Extra-sensorial Extracurriculars, part one
an inaugural list of books tv and music i've relied on over the last year
I know you likely only know me for my ability to respond critically to one’s sense of smell, but I promise – I have useless degrees in both visual art and Modern literature. I want to offer this new series, extra-sensorial extracurriculars, as a way of giving paid subscribers a bit more intimate view into the works I’m consuming on a daily basis, and the things that will inevitably seep into how I see the world and write about the perfumes I smell within it. I am aware of the specific resonance of releasing content on this blog behind a financial barrier, but to be completely candid with you I now no longer have the luxury of being able to consistently write freelance for free. If you feel shut out by this policy, DM me on twitter and we can work things out. That said, this is my idea for a compromise between perfume articles – which on principle I intend to never paywall upon initial release. I had been developing this idea for a while now, and so most of these entries will be dated from a temporal range between last summer and the end of this winter. Thanks for understanding, and God bless.
DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, 2nd Edition, Marsha M. Linehan
This is the book they have you buy when you are admitted to the partial hospitalization program I started in August, and had written this entry in the off-hours between. I think DBT gets thrown around a lot of weird places for a relatively novel and experimental form of treating borderline personality disorder and in recent years, eating disorders and to a lesser extent ocd (those are me!) – but the core of the treatment is essentially replacing harmful behaviors with a set of photocopied worksheets designed to promote radical acceptance (not approval) of dialectical thinking. Having been propelled into the psych ward from grad school, I found it chillingly amusing to hear dialectics (incorrectly) invoked in therapy. That said, Marsha’s dialectics are a little less convoluted than Hegel’s. DBT revolves around accepting that two things, seemingly opposed, can both be true. The central mechanism of this therapy is essentially understanding that life is messy, weird, unfair, and ultimately completely your responsibility to cope with. Marsha herself – who I feel I have earned the right to call by her first name – was hospitalized for misdiagnosed borderline, schizophrenia, and chronic suicidality during roughly the same time in her life I now write to you from. she writes in the introduction:
This book is dedicated to all the [mental health] patients of the world who think that no one is thinking of them. I considered telling you that I would practice skills for you so you don’t have to practice them. But then I realized that if I did, you would not learn how to be skillful yourself. So, instead, I wish you skillful means, and I wish that you find these skills useful.
When I originally started that program, I thought DBT was somewhere between a woo-woo cult and a bodhisattva exaltation. Nearly half a year out, however, I think I have come a bit closer to achieving enlightenment myself. It isn’t about believing these things to be true, it’s about understanding the patterns that form in your life as logical outcomes to unreasonable often contradictory situations, and to understand the power you have – despite everything – to choose differently. In a sense, and I truly do apologize for doing this to a system Linehan herself intended to base off a kind of appropriative hodge-podge of Zen instructions – DBT is kind of Christ-like, because it holds empathy with the lowest of the low, understanding that people don’t hurt themselves for no reason – harmful and maladaptive behaviors are at their core, simply misguided ways of attempting to cope with the world around us. The center of healing is always mercy. Bad things will always happen to good people, and good people will always do bad things to themselves. There is no real way around addressing these difficult truths head on, there are only sets of worksheets you can use to apply yourself to accepting them with intelligence and grace.
The Crack-up, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Lately I’ve been enjoying reading the collected letters and ephemera of some of the most notable mid-20th century fiction writers. There’s something comforting about reading the ways in which their daily lives are touched by the same forces that propel me: chronic bouts of listlessness, vicious self-reflection, relying on the financial graces of others, and an intense need to romanticize one’s lifestyle. Fitzgerald’s The Crack-up is one such compendium, assembled posthumously, of miscellaneous letters and notes portraying both his image-based writing process and his descent into bitterness as the Jazz Age stumbled and fell into the Depression. I read this angsty, capital h Historical book in an almost laughably picturesque situation – vacationing in the Adirondack Mountains – and I will admit this was part of the appeal to me. I felt positively Gatsbyesque flipping through his letters to Zelda at a mountain country club. Living, as he did, preciously and briefly on the luxuries of others. Fitzgerald’s primary source of delirium was the ineffable passage of time, and he spends his letters railing against it on the thin line between grouchy and poignant. Moments that spoke to me were recollections of shining memories with friends in Harlem, a guidebook of phrases designed to prompt scenes (there’s an entire section devoted to only descriptions of girls!!), and autobiography-as-cultural criticism that contains moments in which he essentially solves most of his own problems. If the source of his (and my) ailment is change, the remedy is accepting, not endorsing, the doomed nature of all things deserving of being alive and good and perfect forever. He writes, notably:
Before I go on with this short history let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
Between poetic and ironically geriatric reflections on women’s beauty fading with age and travelogues to fabulous old world hotels, there’s a really important lesson here. At the moment I write this entry I am twenty four tomorrow, and for the first time in years, feel more on the path towards first-rate intelligence each day. Very skillful, Scott. Very skillful indeed.
Passion Pit – Gossamer (Extended edition)
Maybe this is conceited of me to say, but i think no one truly cares about the music of Michael Angelakos like i do. Originally developed as a valentines gift to his girlfriend in college, I think a lot of people write off Passion Pit via Sleepyhead and Take a Walk as a dated artifact of indie sleaze and tumblr music culture. To be honest, like a lot of the emotive late 2000s electro-pop projects helmed by sensitive men I've developed extreme parasocial relationships to, to I've been a fan of his music before it blew up on micro-blogging sites, and I have certainly remained a fan after its relevance has faded. Angelakos himself has a really fascinating arc I think most people aren't even aware of. After starting Passion Pit and devoting the Chunk of Change EP to his then-girlfriend Kristina, he went on to make albums coinciding with each stage of his life. In order: touring during a full-fledged manic episode and being hospitalized for bipolar, slowly rehabilitating after a long break from music and proposing to his girlfriend, amicably separating from his then-wife and coming out as bisexual, and finally learning to love himself as his mental health finally stabilized via experimental electrical brain stimulation for treatment-resistant mood disorders. Needless to say Gossamer was the album he essentially destroyed himself touring for, and the music itself reflects that hyperactive, untenable sort of happiness that makes your loved ones worry on your behalf and the world feel so damn simple. Last summer, after a long attempt to diverge from the exploitative music industry and a pronounced and assumedly intentional silence on his earlier work, he released an extended edition to Gossamer, perhaps his most popular album. These songs, especially the bonus track American Blood, the frenzied Hideaway, and the alternate, uptempo version of Constant Conversations have been the soundtrack to my year. There is something about pitched-up vocal techniques that have always captivated me, most likely due to my own relationship to gender performativity, anonymity, and ekstasis. To be frank, at the time of writing this entry I myself was about to be institutionalized, and was on the verge of a bubble of harmful and unstable patterns of self-loathing, masochistic hyper-productivity, and repression finally beginning to burst. These songs remind me that however hard the fall inevitably is, I'll be alright.
Hospital Playlist, Season 2
I’ll be the first to admit. When people describe Korean dramas as “formulaic” or “cheesy” in their saccharine adheral to adapted ao3 couple shipping tropes, I'm the first one there. Life is hard, and at night as the pink beauty rest melatonin gummies are kicking in, I want there to be absolutely zero nuance or conflict in the media I watch. However, oftentimes the dramas that stick with me the most are shows that tow the line between fun and what people in the business refer to as “healing” – a life-affirming mix of romantic locations, endearing characters, and down-to-earth plot lines. This is a big reason why a lot of TV being made in America right now doesn’t do it for me. I wish this notion, that TV shows could heal your heart, was exported in the original hallyu wave of the 90s, so I could have grown up with shows like Hospital Playlist. Essentially a medical drama about a group of five doctors and surgeons all working at the same hospital, it has become revered for its honest storytelling and realistic portrayal of middle aged life, love, and heartbreak. Even gaining the almost-impossible feat for Korean network television of a second season, it certainly ranks among the top five shows i’ve watched in recent memory. Part of what I think makes Hospital Playlist special is the lack of need to manufacture an antagonist. This is a team of teaching surgeons, focused on hepato-biliary-pancreatic surgery, pediatric surgery, cardiothoracic surgery, obstetrics and gynecology, and neurosurgery, respectively. There doesn’t need to be a bad guy. The conflict comes from the real sort of things that happen to our bodies. Routine cancer screenings coming up positive, freak accidents turning into freak complications, addiction, assault, natural causes. The first episode is notorious for a brutal portrayal of a child passing away in life support, but part of why I personally keep watching is that even when the child doesn’t make it, even when things don’t work out, the show hilights moments of kindness amongst tragedy. I have witnessed the tragic and sterile type of prolonged medical death in real life as well, and this is also true to what happens. Our bodies break down, but there are still people left. We break our bodies down even further in 14 hour emergency surgery trying to do right by people, not even because we love them, but because they are people too, and we love that people are people. Because there are no real character villains in Hospital Playlist, you get to enjoy the fact that pretty much every single main character is genuinely an upstanding and completely moral person. They live healthy, inspiring lives. They’re unmarried into their fifties, they react normally to learning their friend is dating another one of their co-workers, they buy each other dinner, they’re in a band together that performs original covers every episode. What more could you want. Also for what it’s worth Gyeo-ul is peak representation for neurotic girls with wire glasses who miss social cues and get special treatment.
Fall Out Boy, Take This to Your Grave
It’s kind of crazy how hard it is to convince people who haven’t been to Chicago to love Chicago, especially considering how simple it is to find affection for the city when you’re actually there. Formed in the picturesque suburb of Wilmette, a five minute drive from where I sat writing this entry, Fall out Boy is currently a huge arena rock band that was once the tumblr-coded son of the emo trinity, and then before that was an amazing DIY pop-punk band hinging on the lyrical collaboration between Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump. I was listening to this album nonstop over the last few weeks, and am struck by just how clearly it seems to capture the energy of a specific time and place. The music video to one of my favorite tracks, Dead on Arrival, is warped tour meets punk house HGTV – you feel the energy not only from the nascent band, but from their audiences, mouthing all the words. One of the things I like the most about Chicago is the sort of need-to-know basis by which this giant extremely populous city somehow manages to fly under the cultural radar. This is not to say culture does not flow through the city – it very much does – but it often flows through, that is to say, through the Midwest to New York or LA. The people who stay here learn to resent people who see their home as a stepping stone from one place to another. They enact their revenge not by outwardly posturing about the greatness of their city with gaudy t-shirts or bumper stickers, but by simply building community and enjoying the things that make it special, together. In the springtime the streets might smell of narcotic, manic, blooms, but your heart in 20 degree Illinois winters has no room for pretense or peacocking. When winter comes, the city dons a transformative snow-white mask of genuine sentiment and collaborative grit, and becomes a place where people live more than a place people come to. Take This to Your Grave reminds me that Fall out Boy may have toured the greater us, and now the world, but they’ll always drive back home to that light on in Chicago.
Lana, Ultraviolence
I thought i understood everything there was to understand about this album, and then I flew over New York on a flight to Albany International Airport with a barely healed head wound and a high on prescription painkillers, and suddenly I knew nothing. much has been said about Lana’s work (she played a show in my hometown at the time I was writing this, are we on first name basis?) in the verbose and retweetable world of girl theory. Ultraviolence is her most morose, perhaps, but unlike Norman, it mopes with an audience. You get the feeling that Lana’s pain in NFR is real, genuine, after the party so to speak, but in Ultraviolence, she’s knows she’s pretty when she cries. That’s important to me. Not the being pretty while you cry, but the knowing about it. The knowing implies not only a third interlocutor, most likely a male one, but also asserts a careful sort of capability to perform for him. I will not, as many have before me, call this capability, to sing lyrics like “he hit me and it felt like a kiss” – power. it’s so clearly not supposed to be power. There is no such thing as empowerment because, and i’m truly sorry to bring Lacan into this, the assertion of woman within the symbolic order (this is to say, alongside men, in relation to the phallus) is inherent self-effacement. Yeah my boyfriend’s pretty cool, but la femme n’existe pas.
Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor
I’ve been on a massive Flannery O’Connor kick lately, in part inspired by the peri-religious pilgrimage I took to the one block in Savannah Georgia that houses her childhood home, and the Basilica Cathedral of her baptism. Needless to say, praying the stations of the cross in a neo-gothic southern cathedral and then touring the carefully restored home she grew up in made me feel very connected to her memory, and I’ve found myself more and more searching for ways to encounter not only her masterful fiction, but her explicatory writing – reviews, cartoons, essays, marginalia, – that proved both her searing and voracious intellect, and the equal size of her spiritual understanding. Mystery and Manners is an interesting mix of essays relating the role of the fiction-writer as both truth-shower, world-builder, and in O’Connor’s case, devout Catholic. She writes in ‘Novelist and Believer’ that most modern writing unwittingly produces portraits of “the man of our time, an unbeliever, who is nevertheless grappling in a desperate and usually honest with with intense problems of the spirit.” Some sixty something years later, how right she was. The disaffected malaise of Postmodernism only serves to magnify the lay artist’s fruitless search for meaning. I do not mean to suggest that everyone should find this in religion, but rather, that is the purpose of the faithful writer to make you believe in the context of his or her work. O’Connor writes: “When I write a novel in which the central action is a baptism, I am very well aware that for a majority of my readers, baptism is a meaningless rite, and so in my novel I have to see that this baptism carries enough awe and mystery to jar the reader into some kind of emotional recognition of its significance. To this end I have to bend the whole novel—its language, its structure, its action. I have to make the reader feel, in his bones if nowhere else, that something is going on here that counts.” Many of her other essays in this book – “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” and so forth essentially concern themselves with the techniques of style that are able to impart upon her readers transcendent and often contradictory truths. Be it the faith of a Catholic in my home – the deeply reformist and Protestant south – or the nature of His grace in a fallen world, one needs sharp and off-putting tools of language to capture the unique qualities of life that make the South not only my home, but the center of American spirituality. As she writes: “The reader of today... has forgotten the cost of truth, even in fiction. I don't believe that you can impose orthodoxy on fiction. I do believe that you can deepen your own orthodoxy by reading if you are not afraid of strange visions. Our sense of what is contained in our faith is deepened less by abstractions than by an encounter with mystery in what is human and often perverse.”
Perfume Genius, Learning
I had been a fan of Perfume Genius, the moniker of Michael Hadreas for a while. Not only do I humbly relate to being a genius of perfume, but I’ve found his later albums like Set My Heart on Fire Immediately and Put Your Back N 2 It to be heartbreaking and potent portraits of the human body, inconvenient desire, and the many wanton yearnings therein. I only recently, however, fell into his debut album Learning – via algorithm suggestions. What I found, however, has essentially been the sole soundtrack to my winter. Easily the most stripped down, post-twee of his releases, Learning is viscerally reminiscent of my own closeted childhood, and captures the very specific dissonance and pain of powerlessly watching traumatic events in the realm of suburban domesticity splay themselves onto your mind. In the haunting title track he coos to my childhood self: “no one will answer your prayers / until you take off that dress.” I think of the minute and reoccurring abrasions the world rubs on the minds and bodies of young children, not yet mature enough to understand why we are different yet just old enough to suffer the consequences of aging. I think of a sort of clear-headed absolution, the bittersweet ache of looking back on the person you were, knowing you didn’t deserve what you went through, but feeling powerless to stop it. My favorite track “Mr Peterson” casts light on remembered grooming by an over-affectionate teacher with a dissociated haze. There is a sort of matter-of-fact nursery rhyme cadence to Hadreas’ voice as he recounts “He let me smoke weed in his truck / If I could convince him I loved him enough.” The make-do logic of adolescence, where things are neither okay nor right, but simply are – illuminates a number of character studies of flawed, suffering, adults who hurt children, and confused, hurt children who hurt themselves. When Hadreas sings “He made me a tape of Joy Division / He told there was a part of him missing / When I was 16, he jumped off a building.” The situation ends with no real closure, no avenue for recourse to anyone who suffers. Yet still, in retrospect, he finds room not for tacit forgiveness, but growth. These are just things that happen to us, this is just how life is. I can’t help but shout along, tears in my eyes as he sings: “Mr. Peterson / I know you were ready to go / I hope there's room for you, up above / Or down below.”
Melito of Sardis, On Pascha (Peri Pascha)
In the last few months I’ve been an inquirer into the OCA Orthodox church, and one of the habits I’ve picked up from my parish is a habit of reading early Patristic Christian texts, those composed by the Patriarchs of the faith in the years following the death and resurrection of Christ. One of the reasons I’ve found this passtime so engaging is that many of these Patriarchs were Jews, and retain aspects of Jewish tradition in their observance of what would grow to become Christianity. This sort of trans-religious syncretism that was the historical reality for the beginning of Christendom, is clearly extremely relevant to my own situation – as a Jew exploring the teachings of Christ – and has revealed to me a number of truly fascinating connections not only between the Jewish and Christian faiths, but on the ways in which the Orthodox tradition borrows much of its custom from the original law of the old testament. Melito as a theological figure is also extremely interesting to me, as he is described by Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, as eunouchia – a eunuch before God. There has been much scholarship done on this strange statement. Some took it literally, questioning if Melito had been a long-lost Galli of the cult to the goddess Cybele before his Christianization, castrated by his own hand. The prevailing understanding, however, is that this eunouchia symbolically concerns his role in the church. A celibate man who’s embrace of Christ alienated him from his Jewish family, it’s hard for me not to project onto him as a deeply sympathetic figure. It was common understanding at this time that catechumen begin their journey of faith as a servant and progress to mastery, until baptism when they re-enter the servitude of a committed Christian. Many theorize that Polycrates’ descrption of Melito as a eunuch in particular relation to God defines his piety, and the extent to which he was willing to sacrifice everything – as servant to the eternal Bridegroom. His On Pascha itself is an extended homily written by between A.D.160 and 170, espousing the importance of what would become Easter as it relates to those who had previously celebrated Pesach. Quartodecimans, or a group of Christians who believed the death of Christ should be celebrated on Passover, rather than on Sunday would later be persecuted as heretics, but the core reconciliation – that Christ is the truest form of the Passover lamb, marking believers with his blood to be passed over by death remains a canon evolution of the Orthodox Christian faith. As Melito writes, “nothing, beloved, is spoken or made without an analogy and a sketch.” It is perhaps one of the oldest Abrahamic comparative theological treatises of all time to compare old testament examples of sacrifice as rehearsals for the death of Christ. There’s incredible nuance in the Binding of Isaac (my favorite biblical story) with regard to this issue, and even more nuance I feel very divided on with regard to these theories being used to perpetuate Christian antisemitism. I cannot make any definitive statements on the matter, but rather can only assert that the personal significance of these sketches culminating in the sacrifice of Christ has proved incredibly meaningful in understanding my own relationship to Christian worship, especially in a moment in which increasing and ungodly atrocities in Gaza are carried out in the name of Jewish ancestry have alienated me tremendously from Jewish spaces of worship. Melito, a Jew by birth, writes: “for then the slaughter of the sheep was of value, now it is worthless because of the Lord’s life… The Jerusalem below was of value, now it is worthless because of the heavenly Jerusalem… for it is not in one place, or in a narrow plot, that the glory of God is established, but on all ends of the earth.” I see a careful thread of anti-zionist Christian questioning here. Against assertions that Jewish people need a homeland at the expense of countless other’s lives, against cycles of trauma perpetuating themselves in the service of state interests, of genocide being appropriated to justify even more genocide, I can’t help but see Christ’s face in the weary eyes of the Palestinian people. I can’t help but pray in vespers that Christ helps my people to see, as Melito pleaded thousands of years ago in response to the crucifixion – “O Israel, what have you done? Is it not written for you: you shall not spill innocent blood?
Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter, SAVED!
SAVED! – the full length solo debut of Kristin Hayter, is not only my favorite album of the year, but among of the most meaningful pieces of art I’ve encountered in recent memory. It is extremely difficult for me to talk about Hayter’s work at large, both because of the profound effect it has had on me, and also because of the linguistic and critical traps that I believe lie in attempting to speak critically about art made in consequence of such a visceral and publicized history of gendered abuse. This is the real issue I have with much of the work that has been made in wake of her Lingua Ignota project – quite frankly, I find it gauche when genius annotations make direct biographical connections between lyrics and her own impact statement. Those connections are certainly there, for much of what Lingua did stylistically and linguistically sure, but I find it reductive to say that Hayter’s engagement with her longstanding motifs – God, Christ, death, blood, sin, redemption – are merely ways for her to speak vaguely about interpersonal abuse. Not only does this reify a system in which women’s work must always somehow be borne of or relate to her trauma, but it perpetuates the idea that her value alone lies in that which was done to her, not that which she did. That said, there is a direct correlation between Hayter abandoning the Lingua Ignota moniker – a reference to both Hildegard of Bingen and l’écriture féminine – things said in subterranean tongues, speaking against understanding and hegemony, and starting her new work under her full name, The Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter. Here, though she speaks in tongues, the intention is to communicate to you directly, to extend an honest hand of understanding. Notwithstanding, I’ve found one of the most underrated parts of her practice is her skill as an ethnographer. Maybe one of my favorite albums of all time, SINNER GET READY, is a portrait of Amish and Mennonite religious tradition in rural Pennsylvania, and in SAVED! she trains her eye on the evangelical American south. Her music is concerned with ekstasis: “to stand outside of or transcend [oneself]” – both of faith, as evidenced by the sampling and production of glossolalia, or Pentecostal speaking in tongues, and of emotion. I came into SAVED! while becoming hospitalized for OCD became remaining hospitalized for an eating disorder, and I would quite literally use this album as a therapeutic tool in treatment. There were long drives with close friends listening to “I WILL BE WITH YOU ALWAYS,” moments spent shaking in tears in austere hallways listening to “HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING” – this is essentially an album of hymns towards shaky and unsure healing for the desperate and destitute. As I have come to know, when you are on the verge of true healing, you must let go of the very behaviors and worldviews that kept you safe through your worst moments. When your very identity is formed through your relation to trauma, the maladaptive things you did to cope, letting go and forging a new path forward feels terrifying. It feels like losing your very essence, like striking out to rebuild yourself at your most vulnerable and small. What you need, in essence, to preserve you on the shaky and unsure journey towards a new life, is faith. When she sings in “MAY THIS COMFORT AND PROTECT YOU” of new life, there is a multiplicitous meaning, both beyond this life and within it. SAVED! is to me at its core, an album about healing, from someone who thinks themselves unworthy of it. In this sense, the emotive, visceral, and eschatological language of evangelical Christianity is the perfect medium – no sins as great as mine, no life touched by Christ’s redemption as hopeless as mine. Amazing grace / how sweet the sound / that saved a wretch like me. If Hayter’s music as Lingua Ignota captured the wrathful God of the Old Testament – contracts of blood, revenge, ties that bind – SAVED! represents the grace of the new covenant, where the site of salvation, forgiveness, and growth has left the realm of interpersonal conflict and receded into the human heart. I see a direct connection between SINNER GET READY and SAVED! inasmuch as Hayter initially fuses Christian polemics on forgiveness with the self-defeating, brutal, apocalyptic rage that has come to define her past discography. Here, her voice stands quite literally torn down from years of touring under the Lingua moniker, reliving the emotional impact of her worst memories. She no longer has the energy to scream, and now must sing. Her work is at her most melodic in her renditions of traditional gospel numbers like “PRECIOUS LORD TAKE MY HAND,” but the emotional resonance, the wavering of her voice, the artifacting of her recording methods, the call to preserve on forward, is still very much present within the context of the work at large. The album’s emotional climax comes in the devastating “I WILL BE WITH YOU ALWAYS” when after a night beset by innumerable demons, utterly despairing of any hope of restitution, her sinner-narrator finds herself approached by one last figure. Exhausted, mistrustful, and wretched she cries:
…Sinner Friend, I heard that Voice
Sweet as a bright bell
It spoke to me and said, sweet as a bright bell:
‘I will always be with you
I will be with you always’
And I spat
‘Who are you? Some demon? Do I know your name?’
And the voice replied:
‘I am the one heralded by seven trumpets, have you not heard?
I claim no thing and no thing can claim Me
But I am yours, and you are Mine
For this hour, you are free’
And I said, ‘Demon, release me’
‘I cannot release you for you are already free
I made you as perfect as a single blade of grass
Have you not seen?’
And the voice spoke, sweet as a bright bell:
I will always be with you, I will be with you always."
‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands
Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, scholar, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and media studies. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.