Jessica sent me the following email, asking for feedback on her high school media studies project.
I’m a 17 year old piercing apprentice studying in Hong Kong, and I intend to pursue a career in film and television. I combined my two passions together and for my final film project, I created a documentary about tattoos and piercings in Hong Kong.
As part of the project, I’m looking for feedback both from people involved and interesting in the subculture. I was wondering whether it would be possible for you to tell me what you think of it, or even help me post this somewhere so I can gain some criticism that isn’t the youtube “lol datz good”?
Happy to help! Here it is; let her know what you think.
Tattoos as a way to reflect people’s hobbies and beliefs, and two articles shedding some light on the local “scene” in IL and CO.
IAM members, as always, can submit links to body modification-related articles here.
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The past week most online newspapers seemed to be very preoccupied with the TSA affair but here’s the only one article for you to read: Nipple rings and national security;
Trashy or not, tattoos are still something you must pay for, so here is an answer for both a crucial and annoying question we are asking ourselves quite often, i.e., how much does it cost: Tattoo prices unique to design location Too bad it is something only people from NE might find useful.
So about a zillion people have written me about how the TSA has banned — at least in one ill-advised case — people wearing nipple rings from flying in America. Because, what, terrorists are planning on using exploding nipple rings? (Photo c/o Enrikay). Obviously this is a screener over-stepping their authority and abusing their power, rather than an official TSA mandate, but I think it illustrates both that the prejudice against even basic piercings is still strong, and that one of the strong arguments not to give any unwarranted powers to the government is that individuals always will abuse that power, even if the government itself is in theory “good”.
It also reminds me that the BME newsfeed has been sorely neglected over the last while — entirely my fault — despite the continued efforts of Ania and others. I’m pleased to say that Ania will be taking over managing the newsfeed, so over the next couple weeks, watch for regular updates (perhaps “this week in Mod News” or something) on what’s going on. IAM members, as always, can submit news here.
Update: The TSA has refused to apologize and stated that the above was in accordance with official policy, although they say they’ll be updating the policy to allow people to simply show their piercings rather than being forced to remove them.
Continuing this discussion of mainstreaming, I’m in 7/11 this morning and they have a new energy drink called “Inked”. It’s got a faux-tribal border, a “rock” font, and a neo-Japanese wave in the middle, and the flavor is called “Razzle Dazzle” — could there be a more embarrassing name? It’s as if they’re making fun of you for buying it. I’m reminded of the scene in Family Guy where Lois is running for mayor, and realizes that just by saying “9-11″ and “Jesus” and “terrorists” Giuliani-style, all of a suddenly the crowd starts cheering and buys whatever she’s saying… What, are tattoo fans so gullible that they’ll buy an energy drink just because it says “cool razzle dazzle tatties” on it?*
* Yes, I bought it. It tastes like a sort of watered down “Tahiti Treat”.
I made some very minor changes to the front page of BME and BME/extreme. Mostly it’s just making the text a little bigger, taking off unused elements, and expanding ones that are being used a bit more. There’s nothing particularly dramatic about it, but if the “latest updates” ticker breaks anyone’s browser, please let me know. The members page is more heavy updated as an index, but since it was just a list of small-text updates before, I hope that’s a good thing.
Suggestions (if possible, with a mock-up or example) are very much appreciated!
I’m going to try and dedicate a day every week or two to clean up an element of the site, with galleries being next on my list (most of that work is already done)…
So I was thinking about the recent post about job discrimination with body modification, as well as reflecting on the inspirational interview with Alvar from last year… it’s been my observation that the higher quality the job is and the better you have to be at it, the less relevant your body modifications become. On “low end” jobs it seems employers are much more able to get away with judging a person for petty things like earrings — but in the kind of job that I believe most exceptional people aspire to, one is generally judged more on ones frontal lobe than one’s 1″ lobe..
Anyway, so I was really pleased to see Kiowa from Missouri’s graduation photos proudly showing his stretched piercings, and wanted to use it as an excuse to (a) if you want to be free to live your life publicly modified, performing well academically is a great start, and (b) the BME 2008 scholarship application is available.
Yeah, that’s right — I’m finally updating under my own username! Much thanks to Roo for helping me get posts here until now, but, as much as that help was appreciated, I’m definitely relieved that era is over.
Just to keep everyone in the loop as to the update schedule that was hinted at elsewhere, I agree that main site updates can be expected very soon and am also very happy to see that happening. BMEvideo is nearly ready to be udpated and should have new content within a day or two, and the main BME site should be flooded with experiences and images early in the week, if not sooner, depending on when a small number of technical issues that are barring that update can be resolved. I’ve had a chance to skim through some of the content that’ll be going up over the next weeks and I’m very excited and pleased about it — giddy, really — and I think you will be as well.
Roo and I will need to focus primarily on getting the main sites caught up, so we may be a little slow here on ModBlog over the first week, but I do have a few things I want to post later today. Let me prelude to them by posting a couple pictures from one of my favorite anthropological photo books, Africa Adorned. On the left is a Murle woman from Sudan with decorative facial scarification, and in the middle and on the right a Dinka man and woman, also from Sudan, with forehead scarification.
Anyway, stay tuned later today for a few brief posts.
As I mentioned earlier today, I think I’ll not wait until BME is up and running again fully before continuing to post, so please do feel free to email me submissions here (snowrail@gmail.com) and I’ll post them on ModBlog if it’s appropriate, as well as also submitting them to BME for you. As soon as that’s up and running you’ll be compensated as well. Thank you again to everyone who’s been supportive both as a reader and as a contributor.
PS. Continuing the trend of posting source files for the various images that I create for BMEshop and BME, if you’d like to download this image (based on the original Scott Fox artwork) as an EPS file, click here: bme_baby.eps
The BBC have just emailed me, warning that very soon the world’s going to be hit by an F5 shortage and a decrease in the availability of Apple + R’s!
Which reminded me of something, once you’re registered and logged into ModBlog, you can click here to see when the next scheduled update is due to appear. There’s nothing queued at the moment but when there is they will be displayed below the Posts widget on the right hand side.
That page is also available by clicking on Site Admin (on the right of this page below Archives) then Dashboard.
So we were looking at our local small-town paper, The Cape Breton Post, and Caitlin noticed that their “who’s reading the post” cover person had stretched ears and neck tattoos, and is wearing a shirt for East Coast Studios, a little shop across from the Tim Horton’s in Sydney, not far from where the BME production offices are in the process of relocating to… On one hand I do miss body modification being an underground art form, but it is very nice knowing that no matter where you are it’s no longer a handicap.
As I mentioned, I was just visiting Santa (mostly hoping he could help me out with my peanut collection — it’s been a little boring around there), and he asked me to pass on some news about BMEshop that was written up in one of the fictional gift-givers trade journals. If you place an order over the holidays, and enter the coupon code “BME-HoHoHo” (at the checkout page, then hit “recalculate”), it will give you 5% off of your order. I believe this code is good from now until the 26th.
Remember, every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings you order from BMEshop, a eunuch loses his nuts.
I’m overjoyed to say that we’re getting close to having ModBlog back to its old self.
I will be going back to creating video entries and I’ve got a bundle of letters from Shannon that I’ll be posting for him until he’s able to make the posts himself. Fingers crossed that this is a sign that everything will be back to normal soon.
- Roo
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Dear ModBlog,
It’s been a long time since we last spoke, and I’ve missed you deeply. One day soon I will be back, and we can talk at length about all our adventures, but until then I’d like to send you a few letters and pictures from my journeys and tell you about some of the friends I met along the way. Perhaps you’re wondering where I’ve been? Well, for now I’m at the North Pole hanging out with my good friend Santa* — we’ve got a lot of work to do on the Naughty and Nice list**… some people have been very naughty!
I’ll write again soon. Because I’m “stuck at the North Pole”, I can’t check the mail in my mailbox at BME right now, so if you’ve got things to post here, please do email them to me at my gmail address and I’d be happy to add it.
With the exception of one or two functions, IAM is approaching being back online. If you’d like to use it now, before DNS updates, you can add the following to your hosts file (please only do this if you understand what you’re doing):
38.99.130.173 iam.bmezine.com
The only function that I know is not working is that my mime encoding is offline so you can’t currently email entries with pictures to yourself. Everything else appears to be working. If you find other stuff that’s offline, please send it to me at snowrail@gmail.com.
Xeni over at BoingBoing has posted a nice follow-up interview with Jim Ward (available both in audio and in transcript form) about both piercing history, and the Louie (father of Karl) Rove piercing story. Click the picture of Jim to jump right to the interview now.
Check out this interesting tidbit of piercing history crossing over with much larger world political history in this article by Yard[D]og, and then please come back here to comment or share your own stories. Click the picture to jump to the article.
You may remember that a while back I posted a cervical piercing (on which you should definitely read the follow-up interview, so let me add this unusual genital piercing that’s resultant from a split Princess Albertina. Erika decided to take the two flaps that were left from the split (sort of a mini “female subincision” I suppose!) and pierce them each with a barbell.
Yurah Kalmikov at Planeta Tattoo in Kiev, Ukraine did the piercing and everything is healing nicely. To the best of my knowledge, and theirs as well, this is the first piercing of this type… So far they’re just calling it “Erika’s Fantasy”, and unless anyone else steps forward, they have naming rights!
Vinyl is part of the unofficial (but hey, everything on BME is unofficial so it’s fine if we just say “official” and “unofficial” interchangeably most of the time I think) Team BMERun For Canada! He placed 14th overall, and 2nd in his category (oh and as well as being a great athlete he has really neat tattoos). Congrats to Tom as well!
Mostly things are a little bigger, the XML is cleaner, and from an end-user point of view, the really good news is that there’s a search box. If you’ve got feedback on the change, suggestions, or find a problem, please post them here! Thanks! (PS. Theme care of Jon)
There are about twenty tickets left for ModProm II, the main event (in my opinion) of the BMEfest day. You can get more details about BMEfest at BMEfest.com but to get your ModProm ticket online (and a shirt too), click here to get it at BMEshop with your credit card. If you need to make alternate payment arrangements (as in you don’t have a credit card), please contact Phil. Tickets will be on sale until Monday.
Other than that, “real” ModBlog posts start again tomorrow! Now get your ticket… or party in Russia with Dem (this photo is from their New Year’s party):
I am very sad to report that Matt Luvpain (July 24, 1976 - June 11, 2007) passed away in his sleep on Monday from natural causes, and attempts to resuscitate him failed. Matt was a friend, an extremely modified individual who was one of BME’s most prolific contributors, and one of the Eunuch Archive moderators. This comes as a very unpleasant and upsetting surprise to myself and the multitude of people he touched. Matt will be greatly missed by his many friends and family.
This bodyart-themed film project starring Jason Behr seems to be much farther along than The Body Piercer. In theory this gets released, at least in New Zealand, in August 2007.
