Oddity Central |
- Vietnam Festival Is Dedicated to Meeting Ex-Lovers
- 13-Year-Old’s Christmas iPhone Comes with 18-Point Contract from Mom
- Orlan – The French Performance Artist Who Used Plastic Surgery to Challenge Beauty Standards
| Vietnam Festival Is Dedicated to Meeting Ex-Lovers Posted: 03 Jan 2013 03:55 AM PST Most people cannot stand the thought of their partners even talking to their exes, let alone socializing with them. But things are different in a small community of Vietnam. A yearly 'love market' of sorts is held in the hillside village of Khau Vai, 500km north of Hanoi, near the border with China. It takes place each year, on the 26th and the 27th of the third month of the lunar calendar. During these two days, hundreds of ex-lovers from various hill tribes like Nung, Tay, San Chi, Lo Lo, Dzao, Giay and Hmong are reunited. They trek in from various mountainous districts nearby to be able to spend two days with the ones they could not spend their lives with. This concept might sound extremely unusual to us, and there might be every possibility of a cat-fight breaking out if this unique love festival was held anywhere else in the world. But the people of Khau Vai have a strong reason for the celebrating their love market. It has been a part of their tradition for centuries, originating from a local legend. The story is rather sad – an ethnic Giay girl from Ha Giang had fallen for a Nung boy from Cao Bang., but she is said to have been so beautiful that her tribe did not want her to marry a man from another community. What followed was a bloody war between the two tribes. As the lovers witnessed the tragedy that surrounded their lives, they decided to part ways in the greater interest of peace. But their love did not die there. A secret pact was made between the lovers to meet each other once a year in Khau Vai– on the 27th day of the third Lunar month. The tradition is still being carried on today. On the designated days of the festival, local artists decked up in colorful clothes reenact this tale of forbidden love. Photo via Vietnam Festivals Some might dismiss the lovers' rendezvous that happen in Khau Vai as short flings, but in reality things are very different. The villagers view it as a time to go down memory lane, cherishing happier moments of their past. Lau Minh Pao, for instance, gets to meet his old flame and talk to her once a year. "In the past, we were lovers, but we couldn't get married because we were far apart," says Pao. "Now we pour our hearts out about the time when we were in love. We meet together to re-tell the tale of how it was when we were in love back then." Pao's wife has no problems with this, as she is off meeting her ex-lover at the very same time. This is a typical scenario for most people of these hills. Over time, however, the tradition has taken on a more modern feel. The young plan dates via text messages and take pictures on their mobiles. The village itself is more accessible because of new roads. 23-year-old Hua Thi Nghi, an ethnic Giay, says "The young generation now go out together and find each other, and it's more modern, freer and clearer. Back in the old days, our grandparents had to pursue love in secret, not like today."
The Khau Vai love market is now so popular that it has become a tourist attraction for domestic and foreign visitors. Some of the other activities at the festival are a trade-tourism fair and a performance on the ritual of rain-worship of the ethnic Lo Lo people. There is also a ceremony to receive the certificate recognizing the festival as an 'Intangible Cultural Heritage.' Folk games such as shuttlecock, Ferris wheel, see-saw and cock-fighting are a part of the love market as well. Local cuisine and the beautiful highland girls in their traditional costumes are an added attraction. Nowhere else in the world has an entire festival been created around the simple act of meeting one's ex-lover, with no awkwardness whatsoever. Source: Reuters Vietnam Festival Is Dedicated to Meeting Ex-Lovers was originally posted at OddityCentral.com  |
| 13-Year-Old’s Christmas iPhone Comes with 18-Point Contract from Mom Posted: 03 Jan 2013 02:56 AM PST “Merry Christmas! You are now the proud owner of an iPhone.” Who wouldn’t want to find a message like that next to their Christmas gift, right? Only in the case of 13-year-old Greg Hoffman, from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, this was only the beginning of an elaborate 18-point contract he had to abide by in order to keep using his brand new Apple iPhone. Greg Hoffman had been begging his parents for an iPhone for a whole year, so when he finally fond it under the Christmas Tree, he was the happiest 13-year-old in the world. Only his joy was short-lived, for with the popular smartphone came a contract put together by his mom, Janell, which conditioned the use of the gadget. The first of 18 points in the contract made things very clear for Greg. It read: ”It is my phone. I bought it. I pay for it. I am loaning it to you. Aren’t I the greatest?” His first reaction was “Why? Why did she really have to do this?”, but his mother revealed her motives on ABC’s God Morning America: ”What I wanted to do and show him [is] how you could be a responsible user of technology without abusing it, without becoming addicted”. Although she ultimately admitted the 18-point “document” was created partly in jest, Janell Hoffman wanted to help her son avoid many of the pitfalls that both smart phone using teens and adults fall prey to, and teen behavior expert Josh Shipp agrees with her. ”You wouldn’t’ give your kid a car without making sure they had insurance,” he says. ”And so giving them a cell phone or a computer without teaching them how to use it responsibly is irresponsible on the part of the parent.” Here’s the whole contract that came with Greg’s iPhone, for Christmas:
Source: ABC News 13-Year-Old’s Christmas iPhone Comes with 18-Point Contract from Mom was originally posted at OddityCentral.com  |
| Orlan – The French Performance Artist Who Used Plastic Surgery to Challenge Beauty Standards Posted: 03 Jan 2013 01:31 AM PST We've heard countless stories of women who go through procedure after procedure in an attempt to improve their looks, but when I first read about Orlan, a French performance artist, I was shocked. She has also undergone several surgical alterations to her face, but for a different reason – to challenge the standards of beauty that society has set for women. She makes use of plastic surgery as a part of her art, to transform her face and body in such a way that it questions traditional perceptions of beauty. Orlan has done things to herself as bizarre as reshaping her face to resemble Zimbabwe's Ndebele giraffe women. The whole purpose of her art, she says, is 'to shock'. "The whole point is to be against the idea of social pressure put on a woman's body," Orlan is reported to have said. Her present day career is inspired from an incident that occurred in her life, way back in 1978. She was preparing to speak at a symposium one day, when she was rushed to the hospital for an emergency surgery. "I almost died because I had an ectopic pregnancy," she said. "They had to operate to save my life and remove what they told me was a non-viable fetus." What was most unusual about this incident was the way Orlan chose to handle it. In what can only be called the beginnings of reality television, she took a camera crew along with her to film the operation as it happened. She also insisted that she remain conscious throughout the procedure. "I wasn't in pain and what was happening to my body was of profound interest to me. Pain is an anachronism. I have great confidence in morphine." Photo: ArtsComments It was that one film she made 34 years ago, that inspired her to do what she does today. "For many years, I had appropriated baroque imagery in my work, especially in relation to Catholic art. So when I lay open on the operating table, the parallels between the operating theatre and Catholic mass were not wasted on me." But more importantly, the double role of what was going on struck her – she was both the observer and the observed. This was a revolutionary moment for her, being a feminist artist and troubled by the role women had to play in art. So Orlan decided to go under the knife again, and again, out of a belief that surgically changing her body could translate to a powerful work of art. She went through 9 plastic surgeries in a span of just 5 years – from 1990 to 1995. One operation changed her chin to imitate that of Botticelli's Venus, another changed her forehead to look like the protruding brow of the Mona Lisa, and yet another altered her mouth to look just like Francois Boucher's Europa. Beauty was the last thing on her mind during these surgeries. "My goal was to be different, strong; to sculpt my own body to reinvent the self. It's all about being different and creating a clash with society because of that. I tried to use surgery not to better myself or become a younger version of myself but to work on the concept of image and surgery the other way around. I was the first artist to do it," she said with pride. Photos: Drawing Lines on the Face, 7th Surgery-Performance, titled "Omnipresence," New York, November 21, 1993; The Kiss of the Artist on Tracing Paper, 4th Surgery-Performance titled "The Successful Operation," Paris, December 8, 1990; Close-up and a Look to the Camera, 5th Surgery-Performance titled "Operation-Opera," Paris, July 6, 1991 Orlan was born Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte, a name that she dropped at the age of 15. Her entire career is best described as a series of rebirths and triumphs of will over technology. Beginning with black-and-white nude poses, she has a rich 40-year-old history of 'shocking' artistry under her belt. Before she underwent her first surgery, she had shocked audiences by wearing a nude body suit in front of the Grand Palais in Paris, inviting people to pay coins for kisses. The coins went into a slot at the top of the body suit, dropping all the way into a cup, a 'sex draw' at the very bottom. Orlan's performances during surgery are perhaps the highlight of her work, especially when she dressed as a Madonna figure during one surgery, holding up a large black cross in one hand and a white one in the other, while doctors and nurses dressed in costumes worked on her skin. She's also made attempts to emulate the Persian Mangbetu women, whose heads are wrapped in complex braids, an Olmech monarch whose nose is artificially elongated in a death ritual, and Ndebele giraffe women, who wear dozens of tight neck rings to elongate their necks. In 1993, she underwent surgery on her brow, installing two little implants on either side of her forehead. She sometimes decorated her 'devil horns' with glitter eyeliner to accentuate their presence.
Although Orlan has stopped subjecting herself to plastic surgeries these days, she keeps herself busy with sculptures, installations, photographic works and performances. Critics have called her mad and her work has been described as masochistic and disturbing. But for all that she's done to herself, Orlan looks like a pretty normal person to me. At least, more normal than most. Source: The Guardian Orlan – The French Performance Artist Who Used Plastic Surgery to Challenge Beauty Standards was originally posted at OddityCentral.com  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Oddity Central - Collecting Oddities To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
