FN Review of The Coffee Visionary: The Life & Legacy of Alfred Peet

On my desk as I write this is a mug of Peet’s Costa Rican coffee, ground in my kitchen, brewed strong, and drunk black. The beans arrive via UPS within days of roasting. Peet’s has been my house coffee since I was a Cal Berkeley undergrad. I remember seeing Alfred Peet wearing his shop coat behind the counter at the original store on Vine and Walnut. So, in the interests of full disclosure: yes, I’m a proud Peetnik. Peetniks are all about the coffee: the beans, the roast, the brewing. Like Alfred Peet himself, they disdain what they regard as the coffee-flavored milk drinks served by Starbucks.

Despite my lifelong commitment to the brand, it turns out there was a lot I didn’t know about Alfred Peet. That’s been remedied by Jasper Houtman’s excellent new biography, which covers Peet’s personal life as well as the history of the company. Houtman bases his account on published and unpublished interviews with Peet, as well as first-hand interviews with many people who knew the man personally.

Born in Holland in 1920, Peet was raised by a stiff, demanding father with whom he never established a warm relationship. Years later, when he traveled and lived around the world, he wrote only to his mother, never to his father. This alienation wasn’t entirely his father’s fault. Young Alfred was a rebellious child: he didn’t do well at school because he felt pressured to perform, and he chafed at the tight confines of bourgeois Dutch culture.

Peet’s father and various in-laws were in the coffee business in Holland. Alfred had a natural flair for tasting coffee and tea, but rather than join his father’s company, he left Holland as soon as he could. After WWII went to London to work in tea for the Lipton company. Soon he left for the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), and after that for New Zealand. Seeking a still bigger horizon, he came to the United States in 1955, landing in San Francisco. A series of short-term jobs—including door-to-door salesman—followed, which the shy Peet found excruciating. But he was determined to make his way.

At the time, most coffee came pre-ground in cans from the grocery store. But having discovered the Italian espresso culture of North Beach, Peet realized there was an opportunity in America for better coffee. He was determined to make it happen. Unlike the Bay Area innovators of recent years, Peet was no young upstart. He didn’t open his first store until 1966, when he was forty-six years old. His timing and choice of location couldn’t have been better: the store on the corner of Vine and Walnut became a founding feature of Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto. The area’s reputation was cemented when Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse around the block in 1971.

From the beginning, Peet’s mission was to teach people about coffee. In doing so he didn’t pull any punches. He railed against customers who brewed his coffee in percolators. He fired employees who didn’t follow his strict procedures. And yet he freely shared his knowledge with people who wanted to learn about coffee. He trained many coffee roasters who went on to build their own businesses (such as Starbucks). Despite his Dutch directness—which Americans often read as rudeness—and his inflexibility about the correct ways to do coffee, many of those he trained came to fondly regard him as a mentor.

Like most entrepreneurs, Peet assumed total control of all details of the operation. Part of this was intellectual—the man was a perfectionist who insisted on doing it the best way, or not at all. Another part of it was characterological: scattered throughout Houtman’s book are examples of obsessive-compulsive behavior, as well as a compromised approach to interpersonal relationships. These traits enabled him to create a brand known for its commitment to quality, but also limited its potential to expand. Peet was entirely comfortable with this outcome: he had a small but profitable company that met his personal standards. Later in life, he acknowledged some downsides: he had missed out on some trends and opportunities, and suffered from the stress that went with total control.

Alfred Peet’s emphasis was on practical hands-on training. He felt cupping and roasting can be learned, but not from textbooks. Remarkably, he did not consider coffee to be the ultimate sensory challenge. For him, that was tea.

“In essence, tea is a more interesting product than coffee,” Alfred said. “Tea you can truly compare to wine, there are as many teas as there are wines, with as many different flavors, colors, and bouquets. (. . .) In contrast with tea, coffee is a rather coarse product; the subtle differences that you see in tea, you can’t find in coffee.”

Peet had little use for pompous, wine-like descriptions of coffee. He encouraged people to use simple, even personal terms to describe coffee flavor. His emphasis, especially when teaching someone how to roast beans, was on direct experience, on doing rather than knowing. This could lead to some unusual, almost Zen-like, directives.

How do you determine the moment when you have to take the beans out of the roaster? “The coffee will speak to you and will let you know when she’s ready,” Alfred told his students. For outsiders this sounds mystifying, but those who wanted to learn the profession from him developed an ear for it as well.

Peet didn’t invent a technology. He didn’t build a commercial empire or create a new way of doing business. Instead, he was a sensory entrepreneur: a blender of beans and an evangelist for flavor.

Alfred Peet has become known as the father of the American coffee renaissance. The impact of his life and work are evident wherever one goes. Today, there is quality coffee and espresso in crossroad burgs and small towns throughout the country’s vast interior.

For that, Mr. Peet, we thank you.

FN Review: Sense of Smell, by Marcel van Brakel, et al.

I had my doubts when this oddly shaped book arrived in the mail. At nearly two hundred printed pages, its foldover, center-stitched format gives its open side a goofy beveled edge. It looks and feels like a gigantic pamphlet.

What’s inside, however, is fresh, compelling and thought-provoking.

Sense of Smell is a collective work, a co-creation of the faculty and students at Avans University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands who took part in a field study in Berlin and an intensive 48-hour brainstorming “sweatshop” that produced novel olfactory design concepts, some of which were later realized as art installations.

The book is arranged in themed sections: data, temporality, taboo, perfumication, and ethereal. Each section features essays, projects (descriptions of exhibits), and concepts. The layout—English (black) and Dutch (red) text side by side or over/under—is pleasing and the many color images are striking and beautifully printed.

I was wary initially of the essays which introduce each section. Brief overviews of smell topics risk being inaccurate or lightweight. And indeed, when the essay in the “Ethereal” section cited The Matrix as a philosophic reference, the alarm on the FN Bogosity Meter went off big time. Many of the other essays, however, are crisp, lucid and quite accurate. There is discernment at play here.

My only quibble with the essay “Cinesexual smell: The ecstatic olfactory face” is that “smelling a nice smell” is a conventionalized facial expression, rather than the involuntary expression of deeply emotional experience that author Patricia MacCormack assumes it to be. However all is forgiven because she includes the great image of Udo Kier as Baron Frankenstein reaching orgasm while fondling the entrails of a female zombie. Awesome. And speaking of entrails, fans of I Smell Dead People will enjoy Nienke Huitenga’s interview with forensic sniffer Harry Jongen.

Rosi Braidotti uses Pinka, Virginia Woolf’s cocker spaniel, as an olfactory lens to examine the author’s relationship with Vita Sackville-West. Woolf’s Flush, written from a dog’s sensory point of view, has a lot to recommend it. But Braidotti’s turgid academic prose (“Nomadic becomings express the positive structure of difference, unhinged from the binary system of dialectics that opposed it to Sameness”) snuffs out any motivation to follow her thesis. This one dud proves to be the exception among a set of readable and entertaining essays.



By now I have read most of the available cultural chestnuts about olfaction. So when, for example, Sense of Smell plays with the Warhol “smell museum” idea that I wrote about in my own book, I get fidgety. But I was pleased and excited to find anecdotes that were totally new to me, like Judy Garland’s BO problem and how she tried to solve it. I also had never heard of the Italian Futurist Carlo Carrà’s interest in olfactory-visual synesthesia, or of the Shinto benjo-gami (privy gods) in Japan. (This should give you some idea of range of ideas entertained in this volume.)

The concepts and design projects in Sense of Smell provide a comprehensive look at recent artistic and technological explorations of scent. Some, like Amy Radclife’s Scentography system, or the whole-body-odor extraction of Martynka Wawrzyniak, or Lernert & Sander’s potpourri stunt will be familiar to FN readers. And ISDP fans will have been all over the “Famous Deaths” installation (imagined smellscapes from the JFK assassination, etc.) that made waves recently.

There are many other entries to surprise and delight the olfactively-inclined reader, such as the piece on the stinky booby-trapped underwear design called Skunk Grenade, or the one about sneaker smell-fetish websites. (I admit I’d never heard of sneakerslaves until now, but having met the leading prophet of the Fart Smeller Movement I can’t say I’m surprised.)

The Lucid Dream Generator CMD Concept is the merest germ of an idea, but one that got me thinking. I believe there is a lot of potential here, given that commenters have made my “Dreaming of Smell” post one of the top rated search engine results on the topic. There are surely a lot of ways to use scent to bend the trajectory of dreams.

Bottom line: Sense of Smell is a beautifully produced omnium gatherum of the contemporary scene in olfactory art, design, and inspiration. If you want to get a sense of where creative minds are taking the field, you should get yourself a copy.

The book reviewed here is Sense of smell, edited by Marcel van Brakel, Wander Eikelboom, Frederik Duerinck, et al., 2014. Published by The Eriskay Connection. ISBN 978-94-92051-00-4

P.S. A earlier version of this post misidentified the academic affiliation of the authors. Hat tip to commenter Wander for pointing it out.

FN Review: Mandy Aftel, Drunk with Scent

 Mandy Aftel has hit another one out of the park. After scoring with Essence and Alchemy, she drills one into the upper decks with Fragrant: The secret life of scent. Her new book is built around five raw materials of natural perfumery: cinnamon, mint, frankincense, ambergis, and jasmine. Chapter by chapter she shares her working knowledge of the individual materials and places each one in historical and cultural context. We learn how to use them (guided practical formulations are provided) but we also learn about Mandy: her approach to life, meaning, and creativity. We discover her amazingly vibrant aesthetic, and how it grew naturally (so to speak) from her Berkeley environs. It is artisanal and whimsical. It takes pleasure in the simple deeply observed. It focuses on the quality of raw materials and the authenticity with which they are experienced. Think Bernard Maybeck and Alice Waters.

In each chapter, Mandy effortlessly transitions from an emotional and intellectual immersion in scent to the practical means of buying, sampling, and blending essential oils. Her personal fragrance fantasy land is a Peaceable Kingdom—in one category of scent after another she steers away from the sharp and overpowering and favors materials with softer impressions that lend themselves to blending.

Mandy imbibes the cultural and historical emanations of scent as enthusiastically as she inhales the essential oils themselves. She seeks out exotic materials and rare perfumery books with the same thirst for experience. As a scent scientist and fellow bibliophile, I appreciate this and applaud it, even as my personal interest in the intellectual history of smell leans more to philosophical treatises and natural history than to the formula books and practical guides that Mandy favors. But this is a matter of taste.

The real difference between Mandy and me is one of temperament. For her, enthusiasm and passion drive creativity. For me, the search for pattern and motive compels description, quantification, and analysis. My joy comes from tracing a new regularity of behavior or revealing an unsuspected piece of natural history. Hers comes from arranging a beautiful experience for others to share.

Does the way of the scientist not involve creativity and inspiration? Of course it does. Does the way of the perfumer not involve measurement and precision? Of course. But where Mandy revels in mystery, historical echoes and parallels, I thrill to clarifying the underlying psychobiology of sensory experience.

Throughout human experience, the allure of ephemeral smells and flavors was potent enough to change the course of history. Mandy vividly describes how the discovery of scents and spices drove early Europeans to take great risks in exploration, trade, and warfare. Not that she would put it this way, but the history of spice and perfume is inseparable from the development of capitalism. To celebrate one is to celebrate the other. No wonder the social frivolity of scent and perfumery’s exploitation of natural resources have been favorite targets for leftists and greens. Mandy’s Berkeley-based aesthetic sits uneasily on this cultural fault-line.

Mandy is an exponent of “authentic luxury” which she defines as psychological engagement with the honest immediacy of sensory experience. In this, she aligns herself with locavorism and Alice Waters’ Slow Food movement. I, too, encourage people to expand their sensory horizons, to stop and savor the world around them. But mindful cultivation of one’s sensory experience is a stone’s throw from fatuity. Those who can afford it thrill to the localness of their salad greens and grilled lamb. Those in a lower tax bracket can be seen across the street from Chez Panisse, waiting in line for pizza at The Cheese Board Collective. For them, the forty-minute wait isn’t a hindrance (few people in Berkeley are deadline-driven); rather, it serves to authenticate the sensory superiority of their pizza experience. Here is the Cheese Board’s pizza offering for tomorrow (the day of Fragrant’s publication): Crimini mushrooms, onion, mozzarella and Campo de Montalban cheese, arugula (Heirloom Organic Garden of Hollister) in a lemon dressing. Mr. Dino, my local purveyor of finest quality pizza back in New Jersey, would consider a forty-minute wait a failure of customer service, as would his deadline driven customers. Heirloom organic arugula would elicit from Mr. Dino a blank stare.

Throughout Fragrant, Mandy celebrates the act of discrimination, the exercise of a knowledgeable palate upon selected raw materials of experience. Training one’s nose (and brain) to find the nuanced differences in a series of ambergris samples can be revelatory; learning how to blend ambergris with other materials can, as Mandy illustrates, be a creative project akin to learning how to paint in water colors. Yet I can’t help but wonder whether for every talented Mandy Aftel there are ten Randy Marshes finishing every dish “with a little crème fraîche.”

Mandy’s facility in reading character is the talent of the clinical psychologist, one she re-deploys with respect to scent: she listens to how an oil presents itself and how it reacts with others. In her fascination with the symbology of scent, the meanings of its folklore and myths, Mandy takes as her aesthetic scope the entire scented world and our experience of it—human involvement with fragrance from prehistory onward. Her aesthetic compromises, in Wallace Stevens’ phrase, “the whole of harmonium.” She is the world’s first Jungian Perfumer.

Schlubs of New York

There are rare nights when Manhattan has a manic, magical charm. Then there are nights like tonight, when Tenth Avenue reeks of discarded ice outside the fish market and the air is shattered by car horns as drivers blast their way into the Lincoln Tunnel. (To be fair, these aren’t New Yorkers—they’re assholes from New Jersey in a big fucking rush to get back to their blighted home turf.)

On such a routine, uncharming evening people in New York look like hell—vacant, tired, badly dressed; a parade of the lame and the halt, the obese and the homeless. Chelsea becomes a badly lit Fellini set.

Hordes of people pour across town, flooding the sidewalks. I fight my way down Tenth through the selfie-taking mob, past a couple of bloody zombies. I start thinking about airport temperature screening for Ebola and what a joke that is. It’s not until I pass another ghoul that the signal rises above the noise and I realize these are not the usual schlubs of Manhattan. These are out of town schlubs dressed up as zombies (and anime princesses and super heroes). I am surrounded by morons exiting Comicon at the Javits Center.

At 28th Street I reach my goal: an opening at the Fred Torres Gallery, billed as an “experiential showcase” that “blends diverse visual and olfactory mediums to explore a full spectrum of the moments and states that cannot fully be defined.” Thus the show’s title, “Liminality: betwixt and between.”

A small group of people mill about on the sidewalk in front of the gallery’s plate glass window. They’re watching perfumer Christopher Brosius on a step ladder hang some laundry on a metal frame. At least that’s what it looks like at first glance. On second glance (and first sniff) he’s hanging a silken sheet printed with a phrase and ever so lightly scented. The 15 knot breeze coming off the Hudson makes it hard to build much olfactory ambience. A silver-haired gentleman is observing the scene while a Asian woman gesticulates and lectures him energetically in German.

CB himself, of course, is wearing boots and a black kilt. His parti-colored hair is braided to his scalp in tight cornrows. He peers myopically through wire-framed aviator frames set with thick lenses. It’s quite a look. [You should talk, Mr. Minus Six Diopters.—Ed.] [Yeah, but I gave up aviators frames in the Eighties—right after kilts.]

Inside the miniscule gallery I gratefully accept a glass of champagne from an attractive young woman with ample and generously displayed cleavage. Reluctantly, I turn away to the art. There are three visual artists, each with his own wall. One is a collection of dark B&W photos of random people in random scenes; the images are untitled and uninterpretable, but all are definitely bleak. On the next wall hang three quasi-representational paintings that are quasi-engaging. On the third wall is a series of color photographs. Some were taken in a semi-finished attic with a female subject who looks lost and ill at ease. Others feature bare male asses. This is the artist examining “the tension between sexuality and intimacy.” Or something.

In the center of the room, on a pedestal draped in white fabric, stands a clear glass Florence flask. No one is paying it any attention. I lean in and sniff—I get notes of dry wood and fresh green leaves. This is CB’s contribution to the show.

The show was organized by an outfit that bills itself as “a full-service curation and experience-design agency specializing in immersive events production.”

Really? I got fully immersed in the champagne and that was about it. I guess if you want to “cultivate an inclusive influencer network augmenting cultural cachet,” then this is the agency for you.

Or you could set up an odorized booth at Comicon.

The FirstNerve Library

I have updated the Amazon widget on this page with personal comments on each of the books that I recommend. The selection reflects my preferred blend of science, history, memoir, and stories. I will add to the list from time to time. Click through to purchase them on Amazon: there is no extra cost to you and a few coins will drop into the FirstNerve beer fund.

FN Review: Led by the Nose

English journalist and author Robert Chalmers is an interesting fellow, as I learned while being interviewed by him recently. He’s a man of refined aesthetic judgment and wide-ranging cultural curiosity who sounds, on the telephone, like one of those portly, slightly bibulous character actors from black and white British films of the 1930s. (I have no idea how well this impression corresponds with reality—he does not google easily.) Chalmers is on good terms with Elvis Costello, jets off to the Cote d’Azur to interview famous actresses, and since adolescence has been a devotee of fragrances by Creed.

Chalmers has now published a greatly expanded—and more leisurely and nuanced—version of his European Newsweek story as an ebook. In Led by the nose: The future of smell in a virtual world, he tracks down the inventors of the latest digital smell technologies (Scentee’s Adrian Cheok and the oPhone Duo’s David Edwards) and tries to envision the changes they may bring to society. He sets this narrative against a lively and humorous depiction of perfume culture.

Along the way he manages to heap praise upon What the Nose Knows. Consequently, I can’t pretend this is an impartial review. But I can say that Led by the Nose is an amusing and inexpensive read for anyone who likes perfume and/or is intrigued by the future of scent technology.

FN Review: The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert

I bought this book on a lark while ordering audio cables on Amazon. It’s a goofy, hand-illustrated, little board-book by Master Sommelier Richard Betts. His conceit is that he will help you follow your nose to a wine you like, minus all the pretentious verbiage associated with wine-tasting.

The core concept, which I like, is to begin with your favorite fruit aroma: red versus black fruit in the case of red wine, and ripe/tropical versus pear/apple for whites. He also covers woody, earthy, and “other” notes. Every so often there is a scratch and sniff sample to try—which could be more than a gimmick in this context. After sniff-reading my way through it, however, my reaction is “meh.” The scent samples leave a lot to be desired. While the peach, for example, comes through ripe and clear, the pear is weak and nondescript. The dill is a fail, and “flowers” smells like the courtesy soap in a budget motel.

Oh well.

FirstNerve Review: The Neuropsychology of Smell and Taste by G. Neil Martin

A book titled The Neuropsychology of Smell and Taste is not what one normally grabs from the shelf for amusement during a long plane ride. But having agreed to review it, I took it along on a recent flight from Newark to San Francisco figuring that it would, at least, deter annoying attempts at conversation from fellow passengers. How wrong I was. An attractive woman saw it peeking out of my carry-on bag and began talking to me in the boarding line; she is a neuropsychologist in the Bay Area. Somewhere over Nebraska the guy next to me asks me what I do; he has a cousin in the fragrance business he had to tell me about. Then the weirdo who had been marking up a briefcase full of fashion magazines chimed in about perfume trends; he’s a department store merchandiser. The lesson, I suppose, is that if you want to meet people you could do worse than get yourself a copy of Neil Martin’s new book.

Martin, who teaches psychology at Middlesex University in England, is the author of several well-regarded textbooks, as well as original research papers on, among other things, odor perception. His latest opus, part of the Psychology Press Brain, Behaviour and Cognition Series, is a lucid summary of the field aimed at advanced undergraduates, grad students, clinicians, and those looking to do research in the area—in other words, anyone with more than a casual interest in the functioning of the nose, tongue and brain. Those working in commercial venues—aromatherapists, neuromarketers, food writers, flavorists, ENTs, etc.—will also find it useful.

I think it says something positive about the field that there is finally a book to fill the gap between the hyper-focused experimental reports in the scientific literature and the dense, scholarly compilations that weigh down the bookshelves of the few with grant money enough to afford them. The area is sufficiently mature and the audience sufficiently wide to warrant an accessible treatment.

Martin’s topical approach is straightforward. He begins with the psychology of chemosensation and how smell and taste perceptions are measured. Then he reviews the major factors underlying individual differences: age, sex, personality, and culture. Next, he describes the basics of anatomy, neuroanatomy, and neurophysiology, covering everything from receptors to cortex and including such mechanical phenomena as the nasal cycle and swallowing. (Actually, he misses a couple of key papers debunking the nasal cycle by some fat-faced four-eyes but that’s a mere quibble in a work of this scope.) From there, it’s on to psychophysiology and neuro-imaging: the full array of studies using EEG, fMRI and allied techniques. The penultimate chapter deals with disorders of perception, including full attention to smell impairment in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. He concludes with the neuropsychology of flavor, taking a wide view that includes interactions between smell, taste and sight, and the mechanisms of hunger and satiety.

Booyah! Martin’s coverage is exhaustive but not exhausting. He has a deft touch in highlighting key findings, and he leavens the text with witticisms as dry as the sherry in the faculty lounge. His judgment is solid, making him a trustworthy guide for those venturing into the area for the first time.

I found the neuro-imaging chapter less satisfying that the others, but this is no fault of Martin’s. fMRI studies induce a sort of kaleidoscopic effect on the reader due to the fractal nature of the papers themselves. Each begins with an odor manipulation, then inventories activity in various brain regions of interest, compares this activity across the left and right hemispheres, and sometimes across ipsi- versus contra-lateral nostril odor delivery, and finally cross indexes these differences in men and women. The result is a patchwork quilt of neuroscience mini-effects: “Nosenpicker and McMucus found that unpleasant odors delivered to the left nostril evoke greater response in the left orbitofrontal cortex of men and a decrease in activity in the right insula in men and women, while a pleasant odor delivered to the right nostril tends to result in heightened response to the . . .” and so on. Martin tries manfully to extract general conclusions, but there is only so much one can do with brain science of the slice and dice variety. I believe imaging people have been shotgunning in all directions for too long; it is time they got their own house in order by tying specific hypotheses to specific brain areas.

The Neuropsychology of Smell and Taste is timely, up-to-date, and an excellent overview of the field. I expect it will become standard reading in sensory science.

Barbara Herman's Scent & Subversion

On Tuesday, Mindy Yang and Chad Murawczyk of MiN New York hosted a party for Barbara Herman to celebrate her new book Scent & subversion: Decoding a century of provocative perfume.

Herman blogs extensively on vintage fragrances at Yesterday’s Perfume and the smellerati were out in force at the party. I rubbed elbows with Lucy Raubertas (Indieperfumes), Gaia Fishler (TheNonBlonde), Douglas Bender (CharentonMacerations), Christophe Laudamiel (Dreamair) and a couple of the Goodsmellas.

Of course the star of the night was Barbara Herman who read some lovely passages from her book. Scent & Subversion begins by introducing us to her “chemical romance” with the great perfumes of the past, and then surveys the icons of the 20th century in chronological order. Her capsule appreciations cover everything from Fougère Royale (Houbigant, 1882) to Laundromat (Demeter, 2000). A third section profiles a few “scent visionaries” and gives useful advice to those who want to collect their own vintage samples.

Herman is a deft and inventive writer whose talent is to make the scents come alive in your mind’s nose. To a literary genre still hung-over after an early overindulgence in bitchy snarkitude, her approach is welcome as a fresh breeze. This splendid little volume (it fits easily in the hand) is beautifully produced and generously illustrated with original color advertisements.

P.S. Thinking of buying a copy? Click through the Amazon widgets on this page and you’ll kick a few pennies into the FirstNerve Beer Fund at no cost to yourself.

Amuse-nez in Chelsea: ICONOSMS at Dillon Gallery

Last Thursday evening, walking west on 25th Street, the idea of attending a gallery opening suddenly felt like feeble excuse to be outdoors. I was being pummeled by an Arctic blast that raced across the river from New Jersey. The cold made my face hurt. Head down, I passed the Fisker showroom displaying a pumpkin orange Karma. I didn’t even stop. I marched past a gallery full of hipsters clustered around wall-mounted chunks of metal. Ahead of me, two guys wearing sneakers and tattoos were carefully arranging large black sacks in front of another well-lit gallery window. An assemblage? A performance piece? No, just setting out the garbage.

Then, near 11th Avenue, the icy wind whipped a warm floral perfume into my face and a moment later I noticed the sign for the Dillon Gallery. I had arrived. And I had already begun to experience the “osmo” portion of Volatile Marilyn #5, one of the ten new Iconosms created by Les Christophs.

These hybrid olfacto-visual artworks are the production of Christophe Laudamiel and Christoph Hornetz, the always interesting pair whose goal is “unleashed Perfumery,” an art form free of artistic, emotional and academic constraints. Each work consists of a scent (the Osmo), a visual element (the Icos), and a brief statement of the inspiration or intended experience.

For Volatile Marilyn #5, the scent is “a 21st century wink to Chanel N°5 (1921)” that “captures [Monroe’s] sheer whiteness, her innocence and her indefinable personality” as well as her ephemeral yet larger-than-life presence. It is diffused from a small unit located near Dreaming Marilyn DE#5, a print by photographer Laurent E. Badessi. Located nearest the gallery entrance, this was the scent that drifted out the doors and into the passing gale.

As with all the other works in the exhibit, Les Christophs are casually open about the formulation of Volatile Marilyn #5: “The 3 common ingredients found in both scents [i.e., Chanel N°5 and this piece] are rose extract, jasmine extract and methyl-nonyl aetaldehyde.” I’m not sure what the crowd (and it was a crowd—the large gallery space was soon packed) made of this information, but I found it engaging and illuminating, in the same way a wine menu might mention oaky notes in its Chardonnay. It drew me into the experience and offered contact points between my knowledge and the artists’ intent.

This transparency with respect to formulation is a signature of perfumer Christophe Laudamiel. He doesn’t mind you knowing how he achieves his effects. In Lilac Mon Amour, for example, he explains why natural lilac scent is unextractable from the floral source and how it must be recreated with other molecules from nature and the laboratory. He cheerfully refers to his artistic use of this rendering as a “trompe-nez” effect. The scent, diffused like most of the others inside its own small tent, is paired with a gorgeous print of a lilac blossom by photographer Brian Jones. The accompanying text captures the whimsical attitude of Les Christophs toward their art and audience:

“One can be transported as far as one wishes to go . . . or one can choose to remain under control, coercively preventing one’s own brain from day-dreaming . . . Just relax . . .”

It’s hard not to smile while reading this and inhaling the ultra life-like scent.

Not all of the visual elements are prints. In Gone with the Wind, colored threads unraveling from an embroidered cushion trail like scented kite tails in the breeze of a fan. In Fuller Helmets, the visitor raises his head into geodesic frames made of scented plastic. And in Muguet Patch 9, a collection of white stones sit on a swatch of AstroTurf; press them and they light up briefly as you inhale another trompe-nez effect—lily of the valley.

These are early days for olfactory art. There is no definition of it, only examples.The works on display in ICONOSMS are a delight. They are refreshingly free of dogma and politics; they do not attempt to shock. They lead the visitor by the nose and invite him to sample a specific experience. They entertain. And they are wonderfully self-curating.

Les Christophs “ICONOSMS” is on display at the Dillon Gallery, 555 West 25th Street in New York, from January 24 through February 6, 2013.

FirstNerve Review: The Art of Scent 1889 – 2012

The Scent Stripped Bare by Its Curator, Even.

The Art of Scent 1889 – 2012 occupies the fourth floor of the Museum of Arts & Design on Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. The main exhibit is a large room with a white wall. Along the wall are twelve smooth indentations that from a distance look as if a giant pressed his thumb into putty. On closer inspection each has a narrow cleft at the bottom. The overall effect is vaguely gynecological. Lean into the shallow, curved opening and you notice a hole in the bottom. A sly reference to Duchamp’s urinal? A hiss and a low rumble of plumbing announce a scented air stream rushing to meet your face. It’s MAD’s version of a swirlie.

An explanatory text appears now and then beside the opening, backlit in white letters. The text is reproduced in a pamphlet that observes all the proper forms of an art show catalog: artist’s name, the work’s title, its date and provenance, and a brief description of its significance. Except that the twelve art works in question are perfumes. And therein lies the central conceit of The Art of Scent: its whiny, foot-stomping, insistence that perfume is Art.

A side room offers the same dozen perfumes in a more traditional medium—alcoholic solution. They are arranged in clear covered platters on a clear Plexiglas table surrounded by clear plastic stools. Labeled blotters are provided for dipping and sampling. (Unusually shaped, these are the capellini of blotters; they bring to mind the phrase pencil-dick bug f***er.)

Along the wall of the side room are five stations that dispense scent-sample cards from biomorphic protrusions on the wall. (They are suggestively labial in a Videodrome sort of way.) The samples consist of four accords from, and the complete formula of, Lancôme’s Trésor. Here a visitor actually gets to look under the hood and see how perfumer Sophia Grojsman built the fragrance. The accords (incorrectly equated with “mods” in the accompanying text) by themselves are stark and seemingly unrelated; their integration in the finished fragrance is remarkable, and vividly illustrates the complicated, combinatorial magic of perfumery.

The liquid versions don’t always match those wafting out of the wall, which were adapted to suit the dry delivery system. In particular, the wall’s Drakkar Noir was coming apart—a grassy note stood out and the impression was not at all like the (very familiar) commercial product.

The final piece of the exhibit is an iPad app that lets visitors pair an abstract descriptor with a realistic one to describe each perfume, and then projects a word cloud representation of the current tally onto a screen at the end of the room. Pointless but harmless fun.

All this spritz and tell has one objective: to sell the notion that perfume is Art. In a world where a crucifix in jar of urine and a sliced-up sheep in formaldehyde are considered masterpieces, this would seem to be a fairly low bar to clear. Yet, the exhibit huffs and puffs to make its point.

For example, the words “perfume” and “perfumer” appear nowhere in the catalog. This ostentatious omission is part of curator Chandler Burr’s puerile attempt to win the argument by recasting its terms. He talks about olfactory art, not perfume. He talks about scent creators and scent artists, not perfumers. He talks about patrons, not perfume brands. He slings a lot of hash about “aesthetic visions,” “abstraction,” “ornamentation,” “minimalism,” “hyper-realism,” “diaphanous quality of light,” and “21st century sensibilities,” but nothing about top notes or fragrance families. The idea seems to be that if he can talk about perfume in purely artistic terms, it must be Art. But calling it so doesn’t make it so.

Beyond sheer assertion, Burr’s only specific claim is that olfactory Art only became possible with the invention of synthetic fragrance chemicals in the late 19th century:

By freeing olfactory artists from an exclusively natural palette, they [synesthetics] turned scent into an artistic medium.

So if you didn’t have coumarin or vanillin on the shelf, you weren’t doing Art. Tough beans for Giovanni Maria Farina, who created Eau de Cologne in 1708, or Jean-Louis Fargeon, perfumer to Marie-Antoinette. And whatever ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian perfumers were doing, it wasn’t Art.

The odd thing about Burr’s claim is that it ignores the difference between a flower and a perfume oil. A pile of rose petals on the floor of a barn in Bulgaria does not a natural palette make. Petals must be distilled, extracted, de-waxed, filtered, and blended before the perfumer can reach for a bottle of rose oil. The same goes for the bales of patchouli, the crates of oakmoss, and so on. Once processed, these materials have an amplified, focused smell that, while it may be reminiscent of the source, is entirely novel, man-made, and not found in nature.

What’s missing from The Art of Scent, with its clean white walls and transparent furniture, are the messy, colorful worlds of commerce and fashion—the reason these fragrances exist in the first place. Consumers don’t buy Drakkar Noir to hang on the wall or admire on the mantelpiece. Yet in Burr World, Pierre Wargnye is an artist who woke up one morning in the mood to “violate” the “strict line between ‘fine’ and ‘functional’ fragrances.” The Muse told him to start with a shitload of synthetic dihydromyrcenol and the result was Art. In real life, the Guy Laroche people circulated a fragrance brief and Pierre Wargnye worked on it because that’s what his employer, a large, publicly traded New York corporation, asked him to do. And it became the “most significant and influential scent” of the 1980s because a lot of guys bought it. To wear. On their skin. To attract chicks.

You can stick your head in the wall all day long, but you won’t learn that at MAD. The Art of Scent 1889 – 2012 smells okay, but it’s a history deprivation chamber.

P.S. As a gesture to loyal FN fans, we brought the BurrOMeter out of storage, fired it up, and aimed the sensors at the show catalog.




Name Drops: 17

Aimé Guerlain
Ernest Beaux
Francis Fabron
Bernard Chant
Carol Phillips
Pierre Wargnye
Olivier Cresp
Jacques Cavallier
Annie Buzantian
Alberto Morillas
Jean-Claude Ellena
Carlos Benaim
Max Gavarry
Clément Gavarry
Daniela Andrier
Issey Miyake
Miuccia Prada

Bonus Points:

Perfumers: 14
French: 10
Designers: 2
Moguls: 1

Jean-Claude Ellena Deluxe Triple Bonus Points®: 3

Autre Merde Française Bonus Points: 4

Eiffel Tower
traditional French floral
nineteenth-century Paris
nineteenth-century French scent making

Le Capitaine Louis Renault Bonus Points: 4

shocking
shocked by
startling
dramatically

Total BurrOmeter reading for The Art of Scent: 55 milliburrs

Outlook: Clear skies, clear furniture. Smooth sailing: no friction, no traction.

Fifty Shades of B.O.: The Olfactory Fetishes of E.L. James

* * *

UPDATE: Welcome, readers of The New Yorker and fans of Alastair Gee! If you like olfacto-literary deconstruction, you might also want to have a look at Eustace Tilley Cogitates or The Bad Smells of Toni Morrison.

* * *

It’s a monster bestseller. It’s pissed off the feminists. And it may be why all the soccer moms in our neighborhood are eyeballing the checkout guy at the ShopRite. In other words, there were more than enough reasons to leaf through volume one of the Fifty shades of Grey trilogy. As we did so, we couldn’t help but notice that author E.L. James is fully engaged on the olfactory front.

Here is the opening of the infamously spicy Chapter Seven:

The first thing I notice is the smell: leather, wood, polish with a faint citrus scent. It’s very pleasant, and the lighting is soft, subtle. In fact, I can’t see the source, but it’s around the cornice in the room, emitting an ambient glow. The walls and ceiling are a deep, dark burgundy, giving a womb-like effect to the spacious room, and the floor is old, old varnished wood.

OK, so the heroine-narrator sounds like the Century 21 lady leading you through a classic center-hall Colonial with updated detail work. Soon she’s pointing out the furnishings—wooden cross, iron grid on the ceiling, padded bench (oxblood leather!)—and then Mr. Grey’s accessories: whips, riding crops, restraining cuffs, yadda yadda.

Yet such attention to ambient scent is, in fact, relatively rare in the book. E.L. James is much, much more interested in body odor. You might say she’s obsessed by it.

Mr. Grey, the super-fabulous, super-hunky, super-wealthy object of Anastasia Steele’s affection is a very fragrant fellow. His is a “clean, wholesome scent” with some additional features:

He smells of freshly laundered linen and some expensive body wash.

Whoa. He has a driver, a live-in housekeeper, and his own helicopter, but he doesn’t . . . wear cologne.

James invokes Grey’s B.O. at every turn.

. . . brushing his hair with my nose, smelling his clean, fresh smell. 

He’s close enough for me to touch, for me to smell. Oh my . . . sweat and body wash and Christian. It’s a heady cocktail . . . 

I reach for the body wash and it smells of him. It’s a delicious smell. I rub it all over myself . . . 

He smells clean, fresh, heavenly . . . 

His jacket is warm, far too big, and it smells of him . . . delicious. 

I’m lying on top of him, my head on his chest, and he smells divine: freshly laundered linen and some expensive body wash and the best, most seductive scent on the planet . . . Christian. I don’t want to move. I want to breathe this elixir for eternity.

Alright, already! Clean and fresh. We get it. And enough with the linen and body wash.

His proximity is heavenly. He smell of body wash and Christian, an inebriating mix . . . 

He runs the tips of his fingers down my cheek. Oh my, his proximity, his delicious Christian smell. 

“My pleasure, Anastasia.” He kisses me, and I inhale his sexy Christian smell. 

. . . I know it will take an eternity to expunge the feel of his arms around me and his wonderful fragrance from my brain.

Christian, divine, heavenly, eternity. Wait, are we in Bible class?

I nuzzle up against him, eyes closed, my nose at his throat, drinking in his sexy Christian-and-spiced-musky bodywash fragrance, my head on his shoulder. 

It’s a delicious smell. I rub it all over myself, fantasizing that it’s him—him rubbing this heavenly scented soap into my body, across my breasts, over my stomach, between my thighs with his long-fingered hands. 

  . . . turning my face into Christian’s chest, I inhale his unique scent and nuzzle him . . . 

I am curled on his lap, my head against his chest, as we both calm. Very subtly, I inhale his sweet, intoxicating Christian scent. 

Our tongues entwine, our passion and ardor erupting between us. He taste divine, hot, sexy, and his scent—all body wash and Christian—is arousing.

Whew! That’s one good smelling dude. But it leaves us wondering about the endless olfactory tropes. Is this repetition a feature of romance novels? Perhaps so. (And despite all the soft-porn BDSM hype, Shades of Grey is totally a romance novel. We had to skip past large swaths of gag-inducing emotional narration, boring phone conversations with supportive family members, and page after page of “does he like me?” and “do I like him?”)

And what of Grey’s olfactory take on Anastasia?

“You smell so good,” he murmurs . . . 

“You smell divine.” He nuzzles behind my ear. 

“You smell so good, Anastasia,” A tremor runs through my whole body. 

“Do you know how intoxicating you smell, Miss Steele?” he murmurs . . . 

“You smell so good, Anastasia. So sweet.” His nose skims past my ear down my neck, and he trails soft, featherlight kisses along my shoulder. 

“You smell as divine as ever, Anastasia,” he whispers as he places a soft kiss beneath my ear. I moan.

Well there you have it: she smells pretty damn good herself, although in a completely banal, non-specific sort of way. She doesn’t seem to wear any perfume of her own. Nor does Mr. Moneybags bother to buy her any.

What are we to make of all this? E.L. James uses olfactory imagery to drive home the point that Mr. Grey, despite his outré sexual habits, is intrinsically a good man, i.e., one worthy of Anastasia’s affection. James layers on the fresh linen and expensive body wash to underline Grey’s wealth and freedom from the mundane. How dreamy would it be if he smelled like Tide® and some no-name brand of shower gel from Walgreen’s?

On the other hand, Anastasia’s blandly positive B.O. merely restates her inherent purity (she’s a virgin as the book begins) and intrinsic desirability as a woman. No worries about smelling fresh or whether Grey will approve of her choice in perfume. No need to make an effort to impress. It’s the ultimate chick-lit fantasy: “Mr. Wonderful loves me just as I am!”

E.L. James is already hawking a CD of all the music mentioned in the trilogy. We imagine high-end body wash brands are pounding at her agent’s door, looking for product placement in the upcoming film. Can a film tie-in fragrance be far away? The female fan-base may want their man to smell like linen and body wash, but given the nature of the Fifty Shades fantasy, they may not see the point of an Anastasia Steele perfume.

FN Review: The Book of Lost Fragrances

When I was offered an advance reading copy of M.J. Rose’s new novel, The Book of Lost Fragrances, I hesitated. It wasn’t because, as Ms. Rose’s publicist pointed out, Publishers Weekly described it as a “deliciously sensual novel of paranormal suspense.” Here at FirstNerve we have no problem reviewing novels loaded with paranormal suspense. And the deliciously sensual is always welcome. (Mmmm . . . tasty!)

No, the hesitation was due to the prospect that The Book of LF would, by its mere physical presence on the shelf, cause a small but steady decline in testosterone levels. And you know how that goes—you review a romance novel and a few days later a small inner voice is saying, “Try putting a dollop of crème fraîche into that pesto,” and pretty soon the chardonnay budget is through the roof and you’re wondering if it’s time to start using a moisturizing facial scrub.

But rather than shrink from FN’s commitment to all things olfactory, I bravely accepted the offer and my copy of The B of LF arrived last week.

It had great looking cover art. Inside, a page listed the author’s previous novels including Lip Service, In Fidelity, and Lying in Bed. [Awesome titleage!—Ed.] Then came an epigraph from Marcel Proust, an unmistakable signal that the story to follow would be highly enriched with canards about odor memory. Indeed it is. M.J. Rose is a Proust Booster of epic proportions; an estrogen-fueled fabulist who takes odor-based recall to a whole new level.

The BOLF is ostensibly the story of Jac L’Etoile, a semiologist who has her own TV show called Mythfinders. Soon enough, however, we’re following multiple story lines set in ancient Egypt, Revolutionary-era France, and present-day China. The plot hinges on Cleopatra’s perfumer, who is charged with making a memory-evoking fragrance powerful enough to reveal the smeller’s previous lives. The perfumer and his lover take to their double-wide sarcophagus, each holding a jar of the scent, so that they may use it to find each other in subsequent incarnations. Their souls—and his vision-inducing scent—make numerous reappearances in the L’Etoile family, Parisian perfumers who have been running a successful business since before the Revolution.

Also in the cast of characters are the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, who want the fragrance to help them identify the next D.L., along with the Communist Chinese and their hired thugs who want to stop them. Plus the Jungian analyst from a Swiss nuthouse who wants the fragrance so he can settle some of his own Oedipal issues. Plus Jac’s bisexual brother Robbie, her Alzheimer-stricken father, and her ex-boyfriend Griffen North, now a studly archaeologist.

Whew!

M.J. Rose stocks her story with enough characters to fill a Hollywood tour bus: dramatis personae-wise she’s the Charles Dickens of romance novels sensual novels of paranormal suspense. When Jac, under the hallucinogenic influence of the ancient Egyptian scent, has flashbacks to her previous lives, it gets a little complicated. With all the reincarnations, the effect is like flipping between three episodes of Law & Order SVU playing on different cable channels—while eating an entire jumbo tub of buttered popcorn. The overall effect, for me, was filling yet unsatisfying.

For other readers this might be a feature, not a bug. The reincarnation bit lets you thrill repeatedly to the same emotions with the same (?) characters in different epochs and places. It’s the multiple re-entry vehicle of romance novels sensual novels of paranormal suspense. More bang for the buck. Except that there’s not really that much bang in the book. TBOLF observes a certain literary decorum. Despite all the yearning and passion, I was startled when the word “cock” made its single appearance.

The genre elements of TBOLF let the reader have her cake and eat it too. You can have guilt-free sex with a married ex-boyfriend because you were hot for him in a previous life. You can be a modern American woman but also be suavely French. You can have no perfumery training whatsoever yet have a better nose than your father and brother—both professional perfumers.

Nifty.

Rose writes quite convincingly about scents and about the experience of smelling. I give her credit for sustaining an entire story based on smell—as a plot element, as a theme, and as narrative description. In this she does better than Tom Robbins. While she takes the metaphysical claptrap of Jitterbug Perfume seriously she spins it into a passable chick-lit potboiler.

Hey, who wants some more chardonnay? You really should try the pesto.

They Stink Among Us: Another Classic from the First Nerve Library

FirstNerve commenter EdC has a knack for delivering book recommendations during the lull before the Super Bowl. Responding to last week’s item on Malawi’s proposal to outlaw public farting, Ed suggested I look at John Scalzi’s Agent to the Stars because “the extraterrestrials communicate by smell.”

Well, that sounded like just the ticket for a slow Friday night. Especially after a miserable week of navigating around potholes, through slushy intersections, and around mounded ice-banks, all freshly glazed with that depressing combination of snow, sleet and freezing rain known as “wintry mix.” Thirty seconds after seeing Ed’s comment, Agent to the Stars was on my Kindle and I was horizontal on the couch with a brewsky.

What a great book to kick back with. It’s a light but clever story about space aliens who discover Earth after picking up our television transmissions. They watch enough sitcoms to learn English and acquire a flawless ability for wise-cracking. Sensing from broadcast entertainment that Earthlings are ambivalent about aliens (Predator versus E.T., for example), they realize their introduction to humanity must be managed very carefully. So they decide to hire a top Hollywood talent agency to handle it. The job goes to Tom Stein, the story’s narrator, an up-and-coming agent whose sharp verbal sparring reminds one of Ari Gold in Entourage.

Scalzi has fun with Hollywood’s cut-throat, self-absorbed ways. The assortment of characters is satisfying: the ultra-bitchy actress, the beautiful but vacant one, the sleazy, client-poaching junior agent, and the creepy, stalkerish reporter for the universally despised industry tabloid. The collisions between Hollywood and the outsiders resembles those in Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty, except that it’s aliens instead of mobsters who mix things up.

The aliens in question are five-gallon blobs of protoplasm who, in their natural state, communicate with one another using smell. (Each “speaker” accompanies his olfactory message with a unique molecule that identifies him personally.) There are some good scenes where Joshua, the lead alien, hangs out with the neighbor’s golden retriever—they get along famously.

Soon after meeting Joshua, Tom Stein asks him what his species calls themselves. They are the Yherajk.

“It’s not our real name,” Joshua said, “but you couldn’t pronounce what we’re actually called.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Well, for one thing, it’s a smell,” Joshua said. “Would you like to smell it?”

I glanced at Carl. He shrugged. “Sure,” I said.

The room filled with a stench that resembled the offspring of a rotted sneaker and Velveeta. I gagged involuntarily.

“God, that’s horrible,” I said, and immediately regretted it. “I’m very sorry,” I said. “That was probably the first-ever insult to an extraterrestrial. I apologize.”

“No offense taken,” Joshua said, mildly. “You should come to a Yherajk get-together. It’s like a convention of farts.”

The Yherajk have an olfactory art form they call tivis, which loosely translates to “smell painting.” It consists of bits of crusty stuff in a shallow bowl equipped with wires as heating elements. (These shapeless aliens aren’t big on visual aesthetics.) The smells in a tivis are designed to evoke specific sets of major and minor emotions. Tom Stein experiences one for himself:

I smelled something acrid, but I was also immediately overwhelmed by a sense of wistfulness, with overtones of happiness but the slightest bit of regret. It was the feeling you get when you see an old girlfriend, realize that she’s a wonderful person, and that you were kind of an idiot to let her go, even is you’re happily married now.”

The host alien is dismissive of this particular example of olfactory art.

“This one is actually fairly crude—it’s just one primary emotion with only a couple of emotional harmonics. Any of us could have made it, actually. It’s the tivis equivalent of paint-by-numbers. Some of our tivis masters can create works of incredible emotional depth, layering emotion on emotion in unexpected combinations. You can get really worked up over a good tivis.”

Agent to the Stars may qualify as science fiction, but I’d call it a comic novel that happens to include space aliens. The dialog is snappy and the olfactory speculations are sprightly. Very entertaining.