Monthly Archives: November 2022

A perfectly Japanese experience.

I have become quite interested recently in the concept of neurodivergency. Used to describe a wide variety of ‘disorders’ or mental differences ranging from severe autism to those on the spectrum to those whose brains simply work differently to the majority, I wonder, sometimes, whether I also belong in the category of the neurodivergent.

Firstly, the dreams. I dream so intensely, all night, every night – full, blistering oneiria with incredible detail, emotionally wrought; often exciting; erotic, frequently terrifying, exhilarating but exhausting – a lot also have soundtracks (D has seen me waking up singing a theme or song before); to me this is entirely usual, and yet, when I ask people around me – students, teachers, hardly anyone seems to dream or at least remember their dreams, and then I almost feel alienated and embarrassed as though I were a different species, realizing that my brain is so much more febrile and wild; porous and delicate than the average person but I don’t feel remotely sad about this either – to me my dreamlife is such a rich universe that I almost feel pity for those that don’t have it. I often feel too sentient; empathic like a sponge; slightly psychic. Extremely oversensitive to light, noise, atmosphere; colour; smell. Exhausted by too much human connection, even though I am a teacher – the eternal difficulty for the extroverted introvert.

So far so good (at least I think so – is it strange to just accept yourself?). The other side to this, though, of course, is ‘imbalance’, if it needs to be seen that way (I keep telling students, and this is one area I do well in and which is very important to me, as I feel it is my mission to encourage these young vulnerable people not to be too down on themselves about not being perfect in a culture that tends to be perfectionist; that you don’t have to be good at everything; that the widely held, and very guilt-ridden belief that perseverance and endeavour can triumph over everything is utter nonsense, because it just is – no one can be good at everything and neither should they necessarily want to be – the human tapestry of possibilities and potential so vast and multicoloured that there are always and always will be people who can do something you cannot and vice versa; and because I have myself heard very technically sound pianists pounding away like machines on the keys at migraine inducing levels at day long ‘happyokai‘ recitals of eager child to adult amateurs in staid, pleated dresses and mini tuxes and yet you just know that no matter how much they practice like furious automatons in their houses at night they will never actually be able to play a lick of music ,and that listening to even a couple of hours of this innane furiosity made both me and the d feel like our heads were going to explode; I truly believe in proclivities, natural abilities, inclinations; interests; we are not like hot irons that can be hammered into shape by convention even if other people try to make us believe we should be – and although it is always good to try different things (if you want to), when it comes to lacks, and inabilities, I believe that desperately trying to overcome them when you lack the innate ability is like flogging a dead horse.

My own disabilities definitely include a great lack of spatial awareness – a very chronic clumsiness that could be termed dyspraxia (oh the smashed perfume bottles!) I have to focus for a long time and try desperately hard to work out which way to put a gas cylinder into the kerosene heater, something a lot of animals and young babies could certainly work out more quickly. I think I may also be slightly dyslexic when it comes to numbers (in fact I know I am). While I can work out percentages in my head so am hopefully not 100% clueless, it is quite easy for me to forget my PIN number at the bank; very easy for me to get numbers the wrong way round (the students also laugh, but have largely got used to, my total inability to count; I invariably hand out the wrong number of papers to be distributed around the classroom — ‘Mr Chapman, er, two more please‘ is a frequent refrain – a problem that became rather more serious when – and this embarrasses me to admit but here we go – back in 1993 when working at an international language school in London, and on a day trip to Cambridge, I failed to count the number of students on the bus home (my mind went totally blank and I was just faking it as the bus driver was urging us to leave), leaving two Russian girls behind in the city who only by chance saw our very bus going by one of the colleges, hailing it down furiously and shouting at me in outrage as I sat slumped, red-faced, at the front near the driver’s seat mortified all the way to the drop-off).

Yes. I knew instinctively that I never could, nor would want to, drive a car (and have never even had one driving lesson – no one needs Neil Chapman behind the wheel on the road), and though I did my very best, I managed to get an abysmal grade E in my maths O level, the British equivalent of a junior high school diploma, without which you can’t go to university, meaning that when the system changed to GCSE the following year, I had to go to the secret maths dunce class on afternoons when others were outside playing tennis or doing drama club, just scraping a C with a great deal of perseverance (and utter, utter boredom).

Anyway. Mathematics. My discalculia.

How is all of this relevant to perfume?

Well, primarily for the fact that in trying to review this collection by new Italian brand D’Otto, with perfumes created by the excellent Paolo Terenzi, a perfumer with a mind-boggling number of Italian niche fragrances under his belt, most famously for Tiziana Terenzi, I simply couldn’t work out which was which ( compounded by the fact that when viewed upside down on the futon, the vials seemed indistinguishable) It has actually been hard to do this review this morning as I have been so confused, eventually having to spray each on on tissue with big numbers written in black marker pen and even then I have not been sure that I have been describing the right one. A baboon could do a better job.

I also fail to entirely understand the concept behind the names of these scents (it seems to be a given now, in the independent perfumery world, that practically any new launch by a new scent outfit must embrace a visual, artistic, historical or topographical crux around which that house tries to distinguish itself from all the others clamouring for attention in a very overcrowded market; hence we have endless brands trying to embody international cities; colours; music; movies; years in history; elements; animals, the list goes on and on and can be fun and interesting sometimes even though personally I just prefer an enigmatic title of something like Arpege that doesn’t try to explain away too much about the olfactory composition with other conceptual constructs but rather just is what it is; here, the idea, apparently, is that each piece in this initial collection of five fragrances corresponds with a particular painting from the early twentieth century period of abstract art; hence we have Kandinsky, Mondrian, Klee etc each represented in perfume – which I get, but what’s with all the f****** numbers?)

Scrutinizing the five samples from the D’Otto collection, I was at first completely incapable of working out which was which. My brain…..went into warp hole incomprehension. 3+5, 5+3, 2+6, 6+2, even just writing this has scrambled the wires (I gave up the Japanese written system the first week I was here as I just can’t imbibe it mentally – sonically and aurally, I have absorbed quite a lot over the years, but my number phobia stretches to other alphabets as well, blimey I am limited! ) As a selling point, I don’t think this is particularly smart . Even if you are a mathematical genius drawn to numbers, do these perfume names draw you in? (the bottle design does, but..) is there an enigmatic inscrutability here that I am just not getting because it is numbers themselves that just don’t appeal ? (I remember my mathematician friend George, who I was joined at the hip with at university explaining to me in frustration one day that my quick-damning prejudices against his mystifying studies ) were just locking me out of a whole beautiful universe that I would never be privy to : and for a brief moment, I may have regretted my temperaments and leanings and wondered how it would have been if I had been born an entirely different person.

But now to the perfumes themselves.

1+7, which I can recognize because there are no other perfumes with the same digits, is really rather beautiful.

Although I intensely dislike the painting this perfume is allegedly based on (I have an aversion to all shades of brown so cannot, for example watch westerns or any film with that palette) and have no synaesthesic nod of recognition smelling and looking (to me 1+7 definitely smells green and white), this is a scent I would like a full bottle of. It is lovely. The opening is totally delightful, reminding me of the green, citric shampoos from the 70’s I have waxed lyrical before about on here; the whole, gentle, fresh, natural, like wind blowing through the trees in spring. I feel calmed by this. I smell hope.

5+ 3 is also very handsome perfume. As one Fragrantician says, this is quite reminiscent of vintage Serge Lutens’ Chergui – I was thinking Cedre at first, but no, they are right, it is Chergui, so if you miss the original version of that strange and unusual blend that many people still pine for and feel like a denser experience, you will really love this; it is deep, mysterious, with a gorgeous tobacco honeyed mystery to it that could prove quite magnetic on the correct wearer. Again, I personally sense zero connection to the Mondrian, with its clean lines and primary colour palette – this to me would be a deep honeycomb amber with flecks of coral and dark orange – but perhaps that is just my weird cerebellum.

3.5, which I keep confusing with its anagram – is an obvious homage to Christian Dior Hypnotic Poison – a higher quality version thereof, and indeed very luminous, positive, like the happiness promised by the cheerful painting – if potentially a little bit sickly (this is the full Italian diva ; radiant and self confident – you can just feel her, bare-shouldered and self-confident, swanning into the gala). I like it, even if I have never been drawn to the works of Paul Klee – I just don’t like them – and can find no bridge whatsoever between the picture and the smell.

2.6 is the only perfume from the initial D’Otto collection that I can see any resemblance / match to the painting the scent was inspired by. Dark, bitter, this is the kind of wood scent that has me running for the hills and has been done many times before by houses like Byredo, but if you like such scents, the familiar, creosote dark brown/ blackness, 2.6 is a fairly convincing rendition.

It might smell good on you, but I must say that I don’t like 6+2 at all; to me it is just yet another overdone woody where the inchoateness of amberwood chemicals cancel out each other into a black hole of manly – but then I am just not able to appreciate any perfumes of this type in the first place – I just have an intuitive aversion to this whole genre.

The original inspiration that this scent is based on (by far the worst match!)

is also, I must say, just so hideous to me personally that I literally hesitated whether to insert this one into this piece. Looking at the above painting just makes me insane – it is wrong to me on every level, to the point of nausea. But I guess that is the point. These things are very subjective :: for the perfumer who has come up with a high quality batch of perfumes that many will find pleasurable (I do recommend trying the sample set if any of these sound appealing), these paintings – all considered masterpieces by the establishment – are representations of what he was seeing in olfactory form. For me, however, strangely, there is virtually no correspondence between the two.Then again, my brain is different…

The timing was impeccable. Just as I started excitedly gorging on Season Five of The Crown, a package arrived in the post from the lovely Rose Strang, containing some rather regally bearing perfume.

It has been a very good teaching term. Taxing, but I feel close to the students and have been enjoying it – yet still, I am also now already close to burn out ; ready to disengage: immerse myself fully in lives other than my own – even royals in caricature (Elizabeth Debicki as Diana :::: spectacular); (Jonny Lee Miller as John Major! Olivia Williams as Camilla ! Is Imelda Staunton the best sovereign portrayal yet?)

Yes, it might be a bit soon after the death of the Queen, and the series might not be fully ‘historically accurate’ – much to the fury of the British tabloids (but in that case, neither is anything, in truth, not even the utterances from our own mouths, which do not strictly always concur with the ‘facts’ even when they happened mere seconds ago, our memories intrinsically unstable…..) Personally, I don’t hold to the idea that everything presented on a screen about living or historical figures should attempt to be carbon copy of ‘reality’; a dramatization is not a simulacrum; fictional, artistic license a given not warranting disclaimers. For me, these are thespian explorations, attempts to personalize and bring fully to life otherwise rather cardboard, and two dimensional figures that supposedly represent us, parading themselves inside our consciousness; ( and do we pay for them). All film and TV, it could be argued, including news programmes, all fonts of public information, are ultimately, basically, made for us to consume as forms of entertainment, and so I can’t really understand all the furore surrounding The Crown, particularly when so much is objectively verifiable – the mortifying transcripts published in the Daily Mirror of Charles dirty pillow talking to his married lover, for instance, and in a country which traditionally has little deference for authority ………..with Judy Dench writing an indignant letter to the Times — it all feels a bit like a storm in a teacup; one which I am sure has the Netflix executives clapping their hands together in glee.

Whatever your take on this subject – whether these people are touchable or untouchable – it certainly makes for very good television. Even if you ‘hate watch’ this series (quite easy for those who despise its subject), The Crown is compelling, brilliantly crafted, deeply riveting stuff.

I NEED THIS BOTTLE

This time three years ago, I was secretly in Florence, awash in memories and the rain, attending the opening of The Firenze Perfume Library on street leading to the Duomo (which stocks my book in both English and Italian). Naturally, I spent some time at the Santa Maria Novella flagship, an apothecary shrine of perfumed beauty that, though having studied in Florence for a month or however long it was back in the nineties as a young university student, I had somehow managed to never discover – this was actually, unbelievably, my first time entering this sacred space. Wow. The farmacia, cloistered in a centuries old building, is divine for the perfume lover – almost too much to cope with- the paper-enwrapped soaps religious reliquaries; the original Iris, one of the many editions of acqua di colonia, a cool, floral aldehydic I wrote about admiringly several years ago.

The new, recently released and more modern eau de parfum edition, L’Iris, is a very welcome addition to the venerable Florentine stable. Silvery, soft, metallic; feminine and undeniably posh, the soapy fresh lift of magnolia, geranium, Sichuan pepper and neroli in this new version is the gateway to a rather traditional (you might call it timeless) iris, ambergris and musk that has an immediate ‘social rightness’ and acceptability, faultless as a dressed up scent for lunch – with any kind of ladies – or afternoon tea. Redolent, vaguely, of Hermes Hiris, or a far more bookish and ethereal relative of her more business-like cousin in Milan, Prada, L’Iris is green, appeasing, perhaps a little grating in its sheer nicety (‘magnolia’ tends to get on my nerves) but, still, undeniably rather lovely.

Wearing its wealth and simultaneous opulence on its sleeve (though in a rather chunky and ugly bottle) is the gorgeous Heritage by Fragrance Du Bois: a very rich, rather swoonsome floral amber with smooth oud in the base I had never heard of before that feels like the most beautiful, hypnotizing soap. With a similar texture and scope as Puredistance Opardu (but without all the lilac),, Amouage Gold, or some of the mellower Montales, this is one of those immaculately blended sandalwood-based, orris-vanilla jasmine incenses with a heart of aldehydes that you just sink into, or rather let sink into the skin on your wrist with its long-lasting, unhurried sillage and moreish elegance. With its eye-watering price – $600-$800, I will not be buying a bottle, but I will certainly be cherishing my sample, saving it for silent and soothing reality-evasion ; times – like the vastly enjoyable and guilt free bingeing, yesterday, on all the top level acting, costumes and set design (and the music!) – that ingeniously frame all the spoiled – but historically traumatized, British royals, with their loves and their betrayals, grievances for one another, always musing and pontificating on their immutable roles in society; trapped, staring out, onto the garden grounds hidden behind carefully curtained, embroidered lace.

ON PERSONALITY, VERSATILITY, AND HERMES EAU DE NARCISSE BLEU (2013)

Strolling down a road I have never been down before (how can it have taken me so long to go in the opposite direction?) I not only discovered a – today closed but – very beckoning, curious looking recycle shop, but also an entire temple complex – complete with miniature ukiyo-o-e museum, to which I will inevitably return.

Sometimes on these extended lunch breaks I feel lonely. Not so today : in the blissfully warm, autumnal sunshine I sat on a stone ledge beneath a tall cypress tree and just felt the air.

In front of this wooden sliding screen window, before a house in the grounds, was a beautiful yuzu tree; with thick, crinkly skin; just a graze of its tight, crenellated surface enough to release some of its scent; the sacrosanct atmosphere forbidding all theft ( I am terrible when it comes to citrus ).

Even the cold pressed yuzu oil somehow doesn’t render the unique beauty of this long prized natural essence. The Muji essential oil I bought recently worked nicely in an iyokan, grapefruit lip balm/ vaseline hand cream I have given to some students ( for optimism and positivity ), some friends and myself called The Magic Orange, but it was more likely the iyokan-bright eye opener that starred there; the yuzu more a cameo background.

A drop on my toothpaste in the afternoon was quite enjoyable (deliciously cleansing and gum-clean), but still, I have never really found anything yuzu inspired that comes close to the natural peel. There are countless Japanese made solid perfumes, hand creams, body sprays that feature yuzu; some quite nice but usually with that synthetic unwanted undertow that you always hone in on.

In perfume the yuzu it is often too sweet (Oyedo by Diptyque; a real toothacher); brash ( Heeley Note De Yuzu; nice but a bit too late 90’s gay club); odd (Parfumerie Generale’s minty Yuzu Ab Irato); flouncy yet drab (Yuzu by J-Scent, Yuzu Fou) or even non-existent (Caron’s rubbish Yuzu Homme, which seems not to contain even a single drop).

No. It is best in the fruit.

Just picked from the branch with its prickled twig; rubbed on the skin..

Just been to an interesting Man Ray exhibition at the beautiful Hayama Museum Of Modern Art just down the coast from Kamakura.

If it weren’t for the fearful, almost hostile women patrolling the gallery

I would have taken and put up a picture of the beautiful Sleeping by Schiaparelli- a parfum bottle of which was standing next to some exquisite Lucien Lelong and Guerlain Lius and Shalimars for aesthetic and historical context ( he also photographed Chanel )

I felt such a fierce longing to smell the liquid in that housed off, security alarmed bottle ; three quarters full, I wonder what it is like ? What a great antidote / riposte to Shocking : ‘Sleeping’: fitting so well with the portraits of Dali, Cocteau, Juliette Greco – a lovely photograph of Catherine Deneuve, many of Kiki de Montparnasse

Immersed in the artist’s Dadaist/ surrealist creative fertility, leaving the space for the sea air I feel stimulated, energized : awake

A pleasantly warm, mid-registered, and very berryish confection by Miller Harris, Myrica Muse, the latest release from the popular British house, is a lightly spiced, woody musk-vanilla with fresh notes of tangerine, pink pepper, bayberry and a very vivid strawberry that cedes gently to a base accord of amber, benzoin, and rum.

Created by perfumer Emilie Bouge, and described by the brand as being

” A stolen pause, enjoyed alone, quiet, elegant and in reflection for the joy to come..“

Myrica Muse is one of those easygoing, medium-heat perfumes (in the mode of, say, Dior’s Eau De Dolce Vita) that work well at this time of year as we go into winter; a little tingling, perhaps, but not too spicy; present, but not overpowering (and thus perfect for the workplace); a little flirty and fruity, but not juvenile. Although I sometimes wonder who Miller Harris’ intended current audience is – the brand’s previous incarnation, under Lyn Harris, created perfumes that were far edgier, actively different and strange (both dark and transparent – think Terre De Bois), whereas the Miller Harris releases of recent years have been much sweeter and more commercial, in thicker, more vanillic and powdery releases such as Violet Ida, Blousy and Brighton Rock,; yetthe brand still has an intrinsic appeal. ( I fell in love, eventually, with the tulip-inked saffron and cinnamon Bertrand Duchaufour oddness that is Tender. )

I can see Myrica Muse doing well here in Japan (the genus myrica refers to a variety of medicinally used berries such as myrtle and bay as is quite an appealing concept), in a place where perfumes with a woodier, but not oud-threatening, vibe, are quite popular. As a bay lover myself (coincidentally, the neighbours across the road recently felled the beautiful bay tree out on the street that I have been surreptitously pinching leaves from at night for years to put in chicken and vegetable stews – I was actually planning to do a piece called Levelling The Laurel ; the other night, seeing that the precious leaves would just go to waste and be discarded in Wednesday’s biotrash, I quietly carted off whole bayleaf branches that are now drying nicely in our kitchen).

I would have liked a little more herbal depth; more contrast with the fruit and flowers, and definitely a more pronounced note of bay, which provides a fuzzy backdrop in the perfume here, but is not directly tangible.

Then again, it’s often difficult to satisfy the more demanding perfumistas such as myself in tandem with the casually browsing man or woman on the street : our wants and needs are probably slightly different. I must say though that the overall ‘kind and positive aura’ this scent gives off – an unseamed, general sweetness that I was quite pleased to walk back into the room for – worked rather well on the D, who has taken to wearing many different kinds of perfumes recently that stray slightly outside his comfort zone (he is quite adventurous in this regard and was open to this one immediately). As the current balmy Autumn weather falls to a late Autumn chill, I can easily imagine Myrica Muse – worn lightly on a scarf or under a sweater – as the breath becomes gradually more visible in the city night air and you cup your hands to your face at the chosen meeting spot, being an optimistic, heartlifting buffer to the cold.