Review-IDLE Specimen Pack

instagram is… strange. 

right now as i write this my algorithm as far as the explore page and reels go is as follows: fragrances, streetwear, a random gta server where people pretend that it’s 2010 harlem and the bronx(they chase each other around wearing biggies), wong kar wai clips and astrology content. for some reason gemini memes are literally just adhd memes. i told one of my fellow gemini friends(who happens to have adhd) and he noticed it too. i suppose i’ll sort all of that out if rfk jr finally follows in the traditions of his ancestors.

despite meta’s best efforts i have only bought three things because of ig ads. none of them were through the app. the first thing was a kufiya from hirbawi. they had them in stock so i finally bought one. simple as that. this doesn’t even really have anything to do with instagram. i already knew who they were, i followed them, i literally switched over to safari after watching a story and i bought something.

the second is that one random korean fragrance brand that pops up in your(or at least mine) ads from time to time, elorea. i happened to pass by their store in soho about a year and a half ago and i bought jang, which is a fermented soybean fragrance with notes of ylang ylang, jasmine and myrrh. then over the summer i bought hazy blue, which combines sandalwood with lily of the valley, bergamot and orange flower water. finally last week i bought haenyao, which has notes of sea salt, pink pepper, lilly of the valley and amber. more of a spring and summer scent. so far haenyeo is probably my favorite of the three although i do like how warm jang feels.

that day i went to a skate shop, ate peppered pork and roti at a sri lankan restaurant and bought perfume inspired by korean diving women. you know it’s a decent day when it sounds like an action bronson verse. 

the third thing…

once again i was in nolita and i stopped in a store on mott that specializes in niche fragrances. i tried on this parfum called oud de grand and they were not capping at all it was oud and boy was that shit grand. i only let them put on two sprays on my right wrist and still… it smelled good but wow that had some power. granted i have a nose like a police dog but it couldn’t escape me. if i were an actor i would have been ouda hagen that day. if i were a lesser nas single i would have been oudchie wallie. if i were my favorite wkw i would have been in the oud for love.

i’ll stop with the oud.

which some people don’t do, at least not according to my explore page. the other day i saw a video of a guy from the emirates burning agarwood(what oud is made of) incense under his robe so that the steam hits them then he sprayed himself with more oud. i counted how many times he sprayed himself it was thirty-four!!!!

that has to be a crime! all that oud in hundred and twenty degree weather! all the other shit going on in dubai, slavery, sex crimes, tax evasion and now there’s chemical warfare on top of that!

so after trying out underground designer ouds made in thailand by guys named russian adam(moving from bronson to danny brown it seems) i bought a discovery set from the other, much weirder niche parfum that probably pops up in your algorithm: idle. or as they call it, “post-parfum”.

according to their website, “these compositions are created for encounter rather than impact” and “they operate as abstract sensory forms, unconcerned with conventional expectations of what a fragrance ‘should’ be”. this tracks with my first encounter with them. a couple months ago, when i first saw them in my stories, i happened to pop into dimes market in the eponymous square. i sprayed one of them onto a tester and told the salesperson that it kinda smelled like windex. she said it was her favorite one. i didn’t know if she took it as an insult or not so i didn’t press any further. 

still found the concept intriguing so i bought the discover pack because i don’t want to spend a hundred and seventy dollars on something that smells like windex. at least not yet anyway.

so let’s talk about some spooky ass spectral fragrances!!!

the idle specimen pack(of course) comes with decants of five different “scents”: cut-continuum, tracelessness, formlessness, lifeworld and no-mind. they don’t list any actual notes on their site as each individual wear of each fragrance is meant to be drastically different each time. i’m wearing a different scent every day and basing my impressions on that first wear.

cut continuum is… floral? almost like a ghost of a bouquet? there isn’t really any particular type of flower or fruit that sticks out. this isn’t a rose or jasmine scent for instance. it reminds me of being on that one block on west 28th street with all the floral shops. the word reminds is doing a lot of work because it’s more like an echo of a memory of being around a lot of flowers than an actual composition of different notes coming together. it smells… dewy. artificial yet dewy. either way this echo lasts surprisingly long.

lifeworld is a skin scent, if such a thing could exist in this niche. it’s vaguely nutty, there’s kind of a sandalwood thing going on but it’s not really that pronounced. there’s a creaminess to it. strangely enough it reminds me a bit of tam dao by diptyque in the sense that i fear i’m nose blind to the latter whereas lifeworld seems like it’s trying to capture the sense of a sandalwood that has faded. i have the jasmine sandalwood dr bronners soap and it almost reminds me of what that smells like an hour or two after being used. strangely enough despite its aspirations towards being a miasma the lifeworld seems more pronounced to me than the tam dao. this includes both the eau de toilette and eau de parfum concentrations. 

formlessness seems herbaceous on the dry down. when i first put it on it smelled kind of alcoholic, almost anti-septic. this might have been the windex scent i was talking about earlier. it definitely seems aquatic in some way. kinda smells like the remnants of a fancy soap, like after you wash your hands at a pricey restaurant. or a pool that just got cleaned. it doesn’t smell exactly like aesop as in a dupe but rather after you used an aesop body wash or hand soap if that makes sense. it has a bit of that earthiness but in a very fleeting way that’s less obtrusive or offputting than aesop’s fragrances can be. either way it smells like something that just got washed away, but in a very clean way. ironically for all of its embrace of artifice it actually smells more natural as time goes on. if there’s one note that pops out at me it’s sage, which is surprising.

tracelessness is woody, for lack of a better term. it smells like a shelf that has been left out in the rain. maybe that comes to mind because it’s raining as i type this paragraph. it kind of smells like steam. just something that would bring out a wood essence or wood aura without smelling outright of wood. it reminds me of a bookshelf that is right next to a radiator with a malfunctioning valve. just that mixture of wood or compressed pulp and water. it manages to be ephemeral yet highly specific. next to lifeworld i would say this is more straightforward as far as woodiness goes, if such a notion can apply here.

no mind off rip is kind of spicy. it kind of reminds me of pimento a bit. there’s a bit of cinnamon in there. it doesn’t smell like rum per se but it does remind me of a rum based liqueur. after a little bit it kind of smells a bit like tiger baum. the red kind specifically. let’s be honest you can tell by the references i use that i’m kind of washed and thus am familiar with different styles of tiger baum. it has a more interesting woodiness than tracelessness, almost like a monocle hinoki from a world where hinoki trees no longer existed so they had to attempt recreate the scent from memory.

if i had to choose a favorite… cut continuum and lifeworld were up there but honestly no mind might overtake them. it’s bizarre yet it goes so many places right from the get go. it’s nothing yet it kind of has everything.

all of these give off the impression that something was washed away, much like how all of burials music depicts the scene after a rave. they’re all hauntological at their core, i’m wearing mark fisher(pause). despite my attempts to grasp for language to describe these scents, i have to come back to one notion: they smell like Nothing. mercurial notes aside they capture and depict Nothing and were fashioned specifically to depict Nothing.

lately i’ve been trying to get back into reading. this has been one of my more chronic expenses over the past year. i’ve specifically been trying to branch out of reading mostly nonfiction or theory. also my attention span when it comes to theory is… and yet i dare to talk so much shit across so many venues. so i’m reading novels, poetry, just anything i might find to be worthwhile as someone who has an artistic mien.

in this quest to reclaim my bibliophile status i’ve returned to one of my favorite authors, percival everett. i first became acquainted with him when i read erasure back in 2010. my first impression, probably based on the year it was published, was “wow this is kinda like bamboozled but for literature”. which is really selling it short. there’s the intraracial class conflicts, there’s the whole other book in the middle, there’s the whole meta narrative concerning the two in that the book monk writes is parallel to erasure itself, showing that you can’t really escape your “pafologies”just by dwelling in a higher tax bracket or being educated. monk’s (and i suppose everett’s as this does seem semi-autobiographical) status as an anomaly only serves to showcase the depth of the universality he ultimately dwells in. it’s just a really well written and well composed and hilarious and thoughtful piece of literature. the “fuck you” sequence between van go and his father has been stuck in my head for sixteen years.

i haven’t seen american fiction. don’t really plan to. i saw the trailer and… it seems kinda dumb? doesn’t really seem like here’s much to chew on despite the awards it won. i don’t expect much from gawker alums. just base level snark and some navel gazing observations, a few fairly obvious jokes. he was one of their better writers for whatever that’s worth. 

still though the most i reasonably expect from ex-gawker people is a decentish think piece about how capitalism is bad in some ways. forget about any real interrogation of the current media climate or how everything has been compartmentalized. or even how issa rae’s character doesn’t really ring true in that she’d probably be an essayist or critic instead of a novelist in real life. that might take self-reflection beyond the level of a think piece and that might even lead to some culpability…

quiet as it’s kept sneer culture and lowcow culture most likely started with gawker’s “fameballs” like julia allison, aleksy vayner, arthur kade et al. influencer culture too, for that matter. it’s sad that peter thiel had to be the one to finish them off there’s no real victories in this world.

that was the overarching theme of the obama years, wasn’t it? no true victories. we had the first black president, who was a first generation american raised by white midwesterners in hawaii, who campaigned on ending the iraq war and fixing the financial crisis and ended up extending the border to 100 miles inland, enhancing the patriot act and creating a revolving door between silicon valley and the state department, more or less helping usher in the hell we live in under three(let’s be real here) terms of trump. so much promise wasted. i feel like i should have known better but… 

a truly fascinating man. the only writer alive who could have possibly created him is percival everett.

i just bought so much blue and i intend to start it at some point. i own a lot of damn books. i finally got around to reading dr no, which was on my list for years. just the premise alone hooked me.

dr no is about wala kitu, a black mathematics professor who specializes in nothing. as in the actual metaphysical concept of nothing. even his name(which is assumed) is made up of the tagalog and swahili words for “nothing”. he is hired by john sill, a wannabe bond villain who wants to break into fort knox in order to steal “nothing”, as there is a popular myth that nothing is actually in there. this nothing is to be weaponized against america. sill’s villainy stems from a thirst to get back at the police who murdered his parents for getting too close to discovering their culpability in the king assasination. self aware capers and hijinx ensue, as well as a lot of puns involving nothing. a lot of the interrogation scenes read like abbott and costello bits. a few scenery changes, a few million wasted, a town is erased, even a murder or two(to be fair no one gives a fuck about the vice president)but ultimately it all amounts to nothing.

it’s more lighthearted than james, erasure and the trees but it’s still pretty enjoyable. the main thing that stuck with me was the notion of thinking of nothing as its own distinct identity. as, well, something.

in one chapter, sill and kitu(against his will) make an attempt to weaponize nothing by pointing it a a town in massachusetts where someone referred to sill as a hard r. the town is erased. there’s no explosion, no deaths, no outcry, it just ceases to exist. the only people who actually remember that quincy exists are sill and kitu. really only kitu. the fact that nothing is there adds weight to it in his mind. 

personally i’ve been to quincy. it’s just a regular ass boston suburb. i think derek lowe lived there back when he was a starter for the red sox. i can easily imagine someone there dropping a hard r somewhat casually despite the limits of their accent. but if it disappeared you do kinda have to imagine that these are lives and hopes and dreams and houses and businesses and schools, just thriving ecosystems and environments that just… poof! 

abscence possesses a certain weight, doesn’t it? when something is tangible you take it for granted, don’t you? your keys are in your pocket, there’s some gabagool in your fridge you plan to snack on later, your partner is going to fall asleep before you, facing the other side of the bed, waiting for you to spoon them, so much you just assume is always going to be there. and then-

when something turns into nothing, your imagination takes over. there isn’t anything to grab onto. there’s Nothing to grab onto for that matter. what was once real turns mythical or even mystical. Nothing has no real limit, it’s nothing. thus it can be anything if you really put your mind to it. if a space has nothing anything within it just becomes that much more prominent. this is why engineers drop the beat out if a rapper has a semi decent punchline. hell this is why rothkos are so powerful.

going back to burial and mark fisher, the latter spoke on how the former’s effort to capture the essence of illegal raves long gone was really a tribute to the ghost of socialism in the uk. an accurate choice of words, as socialism was relegated to the realm of hopes and dreams.  ken livingstone’s second life in politics was marked by the olympics and the oyster card. jeremy corbyn is a nice old man who was too afraid of not being liked to ward off claims of antisemitism from people who were in the epstein files. militant labour for all of its bluster was quashed as soon as they began to make any real traction. probably the best of all of the various trot sects in british history. regardless as the uk is attempting to dismantle the nhs, turnt the best of its former colonial subjects into loyal foot soldiers for a sinking money laundering scheme and figure out the best way to kill its trans people while keeping its hands free of blood, a better tomorrow is relegated to the world of dreams. that is to say, it is Nothing.

but nature abhors a vacuum and inevitably something always comes out of nothing.

at the end of each day i’ve worn an idle scent i have smelled something but im not sure if thats the fragrance or if its just my natural scent. maybe its just a placebo effect. maybe thats the point. yet in its indistinctness it feels more prominent and longer lasting than a lot of scents i’ve tried out. 

as i’ve said lifeworld feels stronger to me as a sandalwood than tam dao. i’ve tried both of them! i’ve read fragrantica, parfumo, i have an idea of what it’s supposed to smell like and it hasn’t hit me like lifeworld has.

it’s apropos that the first time i encountered idle was in dimes square. all of this press and hoopla, magazines, peter thiel funding and the ultimate value of all of this?

nothing.