Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

This morning I was browsing the news and skimming through the top news photos and came across an image from a Thierry Mugler men’s fashion show in Paris yesterday, and I think that like me, some of you will get a kick out of said photo from the show (credit: AP/Francis Mori):

As I’m sure many realized, that model is none other than “Skullboy”, Zombie, who I profiled with the help of BME reader Veronika back in 2008 (that link goes to original interview; assorted BME coverage here). Obviously neither I or BME can take credit for his success and climb to model-dom, but one of the things that I’ve always been proud of with BME is that it’s been a wonderful genesis point for so many people and cultural movements. Many people took their first public steps there, and without BME they might have had a very different launching point and path into the world. So I was quite happy to see this photo. What an interesting world, that a marginalized Quebecois street kid has been whisked off to become an international model. And I don’t think he’s there as a novelty act or freakshow either, which admittedly is a small positive step, but I think we’ve gone much farther, and are part of mainstream aesthetics — attitudes about beauty have evolved more positively than I ever could have imagined in 1994.

When I started BME, I felt very culturally disconnected and “preemptively outcast” from the world around me because of my instinctive interest in body modification, which in the eighties, when I started getting seriously started on transforming my public visage and identity by restructuring my body to match my own personal sense of beauty, was a real outsider and frowned-upon activity with primarily negative connotations. Part of the reason the website was called “BME” was not just as an acronym for “Body Modification Ezine”, but also as “Be Me”, because I had the concept that instead of me bowing to the outside world and “being them”, I was going to do everything I could to change the outside world and have them “be me”. As luck would have it, I wasn’t the only person who felt this way, and many other people joined my mission of transforming the world to match our fantasies, and I think looking at how different the world is now that we did a damn good job and especially those of us who were there from the start — all you piercers and body artists and enthusiasts struggling in the nineties to create what is now a mainstream industry — can give ourselves a big pat on the back for a job well done. How many people can say that they took part in changing this ill-fitting nightmare of a world we live in to match their warmest dreams? If you’re reading this blog then there’s a good chance that you were part of that fantasy and I hope that seeing that photo above helps remind you that we achieved the comfortable impossible.

Now, to move off onto something else, when I took that screen shot I still had open on the other half of my screen Daz Studio, the figure-centric 3D animation and modeling software that I mentioned recently had been very useful in doing posing for recent paintings. Last night I spent some time teaching Nefarious, who is not quite eight years old, to use it and she’s had lots of fun creating little pigs and other fantasy characters. So I wanted to again recommend this tool not just for artists but also for parents, especially because it’s a free download, which you can get here along with many free models and scenery as well. These dancing pigs are her first creation.

Today I’m going to try and move the trike project ahead a little more if I can find the strength. We’re starting to get the mechanical aspects much more solidified. Right now I’m using a pair of 400W hub motor, one on each rear wheel, that are controlled with a 40amp 48V dual motor controller with a reverse switch. Power comes from a pair of 10Ah LiFePO4 high discharge batteries that also has a 12v/5v adapter so I can attach various accessories (USB power, lighting, and so on). According to my dubious online calculations that means I’ll do a “blistering” quarter mile in a bit over thirty seconds at about 40 mph, perhaps 2/3 the speed of an old VW Beetle. Maybe I want more? I’m waffling right now on whether I want to continue with building it with a composite frame or if I want to go the easy route and build it on a metal tube frame. For a variety of reasons, but mostly simplicity, I am leaning toward the latter.