Ticketmaster alternative / WED 7-24-24 / Fashion designer Cohn with an eponymous rhinestone-encrusted suit / Small vessel in the deep ocean / Alfred for whom a coffee chain is named / Joystick-controlled contraption depicted in this puzzle

Constructor: Shaun Phillips

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium 

THEME: CLAW MACHINE GAME (35A: Joystick-controlled contraption depicted in this puzzle) — black squares in the upper middle are supposed to be the "claw" and I guess the "+"-shaped black square formation is supposed to be one of the prizes in the machines. Maybe the black square formations on the bottom are involved too, I don't know ... Also:

Theme answers:

• "HOLD ON A MINUTE" (5D: "Wait!" ... or hopeful words while playing a 35-Across?)
• CRANE OPERATOR (10D: Professional who might expect to do well with a 35-Across?)
• AMUSEMENT ARCADE (54A: Setting for a 35-Across)

Word of the Day: NUDIE Cohn (49D: Fashion designer Cohn with an eponymous rhinestone-encrusted suit) —

Nuta Kotlyarenko (Ukrainian: Нута Котляренко; December 15, 1902 – May 9, 1984), known professionally as Nudie Cohn, was a Ukrainian-American tailor who designed decorative rhinestone-covered suits, known popularly as "Nudie Suits", and other elaborate outfits for some of the most famous celebrities of his era. He also became famous for his outrageous customized automobiles. [...] Cohn's designs brought the already-flamboyant western style to a new level of ostentation with the liberal use of rhinestones and themed images in chain stitch embroidery. One of his early designs, in 1962, for singer Porter Wagoner, was a peach-colored suit featuring rhinestones, a covered wagon on the back, and wagon wheels on the legs. He offered the suit to Wagoner for free, confident that the popular performer would serve as a billboard for his clothing line. His confidence proved justified and the business grew rapidly. In 1963 the Cohns relocated their business to a larger facility on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood and renamed it "Nudie's Rodeo Tailors". //

Many of Cohn's designs became signature looks for their owners. Among his most famous creations was Elvis Presley's $10,000 gold lamé suit worn by the singer on the cover of his 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong album. Cohn created Hank Williams' white cowboy suit with musical notations on the sleeves, and Gram Parsons' infamous suit for the cover of the Flying Burrito Brothers' 1969 album The Gilded Palace of Sin, featuring pills, poppies, marijuana leaves, naked women, and a huge cross. He designed the iconic costume worn by Robert Redford in the 1979 film Electric Horseman, which was exhibited by the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. // Many of the film costumes worn by Roy Rogers and Dale Evans were Nudie designs. John Lennon was a customer, as were John Wayne, Gene Autry, George Jones, Cher, Ronald Reagan, Elton John, Robert Mitchum, Pat Buttram, Tony Curtis, Michael Landon, Glen Campbell, Michael Nesmith, Hank Snow, Hank Thompson, and numerous musical groups, notably America and Chicago. ZZ Top band members Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill sported Nudie suits on the cover photo of their 1975 album Fandango!. (wikipedia)

• • •

There's not nearly enough pictorial oomph here to make this endeavor worthwhile. You've got a kind of claw at the top of the grid, but nothing else evokes "claw machine," and the claw just looks like an ordinary black-square formation anyway, so ... I dunno. Very little visual impact, and very slight resemblance to the "game" in question. And that's the next big problem. "Game." It's a "claw machine." That's what it's called. The wikipedia entry: "Claw machine." It appears to be "crane machine" in some contexts, but mostly, it's a "claw machine." It is decidedly not a "CLAW MACHINE GAME." Yes, you need "game" to get you to a grid-spanning 15 letters, but oof you gotta get the terminology just right or Don't Do The Puzzle. This problem—the "slightly off" / "extra word" problem—kept happening, over and over with the themers today. Every. Single. One of the themers has a word in it that doesn't quite work or relate or make sense. Actually, CRANE OPERATOR is OK. I had OPERATOR and no idea what the first word could be (SMOOTH?), but when I got CRANE, I thought "OK, yeah, I guess that works." But "HOLD ON A ___?" Why MINUTE? You definitely don't need to hold on that long. Arbitrary. And then there's AMUSEMENT. What in the world is an "AMUSEMENT ARCADE?" It's an ... arcade. Maybe it's a video arcade? A penny arcade? Looks like "AMUSEMENT ARCADE" is in fact the title of the wikipedia entry on the general category of arcades, but I've never heard that term used, so I had ARCADE and literally no idea what was supposed to come before it. Forever. I had -EMENT before AMUSEMENT occurred to me. I don't think. AMUSEMENT ARCADE is a foul, since it's a real term, but it's not being terribly in-the-language added to my overall feeling that the themers were slightly to very ... off. Everywhere. All the time. And worst of all in the revealer itself, with the addition of the extremely redundant "GAME."

Fill-wise ... well, a lotta names. Right out of the box, once again (as with yesterday), we're inundated with proper nouns. STUBHUB over PIER ONE crossing UEFA, followed quickly by JOANN over O'SHEA. That's five names before you ever get out of the NW (I'm not counting OSLO as a name since OSLO has pretty much achieved the status of background noise in crossword puzzles). I knew all the names, including STUBHUB (which I got immediately, with no crosses in place), so I flew through that part, but I could tell that it was gonna be thorny for some. The NE corner was less name-y but also less clean, with the crosswordesey EENIE and ESAU and the improbable MINISUB (20A: Small vessel in the deep ocean) and the apostrophe-S-less PEET (22A: Alfred for whom a coffee chain is named) and the awkward RERINSE. And why doesn't TECHIES have something in its clue implying slang (8A: Some experts on viruses)? You wanna abbreviate to TECHIES, the clue should indicate that you're going slangy, and it doesn't. Sigh. The rest of the puzzle was solid enough. Highlight for me was NUDIE, for sure. Great new (and non-porno) clue for that one. I learned about the NUDIE Suit by listening to "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," specifically the episodes about Gram Parsons. I went from "how the hell am I supposed to know designers!?" to "OMG the NUDIE Suit! Yes!" pretty quickly on that one. Those suits are flash. They scream Americana. All performers should wear them (contemporary artists like Lady Gaga, Kesha, Taylor Swift, and crossword favorite Lil Nas X all have). Love love love. The rest of the puzzle didn't do nearly so much for me.

Not much difficulty today for me. Misread 7D: "Cool ___!" as merely ["Cool!"]—that is, somehow didn't see the blank space following "Cool"—and was So Mad that the answer was BEANS. "The expression is 'Cool BEANS!,' not just 'BEANS!' Who is saying just 'BEANS!'? Have we shortened it to just 'BEANS' now!? Damn slang changes, I can't keep up mutter mutter mutter." But no, my eye just missed the blank space. Not reading clues correctly has caused me more pain over the years than simple ignorance ever did. Had AJAR before A TAD, that was weird (42A: Ever so slightly). I guess my brain just supplied "open" at the end (or beginning) of that clue. Balked at spelling CAROTID, even though, looking at it now, I'm not sure how else I would've spelled it. I left the first two vowels blank because I didn't want to F' up and I figured the crosses would take care of things. And they did. Had "IS IT?" before "IT IS?," since "IS IT?" reads way more question-y on its surface than "IT IS?" does. "IS IT?" has question syntax, whereas you need to mentally supply the question mark to make "IT IS?" a question. Anyway, this created minor havoc around the awful (truly awful) Biz OPS (60A: Biz ___ (corporate team, informally)). Are "corporate" people never embarrassed by this jargon? BizOPS sounds like '90s hip-hop slang that got "bygone" real quick. Like a variation on "bops" that someone tried to make happen in late '95 and that maybe caught on at a handful of east coast radio stations for like three months. "We got some phat bizops comin' at ya in the next hour..." Or if Biz Markie had a spy movie-inspired alter ego: Biz OPS! That would've been cool. As "corporate" lingo, though, it's just sad.

Bullets:

• 15A: Longtime home decor chain with a name that anagrams to PIONEER (PIER ONE) — always hate the "anagrams to" clues, but I guess PIER ONE is sufficiently bygone now that people need help. Not sure why, but I was leafing (digitally) through a list of "chains that no longer exist" just the other day and there was PIER ONE and I thought "wait, that's not still out on the Vestal Parkway?" Like, literally, we had one in town and I just assumed it was still there. If a PIER ONE disappears from the Parkway, does it make a sound? Apparently not. Circuit City, that disappearance registered. But PIER ONE ... poof, just gone. I bought some really ugly blue-tinted wine glasses there once. That is my PIER ONE memory. What's yours!? [side note: it's really "Pier 1," numeral "1" ... I was trying to figure out why PIER ONE looks so bad. And that's why. This spelling issue makes today's clue actually wrong. Flat-out wrong. You can represent a number as a word in the puzzle, but anagramming is a very specific thing involving the actual characters of the actual name, so ... [annoying buzzer sound!] this clue is DQd]

• 3D: Soccer org. that runs the Champions League (UEFA) — knew this one but my first spelling of it came out UIFA. Like FIFA and UEFA had a baby: Baby UIFA. I think I was under the influence of other famous UI-starting words, like the UINTA Mountains of Utah, or ... uh ... (do not say "UIES" we all know that is not and has never been a thing no matter how many times the crossword tries to make it so)
• 32D: "Your" of yore (THY) — I just like this clue. I like its lilting rhyminess. I also just like the phrase "of yore." As you're (!) probably aware of by now.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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