#lithuanian singers

[unhonestlymirror]

MONIKAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

[yourdailyqueer]

Sufjan Stevens

Gender: Male

Sexuality: Gay

DOB: 1 July 1975

Ethnicity: White - Lithuanian, Greek

Nationality: American

Occupation: Singer, songwriter, musician

[postcard-from-the-past]

Lithuanian-German actress and singer Cornell Borchers on a vintage postcard

[cuntvonkrolock]

it's super funny to me that the most famous lithuanian is hannibal fucking lecter

[higherentity]

[honeygrahambitch]

I love two blondies at this point in my life

[damiano-david]

"It seems like the main singer borrowed his outfit from Måneskin, but just didn't consider that the sizes might be different" - Lithuanian commentator about Ireland

[hrrtshape]

𝓜Y 𝓕AME 𝒟R ✶

　 ﾟ　　⊹　₊　　𓏵　　˚　　 ∿

— ACTING scene.

Born to cinematic royalty, the daughter of […], a multiple Oscar-winning Russian director and actor, and […], an Oscar-winning French-Lithuanian model and actress, it seemed only natural that the spotlight found […]. From her very first steps into the industry, she was destined to shake the world.

Her first role as a precocious four-year-old in Ponette (2002) stunned audiences with an astonishing portrayal of grief and disillusionment, carrying the film’s themes of innocence lost with an eerie maturity. This debut set the stage for a career of bold, emotionally intense roles. By 2006, she had returned with Little Miss Sunshine as Olive, snatching up an Oscar nomination and making it clear that her raw talent was no passing phenomenon. With each subsequent role — Léon as Matilda, Atonement as Briony, True Grit, and Lolita in the titular role — she not only proved herself, but solidified her place as the youngest actor to hold the industry’s record for Oscar nominations.

Her meteoric rise continued through her adolescence. Moonrise Kingdom showcased her quirky charm, and at just 15, she won an Oscar for the haunting role of Nina Sayers in Black Swan (2013). The following year, she starred in The Grand Budapest Hotel, adding to her artistic credentials. After a brief break to delve into music, she returned with a bang in 2017, snagging another Oscar nomination for her nuanced portrayal in Greta Gerwig’s Ladybird meanwhile only being 19.

The following years unfolded like chapters from a film lover's dream, she transformed into the unforgettable Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Little Women marked another Gerwig-Chalamet collaboration, and her hauntingly layered performance in Strange Colours landed her dual Oscar nominations in 2020. Following these, however, she took a two-year hiatus, retreating from both the screen and the public eye.

In 2021, her triumphant return was cemented with Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, and she won yet another Oscar for Un Profil Perdu, a striking adaptation of Françoise Sagan's novel. She made her TV debut the same year as Beth Harmon in The Queen's Gambit, snagging her first Emmy and completing her EGOT status.

In the horror genre, she became an icon through her roles as Pearl and Maxine in Ti West’s trilogy, a chilling and mesmerizing presence that has become a classic. Balancing this with arthouse flair, she won another Oscar in 2024 for her work in Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things, an achievement that only further cemented her as one of the most versatile talents of her time. Continuing her partnership with Lanthimos, she next appeared in Kinds of Kindness and took on the subtlety of a supporting role as Livia Cardew in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

Currently, she’s filming Frankenstein with Jacob Elordi, under the visionary direction of Guillermo del Toro.

— SINGING scene.

In 2015, at just 17, […] stunned the industry with her debut album, Born to Die. While her persona had leaned toward a softer, introspective vibe, this album unveiled a darker, bolder edge, sparking conversations on whether her artistry was more than mere nepotism. The album, which she described as “a homage to true love and a tribute to living life on the wild side,” received widespread acclaim and earned her a Grammy, forever reshaping the path for singers with an art-house, cinematic style.

A year later, she proved herself a versatile force with Ultraviolence. At 18, she shifted to a rawer, rock-inspired sound that echoed late ’90s ballads—an era drenched in gritty romance that she knew was bad, yet stayed and kept on yearning. With this album, she traded the glamour of her debut for smoky eyeshadows, hushed rebellion, and a sense of reckless freedom. A true chameleon, […] effortlessly moved through each theme, establishing her as not just a hitmaker but a storyteller with profound depth.

By 2017, she unveiled Honeymoon and Lust for Life. Honeymoon, delicate and introspective, was an ode to solitude—a quiet journey of self-reflection after the chaos of love and fame. Shedding leather jackets and gritty, abusive romances, and leaned into a softer aesthetic with oversized ’60s shades, capturing the bittersweet nostalgia of being alone. Though tranquil, Honeymoon pulsed with an intense emotional current, a transitional phase in her artistic journey—a chrysalis stage that would blossom with Lust for Life.

Turning just 20, […] released Lust for Life, describing its aesthetic as a “retro sensibility with a futuristic flare.” With this album, she found an equilibrium, blending hip-hop influences with her signature baroque pop. She shifted her gaze outward, integrating a budding political consciousness into her art. It was her goodbye to the heavier, beat-driven tracks of her past and a welcoming of a more introspective, hopeful phase—a celebration of life and resilience.

Then, in 2019, she gave the world Norman Fucking Rockwell! On her fifth album, she wove together themes of freedom, transformation, and the raw beauty of survival, solidifying her as one of America's most gifted songwriters. Lyrically rich and brimming with Americana references—from jazz and girl groups to Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Springsteen—NFR felt like an act of defiance, celebrating the multitudes within her. Pitchfork awarded it a rare 9.4, making NFR her highest-rated album to date, a crowning jewel in her musical legacy.

In 2021, after a long, silent hiatus, […] returned with her sixth album, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, named in homage to the 2013 horror film of the same name. The album opens with the haunting ballad Without You Without Them, a reflective piece laced with gratitude, privilege, and the bittersweet reality of her upbringing. The tone shifts quickly, though, as tracks like Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires, Gibson Girl, and Ptolemaea dive into guilt, cynicism, and the inner torment that had long shadowed her life and career. With each track, she peels back more layers, embracing her darkness, fully leaning into themes of self-doubt and raw vulnerability. The album’s intensity reaffirmed her place as a visionary, a creator unafraid to blur the lines between beauty and brutality.

In 2023, she unleashed Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard, a sprawling, enigmatic odyssey through memory and myth. This seventh album is an embodiment of “psychoamericana,” a term that feels tailor-made for her evolution—a tangled journey through her personal folklore and the collective dreams of America. In an interview from 2014, where she once said she wished she was dead, and the media pounced on her, dissecting every word. Ocean Boulevard feels like a reclamation of that misinterpreted despair, an attempt to find rhythm in the chaos, a meditation in a misty forest of memories, with the strings and Wurlitzer tracing the delicate breadcrumbs of her reflections.

Looking ahead, […] has hinted at an upcoming album originally planned for September 2024 under the working title Lasso. Leaning toward country and Southern Gothic vibes, she explained her struggle with its identity, pausing its release as she wrestled with the album’s intensely American aesthetic. “It stopped feeling like me,” she confessed. Now, she promises a slightly lighter yet unmistakably pointed lyrical style, with classic Southern Gothic and country inflections. So far, there’s no set release date that is set in stone.

[eretzyisrael]

At the extraordinary UN General Assembly in New York (2021), held at the request of the leaders of the European Union and the New Arab Bloc, Israeli representative Miriam Novak spoke.

Standing on a high podium against the backdrop of the green marble wall of the main UN meeting room, Miriam Novak said into the microphone:

 Ladies and Gentlemen! As you can see, eighty years ago, Europe, led by Germany, carried out an ethnic cleansing:

 it destroyed almost all the Jews living there. The French, Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians - all helped the Nazis.

You killed at least six million Jews along with their newborn babies.

Each of them could give the world children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, so you can safely multiply the number of those killed four or five times...

And now, when we are again robbed, beaten and killed in all your countries, and your courts set the murderers free, you tell us that we have no right to defense?

 Don't we have the right to warn our enemies that we will respond to a new ethnic cleansing with an even more powerful blow? 

Maybe you can name another nation that your new international community led by Iran is so fanatically striving to destroy? And for what? 

For two thousand years we lived among you, giving you our knowledge, discoveries and inventions. 

We have given you the alphabet, the Bible, the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ, the twelve apostles, Spinoza, Disraeli, Columbus[?], Newton, Nostradamus, Heine, Mendelssohn, Einstein, Singer, Eisenstein, Freud, Landau, Gershwin, Offenbach, Rubinstein, Sen -Sans[?], Kafka, Lombroso, Montaigne, Mahler, Marcel Marceau, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Yehudi Menuhin, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Miller, Maya Plisetskaya, Stanley Kubrick, Irving Berlin, Edward Teller, Lyon Feuchtwanger, Paul Newman, Robert Oppenheimer, Benny Goodman, Eugene Ionesco, Imre Kalman, Marcel Proust, Charlie Chaplin[?], Marc Chagall, Barbra Streisand, Claude Lelouch, Steven Spielberg, Anouk Aimee, Leonard Bernstein, Norbert Wiener, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Andrew Lloyd Webber and thousands of other scientists and educators. 

Just imagine how many of the same geniuses the millions of Jews you killed, and then their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, could give birth to the world!

But these unborn geniuses disappeared forever in the ovens of crematoria, burned synagogues and mass graves.

So do you really think that with your resolutions, boycotts and sanctions we can be driven into gas chambers again? 

No, gentlemen! 

Having lived among you for two thousand years, we had to adapt to you and learn not only your languages but also something of your psychology. Otherwise, how would we have survived in Persia without Persian treachery? In Spain without Spanish cruelty? In Germany without German obedience to discipline? In France without French stinginess? In Poland, without Polish swagger, and in Russia, without swearing and the Russian habit of using yard toilets, where you need to sit like an eagle and talk about your spiritual greatness? - (Laughter in the hall.)

Read the whole thing. EY

[eurovision-revisited]

Eurovision 2004 - Number 44 - Rūta Ščiogolevaitė - "Over"

This isn't Rūta Ščiogolevaitė's first dance at a Lithuanian national final, but this is the beginning of a remarkable run of five entries over the next twelve years in which she is never out of the top five. Who is Rūta? From the age of 14, she's been taking singing lessons at a conservatoire in Vilnius. She's been touring and singing all over the world throughout her student years. She's been collaborating with other Lithuanian musicians and singing backing vocals. By 2004, she was on the cusp of becoming one of the more well-known singers in Lithuania.

In 1999, she took part in the first Lithuanian national selection show, but on that occasion she didn't make it into the top four. After five years refining her craft, she's back with a song written by the same group of Estonians who are also busy writing songs for Euro Laul this year...

Over is power pop that at times threatens to deploy some of the hooks of Call Me Maybe seven years before that song was written, but backs off that into a 1980s-infused vocal showcase for Rūta. She's got it. Even if she's pushing her voice to the limits of the power notes it can handle, she's proves she can sing this material with confidence. She is a performer who knows how to handle a stage. The magnitude of her presence far exceeds everyone else in Eurovizijos Atranka this year.

The jury wanted her. They placed her first of all the acts. However, the televote were besotted with a big name band and quirkier performances. They placed her fifth leaving her in a three-way tie for first place.

I have no idea what the tie-break rule was. The act that came third was the one the televoters wanted. Rūta was the judges choice and came second. The act that came second with both won the tie-break. It may well have been decided by running order with the earlier performance winning. Rūta lost to the the ultimate compromise candidate, and subsequently Lithuania finished 16th in the first Eurovision semi-final.

Eurovizijos Atranka this year was her launch pad. By 2007, and her next appearance in the national final, she had been voted Lithuania's Brightest Star and had the biggest radio hit of that year. Despite all this success Rūta never won Eurovizijos Atranka. She hasn't represented Lithuania at Eurovision and remains of the bigger national final secrets. Her last attempt came in 2016 (after declaring in 2011 she wouldn't return) by which time she'd been a judge on the Lithuanian X Factor, won the Lithuanian Masked Singer and has been a mentor on the Lithuanian Voice.

[unhonestlymirror]

Lithuanian-Armenian soprano Asmik Grigorian makes her Met debut as Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Xian Zhang conducts Anthony Minghella’s iconic production.

Videography by Neville Braithwaite / Met Opera

[yourdailyqueer]

Silvester Belt

Gender: Male

Sexuality: Bisexual

DOB: 26 November 1997

Ethnicity: White - Lithuanian

Occupation: Singer, songwriter

Note: Represented Lithuania in Eurovision 2024

[postcard-from-the-past]

Lithuanian-American singer and actor Al Jolson on a vintage postcard

[girlactionfigure]

Brave Austrian Sergeant

Saved over 250 lives

Anton Schmid was an Austrian electrician and devout Catholic who became a sergeant in the German army and used his position to help Jews in a variety of bold and ingenious ways.

Born in Vienna in 1900, Anton came from a humble background and was raised in the Roman Catholic church. After graduating from elementary school, he didn’t have the luxury of continuing his education but instead apprenticed as an electrician so he could help support his family.  In 1918, Anton was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army and fought fiercely on the front lines in some of the final battles of World War I. After the war, Anton returned to Vienna, where he married a Catholic woman named Stefanie and had a daughter, Greta. He opened a small radio shop where he employed two Jews and lived a quiet life with his family. Nonpolitical and introverted, Anton tended to avoid conflict, until the German annexation of Austria in 1938, which led to increased persecution of Vienna’s Jewish population. Anton watched the rising hatred with alarm, and reached his limit when the home of his Jewish neighbor was viciously vandalized . Anton made a citizen’s arrest of the man responsible and then helped several desperate Jewish friends escape into Czechoslovakia. When war broke out in 1939 after Germany’s invasion of Poland, Anton was drafted into the German army as a sergeant at age 39 and sent to German-occupied Vilnius in Lithuania, where he was given a desk job due to his age. Anton’s military responsibilities included locating German soldiers who’d been separated from their units and reassigning them. He  interrogated them and he took pity on many who’d gone AWOL due to combat fatigue, declining to charge them with desertion or cowardice, which would have resulted in execution. 

In September 1941, 3700 Lithuanian Jews were rounded up and massacred in a pit outside of Vilnius. From his window, Anton had a view of the gathering point, and he was shocked and outraged by the ugly violence he witnessed. On that day Anton determined to do whatever he could to help Jews, no matter the danger to himself. The first Jew Anton helped was Max Salinger, a Polish Jew who was stateless and desperate. Anton gave him the identity papers of Private Max Huppert, a German soldier who’d been killed, and employed him as a typist in the military office, where Max worked until the end of the war. Anton next helped Luisa Emaitisaite, a young Jewish stenographer who was caught outside the ghetto after curfew and faced imminent death. Perhaps sensing something kind in his face, Luisa begged Anton for help and he hid her in his own apartment, then procured false identity papers for her and hired her as a stenographer. Like Max, Luisa survived the war due to Anton’s efforts.

Anton was just getting started. After the Germans occupied Lithuania, they impounded many businesses, and then needed workers to keep them running. In the beginning, facing a lack of skilled workers, the Germans were willing to employ Jews and provided them with work permits, which they called “leave from death papers” as they prevented the holders from deportation to concentration camps. However, in October 1941, killing Jews became top priority for the occupying German army, and they rescinded Jews’ work permits. Those working in Anton’s office begged him for help and he found an ingenious way to save them. He requisitioned military vehicles and festooned them with prominent signs warning of  “dangerous explosives” inside. They passed through military checkpoints without being searched and the Nazis didn’t realized that the trucks were actually filled with Jews. Anton drove them to Lida, a nearby town where Jews were not yet being arrested. Anton also obtained valid “leave from death papers” and was able to employ 103 Jews in a variety of positions. 

During this time, Anton hid Hermann Adler, a Jewish poet and resistance fighter, and his wife Anita, a well-known opera singer, in his small apartment. Through Hermann, Anton met other Jews active in the ghetto resistance and provided supplies that helped them commit acts of sabotage against the Nazi occupiers. Because of his ties to the Jewish resistance movement, Anton was arrested in January 1942 and imprisoned in an army jail. On February 25 he was sentenced to death. In his final letter to his family, Anton explained what motivated his heroic actions. “I want to tell you how this all came about. The Lithuanian military herded many Jews to a meadow outside of town and shot them, each time around two thousand to three thousand people. On their way they killed the children by hurling them against the trees, etc., you can imagine.” Perhaps Anton knew that the Nazis would one day deny what they’d done, and he wanted to leave a record of the atrocity. He told his family, “I have just acted as a human.” If only more people had acted like humans during that dark time.

Anton was executed by firing squad on April 13, 1942. Nobody knows how many Jews he saved, but the number is upwards of 250. In 1945, Hermann Adler published a collection of poetry in Switzerland, including the prose poem “Songs from the City of Death,” dedicated to Anton Schmid. Adler described Anton as “a socially awkward man in thought and speech” and a saintly figure. When Jews in the Vilna ghetto heard about Anton’s execution, they recited Kaddish, the Jewish mourners prayer. 

After Anton’s death, his widow Stefanie was harassed by her neighbors, who smashed her windows and called her late husband a traitor. Anton was not acknowledged by Austria as a victim of the Nazis, so his families did not receive government support. When Max Tenenbaum, then in Israel, heard that Stefanie and Greta Schmid were living in poverty, he traveled to Vienna to tell them what Anton had done for him. From Israel, Max provided Stefanie and Greta with ongoing financial support, and publicized the story through his work as a journalist. In 1964, Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem honored Anton Schmid as Righteous Among the Nations and brought his widow to Jerusalem to accept an award and plant a tree in her husband’s memory in the Garden of the Righteous. In 1965 the Simon Wiesenthal Center helped Stefanie travel to Vilna, where her husband was buried (Soviet regulations restricted movement), and erected a new gravestone with the inscription “Here Rests a Man Who Thought It Was More Important To Help His Fellow Man Than To Live.”

Abba Kovner, one of the few ghetto resistance fighters to survive, later testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” Kovner testified that the first time he heard of the unrepentant mass murderer was from Anton Schmid who told him of a rumor that “there is one dog called Eichmann and he arranges everything.” On the stand, he described Anton’s heroism: “During the few minutes it took Kovner to tell of the help that had come from a German sergeant, a hush settled over the courtroom; it was as though the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honor of the man named Anton Schmid. And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question – how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told.” (Hannah Arendt)

Decades after his death, Anton was belatedly honored by Germany, which renamed a military base in his honor in 2000. At the ceremony, Minister of Defense Rudolf Scharping praised Anton Schmid as the model of a brave soldier, and German historian Wolfram Wette described Anton as “one of the gold grains under the heap of rubble” in Nazi Germany.

For saving the lives of hundreds of Jews at the cost of his own, we honor Anton Schmid as this week’s Thursday Hero.

[higherentity]

[brookstonalmanac]

Birthdays 8.14

Beer Birthdays

Eugene L. Husting (1848)

Brandon Hernández (1976)

Five Favorite Birthdays

Halle Berry; actor (1968)

Mila Kunis; Ukrainian-American actor (1983)

Gary Larson; cartoonist (1950)

Steve Martin; comedian, actor, writer, banjo player (1945)

Bruce Thomas; English bass player (1948)

Famous Birthdays

Russell Baker; essayist (1925)

Emmanuelle Béart; French actress (1963)

Catherine Bell; actor (1968)

Herman Branson; African-American physicist, chemist (1914)

Sarah Brightman; English singer-songwriter (1960)

John Brodie; San Francisco 49ers QB (1935)

Lodewijk Bruckman; Dutch painter (1903)

Sharon Bryant; R&B singer (1956)

Kevin Cadogan; rock singer-songwriter, guitarist (1970)

Méric Casaubon; Swiss-English author (1599)

Yannoulis Chalepas; Greek sculptor (1851)

Darrell "Dash" Crofts; singer-songwriter and musician (1940)

David Crosby; rock singer (1941)

Charles Jean de la Vallée-Poussin; Belgian mathematician (1866)

Mstislav Dobuzhinsky; Russian-Lithuanian-American artist (1875)

Slim Dunlap; singer-songwriter and guitarist (1951)

Tracy Caldwell Dyson; chemist and astronaut (!969)

Richard R. Ernst; Swiss chemist (1933)

Erica Flapan; mathematician (1956)

Francis Ford; actor and director (1881)

John Galsworthy; English writer (1867)

Alice Ghostley; actor (1926)

Larry Graham; soul/funk bass player and singer-songwriter (1946)

Buddy Greco; singer, pianist (1926)

Marcia Gay Harden; actor (1959)

Jackée Harry; actress (1956)

Robert Hayman; English-Canadian poet (1575)

Lee Hoffman; author (1932)

Leopold Hofmann; Austrian composer (1738)

Doc Holliday; dentist, wild west gambler (1851)

James Horner; composer (1953)

Ernest Everett Just; African-American biologist (1883)

Jan Koetsier; Dutch composer (1911)

Margaret Lindsay Huggins; Anglo-Irish astronomer (1848)

William Hutchinson; founder of Rhode Island (1586)

Magic Johnson; Los Angeles Lakers (1959)

Stanley A. McChrystal; American general (1954)

John McCutcheon; folksinger (1952)

Paddy McGuinness; English comedian (1973)

Lionel Morton; English singer-songwriter, guitarist (1942)

Bruce Nash; film director (1947)

Frank Oppenheimer; particle physicist (1912)

Hans Christian Ørsted; Danish physicist and chemist (1777)

Susan Saint James; actor (1946)

Paolo Sarpi; Italian writer (1552)

Ben Sidran; jazz and rock keyboardist (1943)

Stuff Smith; violinist (1909)

Danielle Steel; writer (1947)

Jiro Taniguchi; Japanese author and illustrator (1947)

Bruno Tesch; German chemist (1890)

Ernest Thayer; "Casey at the Bat" writer (1863)

Pieter Coecke van Aelst; Flemish painter (1502)

Carle Vernet; French painter and lithographer (1758)

Claude Joseph Vernet; French painter (1714)

Earl Weaver; Baltimore Orioles manager (1930)

Wim Wenders; German film director (1945)

Lina Wertmüller; Italian film director (1926)