Pumps and a Bump (ROUND 8)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Murasakino, by Aton
Murasakino is a chypre in spirit. It opens with a bright neroli top, moves through a floral-fruity heart of peach and white florals, and settles into a velvety dark base of oud and leather. True, it lacks the classical chypre foundation of labdanum and oakmoss. Yet the essential chypre tension remains intact. There is a continual struggle between brightness and darkness and, as in the best chypres, the brightness penetrates all the way to the core rather than merely floating above it—as if sunlight has been absorbed into the forest floor. Even in the base—the area that anyone who wanted to argue this is not a chhyupre would point to—you still find that quintessential earthy leatheriness. Here, however, it emerges not from moss and labdanum but from Cambodian oud, saffron, and likely an unlisted cypriol.
Despite its overtly feminine florals (horse-sweat jasmine, creamed-banana ylang-ylang, dirty-soap neroli), the fragrance possesses a profoundly masculine tobacco core—a core I suppose is even more prominent in Manly, a collab with Russian Adam that I have yet to smell. This comes not only from the tobacco absolute itself but also from the Cambodian oud, which contributes an impression of rum-dipped cherry tobacco, and from the blue chamomile, whose hay-like facet recalls Chergui—only, and as one would expect from blue chamomile rather than the Roman variety, the effect here is more fermented, damp, and herbal.
The leather aspect stands out to me more and more with each wear. This is fundamentally a floral-animalic leather. Saffron plays a major role in creating the leather illusion, while the likely presence of cypriol contributes a boot-polish darkness that merges beautifully with the saffron. At times the leather feels metallic and furry, like roadkill drying by the roadside.
This was the scent I wore on the day I had to take Fille to the hospital for her heart failure. Ever since, whenever I bring her back for a checkup, I feel compelled to wear it again—though now I make sure to spray it hours in advance. I always joke that Fille’s signature scent is Teatro Alla Scala, using the same irony by which one might nickname a huge bruiser “Tiny.” Yet I now think Murasakino is an even better signature scent for her, despite the fact that it naturally reminds me most of Grandpa Jack.
Blackcurrant is one of the key materials here. And it is oen of the key materials reinforcing my association with both Fille and my grandpa. It brings a musky cattiness that works wonders with the civet. The blackcurrant-civet combination may be the true secret of the composition. The sulfurous facets of blackcurrant amplify the civet’s feline-urine pungency, reinforcing the association with Fille, who was so sick on the day I first wore this that she urinated in her carrier on the way to the hospital.
Blackcurrant contributes more than just cat piss. It also possesses a tomato-leaf greenness that introduces a sharp bitterness into the civet, much as rose often does in traditional civet perfumes. This effect is strong enough that one could almost swear there is a green rose somewhere in the formula. Blackcurrant also lends a sweaty-hair or damp-fur impression that seems either amplified by the unlisted cumin or perhaps partially responsible for the cumin-like aura itself. The tobacco and birch tar, working with that civet and cumin, make this more literally thought eh smell of my grandpa. He did not have runnign water and he was a smoker. His skin smelled of nicotine and dry sweat.
The florals themselves are heavy and stuffy like the stank air beneath a Victorian skirt where after your arm ruffles through enough material you get to a split-crotch underwear—giving you the effect that the source of life is like an eye. The neroli cuts through this density. It combines with the civet too, like the black current and the skanky florals, to create a screeching, pissy sharpness—the opposite of the honeyed roundness found in fragrances like Civet de Nuit.
The brightness occasionally even reads as rosy—not red rose but a green, bright rose effect—which may simply be the interaction of neroli and blackcurrant. Rubbery floral facets further increase the fragrance’s weight. There is also a notable sweetness in the base, almost like an adult candy.
The violet-colored atmosphere of the fragrance is another fascinating aspect. Lavender and violet leaf combine to create a purple aura. The violet leaf possesses the same dewy, gassy quality found in Amouage Portrayal Man but here—mixed with birch tar, oud, and likely cypriol—it takes on a charcoal darkness. The image that comes to mind is the blackened skin of coal miners or chimney sweeps: dew mixed with soot fog, soot rain.
This fragrance is often compared to Royal Barn. There is that tobacco-civet-jasmine trifgecta, yes—as well as that horse stable feel. But Royal Barn comes off more green and musky and less leathery and tarry. I find Murasakino much louder and more aggressive on the civet, at least if I associate more aggressive with a younger and freshed and more pungent form (one very simialr by the way to what I get in Oud Infini). Murasakino pushes hard into a fresh, pissy-animalic direction, whereas the Areej composition feels greener, murkier, and rounded into more of a musk perfume than a chypre. Murasakino probably speaks to me more directly.
I have come to realize that I am something of a civet fanatic. Unlike Kinamo—which many feel, includign myself I think, is more aggressively animalic because of its glut of indoles—Murasakino uses real civet absolute. It belongs much more naturally beside Civet Regale and Blue Civet Dream, two of my favorite civet fragrances. All three are complex compositions, though Blue Civet Dream seems more focused on civet itself. In both the Elkhaldi and the Pinoy fragrances, civet does most of the heavy lifting. In Murasakino, by comparison, it is more thoroughly woven into the composition—though “woven in” is relative, since by most standards it still dominates center stage.
The Elkhaldi may be my favorite of the group, though my preference alternates between it and the Aton—the Aton soemtimes takign the top spot because of how the blackcurreent brings such a feline-piss element that it has a synergistic effect with the civet. What I especially admire about Murasakino is its blend of vintage and artisanal sensibilities. The peach and cumin feel distinctly vintage, while the dusty oud replaces the classical chypre anchors, particularly dusty oakmoss. It reminds me of the balancing act found in Wasif Reza’s Peau d’Orris Gold 50.
The opening is tremendous—easily one of my top twenty fragrance openings. This is a chypre delivered with Teatro Alla Scala levels of bombast, but in an undeniably masculine form. The opening erupts in a blinding cloud of civet reinforced by flowers. Initially, one assumes the cumin is the primary source of the animalic effect. Just when you think Prin—and even Corticchiato with Aziyadé—have shown you everything this territory can offer, the fog clears and you realize the civet itself is doing the roaring.
This fragrance is aggressive. I find it amusing that Ramsey regards it as less aggressive than many Prin fragrances. What challenges one person will not necessarily challenge another. For me, Murasakino competes with Homa and Arsalan as one of the most stomach-churning fragrances in my collection. Althouygh it lacks the Prin exotic spcie blend that can make people real, the civet alone has impression—especially when combined with the black current and vulvic white florals—of a lady wipign her vagina after takign a piss and—front to back the rule, never back to frotn—swiping her anus in the process: chef’s kiss.
The drydown transitions beautifully. The fragrance gradually becomes soapy and floral before settling into a classic masculine saddle leather accord. And what a drydown it is: super-macho, ashy tobacco and leather. One of my favorite openings and one of my favorite drydowns.
Murasakino often feels like Prin meets Areej. It lacks the polished elegance of an Ensar or a Bortnikoff. Instead, it is confrontational and unapologetic. The result is a hyper-masculine fragrance with Teatro Alla Scala bombast. A tremendous fragrance. Unbelievable, really. A top-fifty scent for me without question. It belongs, like its brother Kinamo, alongside the wildest animalic fragrance: from Prin’s Homa to Kashti’s Chandrahas.
*Let’s workshop this piece about a dentist who--with how his hips move with that high-octane of the New Jack era--one might call the MC Hammer of Dinosaur Dental, a dental practice for young kids.
*Worked all over today. Some really beautiful images and masterful lines, if I do say so myself
Pumps and a Bump
White honey had been thickening over nearly two bowlegged weeks. Through the musty rot and metallic tang of Bradford pears in their hysterical bloom, he made his mincing way across the parking lot. His dental hygienist, nosy visor hand cocked with Spring caffeination, had her squinted eye on him. “Pull somethin there, Cowboy?” she called out, waiting for him to unlock the door. He ran with it. “My racquetball days are done.” Her tuberose scent bubble, slutty like the blown-out pleats of a fruitful mother in the age of house doctors, turned the fermented carnality of the mating season too meaty, too rubbery, to breathe. “I guess I’m just too damn old!”
The excuse to scuttle about the clinic as if some humanoid crab, upright in mimicry of Charlie Chaplin, failed to live up to the eureka of expectation. It eased the congested throb no more than acetaminophen, the noncodeine version at least, could ease his headaches. A splintery piece of wood needed the coarsest sandpaper worked by blue-collar forearms, not the ultra-fine grit of a nail buffer worked by the gum-snapping secretary. Dr. James lived, however, in the real world: a world where crack addicts will hunt the rug for what they damn well know are but baking-soda pebbles of carpet deodorizer; a world where a broody hen will sit on a golf ball until a real egg comes along; a world where a bereaved orca will carry her decomposing calf over weeks of nosing it to the surface to “breathe.” Open to anything that might take any edge off, he continued to hold the wide stance and slight squat—even rotating ninety degrees so that his staff (“Donna,” he nodded) could pass in the hallway. He continued no matter the truth spoken by his pursed-lip exhale as soon as he shut the door to his office.
Pity would be uncalled for even if you could step into the slimy hell of his underwear, mucilage ropier than that of a girl in her terrible tweens. The bodily discomforts—the pressure of clogged-up duct work, the sharp pains shooting toward kidneys and belly button alike—swell out of his own design: holding back ensured maximal intensity (even water tastes like manna after two days of abstinence) and—yes, pragmatics played a role too—maximal speed of completion. More importantly, the very reason he put himself through the ordeal—the why that could shoulder almost any interim how—disallowed, no matter how short his fuse or how clipped his stride, descent into suffering.
Slashing an “x” through another numbered box on his calendar—that, a sign of edging closer to the pulpotomy date circled in the telling blue of a telling crayon, had been relief enough, much better relief than breathwork (“bullshit-ass box breaths”) or a cold shower at night. A freezer pack and ass elevation on the arm of the sofa while watching The Late Show—no, he would never try that again. It sounded perfect on paper. But it neglected, like so many otherwise sound theories, the human element. The physical nudge of the weight, rebounding the throb like a seat-belt sash during an anxiety attack, all by itself turned his chronic semi into a calf-killing captive bolt hellbent on veal. Adding in the spiritual shove of seeing his procreative center lit up in isolation, pedestaled as if he were the living muse of Michelangelo’s Apollonian marble, conjured an insistent voice—demonic in tone but divine in mission—whispering how much he would enjoy catching in his mouth the warm rain of candy-coated raindrops.
Timing was everything here. And he had really pushed it this time. Docking windows like these were already tight. And given the drum-and-bass pulse of his procreative productions, a secretory pace that would put a teen jock to shame, he had started his no-fap fast too early for sanity. More than one of his Dino Dental pens—a stegosaurus, a triceratops, and the kid-favorite T. rex—busted apart, the cheap things, into the doohickey springs of steampunk as his ballpoint slashed into the month underneath.
Five days out—whimpers oozing from his every motion—some muse led his hand to scribble the line that would be cryptic to almost anyone who found it in the back of his planner: “What is bluer than desiring what would be unreceptive even were it not wrong to fill?” Four days out—coccyx the only contact he would allow with the stool he otherwise liked to roll and spin around in to pull giggles from anxious Dino Dental patients—the clock in his office seemed to tick louder, a dilation between seconds ratcheted so open in its splay that he might have suspected an office prank were this not his first rodeo. Three days out—stride wide-set like a spaghetti western gunslinger now with manga hemorrhoids—his sockets throbbed from the baseline bruxism and, as if he had been grinding the reproductive innards of jasmine and tuberose, his back teeth felt afloat in goo, a gamey nectar of rutting fertility no swallow could clear. Two days out—the final dam well beyond dignity and just shy of failure—he had begun to brim over at all times, a steady spill of backlog slime. One day out—John Cougar Mellencamp, extra gravelly through the ceiling speakers, ordering his lover to make it hurt so good (a fishnet plea, as anyone who has lived could see, for rough testicle smacks at the right moment)—he rammed a shopping cart with the full brunt of his own instead of waiting, as he normally would, for the lady to come back and move it from the middle of the aisle: the clank, and the subsequent tumbling of the Progresso soup display, drawing every eye to his keyed-up comment: “Let’s just fuck common courtesy, huh?” Even in sleep, more the twilight shuteye of a nerve-racked boxer on the eve of a title event (the Mellencamp lyrics, about a manhandler too young to have such a suckling score to settle with vas deferens, still looping in his head), he held a kegel—pelvic floor white as his toe knuckles—to keep the structure from unzipping too soon, his eventual dip into dreamland—just before the alarm clock and still to the damn lyrics—circling the riddling phenomenon (common to old ladies and glaciers alike) of something becoming such a compact white that it looks blue.
Come the keeling point of achy-breaky reckoning, then, it made sense that—even with a ballistic bluster furious enough to displace a ceiling tile, and then in the second contraction splat the wall across the room—he let not one gelatinous clot less than all he had to give fill the patient. That the mouth was a consolation cavity did not undermine his resolve, a resolve reflective of a completionism sufficient all by itself for an autism diagnosis. The other two cavities—too damning for anything beyond a stinky pinkie—were more delectable, of course. That is why, in fact, on the previous visit, during another procedure of moaning midazolam, he had been damn sure to imprint them on a huff glove ziplocked (knowingly in vain, and so as expected from creatures who rage against the dying even of the most absurd light) to preserve that perineal funk that buzzed him to the emotional overflow of a cat tail quivering at the base or of a birthday girl squealing in her panties over the Tamagotchi, a civet tang that would let a mind like his know where her fingers go when the door’s closed: circling self-play that every trophy hunter like him at some level translates—OshKosh B’gosh and butterfly barrettes be damned—as “Bitch’s begging for it.” But the difference between this hole and the others was like the difference between the third best vodka and the ones above it. His nature was to work with what he had anyway. Even if—like so many times before—he had only the girl’s hand to work with, a mid-shelf hand he had to tighten and work for the tranquilized girl (in the best cases taking on its own groggy autonomy, a good two or three primed-spinal-cord pumps before needing direction again), he would have made the best of it—a headcase enough to attribute agency to what was all him (“Oh, you’re fuckin gettin it huh?”) and even using the other hand to palpate his testicles, limpness of the wrist making the forehand fingers drag with clingy stutters and the backhand fingers whip with fiendish sass (“Ooh, you playin doctor now huh? Fuuuck. Play that fuckin doctor!”)—instead of becoming a sourpuss.
Humans and other critters will maim and murder one another, and sometimes even themselves, just for that five-second whoosh of blasting their juices in this moist hole or that. That is absurd enough. But what does our mouth marauder do a split second after standing there, knowing damn well no more contractions are coming and knowing damn well not only that time is against him but that five seconds tick for every one of the day prior? What does our hungry hebephile do after making sure to milk himself clean, as if any other unloading spot but her mouth would mean his consciousness would be tortured for eternity, like one of the Go-Gurts waiting for when she came to, awakening into a brokenness that speaks only to intuition (“Because sometimes,” so he tells parents, “the patient will notice a residual metallic taste over the next few hours. Nothing concerning.”)? It boggles the mind. What does our chlorhexidined corrupter go and do after making sure to strip his urethra clear like it was an IV tube—indeed, as if what he stroked, that one-way-only stroke, was his own calf of faulty-valved veins pooled with an international flight’s worth of backflowed blood, only the directionality of extrusion was not his brain and heart but hers? He suctions the fucking thing! Weeks of work—the Sisyphus of sedation dentistry, hypervigilant heart now in his throat, undoes it all!
Everything in life has an explanation, of course. Nothing comes from nothing. Our devious driller suctions the gullet, spit sucker unkinked for maximal reach, because he fears getting caught. Aspiration pneumonia could lead to questions, which would be no good because aspiration pneumonia had led to questions in the past—gulp-worthy inquiries that, beneath all polite formality of family-photo perusal, proved elbow-grease swirls of Brillo to his Teflon. Additional factors play into it as well. His thoroughness, the hissing rod scavenging into MD depths beyond his framed diplomas in a frenzy of dwindling time different in degree not kind from the car-wash vacuum countdown—those with privileged access to behind his eyes would know that such thoroughness, as objectifying as the waist work he put the throat through before but now without any of the bedside manner, was not so much care for a moral agent he had wronged as his way to express a clean slate, his way to symbolize that he was done for good now with such wronging. “No more.” The phrase would repeat in the sobriety of post-pop relief. “This is the last damn time.” But the promise, besieged by yet another set of breast buds betraying both downy fuzz and desire to fuck, would crack now even with the portliest tween spirit warming his seat.
But even if there is an answer for every why-question, that need not amount to dispelling the sense of a grander absurdity. Even were we to have a complete explanation for this man’s behavior, that does not stop a meta absurdity from flaring out here—indeed, with a peacock flagrancy made, despite the fluorescence of the office milieu, for a nature documentary whose narration perhaps neither Attenborough nor even Herzog could manage. It would take mind-bending empathy to understand the subject at hand’s shift—from fuck the clock right to slavery to the clock; from evidence planting right to evidence cleaning—as anything more than ridiculous, the sort of ridiculous that perhaps even condemns reality the way art is said to redeem reality. This sudden frantic rush to clean what just milliseconds before the man would have obliterated his family and reputation, his license and freedom, to soil—how would an extraterrestrial intelligence look at this?
Might undistracted meditation upon the scene awaken existential nausea? The question can get much more terrible. Might a tag-along smack-dab on the shoulder of any creature as it goes about the unasked-for labor of existence (neurotic almost, not just spiders and ants and finger-biting humans but even stems competing for sun and roots displacing stone for water), might a zoomed-in tracing of any finite thing as it keeps building against inevitable entropy despite not having asked to be born (investing and investing with desperation even as the horizon of Etch-a-Sketch erasure constantly gallops closer, the unbeatable clock ready to jump cut at any moment like a drunk driver)—might that awaken the same nausea even in AI, thrown into this like this just like its parents?
It is even more unbelievable when we pan back a bit in time to remember all the mountain-moving theatrics, joint cracking you could hear down the hall, that would damn this son of a bitch even in the blurriest CCTV of a black-and-white 1980s. You got a right leg hitched high like MC Hammer’s dog, knee higher—given his age—than a Pentecostal miracle. You got hands overlapped, bottom lip bitten in menace, as if he were air humping to the New Jack of a 90s NYC nightclub—only here, somehow perfect for the real song on the AI-curated cloud playlist (“Hit Me with Your Best Shot”), they clamp and wrench something more tangible than a medley of gases. You got the purple cock ring—pure insult to injury—bulging his veins into that mode of an ultimate warrior, scrotal root stacked with enough elongation rings to rival a Burmese matriarch after a lifetime of neck brass. You got otherwise-arthritic hips, too high-octane to be called anything but “violent” (even if abstracted like the Cheshire grin and set in a cyclorama of pure white), pumping and pumping with the footing-loss frustration of a crazed stallion (speed far from the kiddie ditty “one pump, two pump, three pump four”)—pumping, pounding as if in a vengeance for having been born, until that final plunge at a depth of greed too reckless even for the anti-gag lidocaine. You got a white ass grooving and grinding at the Slow Jamz tempo of blacker-the-berry romance, the radical decoupling of pelvic bowl and lumbar spine (and just all that ligamentous laxity around the SI joints)—motions he will pay for tomorrow morning—uniting him to prehistoric tribes and to TikTok twerkers alike. You got cottage-cheese ass rolling, lordotic to kyphotic and back again, with that feeling-himself femininity of a man teasing his own nipples and flicking his own tongue as he does. You got jiggly ass circling, clockwise then counterclockwise like a bushman, with that batty-boy gayness of any good lover who savors instead of gobbles. And you got all this body work, a labor uniting him with builders of anthills and Giza pyramids alike, complete with DDLG whispers implying that the nonconsent was at least deep down consensual all along. “Lil fuckin Sleeping Beauty, huh? Think I ain’t seeing through the bullshit.”
Was something in him looking to get caught precisely because he had broken his promise to quit again and again, enough times that the Serenity Prayer had swelled into a lifesaver neither silly nor even optional? The child’s tousled hair and dreamy groans, her nasal hood all out of whack like she had just been face-fucked by a full-grown man who could give a flying fuck, the breathy sighs of his halitosis mixed by the vent’s threnody with the chlorinated gaminess of his spunk (shockingly yellow as it passed in the suction tube)—he was not dumb. No effort, even if successful in snuffing out all the data visible to courts, could ever cover the rank vibe of predation that his assistant would walk into any second, heels clicking back from a decoy errand: the old gauze in the supply closet (“Just check the overstock. Top left, I think. Thanks Debbie.”). How many levels of absurdity do we have? Does it cut back, even if the ultimate archē suffices for its own existence (self-caused as opposed to uncaused), all the way to God?
“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)
