If you want to get a sense of television’s monolithic past, watch an episode of the 1950s American family show Leave it to Beaver. Gleaming white, pristine—it looks like it was carved out of marble—the show exemplified an ideal of a suburban middle-class family. Just about as opposite to The Real Housewives of New Jersey as you can get.

“Andy Kaufman: ‘I Trusted You’”: Andy Kaufman was my mom's friend when she was a little girl in Great Neck, Long Island, so I've always been aware of his work, and this is by far my favorite clip of him.

This first post is an introduction both to me and to some of the things I’d like to talk about while blogging for the Take. I’m a composer, but in a slightly looser sense of the word than you might expect. I write string quartets, but I also perform onstage as a live visualist and musician, make feature-length cinematic work, public art installations, interactive Web sites, and design performance works for ensembles of people with laptop computers.

I didn’t go to film school. Instead I went to liberal arts school and self-imposed a curriculum of creating tiny flawed video sketches, brief meditations on comic conundrums, and slapping them on the Internet. Messages in a bottle—maybe some like-minded individuals would respond and leave a comment that said, "You're just like Sarah Silverman," because that's mostly what people say to females peddling funny. Maybe potential employers would Google me and then deny me secretarial positions upon graduation.

In 1995, along with many people all around the globe, I was making my first Web page, for an experimental film club in Moscow. I still remember confusion about the new medium. Was it here to replace everything that was before, or was it just a temporary phenomenon to give way to something else next Christmas? Whatever the future would hold, one thing was absolutely clear: in a couple of more weeks, maximum a month, when the next browser version was released and the connection got a bit faster, with some more memory in the computer, it would be possible to watch films online.