From the headline, “Eastern Europe’s Hitler nostalgia,” Michael Goldfarb’s cross-posted article in Globalpost and Salon (where I read it) feels like link bait. And maybe flame/trollbait. The subhead promises an article about “pro-Nazi sentiment” in “Lithuania and Latvia.” What follows is an article dispatched from, and largely about, Poland.1 It’s easy to say about an [...]
A journalist friend once said that he’d never write a certain airline’s name “airBaltic,” because he refused to do their brand management for them. I can’t remember if he chose to call them “Airbaltic,” “AirBaltic,” or “Air Baltic” instead, but the lowercase initial was beyond the pale. In English, of course, proper names are always [...]
Continue reading about Free advertising and trademarked names
It’s tough to read through the sneering contempt shown by the journalist, but lrytas.lt is reporting that Algirdas Paleckis was found innocent of denying Soviet atrocities. The court found that Paleckis’s comments were an opinion, and therefore protected. Then the journalist, in a non sequitur, reminds us of who Paleckis’s grandfather was. I’ve already covered [...]
Continue reading about Paleckis found innocent in something resembling a victory for free speech
[I expanded and updated this on 21 December 2011, to organize the argument better and provide more background.] News has broken over the past week about the uncertain fate of Algirdas Paleckis, the head of the Socialist People’s Front, a party in Lithuania. Speaking on the radio in November of last year, he talked about [...]
Continue reading about Lithuanian speech laws can claim first scalp
Aras recently wrote about his “month” of “not” eating meat and added a few questions throughout that I suppose were rhetorical. Well, for the next thousand words or so, I’ll pretend they’re not. At the outset he claims to have gone “all out” with not eating meat, like me. I would hardly consider myself “all [...]
Continue reading about The blasphemy of not eating meat in Vilnius
I’ve written three things for Lithchat in the past few days that may be of interest to readers of this site, as well (it’s not 100% overlap, thank goodness!): On Mikutavičius, not singing “Trys milijonai,” and cultural patrimony discusses the mini-scandal that emerged when Marijonas Mikutavičius elected not to sing his sports anthem, “Trys milijonai,” [...]
No, this is not a dream gournal. And this may seem as too clever by half, but I promise that my subconscious brewed it up in between snooze taps this morning. I was hanging out with someone who needed to fill out a form (in France), but he was functionally illiterate and does not know [...]
This might get a bit weepy or whiny in places, but I promise there’s a bigger point to it. I’m writing this post from Café de Paris, which is more or less exactly what it sounds like, except that it’s in Vilnius. I’ve spent a lot of time here over the two months I’ve been [...]
I have been posting of late, just not here. I’ve put up three posts over at Lithchat discussing the Eurovision Song Contest, in particular the song chosen by the Lithuanian people to represent them at the contest, the subversive “Eastern European Funk.” The first post merely introduces the song with a few video clips thrown [...]
Continue reading about Eurovision and neoliberalism: the case of InCulto
I wrote a little something about James Verini’s fascinating Vanity Fair article about the Moscow newspaper, the eXile, edited by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, over on Lithchat. Mostly, the piece prompted an opportunity to think about how my own experiences during the ’90s, especially as they pertained to Eastern Europe, would have been different [...]
Continue reading about Ames, Taibbi, Moscow, and missing the boat