OUT OF CONTROL: Cary Loren & BookBeat
By John Sinclair

“Our bookstore’s like a screaming little kid that’s out of control,” BookBeat proprietor Cary Loren confesses, looking sort of sheepishly around his overstuffed shop at the outer corner of a strip mall at 10-1/2 Mile and Greenfield in Oak Park, Michigan.

He’s got that right: “out of control” is the proper name for this perfect mess of a place crammed with books and visual curiosities of unseemly descriptions. True, the store presents a penetrable opening space sporting popular literary products from the present, and there’s a recognizable counter with cash register and other expected signs of business activity, but past this navigable vestibule the books come stacked up thicker and higher with each step toward the rear.

BookBeat isn’t some dusty relic of the days of bookshop glory, although the shop is clearly the creation of serious modern intellectuals of the humanitarian persuasion. It’s a bright, colorful, warm and welcoming place for intellectual stimulation, art and politics, with a parallel reality as a comprehensive source for state-of-the-art children’s books, classic literature and progressive texts.

Like all successful shops BookBeat pays close attention to the contemporary marketplace and takes great pains with its art and literary specialties and its treasured legion of readers. The store’s regular reading series features the usual traveling authors and more idiosyncratic guests like Nikki Giovanni, Ira Cohen, Stanley Mouse, Faith Ringgold, Darlene Love, Anne Rice, Sonic Youth, Billy Name, Ultra Violet, Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw. They also host in-person writer events at nearby libraries and cultural centers and sponsor book clubs and book-related community events of many kinds.

These crucial outreach activities have combined with the shop’s extensive and eclectic inventory to anchor BookBeat firmly in the center of the local literary and arts community. “I think you can have a good bookstore with a lot of different things,” Loren says, “but you still need literature, and experimental literature, so that’s been a core part, and the photography’s been a core part.

“But we’re missing the auto repair section, and the computer books…. There’s just whole wads of books that we just said, ‘Fuck It,’ you know. I wanna have certain books on my shelf and I don’t care if it’s there a year or ten years, it’s still a viable thing.”

Loren’s sensitivity to the needs of his clientele has paid off in the best possible way. “Our customers are very loyal,” Cary says, “and they’re voting with their feet when they come here instead of going to one of the chain stores. Those places are becoming more dominant and more controlling of the whole environment.

“What worries me,” he says, “is that I don’t think there’s another generation coming up that understands the value of independent bookstores and of independent culture in general, as opposed to the chainstore reality.”

He has every right to be worried, because without new seekers of wisdom and truth the independent bookstore as we know it is doomed to extinction. The converse is also true: Absent the classic independent bookstores like BookBeat, how will young readers ever understand the value of these places or be able to measure the hole left in our cultural life by their disappearance?

So much of the world represented by places like BookBeat has passed on that their continued survival is a critical issue for the future. The great thing about them is that the mental world where I live and prosper still exists here. It’s an environment specifically designed for those of us who have the mental patience to investigate and discover new realms of intelligence and creativity, and you can tell at once it’s not run by someone who got an MBA in management and trained at Borders or Waldenbooks.

In fact, BookBeat was created by a pair of young intellectuals from suburban Detroit as “something they could do” after college. “And, you know,” Cary says, “I was not capable of doing anything else. When I was going to school I was working for other bookstores, so I knew I could do this. I wanted to go into arts, but I also knew that I needed to, like, make money. And I didn’t want to stay in school and teach, and I thought, maybe I could do art and things on the side, and be supported by the store, eventually.”

Cary and his wife Colleen opened BookBeat in a former pregnancy boutique called the Purple Pickle in the summer of 1982. “I moved back into my parents’ house when we first opened the store,” Cary recalls, “to save money. Colleen and I both lived with our parents to save money.

“But that was good to be able to put everything into the business for those two years, so we were able to expand. There was a Detroit Edison outlet next door, and three years after we opened we took that space.”

Why the strip mall in Oak Park? “We knew the area, because we had grown up around here,” Cary says. “We started with really nothing—my own collection of books, beat literature and stuff, and we wanted to also relate to the community too, so we were stocking Danielle Steele and Stephen King and whatever people were buying, you know, at the time.

“But our emphasis was on the arts, and children’s books—those are the two areas where we wanted to start off, and we’ve stuck with that.”

The arts make a lot of sense, and popular releases, but what about the children’s books? “There’s a couple reasons for carrying the children’s books,” Cary says. “One, a lot of really great illustrated books started to happen at that time, and we also saw that future readers are children, you know? So we need to indoctrinate children early, because those are your future readers of adult material.

“Colleen’s input has been really important,” Cary adds, “because she’s put so much into the children’s side of the store, and it’s been the money-maker part of the business, certainly of late. She works closely with parents and teachers—she reads a phenomenal amount of material, I mean thousands of books every year, probably three or four thousand books a year.

“And so she has this vast warehouse of, you know, first-hand information from reading so much, and she can tell each teacher what to use for the class being offered, and she can come up with programs and books that not only affect the teacher but all the kids in each classroom. She’s become a great resource for this area.”

How did a couple of nice suburban kids get into all this strangeness? “I was going to Eastern Michigan University, and I got through school by working in pizza places. But I was thinking of the bookstores in Ann Arbor. Borders had just started when we got to Ann Arbor, and there was Centicore, that was one of my favorite bookstores, and there was David’s Books, a large store on Liberty, it had a lot of hip poetry.

“We met Andy Warhol at the Centicore one time,” Cary laughs. “I was a real Warholite, following his films and stuff, and I used to write to him when I was a high school student, like, ‘If you’ve got any job openings or anything,’ you know, and he’d send back, like, a signed postcard or something.

“But the guy I corresponded with was Jack Smith, who wrote back and said, ‘Come visit me. If you’re ever in New York, I’d like to meet you.’ So I did, and that’s when, like—that’s just before Destroy All Monsters was formed, and so my esthetic really came out of my time in New York with Jack Smith. He was my mentoring experience, and so I brought that back to Ann Arbor, and that became a part of the Destroy All Monsters thing. I was doing films, photography and collages that were in his vein of… camp and strange exotica, you know?”

The lasting effect of Jack Smith’s cultural tutelage persists in Loren’s personal artistic output: Not just his long-standing participation in the pioneering out-rock ensemble Destroy All Monsters, but in films like Shake a Lizard Tail or Rust Belt Rump, Grow Live Monsters, Strange Frut: A History of Detroit Culture (Part One), Letters from the Dead House and Fantomash, and CDs like the seminal DAM: 1974-1976, Backyard Monster Tube & Pig, Music is Revolution and Monster Island albums like From the Michigan Floor, Dream Tiger, Swamp Gas and Killing Me Softly. This is some pretty weird stuff.

But Cary goes even farther back: “I’d also like to mention the influence of the [early ’60s arts collectives] Once Group of Ann Arbor and the Detroit Artists Workshop on what our bookstore became, and also anti-art movements like Fluxus and Dadaism.

“We also try to publish and try to get a few things out. We’ve done books with Lisa Spindler (Perfume), a Homage to Hans Bellmer, the Destroy All Monsters package Geisha This, and the projects we did with you.” [Full disclosure: Cary Loren and this writer have collaborated on several projects at BookBeat, including the books This Is Our Music and PeyoteMind and the CDs of PeyoteMind and Music Is Revolution.]

“We started our little backroom gallery soon after we opened, and we’ve had exhibitions by James Van Der Zee, Weegee, Billy Name, Day of the Dead Mail Art, Bruce of Los Angeles, Jim Shaw Dream Drawings, Gordon Newton, Leni Sinclair, Haitian Voudou flags and objects, Alfred Steiglitz & Cameraworks, Nina Glaser, and the group show titled Women Photograph Mythology.

“Artist and curator Jon Hendricks is currently helping me with a project with one of our gallery photographers, Jeffrey Silverthorne. We published a little book of his photographs of Goth kids, you know, shot in Detroit, with little hand-tipped-in black-and-white contact plates. I related to the Goth kids because they were, to me, like the sub-culture of now, of the ’90s, at that time. So we put this little book called GOTH together and Jon sent a copy to the director, Lars Schwander in Denmark who became interested and is now publishing a catalog and traveling exhibition of Jeffrey’s work.

“Some of the bizarrities we carry? A lot of experimental music, Sun Ra CDs and Sun Ra videos, Harry Bertoia LPs, miniature books, hand made artist books, original photographs, tarot cards and other odd sidelines some might consider ‘out’.”

Finally, looking into the future after 25 years in the same bizarre location: “I don’t know. Nobody’s gonna offer me ten cents for this store. Economics could squeeze us out of it. I mean, it’s gotten tougher—every year it’s tougher—so the economics could really squeeze us out.

“I’m know I’m not gonna get a buyout, but I gotta think of this in terms of my retirement, you know, and the thing is, I’ll never get out of it! There’s no leaving it. It’s impossible….”

© 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.