Category: Musings

Piles O’ Crap (TM)

Spent a happy morning today getting all of my boxes of stuff from New York delivered by the shipping company. It all seems to have survived pretty much intact apart from a couple of bowls, but then I had too many of those anyway. I intended to only put up my CD racks so I could organise my CD collection but had to try and find the small pots containing the screws.. These eventually turned up in the scond to last box I unpacked. Sigh. So next time I’m going to make sure I make a note of where I put those type of things.

It’s very weird seeing all my New York stuff in my old room though. Doesn’t look the same away from my bright, spacious New York loft (which I’m still missing hugely). Someone asked me a while back what I would remember from New York – I think the main thing is a greater sense of what people can achieve when they get on with it. New York is a place that encourages you to go for your dreams, and everyone crowds round to help someone with a strong purpose. It’s a great thing to see in action, and means you always get interesting conversations with people down in pubs. I know the same drive does exist in London but I’ve not really observed it in action yet. Fingers crossed I find out where it is sooner rather than later. Maybe it’s something to do with my own perceptions, which are somewhat subdued at the moment in this transitional phase of coming back here.

Of course other things are sorely missed from that great city. The light, the views (simple cityscapes as well as the obvious tourist sights), bars that stay open till 4am and aren’t smokey, subways that run all night and cost $17 for a week, great food, friends and just the huge range of things you can do at all hours of the day. I also really miss my yoga sessions in Williamsburg at the moment. I know I’ll be back there some day, I just don’t know if I want to spend the rest of my life there yet. This was the reason I decided to go travelling – to see the world and make a decision on where I wanted to settle down for a while. Maybe I won’t manage that. I found out the other day there is a condition called ‘decidophobia’, a fear of making decisions – I’m really starting to wonder if I suffer from that. It might just be as simple as taking more responsibility for my own life and actions (thanks to Jo for being honest about that tonight, appreciated it, just wished someone had been that blunt earlier).

Tomorrow is another day, and one in which things will be getting better.

Oh, say can you see

The WTC attack is being commemorated for a month with towers of light, two beams consisting of 88 spotlights where the towers used to be. I spoke to a few people back in New York about them and the general feeling was that it was quite weird and not a comfortable thing. Luckily they turn off at 11pm.

6 Months On

Six months ago today New York was devasted by an unprovoked attack. I was looking back at my entries from around and after that time – it’s been a helluva six months.

Here’s to the next six months being better, for everyone.

Brit Mums

Happy (UK) Mother’s Day to all those Brit mums out there! This was one of those days I always used to forget when I was over in New York as it’s on a different day in America. Go figure. Just finished off a luverley lunch catching up with a large chunk of my family and now feeling quite bloaty. I’ve also taken this opportunity to upload a pile of my latest pictures onto dotPhoto.

Also another quick service announcement. I’ve finally got around to buying a proper URL for this site – it can now be found at ultrahi.net. At the moment this just redirects you to here in simple URL redirect fashion but it’s a step in the right direction. I’ve also added a direct sub-domain to my photos as http://photos.ultrahi.net/. Fingers crossed it all works to plan – I’ve also added some mail addresses so I can be reached at matt@ultrahi.net (or the more formal ‘matthew’ if you’re annoyed at me). Next step is to get my site revamped ready for my travels. I’ve identified a few directions to try out and a name – Continental Drift, any thoughts welcome as always.

On the subject of travels… I’ve been very lax since I got back from New York in sorting things out. I totally under estimated how emotionally distracted I would be leaving everything behind – the city, the lifestyle and the people. Big recommendation here people is to always make sure you’re coming into something when you go somewhere, for example a new job, then you have something to keep you motivated and flowing. Having said that I’ve started to get things moving along now – applying for visas, finalizing routes and so on.

Synchrony City

Bleurgh. Think I might have overdone it this weekend… Had a great and drunken time with many different people. Friday night we started out in Ben Crouch’s Tavern – a ‘theme’ pub just off Oxford Street based around the life of a guy who stole corpses. A short (but expensive – £10) taxi ride later we were over near Old Street for the Last Days of Rome night hosted by some friends of Dana’s. This was a lot of fun and reminded me of Organic Grooves back in New York for their inclusion of bongos.

Saturday, having woken up quite hungover on Chris’ floor, I caught up with Phil and Steve again for increasing drunkeness in Clapham. Phil decided that disgression was the better part of valor on this occaision and stayed home to pass out and play Grand Tourismo on his PS2 while Steve and I wandered over to Brixton. Fond memories of Nuclear Free Zone at Club 414 won out over the extremely busy Dog Star lounge, so we spent the night in a pretty empty club playing some stonking music. Why is that always the way?

Sunday continued in the same drunken form with waking up on Phil and Steve’s couch then going into town shopping, eating and drinking. This was a nice appetizer to more of the same over at Aimi’s where she cooked everyone a luverley ratatouille. Ah, bless. All in all a good few days to compensate for the quietness of the rest of the week.

On a completely unrelated note I read that Joel Meyerowitz’s photos of September 11th are coming over to London to mark the six month anniversary. Can’t believe it’s already been that long. I really like some of Meyerowitz’s street photography so I’ll try and get along to this. Assuming of course that my impending medical on Wednesday doesn’t show I only have a few days left to live from excess alcohol consumption and lardy Brit-grub!

Design for Life

Managed to finally drag my chilly arse out of bed this morning after ten or so hits of the snooze button. Not sure why I was being so lazy after yesterday’s laziest of lazy days. Wandered into town and checked out the Design Museum where they’re showing a web design “retrospective”. Lots of interesting things, including Tomato’s C_I logo for Sony. This is an interactive logo that people can actually affect in real-time through a variety of interfaces. Sony use a real-time grab of the interactive logo for their product adverts and the like. Here’s hoping you can get swearwords up there….

Sunshine on a Rainy Day

Wow. The sun actually shined today, amazing. I celebrated this momentous occaision by going out for a run along the Thames. It was dark by the time I got out there and the bridge lights reflecting against the low tide water made for some beautiful views. Now I’m achy and continuing my relaxing day of going through all Stephen’s DVDs that I haven’t yet seen (Hannibal is turning out to be the best so far).

Meanwhile another random act of synchronicity happened yesterday. I went along to the Victoria and Albert museum to check out the photo still life exhibition and spend a happy time perusing their online archive. Good exhibition and I found out that most of the photography I do is classed as ‘givens’, finding views on things that already exist in real life rather than set-up shoots. On the way into town I decided to walk rather than take the tube and wandered straight into George, who used to work at PGL in 1991! This was pretty bizarre as I was just wondering how I was going to get in touch with everyone I knew down in Australia and New Zealand and, guess what, she’s still in touch with them all. Gor’ blimey guv’nor.

‘Cos it’s Raining

On the subject of spending time wisely mine has mostly been spent catching up with friends in London and watching grey skies. I miss sunny Williamsburg! I miss tubes (subways) that don’t stop at midnight and only cost $17 a week rather than £22 for just offpeak! I miss being able to walk everywhere! I miss the skyline! I miss my apartment! Well, it’s only been a week – I’m sure this will wear off soon.

Having a good time though. Lots of parties this weekend – bit of a birthday season amongst people of my aquaintance (sic), and thank heaven for the proliferation of text messaging on this side of the Atlantic. Also randomly bumped into some folk I haven’t seen in many years. Very strange indeed where you see people. I’m still trying to get my head back onto sorting out travel plans and combining this with developing art/graphic design skills to trigger a change in direction. A few more folk interested in travelling are coming out of the woodwork and that’s cool. Not sure that I would deal at all well with travelling on my own. Go stir crazy after a day by myself sometimes.

Oh, and though I never thought I’d say this, but England needs to ban drinking on the streets. I was going into town last night around 7pm and everyone had a can of lager in their hands. Do we really need to get that drunk before we get down to the bar? Will those few extra minutes of drunkeness make us all achieve nirvana more easily? Or maybe I’m just getting old. Nyah.

Work that booty

Great article in Vice this month about how to be a gold digger. Apparently you can make heaploads of cash each year without putting out. Oh, unfortunately this only works for women, otherwise this would be my dream job. The question becomes though, how near is this to prostitution? If you definately put out purely with the intention of getting stuff then I’d say it was, but if you just hang out with married guys to get their stuff with no fun(ny) stuff then that’s probably just a non-taxable escort service.

Thank Blighty it’s Wednesday

Gah! I hate those frikkin’ keyboards which are split down the middle with cunningly placed backspace buttons for when you mistype… Just one of the many differences I’m getting to grips with now that I’m back in England, staying at my old house in Camberley (a small commuter town south west of London). Yep, I have actually left new York now.

For those of you who didn’t catch this bit of news I didn’t actually leave on Friday night. Virgin offered my a large pile of airmiles to bump my flight so I took them up on that. This meant I had a pretty chilled out couple of days in Williamsburg having sorted out everything that needed sorting already. Sweet. Finally flew out on Sunday and Virgin decided to upgrade me to Upper Class! This was too wonderful for words, and the only downpoint of the entire journey was that when I finally decided to go to sleep on the totally flat, wide seat I got woken up for my massage. It’s a tough life. This of course means I’m now seriously considering paying double money to get a business cass round the world ticket rather than a coach class… Serious ‘traveller’? Me? Yeah right!

I’m pretty much over my jet lag now and planning to head up to London on Thursday night for a weekend of partying. In the meantime I’ve re-arranged my old room (again) and am trying to get better at throwing old, un-useful things out of my life. Never have been very good at letting go as I think I mentioned a few entries ago. Getting better now though.

On a more random note saw a program on obesity in America last night. Kids who are scarily overweight and either really unhappy or have parents who tell them it’s OK to be fat. Don’t worry about the heart disease you already have. It’s all well and good being happy with the way you look, but you take your own choices on chosing to die young from fat related illnesses. Of course, if only exercise was as easy as taking that next beer and slumping in front of the TV for a few hours.