Today the flag I used to put up every September 11th in Montclair, New Jersey now hangs on my house in Colorado.
It’s there for the two guys on my old block who were murdered that day 20 years ago.
David Lee Pruim who worked for Aon in 2 World Trade Center.
Michael L. Collins who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald in 1 World Trade Center.
Many anniversaries have gone by. The fires are out, the wreckage cleared, new buildings built.
But the grief and anger smolder on.
I will never forget.
A little over five years ago we called a wrap on our wildly popular I Smell Dead People™ feature, along with the annual Norman Bates Award™ competition. It wasn’t for lack of compelling material. From a simple premise (a person follows a repulsive smell only to discover cadaverous remains) came stories that illuminated the human condition in all its highs and lows. However there were simply too many incidents to catalog and each one took some unraveling. Also, I needed to free up some time to write what would become the fictional adventures of Nick Zollicker.
This week the lurking thrall of ISDP finally broke through my studied indifference. The first item to grab me was a headline in the august Times of London: “Russian admiral’s wife and son found stabbed to death.” The bodies of Rear Admiral Leonid Lobanov’s elderly wife and middle-aged son were discovered in a St. Petersburg apartment after neighbors complained of a bad smell.
No big deal, right? Standard unnoticed deaths. Wrong: “The pair had been stabbed and slashed several times in the torso, neck and face. They were in a sitting position on a sofa.” And here’s the kicker: the bodies were discovered eight days after the Rear Admiral “died under the wheels of a suburban train near Ruchi station in the northeast of the city, two miles from the apartment where they all lived.”
That’s potentially the basis for a typically dark Russian tale of depravity and intrigue. The only question is whether it should be written in the style of Dostoyevsky or John le Carré.
The second item to leap out at me came from the execrable Star Tribune of Minneapolis. [Why so harsh?—Ed.] [It’s Minnesota’s answer to the Los Angeles Times.] [Oh.—Ed.] The headline wasn’t anything special: “Murder charge: St. Paul woman shot ex-husband, buried him in their back yard.” It was the subhead that raised the relevant possibility: “A neighbor told police about a bad smell coming from near Karina Her’s garden sometime shortly after July 5 and persisting for a week.”
So—do we credit the neighbor with an ISDP find?
Karina Her
Enthusiasts know that to qualify as an ISDP incident, the body in question must be discovered by someone smelling it. Suppose an out-of-state relative requests a welfare check on an elderly family member and the responding police officer detects the telltale scent wafting through an open window. Sorry—no dice. The ISDP Rules Committee sets and maintains very high standards.
From the Star Tribune story (along with this one from WCCOChannel 4) it is unclear whether the neighbor’s complaint led directly to the discovery of the husband’s body. After all, the victim’s stepdaughter apparently implicated her mother in a 911 call. The sequence of events is critical to determining whether this is a true IDSP event. (See how much work this takes?)
Finally, this item from the Overpromising and Underdelivering file: “L.A. Woman Says She Slept 3 Feet From Her Neighbor’s Corpse for Weeks.” At first glance it looks like Reagan Baylee deserves a Norman Bates Award nomination. But it turns out her neighbor’s corpse was in a different apartment.
Ms. Baylee’s emotional and highly personal account, as befits the Age of Social Media, overshares to the point of TMI. (Check out her TikTok video for the full effect.) Still, she supplies some telling details and her story has an excellent plot twist. (Which neighboring apartment was the gruesome odor really coming from?)
Jing Daily, which alleges to be all about “the business of luxury in China,” has a recent piece on China’s “patriotic perfume boom.” The story condescendingly puts Western fragrance brands on notice while promoting the new hotness: Guochao, which means “Chinese heritage hip.”
Long gone are the days when established global brands could simply crack the Chinese market with a French label and a cliché image portraying an actress wearing the scent during a night walk in Paris. In a market that is increasingly being dominated by up-and-coming Chinese brands, Guochao-themed shopping festivals, and openly patriotic influencers, international perfume houses can no longer claim to be the authoritative gatekeepers of refined taste.
Uh oh. Sounds like trouble for Chanel and Estée Lauder and all the other mega-brands that want to slurp down that sweet, sweet ChiComm money.
Guochao brands are increasingly turning toward local lifestyles for inspiration.
Well, fair enough! Maybe we can help. We locked the FirstNerve marketing team into a windowless conference room and had them brainstorm new Guochao fragrance concepts. Here’s what they came up with:
Kowtow by Lebron James. A sports cologne from the hoops legend himself.
Slave to Love by the Uyghur Autonomy Region Committee. A people, a place, an attitude.
BSL No. 4 by Shi Zhengli. Die Fledermaus turned into a Chinese opera and captured in a bottle.
Lie Flat. The effortless fragrance for slackers.
Deep Cover by Tang Juan. Your scent, your secret.
Kowloon Memories. The scent of freedom fading in the wind.
1989 Chang’an Avenue. Feel the power, fight the force.
Honey Pot, the alluring new scent from Fang Fang.
“I was already thinking about how I was going to make Black Bart’s Cave a little bigger.”
As Eric Cartman once said, “I think we should go through Black Bart's Cave right away ‘cause, we’re gonna wanna do it seven or eight times.”
Many in my generation vividly remember Dionne Warwick’s hit songs of the 60s: Walk On By (1964), I Say a Little Prayer (1967), and DoYou Know the Way to San Jose? (1968). The slickly orchestrated pop tunes (by Burt Bacharach and Hal David) were a perfect match to Warwick’s effortless high voice and precise delivery.
So what brings her to mind? Why, a press release from Fragrance Creators Association:
Fragrance Creators Association has announced that DDD3 Inc., owned by entertainer, entrepreneur and philanthropist Dionne Warwick, has joined its membership of more than 60 large and small businesses spanning the fragrance supply chain.
My reactions were, in descending order:
“That’s nice, Dionne Warwick is still alive.” (She is 80 years old.)
“What on earth does she have to do with fragrance?”
It turns out she launched a single, self-named perfume back in 1986. Dionne must not have been too memorable—there is no mention of it on Fragrantica.com and only a placeholder on Basenotes. Good luck trying to find a collectible bottle on eBay.
According to the FCA blurb, she plans to relaunch Dionne “in response to popular demand.” Or perhaps to leverage attention from her recent nomination to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Or perhaps to climb out of her 2013 bankruptcy and deal with an epic $7 million owed to the IRS.
DDD3, Inc., the company named in the press release, is not a fragrance house. It appears to be the corporate entity that books her ongoing musical performances. Warwick’s contract rider can be found online. Alas, it contains nothing as outrageous as Van Halen’s no-brown-M&Ms clause. Sure, Ms. Warwick must be flown first class, but most of the rider concerns stage lighting, rehearsal timing, and orchestra staffing (“Three (3) trombones-two (2) tenor & one (1) bass”). Her dressing room requirements are not particularly diva-ish. She prefers Pepsi (“No Coca Cola or Diet Sodas”), Cristal (“Two (2) bottles of Cristal Champagne per concert (NO SUBSTITUTES)” and is very specific about the fruit plate:
Fresh fruit platter: sliced pineapples, green seedless grapes, sliced watermelon, sliced honeydew melon, sliced cantaloupe melon and bananas. If any of the above fresh fruit is not in season, contact road manager.
Ms Warwick is entitled to earn whatever the market will bear and she is certainly playing every card she can as she climbs out of a deep financial hole. What lingers in the mind, however, is why the Fragrance Creators Association sees fit to include her and her company in its membership on the basis of a one-off scent that vanished after launch 35 years ago.
