This review was written when the e-book was finished. It's being reposted now that the movie has been released and is available for screening. This is a valuable piece of California history and also a feast of visual art, from pretty nature scenes to horror pictures.
Title: The Lost Era Transcripts
Author: Peter Wade Hampton
Editor: John W. MacLean
Date: 2023 (movie, blog)
Quote: “Someday, Pete Hampton will be recognized as one of America’s great artists. I am going to have a role in making that happen”.
Pete Hampton grew up at a peculiar time in southern California's history: a time when relatively generous amounts of rain had encouraged more diversity of wildlife than most people see there, and relatively few people had crowded the wildlife out. He painted his memories, not always with perfect accuracy, but with a determination to preserve the sights he'd seen. He documented what southern California looked like without smog, traffic, and billboards.
As his book makes clear, Hampton was an anxious, nightmare-ridden child, and in his case nightmares seemed to be part of a manageable psychotic condition. He saw and loved the beauty of nature, and wanted to discourage people crowding in and urbanizing places where a few humans could coexist with that beauty. If he gained any other wisdom from what he'd seen, however, he failed to write it down. Maclean tells us that a publisher had wanted to publish his book, then backed out of it--possibly due to timing, but also possibly because the story doesn't end with Hampton outgrowing his nightmares. He still had them during his last illness; he died old, but raving in nightmares. People who think a story ought to provide an encouraging message, "This was an unpleasant situation; this is how the character(s) made it better," will be disappointed.
But, for Hampton, the story wasn't about him. It was about the time and place that deserved to be remembered, so far as possible preserved--even if his memories of that time and place were all wound up together with his nightmares.
So he left behind a manuscript linking pretty nature paintings and nightmare paintings. I don't think the nightmare paintings are very disturbing to adults of steady nerves and clear consciences. They feature a lot of cartoonish monsters. He was a little boy; he'd heard nothing about the real horrors of war, even the "good" but horrible one in the 1940s.
He left a younger artist friend (MacLean) the task of making his manuscript publishable as a book or a movie. The technical details were apparently quite tedious, but MacLean did the job well. The Lost Era Transcripts has become a documentary movie. When I offered to view the movie MacLean, charitably remembering my absurdly low visual attention span, sent a link to the manuscript in blog form, each chapter visible online as a blog post. The hand work of scrolling and clicking helped me focus on a book that's long on color pictures and short on words.
It would make an excellent big heavy glossy gorgeous coffee-table book, for all who want their coffee tables to display an interest in California history, ecology, artists, dreamscapes, or any combination of those things. It would be expensive to print and might have to be published privately, or by a university, as a limited edition; but for art lovers these lively, quirky paintings would be worth their price. Hampton's heirs might even consider selling limited editions of frameable prints of individual paintings, full-sized or close.
https://www.thelosteratranscripts.com/2020/05/the-lostera-transcripts-story-and.html
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