Friday September 30th, 2005 @ 10:08 PM
JudgeLauri Blake (R) of the US 336th District Court in Grayson County, Texas
Judge Lauri Blake |
ruledthis week that the penalty for a teenaged drugoffender, on top of the requisite probation, is no sex as long as she(the offender, not the judge) is living in her parents’ home and goingto school. (State law allows judges to assign conditions theybelieve are fair and appropriate. Theage of sexual consent inTexas is 17 for both males and females, for heterosexual sexonly.) While I’m sure it’s not in the judge’s plans, I’d considerthat incentive to quit school and move in with my boyfriend if I werestill a teenager. (I’m not saying that that’s right; I’m speakingfrom the brain of a former teenager.)
What does this have to do with Modblog,you may ask? This same Judge Blake also prohibits tattoos, bodypiercings, earrings and clothing “associated with the drug culture” forthose who are on probation and free on bond. (In Texas, anartist may not tattoo a person younger than 18 years of age withoutmeeting the requirements of 25 Texas Administrative Code,§229.406(c), nor may an artist perform body piercing on a personyounger than 18 years of age ithout meeting the requirements of 25Texas Administrative Code, §229.406(d), without the consent of aparent, managing conservator, or guardian.)
Are tattoos a right, or a privilege? If they are a privilege,whohas the right to decide? Doesa judge have this right? With body modification more prevalent intoday’s newsthan even last year’s news, appellate courts may indeed decide whetherit’s an assignment of conditions following the breaking of the law, oran imposition of their personal morals upon us.
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Friday September 30th, 2005 @ 5:36 PM
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Thursday September 29th, 2005 @ 5:36 PM
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Wednesday September 28th, 2005 @ 10:54 PM
It’s not often these days that I get to post what I consider to be an entirely “new” piercing, but thanks to Ben Trigg at House of Color in Colorado Springs, I’ve got one for you today. I’ll post more on it later, but here’s what he calls an “eye boogie” (if I’m reading what I’m seeing right, it’s closer to a single-point pocketing or a transdermal than an eyelid piercing by the way)…
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Wednesday September 28th, 2005 @ 5:33 PM
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Tuesday September 27th, 2005 @ 11:17 PM
I’ve gotten a number of media requests lately, so I’m posting them all here. If I hear back that they’re filled, I’ll update this entry, although I don’t always hear back so if more than a week or two has passed, there’s probably no point in writing these folks. Oh, and if you write them, tell them that Shannon from BME told you about it.
From: Sunny Foscue
Subject: Fear Factor
I am a Casting Director with NBC’s “Fear Factor” and was wondering if youknew anyone for our upcoming “Freaks vs. Geeks” episode. The “Revenge of theTattooed Nerds” article was great, and I would love to get some of thosepeople on the show.
We are looking for guy/girl “Nerd” Teams to compete against “Freak Teams”. Iwould love to talk to you more about the show if you are interested inhelping me out. … Anyone that you have I would love to interview. Theycan just send me their info along with a picture to my email and we will getthem set up. We are looking for super freaks!
Thanks,
Sunny Foscue
sunny.foscue@fearfactor.com
Twwly mentions she’s looking for a few guys to hook up with her enticing friends for this show as well. Here’s another one. It’s definitely a fun little gig, I can’t give you more details publicly but if you’re in the NYC area, drop them a line. This is for filming tomorrow night.
From: testshow001@yahoo.com
Subject: TV Show looking for one pierced person
Major cable network TV show is looking for a heavily pierced person (maleor female) who appears 18 to 22 for a new show taping in midtown NYC.
Individual must be available for the show taping on the evening ofWednesday, September 28. If this is you, please email a photo and contactinfo to: testshow001@yahoo.com
Participants will be compensated
Here’s an interesting project for a suspension group or suscon organizer…
From: Jamie Friddle
Subject: Other Americans
I am researching eccentric communities and events in America for a pictorial essay titled Other Americans: underground . overground . off the grid. I am the team writer. We are in the middle of assembling a prototype for the book, as well as a proposal. You can read more about the project on our web site: www.otheramericans.com.
I am writing you because I’m interested in profiling one of the suspension/ritual cons. We think the body modification community is unique and, though not solely American, it is worth investigating for inclusion in our book. The final project will have 12-15 groups ranging from “way of life” subcultures to extreme sports.
Can you recommend a couple of suscons that occur annually? One of the subtexts of the book is that while old-school forms of community are slowly disintegrating, other forms of community, largely based on passions, are emerging.
Best,
Jamie Friddle, Writer
jamie@otheramericans.com
Other Americans
www.otheramericans.com
And one last one:
From: nancyhass@nyc.rr.com
Subject: NYTimes writer looking for college students who got tat soon after getting to school and really freaked their parents out at Thanksgiving
Hey. I’m a NYTimes reporter writing a story on the conflict that tends to ensue between parents and “children” at freshman Thanksgiving break. For what it’s worth, I’ve got three tats and I used to have a naval piercing until my kid was born a few years ago. I remember all too vividly the shit that happened when I came home with my first tattoo — a black dahlia on my shoulder — at 18. I figure some current students have got to have some Thanksgiving horror stories.
nancyhass@nyc.rr.com.
Thanks
N
Good luck, and if you end up doing one of these projects, drop me a line!
Posted by Shannon Larratt | Permalink | 2 Comments
Tuesday September 27th, 2005 @ 11:00 PM
Certainly tattoos and music go hand in hand, and every time I update there are band logos, portraits, song quotes, and other musical tattoos. But rock’n'roll is more than just a catalog of sounds — it’s a philosophy, and sometimes people choose to simply declare their affiliation to music as a whole… thus this mini-gallery of declarative rock’n'roll word tattoos!
Oops… dunno how that last one slipped in there…
* * *
“This is a snakeskin jacket, and for me it represents
a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom.”
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Tuesday September 27th, 2005 @ 10:32 PM
I’ve giggled here previously about finger mustache tattoos (one, two), so I thought I ought to mention the equally clever silly finger teardrop tattoos. These two examples are on IAM:BruisedandBroken and IAM:Aretha who got them done at the Boston Tattoo Convention.
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Tuesday September 27th, 2005 @ 5:29 PM
Please note that links may expire. IAM members, please help out by submitting stories!
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Monday September 26th, 2005 @ 5:33 PM
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Monday September 26th, 2005 @ 5:07 PM
The work that’s being done by top scarification artists these days has now reached the level where it’s competitive with tattooing in terms of the aesthetic result. This amazing example on DejaMoon is a collaboration piece between Dave Gilstrap and Brian, and is three and a half months old in this photo. This is definitely one of the best examples of cutting work I’ve ever seen.
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Monday September 26th, 2005 @ 4:41 PM
Blair sends in this picture taken at the war protest in Washington DC two days ago, saying “I just thought it was interesting to see someone with full sleeves who isn’t a protester”. It’s certainly not unusual to see tattooed cops (juristictions attempting to bar the practice for their officers notwithstanding), but this guy definitely has some nice heavy work — and with it on his hands and neck, surprisingly public as well. I have to wonder if it’s made it easier or harder to do his job, both because of how the public responds to tattoos, and because of how the administration would.
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Sunday September 25th, 2005 @ 5:32 PM
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Sunday September 25th, 2005 @ 12:55 PM
I’d assumed everyone realized that Amina’s chestpiece (original article, first follow-up) was based on Pirates of the Caribbean artwork, but since it’s being insisted that I mention it, here’s some of the pictures movie that Tim Kern possibly worked from to create the custom tattoo:
A reader wrote Amina and CC’d me to say,
“Where is the outrage at stealing the [non-tattoo] artwork that someone created? Oh, wait… there is blood added, and the banner was changed because a ‘dead men…’ banner kept that low would have covered your nipples …are you going to continue to persecute this guy because you don’t have the balls to say, ‘Wait, I guess my chestpiece is actually a copy of someone else’s artwork!’ Not only a copy, but an exact duplicate of the swords from Pirates of the… and an exact duplicate of the skull from the other image. I’ll be waiting, probably til eternity, for you to post these two pictures in all of your ranting and raving about the theft of ‘original’ art. If your chestpiece is original because you added a couple things, then this guys is just as original, as he added a mace and the blood is different.”
Tattoos borrow from pop culture. They always have and they always will. For the heavily tattooed Maoris of New Zealand, their mokos — their facial tattoos — contained their family history and told a story of the bearer’s genealogy. For modern individuals, tattoos tell the story of their lives as well, so pop culture references are not only common but required due to the saturation of that imagery in our world. So in order to wear a tattoo that accurately captures a person, often they actually need to borrow from and tell their stories using imagery from movies, advertising, corporate logos, and so on. It’s not theft, it’s truth.
However, there is something fundamentally different between copying a piece of print artwork and copying someone’s tattoo. It’s like the difference between speaking the same language (using the same words) and literally saying the same thing. In terms of the damage done to the wearer, it’s identity theft. The Maoris, when they needed to enter into a contract with a Westerner that required a signature, would draw out a picture of their moko instead of writing their name — and even now, for many heavily tattooed individuals, their tattoos are as linked to their identity as their given name, if not more.
In terms of damage to the original tattoo artist, work has to be done to “translate” the image from something that works well on paper (or whatever the original medium is) to the skin, and an aesthetically pleasing combination for the desired body part has to be designed in order make it a successful tattoo. This is a far more time consuming than one might assume — and there are an infinite number of combinations, variations, and interpretations for any given reference — and it is the quality of this translation that gives the piece unique artistic value as a custom tattoo. Skipping this step and just using someone else’s tattoo takes advantage of the hard work someone else has put into the design, to say nothing of the personal violation.
If Amina’s “fan” had wanted a Pirates of the Caribbean chestpiece rather than Amina’s literal chestpiece, it is true that he would have walked away with a very similar tattoo because both artists would have been working from the same sources. However, it would have been a fundamentally different tattoo, and comparing the two “thefts” is not valid.
Update: In regards to telling the story of one’s life with pop culture, Amina talks about this chestpiece in an interview that will appear in the December issue of Skin&Ink magazine:
“Currently my favorite tattoo is my chest piece, which was designed and tattooed by Tim Kern at Last Rites in New York City. Many people believe that the piece was created after a Motorhead song, and even though I am a Motorhead fan, that song was not in mind during the design of the tattoo. The piece was actually designed after the talking pirate skull in the Anaheim Disneyland ride ‘Pirates of the Caribbean.’ Being an Anaheim native, I owned a Disneyland annual pass since I was a teenager, and many summers were spent making out in ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ — “Dead Men Tell No Tales” had just become hauntingly familiar to me.”
Pick up the magazine for full coverage.
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Saturday September 24th, 2005 @ 5:56 PM
Thanks to a few people who wrote in to answer the question as to where the world’s most popular fairy comes from… It turns out she’s the old logo for the Britney Spears Foundation (and is also seen in the album artwork for Oops! I did it again), which explains the popularity.
The naughty fairies are from the Bondage Fairies comic by the way.
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Saturday September 24th, 2005 @ 5:29 PM
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Saturday September 24th, 2005 @ 4:08 PM
While searching through my emails to find something to write mean things about, I found this little gem from IAM:Skarekrow. It’s a humorous twist on the much overdone oldschool swallow. This piece won first prize for best small tattoo at the Swedish Tattoo Convention. I can see why.
Tattoo by John Lind at House of Pain in Norrtälje, Sweden.
PS. Want me to review your tattoo? Email it to me.
Posted by Shannon Larratt | Permalink | 3 Comments
Saturday September 24th, 2005 @ 3:07 PM
Brian Froud and Amy Brown fairies get submitted to BME’s fairy tattoo gallery on a pretty regular basis, but of all the fairy tattoos that I see, one stands out as being done more than any other. I don’t know the original source of the design, and maybe someone reading this can tell me, but this simplified fairy just keeps getting done over and over and over — so much so that I’m beginning to think it’s the mark of some sisterhood cult that, being a dude, no one is willing to tell me about.
PS. Personally I like my fairies perverted or at least nude.
Update: Question answered!
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Saturday September 24th, 2005 @ 12:09 PM
I come across all kinds of articles every day, and just came across a press release for Nicole Yost’s Asta Arts Kick Ass Rubber Stamps.
While we on IAM are a creative lot (along with scarification, piercing, and tattoo artists, we have our fair share of photographers, knitters, scrapbookers, and other crafters), I couldn’t find any forums for rubber stamping. Maybe it’s because there weren’t any cool stamps before?
The inspiration for the retro-cool stamps came to Yost during a late-night crafting session. “I was making a stack of hand-stamped cards and I just thought, ‘Why doesn’t anyone make any cool rubber stamps?’ I knew exactly what I wanted, but no one was selling anything like that.” Eventually, Yost drew up the designs herself and her company, Asta Arts, was born.
The prices, starting at $4.99 for a small nautical star and going up to $14.99 for an intricate dragon seem reasonable to me, as compared to what I see in the local craft store. I don’t have these in my hands so I don’t know the actual quality, but the lines look like they’d be great for decorating a scrapbook, laying out the bare basics of a tattoo design plan, or stamping your little sister to convince your mom that you’ve corrupted her, too.
Administrative ModBlog note: For LiveJournal users, thanks to the
BME IAM community there, a feed has been added so you can add this blog to your friends list. Just click the “LJ” link in the title bar on the
main page. Thanks!
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Friday September 23rd, 2005 @ 9:33 PM
From the popular BME “geek tattoo gallery“…
Highbrow Geek
(Turing Machine)
Lowbrow Geek
(Tetris Block Bracelet)
Definitely not a Geek
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Friday September 23rd, 2005 @ 9:28 PM
Recently we mentioned how Amina Munster had her tattoo ripped off by tattoo “artist” Brandon Swartz. She updates us on how he responded to being asked for an apology on her page:
“When I called Inflictions to speak civilly with Brandon Swartz concerning the matter I was mocked and laughed at by the employees of Inflictions who stated that I would just humiliate myself as the public would find my actions frivolous. Later in the night I received a call from a tattoo artist of mine concerning the welfare of his friend… Brandon personally requested that this man contact me concerning the matters. This was followed by a call from Brandon Swartz who indeed confirmed that he was aware the tattoo had previously been tattooed on flesh. The patron had brought in a photo of me wearing my tattoo, [and] the rip off was produced from it. Swartz acknowledged that he knew who [Tim Kern] had tattooed the original piece while trying to flatter me by stating that Tim is such a better artist than he — maybe because Tim is able to draw his own tattoos?”
“When I spoke with Brandon Swartz I ultimately decided that I would put the matters to rest if I received an email (not phone or address) contact of the man depicted in the photograph as well as a written apology from Swartz. Swartz then claimed that I was asking for TOO MUCH.“
“Brandon Swartz threatened me stating that ‘All artists would hate me’. This, though not true, would not bother me as all of my artists are good friends and men of respect, none of them are scratchers like Brandon Swartz.“
“Swartz also claimed that Steve Potts (Owner of both Inflictions shops and Swartz’s boss) is good friends with Paul Booth (Tim Kern’s boss), and this matter could jeopardize Tim Kern’s job. It is common knowledge that Paul Booth himself has had a tattoo of his own illegally reproduced on the skull of another man, I highly doubt that Paul Booth would ever side with the Artist who illegally reproduced the image. In fact I would think that Paul Booth would want to see some precedent set in these matters.”
As a side note, it’s been pointed out that Brandon Swartz doesn’t understand cross contamination issues since he’s not using any barrier film on his machine or clip cord on the photos of him tattooing. So not only is he a thief, but he’s also potentially endangering the lives of his clients…
We also recently covered tattoo theft by King of Kings in the Europe, a shop with a bad reputation for stealing other artists work, claiming it as their own, and then stalling on even removing the photos from their website — as recently also noted in Needled. Anyway, ModBlog writer Rebekah drops Han a line to see what he had to say:
To: King of Kings Tattoo
A lady in Canada is very distraught after having seen a photo of her tattoo on your web site. She is upset because you didn’t tattoo her; Cory Ferguson did. There is no doubt that the tattoos are identical. Cory’s art came first, which makes yours the copy… which you seem to be passing off as your own original work.
I’m curious as to your side… I’d love to know what your excuse is.
As I’m sure will come as no surprise, his reply contained only two words:
From: King of Kings Tattoo
DROP DEAD!!!!
Well, at least this is creating a useful list of shops to avoid.
Posted by Shannon Larratt | Permalink | 6 Comments
Friday September 23rd, 2005 @ 8:15 PM
Tattoo artists and fans getting tattoos of tattoo machines is certainly not an uncommon theme, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to see the same thing manifesting in the world of scarification now that it’s growing up as a semi-mainstream artform. Here’s a few pictures of UREA in Brasil (a scarification artist himself) doing a large cutting of a #11 scalpel blade on his forearm.
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Friday September 23rd, 2005 @ 5:34 PM
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