Capture: Roamin' Holiday
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Hebe, in reply to
now I want a feed of crayfish
+2
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Hebe, in reply to
Endearingly filthy and rebellious. Some young punk band should adopt it.
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Chris Waugh, in reply to
Those Marines sure knew how to make friends. Maybe I should pass this on to my ex-Marine colleague?
I don't remember my grandad ever saying anything about the USMC, although he did fight on Guadalcanal, but I do remember him not being favourably disposed towards the US Navy after the captain of the American troop ship that brought him home from Italy sailed into the Manukau Harbour, realised his mistake, then sailed back out and up around Northland before getting the ship to the Waitemata where it was supposed to go.
Of sluts being fucked in alley-ways
Funny how that "keep your filthy foreign hands off our women" attitude pops up in so many different cultures.
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Islander, in reply to
Shit o dear!
Live & learn-
the USMarine Corp hymn is sung to the tune of the “Gendarmes Duet”!!!The words I learned to *that* at school included
"but if we meet a helpless woman
or little boys that do no harm
we run them in, we run them in (rep. again)
because we're the bold gendarmes!" -
Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Olly has left the building…
Endearingly filthy and rebellious.
Some young punk band …Speaking of endearing proto punks, some of you may have heard that Oliver Lindsey Scott (Olly) died in Invercargill on Christmas Day, he was 60 years old.
Christchurch denizens will remember him from Mollett Street and The Gresham, as the founder of the Basket Cases (also known as the Detroit Haemorrhoids, and briefly the OK String Band) members of which went on to form Toy Love, The Playthings, The Bats, The Androidss and The Gordons… Olly was also in The Belle Motions and most recently The Chick Magnets.
He also had a band in the UK, called 69, before he came to NZ for a holiday and stayed… and an album Graffenstadden.He created many fine instruments under the guise of SPOGBAM, the Society for the Promotion of Guitar Butchery And Manufacture, including work on Paul Kean’s bass, a clip together triple neck guitar and the heaviest drum set I have ever had to move regularly, made from heavy gauge steel…
His many talents included recycled denim tailoring, and memorable garments included some made entirely from pockets – not a great garment to misplace something in…
He also self financed and published an authoritative biography of Buster Keaton The Little Iron Man – he spent a lot of time interviewing Keaton’s widow, Eleanor, to get the best details.
He ran the occasional hands-on toy museum for kids (most memorably at the now destroyed Linwood community hall) from his once vast horde of trains and toys…
There is much more to be said I’m sure – feel free to add any recollections.
He is survived by his daughter Dommie.
He will be missed…Roy Colbert has posted a great memorial piece in The ODT called Olly of the shed was one out of the box – with which I have only a few very minor quibbles about veracity…
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Chris Waugh, in reply to
That reminds me of one of my French lecturers at Otago showing us a video in class one day, then pausing and saying, "See that uniform? That's the CRS, which means Compagnie Républicaine pour la Sécurité, stay well away from anybody wearing that uniform". I then seem to remember him saying something vague about seeing something happening at the end of the street, going to check it out, and not appreciating the smell of teargas, but I may be conflating two stories here. Dr Dineen certainly had stories to tell. In any case, he certainly sounded like he'd learned the hard way when he told us to steer clear of the CRS.
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Julie Cross, in reply to
Heh. From the balcony of my old place in North Sydney I remember counting nearly 40 of the buggers during the ‘season’.
Saw this the other day on why so many jacarandas in Sydney: "the true ''mothers'' of thousands of jacaranda trees in the shire were Sister Marg Haxton and her successor Sister Beryl Alice Mullins of the maternity ward at Jacaranda Hospital, Woolooware, who gave saplings to every new mother in the late 1940s, '50s and '60s. But the practice was also common on the north shore, with the Royal North Shore, the Mater, Ryde Hospital and two hospitals in Mosman handing out jacarandas to new mothers for the better part of last century"
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Julie Cross, in reply to
For when the boys come home from overseas
And they gaze on homeland scenes,
Then God help those sons-of-bitches,
The United States marines.Thanks for this Geoff. My grandfather was a US Marine. I don't know the full story but this is one version to insert in the family history.
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
Funny how that "keep your filthy foreign hands off our women" attitude pops up in so many different cultures.
". . . Victory girls. All these schoolgirls from fourteen to fifteen would rush home after school and put on short skirts made out of flags - red, white and blue - and go tarting along St Kilda Road with the GIs and, of course, diggers . . ."
Artist Albert Tucker, in On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime: 1939-1945 -
Chris Waugh, in reply to
Ugh, I find the painting in that link really quite abhorrent.
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
Ugh, I find the painting in that link really quite abhorrent.
One person's art and all. Tucker's 1947 pen & ink from Hiroshima is almost the kind of thing that wouldn't frighten the chooks in a corporate corridor, provided they didn't know what it was about.
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
.
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Geoff Lealand, in reply to
Julie: thanks. I would recommend a cautionary note; this 'hymn' was a version of events driven by resentment and prejudice, rather than comradeship. History is seldom pretty when the motivations for events are investigated. I should be proud, for example, that my father was a major ringleader in the mutiny by the Second Echelon soldiers who refused to return to Egypt and Syria from leave in NZ. But it is tempered by a realisation that they mutinied because they wanted those they perceived as 'slackers' or 'shirkers' to go instead.
But it is a history worth telling, I believe. I imagine that your average GI was a more interesting and exotic creature for many NZ women than your average Kiwi bloke, in these times. -
Russell Brown, in reply to
Speaking of endearing proto punks, some of you may have heard that Oliver Lindsey Scott (Olly) died in Invercargill on Christmas Day, he was 60 years old.
Olly! I didn't know him well, or long -- and it was, um, 30 years ago -- but I certainly remember him. A lovely man, who seemed like a bona fide slice of 70s London.
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
I imagine that your average GI was a more interesting and exotic creature for many NZ women than your average Kiwi bloke, in these times.
That's certainly the folklore I recall from my youth. Americans troops were stereotyped as pampered (canned xmas pudding, ffs) and inept - much was made of supposed 'friendly fire' incidents. Their largesse towards local females was legendary, from the 'fine dining' available to guests at their officers' club in Parnell (baked Alaska!) to their apparently endless supply of nylons. Did they issue them with nylons?
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Sofie Bribiesca, in reply to
Ugh, I find the painting in that link really quite abhorrent.
The feeling (and explanation) of that painting was still felt when my dad was based in Christchurch in the fifties. And mum did go down to the wharf (with the older sister who needed her for a "blind date" with a couple of Marines ). Happy I am, that turned out well, for they got married soon after. Plus I , one of their little bundles of joy, arrived to confirm their (Catholic faith) enduring love for each other. Ahh, the luck of the Irish huh? ;)
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Sofie Bribiesca, in reply to
But it is a history worth telling, I believe. I imagine that your average GI was a more interesting and exotic creature for many NZ women than your average Kiwi bloke, in these times.
Aye. Exactly as my parents tell it.
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
The feeling (and explanation) of that painting . . .
Albert Tucker's skull-beneath-the-skin sensibility was shaped by his being assigned by the army to document before-and-after reconstructive surgery of war wounds. At the time of his Images of Modern Evil series he'd been discharged and was plainly not a happy man, though the uncompromisingly gothic element never left his work.
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Hebe,
Back to flowers: the centre of a huge double red poppy
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Joe and Sofie, I'm trying to think why I reacted so strongly to that picture. My best guess is that I do have to deal with the reality of the kind of attitude it portrays. On rare occasions it's a Chinese person objecting to seeing this white guy with a Chinese woman - once the woman in question was only a colleague, which is even more ridiculous. Far more often, unfortunately, it's one of my foreign colleagues talking about our students as if they're all evil, subhuman monsters, or just spouting racist nonsense about the Chinese in general (and no, they haven't yet pushed me to the point of telling them if they hate the Chinese so much they should just fuck off to whatever shithole it is they crawled out of, but I have been tempted). Basically, the dehumanising of some Other I saw in that picture is something I have to deal with regularly that I really, really hate.
But yes, it's art, and perhaps even good art in that it very vividly and powerfully conveys its message, and it does portray something that is still a very real problem in this world, which is one of many things we need art to do. But it did inspire a very violent reaction in me.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
Far more often, unfortunately, it’s one of my foreign colleagues talking about our students as if they’re all evil, subhuman monsters, or just spouting racist nonsense about the Chinese in general (and no, they haven’t yet pushed me to the point of telling them if they hate the Chinese so much they should just fuck off to whatever shithole it is they crawled out of, but I have been tempted). Basically, the dehumanising of some Other I saw in that picture is something I have to deal with regularly that I really, really hate.
It seems reminiscent of the days of the Shanghai Int'l Settlement. And if you've read the Tintin book The Blue Lotus, it makes even more sense.
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Chris Waugh, in reply to
I find that aspect of China expat society extremely frustrating, but yes, there are a lot who still behave as if they were in the International Settlements (and it wasn't just Shanghai - Tianjin (birthplace of Eric Liddell) was another famous one, Qingdao is still marked by its German architecture, and many other Chinese cities hosted them). But even in the days of the International Settlements, there were those (e.g. Rewi Alley) who went out of their way to actually get involved in Chinese society. The expats I find it easier to deal with here are those who make sure they don't get caught in the China Expat Cone of Arrogant Ignorance, and for all my whingeing, there's actually quite a few of them these days. It also seems to me that the Chinese themselves are finally deciding that enough is enough and are demanding a bit more basic respect from the expats they host.
And I'm a big fan of Tintin and I've even managed to collect a few of his books in Chinese translation, some in a format very close to the original Franco-Belgian bande dessiné format, but most in a traditional Chinese format which I wish I had access to when I was a kid, because the Chinese format is just the right size for a young lad to slip into his pocket, and slip back out again when school gets boring.
Wow, seems I've pulled off a pretty big threadjack. Since it's Capture, I'll add a photo. Tintin in Chinese.
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Sofie Bribiesca, in reply to
Since it’s Capture, I’ll add a photo. Tintin in Chinese.
O, what the hey, not a great shot yet, but here is a dragonfly :)
They are feisty lil' buggers. Out in the open they are a lot harder to capture.
Keep up your good work Chris. -
Is anyone in Dunedin? I've just read The Larnachs by Owen Marshall. Bloody good holiday reading. I take my hat off to him - wish I could wander up to the castle and have a look at the setting.
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Jackie Clark, in reply to
Very interesting history, that place. On our sojourns around the Sth Island, from the time I was a young girl to my young adulthood, Larnach Castle was a regular stop. You could feel the ghosts, I swear.
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