This is so alluring to me as a thing because it takes something inherently philosophical and makes a simple need driven to by one man. It is strictly masculine if you really look at it.
Background: A man by the name of Richard Preneke in the 1960s (who at the time of retiring age) chose to exodus society in an attempt to be isolated by Alaskan wilderness.
This video is a set of home recordings (and narration from his personal diaries) that show him constructing a log cabin from scratch. and I mean... from scratch. He brings with him personal necessities and makes everything from primitive tools. Literally, the only tools he brings are the metal pieces with no handles, meaning he had to hand carve his handles and then assemble them, and THEN he chopped down his own lumber, sawed it into pieces, and assembled each pieces of the house bit by bit.
This also includes roofing his house, stacking logs for the cabin, making his own doors, windows, and quite climactically assembling a chimney/fireplace from stones and a little cement (which he feels guilty about using as you find out in the story).
What makes me feel 65 enjoying this is it has long been run as a filler documentary on PBS for years and years and years. Although after discovering this only a couple of years ago, I happen to just love with the way this is handled. It is poorly made (from what I gathered it was put together by some of Preneke's relatives) using odd celtic music and at times a piece or two of film that was clearly shot currently in order to subsidize Preneke's dialogue.
My roommate recently told me he was going to be writing a thesis utilizing a connection between this specific movie and Henry Threau's Walden, and this came back into my mind, as it is essentially Walden without any intellectual theme. It is the hollowed out easy to understand relaxing piece of mind, without ever alluding to how this outlook, and yet you still seem to understand it on an instinctual level. The most unfortunate thing about sitting down to enjoy this (and it's incredibly short, something along the lines of 45 minutes), you can't help but feel diminished by society. How the ice cold can of Ranier in your hand is something you depended on that was comforted for you, as he is making making utensils out of pieces of pine or as you illuminate your apartment with a lamp as he is stuffing his perishable food underground in the permafrost of an archaic refrigerator.
He's not subtle about how he feels about society, but he's not very articulate about it either, and that's what gives it its theme.
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