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: