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Dzing! It’s a French perfume. I wet my wrist.
---Dzing! by L’Artisan Parfumeur. It smells like shit. It’s an animalic, a type of perfume with a fecal fragrance. When I sniff myself, I get a whiff of wet fur and asshole.
---Dzing! smells like a circus animals – lions, elephants, bears – and the shit they shit. I smell other smells in it, too. Sawdust. Leather saddles. Something sweet – cotton candy, caramel apples, or nuts.
---The scents of a circus in a bottle. But can they be captured in a book?
“The Show That Smells” – this is what carnies and circus folk call an animal show. It’s also what I named my new novel.
---The Show That Smells is set at a circus.
---There’s a midway: the story’s set entirely in a mirror maze.
---There’s fashion: Elsa Schiaparelli, the fabled fashion designer, is a vampire; Coco Chanel, the fabled fashion designer, is a vampire hunter.
---There’s perfume: Schiaparelli is selling Shocking!, a perfume whose base note is blood. When humans wear it, vampires can home in on them. Chanel is selling Chanel Nº 5, a perfume impregnated with holy water. When humans wear it, they’re impervious to vampire assaults.
---I’m in it. I play a writer for Vampire Vogue magazine.
Charlie Chaplin, Mirror Maze from "The Circus"
Vampires, carnivals, couture – The Show That Smells is full of these things, as was my previous novel, The Haunted Hillbilly.
---In The Haunted Hillbilly, a vampire named Nudie made Hank Williams a star. He did so by making Hank Williams's suits: garish gabardines gussied up with sequins. The suits proved irresistible to the public: they glittered like the chalkware dolls that carnies used to give away at carnival games. Nudie made the sequins by boiling human bones.
---In The Show That Smells, Elsa Schiaparelli sells Shocking! It’s made with with blood from babies. Her haunt is a mirror maze, the perfect place for a vampire to prey on people. Like a scent, she has no reflection – no one can see her coming! I like to think that the maze’s mirrors are akin to facets in a crystal flaçon. Is being in a mirror maze something like being in a perfume bottle?
---The Haunted Hillbilly starred Hank Williams, country music’s most famous singer. The Show That Smells stars Jimmie Rodgers.
Jimmie Rodgers, "T For Texas"
In 1927, a nobody named Jimmie Rodgers walked in a hat warehouse in Bristol, Tennessee. He had on a business suit and a boater.
---He’d come to sing, not to shop. The Victor Recording Co. had set up a recording studio in the warehouse, hoping to find local hillbillies to make hillbilly records. Jimmie wasn’t local. He hailed from Meridian, Mississippi. He was, however, a hillbilly.
He sang some sentimental songs that sounded folksy. Victor released them. They sold strongly. At a Victor studio in New Jersey, he sang several more. “T for Texas” – also known as “Blue Yodel” – was one of them. It became a monster, a million seller. Jimmie Rodgers became a star. He toured with Will Rogers. He recorded with Louis Armstrong. He shot a short movie in Hollywood: he strummed and sang before a backdrop of a railroad shack. Before being a singer, he’d been a railroad man, a brakeman on the Mobile & Ohio. “The Singing Brakeman,” Americans came to call him. Also: “The Mississippi Blue Yodeler” and “America’s Blue Yodeler.” He yodeled the same yodel in almost every record he cut.
---He wasn’t the only act discovered in Bristol. Days after he recorded his first records, a singing family showed up at the studio: the Carter Family.
The Carter Family, "Sea of Galilee"
“He loved the hillbillies, the same as he loved the common people everywhere,” said Carrie Rodgers in her memoir, My Husband, Jimmie Rodgers, “and loved to be among them and with them.”
---More than that, Jimmie loved circuses and carnivals.
---As a kid, he ran off with a circus. The big top: bedsheets he borrowed from his brother’s wife. The big act: him, singing. He sang in Meridian, then tramped to another town. By the time his brother caught him, he’d made enough to buy new bedsheets. He ran away again. Local children were the circus acts. His tent was store-bought, charged to his father’s account without his father’s knowing it.
---As an adult, Jimmie owned a carnival. In 1925, he was a struggling singer, driving around Dixie with a street show. Having bought an interest in the operation, he brought a carnival on board. It included a Hawaiian show: girls in grass skirts dancing daringly. Did it include games or rides? Did it include a freak show? An animal show? Books about Jimmie don’t say. What they do say: the carnival was destroyed in a blowdown, which is carny slang for a big windstorm.
---“Big Circus Tent” – this was the name of a show he headlined in 1930. He toured it through the south. He shared the bill with “Miss Helene, Mentalist.” The big top was red and contained a calliope, a “colored orchestra,” and, of course, hundreds of seats. Beyond the bigtop was a complete carnival, including rides, a midway, barking barkers and minstrel shows. Jimmie’s dressing room was a tent with screens and roll-up walls. And a bed. After a show, he had to rest. It took him an hour to remove his make-up. He was dying of tuberculosis. He had a pricey collection of perfumes from France. He would sniff them – it killed the stink of sick rising from his lungs.
Narcisse Noir by Caron.
---It was Jimmie Rodgers’s favourite perfume. In the United States, it was sold as Black Narcissus. The top note was orange blossom; the bottom, black narcissus.
---Jimmie’s nose was full of the fragrance of his liquefying lungs. I’m sure he would have loved a perfume that smelled like something sweet from his life. Like Carrie, or Carrie’s vagina. Or a carnival.
Shocking! by Schiaparelli. It wasn’t her first perfume, but it was her most famous. Introduced in 1937, it included notes of narcissus. Its animalic scents came courtesy of ambergris and civet. Ambergris is a waxy substance found in the stomachs of sperm whales. Civet is oil from the anus of a civet cat.
---Schiaparelli intended it to shock. Shocking! was supposed to smell like panties, like post-coital pussy. She titled her memoir, Shocking Life. She named her favourite shade of pink, “shocking pink.” Shocking is also a sideshow word – “Shocking and Amazing! See the Living Vampire! See the Human Worm! See a Beautiful Girl Become a Gorilla!”
In 1938, Schiaparelli staged a circus in the street in front of her shop in Paris. Tightrope walkers trod high above the Place Vendôme. Fire breathers breathed fire. Acrobats acrobatted.
---In the shop, Schiaparelli showed her Circus Collection. It included a coat stitched with dancing horses, and closed with acrobat-shaped buttons. Buttons on other ensembles were clowns. Handbags were shaped like balloons.
---Sideshow freaks were Schiaparelli’s main muses. She put monkey fur on boots and bracelets, an homage to the Girl-to-Gorilla sideshow act. The act is accomplished with mirrors. She printed crepe dresses with lobsters, which I interpret as a paean to Lobster Boys, men born with claws for fingers. She showed a Tear Dress, a dress with a trompe l’oeil pattern of tears and rips, as though it had been torn by a tiger in an animal show. The Skeleton Dress was a black dress that seemed to have bones – a spine and ribs stuck out from the fabric, making the wearer seem like a skeleton wrapped in a shroud. It was an homage to the Human Skeleton act. At a carnival or circus, the Human Skeleton was a man who was wasting away with tuberculosis.
What kind of couturière turns her clients into freaks?
---Schiaparelli had a sinister sense of humour, for sure. In my novel, I make her a vampire. Is it so far-fetched?
---Schiaparelli hated Chanel; Chanel hated Schiaparelli. Bad blood doesn’t begin to describe it. Chanel refused to say Schiaparelli’s name, let alone speak to her or of her. Which is why it shocked tout Paris when Chanel approached Schiaparelli at a costume ball in the 1930s. Chanel asked Schiap to dance. She waltzed Schiap across the floor. She dipped Schiap so that Schiap’s hat came into contact with a candle. Schiap was on fire.
---Burning a foe to death is barbaric. Unless your foe is undead.
In The Show That Smells, Schiaparelli is a vampiress who dresses the world’s wealthiest women.
---For her Carnival Collection, she shows apparel inspired by Human Skeletons and Lobster Boys. When the world’s wealthiest women are dressed as sideshow acts, she will put them in a sideshow at a vampire carnival.
---Her carnival will feature rides that vampires can revel in – haunted houses full of priests and nuns. It will feature games with prizes that vampires can prize – dolls made from dead babies stuffed with sawdust. Jimmie Rodgers will sing beneath the bigtop. She makes him a Faustian offer: he will be able to sing forever, so long as he becomes a vampire. What choice does he have? He is dying of TB. What makes his life bearable: the smell of Chanel Nº 5, and Carrie.
---Carrie Rodgers attempts to protect her husband from the vampires. It’s a futile task, until the cavalry comes: Coco Chanel and the Carter Family. The Carters are formidable foes. Their signature song is Keep on the Sunny Side. Chanel is the designer who made beachwear and suntanning fashionable. She made cross-shaped brooches and bangles fashionable. Coco was her nickname; her given name was Gabrielle, as in the archangel. Only Christian Dior had a holier name. Then came Christian Lacroix.
In The Show That Smells, I describe Shocking! as smelling the same as Dzing! – sawdust, sugar, animal spoors. And blood. When women wear it, they smell like a vampire’s supper. Vampires wear it, too.
---Vampires love perfume, as they have no scents of their own. They don’t have bad breath; they don’t respire. They don’t have body odour; they don’t perspire. They’re dead, so they carry a trace of cadaverine. Dogs detect it. Vampires prefer perfumes that camouflage them: scents that smell like living rooms, or libraries, or late nights.
---Vampires are perfectly suited for perfume. Perfumes flower on people – they’re transformed by the heat of bodies. Perfumes stay the same on vampires. Vampires have no blood, no body heat. They’re white. They’re absorbent. They’re smelling strips. Do this: Smell The Show That Smells. It doesn’t smell like paper. It smells like vampires perfumed as paper.
Notes on Images
#1 -- Pin by Jean Schlumberger for Schiaparelli
#2 -- Cover designed by Joel Westendorf, art by David Altmejd
#3 -- Narcisse Noir, Jimmie Rodgers's favourite perfume
#4 -- Ad for Schiaparelli's Shocking! by Marcel Vertès
#5 -- Portrait of Schiaparelli by Horst
#6, #7 -- Skeleton Dress by Schiaparelli
#8 -- Schiaparelli button
The Show That Smells reading tour: http://www.akashicbooks.com/showthatsmellsevents.htm
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