Parlez à la main, copain
600 posts, three years, two countries, and a baby; and now to start a new weblog in another universe. Thanks for stopping by! Feel free to browse through the past three years of entries and enlightenment; for all pete's new blog entries, please go to petescully.com, or step through the magic portal above... pete
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auf wiedersehen, pete
Today is my third bloggiversary. And on this day, at 600 posts, it is time to continue elsewhere. I’m due a change, and a change may do me good. My blogging will now be done at petescully.com.
No one particular reason. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, I actually set up the other blog more than two years ago, but decided to stay at 20six when so many others left it. I like 20six’s blogs (I found it much better than, say, blogger), but the blog-outs have been worrying me a bit though. I just want to stop here and continue elsewhere, leaving this as three years of webloggery. In fact, I won’t be leaving the 20six blogs completely, as I will be using my secondary blog (pietscully) as a kind of experimental area for various side-projects. It may be the pete fringe-blog. (It isn't actually the only one.) But this one will stay as it is, frozen in time. A book doesn’t die because the author stops writing it, and nor does this blog.
I'll think of the new blog as ‘Volume 2’.
Story: I started this blog three years ago today (April 9) when I was overwhelmed with coursework and medieval research during my MA. I got a creative burst and found new ways to vent it. I found 20six because The Vessel started a blog there taking photos of the shadows on the dining room wall; I started one too, because in those days you had to have one in order to comment on one. I wrote the odd thought and thought odd, and every now and then posted the odd drawing, from my damp flat in hornsey lane. It became my ‘Preparing to Move to America’ blog; and when I flew out to California in September 05 it became my “Living in America” blog and a way for my family and friends back home to catch up on how I saw this slightly mental land (see “From the US of Eh" ) And I would read other blogs from back in the UK to remind me of the slightly mental country I left behind (blogs such as Scotland-based Red Queen, now vanished, and the Switzerland-based Brit of Don’t Mention the Skiing, now in Germany ).
Then in the summer of 2006 I discovered sketchblogs, where people would post what was in their sketchbook from that particular day. The first I found was Jana Bouc’s blog, and it inspired me to start using watercolours in my sketches. Since then I’ve painted and sketched more and more, drawing inspiration from some of the prolific and incredible sketchbloggers out there. I was astonished that people could go out and draw something new every day (such as in one mile from home), until I found that I was doing that too. So this went from being a blog where I wrote about what was all around me, to one where I drew everything that was around me, like illustrations to my life (of which you would only really get small glimpses). And I can see that through sketchblogging, I’ve improved enormously. And now in 2008 I have become a parent! Life has changed a lot. All the while, I mostly didn’t want to leave this blog because it would mean losing the “.co.uk” bit at the end…it would mean I really have left Britain behind. Well that’s just silly. Perhaps, if I get really homesick, I’ll just go ahead and start petescully.co.uk or something, or pierrescully.fr if I miss France, or whatever.
So... thank you to all who have been reading this blog, and to those who have been so kind as to link to me in your own blogs. I’ll be over at petescully.com, doing the same sketches of the same trees and the same streets and saying the same puns and complaining about the same presidents (until january, of course) and everything.
And if I get bored, well I might just come right back here.
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don't mention the torch
Let's make it clear : the Olympic Torch is not actually important. It doesn't matter if it goes out; mankind is sufficiently advanced to find a way to light it again. You don't need heavy-handed sky-blue thugs (Seb Coe's own words) to protect it from people venting their anger at the one-party-dictatorship in China and their brutal crackdown on Tibetan 'separatists'. If you have to put it out and jump on a bus, it's okay, you can admit it. The whole torch relay was started by the Nazis anyway. You can't pretend that it was never political. I'll tell you what I think of when I see the Olympic torch (apart from the Aryan-supremacist iconography and the former symbol of the Tories) (and yes, apart from a Mr.Whippy). That bloody Chariots of Fire theme by Vangelis. And I'll tell you what I think of when I think of that. An exchange trip to France I took at college, when I shared a room with a guy who listened to it on his headphones, after dark, when he thought I was asleep (I so wish I had been), and I could hear him busy doing the 15-centimetre sprint, tossing the caber, giving the bronze medal a good polish, slapping duncan goodhew on the head. And yelping, "putain! putain!", as if I couldn't hear him or something. I don't know what he was thinking of, but I bet it wasn't Nigel Havers.
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whither blog?
 
The outages (or are they rolling blog-outs) lately have really frustrated me. I feared I might never see the blog again! Every time I clicked on that 20six... link, one bar, ooh two bars, three; "sorry this site has not been found." Well look harder, it is there. Somewhere. In the ether. "No, honestly, I can't find it. Would you prefer to look at this one instead?" Oh, ok then. Am I then moving? No, not exactly; it's more, am I opening another door, another direction; this blog, in the very-nearly-three years since inception, has gone from being the equivalent of a sketchblog with words not pictures, to a 'leaving-for-america' blog, to a 'i'm-now-living-in-america' blog, to a part-sketchblog-part-wordblog-part-slag-off-king-george-bush-blog, to the equivalent of a wordblog but with sketches. Three years ago I'd never even heard of the word blog. I think I will still have this as blog-number-1 for a while yet, but have decided to definitely do the primary blogging in a different sketchbook at some point in the future, with this possibly remaining as my archive and place of experimentation. This will be the avant-blog. The après-blog will appear sometime soon. In the meantime my sketchblogging will continue unabated (except, of course, by those infuriating blog-outs).
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i'm only sleeping
The boy, dormant dans son car-seat. There is a lot more blue shading in the original, but my scanner sucks certain blues away from pictures as a kind of toll. Where's the blog been lately? It's been bloody hard getting on here. I've been pretty busy this week, have done not many drawings; but the spare moments i have had, the blog's been vanished into the limbaugh. My apologies to those who've tried to find me but were luckless this week. As for the planet in general, well it's a funny old world, saint. Tibet? China will get away with doing what it wants, and then claim those dastardly monks are just trying to spoil the olympics for the poor old one-party-only opposition-illegal resolutely-crush-protests state of a billion non-voters. Accusing the rest of the world of promoting biased reporting, yet banning such forms of free speech as youtube for fear their own propaganda message will be undermined. And we will speak freely, all of us, based on what we have heard around the world, and yet nothing will happen, because China has no need, no need at all to listen to anybody. The great game of power.
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it's enough to make your heart go whoo-oo-oo-ooh
I wanted to post this drawing on Sunday, after my beloved (and oft belittled) team finally won a trophy (9 years since we last won the same cup)! I was celebrating with my son Lucky Luke (his month-old birthday too) whose favourite song is "Lukey's Going To Wembley", and wanted to blog, but for some reason 20six has been going AWOL, and forcing me yet again to consider the long-expected move (I've stuck around because i'm sentimental - or is it slightly mental - and reluctant to drop the uk bit, like it anchors me to britain or something). Sadly, I missed the actual game - never saw any of it. It was all played out on tv screens on a different planet, at a time before I wake up anyway, and I had to get up and watch the scores roll in on the bbc website. But it meant I got a whole day to celebrate (and change nappies). And Wembley! The new Wembley! I'm from fairly near Wembley, and remember the arch being hoisted up. I wish I could've been there. I'll take my son there one day.
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do they know it's pancake day?
Today California and the US is celebrating the quadrennial feast of Super Tuesday. It follows Superbowl Sunday (described by a daytime TV presenter last week as the ‘second-most important eating day in the US after Thanksgiving’ – Christmas must be a miserly affair in that house). I don’t know whether you are supposed to say ‘Happy Super Tuesday’ or ‘Merry Super Tuesday’, or whether it’s politically correct to say either: should I just say ‘Happy Second Weekday’, or ‘Super Pagan-War-God Feast’? Are we supposed to give cards? Either way, Monday was actually described on KCRA3 as ‘Super Tuesday Eve’. Never mind Shrove Tuesday. I suppose tomorrow, being Ash Wednesday, will be appropriately if not wittily rechristened ‘Fall-out Wednesday’. Or perhaps it will be the opposite, ‘Make-up Wednesday’, because that’s what these candidates all seem to do once they stop running against each other for office.
‘Commitment 2008’, that is how the current wave of primaries and caucuses is being sold on the news channels. I don’t know what exactly that means but it sounds serious and brow-furrowing. It’s Democuhcy an’ we mean it, man. In the Democrat corner it’s officially the first black (African-American) candidate against the first woman (Female-American) candidate, and though the media makes a lot of this, I’m glad that most ordinary people I overhear do not (rather, one good candidate against a better candidate, you decide which). For the Republicans it’s Old-White-American against Mormon-White-American, oh and that other guy Huckabee, who is a tabloid headline waiting to be overused. Ah, good luck to them all. None of them are called Bush, which is a massive bonus.
And so the boys and girls of 24 states are out today voting, talking, arguing, getting involved. In so many ways, this sort of election is so much more exciting than the Presidential Race itself, which is a bit like a world cup final, tired and depleted, ending in tears or penalties, although without Zidane to headbutt the cocky guy. It’s like the FA Cup round three: there are more candidates, always a chance a minnow could kill a giant, the debates are more varied, they actually address issues before sniping (oh who am I kidding), and…actually now I think about it, it’s none of those things. What am I going on about, it’s Pancake Day. Give me some eggs and flour, some Jif lemon (or is it Cif now, I forget), some sugar and a nice hot pan. I can’t vote here anyway, I’m not a citizen.
Last night, the newsreader did offer a number to call if anyone has election problems. I was going to call and ask if I should call my doctor if I’ve had an election lasting more than four hours.
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in the cup for tott-ing-ham
FIVE-ONE!!! Tottenham beat Arsenal 5-1!!! Spurs are on their way to WEMBLEY! .....come on you spuuuuuuurrrrrrssssss......
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sketchcrawl 17: davis
today was the 17th worldwide sketchcrawl, and I stayed in davis; it was a very small group, and met at mishka's cafe to sketch...the sun was shining, ad though it was a cold morning, it got warmer. I went off solo after a bit and sketched downtown all day.
 
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brown on brown, purple on white
 
January is brown, not the golden brown of summer, but the damp brown of rainstorms and grey days. I got used to grey days in the UK, so they are a rarer delicacy for me now, though we have a lot at this time of year. That's ok though. Above on the left is a bike by a tree near the building I work in, I ate lunch after waiting a long while for it to microwave, and was then determined to go and draw something, anything, to illustrate in 25 minutes the month of january, and it's davis, so there's a bike, there's always a bike. Above right is the kitchen sink, drawn last night in purple while listening to blonde on blonde. I've kept these small for some reason. Clicking on them sends you to flickr where you can see them in slightly bigger.
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