The Work of Matthew T. Marco and the Spazowham Design Group

This is required viewing for anybody who confuses sporting a lapel pin for true patriotism. I question and doubt my government because I want it to be better, because its impact on the world is undeniable. All those baseball games where people stood respectfully and listened to a celebrity of dubious talent sing the national anthem were just practice for this moment. Eddie Izzard said about the American national anthem: “70% of what people react to is the look, you know, it’s how you look; and 20% is about how you sound; and only 10% is what you say.” But that crowd on St. Mark’s Place knew and believed 100% of what they were saying. The awkward pause before ‘banner,’ where the crowd collectively catches its breath to belt out the last three words of that phrase, gives me chills.

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Philippe Starck’s retirement announcement via AFP, via Kottke from Die Zeit. It ends: Starck said the only objects that he still felt attached to were “a pillow perhaps and a good mattress.” But the thing one needs most, he added, was the “ability to love”.

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There are very few things that sour my tone to a shade of violent: talking to my mother about money and anybody about the lack of support for a LAMP infrastructure at HIR are the two of those; PC hardware troubleshooting is a third cause of stress, compounded by the data obliteration.

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If If Charlie Parker was a gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of dead copycats and this article on the Leica M8 in the New Yorker are, respectively, film’s wake and eulogy, this article (and the paper it references, Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing) are why we should be mourning.

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My project starts on page 242, and yes, I’m aware of the (at least one) typo in my contribution and the first thing I’ll do when I return home tonight is check the proofs and either drink in self-loathing or quiet celebration. Nevertheless, it’s a beautiful tome, 631 perfect-bound pages, and I’m honored to have contributed six of them.

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Had I visited Montréal when I was 19, buying too much second-hand music, attuned to markers of soi-disant hipness through vodka hazes, and leading a life of dissipation, dressed in dubious vintage, it would’ve been the place I would’ve liked to grow old. It strikes me as a stubbornly unique place, the one city in all of North America that acknowledges its European colonial heritage as integral to its identity — Vieux-Port cobblestones, haute cuisine, and all things vintage — under a Francophone umbrella.

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If there is a climax to Manufactured Landscapes, it is the moment when Edward Burtynsky, the photographer and the ostensible subject of the documentary, explains (however weakly) his reasons for not politicizing his photography. Visual information, pure, noble, and free of bias—I felt the audience around me leap into a hushed rebuke.

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I learned today about Peter Schweizer’s editorial in USA Today about Al Gore not using renewable energy sources to power his own home even though they’re available in the metropolitan markets where he resides, Washington, DC among them. To which my first thought was not oh, the hypocrisy, but, why the hell am I not using renewable energy sources to power my own home?

So in ten days, I will be—though not without some effort.

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