Kookoo for Koku

Koku, translates to English from Turkish as
odor/scent,
mentioned
in a previous post
Vedat Ozan's smell/scent radio show.

Not speaking Turkish, for me the sound koku evokes the cooing of morning doves or pigeons, which I find lovely.

 

Here a current article on perfumer, photographer, radio show host of Koku Vedat Ozan, as the title says, the man who beautifies his life with photography and smell.
Vedat Ozan's photography here and here The perfumes I have smelled to date are divine, fun, bracing,sensuous and other adjectives depending on the one.

The title Kookoo for Kokuechoes the sillily sung tagline for Cocoa Puffs cereal, repeated by the mascot coocoo bird. Actually it was as catchy as the idea of having a chocolate breakfast cereal. In my family we kids weren't allowed to have its sugars, so of course I got it "bootleg" from a neighbor or snuck it somehow, fascinated with how the milk became chocolatey brown.

So coocoo or kookoo, obsession comes up among the perfume/scent/olfaction crowd.

"Until you dream it," used to be the training ... whatever you were studying, a different language, choreography, a new topic, music, software, recipes. It was not merely eat, sleep, read, talk, live it ... you had to dream it. When young, overhearing my ballet teacher from France saying, I knew I had the language (English) once I was dreaming it, left an impression, as well as a memory every time I dreamed something I was learning - both in waking life - and learning in dreaming life.

Obsession. I am not talking about having to wash your hands 50 times before you can proceed to the next square of your move, trying to control life, but, you may try something 50 times, sketch it 50+ times, play with the variations 100's of times because you know you are working towards it, you are making yourself available for it to get you! Thus the practice of practice. With practice the form emerges.

Outside my prior journalistic purview, people sometimes stop mid-conversation and say, but I don't want to bore you with my rambling, I could go on forever about (geology, star formation, nanos, music, movies ...). It is there where the gems are. When people get onto the topic of their passion, if they have a passion, I hope they have a pash, a light lights up behind the eyes, the voice ignites lyrically playing through accent and dialect. On that bubble you can just take a ride around the world they're sharing.

To speak the language of koku is a gift
and I love all those who can speak it with me
we cross boundaries of land, language and time
for, the magic in the bottles and books still talks
long after its author is gone
















photo: Silver Lunar Landscape Cactii Lura Astor
Illustration:  Femme Lura Astor (original fragrance by Edmond Roudnitska for Rochas (and his wife Therese)

winter's solstice is almost here

Cold things
have little smell,
and one of the attractions
of a snowy night
is the total blank
our nose perceives.


~ Luca TurinThe Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell
 





But flowers distilled,
though they
with winter meet,Leese but
their show;
their substance
still lives sweet.

~ William Shakespeare

Sonnet 5
Those hours that with gentle work did frameThe lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell
Will play the tyrants to the very sameAnd that unfair which fairly doth excel.
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there,Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,Beauty o'er-snowed and bareness everywhere.
Then were not summer's distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show;
their substance still lives sweet.~ William Shakespeare

I love juxtapositions of spritzing spring/summer
in the dark of winter,
notes held captive in glass reveal their stories of light and season.
In bright of summer, putting on a cool, sharp winter plays with the senses.

The perfumers' art amuses
and for this
I thank them, heartily, joyfully.

photo: Lurana author in 1967 or '68
part of a photoseries/art poem
for an art project to a Ferlinghetti poem
Pound Ridge Tree Reservation, Connecticut