Swedish sparkles / A hopeless position

Screenshot of ABBA, performing in the music video for "Waterloo"

Today: Diana Moskovitz, investigations editor, writer, and co-owner of Defector; and Amy Chu, artist and publisher of Camoot.Journal.

Issue No. 199

A Night at the ABBA Museum
Diana Moskovitz

Film Review: No Other Land
Amy Chu

A Night at the ABBA Museum

by Diana Moskovitz

I’ve been in Europe for two and a half weeks researching my book about Alice Milliat, the French woman who got women’s athletics permanently into the Olympics. Which is how I found myself in Stockholm two days after the U.S. presidential election. I had been excavating the archives of J. Sigfrid Edström—president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, who would go on to become Olympic president—a man who spent years working to kill Milliat’s movement. 

I’d been plowing through Edström’s letters—letters in which a wealthy and powerful man moans frequently to his wealthy and powerful male friends about a certain kind of woman. In one of them, Edström wrote of Milliat’s federation, which was running low on cash and asking for assistance: “We should like the whole thing to disappear from the surface of the earth.”

Days of this, bookended by the ambient sound of Swedish news discussing the U.S. election, and I needed a change. I needed bright light, glitter, and unrelenting joy. I needed ABBA.

I am not an ABBA superfan. I am simply a person who thinks this Swedish quartet has a grand amount of great songs. “Waterloo”? Total banger. “Lay All Your Love On Me”? I could listen to it all day, along with “SOS”, “Take A Chance On Me”, and “Voulez-Vous.” “The Winner Takes It All?” One of the greatest breakup songs of all time. And Mamma Mia is a fun movie that I turn on sometimes. My research hours left me time for one fun cultural activity and when my husband mentioned that there was a shrine to one of Sweden’s biggest global cultural exports, I stopped him right there and wouldn’t even let him list the other options. It just seemed obvious. 

Aboard the tram to the museum, the stops were announced in Swedish, but the announcement for “ABBA Museum” came loud and clear and that’s when many of us exited, giggling and chatting in various languages. ABBA THE MUSEUM greeted us, offering anyone willing to put their head through a cut-out poster board a chance to join the band. Inside, the messaging was not subtle. Plastered on the walls, walkways, and touch screens was the message, “Walk in. Dance out.” 

Though called a museum, the experience is built around specific mood lighting and participation stations for each section, each one like a little movie theater or concert hall. It’s less stuffy than a traditional hall of exhibits, a more immersive experience for a digital age. The light tells you where to look. 

First came a montage video of ABBA’s greatest moments, followed by a large walk-through display about ABBA Voyage, an ongoing “virtual concert residency” in London in which “ABBAtars” of ABBA perform their songs. From there, the museum briefly, and I mean briefly, takes visitors through the history of the group’s formation, explaining where each member grew up, how they fell in love with music, honed their talents in the Swedish music scene, and found each other. There’s one such personal history board for each member, and they cannot help but raise questions—wait, Anni-Frid was married and had children before she met Benny, and Benny also had children from a prior relationship before ABBA? And tell me more about the Swedish folkparks!—but no, this is not a museum for context. This is a museum in which you turn the corner and suddenly have the desire to scream OH MY GOD IT’S WATERLOO!

Walk through a heart-shaped door headlined “the night that changed everything” and there it is, ABBA’s 1974 history-making performance in the Eurovision Song Contest, playing on a suspended screen, looping into infinity (or at least until closing time). There’s thick, gold-and-pink tinsel on the walls. Light bulbs ring a full-length mirror decorated with “Waterloo” lyrics, flanked on each side by mannequins dressed in Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad’s Eurovision outfits, one a velour-type fabric of the brightest colors, the other a burnt-orange skirt paired with a white blouse draped in silver chains. The nearby plaque explains that Frida asked Inger Svenneke to make these getups after seeing her designs in a shop because, “They really wanted to stand out from the other artists’ mainstream outfits.”

I could have stood there forever. All these years later, “Waterloo” remains a perfect pop song. The chorus catches. The beat bops. As Eurovision rules require to this day, the song runs under three minutes. The lighting is impossibly good, the mirror perfectly positioned for photos, and there’s plenty of room to dance. This the ABBA Museum understands: when you’ve got something this good, just get out of the way.

Yet my gnawing sense of efficiency got to me, and I eventually left the “Waterloo” zone.

You can see the massive, 40-channel mixing console used at Polar Studios to produce three of ABBA’s albums (as well as Led Zeppelin’s “In Through the Out Door” and Genesis’ “Duke,” both given passing mentions), and an homage to the summer house where ABBA wrote songs. One plaque concedes that longtime ABBA producer and manager Stig Anderson “could be rather blustery at times,” but don’t worry because Polar Studios employee Görel Hanser would “pour oil over troubled waters.” And look at all these original track lists, early ABBA photos, and so, so many plaques and records! Clearly, ABBA has no choice but to go on a world tour.

I also played a game to see if I could properly mix an ABBA song and failed badly. 

Would you like to see ABBA’s tour rider? You can. ABBA is not hiding from its proper place in the pop music pantheon. It’s right there, front and center, as part of the section on touring, along with the memorabilia, historical outfits, and a suitcase topped with a sticker that says, I ❤️ STOCKHOLM. On tour, ABBA required two dressing rooms and asked they contain the following: “Two big mirrors, two bottles of French dry champagne (well chilled), 12 bottles of Perrier water, one bottle of Scotch (Johnny Walker Black Label), half a bottle of Negrita, 10 bottles of Coca-Cola, tea, coffee, milk, lemon, sugar, assorted fresh fruit, cups, glasses, and spoons.”

And perhaps you would like to feel like a pop star yourself? In a booth, I sang my own version of “Waterloo”, complete with headphones and microphone. Moments later, I performed “Dancing Queen” on stage flanked with giant avatars (or should I say “ABBAtars”) of ABBA. I did all right, but nowhere near as well as the child who went right before me and danced with the abandon of a kid entirely unconcerned about how they are perceived and not weighed down by the knowledge of what another Trump presidency means for the world.

This is, in some ways, the immersive highlight of the experience, a fulfillment of the museum’s promise that with enough technology and excellent lighting you can feel like the fifth member of ABBA, if only for a moment, and perhaps in a way that also translates into content for your social media feed.

The museum from there takes you through the history of ABBA’s iconic music videos and countless famous costumes. The closest it gets to waving a hand at regret is a display to the song “Slipping Through My Fingers.” The pressures of all that fame? The divorces? The massive hit song clearly inspired by breaking up? What do you think this is, Fleetwood Mac? That is for another time because, as the signs tell us, “breaking up is never easy,” but also look around the corner and OMG IT’S MAMMA MIA!!  Don’t you want to sit next to a chair that says “Meryl” and pretend you’re friends with one of the world’s greatest actors? I sure did. There’s even a tribute to one fan who went to all 17 ABBA concerts in North America in 1979. 

And look, a gift shop! With shirts that sparkle! (For the record, I bought an ABBA beanie.) 

Later, walking back out into the cold night, my husband told me about a plaque I had missed. It was from the display about Agnetha and, in it, she said all of ABBA’s songs were about love. 

And that’s why ABBA feels like the ultimate escape from war, murder, flooding, elections, or even just a long cold winter. It was that feeling of being steeped in the radical joy of love. Okay, and the sparkles and the costumes. ABBA's irresistible music is the real draw—but it never hurts to add some glitter, too.

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Film Review: No Other Land

by Amy Chu

Colonizers write about flowers.
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks
seconds before becoming daisies.
I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.

Noor Hindi, “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying”

I have been thinking about love. I can’t stop writing about it. The essays sit in my drafts because I’m trying to edit out as many of the sentences as I can that begin with “I”. 

I feel dread. I want to quit. I can’t write about love.

In October, I attended the Boston Palestine Film Festival screening of No Other Land, a documentary about the occupation and destruction of the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta. Much of the film’s power comes from Palestinian activist Basel Adra’s first-hand camera footage of  evictions, demolitions, and attacks carried out by Israeli developers and military. Again and again, I watched bulldozers tear down houses and animal pens as families scream and try to salvage what they can from the ruins of their homes.

Adra films a soldier shooting Harun Abu Aram point-blank as he tries to stop the Israelis from taking his family’s generator. Harun survives, but he loses his home. Forced out with nowhere else to go, his families and others retreat into underground caves.

I have seen similar images on Instagram and scrolled away or exited the app to avoid the sight of emaciated children or bloody, mangled bodies. At times I’ve taken these images in, because the poster has asked for my attention and paid for it in life and freedom.

I realize that violence strips the perpetrators of their souls, but not those of its victims.

Adra also uploads his videos to social media but the experience of the documentary in a movie theater is wholly different. The tension and violence are relentless. The viewers are immersed in vision and sound.

In between these scenes, heralded by the rhythmic robotic arrival of bulldozers in the daytime, we spend intimate time with the director’s family through old home footage and clips of conversations in their living room. We learn that Basel’s family has a history of activism and see that they are rightfully exhausted. Yet they continue to joke.  

One night, Basel’s mother quips that she’s done fresh laundry for him so he has a clean set of clothes if he goes to prison in the morning. On another, Basel asks Yuval Abraham, the Israeli investigative reporter he’s been working with, “Will I ever get married?”

This question generates laughter in the theater, and surprise. I don’t laugh. The wish Basel reveals in that moment doesn’t match what he has documented for us onscreen: stun grenades thrown at peaceful protestors, military arriving with rifles to demolish a school while children are still in class, and Harun lying paralyzed, depressed, waiting to die, in a cave.

And still Basel thinks of marriage? I can’t forget his question.

When Yuval complains that his articles about the evictions have not generated enough views, Basel reminds Yuval that his “enthusiasm” is not enough to sustain their cause. He tells him, “Get used to failing. You’re a loser.”

Basel Adra is 28 years old. I’m 25. Young people cannot dream without anxiety, with the ever-present threat of the climate crisis fueled by American greed and entire lineages of family wiped out by American bombs. Who are we to love and to hope? Is it at others’ expense? I find it impossible to think about love without considering the absence of the children and adults who were robbed of life and its promises.

Basel reminds us, “This is a story about power.” Our lives are tied together and torn apart by power. Can we be bound by something else?

No Other Land is playing at the Lincoln Center until Thursday, November 14.

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