You're So Beautiful

strange:/

 

Sorry people, was cleaning up the off topic posts and made a human error....

 

damn you human!

 

In my street punk years with a dirty face. Taken in a photo booth for my social welfare commuter ticket. People say I look cross.



Hahahaha no, I'm not a hippie. But I really dig this pic. The chick next to me's brother wanted a shot of hippies for a photo assignment and because I had long hair, she asked me to dress up like a hippie. So I was just a poser hippie.
She is about to blow smoke into my mouth, look what's in her hand.

Unfortunately all my recent pics were lost after my other hard drive packed up (that's the scourge of digital media).No backup! but I haven't really changed all that much in 10 years from the last pic except that I keep my hair short now (#4) and I've got this mohawk-goatee type thing on my chin and a few more tattoos.

 

hey, do you live in germany or something? weird question, I know. the first photo just seemed familiar, i was looking through this photo archive(by karl nagel i think?) and i saw a very similar one.

 

I lived in germany from 1985 until 1992. First in Düsseldorf for 1 1/2 years, then one day I received my army call-up papers in the mail. And there was no fucking way I was gonna let myself get drafted into military service. That was also one of the reasons why i left south africa, to avoid being drafted. I could have done community service instead but since I had a friend in Berlin who had moved to there one or two months earlier, I decided that this was the best opportunity for me to get to Berlin (since I had always wanted to go there anyway). So the next day I organized a furniture removal truck to move all the stuff I wanted to keep and gave all the other stuff away, like the coal heater, etc to some friends who lived in the local squat in the Kiefernstrasse (don't know if you've heared of it? It became notorious and was all over the german media, saying that they were harboring RAF terrorists. The fact is no-one living there had any knowledge about them being from RAF) and we (my gf & I) moved the very next day. (in those draft papers, they gave me, I think 3 days to report for duty )
The wall was still up at the time and berliners were exempted from military service.
Hahaha I sent them back their form with a big "fuck you" (well, the german equivalent of that) written on it.

Berlin was awesome with a massive punk scene and enough gigs. It's a melting pot for punks from all over germany and europe. In one squat I stayed in (after the fall of the wall) there were punks from italy, yugoslavia, spain, sweden, denmark, austria, 4 hippies from poland (but they kinda did their own thing and didn't associate with us, besides the obligatory greeting (haha come to think of it, that's probably how the Kiefernstrasse squatters didn't know what those RAF guys were up to). It was probably due to the language barrier), east & west germany of course and even one from south africa - myself.

If you find it again, could you post it to my PM box? Although I have no idea how my pictures could've landed in that archive since photos of me from that time are very rare.
After reading what I've just written it seems a bit chaotic and all. I hope it's not too confusing.

 

Ah so you were born in south africa but moved to germany? Haha thats quite a stretch. Did you go back to south Africa? Or did I get it all wrong?
Hm, I think I might have heard of it, but I haven`t been in Düsseldorf before. Haha the excuses they make to have a valid reason to evict squatters, eh..
Haha nice one!
Well yeah I`ve heard Berlin is great. I haven`t been there yet though, only in eastern Germany, which was pretty much like eastern Europe.

Sure! I`ll have a look again I`m pretty sure that was the same one I saw.
I haven`t had any luck finding it yet, but here`s the link if you want to have a look yourself too http://www.punkfoto.de/

 

Cheers. Don't worry about it, I just thought you might have a vague idea in which category to look. I've also been looking through some archives and so far I recognize 12 people (edit: the number keeps increasing. Gee, thanx for pointing out this link)(sadly I'm also finding out that at least 2 are RIP :/ )

You almost got it right, I was born in germany and came to south africa at the age of 6. After high school I moved to germany with my girlfriend. I knew some of the local punks there after a previous visit a year earlier (when I went over with my mom to visit family) and I stayed in contact with two of them until I returned. And after 7 years I returned to south africa, where I'm currently residing (I have dual citizenship).

When you went from the west to the east it felt like stepping through a time portal to a place that was stuck in the late fourties or fifties. A lot of the buildings were still pockmarked with bullet holes. Everything was left to rot. But everything was super cheap, and after getting a good exchange rate illegaly from a taxi driver (8:1 as opposed to the official 2:1) you could have a really good time.
You only ever saw 2 or 3 different makes of cars on the roads (correct me if I'm wrong).
It wasn't all bad though. For example the ticket dispensers they had inside the train stations were self- service. You just turn a dial and out comes your ticket. All they ask is for you to leave a small donation in the money box. So where are you from and where are living at the moment? If I had to guess I would say you're from former yugoslavia and are now living in either germany or holland?

 

Haha that sounds daft. What I meant was train travel was basically free!

 

Yeah, my internet is really bad, sucks living out on the countryside. I tried looking for it, but everything takes ages to load. I swear I`m gonna get high blood pressure over this.
Aw, thats sad to hear :/ I hope you`ll get in touch with your old friends though.

Ah, right! So how come you moved to South Africa? I`m guessing it was your parents/work?

Haha its still like that, its not just the place but the people too. I remember they were building something in the city(I was in Leipzig), this was a few years ago though, so I don`t know what its like now but I`m guessing its pretty much the same.
Oh I didn`t get any train rides for free though, haha. Too bad they changed that.

Thats a good guess! We used to live in Switzerland and in Austria, but we ended up moving to Norway. And I`m Kosovo-Albanian

 

hahaha fuck you guys, i only ever lived in the USA, and the only time ive been outta this country was mexico

 

Yes, I was originally planning to return to SA for a 3 week visit but my parents eventually convinced me to enrol at a technicon for a course. It was a very tough decision for me to make (a lot of people would laugh at this).

Haha that all changed after the collapse of the socialist system.

Norway sounds cool (no pun intended). Some great bands there I think. Do you have a decent scene up there?

 

HAhaha mexico sounds cool but I heard you need to wear a bulletproof vest when you go there.
Yea, it's cool to live in europe also because it's relatively small compared to the u.s. and it's easy to travel to other european countries by rail. But I only ever went to Amsterdam while based in germany.

 

You mean like "wow, they're actually building something!!!"?

 

hahaha ive only been to TJ in mexico, it was pretty chill. That was a long time ago though, and its probably alot more dangerous now. hahahaha me and my friends always joke about how you can probably take california alone and it would spread across most of europe

 

hahahahahaha heres a few more old ones....




hahahaha this one is punx as fuck

 

hahah the first one looks like you scoffed down a whole jar of jam and you've now got a hectic stomach ache.
The second one is awesome. It looks like the back of a record cover.
Haha I just saved them to my HD.

 

Ok Leipzig is a big city so I guess it's no real surprise that they would want to modernize it but there are a lot of smaller towns in the east that have virtually become ghost towns.

 

haha hey feel free to drop by anytime. I`ve never been outside europe if it makes it any better

 

Aw, thats nothing to laugh at.
Haha yeah, greedy bastards, Now they actually want to charge tourists? pff.
It is pretty cool(as in cold). I know basically none in Oslo, but the town i grew up in was alright. They`re all junkies now though, not a very political scene over there. But its good in Oslo I think.

Exactly! I thought they had given up on east germany.