Celebrity Fragrance Update

The big craze among celebrities these days is the release of a perfume with their name on it. Sarah Jessica Parker has released ‘Horseface’ while Christina Aguilera spent hours in a lab making her eponymous fragrance. There are many fictional characters who have their own perfumes, too, including Miss Piggy, Jade Goody and Paris Hilton. The Imaginary Review decided to have a sniff and see what the new additions to this list are like.

Alan Cumming released ‘Cumming: The Fragrance’ last year, and has spent all his time since then trying to follow it up with another. Now, he has finally finished his work, and the result is 'Cumming: On Your Neck'. The perfume smells a little wheaty, with a saltiness and bitterness to it that brings to mind memories of my teenage years. It isn't the most pleasant smell I've encountered, but not the worst, either.

The second fragrance that we tried was 'Lockhart', from a fictional character, Tifa Lockhart from the video game Final Fantasy 7. This scent is both playful and sincere, with a heavy emphasis on crude oil and bone marrow. Tifa herself has commented that she had a large hand in the creation process, and that the smell was designed to resemble the smells that she remembers from inside the womb. One problem that I noted with Lockhart was that the scent attracts weasels, and when wearing it I could not escape from the onset of small mammals. Otherwise, this perfume made me feel special, like a beautiful woman, which is nice because I am an ugly, ugly man.

Ad for Tifa Lockhart's new Fragrance, 'Lockhart'

Finally, dancing singers The Pussycat Dolls have released their own set of fragrances which come in a box set of six bottles, one for each member of the band. To be honest, when I first tested the scents I thought there had been a mistake, as only one bottle contained perfume; the other were all full of water. But when I contacted the distribution company, they confirmed that this was intentional. It seems that only one of the Pussycat Dolls' fragrances actually does anything, much like the band themselves. The smell is quite nice, but as soon as I had stopped smelling it, I couldn't remember anything about it. My notes say that it had elements of cinnamon and angst, but I have no recollection of it.

Music review: “Freedom 2008” by The Right Trema

The Trema, (or diaeresis) punctuation mark has fallen out of favour in England in recent years. Words such as “coöperate” and “noöne” are now spelt without the trema, usually with a hyphen, leading many people to wonder what has happened to the diacritic since it left the public eye.

The truth, long denied by the Trema’s management, is that the punctuation mark split up, citing that oft-used reason, “artistic differences”. The left dot of the trema, it is believed, had wanted to continue being a diacritic, and was content to sit atop vowels, letting people know that the sounds of the letter is pronounced separately to that of the preceding vowel. The right hand dot had other ideas, however, and broke up the partnership to pursue a career in music.

Several decades in the making, The Right Trema has finally released its first album, Freedom 2008, on Glottal Stop Records. With production from Timbaland (who guests on several of the tracks), the album is a polished, well written affair with some excellent stand-out tracks.

‘U Got Me High’, a duet with Nicole Scherzinger of the Pussycat Dolls, is one such highlight. Slow and sexy with Timbaland’s trademark syncopated beats, the passion on show from the two singers will really make you believe that a human female could fall in love with a punctuation mark. The faster party sound of forthcoming single ‘(Everybody) Get Jumpin’’ should make it a hit in the clubs, and the electro-influenced cover of Talking Heads’ ‘And She Was’ is piece of pure pop genius that almost (almost!) improves on the original.

What lets Freedom 2008 down, however, are the tracks on which The Right Trema seems to be fixated with his status as a small dot. These songs are typically aggressive, and show no small amount of insecurity on the part of the singer. Take ‘Song for Warner’, a diss to the record label who initially refused him. The chorus, “Warner lost out by refusing me/Bitches in the office sad at losing me/Motherfuckers don’t know what I’m all about/Don’t call me no motherfuckin’ umlaut” sounds as bad in song as it does on paper. (One could say that it's as derivative as the mathematical function that uses tremas when written out by Newton.)

It’s sad that The Right Trema should have such a chip on his shoulder when the rest of his music is so good. As he stated in a recent Rolling Stone interview, if someone like Paris Hilton or Heidi Montag can release music, why can’t a tiny limbless dot with no mouth or internal functions do the same? Maybe when he is accepted by the music industry he’ll be able to released a more consistent album.

Incidentally, fans of The Right Trema may be interested to know that he has buried the hatchet with his old partner, Lefty (who has spent the last few decades working as a tittle, the dot on a lowercase letter ‘I’), and they are making plans to collaborate on a new project, the word ‘naïve’.

Freedom 2008 by The Right Trema will be released March 10th on Glottal Stop Records. A special edition microdot copy will be available from the company’s website.