New kitten (adorable in most respects) spilled water over keyboard and Apple says the machine is “vintage” i.e. more than 4 years old, may be impossible to find parts! Apple’s new Hermès watchstraps and no new Mac Pro thing is starting to chap my ass, given that one way or another I’ve probably spent over $200k on their hardware (lab and home) since 1981. Update: fixed, €270, i.e. the price of […]
When I was a schoolboy in Paris, I and my classmates would say to each other that we belonged in Charenton, site of a famous upper-crust mental asylum, even though it had lost that name decades earlier. CM chose the name because D.A.F de Sade spent time there (and wrote no doubt tedious things, now mercifully lost). Another patient was the great Paul Verlaine who, unlike Sade, wrote far too little. All […]
Italy’s best kept food secret is a little tin of corned beef, or to be exact boiled beef chunks in jelly. I order it on Italian websites. This is not mashed-up mystery meat that sticks to your palate and needs chloroform-methanol to wash down. It is really good, high quality stuff from Argentina, contains practically no fat, and tastes delicious. I suppose you could put it in a salad or spread […]
Tonight at long last I visited the recently completed building site of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre, a huge complex in the middle of Athens. Only part of it is open to visitors, but you can walk along the long rectangular pond to a plaza that has the Opera on the left and the National Library on the right. It is an oasis of magnificent, Ancient Egyptian architectural scale and grace, […]
Readers of The Economist and jaundiced realists like myself will not be surprised to hear that diversity and competition are the engines of creation. Add to that the magic element of surplus, i.e. a surfeit of talented art school graduates chasing too few jobs, and you have the makings of a revolution. This is precisely what happened in postwar Italy: too many architects + too few interesting things to build = Italian […]
Some new things are immediately, obviously useful, some reveal their brilliance in time (e.g. many Apple devices in my experience). A month ago I posted about Ponk, a subscription service that sends themed perfumery raw material samples by mail. They kindly sent more. This time the Module 5 collection of small samples, as ever beautifully packaged, was of woody-ambers, which have seen an extraordinary arms race in recent years. With a smell […]
This post is about good sound, how wonderful it is (as good as good perfume, I think), how everyone can appreciate it —the look on my 3-yr old daughter’s face when she first heard it said everything. It makes a huge difference and you don’t have to spend a crazy amount of money to get it. So 1- Forget loudspeakers. The cost of good sound is exponentially related to power, therefore 2- Use […]
When smelling Hiram Green’s Shangri-La I was struck by the powerful note of gamma-undecalactone , a molecule first introduced in perfumery in 1908 by its discoverers, Russian chemists Zhukov and Shestakov. Hiram Green describes his fragrances as all-natural, so I wrote to ask what this archetypal synthetic was doing in there. He kindly explained that this was EU Natural undecalactone. A little searching revealed that EU Naturals are defined as molecules that “must have been […]
Monsillage sent me samples, including two larger bottles of fragrances that owner-perfumer Isabelle Michaud thought I would like. She was right: Eau de Céleri is a very refined, urbane, and charming spicy-herbaceous composition, the sort of fragrance you put on every summer morning as you would an Eau de Cologne. The difference is that the entire, and very clever, accord involves little or no citrus and achieves freshness by completely different and […]
I first met Hiram Green over a decade ago when he had a tiny boutique called Scent Systems in near London’s famed (and now completely theme-parked) Carnaby St. He then moved to the Netherlands and set up as an independent perfumer. He sent me samples of three of his fragrances. Dilettante is an orange flower composition, sunny and straightforward, “fresh and sweet throughout” as HG himself describes it. Moon Bloom is a beautiful […]
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