It all started with guitars. I play guitar, but beyond knowing how to change a string and tune it, I had never really thought about how it worked, how it was put together. Then one day I thought about it and started watching videos posted by luthiers on YouTube, which led me inexorably from making guitars to repairing guitars, which led to the algorithm to show me videos of all sorts of other things. repaired. Such is free association in the era of late capitalism.
But once I saw Awesome Restoration’s rehabilitation of a little furry bear riding a crank scooter – which included building a small wooden chair for the bear to sit on while the scooter was taken apart, repaired, repainted and reassembled – there was no turning back.
I was late to this party. “Restoration video” turns out to be a well-established genre with, I suspect, hundreds of dedicated channels, each with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of subscribers. You may know “The Repair Shop” (BritBox, but with many episodes available on YouTube)a British series in production since 2017 in which guests bring wounded family heirlooms and sentimental keepsakes to a cabin in the woods to be rejuvenated by expert artisans. Judi Dench brought a pocket watch, King Charles a vase. These channels, which come from all over the world, are like that, but without sentimental stories.
That’s not why I became interested in restorations, but as a bonus, they provide a wonderful distraction during these uncertain times. The fact that they have soothing properties is not lost on producers; many clips feature ASMR in the title, referring to this brand of audiovisual content intended to relax the listener/viewer. And in an age where people can seemingly be fooled at any time, these videos offer strong documentary evidence of expertise, skill, and fine motor skills.
They follow a three-act narrative, leaning toward a happy ending. Something begins in disrepair, disarray, bad condition. A hero arrives, armed with knowledge and skills, to get to the root of the problem. Finally, the object returns to its health, its previous state or, perhaps, something better. There is drama, there can be comedy. It’s even a kind of love story, if you want to personalize a toy car, a guitar or a pocket watch. If it is always more or less the same plot, the details are always different – the devil is in the details, they say, but God also (says Mies van der Rohe) is God.
Items to be repaired include antique toys and games, mechanical piggy banks, hand-cranked coffee grinders – most restorers seem to have made one – locks, furniture, pinball machines, gumball machines, espresso, typewriters, pencil sharpeners, cash registers, leather goods, artwork, knives, guns, shoes and all manner of gadgets and gizmos of the pre-digital age. Some restorers are professionals, but many others seem to be amateurs, seeking challenge, fun and satisfaction. They came out of their basements, sheds and garages to achieve a kind of stardom. Many have Patreons; some sell derivative products.
But unlike celebrities who celebrate themselves on social media, most are relatively anonymous: their identity is their work. We see their hands, like those of a magician performing magic, in close-up, but rarely more. Sometimes, as in the mesmerizing microscopic world of watch repair, it’s just a matter of fingertips.
Their channels have names like Restomaniac, Restorology, Restoration Station, Rusty Shades Restoration, Rescue and Restore, Old Things Never Die, Cool Again Restoration and Not great restorations (by “Dr. Beer”, who reviews a different beer in each episode). Some clips involve narration. (Here is Nekkid watchmakerwho looks a bit like Werner Herzog, describing a part he tries to clean: “The stains were like the teeth of a bad tobacco chewer in a western. “) But most are satisfied with the sounds of scraping, sawing, sanding, drilling and hammering. Some provide captions, while others let the images speak for themselves.
Even if you weren’t that kid who took apart your toys to see how they were made — and there’s a lot of ingenuity just in building one Plastic “Star Wars” X-wing fighter – there’s a vicarious pleasure in seeing this done, especially if you’re not the type who could ever put things back together. (I mean me.) I didn’t expect to be so interested in the unscrewed screws, the bent tabs, the machines reduced to components, cleaned and painted, with newly made missing parts. And yet, it’s not so surprising: we are, after all, the animal that loves before and after photos – even if in restoration videos there is also a good before that precedes the bad before; the goal is to return to that original state and, in doing so, move forward.
It is true that the success of the genre means that there are fake restoration videos, where the creators dirty an object in order to clean it, and thus recover some of the money that can be made through the YouTube economy. In fact, there are enough of them that they have inspired a video subgenre dedicated to challenging them. However, a little common sense will help distinguish genuine articles from spurious articles. (Any video that begins with someone finding a dirty old camera or Game Boy console in a trash pile should not be trusted.)
On the day of what is without exaggeration called the most important election of our time, ignoring current political news in favor of restoring an antique cheese slicer may seem frivolous. But broken things will have to be fixed. (Please see the Oscar-winning film “The last repair shop”, co-produced by the LA Times, about the people who repair LAUSD students’ instruments and the students whose instruments are repaired.) Some of us will have to repair things, whether or not they are of any practical use. And it’s a beautiful thing.
