Made by Hand (4 page)

I became acquainted with Mister Jalopy (he doesn’t use his real name in public) through the tool reviews he submitted for the first issue of
Make
. I was charmed by his perspective of the world as a hackable platform, something to be remade and remodeled to his exacting, eccentric, yet infectiously appealing aesthetic sensibilities. His first
Make
review was for a screwdriver kit that came with fifty-seven different tamperproof screw bits that would, as he put it, “open damn near every machine meant to remain unopened.”

Intrigued, I visited Mister Jalopy’s blog (
hooptyrides.com
) and saw a couple of photos of his workshop, brimming with his garage-sale treasures. (Jalopy goes garage-saling every Saturday in the “deep sea suburbia” of Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley.) I e-mailed him and asked if we might photograph his shop for the magazine. He agreed and gave me his address.

My wife, Carla, a part-time photographer, accompanied me to Mister Jalopy’s tidy house on a tree-lined street in Burbank. He was in front of his garage, stripping the varnish off a wooden desk he’d picked up, naturally, at a garage sale. A tall man in his midthirties, he had longish black hair and wore wire-rimmed glasses and Levis paired with a Western-style shirt.

I eventually figured out that this was his unwavering personal dress code.

A rusted Mercedes Benz, circa 1960, sat in the driveway. On top of it rested a large gasoline sign rescued from a closed filling station. Parked next to the Mercedes was a wood-paneled station wagon, which Mister Jalopy was tricking out for amateur drag racing. On closer inspection I noticed that the “wood paneling” was actually a custom paint job, not the vinyl wood-grain decal typically applied at the factory. Mister Jalopy told me that he’d hired his neighbor, a retired sign painter for Disney, to paint it for him. When I looked closely, I saw that the knotholes and grain patterns of the painted wood were filled with images of monster eyeballs, spiders, and other creatures.

Mister Jalopy led Carla and me into the garage. Eye-catching bric-a-brac covered every square inch. On the floor were a miniature gray race car salvaged from a 1930s kiddie ride, four bright yellow magnesium racing wheels from Barney Navarro’s 1967 Indy 500 car, a vintage O’Keefe & Merritt stove (painted turquoise with racing pinstripes), the aforementioned art deco Farnsworth radio cabinet fitted with a Macintosh-based album digitizing system, and a Captain Fantastic pinball machine Mister Jalopy had found abandoned on the side of the road. After tussling over it with a drunk homeless man, he had victoriously brought it home for restoration.

The garage was a personal expression of Mister Jalopy’s philosophy. In his world, the things around you should have meaning, and his way of giving them meaning is by collecting, customizing, rebuilding, and combining them in ways that make him happy. Standing there in his garage, looking at his chests of hand tools, Model T headlights, art nouveau lamp stands, cast-iron cookware, old countertop-advertising mascot statuettes, and other cleaned-up, refinished, and remixed garage sale finds, I suddenly very much wanted to do what he was doing. I don’t mean that I wanted to copy his aesthetic sensibility (though much of it resonated with me); I just wanted to gain that kind of control over my environment and the things in it. To make my space mine.

We hit it off that day and became friends. I eventually asked him to explain his knack for turning other people’s trash into treasure. “People think it’s unusual, what I do,” he said after a lengthy pause. “I don’t even think of it as what I do. I’m just living. What I do is the same as cooking or gardening. The difference is the perception of the barrier to entry. People are afraid that they’re going to screw something up, that they’re going to ruin something. And unfortunately, it’s valid—they will. You
will
screw stuff up. Things
will
be broken. But that’s the one step to overcome to get on the path of living this richer life of engagement, of having meaningful connections to the objects around you. It’s that necessary step you have to take—the courage to screw things up—so you’re able to fix things, or to make stuff from scratch, or to refurbish stuff to live according to your standards.”

Mister Jalopy’s answer made me feel both ashamed and inspired. Ashamed because he was dead-on about my own fear of screwing things up and the cop-out rationalizations that ran through my head whenever I considered doing something myself: “I’ll mess it up.” “Experts can do it better, faster, and cheaper than I can.” “I might electrocute myself, poison myself, lose or break a body part, or get blown up.” Whether he knew it or not, Mister Jalopy was prodding that helpless and insecure part of me that balked at the challenge of DIY. But his answer also inspired me, because I now felt like I had permission to make mistakes, to break things, to fail.

What I’ve learned from Mister Jalopy and other DIYers is that mistakes are not only inevitable—they’re a necessary part of learning and skill building. Mistakes are a sign that you’re active and curious. In fact, recent brain research suggests that making mistakes is one of the best ways to learn.

While there’s nothing wrong with striving to become an excellent craftsman who can do no wrong (if such a person exists), most of the broad-spectrum DIYers I know tend to
honor
their mistakes, not hide them. Tom Jennings—the skate-punk hacker who founded
Homocore
(a queer zine in the 1980s), invented Fidonet (the way pre-Web bulletin-board systems sent data to one another), cofounded the world’s first Internet service provider (The Little Garden), and rebuilt a Data General Nova 4/X minicomputer system in his living room, among many other insanely inventive creations combining software and scavenged electronics—wrote an article for an early issue of
Make
about failure as the great teacher.

“No one talks of failure as anything but shameful; this is wrongheaded and foolish,” he wrote. “Mistakes are synonymous with learning. Failing is unavoidable. Making is a process, not an end. It is true that deep experience helps avoid problems, but mainly it gives you mental tools with which to solve inevitable problems when they come up.” He argued that “the act of failing again and again” is the only way to equip oneself with the mental toolbox of a successful DIYer.

Jennings and Mister Jalopy, among other DIYers, appreciate the useful and beautiful aspects of their home-built objects, but they also hold the irregularities and flaws of their creations to be admirable qualities, the qualities that make them stand out from smooth and shiny mass-produced commodities. It touches on the Japanese concept of
wabi sabi
, the beauty found in an object’s imperfections.

Before the 1920s, people in the United States and Europe were more like Mister Jalopy and Jennings. But instead of being DIYers by choice, they did it themselves out of necessity. In those days, when people bought something—a butter churn, an electric fan, a power tool—they expected to maintain it. Fortunately, things in those days were built to be fixable by the owner. They didn’t yet come with those condescending NO USER SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE stickers affixed to them. They were easy to open, easy to tinker with. They had instructions printed on them. They either came with the tools needed to keep them in working order or were compatible with standard tools.

If you owned a Model T (produced from 1908 to 1927), you were expected to be a mechanic as well as a driver, making repairs as necessary—especially to the tires, which blew out often. This wasn’t an unreasonable assumption on the part of the Ford Motor Company, because a large percentage of the people who bought Model Ts had experience maintaining farm machinery. The only tools you needed to repair a Model T were a wrench, a hammer, a screwdriver, and pliers. According to a Smithsonian Institution exhibition called “America on the Move,” Model T owners boasted that they could fix their cars with “twine, baling wire, or clothespins.” For these people, do-it-yourself was a way of life.

Until Sigmund Freud’s nephew killed it.

Edward Bernays is widely regarded as the creator of modern emotion-based advertising. Bernays used his famous uncle’s ideas about the drives and desires surging below the surface of our rational, fact-based consciousness to brainwash millions of people into becoming consumers instead of makers and fixers. Born in Vienna in 1891, Bernays moved to the United States as a young man and became Enrico Caruso’s press agent. Soon he was selling his public relations services to major corporations around the world. In a few years he managed to change the way people felt about being self-reliant.

He did this by persuading people to buy products and proposals through tantalizing depictions of fantasy worlds that stoked their unconscious urges, instincts, and sexual impulses. His campaigns sidestepped rational thought, appealing to the subconscious parts of the mind—the parts immune to logical argument. The best part about Bernays’s technique (to the manufacturers who hired him) was that no matter how much stuff people bought, they never felt satisfied. Like a mirage, the promise of fulfillment seemed alluringly attainable but remained always just out of reach.

In 1917 the U.S. government hired Bernays to sell a dubious public on the idea that the nation needed to enter the Great War. Bernays coined the slogan “Make the world safe for democracy.” It worked. When the war ended, Bernays was invited to attend the Paris Peace Conference with Woodrow Wilson, where the president was welcomed as a liberator. Bernays wrote in his 1928 book,
Propaganda
, “The astounding success of propaganda during the war . . . opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. . . . If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it?”

In the 1930s, Philco hired Bernays to increase the sales of radios. At the time radios were considered something that only people in lower socioeconomic classes owned. To counteract this perception, Bernays orchestrated a black-tie gala at the gallery in Rockefeller Plaza to promote the radio as a status symbol. He also convinced high-end architects to design houses with radio-listening rooms. As a result, “radio, a toy of the unwashed, became the musical instrument of the affluent,” said Bernays.

Bernays’s proudest accomplishment was the creation of a nation of female tobacco addicts in the 1920s. George Washington Hill, then president of the American Tobacco Corporation, hired Bernays to persuade women to take up smoking. At the time, women bought just 12 percent of the cigarettes in America. “If I can crack that market,” Hill told Bernays, “I’ll get more than my share of it. It will be like opening a new gold mine right in our front yard.” Hill wanted to promote the idea with a slogan Hill had developed: “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.”

Bernays, who was well-connected in the media, asked photographer friends to take photos of slim, pretty women smoking. He also paid physicians to go on record stating that cigarettes were an important part of a meal because the smoke “disinfects the mouth and soothes the nerves.” But Bernays, genius that he was, didn’t stop there. He knew that in order to succeed on a grand scale, he must change the environment in which women spent their every waking hour. He persuaded restaurants to offer cigarettes on their dessert menus as a substitute for calorie-rich sweets. He got furniture makers to fit kitchen cabinetry with compartments for storing cigarettes and houseware manufacturers to make cigarette tins (with matching flour and sugar tins). He wanted cigarettes, and the opportunities to smoke them, to be ubiquitous.

Through Bernays’s efforts, women had started to smoke at home and in restaurants, but shouldn’t they, like men, be smoking in the streets, too? (At the time, smoking in public was considered unladylike, and women were reluctant to join men in lighting up on the corner.) Coming up with the strategy of equating smoking with freedom, Bernays orchestrated a stunt in which a large group of attractive young women smoked in public at the Easter Day Parade in New York. Bernays tipped off the press that a group of suffragettes was planning to publicly make a stand for independence by igniting “torches of freedom.” What he didn’t tell the press is that he had hired the psychoanalyst A. A. Brill to help him understand the psychology of smoking and how it could be applied to the art of subliminal influence. Brill told Bernays that cigarettes were symbolic penises. (Bernays’s uncle would have told him the same for free, I’ll bet.) By combining the idea of empowerment and freedom with symbolic penises, Bernays’s plan was a hit. The press was on hand to photograph the staged event, and as soon as the images appeared in the newspapers, cigarette sales skyrocketed. By the end of 1928, American Tobacco’s annual revenue increased by $32 million (about $400 million in today’s money, adjusted for inflation) over the previous year.

This outdoor-smoking stunt was emblematic of the new trend in advertising, which appealed to people’s subconscious, irrational desires instead of their actual needs. Today advertising that links emotions to products is so prevalent that no one is surprised when advertisers tie subconscious urges with every kind of non-essential mass-produced product imaginable, from coffeemakers to motorcycles. Even though the techniques used to light up our ids were revealed long ago, they are just as effective now as they were when Bernays introduced them more than eighty years ago. That’s because our ids can’t listen to reason but can only (as Freud described it) “[strive] to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs.”

The problem, of course, is that smoking cigarettes won’t ever make you free. But as long as advertisers continue to target the subconscious with the idea that products and freedom are one and the same, people will buy more and more in a desperate effort to achieve independence.

Bernays went on to work with corporations to sell cars to men and magazines to women on the promise that consuming them would boost their sex appeal.