petescully - @ 20six.co.uk

we mean it, maaaaan

I've been too busy to write and too busy to think lately, but I'm up realtively early on a Saturday (9.30 on a Saturday for me is like the crack of dawn), so here's time to make some comments before going about the business of the day (getting Hair cut, posting letter to Tel in Korea, drawing some of Davis, reading some of Watchmen, listening to some Weller, playing some Ibanez Guitar - yeah, Saturdays man).
god save the queen
I didn't catch much of the Oscars, but I caught the last few, and I'm really glad that Helen Mirren won Best Actress for the Queen. She did such a good job as EIIR she should be given the job of Heir to the Throne. Crikey, I remember that crazy week in 1997. I'd actually been eating at an Egyptian restaurant right by Kensington Palace that night, and next morning I went to France with Tel. We missed the initial shockwaves of it all in Britain, though of course it was never off the news in France either. People would stop and ask us, as Britishers, "how are you feeling, are you alright?" Um, yes, we're fine. We were going around the streets of Strasbourg on our bikes flashing our cameras pretending to be paparazzi (we were young, stupid and satirical), and then we got back to England and it was like, whoah, what the hell is going on? And everyone was slagging off the Queen. I still have the News of the World I got on the morning Diana crashed, where the front pages are all about the nation's darling princess being gone forever, killed by the evil media and the old-fashioned royals, whereas the interior pages had been written before news of the crash had reached the editor, and were full of all the anti-Diana "who does she think she is, she's a disgrace" diatribes that were at fever-pitch in the weeks before she snuffed it. Vive la presse.
it's a fascist regime
I've just finished re-reading Philip Pullman's excellent trilogy His Dark Materials. It's one of my favourite stories, mainly because I think the characters are so strong and individual, but also because it is so sad towards the end. There is a bit in the book in which the main character, Lyra, makes a journey into the world of the dead, but is forced by the rules of nature to leave her daemon, part of her very soul, behind on the grey shores as the boatman takes her on. It is a terribly sad moment, and you know she is being torn apart at this moment, and I think that is how I felt when I moved to America. I left people I loved (my family) on the shores when I flew over the Atlantic, and it was like leaving a part of my soul elsewhere. Eventually, Lyra is reunited with her daemon, but they have grown a little, and have learnt how to live far from each other, to get used to it. Interesting. It's a great story.
she'll make you a moron
I saw an advert for that show 'American Idol' the other day. It's one of the more popular imports from Britain's starsearch/reality-TV craze, and has gotten to the point where even one of its rejects went and won an Oscar last weekend. And of course they have Simon Cowell and his tight t-shirts. There is another show where they have, oh my god I couldn't bloody believe it, Piers Morgan on the panel. Piers flipping Morgan, him from the Daily Mirror, who would always be roundly ridiculed on Have I Got News For You, now a TV ('totally vacuous?' ) personality in America. Anyway. There was this woman singing (howling like a cat with a personality disorder), and Cowell said she was just not good enough. Well she was in a rage of angry tears backstage, "what does he know, he's not even American! this is an American show, American Idol!" Apparently this is not the first or even the second time he's been blasted for not being American. Evidently Xenophobic remarks are fine on TV here. A couple of weeks ago there was a humourous reporter asking a French basketball player in the NBA if ever he wanted to just surrender halfway though a game. He should have responded, at least we don't join the game halfway through. But what does he know, he's not even American.
potential h-bomb
The major marketing campaign to convince the public that Iran is the urgent enemy and we must attack them without delay is on. If we can blame the Iranians for the chaos in Iraq, if we can say it enough times, it will become true, and everybody will support an attack because they have been convinced by the politics of the media which doesn't need hard evidence to prove anything, just hard headlines and a firm demonisation of Ahmedinedjad and mistranslation of all he says (this famous 'wipe Israel off the map' thing we hear so much about, let's not forget that other places were wiped off the map, such as Middlesex and Rutland, without international outcry, we just assume he means with mass-destruction, because that's what we'd do). That's not to say we can trust the Iranian government, but we seem to be doing everything we can to antagonize them. I just worry that the war-hungry Admisitraitors can actually scare and convince the public for a second time that opening a second front in the endless war and invading another sovereign nation that never threatened us will be the right thing to do to protect us. I probably don't speak for everybody in the West, but I personally have felt far more threatened and unprotected since we invaded Iraq than at any time before, even during the Cold War. I'm afraid that acts of global aggression and antagonism will bounce back on us one day. In the words of Marvin Gaye, what's going on?
And that's my two cents for the week. Now for my haircut.

3.3.07 19:30

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pink blossom, B street

pen and watercolour, a few hours ago; in central park, davis, while the farmer's market was packing up, and people were milling about in the early march sunshine, I got my paints out and tried to capture the very pretty pinks of the very spring-like trees. I love blossom, I'm a real sucker for it. Back in Burnt Oak, it was always the time when the normally grubby area looked dare I say beautiful. Here in Davis, the blossom has sprouted dramatically and after the rains we're having some nice sunshine and temperatures. In the warm sunshine, I had to cover my face while drawing (well, pink blossom is not very manly is it).

4.3.07 01:10

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the house on 5th and J

micron pen and watercolour, 3 march 07: i've wanted to draw this house for ages, it's so american movie, so teen-slasher flick, so poltergeists and doorways to spectral planes. I love a picket fence.

5.3.07 05:21

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Yr 2, Wk 75: The Vinyl Frontier

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.

6.3.07 13:30

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nice mansion, guv

pen, paint, paper: march 4th, on my sunday walk around midtown. I don't think arnold lives here at all - there's no room for the hummer - but this is the historic governor's mansion on 16th and H (I think). Did you know, Ronnie Reagan was the last Guv to live here? I couldn't get a good view to draw the thing, so I climbed up into a car park (that's a parking lot to americans) and looked down at it. A good trick. It's lovely and warm in early March, sunny, mild, perfect.

6.3.07 13:42

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spring forward

Stupid early time change. The US has decided that it will bring its clocks forward an hour two weeks earlier than normal this year. It will also put them back two weeks later, so I hear. does this mean global warming is making winter that little bit shorter each year? Or does king george just sit there and think, heh heh, yeah, U-S-A, y'see we're ahead of the rest of the world, we're aleady in the future, and they're lagging behind in the past, heh-heh, yeah. S'right. I bet, I bet tony wishes he was an 'murrucan, he could be in the future too, yeah. Oh george. How is South America by the way? I hear they love you down there. They love you so much that they're using all of their police resources to make sure you see and hear absolutely nobody voicing any dissent against you. You don't want to hear popular dissent, do you. It would be bad for your morale, after all. It reminds me of The Life of Brian, when Pontius "Welease Wodewick!" Pilate is being ridiculed by a Jerusalem crowd, and his guard tells him they're not laughing at him, it's just some Jewish joke. Welease Wumsfeld. Happy Spring, folks.

11.3.07 18:06

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feeling flat, on L & 20th

sketched this afternoon, watercolour, pen, pencil; a hot and sunny march afternoon, spent in midtown again, on my now-weekly sketching walkabout. Unfortunately, though I enjoyed the drawing element of this chaming building on L St and 20th, I fell flat on my arse when it came to rendering the paint. I did two, simultaneously, to get two effects, neither of which really worked, both were flatter than yolo county, and I'm still having trouble with the clear blue sky, the easiest thing in the world. I think the colours are wrong. The shading is wrong. I know they're only sketches, of course, and I like to try stuff out with my sketches, but all the same. I went home and played with the paints and the colour-wheel; much studying to do, pete. Much learning to be learnt. I think I need to approach everything from a completely different angle.
There are lot of palm trees in sacramento.

12.3.07 07:22

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power chords for better living

last week, no, two weeks ago (time flies) I stayed in and played with the guitar and the cheap recording software on the computer, and wrote and even recorded a new song in an afternoon, i called it 'angry words'. Lots of fun it was too.

12.3.07 07:28

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Yr 2, Wk 76: What's Up, Doc

I went to the doctor's a few weeks ago. I'd never been to the doctor's in America before - well, I was hardly a regular at the docs in England either (I knew the routine though - go there with a broken leg, they tell you it's a virus, that sort of thing). Nothing serious, I'd just been having a few pains and wanted an actual certified medic to check me out. The problem with having a few pains here and there is that if you tell anybody (and this is a universal truth, especially in your place of work), you come away thinking you've only got weeks to live. People would say "it's appendicitis!", even though the pain I'd be describing would be closer to the answer's page than the appendix. And I'd believe it all, too; I'm not one of nature's hypochondriacs, but I'm certainly one of nature's worriers. So I thought I should get a doctor to have a look.
I'm lucky - I have health insurance, one of the benefits of my job. Millions in America don't. It's not like in the UK, where we have the NHS - love it or hate it (depending on which tabloid you read), it's the most valuable thing Britain has, and America would do well to look after its population as a whole with universal healthcare. Richest country in the world and all that. So I went to the doctor's, and was surprised I still had to pay to see the man - a small amount, 'co-pay', but still. They made me wait around, too, in a room full of people with either nosiy children or noisy illnesses. Noisier still was the sound of the cash register. I couldn't help but think how impossible it must be for people with either no job or really badly paid jobs who cannot afford health insurance, but get sick. How do they cope? Truth is, they do not cope - getting ill is one of (if not the) largest cause of bankrupcy in the US. However, eventually I got to see the nurse, who performed a series of mysterious tests, such as clipping something to my finger and saying 'ok' - I still can't work out what it's for, perhaps it measures fingernails or something. I can't put my finger on it. anyway, I was told to take off my shirt and wait for the doctor, who came 25 minutes later (in the meantime, I caught a cold).
Well, he squeezed me a bit here and poked about a bit there, and asked what was wrong and if I'd had these sypmtoms or those symptoms, none of which I had, which evidently must have been a good thing. He told me to take a few tests (urine, blood; personally I'd have preferred geography or music), and basically I came away thinking that my diagnosis was, well, Mr Scully, you're 31, you see. I've not had any mysterious pains since, and I got my test results back today, too. Lots of 'negatives' (it reminded me of when Del Boy Trotter got a similar letter and panicked because he thought 'negative' meant 'curtains'). But it seems I'm fine. which is good news, because we're on the verge of pollen season, and it's only a metter of time before my hay fever explodes in a mess of streaming eyes, itchy nose and lots and lots of tissue. Buy your Kleenex shares now, folks.

14.3.07 01:42

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a hot day in the middle of march

pen; a really hot day for march, sunny and bright, lots of people out an about of a friday afternoon, looking for the nice outside chairs and tables for a nice cold refreshing drink. I went indoors to a cool spot in little prague, davis, for a hoegaarden and a touch of sketching.
pen; and then later tonight, mrs pete fell asleep while mr pete watched star wars and drank tea and ate a snickers ice cream. i'm going to go on the 13th international sketchcrawl tomorrow in berkeley (i did a davis one a while back) so i was exercising the pens. Or exorcising? Whatever i did, my head span around. Maybe it's the heat.

17.3.07 07:17

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[next page]

the house on 5th and J micron pen and watercolour, 3 march 07: i've wanted to draw this house for ages, it's so american movie, so teen-slasher flick, so poltergeists and doorways to spectral planes. I love a picket fence.
5.3.07 05:21	Permalink / 2 Comment(s) / Comment

power chords for better living last week, no, two weeks ago (time flies) I stayed in and played with the guitar and the cheap recording software on the computer, and wrote and even recorded a new song in an afternoon, i called it 'angry words'. Lots of fun it was too.
12.3.07 07:28	Permalink / 11 Comment(s) / Comment