You Mean, Coitus?

The problem, he said, is that child porn laws never contemplated "children sharing images of themselves," and youthful sexters have little concept of their actions as a crime. "You can literally see the shock on their faces," McCarthy said.

-Reported in WaPo

The business model of pimping is remarkably similar whether in Atlanta or Calcutta: take vulnerable, disposable girls whom nobody cares about, use a mix of “friendship,” humiliation, beatings, narcotics and threats to break the girls and induce 100 percent compliance, and then rent out their body parts.

-Nicholas Kristof

“Just because you’re wearing high-heeled sexy shoes doesn’t mean you should have a baby,” said Neil Cole.

I believe we can all rally around this sentiment.

Cole is the head of Iconix, a company that makes the Candie’s line of teen fashions. A couple of years ago, under fire from critics who accused him of dressing high schoolers like tarts, he established the Candie’s Foundation, which fights teen pregnancy. And there he was on Wednesday introducing the foundation’s new teen ambassador, Bristol Palin.

Palin is not in any way to be confused with the new Candie’s brand spokesperson, Britney Spears. Bristol is the one endorsing abstinence; Britney is the one promoting “hot bottoms.”

-Gail Collins

I ask because teenage sexuality is one of the leading causes of illegitimacy, which believe it or not is more pandemic than the swine flu and more damaging to the institutions of family and marriage than any same-gender commitment ceremony in California or Iowa.

-David Waters

America is certain of one thing and one thing only regarding adolescents: they do not own themselves; they do not possess independent moral agency; their sexuality is by definition victimhood, even when practiced volitionally; consensual sex and forced prostitution in the under-18 population are essentially inextricable.

The solution to so-called underage prostitution is to legalize prostitution, to allow people to exchange money for sex, and, if necessary, to subject that profession to the same child labor rules that we enforce in other professions at far lesser expense and to far greater effect, principally because as far as laws go, child labor laws are rational and enjoy such broad consensus that they effectively enforce themselves . . . unless I am unaware of some ongoing scourge in the newsies industry. The solution to "sexting," or more particularly to the problematic application of draconian pornography censorship to teenagers who send each other titty pics or parents who take cute pictures of babies' bums is to end entirely the prohibition on pornography, including so-called "child pornography," which criminalizes a product rather than the damaging acts that may go into its production. Kidnapping, rape, molestation, harassment, etc.--the statutory bases for prosecuting adults who actually abuse children to produce exploitative sexual video and photography exist, but by instead availing ourselves of our preposterous prohibition on a whole vast, subjective category of media images, thoughts, and expressions, we end up with the priggish absurdity of prosecutors threatening jail and lifelong repercussions to teens for sharing nudie shots.

It's also worth noting that although they're not usually aware of its illegality, the kids sharing these pictures do so precisely because our culture persists in making mere nudity thoroughly titillating. But the old aphorism is instructive: familiarity breeds contempt. Not that I wish to see us grow contemptuous of each others' naked bodies, but a society able to cure itself of the view that nakedness is inherently prurient is one in which exhibitionism escapes censure while declining in currency.

As for pregnancy, we live in a miraculous technological age in a fantastically wealthy society in which we are able to exert nearly full, conscious control of human reproduction, usually with the most minimally invasive measures, and despite the caviling of that commune of queasy fetishists tolerated with mild amusement by the real Romans (as are the feral cats in the Forum), the solution to "the crisis of illegitimacy" is simply to allow women not to get pregnant.

Vélo

As many of my readers are dirty biketivist hippitarians, I have constructed this little urban cycle tour of Pittsburgh, to entice younz all to our fair city. It hits a decent cross-section of city neighborhoods, although skips those where you can score good dope, the West End neighborhoods because who cares, and the North Side because Danger Will Robinson.

Beginning Downtown in the theater district at Seventh St. and Penn Ave., head East Northeast on Penn, cut left at 11th St. and right again on Smallman, which you will follow all the way through the warehouse-y back end of the Strip District, looking out for potholes, semis, and railroad tracks. At 32nd St. in Lower Lawrenceville you'll turn right, go a block, and then left onto Penn, following it up the hill to Main St., at the border of Lawrenceville and Bloomfield. Take a right on Main and then a left where Main hits Liberty Ave. Liberty runs all the way through the heart of Bloomfield. Watch out for drunks, motorcycles, and drunks on motorcycles. Liberty becomes S. Aiken Ave at Center Ave, and you'll stay on it, heading into Shadyside. At Walnut St. turn left and keep an eye out for suburbanites trying to parallel park Suburbans. Walnut runs through the Shadyside shopping district and a little cross-section of the Shadyside residential scene. At Shady Ave., turn right, and head uphill, crossing 5th Avenue, and keeping your eyes peeled for Pittsburgh's few Messicins, tending lawns of petite bourgeoisie estates.

At the top of the Shady Ave. hill, turn left onto Wilkins and head downhill. At the light at the bottom of the hill, bear left onto Dallas Ave. At the light, turn right onto Reynolds St., Pt. Breeze's and maybe Pittsburgh's prettiest residential street. Take Reynolds past the Frick Art and Historical Center and the entrance to Frick Park on your right, watching for unleashed dogs, then turn left on Lexington and head down to Penn Ave. At Penn turn right and proceed to the corner of Penn and Braddock Ave. This is a traffic-heavy stretch. Watchout! You'll follow Braddock until you come to the light at the intersection of Braddock and Forbes Ave, with the Frick Park Playground just in front of you. Turn right on Forbes, which is another busy and fast-moving road along its lower half.

Forbes cuts through Frick Park and then heads uphill to Squirrel Hill. You will go through one end of the Sq. Hill business district and then a bit of residential until the road dips downhill and curves right. Here you will instead bear left, watching oncoming traffic, and head into Schenley Park. An immediate left on Darlington Road followed by a quick right onto Circuit Road will send you down a fun, curving hill with a couple of nice switchbacks. It will dump you onto Schenley Drive. Hang a left and then follow it as it curves right, crosses Panther Hollow on a bridge, and brings you around behind the Carnegie Museums and Library. Follow the road around the Museum and hang a right where it dead-ends into Forbes, aiming for the left lanes, which are turning lanes. At the light turn left onto Bellefield, and then make a quick right onto Filmore. Filmore crosses the busy little commercial Craig St and sends you down a short steep hill to Boundary St, which runs through Panther Hollow. Watch for wild turkeys. For real. Follow the bike trail signs, as Boundary turns into a bike and walking trail that takes you under the Parkway and into the Cut. From there, follow the signs for the Eliza Furnace Trail (AKA the Jail Trail). Take the trail until you see the ramps, which take you up to the bike lane of the Hot Metal Bridge. Cross the bridge and you'll find yourself on the South Side. Hang a Right on Carson St. and follow Carson all the way through the busy South Side bar district, watching for drunks, homeless people, gutter/crust punks and their dogs, and suburbanites. At Station Square, turn right and cross the Smithfield Street Bridge, heading back into downtown.

Follow Smithfield St. all the way across town to Liberty. Make a left and then immediately right onto 9th Street. 9th takes you over the Allegheny River to the North Side. Hang a right and then bear right onto River Avenue, which runs all the way along the Allegheny River to 31st St. Turn right and cross the supremely goofy 31st St. Bridge. At the light, turn right onto Penn Avenue, and then follow Penn back through the main drag of the Strip District until you end up back Downtown.

23 miles and a fair portion of the city.

That Poor Slut

[O]bviously Israel’s nuclear program is not a direct security concern for the United States in the way Iran’s is.

-Yglesias

Man, they're gonna kill that poor woman!

Iran's nuclear program isn't even an indirect "security concern" for the United States. It's a non-concern. At best, it doesn't exist, and is a public relations fantasy perpetuated by Western governments (in contravention of their own intelligence services, notably) in order to maintain a pretext for isolating, or attempting to isolate, the Iranian state, a holdover Cold War policy about as useful, practical, and sane as the continued American policy of isolating Cuba. (Nevermind "Iran is a state sponsor of terror" and so on. The genesis of our Iranian policy was the Islamic Revolution--the bastards had the temerity to kick out our selected kleptocrat!) At worst, it's an attempt to create a deterrent--hell, even the appearance of a deterrent--to keep the truly insane regional players, i.e. Israel and the United States, from doing something crazy.

And let's digress for a moment. The increasingly bellicose rhetoric coming from the Israeli government toward Iran is not the result of some fear that Iran is going to "wipe Israel off the map," as the endlessly repeated and thoroughly mistranslated phrase goes. (Really, do Iranian presidents speak in late 20th century American war-nerd idiom? Uh, no, emphatically not.) Israeli hysterics are the result of their perception that the window of opportunity is closing. An Iran in possession of a nuclear weapon does not threaten Isreal's existence. It does however threaten the Israelis' ability to, for instance, launch unilateral air strikes, should it ever come to that. Such talk should be familiar to Americans, whose own government defines as intolerable any other nation taking steps that abrogate America's capacity to do whatever the fuck it wants inside any other country in the world.

Anyway, returning to the good Mr. Yglesias, I have been unfair in excerpting an especially tendentious line out of a more reasonable post, but I think it serves to highlight the fact that even most domestic skeptics on the universal goodness of Israel and universal badness of Iran accept nonetheless that Iran is somehow uniquely dangerous (how it is dangerous is never, ever specified), unlike, say, our ad hoc allies India and Pakistan, whom we must simply try "to bring . . . over time into the NPT framework."

Der Ring des Niggerbum

Do you know the story of Frank Ricci? Born with a club foot to a gypsy apothecary and an aquatic Manimal, he was struck deaf and dumb at the tender age of twenty-three by a case of virulent retardation, but by studying hard and joining some union or something, he became a firefighter, standing 20 hand at the shoulder. Then a black negro snuck into his lonely widow's walk and stole his precious, magical ring, transforming into a great dragon and destroying the village. Oh no, there were no firefighters! Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor had imprisoned all the white people, leaving only shiftless blacks, lazy Mexicans, and the Japanese, who consider it shameful to fight fires. So, so shameful. To their ancestors.

Shrinkage

Huge, vital, national. Jesus Christ, just stick it in already. Why is it no matter what Peggy Noonan writes, it sounds like she's talking about cock?

Good Books

I had never read a Nicholson Baker novel, but I enjoyed Human Smoke, his pacifist history of the Second World War immensely, although admittedly some of my enjoyment was derived less from the book soi-même than from the absolutely histrionic denunciations it produced in critics across the political spectrum, who climbed on top of each other to blazon their universal conviction that WWII was the single most edifying event in the history of the human species. Frankly, Baker's novels, what I knew of them, seemed like they would be cloyingly obsessed with minutiae, but I have been reading The Mezzanine, his first novel, and have found it to be absolutely compelling, a trove of finely turned sentences, one of those great, rare workplace novels in which the offices where we spend so much of our time are atomized and examined as societies in their own right. I read half of it on the bus in one morning, finished it in the evening. It is, additionally, one of the finest portrayals of filial and paternal affection that I've yet come across, and this is no small feat. Tolstoy's observation about happy and sad families overstates it, but it's true that affections of the unromantic kind are more selfsame and harder to render distinctly in writing than unhappiness, disunion, disarray, and hatred. There is a long footnote digression in The Mezzanine where the narrator begins by recalling the doorknobs of his childhood home and his father's habit of hanging his ties on the knobs all over the house. He remembers his father's excellent taste in ties. It leads him to remember a recent dinner with his father and a few relatives where dad compliments him on a newly purchased tie, one of the first that he's ever bought for himself, and from these few quotidian memories, Baker builds a family's world, a father finding a way to express love and pride in his son, and a son, now a young man, feeling genuine joy on hearing it.

The Contract

As I said some very mean and intemperate things about a Chris Nolan flick staring the Baleful Christian and praised Huge Ackman for screaming NOOOOO! as the camera zooms out skyward, I want to take a moment to praise a different movie involving all three of them, and that movie is The Prestige, based on Christopher Priest's excellent novel of the same name. Starring Bale and Jackman as two feuding fin-de-siècle British stage magicians, featuring a wonderful turn by Michael Caine, a less wonderful turn by Scarlett Johansson, and most delightfully, bringing on David Bowie to do a perfectly pitched Nicola Tesla (really, really an inspired bit of casting), whose appearance in today's news reminded me of this movie, it had the misfortune to come out at almost the same time as that flaccid period piece, The Illusionist, which stared Edward Norton and Jessica Biel's various limpid gazes.

The novel's plot and narrative mechanisms are complex and convoluted, impossible to relate without spoiling, and the liberties Nolan took in bringing it to screen, if anything, improve on the neo-Gothic atmosphere and, better yet, render the reveal (the prestige) more compellingly than does the novel, which struggles to find a vocabulary for the wonders it ends up describing. The opening scene of the film returns hauntingly later on, and as in the book, a movie that begins as a investigation of the technology of magic neatly inverts itself before its close.

Kinch

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake and bake.

Slaughterhouse Five

I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British, during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, "we don't torture," when the -- the entire British -- all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. And -- and -- and the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts, and over time, that corrodes what's -- what's best in a people.

-Barack Obama

We don't torture.

-George W. Bush

We can perhaps forgive President Obama for ignoring The London Cage. Probably just a few bad apples anyway. (Churchill was, on the other hand, infamously bloodthirsty when it came to "primitive tribes" and other subjects of the empire. Gas the Kurds, torture the Kikuyu, and so on.) Look, the Allies firebombed Dresden; America nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pace John Stewart. We would be wise to establish a rule that appealing to the leaders of chief belligerents in a vast global war will not result in clear moral direction. The question of who did or did not commit atrocities during the Second World War rather hops over the fact that The Second World War was an atrocity that superseded any of its component parts. There is a point at which this contest to name the greatest restraint in the face of the mostest evil skips directly to farce. During WWII, a bunch of terrible, brutal, vastly powerful men made terrible, brutal, and largely exigent decisions as they hurled millions of men and billions of tons of matériel at each other. Yes, the Nazis were very bad, but so was Stalin, and so was Chiang Kai-Shek. How do you even craft a moral equation? Were 6 million European Jews worth 20 million Soviets? It is a conflagration totally devoid of moral lessons or principles--just horror, pure horror, and destruction. Hauling out our bloody ancestors as paragons against which we measure our own perversions is a losing proposition, whether we grapple with it truthfully or, like Obama, deploy it dishonestly in the service of prevarication.

Blawg Role, Encoure

Agitprop: Under New Management.

Existence Is Futile

Professor confuses Comtian Positivism with the scientific method. Hilarity ensues. One of the standard claims of religious apologists is that "science," whatever they may mean by that, cannot answer "the big questions": Why Are We Here? What Is Our Purpose? What Is the Meaning of Life? And one of the standard ripostes of the non-overlapping magisteria crowd is to say, Well, science, whatever they may mean by that, doesn't propose to answer those questions. This, I think, is cheap--just a cop-out. It accepts the premise that the answers to these self-indulgent questions must derive from some ontological metaphysics. Meanwhile, science does provide a foundation for answering this sort of question. We are here to transmit genes. We are machines for the propagation of genetic material. Life is devoid of intrinsic meaning; it is simply a category defined by the possession of genetic material, the ability to reproduce, and so on.

Lack of intrinsic, self-contained, self-referencing, universal, irreducible "meaning" tantamount to natural law does not mean that we can't approach the questions of life's worth and meaning within the social context, that we ought not approach questions of equity, justice, happiness, ethics, etc. in the realm of human society, however it may be constituted. But of course thinking about our rights as individuals and duties to our fellow man without appealing to the universal schoolmarm, schoolmarm without end, is a terrifying prospect, implying as it does that values may evolve, that meanings are contingent, that thinking may very well have to occur.

WORD FM

Islam is just as absurd as any other goatherd's religion, but I listened with some befuddlement to Steve Inskeep chuckling with Neil MacFarquhar over such odd muzzilimn accommodations to modernity as, for instance, call-in religious lines of which Middle-Easterners avail themselves in seeking instructions on matters pertaining to their faiths. Har har. Also, how can they know what's right or not, without a "central authority, like the Pope"? National Public Radio: forgetting Martin Luther for 40 years now. Dudes've never heard a Christian call-in show? Fer real?

Planning Stages

Remarkably, the Pittsburgh Port Authority Transit Overhaul does not appear to have been authored by Anthony Burgess. In fact, it makes some sense. Ah, but caveat lector: it makes sense on paper.

Dear John

Oh, Obama, niiiiice. Hey, maybe we could organize a letter-writing campaign.

Good Humor

The reviews are in and Wolverine (or, as it is more clunkingly, officially called: X-Men Origins: Wolverine) is judged to be a failure. But by what rubric? Here we might consider last summer's two supremely silly yet (or therefore?) roundly praised comic flicks, Iron Man and Batman: Something or other, as well as this past winter's overlong turd, Watchmen.

Batman fares worse on second viewing. What seemed at the midnight show to be an overedited, cryptofascist male gadget fantasy, a Hammacher-Schlemerer catalogue through which the late Heath Ledger occasionally sashayed like a minor inmate from a college production of Marat/Sade, cast only because the queer director liked his . . . diction, transforms upon review into one of the most supremely turgid eighteen hours in the history of cinema, as if Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s Our Hitler had been reimagined by an adolescent A/V club of Rand enthusiasts and revenge fantasists, two sets that admittedly overlap to a greater, not lesser, degree. It is relentlessly loud and even more relentlessly preposterous for the apparent seriousness of its ambitions. Am I the only one who believes that literary ambition killed the comics? The substitution of pop Freudology for character destroys what makes, or made, comics fun. It is actually possible to construct what are now universally known as "dark" characters without drowning them in a Mariana Trench of Oedipal fuckwhat and shitnot. A real "re-imagining"--another ridiculous neologism--of the character, who after all originated as a detective, would properly look to noir, Hammett, Spillane, Bogart.

If Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight managed anything approaching genuine interest, it was that it maintained an atmosphere of dour portentousness for thirty-nine straight hours without actually portending anything. What was the Gee-Dubyan expression? All sizzle, no steak? It was a fajita pan full of crackling oil but no meat or peppers. Presumably there was some philosophical tension between Control and Chaos, but you can watch the marvelous Stockard Channing expostulate unconvincingly on the same subject in the film version of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation, in which Will Smith plays a genius transformed into a play-actor far more convincingly than baleful Christian in either of Nolan's pulp oeuvres.

The action sequences in The Dark Knight are darker than a bad Italian restaurant, and so I spent the entire movie feeling as if I were trying to read a menu. In any case the fighting was edited by a humming bird. The nec plus ultra of night fighting in films may still be Lee's Crouching Tiger, which made balletic virtue of bodies even at their most absurdly antigravitational and also made a quality of silence, which is more than you can say for the crash-banging of the Dark Knight himself, who is as balletic as a charging hippo . . . and as loud. Poor Morgan Freeman occasionally wandered through the movie, looking slightly befuddled. I assume he was hired to lend gravitas, as he is black, old, and therefore wise. When finally it all ended, after twenty false endings and ninety straight hours at 400 dB, I felt as if I had been beaten, and not in a good way.

And yet . . . this movie was held up as the New Seriousness in comix, while its kinetic and brightly colored summer counterpart, Iron Man, in which Robert Downey Jr. dons a gaudy metallic costume and does battle with Hollywood's two favorite types of evildoers, Muslims and bald guys, was supposedly only the skillfully executed counterpart, the delicious meringue and ice cream to follow Batman's bloody steak. But this movie was the far more enjoyable, and certainly the better, of the two, if only because someone remembered to pay the electric bill. The praise lavished on Downey's performance was thoroughly overdone--playing insouciance isn't exactly a stretch for him. Jeff Bridges was bald . . . and he smoked! Ruh-roh! Gwentyth Paltrow's cheekbones made several interesting cameos. I wished it had eschewed entirely its hopelessly confused attitude about Military Good/Military Bad, Muslims Bad/Muslims Good. Oh for chrissake, who cares? Blow something up! Do it again!

Then Watchmen, based on Alan Moore's dour tales of fetishism, was adapted for the screen. It took one look at The Dark Knight's five-day festival and raised it a whole summer stock season. It dealt with precisely the same, uh, themes, but even more incoherently and with even worse lighting, if such is possible. It was meant to explode the superhero genre, but instead merely exploded. Even more than Batman, it slavered all over the inherent fascism of herodom, and concluded that look over there, a flying thing, cool! Which would have been fine at mile marker 5 or 10, but at 1500? No thanks.

Wolverine, a pastiche of all these things, is even more thoroughly birdbrained which makes you wonder: why do they hate it so much? I suspect residual embarrassment over enjoying something so completely adolescent. Personally, I enjoyed it. It quickly dispatches its psychology, rolls uninterruptedly from genre cliche through fireball, and, at a mere 107 minutes, clocked in at 20 less than even Iron Man. It seemed to me to be exactly what a Marvel comic ought to be, a skein of unintelligible nonsense with amazing pecs. Oh, Hugh!

Foodie Friday - More Risotto

Here is a risotto recipe for a cool spring evening that looks forward to the bright flavors of summer but recalls the savory taste of winter dishes. For added depth, I crib from the Vietnamese, adding cinnamon and star anise to my broth--the Venetians long controlled the spice trade in Europe, so it seems mostly appropriate. For the greens, I use baby mustard green ("mustard tips") available at most Asian food markets, for their special pungency and aroma, but any similar leafy cabbage--Kale, collards, etc.--will do in a pinch. Instead of folding the cooked greens into the risotto, I serve this dish with the rice as a bed and the greens prominently on top, melting a bit of fruity Trugole, a cow's milk cheese from nearby Asiago, on top to finish,

Lemon Risotto with bitter greens

For the stock

1 yellow onion, quartered
5-6 chicken feet
a 3" cinnamon stick
several whole star anise pods
1 carrot, washed, unpeeled, roughly chopped
water
salt

For the risotto

2 cups arborio rice
3-4 medium shallots, finely diced
3-4 cloves garlic, smashed and finely diced
several cardamom pods, husk discarded, seeds ground
1 stalk lemon grass cut into several 3" segments
1 cup dry white wine
juice of 1 lemon
1 cup Pecorino Romano (or other aged, very salty cheese), grated
stock--see above
fine sea salt
cracked black pepper
extra virgin olive oil

For the greens

1 lb young mustard greens (or substite--see above), choppped crosswise into 1-2" sections, including stems
1 sweet onion, halved and cut into thin slivers
1 tablespoon fennel seeds
1 teaspoon raw sugar
water
fine sea salt
extra virgin olive oil

For the garnish

Paper-thin slices of Trugole cheese (I use a vegetable peeler--works wonders)
zest of one lemon, blanched for 20 seconds, dunked in icy water, strained out with a fine sieve, and laid out to dry on a paper towel

To make the stock, combine all of the ingredients in a smallish (3 qt or so) stock pot, filling wholly with water. Bring to a boil. Skim any scum that rises to the top. Reduce to a simmer and simmer covered for 3 hours. Easily done in advance. Keeps in the fridge for 4-5 days. Just remember to reheat slowly over a low flame before using in the risotto.

To make the risotto, heat a generous pour of oil in the bottom of a heavy pot, such as a good dutch oven, over a medium high flame. Add the shallots and garlic, salting lightly. When softened, add the rice, cardamom, and lemon grass, scalding for a minute or two in the hot oil. Deglaze with the wine and lemon juice, then begin slowly adding the stock with a ladle, reducing the heat to medium low. When cooking risotto, concern yourself less with stirring constantly than with the level of the liquid, which should be maintained constantly so that all the other ingredients are wholly but just barely submerged. It is good to give it a brisk stir for thirty seconds or so following each addition of liquid, but no more stirring is called for.

Meanwhile, bring a pot of water to a brisk boil. Blanche the chopped greens in boiling water for no more than a minute, then immediately drain and transfer to a bath of ice water. This process softens them slightly, and also releases chemicals which mute the greenness of the chlorophyll, ensuring a more colorful presentation later on. Pat dry with paper towels

When the rice is soft and creamy to taste, add the cheese and stir in thoroughly. Salt and pepper to taste. It should still be a bit wet at this point. Remove from heat, cover, and let stand while you prepare the greens. This will allow the remnant liquid to be absorbed and the flavors to further mingle.

To cook the greens, heat olive oil in a heavy sauté pan. Add the onion and toss until it begins to soften. Add the fennel seed and toss for a moment. Begin adding the greens in batches, salting lightly with each handful, adding more when the previous batch has started to visibly wilt. Toss often, but not constantly. When all the greens are in the pot, add the sugar, stir thoroughly, and cook for a few more minutes until the greens appear to be evenly cooked.

To serve, spoon the risotto into a shallow bowl. Use a slotted spoon to transfer a serving of greens into a neat pile on top while still very hot. Lay several thin slivers of the Trugole cheese on top and let melt slightly. Garnish with lemon zest. Serve immediately.