#391: Going MAD in Mass, Live Sketching another Substack Event @ The Hotel Chelsea & More!

+ Oh, the humidity!, Sidewalk Stabbing, Morris says cheese!

I got to live sketch another great event for Substack Reads last night at the iconic Hotel Chelsea

I walked into the Piano Room of the iconic Hotel Chelsea last night to find the brilliant Mary Gaitskill and Tavi Gevinson — subscribe to Tavi’s Substack at TGmail and Mary’s at Mary Gaitskill.

See today’s Sketchbook for a sneak peek of this week’s paid post. If you want to see it before Friday, you can upgrade now.

“Oh, the humidity!”

…from a sweltering sidewalk in Manhattan. I hope you’re having a cool week!

When I call my mum back in Australia, she’s telling me about how freezing it is while my phone is melting onto my ear and the soles of my shoe are liquefying into the sidewalk. In my hometown of Perth in Western Australia, it’s coming into a particularly bitter winter. But to be fair, it never really gets *that* cold there… My phone blares with daily heat advisory warnings and air quality alerts, while they figure out how to deal with the kind of cold New Yorkers now, get for most of Spring. The coldest temperature ever recorded in Perth was when I was 21: it got down to −0.7 °C (30.7F, for those of you who still refuse to use logic to measure temperature.) Still, New Yorkers are the world champs at complaining about the weather…

The (not-so) Great Debate

Tonight will see Trump and Biden stand for a rematch of their 2020 debates, all of which were basically pointless. When Scott and I did this poster for the New Yorker back in 2020, we were told in the comments by shrieking alarmists that the NYer were “Endangering democracy itself” by running this cartoon and daring to make one soft jab at Biden (which was really a jab at Trump’s dopey nickname for Biden). Anyway… I hope it does something to move the needle, but I’m not holding my breath.

Growing up, the Usual Gang of Idiots were the demigods in my comedic Pantheon; The show at the Norman Rockwell Museum is a perfectly curated collection of seven decades of their misdeeds. Click below to read more:

This week’s Sketchbook is from live sketching an event for Tavi Gevinson and Mary Gaitskill at the Hotel Chelsea this week. Substack hosted the event and had me scribble some of the magic.

The magical Emma Gannon

Special guest Tavi Gevinson

While I do love the convenience of an iPad/Wacom/Xenselabs tablet… I can’t ever replicate the joy of using analog tools. I’m launching a new Substack called “Process Junkie” to explore all of the joys of the Process of making art. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, you can sign up here.