Like tiger lilies under fluorescent tube lighting.
Monthly Archives: May 2016
this is making me totally homesick
Filed under Flowers
VINTAGE DIORISSIMO ESPRIT DE PARFUM
Filed under Flowers
I KNOW YOU WANT ME: DIORLING by CHRISTIAN DIOR (1963)
A very rare find, my eyes almost popped out on stalks of amazement when I saw Diorling standing there impassively and forlorn, neglected by perfume-blind passersby at th…
Source: I KNOW YOU WANT ME: DIORLING by CHRISTIAN DIOR (1963)
Filed under Flowers
DONALD TRUMP : THE FRAGRANCE
Donald Trump is interesting in that he provokes two extreme reactions in me. On the one hand, I could write reams and reams and reams about what he represents, on analysing his self-centred, bigoted, and very dangerous impact on the world. Simultaneously, at times, he quite simply renders me speechless.
( note: re-reading this now, over two years later, I realize that what I wrote here, syntactically this doesn’t actually make sense. Had he already obliterated my brain by this point? What was the second thing that I was referring to? His UNBELIEVABLE self belief ? ( which still completely ASTOUNDS me, and which I am strangely in awe of, as it is precisely this self-powering Ego thst has allowed him to just smash his way around the world the way he so gobsmackingly has, fucking everything up like a satanic baby….
– didn’t you love the protest ballon in London though?!!! )
Today, tired from work and from reading about him all morning in the weekend newspapers, I am veering more towards the latter.
Sheer stupefaction.
I have never smelled any of the fragrances released by the house of Donald Trump, nor do I intend to, so I will let other people talk about them instead.
“Success” is one of The Haus Of Trump’s more recent releases, ” Trump “his eponymous and original signature perfume – though that last word, perfume, is not one that the misogynist and homophobic, illiterate fools that support him would be very likely to use themselves ( no, this is a Trump ‘cologne’).
No, there are no Donald Trump scents in my own perfume collection, nor will there ever be. But it is quite fascinating to read the quite brilliantly evocative reviews of ‘Donald Trump, The Fragrance’ from the Amazon website, if you care to read through a selection from them that I have cut and pasted below: a curious, and quite toxic mix of gungho macho bullshit and scabrous, seething sarcasm (and it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between.)
All of which, in any case, just shows what a deep fascination this narcissistic monster has for the American public, the world at large, and for people like myself who, in some kind of can’t-look-away-from-the-impending-disaster-that-is-about-to-occur type of syndrome, just can’t get enough. A kind of cynical and masochistic despair at the deep idiocy of the world, alongside an undeniable appreciation of the buffoonery and the camp, as well as his obviously twisted brilliance – this man is very, very canny and he knows just how to plunge deepest into the cruellest prejudices and shabbiest instincts of the ‘disenchfranchised’, who he openly mocks, but who are just too blind in their own crude simplicities to see through what are obviously lies, jingoism and blind, unadulterated ambition. This alone, the fact that so many of us are just totally mesmerized, makes me wonder whether in actual fact, despite all our (too late ) mockery, this man just MIGHT get enough votes to win the next presidential election.
I think I’ll start building my underground nuclear bunker right now.
Here goes, anyway. Some brilliant reviews of Donald Trump The Fragrance.
By Gen. JC Christian, patriot on April 28, 2011
Bullish. That’s the one word that best embodies both the spirit of Trump, the man, and and the fragrance of his cologne.
Indeed, a bull was the image that immediately formed in my mind the first time I smelled “Trump the Fragrance for Men.” I’ll never forget that introductory whiff. It seized hold of my entire being, unleashing a storm of olfactory memories that left me gasping from a perch on a long-forgotten “bulling stool.”
Authentic Americans, patriots like Joe the Plumber and Donald the Trump, simple men who revere the values of the Heartland, will always remember the joyful hours they spent on a bulling stool. Who could forget the wonderful sense of anticipation you feel as you sit there behind the bull, slowly massaging his glorious bull grenades while you screw up the courage to sniff the holy land–that tract of hide that resides so invitingly between the bull bag and the cave of shame–until, eventually, the wanting overcomes the fear and you thrust your nose hard up against the bull and take a whiff.
That, dear readers, is the musky barnyard smell of “Trump the Fragrance.”
But that is only part of the bulling stool experience and its relationship to the Donald. Occasionally, the bull will mistake the grenade massage for a medical examination, and he’ll turn his head and cough. When that happens, bovine physiology dictates that the bull forcefully eject the entire contents of its fourth stomach out through its cave of shame. Imagine leaning into that as you’re thrusting you nose in for a sniff. It’s a breathtaking experience, literally breathtaking. It’s also very exhilarating to take the full force of such a load of pure bull in a single sitting. It’s the only experience that is comparable to sitting through one of Mr. Trump’s speeches. They’re the same thing, really.
By G. Eric Sieferman on April 28, 2011
Since using this life changing product, I’ve experienced several bankruptcies and the dissolution of two or three marriages. Never before have I been so close to achieving a pinnacle of the American Dream. I’d give this balm five stars, but it’s annoying that I have to produce a birth certificate every time I purchase a bottle.
By Railbird on April 20, 2011
Whodda thunk it? A bombastic superannuated meglomaniac freak show attraction is also a fragrance maven? Nu? What next, Donald, advice for the lovelorn? Like its eponym, Eau de Trump is no flower born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air. Place a few drops discretely behind your ear and women will “sense” your presence two floors below. Bloodhounds will find you in a chili pepper patch. Babies will sneeze when you enter a room. Teenage girls will giggle as they text their BFFs. Believe me, it happens!
My marriage had been hitting a rough patch. After 15 years I’d put on weight, all we did was idiotic sitcoms and reheated Stouffers dinners. Maybe the magic had gone out of our relationship. I thought about joining a gym, or showing my wife some consideration or maybe stop flirting with the divorced cocktail waitress with the Dolly Parton wig in the trailer next door. All those things seemed way too hard. Instead, I tried a little Eau d’ and next thing you know, I’m in the sack with the cocktail waitress, and it may be a wig, but those memory glands are for real, baby! (Marriage is way-over rated!)
So it really worked out for me, but I wish I had followed the Donald’s example and gotten a pre-nup. The wife got both halves of the double-wide, but at least, I kept the Harley and the pitbull.
Only for Right Wing Republicans
By Amazon Customer on April 29, 2011
I bought some Trump the Fragrance and tried it out recently. When my wife got a whiff of me she immediately sent me outside to the deck. (Thank goodness the Wi-Fi works out here) She said I wasn’t allowed in the house until November, 2012 unless she could hose that smell off of me.
I’m holding out until the Iowa caucuses!
Can’t please those Democrats.
By C. West on April 30, 2011
I find this ‘fragrance’ to be very reminiscent of a bar scene where men tell lies mostly to impress other men.
Of a man who sees women only as Arm Trophies. If I were the man who squandered his father’s fortune, had a comical combover and lied about my draft deferments, this scent would surely bespeak of all of that and more!
Motel Soap will leave a person more appealing than this, yet the latest in self-promotion of a man failed in everything.
Women who can think for themselves will be repelled. Gold diggers and bimbos will love it.
Wear at your own risk.
Filed under Flowers
THREE HAIRY SCENTS BY ROCHAS, PARIS : : : : MOUSTACHE (1948) + MONSIEUR ROCHAS (1969) + + MACASSAR (1980)
BECAUSE THE EDICT ON FACIAL HAIR AT MY COMPANY BUGS ME EVEN MORE THAN THE ONE ON PERFUME. I HAD TO SHAVE TODAY AFTER THE ‘GOLDEN WEEK’ HOLIDAY AND I FEEL LIKE AN INFURIATED AND EMASCULATED DELILAH (WELL, SAMSON, ACTUALLY, BUT YOU GET MY DRIFT…..)
SAVAGERY & CIVILIZATION: : SYCOMORE by CHANEL (2008)
Sycomore is one of my very, nearly, almost perfumes. In that, if I were to somehow receive a bottle as a present I would be quite thrilled, but I am simultaneously not ever quite thrilled enough to buy one (in Japan you can only get the three hundred dollar 200ml bottle, so that is simply never going to happen). I do want it though, someday. Definitely. And when I do I will probably get through it in no time as I did with my Tom Ford Grey Vetiver and my Maître Parfumeur et Gantier’s Racine (exquisite), and all vetiver perfumes generally. I love them. I feel natural in them.
A refined, dense but very sinewy perfume that is all about vetiver from the start to the finish with its typically Jacques Polge excellence and long-lastingly quality Chanel architecture, Sycomore comes on to the skin fully realized, the vine-like vetiver central note encased in a subtle aldehyde and sandalwood papousse, a fine hint of violets, and the mulched, cool earth of the forest floor – with delicate undertone touches provided by myrtle and tobacco. If you have never smelled this lesser known perfume from the Chanel Exclusifs, however, it is possible that I am perhaps, as usual, poeticizing it (or trying to) a touch too much, because despite the perfume’s very wearable and dependable artistry, I do always feel, every time I smell it, that something is missing within the structure, that it is overly monothematic and needed some iris or some other flowers à la Nº19, or else another note of more left-field eccentricity just to elevate it more imaginatively above the merely chic and ‘beautifully done’. The perfume is very nice, certainly, and one of the very best vetiver fragrances that you can buy, but for me it definitely does lack poetry.
Still, I was happy to reacquaint myself again with Sycomore the other night at the Chanel counter in Yokohama’s grand Takashimaya store, spraying myself liberally and wishing in fact at that moment that I had enough money to just plump for a bottle on the spot (I do, also, I have to say, incidentally, that love that name – Sycomore; so evocative for me, as those trees and the little helicopter seeds that come whirling down gently from above to the autumnal ground were something I was always fascinated by as a child, at my lovely little primary school back home – Oak Cottage, a halcyon time in my education at that school surrounded by fields and trees and the perfect place for a boy like me to indulge in his fertile, strange imagination). Like oak trees and poplars, beech trees and all the beautiful deciduous trees in the parks and the countryside back in Ol’Blighty, sycamores having a very magical quality for me, the England in my DNA, the seasons.
Sycomore the perfume, however, has none of this youthful delicacy. For me, it is an impeccable, elegant, but also very urban perfume – if still a tenuously pertinent scent, in theme and partially in execution, in its green and woody evocations of forest depths, for the film we were about to go and watch at the cinema, the Oscar-winning (and oh, how it went for those Oscars!) ‘The Revenant’ , starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Tom Hardy and directed by the Mexican master of miserabilism, Alejandro Iñnáritu. I am not usually a fan of this director’s work with the exceptions of Birdman and Amores Perros (nihilism and despair are two things I am not really interested in), but I had heard good things about this latest film from some friends of mine, particularly about the innovative cinematography, and was precisely in the mood for being immersed in nature, in the iced landscapes of American and Argentina, in the uncontaminated purity of lakes and rivers and snow, and, after all the pink and camp effrontery of the recent shenanigans in Tokyo with our own film making, just some air, some space, and some good old murderous revenge served ice cold.
You couldn’t really have a more malodorous film than The Revenant. You can see quite clearly that all the characters, from our shuttered, modernised viewpoint, stink. What is fascinating about watching it, beside the intrigue of the story, with its raw desperation and gruelling arduousness, the dazzling photography (the film was made entirely using natural light and it shows), and the piercingly beautiful soundtrack, is the visceral truth that ultimately we really are just animals; beasts fighting for survival, dirty and stench-ridden to the point where we blend right back in with nature and where it doesn’t matter any more; and when the cover up and the lie – perfume, for instance – that intricate olfactory mask with which we adorn ourselves – is exposed as a strange kind of deluded frippery. Yes, we might smell beautiful in our chosen beloved perfumes on a daily basis, but how feral and rancid we would all start to smell in different circumstances, toiling rabidly in rank, soiled bear skins just to stay alive, feeding on raw bison liver and whatever scraps of meat we could get our hands on, as our foul, festering wounds from the bite of the bear reveal the organic rot of our own fragile flesh.
For me, as a man who is totally led by his senses, this fear of the wild pungence that we subconsciously know lurks always there within us was one thing that was intimately exposed in watching this quite masterfully rendered film (with Sycomore, as a contrast, always providing a mesmerisingly oppositional accompaniment). Based on the true story of a fur trapper who was savaged by a bear, betrayed by his fellow hunters and left for dead in the wilderness after witnessing his son being cruelly murdered, we watch a mauled, sick and bewildered individual crawl 200 miles through unchartered pristine terrain in vast, primal landscapes of iced rivers, mountains and wind-whipped dark green pine forests, drenched in freezing waters, always on the verge of shivering to death (as the actors and crew were in real life, apparently, always at the whim of their quixotic and sadistic director), compelling and far-reaching to the eyes and the brain in its clear and awe-filled capturing of nature……..but the stench. The putridity. The clinging, great unwashedness. I could feel it. Like the bear that bites through his flesh and drools incapably over his face (a viscerally impactful scene that is nevertheless quite hard to watch as you quake in your cinema seat), the bear is just protecting its young, reacting on instinct, just as the character, Hugh Glass, is trying to protect his. Both creatures are ensconced in their condensed, unwashed odours, the smells that chemically come naturally from their heat producing bodies, as the trappers come across Glass – helpless, bleeding and broken, almost crushed beneath the hulk of the huge wild bear that, stabbed and shot, has fallen down now into a crevasse on top of him, the man on the verge of death and oblivion. Against the back drop of all the ice, and the snow, and the howling, ferocious winds, and the constant unrelentingness of nature, you realize quite profoundly, then, that his crude, foul smells, his blood mingling with the bear’s, would just in fact, in these circumstances, be irrelevant, that they might even be a source of comfort: the warm moisture of self, of still breathing, of still being alive.