This isn’t your granddaddy’s America anymore: tattoo artists are stepping out of the shadows and into shopping malls, breaking out in a way that piercing parlors did a decade ago.
The busy and very fleshy Urban Ink has a clump of ads for tattoo suppliers, piercing instruments and ink wholesalers, showing the reach of a growing service industry that’s earning a bundle spreading indelible cultural statements across the nation’s strip malls. Several tat titles are popping up everywhere on newsstands. Urban Ink showcases glamour shots of lots of exposed bodies emblazoned with body art in catalog-like fashion spreads. The artwork is impressively complex but looks quite painful. If the tattoo crowd starts selling their skin as “your ad here,” for elections, advocacy slogans or job placements, the tat-touters could afford the plastic surgery costs for erasing the commercial message for new placements, with money left over.
Pinup magazine Skinz may be enough to send Sandra Bullock’s cheating ex Jesse James into a drooling tattoo-induced coma. But for average fetishists, the titillating glossy appears to be nothing more than your typical pictorial of homely inked-up women in various states of undress. The pricey mag , which contains less than 100 words of text in the entire publication, promises on its cover to deliver a flesh festival of “tatted out models in their most revealing layouts.” But the mag’s a letdown, given that most of its more “exclusive” pics “too sexy for newsstands” are on its pay-only website. On the actual newsstand, the mag offers up a relatively tame ensemble of pale, bald, pierced and gothic women in stylized poses, with original names like Mercedes, Heather, Ashley and Sandy. Imagine that.
Your excuse for reading Inked Girls can’t be that you enjoy the articles. There are no articles, just pictures, and risque ones at that. You could say you enjoy the photography, though, because it is artistic in its own way. The photo shoots of tattooed women are about as tasteful as they can be. Still, it seems mostly to be for people with a fetish for tattoos, and that is a growing group given all the ink you see these days. Why stop at Inked Girls? There could be Inked Grannies, Inked Athletes, Inked Doctors. Everybody’s doing it.
Inked features plenty of skanky women posing in little more than colored ink. That makes it more surprising the mag is one of the more upscale titles among the scarily wide category. This edition looks and feels like the editors lavished money on it. The photography is quality, even if the models maybe aren’t. A piece on artist Keith P. Rein features his pornographic works of ladies sucking Popsicles and hot dogs. Need we say Inked is geared for the guys? We’re appreciative of street subcultures, however, and enjoyed reading about the wide cross section of folks who like to decorate themselves, from skateboarders to Celtic musicians. Inked also covers travel, taking the reader to Lisbon, Portugal, where it guides us to a dimly lit bar to chat with 50-year-old prostitutes. It’s unlikely they’ll be wearing less than the ladies in this magazine.
The New Yorker reminds readers that besides the upcoming papal selection in the Sistine Chapel, there’s possibly another weighty vacancy that could occur on the Supreme Court. Ruth Bader Ginsburg will turn 80 this month and the magazine offers a lengthy bio of the second woman to be appointed a Supreme Court justice. Ginsburg tells Jeffrey Toobin that she plans on remaining in her post for at least another year despite political maneuvering to get her to step down to allow President Obama to name a new justice during his second term. Elsewhere, the magazine delivers an interesting piece exploring the events that led up to the suicide of so-called Internet activist Aaron Swartz.
New York is chock full of lists thanks to its annual “Best of New York” feature. It’s hard to quibble with the user-friendly list, which attempts to identify the best of everything in the sprawling city from eateries to dog groomers. But we do think the color-coded feature could benefit from being sequestered to one section of the mag rather than scattered throughout. Elsewhere, readers are subjected to the meandering bloviating that is Frank Rich. At one point, in an article waxing aimlessly about the Republicans’ attempts at breathing new life into their party, Rich briefly shills for “Veep,” the TV show where he’s a writer: “Listening to this pablum, I find it hard to not to think of ‘Veep,’ the satirical television series I work on,” Rich name drops.
Time stumbles after its epic health care coverage last week by Steven Brill. This week the cover story attempts to explore the Oscar Pistorius murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp through the prism of escalating violence in South Africa. However, the weekly struggles at making a clear link between a violent post-apartheid South Africa — Cape Town, where Pistorius resides, boasts one of the highest crime rates in the world — and Steenkamp’s tragic murder. Yes, South Africa is violent. Yes, the country’s deeply scarred but we’re not exactly sure Time’s Alex Perry hits his desired target in this one. Speaking of a culture of violence, another article enumerates the novel ways a batch of gory TV dramas like “True Blood,” “Game of Thrones” and “Sons of Anarchy” are exposing viewers to death.