Boring tattoos / Spooky music
Today: Sam Thielman, a reporter, critic, essayist, and editor, and graphic novel columnist for the New York Times; and Trevor Alixopulos, who draws comics and illustrations and lives in California.
Issue No. 431
Boys’ Lives
Sam Thielman
HYDRANYM No. 22: New VOTING schedule!
The Editors
Ghostly Melodies
Trevor Alixopulos
Boys’ Lives
by Sam Thielman
When I was a kid I had a subscription to Boys’ Life, the magazine of the Boy Scouts of America. It ran some okay fiction and some outdoorsy nonfiction that was about as boring as toast and, occasionally, a comic strip adaptation of a lesser Isaac Asimov novel, which I would clip and save in a blue schoolwork folder.
But the best part of Boys’ Life, as any reader will attest, was the two pages devoted to cheap plastic crap sold at outrageous prices by the Johnson Smith Company, the elderly novelty concern that has for decades been this country’s primary purveyor of fake dogshit, fake vomit, fake broken eggs, fake boogers, fake knife wounds, and books on hypnosis. I used to send away for their book-length catalog, which reliably had a page’s worth of fake Nazi medals (“Imperial Germany’s highest World War I award for bravery!”) for sale near the belt buckles that said AMERICAN LAWMAN and hats that said POLICE. The Confederate flags were over near the old coins. The Marine Corps shirts and hats were somewhere else entirely.
When I was a kid I thought all this stuff was kind of edgy but I never thought of myself as tough in that way. I knew the kids who did; they sucked and their dads sucked worse. There is a kind of ambient Nazism in American culture, untethered to any specific social movement, but it is never entirely free of association. Nazi tattoos can’t exist without skin. There’s somebody in that skin. The Nazi tattoo tells you who it is.
Keep us breathing fire!
For $3/month you can read this whole post and get our weekdaily newsletter too!