Lunch at Saltbox Seafood – M had the mussel curry & it smelled amazing. I will be really sad when Ricky decides to go ahead & make the leap to a bigger space, one that isn’t literally a block from my house.
We ran errands all afternoon. Went to Atomic Empire for the first time in a while. The board-game selection is yet still bigger than its already sprawling former self. I have to assume that a lot of them are pretty meh – but which ones? Wound up just getting yet-another-Ticket to Ride-expansion map.
There was a sale on books so I picked up the fairly recent D&Q reprint of Chester Brown’s “The Playboy.” I go back quite a ways with Chester – I stumbled across Ed the Happy Clown in college, probably not long after it was published, and read Yummy Fur for a while before I started forgetting to seek it out. I still wish someone would collect all of his Bible stuff into a book-length reprint.
His experience with sexuality is so completely divorced from my own. His frankness – here and in Paying For It – is so matter-of-fact and, I dunno, almost welcoming? And then you get to his insane end-notes & the vibe shifts, sometimes slightly, sometimes not so slightly. This is more true of Paying For It than this one, though.
We had tickets to the Duke Performances Sam Green + yMusic show. I don’t remember what the blurb in the initial DP catalog said, and I’m not sure that I read it anyway – in any case, all I really knew we were getting was some kind of multimedia film + live accompaniment thing.
What we got was a wonderfully engaging meditation on World Records, as tracked by Guinness, focused on examining the line between those that are voluntary achievements (World’s Longest Fingernails) vs. those that just happen to people (World’s Tallest Man).
It was part lecture, part recital, part documentary film. In retrospect, had it been flattened into a “normal” documentary film it would have been every bit as compelling, but the “liveness” of it was still a lot of fun.
Green was using a presentation remote to advance & trigger stuff, which led me to wonder whether the whole thing was just a big Powerpoint/Keynote presentation, or if it was something more custom or more industrial-strength.