6 — Tuesday, October 8, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

By Debra Hamel
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
10/08/19

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

10/08/19

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Tuesday, October 8, 2019

ACROSS
1 How headless
chickens may run
5 Argo and Titanic
10 Email asking for
money, perhaps
14 Pedi partner
15 “A Confederacy
of Dunces” author
John Kennedy __
16 Gyro bread
17 Ocular arch-
shaping cosmetic
19 Like Felix Unger,
e.g.
20 Forbidden
regions
21 Mom’s brother
22 __ Lanka
23 1/60 of an hr.
25 “The cow is of
the bovine __; /
One end is moo,
the other, milk”:
Ogden Nash
26 Robby the Robot,
e.g.
32 Miss. neighbor
33 High school stat
34 Loewe’s lyricist
37 Dog pack leader
40 One or more
42 Spanish “I love
you”
43 Get by
45 Article in Die Zeit
47 Up to, briefly
48 Backyard cooker
52 N, E, S or W
54 Golf teacher
55 Portuguese saint
56 UPS driver’s
assignment
58 Not one to pass
up a porterhouse
64 King of Siam’s
Broadway dance
partner
65 Tentative “It’s
a date” ... or a
hint to the starts
of 17-, 26-, and
48-Across
66 The Stones’
Jagger
67 One-eighty
68 Distort, as rules
69 Throbbing pain
70 Pro bono promise
71 Boats like Noah’s

DOWN
1 Last word before
digging in?
2 BLT condiment

3 10 C-notes
4 Put the __ on:
squelch
5 Attic function
6 Sewing machine
inventor Elias
7 Corn Belt state
8 Outmoded TV
type
9 __ symbol
10 Wing
measurement
11 Where Reds play
12 In the least
13 2018 Best Actor
Rami __
18 Hard to find, to
Caesar
21 Like some
expectations
24 Feeling poorly
26 Palindromic
address
27 “Enchanted” film
title girl
28 Naval officer on a
cereal box
29 Beer initialism
30 “I’m on it!”
31 “We __
Farmers”:
insurance slogan
35 Pianist Gilels
36 Winning streak
38 “Yeah, right!”

39 With jaw
dropped
41 Affirmative vote
44 Do something
human?
46 Stephen King’s
kid lit counterpart
49 Awaken
50 Sometimes it’s
unmitigated
51 Self-moving
vacuum
52 Certain queen’s
bailiwick

53 Greek column
type
57 Word before part
or heart
59 Sufficient, in texts
60 “Back forty” unit
61 Swerve
62 Kindle technology
63 Gps. of drinks
65 “The lowest form
of humor—when
you don’t think
of it first”: Oscar
Levant

Wilco has lived under the shadow of Yankee
Hotel Foxtrot for almost two decades. Some
of their best work (“Impossible Germany,”
“One Sunday Morning”) has come after their
landmark album, but they’ve struggled to
release a full project that measures up to such a
lofty expectation. They always will.
Skeletal and moody, Ode to Joy is the most
cohesive and consistent Wilco album since Sky
Blue Sky. However, it lacks the highs that Wilco
are capable of reaching. Maybe it’s wrong to
expect Wilco to continue to produce at their
high-water mark forever, but it’s hard not to
feel a little disappointed whenever they put
out another capable but unremarkable project.
However, if you let go of the expectations Wilco
has labored under for the majority of their
existence, Ode to Joy is a successful album,
always pleasant and often beautiful.

The sonic palette is subtle and tasteful,
varied enough to avoid monotony but consistent
enough to lend the project an overarching
thematic sensation. The songs across the
album are made cohesive through a few choice
production qualities — crunchy snares, textural
guitars, gossamer piano — as well as through
their simple, plaintive lyrics. Jeff Tweedy’s
voice has always possessed a charmingly
wavering, wistful timbre; his aging vocal cords

only intensify this quality. Unfortunately, it is
possible to have too much of a good thing, as
his vocals now evoke frailty and weariness to a
degree that can grow irksome.
“Bright Leaves” is a prototypical atmospheric
Wilco piece: Instruments flit in and out of the
soundscape accompanied by glitchy electronic
elements while Jeff Tweedy croons a doleful
melody about somewhat cryptic relationship
problems. The singles “Everyone Hides” and
“Love Is Everywhere (Beware)” are much
stronger in the context of the album. The latter,
a folksy waltz, is one of the more successful
outings on the project, thanks in large part to a
vivid guitar riff during the chorus.
Ode to Joy is not perfect. This project is the
opposite of catchy — as soon as you stop listening,
the memory of any given song fades immediately.
While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, the
album can certainly drift towards tedium, and
it dips in quality towards the middle. “White
Wooden Cross” is one of the weaker lyrical
cuts: Jeff Tweedy, when passing by a roadside
memorial, imagines that his loved one is the one
whose demise the cross marks. This makes him
sad. While such simple moments of imagined
grief can be relatable and powerful, Tweedy
doesn’t really go much beyond the surface of
how those brief flashes of mortality affect us.
Sometimes concision is insufficient.
The quality of the lyrics throughout is
inconsistent. Sometimes Wilco succeeds in
being straightforward and profound: “I’ve
tried, in my way, to love everyone” is the type
of thoughtful simplicity Wilco tends to excel at.
Sometimes they come off as half-baked: “High
in an old dead tree / That plastic bag is me /
That’s where I want to be” falls well short of the
depth and clarity that Jeff Tweedy has shown
himself to be capable of in the past.
There is a fine line between pensive and
soporific that Wilco spends most of Ode to Joy
flirting with. Ode to Joy is weary, the sound of
the thoughts that float through your head right
before a nap after a long day, the sound of a brisk
fall morning as you slowly wake up. I suspect
that this album will blossom with reflection and
repeated listens. Time will tell.

‘Ode to Joy’ lacks... joy

JONAH MENDELSON
Daily Arts Writer

Remember when you were a little kid and
you would fall asleep on the couch after a
“Spongebob Squarepants” marathon? You’d
wake up in the middle of the night, and there
was always some adult cartoon playing. It
was always a little weird, a little creepy and
impossible to figure out what was going on
or who the show existed for in the first place.
That show was “Bless the Harts.” It’s about a
family from the American South, and while it’s
a slightly different take on yet another white
American family, there’s nothing particularly
inspiring or unique about it.
The pilot jumps right into the life of the Hart
family, who live in a small town somewhere in
the South. There’s a star-studded cast, with
Kristen Wiig (“Big Mouth”) playing Jenny Hart,
Maya Rudolph (“Big Mouth”) playing Betty
Hart, Ike Barinholtz (“The Twilight Zone”)
playing Wayne Edwards, and Kumail Nanjiani
(“Silicon Valley”) playing Jesus, for some
reason. The bulk of the story is centered around
the family’s struggles from living paycheck
to paycheck — in the pilot, the family’s water
gets shut off. Jenny finds out that her mother,
Betty, has been hoarding these stuffed animals
called “Hug N’ Bugs” in a storage unit, in hopes
of selling them for a fortune in the future.
Throughout the episode, they try to auction
these stuffed animals off on the internet, only to
find out that they don’t hold any value anymore.
The show makes small historical jokes, as the
Hug N’ Bugs were all inspired by a historical
figure. At some point, Jenny says, “Good news,
Nelson Mandela Super Soaker Hug N’ Bug. I’m
setting you free!” which elicited a nose-exhale
laugh from me. The rest of the jokes were at this
caliber or lower, which offers little to nothing

fresh in the world of comedy, especially in the
realm of adult animation. The southern small-
town living is also a trope that we’ve seen plenty
of times before, but the show didn’t put much
effort into putting a twist on it. There was
the staple mom’s dumb boyfriend, the staple
southern religiosity and the staple “this’ll sell
for a fortune later” hoarder.
The main issues with the series are its
lack of originality and unwillingness to push
boundaries. With the vast collection of adult
animation out there today, there’s nothing
about this show that makes it stand out amongst
the others. But perhaps this is too harsh. It’s
possible that I, an East-Coaster, was not the
target audience for this kind of show. After all,

I’ve never spent more than a week in the South,
and that’s certainly not enough time to pick
up on the intricacies of southern small-town
living. But if they were going to make this show
targeted toward a niche audience, then it might
have been set up to fail anyway. Perhaps over the
course of the season, the writers will learn to dig
deeper and find relatability in the specificity of
the circumstances, and the audience can grow
to larger than that small portion of the country.

‘Bless the Harts’ doesn’t
deliver us anything new

SOPHIA YOON
Daily Arts Writer

TV REVIEW

YOUTUBE

Kevin Barry develops every word of
his novel “Night Boat to Tangier” with
contrasting magnetic forces. The reader is
wholeheartedly repelled by the despicable
tendencies
of
supposed
protagonists
Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond.
Yet somehow, Barry’s captivating style
re-attracts the reader, familiarizing him
with the most unfamiliar of lifestyles and
impulses in a manner akin to that of a
compelling nature documentary.
Barry’s coverage of these longtime
partners in crime begins well past their
prime. They sit in the decrepit port of
Algeciras and wait for the title boat to
Tangier in hopes that Maurice’s long
estranged daughter, Dilly, will arrive or
depart onboard. Dilly is the primary source
of empathy throughout the novel and a
beacon of purity in each flashback Maurice
and Charlie recall. She represents the
innocence that Maurice and Charlie have
long surrendered — the two hope to save
her from a problematic lifestyle like those
they had led their entire lives.
Despite
his
paternal
concern
for
Dilly, Maurice is expertly depicted as a
contemptible human being in just about
every
flashback
that
Barry
provides.
Maurice possesses few memories not
involving mistresses, drug smuggling or
assault. Despite his constant reflection,
his most damning personality trait is his
inability to take responsibility for his
actions, even in hindsight. He had no choice
but to perpetually cheat on his former
partner, Cynthia, since he had a suspicion
that she herself could have been cheating.
His prior heroin use was inevitable since it
was so placating for his anxiety, and the Irish

are an inherently anxious group of people.
By all accounts, Maurice is incorrigible.
This makes Barry’s ability to garner any
empathy at all for Maurice nothing short
of a magic trick. He is only able to work his
miracle through the juxtaposition of the
regret he feels for his invisibility in Dilly’s
life and the lack of regret he feels in every
other facet of his life.

This
tense
question
of
regret
is
exemplified through the generally brief
back-and-forth
dialogue
that
Maurice
and Charlie share as they kill time in
the port of Algeciras. In the very first
pages of the novel, Barry cements their
thuggish personas through their concise,
unemotional responses to one another.
These segments are so well executed that
the reader may find themselves questioning
Barry’s own past — his ability to take on
a criminal voice comes about a little too
naturally. The only time his voice partially
breaks is when Maurice considers his
shortcomings as a father or whether he will
find Dilly. In spite of the initial disgust he
feels toward Maurice’s lifestyle, the reader
cannot help but hope that Maurice gets his
second chance.
Unfortunately,
Barry’s
creation
of

empathy for a wholly detestable character
does not make for a perfect novel. At times,
the dialogue and reflection at the port
feel as though they are done too well. The
format of these scenes is so unique and rich
in voice that the flashbacks consequently
fell short. While Maurice’s backstory is
crucial to the payoff of the more reflective
scenes, the more traditional presentation
of his past tended to create a noticeable
disconnect
throughout
the
novel.
Transitioning from a chapter of rapid-fire,
authentic dialogue to one of more drawn
out, albeit effective, description tends to
disrupt the exciting tempo of much of the
novel and leave the reader waiting for the
chapter to end. Perhaps Barry did this
somewhat deliberately, since the effect
of the imbalance is the reader yearning
to leave the excerpts of the life of crime
characterizing Maurice’s younger years in
exchange for a time period in which there is
an actual chance for redemption. However,
this is a very generous stance to take, and
it’s more likely that these sections were not
as effectively executed as Barry may have
hoped. While not as terrible as the character
they portray, Barry’s scenes set in the past
simply cannot uphold the precedent of
captivation achieved in present scenes.
Kevin
Barry’s
novel
is
one
that
thoroughly impresses in its ability to
both capture a voice so unknown to most
readers and evoke empathy for characters
with so few redeeming qualities. While
the pacing of flashbacks is mismanaged at
times, patient readers may not mind this
shortcoming at all, and restless readers
will still have their hunger for fast-paced
writing satiated by the scenes in the port
of Algeciras. Whether looking for a way to
fill an evening or needing something to do
until your own boat arrives, “Night Boat to
Tangier” is a worthy use of your time.

Empathy against all odds in Kevin
Barry’s ‘Night Boat to Tangier’

ANDREW PLUTA
For The Daily

BOOK REVIEW

Bless the Harts

Pilot

Fox

Sundays @ 8:30 p.m.

DBPM RECORDS

Ode to Joy

Wilco

dBpm Records

MUSIC REVIEW

Night Boat to

Tangier

Kevin Barry

Doubleday

Sep. 17, 2019