Things that we create ourselves still give great satisfaction.

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The Northwest Underground’s fondness for the self-crafted strikes an enormously responsive chord in me.  Crafts were also popular in the 60s counterculture, although the term “popular” seems way too shallow.  At the time, I thought of crafts as perhaps the most tangible and durable artifacts of The Revolution, because they changed the scale and terms of things so that real people and the things they made could matter once again.

In the 60s, the feeling was that mainstream culture’s artifacts had gotten far too slick and unfathomable.  None of the working guts of anything showed anymore;  products were all supposed to dazzle us with their “Look Ma, no hands,” Jetsons-style techno-magical sleekness.  The result was that if, say, a piece of chrome trim on your car started to come loose, you couldn’t take the simple self-reliant action of tightening it up, because there were no screws or bolts or fasteners of any kind showing.  This produced a kind of enforced helplessness. 

In the late sixties, our preference for more traditional crafts reflected a yearning for things that were not only closer to the earth and nature, but also more meaningful to us by virtue of being more involving.   All of this made them feel more deeply real to us.

 

(c) COPYRIGHT 2000 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.