6 — Friday, January 24, 2020
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

WHISPER

SUBMIT A 
WHISPER

By Paul Coulter
(c)2020 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
01/24/20

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

01/24/20

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Friday, January 24, 2020

ACROSS
1 Draft category
5 Crisply played, 
in mus.
9 Qatar’s capital
13 Inflammation 
treatment
15 Apple product
16 Blamed for 
personal 
advantage
19 More mean
20 Sci-fi helmsman
21 Burdened
24 Portable chair
26 “Uno __”: 
cantina request
27 Fundraising 
targets
29 Boar’s mate
31 Punch with 
force, maybe
35 Greatly beloved 
ones
38 He reunited with 
his fictional ex 
on Valentine’s 
Day in 2011
39 Ibuprofen brand
41 Backboard 
attachment
42 Place Sundance 
liked to see
44 Chanoyu 
ceremony 
essential
47 Kazakhstan, 
once: Abbr.
49 Waste time
50 __ store
53 Many an Indian
57 Green
58 Game with two 
secret passages
60 Advice
62 Hotel amenity, 
and a hint to 
three puzzle 
answers
67 They can make 
you better, 
briefly
68 Basically
69 Annoyance
70 Do, for example
71 Cutty __

DOWN
1 Fall mo.
2 Kabuki kin
3 Give the wrong 
change, say

4 Acts of 
reparation
5 IRS IDs
6 Talks up
7 Musical in 
which FDR is a 
character
8 Gave up
9 Board mem.
10 Expresses a 
preference (for)
11 Blah
12 “A Passage to 
India” heroine
14 “Lemme!”
17 Age relatives
18 Clear
21 Delay
22 Not quite 
identical
23 Comforter
25 It’s often served 
with nutmeg
28 “... __ 
woodchuck 
could chuck 
wood?”
30 Subjects of 
European trials 
during the 
Renaissance
32 Wd. ending in 
-less

33 FDR power plan
34 Backtalk
36 Botch
37 Common sense?
40 Bloke
43 It may be tapped 
into a tray
45 Parents, usually
46 High __
48 P.R. part
50 Appear
51 Fluff, as pillows
52 Blender button

54 Hopeless
55 “Beats me!”
56 Up in the air
59 Aims
61 Zaire’s Mobutu 
__ Seko
63 It ends shortly 
after 1-Down
64 __ moment
65 “Bad Moon 
Rising” band, 
briefly
66 “A rat!”

CLASSIFIEDS

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“ Kevin is 
definitely 
the slowest 
worker in 
the daily!” 

“Women 
want me 
fish fear 
me”

“Only 
looking for 
hookups. 
very inexpe-
rienced.”

puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com

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WHISPER

Introducing the

SUDOKU

COMMUNITY CULTURE REVIEW
ENTERTAINMENT COLUMN

The image is this: a gender-ambiguous figure 
stands in the desert facing the camera. They hold 
binoculars to their face, looking to some horizon over 
our shoulder. There’s a placelessness to the setting, 
which is made up of no more than sand, clouds and 
sky. No details or ornament in the figure’s dress bind 
it to any particular time period. It’s universal.
Diminishing 
conceptions 
of 
cultural 
and 
interpersonal difference seemed to be the larger 
aspiration of Taking a Stand, a group exhibition at 
the Stamps Gallery organized around the theme of 
solidarity-building. The show opened last Friday 
night with a crowd of about 50 navigating the 
gallery’s spaces as a DJ spun eclectic beats. This 
desert figure, seen on the event poster, was one of 
several photographs by Meryl McMaster, one of the 
evening’s more successful acts. 
Artist Syrus Marcus Ware drew in gallery-goers 
with works like Activist Love Letters: personal letters 
to activists that highlight a certain individuality and 
humanity that’s overlooked in their arduous work. 
Ware gives them the pedestal they deserve in this 
gallery space.
Leaving the “letters to” format, McMaster’s photos 
painted more vivid landscapes than just about any 
other media on display. Think Gotye’s “Somebody 

That I Used to Know” aesthetic. The introspective 
side of her characters was foregrounded by concealing 
physical appearance with body paint and sculptural 
attire. 
Another exhibition feature: a TV showing 
surveillance from some other space in the gallery. 
Simulated atop the footage were several digitized 
female avatars, each speaking in poem about feeling 
frozen. It definitely generated sympathy, made us 
consider the differences between ourselves and the 
avatars. The footage was actually generated from 
the other side of the wall. The exhibition had an iPad 
that was supposed to factor into a fully simulated AR 
sequence, but instead it stayed frozen on these women 

and their existential dread.
Artist Oliver Husain dominated the back portion 
of the gallery with his fantastical combinations 
of historical objects and events. It started with 
various drawings of a pirate ship docked inside of a 
contemporary mall space, and led to a short film, Isla 
Santa Maria 3D, that played on loop in front of 12 
sets of 3D glasses. The glasses didn’t actually work, 
though, and this didn’t seem intentional given the 
subject matter — a complex commentary on the legacy 
of colonialism via Victorian-era beach dwellers, 
visitors from another planet and a holographic oracle. 
Such an uncanny combination of characters and 

visual effects made several hundred years of history 
seem like a miniscule drop in the bucket of time. It 
displaced us from the arbitrary rules of everyday 
life, making us look inward in much the same way as 
McMaster’s photographs do.
Yet again, though, the technical delivery fell short. 
The whole point of the event was to position the 
gallery as a space of potentially vital conversations 
about political injustice, but the gallery was hardly 
vital. Friday night’s gallery-goers were hardly 
inclined to talk to one another any more than they 
would have on the street. The art on display did some 
work to dissolve our notions of national boundaries, 
but lacked new takes on what the gallery space can be. 
The idea of an interactive video game sequence is 
good, but the reality is that only one person could use 
the iPad at once. Each work engaged the audience in 
a different way, but why not force people out of their 
comfort zones? If the aim was to persuade through 
solidarity, why not actually position people as the 
minority for once? Or have a gallery of team-building 
exercises?
Each artist was acting from their inner self, and by 
no means followed a prompt. Their work happened 
to be featured with others’ under a unifying theme, 
but it just didn’t collectively convince. The Stamps 
Gallery is an important space, and has more potential 
than this.

Stamps’ ‘Take a Stand’ 
impact is limited at best

BEN VASSAR
Daily Arts Writer

The whole point of the event 
was to position the gallery 
as a space of potentially vital 
conversations about political 
injustice, but the gallery was 
hardly vital

Conceptions of cultural and 
interpersonal difference 
seemed to be the larger 
inspiration of Taking a Stand

The ridiculous TV of the 
late 2000s: ‘Kid Nation’

IAN HARRIS
Daily Entertainment Columnist

My house recently stumbled upon a gold mine. 
While casually browsing through YouTube one 
of my housemates came across a video entitled 
“Was Kid Nation the worst reality show ever?” 
After watching only two minutes of this video, 
my friend turned it off and immediately texted 
the group chat with two simple words: New show.
Over the course of syllabus week my friends 
and I binged all twelve episodes of “Kid Nation,” a 
short lived CBS reality show that aired in the fall 
of 2007. The premise is as insane as it is simple. 
40 kids, with no parents, no supervision and no 
adults of any kind, will take over an abandoned 
town in the middle of the desert and attempt 
to form the first ever Kid Nation. The kids are 
split into four “districts” and they compete in 
challenges to determine what role in society 
they will hold. Each week one kid is awarded a 
solid gold star by the elected town council, worth 
20,000 real world dollars.
The show is bananas. The fact that it ever 
existed it all is mindboggling. A Wikipedia 
search reveals that the shows producers actually 
classified and registered the set as a summer camp 
in order to avoid child labor laws. This is just one 
small factoid in the sea of madness that is “Kid 
Nation.” The show can only be found in grainy 
YouTube videos, because CBS all but denies it’s 
existence. While the entire thing is easily found, 
the subpar audio and video quality honestly kind 
of adds to the reality of the experience these kids 
are going through. The entire aesthetic of the 
presentation adds to the strange feeling you have 
while watching, that what you’re seeing shouldn’t 
actually exist.
The people in charge of this show put a group 
of tweens in a desert with minimal commodities 
or utilities and more or less sat back to see what 
would happen. From that standpoint, the show 
is cleanly divided in half. During the first half of 
the season, the town council featured four kids 
appointed by the producers at the start of the 
show. This led to a number of kids questioning 
the authority of leaders that were not chosen for 
them, some kids refused to do the jobs assigned 
to them, while others got into fights with each 
other. Obstacles as simple as cooking mac and 
cheese became gigantic issues with eight year 
olds dumping in more pasta than the pan can fill.
The first half of the season is filled with 
ridiculous nonsense like this, from kids eating 
so much candy they have sugar hangovers the 
next day to kids arguing which religion is best 
based only on the religions name. The chaos of 

kids trying to live by themselves is a setup rife 
with drama and conflict, but one that continually 
makes you wonder if it’s all right for you to be 
enjoying what you’re seeing. This show is kinda 
messed up. The entire premise is predicated on 
using kids’ pain to bring entertainment to the 
audience. How you square that is up to you, but 
the show was cancelled after one short season, 
so it’s doubtful watching it now is really causing 
anyone harm.
However, in the back half of the series things 
take an interesting turn. After (spoiler alert) 
holding an election, throwing out the original 
town council, and electing their own leaders, Kid 
Nation really stabilizes. A Reddit AMA from a 
few years back that was done by one of the kids 
who appeared on the show reveals that the kids 
eventually got bored of the “game” of the show, 
playing the challenges and changing districts and 
what not. They had developed a system of labor 
that more or less worked without much issue, and 
they didn’t even fight that much anymore. It’s 
less bombastic and entertaining than the early 
episodes, but there’s something kinda fascinating 

about the end of “Kid Nation” all the same.
At one point the kids are given a choice 
between a hot air balloon ride and a monument 
to the town they’ve built together that will stand 
there forever. As rightly pointed out by some of 
the kids, the real monument to the journey they 
went on is the show itself. But what started as 
a simple reality show designed to shock the 
audience eventually transitions into a strange 
meditation on the fragility of childhood and the 
inevitability of growing up. As their final days 
together come to a close, many of the kids we’ve 
grown to know become emotional about the fact 
that they’re about to leave people they’ve formed 
a connection with unlike any other they had 
before. As the kids run into their parents waiting 
arms, we watch as they experience joy, and 
 
sadness too. It’s been said that kids do live in their 
own world after all, one where the rules aren’t 
always defined by adults or the strict impositions 
of the adult world. Alas, you can’t stay in “Kid 
Nation” forever; eventually you have to return to 
the real world. “Kid Nation” was brief, bright and 
no more. Long live “Kid Nation.”

The premise is as insane as 
it is simple. 40 kids with no 
parents, no supervision

