Bertrand Duchaufour is one of the very best perfumers around, has become a sort of informal king of niche, and indeed helped define the sector with his work for Artisan Parfumeur, Neela Vermeire and Aedes among others. I was curious to see how many fragrances he had composed to date. The answer, from Michael Edwards’ database, is 140. His equally influential former colleague Mark Buxton did 144. Plotted by year, […]
I was in el expensivo Zurich recently and a journalist asked me what I thought was a reasonable price for a perfume. Mindful of the old days, when I could buy two years’ supply of Brut (complete with nitro musks) for what would today be $30, and mentally adjusting for inflation, I replied that the price of a dinner for two with a decent bottle of wine in a decent restaurant was […]
I was at FutureFest in London, gave a talk and managed through sheer stupidity and incompetence to miss Brian Eno’s talk later the same day. Then I found out the had shown this slide of his favorite books! Amazing! In ancient days after such a triumph someone would have been there to whisper “you are mortal” in my ear. I had heard through the grapevine that Eno kept a copy of our guide […]
The Academy of Perfumery and Aromatics kindly sent me their A Sense for Scents Edu-Kit, containing 20 Whispis and some instructions. Whispis are neat little devices that provide a metered puff of perfumed air and also lock safely. They are apparently good for a few hundred puffs. The kit does not feature aromachemicals, but accords, like apple, wood, rose and more abstractly glacier, feathers and fur and fresh air. It comes with instructions […]
Went out to lunch today in quiet Chalandri, walked past a remarkable church that clearly ran out of cash halfway through construction, all naked concrete with reinforcing steel poking through. The steel bars are bent flat against the facade every which way and resemble the streamers that indicate airflow on experimental aircraft. It should by rights have statues of Cayley, Prandtl and Zhukovsky inside, each holding a model aircraft, eyes turned […]
The sublime Cadet Chapel of the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, designed by SOM architect Walter Netsch (1920-2008). In this superb photo against a dramatic sky, the building seems to be a fulfilment of Gothic, a metaphor of uplift: sursum corda, fly with the Angels if at all possible, but in the meantime try to keep formation with Blue ones* when racing through the Rockies’ endless thin air. All airplane museums give […]
Not perfumes, but music.Valentyn Vasylyovych Sylvestrov‘s 5th symphony (1982) and his Postludium for piano and orchestra (1984) are two of the most beautiful pieces of music I have ever heard. Best for headphones, btw, unless you own a pair of Soundlab U-1s. pic credit: Seattle Times (detail)
I once occupied a lab next to a US oceanographer colleague, a praeternaturally handsome and fit man in his sixties who was an insane wine buff and thought nothing of having $300 of reds (2 bottles) on the table to wash down a salade niçoise. His wife hated booze, so we had to lend a hand, no hardship at all. He was of the opinion that, contrary to popular wisdom, one could in fact […]
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, […]
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