March 19 is one of my favorite days of the whole year.  Not because it’s almost officially spring–although it totally almost hit 70 today!–but because it’s my second-favorite Italian food holiday.*

Saint Joseph’s Day honors the man who married the Virgin Mary even after she got pregnant without his help.  He sort of disappears from the Bible after Christ’s birth, so little is clear about the rest of his life, though everyone agrees that he was a carpenter.  Different religions disagree about whether he and Mary had other children, whether he already had kids from a previous marriage, or whether, as Catholics believe, he remained celibate even after he and Mary were married.

According to the occasionally reliable Wikipedia, Joseph is the patron saint of, among other things, workers, the New World, Vietnam, fathers, people buying houses, and the fight against Communism.  (The Feast of Saint Joseph the Worker, a celebration on May 1 each year, was adopted by the Vatican in 1955 as a response to May Day.)

St Joseph’s Day is also a day for Italians to celebrate, since the saint was believed to have cured a Sicilian famine in the fifteenth century.  Even though March 19 falls during Lent, which is a solemn time, it’s an occasion for Italians to celebrate by eating zeppole (or zeppoli or, as my family would have it, zeppoles.)  These are basically cream-filled donuts that are fried and then topped with more cream.  They are delicious, in other words, and probably also like 1500 calories each.

I actually think that more Italian-Americans should be excited about Saint Joseph’s Day, because it’s a good reason to wave flags around  and eat alot without celebrating the racist overtones of Columbus Day, that other Italian-American celebration.

I was on Federal Hill today, which is the Italian part of Providence, so I popped into a bakery to get myself a zeppole.  After waiting in a big line, I found out that they were sold out of the fried ones and only had baked ones.  (NB: Baked ones suck.)  I got one anyway, but I’m tempted to go out and buy a fried onesomewhere else, since most bakeries only have them once a year.

(*Easter is my favorite food holiday, because of asparagus omelets and ricotta pies;  it’s the only food holiday that’s inherently vegetarian friendly, at least the way my family does it .  And, as my seventh-grade ex-nun teacher pointed out to us, Easter is a bigger reason to celebrate than Christmas–everybody is born, but not everybody rises from the dead.)

I am half Italian and come from one of the most Italian-American cities in the entire country, so I’m always simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by stereotypes of Italian-American men as insatiably starch-loving Mama’s boys.  (I say this as a total starch-loving Mama’s boy, for what it’s worth.)  And part of me is always tempted to go to grad school just to make documentaries about Italian-Americans and talk about, like, my grandparents’ collection of Lou Monte records.

Anyway, I mention this because I just stumbled across this video of a guy talking about his mom while he jacks off and rubs spaghetti on himself.  PhD programs, can you hear me?!  I have at least 35,000 words to say about this, including detours to talk about Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Rocco Siffredi, Silvio Berlusconi and that one website where guys stick their dick through a pizza box.  I’m kind of not kidding.

(via Unzipped)

Three things:

1. Gay people are still up in arms that Tom Ford’s A Single Man is not being marketed exclusively to them.  It started last month, when Miramax released a slightly not-gay trailer and a poster showing Colin Firth and Julianne Moore (but not the far less famous person that plays Firth’s dead lover in the film.)

I don’t know, call me kooky, but I have no patience for people who complain about not being marketed to.  It’s not like Miramax is actively turning gay audiences away–it’s a Tom Ford-directed film based on a Christopher Isherwood novel, for God’s sake–so I don’t see what’s wrong with playing up the Julianne Moore character to lure in some non-gay audiences.

Regardless, I mainly want to see it because Julianne Moore’s hair looks AMAZING.  (Also, it would be nice to see her in something that took place in the same era as Far From Heaven but wasn’t as completely costume-y and ridiculous as Far From Heaven.)

2.  After seeing the underwhelming-to-me-and-no-one-else-in-the-world video for Bad Romance last month, porny blogger House of Vader rote a lengthy and kind of hilarious tirade about Lady GaGa and how she’s all style and no substance. I don’t actually agree with a lot of what he’s saying, but it’s worth reading anyway, especially for comments like this:

“P.s As critical as I am of L.G I will say just for the styling and acknowledge of the gays alone shes a lot better the that latin chick with the horrible voice who sings the wolf song and Rhianna, who is pretty but got nothin’ interesting going on, shes even more of a mannequin then Gaga, but at least Gaga has “flaws” that make her interesting to study. Rhianna to me just looks like a mannequin at Strawberry.”

The commenters all agreed with him, pretty much, including one who said that Lady GaGa looks like Matthew Barney snapped into a Slim Jim. (I don’t actually know what he means by that, but ha!)

3. I’m trying out TeuxDeux today.  Since basically abandoning paper, I’ve been looking for a way to make to-do lists that actually involves crossing off accomplishments (as opposed to just deleting them.)  Seeing three things on a list at the end of the day is much less satisfying than seeing three things on a list and four other things crossed off the list.  I’ll get back to you about how I like it.

My Firefox window of “stuff I keep meaning to post about” has 67 tabs open right now, some dating back to August.  So consider this a bonus news day/info purge:

GlobalComment’s sickening report on the Magdalene slaves is very distressing indeed.  Wayward (or not even so wayward) Irish girls were enslaved by the Catholic Church to work without pay in laundries as recently as 1994, and the Irish government refuses to apologize.  Last week Ireland’s Minister of Education issued a brief statement, referring to the girls who worked in the laundries as “employees.”  The “employees” are understandably upset.

Portland mayor Sam Adams is safe from a recall stemming from his alleged affair with an intern.  But now there’s maybe another recall, although probably not.  Let it go, people.  Let it go.  (I am glad to have learned the phrase “shit or shinola” from the article, though.)

Manhunt bought DList.  I think that’s probably good, ultimately, since Manhunt has way bigger ad sales and could probably keep the site running a little more smoothly.  On the other hand, it would be disappointing if DList became less art-faggy and especially if the music parts of the site were taken down; I’ve actually discovered a bunch of cool new bands by surfing pictures of hipster boys.  But if it just turns into a cruising site I’ll be kinda annoyed.

When I was at the New York Art Book Fair last week I had to restrain myself from going anywhere near the Goteblud table.  The San Francisco zine purveyor’s got tons of awesome vintage stuff, and I knew if I stopped there I wouldn’t look at anything else.  (Semi-relatedly, the guy working that booth was extremely good-looking.)

Here’s the full broadcast (in mp3 form) of Megan Andelloux and Donna Hughes (not together) on a conservative talk show.  If you haven’t been following, Andelloux’s been trying to open a sexual education/resource center in Rhode Island, and Hughes has been sticking her nose in to stop it.  She calls Andelloux a prostitute and then goes on a crazy rant about sadomasochism.  Somewhere around the 39:40 minute mark comes my favorite part, when Hughes pretty much out of the blue says that “a lot of our young people are dying from erotic asphyxiation.”

Speaking of that, here’s a very, very good take on Hughes from a Rhode Island nurse and anti-trafficking advocate.

I really hate Dlisted.  I also really hate Towleroad, who present links to Dlisted as serious news headlines.  (And yes, I know I’m doing that, too, but I also don’t position myself as a major gay media outlet.)

Caitlin Moran at the London Times on having Courtney Love and romance novelist Jilly Cooper as role models.

The Wooster Collective has a new interview series at GOOD Magazine.

Melissa Gira Grant on Madonna, her mom, and Medugorje.  (I’m mainly posting this because seeing the word Medugorje written out only just now made me realize that that’s what my Italian aunt was probably always talking about when she said “East Ciagordia.”  As in, “They didn’t like Cranston so they moved out to East Ciagordia.”  Or “There weren’t any parking spots near the door so we had to park in East Ciagordia.”  After twenty-eight years of trying I still haven’t completely figured out my aunts’ Italian Rhode Island slang.)

I should probably write a whole post about my thoughts on curation, rather than just dumping random links into these news posts.  But in the meantime, here’s Art Fag City’s take.

Someone commented on my new Facebook photo with a Joe Gage reference, and in a fit of boredom the other day I looked up his filmography; somehow I had no idea that the legendary 80′s gay porn director made Tulsa County Line in 2001; that’s one of my all-time favorite all-male adult features.

New Kristin Hersh! New Kristin Hersh!

In older news, one in thirty-three women has been the subject of sexual advances by a religious leader.

Oh, and gay/bi men are 50 times more likely to contract AIDS than any other group right now.  Don’t forget that.

[image: Robert Kelker-Kelly on NBC soap Another World (before he took over as Bo on Days of Our Lives.  This image amazes me.]

National Banned books week just kicked off.

Playboy’s Daily Advisor answers a question from a fool.  Or someone just trying to be funny?

Mpho keeps twittering about how good the new Ou Est Le Swimming Pool is, and I’m inclined to agree, though it’s time for people to move on from that pastel rainbow boxy hipster font.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor gets the Tumblr treatment.  I kind of miss 1998, when she would have gotten an Internet Shrine hosted by Angelfire featuring a brick background and lots of gifs of torches.

What do I have in common with Judy Garland, Charles Atlas, Mike Piazza, Natalie Merchant and Steven Tyler?  This.

A couple of years ago I suddenly became very, very allergic to pine nuts, which made me very, very sad.  This article makes me a little less sad.

The future of museums.

Whoever made this porny GIF is a genius.

I’ve never been to Canada, so I had no idea how awesome their old national parks logo (used until 2004) was.

Newspaper circulation is down, but traffic at the top 50 news websites is up 27%.  I have no idea why this surprises anyone.

The slow decline of the cookbook writer as food anthropologist.

[photo: Sophie E-B with Blur bassist/cheesemonger Alex James.]

Also, in the short that starts the movie off, you get to see Natalie Portman’s ass, which is nice–plumper than I would have guessed, which I like. (If only she’d been willing to show it in Closer… Not that Mike Nichols would have known what to do with it, since he didn’t even get hot slutty doctor Clive Owen’s shirt off until the last scene. The stupid man.)

Another thing about The Darjeeling Express is that the Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman are both kinda cute. Now, don’t get me wrong, I was totally ready to stab my eyes out if I saw another Brody/Erminothingy Zegna ad, and he still gets the award for most disturbingly ugly use of abs on a magazine cover ever. But the dark glasses make him look a little bit French and mysterious. I won’t incorporate him into any of my fantasies anytime soon, but it’s definitely worth noting that he’s not a complete troll.

(looking uncomfortable and not hunky in a magazine.)

Jason Schwartzman is definitely the cutest brother in the movie, though, with his Lee Hazlewood hair and moustache. Generally, when I think of the littlest Coppola, I tend to forget about movies he’s in that I actually like (I Heart Huckabees, or Marie Antoinette, say) and just remember how creepy and awful he was in Spun, the movie stupid Jonas Akerlund made where absolutely everybody was creepy and awful. I used to work in a bar that showed that movie pretty regularly, so I’ve seen it a lot with the sound off and hated every minute of it, every single time.

(no idea.)

But thinking about cute Jason Schwartzman in a movie co-written by his older, far uglier cousin Roman gives me flashbacks to a time when I was totally smitten with another member of that family. (And no, not Sofia, although she does look pretty good and not whoppingly homely in a gymnast outfit.)

Flash back, if you will, to 1994. I, humble pubescent cinemaphile, have just rented Red Rock West, the gloomy and generally awesome thriller where four people in the desert basically try to kill one another over and over for two hours or so. The exciting part comes fairly early in the movie, when Nicolas Cage and Lara Flynn Boyle are about to do it. She starts unzipping his pants. And what should pop out? A big whopping Italian-American boner!? On screen!? On the TV screen in my bedroom?!?! Oh my God!!!

(Red Rock West, the movie that started it all.)

Boy, was I a big excited thirteen-year old spooge fountain that night.

I was so excited that it wasn’t until I rented the movie again a few years later and realized that they don’t actually show Mr Cage’s pee-pee. I thought maybe I had watched an unrated version from before Blockbuster came to my town and started censoring everything, but I can’t find any evidence that multiple cuts of the movie exist, and no amount of googling “Nicolas Cage Penis Red Rock West Hot Sexy Naked OMG” is turning anything up. (Speaking of lame google search results, check this out.)

Regardless. It gave me a whopping Italian-American boner of my own every time I saw him after that, no matter what movie it was. So much so that I overlooked his weirdly unnatural triangle of chest hair in Valley Girl. (But come on–chest hair! In a teen comedy! Hot!) I was totally turned on by his evil tonguey sleazebag character in Face/Off. I thought he was hot in a wifebeater playing opposite Cher’s 1987 hairdo in Moonstruck. I even kind of thought he was hot in Wild At Heart, Raising Arizona, and It Could Happen To You, which are some of the least sexy movies ever made. Not to mention when he played the suicidal but hot drunk in Leaving Las Vegas.

(who knew?) 

It lasted years, although I’m over my crush now. He’s been in too many dumb movies for me to get over. Plus, you know, he’s really goofy and not actually very attractive. I haven’t seen (and frankly hope to never see) National Treasure, the Wicker Man remake, or World Trade Center. I do kind of want to see the Darren Aronofsky movie where he plays a pro wrestler (more on the WWF circa 1989 another Friday), but that won’t be out until 2009 so I have plenty of time to come to grips* with seeing him shirtless in spandex briefs. I wonder if it’ll be worth the wait…

*heh, heh.

(ps–Thanks, Cagefactor, for helping my Friday pass so quickly.