Germination

Who You Calling Dummy? Gunther mans the counter culture at Girard Avenue's GERM bookstore. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

A new Fishtown bookstore wants to bug your brain

by A.D. Amorosi

The scene: Macramé Christs line the walls. The music of Gavin Bryars and castrato singer Alessandro Moreschi fills the intimate room, one wall of which is lined with shelves labeled "Secret History" and "Our Mysterious Brain," bearing tomes on cultural pessimism and mind control. A black-capped mannequin called Gunther sits in a corner, a green light hovering noxiously overhead. The usual fare of wine is served alongside "Judas IsCARROTS" and unleavened bread. A plate on the door reads, "We milk androids here."

This is the opening reception for "The Passion of the Bailey" — 60 versions of Da Vinci's The Last Supper — at Fishtown's all-conspiracies-considered bookstore GERM. Those in attendance are not goons, geeks or freaks. Anarchists and Stalinists, yes. But even these are recognizable folk from WHYY and TLA, local musician David E. Williams (paramour of GERM's owner), neighborhood police officers and housewives. This is the usual crowd at the store, which opened quietly in September and where only books on conspiracy theories, assassination secrets, UFOs, ESP and the all-around unexplained are sold.

"People you wouldn't suspect as being open to alternative thinking are really into relatively extreme theories," says GERM owner Jennifer Bates, a painter and all-in-black beauty whose demeanor is classic lit-punk circa Mapplethorpe-era Patti Smith.

Bates talks about GERM's habitués as one would Ritalin children — an enthusiastic, blabby lot happy for the chance to chat about offbeat ideas rarely contemplated elsewhere.

"People who have taken the time to look realize that things aren't quite what they seem," says Bates. "When they snap into consciousness and start questioning de facto beliefs, they can't discuss it with their friends who are still in the "hive-mind hologram mode' for fear of ridicule. So they talk to me, a complete stranger."

The enigmatic, Miami-born and RISD-schooled Bates shared an unspoken bond with her father, who was in military intelligence.

"After he died, I discovered he had various aliases, and that the name I knew him by wasn't [his real name]," says Bates.

Among his papers were Masonic lodge IDs and "atomic certifications." He also had a library of books about UFOs, which she read at a young age. "I never found out whether he was interested in UFOs and read the books to learn more about them, or if he was comparing what he already knew to what was in the books."

Post-college, she lived in Manhattan (hanging with the types you find in Velvet Underground songs), Hollywood (where she encountered people who claimed to have been experimented on by Mensa) and Miami (where she worked at the Miami Space Transit Planetarium for Jack Horkheimer of PBS' Star Hustler/Star Gazer fame). She moved to Philly in the early 1990s with a friend and ran novelty store Fuzzy Dude, the Roxy Theater and the cash office at HMV.

Around the time she moved to Philly, she had a revelation. "I decided I would open a bookstore, call it GERM, and only sell books I liked, books unpopular with the people I think of as "holograms.'" She says, "I had to wait 10 years for the conditions to be right."

She found those conditions on East Girard Avenue. GERM's mission is to carry books and show art not in lockstep with mediocre thinkers. "I like the written word — there's something alchemical about the letters and words on a page transmitting through your eye and generating images in your head. Sometimes your whole worldview can change with one sentence."

That means paintings like Bates' Alchemy, which deals with the transformation of humans into something "better" through genetic and surgical manipulation. That means shelves filled with William Burroughs, Zecharia Sitchin's works on the ancient Sumerians, lots of William Gibson and Aldous Huxley, and books about inventor Nikola Tesla.

Bates doesn't worry about the death of independent bookstores in a time of corporate supersizing. "The greater concern should be the death of independent thought," she counters on cue. "Better that you encounter concepts and ideologies and reject them than to never encounter them at all." To that end, Bates is starting a UFO discussion group in January for people who are interested in all aspects of interstellar phenomenon.

"It's a shame society hasn't progressed beyond exclusionary tribal thinking," figures Bates. "But hey, GERM will be there for you when you wake up."

GERM Books and Gallery, 308 E. Girard Ave., is open Fridays 10 a.m.-7 p.m. , Saturdays noon-7 p.m. (except Christmas Day) and Sundays noon-5 p.m. Call 215-423-5002 or visit www.germbooks.com. "The Passion of the Bailey" continues through Sun., Dec. 26. A new exhibit, Helmut K's "Photographs From Heaven," will be on display Jan. 1-30 with an opening reception Fri., Jan. 7, 5-7 p.m.