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NYC In The Sweltering Hot Hellscape Of Summer: The Short Film
By
Jen Carlson
Published Aug 16, 2016
Modified Aug 16, 2016
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By
Jen Carlson
Published Aug 16, 2016
Modified Aug 16, 2016
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New York City in the summer is almost impossible to explain with words to an outsider who has never experienced the daily grind of it for the length of the season. In early June, it always seems hopeful—your skin has forgotten the feeling of humidity by this time, your brain thinks it should already be oppressively hot by "now," and you think, since it isn't yet: "This year won't be so bad." But then like a bolt of fire from the skies, the heat drops down like a blanket and reminds us that we're all just droplets of sweat on the earth's surface. The sun owns us for the next couple of months.
Colby Moore has always done a great job at capturing this misery on film, and he just delivered his 2016 version. And man, it's been a hot one... but this time around people don't seem very unhappy. There's not enough struggle. They're not sweating enough. Have New Yorkers become immune to intense heat? What can't we do.
Moore told us today that he "mostly filmed in and around Coney Island towards the end of the video, but I also shot some of the earlier scenes in Morningside Heights, Harlem, Hell's Kitchen, Times Square, the Circle Line in Midtown, up on the High Line in Chelsea, Central Park, at a street carnival in Astoria, and at the waterfront in Williamsburg."
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heat
summer
Jen Carlson
Jen Carlson is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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