Saint Valentine, Revisited

The filmmaker commences the festivities by preparing me a strong lemon drop cocktail and an array of fatty cured meats, to pair with creamy brie cheese and a whole grain baguette. This sumptuous snack was sufficient to satiate, until the supper began.


Since reading The Glass Menagerie, the play by Tennessee Williams, I have been enamored, symbolically and literally, with the concept of blue roses; indeed, I have adopted this as a pseudonym of sorts. Here, the remaining and salvageable remnants of an attempt by the filmmaker to dye some roses blue himself. He, naturally, was disappointed with the results, but I am certainly glad he shared with me the petals, crumpled and forlorn, popped balloons.



Following the unfortunate dye fop, the filmmaker adroitly constructing a new and everlasting bouquet of red roses, from velvet and some painted dowels, a bit of tissue paper and even some tinted binder clips. I love the result.


Before dinner, he proudly presented me with two beautiful art books, both coincidentally in German, though, one looks suspiciously like Swiss German. Maybe. The first is a collection of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec prints, definitely an old, true favorite aesthetic inspiration. While many of his prints remain incredibly iconic and run rampant in the realm of collective cultural consciousness, this book features some interesting pieces that were previously unfamiliar to me, and which exuded a slightly different, fresh tone.



To my surprise and absolute delight, the second book is a collection of prints from the Japanese artist Hokusai; I was not acutely familiar with his work previously, beyond the image of the treacherous towering wave, but am fascinated by the variety and incredible intricacies of each work.