Victimhood Privilege (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: War and Peace 3, by Areej Le Dore
A musky animalic leather fragrance, the smell of deep history—this version of WP is more balanced than the iteration immediately prior. Dense, dark, brooding, anachronistic—this is an oddball in the collection, like Luwak, because it is not classical French like Antiquity II and Inverno Russo. While definitely bringing an old feel like Antiquity and Inverno Russo (that is often part of the ALD charm), this almost feels primordial (like we get from Elkhaldi’s Civet Royale, Nectar Royale, and Incense Royale). WP is also more animalic than these two by far: animal musks and secretions, dark florals, boozy impressions.
This is one of the few fragrances I own—along with Prin’s Burmite Honey and, the weakest composition of the three, mesOud’s Synesthesia—that have real fossilized amber resin. This resin here, smoky and sappy, contributes to an aroma that is definitely in the general ballpark of a museum basement or a musty closeup on the preserved roses (clovey-beeswax Taif and skin-musk Alba) flattened for decades inside one of the almanacs of an old library. It goes beyond that, though. It dips into the territory of prehistoric stone in a coniferous forest. The stone in question has seen its fair share of animal encounters: powdery-terpenic Siberian deer musk whose salty-sweet side is amplified by seawater-dried-on-skin ambergris and whose powdery-starchy side is amplified by makeup-compact orris; sundried-urine civet whose fatty-leather side is amplified by tarred-roadkill castoreum and whose dirty-fecal side is amplified by horse-stable Indian oud. In this fragrance, however, the stone—because of the earthy-chocolate patchouli and the mineralic-rhizome orris and the musty-fungal oakmoss and muddy-roots vetiver, seems like it has been overturned to expose its damp underbelly.
This was the scent I wore to sign the contract for my dad’s funeral services—it sang the whole day, the animalics lasting over 24 hours with that castoreum leather dry down that, while unmistakeably castor, somehow—perhaps because of the rich civet that adds this urinous sheen and the moss and vetiver that are longstanding enough to color the castoreum for a long time—does not have that genericness that runs throughout thew whole artisanal space.
What I really like is that for all its animalics and earthen decay, orris and rose alba come together to suggest a memory of refinement—or I should say, since I see this as a prehistorical perfume, a forecast. It is the refinement we come to eons later at the vanity table where, no matter how much powder we veil ourselves with, we remain irreducibly carnal: anuses and vaginas rife with the single-celled multiplication of alien critters that not only make up most of us but control us—our very moods and outlooks, our plans and purposes—in ways science is only beginning to understand.
It is in the running for my favorite fragrance of all time. And so today I chose it as my birthday fragrance. Should and will go down as one of the bests in history.
*Let's workshop this poem about groups who use their Hollywood-backed and state-sponsored privilege to spread a narrative denied by that very privilege: that they are marginalized victims.
Victimhood Privilege
The lie of marginalization, grant-cycle renewed, roots even deeper the more the group
gets buttered in Disney fanfare and velvet-rope indulgence, in tearful Oscar speeches
where “brave” is said enough to floor Neem Karoli Baba in a Bud Light drinking game.
“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)
