Here is where my thing with David Horowitz has been going. Someone forwarded him my letter to the editor where I compared him to a troll on the internet, ... Christine Peterson(?)
------------
I have a suggestion, one that titilates me a little like a drink of cold white wine after a mouth full of pesto a Genoese.
Call up Judith Butler and ask her if she might find it a delight to take Horowitz to the cleaners. Call it a community service to us geriatric Berkeley radicals. Maybe you could get the ASUC at Cal Performances to sponsor the event. I'd buy a ticket and break my walker to see it.
I suspect there are just enough psycho-sexual-gender daemons chasing around Horowitz's egomania attractions to power to make an evening with Dame Judith worth watching. I suggest JB because of her resuscitation of Hegel's Unhappy Consciousness and the master slave dialectic.
If I were staging this event, I would project the image of Giacometti's tableaux, The Palace at Four AM on a curtain back drop.
Toward a theory of pesto, for cookbooks of the future.
You have to make it by hand with a mortar and pestle. Soak the basil leaves in a little cold water first to wake them up and then shake them in a towel to dry. Chop the basil and garlic fine and begin mashing and grinding these first until the garlic pieces have disappeared and the basil has turned into a ugly, runny mess that looks like chewed grass. Now add the pine nuts and mash these until they disappear, adding a little olive oil to keep a consistent texture. Add the salt here. You should be able to smell the aroma heighten with the salt. When the paste has turned a little runny again, add grated parmigiano reggiano. The buttery flavor of this cheese is essential. When the paste has thickened again, and the cheese has disappeared, add the butter, until it vanishes. Thicken the paste again if necessary with more pine nuts, or thin it as necessary with more olive oil. To make it spoon well add a little of the hot cooking water from the beans and potatoes. I like the consistency to be like a soft whipped butter frosting.
Meanwhile cook the green beans and red skinned potatoes separate from the fettuccine. Drain the fettuccine first, then pour the water from the potatoes and green beans through the noodles in the colander. Toss them together in olive oil and dump them out on a flat plate. Spoon the pesto in a wide ring on top, and then fill the center with fine grated parmigiano reggiano like the top of a little mountain (think of Bocaccio). Lift the whole mixture up a little with a fork and arrange it so that the potatoes with their skins and green beans show through the noodles.
If everything is just right, like it was tonight, the colors look like a renaissance tapestry: faded red of the potato skins, earth green of the pesto and beans, cream colored noddles and cheese, with the amber colored wine. Take a drink of wine first to make your mouth water, then pick a noodle or a green bean or a potato slice with a glob of pesto on it, eat it, and just as the pesto has started to hit your mouth, drink a little very cold sauvignon blanc. The combination takes your head away.
When you finish, break off a piece of baguette and clean the plate, and the mortar and pestle off with the bread. I swear on Marxini's grave, this is heaven.
Chuck Grimes