Go BIG or Go HOME!

So my homegirl, Mari, and I went into Tattooland the other day to get some tats.  We’re not new to the experience but you definitely can’t call us ink addicts (yet). We went to Jack Rudy’s shop up in Anaheim. Jack Rudy is famous you know.  He didn’t create black-and-gray single-needle tattooing, but he unquestionably perfected it 30 years ago and he's pretty much an underground celebrity especially in the tattoo community. Black-and-gray tattooing basically means that the artist uses nothing but different shades of black ink to design a tattoo.I didn’t know much of this information myself until I started talking to the guys at the shop, Big Chuey and Antonio, who hooked Mari and me up. Ok, ok enough with the lecture I am here to talk about my tattoo which by the way took me about 2 years if not more to conceive or at least match the concepts I had in my head with an image.  I’ve always wanted an Aztec warrior to adorn some part of my upper body. A warrior with  the Aztec codices for “flor y canto” which can be loosely translated to what we know as the Fine Arts.  Mari told me that for the past five years, if not more, she’s known she wanted the 20 days from the Aztec calendar along with the two snake heads that meet face to face at the bottom to form part of  her tattoo. So with these ideas in mind we drove down to the OC to get inked. 

Boy did we get inked. We walked out of Tattooland with not jus tattoos but some awesome works in progress; huge pieces. Like my novia said after she saw the pictures I sent her, that we were all about “going big or going home!" She also said that the bois on Culver Avenue had big balls...so there.  After a painful 3 hour session of actual tattooing, the needle etching and or as Mari described, drilling ink on our skin, we still have to go back to finish them off. Why? Well first because the tattooist didn’t want to continue after working on us for more than 4 hours each- including sketching and all. I don’t care what anyone tells you, tats are PAINFUL.   After a while of just laying there and taking it I had to ask Big Chuey if we could take a break. Fuck it! I tapped out.  I was flat-lining, passing out from the pain everything felt so tender and crossing my legs the way I was doing to bare the pain wasn’t helping anymore. Drama, right!? The worst part was that Big Chuey was on a roll and didn’t feel like  taking a break.  I felt him. There are times when I'm writing and get on this groove that I don't want to stop and don't want anything to stop me. I get it, he was ridding his creative wave....BUT it hurt.  “You’re loosing me Chuey,” I almost bolted out when just in time the Big Chuey decided to stop. 

My dude Big Chuey, was good from the word go. He saw the design I brought in with me and after much oohing and ahhing, he got to drawing the design free-hand on my back.  He took advantage of every spot of brown that peeked through my tank top.  I got more and more nervous as I felt the tip of his pen and highlighter go lower down my arm or higher up my back, for a minute there I thought he was going to make me look all gangster by tattooing my neck but I couldn’t stop the guy even if it felt like he was plastering a mural on my back. Big Chuey was inspired “Nice! Sweet!  Bad Ass,” were his  words and I was anxious to see what the finished product would look like. Big Chuey hooked up my speaking/singing/yelling skull- it’s so big it truly looks like a Word Warrior with lots and lots to say as represented by the speech bands coming out of the skull’s mouth. Which is exactly what I wanted because this tattoo represents my coming into my artistic self.  It signifies how much I struggled and continue to struggle with my inner critic and the outer critics as well that I let intimidate and stifle my creative process.  Now, now I don’t want to put the blame just on others I know my path towards becoming a better writer, an accomplished writer, lies mostly on me. I have to put my best effort forward at all times, I have to makes sure I nurture my ideas, I have to make sure I sit my ass down at my desk and write. After all Warriors including Word Warriors have to be in constant battle with their adversaries, real or psychological, in my case. I have to be really ok with me. 

Repost the show blog?

Note:  I suggest you read my first entry- posted on my myspace page myspace.com/claudiadebdp so that this entry makes some sense to you

My friend and BdP supporter extraordinare and future film critique Party Ahn asked me on Friday, premier night of Dickwhipped show, during our Q&A session, what it felt like to work with video.  It was a great question especially coming from someone who works and has a deep interest in that medium. Honestly, our time and minds have been so wrapped around the production of the show that I don’t think I had a chance to process the whole experience of producing the work to give her an answer I felt good with.  In other words I hadn’t had the distance from the work to think about how it was for me to take part in its creation. But  I feel like I’ve had time and so here goes- this is how the experience felt.  It was beautiful.  As a writer I anchor myself- my art in words sometimes more securely than other but that’s what I do.  I almost cherry-pick each work to make sure that what I’m writing sounds like what I hear and see in my mind and is palpable to the audiences’ mind. Words. A picture paints a thousand words but how many pictures can you use to tell a story.  Sounds too obvious perhaps, it was a trippy experience for me.  I’m used to creating images through narrative not so much creating narratives with images.   The inverse of my comfort zone. That’s what  “Fuck, Love: a love story with no words,” was like.  When Mari and I started off we had an idea in mind for a storyline but in the end the pictures had their own agenda. 

  

I also wrote my first script, another first for me.  I adapted one of Raquel Gutierrez' narrative pieces ("Waterboy") into a script called “Metamorphis”. Marie Gaerlan got in the director's chair and cranked out a 5.09 minute short with the incredible support and talent of and Morgan Dye.

The Script

This piece is a butched out version of Marie Shelly’s story of Frankenstein portrayed by Mama Dragga as Dr. Frankenstein. While both Frankenstein and Mama Dragga are in search of creating life, both trying to find meanings to give life purpose, Mama Draga’s goal is to create the ultimate butch.  Masculinity being perfected, created and molded in the strong, delicated big hands of a drag queen. Mama Draga is not a typical mad scientists/adventurer she is a bruja with shaman-esque powers who through séance-like rituals is able to draw the most “desirable” attributes from two butch corpses that lay before her and transfers the attributes to a third corpse- her creation… the ultimate butch.

Int.  Mama Draga’s Séance Room - Night

 

A high SHOT of Mama Draga’s room features the 3 bodies laying on operating tables covered neck down with sheets, Mama Draga mixes concoctions, pulls herbs out of her satchel and burns sage.

 

Mama Draga

(still busy setting up)

 

Why is it that the handsome and the

courageous are always handling the

ball and calling the plays? How do

the worthy and the scandalous charm

their way through the endzone so effortlessly, these machos so full of grace!

 

She turns and walks over to Butch 1, grabs Butch 1's face endearingly.

 

I’m most impressed that she was able to make something out of it.  I wrote the shots the way I saw them in my mind and then Marie managed to “stage” them for lack of a better term and Morgan captured and made it look like something I hadn’t imagined. It was a good collaboration working with that group.  I thought that this type of collaboration was interesting and fun. Some of you saw “Metamorphis” and perhaps didn’t get it. I say SO WHAT! Just enjoy the delectable colors on the screen. And wasn’t Plastinlina (aka Mamma Dragga whose real name is Isaac Prado) HOT? Yes! Hot enough to have three-3 fine butches offer to buy her lunch all in one day. Plastilina has a great voice and is also a talented make-up artists and designer.  We first met when BdP did a show back in September 07 at Highways New Latino Arts Festival. We all felt it, there was chemistry from the start, such good energy. So good that the simple act of Plastilina fastening my lush-lashes as we transformed me into (Roundkeeper (aka King Bitch aka Pat Benatar IMPERSONATOR) was enough to make my butt-hole go "tee-hee". That’s how it started she was my Mamma Draga that day. Which leads me to another question that we’re often asked, “Where do your ideas come from,” from everywhere…including chemistry. If you guys didn't catch the show, pues ni modo hasta la next time. Not sure when's the next time we'll be doing Dickwhipped in LA but we're coming to the Bay, La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley to be exact on February 9th hope our Bay area supporters come to play with us.