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CLJS has opened up their online t-shirt store. Buy one of their popular "Statue of Liberty" t-shirts for only $10 with your credit card or PayPal account online!
As I've milked for almost a year, the first emails I got about inCulto's video for "Welcome (to Lithuania)" were that it was a video developed by a tourist agency. Laughable, still, especially the more and more I watch the video and hear the song. Still there do exist videos made to sell Vilnius as a tourist destination, and they're making a return to BBC and CNN in England this March. As the Baltic Timeswrites:
The commercial is the second production of a televised ad campaign to entice tourists to Vilnius. The Vilnius Board of Tourism began the project in 2005, a year after all three Baltic states joined the European Union and NATO.
“The idea was to make something that was exciting, vibrant, inviting and upbeat,” says the commercial’s director, Donatas Ulvydas. “The Vilnius Board of Tourism wanted to portray people - real people - and feature them in various parts of the capital in order to present Vilnius as a happening European city with exciting possibilities. They wanted to show a city with trendy hotels and modern conveniences, a city full of energy with shiny glass buildings, without forgetting the charming Vilnius Old Town that tourists know and love.”
There's something very disturbing about the article as a whole, in how it engages in its own selling of Vilnius, but, in any case, the video's on YouTube, and here it is, Vilnius For Sale:
How do you respond to this video? With ethnic pride? Does it make you a bit queasy? What iconography of "Vilnius" or of "Lithuania" do you feel it overdoes? What iconography does it totally neglect?
I've been busy, yes, and unable to complete the discussion about the Lithuanian citizenship brouhaha—but it's also become a huge issue that's getting covered on artcles in Amerikos lietuvis and the like. So, I doubt I have anything particularly interesting or new to say. I'm not a immigration lawyer, after all. Plus, I'm behind the ball by now, etc., etc.
I've come back from Brazil, and I will have an article written about the time spent there for PLJS. As for the non-PALJS Suvažiavimas parts, I can only say that Rio is (still) a great city, and I would really like to return again soon—but this time I would hope that the rain could stay in the mountains. We had a lot of fun there, but we didn't stray far from Copacabana. That's only half a complaint; it was really the rain that was dragging us down (and that continued, unfortunately, in São Paulo). São Paulo is, I imagine, a far less impressive city than Rio, or, at least, that's what I get from my time there. It just seems really huge.
In any case, I'm still very eager to start posting here again with some regularity. I hope to start with uploading photos from my trip (there are about 700 that I consider worth putting online), but am not sure that this site's infrastructure is up for it. In general, it seems like the photo aspect of this site is losing steam. Before sites like Facebook and flickr existed, the photos on Lithchat served a noble task. Now, however, the site is slow in comparison to the pro sites, and uploading/commenting/searching/etc. is far more complex, slow, and unrewarding. Furthermore, it seems like I'm the only person still interested in uploading photos on Lithchat, and that's really too bad.
I'm investigating starting up a semi-private, multiple-user contributed photo site on one of the pro sites, but I'm not sure which way to go. Suggestions?
It's true. In October, the Constitutional Court of Lithuania (their version of the SCOTUS) decided that no longer can people become citizens of Lithuania without renouncing their previous citizenship (of, say, the US). This decision has sent shockwaves through the diaspora community; the first email I received announcing the decision was entitled "baisus dalykas." This is clearly going to be an issue for a while now (even though the only appeal is a referendum in Lithuania).
In the meantime, I'm trying to compile a reading list of original documents about this case. I haven't really read through all of them yet, but I can give a sneak preview of my opinion: there is no inherent right to dual-citizenship in the Lithuanian constitution, nor does dual-citizenship even make sense in a post-ethnic-state world, such as the one we live in (despite the protests of our elders). The cries and complaints I'm hearing are either anachronistic or reek of entitlement.
There's a rush to finish up part 2 of the inCulto visit here so that I can start tackling the recent decision from the Lithuanian Supreme Court about the possibility of getting Lithuanian citizenship for people like me (descendents of refugees during World War II). This rush is also convenient, since I'm not sure what to say on a broader, more intellectual level about the inCulto concert. But a few points must be made, regarding what the concert taught CLJS, and what it suggests about the future possibility of importing cultural content from Lithuania.
CLJS lost money on the concert. They were short on the ticket count. I don't think the organization was particularly lavish or extravagant, though some costs did spiral out of control. Simply put, 300 people at an inCulto concert is an insult, both to the amount of publicity CLJS did (and spent money on), and to the quality of the performance. Blame for the scarce turnout can go in lots of directions: Thanksgiving is a busy time, the Sabre Room is an unknown venue, and so on. I don't, personally, think that the ticket price was a deal-breaker for many people—friends complained to me that they were "too broke" to go to the concert, so that would have been true even if tickets were $10, instead of $35. (Of course, at $10 a ticket, CLJS could have sold out the Sabre Room and ran a larger deficit than it is currently running.)
But there are three interrelated issues about that affected the turnout that I do think need addressing, not as a sort of corrective to CLJS in the future, but as a general critique of the way cultural artifacts are packaged and sold among the diaspora community. In other words, this article isn't so much about whether CLJS was "defeated," but, rather, an attempt to imagine a different role for CLJS such that it can do things like sponsor inCulto concerts. The three remaining issues about turnout were: hype, name recognition, and marketing scope.
I've been busy, yes, and unable to complete the discussion about the Lithuanian citizenship brouhaha—but it's also become a huge issue that's getting covered on artcles in 
It's true. In October, the 