Author: Michael Eyal

Gawd! Has it been that long. Anyway – if you’re looking for slightly fresher postings from moi – check out uberthings, inc.

right.

its er.. week 5 or six I think. I’m starting to lose track. NYC sucks you into its great gleaming skyscraper-edged maw and leaves you wondering what, how and most importantly why…

ah yes, why… well, I started figuring out the why about two weeks ago today when we started classes at ITP. If you don’t know, the acronym stands for the Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Whew! ITP. let’s keep it that way.

after a week of orientation which climaxed with a three hour long official welcoming ceremony where we witnessed firsthand the insanely high quality of musical theatre writing, acting, filmmaking and dance that is being created at tisch, the wait was finally over!

I started last week with four classes – Applications of Interactive Technologies, Communications Lab, Introduction to Computational Media and Introduction to Physical Computing. And you thought that the name was the only mouthful. these guys sure don’t understand how to string together a course name with under 20 syllables. the amount of students is surprisingly large, considering that this is a master’s program. in the first year alone there are 117, most of whom have extremely varied backgrounds. we’ve got one Iraqi painter, a bunch of Japanese girls who used to work for Sega, some Japanese guys who still work for some enormous broadcasting behemoth from Tokyo, many Koreans, a gaggle of Taiwanese, a bunch of Israelis, some Brazilians, some from the Phillipines, some from Philly and some from the ass end of Mid-West America. Mid-fucking West as they say. Oh yes, there’s also a couple of students from New York, ha, silly me.. forgetting that little minority. All in all, under one roof I have met more people from more countries at one time than I ever did before.

In fact, the first week is spent walking around saying “Hi, I’m from South Africa, yes we have wild animals, AIDS and Nelson Mandela – where are you from?” It’s quite ridiculous the amount of people in the program, thankfully, after we started doing classes together and hanging out a bit, I managed to pick up most people’s names by osmosis. Although in New York, you tend to meet new people almost everywhere you go. or at least I do, because I don’t know anybody. So remembering everybody is a challenge in itself. but enough rambling, my real reason for writing is to tell you that Americans are crackpots.

huh? what? Did I hear somebody say I told you so? Well, its not like you think. Cultural difference has never held too much of an impressive office in my attention bank, until now. Being an outsider, I live, eat, sleep, breathe, smell, taste, feel, translate cultural difference. Everything becomes filtered through a uniquely South African set of perspectives and values. So what? Well… for one thing, I never realized how genuinely wasteful the people here are. On rubbish day, entire living room sets without a scratch on them are curbed, turfed or kerbed if you prefer that lingo and left to the hobos and students. I have stumbled over perfectly working televisions, lamps, radios, enormous queen size beds and many other artifacts just lying on the pavements.

I reckon with a decent sized rowboat and a few lads to help me out, one trip to the Upper East Side on garbage day will yield enough valuable booty to fetch a king’s ransom in some African kleptocracy like.. er.. South Africa or Nigeria. No, seriously, the stuff is unreal. Many of my fellow students are using discarded electronic equipment ranging from toasters to full size fans to microwave ovens as the basis for their projects. damn. Dan even found a pair of semi-new computer speakers outside this office that was turfing all their equipment. its sheer madness.

even the marketing people are getting in on it with ikea reputedly conceiving of an entirely new campaign to convince people to junk their old furniture. don’t take my word for it – ask the new york times.

In fact, this strategy has worked so well for me that this girl at ITP gave me a brand spanking new ikea desk yesterday. kif hey? Feel the difference in the quality of email? I’ve become Edward Norton from Fight Club and I love it. My life is no longer empty, I have swedish furniture.

okay since reading this will probably take longer than most of you are at work, I’ll rein my little rambling fingers in smartly. heel! fingers! stay.

in the meantime, if you get the urge to email me. fight it! fight it I say, until you canna fight it any longer.. its always lovely to hear from you…

if you want to read my weekly journals go to http://stage.itp.nyu.edu/~ms1671. this is where you will be able to track my progress as I go from making tiny little LEDs glow to creating super neutrino death ray blasters! ha ha!!

love to all

mike

last year i applied to a master’s program at New York University in Interactive Telecommunications. this week i finally received my letter of acceptance after four months of nail biting, caffeine abuse and playing computer games in my pyjamas.

I’m IN!!! Yay!!! whooohooo!!

okay so extreme euphoria was instantly replaced by extreme shock and nervousness at the enormous amounts of money involved. i have developed a nervous twitch in addition to a number of untreatable pyschiatric disorders as a result.

daniel has also been accepted and so two lone africans from the southern tip of the continent will be winging their way to the Big Apple sometime in the next three months for an extremely exciting two year stretch. i will probably take a sojourn in Israel for a month or so to bask in the warm glow of a holy war and visit my family before i go.

thanks to all of ya for being there and i’m sure we’ll have mucho grande parties before i go.

in the meantime, if anybody knows of any large sums of money casually sitting around accruing dust particles – please let me know ASAP – otherwise i will be keeping myself busy perfecting my vaultcracking techniques, learning how to rappel with my new grappling hook and working out how to make myself irrestibly attractive to venerable old men who administer vast sums of money on behalf of dead people.

all donations welcome. (except for the usual bodily fluids of course.)

Namibia… ah… Namibiaaaah… land of dust devils, wide open spaces and a gazillion fisherman. Not to mention the sand, the sand dunes, the largest sand dunes in the world and a couple of snakes. And that’s still leaving out some rather hermitic (or is that hermetic) scorpions, entire coastlines full of writhing seals and the world’s largest non-unionised population of anglers.

hmm.. where do i begin… do i start by telling you about getting on the bus for a 28 hour trip to another country when alba asks me if she needs her passport. Or do I skip straight to our lovely little camp site nestled at the mouth of the swakop river on the beach (and on the municipal sewage outlet if you believe the rumours. bah poppycock!).

as we stepped off our bus into the schizophrenic namibian weather we were greeted by what we thought was an immense frozen tidal wave poised to crash down and wreak enormous havoc on the unsuspecting innocents who inabited swakopmund. this tsunami on pause was in fact the morning fog bank retreating into the ocean since the climate of swakopmund is a shotgun wedding between dry desert heat and the cold atlantic ocean which eagerly rushes to savage it.

swakopmund has a unique climate which we dubbed “the stumbling drunk” because it never seems to be able to commit to a specific direction for any particular day. mornings are generally overcast and cold. fogbanks disappear by about 10 or 11 in the morning and the sun takes the reins. however, if there are clouds, expect to freeze when standing in the shade and roast when stepping into sunlit patches. weird man. very weird.

apart from that, the town is a cheery little replica of a fairy tale village with a few additions. there are the quaint german landmarks, houses which were erected back when namibia was der bundesland’s pinkie finger in africa. there are a host of bog standard seaside flats (i think the plans are published in architects weekly) and a number of rather bizarre modernist monuments like the kristall gallerie which would have been out of place in anything but a reimagining of hansel and gretel on PCP.

highlights include running loose on quad bikes throughout the namib dune sea – i was fortunate enough to have a bike with a loose front left suspension and a girlfriend who thought that holding on tight involved changing positions and clutching like a limpet first at the right arm, then the left. it was like a convoy of bedouins wandering through the desert on camelback, with the odd one at the back suddenly making sand donuts and veering off into erratic directions at regular intervals. other news: sandboarding is not all its cracked up to be. actually boarding down the sand dunes on some masonite is a pleasure, its the walking back up that kills you. every step you take turns into a monstrous 3cm of distance from your last position due to your foot sinking until your thighs into the sand. we hatched the brilliant concept of creating sand lifts which would be the desert equivalent of ski lifts. at the moment the concept is fully conceptualised and we are looking for seed money. any venture capital or offer of hard currency will convince us to finish this masterwork.

a little known fact which became glaringly apparent after an hour in swakop is that it is home to the largest non-aligned tribe of anglers in the southern hemisphere. possibly the northern hemisphere too as there were jumbo jet loads of french, german, british and australians all hellbent on transforming themselves into ernest hemingway’s heirs. so, when in rome, you become a fisherman. i am proud to say that i too – a confirmed leaf eater, a herbivorous hardhat became a fisherman. well i caught some kelp. lots of kelp. big bony belligerent kelp that looked as though it would take out a shark given the slightest hint of provocation. and i didn’t touch any of those stinky little pilchards that attach themselves to hooks and are supposed to be sweetly attractive to everything that lives in the ocean. i’m a proud card-carrying member of the outsourced anglers society. damn proud.

i see that my little missive has become like a sumo wrestler in training and become bloated out of all proportion. very well… consider this Chapter I of “Mike’s Crew Crawls the Namib”. more to follow…

love to all

mike
—————————
master of the masthead
acolyte of angling
demon of the dust

yesterday. a day glorified by artists as far apart as the beatles and guns’n’roses. a day celebrated by historians for providing them with a raison d’etre. a day universally excised from the memory by those who are rudely excreted into the present through the crusty detritus of eyeballs that refuse to open due to the fact that they are sandfilled ballast for a ship that is ploughing on through the dead calm of the eye of a hurricane.

tongue is swollen to about four times its size and cracked down the sides. water is not a luxury. it is an absolute necessity for survival. stupid beeping noise in the background becomes silence after some wild flailing of workable limb. aaaaarrrrgggh!

damn i hate hangovers. although to be honest, i haven’t had one in ages. in fact to be dead honest, i have a little penchant for essentiales or proheps (whichever one’s handy), which have become “Michael’s Little Helpers” (apologies to Mick Jagger). yes siree, these little liver boosters have helped me avoid many an alcoholic aftermath. so this morning’s little surpise was quite a shock to my normally pleasant frame of mind.

but where did it all begin.. well quite innocently as all these things do.. with the best of david hasselhoff, a bachelor’s party and some jolly roger half price pizza. i finished work early and in the vicinity of some shops last night, so i headed for the venerable cd wherehouse in rosebank (so called because most employees just say things like “dude, i dunno where you heard of that.. but it doesn’t exist” when confronted with *slightly* alternative artists like mirwais). joy. so i knew i was in for a special treat when i saw that cd wherehouse was having a back catalogue deletion sale. the marketing people must be running out of steam, they’ve resorted to honesty.

cd sales are glorious affairs, which educate the browser about a huge number of things including: really horrible fashion trends which lived about as long as a mayfly’s puberty, wild overestimations of the success of latoya jackson and similarly myopic sales forecasts of “superstar” musical attempts. bruce willis, david hasselhoff and the entire cast of new jack city’s solo albums belong in the last category.

the obstacles are significant; slogging through the molasses of years of obscure greek singers, equally obscure but more recent popular english language crap, the occasional opera conducted by a blind chinaman and misconceived box sets (“Jazz, blues, funk and rhythm” or “Jazzy Moods”) which usually contain all the songs that the artist in question tried to prevent from seeing the light of day during their lifetime.

but the rewards… aah.. the sweet satisfaction of locating a gem among the dark piles of forgotten rockstardom. the joy of finding an obscure indie band which weren’t quite cool enough to make the jump from UK to anywhere. the utterly orgasmic bliss of “discovering” a copy of daft punk’s homework for R20.

well… sadly that didn’t happen. i picked up liquido (one good song – narcotic), the charlatans tellin’ stories (not bad) and the beastie boys licence to ill (which wasn’t on sale). not a bad haul, but not quite the motherload of hidden loot which i was expecting.

so i trundled off home, playing my new charlatans cd in the car as i was driving, when i had this intense flashback. well not really a flashback, more like a strong feeling that i had to go and pick up the disc of my ex-band’s first album from my ex-drummer’s house (stop me if this ex-ercise gets too punful. ouch! that was bad. alright i’ll stop). so, got the disc, got back home, ripped myself onto MP3 (i can’t tell you how satisfying it is to pirate your own music) and kicked back and had a good laugh.. wow… we were so idealistic. so young. so naively unaware of musical conventions like dynamics, tempo, rhythm, pace, harmony etc etc.

listening to the sound of my own nearly forgotten rockstardom made me wonder if we had ever managed to release it, would i later in life be reduced to skipping through thousands of copies of our seminal concept album “what is the world when all you hear is distortion?”. hmm.. who knows..

this nostalgic melancholy vanished the instant i hit the lounge. el sleaze-o pit-o-naked wenches. well. semi naked wenches. money hungry wenches. greg’s bachelor’s party was off to a great start. the man himself was wedged into the corner, his hand plastered to a beer mug with various substances floating therein..

the problem with stripping is that it turns into flesh overkill. along the same lines as keanu reeves acting in johnny mnemonic, or any dolph lundgren film or some of jean-claude’s more memorable routines. its an assault on the senses. and the worst part of it is that strippers don’t accept plastic. damn. i continually find that i am underwhelmed in strip clubs. after the first hour of appreciating some ex-guinnnes entrants glorious assets, i am just plain bored. i sit around, order loads of drinks, try tempt the waitress into stripping and generally lack stimulation. er.. something like that.

that’s all for this instalment. turn your browsers herewards next week for more enthralling sagas. i promise. they’re guaranteed to leave you breathless with something.