Book review: The Perfume Nationalist: A Cultural History Through Perfume, Media, and Resistance by Jack mason (Patreon)

Jack Mason describes his podcast The Perfume Nationalist as a “continuing radio soap opera… in which art and culture, high and low, are discussed through the historical lens of fragrance.” His show, a sprawling mega-work growing out of the late 2010s fringe right cultural sphere on twitter, should be a staple of every switched-on person’s listening. It’s based on a simple and ingenious hook: a recorded discussion with a guest, often spanning multiple hours, of a piece or pieces of media (books, films, television, music) paired with an appropriate fragrance that illuminates some quality within the work discussed.In conceiving of this format, Jack appears to have discovered one of the most flexible and exciting mediums of cultural criticism ever, its value proved on episode after episode of unfailingly entertaining, high-quality conversation. He brings to his discussions a highly intuitive feeling for the unique textures of a given a work, and, drawing on his encyclopaedic knowledge of perfume, uncovers resonances and connections between worlds of scent, media and memory. TPN is at once a soap opera dramatizing the twists and turns of its own making, a journey into fragrance presented by an expert, a solid education in cinema and English literature, an exercise in cultural history, an entertaining and trustworthy cultural digest of contemporary TV and film, and a sensorium in which, through the magic of audio, the listener is synaesthesically transported to another world.In the 19th century there arose a genre known as the “sensation novel”, characterised by taboo and lurid (for the time) subject matter, and described by contemporary critic Henry Mansel as “preaching to the nerves.” This genre includes novels like Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne which Jack has covered. Alongside the soap opera, I believe “sensation” is one of the critical keys to understanding TPN. Only Jack has had the insight to recognise the “sensational” affinities between texts as diverse as Richardson’s Clarissa, the American television soap, the films of David Lynch, and a piece of scuzzy pornographic 90s anime like Legend of Overfiend (to pick some random examples from his vast and ever-growing canon).What all these things have in common with each other, and with fragrance, is the way each utilizes the specific qualities of a given medium, a given set of tropes or conventions, to impinge upon the senses, the nerves of the reader or viewer, in order to shock, excite, create visions of startling beauty or horror.I love Jack’s highly original use of the term “psychedelic” to describe the sensorily-enlarging-and-engulfing, psychic-tactile qualities of films, television, literature, and music. His courageous refusal to subordinate his tastes to the demands of 21st century political correctness, in an age of sexual hysteria, deep cultural illiteracy and entrenched suspicion towards the mind-expanding possibilities of art, has made TPN an oasis for the discerning pop culture consumer, as is attested by the numerous guests who have reached out to participate in his project (myself included).As a critic, he has the following virtues: he is unpretentious, impatient with received wisdom and platitudes, knows what he likes and doesn’t like, is unapologetic about saying so, and possesses a staggering and hard-earned wealth of cultural reference points. He is also very funny and has an inimitable talent for summing up cultural archetypes in a pithy, withering phrase (I know it’s inimitable because I’ve tried and failed).Now Jack has written a book that is simultaneously an autobiographical account of the creation and day-to-day running of his show, and an extension of it into a new medium. A novel in which the soap opera that is the organising metaphor of the show, with its many “plotlines” (as Jack calls them), is brought into the form of a linear narrative that charts the ups and downs of this heroic creative project, with its various attendant personalities, tragedies and moments of victory.Jack has very kindly sent me a review copy which I have now read numerous times. I cannot make any claims to impartiality since I consider TPN to be one of, perhaps the, greatest millennial artwork, since I like Jack and flatter myself to think of him as a friend, and since I have shamelessly appropriated the format of his show for my own, minus the fragrance element, an artistic debt that I’ve tried to make as clear as possible for my comparatively small listenership.I’ve had the privilege of appearing on his show four times and Jack has been kind enough to appear three times on mine. In conversation, I’ve always found him a warm, funny, affectionate person, as friendly as he is incisive. Recently I found myself listening back to one of his appearances on my show, where he came on to discuss Robert Bly’s mythopoeic men’s rights classic Iron John. I was dismayed to hear myself nervously chuckling my way through what I’d intended to be a sincere, serious discussion of male emotional life and how it is attacked and scorned from every possible angle in the hostile cultural landscape of our current time. Jack, however, was graceful and patient and his incredible frankness and compassionate insight into the subject elevated the episode into something truly powerful.For someone like myself, who is involved in a creative project so obviously indebted to Jack, this book offers a thrilling opportunity to peer into his creative process, to learn of the thinking that went into questions of aesthetics, presentation, show concept. It’s a treat, for example, to learn of the thinking that went into the show’s name:“First, it described the unlikely content juxtapositions of the show, feminine appreciations of the artistry of perfume and brazen MAGA nationalist politics. Second, that it was a titular character, possibly and probably me, a curmudgeonly Rush Limbaugh-style radio host of the underworld called The Perfume Nationalist. Third, that it was simply a band name, a total abstraction. We were a sort of band, and our conversations at their best took on the improvisational rhythm of music.”The conceit of The Perfume Nationalist being a band name is lovely, given that the show, for myself and many other listeners, has assumed precisely that influence and cultural importance. It has played exactly the role that bands once did in culturally richer times, forming the heart of a “scene” and defining a stance and attitude towards the world that a person can buy into, participate in, believe in. It has also, of course, inspired a number of imitators, of which my show is one.From the very first paragraph of this book, I felt a similar sense of excitement to how I felt reading David Thomas’ Book of Hieroglyphs, the Pere Ubu bandleader’s first book: the pleasure of being invited by an artist to learn the critical “backstory” of his project.The first paragraph reads:“Radio broadcasting allows the human voice to be heard across vast distances around the world, bringing together people and minds who would not otherwise meet. The birth of commercial broadcasting in the 1920s inaugurated the Golden Age of Radio where radio became the dominant medium of home entertainment until the 1950s when it was superseded by the dazzling visuals of television. Television was then replaced by the vast interactivity of the internet in the 1990s, and with social media in the 2010s the internet usurped flesh-and-blood reality as the strange landscape where people felt most alive, crafting elaborate representations of themselves and their desires, committing acts of kindness and cruelty they didn’t understand, yearning for deeper understanding and the human touch.”Here you have the entire media history of the 20th century and into the 21st condensed into a neat, concise paragraph. You have the concern with audio and broadcasting as a means of crossing distances physical, social and psychological. You have the seeding of a motif (the “strange landscape” of social media) that will assume more significance as you read on and engage more with Jack’s output. And you are assured of being in the presence of an artist who considers what they do in the context of centuries, not weeks, who recognises his place within history and calculates his moves for maximum effectiveness based on his examination of its curves.Later in the book, describing the milieu he sees the show both developing out of and responding to, he writes:“The initial episodes were filled with contemporary underground right-wing media, like Bronze Age Mindset, Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace, Cody Wilson’s Come and Take It, and the blog Soiled Sinema, along with more leftwing media that flirted with reactionary figures and ideas, Cum Town and Red Scare. I wanted to pay tribute to my influences, discuss them as important art worthy of attention, place them alongside classic literature like Women in Love and Against Nature, and attract listeners from the right-wing internet sphere who might be skeptical of the perfume aspect. This was also when there was significant risk in publicly associating with something such as Bronze Age Mindset, so it worked to establish our street cred. I predicted that there would eventually be substantial and positive mainstream interest in this sphere and wanted to stake my territory for the future.”This except makes an irony of the show clear: TPN invites the listener into “another world” that contrasts our own in its warmth and richness: the psychedelic echoes of the warm domestic interiors of countless TV episodes, the sparkle and glamour it acquires from its topics, its guests and its host, its unapologetic affection for American consumer culture (another thing it has in common with David Thomas’ Pere Ubu). It provides a valuable escape hatch offering psychic recuperation from the abrasive ugliness of contemporary Western pop culture. Yet it grows out of an incredibly astute assessment of the media landscape of its moment.The first chapter develops into a psychedelic Modernist odyssey as Jack traces the entanglement of his own biography with the imaginative shadow-world of American soaps, as the various intertwining narratives of Knots Landing, The Young and the Restless, Dallas etc, threaten to overwrite reality itself, like Borges’ Tlön. Jack shares with other artists I admire, such as Alan Moore, Harold Bloom and the aforementioned David Thomas, an urge to collect, subsume and transform, to take account of the significant works that have informed one’s aesthetic existence and externalise their combined influences into a glittering imaginative edifice of one’s own, in which everything is afforded its right place and relationship.Like David Thomas, a singer and lyricist who once asserted that rock lyrics work best when misheard, Jack is sensitive to the strange imaginative slippage that characterises our best and most sublime encounters with art, the way any deeply engaged act of sense-making provoked by immersion in a great text seems to generate strange synchronicities, uncanny bleed-throughs from the unreal to the real and back again. The resonance, in this regard, of a key TPN text like Lynch’s Twin Peaks and his follow-up Twin Peaks: The Return, is obvious, but it takes a mind as alert as Jack’s to demonstrate those shows' own entanglement with the vast, glorious meta-text of American soap opera, how all these things cast light upon one another, and how they collectively cast light on the human experience itself.Jack is, I believe, the only serious cultural critic of the American soap. There may be others but if there are I doubt any of them are as capable of representing their subject with as much passion and interest. One of the beautiful contradictions of TPN, testament to the unique perspective involved in its creation, is its combination of a proudly MAGA Republican political sensibility with an authentic “cultural studies” enthusiasm for popular media that is often dismissed on the grounds that its target audience is largely female. Jack approaches the soap opera with academic seriousness, pursuing its history across his show into its origins in American radio, seeing antecedents of it in the serialized novels of the 19th century, in the earlier novels of Richardson, treating it all in all as a worthwhile cultural product deserving of critical appreciation.TPN the book provides invaluable lessons for anyone embarking on a lengthy creative project, as we see Jack navigating the highs and lows that inevitably attend any work into which you invest heart and soul. Parts of it are painful and moving: his account of his struggles with alcohol, his reflections on family, pet ownership, the lives of dead friends and the impressions they’ve left on him, his relationship with the woman he considered his mentor and the irresolution of their friendship. He frankly discusses the disintegration of various working and personal relationships and though he is often cutting, he is never glib and retains a generous admiration for his ex-collaborators’ work on the show.It’s also the only book I’m aware of that provides a convenient first-hand account of our recent history as lived from the inside, being a record of one man’s progress through the cultural dark age inaugurated by wokeness and the totalitarian nightmare of COVID lockdowns. It is also so far the only diaristic first-hand history of “RW twitter” as a productive, sometimes enervating, sometimes dysfunctional cultural space, and in that sense, provides a valuable account of a time that, in large part thanks to Jack’s own efforts, will no doubt be remembered as a hidden engine of cultural innovation and as a retrospectively romanticized "scene".Part of the thrill of TPN, experienced as intended as a “continuing story”, is the anticipation of the next episode topic, which is always transformed by virtue of its incorporation into the canon. I don’t believe anyone has ever been as alive to the possibilities of the podcast medium, and its unprecedented potential as a tool of individuation through the practice of art criticism.The TPN canon is as unique and comprehensive a picture of the interior of one man’s taste and vision as any of the great critical tomes from Bloom’s The Western Canon to Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae. It involves everything from Melancholie der Engel to Titanic, 120 Days of Sodom to Fried Green Tomatoes and has resurrected into popular consciousness neglected books like Helen Hoover Santmyer’s …And Ladies of the Club. We find both in the podcast and in the book a discerning, idiosyncratic and original critical eye and a genuinely cultivated taste as distinct and unfakeable as a thumbprint. As if this weren’t enough, the book is rounded out with a collection of Jack’s movie reviews from Twitter and Instagram, all of which are laugh out loud funny (his review of Wicked, in particular, always has me in stitches). I’m relieved to see them collected in print for posterity.Jack Mason's The Perfume Nationalist: A Cultural History Through Perfume, Media, and Resistance is out October 20th through Skyhorse and is available for pre-order on the Skyhorse website, Amazon, Amazon UK and Barnes & Noble