Category: ultrapersonal

On a lighter note, I’m strangely pleased to see the Times do a nice round-up of affordable, exotic dining options on Staten Island. Although I’m not likely to ever get a chance to explore any of these places, it’s nice to take a moment to reflect upon the positive aspects of the place where I grew up for a change.

Trivia: that article quotes a food editor at the Staten Island Advance on whom I had a brief, unrequited, adolescent crush. I note that she apparently never left the Island, at least not for good.

Additional trivia: the Staten Island Advance is Staten Island’s local newspaper, whose offices and plant were just up the street from where I lived until I left for college. Most kids in the neighborhood hung out at some point in the woods around there or in a little spot beneath an overpass in their parking lot, but it was lame.

Oh! And another thing: The Advance seems to have a Gay and Lesbian Life section now. Huh.

I’ve had analog stuff on the brain lately. I may be someone who’s been online for a long time, and who stays tethered to the internet throughout the average day in one way or another, but I’ve always been a little ambivalent about the medium. And I don’t just mean how much I hate building web sites, despite running one (or a few, usually) for such a long time. I guess my ambivalence is more about the culture of the medium, more than the platforms themselves. I’m always fascinated by how the online world changes and surprises me, but I’ve been at it long enough to miss some things that have gotten further than what I liked about them. It was a lot more fun to participate when online life was an immature mess that was in the middle of sprawling outward.

I used to make stuff — actual, physical stuff, like zines and mixtapes and paper and postcards — a lot, and the tactile aspect of that was a huge part of wht I liked. I don’t make so much stuff anymore, and I miss the way I enjoyed the making and the sharing of it. I stumbled into the web because I was curious about this new thing that was emerging, and it was easy enough to tinker with it and feel it out. Throwing up a web page built with Mosaic was also a cheap alternative to putting out the slightly ambitious zine I had been making, so the first pages I made were supposed to be a staging ground for what I’d publish the next time I had a little extra scratch lying around. Then they became a repository for stuff I was posting on discussion groups, and then a repository for what I’d published in my zine, and then Blogger happened and then GreyMatter and then Movable Type and then Flickr and then Twitter and other stuff and it became more and more and now here we are. Now, I find myself constantly expanding and contracting in the online world — testing new things, leaving them when they don’t give me something I like. I don’t really like the endless networks that can spin out in all directions. I like a smaller net with edges that are just blurry enough to leave room for serendipity. I like a bit more community and a bit less…well, a bit less onslaught of everything, I guess.

Continue reading “Crap Rotation”

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.