Paris Tat (Spring 2010)

(So this has been a huge project, I've been working on it since the winter. The whole piece is about getting tattooed in Paris, and about my Grandmother and her life in NYC in the 40's. There is a power point that goes with it, and I'll probably post some more sections of this. It inspired the ideas for my thesis, so thats cool. Basically I'm gonna amend traditional histories with women's stories, making it more true and more complete. So this is some of my memories, and what I can piece together of Elizabeth Ann's. The whole thing is very available upon request. I very wanna go back to Paris, and I very wanna get another tattoo. This is the first calendar year since 2005 that I won't get inked. Weird...)

Olivier maintained a steady if not frantic pace, and when le Tour was complete he rinsed the needle and dipped into a new color: blue. A blue close to that of a midday cloudless sky, a color that did not realistically represent the structure he began to needle onto my skin. This next image was just that; another structure, another landmark, although this one stood overlooking a city I was on more intimate terms with. Over the west side of Central Park, two pointed towers jut above the tops of the trees. Some mistake this for the site of John Lennon’s murder, but that was two blocks south on 72rd Street, at the Dakota. This building is called the San Remo, and it’s your average pre-war luxury apartment building. Asking prices range from 3-25 mill., and your neighbors could include Bono, Steven Spielberg, or Dustin Hoffman. It first entered in my city visuals archive on walks around the Jackie O reservoir, usually taken on slow afternoons with a partner to catch up, gossip, console and laugh with. It is a significant mark of the skyline, less flashy than Empire or Chrysler, endearing in its oft-mistaken old school identity. I began looking forward to seeing it swaddled in the multi-colored setting sunlight.

How it made its way into the fold of images designed to color my ribcage is slightly more complex than a pretty silhouette against uptown summer days. The West Side is my unfamiliar side of town, a whole north to south span that I’ve explored remarkably less in my Manhattan lifetime than the east side. The west side, slowly, became the mythical land of “her”, a woman I’d known all my life but never really seen. When I sat in my childhood church at her funeral, I realized how strange it was that I knew almost nothing of her life before the years I existed. She was my mother’s mother, taller than average and not prone to long speeches. I remember her in slippers and curlers, tending to the compost or doing the Sunday crossword. We never had heart to hearts in the kitchen. She never deigned to pass on sage wisdoms. She came back to New York only once when I lived here, in a dorm on 55th street. She told me then she’d lived on the west side, and that the subway had cost a nickel. I didn’t occur to me to ask her how it felt to leave rural Pennsylvania for the big apple. How it must have been hard being a beautiful single woman in a new urban environment. How she fell in love here. Why she left after four kids. None of this seemed relevant until she was gone, and I realized that her and I had shared this place I loved and I had wasted the benefit of learning from her lived experience. When she was gone she left behind a large mystery and a lot of money, and it was this fund my parents dipped into so I could have my Parisian adventure. So for this, my ninth tattoo, a small testament to two beautiful cities and a woman I loved but never truly knew, this west side landmark became the symbol of her New York, the New York we’d failed to share.