Allen Falkner likes to tickle his students with thoughts of trauma. "Somebody's skin is going to tear tomorrow," he said. "Hopefully." Posted on 02/10/2007 3:20:11 PM PST by SmithL
Allen Falkner likes to tickle his students with thoughts of trauma. "Somebody's skin is going to tear tomorrow," he said. "Hopefully."
Falkner, the "Father of Modern Suspension," had gathered 15 students in the back of a San Jose tattoo parlor for a four-day class titled the Art of Human Suspension. The curriculum attracted a lawyer from San Diego, an IT guy from Silicon Valley, two journalists from Mexico City, a state employee from Nebraska and a truck driver from Pennsylvania.
For $600 a pop, students were taught how to hang a human body from steel fish hooks, the kind used for catching salmon. On the final day of the class, after students learned how to pierce skin, rig pulleys and clean wounds, they got the chance to practice their new skills on each other.
Despite going out of fashion in San Francisco in the past decade, the painful ritual of suspension has witnessed a national surge in popularity. It's an ironic turn, Falkner said, considering the city was the suspension capital in the late '80s and early '90s, thanks largely to Fakir Musafar, the Menlo Park artist who popularized suspension with a 30-page interview published in "Modern Primitives," the 1989 book that brought body modifications such as tattooing, piercing, and scarification, to a mainstream audience.
Falkner, 37, who lives in Dallas and runs Suspension.org, said he keeps tabs on as many as 25 suspension "teams" that have sprouted up around the country in the past 10 years, but none are based in the city. "I don't have a good reason for why it's happened," said Sky Renfro, a former San Francisco resident and owner of Body Mechanixx, an all-things body modification company that sponsored the class. "San Francisco is a fickle...
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I'd endorse this activity in preparation for an IRS audit.
Dear G-d, please don't let these people breed.
This might hurt...
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