/On Scent
A note from the editor
By Christina Voss
We’re posting this a few days later than usual, but the issue has added girth. Slowness compensated with thickness.
Scent. When we sketched out the theme, we were thinking about scent and sex, and maybe some fuzzy extension of scent and sexiness or attraction. As the issue unfolded, scent triggered topics on attraction, repulsion, compulsion, and memory. (There are traces of Proust.)
Scent drew debauchette to someone she wanted to touch, then slap. David’s beautiful piece touches on scent with subtlety, as a similar driving force but with a very different outcome.
Chelsea traces memory through scent, and scent through memory, and there are men upon men upon men. Astrid touches on scent and melancholy, as memory can make us long for something that isn’t there.
Ava inhales, as smoke and desire are intertwined. John muses on the impact of scent, and what, by accident and impulse, he found himself doing.
There’s a fetishist who gives us a little insight into how texture and smell can be integrated beautifully, kinkily, through his taste for tights. I look at pheromones and this notion of primal, olfactory attraction, and I was a little creeped out by the Oedipal bit. In the realm of fragrances, Ethan Imboden talks to us about the logic behind the unusual and innovative Afterglow scents, massage candles that are meant to slick the skin and inspire us through our sense of smell.
We have photography from April-Lea Hutchinson, Caroline Bonarde Ucci, and thedirtystory, with a cat and without. (And debauchette tells us about a cat that stares.) He tells us about a couple who draws stares for all the wrong and right reasons.
Scent. When we sketched out the theme, we were thinking about scent and sex, and maybe some fuzzy extension of scent and sexiness or attraction. As the issue unfolded, scent triggered topics on attraction, repulsion, compulsion, and memory. (There are traces of Proust.)
Scent drew debauchette to someone she wanted to touch, then slap. David’s beautiful piece touches on scent with subtlety, as a similar driving force but with a very different outcome.
Chelsea traces memory through scent, and scent through memory, and there are men upon men upon men. Astrid touches on scent and melancholy, as memory can make us long for something that isn’t there.
Ava inhales, as smoke and desire are intertwined. John muses on the impact of scent, and what, by accident and impulse, he found himself doing.
There’s a fetishist who gives us a little insight into how texture and smell can be integrated beautifully, kinkily, through his taste for tights. I look at pheromones and this notion of primal, olfactory attraction, and I was a little creeped out by the Oedipal bit. In the realm of fragrances, Ethan Imboden talks to us about the logic behind the unusual and innovative Afterglow scents, massage candles that are meant to slick the skin and inspire us through our sense of smell.
We have photography from April-Lea Hutchinson, Caroline Bonarde Ucci, and thedirtystory, with a cat and without. (And debauchette tells us about a cat that stares.) He tells us about a couple who draws stares for all the wrong and right reasons.
Nathan Appel
I talk a bit about eighteenth-century dildos and other sexual devices, a topic I’d like to revisit, particularly the part about the man and the doll.
And we have a new regular, Nathan Appel, who’s been here many times before. Did you know that he makes his own cameras? He does. And he takes amazing photos once he’s done.
And we have a new regular, Nathan Appel, who’s been here many times before. Did you know that he makes his own cameras? He does. And he takes amazing photos once he’s done.
- 02/07/2011
