It would have been cooler if it had been Order 66, Sith fans! I needed to draw at the Silo yesterday lunchtime, but could not face drawing another picture of the Silo, so I drew my Taco Bell receipt.
so let’s see your kit for games
#27 of 30. Some of you know my love for football shirts (or soccer uniforms, if you prefer). I’m a bit of a connoisseur, an enthusiast. Not really a collector, but I have a few. I have a Spurs away kit from the early 90s which is signed by Klinsmann, Sheringham, Anderton, Ardiles, and the rest. I do wear my tops at weekends sometimes, but all that static polyester turns me into a walking van de graaf generator.
I’ve wanted to have a chat – my annual chat, for sure – about this season’s footy kits. All summer I checked daily the following sites, footballshirtculture.com and football-shirts.co.uk, for news on every new shirt release around the world. As always, the South American and smaller British clubs choose practically naked women to promote their tops (almost oxymoronic there); see Linfield’s away kit if you don’t believe me. Some kits this year have been nice – England’s new tailored home kit is lovely, and is the first England kit I’d even consider buying. I’m incredibly envious of Arsenal’s two new away shirts. But there have once more been a slew of lame blah-blah kits this year, with few really original designs for clubs, particularly from the larger companies such as Nike and Puma. Oh, Puma – will I ever like a Puma kit? It’s funny, because the answer to that is yes – I will always like the previous one better than the new one, because they are getting worse. The current windscreen-wipers /chevron template they are overusing has produced some horrific results, but none more ghastly than Tottenham’s current home kit. Awful sponsor aside, the introduction of yellow streaks (cue jokes all over N5, “what do you mean ‘introduction'”, etc) to produce this monstrosity means I’ll be waiting another year for a home kit I might want. It’s not just Puma though – even Adidas have gone for the shock factor with Newcastle’s new yellow-and-custard striped away shirt. Poor Newcastle – they get relegated, and are then told to wear that shirt in front of thousands – okay, hundreds – of people.
But the foulest kit, the most shocking kit of all time perhaps, even more so than Arsenal’s early 90s away kit, has to be Partick Thistle’s new away kit, surely done as a bet, a pink/grey/white camouflage kit. It just has to be a joke. It’s chavalicious. And Puma again.
You can see many of the best and worst kits of all time at perhaps my favourite site on the net: historical football kits. The research these guys have done at HFK is beyond phenomenal, showing images of shirts from all years of English and Scottish football. Its readers help out by forwarding any information they may have; I once sent them a photo I’d found of the Spurs laundry-lady hanging out kits in the mid-30s, showing that we wore navy and white hoops away. Highly exciting stuff for the football kit historian!
And so there you have it, my football kit obsession. It’s funny really, because apart from the beloved adidas trainers, I actually really hate most sportswear.
maffs
Summer’s not finished with us yet, though the Fall presses its nose against the window and demands an earlier opening time. It was over a hundred degrees again on 9-11, and I took a lunchbreak from the busy-ness and drew the outside of work, and not for the first time. Purple Micron. The Math Science Building. I still, even after four years in America, feel funny calling it ‘Math’. To me, and other UKsiders, it’s ‘Maths’, or more properly ‘Maffs’.
you illuminate my darkest corner
I went downtown on Thursday, and stopped off for a big beer at little prague, and as always drew a picture, to unwind. I unwound. Felt better for unwinding. This is a lamp-post at the end of the bar. It may lead into Narnia.
A B C, easy as 1 2 3
Drew this one a couple of weeks ago and forgot to post. This is a typical scene in Davis. Guilbert House on A Street. And that is ‘A’ Street, not ‘a street’. These imaginitively titled streets so many American towns have; seriously, all those A, B, C, D, etc, and 1st, 2nd, 3rd…come on, they could be anywhere, let’s have some soul, something with spirit of place. They are just points on a grid, and look bad on street signs. A, B, C, they feel like placeholders rather than names, as though the town planners when dreaming up their grids thought, we’ll come back to those. Well, A follows B, etc so surely that makes it easier to find yourself if lost? Except in Davis, between A and B is ‘University St’, so that doesn’t work. Ok, so keep the alphabet, well how about we rename (as some cities do, such as San Francisco) those streets so they run alphabetically? And we could have them themed with things relevant to Davis, a college town, they could be named after subjects taught there, so we’d have Applied Math St, Biophysics St, Chemistry St, Drama St, Electrical Engineering St… If you’d rather see the letters remain, and I don’t doubt people are very attached to their lettered streets, then we could make it more academic, so you’d have A+ St, A St, A- St, B+ St, until you get F St, which is just before U St. You don’t want to live on U St.
Then we have the First, Second, Third Streets, well they sound remarkably like grades you get at British universities, so we could Americanize them a little and have them on a US scale of four, so First St would be 4.0 St, then 3.9 St, etc etc. Alternatively, name them after Amendments to the US Constitiution, so First St becomes ‘Free Speech St’, then ‘Bear Arms St’, then ‘Don’t Quarter Soldiers in Peacetime St’, and so on. Let’s face it, a lot of people would be lost after streets one and two. Imagine telling someone you live on the corner of Film Studies and Revision of Presidential Election Procedures. They’d never come visit.
newspaper taxis appear on the shore
It was 9-9-9 a couple of days ago, and passed without much notice (a good thing). I remember when it was 6-6-6 a few years ago. Next year we’ll have 10-10-10 and then 11-11-11 and 12-12-12 and then we can go back to having a normal life and not caring about unusual dates. Today of course is 9-11, and is called so even in the UK (where 9-11 would otherwise be the 9th of November). Here are some newspaper boxes I drew on 9-9-9, on a lunchtime in downtown Davis. No stool, I sat on the sidewalk (oops, I mean the pavement), as people passed by. These things are so American, these newspaper boxes, the make me think of old films, yellow taxis, steam coming out of the street, hot dog stands (that’ll be New York then). This however is just Davis, but it’s still America, small-town America. Small-ish.
Also posted at Urban Sketchers.
dog bless
#26 in a series of 30. Dogs. Not my thing. I’m just not that into them. People – and not smart people – love to think the world is divided into ‘dog people’ and ‘cat people’, elvis people and beatles people, lib’rals and cons’rvatives, celtic and rangers, tea and coffee. And it’s not. I don’t even like the whole pigeonholing thing. I happen to like cats a lot though. And tea, and lib’rals, and the beatles and celtic, but you know what I mean. And then people act as though liking both cats and dogs (as many do) is a novel and radical buck of the trend. It isn’t. They’re both animals, they both poo on the carpet. Personally I love tortoises. They don’t leave hair on your best black clothes.
So in this drawing there is a toy dog. It’s not mine, and no I’m not scared of it. There is also a lead, to continue the dog theme. Ok it’s a power cable type of lead but you know what I mean.
For me however, Dog People has another meaning. When I lived in Aix-en-Provence, the centre-ville had a small but prominent population of ‘dog people’, scruffy ‘swampy’ types who would hang about the fountainsides beating drums and smoking and letting their many dogs, possibly their daemons, chase each other around the town squares. The Dog People. Everyone knew them.
I like that phrase though, ‘let sleeping dogs lie’. It’s true, too. We had a dog when i was younger (‘Soppydog’) and it used to tell some whoppers in its sleep.
its sculptor well those passions read
#25 of 30. Nearly there folks! Yes this is lego. Baby-lego. Since my son got them, I have regained my incredible lego building skills. I’m not an architect, but I am certainly a legotect, and can build any manner of planes, trains and space-rockets with the stuff.
The British Museum…Yes, I did a bit of Interactive Theatre years ago, I was really into it, running some performance-and-games-based workshops, using the methods of Ali Campbell, the brilliant guy who taught me, and Augusto Boal, the brilliant guy who taught him (and father of the art). It’s something I was good at, but never did get back into. Anyhow, the Hidden Histories project was a major eye-opener; a series of workshops with inspirational performers from Shape Arts, a disability arts organisation in London, culminating in an abstract promenade performance among the statues, ruins and spectators of the Greek rooms in the British Museum. We were told (and it might even be true) that it was one of the first (if not the first) time the British Museum had been used to host performance art. It was themed around the histories that are hidden not only in the statues and stones, but also in the people you pass every day, able-bodied and disabled. One thing I learnt was that a lot of the people we were calling disabled were a great deal more able in so many ways than most able-bodied people. I was involved with a few other projects with the Shape performers but this one was the most educational, and most fun.
As did the others, I kept a journal to document the process – not full of the sort of drawings I do now, but cartoony diagrammy stuff, notes, quotes, scribbles, quibbles. The journals were in fact displayed at the British Museum on the days of the performances, down in the education centre. I even made little plasticine figures to represent one segment of the performance. I recall, in the wine reception after the main show (and the press were there), a woman was browsing the journals and was spending a lot of time looking at my one, and she asked me (not knowing it was mine) how old the children were that made these. “Well that child was twenty-five,” I said. I was elated.
look into my eyes, look into my eyes
“Ah come on Ted, you never know, there might be something in it. Sure it’s no more peculiar than that stuff we learned at the seminary, heaven and hell and everlasting life and all that; you’re not meant to take it seriously!” – Father Dougal Maguire
I’ve wanted to draw this building for quite some time. I don’t know who the Davis Psychic is, or what they do, but if they have half the prognostic track record of Mystic Pete then they can’t be half bad. Mystic Pete, for those who don’t recall, is the famed predictor of football seasons (that year when he said that Newcastle would win the league! And they came 14th), and I am his representative on Earth, etc etc. He’s taking a sabbatical this year (and coincidentally Spurs start playing well). Anyway back to the Davis Psychic. That’s a bold statement, a yellow house with purple trimmings. Who is the Davis Psychic? Perhaps we’ll never know. Here is the page on the Davis Wiki: http://daviswiki.org/Davis_Psychic. The wiki writers seem to think the Davis Psychic is a mystery figure with a Hummer who elusively hangs up the phone whenever they call (or whenever they crank call, by the sound of it). I wonder if they have an assistant called the Davis Sidekick? Maybe a Dougal type of person, in a tank-top? “Well, I’m very cynical as you know…”
losing my trainer thought
#24 of 30. Trainers, or sneakers, or tennis shoes, or whatever they’re called. I’ll never say ‘a-dee-das’ though. It is ironic however that I absolutely hate shoe stores, I cannot stand the places. I hatebuying shoes, it fills me with dread. I also hate sports stores (except those devoted to football shirts, like the one in Davis, which is really cool). And yet I love shopping for adidas trainers. Not that I do it very often of course. But for me, once every couple of years or so is often.
petescully 