New Year's Day morning
Waiting for coffee to boil
typing on laptop

This blog has come back, somewhat predictably, because I have a lot of stuff to say about a lot of other stuff. I do not predict it will last very long, but that's the chance you take with stuff like this.

Allow me to reintroduce myself. My name is Matt. I am 40 years old. I was born in San Francisco, grew up mostly in Oregon, went to college at Harvard, have lived in Boston and New York City and Chicago, and currently live in Madison, Wisconsin. I have a beautiful, hilarious, and intelligent wife named Liza (I'm not only saying this because she discovered my blog one night, it's also true) and two whip-smart, creative, and warm-hearted children named Emma and Sammy. If all goes according to plan, we will be adopting a child from Ethiopia this year.

I work for an educational publishing company as a staff writer; sometime this year, my job is supposed to change to be more of a management position like the ones I have had in the past here. If it doesn't, I will be looking for a new job. I have also written four children's books, several plays, and a whole bunch of poems. In the mid-1990s, I was very involved in the poetry slam scene; one year, I was the national Head to Head Haiku champion. (God, all this me me me stuff is making me a little sick.) Oh, and I work on a couple of sports satire websites, the links to which can be found somewhere here.

Over the last ten years, I have also turned into a music reviewer. I started out just doing stuff on the Internet so that I could grab free discs, but I also take some paying periodical gigs sometimes now. My main focus is international music, for a lot of reasons, but I also love lots of other music, as you will see in the rolling sidebars to the right. I have a very ambiguous relationship to music writing, and my publishers have a very ambiguous relationship to me.

I cannot promise that I will update this thing every day, but I will try really hard to do so. I reserve the right to talk about sports (especially basketball, baseball, and international football), politics (liberal to the point of being a flaming radical), television (we watch a lot of stuff), film, music, my personal problems, whatever. All of that. I don't know why anyone would actually read this, but I'm writing it, so welcome to my online world.

Coffee having brewed,
pour a lot of it into
my favorite mug