Dear friends,
We are pleased as punch to announce that tomorrow Steven Frank, author of the London, Ontario related punk biography Young, Fast & Scientific: The DIY World of Al Cole, will be at our shop for a book launch and signing! Frank’s subject, DJ Al Cole, broadcast an amazing CHRW radio show in the 80s called Young, Fast & Scientific (hence the title of the new book, ahem). Cole also managed a bunch of punk bands, and even started the local masterpiece zine What Wave. You can still hear the What Wave radio show helmed by Dave O’Halloran on CHRW every Thursday night—which happens to be our favourite time to tune in. We love everything about this new book and anticipate ignoring all of our customers as we eagerly comb its pages. Frank will be here from 2-4 on Saturday, ready to do our entire job for us while we flip hypnotically through his work.
Speaking of CHRW…
We now have a ridiculous ad in regular rotation! We have both had shows on CHRW, or have been a part of shows over the years, but none of our amateur radio efforts thus far have ascended the Mount Everest of camp the way this new ad does. We mean, it’s no What Wave. It’s no Young, Fast & Scientific, but our ad was deftly recorded in one take at our dining room table with a Blue Yeti microphone and edited with Audacity on an old Macbook running Big Sur. We had a carefully crafted script, but Jason impulsively threw it to the wolves. He birthed a lovely thing, indeed, and it is not just for us! It’s an ad for the whole Vintage Showroom!
We know that sending out an email about an ad is redundant. Why are we advertising our advertising? Jason’s just really proud of the stupid ad that we made, and despite our children’s insistence that being on the radio is pretty unexceptional in comparison to YouTube shorts, hearing our bookshop’s name spoken on the air still sends us swimming. We have retained the inner child of the 1980s who got a kick out of recording themselves on cassette and playing it back to hear how weird our voices sounded.
Perhaps the blithe and bored response of our children offers a clue as to why we do what we do, and love what we do. The way we see it, everything is supposedly available, but at the same time, nothing is real or important—or it is real and important but just for you. The great void of content seems built to tailor a discrete and incentivized shadow of desire that follows you around everywhere, whispering for attention.
Places like CHRW publicly wade through the noise and give it an amateur, honest shape. There’s a real person who says, “How about this lovely song?” Or, in our case, “How about this lovely book?” Wanna read it? Wanna step into a place where we’ve thrown a sheet over the invisible form of culture? It’s not perfect. It’s more like a fort we built with the couch cushions, but, hey, you are invited!
So…after that self-aggrandizingness, here is: our ad on CHRW!
Much love,
Jason & Vanessa
