Heavy chorus instrument in Il Trovatore / TUE 5-31-22 / Group targeted for destruction in Independence Day / Classical queen who cursed a Trojan fleet / Request to someone dressing your submarine sandwich / Brand with flavor Cookie Cobblestone / Competition favoring flexible contestants / Powder-based beverage

Constructor: Sam Buchbinder and Brad Wilber

Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Tuesday)

THEME: LET'S PUT A PIN IN IT (38A: Suggestion to defer discussion ... and what might be said of 17-, 25-, 46- and 60-Across) — places where one might put a "pin" (of one kind or another):

Theme answers:

• VOODOO DOLL (17A: Figure in many hexes)
• CLOTH DIAPER (25A: Alternative to Huggies or Luvs)
• BOWLING LANE (46A: Place for splits and spares)
• ATM MACHINE (60A: $$$ dispenser)

Word of the Day: "I LOST It at the Movies" (7D: "___ It at the Movies" (collection of Pauline Kael reviews) —

I Lost It at the Movies is a 1965 book that serves as a compendium of movie reviews written by Pauline Kael, later a film critic from The New Yorker, from 1954 to 1965. The book was published prior to Kael's long stint at The New Yorker; as a result, the pieces in the book are culled from radio broadcasts that she did while she was at KPFA, as well as numerous periodicals, including Moviegoer, the Massachusetts Review, Sight and Sound, Film Culture, Film Quarterly and Partisan Review. It contains her negative review of the then widely acclaimed West Side Story, glowing reviews of other movies such as The Golden Coach and Seven Samurai, as well as longer polemical essays such as her largely negative critical responses to Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film and Andrew Sarris's Film Culture essay Notes on the Auteur Theory, 1962. The book was a bestseller upon its first release, and is now published by Marion Boyars Publishers.

Kael's first book is characterized by an approach where she would often quote contemporary critics such as Bosley Crowther and Dwight Macdonald as a springboard to debunk their assertions while advancing her own ideas. This approach was later abandoned in her subsequent reviews, but is notably referred to in Macdonald's book, Dwight Macdonald On Movies (1969).

When an interviewer asked her in later years as to what she had "lost", as indicated in the title, Kael averred: "There are so many kinds of innocence to be lost at the movies." It is the first in a series of titles of books that would have a deliberately erotic connotation, typifying the sensual relation Kael perceived herself as having with the movies, as opposed to the theoretical bent that some among her colleagues had. (wikipedia)

• • •

The fill in this one is pretty plain, so everything is really riding on that revealer, and thankfully it delivers. It's one of those idioms I've never used and am only aware of from representations of business or other types of meetings on television or in the movies. Maybe I've heard it a jillion times at meetings I've been in and, like most business-speak, I've tuned it out. Is putting a pin in "it" different from tabling "it"? Nope, "Table" means "postpone consideration of," so I guess someone somewhere just decided the idiom needed livening up. Anyway, it should be a familiar enough expression to most people, and the set of themers covers the "pin" bases very nicely, with VOODOO DOLL expressing the theme most literally or precisely, and the meaning of "pin" getting slightly, uh, bendier from there on: safety pin, bowling pin, PIN number, which is by far my favorite context for "pin" here, mostly because I envisioned the literalists going nuts over the phrase ATM MACHINE ("redundant!," they cried, "the 'M' already stands for 'machine'!"), without realizing that the brilliance of ATM MACHINE as a famously redundant expression here is that the PIN that is relevant here is involved in *yet another* famously redundant expression, namely PIN NUMBER ("redun-... [chokes, sputters] ... -dant! The 'N' .... the ... 'N'!"). So either you're double-mad or you see it as a kind of redundancy joke. I choose option B.

Lots of 3s 4s and 5s today so not much room to get any pizazz into the grid. POOL PARTY sounds fun right about now, but I'm gonna need more than just one ONION RING if we're gonna really get things hopping. I don't love I LOST as fill, but I love the clue. It's a genuinely famous collection of reviews, and I like the New York(er)-ness of the answer. There are good and bad ways for the NYTXW to be obsessed with its home city. This is a good way (Kael wrote for The New Yorker for decades, those decades being primarily the '70s and '80s). There were one too many crossreference clues in this puzzle for my taste, which is to say there were two. PIE / PAN I didn't mind, as those answers intersect, so I didn't have to go looking all over hell and gone to find the other part. The two parts of ICE / CUBE are also relatively close to each other, but having had one crossreference already by the time I got there, I was full. Could've been worse. Could've gone with ARM / REST for the crossreference trifecta. Speaking of ARM, feels like ART or ARC would be better there, which is to say I would never go with a SIM (narrow, old video game-related singular suitable only for xword emergencies, IMHO), when I could get an ordinary word like SIT or SIC in there and clue it All Kinds of Ways. Ordinary words with broad cluing potential > narrowly specific proper nouns if those narrowly specific proper nouns are, themselves, crosswordese of a sort. The reason I'm spending time on this largely unimportant corner is that the SIM clue had "Member of ... family" in it, and so having SI-, I wrote in SIS (and could just as easily have written in SIB). Not real thrilled about cluing ambiguity around an answer that should have, and could have easily, been a different answer. 

More things:

• 2D: $$$ (MOOLA) — wrote in MONEY. I like that "$$$" appears in this grid twice (see the ATM MACHINE clue). I feel like the puzzle is low-key winking at us a bunch, and today I somehow don't mind.
• 9D: Clumsy (MALADROIT) — pretty high-falutin' word for a Tuesday. Had the MAL- and still needed a bunch of crosses to remember that MALADROIT (a fine word, actually) existed. 
• 37D: Wreck room? (STY) — didn't really get this at all ("the pigs just live there ... it's not a 'wreck' to them!") until I realized that STY here is just a metaphor for a messy room, of course.
• 47D: Shade of some turning leaves (OCHER) — my least favorite fall color, first because it just sounds / looks bad ... like a disease that okra would have ... and second because I can never spell it confidently, probably because it can be spelled two ways: OCHRE / OCHER. The OCHRE spelling is preferred in Britain and other non-US places, but while the NYTXW indicates Britishness for many -RE-spelled words (LITRE, for instance), it never does so for OCHRE, so you just have to guess.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. important updates:

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For those who think young sloganeer once / WED 7-28-21 / Signal that a reply is coming in a messaging app / Be motto for wikipedia contributors / Noted colonial pamphleteer / Diatribe trigger / Remove from danger informally

Constructor: Alex Rosen and Brad Wilber

Relative difficulty: Medium (maybe a little tougher)

THEME: DRIBBLE-ing (39A: Make art like 53-/21-Across (as suggested by this puzzle's circled letters?)) with JACKSON / POLLOCK (53A: With 21-Across, artist known to 39-Across pigments back and forth onto canvases) — you can find the letters P, A, I, N, T (in circled squares) DRIBBLEd "back and forth" inside of four answers (well, "back" (reversed) inside one Across and one Down themer, and "forth" (in correct order) in their symmetrical counterparts):

The PAINT answers:

• PETUNIA PIG (17A: Porky's significant other)
• PADDINGTON (61A: ___ station, Central London railway terminal)
• UP TO A POINT (11D: Somewhat)
• TENNIS CAMP (29D: Where you might find love away from home?)

the back-and-forth "PAINT"

Word of the Day: RED BUD (50A: Oklahoma's state tree) —

Cercis canadensis, the eastern redbud, is a large deciduous shrub or small tree, native to eastern North America from southern Michigan south to central Mexico, east to New Jersey. Species thrive as far west as California and as far north as southern Ontario, roughly corresponding to USDA hardiness zone 6b. It is the state tree of Oklahoma. // The eastern redbud typically grows to 6–9 m (20–30 ft) tall with an 8–10 m (26–33 ft) spread. It generally has a short, often twisted trunk and spreading branches. A 10-year-old tree will generally be around 5 m (16 ft) tall. The bark is dark in color, smooth, later scaly with ridges somewhat apparent, sometimes with maroon patches. The twigs are slender and zigzag, nearly black in color, spotted with lighter lenticels. The winter buds are tiny, rounded and dark red to chestnut in color. The leaves are alternate, simple, and heart shaped with an entire margin, 7–12 cm (3–4.5 in) long and wide, thin and papery, and may be slightly hairy below. // The flowers are showy, light to dark magenta pink in color, 1.5 cm (1⁄2 in) long, appearing in clusters from spring to early summer, on bare stems before the leaves, sometimes on the trunk itself. There are cultivars with white flowers. The flowers are pollinated by long-tongued bees such as blueberry bees and carpenter bees. Short-tongued bees cannot reach the nectaries. The fruit are flattened, dry, brown, pea-like pods, 5–10 cm (2–4 in) long that contain flat, elliptical, brown seeds 6 mm (1⁄4 in) long, maturing in August to October.

• • •

Like Sunday's constellation puzzle, this puzzle is trying to do a lot. You've got the artist's name, the alleged technique he uses (DRIBBLE) and then the "PAINT" gimmick, where the letters can be found in forward and reversed order inside the themers (a back-and-forth set of Acrosses, a back-and-forth set of Downs). It was the discovery of the "back-and-forth" thing, the precision of it, that warmed me to this puzzle a little bit at the end. Before that, I wasn't paying too much attention, and it felt like the letters in PAINT were just mixed up / scrambled, i.e. appearing in random order. This is probably because the first themer (PETUNIA PIG) has them backwards and so when I noticed PAINT was involved (inside PADDINGTON), I didn't see PAINT reversed, I just saw "the letter in PAINT out of order." But no, there is a definite "double DRIBBLE" (which ... thank you, puzzle, for laying off the basketball pun). PAINT goes forward, PAINT goes back, etc. Before noticing this little detail, I was put off by a couple of things. First, the very word DRIBBLE, which feels simplistic and reductive. DRIBBLE sounds unskilled or else accidental. You DRIBBLE your drink down the front of your shirt if you're clumsy or inebriated or whatever. A baby DRIBBLEs on its bib. I'm sure it's a word that's been used for his technique, but it looks like his technique is generally called the "drip technique," and splashing is another purposeful verb that's been used. I get that the letters in PAINT represent drops of paint, and that maybe DRIBBLE conveys the idea of droplets well, but the word felt almost condescending to me in its oversimplification. Also, JACKSON / POLLOCK never threw paint in such an orthogonal way. The crossword puzzle grid is maybe not the best medium for imitating POLLOCK—it's all right angles, all orderly and precise. If you look at a POLLOCK ... well, here, just look at a POLLOCK:

"Number 48"

But as I say, the back-and-forth element won me over somewhat by the end. Oh, I also did not at all like all the cross-references in the clues for the artist and DRIBBLE, or the fact that the last name comes first (i.e. POLLOCK is up top while JACKSON is below), so his name is out of order and so you have to go down to the bottom of the grid and hunt for the 53-Across clue if you want to begin to understand 21- or 39-Across (a thing I stubbornly refuse to do). This makes the solve feel a bit fussy, awkward, clumsy. Outside the theme, I had some trouble. Because DRIBBLE was unknown to me for a while, I had trouble with the whole middle, especially SWABBIE (!?), which is a word maybe I've heard, but it feels very slangy / informal (25D: Low-ranking sailor). In fact, it is slang. It should really be clued as slang (I had a similar feeling that BFFS should be clued as an abbr., but BFFS is what people actually say, so maybe it can stand on its own with just a slang word in the clue ("buds") tipping us off to its slanginess) (1A: Buds that are very close). In that same DRIBBLE / SWABBIE area, I also had trouble with BOAR (44A: Male hedgehog) and BOLD too (not a fan of the fill-in-the-blank clues for either BOLD or ONLY, neither of which meant anything to me). 

Had RED ___ and no idea what the rest of the tree was (50A). I know only RED OAK (New Jersey!) and maybe RED FIR (or am I thinking "red fern"?), but BUD, no, that was not on my list of possibilities. See also TENNIS ___, where I was out of ideas after TENNIS COURT (for most of us, the TENNIS COURT is, in fact, "away from home"). Never heard of ROCK COD (just "cod," maybe "Atlantic cod"), but strangely I never even saw the clue for that one, so I can't say it bothered me or held me back. For as dense as the theme was, the fill was alright. I watched EPEE last night (Olympics!) so the "touch" reference in the clue was instantly clear to me (16A: Sports event in which athletes try to avoid being touched). Weird that OIL didn't get folded into the theme somehow (would've preferred that to this punny "strikes?" business) (47A: Industry that encourages strikes?). Overall, an interesting, ambitious, mostly successful endeavor.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Toponym in the dairy aisle / SAT 6-26-21 / Tropical island whose name comes from Spanish for snows / When Ma is gettin kittenish with Pap in Carousel / Ungrammatical title of 1984 Cyndi Lauper hit / Labor-intensive tattoo type /Test that uses radioactive tracers / Literary team playing in front of "ten thousand eyes" / Times when NPR listeners are engrossed enough to linger in their idling cars

Constructor: John Lieb and Brad Wilber

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: CLU Gulager (5D: Actor Gulager of TV's "The Tall Man") —

William Martin "Clu" Gulager (born November 16, 1928) is an American television and film actor and director. He first became known for his work in television, appearing in the co-starring role of William H. Bonney (Billy the Kid) in the 1960–1962 NBC television series The Tall Man and as Emmett Ryker in another NBC Western series, The Virginian. He later had a second career as a horror film actor, including a lead part in Dan O' Bannon's The Return of the Living Dead (1985). He also was in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985). In 2005 he started acting in his son's horror films -- the Feasts movies and Piranha DD -- in his 80s. 

Gulager's first major film role was in Don Siegel's The Killers (1964) with Lee Marvin and Ronald Reagan in his only movie role as a villain, followed by a supporting part in the racing film Winning(1969) opposite Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; in Peter Bogdanovich's drama The Last Picture Show (1971); and opposite John Wayne in McQ (1974). In the 1980s, Gulager appeared in several horror films, such as The Initiation (1984) and the zombie comedy The Return of the Living Dead (1985). In 2005, he appeared in the horror film Feast, as well as its sequels. He also appeared in the independent film Tangerine (2015) and in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). (wikipedia)

• • •

Get a CLU!

This is a wonderful example of how a puzzle can be old-fashioned but In A Good Way. By "old-fashioned" I mean it's not flashing ultra-contemporary colloquial phrases and pop culture names, but its fill still feels thoughtful, polished, fresh, and very much in the (general) language. It feels like the best-constructed stuff used to feel a decade+ ago, but unlike a lot of older puzzles, it is conspicuously lacking in the kind of short repeaters that pros know by heart and novices just stare blankly at (i.e. a certain kind of crosswordese). In short, this didn't feel like it was *for* younger solvers, but it also didn't feel particularly exclusionary of them. And that's all anybody (i.e. me) wants—make the best puzzles you can make, and make them to *your* tastes, but give *everyone* a way to enjoy them. Balance out your cluing so that people outside your particular demographic feel invited in, not ignored. That way, we get a huge variety of puzzle styles and sensibilities, and everyone's mostly happy most days. This is the future liberals (i.e. me) want!* Old and young, content streamers and eremitic cave-dwellers, cats and dogs, all solving contentedly together! It would be weird, yes, but like popping bubble wrap (apparently), it would also be ODDLY SATISFYING.

["Well I spent some time in THE MUDVILLE NINE ..."]

The 15s on this are both solid and stylish. Three of the five are general phrases anyone might say, the other two are narrower in their focus and do suggest a lean toward a certain demographic (i.e. NPR listeners old enough to have "Casey at the Bat" be a seminal part of their elementary school experience), but you wouldn't call either DRIVEWAY MOMENTS or THE MUDVILLE NINE particularly obscure or dusty. In fact, the only answer in this puzzle that made me think "whoa, there's a throwback" was CLU Gulager, a name you used to see a lot but don't see much any more, as his career faded more solidly into the past and constructors began using software that helped them be less reliant on the proper-noun repeaters of yore. But just as I think older (say, my age and older) solvers should come around to learning new pop culture names (within reason! I still have "YouTuber" resistance!), I think it's important for younger solvers to look on old stuff they don't know not always as stuffiness or staleness, but as stuff they just didn't know yet. Also, CLU Gulager is great! Try some! Watch 1964's "The Killers," where Gulager and Lee Marvin just ooze bad-guy cool ... also co-starring Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes, and Ronald Reagan in his final film role ... as the movie's *real* bad guy. It's fun.). Anyway, though the puzzle feels like its cultural center of gravity is well back in the 20th century, it comes forward a number of times, picking up the magnificent DANA Owens (aka Queen Latifah) and Cyndi Lauper and TARA Westover and trap music (ATL) and a lot of other things that remain current. I enjoyed this a bunch.

I never got very hung up during this puzzle, but I never really got up a racer's pace either. Faster toward the bottom, but that's pretty typical (the more you've got in the grid, the easier the rest of the grid gets, in general). I thought I might race through the grid after I blew the top section open very early:

But THE MUDVILLE NINE took some work, for sure, and difficultish cluing made the short crosses not always easy. I struggled to get stuff like SUM TOTAL (great answer) and to remember stuff like NEVIS and to parse stuff like THE ONE. I also did not understand the clue on TOES (3D: Answer that would be more apt at 10 Down?) since 10-Down was [Romantic's dream] and yeah, *some* people are romantically into TOES, it's true, but I still felt like I was missing something there. Then I noticed there was no "-" in "10 Down," which made me look at that phrase a new way ... and *then* the aha dropped. You have "10" TOES "Down" ... well, down there, where your feet are. Assuming you have both your feet. A fake cross-reference! Turns out I like those better than I like real cross-references! 

Some more things:

• 26D: Topographical map feature (RIDGE) — had RI-G-, wrote in RINGS :(
• 23A: When "Ma is gettin' kittenish with Pap," in "Carousel" (JUNE) — I don't think I've seen "Carousel," and the clue gave me strong Ma & Pa Kettle / L'il Abner vibes, so I thought the answer would be more yokelish slang, and I had -UNE, and, well, I am not ashamed to tell you that I sincerely considered SUNE (a backwoods variant of "soon"?!?)
• 40A: Give away (RAT ON) — had --T ON, wrote in LET ON :(
• 32A: English football powerhouse, to fans (MAN U.) — short for "Manchester United." I've seen it in puzzles before and every time I look back over a grid that it's in, for a brief moment I think "What the heck is MANU!? I don't remember that clue?" It is bizarre in that it looks like some awful obscure crosswordese but it's actually a right-over-the-plate (to borrow a metaphor from a different sport), perfectly common colloquial term for one of the most famous football clubs in the world. MANU > NANU (NANU)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. omg does the DRIVEWAY MOMENTS clue actually have an NPR pun in it!? 58A: Times when NPR listeners are enGrossed enough to linger in their idling cars ... as in Terry Gross? Host of "Fresh Air"? Well, if it wasn't intentional, I still heard it, so the violation stands! 

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Mystery writer Blyton / TUE 3-30-21 / Mortal lover of Aphrodite / Compensating reduction of greenhouse gas emissions / Fourth word of a Star Wars prologue / Swivel on an axis / Leading female role in Pulp Fiction

Constructor: Alex Rosen and Brad Wilber

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: MONONYM (38A: Person known by a single name, as found in 20-, 29-, 47- and 55-Across) — one-named *musical* performers all found inside longer theme answers:

Theme answers:

• CARBON OFFSET (20A: Compensating reduction of greenhouse gas emissions)
• SPIN KICK (29A: 360º martial arts maneuver)
• TEN YARDS (47A: Distance for a first down)
• "MINE, MINE, MINE!" (55A: Greedy person's cry)

Word of the Day: ENID Blyton (35D: Mystery writer Blyton) —

Enid Mary Blyton (11 August 1897 – 28 November 1968) was an English children's writer whose books have been among the world's best-sellers since the 1930s, selling more than 600 million copies. Blyton's books are still enormously popular, and have been translated into 90 languages. As of June 2018, Blyton is in the 4th place for the most translated author. She wrote on a wide range of topics including education, natural history, fantasy, mystery, and biblical narratives and is best remembered today for her Noddy, Famous Five, Secret Seven, and Malory Towers. [...] Blyton's work became increasingly controversial among literary critics, teachers and parents from the 1950s onwards, because of the alleged unchallenging nature of her writing and the themes of her books, particularly the Noddy series. Some libraries and schools banned her works, which the BBC had refused to broadcast from the 1930s until the 1950s, because they were perceived to lack literary merit. Her books have been criticised as being elitist, sexist, racist, xenophobic and at odds with the more progressive environment emerging in post-Second World War Britain, but they have continued to be best-sellers since her death in 1968. [...] Accusations of racism in Blyton's books were first made by Lena Jeger in a Guardian article published in 1966. In the context of discussing possible moves to restrict publications inciting racial hatred, Jeger was critical of Blyton's The Little Black Doll, published a few months earlier. Sambo, the black doll of the title, is hated by his owner and other toys owing to his "ugly black face", and runs away. A shower of "magic rain" washes his face clean, after which he is welcomed back home with his now pink face. Jamaica Kincaid also considers the Noddy books to be "deeply racist" because of the blonde children and the black golliwogs. In Blyton's 1944 novel The Island of Adventure, a black servant named Jo-Jo is very intelligent, but is particularly cruel to the children. ^// Accusations of xenophobia were also made. As George Greenfield observed, "Enid was very much part of that between the wars middle class which believed that foreigners were untrustworthy or funny or sometimes both". The publisher Macmillan conducted an internal assessment of Blyton's The Mystery That Never Was, submitted to them at the height of her fame in 1960. The review was carried out by the author and books editor Phyllis Hartnoll, in whose view "There is a faint but unattractive touch of old-fashioned xenophobia in the author's attitude to the thieves; they are 'foreign' ... and this seems to be regarded as sufficient to explain their criminality." Macmillan rejected the manuscript, but it was published by William Collinsin 1961, and then again in 1965 and 1983. [...] In December 2016 the Royal Mint discussed featuring Blyton on a commemorative 50p coin but dismissed the idea because she was "known to have been a racist, sexist, homophobe and not a very well-regarded writer". (wikipedia) (emph. mine)

• • •

This is a concept looking for a hook. As it is, it's not much different from a puzzle where ELM and FIG and OAK are "hidden" inside longer theme answers and then the revealer is just TREE. Where is the ... Where is the Why? Why these names? Why musical names? Nothing but nothing about the revealer suggests music. A tight grouping is nice, but it's not tied to ... anything. No wordplay, no zingy revealer, nothing. Just, "here are four MONONYMs, they are all related to music For Some Reason" (?). It's not that the answers on their own aren't nice. Really seems like "MINE, MINE, MINE!" was probably the impetus for this thing (easy to hide four-letter names, a lot tougher to hide a six-letter). And CARBON OFFSET has a nice modern feel, while SPIN KICK is entertainingly dynamic (TEN YARDS is blah, but you get one blah per theme set if you want it, that's the rules). I just wish the puzzle could've done something, anything, with the mononyms as a group—highlighted some kind of logic. MONONYM is such a technical, anticlimactic revealer. What about "The Masked Singer," isn't that something? Yes, the TV show ... and it's a grid-spanning 15-letters long, too. I'm not saying that that would be a top-notch revealer here. I'm just saying that it's at least Trying. MONONYM isn't trying. P.S. I think mononyms who are also singers should be called BONONYMS. All in favor? Great, it's done. P.P.S. SADE and CHER and ADELE have Got to be calling their agents right about now.

The short fill on this is quite creaky, but it's offset (!) somewhat by the nicer longer stuff. Not just the themers, but HOT TAKE and SIT BACK and BAD MOVE and EYE MASK, all give a certain life to the grid that it desperately needed. It's actually a pleasant enough puzzle to solve overall. The HUGO Boss clue even made me laugh (10A: Who's the Boss?). One thing, though: I have no idea why ENID Blyton was the ENID of choice today. First of all, she's bygone—very bygone. Second, she's British, so actually most Americans, and certainly most Americans under 60, aren't going to have a clue who she is (unless they do a lot of crosswords) (never encountered one of her books in my life; know about her only because my wife grew up in the British Empire). Third, it's slightly weird to call her a "mystery writer"—although she was that, she was far far more famous (and infamous) as a children's writer. I get her confused with ENID Bagnold (who was also a British writer—National Velvet). As I wrote in ENID I thought "Wait, is this the children's writer? The racist caricature lady? With the golliwogs? That ENID!?!" And so I looked her up and yup. It's that ENID. Maybe let's not bring her back, and look, if you can't think of any good ENIDs, just stick to Oklahoma, OK? 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

UPDATE: I just learned that HUGO Boss was an actual Nazi, so while I still think the HUGO clue is clever, I'm never gonna be able to unsee the Naziness now. (Thank you to the thoughtful reader who filled me in)

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French dessert of fruit encased in sweet batter / SAT 10-17-20 / Pattern of five shapes arranged like this puzzle's central black squares / Roman's foe in Gallic Wars / Whence a memorable emperor's fall / Morocco's next-largest city after Casablanca / Language from which peyote comes

Constructor: Victor Barocas and Brad Wilber

Relative difficulty: Medium (6:40)

THEME: QUINCUNX / PLUS SIGN (1A: Pattern of five shapes arranged like this puzzle's central black squares / 62A: One of five depicted in this puzzle) — two answers refer to the five black-square formations seen in the grid (the rest of the grid is mercifully themeless)

Word of the Day: CLAFOUTI (36D: French dessert of fruit encased in sweet batter) —

Clafoutis (French pronunciation: ​[klafuti]; Occitan: clafotís [klafuˈtis] or [kʎafuˈtiː]), sometimes spelled clafouti in Anglophone countries, is a baked French dessert of fruit, traditionally black cherries, arranged in a buttered dish and covered with a thick flan-like batter. The clafoutis is dusted with powdered sugar and served lukewarm, sometimes with cream.

A traditional Limousin clafoutis contains not only the flesh of the cherries used, but also the nut-like kernels in the stones. Cherry kernels contain benzaldehyde, the compound responsible for the dominant flavour in almond extract. They also contain a small amount of amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside - a compound potentially capable of releasing cyanide if consumed, but non-toxic in small quantities. (wikipedia)

• • •

I saw Brad Wilber's name on the byline and thought it would be on the tougher side for me, since he will inevitably throw some fancy / exotic / foreign vocabulary I've never heard of before in there because he reads more than you and me put together and he's just smart that way. And sure enough, there it was, bam, QUINCUNX (!?!?), bam, CLAFOUTI ... and yet my time was totally normal for a Saturday, so I learned a couple new words without too much aggravation, which is just fine with me. I was much more aggravated by AES and HOBS and ENE and a little bit by FES (mostly because I thought it was spelled FEZ) (58D: Morocco's next-largest city after Casablanca). But I very much liked "I DON'T LIKE TO BRAG" and "RETURN OF THE JEDI," and NAHUATL (40D: Language from which peyote comes) and XANADU (8D: Site of Coleridge's "stately pleasure-dome") and SPIT TAKE (14D: Reaction to an unexpected joke) were pretty snazzy as well (for the record, this is the only way in which I will accept "SPIT" in my puzzle). I'm very much not a fan of themes on Saturday (or Friday), as they tend to be themed enough to restrict the quality of the fill but not themed enough to really be worth it. Today's theme was kind of a shrug for me. A push. A wash. I didn't care about it. It's fine. 

QUINCUNX nearly broke me up front. First of all, I wanted PENT-... something. Then I really wanted the latter part of the word to be -CRUX (because the black-square formations looked like crosses). I wasn't quite sure if the "Pattern of five shapes" was the five PLUS SIGNs or the five black squares arranged to look like a PLUS SIGN in each instance. Anyhoo, -CRUX was wrong. But knowing my Coleridge really helped because XANADU gave me not only the "X" but the "A" I needed to see UNDERSEA, and I was able to slowly piece things together from there. Found BANS very hard to get (19A: Some last a lifetime); had -ANS and still no idea, but luckily QUÉBEC fell into place and gave me that last letter I needed. Whole NE was a piece of cake. Zero problems there. Watched all of "Veep" earlier this year and still had no idea re: ANNA Chlumsky, but now that I see her face of course I know who she is. I did not realize she was the (child) star of the 1991 movie "My Girl" (opposite Macaulay Culkin) until just now. That's quite a career. 

Never saw "My Girl," but I did see "RETURN OF THE JEDI"—probably several times—and yet that didn't keep me from failing to understand the clue and initially writing in RETURN OF THE KING (12D: Whence a memorable emperor's fall). I think of Darth Vader as "Lord Vader," so "emperor" weirdly threw me off (I also, it seems, completely forgot that the Emperor was actually Palpatine, who I don't remember being in *any* of the first three "Star Wars" movies ... time for a rewatch, I guess). CLAFOUTI gave me trouble in the SW, but otherwise, smooth sailing. So overall, tough going around the two longer words I didn't know and couldn't hope to infer, and easy going everywhere else. Thus, Medium. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

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Hairstyle that's short on the sides / SAT 10-3-20 / Larva of dragonfly named after Greek myth / Sauce ingredient in Londoner's pie mash / Neighbor of Belarusian / Chemical compounds in bubble gum

Constructor: Brad Wilber and Doug Peterson

Relative difficulty: Easy (well, 3/4 easy for me, and then a bit of a freefall in the NE that was largely stupidity-driven, so I'm just gonna call it Easy overall)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: TARN (42A: Alpine lake) —

: a small steep-banked mountain lake or pool (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

Really enjoyed this one, despite its faint patina of crosswordese (INES SST RAE LETT SETTO DAH OLEG OLES etc). The long answers really hold up—nothing particularly current or flashy, but solid winners nonetheless. Seriously, all the groupings of longer answers are truly fine. And it's worth noting, or confessing, that even though excessive crosswordese bugs me, it's often what gives me my toeholds in tough puzzles, so maybe I should be a little nicer to it. You know, here and there. Not too nice. It's just that the overfamiliar stuff, if doled out in moderation, can be a big help. I mean, I got started by going SOPS SST LETT, not the prettiest combo, but then that opened up SILK BOXERS "ONE FINE DAY" and PET CARRIER, so I mostly forgot about the first few words I put in the grid. Do people really pay a lot of money for SILK BOXERS? Huh. Live and learn. It was definitely a quick solve that went predominantly counterclockwise, starting in the NW and ending up in the NE, and it was in the NE that the wheels came totally off my speedsolvingmobile. If I could eliminate Morse code units from all future puzzles, boy would I? DITs and DAHs ... Gah! Anyway, [T as in telegraph?] just didn't register for me—if it had, I likely would've seen THE CITADEL much sooner (12D: South Carolina college). I had CARPS for CRABS, which was probably the most fatal mistake I made in that quadrant (34A: Kvetches). I really think my answer fits the clue better, and I had the "C" and the "S," so I was reluctant to doubt it. Wanted SNOOTY at 30A: Nose-in-the-air, but then when it didn't work well with CARPS, I doubted SNOOTY, not CARPS, ugh. Thought maybe SNOBBY (?). Again ugh. The biggest ugh, though, was actually having the "IC-" at 21A: Something hanging near Christmas lights and ... coming up with nothing. In retrospect, that seems impossible. I think at that point I was doubting so much, I started to doubt that "C" (from CROCK). But I even tried ICE-something at one point. It's true that the clue is kinda stretching the meaning of "near," but still, ICICLE should've been close to instant with that "IC-" in place, and I just blanked. Embarrassing. 

Here are some other things that happened:

Other Things:

• 24A: Pirates' terms of address (HEARTIES) — I put this in but never felt totally confident of it until I finally sorted out the SNOOTY CRABS part. Piratespeak always seems so contrived to me, and I'm never sure if I have it right. 
• 20A: Sticky pad? (NEST) — Had the "N" and "S" and honestly thought NASA at first (like ... a launch pad?); but this is pretty good, as "?" clues go: nests are made of "sticks," a "pad" is slang for a home ...
• 40A: Larva of a dragonfly, named after Greek myth (NAIAD) — it's the "named after Greek myth" part of this clue that bugged me; it's not named after "Greek myth," it's named after a *particular figure* from Greek myth that you should've specified in some way.
• 28D: Spring or fall, e.g. (ACTION VERB) — proud to figure this one out very quickly, less proud that I thought the phrase was ACTIVE VERB.
• 37D: Post master? (ADMIN) — Had AD MAN for a bit and didn't really get it, but AD MAN is crosswordese and they're always doing wacky "?" clues for ad-related stuff so I wasn't gonna question it ... until it didn't work. I guess here the ADMIN is the person who oversees "posts" (to online forums).
• 27D: What robots might be used to reduce (HUMAN ERROR) — if scifi has taught me anything, this is a pipe dream. The only thing robots are going to "reduce" is the human population. Stay on your toes, people.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. a message from one of today's constructors, Brad Wilber, about the Boswords 2020 Fall Themeless League:

John Lieb and Andrew Kingsley, the creators of the Boswords summer tournament, now present The Boswords 2020 Fall Themeless League.  The League will play out every Monday night at 9 p.m. Eastern in October and November. Solvers may compete as individuals or as a pair.  Contestants can also choose a preferred difficulty level. The entire collection of the themeless crosswords will be edited by Brad Wilber.  To register, to view the constructor line-up, and to get more information, go to www.boswords.org.

Registration closes on Sunday, Oct. 4, so act now.

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Pilgrimage destination in central Italy / TUE 9-8-20 / Pluto's Egyptian counterpart / acid aqua fortis

Constructor: Kevin Christian and Brad Wilber

Relative difficulty: Easy (3:11)

THEME: PSY / CHO (4D: "Gangnam Style" performer / 60D: Comic Margaret) — a puzzle containing basic trivia about "Psycho," which was released 60 years ago today:

Theme answers:

• "A BOY'S BEST FRIEND / IS HIS MOTHER" (17A: With 26-Across, quote from 4-/60-Down)
• ANTHONY / PERKINS (34A: With 38-Across, star of 4-/60-Down)
• NORMAN BATES (44A: Main character in 4-/60-Down)
• ALFRED HITCHCOCK (58A: Director of 4-/60-Down, which was released on 9/8/60)

Word of the Day: Duchess of ALBA (2D: Duchess of ___ (Goya subject)) —

María del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva-Álvarez de Toledo y Silva, 13th duchess of Alba, GE (full name, see infobox; 10 June 1762 – 23 July 1802), was a Spanish aristocrat and a popular subject of the painter Francisco de Goya y Lucientes. [...] The duchess' relationship with famed Spanish painter Francisco Goya and her somewhat eccentric personality have contributed greatly to a continuing interest in her life during the two centuries since her death. Goya executed several well-known portraits of the duchess, most of them during his stay at Sanlúcar de Barrameda (one of the Andalusian country seats of the House of Medina-Sidonia), shortly after the death of her husband, the Duke of Alba, who was also Duke of Medina Sidonia, in 1796. // Goya's accompaniment of the recently widowed duchess combined with certain innuendo expressed in his portraits of her have exacerbated rumors that the two were lovers. Although this has never been confirmed, the sheer number of portraits the artist painted of the duchess certainly suggests, at the very least, a close platonic relationship between the two. (wikipedia)

• • •

I know this movie well. Very well. I watch it every year on Halloween. I've watched it more than any other movie except "Dazed & Confused," which I think I watched every week for two years in the mid-'90s. I've read books about this movie. So it's weird to me that I actually don't get why PSY and CHO are broken up like that. I mean, I have educated guesses. He's a split personality, of a sort, part NORMAN BATES, part his mother (until the very end, when he is entirely his mother) ("she wouldn't even harm a fly"). So that's my guess. But it also seems like it's maybe related to the movie's famous opening credits, with the jagged strings of the Bernard Hermann score playing over the austere linear text that occasionally, as when the actual title "PSYCHO" is on the screen, breaks up:

But since the title doesn't literally snap in half, I'm guessing, but only guessing, that the PSY / CHO break is about the mother / son thing, especially since that's the topic of the TAGLINE included in the grid (42D: Quotable bit on a movie poster). I just wish the PSY/CHO chopped--in-half thing had more spot-on resonance. Also, the rest of the theme is just trivia, very basic trivia, with nothing terribly interesting going on. So even though this is one of my very favorite movies, I'm kinda lukewarm on the puzzle as a whole. Filled in the themers without even having to think. The PSY/CHO thing was an interesting twist, but since I can't definitively say why it's presented the way it's presented, I found it slightly disappointing. Tuesday revealers shouldn't require a "constructor's notes" explanation.

Fill-wise, TOOTLE, why does this word exist? It seems so informal and dumb and ye oldey and honestly, fifers, is this how you describe your music? Lots and lots of crosswordese in this one, and not a lot of interesting longer non-theme fill. Cool that TAGLINE is in here, since "A BOY'S BEST FRIEND / IS HIS MOTHER" feels like a TAGLINE (even if it wasn't on any "poster" I've seen). But most of the fill feels a little dated and rough to me. I didn't know ALBA. I didn't know NITRIC ("aqua fortis"?). I had TAILOR before TANNER (22A: Leather processing professional), and had no idea there was a "law" of SINES (12D: Trigonometry's law of ___). Never very sure about IONE v. IONA (26D: College in New Rochelle, N.Y.). Dumbest thing I did today was (off the -OR) write in HORROR before AUTHOR (47D: Stephen King or Ellery Queen). That's what happens when you just do word association with the first words you see in the clue instead of reading the clue in its entirety. So all that hassle was probably why my time was not a record time, because, as I say, this theme stuff was like asking me to fill out my name, age, date of birth. All second nature.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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