Long-time readers of Letters to an Unknown Audience might remember Coffee in the Park, a conceptual art piece-cum-community project perpetrated in SF in 2004.

I was taking a stroll around my neighborhood one day when I saw a man in a striped jumpsuit and a bouffant flinging a long orange cord around. "Free coffee in a minute," his companion called out. I made the rendezvous and hung out for a couple of hours. He had strung an extension cord (1250' of it) from his kitchen window, around the corner, across the street, and into the middle of a modest park. He also had a Mr. Coffee machine and two large jugs of water and was ready to brew some coffee for the neighborhood. The video from that day has been newly edited and captures a bit of it.

Before long it was an institution, brewing from about noon to 4:00 every Saturday afternoon. Many people in the neighborhood didn't get it. "Free coffee," one of us would say, and they'd say, "What's this for?"

"It's for coffee," I remember saying, or "It's for you."

One time an older tourist couple came by and chatted for a while. They were so impressed that they went away and came back with a panettone—that's a fancy kind of European bread/cake.

Two Saturdays in a row I spent a couple of hours talking to a soldier who'd fought in Vietnam, Korea, and Bosnia. After Bosnia, he retired.

I also met Andre, the middle-aged novelist who could often be seen walking two beautifully-manicured long-haired dogs (identical except one white one brown) around Alamo Square Park. He told me about the love affair that led him to live in India for ten years before it came apart and he came back to San Francisco and wrote novels.

Marc took a Polaroid of everyone, or nearly everyone, who stopped at coffee in the park, and somewhere he has a huge book of hundreds of people raising a disposal cup of Joe served out by his Mobile Cofee Unit. The residents of the Alamo Square Park neighborhood are poorer now for the absence of Cofee in the Park.

A significant fraction of the people I knew in San Francisco I met through Coffee in the Park. It ran for about half a year, then became more sporadic, then Marc went off on a project called The National Dinner Tour (he made dinner appointments with strangers through a Crate and Barrel catalog).

If you live in the US, you can now see Marc in a series of ads for [CAR MANUFACTURER], showing how he's living out of the car (I knew he was a starving artist, but I never thought it'd come to this) for 7 days.

Except for the real-life branding, this project has the stamp of Marc on it (Marc's always been a big promoter of his own brands, like Sliv and Dulet Enterprises, the company he founded as an art project (which he claims had 17 employees at its peak)).

The spots (which integrate lots of footage of other Marc projects past) feel slightly odd, mostly due to the soundtrack, which makes it seem as though Marc is just having a blast all the time, on a constant buzz, like a 24/7 beer commercial. Marc does know how to have fun, but he's more on the slo-burn, taking life as it comes and making the best of it. He listens well and he understands bad news. The ads make him seem like the kind of guy that would just graze over a bummer and crank up some cheesy music. But that's not the Marc I know.

According to [CAR MANUFACTURER]: "Marc's blog content is not necessarily consistent with [CAR MANUFACTURER]'s views."

So I'd like to take this opportunity to point you at some Marc projects that are not necessarily consistent with those views, such as the TP Tornado (I'd like to try this sometime; anyone have a ceiling fan?) the rental-truck brake-test, Fun with Paper Towels, and the Sacramento Lawn-Sprinkler Documentary Proposal.

I also like the plunger experiment.