Antifragility: C.W. Winter on "The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)"
Antifragility: C.W. Winter on "The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)"
Interview
The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) is a film that does not obviously bear the markings of either fiction nor documentary. Divided into five chapters and four parts, sprawling over eight hours, and taking place over 5 seasons, it is a film that evades durational conventions within both the cultural mainstream and contemporary art cinema of which it may initially seem part and parcel. In fact, it avoids easy placement into any contemporary categories, and while this makes up a fruitful portion of the conversation below, it is less interesting than that of how co-directors C.W. Winter and Anders Edström render their anti-epic of minimalism, discreet construction, and de-privileging of moments—which as with many great works of art makes the poetic and political inextricable.
Winter and Edström follow two impetuses which may appear to be contradictions to some: to pay attention to and respond to the real world, and also to have no obligation to some naïve conception of the integrity of that reality. It is a film that knows the real world provides its material but not its direction. Thus, The Works and Days freely fictionalizes, re-stages, and constructs the year in the life of Tayoko, a character and a real person who also happens to be Anders’ mother-in-law, who lives in a small Japanese village in the mountains of Kyoto Prefecture. We move between her own daily life and life in various forms contained in her periphery. As Winter describes below, he and Edström do not provide an explicit mapping of the village but it is a different sort of mapping, one that literally maps out a space, but one that does so rhizomatically, and in the process maps out much more that extends beyond the film both spatially and temporally.
At odds with the clichés of slow cinema, The Works and Days operates in a durational mode that restores power to the cut, to the art of sequencing, to the fundamental building blocks of filmic language. In this way, it is intensely modern and deceptively classical.
Winner of the Best Film award in the inaugural Encounters Competition at the Berlinale in 2020 and now finally screening in some cinemas after COVID-19 dramatically altered the film’s theatrical plans, I enjoyed a generously and appropriately long conversation with co-director C.W. Winter.
Adam Cook: What drew you to cinema?
C.W. Winter: In junior high, I had a friend whose family had a Hi8 camera and we made little movies together. That was my first experience. I was drawn to it because I was a TV junkie. My older siblings were off to college and my mom was at work and my dad had already died. When I wasn’t with friends or playing sports I would sit in front of the TV drawing every day. I had this precocious sense of thinking about narrative. Then I thought I would go to USC and study film only to arrive there and be mortified by the state of affairs because it turned out—and I’ve heard it’s changed since—it was largely a pipeline for studio film and television. I didn’t know enough at that time to be able to articulate why I wasn’t interested in that but I knew that I wasn’t. So I left it behind and thought I wouldn’t do movies anymore.
After undergrad I was looking for jobs and because it was Los Angeles I ended up working on film sets and fluked into becoming a ghost writer for a number of directors. I spent some years working with these kinds of directors, learning how I didn’t want to do things, how to not make films. So I applied to CalArts because I knew Thom Andersen, James Benning, and Allan Sekula were there—and others who turned out to be wonderful. That’s when I made the first feature with Anders, The Anchorage.
Cook: How did you first encounter Anders?
Winter: Anders was maybe my favourite photographer before I met him. He started taking pictures in 1986 and his style hasn’t changed much since then other than certain refinements, the spirit and quality are largely the same. He was one of the first photographers on the cover of this French magazine, Purple, arguably the most important photography magazine at the time. I knew his work because there was this newsstand run by this Frenchman in L.A. that would get these small press French journals. I would go and constantly be looking at and thinking about those images.
I was working for a German director and was sent to Berlin for this job. One of my first nights there I asked for a recommendation for a bar and they sent me to this place that really wasn’t my taste. I was sitting there with my head in my hands and I got this tap on my shoulder and this Japanese woman asked if I would like to be in some pictures in a magazine. I told her that of course I would definitely not like to do that [laughs] and she seemed so dejected that to be polite I asked ok can you tell me who the photographer is and she said Anders Edström. So I said I’d do it. She was shocked I would respond so strongly to this name and it turned out it was his wife. That’s how we met. We did these photographs together. It was this complete fluke where some producers recommend that I go to a bar that I would never go to and the producers on Anders’ job recommend he go to a bar he would never go to. Me living in L.A. and he in London, meeting by preposterous chance in this place we would never normally be.
Soon after, we started talking about how we might make things together.
Cook: That’s an amazing story. Clearly there was a sensibility you had in common but how does that collaboration work and why?
Winter: At first it was hard for Anders to imagine working with me and for me to persuade him to do moving image. It’s very hard for people to remember how disruptive his photos were at the time. I’m occasionally prone to offering up a partially provocative statement that the three most important things to happen in photography in the last 35 years are photoshop, smartphones, and Anders. I like it as a claim. I know it’ll get a rise if nothing else. And it's a fun argument to make. And a useful thought experiment. In the 80s, the dominant culture of photography was virtuosity and Anders was bringing some intentional failure, what Hal Foster might call brutal aesthetics.
Anders thought the value of what he was doing was taking pictures between the pictures other photographers would take. So how could you do that with movement? You lose that in-between moment. But everything is relative to its own medium: it may not be about capturing the single moment between moments, it could be the shots between shots or the scenes between scenes that others would film. When we figured that out, the lightbulb went on and we started doing some test films.
The reason we’re able to collaborate so well is that our division of labour is very clean. He’s in charge of the images and I’m in charge of the sound and coming up with the story. It’s not as if you have two people trying to do the same thing and constantly converging. I trust him to do his bit and he trusts me to do mine. We’re never butting heads. At the same time, we are each other’s best critics. We remind each other when something is too strong, too alluring, or too beautiful. We trust each other when the other has a strong opinion about the other’s thing.
Cook: With both The Anchorage and The Works and Days, there is a familial connection for Anders. Could you talk about the origin of this latest project and also, from your positionality, your relationship to the village and the people?
Winter: That’s another part that works out well for us. For what I’m doing on the projects, I believe it benefits strongly to do it at a remove so that I can see a detached picture, a superordinal kind of view, whereas Anders it’s from having been in a place for a long time. When one arrives in a new place, one will make touristic observations and be drawn to things that are too easily interesting. When one spends a long time in a place, one works past those touristic observations and closer to that of a long term resident. We have made two films with Anders’ families because he had spent many years there taking pictures and done a lot of that work already.
With The Anchorage, shooting Anders’ family—well, sort of, because we fictionalized who the family members were— we had gone to Sweden to make a botanical film on mosses and lichens in the Stockholm archipelago. One day Anders’ mother, Ulla, showed up at the island and told us about when Anders and his sister were small, they were on the island, and this hunter had begun walking around the cabin at night during moose hunting season. We realized this little story was enough to make a whole film. During that filming, Tayoko came out to make food on the film. She got to see Ulla being in a film which then allowed us to ask her to be in a film in Shiotani because she was familiar with the process.
With both films we didn’t have a full story. Our films don’t have stories in a classical sense. Our stories aren’t about getting from the beginning to the end but just to the beginning. We went on multiple trips to Japan and spent time until one night, when we had all been drinking sake, Tayoko talked about these years she had spent in frustration because she had been denied an education and a career, all because she was a woman in this society. Everyone was visibly moved and surprised by this story. We knew we had a story that could get us to the beginning of making the movie.
Cook: Does the film that now exists resemble what you had imagined at the outset? To what degree do you have ideas you want to explore at the outset and to what degree do they emerge throughout the process?
Winter: When we begin we hardly have a sense of what the film is going to look like. I kept this big scroll of butcher paper in my studio and occasionally I would tape note cards to it, but they weren’t scenes or anything, just notes like “make sure to shoot a bunch of dawns up on the fire road” or “make sure to go out and hang out with the wild boar hunter”. Vague things, not in an order or in an arc, things that may be useful to film, and that’s about it. And then Anders’ photographs are used as loose inspiration, reminders of ways of looking.
For the most part it’s a just-in-time model. A lot of times, understandably, younger film studies people or critics might ask in terms of influence or cinephilic reference. That doesn’t really give a very good picture of how we work. If anyone is familiar with Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled, a piece he had at Documenta in 2012, which is just an area in this compost on the edge of the city where he installed a sculptor by another artist and put a beehive on it and there was a white dog running around and he planted marijuana plants…When one gets there one can’t tell where the work begins and where it ends, which objects were already there and which were brought there or made. It begs questions about what even is art as an object. That’s a more useful reference for us than any movie would be. What we had was this valley, this little basin, and in it we had 47 people, and we had two cameras and two microphones and we would wake up every morning and have this little ecosystem to go out and film in. Some days we would walk this way and some days you walk that way, other days we climb the mountain, some days we get in the kei truck and drive, some days we stay in the house. We have these tools and every day we’re just waking up to make things. Like what I was saying about when I was a kid and I would spend every afternoon drawing. It’s like we’re saying we’re going to go draw now. We’re going to go film now.
Once in a while we have an idea but for the most part we are just using the tools to go out to make stuff and it’s only in the edit that we decide what to do with it and find how to make it coherent and forward-moving. We added Tayoko narrating her diary so that there’s a baseline to follow and there are these seasonal divisions—even if the seasons themselves are disordered.
Cook: In regards to what is already there versus what isn’t, the main narrative or thematic element that was already there in this case was that Junji, Tayoko’s husband, had passed away. I’m curious about her creative input. There must have been some shaping of that story with her from the beginning.
One thing we talk about a lot is the idea of antifragility. If you ask a typical person what’s the opposite of fragile they would think something solid or unbreakable, but that isn’t the opposite of fragility. The opposite of something being fragile is that when it is hit it gets stronger instead of crumbling.
Winter: It happened early but not straight away. One thing we talk about a lot is the idea of antifragility. If you ask a typical person what’s the opposite of fragile they would think something solid or unbreakable, but that isn’t the opposite of fragility. The opposite of something being fragile is that when it is hit it gets stronger instead of crumbling. The dominant model of cinema is incredibly fragile. There’s a script that’s been approved by a committee of money people that they have to stick to, they have a schedule they must follow. If anything goes wrong in that formula it’s something like a catastrophe.
In the way that we work, contingency is built in from the beginning. Contingency is the medium. It’s important that people don’t confuse this with chance or improvisation, which are very different things. Those come from within. Contingency comes from without, it’s a thing that befalls you, that’s what the latin contingere means. It’s a thing that comes from the outside. So we go into a place and we know that things are going to befall this production but with the way that we work with a small team and few tools, living in this house for free and cooking our own meals for cheap. We can just wait and wait and wait in a way that the expensive fragile productions cannot. So we wait around and when things befall us, things befall us.
Days before we were supposed to go Japan to begin filming, thinking that he was going to live for 18 months, we got a phone call and found out Junji had suddenly died. I sat there on the phone and within the next 15 minutes—because I had planned for this eventuality—I said okay, we’ll make another film. I remember thinking about Close-Up by Kiarostami and hearing that he was ready to make one film and that he got this news story and they re-mobilized the operation to make Close-Up. I had it in mind to always have a plan B ready because this can happen. So we did, we had a plan that if Junji died we would go and use Tayoko’s diaries, and make a recreation of something like their last year together even though our version is fictional.
Then when we got there just in time for the wake. We filmed that and it was a two-day process. Once that was over we took a week off to regroup and think about what the movie was going to be. I had this idea bouncing around of casting someone as Junji and using Tayoko’s diaries but then I heard Tayoko speak to Junji at the shrine that was set up in her home for 49 days after he died. Everyday she was at the shrine speaking to him knowing he can hear every word. In watching her do this and realizing that in her mind that these were concrete certainties, I proposed this idea that we recreate the last year as an opportunity to do things over because she had expressed remorse that the last year of their marriage was the first year they had fought since the very first year of their marriage. This could be a chance to go back and say many of things she wished she could have said and do the things she wished she could have done and so with that as a vague writing principle, I didn’t write a plot or make an arc out of it, but with that as something like a background radiation, we got back to work and started making a movie.
Cook: A painter may paint one painting or several of a particular place, and must choose what to show, what captures what they want, a photographer may do something similar, but in this film you have eight hours and hundreds of shots, but showing everything is always impossible, it’s still a limitation, how do you choose what to show, what to capture, and what to exclude?
Winter: Are those cicadas that I hear over there?
Cook: Yes! I even made a note to mention that we have this huge population of cicadas that emerged this summer in Toronto. It reminds me of your film.
Winter: I knew it, it’s very appropriate. I’m glad you could arrange that. [laughs]
Anders has been taking these pictures since 1986, we’ve been talking about these pictures for two decades, we have very specific ideas about what a photograph is and how it works. When we go out everyday with our tools we are looking for that.
So, what do we use and do we exclude…When we’re filming we’re not too hung up on this. We used to be. With The Anchorage we had to be because we were shooting on super 16 and we didn’t have the budget to play around whereas this way with video we were free to try a lot of things out. This shouldn’t be confused with a lot of lazy techniques people use in independent film or on television where they’re just blanketing everything because they don’t have any guiding impetus. Anders has been taking these pictures since 1986, we’ve been talking about these pictures for two decades, we have very specific ideas about what a photograph is and how it works. When we go out everyday with our tools we are looking for that.
We give ourselves a lot of room based on the idea that editing is probably our favourite part so we just go out and we shoot. Between scenes with people there are sequences that are just of the land, the natural or built landscape. For those we either walk somewhere or we load into the little kei truck and drive around until we find a place that seems especially uninteresting—we pull over and we’re forced to extract something out of this uninteresting place. Anders and I came from commercial cinema where the impulse is the opposite. By handicapping ourselves at the beginning, it creates a density to the images for us. We don’t think a lot about exclusion aside from that we know we are excluding…We don’t like things that are gritty. We don’t like the excessively beautiful or the clever. We’re drawn towards weaker images because we know that people are going to have to consume them over a long duration and it’s too fatiguing to give people uninterrupted allure for eight hours—the mind just turns off too quickly.
With editing, I sat down with all of it on the first day and realized I didn’t know what to do and that it was going to be a matter of learning how to make this film, how to edit this film, because there is no script. There is some chronology but that’s pretty weak. So I spent a long time just organizing and arranging the footage until it became clear how to start working with it. I would edit the same way we edit photographs: I would find an image that spoke to me and see if I couldn’t edit sequences around that image, and then treat those sequences like patches. Then, somehow, arrange these patches in some kind of linear quilt. I don’t love this analogy but it’s something like that. It was important to me that this not be the longest film ever so it’s not laden with gimmick, or that it not be a film that must be screened over multiple days because I don’t like that, so I decided it should come in at the length of a work day.
Cook: The Works and Days is described as a work of fiction but it obviously has characteristics of what people consider to be documentary-like. Can you describe what these boundaries between fact and fiction mean to you? Do they even exist?
Winter: I don’t want to sound too absolutist because of course I could go back and find exception to this, but I think at least as a general sensibility it’s safest to proceed as if those categories don’t exist, because they don’t concern us. Filmmaking is largely problem-solving and so we go into these situations where we’re trying to make something, here we are, we have cameras, we have a microphone, now let’s just make something, and you’re solving the problem of how to best make that thing. Or, in scenes where you do have something more explicit to communicate, how do you solve the problems of communicating that thing. And there are a whole bunch of tools of cinema and among them is a separate dropdown menu that relates to fiction solutions, this sub dropdown menu of fiction solutions is just another set of potential solutions to what might be the problems of a situation. So the idea that we would think in terms of documentary or fiction just doesn’t interest us. We’re solving problems. Any number of fiction solutions for us will often be the best answers to those problems.
Cook: Going off of that, what do you consider the relationship between a real place, a real time, and a recording of a place and of that time, to what degree can you represent or re-present it?
Winter: Well of course the first answer is that the map is not the territory, so any attempt we’re going to have to map this place is going to be incomplete but it’s especially going to be so because we’re not doing reportage. This is an expressivist exercise unabashedly full of impurities and artificialities and fictionalizations. There are even a couple instances—and I hate to disappoint Thom Andersen—where we resort to geographic license. Sorry, Thom. At the same time, I think there is a quality we can find in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, or My Darling Clementine, or Fort Apache, where having watched these films, if you were forced to, you could go back and make a map of the village, you could draw it on paper. We don’t spell it out as explicitly as John Ford, we don’t show you the one street that faces out onto the nature, we don’t draw out the town as clearly, but if forced, if having only the recourse of this film, a surveyor could easily map this village. The struggle might be watching an eight-hour film multiple times, but it’s all in there.
It is an exercise of mapping a place, even if the map isn’t the territory.
Cook: Going into the film, I didn’t know that it would involve the death of Tayoko’s husband, that there would eventually be this eventual dramatic point, and so I had accepted early on that there wasn’t going to be anything like that. My experience became exclusively about paying attention to moments and details for the sake and value of those moments and details themselves. What I find moving about the film is the idea that the quotidian is enough, the stuff of life is enough, more than enough, it’s overflowing, even bursting, and the things worth knowing and understanding can come from paying attention—and that cinema can be a wonderful way of paying attention, of making that clearer.
I get this feeling when watching the film of something larger beyond the frame at all times, that this one story or one person or one village or one passage of time is encased in a larger, indivisible time than what we’re watching.
Winter: We’re happy to allow that there’s something to Junji’s death that becomes narrative-like and we don’t object to the fact that that’s present in the film, but for us it’s about amplitude and narrative wavelength. We let these moments breathe to a degree that everything is of the everyday, including death, that enough space and time is given to them that the amplitude of the various waves of the film are kept low so there’s an equanimity that’s maintained even if somebody dies.
I think the great…I mean where do we even begin with these people…but one of the greatest…I don’t know…how do we rank the crimes of Sundance? [laughs] But one of the crimes of Sundance, besides destroying access for Americans to the best films in the world playing in their cinemas, I mean when I was a kid the latest Godard film played in the cinema in my little suburban town. You got to see the best films and now all of those parking spaces are taken up by indie movies. One of the things that those types of films do, especially the non-fiction ones, is to try to come up with the most clever subject. Who can come up with a subject that is odd or quirky, bizarre or weird, or somehow so compelling that the filmmakers barely need to show up. Part of what we’re interested in when we’re making films is not letting the subject do too much of the work. A film is images and sounds and cuts. And we try to have it be as much about images and sounds and cuts as we can. I like this story—even though it might be apocryphal because apocryphal stories can be useful too—where before he made Breathless, Godard went to Truffaut and asked if he had any scripts from which he could shoot a film and he settled on the Breathless script because he found it to be the worst of the three. Even if it’s untrue, it relates with this idea of not relying on the subject, of forcing the authors to have to do it even without the benefit of an incredibly compelling topic.
A film is images and sounds and cuts. And we try to have it be as much about images and sounds and cuts as we can.
Another aspect of spending time is that we wanted people who you wanted to spend time with. You can think of films like How Green was My Valley and the Morgan family or we can think of the Earp brothers in Wichita or the siblings of Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family. In pulling away of this conflict resolution structure that defines 99% of films, it’s a lot like the first 14 minutes of How Green was My Valley before the conflict arises. We have that first 14 minutes for seven hours, and so you have the time to just live with this family and enjoy their company because they’re people you would want to spend time with. This of course isn't exactly correct. But it'll do as a heuristic.
Also in regards to time, with cinema and music, there were these parallel movements which were Noise Music and Slow Cinema. In each case, when they rose up, they were these resistance approaches that were defiant, shocking and alienating. Then they devolved into being styles that can be taken up somewhat easily, maybe by people who haven’t thought through all of what made them powerful in the first place. By around about 2013 or so we had largely lost interest in those kind of films with the exception of people who had been there so long that it’s kind of their birthright to make those films forever. James Benning can make those films until the end of time and they will be great and Tsai Ming-liang can do it. Our film is edited together with an average shot length of 18 seconds, somewhere around that of a golden age screwball comedy, which divorces us from the way duration is normally reached through excessively long shots.
We also thought about ways that time works in more expansive ways, so you have these jisei, Japanese death poems, that start every chapter that go from the 18th century to the 1920s. The beautiful way these jisei are written resist the idea of a final gesture being one’s grandest, instead the final gesture is unremarkable. They are this reinforcement of the idea that the death in the film is unremarkable, that it’s just one death of many in Japan on farms or in villages over the last how ever many hundreds of years. But then we pull out further to another poem which is Hesiod’s The Works and Days which follows a tradition of farmers’ manual poetry that includes Marcus Terentius Varro’s Agricultural Topics in Three Books and other georgic poems. They remind us that Tayoko’s experiences are not just of this time and place but are tied to the 11500 years of the human history of farming, at once small and yet related to ideas that are larger than we can comprehend. That’s how we were using time in a sort of accordion way.
Cook: It makes me think of Deleuze’s line of the universe, when he’s talking about Mizoguchi, this idea of this line of the universe connected to the image we’re seeing. As well as this idea of the mental image constituted by invisible relations—you always know you’re looking at more than just the image itself but a set of relations. By making death appear unremarkable like you describe, it also makes the moments we normally do consider to be unremarkable to be given rise by way of that equanimity.
Winter: That is important for us. I think there are ways we think when we’re in a cinema space. You can relate it to learning a new card game. When you learn a new card game your mind is functioning in the memory region and it’s memorizing as much as it can about what it’s seeing. Once you’ve memorized that card game, you’re playing in the default mode network. You’re no longer thinking about what the game is or how it’s constructed. You’re just playing. In front of 99% of fiction cinema, pretty early on our brain is going into the default mode network. And part of what we’re doing is trying to keep the mind in the memory region by upsetting narrative expectation continually and sufficiently enough that one is constantly having to commit to the sense-making of this thing. It’s a different type of thinking and I would argue that it’s a different quality of thinking. It’s an avoidance of inattentional blindness by disorienting the experience and getting the audience to pay attention to objects in a way that allows them to bring their own creativity to bear.
Everyone will bring their own imaginations. I’ve had artist friends in the scene where Tayoko uses the roto and they’ll think of Bruegel’s Icarus, or if they notice the screens in the house they think of Agnes Martin's grids or people who are into landscape might think of Claude Lorrain, literary friends will think of Robbe-Grillet or the Russian formalists. I can’t say that stuff is in there or isn’t in there, but we’re pattern seeking primates. People are going to pull things out if you’re not forcing them in the claustrophobia of an inattentional narrative. When you free people up you’re able to use the time and space in different ways.
A lot of what we’re doing relates to duration and for us some of the interest in duration is to leapfrog back over postmodern critical theory back into what we consider to be the good stuff, looking at art of the mid-20th century and various conceptualisms and minimalisms. Cinephiles might go to Benning, Warhol and Akerman. There’s a finite regress from there that takes us back to Empire which was likely inspired by the kind of music playing at Yoko Ono’s loft on Chambers Street which was likely triggered by La Monte Young arriving in New York and declaring himself the inventor of minimalism when in fact that actually took place when he was living in Los Angeles and started hanging around the living room of a teenager named Terry Jennings who was a backup musician for Ornette Coleman. Terry and Dennis Johnson were recording music that would essentially become the first full-fledged minimal recordings. A discovery of Dennis Johnson’s November helped rewrite the history on how minimalism began. There was this period when these records were being reissued in the 90s, things by Tony Conrad and Terry Riley and Henry Flynt. Those records durationally affected us so heavily and so we wanted somehow to see if we couldn’t capture those feelings in cinema but not in abstract ways which would have been too easy but through fiction which seemed harder.
…often people use this Beckett quote, “fail, fail again, fail better,” but for us it’s very important that you fail, fail again, and you fail worse—or at least worse according to the dominant culture so that we can make films that maybe can work emotionally or critically but fail as capital.
What you’ll also notice is there’s a kind of built-in failure in our work, at least by the classical model of doing things. This is really important to us because it’s a matter of economics, of failing according the predominant economic model, often people use this Beckett quote, “fail, fail again, fail better,” but for us it’s very important that you fail, fail again, and you fail worse—or at least worse according to the dominant culture so that we can make films that maybe can work emotionally or critically but fail as capital.
Lest this get too serious or high-minded, there are other people using duration in ways that we think are effective, like, for example, Gilbert Gottfried’s rendition of the aristocrats joke which was delivered four days after 9/11 and is a masterpiece, and Norm Macdonald’s moth joke. Those speak to us in ways of insistent durational failure that remind us of certain kinds of music that’s important to us like Loren Connors’ Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations or The Shadow Ring, for example. They have this kind of unrelenting failure to satisfy by the conventions of the dominant sphere. And we think those kind of things are important. Because, in a standard distribution of ideas, we’re not just looking for ideas from some fat right tail of excellence. It’s important for us for things to have a lifeblood and that they have a sufficient amount of stupidity, and thinking in these kinds of ways is a way to get at some of that. For instance, there are a number of fart jokes in the film. They’re not there to be snide or flippant, they’re there because that's the most basic kind of joke, and much of what we're interested in getting at is the fundamentals and the basement reality of making something.
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