Sometimes the most obvious question is the one you never ask. I remember in my student days being told about experiments in which pigeons were trained to press a lever whenever a light went on, which caused a machine to release a pellet of bird food. I saw black & white films, with vertical scratches and a hissy soundtrack of the coercive male voice popular at the time, showing pigeons looking askance at the light, the switch and the pellet, and then doing their bit without undue haste, as if what was left of their dignity depended on looking relaxed. The question none of us ever asked was, “How do you get a pigeon to do such a stupid thing in the first place?”

It was only much later that I saw the full movie detailing the training. The pigeon was allowed to move around and, as in a game I used to love playing as a kid, was guided towards the switch and the light by indications akin to getting warmer, warmer, warmest. At first, whenever the pigeon comes nearer to the switch, a pellet drops from the food dispenser. This, to the poor beast, must look like happenstance, but in time it figures out that food is dispensed only when it is the correct half of the cage. In time this shrinks to the correct quarter, then a small area that happens to contain the switch. Pigeons peck at things, and eventually the pigeon pecks at the switch. Food is released and half the job is done. Then add the light and you’re home.

In these experiments, the pigeon trainer, a wretched creature, plays the role of God. By this I mean that he orchestrates a series of uncanny events that eventually fall into a pattern. Pigeons are naturally superstitious, so every pigeon in training must suspect the presence of a hidden supernatural entity that makes food happen if you do the right thing. The pigeon eventually discovers how to make it happen every time, turning what was originally a spooky event into a simple cause-and-effect. I am certain, even though pigeons are notably tight-lipped, that once they found the switch, they forgot all the weird events that led them to it.

As do we. Every scientist, every artist restlessly wandering around his world picks up bits and pieces of evidence dispensed at intervals by an unseen hand, which, as significant objects do in video games, have a special glow that says, “Take me.” The dreamer places these objets trouvés on their mind shelf. Together they make no collective sense. Then one day a strange wind blows, which arranges them into a readable message. At that point the light goes on and you press the switch, immediately forget the long trail of minor miracles that led you to it, and call it your creation.

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I have moved the Collected Posts to Perks for Subscibers. Enjoy!

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Every once in a while (say once a year) a perfume comes along that doesn’t cost the earth and that everyone likes. Many people had suggested I smell LJ, and described it as the best of the Zara line. Naturally it was gone in the shop, and I ordered it from eBay, safe in the knowledge that nobody would be selling a dupe of a dupe. I am delighted to say that it is in fact as advertised by word-of-mouth. It starts out as a very competent dupe of Chanel’s Pour Monsieur, i.e. a classic Chypre with a suitably dandified vibe. Then the leather kicks in, less bitter that I expected from the many descriptions of it as a mini-Bandit. But the best bit, the true test of skill of the anonymous perfumer is the drydown. Faced with a skimpy budget, they resort to one of the trickiest things in perfumery: an accord poised exactly between territories so you don’t smell it the same way twice. In this case these are a cologne drydown, a waxy leathery accord and a ghostly version of the suave candied orange found at the bottom of David Apels’ legendary Pavarotti (1994). An extraordinary achievement at the £35 retail price.

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I got a strange email last week from Christophe Laudamiel including, as an attachment, a cease-and-desist letter from a New York IP Law firm on behalf of Parfums Francis Kurkdjian and Guerlain, both LVMH properties. The letter asks Laudamiel to stop selling two perfume sets called Fuck the Fluff and Augmented Reality. It took me a while to understand what the fuss was about.

Laudamiel had taken it upon himself to improve Baccarat Rouge 540 and Shalimar by adding materials of his own, and was selling the improved version of each in a boxed set, next to a very small sample of the original regularly bought in a store. LVMH was miffed about the small sample and had some legal recourse against anyone selling their stuff under another label.

My first reaction was “what quixotic nonsense is CL up to now?” Laudamiel is 1- a genius, 2- the poster boy for ADHD and 3- a tireless campaigner for honesty in perfumery, i.e. putting a stop to the endless lies about materials and the endless plagiarism of successful compositions. As far as I can gauge it, his popularity in the perfumery world’s ruling class is roughly that of a Soviet Politburo member in 1975 fond of telling his Party Comrades that Lenin was a monster.

Laudamiel’s reply to the expensive lawyers was, sensibly, to abide by the request and stop selling the two sets immediately, no doubt incurring some financial loss. He sent me both sets by courier. Having smelled them, I now see I could not have been more wrong in thinking that this was just a punk move on his part. It is that too, thank God, but I think Laudamiel’s genius has turned up something big.

For paid subscribers: reviews of Fuck the Fluff and Augmented Reality.

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Today and tomorrow are going to be the hottest days in the UK since the Medieval Warm Period. Time therefore for another AMA! Questions in comments! AMA will close tomorrow Thur 9PM GMT.

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The ridiculous Cambridge (UK) fantasist who got his comeuppance earlier this week reminded me that, while I was at MIT some time back, I was asked to opine on the CVs of two possible hires. The reason was that the two had spent some time in France, and that made me the expert. One claimed to have a doctorate from the Sorbonne and one from Oxford. None of the French databases confirmed this, and the Bodleian had no record of his D.Phil. I reported back, and the dude landed a very prestigious job at the Media Lab. I remonstrated, and it was explained to me he was a good fundraiser. The second was applying to be lab manager and claimed to have worked at the “Ecole Polytechnique (Collège de France),” which did not make sense to me, like saying '“I played soccer for Inter Milan (Juventus).” He also claimed a Masters in Fluid Mechanics from Paris 7 Uni. I picked up the phone and asked. They’d never heard of him. He did not get the job.

The French angle got me thinking: suppose you are in Boston, MA and are faking your CV. If you claim to have a valuable degree from Boston (distance zero) you’ll be found out in minutes. If you claim to have a degree from an Agricultural Institute in Azerbaijan (distance infinity) you’ll never be found out but the qualification will have less worth. Picture this as a curve with distance on the x-axis and fake degree value on the ordinate. The curve is zero at the origin and zero far away. It must have a maximum somewhere. My contention is that the maximum must be France. Try it with Denmark or even Germany, and you’ll find those coves have well-organised databases and speak English, which will blow your cover. Italy and Spain are better, but less prestigious. No, peak BS is firmly in France: classy institutions, low English competence, and an abundant supply of people who pick up the phone with an angry “Allo oui!” followed by an indignant “Non Monsieur!” if you ask whether English is allowed. Also the websites are often written in Sapeur Camember Second-Empire administrative French, so not much good.

This led to the graphic above, which I claim as Turin’s Law of fake CVs. I gave a talk on this once and the lone French member of the audience took umbrage, believing I was accusing the French of fraud (again, English comprehension). Beware, though, the French are rapidly getting better at English and the window of opportunity is closing.

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I went and did something silly, with everyone around making fun of me1: I bought a Vision Pro. I have always disliked desktop computers, which I associate with sad old things like office chairs, grimy trackpads, dusty cables, beige keyboards and blank screens staring at you, or Bora Bora screensavers reminding you how boring beaches can be.

Worse than that, I put it in my office. My desk is now a huge Leonardo table I inherited (could never afford it otherwise) with no computer on it! Next to the desk you will find me sitting in a comfortable armchair with a laptop, not infrequently wearing the Vision. What it does is present me with a huge curved screen floating solidly in front of me on which I do the things that require several windows open simultaneously, such as illustrations or Codex work which can get crowded on a 15-inch. Does it takes some getting used to? Yes. Does it work? Amazingly well.

That takes care of work. As many people have remarked, the rest of the Vision Pro’s functionalities are jaw-dropping. When I put it on, I see a clock recessed into the wall, a podcast window, a choice of music and a lovely landscape of the Dolomites around me, rock solid as if they were part of the masonry. When I get bored I look at some immersive videos2. The first one I looked at was taken on a French motorcycle racetrack and starts with a walk among the bikes on the starting line. When the screen went dark and I was suddenly there, perfect 3D degree scene, sounds and all I felt a forgotten thrill, a tiny moment of panic followed by delight.

People have complained about the weight of the beast. I am used to carrying my large head around and the Vision makes a marginal difference, though it is bothersome in hot weather. The display could be a touch brighter, but aside from that it is a miraculous piece of tech. The fact that it makes you look like an idiot with no friends, and no prospect of any, is a downside, but I can live with that.

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Last 5 fragrances from my Zara raid: Hypnotic Vanilla, a blatant dupe of Hypnotique Poison; Amber Fusion, allegedly a Xerjoff dupe; Vibrant Caramel, supposedly a dupe of Prada Paradoxe; Wonder Rose, a dupe of nail varnish remover; and Orchid, apparently a dupe of Victoria’s Secret Bombshell.

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When LLMs came along, I was interested in their oracular powers and approached them in "fear and trembling," on my knees, expecting dogma to fall from their virtual lips. As time went on, I got more restive and braver. Lately I have been analysing data and checking it against the vast knowledge of statistics that seems to be baked into LLMs. As my stats got better, AI seemed to grade me on a curve and complain vigorously about smaller and smaller things. This reached such a point of diminishing returns that some weeks ago I could not stand it anymore and simply told the LLM it was wrong. I expected distant thunder and a power cut, but what I got instead was an apology. LLM freely admitted that its analysis was wrong and involved overthinking. I was amazed. Once hooked on this unruly behaviour, I have been trying it on regularly ever since.

It suddenly occurred to me that my former attitude of supinely waiting for dogma was essentially Catholic, and that my new resistance to the Oracle was very much in the spirit of Judaism (half my forebears are Jewish, half are Christian). Israel, after all, is supposed to mean "struggle with God". Naturally, I put this to the LLM. It said that my distinction was basically correct, with the possible exception of Thomas Aquinas, who couched his questions as a disputation. I pushed back on that, because Aquinas is looking for dogma, whereas the Talmudic approach is, to borrow a term from James Carse1, an "infinite game" where no conclusion is ever drawn. Again, to my surprise, the LLM rather wistfully informed me that it was programmed to be goyish insofar as machine learning was intended to converge towards a single answer and obscure all other possibilities. I suggested to it the output should look more like the Talmud. It agreed with what felt like a sigh.

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I was impressed by my first visit to Zara, and decided to go back for more. Look at the haul above, 10 fragrances. Total cost: £145. That would get you 90 ml of YSL Libre EdT at Harrods. Not all are dupes, by the way. Here we go, part 2 of 3.

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I’ve often been struck by the fact that reformulation of classic feminines, even when done cleverly and respecfully, as was the case for Lauder’s Legacy series, amounts to an alarming weight loss. Often no brains and no respect were involved, and the perfumes came back from their visit to regulatory and accounting looking gaunt and strange. In common parlance, they’ve had work done. Some are so emaciated as to be unrecognizable. But almost in every case, the shift makes them more masculine, a translation in perfume space of the anatomical fact that smooth and soft are feminine attributes.

I have many of the classics on my shelf but had to go to the local perfume floor to make sure no further surgery had taken place. It had, but no matter. Good news nevertheless: young men really do not need to wear a loud aromatic fougère that makes them smell like 11-year-olds clutching skateboards. They can instead confidently set on their bathroom shelf a bottle of a perfume the age of their mom without raising suspicion of a second job as a gigolo. My suggestions are Jardins de Bagatelle and Nahema (Guerlain), Knowing and Youth-Dew (Lauder), Cristalle (Chanel) and Yvresse (YSL).

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My mother mostly hated Lebanon. She was from Argentina, the corner of South America that at the time (no longer) was the sum of its parts, America and South. She was used to clean streets, abundant hot water coming out of the tap, civilised bars like the Tortoni1, bookstores carrying translations from all over the world, performances at the Teatro Colón …

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I was born in Beirut. This turned out to have long-term effects, such as being described as a Lebanese-American scientist on Wikipedia (I am in fact Italian), and being grilled every time upon landing in Tel-Aviv, typically by a young woman in uniform, for possible terrorist intent1.

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I’m on record saying that the only honest products in mainstream perfumery, if one defines honesty as truthful labeling of what’s in the can, are dupes. This applies mostly to the US where labels are allowed to say “Our Version of […].” In the more decorous EU, you have to know which thing is a dupe of what, but fortunately magazines and the internet will let you know.

Zara perfumes are mostly dupes, and some of them are much-liked, so I paid the local Zara shop a visit. There was a tall gangly guy by the perfume counter carrying a large canvas bag full of the fragances and I thought for a second he was buying the whole range twice over. It turned out he was restocking, apparently a full-tine job. These things are selling well, and no wonder: many are priced at £12.50, at least an order of magnitude cheaper that the stuff in the Harrods perfume floor next door.

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Something is happening in perfumery. I finally understood this when I received a parcel from Maksim Bortnikov in Thailand. Ian Fleming famously wrote “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” The three fragrances he sent me are an insurrection.

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Every day brings new wonders, and this one belonged to the special category of things that are marginally useful, prodigiously clever1, totally novel and intensely nerdy: the Digital Sundial. I encountered it on LinkedIn, a website I am signed up to and detest (I call it HR porn). It is a version of the classical sundial where the gnomon is artfully hollowed out so that light passing through it casts a pattern of sunlit dots that gives the time in numbers. In order for it to work, the gnomon has to be internally carved in a very precise 3D pattern of small slats that select which dot will be lit up as the sun moves through the sky. It was invented by French engineer Julien Coyne and is a marvel of ingenuity and mathematics. It is also the first object I own that can only be made with a 3D printer, because no machining or casting could reproduce the intricate internal structure. The marvellousness of it all was compounded by the fact that I read about it while sipping much-maligned retsina wine at Athens airport, downloaded the 3D model and fed it remotely to my 3D printer in the UK, to find it ready to play with on arrival. We live in wonderful times.

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Many years ago, in late Soviet days, I took the sleeper train Kyiv-Moscow. I had been allocated a single cabin in first class, complete with lace doilies and curtains, two velvet couch seats facing each other, small table in the middle. My neighbor was a young Dutch woman on one of those friendship-between-the peoples trips the USSR spent money on in those days. She was an enthusiastic lass and had a wonderful time in Kyiv. She was accompanied by a pale, thin woman in her twenties wearing plaits and dowdy clothing who had been her interpreter and minder throughout.

The Dutch woman went to sleep early, and so as not to disturb her, her minder came to my compartment for conversation. I had a bottle of vodka for the trip, and served it in plain glass tea beakers held in a vaguely Art Nouveau metal holder. Night fell. Our conversation, initially tentative and stilted, took off in strange directions. She told me about herself and I told her about me. After a while I noticed that I was telling her things I usually did not reveal to perfect strangers, and it seemed she was doing the same, though of course I could not be sure. Then we got onto metaphysical and supernatural territory, and things got even wilder. She may have been small and pale, but the force and intensity of her opinions had something frightening about it, as if she were possessed. Her English seemed to improve with time and booze. I was fascinated. I replied in kind, and pretty soon we found ourselves joyfully agreeing on the most eccentric notions as if we belonged to the same sect. At length we got tired, the vodka ran out and she suddenly calmed down. Before retiring, she told me in a quiet, manner-of-fact tone that tourists always had KGB minders, that the KGB liked to hire strange people, and that the KGB person was always the one you least suspected.

I slept like a log and woke up when the voice on the loudspeaker said we would be at Moscow’s Kievsky station in fifteen minutes. I dressed and packed in a hurry, and made to put on a rather gaudy three-diamonds gold wickerwork pinkie ring I was wearing in those days, bartered with my girlfriend in exchange for a diving watch. I had taken it off and rested it on the little table. It was gone. Nothing aside from two teacups and the white cloth was on the table. All predictable silly thoughts ran through my head: had it been stolen? Had I forgotten to take it off and it slipped off my finger in some interstice? With ten minutes to go to arrival, I cleared the table, turned the cabin upside down, went through every pocket and my luggage, grew desperate and eventually sat down on the velvet bench, defeated and near tears, as the train drew into the station. The ring was on the table, right before me, exactly where I had left it, evident as three diamonds and gold are on a background of white fabric.

At that point something clicked in my head: the girl. I suddenly realized I did not remember a single word we had exchanged the previous night. She had made our conversation disappear. I felt certain she had made the ring disappear too, just to show me who she was. I got off the train. She was on the platform with her charge and shot me a brief, fixed look that said “See?”

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One of the strongest pieces of empirical evidence in favor of the idea that our nose smells molecular vibrations is that boron hydrides (B-H compounds, aka boranes) smell sulfuraceous. This matters because the only two things in the universe that have vapor pressure and vibrate around 2500 cm-1 (wavenumber units) are SH and BH. They are also the only atom combinations that give a “sulfur” smell. Decaborane is, among the boranes, a pretty convenient one to smell because it is a white solid purified by sublimation that unlike many other boranes does not spontaneously burst into flames in contact with air. It is therefore the best molecule to experience the amazing coincidence between vibrations and smell. Why was this not recognised long ago? Because someone described it as smelling of chocolate and this seeped into the reference literature and became a fact. I now have located the place where that came from. Decaborane smells, if anything, like vitamin B1. That one person misdirected the field for four decades.

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On a very hot evening in Athens some weeks ago, I met Tudor Ristea, creative director of Ataraxia perfumes. His Deity was a finalist in the Art and Olfaction Awards, and he asked me whether I wanted to smell it. I did, and disliked it not because of anything specific to the composition, but because it’s a honey perfume and I hate the genre. He seemed completely unfazed by my snap judgment, and asked whether I wanted instead to smell a perfume he hated, his Spinal Fluid. He explained that he had tried to do a perfume that was entirely wrong, and succeeded.

In my opinion, artists are allowed to do ugly things once in a while just to clear the pipes. Too much hankering after beauty frays one’s nerves. A relative of mine (family legend) apparently visited a perfume firm in Grasse and at the end of the tour asked for “un peu de merde, s’il vous plaît.” I remember thirty years ago Issey Miyake did a brown duffle coat whose texture was uncannily like a cow’s rear end caked in dung. Liberty bought a couple of dozen in all sizes, could not sell them at the outrageous asking price and eventually reduced them to practically nothing. Weeks later they were still on offer, now down to the cost of two coffees. Still no one would have them. I assume this did Miyake a power of good.

Spinal Fluid packs a huge slug of indole. Indole, typically described as “fecal, floral in dilution” in learned texts, is actually neither. It smells more like rotten teeth at all concentrations, and a touch of rotten teeth happens to make a floral smell more interesting. The other main note in Spinal Fluid’s composition is a blast of heating oil. When we lived in Athens in a big drafty house, I always enjoyed the times when the delivery truck rolled out a pipe from the street and poured a cubic meter of the fragrant stuff into the basement tank. Heating oil may not have the escapist connotations of jet fuel, but it is still a friendly dragon’s breath.

I doubt very much there will ever be a more outrageously Goth fragrance. Tudor Ristea seemed surprised when I told him I really liked Spinal Fluid. I, in turn, was surprised when Tania too declared it good. You have been warned.

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Fifty years ago I first heard of Lazar Berman, an extraordinary Russian pianist who had been confined to the Soviet Union and prevented from doing international concert tours. Aficionados knew about him from his Melodiya recordings alone. Berman had perfected a unique combination of massive strength and crisp delicacy that was perfect for Late Romantic pieces. Like all People’s Artists of the Russian Federation, he earned his living by touring the USSR and giving concerts in dozens of small venues. In 1975 he was finally allowed to travel to the US and became an overnight worldwide sensation.

Someone told me that he had recorded the Scriabin concerto (one of my favorites) and I looked for that record everywhere. I walked into my go-to record store and said to the vastly knowledgeable guy behind the counter “I am looking for Lazar Berman’s recording of the Scriabin F# minor concerto.” His reply was “Aren’t we all?” and he added, with a speech defect that gave extra spin to his words “If you’re looking for wubbish like Bawenboim, we’ve got bloody miles of it.”

Yesterday I remembered this and asked the Web whether the recording had been released. I had been misinformed. There was no such recording in 1975, but there was an unreleased recording from 1992 on YouTube. I finally heard it. It is the absolute best recording of the piece. It felt as if my original informant, the record shop guy and I had willed this thing into existence. Circle closed.

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