ansley15

I feel as if the weekend has somewhat run away from me, but, looking back, I do seem to have got a lot done.

Saturday was gloriously sunny, so once I returned from the gym, I spent quite a bit of the afternoon sitting out on the deck, finishing my book — Bread and War (Felicity Spector) — under the pear and cherry trees. ( The book is basically Spector travelling around Ukraine, eating lots of delicious food, served to her by remarkable people working in incredibly difficult circumstances ) Don't read this book when hungry, or you will find yourself craving vast piles of food!

On Saturday night, I laid the coffee table with lots of food on which to graze, and Matthias and I watched Eurovision. As I said previously, all our local friends who used to join us for watch parties have moved away, so it was just the two of us, although I had additional company in the form of the group chat of my friends from the Philip Pullman fan forum. Those of us taking part in the conversation were a true pan-European Eurovision crowd: a Welsh person in south Wales, a British person living in Switzerland (but in Geneva, not watching from the audience in Basel), a Finnish person in Helsinki, and two Australians living in England. We all universally agreed that the intermission mashup Käärijä/Baby Lasagne song was better than every competing song, and would have voted for it if we could!

Today, after a slow start, Matthias and I spontaneously decided to do a 5km circular walk, which includes the park by the cathedral, a long stretch by the river (where we saw vast numbers of water birds, and a herd of cows lying placidly in the grass), and then a winding journey through the suburban streets of the town. This at least helped me feel that I'd done some movement for the day.

After our return, I curled up in the living room and read my way through the once_upon_fic collection. I didn't think I had the time to participate in this exchange this year, but I've enjoyed reading the contributions of others. I'll stick a few recs behind a cut.

( Recs here )

I'll leave you with one final link: the rather cool news that the children's picture book written by one of my undergraduate friends from Australia has been selected for the Australian National Simultaneous Storytelling initiative, which is pretty amazing.

Back in the day (by which I mean over a decade ago, when Youtube's algorithm just showed you music it thought you might like if you were using it without being logged in, as opposed to shoving horrific far right podcasters and video essayists in your face, which is what it does now), I stumbled on MrSuicideSheep's epic, four-part 'Taking You Higher' progressive house mix. I edited the final stages of my PhD to this music, wrote numerous job applications, and cleaned and cooked repeatedly with this on in the background. Many of the close to 100 systematic reviews for which I've done the database searches (a fiddly task that takes about half a day when it's easy, and multiple additional days longer when it's hard) were done to this soundtrack. I've discovered so much music I like through those mixes, and I'm very certain that multiple Dreamwidth posts have titles taken from some of the included songs.

I follow the guy (I'm assuming gender based on the 'Mr' in the Youtube handle, but obviously I have no idea) on social media, and a few weeks back, he started teasing that Part 5 of this mix was coming soon — after a pause of nine years. When it dropped, the comments were full of rapturous gratitude from people who had clearly used the previous four parts as the soundtrack to their lives in much the same way as I had. They reminisced about the stages of the lives at which they were when the earlier parts had come out, and how far they had come (graduations, marriages, children, new jobs, moving cities or countries, etc) since then. It was just such a nice moment of warmth and community, with people coming together across continents and oceans to celebrate music that had meant so much to them, and rejoice in a new addition to that stream of sound that connected them all. In that space, in that moment, everyone put everything aside, and just united in the sheer, earnest love of music.

The new mix itself is 4.5 hours long!

It's the best week of the year (as long as you ignore virtually everything else that's going on in the world): seven days of that indescribable mix of camp and earnest and songs and staging that have to be seen to be believed that is Eurovision. I love it.

This year has it all. We've got two beverage-themed comedy songs. We've got two songs about female orgasms belted out by two different divas (both of whom were asked to tone it down in various ways, and essentially passive aggressively shrugged and continued capering and gyrating on their giant gold climactically firework-shooting microphone prop/stage trapeze). Latvia sent a folk polyphony group of forest spirits whose entire song and aesthetic could have been lifted wholesale from pretty much any Cirque du Soleil stage band. The Polish singer last competed in Eurovision in the 1990s and has returned to sing in front of a fantasy backdrop (dragons and all) surrounded by a mixed gender group of backing dancers dressed in what I can only describe as centurian fetishwear, all wearing the highest stiletto heels imaginable.

Sweden sent a comedy band of Swedish-speaking Finns (inevitably singing about saunas). Germany sent two Austrians. Ireland sent a Norwegian, singing a dance tune about Laika the Soviet space dog (making this the second time by my count that a Norwegian singer/group submitted a Laika-themed dance song for Eurovision). San Marino sent one of the members of Eiffel 65.

Somehow all of this makes sense.

So, today's prompt is to use Eurovision as a starting point and talk about whatever takes your fancy. If you're watching this year, do you have any favourites or predictions? What are your favourite acts or moments from years gone by? If you're from a country that participates, does it get into the Eurovision spirit in any particular way (or does the whole thing pass by virtually ignored)? Do you have any preferred setting or format for watching? Etc.

This weekend has been a very welcome chance to catch my breath, after weeks of intense work, travel, and a lingering sense that I'd been trying to cram too many responsibilities into too little time. I feel physically and mentally rested for the first time in ages.

Of course, 'catching my breath' in my context still means that I went out three times to the market in the past two days, plus three times to the gym (or rather, two times to the gym and one time to the cinema which is in the same complex), did two loads of laundry, batch-cooked a bunch of stuff, and spent most of this morning doing little bits and pieces in the garden, so I haven't exactly been spending the weekend lounging around on the couch. I never want inactivity — I just want to feel that all this stuff fits easily into the time I have available.

Yesterday afternoon, Matthias and I did the time-honoured Australian hot weather activity of decamping to the air conditioned comfort of the cinema, and watched Sinners. This is probably the first time in a year I've seen a film in a cinema, and it was well worth it! It's been a while since I've seen a movie that works so perfectly on all levels — narrative, acting, visual and aural storytelling, and the seamless interweaving thereof — and this was an absolute feast for the senses. There's so much going on: it's a story about Black American history, culture, and music, it's about cultural appropriation (particularly of Black music of all genres), and of the tenacity of Black people throughout the entirety of their presence on the American continents in building and creating and clawing their way to success and prosperity in the face of the full force of racism that will impede them every step of the way, and tear down everything they've built whenever possible, with zero consequences. In particular, it's about the immense trauma at the heart of the Black experience in the United States — on both an individual and communal level — of the rupture of slavery, and the way it robbed the descendents of the enslaved of knowledge of their history, and the way that, in spite of that, there is this incredible cultural continuity, particularly when it comes to music, that transcends and survives this traumatic rupture, resulting in this most exquisite music, from whose roots pretty much every popular musical genre has sprung. (And of course, all this exquisite musical talent and innovation has been plundered and whitewashed by non-Black musicians ever since mass entertainment became a thing, a point which the film weaves throughout its narrative.)

It's also a vampire horror movie.

There were some scenes that I can't describe without spoiling what really should be seen unspoilt, but which were so visually striking and emotionally arresting that they took my breath away. The music is incredible, and made me want to dance in the cinema. In other words, I was immersed and entranced, and it took away my cynicism about film as a storytelling medium (which, after a big dose of franchise/reboot/blockbuster fatigue, had been pretty high).

Other than movies, I've been slowly reading through the only kind of reading material I can handle at the moment: Consort of Fire (Kit Rocha), an undemanding, tropey romantasy that feels like the equivalent of junk food for the brain.

Beyond that, it's been a weekend of gardening. Last year, I planted an sweet pea seedling, which grew absolutely gigantic, and was laden with flowers of varying shades of pink and purple. It made me so happy, I was planning to get another seedling this year — until I went out to the vegetable patches and realised I didn't have to, as about five new sweet pea plants had self-seeded from last year's. I spent a bit of time this morning constructing frames from bamboo, and training the new seedlings to the frames so they'll grow upwards. I also planted a bunch of seeds in propagator trays: radishes, chili, spring onion, rocket, dill, parsley, chives, peas, marigolds, and nasturtiums. It really is too late for all this — see above for how rushed and lacking in time I've felt for weeks on end — so I'm philosophical about how successful any of these potential plants is likely to be. If anything sprouts and grows, I'll count that as a success. Benign neglect seems to be the route to success in our garden — without having planted any, we have masses of strawberry plants (including one that self-seeded in the cracks between two paving slabs in the patio), a bunch of supposedly dead foxgloves in the front garden suddenly revived (these are not meant to be perennials) and covered themselves with budding flowers, and the unkillable mint died back as it always did in winter, and sprang to life in spring, filling the entire herb garden. The wood pigeons have, as always, stripped half the leaves and unripe fruit from one of the cherry trees, but in a month or so, there should be a veritable feast of pinkish-white cherries nonetheless.

It's nice to have had a good stretch of time to devote to Dreamwidth this afternoon. I've missed this place.