Dispatches from Vilnius

I tried to watch the Netflix series the other night, but it was too painful to see these kids rounded up, interrogated and forced into confessions of the rape of a young white woman jogging through Central Park at night.  The boys had supposedly been "wilding," in which they joined a throng of other black teens from the Upper West Side and drifted through the top end of the park, roughing up a couple of bicyclists and some school teacher who ended up in the hospital with head wounds.  They were no where near the proximity of the rape victim, but that didn't stop a prosecutor determined to find suspects to fit the crime.  The police obliged by extorting confessions out of five boys, all but one under 16, who at worst were simply part of the gang of kids.  Nothing suggested they took part in any of the assaults, much less the rape that left the young white woman clinging to her life in a hospital. The story is well known as the boys were eventually cleared of...

For the past three decades Vilnius has been emerging from its post-Soviet slumber to become a contemporary European city.  In recent months, the city has garnered international attention.  First, by creating a Drive-in movie theater at the closed airport in April, where it cleverly staged its Spring film festival.  Second, by announcing that it would give restaurants and bars free space in the downtown by closing off several streets and opening up its plazas to create the largest open-air cafe in Europe.  It took a while for this to happen as the weather wasn't cooperating, but now in the heat of summer thousands of young people have turned the downtown into a lively urban center once again. However, the mayor appears to have taken this transformation a step too far by creating an " Open Beach " in the historic Lukiškės Square, internationally famous for the toppling of the Lenin statue  after the country declared its independence back in 1990.  Th...

Honestly, I think it hurts Southern rednecks more to see their beloved NASCAR taken over by political correctness than it does seeing their revered Confederate statues being torn down.  While the noose in Bubba Wallace's garage turned out to be left over from last October, the sentiment lurked in the shadows.  Many Southern fans hold Bubba personally responsible for having their Dixie flags banned from racetracks.  As a result, all the NASCAR drivers walked with Bubba as he took the pole position at Talladega last weekend.  This is one of the signature racetracks on the circuit, and not surprisingly some person still found a clever way to fly a Dixie flag about the track. Stock car racing holds a special place in the Southern heart. There's nothing rednecks loved more than to beef up their cars and try them out on dirt racetracks all around the South.  Elvis made the sport famous in Speedway .  He was an avid racer himself.  Oddly enough no Di...

I started reading Juneteenth this week but haven't gotten very far yet.  Not that it is a hard book to read.  It just wasn't what I expected.  For some reason, I had gotten it into my head that it was about the Tulsa massacre of 1921, but the story is set in the 1950s with a huge Black minister leading members of his Arkansas congregation to Washington to confront a Senator who had turned his back on his Southern origins and was now vehemently racist in his beliefs.  The senator is gunned down during a speech, in which he suffers from hallucinations throughout.  As he lies on his hospital bed, he calls for the Black minister, much to the surprise of everyone, and we start to learn the relationship between the two men that stretched back to the 1920s. Essentially, the novel is about what Juneteenth meant to Ellison.  He wrote copiously on the theme for many years but never could quite finish the book.  It lay in over 2000 pages upon his death in...

Fox and other conservative news outlets have gone out of their way to paint the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, better known as CHAZ, as an urban war zone that has descended into chaos, violence and extortion, led by the notorious Raz Simone, who now has his very own wiki page .  No one from their news crew has bothered to visit the district, I guess fearing what might happen to their Fox news truck if it tried to pull into the cop-free zone.  It they had they might find out it has been little more than a block party to this point with little or no harm inflicted on anyone, except maybe the ego of the Seattle police chief who was asked to vacant the east precinct office by order of the mayor to avoid any further conflict.  For now, the mayor is content to let the situation play out with the hope that local residents will eventually give up their "autonomous" status without a fight. Anyone who knows Seattle knows that this has been the den of many of the protests that...

I've noticed the term "cancel culture" being thrown around a lot recently.  An upset Ivanka claimed to be a victim   when the Wichita State University President decided to cancel her commencement speech at this year's graduation ceremony.  He's now under heavy fire from the school's board, which has received a sizable amount of money from conservative donors like Charles Koch, who probably suggested her in the first place. Tom Cotton went on for 10 grueling minutes on the Senate floor, claiming the Democrats were engaging in "cancel culture" in the wake of the George Floyd protests, whereby they were giving countenance to the vandalism of statues and the desecration of our democratic values, with Maoist and Jacobin references thrown in for good measure.  It's enough to make you barf, but he has an audience that licks this vomit up . I suppose you could argue that the first daughter's cancellation is a product of cancel culture as t...

One of the challenges I saw recently on facebook was to post a picture of yourself with a black friend to show solidarity for Black Lives Matter.  Sad to say, I don't currently have any black friends in Lithuania, or for that matter on facebook, to share in this challenge.  The last black friend I had was a Nigerian-American professor at the International School of Management, when it first opened up here in Vilnius.  His name was Abel and we would get together from time to time but he returned to the US and we never kept in contact. I was thinking about him when I saw the Black Lives Matter march in Vilnius yesterday.  There were a handful of black persons in the march.  LRT interviewed a young black woman from Nigeria, who was happy to see the outpouring of support as she said she has experienced a number of microaggressions as a student in Kaunas.  These acts of solidarity do make you feel more welcome as a minority. Not all Lithuanians were h...

As our nation descends into chaos, the indelible image will be a shuttered White House with the president hidden deep underground in a bunker.  For those hip to recent horror movies, the scenes playing out on the streets of our nation's major cities look an awful lot like The Purge , only this time cops have been allowed to join in the action.  Not all, mind you, some policemen have shown their solidarity with the protesters , but unfortunately when night falls these peaceful demonstrations have turned into riots. No one knows for sure quite what is going on.  Conservatives are convinced it is the notorious Antifa at work, but surveillance footage has shown that many of these vandals and looters are white and arrests have further shown that some of these " bad actors " are white supremacists who came to these cities hoping to stir up trouble.  Meanwhile, Twitter has been closing down accounts set up by known white supremacist groups posing as Antifa , hoping...

My first impression of Launch America was whether SpaceX cribbed the logo from Giorgio Armani ?  Even the nifty space suits looked like something the Italian fashion designer would come up with.  Everything about the sleek Falcon spacecraft looked like it had been lifted from contemporary Italian design.  Yet, for all its cutting edge look, there is nothing new under the hood. This is a typical rocket that used stages to thrust its spacecraft into orbit.  The only difference is that the fuselage is recoverable, something NASA never worried about before. This is supposed to save big bucks yet NASA paid $2.5 billion for this launch, roughly 30 times what it has been paying Russia to ferry its astronauts to the International Space Station .  That's a yuge price to be able to say we don't need you anymore.  Yet, we see both the President and Elon Musk gloating over the "historic launch."   The only thing historic was the fact NASA contracted ...

In 2012, Vertigo climbed to the top of the Sight and Sound Poll as the greatest movie of all time, thanks to the largest sampling of film critics ever taken.  That's a climb even more impressive than Scottie Ferguson in the closing scene of the movie. Hitch employed a great number of tricks, starting with a classic misdirection.  We are led to believe he is going to follow up on the success of Rear Window, replacing Lisa with Midge in a playful apartment scene very reminiscent of what we had seen before.  Jimmy Stewart is the constant between the two films.  He is now "Scottie" Ferguson, a retired police detective recovering from a nasty fall he took when he couldn't quite make the jump between two buildings in the opening scene.  But, unlike the invalid he played before, Scottie has pretty much recovered and is ready for action. No sooner do we get to know Midge than Hitch introduces us to Madeleine through a long lost friend of Scottie, who is now man...

One of my problems during this lockdown has been staying focused.  I thought I would read more, but no book has held my attention for very long.  I got about halfway through The Satanic Verses before asking myself what is the point of all this? I was trying to figure out why Rushdie faced a fatwa from Iranian clerics?  The only thing I could figure out was his representation of Mohammed as Mahound, a young evangelist trying to convert the king of some giant sand castle to Islam.  Apparently, Mahound is a derogatory term for the great prophet.  It seems Rushdie had fun with revered Muslim names in general, which didn't make the Ayatollah very happy. Islam is still off limits when it comes to making caricatures of its principal religious figures, as we learned with Charlie Hebdo .  No religion today takes itself more seriously than does this religion, much to the chagrin of Arab comics .  You play with its central figures at your own risk....

Studio Ghibli has turned out many wonderful movies but none quite like Spirited Away .  Chihiro took the world by storm in 2002, as this film became a global phenomenon, winning the Oscar at the 2003 Academy Awards for best animation feature.  Hayao Miyazaki did not go to the Dolby Theater to receive the award, citing the war in Iraq . I suppose Miyazaki has Disney to thank for lending English voices and distributing his films in the US, but Studio Ghibli and Disney have gone in two separate directions when it comes to animation.  Miyazaki still rejoices in hand-painted frames while Disney has gone entirely Pixar.  It's ironic because the anime master was influenced by early Disney animated features and it shows in his meticulous work.  Upon seeing Spirited Away for the third time, Roger Ebert described it as a film of "generosity and love."   Every corner of every frame is filled with moving scenes, not just technically but emotionally, something yo...

It was around Season 6 that J.J. Abrams introduced Jacob and Esau  into his television series Lost, and viewers had to endure them for the remainder of the once popular show that you can now watch as syndicated reruns.  The ABC series had already enticed an Evangelical audience and so Abrams and his co-creators decided to shed the earlier science fiction and metaphysical trappings in favor of Biblical ones.  The theme became so heavy handed that it was almost impossible to watch, but after investing so much time into the show I followed it to the bitter end.  A shame really because there were some great moments in that series early on. Abrams has now sunk his claws into Westworld.  This last season was virtually unwatchable, as Abrams appears to have hijacked the show in favor of his Old Testament musings, with the godhead represented by a spherical quantum computer system named Rehoboam that rules the world through an intricate set of algorithms.  ...