![]() ![]() It wasn’t anonymous, like the suburban air I’d grown up in. And the air, like no air I’d breathed before. I’d come by rail, on the Super Chief from Chicago, and while I waited for my ride in front of the train station I took in that strange new world: the intense but diffuse light, the stucco buildings, the tall skinny palm trees. I got my first taste of LA flavor in September of 1969, when I arrived in Pasadena to study astronomy at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology. Los Angeles has its own literal flavor, a set of airborne molecules as distinctive as any food’s. That piece has become hard to find, so here it is. ![]() I wrote about them in 2016 for the "Los Angeles" issue of the food magazine Lucky Peach, about the flavor of a city and smog in the kitchen, wok hei included. Now readers are contributing their own personal accounts to a communal collection of significant smells.īut back to Los Angeles: I lived there in the early 1970s and have my own set of half-remembered smells from that smoggy time. That sentence made me very happy: exactly the nudge I'm hoping the book will give! And the essay as a whole is wonderfully evocative. McGee, mostly in isolation, I started to pay more attention to the information in the air, to jot down notes about the mundane fragments floating around me as I whiffed them in." ![]() In it she was kind enough to credit Nose Dive for the idea: A few weeks ago, Tejal Rao contributed the words for a multimedia essay in the New York Times titled "Building a Personal Smell Museum of Los Angeles," which appeared as an online slide show and the back page of the print food section. ![]()
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