Vote! Pork v. Beef

Please take a moment to vote: beef or pork?

Pork! – Ms. Honeysuckle Hype

digitally remastered photograph 2010

Beef! – Ms. Honeysuckle Hype

digitally remastered photograph 2010

-What is she asking, really?  Is this about the meat or the images?

Just answer the question, please! I’d like to know what you think.

Sure_you’re right in liking meat (Meat Art Installment 1)

My biggest question is about the use of the underscore, or is that just a really low hyphen? My next question is a story: I’m sitting alone at the counter at Mistral Kitchen, polishing off some kushi oysters, sipping something brilliant involving gin and waiting for my pork belly (served on a sweet steamed bun with cippolini onions-gone-asian and cilantro?  Was that even cilantro?  Might I never need to touch another actual burger?).

WAIT: My PORK BELLY. On day four of “taking a break from meat,” the day on which I reflected back on the smoked chicken I had Thursday (Jack Timmons had smoked it in his backyard for 14 hours! How could I resist? And he’s from Texas, that dreamy drawl…), the Seafood with our hand-shaven noodles on Friday…and…

Waiting for pork belly.  Which was fucking delicious.

I’m not sure what the question is actually.

Look at her fingernails.  The red of the poster and the red of the steak and the red of her FINGERNAILS!  I am in the process of responding to interview questions from Cassie Marketos of Kickstarter.com, who asked:

Where did this idea sprout from? Meat is an interesting entry-point into conversations of sexuality and power. I’m curious to know how the idea evolved!

And I keep on wanting to respond with images.  Because meat is simultaneously so un-ladylike to devour, and so owned-by-men in most narratives of “how labor has been divided” and such an essential part of the ideal American woman preparing food at home for her husband and children and used as an explicit stand-in for “penis,” for “a woman’s ass,” for woman more generally, in language, in images,

Which we could either say perpetuates the idea of women as commodity, as consumable/consumed…

Or acknowledges that this image in an almost magical realism way is a better representation of what it feels like to live in a female-marked body, or to work in the sex industry or pornography, or to wake up in the morning, and make it all into a day marked by meaning and whatever it is we each hope our days might be marked by…than this image

Miss Wasilla 1984

Finally, as the title of this post was written before the post itself, and it seems to plead for one more piece of Meat Art,

Roy Lichtenstein  –  Meat
acrylic/canvas    21 1/4″ x 25 1/4″   1962

The chef in charge of pork belly came over and asked how it was.  Fucking delicious, I told him.  I asked my waiter where it was from, he asked said chef, and the relay response was Snake River, Idaho.  Before leaving for the evening, I asked chef/owner William Belickis if I might come in some time and talk to him about meat: the hand-powered slicer, their butchering, charcuterie, sourcing, their menu.  He said of course, Tuesday through Thursday, any time, and asked what I’d ended up deciding about love, women, immediacy, and patience.  He remembered the conversation we had my first time in the restaurant, when multiple women felt like the most enormous metaphors of decision-making: protection v. vulnerability, immediate return v. investment, love v. fear.  I made the right choice I told him–didn’t you meet her the next time?  I did, he said, I just didn’t know which one it was.  That, I think, is a special thing: to have someone, particularly someone you have only met twice, remember what matters to you most.

Mistral Kitchen  –  Pork Belly
Saturday March 27, 2010

…or if you want blood: Slaughterhouse slides 14-21

Slide 14: (slide 13 is missing, it just felt like pimping the pigs)

Slide 15: This is how you bleed a pig: you slit its throat the long way, and you let it hang over a plastic barrel or a trash can to catch all the blood.  This particular blood will not be saved to make blood sausage, broth, or anything else that people will eat.

Slide 16 a: When you hold a knife like this, it is doing work.

Slide 16 b: When you hold it like this, it is violent.

Slide 17: This pig is taking off a mask, and the mask is his own skin!  It even has eyehole cut-outs, just like THIS mask.

Slide 18: Do you ever feel like you’ve just been split in half?  This pig was truly just split in half.  And this is either the climax, the most revolting, or else the pig has made the sharp transition from animal-being-slaughtered to the more palatable MEAT.

Slide 19: Did you do dissections in biology class?  I don’t mean for the blood spots to be upsetting—please try to focus on the organs, on identifying and labeling them for a moment.

Slide 20: This picture is meant to be very straightforward and to-the-point.  This is the result of a day’s labor, almost completed, you can even see the squeegee in the background and know that this place is kept clean: that pigs come in and pigs go out, and the floor is rinsed and squeeged each time.

Slide 21: I hid in the cold storage room.  I didn’t know I was hiding at the time, but after a while I noticed how cold it was, that this wasn’t really the most logical place to be spending a long while, that it was strange to look to these halved cows for comfort, and stranger still to find it there.

Slaughter post-game report: part one

The truth is, the slaughter was beautiful.  yellow tile, bare rafters, simple, well-handled tools, a photo spread of a room laid out for working.

I promised Jo Sugar, my semi-permanent home in East Austin, to show her only the architecture first.  The images I need to close my eyes to (just in case) are these: