Day: January 31, 2024

on the corner, a break in the rain

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1st & A 012424

A rainy day, the showers stopped for a bit so I took a late lunch and drew the corner of A and 1st. I’ve drawn this corner a few times, they’ve painted this building a few times too. It’s some frat house, Zeta Psi. It’s a whole culture of American university life that we didn’t really have in British universities, not to this extent anyway. I suppose it’s important for stuff, parties on picnic day and beer pong and definitely no hazing. I’ve never been inside a frat house but I imagine it’s either like some gathering of the offspring of wealthy elites with secret codes and fridges of champagne and butlers, or it’s like the house in the Young Ones with bits of old mouldy fruit that talk to socks and Neil the Hippy burning his lentils while Rik the Peoples Poet plans the next protest against fascist pigs. The imagination is probably much better than the reality. You usually see all the new frat and sorority people out and about in large groups in Fall during their ‘Rush’, all dressed up in shiny clothes. As I sketched, the occasional jogger ran by, taking advantage of the break in the rain. I have not yet re-started my own running, I’ve been a little bit lazy on that front. I have the Davis Stampede coming up too, and need to prepare for it more. I had a lot on my mind this day, I often do, the world weighing down, hard to understand. One of the reasons I draw I think is to gain a tiny bit of control over the world around me, as if I can hold it in my hand, but maybe I’m over analyzing it, maybe I just like to draw because I really like drawing. This day was my son’s 16th birthday which was a scary thought too, and my own birthday is coming up soon which always makes me fill with a little dread. Every birthday I’ve had in my 30s and 40s has been spent over here, I’ve not had a birthday in England since my 20s, and those 20s seem like a very distant memory now. Ah well, we move along with time, it’s just not always that fun.

go tell it to the trees

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tree outside calif hall 012224

It’s still January, if you can believe it. It’s been a productive month sketching-wise. I wonder what the point of it all is, all this sketchbooking, but then I remember last January, all those trees that came down, it’s not like the trees got rebuilt or anything, they are gone forever. The big old trees have really interesting shapes and textures at this time if year, when they are free of all those leaves that give us much needed shade in the hot summer, now they open up to provide light. So I am continuing in my documentation of these large living beings, they are worth a look. This one is outside California Hall, the new lecture hall built a few years ago (it’s in the sketchbooks), with the outline of Kerr Hall in the background.  I keep thinking of that Pulp song “Trees” when sketching trees, and that album “We Love Life”, their last proper album as a band from back in 2001. That was quite a long time ago now, but it always makes me think of the year spent in Aix-en-Provence when I first heard it. I liked it a lot, but it’s more what the sound of the music brings me back to I guess, and I think of the chilly mornings walking my usual route to the Faculté des Lettres along streets with bare plane trees and the occasional dog poo, to teach my classes in English. The taste of a fresh poulet-frites for dinner. Completely different life, I can barely remember much of it now. Looking on Google Street View, it looks like the old ‘Fac’ has been demolished and replaced with a new modern building, which looks a lot nicer. No doubt if I’d been there, I would have drawn it all being knocked down and then being built. Looking at this sketch, that tall Kerr Hall behind was where my current department used to live before our new building (shared with Math) was built, just before I arrived. Time moves along, the trees just watch it all go by.