Currently the song “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake is playing in our shop. This is not a super bookish song to have on. You don’t browse great literature while listening to Whitesnake. We had a Benny Goodman playlist going earlier. Benny Goodman is a nice middle ground for customers. Sure, sometimes Jason slips in Rage Against the Machine or Weird Al, and our entire livelihood is put at risk when he starts fooling with the music. Most often is it Benny Goodman or Jelly Roll Morton. How did this eighties glam rock get thrown into the mix?
We think we have the answer. Our 12-year-old also has access to our Spotify account. He sometimes listens to it on his way home from school. This is why, while driving around town, our bluetooth is suddenly hijacked with “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins. We don’t mind it. Sometimes he does it intentionally to make us laugh, and “Total Eclipse of the Heart” will come on or the more abysmal, “I’ll Do Anything for Love (but I Won’t Do That).” The mystery of this song–the riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma of it–is torture, not to mention how awful it is as music (is it music? or just the simulated shape of music?). Meatloaf makes us nearly ground our son on the spot. We pause, however, knowing our taste is no better, as we bop to “Backstreet’s Back” when cleaning or “Bye Bye Bye” by N’Sync while unclogging a toilet.
What to play in the shop is as an important question as what to eat for lunch. We learned a long time ago not to play podcasts. It’s asking for trouble. Even the “Marxist” CBC is too saucy. “How can you listen to that Liberal garbage?” a customer will ask. We gently try to remind them of a time when there was, erroneous as it might have been, a base-line reality shared my many founded on the truths that the President or Prime Minster was not a reptile from space. “He’s not from space,” we are corrected. “He’s from a long line of Hollow Earth reptiles, protected by the Deep State, that controls EVERYTHING.” Off with the CBC then. We’re always happy to debate transit, local development, limits of the State, etc. etc., but as none of us can GENETICALLY TEST the President, or anyone for that matter, really, we’ll quietly take it on faith that they’re human. It’s so deeply saddening that the bland, nearly pointless reality created by a public broadcaster is something you have to fight for. Still, sometimes, when we’re feeling especially stark, we’ll lob the brilliant Conspirituality or Crackdown podcasts onto our speakers and just watch the normies squirm.
Mainly we keep it to music. David Bowie. Julianna Barwick. Tame Impala. Lizzo. Bands like that. We’ve written about this before but it remains a true pleasure when someone half our age discovers The Cure for the first time in our shop. Considering that everyone is funneled into little domes of stimulation, reduced, if you will, to the sensory bubbles of a goldfish, it’s healing to break the glass and have two people who don’t know each other get a kick out of the same thing for no reason except circumstance. We were both here in this Time and Place, digging Weird Al together. It’s positively lo-fi. Now that we think of it, how much information is there when you simply take time for it to materialize? Books are sequential, bound in time and space. There’s a marvel in tackling Housekeeping by Marylin Robinson one page at a time. Like in stand-up comedy, to take that pause and wait for the audience, for yourself, is unbearably rich sometimes, even if it’s just your 12-year-old trolling you with Whitesnake.
Here are some cool New Arrivals.
With love,
Jason and Vanessa
