NYC

As a New Yorker, I’m obsessed with photos/videos of “old, gritty” NYC of the ’70s and ’80s. The past stands in stark comparison to the current pristine present of trust fund kids, new money, and 7-Elevens (shudder). But there’s a right way and a wrong way to glorify the past. After all, what we find beautiful today was considered a nuisance at the time, and in the ’70s, nothing was as polarizing as graffiti.

In 1970s New York, graffiti blanketed the city. It covered subway cars, ran along the sides of every building, and smothered bridges and overpasses. Residents at the time saw the graffiti as a public nuisance that was ruining the beauty of the city, but others saw it as something more, namely as art.

Watching My Name Go By is a short BBC documentary that was one of the first to ask the question, “Can graffiti be art?” It was a radical concept for its time, and the documentary does a great job at injecting points of views from all sides of the debate. However, my favorite thing about the video are the clips of old school NYC, especially those battered subway cars! Sometimes you have to learn about the past to truly appreciate the present, and this documentary does that and more.

There’s also a book out with the same name if you want to learn more about the artists featured in the documentary.

No one has a coffee culture quite like New York’s. From the street vendors peddling $1 cups of cheap coffee to the cafes full of sophisticated youngsters sipping Colombian pour-overs, the city is the place to be for caffeine addicts. In “Coffee: Six Degrees of Caffeination,” directed by Swallow Magazine‘s James Casey, New York coffee culture is explored to its fullest. The video features interviews with noted New Yorkers like New York Times coffee writer Oliver Strand and LCD Soundsystem’s Nancy Whang who both discuss their love affair with coffee and why it has an odd social allure. Spliced between these interviews are shots of six different types of coffee (hence the title): drip, instant, moka pot, pour over, French Press, and Aeropress. Though if we had to pick a preferred coffee method, it would definitely be instant (kidding!).

(Via Nowness)

This past year has seen a significant amount of attention paid toward unlawful police behavior, whether it’s gunning down unarmed black men or rough handling peaceful protesters. However, these brutish police tactics are nothing new, and for most naive law abiding citizens it might come as a shock how indoctrinated the NYPD’s practices are. In this short video taken a year ago during an Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City, filmmaker Paul Sullivan carefully shows how police intentionally target specific looking people when trying to disperse peaceful protests. The video shows how officers arrest people if they fit a particular profile (usually a protester who’s wearing dark clothing or has a beard) and construct a narrative that conflicts with what actually happened. The video ends with arrest #10 being the filmmaker himself who gets roughed up by a cop who threatens to break his jaw. A pretty fitting conclusion if you ask me.