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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After the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, I became acutely aware of how voter fraud and suppression are perpetrated and how the simple process of tallying a majority can get so damn complicated. I don’t doubt that it happened again yesterday, that there were places where voters were intimidated, places where good citizens were confused for felons, places where the vote just didn’t work. And I don’t doubt that it will happen again. I fear this is just an inherent assumption of the millennial voter.

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While composing a shot of pigeons chilling on an I-beam during lunch at the marina, someone behind me chucked a french fry on the barge. Madness ensued.

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I didn’t really mean to take this picture. I was on the plane at O’Hare browsing through shots from my trip to the Pacific Northwest, and I wanted to start again at the most recent shot and didn’t feel like scrolling through more than 300 pictures to get there. The easiest way to get there was to shoot a new picture, put it back into playback mode, and browse from there. So I held my lens against the window and shot this.

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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.

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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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When I was first in Chicago, I was five years old, between a bus from Toronto and a train to Los Angeles—though not my official point of entry into the United States, it has defied its own insignificance—a mere fingerprint on The Bean, if you will—and, with Burger King French toast sticks, become an integral part of this immigrant’s narrative. My memory allows little more than that I was there, but this time, two days in the august company of squared-shoed and trapezoid-spectacled enemies of my enemies, I know to take pictures, to take notes.

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What, I exclaimed. The British girl in the white sundress walking ahead of me turned around at my response and commented, ‘That is the most random thing I’ve ever seen.’

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