Meet my Meat, N.Y.

Meet My Meat, N.Y. is a subversive discourse that questions the philosophy behind the “American way of life” and the futile search for Love and Cinema in the streets of New York.

The remains of love plunge down the drain that are today’s megalopolises. Is it possible to love in New York City, where dehumanisation is quoted on the stock market? Most references that link NYC to love are sad, if not dismal. Taxi Driver (1976) for instance is the desperate cry of a redeeming angel, and in the end insanity irremissibly takes over the neon night. And in Midnight Cowboy (1969), a slam against the American dream, the desperate search for love by its sordid characters, who can only find refuge in sharing their dreams, is doomed to failure and to the most absolute loneliness.

This notion of a nihilistic and skeptical love is what we find in Meet My Meat, N.Y., an existential delirium about the city that never sleep. A city that under the shadow of a massacre, scrutinises our very entrails with its panoptical vision, and turns us into spectacle meat, erotic politicians, preys of a crazy preacher who lights up the vices and vacuities of the Big Apple.

The video oscillates between New York City’s Times Square, and Nanjinglu Street in Shanghai, known as the most important shopping street in China. We are presented with a ludic hell populated by consumerist zombies burning from the neon fire and hunting for spectral desires. Bauman’s prognosis is hereby confirmed: “If we satisfy our desires, consumer society disappears.”

NYC looks for the purity of Love to cover it in darkness and consumerism.