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.

Continue reading

Hardly five days back from Port-au-Prince and I’m moving the one-quart plastic bag of liquids and aerosols from my rolling suitcase to my duffle bag and filling the rest of the space with clothes appropriate to the current Portland weather—a mild peak of 57 from a low of 52, intermittent rain. And when I return on Wednesday, I’ll have a mere 36 hours before I receive Eric for a two-week stay.

And this seems to be the prevailing pattern for 2008: travel somewhere new, host an old friend.

Continue reading

While my visits to California aren’t rare, my two-week stay last winter has been the longest since I moved away, enough time to expand my itinerary beyond family and close friends to not only to visit with past acquaintances but, with some, to also superimpose physical, spatial relationships over evolving virtual relationships, adding dimensions of tone and motion to the plain text of emails. Enough time to not only gorge myself on the late-night fast food of my inner fat kid but to also pilgrimage to the Salk Institute, to deliver red velvet cake to the ailing, to dance at Harvelle’s on a Sunday night. To not only retrace a Los Angeles past but to discover the Los Angeles present.

Continue reading » 1 Comment

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.

Continue reading

Upon describing my apartment to my mother during a phone conversation (rather recently, already months after I’d moved in), annotating from my punch list—paint, halogen, cabinet hardware, and so on—she succinctly restated my bloviating with the phrase, “you’re living in a before.” One of the constants in my life is asymmetry, and I find myself applying this imbalance I once disdained as a lens of optimism to separate the apex of my existence from, more or less where I am now, its midpoint, with an ambition to set a median greater than the mean. What that ambition comprises, however, I have yet to cohere into a uniform and quantifiable after.

Continue reading

I had tried, or I should say, I am still trying and writing and researching and conversing and attempting to construct a narrative that somehow casts the activities of my European vacations and the months between as myth and metaphor, a microcosm of the improvisational information architecture, anomalies of sociology, and decline of western civilization in the first decade of the 21st century. Given the pretentious mess that promises to be, this chapter of my pop-music autobiography may be the closest thing to a straight narrative of my week’s sojourn in Brussels and Paris, 11-19 November 2006, I might extract from that unwieldy text.

Continue reading

I’ve been trying to quantify what it means to be older, to understand the process by which one adapts the tropes of the aged. I wonder if an elder conscience is one that no longer adjudicates between what is right and what is wrong but between what can be forgiven and what can not be forgiven, if wisdom is the knowledge of how much injustice one can inflict and withstand and experience the consequence of inflicting and withstanding injustice. It is a fact of our physiology that we become more attuned to bitterness and less attracted to sweetness as we age, but in what science is the bond forged between idealism (or wonderment or creativity or innocence) and saccharinity? Is cynicism the olive of attitude, that briny defense mechanism we only grow to appreciate once we can suck it out of the bottom of a cocktail glass emptied of gin?

Continue reading

A year ago, I wrote in a short story heavily influenced by experience about the symbolism of a shared umbrella—in every case of its existence, it has been a witness to a basic humanitarian act—a routine compassionate sacrifice—its beneficiaries shoulder to shoulder, perhaps cheek to cheek, in the barest of shelters from harsh attacks from above (’above’ in its most general and immediate sense). Its occupants share a mutual interest in warmth and dryness, and though they can neither be warm nor dry, the empathy is perhaps more satisfying.

Continue reading