The forest, in a metaphor / SAT 1-25-25 / ___ Mountains, Kyrgyz/Tajik border range / nage (cooked in a broth) / Sublimation products / Foe in a 1932 Australian "war"/ Funding source for the Great Wall of China / Coward of the theater world / Old atlas inits. / Aeschylus trilogy of tragedies

• • •

But GESTALT. I think I last heard that term in a Woody Allen movie circa the late-'70s. Diane Keaton probably says it in Manhattan. I'm aware that the word exists, but I would never use it, nor would anyone I know (apparently). And I know what it means ... or I thought I did. Anyway, I would never have put one of these things (the "forest" idiom) anywhere near the other (GESTALT). The clue was very confusing, since it says "in a metaphor," so I thought the answer would be the thing from the metaphor, but it was the forest that was the metaphor. "Clunky" and "awkward" don't even begin to get at what I think about that clue. I left the GESTALT / ASST cross blank until the very end because I just couldn't commit to GESTALT. Unpleasant. The rest of the grid was varied. Highly varied, both in terms of quality and in terms of difficulty, though the only part I found legitimately difficult was the SW—namely, that bank of answers (SHARIA, TAMED, RIPTIDES) that could have provided (but in my case, failed to provide) a toehold on all those long Downs. I don't know how many things I tried before SHARIA. A lot. The worst mistake I made, though, was a pure crossword brain glitch: I wrote in EBB TIDES and not RIP TIDES. The idea of the "ebb" tide lives very close to the front of my brain thanks to my having seen it seemingly thousands of times over the years in crosswords. Rip is a tide I see rarely. And so ... pffft. Worse, the "E" from EBB TIDES made me start (as opposed to finish) 30D: Consumed with grief? with ATE (actual answer: STRESS-ATE). ATE ... something? No. No no no. But if crossword brain got me into that fix, crossword brain got me out. I somehow knew ALAI cold (52A: ___ Mountains, Kyrgyz/Tajik border range). Just ... knew it. In that way where you're like "I know this ... how do I know this? Is this right?" and then it is. The amount I could tell you about the ALAI Mountains ... well, it's not TONS, let's put it that way. Rest of the puzzle ran on the easy side of Medium, but SW def knocked me around.

Things started off fast with this one. This was my opening gambit:

Explainers (deep breath, here we go...):

• 16A: Strike one! (POSE)— "!" clues oddly function as commands. Like [Hit it!] could be a clue for DRUM (or PAYDIRT, I suppose). Any "Strike one!" has nothing to do with baseball here. The answer is a thing you (might) strike, i.e. a POSE.
• 21A: Coward of the theater world (NOEL) — one of those clues where they try to hide a name that is also a regular word by putting it at the front of the clue (where *all* words are capitalized, not just names). But NOEL Coward is so famous (to me) that the trick didn't work at all. 

• 23A: Funding source for the Great Wall of China (SALT TAX) — if you say so! I just inferred this one from crosses. All I know about the Great Wall is that they went there on Love Boat once (not on the actual boat, mind you—it's a magical boat, but not that magical)
• 28A: Felt in the Christmas spirit? (ELF HATS) — which are made of "felt," I guess. I had the ELF early, so this was easy enough.
• 32D: S&P part (AMPERSAND)— ha ha, brutal. Self-referential clue. There's the "S" and the "P" and in between ... the AMPERSAND ("&").
• 35A: One working on a column? (CPA) — a column in a ledger book, or a column of numbers, or whatever. A CPA is a Certified Public Accountant, of course.
• 41A: Jam (SPOT) — in the sense of "in a jam" (i.e. "a sticky situation"), i.e. a SPOT.
• 48A: It's fit for a king (SASH) — so, a king ... sized bed. I don't really know what these are. Dictionaries are weirdly unhelpful. A SASH seems to be a decorative blanket or "bed scarf" that you drape across the bed (????). Here:

[I’m being told this SASH is the thing a ruler or a prom “king” might wear across his body. I’m so used to puns in xword clues that I just assumed a bed was involved]

• 51A: Some photomontage art (DADA) — yeesh. I guess this is in fact true. Still, very hard. That little GIG / DADA / ZADIE / GASES area, strangely hard for me (I know ZADIE Smith, but not that title) (45D: ___ Smith, "The Autograph Man" novelist)
• 5D: Foe in a 1932 Australian "war" (EMU)— I learned about the EMU War (awful) from crosswords. Do crosswords long enough, you'll learn all sorts of things about EMU.
• 14D: They support many student movements (P.E. CLASSES)— true enough on a literal level, I guess. Tortured misdirection, but yes, literally, students do move in P.E. 
• 47D: Sublimation products (GASES)— "Sublimation is the transition of a substance directly from the solid to the gas state, without passing through the liquid state." (wikipedia). I was really thinking Freud here.
• 24D: ___ nage (cooked in a broth) (À LA) — educated guess. "À LA nage" means "in the swim" (not, as my rusty French originally translated it, "in the snow") (that's "neige").
• 31D: Where locks are picked? (HAIR SALON) — obviously the "locks" here are locks of hair. This would've been easier if it hadn't run straight through that SHARIA / TAMED / RIPTIDES section I spoke of earlier. There's a lot of really great HAIR SALON scenes in the new Mike Leigh movie, Hard Truths, which I saw just yesterday. Recommended, if you have a very high endurance for watching a miserable human being just be miserable, hyperbolically and virtually non-stop, for 90 minutes (it helps that Marianne Jean-Baptiste is very good and occasionally hilarious)

• 39D: Place whose name has an appropriate final vowel sound (SPA) — because you (conventionally) say "Ahhhh" there (or "Aaaaaaah"—I forget which one is the sigh and which the scream). 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]