Photo taken with my built in iSight camera on my MacBook. Getting the built-in iSight was a big reason for getting the computer--I just hope I can find less gratuitous uses that this one.

My wife also has a MacBook with iSight, and we did some video chatting recently while she was in Chicago. That was pretty cool, and much easier with much higher quality than the few webchats I have participated in over the last 10 years. Video phones seemed so futuristic when I was a kid, but my son (the goofy one in the photo), even realized as he was video chatting that he would likely be video chatting with us the rest of his life (if and when he leaves home).

Neil Cohen, visual linguist, reviews Making Comics by Scott McCloud. Neil does a nice job of making some distinctions between his approach to the visual and McCloud's approach, and I can't help but think that an email exchange I had with Neil influenced this review a bit.

A review of a book about Dada and modern art.

The works cited include a book about collage.

I had the good fortune to see the Andre Kertesz "On Reading" exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago just before the exhibition closed.

I heard about the Democracy Player today on Future Tense. Watch TV on the Web, make TV for the Web.

Walker Evans and James Agee collaborated on a book in the late 1930s that became famous in the early 1960s, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Interesting contrast with Lauren Greenberg's Girl Culture.

Some more on Evans and Agee.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
http://www.ralphmag.org/AU/famous-men.html
A review of the Agee/Evans book.

Notes on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~hans320/class/lunpfm/
A brief overview of the history of and reaction to the book. Includes quotes from Agee himself.

Hanover Historical Review—Volume 1
http://history.hanover.edu/hhr/hhrvol1.html
This 1993 volume of the HHR features four essays relating to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

An interview with Scott McCloud:
http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=7541