New York Video Stores

[bearcuborg]

So has Kim's officially closed? I was thinking of taking in some stuff to trade and stuffing myself at Velseka on 2nd Ave. tomorrow afternoon.

If someone can give me a heads up that would be great, I can save myself some space in my bag as I travel up from Philly.

[Tom Amolad]

So has Kim's officially closed? I was thinking of taking in some stuff to trade and stuffing myself at Velseka on 2nd Ave. tomorrow afternoon.

If someone can give me a heads up that would be great, I can save myself some space in my bag as I travel up from Philly.

They were still open (not for rentals though) a week ago, but I don't know about now. You could give them a call - 212-598-9985.

Of course, Veselka makes the trip worth it anyway...

[bearcuborg]

So has Kim's officially closed? I was thinking of taking in some stuff to trade and stuffing myself at Velseka on 2nd Ave. tomorrow afternoon.

If someone can give me a heads up that would be great, I can save myself some space in my bag as I travel up from Philly.

They were still open (not for rentals though) a week ago, but I don't know about now. You could give them a call - 212-598-9985.

Of course, Veselka makes the trip worth it anyway...

Looks doubtful, the number doesn't work...

[Perkins Cobb]

The New York Times has a long article about the closure of Mondo Kim's, but somehow doesn't seem to grasp that Mr. Kim is a douche. Richard Brody is coy, but appears to get how Yongman (deliberately?) sabotaged his own attempt to "preserve" the collection for New Yorkers.

[htdm]

Interesting New Yorker article - thanks, PC.

The link to the Princeton lawsuit article was even more interesting regarding donor's rights.

[Perkins Cobb]

Another one bites the dust? Cinema Nolita, which I had been frequenting (albeit not enough, it would seem) since the closure of Mondo Kim's, will shutter next week unless it raises $8,000.

[Perkins Cobb]

Necrobumping this puppy to mention a couple of NYC resources I've discovered lately....

Goraku is a Japanese video store on 47th St. just east of Lex (second floor). They have English-subtitled DVDs of Juzo Itami (complete), Takeshi Kitano, Kore-eda, Shunji Iwai, and other odds and ends. BIG catch: These are not the actual DVDs, they're single-layer DVD-r rips. Huge bummer, but the Japanese DVDs are SO expensive that I snagged some of them. They used to be a few blocks away in midtown, under another name -- I don't know if the copyright police were chasing them or what.

Photoplay in Greenpoint (Kent & Manhattan Streets) has hundreds of Warner Archive and other MODs for rent, plus most of the Twilight Time, Olive Films, Corman/Shout Factory, Scorpion & Code Red releases that Netflix doesn't stock. No Blu-ray at all though, so if you swing by, try to talk some sense into the owner (nice guy who's usually there) in that regard.

[aox]

Interesting that Photoplay is still around and good to know. That was my first video store when I moved to NYC and lived in Green Point in 2003 on Leonard Street. I basically began my film education there. The owner is the nicest and most dedicated guy. I haven't been in that shop since 2005. I will try to make a point to head out there soon.

[Perkins Cobb]

Yeah, he said they'd been there for 10 years. Surprised that it took me that long for someone to hip me to them. It's an awful schlep from where I am in the city, but still my best option for all that stuff I mentioned above.

[Perkins Cobb]

The West Village's World of Video bit the dust last month, after 29 years, and sold the inventory to a liquidator.

I wasn't a regular there, but a few years ago when I wanted to see The Heartbreak Kid, that was the only place in town that still had the OOP Anchor Bay DVD of it (still going for nearly $50 on Amazon).

[Drucker]

For anyone who is a bargain hunter, there is a Book Off on 45th Street between 5th and 6th avenue. They sell DVDs, CDs, and books used. Generally, it's no better than any FYE-type store, but there is a used blu ray section and used DVDs of classic and foreign films. I've found bargains there before, such as Hitchcock OOP Criterions, the OOP Bunuels, and Ran (off the top of my head).

In the last week, I bought Tokyo Olympiad for 15 dollars and Carlos Saura's Flamenco trilogy for $10. Just figured if anyone else is in that area/works near there and has some time to kill on lunch break, you might find some pleasant surprises! Thought I should share the wealth and this information.

[Perkins Cobb]

The last, retail-only outpost of the Kim's Video empire is set to fall this summer, just months after Photoplay, one of the few video rental outlets left in Brooklyn, bit the dust. And Alan's Alley, which I think may truly be the absolute last video rental store in Manhattan (somebody chime in if I'm wrong), is about to be evicted.

[klee13]

Actually, and apropos to prior queries, Two Boots is still around.

[Drucker]

Real bummer. Their collection of new world music is pretty great on CD, and of course their foreign DVD section is hard to beat. I had a hard time justifying going there, with their charging MSRP on so many things (60 dollars, for example, for the MOC steelbook of Cleopatra), but this is sadly unsurprising.

[perkizitore]

Is there something like London's Close-Up in New York? It seems that only something similar can really survive these days.

[Buttery Jeb]

Videology in Williamsburg still exists, although it's hard to know what their selection is now that the actual storefront is mostly a bar and public screening room (everything's stored in the basement, and you browse their titles off their website).

[perkizitore]

I think only a library/cinema/bar hybrid is going to survive (and that only in places like Williamsburg) the old arthouse video stores are doomed.

[HerrSchreck]

Someone had directed me to that blog post earlier this week.

It's incredibly sad what's happening to life. The joy of noodling around aisles, thumbing through rows of artworks in print or on disc or vinyl or cassette--it doesn't matter-- engaging in the process of discovery in an eclectic bookstore in a leaning tenement around the corner and down a previously unexplored, tree-shaded cobblestone street. . . it's turning into a lost pleasure in New York.

I can recall fourteen years ago in NYC as the first big wave of Web 1.0 was gaining steam and venture capitalists were throwing huge sums of cash at dotcoms, every ad on the subway walls was for some new site. And I recall in the spring of 2000 it all collapsed, because not enough folks were using the web To Buy Things. Entrepreneurs couldn't yet figure out how to monetize the internet, as people still preferred to hold things in their hand and touch them before buying, and it was a bloodbath in dotcoms (I was in the biz of launching and marketing them).

Fourteen years later local entrepreneurs can't figure out how to monetize little storefronts when selling artworks and entertainment products, because nobody wants to hold anything in their hands any longer. They prefer to click through, on a mobile app if at all possible.

When I was a young guy in art school, there were a thousand and one eclectic little places in NYC that caused kids to feel like the town was heaven-- "A store like this could never survive in my stuffy little town," about this or that shop dedicated to jazz, to wild films, to mystery novels, to sheet music, to theatrical publications. How many afternoons ducking in out of the rain to peruse and discover a future obsession, to accidentally thumb through a game changer of the mind? How many fortuitous conversations struck up in narrow creaky carpeted aisles smelling of musty old wood--leading to an exchange of phone numbers and subsequent bedtime uh stories?

O well-- most of those wood-and-must stores are gone in NYC. Glass and steel is on a roll.

[Drucker]

The thing that upsets me is that a lot of my friends who have real stereos and buy records and understand the value of listening to something through a real stereo (as opposed to laptop speakers/built-in speaker record players) still are more than content to stream everything they watch through their TV or, worse, laptop.

Also, there are some record stores that are doing great. Princeton Record Exchange is healthy as ever. Rough Trade has opened up in NYC. I have an acquaintance or two who have opened stores in NYC (Black Gold Records I think it's called). It's seems like many record stores are closing and some other ones are doing fine (Academy just moved locations, etc.) The same hasn't happened for film stores, as surely Netflix and Youtube have dominated the needs of casual fans. Really is too bad.

[Gregory]

Lower Manhattan used to be a haven for bookselling, and almost all of that is gone now. One of the stalwarts, St. Mark's Bookstore, has been barely hanging in there in the LES and is currently raising funds to move to a smaller, more affordable space in the neighborhood.

Cosign everything Herr Schreck said. I used to make trips to New York from a long way away in which the main purpose was to hit up a whole cluster of shops such as Kim's and many smaller ones, feeling thrilled and overwhelmed by the sensory overload of looking through so much and how much I was finding that I wanted. Now I don't think there's enough left to warrant any kind of trip like that.

[Morgan Creek]

When I moved to Manhattan thirtysome years ago, a refugee from the Midwest, I was struck by the availability of nearly everything to anyone who was interested in the arts, whether books, music, or film--a state of affairs that HerrSchreck describes so affectionately and vividly above. In retrospect the period from about the mid-80s to the early 2000s was something like a Golden Age, what with Tower Records, multiple Kims, and bookstores within walking distance in nearly every neighborhood in the city. Anytime I stepped into any of those places with the intention of buying one particular item, I left with six - it was all about discovery and surprise, whether finding an obscure noir buried deep in the bins of some cruddy Times Square video joint, or coming across an import of a jazz vocal record I never expected to see in my lifetime, or happening upon an out-of-print book I'd been looking for for years that had just been reissued by some small press.

The issue of "discoverability" is a key one in my business (publishing) these days: How do we make consumers aware of books with dwindling numbers of bookstores (though thankfully, the indies seem to be making a strong comeback in certain neighborhoods and communities - locally, Brooklyn is leading the charge in that respect) and most papers and magazines having either gotten rid of or punishingly downscaled their book review sections? I may be slouching toward fogeydom, but I think that discoverability has been a problem for all the media we used to take for granted. Certainly, nearly everything can be found now online somewhere or other via a Google search, and committed private torrent sites are keeping historic and international film current, but no amount of Amazonian algorithms presuming to guess my taste or nagging ads that have been Googlified into websites I frequent are going to replace browsing: for discovery, for sheer pleasure and, as Schreck also points out, as a great social experience (where no flamewars usually erupted).

Within a few short blocks of my apartment today I can go to five nail spas, five Starbucks, three Chipotles, three Duane Reades, two 7-11s, and enough banks to service Monaco. The local Barnes & Noble was forced to close a few years back because of rising rents, Shakespeare on Broadway is the same story, everyone's been saddened by the fate of Pearl Paint, Kim's is in its last days, and yesterday I found out the place I've gotten my hair cut for over twenty years has to move because their rent was doubled. What's happening in Mahnattan is what's probably already happened in the central part of every American city - a massive homogenization, thanks to real estate trends and what the Internet hath wrought, both economically and socially. It's time for another Jane Jacobs.

[Gregory]

Hear hear. I think one of the solutions for "discoverability"—aside from supporting a comeback for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores run by people who know books—is small curated selections of books in stores that aren't dedicated bookstores. While in college I worked in tiny grocery stores in two different states that had tiny selections of less than two dozen books which the proprietors would recommend to certain customers. More recently I've seen small selections of books in various kinds of stores in NYC and elsewhere. For example, the eyeglass company Warby Parker has at least one person in its creative department who happens to be a serious book lover, and their new Upper East Side store features a curated selection of books under the displays of glasses, as well as decor illustrated by Maira Kalman. How many books will they actually sell? Probably not large numbers, but I think it's a good thing if more shops do this and are actually interested in selecting and selling the books, not just using them as window-dressing or to cultivate a bookish image. Restaurants and cafés with bookstore areas and author events (such as Busboys and Poets in DC) can be a great form of hybrid as well.

[domino harvey]

Busboys and Poets is pretty clever as far as forcing people into a bookstore, as there's really nothing else to do while you're waiting for your table other than browse their healthy selection of books!

[HerrSchreck]

Great posts, Greg and Mr. Creek.

It's not only the damage to the arts /sales that concerns me, it's the extrapolations into the impressions of the nature of a town as it colors the life experience of its inhabitants.

There's an old saying--very tight with the precepts of Buddhism--that goes "We are what we think about most of the time." I think that this is very true.

A town, a city, creates a certain kind of individual--or at least the opportunity to create a certain kind of individual in combination with familial and innate tendencies within the person in question-- via the way that it offers up its Opportunities For Consideration vis a vis its stimuli. Art and esoterica were a big part of what was on offer as an individual meandered his way through life in this city. The physical circumstances of life spoke to an individual with a certain combination of glyphs that colored the individual. And this was of course cyclic, as this Certain Kind of Individual took the energies and modes of thought transmitted to him or her via the stimuli of his environment, and advanced them and developed the ideas resident within that stimuli.

In a little more than a decade, there is a leftover population longing, with un-whet appetites, for a deeper form of stimuli they once new, for representations in the physical world of the esoterica which has been so delightful, and so key in the development of their lives, and made the city such a beautiful place to be. The esoterica that attracted all the big money and tourists in the first place. That esoterica is gone, and they can see, with the simplicity of 2 +2 = 4 the changes that the void has left in all aspects of city life.

In addition, there is a youthful population that knows nothing of the more variegated version of life in the city that is under discussion here, and has the understandable reaction of defending the world that they live in. How will they take the present situation, and take it into the future?

But this brings me back to, "We are what we think about most of the time," because a city makes us think... and in a sense a city thinks as well. The thought of a city is output in the storefronts it presents to those navigating it. And if a city thinks overwhelmingly about chain banks, chain stores, with--for the first time ever in its entire lifespan as a city--no room for individual ownership passionate about selling a certain kind of ware, to service the sophistication of the mindset of its (at least for now) sophisticated inhabitants, then the city has lost a large measure of its greatness.

When a city like NYC, always thought of as the greatest in the world (or at least the USA), falls beneath the sophistication level of its inhabitants and leaves their appetites completely unfulfilled for the first time ever--that's a very tragic thing.

Grand, gaudy, glittering commerce, blaring tony images of the good life--that was always the bird's eye view of the city. Streets paved with gold and all that. But at ground level and across the thousands of apartments across all those byways and intersections, the reality was always far tougher--and there was all fashion of esoteric thought, of radical art, of philosophy, of great street music from those at ground level talking of that toughness . . . all of that made the city truly great, because all of those rose up out of those streets and took over the world.

Haven't seen that happen since the early Oughts, and wonder if I ever will again.

[Lemmy Caution]

On the plus side, legal pot sales probably aren't far off ...

I also recall when Manhattan actually had one or two marijuana delivery services.