Matt Hobbs

Elastica were superb last night at the Bowery Ballroom. Had a luverley night and am now exhausted having stayed out till 3.30am. Luckily I got to lie in till 7.30am when my friend StJohn arrived to look round my apartment for a potential film shoot. Apparently my apartment isn’t right for the part but it is now starring in a dog food commercial.

Finally got to buying a scanner for home. Got an HP ScanJet 5370C which goes up to 1200 x 2400 DPI and has a fun light for scanning negatives and slides. So my Monday evening was a joy of going through some recent photos and putting them onto Zing! which lets you store as many photos as you like and create albums. I’ll put links to some albums on here as soon as I’ve got around to setting them up. Zing! has a very effective upload mechanism that sends previews from your local machine, so even if you have a 2Mb photo the thumbnail is only 2Kb on the screen. Very neat.

The weekend consisted mostly of work even though it was a gorgeously sunny New York fall day. Sigh. Got a lot done though and reduced my inbox from 450 to 30 mails (if only I could lose my spare tire so easily). Friday night ended up at Organic Grooves having had wonderful pizza at Lombardi’s and a quick drink in nearby Sweet and Vicious where I said a quick hello to Hakkan. Saturday I celebrated my fourth year at Quidnunc with a meal at Penang in the Village. And Sunday was capped off with an excellent meal at Canton on Division St. All the Chinatown residents were in their best Sunday clothes wandering slowly down th street past restaurants with no English anywhere on their facade – whereas Canton was full of caucasians with the decor reminiscent of the cheaper curry houses in Selly Oak, Birmingham. Food was wonderful though.

After another twelve hour day in the office we all went out for a meal at Bambou. Beautiful food and excellent wine – thanks to Kate for choosing and John for paying. Don’t have the pineapple boat pudding though, it’s definately the only bad (pine)apple of a good bunch. Night before we ended up in the Joshua Tree which is a whole different ballgame – in fact it was showing one. The clientel was definately a certain New York type – girls with Monica Lewinsky style hair and the same sweater and boys with shirts tucked into chinos. Everyone had dark hair. Strangely our waitress was Irish.

Timezones. You only truely appreciate them when you pass through a number in quick succession.

Having spent a wonderful week on the west coast driving from Las Vegas to San Francisco I then spent a few days in New York and then popped over to Amsterdam for a weekend courtesy of Unilever. Bless. The west is beautiful – Death Valley, Yosemite & Fire State National Park are all so different it’s amazing. Amsterdam blew me away as well. I just want to live everywhere at once!!! Actually, that sounds like New York…

Not long now and I head over to Vegas, baby! Meanwhile I wonder how car rental firms don’t get constantly burnt to the ground for their attempts to convince you that it is possible to hire a car for $99 a week all in… oh, and did we mention the $500 of insurance, tax and excess mileage charge, sorry about that! Anyhoo – staying in the Luxor a big shiny pyramid on the strip. Can’t wait to blow my recent UK tax refund…

On a more webby note chek dis awt… hunger

As of a few days ago (and many dollarinos to evil global .com providers) I own sushification.com and matthewhobbs.net. Huzah! Yep – that’s what happens when you sit around on a very humid day in NYC for a few minutes.

At the moment they are both just pointing here until I think of anything more useful… ideas are building as we speak.

As promised – I’m now fitter, healther and kinder to my fellow human beings. A week into being 28 and already I have achieved spiritual fulfillment.

That might be true apart from the raging hangover from Peenak’s party last night (got home around 5am) and excess weight that my few runs in the week have yet to shift. I’ve made a start though. Ran into work on Tuesday morning (took almost an hour) and Saturday’s run across the bridge and back. Neither of which were ‘runs’ in the real sense – more fits and starts of energy between catch up walks. I would go for another now but the weather’s actually made a turn for the better and I might just go and sit in the park and catch some rays and relax on this Labour day bank holiday.

That aside I’ve checked into DSL for my apartment and it all seems very reasonable so next stop a faster Internet connection. Then I need to get a scanner to get a few thousand photos onto the web. I was looking at getting a new camera but at $1800 odd I figured it would be more important to make the most out of my old one first. Hence going around running off huge amounts of film everywhere to many people’s annoyance (especially Matt T).

Now officially 28… time for recollection, thoughts about the year to come and stocking up on headache tablets for the week just passed.

Last night had a birthday b.b.q. on my roof. Great fun after about twenty hours of pre work. Big thanks to John and Ben for helping to prep and Barbara and Herta (amongst others) for leading cleanup at the end. Oh, and big thanks to the lightning for staying over the bay and providing cool illumination without raining on my stereo. Musical accompliment was provided by David Holmes, Groove Armada and Cassius to great effect. No-one fell through the roof which was nice. Oh, and if anyone has a home for a fridge/freezer full of excess meat then drop me a line… I worry too much!

Friday myself and Nathan went to Twilo to see Sasha & Digweed… After no queuing (strange) and $30 (for me, $35 for Nathan!) we ended up in the redesigned main room. This was looking like a school disco with bad sound, boys on one side of the dance floor and girls on the other. The only difference was a mirror ball the size of a car. This was a bit depressing. American dance clubs behave differently to English ones. In the UK everyone is, in general, pilled up and focussed on the DJ. In the US everyone seems to be coked up and dancing in small groups or breakdancing. After two years of being here I still find this strange. Anyways, the music was pretty shite, the club is sanitized and over-securitized and I have to dis-recommend this night to everyone now. Sorry S & D – I love you guys but Twilo is the worst.

Saturday I misjudged Heather’s birthday party time but caught the last half. Met some loverley friends of Emily and then ended up seeing some bands down at CBGB. Bumped into John down at CBGB and also met Becca and Dunc. Becca, a theraputic masseuse, proceeded to press three places on my shoulder bone, pronounced that I was blocked there and asked if I was stressed. Meanwhile I’m in an ecstasy of relief as my right arm felt more relaxed than it ever has! Thanks Becca – now I need to book Aveda for an hour of similar treatment… super.

Ended up a the Angel Bar last night, formally Dharma. The decor has gone from red and moody to blue and shiny and there is now a staircase up to the overhanging ledge. Big reflective circles on the wall create an amazing view. There were a number of DJs spinning some awesome drum ‘n’ bass and had a nice chat to a fellow Brit who makes commercials, goes out with someone called ‘Jedi’ (seriously) and had heard of Quidnunc. This continues my plan to overindulge in drinking and eating until I’m 28 at which point I foreswear all vices and get fit… honest guv’nor!

Raw fish. Yummy. Especially the cod (which wasn’t actually raw but was the fishy equivalent of candy floss). This was all thanks to the ClubMom project that we did a whiles back. Suitably fished up we had a quick guided tour of the fire station used in Ghostbusters on the way to a few more bars to nicely top off the meal budget. This means I’m doing well on my plan to large it my entire last week of being 27…