This is a secret I’ve never told anyone: Belle & Sebastian’s “Lazy Line Painter Jane” is the song I listen to before every job interview, triathlon, or big challenge I need to get amped up for. Don’t ask me why—it’s definitely not the lyrics. Maybe it’s Monica Queen’s voice coming in about a minute into the song that makes it (and me) soar. I absolutely fucking belt this part out in my car. I listen to it when I need a good cry when everything feels hopeless and falling apart. Well, maybe it’s not so much a secret as it just hasn’t come up before, but it’s become a little important piece of me that even my closest loved ones don’t know about. This song’s role, however, feels private, and when it comes on in a public space, I get to have a little moment with myself that the people around me are oblivious to, like when it came one of those times I was lolling through the hours in a bakery café, and for a blissful six minutes, everything around me synchronized into something greater than the sum of its parts.
So, I’m sharing my secret with you today because I’m thinking about finding strength, the kind of strength we, as in the collective we, all need right now. It’s the kind of strength this song summons for me, so it seemed only appropriate to start this episode of Notions & Notes with it. (I think of my little dispatches to you as episodes, the way podcasts have episodes).
I wanted to explore strength for this episode because I feel that we, as in the collective we, have been feeling drained of it, drained of the emotional capacity for the compassion and concern and anger that we need to face the world’s mounting problems. There was a time when Trump’s mere position in the White House and climate change seemed like urgent crises, but then the pandemic. Then the murders of unarmed Black people. Then the Supreme Court. Then wildfires. Then Ukraine. Then Uvalde.
There’s a New Yorker cartoonist, Daivd Sipress, I particularly admire, because he so briefly expresses the collective we’s anxiety/fear/depression/exhaustion over the last several years.
Sadly, those were all published before the pandemic and January 6th. So yeah, let’s talk about strength today. Still, having humor and irony about it makes me feel understood and less alone, part of that collective we.
Sheila E is the epitome of strength. If you need some strength, channel Sheila E. This is from Sign ‘o the Times, which is one of the best concert documentaries I’ve ever seen.
I love how Notions & Notes has gotten me to discover unexpected new things, and the Onno-bugeisha are one of them. It began with stumbling across the photo below and getting curious about it. Then I learned the Onno-bugeisha were female samurai training and battling from about 200 BCE, beginning with the military leadership of Empress Jingu and continuing as a tradition thoughtout different eras, until about the 1800s.
Several of them, particularly Tomoe Gozen, have become legendary and stories about them blend mythology and history. I love thinking about how the Onno-bugeisha captured imaginations hundreds of years ago, how stories emerged from time, carried person by person until we’re here.
Ear Hustle is one of the few long-running podcasts where I’ve never missed an episode, and it’s the only podcast I’ve known to make me cry. It regularly makes me cry. It’s produced with and by the inmates and formerly incarcerated of San Quentin. Their goal has always been to humanize the lives of the people affected by prison, so they avoid politics and don’t explicitly advocate for justice reform. (However, I don’t know how you could listen to this podcast and not believe fervently in justice reform). Anyway, I’m including an episode I recently listened to because, while the theme was fashion, there was a particular segment (the part that made me cry) in which a man named Kesasi Hill describes finding strength amidst despair.
Here’s that part from the transcript:
I went to prison at 16 years old! 3 days after my 16th birthday! Their means of teaching me a lesson was to put me in solitary confinement for 98 days. And in that 98 days every dimension that I was as a person visited me in that space. The walls contracted and expanded. Daily, like I breathe. Sometime it felt like they were coming in on me, crashing in on me. And sometime I felt like, you know, I can knock them down. I had the strength to knock them down. The one thing that kept me sane throughout all of that, I would write poetry. And I would write poetry on every piece of paper that I can get my hands on. I would get... inmate request forms. And I would write poetry on the back of inmate request forms. And it was a trip... because I used to send inmate request forms and 6-0-2’s trying to get a hearing and trying to get out. But they wasn't going anywhere. So I started using them as paper for poetry. And then they stopped giving me inmate request forms and told me that I was destroying state property. Aiight, so, now I ain't got no paper. So I started writing poetry on the walls. And I ended up covering all the walls in poetry, even the ceiling. And they sent a psych in to look at the ceiling to see if I was, you know, threatening or talking about suicide. And they wanted to know what I was putting on the walls, right. But it was just poetry. All of it was poetry. And to me, poetry was the magic I used to keep the walls in place. To keep the walls, so they wouldn't crash in on me.
He then reads one of his poems. Go listen to the whole episode.
Last summer, a former student of mine responded to the “Seeing Things in New Ways” episode of Notions & Notes where I shared a video of Isamu Yamamoto with this talk by Rodney Mullen, who I see as a sort of philosopher-king of skateboarding. It’s a fascinating talk about how we respond to our environments and how our environments shape us. When I first listened to this, I thought about the parallels in what he says to the challenging work of facing and slowing climate change. Maybe when you watch it you’ll see that too.
When I revisited it more recently, the message struck me personally and offered a guide to the inner strength I needed to find in myself. Mullen uses examples of great skateboarders he admires because looking at the work of others in our community shows us “it can be done” and “uplifts our sense of belief.” And we need that belief. It’s that belief that drives us. Mullen calls that deep inner drive an engine, but he talks about it sort of like a soul. Skateboarders fall all the time, again and again, and get back up after each time—their bodies take great abuse. But it’s “getting up again and again and again that forms the engine” that drives a skateboarder.
Mullen finishes by saying he wanted to show some faces from his community because “maybe it will mean something different in your community.” Whatever you do, whatever area of your life needs to find strength right now, dig into that soul-engine and find it, find the strength to get back up again.
I’m excited by lots of new subscribers. Welcome! I’m always grateful to hear if something in a Notions & Notes episode sparks a connection or strikes a chord. Feel free share what drives your soul-engine, what gives you the strength to keep trying.