Yesterday I finally got the first notice of payment for the ads that had been turned on some time back. It turns out the payment per view is $ 0.0015. I find the whole thing lacking in transparency and in any event consider the income not worth the ugliness. I’ll turn them back on if one day I officially become, to paraphrase William Safire, the Prime Prattling Panjandrum of Perfume Positivism, with an audience […]
It’s been alarmingly hot these last few days in Athens, last Fri on the way back from work my scooter was showing an ambient 43C near the airport, soon after this pic was taken. Impossible in this heat to drink red wine or smell perfumes: everything smells like it’s falling apart and wilting. More soon, global warming permitting. Update: Btw, the sand on my scooter comes all the way from […]
Big, beautiful fragrances like Vero Kern’s require a reset to older smelling habits and demand to be judged after at least an hour on a strip. Of course until about 1980 all fragrances did, then the industry assumed that people have the attention span of a sedated gnat, and put all their money on the first fifteen seconds of pleasure (often followed by hours of repentance). I hadn’t smelled her creations for […]
Refinement is hard to define and easy to recognise. When I lined up the six Cognoscenti samples and before I started smelling them, I was struck by the elegant simplicity of the packaging, the naming (numbers with a subtitle, no Datura Catastrophique nonsense for a change), and the straightforward explanatory text, miles away from the usual hyperventilating tosh. The fragrances, while very diverse, have a family resemblance in their effect, i.e. strikingly original, inviting topnotes followed […]
I’ll be giving a talk at FutureFest in London 17-18 September. Who knows, I may even get to meet Brian Eno. I am reliably informed he has our perfume guide in his loo for casual reading. Nice opening gambit: “Hi, I’m the guy whose book you apparently have in your… ah, never mind.“
I always used to think of Révillon’s Detchema, Caron’s Fleurs de Rocaille and Le Galion’s Sortilège as three dowdy ladies in bouclé outfits and beige, slightly cracked patent leather shoes, having tea in a corner bar of Avenue Montaigne and deploring the fall of the past subjunctive in French. Now that early perfume history is slowly emerging from the shadows, it is becoming obvious that their heyday had been the first thirty years of the 20th century. […]
Today I found out that my composer genius friend Howard Skempton, author of the heartbreakingly beautiful Lento, has written a Piano Concerto which can be heard here starting at approx 59:00. You have six days to do so, then this will disappear in the BBC’s vast archives.
Some years ago I got an email from a not-very-bright Art History professor in a Boston university, asking me to join a Panel on Olfactory Art at a gathering of his tribe. He casually remarked that “there is nearly no consciousness of using smell in art– several one-off works, sure, but no sustained practices that I know of.” I reminded him of the sustained practice of perfumery, to which his reply was “Sure, perfumers are artists […]
Calibrating the new Electroosmograph® with three sniffs of Sauvage via nose cannula: EEG flatline. Machine not defective, just zero signal.
This morning I was overtaken by an old Vespa, as always riding while tilted a few degrees to the left because of the engine weight asymmetry. The fellow on it wore one of those helmets that only reaches down to the equator and is leather below. The blue smoke behind him was deliciously fragrant. It has always seemed to me that Vespa smoke had two different smells, randomly depending on […]
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