Permanent [PR] project

"Skin artist Dave Regan wipes clear excessive ink as he continues to tattoo a crab claw on the arm of Aylen Beazley-Maquehue, of Baltimore, at The Baltimore Tattoo Museum, Sunday, Dec. 2. The parlor walls are littered with American tattoo memorabilia dating back to early 1920."

Fifteen days and counting before I head to Toyko, Japan; I cannot wait. I have so many things to get in order and what seems like little or no time to do it all.

As previously mentioned, during my trip I plan to blog every night and update frequently to clearly document my adventures. Until then, I will continue to update posts with published freelance assignments.

I finished all my exams Tuesday and The Towerlight put out the last issue of 2007 on Monday. It was a very successful year; more on that later this week.

The above picture was part of my final project for my Broadcast Journalism course. The project was to make a mini-documentary on a person, place or area in Baltimore using purely audio capture. The project didn’t require photographs, but I opted to incorporate images anyways. I later combined the audio and images using Soundslides since I’ve done in many times before.

I hated the assignment.

Don't get me wrong, multimedia projects are awesome and fun. But the project was very different from a photo story, as it needed to be more about the history of the place chosen, in a positive approach. It was not journalistic; it was more or less a public relations piece. It’s hard to explain, so I'll upload it once I get a grade on it. I am afraid if I post it now and my professor hasn't viewed it, I might exceed the bandwidth and crash the site it's placed on. Considering my last podcast got well over 5,000 hits.

My experience at this tattoo parlor was not what I eagerly expected. I was planning on hanging out on a busy night, getting great access and remarkable quotes from many sources. But I was told to come in on a slow day, didn’t get many usable quotes, no matter how hard I tried to pull them from sources and my images were OK, no matter how deep I dug to find something different.

I don’t know what it was about the shop, but I felt as if nothing went my way. I surely wasn’t treated with the respect I was giving them. From other parlor visits, ink artists aren’t usually the friendliest of people, so I expected a challenge.

I don’t have any tattoos; some of my friends are covered in them, so I’ve made many visits to other parlors and witnesed the atmosphere. I never felt the need flaunt a tattoo, the permanent part is daunting.

Anyways, not everyone had this off-putting presence toward me, but a couple of them definitely put off a distinct uncooperative vibe. I guess it was when some of them wouldn’t answer me clearly by blatantly mocking or laughing.

Conversely, the above tattoo artist was the friendliest employee. He didn’t hesitate to answer any of my questions openly and clearly. He often would elaborate beyond what I needed and made some great quotes, as goes for all the patrons.

The shop was also very interesting, displaying tons of history on American electric tattooing. It’s worth a visit if you’re bored on rainy day.

Maybe I am being unfair. Maybe I caught some of them on a bad day. Maybe they just didn't like me. Whatever the reason, I felt it was very frustrating when I was unmistakably trying to make the business appear as a pleasant, unique business in Baltimore.

It was a difficult assignment, but a good learning experience.