Blog Through It
Every few months (or years) I show back up here on the candler blog, tap the mic a couple times, and promise to revive a regular posting practice. I’m old enough to know that’s a promise I can’t keep, so I won’t make it this time. And yet, the siren call of writing online has reached my ears once again. So sure, I’ll fire up the engines here and see what happens.
What kicked me into gear this time? Something strange.
On the most recent episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber had Kagi CEO Vlad Prelovac on to chat about search, AI and a whole host of topics. I had heard about Kagi in the past, and I’ve used it a few times and been impressed with the search results. The episode convinced me to give it another go, so I went poking around with everything they have to offer.
Which led me to a very fun tool they have: Small Web. They go into further detail in an introductory blog post, but the idea is very simple: open Small Web and be taken to something written within the last week. It reminds me of StumbleUpon, but good, human.
The first post it took me to floored me: “Screen Time: Perfume in Scarlet Street (1945)” by Jessica Murphy. Scarlet Street is a film I’ve seen many times but I can tell you not once did I ever give a glancing thought to perfume in the film. Murphy describes herself as an “art historian and museum professional with a passion for perfume, always looking for new ways to connect art, fragrance, history, and popular culture.” The site, Perfume Professor, is not a movie site, but it covers perfumes and scents, which is why it likely never would have crossed my path but for Small Web. I’m so glad it did! Because Murphy has discovered a vector I never considered.
On Joan Bennett’s Kitty March having a specific bottle of perfume, which Murphy sources:
Bottles like these seem to have been used by a few fragrance brands in the 1930s and 1940s, which makes sense, since Art Deco had filtered down to mainstream commercial goods and there was a taste for merchandise inspired by the rapidly rising skylines of American cities. …
We don’t learn much of Kitty’s back story in Scarlet Street, but it’s a safe guess that she arrived in New York hoping to discover the glamour of big-city life as she’d seen it portrayed on the silver screen and in magazines, to live in a skyscraper penthouse, even to see her own name in lights. By the time we meet her in Scarlet Street, she’s learned that none of this is likely to happen.
What an insight! Murphy has a whole section of the site dedicated to scents in film and TV. Some fun reading ahead!
Which bring us back to Small Web, described by Kagi like this:
Imagine the internet like a huge neighborhood. There’s a lot of folks around, but we rarely bump into each other, right? Kagi’s all about humanizing the web and we want to help surface the people behind the posts and stories that zip by.
Perfume Professor reminds me so much of why I fell in love with writing on the web in the first place. No matter who you are, your perspective is unique and it just might be interesting to someone. As the web has grown more cacophonous, homogenous it has become harder and harder to encounter these types of perspectives.
All of which is to say I’m thrilled Kagi’s Small Web exists, and I’m thrilled Jessica Murphy is out here blogging. That’s why it shouldn’t just be lip service when I rev up the blog. It’s important to have a home on the web for my whatever thoughts.
And so I’m inspired. To read. To write. To enjoy the Web again.