L’Air du Désert Marocain
I know it’s a matter of personal taste, but after three decades of searching everywhere and never falling in love with any perfume I sampled, I came across Swiss perfumer Andy Tauer’s L’Air du Désert Marocain.
I was suddenly enveloped in magic and swept away to the fragrant deserts and bazaars of the Middle East. The head notes of coriander and cumin, carefully blended with petitgrain and melded to a warm heart of rock rose and jasmine, sustained by a body of cedar woods, vetiver and a background of fine ambergris continue to assail my senses in the same way they did the very first time I touched the perfume to my skin. I swooned then, just as I swoon every time I reach for the unpretentious and unexceptional blue bottle of this inebriating and gorgeous scent.
It occurs to me that the blue bottle, reminiscent of the apothecaries’ thick blue glass of the past, is very deliberate. After all, Andy Tauer is also a chemist, and what self-respecting pharmacist would not dispense a healing decoction protected against the ravages of light by the bluest and thickest glass a vial can be made of?
L'Air du Désert Marocain by Andy Tauer
L’Air du Désert Marocain is the scent of desire, inspired by the fragrant world of the Maghreb desert, powerful, sensual and pure. It’s a dry, resinous cedar scent, rounded out, as I already mentioned, with rock rose and jasmine, and hints of typical Moroccan spices such as coriander, cumin and petitgrain. It is a balm for the soul.
And I am passionately in love with this exotic masterpiece.
I have now had the opportunity to sample some of Andy’s other creations: Eau d’Épices, Incense Rosé, Incense Extrême, and Le Maroc pour Elle. They are all absolutely splendid.
So, as much as I also like the work of other perfumers, Andy Tauer, the unassuming perfume artisan from Switzerland, is my favourite.
In Canada Andy’s fragrances are difficult to find, since they have to be purchased at, or ordered from The Perfume Shoppe in Vancouver, British Columbia.
If Andy Tauer’s heavenly scents weren’t enough of a reason for me to love them, Andy’s passion for what he does and the fact that he is “a lonesome rider”, as he says, with strong convictions, would go a long way to commanding my loyalty.
“You need absolute freedom to create beautiful fragrances. And you need time. And the best ingredients you can get. That is the true mystery [of] how to create thrilling fragrances.” (Andy Tauer).
“Welcome to my fragrant world, welcome to a lonesome rider, welcome to my world of perfume making”, Andy writes on his website, giving us a glimpse into the kind of man he is. “I never studied the art of perfume making in a school”, he continues. “I do not compromise when I deal with perfumes. I invite you to test my fragrant sculptures, luxurious and rich such as Rose Chyprée, or evocative such as my . . . Air du Désert Marocain, and you will believe. I am purely self-taught, started my venture 5 years ago in Switzerland and sell my fragrances worldwide. I am 100% independent and follow my taste and instinct. I consider perfumery as an artisan craft, and I want to stay connected to what I am creating”.
Please, Andy, continue to enchant us as you remain unwaveringly true to your vision.
You will not want for acolytes.
A Walk on the Dark, Wild and Tender Side
It was my intention to create a page on Unkempt Thoughts dedicated to my discovery of, and foray into Film Noir and Neo-Noir.
I changed my mind, as I often do, and have decided this particular journey of discovery merits its own corner of WordPress.
A Walk on the Dark, Wild and Tender Side can be visited at:
Out of the Past 1947 - Jacques Tourneur - Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer
I do hope you will stop by.
In Defence of Teachers
Unless we are all self-taught, I think it would be fair to say that without at least one teacher, none of us could really be doing what we do, or even be who we are.
So, why are teachers more often denigrated than appreciated? Is it because for some of us school was 165th priority when we were young? Is it perhaps because we weren’t as good as we are now at assuming the consequences of our own actions and were, therefore, reprimanded by a teacher who wouldn’t let us get away with anything?
One often hears that the reason students drop out of school, or are uninterested is because they have boring teachers who fail to motivate them. Has anyone considered that perhaps adolescence is not the time in a person’s life best suited to the exigencies of obtaining an education? First there is puberty to contend with; then there is the agonizing search for, and solidifying of personal identity. Not to speak of the existential angst that accompanies the whole process of becoming an adult.
The truth is, that despite appearances, the classroom hasn’t really changed that much since the apogee of Ancient Egypt. There is a building specifically designated for the purpose of teaching. There is a teacher and there are students. The teacher directs the proceedings and evaluates the outcome, even if we toggle between teacher directed and student centered education. We no longer sit on the ground, nor do students write on slates, but the philosophy informing our educational institutions and the application of said philosophy remain the same. There is always talk of reform, but the kind of reform that is really needed no one has the courage to undertake.
Besides, I don’t really think that the majority of people really know what teachers do within the constraints of a system that, like most systems, is riddled with inefficiencies, bureaucracy and a slew of other problems.
Yes, they have two months off during the Summer. A vacation that teachers have already paid for out of their salaries from September to the end of June. A vacation that is sorely needed because weekday evenings, and weekends are consumed correcting students’ work and planning each day’s instructional performance in the classroom.
Like parents, teachers give and give of themselves. They are tightrope artists whose waking hours are spent turning like weather-vanes towards whatever small voice is legitimately clamouring for attention.
If it were only a question of standing up before a group of passive faces, delivering and pontificating!
That is not the case, however.
M. C. Escher - Bond of Union (1956)
The teacher’s mind is one mind and its particular world speaking to thirty or more other minds and their worlds, each with its own idiosyncrasies.
A teacher is a juggler, except the coloured balls that fly through the air are not only lesson plans and ideas tailored to specific abilities, but the feelings, hurts, insecurities and tenuous successes of those whom it is the responsibility of all adults to guide towards adulthood.
To be a good teacher requires, among other attributes, a great deal of general knowledge and years of study. Yet, unlike those who forge their way through academia and can benefit from the fruit of their labours, teachers are considered civil servants and not members of a liberal profession.
Yes, civil servants because education cannot be subject to the strain of competing and colliding interests.
Teachers don’t have to be appreciated more than anyone else, since everyone deserves to be appreciated, but neither should they be derided, as is too often the case.
Amazingly Attractive Art I
The Arts, particularly the visual arts, have always been a passion of mine, together with Film. I have discovered many wonderful Art sites and artists over the years and would like to share them with you.
First to
ARC International – The Art Renewal Center
Not only is this center an extraordinary virtual museum, perhaps the biggest on the internet, featuring thousands of high quality images of the works of the greatest painters and sculptors throughout history, but it is also a most comprehensive encyclopedia and reference of historical texts, biographies, articles and other writings about Art. ARC is also dedicated to fostering the Arts and supports Art education in all its variety.
As their mission statement explains, other than wishing to create the largest online museum, ARC also has as one of its missions
“To promote a return of training, standards and excellence in the visual arts.”
Their complete mission statement can be read here.
A Harem Beauty - Francisco Masriera y Manovens (1842-1902) Spain
Mr. Fred Ross, Chairman of The Art Renewal Center is an extraordinary person, whom I know to be dedicated to the resurgence of the appreciation of classicism and neo-classicism in the Fine Arts, and Art Education in general. He was also very supportive of my own creative endeavours. (Please visit my Between the Worlds page).
I know ARC has been criticized for rejecting Modernism, but I feel their founders are justified in wishing to preserve and encourage art that requires the acquisition and application of academic skill.
The collection that ranges mostly from the 16th to the 19th centuries with beautiful pieces from such artists as William-Adolphe Bouguereau or Francisco Masriera y Manovens is stunning.
Egypt - Max Parrish 1902
CGFA – A Virtual Museum
Another great virtual museum is Carol Gerten-Jackson’s CGFA – A Virtual Museum. It offers, in alphabetical order, many works by the greatest painters like Max Parrish.
Why Angry?
I’ve mentioned the fictitious, Volya Rinpoche, maroon-robed creation of the author Roland Merullo in his Breakfast with Buddha.
With his usual imperturbable equanimity, and child-like humour, the Rinpoche
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
observes and then asks, throughout this wonderful book, “Why angry?”
I had never thought to ask this question myself, but isn’t this question really at the root of all that is wrong in the world? If one really thinks about it, doesn’t war have to do with anger? Doesn’t it all have to do with simmering, unaddressed anger: jealous that engenders anger, greed that precipitates anger…?
I think we are angry; angry from petty resentments. Angry because, somewhere deep inside there is an inner child, an inner being that has been hurt, or has even hurt others, somewhere along the way, and is quietly ashamed.
Breakfast with Buddha
Hey, Mr. Merullo, I do hope you will read this one day because I’m really grateful to you.
As I was book surfing the other day, I came across the title of your Breakfast with Buddha.
Breakfast with Buddha (from Amazon.com)
The word Buddha anywhere never fails to arrest my attention, so I moseyed on over to Amazon.ca. The Buddha salt and pepper shakers did it for me. Unquestionably. I looked no further and ordered the book.
I’m only on page 185, but I can’t help myself and hope you will forgive me for quoting a few paragraphs from your book. I hope you will consider it “fair usage” as do I.
How many of us don’t suddenly “feel that there might be something [we have been] missing all along, some primary color of the interior world that … [is] just outside the spectrum visible to [our] inner eye” (Merullo 183)?
Well, I feel like that sometimes. That’s why your book, which I haven’t yet finished, is touching me deeply.
I, too, would give much to meet not only your fictitious robed monk, the venerable Volya Rinpoche, but, like your Otto Ringling, to set off on a road trip across Canada with him.
I’m not as skeptical as Otto, but the metaphor of the piano player is also haunting me. So the Rinpoche has written a book and this is part of the wisdom he imparts:
For many people, many, many people, the spiritual situation is like that of a young boy who decides to take up the piano. This boy likes the piano, likes the sound the keys make when he touches them, likes the feel of the ivory against his small fingers. Perhaps he knows someone, or has seen someone, who plays well, and this inspires him.
As grows older, he continues to play and to practice. As he practices perhaps someone criticizes him in an unkind way, or perhaps he begins to see that cannot play as well as the person who inspired him . . . .
But then, as he grows older, he decides that . . . he will never play perfectly. . . . So he stops really trying to do so, stops thinking about such things. . . . He makes a limit where there is no actual limit . . . [and] builds this limit the way you would build walls around a room, and then he lives there, withing that room, not completely satisfied but not knowing what he can do about this dissatisfaction. He grows old. . . . What keeps him from venturing outside that room is a kind of fear, the idea that he might fail, . . . that he would then not be the person he believes himself to be. . . . In the spiritual realm, . . . what is he denying himself by staying inside these walls? (Merullo 172 – 174)
I ask myself the same question. What am I denying myself by staying inside walls that I know I have built, in some shape or form, around myself?
Fear is crippling. Fear born of the assumptions we make at every turn is even worse, since they are imaginary fears. So, I remind myself every so often of that quote by Winston Churchill who said, “I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which never happened.”
Isn’t that the story of too many of us?
Across the genres…
It isn’t always easy for high school students to synthesize ideas across written and visual genres.
At a recent pedagogical workshop, we came up with the bright idea of pairing commercials with poems that share similar ideas or messages.
This Ikea commercial:
works particularly well with Robert Frost’s
Bereft
Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and the day was past.
Somber clouds in the west were massed.
Out on the porch’s sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly striking at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret may be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.
The idea is to have students surf to Youtube, watch the commercial and have them read the poem. Discussing the commercial will allow for the exploration of codes and conventions, such as voice, mood, tone, etc. of video clips and film. The poem provides ample opportunities for conversation about literary techniques. Both “texts” can then be mined for main ideas and messages and examined together in light of a relevant statement or essential question.
The following Mercedes commercial, for example, addresses the idea of solidarity, of family tradition, or of ensuing generations:
I’m still working on finding the most suitable poem or song lyrics that would pair well with the Mercedes commercial.
More great commercials are:
Themes, here, could be working together, precision, the importance of every voice, etc.
Then there is:
No doubt this one is about cheating death.
Here is Death’s Way by Robert William Service
Old Man Death’s a lousy heel who will not play the game:
Let Graveyard yawn and doom down crash, he’ll sneer and turn away.
But when the sky with rapture rings and joy is like a flame,
Then Old Man Death grins evilly, and swings around to slay.Jack Duval was my chosen pal in the ranks of the Reckless Men.
Thick as thieves they used to say, and it may be that we were:
Where the price of life is a naked knife and dammed are nine in ten,
It doesn’t do to be curious in the Legion Etrangère.
So when it came to a hidden shame our mugs were zippered tight;
He never asked me what I’d done, and he would never tell;
But though like men we revelled, when it came to bloody fight
I knew that I could bank on him clear to the hubs of hell.
They still tell how we held the Fort back on the blasted bled,
And blazed from out the shambles till the fagged relief arrived.
“The garrison are slaughtered all,” the Captain grimly said:
Piped Jack: “Give us a slug of hooch and say that TWO survived.”
Then was that time we were lost, canteen and carcase dry,
As on we staggered with the thought: “Here’s where our story ends.”
Ten desert days delirious, when black against the sky,
We saw a line of camels, and the Arabs were our friends.
And last of all, the lurid night we crashed the gates of hell
And stemmed the Teuton torrent as it roared on every side;
And we were left in blood and mud to rot on the Moselle –
Two lacerated Legionaires, whom all supposed had died.
Three times death thought to take us and three times he stayed his hand;
But when we left the Legion what a happy pair we were,
Then reckless roving up and down the sunny land,
I found Jack eating bouillabaisse back on the Cannebière.
“Next week I wed,” he gaily said, “the sweetest girl on earth.
I wonder why did Death pass by just then and turn to gloat?
“Oh I’m so happy! You must come and join us in our mirth.”…
Death struck … Jack gasped and choked and – died:
A fishbone in his throat.
If you know of poems that would pair well with any of these themes, please leave a comment and I will add them.
It would be great to hear from you with any other suggestions of commercials and poems you enjoy and would like to see added to this list.
Here we go again…
On Friday, March 25, 2011, the present Canadian Federal government, lead by Mr. Harper, lost the parliament’s vote of confidence.
Talk about colliding powers.
It isn’t even about colliding ideologies. It’s all about grabbing power; and pseudo-power at that.
I’m not a conservative. In fact, I’m not really that conservative about anything, but it seems to me, as a Canadian, that we have been steered quite competently through the turbulent winds of today’s recessional climate by Mr. Harper’s government.
I’m just an ordinary citizen, one of the people to whom the laudable ideal of “power by the people, for the people” is supposed to apply. To say that I am not a “political being” would be untrue, since all of us are “political” in the sense that we have opinions and take stances, but politics is really not my thing. I refuse, though, to be fooled into believing that “the people” really have that much say in the determination of government, here or in any other country. Yes, we have the right to vote, but, obviously, we don’t have the right to say, “No, we don’t want another election.”
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper
Politics aside, “injustice” is the word that comes to mind when I think about what occurred yesterday in Ottawa. It so happens I have a particular aversion to injustice, so,Mr. Harper, since it seems that another election is being imposed on us, I would like you to know that you will have my vote. Not because we share the same ideology, but because I don’t like the reason your rivals want you out of office which, let’s be honest, has, in my humble opinion, very little to do with the rest of us.
Yugasanti…
According to
In the Light of Wisdom
by Swami Krishnananda
yugasanti is a Sanskrit term which represents the idea of “one power colliding with another power”.
I see ideas and thoughts as being very powerful and colliding with each other in our minds.
My ideas and thoughts are also bound to collide with yours. They will, then, agree to part ways, or engage each other cordially.
I hope the latter will happen more often than the former.
Giving this a little more thought, it occurs to me that contradictory thoughts are also collisions. I am definitely intrigued by how these various collisions and contradictions manage to cohabit without causing us perpetual and undue distress.
It’s so easy…
It happened to me today.
Actually, it started last Friday.
You know. When you’ve done something wrong that has rubbed someone the wrong way and you haven’t a clue about it until that person’s behaviour starts to change towards you.
Well, that’s what I’m faced with. Not that I actually did anything wrong, but I was talking about something at cross purposes. The result? Dreaded misinterpretation.
It’s bad enough when you actually hurt someone, but to have someone feel hurt when that was the last of your intentions is just downright sad.
Once you realize that what you had no intention of doing, and weren’t even conscious of doing, has the same outcome as if you really had the intention of doing what you never intended to do, then it becomes a real mess.
No matter how much you try to apologize, tell the person in question that whatever you said was part of a totally unrelated inner dialogue and, therefore, not meant in the way it was interpreted, the damage has been done.
In fact, there is nothing else you can do, because we all think what we want to think regardless of apologies, explanations and entreaties.
Misinterpretation is a really dangerous thing. We all know it is. History is replete with misunderstandings of one kind or another. The consequences? Disastrous.
What I’m looking at might not be as radical, in the grand scheme of things, but losing a friend, especially unintentionally, is, I’m sure you will agree, a terrible waste of a joy that did not have to fade and die.
A few breaths…
It isn’t always possible to meditate for as long as we would like, so every so often I stop what I’m doing, close my eyes and recite the following as I breathe in and out in each line:
I breathe in. I breathe out.
Deeper. Gentler.
I become calm. I let go.
I smile. I am free.
“Healing Pain and Dressing Wounds”
Thich Nhat Hahn
In the Face of Fear: Buddhist Wisdom for Challenging Times
For when there is more time:
May I be well, happy, and peaceful. May no harm come to me. May no difficulties come to me. May no problems come to me. May I always meet with success. May I also have patience, courage, understanding, and determination to meet and overcome inevitable difficulties, problems, and failures in life.
Mindfulness in Plain English – Venerable Henepola Gunaratana
This is to be repeated for parents, relatives, friends, all persons who are strangers, our enemies and all living beings.
Unkempt Thoughts 
