I’m a city person: I feel total kinship with the poet Frank O’Hara when he says, “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”1 With the exception of occasional family visits to non-metropolitan areas, I generally prefer to limit my pastoral experiences to art and fragrances that evoke the great outdoors…
British niche line Miller Harris has launched Scherzo and Tender, new fragrances inspired by the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel Tender Is the Night…
The cold weather version of our summer reading poll: tell us about a great book to curl up with on a frosty winter night, and what fragrance we should wear while reading it…
Timothy Han Edition Perfumes The Decay of the Angel1 was inspired by the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima. It is the fourth novel in Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility cycle. In The Decay of the Angel, a wealthy, retired judge, Shigekuni Honda, adopts a handsome (but bad-to-the-bone) teenager, Tōru Yasunaga, who Honda believes is the reincarnation of a friend who died young. Honda wants to save Tōru from an early death — evil, sadness and humiliation ensue.
In college, I fell in love with Japanese Buddhist art. Studying Buddhist sculpture led me to Japanese literature and films. I dutifully paid attention to (read and watched) Mishima and Akira Kurosawa; they were spoken of and written about more than other Japanese writers and filmmakers of their time periods…
Happy Friday! It’s also Ernest Hemingway’s birthday. Our community project for today: do what you will with the Hemingway theme, and tell us why you chose your fragrance.
What fragrance did you pick? As always, do chime in with your scent of the day even if you’re not participating in the community project.
Based on the quote I posted yesterday, I went with Tauer Perfumes Lonesome Rider. It seemed a good fit not only some of the particular smells mentioned, but also the general air of nostalgia, and it ties in with Hemingway’s image as a rugged, hyper-masculine outdoorsman. Given the weather here, though, I’m wearing about a drop, and I’m staying safely inside with the air conditioning on full blast. I am not a rugged, hyper-masculine outdoorsman…