Category: ultracultural

Et tu, Kim’s?

I was immediately fascinated by this unusual story of how the entire collection of over 55,000 rental titles from the deservedly famous Kim’s Video store has been packed up and shipped to Salemi, a small town in Siciliy that is trying to reinvent itself as a cultural haven. I saw the story late last night, and sent links to it to a couple of friends who might get a kick out of it: one a film buff I know here in the UK, the others good friends of mine who have also left New York after growing up there.

The thought of the Kim’s collection stayed with me until the morning, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on the reason why. I had never actually been a member of Kim’s, and I was rarely a customer. The thing is, though, I always thought of it as a veritable museum of film, and I loved it just for being there. I loved the way the store was organized, grouping films by director or startlingly specific genres. I loved that they rented boldly pirated copies of obscure old and foreign works that weren’t available for general release in New York. I loved that it was useful as an educational resource for me as a film lover as much as it was a store.

I think it was this last aspect that made it seem so perfect to the researcher in me that the collection was shipped off intact. Just knowing it exists somewhere as a body of work is soothing. It’s obvious that Yongman Kim, founder of the store, is a true lover film, regardless of whatever he needs to do as a businessman to support himself. When he was realizing that Kim’s could He promised to donate all the films without charge to anyone who would meet three conditions: Keep the collection intact, continue to update it and make it accessible to Kim’s members and others.”

My friend Mark wrote this morning and immediately put his finger on what was so resonant about all this for me. There’s no point in paraphrasing when he summed it up so well, as always:

While there will always be pockets of NYC that resemble the NY of our teen years, in spirit, it seems a wholly different place to me. The most disconcerting thing is that the places that are relocating/shutting down now aren’t just places I used to go, but places that I had identified as being uniquely of NY, but that is obviously no longer so.

It is amazing though that these things and places are being scattered around the world, and not simply ceasing to exist, as if confirming just how valuable these things are, but just no longer valuable to New York or New Yorkers.

Random wonderful things

I’ve been bedridden for days, so my already active trawling of the web has really gone off the charts. Here are a few gems that I feel compelled to share:

  • The “I Can Read Movies” Series: these imaginary paperback novelizations of hit movies are so beautiful and mid-century perfect they bring a tear to my eye.

  • Comics Grammar & Tradition: I moan about some of the typographic conventions in comics, but I can at least acknowledge that many of them are at least reliable conventions. Here’s a good guide to what they are.

  • Paul’s Boutique, remastered: The Beastie Boys finally re-release one of my all-time favorite records, one that completely blew me away from the first instant I heard it. The accompanying site is Flash-heavy, but filled with good stuff, including a free commentary track of the B-Boys telling stories about the tracks as the entire record plays.

  • Chip Steele, R.I.P.: Chip Steele has been a bit of legend to me for a long-time, ever since my pal Dave went sky-diving with him. If you’re going to jump from a plane, you want a man named Chip Steele strapped to your back! Unfortunately, Steele had a fatal mid-air heart attack while giving a lesson to a young Army private, soon after uttering these now-immortal words: “Welcome to my world.” Pvt. Pharr then landed himself safely, but was unable to revive Steele. If I have ever heard a good premise for a bro-mantic action movie, this is it.

Judge not lest ye be judged

This is a snippet from a fascinating little documentary called Dressing for Pleasure by John Sampson. (Unfortunately the site that used to host the whole thing has shut down, and this is all I can find at the moment.) I totally lack the energy to combine this barrage of related links into a proper post right now, so just think of this as sort of a pervy brain dump:

Edwardian masher

While I’m on this Joe Orton kick, here’s another great bit from the diaries:

Saturday 15 April

Watched Doctor Who on television. Rubbish, but there’s a young boy in it who’s worth looking at; like an Edwardian masher at a Gaiety show, I mentally undress him. I’m sure the BBC would horrified if they realised that even a science fiction series can be used erotically.

Judging from the date, I’m assuming that the episode in question was part of “The Faceless Ones“, and that the alluring lad in question was probably young sailor Ben Jackson, played by Michael Craze.

Ben Jackson

“Edwardian masher at a Gaiety show” is my new favorite phrase, by the way. And though Orton is a good enough writer for that quip to feel very off the cuff, it’s actually the one instance in his diaries where I spotted him re-using an earlier joke. On the 24th of January, 1967, Orton paid a visit to meet Paul McCartney and Brian Epstein to talk about writing a script for the next Beatles movie. During the course of the evening, a pop group called the Easybeats drop by, about whom he says:

…about five very young and pretty boys trooped in. I rather hoped this was the evening’s entertainments. It wasn’t, though. …After a while we went downstairs. The Easybeats still there. The girl went away. I talked to the leading Easybeat. Feeling slightly like an Edwardian masher with a Gaiety Girl.

The Easybeats

Singin’ for your supper

Bette Davis pulled a neat trick when she took on the title role of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, managing to revive (and in some sense, reinvent) her career at an age when most leading ladies were left with no place in Hollywood. I knew that she worked hard to get the role, and worked hard to get it right (that kind of scenery-chewing doesn’t come easy), but I had no idea she went to such great lengths to promote the movie:

Poor dear. The spectacle of her performance in the movie was intentional, and quite briliant. This just makes me wince. You can almost see her gritting her teeth and thinking, “focus on the paycheck, focus on the paycheck”.

[Thanks to Café Muscato for digging up this gem.]

Badger

Badger by Howard

If you think you would enjoy an extremely cute but sad tale of a lonely badger living in a flat in South London (and really, how could you not enjoy it?), then you should buy a copy of Howard Hardiman‘s Badger. It’s really charming, I promise.

[Shameless self-promotional alert: I helped Howard put the final product together, since I’m such a fan of the badger. The book also features a little bit of a little typeface I designed.]

And people think I’m fussy?

I giggled at this passage that I just encountered in The Joe Orton Diaries:

Peter Willes rang up. ‘What do you mean by sending me such an atrocious script?’ he said. ‘What?’ I said. ‘All the “O’s” are out of line. I can’t read a script like that. Haven’t you another copy? ‘No,’ I said. “I’ll have to get it retyped,’ he said. ‘I can’t let the actors see a script in that state.’ ‘Did you read the script?’ I said. “A little.’ ‘What did you think of it?’ ‘I thought it rather dated,’ he said, ‘though that may have been the effect of the “O’s”.’

See? Good typography makes a difference.

One more thing about Orton

You know, there are lots of other things that have been happening that might be better to write about (Travel and work abroad! Fetishwear spending sprees! The waxing and waning of various flirtations!) but all that stuff always takes so much time and effort that I ought to be devoting to things that actually help pay my bills. But since I’ve just started reading The Orton Diaries on today’s bus/tube/plane/train trip, I’m thinking again about a certain ex and all the similarities between him and Orton’s carefully constructed public persona that just seem too perfect to be a coincidence. And the intro of the book also reminded me that Orton’s diaries and letters are held at my old university, in the library where a certain someone also used to work.

Also, Orton is still really sexy and smart and funny. But kind of a jerk, just like a certain someone always was.