Filed under: art, books, Italians, magazines, music, not hot | Tags: art, bad sex in fiction, balls, catholics, cuba, electricity, ellie goulding, helvetica, italy, lady gaga, levi johnston, murder, patrick kennedy, penis size, records, sperm
I had my annual Fakesgiving (alternative vegetarian Thanksgiving potluck) party last night, so there were shouty drunkards in my apartment until 4 this morning. Then I had to take down the Queercraft show. So sorry this is brief.
Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin has apparently banned Patrick Kennedy from receiving communion because the congressional rep (my district–woot!) is pro-choice. The congressman is the son of Ted Kennedy.
Brenda, the transsexual prostitute frequented by Italian governor Piero Marrazzo before his political downfall last month, burned to death in a mysterious fire early this week. Police are treating the case as a murder.
Cuban health care now covers free penis implants.
This is not how I would have spelled out the lyrics to Bad Romance at all.
Art Vinyl is looking for your favorite LP art of the year. Seeing this list reminded me that it’s been a full year now since I’ve had a functioning turntable.
Over at Carnal Nation this week, I learned a lot about my balls, thanks to Scientific American. I also learned how my laptop is probably killing my sperm and looked, briefly, into the shortlist for this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction prize.
Oh, and yawn.
[video: Ellie Goulding's Under The Sheets, which is pretty much my favorite song of right now. I love how it works the whole Bat For Lashes/Florence craze for kooky Englishwomen but also manages to be poppy enough to dance to.]
I don’t think I’ll have my as-yet unwritten essay on Catholic porn done today, but I thought my headline was clever, so there’s that. And here’s some pictures from old Calendario Romanos.
Filed under: gay, heterosexuals, in praise of athletic beauty, Italians, movies, music, starfucking, tv
So, everybody’s talking about Bromance, and Momma’s Boys, and that show where former teen idols all live in a house together–or, you know, blogs are talking about them, anyway–and I was thinking that maybe I wouldn’t have spent the last decade hating reality TV so much if every reality show were a) this gay and b) this focused on dudes with their shirts off all the time. Also, Michael on Momma’s Boys is wicked hot in an “I’m-drunk-and-wish-Elimidate-still-existed” sort of way. Because I saw a little bit of that (ridiculous, ridiculous) program the other night.
Anyway, I came up with my own concept for a reality show. Let’s see what yo think:
Ten celebrity types on different rungs of the fame ladder all live in a house together. Every day they get up to go to work, but here’s the catch: They don’t know what their job is going to be until they open their closet doors and find a uniform, placed there in the middle of the night by the show’s producers and/or the wacky female host (What’s Downtown Julie Brown doing these days?)
There will be gratuitous clothes-changing sequences as the guys put on their uniforms and wonder aloud how anyone could ever expect them to be a UPS driver/mechanic/fireman/priest/marine/flight attendant/basketball player/boy scout/crewman on the Enterprise/telephone repairman. Then they will go off, separarely, to perform whatever package delivery/auto repair/firefighting/marriage ceremony/acts of unnecessary violence/demonstration of oxygen masks/athletic feats/knot-tying/sci-fi shenanigans/hanging out in a cherrypicker needs to be done. At the end of the day, they will return back to the house to change out of their uniforms, allowing for more opportunities for unneccessary underwear footage. This will be called “changing for dinner,” and the dudes will all switch into tuxes, just because. Downtown Julie Brown will serve them a dinner that she will pretend to have made herself, and the guys will talk about their days. Then, afterwards, they’ll all retire to the sauna (you see where this is going) and through some elaborate and completely unnecessarily formalities one of them will be “eliminated” and forced to leave the house. Then there will be a confessional type sequence where, dressed only in towels, the men will tell the camera how completely unfair their elimination was.
Here are my picks for the first cast:
Filed under: books, heterosexuals, hookers, Italians, movies, music, Uncategorized | Tags: 2k8, cai guo-qiang, estelle, michael cera, pia covre, stephen elliott
While I’ll spare you some of my more esoteric ruminations on 2008, I thought I’d take a quick moment to look back at ten of the year’s more awesome individuals, who in one way or another helped make my year.
In alphabetical order, my first five picks for the 10 Most Awesome People of 2008. (Picks six through ten will follow sometime soon.)
Cai Guo-Qiang
I made it to New York four times this year, but I still act like a tourist every time I go; I can’t help it. Despite living just a couple of hours away for my whole life, it was always such a weird and magical place that I’m still awed every time I go.
Maybe that’s why I like when I’m in New York I like my art to be awe-inspiring, too. This year I got to see Banksy’s amazing pet store and the so-so Home Delivery show at MoMA, both of which were probably humdrumto the average Gothamite but the scale of which was still super-exciting to my provincial New England eyes. I was also quite taken with Cai Guo-Qiang’s I Want To Believe at the Guggenheim: cars suspended in the air, lifelike stuffed tigers pierced with arrows, paintings made by igniting gunpowder and, best of all, a mysterious, enormous fishing boat filled with broken crockery at the end.
I got so excited about the whole thing I was even briefly tempted to buy the t-shirt he designed for Gap.
Michael Cera
I must confess that I’ve only ever watched about ten minutes of Arrested Development and never got around to seeing Juno. But I will confess that I have a giant crush on Michael Cera, the very funny and disarmingly hot actor that I first saw in Superbad. (Well, I first saw him as the young Chuck Barris in the awesome Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, but he was only thirteen at the time, so that doesn’t really count.)
He and Kat Dennings were awesome together in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, as they drove around in the dreamy kind of New York that’s full of happy teenagers and readily available parking. Despite the fact that he’s basically a twink known mainly for trashy teen comedies, I’m totally smitten with him.
Pia Covre
A sixty-one year old Italian activist, Covre’s the founder of the Comitato per i diritti civili delle prostitute (Committee for the Civil Rights of Prostitutes.) This year, Rome decided that scantily-clad women were a threat to society (mainly because male drivers might get distracted and cause car accidents.) Covre and the city’s prostitutes responded by dressing as nuns. And in Florence, where police were cracking down on women walking down the street, prostitutes planned to respond by riding bicycles. (Not sure whether they actually went through with this or not.)
Covre’s had her hands full lately, with sex-hating ex-showgirl Mara Carfagna doing her best to rid Italy of prostitution. I’m almost tempted to learn Italian just so I can follow this woman in the news.
Stephen Elliott
When 2008 started I promised myself I’d read at least one book a week. And I read, um, slightly less than half of that. But possibly the most beautifully-written book I read all year was Stephen Elliott’s 2006 novel My Girlfriend Comes To The City and Beats Me Up. Not because I’m particularly into reading about straight people’s bondage escapades, but because the prose is mind-blowingly wonderful. Every sentence is like a revelation, and I don’t mean it’s anything like The Secret, either.
But, you know, that was 2006 and I’m just slow to jump on that bandwagon. And while this probably wasn’t Stephen Elliott’s biggest or most prolific year, he did take the time to release the anthology Sex For America. Starting with a story where Dick Cheney cruises a Wyoming gun shop, the book tackles what Elliott considers the Bush administration’s eight-year war on sex. War, torture and racism have all been glorified since 2000, but the slightest suggestion of sex outside of procreation drives people to madness, for some reason. I reviewed the book here when I read it back in September, and some of the stories have a lot of lasting power.
Estelle
I’m not changing my mind about Kanye West, he’s still a completely annoying fool and if he were a sugary beverage for children he’d be called Douchy Juice. But, I will say that I don’t completely hate Love Lockdown, even if he did feel the need to workshop it on his Myspace after he released it, and I certainly don’t hate American Boy, the song that united hipster blogpeople with pop radio audiences in the UK and the US. Of course, I sort of pretend he doesn’t appear on that song, because who wants to listen to a sniveling jackass when they could be listening to the PRETTIEST LADY EVER.
Okay, not quite, but this woman is phenomenally gorgeous. I hate to be the gay man that’s all “OMG, Lady Singer X is so pretty and her voice is gorgeous and I love her style and the way she makes everything her own,” but that’s exactly how I feel about Estelle. American Boy, though I hate to admit it, is a great single, and Come Over (which has Sean Paul and no Kanye) is even better.
And she’s SO PRETTY I can’t stand it. Pretty! Prety pretty pretty! I hope she becomes Beyonce-famous so I’ll have excuses to look at her all day, even if she’s trying to sell me DirecTV.
30. Sarah Connor, Under My Skin
German pop singer Sarah Connor has had lots of hits in her native land, almost all of which are really dreadful ballads. Her sole American hit, 2004′s Bounce, was an exception, but even that awkward yet fun track can’t compare to Under My Skin, a Pussycat Dolls-like song that, unlike recent PCD output, is neither ear-piercing nor terrible. (Seriously, I Hate This Part makes my ears hurt, even at a low volume.) Anyway, Connor’s not terribly original, but when I’m listening to songs like this innovation’s not necessarily an issue.
29. The Courteeners, That Kiss
UK group The Courteeners sort of passed me by until the recent release of That Kiss, a lovely ballad of the Richard Hawley variety that manages to mix schmaltz and standard Britpop vocals and not be totally embarrassing about it. It ended up being one of my favorite singles towards the end of the year.
28. Scarlett Johansson, A Town With No Cheer
Critically reviled, ScarJo’s collection of Tom Waits covers was actually pretty okay; the Bowie collaboration Falling Down didn’t wow me the way it should have, but A Town With No Cheer was downright beautiful, with Johansson’s dirge-like vocals resting atop a funereal backing track produced by TV On the Radio’s Dave Sitek. I don’t know why people hated this album as much as they did, except to say that people are apparently afraid of an actress who can sing songs that aren’t about, say, the perils of being a female celebrity.
27. Rihanna, Don’t Stop The Music
A year and a half ago I would have laughed if you told me that the best song on Rihanna’s third album was a Michael Jackson-sampling club anthem. I mean, the sample part wouldn’t have surprised me, because Rihanna’s career is largely built around samples of things from the eighties (or, on occasion, samples of Orgy covers of things from the eighties.) But Don’t Stop The Music is so very dancy and not R&B-like at all; while I don’t normally go for anything this clubby, the sound worked really well when paired with Rihanna’s thin voice.
26. Cloetta Paris, Broken Heart Tango
Speaking of thin voices, I was also pretty glad this year to come across Swedish duo Cloetta Paris. Riding the same wave of Italo disco revival as Sally Shapiro and the like, they released Secret Eyes, their debut album, back in April. The title track was very appealing, but I think I prefer Broken Heart Tango, one of those whispery dance tracks that I only wish I’d ever hear when I go out at night.
25. Ting Tings, Shut Up And Let Me Go
I have no idea why Blonde Lady Ting Ting and her partner, Douchy Aviators Ting Ting, elicit such polarizing opinions. But regardless, this song is wonderful. Since I don’t really watch TV, I had no idea it appeared in an iPod commercial until months later, when I was trying to figure out how a little hipster duo from the UK got nominated for an MTV award.
That’s Not My Name was the first track I heard, but the (much shorter) Shut Up And Let Me Go is more vampy and more fun, the kind of song I’d slink around to in twenties-style dresses while smoking and dramatically waving my arms around. You know, hypothetically. If I were a lady.
24. Il Genio, Pop Porno
If 2008 was the year of anything, it was the year of boy-girl duos. (See Crystal Castles and the Kills, as well as songs #25 and #26 on the countdown.) One of my favorites was Milanese duo Il Genio, who debuted this year with restrained electro-pop that sounded a little similar to all the Italo disco, with some difference. For one, singer Alessandra Contini doesn’t have the voice of a small child and, unlike any other Italo singers I can think of, she actually sings in Italian.
23. Ne-Yo, Closer
While I haven’t really gotten excited about any non-Chris Brown male R&B singers since like 1994, Ne-Yo actually managed to win me over this year. Closer didn’t really stand out much at first, except in the sense that it was on the radio a lot and I woke up to it every morning for about two months. But the thing that really made me love this song was seeing him perform it on Ellen; he didn’t sing the chorus at all and did some fancy dancing instead. Pretty classy, especially for a guy who managed to get heavy airplay on hip-hop radio. Which is not a classy place.
22. Erykah Badu, The Healer
Damn, that’s a bassline. If you like the cars that go boom you could do worse than to put on this track, which could make your jalopy and your bones both rattle until they break. It was hard for me to pick a favorite track from Badu’s wonderfully batshit New Amerykah album, but The Healer stands out because, like her earliest hits, it finds a groove and works it for a long time until you’re basically entranced.
21. Bloc Party, Talons
After the very, very, very, very, very disappointing Mercury, I had little hope for Bloc Party’s third album. But then came Talons, all angry paranoia and doom, and I knew they were back. While Intimacy’s not a great album, I can appreciate what they were going for, even with Mercury. (Though why anybody thought that should have been the first single is beyond me.) But Talons is the best song. The marching-army drums and lyrics about sluts and diseases coming in the mail build with an apocalyptic fervor that’s unmatched on the rest of the album and stands right up there with Banquet and Flux as one of their career bests.
Sorry, no time for pictures to accompany the list today, so you’ll have to do without terrible formatting and thumbnails ganked from bands’ Myspaces.* Had to drop the boyfriend at the airport this morning and now I need to do some Christmas shopping. Yay.
[*UPDATE: There's pictures now! After looking at last year's list I decided going the last.fm route was a lot more aesthetically pleasing than the Myspace thumbnails, though three of these 10 artists didn't have pictures big enough to match.]
50. The Ian Carey Project, Get Shaky
Though I normally can’t abide house music, there’s something about this Baltimore DJ’s clubby anthem that makes me ridiculously happy. I think it’s the Knife-like vocals, though I like the word shaky as the object of a command, too. (I’m sure there’s a grammatical term for this, and that I had to learn that term in seventh grade, but right now I can’t think of what the hell it would possibly be called.)
49. GIRLS (nyc), And If You Go
Two bands named Girls emerged this year: a San Francisco group that I’ve never heard, but who ended up on Pitchfork’s Songs of the Year list, and the New York duo who made this song, a gloomy sort of love song that sounded just right in the year that the Jesus and Mary Chain reformed and Raveonettes finally put out their first great full-length.
48. Baustelle, Charlie fa surf
I came across Baustelle while researching a radio show I was doing for St Joseph’s day. A bunch of Italian indie bloggers declared them the greatest thing since sliced foccaccia and I can see why. While most of the music to come out of my (great grandparents’) mother country are on the dated and ersatz side, Baustelle’s indie-pop sounds at least like it was aware of Western culture since about 2000. Sadly, though, I only know Italian cuss words and so the only lyrics I can make out are ‘baseball’ and ‘surf’ and ‘skate’ and ‘filma di porno.’
47. Fall Out Boy, I Don’t Care
Though I thought FOB were a bunch of jerky douchebags when they first appeared, I’ve since come to accept them, and, periodically, rock out like a nine-year old to some of their songs. I Don’t Care took the pounding guitars that made Pink and Katy Perry so annoying this year and made them into a dopey but awesome rock track. Despite myself, I even like how dorky Patrick Stump sounds when he sings the line about the guitar screaming like a fascist. And, semi-relatedly, I briefly entertained thoughts about banging Pete Wentz the other day after reading about his Howard Stern appearance. (Though I doubt I could ever enjoy myself sleeping with him, since I’d probably spend the whole time thinking about ShleeSimp and/or her creepy father.)
46. Silje Nes, Searching, White
My favorite track on Norwegian Silje Nes’ debut album is the most unusual; while most of the album is about cooing and tiny sounds taking up vast planes of space, Searching, White is two minutes of noise, all droning and kicky drums and pretty but indecipherable vocals. It sounds like like a club track written by Hope Sandoval.
45. Lady GaGa, Boys Boys Boys
My favorite track on GaGa’s debut The Fame is also the poppiest, in the old-school sense. Behaving like a bad girl (and demanding eggs in the morning, bless her heart) can’t stop GaGa from singing like it’s 1989. Seriously, American pop radio hasn’t had melodies like this (barring certain Gwen Stefani singles and Nelly Furtado album tracks) in almost two decades. And while Poker Face eventually grew on me, it doesn’t come close to Boys Boys Boys in terms of poppy goodness.
44. Last Shadow Puppets, My Mistakes Were Made For You
I’ll take Vanity Side Projects I Didn’t Think Would Be Good At All But Which Sound Like Odessey And Oracle and Thankfully Not Like The Overrated Arctic Monkeys for $400, Alex. It was hard for me to pick a favorite track from The Age of the Understatement, a solid album of moody, sixties-inspired pop songs from one Arctic Monkey and one Little Flame. Eventually I went for this one, but probably because it’s the most recent single and the one I’ve heard the most lately.
43. The Breeders, German Studies
I never got the Breeders album that came out last spring, though my roommate did and I heard him playing it during the earlier months of this year. I love pretty much everything the Breeders do, but the track that really stood out for me featured Kim Deal singing in German. It sounded about as natural as those old Spanish Pixies songs, but it doesn’t matter because it’s so darn catchy.
42. Girls Aloud, Can’t Speak French
Unlike Kim Deal, Girls Aloud are freely willing to admit that they sing best en anglais. This song went on for about thirty seconds too long, I think; there’s only so many times a chorus should be repeated, and it’s slightly less than 5000, thank you. Still, it was one of the big hits of last winter (for me, anyway) and I liked it a lot more than The Promise, the only track I’d heard from Out of Control before I started making this list.
41. Manda Rin, DNA
“Gimme action and drama,” went a 1999 Bis hit. “Give me 80s Madonna.”
I’ve tried to explain this before, so sorry if I’m being repetitive, but DNA is what Madonna should be doing right now. Former Bis frontwoman Manda Rin makes cute, poppy, optimistic dance-rock; this song and Guilty Pleasure could have made perfect Madonna singles. If Hard Candy sounded like this song I would have been all over it; instead, I had to settle for an album whose best track was the clunky and awkward Give It 2 Me.
Filed under: hot, Italians, music, starfucking | Tags: Italians, marracash, rappers, starfucking
Despite my ancestry and tendency to constantly refer to myself as an Italian-American, I can’t say I speak more than six or seven words of my (great-grand)mother tongue. Also, I’m pretty sure Milanese rapper Marracash doesn’t ever use any of the words and phrases I do know, like la bella figura, which is the title of a new book I keep meaning to read, and zampognari, which has something to do with the nativity.
So not only do I not know what he’s rapping about, but I also can’t find much about him online that’s in a language I understand. In fact, I even had to resort to a translation of his Wikipedia page, which resulted in lots of ridiculousness. But I did discern a couple of key facts:
1. His self-titled debut solo album came out in Italy on June 13.
2. He is fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine.
And, really, that’s all you need to know. But for a little more background, he’s a part of Milan’s Dogo Gang (which also features the foxy DonJoe) and his debut single’s called Badabum Cha Cha. It sounds pretty fun to me, and you know how partial I am to airhorns, but I have no idea whether or not the repeated song title is actually clever, or if it’s the Italian equivalent of a dumb rapper yelling “Yaaaaaaaaaa!” over and over. However, I’d much rather Badabum Cha Cha with Marracash than superman a dumb Youtube celebrity like Soulja Boy.
Foxy pictures after the jump. I’m particularly fond of his nose and eyebrows, for what it’s worth:
Just wanted to let you know updates this week might be few and far-between. I have to work some extra hours, plus I’m working on a number of other crazy projects involving learning a new skill, organizing a film festival, and figuring out a major event for the fall. I’d be more specific than that but, you know, I’m not that way.
In other news, I watched I Fidanzati this morning. It was the first movie I’d seen in months, oddly, and I really liked it. Sometimes it’s refreshing to watch a movie you know absolutely nothing about the actors or the plot or the director. I liked how little plot there was, and how, despite the name (which translates into the Fiances), it was really just a 77-minute portrait of one Milanese factory worker who got sent to work in Sicily, leaving his girlfriend and elderly father alone for months.
