The Ubiquity of Scent, part 2

part 1

It's been over a week since I last applied perfume. How has she survived? is no
 doubt a question surfacing in some of your minds. And now, at last, for a small confession of sorts, which will come as no surprise to some of you, I am sure: many of my body products are selected specifically for their appealing scent, in addition to their functional benefits. A case in point: Clarins Huile Orchidée Bleue, which, to be perfectly frank, smells a lot better any new perfume I've tried in recent sniffing history. I have mixed this product with argan oil in a dropper bottle, and I put it on my neck and décolleté area every night before retiring.

Did I lie, when I promised not to wear perfume while caring for my mother's beloved pup? No, of course not. I have not opened the perfume sample vials I brought along. They sit inert, untouched, in my suitcase. Still, there's no unscrambling the egg, as Pentagon officials are wont to lament having funded the heinous crimes of warlords all over the planet, under the assumption that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Well, not exactly. The principle is more like "forced to collaborate with bad or worse, I'll take bad." The fallacy in the argument, of course, is that anyone is ever forced to collaborate with anyone. But that's another completely different story, redolent of nothing but vice. Let's return to something nice.

My skincare regimen happens to afford me the felicitous opportunity to doze off in a beautiful cloud of scent but without having touched a bottle of perfume. I never agreed to forego my skincare regimen, so I did not lie. It's true that I have been noticing that little Jula seems to suffer allergy attacks especially at bedtime, and she does sleep in a bed on the floor close to mine. Causal connection or pure coincidence? I'm not sure, to be honest, because I always take her out for a bathroom session right before going to bed. She invariably breaks out sneezing the moment we step out the door, and her eyes water, too, clear evidence that this was not all just a pretext on the part of my perfume-phobic mom to prevent me from leaving traces of scent behind. Of course her reason, too, is allergies, but my impression is that she is allergic to added chemicals more than the natural stuff.

My dad, too, like Jula, suffers from severe allergies, especially during the spring, when pollen begins to float about the air. I don't recall my mom ever having suffered in the way that my dad always does from hayfever, but I'll take her word for it! There are a few nagging pieces of evidence in the house, however, which make me wonder how much of her aversion to perfume is a matter of taste and how much a matter of physical discomfort. Perhaps it does not matter, since it is her house, so she's allowed to forbid anything she wants within this space, up to and including smoking.

Which brings me to my stepdad's inveterate pipe-smoking habit. A while back, when I reviewed Tom Ford Tobacco Vanille, my stepdad was brought to the forefront of the perfume blog reading public (perhaps even immortalized!) as I insisted that he smells exactly the same as the drydown of that perfume. Not his tobacco, but him, as he is literally saturated with the scent. Probably the only time he does not smell like pipe tobacco is right after a shower at the gym--before he makes his way outside to light up a pipe once again.

It's a very pleasant smell to me, and I learned before their departure--to my amusement and satisfaction--that in fact he smokes a vanilla-scented tobacco! I actually love the way it smells and told my mom as much. She exhorted me not to share the news with my stepdad, because it would only reinforce and validate his habit! (Of course, I could not resist.)

Well, at this point in history, as "he" approaches "his" eightieth birthday--I suppose that I could name names, but shouldn't I leave something for the biographers to do?????--I don't think that there's going to be any turning back. And, why, after all? This is a guy who for decades has carried three freshly stoked pipes with him wherever he goes--in addition to a sleeve of loose tobacco. So, yes, I'd say that the word incorrigible applies, unless of course one happens to enjoy the scent, as anyone who appreciates Tom Ford's Tobacco Vanille surely would.

Smoking is strictly verboten (auf Deutsch, bitte!) inside the house. However, this humble abode is far from scent free. The hand soap in the upstairs bathroom appears to be one of those triclosan-infused foam generating Soft Soap dispensers. The label has been removed--which is fine with me as the only thing I hate more than plastic containers are plastic containers with their store labels still affixed. I mean, why? Why do I need to know that the Rubbermaid tote in which a serial killer stows the body parts of his victims was made by Rubbermaid? I see this on garbage barrels all over the place. A smooth, monochromatic surface spoiled by an unsightly peel-off label, which no one ever bothered to peel off. When possible, I take the liberty of doing so myself, but touching everyone's trash can is even less appealing than being subject to these omnipresent eyesores. But I digress...

So the Soft Soap--or reasonable facsimile. It is apricot-orange colored and smells very aquatic and calonic. A big "yuck" for me. Not to mention my suspicions about triclosan, which seems to be found in everything these days: hand soap, dish detergent, toothpaste... what????? I was using the orange Soft Soap stuff for the first few days here, as there is no other hand soap in the sink area. Fortunately, at one point I was sufficiently caffeinated to think out of the bottle, so to speak, when I opened the cabinet below, where I espied with relief a bottle of Johnson's Baby Shampoo.

Thankfully, it smells a lot better than triclosan-soaked, artificially orange-colored foam goo, so now I am using that instead. Something about the scent of Johnson's Baby Shampoo is so soothing, perhaps it is tapping into some of my earliest infant memories. Who really knows? What matters now, is that the scent is pleasant enough that I no longer cringe at the prospect of washing my hands. Chez moi, back in Boston, the ready-at-hand bathroom sink soaps are Puig Agua Lavanda and L'Occitane Verveine-scented shea.

Surprise, surprise...




(to be continued)

Tom Ford Philosophizes in and on Film: Carpe Diem—with Style!

Review of 

A Single Man

a  2009 film directed by Tom Ford

Tom Ford: fashion designer, perfume house creative director, provocateur ... film director? Yes, indeed, his début film effort, A Single Man, starring Colin Firth and also featuring Julianne Moore, has established that the creative director of Tom Ford Beauty is also an accomplished film director—and a screen writer to boot!

I must confess that I came to this film with rather low expectations. I was very pleasantly surprised at how good the work ended up being. Critics have grumbled that A Single Man is "boring". They lament specifically the lack of plot and the hyper-aestheticism, but those are precisely the central themes of this film. The naysayers somehow missed in their visceral disdain that A Single Man, based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood, is on its face and by intention much more about style than substance.

The message of A Single Man is a simple one, and for that reason some may find it banal: Carpe Diem. Live each day to the fullest, as though it might be the last. Tom Ford's embellishment of this cliché—if indeed it is one—is to focus on all of the aesthetic minutiae of which every life is filled, provided only that one has eyes to see. And, of course, a nose to sniff.

Perfume appears in only two short segments of the film. Near the opening, what looks to be a bottle of none other than Tom Ford perfume sits on the protagonist's vanity. The bottle is turned to the side, so we are left to guess which member of the Private Collection George Falconer, the troubled English professor played by Colin Firth, might be wearing. One thing is clear: he does not have the entire collection but a single signature scent, along with two bottles of what look to be classic cologne or after shave. One of the “goofs” of this film listed at the IMDB database is that the bottle of spirits consumed by the protagonist was created in 1999, but the action takes place in 1962. No one seems to have noticed that Tom Ford Perfume did not exist at that time, either. In fact, Tom Ford himself was born in 1961!

The second scene in which perfume is briefly referenced is when the professor is speaking with a departmental secretary, whose beauty he is praising in a rather inappropriate way—and not only because he is gay. George is enraptured by the woman, whose physical beauty is enhanced by her scent, which he recognizes and identifies outloud: Arpège.

This scene effectively conveys an idea sometimes lost sight of: that sex and aesthetics are two completely different things. George, being a gay man, has no physical attraction to the woman whose beauty he admires. He finds her to be an exquisite sight to behold, something to gaze upon in awe, an object of reverence, not desire.

Some would say that women should be regarded as neither sex objects nor art objects or repositories of aesthetic value. But that sort of view supposes that human beings have essences. I favor a more existential approach: that people are what they choose to become. If a woman decides to focus on aesthetics or to render herself physically attractive—whether as a work of art or as an object of desire—that can be a perfectly valid choice, it seems to me, provided only that it is a genuine choice. Different people have different strengths and weaknesses. Work with what you've got.

The problem with beautiful women is not that they are beautiful, but that for most of the history of humanity, women have been excluded at the outset from roles beyond those of sexual partner, mother, and aesthetic object. More recently, as women have been afforded the opportunity to do other things as well, those three roles have become (and remain) choices for some.

My impression is that "beautiful" men have to deal with many of the same prejudices as do beautiful women. Stated starkly: many people have a hard time believing that a person can be both comely and intelligent. It's fine to be one or the other, but handsome, intelligent, and talented all at once? That would be way too many good genes concentrated in a single set of chromosomes!

Charlotte or "Charlie", the woman played by Julianne Moore in the film, has spent her life in the role of the beautiful young woman. She was married for nine years and raised a child. Her husband eventually left her—the implication being that he moved on to someone younger and more beautiful than she. Charlotte aged over the course of the decade of their relationship to become someone other than the woman she appeared earlier to be.

Charlie is the classic example of the woman who dedicated everything to her husband and focused primarily upon her beauty and his needs. She has no career, and now that her husband has abandoned her, she finds herself without moorings, a wealthy middle-aged woman who drinks heavily and wonders what she should do now that she is no longer a nubile young thing, and her child has also left the nest. (It is a bit unclear in the film, but the child may have been from a previous marriage.) Charlie never developed her talents nor pursued a career because she was too busy being the beautiful wife of her husband and the mother of a child.

The film is set in Los Angeles in 1962. At that time, women had many fewer options and opportunities than they do today. It is becoming more and more rare to find women like Charlotte in that sort of predicament, although it certainly does happen and is far more common in other parts of the world. But none of this is really what A Single Man is about. This becomes abundantly clear in a scene where George and Charlotte lie juxtaposed on the floor, wallowing in their respective state of despair. George is a college English professor. Having this credential, a successful career outside of the home, has done nothing to save him from his fate.

Charlotte may never have experienced true love, but George did, and he lost the love of his life after a relationship of sixteen years. The film focuses upon the existential despair of George, not Charlotte, though they are friends in part because they share the very same plight. Both have been left bereft: Charlotte because her husband abandoned her, and George because his long-term partner, Jim, has died in an automobile accident. The very identities of these grieving survivors have become bound up with people who are no longer a physical part of their lives but continue to dominate them psychologically from afar.

One appealing aspect of A Single Man is that it is intentionally and repeatedly ambiguous about a wide range of provocative questions regarding homo- and heterosexuality. Tom Ford leaves enough unanswered questions to allow the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions about the meaning of the bare facts of the story. To some, the fact that George and Jim were truly in love, and Charlotte never was, may be interpreted to mean that the love between two males is somehow higher or more exalted or more authentic than the business-like relationships which so many heterosexual marriages become as couples balance the demands of child-rearing and household maintenance.

In some ways Charlotte exemplifies the stereotypical “fag hag,” who ardently wishes, against all physical reality, that her gay male friend might finally see the heterosexual light. (They did have a physical relationship in the past but it did not work out—because George was really gay.) Yet the message in the film is not unequivocally that women are somehow inferior or incapable of true love. Heterophobes may read the text in that way, but a more catholic interpretation would be that love is very rare, between any two people, whether two men, a man and a woman, or two women.

Tom Ford manages to depict the relationship between George and Jim as one of true love, but also as natural as can be. While that sort of depiction may no longer seem revolutionary, given the recent social advances on this front, there was a time when homosexual love was regarded by a swath of the populace as pathological, something to be hidden and corrected or cured.

Homosexual love is presented as normal in this film, while the so-called normal “all American” family is depicted as somewhat unbalanced. George's next door neighbors, a typical suburban family of the early sixties, are cast in a rather negative light. In one brief segment, the young daughter, a blond child with a Rhoda Penmark-like demeanor (see The Bad Seed), catches a butterfly and destroys it between her hands by rubbing them together, crushing the delicate creature's wings to dust. (Animal rights lovers rest assured: the Humane Society monitored the production of this film and has certified that no cruelty was done!)

The juxtaposition of this somewhat boorish and coldly brutal family with the gentle homosexual couple next door seems to be a way of objecting to the erroneous attribution to homosexuals throughout history of psychological and sexual perversion. Again, a heterophobe might read too much into such examples, but a more liberal reading would perhaps acknowledge that cruelty and pathology transcend all demographic and gender-orientation lines.

The film offers a “sexual-preference-less” conception of love (analogous to “color blind”), though the only two characters who achieve true love happen to be two males. The message is not that every liaison between any two men is automatically better than any relationship between a man and woman. This becomes clear as George is confronted with two prospective “replacements” for his long lost love, but neither can fill the void in his soul. Jim was not just a sex object for George, as becomes obvious when he rejects the repeated advances of two different and very attractive potential suitors.

A Single Man plays out over the course of a single day. George has decided to end his own life, and he moves through the morning, the afternoon, and the evening with this idée fixe in mind. He goes to the bank and removes his insurance policy and other papers from a safe deposit box, returning to his home and laying everything out with the suit in which he wishes to be dressed while lying inert in his coffin. He attaches a note to the necktie to make sure that his last sartorial wishes will be respected: tie in a Windsor knot

He leaves a stack of money in a loaf of bread for his housekeeper, and cleans out his office at the university in preparation for his final departure from this world. Once all of the arrangements have been settled in his mind, George attempts repeatedly to shoot himself with a pistol in various parts of his home. 

He is unable to settle on the appropriate arrangement, where he should be when a bullet from the gun fires through his mouth into his head. 

After multiple failed efforts: sitting on the bed, lying on the bed, standing in the bathtub, and even buried within a sleeping bag, George gives up in exasperation, distracted by the phone ringing, which he knows to be his friend Charlotte, who has been awaiting his visit, bottle of Tanqueray gin in tow.

Eventually, after spending some time with a student who has been pursuing him relentlessly, George finally renounces his plan to take his own life. 

It is not quite clear in the film whether the two men slept together or not—the sequence of floating in water could be a reflection of either a physical experience or a dream—but something about the time spent with this sensitive young man changes George's view. 


He replaces the gun back in the desk drawer and turns the key to lock it in, ending what seemed to have been his inexorable quest to commit suicide. George then makes his way back to his bed, where immediately after experiencing a neo-Leibnizian "best of all possible worlds" epiphany, he proceeds to suffer a fatal heart attack.

This dénouement, like the rest of the film, can be read in a variety of ways. One is that what George and Jim had was sacred and should not be desecrated through George's involvement with another, younger man. Another way of understanding the film is as a profound expression of romanticism: that George and Jim's life together was complete, and once Jim had departed, it was George's turn to follow, not by his own hand, but by a force beyond his control. He died not because he was too weak to face the world without Jim, but because it was time for him to go.

Every single shot of this film is perfectly composed, not because Tom Ford was attempting to be artsy-fartsy, but because he really is. The extreme attention to detail, to making sure that every single thing is in its place and properly arranged with balance and symmetry, is an expression of an aesthetic vision of life. The highly stylized quality of this film reflects a desire not only to control the environment in which one spends one's time, but also to be able to gaze upon all within one's view in awe of the beauty to be found in even the smallest of things.

Tom Ford Porn: What does it mean?

While looking for a suitable image to open the lexicon entry on hedonism, I happened upon all sorts of pretty unbelievable things. Did you know, for example, that there are vacation clubs called "Hedonism" and "Hedonism II", where people go to have sex with strangers? Well, it was news to me. 

I also discovered a series of advertisements for Tom Ford Perfumes which I had never seen before. I had seen the Neroli Portofino shot with a naked man and woman pouring, I presume, water on each other from large Neroli Portofino bottles. It must be water, else they would not be laughing, and might even have to undertake a detox program after the photo session, given how strong that fragrance is. The volume which they were splashing around so blissfully in the ad spot could easily have cleared the building. 

I posted the Neroli Portofino ad before in connection with another topic, but here it is again:

Pretty racy, I thought, when I first encountered the image, especially given that the woman is fairly clearly staring at her partner's private parts. Another ad for the same perfume ratchets the excitement up from ogling to direct contact, as though the naked couple were together in bed in the midst of (gasp!) fornication:

A third image for the same perfume features frontal nudity:

To my surprise, however, the Neroli Portofino ad campaign does not hold a candle to some of the others which popped up using Google image search, including this one:

Not sure exactly what this is supposed to mean. Can anyone help me out here? Paper strips used for testing perfumes have been nestled in the woman's behind while Tom Ford, a confirmed homosexual, poses as a creative director assessing the perfumes. The message is quite unclear.

What about this one:

Here we have a more standard advertising technique. The suggestion appears to be that if one wears Tom Ford Cologne, then one will gain access to the treasures hiding behind the bottle in the ad. A version of "panty dropper" logic, it seems. Here a variation on the same theme adds the extra allure of well-oiled skin:

With all of this naked flesh, and the heavy-handed, even panting, juxtaposition of sexual images to bottles, Tom Ford perfume ads start to look verily pornographic!

I use the word pornography with some trepidation, as my own knowledge of the porn world is nearly exhausted by the contents of the film Boogie Nights, which I found utterly fascinating, in part no doubt because it revealed to me a subculture of human society about which I was up until then entirely ignorant.

It's not that I have any principled moral objection to pornography, per se. If it leads men to mistreat women, then I think that is a bad thing, but whether it does or does not is an empirical matter. My real objection to pornography is simpler and less contingent than that. What little I've seen of this genre of self-expression (for lack of a better term) has just struck me as boring or distasteful or stupid—and usually all three. 

Pornography seems to be about separating body parts from souls, and in that sense it does not connect with my own experience in any way whatsoever. I've never had a relationship with anyone which was about isolated body parts. Really. As unbelievable as that may sound, it's true. Perhaps that is because for me, people are a package deal: body and soul. Aristotle opined that human beings were "rational animals" or "embodied souls," and I could not agree more.

Pornography is about severing the soul from the body, and dividing even the body up into appendages to be used as sources of pleasure. Say what you will, but isolated body parts are just not very interesting to me. I am merely reporting on a matter of taste here, not taking to task anyone who happens to like porn.

I also dislike boxing. It's true that one of my classmates in high school was rendered an imbecile by sparring without head gear during a practice session, but I disliked the sport even before that happened. I actually cringe during boxing scenes in movies. Raging Bull is the Scorsese film which I've watched the fewest number of times, and I still have not gotten around to the Hilary Swank boxing movie (Million Dollar Baby). Perhaps there is a connection between my aversion to boxing and my dislike of porn? Do I suffer perhaps from anemia?

Probably what I dislike the most about the small amount of pornography I've seen—and I confess to never having made it through an entire "work", if that term even applies—is that the acting itself was so egregious that I could not even bring myself to watch the thing. To be honest, I found what I've seen excruciatingly embarrassing for the actors. How could they degrade themselves so horribly—not by having sex on film but by pretending to be actors when they were nothing of the sort! Know thyself. 

Which reminds me: while searching for Tom Ford Porn—which returns thousands upon thousands of images—some pornographic shots of Scarlett Johansson popped up as well. I was needless to say taken aback, as she is a real actress, is she not? Coincidentally, Bryan Ross at From Pyrgos opened a recent feature with a photo of and several comments about Scarlett, one of which being that she is the world's least talented actress. I almost left a comment, because I can think of about a hundred worse actresses than her. I am not saying that she's great, but far from the worst. For the record, I disliked Lost in Translation, which I found to be distastefully xenophobic. Japanophobic, to be more precise, and I'll never understand the praise which it garnered (I presume from monolingual anglophone Americans).

Now I am really curious: did Scar Jo (which I learned from Bryan's post is her nickname) do porn before breaking into Hollywood? Or were the porn shots I found photoshopped? Either way, it got me thinking about how easy it would be to fabricate false images of famous people juxtaposed with any- and everything, as in the images of Scarlett with plenty of other people's, let us say, "ample" body parts. Yet another reason to use avatars while roaming about the world wide web...

Add to my avoidance of bad films more generally the fact that I have no interest in watching other people have sex—or any other animals for that matter—and pornography just ends up being a no-go for me. It's not interesting, and I find it aesthetically repugnant and intellectually insulting. Why would I watch it? I refuse to watch bad movies, and the porn which I've been exposed to involved insipid plots and pathetically bad acting. Those are my queue to leave the theater. I never watch regular movies which are that bad, so why would I watch a porn movie which is even worse, given that I've no desire to watch animals copulate—whether dogs, horses, rabbits, or people?

I know that lots of people enjoy or even love porn, and Tom Ford appears to be one of them. In an interview for Harper's Bazaar in 2011, he indicated that he watches heterosexual porn "all the time". He went even so far as to say that his top bookmarked sites are porn sites:

"I watch straight porn all the time. If I go on my computer, there's a button that can connect me to all the sites I look at most often, and they're all porn—and 1stdibs.com. Porn and antiques!"

Tom is not alone. Cyberporn addiction appears to be quite the internet age phenomenon, impossible in centuries past, but made possible today by the ease with which images can be transmitted from one place to another and accessed with an innocent—or not-so-innocent—click of the mouse.

Cyberporn addiction must be real because sometimes when I am in the computer laboratory at the library, I see men in rows ahead of me watching porn, which seems pretty incredible—at a library?—but there they are! They tend to be older men, and my guess is that they watch porn at the library so that their wife will not discover their naughty cookies on a shared computer. I gather that they find it less embarrassing for the people in the rows behind them at the library to know that they watch porn than that their family find out. 

When I've seen what I presume to be "porn addicts" watching women masturbating and the like, I wonder again what the appeal of these images is supposed to be. I guess that I don't understand, but I also don't want to, to be perfectly frank. My reason for posting these Tom Ford Porn advertisements is not so that we can all enjoy the images. Nor am I hoping to draw porn traffic to the salon de parfum, which is not even monetized. No, I have ulterior, philosophical motives.

What do the Tom Ford Porn ads really reveal?

On their face, the Tom Ford Porn perfume advertisements suggest that Tom Ford advocates hedonism. Would that be descriptive or normative hedonism? the savvy salon de parfum subscriber is now wondering. In the Harper's Bazaar interview, the provocateur gestured toward descriptive hedonism about himself. But he is a role model of "coolness" the world over, so saying such things could also be advocating that people emulate him and start bookmarking porn sites, too. "If it's good enough for Tom Ford, then it's good enough for me!" we can imagine some of his many adulators explaining to their employer when asked about the suspicious cookies on shared corporate computers.

One interesting facet of philosophical hedonism is that it does not distinguish pleasure by species. Any sentient creature is capable of pleasure and vulnerable to pain. In an ethical framework such as utilitarianism, if utility is defined as net pleasure, then all sentient creatures should be taken into account in the final equation. That means that cats, dogs, cows, horses, pigs and, yes, rabbits, should be considered in deciding how to act.

Why is this relevant to Tom Ford Porn? you may not without reason be wondering. And the answer is because it just so happens that the house of Tom Ford is on the PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) list of companies which test their products on animals. This is not a result of the fact that Tom Ford is one of the Estée Lauder group companies. Aveda is too, yet they bear the benevolent "Beauty without Bunnies" badge.

If Tom Ford is a philosophical hedonist who advocates maximizing the pleasure of the greatest number, then he owes us an explanation of why his company is injecting chemicals into animals and causing them to suffer so that other animals can spray on the products and hopefully snag some of the hot coochie which his ads promise awaits the wearer of Tom Ford Cologne.

Perhaps I am giving Tom Ford too much credit here. Perhaps he is not a philosophical hedonist at all. Perhaps he is just a money-grubbing guy out to make big bucks. His ads then reveal not what he himself thinks but what he—or his marketing team—thinks that his potential customers think. He obviously does not use soft porn images for no reason. He thinks that sex sells perfume. One surmises that his marketing data bears this out, which is why he has put out so many such ads. He probably knows that not everyone will be seduced by his not-so-subliminal suggestions, but the ads are undoubtedly carefully placed in magazines whose readers generally share Tom Ford's fondness of pornography.

I have never seen any of the above advertisements in any of the magazines familiar to me. So the Tom Ford company has done a good job of placing the ads where they will be seen by people who are likely to view them favorably. Those of us who are not titillated by the juxtaposition of naked bodies and perfume bottles are probably better off not seeing the ads—or any ads whatsoever. 

I own two bottles of Tom Ford perfume: Black Orchid and Black Orchid Voile de Fleur, but they were purchased not because of but in ignorance of the advertising strategies of the house of Tom Ford. The exclusive private collection is this house's effort to appeal to the sophisticated niche consumer and seems to be yet another savvy business tack. 

What Tom Ford Porn reveals is not what Tom Ford thinks, but that his company's marketing data suggest that a fair number of perfume users are hedonists of the sort who use perfume functionally, to achieve other forms of pleasure, above all, sex.