In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools unsuffered. We hope it’s a welcome break from the world of shit falling on our heads daily in the political sphere.
Tonight’s Topic: In Honor of Labor Day
For this week’s Medium Cool, which is the the closest edition to Labor Day, let’s talk about work.
Work in and of itself, the grind of it, is not often the focus of film and fiction. We might see people working, but it’s not usually the subject.
I just got a text from my dept chair, who works so damn hard. He’s also a master carpenter, and has been, in his words, “playing hookey” for a few days, building some cabinets for a bathroom project. He said it’s making him clearer about teaching, and more patient about doing the shit he has to get done as chair.
It’s exactly what I have been thinking about work and peacefulness, in the sense of craft.
What’s a book (or story) or film, or other artistic object that, for you, best represents labor? It could be its difficulty, or the thanklessness of it. Or it could be the beauty of craft, of a job well done.
I Cannot Keep Up
WaterGirl
I love Witness. I am going to have to watch it again. Hope it’s on Netflix.
cope
“The Repair Shop” on Netflix. Skilled craft persons saving things from the past, most of which have little monetary value.
MattF
Writing is hard work.
BGinCHI
I’ll open with a plug for a poet who always comes to mind on this subject, Philip Levine.
Working-class poems, Detroit, and so on. Good stuff.
Here’s his terrific poem, What Work Is.
Searcher
@cope: Beat me to it.
There are a couple of episodes of Grand Designs where craftsmen build themselves a house, go 20 years over schedule, and create something amazing.
[Usually it’s just people dealing with contractors while talking themselves into larger and larger mortgages.]
EDIT: Here’s the one.
BGinCHI
@MattF: That is so damn true.
Worst part is the look on anyone’s face (including spouse) after they’ve asked “How’s your book going?”
pamelabrown53
Gibbs on NCIS builds boats in his basement. I find that both fascinating and endearing.
narya
Anything by John Sayles–book or movie–but particularly some of the pieces in “At the Anarchists’ Convention,” and “Matewan” (and the book about the making of that movie, actually, if we’re gonna get all meta and recursive about it). “The Dispossessed” by Ursula LeGuin. There’s a line in it about the centrality of work that I first heard while in college that has stayed with me for 40 years and that would have been part of my second book (after dissertation, if I had published that). My dissertation was about (language about) work. Marx/Engels, especially when lined up with Adam Smith. And an essay I read recently about bullshit work and its prevalence.
Gin & Tonic
@pamelabrown53: I built a boat, but in the garage, not the basement.
pamelabrown53
@Gin & Tonic:
Did it float?! What I find fascinating about Gibbs’ boat building is that he does it for the process. Otherwise, why build them in a basement?!
BGinCHI
There’s a terrific piece by Eula Biss in The Paris Review on art & work.
I like Biss’s writing, but part of me rankles at making “art” (not hay, which is too hard for most people to make) out of a failure to work hard and learn something. Her waiter anecdote is really familiar to me, as I worked with many (men/women) who thought working in a restaurant would be easy and fun until they faced the grind and lasted like, a week, or maybe two. Those of us who really needed the money, and were trying to get a PhD at the same time, were working our asses off, and learning to cope. It was hard, and worth it. And we didn’t try to do less so we could read books at work, cuz we couldn’t afford to.
Gin & Tonic
@pamelabrown53: Yes, it is perfectly seaworthy.
piratedan
@narya:
I have to second Matewan as a means to define those who work and those who don’t…so I give you Hazel Dickens…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiGPbHnpQks
and sometimes I really feel like the times parallel those in the past, but instead of the argument being the dignity of work, but rather the dignity of race.
full disclosure, it resonates for me because my Dad was the first generation out of the mines as far back as the mid 1800s and I lost a grandfather to Black Lung. So, its personal.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Fun fact: The Amish are the fastest growing population in the US. Soon, we will all be Amish ; p
RSA
John Vivian, Building Stone Walls, Storey Publishing, 1976.
It’s an oversized paperback, just 108 pages, explaining how to build dry stone walls (mortar “if you absolutely must…”). I spent a few summers in my front yard building short retaining walls and gained an appreciation of the skill and labor involved—you can’t separate the two.
BGinCHI
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Finally, I can wear overalls again.
Delk
For Grace
Curtis Duffy takes a raw space and turns it into a 3 star restaurant.
Sadly, a fight with the landlord caused him to walk out. A 2 year non compete clause prevented him from opening a new restaurant. Even more sad: he finally got to reopen his new place last week. The pandemic is going to make it tough to operate.
BGinCHI
@RSA: Wow. Thanks for this.
The summer I turned 21 I packed my stuff and went to live on Cape Cod in an unfinished house owned by a friend’s parents. The house was just the shell, with only studs in the interior (pun intended). We build a bathroom the first day we lived there, shared a room (we had two cots and a radio). After a week of takeout they delivered a stove and sink for the kitchen. My friend and I worked construction during the day, and on weeknights, listened to music and put up sheetrock (which is why his parents let us live there).
At my job, which was as a member of a small crew rehabbing an old house right on Buzzard Bay, I did all the heavy, shitty labor. Among the things I did that summer was build a sixty foot dry stone wall out of field stones my boss had delivered.
I said, “I don’t know how to do this.” He said, “Just figure it out.”
And I did. It was damn hard, and damn rewarding, and I’ll never forget it.
phdesmond
@BGinCHI:
here’s my poem about my work, if i may:
Villanelle: April 15
Two hundred clients see me every year.
They call or e-mail, and we set a date
as, month by month, the filing deadline nears.
The organized, the ones who face their fears,
the ones due refunds (federal and state) —
I meet those clients early in the year.
Our sessions are relaxed — my schedule’s clear.
They’ve added their receipts; they’re never late.
The calls come faster when the deadline’s near.
Slow filers are predictable, though dear:
next time, they vow, they won’t procrastinate.
April brings half my clients for the year.
In heart-to-hearts that no one else will hear
I jot down notes, ask questions, calculate,
hand them their tax forms as the deadline nears.
I’ve come to feel they always will appear —
old, young, singles, couples gay and straight —
That I’ll see all two hundred every year.
But decades pass, and sterner deadlines near.
BGinCHI
@Delk: Amazing. Where’s the new place?
narya
@piratedan: Nice! thank you for sharing that. The book about the making of the movie is really interesting–it’s a detailed explanation of the actual mechanics of making a movie on a very small budget. I also think “Return of the Secaucus Seven” is about work in some important ways–several of the characters have very “mundane” jobs, and the way they walk about their work is really much about having a job that isn’t fancy. (Compared to “The Big Chill,” which I always thought was a ripoff of Secaucus Seven.) Sayles has been one of my personal heroes forever.
BGinCHI
@phdesmond: This may be the greatest accountancy poem I’ve ever read.
Seriously, thanks for sharing it!
NotMax
Going to go eclectic with a few choices somewhat outside the usual boxes.
Films or TV: Metropolis, Modern Times, Leonard Soloway’s Broadway, Harvest of Shame, Putney Swope, Advertising Rules!, Wages of Fear.
Books: The Foundation trilogy (Isaac Asimov), Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser), Oil for the Lamps of China (Alice Hobart), Work Song (Ivan Doig).
BGinCHI
@narya: Me too. I love S7 and Matewan most of all. Brother from Another Planet and the (sadly forgotten) Lone Star.
Great writer and director. His novels are good too!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@BGinCHI:
LOL
BGinCHI
@NotMax: Finally saw Putney Swope last month. Holy shit, what a film.
Omnes Omnibus
Between the Wars.
Delk
@BGinCHI:
Fulton Market
narya
Let me also add: over the years I’ve developed a prejudice. If you’ve never had to do Shit Work to survive, well, it’s gonna take more time for you to earn my trust. SW is basically anything that is low-paying, grind-it-out, boring . . . that realm. And it has to be something that you have to do–otherwise bills won’t get paid. I realize this is just LIFE for many or most people; given some of the realms in which I have worked, though, I’ve been around a lot of folks who do not have that experience.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: YES.
BB’s catalog full of great stuff about working class folks.
BGinCHI
@Delk: Hmmm.
That area is getting too disneyfied for me.
BGinCHI
@narya: That is the whole damn truth, ruth.
narya
@BGinCHI: Baby, It’s You (and not just because of the Springsteen all over the soundtrack). I actually read his novels before he ever made a movie! Well, and, a lot of Springsteen is about work, and he gets it. Wrecking Ball became my 2nd-favorite (after Darkness), and that is ALL about work. “the hands that built the country we’re always trying to keep out.”
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: My drive from my parents’ place back to Madison on Monday was Billy Bragg oriented. Because Labor Day.
phdesmond
@BGinCHI: thank you, BG!
Ken
Demands links to this and this. Neither of them are on my bucket list, except in a “well if I happen to be nearby” way. Does anyone have other suggestions?
RSA
Wow yourself! That’s a great story. It could have come right out of Vivian’s book.
Delk
@BGinCHI: heh. We bought a loft there back in 2002. Way, way before Disneyfied.
narya
@BGinCHI: It was interesting working in a bakery making croissants in my early 50s (short attempt at complete career change)–production environment (you would maybe know the place if I gave you the name), and just . . . hard work. In the two years I worked there, I made literally thousands of croissants, all by hand (I didn’t proof or bake them, just everything up to that point) and with a two-way sheeter. Interesting gaining the trust of the other (mostly Hispanic) guys who worked there, too.
BGinCHI
@narya: Lots of good stuff on work in that catalogue.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: I got to see him twice back in 1990, and it was FAB.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: Bastard.
BGinCHI
@RSA: Oops. Typing too fast…..
geg6
I have an object and a movie.
The object is a well-layed brick wall or structure. My grandfather Schnell was a bricklayer. He had lovely brick walls in both the homes I remember my grandparents lived in. He also built blast furnaces in the J&L Steel Aliquippa Works. My other grandfather was an electrician in the same mill. My dad was an inspector in the seamless tube mill and my oldest brother was a millwright there. My Grandpa Schnell was in the middle of the fight to unionize the mill in the 1930s. We have photos of him, bleeding profusely from the head, after being beaten by management thugs. You can read this fascinating and important history here:
https://news.psu.edu/story/141007/1999/01/01/research/forged-steel
And so, onto the movie, The Deer Hunter. The scenes of their lives in that steel town are just right on point and perfectly rendered. And nothing more perfect than this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PPRKgi8lm0U
BGinCHI
@Delk: Whoa. Smart. I guess I mean it’s getting lots of commercial places fast. I do like it down there, esp all the old light industrial buildings.
When the pandemic stuff first started, I was riding my bike down there a lot, as it was deserted and it was really fun to explore with almost no cars.
How do you like it?
Miss Bianca
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Blech. Based on what I see of the Amish folk around here, that’s a horrifying prospect.
MomSense
One of my friends builds traditional Greenland kayaks – the skin on frame kind except he uses ballistic nylon instead of seal skin. He bends the wood for the frame, which is incredibly tedious and he has different designs based on height, weight, experience, etc. Several years ago he was invited to do an exhibit at the Natural History Museum in NYC. His wife kept texting me with scenes from his exhibit. His exhibit was so crowded. He had kayaks that were completely built and then he had more kayaks in various stages and let people help with different parts of the construction. The frames and his drawings/blueprints are so beautiful. If you order a kayak from him, you have he option of helping him build it. His kayaks are really special.
BGinCHI
@narya: Now that’s work.
Never marry someone who hasn’t worked in a restaurant (kitchen, waiting, or washing dishes).
NotMax
@BGinCHI
One of those either laugh along or outright hate it films.
Not that it’s in any way relevant to what passes for plot, also briefly includes one of the most garishly lumbering of middle of the century excess-on-display autos, a 1959 Chrysler Imperial limousine. Pics (not from the movie): #1 – #2.
BGinCHI
@geg6: Do you know James Wright’s poetry?
Try this one.
There are MANY more great ones.
BGinCHI
@piratedan: You know James Wright’s poetry?
Give this a look.
One of my absolute faves.
narya
@geg6: Oh, nice choice on Deer Hunter. So many small touches (Meryl working in the grocery store . . .).
BGinCHI
@MomSense: Wow. What an amazing skill.
BGinCHI
@narya: It also reminds me why I like the movie Slap Shot so much.
Yeah, the humor is great, and Newman, of course, but it’s the working class PA stuff that really makes the film.
narya
@BGinCHI: Which made me think of another set of novels: nearly anything by Richard Russo (yeah, I know I’ve mentioned him before). There’s a lovely passage in Nobody’s Fool where he says that Sully knew that, with any kind of physical labor, once you found your rhythm you could just get through it.
And, actually, here are some other objects: all of the fancy needlework I’ve done, but also the everyday sewing that my mother and grandmother did/do.
Delk
@BGinCHI: we moved to Lincoln Square 3 years ago. West Loop was getting too NIMBY. After Jack’s Tap closed there wasn’t a decent place to eat that didn’t cost an arm and a leg.
ETA The factory my mom and dad met at is UIC housing.
narya
@Delk: Jack’s closed?!? That’s too bad. They needed to clean their taps more often, but they had a good selection. ETA: and, of course, Wishbone had to shut down, too, because the rent went up so much. When I first worked in that ‘hood, there was nothing around.
MomSense
@BGinCHI:
There are a couple pictures of Fred and one of his builds in this article.
https://www.greenlandorbust.org/traditional-paddlers-gathering-minnesota/
Delk
@narya: yeah, I think the lease was up and the landlord saw dollar signs dancing in his head.
opiejeanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Unrelated to your comment on BG’s parentage, how are your parents doing?
piratedan
@BGinCHI: good stuff, ty for linking to it for everyone… I wish that there was a way to tap into the despair and joy that I felt while growing up, I felt it when we visited WVa while growing up, the sense that this was all that there was to the world, those who worked in the mines, those who worked in the shops and taught the kids and those who oversaw all of it… as if the town was their benevolent small fiefdom and compare that against the joy of my father discovering that there was a future outside and that escape was possible (courtesy of the USAF) and to trade a small number of those years for an opportunity that he SEIZED…. but enough about that. I also fully endorse what others have echoed, that it’s helps to have worked some of those thankless jobs to have a grounding of sorts about what is and what could be.
geg6
@BGinCHI:
Totally agree. Will always love that movie for that.
Motivated Seller
Alone in the wilderness.
A 55 year old man spends 30 years in the Alaskan wilderness and builds himself a cabin. The film is spliced together from bits of his own 8mm filming, and narrated from his own journals.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0437806/
Omnes Omnibus
@opiejeanne: Fine. Still married.
geg6
@narya:
I am not a fan of the second part of that film, but the first part captures a reality I’ve never seen a movie do before or, in quite the same way, since. It just resonates in my soul. I have a love/hate relationship with that film.
Mary G
Completely OT, but perfectly suited to this moment:
More seriously, though I can’t think of its equal in the world of culture, I’ve been reflecting on my housemate for years. She is a caregiver to an old woman who’s had Parkinson’s for 20 years eight hours during the day M-F, and after that works four hours in the evening for a lady who’s quadriplegic. Then she works 24 hours + live-in from Friday evening to Sunday morning with a lady who’s 96 and “forgetful.” They are all in their ways problematic – day lady is a die-hard Trump fan who likes to proselytize and demand Faux News watching, the quadriplegic gets frustrated and screams at the top of her lungs pretty much every night, and the Saturday lady, though a sweetheart, likes to try to escape and gets lost if she succeeds. For all those hours she makes maybe 75% an hour more than the average caregiver, but that’s still not much. I would not last five minutes. She loves doing it; she literally cares about them and takes pride in how well she does it. When one dies, there are 15 or 20 people in line who want to hire her at the funeral.
She pays way more income tax as a percent of her income than any of these bozos like Mitt Romney who sit on their asses all day pontificating about shit they know nothing about. It makes me crazy.
narya
@geg6: I can see that. I always thought the end of it made it clear that it was about something other than or in addition to the war, and about how war made him see everything differently . . . and the same. I’m trying to think of another movie that captures Place that well (though I agree with BG that Slap Shot captures it–and, in its own way, Bull Durham does, too).
BGinCHI
@Delk: Ah, we’re almost neighbors!
BGinCHI
@MomSense: I can barely stand to look at those I want one so bad….
BGinCHI
@piratedan: Indeed. Totally agree.
narya
@BGinCHI: Candlelite Pizza, anyone? I know it’s north of you, but it’s straight up Western. ETA: Well, I don’t “know” that it’s north of you, just guessing based on Delk & Lincoln Sq.
BGinCHI
@Motivated Seller: That looks amazing.
BGinCHI
@Mary G: Salt of the earth. My mother is like that.
BGinCHI
@narya: YES.
I love that place. We used to go all the time but it’s been a while.
Reminds me to grab some takeout from them….
Delk
@BGinCHI: yeah, we discussed it before. You are in A-Ville
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: Adirondack guide boat.
BGinCHI
@Delk: I miss going to the Davis so bad……
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: WANT.
Can someone here build me a boat like that? I promise to take care of it.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: Will you name it George?
MomSense
@BGinCHI:
He makes some that are replicas if ones Admiral Peary used on his arctic explorations.
@Omnes Omnibus:
Ooh that’s a pretty boat, perfect for lake use. I don’t think that would work for sea kayaking, though because of the waves and the cold water.
Omnes Omnibus
@MomSense: Not at sea, sure. But on the lakes and rivers of our respective parts of the country? Pretty damn good.
MomSense
@Omnes Omnibus:
Perfect. It’s a really pretty boat. It looks a bit like a small North Haven dinghy, but the finish is much prettier.
Leto
Jiro Dreams of Sushi. I first watched this on Netflix a few years ago and it represents a level of dedication to a craft that you don’t really see too much anymore. At least not for the length of time he’s done it. I know after I finished watching it, it left me more inspired.
Also for sheer beauty, Sam Maloof’s rocking chairs. He took a simple object, a rocking chair, and transformed it into so much more than that. The joinery work is just incredible. The ability to take joinery and make that an art piece as well, just amazing.
Gin & Tonic
@MomSense: Can you supply a name/number? I have built a wood/fiberglass kayak, and would love to do skin-on-frame.
MomSense
@Gin & Tonic:
Sure. His name is Fred Randall and he lives in Georgetown Maine. His email is fmrandall at g mail dot com
ETA He usually uses ballistic nylon for the skin. Not sure if there are other options.
jayjaybear
My husband’s aunt was an extra in Witness (which was filmed right here in Lancaster, PA).
Gin & Tonic
@Omnes Omnibus: Greenland-style kayak.
There go two miscreants
Just a throwaway line in one of Mary Stewart’s novels, but it’s always stuck with me:
“I have never understood why any man, skilled in his craft and surrounded by the tools of his trade, should be in awe of princes or kings.”
(From memory — I no longer have the book — so possibly not verbatim.)
Gin & Tonic
@MomSense: Nylon is standard these days. Walrus skin is pretty hard to get, and it tends to smell in warmer climates.
Interestingly, one of the modern interpreters of the skin-on-frame concept is George Dyson, son of the renowned physicist Freeman Dyson. He builds on aluminum frames, not wood, but it’s a matter of choice, not theology these days.
raven
@BGinCHI: “You can call me a N(*&98r cuz you don’t know no better but don’t you ever call me a scab”!
NotMax
@jayjaybear
Ditto for filming sequences of The Boys from Brazil. Director Franklin J. Schaffner was a graduate of Franklin & Marshall and had a fondness for the area.
MomSense
@Gin & Tonic:
That Qajaq is gorgeous. I have Greenland paddles – red cedar and eastern white cedar. A friend gets them started and then we sand them until they are the right shape. I’m shit with a plane – so I don’t do that part.
Miss Bianca
@MomSense: You’ve made me remember that after reading about the Ojibway when I was a wee one, I was obsessed with the idea of trying to build a birchbark canoe.
That was after hours of fruitless attempts to teach myself flint-knapping. After which I concluded that I probably just wasn’t handy enough for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
raven
We just watched “Deepwater Horizon” Quite a movie about working people and suits.
Ruckus
I’m one of those who works with tools and hands to build things.
I’ve built Barbie Doll molds, I’ve built parts for airplanes, I’ve built furniture (don’t get ideas – simple stuff), I’ve build bicycles, and workout equipment, I’ve worked on molds for Hanna-Barbera cartoon character soap bottles…. I’ve built a fair amount of stuff over the decades am still doing it part time and I’d say the best part is when you are done, it’s what it was intended to be when you started.
zhena gogolia
I haz a sad because Wednesdays are going to be my killer days this semester, so I’ll probably never be able to participate.
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
Vaguely recall something about the move to Wednesdays being a temporary expedient.
raven
@Ruckus: My redneck, Navy Vet, IBEW worker told me the other day that if it was made it was either god or a machinist who did it.
Ruckus
@raven:
Well there are a lot of nice things in this world that were made by people not in those two trades, god and machinists. And yes I consider god to be a trade, after all there are a lot of people who practice being one. Always badly but still they play the part.
MomSense
In my world we are arguing via group chat about Wick vs Bourne.
raven
@Ruckus: It’s a new world of gods and monsters!
Betty
The book Working by Stud Terkel was a great review of different jobs and the people who do them.
BGinCHI
@Leto: That’s such a great film.
The Japan episode of Season 1 of Crazy Delicious hit me that way as well.
BGinCHI
@Ruckus: Perfect description of a job well done. I wish novels and stories worked that way, but they are devilish.
BGinCHI
@zhena gogolia: We’ll get back to Sundays at some point!
geg6
@Betty:
Great book. Also, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickled and Dimed.
Smalla
@Mary G: This made me think of the movie Sorry We Missed You, which is about the gig economy and takes place in England. One of the main characters is a home care nurse.
OzarkHillbilly
Took till comment #102 for someone to mention Working. Thank you @Betty: I was about to lose all faith in the jackaltariat.
@Leto: Anyone who likes Sam’s chairs, loves his house. Why didn’t you share that too? Being selfish? ;-)