Moacir P. de Sá Pereira on February 9th, 2009

I read today on Café Blogas that MTV News has started a new ad campaign featuring popstars getting, for lack of a better word, tortured by faceless individuals. During the torture, a microphone looms, in order to record whatever comes from the person’s mouth. Accompanying these staggeringly graphic photos is the slogan, “naujienos bet kokia [...]

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Moacir P. de Sá Pereira on January 27th, 2009

Keeping the core of the Inculto rhythm section intact, Jurgis Didžiulis has added a heavy synth profile for a new band, TWNKL. The sound is very removed from Inculto, which is saying quite a bit, considering how genre-bending Inculto was in Marijos žemės superhitai, an album I still haven’t come around to reviewing here. So [...]

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Moacir P. de Sá Pereira on January 21st, 2009

A lot has happened since I posted my review of my friend Karolis’s novel, Finding the Moon in Sugar. Here are a few useful links: Interview with Karolis on lrytas.lt. A decent interview, it goes into quite a bit of biographical detail. Buy the book from Buy Books on the Web. The novel can be [...]

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Moacir P. de Sá Pereira on January 6th, 2009

[Disclosure: The author of this novel is a good friend of mine, but he neither solicited this review nor has he seen it before its posting.] The surname “Nowak,” like its Balto-Slavic variants throughout Eastern Europe (“Новотный,” “Nowicki,” “Naujokas,” etc.), was affixed to the newcomer. Where the other villagers would have names based on occupations, [...]

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Moacir P. de Sá Pereira on December 30th, 2008

Today, Ar dar krizė?‘s answer is, “Krizė? Krizė. Krizė!” And it’s about time that the financial crisis started affecting even this low-budget operation over at Lithchat Command. And it has: Alfa English, which I had been pointed to by the editor of Lietuviams.com, has been shuttered. “Budget concerns,” explains Ieva Barasukaitė, have forced the “indefinite [...]

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Moacir P. de Sá Pereira on December 17th, 2008

The Lithuanian economy is crumbling, and financial analysts are getting excited about GDP contraction that isn’t as bad as they imagined. There is even a webpage you can check to see if the crisis is still going on. And all of this is happening with a brand new government just sworn in, a government that [...]

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Moacir P. de Sá Pereira on December 4th, 2008

I saw the two articles pop up a few weeks ago in which Valdas Adamkus asserted that someday Soviet and Nazi attrocities will be held at the same level. The occasion for his remarks was his address at an observance of the 75th anniversary of the Holodmor, the Stalin-era famine that killed a large portion [...]

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Moacir P. de Sá Pereira on December 3rd, 2008

Pete sent along this link to a bunch of illustrations done by Stasys Eidrigevičius. Though the post identifies him as “Polish,” he was born in Lithuania and completed his formal training there. Since 1980, however, he has been living in Poland. The illustrations manage to capture a certain sense of fear and seeking of comfort. [...]

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Moacir P. de Sá Pereira on December 1st, 2008

In addition to the usual Turkey Weekend antics that the Lithuanian-American youth of Chicagoland has come to expect, this year Lemont also hosted the 14th iteration of the Mokslo ir kūrybos simpoziumas. It’s an opportunity for various academics to get together and talk about their research in a bunch of very broadly conceived panels. It [...]

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Moacir P. de Sá Pereira on September 8th, 2008

Izvestia has thrown together a map of the four different kinds of attitudes towards Russia EU nations display, from Russophobia to Russophilia. I learned about the map from this article on alfa, and have reproduced the map here. You can click on the image to get a bigger version, and the original is, for now, [...]

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