Nostalgia, Graveyards & an NYC Apartment
Published August 12, 2022 · 18:11 · 221,196 views
About This Video
Van kept a 12-by-12-foot SRO apartment in New York City for 15 years. Single room occupancy. Shared bathroom with everyone on the floor. 144 square feet. His girlfriend dubbed it the Fort because it was like the ultimate treehouse: 15 years of density compressed every possession into something important, every square inch accounted for. He was the bathroom mayor. Cleaned it every time, replaced the shower curtain, did the plumbing.
The video is about nostalgia as a new feeling. Van spent so much of his life in New York, which is not a nostalgic city. They tear down Penn Station, they're on their second Yankee Stadium. But now, doing the channel, he looks back constantly. Nostalgia's dictionary definition is homesickness. Missing New York means missing friends, missing friends means missing times together, and missing those times is nostalgia, and it's hitting him hard. He's bringing his son to the city for the first time, carrying a broken dream of the Fort into a city that already demolished it.
Transcript
undefined undefined come here what is that what's inside of there let's dig it up should i get a shovel too
[Music] how do we get the lid off look under here now look there's little screws all right buddy baby yeah
okay okay turn his head around look is that your bed now is that where you go to sleep are you a vampire
no i'm not this morning i uploaded part two of the undefined undefined
neistat brothers respectability tour uploaded it to patreon
[Music] and it's sort of hunter s thompson meets dumb and dumber in aspen it's probably my favorite thing that casey and i made together it's just all it's all just right and it was the prototype for the nystat
brothers hbo series casey neistat van neistat and arielle schulman
do you hear this do you hear him with no money all right and ariel shulman has a movie premiering this
friday night on paramount plus and probably in the theaters too and it's called secret headquarters it's great i went to a screening of it
last week and so watching this video the respectability tour and doing
the director's commentary i had this feeling of nostalgia which i'm feeling a lot lately and it's a new feeling for me undefined undefined
because i spent so much of my life in new york city and new york city is not nostalgic you know they tear down
their most iconic buildings they tore down you know penn station they tore down the polo grounds
they're on their second yankee stadium all those victories in the first yankee stadium and they're not fenway they tear it down and they build a new one right
next to it and then the year they build the new one i'm pretty sure they won the world series that that year too so i've always thought to the future and
always building things to the future and working in the present to make the best future for myself but this year of the
channel i do a lot of looking back and i'm experiencing a lot of nostalgia and nostalgia the
the dictionary definition is homesick homesickness three weeks ago undefined undefined
i scribbled this down 7 16 22 nostalgia speak into the camera
missing new york means missing my friends and missing my friends means missing the times we spent together
and missing those times is nostalgia and it's hitting me hard
[Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so i've been thinking about nostalgia and i'm wondering what's the purpose what's the
evolutionary advantage of nostalgia why do we feel nostalgia next week i'm going to new york
for the first time in three years that's the longest stretch i've been away since i've lived there and i'm bringing my son with me undefined undefined
and when he was first born i had this dream that's now a broken dream i won't this won't happen
i kept this apartment in new york city for 15 years and it was an sro apartment
which is single room occupancy which means you share a bathroom with the rest of the people who have apartments on the same floor
12 feet 12 feet this apartment was tiny it was 12 feet by 12 feet 144 square feet and i called
it one of my girlfriends dubbed it the the fort because it was kind of like the ultimate like tree fort because i was there for so long and
because it was so small it became this very dense essentially like museum installation it was perfect it was
so so so beautiful and every square inch was accounted for every possession that was in there was important
[Applause] but it was also 144 square foot apartment where i had to share a bathroom with you know 12 other people or however many people lived on the
floor and i was like the bathroom mayor so i always cleaned it it was every time if i went to the bathroom and then 30 minutes later i went to the bathroom
again it was like destroyed and every time i took a shower i had to clean the whole bathroom you know scrubbing bubbles i did all the plumbing i
replaced the shower curtain pole the shower curtains i replaced every time if i went away for a long time and came back it would just be ruined and i'd
have to put on like a suit and a respirator and with bleach just clean this whole thing so this apartment was a blessing because it was like 400 and something dollars a month like in 2018.
it was also kind of a curse or golden cage or golden handcuffs because it's not something you let go of right and it
kind of kept me maybe it kept me chained in new york i don't know i think it actually gave me more opportunities 2019 2020 i've got a little baby i've got
this i'm living out west now i'm living on the razor's edge financially and i just cannot afford to pay this 400 a
rent in new york to maintain this thing to maintain this apartment the fort and i knew
letting it go i knew letting it go would i'd regret it but i just couldn't do it and also letting it go was like
letting go of new york too i'm right now experiencing a little bit of regret that i didn't somehow do something
but it was like i owed like ten thousand dollars worth of rent or something i owed like two years worth of rent and then i don't know what happened with the
building but i got a call the this like the superintendent or the building manager said oh we're just we found this note with this phone number inside the
apartment we're wondering what you're doing with it and she said have you moved out and i just did a quick calculation if i say yes i've moved out
i'm off the hook for 10 grand of a of rent of past rent that i owed and if i say
no i haven't moved out i owe like a couple years worth of rent so i just said no yes i've moved out
and she was just like oh okay well um would you be able to if we move your stuff out will you be able to pick it up
at some point and will arrange and can you arrange to have it picked up and i just said yes thinking i c i would be able to
and of course it's like the pandemic it might have been right before the pandemic it might have been during the pandemic i'm not really exactly sure
when it was it was always i had never had a lease with this place it was a single room occupancy it was subsidized by the government i don't know state
government i don't know city government it was like the building was for people who were it was like for poor people it was for like homeless people it was for
displaced people and i had just been i was like an artist who had i had inherited it from my brother
who had inherited it from my ex-girlfriend's cousin who had fled to brazil after like right after september 11 2001.
i got it in 2003. casey had it and from like 2001 to 2003. so i just they moved all my stuff out i mean i haven't been
back they've moved all my stuff out and they sent me a picture of it of all my stuff like in boxes i could glimpse that they had like torn up the floor of the
apartment like all this stuff had been out i laid the floor myself by hand i brought the boards up from chinatown building supply on the subway like five
boards a night like you know five or six foot long boards on a little dolly on the subway like night after night and
then after work working at after working at tom sax's all day i would like i had to grease the um the
screws i used to screw the wood to the floor so that it wasn't noisy for my neighbors because i was doing this at night time and so i had this dream
i had this dream that i would never talk about it and then one day i would bring my son to new york and we would just get on the
subway and we'd go up to 96th street and we'd walk down the hill now 94th street across west end avenue
into my building and x being like where are we going where are we going and i would say oh i'm uh you'll see you'll see and we go
up into my apartment i put the key in the door and i'd open it and i'd open the door and he'd say where are we and i'd say
this is my place this is my apartment and i mean for a kid he would have been
blown away for a kid it was like a perfect little kid scale thing there was a you know little like steps that i had installed to climb up into the loft and
that dream is gone it's all been dismantled it's all i i regret it in the sense that i wish it i had been able to keep it
i don't regret it in the sense of i would do the same thing again i would do it again i would just
i would surrender the apartment again undefined undefined
[Music] so little kids you know they go through obsessions if you have little kids you know this or if you don't have kids maybe you remember this and the current
obsession for my son is cemeteries and graves [Music] when was the last time you were in a cemetery cemeteries are
incredible because there's so much decency in a cemetery human beings are so decent in a cemetery [Music]
a new one you can just at these cemeteries you can just pull over and park anywhere there's no no parking anywhere you can just park everywhere and everyone respects you if you're in
the cemetery even when you're with a little kid a cemetery is the ultimate monument to nostalgia
and it's a sacred place and you can feel it easily
there was something significant about x bringing me to this place there was something it was like some embedded ancient wisdom
in him unintentional he didn't know he wasn't thinking of me about going to this place at forest lawn most of the graves are
flush with the ground they're just basically plaques and so we parked at the bottom of this hill and it was all just plaques and the gold standard for x
he had never seen in real life graves that stick up out of the ground and that's his gold standard he's like yes they have graves that
stick up out of the ground i don't know i think maybe it's a west coast thing i don't know i don't know why but they don't really have them here and so we're
at the base of this pretty steep but small hill where you have the car parked and all the gravestones are flush with
the ground and so we walk up the hill we walk up the hill we walk up the hill and we get to the summit of the hill and we look down into the little valley of death
and x is like they have the graves that are sticking out of the ground and he was just running
through the cemetery he was so elated and so inspired just running through the cemetery and they had mausoleums and he asked about
the skeletons and all the bodies and stuff and we were picking out our favorites and i noticed this one grave that was far away undefined undefined
it had a little vaz a little white vaz next to it and i said x let's go look at that grave let's go
see what's going on with that grave [Music] and at forest lawn they have all of these rules about the cemetery plots like you can't put certain things on
them and flowers are cleared by a certain date and this grave had a bunch of trinkets on top of it
like little mementos that people had left and it had a little vaz next to it and so we got around
and we got to the headstone and it was a you know it was it was a pretty nice decent headstone
like this person had done something and i read the name and it was l
[Music] frank baum and it was under a tree it was in the shade it was like the nicest spot you could have your grave and you
know who elle frank baum is because the book that l frank baum wrote was adapted into the movie that more human beings have seen than any other movie in film history
and the name of that book is the wonderful wizard of oz
[Music] [Music] and i don't know why but that was like an explosive moment for me and i said to ex i said this is the guy
he made the wizard of oz he thought it all up from his head he just invented it and he wasn't as excited as i was
because he doesn't understand about you know how movies are made they probably they're just real to him i think i had an epiphany being in that
graveyard being in that cemetery [Music] undefined undefined nostalgia i think serves two purposes one it returns us
to our people it encourages us to return to our people if we're far away and two
this is the epiphany i had and this may be for the older folks the
younger folks watching this might not be able to relate to this but
i think we experience nostalgia so that when we have an experience
that we know we will be nostalgic about an experience that is going into our nostalgia bank
our nostalgia the strength of that feeling of nostalgia encourages us
to surrender to the experience nostalgia is a license
to surrender to the meaningful experiences in our future
this week on the patreon a live stream answering your questions the link is right there
People Referenced
Hunter S. Thompson, Ariel Schulman, Casey Neistat, L. Frank Baum
Books Mentioned
- author's grave visited at Forest Lawn cemetery (by L. Frank Baum)
Films & Media Referenced
- comedy film referenced
- Paramount Plus film directed by Ariel Schulman