My second most recent (new) purchase is City Orange, by Japanese cosmetics brand Ignis – a dense, but paradoxically light, woody aromatic citrus chypre – reasonably priced; I just walked past the shop one lunchtime, sprayed some on, saw the price – ¥3000 – and bought it.)
I am debuting this today as a workscent.
With definite reminiscences of O De Lancôme in the top (a beautiful mandarin, orange, bergamot and grapefruit), over a warm, almost leathery and slightly suggestively mossy base – with refined notes of vetiver and patchouli – there is a neoclassical, but also quite simple, suaveness to this blend that nicely matches a suit and the office ; I will top up the citrus notes, which fade quite quickly, with my grapefruit/ yuzu this week made hand balm.
Recently I have noticed more of my Japanese colleagues, both male and female, wearing deeper, dryer, woodier fragrances with airily dotted spice ( one member of the administrative staff swears blind he is not wearing perfume whenever I ask him ; in that case he must be sleeping in an incense temple ); sometimes I forget how nice finely layered, flinted aromatics can be, how they can tug at the senses with a certain, dried bark subtlety..
My most recent new ( old ) purchase is a vintage Champagne edt – a scent I was brain craving after just one sniff.
As my friend and occasional Narcissus co-writer Olivia says ( nailing the actual skin effect of this fulsome but somehow also heartbroken perfume ) ‘: it does kind of remind me of that concentrated over-ripened sweetness of something like Sauternes with all its noble rot/ Botyris*elements. Somewhere between dense ancient honey and moss. Oaked and syrupy and just on the cusp…’
I removed the posts about last Saturday‘s Tokyo event, feeling a little overexposed and susceptible to unwanted, prying eyes ( sometimes it is hard living a triple life), but Champagne would have been just perfect, backstage ….
And Viking, buoyed up by the current popularity for roaring marauders in pelts torching villages and carrying off wriggling maidens in blood and axe epics such as the recent Northman by Robert Eggers, or by the matted haired musclebeards in the ragingly successful TV series The Vikings, is presumably meant, by image alone, to evoke unheard of levels of masculine potency. Women will begin screaming, or swooning, on initial contact : caves of babies will be born forthwith.
According to a 2014 British YouGov survey, roughly a third of the UK male population consider themselves to have descended from the Vikings, while a quarter of women make the same assumption (the University of Bristol estimates the reality to be closer to about 6%). I have never personally done a DNA test, but as a white Briton it would kind of intrigue me, at some point, just out of curiosity, to eventually do so. Mostly a historical whirl of Germanic, French, Viking, Scandinavian, Roman in terms of ethnic ancestry, but depending on which region of Britain your forefathers settled in (the further south you go the less the likelihood), it would be interesting, in some ways, for me to find out the ancestral breakdown in my own cell structure.
Although undoubtedly partially Viking myself, then, purely through geographical coincidence – the genepool possibly somewhere hidden in my mitochondria, emerging in the gingerish strains of my beardhair if I let it run out like enough, unlike many – especially on the far right; those that feel terminally emasculated and are yearning for far more testosteroned times when your might could be proved by the sword and your seed ; those who re-enact battleground slaughters in costumes bought on Amazon or storm into government buildings baying like stags
—I personally have no atavistic or instinctual pull towards Viking culture whatsoever.
In fact I feel quite the opposite – and always have (give me the Romans and the Norman Conquest any day of the week). Maybe Burning Bush has some ancient link to piracy and pillaging seafarers and fiery wicks of twisted moss, but I personally can’t stand anything – particularly on the aesthetic level – that features dragon boats, hoary breath, boar carcasses turning slowly on the spit as women with long crimped trellises sew wool and the Norse gods are invoked with vein-busting sword bellowing amidst miserable freezing cold waves spewing onto jagged rocks; D is even worse. All of it just evokes feelings of pure anathema.
(With the global rise in ethnocentrism, and the sense that everything is falling apart into chaos, it is easy to understand why many people, no matter their ‘race’, feel a deep desire to retrace their origins and roots in order to capture a feeling of belonging to something – a tribe, a clan,
– I just don’t personally share that longing.
My extreme, natural aversion to anything of this nature – Lord Of The Rings, anything of the Dungeons And Dragons pixies and faeries genre notwithstanding, earlier in the summer, on the plane back home in August, we did valiantly attempt (though we knew it would be completely in vain), to watch Viking revenge drama The Northman, mainly to see Bjork as the soothsayer:
Good lord it was hard work though.
She, like the rest of the heinously overserious ‘epic’, which coloured in very computerized, artificial, digitally mood’enhanced’ greys and blues, felt half-baked and overcooked (I was a bit embarrassed on her behalf); the rest of the cast had also pseudo-absorbed her ‘diction’ with the most dreadful pseudo-Icelandic accents that made you want to immediately just stopper up your ears. No one needs to hear Nicole Kidman intoning thunderously in whispers, with a Sydney meets Reykjavik trrilling r’d lilt, as Queen Gudrun :
“Frrret not. You will die in battle, my lorrd. The gates of Valholl await you, I know it”.
A much more serious problem from the cinematic point of view, was the casting of Stockholm Hunk Alexander Skarsgard – presumably chosen for his rock hard abs and Conan The Barbarian Schwarzeneggerisms – who was truly overplaying the lead role of arch-avenger Amleth (supposedly a prototype of Hamlet);
For the forty or so painful and mirthful minutes we endured before pressing abort, all this actor, with his very limited expressions, could do (a permanently furrowed brow and ‘intense’ stare – I have seen stegosauruses in the Jurassic Park series display more personality) was roar, slay, flex the triceps and kill, then, do it all over again
…there he goes again
…. and again …..
Yes. I would definitely nominate Skarsgard for a Worst Actor Razzie; the film was intolerable, we were laughing in our plane seats at its profound insufferability, although it must be said that it was received rapturously by a lot of film critics for the detailed representations of daily Viking life and the general lightning-forked melodrama it impaled, so if you yourself are in the right mood for a dark and brooding revenge flick which features huge levels of ultrarealistic violence, wherein comeuppance is ruthlessly enacted whenever and wherever it can be, you should definitely give this a whirl (Richard Brody of The New Yorker had this belittling summary as his headline: ‘The Northman’: Just A Bunch Of Research And Gore’, dismissing its ‘thudding banalities’,) though he was definitely in the critical minority – most people are apparently just swept away in its bloodcurdling passions and antlers dripping in harpooned intestines; some of my friends also liked it…
GOD KNOWS WHY THOUGH.
Anyway, though by Odin, Allfather of the Aesir – – – – – FFS!!!!
What about the perfume review, I hear you beat your iron breastplates in fury: does Creed’s Viking, in fact, capture any of this meatly brutality; does it reek of a thousand armpits, of bodies sweating endlessly in bearskins for weeks on end, of rotting teeth putrid with unpicked flesh?
It does not.
As I sheepishly approached the perfume counter towards this one, eye rolling heavily in advance anticipation of a nuclear strength synthetic woody, I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that instead of what I expected to be a rival to Sauvage in the panty-dropper ‘performance dominance’ sector, slaying hotbreathing wenches in its stead, what I smelled, in fact, was a crisply and alluringly constructed orchestral ginger.
Fresh. Zesty. Kind of delightful. Affirming. While ginger – one of my favourite smells and flavours in the world – is not listed as an ingredient in Viking Cologne (a lighter edition of the 2017 edp), the spiced citric woosh of the juice (lots of mandarin, bergamot, pink pepper, allspice and nutmeg with a lightly fougerish base (lavender, geranium, olibanum, sandalwood, patchouli etc with a hint of sage) to my nose, adds up to an overall ginger thematic; this is brisk and uplifting, masculine, but could be worn by anyone, and it glowed quite nicely on the back of my hand for a whole day as I walked the streets of Birmingham. I even briefly considered Viking as a possible ‘me scent’ (I sometimes wear Old Spice), until the modern masculinity went a bit too potent in the base – not enough to conjure tongue-lolling heads on poles – but still, perhaps a little too much synthetic cedar….
Nevertheless, I was glad to have my (what feel to me innate) prejudices duped. The Vikings, although probably not the most peaceful bunch of tribes, assuredly had a lot more going for them than their very cliched, Hollywood onscreen representations would seem to suggest (and apparently there is no evidence whatsoever that they even had any horned helmets in the first place – this was merely a costume choice for a diva singing in an opera by Wagner – The Ring Of The Nibelung at a German 1876 theatre premiere). It was nice for me therefore, in a way, to discover that the Viking’s namesake perfumes was a fine spice, with touches of old school tropes but not enough to be rendered duddy, in fact quite refined and wearable – you might say even delicate. A very non-marauding, and pleasingly rendered, spruced; trim; and almost gentlemanly counter-stereotype.
The seemingly infinite well of cheap, but classic, beautiful, vintage perfume always formerly available in the recycle shops, flea markets and antique emporia in the urban, and suburban, labyrinths of Japan is now drying up, finally in the clutches of yen-eyed e-bayers cannily extracting all the juice they can. The days of just wandering into a place and picking up a Mitsuoko extrait from a shelf for a song are fading.
And yet. I have discovered a treasure trove. A blissful place full of highly covetable bottles of perfume that make my heart ache with the anticipation of ownership. An assuming little shop down a side street whose identity and location I am not disclosing for the time being as I first intend to drain it like a vampire.
The owner of this place seems slightly bemused by me and my reactions ( he also sells bags, accessories, beauty products, makeup, hats – probably what draws in the younger clientele ), rather than the glass cabinet of vintage Chanel – I NOW HAVE A SAFE SUPPLY OF VINTAGE NO 19 : the 7ml extrait goes for ¥ 1800 – twelve dollars, eleven pounds – so I will be snapping all of those up along with some edt, some 22, Cristalle, and Coco parfum as the months go by); much of the rest of the shop varying from reasonably priced pristine editions ( an Hermes Amazone here, a Monsieur de Givenchy there…) up to expensive essentials – I have my sights already on a giant half liter of Shalimar going for ¥44000 – that’s my birthday present sorted then – as well as 30ml of verifiably vintage L’Heure Bleue parfum WHICH SHALL BE MINE.
I have already also bought such greatnesses as Paco Rabanne Metal – as fresh as if it had just come out of the factory in 1979 – on Wednesday I got a Vent Vert extrait – searing green galbanum top note gloriously intact – for a stupid ¥400 (£2.40!!); a divine Ricci Farouche boxed set; I fancy acquiring some of The Disappeared, just for the hell of it – Cartier So Pretty Eau Fruitee; Tentations Paloma Picasso; a full, very potent original bottle of Calvin Klein Obsession.
And speaking of seminal formulations of scents that are no longer with us, on the shelf the other day was a splash bottle of YSL’s either Champagne – its original title- or Yvresse – I didn’t see the name on the glass ; but that bottle is unmistakable, and so is the smell. I inhaled it deeply, staining my nostrils, imprinting the inside of my mask and my smell brain and possibly spilling the tiniest drop on my work clothes….. and all I can say is that, though I was in the shop for only fifteen minutes ( a gloriously secret sneak from work …) it has been HAUNTING me ever since.
Champagne : when first released, my young self found it dated; passé; an enamel melting lychee effervescence of sick peaches and mouldering; floral oldness; the tedium of diva, the soignee hostess with the mostest; true, I could smell the inherent panache involved here: the neo grand classique; the last gasp of an era as the metallic anorexia of the ozones took over ; Champagne was a last ditch effort, alongside similar perfumes like Ricci’s Deci Dela, to hold on to some of the richer textures; the orchestrated fullness.
And this, being a Sophia Grosjman rose perfume, is certainly orchestral. Swooningly fullbodied, multiplexed: carnation, roses, all the flowers, but also aniseed, caraway, mint, and a full, woozy, sickly tipsiness base accord of patchouli, vetiver, cedsrwood, vanilla, coconut, oak moss, cinnamon, styrax…… if this sounds vomitsome, as though you had been at an all-you-can-drink on a cruiseship and are now chundering seasick over the balustrade, I wouldn’t necessarily contradict you ( the young me always found this perfume to be putridly overloaded while still somehow very predictably French and unbearably ‘tasteful’ – allowing a woman to be respectable, but vivacious, even a little bit ‘giddy’ just for the one special night when she can ‘let go’).
Time has altered my perceptions though. Rarely have I been so possessed by a perfume in recent times – this was interfering with my thought processes as I was trying to teach; the deep heartache of the warm, plaintive bed of chypric fascination ( pure genius), lilting with the mellowed apricot and greener elements to create a deep PANG of perfumed longing. So even if this just turns me into an old fruit, if I am not one already, you can be very, very sure that this will be coming home again next week when I hurry to my private assignation before school, a bottle of YSL vintage, tucked somewhere —ecstatically, on my person.
All things at once; neatly pissy; west/east hybrid, clever melding of cypriol with civet and castoreum to recreate a South East Asian oud without being too obnoxiously oudish : a thick down (no one does contemporary, thick, poreless downs like Francesca Bianchi and I mean that as a compliment: this lasts well into the next day – her Sticky Fingers basically the perfect patchouli vanilla; dense as; Calme Volupte an almost shockingly visceral spiked sandalwood – alarmingly sexual
;
on top, powdered white muskness – those who appreciate the negligence of Tom Ford Urban Musk and Jasmine Musk will like this – with a fondant balsam centre, like an oud chocolate with a liquid floral puree………… ; though White Musk, the original, is still the benchmark of this genre for me (and always has been), other comparable crystallines like Lutens Clair De Musc really just redefinitions; the classic Kiehls and Alyssas just less cleanly versions of the same (I don’t mind a touch of slovenliness in a scent sometimes – it is not usually my go to vibe even if I can’t resist gorging myself sometimes on Bal A Versailles, the musc of all time – but there is definitely a curl up comfort about a blanket of clean/unclean musk even if when worn outside, the riskier risque associations immediately clear )
Unspoken Musk piles on all this musk history, but tells its own stories – full, emotional, as the perfumer herself says, revealing the vice/virtue contradictions inherent in the human; my impression being that it smells quite different depending on the person – on D it was much more feathery and flamboyant while simultaneously too domestic – I smelled woodier, darker, and a tad simplistic, the state of initial cleanliness involved probably also crucial here: I would need to have squeaky clean after-bath epidermis to pull this one off for coziness; unwashed would be too feral – the filthometer teetering too precariously towards Total Skank – with a capital S
Germany has always done herbs and botanicals exceptionally well – many of the best herbal teas, essential oils and plant based medical ointments are assembled or manufactured here (you definitely can’t beat Pompadour’s Pfefferminze for a perfect mint tea); I find many of the best aromatherapeutic essences often turn out to be Deutsch; and Kneipp, a 130 year old institution whose expensive – but incredibly soothing, stimulatingly effective – natural bath salts are very popular in Japan – is no exception ; a company whose products are great for those who like bracing and potent medicinal plant oils to clear their nasal passages or free up sore joints, just unwind( their eucalyptus is unparalleled; I also really like their peculiarly blue forests wintergreen when you need a really long deep soak).
The hand creams produced by Kneipp, though, I must confess, are sometimes somewhat more problematic. From the greasening, emollient point of view when your hands are dry they are of good quality, do the job, and also come in dinky mini sizes that you can easily slip into a small pocket for a crafty drop of scent when you might feel like one. However, the scent of these creams, even when a citrus, is often perturbingly animalic, or at least ‘bodily’ ( a little bit dirty); the plant hormones of the oils used not sanitized and cliniqued out of the final product into something hygienic and more consumer -palatable as they might be elsewhere; The ylang ylang tube I once bought unnerved me – I couldn’t quite place why, but I never used it ; this new apricot cream, which I just picked up on my lunch break, is also carnal, luscious – creamy as an apricot fromage frais ( sometimes I think there is no fruit flavour more delectable : it is easily my favourite jam, and the scent of Fauchon’s apricot tea is to die for …….. — has this note, come to speak of it, to your knowledge, ever been used convincingly in a perfume ? I do remember a gorgeous apricot vanilla confection once by Comptoir Sud Pacifique from back in the day but that is all that is coming to mind right now unless you stretch to the fruit orchards of Femme de Rochas); at any rate, I think I like this, though the scent definitely feels slightly too uncanny – forbidden, almost — to be used in my classroom later this evening.
Another state funeral today – this time a very controversial one : a government funded , costly and grave affair to commemorate assassinated prime minister Shinzo Abe, who was shot dead one Friday in July at close range; this, unlike the Queen’s of two weeks ago, closed off from the public under extremely tight security and anxiety as , according to news reports, at least half the country opposes it being held in the first place and, quite big ( quite unusual in Japan ); loud and angry protests going on as we speak across the country, even, to my slight surprise, where I work in relatively low key Tokyo satellite city Fujisawa, where groups of people with loudspeakers were gathered just now as I went out to lunch to voice their anger and resentment.
It is interesting to me that the emperor – pictured above – travelled to London for the funeral of Elizabeth, but that protocol states that he and the empress not attend the commemoration of Abe’s remains at the Budokan today ; also that the killer, Tetsuya Yamagami, now that it has come to light that at least half the government here have links to the Moonies/Korean Unification Church ( why ?! So bizarre ), the reason Yamagami apparently took ‘revenge’ against Abe in the first place for impoverishing his family (the mother gave all of her savings to the cult) ; he has now become something of a romantic folk antihero to some factions of this society despite the deeply shocking violence of his crime, indicating the deep unpopularity of many of the former prime minister’s conservative policies, and showing quite clearly, once again, that in Japan, as with anyone anywhere , you never really quite know what is going on under the surface.
I was moved by the Queen’s funeral. Awed, even. From the opening, searing deep chorale solemnity of the first voices as the coffin was borne into Westminster Abbey to ‘The Sentences’ – a seventeenth century piece by composer William Croft that stung with a purity of pain and sorrow, filling the vaults to the rafters of the abbey and the airwaves to Japan and around the world, I was profoundly aware of being in the midst of a truly historical moment.
As a typhoon passed over outside, D and watched much of the procession beforehand, amazed at the precisely calibrated organization and meticulously choreographed sense of occasion as the royal family walked somberly and gravely (almost ridiculously), in sync to Beethoven’s Funeral March (at one point, so hypnotized by the endless repetition of the music, I found myself going up and down the stairs to make herb tea walking in exactly the same stulted rhythm, unconsciously marching myself); transported to a very different, more gilded Britishness than the one I am used to (‘chaotic’, savvy, sarcastic, controversial, at ferociously political loggerheads); for once it felt, temporarily – even if this was only illusory – as if everybody had put everything aside and had reassembled themselves into one body of people concentrating their minds on just one thing: with London closed down, almost the entire country focused on the ceremony and the laying to rest of Elizabeth, there was a unifying sense, even from this distance, of a coming together.
It felt genuinely sad. The more I read about the Queen, the more I (perhaps naively) come to the conclusion that despite the many problems associated with what she represented (still strange using the past tense) – the public financing of the royal family, which many quite rightly see as outrageous; the legacies of colonialism; the inherited privilege and entitlement (and so on and so forth), this was a person of true integrity and decency, who spent her entire life dedicating herself to what she believed in. I respected her consistency. First and foremost, paradoxically, even, given her her great personal wealth, unlike so many who pronounce themselves to be Christians but in fact are not, I believe that in spite of her position, she did not generally condescend to people nor discriminate, but seemed to truly believe that all human beings are equal and worthy of respect ; I did not sense the deep hypocrisy present in so many of the supposedly ‘pious’ and racist and bigoted whose hearts are full of prejudice and hate. While the funeral service, so extraordinary in its choreography, and the BBC’s camerawork, as though, almost, you were watching a film that had been pre-considered (which of course, it had been), and not an event of great significance that was transpiring live before your eyes, with its cold but compassionate lenses moving down slowly from the cloisters onto the lonely coffin lying below, covered gently in simple flowers (at first I found the bouquet underwhelming in its scope, but came to like the naturalness of it; the rosemary especially, entwined with myrtle, roses and carnations – there was a tasteful simplicity), all of this non-contemporaneously and profoundly religious in its use of ancient Christian texts and hymns as well as some truly sublime and exquisite more contemporary organ and choir music, which may have felt alienating to the modern atheistic society of Britain; but at the same time, as the head of the Church Of England it all felt very right for her, personally – her own choices; purifying, cathartic, healing, rather than the sham of morality so often seen by religious zealots with no sincerity of religion their hearts. It was religion as consolation, no matter your own beliefs; magnificent, but also intimate, ecclesiastical public rites that allowed you to spiritually exhale and move on; songs and recitations that were often piercingly melancholy, reminding us ever more keenly of our own mortality and that of the ones we love, including the truly heartrending plaintive piece by the bagpiper that signalled the end of the funeral; an epoch making reign of seventy years ending definitely requiring such a drawn out, fantastical, almost ravishing, grandeur.
The lying in state for such a long period of time was, in my opinion, also remarkably well judged. From the sudden announcement of the death, up in Scotland, to the burial at Windsor, a sufficiently long period of time went by for the news to sink into the minds of the people; the various, televised ceremonies in different cities across the UK reinforcing the reality; the endless queues of people lining up for many hours to be able to walk past the catafalque (a new word in all our vocabularies), at Westminster Hall, hypnotic as it was broadcast live on the BBC like an art installation delineating time, slowing it down, deepening and solidifying the moment, crystallizing the mourning into something slow, considered, contemplatory, happening in real time; you could feel the passage of time; though part of me simultaneously felt sorry for the Queen, simply as a physical human being, being constantly on display in this way (I was very glad it was not an open casket : I remember parading past the waxen perturbment of Ho Chi Minh at his mausoleum in Saigon, the complete lack of personal privacy), this presuming that the Queen really was inside the coffin of course – a thought that occurred to me several times as the body was borne aloft across so many miles, turned, jostled, bumped on gun carriages, returned finally to Windsor – it felt tumultuous, rather than serene, for a recently deceased person to be disturbed and moved about so much: no ordinary person would have so little physical stillness. For this reason alone, I am pleased that she is finally at rest at the mausoleum in St George’s Chapel.
Ultimately, unenviably, it felt that Queen Elizabeth, her actions, her body, almost belonged to the State, truly its servant – hence the public’s ‘right’ to view or imagine her within her coffin, replete and loaded with whatever each member of the public wanted to project onto her embalmed figure. I found the spectacle of the crowds waiting patiently to walk past her quite riveting but also quietly harrowing; the Queen had dignity, but not the solace of peace nor deathly solitude. I felt sorry for her. But the public, of course, understandably, had to mark the moment, a change of monarchs – something that has not happened in most of our lifetimes, and the sheer numbers involved and the logistics required to make this run smoothly without hitch were very impressive. It was as though time had stopped, a National Event unlike any other I have ever witnessed, and so it felt absolutely imperative to be there, at the time of happening, on Monday evening, even just on a screen thousands of miles on the other side of the earth. I was transfixed. The beautiful music chosen at the funeral and the manner in which the whole post-passing was managed, was incredible to behold; it was like being cast back centuries into a history that you forget exists or existed, but was there before you, right in the present. Certain hymns, like ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’, took me right back to being a little child when we used to learn it at school, and made me feel quite emotional. Such carefully selected pieces of music touch people deeply; a shared cultural knowledge that you forget lies still within you; the soaring boys’ choir truly reminiscent of angels in heaven. — even if you don’t believe in them.
