According to the official Friday time waster (below) that's the population of Tokyo circa 2015.

Interactive Urban Growth Map

I see it as a coda to the Venice Architecture Biennale, which has been accused of having no architecture and instead dwelling on population growth statistics meant to be both terrifying and inebriating.

current music: J*Davey, The Beauty in Distortion EP

I try not to get swept into the "what's wrong with the local art scene" bitchfest that seems to be a very popular sport in this city... except that I constantly get swept into said bitchfest on a regular basis. I struggle to find a new language that allows me to talk about how things can change, improve even, without couching everything in the handwringing, we-got-it-bad terms that I hear so often.

The complaining, however, doesn't set me nearly as much on edge as the most commonly proposed solutions. The recipe goes something like this: we need more big museums, more big commercial galleries, our own Broadway. That will make us an "international city" with "world-class" status. And then everyone will like us.

And once again, writ large, Atlanta's fascination with bigness and corporate or government-financed slickness. Ah yes, world, please like us for God's sake!

If we don't watch ourselves, we become the next Washington, D.C., a city so glutted with enormous world-class institutions and high-end art museums, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a million dollar endowment. And yet there's a deadness to its art scene; a sparklessness that causes artists from D.C. to glaze over with existential malaise whenever you ask them to talk about their scene. And as a result good art and good ideas come to D.C., but D.C. itself rarely produces any art that anyone notices.

Ok, breathe. I have to take a step back, relent. After all, it was Austin's smallness and parochial myopia that ultimately made the well run dry for me there. I was in a very real sense attracted to Atlanta's feeling of being a "real" city with "real" art. Because the place was grown and sexy. Remember that. Remember that.

What gets lost here, however, is a feel for the small, quirky, independent, and oddly unique that feeds the spirit of a local art scene. Big museums and sculpture parks are great for tourism, which is why we should be pursuing them with all haste. And yet we shouldn't be confused by making the claim that that fosters a vibrant local art scene. Alone, they will not. Artists are not in New York because that's where the Whitney is, the Whitney is in New York because that's where the artists are. This is historically true.

So I offer an additional solution; let us call it one designed to walk hand-in-hand with the "big things" approach. Let's worry about the soul of the artists as adamantly--let's spend equal time forming art collectives, publishing raggedy little magazines, blogging, setting up life drawing sessions, alternative gallery spaces, by-the-hour darkrooms, great used bookstores, arthouse cinemas, and strange little festivals.

This is what saves me in the end. The idea that so little of that exists here (there is some, thank God, and you can find it if you know where to look, but quite little in proportion to our huge population). So there's tons of room for more, endless breathing space.

The last time I visited Austin, the Carbonist Schoolers did a video shoot that required us to dress in all manner of strange capes, aviator glasses, and 19th century corsets. We went out for pizza on the UT campus (the drag) and elicited not a single second glance or raised eyebrow. Of course not. That city is totally saturated with its own strangeness. It becomes a kind of self-referential feedback loop that becomes boring in its own way.

Atlanta is a frontier; fresh ground that need tilling. That makes it exciting. It makes it a challenge, and it makes it worth every minute of being here.

Still feeling a little un-posty, as Code Z continues to co-opt most of my blogging/art energy. It's all good though, as it's paying off. It certainly has been the fastest way to connect with folks in the art world I've ever found. I can't think of any other circumstance under which I'd be speaking to Julie Dash, Thulani Davis, and Faith Childs all in one week, not to mention the slew of workaday artists plying their trade that I come into contact with all the time now.

Plus, people are finally starting to send me free shit, which is really the only reason I started Code Z. Looking forward to getting out of the house tomorrow.

current music: Propellerheads, Decksandrumsandrockandroll

After doing the math, I realized that I was hemorrhaging money every time I went by Staples for a pack of padded envelopes instead of staying focused on either paid work or personal projects. So I did the only thing that made financial sense and hired a part-time personal assistant. Enter Kye. Hallelujah! She's been on the job a total of 3 hours and is already halfway through a 3-month backlog of bothersome little odds and ends I never got around to. File this under: why didn't I think of this years ago?

Meanwhile, I've been thinking about Jerry Saltz and his wax balls. He asks, "Can art change the world?" And my immediate response is that there's nothing particularly wrong with any of provisional answers--yes, no, maybe--that artists have been providing to that tired old question for at least 200 years. The problem is that it's an entirely inadequate question. What does "change" mean? What measuring stick are we using? What is the "world"? I mean to develop these thoughts further since I'm going to be participating next month in the Bioneers conference, and will be called upon to have coherent thoughts about just such questions.

Torkwase took me out to Carroll Street Café Friday night, which is on a narrow little street where if two cars are passing each other in the opposite direction, one has to drive up on the sidewalk. Although the plan had been to hit a series of galleries, the wine was too good and the filet mignon too tender just to up and leave, and we instead closed out the night 4 hours later in the very place where we had opened it. We left the cafe and the night had cooled, and the city changed for me after that. Suddenly I felt like person in it rather than a visitor on top of it. And I could feel this shift when I noticed how much easier it was to navigate those streets and find my way home at the end of the night.

My Atlanta is starting to look like this now: evenings at funky, middle-brow restaurants with company I care about, playing spades in people's back yards, petting people's cats. So different from the enforced solitude I was in while curating the show, building Code Z, and trying to hold together a house built 70 years ago all at the same time, all before having ever had a chance to just be in the city and take it in at its own pace. I said this to Kwase before we started eating--that I'd been waiting nine months for that moment, a chance to finally exhale, to be in this place.

I remember moving to Austin in January 1997 and immediately resenting the fact that Austin was not New York City, where I had just come from. I would look up from an all-night reading jag, ready to throw on a jacket and some shoes so I could grab a slice and a cup of coffee at the corner. Nothing doing in Austin. It's a car trip at least, and at 3am everything is probably closed anyway. It took me the better part of a year to let go of an older way of thinking to make room for understanding Austin for Austin.

Some 9 years later, I find myself here in a new city going through the same process. I have spent my first several months looking for Atlanta's answer to Flipnotics or Gallery Lombardi or Eeyore's Birthday--everything that makes Austin the funky, cozy, self-satisfied little burg that it is--invariably coming up frustrated and empty handed. Everything here, it seemed, had such pretensions of slickness, such ambitions toward bigness and scale. The difference induced a kind of vertigo, which is both scary and disorienting. Only now am I beginning to understand Atlanta in its own right. Only now am I beginning to understand the language it speaks.

I'm ready not to be so alone here. This was the thought I had on Saturday night when Eddie and I found ourselves at the Bridge Show at The B Complex. Corrina Mensoff's sprawling, ambitious Katrina remembrance impresses. It succeeds by dint of sheer volume perhaps as much as by careful selection, but the works comprehensively move though the gamut of ideas, meditating on disaster, recovery, racism, politics, media coverage, architecture, and hope. I had one of those jealous "how does she do it?" moments when I saw just the sheer largeness of the exhibition.

Anyway, I had my epiphany standing before a series of works in the B Complex ante-chamber, contemplating a series of diptychs. Yeah, right. Partnering, pairing. That makes so much sense on so many levels. And that process is absolutely necessary to feel connected to a place. Otherwise I find myself perpetually disconnected from it or even in opposition to it.

Code Z is getting ready to take a major turn as I restructure that enterprise to rely less on myself and my efforts. As I alluded to before, my goal now is to, in effect, deepen the collaborations, to duplicate the keys to the shop so that they're not all in the same hands. Now feels like the exact right time for this transition. Now at a time when finally I'm starting to open a lot of things up and see the city and my place in it in a new way.

Moving to stage 2 with Code Z means getting help, i.e., other people to do stuff. We're a long way from going on autopilot with the site, but at least we're past the point where I'm up until 3 in the morning for a week straight programming, writing, and fixing stuff. It's a collaborative effort, but one that is still largely dependent on my personal energy as the engine; my goal is to create something that exists apart from me, something that doesn't care whether I come or go.