For some reason Dylan needed a one page commentary written about her by a parent for an English assignment. Of course she doesn’t say anything about this until the night before it’s due. So it’s not only a homework assignment, it’s a last minute homework assignment (nice flashback to high school). It feels like it fits in on this blog so I thought I’d post it.

Dylan and writing. I’m not really sure what I can say about Dylan and writing. My sense is that she’s a good writer. She’s always loved to read and talk about art and ideas. She’s articulate and thoughtful. When it matters to her, she’s a perfectionist. And when she cares, she can be very serious.

When she was four she was very serious about staging her own version of the Wizard of Oz. She was going to put it on at the Jump-Start theater where I’m a member of the company. She rehearsed along with the movie almost every day for a while. She even tried to organize rehearsals with the other kids at Montessori school but they wouldn’t cooperate. She complained that they, “weren’t serious enough.”

When she was 10, I helped her set up a blog. She posted things regularly for the better part of a year. I loved reading it – the stories about school and her obsession with J-Rock. Later, when I took up videoblogging so did Dylan. She was great at it. In fact, for a short time in the pre-YouTube world, she was Internet famous.

I’ve always loved that we’ve been able to share these little things. Last week for my birthday my family gave me 2 tickets to see the Flaming Lips in concert. Of course Dylan will go with me. We’ve always listened to many of the same bands (except for the time she was really into the Backstreet Boys). But something changed towards the end of middle school.

About the time she gave up videoblogging, Dylan also stopped sharing things she created with me. We still enjoy things like watching films together and talking about them but I never get to see the things she makes anymore. Photos, drawings and things that she writes – even simple essays for school – I get only brief glimpses if I’m lucky. The one exception was about a year ago when she forgot to erase some writing assignment from the flash drive she borrowed from me. A week or two later when I put it my computer I found a few precious documents. Here’s a bit from one that made me laugh out loud.

“I am not white!
Babe. You’re white.
But, but, I’m Italian! And I have some Mexican-
You’re white. Come on, you listen to The Shins, you have laptops upstairs and downstairs.
I do live on the Northeast side of town…
Yeah, and in a gated community. And you’re a vegetarian!
Well shit.”

It’s funny, it’s real, it’s self-aware and it makes an insightful observation about the interrelation between race and culture. So my sense is that Dylan is a great writer. I just wish we could share this like we used to.

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“See at 90, you have no limit.”

Rebecca’s grandfather turned 90 a couple of weeks ago. I’m hoping to follow in his footsteps.

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I don’t have much to say about this one – at least not yet. It’s been a rough couple of weeks over here.

Technical note: This was all shot on my iPhone. The music is by Moby – “Division” and “Shot In The Back Of The Head.”

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I hope that one day, I’ll be as good as these girls.

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My daughters are over this videoblogging fad.

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Basically this is just me testing out my new Canon HV20 camera while Dylan is acting silly. Jay wants me to remind you all that this is supposed to be silent and that there is nothing wrong with your computer.

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I can’t get Dylan to make videoblogs anymore but I can occasionally get her to talk to me on video. A little more than two year ago she got Internet famous talking about getting braces. Now they’re off and she’s grown up a bunch. I think she looks like a model.

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People always ask me why we never see my wife Rebecca on my videoblog. I always say that she shows up here briefly on occasion but that she not really into being on video – especially when it’s on the Internet. Well just for you, I got her on video the other day when we were driving up to Austin to see The Shins.

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This a follow-up to what happened with Dylan last week.

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Today I was going through some old files and found this “videoblog” from the summer of 2001. It never actually got posted in a blog post but it was linked on the sidebar of my blog back then. What really suprised me about it was the “spirit” of the piece. It’s very videoblogging.

How this video ended up to be was that I was playing another game with myself to help me make more work. This game consisted of carrying my video camera with me everywhere. In this case it was to lunch at Taco Haven (before they remolded it). That game didn’t last too long because my Sony Digital 8, circa 1999 is too damn big to carry all the time.

So what do you think, those of you who didn’t like Richard BF’s take on what a videoblog is? Does this video now magically become a videoblog because it’s video in a blog or has it been a videoblog all along?