Polishing the Family Silver (ROUND 1)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Odor 93, by Meo Fusciuni
Odor 93 (2015, Giuseppe Imprezzabile)—a tobacco-tuberose fragrance that wrenches us into the pagan-woodland overlap between the innermost circle of the white prostitution Venn (namely, trailer-trash females, meth thin and crotch-rot commando, quick to resort to raw-dog anal with little qualms about bottle-fly swarms or follow-through head game), on the one hand, and the innermost circle of the nerd Venn (namely, floppy-disk-era white men, Coke-bottle glasses and pocket protector, quick to freak out if you come upon them over the forest weekend LARPing in some fantasy hybrid of Arthurian legend and Dungeons & Dragons and address them by their government name instead of by “Malakor the Gloomweaver), on the other—
kicks off with spices (dweeb-pit cumin, menthol-elixir clove) sprinkled over dirty-fermented florals (creamy-indolic tuberose, fecal-tobacco narcissus) whose stemmy-twiggy facets get the spotlight due to mossy-vegetal greens (crisp-cool birch leaf, herbal-savory sage, musky-earthy patchouli) and dark-leathery woods (medicinal-phenolic oud, rooty-mineralic vetiver, leaf-fire guaiac, musty-hay tobacco),
this vanilla-dusted swirl of notes mainly meant to keep the Yaaseen-level tuberose (perhaps even up there with Aztec Queen) from appearing simply as the cartoonish bubblegum common on mall perfume counters (the equivalent of waxed and douched white-meat vulva from the first world) and instead (and in honor of its sobriquet “Mistress of the Night”) in its more natural voluptuous sense (the equivalent of mucosal and Outkast-stank dark-meat vulva from the third world)
where we see its buttery-coconut sides (triangle-punctured can of condensed milk) and its fruity-honeyed sides (overripe mango dripping juice) and its green-leafy sides (florist stem cut at angle underwater in a steel-basin sink) and its mentholated-medicinal sides (Vicks VapoRub on the child’s chest) and its carnal-rotting sides (the mortuary-floral liminality between birth hole and shit hole) and its dusty-spicy sides (a residue of black pepper now part of a dim pantry’s dirt) and its rubbery-latex sides (those tubes of gummy plastic material, Super Elastic Bubble Plastic by Wham-O, that kids would blow air into it with a straw to make durable-moldable bubbles)—
the overall result being a white-floral woody fragrance that, in seeming to combine wizard-mage ceremonies of summoning storms or enchanting armor or so on with sex-trafficking ceremonies of skin branding or forced bukkake or so on, has me thinking of the territorial crossing of a woodland LARPing weekend with a mountain kegger party where some Merlin cosplayer finds his virginity screwed (the funny-feelings perhaps strong enough to say raped) by one of the party’s herp-chirp succubae, a quick-and-dirty interaction capturing the fragrance’s mystical-mentholated-mucky aroma and that might very well be the actual yeasty burnt-grimoire aroma of the real Merlin (Morgana juices soaked in his pre-electric-clipper bush and all) if you were to squat before him (ass to grass like a baseball catcher) and shake out the heat trapped under his moldy-sooty wizard cloak like a dusty blanket on the porch;
the overall result being, in other words, a minty-smoky-dirty-sweet-leathery-antique tuberose fragrance (perhaps best represented by Merlin in the 1981 film Excalibur) that arguably beats out, not only in terms of masculine growl (with its vetiver-oud-tobacco-guiac-patchouli-cumin combo) but in terms of over quality and allure (vintage-wood impressions beyond belief), both the vegetative-coconut-camphor Carnal Flower (best represented by the mid-2000s Kim Cattral drunk and pilled up next to her Hamptons backyard pool) and the musky-rosy-rubbery Golestan (best represented by the undeniably-gay-but-still-closeted George Michael in the “Club Tropicana” music video) and even gives Ensar’s best tuberose hitters (Musk Gardenia and Sultan Murad stand out, although I never tried Tuberose Fatale) a run for their money.
Polishing the Family Silver
The story about themselves imparts such a sense of lineal belonging that they guard it
like a sanctuary, only that story—kept alive by pity-exacting pageants of self-sabotage
well beyond twerking on cars, assholes fizzing Perc30s—anoints them supreme victims.
“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)
