'Fuming Scotland

This week's Sunday Herald from Glasgow has a nice little rant from one of its regular columnists about celebrity perfumes. I suspect the writer is more celeb basher than perfumista (sandalwood top notes?), but her heart's in the right place. The last half dozen paragraphs, starting with the quote from J-Lo, are quite funny. Click here.

"Okay, but you owe me"

Image from Venus Erotic Art Museum

One of us

I took my mother to the Nashville Public Library yesterday to do a StoryCorps session, with her as interviewee. I'm doing a little piece on StoryCorps for the Scene, and decided I needed to experience it firsthand. I have to say it's the most highly regimented exercise in family bonding I have ever seen. Not that that's a bad thing. Structure's good, I guess. And I have never felt so thoroughly a part the current trend for finding virtue in self-exposure. I've always hoped to find money in self-exposure--and I have, though to date I can't say I've reaped any fortune. Maybe I haven't exposed enough.

Anyway, this post is not about me, it's about Eudora Welty, and how I discovered yesterday that she was probably one of us; that is to say, a scent freak, a member of the global community of the osmically fixated. It turned out that my mother and I had a little time to kill before our heartwarming 40 minutes in the StoryCorps booth, so we went to look at a photography exhibit in the library's gallery. It was a series of pictures of authors' homes called "Inspirational Spaces," taken by Bob Schatz, a Nashville photographer. Welty's home in Jackson was featured along with the houses of Carl Sandburg, Thomas Wolfe, Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor. (The series isn't online anywhere, but you can see some of Schatz's work here. His compositions are very nice.)

Eudora's house, like the others, is a museum now, and maintained with all the reverent attachment to her relics that you'd expect from Southern literary acolytes. Nobody worships a dead author the way we do. You can actually take a virtual tour of her house by going here. If you do, you'll see a picture of her vanity with a little tray of bottles that are almost too small to make out--but in Schatz's photos you can see what they are: Chanel no. 5 eau de cologne (in its box), a pretty milk glass flacon of L'Air du Temps, a powder canister (also L'Air du Temps, I think), and a fourth scent bottle that can't be identified.

Welty was no glamor queen, so the fact that she actually had a scent wardrobe was enough to make me think she was at least a low-key sniff fiend. My suspicion was confirmed by Schatz's photo of her bathroom (it's not on the virtual tour--wonder why?), where there was a jar of Noxzema and a bottle of Revlon Aquamarine lotion. Pretty prosaic toiletries, of course, but both of them have very distinctive, much-loved scents. I seem to recall that there was an entire POL thread devoted to the smell of Noxzema.

So now whenever I read EW's stories, I'll imagine her taking hits off the Noxzema, or putting her wrist to her nose as she scribbled. By the way, Schatz didn't bother documenting the men's personal items, and O'Connor showed no sign at all of being one of us. Sadly, and unsurprisingly, the only bottles on her shelves were prescription medicine and Bayer aspirin.

Quote of the Day

"Ignoring ignoramuses, assholes, and narcissists is just good policy generally, I think, but especially in an age where two clicks will tell them where you live." Anonymous

One Sentence Perfume Review: Gris Clair, Serge Lutens

I guess you heard the barber shop burned down.



Notes per Lucky Scent: lavender, amber, tonka bean, iris, dry wood, incense
Photo from the Archives of Ontario

Oh, the irony

It seems some poor sardonic soul has been busted for a blog comment. To paraphrase the immortal Linus, don't they know sarcasm when they hear it? **I think that was Linus. Anyway, feel free to be as snarky on this blog as you like. You can even say "bomb." If they waterboard your IP address out of me, I'll at least come see you in jail.

**Okay, now I'm thinking it was Charlie Brown. Where are you when I need you, Leo?

How have I missed this till now?

Al Green singing my favorite Al Green song. In the rain. In Cincinnati. Damn.

Perfume report (and more pics)

Scentwise, the trip started on a very positive note. The woman in the seat behind us on the plane was wearing Mitsouko--probably the parfum, judging from exquisite mellow sillage. If there is anything that can overcome the extended olfactory nightmare of an 8 hour flight, it's Mitsouko. I was almost as lucky on the trip back. Sick as I was, the smell of jet fuel and plastic food was killing me, but there was a young woman across the aisle who kept topping up some gentle sandalwood/vanilla thingie, and it was actually very soothing. Of course, she was engaging in just the sort of behavior that gives perfume freaks a bad name, but I'll always be grateful to her.

I knew there was a Penhaligon's in Glasgow, so I hit it the first day there and dropped some of my mad money on a bottle of Lily and Spice (smells just like something else I can't put my finger on, but I loved it so I caved); a little silver compact filled with solid Bluebell (quoth the very cute SA: "Kate Moss loves this"); a men's sampler with Endymion, Quercus, etc.; and a women's sampler that I wanted mainly for the Malabah. I'd never sniffed it before and I thought I loved it--but yesterday it smelled god-awful to me. Weird how that happens. I'm hoping I'll recover my desire for it, but meanwhile I do love the Elizabethan Rose, which is just the sort of pure, fresh rose that never fails to make me happy. The SA really was very sweet, and could not quite wrap her head around the idea that I was buying all this stuff for myself. She insisted I take some wrapping paper and ribbon "in case you decide to give something as a gift after all." Dave suggested that perhaps she hadn't met a lot of perfume addicts.

That's hard to believe, though, because Glasgow actually seems to be a very perfume-friendly place, at least in terms of scented bodies per capita. I kept getting whiffs of what I'd swear was Daim Blond, and Light Blue is as ubiquitous there as it is here. The overwhelming preference seemed to be for light chypres, or the drier fruity/woody scents. Florals not so much, and I didn't get smacked by a heavy oriental even once. The department store sniffing was quite civilized, as it always seems to be in Europe. They just put the stuff out on the shelves and let you sample unmolested. I didn't have to fight off a single sales zombie during my two outings. The selection was good, too. Even the rather dowdy House of Fraser had several Serge Lutens testers out (Gris Clair, Douce Amere, can't remember what else.) The crappy exchange rate made it easy to resist buying anything I could readily lay hands on in the US, but there was plenty of temptation.

Okay, enough perfume. I promised pics. Again these are all by Dave, I didn't touch a camera the whole time we were there. These first three are Edinburgh: looking down the Royal Mile at St Giles' Cathedral (note the traffic cone on David Hume's head); the dog cemetery at Edinburgh Castle (the highlight of Dave's trip); and a shot of the city taken through one of the cannon ports at the castle.














































*************************************************

Here's my favorite place in Glasgow, The Necropolis, a 19th century cemetery that sits on a hill behind Glasgow Cathedral. It's vast and rather rundown and completely irresistible. They were doing a citywide light show a couple of nights when we were there, which was nice but was put to shame by the sight of the full moon rising over the Necropolis with the headstones in silhouette. The huge monument in the first pic is (who else?) John Knox. The woman in the second pic is yours truly. Dave always takes a picture of me in every cemetery we visit--one of our slightly warped romantic rituals. The last two are different views of the city, both taken from the Necropolis: grimy Glasgow and pretty Glasgow. That's Glasgow Cathedral in the pretty shot.

Airplane book

I meant to post a link to my review of Michael Knight's The Holiday Season before I left, but forgot in all the scurrying around. The book is actually a pair of novellas, both with holiday themes, and it would make a decent travel read. Your own dysfunctional family--I assume you have one--may seem more tolerable after you've spent some time with Knight's fictional ones. Click here to read the review.

What's not to like?

That was our question after 5 days in Glasgow. Before we left, Dave and I must have had a half dozen people tell us in so many words that we were stupid to spend our vacation in grimy, homely Glasgow when Edinburgh is so much prettier. As usual, we did as we pleased, and choosing personality over looks was wise. I said in an earlier post that we're slothful tourists, meaning we're mostly interested in just wandering around taking in the spirit of a place, rather than scrambling to see prescribed sights and have packaged experiences. Glasgow, which is a sort of busy-but-relaxed city with a generally haphazard air, was perfect for us. There's plenty to do there, especially for two people who can happily prowl art galleries, cafes and bookstores all day long, but you never get the feeling that the city's being presented for tourist consumption. On the contrary, people always seemed mildly surprised to see two Americans visiting purely for pleasure, especially in November. Everyone was very friendly, but we never got that sense of being politely hustled you always get in tourist meccas.

The big surprise about Glasgow was the quality of the food. Restaurants are pretty expensive, especially with the current sad state of the dollar, but we had a lot of wonderful meals that were worth every penny. We ate a fair amount of traditional Scottish food, and came away trying to figure out why Americans are always horrified by haggis and black pudding--again, what's not to like? There was very good Indian food, too, along with the usual Continental/fusion stuff. We stayed in one of five rooms above a pub where they served a great breakfast of smoked haddock poached in milk with bacon--not exactly AHA-approved fare, but ideal if you're going to spend the day tromping around in a cold rain.

The room was actually the funniest thing about the whole trip. It was grubby and small, which we expected given the price, and the place was run by very nice people who didn't seem to have the faintest idea of how to operate a hotel. The handle to our door was broken, and people kept saying "We're going to fix that," in a sort of anxious, hopeful tone, kinda the way fundamentalists talk about the Rapture. I got locked in the room one night because I forgot and let the door swing shut, with no handle on my side to open it. Twenty minutes of pounding and screaming eventually brought a fellow guest who opened the door. "Your door's broken," he said. "Yeah," I said, "they're gonna fix that." One night they sold a room twice, so we were awakened around midnight by the argument between occupant and would-be occupant. I'm not sure I'd ever stay there again, but it was certainly a lot more entertaining than the Ramada would have been.

We did spend one day in Edinburgh, and it is indeed postcard pretty, with much more in the way of touristy gawking opportunities than Glasgow--so of course it's lousy with tourists, even this time of year. We also spent a day hiking around Loch Lomond, probably my favorite part of the trip. It was cold but clear, and there weren't many people there; in fact, virtually no foreign tourists, just locals who had driven out for the day, most of whom had at least one dog along. Naturally, that made us miss our crew back home. I think Dave felt especially deprived without canine company, but then he got the chance to do a successful search and rescue for a sweet old guy's dog that had wandered off. That more than made up for it, though I'm kicking myself that I didn't get a picture of the reunion. I never think about things like that at the time.

Dave, however, does remember to take pics, so here are a few he made. These are from Loch Lomond and Balloch Castle. I'll post some shots of Edinburgh and Glasgow tomorrow, and give the perfume report.

The trail you see here is as muddy as it looks, muck up to the ankle, but we enjoyed it just the same. The funny tubes that look like a Cristo installation are covering saplings they've planted to reforest with native trees.