Posted on 2012-04-10 · 1 min read ·
When your birthday brings the world under your window
And the song-thrush sings wet-throated in the dew
And aconite and primrose are unsticking the wrappers
Of the package that has come today for you
Posted on 2012-04-09 · 5 min read · Books · Sam Selvon · Fiction · Twelve · Nineteen
The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon was written in 1956 and tells of the experiences of West Indian men moving to London for work. It has been described as the definitive novel about the experiences of the Windrush settlers. The narrative centres on a man named Moses who was one of the first to come to London and finds himself the first port of call for many subsequent immigrants:
Posted on 2012-04-03 · 3 min read · Ideas · Blogging · Internet · Economics · Twelve
I pay to have this blog up and running. That is, I pay for the space where it is stored and I pay for the name. I have to look after all the files and plug-ins, I have to perform all the updates and optimise the database tables. All this is great fun but wouldn’t it be cheaper to slap the mattischro.me address onto a hosted WordPress.com account?
Posted on 2012-03-31 · 13 min read · Album Digest · March · Music · Fanfarlo · The Shins · Grails · New Build · Scuba · Twelve
Five albums for Album Digest March 2012
Posted on 2012-03-21 · 4 min read · Understated Classics · Howard Budd · Brian Eno · Music · Twelve · Electronic
Posted on 2012-02-28 · 8 min read · Music · Album Digest · February · Burial · John Talabot · Lilacs and Champagne · The 2 Bears · Twelve
One EP and three albums for Album Digest February 2012:
Posted on 2012-02-09 · 2 min read · Books · Reading Projects · J. G. Ballard · Twelve · Update
Ages ago I set out to write a post for each of JG Ballard’s novels. In fact it is the oldest post on this blog. Most of the novels (I don’t have the two autobiographical novels Empire Of The Sun or The Kindness Of Women and the late period novel Milennium People) are sat in a row on top of my broken bookshelf, part of the weight there that bowed outer frame of the unit and made the inner shelves collapse. Had I known that it would be a task unfinished nearly eighteen months later and destroy a piece a furniture that I did not yet own, I may have been less ambitious.
Posted on 2012-01-31 · 8 min read · Album Digest · January · Music · FOE · Leila · Diagrams · Pyramids · Horseback · Fabric · Pinch · Twelve
Five albums to see in the new year:
Posted on 2012-01-23 · 8 min read · Understated Classics · Bjork · Music · Electronic · Pop · Twelve
I got into Début via a cassette from the library, much like I did with Together Alone by Crowded House. I suppose it is less obscure than many of my choices for this strand but I do think that Post is more well-known (because of It’s Oh So Quiet, which we shall mention here only briefly) and that Homogenic is probably more popular among her fans.
Posted on 2012-01-13 · 4 min read · Ideas · Modelling · Short Story · Twelve
Once upon a time there was a man who loved to paint. He studied the art and craft of painting for many years. He chose to invest his time and energy into creating the most realistic portraits that he could paint. For him the joy came not from completing the paintings but the process of recreating the real world with the strokes of his brush.
Posted on 2012-01-05 · 2 min read · Films · Documentary · London · Self Improvement · Twelve
Dreams Of A Life is a documentary about Joyce Vincent, a woman who was found in her flat three years after her death surrounded by wrapped christmas presents and with the TV still on. £2400 in arrears on her rent, she was discovered by bailiffs who forced the door down. The film attempts to work out happened to Joyce by interviewing people who knew her. In two other strands that unfold in parallel, various events from her life are re-enacted along with the clearing of her flat by forensics officers.
Posted on 2011-12-29 · 4 min read · Music · Album Digest · December · Radio Slave · Pinch and Shackleton · Emika · Eleven
Some rather brief pen pictures of this month’s albums. I’ve been a bit busy!