From across America they came, like living tissue samples gouged from the heartland, to graft themselves onto the corpus of fetish, flesh and fantasy capping the nationwide promo tour for Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider's slash-a-delic bodmod-themed movie StrangeLand.

KEITH ALEXANDER

"One Chicago man tattooed his penis", noted StrangeLand's hi-octane press release,"in an attempt to win a trip to New York for the event...." The event? On October 1, 1998, the pain-proof parade of humanity converged for Night of A Thousand Scars at Manhattan's largest nightclub Webster Hall--celebrating Snider's cinematic tale of "a madman who lures victims through the internet and forces them to submit to tribal rituals against their will."

With StrangeLand' s producers providing both motive and opportunity, Keith Alexander of Modern American Bodyarts--who happens play guitar for Dee Snider's touring band--actualized Snider's transgressive midnite-movie vision into a series of spectacles that unspooled in the 40,000 square foot nightclub.

Among Night of A Thousand Scars' most picturesque attractions were the pain-and-gravity-averse troupe Traumatic Stress Discipline, consisting of several intrepid men and a woman who--suspended on steel hooks piercing the flesh of their backs in a kinetic fusion of Stelarc and Fakir Musafar--were swung on steel cables in an acrobatic sky dance 20 feet above the ballroom floor.

Also memorable was SpiderGod5 [Erik Sprague] "doing the dangerous and ill-advised for your entertainment", including fire-eating and intra-nasal spike-pounding. Audience volunteers joined the increasingly popular bodymod icon SpiderGod5 onstage to stretch out on

FROM RAB?

his bed of nails. Assistance was provided by a contingent of significantly metallized R.A.B. [rec.arts.bodyarts] regulars--all freshly carbo-loaded and sugared-up following an exclusive "munch" at the nearby Sunny Noodle Shop.

On Webster Hall's vast, ornately fitted-out balcony, amid divans and other cushiony furniture, a sort of ritualistic dry-hump unfolded in a moaning welter of dominatrixes and their welted underlings--all clad in lingerie and closely scrutinized by a pack of heavily breathing voyeurs, including The Soft Toy Department.

Playing upon video-projection screens were images of giant penii superimposed over vintage Irving Klaw fetish loops. These segued into documentary footage of piercings, brandings, cuttings and assorted blood "sports". Projection artist Alina Wilczynski --whose work regularly appears at Manhattan's Jet Lounge and wherever else lesbians and/or pierced people gather--presented tableaux of scanned S/M performances interspersed and intertwined with industrial objets trouves.

Also bringing comfort to the afflicted and affliction to the comforted were:

The ever-charming, ever-present Kiva attired in a steel bikini, to which Kiva's sidekick Fredini applied a metal grinder, showering the occasion in sparks and toxic noise;

NeoSporic Flesh Mechanic, "sewing lips and eyes together";

BlockHead Insectivore, in a performance involving "spikes up his nose and bugs down his throat";

Sasha and Purp's performance with "Needles, Knives, Electricity & Dance";

ditto Essie and Darby with "Needles, Feathers, Dreams & Dance."

Three extremely non-denominational priestesses wafted through many-chambered Webster Hall conducting a purification ritual with feathers and incense. Following in their fragrant wake was a team of New York City fire marshalls, undoubtedly drawn to the scene by advance word in that day's New York Post warning that SpiderGod5 would be committing arson upon himself.

---

CHARLES GATEWOOD and MARK KRAMER

Meanwhile, back online, fanciers of graven images are noticing the recent Charles Gatewood interview in "punkrocksex.com".

A few notable utterances from famed fetish photographer Gatewood:

"I'm smart. I'm talented. I'm successful."

"I like taking pictures of punk rock girls. I make them look HOT [sic ]."

The Q&A wanders into even more provocative territory with Gatewood's assertion that the person he most wishes dead is a "dumbfuck writer and former collaborator who just ripped me off for $1200."

Gatewood has discouraged attempts by The Soft Toy Department to verify reports that the writer in question was David Aaron Clark, the former Screw editor and Gatewood's collaborator on last year's 64-page photo-and-text shocker True Blood.

DAVID AARON CLARK

Clark--known more for his incantatory public bloodlettings and occasional feats of masochistic vampirism than his advertorial puff-pieces in various commercial-sex magazines--recently threw aside any pretence of either literary or journalistic significance by fleeing from San Francisco to North Hollywood's teeming smut colony.

According to online porno historian Luke Ford, Clark has surfaced as a "director" of X-rated videos for such mobbed-up Porn Valley mainstays as Extreme Video and gross-out smutmeister John T. Bone.

The recent contretemps with the exploitation-minded Gatewood enlivens a downwardly mobile resume that includes Clark's role as the adipose human pincushion in both the 1997 Al Goldstein documentary Screwed, and in Joe Christ's 1995 "body modification" video Sex Blood & Mutilation.

For more on the erotopathic entropy that continues to devour porndom and its inhabitants, The Soft Toy Department recommends "rec.arts.movies.erotica".

These Photos: Sherry Russell and Vilma Martin

Meanwhile, a Condition Yellow hoax-watch remains in effect for the real or imagined mutilation artist Bruce Louden and his mythologizers.

In an undated interview currently running on the Dazed and Confused website, the publication's art editor Mark Saunders conducts an interview with tbe "South African-born performance artist" Louden that touches on many themes familiar to the BME reader.

Invoking such personages as Chris Burden and the Vienna Aktionists in assigning Louden his "place" in the body-art pantheon , Saunders writes, "To date he has severed over 12 pieces of his body, from toes to his tongue, fingers and an ear. The remnants of these performances are....sold to collectors around the world."

"...Louden raised the stakes and completed his most hazardous performance yet...in the province of Kwazulu-Natal, in a secret location on the outskirts of Durban, he severed his own tongue and documented the action film."

Moreover, "....the tongue is to be exhibted in a London gallery..."

Visits and phone calls to such London venues as the prestigious Institute of Contemporary Art failed to produce any evidence of Bruce Louden's existence.

Repeated phone calls and emails from The Soft Toy Department to Dazed and Confused's London offices resulted in a flurry of evasion and dissimulation.

And speaking of severed extremities, Joe Christ fans take note:

Another self-penectomy survivor's tale is told in British historian Simon Winchester's recent book The Professor and The Madman: A Tale of Madness, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. The focus of Winchester's investigation is the 19th century American, Dr. William Chester Minor--a Yale-trained physician and Civil War veteran who moved to London after the conflict and soon went mad, whereupon he committted murder and was committed to England's Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.

In addition to his more enduring achievement of contributing 10,000 entries to the Oxford English Dictionary, on September 12, 1902 Minor "sliced off his own penis in order to curb his sexual desires."

"Fortunately, Minor was a surgeon and knew what to do", explained Winchester to The Soft Toy Department. "So he tied a ligature around the wound, threw his penis in the fire, and went for a walk down in the garden."

In penis veritas.

10/29/98
Cafe Cyberia
Edinburgh, Scotland