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.

One of Our Boys Is Missing - Chapter 3, The Civvy in the Bivvy: Part 1

Charlie 'Terminal' Moraine is a former special forces soldier who served in the legendary (especially since it's now defunct, along with most of the legendary British Army regiments) 53 Assault Reconnaisance Squadron in some of the world's hot spots (well they were hotspots if you were a special forces operative anyway) including Northern Ireland, Oman, Columbia at the height of the drugs war, and Chelmsley Wood in the West Midlands. The Puumaja Crew is proud to present, in serial form, his new book, 'One Of Our Boys Is Missing', covering his life story and over 20 years in the front line of one of the deadliest units since the Ottoman Janissaries.
Chapter three and Charlie passes out from the Calthrops, only to have tragedy strike for the first in a number of times sufficient enough to warrant publishing his memoirs


Our final day at Thrushingfold, and thus the day we'd step out into the big bad world of the British military, finally came. It was a shame to leave the place, I'd grown quite attached to it. It had certainly been an experience, I felt I'd aged about a year in about nine months. I was earmarked for 3 Battalion, who were also usually resident in the same barracks we'd trained in, but at the time were in Gibraltar. The great news was the Kev and Phil the eyebrows were coming with me! Gareth was going to 1 Battalion, who were tasked with the heavy duty anti-tank weapon of the day, the Carl Gustav 84mm, and were up in Catterick in Yorkshire.

Seating was set up in the parade ground for our passing out, it was going to be a real big show. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a small lump in my throat as I heard the crippled palomino played absolutely note perfect by our fantastic regimental band, as I stepped up to receive my beret. Actually I'd had this lump for some days now, it was very sore and I was very worried; turned out it was my tonsils and I had to go and get them taken out by an army doctor a few days later. My parents and sisters had come to watch, though there was no Natalie, which I was disappointed about. 

Colonel Cam, the boss of the whole regiment, came briskly down the serried ranks stopping every so often for the requisite questioning of the new soldier “Bloody well done...I remember when I passed out...where are you going next?...are your family here?”. I'd attempted to get round this by strategically placing myself next to Jake, the one and only black dude to pass out in our troop, he was bound to stop and talk to him thus missing me out, but in a novel twist he actually got both of us, unexpectedly turning to me after giving Jake the once over.... “..and where are you going next?” he almost unthinkingly asked me, so I gave an almost unthinking answer “well, straight after this sir, I'm going to head for the bar for a bit. Then if I'm still able to, I'm gonna go back to my room and get my stuff. After that I'm meeting up with..”..the game show host frozen smile and glazed expression morphed into something a whole lot more pissed off as it slowly dawned on the Colonel that I was actually giving him a real reply to his answer “alright don't get clever with me sunshine” was the rebuke I earned and I was disappointed. He could have ruined my career right from the get go if he'd wanted. Still, some people have no sense of humour.

The folks came for a brief chat at the post-parade reception in the bar, Ted was on leave from his unit and was in fine form, bantering with the guys about how our unit were just souped-up traffic police, and they responded in kind, noting that the signals were nothing more than glorified switchboard operators. The time came for them to go, and I waved goodbye to them at the barracks gates. My father gave me a final wink through the opened window and, still turning back and waving, shot away rather quickly, only to slam into a car in front of him. It was quite an impressive car, a Merc, in fact it was the adjutant’s.

‘Where the bloody hell did you learn to drive? In France?’ the adjutant bellowed as his imposing frame emerged from the car door. I just heard my father mumbling some platitudes before turning tail and sprinting away from the scene.

I decided to go into town to find Natalie, and discover why she hadn’t turned up to the parade. I still remember to this day that it had clouded over, and was starting to spit rain here and there. I’d changed into casuals and I was wearing a new bomber jacket I’d just invested in. I was eager to see her before we left. She was going to come up to Aldershot where we were to be held for a couple of weeks before going to Gibraltar, we'd even talked of marriage.

 
Then I saw it...a local newspaper hoarding, the words seemed to scream at me 'Decapitation of Tragic Natalie: Pictures'. I knew it was going to be her even before I read the article; it turned out she'd been sucked into one of those giant hairdrying machines they used to have in hairdressers, whilst she was getting ready to come to the parade. Apparently her last word was 'Char...'. I just ran and ran in the pouring rain, not knowing where to go, until my feet literally dropped off.

The previous installment can be viewed here.

International Treat Yourself Day Today!

The Puumaja was thinking of revising its opinion of abolishing Friday as posted a few days ago, and changing it to Monday, though we decided that might be a bit predictable.

Instead, we are happy to announce, as a special thankyou to both of our readers, that today, 1 March, is " international treat yourself day"!!! So go ahead, treat yourself. You wanna beer or two after work? so waddacome-adda-go, treat yourself (we won't be doing this alas, on the wagon for the lenten period). You want that new i phone? It's yours (pending certain contractual stipulations). Fancy some chocolate cake? We support you nine tenths of the way (kept back a tenth as a disclaimer for complaints about weight gain or compulsive chocolate cake eating).

After all, you're l'oreal!

Thought For the Day Number 8 - With the Rabbi Anders Weiss

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

 Two teutonic aphorisms for today, the first one  just a paraphrasing really:

"Life is like going to the dentists. You think the worst is still to come and yet it's over already".   Bismarck

"Was mich nicht übringt macht mich stärker".  Nietzsche