Roofie the Straggler (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Private Label, by Jovoy Paris
Private Label (2011, Cécile Zarokian)—a vetiver-patchouli fragrance (more fossil and fungus than grass and twig) whose aura of sterile filth (used bandages, moldy money) and old-world decay (fallen staircases once perfumed by who’s-who entrances, cracked-and-dusty spines once oiled by fingers) evokes a pipe-toking bibliophile’s study gone to lignan-vanilla rot (ripped leather armchairs, their stuffing blooming with silverfish; wallpaper peeling and mottled with roof-leak mildew; hide-curled cinders of medieval manuscripts, recently torched with scotch accelerant for itinerant warmth, on a floor fractured and uneven from the hungry but patient peat bog below)—
opens with a rooty-tarry pizzazz that smells—thanks to a shared core of Ghirardelli-mint patchouli, book-lignan vanilla, brittle-paper cedar, inky-rooty vetiver, tarry-charcoal birch, scorched-earth guaiac, phenolic-oudy cypriol, castoreum-musk leather—close to Amouage’s Silver Oud (only drained of agarwood and thickened with the cough-syrup smear of Mancera’s Red Tobacco) and even closer to TRNP’s Aguru
but soon, as the patchouli’s transition from charcoal chocolate to ashy mushroom lets the papyrus-vetiver combo rise (medicinal, papery, smoky, inky), settles into an aroma of desiccated tobacco leaves (haylike, peppery, resinous, woody) removed from the musty sarcophagi of leather-bound books (tannic, bitter, nutty, smoky) and rehydrated in a glass of high-peat laphroaig scotch (briny, creosotic, vanillic, antiseptic), the vanilla-custard warmth at the base (so-tarry-it-is-leathery labdanum, so-dusty-it-is-creamy sandalwood) sufficiently balancing all the bitterness and ashiness—
the overall effect being a boozy-woody fragrance that, due to it its patchouli-vetiver-cedar-birch bloodline, makes it not just the sibling of Lalique’s Encre Noire and Bentley’s Bentley for Men Intense and Nasomatto’s Duro and Orto Parisi’s Terroni but almost like a 60-40 cross between Profumum Roma’s Fumidus and TRNP’s Aguru, the father of the family perhaps being Bortnikoff’s Sans Fleurs (which brings boozy antiseptic woods) and the mother being some mix between Profumum Roma’s Patchouly and some patchouli-vetiver-vanilla harlot (like perhaps Henry Rose’s Dark Is Night);
the overall effect being, in other words, a peaty-medicinal patchouli-vetiver fragrance, perfect either for an underworld bossman who makes people stand by his mere presence or for a tweed-jacket archivist who has not spoken aloud in years, that would be a dead ringer for my prefered fragrance Fumidus if only (1) its balance between axe-throwing-in-the-rain ruggedness and Proust-reading-in-a-clawfoot-tub smoothness tilted further toward the former (amber creaminess dialed down, asphalt smokiness dialed up); (2) its patchouli were quieter than its vetiver; (3) its beginning shapes in the evolution from oudy cough medicine to peaty mustiness were deleted; (4) its amberwoody base, very subtle and tasteful but making it more louder and long-lasting, were deleted.
*Let’s workshop this poem about a predatory consciousness converting a bachelorette dance floor into a hunting environment where it becomes clear that assault's origin is in the perceptual reduction.
Roofie the Straggler
Hammered blondes sway on the bachelorette dance floor like meat in warbled fade-ins
to cheesy poolside porn, a rogue blowfly crazed by the rhythm of rectal prolapse—lips
bitten, eyes shut; wrists above their heads as if roped to a mast in buccaneer captivity.
“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)
