A synesthesic guide to sights, sounds and smells. Reviews of scents and the science of olfaction.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Liz Zanis: what i read last week (and i only finished one) graphite on found printed board, 12 1/4" x 10 15/16", 2007
OMG! It's spring already! And that means it's already time to vote for the FiFi awards. And we are fast approaching Leslie Vosshall'sHarvey Lecture! OMG OMG! Warm weather, sunshine, sweet scents, new president, Voshall talk in a geodesic dome? It's like the world has been re-tuned to perfection!
Sure, the dome at Rockefeller University (aka Caspary Auditorium) is awesome (particularly on the inside), and a great venue for the Harvey Lectures, but if you're a Fuller purist, it's time to shlep across the East River.
Buckminster Fuller designed the Aviary dome for the 1964 World's Fair. It's now part of the Queens Zoo.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
A tip from Gothamist, that the sensory immersion at the Coney Island Aquarium will extend beyond the smell of fish sticks at the snack bar.
From the Associated Press: "The New York Aquarium's 4-D Immersion Theater will combine the experience of a 3-D film with a variety of sensory effects built into the theater's seats and environment. The sensory affects include water mist, a neck air blast, snow, bubbles, leg ticklers, scents, enhanced floor lighting and seat vibrations."
Gawker just ran part of the press release for the new Bond no. 9 Brooklyn scent. Apparently Brooklyn is unisex "with a decidedly masculine attitude." I love it. The notes are all over the place, with grapefruit and juniper up top, a la Snoop Dog's Gin and Juice. They must be conjuring up the west coast of Brooklyn with this one.
As one of my professors once barked at a visiting speaker who had somehow confused a number of the new York schools, "Bronx? Brooklyn? What's the difference? Coney Island, Riverdale? Same thing really!"
Actual Coney Island circa 2007
Which is my way of saying that I rather liked Bond's Coney Island scent. It smelled like cheap yard long margaritas; neon lime syrup, tequilla, mesquite, grilled hot dog buns and boardwalk.
Fine stuff if you ask me. The new scent seems to call up the Brooklyn Boatnic Gardens a la the father daughter team at Eau de Brooklyn. Brooklyn is so many things I suppose. It's also one of the first music videos I'd ever seen on NYC Public television.
The WHOPPER sandwich is America's favorite burger. Flame by BK captures the essence of that love and gives it to you. Behold the scent of seduction, with a hint of flame-broiled meat.
Robin just posted about this hot new scent over at Now Smell This. I love it. This happens to coincide with the new "Whopper Virgins" ad campaign by Stacy Peralta of "Dogtown and Z-Boys" fame. Clip below, followed by it's YouTube commenter response. An briefing on capitalism today, really.
Fuck you're burgers and junk food americans... if you come here, you can see more than 95% beautiful women but if i will go there in USA more that 50% fat people. REASON? You're junk food and burgers.
Come in Romania and drink alchool made here... our stuffs are more natural than you. We have "tuica" or "palinca" who's much strong than you're Jack Daniel or Bud...
Trevor Paglen: The Other Night Sky. He will have a show at Bellweather Gallery March6th - April 4th, 2009 This revisit of Moon Sparkle is a terrific excuse to wander over for a look at Trevor Paglen's work exploring the "Dark World" of secret military projects which are not so secretly funded to the tune of $30 billion per year.
In our own lab, our projects are less secret, but still not widely discussed. And the lab has been fragrant with Moon Sparkle from one of our students. Lately I've been noticing Moon Sparkle everywhere (particularly on the subway), just as Escada is launching whatever new fruity thing will replace it for 2009. I like Blueberry Hubba Bubba, and I like Moon Sparkle. I'm guessing that it comes out in winter because it's a little too loud for the warmer weather of New York summers, and in the cold weather it's a round friendly scent. In the Black World, it wouldn't be the remote and mysterious Groom Lake, but rather a geostationary reconnaissance satellite hanging just over head, ever present, just out of sight.
In other news, voting is now open at the 9th Annual Basenotes Fragrance Awards. I love Basenotes because it is such a wealth of information on fragrances, their notes and noses that is so easily searchable. It's the closest thing we have to a Wikipedia of commercial fragrance.
This is not my way of announcing that I am not a hippie. Nay-no. Instead, it is an observation, that there is a strong correlation between the application of certain scents (AHEM.. Midnight Poison) and watery eyes, sneezing, a swollen tongue and uncontrollable coughing.
I'm not allergic to much. As a kid I thought I was allergic to marshmallows because of an episode where I ate an entire bag and projectile vomited on my parent's friends. Similarly I thought I was allergic to gluten after sat down with a fork and ate an entire can of mock duck and then experienced flu-like symptoms. (It could have just been the sodium content, a coincidence, or contamination with melamine. Total enigma.)
But this is the second time a perfume has left me in fits. The first was Trance Essences' Abbey Rose. It's not that I dislike the scent - in fact, I am quite fond of Midnight Poison. There are some notes, like calone which make me gag, but they do not turn my eyes red and bloodshot. This possible allergy is a whole new experience.
Yayoi Kusamainstallation view, Infinity Mirror Room, Phalli's Field (or Floor Show) 1965 (no longer extant); reconstructed 1998. From artnet.
Perfume Shrine has already posted a review of the new Comme des Garcons for H&M scent, and I'll throw in my own polka dotted two cents.
(In an interview, Jeff Koons said that the key to his success was polka dotted shirts. When he was selling memberships at the MoMA, in his signature shirts and suspenders, he managed to pull off "zany, yet inoffensive", apparently the magical cocktail for commercial success.)
So nu, CdGH&M is very pop, a perfect distillation of the CdG aesthetic. I was expecting a bland citrus like the energy series, because that would have been zany enough. (Dianu!) But no, they upped the ante, combining the larger than life smoky birch-tar/cedar of an amped up Hinoki with a fizzy citrus top note almost as an after thought. Like the clothing collection which sticks with dots as a major theme, and drives it home, the fragrance goes big and bold. (And much bigger and bolder than I would have expected.) H&M is not the place for subtle artistry, and the scent is as loud and brash as wood can be. Very cool.
I was touched, (as I often am) by posts in Christopher Brosius' Blog. He describes the unusual connection he felt towards a stranger wearing his very personal Wild Hunt fragrance. The scent is brilliant, and in conjuring up the scent of a summer forest it has brought back my own memories of growing up.
Summers, my friends and I took a bus from our homes in Queens out to our summer arts day camp each morning. It was almost a two hour journey, so about half way we changed buses at a rendez-vous point in Queens. "Rendez-Vous" as we called it was the asphalt playground of a public school where we would wait half an hour for our second bus. But across the street was a small patch of wooded park which to us was a forest. We would explore the secluded reaches of the forest (often by necessity since Rendez-Vous had no bathrooms), and a friend who grew up in Russia even took us mushroom picking in this small green plot of land in eastern Queens.
Wild hunt is this quest, for an urban nature. Tamed in a bottle, we can find it daily, at the resting points in our journeys.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
It's like a remote control for your smell-o-vision. I just found this ten channel olfactometer by clicking on one of my own ads. Targeted advertising is amazing some times.
"Vulva Original is not a perfume. It is a beguiling vaginal scent which is purely a substance for your own smelling pleasure. Breathe in and enjoy, anytime, anywhere, the scent of a beautiful woman."
Smell-o-vision and Jasper Johns urge you to get out and vote. At least here in Brooklyn, the air is crisp and leaf scented. And if you need to clear your nose from the scent of all this democracy, the coffee today is free. (And if you're as lucky as I was this morning, so are the Red-Blue Doritos of Freedom.)
An homage to the boldest fruit, she who wears her seeds on the outside. Sister to the rose, most feminine of flowers. Strawberry flowers are far worldlier than I, who in my unsophistication was shocked to discover their bottled scent. For in the world of Fresh they smell much like soiled pantyhose.
A wry comment on femininity. Perhaps this scent is a thesis project on the capitalist evisceration of the female body, extruded into bottles and sold as un elixir charnel. Conceptually astute, but I fear this is a scent I can recreate more cost effectively by embracing the lacuna between my own body and soap.
Ant Farm: Media Burn (1975) videos available here and a shorter version here
The other day I stopped by Takashimaya and Bendels to sample the new fragrances. At Takashimaya, I developed new respect for Ineke Chemical Bonding and pretty much the whole line of Neil Morris Fragrances. In the brown somber hall of the minimalist Japanese store there was a radiant scent of cheer. What can I say, I love a good upbeat citrus, and these lines offered a range of appealing and unusual variations on this theme.
Henri Bendel is done up in bright colors, but the scents there were positively somber. A lovely perfumer was representing her line of 60's influenced scents. One of them even featured my own name so I had to try it on my skin. It was a nice mix of bright citrus, dry rose and a thick gray incense. I found it quite unusual. Standing next to her samples, the perfumer told me a little bit about her company when she excused herself for a brief coughing fit. I realized my own eyes were starting to water. When she returned I realized we were standing in a cloud of incense vapor! I walked away and my eyes thanked me.
Ant Farm, Space Cowboy Meets Plastic Businessman, 1969. Performance at Alley Theater, Houston
After I left the store, my throat felt off and I realized it got worse as my sprayed hand neared my face. Psychosomatic or otherwise, the scent of incense seemed to grow, and tickle my eyes and the back of my throat with it's sooty fingers.
I'm not sure if this was my first allergic reaction to a fragrance or of something in that scent is a universal irritant. But seriously, yuck. I am now a huge fan of ingredient labeling on scent, because I want to know what this was so that I can avoid it at all costs.
Additionally, I was browsing PubMed the other day to put together ideas for an experiment and found numerous articles about the diffusion of synthetic musks into blood, breast milk etc. Double yuck. Besides the fact that many synth musks make me want to hurl, I try to avoid sneaky hormone-like chemicals whenever possible. My fondness for perfume makes this a sticky wicket, as lavender oil will grow extra boobs, and most fragrant things are going to be aromatic hydrocarbons which are likely to fuck with us in yet unknown ways. So my goal is to try to stick to the ones that do the least fucking. And no, this doesn't mean natural perfumery, because nature has graciously provided us with some of the most powerful toxins and mutagens known to man. It just means that I'm keeping my eyes open and noticing labels. I may not know what all the ingredients do, but I have a greater incentive to try to keep track of the effect they have on me.
Dec 2, 2008 • 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM A reception and booksigning follow until 9:00 pm. The New York Academy of Sciences, 7 World Trade Center, 250 Greenwich St. at Barclay St., 40th fl.
It's part of the Science of the Five Senses series. More info is available at the New York Academy of Sciences site. Also, Leslie Vosshall will be giving a Harvey Lecture on May 21st. Harvey Lectures are free, open to the public, and some of the most fun you can have inside a geodesic dome.
Matteo Bonazzi, Listeria monocytogenes polymerizing host cell actin into comet tails (63X)(#48 in the 2008 Nikon Small World contest)
The Yale School of Medicine has a cool show on microscopy through the ages that featured a fun online quiz on food borne microbial pathogens. One of my favorite parts is this chart matching unusual scents to different diagnoses. Who knew tuberculosis smelled like beer?
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
I've been away, spending most of my time filling my skull with genetics rather than novel fragrances. (Speaking of which: If anyone has a good sagittal view of a mouse's skull where I can see how the olfactory system integrates I would be grateful like the Dead.)
I have sniffed a few cool new (to me) things:
Guerlain Eau de Lit: Guerlainade citrus turns to chamomile and hay. 600 count sheets.
Jules by Dior: Strong and well rounded. Propper dry woods and pepper. A mensch for ladies.
Derby by Guerlain: Guerlinade's winter Citrus to spice transition like dry mulled cider
Bill Blass #7: a fizzy gin-joint relaunch of a classic brand (Nicely done samples)
Harajuku Lovers G: creamy coconut with a drydown of Play-Doh fun for the weird kids
Or rather, her talk sold out at the Secret Science Club's meeting last night at Union Hall. Fortunately I was able to sneak in to the standing room only event and catch the tail end of her talk.
I particularly enjoyed her scent world shout-outs. She highly recommends Avery Gilbert's book
What the Nose Knows
, and offered props to the major aromachemical companies and their aggregation in her home state of New Jersey.
She mentioned a new paper on alarm pheromones, that showed that a mere whiff of the stuff could cause mice to freeze. (There is some hot coverage of the frozen mice over at NPR. It's good stuff.)
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