oregon trail

July 7, 2009July 7, 2009Leave a comment

We spent the long Independence Day weekend in Medford, Oregon, attending a large family reunion. I’ve been once before – it’s a long old journey through the northern reaches of California, up the valley and through the mountains, and Medford really does feel a world away from Davis. The heat came with us though, regularly hitting the low 100s. Right on the rural edge of town, horses, chickens, rabbits, and the sound of roosters crowing. I perched in the shade outside my wife’s grandma’s house, and drew my wife’s uncle’s Corvette, which had travelled even further than we had (in considerably more style), but stopped while adding the colours, just as a truckload of cousins-in-law pulled up. I think the ‘missing’ colours actually give the sketch a bit more strength; it is so easy to overdo it.

I did manage a drawing on the drive up too. I sat in the backseat for a little while to feed and generally entertain my 17-month old son, but he fell asleep, so I attempted some in-car sketching, which is pretty hard. You can just about see the mountainous forests whizzing by there.

down by the levee

July 6, 20094 Comments

I fancied cycling tonight, before the Sun went down, so I went down to the very edge of town, to the levee, a spot I’d never actually been to before, though it’s right near where I live. You can see all the way to Sacramento, across the flat Yolo landscape. Not in this drawing, but it is there. The moon (also unseen) hung low and pink, in the east. Some interesting birds hopped about nearby. All very peaceful. The sun started to vanish so I cycled home.

Sepia micron 05.

rail of a time

July 3, 2009July 1, 20093 Comments

Halfway there! 15 of 30. It feels like a journey, a train of thought, one with lots of stations and the bogs are blocked. If this series was the Northern Line, I’d be at Golders Green, about to enter the tunnel below Hampstead, on my way to the pub in Camden Town.

I like travelling by train, and alone, so I can read, or draw, and have my headphones on, and look out of the window. Except if I do need to go to the toilet I worry about leaving my stuff. And if I take it with me, I worry about someone nicking my seat, you know you get those people who seem to spend the entire train journey shuffling up and down the corridors, never actually sitting down anywhere. Then you get those people who don’t sit next to the window, but put their bags there, so nobody will ask to sit there. The ticket inspector inspects your ticket, and places that little magic piece of card above your seat, which magically compells you to sit there forever until your stop, so that if a smelly or noisy person sits nearby, you can’t move, because the inspector will think you’re a new person. Then there’s those compartments above the seat for your bags, which are always just too small for your bag, and you just know you’ll leave it up there and forget (I have done this). Then there’s the ones that cross borders several times in the night, all the stopping and starting, the inspector wakes you up to check tickets, then the passport man comes in to look at passports, then after an hour sat on the border you roll across, having finally gotten back to sleep, only for another passport controller to come in and check you are who you’re supposed to be, along with another ticket inspector an hour or so later, and then the whole thing is repeated a few hours of non-sleep later as you cross into a new country. Then the hordes of people sleeping on the floor in the aisles, plus the lads from the Hungarian hostels coming on board to wake you up and attempt to get your business. Then you have those stories of gangs of thieves who enter trains at night, and gas those little compartments where everyone is sleeping so they won’t wake up, ransacking their bags for cameras and money, and vanish into the night. Then there’s those Agatha Christie murders. I’ll tell you one thing though, if you are getting those night trains, get on board early and get the window seat so you have something to lean against. Better still, get a reservation at the station and insist on the window, that way if someone is sat there already, you can make them move, waving your reservation at them. I had to do this once. After too many night trains where I was the one sat in the middle, unable to doze off, I didn’t care.

Fifteen more entries to go!

as june becomes july

July 1, 20092 Comments

Optometrists (opticians in the old tongue). They are always filled with hundreds of glasses you can’t imagine anybody wearing, let alone yourself. I bought a pair of glasses from here once, though I usually get mine from a different place in Davis. On that occasion, my one had no styles I liked, so I went here, and found one that I thought might suit me, a different theme for me. I called them the ‘half-Svens’ because they were kind of half like the Sven Goran Eriksson rimless style (they had half a rim). Normally I prefer the Fabio Capello style of specs. Anyway ultimately I decided I didn’t like them. They didn’t quite fit right; I did get them adjusted, at least slightly, but still no. So I went back to my old place and found they’d just started doing some great Fabio Capello type glasses. (For those who don’t know, I’m not talking about great fashion designers, I’m talking about foreign England football managers, who happen to wear trendy glasses). I didn’t really like this optometrist anyway. They weren’t enormously helpful, and were a bit disinterested, not even calling me to let me know they were ready after they said they would, whereas the service in the other place is much better. (Jeez this isn’t a consumer blog). However, they operate in a bloody cool looking building, very sketchable, and so I drew this today at lunchtime, on the first day of July. The second half of the year has arrived.

in the shadow of the sun

June 30, 2009June 30, 20093 Comments

We have had 100-plus degree heat in Davis for a few days now. It was 110 on Sunday. It’s that time of year. I hear there’s been a heatwave back in England? I dared to go outside at lunch, and drew the shade of a big tree.

it’s not easy being green

June 28, 20092 Comments

A couple of months ago I mentioned the story of the Davis Toad Tunnel, and promised to draw the little toady post office they built to evade the snakes. It’s down by the human post office, on Pole Line Road. Toad Hollow, it’s called.

Yes, they are actually pretend solar panels on the roofs. This is Davis, after all.

ein märzen aus alten zeiten

June 27, 2009June 28, 2009Leave a comment

Oh man it hot. I managed to cycle downtown last night, to read a few comics and take in the warm evening air, listening to live bands who were out playing tribute to Michael Jackson in their best non-Jacko sounding indie acoustic guitar. I cycled off and went to Sudwerk, the local German-style brewpub, whose locally-brewed beers are excellent. I would miss them a lot if I ever moved back to Britain, they don’t have anything that comes close back there. Pictured above, a nice big litre of the Märzen, my favourite one. Very refreshing!

Drawn in Itoya finepoint pen – I was trying something new – and watercolour.

it don’t matter if you’re black or white

June 26, 2009June 26, 2009Leave a comment

#14 of 30. I practically never play chess any more. This set was bought in Brussels, ten years ago, in a cool toyshop called Grasshopper. I remember the first games I played on it, at the historic A La Mort Subite cafe, against a bloke from Swindon, a fellow teaching assistant who was living in Liege. I won those encounters. I was still fairly sharp then. I had a few tricks, mostly ones my brother taught me, but these days the world would be wise to my tricks. I remember playing one match, at a hostel in Budapest (all these places, eh), against an American backpacker. Showing off, I told a girl sitting next to me that I would checkmate my opponent in ten moves, and asked her to count them. Exactly ten moves later, checkmate. Truth was, I could have checkmated in one move, but decided to show off, and distract my opponent by letting him take my queen and other important pieces, before moving my rook up and catching his trapped king. People were actually stunned. That was very cheeky. I doubt I would have the cockiness any more. I’m also too predictable; I only ever play as white (so I can control the opening), and almost always play with the same opening move, as seen above. But then, that is also a ruse, to make my opponent think I am predictable…

So Michael Jackson is dead! That was a shock. Quite a big shock. Right before his big tour of the Millenium Dome. I did notice the internet slowed down right after I was told the news. He was undoubtedly a massive talent, one of the all-time pop greats from a very early age, but it was a ruined legend; whatever the truth of those allegations (and he was after all acquitted), his persona was increasingly an unbelievable freakshow, Wacko Jacko, and he produced no decent music after Dangerous. I think he will be remembered as two people. No, not the ‘Black Michael’ and the ‘White Michael’, but as the brilliant prodigious pop genius of the 70s and 80s, and the sad, degenerating figure of the 90s and 2000s, with the crazy, ever-loyal army of fans. The Bashir interview proved his ultimate undoing; even long-time loyal fans of his (my oldest friend being one) couldn’t believe what a serious joke he’d become (“no Martin, I am Peter Pan!”), and couldn’t quite swallow the strange things he was saying about his professed relationships with kids, nor the allegations that were made. Who knows whether he would have won back public respect, after his comeback tour? (you know, isn’t really a tour if you’re just playing one venue over and over, that’s called a residency) It might have helped him pay off some of his debts. As it is, his music is now selling out across the world, he has become a one-man economic stimulus. Untimely death can often be the best thing that happens to pop legends, especially fallen ones. I think I still have somewhere one Sunday tabloid rag from the morning after Princess Diana died (here’s the obligatory Diana comparison). On the cover it was all about Our Princess of Hearts is Dead, etc, while just a few pages in, the editors hadn’t scrapped the already published stories of What a Disgrace Diana is, Shame on Her etc. Fickle just isn’t the word. I don’t think the Jacko media circus is over just yet. Expect the eventual biopic to sweep the board at the Oscars.

strings of fear

June 25, 2009June 25, 20093 Comments

#13 of 30. Still no name for this series. I must get on that. This is my acoustic guitar, the one I bought twelve years ago in Charing Cross Road. It’s lived in a few countries.

“many ugly strawberries”

June 24, 2009June 25, 2009Leave a comment

#12 of 30. Denmark, the summer of ’95, strawberries, adidas shorts, and those coins with the holes in them. I was only nineteen, but I felt like an old man of nineteen. I learnt a lot of things. I learnt that when traversing Copenhagen station (or any train station), have a bag that has wheels, or at least some sort of discernible shape, one that doesn’t look like you’re hauling a body bag with a live body in it on your shoulders. It took me approximately a day and a half to reach the strawberry farm in the south of the island of Funen from Victoria station in London, which seems an extraordinary amount of time now that we live in the age of budget airlines and long bridges. In 1995, the dreaded Eurolines buses were the way to go, and Denmark was a nation of many ferry rides. It took almost 24 hours to reach Copenhagen, and from there I went via a mixture of trains, ferries, locals buses and a lift from a chip-shop owner, until I pitched my tent in the dark, and proceeded to spend the rest of the summer picking strawberries, busking in the street with my fellow jordbærplukkers and writing postcards.

Sometimes the picking was not good. The farmer, Bjarne (who I was told was nicknamed the Terminator because of his voice), would inspect each punnet, and if he didn’t like what he saw he would admonish you with the slow mechanical line, “many ugly strawberries”. Usually, ugly ones would be eaten mid-pick, since they were juicier, or even used for jam, but you were paid by the kilo, so more often the jordbærplukkers would hide big fat ugly ones under nice tender pretty ones. On the other hand, a nice punnet of shiny, shapely strawbs would be rewarded with a cool “many beautiful strawberries”. Sometimes the work would be frustrating, cold, back-breaking, sometimes it would be hot, back-breaking and frustrating. Often it would be fun though; the other jordbærplukkers, plucked from around the UK and Europe, were a great laugh. Sometimes we would meet the raspberry pickers from a nearby farm, sometimes hang out with locals, such as ‘Scouse’ Claus, who spoke in a broad Liverpool accent but had never been anywhere near the Mersey (he did work on a ferry though). People are very friendly in Denmark, the friendliest country I’ve ever been to.

It really did put me off strawberries though. I had nightmares about them, giant strawbs chasing me down the street, big piles of them every time I closed my eyes. That horrible red juice would just not wash from my hands, leaving me scrubbing like Macbeth for days after the last berry was picked. What little money I had left as the strawb season closed i used to jaunt around the country for a few days, first to Århus in the north, finally to Copenhagen, where I forewent a night in a packed and sweaty hostel, preferring to spend my last few kroner locking up my unwieldy luggage at the station and crooning in a karaoke bar, where locals bought me drinks and told me stories. When the sun came up, I got on a bus to England, with only a single krone left. I put that coin on a piece of string I found, and wore it all the way home, and for some time afterwards. I wonder where it is now.