The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Glader has an excellent short profile of Christopher Brosius, formerly of Demeter and now of CB: I Hate Perfume. The last line of the piece (“He’s also thinking of launching a clothing line.”) is a bit alarming. I met Brosius once at a Fragrance Foundation event in New York where he was wearing a cape and black leather pants with what appeared to be a silver-studded codpiece.
Dude!
Then again, maybe he was just ahead of the curve.
For those of you following the Smelly Web Indexes conversation on the pros and cons of solo versus group blogs, law blogger Professor Bainbridge has some interesting observations.
It’s the time of year when the cottonwood trees in Washington State release tons of fluffy airborne seeds. As Seattle Times reporter Lynda V. Mapes describes the phenomenon she keeps her nose to the breeze:
That downy fluff is only one of the tree’s signatures. Come spring, just about anywhere there is fresh water in Puget Sound country, the sweet scent of cottonwood is in the air, the perfume that kicks off the out-of-doors season. The source of the scent is a flavonoid in the sticky sap within the tree’s buds that coats the leaves of cottonwood as they unfurl, protecting them against insects eager to attack the first fresh leaves of the year.Meanwhile, a property owner in Harrah, Washington had some manure from a local feedlot spread on an acre or so of his fields. Nearby residents complained about the smell and since Harrah is on the Yakima Reservation, the U.S. EPA sent an Air Quality Monitor to sniff around for violations of federal regulations.
So let’s get this straight. Food scolds Alice Waters and Michael Pollan want us to eat locally grown fruits and vegetables and locally raised meat because it’s ecologically correct. But if local manure spread on a local field smells bad, that’s politically incorrect according to the environmental nannies.
I love green-on-green family feuds. Time to microwave some artificially flavored popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the show.
I first encountered Sissel Tolaas in researching What the Nose Knows. After tweaking the “transgressive” pretensions of certain artistes, I wrote:
Sissel Tolaas, a Norwegian artist who lives in Berlin, gets closer to the mark. She collected underarm sweat from nine men who were in various states of fear and anxiety, chemically extracted their B.O., had it microencapsulated, and then spread it onto large colored sheets. She mounts these enormous scratch-and-sniff panels on art gallery walls for visitors to sample. The show is called “The Fear of Smell and the Smell of Fear.” It sounds creepy and probably smells worse. Sissel Tolaas could go far—she has a firm grasp of the transgressive.Recently she popped up in the German periodical Mono.Kultur as the guest “curator” of twelve blank pages of scratch-and-sniff scents. (So . . . conceptual!) The magazine noted that Ms. Tolaas “is a professor at Harvard University for invisible communication.”
When she arrived here, in early April, Tolaas would tell people what she was here to do, and they would all say the same thing: You have to go by the Folgers plant. “This is obvious,” she says, waving dismissively, clearly tired of the suggestion. “Everybody says this.”How does being obvious make the Folgers plant smell nonrepresentive of Kansas City?
Tolaas aspires to discover the hidden Kansas City and to present that back to the city. “This is my function,” she says. “To find the places that people here wouldn’t.”But if local residents don’t know the smell, how representative of their town can it be?
At 24th Street and Belleview Avenue, she stops suddenly in her tracks. “What’s that?” she asks, before answering herself. “That’s yeast. The yeast is strong here.” Another pause. “Now I’m getting yeast and garlic.”The deeply hidden smells of a brewery revealed by the “professional nose”—and she didn’t even have to wait for the lab results to come back from Berlin!
Of course, at 24th and Belleview, Tolaas is standing smack dab in the middle of a row of Mexican restaurants, accounting for the garlic, and just across the train tracks from Boulevard Brewing Co., accounting for the yeast. She has this strip pegged in a matter of minutes.
When the specimens arrive at her lab in Berlin, she has the molecular structure analyzed so that she can re-create the smells of the neighborhoods. Then she brings the smells back to the places where they originated.So Tolaas is going to bring recreated yeast smell back to Boulevard Brewery? I’m sure they’ll be impressed.
If the Grand Arts Gallery will pop for a Greyhound ticket, we’ll be happy to ride out and demonstrate the FirstNerve method of capturing and recreating local smellscapes. We’ll start with some taquitos al pastor at La Fonda El Taquito and wash ‘em down with a Boulevard Pale Ale. Then burp in a curator’s face. We call it Transgressive Ecological Urbanism.
We await a call from Harvard regarding our visiting appointment at the Graduate School of Design.
The Team Blog Index
Close: 131
Change: +8
Big movers: ISmellThereforeIam +12%, PerfumeDaRosaNegra +11%, PerfumePosse +6%
The Corporate & Community Site Index
Close: -34
Change: -42
Big movers: OsMoz +6%, TheDryDown -30%
Summary
The Corporate & Community Site Index cratered this week, dropping an astounding 42 points as TheDryDown sank 30%. The CCSI is now in negative territory: a first for any Smelly Web Index. The Team Blog Index rose eight points as all five sites registered gains in ranking. The Solo Blog Index was unchanged with only two big movers offsetting each other: OlfactaRama continuing its climb back from the depths and IndiePerfumes sliding back into the ditch. Unlike recent weeks, most sites moved in a narrow range of less than ±5%.
