(Video Link)
Zane Whitmore of Seattle was pierced through the flesh on his shoulder blades four times, and then hung from these piercings onto a hot air balloon. He floated around California's Long Valley Caldera for seventy-five minutes, suspended ten thousand feet over the ground:
The stunt was part of a Portland film production company's filming of a feature-length documentary called Feet Off the Ground. Planning for the hot air balloon ride took about two years.
"This balloon suspension is really the culmination of several years of immersing ourselves in the body modification and suspension communities," Matt Morgan, co-founder of film production company Precarious Egg and one of the producers of the film, said in a press release describing the project.
Link -via Boing Boing
You know its like that ever-so-popular propaganda slogan that picked up wind in the last few decades "I'm doing it for myself." This is said when a woman is talking about the reasons for using make-up and trying to look prettier than she naturally is. "I'm not doing it for attention. I'm doing it for myself." but you aren't the one looking at it, instead you are looking at the faces of people who are looking at it, and that is where it makes or breaks you, and where you are doing it for yourself, in the reflective pool of another's mind, which is the same as doing it for attention. "Well I have to compete with modern beauty." No you don't have to compete at all, but you want to, you want to be lusted after, adored, loved, chosen, accepted, appreciated and above all preferred. But it is a very crafty delusion, I'll give it that. It comes about because in modern culture it looks bad to do things for attention, so we delude ourselves into thinking we are doing it "for ourselves". The delusion is actually, therefor brought on by the same function of the mind which makes us want to look pretty to begin with, protection of self-image and controlling appearances. It is that one silly little function that dominates most of what we do, think and feel.
Speaking factually, your comment is highly ignorant and ill-informed.
I'm sure you can find attention whores in every subculture. But don't speak like a bigot because you have a tendency to assume the worst and generalize based on bad apples -- or straw men.
And I was going to post a link to Tabitha Stevens hanging from hooks in her back for a feature film.
My statement is not debased simply because there have been attention whores for all of human history. My conclusion is that all of humanity has been attention whores for all of human history. But I say "All" rather loosely, it is just the vast majority.
And this isn't based on any historical development of a subculture, this is based in representational neuroscience, psychology and my own consciousness. Actually, if you take the normal level of human inquiry, description and discussion... throw that away, it bears no resemblance to what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about underscores the very nature of self-consciousness and cannot be refuted by a "You are so ignorant man" statement.
Me, me, me, look I have no ego. Pfft.
How can someone hang from a balloon suspended only by his body piercings? That's a chicken vs egg thing.