The sun and rain conspired for a rainbow today, which I photographed as I walked from the subway home after work. The red, orange and yellow are clear, but my camera swallowed some of the spectrum; in reality it was a full seven-color marvel.
Lately I’ve been thinking about (and smelling) fresh colors in association with my apartment building. Perhaps emboldened by the city’s recently approved rent hikes, my superintendent has been making capital improvements, such as repaving the front steps and repainting the trim indoors. All week he’s been slopping violent red enamel-gloss over the previously brown surfaces of window frames, molding and banisters. Today, he went for the door exteriors on my floor, and as I turned the corner at the top of the stairs, I saw mine was the color of an evil candy apple and just as sticky.
It reminds me of a detail from this Guardian article about Stanley Kubrick’s quest to film the perfect red door for Eyes Wide Shut. During preproduction, he ordered scouts to canvass London and photograph cinematic red doors. The one included in the movie was simply built on a set at Pinewood Studios and only appears onscreen for a few seconds, as the character played by Tom Cruise is welcomed through it by a prostitute. And still, somewhere in Kubrick’s estate in Hertfordshire, among the storage boxes of obsessive research, correspondence and notes, are hundreds of snapshots of anonymous red doors.
Red is one of my favorite colors, so I like my door’s makeover. It’s fighting a winning battle with the walls in the building’s stairwells and hallways, which are the texture and color of sulphur. The combination may be as garish as a 1970s Fiestaware pattern or a McDonald’s in hell, but it’s better than the previous pairing with brown.