Recent travels have placed in Seattle every month for the past half year. I’ve found an edgy urban neighborhood which has a grittiness that I find interesting. It reminds me a lot of the urban future portrayed in the 1982 film Blade Runner. The hotel where I stay is a euro-style hotel in the Capitol Hill neighborhood which caters to the upper middle class 30 something crowd.
Capitol Hill is a study in sharp contrasts. It is the most densely populated neighborhood in Seattle. A local travel guide describes the neighborhood. “The hill itself is one of the most prestigious old neighborhoods in Seattle, with countless mansions and stately older homes, quite a few of which are now elaborate bed-and-breakfast inns. At one time local politicians dreamed of making this the location for Washington’s capitol building - hence the name. Today the campuses of Seattle Central Community College and Seattle University mark the southern edge while two commercial centers attract visitors: a small, fairly quiet strip along 15th Ave. E, and the busy, on-the-edge Broadway Ave. E stretch.”
“Because of a strong gay and lesbian presence, Broadway has been likened to San Francisco’s Castro District, but it could also be Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue. It’s a great place to people-watch, and to catch up on the latest fashion statements for the youthful art crowd. You’re guaranteed to see more black leather skirts and jackets, frenzied florescent green hair, tattoos, nose rings, and pink triangles here than anywhere else in Seattle.”
Blade Runner 1982
The area is packed with counterculture small shops and restaurants. Tattoo parlors, piercing shops, adult supply stores are dispersed between art galleries, music stores, hair salons and book stores. The restaurant trade is affordable and highly ethic with wide ranges of Asian fusion cuisines mixed with Spanish, Mexican, Italian and British style fish and chips restaurants. The street life is vibrant and edgy where the hippy, grunge and alternative lifestyles are mixed with gay, anarchist, counterculture and artist communities. Although Seattle’s desperate heroin problem is fully evident, there is not a feeling that the area is unsafe. I began calling the district is “funkytown” because the residents perceived themselves as ultra hip and trendy. Maybe they are? Who am I to judge? I perceive them as more insecure, adolescent teens screaming for attention in a harmless but comedic fashion.
Slowly over a number of trips I began to realize that I was the freak the street life was marveling at. Although the street was obliviously tolerant of diversity of lifestyles, the extended stares and surprised looks informed me that I was the outcast. I began to wonder what in my appearance was so apparent. My attire was was suitability nondescript with a faded pair of blue jeans, a beat up tee shirt with Zapata the Mexican revolutionary staring at you with coal black eyes and a pair of sandals. I was dressed in the official street uniform. The dark sun glasses and ball cap reasonably disguised my age. What was it?
It came to me! I was totally undecorated. My body did not contain a solitary piece of body art. I had no tattoos, piercing, nose rings, chains, split tongues, fake contact lenses, paper clips or implanted horns. I have found it so unnecessary to decorate myself like a Christmas tree that I was never compelled to even pierce my ears. I was the equivalent of an albino freak in a circle tent. My nonconformance was glaringly oblivious to the self appointed fashion judges. I was so out of bounds to the trend setters that I began to crossover into the perverse cool. There’s a freak in funkytown.I have spent a lifetime examining and attempting to understand tattoos. Yeah, it’s a form of free expression, a statement of what the individual stands for or what group they belong to. It’s a way to remember life events, good or bad. Whatever you want to call it, for god’s sake don’t call it art. It’s about as far from art as Muzak is from music. Most tattoos look like the individual was unconscious and their worst enemy was allowed to pick out and place a tattoo of their choosing in order to inflict the most humiliation and embarrassment possible on the victim. Take a good look at most tattoos and ask yourself, why was this individual compelled to place this scribble in this location? For all I know a person may just go out and play paintball with a group of buddies and after the game they find the location of each welt on his body and assign it a new tattoo. Placement appears to be that random.
How many millions of teenage girls have scarred their beautiful bodies by making themselves “special” and picked the ubiquitous dolphin, butterfly, heart, cherry or gecko tattoo. It makes them about as special as a Denny’s grand slam breakfast. I once asked a friend of mine why he always dated girls with tattoos? He said “It tells me she likes to abuse her body.”
If you want to impress me with a tattoo show me the Greek letter sigma from members of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity. By scorching their left shoulders with a brand of the sigma, their values of brotherhood, scholarship and service are physically a part of them. In case you didn’t know branding (which is a form of tattoos) is burning the skin to create permanent scarring in a desired design. Instruments used to brand include a range from a blowtorch to a wire coat hanger bent to the desired shape, immersed in boiling oil and placed on the skin. That’s got to hurt.
I will admit that there are a few tattoo rituals that I would consider art. The Japanese full body Kanji Tattoos and pure tribal or Celtic tattoos. But have you ever seen one in person? For every photo of an artistically interesting tattoo I’ve seen a couple thousand really bad tattoos. Some are so bad they are comical. You just know they got up the next day and said “Shit! What the hell did I do that for?” Mike Tyson was probably one of them.
I’ve got a proposition to help society out of the carnage of human graffiti. Before an individual is allowed to get a tattoo they need to show a certificate of graduation from an art appreciation course. The class would teach them to understand form, color, texture, proportion, scale, rhythm, balance, contrast and contradiction. They could learn the fashion risk of placing figurative Japanese design next to a black biomechanical design. They could understand the impacts of different colored inks and the patina of the skin’s aging process. The process of getting a tattoo could be elevated to a sophisticated gallery opening instead of a drunken ghetto car wreck. We can only dream.
Maybe the nonconformist judges the world too harshly. The next time I’m hiking across the Capitol Hill district, I should stop and get in touch with my feminine side by getting a tattoo of a butterfly on my crouch just to make me feel “special”. If I did that they would no longer stare and say look at the freak in funkytown.
