Fresh meat

Over the past couple of weeks, as a part of the VJ Grab Bag Project, I visited and shot in one of the live poultry markets scattered around my neighborhood, Sunset Park. I've since officially retired the clothes and sneakers I wore during my time there.

Chanel, the charismatic owner, was my main focus. He spoke the best English, and seemed almost validated at having a camera detailing his every move-- even if it was one manned by someone who didn't know what the fuck he was doing. I suppose that falsely introducing myself as a "filmmaker" bought me some legitimacy. I may not be De Sica, but, I mean, I was holding a digital camera in a place where the most complicated piece of machinery was probably the latch to the goat pen.

The other guys were cool too. One guy didn't say a word to me; he just stoically slashed the shit out of sputtering chickens while I tried in vain to get him to give me a play by play. Another guy held a skinned chicken up against my back as a "joke." And one guy wore camoflage and fucked around with the goats in an endearing/borderline abusive type way.

There are probably millions of stories there, but most of them, unfortunately for a monolingual white boy like me, are in Spanish. But maybe that's the story. Some of my shots are tentative-- I felt uncomfortable being near chickens getting massacred and in an environment where I didn't understand what anyone was saying. Hopefully, people who haven't seen this type of thing-- which is most os us I guess-- will be a bit unnerved by it too.

Or maybe it's the completely the opposite- maybe it's about the way in which we can normalize just about anything we do. Editing with Matt today, I initially wanted to throw up when the stoic guy nearly cut one chicken's head off. After a while though, I forgot what I was looking at; I was just trying to decide if the shot was any good. And my face probably looked a lot like the stoic guy's when he tore back a chicken's head and swiped a knife across its neck.