Word: mods
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...this universal phenomenon is being celebrated in two separate showcases. Last week a cross-cultural exhibition titled "Body Art: Marks of Identity," curated by Schildkrout and devoted to the past 4,000 years of body modification--"bod-mod" to the cognoscenti--opened at the American Museum. At the same time, photographers Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher, based in London, have published African Ceremonies (Abrams; $150), two magnificent volumes documenting the continent's rapidly vanishing kaleidoscope of tribal rites, many of which involve elaborate body decoration...
...museum show, Schildkrout and her colleagues focus on five types of bod-mod: tattooing, scarring, piercing, painting and shaping. And while some examples may seem bizarre to Western eyes, says Schildkrout, "we want people to realize that everyone, including themselves, performs some form of transformation. We color our hair, wear makeup, put on clothes, have plastic surgery...
...positronic ray. Audiences ate it up. Drew Barrymore has signed on for a remake, but the new Barbarella will dump the camp factor and tell a very serious scientific story about this positronic ray. No one is going to care. It will just be another embarrassment--like The Mod Squad and Lost in Space which were remade as "straight" stories. Bah. Both films stunk. They didn't have the camp factor, they didn't have the cool factor--and justly, they both tanked...
Branding is, well, a hot trend largely due to Fakir Musafar, 69, a former ad executive who calls himself a shaman and devotes his life to bod-mod, along with other more fantastic practices like O-Kee-Pa, a mystical Native American body-suspension ceremony. Musafar started a California state-licensed branding school in 1992 and has spread his philosophy through a website and a quarterly magazine called Body Play. He claims that branding is now administered by some 50 people in the Western world and could hit the mainstream in the way piercing did a few years...
Even branding is tame compared with more extreme bod-mod, ranging from people who have their tongues split to some Star Trek fanatics who have supposedly tried to look like a Klingon. Then there's Erik Sprague, 27, of Albany, N.Y., who has spent the past several years trying to turn himself into a lizard. So far he has had Teflon implants to enlarge his forehead and filed his teeth into fangs, while covering his body with tattoos of reptilian scales...