This is the personal webhub of Michael F.Nyiri, poet, philosopher, fool, since 1999, 110809

YouTube decided to delete the soundtracks from nine of the over fifty original videos I have on their servers because of "copyright infringement." They began early in the year, and each month I find another email in my inbasket telling me another one of my little masterpieces has been butchered. In late 2008, I had redesigned and updated my MikeVideo site, including adding links to the videos on both Xanga, where my blog, WhenWordsCollide is located, and on YouTube, where I've been a "director" since late 2005, when they established the streaming service. I have just been able to "fix" some of the links to the YouTube vids, either alerting readers that the links go to soundless videos, or inserting new links to the videos I'm uploading to my Vimeo account, which I haven't used in two years. Vimeo has HD streaming, same as YouTube, so I might utilize their services more in future.

My videos do not infringe on any copyrights. For the most part, I create mashups utilizing a number of musical elements, and I always list these songs and tunes at the end of the video in the credits. I don't sell these internet movies. They are offered for free on the web. Since I acknowledge the copyright holders, I should not be penalized. It took a while to update these pages, but for the most part I think I've covered all the bases, and added a new video to the main page of the site as well. My original MikeVideo webpage, from 1999, where I announced that "we'd all someday have our own television stations on the internet" has had to be taken down, sadly, because I couldn't pay for the old site address any longer. It was just archived pages which I redesigned over here at AllthingsMike in 2001 anyway.

My photographic skills are increasing. I haven't created a Webshots folder yet, but I've been dabbling in monochrome photography and have posted a selection of fifteen photos on my blog. The response was terrific. Besides setting the camera to monochrome instead of converting from color in "post production", I've tried to alter the contrast and brightness so that the photos really stand out. These are singular works of art, not to be confused with "snapshots". The study of San Vicente Light to the left was taken on November 1st, on a particularly nice SoCal day, and Santa Catalina island can plainly be seen in the background.

I plan to create a whole set of these works in the near future, and will upload what I've photographed so far in "glorous monochrome" to a webshots folder shortly.

Hollywood Blvd. and Sunset Blvd. are the subjects of two Webshots Gallery Folders uploaded in early October 2009. I began the Hollywood Project in the summer of 2008,. before my then roommate Joel died of cancer, and through 2009, with my physical move and then the hip operation, I didn't really concentrate on the unfinished business of going out and taking pictures. Great that the web sticks around, and so I have finally begun to close the door on this project, which hopefully will include a MikeVideo internet movie as well.

There are 122 high quality photos of Hollywood Blvd. and 154 photos of Sunset Blvd. These join the photos I took of the Beachwood Estates and the Hollywood sign in July 2008. I have a folder on my computer with even more photos which I haven't yet uploaded to YouTube.

 As seems to be usual during the end of every year since I began AllThingsMike as an outlet for my creativity, as the year begins to end, I begin to update furiously. I last updated right before creating this video, and now I'm updating three months later, with multiple projects. This videoblog began as a showcase for some of the songs I wrote in the 70s and 80s, but when I just couldn't seem to sing all that well, I decided to shift focus and make it a poetry reading instead. The raw footage for this video includes about six or eight more poems and a couple of more songs, so I've got material for a few more of these.

The response when I posted the video and Director's Commentary on my blog was pretty good. I have planned to do poetry readings of my work online for years, first when I ran the Yahoo ElectricPoetry group, which disbanded in 2004, and later for the blog. I might utilize Xanga's "XTV" feature, which streams video with a chatroom attached, if there is further interest in poetry readings. In the meantime, this video includes the very first public readings of my poetry, featured of course on the ElectricPoetry website.

This is the year of many changes. In February, I not only physically moved, after living in the same rented house for 14 years, but I bought my own place. "My Little House" is located in a senior mobile home park in the South Bay, and the video blog detailing my move that I promised when I posted my latest Betty Boop Museum photos was finished and uploaded to YouTube in two separate installments at the end of May. The first episode can be watched to the left, and the second is HERE.

Finally, I have my own place, but sadly for the website and for my blog, WhenWordsCollide, I have been socializing more in "real life" and taking time to fix up my place, so I haven't really been updating my online AllThingsMike Universe. On my birthday this year, AllThingsMike turned 10 years old, and I stopped paying Homestead the fee to keep the archived earlier site pages online, so I will be deleting broken links which point to those older pages in the near future. If you click a link for one of those pages, you will get a Homestead 401 error message. Other changes which have taken place this year so far entailed my "hip revision operation" which can be experienced by reading my blog articles in the "A Leg to Stand On" series which was announced in June and is now complete. I am now walking under my own power, and intend on getting out and around Los Angeles with my ever present cameras for some new projects quite soon. Along with the dismantling of my earlier archived web pages, I have also noticed that a lot of the videos on my YouTube channel have had the soundtracks deleted for "copyright infringement." Most of the videos are duplicated on my Xanga video section as well, so apologies for the lack of soundtracks on the YouTube pages. I will be removing these links from the MikeVideo section and uploading the high def versions of a lot of the vids to this site in the coming months.

At the most, I wanted AllThingsMike, my personal website, to be my legacy. At the least, it is a "place" where I can enjoy looking at my "artistic accomplishments" without the trappings of my career or "real life".

It was on May 1st, 1999 that I first ftp'd a page, my poem "bornagain" to the internet. The "original" AllThingsMike was part of the Homestead Community back when hosting a website was pretty much free for all comers I kept most of the old webpages online until July of this year, and will be disabling the links as soon as I can. . In 2001 I moved Allthingsmike to it's own server, and a "history" of my pages can be found by using the Internet Archive database.

The site is ten years old, and now encompasses about a thousand pages of "electronic art and literature". Divided into themed websites and sections, clickable through the clouds at your right or the taskbar at the top of the page, I am pretty much "re-inveinting" myself online, showcasing my latent talents. Although a physical move during the fist few months of 2009 has prohibited me from updating a complete overhaul as planned for the "celebration", I will begin to concentrate again now that the anniversary date is finally here. Upcoming projects include Mike's Video Blog #10: Movin' On Up, a video diary of my recent move, and the addition of the 2009 page to the ElectricPoetry website. I'm actually writing quite a few poems in 2009. which can presently be seen on my blog, WhenWordsCollide. in the last half dozen or so ElectricPoetry posts, including three themed posts for National Poetry Month in April. So far, I've written a total of 14 poems in 2009.

As the year 2008 wound to a close, the roommate I had prepared for in Mike's Extreme Makeover decided he couldn't afford to live with me anymore, and I was forced to find a new place to live, after 14 years in the same house. I could have opted to look for another roommate, but didn't want to be facing "roommate roulette" over the next few years, especially since I am having a major operation upcoming.

I cancelled the operation, and prepared for, and moved during the months of January and February. There will be an upcoming Mike's Video Blog showing the highlights of the move. Because the Betty Boop Museum had to be completely dismantled, I took new photos of the museum when after I set up the figurines in new displays and posted 199 of these high quality photos in a new Webshots Gallery folder entitled "The Betty Boop Museum 2009".

There is also video footage for an upcoming video about the Betty Boop Museum and my various collectibles.

The last major site overhaul I completed before I had to physically move and stopped updating was The Betty Boop Pages. I overhauled the Composite Section, and the Web Images section, relegating the images which had been stagnating on the front page of the site for over a year to their own gallery, and replacing them with all new images, mixing new high quality photographic backgrounds with all new posed images of the Danbury Mint Betty Boop figurines.

In all, ten new composites are now featured on The Betty Boop Pages. Although I did draw from new angled poses of some of the figurines previously used in composites, like the "upskirt Betty" pose used in the composite to the left with a newly colorized skirt, most of the new work utilizes Betty Boops from my plate collection, which haven't been used previously.

The end of the year is always a time for increased activitiy here at AllThingsMike. Since it's the dawn of the tenth anniversary year, there is even more activity going on. A couple of weeks ago, I completely updated the ElectricPoetry site, and for the past two weeks, I've turned my attention to MikeVideo. Besides changing some of the page styles and making the snappy new graphic, shown to the left, I've added year pages like on ElectricPoetry, and created a couple of new "Feature Pages". One of the files streaming from the Selling Sex Page was incomplete (for about three years!) and I've uploaded the complete file (which took me some time to find)

While the site is updated at least a couple of times a year, when I'm making more videos, I tend to update in "blocks", so the site remained unchanged for a while, with "Big Wednesday Dreams", created in Dec. 2007, as the "latest" video. Now I've updated and redesigned the front page of the site, so that my latest couple of videos are shown there, and then all other videos for the year are collected on their own year pages. 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 are online. I've listed in each section all the instances where the videos are online, either on YouTube or Xanga and also supply a link to the "Director's Commntary " pages from my blog for most of the videos.

New videos showcased on the main page include "L.A. Dreams", from November, and "Faire Music", the very fist "test video" for the more ambitious 2005 project, "Renaissance Day", soon to have it's own "Feature Page". The latest "Feature Page" contains the three "ElvisMovies" music mashup videos. It was a lot of work, and I still have to update the style of the History and Video Capture sections to match the style of the rest of the site, but all in all, this past couple of weeks has seen a major overhaul of MikeVideo and were very productive. .

Thanksgiving dawned bright and beautiful after a rainstorm drenched the southland, and I took my camera on a short jaunt to San Pedro, resulting in over 100 photos filled with wonderful cloudscapes in the Webshots Folder "Thanksgiving Cloudscapes in San Pedro." The latter part of the year is filling my muse with new projects all the time, which is fitting since I will probably be a bit housebound after the hip replacement replacement operation.

In the meantime, join me on numerous photo expeditions during the holiday season 2008, including this impromptou joyride.

While driving down Gaffey Street in search of images like this one, I was pulled over by police because I was taking photos in a no parking area by a government compound. I was let go with a warning, but this proves to how great lengths the Mikester will go to get an interesting photograph.

May of 2009 marks the 10th anniversary of this website. Section by section, I intend to completely updatre the complete website by that time. After a long absence updating anything except the blog, owing to the problems I had with ftp after moving my complete site to another server in August, I am in the midst of a whirl of activity right now.

Each Decades page and most of the Year pages on the ElectricPoetry website have been updated. New transcriptioins have been added to 1981 and 1983. There are only a dozen or so poems to transcribe and then all of the Eighties poetry will be fully posted on the internet. Some new transcriptions have also been added to the Nineties section completing all poetry for that decade.

I've also added links to all the Poetry of 2008 written so far this year and added a new link to the blog's ElectricPoetry Themed Posts.

Even though I've been on crutches since late summer, waiting for an operation to be scheduled to replace my broken hip replacement, I started to get a little bit of cabin fever by staying home, and embarked on another photo expedition series to downtown L.A. in November.The cemterpiece of my L.A. Dreams project is the new MikeVideo internet movie slideshow called L.A. Dreams, available on YouTube and Xanga Video. It is a mix of my photos of downtown L.A. dating back to 2004, with special emphasis on the high quality photos I took in beautiful weather in early November mixed with video footage shot over a wide period of time on expeditions to L.A.Music is a mashup of Los Angeles themed groups and songs.

I also have 172 photos in the Sears, USC Medical Center, Bridges folder and 290 photos in the Downtown L.A.in November folder on Webshots. Photo Walks are on the blog for both the Sears, USC Medical Center trip and the trip downtown.

May brought three major projects, and I felt the year at it's half way point was one of the more productiive in memory. Then "real life" reared it's ugly head and Mike's online world took a backseat to the aforementioned real one. In July, longtime friend and roommate Joel Birney passed away. I also found out that my 16 year old hip replacement needed to be replaced.

Not known to leave my videoblogging skills dormant when there is any chance of being creative, even though I stopped the Hollywood Project detailed below, I put together the three part video series "Mike's Extreme Makeover", showing the PART ONE , PART TWO, and PART THREE together comprise a 30 minute program which takes a "reality show" approach to how I cleaned up my house after Joel's death, and prepared for the arrival of a new roommate. There is also a PhotoPost on my blog with high quality photos taken of the makeover.

A blog announcing the arrival in August of new roommate Mike Hatt can be found HERE.

There are 252 photos in the Hollywood: The Sign, Beachwood Estates,and Cemetary folder on Webshots. This is an "unfinished project" which was began scant days before my roommate passed away after a long battle with colon cancer. I never finished the project, and didn't shoot any video, but the material shot provided two Photoposts on the blog and the Webshots folder. I still plan on returning to the Hollywood Forever Cemetary to take the tour, so I can get more photos of the "graves of the famous", including Rudolph Valentino and Cecil B. DeMille. The photo composite to the left is the logo header for the blog series, and includes an enlarged version of the sign photo, plus additions of car photos from other projects. The Chrysler on the left is one of my models.

Back in the summer of 2004, when I was using the still feature in the videocamera, I shot two Webshots Galleries full of photos along Hollywood Blvd. (ONE and TWO) These galleries are among my most visited on Webshots. I plan to get up to Hollywood Blvd again with the new camera, but plans were stifled after the death of my roommate, followed by the news that I need to use crutches because of my broken hip replacement.

The purple Haze of jacaranda flowers covers Southern California in the Spring. An abundance of blooms showed up on the weekend of May 10th and I began my photo excursions the next weekend. On May 16th in Long Beach and May 18th in Pasadena, I photographed dozens of the beautifully flowering jacaranda trees and am displaying the photos in the Webshots Folders Purple Pulchritude One (Long Beach) and Purple Pulchritude Two (Pasadena) There is also a selection of the better photos in the May 21st PhotoPost on WhenWordsCollide

Pirates, buccanneers, wenches, lords, and ladies populate the yearly Southern California Renaissance Faire which occurs in the Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area in Irwindale in the Spring. I went this year on the last day of the Faire, May 18th, and the weather was oppressively hot.

Although I didn't get a lot of varied footage or photos this year, since I left early, I did get almost the complete performances of the Poxy Boggards bawdy men's choral group, and magician, comic and juggler Broon, who put on a good show this year. Both performances are in the MikeVideo internet movie Renaissance Day 2008.

One of the Thursday Calendar entertainment choices in the Los Angeles Times was the 2008 edition of the George Barris "Cruisin' Back the Fifties" car show in Culver City. Only a few miles north of L.A., I hauled both cameras up to the show and spent three or four hours taking both photos and video of the various classic custom cars, both from the George Barris studio, and in competition. It was slightly overcast, but the shining paint jobs are still clearly displayed on these beauteous automobiles. The photography was taken on May 10th. The Webshots Folder, "Culver City Kustoms" with 234 photos, was added later that night. The MikeVideo Internet Movie, "Culver City Kustoms" was added to Xanga Video and YouTube on the 12th, making this project one of the fastest to get to the internet in both photo and video versions so soon after planning and shooting. Read the Director's Commentary on WhenWordsCollide.

On May 1st came the Mikester's fifty fifth birthday, and to celebrate, quite a few creative endeavors were started. Planned and shot in mid March, the Silver Lake Steps Project resulted in a couple of Webshots folders. Silver Lake Steps One with 102 images and Silver Lake Steps Two with 160 images added on May 11th. Intrigued with a Los Angeles Times article about the over 50 public staircases in the Los Angeles suburb of Silver Lake, Mike printed out a list from the internet and took both still and video camera up into the hills of Silver Lake looking for staircases. Covered are the famous Music Box Steps, the Cove, Landa, and the Micheltorena steps. There is also internet movie footage incorporated into the eighth edition of Mike's Video Blog, available on both Xanga Video and YouTube. The video blog is 13:03 and takes the viewer along on the hike with Mike, from planning, driving to, and execution of the hike up three famous staircases. Read the Director's Commentary on the blog.

I have only made eight "Mike's Video Blogs" since February of 2006, but each one is lavish, with travel, music, and narration covering a variety of places and events. The most ambitious is Mike's Video Blog #6,"Almost Homeless", which encompasses three separate "chapters" to document the renovation of my rented house, and then the shocking eviction, and eventual redemption which followed.