main: September 2009 Archives
A Modest Lesson in Journalistic Advice
It may be odd for a former restaurant critic to claim that he always thought anyone could cook anything well, but it's true. Cooking in a restaurant shouldn't be rocket science, yet it certainly isn't easy. Silly Hell's Kitchen and TV shows like it are staged exaggerations, but their working assumptions -- of instinct, teamwork, communication -- are all honest kitchen keywords.
This is my preamble to what could seem like a brag, but it just so happened that tonight I made for myself what could be the best pesto on pasta I have ever eaten. It wasn't difficult, not at all. My supper also led me to remember my other "best" pastas, and I will quickly recount them, so you understand that I understand the subjectivity of "best." Critics in all fields worth their salt think about this sort of stuff all the time.
Two pastas in my life have stood out, and both were eaten in Italy in 1984. The one that continues to demand its primacy was served when my guy and I were guests of artist Sol LeWitt at a town luncheon at a castle in Spoleto. Cloudlike pork-filled ravioli were spooned lukewarm to dozens and dozens of guests seated at long wooden tables. The pasta was burnished by a primitive sauce of meat drippings blushed with warm, ripe tomato.
This is when I understood that the word inevitable could be applied to food. I sampled two, then three portions, and would have eaten more, until a persistent photographer pulled me to follow him among the dirty marble columns of our public estate so he could shoot my red-stained shirt and American-hippie hair.
That momentary, almost medieval savor stayed with me for days. The memory of that memory refuses to go.
The other was a dish of golden silken ribbons, which I rolled out thin on a 300-year-old gray-marble table. Artist Betty Woodman cut and boiled this wheaten tissue, then sauced it with local yellow pepper and oil, a salted rabbit alongside. In this Tuscan kitchen, it wasn't the eating as much as the making; everything save the wheat came from within sight -- that view being a Leonardo given, a Renaissance scrim.
Tonight I am in New York's Long Island, facing a vase filled yesterday with two kinds of basil. You touch plants like these and they flood the air with September smell.
So here's what I did. Epicurious.com gave me a recipe that included three basils and parsley, but it didn't seem quite right. Then without thought I opened the Zuni Cafe Cookbook, recipes from the San Francisco restaurant by the underpraised Judy Rodgers, and there I found a sage pesto in which chopped velvety leaves are heated in scant olive oil and macerated with garlic and salt in a mortar.
So I tried the same with my basil, but right away realized that cooking in oil would sink its flagrant flavor, so I added raw leaves to the mix until I felt confident. Then came a toss of raw pignoli, grated Romano, coarse salt, black pepper. Grind, grind, grind into a paste -- I told myself that it's just this sort of labor that results in pleasure.
I boiled Delverde tagliatelle for seven minutes, took a third-cup of the pasta water and threw it in a preheated bowl, then spooned in my pesto. Too much water! So I poured some out, added all the pesto, then the drained pasta and more cheese.
No occasion attached itself to my solitary supper, but as I lifted each forkful, I was drawn into a world of unprecedented superlatives. Each swallow confirmed, then surpassed, the one before.
I am an average cook, getting better. But my intimacy with flavor has been flourishing since I was a little boy and is now, I am surprised to say, mature and decisive. The critic in me desires so very much that my peak pesto experience could be recounted, repeated, and available to anyone, but the devil behind my ear knows better. It's a victory, that one whispers, to recall your private evening at all.
Write it down, the critic insists. Pay no attention to him. Write it down.
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Who Would Expect a Video Artist To Be a Hero?
Every week's cultural and political news is actually a puzzle to be solved, a jigsaw set with antagonistic pieces. Here's one part of the puzzle that I find heartening, though others may not.
Artnet.com is an auction and art-market site that also has a kind of magazine attached, Late last week the mag lifted part of a story almost verbatim from Catholic New Service. I myself will borrow the beginning of the original:
Pope Benedict XVI has invited hundreds of artists to meet with him in the Vatican in an attempt to rekindle the special historical relationship between faith and art.
More than 500 personalities from the worlds of art, theater, literature and music have been asked to gather with the pope under the legendary Michelangelo frescoes in the Sistine Chapel Nov. 21.
Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said the meeting was to be the first of many initiatives aimed at bridging the gap that has developed between spirituality and artistic expression over the last century or so.
Though the list of invitees hasn't been released, the story says, the following were named: "Italian film score composer Ennio Morricone, avant-garde theater director Bob Wilson, architect Daniel Libeskind, and Bono, the lead singer of the group U2. American video artist Bill Viola was asked but has already said he won't be able to attend."
So Ennio, Dan, and "Bob" could be ready for Rome, but Bill? Artnet, to its immense internet credit, didn't let that sleeping dog lie. Here's its contribution:
According to a source at James Cohan Gallery, which represents the artist, more than just a scheduling conflict is involved. "Bill Viola doesn't agree with many of the policies put forth by the Vatican and the Catholic Church and this is his reason for declining to participate."
I wish the source had been named, but here's the question: Can the art ever trump the context? Years ago, an extremely talented artist I know -- and an exceedingly fine person -- told me that she made something expressly for the Nixon White House. It was work that actually could be used by the president (I won't say more) and probably was.
Do I still like my friend? Yes, of course. I must have asked why she had agreed to add her beauty to the home of a war-mongering crook, but I can't recall. The look on her face, which I do remember, told me she was confident that her pristine work would remain inviolate. After all, Michelangelo too pleased murderers and thieves.
So come November, Ennio, Dan, "Bob," and so many unnamed others may meet Il Papa right under that heavenly ceiling, painted by a man who loved men.
Wonder if they will.
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And Other Crucial Parts of the Culture Puzzle
I've never been a fan
It's a puzzle, then, to find novel ways to react "new" to the daily cultural-political flood. Maybe the task can be accomplished in pieces.
Jigsaw Part 1: Bloodsuckers
I'm afraid that our favorite TV "crossover" shows are withering. You know, crossovers, the programs that appeal to all shapes and sizes, the ones that full professors pretend to feel guilty about watching. Every season has 'em, but in television as in life, nothing good remains firm. Everything droops.
There's not even a Dorian Gray attic to imagine on the inevitably jowly Desperate Housewives premiere. Ellen on Idol? So You Still Think You Can Dance? As one of my outraged Facebook friends said when I moaned about the early dismissal of Project Runway's two most creative contestants, "Please, they're being asked to choose from Macy's Wall of Accessories."
So what's wrong with Macy's? My late mother sold makeup in the Herald Square store, once to Joan Crawford -- shades of The Women.
It's a plug. The whole show has been a multipronged plug, but now that all the compensatory elements of surprise and conflict and joy of looking have evaporated, there's no hiding it. Didn't someone know that you can't move a sewing circus out of New York, New York and expect it to retain even faux credibility? Plus, that pathetic model "competition" appended to the main hour is like throwing a sweater set onto the runway after the wedding-dress finale. So I have moved to that favorite-show middle ground where I won't lose sleep if I miss an episode -- which every studio knows is the beginning of the end.
Yes, Project Runway has jumped the sharkskin.
Faithful readers may be able to guess which crossover shows I look forward to on Sunday nights. Yes, they're both about bloodsuckers. True Blood is first-class progressive trash, and you needn't even remember its axiomatic trope that Fangs = Fags to find the bloody soap simultaneously comforting and refreshing. I'm about to grill a New York steak, bleu, to prepare for the season finale. Maybe I'll shed a red tear afterward.
To introduce Mad Men's third season, the promotion machinery fastened on its period wall-ovens and stovetops, ignoring utterly the show's -- paradoxically faulty -- critique of advertising's hold on culture. Why faulty? The luscious vintage sets and outfits ignite the very hunger for product that the storylines half-heartedly propose is merely a symptom of mass manipulation.
How else would I have noticed that the white Eva Zeisel dinnerware used in some Midcentury Manse looked not like the designer's vintage Tomorrow's Classic (genuine article below), but instead were newly bought examples of the smart hybrid sold by Crate & Barrel?
I ate that steak, by the way, on sleek plates designed in the early '50s by Glidden Parker. The same dishes were used by Lucy and Rickey during their first year as America's escape valve -- probably not my own particular plates, but you never can really know where aged objects have been.
Next Piece of the Puzzle: Why Bill Viola Is Mah Hero
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