Cold War-era group that included Louis Armstrong / "Creature From the Black Lagoon" co-star / Moniker for a noted Boston skyscraper, with "the" / Kafka's unfinished first novel, published posthumously in 1927 / Mount ___, highest peak in the Philippines

Constructor: Brian Thomas + Brooke Husic

Relative difficulty: Easy (3:30)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: BAD ART (The "BA" of the Boston museum MOBA)

The Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) is a privately owned museum whose stated aim is "to celebrate the labor of artists whose work would be displayed and appreciated in no other forum"...Its permanent collection includes over 700 pieces of "art too bad to be ignored", 25 to 35 of which are on public display at any one time.

...Explaining the reasoning behind the museum's establishment, co-founder Jerry Reilly said in 1995: "While every city in the world has at least one museum dedicated to the best of art, MOBA is the only museum dedicated to collecting and exhibiting the worst." To be included in MOBA's collection, works must be original and have serious intent, but they must also have significant flaws without being boring; curators are not interested in displaying deliberate kitsch.

...The museum has been criticized for being anti-art, but the founders deny this, responding that its collection is a tribute to the sincerity of the artists who persevered with their art despite something going horribly wrong in the process. According to co-founder Marie Jackson, "We are here to celebrate an artist's right to fail, gloriously." (Wikipedia)

• • •

It me, occasional indie constructor Christopher Adams, here to kick off ~two weeks of guest blogging while Rex is out on vacation. Lots of fun bloggers (both new and old) to come, and it'll be fun. This puzzle certainly was—my reaction is LOVED IT (3D: "Five stars from me").

I presume JAZZ AMBASSADORS (Cold War-era group that included Louis Armstrong) was the seed, but it was the rest of the puzzle that really made me love it. Don't get me wrong—JAZZ AMBASSADORS is a great entry that I enjoyed and that's very good to know/learn about—but when it comes to puzzles from Brian and/or Brooke (e.g. this recent collab), the cluing is where it's at. And there was a lot to like here, from the intentional vagueness of (Utter) for ABSOLUTE, to the fun, natural language clues for TOP THAT, WHAT A TRIP, AT ANY RATE, and OH NO, to the clues that try to mislead you: (Salon stock) suggesting a plural, for example, and (Window you might want to close quickly) suggesting, uh, something much more risqué than the actual answer. 

There were also a lot of fun facts: some commonly seen in crosswords ("Snow White" having ~250,000 CELS), some not so much (NORWAY having the world's longest road tunnel). And it doesn't hurt that this puzzle has not one but two soccer references in TIM Howard and Megan RAPINOE. Things like that make it much easier to solve the puzzle (at least, in my case) and much easier to love it as well.

I was originally going to say something snarky and sciency about the Coriolis effect, as referenced in the clue for DRAIN, but then realized that probably nobody wanted to read that, so then I was going to link to WRIGGLE and DRAIN from X Japan's album Dahlia, but all the videos were copyright blocked from displaying here, so, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, here's a mashup of Steely Dan and Glenn Danzig.

Another thing that I loved about this puzzle was how well it seemed to flow, and how getting one answer quite often led to another. As per usual, I started with the top row and then quickly switched to downs—having those first letters always helps in getting those downs. Here, DJING gave me GNC, which then yielded AZTEC, and soon enough that whole area was done. Ditto for TIM to MOUSSE to ONO (a gimme with the O) and PRU (which I knew from the clue, but having a letter already there didn't hurt). 

Probably the quickest part of this puzzle was going from POP-UP AD to BAD ART and EARPS to dropping in RAPINOE / PRELIMS / STAYS AT—I didn't even look at the across clues in that corner until writing this up. But I'm glad I did—things like (Word in the name of many candy offshoots) for MINIS are the fun sort of clues (of which there's a few in this puzzle, and which I ought to have listed above) that may not give you the answer right away, but that yield a nice "that makes sense!" moment when you do figure them out.

Olio:

• MOD (Operation that yields the remainder from dividing two numbers, in math lingo) — I guess the "in math lingo" part here is to signify that the answer isn't modulo, but given that nobody actually ever says modulo (outside of defining modulo and then immediately switching to mod), this clue could've done without those words
• ENTRE (13-Across, in French) — This entry is at the bottom middle of the grid. It's referencing an entry in the top left (which is clued without relation to this entry). I'm never a fan of entries that cross-reference all the way across the grid, especially when there's other ways to clue it, and there's no compelling need / really good reason to do so in the first place.
• AMONG (Devil ___ the tailors (pub game)) — pretty sus to not clue this as Among Us, tbh.
• RAPINOE (Sports Illustrated's 2019 Sportsperson of the Year) — per the constructors, the original clue here was ["Being a gay American, I know what it means to look at the flag and not have it protect all of your liberties" speaker], which is the sort of clue that could (and should!) appear way more often in all crosswords.

Yours in puzzling, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

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