AMS205 Is an Order of Occurrence...

Josh Wilson and I partnered for our Team Presentation centered on the paper by Dickenson, Ott, & Aoki titled “Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum”. We worked well together and decided to partner up for the website project. Our initial working title was “Deconstructing the Matrix.” The premise was to examine the media-driven influences in constructing a matrix of false perception about the American Frontier, the Wild West, and the American cowboy. Inspired by the authors of the above mentioned article, plus the many writers we learned about in class, including Gloria Anzaldua, Pat Mora, and Patricia Nelson Limerick, we would look to exploit the cracks that exist in the matrix, and hope to aid in its destruction. We would make Morpheus the new King of the Wild Frontier.

Josh and I started working independently for a week conducting research, and composing our thoughts. I was armed with a stack of books from the Hamilton campus library (I’m bringing them back, I swear. Stop the emails Rentschler) on early influences that shaped our perceptions. I learned about spaghetti westerns and films from Sergio Leone. I read scholarly quotes about the improper portrayal in books and western film that the cowboy was singularly white. I even had a cool web page name picked out: "White Men Can Jump, and Black Men Can Lasso".

But it was all for naught. Dr. K. warned us that we should be keeping a fairly narrow focus based on the time constraints of the project. Josh and I thought we knew better. We were bursting with enlightenment, and intended to prove it. However, the only thing we ended up deconstructing, was our website. We were less than two weeks away from deadline and we hadn’t even reached Buddha’s belly button.

So, where are we now? We’re expanding on an idea that was part of our Team Presentation. During our presentation, we put on a short skit based on the movie starring Ben Stiller titled “Night at the Museum”. Being the clever guys we are, we inserted “Buffalo Bill” in between “the” and “Museum”. In the real movie, historical figures, including President Theodore Roosevelt, come to life at night and interact with the night watchman played by Stiller. In the movie, the viewer doesn’t really learn much about the characters’ roles in history. With our website, we hope to provide a fun, but teaching opportunity.

The story within the site is that of a homeland security student who takes a job as a night watchman at the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming. His name, Joshua Thomas Page, was inspired in part by reality – my partner, Josh Wilson is a homeland security major at Miami, and in part by Sherman Alexie’s novel. Our night watchman’s middle name is Thomas, borrowed from Alexie’s character Thomas Builds-the Fire. His last name, Page is synonymous with messenger.

The website is structured around our night watchman’s journal of his first week on the job, thus there are five distinct pages – one for each day of the week. In retrospect, our title “Night at the BBM” is slightly confusing because we document five nights. I would love to say that we intentionally used “Night” to mean “night time”, but in truth it was just a working name. After I told Josh Wilson that I was ready to change the working title to our final title, he pointed out that we would need to reconstruct the entire site to do so. As I pointed out earlier in this posting, I’m finished with the business of deconstruction and reconstruction.

With six days to go until deadline, I think we’re at least seventy-five percent of the way finished. We have five pages (days) of content ranging from the night watchman’s interaction with John (Manifest Destiny) O’Sullivan and Frederick (Freddy Frontier) Jackson Turner, to his interaction with (We Can Dance if We Want To) Sitting Bull. I’m not sure which is worse at this point: Nicknames for these historically significant men, or the Men without Hats reference. Either way, it’s a sign to end this blog post, and possibly seek professional help.