Sweet Smell of Buffalo

Why I might need to move; an olfactory tale

I’m in Buffalo, New York, to give a talk at the annual fundraiser for the Buffalo & Erie County library system. On my flight here, I read that Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress for the past ten years and the first accredited librarian, first African American, and first woman to hold the post, had been booted out of her job by Donald Trump with no explanation and nothing more than a curt email telling her to clear her desk. I met Dr. Hayden a few years ago. She was dazzling and kind in equal measure—a rare accomplishment—and it plainly sucks to lose her and I hate that she was treated so shabbily. Sigh. These are grim times.

Back to Buffalo. I grew up in a feisty aging rust belt town (Cleveland) so I have a tenderness for other towns of that ilk, and I’m glad to be here. Also, it smells like bacon. Do any of my readers live in Buffalo? Can you confirm or deny the bacony smell? This is not a complaint; in fact, it makes a powerful argument for moving here permanently. Perpetual Breakfast!

Photo by Wright Brand Bacon on Unsplash

I had spent the previous five days in New York City, which most certainly does not smell like bacon. It’s more of a pizza-grease-and-roach-spray kind of bouquet. These days that is interspersed with the punchy smell of cannabis. I think the smell of weed is a bit like cilantro: You are a fan or you hate it. I’m a hater, which means I was born into the wrong chunk of world history, since the smell is everywhere these days. Los Angeles now smells like jasmine, car exhaust, and weed. Santa Barbara, where we hide out on occasion, is weed central, mostly from the huge cannabis farms that have taken over from the orchid nurseries. House prices in the area reflect how close they are to one of the stinky farms. (I think even people who like the aroma can get tired of it now and then.) I’d much rather be enveloped in the smell of bacon.

One thing you never smell these days is cigarettes, so recently, when I caught the woody smell of a Marlboro I thought I was imagining it. At the time, I was in a Las Vegas casino, the kind of place where transgression abounds, but I still couldn’t believe my nose: I really thought no one had smoked a cigarette inside since twenty years ago. But Las Vegas is where all your expectations are upended. And indeed, it was a Marlboro I had detected, lovingly cradled by a young woman with French braids and a fixation on the slot machine in front of her that looked almost surgical. It was the first, but not the last, cigarette I encountered in Vegas, and while this is totally inappropriate to say, it made me a teensy bit nostalgic. I don’t miss inhaling cubic yards of secondhand smoke and having my clean hair smell like an ashtray, but that whiff of cigarette sent me back in time to my earliest days in New York City, when I bummed a cigarette now and then and flashed it around while sitting at a smoky bar. We’re all a damn sight healthier now that there isn’t a shroud of cigarette exhaust in every public place, so I’m not in any way sorry that smoking has been banned (except, apparently, in Las Vegas casinos). I think I’m just nostalgic for my early days in New York, when it still seemed decadent and sophisticated and I was so wowed by it all.

SHOW NOTES

—I tried to read Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan’s award winning book, a few years ago, and just couldn’t crack it. So I wasn’t sure what to expect when the television adaptation showed up recently on Prime Video. But WOW. It’s fantastic. I’m a huge sucker for doomed relationship stories, set against the background of war—The English Patient is an all-time favorite book and movie of mine. Narrow Road strikes many of those same notes, tonally, so it’s my kind of jam. I don’t know why I couldn’t get into the book. But we binged the mini-series and I really recommend it. Jacob Elordi is great (how can you be that handsome and such a good actor?) and so is everyone else in it. The brutality of the prisoner-of-war camp is perhaps excessive (and hard to watch) but otherwise I thought it was an incredible show. I’d almost want to watch it again right away; it’s that good.

—I’m dipping a big toe into the beautiful clothes of Christian Wijnants and recommend you do the same. This is the dress I just got: Pretty dress

—I might even wear it on May 20th, when the film Little Wing, based on a New Yorker story I wrote (also called “Little Wing”) has won a Gracie Award and the ceremony is black tie/red carpet/rubber chicken. (These days, more often it’s rubber salmon at galas.) I’m really excited about the award (the film is wonderful and you can stream it on Paramount+). Red carpet events—at least the red carpet part of them—are just as strange as they seem, with photographers shouting as if they’d just spied a wildebeest in a game reserve. My last such experience was at the Emmys, when How to With John Wilson, the television show I wrote for in 2022, was nominated. I wore a very cool Issey Miyake dress that seemed made for such things. Maybe I’ll wear it again?

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