Tripping the Light Transgressive

What is it with British art students? First we had Jammie Nicholas who decided to create a perfume from a BM instead of flushing it down the toilet. Now we have Leah Capaldi, one of five artists shortlisted for The Catlin Art Prize in England. Emma Love in The Independent describes her entry:

Leah Capaldi’s performance piece involves two actors at a time (one female, one male), who will each be sprayed with a whole bottle of Chanel Allure or Allure Pour Homme. They will walk among visitors at The Tramshed in London . . .

What do you mean, you don’t get it? Have you no appreciation for Art? Alright then, let Ms. Capaldi spell it out for you:

“The idea came from when I was at the British Museum a while ago looking at a statue and a woman walked past me wearing so much perfume it was unbelievable. I found it stifling and had a real physical reaction; I had to walk to the other end of the gallery to get out of that space,” says the RCA sculpture graduate Capaldi, who has already sprayed herself with perfume and travelled on public transport around London in the rush hour to see how people would react.

Now do you get it? Brilliant, yes? She’s grossing people out with perfume. It’s transgressive. Therefore, it’s Art.

Ms. Capaldi is a multi-media artist; she also uses a giant Mickey Mouse head and chocolate cake.

Sounds like fun and free government grant money to me. I’m already working on my first performance piece. It involves students from the Royal College of Art, his-and-her thongs printed with the Union Jack, and a bucket of KFC Fiery Buffalo Wings. The piece is called “Flaming British Assholes.”

Transgressive!

ISDP: Merry Month of May Edition

[This installment of ISDP couldn’t be posted on Friday the 13th because of the Blogger outage.—Ed.]

I Smell Dead People began life, so to speak, two years ago on a Friday the 13th. It still gives us goose bumps when we post an update on that auspicious day. Little did we know at the time that the Uncle Fester demographic was so widespread on the Web. But to all you ghoulish olfactophiles who keep coming back for more, we say welcome and breath deep! Here’s your monthly roundup of the macabre incidents that begin with a foul odor and all end in the same dismal place.

In many ISDP incidents, it falls to the local building manager or maintenance guy to open up the premises in question. On occasion they are also the ones who first pick up the scent. That was the case in Los Angeles on April 15:

a foul odor led a manager at the residential facility at 622 S. Wall to find the body of a 47-year-old man who had been dead approximately three days. Detectives confirmed the man died of blunt force trama.

Parking lots are a surprisingly frequent location for ISDP incidents. The latest example comes from Mooresville, Indiana:

An employee of a local Meijer store found the body of a missing Danville woman Saturday in her van weeks after she was reported missing. . . .

Employees indicated that because it is a 24-hour store with a large parking area, it isn’t uncommon for cars to be there numerous days. [The Hendricks County Sheriff’s public information officer] said an employee finally became suspicious after noticing a foul smell and flies around the minivan.

2011 is turning into a banner year for Norman Bates Award nominees. Here we present John Clauer of Santa Cruz, California. The remains of Heather Stearns, his 30-year-old girlfriend, were found in his apartment on April 26.

Stearns’ body was found in the apartment of 63-year-old John Clauer in Santa Cruz on Tuesday after neighbors complained about an unusual odor. Authorities say she had likely been dead for more than a week.

The circumstances were suspicious and authorities later determined that Stearns has been subjected to significant physical trauma. Clauer, meanwhile, was on parole for a burglary conviction.

A parole officer had visited the room on the afternoon of his arrest, but the officer apparently did not notice the corpse’s stench, authorities said.

State Parole spokesman Fred Bridgewater said Thursday that a report was due today on the parole officer’s visit. He declined to comment further.

Who says that California isn’t getting its money’s worth from its massive public employee sector?



Finally, this is not exactly an ISDP story, but having watched Attack of the 50-Foot Woman on TV as a kid, this item brought us a pang of nostalgia.

Yvette Vickers, an early Playboy playmate whose credits as a B-movie actress included such cult films as “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” and “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” was found dead last week at her Benedict Canyon home. Her body appears to have gone undiscovered for months, police said. (. . .)

Susan Savage, an actress, went to check on Vickers after noticing old letters and cobwebs in her elderly neighbor's mailbox.

Sic transit gloria mundi.


Yvette Vickers

Farting on the Bus: Questions for Daniel Senu-Oke

Our new hero is Anthony Nichols, a thirteen-year-old student at the Canal Winchester Middle School, in Ohio.

Anthony and his buddy were on the school bus last week when they cut the cheese in a big way. This led to an utterly predictable response by their fellow riders:

the flatulence apparently caused a ruckus on the bus amid a flurry of laughs, jeers and lowering of windows

Pretty standard stuff for a middle school bus.

The bus driver, ticked off because he had previously warned the dastardly duo that this behavior was unacceptable, turned Anthony and his buddy over to Assistant Principal Seymour Skinner Daniel Senu-Oke for discipline.

Also pretty standard stuff.

But then Mr. Senu-Oke guaranteed himself a place in the annals of school administration idiocy when he suspended the boys from the bus for “making an obscene gesture in violation of the student code of conduct”. According to the boy’s father, Mr. Senu-Oke also “suggested my son should hold his gas on this hourlong bus ride”.


Assistant Principal Daniel “Hold It In” Senu-Oke

The social psychology of farting is something we take seriously here at FirstNerve. But the notion that farting constitutes an obscene gesture breaks new ground in semiotic theory. It raises some philosophical questions we’d like to ask Mr. Senu-Oke:

Does the gestural equivalent reside in the sound or in the smell?

In your view of Canal Winchester community standards, is a Silent-But-Deadly not obscene?

Is a Bart Simpsonesque armpit fart noise obscene?

And finally, when someone cuts you off in traffic, is your response to fart loudly?

When a Scent Becomes a Thought Crime

Bastards.

The Coffee Bean Meme: Olfactory Palate Cleanser?

One of the cultural myths of smell that I blew up in What the Nose Knows concerns those jars of coffee beans you often see on the fragrance counter in the department store. The idea is that sniffing coffee beans acts as an olfactory palate cleanser, or a “reset button for the nose.”

There is a basis in psychophysiology for expecting difficulties when sampling one perfume after another. A person might adapt or become temporarily less sensitive to certain notes. His nasal passages might become flooded with a cacophony of scent, making it difficult to tell one sample from another. On the other hand, there is no scientific explanation—none, zip, nada—why the hundreds of different volatile compounds in coffee aroma would help with either of these scenarios.

In fact, the very concept of a palate cleanser is suspect. The one good study on the topic found that none of the usual palate cleansing methods (eating bread, rinsing with water, etc.) made any difference whatsoever in flavor perception.

Now comes a study in Perceptual and Motor Skills by psychologist Alexis Grosofsky and her colleagues at Beloit College in Wisconsin. They tackle the Bean Meme head-on, in a sniff test with college students and four commercial perfumes. (Somewhat hilariously, the scents are from the Designer Imposter collection of Parfums de Coeur. You know the ones: “If you like Calvin Klein’s Obsession, you’ll love our Confess.” Hey, Calvin Klein doesn’t fit into every research budget. And in any case, it makes absolutely no difference to the experiment.)

Each participant smelled three of the four perfumes from a dry down blotter in a jar, and rated them for pleasantness, intensity, and masculinity/femininity. Next came the palate cleanser: the subject sniffed a container full of coffee beans, lemon slices, or just plain air. Then the subject was given all four perfume samples—the original three plus a new one—and asked to pick out the new fragrance.

College students do pretty well on this test: they correctly fingered the new perfume 57% of the time after sniffing plain air, 62% of the time after sniffing beans, and 86% of the time after lemon. The differences between “palate cleansing” treatments were not statistically significant.

Smelling coffee beans did not results in higher mean accuracy of identification of novel fragrances. . . . Coffee beans and lemon seem to have no special refreshing properties. Fragrance sellers may wish to reconsider the practice of providing coffee beans to their customers.

Amen to that.