Jere Pohonen has created himself a character that combines the explosiveness of an athlete and a cartoon hero – like a show wrestler or an action figure who transcends many gender and masculinity boundaries, writes entertainment journalist Mikael Matila .
In May 2019, I met a few thousand other citizens at a market in Tampere.
People shouted, roared and created ruckus. Bare buttocks flashed. Someone brought a trailer sauna. We swam in the fountain.
Morocco had knocked. The golden carnival of lions was a common attraction at the end of the cold winter.
At the same time, there was something aggressive about the atmosphere of the party.
The boys had won, and the boys celebrated it. Crowds of people, mostly men, flushed with cheap lager at fluctuating levels of alcoholism, got very high and invented all kinds of tricks.
Masculine danger and the desire to show off dominated the hustle. I remembered the benefit of nightclubs just after closing time.
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When Finland’s Eurovision hero and knight Karija arrived home from Liverpool, it was a slightly different mood at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport.
People dressed in colorful clothes (mainly green, of course), of different genders and age groups, sing Cha Cha Cha over and over again. Everyone hugged the rapper, the rapper hugged everyone.
It was beautiful and moving.
There were no mobile phones. No one roared his balls at the fountain. The boys did not riot. Not a single statue was damaged.
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A more cynical person could certainly say that the Karija Carnival is a “children’s party”.
In many kindergartens today, people probably sang about pouring champagne over themselves and climbed onto the roofs of playhouses to perform choreography. Teacher Björninen and Antilla are able to coax the Karija-addicted teenagers like a constable wearing a shirt.
But then what? For once, we witness a national celebration whose nature may be determined by none other than the national team’s spectators, still kneeling with one foot in the ditch.
Anyway, the Eurovision Song Contest has always been a celebration of diverse minorities, challenging typical notions of what kind of makeup, complexion and glitter everyone can wear. It still is. This is a very basic thing that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who follows the game.
So it’s great that Jere Pohonen has created himself a character that combines the explosiveness of an athlete and a cartoon hero – like a show wrestler (a sport he says he was a fan of) or an action A figure that transcends many gender and masculinity boundaries.
Former Kikko-Vanta Man. Latkajatka.
If Pohonen’s small size, under 170 cm, was an asset on the rink, it is on the stage as well. I claim that if Cha Cha Cha was performed in the same way by a curmudgeon, the show would not be the same at all.
Now wearing nail polish and mascara, Pohonen takes on traditional masculinity in a snappy neon-green bolero and reveals his midsection to us – not to ridicule or threaten, but to expose his vulnerability.
It should also be noted that the box that Karija breaks at the beginning of the show is called “fragile”. does it hurt?
At the same time, viewers have been able to marvel at how Pöyhönen became friends with Bojan Cvjetićanin, the soloist of the band Joker Out, who represents Slovenia in Liverpool. For example, Vezzari went crazy by performing the great scene from the Titanic movie, where Pohonen plays Kate Winslet’s Rose and Cvjetićan plays Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack.
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This is the kind of friendship and manhood among young men that the older generation was not yet capable of.
Latkajatka-jere could do.
So it’s no wonder that kids are interested too. There are worse role models in the world.
