August 7, 2007

AL-ZARQAWI’S POSSE...AT SARDI’S? Yesterday Agence France Presse reported that the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, now in full swing in Scotland, is featuring a tasteless production called “Jihad: The Musical,” which promoters have billed as a “madcap gallop through the wacky world of international terrorism.”

Next up? The musical-comedy, “Maim!”?

STOP! DON’T SHOOT! Last week the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcast came to its senses. After a concerted campaign by the ACLU and an effective Web-fueled protest initiative that mobilized bloggers, amateur photographers, and people in the news business and the tourist trade, the mayor’s minions rescinded a proposal that would have required that citizens taking snapshots or video footage in New York City first obtain a permit for shooting pictures in one spot for longer than 30 minutes. They would have also had to render proof that they had acquired $1 million in insurance. The same rules would have applied to a film crew (or group of tourists) of five or more if they used a tripod for more than 10 minutes.

A similarly wrong-headed law (rescinded in 2005 and described in Watching the World Change, page 121-122) would have made “unauthorized” photography illegal on all New York subways. The edict was scrubbed after it was determined to be unenforceable.

…AND CHECK OUT... Virginia Heffernan’s new “Screens” blog. As she does in her recent Times columns, occasionally quoted in this space, Heffernan continues her prescient and always relevant examination of the intersection of television and the Internet, mass media and grass(roots) media, political spin and advertising, and all manner of amateur/citizen/user/under-the-radar-generated multi-media.

ALSO: Peter Howe’s digital tribute to a longtime den mother to many in the photo community, Jeanette Chapnick, who passed away earlier this month.

ALSO: Photographer James Balog’s groundbreaking survey of how climate change is affecting the rapid regression of glaciers around the world. (Quite literally groundbreaking, alas!)

AND...Having finished Cullen Murphy’s illuminating and refreshingly accessible Are We Rome?, which assesses our two-century-old democratic experiment in contrast with the slow descent of the Roman Empire, I’m now onto a loopy, summer cartoon of a novel, Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris, a manic-depressive hybrid of The Office and Dilbert.

ENDQUOTE... And this, from writer Nancy Jo Sales in the current issue of Vanity Fair:

"They have rehab for everything else, maybe one day they'll have rehab for the addiction to fame. It'll be called Anonymous Anonymous."