DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — In the summer of 1996 Paramount/Dreamworks released the asteroid pic Deep Impact and just a month or so later Touchstone/Disney followed up with Armageddon. Two asteroid movies in a summer. Odd. This past summer the same sort of thing happened with The Illusionist and The Prestige, two magician movies that hit close together. Again, odd.

But neither of those examples has anything on Art Walk's example of coincidence last night. There were two shows of Etch A Sketch art. I'll say that again: not one, but two Etch A Sketch shows.

Niche.LA, in its last combined video/wall art show (the space will be exclusively video in the future) was showing Christoph Brown and his speedy mini Etch A Sketch work. Christoph is the (self-proclaimed?) world's faster "Etch A Sketcher" and was in attendance doing portraits and showing videos of his works put to music.

Down the street at Infusion Gallery was a show of works by Kevin E. Davis titled "Etch A Sketch: Thinking inside the box." Kevin's works were mostly on full-sized Etch A Sketch "canvases", with a few minis and novelty designs thrown in for good measure.

Christoph commented that this coincidence might have to end with a Michael Jackson style Etch-off, but sadly I'm pretty sure that didn't happen.