Shrapnel — October 2004

The Church of Shrapnel

Following the ongoing Shrapnel theme of unusual churches and cults, here's the Unusual Churches and Cults site. Everything from the Church of Ed Wood to the Universal Church of Google. Well, if you're going to worship something, you may as well pick something that provides all the answers.

Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping

I posted before about one man's quest to visit every Starbucks in the world. Turns out Reverend Billy also has a Starbucks obsession, but his is a little different — enough to have earned him a restraining order from pretty much every Starbucks around. So, uh, where exactly in the world can he go then?

There you are, stirring sugar into a double-tall latte, watching the pristine white foam turn espresso-brown. The room glows with earth tones, balmy jazz classics and colour-saturated poster prints of cheerful coffee workers in bounteous lands afar. You take a seat, gaze at some headlines and let the warm pulse of caffeine take effect.

This is your daily Starbucks ritual, and nothing could rattle the bliss of it all.

But then, a tall man — a preacher with a peroxide pompadour — storms into the place. He places a hand on the till, closes his eyes, and announces, in a thundering evangelical bellow, that he's about to conduct a cash-register exorcism.

"We exorcise the evil from the cash register and we ask for the money to flow back to the coffee workers at the other end of the supply cycle," he hollers. "We ask for health and protection for them."

A tattooed Stalin

The cultural archivists behind Statue World also bring you photographs of Soviet prisoners' tattoos. See also gang culture.

All of America is Stalin World

Jean Baudrillard once said Disneyland disguises the fact that all of America is Disneyland. If that's true, what are to we to make of Dollywood? And what about the weird post-communist theme parks in eastern Europe, such as Statue Park, which collects "gigantic memorials from the Communist dictatorship" (but which looks like some sort of Magritte world)? Or Stalin World? (Scroll down to June 7 for the second link.)

This is why I never leave the house

No matter how strange you may find Please, real life is always stranger.

A woman came home from vacation to find a stranger living there, wearing her clothes, changing utilities into her name and even ripping out carpet and repainting a room she didn't like, authorities said.

What Happened to Rasputin's Penis?

Or, for that matter, Napoleon's? Experts may debate the issue, but one thing never changes: penis envy.

There is one exhibit in the museum which makes Knyazkin be especially proud of. This is the 30-centimeter preserved penis of Grigory Rasputin. "Having this exhibit, we can stop envying America, where Napoleon Bonaparte's penis is now kept. Napoleon's penis is but a small 'pod' — it cannot stand comparison to our organ of 30 centimeters," the head of the museum said.

The Ad Graveyard

Where good ads go never to be viewed... until now! (Is that one on the left really a cob of corn?)

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

I can't help but think this is some sort of metaphor....

An Oregon man discovered earlier this month that his year-old Toshiba Corporation flat-screen TV was emitting an international distress signal picked up by a satellite, leading a search and rescue operation to his apartment in Corvallis, Oregon, 70 miles south of Portland.

What the hell are the odds of this?

A bull moose was accidentally strung up in a power line under construction to the Teck Pogo gold mine southeast of Fairbanks. The moose apparently got its antlers tangled in electrical wire before workers farther down the line pulled the line tight about two weeks ago. The moose was suspended 50 feet in the air when workers, recognizing something was wrong, backtracked and found it. The moose was alive when it was lowered to the ground but was later killed when officials from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game decided against tranquilizing it to remove the wires because they were worried the moose, already stressed, would die and the meat would not be salvageable as a result of the drugs. -- AP

Gang Culture

I've mentioned Shelly Jackson's Skin project before, in which participants each get a single word of her story tattooed on their bodies, thus becoming a sort of living text (I'm not sure if anyone gets punctuation). It's an intriguing art project — particularly given that the text will erase itself as people die. But other people already use tattoos to tell narratives of their own, as is evident in these chilling yet strangely beautiful photos of gang life.

Arsenic Lullabies

Arsenic Lullabies comics remind me a little of Adrian Tomine's work, only far more demented and far funnier. Unless you think jokes about fetuses and teenagers having abortions aren't funny. Then you should probably just skip this link.

A new meaning to "road rage"

Remember the old Spy vs. Spy comics from Mad? Trafficlight Wars is the 21st century version of this.

Invisible Cowgirl

Susannah Breslin, of Reverse Cowgirl fame (the now-defunct blog, I mean), is back with a new site: Invisible Cowgirl. Everything you ever wanted to know about extreme porn, extreme gangbangs and Post Traumatic Porn Disorder.

Supperclub

Tired of fast food and takeout? Looking for something different but avant-garde meals are a little too exotic for your stomach? Why not try good old-fashioned excess and debauchery at Supperclub?

Is it a restaurant? Is it a club? Is it a kinked-up performance-art space? From where I'm sitting -- a giant white bed in a huge white room, shared by 149 fellow diners/trippers/voyeurs -- Amsterdam's Supperclub looks like a hallucinogenic mixture of all three.

We've just polished off a mignon de boeuf with spinach and shallot confit and French fries -- our third course out of a promised five; Howie, the rambunctious American maitre d', is hoicking up his ra-ra skirt and sashaying across the floor to the lo-fi lounge emanating from the DJ booth, strewing handfuls of rose petals over passing punters as he goes; and here comes a dominatrix in a mesh body stocking and rubber apron, dragging an unprotesting 'victim' onto a chair, hog-tying him and shaving his head into a rather professional-looking Mohawk.

 

Combat Jack

A fearless Rolling Stone reporter accompanies the First Reconnaissance Battalion into Iraq. Lots of shooting, homoeroticism, more shooting, more homoeroticism, more shooting, and masturbation.

Another big topic is music. Colbert attempts to ban any references to country music in his vehicle. He claims that the mere mention of country, which he deems "the Special Olympics of music," makes him physically ill. The Marines mock the fact that many of the tanks and Humvees stopped along the road are emblazoned with American flags or motto slogans such as "Angry American" or "Get Some." Person spots a Humvee with the 9/11 catchphrase "Let's Roll!" stenciled on the side.

"I hate that cheesy patriotic bullshit," Person says. He mentions Aaron Tippin's "Where the Stars and Stripes and Eagles Fly." "Like how he sings those country white-trash images. 'Where eagles fly.' Fuck! They fly in Canada, too. Like they don't fly there? My mom tried to play me that song when I came home from Afghanistan. I was like, 'Fuck, no, Mom. I'm a Marine. I don't need to fly a little flag on my car to show I'm patriotic.' " "That song is straight homosexual country music, Special Olympics-gay," Colbert says.

Well, at least they didn't have to drink urine with their MREs.

Interested in Protesting the Militarism
and Racist Foreign Policy of Video Games?

Velvet Strike may be the answer for you.

One can at least minimise the killing by finding obscure hiding places on maps and then sitting very still for the entire round where nobody can find one. This generally means each round is 3 minutes of bloodshed and 12 minutes of trying to find the last bloody player who's crawled into a lift shaft and refuses to move. Hiding is also an excellent time to be very chatty and tell everyone you're scared and you've become a pacifist and beg them to leave you alone. Hopefully you'll shame them into peace!

Agrippa Redux

Back in 1992, William Gibson released Agrippa, a poem released on a diskette that erased itself as you read it. Now it turns out our entire culture may be another version of Agrippa.

A book, given acid-free paper and stable inks, will last for centuries in a dark dry room. Nothing created with a computer has ever enjoyed any such persistence. When left alone without human attention, digital media die quite quickly. Computers and their contents survive only through constant, expert maintenance. Data are painfully dragged into the future through "migration" from one obsolescing form to the next. "Bits", digital ones and zeros, are not numbers or Platonic abstractions. They are physically real and subject to entropy, just like leaky plumbing. Bits are electrons moving through circuits, or photons in a fibre-optic pipe. Bits are laser burn marks in plastic, or iron filings stuck together with tape. Those are the weird stopgaps that we are using for heritage.

The Video Game Economy

Who exactly owns it?

Early last year a small Southern California company called Black Snow Interactive made a business move you could almost call shrewd if it weren't so surreal. They rented office space in Tijuana, equipped it with eight PCs and a T1 line, and hired three shifts of unskilled Mexican laborers to do what most employers would have fired them for: playing online computer games from punch-in to quitting time. The games they were required to play were Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot, two of the most popular massively multiplayer role-playing games online. As the workers sat mouse-clicking virtual trolls to death, their characters acquired skills and gold at a brisk, assembly-line pace. For this, Black Snow paid the Mexicans piecework wages -- then turned around and sold the high-level characters and make-believe money on eBay, where a grandmaster dragon-tamer account from Ultima can fetch $200 and a Dark Age gold piece trades for roughly what the Russian ruble does.

This isn't just a question for video-game geeks and video-game lawyers. Economists are interested too.

He began calculating frantically. He gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S. -- higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. Since players were killing monsters or skinning bunnies every day, they were, in effect, creating wealth. Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game -- the equivalent of $3.42 (U.S.) per hour. "That's higher than the minimum wage in most countries," he marvelled.

Then he performed one final analysis: The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia. It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn't even exist.

Castronova sat back in his chair in his cramped home office, and the weird enormity of his findings dawned on him. Many economists define their careers by studying a country. He had discovered one.

In Search of the Giant Squid

Some things may be better off left alone.

On a moonless January night in 2003, Olivier de Kersauson, the French yachtsman, was racing across the Atlantic Ocean, trying to break the record for the fastest sailing voyage around the world, when his boat mysteriously came to a halt. There was no land for hundreds of miles, yet the mast rattled and the hull shuddered, as if the vessel had run aground. Kersauson turned the wheel one way, then the other; still, the gunwales shook inexplicably in the darkness. Kersauson ordered his crew, all of whom were now running up and down the deck, to investigate. Some of the crew took out spotlights and shone them on the water, as the massive trimaran -- a three-hulled, hundred-and-ten-foot boat that was the largest racing machine of its kind, and was named Geronimo, for the Apache warrior -- pitched in the waves.

Meanwhile, the first mate, Didier Ragot, descended from the deck into the cabin, opened a trapdoor in the floor, and peered through a porthole into the ocean, using a flashlight. He glimpsed something by the rudder. "It was bigger than a human leg," Ragot recently told me. "It was a tentacle." He looked again. "It was starting to move," he recalled.

 

The Wonderful World of Accident Reconstruction

Another fun job!

Typically there are two kinds of injuries, those from the initial impact, and the ones from hitting and sliding on the asphalt, known as "road rash." To illustrate the different types of impact a pedestrian can suffer, Rich cued up a series of video clips on his laptop. The first one showed a well-dressed man with a briefcase in each hand caught crossing a busy Manhattan street. Suddenly, a white minivan blindsided him, causing a "fender vault" that tossed the man three feet into the air, still holding one briefcase. A taxi approaching from the opposite direction then launched him into a textbook "roof vault," sending his remaining briefcase flying and hurling him headfirst onto the pavement. This was not a walk-away accident.

 

Perverted Justice

Anti-child-porn vigilantes nail wannabe pedophiles. Stupid wannabe pedophiles, anyway.

The group's volunteers pose as kids, and when an adult hits on them, they publish the person's picture, phone numbers and e-mail address on the site so the group's supporters can hound the person by phone and e-mail. Perverted Justice has made more than 600 such busts since it was formed in July 2002, and many of its marks have lost their jobs and been scorned in their communities as a result of the exposure.

Celebrity Porn Detective

Some people have the best jobs.

Lake, a 66-year-old retired Air Force weather observer, is the self-described Fake Detective, defender of Hollywood babes. Every day in this cramped hovel, he scours the alt.celebrity newsgroups for doctored photos of starlets in various stages of undress. The hoaxsters behind these operations: a breed of hackers known as fakers who pride themselves not on their ability to crack code but on their skill at creating a new kind of postmodern art. Fakers are DJs of the pixel, manipulating pictures with Photoshop the way Moby tweaks sounds with a sampler. Bad fakes are obvious - Britney Spears' face clumsily grafted on a topless torso. The good ones seem sublimely genuine - a midstride shot of Ashley Judd sans panties at the Oscars, a doe-eyed Gwyneth Paltrow lying naked on a featherbed. If they're particularly well-done, they rise from the underground newsgroups and onto the hard drives of people who take them for the real thing.

Forget Video Games

The people behind Onimusha 3 should be making movies.

In Defence of Lust

'Nuff said.

It is a good thing if the earth moves. There is no such thing as a decorous or controlled ecstasy, so we should not persecute lust simply because of its issue in extremes of abandon. Indeed, such experiences are usually thought to be one of life's greatest goods, and a yardstick for others. Even in the rigid atmosphere of Catholic sanctity, the best that mystics could do to express their ecstatic communion with God or Christ was to model it upon sexual ecstasy. The metaphors are the same: in the ecstatic communion the subject surrenders, burns, loses herself, is made blind or even temporarily destroyed, suffering a "little death". Saint Teresa of Avila talks of an "arrow driven into the very depths of the entrails and the heart", so that the soul does not "know either what is the matter with it or what it desires", and still more she talks of the experience as a distress, but one "so delectable that life holds no delight that can give greater satisfaction". So it was not only Bernini who was driven to depict her in terms of orgasm. Her contemporaries were also hard put to know whether this was the work of God or the devil, and it was a close call when they finally decided on the former.

 

So the Choice Is Between a Three-Headed Demon and Voltron? What About Nader?

At first I thought maybe this political game/anti-Bush lesson was an ad for John Kerry. And it is, but I don't think he's responsible for it -- at least not judging from the sodomy, the "touch Hillary Duff" subgame, and the fact you can use Jesus to kill Bush. Or maybe Kerry's more interesting than he appears....

Resistance Is Futile

Joseph Campbell said to follow your bliss, but I don't think he had in mind visiting every Starbucks in the world. For the record, the one closest to me has very nice staff. There's another one right across the street -- just like in Best in Show -- but I've never been there.

Who Knew Taking a Leak Could Be Political?

Is the "Kisses" urinal fun, sexy or misogynistic? Or d) all of the above? You decide.

If This Is Fiction, It's Good Fiction

What could be worse than discovering you have a tapeworm, you ask? How about if that tapeworm starts to come out at a restaurant?

Confessions of a Car Salesman

Ever wondered what car salesmen talk about in those offices while you sit sweating in the showroom? Curious about whether or not those rumours about them hiding microphones in their desks are true? You could always go undercover to find out.

At one point, during a sales seminar, I was actually taught how to shake hands. The instructor, a veteran car salesman said: "Thumb to thumb. Pump one, two, three, and out." Another vet told me to combine the handshake with a slight pulling motion. This is the beginning of your control over the customer. This would prepare the "up" to be moved into the dealership where the negotiation would begin. The car lot handshake is sometimes combined with the confident demand, "Follow me!" If you employ this method you turn and begin walking into the dealership. Do not look back to see if they are following you. Most people feel the obligation to do what they are told and they will follow you, if only to plead, "But I'm only looking!"

While you're at it, why not read up on the history of automobile cup holders? Or where that new-car smell comes from (not from the new car!)?

For Cadillac, the new-car smell, that ethereal scent of factory freshness, is no longer just a product of chance. General Motors recently revealed that its Cadillac division had engineered a scent for its vehicles and had been processing it into the leather seats. The scent ‹ sort of sweet, sort of subliminal ‹ was created in a lab, was picked by focus groups and is now the aroma of every new Cadillac put on the road. Advertisement It even has a name. Nuance.

Moulage

This character could be right out of Please.

If you ever have Marge Dolan do your makeup, don't be surprised if you end up looking critically burned or showing signs of a smallpox infection. Dolan is just doing her job, which is to make you look bad enough to get you on the next ambulance or medevac flight out of a mock disaster area.

And What About People Addicted to Reality?

Now that games addictions have entered the mainstream, there are support groups springing up. But what'll it do to the economy if people stop playing Everquest?

Shit Sandwich

Once, when I was in graduate school, I went to a concert and thought about becoming a roadie and running away with the band. I'm glad I didn't, because this may have been my life:

Sure, many people pledge themselves to sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, but few have done so with the self-destructive verve of the former Studio City resident. Three spiked rings decorate his dick like medals of valor. He's contracted gonorrhea (six times), crabs (four times), syphilis (three times) and herpes. For more than a decade and a half, with lab-rat consistency, Hickey carpet-bombed his cortex with enough pills to stock a hypochondriac's medicine cabinet. At 15, he established himself as Boston's hardest-working rock serf, unloading equipment for bands like Motorhead and Twisted Sister at almost every club in town. At 17, he lived a louder, crueler, dramatically less uplifting version of Cameron Crowe's rock 'n' roll heartwarmer Almost Famous, joining Megadeth on tour as a roadie and discovering the thorny allure of hard drugs and anal sex with Canadian strippers.

NanoDarbyshire

Back in 1986, Eric Drexler published Engines of Creation and got everyone thinking about the benefits of nanotechnology -- and perils such as the Gray Goo scenario, which Prince Charles apparently worries about. There's even a nanotechnology sci-fi genre. But where there's buzz, there's potential for profit:

Nanotech involves designing, manipulating, and building things at atomic and molecular levels -- tinkering with the building blocks of matter. Most applications for it are years or even decades away, but Wall Street has caught on to it, and in the past year companies with any sort of nano connection -- Nanometrics, Nanogen, Nanopierce, Nanoproprietary -- have seen their stocks rise sharply. This boom is in its early days, since most nanotech companies are still tiny and privately held. But the scent of untold riches is already in the air. Josh Wolfe, who started the first nanotech venture-capital firm, compares it to the Internet circa 1993, before Netscape went public. He thinks the first big nanotech I.P.O. could happen in the next year.

But this nanotech boom may be pre-empted by another scientific innovation: the field of nanobiotechnology. And nanobiotechnology comes with its own nightmare scenario: Green Goo. Anyone else remember the good old days, when all we had to worry about was the heat death of the universe?

Celebrity Mutilations

What do Boris Yeltsin, Gary Burghoff ("Radar" from MASH), Buster Keaton, and Tony Iommi have in common? Missing fingers.

The Computer Is Your Friend

You've probably heard it hundreds, if not thousands, of times in your life already: "This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes." If you're like me, you've probably wondered what poor drone has the job of monitoring calls, and what terrible errors they've made in their life to wind up in such a position. Well, it turns out nobody may be listening after all. Nobody but the computer, that is.

The latest version of NICE's software performs 'word spotting,' scanning sound files for predetermined words or phrases, such as 'cancel my order' or the names of competitors. It can even search for anger in callers' or agents' voices by examining the pitch, speed, and other criteria, much as a lie detector would.

Even Better Than the Real Thing?

Just when I thought there was no stranger sexual fetish than bukkake, along come Real Dolls:

I'm guessing that, at least once per relationship, your partner will ask you if he or she is being used just for sex. Even if you're inclined to stop humping their leg for a minute and deny, deny, deny, more often than not, their gut instinct is well founded. If this is a recurring theme in your relationships with people, you might consider investing in a Real Doll, a high-end humanoid love toy that is guaranteed to love you long time -- or, indeed, any time.

AmericaFest

Aryanfest 2004 didn't exactly turn out to be the Million Man March of the White Power movement. It didn't even have the excitement of a Bikers for Jesus rally. Maybe it was the fact it was billed as a family-friendly affair, although a party of neo-Nazis seems about as family friendly as a Promise Keepers rally. Or maybe it's that they're trying to relive a past that's already dead and gone -- although that hasn't hurt the popularity of other groups, like the Society for Creative Anachronism, who have enough members to stage an annual war, or the various groups involved in Civil War re-enactments. Still, the neo-Nazis did manage to get their own Burning Man vibe going:

The atmosphere inside Aryanfest was that of a Renaissance Fair gone over to the dark side, with 'Heils' in place of 'Huzzahs.' Costumed attendees wore Iron Cross medallions and black bomber jackets emblazoned with swastika patches instead of studded leather armor and princess dresses. A Nazi memorabilia dealer hawked SS patches and framed photographs of Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolph Hess in the parking lot. Next to the stage was a picnic pagoda, serving as the Aryanfest day-care center, where little white children in skinhead clothes colored in white power coloring books. Directly next door to the pagoda was a tattoo booth, where the incessant high-pitched buzz of a tattoo gun sounded from behind a blue tarp curtain. Beside the Panzerfaust merchandise stand was the Women for Aryan Unity booth, which sold child-rearing guides and White Nationalist Baby magazines, including one containing a simplified biography of Hitler suitable for bedtime stories.

Human Capital

Now that outsourcing is finally starting to affect white-collar jobs, it's quickly becoming a major media story, and thus a major political story. Sure, people grumbled a little when it was manufacturing jobs heading overseas, but if that meant we could get products cheaper, well, the displaced workers could always retrain. But when our valuable call centre jobs began moving to India, suddenly critics began to worry about the economic impact of the tech outsourcing. Their worries were amplified by Microsoft's plans to outsource a great deal of the company's work (apparently its profit margins aren't high enough) and IBM's quiet announcement that it's shifting production overseas.

While some argue the trend is just another example of the psychotic nature of North American-style capitalism, others argue it's a necessary step in the evolution of capitalism and commerce, and that the West will simply be left behind if it doesn't participate in outsourcing (although some acknowledge it may be left behind even if it does participate). Others argue outsourcing will create new jobs. Then again, countries like India may run into their own problems with outsourcing. And it seemed like just last year that people thought the biggest problem facing business was Wal-Mart.

So what's the future of the job market look like for North America then? Well, while the economy doesn't seem to be adding jobs, it does appear more North Americans are becoming self-employed. And, of course, there are always bad jobs around. The real problem may be the death of the middle class as North America increasingly becomes a service industry nation catering to the needs of a rich few (like it isn't already?). Some critics say we can avoid this new feudalism, but only if we take drastic actions right now. What kind of actions? Jean Baudrillard points to the example of Smurfland, but imagines it on a grand scale, a Disney scale. Welcome to the new economy! Welcome to Americaland!

Sim Life,
Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love Baudrillard

What's a poor worker to do in the era of downsizing, outsourcing, and boomer apathy? Can't get a job with a company? Forget corporations, become your own brand. Of course, if you're not feeling that industrious, you can just become someone else's brand. In fact, life may just be better for you if you think of yourself as a product. Of course, there are always people who want to drop out of every well-run consumer society, but where do you go when there's nowhere left to drop out, when everything has been commodified? Well, why not hide out in the products themselves? An increasing number of people are starting to live inside video games. Canadian writer and games columnist Jim Munro likes to hang out in Grand Theft Auto. Other people prefer The Sims or Second Life. Just be careful you don't fall prey to the evils of Evercrack! Of course, some people have already figured out a way to make a real living off their virtual lives, so don't be surprised when your sanctuary gets commodified and you can't afford to live there anymore.

The Modern Condition?

CNN recently reported the case of a French man who died after consuming 350 coins and assorted necklaces and needles. While the case may initially seem like an example of the modern condition -- consumerism gone awry -- it's actually just a mundane case of pica. No, it's not death by typewriter, although, strangely, sex and typewriters seem to go together. Pica's a psychological condition, usually found in pregnant women, that causes uncontrollable desires to consume "nonnutritive" substances. Perhaps Armin Meiwes, the German cannibal, was suffering from this? No, if you want a true example of consumerism gone awry, no one does it like Americans. Except for maybe the Japanese.

Posthuman Performance Art

Back in the 1990s academia had a brief fling with body theory before abandoning jouissance for the happy family of the diaspora. Body theory, which focused on ways of writing the female experience that disrupted the traditional modes of discourse -- that is, male modes of discourse -- was just one of many theoretical one-night stands: poststructuralism, postmodernism, women's studies, queer theory.

But the intersection of these theories resulted in one of the increasingly rare moments in which trends in the university actually had a real-world effect. All the attention on the body and the performance of identity helped bring the new field of performance art into, if not the spotlight, at least its outer edges. Students graduated from Sonic Youth concerts to Laurie Anderson shows, and then to Annie Sprinkle performances. Cindy Sherman became the intellectual's Marilyn Monroe. It was only a matter of time until the unique cocktail of body theory and performance art was absorbed into the mainstream, manifesting itself in the form of artists such as Marilyn Manson.

But even as Manson celebrated the Golden Age of the Grotesque, the age grew more grotesque than perhaps even he could imagine. While performance artists of the past used costumes and props to make their statements about identity, we're now in the age of actual body modification. We're not talking nose rings and tattoos here -- who doesn't have a tattoo? -- but extreme body modification. Orlan set the stage with surgical reconstructions of her own body as performance pieces, but such acts aren't just the domain of artists anymore. Technology has reached the point where self-manipulation is possible for the masses as well. Want a new look? No problem. Thinking about a sex change? Who isn't? Wondering if the face-switching scene in Face/Off was far-fetched? Not anymore, it isn't. Are you a wannabe amputee? Join the club.

So what's the next shock art then? Sure, there's always cloning , but the more likely scenario will involve technological enhancements to the human body. Cyborgs. We're not talking science fiction here, but things that are actually happening now. Steve Mann, a University of Toronto professor, has been happily transforming himself into a cyborg for some time now . But Mann's cybernetic gear is wearable. Others, like Kevin Warwick, are actually turning to implants.

And while scientists and engineers work out the mechanics, artists are already engaged in the cultural discourse. Body theory? Forgotten. Sexual identity politics? Reduced to a joke. The diaspora? Meaningless. Welcome to the age of the posthuman.