"The enormous public interest generated by garish reconstructions is surely because of and not in spite of their ugliness."

"It is hard to believe that this is entirely accidental. One possibility is that the reconstructors are engaged in a kind of trolling. In this interpretation, they know perfectly well that ancient sculptures did not look like the reconstructions, and probably included the subtle variation of color tones that ancient paintings did. But they fail to correct the belief that people naturally form given what is placed before them: that the proffered reconstruction of ancient sculpture is roughly what ancient sculpture actually looked like. It is a further question whether such trolling would be deeply objectionable.... There is genuine intellectual value in the project and what could be seen as mean-spirited iconoclasm could equally be embraced as harmless fun. On the other hand, at a time when trust in the honest intentions of experts is at a low, it may be unwise for experts to troll the public."

Writes Ralph S. Weir, in "Were classical statues painted horribly? It is often suggested that modern viewers dislike painted reconstructions of Greek and Roman statues because our taste differs from that of the ancients. This essay proposes an alternative explanation" (Works in Progress).

Is that a joke about how the ancient Greeks painted their statues? 

"How many Americans even know what color the ribbon is for prostate-cancer awareness?"

From "What Does It Take to Get Men to See a Doctor? Men in the U.S. live six fewer years than women. One clinic is trying to persuade men that getting checked out could save their life" (NYT).

Toxic masculinity” has become a catchall term.... But when researchers first began using the term, they meant something narrower and more specific: a culturally endorsed yet harmful set of masculine behaviors characterized by rigid, traditional male traits, such as dominance, aggression and sexual promiscuity. Men trapped in this man box, as it is sometimes called, are less likely to seek medical care and are more likely to engage in risky behaviors detrimental to their health, such as binge drinking or drug use.... Even seemingly positive attributes associated with traditional masculinity, such as providing for one’s family... can have negative health consequences. They may put work ahead of addressing medical concerns.... Or they may take on dangerous jobs or work extreme hours. But why do some men hold so tightly to these cultural notions about masculinity that lead them toward worse health? The answer may be traced to how fragile manhood itself can feel.... 

"Plenty of Jews Love Zohran Mamdani."

The headline for a Michelle Goldberg column. Excerpt:

“His campaign has attracted Jewish New Yorkers of all types,” wrote Jay Michaelson, a columnist at the Jewish newspaper The Forward. The rabbi who runs my son’s Hebrew school put Mamdani on his ballot, though he didn’t rank him first. And while Mamdani undoubtedly did best among left-leaning and largely secular Jews, he made a point of reaching out to others....

So it has been maddening to see people claim that Mamdani’s win was a victory for antisemitism.... Ultimately.... New York’s Democratic primary wasn’t about Israel.... 

The attacks on Mamdani during the primary were brutal, but now that he’s a national figure, those coming his way will be worse. His foes will try to leverage Jewish anxieties to smash the Democratic coalition.... But don’t forget that the vision of this city at the heart of Mamdani’s campaign — a city that embraces immigrants and hates autocrats, that’s at once earthy and cosmopolitan — is one that many Jews, myself included, find inspiring....

Earthy.  

I was moved to unearth every "earthy" in the 21-year archive of this blog. They're all quotes of other people. I've never once used the word (except for one instance, now corrected, where I clearly meant to type "earthly" ("I didn't think you would be terribly sad to see that Robert Blake has left the earthy scene")).

"The windmills are killing our country, by the way. The fields are littered with them. Junk. They get older and rusty and get bad...."

"It's the greatest scam in history. The most expensive energy you can buy. They are ugly. A friend of mine comes from Minnesota... He said it's unbelievable what happened.... The most beautiful fields.... I was so looking forward to seeing them again... and they had windmills all over them. These horrible structures.... these ugly horrible things.... I looked at this field that was one of the most beautiful places in my own mind and imagination. It's littered with this garbage. It looked like a junkyard, he said. Then you get different manufacturers, and [the windmills] don't look alike. And they're not painted alike. Different colors. Even if they're white, one's a beige-y white, one's a darker white, one's a lighter white. And they start to rust after four or five years. And then they start to wear out. And nobody takes them because you're not allowed to bury the props... There's a certain type of fiber, and if it goes the ground, we are all going to die. What bullshit this is! Okay?... What they do is leave them up.... Windmills all over the place. Tall ones, short ones, dead ones, they're all dead. Some are hanging over by a thread...."

Said Trump today.

 

You may not like Trump's aesthetics all the time. We were just talking about all the gold leaf in the Oval Office. But he is attentive to the details of the visual world. He's an aesthete. What kind of man cares that the windmills are not painted alike even if they are all white because one's a beige-y white, one's a darker white, one's a lighter white? He not only cares, he will calmly detail the problem of shades of white as if you are expected to notice the variations and become unsettled by them as he is.

You are expected to see it as part of what should concern the President of the United States, this discontinuity of the whiteness of windmills.

I like this about him. I think it matters how things look. These places that are beautiful in our "mind and imagination" need to be kept beautiful. Anyone who modifies the landscape owes us all a duty to take care of this beauty. I don't think this comes naturally to most politicians, but it's something that Trump slowed down to contemplate out loud. 

Early color, rushing toward the vantage point.

Meade got some pictures of me. I made it to the vantage point. I'll save my pics for later.

The sunrise is so early at this time of year. And with the sun moving north and the leaves coming out, my alternative vantage points are far more limited than in winter, when the sun is all the way to the south. We're not yet where we need to leave the house before 4 a.m. to catch the sunrise, but that time is approaching. The warmer weather is nice, but eventually it's too hot, and the longer periods of light are good, but it becomes impossible to get a full night's sleep unless — like a little kid — you begin sleeping before twilight ends. To catch the sunrise, we need to leave the house about when civil twilight begins. Today, that was 5:16. Civil twilight ends at 8:32 p.m. today. So you can see how nature is crunching in on this sunrise ritual!

On the up side, we were back at the car at 6:10 and in a great position to head downtown and park, free, just off the square as the Farmer's Market was opening up. Start time: 6:15. We bought morels, sweet potatoes, and Italian sausage and flew the coop before the crowds materialized. It was funny driving home. We'd had a very active day, but it wasn't yet 7 a.m.

"All this gray — it’s so dark, it’s so gloomy, so ugly. It’s like seeing creativity and art and the colors of my community disappear right in front of my eyes."

Said Richard Segovia, 71, a longtime resident of the Mission District of San Francisco, quoted in "The house color that tells you when a neighborhood is gentrifying/A Washington Post color analysis of D.C. found shades of gray permeate neighborhoods where the White population has increased and the Black population has decreased" (WaPo)(free-access link).

But what does gray mean?

A white woman who owns a home decor company asserts: "It all comes down to this perception of wealth and luxury, this idea that neutrals indicate status.... Black homeownership in D.C. has been shrinking for years, which means the very culture of these neighborhoods has been changing. When we see house flippers try to take color out of a house, or a neighborhood, they’re making it more palatable to mostly White people."

But what's behind all this gray?

The color changes.

"As the sky darkens, light-sensitive cells in human eyes become more sensitive to blue and green hues than to reds and oranges."

"This shift in color perception is known as the Purkinje effect, after a 19th-century Czech scientist, and is typically seen at twilight. To take advantage of the Purkinje effect, wear green clothes or a contrasting combination of greens and reds. Blue-green colors (shorter wavelengths) will appear brighter, while red colors (longer wavelengths) will appear to recede into the darkness."

From a NYT article about the solar eclipse, coming to a city near you on April 8th.

Do you have plans to locate yourself appropriately? Had you thought about what to wear? The pleasing coordination with the Purkinje effect is to wear red and to go dark along with the sun, but the NYT is prompting you to steal focus from the sun by wearing green. I hope I'm nowhere near anyone attempting to take photos to be captioned, "Me and the solar eclipse."

How could 1970s interior decoration have happened?

I don't know. Pay attention this time.

 

From the article, which is in The Washington Post:

"Zillow... does an analysis of paint colors. Its latest analysis said that a white kitchen, long de rigueur, could now hurt a house’s home price to the tune of $612..."

"... whereas a charcoal-gray kitchen allegedly increases the cost by an average of $2,512. (To get these very specific numbers, Zillow showed study participants homes and asked how much they’d offer for each. Then, the company’s behavioral scientists used statistical modeling to figure out how the relationship between list and offer price changed depending on the room color.) In a news release about the paint analysis, Zillow quoted Mehnaz Khan, a color psychology specialist and interior designer in Albany, N.Y.: 'Buyers have been exposed to dark gray spaces through home improvement TV shows and their social media feeds, but they’re likely drawn to charcoal on a psychological level.' Khan specializes in determining how colors and the built environment impact people’s moods and well-being. Yet when she and her husband built their first house... they fell into the same trap of prioritizing other people’s opinions over their own.... 'I never painted anything. I lived in those white walls and I was always thinking about the next homeowner. Everything was for the next homeowner.'"

 
From "HGTV is making our homes boring and us sad, one study says/A pair of professors found that home renovation media leads homeowners to decorate for the masses, not for their own happiness" (WaPo).

That's a big problem with having so much of your wealth in the form of the house you live in. You only want to benefit yourself, but you've got a conflict of interest — the tangible reality of your house or that money out there that you'd realize if you sold. And the thing is, what is good in that tangible reality? What do you actually like and what will you like going forward if you repaint and renovate? Are you really so independent about interior design or are you influenced by what (you think) other people prefer? We like to think we're creative and individualistic, but are we? And if we lean into some notion of our specialness, what horror might we make out of our home? Are you really so special that other people's opinions are not woven into all those personal preferences of yours? Really? Tell me a few things you've done to your house that support your opinion of yourself.

"The sun would appear green if your eye could handle looking at it."

"Basically, when you look at the sun, it has enough of all the different colors in it and it’s so bright that everybody’s eyes are firing like crazy and saying, 'It’s too bright for me to tell you what color it is.' That’s why the sun looks white to us... 'Essentially, it’s a green star that looks white because it’s too bright, and it can also appear yellow, orange or red because of how our atmosphere works.... 'The sun is at its midlife, and it still has quite a lot of years before it changes colors.... It still hasn’t dimmed out one bit.... When astronomers say color, they really mean temperature.... But to anyone in the public, color just means the color you see and how you make sense of the world."

Said W. Dean Pesnell, project scientist of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, quoted in "Is the sun white or yellow? It’s a hot debate, and everyone’s wrong. Plot twist: It’s green" (WaPo).

According to the article, some people on social media are discussing whether the sun used to be yellow and now it's gone white.

The woods at midday.

It was 12:36 p.m. and snowing when I took this picture today. This is a full color photograph, with absolutely no adjustments made to it. It looks so black and white, but there is a slight blue cast to the snow and some brownness to the twigs.

"It’s also possible that the ancients were simply wrong about using color, and that these statues improved as the colors faded or abraded away."

"Certainly, we are under no obligation to view these statues in color, so long as we honestly acknowledge their longer history and original appearance as essential facts. And ideas of authenticity are always tricky. The one thing we can never know is whether our ideas of color have any relation to how color was perceived when these works were new. Indeed, when the ancients wrote about color, from Homer and Parmenides to Plato and Aristotle, their terminology often seems decidedly foreign. Was the wine-dark sea really the color of a fine Chateauneuf-du-Pape, or did that refer to something about luster or sheen or some other visual quality? Nietzsche was convinced that the ancient Greeks couldn’t see blue or green and lived in a world of black, white, red and yellow. It’s also possible that the original figures were meant to be shocking, and our own sense of shock is an analogue to how they were perceived thousands of years ago.... The ancient sense of surprise may have been no less vigorous...."

Writes Philip Kennicott in "What if the ancient Greeks and Romans actually had terrible taste? Antiquities reproduced in vivid color, now on view in ‘Chroma’ exhibition at the Met, may look garish to modern eyes" (WaPo)(reviewing the "Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color," which will be at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through March 26).

ADDED: Here's the museum's video:

I just found 8 TikToks for your mid-Saturday enjoyment. 2 of them made me cry. Let me know what you think.

 1. Grab a banana and dance.

2. How to go downstairs in a wheelchair. 

3. What exactly is your skin color?

4. The oldest car in the world.

5. Two young boys get a little puppy dog.

6. The organist at the Salisbury Cathedral hears a tourist singing and, unseen, plays in accompaniment. 

7. A woman describes her own life in Victorian times — brushing mud off skirts, darning socks, and hearing the drunkards singing in the streets.

8. The uncanny power of classical music.

"I have been painting tabletops, flowers, still lifes and figures, boomeranging to earlier themes. And tennis balls. I have painted tennis balls for at least five years."

"I don’t think I ever paint the color accurately. It’s a funky color. There is a whole debate over the color of tennis balls. Are they yellow or are they green? I think that every tennis ball shifts between that range in the course of their life. They start off neon, like a toxic sludge, but once a ball starts to lose its fuzz and pick up the residue of whatever surface you’re playing on, they get dull. I would say they start off neon green and go more toward yellow over time." 

Said Eddie Martinez, quoted in "7 Questions/75 Artists/1 Very Bad Year" (NYT). 

Lots of pictures at the link but none of Martinez's tennis balls! I went looking and found this video of him painting:

"You're white and you're telling this to 2 black police officers — do you see the problem with that a little bit?"

The insane jargon. The fanaticism. The lack of decency. The absolute certainty. https://t.co/YwO9MKpc5n

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) June 23, 2020

ADDED:

In order to defeat white supremacy, it’s important to rebuke black people who won’t do what they’re told.pic.twitter.com/7m7chVobIg

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) June 23, 2020

ADDED: She fell into that white-person rhetoric — which I think has been identified as not politically correct — where you start naming the colors and go on to colors that are not people colors. She says: "white, black, fucking brown, purple."

"Fucking brown"? Is that like shocking pink?

"Suggestive of the sky at dusk, the reassuring qualities of the thought-provoking PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue highlight our desire for a dependable and stable foundation on which to build as we cross the threshold into a new era."

"Imprinted in our psyches as a restful color, PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue brings a sense of peace and tranquility to the human spirit, offering refuge. Aiding concentration and bringing laser like clarity, PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue re-centers our thoughts. A reflective blue tone, Classic Blue fosters resilience. As technology continues to race ahead of the human ability to process it all, it is easy to understand why we gravitate to colors that are honest and offer the promise of protection. Non-aggressive and easily relatable, the trusted PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue lends itself to relaxed interaction. Associated with the return of another day, this universal favorite is comfortably embraced."

Pantone's explanation of its "Color of the Year" for 2020.

Everything's so political nowadays that I can't help reading that as an anti-Trump message. Quite aside from blue's having become the color of the Democratic party, "relatable" seems like a word only Democrats use.

What am I thinking of? Was it all only about Hillary Clinton? See the NYT column from 2015, "Hillary’s Eternal Quest for Relatability." Excerpt:

The thing with “relatable” is that it has become an inside joke, or even a not-so-inside joke. The word was set in lights by “Saturday Night Live” a couple of weeks ago with a sendup in which the former first lady — played by Kate McKinnon.... “Tonight I am speaking to you not as secretary of state, or as a senator or as a first lady,” McKinnon said, “but as a relatable woman on a couch.”...

Late in the “S.N.L.” skit, McKinnon’s Clinton... cackled and added, for good measure, “what a relatable laugh!”... You can imagine Clinton seeing this and wondering whether she is in danger of being buried by a cartoon...

Anyway, I like the idea that a color can help us with "the promise of protection." And a promise — the feeling of a promise — can help us. Colors help us! Pantone is simply telling us what sort of help from colors most of us will be looking for this year. And, if Pantone is right, we don't want excitement. We want calm and reassurance.

I think Trump knows that. He famously tweeted "All is well" just as the more nervous among us were steeling themselves for World War III and the return of the military draft.

But the color most associated with Trump is orange. Orange man bad! And we know that orange is the complete opposite of blue.

At the Last of the Fall Color Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

The photo documents my chance encounter with fall color this morning.

AND: Here's a quote I ran across in my reading the other day:

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker.

(So begins Chapter 49 of "Moby-Dick.")

"It was around this time that I started separating the alphabet into good letters, V as well as M, and bad letters, S, F and T, plus the terrible vowel sounds..."

"... open and mysterious and nearly impossible to wrangle. Each letter had a degree of difficulty that changed depending upon its position in the sentence. Much later when I read that Nabokov as a child assigned colors to letters, it made sense to me that the hard G looked like 'vulcanized rubber' and the R, 'a sooty rag being ripped.' My beloved V, in the Nabokovian system, was a jewel-like 'rose quartz.'"

From "My Stutter Made Me a Better Writer/At times it caused suffering, but it also gave me a passion for words and language" by Darcey Steinke (NYT).

Tune in, turn on, drop out — with Hillary Clinton. Listen to the colors of your mind.

I'm reading Architectural Digest's Step Inside Bill and Hillary Clinton's Deeply Personal Washington, D.C., Home." Deeply personal? Is that even possible

Ms. Clinton’s mother, Dorothy Rodham, partnered with her daughter in selecting most of the furnishings and landing on just the right paint and patterns... “Both my mother and I love color, and you can see, we have a lot of color in the house that came from our collaboration.”... “I have to say, it was a very nice refuge from my life in the Senate,” says Ms. Clinton of the process. “I’d come home or I’d get sent color samples, or fabric swatches, or pictures of furniture, and it was a nice way to turn one part of my brain off and turn the other on.”

Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.

From the slideshow...

An anteroom ahead of the kitchen, this nook is used for informal meetings.... The space has a little desk that Ms. Rodham had used for correspondence and paying bills.

We're calling her "Ms. Rodham now? And I'm supposed to picture her sitting at a little desk paying her own bills and doing "correspondence"? What is it, the 19th century all of a sudden? Is she still selling the idea that she doesn't know anything about email? [ADDED: Sorry, "Ms. Rodham" must be the mother Dorothy.]

[The decorator Rosemarie] Howe experimented in order to find just the right red for these walls, something coral and not too blue. She landed on Benjamin Moore Bird of Paradise 1305. The painting over the love seat is by Virginia artist Barbara Ryan. “It was something I saw and admired so long ago,” says Ms. Clinton. “We’ve had it for many years. Someone who looked at it remarked and laughed: If you look at the cloud or smoke in the back, it looks like a comic profile of my husband. But that’s not why I bought it.”

Not why I bought it but I enjoy telling people the puff of nothingness in the background looks like my husband... who used to have a little nook next to the Oval Office for informal meetings.

I'm sorry! Am I going too deeply personal? All right then, I'll turn that part of my brain off and turn the other one on, the one that thinks somebody has some D.C. real estate to unload and a glitzy magazine to assist in reeling in a credulous buyer.

But listen to the color of your dreams/It is not living, it is not living/Or play the game "Existence" to the end/Of the beginning...

ADDED: Here at Meadhouse, the word "deeply" is considered deplorable. Read the 2014 post, "Deeply... it's such a poser word."

Said Meade... It made me wish I'd had a tag on the word "deeply" all along. It's a metaphor, creating an image of abstract concepts in space. Where are you when you are "deeply in love"? There are so many trite usages — deeply in love, deeply disappointed, deeply religious, thinking deeply, deeply troubled, deeply concerned, deeply offended, deeply regret — and "deeply" is deeply embedded in constitutional law doctrine with the phrase "deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition." But I'm interested in seeing how is "deeply" is deployed in various political and cultural statements, so I've searched this blog's archive, and here's the best of what I found....

There's a list of 12 items, and it deserves a new one, the unlucky 13th: "Step Inside Bill and Hillary Clinton's Deeply Personal Washington, D.C., Home." Interestingly enough, 2 of the items on the old list have Hillary:

5. Last May [2013[, Tina Brown said: "Now that Chelsea is pregnant, and life for Hillary can get so deeply familial and pleasant, she can have her glory-filled post-presidency now, without actually having to deal with the miseries of the office itself..."...

8. "Clinton’s interest in global women’s issues is deeply personal, a mission she adopted when her husband was in the White House after the stinging defeat of her health care policy forced her to take a lower profile." 

"Deeply" — in the Hillary Clinton context — seems like a cloud or puff of smoke in the shape of defeat.