#finland true winners in my book

[femmehepbvrn]

WELL

[betweenthetimeandsound]

Three Minutes to Eternity: My ESC 250 (#180-171)

#180: Fernando Tordo -- Tourada (Portugal 1973)

“Entram guizos, chocas e capotes, E mantilhas pretas, Entram espadas, chifres e derrotes, E alguns poetas, Entram bravos, cravos e dichotes, Porque tudo mais são tretas,”

“Bells, cowbells and capes are coming in, And black mantillas Swords, big horns and defeats are coming in And some poets Brave people, carnations and swear words are coming in Because it's a wheeze at most”

Despite the title ("tourada" translates to bullfight in Portuguese), it's actually a portrait of a revolution in the making. The lyrics were so clever that the censors at the RTP didn’t notice these lyrics were reflecting the current regime.

That’s enough for a 250 appearance for me, but there’s more that makes the song so memorable.

The build with the brass and percussion sets the stage for something important to happen. Sometimes, I do forget I like this song, but listening to it like right now is an experience, like one entering the battlefield.

The last line, "And the intelligent man says that songs are over..." still amuses me, though it's quite cynical in that the intellectuals would eventually not believe in the movement.

Personal ranking: 5th/17 Actual ranking: 10th/17 in Luxembourg

#179: France Gall -- Poupée de cire, poupée de son (Luxembourg 1965)

“Suis-je meilleure, suis-je pire qu’une poupée de salon? Je vois la vie en rose bonbon Poupée de cire, poupée de son”

“Am I better, am I worse than a fashion doll? I see life through bright rosy-tinted glasses Wax doll, sawdust doll”

One of the game-changing songs of Eurovision, in that the general mood shifts from slow-tempo songs to a little bit of pop. The first ten contests had their share of good songs, but seem to blur into each other at points. Afterwards, the song quality rose, and they were better suited to the times.

Beyond the happy orchestral sound is something quite sad—a pretty girl who sings songs without experiencing what they mean. Gainsbourg was quite the songwriter, but it led to a falling out between him and France later on, because of the double meanings of the songs he wrote for her.

The drama related to France Gall and the contest didn't stop there. Kathy Kirby, the runner-up that year, slapped France when she won. Then her boyfriend broke up with her shortly after, and wrote a song that would be the basis of "My Way".

Quite interesting I must say, though I don’t come back to this song often.

Personal and actual ranking: 1st/18 in Naples

#178: Ajda Pekkan -- Petr'oil (Turkey 1980)

"Öyle gururlusun gidemem yanına Girmişsin kim bilir kaç aşığın kanına Dolardan, marktan başka laf çıkmaz dilinden Neler, neler çekiyorum senin elinden"

"You are so proud, I can’t come close to you I wonder who else suffers from your love You speak of nothing but dollars and marks I am so suffering because of you"

My 1980 winner is not only quite groovy and seductive, but also clever.

The 1970s had two major oil crises--one in 1973, and another in 1979. The first one was when OPEC withheld their oil from countries who supported Israel during the Yom Kippur, and the second one when oil production stopped during the Iranian Revolution, resulting in higher prices per barrel. Both resulted in low supply and increased gas prices in the United States; those who grew up during the era were less likely to drive as a result.

Petr'oil takes this issue and anthromorphizes it, as Ajda sings about the troubles of relying oil as a resource and as a partner. The belly-dance music also emphasizes the tension. combined with the percussion and strings on this piece.

While Ajda has since distanced herself from the song, I embrace it in all its charms. Plus it was heavily underrated in its year.

Personal ranking: 1st/19 Actual ranking: 15th/19 in Den Haag

Final Impressions on 1980: This year stands out a bit, for it had a number of songs dealing with a huge number of topics (including Belgium's "Euro-Vision", which made the contest go meta, haha). Alongside it, the production was a bit bare-bones, because of the Netherlands hosting it four years earlier, but it featured quirks such as a representative announcing their country's song, Morocco competing for the only time, and a steel band for the interval!

#177: The Allisons -- Are you sure? (United Kingdom 1961)

“Are you sure you won’t be sorry? Comes tomorrow, you won’t want me Back again to hold you tightly?”

The lyrics are quite smug, in that the Allisons warn the girl who plans to break up with them she might be sorry and alone. Not unlike with "If I Were Sorry", though there's a bit more charm and teasing towards their soon-to-be ex-, whereas the latter feels a bit more arrogant.

That said, it’s upbeat and almost lines up to the musical scene at the time (comparisons to Buddy Holly are not uncommon), and the musical run time just goes by so quickly (in comparison to other entries of the same era)! It's just a breeze.

Personal ranking: 1st/16 Actual ranking: 2nd/16 in Cannes

#176: Vicky Leandros: L'amour est bleu (Luxembourg 1967)

“Bleu, bleu, l'amour est bleu, Berce mon cœur, mon cœur amoureux, Bleu, bleu, l'amour est bleu, Bleu comme le ciel qui joue dans tes yeux.”

“Blue, blue, love is blue, Cradle my heart, my loving heart Blue, blue, love is blue Blue like the sky which play in your eyes."”

I think I first heard this in the intro to Eurovision 2006's semi-final. While the harp motif stood out, I didn't know where it came from. It was until when I watched the contest this song was in, which is strange because it was notable for having a Paul Mauriat cover which became a hit.

One of many classics which featured in 1960s contests, I like the innocence shown through the lyrics, which uses color and imagery to tell about the different cycles of love. The orchestration along the bridge was especially spectacular, as it provided a cinematic feel towards . Vicky’s accent sometimes gets in the way, but she sings this well and should’ve gotten a podium position.

Personal ranking: 2nd/17 Actual ranking: 4th/17 in Vienna

#175: Kaija -- Ullu joy Hullu yö (Finland 1991)

"En edes halunnut sua omistaa En edes leikisti rakastaa Kaksi kulkijaa yhteen osuttiin Yksi yhteinen hetki jaettiin"

"I didn’t even want to own you I didn’t even want to love you We two travellers came across each other Shared one common moment together"

While I was watching Eurovision 1991, I liked the mysterious verses of Hullu yo, but I found the chorus a bit off, because it was punchier and more energetic. It also had that "minor-verse/major chorus" thing going on, which also made me uneasy with the song. With a few listens, I grew to like a bit more, because of its unique sound. It definitely sounds better with the studio cut versus the live, which shows off the failures of RAI's orchestra.

Another thing about the song, beyond its lyrics about a one-night-stand turned into longing feelings, was the choice choreography. Playing out the turmoiled relationship, it's funny to see how provocative it is, and that's after Toto's hilarious pronunciation of the song.

Elements of the live performance aside, it's still a jam which deserved better. Maybe it would've done so in the televote era.

Personal ranking: 7th/22 Actual ranking: 20th/22 in Rome

#174: Francoise Hardy -- L'amour s'en va (Monaco 1963)

“Si ce n’est toi Ce sera moi qui m’en irai L’amour s’en va Et nous n’y pourrons rien changer"

"If it isn’t you It will be me who will go away Love goes away And we can’t change anything about that"

I was happily surprised hearing this for the first time. It was very melancholic, with an interesting structure between the verses and the chorus. The percussion also helps with the latter, and adds a bit of character to the song.

The fact Francoise wrote this classic gem also warmed me up more to the song, especially because she was from the ye-ye generation of singers (which are known for being young and upbeat). Yet she stands and sings her own composition in a serious, almost bored tone, without taking the substance of the song away

(That being said, I really need to listen to more of her songs; I've found a couple a month ago, though there's obviously more...)

Personal ranking: 2nd/16 Actual ranking: 5th/16 in London

#173: ABBA -- Waterloo (Sweden 1974)

“The history book on the shelf is always repeating itself...”

You don’t need me to tell about this, do you? It’s fun and timeless pop, with some cool costumes to boot.

For more interesting stuff for both, the song Waterloo was an actual risk for the contest--they actually had another song for consideration, the folk-influenced Hasta Manana, but turned to this instead. And it worked, of course!

For the clothes, ABBA apparently chose these glam-rock inspired costumes because in Sweden, one wouldn't have to pay additional fees if the costumes won't be used for normal wear. Both Anni-frid and Agnetha look great, nevertheless.

And as of the moment, my favorite ABBA song is "Knowing Me, Knowing You". Despite the poppy tone, it has a moody vibe throughout, and one knows the relationship is going to end on a bad note.

Personal ranking: 2nd/17 Actual ranking: 1st/17 in Brighton

#172: Gigliola Cinquetti -- Si (Italy 1974)

“Sì, dolcemente dissi sì, Per provare un'emozione, Che non ho avuto mai,”

“Yes, I softly said yes, To feel an emotion That I've never had before”

My friend told me an interesting story about the lyrics—whereas the song Gigliola won with tells of a girl waiting to grow older to find true love, Si talks of the girl growing up and taking the plunge. So she interprets Si as a sequel of sorts.

So why does this beat Waterloo, in my opinion?

I like how the song starts—quietly, but with an interesting guitar part. The instrumentation builds well towards the "Si...", at which it gently but certainly blooms towards Gigliola's certainty on going with the man she loves.

The interesting part of it was how the song was censored in Italy because it was seen as "subliminal messaging" for a campaign on a divorce referendum that May. "Si" sounds like an endorsement for the "no" campaign, as it embraces being in love, even if it requires the death of another relationship.

Personal ranking: 1st/17 Actual ranking: 2nd/17 in Brighton

Final Impressions on 1974: Definitely one of the most memorable years in the contest, if only for who won. The rest was a tale of two halves, with the first half being particularly good, and the other half bad (except for Si, as you can tell). And there were Wombles in the interval act, hehe.

#171: Eugent Bushpepa -- Mall (Albania 2018)

“Lot i patharë ndriçojë këtë natë Sonte kumbo prej shpirtit pa fjalë Vetëm një çast dhimbja të më ndalë”

“Lingering tear, light up this night Find your way out, to soothe my soul Just for one day make this pain subside”

Aren’t the lyrics to this so beautiful? They convey Eugent’s desire to be with his loved one so well, in both its pain and beauty.

The music really helps too--while the pre-vamped version was a whole minute longer, it also has a rockier edge to it. The revamped version cuts it down and cleans up the production, but it's still maintains the overall feel throughout.

Eugent is also a talented talented singer, which proved initial odds wrong and got Albania one of its best results! The bridge between the second verse and chorus has a great chord progression (which was given more space in the revamp), and he deserved qualification for that alone. And those high notes.

(Also, he's probably the best dressed guy of his year...good job Eugent, good job.)

Personal ranking: 7th/43 Actual ranking: 11th/26 GF in Lisbon

[ourimpavidheroine]

I've just read through most of your fic on AO3 and a lot of your blog and first of all, I love your Wuko stuff! Second of all, I see you are an English teacher. Do you like teaching English? Do you think it makes you a better writer? Sorry, just curious, I'm thinking about what I want to major in at university.

Thanks! I’m so glad you enjoyed my stories. :)

Well, I am an English teacher, but I’m an English as a second language teacher, not a comparative literature kind of English teacher (if that makes sense). So while it is true that I do know more than most people either know (or care, to be perfectly honest, and I include myself in that statement) about grammar, I don’t know that it makes me a better writer.

Don’t get me wrong, I think having a good grasp of grammar is vital, especially since once you know grammar rules you can then set about purposefully breaking said rules for impact and effect. Good vocabulary never hurt anyone either! But I don’t think majoring in English is a necessity for that; in fact, my major at university was in Dramatic Arts, not English or even Comp Lit. I trained to be an actor; I was a pretty good character actor (I won awards and was consistently cast in larger roles) and an even better voice actor (I did some professional voiceover work before I moved to Finland).

What saved me as a writer was being a voracious reader. I read a LOT. And by that I mean I generally read upwards of 2-3 books a week. (I’m an extremely fast reader as well.) I have a very wide range of tastes; I read genre work, and classics, as well as modern award winners, etc. This opens me up to plenty of influence, writing styles, etc. That is not to say that I don’t think there is anything useful to be gotten from writing classes! Who in the fantasy/sci fi world doesn’t know about the Clarion Workshop? However, I do think a lot of that is about making connections as opposed to what new things you are learning, if that makes sense. Clarion is acknowledged as the gateway through which you can get published, which is not the same thing as becoming a better writer, for sure.

I have said it before and I will say it again, I absolutely think my writing would improve with a professional editor and some rigorous betareaders. For me, at least, that would be far more useful than a writing class or an English major. But that’s just me, of course. Nevertheless, there is value for all writers in classes, editors, betareaders, etc. I don’t dismiss any of that.

But the real answer here is to write. Write! Write write write write. All of the wonderful books about the art and craft of writing, all of the ever-so-useful posts here on Tumblr about worldbuilding, all of the classes you could potentially take will do you absolutely no good at all if you don’t park your ass in a chair and start writing. 

Look, I am not trying to tell you what to major in. That would be wildly irresponsible and inappropriate of me, I don’t even know you! What I am saying to you is that there is no one way to getting what you want. If you do want to go to university - and I do not think university is the only answer for everyone, never mind the best answer - then learn as much as you can. Take some unexpected classes and learn things you never knew you were even interested in. (One of my favorite classes at university was Avian Sciences, which I very reluctantly took to fulfill my science requirement; I ended up loving it and have wonderful memories of the project I did, which was to observe a nest of red-tailed hawks over 10 weeks.) Take risks, unexpected turns, observe everything you can. Understand that getting older isn’t a liability; it’s actually a lesson in creativity. I’m turning 52 in less than a week and I’ve been married twice (one ended in divorce, the other in death), I’ve buried one parent, raised two kids to adulthood, I uprooted my life to move across the world. I’ve said yes a whole fucking lot to my life. All of that is reflected in my writing. To be blunt, there is no class that could ever teach me how it felt to hold my newborns in my arms or tuck a photograph and some wildflowers into my dead wife’s hands before they closed her casket or to stand outside the psych ward where I put my child after they tried to end their pain permanently. Those are not things that can be taught in a class or a workshop; those are things that you experience and, if you are a writer, carry in your heart until you can put them into words.

The good writers are the ones who live their lives while observing everything they can. It doesn’t have to be a wild life; Emily Dickenson barely left her own house and Jane Austen’s longing for something beyond her constrained, orderly life hovers in the background of everything she wrote. Not every writer has to have lived a life of sheer excess (something which I wish more publishers and frequently published writers would understand). The important thing is to observe and to feel and to get that out of your head and onto the paper (or keyboard).

I am assuming if you are thinking about university you are probably fairly young. So what matters to you in your life right now? What have you experienced? What have you observed? What do you think about those things? What makes you passionate, what do you want to change? What do you want to tell readers about your life? Like I said, it doesn’t have to be anything outlandish or out there. What it needs to be is true; that’s what makes readers relate to your work as a writer. 

In short, dear reader, if you choose university then major in something that makes you passionate, that makes you happy, that makes you think and feel and don’t be afraid to experience your life. That will have far more of an impact on your writing than anything else, please believe me. 

The very best of luck to you whatever you decide. 💕

[sneakend]

Hyvää joulua, @lily-learns-finnish !!! ♡ I was your secret santa for @langblrsecretsanta this year. I got a bit carried away and made you more than one gift, hope you don’t mind. Here’s the first one, it’s a movie rec list of Finnish movies, most of which I have actually seen (I admit I don’t watch a ton of Finnish stuff despite living in Finland). Perhaps you’ve seen some of these but I think watching movies in one’s target language is always good practice since the language in them is much closer to actual spoken language than what you see in text books or literature. Don’t know how easy it’d be to find these movies online but if you’re in Finland I’m sure most libraries have at least some of them.

comedy/drama

Napapiirin sankarit (Lapland Odyssey) (2010) (x)

“After a man called Janne living in Lapland in Northern Finland fails to acquire a digital television adapter for his wife from the local utility store due to not reaching it before closure time, he sets out with his two friends in the middle of the night to get one by any means necessary. He sets up a late rendezvous with his father-in-law who owns an electronics store in Rovaniemi, several hundred kilometers away. Nothing is naturally ever simple and along the way, the trio end up having several comedic misadventures”

Korkein oikeus (Inner Trial) (2008) (x)

“Noa is a young slacker who prefers to spend his days smoking weed. Together with his friends, he meets an old hippie, who is interested in rekindling his past passion of psychedelic trips and mind expansion.”

Menolippu Mombasaan (One-Way Ticket to Mombasa) (2002) (x)

“A cancer patient meets a new friend at the hospital, and together they escape on the adveture of their lives.”

Hevi reissu (Heavy Trip) (2018) (x)

“In this offbeat comedy from Finland, Turo is stuck in a small village where the best thing in his life is being the lead vocalist for the amateur metal band Impaled Rektum. The only problem? He and his bandmates have practiced for 12 years without playing a single gig. The guys get a surprise visitor from Norway--the promoter for a huge heavy metal music festival--and decide it's now or never. They steal a van, a corpse, and even a new drummer in order to make their dreams a reality.”

Pitkä kuuma kesä (A Long Hot Summer) (1999) (x)

“The story of a rock band "Kalle Päätalo" in the 1980s.”

Helmiä ja sikoja (Pearls and Pigs) (2003) (x)

“When their bootlegging father ends up in jail, four twenty-something brothers need money to pay his debts to local crooks. Next, their 9-year-old half-sister is dumped on their doorstep by her prostitute mother. A karaoke set helps reveal that the little girl is quite a singer, just as a talent contest for children is coming up on national television offering more than enough money to the winner. If only the kid weren't so hopelessly shy...”

International

Tom of Finland (2017) (x)

“Award-winning filmmaker Dome Karukoski brings to screen the life and work of artist Touko Valio Laaksonen (aka Tom of Finland), one of the most influential and celebrated figures of twentieth century gay culture.”

Iron Sky (2012) (x)

“The Nazis set up a secret base on the dark side of the moon in 1945 where they hide out and plan to return to power in 2018.”

Jadesoturi (Jade Warrior) (2006) (x)

“Jade Warrior (Finnish: Jadesoturi, Chinese: 玉战士; pinyin: Yù zhànshì) is a Finnish-Chinese co-produced movie. It combines elements of the wuxia genre with Finnish Kalevala mythology.”

Ruokala Lokki (Kamome Diner) (2006) (x)

“Where are we welcome? On a quiet street in Helsinki, Sachie has opened a diner featuring rice balls. For a month she has no customers. Then, in short order, she has her first customer, meets Midori, a gangly Japanese tourist, and invites her to stay with her, and meets Masako, a formal and ethereal middle-aged woman whose luggage has gone missing. The three women work in the diner, interact, and serve customers. A somewhat brusque man teaches Sachie to make delicious coffee, then he returns under other circumstances. Three neighborhood women inspect the empty diner every day; will anything bring them inside? We learn why Sachie serves rice balls; but why Finland?”

horror

Sauna (2008) (x)

“As a 25-year war between Russia and Sweden concludes, two brothers who are part of an effort to outline new border accords become undone by their actions, and their mistreatment of a young woman during their journey.”

Rare Exports (2010) (x)

“In the depths of the Korvatunturi mountains, 486 meters deep, lies the closest ever guarded secret of Christmas. The time has come to dig it up. This Christmas everyone will believe in Santa Claus.”

Lake Bodom (2016) (x)

“Every camper's worst nightmare came true at Lake Bodom in 1960 when four teenagers were stabbed to death while sleeping in their tent.”

Kyrsyä - Tuftland (2017) (x)

“A headstrong textile student tries to overcome her problems by accepting a summer job offer from an isolated and offbeat village of Kyrsyä.”’

scifi

Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning (2005) (x)

“A dark science fiction comedy about domination of the world and the universe, and a parody of the Star Trek and Babylon 5 franchises.”

war

Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier) (1955) (x) / (1985) (x) / (2017) (x)

“The tale of a platoon of soldiers during the Continuation War. Based on Väinö Linna's book of the same name.”

Äideistä parhain (Mother of Mine) (2005) (x)

“During World War II, more than 70,000 Finnish children were evacuated to neutral Sweden to avoid the conflict. "Mother of Mine" tackles that painful patch of history in a tale of 9-year-old Eero, a child who increasingly feels abandoned by his biological Finnish mother and yet not attached to his Swedish surrogate mom. When he is returned to Finland, his confusion intensifies.”

Käsky (Tears of April) (2008) (x)

“The film is set in the final stages of the Finnish Civil War. The film tells a story of a captured female Red Guard fighter, Miina, and the soldier Aaro who escorts her to her trial.”

Raja 1918 (The Border) (2007) (x)

“Set in the spring of 1918, right after the Finnish Civil War, the film is about a Finnish officer who is sent to the village of Rajajoki to form a border between Finland and Soviet Russia.”

Rukajärven tie (Ambush) (1999) (x)

“Set during the World War 2. In the summer of 1941 the Finnish army crosses the border of Russia. A platoon led by Lt. Eero Perkola goes through the wilderness around the Lieksa lake to search for Russian defensive positions. The platoon kills some Russian civilians and rests in a newly conquered village. There Lt. Perkola meets his fiancée Kaarina, who is serving in the Women's Auxilary Corps (Lotta). Then the platoon continues with the mission, but a message about Kaarina's possible death reaches Lt. Perkola. The message causes Perkola to become distracted during the mission.”

children

Muumipeikko ja pyrstötähti (Comet in Moominland) (1992) (x)

“Moomin, Sniff and My set out to stop a comet approaching the Moomin valley. Along the way they meet Snusmumriken, the beautiful Snorkfröken, Snorken and a Hemul, who join them in their quest.”

Joulupukki ja noitarumpu (Santa Claus and the Magic Drum) (1996) (x)

“Strange accidents start to happen in Santa's village when he receives a mysterious letter.”

Rölli ja metsänhenki (Rollo and the Woods Sprite) (2001) (x)

“Hairy and rowdy trolls called rolleys sail to a land inhabited by more peace-loving elves. When the rolleys arrive to the elf village, they scare the elves away and settle down in the village. One of the elves, Milli, a brave elf girl, returns to the village to make a peace with the rolleys. The rolleys do not warm to Milli's peace proposal, but she becomes friends with a rolley called Rölli. It becomes their mission to solve the conflict between the elves and the rolleys.”

Niko - lentäjän poika (The Flight Before Christmas) (2008) (x)

“A young reindeer who suffers from vertigo learns to overcome his fear, takes flying lessons from a clumsy flying squirrel and heads to the North pole to save a troubled Santa and his fleet of flying reindeer.”

[unibrowzz]

My 2020 reviews

All the cool kids were doing these so now I finally dragged my ass into doing them too lmao. 

Albania- Fall from the Sky

A song I swear cursed this whole contest from the moment it won Festivali i Këngës. Like with the shitshow this song caused I just knew the whole year was fucked. With half the fandom whining they didn’t get their first club song of the year to the other half smugly shoving it as their winner despite no other songs being around to compare it to, the whole fiasco just left me knowing that 2020 would end in tears, just hopefully not my own. As for the song, it’s lame. It’s a standard ballad with OBSCENE amounts of autotune, which is weird because the girl can actually sing pretty decently without it, so why they decided to make her sound like a damn computer is beyond me. And WHY did they translate it, haven't the past few years proven that Albania's better off leaving their songs in Albanian? 

Armenia- Chains on You

A bootleg Ariana Grande song, and a really shit one at that. The kind of song only people who think being young, gay and mean counts as having a personality would say is good.

Australia- Don’t Break Me

One of the few decent Australian entries (but that REALLY isn’t saying much coming from me, I barely care they’re in the contest by this point) but marred by a horribly untidy performance and lacklustre lyrics. At least it’s not fucking pop-opera, that’s all I can say. I’d rather listen to the sound of my face being dragged down the runway at Heathrow airport than be subjected to another Zero Gravity.

Austria- Alive

One of those pseudo-jazz dance songs, á la Olly Murs or Bruno Mars (I swear there’s a song like this in every recent contest). I mean, it’s good, but it’s just kinda meh since I’m kinda getting tired of this genre rearing its fedora-wearing head every time a new lineup rolls in.

Azerbaijan- Cleopatra

One of the “better” trashy entries this year, comprised of about five different musical genres, six ancient cultures being appropriated and absolutely zero class. Probably sounds at least 50% better when you’re absolutely steaming drunk and face down on the floor in the middle of a gay bar.

Belarus- Da Vidna

Somehow, this song sounds both very unique and original yet trite and average at the same time. I couldn’t decide whether listening to it was a new experience or if I’d heard it a million times before.

Belgium- Release Me

A song which just drones on till it ends. I would say it’s ripping off the song that won last year, but it forgot that having a chorus stops your song from being three minutes of snooze.

Bulgaria- Tears Getting Sober

A typical breathy mumble-girl song, AKA a genre I can’t fucking stand. Really don’t see the hype with this one, the melody is pretty but the vocals are out for lunch and it’s otherwise completely and utterly boring.

Croatia- Divlji Vjetre

One of the token big dramatic ballads you listen to once, enjoy, then forget about until Darius in the Discord server plays it one night whilst you’re hitting up the radio bot with requests. You’ll find that “nice, but forgettable” is a common theme for this year.

Cyprus- Running

Ironically Cyprus didn’t send a crappy Fuego knockoff for 2020, and I say ironically because a crappy Fuego knockoff would’ve actually stood out this year, and I say crappy because honestly Fuego wasn’t even all that great to begin with. "Running” itself is just one of those edgy tortured soul pop songs which, let’s be honest, would have been paired with an impressive performance which would’ve overshadowed how bland it is. Kind of like “You’re the Only One”. Or even Fuego for that matter.

Czech Republic- Kemama

Standard Afro-pop, a genre we don't often see at the contest so I'll let it pass. I feel like this is the kind of song that’s infinitely better live, and that it would’ve been one of those songs that suddenly became a frontrunner after the semi finals, but I guess we’ll never know eh?

Denmark- Yes 

The quintessential mid-10s Eurovision song. It's got guitars, happy people, Scandinavian origins… it’s just a typical radio guitar song, nothing special.

Estonia- What Love Is

I mean it's better than La Forza. Granted, the sound of someone pissing directly onto a microphone installed in the bowl of a toilet would sound better than La Forza but still. Going back to this song, it’s just... a standard Eastern-ballad with some very desperate lyrics. It feels kind of outdated, if I’m honest. Like something about this just reeks of 2011.

Finland- Looking Back

Yet another dreary, forgettable ballad. It comes to something when the best song they COULD have sent was a party song which sounded like it was from the mid 90s. At least that song was memorable. That said, this one at least has some decent lyrics. Bravo for that I guess.

France- Mon Alliée

France decides to say “fuck it” to being an underground fan-favourite and takes a leaf out of the UKs book by sending the same rent-a-Swede schlock they’ve been sending since 2015. I’m just confused as to why anyone in their right mind would choose to follow the UKs example but you do you France.

Germany- Violent Thing

A rehash of Sweden's entry from two years ago, but this time sung by Justin Bieber circa 2008. Kind of alright if you can stomach the singer's whiny voice, but otherwise pretty dull and kinda forgettable.

Greece- Superg!rl

Hello fellow kidz, we are hearing you like the girl power? The super heroes? The t3xt $p3ech? We made you song, please give us the votes *dabs*

Georgia- Take me as I Am

I mean… this sure is a choice. This feels like one of those songs that everyone memes on because the lyrics are kinda janky and the singer’s voice (and accent) take a bit of getting used to, but other than that it’s just one of those NQ songs for hipster fans to declare as their unironic winner at a later date. All in all this just feels like the male equivalent of one of those mid-10s fat acceptance women’s songs, only a lot shoutier and this time he has more flaws than not being skinny.

Iceland- Think About Things 

A bootleg George Ezra song, performed by a load of disinterested tumblr users in their pyjamas. Because if there’s one thing that sells me on a song, it’s being given the evils by a bunch of nerds who look like they’ll send me death threats for not agreeing with their Pokémon headcanons. To be fair, the song is kind of groovy since it sounds so 70s, but the performance is very off-putting to people who aren’t in the Eurovision loop. And also people who are, because I sure as Hell don’t see the appeal in this myself and this whole performance just feels like Save Your Kisses for Me without the charm. I feel like this would’ve come second or third, definitely with a lot of televotes but either the jury would’ve dragged it down or it wouldn’t have scored enough televotes to win.

Ireland- Story of my Life

A song that’s at LEAST ten years out of date by this point, think like an early Katy Perry, Jessie J or Avril Lavigne song. I’ll forgive it because even though it sounds like it should’ve been entered in 2013 (at the latest), it at least evokes some nostalgic memories of shitty school discos and holiday parks.

Israel- Feker Libi

The female equivalent of the Czech song. Unsurprisingly, people went wild for it when it was released. I guess only women are allowed to sing Afro-pop at this contest. Like with the Czech song, I’ll forgive it since Afro-pop is a cool genre anyway, and even though this is just another club song I can at least see myself dancing to it.

Italy- Fai Rumore

Well, at least my wish of “Italy sends a typical power ballad devoid of anything the mainstream fandom likes” finally came true. It was pretty refreshing to have a year where people weren’t shoving Italy’s entry up my nose left right and centre. In terms of my actual thoughts I can’t deny that the guy has a tremendous voice, but for some reason the song just doesn’t… click with me. I guess I like my male Italian singers a little more gruff and raspy, if you know what I mean. They gotta sound like they smoke at LEAST five packets of cigarettes a day for me to take notice.

Malta- All of my Love

Listen I am 100% rooting for Destiny Chukunyere to win this contest some day but man was this song a disappointment. It feels so… un-special and generic, like it gets the job done and that’s it. It’s not the stand-up-and-belt-it-out soul anthem I’d hoped for, it’s just… there.

Moldova- Prison

All I remember about this song is that it vaguely reminds me of that one Meccano song about the gypsy who makes a deal with the moon or something. And I’ve TRIED to remember more about what it sounds like, trust me.

Latvia- Still Breathing

The one horrible weird song you get every year which overuses strobe effects to the point it comes with an epilepsy warning. Would be bearable if it wasn't for the singer’s insistence that this is actually some feminist masterpiece when it's really just a self-empowerment club song about the singer fingerbanging herself over the fact she writes music.

Lithuania- On Fire

One of the songs everyone thought was going to win at one point, even though it seems like a surefire non-qualifier to me. It’s one of those weird entries, but not the kind of over the top, batshit insane, you’d-have-to-be-drunk-to-enjoy-it weird, the kind of subdued surreal weird. Like this is weed instead of LSD or cocaine weird. Granted my mom, who I consider to be a "typical" Eurofan, actually really liked this song when she saw it in the recaps, so who knows maybe this would have done well with televoters after all.

Netherlands- Grow

I appreciate this song for how artsy and clever it is with its structure, since it starts off acapella and the instrumental builds up with the song until it stops suddenly, symbolising a person’s growth from a child into an adult, and ending suddenly with their death (Geddit? The song’s called “Grow”). But it feels like the kind of song that would be lost on a Eurovision audience. The juries would have taken note, for sure, but the televote… let’s be honest, they’d have been too busy drunk voting for Russia to care about anything else.

North Macedonia- You

Well, it's better than the miserable dirge they sent last year, but given how I'd rather pleasure myself with a steak knife than listen to that song, that really isn't saying much. Going back to “You”, it really just feels like a diet version of Switzerland’s entry from last year, combined with Sweden’s song from 2018. What I’m saying is it’s your average “I’m a man in a club and I want to dance with and probably fuck this hot girl I just met” song, which I a new genre I just made up. You’re welcome.

Norway- Attention 

One of those songs you appreciate because it sounds nice and the singer has a good voice, but instantly forget because it’s really not all that interesting. If I sound like I'm repeating myself, welcome to Eurovision 2020.

Poland- Empires

“Rise Like a Phoenix” but sung by a wannabe Adele and not a mascara-wearing Jesus in a dress. Like a lot of other songs on this list, it’s just average across the board, likeable when it’s on, but instantly forgettable as soon as the next song comes on.

Portugal: Medo de Sentir

Pretty, but also similar to their ill-fated 2018 entry, only with a bit more energy and less pink hair. What I’m saying is this would have been another NQ unless the crowd who enjoy subtle ambience music come in to save it like they did with Slovenia's entry last year.

Romania- Alcohol You

See Bulgaria, because this is practically the same song. It’s just as dreary, just as badly sung (if not worse because holy shit this girl sounds like she’s being suffocated), and I suppose you COULD excuse that by saying she’s drunk or hungover… but I don’t want to listen to someone ungracefully mumble into a microphone for three minutes.

Russia- Uno

A classic big camp party song, the kind of song people who haven’t watched Eurovision since 2003 think wins on the regular. I can see why people would like it (especially in this boring year lmao, I applaud Russia for taking the opportunity to loosen their corset and just send a complete mess instead of their usual clinical vote grabs), but it’s just not something I enjoy. It's the song that plays into the misconception that Eurovision is just a clown show for drunk people, like this is just here to be that one flash-in-the-pan meme song that only entertains people who don’t really care about Eurovision until the day before it airs. Kind of like the old ladies they sent in 2012 (remember them?).

San Marino- Freaky!

San Marino, in true Sammarinese fashion, have yet again sent a decade-ambiguous song which sounds like it was either released in 1978 or 2003. I feel like this would have been one of those songs which could have surprised us if it had a really wacky, creative performance (think like Moldova in 2018), but this is San Marino so you know that would never happen.

Serbia- Hasta la Vista

Insert unoriginal joke about a decade wanting their shitty trend back right here. Okay maybe that’s a bit harsh, especially considering how this song is actually, yanno, unique in comparison to the rest of this year. But it still feels weirdly dated, in a way where I can’t decide whether it sounds like it belongs in 1998 or 2018. I suppose girl power ages a song regardless of when it was released.

Slovenia- Voda

Yet another standard Balkan-European power ballad which you appreciate because it’s well sung, but forget the moment it ends because it’s kinda boring. … Does anyone else have a bit of deja vu?

Spain- Universo

For some reason I feel like this song is shilling itself out to someone but I have no idea who. Aside from the horny people voting solely because the singer is moderately attractive even with that wretched Jedward haircut.

Sweden- Move

Imagine soul but… boring.

Switzerland- Répondez Moi

Imagine Arcade but… in French.

United Kingdom- My last Breath

Not the best the UK could have done, but it’s at least a modern offering unlike the residual dregs of the mid-90s that we sent throughout the 2010s. It’s definitely a bit too generic to have done any better than maybe 15th, but hey at least the cancellation means we won’t have to see it not do as well as the BBC thinks it’s entitled to do, prompting a billion clickbait articles about how Brexit somehow affected our performance.

Ukraine- Solovey

At long last we come to something you probably weren't expecting: a song I actually really like. Which is weird because I usually don't care for or don't like whatever Ukraine vomits into the contest, so I was pleasantly surprised to find a song I liked from them in such a weak year. This song isn’t for everyone, it’s white noise singing which is a very acquired taste, but this is honestly the only 2020 song I find myself coming back to over and over. And it’s in Ukrainian too, so you don’t have to put up with their usual mangled English offerings.

[hufflepuff-ravenclaw-reviews]

Discovery of Witches Season 1 Episode 1

Yes, this is the TV series based off of that horrible book trilogy. People who follow my book blog will remember that I snarked it and had the absolute worst time.

Forget the Fifty Shades... sextet (It's a sextet now, not a trilogy). The All Souls Trilogy is, hands down, the absolute worst thing that I have ever had the misfortune to read.

But Ravenclaw, if you hated the book so much, why did you watch even one episode of the TV series?

All me curious, I suppose.

Going into the episode, my opinion is already pretty rock bottom. I'm expecting a lot of padding, if only because the book was 90% unnecessary bullshit that literally anybody should have told Harkness to cut out.

When they first announced that they were making the series, I joked with my friends that half of the TV show was just going to be Diana disassociating for half an hour as she stared at a sconce and explained how this light fixture once belonged to Henry VIII or whatever. BECUASE THAT'S HOW IT HAPPENS IN THE BOOK.

However, the TV series, as you might imagine, takes some... er... liberties. Already in the first episode, characters are introduced differently, and new POVs are introduced as well. If only because... No, Harkness. We don't want to see Diana dramatically pushing down the lever on the toaster. JFC why.

The show starts off pretty much like in the book: Meet Diana Bishop, who has a doctorate in magical history. She's a witch, but she's not very good at it.

In the book, especially right in the beginning before Harkness figured out what the fuck she was doing, Diana's magic waffled between “I WANT TO BE HUMAN SO I REFUSE TO USE MAGIC!!” and “I AM SHIT AT MAGIC SO I TRY TO AVOID DOING IT WHENEVER POSSIBLE.”

However, right off the bat, Diana talks with her friend, Jillian, and says that she has a lot of lingering PTSD from her parents being murdered because of their magic. Which is fair.

And it's also way more character development than Diana got in literally 15000 pages of trash Harkness wrote.

Diana calls up the famed Ashmole 742 (or as I took to calling it “Asshole 747”), of which the entire series revolves around.

See, literally every magical creature thinks that this book is somehow the answer to all of their problems. They all want it because they think that it's going to share the secrets of how they came to be. And they don't want the other magical species to get their hands on it because they think that the secrets inside will tell the other species how to destroy them.

And as I write this, I think to myself “There can be no winners in a scenario like this. Just mutual destruction over a fucking book.” But whatever.

Oh, and in case you need to be caught up, there are three magical species: witches, vampires, and daemons. I'm using the spelling from the book, because, in my mind, they were not the same thing as “demons”. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the book went out of its way to assure us that “daemons” had not crawled up from hell, etc etc. In fact, I even pronounced it like “day-mons”. The series, however, seems to think that “daemon” and “demon” would be too confusing, and has resorted back to just plain old demon.

First off... let me express my discomfort over the entire library scene. Diana goes in, tells the guy at the desk that she wants such and such books and gives him the call slips. He sends the slips down to where the really old books are stored. And it's interesting to see. But then the lady goes and she just... “Lol, here's this book! And let me grab this other book.” She stacks them up on her chest like they weren't four-plus centuries old. And if we were talking about copies of Harry Potter or whatever, I don't think that I would give two shits. BUT THESE ARE OLD, PRICELESS, ONE OF A KIND BOOKS. AND SHE'S TREATING THEM LIKE THEY'RE 98TH EDITIONS OF HARRY POTTER.

And then the guy goes over to give them to Diana, and he's like “Well, here you go.” and just kind of... tosses them onto her workspace. And Diana starts to look at the Asshole 747.

And not a single person handles any of these books with gloves, either. Diana even touches these old pages with her bare hands, which can't possibly be good for the pages or ink. And in one scene, she even forcefully rips a page apart from the one below it, which had sort of become stuck with the ink.

WHY.

Anyway, as Diana actually looks at the book, it's a very interesting special effect as all of the words swirl around on the page.

However, true to the book, Diana freaks out and quickly returns the book. However, unlike in the book, Diana thinks that she sees her father, and she has a complete and utter panic attack over the entire thing.

She later calls her aunt, who is more angry that Diana returned what is clearly a dangerous magical item rather than to investigate further... Rather than the obvious fact that it's clear that Diana is spiraling into some kind of psychosis what with seeing her father and having nightterrors.

Because priorities.

Also much like in the book, all of the magical species in the area were somehow alerted to Diana calling up the book. And I'm willing to let it slide, if only because MAGIC.

Jillian kicks off her subplot by her telling the head of the local coven about this. The head then calls up the witchy president, who's some old fat guy and I cannot remember his name for the life of me. He also brings along Satu. We were rather rudely introduced to Satu as old fat guy went to get her in Finland. And she murdered the random human that the old fat guy brought along with him.

HAHAHA, BECAUSE NOTHING SAYS 'I WANT YOU TO RULE ME' QUITE LIKE STARTING OFF YOUR REIGN BY MURDERING PEOPLE. HAHAHAHAHAHA /sarcasm

However, as this is likely going to be a long series (if it goes the full length of the books and isn't canceled in the meantime, which maybe it will be if the rest of the episodes are this awkward with clunky dialogue as this first episode), then Jillian's plot is just kicking off. We don't spend much time on it.

However, we do introduce Marcus, who is Matthew's vampire son. (Not to be confused with a biological son. They're vampires, for fuck's sake.) Marcus's friend was hit by a car, and he died almost instantly. Marcus felt bad about the entire thing and tried to turn his friend, only for the vampire mojo to not work at all.

Later, Matthew picks Marcus up from the police station, and completely reams Marcus out for... trying to help his friend. It's a head scratcher, but don't linger too much on it.

Matthew is, however, insanely insistent that the answers to why they suddenly cannot create any new vampires lies in Asshole 747.

So, he starts to literally stalk Diana. And, granted. This is very accurate to how things were in the book. Except, Diana was kind of like “Oh no, he's hot!” about the entire thing. We never saw what Matthew was thinking, because the books were written from Diana's first person POV. But... in the TV series, he comes off less like a smarter and more mature Edward Cullen and more like... Hannibal Lecter. Yeah, you trust him a little if only because he's good looking and smart. But at the same time, you're getting some seriously creepy “He's going to cut out my spleen and put it in soup and feed me the soup before he kills me for real.” vibes from him. Ugh.

It's the complete opposite of romantic, if you ask me. At least the Twilight movies tried to make Edward look like not the kind of person who breaks into a girl's bedroom to watch her sleep. With Discovery of Witches, no such attempt to de-creep-ify Matthew is ever made.

All in all, the episode seemed to drag on forever. Too many subplots were introduced too quickly. The dialogue was clunky and it felt overly forced. Especially from Diana. The actual academic side of the episode was so cringy that I literally wanted to cry and write an angry letter to whoever the fuck wrote this bullshit.

But, the simple fact that it's really, REALLY hard to talk about a pencil for three pages or bricks or the dorm where Diana's staying or her fucking hairbrush means that half of what made the All Souls Trilogy so unbelievably unbearable is instantly cut for more actual plot.

It wasn't nearly as horrible as I was expecting. And I'm as surprised as you are. I've seen way worse things. And the fact that I kind of want to see the second episode just to see where they're going to take this vs how the book was is always a good sign for a show.

Especially one as awful as All Souls Trilogy was.  

[theliterateape]

The Double-Edge of Propagandistic Journalism

by Don Hall

When I worked at Chicago Public Radio (2007-2017) one of the ongoing challenges the station faced was the rush to broadcast in the face of an increasingly Twitter-lead race. 

With the rapid ascension of digital quasi-journalism came the dilemma of either getting the news out first or getting the news out right. For the most part within my decade there, the goal was to get it right so, often, the station was broadcasting news that had already hit for a day or so but provided that essential NPR context and nuance required for listeners not lead by the nose by the Twitterverse.

Given that the business model behind NPR relies heavily on public donations (at the time comprising a full 60% of the funding for WBEZ) the fact that many of their audience were also getting their news from Twitter became more of an issue to confront.

The media world has been shifting ever since. The result?

The United States ranks last in media trust — at 29% — among 92,000 news consumers surveyed in 46 countries, a report released Wednesday found. That’s worse than Poland, worse than the Philippines, worse than Peru. (Finland leads at 65%.)

In a recent conversation with a strident Trump-hater and hater of anyone who may have voted for him ("70 million racist idiots who can't comprehend the difference between fact and fiction...") it occurred that with so many distrusting our media outlets (including NPR) and the resulting rise in independent news substacks and mailers as well as the constant flow of mis- and disinformation readily available in social media platforms, we may very well be fucked.

There's a kind of moralistic paternalism at play here. One side of the partisan divide looks at the other and determines that they are either too morally bankrupt or too stupid to parse out what is truth versus what is propaganda. Like the antiracist phrasing around poor, young blacks who are too burdened with systemic racism to comprehend the criminality of taking a gun and shooting it at a rival, this bizarre infantilism of whole sections of society smacks more of the Church than anything else.

"Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do." becomes "Condemn them, Father, for they know not what is true."

This brings us to the rumors that the NYT has been taken over by Woke post-college Zoomers and that NPR has become more propaganda than neutral news source.

Of course, there is a response from NPR:

Outrage As A Business Model: How Ben Shapiro Is Using Facebook To Build An Empire

An NPR analysis of social media data found that over the past year, stories published by the site Shapiro founded, The Daily Wire, received more likes, shares and comments on Facebook than any other news publisher by a wide margin.

Even legacy news organizations that have broken major stories or produced groundbreaking investigative work don't come anywhere close.

The article notes that “other conservative outlets such as The Blaze, Breitbart News and The Western Journal” that “publish aggregated and opinion content” have also “generally been more successful… than legacy news outlets over the past year, according to NPR's analysis.”

Is the argument presented that Shapiro publishes lies? No. 

“The articles The Daily Wire publishes don't normally include falsehoods.”

Is he Trump-y? Nope.

Shapiro “publicly denounced the alt-right and other people in Trump's orbit,” and “the conspiracy theory that Trump is the rightful winner of the 2020 election.”

The NPR piece can't even claim that The Daily Wire is a news organization as they are quite clear on the Shapiro's website that "the site declares, "The Daily Wire does not claim to be without bias," and goes on to say, "We're opinionated, we're noisy, and we're having a good time."

So, aside from being more successful in attracting eyeballs that NPR, what's the beef?

By only covering specific stories that bolster the conservative agenda (such as… polarizing ones about race and sexuality issues)… readers still come away from The Daily Wire's content with the impression that Republican politicians can do little wrong and cancel culture is among the nation's greatest threats.

Ah! This because NPR doesn't cover specific stories that bolster the progressive agenda (such as polarizing ones about race and sexuality issues), right?

Hypocrisy, thy name is Moralistic Propaganda.

What Does It Mean To Be Latino? The 'Light-Skinned Privilege' Edition Maria Garcia and Maria Hinojosa are both Mexican American, both mestiza, and both relatively light-skinned. But Maria Hinojosa strongly identifies as a woman of color, whereas Maria Garcia has stopped doing so.

The Racial Reckoning That Wasn't In the wake of several high-profile police killings last summer, support for Black Lives Matter skyrocketed among white Americans. Their new concerns about racism pushed books about race to the top of the bestseller lists, while corporations pledged billions of dollars to address injustice. A year later, though, polls show that white support for the movement has not only waned, but is lower than it was before.

Black TikTok Creators Are On Strike To Protest A Lack Of Credit For Their Work Tired of not receiving credit for their creativity and original work — all while watching white influencers rewarded with millions of views performing dances they didn't create — many Black creators on TikTok joined a widespread strike last week, refusing to create any new dances until credit is given where it's due.

New Zealand Weightlifter Will Be The First Openly Trans Competitor At The Olympics

She Struggled To Reclaim Her Indigenous Name. She Hopes Others Have It Easier

Monuments And Teams Have Changed Names As America Reckons With Racism. Birds Are Next

There is absolutely nothing wrong about the heavy-left lean from NPR. I personally still prefer them to almost any other news source. That said, it is anything but hypocritical to then level the accusation at Shapiro's obviously and fully transparent biased website that it is biased while exhibiting the exact same bias on the other side of the fence.

Is their any such thing as objective journalism? I don't believe so but there needs to be the attempt or the whole fourth estate is nothing more than a pack of moralists lecturing those they disagree with on how they should believe and behave and that isn't what journalism is supposed to be. That's what a nosy neighbor, an angry nun, or ideology-spewing lunatic does.

I don't care much for Shapiro or The Daily Caller but the stance of "Do as we say not as we do" is too pervasive in this instance. I expect better from NPR but the pressures of reach, finance, and facing the reality that half of the country finds the brand of scolding progressivism to be so offensive that they scatter to the type of click-bait infotainment on the right of the spectrum is daunting.

Stick to your guns, NPR. Don't buy into the post-modernist belief that objectivity cannot exist. Suffer the slings of neutrality and if the population ignores you, it wasn't like you were killing it in the ratings in the first place.

Like the reporters and producers I worked with years ago, get it right not popular.

[thewidowstanton]

Kalle Nio, magician and visual artist, WHS: Lähtö, London International Mime Festival

Kalle Nio is an award-winning magician and visual artist from Helsinki in Finland. His stage work combines historical stage magic techniques with contemporary video projections. In 2000, he won third prize at FISM in the invention category and the same year co-founded WHS – a collective producing new circus and visual theatre – with juggler Ville Walo. WHS has played a key role in the rise of contemporary circus in Finland and has been seen internationally. Its show Pinta was at Jacksons Lane in London during CircusFest 2016.

Kalle is also one of the founders of Teatteri Union, an art-house cinema and performing arts venue in Helsinki. His works as a visual artist involve the collision of magic, cinema and the human body. He now appears with Vera Selene Tegelman in his award-winning production Lähtö, which he also directs. The show has its UK premiere at the Platform Theatre in London and runs from 10-13 January 2018 during the 41st London International Mime Festival. Kalle takes a break from “testing some scenes for a new show” at Teatteri Union to chat to Liz Arratoon.

The Widow Stanton: Do you come from a showbusiness background? Kalle Nio: No… well, sort of. There isn’t any in my family but I started to do magic when I was a really young child, like maybe most magicians. I had my first performances when I was five years old and then never stopped doing it. So I’ve been doing magic all my life, basically.

Many magicians start out with a little kit, such as a Paul Daniels’ set. How did you learn? Yes, like that. Exactly the same old story. I got a magic kit from a toy store and then I started to learn from books. Then I went to some youth circus schools and things like that, but I don’t have any official circus training; I’m really self taught. Paul Daniels was really big in Finland as well when I was kid and I watched a lot of his shows. 

What made you start it so young? I suppose I saw some magicians on TV and stuff like that but it was something that always felt like my thing. It’s curious because when I started it was just so natural for me; ‘OK, I will do that‘. Then I did magic almost professionally from when I was 14 because I won the youth championships of magic in Finland and that led me to perform on some TV shows that were really popular. After that I had so many possibilities to perform everywhere it kind of became my profession. It was a very natural thing to do.

Is magic big in Finland? I only know of Marko Karvo… Well, there are a lot of really good magicians here but I don’t think it’s any bigger than in any other European country. There are a lot of magicians everywhere and I feel that in recent years magic has become more and more popular. There are lots more professional magicians performing and doing interesting things. It’s a really good time to be a magician at the moment.

What was your invention for FISM 2000? It was two tricks. It’s a funny story actually, because I went to FISM to compete in the close-up category but the judges asked me to go and meet them after the show. They felt that maybe I wasn’t the winner of the close-up category but they wanted to know how I did my tricks. I explained how I’d done them and then they gave me a trophy in the inventions category.

Will you describe the tricks without saying how they were done? The first one was with a soda bottle. I blew into the glass bottle and it inflated like a balloon… [Laughs] … and the second one was a card trick. One of the volunteers picked a card and signed her name on it, then the card vanished and reappeared inside a block of ice.

Where did your interest in historical stage magic come from? I read a lot about the history of magic. I’m really into like, ‘What were the first tricks that magicians started to perform? What are the greatest illusions that no one does anymore?’. I love to read about those and a lot of my influences come from there. I’ll see some old trick that I’d like to try and maybe I’ll start to test it, ‘Could it work? What’s really the secret there?’. Then quite often I’ll forget the original thing and just take some elements from it. So it may be that the theme, or the secret or a visual idea will develop into something completely different.

For instance in Lähtö there’s this trick with mirrors. Normally in that trick, when it was originally performed, you don’t really see the mirror, it’s hidden, so that’s kind of the secret, but what we’ve done is just the opposite. Originally we had just one giant mirror, but to make things more interesting we decided to spit it into several smaller ones. We’ve placed the mirrors so that they are visible for everyone and we manipulate and levitate and move them round the stage. It’s completely different than the original but there is still the foundation it came from, the idea of testing the old illusion but developing it. 

You mentioned going to youth circus, have you got any circus skills? I practised juggling for many years; that’s something I like to do, but I’ve never performed as a juggler. I’ve done some shows together with jugglers and I really enjoy seeing jugging and also thinking about it, but I’m not so skilled as a juggler that I’d like to perform as juggler. In some of my previous shows I’ve used magic and juggling and perhaps at some point I’ll do more of that.

And you’re also an artist. Did you study art? Yes, I have a masters degree in Fine Arts. I went to the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in the department of Time and Space. It means it’s time-based arts, like performance and film and also spatial things, like installations and stuff like that. I studied there, and so I’ve been working as a visual artist as well.

And you’ve had exhibitors all over the place! Yes, it’s true. For me, they’re pretty close to each other, actually. In the performances I do in theatres I consider the lights, the video projections and set decorations and everything that is on the stage to be as important as the performers themselves. So for me, it’s like a work of art. Everything has to be connected together, everything has to work at the same time. So basically, the exhibitions I do are pretty much the same, but one difference is that usually there are no live performers.

The biggest difference between an exhibition in a gallery and a show in a theatre is the way that I can manipulate time. In a theatre the audience comes and will sit there for an hour and normally they don’t go away in-between, so I can have a linear timeline. But in an exhibition people come and can spend maybe five minutes, maybe an hour, you don’t know and you cannot control that, so it’s a really subtly different way of how you can control the audience. I think that’s really interesting because it makes how you have to see the linearity of the work so different.

When was WHS’ first show? Our first premiere was in 2002. We did something like five shows together, the last one in 2008. Since then we’ve been working separately; we run the theatre, where I am at the moment, but for the past ten years it’s been more like two companies or like a collective/producing facility. We also produce other artists and circus performances so it has grown into many companies under one name. Yes, we interviewed the artist Salla Hakanpää about Dive.

Does your association with circus artists come from youth circus? I’m a magician and did a lot of juggling, so I started to work with jugglers and the first shows I did were pretty much circus kind of shows, but they also used a lot of projections. For me the development has been that I started with more common circus elements but bit by bit it’s developed more into visual theatre or theatrical things that I’m interested in. I still feel that the circus is somehow there in the background. I still enjoy seeing tricks and I like elements of the realness of circus.

Tell us about Vera Selene. Is she a circus performer? No, she’a dancer and an actress. I started to work with her on Lähtö and since then we’ve done Cutting Edge; she also performs in that. She’s a really great dancer and I love the way she performs onstage.

The illusions in Cutting Edge look really intriguing! I really love the theme of that show. It’s curious, if you take maybe 100 of the most well-known magicians’ illusions that there are, like, sawing a woman in half, putting swords through a woman, cutting a head off somebody, putting spikes through somebody, it’s all super-violent things. It’s like the magic is full of these really, really violent tricks and for me the question was, ‘So as people, why do we want to see that kind of thing? Why is it fun for us to see somebody being sawn in half?’. That was the starting point of the show.

Also the sawing a woman in half wasn’t actually originally sawing a woman, but a small boy. It didn’t become really famous until they switched it to being a woman; then it became a huge hit. It tells us so much about how our society in Europe… how the European culture is built, that we actually want to see, especially women being sawn and tortured in whatever way. If you take the history of art you have these paintings where everybody has been decapitated and in reality, with the French Revolution with all the guillotines and such. Every country has its own horrible culture of cutting off heads and it started to interest me, the decapitation as a spectacle, because in most countries it was like a piece of cruel theatre. It still exists on the internet and people really watch it. So, what’s wrong with us?

With Lähtö, you perform, you’re the director, and you’ve designed the projections and the illusions. Can you reveal something about it? Lähtö means ‘departure’ and it’s about this couple who have a sort of complex relationship. They are perhaps splitting apart or perhaps not, and it’s not so much about the story but about the atmosphere and the emotion of what they are going through at the moment. What we’re trying to do is have the exterior elements tell us about their interior or internal feelings. We’re not trying to act so much, it’s more about how, for instance, the curtains behind us can express the feelings we have inside. We want all the external elements to be expressive. It has a lot of elements using magic and a lot of visual things like projections and things like that.

From the description in the programme, I was expecting some circus skills… We don’t have acrobatics or juggling but the magic is the circus element that’s definitely there. There are a lot of tricks and then there’s the question of the definition; would you see magic as part of circus? I do, so I think that it’s not wrong to say it.

You do see magic in the circus… The definition of circus is quite curious because so many people have different ideas about it but there’s also the definition of magic. That’s always a really good question for me because sometimes some people will say about some of the tricks I do in the show: “This is not magic.” And for others it is magic. So it’s like, ‘What is magic actually?’. Why isn’t an aeroplane magic because it’s flying or a refrigerator, because we don’t really know how it works? For me the circus is like… if we talk about traditional circus I don’t feel it is a tent with animals. Circus started much earlier; tenting circuses just arrived in the 1820s or something like that. I feel it goes way back into times where they had magicians and curiosities and all these kinds of things. That’s what I’m interested in; going way back.

Have you appeared in the Mime Festival before? No, and I’ve never performed in London or anywhere in the UK before. I’ve been to London for two hours once when I had a fight connection, so it’s a really new world for me. I’m super excited about it and really curious to see how people in London will feel about our show.

Kalle appears in Lähtö at the Platform Theatre in London from 10-13 January 2018 during the 41st London International Mime Festival.

For tickets to Lähtö, click here

Picture credits: Headshot, gallery shot and Cutting Edge heads, Kalle Nio; Lähtö, Tom Hakala; Waiting Room, Jeongah Ha

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Twitter: @MimeLondon @TheatrePlatform

Follow @TheWidowStanton on Twitter

Read our other interviews with Finnish artists: Hanna Moisala, Salla Hakanpää, Heidi Niemi and Saara Ahola 

[ohneweiterebedeutung]

[Disclaimer: This article appeared last year (when I was really busy (...)), before the Volkswagen scandal (and cuts in the VfL budget), and also kind of before *Red Bull Bundesliga* (though that’s hinted at). It’s still rather interesting, I think, not just for fans of German football, so I’m posting it now. I was asked previously by 11Freunde to post the magazine cover instead of the accompanying photos. This is my translation of their article. I am not affiliated with 11Freunde, just a fan.]

The Decline

The national leagues are getting more and more tedious, the Champions League always sees the same winners. Modern football is ruining itself. So what comes after?

(text: Christoph Biermann, photos: Jann Höfer; 11Freunde #180)

One day we will try to remember when it began. Was it at the point when we couldn’t recall Bayern’s and Dortmund’s opponents in the Champions League anymore? Was it when we didn’t know if Bundesliga was even on that day? Or when this autumn, for the first time Bayern still had tickets to sell at the pay desk for the Ingolstadt game? When in Mainz the audience was only scattered across the stands even though St. Etienne really wasn’t an unattractive opponent in Europa League? Or when in the international game against Finland in Mönchengladbach thousands of seats remained empty? Were those the moments when we sensed that the era of football as we knew it was over?

In his bestseller „Tipping Point“ Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell examines the phenomenon of trends and abrupt changes. He describes in it the rapid decline of the crime rate in 1990’s New York or how books by completely unknown authors have become giant bestsellers at lightning-speed. Occurrences like these, according to Gladwell, have a tipping point. A moment of toppling over, starting at which things suddenly and rapidly change. Gladwell compares them to epidemics: „Ideas and products and messages spread just like a virus.“ So is football infested by a virus that could lead to its downfall? At first glance this seems like an absurd notion. Bundesliga stadiums are sold-out and the TV ratings haven’t noticeably gone down. In fact the TV rights for Bundesliga have just been sold for the first time for more than a billion Euros per season, and sponsors are beating a path to the doors of the big clubs. Still, if you asks fans, but also managers, coaches or players, if there’s a change happening currently you’ll find all of them pause for a second, and nod. Nobody in the football industry wants to confirm it openly, who would want to talk down their own business? But everybody agrees that some of the magic of football is flying away. It’s to do with the bizarre state of the big football associations FIFA and UEFA, the corruption and the absurd plans for a world cup with 40 or 48 participants. But essentially the subject is a different one: The sporting competition doesn’t work anymore!

„People go to see the football because they don’t know how it will end“ is one of the golden bonmots of Sepp Herberger. But today, much too often, it doesn’t hold true anymore. More and more we get the feeling that we basically already know how it will end. Of course we don’t know the exact result, but there’s one mighty truth edging into to the foreground: „Money scores goals.“ There’s a direct interrelation between financial input and sporting output everywhere where professional football is being played. If you put the table of a league next to a ranking of the clubs' personnel costs, over an average of ten years they will coincide. That is not just an assertion, economist Stefan Szymanski proved it in 2009 using England as an example. Because there the clubs have to publish these costs in their business reports. Szymanski demonstrates: „The higher the salaries you’re able to pay, the higher up you’ll be on the table.“ Not in every moment and in every year, but long-term. In Germany the personnel costs of the professional teams are a well-kept secret. So in order to get substantive numbers, we talked to numerous Bundesliga managers, players’ agents and countless other insiders. This bevy of experts make for reliable estimates of what the clubs spend on the players and coaching teams of their Bundesliga squads in the current season. Performance bonus payments aren’t included, neither are the expenses on youth training centres, the second teams or the non-sporting staff. What’s surprising about these numbers is the modest means that FC Ingolstadt and FC Augsburg are still having to work with, and how little remains of the former economic power of Werder Bremen. Also astonishing is the huge sporting difference between Borussia Mönchengladbach and Hamburger SV, even though the two clubs have similar personnel costs. But the most important realisation is this: The differences in the league distort the competition. Hertha BSC has twice the budget of Darmstadt at their disposal, Schalke 04 has twice that of Hertha, and FC Bayern has twice that of Schalke. If Bundesliga were a motor race there would be brand-new Ferraris and Porsches competing with aged [Volkswagen] Golfs and [Opel] Kadetts. There at the back the precariate of Freiburg and Augsburg is chugging along behind the middle class and the leading group at the top is speeding away. They’re fighting out the European placings among themselves with FC Bayern as a lonely lead.

The fact that the ranking of the personnel budgets coincides for the most part with the average placings of the last fives years is no miracle. Maybe money doesn’t score goals, but the highest-paid footballers do. There are numerous depressing figures to prove it. So Bayern are smacking down the foot soldiers of Bundesliga with more and more goals. While in the years from 2000 to 2011 they won altogether eleven times with a goal difference of five goals or more, in the past five seasons already there’ve been 18 of these humiliating Munich victories. And matters are similar in the Champions League where in the past five seasons Bayern had ten proud triumphs with differences of four goals or more, in their five previous turns there were only half as many. And on and on with the shocking numbers: In the Bundesliga the record champions and Borussia Dortmund are toppling over victories and records. In the 2011/12 season for the first time in Bundesliga history a German champion, back then it was BVB, got more than 80 points in one season. Only one year later Bayern passed the 90 points mark. Also in the Bundesliga the Munich squad has forgotten how to lose. In the three years of Guardiola they only lost four Bundesliga games at a point in the season when they weren’t unassailable champions yet. Not even Beckenbauer, Müller, Breitner and Hoeneß in the early seventies were that dominant. So are there two camps, the big heads from Munich and Dortmund on the one side and the lumpenproletariat on the other? No. It’s a systemic problem. Nobody’s talking about equal opportunities in Bundesliga anymore anyway. „You can compensate a ten million Euro difference in salaries with good work, but we can’t really plan for an international placing,“ Köln’s Jörg Schmadtke notes drily. Which is also due to the fact that there’s a world of a difference in the league between the clubs’ options on the transfer market. Over the course of the past five years FC Bayern could spend 166 million Euros more on transfers than they’d earned, newly-promoted RB Leipzig a not-too-shabby 100 million Euros. 1. FC Köln on the other hand made over 17 million Euros more than they spent and SC Freiburg at this point is even financing part of their business via proceeds from transfers. Thanks in part to their good work in the youth department the Sportclub has managed to make a surplus of almost 25 million Euros in transfer profits.

As impressive as these numbers are they hardly play any role in the public discourse. Which is also down to us fans who only care to a moderate degree at best about that depressing numbers stuff. We don’t want managers who complain about the differences in salaries, but teams who successfully prevail against the inequalities. Like Leicester City who became English champions last season even though there were only three clubs in the English Premier League with a smaller budget. In Germany, too, a fariytale like that became reality once: In 2011 Borussia Dortmund won the championship with only the tenth biggest salary budget in the league. And didn’t Darmstadt 98 last season end up above clubs who had more than twice as much money to spend? All true, and surely this season, too, will have its exceptions. Maybe this year Berlin’s Hertha won’t drop after the winter break or the Kölners themselves will outperform their manager’s boldest dreams. But the sad thing is: they will remain exceptions. The differences have long become so enormous that a Bundesliga champion other than Bayern is not realistically conceivable. In the five big leagues of Europe there is only one club who has an even bigger economic lead on the runner-up. While Bayern has a good 80% more to spend on players than Dortmund, Paris Saint-Germain in France even have 130% more. The meaning of these numbers: When all the Dortmund players’ wages have been paid, Bayern can additionally afford the salaries of Lewandowski, Neuer, Müller, Lahm, Ribéry and Robben, and on top of that that of Mats Hummels. There’s a similar game further down in the food chain. Newbie RB Leipzig pride themselves on their self-imposed salary cap. No player of RB earns more than a basic salary of 3 million Euros. But there’s only half a dozen first league clubs who break that sound barrier anyway. The salary cap in Ingolstadt lies at 600,000 Euros, a fifth of that amount. Sometimes a special team spirit, an outstanding coach, an earned mutual trust or quality of life can help convince a player to stay. But for a club like SC Freiburg the economic differences to the top are simply too big to be able to hold on to players. It’s a fairly pleasant life for a player to reside in idyllic Breisgau and make half a million, but even medium Bundesliga clubs can offer three times as much. That’s the meaning behind that phrase, „money scores goals“. It’s just trivially about better players and by now also about better staff. Now there’s a transfer market for coaches developping, complete with the payment of transfer fees. Schalke’s new manager Christian Heidel snatched away FC Augsburg’s coach Weinzierl, who went on to help himself from Darmstadt 98. The transfer of sporting director Michael Reschke from Leverkusen to Bayern two years ago was more important than some transfers of supposed superstars. Given these circumstances Freiburg’s manager Jochen Saier states „Every year that we play in Bundesliga is a miracle.“

Miracles happen every now and again but how did we get to this point where diligence and hard work aren’t enough anymore to keep up? There’ve always been financial differences between the clubs in Bundesliga, but up until 1992 they were just about manageable facts: the size of the stadium, the number of fans, the sponsors’ readiness to pay. In the early seventies, FC Bayern benefitted when the Olympiastadion was built, as did Schalke or Dortmund who a little while later moved into newly completed WC sites. Apart from that there were almost socialist conditions. All proceedings from TV broadcasts, including those from European cup matches, were put together and divided by 18. Bayern or Schalke, Stuttgarter Kickers or Wattenscheid 09, everybody got the same share. In 1992 DFB decided to link the distribution of TV money to sporting success. After this motion was passed Heribert Bruchhagen, manager of Schalke 04 at the time, asked to put down into the protocol that this would damage the competition in the Bundesliga. Rarely has there been a prognosis in football proven to be truer than that. In 1992 a mechanism was put into action that increased the differences year by year. When a little while later [TV station] Sat1 started broadcasting live matches, there was an extra one million D-Marks for the teams involved, which more often than not included FC Bayern. From the mid-nineties onward the clubs participating in international competitions, above all the Champions League which started in 1992, as well, could practically keep all TV proceedings from the European games to themselves. Back then, Borussia Dortmund had sporting success just as it started to become financially worthwhile. So BVB could afford to buy back Italian „legionnaires“ like Sammer, Kohler or Reuter in rows and with them win the Champions League in 1997. In 1995 to top it all off, the Bosman verdict suspended the transfer system that had helped smaller clubs, and there was more and more talk of "the scissors" [a gap] opening between the small ones and the big ones. „Those two pieces of the scissors have been blown apart a long time ago,“ says Andreas Rettig, manager of FC St. Pauli and former managing director of sports at DFL. Analogous to Gladwell’s quote from the beginning you could say that the virus of unequal distribution of resources has become epidemic. What’s important to know is that the TV income of the clubs, apart from DFB-Pokal, comes from three pots. The national TV rights with the money from public TV and Sky have for many years been allocated by the same distribution: The Bundesliga champion gets about twice as much as the last in the table, the rest is graded in between, equally spaced. The second pot, from the international commercialisation of Bundesliga TV rights, used to be rather sparsely filled for a long time, and almost negligible. But in recent years those sums have risen considerably and are being distributed according to who’s been successful internationally. The Deutsche Fußball-Liga doesn’t publish what amount is transferred to which club. We had the numbers from the league leaked to us and they show that clubs like 1. FC Köln or Eintracht Frankfurt in the last season received 2.5 million Euros each from the international commercialisation - more than ever before. However FC Bayern München, over the same timespan, have increased their amount to 30.5 million Euros. So the first in the business doesn’t just get twice as much, but more than 12 times as much than the foot soldiers of the league. The third and in the end the decisive factor is the TV money from the Champions League and the Europa League, which are published by UEFA. It’s that money that cemented the Top Four in the league. Here FC Bayern received more than a quarter of a billion Euros in the last five years, Dortmund over 150 million Euros, which once and for all renders the distance to those clubs not playing Champions League gigantic.

As if those margins weren’t big enough, investors, as well, play a still underestimated role in the land of the 50+1 rule. According to research by TU Munich, in the years 2004 to 2014 the Volkswagen corporation invested almost half a billion Euros into VfL Wolfsburg. Which, by the way, weren’t needed to build a stadium, the local arena was opened in 2002. TSG Hoffenheim without the quarter of a billion Euros investments by Dieter Hopp could have hardly established themselves in the Bundesliga. The numbers of RB Leipzig, not researched by the Munich economists, are barely below that. Apart from that, investors are mainly getting in on the big clubs, where there’s already the biggest economic power anyway. FC Bayern is collecting 363 million Euros selling shares to Adidas, Allianz or Audi, Borussia Dortmund 163 million Euros from Evonik, Signal Iduna and Puma. These investments have brought with them a completely new logic in football. There’s no interest anymore in an open competition. After all, the investments would be in danger if Bayern, Dortmund or Wolfsburg - for an extended period of time - had to leave the international stage. That’s also why the distribution of the TV money is managed thus so that the bigger clubs won’t get into trouble when from a sporting perspective things get out of control for a time, like at Borussia Dortmund in Jürgen Klopp’s final year. So it’s no wonder that Bayern-Boss Karl-Heinz Rummenigge wanted to introduce seeding lists into DFB-Pokal. Schalke’s financial director Peter Peters wanted a first and a second leg for the semifinals in the same competition. The last thing we need would be to lose on a bad day to some low-class team! But the clearest manifestation of that insurance mentality is the latest reform of the Champions League, which will come into force in 2018: 16 teams from the big four leagues will be guaranteed starting places, the incalculable play-offs have been cut.

And thus the Champions League will continue its work of destruction with an even bigger force. Though even the [economically] liberal [„wirtschaftsliberal“ - ?!] English magazine „The Economist“ demanded this spring „The Champions League should distribute its money according to how far a team gets, not where it comes from.“ Because there is a so-called market-pool that the clubs are awarded from differently according to origin. When FC Basel reached the round of sixteen two years ago they received 20 million Euros for it. Paris Saint-Germain came as far as the round of sixteen, too, but received 52 million Euros for it. The mean logic behind the unequal distribution of TV money in the Champions League being: The TV stations from France just simply pay more than those from Switzerland. Meaning, in turn: Under these circumstances a proud club like Ajax Amsterdam from little Holland will never again win the Champions League, just like FC Porto from Portugal - not even talking of Red Star Belgrade from Serbia or Steaua Bucharest from Romania. It’s no wonder that more often than not they only serve as cannon fodder in the early rounds. Accordingly the respective national leagues will lose their best players even earlier, and the interest in national football in these countries will decline even further. Of course it’s always possible to somehow find a reason for everything, and so there is one for the fact that Bayern gets the most TV money in Germany. After all, they’re in a tight competition themselves, just not, as they used to be, with the former competitors from Hamburg, Frankfurt and Cologne, but with Manchester City or Real Madrid. In their duels with European giants Bayern face opponents who, in turn, have hundreds of million Euros more to invest into their teams. Manchester City, for example, in the previous year spent 310 million Euros [on players], almost 50% more than Bayern. And yet over the past 25 years in football a completely dysfunctional system developed that completely destroyed competition in several places. What now? To put it culturally pessimistically: Everything will continue as before. Because by now many people don’t just come to the stadium because they don’t know how it will end. They come to see big stars and because football even with a predictable outcome can be a nice spectacle. The sub-competitions in Bundesliga have their appeal, too. Will Bremen manage to stay up - and maybe even Darmstadt again? Or maybe someone will reach an international spot even though they’re not meant to. But this appeal is like a methadone programme. On the whole, football is exhausted and covered in mildew and everything’s flagging. Football as we know it is coming to an end. A Bundesliga without a fight for the championship and at least a hint of a fair competition is not a league worth the interest. So, once again: What’s going to happen? League boss and president of BVB Reinhard Rauball recently announced rather resolutely „I am strongly in favour of the 50+1 rule.“ He’s said that quite a few times before, but soon Rauball could find himself relatively lonely with this attitude. Because within the football scene by now it’s being quite openly discussed if open arms towards investors couldn’t make the league more exciting again. Even to many fans, the possibility of companies holding the majority shares in clubs by now sounds more alluring than ever. Investors, according to their theory, could even out the current economic differences. Prospective buyers from the USA and the Middle East, but most of all China have been knocking on the doors of German clubs for months now, sounding out the options.

Playing it through theoretically that would mean HSV wouldn’t have to keep struggling with a capricious billionaire and his weird flock of advisors, but instead a Chinese state corporation would invest hundreds of millions into the club? 1. FC Köln would be advanced by Qatari millions, Eintracht Frankfurt would enjoy the benefits of determined investors from the USA while at Schalke 04 Gazprom would turn from sponsor to owner. Leaving aside morals and culture, takeovers like that undoubtedly would at least level the advantages of the corporate-led clubs from Leverkusen and Wolfsburg, Hoffenheim and Leipzig, who benefit from investors even today. Though it’s often forgotten that an investor’s entry is a one-time special effect, you can sell the club only once. And even if clubs were flogged off to investors by the dozen, only four of them at a time would cash in on the great earnings from the Champions League. There wouldn’t be any lasting change. And would it even be worthwhile for investors to get in with Bundesliga clubs? The example of England shows us that a football club can, in fact, be a profitable business. The season before last, 14 of the 20 Premier League Clubs made a profit, even Manchester City despite their exorbitant spending. FC Liverpool even made a plus of almost 70 million Euros. In addition to the enormous TV money, the exorbitant admission prices in English stadiums contributed to these winnings. Let’s just for a second venture onto moral grounds […] after all: In Germany clubs in private possession would mean an epic break with the most basic general conception of football clubs as they’ve always been understood here. Even if investors did restart a sporting competition in Bundesliga, an ultimate estrangement between clubs and audience would probably be the logical consequence. Wolfgang Holzhäuser was for many years managing director of Bayer Leverkusen and before that league secretary at DFB. Now he’s retired, happily travelling Europe with his former club and making statements every now and again. The other day he dug out an old suggestion, to introduce play-offs for the championship into Bundesliga. On enquiry he calls it a compromise, „still preferable to having Bayern be unassailable champions as early as October.“ But actually it’s something else plaguing Holzhäuser: „If you seriously want to break the dominance of certain clubs, the starting point has to be the sport.“ Holzhäuser believes that European football will not get around aligning themselves with the US’ professional sports, meaning introducing a draft system and a salary cap. So the big clubs would have more spending power for the salaries of their players.

And his former opponent in many discussions, the admonisher Heribert Bruchhagen by now agrees that it would be right to establish that the best clubs got the last picks of the best players, as it is in US sports. In the USA drafting successfully contributes to a fair competition. Checking the lists of champions of Baseball, football or the NBA will confirm that, while also making it clear that a fair competition does not prevent commercial success. The Dallas Cowboys, at four billion Dollars the most valuable sports club in the world according to Forbes, in the 56 years of their existence have won the Super Bowl only five times. But a draft system in football would be infinitely complicated, because it wouldn’t just be about one league in one country, but would have to comprise many countries and leagues. Will the Argentinian super talent have to join a club in danger of getting relegated in Italy? Would the promising German youth player getting drafted by Ingolstadt despite wanting to go to Munich or Dortmund not win his lawsuit at every labour court? Holzhäuser would still like to play through these plans in more detail and get legal expertise on the subject. And he also predicts „At some point the Champions League will be the actual competition.“ The Bundesliga would be a kind of „qualifying round“. But isn’t it like that already? For Bayern, aren’t the national kicks just a warm-up for the big games in the Champions League? No wonder there are talks of having the Champions League games on the weekend. When the fans have time off, they should get to watch Bayern against Real Madrid, not have to watch Bayern against Frankfurt. That would be a step closer to a European league which for 25 years now has led a spooky shadow existence as a threatening front. The founding of the Champions League itself was UEFA’s reaction to big clubs’ threatening they’d otherwise found a European League. For a quarter of a century it’s been revisited in the context of negotiations of money distributions. Ever since FIFA has started dreaming about getting in on the business with club football there’s the option of a global Champions League or even a world league. Bayern against Boca Juniors or Dortmund against Kaizer Chiefs doesn’t sound too bad either, does it? The enormous pressure weighing on the national leagues thanks to the Champions League and the complete distortion of the competitions by the international TV money has led to an interesting change in the discussion however. In order to get rid of the mildew covering football, some managers are contemplating the unimaginable: That it wouldn’t be a catastrophe but maybe even a relief if the big clubs, be it FC Bayern or maybe also Dortmund and Leverkusen, left the Bundesliga for some European or World Leagues. Of course, without these Big Players there would be a lot less TV money for those left behind. But you could divide it fairly so the sport would be in the foreground again and not the finances. Of course it would be a complete subversion and a maximum break if football would divide into two versions of itself. One glittering, full of stars, for a global audience. And a second, accessible one, for a local or regional audience. But mind games like these only show how big the desperation has gotten. In any case there’s a turning point in football history ahead, it’s just unclear how radical and of what nature. _____

(There’s a mistake here: Leverkusen should be before Gladbach (by numbers))

[ashlegko-blog]

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Hi so well done. I also bought a snag tool for very fine sweaters and even fabrics, in Joanne It has a little lever that pulls the very fine thread thru to the back where you can hide it. I am constantly doing what you show here, being a knitter and having 4 cats!!! I finally started putting a sheet over my sleeping aphgan so when the cats come to visit during the night and they start their they are not creating more Great job, thanx.

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Payday Lender Companies Or Banks

Payday Lender Companies Or Banks

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gelato place was closed but i went ahead and bought two $30 history books instead so who’s the real winner here (not my bank account)

— bitchin’ (@madmaxines) October 30, 2017

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