The St Marks Place clearing-house for the obscure and transgressive across both music and film · the staff-curated downtown New York institution where the experimental, the imported and the out-of-print were the entire point.
Mondo Kim's is the New York clearing-house, and the Bureau files it as the East Village counterpart to the European specialist shops. The flagship of Yongman Kim's Kim's Video & Music chain, it sat on St Marks Place in the heart of downtown Manhattan and combined an exhaustive, staff-curated stock of experimental, industrial, noise and avant-garde music with one of the great cult-film rental collections, music and film treated as a single transgressive whole.
Its character was legendary and double-edged. The staff were experts and gatekeepers in equal measure, and the shop was famous as much for the attitude across the counter as for the depth behind it; this was a place where the obscure, the imported and the long-out-of-print were the point, and where casual browsing met a certain downtown froideur. For the musician or filmmaker chasing something that existed nowhere else in the city, it was indispensable precisely because it was uncompromising.
The film side is part of why the Bureau files it: Mondo Kim's embodied the cross-disciplinary avant-garde this archive keeps returning to, the same downtown that produced no-wave, the Cinema of Transgression and the New York noise underground, gathered under one roof as music and film. When the shop eventually closed, its celebrated film archive was shipped whole to the Italian town of Salemi in an attempt to keep it intact, a measure of how seriously the collection was taken.
The Bureau files Mondo Kim's at RS·006 as the New York clearing-house for the experimental and the transgressive: the St Marks Place institution where downtown's avant-garde, in sound and on film, was stocked, curated and guarded by people who treated it as a serious archive.