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boxing day, circa 5.30 am
pen and paper, in the early morning of boxing day 2006, when i woke up with a bad back and a desire to listen to pulp and draw things around my mum's house. This is the fireplace. I counted that my mum had 64 christmas cards in total, with more to come. That's a lot of fan-mail! There was a lot of food consumed over the christmas break, including many quality street. Below is the tree. Hope you all had a fine christmas.
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2.1.07 12:17 |
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Yr 2, Wk 66: A Rainy Night In Soho I'm too much of a city person, I'm afraid. I finally went down into Central London, and darted around the narrow afternoon streets with my sketchbook and my memories, in and out of shops, picking up cds and dvds on sale like super mario or something. I even met up with my brother, who happened to be in town, and he drove me around in a similar fashion disguised as white-van-man with the missions of black-cab-man. Soon I met my oldest friend, with whom I spent many evenings as an early-twenty-thing in the Wardour Street area. He was off to Korea the next day for a new life, with his Japanese wife, neither of them had ever been to Korea before, so the adventure begins for them. Bit later, met up with my best man plus another anonymous creativist (not creationist), and then another, and then the drinks did overflow. I was drinking strongbow cider, because I'd had this dream a couple of weeks back, and there was someone who'd turned into a turkey and was attacked by giant crows outside the British Museum... I'm not explaining my dreams right now. The evening ended up in the Intrepid Fox - but not the one I know. The one in Wardour Street, one of my favourite pubs about a decade or so ago, a rockers haunt (and I was a bit of a rocker, without the boring rocker clothes and hair) (or music, mostly) (basically I play the guitar, that's good enough for me). I was saddened to see that this historic Soho mainstay had closed, boarded up and empty, possibly to become another loud corporate-style bar, where toilet attendants try to spray you with perfume while you piss (let's just say the bogs at the Fox were not like that at all... ). However, it has actually moved, to a space on St.Giles High st, behind New Oxford Street, much closer to the guitar paradise of Denmark Street, and now it is open until 2am and you can actually move around there without spilling some huge biker's snakebite. And I remember when that place used to be a trendy over-priced bar! The reverse has happened - it has become the rock-pub, though the nearby former Hellfire Club has long since disappeared. So this is London in my absence. I woke up next morning, and Saddam Hussein had been hanged. I had a pretty big hangover myself. New Year's Eve came and went, a couple of glasses of wine in Burnt Oak, while Big Ben struck and the London Eye erupted on the telly. I'm back in America now - we got back on New Year's Day, tired and dreading work, and San Francisco was sunny when we landed. we drove on to the Valley, past the strip malls and big-box outlets and the flat brown land that stretched all the way to the now-snow-capped Sierras (an awesome distant sight). I really enjoyed being Home though. I feel like when Superman flies up above the clouds and reinvigorates himself in Earth's yellow Sunlight (guess what I watched on the plane). But now it's back to Davis, back to work, back to wide roads and cars-big-as-bars, and I have to think up some New Year's Resolutions, which will have to start this weekend I'm afraid. Happy 2007, I hope it's full of peace and love. |
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3.1.07 14:10 |
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crouch end broadway to south end green
watercolour; crouched down on my end beside the new refurbished budgens in my old stomping-ground of crouch end (I didn't really do much stomping there though), this was a bit of a rushed and uncomfortable effort, but here it is anyway. We loved living in crouch end, and we'd live there again, though it would be a bit of a commute for work of course (five and a half thousand miles, even the 91 doesn't go that far).
pen and whsmith sketchbook, in the garden gate pub in hampstead, south end green. I love this pub; so many comfy chairs and smoke-free nooks, a really nice comfortable atmosphere where you can sit and enjoy a nice beer or hot chocolate by the fireplace, a million miles away from the bars-and-grills of america. We dropped in to rest our feet, before visiting my nephew who was ill in hospital (thankfully he's out and ok now). Not an accurate picture of mrs pete but you get the idea. This concludes our brief tour of the nicer parts of North London.
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3.1.07 14:26 |
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let's all go down the strand (have a banana)
watercolour and pen in book; scribbled on the steps of the royal courts of justice, the rain spitting down on me, i have managed to evict all signs of life from the scene (except that one guy but he was just in the way). This abstract image for the uninitiated is where Strand meets Fleet Street, probably my favourite spot in the whole of London, speaking as a former tour guide who didn't mind being stuck in traffic here (but hated it on bayswater bleeding road). These are the last of the sketches i made in London in the new black-velvet-covered whsmith sketchbook, it'll be back to dull old davis and interesting old san francisco after this. What are they these sketches, well they're like deciding to sit and look at something with eyes and ink rather than lens and pixel, they are interpretations of the world into a language that i speak to myself, they are little pockets of my own memory. Soemtimes they work, sometimes they don't, but they speak the same way, just at different speeds. "Dead Life". I think. Pete's still jetlagged. Anyway below, two types of pen bought at the london graphic centre, and this is nearby at Seven Dials. I love Seven dials don't you mate? Not 'arf mate, it's the best in between six-and-eight dials there is mate.
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5.1.07 06:12 |
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have i got noose for you As deaths of former tyrants go, it was utterly undignified and took place amid scenes of humiliation and name-calling. But enough about Pauline Fowler. Saddam swung, captured on a video-phone (he was hanging on the telephone, you might say), and 2006's round of celebrity deaths almost overshadowed the fact that more US soldiers have died in the Iraq debacle than civilians died on 9/11, not to mention how many Iraqis have perished since Our Glorious Leaders began this conflict in someone else's country. To compensate for this, and despite the fact that the new Democrat-led Senate and most of the population of the United States are against it, King "we wouldna done it like that in Tex's" George has announced he's going to send even more troops Over There. He musta felt so proud of the Mission Accomplished when those guards taunted Saddam as the noose was placed around his neck with cheers of support for Saddam's enemy, Moqtada Al Sadr. Um, America's current enemy. This looked very much like a victory not for the Iraqi people and democr'cy, but for the people King George claims to be fighting against. To be sending young American soldiers to die for. George knows this. But he and his neo-con moneymakers will not admit defeat or admit they were wrong and have fucked everything up for everybody, Iraqis and Americans alike, not to mention everyone else on the planet. They want 'victory'. They don't want peace, they want 'victory'. Until recently that's what they were saying was being acheived, and it sounded very much like Comical Ali, remember him, Saddam's PR man? Now George knows it's too late to turn back the clock, that even the horrendous police state that was Iraq was much safer in the world when it wasn't overrun by the people we know as terr'rists. So he's going to send a 'troop surge'. Maybe, though, us anti-war lib'rals are all wrong, maybe the King's right, a true visionary, maybe he sees a tactic in sending more troops to the slaughter that we don't, after all he's such a great tactician. Remember back in 03, when we all said going to war was a stupid idea that would not make any of us any safer and certainly wouldn't make Iraq any safer, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and there was no evidence of weapons of mass-destruction, but George just grinned and gave us his 'trust me, I know what I'm doing' smirk? Ok, we'll give him that one, he was wrong that once, maybe his tactics will work this time? Bollocks. We cannot trust this buffoon in running the world's affairs any longer. Lord knows what chaos he will bring upon us in his remaining two years of office. the US (and by extension, the world) is becoming a totalitarian regime by tiny increments as we plunge into Wolfowitz's New American Century. A few weeks ago, as Donut Rumsfeld was given his sending off party in front of the troops, Cheney and Bush congratulated themselves on concreting America's military dominnce of the planet, and royally slagging off allies for not spending as much on their arms budgets as the US. These heavily armed and weapon-crazy people are running your planet already folks, isn't it wonderful. Please, America, please change this soon. You've made a start with the Senate, let's win back the White House, and the trust of the world. And this concludes pete's first political rant for a while. |
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7.1.07 08:25 |
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the sounds of a younger pete I left a lot of myself in the UK. Oh it's not surprising; I have left bits of myself everywhere I've spent time. Part of me still lives in Provence, looking out for dogshit on the sun-drenched cobblestones; another part of me still stands in line at Belgian post offices waiting to buy one stamp. But this time when I went back to London I brought some of me back with me, namely my guitar, my records and my old cassettes. My guitar, which I've had for ten years exactly now, has served me well over the years. It's pete's guitar, you know? I'm not that good on it, but I don't mind, it made me happy when I was very sad. When I was in Charleroi I was pretty bored, so I would sit on the windowsill of my thirteenth-floor room with my guitar writing songs and looking out at the rain and the slag-heaps. The night I met my wife-to-be I played her some of them in my French bedroom. Yeah, me and that guitar go back a long way. And now I have a record-player again, my not-very-extensive-but-good-enough-for-me (mostly original Beatles LPs) vinyl collection has gone across the Atlantic; blimey, records aint half heavy, ain't they! So tonight while taking down the Christmas decorations we listened to a bit of George Harrison warbling about his Sweet Lord as nature intended. And rubber Soul as well; certain Beatles records can only be played on vinyl, for the simple reason that on the CD version the Ringo song is in the middle of the album (What Goes On, Act Naturally) rather than the easily-skipped-over side 2, track 1. It was put there for a reason you know. Finally, my cassettes. Now I didn't go buying albums or anything on cassette, how lame would that have been. No, my tape collection consists of stuff that I've recorded over the years, half-written songs, things like that, but mostly tinny out-of-tune tracks I recorded with my old school band fifteen or sixteen years ago. My band was called, I kid ye not, Gonads. I was the rhythm (like we had any rhythm! ) guitarist and songwriter. Listening to this vast anthology, the Gonads Anthology, really takes me back. The proto-Eddie Argos lead vocals of Mr Hooker, the (hydrochloric) acid jazz keyboards of Mr Malcher, the enthusiastic riffs of Mr Fleischman, and the fairly rudimentary, hopefully political ('get lost jacques delors' was my most well-known song at school, written as a school homework project years before I officially embraced europeanism) lyrics of mr pete (in those days i was simply 'scully', as in 'oi, scully!') . Jeez, I've not heard this stuff for years. I wish I could figure out a way to convert these tapes to cds somehow. However bad and unlistenable they are, they still piss all over the rubbish in the charts today. Kind of. Maybe. |
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7.1.07 09:21 |
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nothing to say
0.2 staedtler pigment liner, watercolor, new small sketchbook, and a sudden urge to draw what's right in front of me very quickly, which is not very much, except the desk, below a map of the planet we live on. An uncut cd playing nice psychedelia: howlin rain, "the hanging heart". It's cold and I have my hood up. "Heer schal he nat preche; he schal no gospel glosen here ne teche." |
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9.1.07 07:19 |
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from desk till dawn
pen, paint, paper, and my two other desks. In case you are wondering the map on my screensaver is of europe at the time of charlemagne. Just to complete a tryptych of desks, and rudimentary scribbles of everyday places. Not a window in sight (but plenty of post-its) "And he bigan with right a myrie cheere, his tale anon, and seyde as ye may heere." |
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11.1.07 07:50 |
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spend it like beckham ("he's considering a move to LA") Beckham. I remember when you scored that goal against Wimbledon from the half-way line, and Man United starting winning things with kids, though Alan Hansen said they wouldn't. I remember all of your hairstyles, how you annoyed your Brylcream sponsors by shaving your hair. Now you're coming out to California (copying pete, eh) to earn a million bucks a week (so, um, not copying pete after all), leaving our beloved Yurp behind, and giving mrs posh a chance at living somewhere she might be able to have a career again. Maybe. Hang on - a million dollars a week? And "it's not for the money"? The MLS changed its strict pay-structure rule at the end of last season - the 'Beckham Rule' - so that teams can buy a single player who can be paid whatever they desire. So LA Galaxy will now practically be 'Beckham FC'. Other stars will now surely follow, safe in the knowledge they will be the only massively paid ego in their desired club. Fixtures will probably be listed as 'Ronaldo' vs 'Figo', or whichever other stars on the wrong side of 30 come stateside in search of even more enormous wealth and popularity. Beckham is already big here - now he'll be huge. All those season tickets already sold, all those replica shirts (though LA Galaxy will have to change that ugly yellow kit if they really want to shift units). And I wonder if a team such as say Real Salt Lake might tempt the now-well-known-in-the-US Zidane out of headbutt-retirement? He wants to be 'part of history' (I thought steve McLaren already did that? ). He wants to make 'soccer' more popular here. He will do, too, for a little while anyway. But Americans like their sports stars to be tough macho goons, not someone who likes dressing up in knickers and sarongs. And what will happen when he's injured, and LA Galaxy are still paying him a million bucks a week to go to film premieres? I don't think they'll care that much actually - they'll still make millions back on his name. How will the other players react though? Or the fans? It'll be an interesting few years in the MLS. I'm sad Beckham's leaving Europe. I wanted him to go to Spurs of course, even though it was a pipe dream (then again, he is a local boy). I wanted England to beg him to play again - he still is one of the hardest working and talented players we have. I thought maybe he'd go somewhere else, such as France, perhaps Marseille - he could have been the new Chris Waddle (he'd have to grow those mullet curls though). Or even an emotional return to Man Utd for the rest of the season, and I think they'll win the Premiership this year. But it was not to be. And he's coming out here, to California, and that's pretty cool. I should know. |
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12.1.07 20:31 |
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brrrrr!! It got cold here in California! It's below freezing now. "I heard it might snow," voices muttered for days this week. "They say snow is on the way", "it snowed in Sacramento once", "it's certainly cold enough..." Well we aren't getting snow - we aren't even getting clouds. But it's bloody cold. Elsewhere in the US, there are ice-storms and absolute Arctic chaos. I'm alright, I'm sat indoors with my hood up and the heating on, I tried to play the guitar with my new recording software but my hands can't strum efficiently in the cold. So I'm just messing about with my old cassettes and watching Jedi (the original version). It's a three-day weekend, maaan.
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14.1.07 09:32 |
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