Chad Taylor

Random girls. In space

SHADO Moonbase Commander Lt. Gay Ellis (R) was my first pin up. I loved her when she was in black and white on a small TV on Friday nights, half an hour before the TVNZ Friday Night Horror if I recall. Only much later on reading the UFO annual did I discover that she and all the other Moonbase operatives' bobs were purple, which made her even more perfect. Much, much later I would learn that the actor who played her, Gabrielle Drake, was Nick Drake's sister. Purple wigged Moonbase girls and the guy who sang 'Pink Moon.' Just gets better and better.

One of the (too many) themes which The Church of John Coltrane concerned itself with were pin-ups, and the role of the fictional, random girl. In the novel Robert Marling discovers his father's obsession with a 1920s Shanghai lounge diva named Li Jin, while a nearby gallery hosts an exhibition by an artist named Xi Xi who paints the same woman over and over, a Hawaiian-themed pin up known only as Miss Manuki. Late in the novel Robert discusses the matter of pin ups and repeated images with a tagger named Ferguson:
'Graffiti in wartime.' [F said.]

'Ah.'

'I was a World War II enthusiast, originally. I loved planes. I would attend veterans' reunions to interview pilots and crews about their wartime missions. I also collected photographs of their aircraft. The nose art began as a way of identifying the planes. But after a while I became interested in the art itself. Why did the pilots paint their planes with these images of cartoon hookers and pin-ups?'

'For luck, I guess.'

'On one level, yes. They're good luck charms. The women are there to protect the pilots - like the bow carvings of sailing ships. They're talismans, which is why they're so fertile - they're literally busting with life. It's a Madonna-and-whore thing: secular saints. But they also serve as something else: a sort of dream image. The pilots painted this dream girl on the nose of the plane and then took it up into the sky, pushing her through the clouds. They literally make her fly.'

'I never thought of that,' I said. 'But you're right. It's art, in a way.'

'Not that they knew it,' Ferguson said. 'These men weren't artists. They copied the nose girls from the magazines of the day. Hollywood posters which had themselves been air brushed and touched up. The same design – the same girl – would be passed around different air fields, and different men would copy it again and again. So the features would become more stylised. Like Chinese Whispers.'
Coltrane is published in French but not yet in English. C'mon, iTunes: c'mon...