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Monday, April 28, 2014
Life under the needle SARA DINATALE Editor in Chief
Victoria Iacchetta’s grandfather lay lifeless on the shore of Baby Beach in Aruba. Iacchetta was home in Rochester. It was February 2011. The night before, she spoke with her beloved grandfather – her “Nonno” – on the phone. “I love you, bella,” he told her. Six days before her 18th birthday, Iacchetta lost her best friend when her grandfather died in the ocean; he suffered a heart attack. A month later, Iacchetta had a compulsion. A need. She was about to discover a certain type of “itch” she didn’t know she’d ever want to scratch as a way to cope with a loss she wasn’t expecting. Iacchetta found her answer under the needle. “I felt like I needed him to be a part of me every second of every day,” she said. How many young people are getting tattoos is hard to quantify. Iacchetta thinks the number of college-age students getting ink is on the rise and artists agree. The Pew Research Center has reported 36 percent of 18to 25-year-olds have tattoos. Jess Rocha, a UB alum who owns RedHouse Tattoo in Depew, says she’s seen statistics even higher. “It’s definitely a lot,” Rocha said. And with the increase in popularity, many students have an optimistic outlook – they believe the stigma commonly associated with tattoos is lessening. In 10 to 15 years, Rocha, who has been a tattoo artist for the last 15 years, expects the stigma to be mostly eliminated. And though tattooed students have dealt with concerned – if not disapproving – parents and
In this week’s broadcast, see stories on Dyngus Day, Earth Week, the Soria brothers from UB’s wrestling team and more. Also online: a multimedia version of “Under the needle.”
how the professional world may treat them, the prevailing sense of hopefulness about the future of tattoos is leading students to the needle’s buzz. “I think that our generation really gravitated toward tattoos because of the beauty behind it,” Iacchetta said. “It is an art form and I don’t think a lot of people understand that. They just think, Oh these kids are being rebellious and want to get inked because they’re 18 and don’t know what they’re doing.” Iacchetta never pegged herself as the tattoo type, but her memorial piece for her grandfather evoked a discovery of selfexpression she never anticipated. Since March 2011, Iacchetta, now a junior English and history major at UB, has accumulated eight tattoos, each with its own story. But the Italian flag on her foot with “Nonno” written over top will always be her favorite. Iacchetta’s body serves as somewhat of a roadmap of her life. Quotation marks are fixed on her wrists, a representation of the avid writer’s love for the written word; “En attendant Godot,” French for “Waiting for Godot,” sits on her right forearm (she intends to one day read and understand the whole play in its original French); on her ankle in plain text is “explore.” – which fits with not only her zest for history and other cultures, but her own exploration into tattoos. And that’s naming fewer than half. Iacchetta says in times of stress she has looked to tattoos as a type of therapy. Since she was 18, Lemma Al-Ghanem has turned to tattoos during times of transition. The 21-year-old architecture student – a former art student – has drawn each of her own tattoos. It takes her longer than a mo-
Volume 63 No. 75
Students share stories behind tattoos, discuss the art form’s future
ment to tell you just how many that is; she mentally works her way up from her feet to her hips, knees, wrists, ribs and even behind her left ear. The answer she settles on is 12 – that’s within the last four years. During visits to Syria – where her parents are from and her extended family still lives – she would get her body covered in henna. During one of those trips at age 13, she was seeking out a henna shop with her aunt when the pair landed in an actual tattoo shop, unbeknownst to her aunt. Al-Ghanem begged to get the type of body art that wouldn’t wash off, but she would have to wait five more years. When Al-Ghanem first started getting into tattoos, she’d carry around self-drawn sketches regularly – ready to alter her future tattoos the moment a new idea crept into her head. Her first tattoo was an image of a keyhole on her wrist. She got it when she felt “locked into place,” happily starting art
school in her hometown near Washington, D.C. But her shoulder, which is the canvas to three floating leaves, tells a different story about transitions – a transition away from home and art school and to UB’s School of Architecture. She said her body art is “like a bread crumb trail.” Each tattoo sits as an anchor (she does actually have an anchor on her hip), tying her to moments and feelings from her past. “Nefs,” an Arabic word on her wrist that means “self,” prompts her to be true to what makes her happy. A bird is perched on her foot with the verb “to hunt” in Latin script, emphasizing the importance of going out and getting what one wants in life. Like Iaccheta, Al-Ghanem understands the therapeutic facet of tattooing. “It’d be different if it was just like sort of stamped on or right away put on … seeing it spill onto my foot was really calming in a way,” she said. “I was just
Victoria iacchetta, 21
“I felt like i needed him to be a part of me every second of every day.”
like, ‘I thought about this for, like, a year and I envisioned it,’ but it’s not until you actually see it creeping onto your body that you feel like it’s kind of its own thing that’s slowly integrating itself with you, which is a pretty cool, therapeutic feeling.” She gets a surge of adrenaline under the needle’s steady sting; she views the feeling as a sort of tattoo adoption process, reinforcing the meaning she holds behind her pieces. In addition to the stigma, pain also dissuades some from pursuing ink. But not Darrell Delaney, a senior English major, who has a sleeve and chest piece as well as hip and back tattoos. “It hurt. I know it hurt,” Delaney said. “You can remember how it feels like to jump in cold water or something like that, but I can’t remember how it felt to have the needle digging in my skin.” It’s a pain that is hard to describe – sometimes adrenaline can help block the discomfort, but each person handles it differently. Iacchetta’s foot tattoo gave her sweaty palms and the artist had to hold her body down because she was shaking. Despite the pain, some people can’t resist the urge to return to the chair for more. Delaney’s family jokingly calls him a “freak” whenever he takes his shirt off. Two days before Delaney’s 16th birthday, his father took him to a shop to get a tattoo, likely not imagining his son’s infatuation with the art form would eventually lead to aspirations to have much of his body covered in ink. People with tattoos tend to talk about tattoos almost as if they were Lay’s potato chips – it’s difficult to have just one. SEE TATTOOS, PAGE 4
Student Association views election changes as long overdue SA members explain reasoning behind VP, president and SUNY delegate election changes AMANDA LOW
Senior News Editor
Students walking into the voting booth next year will see fewer names on the ballot and vote for each executive board member separately. On Wednesday night, the Student Association Senate and Assembly passed two changes to the election process. Most SA student leaders believe the change was both constructive and necessary to SA. The Assembly passed an amendment changing the constitution to make presidential and vice presidential candidates run on separate ballots. SA Sen-
ate had an emergency meeting the same night and passed an amendment that gives the president the ability to appoint SUNY delegates. Matt Siwiec, the elections and credentials chair, spearheaded the changes to the election process and brought them to the Assembly and Senate. The rule of the two candidates being on the same ballot, however, has not always been a part of the election process. In 2002, SA Senate passed an amendment that required presidential and vice-presidential candidates to run on a single ticket. James Ingram, president-elect, thinks the separation will en-
sure “that all three elected Student Association executive board members are those who the majority of the students wanted to fill those positions.” Ingram voted to abstain from the passing of the amendment because he felt the topic needed more time for discussion. Daniel Giles, Senate chair, believes it will be a “rare occurrence” for a president and vice president to be from different parties. “If it happens, the student body will probably have had a good reason for doing so,” Giles said. “A weak vice president can’t hide behind a strong president any more.”
Travis Nemmer, a former SA president, said the separation of the presidential and vice presidential ballot is “long overdue.” “They do fundamentally different jobs,” Nemmer said. “You don’t need those people to be on the same party. You don’t need them to work particularly closely together throughout the year.” Melissa Kathan, speaker for the Assembly, also believed the change has been long needed. A concern for the 2002 Senate was that personal or political views might come between elected candidates if they were from different parties and time may be wasted solving these internal problems.
“More often than not they are going to realize that ‘Hey, we have a job to do,’” Nemmer said. “The election is over so let’s put our differences aside – start working for the good of the students.” The argument can be made that those issues of “bickering and wasting time” are still happening with people on the same ticket, according to Siwiec. Giles said this year, there was “tension behind closed doors” and the problems at the end of the year between the members were “dangerously close to boiling over.” But he feels the situation eventually worked out. SEE ELECTIONS, PAGE 8