I’ve been asked about a few updates to the dual citizenship project that was called about a year ago by outgoing president Valdas Adamkus. The idea was to figure out a way to grant dual citizenship to emigrants, whose foreign born babies would be dual citizens, without going afoul of the Constitutional Court’s decision back [...]
Other versions: VO [no subtitles] | YouTube | YouTube (VO) | Facebook | Soundcloud (Radio Edit) [mp3] After watching each permutation of the “East European Funk” video several times in order to write about the song in the lead up to the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest, I was rather infected by the song’s catchiness.1 So [...]
I don’t usually use this space to advertise things I’m doing, mostly since I tend not to do things that I think deserve attention. But since this project is closely related to some recent posts on this site, and since, well, this is my site, I think I can tease it here: The reveal from [...]
Today the news reported that the Vilnius municipal government, under pressure from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is renaming K. Sirvydo gatvė after Lech Kaczyński, who now everyone knows perished over the weekend in a surprising plane crash outside of Smolensk on the way to a memorial service of the Polish officers who were killed [...]
As the European Broadcast Union determines whether “Eastern European Funk,” in suggesting inequality between eastern and western Europeans, suffers from having political content, Lietuvos Rytas yesterday published an article by Andrius Užkalnis that argues a similar point of inequality, but from the entirely opposite direction. Užkalnis, the most famous Lithuanian living in England now that [...]
Continue reading about You are William the Conqueror, not Vilius the Vergas!
Because of the victory in Eurovision 2008 by the Timbaland-produced “Believe” (video of Dima Bilan’s semi-final performance, featuring ice skating by Evgenij Pljushchenko), the 2009 edition of the European Song Contest was hosted by Russia (the victor each year hosts the following year’s competition). Georgia, who had, of course, recently fought a brief war with [...]
One of my favorite movies of 2008 was Edward Zwick’s Defiance. I didn’t particularly like it because of its cinematic qualities—though the color, photography, and performances by the two leads (pictured) were excellent—but, rather, for the way it subverts in its retelling a story familiar to every child of the Lithuanian Diaspora: the fight of [...]
Continue reading about Brown is never equal to Red; Brown is always worse
Other than the Lithuanian President’s decision last month not to grant citizenship to ice dancer Katherine Copely, things have been rather quiet on the citizenship front. However, this week, there is some news. The current citizenship law in Lithuania adopted in mid-2008, which has been the basis of my popular “Guide to a Passport” series, [...]
Continue reading about Current Lithuanian citizenship law deadline extended
Over on Twitter, Jurate has been doing yeoman’s work in trying to put the recent “Section-28-style” law that was passed in Lithuania yesterday into context. Pink news describes the law in this way: The law, titled ‘Law on the Protection of Minors against the Detrimental Effect of Public Information’, includes “the propaganda of homosexuality [or] [...]
Continue reading about Is the new law in Lithuania really homophobic?
The biggest, by far and away, task facing the myriad diaspora Lithuanian organizations that had been formed before 1990 was, after Lithuania regained its independence, figuring out how to integrate the new wave of immigrants into the diaspora society. Many casual and lazy prognoses about the difficulty these organizations have faced since 1990 blame the [...]
