A Life Well Lived

This student of mine's final project seemed particularly relevant today as I was commemorating the life of my friend and former colleague Liz Wiatr, whose Internet guest book hardly reflects her scholarly work examining the visual education movement of the early twentieth century with the aid of classroom technologies such as stereoscopes and magic lanterns as instructional aids or her efforts as a filmmaker creating works such as her homage to the city of Los Angeles in her Cal Arts film about Chapbook of the Non-Eminent. Friends and colleagues had forwarded e-mails to me from Liz in a strange process of reconstituting Internet traces.

At her wake today, there was a Mac laptop set up with a slideshow of photographs from her life, much as is also often seen at the milestone birthday parties of Angeleno digerati, but the mourning was also marked by many analog processes: speeches, rock 'n' roll jams, and -- of course -- eating.