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Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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2008.01.22 11.41 |
 Kamarausko 'Vilnius Synagogue' (Wikipedia) And now it's been published in Lietuvos rytas. I originally wrote the article in English (for Lithchat), and then next came the translation into Lithuanian. Lietuvos rytas then cleaned it up even more and converted it into the journalistic/punchy small paragraphs that I had forgotten to write in. They also made a few questionable edits—changing my description of Lithuanian history from "katastrofiška" to "sudėtinga," but whatever. Either way, now that it's in print, I can publish here my English version. But I'll also include a link to Udrio latest interview on the subject. OK, now the article: A count in 1909 of the inhabitants of Vilnius, a city then of about 200,000 inhabitants, found that nearly 40% of the population was Jewish. Lithuanians, on the other hand, accounted for not even 2% of the population of their future capital. The blood of the 20th century has profoundly altered the ethnic makeup of Vilnius, but a century later, as the city prepares for its turn onstage as the Cultural Capital of Europe, the cultural contributions of those 80,000 odd Jews of 1909 Vilnius—of whom there remains only a handful—stay obscured in the cultural lives of Lithuanians in America. The germination of this piece was obviously made possible by the current situation regarding Dariaus Udrio proposal to the Tautinių šokių komitetas for the 2008 Šokių šventė in Los Angeles regarding having a space in the program set aside for a performance by a Yiddish Lithuanian dance group. I’m saddened to see that Udrys felt it necessary to resign his post of chairman of LALB after his proposal was rejected, but I’m more saddened by the circumstances that led to his needing to make the proposal in the first place, as well as the response his proposal has caused.
First, it is a pity that it took someone like Udrys to suggest the idea of including ethnically Yiddish dances at Šokių šventė in the first place. The idea should have grown within the komitetas itself, a komitetas one would hope was committed to pursuing an expansive and innovative cultural program for their šventė. It is a continued obscenity (and I use the word with all its weight) that the diaspora community continues to show a simple incuriousness about the population that rubbed shoulders with their ancestors on the roads of Russian-occupied Lithuania. That on the largest stage available to it in North America (the Šokių šventė), the Lithuanian-American Community (JAVLB) should actively avoid incorporating Litvak contributions boggles the mind. The gains are astounding: the profile of the Šventė would rise, especially among the large Litvak community in Los Angeles, the gate receipts would climb, the dancers would be exposed to different manifestations of Lithuanian culture, goodwill would ring out, and the Lithuanian-American Community would have made a tangible gesture at softening the tension between the two Lithuanian ethnic groups. And as great as the gains would be, the losses would be few. I can think of no negative result of having a Yiddish dance or song at the Šventė. This inclusivity should have been a goal of the Šokių šventė from the getgo, not a novel idea that appears 50 years into the tradition. Second, and more importantly, are the troubling implications that grow out of JAVLB pirmininko Vytauto Maciūno response to Udrio resignation. Instead of highlighting the cultural diversity of the dances, Maciūnas writes about the cultural diversity of the dancers (a diversity that is sadly still a binary one in which the world is split into those for whom the designation “lietuvių kilmės” is appropriate and those for whom it is not). Yet by highlighting the individual diversity, he forces the reader to remember that culture, itself, is not a monolith. We see and appreciate this ourselves at every Šokių šventė, bewildered by the myriad patterns and color combinations in the various tautiniai drabužiai. If we are willing to grant such a pluralism to the costumes worn at Šventė, why not grant the same pluralism to the very dances that are danced? It is important to understand here, then, that the issue is not that some sort of Yiddish usurpers will arrive at Šventė and dance a wholly inappropriate non sequitur of a dance, say, a samba. The issue is that what the Yiddish group would dance is already a “lietuvių tautinis šokis.” That is, it falls under the criteria that Maciūnas himself sets out as the proper content of a Šokių šventė. The Litvak culture is a part of the messy, uncontained whole that is “lietuviška kultūra.” Lithuanians pride themselves on the variegated nature of their culture. They keep alive differences in accent and dialect, expressing wonderment at how so small a group could have such distinct linguistic differences; they tease each other based on their regions. On a quotidian basis, the fully-actualized Lithuanian understands that there are aspects of her adopted culture that are wholly foreign to her, as well as aspects without which she would cease to understand herself. Why must it be, then, that when given this opportunity to try to celebrate that cultural mišrainė, the leadership of JAVLB and the Tautinių šokių komitetas hides behind an implausible and offensive notion of a monolithic Lithuanian culture in which Jewish cultural artifacts—though developed in the Lithuanian milieu—are unacceptable? Have not Lithuanians, excluded from the cultural world for so long, learned only too well the lessons of tyrannical cultural exclusion? The continued profane silence of the Lithuanian-American diaspora population regarding the role of strident nationalists during World War II remains an evergrowing, unconscionable offense. I can only hope that it would not be, as Maciūnas fears, the Jewish community that gives itself over to Udrio provocations, but rather the Lithuanian-American Community itself. I can hope that it be JAVLB that finally reaches a point of being able to look back, like Walter Benjamin's Angelus Novus, at the catastrophe that is Lithuanian history to see that in order to make the history total—to make Lithuanian culture total—they must, simply, make space for the Litvaks, for their contributions, and for their voices, shattered by the march of xenophobia.
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Paskutinį kartą atnaujinta ( 2008.01.22 12.09 )
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Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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2007.08.29 09.33 |
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 An update on my international iPhone travails!
I was in Canada this weekend past. AT&T Customer Care was closed when I crossed the border, so I shut the phone off until 6am CDT, which is when it reopens. I menu-clicked through to seeing an agent with a miscellaneous problem. I asked for EDGE to be turned off, the agent was confused as to why I'd want to do that, but said it would be done. He asked me to power cycle the device.
I did. The EDGE icon was still visible.
A few hours later I called back, and this time the agent told me it was impossible to do what I was asking. Yet whatever he did managed to knock off the EDGE connection. I spent my weekend in Canada not worrying about runaway EDGE charges.
Upon return to the US, I immediately called and followed the same steps as above, yet I did not manage to get EDGE turned back on. I called back three times, and every time the agent said it would be turned on, but nothing worked. Now, two days after my return (and with visual voicemail not working), I called AT&T again, this time eager for some answers.
After being bumped from AT&T to Apple tech support back to AT&T and then to AT&T iPhone Activations, I finally landed in the lap of a helpful tech support person from AT&T. In the meantime, Apple had me reset my network settings (thereby losing my wi-fi passwords). AT&T also threatened me with having all my visual voicemail deleted.
But finally the agent at tech support fixed things, and she gave me the secret tradespeak jargon to get EDGE deactivated/reinstated in the future.
So, to deactivate EDGE on your iPhone for when you are roaming internationally, call AT&T Customer Care, and get transferred to their tech support (but not Apple's tech support). Then ask for them to "please suspend my internet service in Snooper." Afterward, as them to "please reinstate my internet service in Snooper." Snooper is, apparently, the internal system that handles the EDGE connections.
Another hint is to remind the agents that you have an iPhone. The techie told me that it was unclear which system to change at first, since the billing did not demonstrate that my service had been suspended in the first place.
UPDATE: So despite the glowing review above, after my iPhone had been reconnected to EDGE, the Visual voicemail still did not work. Though now I did not even get an option to check my email the old-fashioned way. Just an error, and the ability to play my old, saved messages. After another twenty or so minutes with tech support (AT&T pinged me to Apple, who ponged me back to AT&T), the people at AT&T were able to get Visual voicemail to work again. The problem? The activation had to be resent, as "features were not provisioned properly" earlier in the day. I cannot believe what a PITA this procedure has been. But now Visual voicemail works.
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Paskutinį kartą atnaujinta ( 2007.08.29 14.01 )
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Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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2007.08.17 12.35 |
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This is a bit outside of the usual Lithchat posting fare, but since it involves stuff that happened in Lithuania, it might fit. Within 48 hours of buying my iPhone here in Chicago on the day of their release, I was in Lithuania, making me, I suspect, the first person in the nation to have and use one. Now, obviously, I knew that I'd get slammed with international roaming charges, so I had a backup, unlocked Motorola SLVR L2 that I would use as my phone while abroad (which I subsequently destroyed and replaced with a Nokia 1112). The iPhone I had mostly for music and as a leash to the US, should any emergencies arise.
But because Cozy has free wireless, I was able even to use the iPhone in Vilnius to check my email and surf the web. This I did twice during my eight-day trip, and I also used international roaming once before flying out to confirm some information via email. Otherwise the iPhone sat in my room, doing no more duty than alarm clock and mp3 player.
Imagine, then, my surprise, when my bill from AT&T came with 50 separate "ROAM GPRS" charges totalling more than 6mb and, at $.02 a kilobyte, costing over $130.
So I called AT&T—and the details remain rather unclear—but the conclusion is simple: EDGE is "always on," so theoretically using the phone at all, even just to wake it up to get an email address from your contacts list, can incur hidden costs when you are abroad.
The financial threat is simple to understand: anywhere outside of the US (including, despite the variance in calling rates, Canada), data costs $.02 a kilobyte. It is possible to buy an international data package from AT&T, and the woman to whom I spoke pitched it to me, for $24.99 a month, which gives you 20mb to use. Overages are, depending on country, between two cents and a half cent a kilobyte. So clearly avoiding these charges is something an international traveler should find important.
AT&T will turn off your EDGE if you call them (at 611) and ask them to. Presumably one should do this while boarding an international flight, since the airport pre-flight is the perfect place to use EDGE like a maniac. Then, one must call again upon return to the US to get the EDGE service reactivated. This clumsy procedure is the *only* way to travel internationally with your iPhone where one can both avoid ludicrous data charges and still call the device an actual "phone," should there be people trying to make contact in an emergency.
I asked the staffs at AT&T and Apple if an EDGE connection is established just in waking up the phone. Apple refused to answer, saying that "all billing" issues have to do with AT&T, ignoring the fact that I was asking a technical question. AT&T also did not answer straight, saying that EDGE is "always on," but that that's not a problem, since I have "unlimited data." Of course, when I reminded the woman that this was about international roaming, she just added that, yes, it would cost abroad, without answering, again, what the threshold of iPhone activity is before it makes EDGE connections and starts the two-cent-per meter.
For a long time, I had suspected that EDGE is "always on"--when I wake up my iPhone near cheap speakers, I often immediately hear the distinctive static that is cellular information floating in the ether, without even making a call or anything. And that seems to be the default that I will now assume. So until someone with more technical expertise can figure out what, precisely, one can do on an iPhone without either turning it to Airplane Mode or using the EDGE network, I will have to call AT&T to disable the service every time I fly abroad. Incidentally, a lot of this information is contained, though in far more chaotic form, on the Apple forum about the iPhone.
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Paskutinį kartą atnaujinta ( 2007.08.17 12.41 )
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Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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2007.07.20 12.48 |
 I noticed this same thing the last time I flew FlyLAL to Lithuania in 2003, but for some reason it struck me especially earlier this month when I flew from Gatwick to Vilnius and back: Lithuanians read lots of newspapers. FlyLAL gives out free copies of Lithuanian dailies on their flights, and on one of my flights this summer, by the time I boarded the flight, all the newspapers were gone.
The FlyLAL flight is already surreal by itself, from the hot pink uniforms worn by all the staff, to the real estate sticker ads clumsily stuck on the overhead compartment doors. The stewardesses pass out menus and sell beer by the half-litre can. People show little respect for either the "no cell phones" rule or the "wait until the plane has come to a complete halt" rule. And, of course, everything is in Lithuanian, including "FlyLAL," which is very, very hard for Lithuanians to pronounce.
But what sticks out most for me is that everyone is reading newspapers. Over the course of the flight back to London, my rowmates* blazed through issues of Vakaro žinios, Lietuvos rytas, and other papers. Others finished not only reading the papers, but also started to go at work on the various crossword puzzles. Imagine sitting on a flight from Chicago to New York, where everyone is reading newspapers, to get a sense of how odd this phenomenon is. In fact, I'm not sure when the last time I saw someone other than I read a newspaper on a domestic flight (and, even so, usually I only buy the NYT for a crossword to occupy me or a Boston Globe to get homesick). I suspected that the reason for this massive influx of print culture on FlyLAL was the result of the newspapers' being free, but then I read:
2005 metais vienam šalies gyventojui per metus teko 64,2 egzemplioriai laikraščių - kiek daugiau nei 2004 (63) ar 2000-aisiais (56,3) metais.
What's interesting is that if you take the number of newspapers sold in the US daily (55 million), multiply by the number of days in a year, and divide by the US population, you get about 66.4 newspapers per American, per year. In other words, if there is a difference in newspaper readership, it's not visible in these back-of-an-envelope numbers. Yet I've never seen as high a percentage of people on a US-based flight (or even on the el, with its abundant, free RedEyes) reading newspapers as I did on FlyLAL. As for what everyone was reading about—that is a story for the next article.
* My rowmates were friends who spoke to me in crystal clear Lithuanian, but between themselves spoke what could best be described as 50/50 Russian and Lithuanian. I'm still getting used to how Russian is used in Lithuania, but the way these guys flipped from language to language with each other was astonishing.
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