Windows open
First fall breezes, speed reading, mix tapes
A river swim in Hudson, New York.
I have a mixtape that I got many years ago from my crust punk friend Cody. Cody was a classic Minneapolis oogle and let me tattoo him in a kitchen when I bought my first tattoo machine from Unimax. It’s the kind of cassette you wished was a crush tape but probably isn’t. It was a thank-you gift in trade for the tattoo, likely nothing more, and the tape cover unhelpfully lists the artists but no song titles. It took me years to figure out which songs were by which bands— in particular one song that I came back to again and again. I finally found it, and it sounds much better on tape, the sound crunched by a boombox speaker and somehow sounding battery-powered, but it’s this one:
⭐️ Back to School: Trauma-Informed Tattooing and Beyond starts this Saturday and I’ve been making my way through some new books along with older standbys to brush up and get as current as I can before our time together. There are still open spots for enrollment, along with some pay-what-you-can spaces. ⭐️
If you can’t get enough of school, Wednesday the 11th from 7-9pm, the Borough Based Liberation Project is hosting a teach-in titled From Close Rikers Now to Queens Cop City: Resisting the Borough-Based Jail Plan. This is just one day in a series of programming— check out their site for the full schedule.
Some other amazing Fall classes coming up:
o Sunday the 15th Jaylind Ezili is teaching his Skin Deep workshop on tattooing techniques, history, and safety precautions for clients with darker skin (highly recommended).
o Care/Erotics of Liberation’s year-long study formation Liberation Practice Field
o Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo with Sarah Al-Yahya and Paige Fulton: To The Streets! At the School for Poetic Computation
o Mae Howard’s Disabled Erotics at the School of Making Thinking from Abrons Art Center
This Friday the 13th: RAPP Benefit Flash Day at Flower World
With Nassim, Nish, Rex, Pony, Hassan, and myself – email the artists to reserve a spot :
You Left a Mark on Me, a group show celebrating queerness and tattoos
Curated by Zach Grear and Nelson Santos
Opening September 19, 6-8pm
The Bureau for General Services-Queer Division
208 W 13th St, New York, NY 10011
Colton Ackerman, Alexandria Deters, Virginia Elwood, Evan Paul English, Christian Lord, Dewey Rice, Lancelot Runge, Tamara Santibañez, Zyra West, Zach Grear
Reading this week:
Por ti, me doblo / Junto, me aplico by Felli Maynard
Passions and Perversions: The symbolic maps of contagion By Willa Smart and Beckett Warzer
How Israel's Elite Intelligence Unit Targets Queer Palestinians in the West Bank by Theia Chatelle
Rolling on the ground screeching at this old PSA by then-senator, now-citywide enemy Eric Adams on searching your family’s home for contraband-- bewilderingly conflating the first and fourth amendment.
My friend Jose de Jesus Rodriguez just opened an incredible painting show at Deli Gallery, Long Winded. Up through September 28th.