Little Crumbs and ABBA

Here's another picture I've been meaning to take for a while, and I finally had the opportunity on Saturday. I passed this little shop many months ago while exploring this area but it was closed. I thought it was a cafe, and only later on Google Street View did I see it was actually a junk/furniture shop that regularly spread out its wares on the sidewalk. So I wanted to go back and catch it while it was open.

Given the sign, with a little cup of steaming something over the word CAFE, I deduced with the confidence of Dr. Watson that it perhaps had been a cafe at some point in the past. And indeed, Google shows it as such way back in 2016. Two years later, it was looking more like a vintage/junk shop. Now it's positively crammed and, inside, a bit dark and musty.

I didn't buy anything, but this item was intriguing -- a small bedside cabinet decorated with stencils of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly. I might have bought it if I were 30 years younger (and it was really inexpensive). Now I need it like a hole in the head.

Yesterday I finished my book, "My My!: ABBA through the ages," by Giles Smith. I must say I was a bit surprised when I mentioned reading a book about ABBA a few posts back, and no one challenged me about it. No one said, "You're reading what?!"

Of course it could be that none of you particularly care about my reading habits, which I TOTALLY understand. But I must tell you, this was a very enjoyable book. It wasn't an encyclopedic dissection of the lives and recordings of the ABBA musicians, at least not in any dry, referential sense. It was very readable, more a story of Smith's personal experience with ABBA (like most of us, he discovered them as a young teenager) interspersed with information about the musicians and the records and the photos and the concerts. As Smith himself put it on page 302, the book isn't for die-hard fans so much as "for people who find they have had the members of ABBA and their music in their heads, on and off, practically all their lives without really trying, and might be curious about how that's come to happen."

Having said that, it does go on some peculiar tangents. There's pretty much a whole chapter discussing the wisdom of the line "feel the beat of the tambourine" in "Dancing Queen," ABBA's signature song. Apparently there is no actual tambourine in "Dancing Queen," which I must admit I never knew, and although it sounds like a throwaway rhyme about a silly grade-school instrument, Smith points out that properly playing a tambourine is actually more complicated than one might imagine. Besides, as he says, "feel the beat of the drum machine" doesn't sound nearly as good.

I became an ABBA fan around the time I was 14, when I asked for and got the K-Tel album "The Magic of ABBA" for Christmas. A couple of high school friends were also very into ABBA -- we were not a rebellious crowd -- and I spent hours talking to my friend John on the phone in the evenings, planning ABBA mix tapes that we never made. A few years later I bought their album "The Visitors" at the mall. This was relatively late to ride the ABBA bandwagon, given that they broke up right around that time, but I went on listening to them and I've never really stopped. Their music is still in my iTunes. They really did have a knack for writing and performing musically perfect, if sometimes linguistically awkward, pop songs.

It was always cooler to listen to the Ramones or the Sex Pistols or even Blondie, but I was never a fan of harder-edged music. (I did eventually own Blondie's "Greatest Hits," but I wouldn't call them particularly hard-edged either.)

Anyway, you've probably read some of this before, in my posts about going to the ABBA exhibit or the ABBA Voyage concert in East London. Smith also discusses ABBA Voyage as well as the music's use in the musical "Mamma Mia" and the movies "Muriel's Wedding" and "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," which as you know are two of my favorites. Those ABBA musicians, who are all now approaching 80 years old, just keep popping up like groundhogs in our cultural landscape.