Appalachian Mahākāla
Adventure in Nashville
First a Weed Church official announcement:
Editorial does not recognize the sovereignty of King Charles of England, nor any British monarch, and admonishes in no uncertain terms the twee treatment of horrid people by American media.
Also, I wrote about why AI art sucks for Defector Media dot com this week. I think that if you make a piece of AI art, you should be ashamed of yourself and spend the rest of your life cowering in the hopes nobody finds out. Lucky for me, I believe in God and the Dharma, so I would never risk such a cowardly act, but I hope you non-believers aren’t feeling cavalier when you think “nobody” is watching.
Long Live the Traditional Tattoo
I ended up in Nashville this week for my research gig, which was fun in and of itself. I don’t write about my “Day Job” much nor will I ever (for a combination of contractual reasons and not wanting to bore readers), but one aspect of it that I have always loved is how it sends me on the road to meet nice people and problem solve together. I didn’t end up wandering Nashville as much as I would’ve otherwise liked to for two reasons:
I don’t drink, and Nashville’s social scene revolves around liquor (and great music, of course).
My gig was in the suburbs and I vowed not to use anything other than my skateboard to get around, meaning that I would’ve had to skate over highways to get there. No bueno, so I ended up skating around the resort’s massive grounds, getting equal parts “hell yeah brother” from kind people and dirty looks from dorks.
I was only in town for 48 hours and had seven hours to kill between the end of my meetings and a flight back to Pittsburgh. I could’ve taken the skateboard near the river and floated next to the current for awhile, but instead I decided to test fate: Eddy Deutsche relocated to Nashville a couple of years ago and was operating out of Adventure Tattoo. Eddy’s a busy guy, between taking care of his family and managing the people banging down his door for his legendary work. Thus, I wasn’t optimistic that 12 hour notice was going to be enough to make it work.
The Buddha gave me an assist when Eddy got back to my “no pressure” request for work. Turns out, he hadn’t scheduled anything for the day because he was going to be hanging with the family in the morning and didn’t want to feel rushed. We both took it as a sign, and made arrangements to meet at the East Nashville shop around noon the next day. I walked into the bright yellow storefront adorned with tribal patterns and was immediately greeted by Tibetan Mahākāla masks and art on every wall — the deity I’d asked Eddy to draw up for us in his signature wild style the night before. Kismet was on our side.
The shop itself is remarkable; a traditional waiting area with no view to the artists’ space covered with flash by Koeplinger and his crew of unreal artists. Intermixed were the signs of a great traditional shop: flash sheets by modern legends Robert Ryan and Dan Higgs, and art from Smith Street and other shops with multi-generational reputations. What struck me immediately was the floor, reminding me of what Nick Bubash once described upon his first trip to Thom Devita’s apartment studio. The patterns matched the tribal on the shopfront and on the skin of some of the artists, almost as if the art was flowing upward from the material to the human and then outward from the human to the divine.
If you are in Nashville at any point, Adventure Tattoo is a must.
Tattoos, as with all commercial art, involve give and take between the customer and artist. No artist approaches this issue the same way, but less experienced or temperamental tattooers tend to wear their emotions on their sleeve when the customer makes a creative choice that the artist doesn’t care for. What strikes me about traditional tattooers that have been in the game as long as Eddy is how they combine mysticism and client service. You’re still given choices as you’d expect, but there are some assumptions made when someone requests Mahākāla about what’s non-negotiable. This allows the artist to take more liberties when drawing up a custom piece. Colors are suggested, but reminders are given about which colors are always present in a respectfully rendered deity.
Maybe that’s what draws me to tattooing so much. There are no rules and it’s a subterranean practice that’s only recently become mainstreamed in American culture. But it’s a subterranean practice specifically because it sought to preserve a taboo cultural tradition, thus there are some rules if one wishes to take it seriously. I love unwritten rules, except in baseball, as I find them to be one of the more fascinating aspects of the evolved social contract. There’s very little incentive to keep any of society’s institutions in place aside from pain avoidance / the nagging feeling that maybe they’re institutions for reasons we can’t escape. We all just quietly agree to let them continue every day, as such.
Eddy drew up a Mahākāla in his psychedelic style, emerging from a 2-D window with multi-colored square patterns behind it. Combining ancient Vedic deities with modern psychedelia is perfectly par for the course, but lurking beneath the wild style is respect for tradition. Mahākāla is the deity of time (thus the multi-dimensional design), and the presence of psychedelia in Vedic texts makes the combination theologically kosher, to boot.
We stenciled my chest up and before we got started Eddy muttered (to himself more than me), “man, it looks perfect there, almost like it’d be weird if it wasn’t.” I can’t explain why but some combination of the ten minutes that preceded the utterance and the tone of voice and the reputation — the mystic non-sequitur was the last sign I needed to feel at home. I was more sensitive than usual to the needle (I’m chalking it up to air travel), but we got there and Eddy packed a remarkable amount into 3 hours.
Eddy and I swapped stories about parenting, he blessed me with a few bits about spending time with Paul Rogers and Thom DeVita. One of our more memorable exchanges — ironically, given the subject matter — was our discussion about whether meaning exists only in every individual’s head independently or if there’s unspoken transmission of meaning, suggested in the Flower Sermon by Bodhidharma. I guess that’s another thing I love about traditional tattooers: they uniquely understand and acknowledge the weird, even as occupational hazard. Thus, the esoteric shorthand with your artist while under the needle makes the esotericist feel a little less lonely.
Mostly, it was just fun to watch him work. One of Eddy’s quirks I loved quite a bit was his tendency to make decisions about color on the fly. The machine would be whirring and his head tilted in an entranced gaze at the layout of the work. Then he’d spring into action before the creep of self-doubt could ruin an inspired idea. He’d mutter “fuck it, I’m doing it green” or the like and his tone of voice instilled confidence rather than doubt. It was not a “fuck it” of surrender, but one of the realization that there was no other solution to the problem he’d been quietly solving in his skull.
I left Nashville with the type of souvenir that you can’t explain to someone who isn’t already a convert. Even writing this, there are thoughts that I’m choosing not to record and instead preserving in the liminal space between idea and belief.
I have come to believe that I know little about what I believe, aside from the seed of Belief that sprouts when I let my mind idle. Getting tattooed is an experience that puts you face to face with death, either through the art or the reminder that you are making a “permanent” alteration (and what permanent means in this case). Tattooing makes light of that impermanence and reminds one that, like al-Khidr, we can still build a garden out of our temporary prison. We perceive the world as transient but Mahākāla has protected the Dharma through the rise and fall of countless societies and faith systems.
If impermanence is the natural state of things, why do the gods persist? Why are the same ones always there when billions of independent minds idle?