These Things: Vampires for Valentines. It's An Easy Mistake.

“You will be too much for some people. Those aren’t your people.”

- Glennon Doyle Melton

“Art takes time,” writes Jeanette Winterson in “Art Objects,” like the evolution of the alphabet or 60 years of intimate portraits of your lover, and love too takes time in that instant on an October afternoon in the lobby of a symphony hall before I knew her coming-of-person novel “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit” then shortly after meeting Jennifer and Hemingway’s “Garden of Eden” and the poem, stink, and grating noise of weekend drives to Monterrey and that afternoon lunch in a place just north of Napa where you could order a burrito as a side and fall into discussions of the poetry of Frank O’Hara and how these were set to music by Morton Feldman in 1973 and I don’t want to lose these memories or “That Feel” that Tom Wait’s croons about tenderly at the end of “Bone Machine” but I can’t get the images of Lupercalia and the origin of Valentines Day out of my mind, this day that’s been dedicated to love, to fertility, to the mating season of birds, to ritual sacrifice, to the supplantation of pagan ritual, so it’s easy to understand why even living “Among the Immortals” that they live by the code: “Only Lovers Left Alive.”

So, let me explain:

• A fascinating look at the blood ritual sex magic origins of Valentine’s Day.

• Jeannette Winterson’s “Art Objects,” and I read the word “objects” here as a noun and a verb, is a sparkling collection of thoughts on art and our human relationship to it. “If you can love a Hockney (brightly colored paintings of things you can understand), you can love a Pollock (generally muted colors representing things that only music described before he invented action painting).”

• Also by Winterson, is this fantastic coming of age story of a young (obviously) lesbian who discovers that “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.”

• Lee Friedlander’s intimate photographic portraits of his wife taken over sixty years.

• I just finished reading again Paul Lake’s novel “Among the Immortals” which is very geeky for poetry enthusiasts who love the Lake Poets (Byron, Shelly (Mary and Pearcy), Keats) and don’t mind the idea that they may be vampires.

• Speaking of love stories, one of my favorite love stories to art, and the idea of eternal love, is Jim Jarmusch’s fairly recent film “Only Lovers Left Alive.” It’s a love story where the lovers happen to be vampires.

It’s occured to me that I’ve made an alliterative mistake on the holiday today. It’s Valentines, not Vampires. And so it is.

Recently on The Morning Ride Pedal Powered Podcast

This podcast is a personal journal I record this podcast on my bicycle ride into the office every Monday and Thursday on topics of personal productivity, creativity, cinema, literature, music, and bicycle commuting.

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