Blue Books, Ink and Minutemen

Here is a wonderful end-of-the-semester video by jreeve. It was left as a comment on a post below on tattoos, but it's just too good not to share. I hope one day I'm this cool in class.

Minutemen, Corona.
The people will survive
In their environment
The dirt, scarcity, and the emptiness
Of our South
The injustice of our greed
The practice we inherit
The dirt, scarcity and the emptiness
Of our South
There on the beach
I could see it in her eyes
I only had a Corona
Five cent deposit

Reading the Body

This is from a post on an interesting new blog, Genderquake on tattoos and body writing:

One thing that fascinates me about these images is their insistence on corporeal legibility: the body can easily be read by casual observers. Tattoos aren't the only forms of inscription that lead to this legibility: when I was pregnant. I felt like my body was suddenly the subject of discourse, and that strangers could easily "read" my body to learn that I would soon be a mother.

The public availability of both pregnancy and tattoos as topics for conversation certainly resonates for me. My partner gets attention now from strangers about her ink in ways very similar to the stray comments that had been made about her pregnancies. Both sorts of conversations seem to encourage an immediate intimacy which is very striking, and both tend to be about a recognition of a kinship (I have one of those too...).