Gordon Ramsay (ROUND 8)
Let’s workshop this poem that imagines Gordon Ramsay as a groomsman who struggles to rein in his Gordon Ramsay-ness and keep still, even during the marriage ceremony itself.
scent of the day: Tigerwood 91, by Ensar Oud
Flash notes, first wear»
Bitter medicinal brown-gold with cat-eye shimmer just like the tigerstone cap, only there is this icy-mint edge (as if a ripples of glacial white were swirled in) that I did not expect. / It is the mint of patchouli, but literally (no exaggeration) you feel it in your sinuses—boosted as it is the dental clove—even more than something like Enclave./ (1) The patchouli-mint (Sheikh Ehab, Ensar’s late friend, I imagine—given his involvement in the 60’s era patchouli-filled flower-power movement as well as his stated love of the mint you get in Borneo ouds—would have loved this fragrance for that reason, and I think Ensar could have dedicated it to him) plus (2) the bitter medicinality (a bitter medicinality that goes more in a tobacco-cocao-coffee way than in the boozy wood-varnish way of Tigerwood Terengganu, which—even though I blind bought Tigerwood 91 in hope to get those mahogany lacquer sensations—I am fine with not being here) all together results in something very similar, if we pan back, to Aguru by TRNP. / Yes, the patchouli vibes are strong, even stronger than I get from Oud SQ Terengganu. In my notes from Oud SQ Terengganu I suspected an unstated patchouli note, but maybe that is just my ignorance of the patchouli-mint nature of Tigerwood (because, if memory serves, there is some Tigerwood in there)./ That said, Ensar does list patchpouli in Tigerwood 91. /
I own Aguru but have only worn it once and this is my first hour into the Ensar frag, but I will say that Aguru is a patchouli-oud darling among the artisanal elites and here is your chance to get something quite close but cleaned of the mulchy rot elements into something so pristine and glinting as Kubrick’s monolith—pristine and smooth, yes, but when you bring your nose close there is that matchstick ash I get in a lot of high-quality ouds, Areej’s Oud Taiwan comes to mind. / The ash particulates are so fine here, though, that it has turned as smooth as makeup compact or moth-wing dust/
This might seem like shade since Im not the biggest fan of Bisch, but it is almost as if Bisch was tasked with an homage to Aguru except there was one hiccup—a hiccup that with be his life challenge as someone who, as a captive of Givaudan, loves his captive molecules: Bisch must, using only naturals (no mixed media), bring out Aguru’s ethereal-mystical-Blade-Runner aura, turning what was more a fragrance for Tolkien’s Mirkwood into more a fragrance for Gibson’s Chatsubo (which is actually quite perfect since Chatsubu is not only a retrofuturistic expat bar where old-world fusty-ash materiality and meets a bitter-plasticine cybernetic future, and so aligned with the neon-lit stimulant culture of the Ninsei aesthetic I am getting here like I get from Dunhaung and many other Prins, but also means “tea jar” or “tea pot,” which is perfect for this dark, spiced, bitter, stimulant-tea-steeping-in-a-wooden-vessel profile). / The black tea, pepper, tobacco, and bitter-resinous facets give the scent the kind of nocturnal, stimulant-charged atmosphere easy to link to Gibson’s Chiba City—more the cultural air around a place like the Chatsubo than the literal smell of a bar.”
This insight, in fact, helps me better understand Ensar: his ethereal aesthetic (the most ethereal out of the fire-bender Prin and the earth-bender Areej and perhaps even the air-bender Bortnikoff) gives a new-age, a posthumanist, aura very much like Bische does (and to a lesser extent, in such fragrances as Isfarkand, Geza Shoen)./ My appreciation fro Bische has grown wearign Purpose, which brings this bitter glean of recycled air in a roblox universe that is so lonely it is downrigfht artistic, even though my heart is much more in the artisanal space. / imagine then how gratifying it is to see Ensar make the purely natural new. /
That is a big distinction from Areej: if you want to smell the old stuff, and better than it ever smelled perhaps, that is where you can go—I don’t imagine even the best batch of Mitsouko competing with Areej’s War and Peace or Antiquity (but maybe that is just my ignorance of my epochal shadow)/ But imagine being able to got into Matrix-tech hyperealities with whale poop and deer musk and ancient agarwood—that is what Ensar reliably brings me. / Akigalawood is cool, overdone (esp by Bisch but cool). And, however much I despise Promise as a slander to perfumery, I have nothing in principle against lab molecule versus non-natural ones—indeed, my metaphysics is monistic through and through: a nuclear reactor is just as natural as a flower or a star. But to see Ensar use all these found expressions of the One, all these items of the world that predate man in some fundamental sense, in such remakrkable ways—indeed, even to capture the new breed of humans, already coming, that are as at home is cyberspace as they are in outerspace is downright flooring!
*I worked on beginning and end today—from cowlick to crotch!
Gordon Ramsay The groomsman—too much of a gravity well as it is (tall and blond, British, famous)—could keep still neither for the vows nor for the life of him. Tweaking his pocket square, his boutonnière (even, and as if the unruly tuft held no deliberate charm, wetting his thumb to address a cowlick, the best man’s, as the organ unveiled the bride)— his body buzzes “Not good enough!” neuroticism, the amperage: hummingbird. Live-wire fingers wring the back of his neck, bent and rolling its high-stress sinew—bloodless to red to what warrants a “Bloody hell!” Caffeinated calf raises as if warming up for the squat rack, crepitus spastic against the pregnant pauses of scripture (“Each will be like a hiding place from the wind”), send the eyes of the priest and the groom himself, crossing paths, on a flash hunt: the source clear, clear as raw pork, to the bride’s skeletal “Meemaw” (too severe on manners, too much her own master, too manhandled by the roving fingers of death— infinite in their spare-no-bell-or-whistle foreplay— to succumb to the sorcery of celebrity’s ring), her spine ramrod-straight in the front row. His digits, twitchy as Inuit boarding-school boys in the nastiest dreams of a switch-drunk nun (a yardstick deep in them, and ultimately in her), jazz drum his outseams, the thuds of worsted wool signaling (with their broken staccato) for backup. His face, crumpled like a disgruntled gargoyle, churns every which direction downward (once, twice, even at a wristwatch that is not there)— churns and yet fails to find final focus beyond the Heraclitean fire, the endless fidget, itself. In the red-herring reprieve of noses blowing, his bleached brows—as if to make the flower girl, mouth hung in curiosity over his bulge, giggle the spotlight onto her, buying him more time— pump with micro slapstick, their cheeky eloquence prelinguistic: “Can you believe they expect us to stand here, still, this damn long? Madness!” Hand gestures of disbelief, curbed mid-flail (but still as if to a bad ref call in Game Seven), come complete with thigh slaps and sighs— gusts of agitation. Motor tics upon motor tics mount until the go-to phrases of misdirection (“Oh wow”), the toupees of vocal Tourette’s (“There it is! Unreal!”), find themselves blurted (“He’s taking the piss now!”) at an edging climax (“Wakey wakey big boy!”) where we are called— in a stratagem of complicity-making, sedimented under layers of his muscle memory—to bust out our very own toupee: laughter, its surge meant to assuage our own discomfort as much as his, spin-doctoring the trainwreck of social tension— enough nail-digging cringe to hematoma arms, shred tights—into something perfectly normal or even charming (as if it were all just rehearsal). Collective catharsis works as intended: scissoring him free well before the reception where, between boozy dances with that flower girl glued to his leg and nuzzled snout-first up and under his scrotum (a barretted basset hound who has never heard “No,” her head patted “There there, my darling”), he jabs his index finger into the circling guestbook camera as if in a Kitchen Nightmares back-alley rant—free from the fear-made-formal noose of the bow tie. “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”