You know what? This Onion article is eerily spot-on. Get me the fuck out of here.
Perhaps this is just part of my pre-birthday malaise or maybe it’s been brought on by witnessing a woman on the sidewalk across from my office this morning in a stretchy pink ensemble pull down her pants, hike up her top, and adjust her underwear. And on the street just now I laughed at a junkie who was holding an ice cream cone and sobbing uncontrollably.
Because every last bit of my empathy has been sapped. That’s it! That’s all she wrote!
I’m going up to Brimfield again next week, so at least that’s…something.
Anyhow, this picture. This is my Kim’s Video membership card. I got it right before I moved to NYC. My boyfriend at the time didn’t have a credit card and Kim’s required one, as a deposit. For those of you who are not from NY, Kim’s Video was a NYC institution, staffed entirely by bitter cineastes and musophiles who made it quite clear that your taste sucked. There were two locations, one in the West Village and one on St. Marks Place. (Both of those have since closed, and all the movies were sent to Italy, but now there is a new location on 1st Avenue that I’ve never set foot in.)
St. Marks Place between 3rd and 2nd Avenues, though rapidly gentrifying even 13 years ago, was still quite a bit different from how it is now. There were junkies everywhere and we still had Coney Island High and See Hear Books and various used record stores and performance spaces. These have all been replaced by four frozen yogurt establishments, five Korean fried chicken restaurants, 17 stores that sell bongs and NEW YORK FUCKING CITY t-shirts, and a SuperCuts. I’m not saying it was necessarily better back then, but at least it didn’t look like a wing of a mall in Delaware.
The first movie we rented was Streetwise. I remember it well, because it was one of the only times the Kim’s clerk didn’t sneer at my selection.
Soundtrack: Mark Sultan, I Am the End
Stroke me.
