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By Sharon Jacobs, Assistant Arts Editor
Published February 21, 2010
On a projector screen at the front of the Michigan Union’s Pond Room, a woman dangles inches from the ground. She gently sways back and forth from ropes descending from the ceiling, attached to large metal hooks planted deep in her shoulder blades, her skin stretched almost to the breaking point.
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This is suspension, an extreme, spiritual and sometimes gory practice — and the topic of the semester’s first meeting of the Students for the Appreciation of Body Modification, founded last winter.
The movie on the projector screen is “Flesh and Blood,” a 2007 documentary about radical body modification artist Steve Haworth. As a man onscreen suspends from metal rings in his nipples, SABM Publicity Chair Jordan Marchese, an Engineering senior, discusses his own suspension experience.
“There was a point in which I was spinning,” Marchese recalls. “I was watching the room spin, and I was just completely free … to look down, see that my feet (weren’t) touching the ground and look at the wall and just slowly watch it move and just be completely weightless.”
Marchese isn’t crazy, and he certainly wouldn’t look out of place on a college campus. A thick wooden earring hangs from each ear, but any other metal or ink Marchese has is covered up by his hoodie and jeans — and from talking to him, one would never suspect his penchant for dangling by the skin on his back from hooks and ropes.
But then again, Ann Arbor’s body modification aficionados have a surprising knack for blending in.
The many faces of modification
After more than a year, Karen Ross’s mother still doesn’t know about her tattoo. Ross, a sophomore in the Residential College, had her late father’s initials inked on her inner wrist at Lucky Monkey on South Ashley Street.
“I thought about getting it for like three years before I actually did it, just so it wasn’t some rash decision,” Ross explained. “This is how he used to write his initials, and then ever since he died I’ve just kind of had it in the back of my mind … part of why I wanted it was so I could look at it every day and be reminded of everything that me and my dad had together.”
When Ross wears an inch-thick bracelet on her wrist, the initials are completely covered up. She used to put on the bracelet every time she went home.
“When I was a little kid (my mom) used to tell me like, ‘Never get a tattoo, you won’t be able to get a job, people will look down on you,’ ” Ross said.
But this isn’t just any old tattoo; it has a special meaning.
“I just want to wait and see if she’ll see it on her own,” Ross said, “and if she sees it on her own, then that’s the time that I’ll talk to her about it.”
Art & Design senior Nae Morris is more conspicuously modified. She has several piercings on her ears and nose. But it’s not until she yawns or makes a funny face that the extent of Morris’s modifications reveals itself: The tip of her tongue is split in two, and she can move the segments independently of each other.
“No one ever notices, because when I talk you don’t see it, you don’t hear it,” Morris said of her tongue bifurcation. “I didn’t want a million piercings in my ear, I didn’t want to be visibly known … but I was really happy having things for myself.”
Besides the bifurcation and her numerous piercings and tattoos, Morris has extensive scarification — purposely carved scars in the shape of cherry and plum blossoms run from her armpits to hips on both sides — and implants in her hands.
“It’s the exact same thing as a breast implant pretty much, except that these are solid instead of being a bag filled with silicone,” Morris explained the process.
