Not Even Angus (ROUND 1)
SCENT OF THE DAY: L’Oudh, by Tauer
L’Oudh (2018, Andy Tauer)—the pinnacle of oud presentation in the “American style” (Risk could have been a contender if it were not full of amberwoods aromachemicals) and a fragrance that, while currently demoted by the glory of so many other hits, has the claim to fame of at least staying in the top-ten charts for years now despite its linearity and its being mainly a showcase of Laotian oud (or, perhaps more accurately, a Laotian oud accord of which cypriol does a lot of the heavy lifting)—
teleports me to a desert (arid air dusty with Tauer’s atmospheric ambergris, Tauer’s DNA of myrrh-cola incense comparatively muted but discernible) where I find myself—not outside of Marrakech catching wafts of spice from some nearby souk like in L’Air du Desert Marocain but rather alongside some southwestern highway catching wafts of creosote from nearby railroad tracks like in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—broken down in the high-noon heat (beads of salty sweat, Pepsi too flat and hot to drink, the Honda Super Hawk’s engine too swollen to turn over),
a scene so evocative that it is hard not to see the mirage of heat ripples on the horizon (clear blue sky meeting distant road) as I inhale the road-trip smells of Kerouacian Americana (hours upon hours of this rubberized inertia resolving into the pissy glow of smoked woodchips and subtle greenery until all that remains in the very end is milky sandalwood with fantasy echoes of what came before):
blackened engine oil and burnt clutch and melted rubber (not as prominent to me now with my nose being the equivalent of vulva blown out by a welfare litter of aggressive quantity, but still there), like from tires after doing donuts in the lot of a dead mall (a consequence of birch tar amplifying the smoky-medicinal-inky vetiver and the industrial aromatics of the authentic agarwood oil from Laos);
plus hot leather in the bandaid-mothball direction of several vetiver-patchouli heavyweights (Gucci’s Guilty Absolute, Bianchi’s Black Knight, Opus XI, Tauer’s own Lonestar Memories) and with perhaps the closest aromatic-plus-vibe connection to Opus XI and Gucci Guilty (so much so that I pick up perhaps phantom green-antiseptic sensations, nose clearing terpenes and pinenes, like we can might get from the Marjoram of Opus XI or the Cypress of Guicci), only here that bandaid-mothball leather is stamped by tobacco and boosted by a castoreum that drives home the fart-cured aura of long hours of seated ass while also imparting a metallic edge;
plus sunbaked tarmac (this mainly the result of the morel mushrooms and the patchouli and the cypriol and the styrax, which in themselves evoke forest-floor woodiness and boot-tread earthiness, being channeled in a smokey-tarry direction by the oud and the birch tar)—
the overall effect being an extremely unique oud fragrance that, instead of highlighting fermented-woodchip-manure oud like Lao Oud or moldy-blue-cheese oud like Arsalan or grassy-green-vegetal oud like Triad, highlights industrial-rubber oud like Thichilla but with a key difference (aside from the most important to me, which is that Thichilla has more of an annoying super-amber base):
L’Oudh presents a dark burnt rubber of skidding tires in a scorched roadside setting where the florals (jasmine and rose) are ragged and sparse whereas Thichilla presents a bright fungal rubber of stale swim-tube air in a spring floral-rich setting, the vetiver in L’Oudh (especially coupled with the leathery castoreum, the tarry birch, the burnt Laotian oud, the charred cypriol) adding more of a smoky-inky-tarry aroma (bringing it closer to Oud Taiwan) whereas the vetiver in Thichilla (especially coupled with the mossy-musty spikenard and the green-rot Thai oud) adding more of a rooty-musty-vegetal aroma;
the myrrh in L’Oudh (especially coupled with the sweet cistus and the radiant ambergris) adding more of a cola aroma whereas the myrrh in Thichilla (especially coupled with the earthy turmeric and the mossy-musty spikenard and the rooty vetiver) adding an intense bitter fungal quality (a fungal difference not offset even by L’Oudh’s morel mushroom, whose effect leans less toward moldy funk than toward truffle-oil fuminess that deepens the garage-shop character).
*Let's workshop this poem about the eros of an iterative self-bargaining that gradually licenses disaster, and all for a payoff as low-grade as a pair of white-trash thighs thundering through Walmart.
*I was stuck between two titles: (1) “The Eros of Renegotiation,” which focuses on the seductive-sexual nature of self-deception and sliding back on your promises; (2) “Not Even Angus,” which is a cold hard slap of existential irony in that the person died for some mid-grade grocery store anonymous disc of industrial meat. I went with the latter because to highlight the tragedy of trading your heartbeat for meat that is not even angus.
Not Even Angus —for my mom
Behold another death by burger patties fused in frost, the bloody combo: impatience
plus butcher knife plus the promise—easy to walk back, baby step by self-bargaining
baby step (just one more bend in the cave)—to slant the force away from your heart.
“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)
