Jadranka Stojaković & Đorđe Balašević

 

Addio, Milva

Sad news - Italian singer Milva have died this weekend and with her gone, this is now a twilight of the Gods. Some time ago I wrote about her being - along with Mina and Ornella Vanoni - one of the three main female cornerstones of Italian pop music. All three completely different, respectful to each other and incredibly successful in their own right. Inevitably, listener is moved to compare them but they are genuinely excellent artists worth listening and had carved their own signature.

All three had to go trough typical Italian showbiz route - big festivals, San Remo, TV entertainment shows - before they established themselves and became brands. If Ornella was a tender crooner and Mina a weary, sophisticated lady, Milva was a theatrical red haired volcano, gifted with a spectacularly resonant voice - judged by the merit of the voice only, she might technically be the best singer of all three. Hers was a voice that happens once in a century, a deep contralto that has nothing to do with American rock music and everything with old Bel Canto school of singing (I am sure she must have been trained as a singer) and this might be one the reasons why at certain point in 1970s she became restless and started exploring other music directions - theatre, Bertold Brecht, Tango, Ennio Morricone, etc - before moving on to German and French market. Eventually, Germany, France and Italy all honoured her with national awards - I am talking about knighthoods and Order of Merit. 

Hers is a delightfully eclectic discography that goes all over the map - as expected, 1960s were all about big, Italian ballads and bombastic San Remo numbers but later she gets really interesting and there is a certain willingness to experiment and artistic curiosity that is almost unique amongst big stars who tend to set in their own ways. The sheer amount of the records means that I am always stuck somewhere in the 1960s but actually the older she got, her repertoire got better and more varied. Although she stayed a big concert attraction for the long time, it seems that recording-wise she fell out of fashion at certain point (the destiny of many music veterans) and I remember that browsing trough Italian music shops, I could hardly find her albums - which is strange, considering how big and important she once was. Right now Italian media is praising her to the skies but I feel its a bit too late, she was fairly forgotten in the recent years. Curiously, one of the last pictures published on her Facebook page was the one where lady gets her vaccine, with a message "I get vaccinated because I care about my life and other people's lives. Do it too. We need to get back to life before, and hug our loved ones. Together we can all manage to defeat this virus."  Sadly, she passed soon afterwards but left a beautiful afterglow behind her. I will always love her. 

"The Haunting of Alma Fielding" by Kate Summerscale (2020)

I complained about Kate Summerscale's previous book ("The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher") but at the end read it twice and even bought one copy as a gift. She has a meandering way with storytelling but her subjects are fascinating so I will continue to go on with her work, even though sometimes I wish she go on with the story instead of trying to explain the social contest and background of each character mentioned along the way.

"The Haunting of Alma Fielding" is another true-life story that happened in the twilight of 1930s, just as WW2 was becoming a serious threat. Some kind of panic and fear is already in the air, no wonder that so many people were intrigued with spiritualism, seances and ghosts. It might as well be reaction on uneasiness and atmosphere filled with danger. Hungarian emigrant Nandor Fodor works at the International Institute for Psychical Research but so far he had not find any genuine medium - he was successful at unmasking the fraudsters but he came to the point where his job is at the risk and needs to find a proper person, someone who is truly a miracle worker.

And voilà - here comes suburban housewife Alma Fielding, around whom furniture moves by itself, dishes crash all over the place and even radio smashes on the floor by itself. Even more bizarre, Fielding produces various objects from her sleeves, like jewellery, gloves, etc. And she claims to have no idea how did they get there. Fodor is excited but naturally cautious so when he invites her over to Research center (where she is paid for each visit), he has the whole army of witnesses and helpers who can testify that Fielding is real deal. In the separate toom, Fielding is strip-searched and checked before she falls into trance and speaks possessed by a ghost named Bremba. Other people in the group started smelling unpleasant odours during seances and they generally felt alarmed and uneasy in her presence. As the experiments progressed, Fodor notices that Fielding often seems strangely detached from herself during seances, almost like she is not present and he started to wonder is this perhaps not about a ghost but about mental disturbance.

This is where experiments get more brutal - the more Fodor is suspicious, the more it gets obvious that Fielding does everything to continue being the centre of attention, including perhaps cheating (there are strong hints that she was fraudster) but we can still not explain weird phenomena around her. Just when Fodor started to suspect this is all a reflection of her suppressed memory and she might have created Poltergeist out of long-buried traumas, the colleagues in the Institute demand closure of the experiment - they don't like the direction this research is taking and its all abruptly stopped and swept under the rug. Later we find out that no other but Dr. Freud approved of Fodor's experiments and found the theory completely reasonable and possible.  

"The city on strike" documentary (2021)

 Last night I did something for the very first time - I actually sat in a front of a Dutch documentary screened on a local TV and decided to give it a go with help of Dutch subtitles (I would have probably cheated but English was not available). The movie was titled "De stakende stad" ("The city on strike") and was actually premiered at the end of February, when there is annually a memorial day in remembrance of  famous 1941. February Strike. I had already walked around old Jewish neighbourhood and saw people placing flowers on a particular spot but never knew a real background behind it so this just came as a perfect introduction to a dark chapter in Amsterdam's history.

What happened is that as Germans entered The Netherlands, they immediately started with intimidation of large Jewish population - for centuries Jews were always arriving here and specifically Amsterdam was known as a safe place, where all over Europe there were fires, persecutions and pogroms. Like elsewhere, there were always locals willing to join the invaders, in this case they were known as NSB (The National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands) and they basically persecuted people much more than Germans, because they were extremely focused on showing their zealotry. They would intimidate and beat up Jewish citizens, scare the bar owners from serving Jewish customers, etc. At the very start of 1941. they marched to Waterlooplein (same place where today is a flea market and most of the tourists have no idea what happened here) to beat up Jewish people there - Jews were not waiting helplessly but were armed and helped by communists so there was a huge street fight that left Nazi collaborator Hendrik Koot dead on the ground. He was found holding a rubber hose with iron in his hand so he was obviously caught intent on beating up people but the media described him as "brutally murdered by cowardly terrorist Jews" and made it sound as he had multiple wounds. This was the main reason for two major raids in February 1941. when 427 random Jewish men of age 25-30 were arrested and brought to Jonas Daniël Meijerplein and from there deported to concentration camp. Only two of them survived the war.

It happened on a Sunday morning so lots of citizens of Amsterdam who were on the markets, saw what happened and the news quickly spread around the town. The Communist party quickly organised a full-blown protest against the treatment of their fellow Jewish friends and colleagues - on 25. February all the trams stopped and majority of companies were on strike. Even the ferries bringing workers to their works were on strike. To my knowledge it was the only full blown, open protest of citizens in the whole Europe against the treatment of Jews. The general strike in fact spread to other cities as well - Zaandam, Haarlem, Hilversum, Muiden and Utrecht - The Germans responded to this strike with brutality, arrests and even executions (9 people were killed), the city of Amsterdam was fined with 15 million guilders. 

The documentary deals with not just a strike but also a destiny of some of the men arrested and found on the photos taken by Germans on that morning. Since the men were arrested randomly, they all came from houses nearby and it was a task of the curator Wally de Lang to unearth the identity of the people who were simply taken away and gassed later as a revenge for death of Koot. There are several interviews with elderly men who were there at the time but none of them could really recognise any faces from the photographs. All the men on the photographs were looking away but there is one haunting face looking directly at the camera and all these years nobody knew his identity - in the documentary we see archivists and historians interviewing everybody but nobody knew who he was. Perhaps the hunger, stress and terror changed his face beyond the recognition or maybe he perished together with the rest of his family so nobody remembered them anymore. It was truly tragic and we were following with great interest as curators and historians searched ancient photo archive of all people who lived in Amsterdam at that time (they have tons of pictures taken for the passports and various documents) - they really looked on face upon face until finally they found him and matched the gaunt, despaired face with the handsome photo from a passport. He was leather worker Izak Lemberger who was only 19 and therefore probably the youngest person arrested in that raid - when his family arrived from Krakow, he was only 5 and he lived in a nearby Nieuwe Amstelstraat so this is how the raid worked, they basically arrested everyone in the neighbourhood, house by house. None of Izak's family survived the war. It is just heartbreaking to find the real identity of that unlucky young man who was just starting his life and to compare these two pictures. I can never walk by that square without thinking what happened here. 

"Tina" documentary by Dan Lindsay and T. J. Martin (2021)

Well, I'll be damned (to paraphrase Joan Baez) if that story is not just growing bigger and bigger like some diamond that gets different colours every time we look at it from various angles. And honestly, you would be forgiven if you think that you know everything already: after all, there has been a 1986. autobiography written with Rolling Stone journalist Kurt Loder, 1993. movie with Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne, not one but two musicals about her life (2012."Soul Sister" and much better known 2018. "Tina: The Tina Turner Musical"), the second part of autobiography titled "My Love Story" and number of unauthorised paperback biographies that basically repeated themselves. And its not even the first documentary about her: youtube has excellent 1992. "The Girl from Nutbush" and there are several VH1 "Behind the music" variations. But it takes a Oscar awarded team to re-tell the story again, look at it from different angle and actually make it more exciting than ever before. I am seriously bowled over how Lindsay and Martin took a well-known story and somehow managed to give it a new life. This is some serious craftsmanship here. 

Like millions around the world, I have "discovered" Turner in 1984. when she exploded with "What's love got to do with it". To this day I remember where I was and who was with me as we watched than immensely popular MTV and our reaction to the video clip. And how our teenage heads exploded as someone so confident and strong sashayed on the TV screen. She was older, bolder and sexier than anyone we knew. And in a way, looking back I can say it was quite a sensational to see an older woman re-entering pop music arena and wiping out the floor with all those other kids. Pop music than (even more now) was always more about new fresh faces - the veterans had their place but we actually never heard of someone who was 45 and at the top of the charts - it was unheard of than and frankly it would be today. 

As Turner grew bigger and bigger, it was joy to witness her enormous success as a solo artist all over the world and it seems she really accumulated a lot of good will amongst everybody, people were genuinely excited and happy for her. Naturally I soaked in all the discography, all the books, video clips, concert recordings and interviews. Along the way I have also discovered a whole cornucopia of interesting knowledge about much older, R&B scene in 1960s where she was standing next to giants like James Brown or Wilson Pickett. It was a world she left behind but for a skinny-ass white boy like me, this was super exciting. I mean, this was not some manufactured starlet, this was someone who survived "chitlin circuit"  and is now selling out football stadiums. Unbelievable. 

"Tina" is collage of several different interviews recorded during various decades: you might call it her different incarnations. Today's Tina is a mellow, little lady sitting in her elegant home on the lake in Switzerland, than there is a younger Tina recorded as talking to Kurt Loder who was preparing the book and than there are 1981. audio tape from the very first interview where she explains why she left her ex husband and her voice is still raw with pain and emotions, the wounds were still too close. On top of this, you get a smorgasbord of well documented photos and sensational live performances recorded exactly at the time when the story is happening - this might be the very first time we see a documentary celebrating her as an artist and not talking about her legs or sex appeal.

Than there is a story - its fascinating to see how media became obsessed with it and always came back to it, no matter how big or successful Tina became. The ubiquitous questions and glee about confronting her with them time and time again, makes for uneasy watching - perhaps she was naive in expecting that autobiography would explain her reasons and now it actually backfired at her. Its apparent that Oprah just won't let it go and just loves to bring it up again and again, to the point that we see Tina's obvious discomfort and distaste. Perhaps this is the best thing about documentary - to face the audience with their own glee in all of this, so they might actually understand what it does to her and how she deserves to be spared from opening old wounds. We love to think about her as powerful and strong, but they actually bring her nightmares. Her husband Erwin Bach compares it to post-traumatic stress disorder that soldiers feel years after they have returned from a war. And honestly people, her solo success by far overshadows and eclipses anything that came before. 

Eventually the documentary goes into story with much more understanding and detail than Hollywood movie (I am actually surprised how many people claim they know everything because they have seen the movie) - when Tina earlier claimed "I would have liked the movie to be closer to the truth" many just assumed she meant that it was exaggerated, where actually movie was softened and condensed - what you see here, well documented with photos, interviews and witnesses is heartbreaking and intense, raw, brutal story not just about domestic abuse but what preceded it (both of her parents left her to grandparents and just disappeared), the treatment of women in 1960s music industry, her uphill struggle to gain a footing in business that has already written her off as too old and too black, even the way she works in a music studio where a completely silly pop fluff (already recorded by Eurovision winners Bucks Fizz) is turned into a worldwide smash hit. In fact, there is so much material that you wish this could be TV series, because there is just not enough space for everything - wisely, the directors trimmed the story to its main minimum, otherwise we could have two hours just of people celebrating her. The documentary eventually finishes as celebration of Turner and her well deserved status, we even see her enjoying life in Switzerland and between the lines there is a feeling of her wanting to be left in peace now.  It was heartbreaking, it was cathartic, a genuine emotional rollercoaster and I have cried my eyes out. Will watch it again. 

p.s.

I managed to write the whole essay and not mention his name even once. Good, she deserves to be praised and celebrated for herself.