elise's amateur fragrance corner, part one !
the entry you've all been waiting for (and which nobody asked for) has finally arrived.
To listen along (this is a multi-sensory experience, friends):
I don’t know if this is just my warped, underdeveloped sense of romance or human connection, but I think illness and infatuation have to coexist. In “Phaedrus,” Plato argues that the soul of the lover is “in a state of ebullition and effervescence, which may be compared to the irritation and uneasiness in the gums at the time of cutting teeth” — seasickness that attempts to toss you sideways while binding you to one spot, tied to the mast. It’s disorientation as proof of life.
And I’ll be honest, at the risk of sounding pathetic: it’s been difficult trying to conjure any romantic memories to share here, because I think I’ve shared them all already. They’re never about a true romantic interest, but about a friend, or the city, or a musical act I went to see, a spiritual experience I second-guess myself on actually living through. The greatest semi-romantic heartbreak of my life was the end of a close friendship — I hardly have anything to measure that up against, if you don’t count the steadfast presence of my cat-callers who are in love with the feeling of control and standing they get to exert when they speak to me. I think they probably feel just as dizzy when they think not of me, but how warm the center of their chest felt when other men nodded around them. I think they get one hit and they can’t get enough. I think they dream of those nods that come from broad, stubbled chins.
Lately, I’ve been trying to come to grips with how bad the human body is at expressing anything. Well, maybe not the human body, but my human body. I find this to be an exhausting, boring, largely un-chic topic — hence why it has taken me well over a month to write this newsletter you’re reading now. Yet, as an admitted defender of Valentine’s Day, I did find myself searching for ways to express anything memory of something that resembled romantic love around the time of the holiday — and maybe it’s more like empathy than anything. But a few incidents physically froze me within the last year or so, and none of them had anything to do with another person being romantically interested in me. I guess they just felt like my own version of climbing outside of the useless weight of my body — being seen by something in a way that felt like ecstasy.
Listen, I realize it’s been a lot of waiting around and hand-wringing here for something that will be a fragmented, relatively low-stakes newsletter edition, but I wanted to write something ahead of another bigger piece I have planned for mid-April, and I wanted to get this out of the way before I got to that, and so: this is the niche fragrance edition. For some reason, through $4 samples from LuckyScent (everyone on that Instagram account is my best friend, whether they know it or not), I decided I wanted to develop this hobby of discovering and cataloging scents that relatively small perfumers made. Really, I think it started with a writer I know tweeting about a certain perfume house we will talk about here twice. All of that spiraled into me getting really into fragrance in an amateurish way — I had owned the Taylor Swift Wonderstruck perfume, and I had not long earlier listened to my younger cousin talk about the floral Valentino scent she liked, but that was about the extent of my knowledge up until last summer.
I’ve discovered I have no idea how to develop the strength of a sense, but the attempt feels just as romantic to me as pursuing another person somehow: this process of understanding what you’re drawn to and why, the place you want others to be taken when they smell you. I argued to someone I care for recently that the concept of “sensuality” has gravity — it’s not quite romance, but romance’s more overtly physical cousin — and there is something inherently sensual about selecting a signature scent and letting the world strengthen their own neurons-to-nose connection by being confronted by your olfactory statement.
Of course, scent is the sense linked closest to memory, and this struck me almost immediately on my initial smell test journey. New York based perfumer Marissa Zappas is one of the buzziest niche creators in this industry corner right now, and I decided to try her scent Maggie the Cat is Alive! I’m Alive! because we love Liz Taylor here and I simply will not turn something away if it’s a Cat On a Hot Tin Roof reference. The smell itself was fine, but it immediately reminded me of my paternal grandmother and a different scent I associated with her: an Estée Lauder travel size perfume she let me take from her dresser when I was a very young child — something I probably haven’t smelled in 15 years, mind you. It was probably the champagne note that struck the chord in my memory, but it was eerie how quickly that came back to me. Instantaneous.
The thing is, I’ve been handed this environment that breeds people who have minimal interest in me as a person, and that’s fine. It just means I feel slightly ridiculous beginning to write the following list of recent “romantic” memories and having pretty much all of them relate to music, with absolutely no hint of traditional romance anywhere. I was speaking to another friend-of-the-newsletter recently about how never having a significant other has sort of been a blessing — first of all, you’re able to build up a level of self-awareness and a certain type of interior life that does not depend on anyone else. I’ve written here before about the inherent loneliness in that, but really I recoil at the idea of any of the people I might have loosely “dated” before turning around and calling me their “girlfriend”. I don’t know when or how I could be anybody’s anything some days. It’s good that it hasn’t come yet, I think. I literally made an inhuman gagging sound even at the thought of including a paragraph about my last in-person semi-romantic encounter here so, let’s stick to music for now.
This is a list of my ten favorite tester scents I’ve tried so far, paired with a semi-recent memory that have felt close to this kind of romantic transcendence. It’s not that the scene will have smelled exactly like the perfume, or even that I was necessarily wearing it at the time, but that the way it makes me feel mirrors the way I feel when I crack open a certain tiny vial I’ve received in a shipping envelope, the weight of expectation leaving me breathless. So, here goes.
X.
The scene: writhing around on the office floor on the top floor of my uncle’s house.
The scent: Daddy by Universal Flowering
All of my newsletters which contain anything about myself are about me wanting too much, I feel. Most of the time, that derives from seeing something impossible and then wanting to take it on for myself — meaning a level of envy (one of the most embarrassing emotions we’re burdened with, to be honest) plays into it. It might be unfounded, or I might get over it within the hour of having written it down, but its pangs are there against my wishes. Evidently, lots of people are allowed the space for tantrums, but I have never been so fortunate. Sometimes, they can still slip out. When they don’t arrive in typed-out rants, I’ve been able to contain them to being behind closed doors.
When I was in one of my college poetry workshops — the one with non-majors where I didn’t receive many helpful critiques but I was allowed to do pretty much whatever I wanted — our very old professor, who had traveled the world twice over and wrote out of his probably-rent-controlled apartment in the East Village, was very kind to me about my writing. I think I was just trying to formulate my miserable thoughts into something concrete, and he would frequently say he didn’t “get it”, but would be deeply enthusiastic about the work anyway — and trust me, this wasn’t the case for the entire class’ work. Once, after reading one of my pieces for the week, he asked, fondly, “Elise, Have you ever heard Anne Sexton reading her own work?”
“Um, I don’t know! Maybe when I first read her, I don’t remember.”
“I think you’d like it. People found her terrifying, more than Plath I think. Intimidating. Just the timbre of her voice speaking the words she wrote.”
“Well, that would make sense.” We’re all Scorpios, my brain supplied unhelpfully.
“I think you might be coming from the same place in a lot of what you want to express, if I’m understanding what you’re bringing in correctly. Or the way you read your own work, rather.”
This was the same professor who told me I had an actor’s face and said I gave Fran Lebowitz a run for her money, though I think he was just trying to be nice about the latter one (the better compliment). I hope he’s well now — what he didn’t provide in terms of effective criticism, he compensated for with encouragement that I probably wasn’t going to get anywhere else. And he was sort of right: I think trying to read like Anne Sexton — speaking like god, delivering each personal horror or grievance with the force of someone who knows she will always want too much and will never receive it — helps me throw my tantrums and keep them contained, give them a center. Sometimes I’ll go back to one of these rambling things I send you all and read it to myself, or record myself reading it to hear how my voice changes when I’m trying to express something. I’ll mess up and keep hopelessly spitting out whatever syllables I can catch back up on. It’s strange to hear yourself manipulating your own voice, straining at what you desperately want to get across even if no one will hear.
When I have nothing to read aloud, music will obviously have to suffice. My most recent little singalong meltdown came from a situation where I was, yes, jealous — it took me exactly five hours to get over the way I felt this person had slighted me, but we were only on hour two here. My absolute adoration for PJ Harvey is no secret to people who have followed this newsletter for a while, and one of my prevailing takes is that people underrate Uh Huh Her, her self-produced, largely self-played sixth solo album following her biggest commercial hit, Stories of the City, Stories of the Sea. It is ugly and gritty and often willfully rudimentary in its approach — all things it got flack for and all things I adore about it. Unnerving, stripped down meditations on heartbreak are placed next to ancient-sounding folk songs or thrashing punk interludes about how she’d rather kill you than belong to you. On this given day, I laid down on the wooden floor in my uncle’s house where I was dog-sitting and recited the childish, spiteful lyrics to opener “The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth” like I was hexing the target: “Everything is poison / You’ll be the unhappy one.” To brood is the key action here, and this album has it.
The outtake title track has a similar feel and delivers it in even more severe fashion — Polly draws out the word, “reeeeeeeejectioooooon”, like someone’s trying to pull her tongue from her throat and forcing her to express the pain with the most visceral sound she can manage. As she rhythmically chants that she’ll force you to remember her, there’s a real sense of grit and toil and unruliness. These are all feelings I get from Daddy, a scent by the first niche fragrance house I ever looked into, Toronto’s Universal Flowering.
I initially learned about them through their then-new fragrance, Death of a Ladies Man, which I obviously wanted to try for Leonard Cohen-related reasons. However, to me, Daddy is the scent that smells more like that namesake album feels — an initial peppery hit to the center of your face that dries down into a lightly sweet, clean scent. Everywhere I’ve seen it talked about, people say it leans masculine, but it feels squarely set in the center of the masc/fem spectrum to me. In its dark, seductive edge that eventually settles nicely into the skin, I hear the threat of “Can you see my pocket knife? / You can't make me be a wife” or a very specific yell of “Who the fuck???” on the track of the same name. It’s the clipped delivery of a poet cut free, reading: “My dark girls sing for this. / They are going up. / See them rise / on black wings, drinking / the sky, without smiles / or hands / or shoes. / They call back to us / from the gauzy edge of paradise, / good news, good news.”
IX.
The scene: traveling to the abandoned smallpox hospital on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, alone.
The scent: Hexensalbe by Stora Skuggan
I, among my friends, am famously a big fan of “controlled nature”. Love a public park of any shape or size! Love being able to leave and get on the train again immediately after! I take my time in these parks very seriously, and last month, I realized I had not been to Roosevelt Island — the small strip of land in the middle of the East River between Midtown Manhattan and Queens — since I was a child. I had a friend from California in school who decided New York wasn’t long term for her, but she loved going to the north tip of Roosevelt Island to read and lay out in the sun. In my own fitting fashion, I decided to go in December (no sunny reading weather to be had) specifically to see the abandoned smallpox hospital that closed in 1875 to become a nursing school and which eventually fell into complete disrepair. At the time of the city making officially naming it a “historic” building in the 70s, it was referred to as the city’s “only landmarked ruin."
The Neo-Gothic facade of the building is still gorgeous to my sensibilities (they’re currently building a park around it, which I think would be a good use of the space, as long as they don’t tear the structure down), but it was the walk from the subway station down to the tip of the island that triggered the connection to this next scent. There is a completely built-up center part of the island — what I call “gentrification-style architecture”, mostly buildings from Cornell Tech grad school — underneath and around the 59th Street Bridge, which goes over the island to Queens. Below this, before you get the hospital and the bottom tip, there is a bunch of muddy, grassy park land that I’m sure is lovely in the spring — not so much on this day I went, but I kind of loved it for that anyway. It smelled like the water from the river surrounding us mixed with the scent of the fresh mud coating my Chuck Taylors as I chose to climb up and down the small hills instead of sticking to the path.
In the fragrance world, there are these things called “green scents”, and their name is pretty self-explanatory. They usually smell like the outdoors, like grass. Earthy, usually, though floral green scents will usually be lighter than that, more wearable. These can be hit or miss for me, and I usually don’t gravitate towards them as they don’t always sit correctly on my skin. I tried this scent called Coven from the fragrance house Andrea Maack — sold by the name, of course — which had vanilla, cedar, cloves and a few different herbs on its notes list. It might be fine with someone else’s skin chemistry, but it was the only scent I’ve tried that I knew I could absolutely never wear out of the house. Imagine taking one of those little Ortega taco seasoning packets and throwing it into grass and then leaning down and sniffing it; that’s what it smelled like on me. This one — Hexensalbe by Swedish brand Stora Skuggan — is certainly earthy and green-adjacent, but it wasn’t like that at all.
I wouldn’t say it’s that much more “wearable”, as it’s definitely more of an artistic statement than a date night go-to, but I found myself unable to stop sniffing it when it was last on my wrist. There’s something almost medicinal about it, opening with that pronounced touch of licorice and an herbal concoction you can’t quite put your finger on — and its namesake heralds its medicinal quality. “Hexensalbe”, according to the perfumer’s website, “also known as witches’ flying ointment, was a hallucinogenic salve used in witchcraft in the middle ages. It was a mixture of extremely poisonous ingredients.” The legend goes that women would apply it to their genitals and use the end of a broomstick to make sure it was applied correctly, if you catch my drift here. Allegedly, applying the medicine this way would create an ecstatic sensation, and through this, we now see our current cultural depiction of witches still riding broomsticks, but in a manner that’s decidedly safer for work.
Taking in the not-so-poisonous mix of hemlock, rosemary and tuberose, they’ve made a strangely agreeable offering with this re-imagining of Hexensalbe. I think I was mostly listening to my 60s Brazilian favorites during that long walk on Roosevelt Island — Os Mutantes and Gal Costa, mainly. Their Tropicália psychedelia had nothing to do with my blustery December afternoon in the mud right on the East River, but we were surrounded by structures abandoned and gorgeous — maybe best loved when placed in a certain context, but beloved nonetheless.
VIII.
The scene: face-to-face with a giant image of Warhol’s chest, post-shooting.
The scent: Night Flower by Eris Parfums
This is our first moment of true, frozen, fearful transcendence here, I think. I was walking through the Brooklyn Museum and brought face to face with Andy Warhol’s chest, maybe a few years after Valerie Solanas shot him — the big Avedon photograph of his torso with his shirt off. I took pictures from a million angles of the copy of Valerie Solana's SCUM Manifesto they had on display, and then was immediately forced to reckon with the complicated nature of my own fascination with her as I’m wholly transfixed by this photograph of this man’s insides, scarred and stitched together. I’m not joking when I say I stood staring at this photograph for at least 20 minutes, and it clearly wasn’t intended to be the centerpiece of this particular show about Warhol’s relationship with religion either. They didn’t really have the space for me to stand and gawk at it, and one security guard was kind of just stuck idling by me, maybe slightly worried, as I stared at it for what probably felt like forever. There was something close to the divine present in the gallery space as I stood with my mouth agape — not in a religious sense, like the exhibit might have suggested, but in my cockeyed devotion towards the image. Is this guilty idolatry in action? Maybe.
I don’t think Andy Warhol smelled like Eris’ Night Flower — a seductively syrupy fragrance that smells like flowers soaked in cozy spices and left out in cold night air. However, there’s something detached but inherently attention-grabbing about it — you could picture girls he tore apart and dropped outside the Factory elevator wearing something like this. Or I could anyway. If you douse yourself in enough of it, I figure someone could smell you coming from the next building over. It’s cool, but inviting — like the personal scent of a lovingly worn-in suede jacket that picks up all the smoke and food that crosses its path. Maybe the latter quality is why he’d have thrown them out. I’m sweet on it all the same. Not as ruthless.
I listened to Songs For Drella on the ride back up to The Bronx from that museum trip — this was just before I moved — hearing John Cale and Lou Reed parse the complicated devotion they now feel for their departed mentor from their occasionally standoffish treatment towards him when he was alive. Lou in particular is faced with the turbulent, multi-layered nature of his emotions here. I hear the delivery of the line, “All my life, it’s been nobodies like you,” rendered as a frightened and bitter and tender aside, and I know I’m hearing it expressed as only Lou Reed could express it. There’s devotion in that.
VII.
The scene: Leila Bordreuil’s opening set for Reverend Kristin Hayter at Le Poisson Rouge.
The scent: With the Candlestick by Clue Perfumery
It’s fascinating, how intertwined Catholicism (a belief system I’ve crawled out from under over the years, clearly) and the act of falling into unconsciousness are. And I don’t mean strictly in an extreme speaking-in-tongues, god-is-taking-the-guilt-from-you-via-exorcism way. I was confirmed in the church (and by the time that happened, I 100% knew I wanted out), but every time someone mentions a confirmation, I think of this rumor I heard about a girl I went to high school with who went to the other big Catholic church in the town. Supposedly, she had her knees locked for the entirety of the ceremony — they had to stand the whole time for theirs, for some reason — and passed out in front of the whole church while the bishop went through his spiel. I can smell frankincense and swoon just thinking about it now.
The artist formerly known as Lingua Ingota, the Rev. Kristin Hayter, is someone I’ve written about at length here before, so you’ll know she is an artist who dissects the concept of faith in Christianity and turns it inside out so that you can see the rot at the center while also preserving the mystical, devotional aspect of the culture surrounding some of these sects. I went to see her at LPR in the Village in January and adored the set, but it was her opener that stunned me into that type of claustrophobic, near-ecstatic state I’m yammering about here.
Composer and sound-artist Leila Bordreuil walked onto the stage with a cello, stood in front of her keyboard and soundboard attached to dozens of wires and pedals and said nothing before she began. She dipped the instrument like her dance partner and leaned into the groaning sound it would let out, turning around to fiddle with the cacophonous, fuzzy roar the other equipment produced. It was unrelenting and challenging — you can go listen to her recorded material, but it will not prepare you for how goddamn loud it will be in person — and I found myself hypnotized by the sheer physicality of the performance. I instantly deemed it more impressive than anything I’d seen any man looking at me like I don’t deserve to ever stare up at him do with a guitar. It felt like witnessing true, studied spell work. I was exhausted by the end of it, and I couldn’t tell you how long the entire piece lasted — it could have been 20 minutes, maybe a half-hour. I thought of that poor girl fainting on a decorated altar, and I figured my time had come for a similar display in a different house of worship.
This is maybe the only scent here where I was literally wearing it in the moment; I had just received by tester set order from hot new Chicago-based perfumery, Clue, and had already tried and marveled at the other two scents included — again, impressive as works of art, but not particularly wearable for me (there’s one where a note is “burning paper” and it literally smells like burning paper. How do they do it??). With the Candlestick is the one I found myself most drawn to, immediately taken back to a church pew where this exact type of incense-y essence is baked into the walls at this point. Again, its notes list is pretty spot-on: a burnt, not-too-overpowering cherry scent reveals a stronger, muskier heart, letting fruit and flower give way to the clouds of smoke left at the mass’ end. I’ve already worn it out more often than I thought I would. It proved to be perfect for my step into the otherworldly power of noise-music performance art.
A few minutes after she rightly received rapturous applause from the crowd, I heard a guy announce to his friend, “Yeah, I did NOT get it,” laughing like there was something to laugh about in any of it. “I mean, man…that was just not my thing.” Everyone has opinions, and he’s obviously allowed to express his, but it really was the laughter that got me — not sheepish or like he was actually trying to wrap his head around what he’d been allowed to witness, but as if he was waiting for everyone to agree with him, as if it was obvious why he didn’t want to be challenged by it. He tried to “WOOO!!” his way through Kristin’s spare solo performance as well so. It was clear he didn’t purchase his ticket and overpriced IPA on a search for the same type of transcendence.
VI.
The scene: sobbing like an idiot at every bar on the premises at Pianos.
The scent: Broken Theories by Kerosene
If you live in New York during the month of March, you should go to New Colossus Festival. It’s one of my favorite weekends every year — showcasing a ton of bands from all over the world alongside local up-and-comers at some of the best venues the Lower East Side has to offer. However, I had a weird interaction I won’t go into at one of the shows this year, and the classic thing happened where tears shed for that catastrophic accident turned into me crying about everything wrong in my life once the floodgates were open. I stood at every bar in Pianos that Saturday afternoon and evening and sniffled like an idiot over things no one else was concerned about. I was there alone — it wasn’t like I had someone there to reassure me, and my friends have their own lives and were answering texts in short, unexpressive bursts, so I just kind of spiraled. No one approached me as I openly sobbed, and that was probably for the best. Mercifully, the next day, the bartenders and staff pretended not to remember me. Someone else I really liked but hadn't seen in months pretended not to know me either when I walked out of a bathroom stall that night, still crying, and that sort of sent me spiraling again.
Here’s the thing though: before the falling dominoes set off by that incident, I had been having such a fantastic day — knocking back tequila sodas and meeting bands at the bar at the Knitting Factory (they’re still following me, by the way, if you’ve been here since the summer listening update newsletter edition), dancing like an idiot to fantastic music and making notes on my phone as I texted my friends live updates on who I loved and left lukewarm on. In the moment all of that sort of came to a screeching halt and I was desperately in need of something familiar or comforting, I actually craved smelling a specific fragrance I love. I’m not sure I had experienced that before in my perfume journey. This surely meant amateur hour was over.
The scent was Kerosene’s Broken Theories. If I was to ever have a significant other, I would kill to have them wear this. I am convinced the love of my life smells exactly like this. I’m down to the very bottom of my tester and I’m devastated about it. Austin, TX’s Kerosene might be my favorite fragrance house I’ve discovered (if you were going to force me to choose), and we’ll see them again on this list. Everything I’ve tried from them has been gorgeous and unique, even if it’s not completely to my taste. The first time I dabbed this baby onto my wrist, it was like, oh, great, I smell like an ashtray now. However, being the cigarette smoke-loving sicko that I am, I kept lifting my arm to catch a whiff until it felt like I was hopelessly addicted. There’s depth to the smoke, certainly colored by the combination of the incense and spice notes in there. It’s intense, but comforting somehow, if only to my bizarre nose.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Angels of Light — one of Michael Gira from Swans’ side projects — recently, and this smells like how I’d imagine their most famous album, How I Loved You, would smell. I listen to the song “New York Girls” on a loop some days, and the concussive stabs of its fucking genius outro get me every goddamn time. He said he’d written it about first coming to New York and noticing these packs of girls dressed in black and looking too cool at all the shows he’d go to, but then noticing that when he returned like, 20 years down the line or something, there were still a bunch of young girls dressed like that. Like, if everything else from New York in the punk days has completely vanished, there will always been girls like that — they’re a constant amid all transience. I felt found out when I read that, like he saw right through. I’m not sure that Michael Gira’s New York girls ever sobbed at the venue like me. I’d imagine they smelled like Broken Theories either way. The craving is the romantic element of this scenario, at least to me. I wish I’d thought to pump the bar full of it ahead of time.
V.
The scene: driving to a national park for nothing with my mom and brother before crying over strong drinks for everything.
The scent: Misk’ul Hareem by Anka Kuş Parfum
My mom wanted to see the seals — that’s the gist of the story. Someone she works with told her there are seals that jump up onto the rocks at the crack of dawn in Sandy Hook National Park on the top tip of the Jersey Shore during a certain time of year and she made it a priority to see those fuckers before the season was up. This was right before I moved apartments in February, so I tagged along and convinced my brother to come with. Needless to say, we missed the seals because we left too late, so we drove an hour from my parents’ house for naught (though she went back and caught them later after I moved). The great part of it was that I got to see the protected park — so much of which is filled with half-demolished old army barracks that look incredible and which I could’ve walked around for hours. It was just deeply refreshing not having to stare at a block of condos at this secluded and beautiful section of this great state (if anyone who’s never lived here wants to talk shit, get in my DMs and wait on line to be told off, please and thank you).
Afterward, we drove to the town Rutgers is in and my mom and I downed margaritas and really talked to my brother — who is going through super rough life shit, so hopefully we helped, but the poor thing does not like to drink. My mom and I eventually started crying, really getting through to one another when certain other family members weren’t around and we could let our guard down. She said she was worried she hadn’t been a good mom and I assured her she had been, we’re both laughing our heads off at something that’s probably not funny a second later, stuff like that. My brother, the strangest and funniest person I know, obliviously went, “Why are you guys always crying when we go out like this? I’m not crying.” Because you’re not downing a pitcher of tequila, my love, that’s why. Easy mistake to make. I hummed along to a song by this Irish band Operating Theatre that I adore and scared all the old people passing us as we sobered up and eventually headed home.
It’s the delirious adventure of the day — operating with no timeline or reason, really — which reminded me of the warmth this scent, Misk’ul Hareem, carries. It doesn’t smell anything like the beach, but it is strangely refreshing. Maybe that’s the hint of fruit combined with musk (which usually used as a base note) that makes it such a unique combo. The amber is another prominent element I keep taking note of when I sniff again, asserting itself as an anchor to the ephemeral nature of the lighter scents it blends with. This might also be the most spring-friendly of the perfumes I’ve listed here. Something to consider for the season ahead!
IV.
The scene: feeling flushed listening to “Harm of Will” by Björk on the subway.
The scent: Psychedelique by Jovoy Paris
This one can be quick. Someone told me they had a crush on me at the very beginning of the year, and I felt physically ill in the best possible way every time I thought about it for weeks after. I held the statement in my mouth like it was a new language, because in a lot of ways, it was. It’s mortifying, because then you think about how you’re going to have to explain that you’re not used to hearing people say things like that to you, that you don’t know how to react because you’re simply not ever put in this situation. It’s the slip of someone who has always had to live with the shame of picking another person only because they knew there wouldn’t be anyone else to come along for a while, not because of any true attraction they themselves felt. It’s embarrassing. I don’t want to dwell on it, really.
I solve a lot of my problems by getting on the train and compiling music that will best accompany my journey to nowhere. I’ve talked about Björk at length here as well, but I’ll say that “Harm of Will” off Vespertine only recently became maybe a top-five favorite for me out of her catalog. It says something when lyrics written by Harmony Korine — originally aimed at making fun of Will Oldham (the Bonnie Prince Billy guy) sleeping around with everyone they knew — can make you cry once Björk has crafted a heartbreaking melody to set them to and performed it with a sensitivity that cracks your sternum right down the center and starts pricking with pins to let blood out.
There are few lyrics rendered as romantic and horrifying in their delivery as, “He makes his face known to none / For if he is seen then all will / And all will know / Know me.” It’s the inevitable shame of choosing incorrectly and having to deal with the stain that decision leaves behind for all to judge. It’s wanting to claim but attaching yourself to someone who won’t ever be taken by you. It’s letting yourself be marked, if not completely owned.
Psychédélique by Jovoy (whose other scent Remember Me was probably the next runner-up to make this list) is just as romantic and horrifying — ignore most of the notes here, layers of patchouli steal the show, though it’s not the head shop concoction you’re imagining now. I know it’s not a listed note, but I really do get chocolate from this scent. It might just be the richness of the combination of notes here that does it. You feel like you could get sucked into the smell in the best way.
iii.
The scene: leaving a screening of House of Tolerance at the Roxy Hotel and not being able to feel my face or feet.
The scent: Van Py Rhum by Lorenzo Pazzaglia
You know that thing when you leave a theater after a movie and feel sort of disoriented, like you need time to return to the real world for a while? I think I have that problem at its most extreme — to the point where I’m categorizing it in “terrifying, spiritual reset” territory here. I’ve probably told the story here about how last Leap Day, right before the pandemic shut the world down, the last movie I saw in theaters was Parasite and I was so out of it that I almost got run down by a bike. If I’m really moved by something and it’s late enough and I have too much time not being engaged by anyone else after, I go into a complete state of shock.
The most extreme version of this happened just this past Sunday at the time of writing, when I went to see the 2011 French film House of Tolerance — I went in knowing that Adèle Haenel from Portrait of a Lady on Fire was in it, and very little else — at this movie theater in the basement of The Roxy Hotel in Tribeca. I don’t want to spoil anything in this movie for you, but I highly recommend you watch it and give it your full focus. It’s one of those things where I’m so glad I saw it in an enclosed space where I had to devote all my attention to the screen, because I don’t think I would’ve liked it as much if I’d been able to pause it or check my phone or not allow myself to be completely consumed by it. I’ll say this: it’s always a risk to use an omnipresent, “classic” song in your film, but I will probably never hear “Nights in White Satin” by The Moody Blues the same way ever again after hearing it used in House of Tolerance. That’s how much I believe it will live with me, peering over my shoulder and coloring so much of what I do, long after I saw it.
Anyway, I leave the theater slightly before 11pm, and I can’t guarantee that my walk to the eerily empty Chambers St. subway station actually happened. I tried listening to music, picking up whatever playlist I’d left off on while walking earlier, and I found every song I skipped past unbearable to listen through for some reason — like my brain couldn't compute whatever I was attempting to feed it with so much white static buzzing. Once I was actually in the station, I tried getting back into the new Adrianne Lenker album, which was also a mistake — also not the move when you’re not sure your neurotransmitters can process new emotions for the time being, believe it or not. I rode the half-hour back up to where I was dog-sitting with all my senses overwhelmed and long since dulled. I got back to the house and just sat waiting for all my senses to fully return. Jazz with no lyrics and light percussion kind of ended up being the key back into the real world.
I’ve briefly mentioned Van Py Rhum and its sharp, rum-driven opening that’s steeped in several different varieties of vanilla — not so much dessert, more like the remnants of a night out. There are night terrors baked into the deceptively sweet, dizzying offering Mr. Pazzaglia’s made for us here, I’m sure of it. I think it’s just the discordant nature of the scent that links it so nicely with the movie-going experience in my mind. I hardly think the brothel the film takes place in would smell of this type of vanilla, but part of the point is that it’s the last of a dying breed of highbrow houses in Paris — all the girls have their signature scent and are extremely serious about picking their own, a new girl who joins the house gets to hear a whole speech about it. As the story continues, there’s a drowsiness that pervades all the proceedings. I imagine feeling nauseous around the ever-flowing champagne and overwhelming fog of designer perfume. I think I’ll hold all those girls close to me for as long as I can, and I’ll do it now with every vanilla variation you can imagine.
ii.
The scene: buying tickets to a show I didn’t want to go to in the first place, going by myself and coming home content.
The scent: Blackmail by Kerosene
On the opposite end of the stunned-by-a-collective-event spectrum, there’s nothing like leaving a live show and remembering why you do it all in the first place — which sounds very kumbaya and is a total generalization, because I’ve left shows after drinking too much or being put in a weird social situation and so on and so forth, and that’s all miserable. However, there is truly no high like going to see a bunch of bands you’ve maybe never heard of (who start at a reasonable hour, please) and literally just take you out of yourself for the few hours you’re lightly tipsy and investigating years of graffiti on the bathroom walls as if they’re ancient tomes. If you haven’t gathered from the rest of the little memories I’ve mentioned, I like doing things by myself — if I truly want to go to something, I won’t beg anyone to come with if they’re hemming and hawing over it, I’ll just go.
Usually, there might be some slight discomfort between sets at a show, especially if you’re waiting for one headliner and just kind of standing there staring at the people around you one you start trying to preserve phone battery. But, with things like OhMyRockness’ Hardest Working Bands in NYC showcase, which happened at Baby’s early January, there’s a much more free-flowing energy to the room as people arrive and leave and hang around for each act.
First and foremost, all those acts who played deserve a shoutout here: titsdickass, Skorts, Frida Kill, Two-Man Giant Squid, Starcleaner Reunion and Nara’s Room are all sick, and you should see all of them live ASAP. I loved that there was such variety between these bands, primarily, and it was one of those nights where I could text friends who weren’t present to share my thoughts about the crowd and the outfits and the general mise en scène for the evening. By the time I left, nothing could have stopped me from floating, even as I shivered in the frigid air walking to Marcy Avenue.
These final two fragrances will be laid out slightly differently, with a list of songs to form a mini-playlist, because number one will be heralded my signature daytime scent — and this one, night time. In every night out, in all time spent around performers and people who cling desperately to performers in hopes that they can be a part of something and the ever-present air of self-consciousness that clouds these fumbling-but-valiant attempts at the same ecstasy we’ve touched on here, there is proverbial filth. There is that icky feeling that feels like a layer of film sticking to your skin in these packed rooms of people, wiping the the promise that you’ll never drink again you know you won’t hold to from your lips when you wake up the following morning. It feels dirty when you’ve left those overwhelming rooms, but there’s a sweetness to it as well — the lingering notion that you’ve done something special, something you’ll remember longer than you should. This is what I get from my current night-out favorite, Blackmail by Kerosene.
I think both Kerosene offerings I’ve mentioned here lean “masculine” on the fragrance rating scale, but Blackmail feels like Broken Theories’ girlfriend, if that makes sense. The first time I smelled it straight from the vial, I thought I was whiffing straight-up gasoline and immediately put it aside for later, but dispersed onto skin, it took on a beautiful sweetness that I know I can’t do justice here as I scramble for adjectives to pin its essence down for you. Maybe this explains it more thoroughly than I could on my own: on the Fragrantica page for this scent, people described it as something they could see Joan Jett, Dracula or Jason Vorhees wearing. These are my people!!! Totally wearable, but there’s something mysterious and seductive about it that I truly adore — I also think it’s slightly more palatable than Broken Theories, and again, just sliiiiightly more feminine without being cloying or saccharine. It’s the only bottle of perfume I’ve splurged on for myself thus far (a family member bought me the next scent as Christmas gift, which was a lovely surprise). That’s how deeply I believe in its vaguely sinister magic, babes.
You can now play:
Zola Jesus - “Six Feet (From My Baby)”
Liz Phair - “Glory”
Aldous Harding - “What If Birds Aren’t Singing They’re Screaming”
Julee Cruise - “Floating”
Big Star - “Nighttime”
i.
The scene: on The Ramble during the change of the seasons.
The scent: Purple Afternoon by Universal Flowering
So if a show that strikes the exact right vibe and emotional balance is my happy place post-work day, my midday day-off or weekend happy place is, inevitably, anywhere I can take a long walk. Of course, returning to my love affair with the parks, this works best in large stretches of green: Prospect Park, Central Park, one of the large cemeteries, etc. For our purposes here, I’ll pick the wooded areas of Central Park, if only for the way you can see leaves either grow or fall and pile up, depending on which transitional season we’re entering.
Universal Flowering’s Purple Afternoon isn’t really an “outdoorsy” scent, but there’s a comfort to it that registers as both fleeting and warm to me — which feels rooted in the secondary switch of watching planted, rooted life either live again or die again in order to make way for the months ahead. I won’t say the scent lasts particularly long with my body chemistry, but I wear it to work and out to meet friends and I love the cloud I get to leave behind me, even if it’s not radiating off me the entire day. It has the essence of a coffee shop, but doesn’t smell like you’re directly sticking your head into a bag of coffee beans, if that makes sense. There’s something sexy and inviting and confusing about it — all descriptors I would assign to most Universal Flowering scents I’ve sampled, but they all work, somehow.
Some Fragrantica reviews I particularly liked for this one: “A fascinating coffee mixed with head shop and haunted furniture store.”; “the opening is a deep, statuesque, unicorn-spit purple. the world's most bitter dark chocolate brownie which turns out to have no chocolate at all but definitely something of complex, sinking, swirling overwhelm like obsidian. the drydown is musty, almost chalky, a vampire's coffin in the farthest back corner of cobwebland.”; “Spicy and shadowy. Artful. It evolves in a way that's tough to describe. It's a challenging scent despite being so sweet. Tasseled smoking jackets, old books, wood paneling, candied oranges and sticky coffee dregs...in a word, ‘Victoriana.’”
How was I going to beat any of that? The word “amateur” is in the title of this edition for a reason. Music is much easier to describe when you understand the tools you’re working with, the history that’s come before. “Victoriana” is really all I could hope to evoke as I run my silly errands every day. I’ve always had an inkling that I’m a rotting woman sent out into the sun against my will who then gets into it once she’s spent enough time out and comfortable. I think it suits my temperament nicely.
As I try to reframe my perception or desire — understanding my current relationship to wanting, moving in and out of phases of extreme contentment or extreme hunger — I think this is the shape I want all of it to take.
You can now play:
Judee Sill - “The Donor”
L’Rain - “Stay, Go (Go, Stay)”
Nina Simone - “Lilac Wine”
Julia Holter - “Words I Heard”
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - “Autumn’s Child”
Everyone be good (or not, I’m not your mom). Talk soon.