Devotees of body-modification are recalling 1997 as an epoch unto itself--a time of intense anatomical awareness bordering sometimes on obsession.

Undoubtedly some of this can be attributed to the previous year's Crash mystique--summarized in the normally slow-on-the-uptake New York Times under the provocative headline "Unsettling Visions of The Erotic": "You can view these famished fetishists for whom a slab of scar-tissue or a fresh wound is as erotic as numbed-out pleasure seekers who are so jaded that they can be aroused only by sex that is intimately associated with violence and death. Or you could view them as die-hard romantics...."

Questions like these, of course, are already routine to BME readers--as evidenced by February's flurry of Dickless in Babylon-related activity in Philadelphia City Paper. First, there is the February 7 appearance of "Portrait of the Artist As A Not-Very-Well-Hung-Man" by City Paper scribe Frank Lewis:

"Filmmaker, musician and one-time Texas gubernatorial candidate Joe Christ is the subject of an ongoing ezine series that contends, among other things, that Christ is the anonymous schwantz-less star of his own 1995 documentary, Sex Blood and Mutilation." Phone calls to City Paper soon follow from two female Joe Christ cultists--each of whom plays cadaver roles in Joe Christ's 1993 video Acid Is Groovy Kill The Pigs -- contesting Dickless in Babylon's central thesis of Joe Christ's penile amputation. The result, "The Strangest Story Ever Told", dated March 27, 1997, offers Joe Christ a forum to prolong the falsehood: "Here's a quote for you: Not only do I have a penis, I use it daily. Sometimes I use it to urinate, sometimes I use it for sex, and sometimes I just wave it around in my hand." Shortly thereafter, the pornographic weekly Screw runs a smarmily pro-Joe Christ/anti-Kramer item that contemplatively asks, "Does [Joe] Christ have a dick? We don't know. We have more important things to think about..."

Within weeks, both Dickless in Babylon and BME are mentioned in the pages of the national humor magazine Spy; another month passes and a Newsday profile of Mark Kramer mentions the retaliatory attacks on Spy by Joe Christ.

Meanwhile, on another coast, far, far away, "Hollywood Madam" Heidi Fleiss's Dad Paul Fleiss, MD--whose obstetrics practice includes Madonna and her offspring--announces completion of The Penis Book, containing "everything a man or a woman should know about the human penis--physiology, normal and abnormal developement, lore, problems and evolution. With diagrams, drawings and photographs."

Also on the footnote-filled literary penile beat: Dick For A Day, a book-length "gender-fucking anthology of more than 50 women writers [who] hijack maleness and approprite a penis of their own."

Meanwhile, back in Gotham, tattooing becomes ever more a part of the cultural and civic discourse. There is Seven Tattoos, prize-winning gonzo literatus Peter Trachtenberg's skin-crawling, book-length memoir of degradation and redemption of and through the flesh. And then there is New York City's repeal of a never-enforced tattooing ban --dating to a 1961 hepatatiis scare that was never, observes the New York Times, "definitively linked to tattooing." Nevertheless, legalization means that tattoo parlors--previously unfettered in their entrepreneurism and creativity--now have a bureaocracy all their own.

Summer 1997 brings the Bobbitt-like headline: "Man Is Hospitalized After Atttack On Genitals" Datelined--where else?--San Francisco, July 6: the Reuters item notes, "A man was in serious condition in a California hospital on Saturday after his girlfriend cut off his penis with a knife....Mr. Luna was rushed to Commnity Hospital on the Monterey Peninsula, where he underwent surgery to reattach the penis...", although it "it was still unclear whether the reattachment surgery was a success."

More from the penile-amputation front in the form of unsolicited email from Joe Christ to Shannon Larratt: "So, last chance, take down the Dickless in Babylon site, or be ready for expensive legal action. It'll cost my household less than a week's pay to get an injunction to shut down your whole site."

Perhaps the most over-the-top effort by mainstream media to confront some of the intricacies of soft-tissue modification culture appears in the New York Times Magazine feature "Cutting": "In an age of tattoos and nose rings, self-mutilation is the latest expression of adolescent self-loathing." Times reporter Jennifer Egan--writing from way behind the curve--introduces Fakir Musifar, Keith Alexander's Modern American Bodyarts, and San Francisco blood-artist Raelyn Gallina to whole new swaths of the mainstream reading public. The net effect of "Cutting" is to medicalize the "problem" without explaining how some "injuries" end up at Self Mutilators Anonymous meetings and others proudly appear in BME "Extreme"...

And speaking of anonymous self mutilators, more unsolicited email arrives at BME from Dickless in Babylon protagonist Joe Christ's spouse Nancy A. Collins: "And, as you have persisted in your refusal to remove the offending sites, then you, too, shall be listed as a defendant and, knowing Kramer, he will more than likely leave you holding the bag."

You can hide behind the First Amendment as much as you like, but I, frankly, can not see any lawyer worth their sheepskin advising you to do anything but cut your losses and leave Kramer to deal with the shit storm he's created on his own."

The shit storm arrives in the form of unsolicited email and snailmail from attorney M. Christine Valada: "There appears to be a photograph on your website of an individual whom you identify as Mr. Christ with full knowledge that the individual photographed is not him [sic]. Remove this photo immediately".

Unfortunately, no photo accompanies this September 13 item: "Head Is Partly Severed And Then Reattached": According to Reuters, "A surgeon in Britain has severed a woman's head from her spinal column, and then reattached it, to correct a crippling condition that left her face pointing downward..."

Another Amputation Alernative: An AP item, dated October 21, announces: "Laboratory-engineered tissue from newborn's circumsized foreskins and from cow tendons is being used experimentally to heal skin ulclers and other wounds that have not responded to traditional care."

In the artspaces of New York City, meanwhile, The Soft Toy Deparment is on the scene for exhibits by human-wildlife photographers Charles Gatewood and Katrina del Mar, tattooist/painter/actor Jonathan Shaw and the New Museum of Contemporary Art's one-woman showing of London-based Palestinian transmedia- and body-artist Mona Hatoum. On a transgressive scale equalling such contemporaries in the UK smart-art set as Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn, Hatoum's abolition of boundaries is most invasively depicted in her 1994 video installation Corps entranger. This examination of the artist's body cavities is the visual product of Hatoum's collaboration with a surgeon using a minute endoscopic camera. Projected onto the the floor of a cylindrical booth, Corps etranger is accompanied by the sound of a heart beating--the better for spectators to immerse themselves in the simmering visual and conceptual depths of Mona Hatoum's interiority complex...

Winter descends upon New York City with a sprinkling of questionaires prefaced, "Most men spend a lot of time thinking about their penises. But rarely do we get to hear them talking about their penises." Until now, that is. There follow such invasive inquiries as "How would your life be different if you lost use of your penis? and "Is there anything you'd like to change about your penis?" The survey's findings are to appear in an upcoming HBO documentary, tentatively entitled "Members Only".

In the meantime, there is the controversial "Human Body World" exhibit at Mannheim, Germany's Museum of Technology and Work. Using a process known as "plastination" to transform cadavers into "anatomical artwork", according to the New York Times "...outer muscles fly backward off its bones, as if the muscles were being blown by the wind rushing past...the entire system of muscles...looks like an astronaut's bulky spacesuit dangling on a hanger."

Death-knells also emanate from Genesis P-Orridge's latest hideout in The Bronx with Gen's public disavowal of his once-famed bodily and genital hardwear. "I got rid of all them", he confesses to New York Press. "I can't stand the visual rape of walking down Saint Marks Pl. and having all these unknown people offend me with facial piercings, which are just there to shock and give a pretence of alienation....And as for their supposed 'tribalism', just throw a $100 bill into the middle of the room and see how unified they are."

And that, BME readers, is 1997: The Year in Body Modification. For The Soft Toy Department's next annual report, please visit this URL on April 1, 1998.

Mona Hatoum photo by Leni