December 17, 2018 Hue's Hue Chartreuse, the Color of Elixirs, Flappers, and Alternate Realities By Katy Kelleher F. X. Leyendecker, The Flapper. 1922 Let me tell you about a color that began as a fabled drink. It tasted harsh and punishing, like medicine. It began as a mythic elixir, and then later became a fashionable green: a color for flappers and Oscars-goers. Some time later, in the minds of many, it mistakenly became red—a deep maroon, the dark color of dried blood. Let me tell you about chartreuse. But first, pour yourself a glass and watch as the liquid, green as the fresh growth on spring trees, drips from the bottle. It doesn’t matter whether you like the taste. You’re not drinking it for that reason. Chartreuse, like other herbal liqueurs, is an elixir of life. A cure-all, good for digestion and headaches, for sleeping like an infant and living until you’re ninety. Even if you haven’t had Chartreuse, you’ve probably tasted something similar. Italy has Fernet (a favorite of American bartenders for sipping on the clock, or so I’ve heard), Poland has Krupnik, Portugal has Beirão, and Hungary has Unicum (syrupy thick, black and bitter—my personal favorite). These strange drinks still taste of strong magic; it’s easy to imagine that Chartreuse could cure you. It’s no absinthe. There’s no sexy fairy on the bottle, no Mucha girl grabbing your arm and asking you to dance. There’s only a sickly acid-green liquid and a monastic stamp. Read More
October 31, 2018 Hue's Hue Blaze Orange, the Color of Fear, Warnings, and the Artificial By Katy Kelleher It started with a gunshot. I had just moved into my new house in the woods of Maine, a log-sided cabin surrounded by miles of “public access” forest that were owned by logging companies and managed, as far as I could tell, by no one. It was October, and I was working in my bedroom, with my dog lying heavy on my feet. Suddenly, a shot rang out. It was close. Then another, and another. It was the echoey boom of a shotgun, a sound I’m familiar with, thanks to hours spent skeet shooting under the tutelage of an L2L. Bean instructor in the woods of Freeport. As I listened to the sound of gunfire, I slowly became aware of the stench of urine. My elderly dog, a sweet husky-hound mix named Deja, had pissed all over the floorboards. She was shaking from fear, trembling like an autumn leaf. I didn’t have the heart to discipline her. This has become an annual occurrence. People trek out into the lumber-land to shoot their guns. I become tense and resentful. Deja pees. And repeat. I no longer walk outside in the fall without carrying my fear with me. I’m always a little wary of hunters, but I’m more afraid of the drink-and-shoot types. Every year, people die in the woods, hit by stray bullets or mistaken for deer. And so I wear a blaze-orange Carhartt hat. And so my dogs wear orange bandannas around their necks. And so we nail signs to the trees, glowing, neon-orange signs that tell shooters to stay away, keep off our property. I have no way of knowing whether any of this works. Read More
October 3, 2018 Hue's Hue Hooker’s Green: The Color of Apple Trees and Envy By Katy Kelleher “William Wilson” was published in 1839. It is not one of Edgar Allan Poe’s more popular tales. It is not as fun as “Hop-Frog” or as dread inducing as “The Tell-Tale Heart.” But it is my favorite of his stories, because it taps into a narcissistic fear, that of the doppelgänger or “double-goer.” The story is about two men named William Wilson. The nominally linked males talk alike, walk alike, and dress alike. The two Williams grow up in close proximity to each other on the misty outskirts of London, much to William the narrator’s dismay, who hates the sound of his own name (it’s too common, too pedestrian) and resents this upstart William for forcing him to hear those four syllables twice as often. It is dizzying to find someone with your name. I know; I search for them regularly. I befriend fellow Kathryn Kellehers on Facebook, sending out little electronic pings of acknowledgement. For the most part, they refuse my requests and resist my efforts to spy on their social-media accounts. But there is a Katy Kelleher in Wisconsin who allows me to see her images. On late nights, when I feel particularly alienated from myself, I peer into her life, imagining that we share some destiny, linked by consonants and vowels and perhaps a drop or two of Irish-American blood. William Hooker did not have to look far to find another man with his name. It was a common enough appellation. But the tale of two Hookers is a strange one, for both men were not only contemporaries, they were also both wedded to gardens and bewitched by greenery. They lived in tandem, and they are often confused and conflated. But there were two William Hookers, and only one of them was responsible for the most enviable of inventions: Hooker’s green. Read More
May 9, 2018 Hue's Hue Lilac, the Color of Half Mourning, Doomed Hotels, and Fashionable Feelings By Katy Kelleher Lorde at the MTV Video Music Awards. In 1960, the architect John Macsai cracked open a book of brick samples to show his employer, A. N. Pritzker. Pritzker was, according to the Chicago Reader, an “incomprehensibly wealthy” man who wanted Mascai to build him a hotel. The building would be the first Hyatt Hotel in the Midwest. Mascai had already drafted up the shape of the structure. It was going to be a subtly striking building, a fine example of mid-century modern style perched on short stilts in downtown Lincolnwood, Illinois. Mascai’s plans called for a long low-slung building with the main structural elements, like the supporting steel beams, placed on the outside, allowing for extra-large rooms on the inside. Like most design of the era, it emphasized function and comfort equally, with few decorative touches (and certainly no Morris-esque flourishes). Macsai wanted to use gray bricks and white painted steel for the hotel’s facade. But Pritzker had other ideas. The gray, he said, was dull. He was a man with more dollars than sense, and he didn’t want something tasteful or subdued. He wanted to build something that would stand out, that would trumpet its existence to pedestrians from a mile away. And so, after pawing through the sample book, Pritzker picked out a purple glazed brick. He didn’t pick a deep purple or one of those obscure dark maroons that can read as brown in the right light, and he didn’t choose a soft gray-leaning mauve either. He picked lilac, a shade darker than thistle and lighter than mulberry, a shade that is undeniably purple, even at dusk, even at dawn. Read More
May 2, 2018 Hue's Hue Scheele’s Green, the Color of Fake Foliage and Death By Katy Kelleher Spray of artificial flowers, 1898–1935. According to folklore, one of the nineteen riddles the queen of Sheba posed to Solomon had to do with flowers. The queen brought garlands of cloth flowers or bouquets of wax blossoms—stories differ—and asked Solomon to pick the true flower hidden among the faux. Solomon couldn’t do it by sight alone (they were good fakes), and so he asked the queen whether he could throw open the windows and let some fresh air into the palace—to help him think, he said. As though he had been invited, a fat, drowsy pollinator came inside, and he was pulled, by instinct and hunger, to the true flower. And where the bee flew, so did Solomon’s finger point. “That one,” he told her. “That one is the real flower. The rest are facsimiles.” This story isn’t in the Bible, though the Old Testament does allude to the episode. There’s a moral here (something about every animal having something to contribute), but I’m not interested in morals. Like the queen of Sheba herself, I’m interested in fake flowers and their equally fake foliage. Read More
April 4, 2018 Hue's Hue Jonquil, the Light Yellow of Early Flowers, Mad Painters, and Dust Bowl–Era Pottery By Katy Kelleher John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, 1903. Here are two yellow fables: In the first story, a man sits next to a pool of water. It gleams silver in the moonlight, and the surface is untroubled by leaves or raindrops. He can see his own reflection, and he admires the tender sweep of his brow. He looks for so long that he no longer wants food. Even though he sits near water, he feels no thirst. Eventually, his body, his beloved physicality, withers, and he dies. Where he once sat, a slender-stalked flower appears. The nymph, who had watched the man’s demise from the cover of the trees, names it for him. Every year, in that same spot, a narcissus opens its butter-yellow petals to reveal a diminutive golden trumpet, a floral echo of his lost beauty. Read More