The Printout (Round 5)
scent of the day: Chinese Oud I, by Areej le Dore
Chinese Oud 1 (2021, Russian Adam and Jamira Oud). Because of the other ingredients with which it is blended, the Chinese agarwood used here (wild Hainan agarwood) has more muted mold qualities than we get in the history of chinese oud. Neverthelkess it is still theere. But in concert with the other ingredients it makes for this petrichor mushroom and pine-mint herb with mineralic pepper concoction. The concoction is not dense, however. It is like smelling the steam off of a hot saute pan where these ingredient were just thrown in and then splashed with an orange booze.
The effect is, weird enough, a cooling-appealing fougere that gives you the Zino Davidoff style vanilla-patchuli-moss trifecta and really the whole Zino vibe. And upclose it gives you that matchtick ash of a lot of Areej ouds but tilted in the direction of moldy rose petals that were dried and pestled into a dust. It is unique until you recognize the Zino connection, not just in their shared orange-bergamot opening and rose-jasmine core but especially in the smoky-woody dry down where—after the citrus of the Areej recedes—their shared elements of patchouli and sandalwood and likely tonka (althogh Areej does not list it).
There is a difference, though. Zino goes more medicinal (especially due to the lavender, clary sage, and strong patchouli presence) whereas Areej goes more mushroom under cloud-clearing skies. The edge to me goes to the Areej because I really like his added gardenia (one of my favorite flowers and done to drop-dead degrees by Ensar) and his Prin-style aldehydes and of course the moldy-edge of the Hainan oud. The Patchouli dominate in the Zino. That all said, I only own the new formyulation of Zino, which you can get for ten bucks. If I had to bet Michel Almairac would prefer Chinese Oud as well and Ruyssian Adam would be floored, on the other hand, by what Michel was able to do with relatively cheap ingredients.
The Printout —for C-Ride, a best friend for life
It was a heart-pounding last-minute scramble— a dance the barely-teen latchkey knew by heart. He washed his lather-proof hand (over dishes) as best he could, pelvic floor knotting in stutter. He placed the jar of petroleum jelly (too-bare) in the medicine cabinet, label faced in (as it was). He hid the black-tape-bound banana-peel tube (a MacGyvered apparatus less spicy in practice) in his toy chest—and then, pinched by paranoia, deep in the kitchen garbage, greasy and brown. He ran the dwindled roll of that electrical tape to the cellar, rocks in its radon walls like eyes. He buried the panties that had strapped his face, just right for deep nostril tokes of the tart skids, in his mom’s hamper (pausing at a crustier pair). He pounced to his room upon the muffler scrape as if engaged in his penny-rolling chore all along, curtain shadows ghostly on wood-panel walls.
His windows rattled, the slam of the front door reverberating through the uninsulated hollows. It unnerved him even though he anticipated it. But once keys clanged the curbside coffee table, something new thickened: ear-perking silence, computation. Dead on the living room floor, in the carpet’s worn path, lay an inkjet image— washed out from a cartridge low on black, too yellow from an empty cyan—pixilated on printer paper: black thighs, spreadeagled, onto which the masked marauder, dizzy huffing his source, had just moments before, squatting in ache, pumped out a diaphanous payload, chlorine pool in odor (“All over you, bitch”).
“What the fuck is this?!” his mom shrieked. He surged up from the pennies, possessed by a fierce dread that he had been found out. Yet by the time he reached the cold doorknob, confident there was no way he failed to cover every taboo track, he found himself possessed more so by that insane-making need to know, that if by some chance he had been found out, what damning detail he could have missed.
“What—the fuck—is this shit?!” she shrieked. The printout—she had it in a fist that gobbled the pan-African-hued page header “Nubian Slut” (pussy-ink-robbing red-black-green hard itself not to nut to in dial-up’s line-by-lagged-line load). She thrust the gleaming gorgon head (half-balled) out in his direction (arm’s length). How could it not turn him to stone in the ramshackle threshold, spunk dribbling coagulated to waitress sneakers?
“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)
