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My father grew up in a family with three other brothers and two sisters. It was also a quite affluent family. My grandfather was a Ford executive of sorts, and, from the way that he talked about it, he was a good one. I remember sitting on the floor next to his couch, and I we would play poker while he would talk about how Ford moved him to the worst parts distribution plant in the nation and how he turned it into the best plant in the nation. In some ways, I envy the era in which he lived, but that's probably just the history minor in me longing to partake in the past, but I'm sure that my fondness for jazz has something to do with it too.

Being an affluent family, they were able to afford an eight-millimetre camera. Like any family that owns a video camera, the camera will be abused to record clips of the children engaged in the most strange behaviour… behaviour that will eventually come back to haunt the children later in life.

Years ago, my father took some of the eight-millimetre reels and made a VHS cassette featuring some scenes from his and his siblings' childhood. One of the charms of old eight-millimetre film is that it doesn't come with sound, so my father recorded some oldies off the radio and incorporated it into the video. The songs that he used still to this day remind me of this video: Paul Simon And Art Garfunkel, The Mamas And The Papas, Herman's Hermits and Smokey Robinson. He also had some of the most phenomenal artists of the era such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and (the most amazing) Van Morrison. However, it also included some of the worst music ever made by artists such as The Beach Boys and Frankie Valli And The Four Seasons.

Families grow. Pretty soon, we'll be adding another member to our family when my brother gets married this summer. For reasons that I don't pretend to understand, girlfriends always have a desire to see the old home movies of the boyfriends when they were young. It is for this reason that my family and any woman that I date are under strict instructions to never show the videos nor attempt to show them to anyone that I become on intimate terms with.

It's also the reason that the video came out the other evening. In the process of determining how we could convert the film from a VHS to a DVD, the idea came to us that it might work better to just start over digitally with a twenty-first century solution.

While it seems exciting to work on something like this, the truth is that I probably won't be to interested in making it all come together. Regardless, it's great to watch these old films for some reason… but I don't know what reason that is.