacked out of his own self-interest, despite knowing her and
liking her. The fatal actions he’s taken to hold onto his new life
leave Barry “trying to forgive himself,” but also “in massive,
massive denial.”
“We’ve come to this place where the main character is the one
that’s right,” Hader said. “The main character is us, that’s the
audience surrogate. And I like movies and books and stuff where
the main character’s really flawed, but he thinks he’s right … He’s
lying to himself on this big thing, but hopefully it’s a thing that can
be really relatable to people.”
The goal is that these complicated levels of reflection will
extend to the audience, as the show offers new and deeper ways
of understanding each character. Another compelling character is
Sally, played by Sarah Goldberg (“The Report”), whose relationship
with Barry hinges on, as Hader put it, the two of them “giving
each other what the other one wants” when it comes to emotional
support. This relationship is likely to become rockier following
her season one finale revelation about her abusive and violent
ex-husband.
“You meet Sally, and she seems like this sweet actress that cares
about him, and then you see her turn. You try to play both sides of
it, and say, ‘I totally get why she doesn’t like Barry, but I also think
she’s a little narcissistic,’” Hader said. “So then, this season, it was
kind of like: I’ve gotten to know you. I’ve hung out with you for a
year. And now these are the kind of things that you would find out
about people. People opening up about an abusive ex-husband or
the time they were in Afghanistan, or these sorts of things. And
then also, when you’re in an acting class, that stuff comes up a lot.”
The irony of Hader playing a bad actor in an acting class has
been one of the show’s strengths from the beginning, creating
plenty of opportunities for comedy and allowing Hader to stretch
and expand his own acting talent. He received an Emmy last year
for his portrayal of Barry, who struggles in his acting class with
awkward and sometimes emotionless delivery. Hader himself has
taken improv classes, but never the type of acting classes portrayed
in the show.
“Improv acting classes is like, you just have to go up and trust
your instincts, and kind of play off the other person, and you’re
creating a scene up on stage,” Hader said. “Alec and I sat in on
an acting class, on a couple of acting classes, before we wrote the
pilot. And that’s the only real acting classes I’ve seen. A lot of it
is actually asking the actors on the show. Like, ‘Is this what they
would do?’”
In season one, the acting class became the perfect arena for
central characters working through their personal issues. In a
season likely to turn its attention toward the repercussions of the
past, it will be intriguing to see how characters like Barry, Gene
and Sally further evolve, reveal themselves and come into conflict
within the walls of Gene’s acting studio.
And then there’s NoHo Hank. The audience favorite played by
Anthony Carrigan has become the stand-in representative for the
other side of Barry’s life, the one Barry is trying so desperately to
escape. Yet it’s hard to watch the show and not want to see even
more of Hank — which the show’s creators luckily realized early
on, scrapping their decision to kill Hank off at the end of the pilot.
“Initially, that character was supposed to die in the pilot. That’s
why he gets shot in the car,” Hader said. “And then when the show
got picked up, Alec and I both were like, we can’t let that guy die.
He was so funny. And then every writer we hired when we were
staffing the show went, ‘You’re not getting rid of that guy, right?
’Cause that guy was amazing.’”
The mobster character was originally inspired by a Genius Bar
employee who helped Hader at an Apple store. Since the initial
conception of a “nice” and “polite” henchman for season one
villain Goran Pazar (Glenn Fleshler), NoHo Hank has grown into a
compelling onscreen presence and a crucial part of the show.
“Anthony owns that character,” Hader said. “We try to find
funny positions for him to be in, and his apparent kind of love for
Cristobal, and this kind of love triangle that he has going on. But
then Anthony takes it and runs with it.”
Even Hank, who often bears the role of comic relief, may be
grappling further with the contradictions of his own identity in
season two.
“Everyone’s kind of fighting their nature, and I think he wants
to be a villain,” Hader said of NoHo Hank. “He wants to be a badass
kind of tough guy. But his nature, I think, is that he’s very sweet
and polite, and only sees the good in people, which is ironic for
what he does for a living.”
The show so far has done a spellbinding job of weaving together
comedy and drama using dark irony, sometimes on a broader scale
— some of the heaviest moments come from the acting class, while
genuine (albeit morbid) humor is gleaned from Barry’s endeavors
as a hitman — and sometimes on the level of individual lines.
The further Barry tries to distance himself from his violent past,
the darker the show seems to get, all while keeping its comedic
integrity intact.
“That’s always the hard thing about the show, is going too far one
way or the other. But what we end up doing so we don’t overthink
it is, you just try to follow the truth of the character. You try to be
as honest as you can with all of the characters, and just say, well,
what would they do right here? And sometimes that can lend itself
to being funny, and sometimes it can be really sad,” Hader said. “It
kind of works, because we’ll write it straight for so long, and Alec
and I are comedy people, so then we start to get bored and we’ll
start making fun of our own writing, and then that’s where a lot of
the comedy will come in.”
It’s hard to describe Barry as anything other than a tightly-
produced show: The writing is sharp on both the comedic and
the dramatic ends, each scene is packed with conflict, and the
characters are expertly conceived and rendered. Season one
developed at an mastered pace, aided on its way by captivating
acting and an almost total absence of filler, and season two is set
to continue along the same masterful trajectory, featuring even
darker ventures into these characters’ psyches.
“A lot of shows or stories … you want to do 20 seasons of these
things, you know? And so you try to let that happen slowly. But
I think that’s why television, sometimes, for me, I get really
exasperated,” Hader said. “For us, it was like, no, let’s just let that
happen now. What are we waiting on?”
Bill Hader talks confronting the past in ‘Barry’
TV INTERVIEW: BILL HADER
LAURA DZUBAY
Daily Arts Writer
The
opening
track
of
The
Hands
Free’s
self-
titled
debut,
“Yes/No,”
starts with an explosion
of
instrumental
sound,
pulling in every direction
at once. It almost sounds
like a folk festival band
warming up — the group’s
instrumentation of violin,
accordion,
banjo/guitar
and double bass is usually
employed for things much
more twangy and down-
home — until it’s repeated,
and spins out into a frenetic
phrase that collapses almost
as soon as it gets going. The
rest of the track is no less
of an onslaught, at times
coalescing into fragments
of melody before dissolving
into the joyous chaos of
the
opening.
After
the
aggression
of
“Yes/No,”
the second track, “Kellam’s
Reel/Rusty
Gully,”
is
a
comforting relief. A jaunty
melody is passed from the
accordion
to
the
guitar,
the
other
instruments
sometimes
joining
in
on
regular accompaniment and
sometimes
just
smearing
chords around the edges of
the ensemble. The effect is
breezy and nostalgic.
The
Hands
Free,
whose
members
have
backgrounds
in
classical
music composition, chamber
music and musical theater,
are a group that focuses on
structured
improvisation.
In the liner notes to their
debut, they write that they
“incorporate
elements
of
improvisation,
making
every performance unique.”
The
performers
are
able
to draw on their extensive
knowledge and experience
of
performing
music
to
re-interpret what they have
inherited in an open-ended,
playful way, in the moment.
The album is in dialogue with
several intersecting musical
traditions, but it splits them
open and rummages around
for useful material, adding
the
performer’s
unique
sensibilities. In particular,
the composer and violinist
Caroline Shaw contributes
the
sense
of
suspension
she’s known for, with the
hovering
harmonics
and
finely-sketched
melodies
she contributes forming a
sort of ceiling for the group.
The guitarist James Moore
contributes at times a quasi-
minimalist flow and at times
a
pointillistic
stream
of
consciousness, which also
characterizes his work with
the electric guitar quartet
Dither.
More than anything, what
one gets out of this album is a
sense of several personalities
colliding,
a
conversation
between
friends
about
a
familiar topic with natural
ebb and flow. The group
references the “late-night
folk jams” that formed the
group, and one gets the sense
that the group’s backbone
is
somewhere
between
their
respective
classical
backgrounds and bluegrass
and folk music. There’s a
dialogue between sense and
nonsense,
structure
and
freedom,
aggression
and
suspension. One gets the
sense that were all of this to
be written down, a lot of the
spontaneity that makes this
album so stunning would be
lost — trailing off and trailing
between is baked into even
the most structured music
that the group plays. There’s
a recombinant sensibility to
this music, like a collection
of half-remembered songs.
Mary
Halvorson
and
Robbie Lee’s album Seed
Triangular is much more
open-ended
than
The
Hands Free’s debut. There
are much fewer reference
points, and the music seems
to be instead built from the
sounds of their instruments
themselves:
Halvorson’s
18-string (!) harp guitar and
Lee’s collection of unusual
woodwind
instruments,
including
several
from
the Renaissance and the
Baroque. Halvorson and Lee
seem intent on playing their
instruments
in
strange,
extreme ways. The guitar
snaps and buzzes and at
times
makes
thunderous
sounds,
Lee
bends
pitch
and overblows, producing
all kinds of noisy, out-of-
tune sounds that he uses for
striking expressive effect. At
times it’s hard to tell how the
two musicians are relating
their material to each other
and the listener is left with a
nervous composite.
As
daunting
as
Seed
Triangular
is
for
people
not accustomed to freely-
improvised music, it’s also
a remarkably organic and
instinctive album. It’s the
chaos of an overgrown lot in
the middle of summer, dusty
and wide open. Their music
can accumulate astonishing
amounts of tension before
emptying out into a few
languid
plucks
and
long
bending notes. As avant-
garde as the music sounds,
Halvorson’s guitar can be
almost folk-ish at times, and
Lee’s old instruments, played
in markedly unconventional
ways,
combine
to
give
the
album
a
distinctly
ancient feeling. It feels like
stumbling on an abandoned
house being reclaimed by
nature, wiry plants forcing
their way through the brick.
The
avant-garde
is
so
frequently about trying to
make music take on abstract
shapes and structures. What
improvisation
allows
for
these two albums is instead
a kind of exploration of
musical space: Both in the
sense of the instruments used
and what they’re capable of
producing in the hands of
a skilled player, but also an
exploration of material, of
tradition as interpreted in
every direction at once.
On improvisational folk
MUSIC NOTEBOOK
EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer
6A — Wednesday, April 3, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com