Tag: people

may the sixth be with you

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The UK General Election is upon us. Unlike in the US, where the election date is known years in advance and the campaigning goes on for about three hundred years, filling the airways with irritating paid-for campaign ads, British elections are called with only about a month of soapboxing and eggfacing until the big day, and the long swingometer-filled night. Also unlike America, Britain is not electing a President, but a party to govern. We’ve all become very comfortable with being uncomfortable at how ‘presidential’ our Prime Ministers are getting (ie, they brush their hair and grin a lot), so with thought in mind, which of the three below do you think will become our next ‘presidential’ PM?

gordon brown

See, I’m glad Gordon Brown (above) is not a smiler, and has unbrushable hair. Makes him less presidential. David Cameron (below) on the other hand, old Etonian, friendly chap, cheeky grin, America will love him like they loved Blair. Like so many pop groups before them, our PMs probably feel they can only be truly big if they can break America.

david cameron

He has a big forehead doesn’t he. By the way, America, if you’re following the UK Election, Blue means Conservatives and Red means Labour. Red is the traditional colour of international socialism; it’s only the US that has that the other way round, where it means the colour of Limbaugh-loving necks.

And then in the Yellow corner there is the Other Bloke, who by all accounts won the UK’s first presidential – i mean, prime ministerial – debate (it’s not like they don’t already debate in the House of Commons though, is it). These debates mean nothing, the Liberal Democrats aren’t ever going to really win a general nick cleggelection, because they are deliberately ignored by the Murdoch press (the true rulers of the UK). Unless…surely not? Nick Clegg (right) is apparently becoming swiftly popular, and let’s face it, Brits (like Americans, to whom we gave most of our reality TV shows) love nothing more than an instant overnight popular political hero – oh, what am I saying, there is one thing Brits like more, and that is knocking said hero off his perch and dragging said hero through the razor mill of the tabloid press (hello again, Mr. Murdoch). 

No, he’s not smaller because my Murdoch-payroll editors have instructed me not to get in the way of their Tory revival saga (I’m not The Times, you know). More that the sketch simply looks nothing like him, but hey, I don’t really know what he looks like, or stands for. I know he looks a bit like Philip Schofield, David Duchovny, Kilroy and Jim Davison (shuddering at the thought). Time for me to do some reading up on this election. I won’t get to vote, but I also won’t get to live through the consequences, now I’m over here in Obama-world. I do really miss British politics, honestly I do, I want to watch Paxman, I want to watch Dimbleby, I want interactive 3d Swingometers, I want to see eggs on faces and Prescott punches (whoever the modern equivalent of Prescott is), staying up all night and watching the results of Haltemprice & Howden and Cannock Chase and other places I’d never heard of. This election even looks like it might actually be a three horse race (unlike the last few, which were definitely one-horse races). I drew a political cartoon which got onto the Channel 4 web site last time (Goldilocks and the Three Unbearables), I need to sharpen that pencil again (Last of the Summer Whine: Foggy, Compo and Clegg would be a start, cascading down the hill in a tin bath).

At least this time I won’t need to stay up all night. I’m eight hours behind, so hopefully it’ll all be decided by midnight. I suspect Labour may have to do a deal with the Lib Dems to keep the Tories out of Number 10; if not, Brown won’t have a Clegg to stand on. May the Sixth be with you.

pull the other one

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yellow train, old sacramento
simon sketching in old town sac

Old Town Sacramento has lots of candy stores and saloon doors, but it also has a big railway heritage – there is the railway museum and an old steam train that chugs up and down on weekends. Not so on quiet Thursdays. My friend is visiting from the UK so we swent down there to talk Back to the Future III and do some sketching. That’s him there, Simon, on the right. I didn’t draw the bus transfer ticket, though you know I would. I sat and drew a yellow Union Pacific train engine, which had a logo on the side which we found amusing: “America, We’re Pulling For You”.  A family of tourists came up while sketching and took my photo (that’s not it below, by the way). That’s the second time that has happened on this same spot, funny enough.

me, sketching in old town sacramento

name that toon

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alan shearer

This week’s Illustration Friday theme is Talisman; my entry is football legend Alan Shearer, former talismanic striker for Newcastle Utd, and their new (temporary) manager. What a career he had: Southampton, Blackburn, Newcastle and of course England.  These days, his beloved home-toon club is in absolute turmoil; I thought being a Spurs fan was a hard ride. Now Shearer is in charge, can he keep them up? Will he be a talismanager?

For my American friends: Alan Shearer was an absolute goal machine in the nineties, but you might not know about him because he didn’t marry a pop-star or have a girl’s soccer film named after him (“Run Away After Scoring and Point in the Air Like Shearer” never made it off the storyboard). He was in that film ‘Goal’ though, which also featured cameos by both Beckham and Zidane. I know you’ve heard of them.

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simon

This is my friend back in London, Simon, actor, presenter and fellow on-street sketcher. I’ve attempted drawing him before, but couldn’t quite get it, but this time I think I got it pretty close. Used the sepia micron 0.5, nice for drawing people with.

say your prayers

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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.

every day i look at the world through my window

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routine

Illustration Friday this week is “routine”…this is my entry.

Now, before you say, “do what?”, I’m playing a game here I used to play when i did interactive theatre. This image, ok, it’s an image of Tel looking out of my window in Belgium, about eight or so years ago. Add the word ‘routine’ and you start to write the story in your head around it. 

This may have been the night after this night here. But it was probably after a different night. 

But that windowsill! Man, I spent so many days and nights sat on that, looking out of my thirteenth floor window, across the Square Hiernaux (I nicknamed it the Vicious Circle because of the quite crazy Belgian driving), to Ville Deux, to the Stade Mambourg (where England beat Germany in Euro 2000), and to the terrils, the large slag heaps that dot the landscape of the forsaken pays noir.