on memento mori and perfume
“The Decay of an Angel” perfume by Timothy Han / Edition and/or “The Brief History of the Dead” by Kevin Brockmeir
23 April 22 1
This is about memory. So it may be fallible. It may ramble. The word evocative is frequently used when discussing scents. Apparently there's science behind why smells and memories are tied together 2. Both are evocative and both are also elusive. Wine reviews are famously pretentious, but wine itself has a secret weapon, regardless how ridiculous the description. It gets you pissed. Doesn't really matter if it smacks of wet leather if it gets you plastered.
Perfume is much harder to describe. Listing the ingredients doesn't cut it. It's virtually impossible to describe the smell of a perfume, or an ingredient new to you. Only comparison to another works. Let's dismiss the pedants now, we're not talking neroli and cedar candles. We know what neroli (orangey init) and cedar smells like. Can you describe Poison by Dior, or Happy by Clinique?
Easy to recognise, and in the case of Poison, weaponised in use. I recently met an estate agent wearing it. Or they had been dipped in it. Hard to tell. Olfactory assaulted.
I recently bought Anne "The Decay of the Angel" by Timothy Han / Edition perfumes. If you're a client and you just Googled it, you're not paying me too much. I had to save up to afford it. Whereas eye-watering is a good descriptor for Poison's scent, it's a better adjective for The Decay of the Angel's price.
But it smells fucking nice. If you like that sort of thing.
We need to untangle Ian Curtis, memories, perfume, and the illusion of collective grief. I do at least. Let's start with Yukio Mishima.
Fallible, rambling and elusive. Actually I'll start with David Bowie. In the course of writing this newsletter I noticed that whatever the "mild philosophy" aspect picked to accompany the product, familiar names kept recurring. It's no great surprise that David Bowie should feature a lot in your life if you are a massive fan. I'm not. I love a handful of songs. Adore in fact. But dislike Ziggy and Aladdin, way too twelve-bar-boogie for me.
But exploring the fabric of my life I'm surprised what a thread he is. (Save yourself the effort, I know I'm a pretentious cunt). His music has accompanied me through my life. "Where are we now?" came out in 2013, close enough to my only visit to Berlin. Hearing it instantly brings back the memory of Anne and I in a cab realising we were driving across Potsdamer Platz, and the song entering my head, and hearing it makes me think of being driven across Potsdamer . A self referential loop. It's as if he's been following me. Rather than the obvious logical conclusion that I've been following him.
So his death could have personally affected me. To be honest it didn't. A heartless pretentious cunt then. But one can understand how the death of an artist you've followed from teenhood can seem personal.
The first time I became aware of the finality of death was when Ian Curtis died. People of a certain age refer to “Unknown Pleasures” as the lost years. These are the two years you spent listening to it on headphones stoned out of your gourd. If you're younger than me then Nirvana's "Nevermind" probably has the same function. My professional interest in music cut off around then so you'll have to tell what the later albums are for Gen Y and counting.
My grandfather was still alive, no one I knew had died yet. Ian Curtis killed himself on 18 May 1980, exactly two calendar months after the release of "Atmosphere" on the 18th of March that year. Seventeen year old Julian at the bus stop listening to that portentous baseline had a crash course in the finality of death realising I'd never hear his voice sing a new lyric.3
The music industry and late capitalism of course made sure this wasn't true. Being dead doesn't stop new albums being released4 when you're the hottest thing since rainbow leggings (it was 1980). I saw Joy Division at the The Lyceum, 29th February 1980 for £2.50. And yes, they were that good.
Another year, another taxi. 1997. Anne and I asking the cabbie if anything had happened while we were on holiday, "Only blooming' Princess Di dying is what", there may have been a "guvnor" in there as well. Followed by six months of collective hysteria. In an uncanny confirmation of something or other I just googled "collective hysteria mourning" now, to find a cool word to use, and the top hits are Princess Di.
Grieving Diana - public display of emotion or just a carnival of ... 5
Media and Popular Reactions to the Death of Princess Diana 6
There is a tipping point somewhere between sensing the loss of an artist whose work has shadowed us, and the belief we are affected by the death of a celebrity where our mutual spheres of influence have never touched. I feel there's a precursor to the rise of reality tv, being famous for being famous, and social media. We all want to get home tonight so I'm parking this one here for now.
David Bowie. And his pretentious threading in the fabric of my life. And Yukio Mishima.
Yukio Mishima wrote "The Decay of an Angel".
I first became aware of Yukio Mishima in 1980. On a t-shirt. My memory is very hazy over this. I must have been 15 when I printed my first t-shirt. For a band called Pinpoint.
Threadless7 and their successors with print-on-demand have democratised the printed t-shirt. Now any good graphic designer can produce an amazing niche print, recently I bought Anne a fantastic feminist Star Wars mash-up vest.
The "independent" t-shirt arose in the late 70s. There's fertile ground for a sociological history of the UK through t-shirts, but I'm not the person. I've just spent two weeks trying to remember the name of the company that did the Yukio Mishima one I want to mention. Except it's not. I got confused with John Dove and Molly White. You've probably never heard of them. They invented the printed t-shirt as we know it, inspiring Vivienne Westwood. And me. Who aged 15 saved his pocket money to buy their Marianne Faithfull Mars Bar print. They silk-screened jersey panels which were then made into t-shirts. So ahead of the game before there even was a game.8
The people I was thinking of are Artistique Et Sentimental. Who did a full coverage Yukio Mishima design9. I was flogging my Seditionaires inspired Mao shirt with Artistique Et Sentimental-esque scribbles over (actually random text from a Chinese newspaper I borrowed from the local takeaway, you could do shit like that in 1980) at Kensington Market, when a conversation struck up about how great the Mishima design was, which led to my designing the sleeves for 80s indie starlets The Primitives.
As post-punk rebels in the early eighties we lived dangerously on the edge, printing our T-shirts, inspired by Robert Deniro in Taxi Driver (thanks to The Clash) and the bonkers Japanese sword guy who committed seppuku when his coup to restore samurai honour and the Emperor failed. One Yukio Mishima. Give me a break. I was seventeen.
Here's my Jesus and Mary Chain design, which shows the influence of the Mishima shirt. Although I secured latex from Dunlop and had real red rubber blood dripping from the stigmata.
(Incidentally this isn’t really a Jesus and Mary Chain t-shirt. I know it says JAMC very clearly across it, but in reality my friend Rob was at the time building electric votive shrines to sell to churches across Eire to replace candles as so many alter boys were setting themselves on fire. No. Really. I, during a Beamish inspired moment dared him to deliver one wearing a t-shirt with Jesus being crucified on a pair of chainsaws. He accepted. The real red rubber blood dripping from stigmata™ may have come to me then, or later, I forget. Anyway dare accepted I had to make one, so sold the idea to 5th Column t-shirts as a JAMC thing, then had one of the printers run one off for me without the lettering screens being printed. Rob wore it delivering an electronic votive shrine, where the receiving priest utterly ignored the subtle design upon his chest. What a fucking joy killer huh?)
This succinct critique of early t-shirt history is actually weeks of Googling trying to jog my memory. Only pieced together from finding mislabeled photos.
As a young man I was much taken with Nicolas Roeg's "The Man Who Fell to Earth" featuring one David Bowie. I still rate his haircut in that film as the finest hair style ever. For many years, until embarrassingly recently in fact, I thought the film was dramatised from a book called "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea". I have no idea where I got this idea from. It's quite ridiculous. I have a vague recollection of seeing a copy of the book on my mother's bookshelf amongst the Gurdjieff10 and Roland Dahl. But this could be an utterly false memory.
And rather insulting to Walter Tevis11, the author of The Man Who Fell to Earth who it turns out also wrote the novels that The Queen's Gambit, The Hustler and The Color of Money were adapted from.
I first wanted to buy Anne some The Decay of an Angel perfume in September 2018 after I had been looking into scents based on books and libraries. I emailed Timothy Han asking if I could drop into his Somerset House HQ and sniff it. No go. Liberty now stocks it, it didn't then.
Smell Stories in Belgium also stocks it. They are lovely. I had a "smacks of wet leather" moment conversing with them last month enquiring how it smelt. I sent them a list of the more experimental perfumes I liked, and asked if it was a goer.
Here's what they said "I would categorise all Timothy Han perfumes as ’the niche of the niche’. They are very conceptual... The best way for me to describe The Decay of the Angel... it’s a perfume that smells a bit like a bunch of flowers you’ve had in your house for a week, and you’re wondering if you’ll throw it away or just keep it one more day. The decaying aspect is certainly present. Not something everyone likes.”
Naturally I bought it immediately.
Needless to say Anne being Anne meant I couldn't just rock up with a perfume based on a book unless I could give some background. Would you have guessed, but The Decay of the Angel is written by a Yukio Mishima. The same Yukio Mishima on the t-shirt from 1980. My pattern seeking brain went into overdrive. Or meltdown.
It's part of his The Sea of Fertility tetralogy. Nope, I had to look it up too. A tetralogy is something made up of four works. And Anne being Anne I couldn't just buy the last one, because of course Angel is the final title.
So Googling away to find the others and fuck me if Yukio Mishima didn't write The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. But before that revelation, what should turn up but David fucking Bowie's painting of Yukio fucking Mishima12. Don't look for the patterns. Madness awaits.
Just googled for a good image of image of the painting (the one I first saw was a terrible reproduction) and this turns up from the V&A Bowie show
In 1976, when Bowie headed to New Mexico to film The Man Who Fell to Earth, he insisted upon taking his personal library with him, which consisted of more than 400 books. He packed them in flight cases normally used for costumes and amplifiers. His taste was, of course, impeccable, and absurdly wide-ranging; books on display at the Brooklyn Museum include R.D. Laing's The Divided Self, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason, Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, the complete works of Dorothy Parker, John Cage's Silence, and Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. 13
Incidentally there's also a Bowie t-shirt in the V&A collection that’s credited as designer unknown. Fuck me, if it isn't John Dove and Molly White's iconic Ziggy shirt14. The karmic clowns are colliding in my consciousness.
Anyway. Turns out Timothy Han's The Death of Angel perfume is amazing. Niche. Beautiful. Decaying flower water doesn't do it justice. Anne has no idea of the price and has been rinsing the bottle. I'm not going to tell her. It's to be indulged. Oh. Yes. She'll probably know now won't she?
But Julian, what does it smell like?
The Buddhist scriptures tell us their angels, called devas, have five signs of decay
1. The flowery crown withers,
2. Sweat pours from the armpits,
3. The robe is soiled,
4. They lose self-awareness, or become dissatisfied with their station, and
5. The body becomes fetid or ceases to give off light, or the eyelids tremble.
It smells better than that.
Anne is now slogging her way through the first tome of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy. From her description of it I would rather commit seppuku than have to read it myself.
Which obviously means I'm hardly going to recommend a Mishima15 (although I've finally bought The Sailor who etc etc). And equally obviously I'm going to recommend Timothy Han Editions "The Decay of an Angel". But it's fuck off Julian expensive, so given the themes of death and memory I'm going to proffer a more affordable book as well, one I read a few years back and has stayed with me. For a short while I wanted to make films, then I saw a play by Mike Bartlett, so now I'd rather write plays. "The Brief History of the Dead" by Kevin Brockmeier16 is one of the two books I have already art directed in my head.
“The Decay of an Angel” perfume by Timothy Han / Edition
www.smellstories.be/en/timothy-han-the-decay-of-the-angel-eau-de-parfum.html
www.timothyhanedition.com/collections/the-decay-of-the-angel
“The Brief History of the Dead” by Kevin Brockmeir
I would set it in Brasília, the 60s city designed from scratch by Oscar Niemeyer17. Pure white modernity. Bleach out warm hues. And the Antarctic. You kind of have to, given it's half set there.
The book itself is great, short, elegant, poetic without being flowery or literary. But even better is the inspiration behind it, from African philosophy or beliefs. Buy it. I'm not going to tell you what it is.
And since we’re being all random association also Wim Wenders’s (the same old names recur) “Wings of Desire'', which I tried to show to my daughter aged eighteen, she lasted twenty minutes. I guess if you weren’t brought up on Truffaut, Colombo and Nick Cave then moody Berlin existentialism about muttering angels doesn’t hold as much sway.
“Wings of Desire” directed by Wim Wenders
Further listening
“Atmosphere” by Joy Division
References
I realise in hindsight that there isn’t much memento mori mentioned in this post, if any at all, but here’s what I was thinking about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
Atmosphere by Joy Division, video above
Who the fuck knew that there are quite so many Mishima t-shirt designs out there
https://www.google.com/search?q=Yukio+Mishima+shirt&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiby8q77ar3AhVwxoUKHWULDRoQ_AUoAXoECAIQAw&biw=2080&bih=1191&dpr=1
There’s a reasonable chance your post-punk t-shirt buying or Bowie obsession spared you being aware of Mishima before this post, so here’s some Wikipedia links to check out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sailor_Who_Fell_from_Grace_with_the_Sea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decay_of_the_Angel
Brasília, architect Oscar Niemeye
I enjoyed this, especially being reminded of the brilliant Wenders movie. The muttered text, by the way, is by Peter Handke, one of the most prominent poets in the German language area of the 70s and 80s, and now also graced with a literature Nobel prize. But you are right that his protest movement poetry would not appeal to many young people today. About releasing music after one's death, this reminded me of the recent Abba Voyage stunt. Okay, they are not dead yet, but one can already see Freddie Mercury's hologram slowly materialising out of the mists of the future. And not to forget the resurrected stars in Star Wars, for example. It would be interesting to think about what happens to a culture if death slowly disappears from its collective consciousness, at least as a career obstacle. Thanks!