Limp Dick Loser (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Sultan Vetiver, by Nishane
Sultan Vetiver (2013, Jorge Lee)—a grassy-rooty fragrance that, in showcasing the full spectrum of vetiver (leafy, herbal, earthy, muddy, rooty, dank, peppery, soapy, woody, nutty, smoky, dusty, leathery, creamy, boozy, medicinal), pushes the typical macho bossman associations of the ingredient into territory too chlorophyllic and mysterious and prehuman to fit into sexual binaries let alone into boardrooms—
presents a variety of bright and aromatic notes (herbal-anisic absinthe, leafy-spicy Peruvian Pepper Tree, bitter-tea bergamot, lemon-soap neroli, bright-rosy pink pepper) as well as warm and sensual notes (tobacco-almond tonka, waxy-sweet honey, leathery-smoky labdanum, musky-marine ambroxan)
whose central purpose is to frame or amplify (or give at least some movement to) the jab-cross-hook-uppercut combination of vetiver that makes this Nishane put most other maninstream hall-of-fame vetivers into disciplined formation (Malle’s genteel and gentlemanly Vetiver Extraordinaire, Lalique’s dark and ominous Encre Noire, Diptyque’s citrusy and clean Vetyverio, Tom Ford’s light and soapy Grey Vetiver, Hermes’s woody and minerallic Terre D’Hermes Eau Intense Vetiver, Hermes’s leathery and spicy Bel Ami Vetiver, and even Guerlain’s crisp and tobacco Vetiver):
a Brazilian vetiver—vegetative, herbaceous, earthy, rooty—that evokes the raw essence of tilled soil (tangled with roots and herbs) and brings in a dry-leaf tobacco layer of woody intrigue with some charred facets;
a Javanese Vetiver—cedary, dusty, camphoraceous, medicinal, even mildewy—that offers a woody-peppery bite and bitter-smoky sensuality reminiscent of a cross between mothball basement and sarcophagi dust, on the one hand, and stale cigarette ash and volcanic soil, on the other;
a Haitian vetiver—green and uplifting (with undertones of incense, citrus, and florals)—that imparts the clean and sunlit and somewhat sweet profile (albeit with hints of burnt wood) we see in a lot of designer fragrances;
a bourbon vetiver—creamy, woody, sweet, yeasty, musky, vanillic, earthy, boozy, peppery (prized for its rugged-yet-refined complexity)—that lends an elegant polish and the distant sweetness of fruit, apple especially, long fermenting in warm clay—
the overall result being a woody-grassy multiheaded-beast of a vetiver fragrance that, fortunately is much thicker and skankier than the elegant and clean vetivers of business men but unfortunately has been fitted with titanium laser-emitting synthetic teeth, smells somewhere between the inside of Indian homes whose cooling systems use wet vetiver filters to absorb the heat of the outside air (although Bortnikoff’s Veitver Nocturne Absolu much better captures that in a more authentic, less lime-neon-manga, way) and the musky breath of some honeycomb-gobbling Hindu god whose mouth microbiome carries the same pickly-civety baseline appearing in Afrika Olifant but whose iron-filling teeth here (this a function of the vile superambers) have just finished chomping a diesel-soaked cud of lawn clippings blended with trace amounts of mossy-mildewy mulch and carrot-apple compost and cigarette-ash hay;
the overall result being an invigorating-yet-grounding spicy-green fragrance that, rivaling Kouros in its ability to marry eucalyptus clean and muddy rot (a tension best revealed when you rub this in or rollerball it like Profumum Roma releases), brings out pretty much every facet of vetiver (all amplified by what I used to see as a tasteful but now call “barely tolerable” use of amberywood synthetics, not just laundry-musk cetalox and salty-translucent ambroxan and other ambient ones but even the most nasty blights to perfumery like cold-silver ambroceine and smoky-mineralic AmberXtreme) and yet with such emphasis on the vegetal and grassy (as opposed to, say, the milky-nutty-rooty vetiver of Vetiver Bourbon) that the main image I get (especially with the help of certain easter eggs like wildflower honey and tea) is of dragonflies hovering a freshly mown lawn under noon sun (one of those Thai lawns evoked by green-centric Bortnikoff compositions like Triad),
so vegetal and grassy that this fragrance fails to give us the gothic facet we get in Encre Noire and Fumidus (failing only in a sense, though, because the overwhelming buzzing and blooming of spring-summer imagery, an imagery that would have been much stronger if Nishane and Jorge Lee followed Bortnikoff’s legendary Vetiver Nocturne Absolu and did not ruin this fragrance with the most disgusting-spiky superambers, makes this gothic in the Carl-Sagan sense of forcing us to consider our oneness with all the profligacy of flora and fauna born, for who knows what reason, only to die in droves, in tooth-and-claw battle, under baking sun).
*Let's workshop this poem about a victim's friend group weaponizing a man's moment of conscience, exposing the dark irony that their taunts for his impotence demand he should have been a worse monster.
Limp Dick Loser
All her besties twist into a shiv the very glimmer of good in you, that killbone guilt—
mocking your inability to stiffen up enough to see the rape through, as if a real man
would have pulped her cervix into Saint Teresa bliss with full-exit plunges of venom.
“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)
