Fear of blue and desperate clinging to "character-defining grey."

"The resurfacing will dramatically and permanently transform the character-defining grey, achromatic appearance of the reflecting pool basin. The new colouration will cause the pool to resemble a large swimming pool rather than the reflective civic landscape it was designed to be, distorting the experience of the site for the millions of visitors who come to it each year."

So said the Cultural Landscape Foundation, a Washington society, quoted in The London Times, which looks like this, going all in on AI imagery:

I was going to ding the the Cultural Landscape Foundation for writing "grey" instead of "gray," but when I saw "colouration," I had to assume that The London Times imposes its British spellings on quoted material.

It's funny how people are getting cranked up over the color blue. The Foundation associates blue with backyard summer fun incompatible with what the reflective pool is supposed to be.

"'It’s called charcoal,' Trump told reporters Thursday, touting the contrast with the White House’s white walls."

"The renovation project was begun last month, with the president eager to replace decades-old beige Tennessee flagstone with his handpicked dark granite slabs before the royal visit, said two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe White House operations.... The president has personally inspected the renovations and offered feedback to workers, drawing on his experience as a builder, say current and former officials. He has interrupted policy meetings to extol the changes — a phenomenon captured on camera Thursday, when he repeatedly encouraged reporters attending a drug price announcement in the Oval Office to look at the new granite floor outside. 'It’s a beautiful job, and it’s going up nice,' the president said."

From "Trump eager to show off latest White House project to King Charles/The president’s black granite path is the newest change to the West Wing, following gold lettering, Oval Office gilding and a 'Presidential Walk of Fame'" (WaPo).

Some of us might feel — if we were to have installed a differently colored floor and kept pointing it out to visitors — embarrassed.

"Painting a historic building’s uncoated masonry can trap moisture, accelerate deterioration and cause it to crack or crumble...."

"That risk of permanent damage has led to preservation standards, including the Interior Department’s, to advise keeping a property’s historic appearance as unchanged as possible and caution against new paint schemes on historic masonry unless they replicate or closely match documented historic finishes, the complaint alleges. Paint could not be removed from the EEOB’s stone facade without risking its destruction...."

From "Preservationists sue Trump over plans to paint Eisenhower building/The complaint alleges Trump’s plan would ‘permanently alter one of the most architecturally significant and historic structures in the Nation’s Capital'" (WaPo).

He's the real estate guy. He should be able to explain why adding a layer of paint to an unpainted surface is good. Whether this lawsuit can or should succeed is a different matter. I just want to know why he thinks painting is good. I understand he wants the building to be white and not the gray that it is. I don't care one way or the other. I'm just troubled by the painting of surfaces that were designed to be unpainted.

ADDED: Trump shows his pictures to Laura Ingraham who seems quite disgusted. He's really into the intense whiteness of the imagined paint and condemns gray as a color "for funerals":

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"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?

Another year has passed in The Althouse Sunrise Project.

Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of my daily photographs of the sunrise. A few days were skipped for bad weather and once or twice I overslept, but the ritual practice is nearly every single day. I try to get good pictures, but many days are like other days and simply doing it is more important to me than getting a distinctive photograph. Still I rejoice on those days when it looks especially great, and I take this annual occasion to repost a few of the best.

Like this one, with the most unusual color, from May 21:

And this, from April 26, where white showed its worth as a sunrise color:

And just last week, on September 3, brown was a delicate delight:

"The neutral-tinted individual is very apt to win against the man of pronounced views and active life."

Wrote Theodore Roosevelt, quoted in "Theodore Rex" (available atAmazon, whence I earn a commission).

He was referring to Alan B. Parker, who became his adversary in the 1904 presidential election, and I quote the passage from the book in full because it seems to have something to do with how we react to candidates today and because I have liked colorless politicians (and judges) — perhaps too much:

"[U]nlike everyone else, [Melania] was not wearing black...."

"[She wore a] gray tweed coat with a voluminous skirt, structured and tightly belted. It was reminiscent of the protective clothing, as well as the luxury labels, that became her signature during the Trump administration. The color and the style made her stand out, made her look a part of the pageantry but not of it. And they made the choice seem like a symbol — a sign, perhaps, of Mrs. Trump’s historic ambivalence toward the role of first lady and her reluctance to play to the expectations that surround it, as well as her husband’s norm-trampling tendencies...."

Writes Vanessa Friedman, in "Rare Gathering of Former First Ladies Shows Style, and Subtle/Differences United (mostly) in black, their differences were in the details" (NYT).

Notice that Friedman's description is not a criticism of Melania. It's respectful.

"[T]he school had no janitorial or medical staff and a bizarre list of rules. For example, students were served only sushi for lunch..."

"... which reportedly cost Ye $10,000 (£7,800) a week. The kids weren’t allowed to use forks and had to sit on the floor to eat because Ye 'banished chairs in place of foam floor cushions.' Another alleged no-no at Donda Academy was stairs: there weren’t any classes on the second floor, because Ye is 'afraid of stairs.' Colours were also prohibited: students had to wear all black; cups and bowls had to be grey. Windows were empty because the musician 'doesn’t like glass.' Perhaps most disturbingly, the school doors were locked from the outside during the school day...."

From "'No chairs, no stairs, no glass in the windows': what did Kanye West’s schoolkids get for $15,000 a year? The rapper denies his private Christian academy was a ‘dystopian institution’. But the bizarre allegations keep coming" (The Guardian).

I'd love to watch this as a documentary, but right now, it's just 2 lawsuits.

I laughed out loud at "Windows were empty because the musician 'doesn’t like glass.'" How does that happen? Not liking glass. I could only think of Mary Sweeny, The Window Smasher.

"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.

At the Room Temperature Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"My mother always called me plain. She saw this as a flaw to be corrected. She wanted the whole world dressed in dazzling color—even me."

"I never quite complied. I have the fashion sense of Vladimir and Estragon and the panache of my New England nana. When left to my devices, I choose to be unobtrusive. I choose gray. It suits my diffidence and soothes my extroversion. It is the color, rather than the sound, of silence. It sits with monkish, folded hands and asks for nothing. It never shouts. It never pushes.... A color psychology article on Bustle tells me that I fear commitment. 'Grey is emotionless,' it says, 'boring, detached, and indecisive. Those who say their favorite color is grey don’t tend to have any major likes or dislikes.'... Lovers of gray 'lack the passion that comes with loving a real color.' And yet I yearn for it. I fill my drawers with gray brassieres. I dress my bed in sheets and duvets like a day with all the blue drained out of it. The tidiness, the monochrome inspire peace.... As the black-and-white photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once said to the color photographer William Eggleston: 'You know, William, color is bullshit.'... Dorothy may tumble, tornadic, into Technicolor, but still she always wishes to go home.... I sometimes drive an hour to the ocean, hoping I will find it thoroughly obscured by fog. I am not a melancholic or a bore, but I want a break from all the rainbow violence in the world...."

From "Ode to Gray" by Meghan Flaherty (in The Paris Review).



You know, William, color is bullshit.

The problem with mocking McDonald's "soul-crushing uniforms for our modern dystopia."

AV Club is snarking about the new gray-on-gray outfits:

The new looks will be distributed to all 14,000 of its U.S. locations beginning this month, their total elimination of distracting colors facilitating the orderly consumption of beef discs and potato sticks by an estimated factor of 40 percent, under the watchful eye of Commander McCheese.

Still, lest you think their monochromatic drabness somehow runs counter to the notion of that all-important individuality, McDonald’s points out that its uniforms also include a denim apron that “may be worn full or as a half apron to fit restaurant employees’ personal style.” Personally, I don’t know that I would trust some insouciant, half-apron rebel to hand me a Serenity Meal. But leaving that up to the manager’s discretion is what makes McDonald’s the industry leader in acknowledging that free will has not yet been totally eradicated.

And I'm seeing this at Gizmodo (with photos):

To me, [the new uniforms] invoke a very Logan’s Run future. But mandatory gray-on-gray with a dash of black is pretty much universally recognized as the standard uniform for bleakest of futures... Or, if you prefer, maybe it’s a bit more Hunger Games... Or if you want something even more recent, how about Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale?

Here's my problem. They are not thinking from the perspective of the the people who work at McDonald's. They're talking about how they feel as customers who are used to seeing McDonald's workers in garish colors that scream I work at McDonald's. I think it's obvious from the company's press release that they are trying to be more respectful to the employees, who feel conspicuous or embarrassed when traveling to and from work and who want to blend in with other people who work at other kinds of jobs. The respect — expressed through restrained gray-on-gray uniforms — is not soul-crushing except in the mind of the people who are not wearing those uniforms.

AV Club surrounds quotes from the press release with efforts at humor that in fact reveal its I don't work at McDonald's snobbery:

“Individuality is important to McDonald’s restaurant employees,” McDonald’s says in a press release, charitably recognizing that many of its workers are separate entities from their stations, some even boasting identities and interests that go well beyond operating deep fryers. As such, the company partnered with designer Waraire Boswell to create these fun, flirty, uniquely gray-on-gray uniforms that can provide an “easy transition from the restaurant to a social environment,” where they may engage with their fellow civilians in more casual discussions of deep-frying techniques.

It's AV Club that is failing to see the humanity of the employees. The phrase "easy transition from the restaurant to a social environment" implies that the company knew that the garish orange uniforms made it difficult for employees as they commuted to and from work, perhaps picking up and dropping off their children or doing errands or wanting to do things with friends before getting home and changing into street clothes. The new uniforms are more like ordinary clothes and they make it possible for restaurant workers to blend in with other people. That only translates to "soul-crushing" to people who feel sure they won't have to work in a fast-food restaurant.

The new gray-on-gray uniforms are actually sensitive to the well-being of McDonald's employees.

I have worn a bright-colored fast-food restaurant uniform and I agree.

I have never worn a bright-colored fast-food restaurant uniform but I agree.

I have worn a bright-colored fast-food restaurant uniform but I disagree.

I have never worn a bright-colored fast-food restaurant uniform and I disagree.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey..."

That's from the first text that I ran across looking for evidence to support my theory — stated in the comments to "A Gray Walk" — that "grey" is a better spelling than "gray":

I like the spelling "grey" because it expresses the meaning better. The letter "a" looks happier to me — maybe just because of my name — and "e" looks dreary. 

As the commenter who raised the subject observed, "grey" tends to be preferred in the U.K. and "gray" is the American preference. The important thing, for blogging purposes, is to pick one and stay with it. The key is consistency within a single work, and I picked "gray" early on in this 12-years-and-counting project — probably under the influence of Crayola. And looking for a photo of "gray" on a crayon label, I see that I've blogged about this before, in a post with the evocative title "50 Shades of Gary."

Anyway, the quote in the post title is the beginning of "To Build a Fire." Wouldn't it seem less foreboding if Jack London had written "Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray..."?

And test this one, from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe (whose middle name should have been Allen).

"On a chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood. On the hearth were two or three long and thick tresses of grey human hair, also dabbled in blood, and seeming to have been pulled out by the roots."

or

"On a chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood. On the hearth were two or three long and thick tresses of gray human hair, also dabbled in blood, and seeming to have been pulled out by the roots."

A gray walk...

... out to Picnic Point.

"I always forbade everyone to clean my studios, dust them, not only for fear they would disturb my things, but especially because I always counted on the protection of dust."

"It’s my ally. I always let it settle where it likes. It’s like a layer of protection. When there’s dust missing here or there, it’s because someone has touched my things. I see immediately someone has been there. And it’s because I live constantly with dust, in dust, that I prefer to wear gray suits, the only color on which it leaves no trace."

Said Picasso.

"Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest..."

"... and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight."

Yesterday, I told you I'd heard myself mutter "ah, there's a great gatsby sentence," and I'd wondered if I'd said "a 'Great Gatsby' sentence" or "a great 'Gatsby' sentence." I told you it was a doozy... a daisy. And now, it's today, and that's the sentence. Isn't it quite something?

A spooky gray, ghastly, ash-gray, swarming, leaden, impenetrable, obscure thing happens. We see... that we can't see it. It's invisible, out of sight, obscure,  screened, clouded, and impenetrable. So much about unseen sights and the one — only one — sound, a ghastly creak. What's going on? It's an operation, done with shovels. An obscure operation.

Occasionally an Obscure Operation. You can use that for the title of your next novel.

"A breeze stirred the gray haze of Daisy’s fur collar."

Very little going on in the action here. A tiny wind creates a bit of motion in a small subsection of the lady's clothing. But poetically — in the sound and look of the words — this is a very happening sentence.

Breeze and haze go together, with their z's. Gray rhymes with the beginning of haze, and haze rhymes with the beginning of Daisy. Gray... hay... day... Gray heyday.  

Stir and fur rhyme, and there's a faint echo of that rhyme at the end of collar.

We saw the wind ruffling Daisy's clothes one other time in this "Great Gatsby" project, but we can't talk about that now, because the idea is to restrict ourselves, each day, to one sentence, in isolation.

The Kindle 2.

If you're thinking of buying the new Kindle 2, please use this link and you'll be supporting this blog (without paying more for the Kindle).

As you may remember, I got the original Kindle and initially thought it was cool, then abandoned it for one big reason: the gray-on-gray "Etch-a-Sketch" screen.

The copy on the new one says:

Improved Display: Reads like real paper; now boasts 16 shades of gray for clear text and even crisper images.

I don't care how many shades of gray there are. If you want it to "read like real paper," the background should be white and the text should be black. Screw gray!

Anyway, Amazon ought to ship me a free Kindle 2 after taking my money for what was for me an unusable Kindle 1. I promise to give it an honest review. I will say the new one looks better, apparently it's not wedge-shaped anymore. But I need to see the screen.

ADDED: Try the Stanza app for the iPhone. I like that. It's free and you can download lots of free books too. Any classic book is easily available. I've been reading Mark Twain. The text is black-on-white on the clear, brightly lit screen. Kindle seems to be aimed at people who feel that a lit screen is hurting their eyes. That's not me. I look at a lit screen all day long and enjoy it.

The real problem with electronic books.

I've been meaning to do another vlog about me and my Kindle. (Here's the original one.) The truth is, I hardly ever touch the damned thing.

(But please, if you buy one, buy it through this link so I can get a percentage of the $359 purchase price. And I'm saying that mainly to prompt some skepticism about rave reviews of the Kindle you might be reading in blog posts with Amazon Associates links like that in them. So if you appreciate that little lesson in skepticism, but still want to buy a Kindle, reward me by using my link.)

I've always thought my problem with the Kindle was the gray-on-gray screen — think Etch-a-Sketch — the one the rave reviews say is "easy on the eyes." Yes, and a room with dimmed lights is easy on the eyes, but it's a bad place to read. I want contrast: black letters on a white background. I want that in a book, and I want that in a computer screen, so of course, I want that in an electronic book. I want easy to read.

But anyway, maybe the ugly, hard-to-see screen isn't the real problem with an electronic book:

Books ... give off special smells. According to a recent survey of French students, 43 percent consider smell to be one of the most important qualities of printed books—so important that they resist buying odorless electronic books. CaféScribe, a French on-line publisher, is trying to counteract that reaction by giving its customers a sticker that will give off a fusty, bookish smell when it is attached to their computers.

I know. You're thinking: The French! But focus, people. The entire sensory experience of a book is important.

There's the feel too:

When I read an old book, I hold its pages up to the light and often find among the fibers of the paper little circles made by drops from the hand of the vatman as he made the sheet—or bits of shirts and petticoats that failed to be ground up adequately during the preparation of the pulp. I once found a fingerprint of a pressman enclosed in the binding of an eighteenth-century Encyclopédie—testimony to tricks in the trade of printers, who sometimes spread too much ink on the type in order to make it easier to get an impression by pulling the bar of the press.

Okay, I know. You're thinking, that guy is way more of an aesthete than I even want to be, and if I want some smells and feels — I'll have sex, not grope a book. (I'm talking about you, not me. I will grope an Apple computer.)

***

"That guy" is Robert Darnton, and his essay "The Library in the New Age" ranges far beyond what I've used here, so read the whole thing. Also, Robert Darnton wrote one of my favorite books, "The Great Cat Massacre," and if you buy it at that link, you will be giving me some money, so read that whole thing too.

IN THE COMMENTS: Simon says "Buffy" already did it:

"Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower or a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell... musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is... it has no texture, no context. It's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible. It should be, um... smelly."

UPDATE: Dan from Madison tells the story — with pictures — of me demonstrating the Kindle. Excerpt:

Here is a horrible backlit photo of a random woman who interrupted us to tell us how much she absolutely loved her Kindle. Both Ann and I told her she was nuts.

ADDED NOTE TO READERS WHO ARE HAVING TROUBLE UNDERSTANDING THIS POST: I've added boldface and enlarged some print in the original post, which was apparently a tad subtle. Let me be sledgehammer clear. The stuff about smell is humor. My problem with the Kindle was AND IS the gray-on-gray screen. I want contrast: black letters on a white background. I want that in a book, and I want that in a computer screen, and of course, I want that in an electronic book. I want easy to read. I don't want to read ugly gray-on-gray print. Get it?

"Gray is nature's way of whispering 'You're dying.'"

Anderson Cooper talks about his gray hair. He says it can be cool for a guy to go prematurely gray. But:

When was the last time you saw a sexy gray-haired woman in a movie? Rogue and Storm don't count; they're cartoon characters.

"It's not fair," says Diane Harris, a media image consultant, "but men see gray on a woman and they think she's old."

My friend Cathy went gray in her early thirties. She was attractive and successful, but guys backed away.

"Men instantly assumed Birkenstock-wearing, protest-rally-organizing cat lover," Cathy says. "You could see it in their eyes."

Needless to say, Cathy's no longer gray.

Gray and white are flattering colors. We wear clothes in these colors all the time. But the meaning of gray/white hair is just too deep. I started getting white hairs when I was a teenager and had so many by time I was in my late twenties that my naturally red hair didn't read as red anymore. It just looked dull. And when I ran into friends I hadn't seen in a while the horror would show on their faces! You have to color. Anyway, most women color their hair even when they aren't going gray, don't they? Gray hair? It's just not done anymore. Completely white hair? That might be cool, but it takes a while before it's completely white, and by the time it is, you've probably been coloring so long that it's hard to think of how you could do it. Let the roots grow over the summer, then cut it so only the new uncolored part is left. Then waltz into work in September with very short, absolutely white hair. That would really shock people. I'd do it. But only if they made a reality TV show about me doing it.