Ten years ago, the United States Mint came up with the cute idea of issuing a series of U.S. Quarters to commemorate all 50 States.

Each State was in charge of coming up with their own design and most of them ended up doing a pretty shitty job. If I were running the U.S. Mint back in 1998, I would have laid down a few more ground rules.

Like “no pastiche.”

Most of the State Quarters have this sad “designed by committee” look to them, containing every possible image associated with the State so as not to offend anyone. Quarters are pretty small, so when you start trying to squeeze four or five things on the back, no one can even tell what the hell they’re looking at.

Arkansas’ Quarter is pretty offensive in this regard, with its “diamond floating above a swamp” motif:

And then there’s Louisiana.

South Carolina’s is pretty bad too.

Why couldn’t these States have just bitten the bullet and picked a single image? If Arkansas had just picked a big diamond, They’d have coolest quarter out there. Louisiana’s Quarter would be great with just a big trumpet on the back. Instead, their quarter looks like dump. Why couldn’t they have been more like Mississippi—a State that ranks last in nearly every single category but Quarter Design?

Or North Dakota:

Or Connecticut:

So, rule #2 would be “just one image” (which is more-or-less implied by rule #1.)

Also, no one cares about the shape of your State. Nearly every design is guilty of including their State’s silhouette somewhere on the Quarter to little effect. Just give us a big racecar Indiana:

Strangely, the quarter that breaks no rules and still ends up looking like crap is Wyoming’s half-assed Cowboy:

A few of years ago, art galleries in Chelsea decided that Thursday would be the official night for opening receptions. Maybe they all got together and made a pledge, maybe all the gallerists’ biorhythms got synched-up do to their close proximity, maybe they all just wanted to get away for the weekend. But whatever the reason was, it’s now official—Thursday is the night. Bad news for me, because I almost always teach on Thursday nights and find myself constantly bummed that I was unable to attend so-and-so’s opening.

But I was able to go to some openings a few weeks ago and here is what they looked like:

Most of the galleries pictured run along 27th Street between 11th and 12th Avenues—that’s the cool place for galleries to be these days.

One of the galleries pictured is John Connelly Presents. John Connelly Presents has a real thing for Grolsch:

They serve Grolsch Beer at all their openings. I find myself desperate for a Grolsch every time I’ve set foot into JCP. It’s madness. And it’s not even a particularly good beer. But what it lacks in taste, it makes up for in design—the very satisfying metal and ceramic clasping cap makes drinking a delight. And I’m sure I crave it so much because the people at John Connelly love to hoard over their Grolsch, passing it out to a few chosen people at irregular intervals.

But last time I was at John Connelly Presents I was able to get a Grolsch.

If you don’t know Rob Lathan, you should. He’s a very weird dude.

He’s also one of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet. Plus he’s hysterical. So basically, if you were to walk into a bar and notice Rob Lathan sitting at an empty table, it would be a very good idea to sit down next to him and share a drink.

Just in case that ever happens, here’s a picture you can use use to identify him:

The image is taken from the neighborhoodies website, which sells the official “ROB!” t-shirt based on a prank he helped facilitate for the popular group, Improv Everywhere.

My Rob Lathan t-shirt just arrived today and it looks like this:

There are many things that I like about my Rob Tee (the color, the fact that it has Rob Lathan’s face on it, the flattering cut.) But there are some things that I don’t like that I will now put to you in list form:

1. Rob’s face is too small.
2. The “navy”-colored ink looks black.
3. Some of the details around the ears, nose, and under the mouth have been lost in the printing.

But still, even with all its faults, I love my Rob Lathan T-Shirt.

And I love Rob Lathan.

I own a pair of ESS Heil amt-1 speakers.

You heard me right.

Back in the early 70’s my speakers represented the pinnacle of audio technology. Thirty-five years ago, long-haired Audio Dorks stood around classy showrooms and salivated over the bell-like clarity of my “Air Motion Transformer” tweeter technology.

Three years ago, Kaveri and I were given these cool speakers from a friend of ours—originally a hand-me-down from his audiophile dad. We were thrilled.

And so we treated them very poorly—allowing our frisky cats to use the speakers as scratching posts and tear the thick material that covers them to shreds. And pretty soon the speakers looked like shit.

So about 2 weeks ago, I decided to recover them with this cool fabric I bought at Mood, the fabric store made famous by reality television.

Now the speakers look like this:

I am crafty.

“Welcome to My Study,” the strange little show that Dyna and I threw together for last month’s Channel 102 screening has enjoyed a surprisingly long after-life after being killed by the audience.

It became a sleeper hit, of sorts and among its fans were the Big Honkin’ production team—creators of the current 102 show, “The Defenders of Stan.”

So it was flattering (and kind of baffling) when those guys invited Dyna and me down to DC to meticulously recreate “Welcome to My Study” as part of a show they were doing for a big broadcasting company. Their show is about the behind-the-scenes goings-on at a cable access station. “Welcome to my Study” is one of the shows on that station and Dyna and I play Mitchell and Michele, the strange brother and sister creative team behind “Welcome to my Study.” So we got to act like weirdos for several hours and got paid for it.

The Big Honkin’ guys have access to a big sound stage and were able to make a great version of the original “Welcome to my Study” set that looked like this:

In fact I kind of prefer it to the original set.

She’s coming over for dinner. I’m braising lamb.

“Braising? In Summer?”
“Yes.”

The Lamb Lady at the farmers market said, “braise it.” She also said the lamb was “slaughtered yesterday.”

Speaking of slaughtering lambs, it was strange stumbling upon a bunch of fake Goyard handbags hanging in the Canal street shops. As the gays and socialites will tell you, Goyard is a luxury French handbag company. And I used to work for them. Actually, I didn’t really work for them, so much as I was contracted out by Barney’s to monogram their bags.

—Staggeringly expensive bags made by a company that prided themselves on their exclusivity. I remember the salespeople at Barneys saying to customers, “unlike Louis Vuitton you will never see a Goyard knockoff sold on Canal Street.”

Yes you will. Here you go, public:

It is asparagus season.

I like asparagus.

Here is a picture of the cream of asparagus soup I made from scratch.

Back in the day there were art bars—the Cedar Tavern, Max’s Kansas City, Fanelli’s—but I’d be hard pressed to name a bar in New York these days where artists rub elbows (The Pencil Factory?) Also, artists don’t punch each other in the face anymore, which I suppose is sort of a mixed blessing—no one wants a punch to the face but I bet it would be fun to see an artist just punch a critic in the face at a bar. But if you put yourself in severe debt going to grad school, there’s the legitimate worry that you might ruin your career if you punched someone important. Best not to punch, really. Also, the philosophical stakes in the art world just don’t seem high enough these days to warrant a punch.

But even though there’s no real art bar in New York, there’s a comedy bar and that bar is the Peter McManus Café. It has delightful green booths. It has crazy old ladies. It has cops and other middle-aged men with moustaches. And then it has a bunch of young comedians.

It’s not as lame as it sounds.

I’m there every Tuesday night.

But, my God, it’s taking so long to complete this last “Sexual Intercourse; American Style.”

I’m throwing a party when it’s over. You’re all invited.

Jeff Wall is one of those artists that smart people seem to really like. Nearly every smart person I know seems to think of Wall as a seminal figure.

A couple of weeks ago I took a quick lap around his retrospective at MoMA. Maybe a bit too quick because I still don’t see why everyone goes so apeshit over Jeff Wall. I need to think about him a bit more.

When you think of Jeff Wall you think of light boxes—big transparent photographs lit from behind with florescent bulbs and mounted to the wall. Light boxes are just intrinsically great—any large photo lit from behind is going to look fantastic. I don’t care what it is—a Tylenol ad at the airport—if it’s in a light box, I’m sold. So we can all agree that light boxes are good—that’s one thing that Jeff Wall has going for him.

You also think about the fact that his photos are carefully posed. Even though they look like he just went into the street and happened to be at the right moment to capture something interesting, that’s not what happened—he spent days (days!) rounding up people to pose for him in very specific locations. So if you weren’t familiar with Wall’s work you’d say to yourself, “Whoa, look at that redneck making that ‘slanty-eyed’ gesture to that Asian dude.”

But you’d be wrong because these were “actors” of a sort.

That the photos are “fakes,” meant to look real, is interesting to some people. There was a critical armature that developed around photography in the 60’s and 70’s that attempted to understand the medium by determining its unique and intrinsic properties. One of the intrinsic properties of Photography was thought to be its “truthfulness”—a photograph was a record of light hitting film; it was impartial in that way; it didn’t have the messy subjectivity that painting had. So when you looked at a Henri Cartier Bresson photo, you thought to yourself, “Oh, how delightful that he was there to capture that moment. Isn’t life magical?” By posing everything to look real, Jeff Wall undercuts this assumption of photography’s truthfulness and that makes people feel kind of exhilarated, as if one of life’s big barriers had finally been torn down. “Thank God we can no longer trust the accuracy of the photo,” they say. (they don’t really…)

But perhaps Wall is less a photographic provocateur than a throwback to a 19th century mode of photography that took painting as its model. He seems to like to fill his work with art historical references.

There’s this one that borrows from a 19th century woodblock print from Katsushika Hokusai.

The little figures on the left of this one are posed like the ones in Manet’s “Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe” or maybe like that Giorgione painting whose name I don’t remember. In any event, his pictures look vaguely art historical. People seem to like this about him too.

They also like his politics. Wall has concern for the underclass and really we all should. Even though to you and me, rounding up a bunch of itinerant laborers and making them pose for several days for a big expensive photo seems like the height of bourgeois decadence, for some people this makes Wall a friend of the common man. Kind of like Courbet—an artist that Wall also quotes.

So I’m obviously missing Wall’s greatness and importance. But I’m going to go back to MoMA and see the show again.

I know I don’t write a lot on my blog anymore so I’ll try to be better about that too.