Matt Hobbs

A little birdy told me

Ouch. Another painful sunday morning… Ah well, sometimes you pay for a good night out!

Last night’s exploits were sited at the Corner Hotel where the up and coming band Little Birdy were headlining. The corner hotel is a great venue, I suspect I will be going down there again even though it’s a little bit south of the river for my North Fitzroy tastes. Little Birdy weren’t that great, the lead singer has an amazing voice and great presence but the band seem to let her down a bit. My favourite band was the second support, Dan Kelly and the Alpha Males, who played a sort of countrified/Nick Drake/Blur blend of ‘slop-rock’ as my new chum Chris described them. The lead singer is completely laid back, looking a bit like my mate Gubby strangely enough, but has an amazing understated voice and some stunning songs – check them out if you get a chance.

What really made last night wasn’t the music though but a few other things. First off we made some new friends – Holly and Chris, both from Adelaide (now Melbin) and both band folk – with whom we happily propped up the bar (hence the head pain this morning) and chatted away as the bangs played. Looking forward to seeing both of them play soon.

The next high point of the evening was bumping into an old friend from one of my Surfari trips – Karen! This was highly surprising as I thought she was living in Sydney, so when I first saw her I just assumed it was someone who looked like her. Transpires she’s moved to Tasmania now but was back in Melbourne visiting her new boy who she’d met in Tassie – in fact she was only here for a few days so that definately rates high on the random coincidence-ometer. Luverly to see her again though. In fact had another random bumpage later when walked past Irish Ruth on the streets nicely tanked up post-Irish defeat by one point to Aus. Guess Melbourne’s getting smaller all the time.

On a more techy note – Chris pointed me towards his nephew’s website (JibJib) which is very nice indeed. What I particularly noticed on JibJub aside from the cool Flash stuff was a link to GeoURL, this is a site where you can register the longitude and latitude of your website and then find out sites that are ‘near’ yours in the real world. This is very cool indeed so I’ve put this site on it (thanks to MultiMap for the lat/lon stuff). You can click the new link at the bottom of the page to see which sites are near mine.

Attack of the brain worms

La la la.. la la la lah la… I can’t get you out of my head… Yep, it’s those Kylie moments again when you can’t concentrate due to some song or other swimming around in there and distracting you. Dom explained the other day that there’s a German word for these type of songs – ‘ohrwurm’ (meaning ‘ear worm’) – and now the beeb has picked up on it as well.

Of course the most important tactic to remember if attacked by an unwanted ohrwurm is to try and sing another one that you don’t mind hearing so much. They have vaguely cannibalistic tendancies and tend to eat their own kind – as shown by the Kylie versus New Order remix…

Rainy days

Well after a few on and off extremely nice and sunny days Melbourne’s gone back to being grey, cold and rainy again. Grrr.. Was quite enjoying the sun last weekend! Luckily not as bad as South Queensland where golfball sized hailstones were causing havoc so glad I missed that one.

Great weekend though. We finally got round to the big night out that t’other Matt has been threatening for over a month now. Went down to Honky Tonks – another back alley bar in classic Melbourne town centre stylee. Music was pretty good but a bit too Saturday night mainstream crowd for my tastes – luckily the sambuca helped gloss that one over for a while.

After the clocks had changed, and a quick 4.30am Hungry Jacks (the Aussie name for Burger King) we wandered off to a party just north of my house where Charlie and Michelle were celebrating getting engaged. Charlie’s a British lad currently ex-patriating and we bonded over a love of esoteric British techno (Eat Static and the like who he actually knows). At which point the sun came up and bed started to call… so wandered off home.

Sunday was looking to be peaceful and restful – but luckily Mos and Brock came to the rescue with a barbecue down in St Kilda. This turned out to be at their mate’s dad’s place. Great views of the seafront where a small gale was propelling windsurfers along at vast speeds, plus great food and combination so a good chill out day. Topped it all off with a re-watching of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Smashing. Strange to watch that again after so long – realised that most of the music is in fact a direct rip off from Star Wars.. interesting emotional resonance.

Now it’s back to the life of a code monkey.. Tripsta’s taking a bit longer than anticipated and I’m getting a bit code-shocked now. Not to mention the toll on my poor wrists! Almost there now for first launch and then I can take a well deserved break – huzah! Hard to convince people that building something off your own back where you’re not paid is ‘work’ though even when I’m pulling longer hours than them…

Slash. Slash. Thud.

Been a fairly busy week considering I had nothing planned a few days ago. Managed to score some free tickets to see a preview of Kill Bill Vol.1 the other day which was awesome (I’ve got a review up on epinions). The weather’s been veering between warm and sunny (yay) and amazing torrential deluges (including hail) so I’ve actually been out running for a change.

Best thing is that the Melbourne Arts Festival is currently on, themed around dance. There are so many events going on, many of which are free, that you can’t really get bored. Every night at 6pm in Federation Square (the new square in town) they teach different dance moves. Last night was hip hop, with basic body popping and 3-step patterns and freezes – where you ‘lie’ just off the ground supporting yourself on your elbow wedged into your hip. They made it look incredibly easy of course when it’s actually pretty hard – kind of like an dance version of the harder yoga moves. Amazing to watch though. Melbournians love hip hop and the crowds were out in force. This was followed by watching Beat Street, an 80s movie about New York hip hop then onto see TZU, a local hip hop band where the local possee was out in force. Good fun.

Vividesque (43 points on triple word score)

Wow – what a fun concert. Not as much fun as wandering around Glasto by a long way but Melbourne venues are really well set up and organised. No real trouble and the only time I couldn’t get in somewhere was when I was about a minute too late to get onto the floor at Jurassic (I’d been sitting down recovering from bouncing too much at Lamb). Energy levels were pretty low though after partying till 5 night before – very hungover (twice)…ouchie.

The final line-up I saw out of the many bands to choose from (in order):

• Pacifier – mainstream rock. Spent most of my time looking round the Rod Laver arena which is HUGE. Has one of those slidey roofs which was quite surreal to see a shaft of light coming in. Prince is playing here in a bit but he’s already sold out.
• Hellacopters – shite, unoriginal 70s/mosh rock. Crowd was pretty unimpressed.
• Resin Dogs – good hip hop stylins. Amusing video and whole room was bouncing. Think they might be more local band so had a big following. Hip hop is generally very popular in Melbourne with a big local scene.
• Har Mar Superstar – very funny if a smidge misogynistic. He got a bit snitty when his radio mike died on him but did a great bit where he ran all the way into the crowd in his ‘I’m the greatest’ hand made vest top. His dancing girls are called the ‘Town Bikes’ and do this kind of bad ‘erotic’ dancing. Whole crowd was laughing.
• Lamb – SO good as always. Went right to the front for this one. Show hadn’t really changed much from when I saw them at Brixton Academy and was another really ecstatically enjoyable gig. Mostly songs from new album but a couple of classics that the crowd went mad for. Andrew the keyboard guy’s brother was in the crowd which was funny. Very buzzed after that one..
• Jurassic 5 – Another wow. Was pretty exhausted from Lamb so sat down for a bit and missed getting on the main floor (arse) but had a great time. They mostly did Power in Numbers stuff and a few Quality Control bits but no Lesson 6 (shame). Great show though. They’re very playful on stage and get the audience really going. Then the DJs had their own turns and they were stunning plus some little sampler drum track stuff. Ended up with them all playing those plastic tubes you spin round that make the ‘woooo-ooo’ noise. Weird bit was they flipped out at some guy in the crowd who had a noose or something (probably waiting for Linkin Park) but went right down into the crowd to have a go at him being disrespectful and threatening to ‘beat him and his homeboy’. Sad really – everyone else was really into it big style, whole arena was going off.
• Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – was sitting at back on floor for this in half empty arena. Much more mellow and chilled out than I expected, really nice. Shame I missed them with Primal Scream last year.
• The White Stripes – Crazy stuff. They have so much energy for two people one of whom is just sitting on a drum seat. The whole set is just sex in rock form. Their interplay is just so charged and the way they have the mikes set up round the drum kit just looks like they’re shagging. This was aided by Jack hanging right out, which you could see from 50m back so those groupies must be sore, and Meg for all the world looking like she wasn’t wearing a bra and bouncing up and down as she played the drums as if she was straddled across them/him. Phew! Heady stuff indeed. Jack’s voice is amazing and the instrument playing – so simple and they fuck up all over the shop but it so doesn’t matter as they know each other so well they just pull it together and make it part of their charm. You can hear all his influences in the guitar playing, blended together to create this new rock melange. Wow. Wish I’d had more energy to push forward a bit more.

Also watched some skating and some MC mike-offs. Quite a bit of random fighting in the crowds near the front which the security guards seemed to completely ignore although Lamb had a ‘go’ about it (“we’re about peace not fighting – we’re all one person”). Yay, go hippies! A great day out.

I’m burnin’ up

Yep – yesterday was a day for trying to cause severe flame related damage to myself. Burned my hand while trying to cook the simple yet delicious spinach and feta pasta (thx to Louise for that recipe). Yet again regretting not buying that A$3 colinder from IKEA so will deffo be making a trip down there next week for that. Luckily the meal turned out alright and much beer was drunk to soothe the pain.

Then later down at the Misty bar near Federation Square (a very cool little place down an alley like most of the cool places in Melbourne) t’other Matt tried to set fire to the whole bar with his flamin’ sambuca. Sometimes he really can’t hold his drink… literally. Noone was seriously injured although Dom was surprised I hadn’t got my camera out to take photos of the cool burning – I did point out that I was slightly pre-occupied moving out of the way of the burning fluid coming straight at me. Guess I’ll never be a photo journalist if I continue to put my personal safety in the way of a cool photo.

Mos and Brock rounded up our posse of ten around midnight and we all minibused over to Kensington for Jodi’s house party. This was actually the house that we looked at but didn’t move into a month ago – luckily they got someone else! T’was a great party with a nice brazier burning in the backyard and plenty of wine and beer flowing, thankfully none of it alight even though we’d brought a bottle of sambuca with us. A good time was had by all and eventually staggered back home, well taxi’d anyway, around 5am, making that officially the latest night in Melbourne yet. Hadn’t even gotten to the next party that Mos moved onto. My head is feeling suitably chastised this morning as I try to recover enough to head out to the Livid festival…

Toys

For some reason I was reminded yesterday of my old replayTV (well, Stephen’s old replayTV to be honest). This was a really cool device that recorded TV by you simply telling it stuff like ‘record all episodes of Simpsons’. This may not sound like much but in America you get three episodes of Simpsons on weekdays, none on Saturday and two on Sundays – so that would have been a lot fo recording setting otherwise. Once set, the replayTV would sit there quite happily until the show came on then start recording it. At some point in the future you’d come back to find ten or so episodes of Simpsons sitting there on the machine ready to watch (assuming it hadn’t run out of hard drive space of course). Then I’d just happily sit down for a few hours of mindless high brow entertainment and learning of words such as ‘specious’ and ‘crisortunity’ – deleting episodes I’d seen already straight away and just watching ones I hadn’t.

That wasn’t all though – you could also simply skip through ad breaks, which again in America could save you 10 minutes per ‘half hour’ episode of Simpsons. Sweet. Wait – there’s more. They had this cool thing call ‘ShowStopper’ where you could pause real time tv when the phone went and then go back to watching it where you left it, fast forwarding to catch up with real time again during the ad breaks.

Bizarrely this was back in 2000 that it was first released and not everyone has one yet! It totally revolutionizes the way you watch TV – and gives an indication of what it would be like with on demand TV (ie, where you just say ‘I want to watch Simpsons episode blah’ and you pay directly for that – probably a lot more money for an advert-less show than one with adverts).

The reason I mention this now is that on BBC News today I see that Sony’s next Playstation will incorporate one of these toys in with it. So I’m sure Stephen will be very happy indeed, especially on top of the major congratulations for his engagement. Cheers!

Grrr…

Bollox. Just wrote a big long post about my Great Ocean Road Trip last weekend and it got lost on the way to my site. Bloomin’ Internet.

Ah well – check out the photos in the meantime.

In Summary though – t’was a great weekend and amazingly beautiful. The torrential rain held itself off for the most part – especially on the first day when we really thought we’d have to cancel the trip on the way out of Melbourne. Saw loads of waterfalls, heaps of koalas (one of which was actually moving! I thought koalas only sat still in the fork of a tree wedged up their bum). The scenary there is stunning and it’s so much nicer to have your own car than to be stuck on a tour schedule.

In unrelated news – the continuing grey rainyness here has been useful in keeping me working on Tripsta. This is my new travel site concept which I hope to get up and running end of October. Everyone I’ve talked to about it seems pretty excited by the idea so fingers crossed it works out. In the meantime though the huge amount of cool open source software I’m getting to use again is getting my brain back into shape.. and getting me in trouble with the local internet cafe for slamming their download limits. Sorry guys!

ps, also chucked up some photos of my Melbourne gaff if you’re interested. It’s just changed around ‘cos the Chriss’se’s”s have moved back into their room rather than the sitting room (big thanks to them again for doing that for us).

The fight – norman mailer. Another great book, I’ve been pretty lucky recently on that front. Not read any Mailer before, and not into fighting at all so strange choice to pick up. The atmosphere Mailer conveys of the Ali/Foreman fight as an insider to Ali’s camp is wonderful. You really get a sense of how the fighters prepare themselves mentally and physically for beating the crap out of each other. Poetic and violent at the same time.

Nearly God

Big shout out to Chris (the smaller, Welsh one) for lavishing fascinating Japan facts on me the other night in the Black Cat. The one to share with you today, and it sounds like a cool place to go visit f’sure, is that all Japanese design incorporates a designed flaw – ie, something the designer knows isn’t the best it could be but has put in on purpose. The reason for this is simple – only god can achieve perfection, therefore for any human to attempt perfection is sacriledge and should be avoided. Think I might use that as my excuse for failing to achieve perfection on a regular basis…