#there probably was a theme of overcoming your fears and such but it felt secondary to characters in a scary house experiencing horrors

[sage-basil]

Love Argus. Love toxic yuri. Great event

[borisbubbles]

Eurovision 2010s: 15 - 11

15. Ieva Zasimauskaitė - “When we’re old” Lithuania 2018

[2018 Review here]

~wen wir owld HOOOOOOOOOOOO~

So close to the endgame it’s time to open all of the emotional registers. Much like Hovi, I did not expect to love Ieva as much as I do, however unlike Hovi I had already fully embraced Ieva and “When we’re old” long before rehearsals started.

And for good reason because Ieva fucking disarms me every time without fail. She herself is of course a hilarious, relatably weirdo indie girl, this time in the guise of a Born Again Hindu who ~FELT A COSMIC PRESENCE~ on the stage with her. 😍 Telling the true story of how she overcame depression by falling in love with her hubby. Flanked by holograms that project Ieva’s life dream: to be happy and grow old with the love of her life. All my hopeless romantic triggers are activated by this song. ALL OF THEM.

People are generally divided on Ieva’s voice, but um hello welcome to BorisBubbles. I ranked Nina Kralic and Jana Burcheska hellow-high. I LOVE Ieva’s husky, nasal, ovine, falsetto whine of a voice. It makes “When we’re old” for me. Ieva injects so much vulnerability and authenticity into a song that whenever she performs it, all I can do is sit in silence, tears welling up in my eyes, bleating along with the WHAOHHHHHs. Time truly stands still during “When we’re old” and I’m speechless.

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14. Conchita Wurst - “Rise like a phoenix” Austria 2014

You can be damn’ sure the highest ranked powerballad on this list is “Rise like a phoenix”. It isn’t as much as a song as it is an INSTITUTION. 

Which is why, symbollically, “Phoenix” is a very important winner. It’s a plight for overcoming hate, for overcoming bullying, from being yourself in the face and of adversity and rising from the ashes reborn, reinvented, reinvigorated. Its presentation is provocative, yet secondary, putting vocals and song on the foreground. It is rooted in the political zeitgeist of its winners, like most modern winners, obviously, 

however, ask yourself this:

Would “Phoenix” have won if it hadn’t been a great performance of a great song? 

I don’t think it would have. Take away the powerful composition and leave just the politically correct message, and you get Bilal Hassani. Take away the beard and you have, well, a really good song bond theme by a talented vocalist, that probably would’ve finished top ten, if not top five in most years. 

It’s easy to get distracted by Tom’s stick because a “Bearded drag queen” provides a lot of cognitive dissonance, which I personally love because it forces me to think, keeping my mind sharp. The use of a gimmick does NOT cheapen the talent on display here, however. Tom’s delivery of the song is flawless, hitting every note, delivering both ‘feminine’ nuturing comfort and ‘masculine’ strength to his glorious song. He even throws in some small nuggets of fierceness, providing levity, reminding us of Conchita’s drag queen roots

The act is cut from the same professional cloth; it is maybe a tad provocative, but at it’s core it remains dignified and classy, maintaining a moral high ground that instantly sheds a bad light on any hater. You may pull her down, but she’s gonna FLYYYYY.

Conchita Wurst is the best winner of this decade, period. No winning performance is as ironclad, vocally, musically or stagingwise as hers. No other winner has shown as much raw performance talent as she has. No winner has been able to make such a statement while at their core maintaining a high-quality musical standard. No winner has been such a champion of those whose voices are trampled for being different. To use Conchita’s own words after she won: “WE ARE UNITY. AND *WE* ARE UNSTOPPABLE.” 

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13. Zlata Ognevich - “Gravity” Ukraine 2013

This is the last female fronted act from 2013, you know what that means: EPIC ENTRANCE TIME 😍

What a beautiful dreamscape. I felt bad ranking Elina Nechayeva in a fairly low 39th place, but honestly, “Gravity” vibes very similarly and does the same things a lot better: Breathtakingly regal woman, a mirage of near-divine grace, stunning visual effects... SIGN ME UP ALREADY. At the core we of course find Zlata, the winner of the Best Human Award in 2013. Zlata’s backstage bits were rife with personality facts that instantly endeared her to me. A praraphrased selection from her infinitely quotable interview gold: ”I PRACTICE BIG VOICE BY HOLDING BREATH UNDERWATER”; “I COME FROM PLACE IT’S CALLED CRIMEA, IS LARGE ::reads from online dictionary:: PEN...EEN...SYOO..LA(?) WITH BIG MOUNTAIN AND LARGE SEA ^_^”; “I LOVE UNICORN IS FAVOURITE ANIMAL”. GODDESS. 😍

Fortunately her overpoweringly loud, yet disarmingly weird personality is also omnipresent during her big screen performance. “Gravity” is a mirage of Disney mojo and Zlata absolutely fucking hits it like A SHTRIKE OF DUNDAR

I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a song that is legit quotable at every interval? There is not a single line in “Gravity” that doesn’t bring out the bedroom karaoke: “IMMA LIIIKA BADDERFLYYYYY.” “NOTHING COMES FROM PRIDE, -*HAYLALE*” “NOW I FEEL NO FEEEEE-AAAAAAR.“

And I’m not even done because Gravity ALSO features an excellent backing choir (the male backing vocalist is incredible). It’s just a perfect example of world music, conjuring three minutes of pure, unicorn-endorsed magic. IMMA LIIIKE A BADDERFLYYYYY. 🦋

________________________________________________________________

12. Juliana Pasha - “It’s all about you” Albania 2010

YUARDAWAN 😀 YUGIMMEDATSAMTINANEED 😀 ITZMI 😀 ENDAMFOLIN 😀

We are at #12, which means we’re at that Olympian milestone where every entity ranked is a fucking supernatural force. In Juliana’s case a forced of pure, unfiltered, streechy harpism. 😍 It is so weird to think that she was the first of Albania’s now iconic ‘Shrieking Boss Hag” archetype because it feels like a alliance older than time, sealed and styled in cuneiform onto a shard of Sumerian pottery, blessed by the Annunaki and then embedded into the muddy banks of the Euphrates. 

Anyway, Juliana earned my HEART once she greeted us with her uncanny-valleyesque diction and cheshire-catesque leering, all YUARDAWAN! and proceeded to throw everything, both vocally and facialexpressionly, into the mix, in ascending degrees of deafening loudness. 😍

With a criminally addictive electronic schlager song too boot! One which, like Zlata features an INCREDIBLE supporting cast in a bangin’ gospel choir, as well as a very generous dollop of ❤ ELECTRONIC VIOLA REALNESS ❤

One of the fave musicians of NaziPope, btw. “It’s all about you” is such a Triumpf of the Shrill. 😍

Anyway, this high quality list of ingredients make for a very replayable ride that never spoils or grows stale, no matter how often I listen to it. Which is actually a lot. I’ve looped “It’s all about you” at countless occasions since 2010, making it perhaps the song on this list that I have to the MOST often. (Or second most because there IS a song I still have to rank that may challenge Juliana for that title.) If that ain’t a hallmark for quality, I don’t know what is. 

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11. Koza Mostra ft. Agathonas Iakovidis - “Alcohol is free” Greece 2013

Has life been letting you down? Have you been struck by a financial crisis? Do you no longer know how to continue living. Fear not, because :cracks knuckles: we are about to embark on a MASTERCLASS of unabashed drunken REVELRY:

Um a small disclaimer though. This song has a really really, really, REALLY irresponsible title. DO NOT at any circumstance use alcohol as a coping mechanism, engage in drunk driving or other activities under influence that you may life to regret later, if you live to regret it later. Also don’t drink if you’re underage. Also also, alcohol can cause obesity and cardio-vascular arrest. and cancer, possibly. Drink, but do so RESPONSIBLY. 

HOWEVER, what if this song is... a PSA???😈 An Anti-Crisis PSA that is, lol. A group of folk hipsters literally PARTYING AWAY the misery of the financial crisis in a delightfully self-deprecating fashion is just the pinacle of fun for me and Koza Mostra fucking ROLL with it. Watching them dart out in all wind directions, interacting with each other gives me LIFE.

It’s exactly that sort of industriousness which sets “Alcohol is free” apart from other party songs. There is a LOT of randomness going on in the background and it gives you ZERO time to process all of it, making every rewatch an easter egg hunt.

This approach to staging usually doesn’t work, but here it is actually very intelligent and I’ll explain why: The act places a lot of focus on Agathonas (which it should because he’s the lead singer despite his featured status), but by the same token offers constant distraction by all the Koza Mostra shenanigans in the background...  In other words, it’s an act that forces your attention away from the main event by confusing your senses, requesting all of you concentration keep up with everything that’s going on... which is actually a brilliantly accurate simulation of how 'being drunk’ works.

(btw if you listen closely you can hear the sound of Agathonas tapping his skull lol <3)

So the next time you listen to this song, pour yourself a drink (ONE drink!) sit back and embark on a Waldo-esque hunt to see how many beautiful nuggets you can find hidden in that splendid act, as the upbeat sirtaki madness fills your head with cloudy thoughts. As far as I’m concerned, Koza Mostra have WON the Eurovision Fun Contest. 

EVERYONE RISE AND APPLAUD THE  10 BEST ENTRIES IN THIS DECADE:

From now on, I’ll only include maximum 2 songs per update :o

And in this update we finally say goodbye to Greece, Albania, Ukraine, Austria and Lithuania. Read my thoughts on them, below:

LITHUANIA

Lithuania was hands down the worst country in the 00s and look at their chart now. They are slowly getting their shit together and it shows. Keep on going, darlings!!

AUSTRIA

God Austria are so boring. At least they occasionally provide us with a great entry here or there, but they’re so inconsistent in their entertainment. 2 great - 6 okay - 1 terrible is NOT a great ratio by any means. 

UKRAINE

ALBANIA

Albania are very hit-or-miss, but I really like their presence in Eurovision actually. Like Georgia they entries are so left-field that they are always *interesting* even when they’re not good. Except “Fairytale”. Fuck “Fairytale”.

GREECE

Fuck this decade was ROUGH for Greece. They are a shattered nation and if you think this chart is bad, let me remind you that their best result in the past five contests is 19th place. Same in fact, as San Marino’s highest and lower than the highest placements of Albania, Montenegro, Slovenia, UK, Ireland, North Macedonia,...

[chwrpg]

Mom! I'll be right behind you in the hearse!

A NOTE FROM ADMIN R: Again, we had quite the battle of the CHW all stars for this character but in the end, I had to give Arden to miss Tiff. You put everything into this application and I loved that. I have such a clear vision of who this character is going to be in your hands and I am so excited for everyone to get to interact with this incredible being you’re putting onto our dash. Thank you Tiff for this application.

OOC NAME/ALIAS, PREFERRED PRONOUNS, AGE & TIMEZONE:

It’s Britney bitch, she/her, 25, CST

DESIRED CHARACTER:

Arden Atkins

HOW ACTIVE WILL YOU BE?

7-8

SECONDARY CHOICE:

DESCRIBE THE CHARACTER:

From the very second she entered the world the odds had always been stacked against Arden. Unlike most of the people she rubbed elbows with on the streets of Rosewood she hadn’t been graced with the good fortune of being born into wealth or power. There was no trust fund for her to fall back on or family business to take over. No, all Arden had to look forward to inheriting somewhere down the line was a pile of clothes from Goodwill and a beat up old trailer home that barely fit one person, much less the three women who currently lived in it; that was if they managed to even pay it off. Though who knew how long that would take since they could barely afford it as it was; based on her grandma’s disability checks, her paycheck from her job at Mallrats, and her mom working as a hair dresser. Still, for as unfortunate a hand as she was dealt, Arden never once showed or expressed dissatisfaction about having less than others. The way she saw it there was always someone out in the world who had it worse than her. Someone with even less privilege than her. And besides what was the point in wasting time whining about things when she could go out there and make it happen for herself? Some would attest her outlook on life to naivety, they liked to write her positivity off on the fact that she was still a child who hadn’t yet had a chance to see the world for what it really was. While others just believed she was a stereotypical blonde airhead who never had a care in the world. But in actuality it was because of the things she had grown up seeing, the hardships her family had lived through, that Arden chose to always bear a smile instead of putting up a wall or having her fists held up to the world. She just preferred to believe that all of her trials and tribulations could be turned into positive experiences; lessons to be learned, things that would help mold her into a stronger and more intelligent person. No, her life wasn’t perfect by any means, even when her family was whole. But she would be damned if she let herself become a victim of circumstances.

Just because she was content with what she had didn’t mean she was willing to settle. As much as she appreciated everything her mom had done and overcome to get their family out of the hole her dad had dragged them into she didn’t want to follow in the woman’s foot steps. Because she grew up with practically nothing that she wanted everything. In an ironic turn of events, that she didn’t like to dwell on too much, her drive for more sometimes even mirrored her fathers gambling habit. Except instead of placing everything she had on risky hands she chose to play them all. Odds were that the more doors she opened the more chances at success she would have. Arden didn’t believe in dumb luck, that went out the door the same day her dad and his bullshit did. What she believed in was creating her own luck. After all, as the great Oprah Winfrey herself said “luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.” And she was more than prepared to do whatever it took in order to achieve her dreams. While other doors were closed to her others opened and she came to soon understand that the pageant circuit was somewhere she could get a foot in the door to propel not only her career but herself personally.

SAMPLE WRITING:

It’s lonely at the top…

It was something she had heard a couple of times in those melodramatic teen dramas growing up. One of those lame one liners that she would always find herself snorting over because from the outside looking in the solutions to their problems were literally right in front of them. But as cheesy as it felt quoting and comparing herself to a CW protagonist it seemed that what her life had started to become since beginning her pageant reign. The more titles she racked up the less and less it seemed like people wanted to be around her. And everyone seemed to have an opinion. Some welcomed her with open arms. Mostly the judges and sponsors who were looking to mold her into their ideal spokeswoman for whatever flat tummy tea or hair care vitamin they were trying to push on Instagram. Her competitors though? Not so much. She wasn’t from their world. As far as they were concerned she didn’t belong.

The blonde had come from nothing. Her family had no connections, they had no money, they barely even had a home to call their own. It probably didn’t help that to this day, with several competitions under her belt, she still showed up with handmade evening gowns and press on nails from Target. Others had been entered in pageants from the moment they could walk. They paid thousands of dollars for pageant coaching, and dance classes, hair pieces, spray tans, make up, and even fake teeth. While the most experience she had was binging a couple of seasons of Toddlers and Tiaras and watching Miss Congeniality with her mom at least once a month growing up. Walking in like a dollar store Barbie was a slap in the face. How dare she think she could just waltz in and act like she was hot shit?

Those were some of the nicer things that were said about her.

Yes, Arden was aware of the murmurs behind the scenes about her. There wasn’t any gossip around town that her mom’s best friend Loretta wasn’t in the know about. So it didn’t take very long for them to find just how vicious not only the fellow contests, but also surprisingly their mothers, could get with just their words. They were like vultures who searched for any scraps of their prey they could find to dish out. And she was an easy target for them. A hot topic that had spread like wildfire backstage was her family’s past. Her father’s history of unsavory habits wasn’t hard to track. The man had racked up a debt so large and conned so many people in Rosewood out of money that he saw no other choice than to run from his problems before they caught up to him, effectively leaving herself and her mother caught in the crossfire.

But Arden wasn’t one to sit back and concede because things got tough for her. No, she was the girl who made dream boards and hung them up on her walls so every morning she could be reminded of what she was working for. She was the girl who not only made goals but came up with a game plan on how she could achieve them. And made back up plans and back up plans for her back up plans. People could say whatever they wanted about her all that mattered was that she stayed true to herself, that her family would be proud of her, and that she put her all into everything she did. Maybe that was why she excelled at pageants from the minute she first stepped onto the stage. The way her mother recalled the moment it was like a hurricane storming her way through the rest of the competition.

There was, however, a tougher hurdle to cross and that came in the form of Beverly Leon and her mother. If Arden was a hurricane then Beverly was a whole damn tsunami. She wasn’t sure what she had done to get on their shit list but ever since she had walked in to first compete they had gone out of their way to knock her down at every turn. And . their fire only seemed to be further fueled the night of the Miss Windy City pageant. The night she finally managed to ‘snatch’ the first place title from Beverly’s hands, the rightful owner as the girl’s mother had so eloquently told her in that sickly polite tone she used in front of the other moms and even some judges when she was letting them know she wasn’t pleased. How someone could manage to make underhanded threats sound like simple backhanded compliments kinda scared her. But in a weird way also excited her. If the top of the food chain thought of her as a threat that meant she had to be doing something right.

The Q&A portion had gone smoothly. They always asked the same questions like where the girls saw themselves in ten years or what they would do if they were President for the day. And as she was still learning the answers never really strayed far from ending world hunger or ensuring world peace. There was a specific set of do’s and don'ts. Things the judges like and don’t like to hear. It was this portion of the competition that Arden felt she truly played it. She felt like she knew what the judges were looking for. They were looking for someone who could become America’s next angel. The poster girl for what it meant to be all American. Or at least their old school version of America. That much they made clear when they announced the theme cor the pageant would be Land of the Free. While they tried to be progressive in some respects there were clearly other aspects of pageantry that were behind on the times. Still. it was somewhere Arden felt like she could make a difference. It was where she could flex that 4.0 GPA that she had worked her ass off to maintain. Where she could show that she was as well spoken as Diane Sawyer and as insightful as Oprah. Where she could prove that yes she had the looks but there were brains behind those looks as well.

Her question that night? Who was her greatest inspiration?

“My greatest inspiration would have to be my mother. A God fearing woman who has learned to bring herself and her family out of less than favorable circumstances with hard work. Her strength to work full time but still be a diligent homemaker is what is a true testament of what women can accomplish if we truly set our minds to it. I hope to inspire people the same way she has inspired me be it with a child of my own or any child in need…” There was more to her answer but she could barely remember all the fluff she spewed.

What she didn’t mention in her response was that while her mom inspired her it wasn’t only through her hard work. But in the way that Arden was constantly reminding herself not to walk down the same path as her. Her mother gave up on her dreams for a man. She let herself be defined by his words and actions. And when she had been left with nothing but broken pieces of a family she had to pick up and glue back together on her own. She loved her family more than anything, she was proud of where they had ended up after everything. But she didn’t want to have to go through anything like what they went through ever again. It was exactly why she had cut off communication with her dad all those years ago. It took a while but she got past

Afterwards, while she was fixing her dollar store lashes from falling off she was caught off guard when a soft voice called to her from a couple of feet over. “Hey. I really liked your answer up there. You know, about your mom being your inspiration. I especially like how you added in the part about the children in need, total tearjerker.”

“Thanks. I almost went with Black Widow because you know, everything now a days is an Avengers reference.“ She teased, flashing a sincere smile at Luna. Though by now she knew that talk of her family had spread around the pageant circuit. Those who didn’t look down on her like she was garbage looked at her with pity. And she couldn’t help but reactively defend her mom and grandma. “I meant what I said up there though. It isn’t easy to rise back up from nothing. I believe that those who make something out of nothing are the real heroes.”

“Hey, girl, you go out there and live your truth. Personally I’m more of an X-Men gal. At least you didn’t get stuck with a shitty question like what’s your favorite season. They say there’s no such thing as wrong answers. But you know they’re deducting points if you don’t automatically say summer. Because, you know, independence and what not.” She shrugged coolly.

“You know, when I started I heard a rumor there was a frontrunner for a pageant who got all of the top scores. And the only reason she didn’t win was because she was an Aries. Is that for real?“ Arden asked.

“She was a Gemini actually.” Luna retorted jokingly.

Arden chuckled, happy she was able to talk to someone who didn’t seem like her life only revolved around the competition or winning.“So what about you? Who would you have said your greatest inspiration was?” She knew that Luna was probably just making small talk, maybe even trying to judge her competition. But Arden was genuinely curious about this girl. Luna was beautiful, seemed lively, and had the same air of determination she recognized in herself.

For the next twenty minutes until they had to go back on stage they sat there and chatted. It had just started out as small talk but the longer it kept on the more they divulged with each other. Each others reasoning for entering the pageants, their lives, their interests. It was just so easy to talk to Luna. She even told Arden about her brothers move to New York and how she wanted to someday follow in his foot steps. Talking to her was almost comforting. It felt like they had been friends all their lives.

That was the same night Beverly had “accidentally” tripped her on their way backstage to change into their outfits for the talent portion of the show. The same night she began to realize just how vicious these competitions could truly get.

ANYTHING ELSE?

1985

[bipolaireenivresse-blog]

Spring And My Own Goddess Of Spring And Winter Flowers

It was the best day in my life. I had rented a nice black car and I was driving east, fast and easy, on secondary roads through the rolling plains and plateaus of Champagne and Lorraine. It was 3 May 2017. The sky was blue with scattered white cumuli that were appearing much bigger, higher and greyer at the horizon. Something huge was forming there. I was on my way to see Fishbach’s concert in the Saint-Donat church in Arlon, Belgium, as part of the Aralunaires festival. I was high, very high, higher than I had ever been before. Of course I was smoking weed from noon to dawn. But it was only peripheral adjustment and support. The engine of the highness was endogenous, in my brain. With the precocious arrival of spring I had kicked out depression and been climbing unquestioningly through hypomania: I was not working, I had sufficiently money left; I was in perfect conditions for experimenting and enjoying unconditional happiness, euphoria, excitation and hedonism — the shiny side of bipolar disorder, the golden trick, the lovely upgoing slope to nowhere but inner paradise — whatever may happen subsequently. It was 3 May 2017. I was on my way to see my music idol producing herself with her band in a church (a church!). I would pass through a terrible storm at the border between France and Belgium, arrive little time before the show, sit at the first row in the church, receive an incredible emotional hit and see a tunnel opening in the light and stroboscope landscape like a pathway to another universe; have a short chat with Fishbach after the concert (she would comment the design of my notebook and leave a nice note in it), drink a pint of beer and a big cup of coffee in a bar of the deserted city centre, circle ecstatically in my car in the urban ring roads feeling weird gravity shifts, finally take the way back home, after midnight; once in France, ∼30 km south to the border, I would meet the customs officers, a joint of weed lying, red and hot, in the ashtray close to my small reserve box, and bore them with an unstoppable and improvised speech — I am a writer, I just come back from a concert of Fishbach, do you know Fishbach? No? You should listen, it’s great, she inspires me a lot, look these are the nice merchandising they gave at the show, OK, OK, this side of the car, really you have never heard about her?… — until they let me go; I would shout my joy at the stars in the sky, get lost through the complicated net of roads before home, arrive after the sun had risen, barely sleep before preparing myself for the next show, at night, at La Cigale in Paris — Fishbach again, of course, why questioning? Two concerts in two days, I was just a groupie. It was 3 May 2017. It was the best day in my life. I was precisely on the edge between reason and insanity, hypomania and mania, at the cerebral orgasmic point before snaky mental maze. Under my umbrella, smoking, my back pressed against the outside walls of the Saint-Donat church, on the top of the hill of Arlon, amazed and overwhelmed, I was listening to Fishbach vocalizing before the concert and there was nothing else to live.

Was I then in love with Flora Fischbach and was my tracking of her a psycho behaviour? My friends were concerned with this issue and would let me know. What I will write further will address the second part of the question. Now, about l.o.v.e.: of course I was in love with her. Everybody was in love with her. Well, let’s say, every person attracted sexually by women in her audience was in love with her. I mean, she was, she is too much: delivering brilliant and daring pop music, singing extraordinarily — love her or hate her, there is no middle point on this subject —, beautiful, sexy, even ambiguous in gender and age, naturally classy, and above all hypnotic, magnetic, psychetic; on scene, supported by great musicians, she was, she is fucking something. I fell at first listening and sight, as many, many others.

But my passion for Fishbach was of course well beyond and apart from lust. The discovery of her debut album À Ta Merci in the first days of February 2017 gave me an electroshock. As I alluded previously, I was exiting a long, deep, and chaotic depressive phase and she was just the perfect extra kick I could expect. It was like being a young teenager living his first musical crush once again. With the slight difference that my Fishbach’s crush was several orders of magnitude more intense than the musical crushes I had experimented when I was actually a young teenager, in the late 80’s. Fishbach’s music was just a glittering synthesis of most that I could have liked so far in music draped in the peculiar big sound of « French touch »: the mainstream pop music of Daniel Balavoine or Mylène Farmer, the synth-pop of Kraftwerk or Depeche Mode, the rock of Electrelane, the electro-rock of Ladytron, the lettered songs of Françoise Hardy or Françoiz Breut, …, with, from place to place, irresistible spans reminiscent of Tame Impala or Vangelis’ Blade Runner themes and atmospheres.

Soon, listening to Fishbach’s music became an almost full-time, delighting occupation; she was a drug and she was better with drug. Obviously and corolarilly, there was a noticeable feedback loop between her and my mood level: the more I listened to her music the more I felt hypomaniac and vice versa. Last but not least, there was the song called « Mortel » and its two strangely diverging versions (one on the 2015 Fishbach EP, one on the À Ta Merci album). I was totally stunned: listening to this song was like feeling an harmless though harrowing arrow passing through all the nodes of my entire existence. I swear I watched hundreds of time the YouTube Vevo Dscvr live version of the song. The emotion provoked was indescribable and undecipherable.

I booked a ticket for her upcoming concert in La Cigale, Paris, 4 May 2017. But it was too far… When I discovered that she was actually about to perform her very big touring date in the same place 14 March, I went crazily impatient; I managed to buy, the day before the event, a black market ticket on the Internet. 14 March 2017 was a spring sunny and cool Tuesday. In the morning, in order to lower my excitation, I went running 20 km. I arrived at La Cigale very early in order to be able to place myself in the first or second row in the audience. I was 15. It was my first concert ever. I smoke only one joint and drank only one beer. After the show I was not the same person anymore. Some ravishing wasp come from outer space had bitten me, injecting in my body and soul a sweet and fatal venom. Her name was Flora and, with my poor erudition, I remembered that Flora was the goddess of something in some ancient mythology; I checked on the Internet: indeed, Flore or Flora was, in roman divinity, the goddess of flowers and spring. It was too much, too poetic: the reflection of my own renewal in music and emerging star. And, from then on, everything started to lovely burst.

As I told to the customs officers in the night of 3 May, in these times, I was effectively and vainly trying to write a « novel ». I intended to describe the dying of the light-like loss — or, actually, the refusal of loss — of past euphoria existing in bipolar disorder treatment and stabilisation. Nevertheless, after seeing Fishbach live for the first time, this literature direction split up into various and poorly coherent drafts as I more and more focused my writing energy in composing letters to Fishbach. And, yeah, in the end, I went totally psycho with that. Everything started around 15 of 16 March (i.e., no more than two days after the show in La Cigale): I felt an uninhibited, overwhelming, irresistible, almost vital need of telling her in writing what I had felted during the concert and since the discovery of her music — and acknowledging her. Surprisingly, I had found an email address at her name in a public page in Internet; it was obviously obsolete but I considered this way better than sending a post mail to her family in Charlevilles-Mézières in the northeastern corner of France. She would probably never read the email I had written but, who cared? Just the fact of sending the stuff was delivering me from a weight — yes, I am the boy who listened too many times to « Tous les cris les SOS » by Daniel Balavoine. Nevertheless, I started to dream about the possibility of meeting her and telling her about the mail. From 15 I was regressing to 14 or even 13. The possibility became probabilitywhen I decided to go with some friends to a concert of Cléa Vincent in La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris: the latter singer was kind of friend with Fishbach and Fishbach was not programmed anywhere on that day. It was 12 April and, at that date, my hypomania had enhanced exponentially and, in that night more precisely, my disinhibition was strengthened by a mix of alcohol, weed, and MDMA. Of course Fishbach was there, a few metres from me, in the background of the concert room; and of course, overcoming any fear of being ridiculous, I went straight to her, told her about the mail, « I would like you to read it », verifying the obsolescence of the abovementioned address, finally telling her my first name and surname at her demand. Believe me or not, living such a teenage dream when you are 40-years old — with the physical, psychological and chemical means allowed by time — is quite of a thing. It is totally, absolutely childish but when you are bipolar in a jumping, junkie hypomaniac phase it is the best shoot of heroin you can beg for — then, just add the right dose of romanticism looking at your heroine walking in beauty like the night just as in one of your preferred Suede songs and you are in paradise. From that moment, I started to write other emails to the same address, which from emotional reports of a bipolar fan in euphoria rapidly turned into more and more complex interpretations of the Fishbach’s song lyrics, and especially of the « Mortel » lyrics. Since I met her a few times after shows, I had clues that she was at least receiving my texts; but, strangely, maybe by fear, maybe because my reality was progressively colonised by hallucinations, I would prefer to leave a thick sheet of doubt on what I was in my inner me quite pretentiously dreaming the most — having her as my reader. During the first part of May, as I was sliding on a slippery slope with readings of quantum metaphysics mixed with foreseen theories about the control of technology and Internet over Humanity, my « letters » to Fishbach drowned into delusions: I was for example persuaded that « Mortel » had travelled in time through my consciousness (and of course from hers) between its first version release date (November 2015) and my discovery of Fishbach (February 2017) with consequences on my existence trajectory. It was still not that worrying: in a way, considering the frequently odd nature of Fishbach’s lyrics, this may have been considered as funny. I could have continued my role of freaky, half-crazy groupie: there was so many touring dates to come. For example, I had won tickets for a concert in the suburbs of Paris where both Fishbach and Cléa Vincent were programmed! It was 15 May. But, that day in the afternoon, I got my first psychotic paranoid crisis: I destroyed almost all my electronic devices at home, especially the Internet box that I smashed with a hammer and drowned in the toilets before washing it with burning water and squeezing it in the outside bin. This crisis left me exhausted and I did not went to the concert. I would never see Fishbach again during the 2017 year. I had opened a new territory in my psychosis: after sending her an heavy chain of intriguing playlists and images, I stopped this vain, one-way correspondence. What for writing when you can communicate through quantum telepathy? It was only the beginning of my relation with the virtual, computed part of Fishbach: I would deliver her from the sick program in her brain and we, as one, would save the world. I had some beautiful days waiting for me in the psychiatric hospital.

At the end, if I analyse my relation with Fishbach’s person, band and music, there is one important remaining idea: it is a question of faith. When, nowadays, absolutely sober and cautious with my possible hypomania trends, I look back at this special date of 3 May 2017, I confess I feel a kind of nostalgia. How could I feel different? That day I truly believed I was blessed by her. She was my own Flore, my own goddess of spring and flowers. I will never forget how, before losing control, during a few weeks of a sunny spring, I felt a strong convergence between my delighted mood rises and my Fishbach-related emotional events. I told previously about a feedback loop. Between hypomania and Fishbach, was there a dominating cause-to-effect way? Who knows? Maybe I just have to let myself go and believe in Fishbach. After all, even outside hypomania and without any drug, I still feel the same emotions and energy listening to her music: I am entranced by it/her. Oddly, yesterday, she was performing on a boat in Paris, a kind of VIP, quickly sold out event. On Twitter, I started joking with someone from her record label: even if it was sold out I could try to come swimming or parachuting. Maybe last year I would have been sufficiently insane to try something like that. However, whereas some miles away from me this boat was carrying her, I was running in a deep and dense forest, crossing stags and snakes, fascinated by the diffusion of vespertine lights through the deep green canopy, imagining the beloved beat of « Mortel » entwined in my heart pulses. Despite the extreme heat, I was sometimes shivering; there was something, someone in there, in the air, through the sky and towards the sinking sun. And I was softly riddled by random shots of life.

[junker-town]

Couldn’t Be Me: Why is living so hard?

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In this week’s advice column: How to make the consuming nature of life seem manageable.

Welcome to Couldn’t Be Me, a weekly advice column where I solicit your personal dilemmas and help out as best as I can. Have something I can help you with? Find me @_Zeets.

There’s a self-help book called “Life’s Missing Instruction Manual: The Guidebook You Should Have Been Given at Birth”, and like all self-help books, it reduces life to a mere problem of personal responsibility and a game to be won, rather than a complex, absurd, wonderful, and utterly ridiculous experience to be lived. But the book gets at one particular problem of life: there’s no real guideline on how to live.

Many books have tried to fill that hole; the whole existence of philosophy is based on the question of how to live a good and moral life. But even with the best books, the experience of life is so simplified, so individualistic, and so particular, and beyond a few guidelines we’re still forced to feel, to struggle with life in totality. Which is to say, that life is so damn hard, and has so many unique problems, that it can often feel overwhelming.

There’s no theme in this week’s column, insomuch that the fact of the difficulty of living can’t be considered a theme when it’s perpetual. This week, the overwhelming experiences range from trying to hopeful for the future when everything in the present seems awful, trying to find love when one is afraid to be lonely, and dealing with the reality of a loved one with a terminal illness being very far away.

We can’t pretend that the problems of a person in such a complex world can be handled with cliches from self-help books. Hopefully, in this column, we did a little better than that.

Matt:

How can I feel hopeful about the future considering the leaders and priorities in society. While this is specifically in reference to climate change this can also be considered more generally. I am sometimes consumed by this while thinking about the global reach of these issues but am also personally concerned despite living in one of the countries least impacted.

CBM:

To me, when it comes to the survival of the planet, or fighting for a better future in general, feeling personally hopeful doesn’t matter. The problems are just too big.

An imagination and sense of justice are more important. You don’t need personal hope that the world will be better, but you need imagination to see things differently from the status quo, and a sense of justice to fight for that better world, whether it’s in small community acts or voting out politicians who deny climate change. You don’t need assurance that things will be different or better in the future, but you have to approach everything as if it can be.

So many things that we fight for in our lifetimes will not benefit us, but will make things better for generations to come. There are endless quantities of ghouls, grifters, and banally evil people who love nothing more than to profit from the destruction of the world, but they’re not part of the world’s natural laws, nor have they ever ruled unopposed. For every generation of evil, there’s a generation of good, and fighting against the endless sludge is a matter of obligation to humanity, rather than hope.

Mohamed:

I have some thoughts about attachments and how I can’t get the hang of it. I tend to get easily attached to people I just met and have a hard time dealing with it and letting it go. I often tell myself to focus on myself and first get my life sorted (as it is a giant mess) but since I’ve never been in a relationship as a 22 year old, I tend to gravitate towards people I like a bit too much and think to myself, ”this might be it”. This has a lot to do with my awkward, weird, depressing, sad years in college where I just put it simply; did not like myself.

With all of this, I start thinking about the new people I met on a regular basis. And I know that it will hurt so much in the long run and that I should probably move on.

Have you been in this situation before? If you have what did you do?

CBM:

This sounds like a problem of loneliness and a fear of solitude. Like Nietzsche said, “The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.” But I think Andrei Tarkovsky had the best advice for this:

Learn to love solitude, to be more alone with yourselves. The tragedy of today’s young people is that they try to unite on the basis of carrying out noisy and aggressive actions so as not to feel lonely, and this is a sad thing. The individual must learn from childhood to be on his own, for this doesn’t mean to be lonely: it means to not get bored with oneself, because a person who finds himself bored when he is alone, it seems to me, is a person in danger.

Tarkovsky is saying that what you need most of all is to learn to be alone, and to be comfortable with yourself alone, to like yourself, and if not that, then to at least forgive yourself, so that you’re not always looking for people to avoid loneliness.

As you are now, it seems that you’re trying to attach yourself to others to avoid yourself. And that type of attachment will always lead you, that relationship, and your partners to ruin. There’s no set time on when you should be in a relationship, but to be in a healthy one, you have to be able to be whole by yourself.

Arielle:

You speak about grief sometimes on Twitter, and it really resonates with me currently, as my grandmother just took a really bad turn with a terminal illness. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to deal with the idea of losing such a close family member, and I feel like I am in shock most of the time. I feel bad for not really reacting, but I honestly don’t know what to do. She lives very far away and I am also in school, so I don’t/won’t get to see her often as her illness worsens. To compound this, I have a really good friend that was sort of the only person I felt like I could talk to about it, but we got in a bit of a fight. I feel like the fight was my fault and I’m trying to give him space, but I really miss him and don’t know what to do about that either, because I feel like he’ll never speak to me again.

So, basically, I guess my question is, how do you deal with someone close to you dying when you’re not able to be with them? Plus, how do you fix a friendship that you value so much but have really messed up?

CBM:

For the friendship thing: I talked about this in the last edition of this column, but the unfortunate thing about being the person at fault for messing things up, is that you’re powerless from that point on.

If you’ve hurt someone, it’s up to them to decide whether they forgive you and want to be close to you. They have no obligation to forgive you or to do it at a particular time. The most you can do here is apologize, let them know what you’re going through, that you would like them to be there for support, and hope that they forgive you.

In terms of that grief:

The shock is fine. That’s a normal part of finding out that someone you care about is dying. Because no matter how expected death is, it feels surreal and absurd. An unexpected death is nearly impossible to deal with — one day a person is there, and then the next day, for whatever reason. But the expected death can feel like torture. Never knowing which day could be the last, but still knowing that every day could be it. The process drags on for maximum pain, and at the same time you wish that it would drag on forever so the person can remain with the living, in whatever capacity.

There’s a wonderful movie about that grief of watching someone you love die from a terminal illness called “A Monster Calls.” But a situation like yours is complicated because you can’t be present. Because of school and distance, it seems there’s no one you can see to fix the secondary pain of separation. You could take a few days off from class to be with your grandmother in some capacity. You never know what day could be the last, and spending a few days with her will far outweigh the time missed from school.

If that route is impossible, you could video-call and see her, or just talk to her on the phone. The point is to be there in some capacity, no matter how limited it may be. Every moment is precious in life, but those moments become more pronounced when someone is terminally ill.

Grief is of course something that will stay with you after this. Some people see grief as a sadness that can be overcome. What they often miss is that the space the individual had in your life can only be filled by their physical presence, and it will forever be empty. There’s nothing causing sadness beyond the simple fact that the person you love is no longer with you, and there’s no remedy for that pain. The pain is to be lived with, not cured. Not that you need to wallow and let pain paralyze you, but there’s no sense in pretending as if by accepting the nature of death, that the pain of missing someone can be exorcised.

I send my friends my favorite piece of writing on death and grief when something like this befalls them. The “King of Terrors” was a sermon delivered by Henry Scott Holland after the death of King Edward VII, and it gives a lovely conception of how awful death can be, and yet, how incredibly insignificant it is.

In the sermon, Holland says:

But, then, there is another aspect altogether which death can wear for us. It is that which first comes down to us, perhaps, as we look down upon the quiet face, so cold and white, of one who has been very near and dear to us. There it lies in possession of its own secret. It knows it all. So we seem to feel. And what the face says to us in its sweet silence to us as a last message from the one whom we loved is: “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!