RECIPES & REVIEWS #1: 1/29/25

HOURS SPENT WITH LYLE LOVETT and THE BRUTALIST and THE BALLET and A COUPLE OF GAY RUSSIAN SOLDIERS ... and A PASTA DISH YOU CAN MAKE IN MINUTES

The above photo is of the delicious pasta dish I made on Sunday night. I also made the video I promised you which I’ll post at the end of the column. This first RECIPES & REVIEWS is open to all subscribers but moving forward it will appear mostly on Wednesdays for our paid subscriber community only - either once a week or every ten days or so if you get a little sick of me showing up in your email queues. But I wanted everyone to get a, yes, taste of what we’re trying to do here together before my next column in this new series appears.

There will be a mix of main dishes and salads and soups and desserts.

The science of baking and the art of cooking.

But it’s all rather meditative and creative, which I discovered during the COVID lockdown when I looked at my beautiful kitchen in my old loft in Hudson, New York, and finally made its acquaintance and then grew to rely on the friendship that developed between us. Some solitary folks claim that cooking for one can make them feel lonely - or lonelier - but I have found it makes me feel a deeper level of comfort in my solitude which is always there if I calmly allow it to surface by being of service to myself in the way I am often looking to be to others. Indeed, the only thing I like more than cooking a delicious meal for myself or successfully baking a cake is gazing at the cleaned plates of those for whom I’ve cooked a meal or seeing the surprised smiles on the faces of those - even strangers - to whom I give slices of the cake on my daily meanderings as a pilgrim in cities throughout the world. In some way, I was also on a pilgrimage to that kitchen in Hudson and the honing of self-care that an at-home meal can conjure. COVID and its lockdown gave me the construct to arrive at such a place. A private kitchen whether in Hudson or London or a little hotplate in a small room in Paris or a communal kitchen in Tangier or Vienna is another kind of construct for it. Cooking and baking are venues to arrive at comfort and care and a self-regard that is not rigged to be selfish, or just a setup for our being so. They are acts of service to ourselves and to others.

Those are some of the mindful ingredients I’m putting into this new series of columns - as well as the added bit of spice that my takes on a select few of the films and operas and concerts and musicals and plays and ballets and art exhibitions I attend each week can add to the mix.

And here are the actual ingredients that came to mind when I created this pasta concoction for myself back during the COVID lockdown and which I used for this first dish I’m highlighting this week:

LYLE LOVETT PASTA

(FOR ONE BUT YOU CAN EXTRAPOLATE THE AMOUNT OF THE INGREDIENTS FOR MANY MORE)

Chop the ingredients:

• Three cloves of garlic

• Spears of asparagus - number up to you

• Sprigs of broccolini - number up to you

Leaves of baby spinach - amount up to you

Add the first three together in a pan of olive oil to be sautéed

If the pasta of your choice takes 9 minutes to cook then I usually put these in the pan of olive oil at around the 5-minute mark.

Put the spinach into the pan during the last minute.

Toppings:

You can choose one or all of the following:

• Prosciutto

• Diced fresh tomato

• One sunny-side up fried egg (which you fry in the middle of all the ingredients at the very end of their being sautéed)

Add to the mixture once you have put it onto the drained pasta:

Crumbled blue cheese,

or a cheese of your choosing

###

Above is a photo of Lyle Lovett in his baker’s garb on a kitchen set being directed by Robert Altman when Lovett was part of the cast of Altman’s 1993 film Short Cuts. Also in the photo are cast members Bruce Davison and Andie MacDowell. I remembered as I was posting this photo my seeing a screening of this film before it came out and then did the math. Lord. It really was 32 years ago. I also remembered that I had done a cover story on Andie that same year for Vanity Fair that alternated on the newsstands with one of a newly elected President Bill Clinton who was heading up what was titled “The New Guard,” which, I think, might have been the precursor to the annual “The New Establishment” issues that became a part of Graydon Carter’s now legendary - even longed-for - tenure there as the Editor in Chief.

I also remembered as I sat listening to Lyle Lovett in concert at Cadogan Hall last Saturday night that I had interviewed Julia Roberts for Vanity Fair’s big 10th Anniversary issue back in 1993 when Julia was in the throes of her romance with Lyle. They met on the set of another Altman film, The Player. This is what I wrote within the introduction to our Q and A in Vanity Fair:

Roberts walked away from her much-discussed romances with more style and spirit than anyone gave her credit for. But it was all Elizabeth Taylor-made for tabloid headlines and kicked off the bad-press penance she has had to pay for her success. Loads of stories started making the rounds, and the papers seemed to be printing just about anything. Angry—and feeling betrayed—she turned silent toward reporters. The public began to wonder if something might be wrong.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Julia Roberts is simply that earthy kind of southern gal—so often misrepresented as a misfit—who can outclass the stuck-up sorority sisters while she's off at the fraternity, having a grand old time with the brothers. The only time bullshit could possibly be found in her life would be if it were on the bottom of her frequently bare feet.

And now Roberts is back with a vengeance. She's even shocked the world by marrying the coolest country singer alive, Mr. Lyle Lovett. After the public scrutiny of her past love affairs, there was poetic justice in her ability to pull off a wedding in the middle of Indiana without the press. In fact, I had spent time with her only 36 hours before the wedding took place and, proving what a wonderful actress she really is, she did not blink when I brought up the possibility that she was dating Lovett.

"So. You must be a pretty good poker player," I teased her when she called me from the set of The Pelican Brief the week after her marriage.

"No," she said, laughing, "I'm not a cardplayer."

"Did you already know about the wedding and have it planned when we spoke the other day? I mean, it was only a day and a half before it happened."

"No. Well, I knew certain things, but the core of it was spur-of-the-moment."

"Are you going to go on a honeymoon at some point? He's touring; you're filming. When will you work one in?"

"Oh, life is a honeymoon, Kevin."

"Put that on a bumper sticker and stick it on the back of the pickup truck you and Lyle are bound to buy together."

"That's right," she agreed, still laughing. "Life Is a Honeymoon!"

"So how long have you two really known each other?"

"Oh, we had only taken flight over the last little while. I think that certainly fate and timing played a large part in this whole thing. He's just wonderful. He's just a wonderful person. I couldn't be luckier or happier."

"Did any of your family make it to Indiana for the wedding?"

"Yeah. My mom and my sisters. They're very happy for me."

"Let me ask you something. Did the fact that I came down to talk to you—you know, yet another son-of-a-bitch press person—and asked you about Lyle Lovett have anything to do with your decision to just go ahead and get married? Was it like, Shit! Here we go again. I don't want to put up with this. Let's just get married and get all this over with."

"Yeah. In a way."

"You mean, Vanity Fair and I can take credit for your marriage?"

"It's funny. We both were just giddy and wanted to get together and get married. Certainly, as an afterthought, you go, Let's do it now! We love each other. We want to spend our lives together. This way things are calm and quiet and we can do it the way we want to do it without any influences from anybody else. The only downside to it was that I have a handful of really good friends and I didn't have time to arrange for them to come. That, I'll always be sorry about. But you can only do so much when you have limited time. But heck! We'll just keep gettin' married!"

They didn’t keep doin’ so. In fact, they got an amicable divorce in fewer than two years. No surprise about the amicability because both Julia and Lyle are amiable sorts. It’s part of each of their images. Lyle’s laconic version - he’s even (w)ryer than his buddy Cooder - was on full display at Cadogan Hall here in London the other night at the second evening of his two-night stand. I began to cook to his songs during my two months in Paris last spring, the swing of his terse-yet-tender Texas twang putting me into the rhythm of the this-yet-that of adding together ingredients since cooking often becomes a kind of solo dance for me. I move a bit differently while I cook as the music of whomever I’ve chosen before cooking or baking accompanies the melange of aromas that waltz about until I find myself doing so as well. I guess that’s what’s called a confession since typing that description doesn’t make me appear as cool and droll as Lovett, wallops of such cool drollery there within the driving force of so many of his songs that swell and sweep in the kind of sweetness a cowboy full of the this-yet-that cynicism-yet-poetry who frowns at pulling out all the stops allows himself - especially when talking from the stage, as he did a lot on Saturday, about his 7-year-old twins born on the “12th of June,” which was one of my favorite songs he sang during his 2 1/2 hour set performed without an interval. Their mother is his second wife, film and music producer April Kimble.

Hmmm .. that gives me an idea for a Bundt cake called Sweet-Yet-Cynical Cinnamon that might itself surprise you with its bite along with an unexpected sweetness of its own. Perhaps pepper would work in such an invented recipe - though Cinnamon Pepper sounds like a mixed-race stripper with a little auburn Afro hidden there beneath her pageboy wig the color of a little palomino pony. Or maybe some other ingredient could equal the dash of disquiet that always distinguishes a Lyle Lovett song that might not be cynicism, after all, but something we mistake for it in our own cynical perception of it. Maybe it is a kind of mindfulness itself skewed by that jazz-like skein that skits about in his country songs full of narrative and knowingness. That’s Lovett’s secret ingredient, this musician who was initially a journalism major at Texas A & M. He’s not the cynic but we are and he just sweetly allows us when he’s really cooking onstage with his band to think that he is instead. That is quite the waltz, wondrous and winking, a welcome to my world, y’all, that all great songwriters who perform their own work can swagger into being. And there is that finally, too, this other incongruity that Lyle Lovett contains: the swagger in this sweet man’s stillness. He doesn’t move about much onstage - call it a free-range kind of zen - but boy-howdy does the music do it for him.

Lovett’s voice was alas a bit shot the night I saw him. I talk about it in the video below. I also talk about the band and how spectacular it was - Bill Cox (piano), Jeff White (guitar and mandolin), Stuart Duncan (fiddle), Leland Sklar (bass) and Russ Kunkel (drums.) Cox, who told us that his first trip to London was in 1978 to accompany Leslie Uggams at the Palladium in a variety show that starred Bob Hope and Raquel Welch, brilliantly furnished the night’s improvised jazz interludes. Sklar and Kunkel said they first came over with James Taylor and Carole King in 1971. Lovett’s first concert in London was a small one in 1987. All their reminiscing, these offbeat men ingrained with beats, stirred memories for me of my first trip here in 1978 myself when I was part of David Hockney’s youth-rubbed retinue and I drove with David and Henry Geldzahler and my then boyfriend, Tor Siedler, to Glyndebourne to see David’s sets for its production of The Magic Flute. Yep, all kinds of music waltzed about me the night of Lovett’s concert, his own there rollicking up from the stage where I sat right above it in the side gallery as it inspired the remembered sort which has accompanied me throughout my life, his concert itself now part of the orchestration of memories that can serve as the soundtrack of a life if we allow them their own droll rhythmic knowing drive when they arrive to remind us each of our narratives, those unexpected jazz-like riffs that can remain so oddly with us, the twang of heartstrings slightly out of tune in their yet-again need of that touch of their latest tuner, the singers we choose to serenade us when we stand alone in kitchens to sauté some kindness to ourselves into whatever it is we are trying to concoct.

During Lovetts’s own reminiscing and the instrumental jazz solos that were woven flowingly into a set that made room as well for a Flatt and Scruggs toe-tapper, the aural waltzing of it all there about me welcomed more recent memories of Onegin which I had seen the Royal Ballet perform at the Royal Opera House last Wednesday as well as the night before with its orchestral score arranged by Kurt-Heinz Stolze from a suite of Tchaikovsky piano compositions. I love to see a ballet performed by different leads because they can change the whole tenor of the piece. This one about an unrequited Russian pair of lovers - the bookish Tatiana and the worldly Eugene Onegin - was originally choreographed for the Stuttgart Ballet by John Cranko in 1965 and is based on the verse novel by Pushkin. On opening night the pair was danced by Marianela Nuñez and Reece Clarke. On Friday: Yasmine Naghdi and Matthew Ball. I am a huge fan of all four but Naghdi and Ball were transcendent on Friday. I was talking to the lovely woman sitting next to me about their performances when she told me, “I am glad you love Matthew so much because I’m his Aunt Lorna from Liverpool.” I told her he was the perfect example of the danseur noble. So is Reece. But his aunt wasn’t sitting next to me on Wednesday. During the second interval on Friday, Aunt Lorna told me that she had gotten word back to Matthew to tell him what I had said. I do love this little town where everything continues to connect.

Another connection took place when I went to see Firebird at the King’s Head Theater in Islington which has been directed by Owen Lewis from a script by Richard Hough who based his play on the film and screenplay of the same name by Peeter Rebane and Tom Prior - the title references another ballet written by another Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky. Both the film and play take as their source material a memoir by Sergey Fetisov who was a bisexual Russian fighter pilot during the 1970s involved in a complicatedly requited love affair he had with a fellow male soldier who later became a drama student in Moscow where Fetisov was able to get assigned to a desk job in the military in order to be with him. It is a tragic tale of politics and desire and displacement. The film’s talented Estonian director and co-screenwriter Rebane invited me to see the production. I don’t think he’d mind my using a bit of the email I sent him in Estonia afterward to let you know my thoughts about the show. I wrote: “I loved the production so much, Peeter. It doesn't have the heartbreaking sweep of your film, of course, but it was told with an economic grace and the actors were all so talented and present and the two leads, Richard Eades and Theo Walker, sexy as shit even with their shaved chests or because of them. Depends on your taste. And I looked up Walker’s Instagram. He's got a huge following and I hope they find him in this lovely iteration of this story.”

Walker and Eades in "Firebird" at the King's Head Theatre.

I reference Dan Ackroyd and Clifton Webb in my video remarks about "The Brutalist."

Before I cooked the Lyle Lovett Pasta on Sunday night, I spent the entire afternoon at the Picturehouse Central Cinema on Piccadilly Circus watching director Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, which he cowrote with Mona Fastvold. I say in the video below that I don’t consider it the epic masterpiece that others have claimed it to be but it is hard to explain why without giving away plot points and devices. I think Adrien Brody who stars is actually better than the film and I would not be unhappy if he won the Oscar for his work in this. I think his main competition is Timothée Chalamet and I wouldn’t be unhappy if he won either - although I do explain a bit in the below video why I’d choose Brody over him if I were voting. If Chalamet were doing more of a standard issue imitation of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, he’d be certain to win because the Academy loves giving the acting award to impersonations and not to acting performances. Chalamat chose to go the subtler artistic route and the keenness of his intellect and talent steered him to conjure more of the essence of the artist and not the facsimile. I say it’s “close to an impersonation” on the video but I think I gave the wrong impression in it about how accomplished I actually think it is, and he is as well.

I also liked Felicity Jones in The Brutalist. I did not like Guy Pierce and the Ackroyd and Webb photos above are in snide reference to him - but his in some way had to be a snide bit of acting in service to the snideness of his “mama’s boy” storyline that finally just pissed me off. I’m also sort of pissed that I can only discuss why I felt this way with those who’ve seen the film because otherwise it would spoil an important scene in the plot which comes out of nowhere except from the schoolboy and schoolgirl parts of the writers’ fevered brains, both puerile and perverse in its application as a metaphor (tortured in more ways than one ) and even, I’d guess, rather prejudiced without even realizing the prejudice is embedded there.

There is also an epilogue and two things within it pissed me off, too. One is that after I did the math - if I were correct in hearing that he was born in 1911 - I realized the lead character’s age in that segment was 69. I’ll be 69 in March. I didn’t like the snideness there either of the filmmakers thinking that’s what 69 looks like. And the film’s last line left me rolling my eyes at how hoary and Hallmark-y it was. The first line I would have cut from the film was that last one. I thought: I’ve spent more than three hours of my life to get to that? So much of the film is original and stunning and rather glorious in its execution until it gets to the last act and then it just sort of becomes the thing it is condemning. But I couldn’t stay pissed off when I realized that the line with which they chose to end it all was so unoriginal. Brady is certainly no hack but that line is hackneyed.

Anyway.

Here’s the video I promised to include in this column. I couldn’t figure out how to get it uploaded from my MacBook Air after transferring it from my iPhone. It just wouldn’t work. So I put it up at Youtube and then connected to that. It’s a bit rough - like Lyle’s voice on Saturday. And is itself maybe a bit hackneyed and snide for a cooking segment. I have to learn how to look at the camera and smile a bit more and stop all the grimacing.

They will get better.

Let’s get better together.

I’m tempted to end with the line that ends The Brutalist.

But I ain’t that brutal.

Onward.