Club Zero & conscious eating

Misipasta, weekend picks, and how to eat in bed

Welcome to moviepudding, a newsletter on film and food.

i. Club Zero

ii. Eating in bed

iii. Misipasta in Williamsburg

In theaters this week…

• LE SAMOURAI has been restored in its dove-gray glory at Film Forum

• EARTH MAMA screens tonight at Metrograph.

• LA CHIMERA was among the best things I saw last year. Breaking out some rusty Italian, I interviewed Alice Rohrwacher for Filmmaker and talked about the falsehoods of patriarchy, color theory, and more.

• FREE TIME opens in L.A. More on this special movie next week.

• Earlier this month, I compiled suggestions on where to eat in Astoria here:

First Look Festival at the Museum of the Moving Image

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CLUB ZERO (dir. Jessica Hausner)

Mia Wasikowska excels in her performance as yet another cautiously mysterious freak, possessed of unnatural gifts and potential danger in Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s scrupulously opaque new film. An upscale academy hires Wasikowska’s Ms. Novak to teach a class on conscious eating, an ideological practice predicated on mindful consumption (with regards to our bodies, waste, the environment) which through her instruction degrades into a form of intermittent fasting and then straight-up starvation.

Most of the students are reacting against their own privileged home lives, and the film’s colors become increasingly queasy and desaturated as their calorie count decreases. (Hausner’s sister does the costuming, as bold here as in Little Joe.) One girl, upon refusing food, finds a fucked up kinship with her anorexic mother while a student-gymnast spites her mum who tells her to watch her weight. Meanwhile a ballet student with diabetes easily stops eating without much intervention from his parents, who are too immersed in their third-world country foundation to notice their child wasting away. That only a mother of a scholarship boy seems savvy, and alarmed, by what’s going on hints at class critique.

Prefaced with a trigger warning for eating disorder-related images and themes, the film ultimately does not offer any new insights or observations on body image. or on soft power manipulation by charismatic figures. And if it does they are wiped out by a rigorously detached tone of monotony. Hausner seems to challenging fad diets, dubious health trends, and even broader categories of dubious vinyasa-laced-colonics wellness practices that promise enlightenment. At the same time, it remains possible that Ms. Novak has tapped into something valid by withholding her money and attention from today’s never-ending push towards consumer consumption. In theaters.

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HOW TO EAT IN BED 

Conscious eating, similar to other mindful activities rooted in Buddhist principles, aims to infuse a touch of Zen to your mealtime experience. It involves immersing yourself in the present moment as you chomp away at your food, and what better place is there to slow down your to bask in the every millisecond of mastication and tastes than the comforts of your bed. 

As an aimless, not-yet-fully-formed youth, eating in bed was the default mode of living. Show me an underground, or a recent grad, with a full dinette set and I’ll wager they lead a life of privilege or pretentious restraint. Why spend time in a room allocated specifically for eating when you could be eating at the bar with your friends? When you switch apartments every year to avoid minor but acutely painful rent increases you learn to live lean and furious. Furniture is the first to go. If you’re fortunate enough to have roommates footing the interior design bill, that doesn’t mean you’re lucky enough to actually want to spend time with them, which having a decked-out common area inevitably necessitates. And so we retreat to our bedrooms, creating microcosm of apartment living within our small personal space.

Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, which I wrote about here.

These people are onto something. Eating in bed allows you to cocoon yourself from the outside world and it’s actually not as fraught an endeavor as you’d think. It requires that you pay considerable attention to the act of eating, which when done right should not result in a mess. It is the natural opposite of witlessly scarfing down your chow between distracted viewings of The Curse at the end of the workday. (No matter what the people at Alamo Drafthouse may have you think, eating and watching necessarily divides your attention.)  Here are some tips to get started.

• Use a tray. Ones that come with legs and fit nicely over the lower half of your body from Home Depot  but you’ll do fine with one that lays in your lap, like these colorful ones from Schoolhouse.

• Invest in linen napkins: This may seem counterintuitive, opting for cloth napkins will not only enhance your experience but allow you to channel the urge to wipe your chicken-grease stained hands onto your duvet cover somewhere else. Linens are heftier than the thickest Bounty no matter what the commercials say, and potentially cover more surface area, too. Failing all else, you can use a towel. The one sized for your face, not a bath sheet. My preferred linen homeware brand is Hawkins again on account of color variety. 

• Cook something for yourself: Slowly cooked meals warrant lingering over. A serving size bowl of pasta. You should not be scarfing down your food the way you do over the stove, effectively completing your dinner before it has even begun. Harried consumption is as bad for the mind as it is for your body. 

• …or don’t: Order in or take out. Buy yourself a bag of Flamin Hot Cheetos, to be had with chopsticks. Cut up Halloween’s Mars Bars on your fanciest plate, ala George Costanza. Anything that come in a containers is handy. Just assemble everything before getting under the covers. 

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Yes, that’s a table.

MISIPASTA

Williamsburg, open 11am-10pm daily

If you live in Williamsburg you could order a spread from Misipasta, the take-out pasta operation from Missy Robbins and co, whose enterprises I’m still conflicted about. On a rainy Thursday afternoon the place bustled with usual suspects: local North Williamsburg residents, monied vestiges of indie sleaze with permanent under-eye bags and damaged hair.

I sat at the teeniest table with an outrageous stool alongside shelves of tinned fish in a set up that I can only describe as Wes Andersonian. (see above). The host was cold, but service was very kind and helpful, especially when it came to ordering.

Here’s what I ate:

Everything is meant to be shared, and if you order 5 dishes for two people will put you straight to bed.

White asparagus with salmoriglio are considerately cut into spears and generously bathed in oil, lemon, and herbs augmented with bits of orange zest. It’s the sort of elegant lunch you could eat everyday.