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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dailydisplay@gmail.com
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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
“60 characters.
Bare your soul.
Get featured in the Daily!”
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