The forest, in a metaphor / SAT 1-25-25 / ___ Mountains, Kyrgyz/Tajik border range / nage (cooked in a broth) / Sublimation products / Foe in a 1932 Australian "war"/ Funding source for the Great Wall of China / Coward of the theater world / Old atlas inits. / Aeschylus trilogy of tragedies

Constructor: Michael Lieberman

Relative difficulty: Medium 

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: GESTALT (10D: The forest, in a metaphor) —

: something that is made of many parts and yet is somehow more than or different from the combination of its parts

When he gets rolling, you're not responding to single jokes—it's the whole gestalt of the movie that's funny.—Pauline Kael

broadly  : the general quality or character of something 

When new employees are recruited fresh out of college and can look forward to working for the same company for 40 years, it changes the gestalt of management. —Brenton R. Schlender

… the Old Hollywood gestalt, where daughters adored and romanticized their charismatic, powerful, often unavailable fathers. —Nora Johnson

"not see the forest for the trees" (idiom): to not understand or appreciate a larger situation, problem, etc., because one is considering only a few parts of it (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

[MYRNA Loy (3D: Loy of filmdom), seen here with Crosswordese Hall-of-Famer ASTA]

GESTALT? LOL, what? What a bizarre way to clue that. The idea of not being able to see the forest for the trees, that's very familiar. I know that expression from many places, most notably the song "Different Drum" by the Stone Poneys (featuring Linda Ronstadt on vocals):

But GESTALT. I think I last heard that term in a Woody Allen movie circa the late-'70s. Diane Keaton probably says it in Manhattan. I'm aware that the word exists, but I would never use it, nor would anyone I know (apparently). And I know what it means ... or I thought I did. Anyway, I would never have put one of these things (the "forest" idiom) anywhere near the other (GESTALT). The clue was very confusing, since it says "in a metaphor," so I thought the answer would be the thing from the metaphor, but it was the forest that was the metaphor. "Clunky" and "awkward" don't even begin to get at what I think about that clue. I left the GESTALT / ASST cross blank until the very end because I just couldn't commit to GESTALT. Unpleasant. The rest of the grid was varied. Highly varied, both in terms of quality and in terms of difficulty, though the only part I found legitimately difficult was the SW—namely, that bank of answers (SHARIA, TAMED, RIPTIDES) that could have provided (but in my case, failed to provide) a toehold on all those long Downs. I don't know how many things I tried before SHARIA. A lot. The worst mistake I made, though, was a pure crossword brain glitch: I wrote in EBB TIDES and not RIP TIDES. The idea of the "ebb" tide lives very close to the front of my brain thanks to my having seen it seemingly thousands of times over the years in crosswords. Rip is a tide I see rarely. And so ... pffft. Worse, the "E" from EBB TIDES made me start (as opposed to finish) 30D: Consumed with grief? with ATE (actual answer: STRESS-ATE). ATE ... something? No. No no no. But if crossword brain got me into that fix, crossword brain got me out. I somehow knew ALAI cold (52A: ___ Mountains, Kyrgyz/Tajik border range). Just ... knew it. In that way where you're like "I know this ... how do I know this? Is this right?" and then it is. The amount I could tell you about the ALAI Mountains ... well, it's not TONS, let's put it that way. Rest of the puzzle ran on the easy side of Medium, but SW def knocked me around.

Things started off fast with this one. This was my opening gambit:

I wrote it in thinking, "If this is wrong, I don't want to be right." And then SIA confirmed it (6D: "Cheap Thrills" pop star) and I felt amazing! Good answer at 1A, and I got it right off the bat. Here we go! But then came GESTALT (oof) and then I got shut out of the SW (see above) and so all that whoosh feeling I had at the outset quickly settled back to a kind of plodding feeling (fairly normal for Saturdays). The fill in this one is not particularly good, so it gets all its interest / pleasure from the cluing, which seemed to be striving for trickiness at every turn. Lots of wrong initial answers today. Aside from the ones I've already covered, I had "I GET IT NOW" before "I SEE IT NOW" (13D: "Oh-h-h-h, that makes sense"); I wanted (ID EST did not want, but thought it might be) SPERMS before SPORES (41D: Reproductive cells); I threw down DIEHARD with confidence, but 38D: Ardent supporter ended up being DEVOTEE; oh, and THROES before THRALL (7D: Clutches); oh, oh, and CLOG before SPOT (41A: Jam); oh oh oh, and CANAL before CANOE (I didn't actually write that one in, just thought it) (36A: Sight in Monet's "Boating on the River Epte") (how has EPTE never been in the grid?) (LOL spoke to soon—it has, once, on Aug. 19, 1975: [Seine tributary]).

Explainers (deep breath, here we go...):

• 16A: Strike one! (POSE) — "!" clues oddly function as commands. Like [Hit it!] could be a clue for DRUM (or PAYDIRT, I suppose). Any "Strike one!" has nothing to do with baseball here. The answer is a thing you (might) strike, i.e. a POSE.
• 21A: Coward of the theater world (NOEL) — one of those clues where they try to hide a name that is also a regular word by putting it at the front of the clue (where *all* words are capitalized, not just names). But NOEL Coward is so famous (to me) that the trick didn't work at all. 

• 23A: Funding source for the Great Wall of China (SALT TAX) — if you say so! I just inferred this one from crosses. All I know about the Great Wall is that they went there on Love Boat once (not on the actual boat, mind you—it's a magical boat, but not that magical)
• 28A: Felt in the Christmas spirit? (ELF HATS) — which are made of "felt," I guess. I had the ELF early, so this was easy enough.
• 32D: S&P part (AMPERSAND) — ha ha, brutal. Self-referential clue. There's the "S" and the "P" and in between ... the AMPERSAND ("&").
• 35A: One working on a column? (CPA) — a column in a ledger book, or a column of numbers, or whatever. A CPA is a Certified Public Accountant, of course.
• 41A: Jam (SPOT) — in the sense of "in a jam" (i.e. "a sticky situation"), i.e. a SPOT.
• 48A: It's fit for a king (SASH) — so, a king ... sized bed. I don't really know what these are. Dictionaries are weirdly unhelpful. A SASH seems to be a decorative blanket or "bed scarf" that you drape across the bed (????). Here:
• 

[I’m being told this SASH is the thing a ruler or a prom “king” might wear across his body. I’m so used to puns in xword clues that I just assumed a bed was involved]

• 51A: Some photomontage art (DADA) — yeesh. I guess this is in fact true. Still, very hard. That little GIG / DADA / ZADIE / GASES area, strangely hard for me (I know ZADIE Smith, but not that title) (45D: ___ Smith, "The Autograph Man" novelist)
• 5D: Foe in a 1932 Australian "war" (EMU) — I learned about the EMU War (awful) from crosswords. Do crosswords long enough, you'll learn all sorts of things about EMU.
• 14D: They support many student movements (P.E. CLASSES) — true enough on a literal level, I guess. Tortured misdirection, but yes, literally, students do move in P.E. 
• 47D: Sublimation products (GASES) — "Sublimation is the transition of a substance directly from the solid to the gas state, without passing through the liquid state." (wikipedia). I was really thinking Freud here.
• 24D: ___ nage (cooked in a broth) (À LA) — educated guess. "À LA nage" means "in the swim" (not, as my rusty French originally translated it, "in the snow") (that's "neige").
• 31D: Where locks are picked? (HAIR SALON) — obviously the "locks" here are locks of hair. This would've been easier if it hadn't run straight through that SHARIA / TAMED / RIPTIDES section I spoke of earlier. There's a lot of really great HAIR SALON scenes in the new Mike Leigh movie, Hard Truths, which I saw just yesterday. Recommended, if you have a very high endurance for watching a miserable human being just be miserable, hyperbolically and virtually non-stop, for 90 minutes (it helps that Marianne Jean-Baptiste is very good and occasionally hilarious)

• 39D: Place whose name has an appropriate final vowel sound (SPA) — because you (conventionally) say "Ahhhh" there (or "Aaaaaaah"—I forget which one is the sigh and which the scream). 

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]

Read more...

Seafarer's device / FRI 1-24-25 / Some stripes on drapeaux français / Green-skinned god of the afterlife / English translation of a paradoxical line in a Magritte painting / Fall forecasting aids / Greek goddess sleeping near the river Oceanus / Media outlet with a Francophone counterpart / Best-selling American car of the 1990s

Constructor: Ernest Lim

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none (though for a bit there I thought it was something about "newspapers"...) 

Word of the Day: The Treachery of Images (9D: English translation of a paradoxical line in a Magritte painting) —

The Treachery of Images (French: La Trahison des images) is a 1929 painting by Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. It is also known as This Is Not a Pipe, Ceci n'est pas une pipe and The Wind and the Song. It is on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The painting shows an image of a pipe. Below it, Magritte painted, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (pronounced [sə.si ne paz‿yn pip], French for "This is not a pipe".)

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe", I'd have been lying!

— René Magritte

The theme of pipes with the text "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" is extended in Les Mots et Les Images, La Clé des Songes, Ceci n'est pas une pipe (L'air et la chanson), The Tune and Also the Words, Ceci n’est pas une pomme, and Les Deux Mystères. [...]

On December 15, 1929, Paul Éluard and André Breton published an essay about poetry in La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution) as a reaction to the publication by poet Paul Valéry "Notes sur la poésie" in Les Nouvelles littéraires of September 28, 1929. When Valéry wrote "Poetry is a survival", Breton and Éluard made fun of it and wrote "Poetry is a pipe", as a reference to Magritte's painting.

In the same edition of La Révolution surréaliste, Magritte published "Les mots et les images" (his founding text which illustrated where words play with images), his answer to the survey on love, and Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt, a painting tableau surrounded by photos of sixteen surrealists with their eyes closed, including Magritte himself.

• • •

Most of the marquee answers don't really seem up to the job today. There's an adequate blandness that spreads over this thing, a blandness highlighted by the one answer that is truly unbland—easily the best thing in the grid—and that is "THIS IS NOT A PIPE." I'd've really flipped for CECI N'EST PAS UNE PIPE, but that wouldn't fit in a regular 15x15 grid, so that will have to wait for some ambitious Sunday constructor, I guess. But "THIS IS NOT A PIPE" was the one time during this solve where I really sat up and went "hey, nice." Everywhere else just felt like ... how to say it ... quotidian and workaday and kind of blah. Full of the worldly ho-hum workaday-world concerns of someone who is PRESSED FOR TIME, or who has to BEAR THE EXPENSE of something. Time & money. Yesh, they are problems for all of us, but yawn. There's no doubt that MAKES HEADLINES and LATE EDITION are real things, but as successive answers, following EXIT POLLS, the puzzle really felt like it was going to be themed ... some kind of boring "news" theme? ... but then no, those are just three longish newsy answers. There is no theme. This made me happy (I don't want themes on F / Sat), but also sad, in that those answers now seemed kind of purposeless. Like an abandoned or aborted theme. Not really up to the task of being marquee answers in a puzzle that desperately needs them. But here nonetheless. Just not enough zing today. But that Magritte painting line, that I dug. 

[Coincidentally, I taught Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics just yesterday]

I also dug STATE PEN, though I don't understand why there was no abbrev indicator in the clue (4D: Sing Sing, e.g.) [my bad: Sing Sing *is* an abbr., slang for Ossining State Penitentiary]. COLMAN Domingo was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award yesterday for his performance in Sing Sing (2024). If he wins, then expect to see COLMAN in the grid more often (he has so far appeared once, as [___ Domingo, Best Actor nominee for 2023's "Rustin"]. At that point, I hadn't heard of Domingo or Rustin. I'm up to speed now).

My disappointment today wasn't just rooted in bland marquees. There were several moments where the fill made me wince, or in the case of CEDAR WOOD, laugh outright. Oh, CEDAR WOOD, you say? As opposed to what, CEDAR METAL? CEDAR PLASTIC? CEDAR MARBLE? CEDAR PASTE? What are we doing here? Then there's RETINT and COTENANT, who are fighting the Battle of Who Can Be The Worst Prefixed Answer. Or so says my SEXTANT (40D: Seafarer's device). That's quite a trio, RETINT COTENANT and SEXTANT. The -NT Boys! Why would you put a cutesy "?" clue on possibly the worst answer in your grid (10D: Change one's tone again?). I have never understood constructors/editors wanting to call attention to bad fill this way. Then we've got some absurd plurals—a cadre of KATES and a bunch of ... BLEUS? Do I have that right? (31D: Some stripes on drapeaux français). Yee + ikes. That bit of French hasn't seen the light of day (crosswordwise) since Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-Three, where it was clued [Cordons ___]. No editor after Farrar would touch BLEUS. Until today. So it's a historic moment ... in the history of desperate fill. Not the way I'd choose to make history, but different strokes etc. BLEUS was about the only answer I had any trouble with, due solely to the fact that I forgot "drapeaux" meant "flags"—I (perhaps unsurprisingly) translated it as "drapes." I was like "How the hell should I know what French interior decorators get up to??"

Had the usual bout of single-square confusion. Always unsure of EMEND v. AMEND. "THESE Men" before "THOSE" (56A: "___ Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines" (1965 film)). ELOTA before ELOTE (truly dumb mistake, I've eaten ELOTE and seen it in puzzles and everything). Had "Give it a READ!" before "Give it a REST!" LOL, I like my wrong answer. Someone pushing a book recommendation on you is nicer than someone telling you to shut up, I think. Briefly thought the 1845 immigrants were IRANI (true crossword brain there) (28D: Like many immigrants to the U.S. beginning in 1845). All those mistakes were my fault. My bad. On me. But there was one "mistake" which I want to go back and put in the grid as an act of protest and defiance. That is, I want to reinstate OPEN-ENDED, which is the only acceptable answer to 55A: Type of question not asked in 20 Questions. I plunked in OPEN-ENDED so fast, and that had to wonder who was attending commencement with a letter pattern like -DS (53D: Commencement attendees). For a brief, harrowing moment, I thought they were going to try to make me believe that GDS was an acceptable abbr. for "grads." But no. Worse (or almost worse), they are trying to make me believe that an OPEN-ENDER is a thing. Look, I get not wanting to use SDS, it's crosswordese of a decidedly bygone variety, but this "solution" to the SDS problem only makes matters worse. People ask OPEN-ENDED questions, they do not as OPEN-ENDERs. SRS is better than SDS, yes, somewhat, but OPEN-ENDED is better than OPEN-ENDER by an amount that is near-infinite. So suck up SDS or else rewrite that corner entirely. 

[Students for a Democratic Society]

Bullets:

• 20A: Green-skinned god of the afterlife (OSIRIS) — got this off the "O." I forgot he was green-skinned. I just remember he looks like ... a dog, right? No, damn, that's ANUBIS (who is, in my defense, the "god of funerary rites, protector of graves, and guide to the underworld" (wikipedia). Man, those Egyptians were death-obsessed.

[OSIRIS]

[Anubis]

• 35A: Florida city with the U.S.'s largest equestrian center (OCALA) — this was "Florida city..." and then the voice of the teacher in the "Peanuts" cartoons. I wrote in OCALA real easy. More of that old-school crosswordese.

• 45D: Give a run for your honey? (ELOPE) — oof, even the "?" clues are tired today. This is a really awkward variation on [Take the honey and run?], which is a classic (i.e. already-been-done, don't-do-it-again) ELOPE clue. The clue on UTERI (49A: Development sites?) falls into the same category—tired wordplay. Seen it before. 14 different uses of "development" in UTERI clues in the Shortz Era. This very clue has been used four times now (two have "?" and two don't ... so there's literally no logic to the "?"). Gotta be more creative with your cutesy cluing of crosswordese (did you know: UTERI appeared just once in pre-Shortz puzzles, but has appeared 37 times under his leadership?; also, did you know: UTERUS did not appear in the grid at all until 2007?; also, did you know: UTERUS is an anagram of SUTURE ... I'm learning so much today). 
• 38A: TV family you "meet" in the show's theme song (FLINTSTONES) — You know: "Meet Fred Flintstone .... His pet, Dino ... Daughter Pebbles ... Wilma, his wife!" No, wait ...

• 41A: Temperature gauges, sometimes (TOES) — I liked this one. Had no idea, needed all the crosses, then thought "ah, good one." That's how a tricky clue is supposed to go.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]

Read more...