Sippican Cottage
Donate

If You Make Things, You Are My Brother: Manny Avalos

November 2, 2015 4 Comments

I need you to get past the production values of this video.

Videos made in this fashion are manipulative. They become propaganda. The music is chosen to provoke sentiment without meaning. The slow tracking shots are meant to manufacture interest in mundane tableaus. A voice-over lends senatorial gravity to banal utterances. Put the method aside.

Manny is an interesting person. Manny is an interesting person whether or not there’s a camera dolly involved. I can, however, assure you that you probably wouldn’t think Manny was an interesting person unless he showed up in four minutes of pixels on your iThing. Manny could work in his garage for twenty years and not one of the neighbors or their kids would be the slightest bit interested in what he’s doing. An invitation to see his workshop would be met with a slightly panic-stricken look and a dissembling, “I’ve got this thing in Van Nuys in a half an hour…”. Manny probably wouldn’t care. He isn’t a docent in the museum of Manny. He wants to make guitars.

What Manny is talking about in the video is profound only because it should be quotidian, but isn’t anymore. He’s talking about being connected with other people. He wants to make a guitar so that other people can use it to make music to entertain and delight still more people. He feels connected to the world at large by his own solitary efforts. He admits he found the construction of the guitar interesting for its own sake, but he understands that his interest is pointless unless it serves others.

The bit of text appended to the video makes some bold claims about Manny that I don’t want or need to investigate. They call him a “Renaissance man,” incorrectly, I imagine. It’s the sort of term people with ironic beards and stovepipe pants enjoy using, but don’t really understand.

If I had to guess, I’d imagine that Manny is a retired schoolteacher of some sort, and has taken an interest in his fellow man every day of his 89-year-old life in one way or another. Not the sort of interest that takes the form of ruling them for their own good, either. He has been a productive and pleasant person for so long that he doesn’t know how to be anything else.

The United States, in my lifetime, was chock-a-block full of people just like Manny. Now it’s full of people with camera dollies and ring lights, hunting around for the last Manny on Earth so they can stuff him and display him.

If You Make Things, You Are My Brother: The Tailor

August 9, 2014 1 Comment

Sometimes things are only different. Other times they are plain worse.

Fish don’t know they’re swimming in water. Even people, who are at least 14 percent smarter than fish I’ve known, don’t think much about the air around them while they’re passing through it. Culture is a form of atmosphere. You pass through it, but it yields so easily that you ignore its effects. Then one day there’s a hurricane, or a drought, and you notice it all of a sudden. No one thinks about the Interstate Highway System as a concept while they’re driving on it. Well, no one but me, I gather.

If you like novelty, you can easily be persuaded that plain worse is better. If you dislike novelty, you can easily be convinced that anything novel is plain worse. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a world with only these two types of people, and it’s driving me to distraction.

I Want To Have The Only Blog With Three Deipnosophistae Entries

July 19, 2014 No Comments

Mom never understood the bread.

I could see a little bit of
disappointment, a little at a time. It was like a ship appearing on the
horizon. It’s just a speck at first. You can’t know how big it is until
it gets close to shore. Mom was proud of me when I was young, because my
friends were all hanging out doing nothing on the corner — or worse —
and I was working like a man. But as the months turned to years, the
ship of her disappointment hove into view. The tonnage of it up close
was formidable.

Disappointment is not shame, nor anything like
it. She thought I could do more with myself, is all. Lawyer. Doctor.
General. Something where there would be a newspaper clipping or two she
could show to the neighbors. That’s my boy. That’s all she wanted. An affirmation.

But
the baguettes came out of that hot hole in the wall the first time, and
I was hooked. I was never allowed to do much except sweep the floor and carry the sacks of meal, but I knew right away. I knew I
could never get away from the smell of it, the wondrous feeling of the
flour on my hands, the heat like the sun on a rock at the beach all day
long.

I loved it; and so the fellows that did it with a grunt and
a sneer for money could never compete with me. They’d go home five
minutes early and grumble while I’d go by on my day off and help out and
smile. I am their lord and master now. By acclamation. Let him do it; he’ll do it anyway.
And the owner’s son, dissipated and snarling, didn’t last a month. I’m
the real son. I’ll save my little all and buy it when the old man goes;
or he’ll give it to me, because he wants his idea to keep going, and his
own boy has other ideas.

I bring it home and lay it on the
table, and Mom murmurs her grudging assent. A man decides for himself.
At least he’s a man, she thinks. And the bread is the food of angels;
but still.

Mom will have to go without, because many will never
ask why they raised a statue to me; it has to be enough that a few will
ask why they didn’t, when we are all gone. 

Deipnosophistae

I Want To Have The Only Blog With Two Deipnosophistae Entries

If You Make Things, You Are My Brother: Sabian Cymbals

May 1, 2014 6 Comments

Cymbal making is one of those weird processes that straddles the line between art and science. You’re trying to make something that will live in the world of being musical, a nebulous world indeed, but it’s born in the gritty world of an old school factory. The process still looks vaguely medieval, even if there is a punch clock around there somewhere.

The lathe process caught my eye in the video. Buncha Morlocks and Orcs shovel the cymbal blanks around the cavern for a while, then a guy starts spinning it like he’s making a salad bowl, and he becomes this sort of audio Cellini, shearing the alloy blank to make it lighter and brighter. You can still see the grooves the lathe dude leaves in the cymbal when you examine one on a bandstand. They’re a human artifact on a mass-produced item; that’s very rare in this world. The only human artifact on a mass-produced item I’ve purchased recently is a fingerprint on the inside of the lens of my snapshot camera, which has been blurring a spot on my photos for half a decade at this point. 

My eleven-year-old son strikes Sabian cymbals,the same ones that his father struck before him, so this video is like a postcard from an old friend. Here the boy when he was only nine, whacking on the things, along with his brother. He’s hitting just the cymbals, not the cymbals and the brother, I mean. They only hit each other when the camera’s off.

Tag: honest work

Picture of sippicancottage

sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

Find Stuff:
Archives
Recent Comments
Recent Posts
Tags