Natasha Richardson (left) with her grandmother, Rachel Kempson; niece, Daisy Bevan; mother, Vanessa Redgrave; and sister, Joely Richardson, photographed by Annie Leibovitz at Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson's home in New York, April 1998 for Vanity Fair.
I have recently returned from vacation in Portugal.
It was interesting experience - not because of the usual desire to change the scenery and because of what we have seen there - in many ways Portugal is beautiful and definitely worth a visit - but because of what this experience taught me. To my biggest surprise, once when we actually arrived in Lisbon, I found myself perpetually tired and exhausted, since there were so many things to do but everything was so tiring - not to mention that the weather was against us and we were constantly drenched and wet from the pouring rain - Lisbon is extremely hilly and every single walk turned out to be a Sisyphus mythical climb, it was non stop one climb after another. Porto was just slightly less hilly but even here we puffed and panted and were constantly sweaty (and afterwards sick with cold, after riding sightseeing bus or such) - it was almost as we were punished for having a sunny day, immediately we started to cough.
So yes, it was beautiful. And interesting. But the best part of vacation was our return home, to our regular comfy nest, shower that actually works, soft and comfortable bed, etc. We were so tired of physical efforts to manoeuvre hilly streets, that coming back to a flat surface was wonderful. Seriously, we had enough of this unexpected fitness and came to conclusion that in the future, vacation should be deserved rest which means that from now we might select a small town or even a village with no traffic jams, no crowds and no tourist traps everywhere. I would not mind a walk in the nature but walks we suffered in Lisbon were not enjoyable. From now on, we will plan the vacations differently and we might simply stay somewhere local, out of town, no planes, no stress, no climbing hills. To recharge the batteries and to rest properly, I need a tiny place with silence, perhaps a sound of the rain, open space, some nature and please dear God, flat surfaces. It took me another week to recover from all this climbing (and cold) and that last week of just resting at home was the best part of my vacation.
Just found out a sad news that Ivica Krajač has died. Everybody who was growing up in the 1970s remembers his name, as Krajač was extremely busy and successful lyrics writer for anybody and everybody in Croatian pop music at the time. On every single than-popular pop festival, his name was often quited ceremoniously before the performance - "and now, the song composed by XY with lyrics by Ivica Krajač (and orchestra conducted by Nikica Kalogjera)!"
In a way, his zenith might have been 1970s when local, home-grown music enjoyed particular success and Krajač was particularly versatile as not only lyrics writer but also songwriter himself, serving everybody from peppy Ljupka Dimitrovska to big stars like Drago Diklić, Tereza Kesovija, Gabi Novak and zillion other names. In fact, without him it would be difficult to even imagine our local pop music, since he was one of the most creative people around. Apparently he was also a theatre director, which I didn't know.
Krajač came to prominence in the late 1950s as one of the founding members of very popular vocal quartet 4 M - they were beloved as mainstream entertainers, but this was way before my time and I struggle to find any appeal in their recorded music. (They even represented Yugoslavia on Eurovision). When the quartet disbanded, Krajač created a name for himself as a songwriter and ever since he was a busy man, serving other singers with either lyrics or music or sometimes both. Basically, he is connected to every artist of his generation. While the posterity might remember him as lyrics writer of countless "schlager" pop hits of 1960s and 1970s, my connection to Krajač is his friendship and collaborations with Karlo Metikoš - as a tandem, they created two rock-operas (Gubec beg and Grička vještica) that I still own on the records and know every single lyric + in 1973 they teamed to create a debut LP album for than 23 years old Josipa Lisac and the result was "Dnevnik jedne ljubavi" (The diary of one love), to this day highly praised and beloved concept album and one of the first rock albums in a country. It was because of his collaborations with Metikoš that I noticed lyrics of Ivica Krajač - I also noticed that he carefully tailored his songs according to performer (very much like Arsen Dedić also did) so he would serve pop fluff to some and highly poetic lyrics to others. Decades ago, when I was young and hopeful journalist, I have actually meet and spoken to him, I still remember how excited I was when he mentioned casually that he still owns rehearsal tapes for both rock operas created with Metikoš - they will probably never be released in public, though I would love to hear how the work was created.
