102509

Lord's Jester now has its own blog, LJ blog. Jean Baptiste and I will share writing duties.

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Interesting tid bit: Van Morrisson's famous song Brown Eyed Girl was originally titled Brown Skinned Girl. The suits in the 60s wouldn't have it for a minute.

*Perfume*

The liquid version of Selene may well be one of the best perfumes I've made yet. It's robust and tenacious, but powdery and unimposing. It's salient notes are orris, orris-violet, and clary sage, though it has 16 notes all together. A revamped version of Phoebe, my osmanthus perfume, is almost perfect. The osmanthus is still a little strong, but it's becoming harder to decipher. Another try or two and she'll be good to go. Also, this week we made my first eau de cologne; exactly 5% aromatics in 140-proof alcohol. I've never made an EdC before; we used the recipe for Ares, which I love but which most everyone says is just too strong. It's still quite robust but I'm hoping watering it down will make it more approachable.

This week I said to my assistant that I wanted to focus on perfecting recipes I already have, to the exclusion of starting new experiments. Terrible idea! There are hundreds if not thousands of botanical materials commonly used in natural perfume; I've had some success so far, but I still have a long way to go. There are far too many combinations I have yet to try; while I have a very good perfume imagination, and oodles of smells catalogued in my brain, there's still a lot of grunt work to be done. For example, do oppoponax and cognac (from wine lees) really complement each other as well as I imagine? Innumerable experiments along those lines are still needed.

This week there's been an ongoing discussion on the NP-email list about terminology and natural perfume. Some out there think the whole thing is bunk because even distillation is unnatural. All the processes used to extract the odoriferous principle from plants, distillation, expression, enfleurage, maceration, as far as I'm concerned are perfectly natural. One doesn't need a lab or lab equipment to do these things; in fact, I think they are most commonly done outside. When you get into altering that odoriferous principle, creating "isolates," removing acids, removing color, that's when you get into unnatural processes.

How about organic? As most of you know, I'm all about organic, having studied in depth the dangers of chemical agriculture in college. Believe me, if there were any way to make real, professional perfume with all certified-organic materials, I'd be there. But the artistic imperative to me is to make fantastic perfume with _natural_ materials instead of fragrance chemicals. At the moment, one cannot make a certified-organic professional perfume; there are too many essential ingredients which cannot be found organic. The people out there who don't understand how complex perfumery is, how much training one needs (even if it's auto-didacticism), think all you need is to slap a few nice smelling materials together to make perfume. Not!

There is a number of ingredients which I've learned over the past four or five years is absolutely essential to fine perfume, ingredients which cannot be found certified organic, things like ambrette, costus, rose, jasmine, and juniper, to name a very few. Those out there who are taking a marketing angle which tells them organic is hot are doing harm to the renaissance of natural perfume. My own conviction is that natural perfume should not be so different from mainstream perfume that it seems like a different animal. When a person combines aromatics with no knowledge of how professional perfume is made, it gives us who are dedicated to the art as it was before 1921 (the year Chanel No. 5 was released, the first perfume based on synthetics) a bad name. People have the mistaken impression they've smelled natural perfume before when in fact what they've smelled hardly even counts as aromatherapeutic.

The worst part is this: one can make a perfume with fragrance chemicals, synthetics, and still call the perfume organic; this is because fragrance chemicals are not pesticides (though in many cases they are poisonous and could well be used as pesticides). Isn't that a mind bender? People make perfume with chemicals, then call it organic and vegan. No one stops to wonder if certified-organic perfume can have fragrance chemicals in it or not. It can and does. If you run into perfume which calls itself organic but doesn't say anything about being natural, turn and run. Perfumery is a complex art which takes years of training to suss out; those who do not jump through hoops learning about it are only distorting reality for those of us who take perfume ultra seriously.

*Poetry*

In the next few installments I will highlight three poems which have deeply influenced my poetry--I mean to say they've influenced, one way or another, every word of poetry I've ever written: Why I am Not a Painter by Frank O'Hara, The Buddha's Last Instruction by Mary Oliver, and Dolor by Teddy Roethke. O'Hara was curator for MoMA so he was friends with many great painters; he wrote poetry in his spare time.

Why I am Not a Painter

Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter. I am a poet.

Why? I think I would rather be

a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg

is starting a painting. I drop in.

"Sit down and have a drink," he

says. I drink; we drink. I look

up. "You have sardines in it."

"Yes, it needed something there."

"Oh." I go and the days go by

and I drop in again. The painting

is going on, and the days

go by. I drop in. The painting is

finished. "Where's sardines."

All that's left is just

letters. "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of

a color: orange. I write a line

about orange. Pretty soon it is a

whole page of words, not lines.

Then another page. There should be

so much more, not of orange, of

words, of how terrible orange is

and life. Days go by. It is even in

prose, I am a real poet. My poem

is finished and I haven't mentioned

orange yet. It's twelve poems; I call

it Oranges. And one day in a gallery

I see Mike's painting, called Sardines.

*Herrings*

These are bright red:

1. This one is obviously quite important to me now that I'm living where I belong, in the big city. When I left I had this foolish idea that one's ecological footprint (I didn't have a name for it then; my travels and studies have served me well) is smaller in the country than in the city. Total crap! Everything about cities makes it so that its denizens have a very small footprint compared to most: mass transit, many people living together in large buildings, being able to walk everywhere, etc. It's not even a close contest. Cities will always win, hands down, even if you only consider one thing: in cities the vast majority of people rarely, if ever, use a car. One of my idols, David Korten, reformed World-Bank economist, took note of this non-intuitive fact in his great book When Corporations Rule the World; I mention this agreement just by way of pointing out _I am not crazy_.

2. Plastic isn't piling up in landfills--it's paper. Paper! Paper fills up more than 75% of landfills; if you doubt me, look up the work of an archaeologist named Rathje. Rathje's work has revolutionized waste disposal. From his work we now know that _nothing_ decays if there's no air and water involved. When he did his first excavation on a landfill, he chose Fresh Kills which serves New York. All his colleagues thought he was crazy; his mentor said, "You won't find anything. Everyone knows decay happens in landfills." Not! Rathje dug all the way to the bottom of the Fresh-Kills pile; way down there, among many other things, he found a newspaper 100% in tact, from the 1890s! He sent it to his mentor. Now plastic in the ocean is a bad thing, and the overuse of disposable plastic bottles is disgusting. Know that manufacturing and recycling paper is at least as toxic as making plastic.

3. My studies in college taught me an awful lot, but one of the most important things is this: huge organic farms are every bit as bad for the environment as huge chemical farms. It's true that conventional farmers have the highest rates of cancer of all occupations; but as far as the soil, water, wildlife, etc., monstrous organic farms are just as culpable as conventional. To be truly of benefit, organic farms must be small, and must emphasize hand tools whenever possible; one example is that manual approaches to controlling pests instead of "organic" chemicals should be utilized. But everyone who cares about the future and our children must know this: organic foods are absolutely essential to our well being. Most important are organic fatty foods; pesticides concentrate readily in fat, so don't touch peanuts, or dairy products, or meat, unless it's certified organic. Soon enough, agribusiness will have to loosen its strangle hold on America; then researchers will surely discover that agricultural chemicals (did you know they first started using them after WWII when the DoD had huge stockpiles left over of chemical weapons; what a horrendous idea to use them on our farms) have a causal relationship with countless diseases, illnesses, and deaths.

4. I hate nuclear. But I have to agree with Dr James Lovelock (author of the seminal Gaia Hypothesis): the only way we'll have any chance of making it through the next 50 or 100 years is if we adopt nuclear power. If we don't, the voracious appetites of the developed world, and the developing world whom we've just convinced to adopt our lifestyles, will lead to massive energy wars. Sure there is highly toxic waste from nuclear, but there is from all non-renewable sources of energy. We'll have nuclear fusion soon, and for now the nuclear waste can be buried in the center of the earth. Renewable energy will never make it. This doesn't detract from the fact that all our lives must one day be renewable; we need something in the meantime. Climate change is from cars and coal-power plants; nuclear is the best interim choice.

5. Solar panels are definitely not the way of the future. It takes far too long for them to recoup the energy it took to make them in the first place. Additionally, it takes high-end labs to make solar panels. We will need low-tech solutions, solutions that anyone anywhere can put into action. The future will be made up of cottage industries in battery production, wind-generator production, electric-motor production, micro-hydro generator production, and straw-bale homes (the energy efficiency of straw-bale structures is second to none). Our futures must be renewable, but solar panels must not make up very much of that future; they're too inefficient.

*Poem*

Portland,

You are not so kind and warm

as I thought at first.

Now that I am on

the other side of the world

it occurs to me that

it's quite a miracle

you persevere. How can you

continue all skin deep?

Don't you sense

that you've got no soul?

Suddenly it occurs to me

that you are just like

all the women I found myself

tangled up with out west,

the undeniable appearances

of kindness and altruism

but really selfish to the core,

speaking kindly in public

but utterly disinterested

and cantankerous behind

closed doors,

promising love but failing.

I am happier and happier

with each minute more

that passes away from your

cold grasp. Here's to

never seeing you again.

None of my love, Adam

*Quotations*

Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.

--AJ Liebling

It's hard to argue against cynics--they always sound smarter than optimists because they have so much evidence on their side.

--Molly Ivins

Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.

--David Wolf

The forest is asking to offer its eco-system service to each and every one of us. The potential of the forest is not yet recognized.

--Chief Almir

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean.

But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.

--Mother Theresa

Man is a creature whose evolutionary environment has been the open air.

His nerves, muscles, and senses have developed across three million

years in intimate contiguity with natural earth, crude stone, live wood,

wind and rain. Now this creature is suddenly--on the geologic scale,

instantaneously--shifted to an unnatural environment of metal and glass,

plastic and plywood, to which his psychic substrata lack all

compatibility. The wonder is not that we have so much mental instability

but so little. Add to this the weird noises, electrical pleasures,

bizarre colors, synthetic foods, abstract entertainments! We should

congratulate ourselves on our durability.

--Jack Vance

Society does not need more electronic gadgets, microwave-based communication systems, high-tech entertainment devices, faster computers, and fancier software. We need to anoint each other with fragrances that promote emotional openness, quiet the mind, build inner strength, overcome isolation, enhance intimacy, and support truthful communication. We need noble aphrodisiacs of sandalwood, jasmine, and lotus that help men transform pathological lust into passionate love, and help women transform their fear and hatred of men's violence, aggression, and stupidity into nourishing powerful sensuality. When peaceful cities are blessed with myriad sweet floral scents, when healthy forests are filled with balsamic coniferous perfumes, when farms are enveloped in the earthy aromas of healthy soil and robust crops, when homes are infused with temple essences that bring joy and tranquility, we will understand why the ancients taught that plants were gifts from heaven.

--David Crow

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

--Sartre

I had sticking power, which is just as important as literary talent. I just got on with the work. And I think there are such things as writing animals. I simply have to write.

--Doris Lessing

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.

--Augusten Burroughs

*Music*

I think this is one of the best mixes I've made in some time. Great music on here:

Aromatic Journey #1 10.09

1. Kathleen, David Gray with Jolie Holland

2. Sweet Rose, Eilen Jewell

3. Headsoak, Andrew Bird

4. Stitched Up, Herbie Hancock with John Mayer

5. Burn Brightly, Sonya Kitchell

6. Minnow and the Trout, A Fine Frenzy/Alison Sudol

7. Easy Street (latin), Josh Rouse

8. Rain Roll In, Eilen Jewell

9. Jesus etc., Wilco (with Andrew Bird)

10. Nemesis, David Gray

11. Waiting to Talk, Andrew Bird

12. A Song for You (Leon Russell), Herbie Hancock with Christina Aguilera

13. Almost Lover, Alison Sudol

14. Water, Sonya Kitchell

15. Valencia, Josh Rouse

16. Nowhere in No Time, Eilen Jewell

17. How Indiscrete, Andrew Bird

18. Transformation, David Gray

Peace love and ATOM jazz