The Home Movie

Remember home movies, which were silent, short clips that cost money to develop so you were careful what you shot?

In today's New York Times op-ed, Frank Rich writes about the above home movie, Disneyland Dream, by amateur filmmaker Robbins Barstow about his family winning a trip to Disneyland. In 2008, it was enshrined in the National Film Registry alongside many films including The Terminator and the terrific Elia Kazan/Budd Schulberg satire A Face in the Crowd.

Rich was waxing elegiac about a bygone hopefulness in middle-class America, but for me the primitive technology is as much a part of what's been left behind.

"Hello, I'm John"

Simon and.....

A lot of people are down on the Internet these days, for many good reasons. (Myself included, in this space.)

I have weaned myself from online Scrabble, at least, but when I see my 13-year-old daughter enmeshed in building her new Facebook page, in my head I start to hear the song "Cat's in the Cradle."

Tonight, however, after a long workweek, I came home to one of those wonderful free-association web experiences that led me to an amazing video, which, while hardly obscure -- it's closing in on a million views -- I had never seen before.

And which, more than all the produced tributes to John Lennon around the occasion of his birthday a few weeks ago, bracingly reminded me of the one-of-a-kind way he wore his icon-hood, like a shaggy bathrobe.