#16: With great pasta comes great responsibility
Death By Consumption
8/19/24 - 8/25/24
It's always narratively pleasing when my consumption habits align on a theme. It makes me feel like my life is being written and plotted, rather than a flailing series of accidents. Is this what religious people feel daily? Truly, that must be nice! Last week, I found myself consumed by stories of power: financial power, political power, muscular power, homosexual power. It all made me feel a bit like a tiny, helpless cog in a big, soulless machine, but in some ways that can be freeing. There are always going to be powerful lunatics making major decisions that affect all our lives and there's only so much we can do about it, so you might as well dance with your friends and make some pasta.
"Industry" season 1 — on MAX
I am dangerously close to declaring Industry better than Succession. DANGEROUSLY close. I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this, and I already can't imagine life without it. This show essentially alternates between a scene of high-stress financial drama that I barely understand but somehow care deeply about, and then a scene of the most shocking and scandalous sex you've ever seen. I watch the show with my mouth hanging open the entire time. I'm extremely impatient to get caught up on the current season so I can see what Jon Snow is going to get up to when he joins these little freaks, but I'm also already sad that I'm quickly going to run out of new episodes. It should honestly be a crime for TV shows to produce only 8 episodes every 2-3 years. What if I die between seasons 3 and 4?!?!
Love Lies Bleeding (2024) — on MAX
I regret not seeing this in theaters because I bet it was even more fun with an audience. Still, though, this movie was a blast. The vibe is immaculate from the very start, and it moves at a great pace, slowly but steadily ratcheting up the tension. Kristen Stewart was born for this role (a lesbian), and it's fun to watch a new star like Katy O'Brian be born in front of your eyes. The third act of the movie gets outrageously wild and pulpy in a way that probably turned more than a few people off, but I found it hilarious and oddly moving. Lesbians are soooooo dramatic all the time, and thank GOD for that.
The 2024 DNC — on MSNBC
Do I have selective memory, or has the DNC never been this big of a thing before? I can't ever recall previous election cycles in which, like, coworkers would ask, "You watching the DNC?!" as small talk. And yet, a nation somehow found itself enraptured by an endless parade of minor congresspeople you've never heard of making JD Vance couch-fucking jokes as if they thought of it themselves. I mostly avoided actually watching it live, choosing instead to wait for Twitter to serve up the best/funniest/worst clips, but I did fall victim to the "Beyonce is showing up!" LIE that spread, so I caught a fair amount of the final night's festivities live. And, look, if we can make time for a handful of literal Republicans at the DNC, we can make time for a Palestinian Democratic congressperson, right?! Jaime Harrison, I hope you have painful diarrhea for the rest of your life.
And, look, I completely get why Kamala feels she has to out-militarize Republicans to prove to swing voters she won't, like, cry all day in the Oval Office. But even with that context, it was rather disheartening to hear her happily describe our military as the "most lethal" in the world, and then to see the massive crowd erupt into cheers and chants of "USA! USA!" I am, at my core, still the 16-year-old kid reading Slaughterhouse-Five for the first time in 2003, as the country devolved into a bloodthirsty, Iraq-destroying mania, and I'm still looking around wondering when we'll stop acting like a nation of Viking berserkers, smearing ourselves in blood and screaming ourselves into a frenzy so we can go crush as many skulls as possible. It's always reductive and rarely helpful to compare ancient history to modern times, but it is interesting to think about how the first major fractures in the Roman Empire started to show once their rulers believed the only way to maintain power and popularity at home was to continually expand into new wars of conquest, to find new cultures to fashion into the enemy that the people had to unite to destroy. I'm sure there's nothing in that for us to worry about, though!
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert Caro (1974) — paperback
I'm at the point where I can no longer remember what it is like to read a book that isn't The Power Broker. My arms are exhausted from holding this thing up on the subway, not to mention how embarrassingly "look at me!" it feels to pull this behemoth out of my backpack on a crowded train. "Yes, I'm a READER," I feel like screaming at people as they side-eye me trying to turn the pages without dropping it on the floor. Thankfully, the finish is within sight — I am 300 pages from the end, and I will be concluding Robert Moses Month this week. I can't wait to see what happens! Will the evil Robert Moses be defeated and all his neighborhood-choking highways torn down and replaced by public transportation?! I bet the book has a happy ending. :)
"Dancing Queen: ABBA Glitter Disco" — at The Bell House, Brooklyn
Went to this with a group of friends on Friday night, and had an absolutely hilarious time, despite (or maybe thanks to) the DJ performing one of the worst sets of all time. For an ABBA-themed dance party, you think you'd get more than, say, seven ABBA songs over the course of five hours. The playlist was seemingly borrowed from the lamest wedding you've ever been to, which the DJ clearly thought was the height of great taste and fun. Have you ever heard someone go from Whitney Houston straight into "Hooked on a Feeling," all punctuated by an air horn? Well, now I have! Five minutes after that song cleared the dance floor, we decided it was time to call an Uber and go home. If this guy's making a living as a DJ, maybe it's time I reconsider my career.
Two stuffed pastas — from "Pasta Every Day" by Meryl Feinstein
It's been too hot to cook until recently, so I had to set this cookbook aside for the summer, but I came back with a vengeance this week, attempting two different stuffed pastas: a spinach and ricotta ravioli in a butter and sage sauce, and a braised shallot and Grana Padano agnolotti. I'm usually my own worst critic with cooking, but both of these made me wonder if I should open an Italian restaurant. Sorry to brag, but I freaked it!!!
The ravioli were great, as all ravioli are, but I've made ravioli before so it didn't feel as monumental as the agnolotti later in the week. Still, something about the way Meryl writes out instructions (also the cookbook has a QR code on the back you can scan for videos of her making the different pastas, a feature that should be mandated by law in all future cookbooks) made it all go a lot smoother. Like: when kneading the pasta dough, she tells you to knead it for 5 minutes, then cover it and let it sit for 5 minutes while you "have a glass of wine" (I used that time to read more of The Power Broker, of course), and then knead it for another few minutes. Which felt a little overly pretentious as I was doing it, but lo and behold, the pasta dough was easier to work with and came out smoother and more beautiful. So, by the time I had assembled the ravioli, I was so enamored with my own creations that I was taking pictures of the tray as if I were a parent watching my child in the school play.
And then yesterday I decided to host a dear friend and her iconic fiancee, who was in town from England, so I had to turn out something impressive and worthy of a foreign dignitary. Normally I would never make something for the first time when cooking for guests, just because the potential for disaster is too high, but the spirit of Harper on Industry took over my body and I knew it was the perfect high-risk/high-reward situation. The filling alone was spectacular — you braise like 12 shallots in vermouth and vegetable stock, and then throw a Grana Padano cheese rind in there, too, so it all comes out smelling exactly like French onion soup — and once I had mastered the art of stuffing and folding the cute little agnolotti, I knew I was going to pull off something special. Even better, the sauce is simply the leftover braising liquid mixed with a little cream and butter, so it was a shockingly easy meal that made me look and feel like I was ready to send in an audition tape for Top Chef. Meryl Feinstein, I owe you my first-born.
