As Good Excuse as Any
Oh God it’s almost Valentines Day. I kind of hoped the day would be cancelled this year, considering everything. But here it comes in its gaudy red and pink, inspiring panic and dread in everyone except elementary school teachers and newlyweds. I’m sorry. I should be more positive. Let’s look at our wine glasses as half full, even if they are already empty and it’s only ten in the morning.
Ok, ok, Valentines Day isn’t all bad. In fact, it’s as good an excuse as any to binge on love-inspired art. This year for Valentines Day, give yourself the gift of enjoying some passionate, obsessive, transporting, heady, gorgeous and sexy works of art that make you feel something or learn something or do something that may come close to love.
Following is a selection of works for you to check out leading up to or on February 14. At best they will have you contemplating the meaning and nature of our most sacred emotion. At worst they will help the day pass. Quotes ground each one, because you need a tether to the earth when your head is up there in the clouds.
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME | film adapted from the novel
“Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your heart of burn down your house, you can never tell.”
Sun kissed, lazy days of summer unfold with irresistible longing at a crumbling villa in a small town in Northern Italy in Call Me By Your Name. Seventeen year old Elio ( Timothée Chalamet) falls hard for PhD candidate Oliver (Armie Hammer) the cocky, gorgeous research assistant who comes to work for Elio’s father, a professor of antiquities. Director Luca Guadagnino makes gorgeous use of the setting; ripe peaches drip from trees, dusty sunlight pours through open windows and bicycle rides into town end in stolen kisses against centuries old palazzos. James Ivory wrote the screenplay from Andre Aciman’s novel, capturing the consuming love Elio feels not only for Oliver, but for the feeling of being in love for the first time.
NORMAL PEOPLE | BBC/HULU series adapted from the novel
“We are most alive when we are in love.”
Sally Rooney is an Irish Marxist who writes novels about relationships and late capitalism. Sally Rooney is also a storyteller whose vivid, complex characters get inside of us and accompany us throughout our days even when we’re not reading or watching them. I watched the series adaptation of her novel on the recommendation of a friend before reading the novel and immediately started on episode 1 again when I finished. When I read the book I fell even harder for the story, and for Rooney. (Check out her first novel, Conversations with Friends, also excellent.)
Set in Ireland over the course of many years, Normal People is the story of Marianne and Connell “two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room.” It’s about love between “normal people” from vastly different backgrounds. It’s about the revolutionary power of love to change people when they give in to the reality of their interdependence.
JUSTIFY MY LOVE | music video
“You become what you think about all day long.”
Who needs porn when you have 90’s Madonna? Never one for subtlety, Madonna opted for full blown sadomasochism and voyeurism in her sexy af music video for this breathy song written by Lenny Kravitz and Prince protégé Ingrid Chavez. Paris, glam hotel room, Latin hunk, Marilyn-blond seductress, black and white film by Jean-Baptiste Mondino. Just watch. You’ll see why it was banned by MTV.
LOVE IS CALLING | Sculpture Installation
“Love is the whole thing. We are only pieces.”
To stand in one of artist Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms with your eyes and your soul open is to give yourself over to the euphoric acceptance of our individual insignificance. “Love is Calling” which the ICA Boston acquired last year, may be misunderstood as Seussian cartoonishness if only experienced through the countless Instagram posts in which it was featured. When experienced in person, the extraordinary room captures the infinitely adaptive creativity of nature, the infinite interpretations of sensory data like color and sound and the infinite oneness that we feel when we truly experience love.
The ICA Boston and “Love is Calling” will reopen on March 20, the first day of spring.
BEL CANTO, novel
“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get, only what you are expecting to give, which is everything.”
At the home of the Vice President of an unnamed South American country, an opera singer has been invited to entertain international guests, including a Japanese businessman important to the country. Rebels storm the party and take hostages, including the opera singer, the Japanese businessman and his interpreter. The rebels want justice - prisoners released, fair living conditions for poor citizens. The President, who skipped the party to watch his soap opera, refuses to give in to their demands. Thus the dramatic stage is set for unexpected love stories between unlikely pairs.
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN | film
“The giving of love is an education in itself.”
The late Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, cowboys, secret desire, director Ang Lee… need I say more? Ok, add Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams and ravishing cinematography shot in the Canadian Rockies. Brokeback Mountain’s screenplay, adapted from Annie Proulx’s short story, won an Oscar, as did Lee. Historically, this movie proved that A list actors could portray LBGTQ characters and not commit career suicide. Emotionally this movie proved that a love story is a love story and when brilliantly crafted, it doesn’t matter one bit who is loving who.
ELEANOR & PARK, novel
“Love is a friendship set to music.”
Eleanor’s home situation could not be worse and Park’s isn’t much better. For these captivating outcasts in their small Omaha town, life sucks. But when they start hanging out on the school bus, friendship blooms into something more. They share music and comic books and talk about stuff. Suddenly they have something worth living for.
IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK | film adapted from the novel
The film interpretation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk could not be left to just anyone. Enter Barry Jenkins who took on the project after winning the Best Picture Oscar for Moonlight in 2017. Jenkins’ painterly, nuanced approach captures the intense subject matter of Baldwin’s novel, inspired by the author’s upbringing in Harlem. Kiki Layne plays Tish and Stephan James the sculptor Fonny, who fall in love and become pregnant under impossible circumstances, seemingly inevitable given the societal noose of white supremacy and police corruption in which they live. The community of family and friends that supports and fights for them makes the story ultimately optimistic. But in 2021 this black love story feels more poignant and prescient than it should after forty seven years.
Marilyn Minter | photography
“I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.”
At first glance Marilyn Minter’s photography inspires all the desire, heat and aspiration of consumer advertising. I want that lipstick, those lips, that breathless desire, that life. Until you realize that Minter’s project is successfully appropriating and subverting those primarily male-appointed commercial techniques - dramatic lighting, manipulative depth of field, hyper realistic close ups, over saturated color, sprayed on dew - that make you want it. And then all that desire directs towards Minter herself, for her unstoppable courage, success and originality in making feminist art so rebelliously HOT.
IN DA CLUB | music video
Damn I miss dancing. Will we ever pack into a club and dance the night away, sweating all over each other again? 50 Cent’s sexy, upbeat 2002 music video for “In Da Club” wins when he enters hanging upside down in all his fit glory. The video takes place in a sort of “hip hop boot camp” where 50 is observed by Eminem (who discovered him IRL) and Dr. Dre who produced the song, both of whom take notes in lab coats. One of my all time favorites. Just try to watch it without moving.
SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK | film
“Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.”
That Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper have chemistry cannot be denied. They have lit up the screen together in American Hustle (2013), Serena (2014) and Joy (2015). But Silver Lining’s Playbook (2012) came first and in my mind it is far and away the best. It was also the first time Lawrence worked with Director David O. Russell who is, incidentally, the director of all the above mentioned films. Rumor has it that Silver Lining’s took five years and twenty five rewrites to make it to the screen. The raw physicality and emotional vulnerability of the main characters Pat (Cooper) just out of a mental health facility and Tiffany (Lawrence) recently widowed, feels spontaneous and almost too unattractive to be scripted. We cheer for them to fall in love throughout the film just as we cheer for the Philadelphia Eagles to win alongside Pat’s lovably OCD father played by Robert De Niro.
New England fans have an extra reason to love this movie. Bradley Cooper, who grew up in Philadelphia, is a real life Eagles fan. When the Eagles played the Patriots in the 2018 Superbowl Cooper was there, cheering on his team. Maybe we can’t forgive Bradley for cheering on the team that beat us, but watch the film and you’ll easily forgive Pat.
COVER IMAGE: “With You I Breathe” (2010) by Tracey Emin. Emin, whose raw, confessional art plunders her past loves, losses, injuries and desires, was one of the original YBA’s (Young British Artists) famously shown by Charles Saatchi in his “Sensation” exhibition of late 1997. The artist, despite a serious cancer diagnosis last year, has been prolific during her lockdown recovery.
