#8 in a series of 30. The way I’ve put it makes it sound like a fetish or something. I’m just lazy. I have good intentions, but instead of reading them I stay up and draw the edge of the table, or whatever. Still, it’s the hope of reading them that counts, and hope is the main buzzword in this brave new world, isn’t it? Perhaps I hope they’ll read themselves to me.
Still no name for this deeply personal autobiographical series.
The Monterey Peninsula is some of the most incredible coastline I’ve ever been to, and it’s teeming with wildlife. And massive expensive houses. We drove the 17-Mile Drive, getting out every so often to take pictures, paddle in the rockpools, spot whales (and we did! out in the distance), and I even managed to scribble a few quickies before hopping back into the car. There’s me sketching quickly by the rocks. The last time I’d been, the fog rolled in and out like an army of ghosts, but this time it was warm and sunny.
We visited the Point Pinos lighthouse, which was very interesting. It dates back to the 19th century, and is pretty well preserved. 
You’re not even allowed to use the toilet, it’s so well preserved. When I was a kid I used to want to live in a lighthouse (so many of them in north London). I think it was because of that show Round the Twist, where they all lived in a lighthouse, or it might have been because of Fraggle Rock. Let’s face it, it was the latter. My son enjoyed ringing the huge bell downstairs, but we weren’t allowed to go up to the lamp. During World War II, in fact only days after Pearl Harbor was bombed, Japanese planes flew by Monterey Bay, and this lighthouse was used as part of the coastal defences.
After 17-Mile Drive we lunched in Carmel-by-the-Sea, where Clint Eastwood was once mayor. I popped into a little candy store that sold British chocolates, at a price. $2.95 for a Curly-Wurly!!! Can you believe it? They used to be 15p. There was a Lamborghini parked outside. Curly-Wurlies are surely not luxury items. I imagine this rich movie star now, supermodel girlfriend, Lamborghini zooming down the coast, chomping on a Curly-Wurly. Didn’t stop there. $3.95 for a Fruit-n-Nut! Four bucks for a Walnut Whip, sod that mate, I’ll go without. I didn’t even check how much the box of Maynards Wine Gums were. We drove on to Carmel Mission, which is an absolutely gorgeous building on the edge of Big Sur, which looks like a trip back into the Mexican West. Another quick study, this time in wine red copic, and then off again.
Monterey, sunset. Micron pen and watercolour, in a watercolour moleskine, and pretty much all but done in the dark. That’s ocean fog hanging out there in the distance.
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”
– John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
We were in Monterey at the weekend. Down at Cannery Row (motto: “Yes, We Can”), where they pack souvenir shops in like, um, sardines, I sat and sketched since that day was also Drawing Day 2009. This gave me a contractual obligation to draw. Cannery Row (not in fact named after the actor Sean Cannery) was made particularly famous by John Steinbeck’s book about the place, that people pretend to know well when they go there even if it’s the first time they’ve ever heard of it (and to be fai
r, since bits of it are mentioned somewhere every few yards you feel like you’ve read the book, seen the movie and bought the fridge magnet). It’s funny how if a writer is associated with somewhere then they make sure to drum on about it as much as possible, like those pubs where Dickens/Twain/Kerouac etc drank (Dickens for one drank in every single pub in London, I’m surprised he was ever sober enough to actually get any writing done). Writers hold a special appeal to tourist boards. You never get areas devoted to, say, Joe Bloggs the stockbroker or someone.
The drawing to the right is of the beer garden of the Captain Bullwhacker’s pub (I think that was the name), which was heavily pirate galleon/British pub themed, and undoubtedly where Steinbeck once popped in to use the loo, maybe.
Also blogged at Urban Sketchers.
No 7 of 30. Inter-railing, everyone has to do it once. In America they call it Eurailing (at least I think so; Americans can’t get Inter-Rail tickets because you need to be a European resident, but they can get Eurail tickets). You get a ticket, for less than a monthly travelcard in London, and you can go on any train in Europe as many times as possible for one month. I made the most of it. Lots of stories to tell, and I won’t be telling them here. I should do a series about that trip though, perhaps using notes I made on my travels.
I really travelled light. The bit about the socks is true. Photos prove it; I’m wearing odd colours in most of them. I also never took a guide book. Instead, I constructed one myself, in a simple spiral bound notebook. For weeks I prepared, photocopying this from one book, that from another, pasting in colour metro maps where possible, writing down addresses of possible hostels and sights I might visit, and which stations had the all-important luggage lockers. I was being methodical but allowing for every possibility – if I was in Prague but decided to go to Amsterdam, or perhaps the other direction and see Budapest, it was all worked out in my head (in fact I went to Krakow). I carried therefore the ultimate reading tool – the 1998 Thomas Cook Rail Timetable. Worth its weight in gold. At the back of my self-made guidebook though I left space for my travel notes – and there I logged obsessively every move I made. I enjoyed every single moment.
6 of 30, or half a dozen of the other. Mankind’s relationship with the mobile has been well documented. Some people appear to have the phone attached permanently to their ear. How they can find so much to talk about is beyond me. Others have those little bluetooth headsets and walk about the street appearing as though they are talking to themselves, which is perfectly acceptable these days. I often think about donating some of those earpieces to the street crazies who do walk about mumbling (well, yelling) to invisible companions, so that people will not think they are mental. What people don’t talk about however is that since the advent of cellphones and other such gadgets is that we are losing our memories. Not forgetting stuff per se, rather just not needing to memorize stuff. We have the capacity to memorize incredible amounts of information, but if we don’t need to, then those parts of our brain don’t just start working on other things, like wallpapering the skull or writing operettas; they lay dormant. We have the internet instantly accessible so that we can look things up whenever we want, negating the need to actually learn and retain things. Are iphones banned from pub quizzes? I bet it’s hard to enforce. Not long ago, people would remember and recount whole stories, now we look up the words to Humpty Dumpty. Years before, and I’m talking in early to mid medieval times (before general literacy) memory played an incredibly important role in law and government – what was said and remembered was every bit as credible as what was written down (these days we feel we need constitutions and statute books and so on – we see things differently in the modern age, where the written word is king). What ultimately will be the cost of us not needing to use those parts of the brain which were previously used for memory?
One of the things behind this series is for me to remember where I am right now, and to remember who I am as well, because one day I might forget. Save the world while you can, folks.
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!!
petescully 