I am informed that the newest form of body modification among the cool kids is cranial plant grafting. Is this correct? I should hate to shell out $300 in milk-bottle tops or the equivalent in New Zealand dollars to have a Rafflesia rotten-flesh flower implanted in my head, only to find that I had been duped by unscrupulous persons preying on my gullibility.
Lubbert Das.
Dear Mr Das, you are right, to the extent that floricranial implants are indeed popular among the kids today. Body-mod shops are setting aside their tattoo guns, branding irons and scalpels in favour of seedlings and potting mix. You are mistaken, however, to think of this as a recent trends. Headgrafts are a long-standing tradition.
In this scene, the client is having a sprig of mistletoe implanted in his skull. He hopes that this will entitle him to kiss as many girls as he likes at Christmas parties, despite being overweight and looking like Archie Bunker, and judges that this outweighs any loss of cognitive faculties as the plant's root tendrils infiltrate the orbitofrontal parts of his frontal lobes. The receptionist would disabuse him of this notion but they pay her only enough to be a human bookshelf so she is keeping her mouth shut. I have no idea why the bald guy is holding a novelty teapot.
There is any number of similar implantation paintings from Netherlandish artists of that era. The patients are remarkably stoic about the excavations into their skull to make room for the seed of their choice, not to mention the potting mix and root-growth hormone, but then they have been treated with the anaesthetic of the epoch, i.e. Akvavit and lots of it.
Then with improvements in hand-held firearms, this artistic genre fell abruptly into abeyance, because people were shooting seeds into one another's heads with muzzle-loading arquebuses and muskets and what-have-you instead of taking the surgical route.Modifying your body is your own business, but animals cannot consent, and planting cherry seeds in a pet stag -- as Baron Munchausen has done here -- is simply wrong. It's a form of mutilation, like docking tails for aesthetic reasons. Here at Riddled we denounce and condemn the application of these technologies to domestic animals.
One can always rely on the Japanese to take any new trend to the extreme.
9 comments:
Trolling for Zombies, are we now.
~
The guy doing the implanting on the top must be an ancestor of Tom Terrific.
Treepanation!
dangit, now I'm hungry.
The first picture was in our early days of the production and we were a little unsure of how "The Wizard of Oz" was supposed to turn out and wetas ate quite a lot of the script.
I have to take issue on the Cherry/ Venison experiment. It was a considered response to a market trend that we at Riddled Gentenics (spell checkers being quite rare in those days)thought would bear fruit, so to speak. The ethics committtee process of bribery is a long and complex one and we did our best to comply. Of course mistakes occur but it was not for lack of trying or lack of gift tokens for the Unspeakable Brothers end of year sale.
Trolling for Zombies
If that was the purpose, we would have turned Vesalius' sequence of woodcuts of brain dissection into an animated gif.
The patients are remarkably stoic about the excavations into their skull to make room for the seed of their choice, not to mention the potting mix and root-growth hormone, but then they have been treated with the anaesthetic of the epoch, i.e. Akvavit and lots of it.
CAS had this trend covered.
Honestly, the thought of plagiarising Clark Ashton Smith NEVER CROSSED MY MIND.
Honestly, the thought of plagiarising Clark Ashton Smith NEVER CROSSED MY MIND.
Sure, blame it on the parasitic epiphyte!
Post a Comment