What You Can Learn From: Sumo

When faced with the insurmountable, be daring. Even fat men fall.

The Benefits of Regret: Minor, Major, and Euphoric.

Regret is one of the most cloying, self-wounding sensations a person can experience. It can also be, if viewed with proper perspective, the most useful mechanism to achieve what you wish to achieve. I shall outline the benefits in three forms: Minor, Major, and Euphoric.

Regret lends you the experience and capacity to modify and improve your behaviour when faced with a scenario you regretted your actions upon before. This is because, in essence, regret is not hopeless - in order for it to be regret, in order for it to sting, there needs to be the sense that we could have done better. If someone unexpectedly shoots us and we fail to dodge the bullet, we do not regret this lack of skill because it is beyond our hypothetical means. However if someone throws a water balloon at us and we fail to dodge it we are afforded some measure of regret, as we have the notion that what transpired was avoidable. If viewed in this way, and then applied to a future hypothetical scenario, regret has the chance to metamorphose from a stolid, dour, emotional caterpillar to an optimistic butterfly. You didn't act within your capacity, it says, but you can. At it worst, you get stuck on the first part of that sentence. At its best, you discover the second.

Minor Benefit

In a sentence: you do the same thing better.

For example, you are running in a 10km race. Calculating your fitness, you figure you can run full speed for the last 400m only - any more and you risk not completing the race at all.

You run the race, and at the last 400m you run at your full capacity. You finish the race in 5th place - not terrible, but not what you thought you could do. Worse still, you look around at all the other runners - they are all at their limits, puffed and staggering. You are not. You have the unnerving thought that you could probably run further, for longer. You should have started your final spring far earlier, like 800m or so, and given it all you've got. You misjudged your own capacity, and as a result, you feel regret towards the scenario.

The next year you run the race again. Vowing to not make the same mistake, you increase what you view as your limit, and give it your all. You come in first, but more importantly, feel thoroughly breathless by the end.

This is the minor benefit of regret.

Major Benefit

After you finish the race you take the bus home. You sit in the back contemplating your mood - which you soon realise is too slippery to hold, so you simply sit and pay attention to the faces of those who enter and leave the bus. As you look at each, you start to imagine their lives. Eventually it's your stop, and you leave the bus. You arrive home. You take the letters out of your mailbox and hold them under your arm so you can carry your equipment as well - when you place them on the kitchen table, they are soaked in your sweat. You look at your name on one of these envelopes, typed in Times New Roman 10pt. You get out your mobile phone and call your boss to tell him you're quitting.

The major benefit of regret is that it affords us the capacity to not only reconsider how we approached one specific situation which we did not live up to our potential, but also to other neighbouring ones. If we feel regret over a race ran poorly due to misjudgments of our own toughness, this regret can be turned into the statement: "You know, you are tougher than you think you are."

If, in our working life, we have only ceased in not quitting our hated job due to the fear of how we will manage without it, and an absence of any confidence to grow and find a better job, then such a statement, torn from its initial roots but still beholding the same sentiment, can be the very impetus we need to give ourselves greater credit, and do what we truly desire.

Euphoric Benefit

The night you finish the race you barely sleep. This is made all the more distressing because you should be dog-tired due to the race, and your persistent waking energy serves to remind you of the mistake you have made. Not only did you not run hard enough, but really, you've never run hard enough. The feeling gnaws on you while the ear-splitting shriek of silence pushes you further and further into your own head.

Suddenly you sit up. Suddenly, it seems, you've had enough. But what do you do now, suddenly?

You find yourself running through the streets. You are in your pajamas and slippers, but you run surprisingly well all the same. The air is cold but its sharp tinge starts to give way to the warm sweat now dripping from your forehead. Finally, you reach your destination.

You forgo throwing tiny stones at your lovers window, realising it is not particularly hard to scale the vine covered wall and go up there yourself. Your hands and now slipper-less toes grip whatever it can as you climb - bumps and nobbles press your cold, bare skin, but you keep climbing. You reach the window, and jar it open.

Your lover sits up on their bed, somewhat terrified. You tell them, quickly, breahtlessly, that you were wrong, that you were only afraid, that you will marry them.

They switch the light on. You both blink. They ask you if you've gone insane. Yes, you tell them, but you still want them all the same.

The euphoric benefit of regret is that, in giving us these deeply negative feelings, it gives the potential of a torrent of motivation to never feel regret again. Of course you will feel regret again, since we are always less then perfect, and always make mistakes. But the euphoric benefit is a temporary surge to now do only what you truly desire. The minor benefit tells us that we can do the same situation better, the major benefit tells us we can do other parallel situations better - the euphoric makes no statements upon your own potential or upon any situation, it merely exclaims: "I don't want to feel like this!", and gives you the energy and the drive and the fearlessness to then live true to yourself. Because it is the vaguest, the euphoric benefit of regret is the riskiest, the least accurate, and the most insane. It is also the most fun.

Disclaimer

I am not suggesting at all that regret in itself is good for you. It merely, if viewed in a certain light, creates the potential to live your life truer to your own desires and less to your fears. I don't wish to write about what usually happens with regret, how we don't always pull these potentials from it, because, simply, you know what that feels like, I know what that feels like, we all know all too well what a useless caterpillar of regret can sometimes feel like, when we never let it crawl on, and pupate.

Disclaimer 2

Also, this only all works when we have the ability to accurately perceive our own capabilities - if we, to use the earlier example, forever believe we can dodge that bullet, then we will forever be disappointing ourselves. Unfortunately it is often in our lives where we are incapable of this. Regret, then only serves to drill us deeper into the ground.

John Varvatos, Essentric Molecule, and How I Got Into Perfume.

The first fragrance I ever bought was John Varvatos. For someone heavily into perfume now, to the point where I can identify the smells of individual chemical components in certain fragrances, this is a bit of an odd scent to choose, insofar as it’s so ordinary. It’s not particularly amazing, nor does it have ay cult following, nor is it particularly important. It’s nice – with non-offensive fruity top rush with a spicy hit, but smells a little cheap and needy. It’s unessential, I guess is what I’m getting at.

The story of how I came to own a bottle of John Varvatos, a perfume I am pretty indifferent to, is more interesting then the fragrance itself.

One night working in the bookshop, a day before Mother’s Day a few years ago, an attractive young woman approached the counter asking for recommendations. She was well spoken (if somewhat nervous) and sublimely pretty. She stole my heart in an instant – to the extent that one can have one's heart stolen by a customer when you work in retail (which is a lot – but you’ve probably forgotten them by the next day). She bought a safe gift, the transaction went through, and my romantic pessimism assumed I would never see her again. Sure enough, by the next day I had forgotten about her.

Jump ahead five months. In that time I had quit honours, decided I was never going to be a writer due to a lack of both drive and talent, decided I was going to become a brilliant and renowned product designer instead, and had my first and only panic attack, after a kiss attempt went rebuffed after a dull first date. I was in one of those empty parts of my life – having left one destination but not yet arrived at another, wandering through that desert at average speed in search of its end, its break into society, or at least an oasis. At this point, she came into work again. It took me a while to remember her, but I picked up on the nervous-yet-rehearsed way of speaking and the infallible posture. I decided, despite that recent panic attack, that I would ask her out on a date, lest I live to regret it. Thing is, I felt it unprofessional to do it with other customers around – so I devised a plan: if she came up to the counter while the store was empty, I would ask her out, plain and simple. If she did so while there were others around, I would pass on a charming note. I got writing on the note. This is what I came up with:

Hi – this is kind of lame and embarrassing, and I don’t like to do things in note form because it’s too indirect, but there are people around and it would be awkward, so: did you want to go out on a date sometime? I should let you know I am a frightfully un-cool man, but get to know me and you’ll discover that I’m actually wonderful.
- Kita, 04XX XXX XXX.

I left this for a while in my pocket, then impulsively tore it up and wrote another, less neurotic one:

A date sometime? – Kita, 04XX XXX XXX.

Thankfully, I tore this one up too, and she approached the counter alone, and I asked her out on a date, and, with visible glee and surprise on our faces, we exchanged numbers. Unprofessionally, I spent the rest of my shift texting her, and almost forgot to close the store. If anyone I work with is reading, let me state: I was young.

The date was curious. We flirted, but the conversation was terribly contrived – we were both clearly using up our ‘Things which would sound interesting on a first date’ lines. But we bumped arms affectionately as we walked, and followed up the coffee with a few drinks at the local.

In an odd moment, it was decided that we should air out anything the other should know – about our lives, and what the other might be getting into. I offered my troublesome relationship with my father, as well as my fairly long history of depression. She offered the death of her best friend, and her previous boyfriend, who had left her at the airport some 4 months earlier, who was a semi-succesful (and now much more successful) writer, and was due to land back in town in a few hours. She was picking him up from the airport. I must admit: she won that round.

We went back to her house. She invited me in for a hot chocolate. We sat on her kitchen floor because, apparently, this is what she always did. Her house was dimly lit and impeccably kept – it made my house look like some wretched sty. It was heavily ornate, with not a trace of dust on anything. After we finished our drinks, she took me into the bathroom to show me something which would, in retrospect, become a defining moment in my life – one of those points that don’t seem particularly important at the time, but later reveal their affect with the aid of distance. Eager to make myself appear to be some kind of designer hot-shot (despite knowing very little about design beyond what I imagined) I had talked about all the things I had been designing – several of which were perfume bottles. I liked the perfume bottle as a design object, because its required function is very little, and the vast majority of its purpose is of aesthetic communication. It was like the architecture of the hand-held world (the fact that many architects have designed perfume bottles seems to suggest a connection). With this in mind, she revealed to me her medicine cabinet – and behind its doors, rows and rows of perfume bottles. They were an odd collection of art nouveau crystal shapes and sly, modern rectangles with minimal prints. I can’t remember what they specifically were, but knowing what I know of perfume now, some looked Guerlian, and there was definitely some Chanel. I only smelled one: out of curiosity of what it would smell like on my skin, she sprayed a healthy dose of one on my left wrist. According to her, it smells differently, depending on the person. I remembered this fragrance: it was Molecule 01 by Essentric Molecule. I might have got the number wrong, but to be honest, apart from a few top notes, the Essentric Molecules are pretty much the same. It was a strange scent which to me, at first, smelled like freshly cut capsicum, which eventually turned into a dry, pencil shaving smell. It was a fragrance I would smell again and again, and eventually scrub off my repulsed arms some 10 months later.

If you’ve never smelt an Essentric Molecule fragrance then they’re difficult to describe. This is because they’re very minimalist compared to most modern perfumes, but their essential ingredient isn’t based on any smell you could recognize right off the bat – you would never say ‘Hey, they used grapefruit!’, or even ‘This smells like grandmothers!’. This is because their main ingredient is a fragrance chemical by the name of Iso E Super. Now you might actually know this smell – it’s in a lot of fragrances adding effects here and there and lending an almost sharp, almost grainy (but still so light it floats) wooden texture. This makes the fragrance almost post-modern, insofar as it’s a fragrance which pays tribute to the act of making fragrance in itself, by basing itself so heavily around this single, artificial note.

The effect of an Essentric Molecule fragrance is odd. At first, you wonder what it is – so familiar yet really undefinable without using works such as ‘like’ and ‘sorta’. It is woody, but not any kind of wood you’ve ever actually experienced – it’s a light, sandy coloured grain, a bit like balsa wood, but denser. Unlike most other fragrances though, this concept of “familiar but different” is so bizarre because it is constructed via so few elements – most perfumes work in another way: Comme Des Garcons 2, for example, smells like a “future flower”, a very beautiful, very Japanese, very technological, very refined flower, and it does this by mixing numerous florals together and also utilizing sumi ink, which lends it its alien charm. Essentric fragrances though have their alien quality via only one main note. As such, it is initially interesting, but ends up feeling flat very very quickly. At first it may even be beautiful, until you see it has no depth at all, and as the day goes on, and it stays on you powerfully (it is impossible to wash off), you start to spite it more and more, for essentially just singing the same note, over and over again.

Regardless of my less then stellar introduction to perfume, this was the point where I, for the first time in my life, started to think about perfume as an actual *thing*. She went on to light scented candles which smelt as fruity as they did waxy (though still very nice), and we sat in her living room. She played on her keyboard and I reclined on her sofa. After a while of not talking much, I started to wonder what I was doing there. I was certainly not going to make any kind of physical move: for one thing, she was off to pick up her ex-boyfriend in a very short time, and for another, I was afraid if I were rebuffed, like damned clockwork, I would have another panic attack. In retrospect, when we did talk, it was like we were trying our best to make it all seem meaningful and romantic. I played a very sweet act of a very sweet lad who was falling for a very sweet girl. Unfortunately, I fell for my own act.

The night finished, many hours after it had started, as she finally had to get ready to drive to the airport. We hugged tight, and she assured me she’d see me again soon. As I walked home in the cool spring air I texted her:

‘Bathed in your scent still, it is a warm walk home.’

I realize, only now as I write, that the vast majority of my romantic texts have been vastly unappreciated.

For the next few weeks, we would see each other here and there. She’d invite me around to her house, she introduced me to her friends, I introduced her to mine, we’d have drinks, and made CDs for each other. It felt like we were becoming some sort of couple – if I looked at it only on paper, and never felt the long silences in our conversations. At some point, I decided I needed to be wearing a fragrance. Since I was after a girl that was obsessed with smell, this was of utmost importance. With a spending limit of $150, I walked into town determined to not return home empty handed. My plan was simple: walk into an expensive menswear store, admit that I know nothing at all about fragrance, try everything, work by their suggestions, and but whatever came out on top. For the first time in my adult life, I asked for help in a clothing store, and abandoned all pretense of knowing what I was doing. I tried many, but they all smelled too alcoholic (this was because I was smelling them too quickly, and was not giving time for the most volatile of alcoholic smells to evaporate and reveal the actual perfume). This made choosing a perfume difficult, but eventually I came across one that the woman their noted their boss wore – it was thick, drippingly sweet and spicy. It was the exact opposite of what I wanted – I wanted something light and cutting – but perhaps simply bored or unenthused, I decided to buy it based on her recommendation and the fact I didn’t hate it. It was John Varvatos, and its empty bottle lies face down on top of my bookshelf. I would start to appreciate it more with time, and when, many months later, I opened it up to smell it again, I felt an intense rush back to the past, of me dousing myself in this stuff and walking over to her house, and I felt all the emotions again: the fear, the stress, the elation, and finally, the despair.

She went back to her much more successful writer boyfriend only a few weeks after that first date. She admitted this to me during a friend’s housewarming party I invited her to, shortly after I tried (and failed) to kiss her. I should have gotten angrier – asked her what she was doing with me then if she was still in love with him – indeed, was back with him, asked her, simply: what are you doing here, at this party, by my side? But I didn’t. Instead, I opted to forgive her right away, and tell her she bore no responsibility, and instead, for this reason, I was consumed by my own unhappiness. Eventually, with nothing to hold me back, this lead to despair. I still have trouble understanding why I got as bad as I did, but regardless of the reason pretty soon I hit the single darkest time of my life. Concerned friends were trying to pull me out here and there, but the real breakthrough would not happen till a few months later – seeing her again at an art show, and realising, as she talked quickly and nervously to me, how I imagined most of the things I liked about her, and ignored everything that I didn’t. She was still one of the prettiest women I had seen in my life, but, like most of the lines between us on that first date, it was, like an Essentric Molecule fragrance, mostly surface.

Eventually I forgot about her. Then one day I opened my envelope from luckscent.com to smell the samples I ordered that month. Among them was Essentric Molecule no.1, and it all, even just very briefly, came rushing back. I scrubbed my wrists under the bathroom facet till they were red and raw.

*

Despite it all though, I am eternally thankful I met her. Because of her I not only learnt so much, discovered so much about myself, I also discovered this strange perfume thing I devote so much of my time to now. If we ever see each other in the street (like we do a lot), and if either has the guts to stop and talk (like we never do), I must remember to thank her for this reason, and this reason alone.

Mystery Fragrance.

A woman came into work today wearing the most alluring thing I've ever smelt. It reminded me of lines of mid-morning sunlight cutting into a living room, and those floating specks of dust you see now illuminated, and of dry, unvarnished wooden floorboards, and of saliva and lips, and peeks of underwear under clothes, and of being 11 years old and in lust.

It had a very peculiar saliva-like note which seemed to come from a rotting rose or the like. It might have had a type musk I wasn't overly familiar with (it had that musk-y depth and texture). But it never felt like it was trying to be overtly sexual or even attractive - it didn't announce itself at all, only had a small sillage and stuck very close to the skin.

The most attractive people are those who seem not to see how attractive they really are - thereby, nothing they do is an act or pretence. Attractiveness is merely a casual by-product of their other traits, but one which does not concern or affect them. They are completely innocent to their own charms, and this blissful, un-cynical, unfamiliarity is just so intensely desirable. Because they don't see it themselves, we feel, perhaps a little arrogantly, that we then are privy to this area of their personality so intimate that they themselves do not have access to it. It intrigues without obtuseness. This is what this fragrance was.

I don't know what this fragrance was. I didn't ask her what it was.

You know why I didn't ask her what it was? Honestly? It was because I was afraid she wasn't wearing any fragrance at all, and it was merely her natural smell, and that would mean I would be completely and terrifyingly in love with this woman, this stranger, this person who I would never meet (or smell) again. Le sigh.

My Year in Stars

I was going to write a long, personal account of my year - a kind of yearly wrap-up thing I like to do, but to be honest it's simply too personal and this isn't that kind of "Look at my life" kind of blog. This is done as a compromise which will mean little to me and even less to you.

January: ***
February: **
March: ****
April: ***
May: ***
June: ***
July: **
August: *
September: **
October: *****
November: *****
December: *****

No complaints, it ended well.

Why I Hate Celebrity Fragrances on a Conceptual Level (c/w a short review of I Am King by Sean John).

Perfume counters in department stores are chaotic places come Christmas. Perfume is, perhaps better than anything else, adept at distilling an essence, and increasing its expanse and presence on demand. For this reason it is, in itself, held in small vials, which allow shop-keepers to place a lot together in a relatively small area (for the amount and range of products concerned). So, come Christmas, these aisles which are usually just right a fit for you and a few others, happy to sniff around, become cramped, frenzied affairs, with all manner of hands clamoring around and grabbing and spraying noxious odouers onto dripping strips of paper.

It was in this setting a few weeks ago that I spent some time going through and sampling whatever was in front of me – less intent on making a purchasing selection (I am currently and inarguably poor) and more intent on trying to grasp what each perfumer was trying to do with their perfumes, how they went about trying to do it, and to what extent they were successful. My perfumery knowledge is still largely amateur, but I thought it an interesting and engaging activity to do while I killed time before I went off to buy some shoes.

Some perfumes were clearer than others. Dirty English was obvious – it’s grimy, alcoholic smell communicated a kind of audacious disregard for cleanliness only seen amongst the vilest and most attractive of 60’s rockers. It was very soon unpalatable, my nose moving into sneezing fits to be rid of it. I tried the new scent my Issey Miyake, which was called A Scent By Issey Miyake, and encased in a kind of iconic reference to a perfume bottle, and found it a kind of excited, fresh, green scent which danced around a lot and then proceeded to go absolutely no where. But perhaps the scent itself was so post-modern that I didn’t understand its cleverness. I moved on. And then I hit upon this:



I have seen advertisements for Sean John’s “I Am King” pop up unhelpfully on my browser whilst attempting to read something else, and it featured the man dressed in a tuxedo, riding a jet ski, and some seemingly non-sequiter shots of some bronze shaded women lilting and wilting about in bikinis. Much like Sean John/P.Diddy/Puff Daddy’s entire career, the spot was tongue in cheek enough to shield him from a certain degree of scorn, but not tongue in cheek enough to actually be remotely interesting. It didn’t help that he used the most trite of all imagery – the James Bond scenario: the “meat-lovers pizza” of male fantasy, so utterly bereft of imagination or intrigue and catering for the largest, shallowest of puddles.

If you check the notes list on basenotes.com (which is very handy for these things), I Am King reveals a list which includes the following: French Berry, Mediterranean Water, Lemon Crème, Key Lime Pie. Let’s keep those four ingredients in mind, and for the sake of comparison, lets look at what basenotes.com lists as some of the notes of the previously reviewed Invasion Barbare by MDCI: Lavender, White Thyme, Bergamot, Violet Leaves.

So:

French Berry, Mediterranean Water, Lemon Crème, Key Lime Pie.

against

Lavender, White Thyme, Bergamot, Violet Leaves.

Can you see the difference? One of these fragrances is bullshitting you. Bullshit is very common in all forms of design, fragrance design not excluded, because it essentially very easy to do. To appreciate the aesthetic worth of anything designed you must be willing to take a certain leap of faith that the designer is affecting you as they intended to. Because these effects very easily slip below our conscious radar, which tries to justify to ourselves certain things for certain reasons (‘Of course this chair is a classic of modernism, I paid $4,000 for it’ the most usual excuse), bullshitting is so simple to get away with. Believe me, as a former A+ design student, I know this. But the designers of I Am King give themselves away with this completely ridiculous notes list. Key Lime Pie? Seriously? As a top note, it hits you as soon as you spray it on – this disgustingly false lime accord which smells almost like a stupidly sweet insect repellent. But more to the point – why? How on earth does Key Lime Pie work with anything else there? My housemate made a good point – it was like they called up Sean John and asked him what he wanted for his new fragrance. Looking around at the meal in front of him, he simply listed some of his favourite foods. This is a fragrance not only lost, but lost and panicking, terrified, with out a clue of where to go or what to do.

It also reveals my problem with celebrity fragrances. Because were this fragrance in any other bottle in any other name, nobody would buy it. But because it is attached to the success of Sean John and the stupidly large advertising campaign to go with it (also, I assume, pressure on retailers to stock it – as there was a full shelf with nothing but I Am King alone, whereas most fragrances stood on 1/8th of one), people will buy it. And within a capitalist society, where monetary success is the central motivation of companies, it will become a successful fragrance.

The problem is not that it has a celebrity attached to it and it is successful, nor am I suggesting that all celebrity fragrances are terrible - my problem is that they become successful for reasons other than the fragrance in itself. And for a fragrance – something that should be purely aesthetic and purely personal, this becomes something of a minor tragedy (and a major tragedy for the perfume industry), as it then allows people to make shitty, sub-standard products and get away with it because they have the right label, the right face, and throw around enough money. This happens enough, and soon the mainstream avenue is littered with this formula, as the motivation of economic success, now achievable without any kind of artistic success, is not enough to guarantee a product of any real discernible value.

This is how mediocrity reigns supreme: people let it. You should never buy a fragrance for anything but the way it smells. Otherwise you have to ask yourself: why am I really buying this? How empty is my life that I am forgoing what my senses say in favour of what the label says? You are essentially selling your sense of smell short.

Scent is the most personal of our sensual interaction with the world, and the least cerebral. To attach it to the entirely cerebral social construct of celebrity is to completely miss the point of a fragrance, and completely miss out on what makes them so wonderful: the lack of thought, the pure, unadulterated enjoyment.

What You Can Learn From: Running, pt 2.

I've been running regularly for more than a month now. The more I do it, the more I realise what of the activity can teach us and reveal to us about the rest of our difficulties in simply existing. Here are two more:

1. Running teaches you that there are times you must think and concentrate. And then there are times when you must not think at all. At certain points of a long run, you really have to be very very aware of the mechanics of your body - how your legs feel, how your feet are hitting the ground, whether the rhythm of your breathes are working, your level of hydration, etc. At these points, if you don't concentrate, one of a few things will happen - you will quickly fall out of breath, or you will twinge something in your leg, or you will pass out - either way, you will have to stop running.

But then there are other times in which it is the absolute worst thing to think to much. These are the points where the energy has drained from your leg muscles and it feels like your running on bone and elastic bands. There is nothing wrong with your technique, you are just at a tiring point - a point which, if you concentrate upon, will simply prolong the experience drastically. These are the times you simply need to switch off your mind and just exist.

A certain degree of quality of life can largely be summarized in this equation: there are times when you have to think, and there are times when you have to not think. Happiness is very dependent on knowing when these times are and acting accordingly.

2. Long distance running is an amazingly effective way to learn to love your body. I have had mixed feelings towards my body - a nude scene I did as a drama student stripped away any remaining superficial insecurities I had, but I had always felt an intense distrust towards my body's physical abilities (this is what happens when you are bad at sprt at school) (also, this is probably why I can't drive). Running, more than anything else, gives you a sense of trust. More than that though - it's fondness. Have you ever seen that episode of Top Gear where the three hosts drive across America in cheaply bought cars, having all kinds of crazy hijinks and adventures? Remember their derisory attitudes towards their vehicles at the beginning, and their sense of love towards them at the end? If we go through some kind of adversity, and overcome this, we feel an innate attachment to anything which followed us along that journey. Long distance running is essentially creating our own safe adversity which we can overcome, and our bodies, that which got us through it, become symbols of this dogged determination. When you run enough, your body goes from being your enemy to your ally - you realise that all your earlier spats were mere misunderstandings, and you really do see on the same page about a lot of things.

Perhaps most amazing though is the way our body's admitted foibles - our bad joints or lumpy bits - start to become points of endearment. This is when you truly begin to love your body, when you start to love the "negatives" as well. They symbolise the power and charm your body actually has - your feats and accomplishments become all the more amazing because they were done by a thoroughly imperfect being, and one that you then cannot hate - just as you could not hate a loyal butler who still climbed the stairs each morning to bring you your breakfast, despite having lost a leg in the war. These are points of imperfection and weakness which, because they have carried you through the triumph, are suddenly more endearing then you could imagine.

What You Can Learn From: Muppets

Small Piece of Yesterday.

When we passed one of my neighbour’s houses she stopped suddenly and reached over their fence, then pulled a rather large flower closer with a certain degree of abandon. She smelt it, and then held it close for me to smell – it was very beautiful, but I didn't catch its name. In our townhouse driveway there was a removal truck parked diagonally taking all the remnants from my dead neighbour’s home. A fridge, a washing machine, chairs. Pragmatic men methodically went about gutting the home, turning it into a house.

Meanwhile beside the truck she pirouetted under the shade of an overhanging tree, noting how little light managed to get through between the leaves...

The Nice Thing About Being 15.

1.

I’m not sure the year – it would have been 98 or 99. We, my 15 year old friends and I, were at a friend’s house for video game playing and pizza eating. This was the main highlight of our socialisation – it would be another 3 years until I kissed a girl and, bizarrely, another 7 until the amount of kissing I has done in real life outnumbered the amount of kissing I had done on stage – so at the time we just had video games. The Nintendo 64 and it’s Goldeneye four-player tensions, seemingly endless Final Fantasy’s, and the mesmerizing and bewildering genius-mess of Metal Gear Solid.

We were sitting on various couches in the living room. There were enough of us – smelly, over-looked boys, for some to have to sit on the floor in thrones of cushions. The Simpsons was on TV. It was for this reason and this reason only that we weren’t playing video games. Pizza was placed in the most diplomatic of positions, and we ate and watched while my friend’s divorced parents sat in the adjacent dining room, talking about the Australian Labour Party.

It was the episode of The Simpsons where Lisa fell for Nelson and they briefly started dating. By this stage the show was just falling from its peak, and the plots were just starting to unwind from their tight forms of the mid-early seasons, though they still had a long way to go to reach the mess of desperate, plot-less narrative that they occupy today. It was the scene in which Lisa and Nelson kiss for the first time – Nelson having the very nice line as a thought, pressing his lips to hers: “That oughta shut her up.”

As I noted, we weren’t particular popular boys, probably because we were all very intelligent and defined ourselves as somehow being 'very intelligent' (much to our later unhappiness). We never, as some strange, un-said rule, talked about girls. Perhaps it was to not point out the obvious: that it wasn’t an area where any of us weren’t having any particular luck – not because we were trying and failing, but for the fact that we were all largely very very shy.

Except one of us. He whose house this was, and whom we had seen in several high school 'relationships', and had this seeming innate way of charming women. Years later I would realise that it was simply having the confidence and calm to go and talk to them, then keep talking to them and not listen to any deep neurotic thoughts informing you to run away as far and quickly as you can.

But as Lisa and Nelson kissed, in that very Simpsons way of kissing, like two plungers smooshing together, he suddenly spoke up from his spot on the couch:

“That’s not what kissing’s like!”

A little too loudly, a little too vehemently, for no other reason other than just to announce to us that he, and only he, knew what it was like to kiss a girl, and he, and only he, recognised the severely un-realistic, yellow portrayal being shown to us.

I distinctly remember thinking, as my teeth bit into a triangle of melted cheese:

“You wanker”

– but all the same, being impotent to argue with his actual underlying sentiment.


2.

That same year we went on a high school science camp. It was our class, as well as the other “smart” classes from the other years. Because of this, many of the people there I had not met or socialised with before, but at the same time, I still had my own comfortable circle.

I had always hated school camps. Mainly because I loved, and needed, sleep. I have gotten progressively less sensitive to this need as I have gotten older (to the point where I was fine doing 4 or 5 hours a night when studying design earlier in the year – although that would have contributed to my unhappiness and thus helped make the decision to drop-out), but as a teenager it was still an absolute essential. School camps seemed like exercises in sleep deprivation: put all the kids together in one room, and eventually the actual practice of staying up, and thus flouting the rules, becomes the very challenge of the night. Losing sleep became some badge of honour, since it essentially was anti-authority. I grew up largely constantly petrified of breaking any rules (something I didn’t grow out of until uni, and until I discovered the great extent of rules cast upon you are almost entirely arbitrary), but I also simply needed sleep, so I was want to try and get some. Eventually, the monkey sounds and actions of the other boys would settle into a haze around me, and somehow, I would be able to fall asleep. They would stay up – the especially daring ones sneaking out to a nearby beach, where equally daring girls waited. I liked to feel I had my revenge though: the next morning they would all be dead, while I would be fresh and awake, ready and waiting for a brisk morning bike ride around the island.

Knowing all this, on this particular occasion I was very careful about choosing my bed and setting it up. Firstly, I wanted something in a corner, thereby restricting the directions that sound could conceivably come from. Realising too my sensitivity to light (I am awoken very quickly by brightness and find it difficult to sleep if there is a persistent source of light in visible range) I decided to take certain measures to ensure a comfortable night: I arranged some of my supplied blankets around me, in the frames of the bunk beds, more or less setting up my own, tiny room in the edge of a larger one. At the time I did it out of comfort. Looking back, it was clearly paranoia, and the sheer discomfort of sharing a space with other boys.

This time no one snuck away during the nights. We were the “smart” kids, and with that was a certain expectation to be on impeccable behaviour always, which most of us lived up to, prefects and narcissists in training as we were. But the boy’s and girl’s dorms were just too adjacent and thus too alluring for nothing to happen. Eventually, after some scouts ventured back and forth for a while, the girls flooded our dorm. Nothing really happened: we were still the good kids, but there was still a faint naughtiness about it which was no doubt exciting. Boys and girls on the same bed, a boy (the same boy from the above memory) stroking a girl’s hair as she lay with her head on his stomach, and casual conversation about making out. It was like the beginning of some sort of scene in some sort of movie: it was leading somewhere for everyone, but we weren’t quite sure where.

Except for me, it wasn’t. I was in my room, and I had not ventured out. I had parted the blanket somewhat to allow a view, and some conversation, to the rest of the room in – and it wasn’t something I did immediately either, because I distinctly remember the orange glow of torch lights from the other side of the blankets, and then when I eventually opened to peer out, the disarming clarity of the torch lit world around me. But of course there was no one else on my bed, and no one resting their head on my stomach – how could they, they’d have to clamber through my sheet set up, or my ‘wall’, and even if I would later learn that a few girls there did have crushes on me, it would have taken a daring beyond most teenager’s capacity to tear down my structure and attempt to get close to me. And so I lay there, looking out from my peep hole, and waited, like some East German.

Before anything happened though, the supervising teacher entered the room with such a immense amount of force and anger that she must have stood behind the door for a few seconds before, building herself up. The rest of the room went dead. Torches switched off – to little effect, as the teacher had her own, much stronger torch. She ordered everyone out, NOW, regardless of what they were wearing, everyone out into the cold. The torch went around the room to force the teenage boys and teenage girls out. Everyone complied, shuffling about in their pyjamas or underwear and standing outside, against a wall, with a flickering light above them which illuminated very little, bar the small flies which aired around in a seeming state of constant panic.

Everyone complied, that is, but me. For when the teacher entered the room, and the second I heard that booming voice, I tore back my peep hole and, with my remaining blankets, covered myself into an impenetrable log, and didn’t make a sound. Chaos was everywhere else, and not in my room. As the other students were being lead out to face their punishment, the teacher’s torch continued to flash around, trying to spot any stragglers. Eventually, it’s large orange got fell upon my wall. It stayed there for a while, perhaps because the teacher was slightly puzzled.

‘Everyone out, NOW.’ she repeated.

I remained silent. Then I changed tact. With all the acting skills I could muster (and these were, in fact, numerous, from other situations like this I had found myself in), I applied a groggy haze to my voice and, as if I had only been woken from a slumber of Sleeping Beauty proportions then and there, very gingerly said:

‘Huh?’

The torch light had moved. Again she repeated her command, but this was aimed to the general room and not just me. Soon, I calculated that I was the only one left. I asked, again gingerly, and just as she would have been leaving

‘Do… do we have to go out if we’ve been asleep?’

The line was a masterful one of powerless manipulation: it was delivered as she was leaving, so she would need a strong force to pull her back in, it was me asking her, thereby, through all appearance, giving myself up should need be, and finally, cementing the notion that I had been asleep all this time, and was somewhat bewildered as to what was happening. Looking back, my childhood and teen years are filled with these sorts of lines towards adults, and it’s a tremendous relief that as an adult I seemed to drop out of the habit naturally, and usually only speak with the most earnest and sincere of voices.

The teacher didn’t reply, she merely left. The orange light vanished. From outside, I could hear the other students being yelled at – how they had broken the rules, how they would be sent home, how they could be expelled, etc. (none of which, of course, happened – teachers are usually as empty as dry watering cans). And though it was cold outside, their snickers didn’t make the whole affair seem so terrible. Except for me, as my imagination focused on her yells and her anger, and because I was not out there to experience any of it, for me, tucked in safe under one blanked and behind another, it was all utterly, utterly terrifying.

Despite this, my main memory though was wishing so much that I was out there with them, that I had had a girl’s head on my stomach, and I had been forced to march out there in my underwear, and that I wasn’t such a coward.


3.

This is the nice thing about being 15, being told to you by a 26 year old: that it truly truly only gets better from there.

Angry Smells

I have a theory, not based on any tests or even any kind of evidence or observation, which states that if you smell like something, you don’t impose yourself to be that something.

If we take as given that a certain percentage of our emotions and actions are through compensation (which is certainly not a given, but just for now…), then this perhaps makes a tiny amount of sense – if, through smell, we have convinced ourselves we are something, then we lose that compensatory motivation to be that. If we smell very very sexy and alluring then our attempts to convince the world that we are, in fact, very very sexy and alluring through other means – via what we say or how we act – are perhaps lessened. Again, this is entirely a theory pulled out of thin air and not based on anything at all apart from a mild amount of experience, and I make no pre-tense about actually being correct about this (or anything). I do believe that with the world of smells though it is worth a thought – I know that when I have worn very sexy fragrances like Nasomatto’s Duro my propensity to communicate sexiness is unconsciously stifled. This, more than anything else, is perhaps the greatest that can be said for a perfume increasing one’s confidence – all it works in is alleviating insecurity through a kind of emotional self-manipulation.

Or the entirely opposite thing happens: if you wear something that you utterly do not believe yourself to be, then all the smell informs you is of the chasm between who you are and who the smell is suggesting you are. That is why Jubilation XXV does not make me feel more secure about my financial status, it simply feels like I am too poor to pull it off successfully. Chanel no.5 does not make me feel more feminine, it informs me how unfeminine I am by comparison. The effect of this though isn’t so much an increase of insecurity though, rather, since smell is more visceral and operates from the gut (not literally, of course), it rejects outright these contradictory smells. Jubilation XXV makes me feel poor, but not insecure about not having much money – I viscerally reject it, and accept my paltry lot. Similiarly Chanel no.5 does not make me aspire to be more feminine to match it, rather it recognizes the length of this chasm and pedals back accordingly.

So, to summarise: if you wear a fragrance which communicates something you both aspire to and are able to display, then the experience of wearing it will reduce your insecure motivation to display said thing. However if you wear a fragrance which communicates something which you have no self-belief in achieving, or else doesn’t communicate anything of either your aspirations or realities, then you reject this communication and similarly don’t display said thing.

What happens then if a fragrance is communicating something you don’t aspire to, but at the same time can’t remotely deny as being part of you? What if a fragrance communicates something which, in fact, you don’t like about your personality? Say a fragrance that made you smell greedy, or shallow, or deceitful. What happens then, how do the rest of your actions compensate?

*

Today I tried on two different fragrances from two different houses which, to me, smelt angry. One, Vetivier 46 by Le Labo, is a kind of charged, fiery anger. The other, Sandal De Mysore by Serge Lutens, is a brooding, manly anger. But they both carry in them something which communicates fury.

To start wirh Vetivier 46: vetivier absolute, when smelled un-diluted, is one of the most rough and jarring of all perfume ingrdients: it smells of burnt coffee and dirt, and you wonder how it ever became such a perfumery mainstay. When controlled however, and its best attributes highlighted, it becomes one of the most beautiful of notes. Similar to how patchouli can transform from being a dirty, hippy smell into a sweet, elegant note, vetiver transforms from this ugly earth demon to this pinnacle of class and sophistication. Vetivier 46 works so well however because of its success in leaving some of this demon in. This has a cave-dwelling, indolent, extravagantly earthy smell – the gaiac wood and vetiver lend the masculine beauty, while the black pepper and patchouli allows it to crackle off. This is where it becomes angry – it is so stubborn and uncompromising in itself and those crackles – the points of the scent which splinter but do not fizz like citruses (though it has bergamot in it, which I imagines adds to this effect) – hint at an emotional fragility (which contrasts with the calm vanilla on the base) and the cloves lends the fieriness. And that’s what it smells like really: fire. Disarmingly beautiful fire – not just the smoke or incense of so many other scents, but proper, burning fire.

Sandal De Mysore is an entirely different equation, but really just as beautiful. It starts as this almost funky, sweet-sweaty, spicy smell, but soon (but not too soon, it flashes its ugliness around a good deal first) smoothes into an unapologetic calm of Mysore sandalwood. But it is unerring. With that calmness, that ugliness is still there – the body odour, and the all too edible smell. It’s as if it forces itself into this calm beauty in spite of itself. And this is why it is so marvellous: in using its notes so delicately, it communicates a kind of restraint. This is where its anger appears: it seems so acceptable, now so well meaning, but you just saw it as this ugly, putrid beast. You know it’s lying now as it sits still, and you wait for it to break, to snap.

It doesn’t, it just sits and occasionally reminds you with a whiff of something animal, which is then all the more alarming.

*

My un-scientific, un-proven (un-provable) theory about smell and insecurity would suggest this: if our fragrance carries with it an attribute that we deem negative perhaps the wearing of it would lessen the uncontrollable, invisible effects and motivations of that attribute. Especially because it is beautiful, it gives us a chance to own it, to claim it as our own and then gain some control over it, rendering it more articulate, and at the same time, less dangerous. If we wear an angry fragrance the emotional experience is not one of making ourselves angrier, but rather that of recognising and bringing to the surface such things so they need never surprise us, and reach out from the dark corners like clawing hands.

Of course, as always I am quite willing to be completely wrong, but I hope I am right. It is a nice thing to believe.



(image on top, as well as samples, from luckyscent.com - who do a wonderful job and I am very glad of the existence of)

Synesthesia (is a nice thing to have).

Why You Should Pay More Attention to Your Sense of Smell

Two Reasons:

1. The sense of smell is the only one connected directly to the limbic system, the part of our brains which govern initial emotional and sexual response. Smell then goes on to stimulate the cortex, which allows us to recognise it on a concious level - but long before this we have already made our emotional reaction.

When we meet a lover, the first sense to register the pleasure that comes with this is the sense of smell, for this very reason. Perhaps, then, if you are wanting to make a good impression, there can be no better consideration than the consideration of how you smell, as opposed to what top you're wearing or how you've done you're hair.

2. Smell exists almost exclusively in the moment. We can remember and recite chords of a song very easily, and can mentally put together simple visuals without too much trouble - we're even, to some extent, able to recall the sensations of touch, even enough to make our tiny body hairs bristle appropriately. But smell is notoriously difficult to recall, granting little more than vague approximations, incomparably weak compared to the actual real life sensation.

This is why, I suggest, smell is an oddly useful sense in the staving off of depression and general anxiety. So much of depression and anxiety is perpetuated by the inability to live life in the now, and instead dwell over the past or worry about the future, thus allowing our at times brutal imaginations to run riot on our hypothetical lives. The experience of smell forces us to exist within a single moment - we can recognise and remember the experience of smelling it, but our recollection does not allow us to even remotely recreate this rich feeling. Nor, do we miss smells - it is akin to a death of a dozen thousand of Cupid's arrows in the back to smell a former lover's scent, we will not generally consider the smell when we have no access to it - we will not miss it (though we will miss their warm presence in bed and clever, articulate eyes), and now will we fear it (though we will fear the sound of their disembodied voice from behind a telephone reciever).

In practical terms, smell could be useful for a sufferer of depression and anxiety to simply learn to ignore the shame of the past and the nightmare of the future and simply posit themselves in a fragrant now. I am not suggesting smell is a magic bullet to happiness, but rather, it could be very useful tool in training our minds to simply be, rather than simply implode in panic and despair.

To try and see, why not next time you're feeling overwhelmed, just run a bath with a few drops of some essential oils - a good, and oft repeated blend is a few drops of bergamot, a few drops of lavender and a few drops of cedarwood - and just concentrate your mind to just dissect the smells.

The Problem with Eyes: Some thoughts on Photography, Beauty, Pornography and Obsession.

- I have a problem with photographs. Or, more accurately, I have a problem with how we view photographs generally: we trust them to too great an extent. Take the photographs of night spots which occur in every city every week. Shot after shot of nameless people dancing, or smiling, or drinking, but usually existing in some kind of picturesque vision of hedonism-light (which of course isn't hedonism at all). People like to be in these. They like to look pretty in these. They like this because they feel somehow it reflects their night.

The photographs don't capture the smell of stale beer and spilt coke and whiskey. They don't capture the feeling of being groped by strangers. They don't capture every time you weren't smiling.

But we trust what they do capture. We trust and think "What a good night", because that's what our eyes both us and everyone else. They collect an entirely false reality, which we then happily present as a truth.

That is my problem with photography. Nothing to do with the photographs themselves, but the inherent, occularcentric trust we have in them.

(this is of course a specific example - not all photographs, even those taken of you in night spots, do this)

- The more you love someone, the less their looks matter. Stendhal talked about beauty as it being the promise of happiness, and when you fall deeply in love with someone the happiness they promise you increases dramatically - to unbounded levels. This is why everyone claims that their partner is the most beautiful - to them they truly, sincerely are.

Therefor you should never view yourself as physically un-beautiful - unless of course you feel you unable to give another person happiness.

(and we are all, provided we work at it, capable of both promising and delivering happiness to certain people)

- Pornography is perhaps the ultimate trap, and in being so, the ultimate allegory to the problem of occularcentricism when applied to sexual desire. If you pare it down to what is essentially its base essentials, it begins to sound like some kind of perversely clever torture:

1. Take the single most physically pleasurable act capable to a human being - one whose pleasure is experienced through the less tangible senses: touch, smell and taste.

2. Present this act without using any of those senses, instead displaying it only through the more tangible, intelligent senses: vision and hearing.

Thus, it presents all of the visual cues of pleasure, but removes all the actual sensations of pleasure.

(I should note I am talking here of sex on a purely physical, sensation related level - there is obviously an emotional level in which a great sector of its pleasure resides - I am merely talking of our raw interaction with it through the senses)

- Breast enhancements and cosmetic labiaplasties are two examples of extreme occularcentricism, and both fill me with a profound (and useless) sense of regret over our society. I have no respect for men that favour the aesthetics of boob-jobs - these are men that lack imagination beyond what their eyes inform them and are probably terrible lovers.

(I have no factual basis for this last point but it makes sense somehow, no? You wouldn't trust a perfumer that preferred fake flowers.)

- The current fashion of the clean-shaven pubis is, I think, semiotically connected to the mainstream rise of pornography brought about through the internet. The evolutionary function of pubic hair is to provide visual cues as to the readiness to procreate. Thus it has a sexual link, but one in which leads to a necessary continuation of the species - to put it another way: you fuck, you have children. Pornography presents sex having this particular equation entirely removed from it - no porn films involves the woman then becoming pregnant and the tanned couples starting a family together, because it removes the lack of consequences and thus safety in the sex presented. With the post-internet pornographic boom then the cultural-subconscious decision was made to remove the visual cues of actual sexual reproduction and instead imagine a more fantastical hypothetical scenario where sex never lead to childbirth.

Because we so rarely discuss sex openly or honestly, pornography, viewed largely in private, very easily dictates what we regard as sexual norms. And thus: pubic hair has become both weird and unattractive.

(Again, the visual decision dictates the tactile experience. Again, the problem with occularcentricism.)

- Of all the senses, sight is the only one with the requirement of distance - taste and smell measure actual molecules entering our systems, touch is only experiences on our surfaces (internal and external), sound is experiencable at whatever distance the sound is capable of traveling (and is stronger the closer you are), but sight doesn't work at all if you are too close to your subject. This makes sight the perfect sense for obsessive tendancies, as obsession only works when there is some kind of distance between the obsessed and the obsessee (otherwise the obsessed's fantasies fall flat as they are forced to realise the reality of their subject). If you are prone to obsessing over people then here are two tips to avoid it:

1. Hang out with them on a regular basis.

or if that is not an option,

2. Don't look at pictures of them.

Staring forlornly at a potential lover is recipe for both unhappiness and, if left unbridled, obsession, because it is giving you some kind of imaginary access to them, but none of the actual access which would sufficiently ground your relationship with them. It keeps them in your mind, but in that mind allows them to float to the heavens as if angels, now miles above you, leaving you only to look up and marvel at their completely fictitious splendor.

A Micro Story Draft: Strip Streetfighter

In an attempt to rescue our relationship, my girlfriend and I introduce the prefix "strip" into every facet of our day-to-day lives.

At morning we get up and go through our usual routine, taking our clothes off at every given moment. It takes is 2 or 3 times of putting on and taking off our pajamas before it starts to feel silly.

At breakfast she sleepily undoes her bra while sipping her first coffee with no hands. I whip my belt off and spill the milk.

In the bathroom I brush her teeth with one hand while taking her top off with the other - she does the same to me.

We say goodbye to each other on the front path of our house. She lifts her skirt instead of waving goodbye, I try to unbutton my shirt but the tie gets in the way.

At our lunch breaks we make excuses to others and hide in closets, locked offices, storerooms - anywhere we can be alone, to make out midday phone calls. We just have to trust that the person on the other line is also naked.

We end up getting take out rather then dining in a lot. No restaurant will let us eat the food off the other. We can't eat soup now for more or less the same reason. Spaghetti works.

Our nightly games of Streetfighter become Strip Streetfighter, one item of clothing lost per match lost. She chooses Chun-Li and I choose Ken. We start trying to lose on purpose if we sense the other person is feeling cold. I walk straight into her Thousand Burst Kick.

Bedtime approaches. She starts to undress for the final time but it suddenly occurs to me that I should tell her that I’m tired of her naked body. I tell her. She says “Well," and tells me my bare flesh makes her want to vomit. I tell her her shoulders are “stupid” and “nonsensical”. She tells me she no longer loves me. I tell her I already know.

I sit on the edge of our bed for the final time, running my fingers through my hair. She sits cross-legged on the living room couch, playing Streetfighter again, now alone, winning every round.

The Something of Life (and then death)

My neighbour, Peter, just overdosed. There were the police in their fluro yellow vests and the ambulance officers in their calming blue shirts. By the time I was outside they'd already taken away the body - he was gone, dead. From the front of my house I saw the police searching through his now empty home. Their flashlights lengthened and shortened the shadows of the objects they passed over. One sat upon the officer who was closing the window: her shadow stretched right over my neighbour's yard. Then she closed the window.

I had known the guy since I moved in here almost 4 years ago. On my very first day there I passed him and another neighbour drinking wine together and talking. I thought "I wonder if that's what it's going to be like here - all chummy with neighbours and wine over conversation?". It wasn't. I didn't talk to him much outside of hellos and goodbyes. Until I started suffering from depression in 2007 I didn't realise he was severely depressed. I never knew he was an addict. It's odd how obvious it all is in retrospect though.

*

Please please please don't throw your life away. I am honestly begging you - you, you reading now. Don't even throw it away in small doses - hold it all close to your chest and cherish it. I don't care who you are and what you do with your time, I don't care how much money you make or how long it takes to fix up your hair, I don't care whether or not you give to charities and I don't care what kind of marks you got in high school - the very fact you're reading this means you're alive, and that means you have something that should be cared for and nurtured. Anything less is a tragedy.

*

Peter, I'm so so so sorry.

L'Eau D'Issey pour Homme, or, the Problem with Popularity.

L'Eau D'Issey pour Homme was the last bottle of perfume I bought before I started becoming interested in perfume. This gives hint as to what it really is: the perfume for men who don't think to much about perfume. It is fresh, zesty, and with its strange combination of yuzu and sandalwood, quite unique.

My reason's for buying a bottle though had nothing to do with the smell. In fact, even when purchasing it I still hadn't warmed to the smell - it was too fresh and too zesty, like it was beckoning on insecurely for humid afternoon. My reasons for buying a bottle then, were very very stupid: it was because of the brand. At the time I was really into the work of a designer by the name of Tokujin Yoshioka. I loved his amazing chairs which communicated a real playful elegance and wit, but at the same time maintained a kind odd humility: it was as if the chairs themselves didn't know their own genius (this was, I should note, before I found and sat on one, and found it to possess a terrible texture and a generally over-bearing presence in real life). But Yoshioka was the young fledgling designer working under Miyake's wing, and I got into Miyake's curatorial design work for that. His watches collection in particular is very fun (though bounces between the stupid and the beautiful, depending on the watch). Feeling I trusted Miyake's judgment, I gambled on the bet that I would eventually warm to his perfume.

I did for a while. I really liked the fact that it didn't smell like I had imagined male fragrances to smell, but at the same time still smelt masculine. There was a real Japanese masculinity to it, a type of iki-masculinity - kind of dandy-ish but androgynous rather than feminine. The handsome young Japanese men you see on variety shows, extroverted and elfin and adored by women. And this last point is important.

Wear Issey Miyake and you will probably hear in female whispers around you "Someone's wearing Issey...". They then may ask you if it's you. You say "Yes.". They say:
"I love Issey Miyake, I had an ex who wore it..."
Or maybe it's their current partner. Mention the fact that you wear L'Eau D'Issey pour Homme and, far more so than any other fragrance, women will gush over both how much they adore it, and how they probably have had someone in their life who also wears it (without excaggerating, if the 5 women I've conversed with about Issey Miyake, all have had more or less this reply). Which tells you two things:
1. Women love Issey Miyake.
2. Probably because of this, men over-wear Issey Miyake.

I had no idea of Issey Miyake's reputation for either of these points when I bought it - had I known I probably wouldn't have laid down the cash. But it proved a very interesting investment as the experience of wearing the fragrance taught me something very important about fragrance: It does not pay to be popular.

This is why: Issey Miyake will never be You. Or they will be You, but not only You. If you were to walk down the street wearing Issey and passed someone who got a whiff - they would smell it, and more so than any other perfume, think of someone else - not You. Smell and memory tends to work on a first come, first served basis - the first person who wore lots of Issey will then claim the smell, and you may in fact become this person for one or two people - but for the vast majority you won't be: you will be their ex who once called them fat then locked himself in the bathroom for 2 hours for reasons they're still unaware of, you will be their brother that once sat on their bed crying after his lies about sleeping with Laura Bradley caught up with him in the most painful way, you will be their boyfriend that loves going into work everyday solely for the reason that he can stand and stare at the bikini-girl posters from Zoo magazine plastered on the storeroom wall. But you won't be You.

In fact it is so over-used it becomes a kind of fog. I smelt it on three men tonight just walking through the store. Eventually that Yuzu-Sandalwood combination becomes this general feeling of man: the zesty smell really blends badly with BO as well, so it generates a kind of lazy, "Was working, came home and stunk, sprayed something on over it to hide it", Lynx-effect male mentality. It becomes a man, undoubtedly, but a nameless, faceless man, existing somewhere in the general area of society. And maybe this works for you - maybe all you want in a fragrance is something that lets people know you are a man - any man. But you should want more, because without this fog, a good fragrance communicates so much more. Absinthe by Nasomatto, for example, communicates an earthy yet temperamental genius - a faulty person for sure, but someone whose pure world view is so profound you couldn't really doubt them. Antico Caruso by Profumum is a tremendously succesful man who has never forgotten his roots - he still has Sunday dinner with his family each week, and doesn't show off his wealth, as he is completely comfortable with his position in life. L'homme Sage by Divine speaks of such tremendous sensitivity, such awareness of the senses, that there is no way they can be anything less than a divine lover.

In the face of so many other fragrances, why settle for something that just says "man"? A nameless group, sweaty shirts and gelled hair, annoying you because they took their drinks onto the dance floor. You deserve better.

A List of Men You Shouldn't Go Out With

I've had enough female friends and have talked through enough of other people's relationship problems to come up with some fairly obvious fault areas: men who you really should not go out with. As a side note, people can always change and mature. We are able to, with amazing veracity, turn our lives around and change everything. These then are more possible points in a man's existance when you should not date him (not to they will all grow out of these points either). Here is the list:

Men who expect you to cook for them.

Not having the ability or sense to cook is forgivable – it involves certain skills and modes of thought that not everyone possess. But you should never go out with a man who expects you to cook for them for one very simple reason: it changes an activity which should be pleasurable for you into a chore. Cooking a beautiful meal for a loved one is one of the most instantly gratifying things you can do, but having this expectation on you mutates the activity into something wholly unpleasant.

Men who don’t do their own laundry.

This is both arrogant and pathetic. Men that do not launder their own clothes have been spoilt to a dumb degree and will not be used to not getting what they want. They will be immature and petulant, like young children.

Men that regularly spend 5+ hours daily playing video games and are over 21.

Anyone with that great a need of escapism, whilst not being able to overcome the daily deficiencies in their own life which fill their need to play video games, will probably not handle the trials of a relationship very well (or, indeed, the pleasures: no video game, not even Castlevania, will make you a better lover).

Men with the word “Failure” cut into their arms.

This is a specific case I saw, but it applies generally to someone who hates themselves considerably. Don’t go out with these people – they have, somewhere along the way, convinced themselves that because they are losers, they don’t deserve any happiness or success, and will constantly sabotage their endeavors. Not only that, but because a relationship would you would qualify as a success, they will do everything they can to make you hate them, and if you’re still around, will try to pull you down with them.

Men that are loathed by all of their exes.

I quick glance at a man’s relationship with his exes can give you a pretty good summation of a few things: how they handle themselves in times of relationship crisis, and how generally mature they are. Also, if there are any latent dickhead tendencies lurking underneath, this is where it will be most obvious.

Men who feel the need to constantly remind the world how not gay they are.

The thing is, they’re probably not gay, but this is what makes it so worrisome. This level of sexual insecurity is not helpful for a relationship.

Men with questionable relationships with their exes.

Men who flirt with their exes with little regard for your feelings, and will then turn it around on you with accusations of jealousy. It is really a question of priorities: if they make no consideration to change or modify their behaviour in order to account for your very normal and understandable insecurities over their former lovers than that they behaviour is innately selfish and self-serving.

I have a sense of smell again!: Invasion Barbare by MDCI

I've had hay fever for the past few days and thus my capacity to smell things has been severely limited - everything - rose, new car, baby, sardine - smelling of the metallic nastiness of mucus. It has been very unpleasant.

But I can smell again now, so I thought I'd write up a review of a scent I tried out yesterday: Invasion Barbare by MDCI.


In other reviews I've read that this fragrance ultra-masculine, but a kind of rugged, muscular, barbarian-like (in a Schwarzenegger sense) masculine, which evokes bronzed bodies, animal hide and unrealistic muscles. But I feel these reviews are largely missing the point of Invasion Barbare - that is, it still smells like a torrid, sword-wielding fight, but one done through a certain kind of aesthetic, largely contrary to the aforementioned image.

To me, Invasion Barbare, with its musk/vanilla/leather base and lavender/grapefruit tops, smells of exquisite flesh. It is fresh, clean and sun-soaked flesh. It is lavishly smooth flesh with all the spicy notes (ginger, cardamom) playing finely nuanced supporting roles.

Because it is really an imagined, idealized flesh, it has the effect of being something quite familiar-yet-strange. It becomes the concept of flesh rather than anyone's actual flesh, but in doing so, highlights the nature of flesh to a degree that disembodies it. It is too beautiful a flesh to be actually attached to any living thing, it is rather flesh which is just kind of floating there in mid-air. Much like Luca Turin talks about fruit scents evoking giant imagined fruits, this fragrance evokes a giant hunk of flesh. Now, a giant piece of fruit is all very well and good - this in itself is desirable and playful. But a giant hunk of flesh? No matter how beautiful, there is something violent about it. And no doubt, this is a violent fragrance.

The name is the first give away: Barbarian Invasion. More than enough sliced, disembodied flesh in those two words. Then, there is the slightly carrion-like smell that just juts under everything else - it is not sickly though, but utterly entrancing. Like a slight fecal smell can make a floral scent narcotic, the slight smell of death here makes this all the more desirable. It ends up then being not-unlike a Japanese envisioning of a beautiful, aesthetic death, with its puzzlingly alluring dismemberment and spurts of blood on rainbow arcs. It is truly the most romantic, divine death imaginable.

There is a particular way it blends with your sweat as well that is very clever, but I'll talk about that another day (when I talk about M.Micallef's Gaiac, another tremendous masculine scent). This is really one of the best fragrances I've ever smelt.

What You Can Learn From: Running

I went running for the first time in a year on Friday. It has been a year of very slothful activity: uni has forced me into buses and seats, and the eradication of free time has ruined my once pretty decent diet. With the decision to leave uni prematurely in a blaze of blissful failure and head to a completely uncertain though totally exciting future now fully made I decided I should maybe try my hand at running once again.

I never used to be a big runner, but I did it semi-regularly once I graduated high school. I would run along the bike path near my house, just using the intensity of the experience to drain some of my pent up teenage emotions. Of course for this reason I was a terrible runner: I didn’t listen at all to my body and paid no attention to my breathing patterns. Instead I’d just opt for stupid sprints until I started to taste blood. It didn’t do much for my fitness since I did it too sparingly – it was more like giving my body some kind of a jolt. I had it in my mind that I was a terribly unfit person and that this was merely my nature, no amount of exercise would change my limited physical abilities.

This, however, was of course bull-shit. I was unfit because I never exercised, but my proof of a kind of unshakable unfitness was near dead state I would be in after kind of physical excursion – something that would have changed had I just exercised more regularly and not be put off by the notion that if I am bad at something from the start I will always be bad at it. It was very logically unsound.

Recently I read ‘What I Talk About When I Talk About Running’ by Haruki Murakami and felt a certain sadness at never being a particularly fit man. Murakami’s book partly chronicles his slight melancholy at the realisation of his body’s slow decline as he gets older, and I suddenly realised I was wasting here my own perfectly good, still young body. I suddenly felt I was taking myself for granted.

So I went running on Friday, on the same bike path near my local beach. Following my friend M’s advice, I would run for four minutes, then have a break, then run for another four, and etcetera. This was the plan. I set my iPod to play the last four minutes of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ to note my time, pressed play and started running.

Four minutes later, and about 600km, I was dead. My face was burning red and my legs felt boneless. I was sure I was going to throw up and ruin some poor emetophobic’s beaching experience. Forgoing the plan, I rested for about 10 minutes then got back up, starting a slow walk. I tried running again, but only got about two minutes before I decided to pack it in. Far from feeling dejected about my failure – as I once would have done, I made the mental effort to frame this the right way: I am unfit, but keep running and I will only get fitter. With effort there is only improvement.

I rested and worked Saturday and Sunday. The previous short run had, through various pains, taught me a great deal about the physical make up of the human leg. It even revealed to me a muscle I never knew existed.

Monday arrived and I had promised myself to run again. I wasn’t simply going to give up because I was so terribly at it on first attempt, like I usually do with things in my life. Instead, I was ready to embrace my suckiness – knowing full well this is what I will have to work through. The air was slightly cooler and I didn’t bring my iPod this time. Because I was more familiar with the experience and had a better understanding of when my body was liable to give out, I ran with a great deal less panic. I took great care to listen to my body and run the way it wanted to run, and more importantly, breathe at a rhythm which suited my speed.

This time I ran about 1.25kms – more than twice the Friday before. By the end I was still dead, but genuinely surprised that I had managed that much more. I sat at a picnic table which overlooked the grey beach and caught my breathe. I was surrounded by a circus of flies who ruined the ambiance, but who after a while I became quite fond of. I played a bit with them, making slow, clumsy swats with my hands as if we were play-fighting. I stood up and walked back. I tried to run a bit on the way back but my legs just felt completely hollow.

Today I decided I would run again, and forgo the two day rest I had last time. I told myself how it would be OK if I didn’t run as far, because I wasn’t as rested, and this was no indication of any kind of demoralizing non-linear relationship between effort and success. I did the 1.25km run to the picnic table fairly easily. The flies weren’t there, but without them I could enjoy the serene beauty of the beach unobstructed. When I stood back up to walk home I realised my legs still felt fairly strong. Just to test myself now, I started running again. I did about 500km then got felt it was a bit much and stopped, but still felt a fair deal of admiration for the human body. With about 200km to go I decided “Fuck it” and just sprinted the rest – as fast and as hard as I could manage, just to ensure my legs were properly spent. I hit the rail fence to end it with a euphoric flourish and congratulated myself. I have been good at many things in my life, but (perhaps because of this) have always terrible with any kind of effort.

I think there is a lot you can learn about life through running. In less than a week this is what I have learnt:

1. The human body is an amazing thing which we don’t really appreciate enough. It adapts the physical pressures so quickly that it really is amazing. We think ourselves too weak and too frail and neglect our own potential. This applies emotionally as well – we shy away from situations because we fear the pain they might cause us, but in doing so we ignore the amazing ability of the human animal to adapt and to just keep on living.

2. Being naturally good is one thing, but a true sense of satisfaction only comes from effort. There are plenty of things I’ve done very well without trying much, but the satisfaction you get from these is really somewhat meagre. You usually find yourself saying ‘So? It is what I expected.’ With something you are naturally and self-assuredly good at, your expectation is exceedingly high, so when you reach this high point, it ends up bringing you very little satisfaction – more likely just a smile and a shrug. By putting in sustained effort, you kind of stop yourself from saying ‘Sure, but I was good at it anyway’ and undermining your achievements.

3. Being bad at something is a terrible reason to avoid doing it. To only do what you’re good at directly ties your sense of enjoyment with the acquisition of success. But that enjoyment never satisfies, because you can always be more successful. You end up never really enjoying life because what you are chasing keeps on moving further away – you think you’ll be happy when that one, magical moment of success happens, but then it passes and your life suddenly starts craving something new to pursue. The trick is, as far as I understand, to enjoy everything – no matter if you’re good at it or not, whether you’ll be successful or not. You can’t rely on the idea that the enjoyment will start once you achieve your goal – because it may be there for a while but just as quickly it goes. You have to learn to enjoy it all along the way – live life joyfully. And that is why you shouldn’t stop doing something because you’re bad at it. You should learnt to enjoy it, find the bliss in it, and re-organise your priorities.