Another Wisconsin Traveler

June 21, 2007

The New York Times has been running a series called the Frugal Traveler, written by Matt Gross. This guy has the fun assignment of traveling around the US on backroads and writing about what he sees. And each week he also seems to have a video of his experience. This week he came through Wisconsin.. which is Old Roads territory.

I was curious what the Frugal Traveler would do with Wisconsin. He focused on an intentional community in a tiny town called West Lima. The video features a few road scenes of farms and small town stuff.. but then he winds up at the community and he gives us some interviews with the people who live there. What I found lacking in this approach is any interest in reading the landscape or looking for public signs about what a place means. The goal seems to be to find characters that can stand in for "off the beaten path" America. But to my mind that just means you interview odd people. I see no connection between finding odd and colorful people and understanding a place. The video that accompanies his report tells the viewer nothing about the everyday Wisconsin that Emily and I have been discovering.

I came to a similar critique after watching a series of short programs on European cities filmed by Orson Welles.

I obviously like Welles a lot, but these programs (made for television, I believe) were tedious and uninsightful when it came to the cities he was filming (Paris, London, Madrid). His method was exactly that of the Frugal Traveler: show a few local scenes to establish a sense of place, then proceed to find a colorful atypical person to interview. It is a method that clarifies very little about a place.. it just kind of proves that Welles has a knack for finding odd people.