This trip to Toronto is falling together easily and naturally, and I’m getting to visit with lots of friends who are still in my life for very good reasons, I’m reminded, as I spend time with them.
I’ve also been stocking up on bookbinding supplies — dangerous, but it’s raw material for creative work, the one thing in life I’m willing to spend the most on.
Toronto’s a good place to get these supplies because the city has a very strong DIY culture. Last weekend I went to the One of a Kind fair, a national show that takes place here, along with another fair crammed into St Stephen’s church, and yesterday I made it to the City of Craft event. A lot of other fairs happened this weekend, too, but I couldn’t get to them.
Funny, I like looking at this stuff, but I’m not inclined to buy it, partly because I wouldn’t know what to do with it, because I’m not the target audience (e.g. for stuffed animals, purses, hats, etc.), and because I don’t have unlimited funds “”yet, as I mentioned, I’ll spend anything on tools that will let me do crafty things.
Wandering around these events, though, I can’t help but notice that it gets a bit samey after a while. I like it — the silkscreened prints and T-shirts, the handmade cards and books, the ugly-cute stuffed animals, the home-made clothes and accessories, but there’s a definite style to it, lots of it featuring 60s/70s-style mis-registered prints of birds and twigs — and my fear is it’s such a strong and definite style people will get sick of it and ultimately move away from this kind of work.
That would be a shame, because this movement is the first effective and lasting reaction I’ve seen to a widely felt tiredness with mass commercial culture we have no say in or power over. Indie culture is locally relevant and anyone is allowed to do it. This is an important message, and it would be a shame if that got lost just because people were tired of the particular look it’s taken on.
I had a great chat with my friend Bert this afternoon over so many coffees that when I met another friend later I realised I was acting completely high. Bert suggested that the current craft culture looks this way because of the craftspeople’s age: It looks like what was around during our childhoods. I’d go one further and suggest that most of us probably haven’t had this much creative permission and activity since then… until now.
Still, it means Toronto’s going through a very cool period in which a lot of people are stepping forward to take ownership over their local culture and their creative capabilities, and that makes this an exciting place to visit.
<
p>
