"It's where I learned the Unheimlich Maneuver!"

For your information:

Italian meals, for those of you who haven't had the benefit of experiencing them, generally come in 2-4 courses. I primi (the first course) is generally pasta or risotto. It is intensely easy to fill up on these without realizing that there is almost certainly i secondi to follow, which is often carne (chicken and pork seem to be the most common) although verdura (vegetables) are also widely deployed. If your host likes you, you will probably be treated to dolce, which might be dessert in the American sense (torte, which could have attributes of either pie and/ or cake) or simply fruit. And of course sometimes you get zuppa (soup) before i primi, so you could be looking at four full courses without even accounting for the fact that bread and cheese tend to litter il tavolo (the table) at all times. Luckily, the digestive system tends to be greased with espresso afterwards, so it's seldom (in our experiences thus far, unheard of) to encounter the peculiarly awful feeling of knowing one has eaten so much beef that one will in effect be reliving the experience for days to come.

Now.

I have told you about food so I can tell you about pop culture here in Italia.

LA ZUPPA (my qualifications to talk about pop culture)

Arguably, anyone has the right to talk about pop culture, but in this case I believe I am particularly qualified to do so. After all, I used to write for an "underground" music magazine in New York - one so "underground" that no one who "lived there" had ever "heard of it" (yes, those quotation marks are dripping irony on your eyes. Get a tissue). Even if I hadn't, my entire generation is so steeped, immersed, drowned, etc. in pop culture that even people who purposefully insulate themselves from it (i.e. Lexy) can recognize its artifacts (i.e. when I recite the lyrics to "Baby Got Back"). But more to the point, I can talk about Italian pop culture because it's not that different from ours.

I PRIMI (movies and television)

Hollywood, the major TV networks and even certain syndicated shows have insinuated themselves into the popular culture here. The list of examples that follows should gross you out.

1. Repeated - I dare say pervasive - ads for the movie "Knowing" (renamed in Italian as something like "Sign of the End," I'm not really sure) plastered all over the walls of Roma Termini, central train station of the central city of the country. Everywhere I looked, there was Nick Cage looking wracked with foreboding, followed by shots of natural disasters or plane crashes or something. I guess Jerry Bruckheimer has a summer home over here or something.
2. On a less offensive note, clips from Pixar's recent "Up" on the television at our current farm.
3. On a far more distressing note, episodes of a certain 80s show peddling twisted notions of both martial arts and law enforcement on television sets first at a restaurant in Porto Ceresio and, our first night here, on the TV near the dinner table. Yes, I am talking about "Walker, Texas Ranger." We spent at least ten minutes clumsily trading Chuck Norris jokes with our host family, an experience which, if I think about it too much, becomes faintly nauseating.
4. And finally, yesterday, "Magnum, PI" on daytime TV. confronted with the image of a young Burt Reynolds toting a snub-nosed pistol, driving a red convertible and making eyes at svelte blondes, I found myself briefly paralyzed. "Really?" I asked the universe. "Are you sure? You're not, like, pulling my leg or something?" No. It was not.

I SECONDI (Music)

There is also an MTV-style music channel showing music videos, and today I was treated to two bands well-known in the States: Green Day and Shakira. Now, those of you who know me well might imagine that I produced a shotgun from... somewhere... and destroyed the TV for its impertinence. Sadly, as a former co-worker once informed me, I am pushing 30 and now I no longer do stuff like that. Instead I felt a little sad - not even sad enough to vomit in protest - and went downstairs.

Let me just tell you that the craptastic, played-out Top 40 drivel they've imported from our side of the ocean is not even the worst. Music here is AWFUL. I have not heard a single good song that didn't come from my own equipment since we got here. I haven't even heard a song that didn't piss me off. Acutally, that's not true - we did overhear, in a restaurant in Asti, a weird cover of Radiohead's "Creep," sung in Italian by a dude who was roughly 6000% more masculine than Thom Yorke - but other than puzzled amusement or oblivious disgust, my only response to music I've heard in Italy has been the kind of seething, bone-deep contempt and loathing I usually feel back home when I listen to the radio. So in a way, it's comforting. I can get just as pissed at the media management types who sling crap music, the mediocre "artists" who assemble crap music from their petty lives and the crap-eating idiot masses who shovel themselves happily full of crap as I do at home!

I DOLCE (fun facts about famous people)

Thus far we have heard George Clooney's name at three of our four farms. He was first brought up at the dinner table at Casa Rossa, when our hosts were complaining about some of their guests. They were a German couple and they were obsessed with seeing a house Clooney apparently had somewhere in the area. We of course joked with them about this as best we could. It was cute at this point.

Then, at La Monda, one of the villagers, a 19-year-old girl called Betty, expressed her admiration for him. I was inclined to forgive her for several reasons, the least of which is that I don't actually dislike George Clooney at all. More to the point, she seemed to have a sort of general interest in American stuff, as reflected by her possession of a Powerpuff Girls notebook and the fact that she was studying English. So, you know, no bigs. Whatever. Twice was funny.

I heard his name a fourth time and had a moment of idiot panic similar to the sensation you get when some conspiranoiac first runs up on you with one of those factoids about how every president but Kennedy has been a Freemason or whatever. On TV tonight, some blonde comedienne was apparently making fun of him for marrying a supermodel (?). So either I'm a tool for mentioning this at all, or we are destined to save George Clooney from choking to death on a bite of over-rich frittata or accidentally steal his shoes or something.

CAFFE (the internet)

It's the same. Exactly. Our last host was on Skype all the time to her friends in the city, showed us funny clips on YouTube and had the best wireless signal I've ever used. Matteo, the youngest member of our host family here, showed us a Flash video posted on his Facebook profile about how Italians are different from other Europeans and I'm pretty sure he was suggesting to his dad at the dinner table tonight that it would be useful to start a Facebook group for their agriturismo. Even Francesco, our host at Casa Rossa who allowed us to use their wireless once a week for twenty minutes, was on Facebook.

I suppose once could summarize this over-long ramble as follows: if we just spoke the language, we'd feel right at home. Sort of. No, that's not really the point, either. Maybe it's more like: the monoculture beat us here, and in a sickening way we were glad to see it..? Or it could just be that being in a country, a culture like this, that's totally different in many ways and nearly the same in others, and where we sit at the dinner table in the midst of emotional conversation and understand maybe 3% of it, is sort of like living in the Uncanny Valley.

Which is perfectly fine with me.