Son of a Gun

THE SPECTATOR, WORLD EDITION

Son of a Gun

On the family gun club

In his late-middle age, my father cultivated more of the interests of the old neighborhood. His kitchen overflowed with pasta makers and deli slicers. His prep table was taken over by a home wine-making operation; we ate our meals beside a glass carboy as it bubbled up fermented gas. And scattered about the living room, tucked in the bookcases and stashed behind the coffee table, he positioned an array of locked cases and bags containing a growing collection of rifles, pistols and shotguns.

The acquisitions that came to fill our Upper West Side apartment mainly came from the shops around Little Italy. Home winemaking was once common among Italian Americans. So too was a well-developed sense for gun culture. There was a time when riflery and marksmanship were encouraged across America, after all. Look at any high school yearbook from a century ago and you will likely find a picture of the student gun club. For Americans of Italian descent, an affinity for firearms was a patriotic necessity. The Risorgimento, the fight for Italian reunification, remained a recent memory. In the 1850s, after a first unsuccessful effort, the Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi had regrouped in Staten Island, bringing with him his partisan supporters, including, so the story goes, my great-great-great-grandfather, a Piedmontese from Cuneo in northern Italy. Loyalty, combat readiness and virtù, have long remained in the blood.

In our family lore, the Papal states and the Napoleonic empire were all variously to blame for giving Italy the boot. Our quarrel with Rome went back to the tale of Ugolino della Gherardesca, the Count of Donoratico and our Pisan progenitor, who became caught up in that unfortunate Guelph-Ghibelline business of the 13th century and was framed by a Popish plot. The denouement found Ugolino deposited in the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno, where at least he got to nibble on his betrayer, Archbishop Ruggieri.

Such enmities were slight compared to the family loathing for the Austro-Hungarians and their incursions into Italian lands. At the outset of World War One, my great-grandfather and namesake Giacomo Panero, an American banker, voluntarily returned to Italy to join the Alpini, the mountain division of the Italian army. He successfully pushed the Germans out of the southern Dolomites— in the process, we were told, adorning his high-alpine bunker with Hun skulls. His Italian army portraits, in cloak and alpine hat, still adorn my bookshelf.

When I reached the age of 16, it was time for me to join the family ranks. My father brought me downtown to John Jovino Gun Shop to acquire my first firearm. The old gun shop was a small storefront in an alley behind the palatial former police headquarters at 240 Centre Street. An oversized pistol hung from its sign, a famous urban marker that made cameo appearances from Weegee to Serpico. Founded in 1911, the store was the oldest gun shop in New York, if not the country, before it was finally cut down by the Covid closures of 2020. Back in the early 1990s, as city residents turned to self-defense at the height of the last New York crime wave, business was booming.

Gun enthusiasts are some of the nicest people you will meet. The owners were happy to see a first-time family walk through the door. We selected a Marlin 882 SS, a .22 caliber Winchester magnum rimfire rifle. The gun’s bolt action, still to this day a joy to slide, must have reminded my father of Giacomo picking off those Germans high in the Dolomites. We mounted it with a magnifying scope. To this purchase my father added a .22 target pistol and .357 Magnum revolver.

It should be said that New York City’s gun laws are among the most punitive in the country — for law-abiding citizens, at any rate. Acquiring the license to safeguard a firearm in your home and to transport it in a locked bag to a range is an ordeal. Even during the Nineties crime wave, licensing your firearm was nearly as onerous as today, and my father did it by the book. At the time, it required months of paperwork, background checks and precise postal money orders that had to be filed with a clerk in the bowels of One Police Plaza. Unless you are in a business that transports large sums of cash or cash-equivalents, you can forget that concealed-carry license.

Fortunately at our range it was a different story. Since the owners ‘sold the bullets to the police’, the atmosphere in our tidy range, tucked two stories below the streets of Lower Manhattan, was more laissez-faire. I was more than free to practice with my father’s firearms. I could also try out any of the Glocks or other pistols they kept behind the counter. Want to test out a 12-gauge pump action shotgun against the ‘thug’ target? Fire away. The range came stocked with food catered from Chinatown and, understandably, quickly became my high-school hangout.

In his retirement, my father left the city for freer gun states. His collection came to include a vintage Browning Auto 5 and a Remington 581S. When my wife came to meet him, he gifted her a snub-nosed .38 special in the manner of Clemenza handing one to Michael Corleone, just without the tape on the butt.

In 2003, when the Smith and Wesson company debuted its .50 caliber five-shot revolver (the Model 500), my father was first in line to purchase one. He lived and died an avowed atheist, but he believed in stopping power. The gun was designed to stop a bear in its tracks. It could also ‘put a bullet through an engine block’, he liked to say. When we finally tested it together at a sandpit in the free state of Vermont, the pistol felt like a piece of personal artillery. A flaming shockwave emanated from the end of its barrel and expanded in a cone of heat and light. ‘This gun is your inheritance,’ he told me, more on target than I cared to realize. It was the last time we shot together.

The Smells of Commercial Success

The perfumer Oliver Cresp

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 6, 2013

The Smells of Commercial Success
By James Panero

A review of "The Art of Scent 1889-2012"
Museum of Arts and Design
Through March 3

New York

Should "scent art"--perfume, that is--be critically considered alongside music and painting? In "Against the Grain," an influential 1884 novel by J.-K. Huysmans, the decadent character Des Esseintes makes a case that it should. "After all, he argued, it was no more abnormal to have an art that consisted of picking out odorous fluids than it was to have other arts based on a selection of sound waves or the impact of variously coloured rays on the retina of the eye."

Like much of what Des Esseintes says in Huysmans's fanciful and wonderful book, his case for perfume is both logical and absurd--an aestheticism taken to an extreme. But he is right to argue that scents should command a more respectful place alongside sights and sounds, with a critical language that includes more than merely "good" and "bad." By appreciating each sense on its own, says Des Esseintes, we better enjoy its harmony with others, "co-ordinating them to compose the whole that constitutes a work of art."

Just like food and wine, perfume has recently enjoyed a renaissance of sorts among latter-day Esseintes-ists. Independent perfumeries create their own blends. Professionals and amateurs write sophisticated perfume blogs. The 2008 book "Perfumes: The A-Z Guide," by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, has become something of an Oxford English Dictionary for scent.

Now add to the mix "The Art of Scent: 1889-2012" at New York's Museum of Arts and Design.

Claiming to be the "first major museum exhibition to recognize scent as a major medium of artistic creation," the show strips perfume of its extensive packaging and advertising and presents it as an "olfactory art" in a purpose-built white-cube gallery. Curated by Chandler Burr and designed by the architectural firm Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, the spare exhibition consists of 12 smelling stations seamlessly cast into the gallery walls, a side room with a table of perfume oils, and mouthlike formations sculpted into another wall that spit out scented cards.

The perfumes on exhibition begin chronologically with Jicky, an 1889 blend by the perfumer Aimé Guerlain--considered the first modern perfume for its use of synthetic aromatics and still in production--and concludes with Daniela Andrier's Untitled (2010, designed for Maison Martin Margiela). Along the way we encounter Ernest Beaux's magisterial Chanel No. 5 (1921), Pierre Wargnye's odious Drakkar Noir (1982, for Guy Laroche), Olivier Cresp's diaphanous Angel (1992, for Thierry Mugler) and Jean-Claude Ellena's Osmanthe Yunnan (2006, for Hermès), a scent that starts with an infusion of tea and finishes with a rinse of dental fluoride.

An exhibition of scent is a fresh idea. Too bad "The Art of Scent" is so fishy. With elaborate stagecraft, it is more interested in making the case for commercial perfume as high art, with the rights and privileges accorded therein, than in revealing the artistry of perfume design. For all the hoopla, the show conveys even less than what you would learn walking through the ground floor of Saks Fifth Avenue—which, unfortunately, might be the point.

The urinal-shaped smelling receptacles abstract perfume to absurdity. Paired with illuminated labels that fade to white the moment you want to read them, this is more a show of prestidigitation than olfaction. For a museum of design, MAD seems oddly contemptuous of the design elements that went into these commercial products. "The Art of Scent" gives only passing reference to perfume chemistry and history. It includes an all-too-narrow survey of well-known brands and ignores the independents. It disregards the packaging and advertising that is integral to what these products become. Until the day we have wall-mounted smelling stations in our homes, perfumes are high-end consumables with elaborate marketing campaigns and exotic packaging—a thriving multibillion-dollar industry--and there shouldn't be anything wrong in acknowledging that.

And therein lies the fallacy of this exhibition. Here, everyone is an "artist." Perfumers are "scent artists." Perfumes are "aesthetically influential works of olfactory art." Miuccia Prada, who in 2004 commissioned the perfumers Carlos Benaïm, Max Gavarry and Clément Gavarry to create Prada Amber, is not a fashion executive but a "patron of the arts."

"The Art of Scent" purports to strip away the commercial side of perfume. Instead, it merely adds another layer of packaging, covering over the existing labels and selling the elixirs as high art. At times these gimmicks are all too apparent. The room with the smelling table includes a museum staffer whose hawking of the fragrances is little different from a department-store floor-walker's. The "catalog" of the exhibition is a "limited edition box set" of fragrances that costs $285, with a text that is more sales pitch than scholarship.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that "The Art of Scent is made possible by The Estée Lauder Companies--a Founding Major Donor--and other Major Donors, including Chanel, Inc., Givaudan, Hermès Parfums, International Flavors & Fragrances Inc, L'Oréal and P&G Prestige. Additional support for The Art of Scent is provided by Funders Arcade Marketing USA and Guerlain, as well as Diptyque and Women in Flavor and Fragrance Commerce Inc." There is nothing wrong with corporate sponsorship, but here the sponsorship seems to have gone to supporting a nonprofit front for Madison Avenue. With "The Art of Scent," the Museum of Arts and Design has left a good idea smelling rank. Des Esseintes would be the first to turn up his nose at that.

Shopping: PR misses its target

Dara writes:

Recently I have been struck by the success of advertising and PR agents versus the reality of a product. Take Bigelow Chemists, a small apothecary on Sixth Avenue in New York's Greenwich Village. For a few months now I have been reading about this company in magazines. One of its lip balms has been featured in New York magazine, and its hand soap or face cream in The New York Times "Sunday Styles" section. The lip balm might feature pure peppermint oil and smell like vanilla cream soda. The face cream might contain witch hazel and come in a glass bottle the color of aquamarine. In each case, the product placement gave me the impression of a world-class alchemist concocting expert products and peddling them in a fashionable yet down-home environment on a cute block in downtown Manhattan. Essentially I thought I had hit upon another Kiehl's.

Like Bigelow, Kiehl's began in the mid-nineteenth century in downtown Manhattan. When I first bought Kiehl's products about fifteen years ago, it was a cult favorite. At its schlumpy store on Thirteenth Street, one could buy high quality items, such as a shine agent and detangler for hair, or a body wash that smelled like cucumber. The items were packaged in basic plastic bottles that were unadorned but cost a lot. One feature of the old Kiehl's was belonging to a club of like-minded patrons who similarly didn't mind spending a lot on drug store items, but did not want to look as though they had. When I saw the shampoo and conditioner in the shower at my weird Great Uncle's house in Chappaqua, I smiled to belong to this quirky coterie.

Now, of course, L'Oreal owns Kiehl's. But the point is, I can still walk in the store and face an emporium (and an upgraded one at that) stocked with luscious products for my bathroom shelves. In contrast, Bigelow's, which I visited for the first time last week. When I asked my hairdresser who lives across the street about it, he inauspiciously grumbled, "like Kiehl's? No! Like a crowded drugstore." And he was exactly right. Because the company's PR agents have so successfullly positioned the brand as high-end, I was expecting to enter a veritable Willy Wonka of bathroom goods. Instead, I indeed entered a fairly run of the mill drug store. Yes, I saw the C.O. Bigelow products, but on a few shelves crammed at the very front of the store. Surrounding the company's own items were goods from high-end brands such as Bliss, Tocca, Dr. Hauscka, et. al. These did not impress me, because I can go to the Sephora three blocks from my apartment (and from every Manhattan apartment, it seems), and purchase them there. I made Bigelow a destination because I was interested in an old apothecary that had perfected the art of skin salves. While I do very much like the peppermint oil lip balm I purchased, the purchasing experience enthused me less. The crowded store and hodge podge of items made me feel more like I was grabbing for Peanut M&Ms online at an airport commisary than that I was in a luxury goods establishment in Greenwich Village.

Target was the other reason I became interested in hype versus reality. Could there be a more over-hyped store right now than Target? I am so sick of the ultra-hip holiday ads on television, which parade along to an ersatz indie rock soundtrack. You might remember I have already spoken negatively of the store here, particularly of the way hipsters Frenchify the name as "tar-jay," with a mixture of pride and self-consciousness. In that post, I admitted I enjoyed my first foray to the store, about five years ago in Baltimore, when I bought Isaac Mizrahi pumps that quickly shredded. Well, yesterday James and I visited an outpost in New London, Connecticut, near where his mother lives.

James had remarked that an editor at a fashiony magazine had highlighted the store's breakfast trays as being particularly designy. We found them at the store--all bamboo sides and tin bottom--and indeed they were cool. I had my own agenda. The make-up artist who painted me for my wedding noted that the Sonia Kashuk foundation sold only at the store was the best she had tried. And indeed an internet product search revealed that many women found the same, that it gave the skin a dewy yet fresh and not oily appearance. Alas, the New London store was out of the product in my fair-skinned color. The store was out of a whole lot more. Behnaz Sarafpour is a designer the company has hired, as they did Isaac Mizrahi, to create a line. But all the small sizes were plucked.

We arrived at admitedly a horrible time: two days before Christmas. But we also learned something incontrovertible: innovative design makes up less than one percent of what Target offers. Here is the dirty little secret, strip away the little bit of Isaac, Behnaz, and Sonia, and Target is Walmart. Target sells garbage bags, plastic toys, and cheap jewlery much more than it sells smart, cropped tuxedo jackets. But the thing is, what we hear about is the tuxedo jackets.

I commend the PR agents. They have done their job. I commend the design team. When James wrote about the re-opening of the Museum of Modern Art for The Weekly Standard a few years ago, he remarked on the museum's tacky Target tie-ins. The museum even served "Targetinis"--target martinis, whatever that means--at its opening party. Alfred Barr must be rolling in his grave.

Two years ago I stayed in an adorable boutique hotel in London's Knightsbridge neighborhood with, as it turns out, Target's design team. They were multi-culti mix from Minnesota, where the company is based. But like a self-described intellectual, these self-described hipsters were about as genuine as those targetinis. There is such a thing as too cool, too hyped. I think Tar-jay has arrived there.