I left Atlanta first thing this morning and caught my flight to New York. The flight was uneventful, and I took a cab from Laguardia to my hotel, which is literally in the shadow of the Empire State Building. Dropping my bags off in my room, I jumped on the subway and headed uptown to the museum district.I had purchased a ticket on line for the Whitney Biennial. Unfortunately, before I went to the show at the Whitney, I stopped by the Met and saw Robert Rauschenberg's combines. I say "unfortunately" because everything in the Biennial paled in comparison to what Rauschenberg was doing almost 50 years ago. In fact, the combines still look fresh and new and even occasionally shocking, in the sense of what Robert Hughes called "The Shock of the New." Combines, in case you don't know, are eccentric hybrids of painting, collage, sculpture and found objects, all "combined" into unique three-dimensional assemblies. They might include anything from funny pages, pinups, neckties, pants legs, stuffed birds, furniture parts and more. The fun is in seeing what Rauschenberg's imagination would incorporate next.

The Whitney's survey of the current state of American art looked derivative and tired and, at times, sophomoric, while Rauschenberg seemed strange and odd in an almost otherworldly sense, sort of like medieval tapestries with their rich colors and lights and intricate details. There was typically more innovation, more originality, more audacity and more sheer artistry in a single combine (and there were about 50 of them on display at the Met) than in an entire floor of the Whitney's four-floor Biennial.

I'm not saying there weren't a few interesting pieces in the Whitney Biennial, but it seemed like one had to wade through an awful lot of what looked like first-year art student's work to find the good stuff. My advice if you go is to just head straight for the second floor and skip the rest. Or better yet, just go to the Met and see the combines.After leaving the Whitney, I took the subway all the way downtown to SoHo, and had dinner (a bowl of chili and a beer - my first in almost three years) at Ken's Broome Street Pub. Ken's was a homecoming of sorts for me - way back in the late 70s, it was a favorite hangout of mine when I used to visit New York to see an old girlfriend who was studying divinity at Fordham. The place hadn't seemed to have changed at all.

That evening, I want to an off- off-Broadway play on Wooster Street, just around the block from Ken's. "Fatboy" is an avant-garde burlesque, a live-action Punch-and-Judy show about an enormous central character, the titular Fatboy, who fancies himself first king, and later a messiah. It's a very broadly done satire on greed and imperialism, and subtlety was not one of its characteristics. But it was fun, all the actors hammed their roles with bravura, there was a lot of self-referential postmodernism, and there was hardly a sentence of dialog without the word "fuck" in it. A good time, although not family fare, and almost made me forget that I was missing the season premiere of that other egomaniacal fat boy, "The Sopranos."