6 — Friday, February 21, 2020
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

WHISPER

SUBMIT A 
WHISPER

By Jeffrey Wechsler
©2020 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
02/21/20

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

02/21/20

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Friday, February 21, 2020

ACROSS
1 “... morning 
roses newly 
wash’d with __”: 
Petruchio
4 Jacket stories
8 Caused 
trepidation
14 Phoenix-to-
Albuquerque dir.
15 O’Neill’s daughter
16 “Happy Days” 
diner namesake
17 Networking 
technology
19 Jalopy sound
20 Offering in 
shellfish worship?
22 Mississippi sight
23 Storage furniture
24 “__-haw!”
25 Expanse
26 Word often 
preceded by a 
leader’s name
29 Shellfish 
massage?
35 Perfect place
37 “Modern Family,” 
e.g.
38 Good name for a 
budget shellfish 
dealer?
42 “Catch you later”
43 Traditional 
knowledge
44 Rate for records, 
briefly
47 High spirits
50 Hit the big time
52 Like one who 
exchanges texts 
with a shellfish?
55 One of an infant’s 
pair
56 Sore application
57 City adjoining 
Champaign, 
Illinois
58 Began, as a co.
59 Fourth bk. of the 
Jewish Torah
60 U.S. IOUs
61 Relative of -ity
62 Fast sports cars

DOWN
1 With intensity
2 Dinner menu item

3 Merchant’s 
assurance during 
a sale
4 Carried
5 They’re charged
6 Land parcel size
7 Bag with a strap
8 Bollywood 
costumery
9 Modeling, say
10 They’re not with 
you
11 Uniform 
education org.?
12 Bardot was on its 
cover at age 14
13 Golfing pres.
18 Lea grazer
21 __ admiral
25 “Don’t delay!” 
letters
26 Taking parts of
27 Early initials in 
American cars
28 Certain limb
30 News agcy. 
since 1958
31 __City: computer 
game
32 In __: actual
33 YouTube star __ 
Marie Johnson

34 Honda 
FourTrax, e.g.: 
Abbr.
35 Very active port?
36 Genesis 
pronoun
39 Baldwin of 
“30 Rock”
40 Closed
41 Vet’s concern, 
perhaps
45 Like many hobby 
shop mat boards

46 Surfing 
equipment
47 Hint
48 Dior design
49 Some big box 
stores
50 Neuters
51 Canadian 
Thanksgiving mo.
52 Well-used
53 Vagrant
54 “Dang!”
55 Objection

CLASSIFIEDS

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puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com

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5

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5

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5

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Sudoku Syndication
http://sudokusyndication.com/sudoku/generator/print/

1 of 1
3/17/09 1:03 PM

SUDOKU

It’s FRIYAY!

MUSIC REVIEW
DAILY ENTERTAINMENT COLUMN

‘And It’s Still Alright’ is 
stripped-back and cliche
Looking back at the brutal 
ending to ‘Animorphs’

The struggle between producing content that 
music consumers want to hear and staying true to 
the artist’s heart is, and has been, the plight of the 
singer/songwriter since the genre gained traction. 
It’s the fine balance every artist struggles with until 
they finally decide to do what every artist before 
them has done — release an album that strays far 
from their traditional sound in an attempt to reach 
new and profound conclusions. Nathaniel Ratecliff 
embraces this cliche on And It’s Still Alright, his third 
solo album. He grapples with his recent divorce and 
the death of a close friend, dedicating the album to 
processing the loneliness and sorrow of loss. After 
breaking into the music scene by belting burly soul 
music with the Night Sweats, Rateliff has swung 
to the other extreme of Americana, designing this 
album to be intimate, confessional and cathartic — 
everything a Night Sweats album is not. 
Taking a more stripped back approach, the album 
focuses on Rateliff’s vocals and acoustic guitar 
while all other elements (soft strings, muted finger 
snaps and quiet percussion) seem to fall around the 
centerpiece. “Time Stands” is a collage of ideas — 
waiting for true love, mourning a failed relationship 
and the harshness of passing time — which ultimately 
creates a meaningless yet profound account of losing 
the one you love. “Time stands in a duel and I stand 
for you,” Rateliff bellows over an acoustic guitar 
backed by a high-pitched organ, as if to create a 

glimmer of light shining through darkness.
The album’s raw aesthetic oddly clashes with its 
intentions for a close listen. Rateliff mumbles over 
twangy guitar riffs, producing a vocal performance 
that lacks any shape or mood. He writes to burrow 
inward, inviting listeners into that part of himself, 
but his slurred phrasing and lazy diction contradicts 
this invitation. The album’s final track, “Rush On,” 
is one of the more somber tracks on the album, 
featuring low guitars, a heavy bass drum and 
Rateliff lethargically stringing together lyrics 
whose meanings get lost in his long, drawn out 
mumbling. 
But Rateliff doesn’t leave the album too somber. 
The album’s first track, “What A Drag,” is a bluesy, 
playful tune that contrasts its rather melancholy 
lyrics. “I left, I left feeling alone / But you can undo 
it, man,” Rateliff sings with twangy optimism. The 
album’s title track is also more optimistic in nature 
with its graceful front porch strides and light, 
upbeat guitar riffs. 
While the album is beautiful in its raw, authentic 
approach to music and the human experience, 
Rateliff has clearly fallen into the cliche singer-
songwriter trap. He uses this album to dig deep 
into his “real emotions,” but takes an exaggerated 
step away from his retro, soulful sound with the 
Night Sweats, overemphasizing how this album 
is supposed to deliver something different than 
anything he’s ever written before. Despite this 
misstep, And It’s Still Alright delivers some heavy 
emotions with grace, and like much of the folk 
music we hear today, reminds us of how music can 
pull us out of our pain and suffering.

To an elementary school kid with an insatiable thirst 
for reading, there was no greater joy than going to 
the school library. In a way, besides the books in your 
own home or the books you might occasionally buy 
from a store, the books contained in a library were all 
that there was. All the books contained in that school 
library were books you could find easily, checkout and 
read. Everything beyond those walls was an enigma, 
out of reach and out of sight. Libraries, by their very 
nature, exist a few years behind in terms of their book 
availability. School libraries even more so. Because of 
this, in the early 2000s when I was growing up, the 
library at Wines Elementary School still contained 
many books from the late 90’s. There were dozens 
upon dozens of “Boxcar Children,” “Goosebumps,” and 
“Babysitters Club,” but by far the coolest looking books 
on the shelf were “Animorphs.”
With each cover showing a kid turning into an 
animal and the scary blurbs on the back warning of an 
impending alien invasion, those books were basically 
crying out to be read by sci-fi-minded children. Our 
library had almost every one of them, books 1-53 and 
a plethora of spinoffs. All except one. The final book in 
the series, number 54 “The Beginning,” was nowhere to 
be found. While kids are certainly curious individuals, 
they don’t quite have the attention span of adults. And 
while I certainly wondered how the whole thing was 
supposed to end, this small mystery, along with most of 
my memories and feelings about Animorphs in general, 
faded into the dark recesses of my mind, packaged away 
with memories of the playground and kindergarten. 
This past summer I while I was interning in LA, I 
took a weekend trip to Portland, Oregon to visit some 
old camp friends I hadn’t seen in years. While there, 
we went to a used bookstore in the city. Lo and behold, 
while casually looking through the shelves, I stumbled 
across the entirety of the Animorphs series, including 
that elusive final chapter. Memories flooding back to 
me, I decided it was long overdue that I found out how 
the whole thing wrapped up. I bought the penultimate 
book as well so I could re-acquaint myself with the story 
and threw the two 100 pagers in my backpack for the 
flight home. How little did I know what was awaiting 
me… 
You see, it turns out there was a reason why 
my children’s library didn’t have the final book in 
this children’s series. While it could be a mighty 
coincidence, after reading the end I’m left to assume 
some adult somewhere decided this was too much for 
kids and removed it from the library. “Animorphs” was 
a kids series through and through for much of its run. 
In every book the heroic “Animorphs” (kids who could 

turn into animals) would acquire a new “morph” (or 
animal to turn into), allowing them to solve the problem 
of the day that usually involved the alien Yeerks who 
were trying to take over the planet. Nothing much 
really changed from book to book and the battle with 
the Yeerks more or less felt like a stalemate designed to 
last forever and make as much money for publishers as 
possible. Not so in the last act. In the penultimate novel, 
Jake, arguably the main character of the series, orders 
a ton of secondary animorphs to their deaths (all of the 
animorphs are children, by the way) and then commits 
an act of genocide by flushing millions of unarmed 
Yeerks into the cold vacumm of space. Book 53 ends 
on a cliffhanger, with the conclusion of the war still to 
come. In 120-page “The Beginning,” the war ends in 
the second chapter. The rest of the book is about the 
aftermath. And what a terribly depressing aftermath it 
is. 
As the final step in his master plan to defeat the 
Yeerks, Jake orders his cousin Rachel to her death. 
Tobias, Rachel’s lover, never forgives Jake and goes to 
live out the rest of his life in exile. Jake himself suffers 
from PTSD and is unable to live a normal life, grief-
stricken over the things he did in order to win the 
war. It’s a coda at the end of what had been a relatively 
breezy series about kids battling aliens that takes a 
sharp turn into major anti-war writing in the last two 
books. I got off the plane and felt cold and empty inside. 
In “Animorphs” there is no “Nineteen Years Later,” no 
“All was well,” no Ewok celebration or fireworks after 
the funeral of Tony Stark. There is only war and the pain 
it inflicts upon all those who take part in it, no matter 
the righteousness of the cause. These are heavy themes, 
certainly not ones that I would have understood at age 
9. But when I got off that plane my mind was totally 
blown. 
I wondered what I would have thought if I had read 
that book all those years ago. I read the penultimate 
book and never realized it was setting up Jake as a 
PTSD-stricken genocidal warmonger, so maybe the 
events of 54 would have gone over my head as well. Or 
maybe not. Maybe some other kid, years before me, 
read number 54 and burst into tears, inconsolable until 
an adult took the book from their hands, locked it in a 
dungeon, and made sure no Wines Elementary school 
student would ever read it again. Whatever the case, 
for a series that I read fifteen years ago to reach across 
time and move me today, I have no choice but to give my 
respects. Not everything needs a happy ending because 
not everything in life has a happy ending. I don’t know 
what I would’ve thought of this when I was nine, but as 
a 21 year old with an uncertain future, I tip my hat to 
K.A. Applegate, Scholastic Books and all the rest. These 
were books about kids turning into animals to fight slug 
aliens. There were trading cards and a crappy TV show 
on Nickelodeon. “The Beginning” had no right to be 
such a moving end.had no right to be such a moving end.

KAITLYN FOX
Daily Arts Writer

IAN HARRIS
Daily Entertainment Columnist

NEON

