It used tell people that if all else failed, I would open a bar and call it, “Hot/Awesome.”

There would be nothing fancy about it—no food, no interesting decor, no extensive wine list. It would just be a very average, wood-paneled bar with a good jukebox. Those guys who run Great Lakes and Boat, incidentally, had the very same plan and ended up making a crap load of money, so Hot/Awesome seemed like a good career move.

Now I’m not so sure; I’m no longer enamored with the Hot/Awesome concept. I think now if I were to ever open a bar, I would call it “The Conch and Pony” and serve food—but only Chicago-style hot dogs. I don’t think there’s any place in New York makes a true Chicago-style dog with all the toppings so I’d be cornering that market.

So today, I spent the entire morning designing a sign:

I regret nothing.

You could apply this lesson to any packaged product today from potato chips to Kleenex to cough syrup but let’s just take the Coke can as an example, even though, you really shouldn’t be drinking Coke.

Seriously.

It’s terrible for you.

But, that’s OK ‘cause we’re only concerned with the package here and here is what a modern-day Coke can looks like:

Look closer.

Notice the rendered beads of water, the superfluous yellow stripe, the several shades of red, the inexplicable halftone dots?

Why so much stuff? Why do graphic designers feel the need to pile so many doohickeys into their designs. It’s embarrassing. I hope it’s the higher-ups that are making them do it and not that they actually like this crap.

Maybe it’s because their Bauhaus-trained teachers beat it into them, but graphic designers from a generation or two ago were terrific. Look at the Coke can you would have been drinking from back then:

Pretty slick, right?
Makes you want to drink a Coke (you shouldn’t!)

What about this one.

Here it is more beat-up, but in a regular-sized can.

Sure there are some things out there with really great design; I’ve seen it. But usually it’s the kind of small-scale stuff that you’d find in a Williamsburg boutique, nothing as ubiquitous as Coke.

One glimmer of hope is the newly released Tab Energy.

I’m sure what’s inside the can is disgusting (I haven’t tried it yet, even though I had to buy a fucking four-pack just to take this goddamned picture). But the can looks great. Tab has always had that really cool dark pink color and that ball-and-stick grid is a nice choice. So good going, Tab.

This has been a strange post.

“Don’t be critical of Dana Schutz!” is what Kaveri told me when I said I may write this blog post. This weekend, we both went to see her mini-retrospective at Brandeis.

Why would I be critical of Dana Schutz? Look at this great picture of her standing in her studio:

She looks fun, right? Like the type of artist, you’d like to get to know?

And I have a sort of soft spot for her work because it’s the type of stuff that would have marked you as majorly uncool when I was in grad school. Back in the day (late 90s), only rich dudes who read Bukowski and looked at a lot of Frank Auerbach would adopt that type of figurative/expressionist language. So she has gigantic balls, I think.

And it’s funny because the work now on view at the Rose Museum is different from the Dana Schutz I first encountered. I first saw her work when she was a graduate student at Columbia, and back then it had more the look of “painting critique” that was then the rage. “Painting critique” really wasn’t a critique at all but a way of reframing expressionist language so you could take one step back from all that surging feeling and say to the viewer, “so this is what feeling was like; remember that?” What you’d do is you’d take a typical expressionist approach to mark-making—say, a big pour of paint or a big slash with a housepainters brush—and you’d do it in a very, very deliberate way so it looked icy-cool. And to this day, paintings conceived in this fashion look awesome.

Here’s kind of what her paintings looked like back then, a big network of swords:

But nowadays, she looks more like an actual expressionist, albeit with a lot of humor and a kooky narrative thrown in, like a modern day Philip Guston. And looking at those swords, maybe she’s always drawn on Guston, pre-abstraction Guston like this:

Or post-abstraction Guston like this:

She has the same fascination with the corporeal. In a lot of her paintings people are getting picked apart, their entrails are hanging out, they’re blowing out huge amounts of snot, or chewing their face out or something.

But the color is nothing like Guston, who seemed to mostly stick with white, Cadmium Red Light, and black. Dana Schutz will lay down a thin wash of, say, magenta as a ground; and then she’ll very deliberately clump up mounds of pre-mixed color that play off against that ground—olive green, bright plum, beige, navy blue. She’ll clump-up a big mountain with a certain set of colors and then she’ll move over to a tree and paint that in a different way, with a different set of colors. You look at her color choices and you think, “Jesus, I could never do that.”

But, does it all click for me? The cryptic narratives, the lush and jarring color, the fun blobs of paint, the political high-mindedness, the gross-out body stuff—does it all come together?

Not entirely, but I was instructed not to be negative. I like Dana Schutz. By all accounts she’s very nice. Kaveri has met her in passing a few times and reports that she’s terrific, so there you go. Also, if I ever meet her at a party, I want her to like me.

So, my cool 30s-era doorbell is working all of a sudden. I know this because two young Mormons used it yesterday so they could hand me this card:

I like those Mormons; it’s too bad their religion seems so wacky, what with the Joseph Smith and the Angel Moroni business and the special underwear. And don’t they believe that Jesus came to America or something?

Anyway I liked these two Mormon girls. They were very friendly. One of them said, “Oh, your listening to Fresh Air! I love that show.” So Mormon girls listen to NPR; that’s interesting. Perhaps they were surprised that whitey was living in the ‘hood.

And look at their very girly, pink handwriting—“Sisters Madsen & Bengtzen.” That’s fun, right? Are they posing as nuns or something or do Mormons get to call themselves “Sisters”?

So I felt like I could be friends with these young Mormons. It’s too bad that I had to tell them I wasn’t interested in their church services.

I live in Prospect Lefferts Gardens in Brooklyn.

It’s a neighborhood that no one knows and no one cares about; so much so that I’ve stopped saying the name of my neighborhood entirely to avoid the blank stares. I say, “I live on the east side of Prospect Park.” Or for the truly hopeless I say, “Do you know Park Slope? I sort of live near Park Slope” because even Manhattanites know Park Slope

When you say to friends, “hey, you should stop but my place and we could hang out” they look at you like you’re hopelessly naïve or possibly retarded, even though they live in Park Slope, one stop away.

The problem is that my neighborhood sucks ass. There are no decent bars. There are no great restaurants. There are no boutiques, no bookstores, no coffee shops. The only thing that Prospect Lefferts Gardens has going for it are some nice streets of limestone townhouses and its proximity to Prospect Park.

But the name sucks.

Prospect Lefferts Gardens is too wordy, too weird, not catchy enough. I’m hoping that if I rename my neighborhood and spread it around, I’ll have a local place to drink in a matter of months.

It seems that my friend, Doc (a Prospect Lefferts Gardens resident) had the same idea and came up with Pro LeGs.

I prefer ProLefGa.

If the picture of me below didn’t already prove it, this next post will demonstrate how very narcissistic I am.

You see, I worry that I may be the kiss of death for Will Hines.

A couple of days ago Will asked me if I wanted to be the next villain in his excellent Channel 102 series, The Block.

Now, it still may turn out that I don’t get to play the part, but I can’t help thinking that I may fuck things up. I think I have that effect on Will’s shows. The only time I was ever in a Channel 102 series was when I played the bit part of Ukulele Joe on Fun Squad. In episode 4, I got to say one line; that line was, “Jazz Mode!” Then the show was cancelled.

Did I ruin the show? Put the wrong spin on my line?

So I imagine I’ll have more than just “Jazz Mode!” to say in the next The Block. In fact, I may not even have that line which sucks because I already have it memorized. Also, I’m following the villain played by John Gemberling, perhaps the funniest person I know.

So I’m nervous.