Dispatches from Vilnius

No sooner did I chip away the ice along one side of the driveway than it starts snowing.  A deep freeze last night turned it into an ice skating lane again.  Sun is out this morning so there is some hope it may partially melt away by the end of the day, but the office building next door casts most of the driveway in shadow.  Oh well! I went to get my laptop charger cable, having forgotten it at the office.  There were quite a few runners out, but most were opting for the road and not the sidewalks, as they were pretty slippery affairs.  This is one reason I quit running in winter, as I had taken too many falls and at my age the last thing I need is a hip replacement.  Unfortunately, Vilnius didn't put all its new municipal heating lines under the sidewalks, like other countries have done in their northern cities. Somehow it feels like this will be a short winter, as it came early.  Chirping sparrows moving to the outer branches of the hedges, soaking i...

Sadly, it was an obvious choice, Rogan or Young?   Joe Rogan is bringing in big money for Spotify.  Neil Young not so much.  The only way such a boycott would work is if Young can enlist other musicians to deliver the same ultimatum, but as I understand Neil doesn't have that many friends anymore after the fallout over leaving Pegi .  But, I get his point. Turns out Neil battled polio as a child and still had recurring bouts many years later.  So for him the vaccine is important, as is treating yourself properly if you do catch COVID.  Something Rogan and the folks at Spotify will never understand.  For them, it is all about revenue, and Rogan is the king of Bullshit Mountain right now, drawing in a massive number of viewers to his crappy show and saying anything and everything that will draw more in.  Spotify has gone from being a music streaming platform to another peak in the Bullshit Mountain range.  I'm glad I dropped it long ...

Daina decided to stay home today and sort through all our papers, getting our home ownership and other important documents in order, should we need to move at a moment's notice.  There is a lot of anxiety over Russian troop movements, not just in their proximity of Ukraine, but the Baltic countries as well.  Some Lithuanian political scientists think Ukraine may simply be a ruse and that Putin may strike the Baltics.  This has been a constant worry ever since he became Russian president. My older cousin called me out of the blue on messenger to express his concerns, having recently watched a segment of Fareed Zakaria's CNN program, in which the Baltics were mentioned.  Anne Applebaum noted that Putin's ambitions are much broader than Ukraine and that he very much wants to reconstitute the USSR.  Putin called the dissolution of the Soviet Union the " greatest geopolitical tragedy " of the 20th century, and has long expressed his disdain for NATO.  He li...

The so-called Moscow House has been a bone of contention ever since construction began in 2010.  It was designed with the hope to establish better relations between Moscow and Vilnius when Yury Luzhkov was mayor.  It was supposed to be a center for cultural and business exchange.  However, Luzhkov ran afoul of Putin, and was forced to resign, and not much was heard from him afterward.  He died in 2019.  Construction continued just the same, with a mysterious new client trying to add an extra floor atop, which led to a stop construction order in 2016, and the building was taken over by graffiti artists. It's in a very prominent location, one that is undergoing massive urban renewal, so the Vilnius mayor wants the building torn down, calling it " functionally incomplete and irrational ." Of course, much depends on the owner, unless the mayor plans to seize the building by eminent domain, setting off another row with Moscow, which Vilnius is not on very good terms ...

While fishing around for a better copy of Steely Dan's Pretzel Logic , I came across Rosie Vela , a model turned chanteuse, who seemed to only turn out one album in the 80s, enlisting the help of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker.  As a result, she's credited with bringing Steely Dan back together, as they had parted ways after Gaucho .  I was a big fan of this duo, so coming across this album was a nice addition, especially when it only sold for four euros.  Doesn't seem like Rosie ever built much of a following. I've long been drawn to obscure titles like this, adding a little character to my album collection.  I got back into LPs a few years ago, when I couldn't find a CD of Crystal Gayle's We Must Believe in Magic .  I had found myself humming Don't It Makes My Brown Eyes Blue .  I eventually bought a Rega Planar 1 turntable, a tiny Pro-ject pre-amp and a pair of Edifier powered speakers, so that it all fit comfortably at one end of my table in the attic. ...

The Humanitas bookstore was unloading some of their backlog at half price, so I picked up an Architectural and Cultural Guide to Pyongyang and a Taschen photo book of Soviet Brutalist architecture.  Not that I'm a big fan of either, but it is interesting to look into the dark side.   Brutalism has seen quite a revival in recent years with major efforts to preserve some of the more famous surviving buildings from the era.  Our sports palace remains as forlorn as ever.  There have been numerous plans to restore it, but so far it hasn't happened.  Each time we drive by it, my wife points out how much it looks like Chandigarh from the backside .  A little bit, I guess, but not so much that I have any particular affinity for it.  I just remember taking our kids to see Riverdance and the Shaolin Kung Fu Masters there shortly before the auditorium was shut down for safety reasons. It's not so much the architecture as it is the purpose of the building tha...

Watching  The Lost Daughter  brought to mind the time our kids tried to escape us, if but for a moment, in Barcelona.  We had devoted the first half of the vacation to them - taking them to the Lloret de Mar, which included water slides and other fun activities - and now we wanted a little bit of time to explore the city.  Unfortunately, kids don't like to bargain.  Or, if they do, mostly on their terms.  One Gaudi masterpiece was OK, two pushing it, three too many.  Our daughter had enough and conspired with her younger brother to remind us who we should be considering the most on vacation. We were at Parc Guell, and for a brief moment got lost in the grotto, so to speak.  My wife and I are both architects, so we were looking closely at how Gaudi pulled off all these remarkable details.  They seemed so simple, yet so complex.  Next thing we know the kids are gone.  We had thought we just lost sight of them, but we couldn't find the...

I've been helping my daughter put together a 6000-word paper on the abuse women take in Hollywood, both through the fetishisation of dead actesses and the Lolita effect in which young actresses are paired with much older men.  I hadn't really thought about the former, but I read that a lot of women were very upset  with the way Sharon Tate was portrayed in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood . Way back in 2019 when the film was presented at the Cannes Film Festival, Farah Nayeri dared to ask the vaunted auteur why Margot Robbie had so little screen time as Sharon Tate.  Quentin angrily shot back, "I reject your hypothesis."  It was Margot who tried to answer Farah's question by saying "the moments I was on screen gave a moment to honor Sharon."  I doubt Quentin was very happy with that answer. The film was almost universally praised at the time, but Nayeri's point was spot on.  Viewers had been led to believe that Sharon Tate would be at the center of the...

I've tried to steer away from politically charged posts, part of my 2020 New Year's resolution, but can't resist the occasional post or comments, especially in regard to anti-vaxxers.  This really gets my goat.  You would think that health and safety would be something everyone could agree on, but there are people out there who think it is their god-given right to spread viruses and the rest of the world be damned.  It is understandable that an idiot like Marjorie Taylor Greene is an anti-vaxxer, as she is little more than trailer trash, but it is shocking when someone of Robert Kennedy Jr.'s pedigree becomes one of the most ardent anti-vaxxers in the COVID era.  Yet, he is still allowed to spread his misinformation on twitter and fb.  This I simply don't understand.   In Lithuania, a group managed to garner 100,000 signatures in protest to the green passes that the country requires to enter any major public venue, handing the huge petition over to t...