Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Purple Kinam, by Ensar
Adult cotton candy—by adult I typically mean either boozy or degraded in sweetness from the kid version (and here the latter applies, and perhaps to some extent the former). Did not expect to get such a pyrazine buttered popcorn effect. Unique in general (although I do get that in Tabac Dore too) and, despite the berries and the purple rootiness, it seems unique in Ensar too—although in nose dives you get a strong connection to mystical lotus, almost like an Iris Ghalia take on Mystical Lotus.
Ensar is right to call this extragalactic. I really get this strange alien impression with this one, something out of Carl Sagan’s Contact: purple popcorn in a bucket whose bottom is filled with an olfactory garnish (dried berries, truffley musk pods, tobacco leaves, tea leaves)—this purple popcorn drizzled with movie theater butter (that fake butter oily nectar we all love), only this butter has been ramped up in its umami side (mushrooms, ambergris, Mongolian musk) and it too has a galaxy purple hue from (1) the floral pieces (violet, blue lotus, iris) that continue to macerate in the hand pump vat and (2) the floral absolutes (violet, blue lotus, iris) with which it has been spiked along with the distilled goo from what would seem an oud (my main reference is Franklin’s Maluku King grade Indonesian Oud) that gives iris-mineralic aromas but with a creamed and salted tanned leather accord (burnt-caramel-meets-tobacco Myitkyina plus playdough-meets-musty-myrhh Yunnan).
I have little experience with this but it is one of my favorite Ensars of all time. This is my first solid wear—I had it for awhile but it might even be in my top ten of all time. Insane goodness here. How a fragrance speaks to you will be personal. Take for example that a definitely top ten fragrance for me is Ormonde Jayne’s Montabaco—a fragrance, as an artisanal connoisseur, I am almost embarrassed to have any association with given that its star ingredient—iso-e-super—would have mobs out with pitchforks if they learned that Ensar even used a drop of this stuff in his sprays (which by the way he does). But yeah Purple Kinam touches something that even arguably better crafted fragrances of richer materials do not and it is likely the best in my Ensar purple category (beating even Iris Ghalia and its supersayan form Purple Rain). I cannot analyze it fully, but I will say that the pyrazine component, which I adore in Tabac Dore, is here in spades.
*Let's workshop this poem about the visceral convergence of psychosexual frustration and manual labor, where exhumation acts as a catalyst for the laborer’s transition into a flesh and blood piston!
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy
Vengeful blueballs curdled over months of shovel-centric HITT, you dig up the casket
and—hex key clacking into the slot, last turns uncorking a vacuum hiss that turns you
from laborer to jackhammer— there the OnlyFans slut lies: a sour slurry of asking for it.
“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)
