Tribular (ROUND 2)
scent of the day: L’Heure Exquise, by Bortnikoff
L’Heure Exquise (2018, Dmitri Bortnikoff)—a champaca-oud composition that bridges the boozy-fruit tobacco of Tabac Doré and Sayat Nova with the fermented-chocolate tobacco of Oud Monarch and Lao Oud and the bubblegum vibe of Oud Loukoum,
—opens with a fleeting but forceful burst of christmas-hay Indonesian oud (perfectly captured in Areej’s History of Indonesian Oud) before a flickering radiance of citrus-eucalyptus greenery (Earl-Grey-like bergamot, bitter-honey neroli, lemon-camphor cardamom) alights a bouquet of waxen florals (aprico-cream champaca, honeyed-tea jasmine sambac, musky-green Indian jasmine),
a Juicy-Fruit bouquet—quintessential Bortnikoff, although here the magnolia comes in the form of champaca (a benchmark champaca)—dusted with bittersweet cacao and shrouded in the medicinal haze of tolu-balsam-varnished driftwoods (cedar mainly, but also pine and camphorwood) now charred in an earthen pit along with patchouli-dirt roots and resins (clove-and-camphor-reinforced styrax, fungal-mossy myrrh, briny-mineralic ambergris, and a burnt-rubber trio of smoked-honey Vietnamese oud, smoked-clove Indonesian oud, and smoked-leather cypriol)—
the overall result being a gourmand-leaning floriental fragrance that, perfect for its dusk-and-dawn-hour name, perhaps best out of all my Bortnikoffs balances ethereal immortality and carnal decay (less purely otherworldly than the aqueous spectrality of Santa Sangre and yet not as dankly terrestrial as the compost-laden Lao Oud), a composition that (as many have reported) smells up close more like musty-minty tobacco and at a distance like the juicy-fruit gum of Jubilation XXV (and sometimes even the pink bubblegum we get in ELDO’s Archiv 69 or Lush’s Tank Battle).
Tribular
You are still young yet. Your rockets still thrust from that city of downhill-BOCES dropouts and middle-school pregnancies. The poor there, your poor—and let us zoom in only on those few not detracting from downtown hipster renewals twenty-four-seven, shopping carts creaking rust. Their rotten-egg tap water is “good for the skin,” they say, even as they set it afire from the faucet.
Their kerosene-vapor heaters sibilant as snakes, their roof water tock-tocking their mold buckets, their utility-grade “value bacon” in white cartons leaving no triage window into their all-fat heart tinted gaslit green—they brag not just about how the water is flammable or how much they steal or how far their lady can piss, but also about how they pay child support: “Shiiit. I pay for my kids.”
Those that can read even brag that they can and thereby that even you—university you— are not as above them as they sense you think you are. It never gets old, their faked struggles with the words. “Hi—hick—corey—sm— smock—èd; hick-corey smockèd! That right?” They have an affinity for rice and potatoes and insist the fat is the best part of the steak.
Rickets-stricken as kids, no strangers to lead, they dress in wash-worn clothing, as faded as their line-dried towels. Their skin appears all the more worn, their growths and blotches, their obesities and warts, all the more intolerable. Retardation and flu abounds among them, and so the teen diarrheas from diaper to hair throughout the single-wide sinking in the earth.
They will bring in friends and family members, though—no matter what. And they let them shit and piss and die under your old comforter. During rare visits—jaw clenched in repulsion from such post-industrial tribalism, and its smell of shit muddied by value bleach—your mom, although a light in the madness, will give you that same blanket without thinking a thing.
“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)
