Blind Buys and Videotape

For my first decade in the workforce, I was paid to watch television— a career I manifested as a child idolizing my Gen X camp counselors competing for titles of brokest and most bored. In 2010, I landed a cushy temp job in the atrium of the News Corp Building, where I spent my days nursing a three-year hangover in front of an endless ribbon of cataclysmic news tickers. By then, I’d already logged four years of work-study in the basement of Smith’s AV department, ripped off of New Hampshire schwag under the glow of a Panasonic flat-screen. In an increasingly volatile global economy, the entry-level job market was competitive, but by the time the recession hit no one could rival my qualifications: I had begun honing the art of working-without-working at sixteen, manning my first shift behind the counter of Hollywood Video.

In a purple canvas shirt and eyebrow piercing, I collected $7.25/ hr to watch 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) under the apprenticeship of my 19-year-old manager who’d committed the entirety of Jim Carrey’s oeuvre to memory. I said I was dyslexic to shirk alphabetizing the tapes, reflexively chirping “welcome in” without ungluing my eyes from our Sunday Matinee. When I was feeling particularly antisocial, I’d weave through rows of videotapes and pretend to dust the shelves, flipping over the more scintillating cases to read the back-cover descriptions. These blurbs were the entirety of Letterboxd, Rotten Tomatoes, and IMDb compressed into 3 inches of copy. Factory-perfect covers, sheathed in hard plastic, hand-arranged according to mood-state: humor, drama, horror. How simple, this promise of altered consciousness!

While many attribute an early appreciation of fragrance to Mommy’s Trèsor or Chanel No. 5, I’ve said before that I learned about perfumery first through shopping: the mall was my lecture hall, the clearance racks my textbook, and a minimum wage paycheck my tuition. This was pre-the blogs and pre-The Guide, so I learned about perfume the same way I learned about everything: by observing my immediate surroundings. As a teenage Maxxinista, I got a fragrance education by studying rows of colorful shrink-wrapped boxes, locked in the same theft-protective plastic that encased the tapes at I scanned for late fees at my job after school.

Mirroring my discovery of film, what could have been a sensual process became an intellectual one, and I selected perfumes according to the same qualifiers that guided the movies I chose on my 6-hour shift. My prurient interests led me to check out Sex Lies and Videotape (1997) as well as to Calvin Klein’s lasciviously-titled Obsession (both were absolutely fucked). Higher by Dior looked as antiseptic as my new iPod, as did the cover for Vanilla Sky (2001), which I learned was similarly confusing in a bad way. I trusted Pleasures to be as charming as Under The Tuscan Sun (2003) (it was), while the box for Revlon’s Charlie was as campy as The cover art for Jim Henson’s Muppet Movie (1979), with a fragrance as delightfully synthetic as lipstick on a pig.

Evaluating something based on its packaging means imposing a framework the interior medium doesn’t adhere to: how artfully a movie title is kerned tells you nothing about the film itself, just as the visual language of a perfume box, by its very nature, cannot convey concrete information about the fragrance inside. Department stores offered unique access to perfume “testers” the same way art house theaters were the only places to watch indie movie trailers, but living in the suburbs meant access to neither, so blind buys became my working syllabus. This meant that when I sacrificed 175 minutes of my young life to Oliver Stone’s Alexander, or $12.99 to a bottle of mouthwash-scented Giorgio, I chalking it up to the cost of connoisseurship and charged it to the game.

My earliest memories of these blind buys are colored with nostalgia, broadly, for a culture built on physical media, and more personally, for my earnest devotion to the project of being cool. They don’t know that being cool used to be hard work! Because it took forever, learning about what you liked used to be a process that shaped character. Already at 15, I felt sooo behind, spending nights at home watching movies instead of losing my virginity, investing in a future where I might fit in with the erudite college crowd I fantasized belonging to. I wanted to get every reference, to always be in on the joke, experience the full texture of life. I resented the forward march of time for fear that I might be left behind.

This temporal anxiety shapes my relationship to the same artifacts now—a justification I cling to as I indulge the wistful reminiscence I once attributed to my parent’s generation. As a teenager in an analog world, what was gone was literally irretrievable, so I today, I scour eBay for discontinued EDTs that once constituted checkout line impulse buys, priced today at $300 or more. Fragrances that carry the etherial promise of Dream, Heaven, and Angel instead arrive pungent with the acridity of age. Made unwearable by the passage of time, I line them up on my shelves for display, where they return to their original function as symbols—the ouroboros of nostalgia completing its loop—relics of devotion to an ongoing project I began 20 years ago: the creation of the self.*

*Speaking of objects and identity: Miss Centerfold finally has a box befitting her glamour puss persona. The next run comes in upgraded packaging designed by Maddy Kunkle, who makes everything look beautiful. Isn’t she lovely? Available very soon everywhere Centerfold is sold.