A femurals is a production of IHurt Radio.

Last episode, we traced the rise and fall of the video rental store with Dan Herbert,

a professor of media studies at the University of Michigan, and author of the book rental store with Dan Herbert, a professor of media studies at the University

of Michigan, and author of the book, Video Land, Movie Culture at the American Video Store.

Today, we're going to take our own field trip to an independent video store that, despite

the ever-changing media market, has continued to thrive in its local community.

Later, the ephemeral team will chat with two of our favorite podcast hosts,

Lauren Vogelbaum and Annie Reese of the podcast, Savor, about some of our best video store memories.

But first, a few more words from Dan on the ephemeral experience of selecting a movie

from a wall of titles. One of the things that I think was awesome about video stores is that they

put things into shelves and aisles and that those shelves and aisles had a logic that spatialized a bunch of

notions about taste and value related to movies. What I mean by that is that they put labels on

them, like action or adventure, or romance, or horror.

Different stores created these categories to lump movies together, and they put that into a physical space, or there was a physical space associated with that category. Just the same way you walk down an aisle in a grocery store, and you're like, oh, this is the space with baby food and baby diapers,

and now there's pet toys. What's that about?

I just think that, like, retail spaces are really interesting in general,

and video stores were interesting because of the way they clumped things together.

At the corporate stores, like Hollywood and Blockbuster,

generally those stores put things into very broad, generic categories because those stores were really driven by new releases.

So the biggest section of the store was not based on a genre or a commonality among the

movies, but rather the temporality of the release. The kind of broad categories found at a corporate store imply a kind of openness and a kind

of democratic attitude toward individual tastes that you didn't have to know much about a movie

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