Sly and the Family Phones (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Oud Ertugrul, by Ensar Oud
Another purple-tilted Ensar—orris–violet dominant. I might be prone to say “yawn.” But (1) that is only because I am spoiled with the diversity in my collection and (2) there is somethgin quite allurign and unique here: a tobacco twist on the orris genre, and with a blueberry–banana tilt. Because of this tilt it would not be too ridiculous to place this fragrance in the pantheon of fruity-tobacco scents alongside Sayat Nova (apricot tobacco), Tabac Doré (fig tobacco), Royal Tobacco (prune tobacco), Lagerfeld Cologne (orange tobacco), and what vies—believe it or not—for my number one perfume of all time: Montabacco (bergamot tobacco). If we think of “The School of Athens: (Raphael’s famous fresco of the great Greek philosophers), its position would not be central—certainly not like Plato and Aristotle. It would occupy a marginal place—and if it were in the foreground at all, it would be more like the dejected Heraclitus. Now, if we are talking tropical tobacco fragrances, it might have—even despite its recessive tobacco—a more central place (along with Fan Your Flames).
I do really like Oud Ertugrul. After a sweet floral burst (berry mélange plus tropical ylang) bent in a sappy conifer direction distantly evocative of the holiday candles we get in Tobacco Vanille, I get a lot of Iris Noir’s carroty roots from the orris—the mineralic facet of the orris amplified by Borneo oud, the makeup-compact facet of the orris amplified perhaps by carrot seed, and the creamy facet of the orris amplified by the sandalwood. The musky presence here is clean—clean and alluring, in the nectarous-skin way of a newborn’s head. Herbal-pollen mimosa—fuzzy here, almost like the crushed-stone-and-sea-salt of ambergris, like it is Iris Noir and Kam Kyoro as well as in several other important frags in my collection (Golestan, The Lover’s Tale, Opus 3)—might be largely responsible for that. With mimosa and the many other florals (fleshy-dirty jasmine, garden-rain rose), you can get the feeling that—while there might be some tobacco aromas in the air from people—you are in some secret flower garden rather than in the smokers den of Royal Tobacco.
Borneo oud—outdoorsy in that tart berry-leaf way typical of the material, but here more bent toward orris and vanilla than toward the musty-menthol honey-mint direction it can sometimes take—amplifies the atmosphere of champagne cheer already locked in by the unique sunlit vibe of mimosa: sunny-pollen-meets-chilly-spring mimosa. It brings with it jungle air after a rainstorm, reinforces the tart berry impression, and boosts the banana-custard aspect of the ylang into something like Laffy Taffy banana. I think it plays a key role here—a fulcrum role.
Oud Ertugrul might be said to suffer from two main issues. One should keep in mind, however, that this is my third full wear, and I am quite spoiled when it comes to my Ensar collection. I can easily yawn before a presence that could drop many people to their knees. But here they are.
First, the tobacco could be much louder. Ensar, I have heard (and my experience testifies to that), does not like to make tobacco-forward fragrances. Here was his opportunity to stand—if not in the league of Tabac Doré—at least in the league of Sayat Nova. This, I understand, is largely a matter of personal taste. I would have loved to see him ramp it up. That said, now that I have Mesoud’s 2am—which gives me a strogn tobacco over an ambergris like sparkle—I am much more satisfied with this how it is.
Second, it is highly redundant with many other Ensars. People gave Bianchi so much flak for being redundant. While she is not Malle, which seems to have little to no house DNA (and thank God because even knowing that I still want to write off the whole house after smelling the utter travesty that is Promise), Bianchi is definitely not redundant compared to Prin or—the biggest offenders of them all—Tauer and Ensar.
Of course, it is not fair to hold this against poor old Ertugrul—I should say “young” because this, like so many Ensars, pump out ebullient-joyous impressions characteristic of youth (where all of life seems ahead and not to many bodies, if any at all, of friends and family have piled up). And one good thing about the Ensar DNA is that it is even better than Tauer’s. That is saying a lot. I used to say of Tauer that he is a one-trick pony with that base formula—but that, even so, it is one hell of a trick. That applies doubly to Ensar’s DNA. It is, quite frankly, the most majestic base in perfumery, I might say.
That plus Ensar’s own write-ups, plus the topnotch ingredients, and—to cite something extremely relevant to me, even though it goes beyond the boundaries of perfumery—that Ensar Telegrasfi himself is a man who is not only steeped in the humanities like me (I hold multiple BAs, multiple MAs, and a PhD, all in the humanities) but who has waged a war in defense of artistic free expression (just like me)—all those points, and more, have led me to keep buying Ensar despite the blight of redundancy. But really, it is a tad ridiculous. A wise buyer of Ensar will recognize that he has maybe four or so twists on the bedrock DNA and then get one paradigm example of each of those twists. A wise buyer will split bottles with friends.
The spirit has caught me when it comes to this fragrance. Or maybe I am just overwhelmed with trying to analyze this fragrance to the degree I like to and so, to feel better about myself, want to pan back to survey something much broader than this perfume or Ensar’s house or even perfumery all together. The angle into that discussion I think will be an answer to the question I often get: why do you go for these ridiculously priced fragrances? I do not get messages about my damn literary genius (come on people, I’m throwing pearls). But I do get messages about this. So let me say a few words here.
What draws me to artisanal perfumery is not only the sensual pleasure—the simple fact that the materials smell richer, more alive—nor is it merely the ingredient nerd in me who delights in knowing that the raw materials are uncompromising, chosen for character rather than cost or mass appeal. What I’m also seeking is narrative.
Arguably the art-forward niche houses that do not yet cross into fully artisanal territory (the territory of old Bortnikoffs or the Ensars or the Amphoras or the Pinoy Siruns or so on) do narrative better. They often sell their product with a narrative baked in. Those who love narrative would understandably gravitate toward Meo Fusciuni (a house for whom my love has only grown, even despite owning fourty-plus Ensars) or even Orto Parisi (a house for whom my love—really infatuation—has radically dwindled in the face of just how nonstop kitsch and full of not only cheap but disgusting ingredients it is). The thing is, as a writer, I create the narrative for my scents. If a house has a strong narrative baked in (think, for example, of Maxim’s L’Oud Marine), I will typically run with it. Even so, I cannot help but add onto it. Indeed, I trust my own voice enough, and I make this personal enough, that I have no problem replacing a house’s narrative with my own.
While Areej, Ensar, Jinx, and Pinoy appeal directly to ingredient nerds rather than narrative nerds, the sheer quality of these scents—especially when the skill in blending matches the quality of ingredients (something that can be hard to come by in the artisanal realm)—provokes narrative-making in me far more than typical niche scents. That is characteristic of the artisanal space, I believe.
I wore Unutamam by Nishane the other day. It is a remarkable scent. It will always be in my collection. But at the base there is this amberwood material—a signet mark of pop dreck—that takes some of the wind out of my sails when it comes to narrative-making. You are not going to get that kind of machinic, endlessly reproducible pop dreck in the artisanal space. There are exceptions, of course. Camel by Zoologist or the never-gets-old Montabacco by Ormonde Jayne are made up of many so-called pop-dreck aromachemicals. But there, it all just comes together. (I should say, in fairness, that the redundancies of the Ensars take the wind out of my sails a bit too.)
In artisanal perfumery, yes, I encounter more potential for story and transportation—even if it is not as overt as what you get from higher-end niche brands that can devote resources to massaging the consumer’s mind. With artisanal work, I feel myself artistically transported—not just smelling something pleasant, but entering an expression of a point of view. A perfume can function like a short story or a poem: compressed, suggestive, incomplete in the best way, leaving space for the wearer to participate. I always gravitate toward those—and that happens mostly in the artisanal world now.
But even deeper than that, at a more meta level, artisanal perfumery represents a quiet rebellion against the lowest-common-denominator logic that dominates so much of art and consumer culture. When you try to appeal to everyone, you inevitably appeal only to what is shared by everyone. Nuance must be sanded away. Edges are softened. What remains are base appetites—sex appeal, literal sex, sweetness, familiarity—things unlikely to offend anyone precisely because they say very little. This is how culture becomes beige: safe, smooth, and forgettable.
When you have that, and then a culture in which everyone has for so long been so comfortable that they believe they have a right to be comfortable, the result is that anything—over time—that is not that drab beige becomes offensive. The bar for what counts as heterodox or unsettling drops lower and lower. No wonder—though there are many reasons—for the rise of cancel culture, where even professors—the very people who were long tasked with making young adults uncomfortable by challenging them—are fired for even the merest discomforts, even for statistics that are simply sad to hear.
Cancel culture was always with us. It was a threat that could always arise, as it did during the Salem witch trials. However, what makes it especially dangerous and likely to arise in a virulent form in the contemporary era is that we live in a consumerist world—especially in America—where the ideological teaching to children is that they have a right to be entertained, a right to be entertained at all times. Which means, at rock bottom, that you have a right not to be offended.
That means that whoever is heterodox, whoever in some way threatens that comfort, becomes someone who must be attacked and literally canceled off the face of the planet. Older people might scoff. But is there any wonder, then, that so many young people believe the ridiculous notion that words are violence? And is there, even worse, any wonder that they can successfully weaponize this belief against comedians, professors, and artists—the very people who need the widest latitude of expression for a society to remain healthy—getting them fired without any real uproar, the onlookers saying, “Well, the k-word is problematic. ‘Unalive’ is the appropriate term.”
I find artisanal perfumery to be a sort of pushback against all this horror. Artisanal spaces can afford to choose. They do not need universal approval. They can take risks. They can alienate as much as they attract. And it is exactly this freedom that allows style to exist at all. Style involves unique preference. To have style is to alienate. Nietzsche nailed this point in his writing. The push to be all-inclusive is a push against style. To have style is to exclude.
Why does all this matter? Well, because mass appeal doesn’t merely reflect taste—it trains it. By endlessly reinforcing what is “likable,” especially for people growing up within it, popular culture quietly transforms preference into obligation. Over time what one might enjoy becomes what one ought to enjoy—what one is desperate to enjoy (which sickens me nearly as much, when it comes to people loving the amberwoody materials that bliond the wearer and choke out whole restuarants, as it does when I learn of children who have been “turnt out” by repeated reamings of abusive adults, turn out so severely that their own kink-warped appetite has become hungry like a star). Because of corporate forces that appeal to the lowest common denominator and lean into mass production to cut costs, diversity is under threat. Not only does the artisanal realm reflect the fact that we have divergent interests, it actively keeps those divergent interests alive—so that we don’t all end up liking nothing but the most basic chicken nuggets. Some of us like caviar. Some of us like anchovies. Those differences preserve our humanity in that way.
As we have seen in music, where our options increasingly collapse into pop rap or pop country—which, beneath the optics, are very much the same—there is a real risk that our horizon of options will close down entirely, until we think, as so many poor people have been taught to think, that the Sizzler is the finest of fine dining. Artisanal work preserves diversity and thereby preserves the possibility of discomfort, which is precisely what we are in such desperate need of. For without training in discomfort—the exercise of the body at the gym and the exercise of the mind at universities—we will not be able to face real discomfort. We are in desperate need of true challenge as a pushback against the feedback loop of radical monocrop and radical comfort. Otherwise, we may arrive at a point—like a societal autoimmune response—where we kill our nannies for not fluffing our pillows, which will make the deplatforming of professors for uttering “unsafe” viewpoints look mild by comparison.
Artisanal resists the monocrop. Just as monoculture farming produces efficient yields at the cost of resilience and flavor, monoculture in art produces sameness: predictable, fragile, and ultimately deadening. In perfumery, this takes the form of endless, numbing repetition—the same amberwoods, the same skeletal structures, the same olfactory wallpaper. Different labels. Identical souls.
By supporting artisanal perfumery—even at a higher price point—I’m supporting biodiversity of expression. I’m pushing back, however modestly, against the homogenization of taste and, by extension, of people. I’m pushing back against a pop culture in which every beat sounds the same, every emotion is prepackaged, and novelty is merely recycled familiarity.
It is cool that there can be people—companies, even—who make a living without appealing to everybody. They can have their little niche and stay alive by appealing to a base of people with highly specific, even wild interests: super-animalic perfumes, fecal-leaning perfumes—things you could never market to everyone, just as you can’t market foie gras, insect protein, or other exotic foods to everyone.
I go to artisanal perfumery for quality, yes. It’s about having a refined palate and appreciating craftsmanship. But it’s also my small act of resistance against the monocrop: a quiet rebellion. It’s a safe rebellion, admittedly—it still operates within consumerism, and I don’t pretend otherwise. That’s why I don’t locate all my resistance there. My own writing is another avenue, one that runs deeper. But this, too, matters. It is at least something—if only a beginning.
Be different people. Just because you are black does not mean you hate Trump and love hypersexuality Be your fucking selves. I’m such a lover of diversity that I’m desperate for any signs of positivity. I vomit at all pop culture. Its sucks. I find it the weirdest thing ever that we have a Kardashian president (even though I have, unlike the many who caused so much of the wordls ills with their TDS, recognized how much good he is doing and also how much he seems to be developing away from the morally vacuous person he started out to be). And yet I see a little news clipping of Nicki Minaj or whatever her name is—someone who would formerly disgust me (in fairness, I would still jerk off)—now peaking my interest, turning my head like a high pitch throat sound my turn a dog’s, because she is going against the black american script.
The fact that I am excited by this is itself a sad testament to where we are. Just like it is sad when we think it the greatest thing in the world when, because of the rampant soft bigotry of lower expectations (the true enemy to black americans, especially because it is delivered as a form of help by these scarved canceler ally motherfuckers that the character Mario in my story “Mario Mangione” is on the verge of massacring), it is said when you have such a monocrop, especially in the black American community, that the merest deviation brings you to tears and nearly has you believing in God.
Diversity—I need it, we need it, in this period right after the ravages of cancel culture when cancel culture is actually threatening to make a comeback—and bigger than ever: perhaps in this new phase professors will be hung for uttering statistics that make vulnerable populations feel “unsafe.”
*Let’s workshop this poem about a preditor father (producer, director, editor) who finds he has a budding mini-me in his daughter, who has begun to mirror his own vexation at stage-direction screw ups.
Sly and the Family Phones
Tongue shy above the spread of his bossy sister and her POV gonzo B-cam (“Lower!”),
the giggly preschooler— to the frustration of his A-cam dad (“Suck the shit like I do!”)—
keeps dive-bombing mere mons (baby chub, for all her lip) as if it were tuna soft serve.
