I read this article with a weird mix of excitement and dismay (New York Times, “Kim’s Video Is Back In NYC” By Gabe Cohen 3/31-4/6, 2022). Mondo Kim’s was a legendary video store with an encyclopedic collection of rental moving image content – callin’ ‘em “movies” is not enough. (Like my grandma said it, “moon pichas” is closer.)
My gang then was involved in the VHS video distribution project MWF Video Club. We launched around the same time as Kim’s Video, and they were among our very first, and our most local client to buy artists and indie film and video art on tape.
Kim was a Korean dry cleaner who was expanding his video rental sideline. (Repeat customers important for both video rental and cleaning your clothes, a clear business synergy.) Kim hired an Arab emigre whose name I sadly don’t remember – call him Ahmed – who set up his new store. Ahmed was gegarious and friendly, and told me it was his plan to put the films in order by director, not star or genre. We talked video, and film on video many times. Ahmed bought numerous MWF titles for Kim’s, and because these videos wear out, they’d buy more after a year or so.
Then they stopped buying completely.
Why? By that time Ahmed had been fired. His set-up work was finished, and Kim was running the place himself. Usually he wasn’t there when we went to visit. If you could catch him in his place, he’d just say, “No”, not interested.
Facets Multimedia in Chicago
I figured maybe Kims was just ordering from Facets Video. Milos Stehlik and his pals had built this multimedia empire in Chicago as a non-profit, and they were distributing a lot of MWF videos, even the very obscure ones. They’d get a wholesale discount, and (like us), they’d discount to stores. So I figured Kim was just bundling all his orders with Facets.
Yongman Kim in 2014 when his last store closed. “I am the loser,” he said. “Netflix is the winner.” (Photo Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)
Nick Zedd, who did the footwork with the stores more assiduously than us in order to sell his own videos, and hung out with people who worked there told me, “No” – Kim’s wasn’t buying anything. They were just dubbing their replacement copies – and the copies they would sell – off the ones they’d already bought.
So much for supporting independent artists. But Kim’s was never about that. It was about collecting, assembling the biggest collection of videos of anybody.
Big Fat Pile of VHS
Kim at least was not a philistine. When the store closed in 2014, he told the NY Times that he “ began his library by soliciting thousands of free titles from the Bulgarian and Czechoslovakian cultural consulates.” A clever start. “ ‘My personal style was more French and early Russian realism,’ he said. ‘I still believe the silent is the real form of film. Because too much dialogue builds barriers between people and nations.’”
When Kim’s went out of business, the businessman sought to arrange for a disposition of the collection that kept it together, and kept it in rental circulation. The form of his business had become Kim’s obsession. It was a setup no institution could accept. Some Italians apparently gratified Kim’s desires, and promised to set up a “Kim Museum” in Salemi, Sicily. The strange and improbable story of the immigration of the collection, told in the late Village Voice in 2012, reveals that at one point in the collection’s history, a streaming project was considered, copyright be damned. Indie artists usually can’t really afford to enforce their copyright if their work is stolen, even if they find out about it. Axiom #2: The artist will always get fucked.
“Obsessed Human Beings”
Tim League, of the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain says in in Cohen’s Times story that he’s been collecting the inventories of closed video stores for years. “They’re the work of some 20, 30 years of an obsessed human being’s collection,” he said.
Sure, but they are or were also businesses, and some businesspeople are megalo. They don’t understand themselves as they are, human traffickers in the products of other peoples’ creativity.
Other Models
A far more constructive project of moving image distribution was the Two Boots pizza chain’s Pioneer Theatre with a video store in the front of it. Again, like the Alamo chain featured in the Times text, it was a food service and cinema combine. (This is now common throughout the USA.) With a difference: Two Boots dealt directly and fairly with indie filmmakers over the years the place was operating. Rent killed it at last.
This came from the fact that both Phil Hartman and his partner Doris Kornish were involved with making films, and knew the Lower East Side community of filmmakers. The Pioneer was suited to their needs, which were to have a gathering place, and an actual movie theater to premiere new work. All the work lived in the video store, available in person, “on demand”.
Monday/Wednesday/Friday
The MWF Video Club started as a video rental operation. It was a later project of the artists’ group Colab, realizing a long-held ambition of the group to distribute their moving image work. MWF was artist-centric. It was set up as a rental cabinet, really, in my apartment in 1986. (Steve Stollman built it.) We did weekly Monday salons to screen work and develop stock. Artists working in moving image came because of their interest to meet each other and share their work at a time when there was almost no access to see it any other way. We were scheduled to open downstairs with a proper store, but an eviction forestalled that.
So the project took a turn towards sales, consumer VHS sales, with my house as the back office. (Our last catalogue is still online, thanks to Pam Payne.) It persisted until the very early ‘00s, through a regular series of screenings, many in nightclubs. Grant money paid artists for some of those, but most were our own aggregations of sales stock, i.e., we showed what we were selling. The screenings often got hybrid, including performances and wall exhibits.
MWF Video Club finished in the early ‘00s. It’s ghost flickered back into view briefly at the Trenton State U art gallery in NJ, and for the first 2010 "Lumen" video and performance festival on Staten Island. MWF Video occupied one of the shipping containers the organizers made available. We had the necessary gear in storage -- a rotating VHS display fixture, numerous boxed-up sales stock, VCR players and monitors, and the all-important soft rewind machine.
Hairpin Turn on the Digital Highway
MWF Video distribution was defeated by the first digital turn, the format change from VHS to DVD. (That format sucks, BTW, as it is twice physically unstable with handling and delicate machines, not to mention its dubious longevity.) Orders dwindled to nothing, and MWF Video Club entered its ghost phase, its archival afterlife. After a long period of slumber in various storage spaces, the collection of some 600 videotapes in different formats was taken in hand by the XFR Collective of moving image archivists. They came together out of the New Museum project “XFR STN”, which won an award and had a lot of resonance with the Rhizome contingent of that institution itself.
(A PDF of the exhibition catalogue with numerous artists’ statements is in the LINKS section of this blog post.)
The XFR Collective has been working with the MWF archive for some time. First came the work of making an inventory, then selection for transfer of analog recordings to digital files. Many of the transfers XFR and the New Museum project made have been mounted to Archive.org as part of the “MWF Video Club” there. If anyone wants to watch them, they can, for free. BYO pizza.
“Only for Art”
The first free on-demand hosting of MWF videos, however, was made by Ubu Web, the incredible personal project of online hosting of avant-garde materials. Ubu Web put up a couple of Colab videos (Colab is the parent organization of MWF Video Club). Ubu Web addresses the problem of access to the insane amount of material they have by tweeting about it – UbuWeb at @ubuweb sends out regular tantalizing links into the social media ocean of aleatory distractions.
You Can’t Step into the Same Stream Twice
The "lively arts" and their recorded traces are in continuous flux. The commercial means of delivering this content to consumers also changes greatly over time.
Some of these varied means overlap in Milwaukee, a serious film-loving town. After my parents settled there, I visited over many years, and observed some of these changes.
Orientalism
The pride of cineaste culture in MKE is the Oriental Theater. Nearby was a great idiosyncratic personal video rental store of the kind Mr. League of Alamo Drafthouse loves so well. The Oriental is a grand Depression-era movie palace which happens to have a pretty deep stage. (Staten Island has two of these; one in the hands of Christians and the other I believe still abandoned.) It's a building from the era when cinema was emerging from vaudeville, and live acts were still draws for older popular audiences.
Interior of the main screen of the Oriental Theatre, Milwaukee
The theater is the locus of the well-regarded annual MKE Film Festival, a well-developed project with significant oligarch support. It's a non-profit, like the theater itself, and mobilizes screening venues all over town during its run.
It makes sense for a creatively minded business to seek funding support through an alliance with a non-profit. Since the days Ed Koch’s mayoral admin floated commercial rent control for NYC (in the ‘80s; it sank like stone), I’ve thought the only way to preserve culturally important “businesses” like bookstores and theaters is through publicly funded preferential subsidized rent. Whistle down the wind.
Rocky Horror Cosplays
The Oriental claims to be the oldest site of Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight screenings. On occasion they have expanded the screenings into live shows, using the deep stage of the Oriental. I saw another follies-type act there, I forget the theme... but it was a lot of silly fun. They also used film playing on the big screen in their acts, like, really, quite a lot of contemporary theater.
In the Oriental, the site of film consumption also sometimes serves as the site of live theater production, just as it did when the place was built in 1927.
This is the kind of business art needs to thrive, a business that does not valorize its own stock, its collecting, nor seek only new ways to excite customers, to “stimulate fandom" – but a business that is embedded organically in a community that creates as well as consumes lively and filmic arts.
I tried to propose an annual institutionalization of this practice as “Andy Warhol’s Birthday Party” (August 6). Warhol is the best known example of an artist whose practice embraced film at the heart of diverse others, music, painting, and being in general. And his foundation has the bucks.
Video, Film and Radio
The Oriental Theatre does this kind of combo act only sporadically. Another MKE venue more deeply embedded in its community and its creative context is/was the Riverwest Film & Video store in that ethnically mixed district. (That’s unusual for MKE, which is a super-segregated city.) That store was a combination film and video rental shop and stock supply house serving the local university film program students. In time they launched a low power radio project in the front of the store, a studio-in-a-store-window actually, which persists to this day, although the back house part of the storefront has withered. But it’s still there, keeping up with the needs of the barrio’s creative community.
Making, Not Taking – Production, not Consumption
MWF Video categories answered to what artists were producing around the moment when it was founded, and, since we started as a rental “store”, what artists wanted to see of each other’s work. We sold work in the categories of narrative and feature film, video art, documentary and artists’ television.
The artists’ television was mostly produced for Manhattan Cable’s public access channels. We bought our tape stock at Rafik’s Film & Tape, like many NYU film students. Rafik was extremely artist-friendly. He had a small screening room, and offered editing services. (After his passing, his business was co-oped, and continues today as a post-production and preservation facility.) Rafik was important in the history of NYC cinema; the story is told in Clayton Patterson’s anthology “Captured” (2005).
All the films MWF Video Club distributed long ago are still unavailable anywhere now. Wild Style is the exception, but then we didn’t have it exclusive, it was a sub-distribution from Rhino Video. It streams now on Amazon, along with some other ‘70s-era artists’ films I never had a chance to see. But very few of them.
Where’s the Mayonnaise in this Store?
In my own round of consumption, where do I find the newer films/MI [moving image] content I need to see today? Usually now in an art gallery, a museum, or spit out on someone’s social media with a link to YouTube or Vimeo. There are oceans of movies and sundry, moving pictures which I’d like to see – thought-provoking meditative stuff. And I likely never will. My recreation is on the streaming sites – Shitflix, which is reconfiguring global film production in its sickly violence-dependent deep-American image, and the more congenial if more obtuse Filmin.es (no English subs, sigh). This is almost entirely narrative cinema. (Filmin.es makes some important concessions to other forms of MI.)
But art films and obscure documentaries, much less video art works, don’t figure. You can find some on Vimeo, somme others on Ubuweb, a deeply personal project which serves an extraordinary range of “hard art” content.
Where Is my Edgar in the Video Hotel?
Somehow we are still at the beginning of a truly accessible, comprehensible universe of moving image content. Maybe a virtual environment, a “metaverse” of film-topia?, through which one could wander, encounter guides, have conversations about “content areas” which intrigue you, and through those contacts – with a person behind an avatar? an encyclopedically informed, mannered AI like E.A. Poe in “Altered Carbon”?
There is no AI, no algorithm that’s going to deliver me into my personal paradise of moving image content consumption. Not a lot of money to be made off of me. And of course where you see some moving image work is critical. It is site specific, this consumption, from living room couch to museum gallery. That’s sort of behind the video store idea that Alamo is resurrecting.
It’s also behind the video lounge, the video club, and the museum, where there’s never enough time to absorb more than a fraction of the esoteric moving image content presented in large exhibitions. But it almost never streams.
Frankensteining Super Fans
Times writer Cohen quotes one of the Alamo crew working on the Kims Video redux project: for them, “browsing is the main event” – “[F]lipping through covers, studying the artwork and reading the back of the boxes, is a — maybe the — fundamental part of a video store visit”. Now it’s featured – “a basic difference between the new Kim’s Video project and the original idea of a video store.” They are hoping that the store will make “superfans” out of young people. Their project, they believe, will “reinvigorate film culture” which “desperately needs” it.
Fandom is self-organized knowledge around particular clusters of creative work. These realms of knowledge are active and productive, generatinig zines, fan fiction, cosplay, memes and endless coded social interactions. I’m a fan of moving image art and eccentric indie documentary work. (This blog post is itself “fan crit”.) This complex of MI is altogether more complex than the slick, vendable, commercial narrative cinema.
To fan it is more difficult both in terms of access to its products and staying informed about interesting things to see. Only by reading, and staying within insitutional ambits of art exhibition do I see and discover things I’d like to see in entirety. And then, usually, I can’t; they’re not available online, or require subscriptions.
There is a real need for guidance in the jungle forests of accessible moving image content. However, to seek to generate “intense fandom” is simply to seek to intensify the consumer experience.
No Suggestions
I can’t offer any real business solution to these questions. “Business” itself is the problem. Filmin.es is supported by EU cultural subsidy, as was/is Facets Multimedia. Going it alone on a for-profit basis is for Marvel Comics enterprises, not for independent artists. NetFlix, the prime example, is a narrative monoculture – meat, potatoes, string beans; meat, potatoes, string beans. It’s bad school lunch.
People laugh about the “metaverse”, but we can’t doubt it will become a major new capitalist tool. Still, maybe there might be a virtual grindhouse row with an endless geography of cinemas and museum warehouses any one of which the flaneur could enter into at will to discover new content, new interpretations, new artists. Maybe there’d be also some seedy lounge bar in that VR too, a place where one might enter into some productive conspiracies.
LINKS
“Kim’s Video Is Back In NYC”
By Gabe Cohen | April, 2022
https://drafthouse.com/news/kims-video-is-back-in-nyc
FACETS, est. 1975, is a nonprofit that connects people to independent ideas through transformative cinema.
https://facets.org/about/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facets_Multi-Media#Facets_Video
Milos Stehlik, Founder of Facets Multimedia in Chicago, Dies at 70
by Alissa Simon, July 2019
https://variety.com/2019/film/news/milos-stehlik-facets-multimedia-chicago-dies-dead-obituary-1203260777/
My obituary of Nick Zedd
http://artgangs.blogspot.com/2022/03/good-night-salty-prince.html
Tom Roston, “Passing of a Video Store and a Downtown Aesthetic”, July 24, 2014, NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/movies/kims-video-closes-and-a-village-sensibility-dies.html
Karina Longworth, “The Strange Fate of Kim’s Video”, September 12, 2012
https://www.villagevoice.com/2012/09/12/the-strange-fate-of-kims-video/
Pioneer Theater closes / Monday, November 10, 2008
http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2008/11/pioneer-theater.html
Colab Inc | Avant Garde Artist Collective 1977-Present ...
https://collaborativeprojects.wordpress.com/
MWF Video Club Collection catalogue
The MWF Video Catalog website is no longer active.
http://www.brickhaus.com/amoore/
XFR Collective
https://xfrcollective.wordpress.com/
“XFR STN” (Transfer Station) at New Museum, an open-door artist-centered media archiving project.
https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/xfr-stn
A Report on “XFR STN”: LOCKSS-Ness Monster: “What Have We Done?!”, ca. 2013
by David J. Kim, with an introduction by New Museum Digital Archivist Tara Hart, tagged with David J. Kim, Tara Hart, MWF Video Club, Colab, Archive, Education
https://www.newmuseum.org/blog/view/a-report-on-xfr-stn-lockss-ness-monster-what-have-we-done
"XFR STN" exhibition publication – recollections of Colab TV & MWF artists
https://www.academia.edu/75653161/_XFR_STN_exhibition_publication
MWF Video Club collection on Archive.org
https://archive.org/details/mwf_video_club&tab=collection
Ubu Web videos of Colab
https://ubu.com/film/colab.html
UbuWeb tweets at @ubuweb
Matt Wild, “I finally saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show with a live cast at the Oriental Theater”, June 11, 2015
https://milwaukeerecord.com/film/i-finally-saw-the-rocky-horror-picture-show-with-a-live-cast-at-the-oriental-theater/
"Expanded Cinema"
by Gene Youngblood (1970), the first book to consider video as an art form, was influential in establishing the field of media arts.[1] In the book he argues that a new, expanded cinema is required for a new consciousness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_Cinema
Unsurprisingly, there was a documentary on the place
Review: Emir Cakaroz’s ‘Riverwest Film & Video’ is an Intriguing Fly-on-the-wall Look at a Community Staple BY Tom Tolan
https://www.milwaukeemag.com/review-riverwest-film-video-intriguing-fly-wall-look-community-staple/
Riverwest Radio low power station in the window of the video store
https://www.riverwestradio.com
Clayton Patterson, ed., “Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side”
https://www.sevenstories.com/books/3977-captured
NEXT – My memoir blogging continues with an interview with artist Julie Harrison
The kind of video/theater blend I mean: scenography by Jan Pappelbaum for Professor Bernhardi, Berlin, Germany
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