Emilie's trial by fire as a Kim’s Video clerk

0:08Hey, everyone. This is Emily from The Culture Journalist. And today we're switching things up a little bit. Instead of a typical episode, we are doing a little bonus follow-up to our amazing conversation with David Redman, the co-director of the Kim's video documentary. You know, I mentioned on the pod that I actually used to work at Kim's. It was my first job out of high school and that I would be sharing a little bit about my experiences of working there because everybody's experiences are, you know, different. It was a place shrouded in a lot of lore and mystery. So what I wanted to do today was actually read aloud an essay that I wrote for The Fader in May 2014, almost exactly 10 years ago to this day, and also just a couple of months before the last Kim's Video Store closed down.

0:58And I think it's a really interesting window because I was looking back at the time of the documentary, which starts in like the late 90s and early 00s and, you know, Kim's role in the East Village counterculture of that time. But I'm looking at it from the vantage of 2014 when a lot of that world had already started to kind of disappear and was being replaced by, you know, like the rise of the Internet. We're seeing the disappearance of this world. we're seeing the disappearance of more and more record stores and more and more video stores so yeah i invite you to listen and think about what things were like back then or imagine them if you weren't there to experience it and then also maybe think about how much things have changed between then and now but yeah the article was called why the closure of kim's marks the end of the hipster era and just know that it's been updated slightly for clarity in certain places because, well, it's been a while.

1:55We hope you enjoy it.

2:07When I was 17 in 2003, I landed a summer job working on the third floor of Mondo Kim's on St. Mark's Place in Manhattan. This was back in the days when a massive emporium of film and music like Kim's Video was still a profitable business proposition. There were four of them in New York at the time. And when the people who worked at Kim's Video had a citywide reputation for being the snobbiest video and music clerks in the world. Starting at the beginning of high school and before I'd gotten a job there, I used to try to eat cheaply all week so that I could go to Kim's on Fridays with whatever money I had saved up and buy a CD.

2:46Part of the Kim's experience, which myself and thousands of other New Yorkers willfully subjected ourselves to, was trying to get in and out of there without attracting any off-color remarks from the people behind the counter, who were rumored to be so allergic to subpar music and film that they wouldn't even help you find something if they didn't think that it was aesthetically worthwhile. I, for one, was afraid of the people who worked at Kim's, and I never would have become one of them myself if it weren't actually for my mother. One day, when we went to Mondo Kim's to inquire about some obscure French corset movies she was looking for, she did what I never would have had the guts to do and straight up asked them if they would be willing to hire me.

3:26I guess she thought that it was time that I got a job. And that's it for the free preview version of this episode. There's lots more ahead. Get full access by becoming a paid subscriber for just five bucks a month over at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Please stand clear. The doors are closing.