Since I can remember, and it might even be safe to say since graduating high school thirty-eight years ago, my father has only read two books: The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons, both by Dan Brown. He liked the books because my father likes to pretend to be a Catholic, and he understands the Catholic references. My father doesn’t harbor extensive knowledge about many places or things, but he knows about the Church, and he knows about Italy. He has been both places more than once. I also think that he is able to relate to the suspicions the books propose against the Catholic Church. They make him feel less guilty about failing to practice his religion. I’m sure that if he tried to read more, he would be able to find many more books that he could relate to — books about John Bonham, his true deity, or books alluding to places in New Jersey he has visited. But when he read those two books, the white pages looked so out of place turned by his round, peeling fingers.

A nail-biter myself, I always fear my hands might turn out looking like my dad’s. His fingers crack and bleed in the winter, and during all the other months of the year they are still dry, rough and hard to touch with my own young skin. They are often adorned with purple blood blisters or poison ivy from working in the yard. But it is his finger nails that are most difficult to look at. Those thick, curled-under horns of things could only be the product of a particular combination—incessant biting and years of construction work.

After high school, my father did not attend college. He would have never made it through all four years had he tried, if by some miracle he were accepted or had even applied. My father never could lasso that kind of intelligence — the kind that requires test taking, memorizing, expanding. He is not that way.

He is, however, handy, as they say, more so than most. “I want the kitchen expanded. I want the cathedral ceiling leveled and a second floor on top of that,” my mother said, and he did it. In a couple of month’s time it was done. By one man. He had to hire roofers and someone to come nail on the aluminum siding, but for the most part, it was my father who got it done.

He is constantly going, working, weeding, cutting the grass, fixing something or another, buzzing in and out of the house to retrieve his hammer or a contraption I’ve never seen before and banging, clanking the steel ladder against the house at nine a.m. outside of my still sleeping window. He is one of those people who doesn’t know how to be quiet. Everything, breakfast in the morning, is a parade, with silverware dinging and screaming its departure on the way out of a drawer and sliding pantry doors rolling on their tracks and then slamming into each other. “The elephant woke me up,” my sisters and I used to say, though he resembles nothing of an elephant except for the heavy steps.

He is skinny. Always has been, always will be. He is tall, dark-haired, and goateed. He is graying now.  He wears glasses, and he always tucks in his shirt. He wears jeans and flannel shirts, and sometimes sweaters that he has owned for fifteen years. He changes nothing with the trends or the times. White sneakers are his only shoes, whether his slacks are jeans or khakis or black. “I’m fifty-one years old, what does it matter if my shoes match or not?” he says to me every time I try to suggest a pair of black shoes or loafers. Several times I have tried to explain that matching isn’t always a matter of picking up chicks, that it’s about looking presentable and prepared. He’s out the door before I’m finished.

Once, my cousin Gilda was visiting from Italy and my father, my sister, and I took her to New York City. It had rained that morning, and my father spent the whole afternoon marching around the city carrying an unnecessarily large umbrella in one hand (never the kind that folds into a neat little package and could be easily placed in my purse), his brick of a cell phone strapped to his belt, and a camera around his neck. When you are twenty years old and live forty-five minutes or less from New York, the last thing that you want to look like is a tourist. My father did just that.

For these reasons, I had a lack of understanding of my father for most of my life. We didn’t connect on any level, though I tried. As the only male in a family full of girls (three daughters, a wife, and a female golden retriever), the man needed a son. I played sports that I resented and failed at for years, attempting to be his boy and giving him the opportunity to coach. Still, even after the winning games, he’d fall asleep on the couch without a fulfilling conversation.

My father’s one and only hobby is music. He owns a motorcycle, but I wouldn’t call that a hobby because he only rides in the springtime, and never outside of town or above thirty-five miles an hour. Biking and drumming are the last two activities that my father’s clean-cut, white-shoed, nerdy appearance would seem to allow, but these are the only two things that keep him from the work, veg, work, veg monotony of his everyday life.

One night this past November, I surprised him and showed up at a gig he was playing in Kearny.  This was the first time I was able to see him play outside of our basement, because I was always too young to enter the venue, or too uninterested, but on this night, I decided that I would drive the three hours from school to make an appearance and have a weekend at home. I knew that a couple of my older cousins were stopping by, and I knew they would buy me beers and it would be a dancing evening at the least.

My father was already in his element, playing in his home town, with so many missed, familiar faces showing up. But once he saw me, he lit up like a firefly, propelled by the wings of pride for both me and for himself.  He introduced me to every nostalgic alcoholic of his adolescence and to all of the round, bald, and divorced cocky jocks of his past. It wasn’t until that night that I knew how it felt to be a daughter, to feel like daddy’s little girl.

When my father plays the drums, he is flying. His face arranges in an expression I’ve never seen him make under any other circumstance. His eyes, constantly scanning over his endless selection of possible beats, his mouth agape in a smiling-while-humming combination, his head sliding and bopping in the only way an occupied musician’s body can dance, but the expression is not just of his face.  It permeates from underneath his flushed, yet hardly tired cheeks. It is an expression of focus, freedom, and one of pure joy. It is during these times, within the rhythm of Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick,” not the flow of Melville’s novel, that he truly exists.

My father could have been great. He was offered an opportunity to tour with his music. I have been told this many times, not by my father, but by my mother, his two brothers, and by strangers. But instead, he married my mother. He chose us, and I could tell on that melodious night, surrounded by people who love him and his jams, that he has never regretted it.

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England: “Presenting Kate Middleton (and her sister’s ass)”

France: “Foux da fa fa”

Germany: “Our sausages are huge”

Belgium: “In Bruges”

Luxembourg: “The best things come in tiny packages”

Spain: “Our goalie is hotter than yours”

Portugal: “Better than Spain”

Italy: “Come see our priapic clown! (But stay for the gelato)”

Czech Republic: “Existential crisis? Apply within”

Denmark: “Lars Von Trier is not a Nazi sympathizer, we swear!”

Sweden: “Ikea”

Greece: “Never pay tax again”

Cyprus: “Two for the price of one!”

Slovenia: “To violent crime: Slovenia says NO! ”

Croatia: “Get ready to party; recover in Dubrovnik”

Romania: “We’re not Communist anymore, plus we have the world’s second largest building in square feet. Beat that”

Bulgaria: “The home of Ken Lee”

Montenegro: “That place James Bond went to once”

Albania: “Feel free to blood feud”

Turkey: “We’ll be part of the EU soon, promise”

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It was a warm night in the summer of 2007 and my friends and I were trading obscenities in Italian. I was seated in an infamous tourist bar called “Barone Rosso” in the medieval Tuscan city of Siena, drinking and chatting with three newfound friends from class. I was in the country for an Italian literature and instruction course at the local university that cost only three hundred euros. For three hundred more I could stay in a local residence with some of my meals taken care of for a month. At the time I still entertained the ambition of being a professor of Italian, so it seemed like a good deal. Those were the days, I guess.

L and C were a pair of pretty French girls from Provence and F was a dude from São Paulo, Brazil. Italian was our common language, which took an amusing toll on our communication skills as the night wore on. Forming friendships in what was a second language for all of us added a level of novelty to our socializing. We chatted and joked with each other about the language and the country, letting our conversation drift between topics, from the weirdness of the town’s customs to the rambunctious activities of previous nights as the crowd swelled and shifted around us.

The men in the town seemed utterly smitten with L and C. The girls, despite having been raised in a Mediterranean region themselves, still found the intense forwardness of Italians noteworthy. At any given moment, men would approach the table and try to hold their hands, or bend to whisper in their ears. “So’ innamorato,” they would say insistently, “I’m in love.”

I assumed that the strength of these declarations stemmed from the language itself. Italian has its own unexamined assumptions, which impact the most ordinary interactions. For example, when you meet someone and say, “How was your day?” you often ask “Cos’hai fatto di bello?” which means, literally “What beautiful things have you done?” A similar construction is “Cosa mi racconti di bello oggi?” which means, “What beautiful stories are you telling me today?” While trying to get my head around the real significance of everyday interactions, I often came up against fundamental differences of expression.

I shook my head as the latest suitors walked away. “I don’t get it at all. Do they really think it’s going to work, just saying they’re in love all the time? You’d think they’d realize the phrase loses some meaning if it’s that ubiquitous.” L looked at me with a grin. “I agree, it is a little strange. But what do you think, when is a good time to say ‘So’ inammorato di te?’” I shook my head and furrowed my brow, chewing on my lip for a moment in concentration. I looked up at the other three. “I dunno, after four months, maybe five months of a pretty serious relationship? It would have to seem appropriate at the time.”

My companions’ faces contorted in surprise, and L’s mouth dropped open. They looked at each other with expressions of shared amusement. I searched their eyes as they laughed. “What? Is that too soon?” C arched her eyebrow. “Are you crazy? I would dump a boy if he didn’t say it within two weeks.” L nodded, “If you haven’t said it to each other by the second or third week, something is not working.”

“Really?” I stuttered, “Don’t you think that’s too soon to tell?” F shared a knowing look with the French girls. “Back in São Paulo, you have to say it on the first night, or no girl will let you date her.” I paused for a second, and then turned to him. “Okay, but you have a girlfriend back home, right?” “Si,” he responded. “So you said it to her on the first night?” He nodded. I looked at the girls. “And I know you guys have boyfriends back in Marseilles.” They half nodded, half shrugged their assent, and the conversation moved to another topic.

The discussion stuck in my mind, though I said nothing, in part because all three of my companions that evening were fairly open about their desire to meet attractive members of the opposite sex that night. Their partners back home had shown up in conversation casually, but never seemed to weigh heavily on their minds. I felt, not for the first time, like a slightly clueless North American. I had known that my friends were seeing other people while abroad, but had unthinkingly assumed that their significant others at home were casual or new, certainly not relationships where the word “love” would figure in.

Among the continental Europeans I met while studying abroad that summer, I noticed a freeness and casualness in their attitude toward love and sex that only obliquely intersected with mine. The gulf wasn’t impossibly wide. It seemed rather that there were a number of slightly different shared presumptions that underlay sexual and social dynamics. All of my friends had significant others at home, some of whom would visit for a week. When partners were visiting, everyone treated them like partners. When they were gone, all bets were off, and this never warranted discussion in public or in private. And everywhere, I heard that word “amare”, in all of its tenses and usages: “Ti amo”, “Io sono innamorato di lei.”

_____

Almost a year later, back in my hometown, I was waiting on the steps for the girl I’d been seeing for the past month. She was cycling back from a Holy Fuck show she’d been at with many of our friends. Moments after I looked up, she crashed her bike against a parked car while hunting in her bag for a lighter. She left her bike on the grass and stumbled toward me, stepping over my legs as she entered the house. “Hey, what’s up?” I asked. She turned her head as she walked inside, “I don’t know what’s up, or what is . . . around, but I do know I have a gas fire stove.” While I pondered her response, she reappeared with two lit cigarettes. We sat outside the house smoking for a few minutes, then went upstairs to her bedroom and started fooling around. Suddenly she sprang up. “I gotta go.” I followed her into the bathroom where she began to get sick into the toilet. I couldn’t figure out what to do, so I held her hair back while she was being violently ill.

She abruptly turned her face toward me, and, between retches and gasps, uttered the words, “God, I love you.” Without thinking, I responded in kind.

We’ve been dating for three years.

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When I was a teenager in Ireland, I made a friend from Spain whom I’ll call B. He was easy to get along with, generous and fun loving with a wide grin and a stocky figure. He was a bon vivant, drawn to alcohol and excess, and took a stereotypically Iberian delight in catcalling women. He often regaled my friends with stories about his favorite prostitutes from his old neighborhood. One day he asked me how many I had visited in my life. I shook my head, grinning, “None, I wouldn’t do that!” He looked baffled. “Why not? How will you learn?”

B was eccentric, and had strong views on the world. I remember laughing with my friends at his pronouncements on women: “French girls are the most beautiful in the world,” he would say in his thick Spanish accent, “They have perfect body, perfect clothes, perfect hair, but face just a leetle bit ugly” – he then kissed his fingers – “That is perfection!” This approach to aesthetics extended to architecture as well, and seemed to constitute a general theory for him. He once explained why Sicily was the most beautiful place in the world using a similar rubric: “Everything in south of Italy is classic, elegant, and then you look and is just a bit broken. So perfect!”

My fellow schoolmates viewed him as a harmless oddity, and paid little attention to the underlying character of his views. Since he and I both happened to be foreigners where we went to school, I spent much more time with him than the others did. On weekend nights out together, he would get riotously drunk and tell me about his life back home.

He’d grown up in an upper middle class household in Madrid with parents who’d prospered under Franco. Their apartment was not far from the city center, and was within hearing distance of the protests and disturbances taking place periodically in the main square. Once, a bomb planted by Basque separatists exploded directly outside their home. He threw his hands in the air describing the helplessness he felt on that day, trying to comfort his mother while his father kept watch on the commotion outside.

As I got to know him better, he opened up more and more, regaling me with tales of his hometown with visible enthusiasm. On the weekend, he and his friends would wear matching bomber jackets, jeans and boots. They would sit and drink in bars where the jukebox played only traditional and patriotic music. Some of his older friends would share the latest stories of fights they had in the street and protesters they had frightened. Later they would re-enter the street in a rowdy mass, looking for trouble. B spoke with pride about these friends; he believed they were performing an important social function.

I began to gather that B felt a distinct sense of disappointment, bordering on despair, when looking at the state of modern Spanish society. In his eyes, Spain had been taken over by liberals and businessmen, who cared only for their own individual comforts and new opportunities to make money. No one in power was looking out for the interests of the nation as a whole anymore. Spain was therefore becoming weak, which emboldened the nation’s enemies. It was up to the youth in the street to show that Spain would not just roll over and accept its increasing domination by immigrants, leftists and foreign bankers.

Inevitably, the internal logic of this narrative led him to tell me lurid tales of the infinite malevolence of Moroccans and other Arabs. Supposedly they saw themselves as superior to the working Spanish, because the state provided them with the means to live. They acted like conquerors, taking what they wanted, construing Spain’s generosity as a sign of weakness. Apparently, this even led them to rob Spaniards at knifepoint in the street, killing them afterward.

At this point I shook my head, saying that I didn’t believe him, and he shrugged. “That is why I like you,” he said. “You do not agree with me, but you listen to my point of view.”

When he admitted that some of his friends were neo-Nazis, I said that I didn’t think we could be friends anymore. He quickly backtracked, telling me that they were more like acquaintances, and that he personally had no problem with anyone of a different race than him. “You are Jewish, no?” he asked me. I shook my head. “I like the Jews; I think they are very clever,” he said helpfully. For two weeks I avoided him, which noticeably hurt his feelings.

As time went on, I sought his company less and less, and began interrogating his views more acutely when the conversation drifted in a certain direction. Though his idolization of Franco remained unshaken, he was ready to admit when pressed that his hero had some faults. “Yes, Franco did some bad things; he killed many people. But in the end he was fighting for his country. Don’t forget that Franco built Spain!”

Supposedly Franco had returned from Morocco and single-handedly transformed Spain from a poor country into a modern one. If it weren’t for Franco, so the story went, Spain would be communist or anarchist today – and that dreadful possibility was increasing again.

Eventually B went back to Spain, and I never saw him again. By the time he left, we’d drifted enough that we didn’t even say goodbye.

_____

When people use the word “counterculture,” they’re usually referencing musical or aesthetic movements like punk, hip-hop, or even “indie,” all of which I would sooner call sub-cultures. My yearlong acquaintance with B gave me a different sense of the word, which remains with me still. His words sketched a picture of what it might mean to belong to something that sets itself in direct opposition to the dominant culture, that is not content merely to sit introspectively on the periphery, but rather speaks openly of replacing what it doesn’t accept.

B would always tell me “Fascist means uh, how you would say, ‘conservative,’ where you come from.” I listened to his words, but I was not convinced.

As it happens, I remain a fan of bomber jackets, though I’ll leave mine at home if I ever visit Spain.

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The folks over at Playbill have given Jersey Shore a Victorian makeover in a new video series. While hearing the show’s unsophisticated dialogue delivered in a refined accent is funny (I guess), it’s made it resoundingly clear that Jersey Shore’s time as a cultural phenomenon is rapidly approaching its end date. Not only is the show played out, but the parodies are also becoming belabored and trite. So when will the show actually die?

By now, we all know that MTV is planning to give Jersey Shore a long drawn-out death. In its third season, the show sustained a couple black eyes and a permanent limp with its redundant storylines, but now that it’s headed to Italy, it will hopefully be able to meet its demise. But with the Jersey Shore juggernaut, one can never be too sure. Even though last season carried a permanent air of “over it” by cast members and fans, it still inexplicably brought in killer ratings. Which begs the question: When will people finally start to look away from this tired trainwreck?

Hopefully they’ll start with season four. The mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, has squashed any hopes of a ratings bonanza by enforcing a set of rules that the cast must follow while filming in Italy. The rules, which include banning the gang from being filmed in places that serve alcohol, prevent Jersey Shore from behaving like Jersey Shore, which is permanently drunk. Think about it. 90% of the show’s conflict (i.e. entertainment) is created by their wasted behavior. A sober Jersey Shore is a show that most people wouldn’t like to watch (more than once). Because when you take the booze out of the equation, you’re just left with a lot of hair gel and tedious conversations. Without the cast’s borderline alcoholism, we won’t get things like Snooki sleeping in the dryer (did that actually happen? I feel like it did), Sammi and Ronnie’s fighting (actually maybe sobriety will make them more bearable), hook ups, and endless drama at da club.

Obviously Jersey Shore‘s entire success does not rest upon the consumption of alcohol. In season one and even a little bit of season two, there was an undeniable chemistry between the cast members. Here was a group of people that existed in a ridiculous largely unknown subculture who all thought they were the cat’s meow. No one was more obsessed with someone like Snooki than Snooki herself. They didn’t need you to think they were the shit because no one believed it more than themselves.  This unabashed enthusiasm and pride is what made the show so compelling. However, it’s impossible to capture lightning in a bottle twice. Once Jersey Shore became an overnight sensation, it immediately became a victim of its own success. It became a show within a show. In season three especially, signs of fatigue were littered all over every episode. And it also became obvious to viewers that they weren’t dealing with multi-faceted people. The constant slut-shaming and wasted antics were getting boring. We could watch all of those things in the first season when it’s more entertaining.

It’s hard to predict though when it will actually go away. Even though the mayor’s rules will put a crimp in the gang’s plans, the novelty of seeing these uncultured freaks in a foreign country may outweigh people’s growing disdain. I, for one, will watch the season premiere and then be like, “Ciao bella, bitches.” Because the thought of having to endure a sober(ish) Situation seem too much to bear.

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In this video, posted last year, a young Italian woman interprets Lady Gaga’s hit “Paparazzi” in a language that is somewhere between Italian and English. Never have I been so compelled by such an awful instance of YouTube culture. Is someone playing a joke on me? Is she a lonely soul, crying out to be heard? Is she a deranged individual, with delusions of grandeur and not even a shred of humility? Oh, 2010, where have you gone? Whatever the case may be, this Italian’s performance lingers on in my mind.

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RomaBear

RomaBear was first. I was twenty-one and I was spending the year abroad. He was over fifty and he was a Roman, living his Roman life as a failed opera singer. He could sing but he could not act, he told me. On a night so late that the night was now the morning, we were sitting at his apartment drinking glass after glass of bad grappa. We were watching the sun come up over the dome of the Pantheon through his window when I started talking drunken nonsense. He told me I should stay over, that he had extra beds for guests. I stumbled up, I stumbled over, I fell into a cot in the corner. I put my jacket over my head to block the sun and then I slept. A few minutes later I awoke to find that he had undressed me, tucked me in to clean-smelling sheets and a blanket. He had also taken the liberty of climbing in. I was suddenly very awake at this. He hovered over me, his fists pressing into the mattress beside my shoulders like he was either going to do a push up on me or collapse his elbows, crushing me, to collapse my heart. I thought to myself, “Jesus, this man could kill you.” Then I thought, “Just go with this until you don’t like it, then you can just say stop.” His head went down. He used only his mouth to get me into his mouth. He drew one out from me and rubbed it into his beard. I remember wondering if that was an Italian gesture of love. He then got under me. Returning the favor, I went down and took him in my mouth. Inexperienced as I was, I had to use my hand. I remember when I began there was a strange music in the air outside the window. The sound was muffled by the blanket I was under. It was neither music, nor was it only a sound. It was something in between music and a sound.

His cock was small, uncircumcised, and there was so much hair surrounding it that I felt like I had by accident started performing my first blowjob not on a man, but on someone’s loyal retriever. He was a giant man, covered in fur, a belly on top of his belly. He also had bellies on his thighs, bellies on his arms, a belly on the back of his neck. I remember thinking, “A belly is like a tit but it’s on a man and it’s bigger and in the middle and it’s lower and it’s just better. Plus, the hair.” I’d been with only women up until then and I wasn’t doing too great of a job. He pulled me up with a tug and then jerked himself off under the sheet while having me give small kisses to his neck and cheek. He began to snore before his stomach had had the chance to dry and he was now a slumbering beast taking up most of my cot. I was enjoying the nice-smelling sheets and blanket so much that I just climbed up and laid right on top of him like he was a swollen and furry human bed. I pulled the sheet and the blanket up over us, and I joined him in sleep.

A few hours later, I woke up in a fright and with a headache. “Oh no. Oh God,” I remember thinking. The grappa we had been drinking the night before was without a label so I should have known that that was coming. But I had no idea that this was coming. I remember that I was afraid to open my eyes. I could feel him there beside me. Fat and hairy, scratchy and soft. I thought I could feel him looking at me. There was a sweet breath coming from inside of his beard. I opened my eyes. He was right there beside me, propped up on his elbow and he was smiling and batting his eyelashes. He looked so happy. Of course he was happy. I was gorgeous at that age. I was twenty-one. He asked me, “Come ti senti?” “How do you feel?” Or more literally, “How do you feel to yourself?” I answered in a weak voice, “Can you get me some aspirin, please?” He hopped right up, dexterous for a man of his form and age. He looked younger now. He looked thinner. I remained in the cot and closed my eyes again. There was too much happening. As he got dressed he told me all the great things we were going to do for the rest of the day. He had a special place he wanted to show me. A place that most Romans don’t even know about. It was beautiful outside, he said. We would take the motorino. He was to show me his Rome, the best Rome. He was whistling a happy tune as he left for the store to get me the aspirin. I thought I heard him clap his hands and dance a couple of clumsy steps in the hall. I sat up and I threw my legs over the side of the cot. (I might have held my head in my hands.) I stood and walked over to the kitchen. I washed my face in the deep sink and dried it with an apron that smelled like rosemary. I saw that my clothes had been folded and stacked neatly on a chair by the window. He’s so happy, I thought, as I dressed and looked out at the Pantheon. And so nice. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so happy or met someone so nice in my whole life. I wondered if he might be in love with me. I wondered if that would be good. Then all of a sudden I felt very hopeless and very sad so I sat down in the chair where my clothes had been stacked. Before he returned, I was gone.

Italian Vogue is sort of like the Lady Gaga of fashion magazines. Each month you can barely wait to see what the magazine will look like this time. If each of the international Vogue’s has a personality, everybody knows Vogue Italy for its headline-making photo shoots. So when I heard that the August issue featured a spread called “Oil and Water” shot by Steven Meisel, and starring the 45-year old grey haired model Kristen McMenamy, I couldn’t wait to give away $22 in exchange for a free copy.

Shot in Los Angeles, the spread shows McMenamy doing her best imitation of dead birds. Her body blends right into the rocks, she’s one with the water, she’s fragile and somebody has their hand around her neck, forcing her to cough up seawater. She’s bruised and covered in oil, as if freshly washed ashore. There’s even an image of her standing with her face totally drenched in oil, soaked to the point that you can barely see if she’s human or something else. I suppose it goes without saying that the spread is disturbing, that it reaches for a kind of “ugly beautiful.”

No surprise that it created controversy, prompting Dodai Stewart of Jezebel to tell the New York Daily News that she “didn’t feel it made a statement,” thinking instead  “that they used the oil spill as a backdrop…What makes a stronger statement about oil-slicked birds is an oil-slicked bird.” Like Stewart, other bloggers and Internet personalities worried that the spread simply glamorizes the oil spill, using the tragedy as a way to boost magazines sales. Admittedly, the editorial was choreographed to strike a chord, leading Editor-in-Chief Franca Sozanni to opine, “The message is to be careful about nature…I understand that it could be shocking to see and to look in this way these images.”

But I don’t really understand what’s so controversial about these images. Is it the deadness? Is it the use of an oil spill as creative material? Because I actually think issue is not that the images are “controversial,” but that they’re not classically beautiful. They don’t show woman as her best, airbrushed, most idealized self, as we think fashion images are supposed to show her. McMenamy is covered in oil and blood and dirt, and her gowns are all dirty. How could you possibly wear a Hussein Chalayan in the dirt?! Instead of beauty and grace, Meisel’s pictures are violent and demanding. And it seems like the world is up in arms when models are too skinny, too airbrushed, and then everybody complains when models mimic dead birds covered in oil. You just can’t win.

That said, I’ll admit that – as images – some of them are not that great. But I’m enamored by the cover, which shows a soulless McMenamy draped in a seaweed necklace, her gray hair spread about, a tuft of sinister steam boiling up from the Earth just behind her. This is probably the most classically editorial image from the entire shoot. Another favorite of mine is the one where she’s splayed out on top of a school of rocks, as if sun tanning, with a pool of black oil (or blood) crawling out underneath.

What I love about the spread is the audacity to take on something as recent and immediate as the oil spill, and to keep it ugly. American Vogue, for instance, would never, not ever, anywhere, anytime, do an editorial like this. It’s risky. It provokes controversy, and if there’s one thing American Vogue doesn’t like, it’s controversy.

But I also love McMenamy’s performance as a dead bird throughout the editorial. She manages to turn fabulous couture, accessories and shoes into devastatingly beautiful episodes, and on Meisel’s part it’s interesting how as a photographer he used a disaster as a way to interpret designer clothes. His images capture the despair and tragedy of the Gulf oil spill by showing how it doesn’t just affect wildlife or create endangered species, which sadly some people may only feign interest in. By using a model in place of dead birds, Meisel shows that we are just as vulnerable and affected by the spill as the wildlife now currently soaked in oil.

Breaking Bread in L’Aquila (Food and Fate Publishing, an imprint of Telos Press) is Maria Filice’s first cook book and after reading it, one wonders –– how can that be? Where has she been hiding? Why hasn’t she shared her style of cooking –– and living –– with us long before this? Especially when what she has to offer –– recipes for nourishing, elegant, and sustaining repasts –– is characterized by simplicity, altogether too rare practicality, and great warmth.

Breaking Bread is a beautiful book, carefully organized, handsomely printed, and lavishly illustrated (perhaps “illuminated” is a better word, given the contents and the presentation). Maria met her husband, the late Paul Piccone, in 1990 and in the ensuing years they often returned to Aquila, his birthplace in the Abruzzo, approximately 50 miles due east of Rome. There, they frequented Paul’s favorite tratttoria, San Biagio, run by two brothers, Andrea and Luciano Di Carlofelice. Breaking Bread is inspired by those meals, but even more so by a profound love –– for the conviviality and warmth of shared hospitality; and most of all, by an enduring love for a man who transformed one woman’s life. Ultimately,Breaking Bread in L’Aquila is a love story.

Breaking Bread includes 49 recipes organized into dinner menus for each day of the week. Each menu comprises seven items: antipasti (starters); primi piatti (first course); secondo piatti (second course); contorni (side dishes); and dolci (dessert). The traditional seven-course menu has considerable flexibility: while the antipasti and dolci are fixed, other courses can be increased or decreased, depending on mood, moment, and inspiration. With additional sections like “Pantry Page,” “Wines of Abruzzi,” and “My Philosophy of Entertaining,” Maria offers all the help you need to plan a wonderful meal.

Though the courses may vary, the simplicity of preparation based on fresh, natural ingredients does not. This is first-rate regional cooking, and Maria encourages creative cooking using the best seasonal ingredients available; if apples are good and plentiful, use them; if not, select some pears for a cake; if the red snapper in the market doesn’t measure up, substitute cod; try Marsala wine or fresh lemon juice for the white wine in the Scallopine al Vino Bianco (Veal Scallopine in White Wine). And she takes the anxiety out of preparation with precise but uncomplicated directions and advice. Yet the mystery of the final creation remains intact. Exact measurements are given; careful instructions about things like vegetable selection as well as choosing cuts of meat and fish are set forth; some things are left to inspiration, but not to chance. Most unusually, every recipe is accompanied by a full-page, color photograph. Breaking Bread in L’Aquila gives one the confidence to explore and experiment.

A number of recipes look particularly appealing; just listing some of them gets your juices going: Crostata d’Albicocca (Rustic Apricot Fruit Tart); Pasta al Forno con Pomodori e Capperi (Baked Pasta with Tomatoes and Capers); Tosta di Mele (Apple Cake); Pasta con Funghi (Pasta with Mushrooms). I have already made the Torta di Caffe (Coffee Cake); a quick and easy preparation of ingredients yields a delicate, fragrant cake with a beautiful crumb.

With Maria’s encouragement to shuffle the cards in the deck of menus, I have designed a fantasy dinner that looks like this:

Antipasti: Prosciutto e Melon (Prosciutto with Melon)
Primi Piatti: Le Lasagna di Paolo (Paul’s Lasagna)
Contorni: Insalata con Scaglie di Parmigiano (Romaine Lettuce SaladWith Shaved Parmigiano Cheese)
Contorni: Finocchio e Cipolle Caramellizate con Scorza di Arancia (Caramelized Fennel and Onions with Orange)
Dolci: Torta di Noci (Walnut Cake)

Paul’s lasagna looks so rich and substantial that I’d skip the secondo piatti, especially to save room for the luscious Walnut Cake. But, in the spirit of Aquila, do what you want.

Breaking Bread is not just a collection of wonderful recipes. It is an invitation to share in a way of life animated by pleasure and infused with joy. Integral to any Italian meal is an aura embracing the meal and its partakers, a sense that preparing and eating a meal with those we love is a spiritual experience, including not just present participants but those who once gathered around the table. How beautiful it is that the things of earth, water, and sun are transformed into a heavenly repast, a sacramental moment. When we break bread with others, we invite them to share in what might well be called a heavenly repast, or at least a foretaste of the banquet to come. With this love letter to her dear late husband, Maria Filice extends the invitation, in typical Italian style, to everyone.