Coffee With Kaz: Slavic Surnames, Minimalism & & Growing Up Behind The Curve (Bonus Brew 1)

Yeah, and they don't know who those people are.

Yeah.

That's what I always think like, when I post things on Instagram, like I want to have a lot so then when people can actually go through it and see like the portfolio.

I'm just going to put the-

It's when you start speaking, the way that I listen to your podcast, and now I'm here and it's just so weird.

I'm not even going to look at the list of TV related questions because-

I will go over there.

You know what I'm going to do?

Because my printer is jammed.

It's not working at the moment.

Yeah, movies.

No, no movies.

Oh, no.

Here it is.

There we go.

Why did I think that's like you just make it on the computer, like that's not something you do in here?

It's all real.

Of course it's real.

Normally, I have notes about the guest, notes about you, all that stuff, but we're just friends, so it's kind of a weird one.

Who is this?

Who the fuck is Karen?

So we'll start, but we won't say we're starting because we're just chatting.

It makes me feel less nervous.

Yeah.

But the one thing I don't know, like actually don't know, is how to say your surname.

So you have to tell me that.

I've never said it out loud, so I don't want to get it wrong on first go.

That's fair enough.

Yeah.

It does get butchered a lot, but I kind of just like, I don't care at this point, because my full surname is Brana Koba, but because the Ova in Eastern Europe means that it's linked to the husband or the father.

Yeah, it's like Ova, I explained it to people here that it's like an apostrophe and an S, so it would be Vranukes, because my dad only has the short version of it, which I go by now because I kind of want to reject that.

I've recently noticed a lot of Polish people have been doing it if they have Ova or like Ukraine or Russia.

It's a very kind of a Russian name, like Amikova, you know, that's kind of the name.

And the Ova just like, it means nothing, like, because the root of like, like the main part of the name, so Vranukes, is what my dad has, but then my mom has Vranikova, like the Ova is just the added thing for women.

And what do the boys get?

They have nothing, it's just like the main part.

Well, that's weird, because like, you know, it's just for women and I kind of don't like it, not because I don't identify as a woman, I just think it's a bit weird because if the boys don't get one, why are you getting one?

That's weird.

That's like, because at least the patriotic system in Scandinavia, like say Iceland is a good example.

The, you know, the daughter gets Dottir, added onto their name.

Like if I was there, my surname is Gunn, right?

So my daughter's name would be Gunn Dottir to be her name, Gunn Dottir.

Does the son get something as well?

Gunnson, they get the son.

And that's okay, because everyone gets a little bit.

It's strange to us who don't have that system that they have that, they literally have different surnames.

But if only the girl's getting it, then you know where that's from.

Well, yeah, it's a little bit like boys get a bat mitzvah in Judaism, but the girls don't really and they do have bat mitzvahs now, but they're frowned upon because they're not real.

None of it's real.

We made everything up and we're all taking it so seriously.

That's why I laugh at the world.

I'm like, come on guys, like we made everything up.

Like, it's not real.

I'm not serious.

Just someone at work.

Someone in a uniform.

Like, someone just put on a blue uniform and is like, yeah, I'm gonna go into the streets and help people.

It's like the Wild West ones.

They stick a sheriff's badge on and then they are the sheriff.

Yeah.

That's it.

You can literally get that at a costume shop and quickly be like, yeah, I'm a sheriff.

It doesn't make sense.

No, I agree completely on that.

Back home in Slovakia, some people, I swear to God, the police needs more psycho tests, because some people are out there being crazy and just being so...

Like the thing you were saying in America, they make you do all these things that don't make sense.

And I just think that's just the way that they want to show the power, because people love power.

It links to the control.

I also think I like to have things under control, just because I think that's just a natural thing inside you.

I always think, I wish I could just throw everything I own out and start from scratch zero.

Oh, I wish I did.

And then I was telling my partner, you know what?

I realize why I want to do that every month, but I never do it, because for that one second, when you throw everything out, you gain control and you start from zero.

So you can monitor what you buy, what you purchase, you know?

And I'm like, everyone wants a bit of control because that makes you feel a bit more like you have control, but in a good way that it's comforting, that you know what's happening.

Because realistically, now I have so many things, I'm like, I don't even know what I own.

Yeah, well, I think that's interesting to me because when I moved to London, back to London when I was 17, 18, I guess I knew it.

I was sort of doing it already because I do believe I'm a minimalist.

Personally, I'm a minimalist.

If I was on my own, I barely have any belongings, never really did.

I mean, as a family now, we have so much stuff.

It kind of blows my mind, although when I look at other people's stuff, we have nothing.

And having two guitars seems massively excessive to me.

But one's electric, one's acoustic, but yeah.

But there's two guitars.

Do I really need two guitars?

I could probably plug the acoustic in and make it into an electric.

No one knows.

But things like that.

When I first moved to London, back to London, I had a bag, one big bag, and I made the decision then that everything that I took with me to London would have to fit in that bag.

If it didn't fit in the bag, it didn't come.

I don't know where that came from.

Because of my child, maybe I was actually a certain control, but I remember having to get rid of my record collection and selling my tapes and selling a lot of things and burn.

And then this is the weird part.

When I came to London with that bag, I then decided that I wanted to burn the belongings in that bag.

So one morning, I got up at six, seven in the morning, this is in Bethnal Green in London, and I took out one Brian Adams cassette because I liked that, and I had journals in there for my childhood and stuff like that, and I set it all on fire.

How did that make you feel?

It was like a therapy session.

Sometimes this goes, this is a podcast about television, we will get there, but it has to start with something else.

Yeah, I don't know, I've never really told anyone that I set fire to it before.

I think I was going through a weird period of cleansing.

I guess I just wanted to get away from my past, and I was asserting proper control at last, but it was like starting with nothing.

I had nothing.

I had a Walkman, I had a cassette, and I had some clothes, and that was it.

I feel like that's all you really need.

Yeah.

I know an artist in Newcastle that does the same thing.

She would write a journal and a diary for a year, and then at the end of the year, she quickly goes through it, and then just to see where she was at in that stage of her life, and then she burns it, and I just think that's great.

That's fantastic.

There's something like that in Japanese culture, isn't there?

Or in some Asian cultures where if you write something down, you burn it, and I've done that before.

I remember a New Year's Eve in Tokyo, writing some stuff down, which I don't believe in New Year as an arbitrary date to start doing things, but we all adhere to these numbers, right?

Even though it's the year 2023, it really fucking isn't.

But the point is we do this, and we take our little bits of paper, and I wrote down like, do more exercise, don't be such a prick, or whatever it was that I wrote down.

The classic resolutions that you forget in February.

And I set fire to them, and they go up in the sky, and I used to really think I was burning that part of me out of me, and that I would be different.

And then I wake up the next day, and I get tempted by a cross on it or something.

So it all goes out the window.

I feel like the fire aspect as like, we're just all cavemen inside, like deep down I think our brains are wired like fire.

Yeah, ooh, this is exciting.

You burn a piece of paper in front of a kid, they're like, eyes light up, fireworks.

I mean, essentially.

Yeah, fireworks as well.

It's just like, it all goes back to like the instincts that we have.

And I'm just like, but it is a good way to like start something because then you remember that.

I think that's the thing you remember that you burn it and then there's something in your brain that makes you think about it.

Burning into your memory.

Is that what we're doing?

Is that literally what the meaning is?

Or have we just done that?

I wonder if that sounds like it's from branding or something.

I don't mean branding like Coca-Cola.

More of the sort of, you know, guy who Nixxiom kind of branding.

Awful.

That's not funny.

Good TV show.

Have you seen that?

Have you seen Nixxiom?

The, whatever it's called, the...

Oh, fuck, what's it called?

I don't know.

So him, Keith Ranieri, he's the cult leader of Nixxiom and they did two seasons of like...

He's a cult leader.

Yeah, he's a cult leader.

No, not that way.

No, no, no.

It's fun to listen to those stories.

And they always come, like this guy is just some little fucker who basically had like a mini Jeff Bezos.

He had a kind of early 90s, like what are they called?

Like where you phone up and you order something and it comes to your house.

It's like early internet, but over the phone.

Like phone, not even TV shopping, phone shopping.

I don't even know what that is, but it was a thing apparently.

Home shopping, but via the phone.

That's really sketchy.

Like when you look at it now, I'm like, wow, I just call up some dude to deliver something to my door.

How weird is that?

Like where did he get the things from?

It's so sketchy when you think about it now.

They probably physically went to like cash and carries and got them and put them in a warehouse and then send them out in boxes.

Whereas now you can just get, you can just tell Bezos, I want cheap balloons from China.

Cheap balloons from China, get on a plane and fly all the way here and go through my letter box.

Yeah, only for us to be like, yeah.

It's weird.

Well, drones are coming, aren't they?

The old drones delivery.

That'd be fun.

It's good for the world.

I don't think I like that.

No, who likes that?

Who wants to look up and see a load of plastic tap flying around the sky getting delivered to morons?

Seriously.

Oh, I need some packing tape.

What I'll do is I'll get the drone to deliver it.

I mean, you don't have to be a premium for that.

You have to be prime, prime for that.

Yeah, when that happens, I just want to live somewhere like in the woods, just like in my little cottage and just not pay attention to that.

Because those are the things that you can't, you don't have to agree with them.

And a lot of people will probably not agree with it or dislike it.

But there's nothing, you can't escape it.

You know, it's like you're born into this.

So it's like, you got to just get used to it.

That's kind of what we were talking about before, before this podcast, me and Karen were talking.

It's that thing of the current generation doesn't have any say in the world they live in because it's been made for them and they have to adapt to it.

And I think the backlash has obviously started, as has been mentioned on this podcast before, but it's kind of, I'm interested to see where it goes.

I mean, it's interesting to me.

I've already heard things like people's kids saying to the parents, maybe you should read a book more rather than watching that thing.

So there are like, you know, there's going to be...

Because as we've said, we were talking like old people and their devices is quite the problem.

I mean, they are the new children, essentially.

But if you were, you're 70 years old, right?

You're not 70 years old.

Imagine you're 70 years old and you've lived your life, right?

So you're a kid in what, the 50s, right?

The 50s.

Can you imagine the 50s?

The 50s was just like...

See, I can imagine the 50s because like you said earlier, actually before, Slovakia was slightly behind the rest of Europe.

So you had a slightly different experience of the early 2000s that maybe other people would have in say here or America or wherever.

I feel like that because Ireland in the 70s and 80s was so backwards.

And I say that happily, it was very backwards.

And if you were there, you fucking know it was, right?

Just to let you know, I'm about to do an Irish accent.

The half Irishness of me, I think allows it.

I think it's still okay.

I didn't really think about it when I did it, but I'm not going to cut it out.

I left London, the land of like tube trains and modernity, right?

And I went to like a backwater where kids didn't have shoes and have their willies sticking out their jeans because the zip wasn't working on their Y2K, whatever we talk about.

And they were playing jacks with stones.

Like they get stones and they throw the big stone.

And how many stones?

How many stones, Stephen?

Could you get time to say?

And I'm like, they're playing with fucking stones.

These kids had no toys.

They shared beds like something out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

It was unbelievable, right?

And then, yeah, where am I going with this?

And the point is, so what I'm saying is, if you grew up in that, which would be like 50s England as well, right?

And then you get old, and then you've got an iPad.

Imagine that.

That's like going back in time, and if there was a Jesus, while he's on horseback, giving him an iPad and going, check this out, motherfucker, Netflix and whatnot.

He'd be like, oh, fuck this religion thing.

I'm going to go and watch My Heist or whatever.

So like, it must be brilliant to have lived that life and then get that reward at the end.

And now they're addicted to these insane screens.

But like, so anyway, I'm going on tangent there, but you were saying earlier about Slovakia being slightly behind.

So tell us more about that and what your technology was growing up, television.

Did you have a TV?

Did you have a video?

We did, yeah.

Do you have DVDs?

What was it?

Oh, yeah.

I am still part of that generation that I think I collected DVDs, but slowly as I got older, still wanted to collect them because it was very nostalgic as well.

My dad was starting to, my parents are just trying to always be like, oh, why don't you just download it on Spotify?

Or like, you can watch this illegally online.

Well, I shouldn't say that.

I shouldn't say that.

We should.

No one's ever done it in this house.

We don't even know what torn is.

So they're all just trying to like, maybe now I'm looking back at it, maybe there wasn't enough space in our house.

They're like, why the fuck are you still buying DVDs?

But like, yeah, I just still do that.

And also like, we all had a lot of, because it was like Czechoslovakia, so we had a lot of Czech movies.

I can't remember when the separation happened, but is there a very big difference in culture between Slovakia and Czechia, as it's now called?

I don't think there's, oh, this is if someone from the Czech Republic listens, they're probably going to be like, yes, there is.

But I feel like when you zoom out and you look at them both, they're very similar.

And I think there's a lot of similarities in countries that are Slavic countries in Eastern Europe.

Obviously, they have their own culture and stuff, but especially for the Czech Republic and Slovakia, all of the Christmas movies have been produced probably when it was Czechoslovakia.

And some of them are still not even translated to Slovak, because a lot of Slovaks understand the Czech language, so why would they be translated?

It's pointless.

It's like whenever I meet someone that's from the Czech Republic, here, I just speak in Slovak because we can understand that.

That's like 90% of the language is the same.

So I can just speak in Slovak, they speak in Czech.

And I always say this, we understand Czech better than they understand Slovak because of the influence, because the movies were all Czech, so it all went that way.

But our little Slovakia never really produced anything big to go that way.

And if it did, it was not in the amount that the Czech things were coming in.

So, or like for example, I know there's one, I believe it's German, and it's a Christmas movie that we, it is on every year, every year, every year, no doubt, you will watch this.

It's like the three, like this, I actually think it's very, like it's a Cinderella story, but it has a winter twist.

So it's about this, these three sisters, one of them is the one that cleans, is the one that's very pretty, but obviously she wears like a disguise and she's like visibly like the odd one out, and then it's the ugly sisters, and then she pretends to dress as a hunter and she goes into the woods, and then she finds these like three like nuts there, and then she also, she's just like the main like person that does the chores.

Is it called Three Wishes for Cinderella?

Yes, it is.

And I think is a German.

Life changes dramatically for a Czech housemaid when the family coachman gives her three magical hazelnuts.

That's why I drink hazelnut milk now.

That's magical, magical stuff.

Yeah, I think my parents said it was German and they never really, because you can see that their mouths like speak differently to the dubbing.

That's definitely, that is not German names.

Wait, let's see.

All cast and crew.

Wait, I need to...

This will be heavily edited.

Oh yeah.

Sorry.

I really want to know now, because languages, this is the thing, languages, Czech and German, because I think it was...

Definitely Czech names in there, right?

Yeah, the Czech actors.

Oh, did you watch it dubbed and then re-subtitled maybe, because they do a lot of that, don't they?

Yeah, because it says Czech and then German, but where was this film?

Because it might have been one of those things that...

Because I remember my parents saying something like, notice how their mouth is moving.

Like it's Czech actors, but they had to like do it in German or something.

And then it's maybe they did another version.

I just remember there's something in there in that core memory.

And even like, I know if I had kids in Slovakia, they would go and watch that movie.

It's just, oh, it always plays.

It always plays every time and it's very comforting, but it's just like another Cinderella story.

It's nothing special.

The only thing that is a twist that she dresses like a hunter and then the prince sees her hunting in the woods and he's like impressed.

And then obviously we see the face, but suddenly we don't recognize that it's her, which is crazy.

That's what movies and like TV does.

Like you have different hair and everyone's like, who is that?

I'm like, what do you mean who is that?

You know who that is.

The face is the same.

It's as if I shaved my head and people are like, they don't recognize me.

And TV, it's just so obvious, but it's like everyone's playing along with like, oh, we don't know who this is.

Because now I look at it and she just had like a hat and really short hair, like because it was tucked in.

And then she has long hair.

She's not like people don't recognize her at all.

And that's the same thing with me.

I think that's why I was paranoid when I cut my hair really short.

No one's going to know who I am.

And I'm like, why did I think that?

Because in TV, no one's recognized you change your hair color.

It's a superman thing, isn't it?

You put your pair of glasses on.

Yeah, literally, like a woman will take her glass off in TV and they're like, wow, she's so beautiful now.

I have that fucking trope from the 90s.

It's clearly a very good looking woman.

Yeah.

But they're playing her up.

They're really playing.

Give her some books.

She's walking around a school.

She's got glasses on and really frumpy jacket.

We hate when they're educated.

We hate when women are educated with their books.

And then she drops the books and she goes to like, you know, the fucking sorority party or whatever, some me and girl shit.

And she rocks up and she does this with her hair.

And suddenly she's standing up.

Who's that?

Oh, my God, it's Britney or whatever.

Yeah.

And I'm just like, what the fuck?

Have you not realized that was her just with books and glasses?

It was a Zooey Deschanel the whole time.