The Wit of the Staircase

Swamp Thing

"Isis, oh, Isis, you mystical child.
What drives me to you is what drives me insane.
I still can remember the way that you smiled
On the fifth day of May in the drizzlin' rain."

--Bob Dylan

Jean Claude Ellena, who specializes in making perfumes that are aliver and wetter than water, brings us Bigarade Concentree, a sort of Electricity-Watter water-daughter of bright bitter orange and the silvery water that washes clockwise down the drain with a rock and roll river song sound after the under-rain coriander oil spiked bath of some unearthly hippie fox who's been fucking all day.

Ellena says he loves violet leaf, lovage, and everlasting flowers, and here he brings us something so glam and gorge that it's nearly impossible to describe even in a flower-poem like this one, dropped from the Gallic lips of the master himself.

And yet somehow, drunk on Magic Hat beer and smoking ciggies at the midnight keyboard again after twelve years of none whatsoever, Wit just did.

Link: Aedes De Venustas| Indulge Your Senses....

A Type Of Magic

“Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.”

--John Berger

"In Christopher Priest's 1984 fantasy novel, The Glamour, the innate ability to turn oneself invisible is to possess the glamour.

In his book It, Stephen King uses the word "glamour" in reference to the creature known as "It" or "Pennywise", saying that it means a creature able either truly to change its shape and/or physical appearance at will, or to be seen as different things by different people.

In Laurel K. Hamilton's Merry Gentry series, glamour is a type of magic used by the fey, and something that the main character Merideth Gentry herself can use quite adeptly, even more so than most pure-blooded sidhe.

In the supernatural television drama Charmed the glamour is a power that enables the wielder to turn into another's physical appareance."

Link: Glamour - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Wit's little old Glamour film, featured in The 2000 Whitney Biennial and many international film festivals, and in theaters all over Japan is still available, below

Link: Super Happy Fun!.

Scent Stimulates Memory In Sleep

"Scientists studying how sleep affects memory have found that the whiff of a familiar scent can help a slumbering brain better remember things that it learned the evening before. A rose bouquet — delivered to people’s nostrils as they studied and, later, as they slept — improved their performance on a memory test by almost 15 percent."

Link: Scent Activates Memory During Sleep, Study Says - New York Times.

Night Blooming

"You go back, Jack, do it again."

--Steely Dan

Things get hidden in weird places at Castle Wit. We have a strange mnemonic system of storing things in their just-so place that is so unconsciously motivated that the entire collection, over years, and man--over the places--still waits in its entirety to be unearthed, all at once, all over, in split screen manner by strangers oh so unsuspecting. They hold the things up, squint...But hey! That's my shit, and I want and must have it all still!

Some of you might know the lovable and lauded old lady scholar of ancient magic and olde mental rhythms Frances Yates, who first described how orators remembered before writing. By systems of thought-pictures she said: "human figures wearing crowns or purple cloaks, bloodstained or smeared with paint, human figures dramatically engaged in some activity--doing something." They dressed things up, sent them out that way, so vivid they recognized them when they came back.

And so it happens I often twist my hair up out of laziness into a blonde snail's shell behind my neck and fasten it with an elastic band. Later, when I take the all-day elastic out, perfume is released like some newly minted silver coin, bright and oblivious and ready for spending.

Really, it's quick like Merlin stepping nimble from the tree where witch Vivan had "eternally" imprisoned him: You rang, motherfuckers? And Serge Lutens foresty-fiendish fine pine fleur peur (flower power en Anglais) Chypre Rouge would almost knock me down if I didn't descend into the archive of terrible memory pictures so bravely and so voluntarily, unlike, let's face it, you.

So the incredible fruit gum and the needlike kneels needles (read back from your notes, Dr. what'd I just say) carpeting the prickle-place (huh-wha) are both right there then.

And how the hell did they know? You chasing me through the apple orchard, blooming, alive everywhere, an Alps moving upward, and yet in the dark night it's snowing on the flowers. Because that's spring in Michigan, isn't it, and we were, let's face it, magic. That fruit gum from climbing trees, falling, running some more sticks on your hands and even thighs, or was it the pine tar or some sticky else?

This too in a shitty working class town where everyone knows how to count other people's pleasure with mean measuring auto factory eyes. Hated for this sort of thing still: hogging two seasons sometimes whenever pleases.

Under amber and patchouli also, I remember you, bloodstained or smeared with paint, in crowns, in purple robes, running under white on white. Human figures engaged in some dramatic activity--doing something.

Five Great Floral Perfumes

Per Vogue's Style.com

Chanel No. 19

"Created by perfumer Henri Robert, this blend of neroli, May rose, and vetiver was reportedly Coco Chanel's preferred eau. How fitting, then, that it's named for Mademoiselle's August 19 birth date."

Price: $87 for 3.4 oz

Available at department stores and www.chanel.com.

Antennae Up, Or: What Wit Knows

"There are truths that are singularly shy and ticklish and cannot be caught except suddenly —that must be surprised or left alone."

--Nietzsche

Not to sound like that old commercial for Kellog's Fruit Loops cereal from Wit's nineteen seventies childhood, (that used to be young, dears, though you may be even older. "Much has changed since then, I bet," said a busboy at a Los Angeles diner who was born the year I graduated from high school, wistfully misimagining my crass days of Lapeer West High School sensimilla shotgunning, finger fucking and joyriding as if they were a bygone era of butter churns and calico bonnets) anyway, in this commercial a tropical toucan bird with a massive rainbow beak sings "follow your nose/it always knows."

But really, what the hell does Wit know? Why, what we know is nothing--nothing less, that is--than THE TRUTH, ye seekers, sidewinders, sensimilla sluts, and yea ye scenteurs.

We are assaulted by THE TRUTH at every sharp, shiny, green angle when we uncork something fine like Labyrinth Libertin by Prince Jardinier, as we did from a pale apple green box with a tourmaline ribbon this freezing morning after a firm February fourteenth finger fucking (just kidding about the last part.)

And shit yeah, buddy, whether you're the busboy or the BMOC this is the best scent for this or any other Valentine's Day, which we still think is a horseshit holiday despite Wit's having lived her entire life from birth to eighteen years on Valentine Road in the aforementioned city of Lapeer. (Ed. note: We actually measured this scent's valentine greatness on our fine tuned laboratory instruments of grain of sand and world of flower. We have the tricknology.)

Polite detractors and bitter bitches alike (Hi, Mom) might polemicize that from this so-called "scientific" scent environment might also arise something like seeing the face of Jesus in a tasty golden brown grilled cheese sandwich (mmmm....), or the Sacred Virgin Mary in somebody's old Jeri-Curl stain on a bus window in Flint.

In fact, experience of a supposedly "abnormal" meaningfulness in meaningless pattern and random data like this has a name, neologized by scientist Klaus Conrad as Apophenia. (Some might call it love, we interject meekly from the back of math class.)

But Apophenia, child, is also where one such as Wit spins out a story from Labyrinth Libertin's top notes of basil, heart notes of orange blossom and base notes of box leaves that are like one of the famous hedge-mazes of some English estate, where we chase one fluttering gorgeous olfactory fillip through the nighttime traps and dark dead ends of the ivy as if capturing midnight moths in a nonexistent nocturnal net.

It has been suggested, per Wiki that Apophenia is the spider's web connection between psychosis and creativity, though we thought perfume was. This pop-phen-A phenomena features also, they say, in the paranoid narrativization of Wit favorites Vladimir Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols" and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.

And what a pity, isn't it, that where clinical Klaus Conrad sits amid shards of fucking nothing, you and me and we at Wit sit at a Maas of wait and wonder where there wafts on the wind the next clue sent to us via graffiti swirl and postage stamp.

And from the lovely bottle with pale pear-colored liquid that has temporarily located us at the center of a gorgeous libertinal labyrinth (where we get liberty by being trapped, such is the paradox of finding one's Valentine) yes, at this scary center Wit lifts her anemone-antennae and hears...a Who.

So we respond to this sound today from amid the waxy dark sharp scent of leaves and then the pretty flower scents underneath so soft like a teenage model's delicate Fashion Week fart.

Lonely we wait for some return signal from you wallflowers and wall followers alike. Send word to us, please, right away--by flap of butterfly wing, omenous cloud pattern or ornithomantics. We at Wit await your secret signal.

Link: Aedes De Venustas| Indulge Your Senses....

Link: The Labyrinth Society.

Hey Valentine

Three magic potions of the utmost originality and light and mystery from L'Artisan. Each is like a different artistic expression of the hot red blood and deep gold mystery of the human heart--all in a crimson satin box, round like a magician's cap, for only $75.00!

Wit is working like a dog but still can't wait to post a proper long perfume review later this week.

Link: Aedes De Venustas| Indulge Your Senses....

Other Voices, Other Rooms

Wit has recently relocated its editorial offices. As some of you may know, Wit has a strange sort of Princess And The Pea interior decoration fussiness, and it is this condition that has us rearranging armchairs and rehanging pictures rather than writing any longer original stuff here for the last couple weeks.

We have a few things coming up in the perfume category next week, though, so check back then.

Animal Skins And Smoke Patterns

I breathe in
the cool incense smoke from the metal brazier,
While thinking about a poem for my dear friend Lu Wa.
My sandalwood-hearted companion spits out plum blossoms of smoke,
Looking like the cloudy fog of the other world.
Perhaps it's the soul of my friend the old mountain man
In the smoke's dense patterns?

--Kan Po

Wit apologizes for the lack of a perfume post these last weeks. We are preparing a longer post on the new Los Angeles Lunar Society perfume this week.

Lunar Labdanum, now for sale, is an occult unguent we painstakingly reconstructed from centuries-old Lunar Society Laboratory parchments discovered buried in an old pneuamtic message canister under a craggy California boulder out by the Chateau Marmont swimming pool.

L.L.'s primary ingredient, rockrose, or labdanum, falls on the more masculine side of the perfume spectrum, though ladies of a Lunar sort of character or an unusually Selenic beauty can certainly wear it lightly. Expect all sorts of unexpected adventures under any phase of the moon.

More specifics later...

Link: The Poetry of Scent.

The Onion: Chanel Develops Perfume For Third World

PARIS—Fashion house and perfumer Chanel, famed for its iconic, $300-an-ounce No. 5 scent, announced that it has created a cost-efficient fragrance for the Third World, one specifically designed for the rigors of dry, dusty, less glamorous environments in the Southern Hemisphere.

"Smelling positively bewitching should be the right of everyone, not just a privileged few," said Chanel CEO Maureen Chiquet at the gala launch for the new scent, Chanel 3rd, in Paris' Centre Georges Pompidou Monday. "It is our hope and belief that this new fragrance will bring much-needed panache to the Third World."

Link: Chanel Develops Durable, Low-Cost Perfume For Third World | The Onion - America's Finest News Source.