As latch-key kids of the 80s, we are quite delighted by the strange alchemy of old and new technology. We remember coming home to quiet, non-networked houses to fire up the television and watch WHATEVER was beaming from CFPL London that afternoon. The sounds of the Price is Right are eternally woven into the scents of carpets and juice-boxes. The light from the original Mario Kart on the TV is equal, in our minds and hearts, to the red-hues of the setting sun over farm fields and east London subdivisions. Melancholy aside, we wouldn’t change that. Nor do we fight to remove the old from the new. They rest together in what sentimental and nostalgic folks call TIMELESSNESS. We simply call it reality.
Perhaps this is why our new arrival emails give us so much delight…writing them, curating them (such a pretentious word), and sending them out. We love all the teeny updates to the email system–we can CHANGE THE FONT NOW!?! AMAZING!!!–as well as the lo-fi pleasures of printing out order receipts and placing the books, chosen by you, onto a wooden shelf on the left hand side of the penny counter.
The Cure’s Disintegration plays on the Google mini. A young girl asks us, “Who is this amazing band?” We smile, take a deep breath, and say, “Let us introduce you to The Cure.” She sets her bookstack down on the counter. In it are titles by Simone de Beauviour, Joseph Conrad, and Bruce Springsteen (a gift for dad). We listen together. She asks us (we kid you not) what it was like to hear this for the first time. It was a sea change, we said. That sea is still changing too. THIS IS A TRUE STORY!
She buys her books. We add her name to our email list. We write a little story about her in our next email. In some downtown apartment she’s probably listening to ALL The Cure albums now on her Google Mini, reading Simone de Beauvoir. And this, dear friends, is why we do what we do.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
