Flash From The Bowery

Today’s historians study tattoo art with great fascination, and it’s only become an intellectual curiosity in the past 20 years. Why not until that point, I don’t know, but I do remember that by the late 90’s there was greater interest in it. Perhaps there’s something fascinating about the kind of artwork that one would have permanently drawn on himself? Tattoos were worn mostly by sailors, and the designs were usually the same, but the question is why.

Flash From The Bowery is a book of original tattoo stencils from the Black Eye Barbershop on the Bowery and Chatham Square, the same tattoo parlor where the electric tattoo gun was invented. It was on The Bowery where you’d find all the tattoo parlors, the same street where Norman Rockwell got the idea for his painting of the tattooist inking out the sailor’s ex-girlfriends. It was a sleazy block, full of bars, flophouses, and what would eventually become CBGB’s. The designs in this book were the “archive” of Black Eye’s resident artist, and when he died in the 1950’s, an employee saved what he could of their supplies. The designs ended up in the hands of Cliff White, a modern day tattooist. But the designs themselves date back much earlier. In those days you couldn’t go to a Barnes & Noble bookstore and buy a full-color coffee table book of tattoos. The artists would trace or photograph the existing tattoos of their customers, and in exchange give them a discount on a new one.

The only problem is the history of the actual designs. I would love to know the origins of the flowers, skulls, dice, scantily clad women. By Cliff White’s account, most of the customers were sailors (hence the large number of ship tattoos) or circus employees. If there were foreign sailors getting tattoos done at Black Eye’s, then I wonder if the American, British, and European designs were markedly different. I saw a photo of some French criminals who were detained at Ellis Island in the 1900’s, and they had tattoos of women, boxers, snakes, the usual art. I’m going to guess that the cards & dice motif might indicate willingness to take risk, while the half-naked women were reminders of home. If you’re at sea for a few months, and there are no women on board, perhaps the tattoo satisfies your erotic needs? The skulls could be descended from the memento mori (“remember, one day you will die”) of classical artwork, evoking a reminder of mortality. Paintings with this motto in mind usually placed a flower next to the skull, symbolizing life & death. Perhaps that explains why flowers were so popular in tattooing? Racism is also evident by the tattoos showing stabbed Chinese heads. Though the author assumes this was from the “Yellow Peril,” I believe it is from the US Navy campaign in China in the 1920’s (seen in the film The Sand Pebbles.)

You can include tattoos in the study of US history, and there’s plenty in there to compare the changes in American habits. Back in the 1950’s, tattoos were the kind of thing the wearer kept hidden, but nowadays they’re commonplace. It used to be considered low-class for women to have tattoos, but now I see “respectable” women with all kinds of ink-Japanese koi, scarabs, boyfriends’ names, even old fashioned sailor tattoos (in better quality than the originals.) Perhaps it has a lot to do with women’s rights? I can just imagine a high school student in the 1960’s showing up to school with a visible shoulder tattoo, the principal would’ve thrown a fit. Now, the principal can’t do anything about it. For teenagers, a tattoo has become a symbol that (at least in their own opinion) they’re all grown up.

Too Cool To Be Forgotten

A 38 year old computer programmer goes under hypnosis and goes back in time to when he was a kid in the 1980’s. We’ve seen this concept before; it was the plot of Back To The Future, and even a Twilight Zone episode. The idea of going back in time and trying to right all the wrongs has been used in many other books and movies, and often with zany results.

I won’t give the plot away, but I will say this; he goes back to 1987 when he was 17 years old, and slips right back into 80’s fashion and lingo. He doesn’t lead the kids in rebellion, as you might suspect. On the contrary, he goes back to being a teenager emotionally because that’s the position he’s in. He has serious thoughts on whether or not to stay back in time, maybe start off the dot-com boom, become an independent record producer and sign Kurt Cobain.

One of the reasons I loved this book so much was for the same reason we all loved Back To The Future. When kids see adult authority figures, they assume they were always adults. Ask any high school student, they’ll say they think that the teacher was always a bald middle aged math teacher. They’ll never guess that the teacher used to smoke pot and blast Van Halen on the radio of his parents’ car. They’ll never believe that their mom and dad were once teenagers.

Only Alex Robinson, author of Box Office Poison and Tricked could pull this off. His comics are all about Generation-X growing old and coming to terms with it.

We Won’t See Auschwitz by Jeremy Dres

Poland is something of a no-go for Jewish people. If you ask a Jew what he thinks about Poland, he’ll tell you all about the Holocaust, and how there are no Jews left there. But in this wonderful graphic novel, you’ll see that the opposite is true. There are Jews in Poland, and the Poles are not the pitchfork-wielding peasants intent on driving the Jews out.

Jeremy Dres assumes the worst when he visits Poland. What he finds is that the Jews who left after WWII were mostly the ones from the countryside, and before the war they were farmers. But the urbane educated ones didn’t all leave, in fact a lot of them stayed on afterwards. The Jews of Poland today are often employed in civil service jobs, and they are in positions of importance. As they go into the countryside, a lot of their fears turn out to be unfounded. It’s been years since there were any Shtetls in Poland, and most Poles haven’t met any Jews anyway, so it’s unlikely there’ll be any real anti-Semitism. As for the Christian based anti-Semitism, I doubt most young Poles today ever bother to go to church.

There are Jews that visit Poland every two years. We have something called March Of The Living, where Jewish teenagers from all over the world visit the remains of the death camps. They have a protest march from Auschwitz to Birkinau to say “you lost, we’re not all dead.” Some of my classmates went there back in 1996, and remember the photos of locals lining the streets to jeer at them. Most of them said “I grew up in that time, and I had no idea what those camps were for.” But others would say (in hushed tones) “I knew what was happening in Auschwitz, I could smell the burning bodies.” Nowadays, the Poles are not as hostile to stories about the Holocaust, but at the same time, can we expect them to feel guilty? To Jewish people, it’s a big part in our history, but to Poland it’s just history. This book isn’t really about history, but the present. It focuses on those who are still living.

I give the artwork top scores. The simple pen and ink drawings are perfect for this book. My only problem is that some more background information would have been welcome. I would like to have seen more detailed maps, like we saw in Maus, to show where they were going. Other than that, I’d recommend it to anyone studying Jewish history. The case of the Jewish community in modern Poland has rarely been taken into account.