Bali Hai's blog

Synthetical Thinking

 
(Extracts from 'Perfumes', a catalogue published by the Societe Chimique des Usines du Rhone, probably in the early 1920s.  From my private collection.)

I love reading the 'Perfumes' catalogue.   It contains a descriptive list of a wide range of synthetic perfumes, their benefits over natural essential oils (usually cost and potency), a few recipes for perfumes and a series of photographs of the factories that produced the chemicals.   It's full of possibilities!

I've been thinking for some time about making my own perfumes.   I am ambivalent about synthetic perfumes like the ones listed in the catalogue.  On the one hand, I would prefer to avoid the use of synthetic chemicals as I generally prefer keeping things as natural as possible.  I certainly stick to natural ingredients in the soaps I make. But I'm also aware of the advantages of using alternatives to natural products, particularly where there might be a dwindling or limited supply (like rosewood essential oil). 

I've tried researching various essential oils to check whether the production of the oils are in any way  detrimental to either the environment or the people who live near the resource.  The more expensive oils seem to be obtained from specifically grown crops.  Otherwise, it might be wise if I'm concerned about a particular oil to at least try to source an organic version, or one that is locally produced.

In any event, I still find the catalogue inspiring; it's like looking in a well illustrated cook book that makes you rush out and buy far too many vegetables.  And here's something else I find inspiring:

 
(Pink Tiger Lillies.  Taken with a holga and filter.  By me.)

As a second thought, below is an extract from 'Perfume' of a perfume recipe for 'Bouquet of Moss Rose':

Firstly, you need to make 'rose spirit' as follows;

"Grain spirit of 94% strength without odour or flavour is reduced to 70% strength by adding Rose water, and then dissolving Rhodinol in this alcohol in the following proportions:

Rhodinol I   20gr

Alcohol 70% 1 litre."

This is the 'rose spirit'.  So, the recipe is:

"Rose Spirit.....................660cc

Extract of Orange flowers....240cc

Tincture of Ambergris........30cc

Tincture of Musk..............25cc

Tincture of Vanilla.............45cc

These ingredients are mixed, shaken and left for 15 days in a wll closed bottle at a temperature of 25 degrees to 30 degrees C; it is then allowed to cool, filtered and put into bottles for sale."

 

 

Leave Your Troubles Outside, So.

It's warm and damp here tonight but my thoughts turn to Berlin.   No particular reason, though I have recently revisited Christopher Isherwood's 'Goodbye to Berlin' and 'Mr Norris Changes Trains'. 

When I was much younger, working in the dullest office known to man, I purchased the soundtrack to 'Cabaret' on vinyl.   I would rush home from work and listen to it in my room and sometimes I would sneak a drink of vodka to make myself feel less like an awkward 17 year old and more like a sophisticated gent.  It somehow made me feel optimistic about the future and it also made me feel there was another world out there apart from the one filled with endless filing and filming company records onto microfiche (ha!, microfiche!).

 

 

The musical is a marvel in its own right, of course, but it opened up a wider world to me.   I started reading Isherwood's Berlin stories and ended up reading most of his novels.  I'm a fan and to this day I have a photo of Isherwood on my desk which dates from the mid 60s when he visited Australia. 

I read whatever I could lay my hands on, in those pre-internet days, relating to Germany between the wars.  I read a newly translated collection of Bertolt Brecht short stories, took sick days off work to go and see Greta Garbo movies (yes, I know, the movies I saw were not quite German, but it was about atmosphere), stayed up late to watch Fassbinder movies on TV and pawed over the sinister and often grim art of Germany before WWII.

(Conrad Felixmuller: Tod des Dichters Walter Rheimer, 1925.  From 'Berlin 1910-1933', Eberhard Roters.  I note that the original now hangs in the Art Institute in Chicago.)

I don't work there anymore, but I still listen to 'Cabaret' and watch the movie on dvd and yes, even get drunk to it.  I am no longer precious about it, but I maintain a strong connection to the musical and the wonderful things it led me to.

"At eight o'clock in the evening the house-doors will be locked.  The children are having supper.  The shops are shut.  The electric-sign is switched on over the night-bell of the little hotel on the corner, where you can hire a room by the hour.  And soon the whistling will begin.  Young men are calling their girls.  Standing down there in the cold, they whistle up at the lighted windows of warm rooms where the beds are already turned down for the night.  They want to be let in."

'A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930)' from 'Goodbye to Berlin', Christopher Isherwood.

(man in German city at night, 1930s.  From my private collection)

 

 

Perfumed Men Illustrated

As summer approaches, I started to look for some light reading to take with me on the morning train.  As usual, I turned to EF Benson.  I sorted through my collection and found the wonderful 'Freaks of Mayfair', published in 1916.  Being a big fan of Benson's 'Mapp and Lucia', I love finding prototypes of the characters who fill the six novels that comprise the series.  Flicking through the pages, I was reminded of a fantastic illustration in 'Freaks of Mayfair', representing the subject of the short chapter called "Aunt Georgie". 

'Aunt Georgie' is, of course, a prototype of Georgie, Lucia's close friend and ally.  Benson is particularly cutting about 'Aunt Georgie' but he does make a fascinating character.  Georgie is perhaps more recognisable today than he was to the public in 1916, though maybe I'm reading that with post-Stonewall eyes.  In any event, the presence of the effeminate man in early 20th century literature (high or low) seems to be rare, yet I sifted through a few of my other books and found a handful of beautiful illustrations that I thought I'd share with you, grouped together.

from 'The Freaks of Mayfair' - 'Aunt Georgie': EF Benson, 1916.  Illustration: George Plank.

I love the little details, his short moustache, long pointed fingers, jewellery.  It is largely 'Aunt Georgie's' effeminancy that is the travesty in Benson's story, but I think the author goes a little further than that by letting us know of 'Aunt Georgie's' passion for an athletic priest.  I understand that the public wouldn't necessarily have considered effeminancy as a sign of same-sex desire in 1916, being something which developed via the media and 'medical' studies during the 30s and taking its full shape during WWII and the 50s.  So, to me, this illustration, in the context of the story, seems quite modern.

'The Blind Bow-Boy': Carl van Vechten, 1923.  Illustration: Robert E Locher.

I love this book.  Bohemian New York in the very early 20s with the handsome hero sent to the wicked city to test his moral fibre and finally rebelling by running away with a camp Duke.  Ha!

'A Strange Love - A Novel of Abnormal Passion': George Eekhoud, 1930.  Illustration: Carroll Snell (coloured in by an unknown hand - not mine!).

Originally published in 1900 under the title 'Escal-Vigor', it is here published by that saucy publishing house, Panurge Press, New York, under the title 'A Strange Love'.  Eekhoud was one of those decadent writers at the end of the 19th century and the publication of this novel caused a stir, and a court case, as it deals quite directly with a man's love for another.  Not having re-read it recently, I recollect that it was written almost like a fable and, I understand, it was the least 'decadent' of his work, in terms of style, in any event.  As you can see from the illustration, the young handsome one gets killed, matyred in fact, and his lover mourns his loss before getting killed by the angry mob himself. 

'A Scarlet Pansy': Robert Scully, 1932 (though actually 1933).  Illustration: Rahnghild.

What can I say!  This book was part of the pansy craze of the early 30s.  While its style is somewhat quaint, I actually think there's a lot of humour in this camp novel.  The wonderful 'Fay' takes us through 'her' adventurous life and teaches us quite a lot about life in New York in the 30s for gay men.  A great read.  I love the illustration, the perfectly marcelled hair, plucked eyebrows and cupid's bow mouth - at home and easily recognisable in Greenwich Village or Piccadilly Circus before the war.

So here's to those brave, startling, subversive men and the illustrators who captured their souls.

 

Even the palms seem to be swaying.

It has been some time since I have posted here but I am back.  Hurrah! 

I was daydreaming today (imagine!) at my new desk, which is under a large window overlooking a couple of plum trees in full bloom, sipping tea.  My thoughts wondered to a place far away where the warm breeze rustles the palms and the sea gently laps the white sands.  It's funny really how cliched that is, yet so irresistible.  I looked through some of my recent additions to my photo collection and found this lucky fellow:

Yes, that is where I want to be!   What, standing on a palm tree in madras on an Hawaiian beach in the 1940s?  Why, sure! 

I won't be going back in time, not this week anyway, but I will be looking for a short sleeved madras shirt for summer and maybe some crystal framed sunglasses.  I'll be there in spirit, at least!

As I continued to sip my tea, I realised that even my mug was telling me to find Bali Hai.  This was a gift from my best friend and it comes from an etsy seller, YogaGoat in the US:

My reverie complete, I got back down to work.  And, I'm sure I could smell gardenias.

(photo from my collection)

Eye, eye, what's this then?

One of my favourite souvenirs from my trip overseas is an Holga fish-eye lens.  I bought it at an Urban Outfitters in Santa Barbara quite cheap (compared to what I would have paid for it in Australia at any rate).  I was itching to use it so, as soon as I returned home, I whipped it out and shot a few holga shots.  Here's the precious lens:

Obviously, close up shots would benefit more than any other to make use of the curved lens, but I'm keen to use it in other ways to see what might turn up.   Here's one of the shots I took in my garden:

It's hard to see the focal point in this shot, I know, but I love the colours and the streaming sunlight.  It was late afternoon and a beautiful day, so I feel it captured the atmosphere quite well. 

The Holga has such a wide lens on it that I've always found it hard to avoid the subject of my photos looking small or lost.  I don't take a lot of portraits, partly because I have few willing models and partly because I feel self-conscious (note: must get over this).  I will try using the fish-eye lens for portraiture - the novelty of it might help the subject, as well as myself, to relax a bit.  But in the meantime, I'm happy to experiment as usual with scenes of my surroundings.

He's Got The Sweetest Sweet Tooth Too

I'm not much of a sweet tooth.  I can leave chocolate and lollies around the house, sometimes for months, until they turn white with age.  I rarely have dessert.  But there are some sweet things that just drive me nuts.

Biscuits.  I can't have them in the house.  Shortbreads, chocolate chip, lemon crisps - I'll eat them all - at once - and fight you off while doing so.  Green iced tea, such as Liptons, on a hot day - my partner will tell you how greedily I will snatch a bottle off anyone in a five mile radius if I'm hot enough.  Samos, the Greek wine from the island of the same name - it's golden syrupy goodness fills you with sweet Aegean sunshine.  And tonight, one of my favourites, my partner and I shared fresh peaches and raspberries, with a dollop of Jalna vanilla yoghurt.  Those fragrant berries, the luscious peach slices and the creamy mild yoghurt make one of the best desserts you can have.  Simple and luxurious.  Like me, without the luxurious.

A friend of mine recently returned from a trip to Europe and brought me a gift of, amongst other lovely things, a box of Leone pastilles.   She told me they came from the Absinth Depot Berlin.  As is my habit, I preserved them in their original picturesque wrapping, though my partner thought nothing of saving his and so I was able to taste a few of the spicy sweets.  I understand Leone is one of the oldest sweet manufacturers left in the world.  I recently came across raspberry flavoured Leone pastilles too, and I must say, these are beautiful.  I love the crumbly texture of the pastilles and the flavour is fizzing with raspberries.  Here's a somewhat contrived product photo I compiled:

I could go on, sweet vanilla and rose tea, Victoria sponge with fresh strawberries and cream, Haigh's violet creams (man!), black Spanish sherry, but I won't because I don't really have a sweet tooth at all.

Photo from my private collection.

If I Were a Gentleman

I remember first opening the pages of Alain Lesieutre's "The Spirit and Splendour of Art Deco" and being completely overwhelmed.  The cover of the book was different to the one pictured below.  It was metallic gold rather than brown; a lush, rich cover.  This was my introduction to the extraordinary style of arts and crafts produced in France from the 1910s to the 1930s.  Nothing had prepared me for the richness, the sophistication and the extravagance of what I found inside these golden covers. 

The book itself, first published in 1978, is a lovely publication; beautiful photographs and elegantly produced.  But the one thing that made this book sink deeper into my psyche, even more than the lavish photographs of Ruhlmann's furniture, was the smell of it.

I had borrowed the book from my local library (I borrowed this so much that they may as well have just given it to me) and the previous borrower had left a cigar butt wedged between the pages.  A repulsive idea, I know, but having blown the debris out of the book, what remained within the glossy pages was a distinct smell of tobacco, not smoke, but fresh tobacco.  The paper and ink melded with the tobacco to produce an exciting and distinctly masculine smell.  I'm not one for saying 'this is a girl's colour and this is a boy's colour', but what I mean is that the smell reminded me mostly of what men might want to smell like, or, more particularly, what a gentleman might want to smell like. 

I have no idea what this refined and aloof gentleman from Melbourne smelt like and I must say, I don't really care!  What I am interested in is the nature of that complex smell that came from the library book, one which conjured up so much in my mind and was inextricably linked to the sumptuousness of the content and subject of the book.  How I'd love to recreate that smell; tobacco, paper, wood.  I guess I could take up smoking a pipe and surrounding myself with old books (halfway there), but I just can't justify taking up what I know to be a high risk habit for the sake of smelling like "The Spirit and Splendour of Art Deco". 

In the meantime, I must content myself with the occasional sniff of a pipe, or leave a notably fragrant  book open on my lap with no intention of reading it. 

Vintage photograph from my private collection.

Antipodean Dandy - Charming to a Degree

The postcard below was sent to a young lady living in Strathalbyn, a rural town south of Adelaide in South Australia.  The back is undivided, which, I understand, means that it is likely to have been printed before 1902 (assuming the card was printed somewhere in the British empire) and the original stamp has been removed.  There are no other clues on the card to tell me where it came from or when.

There is, as you can see, a message on the front:

"Dear Flo
The latest in P.P.C.s Eh?  'Get off his nook.'  Am pleased to see you got ahead of the Strath Cricket Club.  Some of the men look 'charming to a degree' don't you think?  Shall probably land in Strath end of year & expect to have a good time.  Kind regards to all not forgetting 'Billy', Yours etc  Charlie".

The quality of the painted background suggests it was not one of the better photographic studios - maybe it was another nearby town, Victor Harbor, for example?   He's an interesting looking fellow.  If the photograph was taken in Australia, he would have been quite the man-about-town; not too posh, but careful with his appearance.   Gloves, button hole (a daisy type flower which looks the same as those in the flower arrangement on the table), large soft-brimmed hat, slim fit suit.  He has pale ghostly blue eyes and fleshy features.  And his name was Charlie.

Purchased at a junk shop in Adelaide.

Of Perfumed Hours of Day

We returned from the market on a warm balmy Sunday with a potted tuberose.  I spotted the unspectacular tuber amongst a pile of cacti and basil haphazardly laid out under a vendor's tent and immediately wanted it for my own. 

That evening, the scent of the tuberose filled the house.  The heady perfume really is intoxicating, it draws you in and clouds your thoughts.  You almost think it's too much but you breathe deeper to take more in.  A very sensuous scent, and, I venture to say, a dangerous one. 

Pouring a Pernod on ice with water, I let the scent take me away.  It has a heady, almost opaque quality.  I would describe the scent as not so much 'tropical' but more like 'humid hot-house'.  If it were a colour, it would be an aged ivory white.  A bit sinister, but beautiful.  More exotic than orange blossom, less sweet than frangipani, it matches the velvet-gloved punch of narcissus.  I can't help but think of Symbolist poetry, Gustave Moreau and darkened book-filled rooms.

Digging out JK Huysmans' "Against Nature", I flipped to the chapter where he fills his chamber with evocative perfumes, finds himself overwhelmed and throws open the windows:

"...assailing his jaded nostrils, shaking anew his shattered nerves, and throwing him into such a state of prostration that he fell fainting, almost dying, across the window-sill."

I knew that the hero, Des Esseintes, used tuberose in a recipe to evoke lilac.  Starting with ambrosia, Mitcham lavendar, sweet pea and other flowers, he adds to this 'extract of meadow blossom' tuberose, orange and almond blossom.  Not satisfied with this new artificial lilac, he goes on, in an increasingly mad frenzy, to add more and more perfumes, changing the mood, conjuring more dim memories and disturbed visions until his final fainting.  Some people just don't know when to stop.

And here's more of the same.  The luscious volume 1 of The Yellow Book, the notorious English magazine which ran for 13 editions in the mid 1890s and came to symbolise the rather weary mood of the time.  The first few editions include illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley.  A lovely set of books.

I could go on, in this purple (or is it yellow) mood.  But I'll finish with a poem by Arthur Symons, "Maquillage" from 1892:

"The charm of rouge on fragile cheeks,
Pearl-powder, and, about the eyes,
The dark and lustrous eastern dyes;
A voice of violets that speaks
Of perfumed hours of day, and doubtful night
Of alcoves curtained close against the light.

Gracile and creamy white and rose,
Complexioned like the flower of dawn,
Her fleeting colours are as those
That, from an April sky withdrawn,
Fade in a fragrant mist of tears away
When weeping noon leads on the altered day."

When the living is easy...

Some might think I am obsessed with the weather, but I just like to keep a keen eye on what's going on up there.  All I ask for is four distinct seasons, without extremities, in order and on time.  What I get, however, is threatening skies, strong winds and horrendous heatwaves.  But these events really are few and far between.  I have nothing to complain about, so leaving the doom aside, I turn today to thoughts of summer.  

Here's a snap of a couple of lads larking about at Henley Beach, a suburban beach in Adelaide in the 1950s.  When I was a kid, a trip to the beach just made me beside myself with joy.  I lived for the outdoors, brown as a nut and half naked.  You'd never know it now...

(from my private collection)

Katherine Mansfield, "The Garden Party"

"And after all the weather was ideal.   They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden party if they had ordered it.  Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud.  Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer.  The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine.  As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understand that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing.  Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels."

I read this story when I was much younger and though it ends on rather a tragic note, Mansfield's description of the excitement of a family preparing for a garden party on a perfect summer's day has remained with me.  She really does capture the freshness and lushness of early summer. 

I have to add EF Benson's "Mapp and Lucia" novels here.  The series of 6 novels written in the 1920s and 30s trace the antics of a comfortable middle class woman and her neighbours living in rural England.  Village life has never seemed so exciting, so compelling!  I have read the novels countless times and I never fail to pine for their tiny genteel world and all of their gossip, schemes and fads.  It's light and almost compulsory summer reading.

Here's a clip for Kraftwerk's "Tour de France", a beautiful and evocative piece of music.  And it has images of vintage cycling plus references to the south of France, so how summery is that!

And while I'm thinking about music, here's a few more.  Apologies for only having a few 80s songs.  I guess when I'm thinking about summer, I get nostalgic, but I hope to maybe add to this list in the future to include a much broader range of songs:

So, what else reminds me of summer: yellow and white striped paper straws, waxed cups, iceblocks, the sound of sprinklers (for this, see the opening scenes of "The Day of the Locusts") and the opening notes of Issey Miyake's "L'Eau d'Issey pour Homme" (which I think is the smell of yuzu).

I love the scene in "The Great Gatsby" where Nick holds a tea party and invites Daisy and Jay to his home - it's raining but warm and his house is filled with (Jay's) white flowers and silver.  In fact, this novel is very summery overall, and I'm very familiar with the tired, tension filled atmosphere of that hot stifling day they all decide to drive to Manhattan.

And finally, here is my holga nod to summer: