June 8.
We stay at an Airbnb in Gibellina. Breakfast is two Cherry Passion croissants in vacuum-sealed plastic wrappers. The lady who rents us the room stores breakfast in the same closet where she keeps the spare towels and the rolls of toilet paper.
“How’s your breakfast?” I ask S.
“Non-perishable,” she replies.
We spend the morning pedaling to Salemi, the next village over. The historic center of Salemi was heavily damaged by the 1968 earthquake and a lot of it was never repaired. Then in 2008, things got weird. An Italian talk show host and former culture minister named Vittorio Sgarbi got himself elected mayor. Sgarbi wasn’t from Salemi. He was a celebrity from Rome and running for mayor was a publicity stunt. As part of his platform, he proposed to sell the town’s quake-damaged buildings for 1 euro apiece to anyone willing to fix them up. He also had the idea to adopt Kim’s Video.
Remember Kim’s? Yongman Kim began renting videos out of his dry cleaning store on Avenue A in New York back in the eighties. Kim had titles you couldn’t find at Blockbuster: foreign films, cult classics, indie and experimental flicks. At his peak, Kim had five stores in Manhattan and something like 55,000 VHS tapes. It was perhaps the greatest collection of hard-to-find videotapes on Earth. But by 2008, the era of the video rental shop was coming to an end. Kim closed his stores and offered to donate his video tape collection to anyone who’d take it. It would be his legacy. His gift to the film buffs of the world. But as much as people loved Kim’s Video, no one was exactly waiting in line to adopt tens of thousands of old VHS tapes.
Then one day, a globetrotting American grad student mentioned the video tapes to his Italian graphic designer friend; and she informed a controversial Italian photographer she knew; and he notified his friend Vittorio Sgarbi, the newly elected mayor of Salemi. Next thing you know, the videotapes were loaded onto a freight ship bound for Sicily.
Since S. and I are in the neighborhood, we decide to ride to Salemi to see what happened to Kim’s. We crank our way up to the top of the village and find the civic museum where we’d heard the tapes were stashed.
“Videotapes?” the lady at the front desk asks, like she has no idea what we’re talking about.
“Yes,” I say. “The videos donated by the man from New York. We were told that they’re here.”
The lady stares at us for a while.
“Ah. Those videotapes. They are here but you can’t see them.”
“Is it possible to arrange a visit?” I ask.
“No,” she says.
“Do you have a brochure? Or some kind of information about them?” I ask.
“No,” the lady says. Then she gives us the kind of tight-lipped smile that suggests there’s nothing more to discuss and we’re being annoying, so please go away.