It is 72 and sunny and I am about to walk over to Federal Hill to stuff my face with zeppoli (or zeppoles, as people in my family would say.) With no disrespect to Purim, St. Joseph’s Day is my favorite dessert-based holiday. I’ve long believed that Italian-Americans should leave Mr. Columbus alone and adopt this day as their ethnic pride celebration, especially because March could use a major ethnic holiday that doesn’t totally suck (ahem) so I will be celebrating by listening to some of my favorite Italian pop songs, like Gigliola Cinquetti’s “Non ho l’eta,” a 1964 Eurovision winner and also the song that I think Angelo Badalamenti based his entire career around.

After the jump, two more favorites that you’ll probably recognize but which you might not know were recorded in Italian first:

No, I don’t know what’s happening here, either.

Dusty’s English version is better, of course, but Pino Donaggio’s “Io che non vivo” was the first to use the dramatic melody that would later become “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me.”

Boobies!!

I had no idea that this fantastic TWiiNS song was a cover until a few minutes ago, when a Facebook comment led me to the nipply original. Also, I just learned that the goofy Pitbull wannabe on the track is actually the same guy who did the awful rappy bit on Cascada’s not-terrible “Evacuate the Dancefloor.”

The original “Boys Boys Boys” was entitled “Boys (Summertime Love)” and was performed by Sabrina Salerno, who was nineteen when it was released. The song spent five weeks atop the French pop charts and two months at the summit of the Italian hit parade in the summer of 1987.

This Thursday I’ll be spinning some tunes at The Salon on Eddy Street in Providence.  Specifically some very European (and Eurovision-esque) tunes.  The fun starts at 9pm and it’s free.  Come!

After the jump, six songs I may or may not play:

London Boys, “London Nights” (1988)

Katri Helena, “Polkkis” (1966)

Marracash ft. Giusy Ferreri, “Rivincita” (2010)

Dover, “Let Me Out” (2006)

Dusty Springfield, “Auf dich nur wart’ ich immerzu” (1964)

Tarkan, “Simarik” (1997)

I apparently have 84 tabs open in Firefox right now, and less than 1 gig of space left on my hard drive. Here’s some links, so I can maybe clear some of this up:

Oregon State University uninvited feminist pornographer/university lecturer Tristan Taormino from speaking at their Modern Sex event. Taormino cried censorship, but the university says the blame lies on student organizers who requested the wrong type of funds. I have mixed feelings about this, I guess, but this Examiner article (!) seems pretty thoroughly researched.

Peggy Scott-Adams “Bill,” a mid-nineties bluesy R&B song about a lady whose man is busy doing it with his baby’s god-uncle, re-entered my memory the other day.  It terrified me as a teenager, though now it’s kind of hilarious.

Bobby Farrell, the male face of cheeseball music group Boney M, passed away on December 30th, though I didn’t see anything about it until the other day.  The group, best known in the US for their Christmas staple “Mary’s Boychild,” had four members officially, though only Liz Mitchell actually sang on their most popular recordings; male parts were done not by Farrell, but by producer Frank Farian.  Farrell did, however, move on to a later solo career.  Here is his first single, 1981′s Grace Jones-ish “Polizei.”

“It had cost her lots of hundreds of dollars, as did everything she owned.”

My boyfriend bought a Volvo this week, and so in celebration we have been listening to a lot of ABBA.  Molly Lambert has also been listening to a lot of ABBA, it seems.

This NBC-Comcast merger is some crazy ish, huh?!

I’ve been kind of geeking out over the Open Air Library in Magdeberg, Germany.  It’s up for a Brit Insurance Design Of The Year Award.

Finally, speaking of libraries, some British folks were upset about the potential closing of a local library and they responded by checking out every single book.

[image: Italian model Sasha Marini by Monica Antonelli for denim label Q-ZEE; it's from last summer, though I've been, uh, looking at a lot of photos of Marini lately.]

[Note: I meant to post this yesterday, All Saints Day, but was busy working.  Today is All Souls Day, though, so it's maybe still relevant.]

When I was in sixth grade, I begged and pleaded with my parents for them to send me to Catholic school.  I was terrified–absolutely terrified–of the prospect of junior high, partly because I was terrified of everything and partly because my junior high in particular often made headlines on the local news for being a cruel and violent place.

I applied to a schmancy private school–a high school that was only allowing seventh- and eighth-graders in for the first time–but I got wait-listed and instead went to the local parish school, the K-8 school that prolonged elementary education for two extra years and which, in the end, I would flee after six months.  (Had I gone to the schmancy school, though, I would have met the young Rocco Baldelli.  Which is not exciting to me, because I don’t know anything about baseball, but he is my age and went to that school  Just so you know.)

Each year, the school I went to chose one Saint that was going to be the Official Saint Of The School For One Year, and the year I went it was Saint Maria Goretti.  Every class was required to learn all about Saint Maria Goretti and how they could try to be more like her.  The kindergarters learned how Maria Goretti was a Young Person Who Really Liked Jesus And Went To Church No Matter What, Even When It Was Hard.  As seventh graders, my class learned that Saint Maria Goretti was a Young Person Who Refused To Be Raped Because She Loved Jesus Too Much.

I always thought Maria Goretti was a teenager when she died, but she was only eleven, the youngest person to ever be canonized.
Maria was the third of six children, daughter of poor itinerant farmers; her father died of malaria when she was just nine.  At the time, her family lived in a house with another family, the Serenellis.  Maria was assaulted by twenty-year old farmhand Alessandro Serenelli, and when she refused repeatedly to have sex with him for religious reasons he stabbed her fourteen times with a dagger (or possibly an awl.)  Maria somehow managed to live one more day, long enough to forgive Serenelli for his actions.  She died in the summer of 1902.

Serenelli was quickly sent to prison, where he remained for twenty-seven years.  While there, he had a dream that Maria gave him flowers, and his life was changed.  He began praying to her, which to me is intensely creepy, but I suppose that’s the nature of sainthood.  Upon release, he went to her mother to beg forgiveness; in 1950, they attended her canonization ceremony together, along with thousands of other people, many of them children.

Maria Goretti was not sainted not because she fought off her rapist, dying a virgin–although Serenelli’s prison stories, unreliable as they may be, suggest otherwise.  No, she was given sainthood because she forgave her rapist, at the age of eleven, while dying of multiple stab wounds.

Maria Goretti’s story is a complicated and fascinating one; part of what I like about it, from a fictive/literary standpoint, is that it’s open to a wide variety of interpretations, depending on how much information you have.  On the other hand, Maria Goretti was a real eleven-year old who was murdered for not sleeping with a man nine years her senior, and today she is celebrated for the fact that she forgave him.  The lessons we learned in seventh grade–go to church, try not to get raped, be nice–are all well and good, but as an adult it seems like the underlying lesson–don’t blame your attacker if you’re fatally assaulted–is maybe not such a good one.

Maria Goretti is the patron saint of young people and rape victims.  Her feast day is July 6.

Banana Republic’s herringbone pants are available in big and tall.

Lynsey G from McSweeney’s on the meaning of the money shot.  I like her column because she’s so completely ambivalent about everything.  But also right.

China will hopefully put an end to “shame parades,” in which suspected prostitutes are shackled together and then forced to walk around in public.

Reality condoms.  I don’t know anything about these from a health or pleasure standpoint, but maybe they’re a good thing?

Dragons having sex with cars.

The Reykjavik Grapevine interviews Bjork about Iceland’s economy, working with Antony, and how Paris Hilton basically saved serious pop music.  Definitely worth reading.

Racism, Shirley Sherrod and the Obama White House.  I’m not one to post political stuff, normally, but Sherrod’s forced resignation is one of the most fascinating (and also stupid) things I’ve heard of in a long, long time.

Is Italy too Italian? (And are those Italian clothes actually Italian at all?)

Finally, I spent a good chunk of this week reading some (extremely long) reviews of early-nineties RL Stine novels, written in 2010 by an adult.  This, because I was trying desperately to remember the name of the author who wrote the deranged killer story that I read when I was maybe ten, that took place in a Rhode Island ice cream place.  (It was Ellen Emerson White.)

Have you heard about the woman who fell off her Wii fitness thing and now needs to have sex ten times a day?  The only thing that’s not explained is how people reached that diagnosis.

Oh look, it’s Thom Yorke with his shirt off.  1997 me just got a boner.

“Let’s hear it for literary masturbation,” says the Guardian.

5 Myths about the sex scandal in the Catholic Church.  #3 is probably the most troubling.  It’s also see this story reported as only beginning in 2002 when the Boston area–and by extension Rhode Island, the most Catholic state–has been hearing stories like this for years and years prior to that.

The Decibel Tolls on music blogging.  (I agree with all of this.  Which is why when I post new, new stuff (like yesterday) I try to go out of my way not to have any strong feelings about its value.  That’s also why you don’t hear very much brand-new music here, and if you do it’s more often than not something I found myself and not something I got a press release about or read about anywhere else.

I Love You Philip Morris, the gay Jim Carrey/Ewan McGregor movie: still not about to come out anytime soon in the US, even though the entire rest of the world has seen it come and go already.

Men’s magazines on the way out?

The New York Times wasn’t that into the new biography of Muriel Spark, but it kind of made me want to read the book, anyway.  (Muriel Spark is my favorite novelist, if you didn’t know.)

I don’t actually understand what this fashion photo book is at all but maybe it sounds cool?

Finally, this video introducing the new $100 bill is really, really hilarious.

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)

Tracey Thorn just posted this on her Twitter; from what I can tell, it appears to be some sort of reality show about male ballet dancers, with a large, pointy-nosed drag queen judging and some sort of athletic theme that doesn’t even slightly fit in with Everything But The Girl’s wonderfully mopey standard.

But, you know, there are worse things in the world than athletic men in singlets dancing around to Todd Terry remixes.

Sheena Beaston just posted her top 10 albums of the year.  Dizzee Rascal, Fever Ray and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs might all be on my list as well if I ever got around to making one, but how have I never heard of this Aceyalone person before?

Someone my age in my hometown was profiled in The Atlantic for being homeless.  Also, hookers!  (Don’t read the comments on that second one unless you want to start hating people.)

If you’ve ever wanted to see watermelon-themed twink porn–and shut up, of course you have–now’s your chance.  My favorite part might be the scrubs or whatever that the guy’s wearing at the beginning.  Unless my favorite part is the subtitles.  It’s hard to say.

I guess maybe I should start watching Gossip Girl.  I didn’t even know Serena’s brother Eric was a major character on the show.  (He’s not in the books.  Or at least in the books I’ve read.)  But hey, he likes Sondre Lerche!

McSweeney’s imagines what an Anne Geddes baby might be like as an adult.  Anne Geddes jokes never get tiresome.

New York Times film critics Manohla Dargis likes to swear a lot.  I still don’t know if I want to see The Hurt Locker.  I’m still reeling all these years later by how stupid Strange Days was; I also don’t know how I feel about everybody being like “this movie is awesome, a woman directed it!” when Kathryn Bigelow’s been making very well-known (if not exactly well-respected) movies for twenty years now.

And, oh yeah, Publishers Weekly made a pun this week.

Gray hair is a trend?  I wouldn’t mind that, actually, especially if it distracted people from the emergent Navajo sweater craze.

I wish more news stories used the word statuette.

Jesse Corcoran’s Olympic frowny faces, located on the side of a Vancouver gallery, were censored after someone allegedly complained about it being graffiti.

And here’s three stories I covered for Carnal Nation:

Reality TV creeps me out in all kinds of different ways, but the most extreme example of why can be found in this story about a gay porn star choking to death while police shot him with a taser and a TV crew filmed the whole thing.

I meant to post about this last week, but the prostitutes of Copenhagen are offering free services to anyone with a pass from the global climate summit; prostitution is legal in Denmark, but the mayor sent postcards to hotels asking employees not to hook up climate summit attendees with escorts.  The postcard actually said “Be Sustainable: Don’t Buy Sex!“  In English, too, that’s not just a weird translation from the Danish or anything.

Finally, Time thinks that Advocate readers are all porn-crazy sluts that want nothing more than to stick their dicks into the nearest inflatable person.

[image via Men and Machines]