Fuckbot Errands (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Figment Man, by Amouage
Figment Man (2017, Annick Mennardo)—an animalic-petrichor fougere that, although designed to capture the Bhutan of Christopher Chong’s imagination, nails with utter photorealism the nutrient-rich fecundity of peaty black earth (a cross between the mycological dirt of some northwestern forest on a dawn of turning over rotted tree stumps and damp stones to dig up fishing worms, on the one hand, and the potting-soil section of a garden nursery where staff members (transplanters, waterers, greenhouse assistants, even cashiers, all with a chronic vermiculite-perlite cough) seem either sloth-slow burnouts or intense-eyed mushroom heads, on the other)—
transitions from nightcrawler-casted dirt full of weed roots and flinty minerals to that same dirt only drier (its woodiness curling and splitting like desiccated bark) or, as a more discerning nose might put it, from something like a zoom in on a wooden chest covered by lichen and still half-buried in vermicompost to that same chest (perhaps a mildewed cedar) in a basement whose stone walls are always wet from an underground stream and finally to that same chest in the dust-mote sunlight of a spiderweb attic where it (along with an earthworm carcass stuck in the bottom corner the whole time) has dried into the lightweight friability of driftwood (albeit I will say that this is true more of my 2020 Oman bottle than my 2017 UK bottle, which—more deep and leathery and damp, less incense and pine and AquaVelva—always keeps an aspect of what I might describe as half-full aquarium whose glass is covered with brown algae),
the nutrient-rich dirt impression here—despite the bright-metallic elements (rose-fern geranium, digital-chrome pink pepper, hubcap-algae lemon) keeping it too Lysol fresh and high-pitched ever to go in the mammal-manure early-stage compost direction of Silver Oud—always remaining—even through that attic end phase, where the smooth combo of sandalwood and guaiac together yield a musty impression of old ash on the brass and wood of an incense casket—rooty and fungal (from the muddy-peppery vetiver and perhaps some unlisted bitter-licoricey myrrh)
as well as animalic (animalic not in a land-mammal way but in a soil-invertebrate way, sort of like an earthworm spin on Salvador Dali Pour Homme) due to unspecified animalic notes (perhaps involving jasmine or even goat-hair tincture) built primarily around the synthetic fixative called “animalis” (a pre-fab costus-adjacent ingredient that here, by no means offensive to my nose like so many other pop synthetics of lowest-common-denominator perfumery, comes off—especially with the help of the musky-leather labdanum—as a very naturalistic muddy fur hindquarters with insinuations of hung-to-dry tobacco and metallic-rustic beeswax and a pissiness much more subtle than what we get in Kouros, the fragrance that made the ingredient infamous but that covers over a lot of the dirty-mushroom-meets-earthworm-soil implication with an overdose of soapy-clean elements like galaoxolide)—
the overall result being an animalis-soil barbershop fragrance that, luckily unmarred by screechy superambers (unlike what I can say about some of my otherwise favorite Amouages like Overture Man, Jubilation XXV, Opus 7, and so on), could have easily been released as Zoologist Nightcrawler or Zoologist Bloodworm or Zoologist Grub or Zoologist Red Wiggler and that, tightening the Zoologist connection further, shares a near identical mineralic-soil-meets-mildewed-wood aroma as what we get in Nightflyer (the original Zoologist Bat), only the musty-dirty crate aroma comes with tropical-fruit notes in Nightflyer (as if the crate were for transporting bananas) whereas here in Figment Man the one fruit we get is a lemon that is fresh green (especially with the help of the geranium) and glints more like steel than the actual citrus;
the overall result being, in other words, the signature scent of an Ewok as he aerates a compost pile on the moon of Endor or Radagast as yet another mushroom sprouts on his reclusive face or (perhaps best, because of the non-gothic cross between slimy-clean invertebrate and after-rain geosmin) an aftershaved Earthworm Jim as he humps among the mycelial fibers of the Wood Wide Web, although in my mind most associated with my father in that fading time when he introduced me to the various smells of fishing in the Hudson Valley:
the smell of digging for earthworms and dehooking bottom-feeders (carp, catfish) at the creek under the Groveville bridge where the blind wino, eyes glaucous as a Lucio Fulchi zombie and clothing musty as the beet-root odor that rises from streets after a summer thunderstorm heralded by an atmosphere electrified with metallic air, would remain slumped until me and my cousin Randy riled up his slurs with a song-and-dance performance of “Thriller” (“Kill y’muhf’kzzz! G’awf m’bridzh!”); the smell of the tackle sections of the corner store that would sell bloodworms in Styrofoam cups during striper season; the smells of the wet stone along the Hudson’s Beacon shoreline, blood pooling in the leathery creases of my father’s nicotine hands from the bloodworms I was too scared to put on the hook.
*Let's workshop this poem about the uncanny gap between screen-optimized appearance and embodied reality--a gap diminishing with each generation as the Jenner-Kardashian fuckbot look becomes the norm.
Fuckbot Errands
Two lines of fecal taupe to chisel the cheeks of the porky podcaster (normalized clown
insanity like overdrawn lips, like Botox)—if these, too stiff for true shadows, make her
a cadaver even on YouTube, what must they do hovering in the aisles of Trader Joe's?
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
