The Swipe Volume 3 Chapter 5
I keep coming back to this Bon Appetit clip featuring the boss of Una Pizza in New York, Anthony Mangieri. His process, his insistence on ferocious control of ingredients and technique when it comes to a meal of very humble origins fascinate me. Seriously, dude, get another dough chef on the line.
Pizza is turning into a bit of an obsession, with it landing for dinner in our house more and more regularly. Specifically, a seafood pizza, which seems to be tricky to get if you go out. Tuna, prawns and mussels is a favourite. It’s all about the dough, though, and I’ve been playing around. Nothing like Anthony’s careful tweaks with different flours and hydration ratios. I use the pizza setting on my 30-year old Panasonic bread maker to make a simple dough with type-00 flour, and let it sit in the fridge overnight. That slow ferment means it comes out lively, bubbly and flavoursome, ready to blast in a hot oven under cheese and a homemade tomato sauce (more below). It’s a good way to decompress and eat something good on a Friday night.
Wherever you are, whenever you are, however you are, welcome to The Swipe.
Featured image by Dominic Wade.
Rob is reading…
Sea Of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. One of those time-shifting novels which attach seemingly unconnected events over centuries together like pearls on a chain, before pulling a rather excellent rug pull which reframes everything. This is clever, confident and arresting SF, and gives me a reason to revisit her Station Eleven, which I started a few years ago and found I wasn’t in the mood for. I am now.
Rob is watching…
Rivals. Blimey, this is a thing. An exercise in revisiting the excesses of 80s soaps with extra swearing and sexy-times. The scenery-chewing is off the scale, the over-saturated colour-grade screaming out of the screen. I hate it, and hate that I can’t stop watching.
Rob is listening…
to James Hatfield off the Metallica’s new guitar. I read a lot of guitar mags. The conversation about tonewoods and how they can affect a git-box’s sound is one that never goes away, especially when talking about rare examples which are subject to worries over deforestation. This, built from wood salvaged from the garage where Metallica first honed their sounds, is an example of how blinkered that argument is. The axe sounds good and looks magnificent.
Rob is eating…
Roasted roots and tomato sauce. As a subscriber to a veg box scheme, I know all about gluts, at this year particularly carrots, parsnips and beetroot. In order to ease the pressure on the fridge this week I roasted a tray full of said veggies before blitzing to a thick paste. Some of this will be used to make soup. Some went into a simple pressure-cooker tomato sauce to thicken and add interest. I confess, mostly I’m just dicking around in the kitchen, but I’ll always end up with something that adds value to dinner.
Rob’s Low-Key Obsession Of The Week…
This Thread on world-building. Really useful, and a great way to focus on what matters in your story. TL:DR—don’t sweat the details.
We’re starting with Ninth Art shenanigans, but fear not, there are lots of pretty pictures to look at. The ligne claire look of continental comic books of a certain lineage features cartoony characters working in front of exquisitely rendered back-drops. The settings, though, exist in a never-time, a post-war fantasy which gives the tales a particular glamour of their own. My uncle owned a full set of Tintins which I pored over as a kid. I cannot help but think that experience was formative in my present comic-geek self.
Edward D. Wood is notorious as one of the world’s worst film-makers, but as ever there is more to the story. He was also a prolific and talented novelist—although his adherence to a certain style and subject matter never really changed…
The Prose Of Edward D. Wood, Jr.
In order to write, you need to be alive. In order to be alive, you need to eat. Some writers seem to forget this and treat the second part of the equation as an annoyance. A suggestion from Olivia Laing—treat your calorific intake as part of the process and engage in food rituals to help you stay focussed and on target.
Related:
Like all the great cities, London exists in the collective imagination as much as an actual working, living location. As such it can easily be parodied or caricatured. The chimes of Big Ben or a shot of St. Paul’s are an instant signifier of a visit to the Big Smoke. But if a film-maker can’t get out on to the actual streets, they can always build their own versions.
A sad reminder that Neil Kulkarni’s passing robbed us of a necessary corrective to the agreed history of British popular music. I’m old enough to remember the Select years, and in fact still have back copies up in the loft somewhere. There was a lot more going on in the nineties than just Britpop and grunge. As a member of the Suede Nation and an attendant at Pulp’s transcendent Finsbury Park gig in ‘98, I can confirm things were a lot more interesting than certain strident voices would have you believe.
I don’t often include ongoing news stories in The Swipe, but the Delta airlines plane which landed upside down last week grabbed my attention. Especially when the Toronto Star snagged an interview with one of the passengers.
While We’re On The Subject – no it’s not more dangerous to fly at the moment and diversity employment programs have nothing to do with the situation.
Font nerd alert. I offer no apologies.
We will lose a tranche of recent history unless we urgently start an extensive archival project. Tape-based media like VHS and even professional-quality cassette formats are degrading at a disturbingly rapid rate. That box of tapes in the basement may already be unplayable as the magnetic oxide on which the signal is carried corrodes away, the glue on the base layer fusing everything into a solid lump of useless plastic. This is vital work, without which we could lose decades of ephemeral records of our recent past.
A long read to finish up. Catherine M. Valente is one of the greats, a writer of rare skill and insight. She’s focussing her attention on how we have, through our embrace of one of the greatest innovations on human history, quietly and willingly broken ourselves. Take time for this one, it’s important stuff.
One last thing.
I’ve been on a George Harrison splurge this week following the rerelease of his needlessly forgotten 1973 album Living In The Material World. However, I’m posting a cover of All Things Must Pass by the artist also known as Jim James of My Morning Jacket. Just because. My gaff, my rules.
See you in seven, fellow travellers.
