Poet Hemphill of the 1980s Black gay cultural renaissance / FRI 7-14-23 / Benny Goodman jazz standard with the opening line "April skies are in your eyes" / Instrument heard in the iconic intro to the Who's "Baba O'Riley" / Brand of cutting-edge equipment / Japanese lunch option

Essex Hemphill (April 16, 1957 – November 4, 1995) was an openly gay American poet and activist. He is known for his contributions to the Washington, D.C. art scene in the 1980s, and for openly discussing the topics pertinent to the African-American gay community. [...] He would garner more national attention when his work was included in In the Life (1986), an anthology of poems from black, gay artists, compiled by Hemphill's good friend, lover, and fellow author, Joseph F. Beam. His poetry has been published widely in journals, and his essays have appeared in Obsidian, Black Scholar, CALLALOO, and Essence among others. In 1986, Hemphill received a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.// Essex Hemphill also made appearances in a number of documentaries between 1989 and 1992. In 1989, he appeared in Looking for Langston, a film directed by Isaac Julien about poet Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. Hemphill also worked with Emmy award-winning filmmaker Marlon Riggs on two documentaries:Tongues Untied (1989) which looked into the complex overlapping of black and queer identities, and Black is... Black Ain't (1992) which discussed what exactly constitutes "blackness." // In 1992, Hemphill published his largest collection of poetry and short stories, entitled Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry, which included recent work, but also selection from his earlier poetry collections, Earth Life and Conditions. The next year, the anthology would be awarded the National Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual New Author Award and a Pew Charitable Trust Fellowship in the Arts. In 1993, he was a visiting scholar at the Getty Center. // In the 1990s, Hemphill would rarely give information about his health, although he would occasionally talk about "being a person with AIDS." It was not until 1994 that he wrote about his experiences with the disease in his poem "Vital Signs." He died on November 4, 1995, of AIDS-related complications. (wikipedia)

I had no connection to this puzzle. Couldn't get my head around any of it very well, and none, literally none of the longer answers clicked for me, so the zoom-zoom factor was nearly nil. The best way to illustrate how Not For Me this puzzle was is to point to what I ultimately thought was the best answer in the grid ("DON'T BE THAT WAY") and then to point at its clue (33A: Benny Goodman jazz standard with the opening line "April skies are in your eyes"). As the puzzle itself says, "WHAT IN THE HECK?" You have this great colloquial phrase, one for which I can imagine all kinds of contexts, all kinds of colloquial cluing possibilities, and instead the place you go is ... whatever the hell this song is?? A proper noun? You steer *in* to the proper noun. And an obscure proper noun at that? Baffling. Benny Goodman, in the year of our lord 2023, when all kinds of more inventive (not to mention inclusive) cluing options are available to you? This ... this is how far apart this puzzle and I are today. Just not seeing eye to eye. I mowed through the NW corner pretty easily but then ... I mean, I couldn't drop *any* of the longer answers through the center, in *either* direction, despite having the front ends of virtually *all* of them. SODA ...? SPEAK ...? I CAN ...? WHAT ...? I thought SCOUT TEAM was correct (19D: N.F.L. practice squad) but kept pulling it because it wasn't helping me get any of the crosses. But the worst of all stuckness came from today's entry in the EAT A SANDWICH category of answer. For 16A: Drank discreetly, I had HAD A SIP locked in. Seemed perfect. So when it came time to try to make sense of 9D: Catches some waves, say (TUNES IN), this is what I was staring down: 

And as I kept going, as I finally filled in the center and circled back around to the NE, I was really truly stuck  with TUSES IN. And while in retrospect it's obvious which letter is wrong in that configuration, in mid-solve it was, well, less obvious. So, it's HAD A NIP... great. Congrats. You got me. What ... fun.

The problem with all these answers in the middle, the ones I struggled with, was that when I finally got them, there was almost no sense of revelation or wonder or aha or any of it. It was "Oh, OK." Nothing felt quite like le mot juste, ever. "WHAT THE HELL?!" is what I wanted, "WHAT IN THE HELL!?" is what I wrote in ... only to find that it was "WHAT IN THE HECK?!" The SPEAK... answer was somehow worse, since it ended up having the dreaded ONE'S in it, ugh ("you" in the clue, "ONE'S" in the answer, always terrible). And then to wrap things up with one of the more disgusting "?" clues I've ever seen (47D: What might make one less likely to flip one's lid? => STYE). Ew, what? Why are you touching your STYE? Why are you "flipping" your (eye)lid At All, what does that even mean? Are you turning it inside out? Stunned that the clue-writer wanted the "flip your lid" pun that bad. Truly, this puzzle and I do not have the same idea what constitutes a good time. It happens.

I was happy to learn ESSEX Hemphill today. Kind of embarrassed I didn't already know him. I wrote in ESSIE and then crossed it with LIAISED at 22D: Acted as a segue for (LED INTO). I was like "No, not LIAISED! My most hated word!" And thankfully, no, not LIAISED. I had LAUDS at first for 1A: Praises loudly (HAILS), but few other outright mistakes (beyond those I've already mentioned). I like TAIL WAG a lot (24D: Dog's show of excitement). It's a funny little formulation (do we need the TAIL? What else is a dog gonna wag?) but it's vivid and colorful and feels very much in-the-language. Plus I just like dogs so dog stuff, especially goofy happy dog stuff, is always gonna please. OK, I gotta get coffee going and get ready for the window guys, then find somewhere else to spend the day so I can get some work done. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. SRO = "standing room only" / Some IPAs are "hazy," I don't really know what makes them so; read here / ORALS are [Defense mechanisms?] because the cluer has confused ORALS with thesis / dissertation "defenses." 

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