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the half-sven look
In Britain, it's traditional to leave your Christmas decorations up until January 6th (the last day of Christmas); not so here, where all those colourful lights seem to be gone before the hangover on New Year's Day. There's our little tree, above, in our living room last week, making the most of its prolonged existence. Meanwhile, on the TV, the race for the Presidency has begun, but these lights wont come down until next Christmas is upon us. That's Barack Obama on the telly there, in Iowa, begging for Change (Iowa Lotta Money, maybe). It was interesting watching the Republicans debate among themselves the other night, followed by the Democrats, in a scene reminiscent of the Life of Brian (and I don't mean the "what have the romans ever done for us" bit). Good to see passions inflamed; they weren't allowed to make personal attacks, and they all tried not to, bless them. I'm not looking forward to the endless campaign of bitchery and lies during every commercial break that 2008 will bring. I've been in America during elections, but not a pres'dential race, and I'm not looking forward to it. Still, it'll have a happy ending: no more Pres'dent Shrub. I finally got new glasses. I would have had them before Christmas but the optometrist didn't bother calling me to say they're ready (won't be using them again). I am trying a new type of frame for me - I'm forgoing the Fabio Capello (no, American folks, he's not a fashion designer) frames and trying a more Sven-Goran Eriksson (nor is he, folks) look - well, half. Sven favours the frameless formation, well I'm only half frameless, I'm trying out what I'm calling the 'half-Sven' look. Only one shoe outside the bedroom door. Needless to say I now look different. A new year, a new Pete. I can now see a little more clearly at a distance, something I missed recently when trying to draw all those buildings (hopefully my accuracy will improve, if not get better).
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two thousand and ate
It's a new year, then. Happy New Year. Or should I say, Happy New Calendar. Happy New Diary. Happy New Letterman's Beard. Happy New Large Inbox Waiting for You at Work. Happy New Fun Remembering to Write '08' and not -07' for the Next Few Months. Happy New Weight after Many Mince Pies. Happy New President by the End of the Year. A few new drawings would be nice, but I've been busy enjoying visiting company, riding a cable car for the first time, eating crab for christmas, tasting wine on the day formerly known as boxing day (watched closely by the birds on the powerlines above), cheesecake factory, folsom prison, etc, etc, etc, and then editing the video of it all, to be sent back londonward. Still, I've got plenty new sketchbooks and pencils and paints and sunshine and rainy skies. And new vocabulary, Happy New Vocabulary, to say the least; I'm hanging onto my old world words but new ones are at this moment being learnt, and they're all Happy and New...but more on that later. And a Happy New Blog? Too many times lately have I tried to find my blog only to find it cannot be found. I've come close before, and am coming close again, to upping sticks and reblogating, elsewhere. What do you think? It's 2008, and this is going to be a pretty big year...
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evening stranded
And so Christmas is upon us, and the world slows down for no man (except perhaps king george), and the birds of davis (see the three lines above, aother message from the sky) would like to wish you all a happy christmas. My mum's visiting, seeing sacramento sights and experiencing holidaytime america, bringing mince pies and dairy milk and maltesers and lots of other goodies! And a copy of the evening standard...I am still successfully boycotting the paper (pretty easy when you live 5000 miles away), and i see it hasn't changed (though i couldn't find victor lewis-smith, the only good bit)... so news from the old world, let's see some headlines..."new maddy evidence is sent to uk"..."soccer fan spends NHS money on season ticket"..."murder suspect fled using child's bus pass"...ban the bags"..."stop squandering the taxpayer's money, ken"..."my drunken bum of a son"..."capello on collision course with managers"...oh and the best headline of all, "steer clear of scumbag pete". Thankfully, it's about some other pete, though bad publicity in the standard can only be a good thing. Merry Christmas, everybody, eat, drink and be very, very merry
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nothing to do with losing 3-0, then
Oh, this is brilliant. Apparently, a Turkish lawyer is preparing to sue Inter Milan for offending Muslims by wearing a white shirt bearing a large red cross (and bringing back horrible memories of the Crusades). Yes, Englishfolk, the cross of St George, that one. The lawyer not only seeks financial damages but also wants UEFA to take action against Inter for wearing the shirt in a match against Fenerbahce (which the Turkish side lost 3-0). The red cross, says the lawyer, brings back 'the bloody days of the past'. The red cross is the symbol of the city of Milan. It's also the symbol of many other European cities, not to mention the national flag of England. I wouldn't mind but they were not even wearing it in Turkey, it was in Milan. Turkey's crescent and star flag is that of the Ottoman Empire, an Empire which inflicted its own fair share of bloody days in the past, and I wonder if Turkey has ever been sued by Balkan or Arab lawyers for causing the same offence? This looks like sour grapes at losing 3-0, or an attempt to stir up more false enmity between Islam and Europe. The only thing is... the red cross in Milan's case is the symbol not of St.George, dragon-slaying hero of the Crusaders, but of St.Ambrose, patron saint of the city of Milan, who had nothing to do with the Crusades, having lived almost a millennium before. Now, Inter's new shirts, while commemorating their centenary, were actually last adopted as their home shirts in the days of fascist Italy, when the club was rebranded "Ambrosiana" (Internazionale not being a particularly appropriate name for fascists). So if this guy wants to sue someone, he should sue England for the flag of St.George and the three lions of famed crusader king Richard I on their shirt, but don't sue Inter for that. Sue them for harking back to when they were a bunch of fascists instead.
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and the sky spoke to me
 another from the mission, 16th and valenica. It's down this street that shop needles and pens was. Bit further down, the mission dolores, oldest building in san francisco. I do love these powerlines don't i. They remind me of musical writing in the sky, and who knows what electronic conversations are going on down each of these long cords. Happy birthday mum!
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i wanna walk like you
Last week I was in the bookshop talking to the guy behind the counter, to whom I was giving some dvd footage I had shot of the Harry Potter event in July (I’m a very slow editor), when a guy in a cyclist’s helmet, who had been struggling to write a cheque (in this day and age), looked up and interrupted. “Potter?” he rasped, accentuating the double t in what appeared I believe was an attempt at a British accent. Slightly off-ended (if not exactly offended), I shot him a quick look and carried on. He said it again in case I hadn’t heard him the first time, and I nearly responded “Malfoy?” but chose to ignore. He stayed quiet and went back to writing his cheque (they spell it ‘check’ here, you know). After a few minutes he approached me and apologized, he hadn’t meant to make fun of my accent, he was trying to compliment it. Oh, ok, I replied with as little rat’s arse as I could find. But this was not the first time, and it will not be the last, that I will be complimented in such a way. You see, it is apparently socially acceptable – even compulsory – for many Americans to affect a British accent whenever they meet someone from across the pond. And they really don’t mean to offend – I think they find it charming, or quaint, or perhaps they think we will applaud their efforts - they are after all trying to be like me, I should be honoured. The thing is, if a Brit were to do the same, they would very likely be doing it to take the piss. An American however might not understand why it’s greeted with cold British sarcasm, such as recently in Sacramento when I congratulated the woman in the saltwater taffy shop for her incredible Australian accent (“I thought Bea Smith herself had walked in" ). But it wouldn’t be ok for them to, for example, imitate a Chinese accent, or respond to their German customers with Fawtlyesque attempts at humourous Teutonic mimicry. I wouldn’t mind, but I feel like I’ve developed a British accent since living here. I would not have pronounced any of the t’s in ‘Potter’ before, they would all be washed away in a downpour of glottal stops. I’ve spoken to other CA-based Brits, and they too have been the victims of spontaneous imitation. Apart from the hilarious faux-brits, there are the ones who make requests for certain words. Sometimes I happily oblige, especially when some Cockney rhyming slang or other comes to mind (although I was out with Tel once, and he kept asking girls about their thre’penny bits). Sometimes I feel like a tired actor, sick of repeating a catchphrase; one time, a shop-girl at a supermarket checkout asked me to say ‘bloody’. “Why?” I asked. “Oh I just love it when you guys say ‘bloody’! It’s so cool!” My first thought was to react with a tirade of classic Watling Avenue vocabulary – everything but ‘bloody’ – but I just politely refused, sorry, I just want my green beans and my milky way, thanks. I think I know how Harry Potter feels now.
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it's only a matter of time before we all vanish into thin air
Yes, petescully be still here…I have had a visiting friend from the uk, so have not been active on the web or drawing front. I have been pretty busy, holidaying as it were in the very places seen and described on these very pages, climbing the uc berkeley campanile, enjoying lashings of turkey in santa rosa, singing maxwell’s silver hammer to a crowded pub in g street davis, watching ultimate fighting on a big screen with disturbingly enthusiastic midtown sacramentans, sorrowful for scotland and despondent for england, eating el salvadoran burritos in san francisco’s mission, duetting as the proclaimers proclaiming something about 500 miles in a bar in the marina, rocky iii on a laptop screen in union square, food, water and a helluvalotta beer. But not much drawing. I must have carried my sketchbook everywhere I went, but just could not get any out. So I’ve got a load of ink and paint stored up inside, and will certainly explode these next few weeks before my next visitor arrives for christmas… But my blog keeps vanishing. Now you see it, now you do not. The header-image, seen by some but not by others, is vanishing even from my screen, if the blog ever appears. It may be time for a move. My substitute blogs are on standby. 20six may get the dreaded ‘vote of confidence’. If jol and mourinho weren't even safe... Back to the sketchbook!
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did you feel the earth move? um, not really
There was an earthquake this week. I never felt it - it was in the Bay Area - but apparently it was felt in Sacramento. It measured 5.6 on the Richter scale, which makes it the biggest since Loma Prieta in 1989, but there was little damage. Still, the news channels did their best to get as excited as possible, featuring interviews with people who recounted tales they'll no doubt be telling to their grandchildren, "yeah the chandeliers started moving, we didn't really feel much," and "things were shaking a bit, and i had to ask someone afterwards if that was an earthquake, and it was," that sort of stuff. You could tell the TV presenters, sat in Sac, were a little disappointed by some of the callers, the lack of drama. Close-up shots of some jars that had rolled lazily off of a supermarket shelf ("breaking news!" ), reports of library books that had fallen over, Mark Finan the kcra3 chief weather lord pouting because he doesn't get to talk earthquake like everybody else. At least it wasn't more serious. With southern CA suffering from those dreadful fires, the last thing we'd need is for the Bay to get the Big One they've expected for years.
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the biometric man
This summer I paid a ridiculous amount of money - more than double what it would have cost just a week earlier, too - to renew my permanent residency, so that I may stay stateside. The reason for the massively increased rate, I was told, was to cover the extra fees for the new biometric requirements, and that I was to go for a super-important biometric appointment when summoned. That was today, and boy do I feel ripped off. Biometric, what a great word, it makes me think they're doing to do all these super-accurate DNA tests, use high-tech state of the art equipment, iris scans, midichlorian tests, I don't even know what I imagined. We were told to leave all cellphones outside the building, perhaps it interferes with their space-age scanning equipment, welcome to the future. But what a let-down! All they did was take my fingerprints (which they already did before, both at the visa interview in London and at the airport on arrival), take my signature (again, they have that), and then take a photo of me at distance and in bad light with my glasses off (all the bags suddenly revealed under my spectacle-less eyes from having just woken up). I had to fill out a piece of paper with stuff like height and eye color on it - and they rounded down on the height, I was being as accurate as I could and they rounded down because their ancient DOS system computer required it) And that was it, see you later, you'll hear from someone in the post. They could at least have pretended! They could have just got some little red light and shone it in my ear and typed a few random numbers into a field I don't understand, and I would have been happy, money probably well spent. But taking information they already have, and charging hundreds of extra dollars for it... I feel like Tottenham Hotspur did after spending sixteen million quid on Darren Bent when we already have perfectly good goalposts. Still, it's gotta be done...
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not another new dawn at white hart lane
So, another new dawn at Spurs. I was sad to see Jol pushed out, I think the board undermined him early on in the season going behind his back, and that has a lot to do with the situation we're in. Now Tottenham are spending squillions on this Ramos guy who speaks no English. And I notice his CV is loooong...he's managed 10 clubs in 14 years! Blimey. But I suppose that makes him perfect for Spurs: we've had about that many managers in the past 14 years. He'll fit right in. On a funnier footy-related note, check out these youtube clips, the first of a Spurs ball-boy who became an instant hero of the Shelf during a UEFA cup match, and the second (my absolute favourite football-reated clip of all time, this week) of a cheeky six-year-old Chelsea mascot playing a joke on Liverpool's Steven Gerrard before a match. As the England midfielder walked down the tunnel with his team, the kid, with an absolute deadpan earnest face, held out his hand as if to shake Gerrard's, but pulled it away and cocked a snook at him instead. Check it out here. Hilarious stuff!
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