By the Seventies, the city, which had been idolized both negatively and positively through the Sixties, had become untenable: cities were nasty to live in, unmanageable, self-destructing. New York, the god of cities, went down the tubes, given the kiss-off when Johnny Carson moved The Tonight Show to Burbank. Having lost all this, the city even ceased to be a viable subject for comedy, as the mean-spiritedness of the Neil Simon school shows. A piece of suggestive folklore, parallel to girls in the early Sixties worrying about hatching black widow spiders in their bouffant hairdos: New York City began to think that all those circus souvenir caymans they flushed down toilets were breeding and living below, and that, in fact, the sewers of their city belonged toalligators….

-"What's Your 10-20?" Redneck Movie Travel Notes, Richard Thompson, Film Comment 16(4) July-August 1980.

Amazing set of photos of NYPD 1978-81 by Jill Freeman here:

http://www.higherpictures.com/Exhibition.aspx?c=44

Super Cops comic from 1974. Apparently only one issue was ever printed by Red Circle, then also responsible for Archie. A single story from the comic, "2 to Get Ready and 4 to Go," is reprinted here:

http://drmonkeyretroblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/have-super-cop-christmas.html

"[Moviewatching is like] the ride through the air with the devil Asmodi who strips off all the roofs, bares all secrets."

Hugo Von Hofmanstafl, "The Substitute for Dreams" [trans. in German Essays on Film]

Qtd. In Kracauer, Theory of Film, p168.

“The history of the horror film is also a history of flat repetition with the most minor of differences — of shark attacks that only inspire bear attacks. But when we shift away from trying to identify the subject positions, radical or otherwise, of that horrible content, we find the basis for a new kind of political reading, one sensitive above all to how films refract an economic and social order that constantly produces swelling mass of the unwanted pressing up against the edges and into the foreground. It is this horror, that of the secondary material that refuses to quit the scene or do its job, that deserves to be defended and elaborated. To move away from allegories of horrible content with their emphasis on identifying who might be radical is to encounter a revolutionary dimension to the political reading of horror films. What at last comes into focus is the insurrectionary prospect of the background coming monstrously into its denied prominence”“The history of the horror film is also a history of flat repetition with the most minor of differences — of shark attacks that only inspire bear attacks. But when we shift away from trying to identify the subject positions, radical or otherwise, of that horrible content, we find the basis for a new kind of political reading, one sensitive above all to how films refract an economic and social order that constantly produces swelling mass of the unwanted pressing up against the edges and into the foreground. It is this horror, that of the secondary material that refuses to quit the scene or do its job, that deserves to be defended and elaborated. To move away from allegories of horrible content with their emphasis on identifying who might be radical is to encounter a revolutionary dimension to the political reading of horror films. What at last comes into focus is the insurrectionary prospect of the background coming monstrously into its denied prominence”vv“The history of the horror film is also a history of flat repetition with the most minor of differences — of shark attacks that only inspire bear attacks. But when we shift away from trying to identify the subject positions, radical or otherwise, of that horrible content, we find the basis for a new kind of political reading, one sensitive above all to how films refract an economic and social order that constantly produces swelling mass of the unwanted pressing up against the edges and into the foreground. It is this horror, that of the secondary material that refuses to quit the scene or do its job, that deserves to be defended and elaborated. To move away from allegories of horrible content with their emphasis on identifying who might be radical is to encounter a revolutionary dimension to the political reading of horror films. What at last comes into focus is the insurrectionary prospect of the background coming monstrously into its denied prominence”

"The American people haven't made up their minds what they want cities to be. They don't know how much agony they want cities to go through. They have to ask themselves: do cities represent an important national resource? And if so, they have to support them."

Robert P. Rosell, Director of Community Development Commission, Detroit. Qtd in "Detroit Struggles to Save Itself, " by Susanna McBee, Washington Post, February 20, 1973, A12.

RED SQUAD is a 1972 documentary, made under the auspices of Martin Scorsese's NYU production class, that seeks to document the police surveillance of protest and activist groups.

http://www.psfp.com/redrevisited.htm