I of course realize that every hotel and motel room has a history, but I strongly believe that that history should not be written, as it were, on the walls. We have all read or seen news stories about drug-induced murder/homicides in seedy motel rooms and have heard the tales of depravity and excess that take place inside the gilded chambers of five-star hotels, but all remnants of those sordid affairs should be (and in most cases, are) erased from the premises, leaving every new occupant of a room with the feeling that, at the very least, no forcible entry ever took place in it. I really don’t think that is too much to ask.

And yet, this is apparently not the opinion of the management of a certain lodging facility in Coral Springs, Florida. I will refer to this establishment as CSI, an acronym which you may interpret any way you like. You may take it to stand for either Coral Springs Inn, or Crime Scene Innvestigations, the latter being my preferred moniker for the place.

I submit into evidence, People’s Exhibit A:

This is a photograph taken of the door to my motel room from the inside. Notice that what might be referred to as the “male” half of the lock, the half that is attached to the door itself and is inserted into the “female” half, which is attached to the door jamb, has been broken off, as if by some terrific force exerted from the other side of the door. Maybe a police officer kicked the door in, or maybe it was the work of a drug-addled and jealous boyfriend, or maybe it was something else entirely, but what is unmistakable is that it is the tell-tale sign of a violent struggle that I would prefer not to be reminded of as I’m settling in for the night.

Though the photo below doesn’t indicate criminal activity per se, it was such a perfectly ridiculous sight that I simply had to share it.

It seems that the management of CSI could contrive no better place to situate a no smoking sign than the bottom of an ashtray. I would love to have been present for the conversation that lead to that ingenious decision. It must have been decided that table tents were either too expensive or too unwieldy and that the best possible way to discourage guests from smoking on the premises would be to furnish every room with an ashtray, but to place it upside down and put a sticker on the bottom of it, thereby disguising its original and intended purpose.

And now back to our forensic analysis. The People present Exhibit B:

This is a close-up photo, taken from the main room, of the door-knob to the bathroom. Notice that a hole has been drilled into it, which was obviously undertaken in order to break the lock. Someone had very likely been locked in the bathroom and was either unwilling or unable to turn the handle and escape to the balmy solace of the main room. Was this person unconscious? Injured? Perhaps dead? I do not know what scenario might have unfolded in the confines of this bathroom or why it required the use of a drill to help resolve it, but I do wish that I had been spared the sight of the tell-tale signs of the episode, which compelled me to imagine what horrors might have transpired in or near the very shower in which I hastily washed myself after an evening on-stage.

Even under the best circumstances, it’s disquieting to consider what unpleasantness might have taken place in bathrooms used by others, but the added suggestion of a forced entry brings to mind things far more unsettling than mere stomach viruses. So if you happen to be in the business of hotel/motel management and there’s a double homicide in one of your rooms, the job of restoring the room to a state of habitability is not complete simply because the folks in housekeeping cleaned the blood off the walls and flipped the mattress. Why not go the extra mile and replace the locks that have broken and door-knobs that have been drilled through? Your guests may not notice that all the relevant hardware is intact, but they will often notice when it isn’t.

I know what you’re thinking: “Another vegan atheist activist magician? Really?”

Well, forget what you think you know about every other vegan atheist activist magician you’ve ever seen, because I, Eric Walton, am not your grandfather’s vegan atheist activist magician! Sure, I eat an entirely plant-based diet; don’t believe in any gods; regularly attend rallies and organize for environmental causes; and, perform card tricks for money, just like a lot of other vegan atheist activist magicians in the past, but that is where the similarities end.

You see, my veganism, atheism, activism, and magicianism are all completely modern and free of the antiquated and arcane trappings of those vegan atheist activist magicians of  generations past. What did your grandfather’s vegan atheist activist magician eat for lunch? Probably a carrot sandwich and cup of tap water. You know what? Fuck him and his sorry ass carrot sandwich. I don’t care if it was the Great Depression. Do you know what Eric Walton eats for lunch? Chipotle, bitches. And if there’s too much blood in his caffeine system, he orders an almond milk latte from the gorgeous baristas at Kahve. And as they punch another hole in his loyalty card, Eric Walton punches your grandfather’s vegan atheist activist magician in his old and dirty face.

And whereas your grandfather’s vegan atheist activist magician might have quoted such atheist luminaries as Democritus or Bertrand Russel when opining on the evils of religion, Eric Walton rocks it 21st century style with copious references to the late and brilliant  Christopher Hitchens and the indomitable Richard Dawkins.  Suck it, Democritus.

And unlike your grandfather’s vegan atheist activist magician, Eric Walton will not clutter the airwaves with talk of the environmental pioneer Rachel Carson, but will instead keep things up-to-the-minute with references to the likes of Bill McKibben and Sandra Steingraber. (Keep up the good work, you two!)

I suppose your grandfather’s vegan atheist activist magician was fond of pulling quarters from behind your grandfather’s ear. Wow. I’m really blown away that. (He says with great sarcasm!) Theirs was certainly not the Greatest Generation for magic, now was it? Hell no, it wasn’t. And what kind of magic does vegan atheist activist magician Eric Walton perform? The kind that will blow your fucking mind, that’s what kind.

So the next time you hear the words vegan atheist activist magician crammed together in a sentence, you would be wise not to jump to any unwarranted conclusions.

The Empire State Building as seen from Church Street in Tribeca

One of New York’s Finest cordons off an area around Pier 85 as the weather grows increasingly inclement.

A woman walks her dog as the storm approaches Manhattan’s Westside.

The waters of the Hudson River shortly before the notorious and destructive surge

The Space Shuttle Pavilion on the Intrepid Air and Space Museum collapsed during the storm and is currently being re-built.

Several large and magnificent trees were uprooted in Central Park and elsewhere throughout the city.

A parking meter in Coney Island

A woman at Columbus Circle looks at a street light that is neither where it should be, nor where it recently was.

The crane at the 57th Street construction site that collapsed during the storm

It takes more than a goddam hurricane and the chaos and destruction that it brings to keep this woman from getting in some cardio.

One of the many fallen trees along the Hudson River Park

If you tend to hold your head sideways, you may notice nothing wrong with the traffic light in this photo. Those who orient their heads vertically, however, will notice something amiss.

The boardwalk at Far Rockaway Beach was completely destroyed.

Solar One, a sustainable energy advocacy group, offered free phone charging at its solar-powered facility under the FDR.

Time’s Up, a bicycle advocacy and direct action organization, also offered free phone charging by means of a human-powered bicycle generator.

An Anarchist with a pair of scissors could have done enormous damage in the days following Hurricane Sandy.

These fliers notwithstanding, the situation in Far Rockaway was awfully grim, even two weeks after the storm.

A pedestrian surveys what remains of the facade that collapsed on Eighth Avenue and 14th Street.

With the subways closed and very few buses running, those of us with bicycles were at a great advantage in the days after the storm.

A woman shovels sludge off the esplanade under the FDR.

A Con Edison van rushes past a large plume of steam on West 40th Street.

Debris and detritus near the Westside Highway and Gansevoort Street

A volunteer stands in the basement of the Mt. Carmel Church in Far Rockaway.

This was a ubiquitous sight in Lower Manhattan in the days following the storm: water being pumped out of basements.

Volunteers clear the basement of the Mt. Carmel Church in Far Rockaway.

With no electricity throughout much of New York City, traffic cops were a common sight.

The sandbags in this photo differ from normal sandbags in one significant way: they are Wall Street sandbags, so they’re filled not with sand, but with gold coins and enormous diamonds.

…and counting

UPS was on the ground, delivering packages the day after the storm.

American Exceptionalism: Volunteers and donated provisions were both abundant at the MCU Park in Coney Island, though people often waited in line for up to four hours to claim food, water, and toiletries.

Two attractive people ignore each other and focus on their phones. Once power went out in Lower Manhattan and much of Midtown, cell phone reception was least dodgey along the river, which is where this was taken.

Urban hunting and gathering

Members of the National Guard make a rare appearance on a New York City sidewalk as patients are evacuated from the ICU of Bellevue Hospital.

Uprooted trees were and are a very common sight in Far Rockaway.

Post-hurricane traffic is the worst!

A pedestrian looks at a toppled phone booth on First Avenue.

A resident of the East Village prepares food for anyone who asks for it. Naturally, there was a separate grill for vegetarians. In this photo, she’s turning over some delectable tofu patties.

Like so much else in Coney Island, The Shore Hotel took a terrible beating.

The South Street Seaport was flooded with several feet of water and the smell of diesel fuel was thick in the air for days after the storm.

A few days after the storm, this banner appeared on the north side of the Manhattan Bridge. The connection between extreme weather events and climate change is incontrovertible, as the good folks at 350.org are very aware.

The English language is remarkable for reasons far too numerous to mention. Though estimates vary widely, most authorities agree that English contains over a quarter of a million words; and that it lends itself to nuances of expression that are quite impossible in many other tongues is beyond question. As a native speaker, it’s easy to take for granted the subtlety and refinement of expression afforded to me by the accident of my birth in an English-speaking country. And many of the ambiguities and idiosyncrasies of English, which so delight scholars and men and women of letters, are notoriously confounding to non-native speakers attempting to master the language. English even has an entire category of words that have not just multiple definitions, but two completely opposite meanings. They are called contranyms and include the enigmatic words sanction, oversight, refrain, garnish, and (my personal favorite) cleave.

As with so much else, context is the key to parsing the intended meaning of these Janus words, appropriately named after the two-faced god of Roman mythology. If I were to write that, “the infant cleaved to her mother’s breast”, you would be unlikely to infer that it was act of violence on the part of the child, unless I had given you some extraordinary reason to think so. Mercifully for us all perhaps, contranyms are relatively few, whereas English abounds in perfectly unequivocal words that are almost impossible to misconstrue: words such as rape. I qualify the word impossible with the word almost because there seems to be some confusion among some elected officials of the United States Congress regarding the precise definition of this word, which, until quite recently, I had never regarded as particularly unambiguous.

If Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan and his feckless colleague, Todd Akin (R-MO), the original sponsors of the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act”, have any credentials as professional lexicographers, they’ve done an excellent job of concealing them. And yet, very much of their own accord and on the basis of an authority that remains a complete mystery to me, these two men have undertaken the offensive, arrogant, and unnecessary task of redefining the word rape, a task for which they are wholly unqualified and a word whose meaning, I assure you, has never stymied any literate person, nor for that matter, any person who has ever been raped.

It can certainly be granted for the sake of argument that in the gradual evolution of our language, the meanings of words often change. Such is the case, for example, with word quarantine, which originally referred to what must have been an exhausting forty-day period that Jesus is supposed to have spent in the desert after his alleged baptism. The modern interpretation of quarantine is obviously quite different from the original meaning of the word, but makes perfect sense in the light of its distinguished etymology. And so it goes for numberless other words in the glorious lexicon of the English language: their meanings evolve. But perhaps the evolution of language, like the evolution of our own and all other species, is too elusive or contentious a concept for senators Ryan and Akin.

I’m not entirely sure how forcible rape and legitimate rape are distinguished from rape as it is almost universally defined and understood, but the distinctions do not interest me for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the people making the vulgar and superfluous distinctions have done so purely by fiat and not out of necessity. And though I myself am no lexicographer or etymologist, I do not think I overstep my professional boundaries in the least by saying that what distinguishes rape from sex is not the stultifying language of an ill-conceived piece of legislation written by a couple of sanctimonious blow-hards who have virtually no chance of ever being raped themselves, but consent.

Anyone who wishes to complicate the matter any further than that, does so not for the sake of clarification, but in the blind pursuit of an ideological end that further victimizes those who have already suffered the pain and humiliation of being raped. Let us not defer therefore in these matters to the whims of politicians and patriarchs, who wade quite beyond their own depths when they distinguish between rape and forcible rape. What sets rape apart from forcible rape is the same thing that sets many politicians apart from one another: distinctions without a difference.

By the end of the day, the police had arrested one-hundred and eighty-one people, which, for someone who was there and witnessed first-hand the non-violent nature of the event and the innocuous jubilation of the majority of demonstrators themselves, is an extraordinary number. Among those taken into custody were journalists, writers, and artists, including writers John Knefel and Wes Trexler, and the prolific artist and entrepreneur Molly Crabapple, whose only apparent crime was showing up.

The following are photos I took throughout the day.

These men and women were ready for action and when there was no action to be found, they wasted no time creating it themselves.

It may not be to the credit of men that the smack-down is generally associated with the masculine gender, though I see nothing especially manly in the smack-downs administered in the world of  professional wrestling, from which we inherit the term itself. Personally, I have always been much more impressed with the rhetorical and oratorical smack-down, such as that delivered by Winston Churchill in response to an admonition from his political rival, Bessie Braddock. As the story goes, Churchill encountered Braddock outside the pub in which he had spent the evening drinking and discerning at once that Churchill was intoxicated and eager to upbraid him for it, Braddock remarked, “You, sir, are drunk!” In response, Churchill offered the now legendary riposte, “And you, madam, are ugly. But in the morning, I will be sober.” Oh, snap.

Impressive though Churchill’s rejoinder was, and as much as I admire his wit and pugnacity, the greatest, the smackiest smack-down that I have ever heard takes the form of a closing argument delivered in San Fransisco, California in 1890 in The State of California v. Unknown Defendant.

The attorney who delivered this smack-down nonpareil was none other than the redoubtable Clara Shortridge Foltz. In addition to being California’s first female attorney, Foltz was also the first female deputy district attorney in the United States; the founder and publisher of the San Diego Daily Bee, and New American Woman Magazine; the first woman named director of a major bank; a member of the Bar of New York; a gifted lecturer; a tireless advocate for women’s suffrage; and, a devoted (and single) mother of five children. And she also introduced the idea of the Public Defender. She was, by any standard whatsoever, a total bad-ass. I urge you to read all you can find about this extraordinary woman and then aspire to be more like her. If you can accomplish even a quarter of what she accomplished in her lifetime, you will have achieved much.

By the time of the trial in question, Foltz had been practicing law for ten years and her reputation as an intelligent and capable attorney was well established. Foltz’s reputation, however impressive and well-deserved, was either unknown to or simply ignored by the opposing counsel in the case, a certain Colonel Thetas Stonehill, a former captain in the Confederate army who went by the moniker “Colonel”. Perhaps the good Colonel felt that his case as the prosecuting attorney simply wouldn’t prevail on its own merits, or perhaps he believed that Foltz would simply demure in the face of a direct insult to her and to her sex, but whatever his motivation may have been, he took his summation as an opportunity to deride the reasoning faculties of women in general and to inveigh against Foltz specifically. Addressing the all male jury, Stonehill explained that, “[Foltz] cannot be expected to reason; God Almighty decreed her limitations, but you can reason and you must use your reasoning faculties against this young woman…” And as if the point were somehow in dispute, Stonehill bellowed, “SHE IS A WOMAN!”

The Colonel would find out soon enough that though he had correctly identified Foltz’s gender, he had failed to ascertain something much more important about her: what kind of woman she was. Foltz was the kind of woman who handily out-classed him and readily out-performed him. Superior to him in intellect, character, and much else besides, she was the kind of woman that an arrogant turd like Colonel Stonehill had no business trifling with. The following are excerpts from Clara Shortridge Foltz’s closing argument in the case, in which she immobilizes her opponent on the mat, ascends to the metaphorical top rope of the ring and then delivers the coup de grace in the form of a rhetorical Ram Jam that would incapacitate even the indomitable Hulk Hogan himself. Ladies and gentlemen, one of the greatest smack-downs in the history of the smack-down:

If Your Honor please and gentlemen of the jury:

You well know that I am not before you by my own choice! That in obedience to time-honored rule I am here by order of this court trying as best I can to represent this despairing man. Is it not strange then that the district attorney should make me an object of his displeasure and challenge my presence at this bar because only that I am a woman? The kind indulgence of the court has permitted counsel to range over much matter that is neither of record nor part of the evidence in this case. I would rather the immaterial and irrelevant part of his speech had remained unspoken, for I take no pleasure in the wanton abuse of a jury’s patience nor in burdening them with matter wholly foreign to the case…

Counsel tells you that I am a woman. I wonder that the planets did not stand still in their course and rivers cease to run to the sea at the announcement of this startling discovery. I am amazed that His Honor did not faint upon the bench and that you gentlemen of the jury have survived this awful shock to your nervous systems.

Let me kindly admonish the learned counsel that in a matter of great pith and moment like this he should break the news gently and not plunge such an original thought upon an unprepared jury. A few more such thoughtless revelations and your nervous forces will be destroyed and your reason dethroned. Counsel should beware how he heedlessly enlightens an unprepared jury on such a vital topic.

Again he tells you that I am a woman. By a natural antithesis I presume he would have you infer that he is not. I suppose he wants me to tell you that he is a man and he takes this hurried opportunity and adroit method of testifying to the fact. Though nobody has yet denied it, he seems to be in a fever of anxiety to emphasize that he is a man. I don’t know why he should make such unseemly hast in announcing it. He should remember that a swift and willing witness to a point not controverted is a herald of suspicion. Useless denial has caught more criminals than has silence a long way…

I am that formidable and terrifying object known as a woman—while he is only a poor, helpless, defenseless man, and he wants you to take pity on him and give him a verdict in this case. I sympathize with counsel in his unhappy condition. True, the world is open to him. He is the peer of all men—he can aspire to the highest offices, he can carry a torch over our streets during a political campaign and sell his vote for a dollar and half on election day, and yet he isn’t satisfied. Like Alexander, who wanted more worlds to conquer, he wants verdicts, and in order to awaken your sympathy for him, he tells you that I am a woman and he is only a man.

I confess I do not clearly see the relevancy of the statement to this case. The logic is, I am a woman; therefore, you should find this defendant guilty. The conclusion is rather sudden. We are hurried across the river of dispute without bridge or ferry or fording place. In the chain of his logic an important link seems wanting. There is a weakness somehwere, but mothers are always weak after such extraordinary births, and we presume we ought to be lenient. “Be to his faults a little blind, be to his virtues very kind.”

But counsel insists that I am a woman. Gentlemen of the jury, of the atrocious crime I plead guilty. Into this world I have broght five healthy children. By my industry I have supported them them till some are even now stepping from youth and maidenhood into the broader estate of manhood and womanhood. And I repel the covert slur and innuendo that came with the words, “She is a woman,” words intended to depreciate me and my efforts before you in this cause, words none the less obnoxious because spoken under the cloak of a honeyed compliment. In the name of the mothers who nursed you, and of the wives and maidens who look love into your eyes, I resent this hidden appeal to a supposed prejudice of this jury. I resent this ill-concealed slur and covert innuendo that the presence of a woman in a lawsuit contaminates her and that her sex must militate against her client…

Counsel intimates with a curl on his lip that I am called the lady lawyer. I am sorry I cannot return the compliment, but I cannot. I never heard anybody call him any kind of lawyer at all.

And now let us take it all together. I am a woman and I am a lawyer—and what of it? It is not so new or wonderful a thing. I am practicing law in this city; I have offices in one of its largest buildings, and I go daily to and from those offices in my right mind. I am certainly not unknown to the bench and bar of California. And gentlemen, I came into the practice of my profession under the laws of this state, regularly and honestly, and not by the certificate of another state that required no learning to secure, and I have come to stay. I am neither to be bullied out or worn out. I ask no special privileges and expect no favors, but I think it only fair that those who have had better opportunities than I, who have had fewer obstacles to surmount and fewer difficulties to contend with should meet me on even ground, upon the merits of the law and fact without this everlasting and incessant reference to sex—reference that in its very nature is uncalled for and is as unprofessional as it is unmanly…

Counsel thought I was too timid to resent this miserable inference against women in courts of justice. I am descended from the heroic stock Daniel Boone, and never shrunk from contest nor knew a fear. I inherit no drop of craven blood. If I have remained silent when others would have retorted, it is because of my respect for the courts and the halls of justice, which I grieve to see become the arena of personal encounter. But the patience which at first may have been a virtue would become criminal by longer exercise. This controversy was not of my seeking—a long series of abuses has forced it upon me.

When I so forget the dignity of my profession, when I so trample upon its courtesy, when I so shut my eyes to the honor and respect due this bench as to introduce such irrelevant matter, I hope that I may be barred the profession and banished the country.

Sources:
Ladies and Gentlemen of The Jury: The Greatest Closing Arguments in Modern Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_S._Foltz

“The three most famous names in history are Jesus Christ, Sherlock Holmes and Harry Houdini.”

-George Bernard Shaw

As the terrestrial existence of Jesus Christ is a matter of some dispute among professional historians, and as there is no question that Sherlock Holmes was entirely fictitious, then at least as far as George Bernard Shaw is concerned, the most famous name of any person in verifiable history is that of the master escapologist and showman, Harry Houdini, whose 137th birthday was (rather, would have been) last Thursday, March 24th.

In honor of the auspicious occasion of Houdini’s birth, it seemed only fitting that I should compose a haiku:

Harry Houdini:

Showman, conjurer, icon.

Bondage fetishist?

Now, as a professional escapologist and conjurer myself, and as one who is therefore deeply indebted to the late, great Harry Houdini, a single haiku seemed like too meager a tribute, so in the spirit of homage, veneration and cross-dressing, I offer the following photographs, which I took last week during a Houdini-inspired photo shoot.     

I hope you enjoy them.    

It is inconceivable that I could have reached the age of twelve without being lied to. I had, after all, not been raised in isolation from other human beings. And as I reflect on it now, it seems altogether implausible that I would not have recognized the perpetrators of at least some of these inevitable falsehoods for what they were and called them out on their lies. It seems implausible, that is, until I consider that as a child I was both extremely credulous and incredibly timid. I was, in the parlance of the midway, an “easy mark”. My childhood timidity, credulity, and tractability also made me an excellent target for religious inculcation, but I’ll grind that ax another time.

The very first occasion on which I can recall another person telling me something that I knew to be utterly false and on which I marshaled the courage to confront the liar with the known facts, was, fittingly, on the midway.

The midway in question was at the Oklahoma State Fair, an annual gathering in Oklahoma City of corn-dog, funnel cake, and cotton candy vendors; trinket peddlers; mechanical bull, thrill-ride, and sideshow operators; Alibi agents; lot lice; Flatties; townies; and, rubes like me who just couldn’t wait to be separated from their hard-earned cash.

Only on a dare or when facing the prospect of starvation, should any sensible person who has reached the age of majority eat a funnel cake.

One of the many sideshow attractions on offer at the Oklahoma City fairgrounds in the summer of 1983 was A GIANT ALLIGATOR!!! MEASURING OVER TEN FEET IN LENGTH AND WEIGHING MORE THAN 800 POUNDS, THIS ENORMOUS AND TERRIFYING, MAN-EATING MONSTER WAS CAPTURED IN THE AMAZON AND IS ON DISPLAY NOW, ALIVE AND ON THE INSIDE!!!

Or words to that effect.

As anyone who has ever visited the midway knows, for attractions such as these, the bally often isn’t delivered live, but is pre-recorded and played in a constant loop over a PA system that invariably sounds as if someone had simply placed a bull-horn in front of a gramophone.

The quality of the PA system notwithstanding, I was powerless to resist the hypnotic spiel that promised a rare glimpse of a powerful and prehistoric animal, the likes of which I had only seen on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. I paid the price of admission to the attendant, a man in his mid-forties with the leathery skin and cynical demeanor that is either the product of or pre-condition for life on the midway, and ascended the platform to see THE RARE, EXOTIC, AND DANGEROUS CREATURE THAT COULD SWALLOW A GOAT ALIVE!!!

I will now tell you what you undoubtedly already know: the alligator was not real. It was a fake. And a shoddy one, at that. The only claim made regarding this attraction that was not completely false was the one regarding its length: it was, by my best reckoning, approximately twice as long as I was tall, making it indeed ten feet long or thereabouts, but otherwise, every word used to describe what was obviously a cheap, plastic simulacrum of an alligator was unquestionably false. I suppose it can be granted that it was “enormous” and “on display”, as stated in the extravagant and misleading description, but it was nonetheless a gross and fraudulent mischaracterization of the attraction and I felt, for the first time, that I had been duped (which I had).

I then had the following exchange with The Man With The Leathery Skin:

Me: Um, sir, that’s not a real alligator.
The Man With The Leathery Skin: Yes, it is.
Me: No, it isn’t. It’s fake. It’s totally fake. It’s not even moving. Not even its eyes are moving.
The Man With The Leathery Skin: Just cuz it ain’t movin’ don’t mean it ain’t real. Don’t you sit still sometimes?
Me: Yes, but…
The Man With The Leathery Skin: Well then, there ya go!
Me: Some of the paint is even chipped off of it. Why would you ever need to paint a real alligator? Under what circumstances would you need to paint a real alligator?
The Man With The Leathery Skin: Listen, son: if that alligator was fake, I would have the Oklahoma City police department on my case like white on rice, but I don’t see no police around here, do you?
Me: No, but..
The Man With The Leathery Skin: Well then, there ya go!

Or words to that effect.

A clean midway is a happy midway! (Disclaimer: To the best of my knowledge, the folks at Blue Sky Amusements are upstanding business persons and have never claimed that a bogus alligator is a real one.)

According to Costentenus, he and his companions decided that tattooing was preferable to death by wasps, tigers, spears, starvation, fire or being cut to pieces. And though Costentenus survived the ordeal, the same cannot be said for his less stalwart companions, who allegedly died (and presumably in terrible agony) in the course of the tattooing sessions. Apparently health code regulations regarding body modification were virtually non-existent and very loosely enforced in late nineteenth century China.

After three excruciating months at the hands of Yakoob’s merciless tattoo artists, the brave Costentenus supposedly killed one of the Khan’s men, was sold to a Turk who put him up for auction at a slave bazaar, and was purchased by a wealthy American whose riches were “gained in the show business.”

Thus began the good captain’s illustrious career in the freak show as a “living picture gallery”.

A full color pitch card for Captain Constentenus, The Tattooed Prince

Of course, only the most credulous twenty-first century reader can believe Captain Costentenus’s account. The tale is so fraught with implausible circumstances and unlikely characters that it’s impossible to regard it as anything more than the ornate fabrication of a flamboyant opportunist. But his story and others like it help account for the modern Western attitude toward and fascination with tattoos. They’re often seen as exotic, primal, atavistic and a hallmark of the rebellious, the fringe and the disenfranchised. To quote the Italian scientist Cesare Lombroso, “Tattooing is in fact one of the essential characteristics of primitive man and men who still live in a savage state.”

Lombroso wrote that in 1896, so we have no way of knowing if he intended his statement to apply to the millions of twenty-first century women whose lower backs would later be adorned with so-called “tramp stamps” or the countless other “savages” whose petite ankles would be graced with delicate daisy chains or tiny four-leaf clovers, but I think it’s safe to assume that he would have taken a rather dim view of all such markings, no matter how modest (or inane).

Over the past two years, I’ve had the great fortune of photographing a number of beautiful women with many gorgeous tattoos. None can compete with Costentenus in terms of total coverage or sheer audacity, but as far as I am aware, none of them are trying. And unlike Lombroso, I wouldn’t dare classify any of these women as savages, or even aspiring savages (though one of them did once express her intention to become a full-time hobo).

When I look at these women and the beautiful artwork on their skin, I can’t help thinking that the act of getting inked is indeed an act of rebellion, but not in a William Wallace kind of way. I believe (and I don’t presume to speak on behalf of anyone pictured here, or indeed, anyone pictured anywhere) that getting tattooed is a woman’s way of asserting ownership over her own body. And given the disproportionate and disconcerting influence of politicians who go to increasingly appalling lengths to limit a woman’s right to choose what she may or may not do to her own body, I see tattoos on women as an act of defiance, a political statement that she and no one else is sovereign over her own body.

And to be fair, I also see tattoos on women as an opportunity to make pretty pictures.

Enjoy.

Maria’s tattoos are as numerous as they are beautiful.

The gorgeous and ornate Vivian Galloway whose many tattoos include the likeness of Felix The Cat

Darling House’s own Savannah D

The incomparable Madame Rosebud of Darling House

Megan has a beautiful tattoo of a woman on her right arm, as well as an owl and a raven elsewhere on her person.

Succor Suicide was a pleasure to shoot with and has a tattoo of a Dali painting on her right arm.

The aforementioned tattoo of a raven

Savannah D is stunning and I defy anyone to say otherwise.

Sources:

Freak Show by Robert Bogdan, The University of Chicago Press (1988)

http://thehumanmarvels.com/