Up, up and away

You'd think that after so many years of jetting around the world I would be OK about flying by now. In fact you might even think that I'd be starting to enjoy it. Nope. It's still four days till I get back on a plane and I'm starting to be filled with full on existential dread about the whole process. This is not being helped by my mind latching onto every article that's currently out about un-fun plane situations from tailfins falling off to hail storms. I was always very jealous of BA Baracus in the A-Team because the rest of the team would always sedate him to get him on the plane in the first place - seems like an idea to me!

Stealing the soul of the streets

Walker Evans is largely credited with creating our modern approach towards street photography and an appreciation for the beauty of the mundane. His photos of road markings, shop signs and disused houses back in the 50s and 60s defined a whole movement. Luckily I stumbled across a retrospective on his work from his entire life at the Photographers Gallery. Amazing to think how old some of those photos are with a style that is so currently in vogue at the moment, a huge contrast to the Guy Bourdin exhibition currently at the V&A.

A large part of the exhibition is made up of a large set of Polaroid images that Evans took in the last years of his life after obtaining one of the first instant cameras back in the 70s. This makes me wonder what he would have made of the current plethora of image recording devices - from digital cameras to mobile phones and beyond. An article in the New York times (with great thanks to metafilter as is so often the case) drew my attention to the current swathe of photo blogging that is happening. One particular site is drawn out for mention, fotolog.net, which allows its members to upload up to six images a day. There is an amazing range of people on there, a huge demographic of which seems to either be in Brooklyn or Chile for some reason. Some folk are following in the Walker Evans style of mundane objects, others seem to be content to post lo quality webcam images of themselves and all styles of photography in-between. It's an amazing blend of images and you can easily lose yourself in there for a couple of hours just following the links to favourites.

So being the compulsive diarizer that I am then I had to join in.... Although I have to quickly say my one gripe is that whatever orientation/size of image you load in the thumbnail images are always horizontal! So of course some images just look downright strange before you see them proper scale. Ah well, if life was perfect then we might as well just go home now {;)

Chicken slop for the soul

Adbusters is advocating carrying out activities in your life that break you out of conformist patterns. My favourite comment in there was to say 'hold on please' to telemarketers when they phone you, then put the phone down and go off and do something else - thus making telemarketing cost ineffective. Clever. Although the thought occurs that some poor telemarketeer on a minimum wage is probably losing their job at the other end of that call by closing small volumes of calls. Decisions are never simple these days when you really stop and consider all of the ramifications.

And they're off...

New game of the day - Kazaa racing! First ensure you have a copy of Kazaa installed on your computer running fine with a nice fast broadband connection. Then gather round how many people are playing, count them up and chose a popular artist, I recommend anyone who has a nickname with the first letter 'j', such as J-Lo, JT or J-Kylie. Then search for their songs and find one for each person playing each with the same file size. Select them all, right click and start the download and they're off.... Bets should be placed on the first song to be downloaded and in the event of a photo finish the winner will be the person who sings the best rendition of their chosen song.

Next week, how to beat the stock market.

In a slight aside my friend Louise over in Ireland met her heart-throb idol Justin Timberlake (or JT) last night. She was quite chuffed indeed at meeting the man also known as the black Michael Jackson for his modern updates on the king of pop sleaze's moves...

I'm a celebrity - get me over there!

Just bought my ticket back down to Australia. Huzah! Leave England on June 1st to go to New York for a few days, then head over to San Francisco to catch up with folk over there and then, on June 17th arrive in Melbourne. From there the plan is to head up north to Cairns for a few weeks of intensive scuba diving and tan work, then back south for another Surfari and finally back down to Melbourne via Sydney. This should give me about six months left on my work visa to enjoy down in Melbourne before whatever happens after that! Simple really.

Currently in the process of moving from the old, banner crazy hosting site at ultrahi.tripod.com to a fresh new site hosted by FastHosts. Of course this involves the transfer of funds and the added confusion that the name ultrahi.net is hosted by Enom. Fasthosts is going to be at matthobbs.co.uk, which should start working in the next few days hopefully and then I'll repoint ultrahi.net to that address as well.

So in the meantime these updates may mean things look a bit weird for a bit... but like all change for the better a short distruption to normality is worth the end result. Huzah!

Wandering around Kensington today and came across the outside exhibition of Earth from the Air next to the Natural History Museum. Now putting aside the irony of setting any kind of outside photo exhibit in England this is a must see, just make sure you bring an umbrella. Seeing these wonderful photos from around the world printed large really brings them to life. Amazingly they were only taken on 35mm (using a Canon EOS-1N) and from a helicoptor, which can't have been the easiest platform to get a non-blurry photo from but Yann Arthus-Bertrand has done an outstanding job. Go see.

Continuing on the subject of artists (as in 'successful' rather than 'struggling' and other such words beginning with 's') I went along to the new Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Lisson Gallery. The Lisson is Kapoor's normal show ground when he's not filling the Tate Modern with wonderful red PVC mega-structures. Consequently this was a return to his post-Marsys forms of reflective cones and columns of varying shades. This is, to my mind, a shame as the metallic structures never seem to have the impact of his more organic, earthy works. So it was good news to see a pile of the familiar klein blue dyed rubble illuminated by strobe lights. The highlight of the trip had to be having the door opened by Anish himself while he chatted away on the phone to someone in French. So stunned was I that couldn't think of a thing to say to one of my favourite artists, combined with the fact of his self-imposed anonymity means I've only ever seen one picture of him and so was unsure whether it was him until someone called his name as he left.

Well after the unseasonably un-English sunny weather of last week the English spring has hit with a vengence today. Lashing rain and gray skies were in full force so I decided not to go for my usual jog round Clapham Common! Instead I've re-located slight up the road from where I was staying - from Aimi's house to Phil's. This is all of an extra four minutes walk so not the most strenuous of moves. Plus Phil has excellent internet as every good host should. Thanks to both Aimi and Phil for their hospitality.

On the subject of homes and houses yesterday was my nephew Nathanael's christening. The lucky little chap now has four god-parents, two of whom are vicars, so his christian soul is veritably saved already. Amen. This can be added to the confusion of having two uncles called Matt, so it will probably all even out in the end. Oh, did I mention that other uncle Matt is also a vicar? All dog collars aside the dampening of Nathanael's head in a draughty church was cause for much family celebration down in Aldershot with huge lashings of food for everyone. The sun also delayed its departure just enough for us all to eat outside before rushing in out of the rain for tea. Smashing.

Hmm.. not really on the subject of homes and houses. The tenuous link however was that I was back in Camberley again, so spent a happy few hours boxing more of my hoarded crap up and throwing other bits and bobs out prior to mum and Henry's planned move sometime this year. This spring cleaning frenzy just extended itself to my Yahoo mail inbox where deleting the emails of a number of ex-girlfriends led to the recovery of about two megs of badly needed mail space - huzah! I'm sure if they ever do decide to talk with me again then this will afford a better fresh start. So on that note I'm off to clear up more electronic crap from my hard drive. Night all.

Phew! It's hot and sunny in London at the moment. Most atypical but very nice when you're not working. I'm currently staying near Clapham Common with Aimi in a converted school. The apartment is the most amazing loft space I've seen in London yet, really reminiscent of good Billyburg loftage. Unfortunately the lease is up end of this month so it's only a temporary thing.

Although that temporary state is handy as I've still yet to decide on my future plans. I've been hanging around in England now since March 17th when I came back from New Zealand and I still haven't either a) bought a ticket back to Australia for the rest of my year visa or b) decided to settle back here. My mind keeps flip flopping between the two which is most un-helpful of the little bugger.

In the meantime though having fun catching up with friends, seeing art galleries and sunny weather so it's not all bad...