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6.30.2004 posted by William 21:10 link |
Like I mentioned once before, when I eat meals at home I turn on the boob tube since it sits on a shelf right in front of the table and keeps me company. Dinnertime often coincides with the Simpsons/Seinfeld bloc on Fox, so that's what I watch, but other times, like last night, I don't get home or whatever until later, and generally this means I watch Thirteen because-- call me a snob if you want-- I can't stand anything else on network TV (no cable here). So I was fortunate enough to catch most of Bill's Run, a documentary about a rural Kansas farmer named Bill Kassebaum running in the Republican primary for a shot at the state Senate, created and filmed by his brother Richard.
The film focussed on the issue of rural flight that plagues Midwest and Great Plains states, whereby young people leave because of the lack of opportunities, and communities grow older and older and eventually evaporate. Bill runs against the very conservative speaker of the Kansas Senate as a moderate Republican who dares commit heresy by proposing the radical notion that the funding of schools and other government services may actually cause people to choose to stay and raise families in Kansas. He is, to put it mildly, an underdog. I'm sure Thirteen will air Bill's Run again if you want to see it; it earns my recommendation and it's only an hour long. What was really cool was checking washingtonpost.com to catch up on the news before I went to sleep last night and seeing that the filmmaker, Richard Kassebaum, would be online today to take questions in a live chat. The Post does a half-dozen or so of these chats everyday. Some feature the paper's own columnists and reporters, and others are with politicians, artists, or whomever else is in the news. I was up to my ears in work today so I didn't have a chance to ask a question, and I wouldn't say any of the questions that were asked were amazingly insightful, but I love how the access is available. That's the kind of content I want to see: interaction, taking advantage of the two communication, biggest difference between the net and other media. |