MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 97)
scent of the day: Vetiver Nocturne Absolu, by Bortnikoff
Rough notes
This belongs right there with Sir Winston and Symphoni de Neroli given its tartness and ambergris glow—especially with Symphonie de Neroli. I might call this the big brother of Symphonie. Both share so much. They have many of the same flowers: a soapy-metallic neroli, which gives an impression of bleached porcelain bathtub rubbed down with lemon and a bar of lye, and tannic-skatole jasmine sambac, which smells like teenbopper pudendum after a teabag has been sitting on it to sooth a tear (the coal-tar shampoo for her psoriasis pulsing into the air a naphthalene smell common to mothballs and railroad-tie creosote). They share the two same varieties of vetiver: mineralic-mud Indian vetiver (rhu khus), which smells like going into a stone cellar in the dead of monsoon season to dig up a jar of copper coins, and asphalt-mothball Java vetiver, which smells like peaty soil that a week back had bacon grease dumped on it (an aroma that, in conjunction with the jasmine sambac, really ramps up that napthalene smell). They even have a common base rooted in sea-salt ambergris, inky-lichen oakmoss, and musty-tobacco trat oud.
Because of how the terpenic-herbal champaca leaf, which on its own resembles kaffir lime leaves, interacts with the neroli, which itself locks onto the lawn-clipping aspects of the dirty peppery tufts of vetiver, Vetiver Nocturne Absolu gives me a lemongrass like in Rogue’s Chypre Siam. That lemongrass aspect, however, is more tart in Vetiver Nocturne and that is because of a green apple note that, with the rhus khus, brings this into the same family as Ensar’s Qi Nan. Tartness, yes, is powerful and with literally trigger your saliva glands.
Vetiver Nocturne Absolu is an opulent twist on vetiver. Many will not read this scent as vetiver not only because it predominantly features Rhu Khus (Indian vetiver) but also given that white flowers and vanilla and spice (cinnamon cardamom) bring it in a wildly different direction than Sultan Vetiver or Vetiver Insolent or Sycomore or Encre Noire or so on. I really love the emphasis on Rhu Khus. It smells so expoticv and I cannot get enough. Veridian Buzz, a stemmy-herbal wheatgrass Ensar, has this sort of swampy vetiver too—with all the green-apple tartness and stringency it naturally brings. Many Ensars have this Rhu Khus and apple vibe, this vibe of hyper-acidic green apple cut with a copper knife on cold monsioon mud. Layers of Jade and Qi Nan are some others that bring that vetiver and apple vibe. Layers of Jade is a strong connection, in fact. The whole thing slides into a lovely green vetiver scent, herbaceous and rooty, like in Vetiver Nocture Absolu—even down to the green-apple vetiver vibe and the background dusty leather animalics. Vetiver Nocturne Absolu is just more nutty and fungal, fresh and sparkling, whereas Layers of Jade is more fruity and funky and dense, blackurrant and castoreum giving it an extra feline-piss leather quality.
I get a strange semi-sweet-meets-minty-ashy oud in Vetiver Nocturne. Experience with Ensar has allowed me to see how oudy this base is whereas before, associating oud merely with barn, I overlooked it. Apple jasmine tea vibes that is soft and round in dry down—the soft and round a combo of the furry-dusty oud and the creamy milky sandalwood. honeyed mentholated green apple from oud and jasmine and vetiver. jasmine here has pissy aspect.
As for the green apple aspect (which is really prominent), it is not Promise’s synthetic apple. This is more more real and exotic here, which is hard to do with apple. The briney-pickly quality of Africa Olifant I get here slightly too—which is a plus. Like in that Nishane I get a diaper peed aroma here too slightly.
Champaca infused sandalwood oil gives a bit of Chinese incense mall store that sells Buddhas and incense cones, but you have to search for it under the grassy tartness. This fragrance combines creamy and tart and luminous and salty and dusty—a lovely feat. vetiver is dirty and rooty but—because of the other ingredients (especially the champaca leaf and white florals)—it comes of more like dirty grass than roots—dirty grass that has been dumped with the pulp of juices Granny Smith apples, which gives a sort fo green-rose facert at times. The roots do come out much more prominently in the drydown.
This boils down to a typical Bortnikoff ambergris scent: sun sparkling on the water ambergris—a great DNA. The ambergris is beautiful and wonderful to have, but it is quite common across Bortnikoff’s oeuvre. You might say that this takes the ambergris base (think Sir Winston) and infuses it with this element: stewed pulp of dirty-sweet grass. Sex and the Sea saltiness in 8 hour drydown of Vetiver Nocturne shows how prominent the ambergris is. Those who wanted a stereotypical vetiver scent would have been better served with no Indian vetiver and much less ambergris. But then we would be in familiar territory. Who wants that at this point? Is the Nocturne and allusion to Chopin?
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 97)
pleats of hormonal-tween tuberose thwacked with a loogie of middle-aged halitosis
sketches letting us see again textures—dramas and vibes, grit—effaced by photos
first-hand—first-tongue—study of tribal microbiomes—ass—untainted by modernity
cut out of your mother, unsmudged by vaginal probiotics—ripples of feebleness
an era where we construe all screaming first as fake screaming
feeling that you are doing society a favor by victimizing other criminals
in the clear, because this is not what an addict looks like
terrorism making our travels more significant
complaining about the job you love
try whistling if the wind sweeps words away
farts of different accents
trying not to scare others while you die—the final distraction
stuck in military prison until you name the names of other faggots
you did not think of the weight that namesake would have on the boy
schizos beaten down by pharmaceuticals
black actors playing streetball awkwardly—practice for the film role
even if we are just bags of chemicals that does not mean psychologists should be replaced by psychiatrists
black dignity survived slavery and segregation and yet has taken to the ICU by welfare, itself a mere jab compared to the coddling— personal, even institutional—of orange-deranged campus whites
that amazingness unlocked even by drugs of bath-salts low
the age where your mortality ceases to be illusory
text messages from under the avalanche
voting for the one who promises to make things how they were before blind-auditions became racist
surprised at how you change— or at how some hidden part of you comes through—in the costume
in a benighted land of scorn for genius and the agony it entails, where all are Einsteins in their cyber bubble, expect not only unhinged theories (Flat Earth), but kids to scoff at expert fears that maybe they misdiagnosed themselves as needing sex-shift surgery
addiction to the same drugs becomes a crime, not a disease, when it ravages group x— that sounds less bigoted than pious elites, poisoners in healer guise, have made it sound if group x has proven a blight: loud all night; lewd and entitled; slovenly and violent
let the poetry of the political statement better stand out by stripping out all references to particular groups
delivery guys shaking up the soda for notorious shitty tippers
raging out on the crowd for laughing at your jokes only because you are famous
learning the full history of a beast compels you to forgive it— unless you yourself are a beast?
moving to escape a demon can have you embrace it with increased intensity— the one teddy familiarity in the change
triggered at every corner, desperate for spaces safe from nanoaggressions—are women today trained, as if by a secret patriarchy, to be fainting Victorians?
wanting to hear all the niceties of the betrayal while wanting to hear nothing of it
fecal transplants from tribesman enshrouded in jungles unplagued by guts of disordered microbiomes
is it that your delivery position is just too degrading for your ex-girlfriend to acknowledge it is you at her door?
undocumented high-schoolers lying about being terrible behind the wheel to explain not having a driver’s license
devitalized by slavery and then by segregation, but most terribly later by white guilt, which whispered—in mesmeric repetition—a gospel eerily similar to what heartened the Transatlantic slave trade: “A white Savior is your only hope out of the dung”
tracking regressive, as opposed to developmental, milestones
trying to win love versus trying to test compatibility
rationalizations suiting the times
trained to treat experience as poetic fodder
an undeniable torrent of energy,
a sort of pep to start a new phase,
suffered upon a loved one’s death
it seems relevant to point out that many whites who had sex with blacks, slave or otherwise, figured—by their very own framework—that they were engaging in a form of bestiality
sometimes the post-plastic-surgery person vaguely resembles who they once were
state propaganda of the sort that flowers bloom in winter around the supreme leader
in what amounts to owning her own inferiority, the black woman assumes that your education means that you do not date black women
training yourself to believe, not the reality of what you see and feel, but ideologies buttressed in the classroom textbook
perhaps the expired lethal injections will not result in carp mouth
done in by a suspicious lump
thinking that saying, “I’d die if I were you,” is consolatory
if your friend cries about her dad dying when she was seven, hold yourself back from saying you wished your dad dead at that age
if you have no unreachable goals, the medicine for such spiritual flatness—a palliative, not a cure— is to find ways not to reach at least one reachable goal
“You’re invalidating my experience”—imagine if this picks up?
charges brought out only after she took a gender course
thirst enough to bite into your own blood ways
track marks hidden in tattoos
comics pausing for a laugh that fails to come
an oyster breathing on the plate of ice
no pre-impact skid marks
florescent light bulbs, held up by suburban kids, glow at dusk under high voltage power lines
hurting yourself in order to hurt others who care, this morphed as your facial hair grew (in part because it grew) into just hurting yourself—and still no one, not even you, came to save you
how did you give yourself permission to cross each barrier blocking you from the extra-marital affair?
the safety provided by society enables us to create technologies unsafe for society
acting as if having admitted that you were mistaken in the past is sufficient for us believing you now
so silent as a father that he said nothing to his son back in the truck after stopping to lift a turtle from the middle of the road
