Sippican Cottage
Donate

A Kind Of Safety

October 17, 2012 23 Comments

There is only one kind of real safety: The wisdom to know where danger lies, and the ability to balance the return on risk with the exposure to that danger.

At its most elemental, danger is easily espied. Hey, look; there’s a giant, spinning metal wheel covered with raggedy teeth. Ahoy! There are straps running hither and yon and spoked wheels spinning and begging to take a digit. Everything from splinters to a head staved in is in play. That’s if the boilers don’t explode first.

Everyone in the video looks unruffled. “Don’t touch the hot stove” is easy if you’re of a serious mind. The boards that marvelous machine is spitting out are valuable and useful and worth the effort, and worth the effort to keep safe, too. Risk/reward at its most elemental.

These are anachronistic machines, which I adore. Simpler is better in almost all things. If they were more up-to-date, there would be a great deal more safety devices in use. What would come of the improvements? The users would get inured to the presence of danger. Blase. They would begin to stick in waxy earbuds and concentrate on organized noise instead of paying attention to what they were doing. Maybe they’d have a snifter or three at lunch and think nothing of it. They might pass the time in skylarking instead of sticking to it. And all the guards in the world will not save those that think that all forms of danger must be made safe –even from attempts at voluntary harm — and whatever downstream effects of danger ignored must be unquestionably and munificently ameliorated by others.

All that “safety” is before you even get to the Gates of Barrister Hades, guarded by the hellhound with three heads: paranoia, hypochondria and fraud. When suffering harm is a winning lottery ticket, the only way to lose is not to play. And the loser always pays. But you knew that. Stay safe!

Hatchet Man

August 16, 2012 5 Comments

If I made something like that log home the fellow’s demonstrating at the end, with those tools, you’d never hear the end of it. I’d be insufferable. I’d turn into a highwayman, kidnapping passersby to bring them home and tell them how I did it. I’d take the gag out of their mouths from time to time to see if they had any questions.

The bespoke axe factory was fascinating, too. I wonder if that’s a husband and wife team. Their wordless pas de deux suggests so to me. My wife and I work together like that from time to time, when we’re boxing tables I make for my cottage furniture business here in Maine. We consider it a kind of date. Of course it’s more of a hot glue gun/cardboard sort of affair. But the working together without thinking part is the same. I don’t have a mancave and my wife doesn’t have a scrapbooking room. We live together in a house with our children and do things together.

“Traditional,” the title says about the axe making and the log house building. I like that word. I’d accept that word if you flung it at me. But there is no tradition in my family for anything I’m doing. My wife’s either. Perhaps we’re doing the most exotic thing there is, tradition-wise: starting one. Or maybe it’s ad hoc, and will pass from the scene with us. Not up to us to decide.

We does it that way because we always done it that way doesn’t cut any ice with us. That’s not tradition. Traditional doesn’t mean reactionary, at least not to us. It means honoring what came before you and not praying solely to the god of fads. Baseball should be played with wooden bats, but I don’t mind it being shown on TV. I might make a Hepplewhite table, but sell it on the Intertunnel.

Reactionaries are people with ideas that don’t work that are a few years old that they’d like to declare unassailable. Money can’t buy class, they used to say. Ideas alone can’t buy tradition. People have to want to do things voluntarily long after you’ve lost the ability to force them to do things.

It’s not difficult to find a certain amount of contempt for traditional things abroad in the land. OK, you cutting edge beautiful people. Go ahead, start a tradition. It ain’t easy. I know. The traditional heating up of the hot glue gun before the FedEx man arrives still hasn’t caught on with the general public, but we like it.

A Demonstration Of The Inner Workings Of The International Monetary Fund, Made Out Of Wood

July 31, 2012 3 Comments

Far be it from me to point out that half the world gets its monetary marching orders from an elderly backup singer in a ska band –after a scintillating synchronized swimming career– with a Paul Anka-grade addiction to suntanning. Of course, she took the place of a homunculus who likes to run around in a bath towel with his pud in his hand and show it to any passersby in his hotel room, so things are looking up!

Pers Makanniska Kabinett

The Real Mad Men’s Office Decor

July 13, 2012 1 Comment

It’s got a view, of course. You need to be up high. Get that feeling of power. Sweeping vistas. That sort of thing. Oh, and a lot of woodgrain, definitely.

The smells are important. Woodsmoke, tobacco, coffee, a hint of whiskey from time to time. Color selection is crucial. There’s a lot of plain, warm browns, naturally –almost monochrome — but then you poke the eye out with apple-green swatches here and there. There’s steel and some plastic, totally utilitarian, of course, but minimalist, not brutalist. The finish has to invite the hand. The clothes are almost austere, like a wrapper, not a drape, but they’re made to let a person move. They signal a kind of status to the world.

One needs to understand the market, but live perched above it. Aloof. You take risks because the payoffs are so big. You push all your chips back onto the table the next day of course. You live for the moment, and there’s no thrill in the mundane. Excitement must be mundane to you. You can’t even smile when you’ve won. Spoils the effect.

It’s Disheartening To Consider We’ve Used Up These Proud Giants And Brought Them Near To Extinction

July 7, 2012 12 Comments

What? No, I’m not taking about the trees. There’s plenty of trees. I live in western Maine. A tree is a weed. I’m talking about the men. Those men you see working there in the video. They’ve been hunted nearly to extinction as far as I can tell. They were marvelous.

The forests shown in this film are filled with sequoia sempervirens again, planted by the same men we just watched cutting them down. There are currently around 900,000 acres of redwoods being “actively managed,” a modern euphemism for being logged and replanted. They do it more intelligently than they once did, I guess; but there’s currently plenty of forest on fire out west that was being “intelligently managed,” so that’s no guarantee that intelligence involves any wisdom.  It’s a dirty little secret that you can cut down the trees and use the wood for something useful for people every once in a while, or wait for nature to supply bugs and fires to get rid of them — but one way or the other, they don’t last forever.

They’re cutting second-growth trees in California now. 900,000 acres is 1.35 Rhode Islands, for those of you keeping score. Rhode Island isn’t that big, you might say, but I wouldn’t want to rake it. They leave a bunch of gigantic sequoias alone in National Parks now, so we can go look at them, which is as good a use for them as building another split-level ranch to get foreclosed on, I guess. I don’t know where you go to look at men like the men in the video now. They’re probably panhandling in San Francisco and drinking mouthwash.

I noticed some inconvenient inconvenient truth at around the six-minute mark. I’m sure they’ll airbrush that out of there next time.

Tag: woodworking

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