LenEdgerly.com

I've started my day with a blast from the past, a clip of the Beatles singing "I Saw Her Standing There" in concert. What a kick, especially the shots of the audience, including one girl juggling her binoculars with her clunky eyeglasses, getting bumped on the arm by a frantic fan beside her. I found this on Terry Teachout's excellent blog, About Last Night. He's a drama critic for Wall Street Journal and mixes perceptive comments about the arts with personal asides, like what a fancy drama critic watches when he's in bed with a cold. And the answer is: Dumbo and Twelve O'Clock High.

My friend Kes Woodward recently turned me onto a new videoblog habit, ZeFrank, who ends each piece with "I'm ZeFrank, thinking so you don't have to." I particularly like this episode, which includes an adorable "power move" by one of his younger fans, and this one, a savvy riff on how the availability of inexpensive creative tools like iMovie is revolutionizing rules of good taste. "Ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool," Ze says. And speaking of taste, some will find ZeFrank's language quite lacking in it, so viewer beware.

Sir Paul says that the original lyrics of the Beatles song opened with, "Well, she was just seventeen / never been a beauty queen," but John Lennon insisted on changing it to "Well, she was just seventeen / you know what I mean." So was she ugly? No way. Every time I've heard that song in the last 40 years or so, I've pictured her as perfection and felt happy inside.

It's nice to be back in the blogging biz, following my nose around the internet, cutting and pasting links, experimenting and learning, starting my day by making something new.

Monday, August 28, 2006