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. We’re here at 7 pm on Sunday nights.
In this week’s Medium Cool, let’s talk about work.
This summer I’m between book projects and have been doing some carpentering. I put up a new ceiling of rustic wood in our kitchen and lounge area, as well as new crown molding, and it looks good. A lot of hard work, attention to detail, learning.
Which has me thinking about the kind of patient labor we read about in books, see in films, or on TV shows. People working. Laboring. Not at fancy things but at what needs to be done, made, built. What are good examples of this?
Have you done some work you want to talk about?
Expansive definitions welcome.
Baud
Working 9 to 5
What a way to make a living…
lollipopguild
The Amish barn building scenes in Witness were well done and helped set the scene for the film.
PST
This is not really a good example of the kind of skilled work I think the topic is calling for, but I will never forget the summer job I got at 17 after graduating from high school. I went to work for the state highway department, and the first day out I found myself walking along a two lane highway for hours in line with my coworkers swinging a weed whip. It was straight out of “Cool Hand Luke,” except we weren’t chained together and we never had to call out, “Shakin’ the bush, boss, shakin’ the bush.” It had never occurred to me that anyone but convicts did that work.
AM in NC
Just watched The Bear on Hulu, which features a good portrayal of the labor involved in the restaurant biz.
something fabulous
Though I’m sure if I went back and read, they’d be horrifyingly racist, and apparently were largely ghost-written by her looneytoones libertarian daughter, so who knows what other objectionable things I missed, BUT: that’s the main thing I loved about the Laura Ingalls books growing up: the incredibly detailed descriptions of hand work: sewing with a pedal machine, churning milk, bringing in hay, even curling hair. So interesting and so different from my life. Better probably not to re-read and confirm the rest.
dexwood
Blue Collar with Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Koto. Decades since I’ve seen it, but it stayed with me. A crime story that looks at unions and the working class.
As far as hands on labor, well, I did a deep cleaning of the kitchen and a bathroom today (in sync with Cole).
UncleEbeneezer
Hey, Fancy is important too!!
The first thing that came to my mind was the tailoring scenes in the Phantom Thread as Daniel Day Lewis sews and drapes these absolutely amazing dresses on his muse, all to this exquisite music. Anyways, it really gives a lovely artistic rendering of the type of work I really only learned to appreciate in the last few years, mostly watching Project Runway and similar shows. Really an underrated film, and one of PTA’s best, imo. Along with Boogie Nights which featured (ahem) a different kind of work…
eddie blake
go see Nope. jordan peele’s film is a really phenomenal, multilayered layered film. main characters are hollywood horse wranglers. there’s a lot of “behind the scenes” stuff and aspects of the hard work that goes into making the things look effortless on screen is explored, as well as the exploitations of the animals and workers that do their jobs anonymously and then are forgotten to time.
jonas
@AM in NC:
Agreed. That’s really on the nose. Very much what I imagined reading Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.
Sure Lurkalot
@lollipopguild: Wow, that barn raising scene in Witness was the 1st thing that came to my mind too! Great cinematography throughout the film.
Brachiator
The photo of Harrison Ford brings to mind the barn raising scene in Witness.
As a teen I recall being impressed by the logging scenes in the 1971 film Sometimes A Great Notion. I think Paul Newman directed the film.
As an aside, I recently watched a string of trailers for upcoming films. Most involved over the top action films about hit men or the next slew of comic book adaptations. I love junk as much as the next person, but none of this stuff showed much in the way of visual creativity.
Also, and I think the implications of this have not been fully felt, the pandemic has shifted the way that we think about movie going. Some of these trailers appear to amp up the visual noise of action and stunts in the hopes of getting people back into movie theaters.
But increasingly, the default for many people is to watch movies at home on streaming services. I was recently listening to a film podcast where one host noted that he will only go out to the movies for a film he is interested in if it is being shown at an IMAX theater.
Some of this decision is Covid related. But he also noted that people who are paying a premium ticket price are more likely to really want to see the film, and are not noisy and disruptive, compared to some of the folks at regular movie theaters.
I note that the two movie theaters most conveniently located near me went out of business during the pandemic, so I am pretty much a streaming only person these days.
ETA. One of the things I find a little sad is that the movie Nope has just opened and yet there are already tons of Spoiler filled reviews on YouTube and elsewhere.
jonas
And speaking of labor in the kitchen, the prison cooking scene in Goodfellas, especially where Paulie is slicing garlic with a razor blade and they’re all stashing steaks and lobsters in ice and talking about how to make the sauce…tough to watch if you’re not on a full stomach.
jonas
Also the opening montage of Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman where the elderly father/chef is making the regular Sunday supper in his small backyard kitchen. Epic cooking scene.
E.
And once again, MMMMMMMMMMMMoby Dick!!
pajaro
Movies that show the efforts in planting, tending and harvesting crops spring to mind. Two examples are Places in the Heart, starring Sally Field, John Malkovich and Danny Glover, about the efforts of a widow in Texas to produce a cotton crop, and Minari, which was nominated for an academy award two years ago, which deals with the efforts of a Korean immigrant family to make it on a farm in Arkansas.
eddie blake
@Brachiator: don’t watch them
eta- some of the “work” scenes in movies crack me up. beginning of conan the barbarian is NOT how you forge a sword
eta, eta- jon favreau’s chef is a great movie about cooking.
BruceFromOhio
Washed dishes in a very hoity-toity Italian restaurant with lads half my age for under the table nightly payout. Paid my community college credit hours with that cash. My fellow students thought I was a drug dealer. I was buff and well-fed, and loved it. A falling out with the boyfriend of the owner sent me down the road to the pasta shop where I learned how to mix, roll and cut fresh pasta for under the table nightly payout plus leftovers. I was buff and well-fed, and loved it. This was the same year MrsFromOhio was working for a photo studio that snagged a contract with Applebees to shoot the food for a menu makeover. She came home with dozens of frozen chicken breasts, all singles wrapped for size to make the grilled entrees and sandwiches. Between my pasta and the frozen chicken, we made every imaginable combination of grill and sautee we could dream up, and we fed everyone that could make it to the table. We were buff and well-fed, and it made the journey through a bachelor’s degree a damned fine ride for those years.
Craig
George Clooney’s character in The American. He’s a master craftsman building fine tolerance custom weapons for Assassins.
piratedan
its kind of funny how we all gravitate to physical labor as work as seen and portrayed in film, yet for the last five or six decades now, we have a brand new type of work, the sorting and sifting of information, of building databases of data that can be mined to make discoveries in what type of medical medication works best to tracking the ebb and flow of traffic to what types of advertisement trigger pavlovian responses in our brains….
I think about how we use data and with that knowledge, try and make better decisions.
James E Powell
@AM in NC:
My chef brother in law said the scenes were so real he could smell them.
dexwood
@pajar io: Places in the Heart is a very good story. A house favorite here. Such a strong cast.
Eta: fingers added the space in your nym, editing didn’t let me make a correction.
jonas
From literature, for some reason I was intensely drawn into the strange description of the eldest son in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying carefully crafting his mother’s handmade casket as she listens to the adze chucking at the wood and plane and hammering through her bedroom window.
oatler
If we could incorporate scrimshaw into a blockbuster it might spark a rediscovery.
Brachiator
@piratedan:
It is difficult to make this kind of work visually interesting. People sitting at a computer is not that compelling.
This is also why the TV series was Magnum PI, and not Magnum CPA.
James E Powell
Office Space, Norma Rae, and Dinner Rush.
UncleEbeneezer
Days of Heaven has those amazing, sprawling scenes of the Okies farming that really created the mood for the film.
Van Buren
I highly rec LABD restoration videos on YouTube. You get to watch a highly skilled, multi-talented craftsman bring old, broken things back to life. As a bonus that should appeal to this crowd, there is a cat helping in every video.
Craig
@UncleEbeneezer: That’s a great movie, it really shows off the relentless drive and attention to detail of a high end tailor.
tomtofa
Just curious – that photo doesn’t look like it came from Witness – is it from when Ford was a carpenter before becoming an actor?
DesertFriar
Our youngest daughter has a non-speaking role as a lunch lady in the to-be-released Netflix’s movie Chupa. Filmed last month.
Craig
@AM in NC: yeah, I enjoyed that. Cooking is art and craft for sure. Also Big Night on the work and craft of creating a great dinner.
UncleEbeneezer
@AM in NC: OMG, if you can get past the ridiculous amounts of yelling. We bailed after 5 minutes. Life is too stressful for that shit on our tv.
Highly recommend The Restaurant for anyone her who shares my sensibilities. Also conveys the intense atmosphere of food service but without blasting your eardrums out so much. Though the final (mini) season wasn’t nearly as good as the full length seasons.
Rusty
Blue Collar, 1978 has some great scenes of an auto production line, in this case they are building Checker cabs. It’s one of the few movies I can think of that has as much time showing the gritty nature of a production line that probably wasn’t much different from 30 or 40 years earlier.
My first job was at 15 as a field hand for Consolidated Cigar, picking shade tobacco in the Connecticut River Valley of Connecticut. We earned farm wage, $2.86 at the time. Overtime got you minimum wage, woo hoo! It was dirty, brutally hot work in the fields. It was a lesson in how the world treats unskilled labor.
This afternoon I have been working on a small shelf unit for our third daughter to take to college when she starts as a first year in a matter of weeks. I decided to make something a little nicer than utilitarian so she can use it later as a small coffee table, bench, shelf unit for the end of the bed, or whatever when she eventually moves into an apartment. Mostly working with hand tools, cutting half laps with a saw and chisel, cutting miters on a 75 year old Stanley hand miter saw. It’s thoughtful work and I want to give her something nice. The pandemic and a job loss, with a new one 7 hours away meant I missed much of her junior year, only seeing her on weekends and her senior year she lived with friends to finish school while the rest of the family moved. So definitely some guilt there (she has been great and has only been supportive, she is a good young woman) that I am trying to address with this as something nicer than she requested. The never ending work of being a parent.
Scout211
@James E Powell:
Oh yes, Norma Rae for sure.
eddie blake
@Rusty: what’s a half-lap?
zhena gogolia
@pajaro: levin’s mowing scene in Anna Karenina. Novel only—I don’t think it’s been captured on film
dexwood
A British tv show – The Repair Shop. Skilled crafts people bringing old things back to life. Sorry, no links, too difficult with an old phone.
zhena gogolia
@jonas: warning omnes—he’s not a fan of that book
piratedan
@Brachiator: depends on context I suppose, but sometimes there are scenes that can work if done properly…
I think back to The Andromeda Strain when the triggered result causes the epileptic reaction and mind blank….
Maybe even something like the FBI Forensics and accounting forensics scenes from The Accountant…
The uncovering of the secret network in Thee Days of the Condor, after reading hundreds of books and submitting a query….
Granted, on the whole, I would say that a lot of these jobs don’t really need or require any kind of glorification, but its almost if the intrinsic nature of work itself is like that
dexwood
@Rusty: Ahead of you at comment 6, thanks for the backup.
mali muso
@dexwood: Oh yes, that show is lovely! Not only to marvel at the level of skill and craftsmanship that the restorers bring to each job but also to learn about artisan knowledge that is becoming rare.
Ajabu
As most of you know (if you know me at all) i’ve been a professional musician all my adult life but it’s two childhood jobs that stick in my memory.: at the age of 10 while still in Jamaica I had my first job. Go to the docks at 4 AM with a stick and flashlight and knock the tarantulas off the bananas before they were loaded on the ship. It was called spider boy.
The other one I remember is working in a bowling alley at 14 as a pin setter before technology eliminated that back breaking motherfucker. What I remember most vividly is the man in the lane next to me. He was about 70 years old. I, at 14. no problem with the bending over repeatedly but it was a criminal act to have someone his age doing it. It was an early lesson in what to expect as an elderly black man in America.
Scout211
I really enjoyed The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See. The history of the tea growing families in remote villages of China served as a nice backdrop to a multi-generational family saga. The growing, picking, preparing and selling the tea was very interesting.
Rusty
@eddie blake: It’s where you cut a dado (think notching the whole end of a board) in a first board that is the thickness of a second board that will form a corner. It’s not a fancy joint but it’s stronger because of the overlap and there is more surface for gluing. It’s my first time doing them by hand, usually you would use a router.
dexwood
@mali muso: As a woodcarver, it’s been a great experience for me to work on museum pieces and private collection items. I’ve learned a lot from that show.
Brachiator
@Sure Lurkalot:
Witness was directed by Australian film maker Peter Weir, who seems to be officially retired. I like this summation of his work, from Wiki
His best films are filled with wonderful production details that make the settings of his films especially vivid. Master and Commander makes you see and feel what it was like to be officer or sailor living and working shipboard on a 19th century warship.
prostratedragon
I worked regularly but not daily in a cafeteria-style kitchen under a professional chef, doing everything from cleaning and washing up to running a meal. There’s a lot of natural camaraderie in that kind of work. When we got out a good meal or left a notably spotless kitchen and dining room, it was high fives time. Much respect to anyone doing that kind of work conscienciously (as many do) on a daily basis and in restaurant conditions.
I like to watch cooking shows sometime, usually on PBS since the number of commercials on Food Network and the like drives me nuts.
Jay
@eddie blake:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lap_joint
Craig
Rounders. Grinding out hand after hand day after day to make a living. All the work that Worm puts into his mechanics chops to get an edge(cheat).
CaseyL
@tomtofa: it is, indeed! From what I’ve heard, Ford still likes to do woodworking.
The comments about shows and movies centered on cooking made me look up a film I saw at a friend’s house years ago: Tortilla Soup. I don’t remember the plot, but do remember the cooking scenes because they made me very hungry!
TheOtherHank
Right now I work as a software engineer, but I spent several years of graduate school working at the bench in a molecular biology lab. This means that I tend to shout or laugh at the TV whenever there’s people doing computer or biology stuff.
I have no idea how accurate they are, having never been a sailor on a square-rigged sailing ship, but I appreciate the descriptions of sailing to and fro and working the guns in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubry/Maturin novels.
eddie blake
@Rusty: thanks. i’ve done tons of carpentry over the last few years, but i’m pretty much entirely self-taught and have no idea what things are called.
prostratedragon
@UncleEbeneezer: My, that music is gorgeous. I must see the movie soon.
James E Powell
@Brachiator:
Harrison Ford worked his ass off in Mosquito Coast. I have to go back & watch that.
I liked the TV series and hope it comes back soon.
TheOtherHank
Tampopo is a fun movie centered around making ramen in small noodle shop in Japan.
Splitting Image
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne is a good one. It has a wide cast of characters basically doing their own thing, whatever it is. Tristram’s uncle Toby was an army veteran who loved telling stories about one particular battle he fought in, but as time went on he began forgetting key details of the story, so he devoted his life to building an exact scale model of the battlefield on his estate to make sure he got all the details right in every retelling.
Another book I like is Une Vie by Guy de Maupassant. It’s about the life of a woman and all the boring bits about getting married and having children that the romances tend to leave out.
The movie Babette’s Feast is another one. A good half of the movie is devoted to Babette cooking a dinner for her friends.
Laurel and Hardy made a lot of movies about working on the job, as did Charley Chase. Notable is L&H’s The Music Box, which is entirely devoted to the act of delivering a player piano to someone’s front door, and which won them an Oscar.
Brachiator
@Ajabu:
And so, you have this refrain in the popular Harry Belafonte Calypso song Day O!
A beautiful bunch of ripe banana
(Daylight come and we want go home)
Hide the deadly black tarantula
(Daylight come and we want go home)
I continue to marvel at how this “charming” little song really gives a vivid description of a hard, sometimes dangerous job.
Jay
I’m not working right now, haven’t applied for EI yet.
Burn out, tired of fixing stuff, tools, systems, training, through Covid, only to get kicked to the curb.
One thing that often bugs me about pop portrayals of work, don’t illustrate often how dysfunctional it is.
Salty Sam
I have done all kinds of work in my adult life- early on I was living the life Bourdain chronicled in Kitchen Confidential (haven’t watched The Bear yet, but it sounds familiar). Having reached my limit (again, as Bourdain described), I moved on to construction trades, eventually winding up hammering hot metal as an architectural blacksmith.
I “retired” 10 yrs ago, sold my shop and all my tools to buy a boat and go cruising. It was nice, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, and yet I discovered that I am not cut out to lie in a hammock, even with palm trees and sugar white beaches. Sold the boat, returned home, and have almost completed putting my shop back together. Just this week I was able to buy back my hundred-year old trip hammer from the guy I sold it to ten years ago.
Looking forward to swinging that hammer for as long as my shoulder and elbow hold out…
Salty Sam
They are amazingly accurate!
Jay
@eddie blake:
Every issue of Fine Woodworking is available on a CD-ROM set.
dexwood
@James E Powell: I liked the book way back when, looked forward to the movie. Left the theater depressed. More a statement about me, not the film which was beautiful shot and we’ll cast.
eddie blake
i got a big kick out the fifth element’s portrayal of bruce willis’ surly space cabby in the brooklyn of the future.
Tehanu
@Brachiator: One of my favorite Little-Known Facts About Well-Known People is that Alan Arkin wrote the lyrics to the Banana Boat Song.
TheOtherHank
I worked as a whitewater raft guide for 7 summers. The fun parts are especially fun. Taking a boat through technical rapids either as a paddle captain with a crew of clients or rowing a gear boat and doing all the work is exciting. There is, though, a lot of cooking and setting up the kitchen and cleaning the kitchen and stowing the gear in the boats and then unloading the boats at the next night’s camp. But the low point is dealing with toilet arrangements. Let’s just say that if you’re on a 5-day trip you bring start with 5 days of food and end the trip with 5 days of “processed” food.
prostratedragon
@Brachiator: And it looks like Nope has a much shorter engagement at many local theaters than I’d have expected; will be gone from all but a few in Chicago by Thursday.
For the work process of a hit man, Day of the Jackel might be tops. His single-mindedness is remarkable — no detours. I have to see The Way of the Warrior again sometime to recall whether it fits this discussion.
eddie blake
@Jay: i know you’re not joking, but i haven’t heard anyone say “cd-rom” in QUITE some time.
i did ok. had apprenticed to a contractor when i was in college and drifted back to the work after the strange and cruel vicissitudes of life. spent the last few years as the quasi-super for a dude who hadda hundred year old house in windsor terrace with tenants.
laid off a while back during the heights of covid and have decided to try my luck in fields not involving the knee-and-back breaking work painting baseboards or refinishing floors as i’m getting on in the years.
Glidwrith
The work in a bio lab that isn’t glamorous: washing the dishes, cleaning out old research refrigerators (no one is a bigger pack rat than a researcher), the Drosophila fly bottles, equipment maintenance of the centrifuges (think built up E. coli) and tissue culture incubators. Add in old, combustible chemicals, unlabeled reagents in rusty flammable cabinets and things can get……interesting.
eddie blake
@prostratedragon: that’s disappointing. it’s REALLY good.
eta- it won the weekend, took in appx 44 million. i wonder what’s up with that.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Of course hard work takes many forms, and for the daily grind of putting out a newspaper you have “The Front Page” (1974) and “The Paper” (1994).
The opening of the former shows the linotype, offset printing, photo engraving, and the intricate final operatic phase of mass production and distribution. Plus Matthau’s chewing up the scenery is itself another form of amazing craftsmanship.
prostratedragon
@BruceFromOhio: Those sound like some very good years!8<)
lowtechcyclist
@James E Powell:
“Everything we need is here!”
Jay
@eddie blake:
I had hundreds of issues of Fine Woodworking and Wooden Boat. Taught me a ton of stuff about tools and joinery.
I always wanted to be in a place where I could build Custom Furniture on contract or spec, or fine small wooden boats.
Never got there.
The closest I got was fixing jobs botched by the Contractor who underbid me.
I did get to use some of my skills and tools to patch hardwood floors rather than replace them, repair, fix and shore up damaged hardwood stairs, build custom furniture once in a blue moon, build a white water drift boat,….
Nishner
I grew up in a blue collar family and worked a number of blue collar jobs to pay my way through college and after. That included construction laborer pouring concrete, concrete finisher, laborer for bricklayers, tied steel for concrete walls and floors, set sidewalk, driveway and wall forms. Did concrete demo work swinging a sledge and running a jack hammer. Also butchered some wood playing carpenter.
eddie blake
@Jay: wow, that’s cool! a regular andy dufresne! may the boat still be in your future.
Narya
The scene in it’s Complicated where Streep’s character takes Steve Martin to the bakery she owns and whips up croissants….is wrong. I used the dough sheeter she has to make 1000s of croissants and that’s not how it goes. Lamination takes a long time—resting is required—and then there’s proofing before you bake; it’s not a thing you whip up.
UncleEbeneezer
I have no idea how accurate it is but A Perfect Storm sure gave a pretty amazing idea of long-haul fishing.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Rusty: Your comment reminds me of the movie Swing Shift, about workers in WWII at an aircraft plant (mostly women, in the war effort). They don’t go into a lot of detail of how a bomber is built, but there are lots of shots of the women riveting metal pieces together. It’s the movie where Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell got together, I think. Also has a terrific Christine Lahti.
Brachiator
The charming 1979 comedy Breaking Away is about a group of working class kids in Indiana who enter a bicycle race against snooty college kids.
The film is grounded by wise, nostalgic references to the local Indiana limestone industry and the stonecutters who worked the quarries. A fading industry which provided a solid middle class life for the characters in the film.
There is a nice bit of conversation between Dave, the young hero of the film, and his father, after the kid has become disheartened by a number of setbacks.
A fun little footnote
The term “cutters” was invented for the movie, because the real name “stonies” was deemed unusable because of its perceived link to marijuana.
Jay
@Narya:
yurp. We had nitrogen fridges to speed up the sheeting process, and proofing ovens.
La Baguette et Eschallote, back in the day.
prostratedragon
@Rusty: Dadoes! I remember them from watching Norm the carpenter on PBS, another work show I used to like.
Jager
I rebuilt a 14 foot sailboat when I was 14, and sailed it for the next 4 summers, I’ve sailed ever since. I had a Ron Holland designed 30 foot race boat in the late 90s. In the spring of 99 I discovered I had delamination under both chainplates. I wrote to Holland asking for his ideas on upgrading a 13 year old race boat. He sent me back a long list of upgrades. It took me 9 weeks of weekends and a week of vacation to get them done. My wife said she had never seen me as nervous as I was when I started cutting the deck with a Sawzall. During the rebuild, Dame Ellen McArthur was preparing for her record breaking solo race around the world. I loaned her crew extension cords and hoses while they were preparing her boat. The payoff was I got to meet Dame Ellen and got a hellacious ride on her boat in 25 knots of wind.
Narya
@Jay: A well-laminated piece of dough is a thing of beauty; real tactile pleasure working with it.
Jay
@Jager:
plywood core on the deck and cabin with plywood blocks for the chainplates and deck hardware?
kalakal
The first 2 Frederick Forsyth novels ( haven’t read any of the others) The Day of the Jackal & The Dogs of War go into incredible detail as to how to fake identities & other documentation, obtain illegal weapons, move stuff and people across frontiers without the authorities noticing etc . Basically the ground work req’d to be a successful assassin or mercenary.
WaterGirl
@Nishner: Welcome!
Jay
@Narya:
at home, yup.
not so much when you had to make 10,000 baked croissant and brioche a day, plus 40,000 flash frozen, ( just needed to be thawed, proofed and baked)
all to Pierre’s standards, which were Parisienne high.
I also managed the distribution. Co. went bankrupt and I busted my ass trying to keep it going while the Bank negotiated a sale.
Narya
Oh—Thomas Perry’s novels! Jane Whitefield novels in particular. And Donald Westlake’s too, esp. the Richard Stark novels, but also the Dortmunder novels.
Bill
A friend of mine swears her kitchen cabinets were installed by Harrison Ford.
Narya
@Jay: the bakery where I worked wasn’t that level of production; sounds brutal.
ETA: but the owner did win the Coupe du Monde de la Boilangerie.
Grumpy Old Railroader
My baby brother has been a carpenter for 40 years. I was helping him put up an addition on his workshed (mostly fetch, carry and clean-up while he worked). He placed a lintel across two newly installed posts and marked 3 feet across the lintel and 4 feet down the post and then measured the diagonal adjusting the post until it was 5 feet across mark to mark. I was shocked that he knew the Pythagorean Theorem and praised him for it. He looked at me quizzically as I explained and he laughed and said: “I don’t know anything about that. This is what carpenters call the 3–4-5 method of squaring a corner”
prostratedragon
@UncleEbeneezer: The book was pretty good in that too, at least it gave a vivid picture.
BGinCHI
@AM in NC: Yes! I almost led with that. Except for the Chicago local stuff, it’s a great show.
Jager
@Jay:
I replaced the wet balsa core under the plates with 1/2 inch marine plywood on a bed of epoxy, then re-glassed the deck. Holland suggested using longer bolts through the chainplates, then running them through an additional stainless steel plate, and running stainless steel rods to another customed plate on the bulkhead. That done I added a 200-pound shoe on the keel, faired it in, and did a new racing bottom on her in wet sanded VC 17…all that work for another 1/8 of a knot! The extra weight on the keel made her behave better and I could carry more sail longer.
Jay
@kalakal:
and allegedly written by someone ( Forsyth) who had a hand in on several Mercenary ops.
Kelly
I worked a couple summers clearing and building logging roads in the western Oregon Cascades. Excellent money and the work was a lot of fun as a fit 20 year old. My Dad, a heavy equipment operator got me hired onto his crew. Late September it was time to go back to college. I told Dad I liked the work and the money didn’t know if I wanted to go back to school. He replied “It’s fun in the summer. It isn’t any fun in November when the rain is washing the snow down your neck and the mud is over your boot tops. By the time you’re my age everything hurts.” I went and finished my CS degree and had a comfortable, air conditioned career in IT.
cope
@Ajabu: In eighth grade, pin setting was my first real job other than babysitting. It was at a four lane bowling alley in the basement of a church. Three of us covered the four alleys on league nights. The experienced friend of mine who got me the job did two lanes at once.
The first time, I was shocked by how big the pins actually were even though I had been bowling pretty much my whole childhood. Pay was $2.25, a bottle of soda pop and a candy bar. The three of us would detour through the graveyard on our walk home.
Steeplejack
@eddie blake:
Half lap joints.
eddie blake
@Steeplejack: yup. thanks. strangely enough, i’ve made those without knowing what they were called.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
Years ago—decades ago—New York magazine had a regular contest where the (very literate) readers were invited to submit entries for things like “beginning of a hypothetical novel,” “greeting card for a lesser known occasion,” etc. One was to suggest the title of a book cowritten by two authors. The winner was William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson’s As I Lay Winesburg, Ohio.
The winner of the greeting-card contest gave the title to the eventual book compilation of the contests: Thank You for the Giant Sea Tortoise.
MomSense
I loved the Chevy Chase writing scenes in Funny Farm.
There is a cool scene in the first season of Outlander showing how women used to process the raw wool. It’s very accurate. They used urine so they also drank and sang baudy songs.
cope
As for hard, skilled work in a movie, I nominate “Thief” for the safecracking. The tools, methods and techniques were dead on balls accurate thanks to the guy who wrote the book the movie was based on. As I recall, he also consulted and had a role in the movie as well. Most importantly, though, R.I.P. James Caan.
Jay
@Jager:
ugggg, balsa.
when I re-did my deck and rigging, ( plywood) I oversized all the fastening holes, ( 1” for a 1/4 in fastener), filled them with thickened epoxy, (cabosil and fibers), drilled the new fastening hole, hole sawed the hole enough to create an o-ring effect, taped inside and out, ( caulk removal), added 316 ss backing plates, (tapped), used a small ton of caulk, tightened finger tight until cured, then tightened down, the excess cut off, the nut removed and replaced with an acorn nut, so no wounds if thrown around the boat.
The key design issue with my boat, ( aside from botched stuff and years of neglect), was weather helm and a delaminating rudder. So, I made a new one, 1 foot longer, NACA 12 profile, carbon fibre over closed cell rigid foam.
I got the idea from a bunch of Catalina 27 racers who had found a small scale MFGr who was making modern rudders to deal with their weather helm issues.
Worked like a charm, 2 finger tiller, could carry way more sail, longer, 1 more knot in speed.
And yes, I had a polished bottom and keel, NC17 hard coat, but I also put sloughing bottom paint overtop, just to reduce maintenance.
I miss my boat, but it became way to expensive to keep her. $8500 a year just for a “parking spot”. I still miss sailing her in heavy weather.
raven
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
raven
@Jay: I followed the rebuilding of “The Western Flyer”, quite and effort.
Craig
@Brachiator: that’s just about a perfect movie. Everything about it is great. When Dave stops speaking with an Italian accent is one of the most beautiful family scenes in cinema.
Anotherlurker
I would recommend “The Perfect Storm” as a good glimpse into the nuts and bolts of working deck as a commercial fisherman.
I’ve worked on lobster boats and skippered and decked on party boats and charter boats and I thought the film really captured the vibe on the dock and at sea.
raven
@Brachiator: The TV adaptation was filmed here in Athens, GA. I was watching the pilot and much of it was filmed in my neighborhood!
Ajabu
@Brachiator: Yes, that song hit home the first time I heard it. And from my current perspective I’m astonished that they hired children for that work and that my parents were fine with me going to the docks every day before school. Norms change, don’t they?
I didn’t know it was dangerous then. I felt grown up doing it AND I never have feared spiders since…
raven
You know who is a commercial fisherman in Sitka?
Anotherlurker
@raven: He who is not to be named?
raven
@Anotherlurker: Yep, rumor was he was a russian.
Anotherlurker
@raven: A lot of folks of Russian descent in AK.
Trollhattan
Amazing people doing amazing things currently, at the World Athletic Championships in Eugene. NBC
Jay
@raven:
there is a Seiner in the Steveston Museum, that is quite famous.
it was built by a Japanese Canadian boatbuilding family.
all of the cedar planks were mated to each other by pushing each new sawn plank against it’s mate, then laboriously lapping them together with pull saws, to the point that there was no gaps between planks and no need for caulk.
The boat only had a 70 year fishing career, until the 1980’s collapse of the salmon fishery caused it to be mothballed.
Trollhattan
@Anotherlurker: Riveting book.
“Lucky” guys when I was in high school did either ocean fishing or logging during summer, the ones who had connections. None I knew were killed or maimed.
Nobody talked about that aspect. They could all afford cars.
Brachiator
@Trollhattan:
Thanks for the reminder. I have really been enjoying this. Some marvelous athletes from all around the world. The TV anchors have been good, knowledgeable and they don’t generally overdo rah rah nationalism.
Trollhattan
@Brachiator:
The track community is a positive environment, compared to other sports I’ve been exposed to. And meets are a three-ring circus of fun.
Jay
@raven:
he’s still around, just not here.
As a late hippie, who took to salmon trolling with a ferro cement sloop, he found it “easier” to adopt a style of speech, that was a combo of “weirdo” and “backwoods”, to fit in on the docks. That wasn’t appreciated here.
Most trollers run diesel powered aluminum or steel boats worth 3/4’s of a million dollars plus, with tons of automated gear, not a 6k ferro cement cutter.
what he saves on fuel, etc, allows him to spend the off season in Seattle, kicking back, living on his boat,
rather than like many with commercial fishing boats who have to scramble in the off season or a bad season to keep up the mortgage on the 3500 sq foot house, the Ford F350 Crew Cab lease, the boat payments and maintenance and the fishing licence leases.
J R in WV
I’ve worked in fields. Neighbor’s tobacco, my corn…
I worked in the Navy, hardest was in a shipyard in Pascagoula, MS — all summer long, they would bring around Navy Koolaide, make you drink a quart and take a salt pill, so you didn’t crash out. Then in a hot-type print shop, just before they went the way of the dodo.
Then I went back to college, got a degree in computer science, made a career of that. Was the hardest work I ever did. Not so much sweat, but a shit-ton of stress and tension. Invisible things that could make or break your systems… Probably did look boring., sitting there thinking, talking with engineers and chemists and biologists… glad to be retired!
Craig
Random about work and repetition. Never a big Top Gun fan, but it’s on at the bar I popped into. Early scene and Val Kilmer is spinning a pen between his fingers to fuck with Maverick, just like he spins a cup around his fingers in Tombstone to fuck with Johnny Ringo. Respect.
patrick II
@eddie blake:
I almost became a cook after watching that movie. The average-looking guy but great cook Favreau had to pick between Scarlett Johansson and Sophia Vergara. Tough choice.
Jager
@Jay:
I owned a mooring in Marblehead for years, when we moved to SoCal I almost shit myself when I calculated the costs to keep a boat out here. I scrapped my plans to buy a new one when I got here. I hooked up with an old sailing pal and he got me a gig as the mainsheet trimmer on a one-off Farr 44. If we move back to the east coast, (my wife has a couple of great job offers) even at my advanced age, we’ll get another boat. I’m looking at a completely rebuilt 83 C&C 41 and an 87 Frers 38. A pal of mine has a mooring at Mason’s Island CT, we can use.
J R in WV
@Brachiator:
40 years ago I worked at a public TV station with a daughter of Harry Belafonte — she was a great co-worker, carried her weight, I learned who her dad was a year into working with her. I’m pretty sure Harry is a great person, knowing his daughter.
Trollhattan
@patrick II:
As one must.
Anotherlurker
@Trollhattan: In my life I knew 2 who were lost at sea. One was the skipper of a longliner, fishing the NE Canyons for Tilefish. A freak storm took them out. The other was run down by a tanker in The Gulf of Mexico while exploring for new fishing grounds.
Commercial fishing is constantly at the top of the list of most dangerous jobs.
Trollhattan
Men’s pole vault–they’re over 19.5′ and still going.
J R in WV
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
The linotype may the most complicated production machine ever invented to produce under the time constraints a daily newspaper impose. They were going away in the 1970s, and I was fortunate to become a linotype operator in the last couple of years the local paper was still a hot type operation.
Once you have a squirt of molten lead typesetting metal splash all over your lap, you know you have a serious job… Jeans and a heavy apron help with it a whole lot.
Subsole
@Jay: True. Wonder how much of that is trying to valorize work, and how much is trying not to get icky realism into our escapism.
Sorry to hear you’re out of work. You know it’s a one-way street, but it’s always a bastard when they go ahead and confirm it.
Subsole
@eddie blake: Such a delightful movie. Still feels fresh today.
“That’s a very nice hat.”
J R in WV
@raven:
I read that book just before we spent a week on a small National Geographic ship that sailed from the western edge of the Baja California Sud around and up the Sea of Cortez — mostly whale watching. It was a great read, although had some older concepts of the locals that were abrasive to a modern hippy.
J R in WV
You all have a good night, I’m to the rack now… dogs already in bed…
Last call?
Subsole
Workwise, I fixed medical equipment for awhile. Not a bad gig. Hated working on the autoclaves. All the joys of plumbing a broom closet, with scalding hot pipes. Which were always rotted half through, because Texas water is hard.
Otherwise, installing telemetry systems, pulling cable and doing punchdowns (which often required figuring out just what the absolute hell the previous installer thought he was doing), figuring out exactly which damned valve on the surgical table was leaking hydraulic fluid, that kind of stuff. Rebalancing centrifuges – which often required hosing out the busted tubes and their contents.
Not hard work – swinging a pickaxe in 100 degree weather is hard work. Actually pretty entertaining. Every day was the same – always something different.
Jay
@Jager:
East Coast boats are way cheaper as well, just because there are so much more of them. Only Hawaii is cheaper, but’s that’s because of the number of “World Cruisers” who give up on the first leg.
Ocean Travelling is kinda like being in a cabin in the woods in Alaska. If you can’t handle the solitary aspects, crew dynamics, you get a bad case of the “shack nasties”.
Jager
My dad’s dad was a farmer, worked his ass off, and he worked my dad’s ass off. The summer I was 10 I helped with the harvest, 3 weeks, 7 days a week. My friends were playing ball, going to the swimming pool. Grandpa worked my little ass off. When it was over, I felt good, I got a check for 100 bucks (I bought a new Raleigh English bike), I learned to drive a Ford pickup and I could beat all my friends in arm wrestling. A good lesson for a boy to learn.
Ivan X
@Narya: I discovered Westlake during the pandemic. He alone, plus Ross Thomas whom I also discovered and writes as well if not better, as if that were possible, I think got me through.
Ivan X
I know this is going to be a dubious choice for some, but among the professional classes (MOTU, really) making hard, ugly decisions in a crisis, Margin Call is a classic. (Yeah yeah I know they’re brokers and scumbags etc, I don’t want to hear it, I’m not sympathetic, it’s just an extraordinary film. They’re not heroes.)
kalakal
I would think the most realistic WW2 submarine book ( & film) would have to be Das Boot. Bucheim had been U- Boat officer and very much wrote from experience. From the other side The Cruel Sea, once again based on personal experience. Both Bucheim & Monserrat took real incidents and people and combined them into one ship & crew. The same could be said for Alistair Maclean and HMS Ulysses
Ruckus
Work.
65 yrs ago I watched my great aunt from Italy run the wash through a wringer and then hang it up. That seemed like a lot of work, especially compared to today. I got my first job (as I’ve said here before) at a machine shop 61 yrs ago. That would be 1961. There is a steep learning curve. Other than school and the navy I worked in the same business 33 yrs, owned it for 18. That was back in the days when people worked more than 8 hrs a day, often 6 days a week. It is dirty work, it is dangerous work, it can get very dangerous. Things have improved in those decades. We made tools that made products that people use every day. Our tools made plastic bottles, toys for Mattel and other companies, parts for industrial/office machines, automotive parts, etc.
I’m building furniture for my own use, 2 pieces down, 2 to go. I’ve been retired for a year and am still getting adjusted to not working.
billcinsd
@Tehanu: That is not what Wikipedia says. Arkin co-wrote the lyrics of the Tarriers (his band) hit version of the Jamaican folk song. Belafonte’s version was 2 years before Arkin’s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-aL7HHN_kw
billcinsd
@billcinsd: Belafonte’s version has the lyrics by Belafonte, Harry Attaway, and Lord Burgess
Nancy
@TheOtherHank: I enjoyed Tampopo as an homage to The Magnificent Seven and we a food movie. Thanks for reminding me.
NotMax
Very later to the shindig but from initial scan of the comments it appears no one has yet mentioned the movie A Simple Curve. Also will note The Royal Tailor.
Pushing the boundaries of the topic, might include as well both Fitzcarraldo and A Noble Intention.
Tehanu
My favorite contest ever was the one for names that described the person, with this: Hans Orff, touchy German composer
Tehanu
@billcinsd: ah well, learn something new every day!
raven
@Jay: I’m in touch with him.
Smalla
The Imitation Game is the one of the first movies that came to my mind. The race to break the Enigma Code was real and it was fascinating to learn more about it and about Alan Turing (even if the movie didn’t get everything right). I also loved learning about Joan Clarke, who was also critical to their success.
BellyCat
Late to thread. Not sure if this was mentioned.
“Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work” by Matthew B. Crawford
Very good philosophical read.
Bill
At work we have 25 miles of railroad that was built in 1912, and we spend quite a bit of time replacing old ties and spiking in new ones. Our locomotives are vintage 1950 diesel-electrics that require periodic maintenance. Our passenger coaches are 80-100 years old. Over the winter we took the roof hatches off one of the engines, lifted out the 9 ton main generator, had it rebuilt, swung it back in, aligned it to the diesel engine to a fiftieth of an inch in three different axes, and returned the unit to service. We run the train 4 days a week and the rest of the time we fix things. Our General Manager is also our engineer, our events coordinator is our head conductor, and I’m the head-end conductor, mechanic, electrician, welder and carpenter. Some days I use a sledgehammer, some days it’s a dial indicator and I’m working in thousandths of an inch. Some days I sit in a chair in a locomotive and look out the windshield at bald eagles and blue herons and deer and bears and the river and the trees. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
NotMax
Three more (older) films which broadly fall under the topic of patient, deliberate work.
Dr. Ehrlichs’ Magic Bullet (1940).
Madame Curie (1944).
Yellow Jack (1938).