Some guys after my own heart

Thanks for a country where
nobody's allowed to mind the
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.

-- Selected excerpt from A THANKSGIVING PRAYER, by William Burroughs

If I have a poltical philosophy, it's founded on the basic tenant "Government is best when it seeks to govern ME the least". I realize we all have to enter into the social contract at some point and concede our natural God-given freedoms to the Man, Big Government, Big Brother or what have you, or we'd live in a very unpleasant form of anarchy, where we'd all have to walk around like it was noon on the streets of Dodge City. No thanks. Yet the flipside of the coin is the increasing paranoia over security and surveillance, all done in the name of the greater good.

Lately I've been taking note of how many times I get filmed a day without my explicit permission to do so. The results are sobering in the extreme. One of these days I'm going to do a little photo essay of how many security cameras are trained on me during the fifteen minute walk from the train station to the front door of my office (well, as much of my office as I can depict, which is the outside). I started counting recently and stopped after I counted ten surveillance cameras. I had gone one city block.

There's a group of well-intentioned Anarchists in NYC that have similar sentiments-- they call themselves the Surveillance Camera Players. Their schtick is to confront the trend in a non-violent, sardonic fashion by staging little plays in front of security cameras. What a wonderful idea!

Performances are minimal, because the actors have to provide the dialogue on posterboard, which has to provide a logistical challenge at some point.

Here's a short one, called AMNESIA, by Denis Beaubois.







"I couldn't help but notice that ..."



"and that.."



"so.."





This is not exactly Tennessee Williams, but it's silly, fun and ultimately thought provoking. Performances tend to draw crowds.



The ultimate point of it all still eludes me somewhat.. the Surveillance Camera Players really need to play in front of a live audience to have their work appreciated by any audience, as they have no access to the recordings of their performances. Still, I find the idea enjoyable and interesting.