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
8
7
3
6
1
5
6
8
7
5
4
5
1
5
8
3
2
3
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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