Bucky Fuller

Just look at all those triangles! This is one of the designs in the gallery that was an extension of the presentation last weekend at the Black Mountain Center for the Arts.

A friend and I attended the Sunday night performance, and it was a really wonderful experience. - Another talented one-man show! And David Novak had the Buckminster Fuller persona down pat.

 And then he even had memorized a whole 2-1/2 hour show(with 15 min. intermission)!  I loved it, and wondered that he is going to be performing it in Poland this next week. I can't imagine being able to discuss these concepts in another language...but apparently he can! The author of the play was D. W. Jacobs, and it's been performed more than 1,000 times since he wrote in in 2000.

My first experience with R. Buckminster Fuller was reading his book "Operating Manuel for Spaceship Earth" back in the 60s-70s...as well as many iterations of the Whole Earth Catalog. He was very popular with the counter-culture, and I was thrilled in 1971 to join a UU Church in Tampa FL that was housed in a geodesic dome.  I also saw the domes in the New York Worlds Fair and Expo 67 in Montreal. Then Disney World had opened in Orlando with Epcot.

David Novak as R. Buckminster Fuller giving a lecture/performance at BMCA

Anyway, I also remember driving my camper van with some friends from Tallahassee to Altanta GA to hear Bucky Fuller speak in person, probably in 1977-78.  We camped in the van after the lecture, which might have been in the Fox Theatre. It was amazing to hear him talk quickly in much the same long drawn-out sentences, with no words less than 3 syllables, and often modifying something that had been mentioned in several sentences prior, but it mostly made sense. When did he catch a breath?

I just looked quickly at his biography, because I was pretty sure he was related to an early UU/transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller.  Yes, she was his great aunt but they never met, because she died about 50 years before his birth. And I learned in the bio that Bucky Fuller was the world president of MENSA from 74-83.

But back to the performance...and the great exhibit in the gallery at BMCA last week.  We quickly looked at the exhibit during the intermission.  It included some panels and artifacts from the Museum of Black Mountain College (Asheville, NC). The college is where Bucky first put his idea of the geodesic dome into models...and finally a working one.