1500 W. 17th
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Behind the striped awnings and ketchup red ironwork you’ll find a white box of a space filled with arty products ranging from highbrow to dirt-ass: a thick catalog, on creamy matte stock, from a Swiss art show on symbols of spiritual physics; a spiral-bound cookbook of real and invented celebrity recipes by local artist Lauren Anderson; Danielle Aubert’s limited-edition volume of drawings made in Excel; all the records on LA now-punk label Teenage Teardrops; Luke Fishbeck’s hand-painted stickers; trinket jewelry by Dramastically Cute Treasures. The eclectic collection is heavily curated but loosely organized–zines of motivational-text art are grouped with batiked T-shirts and seven-inches from a suburban noise label, for example.
Golden Age is relaxed and browser friendly: “At specialty bookstores people often feel like they can’t buy anything without already knowing about it,” says Martine Syms, who runs the shop with fellow recent School of the Art Institute grad Marco Kane. “Here you’re free to ask questions and discover stuff–you don’t have to already be familiar with some weird Finnish noise band.”
