Various and Sundries...

By Tom After a week of delightfully cool weather here in the City of the Angels, we had a dramatic turnaround: a weekend of highs in the mid to upper nineties. Luckily it's that patented SoCal dry heat, complete with Santa Ana winds, so feared by firefighters yet so beloved by me who doesn't like the heat back East where you sweat through your clothes and over-exert yourself by, say, sitting up. Also on the plus side, my friend the documentary film producer was a judge at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles, held every year at the Arclight Cinema in Hollywood. I love the Arclight- it has reserved seating and contains the old Cinerama Dome. It also has AC that could store meat. Which is the perfect place for me to plop myself for the entire weekend of watching Indie Indian Films. Not to mention look at some seriously cute Indian guys. Note to self, go on a date, and not just with Sue. In any case, the Bigarade Concentree indeed was on the floor of the car and did not fall out of my pocket onto Wilshire Boulevard when I got it from Barneys last week. The Malle line is very much growing on me- I am not quite sure yet that Musc Ravageur is going to be a full bottle for me- it seems one that I adore the beginning of but don't much want to leave the house smelling of the drydown. Not that it's not a fragrance that I have a lot of respect for, I find myself reacting the same way to Tubereuse Criminelle. Bigarade Concentree starts off with the pungency of bitter orange rind and cumin and I swear a touch of "new Converse All-Stars", weighty and in-your-face dramatic. It settles down as it wears and the cedar comes out to play. I am really liking it except for one thing: like most citruses, it's not very long lasting. I am on the fence with this one; don't know if this is FBW or if I will put that energy into getting a full bottle of Mandarine Mandarin, even if Mssr Turin proclaimed that it was "not particularly wearable" (harrumph!) And onto The Guide... I did get my copy this weekend, but only skimmed parts of it, since I was running off to Hollywood to moon over younger men, acidly judge the artistic endeavors of people with far more get-up-and-go than I, suck up free AC and two buck Chuck and generally waste some space (I know, you're thinking "how does he remain single?"). I will have to read more of it of course. I did chortle at several of the ones that I read even if I disagreed with it, but as I skimmed more I started to wonder if there was going to be an over-sustained level of snark going on here. Now I fully realise that I am in no way not guilty of being snarky myself; I snark therefore I am should be a family motto. But too much of a good thing can turn one from Oscar Wilde into David Spade. I'm hoping as I read more that sense of foreboding will dissipate... Oh and one last tidbit. I wrote to the good people at Lostmarc'h to kvell over Lann-Ael, asking if there was a place in the US that carried the line. I was in no way hoping that they would send me a full bottle of Lann-Ael gift box full of full bottles to the shipping address included in the email (which IS still valid...). Failing that, they did email me back that the line will be coming to LuckyScent in late May or Early June. I can use my decant of that with abandon.