By C.C. Burnikel
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
10/01/19

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

10/01/19

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Tuesday, October 1, 2019

ACROSS
1 Fisherman’s __: 
waterfront district 
in San Francisco
6 Police HQ alerts
10 Sushi bar sauce
13 Swiss 
mathematician
14 Soft palate 
dangler
15 “t,” in “btw”
16 Golf tournament 
won by Shane 
Lowry in 2019
18 Cavity-fighting 
org.
19 “Easy Rider” 
actor
21 eharmony profile 
part
24 Entry point
25 With 31-Across, 
“The Aviator” 
Oscar nominee
26 Maxim
28 Pequod crew
31 See 25-Across
32 Tidy (up)
34 Stocking experts, 
and what 16-, 
19-, 51- and 
57-Across literally 
are
38 Give as a task
39 Office notice
42 Govt. drug bust, 
perhaps
45 Post-workout 
refresher
47 __ mater
48 TriBeCa neighbor
50 “__ Blinded Me 
With Science”: 
1983 hit
51 Baltimore-based 
medical school
56 “Sands of __ 
Jima”: 1949 film
57 “Fingers 
crossed!”
61 Country star 
McGraw
62 Gas brand BP 
relaunched in 
2017
63 Less prevalent
64 Had chips, say
65 Fail to notice
66 Washington, e.g.

DOWN
1 Spider’s creation
2 “Ben-__”

3 Baba in a cave
4 No longer 
working: Abbr.
5 Curly-haired 
“Peanuts” 
character
6 To have, in Paris
7 Baby seals
8 “Yuck!”
9 Twins infielder 
Miguel
10 Rice, in Chinese 
cuisine
11 “My goodness!”
12 Hankers (for)
14 “Hmm ... not 
likely”
17 Winter flakes
20 Capital of Sicily
21 Fluffy wrap
22 “__ be darned!”
23 Vegas 
calculation
27 Like most of 
northern Africa
28 Little songbird
29 Drillmaster’s 
syllable
30 Opening day 
pitcher, typically
32 Icy road worry
33 Cribbage piece
35 Mama bear, in 
Seville

36 Omega preceder
37 Puts a Singer to 
work
40 “Not really a fan”
41 Mined metal
42 Sizzling Tex-Mex 
fare
43 Fail epically
44 Shout from the 
foyer
45 __ Tzu: toy dog
46 Advanced 
student’s course

48 Contractor’s 
parameters
49 “Yeah, and ... ?”
52 Fancy pillowcase
53 Prefix with sphere
54 Gold medals, to 
Spaniards
55 Quarrel
58 Nest egg 
acronym
59 “Nothing but __”: 
“Swish!”
60 College sr.’s test

6 — Tuesday, October 1, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

“Lost in Translation” is a movie about 
loneliness, the pitfalls of introversion and the 
secret (but widely held belief) that it’s impossible 
to be fully understood by or profoundly 
connected to someone else. This mutual 
disillusionment 
with 
human 
relationships 
turns out to be precisely what allows the 
film’s leads, Bob (Bill Murray, “Rushmore”) 
and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson, “Under the 
Skin”), to bond and, ultimately, experience the 
kind of togetherness they once thought was 
unattainable. 
Given the subject matter of the film, it’s hard 
to conceive how its soundtrack could possibly 
belong to it. The music — mainly shoegaze songs 
that found their home in the late ’80s-early ’90s 
alternative scene — is noisy and thunderous and 
totally uninhibited. In other words, it’s exactly 
what the characters — shy and secretive and 
insecure — aren’t. 
Perhaps the music serves to express what 
the characters can’t bear to. So much of “Lost 
in Translation” is about disguise and the 
artifices we use to hide our genuine selves, 
doing things not because we want to but because 
we think it’s what we’re supposed to do. Bob, 
an accomplished actor, is filming whiskey 
commercials in Tokyo when he’d rather be 
performing in plays. Charlotte is in the middle 
of an unfulfilling marriage, without any sense of 
purpose in her personal life or work. They both 
let themselves be carried along by life instead of 
taking control of it. They have become strangers 
to themselves, people who live not with passion 
but with timidity.
On the contrary, the soundtrack is anything 

but timid. It is loud and chaotic and beautiful 
precisely because it is ugly. It’s a glorious 
explosion of honest, unobstructed emotion. 
It challenges our impulse to hide from each 
other and from ourselves, like in the song 
“Sometimes,” when Kevin Shields of My Bloody 
Valentine sings, “you can’t hide from the way I 
feel.” The music says what Bob and Charlotte 
can’t find the words to tell each other, while 
hardly using any words at all. It is pure noise, 
noise you can feel from the very bottom of your 
heart, noise that demands to be listened to at the 
absolute loudest volume possible. 
Many things in this movie are, as the title might 
suggest, lost in translation. Bob and Charlotte’s 
inability to speak or understand Japanese gives 
them a sense of alienation from the culture they 
are surrounded by. Both characters struggle to 
faithfully express their thoughts and feelings 
to other people, even the people they are 
married to. But the title of the film also seems 
to be a reflection on the act of filmmaking itself. 
Something about the story being portrayed and 
the experience of being there to film it is lost 
when it is viewed just as a movie. Director Sofia 
Coppola seems fully conscious of this, and it’s 
probably why she chose to make Bob’s parting 
words to Charlotte unintelligible to viewers. 
While there’s been much speculation about what 
exactlyhe whispered into her ear, we’ll probably 
never know for sure. Yet, when I watch Scarlett 
Johansson’s face as she gazes out on the streets 
of Tokyo in the film’s final sequence, set to The 
Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey,” I feel 
as though I understand what she’s feeling in that 
moment in response to Bob’s words. And it’s all 
because of that song, which tells me more about 
her emotions than any words ever could. The 
music requires no translation, and because it’s 
there, nothing is really lost.

Silver screen sountracking
with ‘Lost in Translation’

Rock ‘n’ roll doesn’t seem too far from country 
music. They share mostly the same roots, but 
for some reason, it feels like the two shouldn’t 
commingle. Rock is jagged around the edges, 
marked by guitars crunching against crashing 
drums. Country is smooth and soft, telling 
stories of a spurned lover and what could have 
been. Occasionally, rockers make the transition 
from rock and roll to country, namely Darius 
Rucker and Steven Tyler, but seldom, if ever, is 
the transition from country to rock ‘n’ roll made 
successfully. With his new album SOUND & 
FURY, however, Sturgill Simpson looks to change 
that.
Hazy, psychedelic country subverter Sturgill 
Simpson has always toyed with the idea of rock 
music. He even covered Nirvana’s “In Bloom” 
to dazzling results. There, he pulled “In Bloom” 
into his reverb-drenched, psych-country world, 
transforming the iconic grunge track into 
something uniquely his own. With SOUND & 
FURY, he does the opposite. Simpson pushes 
himself into the world of rock ‘n’ roll, taking 
artifacts from his previous work along for the 
journey.
SOUND & FURY may be Simpson’s first full-
fledged attempt at rock music, but you wouldn’t 
guess it. It sounds like he’s been honing his 
rock skills for years. He takes signature haze 
and replaces it with smoke. That is to say, 
where his music used to transcend, it now slices 
and cuts. This is the kind of music made for 
ripping down a western highway in the early 
hours of the morning. It’s slick, it’s greasy and, 
most importantly, it’s fresh. Lead single “Sing 
Along” is the perfect introduction to this new 
era in Simpson’s career. Deliriously distorted 
guitars are accompanied by beefy bass guitar 
and warbling synthesizers, providing the post-
apocalyptic backtrack that Simpson’s vocals need 
as he bellows lines “Compromise is made out of 
peace / But history’s made out of violence / After 
the war of the world’s has ceased / All that’s left 
is deafening silence.” Simpson maintains his 
signature vocal twang, but instead of stretching 
his words as he used to do, he cuts them in half, 
wasting no time to say what he needs to say. 

What’s most impressive about SOUND & FURY 
is Simpson’s ability to maintain consistency 
between all of his releases. He continues to drop 
knowledge like on his previous releases, but now 
he’s twisting it to a darker reality. On “Make 
Art Not Friends,” he warns, “it’s getting hard 
to find a good friend / So close the door behind 
you / Before anyone come in / Nobody writes, 
and nobody calls / Nobody bother, cause I’m over 
it all.” This is not the Sturgill Simpson of yore: 
This a totally new man, one that is suspect of the 
newly-realized fame he has achieved.
This wariness is a just fit for the strung-out, 
apocalyptic feel of this album. It all culminates 
with “Mercury in Retrograde,” a steamy, synth-

driven song that ruminates on fame and all the 
bullshit that goes with it. It’s one of the more 
“country rock” songs on the album in terms of 
sound, with a full string section and twangy, 
distorted guitars, but that’s a good thing. It’s 
softer vibe nicely contrasts searing lyrics like 
“Living the dreams makes a man wanna scream” 
and “Oh, the road to Hell is paved with cruel 
intention / If it’s not nuclear war, it’s gonna be 
divine intervention.”
If anything, Sturgill Simpson’s experimentation 
on SOUND & FURY shows that he’s fully capable 
of making any kind of music he wants, something 
that the country overlords in Nashville did not 
take kindly to upon the release of his second and 
third albums. This release is a big, fat middle 
finger to the country music industry. If they don’t 
want to accept Simpson, that’s fine. He doesn’t 
want them to anyways. If the rest of the country 
scene doesn’t want him, that’s fine, too, because 
on SOUND & FURY, Simpson does rock ‘n’ roll 
as good as or even better than he does country 
music.

Simpson sets world on fire
in ‘SOUND AND FURY’

MUSIC REVIEW

JIM WILSON
Daily Arts Writer

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

FOCUS FEATURES

Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca” invites 
readers into the world of Manderly, an estate 
that’s like a juicy, red apple with a brilliant 
shine on the outside, but rot within. “Rebecca” 
seduces, satisfies and scintillates its readers. 
It opens with: “I dreamt I went to Manderly 
again.” 
I read “Rebecca” for the first time the 
summer between my freshman and sophomore 
year in high school. I was stuck in a limbo 
state, alternating between the consistency 
and comfort of young-adult romances and 
the daunting classics. My English teacher 
suggested “Rebecca.” “I think you’d like it,” 
was all that she offered. And I did. On the 
surface, it checks everything off my list: 
Romance, Gothic, sardonic heroes, mystery 
and horror. In my naivety, I read it for its 
romance, crossing my fingers for our nameless 
narrator and aloof hero to get their happily-
ever-after. 
Fast-forward seven years. The sinister 
atmosphere of “Rebecca” still holds me captive. 
To faithfully summarize Rebecca would 
be a feat in and of itself. Strictly speaking, 
“Rebecca” is about our nameless heroine. She 
retrospectively speaks about her brief period 
spent at Manderly starting with her interaction 
with Maxim de Winter, the man of the manor. 
Described as insipid and unsophisticated, our 
narrator falls deeply and irrevocably in love 
with Mr. de Winter, eagerly accepting to be 

his wife and to hold the proverbial reigns of 
Manderly. In their whirlwind love-story, we’re 
offered one very important detail: Maxim 
de Winter’s previous wife, Rebecca, died in a 
horrible accident. 
Unlike traditional romances, the proposal 
occurs within the first few chapters of the 
novel instead of the end; in fact, the readers 
only get bits and crumbs of Mrs. and Mr. de 
Winter’s love story. The relationship at the 

forefront is between Mrs. de Winter and 
Rebecca. Rebecca haunts each page. It’s an 
iteration of Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca. Where 
our narrator is mousy, Rebecca was regal. 
From a handkerchief that smells of azaleas to 
her loyal companion, Mrs. Danvers, Rebecca is 
imprinted into the very walls of Manderly. 
Yes, “Rebecca” isn’t simply a romance. 

It’s a twisty, mind-bending novel that 
psychologically questions our understanding 
of the entire narrative. As our narrator gets 
engulfed by Rebecca’s shadows, we begin 
to question her reliability. How much of the 
information she shares is accurate? How much 
of it is a projection of her desires? “Rebecca” 
is slippery — it simultaneously embraces and 
criticizes the decadent imagery of social class. 
We’re poisoned by the sickenly sweet air of 
old bloodlines, invaluable materials and sheer 
decadence. We watch our narrator’s trajectory 
from a fresh, doe-eyed schoolgirl to a character 
preoccupied with image. And still, Rebecca is 
there, reminding our narrator that she’ll never 
be good enough. 
After all, there is no substitute for Rebecca. 
Despite having read “Rebecca” before, the 
ending still shocks me. I remember zooming 
past the last quarter wondering how I could 
have possibly missed all the clues last time. 
Daphne du Maurier is a master of spell-
binding literature. I recently ventured into 
her shorter works, particularly “Don’t Look 
Back,” and was struck by the chilling prose and 
equally terrifying ending. Because of “Don’t 
Look Back,” my walks back to my apartment at 
night are accompanied with a sense of unease. 
I wanted to see if “Rebecca” had that tangible 
element of horror that I glossed over in my 
teenage years. It did. Since its publication in 
1938, “Rebecca” has remained a bestseller. It’s 
a hauntingly provocative novel that at once 
touches, critiques and weaves a slow-burn 
mysterious narrative. It has been, and always 
will be, one of my favorite books. 

Revisiting du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’
and its satiny, sultry horror story

BOOKS NOTEBOOK

SARAH SALMAN
Daily Arts Writer

ELISE GODFRYD
Daily Arts Writer

SOUND AND FURY

Sturgull Simpson

Elektra Records

FILM NOTEBOOK

COURTESY OF EMMA CHANG

