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santa cruz (part 1)
yesterday, in Santa Cruz; we drove down to Santa Cruz, by the bright sea, on cesar chavez day (a nice day off for UC employees), and walked about the boardwalk. It was warm, and sunny, but with a nice breeze. Santa Cruz is a nice place, very quirky, but also with an odd mix of beach bums, students, tourists and dogs. The coastline is gorgeous, at the northern tip of monterrey bay.
We walked along the pier and saw sealions swimming in the water. I even saw a sea otter, and a really wierd jellyfish. For fear of dropping my sketchbook into the sea, I didn't attempt to lean over the edge and draw them, so I drew some people instead, while my wife took photos of seagulls... |
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1.4.07 08:20 |
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santa cruz (part 2)
I painted this one from the pier, while huge gulls with enormous long golden beaks hovered above me. I'd have been so pissed if one of them had pooed on my sketchbook. I would have been Anakin with the Sandpeople. I remember the adverts last year for the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk - you can't see it in this picture, but it normally sits to the right there. People have been coming down here for years, it's especially popular with high school kids looking to hang out and show off; in fact the music playing constantly over the PA was stuck somewhere between 1984 and 1987. I thought I'd gone back in time! Do you remember that funfair from the cartoon Dungeon's and Dragons, didn't that send them through time, or to another world or something. Maybe I'm thinking Scooby Doo. Whatever, amusement parks like this, with cotton candy and garlic fries and huge old rattling wooden rollercoasters are definitely a part of the American youth consciousness. Me, I've always been a bit scared of Rollercoasters, and the Santa Cruz Giant Dipper is no different, especially as it was the one seen in The Lost Boys, believe you me. But my wife convinced me to go on it, and so I did, hanging on for dear life as the world rattled and shook to the music of screams and clunking wooden slats. What an experience! I don't think I'd actually ever been on one of those old rollercoasters before. We got off the ride laughing our heads off. It's Santa Cruz, dude, you gotta do the Giant Dipper! We stayed at a Super 8 Motel with walls presumably made of rice paper. We dined at a no-frills (and not many thrills) Mexican place downtown before wandering the very poorly-lit but quite crowded main street, looking in interesting bookstores and record shops.
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2.4.07 00:27 |
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santa cruz (part 3)
We both watched the sun set into the Pacific - a new day for Japan and Tel in Korea - from the cliffs of Santa Cruz, near the lighthouse on the edge of the Bay. The light was incredible, that Californian sun-setting-by-the Ocean kinda light that drew film-makers to the golden skies of Hollywood in the early twentieth century. So I drew a quick black and white pen sketch. Well actually only the pen was black, the paper was white. Nearby on the beach, troops of dogs were darting about at the breaking of the waves, their owners busy picking up the remains their over-ecited little doggy-butts left behind. Yes yes it was a beautiful and romantic evening, but you could smell a whiff of eau-de-chien on the breeze; my wife said it was the poopy beach.
The next day, after the rollercoaster, we drove north to Davenport - we had heard that you could spot whales from out there. I don't mean the country, I mean the huge blue mammal. It was supposed to be whale season. We didn't see any. We did walk down a rocky and unstable little trail to a phenomenal beach, and watched seagulls steal crackers. I drew the above in pencil (and look below to prove it, m'lud). And then we had lunch. there were lots of weekend bikers around - a whole crew of leather-clad not-quite-hell's angels, more like purgatory's angels. Part-timers. They only bite the heads off of free-range corn-fed organic chickens. Good on them, I say. And so, with this in mind, we drove back to Davis.
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2.4.07 06:15 |
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toujours ici! Two years ago exactly I started this bloggery, while seated at the Argos-bought desk in Hornsey Lane while my wife watched The Master's golf - I'd been banished from the TV area because I make too many silly comments about the golfers' names. And today, the same Master's was on (different winner though), same Augusta, but this time at a decent hour (ie, before Easter lunch; I made a long-awaited roast, naturally). Back then the blog was an 'I-should-be-writing-about-medieval-stuff' (procrastination being the mother of invention) distraction, then it was a 'going to America' blog, then it was a 'coming to America' blog, then it was a 'living in America' expatriate blog, then it was a 'what you talking about willis' blog, then it was a 'still living in America' blog, then it was suddenly a sketchblog, at least 75% of the time. I've not been writing as much as I've been drawing, I've not been thinking as much as I've been daydreaming. But I'm still at the desk, holding in the jokes about bogeys on the green (it's allergy season), nibbling a cadbury's cream egg and sipping a cuppa tea, albeit 5000 miles west of usual. Happy Easter!
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9.4.07 05:26 |
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a picture of not really anything really
pen; a different view of the bus terminal at the ucd mu (so many acronyms). It was a colourful spring day, so i went for black and white again. Idid do some colourful paintings just previously (not everything in the book is on the blog you know). I'd just had lunch. I have a nice Thai soup for my lunch. It's great, but I have to cover my entire body with napkins first, as I'm a very messy eater when it comes to soup. |
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10.4.07 04:28 |
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Yr 2, Wk 80: Antiques Roadshow I hated Sundays when I was a kid, for many reasons. There was none of the sense of hope you got on a Saturday. Saturday's were brilliant, weren't they? Getting up and watching the cartoons and the loud and colourful morning shows, with the likes of Timmy Mallett, Michaela Strachan and Noel Edmonds, then later on there'd be the A-Team and football down the park, followed by the final scores (back when Spurs were great and Arsenal were shite); Sunday morning meant Grange hill repeats and being dragged around car-boot sales. And there was that awful dead period of TV on a sunday, from about 5pm (by when any possible footy that might have been on was over) until about 10, when Spitting Image would start. This dead period would be punctuated by such shows as Highway, Songs of Praise, Credo, Last of the Summer Wine, and - as if the car-boot sale experience wasn't enough - Antiques flipping Roadshow. Well guess what - they have it here too. But it's not on Sundays, it's on weekdays - it just feels like Sunday when it's on. Oh, now don't get me wrong - I actually do like the show. Really. The American version is very much like the British version, it's not a glitzy win-fabulous-prizes in-your-face copy, and it's on PBS, which means it has some dignity and no commercials. It doesn't have Hugh Scully, but it does have Mark Walberg, and it's not the guy from Planet of the Apes. I'll tell you what I like about it though. While the British show ambles about the country from village hall to community centre, parading sensibly embarassed old folks trying their best not to show their elation / disappointment at the valuation of their old coronation teapots, the American one is a true roadshow, which really does get about - this is a big country, and yokel Americans can be really, really funny. Last night's one was in Mobile, Alabama (the place namechecked by a stuck Dylan on Blonde on Blonde), and you gotta love the Deep South, their colourful stories and their rocking-chair-on-the-verandah accents. One old fellow was talking about some event that happened back in his own history that was only vaguely connected to the rug or whatever that he was showing, saying how "we hadda rootin-tootin-good-tahm, yes sir!" They show such genuine love for their old family junk, especially such traditional Americana as blankets, and they really do practically fall off their chairs when told that the lampshade they picked up in a junk store in 1957 is worth ten thousand dollars. More than the human side though is the sense of American culture and history that, as an outsider, it's often difficult to find otherwise. An old 'Duke' football, means nothing to me, but it turns out it's from the 'golden age of football' (their football, not ours), which again doesn't mean anything to me, but at least I could understand the warmth with which they spoke about it. One of the more interesting historical artefacts that was evaluated was an old Confederate Army belt buckle. This guy, whose accent had such a twang you could play the fiddle with it, dug this belt up in his cotton field and was going around wearing it for many years. It turns out it's a highly desirable item and, with it's deep-rooted southern history, could easily pick up twenty grand at an auction, much to the evaluator's excitement and old Zeke's astonishment. What they never brought up, but I'll bet they both thought it, is that this very same belt may well have been used to beat poor black slaves in that very same cotton field; it's hard to escape that sinister image of the south. When you start to imagine the hidden history in such a seemingly innocent item as a belt buckle, well, it kind of puts complaining about Last of the Summer Wine on a Sunday evening in Burnt Oak into a little perspective. |
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12.4.07 05:20 |
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april tower
watercolour; it was rainy today, after so much april sun; i looked out over the uc davis skyline and attempted to quickly capture the clouds from the stairwell of the math science building. sunshine and showers. good weather for ducks. it was, too, i could tell they loved it. anyway, this was davis today. goodnight and good luck, or something. |
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12.4.07 07:38 |
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sophie the bookshop dog
pen; this is sophie, the dog that lives in the bookshop. She's a nice dog, a well-known davisite, and she really loves that chair.She's not so good at recommending new books to me though. Tails of the Unexpected maybe. His Bark Materials, perhaps. |
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13.4.07 06:55 |
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rainy picnic day parade
pen; standing in the doorway of the bookshop, sheltering from the massive rainstorm that threatened to wash out the uc davis picnic day, waiting for the annual picnic day parade to march by - and come it did, wrapped in plastic, never mind the rain, the bands were still playing, the costumes were still worn, and the guys with the funny bike things were still going round and round and bouncing about. This was the only thing I drew today; it was far too rainy to draw anything else. |
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15.4.07 09:15 |
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The shootings at Virginia Tech have astonished and shocked and upset me, and everyone else in the country. The enormity of it hasn't yet sunk in; working at a large leafy university campus as I do, it's something that you always think could happen but never think will (though the student-with-gun-in-our-building incident a couple of months ago certainly woke us all up a little).This is one of those events that makes you feel sick, that tests your emotions and reactions. I can't help but feel the deepest sorrow for those that died so needlessly, and for the families and friends they left behind. I didn't like some of the things written straight afterwards, such as on the Guardian website where they asked why it was usually America that saw such shootings, followed by a string of smug comments about crazy red-neck Americans and their guns, and a flush of responses about the urgent need for guns to defend the people of the nation, such as against the 'tyrannical Brits'. Nice to see this awful tragedy has sparked a sensible debate. One Davis student, in the campus newspaper, said that if there weren't gun-free zones and if people could carry weapons more freely, this might not have happened, and the gunman would have been shot down sooner. Is he suggesting all students carry fire-arms? Or professors, maybe? Nobody wants armed police patrolling campus corridors - the Virginia Tech students interviewed on the news tonight certainly didn't. I just don't see how relaxing gun laws would stop people who want to shoot people getting hold of guns. And then the Virginia governor speaks of his loathing for anybody who would want to use this tragedy to spark a debate on gun control in the US, for 'political agendas', though I'm sure he won't mind using the tragedy to boost his own ratings - even King George came down to speak at the memorial service (that's one more memorial service he's attended than the ones held for soldiers killed in Iraq, by the way). If someone really wants to shoot someone, they'll get a gun, they'll do it. What I'd like to know is why do we make it so easy for them to get a gun? Virginia is one of the easiest places to buy a gun in America - you can buy handguns and assault rifles legally from guys just selling them from their homes (as a report on TV this afternoon showed). why? why do people need to buy handguns and assault rifles? Should that not be restricted to the military and the police? Why do members of the public need them? "Protection," chirp the protesters. Ok, protection. Assault rifles? Surely we'd be better protected if these things weren't readily available from your local store? But it won't change - America is too deeply in love with the gun. The right to bear arms - this was part of the sacred Constitution (a document people don't mind rewriting if it allows governments to spy on ter'rists) back at a time when they wanted people to be able to form militias to protect the fledgling country from invaders. Those times are past, and how. We don't like it when Iraqis bear arms in defense against occupying armies. I think it's time they made handguns and assault rifles illegal to own, illegal to buy and illegal to sell. Amnesty time. Sure, if a maniac really wanted to shoot and kill people he'd find a way to get a gun, but we should be doing whatever we can to prevent that from happening. They banned nail-clippers and cans of diet soda from aeroplanes - why can't we ban the sale of guns to any Tom Dick or Harry too? |
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18.4.07 07:32 |
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