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

I’d never torn out a page of a Green Apple notebook before this trip, but if you come across two volumes in my archives missing pages, know that they are neither notes on an assassination nor the map to the holy grail, but leaves burned in service of a fire at Kalaloch, WA, the evening of 8 June 2008, cabin #15 overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I wondered briefly what ideas and sketches were supposed to fill those pages, now given to burn. In a way, I’d burned a lot of good ideas and better judgment to arrive at that cabin that night. Before I left for Portland, she told me that if I lived in LA, things might have been different. Of course.

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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.

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No sooner after I finished repaying my undergraduate student loans did I receive the thick envelope from Georgetown—I’ll be starting work on my M.A. in Communications, Culture, and Technology in August.
Now the real debt servicing begins.

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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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Shing says there’s a special place in hell for people who shop for Christmas gifts exclusively at airports, but I’ve found airports are where I’ve received the most intense, truly full-bodied hugs. The ability to embrace someone as at an airport outside of the airport setting is not unlike the ability to cook authentic ethnic cuisine outside of its home country. On my visits to California, it seems every hug is an airport hug.

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As the Broadway stagehand strike closed and I rushed the box office for a ticket to “Cyrano de Bergerac” last weekend (and will do the same for “Rock ‘n’ Roll” before too long), I was reminded—as I was more consistently my last weekend in California than even I have recently allowed my introspection to persist—the extent to which my life is a bento box.

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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.

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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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