On the telephone, artist Wolfgang Staehle stated that I should get out of the house, that we all should get out of the house. ‘It is a kind of exercise.’ He suggested a small gathering at 149 Ludlow. The ground floor was being prepped for a sound installation by THE THING residency artist Mukul Patel, and a table could be set centre to host 8 to 10 people, sipping on bouillabaisse.

It is a very grand idea, indeed, to have a dinner party and an installation simultaneously. I was there.

I ran into Mikael Vojinovic the other night at a Black Book party.

Mix has emerged in the last year as one of fashion photography's new criminals (he cocks the camera like a gun), with covers and editorial spreads in the likes of LOFT, A4, Animal Magazine, Oyster and many others. He is considered the Adderall of the New York fashion scene--a kind of a prepubescent mixture of Keith Richards and Charles Bukowski. Travelling between New York, Miami, Montreal and Paris, he has developed a fanatic following among the urban style avant-garde--these being primarily hot young models, who seem to enjoy his thick French-Yugoslavian hand slapping their tight asses.

Strung Up

A vital fusion of abstraction and representation is shrewdly inter-weft in the paintings of Elizabeth Neel. At Gasser and Grunert, her first New York solo exhibition, is a series of oil on canvas, aggressively gushing from the walls, with titles like Strung Up, Popped Off, Sucked Up and Flushed Out.

We met early afternoon at her Williamsburg loft, overlooking the East River. I had promised to show Nin how to transform her recipe for crepes into pancakes. We proceeded by way of exact measure. The results were questionable. The space between Kent Avenue and the river was remarkably quiet, punctuated by the occasional call of a seagull. We ate crepe-cakes and chatted.

I first met Nin in 1996 while working at P.S.1, where she was the artist-in-residence representing Austria. Her demeanour remains the same today--an intellect offered gently, a sexy and detached certainty, and a post-war flirtatiousness, somewhere between Monica Viti and Hanna Schygulla.