International Tattoo Art
March, 1996
Sideshows are one of the few areas of entertainment that encourages and nurtures tattooing, and the more the merrier. You need look no further than the Enigma of the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow to see that, or Michael Wilson of the late, very lamented, Coney Island Sideshow.
Plus, tattoo people being what they are, they have a love for the bizarre and twisted, which is where James Taylor’s Shocked and Amazed comes in. (This is not James Taylor the warbler-this one knows what he’s doing.)
The inaugural Shocked and Amazed is packed to the gunnels with delicious photos of old circus and carnival performers and their banners, along with hard-to-find pictures of things like John Dillinger’s autopsy. There are first-person accounts of visiting sideshows, a factual piece of court reporting concerning the exhibition of people with physical deformities for money, some fiction (which is space that could have been more usefully employed) a glossary of carnival and circus terms which is invaluable to those of you who don’t know the lingo, and a thorough bibliography on the subject of freaks and human oddities. Plus there are a lot of other riveting articles that will be of great value to folks who take a serious interest in this stuff. There’s also a mail order service for books on human oddities if you can’t get them in your local bum-fuck-Egypt Barnes and Blowhole.
Issue #1 of Shocked and Amazed is great, and I certainly hope it continues. They’re semi-annual, but it’s for sure if we don’t support the one there is, there won’t be others.
I don’t pretend to be an authority on creepy things in jars, Alligator Men or guys like Otis Jordan, the Human Cigarette Factory. But like the man said, I may not know art, but I know what I like, and this is it. It’s right up your (nightmare) alley. –Chris Pfouts