admittedly I didn’t want to be out at all but it was a friend’s 60th so you go anyway
what I don’t understand is this tendency, among certain people, to just answer questions, as though a superstar – yes this guy had an aura, looked like Jim Jarmusch but with long white hair and smelled strangely divine – you would have sworn it was Lutens Borneo 1840: perfume perfection but he professed not to know what it was, you know, being a man – but never ask any questions back
this repugnant narcissism tends to be more rife among north americans – it just does – you supply the reasons – but this particular dude was from rugby in the west midlands – quite close to where I am from
anyway – who gives a shit
the point is
ASK SOME QUESTIONS BACK, FUCKING SELF ABSORBED MOTHERFUCKER
Although I almost never wear it, the eye popping nature of pink is instantaneous stimulation. In a J-world where almost everyone has been wearing tediously muted subtlety for the last decade – beige, beige, cream, beige, camel, grey, beige, and desaturated Muji and Uniqlo ‘blues’, ‘reds’ (russet: ugh I HATE IT !!) and ‘greens’ – as well as beige, whenever someone – a student; someone on the street – has the temerity to beige-bust and actually shine in a beautiful moment of vivid colour expression I feel momentarily lifted out of the stultifying beige bog that to me signifies a puny meek surrender to the sludge of stultifying conformity that can sometimes clog the veins of Japanese society.
Admittedly, pink can certainly be annoying. Nicki Minaj overdoes it, and I didn’t like the particular ugly cerise shade of last year’s ’Barbie Phenom’ ( which almost made me want to wear beige ) – it is certainly a colour very prone to the tacky.
And yet pink neon. Searing through the soul like a Soft Cell 12” in Soho, ‘81. Peonies unfurling in a side garden. Exquisite pale pink kimonos. Dragon fruit. Cockatoos. In Japan there are even translucent pink Koshu grapes that are splendidiferous – I have never tried them – but look
:::: pink gives a lift to the soul.
The latest release from Frederic Malle, a photo of which I should have taken at the Takashimaya department store in Yokohama which really pulled in my eye deeply : bottles stacked glowing atop one another, electricly lit I stopped in my tracks bewitched – smells very pink – extraordinarily pink. I liked it immediately. Like bubblegum, it is all peaches and vanilla and ylang ylang and banana – tuberose and iso e super and aldehydes, ooh lots of modern aldehydes – sickly, perhaps, but with soul and inner complexity. It has a definite presence.
I know nothing about ‘Acne Studios’ – whose current frontice-woman is Charli XCX, whose smash hit album Brat d got me for my birthday :
The ad campaign isn’t especially appealing to me and the brand seems to be in the Dieselish bracket – high end but not Balenciaga – the Malle collaboration conferring cool on the latter, olfactive kudos on the former , but I did like the presentation and perfume itself.
Acne says
I wouldn’t personally say neo-classical, more ‘future vintage’. There is a bold, gourmand element that reads contemporary, but I was also taken back to one of the pinkiest perfumes ever made, the gorgeous More by Shiseido / which I have written a lot about before if you want to learn more, as well as the ludicrously cutesie D’Humeur A Rire from the L’Artisan Parfumeur limited edition ‘Mood Swings’ box I bought on the King’s Road some time in the early 90’s :all strawberry shortcakes, little girls’ ribbons and enameled nails – jumbled up together with the inescapable fabric softeners of your local laundromat. It is quite fluffy, fattening and nice, if utterly unaffordable (¥54,000 for 100ml to smell like Britney Spears in a tumble dryer?): I could happily have it in my collection and would probably sometimes indulge, but it is not a perfume I will be scurrying to save up for.
There is also the issue of the word itself : ACNE.
Fortunately unafflicted myself by every pubescent’s worst nightmare, I still inevitably succumbed to zits and pimples as a self conscious teenager – squeeze or leave ?- and remember clearly the fuss I would make to buy a cover up stick at Boots The Chemists, mortified to be a boy buying makeup but then I could never understand why people would just stand there in the school corridor with their eye focusing boil in the middle of their face and not at least try to mitigate its horrendousness.
No, ACNE – meaning spots and oozing facial pustules and craters – certainly does not appeal. But all in all, I have to say, this perfume rather does.
Just had a very indulgent and varied birthday weekend beginning on Saturday with diva-ish backstage drama at our Shinjuku drag show where we performed in front of a twenty minute film we had made especially for the night – here is me five minutes before going on
…. I think it went ok although there were inevitable fuckups and regrets that brought the night down a little afterwards
The next day we realized that it was all much better than we had at first realized (: eau, les artistes !) and had a really lovely afternoon in Ueno Park, the more austere, spacious and fadedly elegant old part of Tokyo where we had lunch at the legendary BunkaKaikan museum cafe – hadn’t been there in years, and with all the yellowing ginkgo and zelkova trees reflected in gilded mirrors we spent a good couple of hours just sighing contentedly in semi-melancholic autumnal bliss.
I could quite happily have stayed there all afternoon it was so relaxing (plus walking has become rather painful indeed; all of this was a partial celebratory swansong) but I wanted to go to an exhibition – to just randomly choose one from the several imposing museums in the vicinity ): Monet was horrendously popular and I didn’t fancy old Japanese clay burial masks from millennia before ; we opted for a survey of birds at the Science Museum instead – a full selection of stuffed and preserved ornithology presented cleverly , although after a while with all the crowds and the overheating we were as birded out as Tippi Hedren.
Time for a stroll in the cold but lovely late autumnal fresh air.
We came across the Geidai Art School where I had never been before.
The museum cafe happened to be having a free mini concert of gagaku – ancient court music, still performed in the imperial household on special occasions – so we thought why not : perfect. We went inside.
The musicians were milling at the back of the shop. I couldn’t help approaching them , the scent of incense gradually flowing through the space so exquisite and penetrating – fresh, deeply dignified, and darkly spiced , this was not the hangover of smoke on fabric but smelled cold air fresh – and I simply had to enquire further.
Surprisingly accommodating and down to earth – with all their courtly regalia I suppose I had expected a more supercilious mien – one of the ladies graciously let me inhale the sleeves of her kimono : cloves, camphor, agarwood, cinnamon and unknown ephemera – it was profoundly sense-altering ; you could tell that the garments had been stored somewhere with sachets of incense ingredients in a wooden chest in a beautiful room somewhere and with the music – discordant to many ears with its strangely pitched flutes and koto and bagpipe-like instruments, but to us penetrating and cathartic – I could imagine the sounds echoing through the valleys and forests of Nara, the scent and music commingling in a way that felt transporting.
I was out with a Buddhist friend of mine last night and the conversation got onto the subject of where Tina Turner might be.
Metaphysically, of course, since she is no longer physically with us.
( her answer was something I couldn’t entirely grasp about how her essence in the ether will have been separated into five distinct elements and that if conditions are right, she will be reincarnated again on earth in different form )
I have no real idea about that but this morning I remembered the discussion when my eye alighted on the bottle of Azzaro – sometimes called Couture – that I picked up a year or so ago – I had never even heard of it but loved the box – and had forgotten to write about.
I neglected to write anything after Tina Turner died too – the last couple of years or so things occur to me but I am not always able to bring them to fruition in the moment : I wasn’t a huge fan – though I love River Deep, Mountain High, Let’s Stay Together, Private Dancer and Gypsy Acid Queen from Ken Russell’s delirious Tommy – and liked her spirit and attitude towards life.
In the picture above she is seen with Tunisian Italian fashion designer Lois Azzaro – whose flamboyant but just so creations she favored – the classic flash the legs short tasseled Tina Dress was also by the couturier – so, rather randomly I suppose, today I am going to talk about his (rather successful – if you consider the longevity of Pour Homme – a tasteful yet erotic fougere that still kind of flies off departure lounge shelves ) range of perfumes
( spontaneous posts like these are often lost on public transport with me pressing the wrong button or whatever so I am going to publish this now and then edit it as I go along rather than getting to the end of the journey, messing it all up and then just wishing to evaporate in a puddle like the wicked witch of the west )
Azzaro dressed a lot of luminaries of the day, including the Barry Lyndon starring Marisa Berenson (divine), so it is perhaps not surprising that Couture is a stylish creation.
Very ‘Decadent Dior’ – a bit Diorella meets Dior Dior with a smidgen of Empreinte De Courreges – these kinds of dirty elegants are inherently flirtatious – filth under the flowers with redoubtable style. The creator of the scent, Jan Martel, made only three perfumes but wow, these were Jules Dior, Couture, and Paco Rabanne Pour Homme, one of the best selling fragrances of all time – and clearly had a strong predilection for the carnal lurking beneath polite surfaces – there are indoles and melon citrus, gardenia and fizzy animalics under a sheeny veneer : I don’t love it- there is something a little dead-headed here, a bit too blase, but if I ever meet a deserving disco dame whose coiffed bouffant could benefit from wearing this I might be willing to consider a donation
( hang on a sec, didn’t I meet this very person, smoking outside the Silk Road on Saturday night, partying like it was 1976 or auditioning for Brian De Palma’s Carrie ?)
Azzaro – I don’t carry boxed extraits around with me, except when I do, but it would actually have been perfect for the chick in green.
What do you do when your other half never wears an expensive niche perfume bought extravagantly as an extra birthday present ?
Spray it on his sheets.
That way you get to reap the benefits, in this case a fresh, nutmeg aldehydic, very clear frankincense fragrance (with some admittedly niche-ish trope-ish citric and coniferous facets that presumably put him off – someone was also coughing next to him in a theatre one night when he was wearing it so he never touched it again).
But I have reaped the secretive benefits. A lovely incensey white musk labdanum that lingers on clothes over morning coffee – it lingers on the cat, as well, who is always on the bed
-all in all a subtly pleasurable and vicarious experiment for me to which he has been absolutely none the wiser
It’s that melancholic near end of the year feeling where you sum up in your mind everything that has been happening, how it has been and where you go from here.
For me, there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding everything given that I will be off work for fourteen months from February – (not by choice: I didn’t request that long for knee surgery but had to fit in with the academic year and financial considerations of the company -); I will have a lot of time on my hands. Which could either be a precious blessing – though I will have little money – if I get into a creative groove – or isolating and depressing, if I don’t.
During and post corona, I think I was somewhat mentally shattered. This year, I still feel I was slowly moving through and past all of that in some ways, having processed certain things that were driving me down, but still very susceptible to stress and neurosis – and increasingly, socially avoidant.
I am a very introverted extrovert – essentially a performer (D and I are doing a big show next week in Shinjuku) but also someone who ‘fills up’ very rapidly. This year I have found that with teaching and any other kinds of interaction that I get mentally exhausted more quickly round people than I used to (the natural ageing process? teaching burnout? deep down I do know I need this break to regroup and recalibrate) – and yet, simultaneously I find that loneliness; that piercing, mid-afternoon existential dread that can envelop and almost floor you when your thoughts whirl around you too much – I have to travel quite far to one particular school on a Thursday for instance and get the 3pm blues pretty badly; that feeling of being empty, but also having the whole universe inside you, can be saddening and hard to take.
It’s amazing how the void can, in a moment, be partly filled. I randomly went into Gap – to buy a sweater I needed in the pre-Black Friday sales, and suddenly the beautifully familiar opening minor ascendant chords of the dance floor classic Ain’t No Body by Rufus and Chaka Khan started playing on the shop soundsystem and began colouring my soul. You can be floundering in your own inevitabilities out at sea – and then are suddenly thrown a lifeline. The genius of music is its instancy – its ability to transcend all else and take you out of yourself, or rather into something : a feeling of connection and fullness. I had to stay in the store until the song had finished.
I have also been realizing the same about perfume. For me, wintry melancholia is a given: part of me loves this feeling; the poignancy of life and death poetically borne out all around you in the trees and the wrapped up people shuffling by in their own private worlds; the twinkling lights, the memories of old family Christmases as a child.
The heart lights also up though when someone walks by wearing a pleasing scent – an unsolicited brightening that can take you unawares. We often think about perfume from our own perspective and tastes, but it often fascinates me when particular scent profiles I would never in a million years consider wearing myself, work perfectly – and very enjoyably – on someone else. I have just had a bit of a wild and very sociable weekend which did me the world of good (though our livers might disagree): a Thanksgiving party crammed into a small apartment between Kawasaki and Tokyo on Saturday night where I got chatting to old friends and possibly some new – and a show in East Tokyo last night which was creative, life affirming and wonderful (with the way the world is going, I suppose ‘my kind’ will become more and more marginalized and vilified, but in a way that only makes the solidarity with those you feel a kinship with even stronger).
As I may have written before, I don’t do smoke. Smoky. Burnt woody. Bonfire-esque. Barbecue. Not even in food (I can’t stand smoked cheese, harissa, BBQ sauce – anything smokey at all – though I don’t mind a few songs by Smokey Robinson). In perfume, aggro-sizzlers, combined with the metallic and woody aromachemical; those niche-tastic woodcutter home batch black embered notes that studio type creations often employ, are the most unlikely things you will ever find me wear – well I simply wouldn’t, I can’t – but I will say that I was amazed at how much I was enjoying smelling an exemplar of this type – Red Skies by Maher Olfactive on my friend Andy at Josh and Amber’s. He had just one spray on his chest, he said, and the husky base (oakmoss, davana, labdanum and leather) brooding, jolted by the sharp metallic calone/kaffir lime leaf/bergamot jasmine of the top was sillaging just as a perfume should; sexy and fresh; enough to frame the conversation, adding intriguing depth to the interaction. A difficult, but very sweet, ultrasensitive character who works in the gaming industry, this perfume broadened his perimeters ; emboldened his entire aura.
Another smokey scent was evident immediately from the entrance at the party of the imperious Michelle, whose potently sultry perfume knocked you sideways and drew you in. It was the second question I asked after what’s your name, and it was ‘By The Fireside’ ‘- she presumably somehow assumed I would know it was a Replica, the range of perfumes by Martin Margiela that has become very popular here over the last year or so. Usually a perfume by that name is probably the very last one I would seriously sample in a full smorgasbord of ‘smell memories’ as I just don’t go for smouldering timber, but on her – this smelled fantastic.
I enjoy it sometimes when there is an intenseinternal frictionwithin a perfume; a duel being fought deep inside the construction. Rather than a non-jagged edged smoothness, like the Sophia Grosjman -created Boucheron Jaipur I was myself wearing myself, By The Fireside presents as sweet, smothering and cosy – all chestnut, vanilla, amber, Peru balsam and cloves with a slow beating heart of rich warm orangeblossom – not entirely unlike the original Boudoir by Westwood, worn by the hostess that night, actually- perfumes not afraid to be sensual but without descending into tackiness –but cut through at its angrier core with a brow-furrowed, dark and deeply woody guaic and juniper accord that is in constant competition with its easier, sweeter side. The contradictions are compelling. We soon got into an intense discussion on astrology which was fascinating, all lit up extra by the beguiling otherness of the Other’s perfume; the perfume, weaving its way in and out of the mingling smells in the room and coming back to you, both making the person very distinct, as they emanate an unfamiliar cocoction that binds itself to the words and the connections you are making, and yet entering you, intimately – as you cannot help but notice and breathe in their whole bodily scent. At these times, the coldness in the air outside fades away; In such moments you feel more connected; whole; alive.
In the meantime, someone was wearing The Perfume on a very crowded train and it did feel like someone stabbing me with daggers in the stomach each time I had a waft
We then got off at Kinshicho station in (‘north tokyo’? – so glad, my god so glad –we live in Kitakamakura) – and thus spake zarusthra – there just happened to be a Zara in the station on the way to Fresh Meat – SO GOOD; political, touching, poetic, beautiful actually – that I naturally couldn’t help but stop and verify with my own nostrils that this was indeed the very perfume under scrutiny –
At my first ever Thanksgiving party in Kawasaki – I am wearing Boucheron Jaipur – D is wearing Electimuss Puritas – a soft lingering frankincense – and someone I actually KNOW – Atsushi – has just walked in wearing THE SCENT.
It smells good on him. Less searing. Pretty sure it is it though.
And the perfume in question ….
Sorry to disappoint those who were expecting something expensive and nichey but my nose tells me this is the one.
Zara via Jo Malone Elegantly Tokyo.
Funny that something prescriptively ‘Tokyoesque’ is actually worn here..
I don’t think I have ever put up a post before where I ask the readers to identify a particular fragrance for me – not that I am Al Pacino in Scent Of A Woman (perish the thought).
But Japan has a current olfactory megahit, and I need to know what it is.
It smells like real J-tundra I have ridden past on several occasions: rain-fresh; dry-heathery, natural : hideously artificial.
People are wearing it everywhere. Fashion types. In great clouds. Drillingly specific. Belly-filling. Immaculate. Fascinating. Officiously ‘high quality’. I doubt it is cheap. Mid-twenties to thirties. A bit pretentious. I have very very nearly stopped several women and men wanting to ask them what it is, but have invariably chickened out, for fear of coming across as a bug-eyed stalker. At some point I might have to, but for now I am asking you first.
With a great thwack of Comme Des Garçons-ish Black Pepper – always a queasyish, if ingenious perfume that I once inexplicably bought, – combined with an unmistakeably Diptyqean aqueousness – could this actually in fact be a Diptyque, a word like rhythm, I usually have an inborn inability to spell- given how groovily popular that house has become au japon?
All I know is that this perfume simultaneously (literally) turns the head -while (literally) quite deeply churning the stomach. It is amazing. It is foul. If a lover wore it, you would have no choice but to retrieve the ice pick from under the bed.
I bought this giant yuzu yesterday. Dense, knotted and rindy, the peel will be used to make salad dressings, hot yuzu and ginger tea now the temperatures have suddenly dropped, and possibly, as the Japanese have long done with this citrus fruit, to scrub myself down in the bath water as a fragrant and rejuvenating exfoliator.
