Barcode Dreams

Let’s workshop this poem about the mechanized drift of modern living—fast food, fast everything—where memory thins to a trail of receipts and the mind, numbed by efficiency, begins to mirror machines.

scent of the day: Funkberry, by Ensar Oud

This is only my first wear and I am still in the middle of it—so what I say should be taken with grain of salt (and is nowhere near the rigor I give to my button-up fragrance reviews).

This will get better as it sits, as is true of the wear-experience itself. / It’s easy to underestimate because, after a surprising first few seconds of dazzling tartness (yuzu, terpenic olibanum, grapefruit oil, etc), it settles for about fifteen minutes into something that feels like Guerlain’s margarita-mix Habit Rouge meets Kerosene’s bergamot-tea Unknown Pleasures—only here in Funkberry we get that that artisanal signature of muddled garage-band texture, falling on the more classier side of this spectrum (Pinoy and Prin being at one end, Bortnikoff and Ensar being at the other end, and Areej being in the middle). / Perhaps this first phase explains why I have seen so many people jump the gun and sell their bottles off on the facebook groups. /

But then, around the forty-minute mark, this son of a b opens up with a musky glow (to my nose now similar to Tibetan musk), a glow tinged with a stunning gassy vibe characteristic of many iris-leathers. / like many iris-leathers it seems purple in hue (like the faceplate) but, unlike the buttery richness of Bianchi’s Black Knight, this one is powdery—in that throat-tickling way of Bortnikoff’s Classica (which shares its citrus–ambergris–musk–iris–castoreum backbone) and Areej Le Doré’s Cuir de Russie II (which has a very similar combo of iris, violet leaf, blue lotus, jasmine, deer musk). / The powder here is amplified by Ensar’s signature ambergris and anchored not by leather, as in Areej and Bortnikoff, but by a blend of berry syrup and Vietnamese oud and labdanum-like goo. /

While Classica might still be my favorite (its doughy-heliotrope texture gets me every time, so much that some days I wonder if it is my favorite Bortnikoff out of twenty-plus bottles), and while Areej’s solemnity remains the most arresting in its seriousness (as grave as a Germanic crypt, skulls aligned on musty rotten wood), Funk Berry could very well climb with more wears / Of the three, I think I can safely say now that it best embodies Nietzsche’s life affirmation./ The most fun and ebullient of the trio, it is the one to wear while reading the “Sanctus Januarius” section of Nietzsche’s Gay Science: Areej’s antique aura brings Russian gravitas (low-vitamin-D melancholy, Schopenhauerian gloom); Bortnikoff’s floral-creosote clash evokes an aristocratic falconer on a sunny day (Cervantine energy); Ensar’s musky fruitiness, meanwhile, channels the equatorial joy of salt-of-the-earth people who dance without hesitation, losing themselves in hip-swirling sexuality unencumbered by Christian guilt. /

Yes, this Ensar—the most alive of the three—dips me right into the southern Europe of Nietzsche’s fantasies: the hot-blooded dance-oriented people of the Mediterranean, where the solemnity of Wagner gives way to the swaying hips of Carmen). / The Vietnamese oud here—perfectly chosen for the perfume’s name, given its hints of fermented red fruits and bitter green stems (like the wine-grape stems we get in Corticiatto’s Salute)—brings a clean cheese edge that, mingled with jam and floral facets, makes me think of laughter and movement and song in sunny times of plenty: swarthy tobacco-smoking people eating raspberries, unsugared strawberry jam, blackcurrants, wild-violet honey more floral than sweet, crusty bread, peppered cheeses, wine on the Corsican coast—a fragrance, in effect, that might move the master-perfumer Corticiotto to tears. /

And if all that weren’t drama enough, it dries down to a dusty oudy matchstick-ash (not too far from what I get in Areej’s Oud Luwak)—the color trajectory shifting, albeit with some surprising rewinds and fast-forwards, from bright berry red with orange-yellow sparkle to plum, then to brown-red, and finally to slate-gray smoke over the top of that brown-red.

Barcode Dreams

The carton tilts, the bowl receives,
pellets then crunching
in ears (every file fungible)—

the conveyor-belt go-go-go
whirring even in rare dreams
of twilight sleep, no wonder 

dementia blooms before
grays: looking back, what
autopilot-receipt warrants rewind?