South African society appears detached, aesthetically and socially at least, from classicism. Special occurrences are taking place in the neighbourhood below The Company’s Garden and Parliamentary complex in Cape Town. At 6 Spin Street, sits a restaurant whose presentation concept evolves. Having an actor personify a mentally-degrading Russian Count beside your soufflé, surrounded by a room whose architecture takes you back a century, is a worthwhile experience.
A debate between two lunchers on the pronunciation of
Gilles Botbyl
Marek, who has a travertine-walled apartment but Capetonianly wears thong sandals. Grø, who was meant to study politics at the University of Cape Town, but then didn’t register, due to "personal reasons."
Grø: ...I don’t know hey, is it Persian or Yiddish?
Marek: Well, Persia isn’t really a thing anymore. It’s Iraq now.
Grø: Yes, but, would you rather have a Persian or an Iraqi carpet? Look at that inflection.
Marek: K, but if it’s Yiddish, or whatever, do you think the G is emphasized like a throat disease and the E-S is also apparent?
Features about life from all the world over, presented in English and their mother tongue.
The goddess Venus was once resting beside the Indus River, which flows through Pakistan. While she slept, clever little Cupid used the tip of one of his enchanted arrows to give Venus a manicure. Her nails’ parings fell into the sacred waters of the Indus, and being of heavenly origin, they metamorphosed into Black Onyx once they touched the river floor...
A fair tale. Onyx is also a Greek word for “claw” or “fingernail.”
The model lying with this bottle of Duro was complemented for the fragrance he was wearing over five times within a few hours one evening in Hamburg. The Eastern European cab driver even had something to say about it: He was confused by how captivating the smell was. First he liked it, then he didn’t, then he did again. But he said that he couldn’t wear it. Perhaps a cultural thing. Who will ever truly understand Eastern Europeans anyway?
Duro is one of the curious fragrances of the Nasomatto project, based in Amsterdam. I first happened upon the fragrance at Harald Lubner’s perfumery in Hamburg near the Binnenalster lake, when I’d pleaded with my friend to find a new fragrance for himself. How does a single spray of the pure parfum inside this bottle garner such a strong reaction? Understand first the primeval purpose of smell.
Mr. Lubner explained that Nasomatto’s inspiration for Duro had occured while the perfumer was sitting in his lounge with his hand down his pants. As one does. It was probably a rainy Sunday. On his hand, he smelt what could be considered a very intimate presentation of a truthfully masculine
very intimate presentation of a truthfully masculine scent, which was then developed into a fragrance which enhances all the manifestations of masculine strength.
Early man used smell & scent as a means of communication for the purpose of coupling, before speech had developed. Primitive coupling was not based on personality and shared interests, early man coupled to reproduce, à la animalia. Scents given off by animals and plants, contemporary man too, contain pheromones which signal and trigger social responses in the same species, although today most people are less aware or responsive to these chemicals than before. Each person’s own scent contains indicators about their state of being, readiness to copulate, and their genetic identity. A mutual attraction to someone’s scent is an indication of a good genetic match, to the extent that your offspring will very likely be genetically superior beings, than offspring you would produce with someone whose body odour you loathe. Don’t feel too bad about complaining if someone gets up your nose. You’d probably garner bad young together anyway.
The fragrance each person selects to wear should be chosen to be complementary to one’s own natural smell and character, which applies if one will be wearing scent for the aforementioned animalistic purpose. However, also because of such purpose, fragrances complementary to oneself will be those best received by company. But one may simply want to wear a smell that one has taken to. In which case, one may end up smelling like a flower. Evidently, strangers responded quite well to Duro on the model above, even to the extent that a cab driver who asserted very strongly that he wasn’t gay, was confused about his fondness of a purposefully masculine scent. Someone tell Freud.
The forty-degree Celsius heat and one million percent humidity had resulted in oily skin covering everyone I encountered at the border crossing to Moçambique. The high monobrow rate could not be blamed on the weather, however: That was a more likely result of an extended Portuguese vacation and, as much of a realist as I’d like to be, is perhaps a worse consequence of colonisation than is limited social freedoms. Apparently I am too aesthetically-concerned.
The port of Baía da Lagoa (Delagoa Bay) came into view as I approached Maputo, the Buddha Bar album which was playing, alluding perfectly to the exoticism of this city. I was arriving quite late, having come straight from a game reserve back in South Africa, driving down the wide avenues and boulevards which grace the town, named after Soviet leaders, as I made my way to Hotel Polana where I was meeting friends.
Maputo, like most of Africa, has been called by various names through time. António de Campo, a captain of Vasco Da Gama’s exploratory fleet, discovered the bay in 1502. Lourenço Marques was sent in 1544 to explore the surrounding regions in respect of merchant trade, and King John III subsequently ordered the naming of the bay to be Baia de Lourenço Marques, which Marques apparently referred to as Baía da Lagoa. There is a rumour that da Lagoa was so applied because the bay was en route to Goa in India, during the times when the spice trade powered Europe. In time, the Portuguese lost interest after losing a few too many battles with the indigenous inhabitants.
In the Namib desert, lives a special plant called the Welwitschia mirabilis. Really special. It consists of a few leaves. A few leaves which look like your sister’s hair after she got back from the beach, didn’t wash her hair, then went out to dinner, had someone mistakenly spill a bottle of Pierre Jordaan on her head on purpose, didn’t wash her hair when she got home, then fell into a bowl of yogurt and remained there until morning. Such describes the faded, near-death green appearance of a Welwitschia. Pronunciation aside, you can appreciate an agreed amount of loathing toward the plant. It lives for a thousand years. Sometimes, if the conditions are right and Murphy’s Law spawns the Rosemary’s Baby of irony, welwitschias can live for two thousand years.
Do you have any idea what I could achieve with two thousand years? Do you have any idea what I could achieve with just one thousand years?
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I walk out of the airplane and just as the captain announced a few minutes earlier, the temperature is around eighteen degrees Celcius. It’s late January and I am swapping the Swedish Winter for a week in Marrakech, Morocco.
At the top of an enclave of cliffs which power over the Cote d’Azur, sits Gourdon. Today it may serve well as a reductus, eyeing the Eastern Europeans who’ve conquered most of the Riviera. A Nicoise local whom I’d met a day or two prior, invited me up to Gourdon, a medieval village in the term’s most faithful sense, best-approached by helicopter, because that simply feels fitting in the contemporary scenario of a feudal lord accessing his cliffside chateau.
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It is curious to consider what creations emerge from Ísland. An assumedly un-diverse populace of three-hundred thousand citizens, a third of which reside elsewhere in Scandinavia, from which Sigur Rós & Jónsi, Björk Guðmundsdóttir, and also a definingly rationalist politic have all transpired. Kristjana S. Williams, surprisingly, has no accented characters in her name, though her art indeed contains a mysticism and fantasy which has come to characterise forms of Íslendingur art.