Pasta Alla Puttanesca

Wild! I’ll tell you more below but the short version is that I found a photo of the motorcycle that my Dad bought from Andy Warhol in footage from a Factory party in “The Andy Warhol Diaries” Series on Netflix. (Dad on the bike on the left.)

I have very few photos of Mom and Dad from their time in New York in the mid to late 60s, but here they are looking adorable in New Jersey!

Mom and Dad take in the Statue of Liberty from the Queen Mary 2. Maybe 2017 or 2018?

A recreation of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s studio on Great Jones St. in the King Pleasure exhibition put on by his family. (Note: the Breakfast Club is being shown on the TV. Accurate!)

I got a preview of my friend Yuliya Lanina’s new amazing 6 projector animation installation at Xposed Gallery on the High Line. (It’s not officially up yet, Yuliya literally called the gallery and said “Sarah’s coming over can you turn it on?”. ha ha.)

Mom was always supportive of my creativity. :)

Well, I’m not sure she would be supportive of my doing a rude gesture on film, but here is the only photo of the Warhol “Chairman Mao” t-shirt that Mom bought me from our visit to the Corcoran Museum. (This was photo was from an all-nighter my freshman year at RISD. I have part of my sculpture project on my head. I was tired.)

“No photos, please.” My sister, Elisabeth, gets her “15 minutes of fame” in Upstate New York.

Mom playing with Legos. In theory we were helping our cousins Reed & Mariah build something but they were nowhere to be found in this photo! Charlottesville, VA 1995.

Mom in her creative happy place: her kitchen! 126 Mallette St. Chapel Hill. Maybe late 1980s?

I just spent the week in New York City. [Cue the Pace Picante commercial, “New York City?!”] I lived there after college for a few years in the mid-90s, realized it was not my jam, and decamped to Texas. It’s fun to go back to visit and see what has happened to my friends who have slogged it out all of these years. Guess what?! They all have amazing, glamorous jobs. I guess that’s the payoff for years of expensive apartments and exhausting commutes. I’m still glad I left but I love that I get to mooch off of the accomplishments of others! I first stayed with my step-sister, Jennifer, and her husband, David, who have a fantastic brownstone in Park Slope. Jennifer edits art books, often for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and David is an architect. One of his projects was the renovation of the Brooklyn Museum. Cool. I attended my friend Sinead Gleeson’s panel for her new book (with Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon) “This Woman’s Work” at the Irish Arts Center. I had the meal of a lifetime with my friend Deb (who is, interestingly, doing the sets for the Sex & the City reboot) at my friend Shea’s East Village Restaurant, Rosella, which is right around the corner from my old apartment on 11th Street. Man, has that neighborhood changed! After dinner I zoomed across town to catch a private preview of my friend Yuliya Lanina’s cool animation at Xposed Gallery on the High Line. I was treated to a lovely al fresco dinner by my friend and old roommate, Joey, who is a photographer for Bon Appetit. I was guaranteed some good eye candy and a clean bathroom in Chelsea when I stopped by my buddy Gaines’ gallery, Sears-Peyton. I was comped tickets to the Brooklyn Museum because my friend Bill is the design director for West Elm. And, I shared a front row table with Elisa Galindez’s husband for her cabaret show at 54 Below because my friend Amy was playing saxophone in her band.

It was a great week! I also saw some disgusting and sad things because, well, it was New York. One of the most pleasant excursions I had was to visit the Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition, King Pleasure, which was mounted by his family. I’m a Basquiat fan. My friend Gaines and I drove down to NYC from Providence during our senior year of college to check out his show at the Whitney Museum. Since he died at 27 and a lot of his work is in private collections there are only so many paintings one can easily see. Basquiat’s sisters pulled out some great ones from their collection for King Pleasure. I put the soundtrack of the Julian Schnabel film, Basquiat, on my headphones and took my time in the exhibit, marveling at their recreation of his studio on Great Jones Street (complete with TV playing The Breakfast Club!) and his collection of old cameras, African art, and ephemera. It was a VIBE. I then put on some Charlie Parker and caught the subway uptown to 54 Below for the cabaret show. Now, 54 Below is kind of exactly what it sounds like: it’s the basement of the infamous nightclub Studio 54! If those walls could talk ….. I’m not sure I want to hear what they have to say. ha ha. But, I probably do.

As a teen I was fascinated with Andy Warhol, one of Studio 54’s regulars. I remember Mom buying me a copy of a Warhol book from Nice Price Books in Chapel Hill. (She was always encouraging that way.) I read it cover to cover and then started plotting my move to New York. When I was touring colleges in 12th grade we made a stop at the Corcoran Museum in DC. They had a large Warhol portrait of Chairman Mao. It was the first time I’d seen one of the portraits in person. I was overwhelmed by how large and cool it was. I remember Mom saying to me, “I hate to break it to you but he didn’t paint it from scratch. That’s a silkscreen.”. Funny. That comment was the introduction to something I would later face head on as a photography major in college, the hierarchy of fine art. Painting was at the top, printmaking somewhere below, and photography at rock bottom.

Andy Warhol could, of course, care less about this hierarchy. He was my man. On Saturday night after a long day in Brooklyn I settled in to rewatch Schnabel’s Basquiat but Netflix had other plans. It was not in their catalog so they suggested The Andy Warhol Diaries instead. Sure, why not? It was good, I stuck with it. About three quarters of the way through the first episode I saw a glimpse of something familiar. Wait a minute! Pause, rewind. Was that our motorcycle? I’ve mentioned this in another blog post but I’ll tell the story again. Oddly, Dad bought a motorcycle from Andy Warhol when he was a graduate student at Columbia. He didn’t set out to do this on purpose, Dad just responded to an ad in the paper and the price was good so he went to the freaking FACTORY (!) to pick it up. Andy answered the door of the tinfoil-walled studio holding a can of spray paint. We knew that the motorcycle had been the subject of one of Warhol’s long, boring movies but we had never seen that footage. And, here the motorcycle was on Netflix SMACK DAB in the the middle of a party at the factory. Wild. The tragedy here is that the bike was stolen in my youth by a distressed teen who lived across the street. He used it to run away, having no idea of its provenance. Man, that’s a bummer.

I’m going to just keep bragging. This is a bragging post, sorry. If you don’t like it just keep on scrolling. Last week I stopped by the Museum of Modern Art to see the current Barbara Kruger exhibit. In yet another small world coincidence, my Uncle Frank used to date Barbara Kruger. It must have been when he did his medical residency in New York in the 70s. Frank said Barbara “had wild hair and was a good dancer”. I remember Mom telling me earlier that Frank had dated a female artist who did “something with words”. That Barbara did and still does! Big time. Who would have guessed that one of the quintessential feminist artists I would study would have had a thing with my uncle?! I mean he’s delightful and charming but he’s into motorcycles and stuff and is kind of a bro. Again, wild.

So, New York makes things happen. And I’m just going to keep dipping a toe into the city every now and again without paying rent. I spent a few nights at my friends Bill and Andrea’s lovely home in Boerum Hill. (When I’m there I always see the actor Ethan Hawke wandering around on the street which is becoming less and less thrilling with time.) Andrea is responsible for one of my all time favorite stories. When our kids were little we met up at a playground on a pier just down the street from my old loft on Chambers Street in Tribeca. One of our kids inevitably had to use the bathroom and it was a porta potty. Barf. This, of course, opened up the swapping of porta potty tales. Andrea won by miles. She had grown up in the midwest and once her family attended a polka festival where her sister FELL IN the porta potty. They had to pull her out and hose her down. Little 6 year old Luca (my daughter) heard this story, filed it away, and saved it. Years went by and one night my husband and I came home from a date and the babysitter said “Luca told me the craziest story. It’s so weird that I think it has to be true. Did someone you know fall in a porta potty at a polka festival?”. Yes, yes they did.

That anecdote has absolutely zero to do with Dale Reed but she would have laughed. Mom had a great sense of humor. And I’ll bet that’s the only opportunity I’ll have where it’s even remotely appropriate to tell that story in this blog, so I just did. Looking through Mom’s recipe files I was trying to find something kind of New York-ish to post. I’ve already shared several cheesecake recipes so I figured you can’t go wrong with Italian. Today’s offering? Pasta Alla Puttanesca!


PASTA ALLA PUTTANESCA

1 pound spaghetti
2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil for pasta (see step one)
2 cans peeled tomatoes.
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
4 teaspoons garlic, minced
1/8 teaspoon dried red pepper flakes, or more to taste
1 teaspoon oregano, dried
1/2 cup Nicoise olives
1/4 cup capers, drained
1 tin anchovies
To taste: sea salt
To taste: pepper
1/2 cup fresh basil, chopped, as garnish

Cook spaghetti until al dente in a large pot of boiling, salted water. Drain pasta, dress with a little oil, and reserve.

Meanwhile, drain tomatoes and cut them crosswise, squeezing out as much liquid as possible; reserve.

Heat olive oil in a skillet, sauté garlic and red pepper flakes quickly to release flavor. Quickly add tomatoes and reserved juice so pepper flakes and garlic don't burn. Bring to a boil.

Simmer sauce and add oregano, olives, capers, and anchovies, one ingredient at a time.

Reduce and continue simmering until desired consistency and flavor are reached. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Serve immediately over hot spaghetti. Garnish with basil.

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Sarah Reed