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When I first heard the unfinished version of Super Smeller I’m not sure why but I immediately imagined the camera acting as a probe and getting sucked up a nose. I think there’s a quality to a Doohickey Cubicle that feels kind of intergalactic, a sort of Magic School Bus style science fiction that is both awesome and sweet.A month or so later Francis was in the hospital and a doctor was pushing a microscopic camera up his nose as he so bravely began treatment for a rare type of sarcoma in his right sinus that, at the time of writing the song and making the video, was yet undiagnosed.
I think everything that surrounds Super Smeller amplified in profundity as Francis underwent surgery and completed his radiation treatment. The song and video now stand for me less as a symbol of the prophetic potentiatlies of art but of its infinite possible dimensions and the countless ways life imitates it, the ways it imiatates itself, and the way life has nothing to do with it whatsoever.