HYPERCOMMON

EXTRAORDINARY PORTRAITS OF ORDINARY PEOPLE

by lensandpen • November 9, 2020

This collection of short stories by Steve Wiegenstein describes quirky small town and rural Ozarkers, both realistically and compassionately. If they are all crazily dysfunctional he doesn’t come down too hard on them for their lack of comprehension of the world around them. Chronicles of the clueless make for interesting reading. These are enormously enjoyable tales. Often the marginalized are described with unrealistic, gummy sympathies that are in fact thinly disguised condescension. Slice-of-life literature often has an ideological point—the characters being pawns of a political point of view. His characters may be in difficult circumstances, but they don’t come off as victims. That makes them more alive than much fiction about ordinary folks. These are very real screwballs, wonderfully set in out of the way places—like the scattered lights you see from an airplane traveling between coasts.

Some short “Discussion Questions” are in the back of the book: “Although the stories are set in the Ozarks, do you see them as having wider significance about people and life in general?”

William Faulkner’s Mississippi is also populated by intriguing eccentrics, but Wiegenstein’s style isn’t Faulkner-esque. His sentences are way too short for one thing. That there are some similarities indicates Wiegenstein’s stories have “wider significance.”

Leland thought the tales oddly Fellini-esque—indicating a very much “wider significance”—not like the surrealism of the Italian filmmaker’s wild indifference to chronological time and juxtapositions of supreme strangeness, but rather in his poetic naturalism. Fellini has a similar love of ordinary folk and forgiveness of their profound misconceptions and occasional violence. Scattered Lights stories are quite cinematic as well. Leland said, “As I read on, I began hearing Nina Rota for the score, not fiddles or banjoes. Pulling up some Rota scores on YouTube, I read more of the stories as Rota’s wistful music played and it was indeed a wondrous fit.”

Check out Steve’s blog while you’re at it!

SURREAL 1907 OSAGE RIVER POSTCARD

by lensandpen • October 6, 2020

What in the world is that ball on a stick that pokes up from the bottom left of this real photo postcard marked, “Osage River”? It’s credited to “Becraft Photog. (21).” We have half a dozen of his mostly of Osceola and the upriver spa, Monegaw Springs, cards. In our book Damming the Osage (page 7) we used a wonderful image of his that shows a 68 lb. blue cat proudly displayed by two men and a boy on the streets of that old river town.

This enigmatic view is postmarked “Monegaw Springs Aug. 23, 1907.” It was addressed to Miss Mary Mifflin Kansas City, Mo: “Dear Sister, this is a splendid picture of the Osage. Having a royal good time. Am rather used to the strange country ways by now … lovingly, Edna.” “Strange country” indeed—what IS that ball on a stick?

Did surrealism, the art of incongruous imagery, hit the Ozarks a decade before the term was even coined in Paris? If you’ve got any idea what that ball and stick are please let us know at lensandpen@yahoo.com

LOOK DOWN—A SHARK!

by lensandpen • September 28, 2020

Several nights after I caught the lookdown at a Marathon, Florida boat slip, I looked down and glimpsed something much bigger. Someone had cleaned fish and dumped the remains in the ocean. That attracted a sizable shark. The operator of a small charter boat walked by, looked in the water and asked me if I “want to have some fun?” He was docked several slips down. A few minutes later I was hooked up with a “belly button” that supported a good-sized Penn reel and short stiff rod. Impaled on a big hook, at the end of a wire leader, was half of a four-pound mackerel. He tossed it in and almost instantly the shark took the bait.

Capt. Bill loosened the drag (I had no idea how to work the reel) only a few feet before the beast would have dragged me into the water. I have no idea how long the fight went on but I was relieved when he ran to his boat and came back with a gaff. This all took place next to the highway. While I was having “fun” a small crowd assembled to see the shark played and then hung up by its tail.

When I returned the next morning, a photographer from the local paper was there. That photo and clipping have been lost, but a week ago, going through some old boxes of drawer junk, this snapshot turned up. That’s me at 23 on the left and on the right is Capt. Bill Cross of the charter boat, No Moleste.

I didn’t paint the biggest fish I ever caught. During the day, someone unceremoniously dragged the fish down to the edge of the ocean. While I was trying to cut out his jaws, a young guy from Chicago and his wife strolled by. To the disapproval of his wife, he offered me $50 for the trophy, including the knife I was using. It was a cheap knife and not very sharp and I wasn’t making much progress, so I took his offer. I took the money and quickly departed. He took over the futile task.

Leland Payton, Lookdown on Ice, 1963 watercolor on paper, 18 x 24.

I did a series of watercolors in the Keys in 1963. A few years later, I studied briefly with my hero Edwin Dickinson at the Art Students League in New York. Before I left New York, I asked him to critique my watercolors. He had a problem with me using so much cross-hatching, but he did like the Lookdown painting. I offered it to him, but he said, “An artist never gives his work away.” “How about a quarter,” I said. He smiled, handed me a quarter and took the picture. See July 2019 post for the unlikely story of how I got the picture back after fifty years of wondering what happened to it.

THE BALLET OF NIAGARA

by lensandpen • September 21, 2020

In Lover’s Leap Legends we devoted 66 of 352 pages to the Maid of the Mist legend. These sob stories of a beautiful Indian maiden (usually pictured nude), sent over Niagara Falls in a canoe as a sacrifice to appease various gods, are not technically Lover’s Leaps but they clearly derive from the same indifference to ethnological truth. In both, a “dusky maiden” dies in the end—usually.

Maid of the Mist narratives were hugely popular and had many spinoffs. Recently, we acquired a 1910-1911 New York Hippodrome souvenir program. On the cover is a flakey adaptation of James Francis Brown’s naked Indian girl in a canoe cresting the falls. Curiously, the theater’s dance version does not result in her death. Twice she is in her canoe headed for destruction but is rescued both times. To sweeten the conclusion even more, the two warring Indian tribes grasp the futility of their conflict and the enemy tribes “bury the hatchet.” Princess Ioneta and the handsome young chief are united in marriage.

With seating for 5,300 (the largest playhouse in the world) the New York Hippodrome opened in 1905 with “A Yankee Circus on Mars,” complete with space ships, elephants, a Spanish clown, a baboon named Coco, and hundreds of singers and dancers.

The Ballet of Niagara was less surrealistic and spectacular. Its rendition of Niagara Falls did draw press praise for its realism and there was a snake dance featuring lovely Indian maidens handling large, presumably fake serpents. The relation of handling snakes to the plot is unknown.

The gigantic theater’s overhead was so enormous it never made a profit and was demolished in 1939.

KNOW YOUR HILLBILLIES

by lensandpen • August 17, 2020

For some reason, we have accumulated an embarrassingly extensive collection of everything hillbilly. For some reason, we put a group of our three-dimensional hillbillies together against a graduated seamless background and photographed them. This was to advance a book project which is as-yet unpublished. Naturally when more schooled writers than we’uns hold forth on the subject we pay attention.

In an August 15 post, “Playing the Stereotype,” Steve Wiegenstein borrowed an early photo of jazz guitarist Les Paul performing hillbilly music as “Rhubarb Red” from Thomas Peters Facebook post. Dr. Peters is working on a book on the Ozark Jubilee and Springfield’s radio station, KWTO (“Keep Watching the Ozarks”). It “for some reason” reminded Professor Wiegenstein of the crazy Cohen Brothers film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Under the photo of Buster on horseback playing a guitar, he wrote of that scene where Buster sings, “Cool Water,” the joke being that that song isn’t a cowboy song, but a 1940s pop hit:

What follows is a series of ghastly/comic episodes that both play on Western-story stereotypes and embrace them, just as the “hillbilly” image both mocks, uses, and embraces that stereotype as well.

We make art where we find it, with the materials at hand. Sometimes those materials include simplified versions of ourselves, and then we must decide whether to challenge the stereotype or play with it. I think either decision can work, as long as the stereotype is approached with conscious intent. It’s when stereotypes are presented unconsciously and uncritically that they harm. The rural rustic, the hayseed, has been with us since Greek comedy, and we will probably never get rid of it. So, we might as well play with that image as we move toward the larger points we are trying to make in our literary and creative work.

It’s encouraging that scholars like Drs. Peters and Wiegenstein are looking into the complexities of the hillbilly trope. It’s gratifying that Wiegenstein believes that “The rural rustic, the hayseed, has been with us since Greek comedy, and we will probably never get rid of it.” Perhaps the time and coin we’ve put into this vast study collection are justified.

“Whether to challenge the stereotype or play with it,” as Wiegenstein so nicely states, is one challenge we faced working on our publishing project. Should we be amused or outraged at these rustic embodiments of ignorance and earthiness? Are white primitives cool or even allowable? We’ll have to check with Rousseau.

Puntan dos Amantes, Two Lovers Point, Guam, USA

by lensandpen • March 3, 2020

Lovers leap worldwide. Across the globe, these romantic dramas climaxed on romantic real estate. Actual geographic locations presumably add veracity to the implausible stories. Our research revealed the global reach of this tale of stalwart and undying love.

Souvenir and postcard of the Lover’s Leap in Guam from Todd Hoose.

Tourist postcards identifying Lover’s Leaps have been produced by the millions and I recently received such a reminder from a friend. Todd Hoose was deployed by FEMA to Saipan following Super Typhoon Yutu. While there, Todd emailed, saying he would be in Guam for a meeting; where was that Lover’s Leap we were putting in the book? I sent him the story:

Puntan dos Amantes, Two Lovers Point, Guam, USA, is a full-service tourist attraction. … The park honors Guam’s Lover’s Leap legend. A 25-foot tall statue of the two tragic lovers by Philippine sculptor Eduardo Castrillo was created in 1984. It was destroyed by Typhoon Pongsona in 2002, but retrieved from a junkyard, restored, and reinstalled in 2015.

A plaque on the base tells the story of “The Legend of Puntan dos Amantes.” It’s the familiar Romeo-and-Juliet premise with a Sappho conclusion. An “impressive beauty” is ordered to marry a “powerful, arrogant Spanish captain” by her “wealthy Spanish aristocrat” father. Alas! She loves a “young, gentle, strongly-built and handsome Chamorro man.” They rendezvous on the cliff where they first met:

When the father discovered that his daughter was gone, he told the captain that his daughter had been kidnapped by the Chamorro boy. The father, the captain and all the Spanish soldiers pursued the lovers up to the high cliff above Tumon Bay. The couple stood at the very edge of the cliff. The boy and girl took the long strands of their hair and tied these together into a rope-like knot . . . They looked deeply into each other’s eyes and kissed one last time. In that instant, the young couple leaped off the long, deep cliff into the roaring waves below.

French explorer Louis Claude de Freycinet in 1819 published a slightly different version, which he claimed to have learned from locals. In it both the boy and girl were Chamorro (natives of Guam). She was of higher caste. Without her father’s permission to marry they became impoverished outcasts. They put their love child in a stone vault and climbed to the overlook. Binding their hair together they jumped to their deaths. In later renditions, the baby has disappeared. This unique tying of hair together has persisted and is portrayed in all graphic representations.