Avram's journal

Once it because apparent that paying my taxes wasn’t going to pauperize me, I made a small investment in a new digital camera. My old one (a Canon PowerShot A10) was bulky and heavy enough that I carried it in my bag when I carried it at all, which was enough of a barrier to casual use that I hardly ever used it. The new one, a Canon PowerShot SD200, is about a third the old one’s size, small and light enough that it rides comfortably in my pocket. Good-sized monitor too.

In other news, Ground has closed. The owner sold it, and the new owner has sold off the old furniture and is redoing the whole place. It’ll be a café, which I assume means it’ll sell coffee, but whether it’ll have cheap coffee, as well as comfy seats and wi-fi, only time will tell.

Meanwhile I’ve been doing my local hanging out at Basic, up on Erie and 8th, near the hospital. The food and drinks are good, but the seats are all hard, and it tends to be loud. Not conducive to long sketch sessions. I need a new place to sling my ass while I draw.

The reason my camera and Basic show up in the same post is this odd bit of art hanging on the side of a building right near Basic:

( Weird bat-head mandalla )

I picked up yet another new sketchbook yesterday — a hardcover, spiral-bound Canson. The paper’s almost as good as Strathmore, and I don’t have to knock myself out finding it. I also picked up a cheap plastic envelope to carry cheap copier paper for sketching page layouts.

jayspec462 has not only moved into the neighborhood, but he’s discovered Ground! He was getting too much work done with his laptop, so I told him about the wifi. I retreated to the rear of the shop, where my favorite comfy chair with nearby lamp was waiting for me, with a good view of a pair of young women who waited till after I’d drawn them to start making out.

More at sketchblogs.

Feeling so-o-o-o-o uninspired. Bleh. Spent a bit of time at Ground, mostly just reading Sock, but sketched a little, even though the light was on the dim side.

( One single, solitary sketch, and not even a good one )

I’m trying something new: I’ve started writing out one of my comics ideas as if it were prose. Not quite exactly as prose — I'm taking less care with stylistic niceties than I would if the prose were going to be the finished product, and paying more attention to visual details. But still. Just a few paragraph so far. Two or three hundred words. My two protagonists haven’t even met yet. But it’s something. It’s forced me to make a few decisions, work out some details.

Saw Shaun of the Dead tonight with bugsybanana. It really is the feel-good zombie movie of the year, joining The Frighteners in the very small works-as-comedy-and-horror-both category. Go see it, before it vanishes from the theaters.

Our sample ballots finally arrived today. I still don’t know which of the eleven candidates for mayor is going to get my vote. Hm. OK, I can cross off the guy from the “Yes Lord!” party, just on general principles. And I don’t think much of how things have gone for the arts district and the vintage Loew’s Jersey Theatre on acting mayor Smith’s watch, so he’s out. Nine left.

Man, I missed all the fun.

The heart of the local art scene in this chunk of Jersey City is 111 First Street, an old industrial building (originally a tobacco factory) that was converted to studio and office space. The traditional dance of art and commerce has been taking place, and we’re now at the bit where the artists, having done their job by helping make the area look cool and interesting to new tenants, have outlived their usefulness to the landlords, and are being priced out of their living and work space.

The latest move was particularly ugly. Lloyd Goldman, the landlord who owns the building, put up signs and guards prohibiting non-residents from entering, claiming the building was unsafe (though it had not been officially declared so), and filling the halls with workmen putting plywood over the doors of empty studios. Some of the artists moved their work outside, which worked better in today’s beautiful weather than yesterday’s clouds and rain. (I was in Queens gaming yesterday, so I’m a bit fuzzy on how much of this happened yesterday and how much today. I think the workmen thing was yesterday. There were definitely artists outside today.)

So I wandered around the neighborhood checking out the various other displays local artists had put up, but the energy-to-art ratio was much higher that way, and I wound up not seeing much that was interesting. I feel cheated of a source of inspiration. I’ll have to check out the Hoboken Open Studios in a couple of weeks, or maybe head up the some Boston-area studio tours, if I can find out about some in advance. Oh, and I did a much-needed laundry.

Then it turns out I missed the action. At some point this afternoon there was a protest, and a judge got 111’s doors opened to the public. A small victory for the good guys.

I haven’t been making much art of my own. I did a bit of drawing during drcpunk’s game yesterday. Putting a dark background in this one really helped pop the foreground out. Holy crap I screwed up that hand.

I’m stubbornly chugging along with the brush pens, even though my fine line work is so much better. The brushed lines charge up some part of my brain that thinks that is what a comic line is supposed to look like.

( Melorne waking up, about 500 x 800 )

Woof. Great con. Tired now.

The cab ride from NYC-Chinatown to Jersey City cost more than the bus ride down from Boston.

Hey, bugsybanana, when did you cut out?

Exercise yesterday, drawing today, I almost feel human again.

( Big Melorne picture, over 800 pixels wide )

I’ve also thrown together a quick perl script to build IMG tags with HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes, so I don’t have to keep going through BBEdit. The Image::Size module does all the heavy lifting. Here, in case you need something along those lines:

( Six-line perl script )

I ran into jcb coming out of Ground; he said I look like the weight’s pouring off me, and was surprised when I told him I’d been gaining the past few months. Testimony to the power of belly-tightening abdominal exercise, I guess. Or of wearing dark shirts with light pants.

Got a decent amount of sleep after barking_iguana drove me back from GC-in-E. I’d played a couple games of Fluxx (one of which I won without expecting to, which isn’t all that unusual in Fluxx) and one of Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers (which I also won without expecting to, which is more unusual, especially after the two large point-earners I’d been nursing all game were swiped from me at the end). Also, cake. And salmon. And smoochies.

akawil told me that ladymondegreen had called and said she and estheruth were at the Met, and would be going to see The Guitar Guy and then eating at Yuka; I said I’d join them at the restaurant, ’cause I wasn’t really interested in The Guitar Guy.

I needed some relaxation and sketch time today, so I went to Ground. Read part of a galley proof of a book about the Israel/Palestinian conflict that was sitting there. It was actually pretty good; I want to read more. Did a bit of sketching. Met jcb, showed him the preserved skeleton of an argument (and everyone who’s ever been in an online argument needs to follow that link), taught him how to make an HTML link, forgot to tell him about Xjournal. Then Akawil showed up and said no, they were going to Yuka and then to The Guitar Guy, so I joined him, and met Estheruth, and much fish was eaten, and it was good.

And then I tagged along for The Guitar Guy anyway, ’cause why not, even though he did the exact same set at last week. Including a parody of “Ghost Riders in the Sky” about yuppies. As if yuppie jokes were still relevant, and not something from twenty goddamn years ago. Dude, if you want to mock fashionable people from this decade, make fun of hipsters and metrosexuals, OK? Here, read Gawker for tips.

I made some brushpen sketches of people around us, and damn, I’m still really liking this brushpen. There’s some shadows-and-highlights stuff going on in the smallest of these sketches that I’ve been trying to pull off for a while, and I’m getting the hang of making a wider variety of marks with the brush.

( Sketches )

Then I just lay back and looked at the sky for a while. We were out on Pier 45, so I could see a whole lot more sky than I usually get to see in this area. Without any buildings to use as reference, the clouds looked maybe thirty feet away, like the ceiling of a large room. Every so often a helicopter or airplane would zip by, but instead of breaking the illusion they were drawn into it, seeming like tiny flying toys.

Then we stopped off at a coffee place for beverages and ice cream and ’80s music and bathroom access. Estheruth made me feel really old, like I would collapse into dust right that minute, by telling me what year she was born in, the same year I entered high school. But she’s pretty darn cool anyway.

Went up to the Hoboken Historical Museum today, for some shorts from the Hudson County film festival. I walked, which almost was a mistake, since Hoboken’s north-south numbered blocks are two or three times as long as the Manhattan blocks I use as internal calibration when judging how long it’ll take to walk some number of blocks. I got there about 15 minutes late, which turned out not to be a problem, since they were 15 minutes late in starting, almost as if they’d been waiting for me.

The two shorts I’d gone to see were Sparks — a short romantic comedy billed as involving the World Trade Center, when actually it was set in Jersey City and just had shots of the WTC to establish setting at the beginning and end, and it turned out I’d seen all but the first few seconds at 111 Open Studios last fall — and Popaganda, which I’d thought was a documentary about Ron English, but which turned out to be an eight-minute music-video-like trailer for the full 82-minute documentary. (There’s a one-minute QuickTime trailer hosted on English’s website, and “Read Between the Lies”, another video which uses footage from the short I saw, though it leaves out the naked woman splattering fake blood on a billboard of a giant coat-hanger.)

Among the other films they showed was one from 1906, a silent “Boy Detective” short (in which the protagonist appeared to be played by a woman) filmed a few blocks from the museum. I made a point of walking down that block on the way home, and it was still recognizable a century later.

I stopped at a Starbucks and finished off Mason & Dixon, which was becoming a bit of a chore towards the end. And I ate far, far too much junk over the course of the day. Y’know those new guacamole-flavored Doritos? Well, they taste a whole lot like Doritos, and not much like anything related to an avocado, but afterwards they leave a somewhat guacamolic aftertaste. I am ashamed to know this.