Body Modification: Tongue Splitting

Meet 21-year-old Sophia Bickerton, an aspiring tattoo artist who we featured in our Stripped Back issue in The New Normal, a circus-themed shoot showcasing four inspirational people. Here tells us about getting her tongue split…

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I can’t say that I had a real reason for getting my tongue split, apart from the fact that I think it looks amazing! I love that you are able to do that to your body. I had wanted to get it done for the past eight years and only recently I plucked up the courage to actually go through with it! For two months before I got it done, I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind. I was dreaming about it almost every night. And I’m a big believer that what is stuck on your mind needs to happen. So it happened!

After a lot of research, I ended up travelling to London to have it split. When I woke up on the day, I was so excited – I  just couldn’t wait. While I was travelling I started to feel nervous, so nervous that I felt like I was going to be sick and in the end I had a panic attack because I was so excited and scared at the same time, I just couldn’t process it!

The actual tongue split was magical. I had forceps on either side of my tongue so when it had been cut, it was held apart and I just couldn’t believe it. The thing I had wanted for so long had finally been done. I couldn’t stop smiling and giggling, I was over the moon! My tongue was finally in half! So after that I was on a natural high, I couldn’t feel a thing, only happiness.

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After everything was over and I had been sutured up, I was told about aftercare and what my dos and don’ts were. After that, it was back to the underground to catch the tube and that’s when it hit me. I was in so much pain and, to make it worse, I ended up having a random coughing fit, which as you can imagine wasn’t very pleasant. It ended up making my tongue bleed a lot as it was putting pressure on my sutures. And that’s when I started to realise what I had done, I’ve just had my tongue split in half, and I must admit for the three or more hour journey home I started to regret my decision because it just hurt so much, it was throbbing and it was starting to swell.

Day two and three were the most uncomfortable, the swelling had taken over and my tongue had ballooned that much that I had to sit with my mouth open, my tongue just wouldn’t fit in my mouth – I couldn’t even push my tongue in to close my teeth. But pain wise, it didn’t hurt during the day but strangely would hurt at night.

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And sleeping, oh damn, that wasn’t fun. I went through so many tissues! The drooling was unbelievable and just when the pain would subside and I was drifting off to sleep I would wake myself up by drooling everywhere. In the end I had to sleep with tissues pressed up against my mouth so it didn’t go everywhere.

Day five was the best day, the swelling was minimal and there was hardly any pain. The only down side was the fact my tongue looked so disgusting due to the white scabs. After a week, I ended up taking the stitches out, they were so uncomfortable and hurt so much. But  without them, my tongue felt amazing, I felt free, it felt just like my normal tongue again. The best part was that I could eat properly again.

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People have had mixed reactions, my nanna doesn’t like it at all and doesn’t understand why I would do that to my body, where as my grandad was happy for me, as he knew it made me happy. My niece and nephew love it, they are always asking if they can see it, but for them, it’s normal. They have grown up around me and know that I’m a little different to the rest of the family.

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When I’m talking you can’t really tell what has happened, my tongue looks different but for someone who hasn’t seen it before they don’t know. I’ve had  people ask me what is wrong with my tongue and they seem shocked when I tell them that I chose to do it.
But for the most part, people don’t care, they find it odd but they know it makes me happy and that’s all that matters.

I plan on having my tongue split further back in a few months, which I am really excited about! It healed up just a tiny bit and I’d like to have my split as big as it will allow me without having to have my frenulum cut. I’d also love to get my ears pointed in the future,  but I cant see myself going through the healing process, as it will take months to fully heal and be very painful. For me, having my tongue split is the best thing I have ever done and it is now my favourite part of my body.

Gypsy East Desert Erotica Photo Shoot

In the depths of the Rajasthani desert, the Gypsies created magic… 

Check out the Gypsy East ASOS for your own magical treasure that the gypsies discovered on their travels 

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Art direction & styling – The Gypsy East Collective
Model – Emily-Louise McGuinness
Photographer – Alexandre Fantie-James
Shoot assistant – Harry Newbould

 

Film Review: Slow West

Our resident film reviewer is writer Harry Casey-Woodward who will be sharing his opinions on things he has watched…

Slow West, 2015, cert 15, dir John Maclean, 4/5

If you liked Django Unchained, how about a western shot in New Zealand by a Scottish director? You’ve got to admire a director when they choose a western for their first film in this day and age, when westerns are no longer guaranteed profit makers (unless you’re Tarantino). It must be even more of a challenge to make a good one, now Django has raised the bar and Tarantino’s new western The Hateful Eight is in the saddle. But new director John Maclean has crafted a stunning western for his first feature, which is now out on DVD and Blu-ray.

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Slow West has a simple but original plot. The hero is a young Scots lad named Jay Cavendish played by rising Australian star Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Road and Let Me In). Having left Scotland, we find him riding alone across the vast, wild landscape of the American West to find the girl he loves, who has already emigrated west with her father. He bumps into Silas (Michael Fassbender), a lone drifter who agrees to ride with Jay for reasons known only to Silas.

Both are testament to the theory that opposites attract. Silas is a traditional western hero. Even Fassbender acting in his native Irish accent just adds to his rough charm. He’s got the weather-beaten costume, the stubble, the cigars and the gun. The only thing he lacks is a heart. I was worried Fassbender wouldn’t pull off this Clint Eastwood -like character, since I’ve only seen him in well-spoken civilised roles like the android in Prometheus and the English officer/film critic in Inglorious Basterds. But he’s utterly gripping as a cool, cunning gunslinger.

Jay Cavendish, however, is the natural bumbling teenage sidekick. What he lacks in experience and practicality, he makes up for with naivety and romanticism. Whereas Silas has dulled his emotions, Jay remains the victim of his passions which have led him on his epic, dangerous quest to find his love. Kodi Scot-McPhee gives a charming performance as a lovesick, wide-eyed poet horrified by the violence and suffering he witnesses.

The pair encounter a range of western characters. They’re tracked by a shaggy-coated man named Payne and his motley band of outlaws, a cool performance by fellow Australian Ben Mendelsohn who played hot-headed businessman Daggett in The Dark Knight Rises. There’s also a Swedish couple turned desperate store robbers, a travelling writer documenting the extinction of Native American culture and a bounty hunter disguised as a priest carrying his rifle in a smart case (a possible homage to the eccentric antiheros of the spaghetti westerns).

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Thankfully Slow West follows a trend that has been cropping up in recent westerns. This is acknowledging the fact that the American West was populated by emigrants from all over the world, thus not everybody spoke in a cowboy drawl (a fact often ignored by even the best westerns in the past). The director admitted that he wanted to make a film about the West from an emigrant’s point of view.

The film also features Native Americans. Some are depicted as deadly and otherworldly, others as very human. The main characters mention the decimation of the Native American civilisation, often cynically, as an irreversible tragedy. It has been a while since any recent western has acknowledged this dark side of American history in such a modern fashion. As well as accurate historical details, the film does a good job of representing genders too. When we finally see the love interest Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius)on screen, she’s a gutsy farm girl who ends up doing most of the shooting in the showdown at the end.

If this colourful cast of characters isn’t enough to attract you, the film is worth seeing for its sheer beauty. Most westerns can boast extraordinary landscapes and Slow West is no exception. Like Lord of the Rings, Slow West could be an advert for New Zealand. We switch from tender flashbacks on the Scottish coast to dramatic New Zealand scenery of forests, mountains and plains which makes a perfect Western backdrop. Whoever went location scouting did a good job. The best thing about filming in New Zealand, as the crew discovered, was the incredible light and colour the beautifully framed shots were blessed with. The colours are especially striking for a western, reminding me of technicolor 1950s classics like The Searchers. As Maclean explains, that was purely due to the quality of New Zealand natural light and he didn’t want to shoot another brown western anyway.

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Despite the cool characters, the original plot and striking cinematography, there are two criticisms I would make of this film. One is that it lacked the ‘oomph’ present in other great westerns like The Wild Bunch], Unforgiven and even Django, which stops it ranking alongside these classics. In other words, as nice as the film was to watch I didn’t feel a great emotional impact at the end. The running time is only eighty minutes, which means you have less time to feel involved with the characters than a longer film. However, given the content of the plot I feel there were still opportunities for a greater emotional scope. Moving onto the other criticism, I felt the movie was putting more effort into being strange for the sake of it. The nature of the plot is rather episodic, which leads to several random scenes like Jay and Silas riding past three men playing music in the middle of a barren plain. Jay converses with them in French on the universality of love and death. While it’s nice to see such creative elements in a western, it does reduce the historical realism a tad.

But then Slow West is a different breed of western to the intense, action-packed examples I mentioned above. It’s sparse, lyrical style reminded me most of Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 western Dead Man starring Jonny Depp. Both films are beautifully shot, spiritual journeys through imaginative landscapes of the American West. Both feature traditional Western clichés mixed with modern sensibilities and both balance cynical humour with tragedy and graphic violence.

The presentation of the violence is worth noting in Slow West. Don’t expect the glorified, over-the-top action of Django. It is thrilling and even playful at times, especially during the climax during which Payne fires a bullet to make a weather vane spin round. However, there are other scenes when the pointless, catastrophic consequences of random violence are clearly plain, with little dialogue and visible emotion from the actors needed. Though I have mentioned the lack of emotional impact in this film, I still genuinely feared for the heroes’ survival in the final shootout.

Overall, the film is sparse but not cold. The more I think about it after viewing, the more I admire the creativity involved and the sheer amount of elements that were brought together. This is a cool, lean slice of cinema that looks amazing with subtle depths of emotion and heartache. I respect that such an unusual little gem was allowed to be made and I further respect the fact that it was a British production, having been presented by Film 4 and the British Film Institute. Perhaps this will lead to another wave of European westerns like the Italian spaghetti westerns in the 60s. Shepherd’s pie westerns anyone? More like haggis western, as the director is Scottish. Silliness aside, he has done a remarkable job for his first film and I hope his future efforts share in the poetic, imaginative spirit of his debut.

All opinions of the director are taken from the special features on the DVD

Home Ink

Our Italian contributor Ilaria Pauletti tells us about the Home Ink tattoo party held at Home rock bar a night full of tattoos, burlesque and prizes… 

In December after I long day at work I found myself browsing Instagram and I came across a tattoo competition connected to Home Ink 2015, an event I really wanted to go to. It was being promoted by Home Festival, a music festival that I  love a lot and that is always held in my home town.
So I said to myself, why not? Let’s do it!

To enter the competition all you had to do was share one of your favourite tattoos on Instagram, tagging the organiser in the picture and then getting as many likes as you could. It was very simple, so I decided to share my bunny tattoo (by Amy Savage) and a few days later, they told me  that I won the Instagram contest!

My Rabbit by Amy Savage

The tattoo party was located at Home Rock Bar (Treviso), a great bar with good music and a fresh atmosphere.
The main theme was tattoo and their motto ‘Stay Inked, Stay Home!’ was plastered around the place, I loved the decor.

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The judges were Tizio from Klinik Studio, Amedeo Lombardi who organises the Home Festival events, a member of Tattoo Defender team, a tattoo artist and a tattoo lover chosen from the crowd.

Each participant (from the public) was given an identification number and allocated a category based on the size of your tattoo. During the evening you were called by the presenters to parade and show off your ink. As you were showing the judges your tattoo you weren’t allowed to mention who it was done by, as this may have influenced their decision.

Prizes

While the judges voted in secret the crowd was entertained by a burlesque show by Genny Mirtillo, she is such a lovely girl and I loved her fire eating abilities!
The show ended and the judges announced the winners. Once you were entered into the winners rank, you were called to appear again on stage, and collect the prize won. When it came my turn, I was a bit nervous. But it was also pretty exciting!

Genny Mirtillo

I won a special limited edition pack where I got free entrance to the four day Home Festival events, some cute Sun68 gadgets I will receive this September, a personalised plate with the date and logo of the event and a little bag containing fir seeds to make the world a more sustainable place! Such a cute pack of goodies, right?

Home Festival is without any doubt the best music festival in Italy, you just need to take a look at last year’s line up. So I’m very happy to have joined this Instagram competition, and I can’t wait to find out who is going to play this September!