The conference was a wild event. Popular Culture includes, well, almost everything. Somebody does it, whatever it is, and they were all there, gathered together in the town that defines Popular Culture. Lots of people dressed as their favorite Star Trek characters, lots of sessions about Spider Man, lots of research papers about Professional Wrestling. The guide book listing all the sessions, times and locations was three inches thick for a four-day conference. There on page 472, down in the corner, was my session: Screenplay Writing in the College Composition Classroom.
It went well. But after all the preparation and planning for my presentation, I found that the best part of the conference was everything else. I spent day after day enjoying all the other presenters' scholarly talks on things I would not have thought could be scholarly topics. One that I attended was "Post-Modern Clothing Design and Marketing." A member of the panel had failed to show up, so I stepped in and gave an impromptu talk about making shoes, with the self-made shoes on my feet as examples.
But what made that session most memorable, what ultimately changed my life, was a slide show about the Church of Craft.
The Church of Craft believes that people should make things. That's it. No hymnals, no ceremonies, no prayers or dogma, just handcrafts. Rather than listen to a preacher, their spiritual convocations involve sitting in a circle in somebody's living room, the coffee table piled with tools and materials and, usually (from what I can tell), cookies. They just get together and make stuff and talk and eat cookies. They figure this is enough spiritual enlightenment for anybody.
Every major city around the world has a branch now: Houston, Tokyo, Athens, Des Moines--the photo above is in Prague--and the list goes on. They are everywhere, and they pose a threat to America's Corporate Value System. They seem peaceful enough, but as I listened intently to tales of heroic exploits of the great Crafters of yore, my spine tingled. This, I thought, this is how the Industrial Revolution ends, not with a bang but with a crochet hook.
I guess any fanatical sect is going to have a dark side, and the Church of Craft does not keep theirs a secret. They are so reckless, so driven, so willing to risk everything to spread their faith that, well, I'll let these photographs tell the story...
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| Portland |
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| London |
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| Montreal |
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| Perth |
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| Saskatoon |
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| The Black Forest |
What began as a seemingly harmless social organization has grown to be a worldwide assault on the very foundations of our lives. They are all around us, quietly undermining the institutions that we Americans have come to take for granted: television and shopping. Sometimes their gatherings take a turn for the dark side, and the church will go out in the wee hours of night, raking the coals of hell with their knitting needles. People wake in the morning to find that they, their houses, their pets, their bicycles or their trees have been "yarn bombed." All of a sudden their entire world is covered in coozies.
For the remainder of my visit in San Francisco I kept noticing knitting in the oddest places. They--the Guerilla Knitters, the Yarn Bombers, the Wooly Taggers --call their nocturnal creations by many names, but one of the more prevalent is "coozies." I saw a bicycle that had been parked in the same place for too long fall victim to the wooly taggers: its handlebars were tagged with a nice warm wool handlebar-coozie. Trees, telephone poles, and handrails are particularly defenseless when a gang of yarn bombers goes out late at night looking for something that will stay still long enough to get bombed.
In their own fuzzy way, the Church of Craft is offering the world a new vision, a radical, fanatical, twisted (spun?) vision of what life is all about. They seem to believe that it's not about gasoline or electricity, not even about power at all. They think it's about knitting.
I returned from San Francisco a changed man. The very next semester I began to preach the new gospel, thinking of ways to work the Church of Craft into my writing assignments. I had high hopes for one student, Beatrice. While the rest of my students spent their class time texting, Beatrice sat on the back row knitting. She was covered in knitwear from afro to All Stars, and seemed to be as placid and peaceful as a summer breeze, never perturbed by the small stuff like homework and grades. Beatrice operated on a higher plane than the rest of us. Unfortunately, when I assigned a research paper on the Church of Craft, Beatrice disappeared. I later learned she got pregnant and her parents had dragged her out of that school. I'm sure her kid will never want for baby booties.
If you do a little research, you'll find that Church gatherings are unevenly mixed: mostly women, not as many men. I suspect they'd get more guys to join if they changed the name to something more male-appealing, such as "Concealed Carry Class of Craft" or "Chain Saw Soul." But maybe the issue is something more inherent in male-ness itself. Guys tend to do forms of craft that make it hard to keep up a conversation, and even harder to keep metal shavings and sawdust from getting into the cookie jar. But the Church of Craft remains at least ostensibly open to all comers, regardless of spiritual or mechanical preferences. Their single, all encompassing commandment is "Do Your Own Thing, but Don't Burn the Cookies."
Me, I would love to live in a world where everybody just did their own thing. It gives me no thrill to see a row of people who look like little business clones, dressed for success, or mile after mile of men in chinos and polo shirt. People who have a "my own thing" to do are far more interesting. The interesting people in life are like the interesting places, interesting foods, and interesting experiences: unexpected, surprising, richly textured. These are also the characteristics that make for great stories, great life and, if you think about it, great coozies.
To view some of the author's own creations ... visit his shop, Shibumilife, at ETSY.com.
