Throwback of the week

Some pretty evocative images here, and that dancer on 1:40-1:42 seems to be on almost every video clip made from early nineties to early 00s...Fatu lol

Koi Fish - work in progress

I've been away for a bit and the blog has taken a back seat in terms of the priorities nowadays, I've been trying to put together a good portfolio as I am now looking for more experiences in the shop environment...but here's a little piece I started last week on a good friend....can't wait to finish it....

Javier Campos from Lima Peru... uses Godoy Machines

Javier Campos is a Peruvian tattoo artists. We mentioned his model machine in previous blogs. He has only been tattooing 8 years... look at his work. These are mastepieces. This is what every tattoo artist should strive for. When you have this kind of understanding of your machine and technique, there will be NO limits to what you can do.

I can't wait til the trend of traditional tattooing is over. It will be interesting to see who will be out of work and who won't. Artists with limits are just that. This guy will always be busy because he has the skills.



We met Javier at a convention in Lima Peru about 5 years ago, and saw him again at the following one. Since then, we have become friends and we meet whatever South American events which we decide to attend. Normally we give one of our machines as a prize for best black n grey tattoo, best realistic and best tattoo of the convention. And pretty soon, he was winning all the machine prizes!! We decided to start giving him machines in order to let other artists have a chance to win one of our prized machines.



This is some of the best work to be seen in tattooing. Just compare. Walk around town and take a close look at people's tattoos. Compare.



The subtle shades of greys and skin tones are not the easiest to put into the skin. Over time, the experience of doing this type of realism becomes easier and easier and pretty soon, you get a complete understanding of how to do it, how to deal with different skin types... Training your eye / hand coordination with this type of style will prepare you to handle ANY challenge effortlessly.



Look at the shades of color in the lips. The colors blended to make a realistic tone for the lip color are hard to blend. A knowledge of painting helps to steer you in the right direction. Check the hoop in the girl's nose... very realistic.



Another masterpiece... Remember the name Javier Campos, you may be seeing him here sooner or later...

Democracy’s Prisoners of Conscience

Steven Johnston

University of South Florida

The moral and political impoverishment of the Republican and Tea Parties manifest themselves almost daily. How do they respond to political assassination and multiple murders, facilitated by handguns, in Arizona? Celebrate the Second Amendment as a guarantor of American freedom and advocate arming the citizenry with concealed weapons. How do they respond to activist conservative courts that deem unconstitutional even modest health care reform designed to remedy evident injustices? Denounce the evils of government action and hail the decisions as a restoration of American freedom.

If conservatives were as steeped in American constitutional traditions as they believe, they would recognize the absurdity of the first position and the irrelevancy of the second. Freedom and democracy are at risk in the United States and elsewhere, but not because of the specter of gun control or mandatory health insurance (or tax increases, government spending to create jobs, reproductive rights, government regulation, or budget deficits).

The United States, in the first decade of the 21st century, already enjoys two wars to its credit, one patently illegal, the other a miserable failure whose needless, unjustifiable continuation renders it criminal. The country has inflicted great constitutional damage at home and killed tens of thousands of innocents in Afghanistan and Iraq to prosecute these wars. On these questions, however, we hear no protests from the newly installed Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Nor do we hear anything other than bromides about national security from new Tea Party-backed members who prefer to treat the Pentagon budget, which sustains an unprecedented global empire, as more or less untouchable, despite vague pronouncements that everything is subject to fiscal review. Nor do we hear anything from the gun-toting public whose weapons supposedly protect our freedom from government malfeasance.

Once upon a time, a well-armed American citizenry might have opposed national military aggression and aggrandizement. In theory citizen militias resist tyranny at home and refuse imperial aggression abroad. No such convictions inform a professional mercenary army, which the United States deploys (patriotic protestations to the contrary notwithstanding), let alone individual gun owners. The Second Amendment, despite the ideologically-driven decision of an activist Supreme Court, is a collective rather than an individual right. Historically it did bear a certain relation to freedom—but no longer. America is a country awash in guns, but in the last fifty years this didn’t prevent, for example, either Vietnam or Iraq. The Second Amendment signifies nothing more than a consumer’s “right” to satisfy a socially dangerous fetish. The same can be said with opposition to health care, which supposedly relates to the much vaunted freedom of choice in the marketplace.

A democratic notion of freedom lies elsewhere. This is why the dominant responses—ranging from silence to cheerleading to assistance—to Julian Assange’s political persecution are so disturbing. The hysterical diatribes of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin are to be expected; Rachel Maddow’s disgraceful, ignorant December 15 performance on David Letterman and Bill Keller’s nasty, self-serving calumny in The New York Times Sunday Magazine (a friend of the prosecutor brief for the likes of Eric Holder) less so. Of course, The New York Times loves to trumpet its own civic “virtue” and “responsibility,” which Keller does in the Assange piece, perhaps forgetting how the paper marched in lockstep with the Bush Administration’s campaign for war in Iraq in 2002 and 2003. Ironically, The Times and other media outlets are now in the process of establishing their own electronic “drop boxes” for the deposit of classified and confidential material.

As Assange pointed out in a 60 Minutes interview aired on January 30, WikiLeaks’s political and publishing activism fall well within the American political tradition of opposition to established authority. This seemed to escape the sensibility of 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft, who chided Assange for his surprise that the United States would target him for retaliation for WikiLeaks’s exposés, deeming it natural and therefore somehow unproblematic rather than a further abuse of power. Despite America’s (unwarranted) indignation, WikiLeaks opposes illegitimate and abusive exercises of power—corporate or governmental—regardless of country. The idea is to create a more just society, to which freedom contributes, to which WikiLeaks contributes. And democratic freedom is a political phenomenon that finds its finest expression through action-in-concert. One might think here of recent events in Tunisia, abetted by WikiLeaks, or current events in Egypt. 

As for Assange, when the freedom of one is at stake, so is the freedom of everyone. It is the responsibility of democratic citizens to condemn and resist the state when it threatens not just a single citizen’s political rights, but the liberty of us all by focusing its efforts against a single citizen. This is what we owe Julian Assange and the citizen-and-prisoner of conscience that allegedly provided WikiLeaks with information, Bradley Manning. Eric Holder is doing his secretive best to dust off the Espionage Act of 1917, which Woodrow Wilson used to brutally suppress dissent during World War I, and make it work against Assange.

One democratic organization doing its best on behalf of Assange is Anonymous, a protean cross-state, transnational political force armed with a new set of civic skills to intervene effectively (in part, covertly) against corporate and state assaults on freedom. Like Assange and WikiLeaks, members of Anonymous risk arrest, prosecution, and prison as they resist and seek to reverse undemocratic practices and regimes. 

The United States does not enjoy a robust history of living up to First Amendment ideals. WikiLeaks has provided the country with another opportunity to match democratic promise with performance. No doubt Obama will lead the way in blowing it. With luck, he will be a one-term president. The time for the democratic left to oppose his renomination is here. He ought to pay the ultimate political price for his repeated democratic betrayals, both at home and internationally.

Perturbed as heck, and we'll take it for a little more: The Banality of Lying in Politics

Emily Beausoleil 
University of British Columbia

The recent piranhic media frenzy surrounding Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange almost immediately calls to mind the Pentagon Papers leaked exactly 40 years ago; where, though a mere 7,000 Xeroxed documents compared to Wikileaks’ hundreds of thousands, the government claimed the damage to national security was so great that it required stopping the presses – an order thankfully overruled by the Supreme Court and dismissed by seventeen newspapers; where the Espionage Act was first used as an Official Secrets Act, for which it was never intended; where the government similarly demanded the ‘return of information’; and where Ellsberg was likewise accused of treason rather than patriotism. 

And just as in Ellsberg’s case, too, the contents of this year’s July leak was found, as described in a recently released Pentagon letter, not to compromise security in any way, despite claims by US Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chief of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, among others, that Assange and his team had ”blood on their hands.” 

Certain differences present themselves, of course: where Nixon worked covertly via the order for a dozen Bay of Pigs veterans to “incapacitate Ellsberg totally,” now Democratic Party consultant Bob Beckel can call for the illegal assassination of Assange on public television, as President Obama’s administration makes moves to create an explicit Official Secrets Act. But like the Pentagon Papers so long ago, Wikileaks has, in the words of an international group of former intelligence officers and ex-government officials who wrote in support of Assange, “teased the genie of transparency out of a very opaque bottle, and powerful forces in America, who thrive on secrecy, are trying desperately to stuff the genie back in.” 

Secrecy and deception are a part of politics, though they inevitably inhibit accountability and public capacity for informed decision-making. As in the case of Vietnam where spin doctors and strategists alike overlooked intelligence documents that noted early on the improbability of winning the war, or the more recent manufacture of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and a democratically unelected president George W. Bush, or the official claims of combat with armed ‘insurgents’ revealed as false by Wikileak video footage, during the now-famous 2007 killing of 18 Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, deception is bred into the bone of politics – perhaps it always was. As Ellsberg states in a December interview with Amy Goodman, 

“We’re in an absurd position here with a close down of public discussion of official matters, very similar to that of China. In fact, I even wonder whether there’s a rule that absurd in China. And that’s the kind of information system, I think, that 
our leaders aspire to, and have for a long time.”

But what is striking about this recent case of disclosure is the difference in public response: compared to the public outcry of the 1970s, which ignited protest, fuelled a social movement, and catalyzed the end of the Vietnam War, the public is strangely silent in 2010. Well, not silent, surely – but rather than an eye for the content of these released documents and their implications for democratic transparency and government accountability, all eyes are on Assange, this striking figure stepping on the world stage and the concomitant personal scandal that erupted with impeccable timing; all eyes are on the guerrilla warfare waged in cyberspace between Anonymous and various corporations. Even the accused original source, Bradley Manning, who has been in prison since May, receives his share of media coverage, though the messenger has far more been the target. But with the exception of the New York Times, the actual deceptions revealed by these documents have been all but abandoned by the US media, and likewise public response has been a resounding shrug. 

We’ve gotten pretty good at shrugging, in liberal democracies. A negative definition of freedom helps, of course, construed as the right to be left-the-heck-alone. And since western world leaders saw the atrocities the everyman was capable of during World War One, such passivity has been at times actively cultivated, beginning most famously with the work of Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and originator of the field of public relations, who was employed by corporations and the US government alike to use marketing strategies to siphon this dangerous energy into safer channels. Indeed, Carol Pateman made clear some years ago how such democracies function through, rather than in spite of, the passivity of the majority of the population. What kind of stability, what kind of continuity, could be assured after all, if politics had to make room for the torrent of people who presently feel there is no point? Martin Luther King Jr. makes a similar observation regarding the political power of inaction when he writes from Birmingham Jail that “the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice;...who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season’.” 

But what strikes me about this recent shrug to political deception is how it reveals a general acceptance of lying in politics. We know, don’t we? Are we surprised? The lying in politics that Arendt identified as a core threat to democracy, whether through conscious concealment or unconscious ‘defactualization’ via fidelity to theory, seems now to be only one aspect of, as Raymond Williams first coined it, a “dramatized society.” We live in a culture where the line between performance and reality, between artifice and authenticity, between politics and popular culture has become increasingly blurred. Where identities are cultivated like manicured gardens on facebook, where news stations parade their bias and peddle infotainment, where ‘reality shows’ are clearly staged, where a comedian testifies in character to the Supreme Court and an actor lives and breathes the role of a untalented rapper for two years, where bands are formed around boardroom tables and elaborate hair products can give you that unkempt look, where hipster ‘irony’ comes full circle to earnestness the longer one’s nonchalance is honed and insouciant moustache remains intact. We live in a culture of explicit artifice, and, like the Cubists who were arguably the first to draw explicit attention to the surface within their work, we are aware, very aware, of how much the medium is the message. And yet, as opposed to the Cubists, perhaps, this general awareness of and conscious play with surface is itself somehow less earnest – as if, rather than unveiling a latent truth or essential core, it’s turtles all the way down. In the face of acknowledged artifice, it seems a natural response to cultivate studied indifference and a world-weary arch of the eyebrow. As any middle-schooler will tell you, it’s better to opt out than be the fool. 

This movement to a culture of explicit artifice is paralleled, interestingly, in the world of US cinema, which moved from Method acting’s earnest soul-searching and commitment to the ‘gritty truth’ by actors like Marlon Brando and James Dean post-WW2 – where actors were in therapy as a matter of course and playing Blanche Du Bois almost drove Vivien Leigh insane – to what film historian David Thomson calls “cool pretending” that defines current cinema acting, epitomized by Meryl Streep and George Clooney, where one has a sense the character leaves no traces once the role is cast aside; indeed, that actors are not quite fooled by their own performance, and you have been let in on the joke. 

The pledge to sincerity and emotional truth that defined Method acting have been replaced by a predominance of deft skill and “naked pretense” (which, Thomson says, “you could call...lying, as much as acting”), founded on “a way of looking at the world that says you can't trust anyone, can you? It suggests that—for the moment at least—we have given up on self-knowledge and feel ourselves being massaged or directed by most of our presidents, and nearly all of our eternal performers from Johnny Carson to David Letterman... Presidents move us from time to time, just as hosts make us smile, but most of them warn us that we're in a play or a game.” Such is the contemporary condition in liberal democracies, where sincerity is suspicious and earnestness appears ironic, if not tragic-comedic. 

In a culture where the line between reality and performance is unclear and constantly on the move, it is no wonder, perhaps, that the vocabulary of recent presidential debates has been lowered to a sixth-grade level in response to common conflations of eloquence with insincerity. It is no wonder, perhaps, that comedian John Gnarr is Reykjavik’s latest mayor, and platform promises of a polar bear display at the zoo, free towels at public swimming pools, and coalitions only with parties who have watched all seasons of “The Wire” are more earnest than they first appear. And it seems perfectly appropriate that comedians hold a political rally to restore sanity, while the rise of flash mobs across the western world invokes and enacts a public sphere formerly reserved for public protest – fleeting publics and collective acts now simply for their own sake, as if the performance itself provided a sense of concrete experience and sincere collective that are otherwise absent. Perhaps these performances are an unlikely source of a surrogate ‘authenticity’ – at the very least, they provide respite by explicitly naming the predominance of veneer that is often as obvious as it is undeclared. 

Part of this movement towards explicit artifice is part and parcel of an increasing reflexivity regarding the situated nature of all knowledge-claims, the partiality of perspective – from anthropologists and theorists to jazz musicians, scientists and performance artists, responses to the dangers inherent to claims of ‘authenticity’ and ‘neutrality’ and the ethical obligation to acknowledge the performance within every account have been broad and diverse. And part of this is also, at times explicitly, a response to the lack of such humility within current polemics and fundamentalisms – refusals to, in William Connolly’s terms, “insert a stutter in one’s faith,” that have recently fuelled such vitriol and fear, inhibited reflection, and cultivated new enemies where once were none – perhaps this movement to explicit artifice is a response, if not a conscious call, to calm down, take a deep breath, and count to ten. At the very least, to take a closer look at the medium of the message. 

But one effect of this culture of explicit artifice seems to be a contribution to the politics of inaction. As opposed to the public outcry of the 1970s after the release of the Pentagon Papers that belied a faith in political sincerity and media objectivity now betrayed, we have no such faith. Hence the absence of collective moral outrage, for the fact is that we know we are being deceived; and, in the passing of time and as the facticity of deception becomes one reliable truism, we’re no longer ‘mad as hell’, and yes, I suppose, we’ll take it for a little more. 

Shielded by ironic distance and a rueful grin, armed with sarcasm and a noncommittal shrug, we acknowledge the pervasiveness of veneer, and clear-sighted rather than wide-eyed, we are in on the ruse; we may not know what lies behind it, but at least we recognize the pageantry. We may not know where to direct our dissatisfactions or how to give effective shape to a creeping sense that things are not as they should be, but at least we can’t be called naive. We’re in on the joke, no? Isn’t that something? 

This general acknowledgement of artifice that courses through all levels and arenas of contemporary western culture need not only lead to inaction – as comedians-cum-unlikely-heroes and flash mobs make clear, the performative nature of everyday life might itself offer latent possibilities for collective action. While the potential directions for such collective awareness are rhizomatic and undetermined, I wonder what forms of action might emerge in the absence of recourse to ‘sincerity’ as such – or if, indeed, sincerity might be recuperated, in some form, in the process. This challenge brings to mind another: making “one’s life a work of art,” as Nietzsche and Foucault describe it, requires both brutal honesty regarding the artifice of one’s life and commitment to it nonetheless – both clear-sighted and wide-eyed, somehow. A moving target of a goal, far removed from either entrenched fundamentalisms or evasive apathy. But perhaps it signals a possible, if tenuous, if elusive, model we have yet to recognize in response to a culture of artifice; that, rather than a politics of inaction, such artifice carries with it an ethical demand that is not grounded on essential identity or universal truth, but something else...something else...Damn, it moved.

Latino treat

happy valentines day...

Suited and hair slicked back with some locs - work in progress

Willy paying homage to his buddy...

NEW GODOY MACHINES SITE - WWW.GODOYMACHINES.COM

NEW SITE IS UP...

If you are a professional tattoo artist, go to http://www.godoymachines.com to order our book...the most illegally downloaded industry e-book of our time. The one pictured is the second edition. Way thicker and more informative than the previous edition.

Any one of our machines... the only machines in the world who's patented parts are owned by US, it's builders!!

If you are interested in a machine seminar... like this one in Italy, contact us. Over 140 people attended!!

Let's bring professionalism to tattooing, and not tolerate the mediocrity which is now widely accepted. It's overdue. No more egos, no more attitudes...

Munz - Zenith Crown of a King

Toki Tau 'a e Vaka e - Kava Kuo Heka Festival

In 2010, Su'a Sulu'ape Aisea Toetu'u was invited to display and practice tatatau in Tonga for the first time in over 150 years. The Kava Kuo Heka festival on cultural diversity is held every year as a means of informing and keeping Tongan traditions in the forefront of global changes. Aisea was able to tatatau on several individuals and stirred the interest of Tongans. The following is the preface I wrote for Aisea's part of the workshop. Thank you to Katalina Lobendahn for the Tongan translation and to Latai Taumoepeau for the pictures.

Traditional Tongan tattooing practice was once a common part of Tongan culture. Every young male would be tattooed by the time he reached adulthood. Tattooing among Tongan women was just as common and decorative. Tongan tufunga tatatau were widespread throughout the islands of Tongatapu, Eua, Ha’apai, Vava’u and the Niua’s. George Tupou I outlawed traditional tattooing in 1839 in effort to Christianize the country and bring all the islands under one kingdom. Despite being a devout Christian convert, George Tupou I was also tattooed traditionally by a Samoan tufuga.

Abandoned for over 150 years, traditional tatatau is now undergoing a resurgence with help from Samoan master tattooist, Su’a Suluape Petelo. Traditionally, the Su’a family were responsible for tattooing Tongan ‘eiki like the Tu’i Kanokupolu. Since 2003, a handful of Tongan individuals have been traditionally tattooed and are the first to wear a tongan tatatau in over 100 years. In 2007, the title of Su’a Suluape was bestowed on a Tongan, Aisea Toetu’u. Aisea is the first Tongan tufunga tatatau to have completed traditional work on another Tongan and under this honored title.

The Tongan word ‘Vaka’ has become symbolic in representing this revived tradition. It has also been adopted as the name for the traditional tatatau. As the saying goes, “Toki tau ‘a e vaka e”—so too has this vaka arrived on Tongan shores where it can now seek refuge and reawaken our Tongan tradition.

*********

Mei ono’aho, ne hange ha me’a noa, pe koe me’a anga fa’a fai ‘a e tatatau ‘i Tongani. Pea koe meimei talavou kotoa pe ‘i he kuohili ne tatatau’i kinautolu te’eki ke nau hoko ‘o tangata lahi. Ne kau ai mo hono tatatau’i ‘a e kau finemui moe kau fefine honau sino koe fakateuteu. ‘I he ngaahi taimi koia ne tokolahi ‘a e ha’a Tufunga Tatatau ‘i Tongatapu, ‘Eua, Ha’apai, Vava’u pehe foki ki he ‘otu Niua.

‘I hono feinga’i ke fakatahataha’i ‘a e ‘otu Tonga ke hoko koe pule’anga pe ‘e taha mo hono liliu’i pe fakalotu’i ‘a e kainanga e fonua ke tafoki ki he lotu faka Kalisitiane, ne hanga ‘e he ‘Uluaki Fa ‘o fakatapu’i ‘i he 1839 ‘a e anga fakafonua koeni koe tatatau. Pea neongo hono fakatapu’i ‘e Tupou I ‘a e tatatau ‘i he ‘otu motu Tonga ko ‘ene mateaki’i ‘a e lotu faka Kalisitiane; ka ‘i he ‘ene kei talavou, ne tatatau’i ‘e he Tufunga Tatatau mei Ha’amoa ‘a e La’a koia kuo unga fonua.

Talu e li’ekina ‘a e tatatau mei Tongani ‘i he ta’u eni ‘e teau nimangofulu tupu, kuo ake ‘i onopooni ‘a e tatatau ‘i he kainga Tonga; pea ‘oku fakamalo ki he tokoni moe ngaue ola ‘a e ‘Eiki Tufunga Tatatau mei Ha’amoa ko Su’a Suluap e Petelo hono fakaake ‘a e konga mahu’inga koeni ‘o ‘etau hisitolia. Koe tukufakaholo ‘o e famili Su’a, ko ‘enau ngafa pe fatongia ke tatatau ‘a e Ha’a Tu’i Kanokupolu. ‘I he 2003 ‘i Vaihi (Hawai’i) ne tu’u mai e to’utangata ‘e toko nima ke tatatau’i kinautolu ‘o hange koe anga fai mei ono’aho, pea ko kinautolu eni ‘a e fuofua tangata Tonga kuo ‘aofi honau sino ‘aki ‘a e tatatau Tonga talu eni e ta’u ‘e teau tupu. ‘I he 2007, ne hanga ‘e Su’a Suluape Petelo ‘o fakanofo ‘a e tangata Tonga ko ‘Aisea Toetu’u ki he hingoa Suluape, pea ‘oku ‘iloa e ‘uluaki Tufunga Tatatau Tonga koeni ko Suluape ‘Aisea Toetu’u, pea kuo fakakakato ‘e he tangatani ‘a e fatongia tatatau angamu’a ke tatatau’i ha Tonga ‘aki ‘a e hingoa fakalangilangi koeni.

Koe lea Tonga koee koe “Vaka” ‘oku fakatatau pe fakafofonga’i ke

fakamo’ui ‘a e anga fakafonua koeni koe tatatau. Pea kuo ngaue’aki ‘a ehingoa koeni ki he ngaue mahu’inga fakafonua koeni. Hange koe lea ‘oku pehe, “Toki tau ‘a e vaka e” – pea koeni kuo foki ki ‘api ‘o taulanga e vakani ‘i Tongani ke hufanga pea fakaake ai ‘etau anga Faka‐Tonga koeni.

Randy - Work in Progress

Sega Master Systema.....