FOLLOW me on my popular Twitter feed. Just click this photo! @hbbtruth - David - Common sense on #Politics #PublicPolicy #Sports #PopCulture in USA, Great Britain, Sweden and France, via my life in #Texas #Memphis #Miami #IU #Chicago #DC #FL 🛫🌍📺📽️🏈. Photo is of Elvis and Joan Blackman in 'Blue Hawaii'
Beautiful Stockholm at night, looking west towards Gamla Stan
40 years today since ABBA swept Eurovision Song Contest with their song Waterloo, becoming first Swedes to win: http://t.co/aLNQJtziq3
— Sweden.se (@swedense) April 6, 2014
TheSpringOf74 YouTube Channel video: ABBA - Dancing Queen - LIVE at the Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm, June 18, 1976, at the gala tribute to Sweden's King Carl XV1 Gustaf and future wife and Queen, Silvia Sommerlath, the night before their wedding.
This was the first time the song had ever been performed in public in Sweden.
Above, my screenshot of Expressen reporter/camera operator Nike Jacobson keeping her cool andremaining steadfast while being buffeted by the high winds of Stormen Simone, as the following video shows:
Vi sänder live och ger er senaste nytt om stormen Judas. Vårt team rapporterar direkt från västkusten. http://t.co/9JkQE7S6rG — Aftonbladet TV (@AftonbladetTV) October 28, 2013
More screenshots of mine from this afternoon my time, evening in Sweden.
Make sure you watch this on a full screen for maximum effect.
En somrig hit? (A summer hit?)
Yes!
It will probably come as no surprise to those among you reading this blog who have an interest in this subject that I've been reading and hearing a lot about the new Timoteij single being released for awhile now.
But the first time I actually heard "Het" for myself -sans video and the rap opening that both jolts you and catches your attention- came last weekend, a few days after it was featured on May 12th P4 homepage for Sveriges Radio'sDaniel Kjellander and Jenny Lindeborg, who host a four-hour morning show.
Obviously, I don't listen to SR all the time, probably more like a couple of times a month out of curiosity, and the truth here is that I simply got a tip from someone I trust and followed it up -and took a listen myself. You may well remember that I previously mentioned here that I'd been having some computer problems and all last week, esp. with my speakers?
In any case, it's just as well that I didn't post about that SR link, because I didn't have access last weekend to thistres charmantvideo and THAT's what really makes this particular song POP and sets it apart!
And didn't Johanna (Pettersson) tell us only on Wednesday, on their blog, how truly sick -"cruel"- it would be when we all saw it for ourselves?
Yes, she did, saying "Den är grym! Såå bra! Hurra!?"
First off, there's a whole lot more going-on in this sweet and catchy -and ingenious- video than seems readily apparent at first viewing -a whole lot more, which is why you have to watch it a number of times on full screen to catch some of the clever touches.
To me at least, parts of both the song and the video have an almost Nashville-centered feel to it, like certain very popular female Country Western acts you and I can both think of.
Giving a video a real sense of place and reality is very, very smart, actually.
I dare you not to be hooked by the second time you play it, and actually know what to expect with the whole switch in tone at the beginning from the typical rap 'intro' and the appearance of the long white stretch limousine
and paparazzi at the ready, to the looks of, first, dismay
"That's NOT schlager, that's hip-hop!"
and then quickly, delight on the faces of the little girls and boys wearing those popular pink and blue Timoteijskull caps when the band cruise in,
"Here they come!"
emerging from their sweet cherry red Skoda -embossed with their name in script on the hood and a silhouette of them on the sides.
(Johanna didn't have her license yet when they got the sponsorship deal.)
And in case you were wondering, yes, those pink and blue Timoteij-embossed skull caps ARE ridiculously popular, as even a cursory look at many of the photos or video of their touring the past year has made abundantly clear, where you see them everywhere, and NOT just on kids.
I almost bought one of them last year for my youngest niece, aged ten, up in Maryland, and while not naming names, I have some friends in Sweden who bought a lot of them for stocking stuffers and such, even giving some blue ones to their more hard-edged heavy metal male friends and work colleagues as a joke. (But they had to wear them out in public, of course.)
The slower, quieter part of the song that kicks in at 2:30 or so, starting with a shot of Elina (Thorsell), is a great change of pace and really brings the attention back to the quartet's sweet harmonies that these four do so consistently, seemingly, effortlessly.
Here's a video they recorded of their behind-the-scenes preparation for the "Het" music video, and yes, that is Taylor Swift playing in the background; they love Taylor Swift!
This is the quartet's first video on their "official" YouTube Channel. More on that in a minute.
Speaking of summer, or as one person I know who has spent many, many winters in Sweden puts it, the first time you have seven days in a row when it's NOT freezing, here's a short vid from Expressen TVlast August, showing how willing the girls are to indulge the media to get some attention for their self-evident talent -singing while swimming in a pool.
One of the other things I've sort of been waiting to mention here on the blog for a bit, thinking the new single was the time to mention it, was that there is -FINALLY- an official YouTube Channel for Timoteij, even though their fans have been pretty good the past year at uploading videos they shoot of them on tour around the country or even their TV appearances -perNyhetsmorgon, Lotta på Liseberg, Sommarkrysset and Allsång på Skansen.
As it turns out, your faithful blogger and friend Dave was their second subscriber.
For what it's worth, I have actually mentioned to them via an email that I thought that their very amusing videos on their official -not fake- Facebookpage, located at
http://www.facebook.com/timoteij.officialwere full of personality and often hysterical, especially the ones where they were traveling and Elina was acting as cinematographer from the back seat -82 videos as of a few days ago athttp://www.facebook.com/video/?id=286938310265&s=0- and really needed to be shared with more people via an official YouTube Channel they controlled.
Whether or not they will start putting those sort of funny videos up at this new channel, I can't say for sure, but this first one is certainly a good sign and when I hear something, I will share the news with you here.
Seriously, could reporter Tomas Kvarnkullen be more low-key?He's no Edward R. Murrow, that's for sure!But then who is?
This is London: Edward R. Murrow of CBS News in London during WWII, painting a picture of the city's residents walking about at night in the dark. http://youtu.be/2OqRTo3d-FU
----- Sophie, hate to say I told you so but I told you the other day that the weather was going to get crummy! And now a storm is coming and it looks like they're going to have gale force winds in Skåne. Looks like a good time to see a new film.
Råttan mitt bland NK:s mjukisdjur http://www.aftonbladet.se/webbtv/nyheter/inrikes/article8291800.ab NK is Nordiska Kompaniet, the larger-than-life Swedish department store company with hugely popular locations in downtown Stockholm andGöteborg, that is, in ways that are hard to fathom for many Western consumers under the age of forty who never knew that era, both a mythical and magical name in the world of consumer retailing, and an aspirational lifestyle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordiska_Kompaniet In Swedish: http://www.nk.se/ In English: http://www.nk.se/en/nk-stockholm/
NK Vintersaga - 2010.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4r7gvi96kU Much more than almost any other current department store I can think of, NK is like the old-fashioned dept. stores that, in the United States, used to populate large northern cities, as well as Atlanta, large cities in California and a handful of other larger cities, where the promotional activities within the store as well as the print/TV/radio advertising campaigns were a staple of both everyday amusement and general conversation among the local citizenry.
Personal evaluations were made not only on the quality and service of the stores, but also of their ad campaigns, not unlike frank discussions of sports teams or favorite players, whether in a hot-streak or in a slump, and if the latter, what would be needed to change the dynamic? http://www.flickr.com/photos/christianmontone/4338039892/
My sense of things from reading about that era and talking to people very involved in top-tier advertising agencies from the 1950's thru the late '80's, is that people then had a much stronger sense of loyalty to some dept. stores and an equally strong animus or aversion towards patronizing others, often built over personal slights years before, or in some cases, longstanding racial prejudice not easily forgotten.
Now, it's largely about the cost of an item and where you can it cheapest, NOT the retail experience, and I'm as guilty as anyone else, even though I wish it weren't so.
Until the mid-1960's, when the upwardly mobile suburbs and their growing affluence beckoned them, especially in the growing Sunbelt states -until the notion of a large downtown department store without a large nearby parking garage seemed patently absurd on its face- they often played a larger role in a city's commerce and business image than you might think because of the variety of professionals who worked there and who were available to pitch-in and lend their expertise to community groups like the Junior League, United Way, et al. These professionals were the key to the dept. stores protecting and preserving their upscale image.
For most of the 1970's, I lived four blocks south of the 163rd Street Shopping Center in North Miami Beach, when it was an open-air mall, long before it had a fabric roof erected over it as part of a massive renovation in 1979.
Everyday for years, I walked thru it twice a day on my way to and from JFK Jr, High and NMBHS, soI knew every single inch of it, as did my friends, especially theBurdine's, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burdineswhere I worked part-time while in high school and while back fromIUin the summer a few years later.
See this amazing JFK speech -delivered at 163rd Street!- on, of all things, Castro's Cuba http://www.jfklibrary.org/Historical+Resources/Archives/Reference+Desk/Speeches/JFK/JFK+Pre-Pres/1960/002PREPRES12SPEECHES_60OCT18a.htm
http://www.labelscar.com/
Katie Couric, circa 1984, reporting from the former 163rd Street Shopping Center in North Miami Beach on the subject of shopping mall crime. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbpHgMvM918
The sorts of dept. stores that I'm thinking of, and which applies to NK's now, are the sort of place that would have been the go-to store for not only visiting tourists, but the local smart-set as well, especially twenty-somethings finally coming into some money and eager to spend a little of it on themselves for an emotional pick me-up, a suit for a man an evening dress for a woman. Or a new electronic device that promised to change your life, like a VCR.
That sort of dept. store, regardless of where it was located, were also where many of our common sense notions of contemporary consumer behavior first came into play, and in the case of women's fashion, were often deliberately reversed just to catch the attention of influential young would-be fashionistas of the time, whose word-of-mouth was golden in that pre-cell phone and Internet era.
Quite sensibly, some upscale dept. stores created a group of female teen 'insiders,' a talkative and opinionated bunch whose minds and imaginations they plumbed and mined for insight into teen tastes and aspirations, as a sort of in-house focus group. For instance, the Burdines Teen Board, which when I was still at NMB, had some of my friends on it. If only those girls had blogs back then, they'd be mini-media moguls!
FYI, circa 2007, the Top 100 Fashion Blogs may've looked like this: http://www.customizedgirl.com/blog/?p=9 A newer perspective on the most popular fashion blogs, especially those in Europe, can be found at the updated list at popular blogging network Bloglovin. http://www.bloglovin.com/
There's some pretty amazing things there by some very creative and perceptive people.
There have been so many movies and TV shows made about the inter-relationships of people working at dept. stores that even if you lived in a small town in the '50's that was bereft of that sort of upscale and sophisticated operation, you knew what it was like by cinema osmosis, so you knew EXACTLY what you were missing out on. Which is part of why you wanted to leave Dodge, pronto!
For me, growing-up in South Florida, far from a traditional hotbed of holiday window displays like what you saw in films or TV, the closest to anything like it that I had any first-hand experience came with the Marshall Field's stores in Chicagoland in the mid-'80's, when I lived in Evanston and Wilmette. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Field%27s
On a slightly smaller scale compared to the huge flagship State Street store in downtown Chicago, the Loop, where my talented fashion-forward friend Madeleine Moulton worked, that included the Marshall Field's in Evanston that was located not far from where I lived.
In 1986, that was where I first bought a favorite red Lacoste sweater before catching an early holiday flight to Miami -a sweater that populated many Christmas photos for years- in order to be down here when my nephew Mario was born a week before Christmas. That was not unlike an earlier red one I bought at the-then L.S. Ayresat the College Mall in Bloomington, that populated many photos of me and various friends at IU and several memorable dates from 1979-'84.
You might want to read my May 26, 2007 post at South Beach Hoosier titled South Florida's epidemic apathy shows itself once again.
It was about the Macy's store -theold Burdines store- in downtown Miami on Flagler Street, and the shabby conditions of downtown Miami, and Macy's purchase of Marshall Field's and its effect on Chicago area consumers. That was a follow-up on something that Transit Miami founder Gabriel Lopez-Bernal had written on the subject on his popular blog. http://southbeachhoosier.blogspot.com/2007/05/while-marshall-fields-loyalists-fight.html http://www.transitmiami.com/
Sorry this reads so blah but my original post here on NK's and the role of department stores vanished when my computer crashed this morning, so I will try to re-post it later if I can.
Meanwhile, back in Sverige... Jenny Modin of Expressen reports on a bird that's on the prowl, and which has it's eye -and beak- firmly on usually mild-mannered Ola Petersson.
Jenny gets Ola to describe how, while hunting, he literally walked into a hornet's nest -of feathers!- when he innocently pulled-out his cell phone to snap a shot of a capercaillie perched up in front of him on a stone, along a snowy forest road.
When the bird got closer to him, Ola quickly switched to film mode.
Fortunately for us, despite Ola's obvious chagrin at what happened to him, he's a very good sport and gives us a play-by-play of his embarrassing fowl run-in, and has shared his video with the world to tell the tale!
Proving Mark Twain's maxim true once again: "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog." It's almost like one of those awful Canadian-made Sci-Fi films that the SyFy Channel is always foisting upon us at 2 a.m. on Saturday mornings, usually featuring lots of snow and bored city teenagers at an isolated cabin. But Ola is a better cinematographer!
Här går tjädern till attack http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZMvCqX7CTU
See also: http://www.expressen.tv/ http://www.youtube.com/ExpressenTV http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/c/capercaillie/index.aspx http://www.expressen.se/
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