In the second installment of our Kim’s Video series, Emilie Friedlander reads a 2014 essay she wrote about her experiences working as a teenaged video clerk at the beloved film and music emporium’s Saint Mark’s location. In it, she explores the cultural significance of the figure of the “music snob” in the time before streaming media, the symbolic connections between a vampire movie by Jim Jarmusch and the downtown NYC counterculture of the early 2000s, and how for her, Kim’s Video’s closure marked the end the “hipster” era — a term she defines as “an all-encompassing, almost pathological reverence for art and music, often to the exclusion of other, traditional bourgeois concerns, like educational and professional advancement.” The piece was originally published in The FADER, just a couple months before the last Kim’s Video store closed down.
