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shark punk
by: Oskar Ollebac -
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Fantastic classic tattoo done by Kris Ciezlik at Caffeine Tattoo Studio , Warszawa.
Polish Tattoo Scene.
A young lady (I presume anyway - she may be a mature student) emailed me today for some help with her Uni project which was about ‘how alternative culture sold out’. I won’t go into the finer details but it does pose an interesting statement. For what it’s worth, I don’t think alt-culture sold out at all. It was the media that got all consuming that gave this impression.
Back in the late eighties and early nineties, you could hear about a tattooist, a band or underground movie and it would take you about six months to find anything of substance out. If you were lucky, by the time you had got some correspondence going, said person would still be doing their thing, but a lot of the time, it was unsustainable from the other side of the fence as well. Being alternative is easy when you live at home. Slightly harder if you’ve got your house and family riding on it.
As we all sit here in 2011 - and this is pretty much my response to the original query - if you want to be alternative, don’t show or tell anybody about your stuff. That’s how to be alternative in 2011. Switch off the internet, the TV and the radio. Don’t read, don’t speak and bury yourself in your head.
Personally, I would opt for being original and doing the best you can possibly do. That’s about as alternative as anybody is able to me anymore. I think it’s always been that way - we just lost sight of it somewhere along the way.
Talking of good stuff - which we were in a round about kind of way, here’s some things that landed in the inbox over the weekend:
This is called The Girl Who Sat For Too Long and you can find limited edition canvas prints of it at David Stoupakis’ site here. There’s only 50 of them, so you’ll need to be a bit quick off the mark!
Also in the inbox today, this:
I like this so much, I even put my hand in my pocket. If you wish to join me and be non-alternative, you can find it at Seventh Circle here - along with some other quality goodies.
That’s my half hour of looking busy while I wasn’t really over with…
