On Sunday, the last day of August, I caught the bus to Sacramento and walked around in the breezy sunlight, walking up to midtown, sketching a couple of things as I’ve not done here for a good while now, not since the sketchcrawl in March. Above, powerlines and some buildings and trees (for a change, eh), while below there is an old building I’ve wanted to draw for a while, the one next to the Streets of London pub on J street. Well now I have.
The 18th Worldwide Sketchcrawl took place on Saturday, and I popped across the Causeway for the midtown Sacramento version. Three other sketchers were there, at the Sutter’s fort meeting point; none made it to the ending point, at the Streets of London pub on J street. It was the seventh time I’ve done the Sketchcrawl, and it’s nice to know I’m absolutely not the only one out on the streets somewhere on the planet with pen and sketchbook. Here are my results:
I went to the art store, and found my favourite sketching tool yet: a fold-up stool that easily fits into my small shoulder bag! Only $11. No more sitting on the dirty floor; it means I can sketch anywhere now (normally I find the comfy spot first, then choose what to draw).
After living here for nearly a year an a half, I’ve finally found something about my neighbour metropolis of Sacramento that I like. I know I’ve never really given that sprawling urban splat much of a chance, the way it just squats in the distance across a vast flat swamp, thick with suffocating Valley air and the sound of gunfire on every news broadcast, utterly lacking the grand charm of New York or the dramatic slopes and vistas of San Francisco. Getting the bus through West Sacramento is hardly inspiring, miles of rotten industrial grounds, trailer parks and the sort of motels you only ever see in films with a high death count. I warmed to grubby old Charleroi, years ago, but I think you’d have to be pretty cold to find anything to warm to here.
But recently I’ve been going up to Midtown, where the leafy boulevards are lined with charming old wooden houses, and there are shops and cafes and people walking because they want to, and yet because it’s still Sacramento there’s still some grit, and none of the urban snobbery you find in the more affluent areas. I guess that’s why it’s called Midtown, because it’s between downtown and Uptown, I’d not really thought of it like that. But that’s not what brings me there. There’s this really cool record shop called The Beat, and it’s my new favourite place. My wife first took me up there in January, after I got my new record player, so I could buy my first vinyl LP in many years and add to the ones I’d just lugged back from London (you know, vinyl’s a lot heavier than you think, isn’t it). I was so impressed – the place was so well-stocked, but still airy and spacious, not crazy like Amoeba Records, and they had a phenomenal collection of Beatles stuff, both British and American versions, most of which I have, some of which I salivated over but couldn’t really justify spending on. I spent most of my time in the Who section, trawling through rare European imports, but finally settling on the old compilation favorite Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, because it was the first Who record I ever heard back at my uncle Billy’s years ago, and because if you are going to listen to the old stuff, you can’t do it on CD, it has to be vinyl. I went home, put the needle in the groove, and rocked out; it was like being thirteen again.
I’ve gone back up there a few times to trawl through their CDs, new and used, and have been generally impressed with the large stock, particularly as I seem to find a lot of British stuff you’d never expect to see in a shop deep in Sacramento. No David Devant, however, but you can’t have it all. Nearby though there is a British pub called the Streets of London, which I’d known about since we moved here but have always resisted going to for the following reasons: it’s in Sacramento, it has a name which indicates it’s probably nothing like a London pub, and because we met a slightly weird couple once that said they go out there and I had no inclination of bumping into them. Well I finally decided to pop in and check it out (and to find a table to add some paints to the sketches I’d made around town), after all they might be showing Spurs on the TV. They weren’t, but I bought a pint of London Pride and had an utterly new sensation. It was actually cold, and tasted really good. I like Pride, I used to drink it a lot, but back at the Haverstock in Belsize Park it would always be edging room temperature. Here it was damn cold, and damn good. I didn’t want to get ahead of myself, so I left, passing by The Beat on the way back to the bus-stop. Or I would have passed by if I’d not heard them playing ‘Boredom’ by the Buzzcocks, one of my all-time favourite tracks (and one I never hear blaring from a shop doorway). I popped back in and sure enough they had the Spiral Scratch EP. I’d never even seen it before! But I resisted, for now, giving myself an excuse to come back down, and I will too. I don’t yet like Sacramento, and I’m not about to move there or anything, but after all this time I’ve found I don’t hate crossing the Causeway quite as much.
While this week was laborious for New Labour in the UK, it was Labor Day in the US, a three-day weekend of shopping deals, sunshine and the last-chance for those Americans dictated-to by fashionistas to wear white. The whole ‘don’t wear white after Labor Day’ rule is a mystery to me; what do Ku Klux Klan members do, for example? Asa we enter the autumnal months, as the nights get longer and the heat starts to migrate further and further south, surely it woule make sense to wear more white, as firstly you’d be easier to see by motorists after dark, and secondly when it snows you would be perfectly disguised from the threat of polar bears (not that you get many of them in California).
Having gone across the Yolo Causeway bought my new guitar amplifier, I decided to spend Labor Day in Old Sacramento, where they were having some sort of event celebrating the Gold Rush days, the historic period that pretty much created the State of California as we know it. The old riverside downtown in California’s capital is pretty much the city’s main tourist pull, a collection of old cowboy-era buildings preserved in time, with dusty boulevards and wooden sidewalks. It grew up near the old Sutter’s fort, and these days is officially preserved as a state park. The builidngs mostly house souvenir shops and candy stores, as well as a few decent eateries. The bars are full of paraphernalia – Fanny Ann’s for example is dressed head to toe in old americana such as license plates and old carts hanging from the rafters, as well as a surprising collection of antique British Rail station signs. From the outside they look like old saloons; you half expect some unshaven whiskey-soaked wreck to come flying through the doors and into the horse-trough, followed by raucous jeering and a visit from the sheriff.
For the Gold Rush celebrations, the cobbled roads were covered in dirt, hay and horse-muck and lined with people in Wild-West costume. I felt almost naked not wearing a Cowboy Hat. There were horses and stagecoaches parading all over, mostly carrying packs of young serious-faced children. Tourists crowded outside the saltwater taffy stores to watch wrinkly old gunslingers with names like ‘Doc’ and ‘Earl’ shoot slugs of imaginary justice into weasly villains, much to their whooping delight. I suppose it makes a change from the real-life gun-fights on the streets of parts of south Sacramento. The Wild West never went away down there.
There was definitely a bit of Back to the Future III in the air. The sun was beating down hard, but there was a nice breeze down by the Sacramento river. There’s an old steam-engine that chugs down the waterfront to its terminal in Old Sacramento, a relic of the days when the great iron railroads first united the States of America to its mythical, golden West. On the river itself there is an old sternwheel riverboat, the Delta King, which makes you think more of the slow broad waters of the Mississippi than the rattlesnake west, but then Sacramento is known as the River City. Nearby stood old-time stalls and tents treated tourists to ‘authentic’ blacksmiths, gun-makers and an old Injun practising the ancient native art of making balloon-dogs. I’m glad I wasn’t around in the Old West. Sure there was money to be made panning for gold in tham thar hills, but I just couldn’t live in a historic period where everybody made me think of George W Bush. Hang on a minute, no, I’m confusing the Westworld of the past with the Planet of the Apes of the future.
petescully 