Modern Woodworking
What Your Hobbies Reveal About You
I have three neighbors within shouting (at the top of my lungs) distance of our front porch, and we sometimes go weeks without seeing them. In fact there’s a farmer at the corner, about 2 miles away, who raises feeder beef cattle but we’ve never seen animals delivered, or sent to market, once in 7 years, though his barns are always full of animals. Once in a while we realize that life happens around us without our knowledge.
On the other hand, sometimes you cannot escape the modern world. I recently came across an article, which I can longer find, about porn yoga. My Youtube algorithm includes cooking and woodworking and restoration videos, and sports replays of course. But porn yoga is news. Attractive young women scantily clad, or unclad I guess, stretching their bodies in ways that only educate 13 year old boys is really not yoga. But evidently they amass huge numbers of views and make real cash performing a sordid exercise routine.
My initial reaction was heck no, that’s horrible! One more case of something with a long cultural tradition being brought low by people who will literally do anything to make money, especially sexual things. When I was in high school I remember a discussion about prostitution: Should it be legal, should it be brought out of the criminal shadows? Now, after all the progress of the last 60 years, it’s everywhere. In fact it’s hard to find a domain of life where it’s not ever present. The flood, yeah it’s here.
All of this was top of mind recently when I began to think seriously about a long put off ambition of a Youtube channel. I already own the channel name - “Farm and Shop.” (Pretty good right? Couldn’t believe it was still available!) Now I had just written a post on this very substack with the title Hold Fast People about not letting your internet audience determine the content of your stack, or Youtube channel, or facebook page, or whatever. But, and here it comes, what’s the point of all the expense and time and effort to video your woodworking projects and farm tasks and talk about them in front of the world, including the omnipresent internet trolls and wiseguys, if no one sees them? If I don’t find 100,000 subscribers in the vast, competitive Youtube universe, then no cabbage, brother!
But at the end of the day, one wonders whether the world really wants to see another video about making furniture. The answer of course is no. Most people don’t watch the woodworking channels to learn about woodworking. Consider the fact that you can’t sell woodworking tools today to save your life - which is odd when you think about it, since there seems to be so much interest in woodworking? Most woodworkers on Youtube are in their 50’s, some in their 60’s, but the few younger ones, who are also very successful, have made the switch from woodworking to shop entertainment. There’s very little discussion of functional design, for example, like why the woodworker selects the joinery he does. Matthias Wandel, interviewed below, has 1.72 million Youtube subscribers, because he started when the platform was pretty new and got a head start:
This proliferation of content on the platform has also altered his approach.
"With so much stuff out there now, to have yet another video about how to build a chair or a dresser or something like that, is not going to get traction, because there's so much of it already," he (Wandel) said.
"So you have to focus a bit more on the entertainment aspect of it, or just sort of some interesting angle of it. So it's about woodworking, but it's also about entertainment."
The other issue many woodworkers have is that selling unique, one of a kind furniture pieces is a losing proposition. We’ve become a culture used to factory furniture where extraordinary machines, each with a trained specialist, super efficiently punch out perfect parts that enter the assembly line and come out after stain and varnish like 1000’s of the same piece - perfectly. Against this competition the lonesome woodworker strives relentlessly, and still comes out the loser. He can’t take the time and expense to prototype a piece; so he works on the one off, learning as he goes. The buyer sees in the end result that some slight changes were made, or something is a bit off here or there. You can only imagine the conversation that happens when the affluent buyer starts to undress the hapless woodworker about the $30,000 dining table that’s not perfect in some imperceptible detail. This happens once or twice to the woodworker and they decide their future depends on Youtube, and they’ll do whatever it takes to succeed, and to avoid the humiliating conversation with the millionaire partner of a power law firm about a dining room table!
Having laid out the options I came to the realization that it was time to face facts; I needed a Hollywood style woodworking channel. You want entertainment, oh, I’ll give you entertainment! Out with the prosaic discussions of joinery options and in with the music. But first, it’s important to know who the audience is, or is going to be. If they’re watching for entertainment, then the middle aged Dads with empty nests are out. There’s football on TV five nights a week now. No, I have a strong notion it’s our corporate lawyer from the dining table imbroglio above. After a long day of suing her client’s competitors into submission, she needs something easy to watch on the I-pad as she settles into bed for the evening. Woodworking videos fit the bill, but which one will turn on the interest?
My camera equipment finally came, $375, and that was with free shipping! I need to hit a few home runs, right ‘off the bat’ as they say. Fortunately, I have a good idea about a first project. I’ve got an old, industrial, steel foreman’s desk that I’ll recreate in wood. Something tells me that single women who own condominiums love the industrial look furniture with its broad shouldered, muscular ‘feel’.
Setting up the tripod for those scenes of me working the wood through the various machines was more difficult that I first imagined. I did several takes but no matter the angle I realized the shop needed a good cleanup as the camera revealed all the detritus of previous projects. So that took the better part of the day. When I finally had the place organized and swept I decided it was time for a real attempt at what I hoped to be a radical and brilliant and lucrative new Youtube channel.
So I disrobed, save for my socks and boots, and filmed a scene where I push a 1 x 6 by 8 foot piece of hard ash through the planer and then admire the result by running my hands over finished board. I masterfully avoided looking directly into the camera: I was an elite craftsman deftly practicing my trade with supreme confidence, and plenty of biceps. I turned off the saw and went to check the replay on my computer when I noticed my wife Mary had come into the shop.
“What the hell is this?” She labored to ask, bent over like a jack knife and howling.
“Oh, you wouldn’t understand anyway,” I responded, brought down by her her peels of laughter. “More sophisticated women are going to love my new Youtube channel “Naked Farm and Shop.”
“Well, if sophisticated is the new blind,” she responded, not giving up the high comedy ground.
I sat down on my metal shop stool, a cold shock that I successfully hid from my wife, and started to review the scene on the computer.
“Dinner in 10 minutes,” she managed to blurt out, wiping away the tears. She walked out, and I was completely deflated.
Over the next few days I finished part one of the industrial desk build, my first video, and put it up on Youtube. I decided not to add ‘Naked’ to the channel name as this could offend certain sensibilities which, after coming to the channel unknowingly, would probably become its biggest fans. Strangely, my hoped for audience did not show up initially. Instead there were a bunch of men and boys who took great pleasure in writing scathing comments about my 63 year old frame. One in particular “Assless man makes furniture!” cut a little deep. But I finally couldn’t complain as the number of view rose dramatically, hour by hour.
Yet I held out hope that in time the audience I forecasted would find the channel. But that slim hope was soon dashed as well when I received the following note from Youtube:
Well there you have it, once again brought down by the rules and regulations police! I guess if you’re a lithe 20 year old female with excellent bone structure you can bend and fluctuate all day on Youtube, receiving nothing but accolades and piles of cash. But if your a retiree with a little sagging flesh you don’t have a chance.
The whole episode can’t find its way to the memory hole fast enough, if you want to know the truth. It did rekindle Mary’s affections: She stroked my white hair recently and said “thanks, I needed that. I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time.” The hits just keep on coming. A few locals caught the video, a group of them laughed uproariously right in my face on a recent trip to the village grocery. But I kept my head up! How many of them ever had a viral video with over a million views?
Excellent observations about the work never really being about the thing itself anymore. I think our natural attraction to novelty makes the “entertainment creep” inevitable.