Blogging on Meds

(photo: AP/Ryan McGeeney)

Props to Ryan McGeeney, who this week just proved himself as a better spot news shooter than sports photog, although not with anything photographically, artistically or journalistically significant; give it up to him for the ability and presence of mind to work through physical harm and hopefully grab a great paycheck from it. The (Ogden, Utah) Standard-Examiner PJ was covering the Utah high school track championships, paying attention to a discus event, when he wandered too far and got speared through the leg by a javelin, and he still had the mind to snap his own picture and sell it to AP.

What’s more, this story strikes gold twice with a quote AP got from the Provo High School track team’s Richard Vance. Vance coaches Anthony Miles, the student who speared McGeeney and then in his very next throw went on to win the state title. Talking about the accident, Vance said:

“One of the first things that came to my mind was, ‘Good thing we brought a second javelin.”

I got no business giving rundowns of any of the millions of decent things going on in NYC, but I’m bummed I can’t hustle myself up tonight for this one informal event. Spencer Platt, who won World Press Photo’s 2006 picture of the year, and a few of his friends are are putting on a slideshow of Iraq photos on a white wall at Jay and Walter streets around 9 p.m. He just put the word out on the Lightstalkers photojournalist forum, and says it’s an informal thing independent of the New York Photo Festival, “so bring some beer/wine and a critical eye.”

Platt got the World Press award for his picture of Lebanese twentysomethings in a red topdown driving through a bombed-out Beirut neighborhood. He’s also got a picture of a hotel bombing in a book by certain Medicine Agency bloggers, which I’m about a third of the way into, hooked on, and already feel like I been missing out for only getting to it now.

After Doug brought the evening bloodrush with the Justice «Stress» video, I have to add to the Soundtrack to a Riot with Mac Tyer’s banlieue anthem, «93 Tu Peux Pas Test». Ca va chauffer…

I’m already hacking away at this freelancing biz like a recreational journalist, I don’t need any more hurdles like losing ownership of my work.

Two years ago there was a massive petition effort by photogs, illustrators and artists that shot down what was called the Orphan Works Bill, which would’ve made it more difficult to chase down companies that steal your work. (or made it way easier to profit on others’ creativity without paying them)

The Illustrators Partnership confirmed this week that Congress has sent it a new copy of the bill that was to be introduced within days. And considering the elections and summer campaigning, the bet is that it will be fast-tracked and up for vote by mid-May — which is way, way less time to organize an opposition like last time.

The bill text isn’t up on thomas.loc.gov, nor was it on any schedules, but this blogger and bill supporter says it was introdcued today. He also says worked with the staff writing the legislation, and he’s posted PDFs, presumably of the Senate version and the House’s.

An artist-perspective summation (disregard the cheezy intro and sleazy top-level domain) from earlier this month was confirmed as being accurate by the Illustrators Parnership after it got the bills. Dude’s site also has a q&a primer.

The gist is that the bill would cancel copyrights on all works the made up to 30 years ago and on. In order to have them protected, the owner will have to list them with private registries, which don’t exist yet.

The bill is generally popular because it’s sold as benefiting libraries and museums so they can use old stuff whose owners can’t be located (hence the bill title). There’s also scare tactic argument floated by academics that copyrights hold them back from doing work because they’re scared of infringement lawsuits.

I know some people who are pscyhed for this thing, but a lot more people I know are gonna be fucked out of their work. If it passes, it’ll completely change a lot of industries. The best bet would be then would be to drop out and start up one of the registries.

But if you want to complain, you can easily find the right person here.

It’s not often you can get a passport made on a weekend at the Jersey Shore. So hundreds of Mexicans flocked Saturday, April 19, to this church basement in Asbury Park to get IDs made. Since Wednesday, more than a thousand Mexican citizens have taken advantage of the Consulate on Wheels program.

video/production: Rick Valenzuela

Despite polls and betting houses calling the Pennsylvania primary for Clinton, a bud from my old paper is predicting Obama by five percentage points.  Among his arguments, he points out a purely Philly situation and how it played out recently: 

“One of the most interesting things about this primary has been the way the alleged “special relationship” between the Clintons and African-Americans has crumbled. Whether the borderline-racist remarks by both Bill and Hillary during the South Carolina primary were mere stupidity or a calculated and cynical attempt to out Obama as a “black” candidate, thereby striking fear in the hearts of white voters, their immediate result was a noticeable change in temperature regarding race and the election. 

[...]

Now, in Philly, this matters. Remember the 2003 mayoral election? The curiously timed leak that Federal investigators were bugging the mayor’s office? I remember this vividly. The moment it was seen as outside interference, a crooked attempt to swing the election away from Street, people went into lockstep. The signs went up, the bullhorns came out, and on election day, people voted. In the last few months I feel like I have witnessed the same basic process but on a much larger scale. And no, having the support of City Hall won’t help her. Not if they are merely repaying electoral favors. Have you heard Nutter endorsing Clinton? He sounds like a man admitting to himself that he’s going to need to take vacation days off of work for root canal surgery.”

After challenging Alexis’ values regarding her Craigslist ad seeking photogs to pose as paparazzi at her Sweet 16, ObscureCraft blog got an incredible response.

For her big night, Alexis and her mom plan to spend $1,000 more than the official poverty threshold for a family of two. Fifteen thousand dollars, on a five-hour party for a kid.

Among the blog’s outraged comments is a suggestion to hit up photographer Lauren Greenfield, with a link to the intro for her documentary “Kids + Money.” For even more context, NYT photog Tyler Hicks and reporter Kareem Fahim did a great audio slideshow last year that shows the other end of the spectrum right in this girl’s suburban Central Jersey locale.

Following reports that an Iraqi judicial panel ordered authorities to free photographer Bilal Hussein, who is part of the team that won the 2005 Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography, one of the jurors who awarded that prize stressed press freedoms and said it’s “wrong and inappropriate for anyone” to “imprison, restrain, punish or kill journalists.”

Eric Newton, vice president of the journalism program at the Knight Foundation, helped judge the Pulitzer category won by the Associated Press for its coverage of combat inside Iraq’s cities. Speaking by phone Wednesday, he told Medicine Agency, “It’s essential to the world’s solving its problems that journalists need to be able to operate freely. It’s totally wrong and inappropriate for anyone — a government, organized crime, military forces, corporations, any group — to imprison, restrain, punish or kill journalists or anyone else who’s merely playing an honest or straightforward role in helping news and information flow freely.”

Hussein has been held for nearly two years by the U.S. military — and much of that time without charge. On Wednesday, a new Iraqi judicial committee on amnesty dismissed several of the claims against him and ordered his release.

Good news for the photog, but he’s not out of jail yet, nor quite yet out of the woods.

The story notes that U.S. authorities have said that, under a U.N. mandate, they’re allowed to further detain anyone believed a security risk, no matter what the Iraq court says. The report also says the panel may still be considering another allegation against Hussein.

But the committee rejected several U.S. allegations against Hussein, including “claims he was in possession of bomb-making material, conspired with insurgents to take photographs synchronized with an explosion and offered to secure a forged ID for a terrorist evading capture by the military,” the report stated.

Hussein was still being held at Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, the report stated.

An expat economist I knew in Phnom Penh would pass the time at his boring office job playing computer games, but whenever his Khmer co-workers stopped by his desk, he’d hotkey off the window. Not because he was wasting time, but because he was afraid of having to explain the game Minesweeper in a country where 1 in 300 has lost a body part to a land mine or unexploded ordnance.

It’s amusing and really not amusing, a groaner joke that elicits equal parts smile and wince. But what’s worse, laughing at it or being limited to the binary reactions that discussing amputees and land mine victims can only be either cruel or somber?

Angola’s Miss Landmine beauty pageant looks like 100 percent good times. It doesn’t at all involve horror or pity. In fact, the pageant pulls off not only being uplifting, but actually getting you to cheer for the women. (When you look at the site, open the “Miss Landmine Theme Tune” in a new tab while you read.)

The contestants’ portraits are beautiful — fashiony, modeling-type photos, just with regular people who happen to be mine victims. Some look radiant, and others exude confidence. Their short bios give the usual info like kids, favorite color and dream job, plus the prosthesis they use, the type of mine they encountered and how it happened — walking home from school, running from soldiers, tending fields.

It reads like what I suppose a beauty pageant site would read like, but normalizing the mine info. Which is good, because it sucks to be poor, in a poor country, and handicapped. There’s no need to add stigma on top of that.

Voting is open until tomorrow (Friday, April 4, 2008), which is also International Mine Awareness Day.

As interpreted by Balakov:

*the plaid shirt is an excellent detail.

  
Warlord-turned-president Ramzan Kadyrov rolls deep around Chechnya, in this video blogged then interpreted and re-blogged by Moscow’s English alt-weekly The Exile:

It shows a procession of about 50 luxury cars, mostly BMWs, Porsche Cayennes and huge Lexus SUVs—speeding around the republic like it’s the Dakar Rally.

A blogger added up the value of Kadyrov’s caravan and estimated it’s worth somewhere around $3,000,000 (Porsche Cayennes go for around $200,000 in Russia), and that’s not counting the tag-along Volgas, Ladas and Zhigs that brought in the rear. Is this a sign of Chechnya’s economic resurgence or what?  

Dith Pran at the Killing Fields outside of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 1989.
Photo by Steve McCurry/Magnum

Probably one of the major reasons of awareness of the Cambodian genocide, especially for those born during after that war, is the movie The Killing Fields, which chronicled the life of Dith Pran, a stringer and fixer for The New York Times who was abandoned when the Khmer Rouge rolled in and the barangs flew out. Dith Pran died of cancer Sunday in New Jersey.

By then living in the U.S. as a photojournalist for The New York Times, Dith spoke at a Temple University series on genocide about 10 years ago, and I asked him how he felt about the U.S. pushing the Vietnam War over into his country. His answer was very diplomatic, but essentially amounted to “the enemy of your enemy is your friend.”

Now is a good time not only to remember Dith Pran and the Cambodian genocide, but local photographers, reporters and fixers all over who are trying to get word out of what’s going where they are. Like Ajmal Naqshbandi, who was killed in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, despite negotiations that seemed set to free him and the Italian reporter with whom he was kidnapped. The Italian was set free, but Ajmal was killed a year ago last April. But there’s still time to free Bilal Hussein, who’s been held captive for two years by U.S. forces without charge. Hussein was part of the AP team that won a Pulitzer for its Iraq coverage. Today you can totally see how coverage is different without local photogs such as Hussein, or non-embeds in general.

Here is the picture that Hussein contributed:

By the time I got to Phnom Penh, the war was way over, but it was still was in a Wild West-type era of rebuilding, with power struggles that brought its own violence. It was pretty safe, compared to even a few years earlier, but there were occasionally flashes of sketchy shit. I was in a newsroom as one of about a dozen foreigners, with 20 or so Khmer reporters and editors, one of whom reminded me that, when it comes down to it, unlike him, I could always leave.