Modern Primitives: An Investigation of Contemporary Adornment and Ritual Book

The RE/Search Journals were my late teen year's version of pop-up books of alternative culture. Each and every one of them were the supreme arbiters of what was cool and imminently subversive. They served as field manual and survival guide to the pre-Net world of unique subcultures that were both dangerous and strangely delicate.

Modern Primitives was the first of the journals I had picked up shortly after reading Gibson's Neuromancer for the first time. The synthesis was a profound one which eventually led me to meeting Fakir Musafar and performing a ceremonial body modification rite at a Beyond Vanilla conference back in the early nineties.

Filled with all manner of body modification technologies - some ancient, some modern, some overtly spiritual in nature, some merely motivated by vanity - this book cataloged all manner of historical tattooing and piercing styles. In addition to these were added other, more unusual forms of body-play which still have yet to be exploited by the fraternities and sororities of the world. I mean, can you imagine a Pike sporting a saline-filled scrotum while his Tri-Delt sweetheart dances around him with cowbells stitched to her with fishing line. Maybe in the future, true believers. Maybe in the future.