Would you rather be hot or cool?  It's a long discussion.

A couple nights ago I was at a coffee house in Los Feliz where everyone was cool, at the cool place doing the cool thing.  Except of course for the other crowd – the ones who were hot, driving hot cars, looking at hot babes, wearing hot sports wear.

 

LA is the land of hot and cool.  But mostly hot I think.  It’s just too bubbly and busty to be really cool.

 

I was better at cool than hot because I could pull it off even though I was insecure.  In fact that helped in some awkward way.  With cool, shy can look like deep.

 

Whatever cool I had came from my father.  He was Classic Cool.  Beat Cool.  Hung out with jazz musicians and painted and said things like hodiggitydog and daddyoh.  He remained cool his entire life, well except for that cowboy bit later on.  That's another story.

 

As I see it, the trick is to be hot or cool almost by mistake.  It should appear effortless.  And that’s the funny thing because hot and cool are both about appearance, massively so.  For me, it’s usually about the way things look.  I like to look. 

 

Why this hot/cool talk?

 

It started with wanting to put this drawing up.  I did it in Malaga, Spain.  I was thinking how this woman was really on the Hot side of things, but then I put the beret on her and Cooled it down.  That led me to remembering that I had gone to the Picasso museum that morning and the Alex Katz show at the CAC in the afternoon.  I was sort of thinking how Picasso was hot and Katz was cool.

 

Now here’s the weird part.  I went to the book shelf and got down Cool Rules, Anatomy of an Attitude by Dick Pountain and David Robins.  It’s a good read.  I was flipping through and got to their chapter on A Cool Aesthetic, mostly about AE.  But then I read further and it was all about Alex Katz being the epitome of Cool.  Wow!  Serendipity.

 

What's it got to do with artslant?

 

Spotlight Studios!  You find them under Community.

 

For the hot, the cool and the oh-so tepid!.  All you need are some images, some text and just the right background color. 

And it’s almost effortless, massively so.

 -georgia

 

Helpful Hint: 

To change your background color in your Spotlight Studio, put an RGB hex number into the background field – those are the numbers with 6 digits like #000000 for basic black.

 

Here are some color pickers I found for reference.

http://www.free-webmaster-tools.com/colorpicker.htm

http://htmlhelp.com/cgi-bin/color.cgi