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