PicoBlog

By Andrew Vitelli Growing up in New York – and as a vegetarian since age 12 – pizza was more than just a staple in my diet. In high school and in the years following college, I typically had pizza several times a week, sometimes more than once a day. But I never made much of an effort to seek out the best pizza; usually, lunch was a couple slices at Pizza Grill or Slices in Hastings-on-Hudson, or The Brick Oven Pizza in Dobbs Ferry.

Welcome to The Late Plate, where I share with you the recipes I am cooking at home in my warehouse. I live communally with six other people, which means we each pay £25 a week and collectively that pays for all of our weekly food costs. One person cooks dinner each night of the week for everyone else, so that every night of the week there is a delicious dinner that will feed us all.

Before Goodfellas, before Casino, Raging Bull or My Cousin Vinny, Joe Pesci was, for me, the iconic, gold-toothed, villain from Home Alone. The “smart” half of the Wet Bandit duo, Harry and his buddy Marv (Daniel Stern) embark on a burgling spree in a well-heeled Chicago suburb while all the residents are away for the holidays. The spree, however, comes to a dramatic halt when they discover not all the houses are empty.

Pizza was born in Naples as a humble food that everyone could afford, but it has been elevated to an art form. Italy’s next gen pizzaioli are obsessive about sourcing the best ingredients, often using Slow Food principals. They study how to make their dough light and digestible. They change their menus according to the seasons. And they think outside the box when it comes to toppings, creating unique flavor combinations often inspired by traditional recipes.

On Oct. 25, 1982, at 9:30 p.m. EDT, 40 years ago tonight, the sitcom “Newhart” debuted on CBS. And for eight increasingly wacky seasons, we enjoyed the button-down-minded Dick Loudon (Bob Newhart) cope with the shenanigans all around him at the Vermont country inn he owned with his wife, Joanna, played by Mary Frann. Needless to say, “Newhart” was my introduction, as it were, to Vermont, even if the bucolic opening-credit vistas that roll before us as Henry Mancini’s theme music plays are said to be from New Hampshire, left over from the film “On Golden Pond,” released the prior year.

Gentle reader, This video was shot some weeks back at William S. Hart Park in old Newhall, in the shadow of the beautiful Monterey Style mansion that the motion picture star built to hold his treasured collections of paintings, books, Western and Native American artifacts and relics of a long career. When Hart died in 1946, he left his property to be enjoyed by the citizens of his adopted home. A house in town, tucked below the Sunset Strip, is now a West Hollywood dog park and acting studio.

I am beginning a new stage of a project I've been working on for actual decades. It is a comic strip or web comic that may become a graphic novel. Maybe… The Maybe is important. The art and soul of this project in the present is to allow it to find its form. I am not waiting for this to happen before I share it, because I'm pretty sure that the best and quickest way for it to find its form is for me to share it as I go along.

Howdy, folks. My apologies for having had to absent myself for a few weeks while I finished a couple of client projects and began ghostwriting a book, which is what, by Labor Day, will be my answer to, “What did you do this summer?” Posts may be more sporadic in the coming weeks as I work on this new project, but they also may not be as I know me and likely will welcome finding the time and space to write about something different.

This is the only in-depth story about the short-lived band Deconstruction. Somehow it took 27 years for someone to write it. I didn’t expect it would be me. Jane’s Addiction bassist Eric Avery and guitarist Dave Navarro formed Deconstruction in late-1992, not long after Jane’s broke up, and they released only one album, Deconstruction, right after they broke up, too. For many of us ’90s kids, Jane’s Addiction was our Velvet Underground.