Headed to do an interview at one of the greatest video stores ever made: Movie Madness in Portland, OR. YES I said Video Store.

I'm in the last stages of a new doc about the video store era and Movie Madness is one of the last stores standing. Obviously the tech is beyond obsolete, so why do people keep going?

Documentary filmmaker, journalist, tiny chicken rancher.

Tiny ranch. Normal size chickens.

Mostly posting works in progress and food pics.

People love nostalgia? It's all they have nowadays since culture is dead 🤷‍♂️ everything is a remake of what is in that store basically haha. I look forward to seeing this, lots of us on here were Blockbuster regulars ✌️❤️🌞

Solarpunk ☀️
/replacereality 
 /flows
/permacoolture

That's definitely part of it, but there's something deeper too, bc it's not just nostalgia for the movies. Movies are more available now than ever before (for instance a lot of silent films are old enough to be public domain at this point, so they're on YouTube).

People are nostalgic for shared interest communities.

This question has been vexing me for years. Why were people so worked up about these stores? I saw people cry, sweat, one customer wished cancer on a store owner who was shutting down because the store was in the red.

That customer is a broken human, but what other product could inspire such deep feelings?

This is Mike Clark, he founded the store in 1991. There were thousands of video stores at that time (fierce competition). Mike stood out by just being his weird self and letting the store be a reflection of that.

There's a lesson in this shot - even 10 years after retiring he can't help but tidy up the shelf.

Mike Clark built a thing that has had longevity even as his niche collapsed because it feels like a natural extension of his environment. 

People love movies, Clark gave them a place to celebrate that love and feel embraced. Movies are a big part of how we form our identity. It's subconscious, but he got it.

Look at all this cool stuff he's collected over the years! The actual bar of FIGHT CLUB soap! He's got one of the two knives used in PSYCHO!

This stuff is just cool to look at, but it also signifies a sort of deep nerd investment that many of us admire but can't commit to. He did it, and we can share in that.

These tapes are from the first 50 movies ever put onto video cassette for home use, by Andre Blay at Magnetic Video in Michigan. I don't have a machine to play them on, why did I take this picture? Is this like taking a picture of an arrowhead, or a petrified tree?

What am I using now that will be the next Beta tape?

I think the way we're going to find answers to a lot of the questions I see in tech is by looking at this stuff from the past. Of course the toys are new, but the brain is old. The body has hardware requirements that can't be solved with software. If it worked before it will work again.

That sounds sort of nuts - isn't that what social media is best at, opening doors to shared interest communities?

Yes, but it has to go offline at some point or it all blends together. We get our news, art, comedy, family/friends - everything comes to us on our phone, so it all gets flattened.