To get a sense of what an art form is all about, study the refreshments. Book readings: the refrigerated black trays of carrots and chewy-plastic cheeses. Gallery openings: the flutes of warmish bubbles, dispassionately sipped. How you’re supposed to consume food and drink at these events mirrors how you’re supposed to consume the art pensively, daintily, the brain signing off on the senses’ input. The New York Tattoo Convention, held during three days in October, just gives you candy. Beer and coffee sold at the front, tacos and burgers in food trucks outside, but free candy for all—bowls of it, spread across hundreds of tables.
Yes, this was around Halloween. But we are talking about a community where people dress up in permanent ink costumes that could be a butterfly or a tiger or the Joker, or all three. At the convention, I spotted tattoos of the Godfather, Harry Potter, Slim Shady, Saul Goodman, Walter White, Tony Montana, Pennywise, Tupac, Aslan, and the Viggo Mortensen character from “Eastern Promises” (less famous than the rest, but the inkiest role in one of the coolest tattoo movies), plus more divisive I.P. such as Donald J. Trump and Jesus H. Christ.
The venue was the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s Duggal Greenhouse, all thirtyfive thousand square feet of it. Hillary and Bernie debated here in 2016. The building used to be a boat-assembly plant, which made the festivities oddly apt, since tattoos have always thrived on water: sailors marked themselves and shipped their skins to every latitude, and most of the world’s historic tattoo capitals (San Francisco, Venice, Yokohama, New York) are port cities where a thousand cultures sloshed. During the convention’s opening ceremony, two bagpipers and a drummer marched past rows of stalls, and for a second I wondered if bagpipes might be a tattoo thing. But no: two of the three organizers happened to be Irish.
Denne historien er fra November 18, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra November 18, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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NO WAY BACK
The resurgence, in the past decade, of Paul Schrader as one of the most accomplished and acclaimed contemporary movie directors is part of a bigger trend: the self-reinvention of Hollywood auteurs as independent filmmakers.
PRIMORDIAL SORROW
\"All Life Long,\" the title of the most recent album by the composer and organist Kali Malone, is taken from a poem by the British Symbolist author Arthur Symons: \"The heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,/ All life long crying without avail,/As the water all night long is crying to me.\"
CHOPPED AND STEWED
The other day, at a Nigerian restaurant called Safari, in Houston, Texas, I peeled back the plastic wrap on a ball of fufu, a staple across West Africa.
TOUCH WOOD
What do people do all day? My daughter loves to read Richard Scarry's book of that title, though she generally skips ahead to the hospital pages.
HELLO, HEARTBREAK
Heartbreak cures are as old as time, or at least as old as the Common Era.
ENEMY OF THE STATE
Javier Milei's plan to remake Argentina begins with waging war on the government.
THE CHOOSING ONES
The saga of my Jewish conversion began twenty-five years ago, when I got engaged to my first husband.
OBSCURE FAMILIAL RELATIONS, EXPLAINED FOR THE HOLIDAYS
Children who share only one parent are half siblings. Children who have been bisected via a tragic logging accident are also half siblings, but in a different way.
NOTE TO SELVES
The Sonoran Desert, which covers much of the southwestern United States, is a vast expanse of arid earth where cartoonish entities-roadrunners, tumbleweeds, telephone-pole-tall succulents make occasional appearances.
BADDIE ISSUES
\"Wicked\" and \"Gladiator II.\"
