No one draws house parties like Charles Burns. They seem to channel not the event itself but rather its memory, darkened by time and intoxication, though somehow utterly legible in its emotional salvage. I’ve come to anticipate the formal hallmarks of Burns’s parties: shadows spilling across living rooms; beers held like life rafts; silhouettes crowding backlit doors; faces turning inward, or else away from their interlocutor, as if they’ve already run out of things to say; a pervading physical grotesquerie that could be mistaken for monstrosity if it wasn’t simply puberty.
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