Desert

An AI Experiment

There’s been a lot of talk lately about artificial intelligence — what it can do and what its limitations are. And if you’ve been keeping tabs on it at all, there’s no doubt that it seems to be getting better — and fast.

Texas Standard commentator WF Strong wanted to find out for himself just how good its become. So he did a little experiment.

Texas Standard: June 3, 2020

Though a more peaceful evening across Texas, voices continue to rise over police force against African Americans and people of color. Amid days of demonstrations over policing, a former Texas mayor and one-time presidential candidate decides it’s time for a full throated endorsement of Joe Biden. Our conversation with Julian Castro on what was, for him, a tipping point. Also, the return of the Brown Berets to El Paso. And an attempt to get back to normal at Texas A&M. We’ll talk with the system’s chancellor and more today on the Texas Standard:

How Texas Became A Desert

By W. F. Strong

To much of the world, and to many people in the U.S. who have never been to Texas, the state is a vast desert. It is not the Sahara, but instead a high-plains arid region studded with rocky mesas, sweeping wall-like cliffs, dusty canyons, and sometimes adorned with thousands of Saguaro cacti – native to Arizona, not Texas. Certainly there are parts of west Texas that have some aspects of these images, but more than half the state is green with rolling hills, lush forests and vibrant coastal plains. Yet the desert images dominate minds in distant lands. For that, we can thank Hollywood. 

There are many John Wayne westerns with story lines that weave through Texas, but the films were shot in Utah and northern or southern Arizona. The most jarring example to me is The Searchers. To my mind, The Searchers was John Wayne’s best film. Here’s a clip where Mrs. Jorgensen, a tough frontier woman, defines these early Texans: 

It just so happens we be Texicans. Texican is nothing but a human man way out on a limb. This year and next, and maybe for a hundred more. But I don’t think it’ll be forever. Someday this country’s gonna be a fine, good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.” 

As she says this on her front porch, she is looking at a view of Monument Valley, Utah.  Wayne made five movies in Monument Valley, even though two of them, The Searchers and Rio Grande, had storylines that based them in Texas. Wayne actually said, “Monument Valley is the place where God put the West.”

Another Wayne film that is shocking to a native Texan is The Comancheros. The plot has Wayne playing Texas Ranger Jake Cutter. Great name. He arrests an outlaw for murder on a boat arriving in Galveston and tells him he will return him to Louisiana: 

Regret:   Well, I’ve committed no crime in Texas.

Cutter:    Right. But you killed a man in Louisiana. My job’s to take you to the Ranger Headquarters where a Louisiana Marshall will pick you up. They’ll take you back to New Orleans and the gallows. You know we’re getting real obliging to the states down here in Texas. A lot of folks want to join the Union. 

Regret:  I have a couple of hundred in gold in that jacket. That give you any ideas,  friend? 

Cutter:   I’ve got what you might call a weakness. I’m honest. 

As Cutter exits the boat in Galveston with his handcuffed prisoner, Paul Regret, in tow, he walks right into Southeastern Utah where the film was shot in Professor Valley and the La Sal Mountains, among other places near Moab. Stunning country for cinemascope technology to capture, but not Texas.    

Rio Bravo and El Dorado were two John Wayne Films with Texas settings shot in and around the Sonoran Desert west of Tucson. The landscape there is dominated by thousands of saguaros, enormous 40-foot cacti that look like sentinels of the desert.  Such sights don’t exist in Texas.  

Clint Eastwood’s For a Few Dollars More is set in and around El Paso, but it was actually shot in the Tabernas Desert near Almería, Spain. Fort Bravo, also called Hollywood, Texas, is a movie set town built there in the sixties and has served as a backdrop for many classic Western films like Once Upon a Time in the West and the famous Spaghetti Westerns. Not all of those have Texas storylines, but some do. For a Few Dollars More does, and at least in this case, the landscape of Almería is a good match for the El Paso region.  

Two films more true to Texas in landscape were Giant, shot almost completely around Marfa, and No Country for Old Men, filmed mostly in Texas, but some in New Mexico.  Texas Rising troubled some Texans for two reasons: one, being shot almost entirely in Mexico, which seemed sacrilegiously ironic. And two, for scenes of rugged mountains around Victoria, Texas. I think they got their Victorias mixed up. A more recent film called Hell or High Water, starring Jeff Bridges as a Texas Ranger chasing bank robbers in the Panhandle, was largely shot in New Mexico.  

So you see, movie-Texas depicts a greater land of diversity than Texas actually has within it. To much of the world, we are Arizona and Utah and New Mexico, and we are Mexico and Italy and Spain. Mostly desert. Everything is bigger in Texas because Hollywood has subconsciously created a much wider world in the collective mind of moviegoers. 

Big Bend

It’s feeling like summer — time for a Texas road trip. That was the inspiration for this Typewriter Rodeo poem.

Texas Standard: March 30, 2017

A whole new rodeo: Texas Ag commissioner Sid Miller strikes an economic agreement with a group of west bank settlements? We’ll explore. Also: a billionaire, a brash talker, and a would be president? Skip Hollandsworth of Texas Monthly on the prospects of a Cuban revolution. And how to pay for public schools: in a session dominated by what proponents call school choice, fresh fault lines emerge over the bottom line for eduction. Also, an invader arrives in Texas and experts say it’s killing our bats. Those stories and lots more today on the national news show of Texas, The Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: November 14, 2016

From cyberbullying bills to political ethics rules, what’s just over the horizon for Texas? We’re about to find out for real. Plus as the Feds send more force to the border, there are signs Texas law enforcement may lighten up on the southern frontier. We’ll hear why. Also, republican administrations are often thought of as good for the military business but some at Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth aren’t so sanguine about the future. We’ll explore the fight over the F-35. Plus it is a term that was coined by a police officer: suicide by cop. What’s being done to address the issue and what isn’t. All that and more today on the Texas Standard: