Tag Archives: tattoos

Stay Sweet

Recently, at the library I work in part-time, an elderly disabled gentleman winked at me as he was leaving, said, “Stay sweet.”

Unfortunately, among the musician, artistic, tattooed set I tend to associate with (um, because I am all of these things), I often find a lot of pretension.

I do. I find a lot of standoffish arrogance outside a select group of folk who are awesome and sweet.

Can’t say he didn’t warn you…

My point being to talk about being sweet. One of my girl friends said to me recently, “We need to toughen you up,” because I’m “too sweet.”

I’ve been pondering being sweet versus being tough for quite some time. When I was a teenager, I thought it was cool to be hard and surly and mean, that people would love me if I was all of those things. I soon learned that being hard and surly and mean attracted others who were hard and surly and mean. (Regardless of how hard, surly and mean I try to be, I’ve always been sweet underneath, so therefore have always had a handful of dear friends no matter what I do. Besides, it’s hard to look surly when your face look like a twenty-year old doll face. Cute and surly don’t work together.)

It’s a tough world out there, and it’s easy to get run over. I’ve noticed many writers and musicians adopting a devil-may-care exterior, being rude and sardonic and cynical to others, only letting a select few in. In the past, I gravitated towards these people (OK, I lie, I still do, but I’m trying not to) because they presented a challenge.

My father said to me once, “You always like to adopt strays,” meaning, people who are bruised, broken or socially inept. I don’t know, maybe because I am or have been all of these things, I have a soft spot for delicate folk with tough exteriors. But I’m getting a bit tired of the challenge in general, I dunno, maybe I’m growing up?

And really, it reflects on me and who I am now. I’m realizing lately, the universe is giving me all sorts of signs, that I can’t always keep people an arms length away. They will get bored. They will leave. A lot of people don’t like a challenge. I may like a challenge, but I’m a rarity, and it probably speaks to my own insecurities that I need to be validated by people who to most others are simply “An asshole I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.”

Some guy was interrogating me the other night. Well, psychoanalyzing me actually, because he was getting his big PhD in Psychology and he maybe wanted to practice it out? I dunno. You tell me.

Anyhow, he said: “You build a big wall up around yourself, so that no one can get to know the real you.”

I was like, “Uuuh…,” because I barely knew him, only that he was a PhD in Psych. “Is it the tattoos and black attire?” I quipped. Really, I think he was speaking specifically about himself being let in in this instance, because the dude wanted a date with a seeming “wild girl.” Bug off, buddy. I’m not as “wild” as you think. Appearances can be deceiving. Go to a sex club.

It’s not really recommended any person let every single person in, in my opinion. We each have all these ropes and hoops and barriers for others to jump through, our manners of selection, our biological assessments, our need for certain kinds of symmetry, for damn good reasons.

But really, I’ve realized recently that I’m not a misanthrope, and I don’t like to isolate. I like getting out there and being a part of things. I like meeting new people. I like making friends. I like to explore and find out new things every day.

At the library, I can get a little surly at times. There are some patrons who yank my chain again and again. If you give them an inch, they want a mile. It’s fear on my part, fear they’ll keep pestering me. But I’ve made a goal to be nicer. There’s just something to letting go of prickly fear and letting people in that changes a life. Sure, you don’t want people to hurt you, but people do hurt people. Maybe not always on purpose, maybe on purpose sometimes, who knows. But if you never risk, you never grow. If you live in a tight sheltered little bubble, never venturing out, you can become really smart and read a lot of books, get a lot done, but if you want to meet people, find out what you can learn from others, you gotta stick your neck out sometimes.

I’ve been hurt in my journey to get out there and meet new people, but not in ways that are impossible to come back from. Just ways that bruised my ego. And perhaps my ego needs bruising. I’d rather be a person people remember as sweet than a person people remember as mean. I’d like to continue to be tough, but maybe only in the way I lift weights and speak my mind and get through seemingly impossible challenges with a smile on my face.

I’d like to stay sweet.

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Punk is an Attitude

People often use the word “punk” to describe me. Something about the fact that I mostly wear black clothing, have tattoos, live in Oakland and play sparse, simple yet melodic music…

It’s not an insult. Punk is more than appearance, though. This is something I was talking to my friend about the other day. “You’re so punk,” someone said to her. She did a mental inventory and thought, “I don’t listen to all the punk music, I don’t dress like a punk, what’s the deal?”

It’s her attitude. Live with less. Fuck money. Do what you love and spend less time working. Eat what you buy. Take society with a grain of salt. Don’t let the man push you down. Fight for what you believe in. Don’t blindly cave in to ideals and traditions, in fact, fuck traditions.

Looking back, I realize my parents had punk attitudes, even though they were liberal artist Mormons. How different can you be, right? But they taught me to question authority, to never feel forced to celebrate consumer holidays, not to blindly take no for an answer, turn off the television, to use my brain when it came to propaganda and subversive advertising and politics, and to follow my dreams, putting my life’s work before money.

They taught me to trust my intuition, something that has helped me navigate religious groups, behavior modification programs and self-help groups without ever completely drinking the kool-aid.

As far as being called punk, usually older punks assume I grew up liking the same bands they did. Many of the old-school punks I associate with are grown up with kids, houses, have settled down from their show-going days, yet still hold a lot of those old punk values and listen to the same music they did back when punk was actually a functioning scene and hadn’t (d)evolved into the current thrash/metal scene. They have some awesome stories…because I was sober and born in the wrong decade, I didn’t experience a lot of those things.

I grew up in the valley, pretty far from any indie record store, so my music consumption was limited mainly to what I could find on the radio and get from BMG music. That meant I listened to a lot of mainstream metal, Black Sabbath, Ozzy, Metallica, a shit ton of grunge, Nirvana, Green Day (okay, punk-pop), Hole, Alice in Chains, and industrial that was also more mainstream but just as good, i.e. Nine Inch Nails, 80′s English post-punk such as The Cure and The Smiths. I found the Sex Pistols and David Bowie through BMG Music, I heard of the Circle Jerks and Black Flag through friends, but it wasn’t until I was much older that friends helped me fill in the gaps with the stuff I would’ve died to hear when I was younger: Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Operation Ivy, The Replacements, The Chameleons, The Sound (UK), Slayer, Cortex, etc. etc. etc.

I spent some of my teens singing Social Distortion and the Misfits with groups of gutter punk kids on the streets of California, subscribing to the eat, drink and be merry, screw the system I’m going to live on the fringes lifestyle I thought meant I was truly punk. But I threw that away as soon as I learned I could live in society, earn an OK paycheck and not have to drink in order to pursue the freedom I spoke of.

Meanwhile, some of my friends escaped permanently to Berkeley/Oakland and were immersed in the punk scene for years and years.

So no, in the traditional sense, I didn’t spend my twenties in a punk house going to shows and living a low-impact life in some urban city. I never dressed the part, mostly I wore a uniform of jeans and a black or white wife beater. I spent my twenties in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and then El Cerrito living a married life, trying on different hats, trying to be a good worker bee and fit into the mold by medicating myself and working 9 – 5′s.

Something snapped in my mid-twenties and I realized that I would never fit the mold of 9-5′er or suburbanite (never wanted to be a surburbanite, but the economy kept pushing me further out into the Bay Area ‘burbs). I just didn’t know how to let it go, so I struggled for another couple of years. Mostly, I find that even though I think my music sounds pretty grunge/blues, people tend to hear a lot of punk influence in it, and that actually makes me pretty happy. I feel I’ve successfully amalgamated all of the genres I grew up with, and all of the genres my genres grew up with, to create something that resonates with me. Lately, with the use of my friend’s practice space while he’s on tour, I’ve finally been able to work on the heavier, louder songs I love so dearly.

So, for now, I’ve embraced my roots. Call me punk, say I have an anarchist punk attitude. Though I’ve never been much of a joiner, I’ll take it if it helps you put me in a category. Punk, to me, means being your own fucking person, and not letting anyone else define you.

Flights of Fancy

I promised I would talk about the insanity of the creative mind. First of all, it’s only insanity to the larger world out there because it’s not linear and doesn’t make sense to people who think inside a certain framework. Of course, I am pigeonholing by saying all writers and musicians are insane…

Not “that” kind of insane…the other kind.

Let me speak to the ones I have personally met, which is more than a few handfuls, basically around the West Coast. Of the musicians and writers I’ve met, I’ve noticed a theme. Largely, an intolerance for conformity. A different way of thinking that you have to be pretty open to understand, or at least open to being open to understanding. Most just don’t get it, unless they are it.

I’ll speak to one aspect of “crazy” pertinent to my own artistic mind.

Like many writers, I am prone to wild flights of fancy, or shall I just say fantasy. I have complete enactments in my head which I swear to god are real. I have lived entire lives through my imagination. I may be more crazy than most writers and musicians I know, frankly, but I can’t really say, because many of the musicians and writers I know are imbibing substances I am not imbibing. This affects things and makes it harder to assess what we’re working with here.

For example, I remember when I wanted to be a tattoo artist. This happened about three years ago. I’d been living a relatively dry, boring life in El Cerrito—a stark contrast to my four years in San Francisco where everything was always hopping and there was plenty to do, see and be—tending my grandparents garden, walking around hilly neighborhoods with ‘50s style ranch houses built in random formation around seemingly unplanned cul-de-sac loops. I could see San Francisco from the hills, on a non-cloudy day. Most days were pretty foggy. I looked out at the city and couldn’t believe once upon a time I’d been there and not where I was now standing.

I hadn’t gotten a new tattoo for over five years. I started thinking maybe I’d get a bird. I was getting some extra cash from freelancing, and I hadn’t had extra cash in years, having been either unemployed or sick for almost two. I decided to get one bird, on my stomach, by the left nautical star. I started drawing outlines with marker to figure out if this was really the one I wanted to get.

My husband–ever the restrained one–told me I should get four birds, starting from my stomach and spreading up my ribs over my shoulder. While walking around Oakland, I stumbled into a shop a friend had recommended and I found myself remembering how awesome it was to be tattooed and be in the central hub of a tattoo shop, seeing and being seen. I had found my peeps again.

Because I was so thrilled to be part of a hub, I started dreaming of permanently being part of that hub. What if I become a tattoo artist, I thought, not remembering much about the extensive apprenticeships many artists go through before they find a shop they like and all the drama that can happen behind the scenes, all the internal hierarchy and hoops and the fact you actually have to know how to draw.

I bought myself a sketch pad and fantasized about meeting all the latest and greatest big tattoo artists—getting tattooed just because I was so cool they couldn’t resist adding ink to my skin. I started drawing for the first time in years. I inhaled every tattoo picture book I could find, falling deep into the world of Kat Von D’s diary.

Yep…I thought I was pretty awesome. Not to hard to go from sketch pad to skin, right?

This can’t be that hard, I thought, being a tattoo artist. Meanwhile, I started asking my tattoo artist questions about how he got started. I learned he’d started around my age and had had a hard time getting an apprenticeship where he wanted—people gave him shit. He had to earn his respect over time, just like in many other trades, except this was a bunch of artists with their own devil-may-care rules and proprieties.

I walked around for a few weeks, excited by the prospects and what I knew was decidedly my destiny. Then I checked out a couple more books by tattoo artists and started reading. I read about tattooing grapefruits and your own skin for the first time, about all the tricks your shop mates can play on you in the beginning, about how hard it is to learn to ink skin and how you often have to experiment on your friends first.

I read about crazy people and hard work and drawing, drawing, drawing. I read about a man who tattooed his wife until the day he died. I read about a girl who got in with bad boys and became tattooed head to toe before becoming a tattoo artist herself in Montana. I read about a guy who owned a late-night shop in Portland. I read the history of a local celebrity tattoo artist. I fantasized about being on their level, even though I was already 29 years old and hadn’t drawn much in my life at all since I was 11. My sketch book drawing by this time filled about two entire pages. Roses, and a day of the dead skull.

Then, as quickly as the desire to be a tattoo artist came, it was gone.

I’ve had the same flights of fantasy with other things—SEO marketer, professional vagabonder, National Geographic photographer, acupuncturist, doctor, chef, nutritionist, college-level creative writing teacher. One thing has stuck, however, and that is the title of writer/musician. No matter what wild flights of fantasy I have about other things, I keep creating stuff. Hell, I think my imagination is what keeps me able to write about things—tell stories and put myself in other people’s shoes. It makes shit interesting. Because I’ve been there in my head I can pretend I know what I’m talking about and actually believe I do.

I guess that doesn’t illustrate me as crazy, only as having an extensive imagination. When I picture something I AM it for a while; I become it. It seems inevitable. And then as quickly as I decide that  this is my reality, it’s gone: I no longer care about it at all.

So far, since the separation started happening, I’ve lived in Baja, traveled to Jamaica to teach music to children, moved into my friend’s empty room in England, hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, relocated to Seattle, been flown on an assignment to Boston and New York City, gone on a tour with my music…

Fantasy is what’s keeping me functioning at this point. Fantasy is what mires me in the sane, because without fantasy, I would surely go left. Far left.

Tattoos, Culture and Complete Ignorance of Social Hierarchy

I’m not always the most alert person. It takes me a while to figure stuff out. Like who people are, why they’re important, that kind of stuff.

While watching the end credits for Million Dollar Baby, I once asked, "Who was that guy with the really deep voice?"

I often stumble into a community—say I decide I’m going to learn more about some odd sport like kettlebell, for example—and I adopt the habits of the natives, just chugging along, when all of a sudden I look around and realize that I have no idea who, what or why any of these people around me are, only that I’ve learned to know a few key players.

Kettlebell is how I got my aaaaaaaaabs!!!

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Why Do You Have So Many Tattoos?

Recently, I walked into a locksmith and the guy at the counter said, “Finally, a woman who has more tattoos than me.” He was probably flirting, but having tattoos always invites commentary. People tend to shout at me from the sidewalk, “Hey! Nice tat!”

It’s interesting, to say the least.

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Weekly Feature: Liz Van Pay, Music Journalist

For the weekly feature this week, I’ve picked Liz Van Pay, a cool chick I interviewed for an article about tattoos in Bound by Ink magazine. While interviewing her I was blown away by how easy she was to talk to. She had a particularly mellow vibe that I was drawn to, and though she is still in her twenties, she seemed extremely wise for her years. I especially love how she has managed to do what many creative people do best — channel her life experiences into art. 

Relics from the Past: Photograph of Charlie Wagner, 6-Tracks from Columbia House

Two relics from the past I wanted to share today (click on them to enlarge).

I absolutely adore this picture of Charlie Wagner, one of the cheapest, most talked about, most used tattoo artists (and supposedly a raging drunk) from the early 1900′s, when tattooing still took place in barber shops in tiny, rat-filled stores along the Bowery in New York.

Said Brooklyn Blackie, another well-known tattoo artist who worked during that time, “Wagner was good. Don’t get me wrong.
He was the most popular tattooer not only around the Bowery, he was the most popular tattooer around the world … Maybe in the ’20s he used a pattern, because you know he had patterns, but he never used them. Everything was freehand. You can’t draw freehand and get a perfect tattoo. They may have looked perfect, but they weren’t perfect. But 90% of the older people around, guaranteed, you’ll find a Charlie Wagner tattoo on them. Everyone had one by Charlie.”

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The Trick is to Keep Creating (and Breathing)

Breathing and creation seem to me to be synonymous.

In order to keep breathing, many of us need to create. In order to create, we need to keep breathing.

In life, things ebb and flow. The tide coming in and out, the heat of the sun, the new leaves of spring and the falling leaves of autumn.

In this postmodern (or post-postmodern, if you like) world, we still hail in our expectation of daily structure to the industrial stage of our development. We are collectively engaged in a rekindling of “to the earth” naturism, yet as a whole, how many plastic things do you handle and toss on a weekly basis. Too many? Me too.

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5 Ways To Deal With That Voice in Your Head

I’m hiking the other day and I hear it, “So, you’re hiking, huh? Going up a hill are ya? Well, that’s not a big enough hill.”

Excuse me? Who asked you?

I think we’ve lost her to the voice in her head. It’s cuuuuhrazy time folks.

But you have one too, don’t you? Always running a dialogue. Always chit-chatting, admonishing or pooh-poohing this, that or the other.

I’m online: “Better not go on facebook, you’ll rot your brain.”

I’m at the store: “Better not buy that stuff, it’s too much. But wait, don’t you need that one more thing?

I’m at the tattoo shop: “Hey. Get a tattoo, buddy. You’ll love it. Impulse, baby!”

What can you do about that lame voice in your head?

Has Counterculture Become a Dirty Word?

I first noticed the change a couple years back. I stopped being able to recognize my people by the way they looked.

It used to be that in counterculture circles, there were certain trademarks. There was only a small group who identified with being outside of the mainstream and if you met them you felt like they were kindred spirits almost immediately. It was easier to weed out the chafe from the wheat, so to speak.

I was searching the web for the term countercultural the other day and the term that kept coming up instead was hipster. Which led me to write this essay on why that irks me.

Hipster has become a word used at the very least to define the latest generation of a group of twenty and thirty-something’s taking over the markets of the world at large.

I use the term hipster to describe the vapid clusters of sneer-lipped, often very thin party goers I run into in the Mission District of San Francisco and all over Berkeley, drinking expensive boutique coffee, wearing over-sized prescription-less sunglasses and American Apparel spandex tights, covered from head to toe in recently acquired tattoos and scoffing at anyone who isn’t a part of this new so-called subversive scene. Except they’re not doing anything different.

I use it to describe people who’ve cloaked themselves so thoroughly in their accepted costume of the moment they cannot and will not talk to anyone they smell is not like them. And they’ve let me know, without a doubt, that I’m not like them, though I’ve been wearing components of their costume for most of my life. I use it to describe the people who make other people hate the words organic, vegan and sustainable as well as alternative, anti-fashion and buzzword.

They’re the people that give you that flat, non-blinking stare when you say something that makes complete sense in order to try and make you feel stupid.

The only thing annoying about (people who don’t call themselves) hipsters is that there are so many of them, and they’re everywhere. No longer can you judge a book by its cover, which was so easy to do in the ’90s. I can’t find my peeps because they’re obscured by the latest cult affiliation with fashion. They’ve made “alternative” and “countercultural” a marketing tool for mainstream media, which has so far pervaded our world culture you could probably go to Fiji and still hear about the latest pop celebrity.

There is no such thing as countercultural anymore when it comes to how you dress or what you buy. There is no such thing as different. We’ve reached the apex of mass consumerism and this is the future: a homogenized amalgamation of every fashion and thought that groups of so-called radical people wore in the past, boiled down like Chucky in Child’s Play and coming back to life before your very eyes. Think hippy mixed with punk mixed with ’70s disco porn star and add a bit of Hollywood tattooed pop star to the mix and you might be able to describe how it looks.

Its like the Andy Warhol thing all over again, but even more annoying.

I was trying to describe the visual part of the hipster thing to my friend who lives too far from the city to be impacted by it while I was taking her on a tour of San Francisco for kicks. As we drove through the parking lot of Trader Joe’s, I said, “It’s a little like trailer trash meets porn star at the moment.”

I pointed at a young man walking towards us with a leer on his face, a sleazy mustache, a beat-up trucker hat and butt-tight jeans, with a bag of Trader Joe’s groceries in his hand.

“Like that,” I said.

“Good description. You completely captured it,” she said.

Yet I hadn’t quite captured it. Because what I’m trying to capture, really, is the feeling that I’m slipping out of focus and nothing is what it seems anymore. Because of the mix of culture, fashion and marketing there is nothing I can buy, do, or say that isn’t subject to acquisition and regurgitation through marketing sidebars.

There is no such thing as a hipster, really. Just bands of people who have no movement but that of being twenty-somethings to thirty-somethings. Being young, annoying and snobby is a movement. Jumping on bandwagons that were already movements long ago is the new movement.

The term itself came about decades ago, supposedly when people were dressing like jazz musicians to be “hep cats.” Hipster is a hollow term, meant to describe a copycat population and an attitude as much as a dress code.

An article in Adbusters calls it “the dead end of Western Civilization.” The words that come to mind are vapid, cipher, hollow, pantomime, sieve. It’s what happens when new trends don’t occur anymore and the industries selling stuff and the people out there acquiring stuff don’t have any new ideas but that from the past cults of cool. When everything is accessible for money, nothing is new. I think it started back when department stores started selling pants with holes already in them, but I could be wrong.

You can’t see into it and you can’t describe it because there’s nothing there. It’s just a cloak used to disguise what has happened for every decade we’ve had a trend, yet this time there’s nothing the group is fighting for except their picture on the latest glossy or the recognition of their high-school-mentality stuck peers.

It’s the lastest generation indoctrinated from birth to be something creative and different, yet the only way they know how to do that is to be a part of a group. And the group in this case can’t stand out, can’t be different, can’t be individual.

And because I can’t read the signs anymore, because the fashion statements and tattoos don’t mean anything at all anymore, I can no longer find my people based on how they look. I can only find the people who aren’t my people by their reflections and assimilations of how my people used to look. The irony being that I have to wait it out with people, grow relationships slowly and can’t easily assess someone by their appearance. I guess this is really a good thing, because if I ignore the mannequin masses as a whole, I can weed them out.

They aren’t pretending, they’re out in the troops doing it. They aren’t getting their picture taken, they’re not making the news, they’re waiting in the wings sharpening their tools.

Used to be that a tattoo was a statement. Often now it’s just another brand you acquire to make you look like a rock star without doing anything to be one. And I’m not saying I’m above all this. We all have hipster elements, or it wouldn’t bother anyone at all. We hate what we see that mirrors us.

But before those elements were siphoned off into part of a mass statement I wanted no part in, there were true movements. There was meaning in music. There was a fight to progress and change things. None of this surrender to commercialism, this blatant consumer flock riding out into the city streets.

I used to be able to find my people.

Now it’s very hard indeed.