Beyond Selidor

Tonight is one of my favourite nights of the year: Eurovision grand final. I think I know at least six people currently in Liverpool, some of whom have attended the semifinals or jury performances, others of whom seem to just be hanging around for the vibes and watching the concerts from bars with crowds of other fans.

Matthias and I used to host watch parties, but over the years our group of local friends has shrunk to the point of being nonexistent, due to people moving overseas or elsewhere in the UK. So this year, the party is just us, drinking cocktails made from Ukrainian vodka, and eating canapes that at least contain food from Greece, Poland, Ukraine, the UK, and Spain, prepared by an Australian and a German.

I have my favourites (Team Moldova for ever), and songs that I'd be happy to see win, but in general the winner is not really the point for me — it's the spectacle and the political voting, so I'm sure to have a good time.

In any case, since I can't host an in-person watch party, I wanted to turn this Dreamwidth post into its own party. Feel free to leap into the comments with your thoughts on the current line-up, the song(s) you hope will do well, and your thoughts on previous iterations of the contest. Once things get underway, memes, gifs, reactions to anything going on onstage and in the voting is very welcome! Posting links to video clips, and replying to other people's comments is very much encouraged.

I just have one ground rule: don't rain on other people's parade. By this I mean don't respond to a person's comment enthusing about a particular act by saying how much you hate it. Starting your own top-level comment about how much you hate a particular song is fine, but don't be negative in the replies to another person's positive comment. To clarify:

Not okay
Comment: 'I love the song from [country X] this year! I hope it wins!'
Reply to comment: 'That song from [country X] is garbage and I can't believe you like it!'

Okay
Comment: 'The song from [country Y] was such tedious nonsense, and I think less of everyone who voted for it to win.'
Reply to comment: 'I totally agree with you, that song was awful!'

Also okay
Comment: 'I love the song from [country X] this year! I hope it wins!'
New top-level comment which is not a reply to the previous comment: 'The song from [country X] is garbage and I hope no one votes for it!'

If you're not watching the competition live (for example Australians who have elected not to get up at 5am but rather watch the replay on Sunday night), assume the comments will have spoilers for who wins.

I'm very tired, and have spent most of the day (apart from a long, stretchy yoga class this morning) lying around and scrolling idly through social media. Sometimes, that's how the weekend turns out, and that's okay.

The big thing this weekend was, of course, the Eurovision final. Don't click on the cut if you're worried about being spoiled for the results (although I imagine anyone who cares will know by now).

( Hey ho, let's go! )

The once_upon_fic collection has gone live. I'll post more about my gift, and other works I enjoyed from the collection after author reveals — I never post rec posts during anon periods as I want authors to get full credit for their work — but I'm delighted with the gift I received. It's a sharp, perceptive story based on 'The Sealskin' Icelandic folktale (a variant on the selkie myth) which really digs into the darkness of such stories. For me, selkie stories (or stories about swan maidens, or any other stories about supernatural women captured as human brides) can never be love stories, only horror stories, and that's definitely what I got here — a slow, creeping sense of dread that whispers from the margins, building towards the fic's devastating final lines. I'm so happy with it!

I've started reading my way through the collection, and I would recommend doing the same if you like retellings of fairytales, folktales, or mythology. You don't really need to know canon for most of the stuff I've read so far, but if you feel it would help, all canonical material is freely available online and aggregated here.

And that's pretty much been my weekend.

Tonight is the best night of the year, and my blog has been claimed by gyrating guys with saxophones, Ukrainian industrial folk witches, falsetto vampires stuck on pillars, etc.

To get you in the mood, a selection of my favourite songs from years past — specifically, songs that didn't win.

( I really, really, really don't like ballads )

And who do I want to win this year? My heart belongs to the industrial folk witches.



Edited to add that Matthias is now saying that the Portuguese band is now the odds-on favourite to win, and if that happens, I will have to restrain myself from smashing things in frustration. (Please, please, please can we not have a repeat of Salvador 'I'm far too good for Eurovision and all of you are beneath me' Sobral? Please?)

This evening, there will be an event which bills itself as a 'Eurovision pre-party', with a lineup including past and current contestants. Matthias and I will be watching, and if anyone else is interested in doing the same, the event is viewable online. More details here.

On to today's book prompt:

21. A book written into your psyche

( My answer )

( The other days )

I have a deep, earnest, and enduring love of Eurovision. I've loved it since before I ever moved to Europe — like a lot of Australians, I watched it fairly religiously on Australian TV every year, simultaneously baffled and gleeful. Thankfully, when I moved to the UK, I found myself firmly ensconced within a social circle which shared my love for all things Eurovision, with varying degrees of sincerity and irony.

For many years, my husband and I hosted Eurovision parties of varying sizes — over the past few years it had dwindled to notasapleausure and her husband, as our original crowd of local friends moved on to other cities. And of course, due to the pandemic, this year Eurovision was cancelled. Thinking we would get nothing, Matthias and I had already arranged to have a viewing party via Facebook — interested friends could watch the different acts on Youtube, and air their thoughts in the comments of a post I made. It was a great deal of fun, especially given I hosted it in the early days of lockdown, when there was a real need to lift morale.

I should have known, however, that even with the contest itself cancelled, Eurovision would find a way to infect our screens with sparkles, wind machines, and multiple lyrics featuring the words 'fire' and 'desire' rhymed together.

Instead of the contest, there was a simultaneous Eurovision celebration broadcast across all the competing nations — the performers who were supposed to have been competing this year played snatches of their songs and aired videos recorded in their homes, old winners (or simply old fan favourites) dialed in with performances of their own, and the whole thing just ended up being a sort of festival of Eurovision, celebrating this ridiculous cultural phenomenon, and the weird people who love it.

In any other year, I would have found it too treacly and earnest, but in 'these current challenging times' earnest was exactly what I was looking for. Matthias, notasapleasure and I aired our thoughts in a group chat, Twitter memed away as usual, Måns Zelmerlöw found yet another Eurovision-related camera in front of which to fling himself, and a good time was had by all.

This marks the second year in which I've spent Eurovision night crying. Last year Eurovision was on the same day as the Australian federal election, and I kept breaking into bitter tears at the futility of hoping for an even mildly left-wing government within my lifetime in any country in which I have voting rights. This year it was the montage of empty concert halls in Europe (and the Opera House in Sydney, my Sydney) which had me misty-eyed. Oh, my weary, hopeless heart!

_______________________
As an aside, I am feeling the lack of any decent Eurovision icons keenly. I shall have to investigate...

So. Lots of stuff to get through this week, as my corner of the internet has been particularly full of people doing wonderful, clever and awesome things.

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz had a busy week. Here's Rochita on the uses of anger, her new short story, and being interviewed for Lightspeed magazine's author spotlight.

Catherine Lundoff has had so many submissions to her 'Older Women in SFF' recommendations post that she's had to split it into two. Part one, part two.

I really liked this review of Zen Cho's writing by Naomi Novik.

This review by Sarah Mesle of the most recent episode of Game of Thrones made a lot of points I've been struggling to articulate. Content note for discussion of violence, abuse and rape.

I really appreciated this thoughtful post by Tade Thompson on safety, community and dissent.

Natalie Luhrs makes some really important points here:

This is part of the ongoing conversation about the importance of different voices in our community. About making space for people who have been told–explicitly and implicitly–that what they have to say isn’t worthwhile and that they need to sit down and listen and that someday, maybe, they’ll be allowed to speak.

This list of Best Young Australian novelists looks great, and reflects the Australia that I grew up in. Congratulations to all the winners!

I have to admit that the #hometovote hashtag has been making me cry.

I wrote two longish posts this week. One is over at Wordpress: a review of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. The other is here at Dreamwidth/LJ, and is a primer to Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy.

My mother is a radio journalist. Her programme this week is on Eurovision, and you can listen to it here (not geoblocked). There are additional features . I am an unashamed Eurovision fan, and as you can see, it runs in the family.

Texts from Hieronymous Bosch made me laugh and laugh.

Happy Friday, everyone.

I really need to not take Neurofen just before I go to bed. Although it gives me the weirdest, most awesome dreams (last night, I was hanging out with Thor and Loki and then an alternate universe robotic space-invader version of both of them started threatening the earth and we were fighting each other like in a video game with ever-increasing degrees of difficulty and better weapons and then I had to go on a journey into outer space with a bunch of ninjas because the world was ending and then there were swarms of insects trying to kill us and then it turned out the whole thing was a book being written by losseniaiel and I was a book character who'd gained sentience and agency and could control how the story ended), it also makes me so somnolent that I can barely wake up and when I do get up, I feel like I'm sleepwalking. It's 1.30pm, and only now do I feel properly awake.

I've blogged twice on my German blog, and the links are here and here.

I realise this is an extremely old post (and I think I read it when the original kerfuffle was doing the rounds of the internet), but it feels timely, in that last Friday, a guy tried to make me get into his car when I was waiting at a bus stop at 1am. (Before you ask, I'm all right, and he went away after I said, firmly, that I was waiting for the bus, but it could've been so much worse.) As Lindsay Beyerstein says:

Remember, these are women you like and admire, women whom you hope to charm and put at ease. It is in your best interest, as well as theirs, to approach them in a manner they find congenial.

Men who want to flirt with women have to realize: Women live in a state of continual vigilance about sexual safety. It’s like having a mild case of hay fever that never goes away. It’s not debilitating. You’re not weak. You’re not afraid. You just suck it up and get on with your life. It's nothing that's going to stop you from making discoveries, or climbing mountains, or falling in love. Sometimes you can almost forget about it. It doesn’t mean it’s not there, subtly sucking your energy. You learn to avoid situations that make it worse and seek out conditions that make it better.

If a female stranger is wary around you, it is not because she suspects you are a rapist, or that all men are rapists. It’s because a general level of circumspection is what vigilance requires. Don’t take it personally.

But if you really don’t care whether your “flirting” is making a woman needlessly anxious or uncomfortable, that's creepy.

In less depressing news, Eurovision is tonight! I love Eurovision. I love the cheesy songs, the ridiculous costumes, the snarky commentary. I even love the bloc-voting, which is as much a part of Eurovision as fake tan and badly mangled English. Which is why this post is so delightfully geeky. Martin O'Leary has used statistics and probability to attempt to predict this year's Eurovision winner. I love it.

I leave you with some of my favourite Eurovision music. The first two are from Ukraine, from 2009 and 2004 respectively:





And finally, a youtube party classic, from Armenia, complete with creepy Svengali-type record company figure in the video clip (with the immortal line 'I've got an avatar of my love to keep me warm'):



I leave with with this Scandinavia and the World comic about Eurovision. Since I'm in Germany right now, it's the one from 2010, when Germany won. 'Go away Iceland, I'm hugging Norway'.