This is the pool at our apartment complex here in Davis. I never go there. My mum however is visiting from England, and was sat out there catching some of the unending sunshine that we get here in California, so I joined her and sketched some of the pool area (after watching the FA Cup final played out in BBC website updates). This is what where I live looks like.
#5 of 30. This series is a bit like a mixtape. What goes before and after what is of utter importance. Each mixtape I made was like a story, a soundtrack to my bus journey. I had to get it just right. I still have some of my favourite mixes, and they are perfect to this day. I still half expect some songs, when listening to them on CD or wherever, to cut off just at that point in the riff, just like they do on the tape. Getting the song to begin on the right part of the cassette too, that was a trick. Don’t start recording when it’s that little plastic strip before the tape starts. I used to record from old vinyl at first, big headphones on, the scratchy sound really coming through. From time to time it would be tape to tape, with one of those twin tape decks nobody has any more (I never owned albums on cassette, though – how uncool and against the point! – but I would often tape songs from mixtapes people gave me, oh such quality). Then of course my mixtapes were recorded from CD, sat around a little portable CD player, piles of CD cases around me, notebook in hand, calculating song run-times and moods. On a mixtape, I tended to listen to it all, not just skip through to the songs I knew (like on a mix-CD), so it would have to be done right. Even the decoration of the cassette itself, right down to the writing on the case, had to be just so. Sometimes I would make sure there were just as many songs on each side as would fit on those little lined covers, so you wouldn’t have to look inside the case for the last song. I was a perfectionist.
It seems incredible that the mixtape is now a nostalgia item.
Number 4 in a series. I’ve never liked spiders. Back in junior school this was commonly known, and hilarious people would come up to me with enclosed hands pretending they had spiders to throw at me, claiming to be black widows (really common in north London schools), but their hands were empty, and I would flinch. Of course I’m fascinated by them. There are always the patronising comments, ‘oh leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone’ (I do leave them alone, but they go and build big webs around my back door), ‘they’re more scared of you etc’ (ditto), and those that say ‘oh you should do this or that to cure you of your fear’, but the thing is, fear is nature’s way of saying ‘stay away from the little multi-legged multi-eyed elusive poisonous bugger in the corner’, so I’m glad I have it. I have a toddler, I don’t need black widows crawling about. I do very well to deny their existence, but like Mad-Eye Moody I’m constantly vigilant. And that ‘spider killer’ spray doesn’t work, not at all. They just stand there laughing at me going, oh this smells nice, got any more? Rolled up newspaper on standby. That and a stiff drink (preferably a cup of tea).
Surreal moment this morning: I was mentioned on Fox News! They showed one of my sketches of Sacramento, drawn over two years ago with pen and watercolour pencils (see right), on the local morning news during a piece about Sac’s Tower Bridge. I thought that was pretty cool, and very nice
of the presenter Paul Robins to give me a mention. (I don’t mind that it’s Fox; next: the Daily Mail!). I remember drawing this (seems like forever ago), I like this bridge but wasn’t able to do it justice before but I did like this sketch. This has reminded me, I think it’s about time I went and sketched it again. It’s nice by the River.
Speaking of mentions, I forgot to say that I had a drawing – one of my ‘You See, Davis’ pieces – published in the local Davis radio station KDVS’s magazine, KDViations, this quarter, for their fund-raising issue. It didn’t print too well though, I think the resolution I gave them was too low.
I also forgot to report (since we’re talking media mentions) that I was featured in last month’s excellent Ripperologist magazine, their special 100th edition. It’s the premier journal – online only – for researchers of Jack the Ripper, a subject I know only the general details of (he killed girls, right?). But I did a drawing of the infamous Ten Bells pub a while back, which was also published in the London Walks book (for the Jack the Ripper section), and because the East End’s an old haunt of mine, I had the wonderful honour of appearing in their special edition alongside features of other talented Ripper-themed artists. Cool, huh!!
Memorial Day. Got out on the bicycle tonight after a trying day, and rode about enjoying the evening warmth. Stopped for a cold beer in downtown Davis, where I sat outside and drew the scene opposite me. And actually included cars! This is important. A couple of years ago I sat in this very spot and drew this very same scene, and purposely left a big space where the carwas, because I don’t really like drawing cars (unless it’s a really cool car, and that is the main thing I’m drawing). And then I went and spilled my little water jar all over my sketchbook. You’ve never seen my hand move so fast. Thankfully nothing was damaged – all is well. Thankfully I live in a dry part of the planet and so didn’t have soggy book syndrome.
Anyway the previous drawing is below. Note how there’s a big tree whose trunk begins bottom right. That tree is sadly gone now. It was enormous, but they chopped it down because it was threatening to fall over and crush you puny humans.
Part 3, of 30. I do actually wear my jumpers in the winter, and my scarves. No, I’ve never been a hot weather person. I do like it when it’s sunny, everything looks more lovely, and you get great shadows on paths and buildings which are too irresistable not to draw. But I don’t like actually being in the sun. I could never lie on the beach waiting for a sun-tan. I’m too pale and freckly, and my eyes too sensitive. When I was a kid, we would holiday in Spain; I would dash from shadow to shadow, and still somehow end up in agonising pain with skin the colour of a lobster.
See, the irony is now that I live in California I don’t actually have to worry about it. In England, you always felt guilty if it was sunny, felt like you had to go outside because tomorrow it might rain, and it might not be sunny again – this one day might just be our summer. Here, if it’s sunny in May it’ll be sunny until November. You can stay inside and out of the heat (very wise), and enjoy the sunshine in your own way (I watch it on the internet, personally). When I lived in Aix, in the South of France, you could always tell where the English lived because their window-shutters would be open. The Provencals on the other hand, they knew to keep them closed, lest the sun get in and turn their apartment into an oven. I made that mistake, and learnt fast. I recall spending several nights sleeping out on the balcony (and fending off pigeons) because it was too hot inside.
The other irony is that nowadays I feel guilty when it rains. I feel like I should be outside getting drenched, like in the old days. Things really are messed up.
Part two of the series, as-yet-unnamed. A name will come (answers on a postcard). So, coffee: I don’t drink the stuff. Can’t stand it. Funny enough I like eating chocolate covered coffee beans (many years ago I worked at Thornton’s Chocolates, in a Galaxy far far away). The whole coffee shop thing, that whole culture, the whole ritual of the big coffee cup in the morning, the smell of it wafting across the office block from cubicle to cubicle, the whole ‘don’t talk to me till I’ve had my coffee’ joke boring people like to have on little signs at their desk, the whole roasted java or colombian blend or rain forest bark weed or whatever they call it, all of that just passed me by. I’m not in the club. I was I’m sure comprehensively and definitively put off by those awful Gold Blend adverts in the late 80s, the ones with that guy out of Buffy (who was later the Prime Minister on Little Britain). Well that and the taste. I am a cuppa tea guy. You can trust a cuppa tea (when I make it, anyhow). Don’t give me infusions and green tea and peach tea and rain forest bark weed tea, just regular PG tips style, ‘ave it, don’t mess about. English greasy spoon cafe. Barry’s Irish tea too, the best teabags.
Funny enough though, I used to work at a coffee shop. At an Asda supermarket, even longer ago. Maybe that story will be a later entry in this series.
Another lunchtime sketch (with purple micron), very quiet on campus right now, and I sat outside the Silo drawing bicycles and fart-boards. Oops, mis-spelling there, I mean frat-boards of course (are they even called that?). They look like a gang. I imagine the frat boards marching animated across campus, independently, gathering to harass bikes. A lot of them seem to be advertising Rush, presumably not a celebration of Ian Rush, though it would be more interesting. Ian Rush, he was great, he drank milk so that he’d be good enough not to play for Accrington Stanley. Funny fact, my A-level history teacher, a Welsh guy, left his teaching job to go and tour with his band who were called, of all things, Ian Rush. They sang in Welsh, and presumably scored a lot too.
Sunday sees the end of the 2008-09 English Premier League Season. Manchester United have already snatched a third successive title, so the real focus is at the table’s foot, where Newcastle, Hull and Sunderland are fighting for survival, with the other North-eastern club Middlesbrough already all but down. Mystic Pete assures me that Hull, who are playing Man U, will go down (as you know, I am Mystic Pete’s representative on Earth, and he is seldom wrong, well, sometimes, well, all the time), but in many ways I’d prefer Newcastle to drop. Not that I have anything against them, if anything I feel great pity for Newcastle: not many big teams make a bigger balls-up of things and go through managers than my beloved Spurs, but Newcastle really teach us a lesson. It’s as if the people running the club want them to go down. It reminds me of the Eurosong organizers in that episode of Father Ted, who let Ted and Dougal’s “My Lovely Horse” win. My Lovely Horse, running around in the field… (um, don’t tell Michael Owen)
As for Spurs, well we got out of that battle a while ago, and how! Now we’re a win away from getting into the Europa Cup (that’s the UEFA Cup; as Alan Partridge would say, “they’ve rebranded it you fool!”) which we purposely got knocked out of this season, to give us a better chance of getting back into it next year. Speaking of Europe, Manchester United face Barcelona in the Champion’s League final on Wednesday in what should be a classic. A phrase which guarantees it will be a 120 minute 0-0 affair ending in tired overpaid stars tapping in penalties. Perhaps we’ll be surprised.
The season finale I’m following most closely however is that in France. When we lived in Aix, in 2002, Olympique Lyonnaise won the title for the first time ever, and we were all pleased. They have won it every year since, totally dominating. This year, however, they’ve slipped up and allowed Bordeaux and Marseille to slug it out. As a Marseille fan I’m delighted, (though Pierre Mystique tells me that les Girondins will break OM hearts), but I just hope this ushers in a new era of competitiveness in French Football.
This time of year though is the time when new football shirts come out to play, and debates rage on football shirt websites (such as football shirt culture, or football-shirts.co.uk) about the lame unimaginativeness of Nike’s templates or the dread felt by fans of teams who have Puma that their new kit will also be in their new cheap wierd chevron style (that’s my concern for the upcoming Tottenham kit anyhow; Puma make nice trainers, but atrocious football kits). Kit companies have taken to releasing ‘leaked images’ of fake kits, to throw off the counterfeiters; Umbro did so with the new England kit. And of course, South American and lower-league English teams are still using female models to launch their new shirts (many of whom wear them much more elegantly than the average beer-and-pie-guzzling footy fan would), but this year’s prize for gratuitous use of female model goes to Northern Ireland’s Linfield. Their new Umbro away kit apparently features some sort of thong. That makes a change; most of the new kits this year are just pants.
I remember drawing this building, Davis Community Church, three years ago, and thinking, I don’t like this drawing much. Its the colours. I finally got round to drawing it again, and while i prefer this I still don’t like the colours much. So I’ve decided it’s not me, it’s the building, it’s the wrong colour. I might write to them and ask them to paint it something else, pink or white or something. I edited out the homeless person who was ambling about the entrance with a trolley, mainly because she wouldn’t stand still but kept wandering off yelling something like ‘get out of my head’. I also edited out the big SUVs parked outside. While I was drawing another one pulled right up and parked in front of me, and out stepped JR Ewing, or his double. I’m surprised I saw any of the church. I actually made most of it up.
petescully 