My thanks to Flagrante for furnishing info on the weirdo who runs the Under Mars war photo album site (see posting below) that includes images of killed Iraqis and disrespectful captions.
He's a Canadian called Shannon Larratt, editor and publisher of BMezine.com, "the largest and oldest full-spectrum body modification publication on the planet." Now, why didn't I know that?
His Wikipedia vanity entry includes this: "At about age sixteen, Shannon started tattooing himself, performing DIY scarification on himself and partners, as well as piercing himself (intially nipples and genitals) and beginning to stretch his ears.
"Shannon believes that these interests are as in-grained and as unchangeable as sexual orientation."
His own current body modifications include: Partial genital bisection (self-done); a
magnetic implant in his right hand; earlobes stretched to approximately 2" (no jewelry worn in them) and an 8mm outer conch dermal punch; ink rubbing on his right ankle; scripture tattoos of ROMANS 3:28 and 1 CORINTHIANS 13; the words "STAY CALM" across his inner fingers.
What he does to his body I couldn't care less - though I promise him an interesting re-modification of his body on my mediaeval rack. What I do care about is the implicit celebration of murdered people on Under Mars.
Larratt's email address: glider@bmezine.com.
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Oh dear God. What is going on.
Mme Arcati, it is depressingly clear to me that the blogosphere offers only limited scope for satire, irony, postmodern reference, etc. Its limits of course, like the limits of any communicative medium, are the cognitive limits of both the creator of a given page and whoever happens to be looking at it. This means that to your nutcase, the pictures you referenced are only representations of "extreme body modification" (as with extreme modifications to anything, I guess you reach a point where the original no longer works). And to airsoft man your description was merely potentially useful coverage. A "press mention"!
Well, this is the risk we run, and we can stand or fall with Gutenberg. The potential dangers of ironic material being taken at face value (as in the case that copied Eminem's song "Kim") must be weighed against the value to society of both hard facts and aesthetic experience (which, itself, helps us to interpret and navigate our environment).
I'm lucky, because I didn't even understand what all those body modifications are. And I haven't gone and looked at the Mars site.
We haven't really progressed all that far, we humans.
By the way, I've tagged you. Successes of 2006. Feel free to ignore...
Thank you Ms Baroque - wonderfully expressed sentiments.
I'll stay anonymous on this because I fear for the hatchet job you'll try to do on me for daring to disagree with you, but....
You've got to wade through an awful lot of pictures on 'Under Mars' to find even one disrespectful caption. Most are pretty bland, so I'd venture to suggest the site's compiler is simply captioning the pictures as they were captioned to him, possibly by the person who took the picture.
If so, that speaks volumes about the mindset of the photographer, and not necessarily about the mindset of the site owner. A few minutes spent researching before launching a spittle-flecked rant would have shown you that - if nothing else - the site owner/author/compiler can spell. Is he *really* going to spell 'charades' wrong in a caption? While that's hardly conclusive proof, you would have thought someone going for the pithy wit of a 'charades' punchline wouldn't spell it in such a way as to make the critical word almost indecipherable.
'Under Mars' may have disrespectful captions under some of the pictures. Sadly, that's pretty common on the internet - no, really, you should check some other sites out to see. If you didn't agree with the site's premise, why launch into a muddle-headed ad hominem attack on the possible author based on (apparently) chuff-all research.
Do get a grip, Mme Arcadi.
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