I should start by confessing that I love Valentine’s Day. More specifically, I love a sweet cliché with a twist. Dinner at home and a movie. Heart-shaped homemade pierogi. Cute-but-creepy vintage valentine cards. The collision of romance and camp and sugar and desire. Planning a February 15th trip to CVS for a discount lace-trimmed candy box and not actually going because the sugar crash isn’t worth the temporary euphoria. (Or is it?)
Valentine’s calls to mind the emotional rhythms of the human heart. Lift and fall, hope and disappointment, crushes and getting crushed. It’s Ralph Wiggum’s face lighting up when he receives a valentine from Lisa Simpson. And also Ralph Wiggum’s face contorting with total heartbreak when Lisa rejects him. It’s the smiling train on the valentine oblivious to the damage it will cause with its promise of Ralph Wiggum being choo-choo-chosen and then dismissed. It’s a day devoted to people and feelings, which get lost in the bustle of objects we select as inadequate vessels to translate our affections.
I want you to have fun next week. I want you to feel loved and cared for and happy. So I whipped up a list of Valentine’s Day goodies for you to enjoy, however—and with whomever—you choose to spend the day.
Movie Night📼
(Note: My valentine and I started a tradition of watching seasonally inappropriate films to mark the holiday years ago. I’ve organized these recommendations from least to most unsettling.)
🏜️ Paris, Texas — An existential road trip with Harry Dean Stanton. A moody game of hide and seek, or lost and found—a mysterious card, a beloved discovered in an unlikely place, a disappearing father—set against the backdrop of the desert, motels, and liminal malaise.
💙Blue Valentine — “Do you want to see me tap dance?” Breaks my heart every time I watch it. Ruins every dream I ever had of a cheesy getaway to a themed motel and a bubble bath in a heart-shaped jacuzzi tub.
❤️🔥Wild At Heart — Laura Dern swooning over Nicolas Cage while he sings Elvis at a dive bar. That snakeskin jacket! Willem Dafoe’s cameo as a seedy drifter. Also: moshing in the desert and a dark Wizard of Oz motif.
🔥Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me — Every time I consider re-watching this one, I must forget how devastating it is and yet, I come back to witness the last living days of Laura Palmer, like a dog who won’t stop eating grass.
🕊️Antichrist — If the annihilating prologue doesn’t send you running, you’ll probably be okay for the rustic, horrifying, melancholy nightmare that follows. Actually, you won’t be okay at all. This one will mess you up. “Chaos reigns.”
Bonus Flick for the Faint of Heart✨
🔮The Love Witch — Campy, witchy, and stylish with echoes of 60s folk horror.
Mood Music🎧
🎀“He’s A Rebel” The Crystals — A girl group classic. Conjures candy boxes and vintage valentine cards.
📻The Scientists Weird Love — Grungy, garagey fun. Perfect for bopping around the kitchen as you make dinner, alone or with someone else.
🍋Blonde Redhead Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons — Atmospheric, sexy, and bittersweet. If you want a darkly dreamy listen, this is it.
💔“Sluttering (May 4th)” Jawbreaker — Pure breakup poetry. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over the clever, sadly playful, and oblique lyrics (“Fly in the disappointment/Rubber I’m glue/I’ll write the book on you/It’s sticking to my face”), which find their most direct footing in the chorus— “If there’s a moral to this story then I wish you’d show me.”
🎙️Eccentric Soul: The Prix Label — Perhaps you’ll recognize the crackling opening of “You and Me” by Penny & the Quarters from Blue Valentine. A tender, romantic, at times achy archival album celebrating the soul scene of Columbus, Ohio’s Prix Records imprint.
⛰️Aimer et Perdre: To Love & To Lose, Songs, 1917-1934 — A compilation of folky long-lost love songs that “narrate the human odyssey of love gained and love lost.”
🌟“Stars Are Blind” Paris Hilton — Bring down the house at karaoke or serenade your crush.
Recommended Reading📚
🥀The Burden of Joy by Lexi Kent-Monning — A woman’s husband leaves her on Valentine’s Day to live at a commune. Diamond-sharp, heartbreaking, and still hopeful. I love this one so much, I wrote about it for Black Lipstick Mag in the fall.
💫Things To Make and Break by May-Lan Tan — Siblings, lovers, and friends are among the souls seeking connection in these short stories. Infused with occasional elements of formal invention. A dark, glittering collection with flashes of the uncanny and the magical.
🎥Porn by Polly Barton — A series of nineteen conversations about pornography between the author and self-selecting acquaintances. Far-ranging, fearless dialogs in which nothing is “too much.” I wrote a bit more about this one a few months ago here.
🥩Darkcutter by Kina Viola — The title of this chapbook, and the eponymous poem, describes meat from an animal who endured stress before slaughter. This visceral, intimate exploration of survival after sexual violence weaves a tapestry of memory, animals, nature, death, and a fierce longing to live.
🧊Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy — Obsessive female friendship is at the center of this swift novel set in a Swiss boarding school post-World War II. Icy in atmosphere, swollen with longing and the pangs of adolescence.
❤️🩹The Ancestry of Objects by Tatiana Ryckman — A woman out of work who is considering ending her life meets a married man at a cafe. Infatuation, intimacy, and hope haunt this lyrical enigma of a book.
Dessert🍫🦢
Every V-Day I bake this fudgy flourless chocolate cake by Kat Boytsova. I skip the hazelnuts, but never the homemade whipped cream. You’ll notice that the whip recipe doesn’t call for any sugar, which I think is just right for this rich cake, but you do you.
However spend the day, I’m wishing you a sweet one!
X
Thank you, darling Gina! 🥀🥀🥀
I love Blue Valentine!