I had a disconcerting moment at the video store. I asked the clerk for a specific movie, and when she returned, she handed me the strangest thing. It was a black, rectangular object ? a plastic case that held two reels of brown ribbon. Apparently, the object is meant to be inserted into a video playback device, which runs the brown ribbon across a spinning drum, and the magnetic patterns encoded on the ribbon produce a moving image. It was all so frighteningly primitive.

I asked her if I needed a grammophone for the audio portion of the recording, but I suppose it was slightly more advanced than that.