I wuv my kittie so much dat I gave him his vewwy own Identity Crisis!!! LOL!!!



More here. (via Elisabeth, and Groc, and Zed, and about half the Internet right now...)

How deeply disorientating. Like entering some kind of weird parallel universe.
No, I wasn't asked, or told, or anything really. But that's OK. No, honestly, it is.
And at least they credited me as an "inspiration". Which is something, isn't it?

Update (1) The fun's over, kids - she's changed her template again. (Explanation for latecomers: someone had swiped my site design for their own blog.)

Update (2) The inspiration is mutual. After all, Troubled Diva has been sorely lacking in Care Bears and cute kittens for way too long now...

Jump straight to Part One.

Although for the vast majority of people, watching the contest on television is the beginning and end of their Eurovision experience, for the true ESC diehard it is arguably the least important of all these seven stages. This is because the contest as it appears on TV always comes across as such a pale, two-dimensional summation of everything that we’ve been enjoying over the past few days (or weeks, or months).

The songs never sound quite right - pale facsimiles of the versions that we’ve become familiar with. The edits and camera angles never quite do full justice to the performances that we’ve witnessed on stage. The costumes and dance routines look cheesier and tackier. The presenters look stiffer, slower, more awkward. The video postcards look more irrelevant. The feverish, borderline-hysterical atmosphere in the hall is missing. The excitement has disappeared from the voting process. It’s really nothing like what we’ve all just experienced first hand.

What’s more: under the merciless glare of the camera and the microphone, the limitations of the performers become cruelly exposed. Nervousness, over-excitement, mad staring eyes, wonky fake smiles, crap dancing, breathlessness, bad timing, amateurishness and - most damningly of all - crummy, tuneless singing voices.

But enough about poor old Jemini. (Ker-TISH!) Well, except to say this: of course the UK’s nil points result had nothing to do with politics. For one simple reason: tele-voters are only able to vote for one song out of 26. By doing so, they aren’t able to reject any one song in particular – instead, they are rejecting 25 songs in equal measure. Yes, “political” voting quite demonstrably happens (the perennial Greece/Cyprus love-in being the most notorious example) – but only when people positively exercise a bias towards their favourite country. Political bias against the UK could only have happened in one situation: namely, if voters had decided that Cry Baby was their favourite song of the night, but that they would deliberately snub it in favour of their second favourite song, in order to register a protest. And on the basis of Jemini’s performance, just how likely a scenario was that?

OK, so maybe there are still a few more observations to make. Like Luca, I take issue with those who claimed that Gemma from Jemini was singing “out of key”. She was consistently keeping to the same key – it just wasn’t the actual key of the song. If you could have listened to her unaccompanied voice, acapella style, I reckon she would have sounded reasonable. My theory: in the heat of the moment, Gemma became too flustered to concentrate on the sound coming through her earpiece, and so panicked and chose the wrong key. A more experienced performer would have been able to overcome this, but our Gemma - with not much live stage experience to her name, beyond a few ropey club P.A.s - simply croaked. The look of fear on her face at the end of her song spoke volumes, I thought.

Mind you, Gemma-from-Jemini wasn’t the only performer to have difficulties keeping in tune. Far from it, in fact. Take t.A.t.u, for instance. Ouch! And they came third! Hey, maybe there was a conspiracy after all!

For UK viewers, there is one other crucial difference between live Eurovision and televised Eurovision: the presence of The Wogan. Who, as all but the most humourlessly obsessive ESC diehard must recognise, does a consistently brilliant job of saying exactly what everybody is thinking at home, and undercutting what little solemnity there is with his gently devastating commentary. In particular, The Wogan nailed one aspect of this year’s shebang with precise accuracy. Namely, that all this year’s frantically busy dance routines were in danger of eclipsing the actual singers and the actual songs. I guess that this was inevitable, given that Latvia won last year’s contest with a wholly unremarkable song, purely on the strength of an extremely cleverly conceived dance routine (remember all that gender confusion and shedding of costume?)

This in turn helped me to solve one of the big post-match questions: why did Belgium do so well? Watching the show at home, the answer became obvious – because they played it comparatively straight with their performance, letting the music do all the work. In the midst of all that breathless gimmickry, Urban Trad’s Sanomi actually came across as a welcome respite. Restrained and dignified, if you ignored the fact that it was sung in an “invented language” (I was hoping for Klingon). Ooh, proper music at last! said half of Europe, sighing with relief. The half of Europe with CDs by Clannad, or Sacred Spirit, or Adiemus, or Deep Forest, or Secret Garden, or Enigma, or Enya. You know the type – naff taste, but they’re bloody everywhere, and on Eurovision night they rose up and spoke with one clear voice.

Which just goes to show the difference – nay, the yawning chasm! – between the typically casual ESC viewer and the typically obsessive ESC fan. If only the voting could be left to us. Those couple of hundred million “Stage Seven” lightweights out there – what do they know, anyway? Hijacking our contest with their half-baked, ill-informed choices...heathens! It's all wasted on them, I tell you!

And that, my weary fellow travellers, concludes the Troubled Diva Eurovision coverage for this year, as I reluctantly attempt to re-adjust to post-ESC reality once again. Right now, Istanbul seems so very, very far away...

Supplementary material:
· Audio Post #1
· Audio Post #2

Labels: eurovision, eurovision2003

Attention! Calling the following UK weblogs!

blue witch · destruction for dummies · invisible stranger · kitchentable · popdizzy · silent words speak loudest · sue bailey · thebrick · the church of me · the pill box · these moments that i’ve had · those wonderful people out there in the dark · trash addict · zbornak

I have a small but significant request.

Please follow this link to weblogs.co.uk, fill in your details on the form provided (there are only four fields to worry about), and then submit the form.

This will result in your site being added to the Updated UK Weblogs service. The way this service works is very simple: every time you publish something new, a link to your site will be displayed at the top of the page within the hour. This makes it wonderfully easy for the rest of us to find out when you've written something new. It's a widely used service (and the only one I know which is both accurate and usable), which is guaranteed a) to bring more readers to your site and b) to keep existing readers loyal to your site (including myself, for what it's worth).

It's thirty seconds' work at most - but it's thirty seconds well spent, I promise you. Oh, please don't make me beg...

In the comments attached to the next post down (in which I show you my doodles from 20 years ago), someone called Chuckwacka comes over all misty-eyed, and asks "Where did all the doodles go?" Meanwhile, Gert suggests "You never know, it could be a meme."

This has got me wondering. Maybe, with all this constant access to keyboards, we've all collectively stopped doodling. Which is rather sad when you come to think about it. Has the digital age killed off our creativity with the biro and the notepad?

So come on then. Do me a doodle. Stick it somewhere that people can see it, and tell me about it. Doesn't matter if it's crap, so long as it's an authentic expression of your creative subconscious. Stick a piece of music on, grab your biro, and let it flow, people.

Hooray, hooray, it's a doodle-doodle day!

How did we all waste time before the Internet came along? I'll tell you what I did - I listened to music and doodled. Constantly.

Something that I only realised quite recently: I doodled all my life until the Internet came along - and then I stopped, dead. Preferring to doodle with words and thoughts instead these days, I guess.

Feeling rather sad that I had let my creative talents atrophy like this, I've been attempting to doodle again over the past couple of days. Except that I don't seem to be able to do it any more. I'm so out of practice that the doodles won't come of their own accord, as doodles are supposed to. Instead, I'm overthinking and underworking them.

So, just before I stash all my bits of paper from 20 years ago back up in the attic, here are a vintage selection of doodles from my Berlin years, 1983 to 1984. Start the tour here, then keep clicking on each image until you reach the end. (IE users: hit F11 for full screen display mode.)

You'll find that most of them are, ahem, somewhat of their time. They're unpredictable, they're weird, they're funny - and yet they don't quite know exactly how weird and funny they're deliberately trying to be. Hmm, no changes there then...

Oh, and perhaps I should have warned you earlier: they're also complete crap. Er, exactly why am I showing you this stuff?

...and while the long-buried sheets of paper were all still to hand, I naturally had to check my personal charts for the same weeks in 1982 and 1984. Sadly, my 1982 charts appear to have vanished entirely...but what's this? Apparently, I continued to compile a weekly chart right up until this very week in 1985 - after which I stopped for good. It is clearly no coincidence that I was by now six weeks into my relationship with K, and that we were only within a month or so of moving in together. Greater love hath no man than this, that he should finally stop compiling daft little personal charts for the sake of Lurve...

So, since it's to hand, here's that Last Ever Personal Chart in full, as compiled on June 1st 1985. A Top 35, no less...Of course, I'd never dream of compiling a personal chart these days. Cough.

(It's a long one, folks. Grab a cup of tea and make yourselves comfortable.)

If Eurovision 2003 could have been scored purely on the basis of how frequently the chorus of each song was sung by our merry little group of six, as we wandered round Riga in the blazing hot sunshine on the afternoon of Finals Day, then our votes would have looked something like this:

12 points - Latvia. “Cause this is gonna be the day that we will meet, when heaven comes so down to Earth to say hello from Mars…”

Towards the end of the afternoon, a “street team” from the Mars confectionary company suddenly blitzed the Old Town, handing out hundreds of black balloons bearing the words “Hello From Mars”, in the same lettering as the well known chocolate bar. Which was a canny cross-promotional tie-in, if ever there was one. We wondered whether this might start a trend for future contests: Hello From Snickers? Fly On The Wings Of Starburst? One More Twix?

10 points - Germany. “Let’s get happy and let’s be gay, all our troubles they will fade away…”

“Oh, so does the word gay mean something else, then? We didn’t know that – we’re from foreign. We just thought we were writing a cute little song about being happy. Well, how crazy!”

8 points - Ukraine. “Hasta la vista baby, baby so long…”

“Can’t wait to see the contortionist he’s got with him – she’s on a box, you say?”
“I think it could still win, you know.”
“No, no, bottom five for sure…”

7 points - UK. “Cry cry baby, you lied to me baby, I’ll survive without you baby…”

Our attention turned in disbelief to the second half of the lyrics, as printed in the programme. Allow me to quote them in full: Cry cry baby / (Oh no) / Cry cry baby / (I don’t wanna cry) / Cry cry baby / Baby bye baby bye bye / (Byeeeeeeee) / Ooooh baby / Bye Bye / (Oh yeah) / Oh baby bye bye / Cry Baby / Cry Baby / Cry Baby / Cry Baby / Cry Baby.

“There’s only the one verse at the beginning…and then it’s just…nothing!”
“They’re just picking words at random!”
“And they’ve completely given up by the end; they’re just hitting Control-V to fill up the space.”
“I know they wrote it in a phone box, but did the money run out after the first 30 seconds?”
“Control-V! Control-V! Control-V!”

I pitied the guy we met during the afternoon, who had been commissioned to write a 600 word piece on Jemini by Sunday afternoon, for their local newspaper in Liverpool. What sort of positive spin could he possibly find? Oh well – maybe they’d do OK and surprise us all. Although we strongly doubted it.

6 points - Turkey. “Everyway that I can, I’ll try to make you love me again…”
(Dum bi-dum bi-dum oo-wee oo-wee-um, dum bi-dum bi-dum oo-wee oo-wee-um…)

5 points - Slovenia. “He sang to me nananana, so naturally he set my heart on FYE-YA, he truly was my one DIZ-EYE-YA…”
(We had great fun deconstructing the full lyric to this song, concluding that poor little Karmen was misconstruing events rather badly. But let’s not go into all of that here.)

4 points - Ireland. “We’ve got the world tonight, let’s hold on together…”
(Which would always get me singing Fly On The Wings Of Love directly afterwards. The two tunes do bear more than a passing familiarity, after all.)

3 points - Austria. “Und die Frau Holle hatt gern die Wolle vom Dromedar aus Afrika…”
(Actually, I think that one might have been just me.)

2 points - Spain. “Oh o-o-oh!”
(Much as we loved Dime, one of the few ESC songs to be played down at Club XXL every night, we couldn’t manage to sing much more of the tune than this – try as we might. Too many unfamiliar words to fit into the chorus. Most successful ESC tunes do not make this mistake. As you might have noticed over the years.)

1 point - Poland. “Keine Grenzen, keine Fahnen…”
(Which translates as: no borders, no flags. And this was an entry for an international song contest, with 26 countries directly competing with each other in a hall that would be filled with flags? The irony was not lost on us.)

Word was also filtering back to us that the short-dark-haired-one from t.A.T.u had not even shown up for that afternoon’s dress rehearsal, still supposedly “on doctor’s orders”. During the week, the powers that be had let it be known that if Lena and Yulia decided to indulge in any rampantly explicit lesbotic activity on stage during the finals, then transmission would immediately switch to the pre-recorded dress rehearsal performance. Except that now, there was no footage to switch to. Meaning that the girls could potentially do, ooh, anything they liked! A tactical master-stroke, we thought.

On the other hand, no-one from the t.A.T.u camp had ever actually suggested that explicit lesbotic raunchiness might be on the menu. Which said more about press perceptions of their “outrageous” act than it did about the act itself (who have never actually claimed to be “proper” lesbians themselves, in any case). Media manipulation of which Malcolm McLaren would have been proud, in other words. (Indeed, there was even an article in last month’s issue of The Face in which McLaren fawningly interviewed t.A.T.u’s manager, praising his media tactics to the rafters).

My biggest blushes of the day came when one of our gang, while flicking through my copy of the official programme, came to the feature on t.A.T.u – whose pages had become completely stuck together. “Mike! What on earth have you been up to in that hotel room of yours?” My protestations that the pages were heavily laminated, and that it had been very hot in the hall last night, fell on gleefully deaf ears.

(I also know another story, involving a mistimed dose of Viagra, a recalcitrant cockring, a bumpy taxi ride over cobblestones, and the airport-style metal detectors at the entrance to the Skonto hall. But maybe this is neither the time nor the place. You’ll have to make up your own.)

My worries over the rudimentary facilities at the Skonto hall were immediately dispelled on arrival for the Saturday night finals. Marquees had been erected outside, selling drinks and a variety of tasty smorgasbord-style snacks. As a result, the whole of the entrance area became one vast al fresco garden party, with flags waving, cameras snapping, nationalities bonding and vodka flowing. Not wanting to miss a second of the 26 songs – a decidedly long haul for anyone to contemplate, and one that couldn’t possibly be attempted sober – we had all decided to be “sensible”, and stick to vodka. Neat vodka. Sold in 100 gram measures, with all of us downing at least three before the show. My my, but it was effective.

Which would probably explain our, um, exuberant behaviour that night. Dear me, Brits on the piss, eh? It’s always the same! Although the colossal delegation from Ireland certainly gave us a run for our money – their entrant, Mickey Harte, was the winner of an Irish approximation of Fame Academy, and seemingly half of his home town had flown out to support him. In fact, besides the exuberant and ubiquitous Irish, the massed ranks of close-cropped gentlemen of a certain age from London, a clump of agreeably enthusiastic young Estonians and a gaggle of Germans in red wigs (in honour of their scarlet-maned entrant, Lou), representatives of other nationalities were much thinner on the ground. Where were Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia, for instance?

Inside the hall, we soon spotted the BBC commentary box, conspicuously bedecked with Union Jacks, and scooted up to pay homage to The Wogan. As luck would have it, The Wogan had already emerged from his box, and was holding court with a bunch of similarly over-excited acolytes. Two of our gang had brought some peculiar little electronic gizmos with them, which, when spun in a circle above one’s head, spelt out messages in red LED text. Viewed from a distance in dark surroundings, it looked as though the words were mysteriously floating in mid-air. They had now been programmed to spell out WE LOVE YOU TERRY and WOGAN FOR PM.

“Coo-ee! Terry! Over here! Look!”
God, we were subtle. The great man finally noticed.
“Actually, I’m beginning to feel quite moved now.”
Ah, that trademark laconic wit! We swooned.

After a few more minutes of general banter with the throng, The Wogan announced his retreat.
“Well, at least you lot will be spared from having to listen to my commentary tonight.”
Oh, the twinkly-eyed gentle self-deprecation! Eurovision wouldn’t be Eurovision without!

Last year, I gave you a detailed song-by-song critique of every entry, as performed on the night. This year, I fear such a task is beyond me, with the 26 songs passing by in a delirious vodka-fuelled blur. For this is how I see it: if the rehearsals are for chin-stroking, connoisseur-style evaluation of each song’s chances, then the finals are for putting all critical faculties on hold, going stark staring bonkers, singing and dancing in the aisles (there was a pleasing lack of heavy-handed security, and the aisles were nice and wide this year), flag-twirling, whooping, screeching and generally Surrendering To The Madness. I expect that you get much the same sort of thing at the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party. (Yes, it's to time wheel out that hoary old chestnut, The Strange Cultural Affinity Between Teenage Girls And Gay Men. See Juile Burchill columns passim.)

Besides which, we couldn’t see the stage too well from where we were, and were relying on the giant video screens instead. In which case, you make your own entertainment, don’t you?

This means that no, most of our group didn’t quite realise just how badly Jemini performed. We were far too busy to notice at the time. Although, after duly whooping and screeching our appreciation, we did all turn to each other at the end and mutter “Well, that was crap, wasn’t it?” before returning to our seats (only to jump up again a few seconds later for Hasta La Vista Baby).

Indeed, the only time I noticed a vocalist struggling somewhat was towards the end of Turkey’s performance, as poor Sertab Erener became quite out of breath from all that belly dancing and frock twirling. Ooh dear, that won’t help her chances, I said to Chig, thinking back to the fiasco of Sweden's over-excited Afro-dite the previous year. How little we know, eh?

And as for t.A.T.u – I was so excited to see Lena and Yulia together on stage at last, in costume, actually singing, and giving a full performance, with fantastically effective staging and lighting in the hall, after a week in which they had consistently acted like stroppy little madams, pissing all and sundry off big time, that I became quite beside myself with the excitement of the moment. In fact, I even surprised myself with just how much excitement I was capable of. A Hard Day’s Night will make so much more sense to me now. None of this stopped large proportions of the crowd from booing, however - which merely added to the moment (as I had by now decided that everything to do with t.A.T.u over the week had been one gigantic neo-situationist prank. Which might, in retrospect, have been more than a slight exaggeration). As for that much-vaunted rampant lesbotic activity, it didn’t extend much beyond a slight stroking of the hair. Which I decided served everybody jolly well right for their prurience.

Other highlights included:

· Spotting Ireland’s Mickey Harte brushing away real tears while singing the appropriately titled We’ve Got The World Tonight in front of a couple of hundred of his nearest and dearest (going joyfully mental in the aisles as only the Irish can), plus a packed Skonto Hall, plus a couple of hundred million TV viewers. Well, under the same circumstances, I might have become quite moist myself.

· An elegantly powerful, stately performance from Portugal’s Rita Guerra, of a song which I hadn’t rated at all up until now, which actually sent proper shivers up and down my spine (and to think she had been yesterday’s toilet break!) Mind you, I had probably reached the Sentimental Stage with my vodka consumption by then.

· Chig and I bounding forwards to join the Estonian posse during Eighties Coming Back, which I finally decided I quite liked after all (having finally exorcised myself of all lingering Vanilla Ninja based resentment). Although perplexingly described in some quarters as this year’s “indie” entrant, I thought it sounded more like Voyager’s Halfway Hotel, a minor hit from 1979 with some strong sentimental memories attached. (Oh, and while I’m about it: Mister Norway bore strong overtones of Dean Friedman/Eric Carmen, and the intro to Slovenia’s Nanana was a dead ringer for Duran Duran’s Hungry Like The Wolf.)

· The back of the stage opening up to reveal the Green Room, with the contestants floating above us all, Mount Olympus like, in a sea of turquoise clouds. From where we were, this came across as a great coup de theatre.

· The scoring. Oh God, the scoring! In classic ESC style, everything came down to the very last vote of the very last country. By this time, all we cared about was: where do we all want to go next year? The choice had boiled down to Moscow (not fussed, thanks) Brussels (hey, I could get to meet Quarsan and Zed!) and Istanbul (yes please). So Istanbul 2004 it is, then. Result!

For the rest of the night, and for most of the rest of the following day, the same two questions were asked over and over again by all and sundry: why did Latvia (one of everyone’s favourites) do so badly, and why did Belgium (almost nobody’s favourite) do so well? We were all quite perplexed. Why Latvia? Why Belgium? It almost became our collective mantra.

There would be only one way to find out. Roll on Stage 7.

Jump to next part.

Labels: eurovision, eurovision2003

Besides an abiding fondness for Polari and Smashing Time, I now realise that I have something else in common with the enigmatic Lubin Odana of Trash Addict. In our youth, both Lubin and I were given to fantasising - strongly - that we were the stars of our own 24-hour reality TV shows, with the consequence that what we took as "reality" was in fact artifically constructed for the sake of the show. As I said in Lubin's comments box (attached to his June 2nd posting): when walking into a room full of people, I would imagine that moments earlier they had all been preparing for the scene ("Quick, he's coming - act natural, everyone...") This fantasy also formed the basis for the film The Truman Show, which struck a strong chord of recognition with me.

Lubin goes on to mention that he knows of at least two other people who have entertained similar fantasies in their youth. And I thought I was the only one weird enough to have thought like that. Interesting, very interesting. And this is all from a time well before Big Brother, webcams - or, indeed, weblogs.

At County Hall, where I was working as an increasingly pissed off database administrator, we had recently installed a mainframe-only internal e-mail system, and I had recently struck up an ongoing conversation with someone I knew from the Nottingham gay scene. For maybe a couple of years or so, we were e-mail buddies (you never forget your first, do you?), swapping general news and gossip - preferably as salacious as possible - with copious use of breathless exclamation marks! All the time!

This is what I wrote to him on the day in question:

Between the beginning of 1982 and the end of 1984, I compiled my own chart listings every week, based solely on personal preference. This was my chart of the week, as compiled on May 31st:

A quiet day in world history (in other words: I Googled and I failed). A Saturday, which would have meant my grandmother coming over for the morning, to tend to the roses (we had a large selection, and she was an expert, National Rose Society membership and all) - but most crucially of all, to bring copies of whatever comics I was reading at the time (at a guess, these would have been Whizzer & Chips, Shiver & Shake, Sparky, Cor! and Knockout, with Disco 45 and Music Star for pop news).



Unbeknownst to me, my parents were only a few weeks away from divorcing, a fact I would discover in just over a month's time.

Aged one year and three months, I probably spent the day by crawling round our bungalow in Doncaster, named after the village where my parents first met.

Betty Windsor ascended to the throne, as the "New Elizabethan" era (as it was then modishly dubbed) descended upon the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. Unfortunately, it was chucking it down with rain and everybody kept the roofs up on their carriages - apart from a game old bird called Queen Salote of Tonga, who smiled and waved at the assembled multitudes despite getting a soaking, and was duly clasped to the bosom of the nation for her efforts. I think I was at school with her great-grandson (we weren't exactly close).

My mother, who was twelve at the time, painstakingly compiled her own extensive Coronation Scrapbook, full of newspaper & magazine articles of the day. As a lad, this scrapbook fascinated me for some reason, and I read and re-read it many times over. To this day, I still retain something of that boyhood awe & excitement regarding royalty - despite all rational impulses to the contrary (and these are considerable). Why should this be so? The dreary truth, which I'm loathe to admit: it's probably the camp factor.

Peter of Naked Blog, who was six at the time, has been sharing his memories of the day. Start here for the full experience, then read this bit, and then read this bit.

K's business partner has been at Westminster Abbey today for the special anniversary service. (She filled in some sort of application form, and her name was picked at random.) Meanwhile, I celebrated the day by having a patriotic Coronation Chicken sandwich for lunch. Gawd bless yer, ma'am!