Studies of Matthew T. Marco

At some point since the last time I dispatched postcards, the international rate increased from 90¢ to 98¢. Friends outside the United States to whom I’d written: please accept my apology if it seems you were left off my list since my last adventure more than a year past. Here’s the gist of what I wrote.

At the Museum of Printing History

Houston was unseasonably cold (freezing temperatures at night), expectedly flat, and while hardly the most glamorous place to resume my travelling ways, it is not without its charms. Unknown to every published guide to America’s fourth-largest city: the best Singaporean-Chinese food in Texas is served in a house at the end of a cul-de-sac in exurban Katy.

(More postcards soon, stay warm in the meantime. ~Matthew)

On Thursday as frontloaders and earth-movers shoved street-covering ice blankets into eight-foot piles we weren’t sure if we’d make the trip. FlightStats had our flight leaving on-time and Continental had allowed us to check in, but surely the airport is a special brand of madness, right?

Christina treated me to a pre-flight beer and we departed on time. I downed New Liberal Arts while Christina made headway in her homework despite being chatted up by the Marine in the window seat. Headwinds put us back 20 minutes. It was raining when we landed.

The Museum of Printing History was on our itinerary for Friday: it is to the Newseum what the National Cryptologic Museum is to the International Spy Museum: a droll but substantial approach to a field whose technology has been romanticized and, in the last decade, antiquated. And in each case, the former is free while the latter runs upwards of a dozen dollars a head. Exhibits rotate – one we saw was “QWERTY: A Typewriter Retrospective” (exactly the kind of exhibit for which I go head-over-heels). I’d like to take a class there, any class at all.

I’ll return for the Rothko Chapel – better with whatever sun trickles through the muted horn of a skylight than the electric spotlights installed within, Installations for the Belgian/Dutch/German industrial-age fantasia, and a proper Cuban taco with fucking plantains on it, having learned to check before we leave the El Rey drive-thru.

And I will return. Her folks invited me to after all.

Forthcoming concerts: tUnE-yArDs (opening for Xiu Xiu) and Yeasayer in April. I have two tickets for The National at D.A.R. in June I’m planning to hawk; as it happens, that Sunday is when I’ll be leaving Rome.

In the meantime, we’ll be in New York this weekend, where forecast highs and lows are multiples of 14. I want to visit the Guggenheim for Tino Seghal and “Contemplating the Void,” MoMA for Gabriel Orozco and (yes) Tim Burton, and a healthy dinner Saturday night that costs no more than $30 per person, preferably in the Upper East Side.