Gone to Gowanus

[avram]

I actually played games at GC last night — Cube Farm, Switch, Xactica, and Kahuna (though I misread the rules on the last, and we wound up playing it wrong). Xactica is really tough; most of the players wound up with negative scores. It seems like an odd design to come from the makers of Set, a game with a very broad appeal. Set is a good game for kids, Xactica isn’t. Chris showed up, and acted only slightly jealous when Q left a big, dark lipstick smooch on the top of my head. Baldness has its rewards.

I got home around 5:30 AM, woke up today around 3, actually got out of the house sometime after 4. About a third of the artists showing in the Gowanus Artists Open Studio show are located in two buildings, so I went to one of them, 295 Douglass Street. Lots of good stuff. Ella Yang blew me away. She’s got an amazing sense of atmospheric perspective — that’s using color to indicates distance with distant objects tending towards gray. She does lots of rooftops. In fact, quite a few of the artists did some rooftop paintings. There’s probably a master’s thesis waiting to be written about New York’s role in the portrayal of rooftops in the arts — not just painting, think about comics!

On the way back home I stopped off at Patrick & Teresa’s to drop off something I’d borrowed, and Teresa greeted me with “Had dinner yet?”. She makes a good london broil and brussels sprouts, and I wound up hanging out there till around midnight, chatting about Ken MacLeod and comics and saints and relics and the Head of Vecna and various things.

And then I got home and found copies of Take Out in the mail. This is a minicomic series by Raina Telgemeier (who really needs to get more stuff up on her website). I picked up #4 at Cosmic on Wednesday, liked it a lot, and emailed Raina about getting the others. Number 1 isn’t available, but she sent me 2 and 3. It turns out that Forbidden Planet has all three issues too (or did on Thursday).