pasta perfetto

While I really enjoy cooking, I must admit I rarely get around to it. When business meals don’t have me dining out, I’m likely to piece together haphazard dinners consumed while standing – a handful of deli turkey; a tomato eaten whole, like an apple; a chunk of cheese; perhaps some mushrooms and zucchini grilled up on the Foreman.

Every so often, however, I manage to block out time and really cook. Odd as it may sound, I love it for the same reason I start companies or make photographs: creating something from nothing, even on a dinner-plate scale, makes me profoundly happy and wildly excited.

In particular, I’ve fallen in love with making pasta from scratch. I don’t completely recall what drove me to it the first time, but I remember the details of the attempt: fifteen years old, passing the rolling pin again and again over the round lump of dough, slowly flattening it into a sheet thin enough to slice, line by line, into broad, uneven fettuccine.

After the arm-exhausting rolling effort of doing it once or twice more, I requested a hand-cranked pasta press as a birthday present. Admittedly, an odd gift choice for a teenage guy, and one that got me no end of ribbing from my younger brother. But after my first cranked batch, I was even further hooked. The joy of making something from nothing, compounded by my inner child’s love of the Playdough press: the sheet of dough magically thinning and lengthening with each successive pass, then cranked through the slicing wheel, the broad sheet emerging as perfect narrow strips.

Late last week, I realized it had been nearly six months since I’d whipped out the press. So I blocked in some time yesterday evening, invited a friend, and linguined away. Feeling adventurous, I decided to try making pesto sauce, which in fact turns out be remarkably simple: 2 large bunches of basil, 6 cloves of garlic, 2 ounces of pine nuts, a cup of grated Parmesan and 3/4 a cup of olive oil. Tossed in a food processor for a couple of spins, those five basic ingredients emerge emulsified and emerald green, a perfect pesto.

As an antipasto, I had bought tomatoes and mozzarella, which I sliced and topped with a bit of leftover basil and olive oil – a classic caprese salad. Paired with a bottle of wine and capped with a few store-bought cupcakes for dessert, the perfect evening.

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anthologizing

Not wanting to appear all talk and no action, I’m unveiling Cyan Publishing’s first concrete project: a Best of Web Writing print anthology. [Nota bene: if you haven’t heard me mention Cyan Publishing, you should probably read the prior post first.]

The volume will be patterned after Houghton Mifflin’s great Best American Short Stories (or Best American Magazine Writing, etc.) series, collecting works in the body with a Contributors’ Notes section in the back (short biographies plus anything each writer feels compelled to add about included posts). Because blog posts tend to be shorter than stories, however, the current plan is to organize the body by topic (work, love, family, etc.) rather than only by author.

Each author will retain the copyright to their own work, and licensing will be non-exclusive, but authors will be compensated with a percentage of the book’s profits, in a way that’s closer to film’s model, and considerably more generous than publishing’s.

We’ll be selling the book directly through the soon-to-exist Cyan Publishing site, as well as through major online booksellers (Amazon, B&N, etc.) and (through a relationship with Ingram Book Distribution, the largest wholesale distributor) any real-world bookstores we can convince to wedge the book onto their shelves. To encourage stores to do so, we’ll also be putting together a series of readings, where any of the authors who are nearby and willing will have a chance to share their work in their own voice.

More generally, I’m hoping the book gets all of the writers in front of a host of new readers. Web writing has long been marginalized, and I think unfairly so; there’s a lot of great stuff posted regularly by talented individuals, and this should be a good chance to share that fact with the world.

By now, I have the first ten or so writers in mind, but I’m ideally looking for another fifteen more. If you have thoughts on talented bloggers I may not be reading, or on particularly good posts that warrant inclusion, shoot me an email or leave a comment pointing me in the right direction.

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look out harvey

With a year and a half of progress under Cyan Pictures‘ belt, I’m doing what any aspiring mogul would: expanding the empire. Adding to the indie film end of things, I’ll be slowly piecing together Cyan Publishing and Cyan Records, sibling book and music companies, under a broader Cyan Arts banner. I’m still piecing together business plans for both organizations, but they, like Cyan Pictures, will be built around five simple core beliefs:

  1. Art isn’t just important, it’s also effective, as one of the best ways to make people think, ask questions, and look at the world and themselves in new ways.
  2. The goal of art, then, should be to make as many people think as much as possible. That means art that’s either good or popular isn’t sufficient; art needs to be both.
  3. Technology can be a powerful tool, both in creating art and in bringing it into people’s lives. Too many companies are wasting time hiding from new technologies, or actively fighting them, rather than searching for ways to harness them productively.
  4. While established voices should always have a chance to continue expressing themselves, it’s also crucially important to find and showcase emerging ones.
  5. Artists and customers both prefer to deal with companies that have a sense of integrity and a sense of fun, companies that do the right thing, and have a good time doing it.

For a number of reasons, I’ve always kept this blog relatively business-free, but it’s a policy I’m hereby officially changing (with apologies to readers who’ll be bored to tears by work-related posts). In the next couple of months, as these companies come together (and as, in my parallel non-profiteer life, the Indigo Foundation notches things up), you’ll hear about it here first.

Time to get to work.

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fly me to the moon

Though yesterday evening started out on a rather somber note, through the twin powers of heavy drinking and attractive women, I eventually forged my way back to near full-blown holiday spirit.

Specifically, I headed up to Columbia for a friend’s Champagne & Sinatra party, an event that works pretty much as the name would lead you to believe: champagne flows, Sinatra croons from the stereo, and everyone does their best to look and act Rat Pack chic.

As the hostess is a director, the crowd was overwhelmingly dominated by movie people, leading me to stray from my (rarely successfully adhered to anyhow) “no film girls” policy. I spent most of the evening flirting with a Danish writer so Nordically beautiful that (despite my advertised egotism) I kept wondering why she was possibly talking with me.

Still, by the time I left (in the wee small hours of the morning, as it were [my apologies to Old Blue Eyes for that pun]), I’d not only secured her number and a good-night kiss, but set up a date for later this week.

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valentine wishes

I sat down to write a light, funny piece about Valentine’s Day and love and whatever else. And as I was just piecing it together in my head, an email appeared in my inbox from one of my very closest friends, who’s living abroad, saying that she had this morning been sexually assaulted.

While I immediately wrote her back, I didn’t really know what to say, or do. At Yale, on separate occasions, I was the first person two other close female friends told after they were date-raped. And I didn’t really know what to say or do then either, except to listen, and hug, and listen more.

But I can’t hug someone thousands of miles away. Without a telephone where she’s living, and only sporadic access to an internet cafe, I can’t even listen, and I can only occasionally read. I cannot possibly imagine how she feels right now, but I know I’m both terrified and enraged on her behalf.

It was because of my other two friends that I started teaching women’s self defense; because of this friend, I’ll be returning to doing so. There are far too many terrible things in this world for me to even begin to comprehend. And, at the same time, there is far too little love.

So remember that this Valentine’s Day: while we should never stop trying to rid the world of those terrible things, we should also never stop trying to fill it with more love.

Here’s wishing a safe, happy, love-filled Valentine’s Day to all of you out there in the ether,

josh

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gloating

My parents are better than yours, because not only did they send a care package assortment of Valentines’ Day candies, they included a card with a pickle on the front that inside reads “You mean a great dill to us.”

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wining

Earlier today, Geese Aplenty‘s Greg was kind enough to suggest a list of erudite-sounding wine descriptors he uses to cover the fact that, when it comes to wine, he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.

Which, on the one hand, I very much appreciated, as I rarely know what I’m talking about, on pretty much any subject at all. But, on the other, I also recently discovered that, when it comes to wine in particular, not knowing what you’re talking about doesn’t seem to matter.

Just a few weeks back, I was lucky enough to attend the in-house wine tasting of a high-end liquor distributor. Convening a panel of exceedingly educated palettes (plus a few idiots like me, dragged along for the ride), the tasting was used by the distributor to decide how much of various vintages to order, and where to set prices.

I can say, without a doubt, the evening was the most unintentionally funny of my life. I knew it was starting well when one elderly taster (memorable otherwise mainly for an exceedingly intimidating set of bushy eyebrows) described the first sample, a merlot, as “certainly, a slutty little wine.” While the evening only improved from there, it peaked when another gentleman described one particular shiraz as “a bit like opening an umbrella on the streets of London on a summer’s day, just as the fog begins rolling in.”

As I stifled laughter, the distributor smiled broadly and scribbled copious notes. One can only assume an open-umbrella-in-the-mists-of-London shiraz is bound to be a big seller.

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long-term potential

Fortunately, an evening spent holding a bag of frozen broccoli to my forehead countered Monday’s headbutt melodrama, and I headed into my date last night relatively unbruised and certainly in prime form. I must admit to having been more than a bit drunk when I first met the girl, however, and so braced myself for the potential aftermath of a serious case of beer goggles.

In fact, there was no need for bracing, as my date was even more beautiful than I had remembered. In fact, she was great on all counts – smart, funny and articulate, as well as attractive. But throughout the date, a small voice in the back of my head continually objected. Some part of me, for whatever reason, knew that the relationship wouldn’t work, long term. Which, frankly, is true about the vast majority of relationships I’ve embarked upon; were I to have sat down and thought carefully about them at the get-go, I’d have known they had no possibility of going the distance.

Still, in years (or weeks) past, I’d never paid any heed to that small warning voice. Hearing it insistently last night was, frankly, a new and rather disquieting experience. Was this the first sign of impending emotional maturity? Would suddenly having a conscience weighing in keep me from wreaking my standard horribly messy trail of love life havoc?

In short, I’m not certain. So in this specific case, if she’s willing, I’d love to at least go on a second date; until I get used to listening to that little voice, I’d hate to think I killed off something potentially promising due to poor communication within my own head.

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