New lens.
by Matthew T. Marco on May 27, 2008
Back from a second whirlwind weekend in New York in as many weeks, and there’s a veritable goon squad of deadlines bearing down in the next eleven hours before I leave for Port-au-Prince. Nevertheless, I have a new camera for the trip—93/75 with thundershowers, 6-megapixel sensor and 18-55mm Nikkor kit lens, and the general feeling that when I return Friday, I’ll be seeing the world in a totally different light.
Carbon copies.
by Matthew T. Marco on May 15, 2008
Some people want to be dressed their best, laid in silk-lined boxes, covered in dirt, topped with stone. Some want to be frozen, preserved, to see a future that will reanimate the dead. Some want to be incinerated, returned to dust and inertness.
I think this is for me: Pencils made from the carbon of human cremains. 240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash – a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind.
—Carbon Copies by Nadine Jarvis (via The World’s Best Ever)
If you plan to outlive me, please do me this solid. Thank you.
On the crescent.
by Matthew T. Marco on April 28, 2008
From my hotel room, Friday at dusk.
The most disarming thing to hear after ordering a mojito may be the five-word question for here or to go?
I’m back from An Event Apart New Orleans and after a good night’s sleep, much like Chicago before it, I am not only prepared to be a better web designer but inspired to be a better person. It’s time to move on from this is something worth thinking about to this is how to improve the world.
Homewrecking.
by Matthew T. Marco on April 10, 2008
Mark Shepard: I recently spent the afternoon in a garden at my favorite watering hole in Brooklyn and sat next to a couple who were chatting. The guy was constantly shifting his attention between his conversation partner and his new iPhone. Now it’s common when talking to someone to glance away periodically at other people or things happening around you (I would suggest this is a fundamental attraction of urban environments), but what’s different here is that Mr. iPhone’s attention is constantly shifting between virtual and actual modes of presence. To me, the interesting questions are: What happens when the virtual and the actual are not understood in terms of a strict dichotomy but rather a continuity or a gradient? How might we design for scenarios like this?
Adam Greenfield: I think of what’s happening in this scenario (and I agree, this is an almost paradigmatic case) as a wholesale redefinition of adjacency.
—Situated Technologies Pamphlet 1: Urban Computing and Its Discontents.
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.
And this is incidental music from that visit, that winter, the strangely progressive KROQ playlist as the sun rose over the 110 sound barrier just south of downtown on an early Saturday morning, the iPods of Murky Coffee baristas, tributes to Oscar Peterson, album cuts from second-hand finds at Lovell’s. It’s another chapter in my pop-music autobiography for download (and eventual plastic distribution), 18 songs over nearly 80 minutes, called (yeah seriously) Homewrecking.
My history aside (or probably integral), this isn’t so much about cuckolding as much as it is about a botched divorce from an entire status quo that’s willfully hurtful to the people who necessarily inhabit it. For as much as I fantasize of a life free from coding and production, the limits of my suburban upbringing, and geographic monogamy, there’s sense in sticking it out, building up savings, vesting in the retirement system, and earning my masters. And while it wouldn’t kill me to buck up in the meantime, I (more often than I’m comfortable) think I might regret this course of action in my financially stable but dreary future.
This unwillingness to make a definitive break, to recognize baggage as baggage, seems at odds with my personal crusade of reduction like an aerodynamic glider strapped to a bus. And it’s this imbalance of desiring, between that actual past of concentrated frivolity and the virtuality of distributed but stimulating relationships, a byproduct of that vacation, that’s been the motivating asymmetry of the past few months. That I find the affect-less timbre of Google Talk and Scrabulous conversations with old friends and distant acquaintances often more engaging than diurnal millennials in declining orbit seems a sign that the drudgery and dissipation of my days are just an indefinite prolonging of an even more vacuous existence.
I have this recurring dream where a close friend (likely one of you) and I find ourselves in a smallish, glamour-less room, low ceilinged and its floor dedicated mostly to a swimming pool, the walkable area of the space only a smooth but unpolished concrete border a couple feet wide. Oh, and the pool is filled with oranges instead of water.
I decide that the two of us should try to find the bottom of the pool, and you agree. Sometimes I dive in first and sometimes you do, and I wait at the surface for just a few moments.
“No luck. Your turn,” you say as you surface, and I dive in. I dig through oranges and more oranges and after a while they are colorless pebbled orbs, and soon after I can no longer sense the fragrance of oranges and dust. I wonder if you’re still at the surface, if you’ve left me here to dig through, if you could hear me if I called your name. And though I can still breathe and burrow, I push down oranges to pull myself to the surface and you’re still there. “No luck. Your turn,” I say and so you dive in again and I wonder this time if I’ll be able to hear your call for help, if you know to navigate by scent as well once you can’t sense light or sound or even touch, but then it all smells like oranges and dust. I wonder if you know which way is down. I pace the step-and-a-half between the wall and the pool’s edge, sometimes a few steps laterally, but always returning to the same position I stood so that when you return to the surface you won’t be disoriented. And this dive is longer than the first but you’re back. “No luck,” you say with bright diligence and so I dive in again, longer than the first time and deeper than the first time and so too the stream of thoughts of whether you’ve left the room or whether you’re bored or healthy or cursing me for drawing us into this task. First light then touch then sound then scent. I surface.
No luck. Your turn. It continues, each turn longer than the last. No luck, I’ve got nothing, no dice, keep digging. Your turn. It keeps going and it’s just oranges and oranges and oranges and dust. No luck, your turn. Pacing. No luck, your turn. Oranges and dust. And so on and never to the bottom of the pool. And then I wake up.
Some friends have tried to ascribe meaning to it, to re-draw the setting, but it’s resistant to change. It escalated in frequency in February and March, to the point where the imagined feeling of a pebbled rind of citrus fruit anywhere was enough to unsettle me, to provoke an involuntary twitch or grunt. Still, it never pitches me immediately into consciousness like a nightmare. Perhaps that’s the point.
Debt.
by Matthew T. Marco on April 3, 2008
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.
Dead.
by Matthew T. Marco on March 28, 2008
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”.
Some things work, some things don’t.
by Matthew T. Marco on February 25, 2008
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 two of those; PC hardware troubleshooting is a third cause of stress, compounded by the occasionally attendant data obliteration. Through January and February, the former have been the subjects of too many conversations over the past couple months, and as I have calmed to the temperament necessary to produce prose, November’s on-board SATA controller went AWOL and took an extraordinary digital music collection as collateral damage.
I’m at war with acronyms.
I took the occasion of Shing’s visit to see the Natural History Museum and Folger Shakespeare Library (Macbeth—with magic by Teller—looks interesting) and inject some culture in her life, as well as five pounds of chicken adobo, French toast, bacon, shots and pickles, and tea. We shared a beer and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos at the edge of the ice rink in the National Gallery Sculpture Garden. At the Jefferson Memorial, she disparaged the lighting squares; I noted the consistently mis-kerned Os.
The state of California is back in full force, giving a majority of its delegates in the Democratic primary to Senator Clinton and demanding a few hundred dollars from me in alleged back taxes—my usual snark is useless here.
I’m considering the contents of my go bag.
Recent expenditures are running higher than I’d hoped, largely due to home improvement expenses: I ordered a daybed, had a few prints professionally framed, and am still in a painting mood (though not necessarily a sanding-and-taping mood). I’ve taken receipt of my bicycle, severely in need of a tune up, and am working on lighting my living room. Over the weekend, I sanded and stained the baseboard CD shelves I cut from tongue-in-groove flooring last month.
And whither my visit to Cuba? The only itinerary certain so far is New Orleans in April for An Event Apart (AEA), though I haven’t set booked a flight. A five-day in Portland and Seattle (possibly Vancouver as well) this June is still in exploratory stages. I have my lawn tickets for Radiohead at Nissan Pavilion 11 May, but I’m considering hustling those for a Saturday pass to All Points West (APW) in August. Pretty good chance I’ll be in New York this weekend too.
My graduate school applications are done, and for that, I entered my undergraduate transcripts into a spreadsheet line-by-line, calculated the fluctuations in my cumulative grade-point average quarter-to-quarter. I relived every class I took at typing speed—I’m sorry I was such an asshole Fall 2002. Six years ago, I wish someone had pulled me aside and said something like this:
That’s the difference. Between caring and judging. That’s it.
Slow process.
by Matthew T. Marco on January 16, 2008
After discovering tongue-in-groove flooring and having Dave bring his circular saw to my apartment, I now have the beginnings of the baseboard compact disc storage I sketched. It’s neither stained nor bracketed yet, but even as a freestanding configuration of jewel cases and unfinished pine, it’s a marvel of efficiency.
The more enlightening consequence of assembling the furniture was not the realization of how well I’d exploited the ill-used volume bordered by my living room floor and kitchen wall, but rather the fact that I own a copy of Blinking Lights and Other Revelations by the Eels. Hardly remarkable given I’m a dedicated fan, but I bought the CD in Montreal in September. Not only have I been living in this apartment for seven months with a disorganized collection of 300-odd CDs, but it’s disorganized to the point that an album four months in my possession has only now surfaced.
Incidentally, I’m rather enjoying the music. Well, to the extent that one enjoys the music of the Eels, I suppose.