Ester Bloom is the artisan culture columnist for Cheek Teeth. She blogs at Full of Pith and Vinegar.
My best friend Charrow's homemade cranberry-raspberry jam tastes like it's straight from the farm. The vapors given off by her homemade vanilla extract call to mind old cookie plants in factory towns, while her partner JJ's homemade yogurt and granola have a wholesome, early-days-of-Moosewood, late 70's vibe. This phenomenon of Returning to Homemade, featuring amateur stabs at everything from beer to Kombucha, is not exactly new, but its prevalence is. Once upon a time, you couldn't look into someone's bathtub without finding an attempt at gin; now you can't peek at a backyard without encountering a chicken coop.
My best friend Charrow's homemade cranberry-raspberry jam tastes like it's straight from the farm. The vapors given off by her homemade vanilla extract call to mind old cookie plants in factory towns, while her partner JJ's homemade yogurt and granola have a wholesome, early-days-of-Moosewood, late 70's vibe. This phenomenon of Returning to Homemade, featuring amateur stabs at everything from beer to Kombucha, is not exactly new, but its prevalence is. Once upon a time, you couldn't look into someone's bathtub without finding an attempt at gin; now you can't peek at a backyard without encountering a chicken coop.
The post-modern sketch comedy show Portlandia on IFC mocks the contemporary urge to do things the old-fashioned, messy, and time-consuming way ("We can pickle that!"). In Season 2, episode 5, a song-and-dance number sends up this lifestyle as a return to the 1890s.
The loving mockery resonates because the lifestyle being lampooned goes beyond food to aesthetics and general rejection of modern conveniences. Many of the same people who make their own sauerkraut also eschew belts for suspenders, cars for bikes, and five-blade razors for full, Tevye-ish beards (regardless of how the ladies may feel about it).
The rejection of modern conveniences hits a wall, though, when it comes to Apple products. Maybe an iPad 3 should look incongruous in the hands of a guy with a well-groomed mustache and a bow-tie, or a barista with asymmetrical hair and over-sized glasses, but it doesn't. And although plenty of hipsters fetishize typewriters, either in the abstract or as collectibles, who still tries to hammer out a novel on a Remington Portable?
I look forward to the day that Jonathan Franzen announces that he hates not just Twitter but laptops too and he composes best at a desk with a nib pen and an inkwell (and a wastebasket, of course, to be filled with crumpled drafts). Then we'll see whether the back-to-the-old-school impulse catches on and manages to extend even to writing and writers.
I look forward to the day that Jonathan Franzen announces that he hates not just Twitter but laptops too and he composes best at a desk with a nib pen and an inkwell (and a wastebasket, of course, to be filled with crumpled drafts). Then we'll see whether the back-to-the-old-school impulse catches on and manages to extend even to writing and writers.
