Hockey great Eric / SAT 12-7-24 / Renowned conductor born in Bombay / Stressed half the time, say / Introducer of the "New Look" in 1947 / Most successful American video game franchise, for short

Constructor: Luke K. Schreiber

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Zubin MEHTA (22A: Renowned conductor born in Bombay) —

Zubin Mehta (born 29 April 1936) is an Indian conductor of Western classical music. He is music director emeritus of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) and conductor emeritus of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. [...] Mehta was music director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra from 1961 to 1967 and of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1962 to 1978, the youngest music director ever for any major North American orchestra. In 1969, he was appointed Music Adviser to the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and in 1981 he became its Music Director for Life. From 1978 to 1991, Mehta was music director of the New York Philharmonic. He was chief conductor of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence from 1985 to 2017. // He is an honorary citizen of both Florence and Tel Aviv and was made an honorary member of the Vienna State Opera in 1997 and of the Bavarian State Opera in 2006. The title of Honorary Conductor was bestowed on him by numerous orchestras throughout the world. More recently, Mehta made several tours with the Bavarian State Opera and kept up a busy schedule of guest conducting appearances. In December 2006, he received the Kennedy Center Honor and in October 2008 he was honored by the Japanese Imperial Family with the Praemium Imperiale. In 2016, Mehta was appointed Honorary Conductor of the Teatro San Carlo, Naples.

• • •

[31A: Plea of innocence]

[I get to the puzzle, eventually, I promise]

Hello, everyone. I'm back from a whirlwind pre-weekend (the official term for W/Th/F) in Minneapolis—my spiritual hometown and, after NYC, the crossword-solvingest city in America, if reader mail is any indication. Minneapolis and Ann Arbor. Those are the two locations where NYTXW solving seems densest outside the immediate tri-state area of NYC. Pound for pound, I get more support and more mail from those two places than anywhere else. I mean, look—first thing I see after I get through security and stop to get my coffee: this couple, solving the NYTXW together, On Paper (they had printed out the newspaper version of the puzzle)

It was all I could do not to sit down at their table and try to make friends, but you don't interrupt solvers mid-solve, and anyway, who wants to be accosted by a giant bald puzzle evangelist first thing in the morning. Probably only six or seven of you. So I just sipped my vanilla latte and absorbed the calm focus radiating off these lovely people. Anyway ... where was I? ... oh, right. Minneapolis. And now I'm home again. Speaking of home, we arrived home to find our home ... recreated ... in gingerbread form (courtesy of our creative and apparently very bored daughter):

[here's Google Street view for comparison—sorry my gorgeous trees are blocking the view]

The trip included an unplanned overnight stay at one of Chicago's many mediocre airport hotels (courtesy of late plane + snow squalls in Syracuse); an unplanned viewing of Hopper's "Office At Night" (I went to the Walker to see Franz Marc's "Large Blue Horses"—truly amazing—but then my wife just pointed at the painting next to it and both our jaws fell open); and an unannounced and extremely unexpected guest appearance by Lucinda Williams (!!!!?!?!) at the Cyndi Lauper Farewell Tour concert that I went to with my best friends on Wednesday night. 

[me and a lady in a gold vest absolutely losing our minds as Cyndi Lauper says "... Lucinda Williams"]

I didn't solve at all while I was gone. Well, no NYT puzzles, anyway. I have a book of old Out of Left Field cryptic crosswords that co-creator Joshua Kosman sent me recently, and I solved those on various planes and in various waiting areas (great puzzles, ideal traveling companions). Was a bit worried to dive back into NYTXW-solving on a Saturday (the hardest of days, usually), but today's puzzle was very accommodating. Thorny, but doable, and ultimately somewhat on the easy side. The giant open middle area looks daunting, but once I got a little traction, it started to come together without too much trouble. The first (NW) corner was the slowest, but first parts are always (or often) slowest. All the other corners I've got marked as "Easy" or "Easy-Medium"—I rated them all separately, as the segmentation made this feel like five puzzles in one, but no part ever got north of "Medium," and on the whole, it ended up a solid "Easy-Medium (two parts Medium, two parts Easy, one part Easy-Medium). 

When you design a puzzle like this, where everything is riding on one element (today, the giant center), that element had better be good, and while I think it's impressive to get that center area to work at all, given how wide open it is, I have to say that the actual answers in there didn't do much for me. Not enough zing. Or maybe too much ... lead? SEALANE and LINDROS (24D: Hockey great Eric) and SOILING and MISDEED and ROAD RALLIES and CENTRAL BANK (even as clued) (34A: Subject of a rap battle between Hamilton and Jefferson in "Hamilton") didn't exactly float my boat. LEAD BALLOON is an idiom part, so kind of sad on its own. That DIRE STRAITS clue should've been musical. 

Again, it all works there in the center, but only in a workmanlike way. And then the corners were largely throwaway, with some highlights (NECK RUBS, TUMULT, OJIBWA) but some lowlights as well (I don't want to think about Bush ever, even mockingly—or INOUYE, for that matter, given the allegations of improper conduct and sexual assault; the THE in THE USA feels awkward and gratuitous (15A: Host of a record eight Olympic Games as of 2024); and BIT OFF is yet another sad idiom part (1A: Undertook, in an idiom). It all played out very average. Adequate, fine, decent. Nothing godawful, nothing particularly memorable. 

Bullets:

• 7A: Stressed half the time, say (IAMBIC) — home run. Love this. It's perfectly misdirective. Seems to be about the anxiety kind of stress, ends up being about the poetic kind of stress. I follow a bot on BlueSky—the only good bot, I've decided—called iambic.bot, and all it does is retweet (on BlueSky it's "reskeet," I think) posts that are (unintentional) single lines of IAMBIC pentameter. 

• 27A: Illegal substance, in sports lingo (P.E.D.) — Performance-Enhancing Drug.
• 51D: Most successful American video game franchise, for short (C.O.D.) — Call Of Duty.
• 35A: Like the two Super Bowl teams in early January, for short (T.B.D.) — To Be Determined.
• 46A: Home turf? (S.O.D.) — jk, it's just SOD, like the stuff you might lay down in front of your "home" (if you want a front lawn).
• 52A: In which you might confront the elephant in the room? (CIRCUS) — this evokes animal mistreatment. Hate circuses, hate the idea of "confronting" an elephant, or doing anything to an elephant besides protecting it from human depredation, boo to your cutesy clue for sure. Consider making Sheldrick Wildlife Trust part of your annual giving plans.

See you tomorrow, with a Holiday Gift Guide and the first installment of reader-submitted Holiday Pet Pics!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]