Eurovision for Beginners
Eurovision is my favourite day of the year, bar none. Christmas, birthdays and even the sainted Halloween pale in comparison to the most glorious festival of tackiness you will ever see. What follows is a guide for those who were unlucky enough not to have grown up with this slightly hallucinatory programme.
The Eurovision Song Contest is an annual American Idol-style competition that aims to foster European unity through the sharing of musical cultures. The first barrier to this is that Eurovision’s geography is flexible – countries as decidedly non-European as Israel, Turkey and Morocco have competed on the grounds that they are within the European Broadcasting Area, an odd distinction that has no wider relevance.
The second barrier to European cohesiveness is that every entry seems to have been forged under the influence of psychotic drugs, giving the impression that your neighbours are mildly insane and thus in the process actually encouraging xenophobia.
A good Eurovision entry will include one or more of the following:
. Multiple synchronised backing dancers
. Extravagant costumes
. Neon
. Fireworks
. A techno beat
. Ripping off a long dress to reveal a shorter one underneath at the key change
. A chorus consisting of nonsense syllables (la, boom and ooh have all been used to great effect)
. Elaborate staging (2011’s Swedish entry displays this perfectly: at one point the boyishly handsome singer is encased in a large glass box, which he then breaks with the sheer power of his voice at the key change.)
Performances that perfectly encapsulate the Eurovision spirit:
. Sweden 2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfx0OMM2u0A (as well as the aforementioned glass box, there are incredibly committed backing dancers and another Eurovision classic: lyrics that were clearly written by someone who did not count English as their first language. The first line, sung with great conviction, is ‘don’t tell me its impossible/ because I know/ its possible’, which has never been said by anyone before.)
. Moldova 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkmncrAPILw (a rotating violinist playing a neon instrument, singers dressed as exotic birds, and the most incredible sax solo you will ever witness.)
. France 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqpFUVAEhn8&feature=relmfu (breaking out of their usual ballad-in-French model, France devote an energetic song to butt-shaking)
The performances are only half of the evening though: hours are dedicated to the archaic voting system, in which every country who entered – regardless of whether they got past the pruning semi-finals – has an attractive person in their respective capitals read out how their population has voted. (This year there were twenty six performances and forty two voting countries. Its at this point you settle down with a drink.) The keys to winning are the all-important douze points, while the dreaded position is nul point – to be left languishing at the bottom of the leaderboard with zero, which the UK has done several times.
Actually, the UK pretty much always does terribly due to the fact that no one in Europe really likes us that much. Voting is hilariously tactical which makes for a good drinking game: Belarus and Russia always swap twelve points, as do Portugal and Spain. The Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) always vote among themselves, as do the Scandinavians (Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark). The breakup of the USSR puts the many states of Eastern Europe in a strong numbers position, and there are many countries that I know only from Eurovision (FYR Macedonia, anyone?).
In the UK, Eurovision is regarded as a giant tasteless joke, but in many newer parts of Eastern Europe – where countries may be only decades old – winning is a sign of acceptance and a genuine honour. This year’s host Azerbaijan had hours in which to advertise Azerbaijani tourism, and made the most of the opportunity to establish an identity to millions across the continent. And despite the musical wasteland in which it resides, the contest did help to launch the careers of ABBA and Celine Dion.
But let’s be real. This year, Russia entered six octogenarians and Ireland for the second time entered Jedward, twins discovered on a reality show whose performances suggest they were high on food colouring. And that’s the Eurovision I know and love.
Paper Cut Letters
Typographic Artworks by Annie Vought:
“I have been working with cut out correspondence for the past four years. I meticulously recreate notes and letters that I have found, written, or received by enlarging the documents onto a new piece of paper and intricately dissecting the negative spaces with an Exact-o knife. The handwriting and the lines support the structure of the cut paper, keeping it strong and sculptural, despite its apparent fragility. In these paper cutouts, I focus on the text, structure, and emotion of the letter in an elaborate investigation into the properties of writing and expression. Penmanship, word choice, and spelling all contribute to possible narratives about who that person is and what they are like. My recreating the letters is an extended concentration on peoples’ inner lives and the ways they express their thoughts through writing.”
via: WE AND THE COLOR
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