The tale of the Lycra sniffer

Time once again for us to examine the Chandler Burr's New York Times perfume reviews. Got your smelling salts ready? Good.

From Sunday's paper:

In 1999, the perfumer Michel Almairac produced a perfume for Gucci that was -- and remains -- virtually perfect.

Not literally perfect, mind you.

Its scent is marvelously, explicitly unnatural, as if one were smelling a coat made of the most expensive Lycra.

Couldn't you just wear biking shorts? Er, the world's finest, most expensive biking shorts?

But beneath the surface, Gucci Rush runs on lactones, marvelous synthetic molecules that give off the fresh-chilled aspect of yogurt, with a hint of the plastic container it comes in.

Activia: Yogurt that makes you poop. Just dab a little on your pulse points and ...

The genius of Rush is clarity without cleanliness. ...

It's like the world's smartest hobo!

Its architectural cognate is the Bank of America Tower, now rising at Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street. The skyscraper's guts are advanced materials like slag-mixed concrete, but its facade even more closely reflects the perfume.

But have you tried spritzing an office building? It cannot be done.

Really. I've tried.

This box is angled, complex, multifaceted. Its clear glass skin is washed in a milky, pearly whiteness, keeping it both warm and cool.

It is both up and down. Night and day. Pastrami, and yet roast beef.

Astonishing.

Indeed.

Dining out with the Surrealists

From the current issue of The New Yorker:

Tailor's specialty, across the menu, is flavors that don't occur together in nature: pork belly and butterscotch, a befuddlingly appealing Scotch infused with pumpernickel.

Other flavors that don't occur together in nature: beets with cocoa, foie gras with peanut butter. But there's a reason no one would ever put combinations that bizarre together, right?

The sweet stuff has lots of salt--beet ravioli with cocoa caviar?--and the salty stuff has lots of sweet. Peanut butter, cocoa caramel, and something called "pear soil" don't do much to improve "the foie" ...

Sigh. I stand corrected.

--as a waitress referred to it recently--

What a scamp!

... but a dish of roasted duck, spaghetti squash, raisin dashi, and chanterelles (tiny as thumbtacks) is absolutely magnificent.

No, I'm pretty sure those were actual thumbtacks.

Given the sugariness of most of the main offerings, dessert is pretty unnecessary, and one, the rum-braised banana with mustard ice cream, is downright scary: a banana is frozen and dehydrated into a large chip--a phallic fossil.

No, I'm pretty sure that was an actual phallic fossil.

If you're in an adventurous mood, ...

Why do I think something truly horrendous is coming up?

... it's better to order another drink. There's the Bazooka, made with bubble-gum cordial, or the Asa Gohan, which means "breakfast food" in Japanese and is supposed to taste like a bowl of Grape-Nuts. (Open Tuesdays through Sundays for dinner. Entrées $24-$27.)

Make mine an Alka-Seltzer, and don't put anything weird in it.

I'm pretty sure dew tastes like water

Sometimes, it becomes clear that I could focus exclusively on insane reviews to fill this blog. I won't, but this New Yorker restaurant review is vintage food-critic nuttiness. It's so crazy, I won't even interupt the flow with any snarky comments, though I will highlight a few of the odder turns of phrase--and keep in mind that this is a positive review.

A simple apéritif of shochu, garnished with tiny morsels of pear cut in leaf and star shapes, tastes the way you imagine dew might. Monkfish liver is presented in a vase of pebbles, abalone on a cushion of salt; you get to sear small rectangles of beef on a terrifyingly hot shiny stone. Dried mullet roe (which you grill over an open flame) looks like carrot, has the consistency of bean curd, and tastes like anchovy, only more so. Coupled with a rectangular tablet of daikon radish, it looks uncannily like a mah-jongg tile. Aigamo duck comes with a cake of mochi—a kind of rice polenta with a texture between dough and string cheese but stickier than either. (In Japan, people occasionally suffocate while eating it.) The kaiseki meal culminates in a dish that might seem plain: steamed rice. But the silvery Koshihikari rice from Uonuma is highly prized, and here it is served with condiments including twice-grilled salmon as light and brittle as a cracker and as salty and desiccated as jerky.

I just love how the writer throws into a parenthetical aside the fact that a rice dish served here has actually, you know, killed people. But, mangia!

Quelque chose à ce sujet sent la merde

Third in an occasional series in which we gaze, shielding our eyes, at the intense light given off by the perfume reviews in The New York Times. From today's Style magazine:

I must admit, with some unease, my initial obtuseness toward Comme des Garçons 2 Man, one of the 10 greatest works of perfumery art in the world.

Just slightly above Axe body spray and Jean Naté and below Old Spice.

The perfumer Mark Buxton built the upper decks of this sleekest of vessels out of C11 ISO, a synthetic molecule that smells of clean pressed fire, if you can imagine such a thing; ...

No.

... the pine-scented synthetic C12 MNA; ...

A smidge of Pine-Sol.

... and a high-quality natural Haitian vetiver that smells like dust on jungle trees.

I repeat: No.

But the hull is frankincense from Oman, an incense cool as cream, warm as onion-skin stationery, glossy and slick as a traffic light in the rain.

As strong as a Gauloise, as chewy as an economy-size box of Jujubes, and as furry as ferret.

This technically flawless perfume (it diffuses like radium) ...

So, that's what Madame Curie was working on.

... smells more beautiful than one can say, like a perfect chord in an empty echo chamber.

Is that a koan? Like, what is the sound of one hand holding one's nose?

Herodotus warned that frankincense was dangerous to harvest because poisonous snakes lived in the Arabian trees that contained it, and I do believe my first reaction to 2 Man was, in part, fear.

Much like my reaction to this review. And, to be fair, I suspect that Herodotus was nipping at the absinthe.

This perfume is not just extraordinary. It is perfect.

I am now officially out of snark.


(PS: That subject line translated by the Google language tool. God knows if it's good French, because I certainly don't.)

Humor is where you find it

Bringing the funny is fickle.

For me, this line from Alessandra Stanley's Mad Men review in the Times the other day falls with a big thud because it just tries too hard:

"Mad Men," a drama about the advertising business in 1960, is a period piece in the style of "Masterpiece Theater," only the pivotal setting isn't a genteel drawing room in the heyday of the British Empire; it's the booze-spiked office water cooler at the beginning of the end of the American Century. (Not "Brideshead Revisited," but "Brylcreem Revisited.")

It's like she's saying to her readers: "Get it? Huh? Get it?" Not that it would have been a great gag anyway, but she might have gotten a smile out of me if she'd simply written, "... at the end of the American Century. Think 'Brylcreem Revisited.'"

Likewise, I couldn't even read the first few paragraphs of today's Maureen Dowd column without my eyes glazing over. Truly: Ugh.

On the other hand, the Times's perfume reviews? Comedy gold!:

Use civet or a synthetic facsimile up front, and you get Yves Saint Laurent’s Kouros. ... The problem is that this strength, clarity, persistence and depth are applied to the hot, ripe smell of a French trucker’s Jockey shorts after a muggy day on the A51. Which illustrates the difference between being great and being wearable. This perfume is fecal. Technical excellence must count: thus two stars, for solid construction. But an era’s aesthetic must count as well, and despite its molecular wizardry, Kouros is as wearable in the 21st century as 19th-century spats. ...

Civet can also act as a support for another material. In the case of Rose Poivrée (introduced in 2000), that would be rose absolute, never a lovely scent and certainly not by today’s standards. ... Here, Jean-Claude Ellena uses civet to amend rose absolute, and the overall effect is akin to breathing in the warm, slightly fetid breath of some immense, fur-covered animal. It is that moment in an Indian spice market when a surge of sweltering, humid air, as if from the lungs of some morose god, drowns you in spice and car exhaust. But if you have the skin for it, this perfume is mesmerizing, even today.

But that's just the setup. Then comes the punchline: The perfume that smells like a furry animal's fetid breath, morose god exhalations, and car exhaust gets five out of five stars. And to smell that way will set you back about $140 for three ounces.

Now, that, ladies and gentlemen of the comedy jury, is funny!

PS: Oh, that and the fact that "civet" is the secretion of the civet cat's anal gland.

Why I will never write perfume reviews for The New York Times

Because I could never string together sentences like these:

Bigarade smells like a person trapped in a complex weather system, the wonderful scent of a guy's armpit and a woman's humid skin washed in fresh rainwater and ozone. ... It is a masterful juxtaposition, and smelling Bigarade is like looking down into a well of cool, black water. Your retinas expand from the strange pleasure of this scent. --The New York Times

I suspect this writer's retinas have expanded from sniffing glue, not perfume.

(I should point out that I saved a draft of this on Sunday for later posting, and Gawker pointed out the same passage on Monday. No plagiarism intended.)