Word: songs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Critics deride the Eurovision Song Contest as a cultural Chernobyl, an ostentatious talent show in which gaudiness and sex appeal have more currency than musical ability. During the May 16 final, watched by more than 100 million people worldwide, contestants once again called upon their decidedly nonmusical charms: the Greek entry ripped his shirt to expose a waxed chest, while the Albanian entry wore a pink tutu and stood on a wind machine. But in the end, Alexander Rybak, a boyish fiddle player from Norway, stormed to victory because he had the best song - and he didn't even have...
...last year, Serbia the year before, and Ukraine finished second both times. It may seem like sour grapes, but commentators from losing countries (the U.K. finished last in 2008) have consistently complained that the public phone vote used to determine the winner has ensured that historical ties always trump song quality. An entry from Greece, for example, could still earn top points from Cyprus, even if the song is painful to listen to. (See a TIME package on loving Eurovision...
...gift and humanism to Shakespeare's. Both men, he says, are "fascinated with the contradictions of human beings, with their complexities and ambiguities. As with Shakespeare, there's heightened poetic expression in Sondheim, but when you dig into it, you find it's in touch with something real." The song "Send in the Clowns" contains not just pretty lyrics, but musings perfectly pitched for the character of Desirée, a glamorous actress pushing 40 and facing what may be her last chance for love. "The cadence, the vocabulary, the incidences in the music, a pause he's written...
...Wandering past model rockets, orange cosmonaut suits emblazoned with red U.S.S.R. emblems and a diorama of happy cosmonaut mannequins sitting around a campfire next to a crashed space capsule waiting for pickup, Lynn Nordstrom of Albuquerque, N.M., and her two sons - in Moscow for the Eurovision song contest - say they are enjoying their visit. But "after looking at this, I'm afraid of the Egypt syndrome, where all you do is talk about how great you used to be," Nordstrom says. "The museum is terrific, but you need to look to the future. My whole youth was spent hearing about...
...they mean nothing. They are for study, to help me with anatomy, form and function." Is Black House the flipside of the virtuous White Temple, or is that reading too much into their close proximity? Thawan is noncommittal: "Why do people say this is hell? Like the John Lennon song, there's no heaven above and no hell below...