We haven't forgotten about you, kids. For the last few hours we've been losing our way around town, switching subways and marveling at the wonder that is the Time Warner Center. It occurs to us we haven't been north of 57th on the West Side in probably literally a year, so we're quite enjoying our foray into gigantic buildings and cleaner streets. Something to be said for making money and living in co-ops. Not much, but something.

But we digress. We've just escaped Avery Fisher Hall, found some wifi ($3.95!) at Barnes and Noble, and we're here to give you the full report.

We'll start at the beginning:

First impressions are that this is kind of like the first day of high school art camp. Everyone's sitting around, a couple people landed off into groups, but Avery Fisher Hall looks sadly empty for the 1:55 speaker, Charlie White. Then again, it's only 1:38 now so who knows what last-minute flurries could come. Set-up is pretty cool. A stage, two podiums each with pink "The Super-Species of Art & Design" posters, and two big screens each flanked with a yellow vertical Semi-Permanent 05 poster.

So we're here waiting to hear Charlie White start speaking. According to the press materials, color-printed and stapled in our shiny white envelope (not to mention the extreme laminated awesomeness of our bright-yellow press pass), Charlie's known for getting a little freaky.

You can't help but be disturbed when looking at Charlie White's photos...Often his work asks the question, 'Who are the freaks in this world?' and scares us with the realization that they are living quite comfortably among the globe.

BREAKING: A video of a dove bleeding guts out of its cloaca just started on the right screen. Imagery all looks very Monty Python sketch on extreme acid with a bit of Constantine hell shots thrown in. Oh, there's a disemboweled donkey with a rack. Obviously. And a baby's leg just got eaten by a fish, the fish eaten by the bird, the bird eaten by a person. This is wack. Turns out it's by Gints Apsits, music by Ramon Schneider and Adam Liebman. Movie's called Ministry Messiah. Small comfort.

Avery Fisher's totally filled up by now and Charlie's being introduced. Turns out he did that Interpol video, "Evil," with the really freaky-looking alien dude who gets in a car crash. Turns out that wasn't so much a one-off interest in freaky-looking alien dudes as kind of his milieu.

Talking about the idea of "verisimilitude," Charlie's starting to explain what he does. He makes these large-scale completely artificialized photographs (often with multiple layers, each Andreas Gursky-perspective-free-sharp). First series is about LA. He wanted to create a total system that could explain the complete emptiness of LA and came up with an "epic monster event."

"LA is such a horrifying place due to human separation and how things are stratified," he's saying, which is why he constructed this very toothy monster that appears on photos of parking lots and the gym, ultra-iconic LA settings, ending up bounty-hunter-displayed on the edge of a stick. It all works because the photos, the In a Matter of Days series, are so almost normal but then they have this, you guessed it, really freaky-looking alien dude. See below, "Highland Park".

Next series, "Understanding Joshua," is about a character Joshua, who allowed White to get inside peoples' houses. White's really obsessed with hair color. Blondes mean one thing, brunettes another, we're not even gonna touch the redheads. Seems White had some, um, personal issues going on that he sort of touches on -- eviction, hospital stays -- that he used Joshua to work through again, this time through art. Thankfully it never digresses to the point of being the really crappy art that's like "Oh, this art is valid because it helped me heal even though it's totally uninteresting." You know what we mean. It's just cool pictures, staged really well, with interesting (if sometimes cliche) subtext. So Joshua appears in all these compromising situations with women... he's kind of the really ignored guy, iconically potbellied and thin-armed, who shows up and women (and men) feel sorry for and talk to but he always ends up in these really difficult situations that he doesn't seem to want to be in but also doesn't know how to get out. Two from Joshua below. See what we mean:

Next series, "And You Jeopardize the Integrity of the Hull," a purposefully cut-off title that starts with a picture from Ovid's Lida legend (Zeus comes down as a swan and ravishes/bones Lida) and goes through Plum, a completely exaggerated boy-band ("better nipples! better bodies! better purple!") ending with a Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light ripoff for which White was served a cease and desist order. An order which said, "Don't think artistically about Thomas Kinkade." So he enlisted a map painter and made his own Kinkade-esque set and photographed puppets.

Essentially, this guy's stuff kind of blew our mind, visually, but didn't seem to do anything all that really innovatively new, at least conceptually. Getting the layers of film to come together in digital crispness is a little Gursky while the elaborate setups are a little Crewsdon. But the freaky monsters are all White. As is the stylized and, frankly, inescapable emptiness.

In conclusion, we think White is to photography as Bret Easton Ellis is to novels. We like.

Back to the fold. We'll keep you posted.