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

Alright, I'm a lazy globber blogger. i'll admit it readily. below is a message that was distributed a while ago. don't hate me for publishing it.

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hello far flung friends, relatives and people that I might have met at a party somewhere..

excuse the mass email format - just think of it as your own personal little message from me.. or not..

new york is the shit! it is soooo coool!! and soooo expensive!! aaarrgh!! there are so many awesome shops, things to do, people to see, things to eat - everything - it just makes you want to be a capitalist piggie!!!

I arrived on saturday morning after enduring a 17 and a half hour night flight, it's all night, so just when you expect the sun to rise, it stays black.. very sucky. we had our own little entertainment systems - which was quite cool, and the time passed pretty quickly after watching a couple of movies and chatting to the christian missionaries from zanzibar who'd invaded the flight..

we got off to a rollicking start and after the seemingly endless night, I made a deal with them to let me sit at the window seat for the touchdown in new york. what a useless view that was. atlantic ocean, then eastern seaboard - like little bits of crappy coastline, then lots of little boxy houses, some mansions, and then the airport. I was so disappointed. didn't even see manhattan skyline or anything. phoey. slept about all of two hours on the plane.

spent the first day - saturday - hanging out with Simon and Suyen (my mildly suffering hosts - big ups to Andy) who took me to this amazing vegan / vegetarian restaurant where they make every single thing on the menu with the most amazing soya stuff I have ever tasted. It was brilliant - we had like cajun chicken to start, and then I had black pepper encrusted beef with teriyaki sauce. You don't understand how yummy it was - it was amazing. I can't describe it more - the textures were unreal - I've never tasted anything like it. And another thing - I could finally eat anything on the menu!! ha ha!

afterwards we walked around washington square park where we checked this guy with a 'I'm with schizo shirt' who was performing some mesmerising street theatre, balancing bicycles on his chin, juggling knives upside down and the like. also checked out some old hippies playing speed chess and a lot of black homey drug dealers..

we ended up drinking margaritas at this mexican place across the road from simon's place when my biological clock caught up with me and showed me who was boss. Luckily I managed to stumble across the road into bed before my world came to a grinding halt..

sunday was more chilled, went for a run in the morning along the harbour and saw the world's largest procession of harley davidson breakfast thugs slowly idle past. it took them about 45 minutes just to drive past us, there must have been around 5000 enthusiasts ranging from the die-hard live-the-harley-dream types to your average schmo who's just discovered that he can have fun with both hands at the same time..

if there's one thing I can say about NY, manhattan in particular - its like you see in sex in the city - only a few hundred times more intense. on that note, the stars of sex in the city are regarded as demigods, being seen as living the new york dream and consequently idolised. it's pretty common to see shops posting huge signs like "Thanks to our star customer and wonderful friend - Sarah Jessica Parker from Sex in the City" or advertising themselves in an upcoming episode. Indeed, started watching the new season on sunday night and its turned into a bit of a commercial with krispy kreme donuts and fedex deliverymen the subject of the show... oh well it was inevitable I guess..

yesterday I finally took a walk to the place which I signed up for - NYU. the NYU campus isn't really a campus in the sense that most of us are used like a closed off area like Wits or UCT - its more like a sprawling collection of about 45 buildings all located in the same 40 block radius.. and don't be fooled by those evil dinky maps you see at home - most self-respecting blocks in manhattan are a good km or two long...

The main area of NYU is set around Washington Square - and it's beautiful.. also they are extremely organized - I suppose I shouldn't really be amazed - but it’s a nice change. My school - Tisch is actually just off Broadway and was preparing for new admissions. I went up and saw some really great student and professor projects - like greg shakar's lightning organ - which generates notes by using eletrical sparks across these huge tuning fork things - and danny rozin's wooden mirror - which acts as a regular mirror by moving small little wooden panels to create an image..

afterwards, caught the subway uptown to 48th street, where I gawked in utter amazement at the enormous ads urging you to go see Anne Heche's latest broadway show or check out FCUK. I am nursing a strained neck and severely damaged ankles after tripping over myself so many times. laugh if you will, but I dare you to be nonchalant when you hit broadway or times square for the first time..

ended up meeting an ex-south african in the lower east side, then checking out this great free jazz band at Frank's in Brooklyn, they were great, but I've never really seen a band which has drums, hammond organ and two lead saxophones.. hmm..

and that is that for the moment - its about 9 in the morning here - about three in the arvie your time and although I have just woken up, I feel like I have been gang raped by a herd of extremely horny bull elephants so I think I need to take some guronsan..

love to all

[:]michael sharon
[:]signatureless... again

In the space of a heartbeat on late tuesday afternoon my life went from idling in neutral to 3000 km/h in 10th gear.

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.)

sand. sea. seals. mike's holiday adventures

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

REPORT: Aimlessly skipping past David Hasselhoff and some rather casual strippers

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 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.

Yet another example of why freedom of speech is such a potent force in America:

The Onion | 31 October 2001
Gore Delivers Emergency Presidential Address Into Bathroom Mirror

UPDATE: Holiday in the Middle East

and so, a day after possibly the most-watched / televised / commentated / media saturated event in the world shatters the tranquility of the new millenium, michael sharon, fearless commando of the new order, packs his hawaiian shirts, his rooibos tea and steps on an el al flight heading for sunshine, rosh hashanah and possibly the country with the world's most dangerous suntanning.

wednesday the 12th of september 2001 probably went down in most people's minds as the day they tried to grapple with the events of the previous afternoon (back here in sunny suid afrika it was a tepid quarter to four in the arvie). inconceivable. monstrous. incomprehensible. disastrous. these were some of the words jumping out of people's mouths and into other people's brains. i was using them to inquire if there was an alternate meal arrangement on board my flight. naturally, before take-off our flight was delayed by two hours. naturally. nobody wanted a repeat of the new york incident. although there isn't much in the way of comparable targets in johannesburg or even africa for that matter. maybe the brixton tower. hmm. or the carlton centre. possibly the ponte. still once the flight lists had been checked and checked and quadruple-checked and even our baggage was suffering from intrusive anal cavity searches - we finally took off.

el al has a reputation for security which is unmatched worldwide according to the international herald tribune. Only one flight has ever been hijacked (in 1968) and every single flight features armed sky marshals travelling incognito with passengers. upholding this fearsome reputation must be the only explanation i can think of for them to have skimped on every single other aspect of the airline's budget including recognisable food stuffs, leg room for human beings who are not severely vertically challenged (i.e. midgets), decent bathrooms and a friendly bedside manner in their cabin crew. ah well... i suppose i should be thankful that i got on the plane, got off the plane and there was nary a whiff of skyscraper within spitting distance.

in fact the dreaded land of the video journalist's wet dreams was glorious. wow. the weather (look i'm starting with the obvious here and moving to the ridiculous) was kind enough to bring out a gentle middle eastern autumn (heat wave for those of you in london) which averaged about 30 degrees, served in conjunction with a delicately cooling breeze - savoured slowly at night. the family were their usual joyful selves. this was the first time i've seen them since they made what must be one of the most insane moves in the world from johannesburg, south africa to ra'anana, israel in early february. walked into their flat, took one look around at all the junk and clutter that i've known since i was a figment of imagination and felt right at home. the bliss of seeing the family for the first time in ages also didn't prevent the sheer joy of parent-child squabbling from occurring.

israel is fabulous. tel-aviv is a lively bustling beast of a city with cooler-than-thou's hanging out on every street corner, more punks than sex pistols concerts circa 1977 and the most absolutely eye-poppingly, gasp-worthy, loud-exclamation-of-amazement-pretty gorgeously proportioned girls. aaaaaaaaarrgh. and they're everywhere!! its like the most welcome alien invasion known to man. it was definitely appreciated by a lone alien from the bottom of africa.

as for the food, well, put it this way, i sneaked back about 10kg's of tsfatit cheese, bulgarian cheese, humus, malawach, burekas, bissli, halva and assorted chocolates back home. it was delicious. my routine consisted of waking up, eating, going out somewhere, eating, saying hello to friends, eating, or meeting some family, eating. i was initiated into the tales of the "secret" history behind jewish holidays. "we fought, we won, let's eat." and so i carried on the grand tradition of my long-nosed ancestors in a fine culinary style.

tension, war and things better left to time magazine:
there was constant tension in the air, but israel is a country that has always been at war. you don't feel that the country is at war, until you understand that this war is the same war that george bush is blindly leading the world into. this isn't a war of easily identifiable good and evil, where the side that is evil is a race of godless, alien bloodsuckers ready to leech the life from their enemies and wanting to oppress every single man, woman and child into a state of cowering obesiance. this is a war of attrition, where armed policemen and women and soldierboys and gals search everybody going into any public space. armed soldiers walk around open air markets. everybody is alert to baggage being left alone.

and yet. people throng the streets. the cities teem with life. its difficult to imagine a people for whom shouting and swearing is an olympic sport cowering in their homes.

so after philosophising about the israeli condition for all of 30 seconds, i proceeded to run around and meet more relatives than i have ever known have existed. ancient photo albums were sourced showing porcelain perfect portraits of turn of the century relatives in monotones and parents, cousins, uncles, aunts, grand-relatives and others all at various events which were deemed photo-worthy. i was constantly squeezed and pinched and told that i had this one's eyes and that one's hair and this one's stubborn streak. nobody managed to genetically identify the original donor of my nose although one cousin had managed to assemble a remarkable family tree tracing my roots back to bloody 8th century AD. i was briefly impressed, then gave up ever trying to figure out exactly why great (ad infinitum) grand father yossie was a lady killer in a tunic.

but siblings and distant relatives aside, the highlight of my trip was going to ein gedi on the shores of the dead sea for two days. if you haven't gone yet - go!!! pack your bags, book a ticket on an airline still afloat and rush to the depths of the lowest place on earth. wow. you cannot really comprehend the meaning of "float" until you're doing it in the middle of an ocean full of zero critters but which is so bloody salty you get some water in your eyes and then run around squawking like a headless chicken until you find the fresh water trough and you realise that you're not actually going blind after all. truly awe inspiring. (hint: read the sign carefully which says 1. do not aubmerge your face in the water.)

so i have returned to the bottom of africa (without serious incident (unless you count the airline food)) where the currency is rivalling those french boys in the big blue for unassisted diving, my bank balance is starting to wish it had a different owner and my car is aging very ungracefully and making plaintive requests for retirement.

i'm back!!!!! open for emails, gifts, toys, love and donations of any kind (err.. except for bodily fluids)!!

talk to me.

shout at me.

berate me for not bringing you some falafel.

come on... i welcome it..

michael sharon
pioneer of posture | überthings inc.
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