From 1992 through 1993 I worked at The New Press, then the only major New York publishing house that was not-for-profit. The offices were perched on the fourth floor of what looked like an abandoned building in a... questionable... neighborhood within spitting distance of the Port Authority bus terminal.

Fortunately, the adjacent Hell's Kitchen neighborhood was slowly on the rise back then and happened to have a pretty good little sandwich shop. I would stop in for lunch there 2 or 3 times a week, and every time I ordered a mozzarella sandwich on baguette with sun dried tomatoes and mustard. I was a creature of habit back then.

The whole sandwich was good, but the mustard in particular was the most incredible mustard I had ever tasted. Clear-your-sinuses mustard, with a specific tangy taste that was seared into my memory.

Unfortunately, I took this mustard for granted and never bothered to find out what brand it was. Big mistake.

I moved back to Boston in '94, then to Austin in '97, and over the course of 10 years tried to find that mustard. I tasted every brand in every store I could find. It was not unusual for me to have 3 or 4 open jars of mustard in my refrigerator at any given time, most nearly full and destined for the trash can.

Along around 2003, I had settled into a brand that wasn't exactly right, but it was vaguely close. Closer than any other brand I had tried. Don't remember the brand, remember the little cartoon chef on the label though. So I had kind of given up.

So the next move was to Atlanta. Maybe I'd have more luck there--more high-end restaurants, new culture. It's December now and I'm having a farewell lunch with Richard at the Hyde Park Grill. The truck is rented, boxes have been packed, I'm breathless for Atlanta. I ordered french fries with some mustard on the side. I think you see where this is going. THE mustard. At last.

I had to stop Richard mid-sentence even though I'm sure he was saying something very important, so I could ask the waiter what brand of mustard this was. First he tried to give me some generic answer, like "oh it's a spicy mustard." But I wasn't going to let him get away with that.

"Look, dammit! Don't fuck with me! I've been looking for this mustard since 19-goddam-93. You will not give me some generic answer. I've come too close. If you want any hope of a tip, you will look up the exact brand and tell me exactly what it is!"

That's what was in my head, but I think what I actually said was, "Can you tell me what brand it is?"

So he left and came back with the can after a few minutes. Roland's mustard. From France. Big industrial can. No problem. I'll order some off the 'net as soon as I get to Atlanta. After all, everything's available online.

And that's what I did. I placed an order for 3 bottles on January 3rd from Gristede's in New York City. And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

WTF? I finally wrote Gristede's and said, "Goddam you! I've been waiting for this mustard since 19-freaking-93. Don't fucking toy with me now! Send me my damn mustard!" That's what I was thinking. What I actually said was, "Please let me know the disposition of my order."

Backordered! "We regret the inconvenience..." You've got to be kidding me. That was a week ago.

Well, friends, I'm happy to announce that the mustard came in the mail today. At last! And with it came a decade of missed summers in New York, the steam from the streets of Hell's Kitchen, and a renewed appreciation for all that was.

I have now been threatened with enough lawsuits and invocations of legal dogma that I feel I must officially go on record as saying: no, I will under no circumstances remove any postings from this site by myself or by commenters that fall under the banner of legally protected speech. Such a move would be un-American. And I mean that sincerely.

I am not a lawyer, so don't take this as professional legal opinion, but essentially, libel (which people typically mislabel as "slander") must satisfy 2 conditions: 1) the writing must first be provably, demonstrably false. For example, saying someone was indicted on federal racketeering charges, when in fact such an event never occurred can be shown to be false. Expressing one's opinion, on the other hand, is constitutionally protected speech. For example, calling someone an ignorant slut, even in public, even in writing is probably not very nice, but it is also not a crime. Ditto for calling someone a boring and trite painter. On a related note, truth is an absolute defense. So, telling the world that so-and-so got into such-and-such a group show only after agreeing to give the gallerist a satisfying blowjob is completely legal if it's true, even if it tends to harm so-and-so's reputation.

2) The un-factual writing must be shown to be motivated by malice, rather than, say, by oversight, or simple error. (Professional journalists have a slightly different standard.) This is extremely difficult to prove. Basically, you have to prove that the writing was specifically aimed to bring shame to the person written about, rather than, for example, to shed light on crass or stupid art practices, even if in the process of doing so you misattribute a crass and stupid artwork to an otherwise brilliant artist.

One more note: someone being a "public figure" means they have less protection under libel laws, not more. In other words, the law generally recognizes that if you have a "name," some criticism is going to come with the territory. Suck it up.

I have no illusion that this posting will change anyone's mind; but it had to be said.

current music: One Luv Entertainment, Continuous

A former coworker recently gave me some pretty reasonable advice: "Just remember," she said, "no one wants to hear about your hardwood floors..." Well, I'm completely ignoring that advice here with my first real mention of my renovation efforts.

I've been in the house now just under a month. My original plan had me finishing up all the landscaping by now and getting started on electrical work. HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Basically, I've just gotten finished dealing with the mortgage company and am still staring at a pile of unopened boxes from the kitchen to the front porch. (Note to self: post ad on Craig's List tomorrow to give away all the empty boxes.)

But I haven't been completely useless. I've got plans, baby! Big Plans. My intention, after all, is to revamp this place from top to bottom, shine it up and turn it into the showcase it is somewhere beneath all that dust and bad 80s paint. And it should only cost... well, tens of thousands of dollars. So we'll be doing this project on the long term plan.

My one regret with this house is that I didn't just come through with a fire hose and water blast everything before moving anything in. Every surface of this house needs a good scrubdown, and now I have to work around furniture, rugs and clothes to do it. The former owner, it seems, basically stopped caring for the place months--maybe even years--ago, and the house has been sliding gently into benign neglect for some time now. Except for the bathroom, which is in strangely pristine condition.

This hasn't stopped me planning, though. I spent too long one weekend with an electronic measuring device that worked, oh, 65% of the time and a copy of Adobe Illustrator CS, and came up with the following plans (click to enlarge):



At left is the house as-is. Note the complete lack of hallways or other transitional spaces. This essentially means that every room ends up feeling like a hallway--a space you go through to get somewhere else. Very disconcerting. At right is the redesign, complete with furniture sketched in to make sure everything sizes out right. Slightly more ambitious than my original redesign plan, but still reasonable.

Or at least it seems that way now.

We'll see. Yeah, we'll see.

Every time I move to a new city, I have at some point a meltdown; a point where everything seems too much--too alien, too foreign, too overwhelming. In Austin that went on for 3 days, paralysis as I attempted to figure out how I would start life again from scratch after leaving it all behind in Boston; in New York it lasted for months. Here, it started this morning and ended by the middle of the afternoon.

So by the time I headed out to L.A. artist Joe Sola's "Taking a Bullet" opening tonight at the ACA I was in high spirits. Good thing, too, because the show, while fun and ultimately harmless, was somewhat underwhelming.

The centerpiece was Sola's "Male Fashion Models Make Conceptual Art," which featured 5 chunks of half-dressed beefcake playing with poster paints, tin foil, styrofoam cups, and glue guns. It was a little tough to watch. The models, of course, weren't making conceptual art--none of them were artists outside of tonight's gig. I asked--the models were the conceptual art.

Fortunately, Joe seemed pretty honest about all of this. I asked him about his thinking in putting the piece together, and he said, basically, he just wanted to watch some pretty guys make art. Oh, and plus this way his work can deal with the idea of beauty, which he doesn't normally get to do.

Ok, go for it. That's one way to do it.

In looking at the work (or rather, not looking, since I found it weirdly uncomfortable to be so voyeuristic), I was hoping for an antidote to Vanessa Beecroft, whose work so thoroughly dehumanizes women in particular and the human form in general that I find even the best of it offensive at pretty much every level. That's a big burden. What I got was somewhere midway between the dehumanizing Beecroft and say Spencer Tunick, who also uses the human form as raw material, but in a way that draws out the humanity of his models rather than denying it.

Other works in the gallery may be worth a stop in if you're in the area. The part in his video "Studio Visit" where he suddenly jumps out the window--hilarious! The watercolors, a little tepid, but nice.

As for "Male Fashion Models Make Conceptual Art," the title is either a lie or a joke, because they mostly made a mess. If you missed tonight's opening, you missed the conceptual art. What remains in the gallery is just the aftermath, a remnant, like the empty beer cans on the lawn when the party is long gone.

current music: Ben Harper, Burn to Shine

Cut to: montage of of various locations around Atlanta's midtown arts district, views of art by Kiki Smith, Lorna Simpson and Ellsworth Kelly, all over the pulsing strains of Pink's "Get This Party Started."

My afternoon was something like that. Kind of. At last relieved of some onerous book deadlines and endless unpacking, it was time to absorb some high visual culture.

Last November, Renzo Piano's addition to the High Museum inspired a month's worth of bad newspaper headline puns, and although I was in town for the opening, I recall being so immersed in the house search that I had neither the will nor the mental space to actually attend.

I missed out. But fortunately architecture is semi-permanent and I was finally able to see the museum today. What's most notable is how unnoticeable it all really is. From inside, there was never a moment where the soaring roof or the sweeping view took my breath away. There were no structural backflips or contortions of material mostly designed to proclaim the supposed genius of the architect (I'm looking at you, Frank Gehry). No, from the inside, the story was about the art. Piano's renovation is nothing if not thoroughly self-effacing, deferring to the art it houses.

There were problems, however. Design flaws.

I admit that I have no patience for vague wayfinding systems and that, okay, I'm easily turned around in complex spaces, but the new High (see, the puns are unavoidable) amassed traffic-flow faults at such a rate that they eventually overwhelmed my enjoyment of the art.

First there's the matter of finding the entrance, which is a little like trying to find the book that opens the secret corridor behind the library wall when you pull it. There's lots of glass and lots of doors, yes, but ah! which one takes you into the museum?

Once you find the main entrance, you are welcomed into a great and imposing Central Hall (yes, it needs the capital letters). Pay attention because it gets tricky. You head toward the staffed booth--a natural inclination--whereupon a staff member will accost you almost from behind asking you to state your business. In a nice way of course. I mean, she's not trying to be mean; she's just been told to greet people as they come in, but if you have long legs like I do, it's possible to get pretty far in before she can reach you.

She then sends you to the booth you were headed towards anyway. The lady at the front sends you to the side of the booth to pay. Why the cashier isn't front and center is never exactly clear. Had someone told me at that point that I had to check my bag I would have had to cross back over in front of the booth in order to get to the coat check at the other end of the foyer, but in fact no one said anything. No one that is until much later when the guard in another building nicely (yes, again nicely) told me I had to go back over to the first building to check my bag, which apparently was too large.

All of this, however, was after attempting to leave a Skyway level gallery by following the bright green exit sign (seems reasonable, no?) and ending up in a stairwell with not very clearly marked signage at each level. I ventured a doorway. Unlocked! I end up in some kind of Star Trek glass time tunnel. Another guard comes out from another doorway and tells me I'm not supposed to be there. What!? Help me, please! She can't tell me where to go, only that I'm not supposed to be there. So I decide at that point to take it back to zero. Ground floor. Let's start all over.

That's when the incident in the other building occurred. Which ironically somehow got me back to the Forbidden Zone except that somehow now I was on the other side of the door, the guard's side. So I guess it was just the time tunnel that was off limits, not the area beyond it, which I was now in.

As I accumulated logistical faux-pas after logistical faux-pas, I became increasingly paranoid about going the Wrong Way. So much so, that I could no longer concentrate on what was probably a pretty excellent collection.

All of those faults, though, are pretty minor and can be corrected by moving furniture around, sacrificing some of the pristine minimalism for some clear signs and maybe dimming a hall or two that the public isn't supposed to go into. Small stuff.

Overall, the space is a beautiful one to be in and one that respects the art, even if it doesn't always respect the art lovers.

current music: Heather Bishop

I'm just glad to be living in a city where there's some sister running around named "Nefertiti Jones." Goddam, Atlanta.

Ok, so I did a terrible job keeping up the bloglet at left, so I got rid of that. Pretty soon, I'll start up a home remodeling bloglet that I'm sure I'll be equally mediocre at updating. Meanwhile, after being in the new house for a few days, I've given her a name befitting her true personality. My new house is... wait for it... wait for it... Lena Horne! How excellent is that?

current music: iTunes mix

Just starting to get my head above water here. The move (via U-Haul, thanks Paul and Kazki) was without incident. So far the only damage seems to be a slight scuff mark on the back of one chair and the total loss of one (blank) canvas stretched beyond use. Not bad.

Meanwhile, I'm starting to sink my hooks into the local art scene. A friend of mine who, rumor has it, wants to remain anonymous for the time being just launched Greyscale as both a digital and print newsletter publication. This removes one more excuse not to know what's going on.