Making perfume

 

Here is the long awaited story of how we went to Grasse, France, perfume capital of the world, and made our own signature scents!

What's that? 

"Who was awaiting this?" You want to know?

A PERSON CAN WAIT FOR SOMETHING EVEN IF THEY DON'T KNOW THAT THEY ARE!

Let me set the scene:

Back before our France adventure, when it was still just a glimmering dream in our eyes, we were watching the Japanese dating show I recently told you about, Offline Love, where young Japanese people go to the city I live in now and let fate and a few contrivences of the production staff guide them to each other. In this show each person got sent on one special little trip and was able to invite one of the other "contestants" to come with them. One of these adventures was a trip to Grasse, where they would make their own personal scents!

This very much captured my wife's imagination. So after we were in this area of the Cote D'Azur for a few months we booked our own perfume experience!

Grasse is a beautiful old hill town that we were even able to glimpse a bit of from our first apartment here in Theoule Sur Mer, though it was farther up towards the mountains than it looked. I find that pretty much everything around here is farther than it looks, but maybe that's because we walk so much. We took a very handy train to Grasse from what amounts to the backyard of where we live now. The train follows the coast into Cannes, where we have been many times, but then deviates from the main coastal train route up into the hills, wandering through the countryside and a couple of small cities. We had never been on this train route and it was mildly pretty and interesting. The famous mimosa bloom, already started then and still going now, was showing off with some glimpses of amazing floods of yellow flowers. After a little over an hour our train ended its route in the medium sized town of Grasse.

Hmm, well maybe not in the town of Grasse.

It was more like a place surrounded by roads. And then all around that was something a bit like suburbs, semi rural suburbs I guess, or maybe like Bloomington, MN, or the San Fernando Valley. Up the hill, way up the hill, was what turns out to be a richly historic and pretty large ancient city and modern tourist attraction known as Grasse. We did go there later, but only briefly because we had to go home at that point and it was rainy. It was not particularly walkable from the train and required a slow bus on a winding road.

But never mind that, our perfumery was not located in the tourist wonder and charming hilltown of Grasse, even if surely, dating back as it did to the 1700's, it started out there. It was located out in the general and not historic or particularly nice sprawling remainder of Grasse. We walked there without much joy along sidewalks next to large roads. We looked for a place to lunch and failed utterly.

But I am not here to rain on your lovely story of us making our own perfumes! Or on my story for that matter. So let's just move on from our wandering the roads futilely looking for food and leave us waiting in the parking lot of our perfume showroom. 

They were closed for lunch. Perhaps the staff went out to eat at the local McDonalds? 

But we were not alone waiting for our exciting perfume experience! Other people waited with us.

Most of them were Japanese. Offline Love was very popular!

But fear not, the worst part of the whole perfume experience is over now, thank god, because the perfume making was pretty neat. 

We had a sceduled appointment and it cost, well, a lot; a bit over 100 euros each! There were probably about 12 people doing this perfume thing, and each person got their own special mad scientist carol in the perfume laboratory.

I think I even have a picture!

Yes, yes, this is in the main room:

 And here is my work space:

See all those little bottles everywhere? Those were the scents we worked with. We each got the same 120, in three rows of 40. These were the base scents, which were the strong undertones of the pyramid of scent we were building. This would be the most lasting and powerful scent. The next row of 40 was the midtones, and they rounded out the base scent and were more floral I think. And then the top row of 40 were the top notes of the perfume, mostly fruit and some flower, fresher, lighter smells, what you smelled most of initially with a final perfume, but which were also more ephemeral and didn't last so long.

We were shown how best to smell the bottles (take it easy and don't overwhelm the nose. It is a lot of smelling) and set to work testing out the bottom row of 40 scents. Our job was to choose five or so that we liked, just going on our immediate preference, and then rank those five. When we were done the perfume people came around to us individually and gave us the portions we should use of our five base notes, based on harmonious blending and our preferences. We poured them out porportionately into our beakers.

You can see my full perfume beaker in front of some scents, below:

We went through the same process more or less with each of the next two rows of scents, though we were to test those scents against the base we started with to make sure we liked how they worked together. I picked a lot of woods smells in my base notes with a bit of rose and ocean in my midtones, and all the citrus I could in the topnotes.

They took our beakers away when we were done, and our recipes, to keep on file in case we want to order more of it later. We had to name our scent as well. I called mine "Underwood". Then, shortly, we got our bespoke perfume back very prettily packaged in our own perfume bottle with its name on it and everything.

So do I positively reek of "underwood" now? You wonder.

No! 

Now it has to mature for three weeks!

But that's more like two weeks now from when I'm writing this, and I am very much looking forward to trying it out.

And as soon as the AI can figure out how to share scents online you can smell it too!

So many people

 

It was fine when I stayed put in Minnesota for the most part. The world seemed large, but Minnesota sort of spoke to the rest of the world. It acted as a microcosm. And even the travel we took from there hearkened back to that place as a kind of knowable reference point. Minnesota was an analogy.

Then we tore up all the flimsy roots and flung ourselves off once again into the wide world. And there are so many people. Japan was crammed, absolutely crammed, and not afraid to go out and show it. It's not much different here. People are everywhere!

You will not understand how many people there are and neither will I. Yesterday I was talking about all the people taking pictures of the beach here. Everyday ten thousand new people come here and they take a picture of the beach.

I ask you:

Where do all these pictures go?

I follow ten stories, a hundred stories every day, I have a thousand, and I write just one. But do you know how many stories there are?

534,565,109,336,298,004,288,776,364,987,303,219,997,136,399,001,002,697,142,314,688,887,410,014,879,523,659,823,226,444,112,970,003,660,985,321,658,017.

And those are just the good ones.

The moment

 

There's a scene in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty where the super cool and awesome photographer played by Sean Penn, perched high in the Himalayas to photograph rare snow leopards, explains how when he finally has the shot, sometimes he just lets it go. That occasionally he just wants to let the moment be, or something like that.

I am not the world reknown and beloved fictional pulitzer prize winning wildlife photographer played by Sean Penn. I am just another guy with a camera phone out on the beach. There are thousands and thousands of pictures taken just on this beach in this city every single day! 

Nevertheless, I think of this little moment sometimes.

I see the most beautiful ocean yet again, the water a strange shade of lurid turquoise every so slightly different than it has ever been before. The Paillon River, usually a trickle or even a stagnant pond, is running richly out from underneath the very center of the city, a lovely aqua green against the rocks and into the sea, while the sea's high waves roll hypnotically up the river. Larger than usual waves smash into a rare break of rocks at the river mouth and a pure white lather of ocean hurls into the sky.

I think 

"That would make a nice picture."

And then, with my wife, I just stand there.

French apartment

 

There are so many things I haven't had a chance to discuss about our move to France, and since hundreds of thousands of people follow clerkmanifesto now looking for tips on their own future relocation to Europe, I feel a certain responsibility to cover some of those things that got lost in the heady rush of our arrival in this country.

That's why today I am going to discuss... The French Apartment.

You see, I live in one.

I am writing to you from one right now, tucked in a dormer window of a studio apartment that likes to put on airs of being a one bedroom but really really isn't one. 

The rain is pleasantly falling outside in an otherwise quiet night. 

Here, let me get up, turn around, take a random picture through my window, and report back:

 Well, whatever. It is now an hour later and that's my picture... drawing thing, through the partially reflecting dormer window, and that's France. You wanna move here, go for it. They do many things sensibly and with great style here in France, though they lack a bit of whimsy, and for the first ten or eleven years that you stumble around here still trying to learn French be prepared that you will often feel like Mr. Bean.

Well, maybe not you.

Anyway, one thing we read a lot about before we came is how very difficult it is to rent a French apartment.

It sort of is, but I don't want to go much into that now, especially after I already used up all my time I have for this post on making a four layered picture/drawing of me reflected in my window.

What I really want to talk about is what I didn't understand when I obsessively researched French apartments from an anticipatory vantage point in Minnesota.

The prices for renting French apartments are not too terrible considering how the cost of all houses and apartments in France is nearly as bad as those in the United States. And yes, though there are 67 million people in France, there are only about 10 apartments available for rent at any given time in the entire country.

 But the most shocking thing even in that is that there aren't any bargains.

I just didn't figure on there not being bargains.

Let me put it this way:

Say you're at a restaurant, and though the lobster seems nice, you don't have 85 dollars for it. So you're like, well, what are these no frills ham sandwiches going for then? 

65 dollars. They are going for 65 dollars.

That explanation maybe didn't work.

Let me try it like this

 If you can't save a bunch of money, or get an amazing apartment, by living in some wildly out of the way place, with few shops or services available, or by living in an ugly apartment block wasteland that France is full of in their own weird version of suburbs, why wouldn't you just live, well, somewhere like we do now?

I don't know.

But I am glad we got the one apartment they had available in this city 350,000 people.

Offline love

 

Before we moved to this city but after we had visited and were planning to move... somewhere around here, we watched a Japanese dating show that took place in this very city. It was called "Offline Love" and shown on Netflix. It featured a group of Japanese young single people none of whom knew each other. They were sent wandering out into this city and given a base. The base was a cafe/restaurant that had been closed down, rented out for the duration of the show, which was maybe a week and a half or so? They turned in their phones and were given a mailbox where they would receive messages from the show, and could send and receive them to and from each other. Also there was always some nice food at the cafe for them, and tables to sit at. Mostly though it showed them wandering this city with a sort of bespoke guidebook, sometimes alone and sometimes together, and there were some specific area related trips or dates as well.

The "point" of the show was to see how much fate could bring them together, though there were also some events and dates that would contrive to bring couples together in particular ways.

I'm not sure when this show was made, maybe a couple of years ago. We have eaten at the cafe, which is on a very charming square down the street from here. In fact there really aren't that many days we don't walk by that particular cafe. The show must have been popular back in its home country. I always like to look in at the people sitting at the restaurant just to make sure there is at least one Japanese couple or group having a drink or food there.

There always is.

A French mall on the Cote D' Azur

 

Today we went to the mall, a mall so big they call it

The Mall of France!

Not really.

But it was a big mall, full of people on a Sunday, and we took a train to it, walked across crowded roads, and went into the first gaping entrance we found. And it was a mall, like all the malls ever anywhere.

Albeit with a few more pastries,

And a beach.

The sea again and again

 

I take a lot of pictures of the sea here. Some of them might be good, some not. But they're just the sea. They don't really say "France", or tell you about where I'm living, or illustrate the strangeness of a life here that's so different than the life that came before. It's the hardest thing to tell about because it's the most the same. You have the same thing wherever you are. It doesn't have to be the sea.

You have a sky and a moon and a tree or a cactus, a river, rain falling from the sky, or snow, and they're all as good as it gets.

I love this city, it is different and beautiful and usually so interesting. The cheese is good and the buildings are amazing. The streets are lively and full. There's music and history and pastry and the days go by very fast here.

But the sea, crashing into the rocks and the tiny stones of the shore, turns out to be the best part.

Squaring our accounts

 

Having a rather detailed account to write about our trip to Grasse, the perfume capital of THE WORLD, where I created my own scent, I figured I had better clear out my rich backlog of complex photographs, or, um, drawings, or sort of both, that I've been working on. So I opened up my file where I am working day and night on these images, and I found...

Three.

Three?

So be it.

This is behind me right now, and over some rooftops, though the seagull has moved on to other things

This is a view through to the Ferris Wheel as one emerges out of the old town of our city toward the city center currently feverish with Carnival preparations.

This is from the ornate back wall of the chancel in the Russian Orthodox Church on the other side of the train tracks from us, notable not only for its lovely Church, but even more importantly for its fluffy bunnies that live on its grounds.

Off to Grasse

 

As my city feverishly prepares for Mardi Gras, in less than a week, we are off on a day trip to Grasse, the perfume capital of the world.

So I hope you like perfume.

Due to some family interest sparked by an event on a Japanese dating show that took place in our city, we will be mixing our own personal scents in the city of Grasse. And though Grasse was able to be glimpsed in the distant hills from the windows of our Theoule Sur Mer apartment, it is, after four months here, the first place we are visiting not directly on the coastline.

It's old.

It grows a lot of flowers.

And, well, I don't want to bore you with too many details.

But after we go there I may do that anyway.

Or maybe it will just be a single picture.

Or perhaps the first ever blog post you can smell.

Postcard at the library

 

In 2022 I sent a postcard from this city to the library I worked at. It was a vintage image of a surrealistic scene of The Reserve, which is a restaurant and an outcropping of rock just past the port area of this city. In the old black and white photograph there was an old sailboat perched on this table of rock in the ocean, with a little bridge to it. It was very much a real scene. Now, and when I sent the postcard, the boat is gone and it is only a fancy restaurant with a fantastical setting floating on an island of rock. 

After my trip someone taped the postcard to the computer area we use when we're in charge of the automated check in machine.

The postcard was still taped up there when I left the library after 31 years working there.

I don't know how many of the traces of me have been removed from that library, or have faded away. I don't know if someone bothered to toss a four year old postcard away yet.

I looked at that postcard a lot, working on the machine late at night. Now I live here and sometimes we walk by the place from that image. I've taken quite a few photographs of it and here is one, in my current style. This was taken from a similar, hopefully almost identical vantage point that the postcard picture was taken from, with maybe a hundred years between them.

The public music of France

Maybe it is not right to smear all of France with this brush. I really can only speak to the far south down here on the Mediterranean Sea. But I would like to talk about the music that is played in public places.

 And I realise this in itself is a reductionist analysis. We are out in the public a lot here in france, in cafes and restaurants, malls and convnience stores, bars and tiny shops. We are in public buildings, supermarches, and hardware stores. And like in any other city there is a lot of music playing. I hear pop music, French music, jazz, and more pop music. But still, like it was in Japan, there is one kind of music that stands out for how commonly it is played and for how out of porportion it is to the standard kind of music played in cities.

Before I tell you what it is, I want to explain it a tiny bit more by way of labored analogy. 

Say you went to visit Vancouver, and in the shopping centers and cafes and shops and restaurants you heard all the mix of music you might expect to hear, but you also hear, to your utter surprise, old, authentic, ragtime music. You hear it so much it defines the music of the town. Why ragtime music? It stops even being weird. You notice it, but it doesn't even surprise you after awhile. You just understand that Vancouver has something going with Ragtime.

Vancouver doesn't have anything going with Ragtime that I know of.

Neither does Provence and the Riviera.

But the thing that the music here has, that is just like that fictional ragtime in fictional Vancouver is...

Cover songs of hits of the 70's, 80's, and 90's. 

We have been in dozens, maybe hundreds of places here in France that play nothing but covers of hit songs from 30 to 50 years ago. They do not play the originals of these songs. Or, they play them so rarely that when they do I think "This cover is playing it really close to the original!"

Some of the covers are good. Some are... okay. It's mildly entertaining. And all of it seems like a pretty strange relationship to popular music.

I have no idea what's behind it.

 

But so it is on the Cote D' Azur.

Japan had something similar, though better. And perhaps I'll tell you about that in the next day or two.

Rain on the roof

 

The rain is coming down tonight and I hear it on the roof. We are way up in the eaves of an old multi storied building and I like it this way. Cozy. The city seems quiet tonight, though I know it really never is, and counter to what seems normal to me, plenty of people are walking around out there. It is always a relative measure. On the promenade along the beach today, in the gray and the drizzle, it was what I probably would have considered thronging almost anywhere back in the USA. 

Here? 

It was so quiet! 

Look at all the (wet) chairs to sit in over the ocean! Hardly anyone is even swimming! And this group of 40 high school students isn't even in anybody's way.

And so I find it a good night to work on some pictures. These days, as you have seen, I am making them more like drawings or paintings, with etched in layers, causing me to be completely unable to keep up with working on the many pictures I take most days. 

These ones are from Italy still, Ventimiglia, mostly the old town over the river:

The Seussian scale

 

The twisting, vertical little towns around here, most with a medieval origin, but some forming the core of much grown cities, are somewhere a little bit better than amazing. And though European old towns have almost a postcard meaninglessness to them, too picturesque to suprise anyone, in person they are always a kind of visceral thrill, more like encountering a National Park than they are urban tourism. 

Given enough time, people and their works are just natural phenomenon like anything else. And after all the murders and opression dies down, the kings dead and all their children and vassels, our wonders rival the Grand Canyons and Half Domes. When the dust settles we don't compete with god, we're simply made of the same stuff.

Too much? 

No, really, some of these streets I walk feel every bit like the slot canyons of the American Southwest, and the wonder I feel is... awe.

So I've decided I need a rating system!

 Living in France now, encountering old city after old city, my head spinning, I needed to find some way to order them in myself. It is not judgement so much as a way for me to measure what is most important to me in the hundreds and hundreds of years old cities that I feel so lucky to live in and near.

And so I have developed the Seussian Scale to rate these thrilling old cities abounding here.

What is "The Seussian Scale"? It is a measure of the narrow intricate windings of old pre automobile stone villages and cities. It gives points for staircases, tunneling passages, and complicated bridges, routes, and overpasses. Rewarding steepness, complicated handmade construction interacting with outlandish natural features the Seussian Scale is a measure, from one to ten, of just how well a city would fit into a book by Dr. Seuss.

And I am just back from my highest scoring city yet! Achieving a whopping NINE on the Seussian Scale, Ventimiglia in Italy, built on the steepest cliffs over a river and the sea, cutting through tunnels and wandering over its tiny little passageways since, I don't know, the 900s?, was a marvel of Seussian complexity.

My pictures struggle to do it justice, but I have done my best.