#10: On Craft
And also, work. (Put them together and you get... Kraftwerk.)
Hi friends,
I recently watched the short-lived but very funny comedy series Party Down. (Maybe when this pandemic finally ends I will find something else to talk about on here other than all the TV I’m watching, but honestly don’t count on it.)
Party Down aired in 2009-2010 to low Nielsen ratings, but has since developed a cult following — largely because most of the cast have since gone on to become very famous. It stars an ensemble cast (including Adam Scott, Jane Lynch, and Megan Mullally) as the dysfunctional staff of a low-budget event catering company in Los Angeles. All of the catering staff are either former actors, aspiring actors or writers, or some combination of both depending on the day and the latest news from their agents. None of them want to be catering sweet sixteen parties for minimum wage, but of course that’s exactly what they’re doing.
The show follows The Office’s model: mundane workplace, tragi-comic boss who takes the job way too seriously, bored coworkers pranking each other, escalating hijinks. But instead of Scranton, Pennsylvania’s office-park stasis, Party Down transplants this concept to LA — where everyone, especially your bartender, is an out-of-work actor. The lengths to which the motley crew of characters go in their pursuit of auditions and industry breaks are what lend the show most of its plot-lines, and cringe laughs. (In one episode, Jane Lynch’s character imitates various farm animal sounds in full-throated theatrical rendition to impress a party guest who has told her, as a cruel joke, that he’s casting for a live-action adaptation of Old McDonald.)
The series opens with Henry (Parks and Rec’s Adam Scott) — whose burgeoning career as a serious actor has been tanked by a too-catchy beer commercial that he can’t live down — glumly returning to the catering job that he had quit when his acting career took off. A major plot point is Henry’s internal debate over whether it’s better to climb the catering company’s corporate ladder: get promoted to a higher salary, benefits, and resign himself to the sensible choice — or to return to acting, the craft which has burned him before but is his true passion. These two options are presented as either-or: settling vs striving. And the show offers a pretty cut-and-dry case for the audience to root for the latter, partially because Henry’s love life is also tied up in this choice. He’s choosing between a lacklustre relationship with fellow caterer Uda (Kristen Bell), but is really in love with his on-and-off-again hookup Casey (Lizzy Caplan). Uda is robotic, hyper-professional, and takes catering as seriously as a drill sergeant. Casey, a sardonic up-and-coming comedian, is clearly the show’s intended Pam to Henry’s Jim even though (or maybe because) she breaks his heart more than once throughout the series. Repeatedly, Henry alludes to the idea that ‘taking a risk’ — either with Casey, or with returning to acting — means also taking a risk with the other. It’s Hollywood and Casey, or it’s catering and Uda.
The funny thing about linguistic eccentricities is that you don’t tend to notice them until you encounter them in another language. In my case, this was when I started studying French in middle school and learnt that métier, or ‘craft,’ can mean a professional vocation or, like, papier-mâché DIY projects. I also was struck that to ask someone’s profession in French, you actually ask: ‘tu fais quoi dans la vie?’ which translates to ‘what do you do in life?’ It somehow didn’t occur to me until years later that we say nearly the same thing in English, and so at the time I remember being (very mildly) perplexed: but what about if you have a day job that isn’t your ~reason for living~, a job that you feel doesn’t shape your identity as a person, how do you answer then?
This was perhaps the first time that I came up against ideas of proprietorship, the tenuous distinction between hobbyist and professional, who ‘gets’ to call themselves a writer or an artist or a musician or whatever. What’s the dividing line for this, money or expertise? In practice, generally the former, because of the deep-seated societal belief that earning money off a craft is what indicates success or professionalism in it. It’s startling to be confronted by how language shapes and is shaped by the societal constructs we live under. Job and vocation and side-hustle and calling and craft and aspiration all get mixed up in a confusing language soup. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines ‘craft’ as: ‘skill and experience, especially in relation to making objects; a job or activity that needs skill and experience, or something produced using skill and experience’. Even the official dictionary definition finds a murky overlap between activities and jobs, and a direct value-driven relationship between skills and output. (Language under late capitalism, we love to see it.)
In an essay in the Atlantic last year called Workism is Making Americans Miserable, Derek Thompson charts the evolution of the complicated societal narrative which glorifies a perceived relationship between work and personal fulfilment or identity. It’s a very American thing, this ‘culture that funnels its dreams of self-actualisation into salaried jobs,’ in its valourisation of individually-driven success — though it does reverberate elsewhere in the world. There’s that pervasive, noble-sounding idea that ‘if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life,’ etc. But the flip-side of that go-getter party line is that someone out there has to do the unlovable jobs, the un-glamorous ones that keep society running. And that person isn’t deriving passion and personal gratification out of their menial or labourious tasks. To tie actualisation or personal purpose to work, in these instances, is classist. Here, the workist framework collapses in on itself as it becomes clear that for its logic to hold, either the person or the job must be found to be unworthy or lesser. As Thompson writes:
‘In the past century, the American conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings—from necessity to status to meaning… The rise of the professional class and corporate bureaucracies in the early 20th century created the modern journey of a career… The upshot is that for today’s workists, anything short of finding one’s vocational soul mate means a wasted life.
But our desks were never meant to be our altars. The modern labor force evolved to serve the needs of consumers and capitalists, not to satisfy tens of millions of people seeking transcendence at the office. It’s hard to self-actualise on the job if you’re a cashier… and even the best white-collar roles have long periods of stasis, boredom, or busywork.’
Despite Keynes’ 1930 prediction in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren that technological advancements would allow for a more efficient and increasingly automated workforce — allowing people to work shorter hours and enjoy more leisure time — the opposite has happened. Namely, a coalescence of narratives: rugged individualism, a Puritan work ethic, and the cutthroat hierarchies which emerge in a country lacking significant social welfare safety nets. Through all of this, we are led to believe that our work is a defining and actualising force, and that pursuing it is of the utmost valour; in effect, seeking to quantify and optimise ROI to justify our own existences. Thus: #grind culture, lean-in culture, weird LinkedIn culture, two-weeks-of-annual-leave culture.
A lot of the time this all gets discussed regarding the startup or tech spheres, but this pressure certainly exists in artistic disciplines too. Other than for the lucky few who get paid tremendous amounts to do exactly the creative work they want to do, most individuals in creative fields are torn between looking for lucrative ways to do watered-down, commercialised versions of the work they are talented/qualified at/interested in doing — or keeping their art ‘pure’ by doing an unrelated day job and squeezing out nonexistent free time for creative endeavours. A lot of the time this isn’t even really a choice, or sheer financial necessity is the decider.
A question I’ve considered lately is: what is my dream job? Off the top of my head, it’s definitely one where I get paid enough money to survive and thrive in the world we live in, by doing the most uncorrupted, authentic, artistic work as possible (to great acclaim and positive social impact, of course). But why do I think I need to find one magical dream career that serves these myriad purposes, instead of having separate strands of fulfilment across various parts of my life? Writer Haley Nahman, whose newsletter I always admire, recently articulated a lot of the thought patterns I tend to move through:
‘I’m not an expert—in fact I’m still blatantly and overly attached to my work—just committed to questioning and learning. And I’m aiming some of that inward, by asking myself why I want the things I want, questioning whether my resistance to rest is intrinsic or learned, and challenging myself to define myself in terms not related to my income. I don’t think ambition is wrong, but I’m trying to get better at following my desires through to their logical endpoint: Knowing what I know about moving goalposts, what am I actually pursuing? Knowing what I know about what I need and can give, what should I pursue? The beauty of these questions is they almost always bring me comfort and make me feel more grounded. They aren’t the kind that make me squirm and want to run away. It didn’t take much convincing for me to see that the current model of work-as-religion isn’t serving most people, and that pursuing a different relationship to work (on the individual level but most importantly, collectively) is more useful than seeking out increasingly creative ways for laborers to thrive within a system specifically designed to serve their bosses.’
One thing I know is important to interrogate, as Nahman mentions, is a relationship with rest — or resistance to it. (I think many of us experience this resistance; it’s nearly impossible not to get swept up in it. And I would be be remiss not to acknowledge that the push-pull of rest vs hustle affects different interest groups in differing degrees of intensity and must be considered through an intersectional lens. Women of colour, predominantly Black women, are the ones driving crucial conversations around rest ‘as a form of resistance and reparations,’ against violent, dehumanising systems — as Tricia Hersey’s powerful project The Nap Ministry puts it.)
For me, thinking about all of this means asking myself questions like: Do I lean on the unnecessary 'busy-ness’ of hustle culture as a way to trigger a feeling of gratification because I am worried that with a less crowded slate of projects I’ll lack some intrinsic worth or be unable to self-actualise in some way? Do I think it’s admirable or shameful or inferior to feel either gratified, or not, by my work? Money aside, is it possible to be really content with divesting work performance from personal identity and satisfaction, and if so, how? Or is it wasteful or silly or amateurish not to do paid work in the fields I’m passionate about? And then the biggest question: what really is the concept of a dream job anyway — isn’t it kind of unfair to be bound by this framework of looking to work as the be-all-end-all?
It was refreshing to come across this piece by Jamie McCallum in Jacobin, which draws a separate but related conclusion to Thompson’s. McCallum writes:
‘For a while, it seemed these complaints about meaningless work reflected not only the exploitative nature of work, but also the prophetic demands of the New Left. Campus activists, feminists, and even young technologists sought to rescue work from its alienating quality — or to abolish it altogether. This seductive possibility calls to mind Marx’s remark about human nature, which he explains by noting the difference between the worst of architects and the best of bees: the former erects the structure first in the mind, the latter builds on instinct. The creative imagination at work is, in other words, the most fundamental hallmark of our humanity.
But history is cunning […] An expanding class of managers, supervisors, business leaders, advertisers, writers, gurus, and others intercepted these new demands for meaningful jobs and repackaged them as a new ideology of work. The result was the popular discourse on meaningful work we have today, which encourages finding personal worth and fulfilment in one’s job as a part of the job itself. This managerial revolution was successful because it seemed to deliver something we already desired.’
Where Thompson believes that the proliferation of workism ‘defies economic logic,’ McCallum instead argues that it affirms economic logic, that ‘hustle culture is simply a corollary to hustle economics’. And so McCallum’s point is that rather than protesting the idea of work, what ought to be protested is the inability of the systems we have in place to grant us all meaningful work. Meaningful work, he argues, is something everyone deserves:
‘The failure to provide meaningful work to the vast majority of the population is a powerful indictment of our system... Discovering a type of work and workplace organisation that is truly engaging and empowering need not be a cynical or futile project, nor should it be dismissed as superficial. Rather, it carries with it the potential for larger political and social change.
If we have to work to live, we should demand legitimately meaningful work as a fundamental right. Such work should challenge and inspire our collective mental and emotional faculties and make a clear contribution to a better world. And a demand for more engaging work can also accompany a demand for shorter hours. We deserve more meaningful work, but we also deserve more of our precious waking hours to do what we will, rather than serving our boss.
If some of our work is unable to be meaningful, we should demand it be well paid and reduced to a minimum amount of time. Bosses are peddling us “meaning” instead of money or free time. That’s not good enough.’
This argument about meaningful work resonates because it holds space for something which is true and which sometimes gets misrepresented: anti-workism doesn’t mean not wanting to work hard at things whatsoever. Rather, it’s about the structural frameworks of work that we are operating within, and how as long as these frameworks are as stifling as they are, perhaps it’s enough to just survive within them and derive personal fulfilment elsewhere. What that looks like in practice, though, is a difficult unspooling of learned beliefs. (This is perhaps particularly loaded for people in creative fields — for whom our work/craft/whatever we’re calling it is a form of personal expression and is so deeply tied to the self even as we’re often compelled to monetise it.) Arguably, ‘meaningful work’ is maybe the truest definition of ‘craft’?
I think it’s necessary to unpack the ways our individual notions of success and hustle are externally influenced by socioeconomic and cultural forces, but equally I don’t want to conflate the worker-bee definition of work with the idealised meaningful work that most of us dream of doing — and to then paint it all in a broadly negative brush. There’s nuance, or at least a discrepancy that bears pointing out between the personal and the systemic.
Where Thompson and McCallum overlap is in their shared belief that specific, humane, policy ideas — UBI, parental leave, etc — may not be able to make the inherent fact of working suck less, but they would make work less central by offsetting it with dignity and livability, thus sparing the ‘vast majority of the public from the pathological workaholism that grips today’s elites, and perhaps creat[ing] a bottom-up movement to displace work as the centerpiece of the secular American identity.’
The characters of Party Down perpetually believe they are just one good audition or networking connection away from making it in Hollywood; conversely, they’re just one bad break away from thinking of quitting Hollywood. They feel that the quest for success in the entertainment industry is not merely a finicky game of chance — the next audition will be the one! — but also a pursuit to which you really have to be wholeheartedly committed. Casey, devastated by a setback in her comedy career and angry at what she feels are Henry’s hypocritical attempts to comfort her, tells him: ‘Maybe if we were the same kind of crazy, but we’re not. Because if you’re not crazy enough to believe it for you, then how can you believe it for me?’ The next day, having taken the rebuke to heart, Henry goes to his first audition in years.
Casey and Henry are the emotional core of the series, the two reasonable characters in an oddball crew. They don’t believe in themselves, but they each believe in the other. It’s clear that they’re supposed to end up together, and similarly the series makes it clear that they’re both supposed to keep cracking on with their creative aspirations — that they deserve better than their underpaid service job. But as Naomi Fry writes in the New Yorker, Party Down’s more goofy characters are given a modicum of depth too. ‘Even with its more foolish characters,’ Fry says, ‘the show makes a case — comical but still resonant — that underneath the ill-fitting button-down caterer’s shirts and pink elastic-band bow ties are real people [who] have interior lives… Ones that might be richer and more textured than one could ever imagine.’
Because the thing is, the funniest episodes are the rare ones where the Party Down employees are not actually on the clock: instead, collectively playing a competitive game of kickball at their company picnic, or attempting an ill-fated scriptwriting workshop at actor Steve Guttenberg’s house. In these moments, the characters are (somewhat) free from the mantles of both their day job and their professed dream jobs, and the ensemble comedy can truly shine.
This was longer than expected so I’ll leave you for now with just this one very lovely Linda Gregg poem called The Letter. Happy Hanukkah to those celebrating! See you next week.
Maddy