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Resumen
Resumen
Believing herself a daughter of the West, Karol Griffin took the myths of the place-and of the outlaw-on faith. When she walked into the Body Art Workshop in Laramie, Wyoming, she found what she was looking for: a culture on the fringe of polite society, complete with outlaw signature. Soon Karol was a full-time tattoo artist, an occasional outlaw, and a tattooed woman looking for love in all the wrong places. By the mid nineties, the West had been invaded by suburban culture; and tattoos had become a mass commodity of coolness, compelling Karol to go even farther to find the authentic outsiders she romanticized. She eventually hooked up with a real old-fashioned Wyoming outlaw, complete with felony convictions and out-standing warrants-which is how Karol wound up looking down the barrel of a gun held by a tattooed caricature of true love.
Reseñas (4)
Reseña de Publisher's Weekly
By age 17, Griffin preferred to "read about Frank and Jesse James than watch Donnie and Marie Osmond on TV. Goodness is often painfully dull...." Working at a photo lab, the Laramie, Wyo., native met the characters at the tattoo parlor next door, befriended the owner, learned the craft and became a tattoo artist there. Griffin injects her eloquent debut memoir with plenty of historical and social facts on tattooing and the West, with such passion and expertise that even super-technical details go down nice and easy. However, despite the author's purple hair, blond dreadlocks and recreational drug use, she never comes off as authentically wild herself. It seems as if she's executing a mandate to hang out and occasionally fall in love with bad boys (although the one she eventually marries-and divorces-isn't), the crowning jewel of which is a disastrous post-divorce liaison with a convicted felon who beats her at gunpoint when she's pregnant. (Due to "an unspoken western code of honor among outlaws," she doesn't press charges.) Thankfully, a clue pops up halfway through the book: readers learn Griffin's from a typical middle-class family whose conventional ambitions for her she is uninterested in fulfilling but which leave her nevertheless conflicted (she finally admits this during a heroin-fueled introspection). Griffin's book is ultimately about how rebelling against her family led to a greater entanglement in a more dangerous dysfunction. Which goes to show: goodness may be painfully dull, but badness can be just plain painful. Photos. (Oct. 6) Forecast: Griffin's author tour has her driving a classic, red Packard to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Wyoming, Denver and Boulder, which should spark interest. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Life of a bad-girl tattoo artist with retrograde tendencies, set in a rapidly changing West. "Growing up western," writes Wyoming native Griffin in her debut memoir, "I bought into the romantic myth of tattoos as a mark of the outlaw." She reacted to her sensible parents' urgings of education and career by apprenticing herself to Slade, a rough-edged tattooist whose shop stood out amid Laramie's early-'90s gentrification. Griffin brought a discerning artistic eye to custom tattoo work and to the ordinary designs, known as "flash," that most customers preferred. In addition to providing a livelihood, tattooing allowed her entree to a seemingly endangered underworld of muscle-car fanatics, embittered ex-ranchers, drug dealers, and other rebellious blue-collar types. Griffin developed acute awareness of tattoo sociology, and she shrewdly comments on the mix of exhibitionism and desire for community that lured both dilettantes and the hardcore "full sleeved" into her shop. Her facile prose captures the harsh yet intriguing Wyoming landscape, and she is perceptive to the point of exhaustion on tattooing's history, methods, and ramifications. Otherwise, this is mostly a story of men and miles: a brief marriage to an uptight lawyer, the platonic relationship with Slade, and affairs with macho criminal types who meet bad ends (including one who impregnates, batters, and stalks her) in an ongoing narrative of road trips, substance abuse, steamy/coy sex scenes, and ritualized nipple piercing. Elsewhere, Griffin's observations seem filtered through a tiresome culture-war prism that divides humanity into scorned poseurs (college students, dude-ranch guests, late-blooming yuppies, "candy-assed middle-class punks") and avatars of authenticity (bikers, cowboys, felons, tattoo obsessives), whom Griffin unabashedly worships. Since her condescension toward the "straight" people who commodified tattoos and gentrified Laramie is matched by her dizzy embrace of brutal, primitive men, her story develops a nagging undertone of dissonant hypocrisy. Somewhat novel in its concerns, less surprising in its execution. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Reseña de Booklist
This is one of those books that almost defies categorization. It's a memoir of an intelligent, creative woman who dropped out of college to become a photographer and who wound up being a tattoo artist, too. (She also, for a short time, shelved books in a library and worked as a phone-sex operator.) It's a memoir, but it's also an education in the history of tattooing, from the discovery of the practice by white people two millennia ago to the modern day (the practice was called ta-tu in Tahiti, along about the mid-1700s). But Griffin is interested in more than just history: she also explores the subculture of tattooing as it exists today. A surprising chunk of that subculture is located in Wyoming, and that leads the author into some provocative commentary on her home state of Wyoming, with special attention paid to the relatively recent popularity of body art. And the book is a personal story, too, as Griffin examines the bond we sometimes have with people who will destroy us (when the tale opens, the author is pregnant; the father, an ex-lover, is in trouble with the police and has a history of beating the mother of his child). The book does so many things that it's impossible to say which thing it does best. A remarkable performance, and one of the most unusual reads of the season. --David Pitt Copyright 2003 Booklist
Library Journal Review
The combination of writer, photographer, and tattoo artist defines the unique professional life of Wyoming-based Griffin. Her debut is part autobiography, part social commentary on the (formerly wild) West, and part dissertation on the art of tattooing, the latter meeting with marked (excuse the pun) success. As a teenager on vacation in Canada in 1978, Griffin had an epiphany when she locked eyes with a biker in a gas station and was mesmerized by the snake tattooed on his bicep. The moment shaped her future-and her taste in men; Griffin prefers "bad boys" with tattoos. Much of the book deals with her various relationships with them, up to and including her toddler son. Griffin also touches on the sullying of the West by too many city transplants, but this theme is the weakest of the three. Griffin writes with a lively and generous style, her observations tinged with sardonic humor. However, it is increasingly hard to make sense of her attraction to serious felons and two-bit criminals. As the tattoo theme weakens, Griffin's sizable literary talent is compromised. A marginal purchase, then, but the publicity campaign may generate demand. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/03.]-Janet Faller Sassi, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.