Berry farm eponym / THU 10-21-21 / Clueless about current trends / French city nicknamed the capital of Flanders / Scoreboard numbers when a baseball team puts up a picket fence / Word in a Shakespearean incantation / Type of angular momentum in physics

Constructor: Michael Lieberman

Relative difficulty: Medium (tough to get that first themer, possibly ... then easy)

THEME: What lies beneath ...— theme answers are all phrases that follow a "___ UNDER ___" pattern, where the "under" is represented literally, i.e. the first part of the phrase is literally found under the second part:

Theme answers (all these answers are Downs, so you're going to have to tilt them using the power of your imagination ... or, you know, just look at the actual grid, above):Word of the Day: Jimmy COBB (9A: Jazz drummer Jimmy) —

Wilbur James Cobb (January 20, 1929 – May 24, 2020) was an American jazz drummer. He was part of Miles Davis's First Great Sextet. At the time of his death, he had been the band's last surviving member for nearly thirty years. He was awarded an NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship in 2009. (wikipedia)

Clever theme, though once you crack it, man those themers are easy to get. I spent half my time (probably) on that first themer, particularly the latter part of it, over there in the west. I don't remember exactly what tipped me to the gimmick, but once I did, I was able to fill in all the other themers except the PRESSURE one (seemed like you could do a lot of verbs under pressure ... break, maybe? Anyway, I waited for crosses to help me). Oh, no, now I remember what tipped me. I had A ROCK and no idea what was going on—I thought maybe the puzzle was going to be inventing weird words, and that the A- was a prefix meaning "not" (as in "amoral"), and then, well, god knows what the imaginary word was going to be. But I couldn't get enough of the latter part of the themer for a while because even though HIVE and WIN were right, I couldn't confirm them with crosses. Totally forgot William SHAWN, whom I always picture in my head as Wallace SHAWN (from "Princess Bride," among other things), and there was no way I was going to get PIXIE from 32D: Kind of short cut, so I just flailed a bit. The key, it turns out, was getting 27A: Things you saw while asleep? (LOGS). Didn't get it at first pass, and didn't relook at it for a while, but when I finally did, I had -OGS, which clearly made the answer LOGS, which gave me L-V-N- after A ROCK, and then the theme concept jumped out at me. "Living under a rock." LIVING under A ROCK. Got it. That was pretty much the struggle in its entirety today.