SeeingEyeBlog

There really is no feeling like that of total exhaustion due to a hard day of work on a project you love. Laying in a hammock with a beer in one hand, enjoying the sunset after making tangible progress on the creation of one’s own hands, is more fulfilling than many things which purport to be. It is certainly a better feeling than paying thousands of dollars to fly first-class to a 5-star beach resort to enjoy a similar hammock and beer. So, as the mourning Geoffrey Lebowski pondered in The Big Lebowski, “What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?”

Now, I have enjoyed the sunset hammock in both circumstances. In the case of the beach resort, the girl I was with had a great time, and admittedly the hammock was relaxing and the sunset beautiful, but the circumstances seemed insincere, and I was unfulfilled. Working “behind the curtain” in hollywood has made me very sensitive to the differences between fakery and reality. When I was enjoying the sunset after a day of work building my outdoor kitchen (alone), that same girl seemed to be bored while I was feeling fulfilled.

I don’t have enough information to decide whether this is a man/woman difference or if it was unique to us. But what I do know is, those men who identify with the girl in the above example aren’t real men. A man–a real man–is made by that which he makes. And of course, The Dude would add, “That and a pair of testicles.”

I’ve been working 16-hour days lately and today I had a well-deserved day off. I was in San Diego at my parents’ house so I had access to television (I work in entertainment but don’t have a cable subscription in LA). I watched some show on Discovery about the way things are made, and this episode featured apple juice and violins.

It is lamentable that automation and modernity have all but done away with quality craftsmanship. The fruits of our labors can rarely be embodied as a tactile product with a 500-year lifespan (I don’t know any luthiers, and many guitars are made in automated mills anyway). In previous generations, a man could create a magnificent instrument in his humble workshop, and live on essentially bread and water, with fruit or vegetables seasonally. Nowadays we work in offices with little to show for ourselves, and eat any kind of food regardless of season.

It’s interesting to speculate about the 16th century craftsman eating an apple at the end of harvest season, who, finishing a violin as he eats, may only have crafted two more violins by the time the next harvest offers him his next bite of apple. The apple and the violin were worthy of much higher appreciation when it required that much patience to enjoy them.