Old perfume ads for new c-list - Syna Majumder

INT. WAREHOUSE/ELEVATOR/POURING RAIN/DARK MIRRORED VOID/EMPTY OFFICE, FORTIETH FLOOR/DUSTY WWII-ERA BUNKER/FRAMED IN A WINDOW/STRIPPED QUEEN-SIZE BED

V.O.

they don’t tailor jackets how he wants anymore so he makes do with longing. sits in corners of bars waiting for them to have paris on the television. a relic but conscious enough that he polishes his elbows and pays special attention to the veins on his neck. his moment passed in the night when he was dead and he woke up to foreclosure signs on video store doors and beige suede. everything is in the missing. his love rubs against the anachronism of his performing it. what he feels cannot carry a tune -- what he loves is the crashing noise of a traffic jam. he is fundamentally incompatible with the work of invisibility. sitting there he licks scrutiny off his haunches.

I have to know! Do you have a favourite perfume advert?

Everyone’s made a perfume commercial! Scorsese, Lynch, Malick, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson. You expect a burger to taste like something; something can look great and hence have commercial value; no one really advertises songs, but you can theoretically film an ad for speakers or headphones. But it could be apple juice in that Guerlain bottle on the screen for all you know! Perfumes make the most out of the synthetic nature of advertisement. It invites fantasy. But yeah, the 2011 'J’adore' with Charlize Theron is really delightful. It’s so ghostly. I’d never buy a bottle.

What struck me about your poem was the screenplay format, a relatively recent invention in the history of writing. How do your poems embrace new (and old) technologies? You mention ‘waiting for them to have paris on the television’ and ‘foreclosure signs on video store doors’.

He’s hoping for a Casablanca re-run because that’s the type of model who sells this perfume. The poetic form lends itself well to observation and to nostalgia. Because of where we are in time, technology is an organic way to access both of those things. I’ve been thinking about artists who’ve redone their work after long swathes of time, or had extraordinarily dense careers — Will Toledo and John Darnielle come to mind — and fluctuation in equipment becomes a marker of so many things: time, finances, age. Because of hours-long video essays, I find myself missing Blockbuster — a chain I’ve never been in the required continent for. All this is to say: poets are often so aware that they are running out of time which is why they write like they have an overabundance of it. Like, seventeen cantos?

Regarding another staple of the screenplay, the ‘V.O.’ (voiceover), what can reading aloud offer for you?

I love a voiceover. I realise that’s not the answer to your question. It’s a secret between the artifice of the work and its audience, like an in-joke or a God mic. Reading my work aloud, in stark contrast, is not the funniest thing. I like doing it, but I’m not the biggest fan. Doing it in my room, I feel like a bad mime — doing it in front of an audience is homework. Mimesis again: what you read out is not what you wrote. Sometimes it lands wrong. But it is also then that the poem becomes something that’s not Schrodinger’s zine contribution, and that’s net good.

You switch to lowercase letters during the poem, as I noticed when I first edited your writing for The Wicked Ant. Is there an influence on this aspect of your style?

I don’t know, exactly. I’ve been working on a lot of prose and it follows the rules of conventional capitalisation, so it could be that there is some level of unconscious differentiation, but I don’t think that’s true for this one. Perfume Guy just doesn’t deserve capitals. When I think of why I might be doing it, I think of LiveJournal posts by band members. (Some more old tech!) Sam Sax, Kaveh Akbar and Hanif Abdurraqib are doing exceptionally graceful things with it as well.

‘his love rubs against the anachronism of his performing it’ is one of those lines I wish I’d written. The poem aches with mood, a brand of wistfulness I’m used to seeing, perhaps, applied to the faded film starlet, smoking from a cigarette holder in a flammable coat, moth-bitten glamour. Talk to me about ‘he’. Why the ‘c-list’ as a subject?

The C-list differs for anyone you’re talking to. It is amorphous and relies upon personal conviction. This is not as true for the A or B list — at some temperature, fame becomes a high-gloss burnishing. But the C-list, or at least this ad’s C-list, which seems very influenced by traditional stardom, is not like that. There was this Zizek ad campaign for Abercrombie which was all about romantic life as panopticon or whatever. Flaccidity as a result of underselling. It’s all block capitals. It feels like you’re reading some sort of subversive truth instead of something which was also okayed by everyone in some Madison Avenue boardroom. How fun is that? I wanted to write something which was a bit more shameless about selling failure.

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