On my recent tour of the old Carnegie library, the tour ended with a movie, filmed in 1971, of a typical day at the Duluth Public Library. Here we saw people going through their ordinary day: checking books in and out, cataloging new books, fixing old books, and doing the general tasks involved in running a library.

It was amazing. (I mean, it was amazing even in addition to all the hot library ladies -- and there were many.) Here are all these people doing what they do every day, and it is unfathomably different from anything anyone does today. Punch cards, mimeographs, archaic filing systems, teletype ... it's weird to imagine what life was like before there was 200 microprocessors in every home.

But I do vividly remember life before the Web. It kind of sucked. Still, the things we used in our daily lives back then were facsinating and pretty. Not nearly as fascinating and pretty as a Powerbook, but damn fine nonetheless. Plus, their scarcity these days boosts their aesthetic value.

Anyway, I have this idea to start making mundane movies about mundane things. And while they wouldn't be very interesting at all now, they might be interesting in the future. I remember getting my first library card. It was white, with my name typed on a sticker on the front of it with a typewriter. My card number was raised in the plastic, like on a credit card. When I checked out books, the library tech would place it in a machine just like the old credit-card machines (ker-chunk) that made a copy of the number by pressing the raised numbers against carbon paper. But when the lady behind the counter gave me the card, she also placed a barcode sticker on the back, explaining that soon the library would be switching to a system that used "zebra stripes."

I had that library card until I was about 20, when they took it away from me and made me get a newfangled one.

I need to make movies.

Any leads?