choc and awe

milky way
A quick one; a cup of tea and a chocolate bar. My illustration friday entry for the theme of “sugary“.

The chocolate bar is a Milky Way, but don’t let that deceive you, British friends – American Milky Ways are nothing like our Milky Ways. They are in fact almost exactly like our Mars Bars. They also go very well with tea. The Milky Way/Mars Bar thing is one of many instances where our two cultures look different and call itself different things but are in fact the same. I can’t be bothered to name any others.

I got that mug at the Getty in LA. And you know what? I didn’t actually drink this cup of tea from that mug, I drank it from a different one, with my name on it. I just thought the colours and pattern would be better next to the milky way. I used to have a funny way of eating Mars Bars: I’d eat the sides first, then I would nibble off the top, and then the rest. A friend at college once gave me a king-size Mars Bar for ny birthday with a big note on it saying “eat it properly”.

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?

hampstead revisited

hampstead houses

Another drawing of those houses by Hampstead ponds, this one done on bristol paper (no, that’s not one of sarah palin’s offspring); these buildings have a very hundertwasser quality, and I’m sure are very expensive (although possibly less expensive right now than before).

The last one I did, in my moleskine with a brown wash, is below. I’m leaving this one washless.

houses by hampstead heath ponds

graffiti about slash-street affairs

I could get used to these. A month ago I did this labour-intensive drawing; tonight I finished a second one. You can I’m sure guess the theme. All will be revealed when we turn to the answers page, a singer once said.

that's entertainment

I am still around, I have just been busy. But I found time to fit this in too, which helps create balance. Plus I stay up far too late for someone who works so early. These things sometimes accompany those wee small hours; well, these and the baby monitor.

A note on the broken ibanez guitar head: this was the guitar i bought when I first moved to the US. I looked after it so well, but one day it fell lamely from its stand onto the carpet and the head just came off. Not my happiest moment. Very difficult to repair (the guy in the shop couldn’t bare to look at the poor thing, it was like bringing in his grandma’s head or something), so the decapitated body sat gathering dust in the corner like the shards of narsil. When we moved out, I wasn’t sure what to do with it (you get attached to your instruments). My wife suggested I dispose of the body Pete Townshend style. And so I did. Have you ever done that? It felt pretty good. I kept the broken head as a souvenir (or a warning?), and there it is. The broken Ibanez.

nice one, centurion, like it

packed

Illustration Friday this week, well, “packed” – considering we still aren’t completely unpacked it was appropriate. Two weeks in the new place and it’s still hard to remove some objects from their very temporary homes. We only moved a hundred yards, for heaven’s sake, I can see my old apartment from my new one (it’s a bit like seeing Russia from Sarah Palin’s house). The books are all on the shelf (permanent positions undecided), CDs, records, glasses, knives and forks; it’s the stuff marked “misc” (or “pete misc”, to be precise) that is having a hard time settling.

Speaking of new homes: this is my 100th post on my new website (hence the title). That’s 700 posts in all if you include the old blog. Wow. At this rate, I should hit 1000 posts in around… April 2010.

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).

sold down the river

Under the toun of newe Troye,
Which tok of Brut his ferste joye,
In Temse whan it was flowende
As I be bote cam rowende

(John Gower, Confessio Amantis)

a ship on the thames

Another boat? Yes, this one was on the Thames last year, and so today I drew it into my small wh smith sketchbook. There’s the City in the background. I always seem to draw London in black and white these days; is it becoming like an old film to me already?

In this time of incredible financial turmoil, a picture of something actually staying afloat in the financial heart of the City.

bic to school

bag

It’s that time of year again. Things start getting busy in the academic world. I invigilated (or ‘proctored’ as they say here) an exam today, during the air-conditioned silence of which I drew part of my bag (“draw what is in front of you”) in my rhodia notebook, in ball-point pen. I like drawing in biro, though I don’t do anything other than scribble endlessly and mindlessly in it (this accounts for at least 70% of all the drawing I do, mostly scowling faces and figures with lightsabres or football shirt designs, which you never see). Squared rhodia paper seems so appropriate (and I love it, it reminds me of France). Behind the bag, some of the extremely hard stats stuff, none of which I could make head nor tail of, but which I’m sure looked like elegant poetry to the trained eye.

chez nous

chez nous

First drawing in the new apartment. Unpacked boxes not in view. Wish I hadn’t done the shsding lines on the walls, but they have a ‘sod it, just finish and go to bed’ feel to them. This apartemtn is in reverse to the old one, it’s wierd, like bizarro world or something.