I made a new video of my eye… I don’t have any editing software on this computer (I’m still using Caitlin‘s) so I just posted it as it came off the camera…
My eyeball tattoo (done by Howie/LunaCobra) remains one of my favorite body modifications, along with the magnetic implant (by Steve Haworth) and my split tongue and others. Admittedly it just looks like a growth/deformity and some strange spots, but I just love it… It’s approaching one year old, making it, along with Josh’s blue eye, the oldest injection-style eye tattoo out there, and the oldest one with a complication. The “cyst” type structure still has a bit of a dull ache from time to time, although I admit that it might just be a matter of feeling paranoid about a headache! It’s certainly not enough to stop me from wanting to add more.
It’s crazy how popular this has gotten… As well as being featured on CSI, I think Howie and a couple others have done around two dozen by now. When I was still with BME, only a small percentage of the people I knew chose to submit their pictures, so I suspect there could be even more people than I’m guessing. For example, here’s Stevve, one of Howie’s other victims customers:
Photos: LunaCobra
They’re doing a “demon eye” on him; this is the first stage of the work. Next they’re going to be doing a layer of black ink which should blend nicely. You can see some great pictures of Josh’s eyeball (a mix of blues), as well as other eyeball tattoos in my previous ModBlog posts. Definitely I’m very jealous every time I see one, and I hope Howie comes up to Toronto this summer again.
This still needs a lot of work and I’m not so happy with it at present (it’s also a poor photo), but I did a little bit more painting on this project…
There’s a little more about this painting over on I Need More Life, but I spent a few hours today finishing off the base coat. I’m definitely far from satisfied and it needs a ton of work to get it to a good place. I may put it aside for a little while.
I went for a walk with Caitlin to have some falafels for lunch, and we bumped into an older Indian guy begging on the street covered with a mix of street/jail tattoos and religious tattoos on his face… Pretty neat look, although that coupled with not speaking much English has to make life very difficult for him. I was thinking about going and trying to track him down for an interview about his experiences…
I was reading Mary Roach’s new book, “Bonk”, and in a chapter on clitoral relocation surgery is a brief note about the “Janjero tribe” –
…one culture cuts the nipples off boys, to masculinize them. Bonaparte gives a quote obtained from a nipple-less Janjero tribesman by an anthropologist named Cerulli. “We do this because we do not wish to resemble women in any way.”
Roach mentions that she was not able to confirm the above claim in a journal search, and I couldn’t find much about it either… The “Book of the Penis” by Maggie Paley also contains the following comment,
Among the Janjero of Ethiopia, a man who’s had both nipples and one testicle removed may never rule. All males with the exception of the king and his sons are mutilated in this manner. Members of the lowest class are left alone, since no one would let them rule in any case.
“Black God: The Afroasiatic Roots of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Religions” by Julian Baldick and “Black Eros” by Boris de Rachewiltz, and a few web sites contain similar commentary about the puberty rites of the Janjero, but I couldn’t find anything I’d call definitive, and there’s an awful lot of fantasy in early anthropology. Still, I found it quite interesting because it’s the only reference to nipple removal / nipple nullification that I know of in a traditional context.
Anyway, I’m enjoying “Bonk” and will now get back to reading.
Well, I no longer have an office in my house, nor porn-related visits from affable migrant workers. I don’t know if it’s a reflection on the virtuality — or even real-world valuelessness — of the nature of my work product, but it’s interesting to think that everything I’ve done on BME in a decade and a half can be shrunk down to the content of a few DVDs… or in this case, a bunch of cheap electronic junk.
Ah, what to do now?
Part of me wants to sit around, play Guitar Hero and watch TV all day (which I may well do today, as I am computerless right now other than stealing Caitlin’s computer when she’s not here), but I think I have five main things on my “next stage” projects, at least in the short term:
- Finish the book projects that are already started.
- Launch the new site.
- Get enough good paintings done for a show.
- Teach a robot arm to paint (that’s my new project, building on my earlier work with computer composed music; teaching a computer to paint in my style, using lots of paint and good texture).
- The snowrail.
I’m really looking forward to the robot painting project and have been obsessively watching robot arm videos and watching various sites for used industrial robots…
