Tonight i went to Skate Video Night, part of the Geffen's new show. There was a panel made up of: Spike Jonze, Stacy Peralta, Lance Mountain, Ed Templeton, Greg Hunt, Ty Evans, Rick Howard, Aaron Meza and Tobin Yelland.
When asked about why skate videos have kept footage of the riders falling and goofing off, Stacy Peralta said,"We had the power to wreck skateboarding or empower kids."
I think a lot about the importance of making mistakes, fucking up, and figuring things out the hard way. I guess that's why I like skate videos; yeah, you're going to see amazing tricks, but you're also going to watch the same athletes goofing off and falling down. Getting it wrong is not just acknowledged, but celebrated as an integral part of learning.
As a kid, I remember focusing so hard on getting the right answer, and pushing myself to never make mistakes. I definitely feel those moments when a skater pushes himself to the point of breaking his board. But the fact that those moments are documented and put into a sometimes totally polished video is not just refreshing, it's illuminating.
It seems like the more I think about something, the more it tends to pop up in random places. Here's a link to this TED lecture trent and i watched on being wrong:
http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html
During camp last year, I realized how debilitating it is for a kid to always feel the need to find the "correct" answer to a problem. For one of our projects, we made our own islands and used craft materials to furnish them according to what would comprise our ideal island. For many of the children, it was difficult at first to use the materials as something other than what they knew the objects were. As the project progressed, imagination took over, and the fear of "misusing" the objects was thrown aside. I noticed one little girl cutting blue circles out of paper and sticking them onto stretched cotton balls. I said, "Are those polka-dotted clouds?" (my adult mind was totally having a hollow-face illusion moment!) The little girl replied, "No, I tried to cut holes but it looked stupid, so I made the holes in the clouds where the sky pokes through!"
By fearlessly working against herself, practicing and experimenting, the girl figured out a way to represent the part of clouds that she found interesting. It reminds me of the shots in Yeah Right! with the invisible skateboards; with anything there's a lot of hard work and practice involved, but it's good to get it wrong and keep going.
