Monthly Archives: January 2016
SIX TUBEROSES
“You could smell her tuberose from the stage”,
my cousin said, speaking of Madonna.
Somehow he always manages to get the very best seats to her concerts, and she apparently wears so much tuberose (either Fracas or Annick Goutal Gardenia Passion) that as she grinds and sweats and hurls herself around, powder and tubereuse arise from her and emanate out into the audience: a tangible, tantalising perfume. You can smell me, but you’ll never touch me.
A huge Bowie fan, like many current pop stars who were influenced by him greatly in their youth, she sang ‘Rebel Rebel’ the other night in Houston, Texas – bowing down in tribute before a huge screen of Ziggy Stardust. I’d love to have been there.
But Madonna is coming to Tokyo soon as well. We’re going to go and see the show on Valentine’s Day, although the top-priced tickets, at five hundred dollars by the stage, are, unfortunately, out of reach.
I suppose I’ll just have to imagine the tuberose.
Source: SIX TUBEROSES
Filed under Flowers
I AM NOT YET READY TO TOUCH DEATH
I am currently in my easy season: from December to April the schedule is much lighter. And so I had the time, and the space, to waste some time in Yokohama city centre today before my lessons. I went to Tower Records. It still, just about, exists in Japan. I went to the David Bowie Section. Black Star, the new album, was sold out. Except for one edition of the vinyl (hurrah that records are coming back!)
A man standing next to me had a plastic basket full of CDs, about fifteen, all Bowie.
(Why was he buying them? Out of curiosity? Because of the ‘hype’?)
I moved towards the new record. And I felt suffocated. Oxygen stopped, just by looking at it, even though I had just been quite seriously considering buying it. David Bowie’s epitaph. His brilliant joke. His gravelly, barking, voice beyond the grave. And it suddenly seemed electrifyingly creepy. Petrifying, actually. As though my breath were being negated. The idea that I would put that on the player, and have his voice, his body freshly cremated, today, or yesterday, or whatever time zone he is in, coming at me through the speakers. Speaking, singing to dead, from the ‘beyond’. An ‘agonizingly lovely record’, or whatever the reviews are saying.
But looking at the plastic, and the vinyl beneath it, and the paper sleeve beneath that; and then the label on the record beneath that, I really, quite viscerally, felt the BLACK. The death. A sense of being enfolded. Of being entombed. Of being somehow drawn against my will, with the fingers of Lethe, into a lightless void. And quite frankly I was on the verge of a panic attack. There was no way in hell that I was buying that disc, even though that had been my intention, just minutes before; even though I had played Station To Station, though half-heartedly, and at very low volume, earlier in the morning.
I went to another record shop, one of those hidden away emporia just for geeks (I got a new stylus for my birthday, and so am loving my plastic record player in the kitchen), a place surprisingly busy for a Thursday afternoon, a place I thought I could pick something obscure, or long forgotten, unobtrusively, and inexpensively, a cheap thrill before work – but, as I well should have imagined, it was all Bowie, Bowie, Bowie: records out on display; posters, picture discs, and every conceivable playstation or video booth or radio speakers playing some form of the greatest hits: I had just escaped from Black Star (David, no offence: I genuinely think this is genius: you planned it exactly, as I would have, probably, had I been in your position); you knew that there would be a brief ‘before’, to get the reviews (it’s apparently a masterpiece, but who knows what to believe anymore); you knew that then people like me would stand before the vinyl – it is beautiful – and potentially have this exact reaction (seriously, what the fuck is a download? it is nothing). Even a CD is nothing compared to the record: that great, physical, deathstar of Black, of oblivion and cancellation, so big and so light-consuming that I felt instantaneously snuffed out even just looking at it : the whole thing is just so MAGNIFICENTLY RENDERED.
But hearing Let’s Dance, and China Girl from one speaker, and This Is Not America from another, and Blue Jean from another, and Absolute Beginners from yet another; all at different volumes, and in different places, an aural disorientation, and then the array on display of all the albums, all those faces, all those looks from the beginning to the end, we couldn’t escape your face at all, it was a cacophony and I started to feel a bit unhinged- and having just had that ‘blackout’ at Tower Records, I was starting to feel I couldn’t breathe. Very ; highly; unpleasant. I was sweating. It is very cold right now and I was typically overlayered and be-scarved, really overheating in the Bowie blanket (death casket) of commercial sell-sell-sell that was going on all around me.
I had to get out.
Filed under Flowers
WHAT WAS BOWIE’S SCENT?
Silver Mountain Water, by Creed.
Icy, sparkling, andogynous, metallic.
Filed under Flowers
DAVID BOWIE: : : : : : TRUE ARTIST
I spent most of last summer listening to the music of David Bowie. As though I was discovering him for the first time. Somehow, and for no apparent reason, although I have a good few Bowie albums in my collection and have long had a keen respect for his music and alien-like unapproachability; the fact that he was (I can’t believe I am already using the past tense, I really can’t) so effortlessly, so brilliantly cool and so utterly, uniquely distinctive, so inimitably original – despite all this, I had rarely let his oeuvre get so completely under the skin as I did for those hot weeks we spent at home in July and August just lazing around and blasting out his music. Last August the soundtrack was David Bowie. And virtually nothing else.
My longtime friends all know that I am always making CD compilations that I then send them ( although it has tailed off somewhat in recent years), and, if the CD drive hadn’t been bust at that particular time and I had been more prescient, then many of them would probably then have been receiving, in the post, my ‘Ultimate Bowie’ mix, called ‘I’m Only Dancing’ that I was working on and listening to obsessively, all day every day, so perfect in the searing Japanese heat, so ridiculously exciting. Exotic. Full of heat, yet cold; that exquisitely clammy froideur, grandeur; that bi-optic, reptilian genius (and yes of course I realise that you can just send playlists online and all that, but receiving the physical, personally designed CD as an object to keep – and all my friends will also attest, always perfumed, oh yes, you have to perfume the track listing to make it sink into you even more – is so much more pleasurable and endurable). The antithesis of the banal and the prosaic, this weird, eerie funk music bathed in atmospherica, those cold, staring eyes, the curious, unworldly mindset of an inscrutable, canny rockstar who had so perfected the art of overwhelming detachment that for many people, in many walks of life, he was a God.
Beginning with the cocaine-fuelled hysteria of ‘Stay’ from Station To Station, a song that played loud could literally bust my brain chemistry I find it so exhilarating, so rangy and sinewy, a blinding, white-powder shock funk that even with my crummy, bad knees had me dancing like a dervish round the kitchen on the vestiges of my cartilage (along with Duncan, as well half the time, both of us swept up in the fever), in my decade-hopping mix taken from most of the albums, I then wound eclectically in my choices through the blue-eyed white boy funk period of Young Americans (possibly my favourite Bowie album), that record – seen on my sofa in the picture – that has such addictively swaggering songs on it as Fascination and Right – so insanely danceable and heady I could lose my mind to them -(and have done, frequently) on the dance floor, through to the shimmering, jazz-tinged chameleonica of Lady Of The Grinning Soul (so, so beautiful, from the Aladdin Sane LP, along with that classic, addictive and head-spinning eponymous song), through to the gloom-laden instrumentals from Heroes and Low, and The Secret Life Of Arabia (swoon) as well as the Turk-tinted pop songs from Lodger – all my favourite Bowie songs, in my obsessive compiling, merging, gradually into a two CD mix that gradually segued into the hits, on Part Two, from Loving The Alien through to Space Oddity and the beautiful Life On Mars, Ashes To Ashes, Look Back In Anger, the, again absurdly groove-inducing John I’m Only Dancing (Again) and ending, finally, with the full length album version of Let’s Dance, which to me, is such a blisteringly, searingly, body-wrenchingly exciting pop song that I can still never forget the moment, in 1983, that it blasted right through to the top of the charts. It was amazing: nothing had ever sounded quite like it. When we have a party and I put it on and it reaches that climax, I really do tremble like a flower.
*
And then, just two nights ago (really?) we were about to go out, to Tokyo, and post bath, getting ready upstairs and applying my scents, I happened to see on social media that there was, out of the blue, a new single: Black Star. Like many people, I have been less enamoured of David Bowie’s output of recent years, but clicking on the Vevo link for the hell of it I found that I was quite mesmerised, that his music was again renewed: a riveting, ten minute song that begins like Bjork’s Spain/Moorish Hunter, that then segues and swoops into more soaring, melodic territory before returning, with its Butoh influenced dancers, to its odd, jittering start. It was so good I listened to it immediately again twice more afterwards, excited and genuinely drawn in. I’ll buy the new album next week, I said to myself, having read some rave reviews, amazed and really pleased that someone, at 69, could still be at the pinnacle of their powers, still able to shift gears, and styles, create relevant sounding music ,preserve that mysterious aura that David Bowie has always had more than any other pop star, ever (forgive me if I am sticking to the present perfect tense; it feels more natural, somehow, than the past simple: can he really have gone? ). I really couldn’t believe it at all this evening when I saw that he is now dead, just when he was about to stage another artistic rebirth (with another single, and a musical, most tellingly, called Lazarus. He knew).
*
In truth, if I am honest, unlike other people I know, I never felt any deep, sentimental connection to David Bowie. In some ways he even repelled me . Many of my friends, on the contrary (because I naturally, obviously, have the kind of friends who love David Bowie) will be really mourning the loss of the man today and tonight, really mourning him – on a deep and emotional level for what he meant for them- for the incredible pioneering of his artistry and androgyny, his middle finger to the establishment, for the sheer influence that he has had on so many spheres of modern culture (he changed music; he changed how we view gender, the man truly liberated, and the way he looked was so astonishing; I picked up, again in the summer, during this almost clairvoyant late-stage Bowie mania, a Greatest Video Hits Collection that was fascinating to watch, to see his evolution, but despite all the kaleidoscopic image changes and abrupt changes in musical style it was the Life On Mars video that struck me the deepest: I honestly don’t think I have ever seen a human being look more amazing; more enviably stylish and original. He was not of this world; a man who fell to earth, from beyond).
Yet, as I said, he never really touched me emotionally. The friends I have in England and around the world at this moment who will probably be crying at the loss of their Hero, their Thin White Duke, their Ziggy, those precious, classic records they played to death as they were growing up and that presented them with salvation and a sense that there was hope for people that couldn’t, or didn’t want to, conform to the bleakness of society’s rules, I know they will be devastated at his loss, but I myself had other idols and music that touched me on a deeper, more intuitive emotional level, that reached further into the recesses of my soul. He was not my favourite musician. And yet, when I think about it, there is not a great deal of music in the pop music canon that can make me feel quite so deliriously excited and outside myself as David Bowie’s, that can rev me up in such an incandescent, peculiar way. If dancing and the inability to sit still, or restrain your inner organs in serenity is emotion, then the man, in fact, did blister me to the core.
For me, David Bowie was more than just a pop singer, or a performer. He was a true artist. He was living his ideas, aware of his deity-like status, yet not exploiting it. He just created, from afar. And how clever, and how tragically beautiful, in a way, this ending. To make an album in silence, while suffering with a terminal illness in pain, to still create and make new music as a fresh, indignant riposte to mortality: to release an album – on his birthday – and then to die right afterwards. It is a cruel, master-plan of a cosmic joke. His final bow. Sad, but totally brilliant. Somewhere, out there in the strange Major Tom trajectory of his space odyssey, I know that the Star Man is smiling.
Filed under Flowers
COMME DES GARCONS ‘FLORIENTAL’ (2015) + THE HARA MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
The perfumes of Comme Des Garcons are quite often sold in modern art galleries here in Japan, which makes sense when you think of the continuously avant garde fashion creations of founder Rei Kawakubo, as well as the conceptual inventiveness of many of the fragrances and their futuristic, ‘anti-perfume’ philosophies. In terms of design, also, the bottles of Comme Des Garcons scents – sleek, ergonomic, if often impractical – fit nicely into the context of an art museum gift shop, placed neatly next to stylish unnecessities, note pads, and odd-ball eccentricities, and thus I was not at all surprised to see a quartet of CdG perfumes yesterday when we went to the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.
I was in need of some mental clarity and aesthetic simplicity after the gorging of Christmas and New Year, and this is a place I find serene. Unlike the huge national museums of Ueno, which are good when you are in that ‘grand’ kind of mood but too municipal and crowded with spectators otherwise – or else the Tokyo Museum Of Contemporary Art, which is in a quite ugly, post-nuclear area of the metropolis that makes me not really want to return to it (despite the allure of the current Yoko Ono retrospective), the Hara is in a formerly private residence turned small art museum that has a pale, dream-like melancholy to it, with a beautiful traditional Japanese niwa and appealingly ramshackle sculpture garden – run down, almost, yet sleek and perfectly white inside, with an excellent architectural balance between building and light, both natural and artificial, that makes for a very calming, and re-equilibrating, gallery experience.
Tucked down a residential side-street somewhere between Gotanda and Shinagawa, I can feel my mental and spiritual temperature cool a couple of notches in this space. And the current exhibition, a collection of contemporary photographs from the Deutsche Bank Collection, may have been rather small and not overly extensive, yet it hit the mark acutely with a series of pictures that unpretentiously captured quite touching moments in time and humanity, including pieces by photographers across the globe that gave me that familiar feeling in the chest that signifies that an aesthetic target has been hit, and quite possibly my emotions as well. With the world teetering ever further into turmoil (and it’s only the beginning of the year), such a seemingly disparate collection of cross-the-board humanism provides a tangible, if fragile, contrast.
One series of photos that struck me particularly were four black and white photographs of clouds by the British artist Cornelia Parker. Placed side by side on the wall I felt something instantly – a moment of transience, or just a poetic juxtaposition perhaps – or maybe I was just somehow recognising the English sky and feeling momentarily homesick, but in any case there was a sense of the evanescent being captured at a pin-prick in time, a tension between silence and motion that struck a chord. Reading the title of the piece afterwards, however – ‘Unrecognized Object’, the work was then invested with much deeper added meaning through the peculiarly sinister fact that the pictures had been taken with the camera of the Nazi SS commandant of Auschwitz, the lens used therefore loaded with history and evil, even while the artist was taking pictures of something as simple and innocuous as floating afternoon clouds.
The piece worked for me on both levels. On a level of purely artistic execution, yet also with its added, disturbing significance. And this is how, in some ways, the perfumes of Comme Des Garcons also function -an interplay play between brain and nose, between ideas and purely abstract conceptions and the physical reality of smell – just substituting the visual for the olfactory. Although it would have made more sense in some ways for the museum to perhaps have included ‘Serpentine’, CdG’s release from last year that was created to capture the grass and the air of Hyde Park in London along with some of its pollution (and coincidentally where I also saw a fascinating installation by Cornelia Parker two decades or more ago, where the Serpentine gallery was filled with curiosities from Victoriana Britain along with the actress Tilda Swinton asleep in a glass case: visitors, including myself, pressing their noses right up to where her face was, watching her breathing and ‘sleeping’ – the fact that such a famous person had become an exhibit, an object to peer at, was genuinely mind-altering – I can remember running through the rain in the park afterwards, strangely invigorated by it), the latest release by the unrivalled Japanese trendsetters also plays – albeit less successfully, perhaps – with the idea of ‘perception distortion’, with the interplay between an idea or preconception that has been placed in your thoughts, and the physically perceived odour of the fragrance itself.
In truth, however, I am probably over-intellectualizing a scent that I don’t find particularly intellectual (or even especially interesting) – though I do, on a very simplistic smell-level, think it is quite nice. Like Le Labo and their intentional misnomers (‘tuberose’ smelling like orange blossom, ‘orange blossom’ smelling like jasmine, and so on), Floriental, a somewhat misleading name, purportedly contains no flowers (though I don’t actually believe this) and is not a classical ‘oriental’ either, despite the presence of labdanum in the base – even if does, admittedly, smell quite au courant in that oudhish, Western Exotic manner. Rather, Floriental is a sweet, warm, rich and quite inviting spicy woody ‘red’ perfume: unoriginal yet appealing, with that heated synthetic santal (described in the press notes as ‘lavish sandalwood’) we know so well from other such Comme Des Garcons staples as the popular Wonderwood, yet with the texture and timbre of such eighties spiced scents as Nina Ricci’s ginger-lipped RicciClub or Ungaro’s baroque, tapestry-like Ungaro III Pour Homme. Essentially a very hot-sillaged mood enhancer: gingery, peppery, woody and balsamic – the scent does, strangely, have a florally-hallucinogenic aura to it, whether from that name that has been planted in your head or in the amalgamated flora of its whole, and I find it quite enjoyable for its rambunctiousness and positivity (there is a very extrovert and uplifting aspect to this scent that would work well as a silent self-introduction at a party), even if it is not something I would ever contemplate wearing myself. For me, one of the other Comme Des Garcons perfumes on display in the gift shop – Zagorsk, holds far more appeal, with its cold, Russian incense, its hushed, snowed-in violets; the sense of remote, Siberian air…. more artful, whispering and austere, and more in keeping with the hushed and cerebral ambience of the quiet, tree-surrounded Hara.
Filed under Flowers, Woody Florientals
HAIR: OSCAR by OSCAR DE LA RENTA (1977)
Source: HAIR: OSCAR by OSCAR DE LA RENTA (1977)
We started rewatching Dynasty after thirty years last night.
Oh the memories!
One hour down, eighty or so to go.
I thought, anyway, that I should repost this old piece I wrote about Oscar De La Renta, which always put me in mind, somehow, of the ludicrous, husky, Krystle Carrington – not realising until just a few moments ago that she already had her OWN PERFUME.
You simply must watch this ad:
Filed under Flowers
VINTAGE MITSOUKO SOAP
It’s a new year, a bright, sunny day, and I thought I would finally open the box of Mitsouko soap that was standing next to my bed.
Such a shame, in a way, to break through the wrapping and use up a vintage rarity that has been lying in wait for many years untouched (until I snatched it up at a flea market), but then these soaps were made for washing, to be used, and I found that today I couldn’t resist.
In the Golden Years, soaps by the loveliest perfume houses were really PERFUMED. And although this particular product may have lost some of its pungency (fresh off the Guerlain factory production line it must have been more bursting with perfumed oils), it still glowed from within the cellophane with a velvety, gourmand sliver of cake, Mitsouko as I like it best (in the parfum de toilette format preferably, when the rich and edible, friandise of Mitsouko’s sunnier elements – lost in the dour and unfriendly vintage parfum) come more to the fore, the sensuality more resplendent than the seriousness.
In the shower, the soap has a forest-white foam, lathering the skin intimately with a gentle chypre film of Guerlinade – luxuriant and pleasurable, inviting you extravagantly to begin the perfuming layer process, though with just one use, the letters you see inscribed in the hard, uninviolable flesh of the soap, have unfortunately already faded away.
Filed under Flowers