Early autumn re-runs: Paint that ceiling porch Haint Blue

This post appeared originally on 1 June 2009. It remains one of my all-time biggest traffic draw to date. Who knew there was so much interest in Haint Blue.

I spend a fair amount of time specifying paint colors for people and last week I was working on a color scheme for the exterior of an older home. The clients warned me that they didn't want anything wild. I took that as a good sign because clearly, they'd seen some of my more adventurous work and they still called me.

So I came up with a scheme that involved three shades of taupe, white trim and a black front door. Ho-hum, but it was pretty refined and as instructed, "not wild." However, this house has wrap-around porches on the first and second floors, after all it's an old, traditional Florida house. I specified Sherwin Williams 7608, Adrift, for the porch ceilings. Adrift is a light, neutral blue. In an effort to sell the idea I referred to the ceiling color as Haint Blue and they were smitten and signed off immediately.

Painting a porch ceiling blue is a very traditional effect, even though it doesn't show up very often anymore. It's a southern thing, but I'm a Yankee's Yankee and I grew up in a house with a blue porch ceiling in Pennsylvania. Ours were blue because that was the color they were painted when my parents bought that house in the '60s and we never changed it. I think that there was some vague story about the color keeping spiders away. Like I said, they were vague stories and really, we never really talked about it very much. But every time we painted the house, those porch ceilings stayed blue.

Well, about a year-and-a-half ago, a great friend of mine moved to New Orleans. Within days of his landing there, he turned into a combination of Marie Laveau and Tennessee Williams. In a matter of hours, he'd absorbed all of the lore of that fable-filled city and was spouting it back like a lifetime resident. I have never seen someone make a geographic transition with that kind of ease and thoroughness. I envy him his sense of place sometimes. Anyhow, when he was telling me about his house on about day two, he mentioned that its front porch had a Haint Blue ceiling.

I'd never heard the term before, but I knew exactly what he meant. Apparently Haint Blue still figures prominently into New Orleans homes. I asked him where it got its name and he said that New Orleanians use that paint color to keep away haints, or or spirits of the dead with bad intentions.

Well, I did a little digging around, and the practice of painting a porch ceiling blue did start in the American south. The expression Haint Blue comes from the Gullah people of the South Carolina and Georgia  low country. They painted the entries to their homes light blue to keep the bad spirits away. The blue color represented water, and as everybody knows, haints can't cross water.

If you were an impoverished descendant of slaves in the coastal south in the 1800s, you got paint the same way you built your house --from scratch. Powdered pigments were mixed with lime, white lead and milk. The lime and lead content of those early paints probably had the added benefit of poisoning insects that landed on it. So even though the pigment got all the credit, the credit was actually due to the toxic soup the pigments were suspended in. Any color of those old, home-brewed paints would have poisoned insects, but the Haint Blue got all the glory. This is interesting, because a blue ceiling is credited with repelling insects even now. Paint doesn't have lime or lead in it anymore, so it's not surprising that modern Haint Blue (and all house paint) is completely ineffective as a bug repellent.

All of the woo-woo nonsense not withstanding, painting a porch ceiling blue is an interesting, and depending on where you live, unexpected touch. So even if I don't buy the myth, I appreciate the connection to the past. If you're in the mood for an exterior color change , think about adding some Haint Blue.

It's the Florida Orchestra's opening night tonight

You heard that right, it's the season opener tonight and I have tickets. So at 8pm, St. Pete's spectacular Mahaffey Theater rolls out all the stops for the Florida Orchestra's performance of Ottorino Respighi's I Pini di Roma.

I'm particularly thrilled that Respighi's Pines of Rome is on deck for tonight, it's one of my favorite pieces of music and I have an attachment to it that defies my ability to describe adequately. As always, there's a story behind it but first a little background.

The Pines of Rome is the middle chapter in Respighi's three-part Roman Trilogy. He wrote his trilogy between 1915 and 1928 and each debuted as a separate work. The Roman Trilogy is Respighi's loving tribute to the sights, sounds and history of Rome. It's a work of mind numbing emotion and huge swaths of it leave me a babbling, weeping fool no matter how ofter I listen to this music. The first chapter in the trilogy is Fontane di Roma, the Fountains of Rome. The Second is I Pini di Roma and the the third is Feste Romana, Roman Festivals. Since the Orchestra's only playing the Pines of Rome tonight, I'll restrict my gushing to it.

Each chapter is broken into for sections and each describes a different scene. The Pines of Rome consists of I Pini della Villa Borghese (The Pines of the Villa Borghese), I Pini Presso una Catacomba (Pines Near a Catacomb), I Pini del Gianicolo (The Pines of the Janiculum Hill) and I Pini della Via Appia (The Pines of the Appian Way).

This is the opening section, The Pines of the Villa Borghese. It tells the story of children playing army under the pine trees in the Villa Borghese near the Pincian Gate. Feel free to play this and keep reading.





Here's how my connection to this composition came to be.

In May of 2008 I was staying in a Roman neighborhood next to the Piazza Barberini. That's the lower arrow on this map.

The Piazza Barberini sits at the bottom of the Via Veneto and the Via Veneto starts at the Pincian gate. The Pincian gate is the upper arrow.

Here's Google's Street View of the gate.

I like to get up early and walk around when I'm visiting somewhere. One of the best ways to learn about a city is to watch it come to life in the morning. Rome has the added attraction of everyday life unfolding against a backdrop of truly ancient architecture. The Pincian Gate dates from the 5th Century and it was through this gate that Alaric and the Visigoths swarmed when they sacked Rome in 410. You know the expression "Barbarians at the gate?" Well, here's the place it referred to originally.

The Pincian Gate stands at the top of the Via Veneto and is one of the entrances to the Villa Borghese. The Villa Borghese is essentially Rome's Central Park and it's also the site where the Visigoths camped during their year-long siege of Rome.

So, it's now May of 2008 and it's a gorgeous spring morning and I'm taking a walk by myself. I'd loaded up an iPod with Italian music before I left the US and on that morning, Ottorino Respighi was my play list. I started listening to his Roman Trilogy and I was finishing up The Fountains of Rome when I approached the Pincian gate. What happened next was completely unplanned but as I stepped through the gate, I Pini della Villa Borghese started. Right in front of me I saw this.

That's my photo of the actual Pines of the Villa Borghese.

It hit me like a Mack truck that I was standing in the spot that inspired Respighi to write The Pines of the Villa Borghese. Since he'd written it around 84 years prior to my standing there, the odds were that I was looking at the very same trees he saw. I am not someone who's prone to losing control of his emotions. However, that realization, combined with the music I was was listening to was too much. I thought my head was going to explode as I burst into ecstatic tears and collapsed onto a low wall. I sat there for a while and listened through the rest of the Pines of Rome without taking another step. It was the wildest thing. It was as if I'd been given a private performance by the composer himself.

Hearing the result of a great artist's inspiration, whether it's a symphony or a banjo solo really gets my heart pumping. Better than other medium, a music invites you into an artist's world and then he invites you to stay. I get it that musical tastes are extremely subjective but no other musical form touches me quite the same way that a great, orchestral composition does. That a composer has an idea about how something might sound and then he goes out and creates the individual music for more than 100 instruments is an achievement of such stunning complexity it's hard to fathom.

Here's Respighi's entire Pines of Rome.

I Pini della Villa Borghese





I Pini Presso una Catacomba





I Pini del Gianicolo





I Pini della Via Appia





Now more than ever, community arts organizations, like my beloved Florida Orchestra, need your support. If you like the arts, whatever their form, patronize them. Go to the symphony, the ballet, the opera, a play. These organizations dedicate themselves the best humanity has to offer and they need your patronage to keep the lights on.

Let's have a pizza party

I've been on a pizza kick lately. Make that, I've been on a real pizza kick lately. Pizza in Rome has nothing in common with that garbage available for delivery except perhaps the similar-sounding names. Roman pizza hunts me, it does. So I've spent the better part of the last year mastering the manly art of pizza making and I can honestly say that I make a mean pizza. While hardly as good as the stuff in Rome, it's a thousand times better than anything that comes out of a box and best of all, I know what's in it.

The key to successful pizza making is practice of course, but you need cold ingredients when you make the dough and the a really hot oven when you bake your pizzas. It's all but impossible to bake pizzas at home without a pizza stone, so go get one before you try this. No two ovens are the same and so you're going to have to play with the baking time and temperature until you find the right settings. I have a crappy oven so I bake mine in two stages.

Baking bread and bread doughs is fun and there's something about it that appeals to me on a very primal level. I like to make things with my hands and the idea of making food with my hands has an appeal to me I just can't describe. I bake the old-fashioned way, no power tools. If you use a mixer or heaven forbid, a bread maker, I don't want to know about it. Baking bread is actually very easy. There are usually four or five ingredients and the yeast does most of the work. It is not a fast process, but easy access to fast foods is why westerners are so fat.

I got started with my pizza dough recipe on a website called 101 Cookbooks. The ingredients are about the only thing my method has with theirs at this point though. This is a great way to start though. Recipes are just a starting point, true mastery comes when you fly under your own steam.

• 4 1/2 cups bread flour, chilled 
• 1 3/4 teaspoons salt
• 1 teaspoon instant yeast 
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1 3/4 cups water, ice cold
• Additional flour for dusting and additional olive oil for finished dough

1. Stir together the flour, salt, and instant yeast in a 4-quart bowl. With a large metal spoon, stir in the oil and the cold water until the flour is all absorbed. Repeatedly dip one of your hands into cold water and use it, much like a dough hook, to work the dough vigorously into a smooth mass while rotating the bowl in a circular motion with the other hand. Reverse the circular motion a few times to develop the gluten further. Do this for 5 to 7 minutes, or until the dough is smooth and the ingredients are evenly distributed. The dough should clear the sides of the bowl but stick to the bottom of the bowl. If the dough is too wet and doesn't come off the sides of the bowl, sprinkle in some more flour just until it clears the sides. If it clears the bottom of the bowl, dribble in a tea- spoon or two of cold water. The finished dough will be springy, elastic, and sticky, not just tacky, and still be cooler than room temperature.
2. Turn the dough onto a floured table top and form into an even ball. Add around a tablespoon of olive oil to the now-empty bowl. Put dough ball back into the bowl and roll it in the oil until it's evenly coated in oil. Cover with a damp kitchen towel and let rest in the fridge overnight.
3. The next morning, set the covered bowl on the counter and let the dough warm up and rise. When it nearly doubles in size, it's done rising.
4. Punch the dough down to remove the air and turn it out onto a floured table top. Roll it back into an even ball and then form the ball into a log about a foot long.
5. Take a dough scraper and cut the log into six, even slices. Oil your hands and roll each slice into a ball.
6. Place each ball into a small, zip lock bag and toss in the freezer.

It's pizza time!

1. When you're ready to make a pizza, take a frozen dough ball and put it into a glass bowl then cover it with a damp kitchen towel. Let the dough defrost in the refrigerator. It will take two hours or so to defrost. Once it's defrosted, set the bowl on the counter and bring it to room temperature.
2. While that dough's assuming room temperature, set a pizza stone on the lower rack and pre-heat your oven to 450 degrees and assemble your toppings.
3. When the oven's to temperature, lightly flour the counter and your hands and make a pizza from the dough. Start with a ball and flatten it. Pizza dough is very elastic but you can poke a hole in it if you're not careful. My pizzas are rarely perfect circles but you'll get better at this the more often you do it. By the time you're done forming your pizza, it should be between nine and 12 inches in diameter.
4. Take the hot pizza stone out of the oven and set on a rack. Be really careful with that stone. Place your pizza on the stone directly. Brush with oil or pesto and bake for five minutes.
5. After five minutes, remove the pizza stone and set it back on the rack. Add the rest of your toppings now. Go easy on them. A good pizza has no more than three toppings and they should be added sparingly.
6. Return the pizza and the pizza stone to the oven for an additonal four minutes.
7. Remove from the oven, set the stone on a rack and let sit for two to three minutes.
8. Slice it up and pretend you're in old Napoli.

Not to jump the gun, but the holidays are around the corner

Believe it. Canadian Thanksgiving is this weekend. Thanksgiving in the US will be here in seven weeks and Hanukkah starts a week after that. Hanukkah starts in eight. Christmas is in 79 days. Kwanzaa starts the day after Christmas. I'm sure I'm missing more than a few of them. Oh yeah, Saturnalia runs from December 17th through the 23 if anybody out there still celebrates Roman holidays.

So it's already time to start thinking about exchanging gifts with the people in your life and I just came across a gift idea that never would have occurred to me but makes perfect sense.

In keeping with the practicality that's suddenly all the rage, Top Knobs is selling gift certificates. Theses gift certificates are available in amounts from $50 to $500 and are redeemable at any of the 5000 Top Knobs showrooms found all across North America.

The best way to give a quick makeover to a kitchen, a bathroom, a closet or a piece of furniture is to replace its hardware with something new. Top Knobs has over 3,000 products available in 30 finishes and there's something for everybody in their collections. What an original way to give somebody something most people wouldn't do for themselves. Especially now.

I have to say I thought this was an odd idea at first but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made and the better I liked it. If somebody on your list is putting off a remodel until things start to improve, this is a great way to give them a mini-makeover without breaking the bank. After all, 400 of their offerings sell for $7.99 or less.

You can buy Top Knobs gift certificates on their online store, just follow this link.

And no matter how much I want to ignore it, the holidays really are just around the corner. I think this is going to be a hardware Christmas.

Jeeves and Wooster go under cover as pendant lights

This is a series of pendant lights made by London-based Jake Phipps.

They're made from actual bowler and top hats and they take their name from an early '90s BBC show of the same name. By the way, the show starred now US TV star Hugh Laurie and current Twitter celebrity Stephen Fry.

Anyhow, any time I see a bowler hat I think of Belgian Surrealist René Magritte. I like Magritte a lot and I've probably said so before on this blog. Here's why I have bowler hats and René Magritte linked so tightly in my mind.

Golconde, 1953

The Mysteries of the Horizon, 1955

The Son of Man, 1964

As much as I love his art, what I love even more was his perspective on it.

visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?' It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

Words to live by if you ask me and not just a description of paintings.

So back to Jeeves and Wooster pendants, what do you think? Would you hang something like this in your home?