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I can’t put my finger on the exact year that New York City discovered ramps, but it was long enough ago that they’re no longer used in cocktails. Like other springtime delicacies—fiddlehead ferns, wild asparagus, morel mushrooms —ramps must be foraged, their resistance to cultivation an essential part of their charm. Vivid against the dun leaf litter of the forest floor, they point up to the sky, jostling their satiny green neighbors in festive profusion. The leaves terminate in elegant rhubarb-colored stalks that secrete their pearly bulbs underground. Unearthed and bound into tidy bundles by gentle hands, they make their way to the Union Square farmers’ market, where they are snatched up by apartment dwellers, grey eyes hungry for green. They are particularly delicious with slow-scrambled eggs, or wilted in the hot fat of a roast chicken and served with mashed potatoes. Pickled and draped over the rim of a glass they make a martini somehow both soigné and louche, though not, as I said, anymore.
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Late in the spring of 2020, after the sleepless nights of sirens had ended but before the refrigerated trucks for the bodies of the dead had left Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, a huge tree on the way to my new studio burst into flower. This tall and graceful specimen, bearing up panicle after panicle of orchidaceous horns, leaned delicately over a long quonset hut that had been used as an underground club back before Bushwick went mainstream. This neighborhood is so intensely industrial that hardly anything grows here. How is it, then, that such a magnificent tree can survive? I fixated on it, and this tree became a stand-in for all the people I wasn’t seeing and all the things I wasn’t doing. The Empress tree, Paulownia tomentosa. I found an essay by Wei Tchou, The Empress of Gowanus, in which the author wrote about a pair of trees by the Union Street bridge across the Gowanus Canal. I knew exactly the bridge she was talking about, and I set out on my bicycle to visit those trees, finally leaving the circumscribed area in which I’d been quarantined for the previous two months. The trees were there, exactly as described, having shot up from the undergrowth of the bridge. I rode further afield through the empty streets. It was too late in the year for magnolias or most of the cherry trees, but there were many carefully positioned dogwoods in bloom. A row of horse chestnuts lining Fort Greene Park preened under an inflorescence of snowy blossoms. The Paulownia, on the other hand, could be found next to auto body shops, or on the sloping verge of unused parking lots. Wei Tchou wrote about the tree’s arrival from China in the days when Brooklyn was still a major shipping hub and its hollow seed pods were used as packing material; and she also described the tradition of planting an Empress tree upon the birth of a baby girl, cutting it down on the announcement of her wedding, and using its wood as part of her dowry. Paulownia is the fastest growing hardwood in the world, reaching its full height in only 10 years. It is also the symbol of the Japanese government. When I lived in Japan I must have seen its stylized blossoms in the form of the Official Seal hundreds of times without ever realizing what I was looking at. I could see that great Empress from my window, as well as another smaller one next to the train tracks, where boxcars full of garbage gather at night to await the opening of the Waste Management plant. This spring, at about the time I got my first COVID-19 vaccination, a developer razed the quonset hut and my Paulownia along with it. The smaller one next to the garbage train is still there, and though it appears to have suffered a partial death over the course of the past year, half the tree is blooming once more, its purple blossoms standing out sharply against a yard full of mechanical cranes and cherry-pickers, and a rooftop bar that has also come back to life.
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Vermeer’s women are morally unperturbed and modestly presented, often in butter-colored satin or ermine-trimmed housecoats in this toothsome shade. Even in the unusually explicit painting The Procuress, the eponymous figure is smooth-skinned and languid as she looks down at her charge, fresh as a daisy in a canary jacket, with a proprietary gaze. The instability of yellow is used to great effect in these pictures, juxtaposed as it often is against the mathematical precision of Vermeer’s compositions. Its delicacy and softness heightening the extreme complacency of his figures, their beady-eyed, rather dopey-looking faces bereft of both sorrow and wit. The charm and sense of humor that pervades the work of many of his contemporaries are utterly absent in Vermeer’s. He manages to augment the subtle blur of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa smile with the irrational highlights James Rosenquist found in commercial imagery to create a mise en scène of cozy amour propre. Almost no yellow is present in Vermeer’s painting Woman Holding a Balance, which depicts a young woman wearing a coat of the Virgin Mary’s lapis blue and standing in front of a painting of the Last Judgment with a set of scales balanced in her hand. But unlike Jesus Regnant, who measures souls, she prepares to weigh pearls and bright yellow gold—the same color as her tunic, which peeps out from beneath her coat, highlighting her pregnant belly. If it were possible to distill the Prosperity Gospel into a limpid moment of exquisite tastefulness, this would be it.
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We heard that everyone in Hamburg wears a navy blue suit; we like this very much. “I mean business.”
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The color of Stockard Channing’s cunningly tailored suit in the last scene of Six Degrees of Separation. Along with her husband Donald Sutherland, she’s at a dazzling spring luncheon hosted by Madhur Jaffrey in an Upper East Side palazzo. They’ve just made a lot of money (off a Cézanne), but they’ve lost track of the mysterious gay con man, Will Smith, who had changed their lives. Unable to find him after he is devoured by the criminal justice system, Channing, a woman who had devoted herself to a sardonic apprehension of beauty, is undone. Is it embarrassing to have so much sympathy for such a coddled character? Is it even worse that I share the hustler’s longing to be a part of her life? Or that the movie is her story rather than his? Yellow is difficult, but it seems to me that this yellow seems to have overcome many of those difficulties. And of course she can make the yellow work. Even as a blonde.
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Researcher Alexander Schauss wanted to know whether or not certain colors could be clinically shown to have behavioral effects on test subjects (including himself). In 1979 he convinced a Navy jail to paint a holding room this exact shade (named “Baker-Miller Pink” by Schauss after the jail’s directors). The color seemed to work like magic, and it began to be widely used by correctional facilities and police forces, thus earning it the nickname “Drunk Tank Pink.” The results of this work can still be seen today in the use of pink uniforms for male prisoners in the United States. Some might find it interesting that they were originally intended to pacify the inmates rather than humiliate them.
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Emma Bovary’s yellow gloves.
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On the Western end of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, near the Porcupine Mountains State Park, there is a restaurant called Foothills which had just opened for the season when we stumbled upon it. There was only one other occupied table in the cavernous, silent dining room. Like any number of restaurants and supper clubs in the Great Lakes region, the place was constructed in an ersatz log-cabin style of harshly yellow-orange pine timbers with a full complement of matching furniture, damp-ragged to a dull sheen. It was “ribs night” so we ordered ribs. When they arrived, gray, steaming, and very wet, it was apparent they had just been pulled from a big pot of boiling water and doused with off-brand BBQ sauce. We left most of the food uneaten and bought beer and small bags of novelty potato chips to-go from the young waitress. When we left she followed us outside, rolling into a languid argument with her rangy, tattooed boyfriend. Standing next to his motorcycle, both of them were unexpectedly gorgeous, bronzed and lambent in the abandoned dusk.
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