Tag: sorority house

the first street (or the last street, depending on your direction)

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1st st 011325

Well this past week has been a big pile of pants, but we press on. Here are some more drawings of Davis from this long and wounding January; I am trying to post them all in themed batches where I can, the last one were all along one block of E Street in Old North Davis, and these ones are all along First Street (also known as 1st Street) in the downtown-to-campus corridor. First Street was named after William Randolph Hearst, a rich oligarch who had so much money he could do whatever he wanted, glad we don’t have those any more. I’m joking it wasn’t, and we definitely do. No, it was named after England’s World Cup Winning Hat-Trick Hero, and only surviving member of that famous team from ’66, Geoff Hurst. We don’t have those any more, English World Cup winners. I’m joking, it wasn’t, and we definitely don’t. I actually call this street ‘Last Street’, because I live in North Davis and coming from that direction, this is the last street in downtown. However we are so coming-off-the-freeway-centric aren’t we. What’s in a name? Don’t let’s get started on that. Ok, the sketch above, I was very pleased with how this turned out. I think this building is part of UC Davis called the Center for Child and Family Studies, they have a pre-school I think, my son went to another one in town. That was a long time ago now. I liked the light on the side of the building and the view down First Street, that is a very busy road. I used a bit of Buff Titanium for the side of the building; this is a new colour I got recently, Daniel Smith, I have seen it in other people’s palettes and wanted to give it a go. It’s a fantastic colour, very versatile and subtle, and handy for those warm washes on off-white buildings, mixed with a little orange or ochre. The sky was being very helpfully interesting to paint. It was cold, and I drew mostly at lunchtime (plus a little bit post-work) colouring in later for the most part.

1st St real estate 010825

This next one is a block or so up First Street towards downtown, a building I have not only sketched before (twice) but also held an exhibition at, one of those 2nd Friday Art About ones I used to do years ago, they were very nice in here. It’s a very sketchable shape, and I stood across the road in the shade, listening to an audiobook while I drew. It was ‘Guards! Guards!’ by Terry Pratchett, one of my favourite books when I was a teenager, and still a fantastic story. This month I have so far listened to four Terry Pratchett audiobooks, all recent productions excellently narrated (by Jon Culshaw, who does amazing character voices, with Peter Serafinowicz as Death and Bill Nighy as the Footnotes) in the ‘City Watch’ series. So far I’ve listened to ‘Guards! Guards!’, ‘Men At Arms’ (another which I fell in love with in the early 90s), ‘Feet Of Clay’ and ‘Jingo’. Next in that sequence is ‘The Fifth Elephant’ (which I remember being so-so about when I read it), then ‘Nights Watch’ (which I remember absolutely loving), then there’s ‘Thud!’ (which I was indifferent to, so we’ll see if a re-listen changes my mind) and ‘Snuff’ (which I never read; I’m still saving some Pratchett books for later in life). This year, 2025 (in case you need reminding), marks ten years since Terry Pratchett died. He was the author whose work I felt most closely connected with while growing up, and I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately.  I think about his illness, and about age, and how he handled it all and how he stood for people. He has missed a lot of how badly the world has gone. I will listen to those new audiobooks, which have many other narrators, in the run up to the anniversary, and read the old books too, although my own collection was left in England in my sister’s garage, and that garage was subsequently demolished when the neighbourhood was rebuilt, probably with my whole collection of Pratchett books inside it. Now is a good time to start rediscovering them all, but I will probably always leave one or two unread, because if I do that then he’s not really gone, is he.

1st st 011525

And here are two buildings on First Street that I have not only drawn before, but in fact drew on the same day of the year eleven years previously. I drew both of these after work, finishing a little early to catch the fading light and the soft muted shadows. I coloured a lot of them in afterwards but I was keen to grab those shadows. The building above at 221 First Street was the ‘A.J. Plant Home’, according to the City of Davis historic pedestrian and bike tour which I have discussed in previous posts. Built in 1911 in the Dutch Colonial Style, it used to be a frat house but is now home of AGR Partners, some agricultural firm. Not ‘Alpha Gamma Rho’ which is a real fraternity somewhere else in Davis. I have drawn this building a number of times, the first was back in February 2010 though. What a time of my life that was. I didn’t expect that I would still be drawing that building in 2025. Below is the Delta Delta Delta (or ‘Tri-Delta’) sorority next door to the one above. Tri-Delta was the first sorority at UC Davis, with this chapter being founded in 1974. We didn’t have these types of things at university in London, so I never experienced that part of student life, but let’s be honest, I would never have been in a fraternity anyway. I’m just not that sort of personality, am I. There are people that are, and there are people that aren’t. It’s a nice looking little building this though, some of these places are big and a bit grotty looking (think beer-pong and robes for curtains), some of them a big and seem to be quite moneyed, and some look like this, quite nice and well-kept. It’s a different world to mine. I do occasionally get asked by people for prints when I’ve sketched these buildings, since they contain a lot of memories for people, though whenever I posted them on the old Society6 they would invariably be taken down at some point as some sort of violation of their terms, I assume because it has the frat house logo on it, and they don’t like that on a print you’re selling, even if the same frat house has asked me for it (and my own cut of the sale is very small compared to Society6). That particular print site ended up being useless anyway, screwing over its artists and taking more and more of a cut, so I took all my stuff off it. I did start a Redbubble site, though so far that’s proved worthless to me, so I’m not currently doing prints to order, certainly not of frat houses. But I’m still drawing them all, still documenting the whole of this city and this university in my sketchbook, and sharing them to look at here. More to come.

1st st deltax3 011625

sorority now

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Delta Gamma, Davis

A late afternoon/early evening “need to get out of the house” sketch, sat at the desk in the kitchen all day I escaped on the bike despite the threat of sneezes, and cycled toward the UC Davis campus where we’re currently working away from. I stopped at Russell, and drew one of the many fraternity/sorority houses that line that long avenue. Sorry, boulevard. Street, boulevard, avenue, road, I don’t mean to be rue’d. Sorry I’m juts avenue on. Right, now the obligatory weak puns are out of the way, this is Delta Gamma. It’s a sorority and as I have mentioned before, the whole fraternity/sorority thing is highly alien to me, for two reasons: one, I’m from Britain and we don’t have those there at our universities like they do in the US (not to say that certain old universities don’t have their posh-person clubs, but that’s also very alien to the likes of me), and two, well I have never been one of those “member of a social club” types. Some people just are, some people just aren’t. So I’ve always found the whole thing fascinating, but not so fascinating that I want to know anything about them. I work for the university, but I have never interacted with them, and I’ve mostly worked with international graduate students who are probably as nonplussed about these organizations as I am. The Greek lettering they use for the names means you can come up with funny pretend ones; Terry Pratchett once joked about the rowing club “Rho Rho Rho”. I always liked Theta Xi, where future cab drivers go to learn The Knowledge. (For non-Americans, The Knowledge is something that London black-taxi drivers have to learn in order to be eligible to drive one of the famous black cabs. It’s not something you learn overnight or by taking an online course. You learn The Knowledge over the course of a couple of years or more, by studying the A-to-Z every day. My brother did it, but gave up. My former brother-in-law did it too, but also gave up. He had a huge map of London on his wall while trying to learn it. They both drive all over the country for a living and could tell you the quickest route from Penzance to Penrith, but the Knowledge requires you to learn every single street in London and the shortest route between them. I know quite a few black cab drivers back home who’ve driven for years. You would see trainee cabbies riding around London on their mopeds, easy to spot because there would be a huge map board on their handlebars. There was a little test book you had to study. I never wanted to be a cab driver myself, but I was fascinated by The Knowledge and loved the idea of being able to store all of that information in your bonce. This is why cabbies have such great general knowledge, they are used to soaking all that in. Now as I write all of this, I’m writing from memories about this stuff when my brother was doing it, so it might be completely different now. Even since I have moved to the US, the world has changed. With smart phones and more accurate GPS, with all these Uber and Lyft apps, black cabs and their Knowledge might seem a bit old fashioned but I still admire them. Not that I’d hail black cabs very often, a bit expensive. I like to walk about central London. How did I end up talking about London taxis? I should draw one sometime. In the meantime, here’s another fraternity/sorority house. To get into one of these, you don’t need to do The Knowledge, you just need to do whatever they do in their ‘Rush’ periods, I don’t know, wear a different dress every day is one I was told about, or hazing, which I think involves beer. I remember the first time I ever met “Frat Boys” at an American party in Provence, and my American friend explaining to me “these lads are typical Frat Boys” and the idea of them stuck. Very drunk, huge muscular frames, nasal voice, glazed expression. Long time since I was a student, and this would have all been alien to me. Except the beer, of course. (And the glazed expression, and the nasal voice; it was the muscular frame my skinny-boned stick figure body didn’t have). Many British universities are actually built around the campus pub. I suppose the closest thing I can think of to these institutions in British universities are the rugby teams. I remember at Queen Mary, being in the pub at the same time as the university rugby team was not fun. I remember one rowdy night when the rugby team were all partying around one table and one shirtless bloke was stood on a chair drinking massive amounts of cheep beer (the student union pubs always had the cheapest beer, like a quid-twenty a pint), vomiting into a bucket, then drinking more beer all while stood up, with his fellow rugbyers singing something one of their public school rugby field songs (by the way, a “public school” in England is a private school, not a public school, which is a state or comprehensive school, and both rugby and cricket are very popular at those) (the one I worked at for a while had strong rugby and cricket teams, but didn’t even have a football team, that’s more a sport for the oiks, like at my school). Anyway I seem to recall he was then encouraged to drink the vomit from the bucket as well, which he gladly did, to much public schoolboy merriment. The antics of the British public boarding schools and university rugby teams are more worlds of mystery to me. But I studied drama, and I’m sure they thought we were all bonkers as well, and they were probably right. I took part in a multilingual performance show once where I had to play a drunken old man doing a solo piece on stage drinking a bottle of wine and ranting about, I have no idea what, it was by Raymond Queneau. Anyway I was given a bottle of real wine and I got through about three quarters of it during this one very silly speech, which only wet on for less than ten minutes. Needless to say there was plenty of ad-libbing by the end of it. the vice-chancellor of the university was in the audience and he actually came up to me and said how much he enjoyed the show, but because I had so much wine in me by this point I immediately asked if there could be more funding for the university theatre company, as if I had any idea about that at all, I’d just heard they were well short of dough These days I am part of university bureaucracy so I navigate such things differently, but when I was a kid I thought “the multilingual absurd performance piece is the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the vice-chancellor!”. Ah, student life was fun.

sorernity now

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Pi Beta Phi Sorority, UC Davis
Continuing the intermission from Italy posting, here is one from the edge of UC Davis, a sorernity house on Russell Blvd. One of many; this area is called “Frat Row”. This one is “Pi Beta Phi” which is you all know is short for “Pirates Be-taking Philosophy” which yes I know makes no sense, but I know nothing about the origins of the phrase and don’t want to assume. I assume it is some sort of in-joke, like “Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense”, the famous slogan of the Knights of the Garter, which I’m sure they never intended to be their permanent slogan, just a bit of a laugh, like their name, Knights of the Garter. The origins of names and phrases are often lost in the swirling sands of history. Ok before I turn this post into another inevitable meaningless collection of weak jokes and untrue etymologies (“sweetheart, that could be the name of my autobiography”), let’s just get back to the subject matter. There are lots of these houses just off campus, but as someone who didn’t go to college here this whole ‘Greek Life’ is alien to me. When I was at uni I went to the New Globe pub in Mile End with my fellow drama students and got drunk on halves, and that was about it really. Fratorities and Sorernities are not really a thing there at all. The first time I ever met ‘Frat Boys’ was when I spent a year in France teaching after I graduated. There were lots of American students in the city where I lived and I remember going to a party and some lads being described as ‘Frat Boys’. “Frat?” I would ask. “Is that an acronym, like ‘Fourteen Recipes About Thunderbirds’, or ‘Flying Rabbits Are Terrifying’ or something?” (I was not as good at coming up with funny acronyms back then) “No,” they would say. “It doesn’t mean anything. It just means they drink loads, are usually white, and drink loads.” I think that was the description I was given, it was a long time ago and I didn’t really understand it. They might have said more but they definitely said that. I didn’t think they drank more than British binge-students.  I have snippets of very odd conversations with young Americans while living in France, like the person who asked me, upon hearing that I was from London, if I liked “London Broil”. Again I didn’t know what that was (I still don’t by the way). What I got was that “Frat Boy” just means a certain recognizable type. They might not even be in a “Frat” (and I didn’t learn what that was until I after actually moved to America) (and then spent years deliberately saying “Fratority” and “Sorernity” just to see if anyone would correct me, then I would laugh). It’s an expression I hear very often, “They’re just a bunch of Frat Boys,” “This place is full of Frat Boys”, “Get off of my lawn, Frat Boys”. I’m focusing very much on the Frat Boys here but not on the Sorority Girls. You don’t shorten that by the way, you say the whole thing. The rule of thumb is if you can pronounce the whole word ‘sorority’, then you are sober enough to drive home. I don’t know much about these societies other than what I’ve been told, about how they do ‘Rushes’ where you have to wear a different dress every day for a month, and say “ew” a lot. Like I say, it’s all alien to me. My wife did make me watch “Legally Blonde” years ago, but it was because I lost a bet (if I had won she would have had to watch “Young Einstein”, to this day she still hasn’t had the pleasure of seeing that amazing and not ridiculous at all movie). In “Legally Blonde” they make references to some sorority or other and that is pretty much all I know. So, I decided to do a little research on this particular sorority. When I say ‘a little research’ I mean I googled it and looked at the Davis Wiki page. Apparently (and this is cool) Pi Beta Phi was the first “national secret college society of women”, founded in 1867 in Monmouth Illinois (as “I.C. Sorosis”, and we can all agree the Greek letter name sounds a lot better). This means they are 150 years old! Notable Pi Beta Phi people are Jennifer Garner and Faye Dunaway. Not from the Davis chapter of course, but it’s a national organization. So there you have it. It also definitely has nothing to do with Pirates Be-taking Philosophy.

sorority seems to be the hardest word

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alpha chi omega davis
One of many downtown buidlings I’ve always wanted to sketch but given a ‘some other time maybe’ thought to, this sorority house on the corner of C and 2nd in Davis, Alpha Chi Omega (I think it’s a sorority. I always have trouble saying that word, “sorority”, words with too many ‘r’s are never easy. Many Americans have trouble with the word ‘mirror’, pronouncing it more like ‘meer’ as opposed to ‘mirrah’ like we Londoners do). I always thought that Alpha Chi Omega was a Greek equivalent to the A-to-Z maps of London. If you are wondering, I didn’t really, I just made that up and had never actually thought of that before. Anyway, I sketched it one lunchtime in brown-black ink, decided against colouring it in. The weather is nice right now in Davis, a little more autumnal, though still sunny.