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

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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