Monthly Archives: January 2021

Humour, Links

Crafting Inner Peace

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For those of us hoping for a positive start to 2021, after (gestures vaguely) all of this, the first week has been a long year. The three horsemen of disaster—Trump, Covid, and Brexit—are abroad in the land, with Seasonal Affective Disorder loping along behind them like a particularly morose hound. After everything we’ve been through, self care remains very, very necessary.

One of the easiest ways to let the overtaxed brain drift away is to dive into some old-fashioned media consumption. But what to watch in these trying times? Netflix, Amazon, and their ilk have plenty to offer (I’m partial to a bit of Ted Lasso on AppleTV+ myself), but sometimes even the most easy-going narrative can require a little too much focus of the viewer. When seeking respite, it’s better to let someone else do as much of the work as possible.

At such times, YouTube is your only man. Cooking and baking channels are massively popular and might seem to fit the bill, but don’t be fooled. There are traps inherent in even the most alluring recipe video: not just the hunger they’ll inevitably spur, but also the subconscious guilt at the fact that you’ll never cook any of these delicious dishes, even though you could at least give it a shot. No, if you’re looking for pure guilt-free, stress-free viewing, you need to watch something where there’s no possibility of copying the feats depicted.

For me at least, I get that service from crafting YouTube. There’s an entire universe of YouTube videos in which expert crafters demonstrate their skills, and many of them rank among the Internet’s most soothing experiences. Stick on a video, or cue up an entire playlist, and let some of these voices (ranked below from least to most relaxing) ease all your cares as they demonstrate their skill and knowledge.

Metalwork—That Works

Born from the remants of the second version of the Man at Arms metalsmithing channel, That Works features a small group of forge-addicted smiths and their supporting craftspersons, mostly recreating weapons from popular media like games and TV shows, but also talking about their tools and working on more personal projects. They’re a lively and talkative bunch, and when they build a weapon there’s always a closing montage of it being used to stab, smash, and slice innocent fruit and veg. Even so, the actual process of smithing and grinding can easily lull you into restfulness, and perhaps a little bit of energetic destruction right at the end might be just what the doctor ordered to work off the last of your stress.

Machining—Clickspring

Metalwork on a much smaller and more precise scale than That Works, Clickspring sees a genial, soft-spoken Australian called Chris narrate his way through the creation of fascinating clockwork mechanisms. He seems to have only recently restarted posting after a bit of a gap, and he’s currently working on a recreation of the Antikythera Mechanism, but there are plenty of videos in his backlog, featuring both precision metalwork and the creation of the tools needed to do so. As long as you don’t have a problem with all the grinding and filing, or the Ozzie accent, Chris’s dulcet tones might be the perfect guide to a world of satisfying clockwork, demonstrating some of the surprisingly simple techniques that watchmakers have developed over the centuries of their craft.

Restoration—Baumgartner

A step further even than Clickspring in terms of precision and dulcet tones, Baumgartner Restoration offers up the wisdom and skill of Chicago’s Julian Baumgartner as he takes the dingiest, most damaged artworks and restores them to something close to their original form. There’s a lot to compare in the two channels, as both hosts are keen to emphasise the need to do things the right way and will occasionally throw in a wordless video as ASMR bait for their followers. However, Julian probably just has the edge in terms of the warmth of his voice, and there’s something exceptionally satisfying in watching cack-handed old restoration being removed and repairs to fine art being undertaken at the smallest scale. Plus, whereas Clickspring’s Chris breaks down his work into multiple short videos, Julian usually completes one restoration per video, ensuring a satisfying reveal of the finished work at the end.

Woodworking—Ishitani

For the ultimate in relaxing craft viewing, it’s to Japan we turn, and specifically the Ishitani channel of a Japanese maker of custom furniture. Carving, sawing, and hammering in a workshop set in unspeakably idyllic surroundings, these videos are almost entirely without narration of the kind that might tax a stressed viewer’s cognition. Instead, you’re invited to enjoy the simple satisfaction of seeing hunks of lumber being brought from their raw state into the form of furniture that you would weep to possess, with occasional cameos from the craftsman’s family and pet dog. In fact, the envy engendered by watching this furniture come into being, and the inevitable dissatisfaction with your own paltry surroundings by comparison, are some of the only minor issues with Ishitani. The other is the fact that the channel hasn’t posted a new video in over half a year, but with over three years of videos to watch, you won’t run out for a while.

Cinema, Reviews

Freshly Baked Reviews — January 2021

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A few years back, I was in the habit of writing regular reviews on this blog. Covering games, books, and movies, the poorly explained schtick of the reviews was that I limited them to three sentences each. This both leaned into the fact that this was more or less my job for over a decade (compressing information into tiny packages, not writing reviews) and was a fun writing exercise, even if it did occasionally lead to long run-on sentences.

Anyway, after a 2020 that proved very hard for writing, I figure it’s worth my while to develop a better writing habit, and returning to something that was once fun seems like a good start. So expect a few more of these review bundles in the months to come, but in the meantime, here’s what I thought of four movies that I managed to catch over the Christmas break.

Soul (Pete Docter)

Pixar’s latest musing on the nature of life, the universe, and everything may not have been the biggest movie to be released online-only at the end of the plague year, but it wasn’t far off the top of pile. Telling the story of a teacher and aspiring jazz pianist who finds himself hovering between life and death just as he gets his big break, it sets its characters to explore the question of what life is for: a single grand purpose or the simple joys of existing day to day. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Docter, who also directed Up and Inside Out for Pixar, lands on the latter option as the best one, and while Soul’s message might prove a little straightforward if you’ve already spent part of your life considering it, Soul tells its tale with warmth and humour and is definitely worth checking out.

Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins)

Okay, so this movie was the biggest online-only release of the festive period, made all the more notable by Warner Bros’ decision to shift its entire slate online in 2021, and it’s just a shame that WW1984 turned out to be a colourful mess of a film. The first Wonder Woman cannily cast Gal Gadot as a fish out of water hero, but despite the sequel being set some seventy years later, there isn’t any character growth to be seen, and Gadot and her talented supporting cast find themselves tumbling through a series of set pieces that are barely connected by the central conceit of granting wishes with dark costs. WW84 has clearly suffered from its many delays and the chaos surrounding the DC cinematic universe, and the result is a colourful and occasionally exciting shambles that doesn’t build on the success of its predecessor.

Tenet (Christopher Nolan)

If the pandemic year had a tentpole film, it was Christopher Nolan’s time-twisting Tenet, which Nolan fought to get into cinemas and which proved to be divisive on its release. Nolan’s success over the years has seen him lean increasingly towards structural complexity, as seen in Inception and Dunkirk, and Tenet pushes that habit further still, to the point where the structural games overwhelm character development and even plot clarity. Tenet is certainly a spectacle, but its drabness is only really alleviated by Robert Pattinson’s louche secret agent, and while repeated viewings might provide insight into its depths, there might not be much impetus to watch it again if it fails to engage and inspire on first viewing.

Wolfwalkers (Tomm Moore & Ross Stewart)

Arriving just as the year was ending, in a small scattering of cinemas and on Apple TV+, Wolfwalkers is a spellbinding animated tour-de-force, set in a myth-soaked vision of the Irish past. Cartoon Saloon’s film tells the story of two girls—a hunter and a “wolf walker”—who connect amid the turmoil of Cromwell’s occupation of Kilkenny, with animation that sweeps and shifts in stunning hand-drawn fashion as the characters shift from human to wolf and back. Undoubtedly the artistic high point of all the films I’ve seen in the past month, Wolfwalkers benefits further from heartfelt performances from its voice actors and a story that invests viewers in the survival of the wolves and wolfwalkers as a vision of a threatened, romantic land.