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i look at the world and i notice it's turning My guitar died last night. I'm really upset; it was a freak accident. I put it onto its stand, but it fell onto the carpet, a very soft carpet, and I couldn't stop it. There was very little noise; it was if six strings cried out in terror, but were suddenly silenced. I turned around, and it was lying on the floor, and (I know this sounds funny but it really isn't) it's head had fallen off. The head had completely broken away from the neck; it was still connected to the rest of the guitar, which I had kept pristine and spotless since I bought it in October, by the strings. It looked so sad, lying there on the floor; the guitar is a member of the family, like a pet, a black electro-acoustic Ibanez, always there when I needed to have a relaxing strum. It was the first thing I bought when I moved to America, a move that was naturally full of emotion and upheaval; the new guitar helped me deal with settling in, gave me a channel. Why had it snapped so easily? My other acoustic, back in England, has fallen over many times without so much as a scratch to show for it. I thought it must have been the effects of the recent heat, that maybe it had caused the wood to become so dry that it was easier to break, a conclusion which made me resent the Central Valley climate even more; but I went to the local music store, Watermelon, and the guy there said that the heat had nothing to do with it. He said that, being the weakest part of the guitar, the top of the neck snaps more than you might think. He also showed me a couple of guitars whose necks had been fixed, glued and bolted back togeher, without affecting the sound of the guitar at all. Of course, one of them looked a lot like Frankenstein's Monster-Guitar, but the other actually looked pretty smooth. So perhaps there is hope yet...but right now I'm pretty down about it. I'd just come up with a couple of new chords, too. |
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1.8.06 23:55 |
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Week Forty-Four: The War on Mosquitoes Over the past few days Yolo County has exploded into colour, as millions of bright yellow butterflies, some pale like rose petals, some crisp and golden like autumnal leaves, have emerged from their cocoons into the sunlit fields. They have been joined by a sudden burst of erratic dark red dragonflies, which dart about inquisitively with all of the elegance of a supermodel emerging from a Soho nightclub at 4am with a washed-up occasional singer. Their arrival has coincided with the Delta Breeze, the cooler air that has finally ended the recent hot spell, and all is well again for the people of Davis. Or it would be if it wasn't for the unwelcome appearance of another insect, the mosquito, the bug for whom all these screen doors was made. However it isn't the mosquito itself that has everybody worried, it is what it carries - the West Nile Virus, which has been discovered on specimens at the UC Davis Arboretum, and many other watering holes besides.
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2.8.06 08:20 |
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autoportrait
watercolour; done very quickly just now, from a photo taken a few months ago in davis. ignore the background. mosquitoes not yet active with west nile. guitar still alive. spurs still above arsenal. harry potter scar not visible (at least in the photo). |
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3.8.06 08:27 |
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"...in scotland's green and pleasant land" (W Shakespeare) Last night I officially became someone who complains to newspapers about really quite minor points in their articles. Having read a piece in the travel section of the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday about hiking on the Hebridean island of Islay, I noticed that the author described the glens as 'the epitome of Shakespeare's "green and pleasant land".' So I actually emailed the author (who does the job I want, so no jealousy or anything) and pointed out that not only were they not Shakespeare's words (they were Blake's, as if you didn't know, after the Ashes last year), but that it was specifically a reference to England and not Scotland. Of course I did also say that I really enjoyed the article (and I did, despite the errors) and that I really wanted to go hiking in the Hebrides (which I do, despite the midges). I laughed at myself as I sent the email - am I really that person, do I really complain to newspapers, pointing out the little slips of hardworking hacks? It's a slippery slope, and I don't want to become Lynne Truss. Maybe I just wanted to make sure that his audience, who are American, are not misled by literary quotations, and do not go around calling Scotland 'England' (as people sometimes do; there are those who don't think there's a difference). Well, he replied, next day. He said he'd actually had that pointed out to him already, and that he hadn't meant to make that slip - he was confusing it with the 'Sceptred Isle' speech in Richard II (again, though, that was a speech about England, not Scotland). He did recommend I go to the Hebrides (well, he told me to take a hike...only joking) as it is spectacular - and green, and pleasant. Fair enough. It was nice of him to respond. Anyway, he told me that the Chronicle had actually printed a note today to correct the error! You too can change the world. |
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5.8.06 02:08 |
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the broken ibanez
pencil, paper; i'm really feeling its loss, especially when i hear the strum of living guitars in random songs; I've not decided whether to get it fixed and have it look like Franck Ribery, or buy a new one and feel guilty of betraying the injured instrument. You cannot underestimate the relationship between man and guitar. |
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7.8.06 08:04 |
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Week Forty-Five: Tip Toes The Cheesecake Factory restaurant in San Francisco gets really, really busy on a Saturday night. If you arrive at quarter to eight in the evening, you will be asked to wait for half an hour, then given an electronic pager, which will buzz when a table becomes available. The staff let you know that it mat take anything up to an hour and a half before you are seated – and, standing shoulder to shoulder with the hungry half of California in the waiting area, you don’t doubt it. It will be almost ten o’clock before you are finally shown to your table, on the breezy patio overlooking Union Square, by which time your stomach will be ready and growling for the enormous dishes this place offers. From then on, however, don’t expect it to be any better – you might wait another twenty minutes for your drinks, another hour for your food, and by the time the cheesecake arrives you will be getting ready for breakfast. It is made all the worse by the fact that other diners around you, and I mean those who were seated after you, are already tucking into their mains by the time your bread arrives, and are pulling out the credit cards while you are still waiting for the server to notice you are finished. At least, that’s what happened to us last week, because we were unlucky enough to have a waitress who, as my mother would put it, lived most of the day in dolly daydream land, wandering about the restaurant as if it were empty. For this reason, we decided to protest in the most effective, if controversial, way possible: we left her no tip. Tipping is a major part of American culture. When I was a London tour guide Americans who appeared to have paid no attention whatsoever to my rambling stories on the finer points of Regent Street lamp-posts would nonetheless leave me a couple of quid as they escaped the rainy open-top bus. It is something I have naturally taken up myself here, particularly in restaurants, where the common thing to do is to double the tax and there’s the tip. I even tip barmen, who do little more than pour fairly expensive beers and grunt while inspecting my ID to make sure I’m over thirty. The tipping culture here is such that you actually feel guilty if, as we did last week, you decline to leave the extra for what was surprisingly poor service (surprising because this is America, and the level of service you do come to expect is higher than in Europe). This guilt doesn’t only stem from the fear that if you don’t tip, not only will they do nasty things to your food or drink should you return, or that the universe will somehow extract those few bucks from you in some act of karmic vengeance. This guilt stems from the knowledge that many waiters live not off their wages but from their tips, and that the State allows these large restaurant chains to pay below minimum wage for this very reason. Waiting is a very hard job, after all (I know, I did it for many years, often in far more stressful environments than the Cheesecake Factory); but then, waiting until almost eleven o’clock for your food is pretty hard as well. Now I’m not Mr. Pink, I’m certainly not anti-tipping, but I do see some of the points of the classic argument – why do we tip some people but not others? Why do we leave tips at restaurants but not at fast-food places (where people earn even less in a harder job with arguably more demanding customers), why do we tip bell-boys but not the poor sods who pack our groceries at the store, why do we tip bar-staff in American pubs but not the hardy folk who have to clean the toilets after people have thrown up? The day we went to the Cheesecake Factory we had lunch at a small, unkempt burrito place in Berkeley. The tables were decorated with pictures of famous footballers cut out of Mexican magazines (one had an Arsenal player; I didn’t sit there). The food was incredible, authentic Mexican, and very cheap, but I noticed that nobody was leaving tips, despite the place being reasonably busy. I mean, the service was no worse or better than you’d expect at any burrito bar, in fact I was really quite impressed that the server spoke to me exclusively in Spanish. So as we left I stuck a couple of bucks in the empty but optimistic tip jar on the counter. It probably made little difference, but it showed my appreciation. So when later at a busy, fairly expensive restaurant the waitress gives me my drink twenty minutes after giving my wife hers, with no apology or explanation as to the reason for its lateness, and then continues ignoring us in this fashion for the rest of the evening, then taking away the tip that would have been given automatically is, far more so in the US than in Europe, perhaps the most effective way to express dissatisfaction. |
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8.8.06 08:27 |
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beside the seaside, beside the OC
watercolour, whsmith sketchbook; late last night, from memory (well, an SD memory card, that's memory isn't it?); a trip to southern california, P. is in Laguna Beach (one of our favourite places, except it sounds too much like 'Gooner Beach'), A. is in Newport Beach, home of the OC, Klinsmann, and Jim from Neighbours. My face looks swollen, or maybe i'm chewing a whole apple. |
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8.8.06 17:27 |
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an art-felt entry I'm finding it difficult to blog on the war in Lebanon; I know how I feel about it, but the seemingly hopeless situation in the Middle East is making me sad, and for some reason I can't get my head around it. I think it's because, well, I can't blame King George and the Dick-Tater for it. Even Dubya has called for peace (a few weeks too late, of course), and is working out a deal with of all people the French. I've not even drawn any cartoons of the Chimp-in-Chief for a while now; I can't be growing tired of The Decider already, can I? I do seem to have turned my attention to sketching a lot more lately though; I've been inspired by a slew of sketch-blogs lately that I never knew existed. All you have to do is scratch the surface - that's what I love about the internet, you look at somebody's blog, follow the links or the sites of the commentators, and see a million different points of view - but those of the visual sort, not the 'today i left work early' or 'guess waht i di today? (600 comments, all meaningless)' or 'this war's good/bad/whatever'. (Of course, my favourite artist the vessel has gone back to being a pop singer and neglected his shadow-wall magicry). It's like shaking a can of pepsi, opening it, and getting fizzy drink all over the place. What? No it's not. See, I can't even make a good analogy any more, my mind is thinking only in pencil and paint. And I'm thirsty as well. I've been trying to use watercolours lately, the pencil kind, the tablet kind, the tube kind; having never really used them before (except at school, a couple of times, fifteen years ago), and I think I want to take a class if I ever get time. I have this urge to draw everything and everyone around me, on my lunch break, before dinner, in the wee small hours before crawling into bed. I draw constantly anyway; I think I'm addicted, I've been like it ever since I picked up a pen (and I hold a pen funny, because I picked up a pen and started drawing before peple taught me how to pick up a pen; they tried to change me, but I wasn't having it). And I'm super super fussy about my sketchbooks, as I am about my journals. It has to be just so. I used these particular Canson ones I could only find in France for a long time, refusing anything else, so when I ran out I would have to wait until my next trip to Aix to buy one from this one shop, Chez Michel on the Cours Mirabeau. Now I'm using a silver-covered A5 book from WHSmith; of course, now I find I'm comfy with it, I'll have to wait until I go back to the UK to get a new one. Or I could go for what everybody appears to using these days in the sketching blogging world, the Moleskine. I nearly got one today in my local art shop (the Paint Chip, Davis), but found a little printed note at the front that said "if found, return to....." with a space underneath saying "reward: $....." - talk about presumptuous! What if you were a poor artist, and put nothing? someone could find your book and refuse on principle. Or if you did state an amount, well people could hold it for ransom, anything. Mental note to yourself, Pete - if you get one, don't lose it, you'll be up all night with the worry. Bad enough my guitar collapsed last week. Peace and love and dialogue and new paints. California's rubbing off on me. |
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9.8.06 06:46 |
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tel, with pint, nw1
watercolour, on watercolour paper; just now, from a photo taken at my leaving party last september in camden town; this is tel, he likes ponds, selling books and everything japanese. |
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14.8.06 08:15 |
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thus spake ahmedinejad, the blogger So there is finally a cessation of fire in Southern Lebanon, though Israel and the Hezbollah militia were anxious to use up as many of their expensive missiles and bombs as possible before the final whistle. I'm sure the international arms dealers are giggling with glee. They know all it takes is for one young Lebanese, angry at having lost his whole family or village, to join the Hezbollah ranks and do something to provoke the Israelis into starting it all again, and then the invoices will start rolling in again. War is a profitable business; those bombs probably cost more than it takes to rebuild. In the meantime, because some bloody stupid nutters know how to make bombs far more cheaply out of unnamed liquids, the flying habits of the Western World have been changed yet again. Airports are packed, flights are cancelled, and people have to fly thousands of miles with not so much as a book to read, let alone a bottle of water or can of Pepsi Max. Passengers crossing the Pond have to sit through hours of mindless entertainment and crap wallywood movies, or simply looking at the Map; still, at least we foiled the terrorists, eh. Now the levels have been downgraded, and I'm sure that the carry-on baggage thing will not last very long, as governments are put under pressure from the millions of dollars and pounds and euros lost in sales of duty-free and possibly airline tickets. And then last night, the Iranian President Ahmadinejad was on American TV, being interviewed on CBS' flagship 60 Minutes. The interviewer, who looked a lot like Jacques Chirac, held nothing back, demanding why he has called for Israel to be wiped off the map (no reply, he just grinned), why his army has a unit that has been trained to serve as suicide bombers in the case of an American/British attack (roundabout reply, grin, retorts that he should be allowed to fight back), and so on. In fact, it is a surprise he answered at all, given the interviewer's attitude toward him. "Don't you have the courage to answer? Why don't you answer!" Now I know that we Brits are used to Mr Paxman treating everybody like that, but over here they are not, and I am absolutely certain that he would not have been allowed to talk to King George like that. In fact I'm sure King George would not have sat down for an interview like Ahmadinejad. Now while I definitely agree that these questions need to be answered if anybody is to take Ahmadinejad seriously, it did seem as though the interviewer wanted only to make a fool of him, to belittle him before the American public. Yet despite the undoubtedly scarier side of his rhetoric - and I do not for a moment trust the guy - I have to say that Ahmadinejad was fairly spot on on one point: that the current US government wants the world to do things their way, or else. The interviewer aggressively demanded why his country does not pursue relations with the US (moments after talking about the 18 page letter he sent King George back in the Spring, for which he hasn't received a reply; he probably still hasn't finished reading it), to which he replied that it was the US who cut off ties, and that this current government does not want dialogue. That before the Revolution the US was happy to assist Iran in obtaining nuclear power. Interesting point, though unlikely to convince the UN. And now President Scruffy (who also claimed that being well dressed was important, even though he looked as though he shopped in Mr Byrite) has joined the blogosphere (that's a link to the BBC report; I'm guessing that the FBI are probably keeping a close eye on who reads the actual blog). And so to a new week. This world is never boring, I'll give it that. But isn't there an old Chinese curse, "May you live in Interesting Times"? Give me boring times any day: peace, boring old peace, boring old love. |
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14.8.06 21:16 |
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