MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 72)
scent of the day: Silver Oud, by Amouage
Silver Oud (2021, Cecile Zarokian)—a wood-coal fragrance with an intense earthy impression, only instead of the bright potting soil of Figment Man we get tire firepit compost active with the late-stage rot of fruit and pinecones and even hints of charred cowpats—
opens with a churning pileup of earthy-woody elements (charred-herb cypriol, camphor-cocao patchouli, pencil-sweet cedar, chimney-soot birch, medicinal-tar guaiac, fruity-manure agarwood) that together impart not only creosote facets (amplified by the metallic-leathery castoreum and, I suspect, a lick of sticky pine tar) but also gourmand facets (amplified by the boozy-creamy vanilla and what reads, to me at least, like ghosted raspberry ketone, some sort of fermenting sweetness),
an opposition zipped together by a musky-caramel ambrarome into a mineral-rich loam that seems composed from a velvety rum cake crushed up with a bit of Skittle-feed cowpat (the oud in the name) and a whole bunch of cinderless campfire ash (the silver in the name)—
the overall effect being a smoky-woody fragrance whose Assam oud, while giving a lot more of the matchstick ash we get at the base of Oud Taiwan and several Ensars than of the chocolatey haunch and fruity tobacco many of us expect (and get in spades, for example, in Miyaz releases), serves as only a small part of the charred-woodchip-meets-mineralic-charcoal accord made by the star ingredients (patchouli, birch, vanilla, cypriol), and this is why one should not going into this expecting to see highlighted an infected-cyst-blue-cheese oud (Prin’s Arsalan) or a moldy-beach-ball oud (Prin’s Thichilla) or an engine-oil-meets-burn-clutch oud (Tauer’s L’Oudh) or a chocolate-shit-haunch oud (Rania J’s Assam Oud) or musty-rope-meets-mushroom-and-mildewed-cheese-rind oud (Areej’s History of Chinese Oud) or even a barn-straw-and-dried-cowpats oud (Areej’s History of Indian Oud) but rather a perfume much better crafted and much more reminiscent of Private Label than any of these (Private Label with some Ani and some fruity-matchstick-ash oud thrown in);
the overall effect being, to drive home why this still remains in my top fifty, a patchouli-birch memento mori that, although characterized by sulfuric ash and organic decay, avoids cheap gothic tropes of mascara romanticism and yet brings enough powdery poshness and vanillic sweetness to land in a zone as dandyish as Portrayal Man, only instead of Oscar Wilde we have here the gentlemanly and urbane Satan of Goethe’s Faust (a Satan that does not spin heads around and do jump scares but who has us consider, in the placid tone of Carl Sagan, the immensity of the universe and the reams and reams of plant and animal death and how we are not above any of it).
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 72)
the first human kiss
Wigger Studies in a future college near you, profs specializing in specific decades
an addict’s radar, effective in every city, sometimes spots a closeted dealer
a guard kind enough to smuggle in a snowball for the man in solitary
over-policed because under-resourced—not because of toxic cultural attitudes
eyes are not made racist seeing that gorillas in estrus twerk like the best of them
phoning a friend in your sights to watch how they react to your call
boomboxes known to eat tapes
anger is armor—heavy armor
always stopping the use of the drug, but never the starting again
the kind of girl who would disagree with herself if you started agreeing with her too much
if we can still be so cradled and soothed today by the tailpipe fumes of our unregulated youth, what other horrors might we have grown to love?
the more we will interact with AI the less our inner worlds will seem so special, so other to computation
it sucks when you have been clean so long, but your side personality gets smashed any chance it gets
helplessness: gasoline for addiction
TV doctors instructing real doctors on bedside manner
labs stationed within Euro clubs to test the authenticity of ecstasy
the human psyche mapped out over decades of web searches
a voice—think Coko’s—that renders bad looks—think Coko’s—unimportant
tired in a way that sleep could never fix
a land where people are fired— rendered unemployable even— because of “transgressive” poetry
so taken by the painted landscape because our primitive ancestors would find it a place for flourishing
speediness, which our culture shames us into, at least helps us block out the queasy questions
might awareness of our resilience to setbacks, knowing how we get over them in time, perhaps make us more susceptible to them?
to ask and not to ask Xs for forgiveness when they insist that nonX you insulted them is racist: to ask is to discount how dire the X experience continues to be due to terrors perpetrated by your kind; not to ask is to ignore that X people insist you insulted them
whenever she heard rapey squeals in her son’s bedroom, the mother simply told them to “quiet down”
tapped—or better, perhaps, trapped— by critics, collectors, and curators as the hottest artist on the scene
the mega-retail corporation serving as a private anti-poverty program for those withered to poverty by it
protecting yourself by thinking that the gist is all you need— the gist of the madman’s words
