September 23, 2009

• Wayback Post: Creation, Accomplishment, and Fame

  Creation, Accomplishment, and Fame

  

  Left: Stephen Spielberg, age 64. Famous filmmaker, began making 8mm films at 15. Most well known and wealthiest director in the world. Right: Michael Nyiri, age 56. Forever aspiring videomaker, began assembling "MikeVideos" on Beta at age 36 Destitute and unknown still looking for his "big break"

  (This is an edited version of a blog entry originally posted on Jan. 4th, 2007)

  When young, I always dreamed of fame and fortune. I was going to write the great American novel. I actually wrote a novel at age 14. (It needs a lot of work) When I would pass around my notebooks full of short stories, chapters of various unfinished novels, and poetry to my friends and family, everyone fawned and praised. Knowing no criticism, I blindly thought I would be able to submit my work to various publications; the editors would be wowed by my words, and I would become the youngest Poet Emeritus of the State of California, or something like that.

  Then I woke up.

  No, wait.

  What I really wanted to do is direct movies. In college I minored in film history, because there was no such thing as home video "back in the day" so I took classes to learn technique and immerse myself in the movies. For four years, I watched as many films as time would allow, and although, unlike Spielberg, who shot a scripted World War II film at age 15 on 8mm film, I didn't make films because my parents weren't up to date on the latest technological breakthroughs in the Sixties, and we didn't even have a record player.
  
  As a child I did have a small audio tape deck, however, and became the Orson Welles of our neighborhood, conducting interviews, and performing radio plays on reel to reel tape, alone or with my siblings and friends. I sat in front of the television with my tape deck in the evenings recording theme songs and pertinent passages from favorite movies.

  Spielberg was able to break into the "business" soon after he attended college. Using his student film from Cal State Long Beach, "Amblin", as a calling card, he began his career directing a segment of the television movie "Night Gallery" and cemented his future fame with "Duel", a "movie of the week" in 1971. By 1974, he had directed "Jaws" the most popular film up until then, and the movie that defined the term "blockbuster" and helped to change the movie business (sometimes not for the better) from then on.

  I was to graduate from college that year, but as anyone who has read this blog for a while probably knows, I had to drop out, and began my first career in retail sales. In my spare time, I still created "audio collages" using record players and tape decks, a practice that is now commonly known as a digital "mash up".

  When affordable home video appeared in 1981, I bought one of the first CED videodisc players, one of the many formats in which I've invested that have ceased to exist over the years as the technology got better and better. I used the videodisc player and a Beta tape deck to create "video collages". By 1986, I bought a marked down video camera and I embarked on the first steps toward realizing my childhood dream. I became "MikeVideo", and I started to make movies.

  Writing and videomaking have been my two chief "hobbies" for a long time. The process of creating what I feel to be a poem with a universal message or editing video footage into artistic collages is almost like a drug to me. I've gone whole nights without sleep (other more tangible drugs were available to help with that conundrum) when "in the zone". Producing a video for me is like giving birth. And like I once heard a famous director (I believe it was John Ford) say: "You know you're a good director when you can kill your babies." He was talking about removing "favorite" shots or passages from a finished film because they didn't really add anything to the plot or theme of the piece. My first videos were not very tight, but as I grew comfortable with the medium, I began to make "long form" videos, which would last an hour or more, and now, with the advent of "internet video", I try to make sure each piece doesn't last more than 10 minutes.

  I would force all my friends to watch my little masterpieces and the consensus among a lot of my supposed "friends" was that I should leave myself out of the picture. I've always been a "speaker" as well as a writer. I developed a "DJ" voice while in high school and I have been tapped by both scholastic and civil community to act as a speaker. I was in drama in both high school and college, and considered myself a "personality" as well, so I was a natural fit as a host for my own movies.

  Like I said, my friends thought otherwise.

  In time, I began to concentrate more on the photography and the editing than the showmanship aspect of videomaking. But it was always a hobby, and I've always been proud of the surviving work, which is varied and I think pretty darned entertaining.

  When computers and the internet arrived in the 90s, I figured that I would finally have an outlet to share my work, and to help me gain a readership and viewership.

  I wanted to be able to utilize the internet as a promotional tool for my creative output for about three years before I actually got a computer and went online. Four computers, two DSL services, and three servers later, I am still trying to utilize the internet to promote my own "art and literature." When younger, instead of following my muse, I was far too busy advancing my business career while at the same time taking lots of drugs and partying like a fool. By the time I got online, and created the sprawling cyber container for my words and pictures that is my personal website AllThingsMike (http://www.allthingsmike.com), I had a lot of pent up creativity which exploded into cyberspace and I would start a lot of projects that are still not finished till this day. This is not because of procrastination or lethargy, but because I soon found that my own personal vision of the world wide web, in which I could present video and multimedia, hadn't yet arrived. For a long time, all the different pieces of hardware I wanted to utilize to "tell my story" on the internet wouldn't even connect with each other. In time, I found my sites listed among the search engines, and I was quite happy with my creations. Even though the graphics heavy web pages I did meticulously create would tend to crash people's computers (dial up modems were especially susceptible to this malady), those who were able to see the results of my labors usually praised them.

  The dream to direct movies became a dream to become "internet famous" and get my name in the Los Angeles Times Calendar section. I went into creative and promotional overdrive. I'll admit I don't go into the "self publishing" route. I offer my work for free, on a website I pay for to insure that visitors don't get bombarded by advertising popups. I joined message boards and poetry groups, became a member of early social networking systems, and was blogging before they coined the term. That was before the program was established, so I had to type the date and time into the computer myself.

  In time I felt I didn't have much time left to create the "universe" of possibilies I seemed to see inside my head. Thankfully, computer speeds and online video streaming caught up to my "internet dreams" and now the possibility of showcasing intricately detailed composite artwork and elaborately edited video pieces is not just a possibility, but a reality.

  The title of this blog is "WhenWordsCollide", a sly reference to the fact that, as a writer, I tend to embellish and adjectify, using parentheticals and tangenitals, so that every "piece" is usually pretty long. I do consider myself a writer, and even when constructing a blog article, I edit constantly (even though I sometimes add more words instead of subtract them, anathema to editors everywhere) and I usually get around to a point sooner or later, hopefully with a flourish. I rarely write anything online without a purpose, and even though I've always constructed these blog articles to resemble glossy magazine spreads, with graphics and photos, I'm sure I haven't attracted thousands of readers because a blog is usually read by bloggers, and bloggers have a lot of blogs to read, and possibly blanch at the mere sight of all the words colliding on this site.

  My latest dreams of creating internet societies and becoming the Poet Laureate of Cyberspace are only dreams. I figured if I could just create one little piece of artwork or write one poem that travelled the internet until it got back to me in an email attachment like one of those "inspirational" Flash animations (or those pesky dancing hampsters) then I would be set for life, and perhaps be able to say "hi" to Spielberg as an equal.

  The best "critical" comment I ever received here on the blog was that my site was giving the reader an epileptic fit. I do design the layout of all my webpages, however, and I find my own work stimulating and colorful. I do call my website "an electronic experiment in art". As an experiment, sometimes things don't work, and over the past seven years, I've recreated most of my expanding website until I discovered a format that is easily navigated and attractively packaged. Slowly but surely, my "universe" is coalescing into what I "saw" when I first created it. "WhenWordsCollide" is a repository for updates to the separate sections of my website. There is an index in the sidebar, and I use 'tags" religiously after Xanga introduced them. There are also links to the main parts of my site. I have called myself repeatedly "a failed writer" because my physical notebooks are unfinished, but since I've been blogging, I have actually written more and have been serializing what will eventually be an online autobiography or memoir. One of the projects which is almost complete is the posting of all my poetry on the internet, on a website created in 2003 called "ElectricPoetry." (http://www.allthingsmike.com/ElectricPoetry/)

  In 2002 I began to stream my latest videos, which I call "internet movies", from my allthingsmike server. Then in December 2005, I uploaded four short videos to YouTube, . A complete "history" of my videomaking projects over the years is on the MikeVideo website. Although some of my videos (usually "ElvisMovies' or "Betty Boop Dreams") get comments and hits, I still haven't created that one piece of universal art. Perhaps my friends back in the 80s were right, but I don't think so. I enjoy watching my own creations repeatedly, and I'm probably responsible for most of the hits they get.

  The neat thing to me is that they are available to be seen. Maybe my fifteen minutes just aren't meant to happen yet. Maybe my "best work" hasn't been created yet.

  Spielberg probably won't ever see any of my work, but the neat thing is that it's all online, waiting. Spielberg, if you're reading, drop me a line.

  • 10:29 am
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