6— Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Arts
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By Paul Coulter

©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
10/22/19

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

10/22/19

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Tuesday, October 22, 2019

ACROSS
1 Barbecue 
glowers
6 Priestly robes
10 Cobblers’ tools
14 Neighborhood 
map on a city 
map, e.g.
15 Java neighbor
16 Former Iranian 
ruler
17 Classroom text
19 Deep sleep
20 Represent
21 Like a bike
23 Goes on to say
24 Summer on the 
Riviera
25 MLB Network 
analyst Martinez
28 Twinkling in the 
night sky
34 On bed rest, say
36 Lupino of “High 
Sierra”
37 Bird’s crop
38 Colorado native
39 Relief from the 
daily grind
42 “__ Am”: Alicia 
Keys album
43 Screen material
45 Sinus doc
46 Growing weary
48 Office spot with a 
coffee pot
51 Landlord’s 
income
52 Tell tall tales
53 Field of study
55 Pays some of
59 Closed in on
62 Cut __: dance, in 
old slang
63 Start of a sports 
season, and 
what each half of 
17-, 28-, 39- and 
48-Across can 
have
66 Hightail it
67 Trait carrier
68 Mozart’s “Così 
fan __”
69 Spill the beans
70 Taiwanese PC 
maker
71 Most common roll 
of two dice

DOWN
1 Prefix with 
gender

2 How software 
was once sold
3 Queens tennis 
stadium
4 Johnny’s “The 
Big Bang Theory” 
role
5 Was 
conspicuous
6 Convent leader
7 Language of 
Southeast Asia
8 Hard punch
9 Many a Punjabi
10 One leading 
a Spartan 
lifestyle
11 Healthy bread 
type
12 Like a weak 
excuse
13 Roe source
18 Inc., in the U.K.
22 Slender 
aquarium 
swimmer
25 __ bob: vertical 
measuring tool
26 Diner
27 Gas at a truck 
stop
29 Connect with
30 Big deal
31 Whitewater ride

32 “Who __?!”: “Join 
the club!”
33 Small sticks
35 Jetty
40 6, on a cellphone 
keypad
41 Insects with a 
painful sting
44 Stylist’s supply
47 Debate again
49 Hawaii’s 
Mauna __
50 Style

54 Camping gear 
brand
55 Inane
56 Mystery writer 
Gardner
57 Tranquil exercise
58 On __: without a 
contract
60 1999 Ron 
Howard film
61 Go out with
64 WSW’s opposite
65 Japanese money

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Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. They hit it off, 
hold hands into the sunset, get married, have 
kids — the whole shebang. It’s a tale that’s been 
recycled throughout all of time, and while it’s not 
entirely realistic, it doesn’t mean there’s no hope 
for us. As society has slowly started to realize, love 
takes shape in infinite forms, and “Modern Love” 
presents this to us in a beautiful, realistic, painful 
and sometimes convoluted way. The eight-episode 
anthology was inspired by a column in The New 

York Times under the same name, and portrays 
love stories in a light that’s true to life. Like all 
great anthologies, some episodes will stand out 
among the rest and leave you thinking for days, 
and some will simply disappoint. This season has 
a strong start and finish with not much of value in 
between, but a great part of the anthology format 
is that you can skip episodes without missing a 
beat. 
Under a common theme of love, each episode 
features nuances of affection rarely seen on the 
big screen: The platonic love between a woman 
and her doorman, the ones that got away, two gay 
men and their adopted daughter and a bipolar 
woman and herself, to name a few. These episodes 

were some of the most impressive ones from the 
series, and their departures from the romance 
genre are just enough to provide a fresh new 
take, but not far enough to be cold and detached. 
They hit you just as hard as any cheesy love story 
would, but force you to think about love in a more 
realistic sense. 
The episode featuring Anne Hathaway (“The 
Hustle”), in which a woman reconciles herself 
with the presence of her own mental illness, 
marks the end of a great start to the season. After 
that, the season takes a weird dip downward 
into the territory of stale acting and unrelatable 
plotlines. The worst and frankly creepiest 
episode of the season is about a young girl named 
Maddy (Julia Garner, “Dirty John”) with serious 
daddy issues. She attaches herself to Peter (Shea 
Whigham, “Joker”), a higher-up at her workplace 
who seems to be around 30 years older than her. 
Long story short, she begins to see him as a father 
figure, he thinks of her differently, mixed signals 
are exchanged and things get very, very weird. 
Maddy’s story makes you wonder whether the 
creators thought it was supposed to be watchable. 
On the bright side, the good stuff picks back up in 
the last two episodes of the season. 
If you’re a crier, you’ll surely shed tears at the 
best parts of the series. It crushes you, gives you 
hope, rinses and repeats. With the diversity of 
topics the stories cover, anyone should be able 
to find an episode they vibe with the most and, 
who knows, maybe it’ll be the daddy issues one. 
The anthology format makes the show a lot more 
watchable and digestible, and we can only hope 
that the show will get picked up for a second 
season so we can continue feeling all the things.

The antithesis of Hollywood
romance is ‘Modern Love’

SOPHIA YOON
Daily Arts Writer

AMAZON VIDEO

TV REVIEW

When Zac Brown Band released Welcome Home 
in 2017, it sounded as though they were home 
to stay. Songs like “Roots” and “Family Table” 
celebrated Brown’s family-man image and firmly 
planted the band back in the country soundscape in 
which they started. But this September, the band’s 
latest album, The Owl, found them on a different 
planet. The Owl is Frankenstein’s monster: Dance-
pop beat drops, questionable lyrics, rock and 
country all mashed together haphazardly. It’s not 
like there weren’t any warning signs beforehand — 
Zac explicitly made the leap in 2016 by starting the 
EDM trio Sir Rosevelt. It’s just that Welcome Home 
seemed to promise that these interests would 
be kept separate. The Owl blends them together. 
Unsurprisingly, fans were disappointed. But what 
was most shocking was when Zac Brown doubled 
down on his new sound by dropping a solo pop 
album, The Controversy, a week later. Then fans 
were worried.
The band’s album titles have always been 
markers of their artistic development. Their first 
album, The Foundation, poured the foundation 
for Zac Brown Band’s wheelhouse with hits 
like “Chicken Fried” and “Toes.” These songs 
established the band in its corner of country music 
filled with strings, salt water and sincerity. Jekyll + 
Hyde (2015) embodied two personas — one at the 
beach, one suited for the club, both still country. 
This album is sonically closest to The Owl, the only 
difference on the former is that Brown doesn’t try 
to be both Jekyll and Hyde at the same time. 
The Owl is an equally revealing title. Like Zac 
Brown’s interest in the EDM world, owls aren’t 
seen as much as they are understood to always 
be around, living in the shadows. Additionally, 
owls are nocturnal. So it’s fitting that The Owl 
would come out during a period of darkness for 
Zac Brown a year after he and his wife announced 
they were separating. The first song, “The Woods,” 
invites the listener into that darkness and a side 
of the band they’ve never seen before, while 
acknowledging that a longtime fan might decline 
the invitation.
“What makes me smile / might make you cry” 
he shrugs over an auto-tuned and fiddle-heavy 
pop track. While “The Woods” is bearable, other 
tracks, like “OMW,” are not. “When you see that 
OMW / OMW / meaning I’m on my way, yeah / 
hell yeah / I’m on my way, yeah,” Brown croons 
like a dad rushing to hook up with someone half his 
age. Most of the songs on The Owl fall somewhere 
in between. For example, “Already on Fire” has a 

believable Western film groove and catchy hook 
that a deep, dark, out-of-nowhere autotuned 
bridge derails.
The title of Brown’s solo album, The Controversy, 
speaks for itself. It’s clear that Brown knew what 
he was about to incite when he dropped it. Labelled 
pop instead of country, (unlike The Owl), the 
album still feels too busy with EDM, hip hop, R&B 
and rock meshed together. But the music itself isn’t 
really what I have a problem with, it’s the lyrics. 
In “Swayze,” Brown brags that, “every time I get 
a new bitch, I need a new bitch.” It’s so gross that 
it’s comical. In “This Far,” the song questions how 
he became so successful — something listeners 
will be wondering throughout the album, Brown 
sings, “No C-G / I’m still I” so solemnly I can’t help 
but smile. The only joy I get from listening to The 
Controversy is from recognizing how ridiculous it 
is. 
Every artist changes their sound. Whether it’s 
a switch in genre or producers, a musician’s urge 
to try something new is as natural as a fan’s initial 
discomfort in hearing their favorite band sound 
different. But I don’t feel uncomfortable listening 
to The Owl or even The Controversy despite how 
cringe-worthy both can be. I just feel sad. It’s 
tempting to write an obituary for the Zac Brown 
Band, but the situation is worse than that. No-fun 
attempts to push genre boundaries like Jekyll + 
Hyde, The Owl and The Controversy sound like 
cries for help. It’s assumed that when musicians go 
through difficult times, they make their best music. 
But what happens when an artist already made 
meaningful music about their happy everyday life, 
and then has their world flipped upside down? In 
Zac Brown’s case, all that was deep turns shallow.
Still, there are two songs to return to out of all 
of this. “Someone That I Used to Know” pulls off 
EDM-country and offers some explanation for 
the band’s new direction. “When you keep on 
losing / with the path you’re choosing / then it’s 
time to let go / of someone that I used to know,” 
Brown advises. Unfortunately, that someone 
seems to be the “cold beer on a Friday night / 
pair of jeans that fit just right” beanie-wearing 
Zac Brown fans grew to love. The other song is 
The Owl’s closer “Leaving Love Behind.” Entirely 
acoustic with gorgeous harmonies, this song is so 
good it’s frustrating. It’s a reminder of what the 
Zac Brown Band is capable when Zac Brown is in 
the right headspace. It also provides context for 
the rest of the album by showing what got him in 
the wrong headspace — his heartbreak at the end 
of his marriage.
“Everything we lose / will be a gift in time” he 
sings, and I agree. But it’s obvious this time hasn’t 
come yet for Zac Brown.

Who hurt Zac Brown?

MUSIC NOTEBOOK

Mozart’s “Requiem.” Mahler’s “5th Symphony.” Glass’s 
“Glassworks.” Davis’s “Kind of Blue.” All of these pieces of 
music have proved to be seminal works that have proved to 
influence the shape of music yet to come. It’s common to see 
them performed live by different symphonies, chamber groups 
or jazz combos. However, despite being the spark that began the 
ambient movement of music, Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music For 
Airports is rarely heard outside of a prerecorded context. The 
Digital Music Ensemble hopes to change that. 
Stephen Rush, the director of the the University of Michigan’s 
Digital Music Ensemble (DME), compares Eno’s Music For 
Airports to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. “It’s not that hard to 
see live,” Rush said of the Symphony in an interview with The 
Daily. “But has anyone seen Music for Airports done? This is 
a piece of music that founded a genre. And we have not seen it 
live? That’s crazy!”
Although it wasn’t his first dive into ambient music, Music for 
Airports is certainly Eno’s most popular and influential work. 
In the winter of 1975, right after he released his critically-
acclaimed art rock album, Another Green World, Eno took a 
sharp turn in the opposite direction with his first ambient 
album, Discreet Music. This album proved to be a teaser for 
what was to come three years later with Ambient 1: Music for 
Airports.
After waiting for a delayed flight in a European airport, Eno 
was inspired by the soundscape he heard. 
“Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of 
listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must 
be as ignorable as it is interesting,” Eno said. Eno accomplished 
this through a series of tape loops — tape that has been spliced 
together to create a seemingly infinite loop that continuously 
repeats itself. Eno originally recorded the piece by phasing in 
and out tape loops of different lengths, using a variety of sounds 
from instruments like piano, voice and even synthesizer.
Just like the original piece, the Digital Music Ensemble 
plans on recreating the album through tape. Although Rush 
wrote that the group plans on recreating the piece as closely 
as possible, he also chose to make the piece more of their own. 
“I asked all of the students to write their own loops to place 

or play over the original music,” Rush wrote. “People that love 
the original may be disappointed because they will hear it (the 
original piece), but they will also hear what our students have 
placed over the top. The main thing that is different, of course, 
is that this is a physical installation … not an LP record.”
The official title of the group’s performance is “Pond Music 
XVII: Brian Eno’s Music for Airports.” In the past, the ensemble 
has done a variety of performances on the pond by the Earl V. 
Moore School of Music, each serving as more of an installation 
than a performance. While the pond doesn’t directly play a role 
in making the music, Rush says that it plays an integral role in 
the installation. 

“The pond provides a beautiful natural landscape. It is also a 
neutral gathering space for music. No one has any expectations 
of what music would come from a pond space,” Rush wrote. 
“It also messes with the audiences notion of time. When is the 
piece over? When does it start? Most of it really doesn’t matter 
with 40 hours of installation time. Just sit and listen, or walk by 
and notice.” The group spent time installing airplane propellers 
on the pond in order, spinning and mimicking the tape loops in 
order to visually accompany the music. 
The Digital Music Ensemble will present four performances 
of “Pond Music XVII: Brian Eno’s Music for Airports” on Oct. 
24 through 27, starting at noon on the Pond near the Earl V. 
Moore School of Music. Admission is free, and the public is 
welcome to come and go as they please.

DME to channel Eno’s ‘Airports’

COMMUNITY CULTURE PREVIEW

If you’re a crier, 
you’ll surely shed 
tears at the best 
parts of the series. 
It crushes you, 
gives you hope, 
rinses and repeats.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Pond Music XVII:

Brian Eno’s Music for 
Airports

Digital Music Ensemble

October 24th-27th

Free

Modern Love

Season One

Amazon Prime

Streaming Now

KATIE BEEKMAN
Daily Arts Writer

RYAN COX
Daily Arts Writer

