Joy of Non-Repeat Experiences

A friend of a friend invited me to a psybient music performance last night. Not sounding familiar? Yeah. Me neither.

I pretty much know now that I would hate Burning Man. Aside from the grit and lack of clean bathrooms and heat stroke, I am just not that free. And I'm super judgmental, which is exactly what BM (and this event last night) is not. And here's my description.

There was bad art galore, some of it being live-painted. And not the good kind of live painting but the kind where you bring your already painted painting to the show and then make small, strategic dabs of paint on it in order to enhance its value and not eff it up so someone will still want to buy it. That stuff is being done in the main hall where the music is being performed. Some of this painting is "good" and some of it looks like the result of a "Pinot and Paint" party where you and your friends try to recreate a Roger Dean painting.

Act 1
Not bad. Crazy mashup of pulsing music and geometric black and white graphic visuals projected on the entire stage. Sword dancer performing.

Act 2
Australian artist in leather hat mines trippy (i.e. non-Western) music to a pounding beat. The visual artist paired with him has made computer artwork of Hindu deities that appear to break into components and turn inward, "swallowing" themselves. I found this pretty offensive. Some dancers.

Act 3
Man in fedora with pheasant feather accent creates pounding beats. Somehow, he finds an extra-low setting for the bass and it feels like my internal organs are being tossed about my abdominal cavity. I think this is my favorite of the three. Some of the dancers, wear leather pants with white graffiti and studs, and have small leather tops that show off their tattoos. The pants have no bottoms, and the bottoms in the holes have no muscle tone. So when they occasionally shake their butts, the cheeks just flap.

I knew I was officially done when a guy brought a gigantic vase on stage and put it on a stand. Then he made an arrangement of fern fronds in the vase, to the beat of the music. I paid real money to watch a guy dramatically recreate a fern using parts that had been a fern, on stage. That was both my favorite and least favorite thing.

Then aerial acrobats appeared, and dangled from the ceiling, and I was really hoping I could get my host to agree it was time to leave... and we did.

The venue holds 500 and it was at capacity as we left, around 1:30+ am. We didn't get to see the act we'd gone to see. I have to say that the event was well organized, felt safe, people were pretty well-behaved, it had clean bathrooms and other than some seriously sour aromas (cumin armpit and people smoking cigarettes that smelled like a burning combination of beedis, fish sauce and that smell when you floss your teeth), it was pleasant.

Now I get to repay the favor and pick the next adventure with this friend.

Pittosporum Tenuifolium

Pittosporums can be magnificent. Some varieties smell so deeply of orange blossoms that you can smell them hundreds of feet away. And then there's Pittosporum Tenuifolium. In the summer it smells like sun-baked sidewalk urine. Why do people use it as a hedge? Why?

This year I'm working on my hate abatement, because life's too short. And while passing by a bush after a nice rain, I found something to like about this otherwise revolting shrubbery. It turns out that it has a beautiful purple-black flower. I'm kind of obsessed.

The Old Place. Whale Edition

Every Labor Day I think of the heroin story, but I've already told you that.

Instead I'll tell you this tale from the Old Place.

The Old Place was extremely hot in the summer. We lived in an old brick building next to the Petroleum and Nuclear Worker's Union Hall. On summer days the house would be cool until evening, when the bricks would expel the heat they'd been collecting all day. Some nights it would be 90 degrees at midnight, and rising. Kinda awful. However I don't think we ever paid more than $500 bucks a month for this place and I was on disability so this was the perfect spot for us during those years.

About a dozen years ago, on a hot Thursday in late August, we were watching ER. The teaser for the 11 o'clock news came on saying that a whale had washed up on the coast of our town. Our little beach was maybe 200 feet across, so we assumed that they meant the oceanside beach of the same name.

We waited for the news, and, sure enough! We recognized our little beach and the burned-out pier. Crazy! We grabbed our flashlight and walked down to the beach. There we found another couple who had obviously watched the news also. Our lights made out the shape of the whale. Not much to see, but I would come down the next day and see him in daylight.

The morning paper said that we were about to have a heat wave on the weekend. It was pretty warm by the time I left the house. I stepped out and it smelled...a little "whale-y". Poor whale. According to the Fish and Game guy I met, the whale was a juvenile female, had been deceased for quite a while and wasn't in his jurisdiction. The joy of living in an unincorporated area. "So what's going to happen with the whale?" I asked him, "I don't know," he said. Uh-oh.

I ran into a neighbor on the way back home and we talked a bit about the whale, the smell, and the upcoming heat wave.

Two days later I saw the same neighbor and commented that it was smelling a lot less whale-y. He said "You know why, right?" "Me and Bob..." (anything that started with those three words could not be good. Bob kept a pit bull chained to his porch behind our house, he didn't have a lick of sense and he owned guns) "went out in my boat, tied a rope to its tail, and towed it into the bay. Then we shot it full of holes." He seemed surprised that it didn't sink. All he knew was that he didn't want the smelly whale on our beach during a heat wave. I could tell that in some weird way he thought it was his civic responsibility to do something with the whale. He lived next door to me and also owned guns, so I wasn't going to disagree.

One week later, on Thursday, we saw the teaser for the news: "Another whale has washed up in the area." It was clearly the same whale, and I could see the bullet holes this time. It had floated into another county, on the beach fronting a fancy neighborhood, just in time for the heat wave.

I almost had an image to illustrate this post.

That first smelly day on the beach I used the last shot on my camera to take a picture of the whale. When I got my film back, the whale shot wasn't there.

So ends the story of the whale.

Perfume

I've been thinking about scents ever since Kaohsiung, where I bought L'Eau by Diptyque. L'Eau bewitches me, and I hope I'm not the only person who likes it. It goes on strong and herbal. Not usually my scent profile. The green notes quickly recede, and are replaced by clove, which is a favorite scent of mine. Eventually the scent is transformed a third time, leaving a fragrance of sweet musk. 

It seems like every time I sniff my wrist the perfume is different, and yet there was something about it that was so familiar that I became preoccupied with it. I recently identified it: Sen-Sen. Maybe that means it has licorice notes also....

Other favorite scents from the past, in chronological order:

• My childhood locket that came with a little sponge inside and lily of the valley perfume to put on it
• White Shoulders (even had the soap)
• Di Borghese (gift from a friend's mom)
• Tatiana
• Madame Rochas
• Occasional forays into Kouros (men's cologne popular in dance clubs)
• Various hippie oils from The Body Shop
• Chanel 19
• Poison
• Eternity For Men
• Amarige
• Madame Rochas again
• Oscar
• Incense Jaisalmer
• L'eau
• Incense Kyoto (May 2010)
• Spice Bomb (June 2012)

Who will be next?

20220526: How could I forget? Halston (in the bottle designed by Elsa Peretti)

Ginkgo

I thought I loved ginkgo trees.

Having tangled with one last week, I have to say I'm reconsidering!

While on a walk with our friends, we came across fruit on the ground under a ginkgo tree. I'd always wanted to try a ginkgo nut, and this was my chance. It was a hot day. They were warm and wrinkly, like grapes turning to raisins in the sun...and they smelled a little ripe, roasting on the hot Sacramento sidewalk.

Back home, I pulled the flesh apart to reveal the hard pistachio nut like seed inside. A rank stench filled the house. Mrguy rushed into the kitchen to open all of the windows and the back door. I will not be trying fresh ginkgo nut, it seems. Or growing a ginkgo tree.

And that's o.k.

Brew 4

I wish that the perfume of mrguy's hops for his Oktoberfest brew were transmittable via the blog.

I also wish that the rich egg-like stench of the beer which is either brewing or festering in the Man Room were similarly transmittable.

I hear that this is what this particular hops does when it's doing its magic.

Whew!

Day 2. Transportation by Eggshell

In the days leading up to our visit, I read most of the State Fair website so that I could develop a plan. Most of what's described here was on my hit list :)

First I wanted to see all the stuff on a stick. We saw teriyaki ostrich, hotdish, Pronto Banquet on a stick, gator, and Scotch eggs. For sheer cuteness and how'd they keep it on a stick-ness, this was my highlight:


Sadly, due to the events of the Scrabble party the night before, I wasn't in the mood for carny-fried mystery victuals, so I had nothing on a stick until right as we left I bought a frozen banana. I believe this is cheating, because I'd have that banana anywhere anyway.

I made a stop over to the Minneapolis Star Tribune shack to introduce myself to James Lileks, whose website I've enjoyed for almost as long as I've had access to a graphical web browser. Nice guy. Funny in person. Discussed moleskine notebooks, since I had my personal book with me at all times during the fair. Disagreed with me about whether the Headhunter category in the gladiolus competition was going to reflect headhunters or not. That was cool.

Moving along, we made a visitation to the Princess Kay exhibit to see a Butter Princess' likeness being sculpted. That was tremendous. The chilled booth rotates slowly, and the princess and the sculptress do their work.


The Ag-Hort-Bee building is where I pinned most of my hopes. There you find the bee exhibits, crop art, flower displays and vegetable competitions. We saw squashes so huge that they resembled large sleeping animals:


The bee exhibits featured a hive behind a screened off area. You can put your face near the screen and feel the wind of their wings and smell the bees' sweet grainy aroma. Who knew?

The seed paintings in the Crop Art room were worth a visit. The Colonel Sanders was the best of the bunch, but the political ones (Al Franken, running for senator, rendered as Stuart Smalley; Dick Cheney depicted in beans as the root of all evil) were pretty great too.


These were the expected pleasures, but there was more to love. We happened upon the tiny tiny tiny tiny horse judging competitions. I saw the most beautiful cow in the world. The craft booth had a dress someone had made in the theme of sock monkeys.
And there is a competition in which people collect post cards and arrange them around a theme. The loveliest was titled "Transportation by Eggshell," and was a selection of Easter cards in which chicks or little people were shown being transported via egg zeppelins, boats and carriages. So sweet.

A good time was had by all :)

Skunk

As I was making my way home from the factory the other night, I had an intense OLfactory experience: a skunk smell on the highway gave way to a hint of lemon oil in the finish and memories of the old place. Whoa. I think about skunk too much.

Well yes I do. Only three synapses separate the olfactory nerve from the hippocampus, which explains why smell evokes memory so quickly. But the fact that I had so much to say to myself about the qualities of the smell was a direct result of living in a refinery town for seven years.

What I was smelling was a mercaptan, a smelly sulfur compound. Mercaptans are responsible for both pleasant (grapefruit)and unpleasant (dung, skunk) smells. They are also a byproduct of the oil refining process, and the refineries would release them into the air late at night or when it rained.

I think of them as nasty and dangerous toxins. The refining industry thinks of them as less toxic compounds whose main problem is their ability to cause residents living nearby the refinery to pick up the phone and call the authorities!

And that was me. I was a waitressing night owl back then, and was on a first name basis with the nighttime operators at the air quality control board.

Things improved when one of the refineries closed. And then we moved to the new place and mercaptan isn't part of my life like it once was.

But every time I smell skunk, I parse the odor: skunk? or "skunk?"