WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO. (photos by Juan)

Why do we do what we do?... there are several reasons we do what we do, the way we do it...

We tattoo all day... work really hard because we have fun at work, we challenge ourselves daily so that we can be more versatile, creative and technically advanced...

We do great work, like this unreal piece (below) by Mark. We feed off of each other's creativity and are stoked when we do really cool tattoos. This inspires us to be the best we can be.

We do it so that we have stories to tell. Think this one in the works (below) that Sasha is dealing with is gonna be a good one??? I think it definitely has possibilities... we talk laugh all day long, the conversation and the stories are endless.

That look on Sasha's face says it all!! Finally, after a long week... we get to reward ourselves with... MEAT... brisket, sausages, pulled pork, ribs, rib ends, fries, cornish game hen, fries, potato salad, beans, cole slaw, barbecue sauce... pecan pie for desert!!!

F*CK YEA, LET'S EAT!!!"

STICKS DON'T PAY THE RENT BY SASHA

A few years ago, a repeat client of mine walked into the shop seeming quite disoriented, which was unusual for him. he shows me a geometric design he wanted to have tattooed and asked for a price quote, all twitchy like.

i could tell by the psychotic glint in his eyes and his self-inflicted rantings that he was off of whatever meds he was supposed to be on. i quoted him the minimum charge and he proceeds to dig around in his pocket. he procures a bunch of twigs, leaves and bottle caps. he tells me that they are magical and sacred and wants to know if he can trade them for the tattoo.

at this point i have to giggle to myself and when i tell him no he continues to tell me how powerful they are and that he got them from a shaman. i tell the guy "cash only" and feeling defeated & possibly realising the lack of monetary value, he gives me the sticks, leaves and bottle caps because he "wants me to have them" and he leaves the shop. i actually kept them for like a year, cause they made me giggle every time i saw them, so in a way i guess they were kinda magical.

now, off-handedly in our discourse i made the mistake of complimenting dude on his dope vintage leather jacket. so half an hour later he comes back to the shop wanting to know if i would trade the jacket for the tattoo. i woulda come out on top on this deal and it WAS a tempting offer, but i just couldn't bring myself to take advantage of the guy in his debilitated state. i was kinda hoping that he would see the lack of monetary value in his jacket and give that to me in defeat also.

i learnt that day that i do have morals and that no matter how hard i tried i would never be able to pay my rent with sticks, but at least i could make a fire, adorn myself in leaves and drink out of battle caps. i always get the crazy ones.

THINGS ARE PICKING UP! FINALLY

Just some examples of what's going on lately. Some really cool pieces are happening in the shop. Here, of course are some samples of realism. Both done by Art...

FINALLY, after the Canada Line construction, which took 2 years, the "recession", the Olympics... and a rainy winter, things are picking up again. We're pretty lucky to have the Canada Line train running under our street but during it's construction, things were pretty dismal. The street was torn up from one side to the other. Foot traffic was a thing of the past. The waiting area of the shop which was as busy as a single's bar was completely dead. No cars were able to travel down the side streets, or even park in the neighborhoods due to pipe replacement.

I remember working late one night, til about midnight and hearing a loud rumbling sound accompanied by a real foul smell. I bandaged my client and went outside to see what was up. As I looked into the trench which has now been replaced by Cambie Street again, I saw a pipe puking out, what looked like a brown spray of human turds and sewer juice! The next morning, as I showed up for an early appointment, it was sealed up and the smell was gone. The city handled it pretty quickly!

Everyone at the shop is busy right now... even Fester is starting to go. Get down here!!!

American Assassinations

Michael J. Shapiro

University of Hawaii

      In a recent article in the New York Times, Tobin Harshaw, equated assassinating Americans, with killing the Constitution. He referred to the practice, begun under the last Bush administration and continuing into the present, of authorizing the CIA, “to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests.” Reading the piece, I was struck by how common place such extraordinary measures have become. Outrage is expressed time and time again and the practices continue relatively unchanged despite the transition of political parties and presidents. Is the current climate of covert violence the necessary outcome of the times? Did it have to come to this? 

In order to gain a politically perspicuous view of the way contemporary politics mobilizes the tensions between justice and its location within spaces we cannot control or effectively address (ultimately many are left with a sense of powerlessness to describe our opposition to state definitions and justifications of the police order), we need to defamiliarize the contemporary relationship between justice and the demand for order at all costs. As Foucault has noted, when referring to his “method,” to be able to grasp “the history of successive forms” and appreciate how peculiar the contemporary form is, he had “to stand detached from it, bracket its familiarity, in order to analyze the theoretical and practical context with which it has been associated” (hence his analysis of the way sexuality was problematized in ancient Greece). In a similar methodological gesture, the classical historian, Paul Veyne, notes that he is interested in analyzing Roman history because of the way it allows him to see the present: “Rome…takes us out of ourselves and forces us to make explicit the differences separating us from it.”

What kind of history could make our difference more apparent? If we recognize that the contemporary spatial strategy for responding to crimes is dominated by agencies whose ultimate horizon involves mechanisms of confinement, the system of law and justice in medieval Iceland is perhaps the best historical moment we can use to “take us out of ourselves.” As the writers of Icelandic Sagas teach us, medieval Iceland had a singular way of identifying political affiliation and allocating legal protection. A person’s affiliational identity was not that of the modern citizen subject. It was primarily communal rather than territorial inasmuch as it was tied to family and clan heredity. Nevertheless, one’s legal identity could migrate into a spatial mode because the movement from inside the law to outside of it (being outlawed) could be juridically determined at a yearly meeting of the clans at the Icelandic Althing. For example, if a person was charged with murder and thereby ordered to pay compensation to a victim’s family or clan, failure to come up with the payment would outlaw the perpetrator. Once outlawed, a person could be killed with impunity.

 Although pieces of literature and thus imaginative reenactments of Icelandic events in general and juridical history in particular, the Sagas yield a significant analytic. Their characters challenge the necessity and inevitability of the current predicament of confinement.  The characters of the Sagas varying relationships to juridical space – being either inside or outside of it – reflect a relatively unfamiliar model of the administration of justice. Unlike the mechanism of confinement, which has characterized centuries of the European and American justice systems, medieval Iceland administered justice by making the penalty a very precarious form of exclusion. For example, in Njal’s Saga, both a well intentioned character, the noble warrior Gunnar, who killed to protect himself, and an ill-intentioned character, the notorious Killer Hraap, who killed arbitrarily, end up outside the law and are killed by their enemies.  At a minimum, the part-time administration of justice at the medieval Icelandic Althing functioned to allocate bodies to a space where there was no law.

By looking at the juridico-political system of medieval Iceland in the present, we are able to reflect on the historical trajectory of relationships between bodies and legal spaces and defamiliarize the current relationship. The outlawing practice in medieval Iceland was not predicated on the kind of security issues that are preoccupying the contemporary state. Outlawing was designed to disconnect wealth and violence and to regulate inter-clan violence. The almost certain consequence of being placed outside the law was death at the hands of one’s enemies. Because there was no centralized system of revenge, retaliation for the alleged crime was strictly free lance; it was in the hands of the aggrieved parties and their allies. The result could be catastrophic because it was common for cycles of retaliation to develop and engulf the entire social order. Indeed, the justice system of the modern state was designed in part to avoid the escalating cycles of violence that have occurred in pre state political systems. By monopolizing retaliation, the state monopolizes and depersonalizes revenge.

Although the administration of confinement in prison systems and other more ad hoc or spontaneous places of confinement remains the ultimate horizon of contemporary justice systems for those “brought to justice”, the strategy of outlawing is invoked when a citizen (someone presumptively inside the law) is, by executive order, translated into an enemy status (for example the current U.S. practice of designating some Americans as “enemy combatants” or those providing “material support” for terrorist organizations).  Such translations are increasingly the case. Once the “war on terror” reached its current level of expansion, it began to resemble practices that Foucault ascribed to modern medicine; its locations included a nomenclature (a list of terrorist acts), ways of classifying bodies (e.g., psycho-biological discourses on the terrorist were engendered), and a proliferating set of surveilling and policing agencies. Some of those agencies lack killing power - for example the public health services that are now licensed to heed the dangers of biological terrorism – but some – for example the CIA -  are enjoined to engage in extra-judicial killing of those placed outside the law. And insofar as the decisions for such juridical exclusions are made in places sequestered away from public media (unlike those taken at the Icelandic Althing) it is difficult to demand accountability for each execution (or in many cases to even learn about it). 

check out the boy Young Sid's new album 'What Doesn't Kill Me' album art

god speed on your musical journey bro...
shout out to MTC for putting up the images for me to bite...

JULIA GNUSE, ONCE AGAIN VOTED MOST TATTOOED WOMAN...

I (ART) started tattooing Julia in 1991 in Newport Beach California. She walked in one day without any tattoos, hoping to get some relief from a skin condition which was a side effect of her liver producing too much iron for her blood. The skin condition manifested itself in the form of blisters which were as deep as 3rd degree burns. They commonly show up on the hands and face mostly but other body parts were affected. She made an appointment to start tattooing her body suit for the following week. Twice a week for the next 7 years and about 2300 hours later, she was the most tattooed woman in the world. I moved to Canada in about 1998 and my brother Steve took over where I left off. We have appeared on the Guiness Prime time TV show, You Asked for It, Ripley's Believe it or not, Pro Sieben TV (Germany)... and many more.

Recently, she was in Milan where she was AGAIN voted most tattooed woman. There have been several contenders but none with the coverage she has. I look at her photos and it's hard to believe that she was my project...and my brother's, and we feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to opportunity to tattoo her, to have had the recognition we have had and at the same time, be able to restore confidence and happiness in Julia's life, by putting images on her skin which she loves to look at everyday instead of blisters and the scars they leave.

People judge all the time but they don't know her story. If I was in her shoes, I would do the same thing. When experimental medication causes blindness, when dermabrasions and chemical peels only left scars... when doctors said there was NO treatment available which would end this condition, tattooing saved her sanity & happiness. I have had one well known local artist tell me that what I did was "wrong" and that he wouldn't want to "contribute to another person's nightmare". How can this be considered a nightmare when she smiles everyday, now knows Quincy Jones, has been asked by Aerosmith to appear in the "Pink" video, she gets paid for TV appearances, she is flown all over the world - all expenses paid, to show herself off... and all because she wanted to remedy a condition which NOBODY could treat, except tattooing.

My first video upload

Our 2nd session with the 'Christ the King' back piece, thats the work on the bottom images - to Dead Prez 'Hip Hop'

one more session to go

NEW ARTIST - "FESTER", STARTING AT SHOP TODAY!!

Armando "Fester" Castruita, is starting at the shop today. Great artist and friend. I've known him for many years from attending tattoo conventions in Mexico. He is a great talent, and we're stoked to have him in with us. He and Juan used to work together in Fester's shop "Ninety Nine Tattoo" in the city of Celaya in Mexico. He can do any style of tattooing... with his eyes closed!

His schedule is not yet set, it will be in the next few days. Come by and check his portfolio out or just tell him "welcome"!

The Shock Doctrine and the Neoliberal Imaginary

William E. Connolly
Johns Hopkins University

In a compelling book, entitled The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein charts how the neoliberal right follows the double-barreled strategy introduced years ago by its patron-saint, Milton Friedman.  Right wing think-tanks first prepare a set of market deregulations, anti labor actions, and tax cutting policies, waiting for an acceptable time to enact them. Then a rightist administration deploys any new shock that comes along to push them through. Friedman himself tested this strategy in Chile, after Allende, with probable American help, was killed in a coup and General Pinochet took over. It has since been deployed often. An economic crisis in Argentina? Use the IMF to impose neoliberal policies and deregulation. A recession in the United States in the late 1970's?  Give large tax breaks to the rich and decrease regulation when Reagan gains office. An economic meltdown in 2009 created by deregulation, bank adventurism and high frequency trading?  More bailouts, joined to militant resistance to reorganize the neoliberal policies that created the disaster.

Klein’s book, which appeared before the latest meltdown, is compelling. She does not argue that the “neos–-the neoliberals and neoconservatives in tandem--create every crisis. But they are ready to impose preconceived policies each time one arises, as the drumbeat on Fox News and CNBC financial 'reporting' reveals. As Friedman himself said, revealing neoliberalism to be a politico-economic doctrine from the start, 'only a crisis produces real change...That I believe is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive..until the politically impossible become politically inevitable.” (quoted in Klein, p. 140) The shock doctrine was enacted again after 9/11: the attack by Al Qaeda was used by Bush and Cheney to launch a reckless, destructive war against Iraq the neocons had wanted all along.

If I were to criticize Klein, it would be to suggest that she underplays how a significant minority of the populace is primed by existential temperament and/or economic position to embrace this double-barreled strategy. A large section of affluent and aspirational consumers, feeling entitled to cheap oil, two or more houses, SUV’s, and yearly bonuses, are primed to neglect the dangers of oil dependence, to accept destructive military policies, and to embrace market deregulation to inflate housing values and investment portfolios. A section of white blue-collar workers, offended by minority movements that ignored their grievances for too long, are attracted to the utopian promises of this constellation. Many on the right edge of evangelism, joined by some Catholics, act as if God himself is a protector of market adventurism. If they need support for such a strange idea, they can appeal to George Gilder’s 1981 book, Wealth and Poverty. That book helped to spur the unholy alliance between neoliberalism and evangelism I call the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine. 

Here is a question that deserves more attention on the democratic left:  Why are so many constituencies eager to reinstate the neoliberal myth so soon after each new disaster discloses its utopian character and destructive tendencies? There was the 1970's reinstatement only a few decades after the Great Depression and fascist responses to that crisis in several countries had seemingly taught (nearly) everyone how disastrous such a utopian vision can be. And it has now occurred again, this time only a few months after the last meltdown.

We can see why Wall Street and corporate elites are so eager to forget. But why such dangerous forgetfulness among large sections of the populace?  Is it bound to a problematic conception of individual freedom through the acquisition of private fortune that requires the myth of an untrammeled market to sustain it? Is it tied to the quest by a large section of white working and middle class males to redeem their dignity in a tough economy by castigating minorities who would otherwise make additional claims upon them? Does it flow from a generalized American demand for special entitlement in the world in which those claims increasingly face resistance? Does it reflect failure on the Left to devise an ideal appropriate to the times after the demise of socialist models of productivism? Perhaps it reflects all of these, as they work back and forth on each other to varying degrees for different constituencies. 

Sure, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and CNBC preach neoliberalism daily, playing up its aspirational side while obscuring its draconian disciplines. But that repetition, again, does not sufficiently explain the lure of the myth or the intensity of denials about its harsh disciplines and contributions to periodic crisis, unemployment, a crumbling infrastructure, debt, racial division, and climate change.

One thing seems certain. While the democratic left must expose the shock doctrine of Milton Friedman and his gang, we ourselves need more militant strategies to press “Independents” and “blue dog democrats” to rethink their priorities. And we also need to articulate an interim vision that speaks more sharply to the systemic risks and personal troubles of today. My sense is that one place to start is in the sphere of consumption, showing how the established infrastructure of consumption simultaneously renders it difficult for many to make ends meet, encourages unwise economic decisions, and endangers the planet. An infrastructure, for instance, may be organized either to demand the automobile or support mass transit, to demand oil and coal generated electricity or provide a grid that supports sustainable energy production, and to provide expensive hi-tech care out of the reach of many or support preventative health care. The latter in each case reduces the costs of consumption for low income consumers while supporting sustainability for future generations.

As you show people how apparently autonomous consumption decisions are channeled by the market and state sustained infrastructure in which they are set, it may be possible to pose changes to that infrastructure itself that speak to the issues of household cost and sustainability, Along the way it will be important to show how neoliberal policies, promising a reduction in the size of the state, actually produce powerful pressures to expand the state to maintain its own preconditions of existence without reducing pressures on household budgets. But that is a topic for another time. 

This Is Your Brain, This Is Your Brain On Politics.

Alan Finlayson
Swansea University



There can be no doubt that ongoing developments in sciences of the mind and brain are central to our contemporary condition and will have an immense impact upon future politics. But the particular form this may take remains an open political question - except in the United Kingdom. The nation that gave the world free-trade, cricket and Puritanism is now a pioneer in the application of ‘cutting-edge’ neuropsychology and neurophysiology to problems of government policy. We call it “behavioral change”. 

Tony Blair’s new Labour came to power in 1997 preoccupied with two things: reform of the public sector (which in the UK means schools, hospitals and universities as well as the labours of the civil service); and amelioration of the poor socio-economic conditions of the very worst-off or most ‘excluded’. In both cases it sought to create systems of incentive and disincentive that would lead people to act in ways the government desired. In public services this included forms of market competition and performance measurement as well as rewards for demonstrating entrepreneurial capacity. In welfare it included tax-credits and wage guarantees to ‘make work pay’. In short, new Labour swallowed much of what was invented by the theorists of so-called ‘public choice’. Two things happened to modify this.  

Firstly, improvements were not as large or fast as desired. Government therefore sought more refined ways to modify behaviors, or at least a more solid-seeming evidence base for doing so. Secondly, Labour also recognized – correctly - that from climate-change to poor educational attainment, government alone cannot solve the problems we face, and resolution also requires action on the part of citizens both as individuals and as parts of collectives.


Labour drew the conclusion that if it couldn’t solve policy problems by directly acting upon them then it could do so indirectly by acting on individuals and getting them to solve the policy problem for it. Individual mental behavior thus became a primary object of policy and ‘behavioral change’. Indicative policies include: dosing prisoners diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Disorders; cash-grants for low-income pregnant women intended to enhance in-utero diet and thus the physical and mental quality of babies; schooling kids in emotional and financial literacy; incorporating behavioral management principles into urban design. 

These developments are symptomatic of the collapse of two prior paradigms for government thinking. The first is of course the social democratic idea that the protection of public and collective spaces from the deformations of corporate self-interest ensures opportunities for democratic self-rule that transform individual capacities. The other is the idea of public and rational choice theory that the protection of private spaces from the deformations of collective interest ensures opportunities for corporate rule that transform profit margins. Having already rejected democratic socialism Labour’s inorganic intellectuals then recognized that the simple utilitarianism of rational choice theory (which despite decades of effort still can’t work out why anybody bothers to vote) is inadequate to the task of predicting or managing large parts of human activity. In addition to thinking in terms of rewards and punishments they sought to take account of interpersonal and communal influences upon behaviors, and were excited to discover that social action is sometimes shaped by “social norms”. 

And so into British public policy there came neuroscience, to sit alongside economic and psychological behaviorism and the tedious just-so stories of - inexplicably fashionable - evolutionary psychology. The conclusion has been that, as one former adviser to Tony Blair puts it, ‘by highlighting our psychological frailties and the way these contribute to market epidemics’ behavioral economics and neuropsychology contribute to ‘a powerful case for regulation, paternalism and measures to promote feelings of security’ as well as to appreciation of the fact that strong social institutions can help to contain what might otherwise be our impatient and short-termist pleasure-seeking. “It is sensible”, he argues, for politicians to work with the constraints of our mental predispositions…by revealing how social arrangements have been molded by human nature, it encourages us to respect the tacit wisdom of established norms and be sensitive to the damage that can be done in the name of modernization”. 

And, that, of course is a classical form of Conservatism. People, we now learn, are frail and weak. They are prone to error and also – the most important of contemporary sins – irrationality. They must therefore live in societies where better people, who care about them, can oversee the strong institutions that keep them on the straight and narrow. And, indeed, the British Conservative Party is just as interested in behavior change as new Labour has been. Here is Conservative Party leader David Cameron speaking at the end of 2009: “There are lessons we can learn from the latest academic research which shows how government, by going with the grain of human nature, can better influence behaviour. The behavioural psychologist Robert Cialdini argues that one of the most important influences on how we behave are 'social norms' - that is, how other people behave. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have argued that with the right prompting, or 'nudge', government can effect a whole culture change...’. Yes, British Conservatism now takes its lead from an Obama lawyer. 

There are lots of things wrong about this. There is space here to mention only three. The first is this: policy claims about neuropsychology and behavior almost always make it seem as if the latter studies the brains only of those whose behavior is an object of social policy and rarely the brains of, say, the people who make such policy. But if neuropsychology, neuroscience (and evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics) tell us that our minds are not very good at making decisions then this must surely apply as much to the Downing Street Policy Unit as it does to any else. And given that these people have the power and position to affect national policies that include matters as significant as how we educate our children and which countries we invade, should we not be concerned with their brains above all? Perhaps (to employ insights the evolutionary psychologists are very proud of) people go into policy-making, think-tanks and government because they imagine that the heady scent of power coming off them might help them to attract more partners with whom they might mate? And if there is one thing that policy makers are good at in a country such as the UK – with a venerable tradition of centralized government – it is exercising the irrationality of groupthink (q.v. ‘invading Iraq with neither a reason or a plan’). In short, if new findings about brain and behaviour are true then they should not change how government works but how we think government in the first place. 

Secondly, this approach to policy is significantly silent about something: if we want to understand how and why people today behave as they do maybe we should look at not only the ‘internal’ influences but the ‘external’ ones. Those might include, say, advertising companies encouraging unsustainable debt, film and television studios inflating fears of crime or junk-food chains wrecking our biochemistry with appallingly bad products. Indeed, much of what is presented as new findings about how to frame decisions and ‘nudge’ behaviors has been most developed in the field of marketing. There is little point, if one is worried about energy costs in expending effort to get people to recycle a bit more, use some different light bulbs and generate bit of their own electricity - much better to change the ways in which energy corporations produce and deliver their electricity. In short in a society such as ours where people – whatever we pretend – have radically different levels of power over the world, the behavior the matters most is not that of the routine individual but of the powerful; the people who run and own corporations and banks and so on and whose madness and anti-social tendencies have of late been all too apparent. But about this the advocates of behaviour change policy are mostly silent. 

Thirdly, the incorporation of neurological thinking into British government is not the outcome of a careful reflection on the state of research and it is very selective. That is unfortunate because there is so much to be learned from neuroscience. My concern is that the way it is being incorporated into policy may encourage us to reject the science and to depart yet further from materialist theories and methods. It is unlikely that many will come fully to embrace the Churchlands’ declaration that human brains and bodies are “epistemic engines” exploiting the “flow of environmental energy, and the information it already contains, to produce more information, and to guide movement”. But they might see the significance of the finding that our dynamic neural networks are parts not only of our internal nervous system but also of much larger networks comprised not just of other persons and their bodies and brains, but also a natural environment (including rain, gravity and e-coli) and cultural environment (including forms of communication, types of food and kinds of routinised or institutionalized activity). 

Politics has not just become neurological now that we have studied brains and that governments can take neurology into account when designing polices. Humans have always acted on themselves and on their brain-states (thorough diet, fasting, intoxication etc.) and States have acted on their subjects (through festivals, military training, education etc.). Understanding that and specifying how it happens today is a vital contemporary challenge. 


The incorporation of neuroscience into the thinking of British politicians and policy makers is part of a wider collapse in the confidence and conviction of politicians of all kinds and who, as a result, turn to whatever sounds clever and looks ‘cutting-edge’. With no faith in the difficult processes of democratic government, and unwilling or unable to challenge the pathologies caused by those who control significant means of production, our politicians have instead turned to micro-techniques for trying to manage individuals. The outcome – of course – is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. 

All politics is concerned with behavior change. People have written books, sung songs, and made speeches, they have marched in celebration, in protest or to war all because they wanted to change the habits, thoughts and feelings of others. British politicians may have rejected literature for behavioural neuropsychology. But the rest of us need not be so refined in our choice of political techniques. There is behaviour out there that needs to be modified and there are powerful people who are finding it difficult to learn the lessons of their bad behaviours. It is up to us to help them by any means necessary.