Great Unsung heros of tattooing (part 1)

If you are a tattooer chances are that you know the names of the people who paved the road of tattooing before us. Giants like Sailor Jerry and Ed Hardy, if you have dug a little deeper you might know some of the slightly less famous folks like Cap Coleman or George Burchett upon whose shoulders we all stand. But most tattooers don’t really know about the people and inventions which have directly and pointedly changed tattooing into what it is today. These people and milestones aren’t just important because they left a legacy of artwork or an ethic we can aspire to, in many cases these folks literally invented the stuff we use daily and we don’t even know about it!

My first candidate is also my personal choice for the tattooer who has done the most for the technology of modern tattooing, Bill Baker.  Id be willing to bet that 90% of tattooers reading this right now don’t know who Bill baker is, note that i said “is” not “was” because he is still alive and still doing stellar work in Toronto at the Pearl Harbor Gift Shop. In the late 80′s and early 90′s He did the first real scientific testing on tattoo needles and eventually came up with a theory of needle manufacture that led to the first high quality, textured, really sharp pins available in various thicknesses. Today it is a given that needles made specifically for tattooing are available, but prior to Bills work the vast majority of tattoo needles were actually milliners needles or other sewing type needles.

That should be enough to consider him an unsung hero of tattooing, but he didn’t stop there, he founded a company to make and supply those needles called Eikon. Through this company he released his research for free online for any tattooer to study, also through Eikon he literally changed the way we all think of tattoo machines when he created the very first power supply that not only powered your tattoo machine, but told you real, heretofore unknown data about how that machine was running. What do I mean? Prior to Bill producing the EMS power supplies and meters it was commonly believed that a tattoo machine ran at about 25 to 50 strokes per second. Imagine our surprise upon hooking up those first power meters produced by Bills company and finding that our machines ran hundreds of cycles per second! Some power units could tell you how much voltage they were sending to the machine, but none told you how “efficient” it was (the percentage of time the needle was in the extended position vs. the retracted, Bills meters did. In short and overnight we went from a world of tattoo superstition and old wives tales to hard facts and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it turned out that most of the “common knowledge” out there was flat-out wrong!

So these things would definitely be enough to put Mr. Baker in our hall of fame if he had gone no further, but, of course, he did go further. In a series of “zines” put out by Eikon over several years Bill broke down the functions of a tattoo machine scientifically, tested, experimented, tested again and all the while he made this information public! He figured out exactly why and how a tattoo machine works, how to adjust it, and how to make it do all this efficiently and using repeatable, testable, information. Information that was only gather-able because of the meters he invented! He didn’t hide it like most “old timers”, he wanted to better tattooing as a whole, and he most certainly did. Because this blog is open to the general public I wont go into technical details, but rest assured that dozens and dozens of technical things about tattooing changed from the way they had been for decades! I can’t speak for other tattooers, but those zines were the Rosetta stone of tattoo machines for me, I could finally know exactly what I was doing when I built and tuned a machine, my tattooing got better almost instantly and a load of phony tattoo “lore” went out the window. The great shame is that Bill was forced out of the company he founded and provided the innovations for, if he hadn’t been sidelined by the ouster and ensuing legal battles how much more would he have been able to contribute to tattooing?

Every modern tattooer is using some piece of the knowledge that Bill Baker contributed to our world, if you use needles and a power supply to tattoo then something Bill created, modified, or perfected went into making them better.

To finish off this first episode of the great unsung heroes of tattooing id like to briefly mention the contribution of a piece of technology so common today that we seldom notice it, the Ink Jet printer. It’s almost impossible to imagine at this remove what it was like before cheap, highly functional photocopiers/printers were as ubiquitous as they are today. The fact is that even as recently as the late 1990s a copier was huge, expensive, and seriously limited in its functionality. One of the great advantages to the shop where I served my apprenticeship at was that it was half a block from a Kinkos copy center. I’m not kidding, this fact alone made us stand out from the more suburban places where the tattoo you got was the same size as the one on the wall and that was it! Today it is no problem for a customer to ask for a tattoo to be 10% bigger, but until the availability of the modern inkjet this meant either a trip to the copy-store or using some contraption to enlarge the image in order to retrace it.

Perhaps, then,  it is no surprise that since the advent of these copier/printers that tattoos have gotten larger and larger as the artist is able to take a small drawing and blow it up until it fits around (and with) the contours of the body. The irony is that a technology which made doing the same image over and over has actually helped steer clients away from flash and towards one-off client specific tattoos. The cheap copier made accommodating the customers preferences easier and helped to make custom tattooing the norm rather than the exception.

Black Cat hosts Brad Warner!

We are pleased to announce that Zen teacher and author Brad Warner will be at Black Cat tattoos on June 21st. The author of Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up!, Zen Wrapped in Karma, dipped in chocolate, and Sex, sin, and Zen will be on hand to sign books and to promote his latest work “There is no God and he is always with you“. There will be a brief Q&A session and Brad will have books on hand as well. The event begins at 7pm and is free to the public. Donations are accepted but not expected and will go to help Brad offset the cost of his (self-financed0 book tour of the Northeast/Midwest.

 

On a personal level this is a great honor for me. Brad has mentioned in the past that when people tell him “your book changed my life” that he feels it’s too much credit to the book and not enough to the person whose life it is. I understand this and agree, but i have a hard time seeing how my life would have been what it is now (namely, awesome) if i hadn’t stumbled across Hardcore Zen at a particularly low point in my life. I was searching for something, something that wouldn’t be sated by numbing my brain with drugs or booze, something I wouldn’t have stuck with is it tried to force some superstition down my throat, and something that I wouldn’t have trusted if it came from some supposedly beatific guru in book promising rippling ponds, pretty lotus and the spiritual equivalent of elevator music. Basically i needed someone (or something) to hit me upside the head with the truth, presented straightforwardly and without  a hint of the kind of bullshit that my well honed cynics radar can pick out 100 miles away. When I read Hardcore Zen I immediately resonated with Brads approach, he told it the way he saw it and invited the reader to try it for themselves and either confirm it via their own experience or reject it. He didn’t care either way, and i appreciated that! In my own life I have found that folks who really, REALLY want you to believe what they do always come off like they don’t really believe what they are selling, as if the only way they can have any confidence in whatever snake-oil they are peddling is if everyone else repeats back the party line. Zen, and soto-zen in particular is the complete opposite of that, in it one is constantly admonished to think for oneself, to ask hard questions, to explore doubt thoroughly and to, in the end, reject that which doesn’t resonate with the truth, even if it means rejecting Buddhism itself!

In Hardcore zen, for the first time, I found a method to look at my own life thoroughly, more thoroughly than i even expected to! I was looking for something to give me peace of mind without being “too hard”, but of course I eventually found Zen changing everything, even the things I thought I didn’t want changed! I came into zen with some very firm ideas about the world and myself only to find 10 years later that everything has changed! They say “everyone gets into zen for the wrong reasons” and boy are they right! The funny thing is that even with that, if you do it long enough it tends to straighten out the things that are crooked, even the ones you didn’t know were a problem! Its like going into a Chinese restaurant and being served French cuisine. . . .and then finding out that French food was exactly what you needed to eat!

Anyway, the honor is all mine to be able to help Brad, even a little bit, to promote his new book. Whether he wants the credit or not, reading hardcore Zen those many years ago was exactly what needed to happen in my life, perhaps I would have gotten here anyway, but I truly appreciate the path that book helped me to use in getting to where I am today.

If you live anywhere near Pittsburgh you should definitely come!

Newness (shop and tattoos)

So the new shop is open. Its been about 3 weeks and already I feel like I’m settling in like we’ve always been there. In addition to Cara, myself, and Jesse, we hired our good friend and fellow new dad Matt Macri .  So while I have stopped doing walk in Thursdays, we still have at least one artist almost everyday who can handle walk ins, at least until they get booked up too! Another big change is that I am now taking thursday off to hang out with Luna and Cara is tattooing all day Thursdays. I feel so lucky that I get to spend so much time with my daughter and that I have such reliable friends working for me that I can give Luna all my attention and give her mom a much-needed break from baby duty, even it its only one day a week so far.

We had a great “grand opening” party, tons of friends showed up, Kevin Sousa provided the food and Full Pint Brewing donated beer and Cara and her good friend, local fine artist Thommy Conroy hung the crazy amount of art we moved over from the old shop.  I took a second out of the busy night to snap a couple of pictures which i stitched together to give you an idea of how much BIGGER the new place is compared to our Oakland locale..

I totally based the idea for the open floor plan and oak toolcarts that we tattoo off of my trips to get tattooed in New York, specifically on the Kings Ave. Bowery location. I really liked the open room idea, and it has already been conductive to a relaxed ability to exchange ideas and critiques as well as a more free flow of conversation between artists and customers. I’m a worrier by nature, and naturally moving across town into a building with a completely different format and with new people should have really set off my panic buttons, but this time I wasnt all that stressed out. I guess I knew that this was a step up for Cara and myself and I was confident that the new space would be a benefit to all of us in the Black Cat family.

I have been working on some really fun stuff and with a few more artists I have been able to focus more on the specific stuff I want to tattoo. It’s always tricky, because I don’t want to sound snobbish or picky, but at 42 years old I feel like its time for me to specialize in the kind of tattoos I can do a really good job on and let the ones that would be good but not spectacular go to people who would do a better job on them. I confess to feeling a little guilt because, if I’m being honest, I’m also a little burnt out on doing tattoos that are not in my area of enjoyment. I guess I have earned the right to pick and choose, others people certainly reassure me of this, but I still feel a little concern that by not taking any and all tattoos that I have somehow become a big-headed rock star. The mind is funny like that, as soon as you get what you want you either want something else or you feel guilty for getting it. Thats why Shunryu Suzuki called the untrained brain the “monkey mind”, jumping and running around this way and that, never stilled. One of the nice things about sitting for a few years is that I can see this monkey mind from a little distance, I still have the crazy running around thoughts, but these days I can watch them without having to pick them up and play with them, sometimes I start to go into that cycle and a little voice says , “ah, best not to go there, buddy” and I can back off.

Anyhow, here are a few recent things I’ve been working on.

A good friend and ray of sunshine in our lives has been talking about a back piece for some time. She has a special affinity for Ganesha but was torn between the elephant headed boy and a Medicine Buddha to honor her herbalist/holistic healer career. In the end we combined the two ideas doing a Ganesha but in the more Nepalese Buddhist style of art. Back-pieces are no fun for the customer 90% of the time, even folks with very heavy coverage and lots of years getting tattooed are surprised at how bad the pain can be. We ended up doing this outline in two sessions.

I finished this dragon on a long time customer and we blended the background a bit up into some tribal blackwork we did a few years ago. I think I am done doing tiny dragons on arms, this piece is a great size and allowed us to get a lot of detail and readability. I love doing traditional inspired tattoos like this nurse/gypsy, It might seem strange to do Japanese and traditional American t first glance, but in reality they are very similar in technique and graphic punch. They both have a long history of stories and meaning that a tattooer can draw on to add depth to a tattoo and if done correctly both will look good for the clients lifetime.

Some tattoos become popular and then fade never to come back, some are perennial favorites that have been around as long as tattooing and will still be getting done  generations hence. I have done owl tattoos for 16 years and they never seem to fade in popularity, like a lot of tattoos which have that kind of staying power, an owl tattoo has a visual power which affects everyone who sees it on a subconscious level, it goes beyond the simple image and into a symbol. When we see a heart we think of “love”, when we see a skull we think of “mortality, and when we see an owl we think of “wisdom“.

What not to say to a pregnant lady.

Having a baby is a lesson. It is a lesson in patience and humility, it is a lesson in generosity and respect for the power of a womans body. Unfortunately it is also a lesson in the power of careless words and speaking before you think. Now that our amazing baby is almost six months old I can reflect on Caras pregnancy with joy and wonder, and also a little cringing at some of the dumb shit people would say to us about the pregnancy.  People often say hurtful or just plain stupid things out of ignorance or pure thoughtlessness, when you are saying these things to a person who is not only scared about all the many many unknowns of childbirth but also riding the waves of hormonal wackiness I believe a little more consideration might be in order. So think of the following blog as helping you to avoid accidentally saying some of the things that made me want to knock people’s teeth out when they thoughtlessly (though innocently) said one of those things one should never say to a pregnant couple.

1) The only thing to say about a pregnant woman’s body is “You look beautiful!”.

Lets face it, we live in a culture where women’s bodies are constantly and bizarrely open to public comment. The covers of countless shitty gossip rags are full of articles about how this or that person is “too” fat or “too” skinny complete with blown up photos of a cellulite thigh. Many women in our society were expressly told by their parents, friends, or boyfriends that their bodies were somehow imperfect, even the most independent and self actualized woman often harbors a fear of public comment about their bodies. So when some well-meaning person says “My god you look HUGE!” it doesn’t matter that said buffoon wa talking about her belly full of baby and may even mean it as a compliment, after 20+ years of being terrified of being called fat in public this comment carries a lot of psychic harm.

Consider that you are speaking to person whose body has radically transformed in months, not years, into something unrecognizable. A pregnant woman’s body looks different, feels different, occupies otherwise familiar spaces differently, also these bodies are producing tons of hormones that the mother is not used to, these may make the pregnant woman feel nervous, angry, protective, or depressed and the last thing they need is to deal with the fallout in their minds of a society that values woman primarily by their appearance at a time when that appearance is going crazy.

In short, if you must comment then keep the comment positive and accentuate the good aspects of the pregnancy on her body. Trust me on this, no matter how funny you think you are or how much “she must realize how big she is” you are going to get a pregnant lady karate chop to the throat if you go there.

2) We have already heard it.

What do I mean by “it”? I mean all of it. Any of it, and I guarantee that you are not going to be telling us something we fucking don’t already know about pregnancy.  She shouldn’t eat sushi while pregnant? we fucking already heard that shit 400 times. Oh my life is about to change? Thanks for assuming im such a fucking idiot that I don’t realize that creating a new life that i will be responsible for clothing, feeding, loving, education, and protecting  for 18 years might cause my life to change a little bit. Oh you read this great book? Thanks Bookie McReviewer, good thing you read my mind and realized I wanted to have yet more shit to read than the 5000 books every pregnant couple gets “gifted”. We heard what Dr So-and-so said, we heard about cloth diapers vs. disposable, we heard about what too much caffeine can do, we heard about playing music for the fetus, we read all about the hospital/midwife center/witch doctor that is a magical wizard when it comes to zooming babies out of the vajayjay and into a bassinet. Guess what, If we don’t Ask then keep your fucking nugget of wisdom to yourself.

Pregnant couples are already drowning is a sea of information, we obsessively read, watch, listen to any and all things relating to pregnancy. It’s like we dropped into a 9 month intensive college course where the final exam involves my wife pushing a live human out of her body, you don’t think were gonna do a little research on that shit!? So when you come up with this really important thing you saw on Ellen or on (that fucking) A Baby Story it is almost 100% of the time just adding another tiny little brick of stress to our lives.

oh and if the tidbits you wish to share with us is a fucking horror story about your or someone you knows shitty birth experience then. . . .

3) Keep your shitty birth experience story to your goddamn self.

You are not helping. You’re not. Telling my wife about your 500 hours of bloody fucking screaming labor, or how your poor baby had to have an extra toe removed from its precious goddamn skull or how the nurse laughed at you when you screamed for morphine and how you needed 52 stitches is not helping. It might help you to justify your pain and to process your traumatic experience, but you need to do that shit with someone who is NOT about to give birth in a few weeks or months. We already live in a culture which treats birth like a disease and there are actual television series (like that shit sucking A Baby Story) whose entire premise is “look how fucked up this birth thing is yo!” Our Doctors have already spelled out exactly how crazy and heavy this is going to be, we don’t need someone telling us about the horror story their cousins birth was.

Think of it this way, if your best friend was about to go on a plane and was terrified of flying, would you a) tell them it will be fine or b) describe about how your neighbors brother died in a fiery crash? Look, your experience is valid, and if you overcame some serious shit then you are a fucking hero (really) and I have nothing but respect for you, but can we talk about it after my wife has her own experience? Because scaring the shit out of us really is not a help at all, not even a little bit.

4) Don’t predict our doom.

Telling me that I have no idea about how shitty my life will be with a baby, sucks. Telling my wife that her body will be destroyed by birth or that she wont be able to handle the sort of birth she wants really sucks. Telling us that fraising kids is really hard and that maybe we wont enjoy our lives anymore (because they don’t enjoy theirs since kids came into it) sucks and is kind of sad. A surprising number of people seemed to take perverse delight in letting us know how naive we were and about how we would never sleep, have fun, travel, eat at restaurants, or “hang out” ever again. It turns out that they were all wrong, at least about our lives, maybe their lives suck that bad. I certainly hope not, but that’s what they seemed to be going through and confidently predicted we would too.

Maybe these people (and its usually guys) don’t like having kids, it certainly sounds that way. They have every right to feel what they feel but its a sad and desperate sort of attempt to project the fact that having kids is not their bag onto us before we’ve had a chance to try it for ourselves.  Perhaps I could have hated it too, maybe I could have regretted my “loss” of “freedom”, but it was our experience to have and the smarmy predictions of how miserable we would be just added more worry to our minds when it wasn’t really necessary.

Even worse was when we told people that we were going to have the baby at a midwife center with no drugs, oh the looks of “yea right, good luck with that, hippy” followed almost every time with “Yea you say that now, wait til you’re in labor!” Well my wife did wait til she was in labor, and then the proceeded to have a baby while standing up feeling and every second of it. Guess what? she tells me she would do it again in a heartbeat. She is a bad ass, but lots of folks who consider us their friends predicted that she would crumble like a cookie and it sometimes caused us to doubt ourselves when we should have been pumped up by those we love instead of torn down with bummer predictions.

Even if you are right, and even if your dire predictions are going to come true, why on earth would you want to put that onto us before we go into one of the biggest moments of our lives? Are these the kind of people who tell their buddies right before marriage, “well, no more having fun for you!”? Think about it, are you that unhappy that you need to project that misery onto other people before they have their own turn at this thing called “being a parent”?

So basically the gist of this article is to say that for Cara and I (and, I’m guessing, lots of pregnant couples) there was a surprising amount of thoughtless or outright ignorant comments and while many were well-intentioned, the final result was to cause stress at a point when more stress was acutely painful. Pregnant ladies are sensitive, their babies daddies are protective, and at a time when the world seems chaotic and unpredictable a few kind words will (and did) do wonders for our mental state. So, what should one say to a pregnant couple? Unless specifically asked, I would keep my stories and medical opinions to myself, I would tell any expecting couple that they will do great, that their experience will be awesome, that mom looks beautiful and that I’m sure they will have a great birth! Even if you are wrong, who wants to be the one who predicted a tragedy in a friend or loved ones life. Keep it positive or keep it to yourself.

New shop? New shop!

Because I have not written a blog in a long time I feel it’s tiny voice even in my sleep. Like a dog you thought would die if locked in the shed only to hear is mewling whines for weeks and weeks, ever quieter and yet no less there.

Sorry, that was a pretty heavy metaphor.

Anyway, having given birth to this blog I feel like I must, occasionally, feed it. But to be honest I haven’t had the urge lately, you see there is a new ” project” on the horizon and I tend to be the kind of guy who gets very hot on one thing and let’s it consume me for a bit. Right now most of my waking energy is spent thinking about my new baby girl and THE SHOP. The baby girl part is mostly thinking about how I can be less useless to my wife who I estimate is doing ninety-eleventy percent of the work currently, while letting me remain a selfish lazy crybaby. This requires a lot of work and self reproach fortunately I have a lot of practice at it and, like the master of judo who has hardened his muscles through countless hours of training, I too can throw my ego around using only its own (prodigious) weight against it. So I try to remember to change a diaper before being asked and to entertain my little girl as long as possible while my poor exhausted wife gets a shower, not as easy a task as it sounds since my breasts will, stubbornly, refuse to produce milk.

Perhaps we should all be grateful for that.

The other, and significantly less important, object taking up space in my mind is the impending relocation of Black Cat Tattoos from our current location to butler street in Lawrenceville some time in April. Cara and I have been looking for a new, larger location for some time and since the current lease on our spot on Craig street ends in April we were actively searching for a few months. Sadly most of the spots on Craig street were unsuitable (stupid expensive) or not a good fit (run down shitholes impossible for customers to find) and so we had to look in other areas more acceptable to hipsters like us.

Clearly we needed to look to Lawrencevile where the waxed mustache and ironic “who’s the boss” t-shirt still roam the plains in herds uncountable. Through great fortune and the keen eye of friends we found such a location that, uncannily enough, would become available right when we needed it. Also, being in the as yet mostly empty but clearly up and coming area of butler street near 34th street we would be over a mile from the next nearest tattoo establishment. In this age of Southside tattoo shops opening inside each others back pocket I may be a bit old fashioned, but I still feel that a respectful distance from other tattoo shops should be the (polite) right thing to do.

I will miss Oakland, I have tattooed in its dirty bosom for my entire tattooing career, I’ve smelled it’s O fries and told its bums to fuck themselves for nigh on 16 years. More specifically I will greatly miss the folks at Phantom of the Attic games. One could only dream of more pleasant neighborsm , truly, of all the changes to come, moving away from Geoff and crew is the only cause for regret I have.

Still, onward and upward! We will be in a nice, newly refurbished building with heat that works, ceilings which don’t leak, and with room to stretch out. We will also be welcoming a new artist, Matt Macri into the black cat family (I’m the dad). At this point all I can really do is plan and work on preliminary things like signs and what sort of chairs to have, fortunately the move will be far less of a build out than the current Black Cat location where we had to take a very raw space and build walls, lay floor, install plumbing and electricity, instead we will be picking out bookshelves and figuri grout where to hang the pile of great art from friends we have acquired over the years.

As of now the only firm info I have to share is that we will be in the new spot by May and that I will be updating you if e folk as I am able.

I’m excited!

(Dis) illusion

It is a sad cliche that our heroes often, in time, are revealed to be all to human. Sometimes this is because they espouse something that they can’t live up to, or because they commit some action that seems to be counter to everything they stand for. Very often it is because our own expectation and ideal of them is unrealistic and after a time it dawns on is that this person we held up in our minds as a hero is simply, disappointingly, human.

Sometimes though, our heroes stop being so heroic in our eyes not because they failed, or because we weren’t looking at them realistically, sometimes they stop being our heroes because we become better than they are. It’s difficult to articulate something like this and not sound like you are giving yourself a compliment, but being honest with oneself includes not only finding our own faults, but also in seeing our own progress. If you only ever think “I suck” then you are as deluded and full of horse poop as someone who only thinks “I’m the best”.

Many years ago when I first became a tattooer I devoured any kind of information on tattooing that I could. There wasn’t so much media as these days and the few books out there (aside from Ed Hardys excellent “tattootime” books) were dated and generally full of mediocrity. So most of the best stuff came from tattoo magazines, and the best of those came from Europe since almost all the u.s. magazines were full of biker shit and shitty supplier ads.

I picked up an Italian mag called “tattoo planet” regularly. The art was awesome, featuring guys like Filip Leu, Theo Jak, Permenant Mark, and others who I idolized. One guy in particular whose interview and pictures inspired me to the point that I set my plan for my entire tattooing career on his example. This artist was an American like me but had eschewed the street shop and “low com denom” flash ( as in; mediocre art which appealed to the greatest number of uninformed tattoo public) that was my world at the time in favor of having a private studio off the street, doing large scale Asian inspired work, and generally avoiding all the trappings of cheesy tattoodom. Despite the fact that I was a pretty bad to average tattooer at the time something in the this guys approach resonated with me and right then, a mere 2 years into tattooing I decided that someday I would be doing that kind of work in that kind of environment.

Pretty lofty for a guy who couldn’t pull a straight line or draw better than a high schooler, but I knew that the goal was something for the future.

After a long time I got better at tattooing, and eventually did open my own shop off the street, doing mostly larger Asian stuff, with few of the trappings of cheesy tattoodom. In short, I actually did reach the goal I set in 1997, I never forgot that interview, and I still don’t know to this day if my life would look the way it does if I had read that piece. I was, and am, grateful to that tattooer for their inspiration, I would occasionally look for their work in books or online, but nothing really new seemed to show up.

Enter Instagram. I saw this persons comment on another tattooers thread a month or so ago and was really happy, at last I would get to see their newer work! Maybe I would write this person telling them how inspirational they had been to me. So I clicked on their name and was shocked. There was a few nice pieces but in general it was pretty average, and surprisingly, it was worse than the artists stuff I had seen in the 90′s! I kept following their work for a few weeks but eventually “un-followed” them, I use Instagram to be inspired by people who are killing it, people who I may never be as good as, but who inspire me to try anyway, and this persons work wasn’t anymore.

I want to make it clear that I am not saying that this artist is “bad” or that I am better than they, I also still owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude for showing me what was possible outside of the tiny fishbowl of tattooing I had lived in, but it was still a disappointment.

For little while anyway.

A strange thing happens when we have our illusions dissolved, even apparently beneficial ones like the inspirational illusion I had all those years ago. Assuming that we dont run right out and fill the void with another delusion (which is what we usually do) a space is opened up for the truth to sit where the illusion had been. I found myself suddenly inspired to draw a particular set of 1/2 sleeves that had been poking around in the back of my mind, I had a weird rush of new ideas fora big project we will be announcing soon, I suddenly felt at peace with my (slow but steady) progress in my own tattooing. In short, I like to think that letting that image go opened me up to new inspiration.

Illusions (and delusion) are a part of human nature, you can’t stop them for happening but we can learn to let them go. Sometimes we can do it quickly, like when we look at a menu at Arby’s and think ” that’s gonna taste good” and 10 minutes later feel like throwing up. Other times we have been indoctrinated with them from so early on that we don’t even realize its a delusion til something happens to shock us out of it (like realizing that getting a bunch of money and power still doesn’t stop us being miserable). But the end of an illusion is a wonderful opportunity, the humanizing of our heroes is a wonderful opportunity to be inspired by something greater and one person or ideal, it’s a chance to be inspired by the truth, by yourself, by all of us (which, coincidentally, are all the same thing anyway.)

Fear

In Buddhism there are three big reasons why we are suffering, and every other smaller reason can be chalked up to one of these three big ones. I’ve talked before about greed and ignorance, but right now the one I see most prevalent around us is fear. If these three poisons, as we call them, are the cause of all of life’s suffering, then perhaps none has caused quite so much actual death, destruction, and mayhem as fear. We’re living in a time when we as a society, at least in the Western world, live, work, create, and exist in an atmosphere of fear. It pervades everything around us, and we are so engulfed by it, so conditioned to accept it as a natural way of things, that we are like a fish who swims in the ocean and never knows that he is in water, we breathe the fear and exhale anger. even those of us on the supposed peaceful path have a lot of anger. And it doesn’t require taking a very hard look to realize how extremely poisonous and harmful of a world this has created for us.

Lets take a look to the news for an example; right now in the United States is a huge debate about gun control, this is mostly the result of a series of tragic mass killings and a growing realization on the part of the average citizen of the extraordinary number of deaths related to firearms in this country. Frankly, my point in this labor is not to take a side, but to simply to show what an environment of fear can do to an otherwise rational debate. If you asked somebody who is against gun control why they don’t want any form of restriction on firearms you can get all kinds of answers that relate to home security or personal safety or hunting, but just getting a little deeper and asking why they are against even seemingly benign and reasonable restrictions you find that 90% of them, the people who are hard-core gun enthusiasts let’s say, will tell you that the real reason they don’t want any restriction at all on firearms is because they feel it is their only defense against our own government. In other words these folks really believe that at any moment an American Nazi-type regime Gestapo could come in and try to ” take over”, and for these folks it  is a perfectly reasonable line of argument to say we should have absolutely no restrictions on guns that we should allow the amazing number of killings that we have every single year, and that we should allow tragedies like dozens of schoolkids being shot in mass killings to occur because of a Fear of some fantasy attempt at a ” takeover “occurring. It’s kind of like deciding that we should all live underground concrete bunkers because one day the moon men might come down and try to take our women. The likelihood is almost exactly the same of these two events occurring, and yet otherwise rational people act and believe like this ridiculous notion could occur and furthermore they surround themselves, their families, their neighbors, with frightening firepower and ignore all the studies which are shown that they are far more likely to harm their own children or spouse or themselves than to ever defend themselves from any outside force.

You want talk about one another example that it’s a bit less politically hot? Did you know that up until the turn of the 20th century there was no such thing as mouthwash for bad breath? oh i am sure it existed and that people didn’t like it, but it wasn’t considered a big enough deal to have a whole separate product for it. All it took was one genius to write that first ads tagline along the lines of “I would marry her, but that breath!” And now we have a multimillion dollar industry dedicated to making our breath not smell. The company wanted to sell a product, and so created a fear that has now lasted for 100 years and probably never go away. Need more examples?  All it takes is a cursory glance at magazines from the late 1800s to realize that what was once considered a healthy body would today be considered obese. Once again a company(s) wanted to sell a product (or several million products in the case of weight loss and body image) and so they created a fear. Millions of us torture ourselves worrying about whether our bodies are too fat, smelly, dark, or light. Fear is a natural state but these days it is being used for profoundly unnatural reasons by people for both political and financial gain.

It’s incredibly liberating reach a certain age or meditate long enough to get up with the fear and to decide to stop feeling it. And it really does happen that way by the way, one day for whatever reason, you just get tired of accepting it. At least if you’re lucky, there’s a lot of people out there watching news pundits, reading inflammatory website,s believing in obscure ridiculous conspiracies who never get tired of the fear, but man,  it’s got a be like drinking poison every day though. No matter how much you think you like the taste, and a how immune you think you are, there comes a time when  this will finally beat you down and destroy your health so thoroughly that you ceased to be functional.

FDR is famous for having created a quote” the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” that quote might be more accurate now than even when he when he came up with it during the Great Depression. Fortunately, there is a way out of the fear trap. And like most solutions to the complicated problems of our lives the solution seems goes against the conditioning that we have been indoctrinated with her whole lives. In the same illogical way that the only way to cure hate is with love and the only way to cure intolerance is by understanding the intolerant, it turns out the only way to cure fear is to let ourselves be vulnerable. To accept that these things that happen in our lives are not the end of the world and to see that the real drama and trouble doesn’t come from outside of us but from our own minds. It is true that our nation in particular is subject to pernicious dosing of fear from those who use it to control us ( the  gun manufacturers and weight-loss companies and fashion magazines and news pundits make their living because we are fearful) and they do a very good job of convincing us that we need fear, but we don’t. At the end of the day they are afraid, they are afraid of us no longer being afraid. All those groups who make a profit of our paranoia live in mortal fear that one day we will not air each other that we will realize how alike we really are, that we will get to know our neighbors not as foes or potential competition but as people who are very much like us trying to live lives very much like the ones we wish to live. And to start to live this way is the ultimate middle finger in the face of fear, to say “I refuse to drink your poison.”

tragedy

What do you say about the mass murder of a bunch of grade school kids, their teachers, and the devastation that is left on a day like today? There is nothing but outrage and sadness and I, like most people, have my own favorite people who I want to blame for this horrible event. There seems to be no justice or righteousness in this world, there can be nothing to justify such an act nor can any of our petty political views touch the enormous sadness and futility of such an event. I am a Buddhist and I meditate and yet all I want to do is yell and scream in the faces of those who I blame for enabling a damaged fucking asshole to murder 20 children. I want to punch every person blabbing about the second amendment in their mouth til they are spitting teeth and shove their heads into the piles of gore left over in a Connecticut school and say “see, motherfucker!?”

But the fact is that I know that’s not the problem, lots of people have guns and don’t murder random strangers and children. A maniac with nothing more exotic than a pick up truck could kill just as many folks by running them over. The tool that murder was committed with is an inanimate object, it has no power to act without the person behind it deciding. I personally don’t like guns or people owning guns, but I’m also not so naive that I think that if this psychotic person didn’t have a gun that he wouldn’t have found some other way to murder innocent people. He would have killed someone, several someones, one way or another, the firearms just made it easier.

In the coming days we will hear blame being laid all about, on the mental health system (or lack of it) in our country, on warning signs which were  ignored, blame will be placed on pro and anti gun positions, on schools for not being fortified bunkers and on police for not being psychic. There will be investigation after investigation, the shooters life will be examined under a microscope and at the end of it 27 people will still be dead, and no amount of blame or understanding motivation or political solution will change the fact that one psycho can, for a limited time, run amok and forever destroy the lives of families and the community he or she chooses to terrorize.

Frankly i don’t give a fuck why this person shot those kids. Why wont help me erase the image of their school being evacuated or the mental picture of an adult aiming a weapon at a 10-year-old. Knowing why will only reinforce the idea that “that guy” was the only one capable of doing this horrible thing and reinforcing the lie that none of us could ever, ever do something so evil. The plain fact is that all of us could be that killer, it would only require a traumatic brain injury, a string of bad luck, some bad drugs, a disconnect in the electro-chemical pathways in our brains and any of us could be that person, in military fatigues, shooting at children on a cold December morning. The great danger lies in us not recognizing that potentiality, I’m sure no one thought they could be the one to help round-up victims for the holocaust but in the end it took hundreds of thousands of otherwise innocent German citizens to make the tragedy happen and I bet each and every one of them never dreamed they could be a part of it. We let our government invade Iraq, jail asinine levels of our own citizens, and let our fellow citizens die of easily treatable illness because any time we talk about the shared burden we all have as a society some fucking moron screams “socialism!” I look at the Connecticut school shooter and wonder “how the fuck did they let this happen!?” and yet I am pretty sure that our children will look back on the way we live and treat each other in 2012 and say “how the fuck did they let that happen!?”

In a way we are all part of this asshole murdering those kids today. Not literally, of course, but we partake in a society that agrees to ignore the mentally ill, that chooses to look the other way when one of us is really hurting and clearly in need of some kind of intervention. If the shooter today was my neighbor I wouldn’t know his name the way i don’t know any of my current neighbors names. I wouldn’t know if he threatened to shoot up a grade school before he did it, and I wouldn’t think it was any of my business if he wanted to buy 14 guns. I (we) live in a world now where our outrage at an event can be soothed by writing an angry post on Facebook, where “tackling the problem” means hitting the “like” button on some witty political post. I look at my new baby daughter sleeping and wonder if I can ever send her off to school in a world where someone like this guy can go so far down the fucking rabbit hole that killing children seems like the only thing he can do and never have it recognized by anybody!?

We need to wake up. We, and im including myself in this, need to really take a look at our world,( the real one not the fucking fantasy that television and the internet sells us) and realize that we can not do this alone. Any of it. We can’t live this close to each other, we can’t depend on each other so much and still pretend that we are all fucking individual cowboys who don’t owe anyone else a fucking thing but that we ourselves are owed everything. A society that looks out for all of its citizens gets the warning signs when one of us goes kookoo and starts planning to shoot a school up! If we stopped looking at everyone else as competition and realized how much we need each other just to keep this crazy civilization functioning then maybe we could see when one of us is becoming unbalanced and say “hey, maybe we should talk to that guy” instead of blaming the “authorities” for not doing our jobs for us!

I don’t know. there is no easy solution, I know. But I have to believe that if we, as a country, a culture, and a society decide to start taking responsibility for each other then maybe we could be spared a few days like today. Obviously what we are doing now isn’t good enough to keep 20 little kids alive.

Ink Master?

I don’t watch the reality television show “Ink Master”. I have tried to watch a few episodes but it’s just not my thing, I don’t hate it or care enough about it to get riled up about its existence. I don’t expect the world to change to suit my needs and if a television show is not to my liking I simply choose to turn it off. Lots of folks in the tattoo world get extremely angry when something relating to tattooing is presented in a way they find distasteful, and tattoo television shows usually generate a ton of vitriol. However the fact that these shows continue to be made means that someone is making money off them so I don’t expect them to disappear as long as that is the case. I don’t like stepping in dog shit but I wouldn’t go around demanding that all dogs have their assholes sewn shut.  My vote it to simply not watch tattoo television shows.

Imagine my surprise when a friend sent me a cell phone picture of a tattoo that was on a recent episode of Ink Master season 2. It was a picture of this tattoo:

Which I immediately recognized as a copy of some flash I painted last year that looked like this:

Heh.

Let me state right away that I was not mad about this at all. The design in question is flash, it is designed to be sold and reproduced. If I have any beef at all, it’s that the tattooer in question should have stuck to using the clouds I put on the original (his are terrible) and that one of the episode judges said it looked “like a man in a tiger suit humping a rock”. (although that is actually pretty fucking funny.) Yes, I watched the episode online once I found out about my flash making a “guest appearance”.

Frankly I think that if a tattooer can not draw his own tiger better than me then I’m all for him or her using flash for this purpose. At the end of the day the highest we can aim for as tattooers is giving the clients something  they can be proud to wear, I’m not sure if this tattoos counts as that, but I shudder to think of what this tattooer would have drawn on their own. So, to be clear, Im totally OK with my flash having been used, in a way its flattering to think that this guy figured my version of a tiger was better than anything he could come up with himself, but that does lead to a question. . .

The (ridiculous) premise of the show is that the people in the contest represent the best tattooers out there and that by the end of the contest one of them will be deemed the “Ink Master“. In other words, one of the contestants will come out having been crowned the “best tattooer in the world”. Of course this is silly on many levels including the fact that the worlds best tattooers don’t try out for this sort of side-show and the idea that an “Ink Master” is someone who does each and every style of tattooing with equal proficiency is, frankly, stupid. There are many talented tattooers who are good at a wide array of styles, but no one does every single kind of tattoo with equal skill, the very best in fact do the opposite by focusing on one or two particular areas of tattooing.

But even granting this silly notion that the winner of this show will be the “Ink Master” should said master of inking not be able to draw his or her own tattoo? Judging by the tattoo of my flash I very much doubt that the artist in question is an “ink master” and the fact that they didn’t bother to draw their own work even knowing it will be seen by millions of television viewers tells me that they probably should still be an apprentice rather than a prospective “master”.

The Baby

Cara was due, she was actually over due. At 42 weeks we were trying every crazy method known to start labor. Yet nothing seemed to work at kickstarting her uterus into “eject” mode, and while contractions were in short supply, advice was not. Lots of well meaning folk had put in their 2 cents over the previous 42 weeks and we certainly appreciated the concern, but at this point we had heard it all. Many. Many times.

Once a pregnancy gets to being “overdue” there is a lot of pressure to induce labor. Some of this comes from the medical industry and their desire to minimize costs by industrializing birth. But there are also very real physical problems which can arise and while we wanted as natural of a birth as possible, we also didnt want to put the baby or Cara in danger. Our dream of a birth at the midwife center ended when they broke her water and found more myconeum (a.k.a. Baby poop) in the fluid than they were comfortable with. A trip to the hospital was in order, and getting contractions started was the mission.

The answer was a drug called Pitocin and it causes contractions. Strong contractions. So strong that many folks are forced to use other drugs to offset the tremendous pain. Eventually many women who went in wanting a natural birth end up with epidurals or Caesarian sections. Sadly once the medical ball gets rolling, it ends up being very hard to stop. Fortunately for us a fairly low dose seemed all that was required and by 2am her body was beginning to draw up an eviction notice for our little bundle of joy. Despite not being at the midwife center Cara wanted as natural a birth as possible. So one of the midwives, our doula, a nurse, and myself were the only crew. As my wife rode wave after wave of contractions I provided counter pressure on her back, or sat in front of her as she stood (!) only leaning over a yoga ball to grip my hands as each spasm came and went. It was amazing and inspiring as she moaned these animal cries and rumbled low breaths in through her nose and out through her mouth with long, impossibly long notes. It wasn’t screaming or yelling, it was closer to a lions throaty roar than anything.

We opened the window blinds to the birthing room, outside was a panorama of Pittsburghs south side and in between her contractions I would look out the window and a strange thought popped into my head. It was deeply dark aside from the lights of the many buildings, and even if I didn’t know what time it was looking at the old hospital clock over my panting wife’s left shoulder, I would have known it was deep deep night. 3am, 4am, the kind of dark where dawn seems a long way off and even with this I knew , somehow, that when that sun came up our baby would be here.

They say “ignorance is bliss” and they also say ” a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” and we had taken classes and read enough books that I knew when her contractions went from 30 to 60 second waves to monsters that lasted over a minute and came so close that she couldn’t stand up and sway between them the way she had for hours and hours earlier that the time for pushing was nearly on us. Throughout the hours of labor she had never asked for drugs, she had never said ” I can’t do this” had complained only of being tired, but when those transition contractions hit her I saw a look of fear that hand not been there before, it said “I’m not sure I can do this”. It was 6 o clock and she asked the midwife if it would be possible to take something for the pain, the midwife told her that the next midwife on duty would be there soon, to hold on til 7 and then they could see.

Cara decided to tough it out until 7, and sucked up these mega contractions breathing and moaning. When the tiny merciful breaks between came she would stand up and we would both look into the pitch blackness out the window. At this point the only things the doula or I could say to her was “you can do it!” Nothing else mattered but that thought. That one hour seemed like a dozen and when I next looked out the window an orange glow was in the sky over the Southside, just before seven the next midwife came in, after the midwife checked her cervix,Cara asked ” can I take something?” And the midwife laughed saying “No, you are having this baby now!”

And she was!

She crawled onto the hospital bed on all fours, the transition contractions seemed to have subsided. All of the sudden she didn’t need me to squeeze her hands or the doula to press on her hips, she was almost totally silent. The midwife coached and told her when to push and how well she was doing, the sky was almost completely lit up with a new morning. I stood up by her head, one hand resting on her shoulder when the nurse told me “go look down there!” I was scared, I am not good with gory movies or blood, but I couldn’t miss this and my wife was oblivious of everything around her having entered a truly animal state. No more pep talk, no more squeezing, her body took over and everything modern fell away. Like her primitive ancestors had done in thatch huts and stone caves she pushed the baby out on instinct and internal strength alone. I might as well have been the hat rack at this point so i went to look at where the action was! As I peeped around her thigh I saw that the entire top of our baby’s head was already, irrevocably out! I was amazed, I couldnt tell whether I was standing or sitting, I felt like my nose was inches from my baby’s face as first one eyebrow, then eye came out, and with that the head popped out with a squirt of fluid, the midwife efficiently and casually flipped the umbilical cord from around the babies neck, worked the shoulders free with another squirt of goo and there was our baby!

Cara, turned around, still on all fours and an amazing smile broke out across her sweaty face! She did it! They whisked the baby to a bassinet to clear its lungs of the dreaded myconeum, everything was fine, I got 3 or 4 thumbs up from the mass of extra nurses and pediatrician who suddenly appeared in the room.

The sun was beaming in the room, my baby began crying , someone yelled to us “it’s a girl!”

Cara looked at me with the brightest eyes, beaming like the sun itself and whispered “it’s a girl!!”