Saxon Henry's Blog, page 15
April 1, 2015
The Legacy of the End of an Era
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
Don Draper reads Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency.”
A voiceover of Don Draper reciting the lines leading this post while thumbing through a copy of Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency bring one of my favorite episodes of Mad Men to a close. He’s reading them from O’Hara’spoem “Mayakovsky,” which first appeared in print in 1957. The choice of this poem by this...
March 16, 2015
Love Among the Ruins
Study for plate V of the Différents vues de Pesto: A view of the Interior of the Basilica looking north, ca. 1777-78, rendered in black chalk and wash with pen and brown ink and red chalk on paper.
How would it feel to spend your life so absorbed by crumbling architecture and disintegrating stone you could bring them vibrantly back to life with chalk and a pen? Giovanni Battista Piranesi knew, his talent for accuracy in imagining the details that flirted at the edge of the decaying world so a...
March 10, 2015
Poetry and Ceramics in Savona
In angry sea, suffered in the storm,
I call upon you, our benign Star —Gabriello Chiabrera
The restored frescoes on the ceilings hover above priceless treasures.
The above lines penned by the 16th-century Savona poet made a strong impression on Thomas William Parsons when he found them inscribed on a statue of the Madonna near the town’s lighthouse during a tour of Italy in the 19th century. He was so moved, the American poet penned the sonnet “Savona: Vespers on the Shore of the Mediterranean”...
March 3, 2015
A Definition of Fleeting
“O nature, merciful and cruel mother,
when do you have such power and such contrary wills,
to make and unmake things so charming?” —Petrarch
Petrarch, one of the best-known Italian poets of the Renaissance, built a legacy around the ephemeral emotion of grief. He once lamented that everything pleasing in the world was to him nothing more than a breve sogno (a brief dream). He described himself as having a yearning mind, as a man who thought and wept and wrote. He did so as a restless rambl...
The Definition of Fleeting
“O nature, merciful and cruel mother,
when do you have such power and such contrary wills,
to make and unmake things so charming?” —Petrarch
Petrarch, one of the best-known Italian poets of the Renaissance, built a legacy around the ephemeral emotion of grief. He once lamented that everything pleasing in the world was to him nothing more than a breve sogno (a brief dream). He described himself as having a yearning mind, as a man who thought and wept and wrote. He did so as a restless rambler s...
February 24, 2015
Mme Cezanne at the Met
“For nearly seventeen years, Cézanne would conceal his affair with Hortense from his father…” —Philippe Cézanne
“Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair” (about 1877) by Paul Cézanne, oil on canvas; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. As I studied the sketches and paintings in the Madame Cézanne exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I was compelled to ask the sullen woman peering back at me, “What would it mean to live with you hovering above a console table? How would it feel to find you lurking i...
Madame Cezanne at the Met
“For nearly seventeen years, Cézanne would conceal his affair with Hortense from his father…” —Philippe Cézanne
“Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair” (about 1877) by Paul Cézanne, oil on canvas; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
As I studied the sketches and paintings in the Madame Cézanne exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I was compelled to ask the sullen woman peering back at me, “What would it mean to live with you hovering above a console table? How would it feel to find you lurking in...
February 19, 2015
Courtesan Style Counts
“Who were these women, these ghosts of society? And what was this strange ‘half world’ that they inhabited—the demi-monde…?”
– Katie Hickman
The Alden Parkes Courtesan Chair in all its splendid glory! With Valentine’s Day solidly in the rearview mirror, I’m leaving love behind to fully embrace lust. What precipitates this dip into ardor? I’m seriously enamored with this sexy chair by Alden Parkes, which the manufacturer has dubbed the Courtesan chair. It is aptly named because it represents...
Courtesan Style Counts Just as Much
“Who were these women, these ghosts of society? And what was this strange ‘half world’ that they inhabited—the demi-monde…?” – Katie Hickman
The Alden Parkes Courtesan Chair in all its splendid glory!
With Valentine’s Day solidly in the rearview mirror, I’m leaving love behind to fully embrace lust. What precipitates this dip into ardor? I’m seriously enamored with this sexy chair by Alden Parkes, which the manufacturer has dubbed the Courtesan chair. It is aptly named because it represents the...
February 15, 2015
Model Property: The Grand Budapest Hotel
“The hotel becomes a character in the movie…” —Owen Wilson
The architectural model that became The Grand Budapest Hotel.
When the Writers Guild of America awards were handed out yesterday, Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness won for the best original screenplay for The Grand Budapest Hotel. I absolutely adored the film, which also won the Golden Globe for the Best Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical and is nominated for nine Academy Awards to be handed out a week from today. Oscar nods include Best Wr...
