Last Saturday at 8pm we tuned in to The Casket Of Horrors, a live cabaret in Tokyo featuring video submissions from contributors who couldn’t be there at the venue in person.
It has been very hard for performers. Some people I know make their living doing shows (or otherwise, it is the thing that ‘gives them life’). Since the Covid 19 outbreak there has been no Closet Ball, for instance – a mainstay of gay life in Tokyo for many people and overseas visitors, which both D and I have performed at on numerous occasions: Halloween events will similarly be shut down this year.
Despite the difficulties for everybody, it has been quite interesting, watching how performances evolve; from live stage to video; from no audience to screen audience; a very different way of presenting your ideas and songs; an entirely different kettle of fish.
With D Whom, I just follow orders. ‘Tonight you are going to decapitate me against a green screen and hit me with socks pretending to be bats’ : ‘tomorrow night I am going to film you as a corpse’ etc etc. Covid Cabaret was a scream, his teaming up of a pangolin (‘Patient Zero’) with pigs and bats – making a mockery of the virus, because sometimes you have to poke fun at the thing you despise, and fear, as people did in the 14th century during the Black Death; this was live, though, and we did it against a green screen and the background film he had already made, not quite knowing whether we were coming or going; it was precarious and hilarious.
Yesterday’s entry – each entrant being limited to four minutes or under – was D’s twisted love story set to a soundtrack of Prisoner by Barbra Streisand – theme from Eyes Of Laura Mars, a cult seventies thriller starring Faye Dunaway that we both adore – and Yoko Ono’s Beautiful Boys. Exhaustingly, I had come back from that day of all day interviews I had been doing a few weeks ago (discussed at length in my piece on English Education In Japan); relaxing on the balcony, if you remember, smelling perfumes, just recovering from the day: the last thing I wanted to do was getting dressed up and painted like a bloated horror hag doll.
I had promised though; so let him get to work. There was a deadline. And so D stitched together some kind of petit melodrama revolving around him being incarcerated for the murder of Burning Bush (and who can blame him?); then realising his mistake, and after being in prison for god knows how long, returning home to find that he is still completely haunted, as I float in car windows and the doors of abandoned houses (we filmed this latter part a couple of Sundays ago; you can see our local shopping street in the sunlight, and an overgrown house around the corner).
All perhaps rather insane. But actually, really quite cathartic.
Some things are much more expensive in Japan. Essential oils (especially if imported, : Tisserand, Neal’s Yard – about three times the usual price); fruit; fish; airline tickets (rigged so you pay twice what you would pay flying from the UK ; usually it costs about $2000). Perfume. Books. Conversely, eating out is incomparable in terms of quality to most other countries and often far cheaper, so it is actually often more economical to go to restaurants than assemble your own ingredients – the reason we only really cook at weekends. Duncan eats out every single night after work, and could probably write a guide to the best Italian and Indian local restaurants, the local Japanese ‘curry rice’ joints, Chinese eateries; noodle bars and soba shops.
In terms of what I spend money on, oils are a life necessity for me. If am on a tight budget one month, I still have to factor in these as necessary purchases, for baths; general health and leg pain relief – my mood is also infinitely better when teaching as though I get an entire relaxing and tuning up of my physiognomy. We actually lost the bath plug ( I know : how?) in the summer, so it was months of showers only before we got round to buying another one. But when we did, I could hardly believe how different I would feel for the rest of the day, particularly if I had used eucalyptus or bergamot: serener, more balanced and unified. Like a different person.
As ‘luxury purchases’ for perfume, I use only the essential oils of patchouli and vetiver. Patchouli as incense, vetiver oil as skin scent. The particular vetiver I was discussing in the last post in my ‘Dirty Weekend’ — Katy, as you asked – is this 5ml of Javan origin from Japanese make Aroma Bloom – pricey perhaps at about ¥1800, but as it is so concentrated it lasts quite a while and totally wearable; AMAZING on coats and sweaters and hidden in trousers – to me this is my ‘underlay’ of vetiver scent; if I wake up feeling minimalist on a particular day I need no perfume; just nature outside and the deepening earth-wood-grassy note as it maturates on either my clothes or the body. Equally, , it goes perfectly with other perfumes ; for contrast (but perfectly complementing). I particularly enjoyed this oil the other day, with a silvery, soapy vintage Rive Gauche extrait.
Heavy rain puts a beautiful barrier between you and the outside world. Curtained off by sheets of water and winds as the typhoon passes over but doesn’t actually hit, you are lagooned in your home with an extra layer of protection from what lies beyond, the most perfect feeling after a week of physical and psychological exertion. Lost in the cinema room, shutters on the windows – the air outside dark and livid green grey, we had an afternoon matinee of England Is Mine; a biographical film based on the life of Morrissey, miserabilist poet and singer of The Smiths; more rain and gloom down the Victorian canals of Manchester as the icon barely just survived his depressed pre-fame days stuck in jobs at the Inland Revenue and as a cleaner at the local hospital; a double compounding of dankness and rain that equated a positive – a blocking out of filth; a purification.
We started following this with a film from Ireland, ‘Cured’, about the partial rehabilitation of zombies after a psychosis-causing and murderous plague (sound familiar?); these still nightmare-stricken individuals’ attempts -re-introduction into society after the discovery of a vaccine, but it was a little too grim; a tad too close to the bone; so we switched to a romantic coming-of-age film by Francis Ford Coppola – The Outsiders, from 1983, based on the novel by S.E Hinton; pomaded, jacketed young hoods in Oklahoma trouble, straight from a Smiths cover. Stark, beautiful, the looming, figures in their bleak town at night desperately trying to stir up a reason for living, this segued perfectly with England Is Mine. Drinking red wine in the dark, we both felt that we had been beautifully dipped into a dream.
I was, and am wearing, a pure vetiver essential oil as I write this; one I discovered in a local aromatherapy shop, and a scent I now consider to be my perfect perfume. Viscous and rough at first (for the first minute or so), it then melds with my body in the most pleasingly natural way imaginable – cool, mysterious, earthy and woody, but constantly changing; a natural adaptogen. These last few weekends I have actually not washed nor showered – sometimes for two or three days in a row; very unlike me. Instead, I have just applied vetiver oil all over, in carefully orchestrated measures and places, and then worn the same clothes for days and just relaxed and luxuriated into myself; sensing the smell rise up now and then (D really loves it on me) in all its deep-grassed greenness and cool sagacity. During the week I am always meticulously clean; I enjoy the procedures; the lemon soap, the right shampoos, the carefully chosen washing powders for my clothes, but sometimes I sense an abrasion, that my skin and my organism needs a break. And filthy I may be (in some people’s eyes) – but smelling into my undershirt right now I am liking what I smell ; we have melded. The vetiver oil is present and has become part of me.
Is it possible that wholly natural perfumes and preparations have an edge sometimes, when you are feeling overloaded? Sometimes I do feel so. A lot of things that I get sent to smell are unpleasantly chemical; alien, and when I am in home-mode I instinctively recoil from them as fashionist intrusions. Sometimes I want to return to something more organic. Finishing the Coppola after dinner, I felt like an addition to my scent, a top-up, and reached for Dutch all-natural perfumery Abel’s Cobalt Amber. A fresh, spritzy opening aside (pink pepper, cardamom and juniper berries), the part that I am less keen on, the perfume quickly subsides into a eminently wearable, simple, and gorgeous skin amber; all labdanum, tonka bean, peru balsam and a touch of cacao that is not heavy, not too sweet, but has a persistent gossamer lightness to it that lingers pleasingly on the skin. Ambers can be very ‘involved’; I feel that you must be committed to wearing one for the day (or let’s just admit it – the perfume wears you); the additional conceptual additions – Ambre Russe, by Parfums D’Empire, say, all caviar and vodka and Trans-Siberian Express and fitted train carriages; the glinting, extra ingredients much more suited to dressing up, going out; displaying yourself for the sake of other people. For staying in, and the much needed interiorizing and containment of privacy, sometimes just skin and natural essences are good. With vetiver surrounding and soothing me with its quiet masculinity, the ambered textures of this perfume; gentle, fluffed; contented and innocent, took me to the necessary, soft-padded edges of my own cocoon.
The word ‘toxic’ has become overused. Toxic relationships, toxic friends, toxic colleagues, toxic families – though I do feel it is entirely appropriate in the context of the phrase ‘toxic presidency’. But what is toxic to me, might not be toxic to you. You might be ‘toxic’ to me, but I might also be ‘toxic’ to you. Toxicity is subjective, biased, personal : a colleague of mine, one of the very few-non-Japanese teachers I work with, told me directly to my face last year that sometimes, when I walk into a room and am clearly in a bad mood (it is true that I am not very good at concealing my emotions), I am like a ‘poisonous ice fog that infects all who come into contact with me’. I would definitely dispute this – although I think he is entitled to his own opinion of me – seeing that I am sure that many of my Japanese co-workers would say instead that I am really quite friendly and affable (when I am in the mood for talking). I also don’t think he is a bad person – I just shudder in his presence. After two quite unpleasant exchanges this week, one involving politics, the other a simple small talk conversation about the weather, which left me feeling very unsettled and, indeed, slightly poisoned, I have come to the conclusion that we are simply incompatible.
Human relations are rarely uncomplicated. We are all different. When I was doing the first part of my distance learning Perfumery Diploma, we had to do diagrams for each unlabelled essence we were studying; giving each one a rating of how strongly it was citric, ambered, cloved, peppered, woody, vanillic, etc etc, marking a cross along the line from one to ten and then, at the end, joining up the crosses to form a unique, individual shape. I think people are like this as well; we all have differing concentrations of personality facets and ideals, traits, from conservative to liberal, introverted to extroverted, optimistic to pessimistic, active to lazy, realist to dreamer, rational to irrational, thrifty to decadent, libidinous to unsexual – the list goes on and on forever, which is why it is a small miracle when we make a true friend or find a suitable partner; the person doesn’t have to be the same as you, but the characteristics must interlock in some way or be magnetic to each other; attract and be mutually enjoyable.
This person I work with – mercifully only for very short periods of time on two days a week (but I am going to avoid him from now on : my natural instinct is for confrontation and to get things out in the open, but we have already done this once and it made things ultimately worse – I think a clear-eyed acknowledgement that it is never going to work would be better); the good thing being that in Japanese culture, unpleasantness is to be avoided at all costs, and we are both bound by these incontrovertible rules. Simple ‘konnichwas’ will have to suffice.
Speaking of the Japanese work place, I read a very interesting article the other day on ‘toxic positivity’, which truly chimed with me as being an excellent summation of the positives and negatives of the culture of this country. Although, as a Brit, I sometimes do miss the moaning and complaining on a Monday morning, when everyone sighs and drinks tea and commiserates on the fact that the weekend is over and nurses their hangovers, then finally decides to ‘get down to work’ (in Japan you just say hello and get straight down to work without a moment’s hesitation), at the same time it is nice to not have any office politics – at least not on the immediate surface – and to be able to get on with what you have to do without too much worry about people you can’t stand the sight of; you simply keep that to yourself, and try to not let it bleed out into the atmosphere around you.
I also love the fact that you don’t have to worry about being knifed in the street, as you often do in the UK, or being shot – in the US : that you basically feel physically safe, in other words – which is not something to be sniffed at. People are civil, polite – the deepening chaos in America as the Pig (the most toxic person in recent memory, in the last hundred years – whose negativity – everything he has done or said has been so deeply negative, hateful, rageful, petty, nasty ) deliberately stirs it all up for the sake of his hollow satisfactions, is unimaginable here. Instead, there is an acceptance of the status quo that borders on docility: an ossification of the mind that can foster a pale, inwardly looking negativity that eats the soul.
An article in the Japan Times the other day analyzed the fact that the suicide rate here has increased rapidly over the last few months, during the isolation of the coronavirus lockdown – particularly among women, school children, and a number of high profile celebrities – who have been taking their lives at an alarming rate. One of the reasons for this is said to be ‘toxic positivity’ – which seems like an oxymoron (how can something positive be considered negative?) until you think about how shallow and shiny Facebook is, with the majority of people presenting idealized versions of their lives; Instagram even worse – a neverending parade of smiles and desserts and cute children and lunches – or for me, the true horror that is Disney, a place that makes D and I want to practically kill ourselves in a desperate lovers’ suicide pact as the giant masked puppets smile their hysterical, rictus fixtures of permanent, wide eyed delight. A surfeit of unrealistic, relentless positivity and fake happiness is corrosive and dangerous to the human spirit – with sometimes deadly consequences.
I have always resisted this, in the way I also reject extreme negativity. Although I would never present myself as an ‘ideal’ anything, particularly considering how extreme I can be; I am hedonistic, extravagant, excessive, narcissistic – the list goes on……. to me, because I am me I suppose, my own balance of positivity and negativity feels just about right. I cannot stomach really negative people for too long as they are just such a downer (and they bore me to death). But equally, fake positivity makes me sick. I am not really interested in small talk; I can do it, because you have to in order to lubricate the wheels of communication in society with something, but as my friends know (and I am lucky in being able to say that I really do have real friends), I usually just jump in at the deep end; I can handle desperately difficult situations and tragedies more easily than eye-avoiding, pointless banter; if it is real and honest, then even when the topics of conversation are difficult, the admittance of the fact that our lives are not perfect, and that we all have problems, often very serious ones, is, as one friend said to me the other day, a ‘balm to the soul’.
The inherent problem with the colleague I have been having difficulties with is that we are polar opposites in this regard. He hates anything other than pleasantries and conversations that involve something external (he is very intelligent, knowledgeable, analytical if opinionated, as of course am I) and can and loves talking at length with the other Japanese teachers about etymology, geography, history, sport, trivia, all while laughing continually even though it isn’t remotely funny: a Santa for all seasons — I cannot do polite laughter to save my life, I absolutely detest it), whereas in my case, if I can’t have a real conversation, on the whole I would rather say nothing at all. Therein lies the rub, though – everyone is different. But perhaps he is ultimately far more suited to a Japanese company than I am; there is no doubt, as the article on toxic positivity says, that Japan has very particular cultural norms in terms of discussing emotion, and I do believe that this atmosphere is more appropriate for his particular character blend. (I personally find all cultures stifling, restrictive, limiting, incidentally, which is why I have chosen to be outside them as much as possible; you might call it a ‘bubble’, and that I am not living in ‘reality’, but I would definitely dispute that; it is a choice; I reject all false parameters on my being in terms of cultural expectations, gender, age, nationality, everything; at work I have almost complete freedom in what I teach with no interference; the only requisite being that the students enjoy the lessons and benefit from them educationally; I am not part of the internal machine in that regard, more the maverick who flits in and out three and a half days a week ; my liberty is everything to me, a true ippiki ookami – lone wolf.)
But a lone wolf who feels connected. I personally reject the extreme negavitity of the Monster, as I reject the isolationist misery of Brexit. I don’t miss the aggression and overt negativity of much of British society, even if I equally agree with the author of the article that too much concealment of emotion, in the stereotypical Japanese version, is also extremely dangerous for the human soul. Neither system is ideal, by any stretch – some kind of blend of the two would be better, ‘Western’, and ‘Eastern’ : but then would countries then have any individuality – or would they just become a homogenized mush?
This post is not intended to come to any conclusions. There are no conclusions to be had, and I don’t know if I am just contributing to the terrible maelstrom we are living by tossing out ideas about what and who we are as individuals, as societies, as global humans. I just know that for me, light and dark, positivity and negativity, life and death, have a natural equilibrium; we need both. I love happy music and sunshine and emotive and sentimental films and joking around and delighting in the aesthetic beauty of the world as much as I love listening to depressing music in the rain and horror; when I am happy I like to have happy conversations, and when I am not, I don’t shy away from expressing it. The point is balance. And that is something that is dangerously absent right now in this chaotic, and ‘toxic’ air, that all of us – no matter where we live – are currently breathing.
The founder of Kenzo, designer Kenzo Takada, has died of the Covid 19 virus in Paris.
I was always drawn to Kenzo perfumes (and his neckties and shirts and sweaters – his tropical/ Parisian ‘Japanese innocence’ aesthetic was instantly appealing to me from the offset) long before I ever set foot in Japan. From his first perfume, Kenzo Kenzo (1988), a warm spiced floriental that some of my friends wore in high school to deliciously soothing effect, to some of my own absolute olfactory milestones and most worn ever scents, including the brilliant Kenzo Summer (2005 – a perfume I can’t live without); Kenzo Pour Homme (1991) – an unforgettably original aquatic, to Jungle L’Elephant (1996), a spicy liquorice and patchouli vanilla bonanza that was my definitive signature for several years (- while my sister and my music partner both rocked Le Tigre and the almost luridly sweet and seductive Kashâya (1993) ), another friend his 90’s diffident water floral, L’Eau; also, Parfum D’Été, which was the perfume of Helen and other friends for quite a while – a dewy, green delicious floral in an captivating bottle that is truly of that time and stamped on my heart and memory – but even as recently as 2017, when I was given Kenzo Amour Eau Florale, which I wore in hospital and was great after as an after shower soother – —- the childlike, colourful escape of Kenzo perfumes has always been a delight. I have so many memories attached to these scents …
Selling everything he had and buying a one way ticket to Marseille in 1965, Kenzo scraped and worked until he had enough money to open his first boutique, the Rousseau inspired JungleJap featuring his first collection, which was spotted by the editor-in-chief at Elle at the time in Paris , who ran it immediately on the next issue’s front cover – and a fashion star was born. I love such passion and impulsive following of one’s instincts – an energy that was borne out in the sheer fun and pleasure of his creations.
Both Cécile Zarokian’s ‘La Surprise’ – inspired by the Rococo painter Fragonard’s work of oblivious springtime love and joy as a young woman in a garden surrounded by flowers is startled by her admirer – and Nathalie Feisthauer’s ‘L’Aimée’ (The Beloved), based on the tender picture by Jacques Louis David of a woman holding the hand of her child – are pleasing, fresh florals based on priceless classical paintings for French house MDCI, a well-esteemed niche company that usually employs a wide range of noted crème de la crème perfumers to make its scents, from Patricia Nicolaï to Francis Kurkdjian, Bertrand Duchaufour, Pierre Bourdon, and many others – yet manages overall to achieve an all round, smooth and refined palette of fragrances in its collection.
These two new perfumes make nice additions to the roster. If you were to read the full list of notes of the perfumes, though – in the case of L’Aimée, a veritable multiplex of flowers, fruit, woods, and resins (with a heart of rose, jasmine, champaca, lily of the valley, heliotrope, peach and raspberry, overlaid delicately with a bright introduction of blackcurrant bud, orange, bergamot, mandarin over a more sensuous sounding rich base with officially released notes of amyris, oakmoss, cedarwood, vetiver, patchouli, vanilla, amber, and musks) – you may be forgiven for expecting a more full-figured perfume, in keeping with Madame Sériziat’s dress; more of a hint of underlying sensuality. Instead, while I liked this immediately (though posited as a neo-classical creation, to me this is like a more attenuated, aqueous Beautiful by Estée Lauder, with a prominent and high quality rose and jasmine centre polished cleanly by all the fruit notes and the lightest dab of patchouli in the final dry down) – it is somewhat faint on my skin, reticent and ladylike – which probably captures the idea of the painting as intended.
La Surprise – also neo 1980’s or 90’s, rather than obviously alluding to the eighteenth century and the carefree Rococo period for which Fragonard is famed, has intimations of Fleur de Rocaille or Red Door, just prettier, more petal-scattered and fresh, less burdened, and is even lighter than L’Aimée, with its green notes of bergamot and cardamom, blended with new rhubarb, a bouquet of freesias and other white flowers alongside a ‘solar accord’ that adds a certain modern lucency, while a sandalwood/rose/violet heart and ‘woody notes’ musk conclusion add up to a scent that is eminently wearable – I can see it being nice sprayed on a cold sunny Autumn morning – but not, if truth be told, especially memorable.
In perfume terms, the artist Fragonard is of course most famous for the painting used in the middle label on the bottle of the (in)famous Bal A Versailles, a thick, musky animalic floral amber from the 1960’s that is legendary in its animalism and decadent extravagance. It is also most definitely memorable, even if most people would never want to wear something this heavy and enveloping on a daily basis ( I save it only for cold days on a whim). The two MDCI perfumes I am writing about here are the polar opposite of the masterwork by Jean Deprez: fresh floral evanescences that are worth seeking out if you like clean flowers, but – given the provenance of the origin and concept of the brief for these new additions to MDCI’s painting series ( I think Ms Feisthauer’s L’Homme Aux Gants, a woody suede-nutmeg balsamic based on the painting by Titian that I was wearing last night – is more effective; I also love Ms Zarokian’s stand alone gardenia orange blossom-vanilla confection Nuit Andalouse) – – perhaps not entirely worthy of the Louvre.
I write about this every year, but it never ceases to amaze me that the osmanthus in Kamakura really does come out like clockwork in October 1st.
On September 29th I could see and smell inklings : a tinge in the air walking back from the station. On the 30th it was distinctive. As soon as it was officially October, though ( a divine month in Japan – sunny and beautiful ) it was osmanthic mayhem : our front garden tree is the biggest in the area (pictured), and if I open the windows the scent of osmanthus flowers just flood right in to all of the rooms : petallic apricot, coy; concentrated; resplendent. I am drinking it all in today in inhalations of pleasure : a transcendent hope on our bleak and head-hammering horizons.
Our landlord – two doors down – is itching to strictly prune all our foliage as according to him it has turned into an ‘overgrown mess’ ( precisely how I like it), but I asked him kindly to at least wait until the osmanthus, or kinmokusei, has had its dreamy two weeks of glory. He consented, but the ever burgeoning tree is now coming into contact with the telephone wires; protruding into the street now, scraping the occasional delivery truck.
For the time being, though, I am going to revel in this scent. The day and night air is replete with it, and there is no forecast for rain, which usually just washes it all away after a couple of windy days. It is gorgeous.
