Archive for October, 2008

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Crisis? What Crisis?


2008
10.23

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RIGA – It turns out this is a crisis.

To quote a comedic genius of Rowan Atkinson, “A large crisis. In fact, if you’ve got a moment, it’s a twelve-storey crisis with a magnificent entrance hall, carpeting throughout, 24-hour porterage and an enormous sign on the roof, saying ‘This Is a Large Crisis’. A large crisis requires a large plan. Get me two pencils and a pair of underpants!”

Global markets are falling. The crisis of liquidity has arrived as the economy is entering a recession. Many will lose their jobs. And the three Baltic states find themselves but specks on the surface of the twelve-storey crisis. Each with its unique story to tell about it.

As it could be expected, politicians here in Latvia blame the world economic slowdown for such a poor performance of the Latvian economy. After years of double-digit growth fueled by cheap Scandinavian credits, the economic growth here plummeted in the last quarter to almost zero. Tax revenues dwindled. The government has been forced to cut jobs, freeze wages, eliminate ministries, and build libraries. Businesses warn they’ll be cutting jobs, sending the unemployment rate into the territory of double digits.

Not a pretty picture.

But blame to a greater extent lays with those same politicians. During the fat three years of the stout ex-prime minister the government spent as much as it raked in. No one wanted to save, no one needed to save. On the first taxi ride from the airport home when I first returned in the summer of 2007, the taxi driver had it all figured out. The inflation was a good thing, he told me. It meant the economy was growing. The former prime minister Aigars Kalvitis and his transport blabbermouth minister Ainars Slesers aimed to catch up with western Europe in the matter of a decade. Now, the pot-smoking haze of the last three years is beginning to recede and we’re recovering to brutal reality. Have to grow the economy the hard way.

Here, everyone knows why Latvian economy is in a slump. Granted, the world economic downturn amplifies the crisis, but it’s not what has caused the slowdown. Alas, for reporters like Peter O’Hanrahanrahan the Baltics are bound to be next to go down after that peculiar place called Iceland. And even though the headline reads “Baltic states could follow Iceland’s lead, warns IMF” it is actually The Independent that is warning us.

Spare me.

If Mr. Hanrahanraha had been familiar with the Baltics, he would have known that Scandinavian banks that lend money here, not local ones. The second largest bank Parex has yet to say anything about having difficulties and needing of a bailout. Lending came from Sweden as today’s earning reports of those banks show.

The world crisis have had its impact on lending certainly, but not to the extent that The Independent would have us believe.

Sometimes, I think I would feel better to put my underpants on my head and stick two pencils in my nose than reading news about the perpetual crisis.

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The Splendid Palace


2008
10.09

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RIGA – A location of the cinema Riga on Elizabetes iela has long offered city dwellers bread and circuses.

From the dawn of the 19th century to the present day, visitors and locals alike have stormed to watch films, variety shows, even fighting championships. The first theater, “Olympia”, was located near present-day cinema Riga. It started showing moving pictures in the summer of 1905 in the nearby park located in the place of today’s Riga cinema. In 1918, a famous Latvian architect Eižens Laube rebuilt the wooden theater building.
In the fall of 1919, the new cinema called “Maska” (Mask, pictured) opened its doors to the public, offering a variety of moving pictures, including “Latvija Top,” whose ad is shown on the right. Certainly it wasn’t the first cinema in the city, but it grew popular with the public.

Two days before the New Year in 1923, a new cinema opens near “Maska.” Russian businessman Vasily Emelyanov opened the cinema “Splendid Palace,” which will much later become Cinema Riga. Born in St. Petersburg, Emelyanov decided not to return to Russia after the Bolshevik coup in 1917. He remained in the Baltics and opened a chain of movie theaters in four Baltic capitals, Helsinki, Tallinn, Riga, and Kaunas. In Latvia, he formed a company named “Ars” which owned also other movie theaters in the city. The theater showed European and American films as the company signed agreements with American movie studios. The first film shown at the Splendid Palace was a drama adventure Under Two Flags about a love triangle in the French Algeria.

On the run from punishment for a crime committed by his brother, Bertie Cecil (alias Lewis Victor) joins the French Foreign Legion. In Algeria, he becomes the hated rival of his commander, Chateauroy, who despises Victor’s breeding and also competes for the same woman. Victor is beloved of Cigarette, an Algerian camp follower, who saves his life, though he love another.

The theater also showed Coney Island, a film with comedy geniuses, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Buster Keaton. The Splendid Cinema became the first theater to show films with sound. It became the motion picture called the Singing Fool, shown here in 1929. Ten years later, the Great Leader Kārlis Ulmanis attended the showing of the Latvian sound film, “A Fisherman’s Son.”

However, the Splendid Palace cinema was so much more than its repertoire. Today, the building is a national monument of architecture, originally designed by the architect Fridrihs Skujiņš, who also designed the present-day Cabinet of Ministers on the opposite side of the street. To this day, the Splendid Cinema remains tucked it behind an architectural eyesore, a casino (pictured below).


“Maska” remained under construction until 1947 when it was opened under a new name “Spartak” (Spartacus), a specialized movie theater that showed non-stop documentaries. In the 1980s, it became the first stereo theater in Riga. And now its screen is used as the second screen of the movie theater Riga.

When the Soviets arrived in Riga in 1940, both theaters transformed into the mouthpiece of the Soviet propaganda, showing Soviet epics like “Lenin in October.” In spite of attempts to appease new authorities, Emelyanov was arrested by the Soviets and on June 14, 1941, deported to Siberia, where he died 8 years later. Under the German occupation, “Maska” became a closed theater for the German military.

After the war, “Maska” remained closed down, while “Splendid Palace” opened with a war epic on November 6, 1945. Interestingly enough, its Western bourgeoisie-like name “Splendid Palace” had remained the theater’s name until the early 1950s when it was renamed into a politically correct “Riga.” When Latvia regained its independence back in 1991, the sweeping wave of returning historical names to streets and parks avoided the movie theater.