Eighth Grade Persona Project (ROUND 1)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Kam Kyoro, by Ensar Oud
Another banger with salty sea-brine ambergris ethereal vibe like Pink Papua (one of my favs) and especially mystical lotus (because of the shared aquatic-tea blue lotus), except here there is a green presence (cypress, artemsia) to give the blue lotus more of a Mousse Illuminee and even Memoir Man bend (which thereby brings it into Irian Green territories. / What is most unique here is the aromatic bite of juniper berry (distantly reminiscernt of Rake and Ruin) plus a subtle underlay of a similar smoke we get in Aroha Kyaku. Only here we get added funk that because of the hyrax-osmathus combo goes more in a dusty apricot suede direction than the metal-black smoked leather of more castoreum-rooted releases. This suede comes off even fuzzier when you consider the subtle role of the velvety rose.
These ambergris heavy Ensars blur for me—I need to spend more analytical time with each. But what is clear as off now is a wonderful tension between brightness that reaches its roots into darkness. The combo of blue lotus and artemisia and mimosa gives this a solid connection to Musk Gardenia releases—but this is much more aquatic in orientation, focusing on ambergris instead of musk and also have much more of a wild tension between light and dark. Indeed, I would even call this blue—having some shower-gel roots even—so long as you have the nose to smell it: an incensy adult shower gel (not the frat-guy generic shit).
Yes, tension is what this sucker is all about. You got all these cold notes: bracing-medicinal blue cypress, bitter-herbal artemisia, pine-needle-in-an-ice-cube juniper berry, natural-spring blue lotus. Then you got all these warm notes: smoky-resinous ouds, sun-baked stone hyrax, dry-toasted caraway. The effect is that you get a clash of warm front and cold front bridged by the middle-ground chameleons: sea-breeze-meets-skin-salt ambergris, apricot-skin-meets-iced-tea osmanthus, sunny-pollen-meets-chilly-spring mimosa. So yes, you get a sophisticated tug of war where silver-blue chill gives way more and more to the heat of salt-crusted leather. Think of it like blue sports body wash meets artisanal attar.
*Let’s workshop this found poem: an antiracist clause in a middle-school writing assignment that asks students of a certain racial identity to stay in their lane as a matter of equity-based recompense
Eighth Grade Persona Project
*Non-BIPOC students who plan to write about a BIPOC figure are discouraged from inhabiting that figure’s own voice. To respect lived experiences and traumas
spoken over and misrepresented for too long, you are encouraged instead to adopt a more removed perspective: bystander, journalist, even analyst. This is a guideline.
It is not a formal rule. That said, any student who decides to take a different approach must meet with me no later than two weeks in advance to discuss the risks.
“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)
