maybe it’s because i’m a londoner

Earlier this month I officially became a published illustrator, and this week I finally received my copy of London Walks – London Stories! I was excited to receive it, and it’s quite the book; a shame I’m not in London, to walk around with it and learn a few new things. As a devout though exiled London Walks - London StoriesLondoner, and a former tour guide and London historian myself, to be asked to illustrate a book about my home city written by the guides to whom I always revered (the blue-badge London Walks folk), well an absolute honour to say the least.

One of the funny things, my name appears on the inside title page just above Rick Steves, the celebrated PBS travel guy, who wrote the foreword. Surreal! The book will be out here in the US on April 28 (I found out on amazon). The drawings have already been appearing on the London Walks leaflets you get in all the tourist places in London, in minute form, but here is how they look now:

london walks page

 I haven’t read it all yet, so I’m off to do so.

and a happy new year

humpty dumpty

humpty dumpty

This is what I looked like on my first ever New Year’s Eve. Rather the lump I was. This New Year’s Eve, 32 years later, I look a bit more rough around the edges, but that is because we just arrived back from London, and a long and tiring journey it was. Gets more difficult every time. It is my son’s first New Year also, but he is thankfully fast asleep. I should be able to post a bit more regularly now I’m back in the US, after I’ve scanned the rest of my drawings from London and Belgium, but in the meantime enjoy your parties and your fireworks, I hope you all had an excellent Christmas, and I wish you a happy 2009. I’m off to bed.

the day after the revolution

all change

My new post on urban sketchers – that is turning into a great and very productive website.

Today is Guy Fawkes Night in Britain, but not here (and who would want to be seen to be associating with – palling around? – terrorists who target their own country, like Guy Fawkes, anyway..?). No, today is the day after the most important US election in recent memory. Oh yes, we happy, we happy! Can’t quite describe it. Best decision not only for America, but for the world.

But I’m very unhappy about California voting Yes on Prop 8 – the proposition that bans gay marriages in the state constitution by ensuring that it can only be between a man and a woman. The way that campaign was run, as if by having gay marriage your kids were somehow in danger, was offensive beyond belief, and was heavily supported and funded by the Mormon church in Utah, out of the state (dudes, come on, not the ones to lecture californians about marriage).  I fail to see how two gay people being married hurts anybody else, or damages the sanctity of marriage, nor how it threatens the building blocks of society (it only really threatens the blockheads of society) – do they wish then to ban divorce? ‘Protect marriage’ they say – hey guess what folks, men can still marry women if gay marriage exists! Are they hoping then that children will not know about gay people at all now that they officially can’t get married? Are they hoping that by keeping homosexuals as second class citizens that children who may have grown up gay might now be saved? Are they hoping that gay people will now simply go away? Bigotry and discrimination. Why not go further and ban gay people from voting, in case their pro-gay votes damage the electoral system (please, no swing-state jokes)? Perhaps they are worried that if two men can marry each other, the system of marriage and its inherent tax and legal status benefits will be exploited to the point where it becomes a mockery. So, then, such scam or sham marriages never happen between a man and a woman? Complete lunacy.

And while out of state religious groups funded the Yes vote, it was not really about religion, or schools. A great many religious organizations opposed Prop 8, as did the California Teacher’s Association. Oh well, vote lost, now for the legal battles and appeals.

Maybe one day we’ll have a gay president. Hah, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if we already have had one, at some point in history. Personally, I’d like to see an atheist president one day too. It’s funny, but in the system which cherishes separation of church and state, that option seems the most unlikely.

Anyway…the drawing, today, at the new shiny Silo bus terminal. That Sepia micron 05 again. I quite like it. Wonder how long it will last.

president obama!!!

8:15pm: President Barack Obama! Phew, what a relief. And I happened to switch on FOX News (which i never do) at 8pm, at the moment they gave the announcement – I’m so glad I did, their announcement was very glum! “Barack Obama is President. It’s Over.” McCain is conceding as I write. And the crowd are booing as he says he congratulated Obama. Get over it, Republicans. Well done Obama! 

Now, please, let’s forget all this Joe the Plumber nonsense.

urban sketchers of the world unite

I love cities, I love drawing in cities, and so this is right up my street, and yours too. A new website will be officially launching on November 1: urbansketchers.com. Founded by Seattle-based illustrator Gabi Campanario, it will feature the drawings of a number of excellent sketchblogging artists from cities on four (so far) continents. I am pleased to announce that I am the correspondent for Davis, and I’m really looking forward to contributing to this exciting project. The other artists involved have some incredible work, some of which I’m familiar with, and many whose work is new to me (and it is very inspiring stuff!). I love that there are so many different ways of interpreting our cities, so I’m looking forward to learning a few new styles. Check it out, bookmark it, tell your friends, get a sketchbook, go outside, draw stuff. Now form a band.

(Now, of course, I have to try to make Davis look ‘urban’…)

*

Tomorrow, I’ll be off to San Francisco for some very urban sketching down in the Mission, for the 20th Worldwide Sketch Crawl. My sketching stool is being stitched together, I’m testing out a new paintbox, and leaving room inside me for burritos. The Sketchcrawl is happening all over the world, so check out the forum to see if any other sketchers are getting out and about in your city. And yes, this time there’s one happening in London too (on the South Bank from Borough, the same route Simon and I did last year for the Sketchcrawl).

thro’ each charter’d street

Eagle-eyed visitors to London can see my drawings on the latest info-packed leaflets for London Walks (see walks.com), which you can pick up in any tourist-area pub in central London. They’re the oldest walking tour company in London, and I’ve provided the illustrations for their forthcoming book (all will be revealed). My mum and my sister came across the leaflet (see left) while out one day by the Thames, and mailed it out to me. The drawings are pretty small, but then I do draw pretty small.

Several years ago, I used to be a tourguide myself on the streets of London, mostly as an open-top bus tourguide for the Big Bus Company, but I did a few long walking tours as well. Those buses, now that was an education in tenacity, let me tell you. When it’s pissing with rain, the microphone has stopped working so you have to shout above the London noise, when you’re stuck in thick traffic on Bayswater or scrambling round corners in Mayfair while being attacked by trees (I was actually knocked down the stairs by a tree once; I carried on speaking, “…and on your right, that’s where the Queen was born…”), being verbally abused by cab-drivers and asked strange questions by tourists (“why is it called snappy snaps?”) or being corrected on the tiniest details by smug locals (and subsequently smirked at for correcting their correction, none more smug and local than I), and making Americans laugh with a hilarious spontaneous-sounding joke I’d actually been told by another American on the previous tour, oh I enjoyed those days a lot, and I really learnt a lot. I actually loved tourguiding in London almost as much as I love drawing, so it’s a fitting pleasure that I’m illustrating this new book by these particular tourguides who, I’m told, really know their stuff.

i’ve got a pocket full of pretty green

So the 700 billion dollar bail-out was passed. That is an absolutely incredible amount of money. Seems like even more considering nobody else has any. My own bank, Washington Mutual, went under – biggest bank to collapse in this country since the Great Depression. I loved the way that, when the House republicans voted down the bill, they actually blamed Nancy Pelosi and the democrats for making them vote that way. Incredible. But the bail-out has passed, though as Bush warns, we’re still up shit creek.  This economy, so long left to bailed outits own devices and unregulated, is in free fall. Thanks President Bush!! Thanks a lot!! Just when you thought the mess of Iraq would be your legacy, or your utter mishandling of Hurrican Katrina, your presiding over the biggest economic collapse in decades comes along and trumps everything. Well done! Probably another reason why a failed businessman should never have been put in charge of the country.

Even your own party’s candidates, though they show no sign of actually changing any of your policies or doing things any differently from you, are denying any knowledge of you. I actually felt a bit sorry for you during the VP debate the other night, the way Sarah Palin seemed to whitewash you, the way she shot down Joe Biden every time he dared mention the many mistakes of your administration – seriously, who on earth was she kidding with all that “you’re just looking backwards” and “say it aint so, Joe” bullshit?

Oh dear. We had one unqualified idiot run the country, now we have this vacuous Palin, one heartbeat and a stolen election away from the government. They are saying that, well, she didn’t lose the debate, because she didn’t make any ridiculous mistakes like she did in the interviews. (By the way, are we going to see a spate of ‘Palinisms’ desk-top calendars now?) Debate? She answered no questons, reeled off a series of monologues that had little or nothing to do with the topic at hand, droned on and on (the palin-drone) about her family as if the simple fact she comes from a family makes her electable (please! please! anybody can go onstage and say that folksy rubbish, it doesn’t mean they should hold executive power!), and threw out a few of those stupid ‘this will get talked about’ buzzwords such as ‘Joe sixpack’ (seriously, what on earth?), ‘doggone’ and the aforementioned ‘say it aint so, Joe’ which must have taken the republican campaign writers hours to come up with, only for her to fluff it. Fluff. So much fluff. And I’m sick of the constant decription of McCain as a Maverick, like it’s a good thing – you never know what irresponsible thing he’ll do net. She offered no substance whatsoever. Anyone or anything she didn’t like was dismissed as an ‘east coast elitist’, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. She wants to change Washington? How exactly? She showed she has absolutely no regard for Senators, or the Senate – does she then have no regard for the American system of democracy? The talk of her ‘loyalty tests’ back in Alaska when she became governor, and even when she became mayor of Whassitcalled, are pretty bloody sinister if you ask me – will she insist we all take such loyalty tests? I tell you what, all of the things we hear about her, the troopergate inquiry, the links to that pro-Alaskan independence party, if any of this had been the case with the democratic candidates they would already have been blown out of the water by the media.  

Case in point: John McCain. First he says the fundamentals of the economy are strong, then says the opposite, then says he was talking about the American workforce (the businesses who ship jobs overseas don’t agree, and you made it clear in your acceptance speech that you support those businesses and their outsourcing practices when slagging off Obama for wanting to penalize them). Then he said he wasn’t going to attend the debate, and then he was. He said he was dead against the bail-out (probably because, being Bush’s idea, he should be against it, just because), then decided he was for the bail-out… why is the word “flip-flop” not being bandied around every time his name is mentioned? Because, during the last election, that was the word the media most commonly associated with John Kerry (rather than ‘war hero’), and it undermined his whole campaign. The McCain/Palin ticket appears to be made up of the cast of Rainbow (specifically Bungle and Zippy – we don’t talk about George any more), surely a campaign this bad cannot hope to win, and yet… Bush won the last two elections, didn’t he?

three years across the pond

Tomorrow, I will have been living in America for exactly three years. Just wanted to note. It was, I won’t pretend, a shock of a move at first, leaving behind family and friends (and match of the day), but I think I’ve kept busy. I wrote a weekly column on my old blog called “from the us of eh”, describing my initial thoughts about this new place I lived in. I draw those thoughts now, mostly, non-verbally.

You can read them all here: “from the US of eh”.

Here’s to more years (depending on the outcome of Nov 4, of course).

say your prayers

An attempt at Barack Obama (but looks a little like Les Ferdinand). Funny, Tony Blair was on John Stewart’s show this week because he’s now teaching at Yale on faith and globalization and he mentioned about how it’s not quite proper for British PMs to talk about their religion, how in the UK it’s a much more personal thing, and yet out here the Pres has to be seen to be worshipping God on every corner (well, let’s face it, it’s to win votes in the Bible Belt).

barry o'bama

That said, Blair could only convert to Catholicism after leaving office, because to do so while in Downing Street would have been a huge political no-no (even now they are still quite sceptical of Catholics in the UK, oh how things have changed since 1688).  Here, however, for all their ‘separation of church and state’ affectations, and for all their ‘freedom of religion’ founding ideals, it is pretty much a given that an atheist will never be President (unless, perhaps, someone chose a ‘token’ atheist as their running-mate to win the God Less America vote). Barack Obama is a Christian – yet it seems people are not convinced that he isn’t a Muslim: just the other day, on NPR, a woman said that she thought he was a secret Muslim, giving her justification as she “just didn’t trust him”. Opinion polls equal democracy here, by the way (to quote Dan Bern). But, what if he were, would it matter? He’d still believe fervently in God after all, same as you Governor Palin. If his faith is the issue, that would clearly not be in question, and if the system the US has is designed such that religion is kept separate from political issues, then again it wouldn’t matter if he worshipped Papa Smurf or Gargamel, it wouldn’t affect his foreign policy. Unless, of course, you actually believe it should. Unfortunately it appears so many do.

Incidentally, came across this blog entry just now, a guy in Alaska who staged a one-man protest against Sarah Palin by simply sitting outside the Alaska governor’s mansion with the sign “Palin Lies” (which, it is becoming increasingly apparent, she certainly does, especially with regards to earmarks). Fair play to the man; unless he means Michael Palin? “No, the parrot’s not dead, he’s just stunned”.

Anyway, that’s my religio-political blogging for the month (and I write this wearing a Celtic shirt). If you want me, I’ll be putting lipstick on pigs to see if they really are still pigs. I don’t know what it means but apparently it’s popular.