Bohemian Burbs: Black & Read
Decider bravely ventures into the suburbs—and lives to tell the tale.
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The last 15 years have been good for longtime Colorado residents; they’ve gotten to see Denver and Boulder, each in their own way, transform from cow towns into world-class cities (or close enough for us, anyway). Of course, the surrounding suburban wasteland—littered with decaying shopping centers and dollar theaters—haven’t always fared so well. Still, the savvy strip-mall surfer knows that there are there are treasures to be discovered among the chain restaurants and cookie-cutter houses that lie just outside city limits. For instance: Black & Read.
Sticking out like a sore thumb in Arvada alongside a lonely Hobby Lobby and a not-so-super Target, Black & Read is a multimedia smorgasbord that’s specialized in music, movies, books, and games for over a decade. The posters hanging in the front window give shoppers a tantalizing peek at what’s offered inside: Earth, Wind & Fire and KMFDM get equal billing alongside tattered old flyers for events which were cancelled long ago.
Inside, the store could be the set for a deleted scene from Ghost World: Teenagers can be seen picking up everything they need make the transition from hopeless nerds into pseudo-intellectual snobs: Beat literature and Sartre’s Being And Nothingness are just a 20-sided dice-throw away from a case filled with Dungeons & Dragons paraphernalia. Long-forgotten pulp paperbacks that your parents (or even grandparents) were embarrassed to be seen reading are piled up here, as well, available for purchase under the auspices of irony. Like the best used bookstores, dog-eared paperbacks are strewn at random throughout the isles. One of the many handwritten, get-off-my-lawn worthy signs hung throughout the store reads, “Hitler didn’t put books back when he was done looking at them. Do you want to be like Hitler?”
Black & Read’s selection of VHS tapes (remember those?) are organized using the same philosophy—which is to say, digging is half the fun. Shoppers burrowing through the piles of straight-to-video movies staring Don “The Dragon” Wilson may be able to turn up a copy of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Of course, some cineastes have been searching endlessly for that copy of Cyber Tracker 2, and there’s a good chance they can find it here on DVD, as well. But VHS tapes aren’t the only ostensibly archaic media platform stockpiled here. Vinyl LPs, both new and used, consume almost half the considerable floorspace of the store. Black & Read’s music staff seem to shares the record collector’s obsessive tendencies minue the urban record-store clerk snobbery. So go ahead, pick up that Ratt album with pride. After all, you’re in the suburbs. There’s no no need to play it cool.
