Some views of the Lower East Side from Spork’s archives.
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Spork used to work on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the immigrant neighborhood evoked in this animation by Gary Lieb. The neighborhood is now a center for literature and art, and has probably become too expensive now for poets and artists because the Yuppies have been attracted by the allure of non-conformist culture…
Spork wanted to embed the video in this blog rather than link to it, and The New York Times has set up their video page so as to enable people to easily embed the video on their MySpace or Facebook pages, and to post it to various other Web 2.0 sites such as Digg, but they don’t have a tool for posting to Tumblr. Tumblr, for its part, doesn’t support the Flash-based Brightcove video player used by the Times on their page. This is a case where the multiplicity of technologies that all do the same thing (post a video on a web page) rather than copyright issues is an obstacle to sharing freely online.
Stencilled graffiti in Oxford, England, as photographed by Spork in 2004.
A follower from Worcester, UK, suggested we might enjoy the Banksy exhibit at the Bristol Museum. Banksy is an elusive graffiti artist, known for his use of stencils, who has been highly praised by some in the art establishment whilst at the same time condemned as a vandal by local authorities. His current exhibit at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery is his first show at a mainstream museum and it was kept a secret until it opened. Much of the exhibit is rumored to be viewable online, but links prove as hard to pin down as Banksy himself. Here is the trailer which appeared on YouTube.
“
[W]e respond to threats that we deem disgusting or immoral — characteristics more associated with sex, betrayal or spoiled food than with atmospheric chemistry.
“That’s why people are incensed about flag burning, or about what kind of sex people have in private, even though that doesn’t really affect the rest of us,” Professor Gilbert said. “Yet where we have a real threat to our well-being, like global warming, it doesn’t ring alarm bells.”
Nicholas Kristof attributes irrational political judgments to the way evolution shaped the human brain. Spork enjoys reading about research in decision making but she is less inclined to forgive people for their bad judgments on the grounds that their brains are designed to solve yesterday’s problems. If that were the case, no one would care about climate change and other slow, long-term dangers, whereas in fact the people who don’t worry about such things are those old enough, rich enough, and geographically well-placed enough that they will do fine even if three quarters of the world is melted, drowned, or starved.
Of course, selfishness is also a built-in trait of all species evolved through natural selection… This is why Spork dislikes evolutionary explanations; it is possible to find a plausible evolutionary justification for any observable fact about human nature. This is because if we have a particular trait, it must (by definition) have been favored by natural selection, or at least not have been eliminated by it (in the case of random mutations). Thus such explanations are tautological and basically empty.
The three photos used to make Spork’s postcard, along with rude graffiti (four feet high) which was adjacent to the sign about collars. It was so dark when Spork took the sign and graffiti picture that Spork did not realize that the graffiti depicts a body part until she saw the photo at home.
