MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 71)
scent of the day: Tigerwood 91, by Ensar
Bitter medicinal brown-gold with cat-eye shimmer just like the tigerstone cap, only there is this icy-mint edge (as if a ripples of glacial white were swirled in) that I did not expect. Tigerwood 91 is darker than Tigerwood Ha Tinh—the mahogany floor is varnished with a medicinal laqcuer with hints of dark roast coffee. / It is the mint of patchouli, but literally (no exaggeration) you feel it in your sinuses like lidocaine—boosted as it is the dental clove—even more than something like Enclave./ (1) The patchouli-mint (Sheikh Ehab, Ensar’s late friend, I imagine—given his involvement in the 60’s era patchouli-filled flower-power movement as well as his stated love of the mint you get in Borneo ouds—would have loved this fragrance for that reason, and I think Ensar could have dedicated it to him) plus (2) the bitter medicinality (a bitter medicinality that goes more in a tobacco-cocao-coffee way than in the boozy wood-varnish way of Tigerwood Terengganu, which—even though I blind bought Tigerwood 91 in hope to get those mahogany lacquer sensations—I am fine with not being here) all together results in something very similar, if we pan back, to Aguru by TRNP. / Yes, the patchouli vibes are strong, even stronger than I get from Oud SQ Terengganu. In my notes from Oud SQ Terengganu I suspected an unstated patchouli note, but maybe that is just my ignorance of the patchouli-mint nature of Tigerwood (because, if memory serves, there is some Tigerwood in there)./ That said, Ensar does list patchouli in Tigerwood 91 and it is clear alogn with the moss/
I own Aguru but have only worn it once and this is my first hour into the Ensar frag, but I will say that Aguru is a patchouli-oud darling among the artisanal elites and here is your chance to get something quite close but cleaned of the mulchy rot elements into something so pristine and glinting as Kubrick’s monolith—pristine and smooth, yes, but when you bring your nose close there is that matchstick ash I get in a lot of high-quality ouds, Areej’s Oud Taiwan comes to mind. / The ash particulates are so fine here, though, that it has turned as smooth as makeup compact or moth-wing dust (the moth, hoever, might be in in an industrial land of gasoline/
This might seem like shade since Im not the biggest fan of Bisch, but it is almost as if Bisch was tasked with an homage to Aguru except there was one hiccup—a hiccup that with be his life challenge as someone who, as a captive of Givaudan, loves his captive molecules: Bisch must, using only naturals (no mixed media), bring out Aguru’s ethereal-mystical-Blade-Runner aura, turning what was more a fragrance for Tolkien’s Mirkwood into more a fragrance for Gibson’s Chatsubo (which is actually quite perfect since Chatsubu is not only a retrofuturistic expat bar where old-world fusty-ash materiality and meets a bitter-plasticine cybernetic future, and so aligned with the neon-lit stimulant culture of the Ninsei aesthetic I am getting here like I get from Dunhaung and many other Prins, but also means “tea jar” or “tea pot,” which is perfect for this dark, spiced, bitter, stimulant-tea-steeping-in-a-wooden-vessel profile). / The burnt tannin black tea, the pepper, the tobacco, and the bitter-resinous facets give the scent the kind of nocturnal, stimulant-charged atmosphere easy to link to Gibson’s Chiba City—more the cultural air around a place like the Chatsubo than the literal smell of a bar.” / Indeed, I will add that there is a varuek prin style castoreum leather drydown too, only what is special here in the ensar is the slight automotive slight diesel aspect to the leather—you realize it was there the whole time, where the laquer i expected would be. / But still this diesel is limned with ambergris, tobacco, and vanilla
This insight, in fact, helps me better understand Ensar: his ethereal and always water-tinged aesthetic (the most ethereal out of the fire-bender Prin and the earth-bender Areej and perhaps even the air-bender Bortnikoff) gives a new-age, a posthumanist, aura very much like Bische does (and to a lesser extent, in such fragrances as Isfarkand, Geza Shoen)./ My appreciation fro Bische has grown wearign Purpose, which brings this bitter glean of recycled air in a roblox universe that is so lonely it is downrigfht artistic, even though my heart is much more in the artisanal space. / imagine then how gratifying it is to see Ensar make the purely natural new. /
That is a big distinction from Areej: if you want to smell the old stuff, and better than it ever smelled perhaps, that is where you can go—I don’t imagine even the best batch of Mitsouko competing with Areej’s War and Peace or Antiquity (but maybe that is just my ignorance of my epochal shadow)/ But imagine being able to got into Matrix-tech hyperealities with whale poop and deer musk and ancient agarwood—that is what Ensar reliably brings me. / Akigalawood is cool, overdone (esp by Bisch but cool). And, however much I despise Promise as a slander to perfumery, I have nothing in principle against lab molecule versus non-natural ones—indeed, my metaphysics is monistic through and through: a nuclear reactor is just as natural as a flower or a star. But to see Ensar use all these found expressions of the One, all these items of the world that predate man in some fundamental sense, in such remakrkable ways—indeed, even to capture the new breed of humans, already coming, that are as at home is cyberspace as they are in outerspace is downright flooring!
tigerwood has minty chocolate too. / Brown-gold vibes of polished furniture with pale wintergreen lining, patchouli-mint lift, bitter medicinal snap/tigerwood 91 match stick sulfur but matchstick is made of clove
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 71)
seek out abuse to distract you from loneliness
dying just before the great jump in life extension
smoking the money for the bus to rehab
an addiction to putting his dick in crazy
soft-lit living rooms seen at twilight from suburban streets
the creepiness of those who live in homes of wilted plants
coming home, eager to share new truths
Mom loads the needle for her ten-year-old girl: “Might as well learn how to cope”
just as we can put on beer goggles to see what it is like to be drunk, God has access to perfect beer (or lust or fear) googles to see exactly what it is like to be drunk (or in lust or in fear)
invigorated to learn that your high-school crush turned to crack, since now you have a chance— a rock in hand at her door instead of a corsage
to the lifelong-blind words might seem better than a picture to describe the site, but—since words refer to things he has never seen—the picture might turn out better if you let him embrace your hand as you draw it
funkgasms from Soul-Train-line footage
prey to external forces (cyber bubbles foremost), heedless to how their actions impact others, prone to rashness—kids cannot marry or get the death penalty, yet hesitancy about the entire friend-cluster’s demand for sex change spells LGTBQIPsSAA+-hate
might we send them there because— not merely in spite of—all the findings about rapid wilting in the nursing home?
a white man in Trinidad mistaken for just another storefront mannequin
the frustration of having entered her life after she became observant, no longer open to fuck guys not of her religion
a novel exploring what the marginal characters of some other novel have to say
does being more enthused than usual around her, a better person around her, mean that you are being fake?
Klan members pour their hearts out to one another on occasion
multiple masks versus multiple personalities
industry-friendly science
since people cannot help but broadcast what seems miraculous, how did the disciples hold their tongues over forty days of numerous appearances by Jesus?
the addict's eureka surge from the lowest blues, realizing that right there in his daughter's room—unappreciated, one might add—is all the jewelry he has ever given her
careening alone into rival-gang territory, looking to fight
leaving prison with a resolve to get back on track
visiting the jailed murderer to vouchsafe forgiveness
the oxytocin rush of that needle made seem like a joke the bliss of a mother staring into her just-birthed child
prison-guard accommodations and sober smiles for the inmate on his way to execution
whether love can find you only if you are looking depends on what constitutes looking
