Being There with Wilco

Once upon a time (in the early 1990’s) a dude I was smitten with took me to see a band called Uncle Tupelo at Liberty Lunch in Austin, Texas. My date was always broke and had a radio show on the student station, so I know we must have gone because he was on the list!

At the end of the show, I remember my pal walking up to the stage and handing Jeff Tweedy what was (at least in Austin slacker circles) the early 90’s business card of the gently employed. That improvised business card was a torn off portion of his deposit slip-- the part with his phone number on it —for the next time the band was in town. They chatted for a bit while Tweedy was packing up his gear, and my date and I left.

The early 1990's was a time when alt-country was just starting to become a going concern. I may have hopped on the alt-country bandwagon a little more easily than some.

You can take the girl out of Pasadena, but it's hard to take the Pasadena out of the girl. Growing up just outside of Houston, I heard a lot of country music before I was old enough to drive. How chicken-fried was my upbringing?  My orthodontist was across the street from Gilley’s, the bar made famous by the movie Urban Cowboy.

The aftermath:

After the Uncle Tupelo show that night, I was impressed enough went out and got Anodyne, the Uncle Tupelo album that the record store had in stock.

Once Tweedy and Jay Farrar of Uncle Tupelo went their different ways, I stuck with Tweedy.

Sounds of the Budapest Subway....

One of the things I loved most about Budapest was the sounds that the vintage subway made. It's the cutest subway in the world!
I have no idea why these sounds aren't offered as standard text tones on the iPhone!

Samurai Culture is in for Christmas

 A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to spend nearly the whole month of December in Japan. I fell in love with Japanese food--not just sushi--and realized just how little I really know about Japanese history and culture.  (Sure, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, I'd taken a class on "Japanese Literature to 1600" but that was really just hitting the highlights!)

During that time in Japan in 2009, I was even lucky enough to spend most of a day exploring Himeji castle, which is located not terribly far from Kyoto.

Coming back to the US, it took a long time for me to reconcile my own impressions of Japan with the way that culture is portrayed in America.

Last week when I stopped by Target, I noticed that several toy designers were also influenced by Japan. And while I'm no more than a tourist in Japan, I was gobsmacked by this piece of colored plastic. Partly because as far as I can tell, it looks far more like a version of a back-lot Chinese castle than it does a feudal Japanese defensive structure.



Just a few toy displays over, I was completely dismayed by the aesthetic choices behind the Samauri outfit that Barbie's main dude Ken was wearing. Why had they put him in dreadful red satin, not in some nice cotton, linen or silk hakama or even in some decent robes?

Exploring Food as Culture

Drinks at Haddingtons in Austin, Texas

My husband and I have a modern mixed marriage. My husband cares a great deal about food, while I do not.

Much to my surprise, I am one of those people who goes through the day forgetting to eat. I literally have an alarm on my phone reminding me to eat lunch, though sadly that usually doesn't work. 

If I lived alone—or if my husband cared a lot less about food—I would have peanut butter sandwiches every night. If he didn’t cook, I would store sweaters in my vintage oven.

Since I do not live alone, I often end up in some of the city’s best dining rooms.

While I appreciate a good meal that someone else cooks, there is no way that I can write about food the way that most writing about food is done.

However, I spent a long time as a theater critic. I write about culture and society. For a while I’ve been toying with the idea of sharing what passes through my brain when I go out to eat.

This morning, I came across a passage in Sam Sifton’s account of his two years spent reviewing restaurants for The New York Times:

All criticism is argument. Mine has been from the start that restaurants are culture, and that there is no better perch from which to examine our shared values and beliefs, behavior and attitudes, than a seat in a restaurant dining room, observing life’s pageant in the presence of food and drink.

 

Inspired by Sifton, I am going to make more of an effort to write about the fancy restaurants that I often end up in. I will not be writing about the food—you can get better food writing from a Yelp review than you can get from me—but I will make the effort to cover the culture from a dining chair.

If you want a drink like the one in the picture, head to Haddingtons.
Their grub is way better than a peanut butter sandwich.

CMJ: Someday I am going to be inside you.

After going to SXSW for the last 10,000 years, I've sometimes thought about going to the CMJ Music Marathon  in NYC. Since I'm usually double-booked in October, my going to CMJ is more a fantasy than anything else.

Sure, it's partially because I love the City--because I'm an urban creature and NYC is the urban I love the best-- but that's not all.

I totally admit that I have a bad habit of living in the future. Most of what's on the radio is music that I associate with the past, not the life I'm living now. As such, I'd totally be pleased to see new things at CMJ, and revisit a few old favorites.

TRIAL RUNS: BANDS I HAVEN'T SEEN

If I were going to CMJ 2011, I'd totally want to check out:  super-cute Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr  and the Miniature Tigers (who both played ACL 2011, though I was busy elsewhere)  Fresh Millions, Givers (whom my friends have been raving about), Metronomy, Wild Flag, Morning After Girls, The Wombats, Locksley and J Mascis (whom I'm kind of ashamed that I've never seen, even though I've loved Dinosaur Jr since the dawn of time.)

SECOND CHANCES: BANDS THAT HAVE GOOD PRESS BUT I MIGHT HAVE SEEN AN OFF SHOW

At CMJ I might check out bands who didn't blow me away the first time, but whom I have real hope that the intervening years might have taken to the next level: Titus Andronicus (sloppy and possibly drunk the first time I saw them at a late show on Saturday night at SXSW 2009--which I'd REALLY been looking forward to-- but they've gotten lots of buzz since then), Heloise & The Savoir Faire*, Robbers on High Street (I totally love one of their albums, but, again, they were sloppy and I suspect they were drunk the first time I saw them, years ago at a Fun Fun Fun Fest preshow at the Mohawk in 2008.)

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are nice, and I'd likely catch them again. Truthfully, I don't know how much effort I'd make to see them twice, though I enjoyed them at Fun Fun Fun Fest.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah at Fun Fun Fun Fest

The most ridiculous horoscope EVER.

Okay,  I know that they say that these are for entertainment purposes only, but it's kind of crazy when they promise you a "life-changing" day. This was mine for Thursday. 

Here's the Bumper for that Column that I wrote about Scare last year!

It's September, which means it's totally time to start getting ready for the enormous haunted event SCARE FOR A CURE .

Today I ran across the cell phone bumper that a lot of people from Scare helped make. I wrote about that shoot and SCARE for a column in the Austin-American Statesman last year.




If you want to see the work that it took to do this make-up, check out the Flickr set.

Read Instead

Read Instead
Originally uploaded by annainaustin

This is from a bookstore in Cambridge, Mass.

Books: The President is a Sick Man

I really couldn't have picked a worse book to keep me company as I stayed up late with the ouchy results of some long-dreaded dental work. It wasn't that the book was bad, it's that the subject matter was totally wrong for someone with an aching mouth!

Yet despite my unhappy mouth, I had a hard time putting down my copy of "The President Is A Sick Man: Wherein the supposedly virtuous Grover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and vilifies the courageous newspaperman who dared expose the truth" by Matthew Algeo.

In 1893 President Grover Cleveland had a tumor removed from the top of his mouth. In secret. On a yacht. In 1.5 hours. BEFORE THE INVENTION OF ANTIBIOTICS. Or ex rays. Or, or, or..... I feel a bit faint just thinking about it.

I'm far, far too lazy to do a proper review of the book, but it's a well paced tale of a little-known saga from American history.

It's a story located at the nexus of American history, the history of medicine, and the history of journalism. Together it comes to a page-turning beach read for the serious-minded.

Maybe I should pass this book along to my dentist. The pictures of the casts made of the inside of Cleveland's post-surgical mouth (p. 185) were enough to give me the willies.

"The President Is A Sick Man: Wherein the supposedly virtuous Grover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and vilifies the courageous newspaperman who dared expose the truth."  Matthew Algeo, Chicago Review Press, 2011, 1st ed.

Someone Really "Sampled The Dog"

One of the things I find very curious about music is how stratified it is. If you are 20 something you listen to one kind of music. If you are older, you listen to something else. Bands I'm super-excited about seeing mean nothing to some people I went to college with.
This makes no sense to me.

Yet the fact that I've been listening to music critically for a very long time means that sometimes I see connections no one else does.


Recently the blogosphere was agog with this new song from indie darlings James Blake & Bon Iver. This song incorporates barking. I don't know if this barking is from a dog or a wolf, but it's natural enough to confuse my dog.  



My mind lept immediatly to Austin band Tinbuk 3's vintage tune "Sample The Dog." This song came out a year before wee wunderkind Blake was born.

There's the off chance that you might know Tinbuk 3 from their song
"The Future's So Bright, I've Gotta Wear Shades."

Other people write about Latvia!

One of the curious things about regularly visiting a small country where you don't speak the language is that when you leave, it's like the country--except for your friends-- vanishes from your world. Good luck if you want to know anything about the elections, or the economy, or which politician is divorcing his wife.

But in the last couple of days, I've bumped across two interesting articles about Latvia and/or Latvians. Both of them are in English!

This is a New York Times story about bad boy tennis player Ernests Gulbis.


This is a first-person account in the Wall Street Journal of a trip to Latvia by Kathy Reichs, the writer of the TV show "Bones." Reichs is married to a Latvian.

Who knew?

Update: I also found a link to new book about the Estonian ambassador during the cold war.

Shopping in the Junior's Department....(aka...You can go home again!)

When I was in Pasadena earlier this summer, I popped into the Pasadena Town Square Mall with my mother. It's the mall that was built near my parents house in the early 80's.

If you include the Foley's that was there before the rest of the mall was built, this is where I bought most of my clothing from elementary through high school. (To be honest, this is where my family bought most of my clothing... but I did get more of a say in it as I got older!)

Waiting for my mother to get her hair done at the mall this past June, I dropped in on the junior's department of the former Foley's (now Macy's) where I'd bought a bunch of things that I loved to death in junior high.

BOOKS: "One Day." Reading the book moments before the movie came out!

On my way back to Austin from my summer adventures, I read the novel One Day by David Nicholls.  I read it in pretty much one giant gulp.

While I had toyed with the idea of buying the book a number of times--at both the airport and at Target--I didn’t do it until a European dude recommended it to me. Later, when I told him I was reading it, he said that he hoped I loved it.

Which is a very unusual thing for a straight man to say, or, at least, it would be an odd thing for a straight American man to say.

In America, One Day would be termed “chick lit.” It’s in the pink ghetto of writing marketed to women, mostly because it deals with the emotional lives of people. In America, mass-market literature about feelings is pretty much the providence of women.  I don’t generally see straight dudes reading books where the characters have feelings, but that could be because I live in the machismo-poisoned land of Texas.

If you've missed picking up the book, the premise is that Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley kind of hook up in 1988 at the end of their studies in Edinburgh. The book follows their friendship over the next 20 years, dropping in on both of them each July 15th, which happens to be St. Swithin’s Day. Sometimes there are big changes from year to year in each of their lives, sometimes there aren't.

I really enjoyed One Day, although, in some ways, it was strange reliving tidbits of the 80’s. (In 1988, as Dexter rags on “that Tracy Chapman tape” I knew exactly how annoying and overplayed it was at the time!)

FILM: BELLFLOWER (2011) is a Bad Bromance

The car from the film visiting Austin, Texas during SXSW 2011

Last week I saw the movie BELLFLOWER, which, based on the trailers and the general buzz about the film following Sundance, I had totally expected to love.

Instead I was disappointed by this pre-apocalyptic bromance of a film.

Since I’m totally against spoilers, I’ll just let you know that the film is about two angry dudes in their early 20’s who like to blow things up, and deal with their feelings by blowing things up.

I have no problems with dudes blowing things up. The @madspark is one of my real-life friends, and he blows things up on a regular basis, partly because he can think of cool ways to do just that.

Maybe it’s a good movie to see if you are an angry dude. But not if you are a woman.

My husband didn’t care for the film much either, and he likes DIY pyrotechnics an awful lot.

The MEDUSA, outside the Alamo Ritz, SXSW 2011

I Don't Want To Go To The Dentist

When I was in high school, I had the most traumatic dental experience of anyone I know. Stop reading now if that sort of thing makes you uncomfortable.

When I was 15 years-old, I needed to have my impacted wisdom teeth removed. Since my mother was adamant that I shouldn't be "put to sleep" for this--as was the recommended procedure-- she found someone who was willing to take these teeth out under local anesthesia. This was a very bad thing for me.

The Space Shuttle I Knew

*If I hadn't been too lazy to drag my laptop to a Latvian coffee shop with a decent Internet connection, this would have been published on July 21st. But I was lazy.

When I was in elementary school, the space shuttle was doing piggy-back test flights. During one of these low-altitude test flights, the shuttle flew over my school in Deer Park, Texas, located not too far from the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake.

I was outside when the shuttle flew overhead. In the only incidence of mass hysteria I’ve ever been part of, all of the kids who were playing outside began to run after the shuttle. The teachers, with their longer, grown-up legs, sprinted to cut off the mass of children before they dispersed into the long grass of the field next door, explaining that we could never catch it. When they admonished us, they were panting from a combination of spring heat and exertion.

Not long afterward, I remember holding a shuttle radio antenna that my dad had made for NASA. (That’s the triangle piece on the very front of the shuttle, part of the black nosecone of the vehicle. It fit in the palm of my hand.)

The first time the space shuttle launched (in the early 80's), I was in my elementary school cafeteria. There was an entire school of children crowded around one television set, and, if you squinted at the tiny image all the way across the room, you could see the white shape move across the blue sky on the television screen. For those of us in the back who couldn’t really see the TV, the teachers announced when the shuttle had launched.

Stepping through a NYC winter

Stepping through a NYC winter
Originally uploaded by annainaustin

I just found this photo while I was cleaning up my photo collection. It makes me happy.

A Video with Duke and Chuckie

 Last time they were here, my Latvian houseguests made a video about Duke and Charlie.

We lost Chuckie this past August (at the age of 10), and we lost Duke this week (he was 13). But since I never take video myself, I'm so glad my houseguests made this, so I can see both of them together and happy.

FOOD: New England Seafood

I spent last week seeing the sights of New England with my family. Being that it's my family, it included a lot of stops for noshing.  (And a few stops for shopping.)

Pictured on the left is a really awesome tie that I totally wish I'd bought at Building 19--(which is a New England cross between Goodwill, the dollar store and a scratch and dent joint--but the glory that is Building 19 deserves a blog post of its own!)

Here are a few of the places where we went last week on our quest to eat our way through New England:


Red's Eats

While I'm partial to the lobster roll joint on the bridge in Kennebunkport I realize that there are other places you can eat this delicacy.

Red's Eats is one of the other top places where you can get lobster on a bun, with nothing but mayo and butter to set it off. I love a lobster shack far more than a fancy lobster place!

It looked like Red's Eats might have been included in the book,  "1000 Places To See Before You Die."






One of the things you may not know about my home life is that my sweetie is addicted to fried clams. And when I say addiction, I mean addiction. On one trip up north, we had to pay a visit to a real ER. The diagnoses: an overdose of fried clams. Honest.

As a result of this addiction, we often pilgrimage to what is often considered to be the best friend clam in the world: The Clam Box. (It's quality over volume these days for my sweetie.)



But of course, these weren't the only seafood places we ate. Here are some other seafood pic's after the jump:

FILM: Madness at the Movies

Recently, I've watched both the French film Seraphine (2008) and the most recent cinematic version of Jane Eyre.

The representation of madness in these films couldn't be much different.

In Seraphine--based on the real life of primitive artist "Séraphine de Senlis"--we watch as the painter slowly goes madder and madder, and is later committed to the asylum where she dies. At no point is her madness is she attractive. She is a peasant who paints her way out of poverty, only to leave the world of sense and reality.

In the current Jane Eyre, the madwoman in the attic is crazily beautiful, passionately attached to her husband, vile to Jane, and beautiful in an eerie and otherworldly way. She's a heiress fallen on bad times.

What does the difference between these two versions of madness mean? Heck if I know.

Sometimes I just observe, without having an answer for everything.

Yankeeland: Tips for the Southerner

For the last week, I've been in Yankeeland with my family.
I've hung out with my extended family in a grouping that's too complex to try and detail to anyone who doesn't already know them. Let's just say that ages range from 2.5 to over 70...and we like to book a nice early table for dinner.
This trip has included both the northern and southern branches of my family.
It's strange, because I forget how different things were to adjust to when I first started coming north many years ago.

So, as a primer, here are some of the things that I've been explaining to my southern family:

10 Tips for a Southerner Visiting the Northeast in the "Summer."

1. If you want a Southern milkshake, order a frappe.
2. People here actually eat baked beans...and they are actually served for breakfast in a few places.
3. It's June, but school is still in session.
4. The concept of "Summer" really gets rolling around July 4th.
5. Noon is the hottest part of the day. (In Texas, it's at 4 p.m.)
6. Chowder, Lobster and Revere are said without an "r" and with a short "a" at the end.
7. It's taken me nearly 20 years to get close to the right way to pronounce the towns North of Boston. I'm still iffy. Don't be surprised when people can't understand where you mean!
8. Dunkin' Donuts coffee is nearly a religion.
9. Just pretend agree with the locals when they tell you it's hot.
10. A "Water Fountain" is sometimes known as a "Bubbler."

A few more pictures, after the jump

I'm in Yankeeland!

Originally uploaded by annainaustin

I love this picture, taken just outside of Freeport Maine.

Hanging Out With Keith Richards...the Don Draper of Rock 'n' Roll

While I was sick with post SXSW-crud, I spent a lot of the time in my cough-medicine haze sucking down the 547 pages of Keith Richards very readable autobiography, Life.

Nearly every publication on the planet reviewed the book when it came out last fall, so I won't bother giving you the reviews you can read nearly anywhere, like here and here.

Yet, despite the acres of print generated by the publication of the book, I don't know if anyone else read it the same way I did.

Personally I was amazed by reading Richards' account of growing up in post-war England, and realizing that, if he ever sat down with my dad, the two of them could have a great time talking about what it was like growing up right after the war. (With only six years difference between them, they're practically the same generation.) Between the rationed candy and the horse-drawn traffic that Richards remembers in post-war London, it's clear that he's from a bygone time. "London to me when I grew up was horse shit and coal smoke,"  Richards said (p. 33).

Also, Richards was an avid Boy Scout. Who knew?

I suspect some of that hands-on Boy Scout training came in useful later, when Richards made his first amps, hacking them from radio parts (p. 89),  and later re-assembling his own amps when they fell apart. (I suspect if you ever need to hot -wire a car, Richards is your man.)

Yet from his descriptions of his involvement in the Boy Scouts to talking about his current life, I was even more amazed at what a totally male world that Keith Richards seems to live in. In the entire book, the only women he describes are his manager, his family members, his lovers and one singer he worked with in Jamaica.

What you get throughout the book are the various descriptions of the women who took care of Richards. Women who cooked for him, cleaned for him, and got him off. Some of the lovely and talented women in his life included: Ronnie Spector, Anita Pallenberg, Patti Hansen--and hordes of kind women who fed him and looked after him over his life. But, frustratingly, it's clear that Richards is from the Don Draper era of Rock 'n' Roll.

Reading the book, I kept waiting for Richards to talk about a female keyboard player he worked with, a brilliant songwriter he met, or, well, nearly anyone he worked who didn't have a penis. But that just isn't the case, except for a little work he's done with former love Ronnie Spector. His creative world is a world of men.

Richards clearly likes women just fine, but as he represented himself in his book, he just doesn't see them when they aren't taking care of him and/or when he doesn't want to sleep with them. And that makes me sad.

His longtime manager Jane Rose must be a bloody saint.

It's easy to forget that the modern world of Rock'n'Roll was born during the Mad Men era. The time when the fictional Don Draper ruled Madison Avenue was the same era when the Beatles put out their first album, and when the Rolling Stones were born. It was a world where women were often relegated to the sidelines.

Thanks Keith for reminding me about a not-quite-vanished era. For all of the hoopla about Richards being a folk hero, he's just an ordinary guy who is a product of the era he grew up in.


*Page citations are from the first edition, 10th printing, hardback edition of Life, by Keith Richards. (2010, Little Brown)

Thoughts on the Royal Wedding...

Love is a very strange thing. Getting up insanely early this morning to watch the Royal Wedding in my PJ’s, I couldn’t help thinking about all the ways that we structure and regulate love in modern society, mostly because of the institution of marriage. 

Most of the world agrees that marriage can only be between a man and a woman, that it can only be between two people, that it's nicest when it's accompanied by a big cake and a bigger white dress.

This is strange when we think about the ways that love is often fluid, changeable and crazily life-altering.

People don't fall in love for rational reasons, but they often enter into a legal contract because of it.

Yet, the institution of marriage has been described as “the only contract that you can’t get out of without the state’s permission.”

Yet, even given the bitter backstory with the groom’s own parents, I couldn’t help thinking that Kate has just married a job that she can never really leave.

In many ways, it’s the same thing as Bella becoming a vampire in the Twilight series. One ceremony with the magical prince, and you can never, never, never go back to your old life.

Poor Kate, I hope it works out for her.

Of course, I want to believe in the fairy tale for her. Yet, she might be wise to remember Sarah Ferguson. She was the center of the last royal wedding of this scope…and she wasn’t even invited to this ceremony.

Oh look, more pictures on the Internets!

When I told my sweetie that someone else was using some of my pictures to illustrate an article on Latvia, he quipped that it must be the cousin of one of my friends there!

I guess anything is possible!
(Scroll down to the end of that article to see my pictures!)


Then again, here's a picture of the Latvian band Brainstorm playing SXSW, on their Wikipedia (Vikipēdijas) page. 

And a picture of Latvian seafood illustrating another Latvian article ...


There's also my picture illustrating an article on hotels in Japan.

I Haven't Been to England Since Clinton was President.

***A note to my regular readers: the following blog post is my entry in the Blog Away contest. With luck, I'll be blogging about the Royal Wedding firsthand, not from what I see on the telly:

I haven't been to England since Clinton was in office, and I realize that this is a very long time to avoid visiting a country where they nearly speak the same language. The upcoming Royal Wedding has made me realize that I might have missed a few things in England.

Then again, the England that I visited in the 1990’s needed changes. In 1992, I stayed in a London hostel so squalid that, when I locked the bathroom door to take an early morning shower, I found a line of livid strangers outside the bathroom door.

Reporter Sarah Lyall moved to England in the mid-1990's, and has illustrated the changes in English society in her book The Anglo Files.  I’m curious to see these societal changes firsthand. I just never again want to be facing a long line of hostel strangers in my towel.

Sure, I’ve got several girlfriends who’ll be spending time in England this July. Alas, their trip falls during my annual pilgrimage to Latvia.

Faux-Brit tearoom during SXSW 2011.

If I’m blogging during the Royal Wedding, you can expect that I’ll blog, Tweet, and post pictures to my Flickr account. The adventure might be documented at www.anna-hanks.com .

If I go to the Royal Wedding, I hope to find something classier than this!

Still recovering from SXSW...but my pictures are busy on the Internet!

Like a lot of people, I'm still recovering from SXSW, specifically the SXSW-crud.
Putzing around on the internet in my feverish state, I found some of my pictures were on a site called the Flickr Hive Mind.
Who knew?

It also turns out that one of my pictures (of a famous pig statue) is used to illustrate this gallery walk in Riga.

And illustrating an article on "Where to Eat Tourist Free" during SXSW.

I also found a link to a story I wrote in 1999 about the Estonian artist Juri Arrak, but it's behind a Baltic Times paywall. This reminds me that when I was writing the story, I took a gazillion pictures of Arrak posing with his dogs and his paintings in his studio. Maybe I should scan those pictures and put them on Flickr?

Latvia: The Land of 24 Hour Party People...that I met at SXSW.

Riga graffiti.

It's strange the impact that South By Southwest can have on our lives, in ways that sometimes go far beyond the music.

View of Riga.

In 2006, I did a story for The Baltic Times about the Latvian singer-songwriter Goran Gora, who came for a SXSW showcase that year. He played at the now-defunct club Spiro's (on Red River) to a crowd that I could've comfortably fit into my living room. Since I'm a terrible interviewer, I asked if I could shadow Goran around the festival for the article. I inadvertently bonded with Gora's posse, something that's never happened with other sources.
Mix that accidental bonding with some quickly-expiring frequent flier miles, the offer of a place to crash, and the fact that I briefly worked in Estonia, and you have a hell of a road trip. Especially when it's a road trip I now seem to take on a very regular basis.

Stone face in Old Town Riga.

I freely admit that that this sort of road trip is unusual. When I confess I’ve visited Latvia the last three summers, I usually get a double-take like I’ve revealed I’d repeatedly been to Rumpelstiltskinland, Oompa-Loompastein or Unicornworld. I'd get fewer strange looks by claiming routine jaunts to the moon.

Since fairly few Americans get to that tiny Baltic country, I’m a bit unusual there. Combine my relative exotic-ness with the fact that many of my Latvian friends are the “make the party happen” folks in the region—and you have a recipe for a certain amount of craziness. And frankly, it’s a place with an absurd amount of craziness to spare. After all, the bars in Latvia aren’t even required to close, as long as they have the right license!

Vintage Treasures From Deep Inside My Brain.

As a few of you may have noticed, my proper web site has recently had a redesign. As part of this, I spent some time delving through my hard drive, looking for saved copies of a few things.

In doing so, I found some seriously vintage items I'd forgotten about. Some of it--like a journal from when I was 19--were kind of horrifying.

Luckily, I also found a few things from a pre-digital era that I thought I would share with you, including a poem or two that I actually still like, and what was a Medievalist meme that was passed around on paper in the mid 90's.

Yes, there was more stuff in there, but I'm sparing you most of it.

Who knows, there may be more vintage treasures to come!

Time to Return to the Well of Elvis Costello-ness.

Just days after I moved to Austin, I walked into the now-defunct Sound Exchange on the drag. It was so long ago, that Daniel Johnston hadn't even painted what was to become the iconic frog on the side of the building! In what turned out to be a transformative moment because that's where I first heard Elvis Costello playing over the store's speakers.

Over the next few weeks, I snatched up used cassettes of most of his albums. Among the albums I either never got --or never really listened to--was Truth. Not surprising, since I was 18 at the time. Rob Sheffield has recently encouraged me to revisit this album.

 I was a little surprised that I never saw what Sheffield saw in this album. But you know, I'm open to new things, or rediscovering old things from artists that I really, really like.

Here's a video of one of the songs from the album:

Apple Fixed My Three Year-Old Laptop For FREE!

Brokeback MacBook

For the last couple of years, I've been living with a hairline crack on the right side of my 13-inch MacBook.  This didn't surprise me, because my MacBook lives a hard life: it's been to more airports and countries than some laptops half its age. It's so full of pictures that tech support had to insert more memory to make it functional. In short, it works for a living, instead of lying around as a pampered and spoiled laptop.

In order to deal with this worsening problem--and being someone with a gift for sweeping issues under the rug--I had placed a cute tiger sticker over the crack when I was in Japan in 2009. If the defect got worse, I didn't want the plastic piece falling off and getting lost!

The broken corner, January 2011.

This past January, the sticker fell off. To no one's surprise, not long afterwards,  the plastic corner piece finally fell off. It happened when I was staying in Boston. I spent at least a solid hour looking for the missing piece in my little niece's very tidy bedroom, even shaking her Hello Kitty sheets to see if I could find the missing piece! No luck, the tiny plastic triangle was gone forever.

The jagged edge was slightly uncomfortable on the inside of my wrist, as well as being hopelessly tacky. With SXSWi coming up, I didn't mind being the girl with the near-vintage laptop at the tech-toys festival...I minded being the girl with the visibly broken vintage laptop. There are limits!

When I ducked into the heated Apple store on NYC's Fifth Avenue on a cold day-- to see if I could buy a replacement for the top piece of plastic--I was told that this cracked corner was a known issue  and that I should make a "Genius Bar" appointment. So when I got back to Austin, I did just that.

Visiting The Doctor

When I took my laptop in--and they told me it was really three years old--I expected to be laughed at. When the dude at the Genius Bar added that he's never seen a crack exactly like mine.... I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Yet, when he plugged my laptop into the system and looked at the history, it turned out that my laptop was covered! He even grabbed another brittle bit from next to the camera (a defective part I hadn't even noticed) and pulled it off! He told me that they'd be replacing all the plastic on the inside of the computer (including the keyboard and trackpad), that it would take 1-3 days and that I wouldn't have to pay anything.

Ta da! The corner is no longer broken!

When I picked up my repaired laptop, my sweetie noticed that the replaced pieces (i.e. basically all the plastic on the inside of the laptop) are slightly gray in tone compared to the brighter white of the original keyboard/trackpad etc.

I wish I'd known about this Apple repair earlier! I lived with an annoying crack/sticker for a long time, when I didn't need to.

When I picked up the repair, the girl who helped me said that she had the same model of MacBook, and that she'd had her own laptop's parts replaced twice!

Who knew?

Umm, actually Apple knew. And they didn't bother to let me know that my problem might be covered.

Valentine's Day=stolen poetry

Once upon a time, I used to write a lot of poetry. So when I came across this passage by Richard Siken, I had to share it with both of you.

I spent the afternoon with one of my girlfriends from high school, so I've been thinking about that period in my life today.  This passage feels like the forbidden-ness of everything when you're in high school.

      

"You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for."
— Richard Siken

 I hope your Valentine's Day was filled with the right kind of obsession.

I feel at home in New York...and sometimes I wonder why.

A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to flee a big snowstorm in Boston, and go spend some time in NYC.

When I was there I stayed with my cousin, her baby Hudson, and my Aunt Diane, whose flight had been delayed for a couple of days by the snowstorm.

Since the last time I visited, my cousin has moved to Brooklyn, a borough where I've never spent much time. Yet, it feels very much like home, as does the rest of NYC.


In a lot of ways, this makes little to no sense. After all, I only lived in NYC long enough to get mail there while I was doing a brief program at NYC in the early 90's. For years afterward, I was lucky enough to visit my former roommate Cora, and get to briefly drop into her NYC life. Hanging out with Cora and her modern dancer/Martha Graham School of Dance friends, I got a window into the city that I would have never gotten as a plain ole tourist.

But as for part where NYC feels like home, I can't really explain it, expect to wonder if maybe it has something to do with television and movies.


While I was in the city in early February, I stumbled across the filming of a remake of the 80's movie Arthur, starring Russel Brand. The filming had closed down the front entrance of the Strand book store, (close to Union Square.)

I couldn't help but wonder if all of the location filming that's been done in NYC has sunk into my brain, making me feel at home just because of all the images that I've absorbed from the screen over the years.

I spent some time contemplating this, until I came home to Austin. While sitting on the floor feeding my dog, I looked up at a favorite childhood toy that I had recently rescued from my mother's garage. It was a plastic copy of a toy brownstone, made as a Sesame Street tie-in during the 70's. It's kind of eerie how much the plastic toy looks like a real brownstone!

 

So does my strange at-homeness in NYC have something to do with mass media? Maybe.

Someone used one of my pictures! Again!

Oh look, someone used one of my pictures in a blog post. It's the little things that matter.
But, let's be honest. Not many people other than me would be taking pictures of a 7-11 in Japan, then putting them on flickr.

My close encounter with winter:

It’s snowing again in Boston. Again.

I know, I know. It’s kind of what’s expected right now, what with it being the darkest part of the year.

“January in the Northeast…would you expect anything less,” my friend Tracy quipped on Facebook, when I was complaining about how cold it's been.

Yet knowing something logically and processing it conceptually are two different things. This much snow and coldness has been hard for my brain, because it just runs counter to my entire view of the world.

For example, this past weekend I saw people out ice fishing…and my sister-in-law offered to take me walking across a frozen pond, just for the novelty of the experience.  Um, I know ice fishing exists, but my brain is convinced that ponds are for swimming in, not for walking across. I am not Jesus.

Back when I was in graduate school, I remember having my thesis reader, Dr. Bob Jensen talking about how much he missed shoveling show. This past week, I shoveled snow for the very first time in my life.  I’m beginning to think that Bob has some strange ideas.

On Saturday morning, I saw my brother-in-law Andrew chipping away at the giant ice dams on his roof, and cleaning some of the two foot of snow off of their roof. I had heard a rumor that icicles could actually get big enough that they’d really do some damage if they fell on you, but I’d certainly never seen such a thing!

In the last few days, I’ve also learned about something called a “snow farm.” Misleadingly, this isn’t where they grow snow. Rather it’s the place where old, sad unwanted snow is taken to die after it is scraped off the highways. I don’t know why they don’t call it a “snow morgue.” 

Snowpocalypse '11

I've been lucky enough to be on the East Coast this past week for a close encounter with some VERY Winter weather.

I know I'm from Texas, but I assure you that things have been bad, even for people who are used to winter! My friend Chris even claims that last week was even the coldest it's been in Boston for the last 10 years.

How cold has it been? The front page of the Boston Globe from this past Monday should give you a clue.

•  My friends who were visiting Boston from ESTONIA were complaining about how cold it was this past Monday, when the high temp, was around 10 degrees Fahrenheit! Estonia is sort of between Russia and Finland, and it isn't exactly known for its warm, sunny climate.
• This past Monday, the locals were complaing about the bitterly cold temps. The best line was from a conversation that I overheard on the "T" while crossing the Charles River: "It's like the arctic. There are ice floes out there."
• There were plenty of Boston locals who could be spotted around town while wearing those crazy lumberjack hats (You know, the ones with the earflaps and the fur around the brim!)
• On Monday, I bundled up in so many layers that when I left my friend Chris' place, I could barely move my arms. He didn't want to say that I looked like the "Michelin Lady" But I did! 
• It was so cold that even with my glove-inside-a-glove strategy, walking around Boston this past Monday, my fingers were still cold.
• The UGG motorcycle boots that have been way too warm to wear in Austin have been just fine here. Especially with a pair of wool socks!
• I saw a woman in Malden using a PICKAXE to break up a good-sized chunk of snow and ice on her front walk.
• On Thursday, which was a "snow day" for many of the schools in Greater Boston, I saw kids using all sorts of homemade sleds, and improvising areas to slide on. My favorite was the kids who were using some sort of tray to slide down their snowy back steps. 

Still not convinced?

It's Cold in Boston.

Originally uploaded by annainaustin

Just wanted to share this picture of snowy Boston with you. There's more to come on my close encounter with Snowpocalypse '11!

Look, it's a blog redesign!

You might notice this blog's spiffy new design that was recently done by the ever-fabulous Paul Sicard, whom I had the foresight to marry in 2002. I've even changed the name to better reflect what this blog is; an outlet for the many shiny things that I'm attracted to in the pop culture landscape. 

The image in the background is one I took in the artists lounge at the Austin City Limits Music Festival. The whole thing was decorated with a "Hotel California" theme, since the Eagles were playing the festival.

You may have already seen this column I wrote for the Statesman on the festival.
  

Awesome spot at the "Hotel California" themed ACL artists lounge!