Dear friends,
This afternoon we enjoyed the delicious french fries from Anderson Ales. We bought beer and that will be for later. No drinking on the job unless you’re Vanessa. While we were at Anderson we chatted with the folks there about how good their fries are. These are seriously good fries. Later two of the servers came over and looked at our books. One of them took a photo of our bookbus (returning to the streets of London next month!) Actually, as we write this, two more servers came over to look at books! They’re a literate lot, those Anderson kids. They’ve got some good titles under their arms. One of them carries an Odyssey Records bag. Clearly these are cool kids.
Taking this moment to sit back and reflect on things, we notice that a sense of community has returned to our lives. It’s been a bit. Our retail muscles had to strengthen again as a winter working from our home office had atrophied the ability to hold more than one conversation at a time. Even that was a challenge. On Elias we work beside people who have been stirring things up for decades. It feels good. It rises above the sanctimonious posturing of Community Building and actually becomes a nuts and bolts Place to Be. More than that, it becomes a place to be one’s self—eating french fries, talking music, reading books, chilling out.
These things always happen by accident. By that we mean people work to make lives in public and they go any number of possible ways. What is good can become awful and what was awful can change again into something magic. Just look at the motley crew at 1025 Elias. A record store that needed a new location. Two vintage dealers fucked by construction. An artist run gallery filled with smart, arty nerds. This is the island of misfit merchants. No one needs to do this. They want to do it. They’re all called. It’s vocational, in the religious sense of the word. One hears the weird song and one follows.
We admire people who put themselves out there for better or worse and try to Sing their Song as it is a heady, fraught, often hostile place to stand. Yet if a moment can happen that fills the soul then it’s like a sudden meteor shower—unplanned, known perhaps only to astronomers, yet all yours as you drive into the dark country and see lights flying in the sky. Here you were alone and now you’re in the middle of a dark road with several cars pulled to the side quietly witnessing the heavens with total, equally enthralled strangers.
We can’t overstate this enough. Places like this are precious. Sure, they might be markets ultimately but no one opens a vintage clothing or furniture shop unless they truly love lovely things. When people come by to see those things it’s hard not to just explode with ENTHUSIASM. We sold a whack of comics today to a guy who collects them and then DONATES THEM TO SCHOOLS AND ARCHIVES!!! He’s donated thousands of comics to a school so kids can study them. Tell us this isn’t close to sainthood. He’s just tickled by this too. It fills his soul.
All this from a plate of really good french fries. Eternity in a grain of sand, as it were.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
The Anderson kids are cooler than us.
