6 — Friday, October 18, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

By David Alfred Bywaters
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
10/18/19

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

10/18/19

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Friday, October 18, 2019

ACROSS
1 Show anxiety, in 
a way
5 No good
11 Prankster’s 
projectile
14 Excited response 
to a cue
15 Pressed
16 Also
17 Iranian vocal 
improvisation?
19 Primitive dwelling
20 Furniture 
cleaning brand
21 Bar __
22 Assistant
23 Web address
24 Household 
employee’s 
fraudulent ruse?
26 Approve
29 Put into words
30 Preface to a 
conviction
31 Product warning
34 Sew up again
38 Nursery school 
air fresheners?
42 First name in 
black-and-white 
photos
43 Stash
44 Cabinet dept.
45 Born, in Brussels
47 Smidge, to a 
laddie
50 Poem that 
seemed awfully 
profound at the 
bar last night?
55 Realtor’s unit
56 Words of 
understanding
57 Shad product
58 Tabloid output
61 Catch
62 What optical 
character 
recognition 
software often 
produces?
64 I problem?
65 Purpose
66 “This is terrible!”
67 Intl. Talk Like a 
Pirate Day month
68 Sudden reactions
69 Crucial things

DOWN
1 Plumbing item
2 “So be it!”
3 Casual pants
4 Make certain
5 Decree
6 Item near a 
sugar bowl, 
perhaps
7 Opera about an 
opera singer
8 Peruvian of old
9 Comes to 
realize
10 Summer CT 
clock setting
11 Moral principle
12 Big wheel in 
delis
13 27-Down’s 
victorious words
18 Hebrides unit
22 So far
24 Pokes (around)
25 Knitter’s need
26 Opera about an 
African princess
27 Gangster movie 
hero, perhaps
28 Sailor
32 Follower’s suffix
33 Displeased look

35 Sad song 
subject
36 Cogito __ sum
37 Car sticker amt.
39 Perfume with 
myrrh, say
40 Actor Guinness
41 Lamb’s dam
46 Roaming, like a 
knight
48 Palindromic 
Parisian 
pronoun

49 Performs 
adequately
50 Longs
51 Treatment
52 Jazz style
53 Vital vessel
54 Barbecue brand
58 Some NCOs
59 Wacko
60 First chimp in 
orbit
62 Base figs.
63 Small colonist

Classifieds

Call: #734-418-4115
Email: dailydisplay@gmail.com

LOOKING FOR SOMEONE to 
drive my daughter from AA to Wix‑
om 2‑4 af 
ternoons/wk. Days and rate 
negotiable. 734‑355‑9313| Starting 
ASAP

HELP ELDERLY WITH 
HOUSEHOLD TASKS
Walk to UM, 734.276.6797 $10/hr

HELP WANTED

HELP WANTED

The Michigan
Daily loves 
its readers
a LATTE

“Pockets of Silence at the Glorified Disco.” Fourteen 
School of Music, Theatre & Dance students stare at this 
strange amalgamation of words, amazed (and perhaps a 
little intimidated) by the fact that they have named a show 
they haven’t even created yet. 
“They did a photo shoot almost immediately after, where 
they made a poster for the show,” Assistant Professor of 
Dance Charli Brissey added in an interview with The Daily. 
“There was suddenly this strange camaraderie for a show 
that no one had made yet.”
This is what the first day of class looked like for 
DANCECHAMBERDANCE, a five week mini course 
that is expanding and testing the definitions of dance, 
chamber music and collaboration. In SMTD there 
has been an increasing interest in these collaborative, 
interdepartmental classes. Among an emerging gaggle of 
such classes, DANCECHAMBERDANCE has come forth 
as an “infrastructure” for cross-department collaboration. 
Brissey, who teaches the class, describes their role as 
“facilitator.” 
“I don’t choreograph for the show, I don’t tell the students 
what their collaboration needs to look like,” Brissey said. 
“I’m just there to teach them a little bit about production.” 
The show is entirely left to the students to run and 
organize. So how does a group of fourteen students — 
ranging from ages 19 to 35 with varied experiences in 
production and their respective fields — create a show from 
nothing but a title? 
The students at DANCECHAMBERDANCE break 
the rules a bit and test the limits of their project and each 
other’s artistry. In an interview with The Daily, students 
in the class Jacob Taitel and Aislinn Bailie described the 
process of creating this show as “exploratory” and “wildly 
improvisational.” They said that the first few rehearsals 
were mainly used to figure out what everybody could 
bring to the table. From there, it was clear the line between 
“dancer” and “musician” was going to become blurred: One 
dancer professed that they could DJ, another could play the 
drums, a tuba player was trained in ballet for a year and a 
bassoon player could beatbox. It is a piece where everyone 
does everything. It’s less about setting a dance piece to 
chamber music and more about artists creating a fusion 
piece with movement and sound as their primary tools. So 

the class tumbled forward, tossing out concepts, interesting 
words and scraps of music or choreography, and instead 
created a space to improvise with other artists and create 
something risky in a low-stakes environment. 
“It’s so nice to just let out energy and put something 
out there knowing that someone else will pick it up. Like, 
everyone’s just trying stuff,” said Taitel, a second year 
Masters student in Tuba Performance and Chamber Music 
and student in this class.
In addition to this class being a space for artists to 
experiment without the pressure of perfectionism, it has 
also become a space to learn about one’s own craft through 
a different kind of artist’s eyes. 
“I get some of my most effective criticism from 
other people within the arts,” Taitel said on the idea of 
collaborating with dancers, “because they don’t deal with 
the things that I have to deal with as a musician — they just 
hear the music.” Musicians who have never played improv 
before were met with the challenge of thinking and creating 
beyond the music stand (of which there are none of in this 
show). Same goes for the dancers; this class has become an 
opportunity for artists to expand their vocabulary and skill 
sets across artistic mediums.
And the results seem pretty exciting. And weird. “There 
are a lot of pockets, some disco, and, I don’t know, we break 
into a line dance at one point? And that’s pretty cool?” said 
Bailie, a Masters student in Bassoon. 
Other notable cameos in this piece include a metronomic 
solo dance piece, a set of pieces on the seven deadly sins and 
a good many dancers playing music and musicians dancing. 
“Sometimes we don’t even know what’s going to happen!” 
Bailie laughingly explained, “Not in a bad way … in an 
exciting way. You have to be present for it.”
In live performance, there is often a pressure to make 
capital-A Art, art that is supposed to feel deep and complex 
and cryptic, but oftentimes just renders the audience 
confused and feeling a bit left out. This group of artists have 
relieved themselves of that pressure and seem to just be 
creating for creation’s sake, reacting honestly from moment 
to moment, in what will be a unique, strange and genuine 
experience. 
“I think that what an audience member takes away 
from a piece is pretty up to them and their experiences and 
however they feel,” Taitel said, “but I guess if I had to choose 
something I want them to take away from this, it would be 
that weird things can create emotion too, and things that 
you wouldn’t expect can be extremely effective.”

New SMTD minicourse 
breaks discipline barriers

COMMUNITY CULTURE REVIEW

STEPHANIE GURALNICK
For The Daily

In PBS’s “Press,” a cheerful yet outdated melodrama 
set in contemporary London, two British newspapers — 
The Post and The Herald — find themselves engaged in 
a war where the journalists that cheat and lie the most 
appear to be the victors. While the offices may be close 
in proximity, their journalistic practices and financial 
conditions differ significantly. 
The lowlife Post is led by uber-confident editor-in-
chief, Duncan Allen (Ben Chaplin, “Kiss Me First”), 
who was once an impressive and ethical journalist. His 
profession and unnecessarily high opinion of himself, 
though, have eroded these attributes in favor of seeking 
sensationalist stories.
Holly Evans (Charlotte Riley, “Dark Heart”) brings us 
inside the left-leaning, award winning, serious reporting 
Herald that prides itself on exposing corruption and 
hypocrisy. She is a humorless investigative journalist 
who marches on with the hunch that a new injustice is 
always around the corner. She represents what Duncan 
used to be — she abides by the highest journalistic 
practices, but lacks the cut-throat attitude of Duncan. 
Duncan, however, is not the one calling the shots 
for The Post. George Emmerson (David Suchet, “His 
Dark Materials”) is the CEO of World Wide News, 
the company that owns The Post. Emmerson is not 
motivated by financial gain, but is instead determined to 
wield his influence around the world.

The central focus of this six part mini-series is the 
differing practices of journalistic integrity of these 
respective papers. The result is continuous action that is 
impossible not to become entrenched in, even when the 
practice is as simple as reminding us that it’s wrong to 
steal. Holly represents the heroine: She fearlessly fights 
her way through the cruel and dark tabloid world, full 
of reporters who blackmail parents of kids who have 
committed suicide with threats of humiliating publicity 
if the grieving parents fail to meet interview demands. 
While it’s an entertaining show, “Press” comes up 
short in being mostly about print media, as if the Internet 
is not central to contemporary London journalism. The 
setting might be off by about two decades, but it doesn’t 
hinder the pacing or quality of the show. On the flip side, 
“Press” brings in real-world issues such as declining 
sales, press regulation, difference between public 
interest and interest to the public and whether or not 
something that is in the public domain is fair game.
Beyond its lame attempt at being relevant, “Press” 
also fails to humanize its characters, as most of them 
lack personal lives. Even Duncan, whose screensaver is a 
picture of his wife and kid, prefers to spend every second 
creating stories that will ruin other people’s lives and, 
consequently, his own in the process. Maybe because 
“Press” is a mini-series with a tight narrative, there is 
no time to explore the lives of the characters outside 
of work. The only reason it’s problematic is because 
the characters have been framed to make it seem like 
journalism is the only thing in their lives and they all 
have absolutely no interest in anything else.

‘Press’ is 20 years too late

TV REVIEW

JUSTIN POLLACK
For The Daily

PBS

Jesse 
Pinkman 
(Aaron 
Paul, 
“BoJack 
Horseman”) is, in many ways, the unsung 
hero of “Breaking Bad.” Even as Walter White 
(Bryan Cranston, “Malcolm in the Middle”) 
became just a tad too deplorable to sympathize 
with by the end of the series, Jesse maintained 
as a character viewers could see the humanity 
in, despite his crimes. After all, he was just 
a kid when he partnered up with Walter, his 
chemistry teacher, to join the meth trade. And 
though his youth is no excuse for what he ends 
up doing, it does make us more forgiving of his 
actions, more inclined to cling to him.
Yet, “Breaking Bad” was never really Jesse’s 
story. It was Walter White’s. It was the story 
of just how far a normal man will go to find 
wealth and power, confidence and meaning, 
even when it costs him the safety of his family 
and, eventually, his own life. The series 
finale wrapped up this story perfectly with 
Walter, or rather Heisenberg, making peace 
with himself, or at least as close to peace as 
he could manage. But for me there was still 
a looming question in the back of my mind: 
What about Jesse? How does his story end?
This is where “El Camino”, Netflix’s latest 
extension of the “Breaking Bad” universe, 
comes in, arriving more than six years after 
the show’s final episode. “El Camino” tells 
viewers everything they could want to know 
about Jesse’s fate, picking up exactly where 
“Breaking Bad” left off, with Jesse fleeing the 
neo-Nazis who kept him hostage in Todd’s 
(Jesse Plemons, “Fargo”) 1978 El Camino. 

Shootings and heists ensue, but Jesse isn’t in 
it for the reasons he once was. He’s desperate 
for money, not to fuel his own greed but to 
pay Ed (Robert Forster, “Mulholland Drive”) 
for a new identity and a new life. All in 
all, it appears that Jesse has learned from 
Walter’s mistakes. Meth dealing, despite its 
profitability and its thrills, just isn’t worth it 
for him, at least not anymore.
Jesse wants to escape his past, but can he? 
The short answer is no. Mike (Jonathan Banks, 
“Better Call Saul”) even tells him so in the 
film’s first scene, saying, “Sorry, kid, that’s 
the one thing you can never do.” No matter 
how far away from New Mexico he manages 
to run, he can’t run away from himself, from 
the people he’s killed and from the people 
he’s lost. You can see his torment, his grief 
written all over his face, covered in dirt and 
scars from his time in captivity. You can see it 
in his eyes, too, even after he succeeds in his 
mission. There’s no way for him to rid himself 
of it. There are only two options: die, or learn 
to live with himself. He chooses life, and I’m 
happy for it.
“El Camino” doesn’t need to exist, but 
I’m glad it does. It’s given Jesse’s journey a 
closure I never knew I needed. It doesn’t tie 
up every loose string, but it’s all the better 
for it. Had “El Camino” given Jesse a happier 
ending and a less ambiguous future, the movie 
would be devoid of the realism and complexity 
that made “Breaking Bad” so challenging 
and so exciting to watch. Because this film 
exists, “Breaking Bad” fans can take comfort 
in knowing that, even if Jesse isn’t okay now, 
maybe he might learn to be, and that’s more 
than enough for me. 

‘El Camino’ lets fans say
goodbye to Jesse Pinkman

FILM REVIEW

ELISE GODFRYD
Daily Arts Writer

NETFLIX

Pockets of Silence at the Glorified 
Disco

Oct. 18-19 @ 8 p.m.

Arthur Miller Theatre

Free

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie

Netflix

Press

Season Premiere

PBS

Sundays @ 10 p.m.

