Acting up

It's a story I often enjoy relating: how when I first saw Ross Noble live, in late 1999 or early 2000 in Nottingham, his encore consisted of taking around 200 students and Just The Tonic promoter Darrell Martin to the then-24hr Texaco garage on Derby Road in Lenton to dance to imaginary music on the forecourt for the benefit of the person who has to sit through hour after hour of tedious uneventful security camera footage. Not a gig to be forgotten in a hurry.

Anyway, it turns out that there's a group in New York who've had a similar idea. The Surveillance Camera Players - as the name might suggest - perform plays before surveillance cameras, though somehow I doubt that their key motivations (political protest against the infringement of the right to privacy by the state and corporations) ever crossed Noble's mind...

And while I'm on the subject of the Big Apple, a couple of other interesting links:

A New Yorker piece from 2004 about Manhattan being - contrary to popular belief - a model green city. That despite there being a complete lack of recycling facilities - though the article's author David Owen takes issue with the view that recycling is key to sustainable living.

New York City Walk - the record of one man's quest to walk every single street in Manhattan, a feat which took him two years to achieve.