The age of post-modern primitivism took New York City by storm last month with two historic convergences that attracted some of civilization's most passionately adorned residents.

Looming large in the mediagenic foreground was The 1st Annual NYC Tattoo Convention, a massive gathering of the tribes at Midtown Manhattan's landmark Roseland Ballroom--a thematic tribute to Local Law 12 of 1997, known also as the Tattoo Regulation Act, which repealed New York City's 36-year-old official ban on tattoo'ing. For three sold-out days and nights, countless fans of the fleshly arts wove a shimmering human fabric that simultaneously evoked the lowbrow splendor of a boardwalk or carnival midway and the amplitude of the high-fashion catwalk. Dispensing tattoo-related goods, services, knowledge, gossip and bonhomie on these deco premises were over 70 exhibitors/ practitioners from the U.S. and abroad. Also present were New York City Department of Health officials, field-testing the newly published official manual Recommendations for Tattooing Practice.

Meanwhile, ten miles south of Times Square, on a more microcultural wavelength, 50 or more of the heavily metalized inhabitants of the Usenet community "rec.arts.bodyart" gathered for RABcon98--an offline celebration of soft-tissue modification hosted by Modern American Bodyart's renowned piercer, Keith Alexander. Here in Bayridge, Brooklyn, at the very heart of Saturday Night Fever country, the "RABbits"--the self-affectionate term for "rec.arts.bodyart" insiders--have convened from 13 states plus Cananda for two days of real-time schmoozing, piercing, cutting and branding.

Carloads of Bayridgeans--not incredulous, exactly, just...very interested--oozed by to scope out the RABcon98 ad hoc carnival of metal-and-ink garnished humanity outside Alexander's shop. One lucky, heat-seeking RABbit named Hound was the reciptient of a Keith Alexander backbranding, administered on the sidewalk. Also served al fresco was a fire-eating performance by Erik, the philosophy grad student known online as Spidergod5--accompanied by the clicking, whirring camera mechanisms of 20 RABbits freezing the event into visual specimens which, within days, will be uploaded thoughout RABbitdom. Inside, cuttings and piercings aplenty were given and received with grateful shudders of joyous pain. Also available was an Internet connection with IRC [Internet Relay Chat], offering the cyber-hungry uninterrupted access...

Summarized Keith Alexander, "The BA crowd is a loving, highly intelligent group, despite public opinion. Tattoos do not instantly mean convict. In this instance, it means computer geek."

It was Alexander who had coined the specific term "RABcon98", as well as opening Modern American Bodyarts to the event. The idea itself had its roots in RABbit gatherings known as "munches" that would culminate in diners and other downscale eateries nationwide--a concept finessed and flogged into its present form by dedicated RABbits such as Heidi and The Katester, two exceedingly pleasant midwestern ladies, an electrical engineer and a librarian respectively, who had carpooled it all the way here--and would, the following week, compile and post the "rec.arts.bodyart" stats on who made their mark on whom at this, the biggest munch yet.

In the meantime, Heidi and The Katster's own relatively demure facial and tongue studs--the duo's most readily apparent piercings--resonated with body-art's most inflexible truism: You never know what people have underneath their clothes or embedded in their flesh.

And because dislocation of private experience into public spectacle is for many the goal of body-modification, the NYC Tattoo Convention proved a triumph of off-beat enterprise. Here, at the very brisket of an ever more corporatized Times Square, was a satyricon-like swirl of inked, stapled and riveted human--bonded by the otherist esthetics of Coney Island and the Lower East Side.

Onstage, illustrated audience members vied for such honors as "Best Tribal Tattoo" and "Best Overall Tattooed Person" in the dermal karaoke of an audience-participation tattoo contest--MC'd by swankily tattoo'd downtown hostess Deb Parker, creatrix of themed East Village nightspots. There were also prodigious feats of stylish, endorphenized self-endangerment from acts including the fire-eating Kiva, the sword-swallowing Fred, and the contortionistic Pain Proof Rubber Girls--plus a ceremonial moment of recognition for Kathryn Freed, the Lower East Side politician who sponsored the successful legislation known to her constituents as the "Freed Tattoo Bill".

[The Soft Toy Department's own "1998 Special LifeTime Achievement Citation" goes to Hamburg, Germany's 66-year-old from-the-neck-down gesamtkunstwerk Tattoo Theo, whose eloquent flesh reads like a memoir salvaged from that city's once proudly shameless, and now-sanitized, Rieperbahn.]

Altogether The 1st Annual NYC Tattoo Convention was pervaded by an exhuberant, epochal vibe--a collective realization of being in the presence of cultural and social process. Already the Tattoo Convention had been given the full-dress treatment in New York[ and the Times ; and in the week to come, there would be follow-ups in the Village Voice and a tony "On The Street" photo-spread in the Times ' "Style" section. These notices in themselves would be, for many, an occasion to marvel at the fullness with which bodyart had migrated into the global gaze. For others, such as veteran tattooist-to-the-stars practitioners Jonathan Shaw, Gil Monte and Spider Webb--this weekend's worldwide recognition factor has no doubt been a long time coming.

One of bodymods more atypical personalities--doing a brisk business on Roseland's mezzanine--was John Lomax, creator of the U.K.'s Wildcat Collection of "new generation bodywear, who urged caution in the midst of today's dizzying market free-for-all. "People need to take more seriously what they put in their bodies", warned Lomax, "Many people with piercings don't know the difference between surgical-grade and implantation grade steel, or that there's different grades of titantium. They just hear the words "surgical-grade" or "titanium" and think they're safe." The metallurgically-minded Lomax has actually patented a hypoallergenic, non-releasing metal he calls "Implantium"--to combat bodymod's rising tide of bioincompatibility.

The equally hyperpurist RABbits, on the other hand, proved to have very little interest in making their intricately insular world intelligible to outsiders..These overachieving spawn of Fakir Musifar clearly included some of the most-well adapted citizens of our age. Merely to read their email suffixes--yale.edu, princeton edu., columbia.edu--was to concede that the RABbits were a kind of cognitive elite with their own self-contained, text-and visual cosmos of soft-tissue information and ideation. [On the other hand, RABbitdom also has its down side--as was evident in Erik a/k/a Spidergod 5's chilling tale of adjunct-faculty careerism when one's true desire is "to look like a lizard".]

Part of the RABbits' charm derived from their seeming capacity to render normal journalistic processes nearly irrelevant. RABcon98 had not even ended before messages and photographs were being uploadedon Usenet--luckily for the The Soft Toy Department, which had not been on hand Saturday night when approximately 50 RABbits dined at Bayridge's BridgeView Diner--famed throughout Brooklyn for its steaks, chops and seafood, and now, perhaps, for RABcon98. . According to a fast-breaking rec.arts.bodyarts posting--soon to be followed by innumerable photos--it was here, in this clean, well-lit neighborhood eatery, that one much-admired RABbit, Josh Burdette, a University of Maryland senior, picturesquely inserted a pickle in each of his stretched earlobe orifices. According to Keith Alexander, these implantation-grade antipasti were "Kirby Pickles...more cucumbers than pickles." A source at the BayView insists they were "half-sours, or possibly dills". The Soft Toy Department's investigation continues.....

Photos and report by Mark Kramer