This is a television set somebody dumped into the cove just north of the ice-skating rink, near where the mute swans often nest. I find it hard to imagine why anybody would have bothered to carry it that deeply into the park, but I suppose there is no accounting for assholes. During the last year, I’ve seen a tremendous number of televisions on the sidewalk as people have up-graded to flat screens. The wanton waste is awesome -- in its old sense, full of terror and dread. What a shameless society we have become, gathering in our new toys while tossing out the old ones, most of which work perfectly well; but now I suppose it behooves some people to see the make-up covering whatever air-head celebrity’s pores in greater detail. The amount of toxic junk from our electronic garbage is astounding. A fair amount of it is shipped off to China, where the desperately poor break it down for re-usable materials, polluting themselves, their villages, their children. Do people imagine it's not polluting our future just because it's somewhere else?
5 comments:
Maybe someone brought it to a barbecue?
You have to use an awful lot of sauce to make a barbecued CRT palatable...
There was a film made about this photographer named Edward Burtynsky who did a series called Manufactured Landscapes. He has some powerful images of e-waste recycling in China. Sadly, most e-waste that's "properly disposed" ends up in Africa or China only to screw up their environment. But that's their problem, right?
http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/film.php?directoryname=manufacturedlandscapes
-Nate
Burtynsky had a great show at the Brooklyn Museum a few years back, amazing stuff.
My TV, stereo, turntable, dvd player are ALL from the street. The turntable even had a new needle in it! I live off of the wealth of my brownstone brooklyn neighbors very often...found a copy of David Byrnes book on the sidewalk last week, it's worth 75 bucks...
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