ISDP: Close But No Cigar

Despite the prophecies of the Goracle, it’s been a cold damned winter hereabouts. How cold is it? Well, last month we came up empty. And this month looks pretty bleak as well.

Normally, we’d be all over a story like this: smell leads to the discovery of human body parts in a garbage bag on a Bronx street. The remains were those of a 45-year old woman thought to have been murdered and dismembered by her own son. However, the fact that her remains were sniffed out by Nana, “a 10-year-old boxer-pit bull mix,” rather than by the guy at the other end of the leash, means the incident doesn’t qualify as a bona fide ISDP event. Sorry, but we have strict editorial guidelines and that’s that.

Our second candidate case comes from the Cecil Hotel, located near skid row in downtown Los Angeles. After residents complained about low water pressure and “funny” tasting tap water, hotel management sent a maintenance worker to check out the water tanks on the roof. According to one account,

he made a gruesome discovery: the body of a young woman, lying at the bottom of the tank. The body was soon identified as that of 21-year-old Elisa Lam, a Canadian student, who had been missing for three weeks. The cause of death, said LAPD Sergeant Rudy Lopez, remained uncertain. Foul play had not been ruled out, nor had the possibility of “a very, very strange accident”

We think Sergeant Lopez has a firm grip on the forensic difficulties of the case. What leaves us puzzled is whether this is a legit ISDP item. We could call it I Taste Dead People but that would blur our brand identity. We considered submitting the incident to the judgment of the ISDP ombudsman, but we never got around to hiring one. We interviewed one guy who looked promising until he started rambling on about the Vibration Theory of Olfaction. The topper was he wanted us to pay his relocation expenses—from Greece! Get real, dude.

We hate to disappoint our loyal readers, so as sort of a lagniappe we offer a link to Metalunderground, where you can listen to the new album by Spanish band “Scent Of Death.” Here’s a snippet from their press release:

“The Spaniards have been doing their thing for a long time and it shows as they blast with the same brutal intensity and technical dexterity as bands like Immolation, Origin, Morbid Angel and Behemoth. This is some serious death metal that will surely appeal to all fans of intense and downright brutal extreme music.”

Brutal intensity and technical dexterity—that’s our new ISDP motto!

When Olfactory Artists Attack

By now we’ve all seen the picture of Lernert Engelberts and Sander Plug standing next to the thousand-plus dram samples of perfume—all released in 2012—that they dumped into a single flask and labeled “Everything.” It’s art, at least as currently defined.

It’s also troubling for anyone who loves perfume.

The New York Times, ever anxious to be seen as hip, gives this pair of Dutch putzes exactly the supportive exposure they’re after (fragrance advertisers be damned). The headline—“When Everything Smells Bad”—is a typically elephantine Timesian attempt to be cute. [“Everything,” get it?]

Even the photo caption—“The masks are to protect their noses, not their identities.”—is a gratuitous effort to play along with the stunt: the DPs are wearing dust masks which don’t do a bit of good protecting against smells.

As if the point of childishly mixing 1,400 perfume samples together isn’t clear enough, the Times hastens to spell it out for you:

“Our point is, why do you need nearly 1,400 new scents in one year?” Mr. Engelberts said, using a figure cited by Basenotes, an online fragrance forum.

One can almost hear tongues clucking all over the Upper West Side: “So wasteful!” “Marketing run amuck!” “Greedy capitalists!” Really? Try it on with products favored on the UWS:

“Our point is, why do you need nearly ten new Volvos in one year?”

 “Our point is, why do you need nearly 100 new artisanal organic goat cheeses in one year?”

“Our point is, why do you need nearly 350 new pinot noirs in one year?”

My point is, why do we need another trivial Marxist cultural critique masquerading as art?

Dolce & Gabbana Go to a Sex Therapist

“If a fragrance is announcing desire, what it’s doing is altering you to pay attention to the potential, for inviting you to experience aspects of your desire.”

Does this make any sense, grammatically or otherwise?

Go Rimbaud

In the NY Observer, Nate Freeman interviews the author of I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, the new memoir by Richard Hell. (Yes, as in Richard Hell and the Voidoids.) From the quoted passages Hell sounds like a smell-aware writer.

In the mid-Sixties he hitchhiked his way to Florida with Tom Verlaine:

“We didn’t know anybody there,” he writes, “or know anything about the place except that it was warm and airy, and there was plenty of citrus fruit and seafood, and girls who smelled like suntan and had little particles of sand on them here and there, including inside the waistbands of their panties.”

Then there’s this bit about CBGB:

The birthplace of punk was a garbage dump. In an unpublished column he wrote during the club’s formative years that is included in Tramp, Mr. Hell says, “the first thing I noticed is that it smelled like dogshit. Then I saw the damned dog.”

Good times.

Blaming the Methane: Los Angeles Edition

Methane is an odorless gas. It is also hazardous at high concentrations. This is why the gas company adds a stinky blend of mercaptans to it as a warning agent. Simple, right? Unless you are a TV reporter or Santa Monica Fire Department spokesman, that is.

A sulfurous stink rose in Los Angeles over the weekend and the usual clown riot ensued. Here’s the headline from KNBC-TV:

Ocean Stink Prompts Flood of 911 Calls

And here’s the lede: “Methane gas from the sea floor caused a foul odor on Sunday . . .”

I don’t blame coastal resident Maria Carlito Covarrubias for posting on Facebook about a possible gas leak, nor Summers McKay for calling her building manager with the same worry. Like everyone else, they’ve been drilled since childhood to identify mercaptans with natural gas. And public safety-wise that’s a good thing.

But reporters (yes, Sharon Bernstein and Heather Navarro, I’m talking about you) ought to know that methane is odorless and the stink is artificial. And first responders (Justin Walker of the Santa Monica Fire Department, I’m talking about you) should be clear on the concept.

When he talks about tectonic plates and sea floor ruptures, Mr. Walker could simply point out that regardless of methane content geologically vented gases often smell sulfurous (fumaroles, mud pots, hot springs, etc.).

Adding to the confusion is this KNBC subhead: “The smell may not have been the result of a natural process in the ocean as originally thought.” Huh? So was it a utility gas leak after all? Something extraterrestrial, perhaps? Or did the copy desk just stick that in?

Sheesh.

UPDATE March 4, 2013

One and a half cheers for KABC-TV which gets it mostly right:

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (KABC) — Air quality officials said methane gas [d’oh!] or stinky algae were the likely sources of Sunday's foul odor across the Southland.

Technicians with the South Coast Air Quality Control District said they believe the stink is an ocean-based natural occurrence blowing ashore from the Santa Monica Bay.

Santa Monica hazmat crews found unusual concentrations of odorless methane gas [yessssss!] in the air.

Officials believe either a pocket of stinky algae, or a bubble of methane laced with sulfurous gas, surfaced in the ocean. [There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?]

Meanwhile, the L.A. Times blog quotes S.M.F.D.’s hapless Justin Walker:

Recent shifts in water temperature might have caused plankton and algae beds to bloom, releasing methane just under the surface, Walker said. The gas also might have been produced by a geologic event, such as a shift in tectonic plates, he said.

Or, to quote Zed: “Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.”