WISDOM: A PORTRAIT SERIES
M A T T I M A R A N D A
GUITARIST + BUSKER
NEW YORK CITY
Photograph by Isaac Rosenthal
I. The past year personally, it was spent in Chicago at my parents' place. I didn't have much of a social life due to the fact that most of my friends moved kind of far away or were just busy with their wife and kids. I don't even have a girlfriend.
II. Professionally, I was a food runner at a sports bar that specialized in mainly chicken dishes. Imagine a vegan (me) working serving chicken all day or night. It sounds messed up to some, but I needed a job and that was the only place that hired me.
III. The challenges I have faced in life? There are so damn many: trying to find a job I can tolerate, trying to keep working as hard as I can for what I want, skateboarding was and still is the biggest challenge for me because if you're careless, you just end up getting hurt. Life takes a lot of focus doing the things you love.
IV. The concept of wisdom: wisdom is simple: you learn from your mistakes and other people's mistakes. If something didn't work right before, why should it work now? I think it also involves being creative and just messing around and experimenting with things. When I play music, I constantly change the settings on my effect pedals to see how they interact with each other. I've learned by just trying new things with the pedals.
V. Always carry a spare pair of socks, shirt, deodorant, toothbrush/paste, condoms, tampons if you're a female, napkins and a water bottle everywhere you go. Trust me, they come in handy.
VI. I encourage taking a journey to anywhere you've never been. Road trips are the best. When my friends and I were still in our teens, we drove through Indiana, Kentucky, we went to Nashville, just all around. We stayed in a house that was under construction so we bathed in the Louisville fountain, washed our clothes in there, it was the funniest thing ever. I'd love to do something like that again.
TM
