Soprano who ends up trapped in a vault / WED 12-8-21 / Italian alpine cheese / Food industry lobby in brief / Dogs that were once samurai companions / Percussion instrument that's also the name of a popular ringtone / Mid-19th-century Russian ruler described as autocracy personified / Hookup that may get kinky

Constructor: Philip Koski

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "IT'S A / WRAP!" (68A: With 66-Across, director's cry ... or hint to 20-, 37- and 58-Across) — letters in "IT'S A" (!?!?!), in that order, are "wrapped" around the theme answers; that is, the letter string "ITSA" starts at the end of each answer and then "wraps" around to the front:

Theme answers:

• A BATTLE OF WITS (20A: What intellectual rivals engage in)
• SARGENT PORTRAIT (37A: "Theodore Roosevelt" or "Robert Louis Stevenson"
• TSAR NICHOLAS I (58A: Mid-19th-century Russian ruler described as "autocracy personified")

Word of the Day: AMOCO (44A: Classic gas brand) —

Amoco is a brand of petrol stations operating in the eastern United States, and owned by British company BP since 1998. The "Amoco Corporation" (/æməkoʊ/, originally "Standard Oil Company of Indiana" until 1985) was an American chemical and oil company that was founded in 1889, around a refinery located in Whiting, Indiana, United States. Part of the Standard Oil Trust, it focused on gasoline for the new automobile market. In 1911, during the breakup of the trust, it became an independent corporation. Incorporated in Indiana, it was headquartered in Chicago. Amoco merged operations with BP in 1998.

Although the Amoco Corporation merged in 1998, the Amoco name was resurrected in 2017 as a brand that service station owners could choose to use when they purchase supplies from BP in selected areas of the United States.

In 1925, Standard Oil of Indiana absorbed the "American Oil Company",^[1]founded in Baltimore in 1910, and incorporated in 1922, by Louis Blausteinand his son Jacob. The combined corporation operated or licensed gas stations under both the Standard name and the American or Amoco name (the latter from American oil company) and its logo using these names became a red, white and blue oval with a torch in the center. By the mid-twentieth century it was ranked the largest oil company in the United States. In 1985, it changed its corporate name to Amoco.^[3] Amoco merged with British Petroleum in December 1998 to form BP Amoco, renamed BP in 2001.

• • •

Oof, this puzzle. What is even happening? Saw the split AITS in the first themer and thought "so ... it's about islands? River islands? Islands in the stream?" But no. It's a, it's a, it's a ... IT'S A / WRAP :(  I grasp the concept, I do, and yet ... I don't get it. You're supposed to notice things that no solver is going to care about. Like the fact that IT'S A always appears in that exact letter order. All I saw was an ITSA jumble where some letters appeared on one end and some on the other. Only in writing the theme description did I notice the exactness of the "wrap" thing, but here's the thing: it's not like that discovery made me think "wow!" It made me think "huh ... why?" Yes, the "IT'SA" string advances one letter place with each subsequent theme answer, Who Cares? Noticing these details made me even sadder than I was before I noticed them because it meant that there was such a level of intentionality to the way the theme was built, and yet still the results were still incredibly dull and disappointing. I can't imagine wanting to do anything with the letters in "IT'S A" ... it's a [wink] mystery why anyone would think, "you know what would be fun ... something with the letters in 'IT'S A'." Discovering that those letters "wrapped" *in order* (as opposed to in some kind of jumble) didn't increase my appreciation of the puzzle; it couldn't go back and take all the wincing out of my solve. It did explain why we got *this* (weak) answer set—possible theme answers are a *lot* more limited when your "ITSA" has to be in order, as opposed to just a jumble. But do I now love a random Tsar with a Roman numeral at the end of his name? Do I love that as fill? I do not. Do I love that one of the "A"s (in A BATTLE OF WITS) is not embedded in a larger word but is instead a free-standing word, a gratuitous addition to an answer that under normal circumstances would never feature the indefinite article? I do not. Do I like SARGENT PORTRAIT as a standalone answer? Not really. It's a phrase. And he certainly did paint portraits. But it's not good on its own, the same way DEGAS BALLERINA or TURNER LANDSCAPE would not be good. I say this as someone who loves Sargent and who once stood mesmerized for the better part of an hour one afternoon in front of this astonishing painting:

[Lady Agnew of Lochnaw]

Up close it's breathtaking. The patterns, the textures ... her incredible stare. Peak museum experience, truly (this was in Edinburgh sometime in the mid-'90s, I think). Anyway: Love the painter, love the portrait, don't particularly love SARGENT PORTRAIT as an answer. And the revealer is the thing I resent the most, I think, because it's positioned so awkwardly... but that awkwardness is intentional? Because the answer itself is supposed to "wrap" around the grid (even though it's actually just split in half and doesn't "wrap" in the same mid-word way that ITSA does in the themers). I don't read the Across clues in order, ever, so all I saw was a butchered, awfully laid-out revealer. And again, I keep coming back to the idea that the core of the theme idea here is ... ITSA ... ITSA not-a thing-a. It's a horrible partial in any other grid. If you want to see what I mean by "horrible partial," then just lift your eyes literally one answer up from "IT'SA" and look at ANET (seriously, How Are These Unsightly Answers *Abutting*??). 

The fill overall tends toward the stale (AMOCO ATOI AIDA SEPT AWS SAAB IDA OER NERFS plural (?) ARTOO GAL AROD NRA EDU ... then there's the attempt at clever repeated cluing that just results in misleading / inaccurate cluing, where [Long time] is the correct clue for EON, but then the "no, not necessarily" clue for ERA. When the clue is [Long time], E-- should not be a kealoa*. That is, you should not feel as if you are choosing between two equally valid answers. EON is valid for that clue, ERA really isn't. EONs are long by definition. The idea that an ERA is long is totally arbitrary. We refer to coach / manager stints in sports as ERAs but some of them don't last long at all. A stretch of time is called an ERA because of a certain quality of that time, not the length of that time. So with this repeated cluing, the puzzle once again *intentionally* gives us awkwardness because it thinks it's a feature, not a bug. I don't understand the design mindset here. This is such a hard come-down after yesterday's delightful romp. 

It was easy, though, so at least I didn't have frustration stirred into the mix. I got stymied at STORIED (28A: Like the Tower of Babel, in two ways) and (for whatever reason) TRIBE; I wrote in REST (as in musical notation) before RUST at 54A: Sign of inactivity; and I misspelled AMACO thusly, which made the DOOM cross slightly challenging, but otherwise, no real challenges here. Just a train wreck of a theme. It's not enough to have a theme concept; you really have to think about whether that concept is going to provide any solving pleasure. Otherwise you're just pleasing yourself. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. [Hookup that may get kinky?] is a good clue for HOSE. That was the high point of the puzzle for me—a sexy HOSE.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]