television

In 1994, when I was 23, I was shopping for graduate schools. I remembered a paper I’d read by U of O archaeologist Madonna Moss, “Shellfish and Gender.” So I applied to the U of O. A year later Dr. Moss was my graduate advisor.

In 1990, I was obsessed with Twin Peaks. It was set (and filmed) in Washington, but that was the first intimation of the coming Pacific Northwest Cultural Wave (Grunge, Starbucks, Microsoft) that kind of wormed its way into my perceptions of the world.

In 1986, when I was 14, my family took a vacation to the Pacific Northwest. On that trip I first saw the ocean, probably at Neskowin. We stayed in Manzanita. I’d had dreams about the ocean my entire life: swimming in heavy waves, being underwater, sailing, standing on beaches. The beach at Neskowin was exactly like I imagined an Oregon beach should be. Even the smell was familiar; the whole experience was familiar. Cold feet, salt air, windburn, gray sky, woodsmoke, rotting seaweed.

In 1985, I saw the movie Goonies. It was a good enough story but I fell in love with that landscape. Trees and cliffs and rocky beaches, set hard against the restless water.

In 1981, I was in fourth grade, the year that Nebraska children first learn state history. We lived in Scottsbluff, within sight of the famous bluff that featured prominently in diaries of the Oregon Trail. Near at hand were actual physical artifacts of the Trail: the Rebecca Winters Grave, Signature Rock, wagon ruts on Windlass Hill. Much of our state’s history was the story of people moving through. To Oregon. These were gruesome stories of hardship: hunger, starvation, dysentery, Indian attack, freezing in passes, drowing in river crossings. It didn’t take a genius to figure: Oregon must be pretty nice. Nice enough to walk for four to six months across a continent.

The year previous, Mt. St. Helens erupted. It struck me as profoundly weird that people would live in a place with volcanoes. And Bigfoot. And flying saucers. All of which were childhood obsessions.

Also around that time I read a book I think no one else has ever read: The Haunted Cove by Elizabeth Hazelton. I think I got it free from Scholastic Book Club for ordering umpteen other books. It’s a Young People’s Mystery (ala Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew) set on the Oregon Coast. Hazelton did a superb job drawing the Oregon land/seascape. Her prose is why my dreams of the ocean looked exactly like the ocean in Oregon. This obscure book is probably singlehandedly responsible for my ultimate move to Oregon.

We’ve a long gray wet spring that just can’t seem to quit. It’s easy to complain but — for me, anyway — easier to remember: this is why I moved here. I came here for the gray and wet and chilly. So mild, so green; so unlike the fierce wilting humid heat of my childhood summers. The coldgraywet makes me grateful for books, for bicycles, for mud and coffee and hiking boots, for empty beaches and quiet forest trails. It makes the beer taste better.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was a genre show called Western Journey. Set in 1870, the show followed the adventures of a small band of US Marshals who traveled around the Wild West in an enormous and wonderful stagecoach called the Venture. The show followed a loose formula. Every week our band of heroes would ride into an isolated town — usually a village populated by previously-uncontacted Indians with surprising and thought-provoking cultural systems (who nevertheless all spoke English). The cultural tension between the locals and the crew of the Venture provided a counterpoint for the cultural prejudices of the show's modern audience. Although it pretended to be a western (in the vein of contemporary genre pieces like Gunsmoke or Bonanza), it was really about something else: modern America.

Western Journey was produced just before my time, and had some corny anachronisms — its sexual politics were particularly suspect. The attention to period detail was sometimes contrived but surprisingly believable. Several plots were resolved with unusual technical applications of horse tackle, Remington repeaters, or late 19th-century medicine. The original Western Journey enjoyed only limited popularity during its first run on television but acquired a new life in syndication, spawning half a dozen films, three of which managed to surpass the original material.

Some years later, the creators of Western Journey revived the franchise, moving its setting ahead 80 years, to 1950. This seemed like a bold dramatic maneuver, but almost immediately disappointed. Western Journey: The New Generation stuck surprisingly close to the formula of its predecessor. The West of 1950 was not much changed from that of 1870. There were no Interstate highways, strip malls, airplanes, or Disneyland. The new characters still traveled from Indian village to Indian village in a somewhat larger and fancier stagecoach (again called Venture), although the six-shooters were styled differently, and the crew wore a different kind of ten-gallon hat. Actually, it wasn't all that different, now that I think about it.

Apparently, in the 80 years since the original events of Western Journey, American politics, history, culture, and technology had advanced only incrementally. The Wild West was still plenty wild, although the Indians were portrayed a bit more sensitively, and with slightly better costumes. (Of course they all spoke English, except for the Lakota, who occasionally spoke Lakota for some reason.) The only indications of progress — political, technological or otherwise — were in the persons of a Lakota scout who served with the Venture (the Lakota having been the main heavies of the original series), and an anachronistic robot crewman. The crew occasionally spoke about how less wild the West had become, which they demonstrated by extemporizing ponderously before almost every shootout. More than once I opined that, for all the apparent lack of cultural evolution in the 80 years between the series, they might as well have set WJ:TNG in 1880. It certainly would have been more believable.

Oh, and the new stagecoach Venture was outfitted with an enormous Super Nintendo video game system for the crew’s entertainment. About every fifth episode actually took place inside a Super Nintendo videogame.

So, to summarize: in 80 years, technology and society had advanced this much:

• The U.S. is no longer at war with the Lakota
• US Marshals deliver monologues before shootouts
• The six-shooters, stagecoaches, and ten-gallon hats are totally different
• Someone invented Super Nintendo, and its sole application is apparently for the entertainment of US Marshals
• Someone invented self-aware robots, but only made one of them, and it also rides around the West in a US Marshal stagecoach

Where WJ:TOS was a phenomenon, WJ:TNG was a runaway success. It produced twice as many episodes, four movies (all of them inferior to the TV show), and two spinoffs:

• Western Journey: Fort Vancouver was set in the far Northwest Territories, in a trading post which was apparently a lot like a suburban convention center-cum-shopping mall.
• Western Journey: Traveler followed a group of US Marshals who found themselves cast halfway around the world, in the highlands of New Guinea. They had to battle their way through an utterly exotic landscape, among utterly foreign cultures, to make their way back to North America. The landscape of New Guinea turned out to look a lot like the American West, and it was populated by English-speaking Native Americans.

By the end of WJ:T’s run, much of the romantic spirit of Western Journey was drained from its fictional universe. Western Journey episodes had become an elaborate Wild West kabuki of diminishing interest to all but the most fanatic admirers. Most plots resolved themselves through the techno-fixes occasionally employed in WJ:TOS. The Wild West seemed like a strangely static place: you had your marshalls, you had your Indians, you had some occasional settlers, and they never seemed to change or go anywhere, or evolve, or die. Most of the characters seemed like technocrats or technical specialists of one kind or another, and most of the dramatic action seemed to involve people typing on typewriters and delivering monologues.

Then, a few years back, Western Journey appeared in its final incarnation. Set 100 years before the original Western Journey, Venture promised to refresh the sagging franchise. The premise was brilliant: by moving the show’s setting to 1770, the writers could exploit the encyclopedic backstory of the Western Journey universe, and reintroduce the wild romance of the original series. I had every hope, in fact, that it might prove more wild and more romantic, as it was set before the invention of six-shooters or the founding of the United States, at a time when stagecoaches were dangerous and unpredictable, and none of the Indians could be expected to speak English.

Within about two episodes, Venture had proved itself: the world of 1770 was pretty much like that of 1870. In the second episode, one of the Venture’s crew invented the six-shooter, and by the fourth episode we witness the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The new (old?) Venture employed a linguist specializing in Native American languages, although again, most of the Indians spoke English. To be fair, this time around the ten-gallon hats were very different. They had pockets.

But apparently, the exploration of an untamed continent, the birth of a nation, and the Revolutionary War presented dramatically unsuitable ingredients for an adventure show, because most of Venture’s long-running plot lines revolved around time travelers from the 25th century who were fighting a war in 1770. Altogether this gave the unsatisfying impression that the entire culture and history of the United States were lifted in 1770 from 25th century time travelers.

I’ve recently heard of a new entry into the Western Journey canon: a new film featuring the characters of the original television show, but set before the events of the first season. I don’t have high hopes that this entry will breathe any new life into the franchise. It has a promising cast, but then, the sustained failure of Western Journey hasn't been talent, but imagination. In a perverse way, this might be the the franchise's most impressive achievement.

With more than 700 television episodes and ten movies, filmed over a period of almost 40 years, Western Journey expresses a grand narrative arc of almost exactly zero. If we are to believe the evidence presented by the fictional universe of Western Journey, the greatest advances of almost two centuries of American history were in the fields of military headwear and the interior styling of stagecoaches.

I remember an episode of Star Trek where the crew were visiting the Bi-Weekly Ironic Techno-Utopian Planet™. In an offhand way, one of the Techno-Utopians demonstrated a Utopian Creativity Machine™ that could transform thought into sculpture, or something like that. In the mind of the writers, this demonstrated the obvious superiority of the Techno-Utopians, both technological (“the machine reads your mind and makes sculpture!”) and social (“we don’t squander our technological prowess on trivia like war.”). The subtext was that such superiority was beyond the ken of Earthlings four centuries hence—let alone Earthlings of the present era. Of course, this show was produced a few years ago (late 1980s?) so times have changed a little, but we already have Utopian Creative Machines™. We call them “computers”. Volumes have been written on the creative potential of computers (and, by extension, the Internet), so I won’t go there. Here’s where I’ll go instead: computers allow unhandy people to make things.

I owe the entireity of my creative vocation (and avocation) to computers. I don’t mean this only in the sense that my primary medium is the Internet...I mean that I created much fo anything before I began using computers to help me create. (I’m using the term “creativity” in the broadest sense here. That is, the act of creating anything: term papers, artwork, websites, fun software widgets...etc.) I’m the kind of person with black thumbs, both of which are apparently left. My knowledge of bicycle repair, for example, came at the cost of hundreds of dollars of broken bicycle parts. The only houseplants that do well in my house are cacti...and I’ve killed a few of those as well. My sketches from art classes are smudgy and indistinct. When I was seven years old my teacher put one of those rubber triangles on my pencil in a vain effort to reform my penmanship. All my attempts at oil changes end in bitter tragedy. Whenever I’m forced to manipulate actual atoms to repair, create, enhance, or modify something, those atoms wind up resenting me. Creating things with atoms means having good form, never messing up (or gracefully converting mess-ups into something positive). If you mess up an atom, it stays messed up. Forever. For the length of human history until perhaps the 1970s, “creativity” was roughly synonymous with “being skillful with your hands.”

Electrons, by contrast, are forgiving, plastic little souls. They cheerfully wink in and out of existence on command. If you offend them somehow, you can undo your offenses. With electrons, form is nonexistent—numbers are perfect already. “5” means ::. whether you write it “five” or “fünf” or 五. Creating things with electrons is a totally zen experience. I usually begin with a mathematically precise picture of my final product and just start creating it. If, in the course of creation, my internal picture changes, I can change the electrons to match. In the digital world, creating a thing is about a difficult as imagining a thing. Since the birth of the personal computer, “creativity” has also taken on the definition of “being skillful with your mind.”