BME: Body Modification Ezine

I had to share this beautiful photo by Kerry Pink of Simon Kendall, one of my favorite face-tattooed people. If you’re wondering why he looks so wonderfully happy in this picture, you need to understand why he got his face tattooed in the first place. If you continue reading after the break, there is a “before” picture of Simon and in it you’ll note that his face is very heavily scarred (his stomach and arms are deeply scarred as well, and he wears prosthetic legs, but all of that, unlike his face, can be covered). He had always been uncomfortable about these facial scars, and it had a very negative impact on his self-confidence. Luckily, the social acceptance of tattooing has given him the opportunity to cover up those tattoos with something more beautiful to him, and now wears a beautiful new face overflowing with artistry and beauty. He now has more confidence than he ever thought possible.

Anyone should be so lucky to have such an amazing visage!!!

Cesare, whose remarkable multi-mouth face I included a few posts back, also wears a number of amazing deep piercings. More importantly perhaps, he’s not just skewering himself like a Fakir doing a pain show — these are long-term well-healed piercings. For example, his subclavicles are now three years old if memory serves, and his bicep piercings, which actually pass through the bulk of the muscle, are also getting old. His deep hand piercing shown here has truly shown the test of time, and in this picture is about four years old. A very special piercing that not everyone has the hygeine level and body awareness to successfully heal, but it can be done. To be very clear about what this is, it is a flexible bar that passes between the metacarpals. In the photo you can also see some other deep hand piercings including a transfinger piercing, but the stigmatum piercing is the deepest, and most unique and impressive of the set to me.

P.S. I promised that I would post some pictures of healed “impossible piercings” that I’ve previously posted on my wall, so last night I read up on Facebook’s Graph API and discovered that scraping ones posts is remarkably easy. I had gotten a SocialSafe account, but for some reason it randomly missed 500 or so posts, which I have no good explanation for. But right now I’m dowloading the remainder of the 2,000 or so Modblog-type images and articles I posted there over the last few months (I’m truly shocked it’s that many), and I will endeavor to repost the best of them here, since they’re virtually inaccessible — and thus useless to future readers — on Facebook.

This September photographer Lars Krutak is releasing his new book, “Spiritual Skin: Magical Tattoos and Scarification”, and below are two of the photos from the book taken on journeys in 2011. The picture on the left is of a Kayan man tattooed in the Penan style by a Penan tattooist, and the one on the right shows Iban tattooing at Entalau Longhouse, Sarawak.

I have to admit I have about zero interest in the Olympics, but I do browse the many, many articles on Olympic tattoos — for example, Oddee ran one a couple days ago that had an interesting mention of “sponsorship tattoos” (ie. selling your skin as adspace on eBay). However, most of the tattoos are quite generic, or just symbols of the corporate games which are no more interesting to me than a Nike swoosh — not that I begrudge any athlete getting them because of the immense significance to their lives. But a tattoo that caught my eye on a deeper level is that of Ele Opeloge, a Samoan female weightlifter in the +75kg category who I believe is actually competing today.

As you can see in that picture of her competing at the Bejing 2008 Olympics, she wears the “malu”, which was part of a coming-of-age ritual for her, symbolizing both maturity and a respect for the Samoan culture, society, and history. It’s refreshing to see similar tattoos on many Polynesian athletes — and you’ll also see them celebrating their culture in related ways, for example Maori rugby players doing the haka wardance before matches. In the picture below you can click to zoom in to get a better look at Ele’s tattoos

PS. Notice her “scarification by weightlifting” on her shins?

One of the first tattoo artists to introduce me — and the larger BME community — to the new French art-style of tattooing was Lionel Fahy of Out of Step Tattoo (http://lioneloutofstep.blogspot.fr/). What you may not know, is that not only is he a brilliant tattoo artist, but he’s also an amazing musician. In this video slideshow of his tattoos, the soundtrack song is also his work, so be sure to listen to this with the sound turned on.

Speaking of Iestyn Flye (see the entry below this one for the scarification seminar he’s hosting with Ron Garza), I also wanted to share this amazing set of very British deep chest piercings he did. You may be wondering to yourself how such a thing could heal, since of course if you shrunk the whole thing down to 14ga, this would be about the least advisable way to do a surface piercing. However, once you start talking about this bulk of tissue, the body responds quite differently and rather than trying to spit the material out like a sliver, accepts it as “too large to fight” and sullenly heals around it — albeit in a process that can take a year or more to fully mend (with a certain amount of kicking and screaming by the tissue!).

I have been reading some of the comments on things I’ve posted with great interest. I appreciate the many warm welcomes, but it is interesting to note there are some very conservative voices commenting with knee-jerk reactions to fringe body modification pictures without reading or understanding the associated text. I wonder if that will happen with these as it did with the subclavicles? Please, readers — try and give what I post the benefit of the doubt. If I post something I feel is unsafe, I assure you, I will say so. Yes, I have a high tolerance for the unusual, but I am also not a naive fool that doesn’t have enough experience to know what the body can heal safely and what it can’t. Over twenty years ago, in the 1980s, when I was a kid in highschool, I told my then-girlfriend that I would never get a tongue piercing, and that to do such a thing was an insane risk. That seemed a reasonable thing for me to say at the time, but it sure sounds silly now, doesn’t it? If I’ve learned anything since then, it’s that the body is a remarkably pliable vessel for our sentience, and that it will tolerate being manipulated and sculpted in far more diverse ways than common sense would suggest. Now, there’s nothing wrong with caution — it keeps us alive — but there is something wrong with continuing to have that fear when time and experience show something to be possible. And of course we must remember that aesthetics differ not just between cultures, but between individuals, and one may enjoy pale plainskin, another symmetric perfection, and another a face that looks like it was caught in an explosion at a body jewelry factory. To me, that’s always been a wonderful thing about BME — that it embraces all those flavors.

I wanted to share with you a flyer on the scarification seminar being hosted by Iestyn Flye and Ron Garza the weekend of the London Tattoo Convention (September 30th and October 1st). This is a hands-on fundamentals and theory class for active practitioners (you must be working at a shop and familiar with blood borne pathogens to sign up) interested in scarification, hosted by two of the top scarification artists in the world. Of course Ron Garza is an old BME favorite, but since Iestyn (of Divine Canvas in the UK) may not be as well known here, I’d like to begin by posting a small sample of his scarification work.

Whether you are a fresh beginner, or whether you’re an experienced artist, I can’t imagine anyone not coming away from this seminar with vastly improved skills to offer their clients. If you’re a scarification artist or a piercer or tattooist interested in getting into this field, and can get to London for this, you won’t regret it. Here’s the flyer itself:

I’m used to posting dozens of entries a day, which I realize ModBlog isn’t quite used to and since things are now scrolling a page away without many people even knowing that I’m writing anything at all, I think at this point I will call it a day and build up steam as time goes on — and assuming I adjust to doing this (and I’m sure many of you understand how difficult this is for me emotionally), I will probably cross post links or a digest to Facebook, and continue covering the mod community from my vantage point.

In any case, I want to share someone who ranks very high up the list of my favorite mutants, the amazing Cesare Di Borgia, who I know has been posted here before so I hope you’re familiar with him. Not only does he have an incredible chaotic collection of facial piercings — it’s impossible to miss! — and massive stretchings, but not visible in this picture he also has subclavicals and other radical deep piercings including bars through his biceps, which may well be unique. And Cesare is anything if not unique. He is a real gem, a beautiful oddball, and a wonderful man on a personal level as well. It’s guys like Cesare that keep me excited after all this time about body modification. Anyway, the reason I chose to share this photo he posted today is that I love the effect that his drooping plateless lip piercings give, almost as if he has two mouths. It actually takes a moment to even realize exactly what you’re seeing!

I also know that I can judge whether I will like a person by their reaction to Cesare — whether it be open minded or it be fearful or even angry bigotry. He’s not someone that inspires ambivalence. Later days, everyone.

Speaking of deep piercings, another classic of that genre is the mandible piercing, also known for a while as the “sprung” piercing, after the first woman to have it done by the late Mick Noland, although that name is all but forgotten these days. Although this piercing doesn’t pass into the inner body like subclavical piercings do, it passes through a remarkably large collection of different kinds of tissue and narrowly evades numerous pieces of anatomy that would rather not be skewered, so it is another piercing that makes many people’s “never do” lists… But again, it also has proven itself a viable and remarkably heal-able piercing on the small handful of people who’ve worn it. Andy Gehris of Modified Body (a part of Art-n-Soul in Allentown, PA) has had his as long as anyone I can think of, with the piercing now being ten years old and counting.

Just to be clear for those that are not familiar with this piercing, it is a bar that passes from below the tongue (inside the mouth) straight down inside the jaw and out the bottom. You can also do a “fake” mandible piercing with a surface piercing or microdermal (or transdermal for more permanence), but this is a “true mandible”. Another slightly clearer photo from earlier this year is after the break.