Hey, remember the Working-Class Cyborg article, in which I profiled Rob Spence? Well, we’ve got a fancy video accompaniment now! Many thanks to Chris McMillan (IAM) for all his work behind the camera and editing!
So, if you’ve been around the Internets once or twice, you probably know the lovely Molly McAleer, formerly of Defamer and other various hilarious online ventures. (She even beat Christina Hendricks for “Best Newcomer Boner” on Boner Party! The Internet is a magical place.) Well, now she’s hosting The Molls Show, and wouldn’t you know it, she just had BME’s own Rachel on as a guest to answer a very special question about tattoos. The whole episode is fun, but if it’s just Rachel’s soaring soprano you wish to hear, skip ahead to the 2:00 mark. And then go back and watch the rest of it.
And finally, this wild Alice in Wonderland backpiece comes to us from Victor, who designed it alongside his tattoo artist, the very talented Estella Cavalcanti from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
What else came up through the rabbit-hole this week, folks?
- We posted a great interview with Rob Spence, the working-class cyborg.
- Peter finished his body-suit, 20 years in the making.
- All the creatures of the forest assembled for a lovely tea party!
- Guess what? Jenni has a wang in her ear.
- Nobody lounges harder than BME Boys.
So goes the week, friends. Go enjoy the weekend—we’ll be here every so often, and then it’s back to normal on Monday morning. Until then, stay safe, have fun and, as always, thank you for your continued support of BME.
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[The Celebrity Cafe] Well well well, guess who’s too good for his tattoos all of a sudden? That chump over on the right, Mister Fancy Hip Hop Producer Pharrell, who you may remember from occasionally whistling and snapping his fingers in the background of Snoop Dogg songs. (OK, he did a fine job on that last Clipse album, too.) Anyway, Johnny Jackerson there used to have all kinds of tattoos, but that era has come to an end! Because he is an adult.
Although Pharrell would not give exact numbers, he did say that regardless of the price he plans to go ahead with the surgery.
“It’s going to be pricey, but worth it,” he says. “I got fire on my arms! I’m a grown man!”
Some vicious Internet rumors, however, have suggested that he is just going to fill his arms right back up with the devil’s ink, and this was just a means to start with a blank canvas. Although this was a laser procedure, that wasn’t always the plan! At first, Pharrell was looking into some experimental grafting process in which the tattoos wouldn’t actually be removed at all, but would have instead been covered with brand new skin, grown on some horrific eugenics flesh farm.
[He] is trying a revolutionary new tattoo removal procedure, which involves applying replicated skin over old body art.
“It’s basically like getting a skin graft, but you’re not taking skin from your ass or your legs. These guys actually grow the skin for you,” he explained to Vogue. “First you have to give them a sample of your skin, which they then replicate. Once that’s been done, they sew it on - and it’s seamless.”
On his blog, however, he wrote, “Laser treatment bitches! Extra crispy. See, no skin graft here, just pure laser pain. This is our own version of Mythbusters! Laser is the new primer.” See, Rob? Some people absolutely do Twitter from the emergency room.
[KMPH] And this just isn’t funny at all. Local Fresno, California, shitbag Enrique Gonzalez, a Bulldog gang member, held down his seven-year-old son while some other fool tattooed a paw print onto the kid’s stomach.
Police discovered the tattooed child on Monday, and soon after arrested the man responsible for the tattoo; 20-year-old Travis Gorman of Fresno. Gorman, a parolee, was arrested on Tuesday, and booked into the Fresno County Jail after he was positively identified by the child as the man who tattooed him. Tattoo paraphernalia was also discovered during his arrest.
Admittedly, everything I know about California gangs I learned from watching The Shield, but that show sure made it seem like gangs down there just willy-nilly tattoo people they consider their property. Whatever happened to just wearing distinctive colors? I miss the ’90s sometimes.
[Guardian] Finally, we’ve mentioned former Palin-child-beau Levi Johnston and his ring-finger tattoo commemorating his love for the former vice-presidential candidate’s daughter, Bristol, but the happy pair of teenagers have called it quits! Now Levi is doing a press tour, showing up anywhere that will have him, trying to squeeze some money out of the situation. Well, last night, he and his clan were on CNN’s Larry King Live, finally answering the question all of America was waiting for: Why’d you get that tattoo instead of wearing a ring, fella?
During a bizarre exchange, King asked to see the “Bristol” tattoo on Johnston’s finger. King asked Johnston why he got the tattoo: “You know, I was - I was hunting again and I lost the ring that she gave me. And it was bad so I figured … this way I wouldn’t lose it and it would get me out of a bind, you know,” Johnston said.
We all know the jury is perpetually out on whether it’s a good idea to get the name of a sexytime partner tattooed on you, but there are many compelling cases to be made for doing that sort of thing. This may not be one of them.
[My Fox Philly] Well here’s a charming story about people fulfilling their civic duties! The good folks at Dreamline Ink in South Jersey were just minding their own business when a clean-cut, well-dressed young man named Robert Champion strolled in and confessed to a bank robbery. He probably told them, of all people, because tattoo parlors are known hang-outs for criminals of all stripes, and he thought they’d get a kick out of it.
When Anthony McElhinney asked why, the 19-year-old told him he’d just robbed a couple banks.
“He told me one bank, $2500, and the other bank, $500. I asked him ‘What’s the point? and he goes, ‘Well, I don’t know. Just something to do,’” recalls Anthony McElhinney of Dreamline Ink.
But it hadn’t turned out the way Robert Champion had expected, because surveillance cameras captured him in the act.
“He just told me he wrote it on a bank slip and he walked up to the teller and said ‘Give me this money, I’m robbing your bank,’” tells McElhinney.
Following one of his million-dollar heists, Champion went to the tattoo studio to get some work done, made an appointment for a later date and left a deposit. But! After catching himself on television (because of the surveillance cameras, you see), he went back to the tattoo shop, asked for his deposit back and confessed. McElhinney jotted down his license plate number and phoned the police, who promptly arrested the thief. The best part of the story, though, by far, is this:
What’s ironic, the tattoo was to say: “Champion.”
“I guess he didn’t live up to his name, you know,” says [tattoo artist Vinnie] Ferragame.
Immediately following this joke, Vinnie Ferragame was cast in a brand new Fox sitcom, beginning this fall.
[Philadelphia Inquirer] Today’s irony report comes from Tim Johnson, who writes about a fun new trend developing all over China: Chinese people getting tattoos of words! English words. This is funny because ever since tattoos were invented in the 1970s, Westerners have been known to get Chinese characters tattooed all over them, sometimes with very wrong interpretations of the actual words or phrases they wanted, and now, because of globalization, the shoe is on the other foot.
“It’s better looking and simpler than Chinese,” said Zhang Hui, as he pulled his shirt off to display his former girlfriend’s name tattooed in Roman letters between his shoulder blades.
His new girlfriend slunk to the back of the room.
“The English looks better,” agreed Rocky Feng, a 24-year-old teacher shopping for a tattoo in a backroom parlor in north Beijing.
While tattooing isn’t quite illegal in China, it occupies something of a grey area, according to the article. Many shops, however, have been opening lately in the country (and flourishing), albeit in back alleys and people’s homes.
Zhang’s cousin, who said her name was Ting Ting, showed off part of a vertical tattoo that dropped down her back - in Greek.
“I think it says ‘I’ll love you forever,’ ” she said. “I didn’t have any particular reason. I just liked the way the Greek letters looked.”
It was actually a recipe for spanakopita. The cycle continues!
[Augusta Free Press] Hoo boy, now here is some ridiculous jabbering. Bruce Sallan, a former television producer, has written this brilliant op-ed column for the Augusta Free Press, which I swear to God reads like a parody of every crotchety old man article ever written. Can you believe he was a free spirited rock and roller when he was a young man? It’s true!
My parents’ tastes in music, fashion, and politics, my Mom’s helmet-style hair-do, which required weekly visits to the hair salon, were all stupid, old-fashioned, and ugly. It was inconceivable to me that they didn’t dig or see how groovy The Doors, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, or The Stones were. The fact that most of them died of drug overdoses escaped me at the time (e.g. Brian Jones of The Stones in case you think I’ve missed something).
[...]
So, when I became a parent, I was sure I’d appreciate and respect my children’s tastes because they’d probably just be the same as mine. I’d enjoy their music, their hairstyles, their fashions, etc.
But I bet that’s not what happened, is it!
First, there was rap.
Shit!
Then, tattoos and piercings. And, my favorite, wearing pants that fall down to the bottom of their butts.
Ha ha, Bruce Sallan’s “children” are really just composites of every early-2000s “rebellious” stereotype. I BLAME GANGSTER RAPPER MARILYN MANSON.
While my teen is not allowed to have tattoos, or piercings, he makes up for it by coming home with tattoo sleeves penned at school, in class, by various of his friends. (Bet you don’t know what that term means. OK, I won’t make you search on Google, as it won’t be in your dictionary…hmmm, when’s the last time your kid looked up a word in a dictionary or you did, for that matter? A tattoo sleeve, as the word sleeve implies, is a tattoo that covers the entire arm, up to the shoulder).
Yeah, what’s up with kids not using dictionaries anymore? OR YOU, THE READER OF THIS ERUDITE PROSE, FOR THAT MATTER? Luckily, master explorer Bruce Sallan is here to do the dirty work for you, explaining what the fuck a “tattoo” “sleeve” might be. He clearly thought it was some sort of raunchy sex position when he first heard it.
Now, as a parent we all know that we have to pick our battles and my teen son knows that tattoos and piercings are not going to happen in our house. In spite of it being against our religion, he’d love to have a tongue piercing, a death skull tattoo or, at the very least huge pierced earrings, as many of his teen friends have at ages as young as 14.
Luckily, those kids are going to hell for exposing their underpants to the good people of Agoura, California.
A little while ago, Phil and I spent the evening with Rob Spence, the gentleman in the above photo. When he was a boy, his right eye was severely damaged in a shooting accident. Three years ago, he finally had it removed. Now, he’s not satisfied with a vacant lot in his face, and, with the help of a brilliant young engineer, is trying to build a miniature video camera he can wear as a prosthetic eye. We talked about the difficulties of being a recession-era cyborg, whether he’s setting a bad example for future generations, how to get laid as an amputee, and much, much more. If nothing else, go read it just to see Phil’s wonderful photography. (And there’ll some great video from Chris coming soon, too!)
To read Working-Class Cyborg, please click here.
[Ed. note: Comments on this post have been disabled. Run amok in the forum attached to the article. Thanks.]
“Mommy, can I go out and kill tonight?”
“Now, now, you know what day it is. Just go pull your sister’s hair and burn the cat’s tail before bed.”
Sigh. Better luck next time, little buddy.
(Tattoo on Medic by Dave at Pikes Peak Tattoo in Colorado Springs, Colorado.)
And just like that, our broadcast week comes to a close. What kind of mischief was there this time?
- The unholy trinity of scarification appeared…to mixed results.
- “Guess What?” made its triumphant return with a tough challenge.
- Alice is more man than we could ever hope to be.
- Hey, these scarifications are healing rather nicely!
- The ihung team made good use of this mysterious alien structure that landed in someone’s backyard.
- This wildlife sleeve is as real as it gets.
- Well…hello.
And that’s that. We’ll be here over the weekend as per usual, hopefully getting a few updates from this weekend’s Dallas SusCon, and maybe even taking a break to enjoy this beautiful patio weather.
I can’t help but feel like we’re forgetting something, though…
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| © Markus Cuff Photo 2009 |
Markus Cuff has been cooperative so far, but now he’s stiff-arming me. We’ve been on the phone for a good half-hour or so, having a perfectly pleasant conversation about his 15 years as one of the top photographers at Tattoo magazine, and now this? He gives me the high-hat over a harmless, standard interview question?
“How old are you?” I ask with my typical childlike sweetness and wonder.
“I’m, uh….” He stops himself short. What have you got to hide, Cuff? “I’m 103,” he finally says. “My age is a closely guarded secret.”
“You can be vague,” I tell him. “Just say you’re ‘something-ish.’”
“‘Something-ish,’” he repeats, and pauses again. “A hundred and three.”
Whatever, wise guy. I’m only asking because his story makes it seem like he’s lived through (and contributed to) a number of seminal cultural moments, and these life experiences just seem a little incongruous with his lively, almost boyish voice. But, sure…103.
What he tells me is by the time he got around to photography, he already felt like he was late to the game. If he’d started in earnest as a teenager, he could have been going to concerts and shooting bands like Led Zeppelin and Cream, guys like Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn, and maybe he could published a retrospective book by now, making money off portraits of rock gods. He saw others go that route, but while his potential peers were chasing fame as photographers, Cuff, the boy from suburban Maryland, home of Link Wray, took a detour and made a name for himself as a musician instead. He spent two years handling the drum kit for Emmylou Harris’s band, touring and playing on her Pieces of the Sky album. Some time in the late seventies/early eighties, he moved to Los Angeles and ended up playing in The Textones with Carla Olson and Kathy Valentine (the latter of whom would go on to join The Go-Gos), hitting the L.A. club circuit with bands like X and The Blasters.
It was there in L.A., though, that he made friends with some kids who were taking photo classes at Santa Monica College, and Cuff, who had once long ago learned how to develop prints from black and white film, felt that old passion start to warm. “I looked at their work,” he says, “and thought, ‘Damn! I know I could do as well as that! I think I’m a lot more artistic than these people!’ And I think it just sort of clicked with me—no pun intended.”
As a teenager in Maryland, Cuff would spend a lot of time in D.C.’s cultural institutions—the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian, the Freer Gallery of Art—that allowed visitors in gratis. He developed a taste for Hokusai woodcuts and other Asian-style pieces, but more generally developed and nurtured an inclination towards the visual arts—an inclination that would lie dormant during his musical excursions, that is, until he joined his friends at SMC, where he excelled. He got a lot of A’s. He immersed himself in photography. He sorted out his influences: Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, Robert Frank and Walker Evans, and, of course, the master as far as he’s concerned, Irving Penn, who he calls a “dynamo of photography.”
“I don’t think anyone’s ever been as versatile as he is,” he says of Penn, who’s shot everything from portraiture and fashion to cosmetic ads and the “mud men of New Guinea.”
None of this should come as a surprise. A young, eager photographer falling in love with the classical beacons of the art form? Sure, and next you’ll tell me there are freshman philosophers with things for Freud. But what happened next was Cuff, instead of shooting tulips and teapots, got picked up in 1990 by the magazine Easyriders and started photographing motorcycles. “That was fine with me,” he says. “I needed a job.”
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| Mike Rubendall / © Cuff |
Except it was luckier than that. When he wasn’t hanging out at galleries or playing drums in his younger days, he was going to car shows, reading hotrod magazines and trying to copy the custom car designs of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth on white T-shirts with felt-tip pens. He had experience dealing with insular communities of people who liked to go fast—motorcycles were a breeze. But Easyriders didn’t just traffic in bikes; their roster of magazines also included Tattoo and its sister publications, Flash and Savage. In 1994, Billy Tinney, the editor-in-chief and senior photographer for Tattoo, tapped him for a special assignment: To start shooting profiles of tattoo shops in Los Angeles for the magazine. It was an era, Cuff says, when tattooing was still somewhat underground. “This was before you were seeing [tattoos] on every basketball player, every football player,” he tells me, “and way before things like Ed Hardy shirts and Affliction.
“I thought to myself, ‘This is mighty…niche. I wonder where this could ever go?’”
Cuff’s first assignment was to shoot Greg James and the crew at Sunset Strip Tattoo, or, as he describes it, “baptism by fire.” He was accompanied by two other editors under the Tattoo umbrella, Frenchie Nilsen and Dave Nichols, to make sure he knew what he was doing and that he was the guy for whom they were looking. Sure enough, he didn’t freak out or soil himself or anything of the sort. And the tattoo artists? Well, they took to him quickly, too, he says. But I’m not buying it. If he’s not going to tell me his goddamn age, I figure the least he can do is give me some dirt about the vicious hazing he must have faced at the hands of these old school bad-asses…except he doesn’t budge. “I’m kind of a get-along guy,” he says with such sincere cheer that I know it has to be the truth. It’s becoming apparent that this is a guy who trades in gaining access to the famously inaccessible, and that’s the sort of station that requires either authenticity of personality or a high tolerance for fakery. After nearly two decades behind the lens, though, it strikes me that the latter would be too exhausting to cling to.
With Sunset Strip Tattoo in the can, Cuff was anointed “the local guy.” He hit shops all over the city, photographing their interiors, exteriors, staff and clients, building records for each. There are only so many local shops to cover over a year’s worth of issues, though, let alone four or five years’ worth, so the magazine started sending him on the road, first to San Francisco and San Diego and Santa Barbara, and eventually to Phoenix and Portland, New York City and Boston, Hawaii and Tahiti. He learned as he went along, though he still says he wouldn’t consider himself an expert. When he went to Tahiti, he picked up a book about the history of tattooing on the island and, when taking refuge from the heat, read about the English and Russian explorers who came to the island and left with tattoos, only to be gawked at back home like circus animals. It’s in these more “exotic” locales that he typically feels more compelled to educate himself about the culture. “The more literal kind of old school, classic American-style tattoo is a little more understandable,” he says. “It has symbolism, but it’s something you grow up with. You see someone walking by with a sailor-style tattoo and you don’t think it’s that strange. With the island tattooing, I felt like I had to study it a bit more.”
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| The Dutchman / © Cuff 2009 |
One of his greater thrills was getting the chance to photograph The Dutchman and his Dutchman Tattoos Studio and Gallery in Burnaby, British Columbia, a few years ago—partially due to admiration, but also because no one had photographed the artist in years. “He pointed to an old article on the wall,” Cuff says of The Dutchman, “and said, ‘See? We’ve been done before.’ And it was from the ’80s! I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”
But some of his favorite studios are back on the mainland. He raves about Mike Rubendall’s Kings Avenue Tattoo in Massapequa, New York, to which he’s made several professional visits. “The level of the artistry is just so high,” he says. “There’s never one image that comes in front of my lens where I think, ‘Oh no, how am I going to do this?’ or, ‘I’m going to delete this after I leave.’ Because that does happen.” One of Cuff’s biggest pet peeves when shooting clients’ tattoos is going home afterward, looking at the images on his computer, and realizing that someone has tried to sneak a cover-up past him.
“All power to those who can do cover-ups,” he says, “but for me it doesn’t work. I see something underneath the other image and it bothers me, especially nobody’s told me it was a cover-up.”
At this point, he’s got shop-shooting down to a science. Shops are approached far enough in advance to allow time for the artists to contact clients to come in and be photographed, and once shows up and sets up his lights, it’s all business, blowing through an average of 25 clients a day, in addition to any supplementary photos of the shop itself and staff. There are no assistants, no make-up artists, no hair dressers, so part of his success and peace of mind can hinge on the cooperation of his subjects, some of whom, he says, go above and beyond. It’s not uncommon for shops to assign counter staff to handle photo releases and other paperwork and to supply him with coffee and muffins. Beyond that, though, the ingredients for a great photo shoot are somewhat expected. “Some hot girls are always fun,” he says. “It’s always great when you see someone who has it all together. Great makeup, hair, cool clothes…it’s a great feeling and makes my job pretty easy.”
Most shops, he says, have had a convivial atmosphere during shoots, but there have been exceptions. Occasionally, he’s had shoots where he’ll take a staff photo early in the morning, and then need to take another one in the evening—because someone was fired or quit during the day. “That’s not a horrible thing for me,” he says, “but it definitely makes you think, ‘Hey, there’s some drama going on around here.’”
All of this—the travel, the education, the meetings and greetings and inside baseball—and yet, Cuff himself does not have a single tattoo of his own. Sure, he has his reasons—he’s very light-skinned and prefers long-sleeved shirts, so he wouldn’t ever show one off; he doesn’t work out assiduously and isn’t going to be flexing in the weight room with a pinup girl on his biceps—but he largely abstains because he considers himself a sort of cultural anthropologist in the tattoo world. “I’ve dropped in via photography,” he says, “and I’m documenting a world. I don’t necessarily have to participate actively to document it well.” He analogizes the fact that he doesn’t have tattoos to the common phenomenon of great fashion photographers who neither (1) dress well nor (2) walk the runway. “The idea that you have to be a motorcycle rider to shoot motorcycles,” he says, “or a tattooed person to shoot tattoos is kind of a holdover idea from the ’50s and ’60s, when the tattoo and motorcycle cultures were so underground that the only people who were interested in capturing them were from those worlds.” When Easyriders came around, however, Cuff’s focus wasn’t on becoming a biker: It was on becoming a great photographer. “I’m a beauty fiend,” he admits. “I’m not trying to expose an underbelly, and I’m not trying to get at somebody and expose their weaknesses. I’m just trying to document things in the most beautiful and flattering way I can.”
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| Justin Weatherholz / © Cuff 2008 |
Following Cuff’s immersion into the world of tattoos, however, he’s experienced a dilemma all too common to the heavily tattooed: a relative lack of mainstream acceptance. Some photographers are able to stack their portfolios with tattoo imagery, he says, “but I don’t think if I sent in my portfolio of images and they were all loaded in that direction that I could get a job with a mainstream ad agency.” He’s approached gallery owners in Los Angeles about potential gallery showings, and has frequently been told of the catch-22 inherent in this sort of work: the people who are more likely to enjoy his work are the least likely to buy it. “It speaks to a certain crowd,” he says of tattoo imagery, “and it’s largely a younger audience, who, in general, is trying to pay their rent, trying to feed themselves, and they don’t have the kind of disposable income an older, moneyed crowd has. So if I print an image fairly large and I mount it and I matte it and frame it and I charge ‘X’ amount of money, it’s something that’s going to appeal to an older audience as far as the quality and presentation, but it’s something that a younger audience is more likely to buy…if they could afford it.”
It’s a tough spot, he admits—all the more reason to not allow himself to get stuck in one niche. As a photographer, he’d love it if people looked at his tattoo work and, in that, saw someone talented enough to do fashion or advertising, or looked at his motorcycle shots and entrusted him with a car campaign. It’s a conundrum for the photographer who worships the versatility of an Irving Penn, yet maintains, “I don’t necessarily want to sell out, I don’t necessarily want to be watered down.” The common thread through all his work, he says, is that he seeks imagery with an edge—work that speaks to what he calls a “knowing audience.” The sort of thing that can be off-putting to people in the “straight world.”
And sure enough, he has branched out: Within his portfolio is his “Wasteland” series, which focuses on broken down, dilapidated rural scenes (with some shots of Hank Williams III included for good measure), as well as some of the live concert photography he missed out on in those early days. “It’s like big-game hunting,” he says of shooting concerts. “You’ve got three songs at the front of a concert. That’s all. You get the thing in your sights and you get it…or you ain’t gonna get it.
“There’s an adrenaline rush when Madonna jumps out on stage; you’ve gotta get a charge out of what you do.”
Nonetheless, he still feels like he’s hustling to catch up and build his body of work. “It’s almost like their classic rock photography is my classic tattoo imagery,” he says of those who jumped on the photography train ahead of him, the artists close to him in age—whatever that is. “Maybe if I live to be 100,” he says, laughing, “there’ll be a retrospective.”
Wait…100? What the hell happened to 103?
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| Dawn Purnell / © Markus Cuff photo 2008 |
Visit Markus online at MarkusCuffPhoto.com.
Please consider buying a membership to BME so we can continue bringing you articles like this one.
Earlier in the week, we posted this tremendous Jesse Smith tattoo, and, for some reason, some people convinced themselves it was Photoshopped in some way. It was not. Here’s another piece—”The backlash of stealing the devil’s pitchfork is massive,” he says of it—and, honestly, if you’re still not convinced, go look at his web site. They’re real, and they’re spectacular. And I don’t break out supremely timely references like that for nothing, friends. Trust.
And that’s the week, folks. What might you have missed?
- Pictograms fell from the sky.
- The fake mustache came to town, and oh, the people rejoiced.
- Everybody was tattooed with misspelled names. Some people reacted more appropriately than others.
- Tattoos + Scars = Thumbs up.
Stick around over the weekend, all. We’ll be here as per usual, keeping the place warm until things turn over and begin anew on Monday. Stay safe, everyone, and, of course, thank you for your continued support of BME. Have a good weekend.
In light of the recent developments with Moonshin Tattoo in Ontario, it seemed fitting to assemble our esteemed panel to discuss government regulation and legislation of body modification: Is it good, bad, or just plain necessary for the industry? And how do you determine what the “industry” even is?
To read BME’s Big Question #8: Regulation Time, please click here.
[Ed. note: Comments on this post have been disabled. Hoot and holler in the forum attached to the article. Thanks.]
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