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Mirrored from Madam Nakamura-Branchevska.

I made a site that I’m quite proud of, an adventure through San Francisco. And my kid asks to read it, and since I’m quite proud of it I pull up a short biography of Agoston Haraszthy. And he reads it with the world’s most stoic poker face. Revolution? Wolves? Gosh-darned crocodiles? Not a lash moves.

So I ask him – how come? and he says: “What’s there to be surprised about? It’s a typical mom story”. And the worst thing is – he’s right. Eh 🙂

I’m still adding locations to the site. The first 70 or so are up, and I have another 70 lined up for next week. The problem is – every time I write up one place I discover three other places and two people to add to my backlog. The Hydra of San Francisco History is eating my braaaaaain!!! :)))

Mirrored from Madam Nakamura-Branchevska.

This weekend I’m doing almost nothing (by accident!), but last weekend I did two awesome and extremely overloading things.

This is the first – I went to Aftel Archive of Curious Scent, a scent museum in Berkeley. It’s an outpouring of Mandy Aftel’s personal collection gathered over decades of making perfumes. She didn’t start out wanting to make perfume – she just wanted to write a book where the main character was a parfumier, and instead wrote a book about perfume itself. And then another one, and another one…

The museum consists of one large room with curiosities, like this 19th century Indonesian ship made out of cloves.

Or like those onycha shells (it means fingernail) that smell very subtly but when burned at the Temple in combination with 10 other ingredients as per God’s own recipe will sublimate the evil odor of one’s animal soul within its heavenly fragnance.

The best part of the museum, however, is outside. There one can take off the mask, and compare modern smells with ones that aged for a hundred years, and synthetic smells with natural ones. Best of all – one can smell each part that goes into a perfume.

One smells them in order, as they would naturally come to one’s nose – top notes first, one by one, and then all three together, followed by three middle and five bottom note ingredients. It is incredible that none of the individual ingredients smell at all like the resulting perfume and only a little bit like each of the three combinations.

At the end of the visit one can pick four from scores of sample scents and get a scent strip to take home. My four, including deertongue , which is now my officially favorite smell, are now hiding deep in sweater drawers to surprise me when I forget about them.