Bent Crayon Records: Indie Rock Shangri-La 
BY AMANDA SCHOONMAKER

It can be such an easy trap. With the spread of the web, the option of anonymity is suddenly available for any record consumer. You purchase that mediocre Letter E album from a random online record store and a week later, a plain utilitarian cardboard package addressed to you arrives in the mailroom. Inside you find poorly designed stickers and coupons intended to make you love the unnamed online record store but which really only serve to make you feel vaguely empty and detached from the music for which you supposedly feel such great affinity. You regret it in the end, buying that album of bland mood music meant to be played in your hypothetical converted loft in Brooklyn. You lament the fact that your e-commerce has helped stores like Insound move into a new Soho office space. Something is amiss.
But on the east edge of greater Cleveland’s industrial working class neighborhood of Lakewood there is a somewhat peculiarly-placed record store called Bent Crayon. The store is easily northeast Ohio’s best approximation of the haven for indie rock consumer commerce that is New York’s Other Music or London’s Rough Trade.
Owned by John Cellura (known in many circles to be the haughtiest man in northeast Ohio), Bent Crayon functions as a sort of Shangri-La for a particularized group of area record collectors. 
The store itself, like every other architectural marvel of Cleveland, seems awkward, almost accidental. Clear, fairly expansive windows provide a spectacular view of dirty, run -down Detroit Avenue. Proving a pleasant contrast to the somewhat filthy exterior, the store’s walls are white and clean, though indie rock posters threaten to overtake the minimalist design aesthetic. Adding to the potential sense of awkwardness, the shelves are so packed with items that it is often difficult to flip through the merchandise. Many records even pile up in random corners of the checkered floor. 
But even if it’s a bit cramped, Bent Crayon houses the best collection of reasonably priced new electronic, experimental, and rock music in the area. The shelves are crammed, simply because Cellura obsessively stocks the store with a wide variety of titles. The section of indie-appropriated hip-hop is smaller, but impressive. The selection of experimental (read: freeform) music is really one of the best I have ever encountered. Titles in the experimental section vary from the Kronos Quartet to the Swans to every single one of those pretentious Thurston Moore “jazz” albums you might ever desire. Yes, the Knitting Factory label is obviously very well represented at Bent Crayon. And the jazz titles are stocked to easily appease all of the indie rock purveyors of “fake-jazz” and maybe even real jazz enthusiasts. 
The rock section is the largest. The store tends to stock all big indie labels, like Drag City or Merge, and many more obscure ones. The selection of older, influential music is average. The store probably houses the available Fall catalog in its entirety, but not every Velvet Underground bootleg you might desire or any vinyl copies of MC5 albums. The 7” collection is always complete. 
Bent Crayon also carries most new, slightly obscure magazines such as the Minus Times and Magnet, which always provide good coffee table material with which you can impress friends even if you are too lazy to read them yourself. 
Bent Crayon is the physical manifestation of the generalized indie record collector’s desire to heal the broken self via the consumption of fetishized objects. Shopping at Bent Crayon is the ultimate ambivalent, paradoxical indie rock experience: you love it with a minor sense of discomfort as you participate in the exchange of cultural capital. 
With the loss of the lovingly but spastically stocked music section of the Co-Op Bookstore, Oberlin students tend to miss out on the best part of buying records: the greedily individualistic and yet lovingly communal experience. 
Before Insound and Ebay, we all used to suffer when clerks smirked if we purchased the wrong title. And best of all, before everyone got lazy and started buying records online, we used to discuss the records with people from whom we purchased them. 
Buying records on the web cuts out the wonderfully awkward, ambivalent experience that record shopping really should be. It’s just too easy. 
Every time I go up to the counter at Bent Crayon, Cellura and I discuss every title I am purchasing in minute detail. Then I always ask him why he, a guy of such refined tastes and sensibilities, stays in Ohio. His response is always a blank stare which subtly hints at his feelings of minor disdain for me. Chances are he’ll stare at you in the same way, but it’s all part of the worthwhile Bent Crayon experience.

Bent Crayon Records is located at 11600 Detroit Avenue in Lakewood.