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taking a napa
watercolour, with wind in my watering eyes; the view from the opulent french-style domaine carneros winery, napa, while hundreds of dollars were being spent sipping drips of wine and nibbling thumbprints of cheese behind me. I only had a moment, and my eyes could barely see, and this is the result.
pencil; this is the view from the other direction, the actual winery itself. It's supposed to be tres french. I suppose it is. I tell thee wine's a lot cheaper in france though. i liked what i tasted, and bought what i liked, a $22 bottle of avant-garde pinot noir. Good job i didn't like the 'famous gate', that cost $55. As they say in parts of rural france, "yeravina larf, intya?!" I didn't draw any of the people that were flitting by me as i drew; people are such transitory figures, don't you feel? |
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1.10.06 20:51 |
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sonoma, i'm mission you already
fineliner pen, watercolour; yesterday at the mission san francisco de solano, in sonoma. I love sonoma. It's a really pretty town, and I wish we lived there. The first time I came to the US we housesat for a couple of my future wife's friends there, and I drank local wine and ate the lcoal cheese for the first time. It'll never leave me. This is the mission, the lats of the California missions to be built, back in the age of Spaniards and Natives and kings and 'discovery', hah. Before the English-speakers. Before the gold. Sonoma is where the California Republic started, that whole thing with the bear, before it became a State. It's good to see a little of California's history before the US came along. Before the strip malls. |
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1.10.06 22:00 |
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make way for the king of the administration Oh dear. King George is coming to town. Well, not this town, but a town near enough, and they will talk about nothing else on the news. Everything in the city of Stockton (not the one Upon Tees) is grinding to a halt for the day because The Decider is coming to Raise Funds for local Republicans standing in next month's elections. The newsreaders are camping out already, saying the sentence "The President of the United States is Coming to Stockton" over and over as if they don't believe this Great Honour is true. It's such a fiasco whenever He goes anywhere. Remember when He came to London? and most of central London was closed off for the day so the Emperor could ride through the rainy streets of people who Couldn't Care Less. Yes, police officers had to be taken away from other parts of London (where actual crime was taking place, or from the Old Bailey where a major trial had to be halted because the police had to go and protect War Criminal #1 himself). It's the same wherever he goes. Every cop in Stockton is on duty tomorrow, nervously protecting His Hyenaness. Cops are even being draughted in from Sacramento and elsewhere. All for one man. This is a show of Power, not humility, not even fear of assasination (which haunts him I'm sure, as it should everyone else - the world would be infinitely worse if W was ever done away with, because it would mean Cheney would be the Prez, and the neo-Cons would be able to use the national drama and panic to get everything they want, kinda like just after 9/11). Power. Everyone must feel His Presence, everyone must know He is There. The past two times I was in Vegas, Shrubby was in town, and roads were blocked for hours, and planes were delayed needlessly, all because He was Passing Through. All for one man. Jeez, they don't do that for the Queen in the UK; they don't even do it for Beckham. He is one man, he doesn't deserve all that special attention; he is only the President. These displays of Power just show how very very far away from the People he is. In other news, it's getting slightly colder, causing the weathermen to go into fits of madness, with 'winter' and 'chilly' and warnings of 'wear your warm coats' and 'get those extra blankets out' because the temperature has dropped into the 60s and it has gotten a little bit cloudy. What a place. Back to my paint set. |
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3.10.06 07:28 |
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the boomtown frats
pen, paper; the frat houses are starting to buzz, it's the start of the college year, which in davis means madness and heaven knows what else. and all those greek letters, is that because they ran out of names, like at the end of hurricane season? and is KFC a frat house or a fat house? or is it kilmarnock football club? what i do know is that they can have all the greek letters they want, they don't do kebabs like up green lanes mate, no surrey. |
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3.10.06 07:39 |
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reading avidly
pen, paper; scribbled hastefully in the eveningtime, in the heart or maybe the head of downtown davis, part two of the city known as davis (the first chapter being the uc you see). more words per square inch than any other shop downtown bar none (one speaks not of borders, or 'frontieres' as the french call it, except in hushed whispers). |
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6.10.06 00:27 |
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pass the pepper
fineliner pen, watercolour; mrs pepperpot, married to the honourable mr salt, has travelled from burnt oak to crouch end up to highgate and across the world to california, where she still stands alongside her single-holed hubby on our dinner table. don't get too close, or she'll make you sneeze |
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8.10.06 06:42 |
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end of the sketchbook 02 micron fineliner pen, watercolour, and the last page of the whsmith sketchbook (i must buy more when i go back to the uk at christmas); with a headache, i sketched my home desk, and finished the book. that's all you get. so anyway i watched x-men 3 on dvd and saw the deleted scene where magneto has a beard. reminded me of saddam before capture, dressing up as santa. bought my wife a new bike today too. october is great, it's my favourite month. |
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8.10.06 07:53 |
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pete time It's really early in the morning, and that Davis wind is up again, blowing the trees against our builidng. We're signing a new lease, which means we don't have to move apartments (thank goodness), but it also means we are in Davis for another year at least. I can handle that (talk to me in twelve months). But yes, it appears that Fall / Autumn is upon us now, though it still isn't time for my trusty scarves. Yesterday was quite warm, not that I really left the building much. I like this very-early-morning, before-five-am feeling. When I was a kid and would stay up all night listening to the radio, drawing, writing, reading, waiting for the sun to rise above the mist and the trees in Watling Park, bringing with it that strange damp odour of morning dew and the alarm call of early birds hi-ho-ing off to get the worms, this was always my favourite time of day. Pete time, I suppose you'd call it. I do miss looking out of a window in the morning at the world waking up. Ok my window in Burnt Oak looked out only over Burnt Oak, but when the air is still and the noisy folk are asleep it aint so bad. In Charleroi I had the best window of all, thirteenth floor, overlooking le pays noir. And in France, I overlooked an Aixois housing estate, with rugged hills in the background. I can't see much out of my window now except for rocking silhouettes of trees to a soundtrack of the freeway and the freight trains. |
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10.10.06 13:08 |
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start of the sketchbook
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10.10.06 13:24 |
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Yr2, Wk53/54: All Greek To Me A new year for me, a new year for the universities, and right now college campuses are packed with new students, shuffling about from class to dorm to class with expensive new books and the unmistakebale mix of eagerness and trepidation. Slightly more experienced students wander about casually, offering all the wisdom of a world-weary 20-year-old to greener kids, while graduate students cycle around with far weightier things on their minds. Others still can be found performing any number of bizarre and ridiculously dangerous acts, all in the name of joining one of those mystical groups with greek-letter names that, while non-existant in Britain, have been a huge part of university life here since before the USA was the USA (or even the ΥΣA). Despite their boards and signs and sweaters and houses everywhere I look, fraternities and sororities are still a bit of a mystery to me. I'm sure that is their intention; after all they were founded as secret societies, much in the tradition of the masons and other shadowy fellowships. Some of the oldest fraternities date back over two hundred years, such as Phi Beta Kappa (ΦΒΚ), founded in 1776 as a society for "fostering and recognizing excellence". Many fraternities grew out of the idea of being a forum for academic discussion, but it wasn't long before the social element became a prime reason for joining. After all, isn't that what old boy's clubs are all about, the networking? Frats such as Sigma Phi (1827) were among the first to expand their net between colleges, and Zeta Psi (ΖΨ, 1847) was the first to be present on either coast. Sororities (girls only, in case you don't know) followed later, as did groups for minority groups such as Latinos and African-Americans. Among the first fraternity established for the latter was Alpha Phi Alpha [ΑΦΑ], whose past members included Martin Luther King Jr and Jesse Owens. As you'd expect, many of the great and not-so-good from American history were in frats, and I'll bet that students look closely at the roll of honour before signing up. Some follow family ties; King George was in the same frat (Delta Kappa Epsilon) as Daddy Bush, for example. Not that the Bushes ever indulged in rampant old-boy cronyism, eh folks. To join a fraternity or sorority is to join a historical association. So what does it take to actually join? There has been a lot of talk in the news lately (I guess it's a common news item at this time of year) of the ritualistic behaviour known as 'hazing', in which 'pledges' are weeded out through a series of tasks during 'rush'. Ok, yes, I got lost back there on the way in. There is a whole new vocabulary that comes with this frat business, that may sound like something to do with furniture polish but probably involves a lot more cleaning up. Rush week is going on now across campus - I've seen the fliers - and that means it is time for new members to join up. A new member being a 'pledge'. And you show just how badly you want to be part of a club that would have someone like you as a member (keep groucho out of this, pete) by performing all sorts of crazy stuff, usually involving drinking. People have died in hazing, resulting in calls for it to be banned, with organizations such as StopHazing.org campaigning against it through education. Most of the extreme cases of hazing involve pledges consuming large amounts of alcohol (which is fairly common among British students who aren't trying to join a club), or even water (which is a little less common in Britain's student union pubs, but is apparently quite dangerous), but can even, in the case of certain sororites, involve going to a different social event every night for two weeks and having to wear a different outfit every single time. If you wear the same outfit twice, you're out, sister. Not quite life-threatening, but bloody expensive. So why do people join these crazy and secretive groups? Coming to university is a daunting and often lonely experience, so being part of a ready-made family of new friends can be pretty helpful. What's more, a lot of frat members live in their frat houses, and Davis has plenty of those, their big old-fashioned buildings lining the edge of campus. Most importantly, you can put it on your CV, so when employers in years to come see you were in gamma beta ipsilon or whatever, and they too were in gammer bitter whoopsydaisy or something, then you might get the job. I don't know, I'm glad we don't have frats in the UK. No, what we have are things like the rugby club, whose members (if my memory serves correct from my own uni days) will converge upon the pub, drink massive amounts of pound-a-pint lager that would make even the hardiest frat boy shiver, stand on the table, vomit into a bucket, drink more cheap beer, vomit into the bucket again, and if particularly daring, drink from the bucket. While naked. I suppose everywhere has their little cultural quirks. |
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12.10.06 18:45 |
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