Matt Hobbs

Do I know you?

After the wonderful sunny start to the week New York has decided to go back to being extremely wet and grey. Luckily I’ve packed some pretty full on waterproofs since I’m heading down to Melbourne and the weather down there is quite grey during winter, so staying relatively dry. Also bought myself a new rubberised bag from Brooklyn Industries (where else would I shop?) which is doing just lovely thank you very much missus.

Feeling sad though because tomorrow is my last day here before I head off to SF. I’ve managed to catch up with lots of people (some planned, some more synchronicity based) and that’s all been smashing. Last night hung out with Carter and Kristin and their friends Jon and Francine down at Moto, a cool little bar/restaurant right next to the JMZ line. Moto is an amazing little place with a great faux french style, wonderful food and to top it all off this amazing band started playing just after we finished dinner. A great evening all round.

On a camera type note (and with a big thanks to Carter for his positive praise on my photos) it’s amazing how much the price of Compact Flash cards has come down since I bought my camera last August. Back then a 192 meg card was setting me back $120, now the same type of card costs $150 for 512 meg. That’s a lot of photos and I need to watch that my poor little computer doesn’t get overloaded holding them all. Might be time to invest in an external 120 meg drive just like Andy with his plans to back up his entire CD collection. Tim was saying that the reason for this is there’s a new type of really fast compact flash about to come out, so the older (16x) speed ones that I’m using are getting a bit defunct. Professional photographers tend to use microdrives because they write much more quickly, although they are more susceptible to bumps.

Hot in the city

Well having been warned that New York was wet and grey I’ve been pleasently surprised by today’s hot sunniness! Much like the atypical weather I left behind in London. Bright sunshine is always the best way to enjoy wandering around New York streets, especially when you’re a bit jet lagged. Managed to fight off the jet lag long enough to buy a new bag and sort out a new phone number – +1 (347) 678.6295 which will work while I’m in the US thanks to the lovely Mr Virgin.

Also, as a slight follow-up to the last post, you may have noticed that I didn’t die on my last flight. Phew. And not only that the flight was pretty much empty so I had three seats to myself to enjoy a lovely selection of movies – my favourite of which was Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the ‘fake’ biopic of the guy who presented and invented the Gong Show and who may have been a secret assassin for the CIA in his spare time. Very strange but a great movie.

Be your own life coach – fiona harold. Where many life coaching books tend to come off as very patronising, obvious and, most of all, American, this book is none of the above. Fiona Harold has spotted a hole in the market and fashioned herself into Britain’s most successful life coach, which means she’s about two foot shorter than Tony Robbins but has more hair (well, real hair anyway). This book pretty much sums up how you yourself can define who you are and what you want to be. No filler, just effective exercises for you to work through and see how you really think. There is some pseudo-psychotherapy going on in there but it’s not extreme and the main flaw I would suggest is that sometimes it’s easier for someone else to see your weaknesses and strengths than you find it yourself – so just using the book isn’t always the answer. That said it’s a great book and I highly recommend it to everyone to help understand who you are and what you want to do.

Women – charles bukowski. Another psuedo biographical story about Henry Chinaski, once street living post office worker now semi-successful writer and womanizer. This book is a sequence of exploits in Chinaski’s later life as a published writer and poet. Through his writing Chinaski is now able to fulfil his ideal lifestyle of drinking, shagging many different women and generally floating through life. Each chapter is incredibly short giving a real sense of the longevity of Chinaski’s plans for life. Although the main themes carry on through the book there is no real story as such, just slices of life being lived in a suicidal style. You find yourself wondering if this was really how Bukowski was living or whether it was the fuck fantasies of an old man. Guess I’ll have to read a biography to find out. If you like Bukowski this is a great read.

The wind-up bird chronicle – haruki murakami. It seems like only a short time ago that I read my first ever Marakami epic, Norweigan Wood. Back then I’m pretty sure that was the only book of his that you could find. Now every other book I read is one of his, something that hasn’t really happened for me since Terry Pratchett. Not that these two authors are in any way alike, it was more a comment on how my reading has changed over the years!

But back to the book itself… The chronicle, as I shall call it for brevity, is not a thin book. Weighing in just over 600 pages it at first seems a little daunting. Luckily it was worth the effort. The story is based around Toru Okada who loses his job, cat and then wife in quick succession. All of this seems quite straight forward and sane until about a third into the book when an increasing number of psychic characters start to emerge. At this point the story changes completely, from a simple tale of modern life to an allegorical stew of meaning and stories within stories. Characters come in and drop out with surprising regularity with Toru being the main link through all of them. Sounds confusing? It is, but somehow even though it doesn’t really make any sense you find yourself hanging on every twist and turn, fascinated to see what happens and how. Dry cleaners, mediterranean islands, birds, a female ‘fitter’ and her mute son are some of the characters you come across, with situations ranging from a normal suburban street, through the Japan-Russia conflict of the early 1900s to an all-pervading well. Oh, and of course we get to find out that Toru likes cooking spaghetti as his main meal as he tries to recover his lost wife.

Then, as strangely as it starts, the story stops. Everything sort of makes sense and you feel like you’ve climbed a mountain and are looking out on amazing views below. Phew. A happy ending as only Murakami could construct from another great book.

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.

Pop

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…