Restoration videos offer a soothing distraction in a time of great uncertainty – Twin Cities

It all started with guitars. I play the guitar, but aside from knowing how to change and tune a string, I’ve never given much thought to how it works and how it’s put together. Then one day I thought about it and started watching videos posted by luthiers on YouTube, which led me inexorably from building guitars to repairing guitars, which in turn led to the algorithm showing me videos of all sorts of other things being repaired. This is free association in the age of late capitalism.

But when I saw Awesome Restoration rehabilitate a furry little bear on a wind-up scooter – which included building a small wooden chair for the bear to sit on while the scooter was disassembled, repaired, repainted and reassembled – I left it doesn’t go any further back.

I was late to this party. “Restoration video” is proving to be a well-established genre with, I suspect, hundreds of dedicated channels, each with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of subscribers. You may be familiar with The Repair Shop (BritBox, but with many episodes available on YouTube), a British series in production since 2017 in which guests bring injured family heirlooms and sentimental keepsakes to a cabin in the woods to be replaced by an expert to rejuvenate craftsmen. Judi Dench brought a pocket watch, King Charles brought a vase. These channels that come from all over the world are like that, but without the sentimental backstories.

That’s not why I’m interested in restorations, but as a bonus they provide a wonderful distraction during this time of uncertainty. The fact that they have calming properties has not gone unnoticed by the manufacturers; Many clips contain ASMR in the title, referring to the type of audiovisual content intended to relax the listener/viewer. And in a time when people seem to be fooled all the time, these videos are tangible documentary evidence of expertise, competence and fine motor skills.

You follow a story in three acts that moves towards a happy ending. Something starts out in a bad state, in disarray, and in disrepair. A hero armed with knowledge and skill arrives to get to the bottom of the problem. Eventually the item returns to health, to its former self, or perhaps to 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, guitar or pocket watch. If it’s more or less the same plot over and over again, the details are always different – the devil is in the details, they say, but so is God (said Mies van der Rohe).

Items to be repaired include old toys and games, mechanical money boxes, hand-cranked coffee grinders – most restorers seem to have done one of these – locks, furniture, pinball machines, gumball machines, espresso machines, typewriters, pencil sharpeners, cash registers, leather goods, artwork, knives, guns , shoes and all sorts of gizmos and gadgets from the pre-digital age. Some of the restorers are professionals, but many appear to be hobbyists, dedicated to challenge, fun and satisfaction. They have come out of their basements, sheds and garages to achieve some kind of stardom. Many have Patreons; some sell merchandise.

But unlike the more common social media stars who celebrate themselves, most are relatively anonymous – their identity is their work. We see her hands, like those of a magician conjuring close-ups, but rarely more than that. Sometimes, as in the fascinating microscopic world of watch repair, it’s just your 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 Terrible Restorations (from “Dr. Beer,” who reviews a different beer in each episode). Some clips include narration. (Here’s Nekkid Watchmaker, sounding a bit like Werner Herzog, describing a part he’s trying to clean: “The stains were like the teeth of a tobacco-chewing villain in a Western.”) But most are happy with the sounds of cockroaches, Sawing, grinding, drilling and hammering. Some provide captions while others let the images speak for themselves.

Even if you weren’t the kind of kid who took apart his toys to see how they were made – and there’s a lot of ingenuity in the construction of a plastic “Star Wars” X-wing fighter alone – there’s a certain joy in it , watching it come into being. especially if you weren’t the kind of person who could ever put things back together. (I mean myself.) I didn’t expect to be so interested in loosening screws, bending tabs, dismantling machines into parts, cleaning and painting, and remaking missing parts. And yet it’s not so surprising: we are, after all, the animal that loves a before-and-after photo – although in restoration videos there is also a good before that comes before the bad before; It’s about returning to that original state and thereby moving forward.

It is true that the success of the genre means that there are fake restoration videos whose creators dirty an object to clean it, thereby taking a share of the money that can be made from the YouTube economy. In fact, there are enough of them that they’ve inspired a subgenre of videos dedicated to highlighting them. Still, a little common sense can distinguish the genuine articles from the disingenuous ones. (Any video that begins with someone finding a dirty old camera or Game Boy console in a pile of trash is not to be trusted.)

On election day, which is without exaggeration described as the most consequential election of our time, it may seem reckless to ignore political news and instead watch the restoration of an antique cheese slicer. But broken things need to be repaired. (Please watch the Oscar-winning film “The Last Repair Shop,” co-produced by the LA Times, about the people who repair instruments for LAUSD students and the students whose instruments are repaired.) Some of us need to fix things, whether they are of practical use or not. And that’s a beautiful thing.