Wasted White Privilege (ROUND 2)
scent of the day: Nightfall Neroli (plus Ethiopian Civet), by Elkhaldi
Wearing both scents on my hand—the plain Nightfall Neroli (sample) and my full-bottle version: a 15ml spiked with 1g of Ethiopian civet. Most of the civets I have experienced are in the vein of sundried piss or the smell of chitterlings cooking: a bright ammoniac element like with other sundried things. But I have noticed, especially through Elkhaldi, some more movign aromas from the civet he has sourced over the years. For one I have noticed a halitotic aspect especially in his Civet Regale and Civet Royale. The Ethiopian civet in Nightfall Neroli brings a tinge of that but also something even more unexpected: a chocolatey-oudiness.
Yes, the civet here (and somewhat in Civet Prestige too) is supremely chocolatey—almost like a chocolately oud (think the cocoa-hindi bombs of Miyaz and Areej). With one gram (a tincture) in my 15ml bottle it definitely overtakes a lot of the elegance of the unadulterated version, which is pretty and quaint in comparison and does seem pretty and quaint objectively:a clear female genitalia skank present. Think of my version as more like a noir version, if you will. The sunny peach-apricot of the regular becomes like the dark underworld doppleganger—a nasty little peach: a bruised and trackmarked and cigar-singed whore of a peach.
I absolutely love it even though I do admit that the composition was harmed in the process of addign the civet. You get what you ask for and I did. To have preserved the integrity of the whole I think the 1 gram of civet would only fly in the 50ml. Maybe it would require a 100 ml, in fact.
The original integrity comes out more in the dry down. That makes me happy. But the peach is still much richer even in that drydown where the two converge. The Mitsouko-like peach is rich in the way the peach is rich in Russian Adam’s Antiquity. My version in effect comes off like Antiquity with a glut of civet. Nextar Thai is another comparison. I never smelled the plain Nectar Thai, but the wispy airiness of the plain Nightfall I imagine is like that. And my own civet-charged noir Nightfall is very much like my suped-up SE Nectar Thai—a peachy oudiness in the drydown.
Sayat Nova, Antiquity, even Mitsouko—there are reasons to drawn the connection to these, especially after the monstrosity of animalic chocolate dissipates after the first few hours. But the expected connection is with Nectar Thai. Bot have a lus stone fruit core: a peachiness (Nightfall Neroli adds Apricot), which gives both scents a sweet and juicy velvety fruitiness at the top. The osmanthus connection is big too: it reinforces the leatheriness and slight floraliuty fo the stone fruit theme.
the Both include Osmanthus (Nectar Thai features both Chinese and French varieties). Osmanthus naturally has an apricot-like, leathery, and slightly floral aroma, reinforcing the shared stone-fruit theme. The thai oud in both comes off as a tropical humidity with strong suggestions of mossy-fungal tobacco—a tobacco, yes, that comes off less honey sweet like in Cambodian varieties and more mildewy.
That said, there are differences. Nectar Thai leans into a sweeter, more powdery floral direction with heliotrope and narcissus even as it plunges deep into raw, heavy animalics like civet, castoreum, hyraceum, wool, and creamy sandalwood. On the other hand, Nightfall Neroli—my version at least—bends the animalics in more of a chocolatey fecal peachfuzz leather (more metallic with hints of unsweet orange bitters than creamy) than a sweet powdery peachfuzz leather (more creamy and wooly than metallic).
*Let’s workshop this poem about white trash children (discarded, feral, angry) in the toxic shadow of an abandoned industrial economy, children flaunting their only real power: malignant bitterness.
*overhauled the whole thing really. I wanted to make clear that the black boy on the spiderman bike is actually older than all the white kids that pedal in on theirs.
Wasted White Privilege
Too eager to salt walkways with bushy-tailed Hellos for the wall of plywood windows they U-Hauled into when snow still muzzled the bark of lopsided porches, the breath of solvent soil from a dump-and-ditch IBM long gone like dads here—the new couple on the block,
black parents smiling in a summer sun side-hug, tell their boy not to ride his Spidey bike off the sidewalk and, unaware that such expressions of supervised care ladle out a chum even more irresistible to nogoodniks than an open hydrant or a busted vending machine,
within seconds a shirtless shiver of white trash, teeth rotten already in their laundry-basket cribs, pedals in on wheelies and handlebars and pegs, flexing freedom in an endless circle of jumping the curb into the street where for the eyeing older boy they spit Red 40 at cars
without any more reservation (in this bitter payback they simply think of as “fun”) than they would teabag their pubeless scrotums into the mouths of their moms too conked out on smack to fend off the nipple suckling and the pussy probing (let alone her own greedy moans).
“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)
