Don Juan's mother / WED 6-17-20 / 1960s band with car-related name / Company that's RAD on New York Stock Exchange / Longtime director of La Scala New York Philharmonic

Constructor: Daniel Raymon

Relative difficulty: Medium (4:21)

THEME: FIELD OF DREAMS (53A: 1989 Best Picture nominee ... with a hint to 20-, 24-/27- and 32-/37-Across)— theme answers are kinds of fields (?) that are also things upon which you sleep, perchance to dream:

Theme answers:

• BLANKET OF SNOW (20A: Winter whiteness)
• SHEET / OF ICE (24A: With 27-Across, slippery hazard)
• BED / OF ROSES (32A: With 37-Across, metaphor for comfort)

Word of the Day: TOSCANINI (23A: Longtime music director of La Scala and the New York Philharmonic) —

Arturo Toscanini (/ɑːrˈtʊəroʊ ˌtɒskəˈniːni/, Italian: [arˈtuːro toskaˈniːni]; March 25, 1867 – January 16, 1957) was an Italian conductor. He was one of the most acclaimed musicians of the late 19th and of the 20th century, renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his eidetic memory.^[1] He was at various times the music director of La Scala in Milan and the New York Philharmonic. Later in his career he was appointed the first music director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra (1937–54), and this led to his becoming a household name (especially in the United States) through his radio and television broadcasts and many recordings of the operatic and symphonic repertoire. (wikipedia)

This is another one of those themes (like yesterday's) where the cleverness just misses slightly, in a way that has solvers wondering if they actually Got it, or if there's something they're missing. Yesterday, it was the "square" part needed to make any sense of the whole "area" angle ... a logical gap that had to be filled by the reader, but which in some cases never got filled (without explanation) and even when filled was much more likely to elicit a "... huh ..." than a "wow." You can get as clever as you like, but your gimmick better Land, eventually, or else it's a flop. Today ... instead of supplying "square" we have to infer what the hell "fields" has to do with anything. This isn't hard, but it is unsatisfying. There's just too much going on for this to really work. You have the whole bed metaphor thing, which seems like a fine theme, but then there's the revealer, which adds this "field" element, which just makes things odd. The "field" metaphor seems fine for BLANKET OF SNOW, but seems very tenuous when applied to a mere SHEET OF ICE; yes, technically any expanse can be a "field," but ... bleh. There's a cogent core idea here, with the BLANKET SHEET BED set, but the revealer tries too hard and slips and face-plants, imho. I would add this assessment to the fill. Or at least to the NE and SW corners, where the constructor clearly thought he was doing something *good* by putting those "Z"s in there, but woof, no. That is textbook Scrabble-f***ing. The "Z" is not worth INEZ / OZS and the surrounding fill (DOMO, GTOS). Any half-decent constructor can construct that corner cleanly and even interestingly in under five minutes. But some constructors still labor under the delusion that "Z"s (or "Q"s or other rarer letters) will make their puzzles inherently snazzy. The SW corner is even more egregious, as ZONAL is such an awful, painful adjective (57A: Like certain transportation pricing). "Oooh, a clue about transportation pricing! Cool!" said no one. Just make the "Z" a "T" and write Good Clues. Come on.


The rest of the fill is really bad in places, especially the north, which is a minefield of garbage. Like, it's garbage that also explodes. OLEIC REATA OMANI! It's like some kind of unholy incantation used to summon OOXTEPLERNON, the God of Bad Short Fill. DSO APER CPO all ensure that we never get too far without groaning, and then the south is rough too, with the plural DDAYS (always awful) and the semi-archaic "I FEAR ..." really making things not very fun.


Mistakes:

• 6D: Ancient Mexican (OLMEC)— I had AZTEC
• 7D: Rodeo rope (REATA) — I (confidently) had RIATA. So confident am I in that spelling that I've actually had to correct myself twice already while writing this blog post. I guess REATA is the Spanish, and that spelling survives. There's kinship with "lariat" that makes me want the "RI" spelling. For the record, RIATA is roughly twice as common in Shortz-era puzzles as REATA. 
• 16A: Don Juan's mother (INEZ)— wasn't sure if this was gonna be the INES spelling. Lesson of the day is—if it's Don Juan's mom or a hurricane, it's a "Z" 
• 53D: Only digit in the ZIP code for Newton Falls, Ohio (FOUR) — I had FIVE. How in the hell should I know? What a miserable clue.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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