You Interested In a Little Body Work?

Body modification and body art are very hip these days. Whether on Melrose Avenue or in San Pedro, just take a stroll and you’re likely to see piercings and tattoos on everyone from the rave crowd to old salts who never thought of themselves as style gods.

I want to be hip. But, unfortunately, I have the same problem Daffy Duck once expressed when he arranged to have Bugs Bunny chased by a hunter instead of himself. “I’m different from most people,” Daffy said. “Pain hurts me.”

Luckily, for people like me who have avoided body art and modification (I did have my ear pierced in a mall earring kiosk by a teen-ager wielding a gunlike device, but that hardly counts these days as exotica), we can at least share the experiences of others on the Internet.

Let’s start out with the ultimate in body modification--cosmetic surgery. Liposuction, implants and the like have made it onto the Net, mostly in the forms of advertisements for various clinics and doctors. Probably the most extensive and inadvertently hilarious site in that field is called “The Body Electric” and described as the “Body Enhancement Information Guide.”

The creators of this site (a company called InterNet Educational Technologies) obviously see themselves as true artists. Here, they do not say liposuction when referring to the process of taking a Hoover to your excess fat. They call it “liposculpture” as in “Buttock Liposculpture,” one of the site’s section headings.

There are plenty of before and after shots on “The Body Electric,” including several that re-enforce the notion that some forms of cosmetic surgery are best experienced only virtually. The before and after photographs of calf implants, for example, seem to demonstrate that the only real difference after surgery is that your legs get better lighting.

This is not to put down a whole field of medical science. Plastic surgery is, of course, an honorable endeavor that is a godsend to people who were born with serious physical abnormalities or who suffered deforming injuries in accidents. Several doctors and medical centers around the world specializing in the field have modest sites on the Internet. These sites do not, however, have the entertainment value of “The Body Electric,” and that is a good thing.

Now, on to piercings and tattoos.

Luckily, the folks at most of the several sites specializing in these areas have a sense of humor. They need it, just to handle the comments they get while out in public.

On “Jim’s Tawdry Tattoo Page,” there is a collection of handy comeback lines to oft-heard remarks, such as:

* Did it hurt? “Yes, but my life is pain.”

* What is that thing? “It’s Sanskrit for ‘Satan lives within.’ ”

* What did your parents say? “My dad stabbed me, but that’s OK, because my mom dropped the gun when she saw the blood.”

* That’s permanent, you know. “So’s your plain skin,” or “So is being boring.”

Jim, like other aficionados of tattoos and piercings on the Net, offers links to various sites where you can find writings on the topic, including articles entitled “Tattoo Aftercare,” “Tattoos in Ancient Europe” and “Cross Cultural Body Decorations: A Literature Review.”

There is a zine called BME (“Body Modification Ezine”), which features beautiful graphics. On the “Janet’s Back” site you can indeed see photographs of Janet’s back, which features individual tattoos of every letter of the alphabet in both upper and lower cases (it’s actually by far the coolest set of tattoos I saw on the Net).

And then, just when you’re thinking all this is kind of interesting, you happen to click into a little site about branding. No joke. Just like on “Rawhide,” for those old enough to remember. This site shows photographs of people appearing to receive actual, albeit small, brands at a place called UrbanPrimitives in Toronto.

And that settles it. I’m sticking with Daffy.

* Cyburbia’s Internet address is colker@news.latimes.com.