A Dress

Life puts interesting things in your path.  Some are objects, inherently fascinating.

Objects from family add a level of connection and investment, and in a way, responsibility for the owner.

Many times, these objects will appeal to a romantic notion of "would have, could have"--had you been alive at the right time / had the right talent / in the right place, the object could have been yours.  Used by you, worn by you, admired by you.

However, some objects are removed from your sensibilities, and only your love of history, your sense of human hand, your willingness to step inside another mind, your realization that something exists in front of you that, given the right attention, will allow you not only to understand the object more, but also give you a fresh view onto yourself.

So, you dare go open up.

And find a way inside.

***

I am but one of my Nana's six granddaughters.  Nana was a saver, a collector, a provisioner...not exactly a hoarder, but certainly someone who held on to things.  Hence, at the end of her life, the basement of her modest two-bedroom bungalow, in which at one time there were--let's see, husband, two kids, wife of third kid, father--two kids and four adults living.  Plus the eight dogs.  And some cats, I think, but they were what we would call "outdoor" cats, though that distinction made not a lot of sense at the time.  The house, suffice to say, was full.  And much life was lived there.

The magic of being a collector, a treasurer, an appreciator of objects and artifacts, was that life as the granddaughter of this woman yielded many interesting somethings.  A chunky comic book...a tea cup from the war...a woven fishing creel...a costume jewelry parure...photos.  Toward the end of the ten year period over which she was slowly handing out things, I put together that she was slowly doling out to all of her granddaughters, according to a system which somewhat related to who their parent (which of her children) they descended from, but also some sense she had of what you would treasure.

I do not know why, in the end, I was chosen to get her mother's wedding dress.  I had not married conventionally, I was not the daughter of her daughter, and I was among the most tomboyish of her granddaughters.  I did not sew, though my other grandmother and my mother did, and perhaps that plus the fact that her mother was a seamstress played into her conclusion.  Perhaps because I had cooed at the detailing of my father's baptismal gown--an object which should be noted was not again used for her son's children, or by her son's children's children.

Perhaps it was as simple as the fact that we shared favorite colors.  Or somehow, in some way, the fact that I shared her husband's stubborn streak.  Or maybe she had given all of the other of her mother's significant objects to the other girls, and this was what remained for me.

A wedding dress.

**

I am truly amazed at the details of the handwork.  Handwork which I have never attempted, mind you, but which I learned about thanks to a treasure given to me by a friend from the basement of a house he moved into.  (Once again, from the damp depths...)  A turn of the century how-to book on tatting and needlework.  Which also came with two pamphlets I prize to this day, "How to Dance and When to Dance" and "The Dangers of the Slave Trade in the City."  But this book, this odd combination of Victorian typeface and photographs, and its details instructions on how to tat and crewel and all sorts of sub categories for making certain sorts of empty space in fabric, or how to add raised shapes.

 My Nana, it turned out, liked to embroider.  As did my Grandmother.  My Nana was fond of the empty spaces kind of work, the stuff you would do at the edge of tea towels.  My Grandmother liked the crewel work, the kind of stuff that made things bumply.

You may have inferred I learned neither.

I stare at this wedding dress, and try to understand it by the hand that made it.  A hand that was not the hand of my Great Grandmother, but a dress touched by the hand of my Great Grandmother as she committed to the man that would sew back together the nipples my Nana's baby bottles, even though Nana was supposed to be too old for them, these objects that my Great Grandparents would not have had as the accoutrement of their youth.

Each generation touches something new, something old.  Whether or not they are aware they are doing so.

I try to be aware.

So, because I fear too much contact from my actual hand upon this fragile, 100 year old garment, I touch it with my eyes.

I note the changes in texture, the kind of dexterity to create, the kind of feel it must have had.

I imagine the body inside, other eyes seeing, joy, apprehension, welcome.  It is never me I imagine in this dress.  I know that some people would.  In fact, I have done so with other pieces of clothing.  Part of it is the era; I never fancied myself Victorian or Edwardian.  

But part of it, I think, is I feel there is someone else in that dress.  Still.  My Nana had stored it as her mother had, and pulled it from the crypt that was a modest bungalow's fruit and coal cellar, carefully packed away in a box.  She had never fully examined it, she said.  She was, from a curatorial point of view, afraid to expose it to light.

I'm trying.  To examine it.  To expose it to light, which is the information our eyes use.

Because, here, my eyes are my hands.

*

I'm trying.

It is interesting, feeling with your eyes.  Putting on clothes which do not fit.  Knowing that you could never be this, but someone needed to be this so that you could be here now, feeling without touching. 

Yet feeling.

all photos are by and property of the author, taken while wearing blue jeans, a pashmina, and vintage Mitsouko edc.  Which just this day, this very wearing, for the very first time after many many tries, makes sense.  Turns out it does not screech every.single.time.

Channels and noise

Do you tweet?  How's your RSS feed?  IM'ed anyone today?  What's your junk mail percentage in your e-mail inbox?  Whose pet performed some antic and ended up with a picture of it up on Facebook?

My answers:
Yes.  Not maintained.  No, but I Skyped my kid the other day.  Way up, over 50%, since some "friend" sent me a link to a coupon site.  (Raises hand in affirmative response).

And that's just the citizen me.  ScentScelf tweets, keeps a Facebook page, and blathers in a blog on a regular basis.

Time for some meandering.

****
Once upon a time, there was a summer of adolescent awakening.  No, not that kind.  But, among other things, I:

• temporarily swapped away my books #1 and #2 of Nancy Drew, which had been my mother's, and were first edition WITH their jackets, for a couple of Dana girls mysteries, so each of us could experience the other series;
• swam in an in-ground kidney shaped swimming pool with a diving board at one end;
• rode my bike to the edges of my town and into another;
• went to slumber parties, a phenomenon now dissed by Tiger Mothers and studied by cultural anthropologists;
• was snuck into a friend's father's den, an area of the house oddly dim even in the bright midday, and warned twice warned to NOT TOUCH before a panelled wood door was opened, so that I could see this:

Breaker break one nine, good buddy.  Did I know what this was?

Such was life in certain suburbs before the great divide that I could hazard an educated guess.  Sure, that was...a CB radio.  Which another friend had told me about, because her dad used them in his truck, and by truck I don't mean Ford F-150, but a serious Mack, baby.  On my block, truck drivers, line chefs from the GM cafeteria, engineers from Ford, electrical salesmen.  Down the street, kidney shaped pools.  On the other end of town, where I rode my bike for slumber parties, a favorite "ride by": the house that had a heliport.

Hold that thought.

Meanwhile, return to the hushed plush carpet quiet of the dim house and the cupboard housing a magical communications device.  One that was "don't touch," because one shouldn't turn it on before knowing the rules of operation.  By which it wasn't meant so much how to actually operate the thing, but the conventions of participating in the conversation.  You didn't just hop on an start talking, you made sure you had a clear channel.  Once you had a clear channel, you weren't supposed to yak about what cookies you were making, or what Uncle Don brought home last night.  That was telephone talk.  You could discuss the weather (potentially useful to travelers, such as truck drivers).  And you could simply listen to the appropriately focused conversation underway.

I hushed to carpet quietness.  This was Serious Business, and while I grasped that the reason this particular radio sat in this particular location had plenty to do with why there was an inground pool in the backyard and an expensive sports car in the driveway, I still held respect.  For it seemed that the radio's power was being used for good and not for evil.

My guide then proceeded to turn the device on.  I nearly gasped.  She shot me a look of shush, which I did.  "I know what I'm doing," she said.  It was okay.  She found a channel, said all the proper introduction phrases.  Respectfully listened, answered a question.  Moved to another channel.

Then tossed her long hair out of her eyes and said in a voice I would later learn to call "coquettish": Hey good buddy, how's the weather where you're at?

There wasn't much talk of rain.

Lady breaker...

***
ScentScelf writes this blog, keeps a Facebook page, and maintains a Twitter account.  In this blog, my chapbook of sorts, I mostly write.  It is a place to assemble ideas and data and discoveries into more coherent chunks, sometimes more so, sometimes less so.  On the Facebook page, I link posts from the blog -- a kind of Facebook user friendly RSS feed, a heads up, or warning, that there's fresh material here.  I'll also post links to articles I think are interesting, that I'm ruminating over, to things that I find interesting but veer beyond whatever I think the edges of the blog should be.  On the Twitter feed, I'll put up posts that are either blog-type-material expressible in 140 characters or less, or items related to my passion for fresh water.

All of which is a way of saying I see them as somewhat different creatures, with perhaps overlapping but ultimate different character.  I *do* think about it, somewhat.  Because I can't see why you'd want the same noise from multiple channels.

Breaker break, good buddy.  Baby blog bear here.  Brush your teeth and comb your hair, catch ya on the flip flop.  Nice to have you in the chain gang.

**
Not only does the same information repeated over and over again read as "noise" in my head.  So does blathering just to keep fresh content in your feed.  And so does shilling.

As a case study, let's look at Roger Ebert.  Ebert is prolific.  He is a curious guy who bothers to process things and then write thoughtfully and engagingly about them.  He blogs on all sorts of stuff, has a ton of good leads to other interesting material, is thoughtful, and a good writer.  As a result, he has received many accolades for his blog.  He also writes a newsletter, to which I subscribe.  And he has a regular gig as a movie critic. These things bring him a variety of rewards, but not surprisingly, only one brings him real income.  Should I need to point this out, it is not the blog.  As a result, Roger found himself addressing the same question many bloggers and writers find themselves facing:  How can I make money at this?  His answer was to put up an Amazon link on his blog.  Amazon links work on a simple principle:  post one, and you will earn a percentage of sales that result from traffic entering through that link.  Pretty straightforward.

But here's the rub.  Roger started using his Twitter feed to post links to products available on Amazon.  Mind you, he's a clever guy, and generally devised a tie-in to something he had discussed or was discussing in his writing.  However--and this is an important however to my sensibilities--what had been content rich was now 50% junk mail.  Chatter had become noise.  And Roger sounded like a shill.

He's taken some guff for it, and has answered the complaints.  He believes he is right.  He wants to earn money from his efforts.  He is disappointed the more people haven't voluntarily signed up to subscribe to his output (something he admirably offered on a sliding scale basis), and has decided that advertising is the way to go.  Subscription versus sponsorship versus advertising.  (We don't seem to have old world patrons anymore; a MacArthur grant after a years of effort for a notable few is about as good as it gets.)  Old story.  I get it.  (I wonder if Octavian is paying attention?)  It's a tough balance.  Time is spent.  Effort is made.  Ebert has a day job, one which cushions the blow.  In that case, his employer (The Chicago Sun-Times) does the dirty work of soliciting and charging for advertising.  That's what lets them hire people.  Which allows someone to be a "salary man."  Which comes with its own costs.

There is no easy way out.  No clean, pure solution.  Roger drew a line in the sand.  He thinks he is right.  I don't.

My line?  Shilling is shilling.  And noise is noise.  It seems to me, while our tolerance levels may vary, there is a way to moderate the traffic so that we turn on and tune in, not tune out.  If the content provider can't respect that, the only choice for the listener is to tune out.

There is no clean shot.  Best get dressed for the ball before you drop the hammer down.  Right now, it seems like everybody must be walking the dog.  Too much jaw jacking and you're going to put us all in the mud.  


Don't want a SNAFU from that sonnet.

*
When I first started having control of who and when I had conversations with, my choices were:  Walk to their house and see if they were home.  _OR_ Pick up the phone and see if the party line was open to make a call.

At one point, I used a dial-up modem (listen to the tones! wait for the connect sound!!) and could share interests with like minded folk on a BBS.  And, oh, joy when the day came...you could pay for an e-mail account with AOL.

No, the point is not how complicated communication is these days.  Though it kind of is.  So was an awl and a tablet, in its way; just more in the production than the reception.  The point is that there used to be all kinds of visual and context clues for what kind of sounds you were about to hear:  meanderings about nothing with friends were when your were hanging out.  Using the phone to determine where meetings would happen, and who had a parent that could get you there.  Hallways were for finding out who was on the basketball team.  Classrooms were for pretending to learn but really passing notes; libraries were for pretending to pass notes but really learning.

Advertising wasn't signified by a jump in volume on your television set, or a banner across the front page of your newspaper where a headline used to be.  Not that there weren't overlaps in advertising and editorial content.  But that was generally seen as poor form.  Or so my mythology goes.

Today, you sit with these devices, this input, this constant ready state for the next bit.  Byte.  What have you.

There is power in these new communication forms.  Twitter and Facebook helped a revolution, they say.  They've also led to suicides, career and actual.  With great power comes great responsibility.

My copies of The Secret of the Old Clock and The Hidden Staircase are still not on my shelf.  Waiting next to the incomplete set are both Dana girls books, ready to hand back.  I have a feeling I'll be holding on to them for a while.

But I hold out hope.  And I try to mind my communication manners.  My glass is generally half-full.  So I like to believe -- time to retrieve that held thought -- that we can all get along.

Like Rodney King said.  When a truck driver made the news.

I know, I know.  Meandering.  Miscellany.  But there it is.  Modern communications, older communications, keeping the input clear, grabbing the randomness at will, finding order.

Pass the numbers.  Ten-Ten, we'll do it again.




Get help with CB Slang at CB Gazette.  Learn why Concrete Blonde is not just a band.
Photo of Louie Louie's CB station found at The High Desert Cobra 200 Club.
Algorithm for deciding whether or not to follow a Twitter account created by Dan Shapiro.


Didn't think you were going to get away without a link to C.W. McCall, did you?  Watch a 45rpm disc of Convoy played on a turntable in a Magnavox console, because there hasn't been enough nostalgia for those who remember, or cabinets of curiosities for those who have no idea what I'm talking about.  But if handheld makes you tipsy, try this link and enjoy the Kristofferson/MacGraw movie poster.  Of course, you can shake your head and try to figure out why movie geeks (including Ebert) have praised Sam Peckinpah.  It wasn't because of the movie adaptation of the song, that's for sure.  I do miss that United Artists logo.  I wonder what Fairbanks, Pickford, and Chaplin would have thought about Rubber Duck.  Their producer sides might not have minded.  I'm pretty sure D.W. Griffith wouldn't have.


If you've made it this far, maybe you'll want to follow me on Twitter after all.  

Vol de Nuit Isn't

Subtitled:  A Failed Narrative but a Great Perfume  (A Review)

Prequel

No matter how you approach perfume, completely naive, or studiously researched, it would be hard to come upon Vol de Nuit and not immediately conjure a back story.  Even if you don't speak French.  Because--and, fine, I will speak for the American audience here, hoping one of you Brits speaks up regarding your school experience--most American school children are exposed to "The Little Prince."  Lay Payteet Prahnce, perhaps your teacher added.  Or, perhaps, if you moved fairly frequently, you were exposed to other helpful pronunciations of the "original" title; Luh Pehteet Prince being among my favorite clarifications.  Mind you, I didn't know a speck of French as a child, but even I was able to ken onto the fact that Peter Sellers could have done better at awful.  I could READ, for heavens sake, I just wasn't French-knowledgeable.

The petit point?  Said teachers would generally then offer up, another title by the same author, should we wish to consider reading further:  Vol de Nuit.  Night Flight.  Which sounded romantic, but made me wonder if it was a sequel or prequel that would help me figure out the plight of the lonely guy and his flower, kind of like one wonders what became of Scarlett after Rhett left not giving a damn.  (After I started writing this, it occurred to me that there is now a generation of students who might get a malevolent association with the sounds of Vol de Nuit, being similar to Vol de mort and all.  Which might serve them better when thinking about the perfume.  But that is another story.)

In addition to the teacher voices in your head, there is the "official story," and if you at all poke your nose into Guerlain's business, you are pointed toward Antoine de Saint-Expury and how the fragrance was created in his honor / drama of aviation / a pilot / blah blah blah.

So, in my head, I have:  Vol de Nuit = Night Flight.  Vol de Nuit = perfume.  Vol de Nuit ≈ smells like a night flight.  Vol de Nuit ± solves/addresses the problems of the little prince.  Vol de Nuit ≅ will transport me so I don't worry about existential conundrums.

(For further cognitive miasma, see Kevin's lovely review of Vol de Nuit as a night flight, wherein he constructs his own narrative.  Or Helg's review, where she acknowledges the narrative and locates where she finds Vol de Nuit among a pantheon of galbanum scents.)

There it is.  Identified, labelled, sorted, catalogued, told.  If you are me, you try Vol de Nuit many times, starting with early in your fall down the rabbit hole.  It strikes you as difficult, as bitter, as old, as a potential scrubber, as interesting but probably not you, worth coming back to for academic purposes but not for pleasure.  It's no night flight.  But you go back, repeatedly, looking for nocturnal, or at least crepuscular, lift off.

And then, thank goodness, you have the good fortune to one day out of the blue decide to spray in the bright light of mid morning, and spray generously, and just let things be, immediately forgetting what you have done.  So that this waft springs up from your wrist, and you say "wow," and you spend hours upon hours with it.

And find you are happy.  And decide to relocate yourself vis-à-vis Vol de Nuit.


The Review Part

What Vol de Nuit isn't:  blackblue and murky hard to see with the only clearness being the stars above you and the whole experience gravity defiant, transporting you through the air.  Vol de Nuit is not a night flight.

What Vol de Nuit is:  greenherbybitter powder mashed in such a way that earthy bits (perhaps the daffodil, certainly the oakmoss) ground you and yet eartly lifts (sparkly citrus bits or invigorating herbal sniffs with florals interwoven just enough to keep it from being a total Druid potion) keeping things from being all around your ankles.  Vol de Nuit is a tree growing in the forest, knowing which way to reach for sunlight, aware of all it touches from root to leaf.

Vol de Nuit is more "Tree of Life" than "Flight of Night."

In less fanciful terms, it is a green plant-focused woody with plenty of powder.  The notes mention flowers, but I don't get much (read "any?") of that.

In mathematical expressions, Vol de Nuit ≠ transportation, literal or existential.  However, Vol de Nuit = an interesting perfume that I will sometimes want to wear.

Coda


My long day into night with Vol de Nuit was interesting.  Repeated pleasure from huffing, frequent wrist to nose and/or putting nose to the waft like a dog might kind of day.  It was a totally different experience of exactly the same thing...unlike those times when you have an "a-ha!" of something different, some new note or aspect striking you, this was one of those times when you know full well you are experiencing the very same input you did last time, but it's coming in differently.  Like...the first time you think in a different language.  Or when you see the vase and not the human faces in that picture.  Or when you have been spending your time playing jazz copying other solos and/or carefully constructing a line based on the key and the tempo and the meter but then WHOOPS! you are just playing the thought without worrying about the parts behind the expression.

Or like when you shift your angle slightly, and instead of seeing the reflections in the plate glass window, you see the display inside.

It's always been the same information available to you.  Were the earlier reads "correct" also?  Were they your own?

Here's what I know:  I've been spending years assiduously checking out fragrances whose notes or explanatory copy mention "forest" or "green woods" or "druidic potion."  (Okay, haven't come across that last one, really.)  Little did I know that adding a healthy dose of powder, and accepting the sentence constructions of a writer from the PREVIOUS turn of the century, rather than the one I lived through, would best express the thought.  Herbalgreenbitterwoodyhintsofsmoothdefinitelypowderystuff that smacks of/with my beloved galbanum but doesn't bite hard, I'll be back.


What I was sniffing:

Vol de Nuit, parfum concentration.  That iconic Guerlain purse sprayer holds a refill of VdN parfum.  I sprayed the day of the revelation.  I've dabbed for my return while writing.  The sample vial is for size reference; early in my perfume explorations, I was surprised by how small those expensive extraits were.  Chalk it up to a supersize culture plus an edt life?  Plus, I suspect, there is something about how large things loom in our imagination.  Those Lutens bell jars are not cookie jar size, for example.  You could hold one between your thumb and finger, thumb under the bottom, finger on the top.  Not that you'd want to.  Just saying.  So, there's my Vol de Nuit, purchased as a gently used item, quadrilobe stopper already undone.  Purse sprayer new old stock.  Have since smelled samples from other vintage and new bottles, am satisfied the partial bottle was not altered.  (I may not be so good at identifying notes, but I can do pretty well at recognizing watered down side by sides, thank you {cough cough} Chanel Coco NOT.)


Um, that'd be your disclosure statement for the day.


The image is the author's own.  As usual, play fair if you wish to use it.