News From Home (1977)
When I post things like this I inevitably find out most everyone has already experienced 'the thing'. In this case it's a video set in New York, and it's unlike anything I've ever seen. I'm only 7 minutes in, and it's just flat video from New York City. Remember the whole "slow tv" thing from like 2015? It's slower than that. But I'm a sucker for urban hell type landscapes set in the 70s. It's making me think a lot about life, and about existence, and about mattering. And I'm getting depressed. Time to go do the dishes. Stay safe you all. And if I ever disappear from this realm, know I absolutely loved it here. On Earth. Online. On mltshp.
That was the grimy, exciting, sketchy, bustling, smelly, fragrant, dangerous, wonderful NYC I knew as an 11-year-old weekends-only Manhattanite kid of recently-divorced suburban parents. (Also the year the Yankees won their first Series since '61, and I got to see Reggie hit his three Game 6 homers from first base-adjacent seats with my dad — my one big sports memory with him.) I don't wish the city now was still as decrepit as it was then, but I do feel fortunate to have experienced it (even if only as a young'n) before it became the so much the Oasis for the Wealthy it is now. I guess the positive flipside of some of that change is that vast parts of all five boroughs that were often too dodgy to roam around then are now as accessible as Midtown in the '70s.
Hey, I just re-read your caption, and you've got me wondering what it was about News From Home that put you in such an existential frame of mind?