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Am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. Okay, let's bango. Bonjour et bienvenue à The Choses sur les Chaux, un podcast de l'art. Je m'appelle Linse, and I speak a the French a very well. Just kidding. That 10-second intro literally took me half an hour, and I'm not even sure that I got it even a little bit right. A bit Lincy, why do you speak a French to introduce your podcast? I mean, did Lumière from Beauty and the Beast just infiltrate my sound studio? Because it sounded like he did. And he'll just have to wait and see on that one, though I promise that it will become clear as to why I just humiliated myself speaking French to introduce episode 5 of Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. In case you didn't catch it in Francet, my name is Lindsay, and I am reporting to you from my sound studio in Green Bay, Wisconsin. And before you get any big ideas, that's just a fancy way of saying that I am recording this in my parents' walk-in closet. But the sound quality is actually really good, so let's just get on with it. Thank you for joining me for episode 5 of the podcast, which, fun fact, was the original goal for the number of episodes that I wanted to record when I started this all. So small goals, small victories, my friends. Now a week ago I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to cover in this episode. And then inspiracion, I don't even know if that's the word in French, inspiration hit, fifth podcast, which only about five people will probably listen to. Well, it's only fitting for me to record an episode on a way more famous five. And yes, or maybe no, I don't know what you were thinking, but I am talking about Chanel number five. Chanel numero sanc, numero cinco, numero cinque, numer fenf. That last one is German, which um is appropriate, but you won't know why until you listen to the podcast. Now you must be thinking, Lindsay, Chanel number five is a perfume. It's not art. And to that I say to you, good monsieur, good mademoiselle, that you are oh so wrong. Chanel number five is a modernist icon, from its formula to its bottles to the woman behind its creation. Chanel number five is a work of modern art. And I have proof of this because the professor who I was a teaching assistant for this semester, Professor Jonglain, allowed me to give a lecture on Chanel No. 5 to our class, which was a class on modern art, architecture, and design. And that guest lecture actually turned out to be one of the highlights of my entire semester. So I thought it was only fitting to turn it into a podcast episode. And what better podcast episode to turn it into than you guessed it, number five? In this episode, I will discuss Chanel number five as a work of modern art. Unlike the subject of episode four, which I'll remind you was Niccolò Delarca's Lamentation, I think that most people know and can imagine a bottle of Chanel No. And of course, the golden liquid inside, promising that signature Chanel number five scent. And if for some reason you don't know this or can't imagine it, just do a 30-second Google search and educath, and I'll take care of the rest. But before we can talk about number five, we first need to talk about Chanel. Gabrielle Chanel, that is, the famous coutelier of France whose brand is still ubiquitous with luxury clothing, accessories, perfumes, makeup, you name it. Now I'm not going to go into Chanel's entire life story. I will give you about a 10-minute overview. But if you are interested in a more thorough rundown of her life, I would recommend listening to episode 98 of the History Chicks podcast, which happens to be one of my favorites. Gabrielle Chanel, who I will be calling Gabrielle rather than Gabriel, which is how the French seem to say it, was born in August of 1883 in the Loire Valley region of France, which, if I know anything, I know that it makes real good wine. Gabrielle was actually born to unmarried parents, which was pretty scandalous for 1883. Her dad, from whom she gets the surname Chanel, was a bit of a charlatan, if you will, and her mother, unfortunately, died of tuberculosis when Gabrielle was only twelve, so from a very young age, both of Gabrielle's parents were largely absent from her life, one by choice and the other by circumstance. After her mother's death, Gabrielle went to go live with her sister at a convent in the town of Aubasine, which is in southwestern central France. Gabrielle lived at the convent until she was 18, at which point she basically aged out. In order to support herself at this time, Gabrielle became a seamstress by day and a ba da da cabaret singer at night. And it was here and now that Gabrielle began to go by the nickname of Coco, which was probably derived from some of the songs that she would sing in De Club. This is not all just useless background information to prove that I actually read about Chanel's life. Her growing up in the French countryside has a point, I swear. As for now, it's useful to note that although the Chanel name would later become ubiquitous with luxury and wealth, her early life was spent in relative poverty outside the metropolitan centers of France. Despite her humble start in life, Coco, as I will now call her, was basically a dude magnet. And she wasn't just any dude magnet. She was a dude magnet for wealthy dudes, which is what I too strive to be. Fail to be, but strive to be. And Coco became a dude magnet by being a cabaret singer at the bars that the soldiers frequented. One of those soldiers was Etienne Balsant, who was a super duper rich guy. Long story short, Coco shocked up with Balsan and enjoyed three years of crazy luxury at his chateau. Balsan was also the one who enabled Coco, who at this point was an active milliner or hat designer, to open her first store, which she did in the bachelor pad that Balsan kept in Paris. Like, no joke, Coco literally turned his bachelor pad into a millinery shop, which all I have to say to that is hats off to you, Coco. Hats off to you. Hey, pun intended. Coco started this millinery shop around 1908 or 1909. In 1909, Coco did another thing, or should I say, person. She started an affair with Arthur Capell, who is a rich English guy who happens to be one of Balsan's good friends. Oops. So obviously, some pretty shady stuff is happening, but it's important to recognize that Capell will end up being the most important man in Coco's entire life. Not only did Coco talk about Capell as the love of her life, but he was really the one who put Coco on the map in Paris. She lived in his apartment on the Champs-d'Elysée, and get this, Coco actually convinced Balsan to give her his bachelor pad that she had turned into a millinery shop. But eventually Coco outgrew that space and moved into a larger space on the Rue Cambon, which is close to all of the big stuff in Paris, whether it's the Tuileries, the Louvre, the Opera, as well as the Place Vendome, which is the primary square in this very fancy area. And in this store at the Rue Cambon, Coco would eventually start making clothing alongside her production of hats. Long story short, Capel ensures Coco's success as a businesswoman in Paris. He is not only the love of her life, but he's also her primary business backer. He makes sure that she has the money that she needs to run her business. Now I promise you that their love story is more epic than that, but for the sake of time, we need to fast forward a bit. So Capell and Coco were together for about ten years before they separated, and Capell ended up getting married to some equally rich, aristocratic, fancy schmancy lady. But you know, ten years doesn't just go away at the drop of a hat, and Coco and Capell are still unofficially together, which is to say that they are still having an affair. But that all ends in 1919, when at the age of 38, Capell dies. Like he straight up dies in a horrific car crash, and Coco is just absolutely devastated. From what I read, she never gets over his death, and I don't blame her. She essentially remained heartbroken for the rest of her life. But what she didn't remain was single. Remember, I told you. Coco Chanel equals dude magnet. Enter into the picture Duke Dmitry Pavlovich Romanov. Yes, I said Romanov, as in the Russian imperial family Romanov. And it gets better. Our homeboy, Dmitry Pavlovich Romanov, comma, Grand Duke of Russia, was living in France after being exiled from home country, because in Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution had overthrown the Romanov Imperial family and basically killed them all. So Dmitry, being an heir to the Russian Imperial throne and not being an idiot, was like bye, and he scrammed in order not to get killed. However, Dmitri is not just the Grand Duke of Russia. He is one of the men who allegedly killed Rasputin. Yes, Rasputin, that weird guy in Russian history who most of us know as the villain from the non-Disney movie Anastasia. Coco's new lover killed that guy. Although way less exciting than killing the Russian holy dude immortalized in the movie Anastasia, Dmitri also did something that is critical to the development of Chanel number five. He took Coco to the south of France in 1920, because at that point Coco had already decided that she wanted to expand her fashion empire into the realm of smelly stuff, meaning playfume. And Dmitri was like, I know a guy, and he did. The guy that Dmitri knew was named Ernest Beau. Now don't let the French name fool you. This guy was also Russian. In fact, the reason that Dimitri knew Ernest Beaux was because Bo was the perfumer to the czars. Like no joke, Beau's profession in Russia was to make perfume and cologne for the Imperial family. So when the Bolsheviks took over, Beau Bolshevolted because he didn't want to get moited. In the name of not getting moited, Beau took his perfume business to Cannes, France, the same place where the very fancy movie people still go each year, even today. And it was in Cannes that both Coco and Beau met and began to scheme about her first perfume. And it's in this meeting that Chanel No. 5 is born. Before going into the perfume in specific, why did Coco want to even make a perfume in the first place? Well, long story short, she thought all of the other perfumes on the market were basically floral garbage. And this is where her upbringing in the country comes into play, at least a little bit. And that is because there are actual studies that show how living in an urban center can affect our sense of smell. Living in a big city essentially causes our sense of smell to atrophy, given that it is almost fully engaged all of the time, and our bodies just can't take it. It's similar to the idea that you often don't notice smells that you've grown accustomed to. But in the city, your sense of smell is working all of the time, and eventually it stops picking up on things. But having grown up in the country, Coco had a very sensitive sense of smell, maybe even to the point of neurosis. Coco would even claim that her sense of smell was so acute that she could smell flowers on a person hours and hours after they had touched a bouquet, even if that person had washed his or her hands in between the contact. Now to me this seems exaggerated, and it probably was, but Coco did value cleanliness above most things. She was known to even complain about how upper society women smelled dirty from not washing themselves or their clothes frequently enough. Now remember, women's dresses at this time were extremely involved, and dry cleaning wasn't a thing. So you just wear the same dress over and over again. And what does any high society gal do in that situation? You spritz a little more perfume on your body in an attempt to basically mask the smell of your BO. Let's be real, I do that all the time. Coco especially complained about floral scents, which were basically the only thing on the market. And usually perfumes had a direct correlation to a single flower. So for example, perfume X might smell like Lily of the Valley, while perfume Y primarily correlated to rose. Coco claimed, however, that a woman should not smell like a flower. And that's an interesting point. Like, whoever decided that a woman should smell like a flower? But then again, what should a woman smell like? When asked about the concept behind Chanel No. 5, Coco remarked that, quote, a woman is closest to being naked when she is well dressed. I wanted to give her a perfume, but an artificial perfume. I don't want rose or lily of the valley. I want a perfume that is compound. End quote. Coco was also known to repeat a quote by Paul Vaterie that a woman who doesn't wear perfume has no future. And if that's the case, then you best get your sunglasses on because my future is bright as hell. For Coco, however, this quote, the quote that a woman who doesn't wear perfume has no future, had a more specific meaning than its original intention by Vaterie, because Coco did not approve of just any old perfume. She wanted the modern woman, which is to say the well-dressed, well-groomed, financially well-off woman, to wear Chanel number five, which was a modern scent for a modern woman. After all, how can a woman have a future if she smelled like the past? But how does one even begin to design a perfume for the modern woman? Well, the first step is to decide what you want your perfume to smell like. And Coco would later say that she wanted Chanel No. 5 to smell like a woman's perfume with a woman's scent. And if I'm her perfumer, if I'm Ernest Beau and she tells me that, I'd be like, thanks for nothing, Coco. But in order to create this woman's scent, Beau took over 80 notes, so 80 different scents, and blended them together to create what would become one scent. In this way, Chanel number five is a little bit like some of the paintings that were produced at the time, which utilized small units of color to create a whole picture, like Syrah's An Afternoon at the Grand Jot or Landscapes by Paul Cezanne. What's more is that Beau created Chanel No. 5 as a synthetic perfume by using aldehydes, which are a synthetic compound that enhances the fragrance of natural ingredients. Some people claim that Chanel No. 5 is the first synthetic perfume ever, but that's just false. It was, however, one of the first perfumes to utilize this new technology. So for example, Bo would mix jasmine extract with benzyl acetate, which was a synthetic compound derived from coal tar that, for whatever reason, smelled exactly like jasmine. By combining jasmine extract with benzyl acetate, one could create an enhanced jasmine smell that lasted longer on the skin without needing to use so much of the natural jasmine, which was one of the most expensive flowers to employ in the perfume business. In other words, Bo is utilizing modern advances in his own field of perfume making as he creates the fragrance that Coco so desired. While we know some of the 80 notes in Chanel number five, which include jasmine, may rose, sandalwood, Brazilian tonka beans, and a bunch of other stuff, the recipe for the blend is still top secret. While we might not know the exact recipe for the perfume, what we do know is that Beau succeeded in creating a perfume that was quote unquote compound, which is exactly what Coco asked for. In combining 80 different notes to create a single fragrance, Bo ensured that Chanel number five had no direct referent. No one would ever smell Chanel No. 5 and think, oh yeah, that smells exactly like such and such a flower. Because it didn't. Chanel number five smelled like Chanel No. 5. And in creating this perfume, Beau and Coco created a modern scent for the modern woman. In combining 80 different scents, Chanel No. 5 smelled like one thing itself. It was essentially an abstraction for the senses. As we all know, every perfume needs a name. And there are a lot of stories about how Coco may or may not have picked out the name Chanel No. 5. The naming process has really become more of a legend than a fact. The most commonly known story is that Bo brought Coco a series of perfume samples, and she chose the fifth sample to use as the final perfume product. Another version of the story is that Coco's favorite number was five. She would actually often hold her fashion shows on the fifth day of the month, which certainly suggests a fetish for the number. Yet another rumor is that Coco was deliberately attempting to connect her perfume to the age of the machine by giving it the perfume name equivalent to how manufacturers would name cars and airplanes with letters or numbers. So think of how Henry Ford named his car the Ford Model T. Of course, all of these stories could be true, just as none of them could be true. No matter how Coco actually chose the name for the perfume, she must have known that the name Chanel No. 5 would stand out amongst the perfumes of her competitors, who often named their perfumes with fluffy or exotic titles like Nuit de Chin, Knight of China, or Il Plot du Bazet, its raining kisses. By naming Chanel No. 5 Chanel No. 5, Coco wanted to differentiate the name of her product just as she differentiated the scent of her product. And much like the scent of the perfume, the name Chanel No. 5 has no direct association. It isn't a metaphor and it isn't at all descriptive. The name of the perfume, just like the scent, is an abstraction, and it has the whiff of an industrial production about it. That being said, about the name and the perfume, Chanel No. 5's status as a modernist icon is more than just about a scent or a name, because a scent has no corporeal form and a name cannot hold liquid. Coco had to create a bottle worthy of her new perfume and her name. And ultimately the bottle is what would come to represent Chanel No. 5. Many of us, including myself up until a few months ago, actually have no idea what Chanel No. 5 smells like, but many of us do recognize what it looks like. And what we know as the Chanel No. 5 bottle of today is not that far off from what it looked like 90 years ago. That is how successful Coco's design for the bottle was. It has lasted almost unchanged for nine decades. Coco's longtime lawyer Robert Chalet would later remark that, quote, Coco designed something supremely simple and therefore supremely sophisticated. The bottle never changed. There is total recognition. In saying this, Chalet means that Coco was so successful in her design that no one needed anything other than the bottle itself. Itself to identify the product. It was basically a miracle of modern marketing. As of the perfume's launch in 1921, Chanel No. 5 was sold in clinical, almost pharmaceutical looking bottles. The bottles featured and continue to feature a monochromatic label in Sans serif font, meaning that the font doesn't have the serif or the slight swell at the end of each letter, like you see in fonts such as Times New Roman, or, you know, a hundred other fonts that have a serif. Which is to say that even when it came to the font on the bottle, Coco avoided excess. The square-topped stopper on the 1921 bottle was also the first time ever that the now iconic logo for Chanel first appeared, the intersecting seas. By 1924, the design of the bottle had changed to feature beveled edges in a diamond cut stopper instead of the square-topped stopper. Coco allegedly chose this shape because it matched the outline of the Place Mendome, the square I mentioned earlier, which was nearby her shop on the Rue Cambon and home to the Ritz Hotel, which is where Coco would live for many years. If this is true, Coco managed to distill an entire architectural space into the stopper of her perfume bottle. Overall, the 1924 bottle is almost indecipherable from the bottle we see today on the shelves of Sephora and, you know, swanky department stores. The beveled edges complicate the design of the 1921 bottle while still lending the bottle a certain industrial edge. This isn't blown glass, but rather glass that has been beveled using heavy-duty machinery. What's more, the overall design of the bottle does nothing to disguise its contents, but rather acts as a window to the product inside, putting the substance itself on display. Many design historians and critics have commented on the modern design of the Chanel No. 5 bottle. One author, Judith Brown, notes that the industrial abstract quality of the bottle registers a quote new aesthetic dimension. Another scholar, Jessica Berstein, has described the bottle as, quote, devoid of content and replete with surface, which Berstein suggests reflects the coldness of a modernist aesthetic. Other design critics have praised the bottle's industrial modernity and machine age design. One thing is for sure, the bottle was unlike any other perfume bottle on the market, which were often colored and patterned to the point of ostentation and had absolutely no problems with cultural appropriation. And this is pretty common for perfume bottles of the time, such as one from 1919 by the brand Rossine, called Aladin, which was a perfume crafted by Coco's rival Paul Poichot. The 1919 bottle of Aladin boasts a figure that, to me, resembles portraits of Shah Jahan and other Mughal emperors, effectively marketing the perfume as something exotic and alluring through the use of a racial stereotype. So basically, it is the total opposite of the design for the bottle of Chanel No. 5. The design changed between the 1921 and the 1924 bottles came after Coco partnered with one of the largest fragrance companies in France in order to expand the market for her perfume. The company she partnered with, Les Parfumeries Bourgeois, was run by two brothers by the name of Werthheimer. The Werthheimers would produce and distribute Chanel No. 5 using an industrial facility where the iconic perfume would be created, bottled, and packaged for consumption. For their services, the brothers would receive 70%, I repeat, 70% of profits from the perfume. The person who introduced cocoa to the brothers would receive 20% of profits, leaving cocoa to take home only 10% of profit. To add salt to the wound, the Wertheimer family would go on to take over ownership of the Chanel brand, albeit much later. And the heirs of Paul and Pierre Wertheimer continue to own the brand today. The family is worth an estimated $19 billion. That's billion with a B. Coco would later call Pierre Wertheimer, quote, that bandit who screwed me, which is as accurate a statement as I have ever heard. The real mystery of Chanel number five is that no one can quite explain its success. Yes, the perfume and the bottle and the name were unlike anything that anyone had ever seen before. But Coco also knew how to market her product and who her target audience was. Coco's ideal client was a well-washed, fashionable woman with money to spend. Coco and the Chanel brand made absolutely no secret of this. In a catalog from 1924, the company writes about their perfume as follows: quote, for an elite clientele, price is a secondary consideration. It was never imagined that Chanel perfumes could become luxury fragrances for the general public. They must remain exclusive, chosen by an exclusive public with refined tastes. End quote. I attempted to find the price for the original bottles, but I was thwarted. Though from that catalog entry, I think we can safely assume that a single bottle was worth a lot of money. Despite the cost of the perfume and Coco's desire to serve only an elite clientele, Chanel No. 5 succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams, both at home and abroad. My favorite thing that I learned about Chanel No. 5 over the course of my research was the fact that following the Allied liberation of Paris in 1944, American soldiers flocked to Coco's store on the Rue Cambon to purchase perfume for their sweethearts back home. If these soldiers had known what Coco had gotten up to during the war, they probably would have taken their business elsewhere. But I will let you research that one on your own. Though I will give you a hint, it involves Coco, Nazis, and Winston Churchill. And before you go thinking that Coco Chanel went around punching Nazis in the face, you will unfortunately have to think again. But that is a story for another day. Now, as with most great works of art, Chanel No. 5 has an afterlife, meaning that it has continued to pervade society for decades after its creation, taking on lives parallel to that which it was originally intended to live. Then again, maybe afterlife isn't the right word. Can you really say that something has an afterlife if it's still a cultural icon in our society? Maybe not. Perhaps the most well-known endorsement of Chanel No. 5 was by Marilyn Monroe, who famously responded, Chanel number five and nothing else, when asked what she wore to bed. Munro seemed to confirm this statement in a 1953 photo shoot for a magazine entitled Modern Screen, in which Monroe posed naked in bed. On the bedside table there's only a bottle of Chanel No. 5. In 2010 at the Marilyn Monroe Auction, a receipt for Chanel No. 5 found in the late actress's home sold for over $5,000. An unopened bottle of the perfume was also for sale. It sold for $7,500. As a work of art, Chanel No. 5 received its kudos in 1959, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave the bottle a spot in its permanent collection. This was followed in the 1960s and the 1980s by a series of prints by Andy Warhol that paid homage to the perfume. Even today, prints dedicated to Chanel No. 5 are easy to find on the internet, though they usually feature flowers in pastel colors, which essentially betrays everything that Coco Chanel would have wanted her perfume to be associated with. But unfortunately, c'est la vie. A la vie. As recent as 2016, Vogue magazine heralded Chanel No. 5 as the world's most famous perfume and claimed that a bottle was sold every 30 seconds somewhere in the world. I find this data to be slightly unbelievable because I don't know a single person who wears Chanel No. 5 today. Maybe because it's so damn expensive still that I don't know anyone who can afford it. But also, I haven't smelled Chanel No. 5 on anyone. Mind you, up until a couple months ago, I didn't know what it smelled like, so maybe that's not a fair assessment. Now this brings us to our big finale. What does Chanel number 5 actually smell like? So when I gave this lecture for our modern art architecture and design class, I bopped into Sephora to get a sample so that students could smell it, and let's be real, so that I could smell Chanel No. 5. And when it came time for show and tell, a lot of students crinkled their nose and made some comment that Chanel number five reminded them of what their grandmothers wore for perfume. Which is to say that it has a strong, powdery scent that has a slight musk to it, which people seem to associate with an older generation. And while some people might consider that to be something like an insult, I think that that's a compliment to our grandmothers, who bought a crazy modern perfume back in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and never stopped using it. We now, as a younger generation, now associate that smell with the generation for which it was made. But sense change and trends change. And the few times that I've worn Chanel number five since picking up a sample because, hey, I'm not gonna let it go to waste, I find that Chanel number five changes slightly when it's had time to sit on the skin. And it becomes less overpowering than when you smell it straight on from the bottle. Now, I'm not saying that I would wear it every day, but I am quite fond of Chanel No. Maybe just because I researched it so much. Though for now I think I'll stick with my signature Dolce and Gabbana light blue. Thank you very much. To end our discussion of Chanel No. 5, I want to leave you with this anecdote that I collected a couple months ago. As I said, I went to Sephora to get a sample of Chanel No. She was very patient with me, even though she knew I was not going to buy anything. God bless her. As we were talking, I asked her if Chanel number five was still the most popular fragrance they sold. She said no. So I naturally asked what their most popular fragrance was, and she responded with, Well, it's still Chanel, but it's not Chanel number five, it's Chanel Chance. When I asked her why she thought that Chanel Chance was their most popular perfume, she said, and I swear to God I'm not making this up, she said, because it's more modern, it's a more modern scent for a more modern woman. And that floored me because it led me to realize that it's now our generation's turn to define what modernism is to us. We are currently making modernism, though I think it's safe to say that it still smells like Chanel. Ultimately, Chanel No. 5 was unlike anything that had ever been seen on the market when Coco first released it in 1921. From the chemical compounds used in its creation to the industrial design of its bottle to the scent itself, Chanel No. 5 embodied the modernism of the early 20th century. And it has since solidified its place as a cultural icon in our society, much like its creator, Coco Chanel herself. With that, I will bring this episode about Chanel No. 5 to a close. I encourage anyone with a curious nose to stop in at a Sephora and take a little sniffy sniffy of the stuff to get a feel for what a thoroughly modern woman would have smelled like in Coco's time. And who knows, maybe it'll become your new signature fragrance. Also, anyone who is interested in learning more about Chanel or who just wants to see some really cool short videos, I encourage you to check out the website inside.chanel.com, which is a site run by the Chanel brand that features short videos, photographs, and information about Coco Chanel's life and the products she created. The information within the site is understandably biased to show Coco Chanel in the best possible light. So don't go there expecting any word on her collaboration with the Nazis, for instance. But the visuals are epic and stunning. So seriously, if you have five minutes, check out the site inside.com. As always, any visuals related to this episode of the podcast will be on the podcast's website. Stuff about things podcast.wordpress.com under the entry on episode five. I will also include the host of sources that I used when writing and preparing this episode. There are quite a few more than there were for the fourth episode, as Chanel is much more of a household name than Niccolo Delarca. Sorry, Nikki. For anyone wanting to know more about Chanel, I recommend the 2011 biography by Lisa Cheney. And for more information specifically about Chanel No. 5, there is an excellent and very enjoyable book entitled The Secret of Chanel No. 5: The Intimate History of the World's Most Famous Perfume by Tiler Matzeo. There are, of course, a bunch of other sources listed on the podcast's website that you can go look at and potentially check out from your library should you want to know more. As for Gus Corner this week, I am delighted to report that I have been reunited with the Princeling himself. He is as happy as a clam with the summer weather that has hit Wisconsin, and he is still fearless when it comes to cars. After almost getting hit by the UPS truck, Gus proceeded to get into said truck and disappear into the back where all the packages are. God bless the UPS guy who just saw an opportunity and continued right up the driveway. Gus then proceeded to run laps, not around the truck, but through the truck, using the doorless front cab as a shortcut. Such a weirdo. As for the episode's extra Gus content this week, Gus has somehow wheedled his way into advertisements for Chanel number five. Imagine that. This includes one photograph of Gus or perhaps one of his ancestors wooing Marilyn Monroe and another of him posing in the back of Coco Chanel's living room. I'm starting to wonder if Gus is a time traveler. Though I will say that if the Chanel brand wants to hire a new spokesman to replace Brad Pitt, Gus is open, available, and his agent, that is me, is awaiting your call. That's all from me this week. The habitual thank you goes out to hook sounds.com and freemusicarchive.org for the music featured in the podcast's opener and closer, which includes a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto number four by Kevin McLeod and the song Success Dreams. As for the next episode of the podcast, I don't know if I will be able to get another one lined up before I leave for Italy next week, though you will be seeing one soon after I get back in mid-June. So keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, hopefully absence will make the ear grow fonder, or I don't know, something like that. As always, thank you so much for listening, and I hope that you'll take time to look at and smell something beautiful today.