Noone Is Really Cool...

...I'm happy to say. The whole thing's just a front. If you're a member of a highly successful band, sooner or later you're going to end up releasing a 'greatest hits' album; fashion designers get old and ugly in the end, and writers get misinterpreted by legions of clones who like to hold up one of their efforts whilst on public transport or

I once worked with the former manager of a band who made it very big in the UK and worldwide in the late 70s and early 80s, and he used to eat his lunch with a napkin tucked into his collar so there was this kind of white triangle hanging over the front of his shirt, like people did in Edwardian times or something. He was a former Lloyds' name and didn't he just know it. I was not impressed.

In the final go round, being cool is incredibly hard work, one slip, one overheard conversation about train times, prices or whose turn it is to feed the cat and your cover's blown. And not even stupid people can maintain that indefinitely.

The only way round this is to die young, then you might just make it, but a fat lot of use it's going to be to you

So wear your horizontally striped jersey, red corduroy shirt or fleece top with pride, and take some comfort in the fact that your life is not a lie.

Thought For the Day - With the Rabbi Anders Weiss

 ..religious leader, psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

 Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.

 

Viktor Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning.

 

 

The Genius From Dunfermline

The Puumaja Crew is today feeling reassured that it's ok to like Andrew Carnegie, the emigre Scot who effectively WAS the US steel industry there for a good while and was the second richest man in history according to some reports (Rockefeller was the richest). The moderator's mother had in fact told him that he was 'horrible to his workers' without elaborating.

The seal of approval comes from our older brother Seth Godin who tells us today that Carnegie realised the value of people over infrastructure, capital, process, culture etc. something that in our experience has been lacking in every place we've worked, big or small. And we guess, unless your name's Rockefeller you're not in much of a position to question that!

How to do Cover Versions Properly

..in our view is to add something more. Slavishly following the original as seems to be the norm nowadays doesn't really add anything new. We have many favourites, some of the Byrds' Dylan covers spring to mind, Cream's 'I'm So Glad' (originally by one of the delta blues greats Skip James)  or the Sex Pistols' genuinely novel and rather good treatment of the Who's 'Substitute'. But the the latter almost win the award for sheer added value, with the admittedly already great song 'Young Man Blues' by one Mose Allison, who was about 40 when he wrote it, as Pete Townshend slightly sneeringly (and now very ironically) mentioned on the remastered Live at Leeds album. This is from that era, at the Isle of Wight festival. The real winner in our view isn't really a cover; just take a middle of the road French hit from the mid 80s, change the lyrics (and the language) and add in a cool sound (and Sarah Cracknell) and you're away...

TV Idents of Yore

It's Friday and the Puumaja Crew is going to be a bit self-indulgent, because we can do that, and rewind back to our childhood and the various TV idents that could be seen on British tv. Type 'TV idents' into youtube and you invariably get a slew of British TV clips, not American or any other country. Not sure what this tells you about us

Like a lot of people I grew up with the slightly snobby assumption that ITV, the commercial channel, was somehow lower rent than the non-commercial BBC, even though it was responsible for some real quality programming if memory doesn't fail to serve. But it was the various idents which were the real hook for me. Since the channel carried programs made by various companies, generally delineated on regional lines, that company's ident often preceded the program Although there was a bias towards programs made in the region which you lived in, in my case the midlands, as there was a lot of networking, you tended to see all the various idents no matter what part of the country you were living in.


Thames TV - the grandfather of them all with the rather grand and strangely reassuring theme and mirror image set up. It wasn't for years that I came to realise how geographically inaccurate it was and thought that the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul's Cathedral and Towere Bridge were indeed next to each other like that. Also remember that there was a special one before the Morecambe and Wise show after the latter had defected from the BBC, in which the ditty 'here they are now, Morecambe and Wise' was sung to the same theme, rather shitly.

LWT - London Weekend Television, as I remember took over from Thames around a Friday evening until the following Sunday evening. Well, that would make sense anyway. But I can't be sure since I didn't grow up in or near London. For some reason I'm getting glitzy game shows which appealed to me at the time, Bruce's Play Your Cards Right sticks in the mind. Awful signature tune which was later lampooned by Victor Lewis-Smith in one of his inspirational hoax calls (to LWT as it happened).

ATV - I think this was the company that covered my area; I say think, the graphics used to disorient me so much I'm not sure now, the RGB circles merging into this horrible yellow and blue thing which as a very small child in the late 70s I somehow got confused with the 'Jet' petrol station sign. Was replaced by...

Central - definitely my home area's station, I'm ashamed to say. Not a lot you can say about it, I'd managed to more or less excise it from memory until I purchased 'the Last Place on Earth' with Martin Shaw, on DVD; whether for copyright reasons or not, the ident had been left on before the theme tune.

Anglia - notable for three things. The silver knight looked vaguely like a botched airfix model of the Black Prince that I had; I only ever remember it preceding 'Sale of the Century' with Nicholas Parsons (which I now notice from the Youtube comments that other people had this association too) and, notwithstanding this, something tells me that in a nutshell, the ident said 'the next programme's going to be shit'.

HTV - as a child, had no idea where in the country this was from; I now know it stands for Harlech TV (they get a station all to themselves?!?) so evidently it was Welsh, but the shiver that the wobbly theme sends down my spine is largely due to the fact that it was the ident which was followed by Robin of Sherwood..

Granada - just weird, the music, the strange logo reminiscent of the 'male' sign, and in any case where the hell is Granada, I thought it was in Spain?

and finally, no compilation of TV idents would be complete, or at least not for me, without the catatonically safe and reassuring Border TV ident, which may well have been nationally relatively unknown; I only ever saw it when staying with my Grandparents in Dumfries and Galloway during school holidays, and it always seemed to precede stories about minor criminal incidents or country fairs in the regional metropolis, Carlisle.

There were others - I haven't included Yorkshire TV largely due to the intensely irksome and boastful nature of it's folk, coupled with the fact that I couldn't find an old clip, Tyne Tees because it looked too much like Yorkshire's, Southern, since they eveidently didn't make anything worth networking as I don't remember it, or Grampain 'cos the only thing I associate with that is 'Take the High Road' and the suffering is now too great..

Sprezzatura

The Puumaja Crew would love to be able to exhibit sprezzatura, a for us hitherto unknown Italian word which originated in rennaisance author Baldassare Castiglione's "Book of the Courtier", presumably as a trait seen as virtuous and worth having.

Put simply, or put in some way or other, it is "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it". So the embattled rail traveller in the UK tutting and sighing over delays, the beer drinker who announces that they're on their nth pint of the evenint,or the  ESL teacher who flusters into a lesson or comes out f-ing and b-linding or the blogger frantically tapping away, deleting, tapping away again then posting out of frustration. Then taking the post down...all these people DON'T have sprezzatura, if we understand the definition correctly.

Of course, this shouldn't be confused with laziness in our opinion; remember the swan, serene on the surface whilst the legs are going 19 to the dozen. But it seems a quality difficult to cultivate, even in Estonia. But a worthwhile one nonetheless.

How Long Does It Take To Get It?

The 'Crew has observed that it takes some of us longer to 'get' the rules of a game than others. We've noticed this in ESL teaching. Some people understand almost immediately off the bat when a follow up activity has been exemplified or explained, whislt the enjoyment of their slower contemporaries isn't in any way jeopardized, the more awake ones can and generally do explain things for the not-so-sharp in their own tongue, and this often has little bearing on enjoyment or the outcome or the 'winner' of the activity, the latter group often coming from behind; remember the hard and the tortoise.

We've noticed that it could be this way with life too. Some of us get it straight away and for others the conundrum can take a while to unravel, but this doesn't make one group winners and the others losers. Not at all.

So it could be a good thing if it's taking you a while to get it.

Do the Thing and You Will Have the Power

..so said Ralph Waldo Emerson, and now my big brother Seth Godin has reiterated it in his own admirable style. Very few of us (in fact none of us) 'feel' like getting up on a regular morning or doing the things we're supposed to, and yet we still scrape through somehow. That's just because, once you start to do something, no matter how much of a running jump was required, you find yourself warming up to it. Procrastinate too much and you'll end up feeling much more uncomfortable than you do when you start the job. So in essence the way to find the energy to do something is to do it; waiting until you've found the energy to do it is a bit like saying "I'd put some wood on that fire if I could get any heat out of it", or "if I won that marathon I'd start training for it". Maximum respect all round.