![]() “It just cuts to him throwing the whole computer in a dumpster.” He brings up a scene from season four of Parks and Rec, in which Ron learns of cookies tracking his movements online. “For me, the more I am able to curb my use of screens, the happier I am.” I also understand the pull of the pub and the bong, and part of life is learning when to enjoy those escapes – how much of them is healthy, how much of them is detrimental. ![]() “I certainly have it in me to just surf online and entertain myself, to eat fast food and be a lazy consumer. ![]() On the other never being able to say ‘I don’t know’ is, I think, inherently damaging to the human psyche. “On the one hand it’s amazing we can look up any information that we seek. “I recognise what a luddite I am, but it’s sincere, in the same way that I prefer a tangible book to an ebook,” he says. And Offerman – reluctant tweeter, Walt Whitman fan, proponent of slow living before it was a movement – seems resigned to it. It sounds like a last-ditch bid for compromise in a battle that’s already been lost. It’s made for a stadium, to have it wrap your peripheral vision. Even watching it on a screen this size” – he gestures to a large canvas on the wall – “in your living room is doing it a disservice. ![]() “We’re constantly wrestling with their propensity to watch everything – TV, films – on their laptop. He tussles with his teenage godchildren in Los Angeles over screen time: not how much, necessarily, but how big. He is as at ease in the great outdoors – using his hands, building receptacles for babies (a cradle resembling a little rowboat, “but I stand by it because it’s seaworthy”) and illicit substances (small, coffin-shaped boxes “to secretly hold people’s marijuana”) – as he is uncomfortable in the digital world. I know I don’t have a canoe in me, but if I did, Offerman would be the man to find it. He is a master carpenter and rhapsodises, in an entirely pragmatic and not at all patronising way, of the transformative power of “successfully shaping wood with handtools”. But the character’s passion for woodwork came about after the entire writing staff paid a visit to Offerman’s wood workshop in east Los Angeles. Offerman has much in common with his character by both character and design: Swanson played the saxophone before the writers knew the man who’d portray him could, too. His career began in professional theatre, around 1991 his breakout role in Parks and Recreation, which first aired on NBC in 2009 and concluded early last year, was one of his first in comedy. Offerman still doesn’t consider himself a comedian, even while doing press interviews during his standup tour of Australia. It was before he came to be seen as a comedic actor, he says – though “the canoe video does have a few laughs in it”. I’d brought up a role of his that predates Parks and Rec: presenting a 136-minute instructional DVD called Fine Woodstrip Canoe Building. (“A great place to start is actually a paddle.”). A bedside table from Ikea that took me a week to assemble barely functions a canoe is definitely beyond my capabilities, no matter how simply Offerman breaks it down for the “beginner woodworker”. He’s really hit his stride, leaning forward in his seat to emphasise a point about something called a spokeshave, and inwardly I’m starting to panic that I might have to admit I’ve no intention of following through.
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