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COVER STORY
Smell
Kurt Andersen and the writer Chandler Burr explore
the allure and mystery that smell has for us. Burr believes that we should
build museums for the nose.
 Demeter
Perfumers generally design complicated scents to stimulate
a fantasy or a mood, not to match any one particular thing. But one small
fragrance company in New York called Demeter takes a different approach.
Demeter bottles the smell of celery, or of a gin and tonic, or of snow.
Sarah Lilley went to find out what isolating smells like these does for
us.
Go to the official website for Demeter
View list of Demeter scents currently available
 Scent
of a Painting
Keith Miller is a painter in Brooklyn. He says it's
quite easy for artists to get wrapped up in the romance of how their materials
smell, from the buttery oil paint to the sting of turpentine. Produced
by Michele Siegel.
Go to Keith Miller's website
 Death
in Venice
Smells can be hard to describe, but a good writer
can transport readers pulling them by the nose. Adam Haslett, author of
the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, admires
Thomas Mann's Death in Venice for its stench. Everything in the
story, he says, is "overripe." Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.
Learn more about Thomas Mann and Death in Venice
Read a review of Adam Haslett's short story collection
 Sonic
Smells
We hear how smell and sound go together. Jamie O'Shea
is an artist and the inventor of the Olfactograph, a mechanism designed
to capture and record scents, like that of a campfire or an indoor pool.
In O'Shea's installations, he often pairs the Olfactograph with audio
recordings of the places they were captured. It's multimedia of a new
kind. Produced by Trent Wolbe.
Go to Jamie O'Shea's website
Go to a page on binaural recordings
SPECIAL GUEST
Chandler Burr
Chandler Burr is the author of The Emperor of Scent:
A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses.
He is also the author of A Separate Creation, on how biology creates
human sexual orientation. Burr has written for Fast Company, Fortune,
the New York Times Magazine, and US News & World Report.
Go to Chandler Burr's website
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Now
Playing
Artist Rosamond Purcell usually photographs
natural history artifacts in the back rooms of science museums. But
for her current project, on view in Boston at the Tufts University Gallery,
she does more. Purcell recreates an entire cabinet of wonders from 1655.
Produced by Harriet Baskas.
Go
to the Tufts University gallery site
Read
about Rosamond Purcell's book
Alpendub
Yodelling with a dub beat. Dub music is a worldwide
style (developed in Jamaica) of futzing with the bass and drum tracks
of songs, and adding thick production effects to transform those songs.
Robert Cummings, a Canadian drummer living in Berlin, has started applying
dub ideas to folk music from the Bavarian Alps. He and his band call
the project "Alpendub." Produced by Monika Mueller.
Learn
more about Alpendub
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