Hippie confab / SAT 9-4-21 / Iranian port near the Iraq border / Malt liquor bottle in slang / Ancient siege weapon for launching stones / Marengo for Napoleon / Chaparral or savanna / TV lingo for using established hits to prop up weaker shows / 1914 Freud essay that introduced the concept of "ego ideal"

Constructor: Byron Walden

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ABADAN (33A: Iranian port near the Iraq border) —

Abadan (Persian: آبادان‎ Ābādān, pronounced [ʔɒːbɒːˈdɒːn]) is a city and capital of Abadan County, Khuzestan Province, which is located in the southwest of Iran. It lies on Abadan Island (68 km or 42 mi long, 3–19 km or 2–12 miles wide). The island is bounded in the west by the Arvand waterway and to the east by the Bahmanshir outlet of the Karun River (the Arvand Rood), 53 kilometres (33 mi) from the Persian Gulf, near the Iran–Iraq border. Abadan is 140 km from the provincial capital city of Ahvaz. [...] The civilian population of the city dropped close to zero during the eight years of the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988). The 1986 census recorded only 6 people. In 1991, 84,774 had returned to live in the city. By 2001, the population had jumped to 206,073, and it was 217,988, in 48,061 families, according to 2006 census. Abadan Refinery is one of the largest in the world. The population today has reached almost 350,000 people. (wikipedia)

• • •

Well that was a proper Saturday. Very doable, but not without its scary moments. Slow and steady wins the race. For me, nearly all of the trouble came in that bottom corner, that vast RANGELAND that runs from south to east, and includes the tail end of RANGELAND, a term I couldn't get a handle on for some reason. I had RANGELINE in there at some point. Bizarre. Would've helped if I'd ever heard of ABADAN, a real geographical poser. But I hadn't. Consequently, or seemingly consequently, RANGELAND/ABADAN ended up being the beginning of troubles that spread all the way to the bottom of the puzzle. But above ABADAN, and west of ANODES (which I had as ANIONS at first, sadly), almost everything was very tractable. Not a breeze, but not a disaster either. All the green ink on my printed-out puzzle is roughly in the south and east. And yet the puzzle still felt very smooth and even. It's not as if that SE segment were cordoned off in such a way that it felt like an entirely different puzzle. Despite all my struggles there, the puzzle continued to have ... what's the word? Flow? I felt like I could always move about, try a new tack, etc. There were always strings to pull, new avenues to follow—I just had to pull and follow a lot of them to get things to work out. This felt old-fashioned tough and old-fashioned good. Cluing was clever and tricky in a way that was mostly satisfying instead of annoying. Even the clue on ON A LARK, which I found irksomely bizarre for most of the puzzle, ended up being right on the nose, such that I had to admit ... "yeah, that works" (35A: Out of whimsy ... not "Out of" in the sense of "No longer having" but "Out of" in the sense of "On account of," as in the phrase "out of spite"). 

This puzzle got me on its side early with a big flourish, a long answer with a trick clue that unfurled with fanfare accompaniment (in my head):

All I had was the "UNM-" part, but that was the crucial part, it turns out. Loved that moment where my brain went from "golf and tennis" to "geopolitical drama." Good aha. I was lucky enough to know Superman's dog, as he had his own comic there for a bit in the '00s and I used to buy it for my daughter. I should've known it from teaching comics for many years, but my interests just aren't that solidly in the DC (or Marvel) universe. I couldn't move down from the NW (largely because 23D: Mostly online writing genre was ALT blank and I wanted FIC but wasn't sure so (wisely) laid off). So I moved to the NE, where TENTPOLING gave me trouble. I wanted TENT POLES but it wouldn't fit. That is, I knew the lingo—hit shows are TENT POLES—but turning it all into one "-ING" word, that I hadn't seen before (20A: TV lingo for using established hits to prop up weaker shows). Anyway, I got it, and then after I moved through the NE with only a SHORE-for-SHOAL error (16A: Sight at low tide), I hit my first and only real wall:

Again, probably should've gotten RANGELAND, and almost certainly should've put together "ON NARCISSISM" from what I had in the grid (21D: 1914 Freud essay that introduced the concept of "ego ideal"), but nope on both counts. Iranian city, nope. And then there's RAW EGG, which, again, I should've gotten, in retrospect. Tartare is raw, so ... R-- should've been RAW. I ended up getting the EGG part and still just having R--EGG. Considered ROE EGG, but that seemed, well, redundant. RED EGG? Fish eggs are red, right? Sometimes? My brain was just off ON A LARK, I guess. But EGG got me GADS which got me the first letters of all those 5s in the SE, and that little bit of traction was all I needed to get going again, so that I could come at that whole SE section from underneath. BALLISTA was pretty harrowing (36D: Ancient siege weapon for launching stones), but luckily inferring the spelling from "ballistic" worked, and I'd heard of HIALEAH (38D: Florida city with a large Cuban American population (70+%)), so eventually I managed to get out of there alive and finish things off in the much easier west and southwest. I DON'T ASK why I DON'T ASK has an "I" at the front of it (7D: "Better off not knowing"), which sounds weird to my ears. It's really the only thing that feels slightly wobbly in this puzzle. Love the clue on (Stephanie) MEYER (52A: Favorite novelist of Twihards) and now hope TWIHARD(S) shows up in a grid someday. Anything else? Oh, I thought the [Hop-hop subgenre] was some kind of RAP, like ... [some letter] RAP, like G-RAP (gangsta?) or E-RAP (emo?) or something. But the word "rap" was an illusion. It was TRAP music, a genre I associate with the band MIGOS (I think they've been in the grid before?). I can't really define it, so I'll let wikipedia do the work:

Trap is a subgenre of hip hop music that originated in the Southern United States during the early 1990s. The genre gets its name from the Atlanta slang word "trap", a house used exclusively to sell drugs. Trap music uses synthesized drums and is characterized by complex hi-hat patterns, tuned kick drums with a long decay (originally from the Roland TR-808 drum machine), and lyrical content that often focuses on drug use and urban violence. It utilizes very few instruments and focuses almost exclusively on snare drums and double- or triple-timed hi-hats. (wikipedia)

That's your final (and perhaps only) lesson for the day. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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