Superman of Kansas and Krypton and Cleveland

By Kenyon Gradert, Course on Midwest Culture Series Editor

 

“Behind the high-flying legend lies a true-to-life saga every bit as compelling, one that begins not in the far reaches of outer space but in the middle of America’s heartland. During the depths of the Great Depression, Jerry Siegel was a shy, awkward teenager in Cleveland.”

 Much like a comic book origin story, thus begins Larry Tye’s Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero, released last June.  

I grew up on comics. When I met others like myself, the inevitable question was “Marvel or DC?” Expected to declare an allegiance, I placed my loyalty with Marvel, avowing that they do “more human stories.” Spiderman grew up in a place on a real map (Queens) and generally seemed like me.  Where was Gotham City? Aquaman from Atlantis? Wonder Woman was Amazonian? Why were the rest from space?

Superman seemed the height of this romanticism. He was a god with but a single weakness that seemed tacked-on so that writers could actually create stories (which, we all know, require weakness). To boot, the magnitude of superhuman power was grafted onto an utterly bland personality. He was a terrible combination of übermenschlich Everyman (Walt Whitman being a fantastic combination, for the record). At least Marvel’s equivalent, Captain America, came from New York City and fought in a war I’d heard of through grandparents. Even if Marvel writers risked the ridiculous by freezing Cap in ice, they revamped him through showing the moral and psychological tensions of dropping a robust member of The Greatest Generation into the 21st-century. Superman was from space and a fictional place blandly called “Metropolis.”

But he wasn’t just from space, which makes for the draw of Tye’s biography. Superman, the quintessentially red-blooded American, was created by two Jewish kids in Cleveland trying to fit in to a part of the country that too often considered itself quintessentially American. Ironically, in the process of trying to fit in, Siegel and Shuster stood two heads above all by creating a definitive American myth.

What’s more, Superman’s Jewish-Cleveland creators dropped their mythic creation from the starry heights of Krypton and into Kansas to be raised by humble farmers—not without significance. Superman would not be the same were he placed in Brooklyn like Cap. He’d be too earthly and less pure. As an Americanized Christ-figure, Superman could come from nothing short of a backwoods Nazareth, a pastoral landscape famed for supposedly producing the good, the representative, the plain, but also safely distant and ideal.
 
As stories have matured, writers increasingly paid attention to Superman’s earthly dwellings to ward off these potentially alienating mythic qualities. Smallville was perhaps the most popular renovation of the character, which materialized after series developers Gough and Millar pitched their "no tights, no flights" rule in the wake of a failed pitch for a Batman series.

The new film, Man of Steel (June 14, 2013), holds the promise of producer Christopher Nolan (of The Dark Knight franchise fame) and his trademark realist perspective on a story that is often too hard to make realistic. What can we expect? The recently released teaser-trailer focuses heavily on Superman’s rural origins (read, “cornfields”) but also frames a mythic struggle. In the American teaser, the montage features a voiceover of Superman’s earthly parent, farmer Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner) telling his extraordinary son “you’re not just anyone.” The European trailer is identical, but with a voiceover from Superman’s celestial father, Kryptonian Jor-El (Russell Crowe) telling his son “you will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They will rise behind you. They will stumble. They will fall. In time, they will join you in the sun.” 

 
By the teaser’s account, the film promises to be a balance between Superman’s mythic strengths and his earthly troubles, between Krypton and Kansas, between the ideal and the real. Although the teaser seems to emphasize Superman’s troubles fitting in to the Heartland, it also balances these human struggles with the mythic image of a god’s loneliness in sea, earth, and sky. The balancing act is a tricky one, but necessary for a figure both ideally mythic and near to our hearts.

• A final Midwest connection. Larry Tye also wrote an award-winning biography on Satchel Paige, a southerner who made his name as a wild pitcher for the famed Negroe-League Kansas City Monarchs and later, the Cleveland Indians and St. Louis Browns.

Mexican-American Gothic: Santiago Forero

Mexican-American Gothic; Santiago Forero

An image for our cultural and political moment, an image not of the past, but of America's future.

Larger, high resolution images of the work of photographer Santiago Forero can be found here.

The original painting by Grant Wood:

Related Articles:
Reconsidering Grant Wood's Revolt

Jack Driscoll: Place Forms Character

Editor's Note: Today we are pleased to welcome Polly Atwell as a contributor. Polly is a writer, critic, and author of Wild Girls, a novel forthcoming from Scribner this fall. For more information on her work, please see our contributors page.

By Polly Atwell

Mention Jack Driscoll’s name to a fiction writer, and you’ll likely get nods of recognition and admiration.  Mention his name to someone who’s spent time in northern Michigan and you’ll get the same response, perhaps with even more enthusiasm.  Since his debut story collection, Wanting Only to Be Heard, was published in 1995, Driscoll has been recognized as the chronicler of that snowbound and still-remote country between Detroit and the Mackinac Bridge.  His stories and novels mine the rural landscape, producing characters that feel like people we know, whether or not we’ve ever been north of Chicago.  In his new collection, The World of a Few Minutes Ago, Driscoll’s flawless sense of prose rhythm, his well-trained eye for the perfect and often humorous detail, and his deep compassion for his characters make the stories a great pleasure for writers and non-writers alike.

Driscoll’s compassion and sense of humor extend into the real world, where they have benefited legions of students at the Interlochen Center for the Arts and the MFA program at Pacific University.  I was lucky enough to be one of those students, and recently I had the chance to talk to Jack about his work, his life as a writer and teacher, and what it means to tell stories of those small rural communities at the 38th Parallel.  An excerpt from our conversation is included below.

“I’ve lived now for thirty-seven years up here in the northern provinces, long enough to have witnessed a literal transformation of the place itself.  When I first arrived in 1975 there were, as I remember, no full stoplights, and so at best we had to slow down a bit for those blinking yellows, and the spaces between them mostly farmland and uninhabited coastline.  Somewhat barren but not as if ‘creation had stopped halfway through the third day,’ to pilfer from Whitney Groves.  Because of the region’s great beauty, and the town’s gentrification, our status as a destination—via the New York Times and elsewhere—has coordinated an entirely new look.  Coffee shops on every corner, and upscale restaurants, film and literary festivals, organic co-ops and farmers markets, and the population during the summer months increasing tenfold.  To varying degrees, cultural collision does occur, though those inherent hostilities are not so directly confronted in my stories.  The focus for me is always something else, by which I mean that tension created by what a place/community offers and what it can’t possibly provide.

“Here’s our standing joke: we have three seasons in northern Michigan—July, August, and winter, and in 2010 we endured an official 209 inches of snow.  Place forms character.  Or, as Ortega y Gasset says, ‘Tell me the place in which you live and I will tell you who you are.’  Up north this protracted winter season overlays and outlines a terrain as gorgeous as it is terrifying, empty, cut-off, unforgiving.  I’ve come to love such extremes, and how these conditions conspire to define behavior.  As the teenage narrator in ‘That Story’ says, ‘I’m eye-level with the snowdrifts that the wind has sculpted, the temperature single-digit at best, and it’s beyond me why I say what I say, but I do, inviting trouble of a magnitude that we don’t need and yet sometimes covet.’  Eliminate this frozen landscape and the story ceases to exist.  It’s the nature, I suppose, of a writer’s sensibility with a particular place, where the characters’ inwardness is informed by all that surrounds them in the actual physical world in which they operate.  Nothing comes more naturally—and less self-consciously—to me than setting my stories here, where I’ve now lived for thirty-seven years.  Not to mention the wildness of such a terrain, which I’ve always, from the time I was a little kid, craved, the woods and the waterways.  And why writers such as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau have been so important to me.”


This feature will continue in a second part, with a selection from "That Story" by Jack Driscoll.

Helen LaFrance: Painting From Memory

Church Picnic; Helen LaFrance

Think twice and see it once. Think you're right and know you're right before you do something. I like to have people see what I see, the way I see it. I try to see through a thing.

We begin this week with news of the extraordinary "memory paintings" of Helen LaFrance, a self-taught Kentucky artist who has spent a life painting, and, at the age of 93, is still producing vibrant work from a dayroom-studio in her nursing home. 

Here's Kathy Moses Shelton, author of Helen LaFrance: Folk Art Memories and Outsider Art of the South writing in Nashville Arts Magazine on the work of Mrs. LaFrance:

In 1995, I had the pleasure of being introduced to self-taught Southern artist Helen LaFrance. An accomplished painter, quilter, wood carver, and Biblical interpreter, Helen LaFrance also has an exceptional ability to connect with the viewer emotionally through the memories they share. She paints scenes of a time and place that many recall but others respond to as well. On canvas, she transcribes the values and traditions she grew up with, the concept of family and church, the strong work ethic that was her model. These paintings fall into a category of American folk art known as memory painting. And memories, as we all know, give meaning to our own lives and to the lives of others when we share them.

We are also including below this fine video by the Oxford American that first introduced us to the work of Helen LaFrance; below, please also find a video produced in conjunction with her Kentucky Governor's Award in the Arts. 

From Last Chance To Venice: A M12 Mixtape

This week the M12 art collective has traveled from their usual base of operations on the Colorado High Plains to the European Lowlands, more specifically the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale, the most prestigious event in this field. [full disclosure: AOTR Director Matthew Fluharty is on the M12 Board of Directors.]

In a confirmation of the values and aesthetic objectives of the M12, the collective's Campito Project will stand in the US Pavillion as part of the show Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good. 

We will be featuring an interview with Richard Saxton and Kirsten Stoltz of the M12 when they return stateside but, until then, we offer this From Last Chance to Venice mixtape -- a selection of songs near and dear to these artists. The Last Chance portion of the title refers to the small town (pop. 14) in Colorado that is collaborating with the M12 to create The Experimental Site for Rural Creativity, a permanent home for the M12's work. 

For folks who don't use Spotify, we offer this mixtape via YouTube. As some of these songs could not be found on YouTube, other songs by these artists are presented instead:

A Good Flying Day - The Sadies

That's When I Reach For My Revolver - Mission of Burma 

Cherry Bomb - The Runaways

Cachaca - Calexico

Cannonball - Waco Brothers

Ether - Gang of Four

Aspirin - Green on Red 

Rebel Girl - Bikini Kill

43 - Richmond Fontaine

Betty's Overture - Lambchop

She's a Wild One - Blue Moutnain

Oh Bondage Up Yours - X-Ray Spex

Man of Constant Anxiety - The Bottle Rockets

Related Articles:
M12: A New Vision For The High Plains
M12 Collective: Ornitarium
Richard Saxton's Vernacular Landscapes

Introducing The Rural Arts & Culture Working Group

Working on next steps; all photos by Shawn Poynter

By Matthew Fluharty, Director of Art of the Rural

Over the next few weeks Art of the Rural will begin to share the stories and perspectives from the Rural Arts and Culture Working Group, a diverse group of artists, practitioners, and advocates that recently gathered for inaugural meetings at Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield, Massachusetts. Our time together was made possible by Americans for the Arts, Arts and Democracy, The Bush Foundation, The Center for Rural Strategies, Greenfield Community College, The National Endowment of the Arts, and The New England Foundation for the Arts.

Along with Whitney Kimball Coe of the Center for Rural Strategies and Matthew Glassman of Double Edge Theatre, I had the honor of convening this Group and helping frame and record the initial conversations. Forty folks from across the country came together in response to a call to create and advocate for a new narrative of the rural arts and culture that considers rural-urban connections, cultural and agricultural sustainability, the role of rural youth, racial and ethnic inclusiveness, and the necessity of creating fresh cross-sector collaborations.

We gathered at Double Edge Theatre to start a movement.

Both in its philosophy, and in the site-specific theater work that occurs across its farm, buildings, and fields, we found in Double Edge a profound metaphor for both the urgency and the timelessness of our mission. Led by Artistic Director Stacy Klein, this theatre has embraced its local community and helped transform a town's economy, all the while producing some of the most vital and transcendent productions to be found anywhere in America. It's rare for an artistic project to so consistently achieve such a high, experimental, standard while also maintaining such an commitment to local place.

As a result, our Working Group meetings were inspired, and given structure, by the rhythms of this company. We had a chance to take in a performance of The Odyssey, their annual "summer spectacle," and to witness their farm transformed into a tableux through which an ancient story finds a contemporary voice. On this visionary ground, and with the assistance of a dozen of its actors each day, we found the facilities and creative spirit through which to come together as a peer community and chart the course before us, like Odysseus, that might lead us to port.

David Martinez of the Media Literacy Project, with Kelle Jolly of Carpetbag Theatre, and Rachel Reynolds Luster of AOTR

Cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational, we convened with a shared belief in the power of artmaking to both express and reimagine the cultural life of rural America. As we've all seen art change the lives of individuals and communities, we also feel that it can play a profound role in shaping how rural America is represented in national policy discussions. Artists and cultural practitioners can create powerful narratives and metaphors to a host of policy concerns, from rural broadband to economic development to the need for greater philanthropic investment in rural America.

 Javiera Benavente and Caron Atlas of Arts and Democracy

Though we travelled to Double Edge Theatre from all across the country, and though our own definitions of those central terms -- rural, arts, culture -- varied within our fields and our regions of experience, we discovered a common ground and a shared imperative. We found ways to best understand the cultural moment that surrounds such work in rural (and urban) America, a quality of consciousness best described by Carlos Uriona of Double Edge Theatre as that of Crisis, Danger, and Opportunity.

Art of the Rural is committed to sharing the stories and perspectives that make up such a consciousness, and in coming weeks will begin to feature the voices from this Working Group as well as the voices of those who did not spend those four intense days with us at Double Edge Theatre. Though forty folks gathered for this initial meeting, my colleagues and I recognize that a fully-articulated effort will take far more minds, and far more collaboration. In September we will begin to share more information about the ways that everyone can help to contribute to this work and these conversations.

Nikiko Masumoto, agrarian artist; Rachel Beth Rudi, AOTR contributor

In thinking about what we can craft together, I'll offer this basic assertion of the Group's purpose and its statements of belief:

We gather to develop an organized effort that promotes our shared belief in the transformative power of the arts in rural America.  We hope [as this work begins] to create the basic framework for a movement that spans the country,  that resonates across cultures, disciplines, and experiences and informs policy.

•We believe that rural America is changing. Artists and cultural workers are on the front lines of these new definitions of rural place and identity.
•We believe the arts and culture inform policies across all sectors.
•We believe the arts are a primary vehicle for the advancement of cultural values and rights.
•We believe that storytelling and creativity are essential to the health of a community.
•We believe that arts and culture are central to all forms of sustainability.
•We believe that the efforts of artists and cultural workers can empower youth and expand cross-cultural dialogues.
•We believe artists create powerful narratives that transcend rural-urban and international boundaries.
•We believe real change is cultural.

Jennifer Armstrong, Illinois Council of the Arts; Bonita Rickers, Institute of American Indian Arts; Patrice Walker Powell, National Endowment of the Arts

While the language above formed a foundation for the first scenes of this movement, there are additions, clarifications, and expansions to this mission that emerged during our conversations at Double Edge Theatre. Forthcoming  documents and communication will offer far greater detail of this content.

Thus, I'd like to offer a few additional thoughts -- and to say that the reflections to follow are solely my own. We hope to share many further perspectives on the philosophy and next-steps of a rural arts and culture movement on Art of the Rural in the coming weeks.

• We need to build a broad coalition of folks from the local to national level. We are building this movement not only for ourselves, but for our children and grandchildren. We are establishing a support system -- from academics to artists to cultural practitioners to arts advocates -- that can offer, for the first time, a collaborative narrative of rural artmaking and its inseparable cultural life. Let's build this now, so that our children don't have to come back in 20 years and try to create this again.

• Let's steward these collaborations toward art, publications, events, etc, that create a body of expression and a store of resources that can provide an organized aesthetic and cultural perspective that has, up to this point, been a challenge to locate and assemble into a coherent narrative.

• With this, let's at last refuse the rural-urban binary. The fate of rural America is the fate of urban America.

• This a moment to also reconsider what "rural" identity means. Can we make space in this definition for the millions of folks within the rural diaspora who live in our cities and suburbs? Might art and culture work serve as the bridge to opening up notions of rural membership to urban audiences?

Carlos Uriona, Double Edge Theatre; Savannah Barrett, arts administrator & AOTR contributor

• For us to understand where we've going as rural people and artists, we must understand where have come from.  We need to grasp our social history -- and to project this history across imposed cultural and ideological boundaries. If we are going to argue for a new place for the rural arts, we must understand, historically, how the rural arts have been situated in this national and international conversation.

• To those ends, universities must be engaged partners in this work. And these institutions need to think more broadly about their responsibility to their regions.

Kirsten Stoltz, M12; Rachel Luster; Scott Walters, Center for Rural Arts Development & Leadership

• We also should scan the folks who normally participate in such rural-themed convenings and collaborations. What occupations and points-of-view are often left out?

• This initial meeting, necessarily so, was focused on the community applications of the arts. How do we integrate the experience of individual artists not working an explicitly "social" vein? How do we integrate art that is abstract and non-representational?

• In a changed moment for arts funding, what is the role of entrepreneurship? 

Elandria Williams, Highlander Research and Education Center; Jay Salinas, Wormfarm Institute

• If we are building a rural arts and culture movement, this must be a gathering force that is open, inclusive, and dedicated to honest dialogue. Let's create a space where we can speak freely, and where we expect to hear a difference of opinion.

• Many of us have been to meetings and conferences that led to impassioned and creative conversations -- and then, after everyone left, produced nothing concrete or sustainable. This Working Group is founded upon the belief that conversation is not enough. To make change we must make change. 

• And, most importantly, this must be a movement built upon real human relationships. As Kelle Jolly of Carpetbag Theatre said during our gathering, let's go to each others' homes and let's sit at each others' tables.

Please find below more excellent photography by Shawn Poynter, with a full archive of photos from the Working Group gathering here. To read more on further perspectives on this work, please see Mary Annette Pember's piece in The Daily Yonder and Chris Beck's reflections on the USDA Blog. We will be sharing more news and updates on this work soon, with opportunities for conversation and collaboration.

Logan Anderson, First Peoples Fund; Frumie Selchen, Arts Alliance of Northern New Hampshire; Chris Beck, United States Department of Agriculture

Catharine Jordan of the Bush Foundation, Jay Salinas and Donna Neuwirth of the Wormfarm Institute, and Matthew Glasman of Double Edge Theatre

Mary Annette Pember speaking during a conversation on rural media

Philip Arnoult of The Center for International Theatre Development facilitating a discussion

Arts Funding 2.0: Caleb Elliott

By Rachel Reynolds Luster, Contributing Editor

This week’s featured crowd funding campaign is Caleb Elliott’s Kickstarter project, “Caleb Elliott’s Debut Album.”

“Son of a preacher man. Child of melody. Brother of Harmony,” begins the bio link from Caleb Elliott’s Kickstarter project, which seems an apt introduction to the music he’s creating along with a host of well-honed musicians including Grammy award winner Mitch Reed of Beau Soleil and Sam Broussard.

Caleb’s south Louisiana roots are evident in the tracks available, but there is also a richness that reaches above and beyond the expected, in part because of the mix of beats and grooves laid down by Doug Belote, as well as Caleb’s background as a classical cellist.  He's been a singer/songwriter since age thirteen.

The songs have been recorded for his debut. This campaign focuses on the final touches in the studio, production, and release. Caleb’s offering some sweet incentives for supporting the project including copies of the record in digital and vinyl formats and even an associate producer credit. The campaign is gaining ground, and we wish Caleb the best in successfully funding his project. We’d like to offer a special thanks to Art of The Rural reader, Jen Mouton, of Bonne Terre Cottage for sharing this campaign with us. Jen’s got a great retreat down just outside of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana that you might want to look into as well.

Folks can find out more about Caleb at his Caleb Elliott Music Facebook page.