THAT is Isamu Yamamoto, who at fourteen won the World Freestyle Round-Up Skateboarding Championships and is the first to win using two skateboards. He’s influenced by Brett Mullen (check out Mullen in this 1986 Freestyle competition to see the inspiration), but it’s clear he’s analyzed Mullen’s style and then made his own. This is something that always interests me about artists, writers, and makers of all kinds: how they analyze the work of those they admire, not to imitate, but to create their own voice.
I discovered Isamu randomly: nosing around the website of an unbearably cool indie press. Here’s one more cool video of Isamu’s freestyling if you’ve got a rainy day to spend watching brilliance.
I hope and assume everyone reads The Little Prince at least once in their lives. I loved it so much that in college I painted a mural of its most famous quote in French on my dorm’s kitchen wall: “Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.” Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.
One of my favorite passages is when the Little Prince meets a fox who teaches him what love is.
“I am looking for friends. What does that mean -- tame?"
"It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties."
"To establish ties?"
"Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world....”
“I am beginning to understand,” said the little prince. “There is a flower…I think that she has tamed me.”
The fox tells the little prince that we are “responsible forever” for those we have tamed.
One of the little ecological lessons of the book is when the Little Prince explains to the stranded pilot narrator that he had to be careful not to let baobabs grow on his little planet: “When you’ve finished your own toilet in the morning, then it is time to attend to the toilet of your planet, just so, with the greatest care.” I’d like to cultivate a daily practice of caring for our planet as I care for myself.
Much of this classic book is about the folly of how adults come to see the world. For example: “Grown-ups love figures... When you tell them you've made a new friend they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies? " Instead they demand "How old is he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make? " Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.”
And that’s why I’m including this book in this Notions & Notes: there is something about how young people can see the world—without biases or assumptions or preoccupations with “success”—that is valuable for us grown-ups to remember and listen to. There’s something inherently creative in how young people construct a new understanding of the world in the process of growing up. When I observe changing paradigms around race, gender, climate, and capitalism, I’m astounded at how much change has been brought about by younger perspectives and voices challenging deep-rooted assumptions of our culture. Meanwhile, adults settle into the familiarity of what they already know and believe. “Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.”
The narrator/St.-Exupéry is very proud of the baobab drawing, writing: “When I made the drawing of the baobabs, I was carried beyond myself by the inspiring force of urgent necessity.” Here’s a little more about St.-Exupéry’s drawings.
Another work of art that uses a “children’s” medium to challenge norms is The Point, a 1970 animated film about a boy named Oblio who is born with a round head in the land of Point, where everything has a point. His adventures are illustrated by a Harry Nilsson soundtrack in psychedelic interludes. He’s banished to the pointless forest, where he meets a variety of characters who teach him “the point” of being in this world. As the Rock Man teaches him, “You don’t have to have a point to have a point.”
I loved this movie as a child (I’m lucky to have the kind of parents to show it to me) and, like The Little Prince, rediscovered it in college when I was so actively shaping my worldview and finding ways to articulate it with music, movies, books, and friends.
Go watch the whole movie, if you can find it—it’s delightful and a good reminder not to narrow your perspective on the world, to question the dominant paradigm, to be accepting of those who are different from you.
I can’t believe how lucky I am in the work I do. I get to meet young people on the cusp of adulthood, deciding where they want to go to college and what they want to do with their lives, and I get to help them through the messy parts. I often find myself telling them it’s ok not to have a plan, to want what you want, to be many things at once, to be who you are. I tell them wealth and prestige are no measurement of success or happiness. This year I worked with artists, musicians, a pre-professional dancer, farmers, a rock climber, a medical researchers, and so many environmental and social justice activists. All of them are deeply informed and accomplished in ways I couldn’t have been at their age, and they are committed to using their educations to better the world. These kids can see how how broken everything is, and instead of getting depressed (which is my response) or accepting it’s the only good way to do things (which is what most adults say about democracy, capitalism, and justice), they see there are better ways to be in the world. My god, is it inspiring. I began this issue thinking about how creators find inspiration in those that came before them, but here I’ve tied myself in a knot, and realized I’m now old enough to be one of ‘those who came before,’ and yet, I’m most inspired by the young voices and ideas I get to meet in my work.
A Rabbit Hole on Black Mountain College
Education is a powerful lever of creative and intellectual change. A few years ago, I got to see the ICA’s exhibit on Black Mountain College. At the time, I was in the middle of earning my MFA and struggling through creative self-doubt. I looked at the writing landscape and noticed the writing and writers considered “great” and successful all seemed to be doing the same things, to sound the same. I wrote poems I for workshop, which were well-crafted, lyrical, admittedly beautiful and sad, and then I wrote a book-length hybrid manuscript in an independent study and on breaks where I worked through my bullshit and grief—I called this manuscript “my monster” because it seemed to keep growing new branches like something out of Little Shop of Horrors—and, being part poetry, part prose, part visual thing, it didn’t fit in anywhere. The exhibit on Black Mountain College happened at the time I creatively needed it and gave me the courage to walk off the path.
Here’s a good summary of the education at Black Mountain College. For a truly deep dive into Black Mountain College, there is an incredible journal dedicated to critical thought around the college and its members. I’m excerpting an essay from volume 12 of this journal because its author describes the pedagogical philosophy at Black Mountain better than I can:
“Much of what Albers brought from the Bauhaus was congenial to Black Mountain College: The principles of “practice before theory,” “learning by doing,” and “study, not art”; the dissolution of the hierarchy that elevated fine arts above everything else; recognizing that art is an experience rather than a commodity.”
“The unique character of Black Mountain College also shaped Albers’s teaching. The poverty of the school forced Albers and his students to improvise. In Lee Hall, where sufficient chairs were lacking, Albers and his students worked on the floor in an atmosphere of playful informality. Their having to rely on cheap and discarded materials encouraged Albers’s students to experiment and take risks, took the preciousness out of art, and underscored the idea that this was study, not art. Not having grades—a principle of the school—also encouraged freedom and experimentation. The surroundings of the college provided autumn leaves that found their way into Albers’s color course. The abundance of natural materials encouraged Albers to expand studies of texture in the basic design course.”
“Asked by a student upon his arrival at the College, “What are you going to teach?” Albers famously replied, “To open eyes.””
And to understand the impact of this unique philosophy of education, to understand how its students and faculty saw things in new ways because of their time there, you should look at their creative work. I’m including some pieces I love or am intrigued by, in hopes I’ll send you down your own Black Mountain College rabbit hole.
Anni Albers
I particularly love Albers’s woven textiles.
John Cage and Merce Cunningham
This is the work of lovers and collaborators. Cunningham choreographed “Beach Birds for Camera” Cage composed “Four3” to accompany the piece.
Robert Creeley
A Prayer
Bless
something small
but infinite
and quiet.
There are senses
make an object
in their simple
feeling for one.
Robert Rauschenberg
He might be best known for his pre-pop collages, but I love Rauschenberg’s “combines," a term he coined for the mix of painting and sculpture. I remember standing in front of “Bed” in high school, and it was the first piece of art that made em realize the longer I stood there, the more I appreciated it.
Ruth Asawa
I already went down an Asawa rabbit hole in my very first Notions & Notes.
Mary Parks Washington
Ok, so this is why rabbit holes are so rewarding. I’d never heard of Mary Parks Washington, and by the looks of Google, it seems she’s underappreciated and unfairly forgotten when people talk about Black Mountain College or art in general. Here’s a fascinating interview with her that sort of demystifies the experience of being at Black Mountain. Her “histcollages” combined painting, drawing, and ephemera. They’re beautiful! I wish I could see these in person.
Buckminster Fuller
I got fascinated with Buckminster Fuller after seeing a performance/documentary on him. The Love Song of Buckminster Fuller is a documentary of archival footage screened with a live performance of an original score by Yo La Tengo. Unfortunately, there are no clips on the internet—it was just one of those things you had to be there for. But, there is this neat 3-minute overview of Fuller, which will help you see why I’m so obsessed.
Perhaps Fuller and I share similar obsessions we work out in very different mediums, or perhaps something about seeing Love Song and Yo La Tengo served as unconscious inspiration for that monster manuscript I mentioned earlier. Forms found in nature and an ecologically sustainable utopian ideal are part of the fabric of that manuscript, and I even threw in a society living in floating geodesic domes. When my MFA professor read an excerpt, he was startled and asked what poets I was reading, what inspired such a monster. I admitted it wasn’t poets—I was inspired by sci-fi comics, punk, nature, and apparently, Buckminster Fuller.
What I’m noticing in this rabbit hole, is that many of the Black Mountain teachers and students invented their own hybrid forms through combinations of ideas. Alber’s modernism was influenced by South American indigenous weavings, Parks Washington created histcollages and Rauschenberg made combines, and Asawa made sculpture from basketry techniques and inspired by nature. If an artist makes a practice of looking closely and examining the world around them, of looking at how things are made or done—whether it’s art, nature, or skateboarding—inspiration comes from whatever they cross paths with.
Finally, my writer friend Matt King responded to the Notions & Notes about time to share an essay he wrote and published in Catapult about the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, because the essay ends with a reference to the same Einstein’s Dreams vignette I included in that issue. It’s an absolutely incredible essay. It felt fitting to include with this issue, partly because a pivotal moment in the essay contrasts the point-of-view from the top of the skyscraper and from the ground, and partly because I love that bit of shared inspiration from Lightman—how we both read that little scrap of writing in a not-particularly-famous book and it was a lens through which we could see our own, different work and ideas.
It continues to paralyze me—every time I witness a fresh example of how little the conversation around wealth and inequality have changed over the past decade, despite the Great Recession and several popular movements of dissent. The prevailing world order can make both sides feel powerless: Dissidents condemn an amoral system that operates without regard for human life or dignity; defenders uphold the capitalist system as inevitable, the only viable and most efficient option. Meanwhile, the ever-rising skylines of financial centers like Dubai and New York and Hong Kong represent a physical manifestation of the abstract wealth that both holds the world together and is tearing it apart.
And here’s his Lightman reference:
In this world, everyone lives in the mountains, well-off individuals build their houses on stilts, and height has become the universal status symbol. “In time, people have forgotten the reason why higher is better,” Lightman writes. “Nevertheless, they continue to live on the mountains…” Man-made towers have always represented our longing to leave this world, or at least rise above it. Their sights inspire our shared sense of wonder, but they also fuel our delusional egos, stirring us to reach higher, work harder, move faster, get richer—but to what end? The voyage to the top of the world eventually reveals itself to be a mirage: We arrive and find ourselves alone, peering into the empty space above the clouds.
I love getting emails with the connections you make with the various odds and ends in an issue—it was not something I expected, but it has been a real joy. So please, let me know if something in this one inspires you!
Also, please share with anyone you think might like reading this too.