Cool Zone media. In this life, you get so few perfect moments. Right. There's the day you get your eighth grade school picture back, and the most beautiful girl in class, who lives down the street from you and was a fucking hockey player, says, nice picture, Jamie. There's a day in Sweden with an ex boyfriend when you manage to sneak into the Abba Museum and eat five hundred o d'ures before an engagement party realizes that they don't know you.
There's the day last week when you're in line at the overpriced brunch place and a TV actor you were never quite a fan of says I'll get her bill too, and you're like, wow, he's kind of a creep, but I didn't need to pay for my bun. And then there's a day you wake up at seven am and receive an email with this subject line.
Be involved in the world's largest sculptural hot dog.
Oh oh, oh, my god, listener, there is a strong possibility. You know why this email came across my desk. The reason is I wrote a book about hot dogs last year called raw Dog, The Naked Truth about hot Dogs. And while you think, Jamie, surely you're sick to death of talking about hot dogs. Something I've learned about myself is that I am, in fact, inexhaustible when it comes
to talking about hot dogs. In fact, if you're listening to this episode the day it comes out, I am on a plane at this very minute to attend the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest on Coney Island for the third time. Because now I've gotten in at the after party and it's going to be a hell of a year because the fifteen year champion, Joey Chestnut is officially leaving the contest. We think I wouldn't rule out a ww E style jump scare appearance putting that on wax Oh,
where is Joey going? I'll tell you to face his old rival to Karo Kobayashi on Netflix on Labor Day. And it's just a thrilling time to be a fan of hot dogs. Anyways, as I'm reading this email, I learn that the proposed largest sculptural hot dog will be installed in Times Square, which introduces a lot of questions. Who got permission to airdrop a giant hot dog in Times Square? And not to be conspiratorial, but why the name of the project was hot dog in the city.
And as much as I love the hot dog, people who strongly associate themselves with the idea of the hot dog runs the risk of some very sinister American nationalism. So placing a massive hot dog in the middle of Times Square uncritically might have been something I was not on board with, which I know might sound weird, But a symbol so closely associated with a very troubled country needs to be understood in context with who is using
that symbol. Right, So, I love hotig do, but I am extremely skeptical of people who hawk hot dog imagery. An uncritical symbol of America is not something that you want to be rooting for during an election year where one candidate is shrugging his way through funding a genocide of the Palestinian people, and the other candidate is Donald Trump, who said this, Well.
As you know, we just worked with the meat processes. The companies that we're talking about, you know the ones I'm talking about, because they're all they all become very well known.
They were well known.
Anyway, they're big companies, but they're now being treated fairly. They're thrilled.
How do you think the workers do in those plants?
What are you doing.
Well, we're doing that.
We're going to have a report on that probably this afternoon. We're gonna have good form of protection and through quarantine, when we find somebody that's not we're going to be very they're going to be very careful they are as to who's going into the plant, and the quarantine is going to be very strong. And we're going to make people better. When they have a problem, we're going to get them better. Hopefully they're going to get better.
Yes, Trump and many presidents before him have a role in one of the more infuriating aspects of what the hot dog has come to represent, the furious and brutal production of meat in America. The clip you just heard is Trump back in twenty twenty placing an executive order towards the beginning of COVID lockdowns in which meat production was declared as essential in the US. As time went on, it became clear that this order gave carte blanche to and in fact was drafted by meat processing CEOs at
Tyson and Smithfield Farms. This legislation was first of all, unnecessary. Meat production is not essential, and because of other factors like decreased union power, tremendous employer intimidation, and employees fear that their government would not provide any other financial relief during lockdown led to lives being lost at exc extremely high rates within this industry. At one point during lockdown, the only place more dangerous to work at than a
hospital was a meat processing plant in the US. And that doesn't even start to address the animals. So I mean it when I say a symbol, even when as silly as a hot dog, comes with a lot of baggage, even when it's a symbol of the only remaining perfect food on Earth. Sorry, the email at seven in the morning, and I'm staring at my phone where this mysterious email
is begging me to answer it. And what I need to do is make sure that the person on the other side of this email is overthinking the topic as much as I am. Listener, I am thrilled and relieved to report that they were. The message came from art duo Gen Catron and Paul Outlaw, who had been commissioned to create a sixty five foot long hollow hot dog sculpture to put in the middle of Times Square. Even more amazingly, this sort of work was their specialty. Their
previous work was fucking weird. It was incredible. The message said.
Here's a bit more about us. A project deck is attached and will also leave you with this inspirational gift below smiley face.
The gift giff sounds weird to me. Maybe that's a generational thing. Maybe I'm old. I don't want to say it. The gift did not disappoint. It showed a massive hot dog on a dump truck bed, lifting into the air and shooting confetti in front of a tourist bus and an ad for the Lion King on Broadway. And you have to understand. You see this and it sounds fake, but it wasn't. Jen and Paul went on to describe the project.
Like this, a symbol and a food found throughout Times Square. The hot dog shares elevated status as a New York City icon, alongside the yellow taxi cab, the pretzel, the Deli cup, and the playbill. A humble handheld sausage with roots linked to German immigration in the eighteen hundreds, the wiener has also become inextricably linked to American culture, from baseball games and the Fourth of July to hot dog diplomacy as an enduring tactic of US international relations.
Okay, so here was the deal. Jen and Paul weren't just making a gigantic hot dog. They wanted to say something about the hot dog and wanted to call people in to help craft events that would make that intention clear. Their entire body of work reflected that, finding the darkest corners of American culture to comment on, using bright, interactive, occasionally sinister feeling projects that drew you in visually before you even realized how fucked up the subject matter was.
They wanted to examine the hot dog as a symbol by creating a monument of a hot dog. Yeah, by the end of this email, I was in. I was absolutely in, and I hadn't even gotten out of bed yet. Jen and Paul were these puzzle box artists that disguised fascinating questions inside of really audacious, freaky, large scale art. And not for nothing. But this wasn't just going to be a hot dog sculpture. It would be a hot dog sculpture that raised in the air, erect an ejaculated confetti.
And so the moment of truth, a sixty five foot hot dog is knocking at the door will you answer, I replied, Oh, my God, of course I want to be a part of the gigantic confetti hot dog celebration. Yes, that was all caps, And three months later I was there in Times Square watching an enormous hot dog come mustard colored confetti all over the squealing masses. It was horrific,
it was perfect. The hot dog has been a cultural main character for oh for a century, but every once in a while, it becomes the Internet's main character.
To the sixty five foot hot dog in Times Square.
Your sixteenth minute starts now.
Six s six.
Oh, this is exciting for me.
It is hot dogs season, and with hot dog season comes the inevitable and necessary questioning of why and how a hot dog came to symbolize America.
I know what you're thinking, Jamie.
You just wanted to talk about hot dogs.
Yes I did.
There was a sixty.
Five foot one in Times Square. Are you gonna tell me I'm wrong? And it's the first episode of sixteen minute to discuss a viral work of art. Kind of an underrated subgenre of main character, I think, but there's a lot of them. Consider that terrifying restored fresco of Jesus by an eighty one year old woman in Spain that looks like, well, you've seen it, not Jesus Monachelabi's data illustrations that make crucial underreported stories pop up right
in your Instagram feed. Ooh, here's a deep cut those Hamilton Tumblr fan art illustrations that reimagines famous slaveholder Thomas Jefferson as a queer furry taking Japanese lessons or works of art that come around every so often and are received rapturously. There's a comic I see every once in a while from the incredible artist Hallie Bateman that shows people passing each other in a busy city connected by tenuous primary colored lines, with the caption It's a miracle
we ever met. As I was getting ready for this episode, I was kind of comforted that what makes a piece of artwork get popular on the Internet is still kind of a mysterious thing. They can be digital pieces, but they aren't always digital pieces. Sometimes art gets to you through the algorithm. Sometimes it's how the artwork itself connects to a cultural moment. And sometimes the artwork is bad and there's nothing that drives engagement like cyberbullying.
An elderly woman who lives in Spain.
And sometimes it's because the art in question isn't just in It pulled you out of looking at your phone in the first place, at least for a second before it occurs to you to take a selfie with it because of the gigantic hot dog? What were you gonna do not take a picture with it? I find this comforting. The powers that be who fund public works of art can't really predict how people will.
Respond to it.
And it is from this great tradition of public art that people grow irrationally attached to and angry at that we find the sixty five foot hot dog in Times Square. So let's talk a little bit about what constitutes public art. So public art, the non founding father monument type has been around since the late nineteenth century, give or take,
following the World's Fair of eighteen ninety three in Chicago. Interestingly, a lot of the false narratives around who invented the hot dog came from this same World's Fair, but that's for another day. The point is publicly funded art comes alongside industrialization and the increase of people living in urban centers.
When I say public art in.
This episode, I mean pieces that were made possible by at least partially public funding, so not overt advertisements, and usually touching on themes that funders think will be relevant.
To everyday people.
Although the way that public art has been funded over the years has changed, but thankfully it's still a part of our landscape today, which is amazing, especially if your mom's mission in life is to get a selfie with this Chicago being. For some reason, the kind of public art that leads to a gorgeous feminine phallic object in Times Square can be traced back about.
One hundred years.
The book Modernism for the Masses by Jody Patterson gets into this history in detail. Arts funding, as we know it really took off in the US in the nineteen thirties during the New Deal era under President Roosevelt, and was meant to keep artists working and developing a more distinct national art style to compete with other countries invested in a similar mission, because countries love to use art
as soft propaganda to demonstrate how awesome it is here. Actually, Navy recruitment went up five hundred percent after Top Gun came out.
To reach for something bigger, a master, a more challenging world to feel the confidence and pride of knowing who you are and what you can do.
Show the world your US Navy Live the Adventure Paul one, eight hundred three to seven.
Maybe, but these New Deal programs were net good.
They ended up nurturing a lot of.
Artists who are a part of American canon today, employed them so that they didn't need to leave their respective creative fields, and expanded the average Americans access to art by putting it on display for free and using other money to open community centers in underserved cities. And this gave many marginalized Americans access to arts and arts education. It's the kind of stuff that we don't really invest
in today, and it made a big difference. Slight propaganda intent aside this New Deal program, the Federal Art Project generally worked for artists. They were, of course, dead broke during the depression, and while censorship within these grants were about the issue you would expect, there were technically only two rules for a Federal Art Project at this time. They were no nudes and no politics. Best of luck
with that, Franklin. Many artists n these things in any ways, and were still provided with the living wage, studio space and public audience they needed to establish a career. Unfortunately, this program went away in the early forties when America's involvement in World War II increased, but the spirit of it made a short comeback in the nineties seventies under Richard Nixon.
Oops did he slay there?
Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got.
No, he was a bad guy regardless. From nineteen seventy three to nineteen eighty. According to Jody Patterson in an interview with Fox's Alissa Wilkinson, a Nixon program called the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act ended up employing about ten thousand artists during this time. I was not aware of most of this information, and I was honestly a little surprised to hear that public art has been around for
so short a time. In the way we're thinking of it, these full salary, government funded programs have largely dried up. One of the most effective ways of getting funded today are through private public sector collaborations, which is how Hot Dog in the City gets made. So instead of being government funded like artists of the late nineteen thirties, this system has the public partially funding the project and the rest of the money coming from insert corporation name here.
Another popular way to get funding is from a still operational New Deal policy called Art in Architecture, which to this day institutes that half a percent of construction costs to all American government buildings be used to commission public American art to go in front of them. So if you've ever asked, why is this gigantic clothes spin in front of my government building?
There you go.
But what I love about public artworks is when they get people mad, and that happens with pretty great frequency. Some of my favorite examples include the Gorilla Girls' billboards do women have to be naked to get into the
Met Museum from the nineteen eighties. What I learned about last year was Paul McCarthy's tree, which is advertised as a gigantic green inflatable tree heavy air quotes that many correctly saw as a giant inflatable green butt plugs, hygewayways, good fences, make good neighbors from back in twenty seventeen that commented on America's growing hostility towards immigrants. And there was some controversy with hot Dog in the City, But
we'll get there. The sixty five foot hot dog was funded by Times Square Arts, a public arts fund that was founded in nineteen ninety two, and they actually sought
out Gen Catron and Paul Outlaw. At the time of this writing, Times Square Arts is funded in a public private way, so part of the huge hot Dog was funded by the city, the state, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the other part was funded by drum Roll, Please Meta and Morgan Stanley, and obviously Times Square is a huge get for a public installation artists. The square itself has been the hub of American consumerism and pop culture and Elmo impersonators the costumes ventilated at
the neck for over one hundred year. About half a million people pass through there every day, and if you're an artist being asked to make something, there's few places on earth where there's more visual noise to cut through.
Enter Jen and Paul.
Come with me if you will. Two today, a few weeks ago, basically today, Inside Out Too is doing great at the box office, and if it does better than Minions, I'll walk into traffic. Record heat is once again sweeping the globe. The American government continues to aid in event Israel and the genocide and starvation of Palestinians, and I have my period today.
This is the world.
That the sixty five foot hot Dog takes place within. Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw were asked to pitch some ideas to Times Square Arts for the spring of twenty twenty four, and Gene Cooney at Times Square Arts was right to ask them because they were uniquely suited a large scale public project like this. After they met getting their MFAs at Crankruk Academy of Art in the late two thousands, Jen and Paul banded together and moved to
New York. They've worked on both huge, fun public projects and smaller, sometimes more somberly themed gallery pieces for the better part of fifteen years. Whether they're interactive and outside or in a gallery, they all share the same visual language. So I'm no art critic. I literally just told you
I'm a big Manions fan. But whether Jen and Paul are making something for fun or using a miniature sculpture to envision what Alex Jones's depression bathroom might look like, the work is colorful and it dares you to interact with it physically and intellectually. I really like what they do, but going through their catalog, I especially love their public and their performance pieces.
Back in twenty fourteen, there was their double.
Decker bus tour of Chelsea's art galleries, which included a gift shop that poked fun at the abundance of white men whose work populated those galleries, as well as making up random artists of their own and the hopes that people would notice.
Hi, I'm Jen Katrine about Paul Outlaw, and you are here at Gen and Paul's one stop shopping Souvenir City and Chelsea Bus Tours.
This is our big bus, Chelsea, New York City.
This is where all the blue chier galleries gather to play.
So we're here to give the inside scoop and what.
Really goes on in these galleries.
Now, the Chelsea art thing can be very very confusing. Why does some artists make so much money?
Why are most artists white?
Mouse? We don't know, We don't know, but we have a pretty good guest.
And it got a reaction.
Chelsea Art galleries were pretty annoyed at this big, homemade, double decker gaudy tour bus careening down their fancy little district. Another early amazing project from them was back in twenty ten with Genden Outlaws Fish Fry Truck before the Big Food Truck Boom, where the two bought a retired food truck off breakflast, added hydraulics, and then almost pop up book fold out animatronic restaurant where they would serve fresh crawfish inspired by their rural upbringings. And even after the
truck closed, the performance kept going. They were on Chopped.
And finally Chef Gen Catron and Chef Paul Outlaw, We're the chefs and owners and chin and Outlaws Fish Frout Truck and crawfish Boil.
I heard that southern Illinois.
I'm from Perio, Balabama, on the Gulf coast, looking to New York City.
We'd filled the missing boy in New York for.
This mud bug from Louisiana.
When Jane lights up every ring she walks into. The biggles are good, Paul, I could be the best.
Everything he does.
I'm not afraid of losing because I've never done it. I don't know what it's like. Chin It Outlaws, curl Fees.
They were not professional chefs and yet they ended up on Chopped. In their gallery work, you get a chance to see Jen and Paul with a little less chaos and a little more overt political messaging. They created miniatures that referenced right wing conspiratorial moments like Pizzagate, like Alex Jones, an acknowledgment of colonialism, a sculpture about the violence it takes for a banana to get into your hands at a local grocery store. But their public projects usually tend
to be more interactive. You were on the bus on the art tour, you were eating the crawfish. They once designed a giant mechanical pair of tongs that picked up a big, fake giant meatball and a big fake giant plate of spaghetti. They're really creative, and they're all about messing around with contexts, and this hot dog project was no different. It wouldn't just be a sixty five foot
long hot dog. It was a hot dog that would rise and come at noon every day and was all so hollowed out to host very small events, Which brings me to the event, which was another crucial part of Jen and Paul's mission with this project, because while the hot dog itself was meant to draw tourists in in Times Square, the six weeks that the hot Dog was there. Yes, sorry,
if you're listening, it's already too late. They've programmed a series of events that either played into or directly contradicted the jingoistic americanness that we're trained to see in the hot Dog. They talk about it a little here in a promo video.
Hot Dog being kind of this very deeply entrenched American symbol has permeated our culture, So the hot Dog means a lot to who we are, and also the darker or sinister parts of how the hot Dog came to be, I think is also reflective of our larger American culture. So we think it's such a good and fitting symbol to blow up at this massive scale.
Along with the hot Dogs, we also have a lot of additional programming that's going to help really shape and formulate the story that we're trying to tell.
We're hoping that through this wide range of avenge that we can tell the largest story the hot Dog and kind of the larger story of ourselves too.
Before the Hot Dog's grand unveiling in Times Square on April thirtieth, Gen and Paul announced the following programming. The Hottest Dog, a canine beauty pageant, a hot dog gating contest with Nathan's hot Dogs just like the Fourth of July show on Coney Island, a condiment wrestling match featuring the Extreme Wrestling Alliance, which is a local backyard wrestling organization, and Chokehole, a New Orleans drag performance group.
A video series that explored.
The highs and lows of being a street vendor in New York when street vending laws are more restrictive than ever. And a day long academic summit on the Hot Dog, which brag I spoke and hosted at, which also featured street vendors who were organizing on behalf of their peers. A high school debate team arguing Ketchup versus Mustard Mustard one huge upset. There was a professional eaters panel, and there was a speech by one of the most famous vegan feminists ever, Carol J.
Adams.
And this all took place in a Broadway theater on a Sunday afternoon. These events were in addition to massive opening and closing events for The Hot Dog on April thirtieth and June thirteenth, And while these events were dispersed throughout the run, every day at noon the hot dog would be hoisted onto its side and would shoot confetti that the delight and confusion of tourists and costumed elmos.
After the announcement, Evil seemed generally pumped, The programming sounded cool, and the sixty five foot distinction made it officially the largest hot dog sculpture ever made, with apologies to that other guy, and Jen and Paul were all set for the big opening because with that opening would come the reviews. So it's the day of the Times Square unveiling April thirtieth, The advanced promotion for the project has gone over very well.
The poster features Paul, who's painted pink and lying in a gigantic hot dog bun covered in mustard and naked except for a loincloth, while Jen looms above him and a hot dog metallic bikini like the Venus de Milo. She's about six months pregnant. Because did I mention, Gen and Paul are partners in life and in art, and their sixty five foot hot dog is unveiled literal days before Jen gives birth to their second child. I mean, there are two people on Earth living the dream, and
it's these two. There's a crowd gathered around the hot dog looking at its wondrousness, and Jen and Paul are dressed to the nines. He's wearing a suit, she's wearing a sheer dress covered in applice daisies. And to open the event, they go for a comical amount of American imagery. On one side of the hot dog there was a professional cheerleading squad, and on the other side of the hot dog there was the Late show's gospel choir performing. It felt like the marriage of American religion, pro sports
and religion. A few days later was the Condiment Wrestling match, which contrasted these scrappy backyard wrestlers with nipple twisting drag performers. And it was here where the more polarizing coverage began. So I gathered some initial press reactions to this hot dog, and one of these things is not like the other. Let's see if you can spot it.
It's both a celebration of the food item as well as a Marxist critique of the labor conditions so many vendors face, and of the meat packing industry more broadly. Where Claude Oldenberg meets up to Sinclair.
Times Square, the capital of capitalism amplifies the messages of the artists who suggested the origins of the hot Dog, and what today makes it the almost perfect American capitalism story in good ways and in bad ways.
Not only enhances the entropy of Times Square, but also dominates the palette entirely. Amid the sensory overload of slow moving crowds, creepy costumed characters demanding paid selfies, the infamous naked cowboy, and Retina singing digital billboards.
The mood was joyful and astounded even the scene. At all Times Square security guards laughed and Onion pummeled another character in the corner of the ring pure delight. Chohl got rounchy howls. The hot Dog ascended skyward.
Times Square's Giant hot Dog is apparently a meat manifesto about toxic masculinity.
Wait, we found it now.
Those other reviews are very art world, They're very heady. They're using names that you're like. I was supposed to read them in high school, But did I for that last pull as a headline from the New York Post. So before that, I quoted a lot of liberal, art world friendly publications. The most popular publication I quoted was The New York Times, who still actively failed to report.
On the genocide in Gaza.
So I'm not meaning to say that any one publication is better than the other.
However, it is The.
New York Post, with the historically right lan that takes the bait of the Giant hot Dog's message. They heard the word masculinity and realized, wait, that's one of the words we put in headlines to make people all mad.
This headline, I'm square Giant hot Dog is apparently a meat manifesto about toxic masculinity, was written by columnist and reviewer Johnny Oliniski, author of important articles like bear Breasts, Suicides and Floco NYC can't handle public art and the biggest problem with House of the Dragon, I can't remember anyone's name.
Look, no hate.
I used to write clickbait for a living, too, only making fun of him because this guy seems like an asshole. Let's hear what he has to say about the concept of masculinity. I'm sure he's very reasonable.
Their Titanic sausage is apparently meant to quote examine consumption, capitalism, class and contemporary culture. Times Squared Arts website amazingly reads that must be why every day at twelve pm, the installation lifts off the ground, angles up to sky, and becomes a confetti cannon. The explosion of euphemism is supposed to reference the quote hyper masculinity and showmanship often associated with American culture and patriotism end quote.
I'm sure it is. And later on there are.
Even events pegged to this best of worsts, which is in town till June thirteenth. One called the Condiment Wars will feature the wrestlers of a New Orleans based drag group known as Choke Cole, who will quote take down masculinity, corporate America, and capitalism end quote. Yeah, I sense a trend here. Later on there's a canine beauty pageant one hundred percent approve, a hot dog eating contest makes sense, and then an on stage talk at town Hall debating
the merits of the food uh oh. Among the panelists at that chat will be a feminist, vegan, writer, and activist. I have a sneaking suspicion she won't be pro hot dog.
Loser.
Shut up. Bullying is bad except when I do it to this guy right now, loser, But when you think about it for a second, this guy and the New York Post have played directly into Gen and Paul's hands. They set a trap and he fell into it. But when you think about it for a second, this guy and the New York Post have played directly into Jen and Paul's hands. They set a trap and he fell into it. I wanted to know more about how this project came together, and we're better to go than the source.
So the day after that hot Dog summit that Johnny owen Eski hated so much, I took the subway over to Gen and Paul studio in Brooklyn, where they were in the process of cooking up the closing ceremony for June thirteenth. Here's our interview.
I am Jen.
Catrin and I'm Paul Outlaw, and.
We are the artists behind Hotdog in the City.
Hi guys, Hi?
Was this the room that the hot Dog was conceived inside of?
This is where we conceived all our children?
Wow, including the two real ones.
Yeah, we've been in this room for We've been in this building for eleven years, and in this particular room for eight eight years maybe.
Yeah. How long have you been sitting on the hot Dog idea?
How?
What was the genesis of it.
We really do like working with food as far as our studio practice goes. So we have actually been making like hot dogs for a little like pregnant hot dogs for a while.
Like that went over there.
We should mention food in all its forms, like food sculptures, yeah, and actually start cooking and serving food. Yeah, food as the grotesque.
And then we started to think about like Times Square approached us about doing a project, and so we presented several ideas to them, but you know, the hot dog just kind of started to make the most sense because Times Square. You know, like when people think about about times we're going to think of street vending and the hot dog and just New York City in general, like asar as like where we should geographically place it.
It just made sense to put it in Times Square.
We had a number of proposals with Times Square Arts as well, but the hot dog kept reappearing as the that's the favorite of the panel.
Am I to know what any of the sure? Yeah.
It was like a massive cake where like you would.
Go in birthdake, multi tiered Bertha cake.
Where people would have to wear candles on their heads and like go inside and their heads would pop out and be like the candles for the cake while they had like woke and coffee, but.
We can serve them a cup of coffee and be like a coffee shop. But uh, but on top of a six story birthday cake.
And then what was the other one we had?
We had we had several ideas that involved large piles of trash and rotten food with oh, with flies that were drones, barrel barrel sized flies that were all whoa.
Back down, But we can't do drones.
Sometimes the flies would go up in times square and do they would do They would be choreographed. Yeah, they would put on a production and then land back on the pile of trash.
But yeah, yeah, we could not do it there. They are huge restrictions on Yeah, so we have a bunch of create Our brainstorming sessions are honestly just like really wacko. Like it takes us a while to finally land on something that's both crazy and actually physically possible to do. But for a while when we're talking about all these things, we just we just like let loose, like it doesn't matter if this is actually physically possible or if you know, we can actually do it.
We're just going to talk about it.
But then we commit with the hot Dog, and then we knew the hot dog was not enough, Like we're like, no, it needs to be like it needs to speak to Times Square to like this corporate masculine capitalism that's just like overbearing in this area.
It was Paul.
Eventually, I believe it came up with the idea to kind of well, we started from like a missile treck, honestly, like raising up in the air.
Yeah, a ballistic hot dog was kind of the origins of that.
Yeah, and you know, just like shooting up and then shooting.
Out confetti North Korea style military parades.
Yeah, well, making its.
Way through the New York City and then and then lifting up towards skyward.
The sordid parts of the hot Dog make the sordid parts of America. So as we started like digging and we're like, well, this actually makes a lot of sense to put in Times Square.
Okay, So I want to take it back a little bit and talk more about your lives specifically, how did you get from where you came from to working together?
I grew up in southern Illinois. There was no like art scene obviously, just like a lot of farm farmland, but I was always just doing weird shit performative type things that I didn't know as art. And then eventually I think I came to the conclusion that what I was doing, the only category fit it would be art and so yeah.
Such as what oh well, yeah, well, I had.
Like a bunch of pet animals, but like weird ones, Like I had two pet raccoons, and like I was always out in the woods like training them to do things like like what, well, I had to train them to like live off the land because their mom died, so I was like teaching them to catch crawdads in
the creek and things like that. But then I don't know, I had like little performance elements that they would do too, and I was always really interested in like getting these like weird pets of mine to do like performative things with me. So like yeah, yeah, like a circustrate exciting. But I will say like eventually I did, like I released, they weren't ever in a cage. They actually always just lived in a woodpile and they were always.
Free to come and go. But eventually I had to like force.
Them to go because they were getting like older, and they needed to be like away from me because I'm not a raccoon. I can't really teach them, like they just can't be with me forever because the raccoons, I'm a person. So I had to like send them out into the countryside and I had to like take them in a truck and like release them into a woods far away so they wouldn't be like so depending on me.
But at that point I knew that they were like okay, Like they would go out for the day and like get their crawdads and like eat their food, and then I was like, Okay, they're free to go.
It's like they were sending them to college.
Yeah exactly, but not just raccoons.
Gin is progress to other animals.
Oh yeah, well, well this is going to start feeling like I'm going to get in trouble.
So it was just mine, none of much trouble.
You graduated the mice, yeah you did, chickens, yeah, quail I did.
Yeah, but it was all very.
We're all wearing funny hats.
Yeah, but it was all very I know.
I feel like this sounds so borderline as whether I'm like like I'm mistreating animals, but I swear I'm not mistreating animals. And yeah, they just I just had like pets and they just they hung out with me.
I did fun things with them.
Yeah you had you had as many circus I did, Like I had like a little circus anyway, So I just say that that was art and that I could be an artist.
And then I'm from Alabama, small town Alabama, but but I was always uh doing artwork of some sorts and ended up ended up just finding my way into a sculpture program in college and getting serious about it, and then just after that just moved to New York. After a few years working as studio assistant. In New York, I went to Cranbrook and outside of Detroit for graduate school,
which is where Jennifer also happened to be going. That's where they recognized her natural talents and ability for training animals, and they allowed her to come to Cranbrook also.
Yeah shocking.
We actually went to school together for a couple of years in Detroit and then moved back to New York after that, and we've been we kind of started working together and in at Cranbrook helping each other out with projects. I would help jen rig up her mice, ferris wheels that operated, and Jen would help me put on game shows at the student gallery. So our work just kind of started melting together. When we go to New York, it just became kind of second nature to be working
together all the time. We actually do a lot of performance work in our in our in our studio practice as well. We do a lot of sculptures, and we do environments and use a lot of audience participation, and they're all kind of extension of what the idea of performance work is, including the hot dog. It is a sculptural object, but there's also a performative aspect of that.
Yeah.
I think that Jen and I both started really really using performance in our work at grad school.
And then I think for us, public art needs to have different level of approach because you are dealing with public who may not be as they don't have the same like art history understanding. And that's not a criticism, that's just you know, that's just what.
It's just the world. It's just the world.
Yeah.
When we make public works to make something that is at least approachable on a certain level, and then you know, as people dig in and hopefully we hold their attention and keep their attention and then they can start maybe thinking about the more critical elements that we're trying to bring out to light.
So that's part of what I love about the approach to your public work, where like you can enjoy it if you get it, and you can enjoy it if you don't get it.
Yeah, like that is what makes a great piece of public art.
Could you give me a dumb person an idea of how you build a sixty five foot long hot talk?
Well, I mean it is the magic of engineering, I suppose, but it's like it's it is. It does start on we start with drawings of what we wanted to look like, what kind of scale might be taking, and what the what the overall shape looks like obviously like any artwork would start. And then after that we dive deep into the computer. Uh so it gets engineer drawings for something like this that is very much in the public realm and very very large. It also has to get engineering
stamps and approvals from engineers. So we have to have the internal structure all has to be built to speck and all the materials have to be SpecEd out and then get approved by the engineer. That part is basically a welded steel frame that's connected to a semi trailer that would have been like a dump trailer for like dumping dirt rocks up the boat.
Okay, which is brilliant because when something already exists, it's like much easier to get an engineer to stamp it. That was Paul's idea. Actually, he's like, well, this already exists, so we'll just so you're just using like a dump truck.
So we took it.
It's a dump bed, a dump bed trailer, semi trailer. We removed the tub so it's just the trailer frame and the hydraulics, and then we built our own interior frame at a steel for that. It isn't two pieces. It bolts together on site. Because the length was going at sixty five feet long, it was too long for an actual semi trailer, so we did cut it into two pieces.
Ok There.
Once the frames done, then we get back to the fun art part and we basically clad the whole thing in Pham that is carved to be shaped like the hot dog, to look like to look like our drawings and our pictures and our renderings.
It seems like I got away with feels dramatic, but it feels like you guys got away with so much in the creation of this hot Dog, Like I'm just in awe of how much you got away with.
Yeah.
No, they were surprisingly accommodating, like they were enthusiastic about it.
They let us do really.
The wrestling show, and I was like, this is going to be wild. And I think as they as they saw the show unfolded're like, oh, this is wilder than we thought it would be.
But they still were like, Okay, this is a nice Yeah, ask for forgiveness later.
Yeah. Yeah.
What are interactions or things you've heard anecdotally about the public interacting with this hot dog that stick out to you.
Really remarkable response, like like people absolutely love it. They show up there just to see it. They come to Times Square just to see the hot Dog.
Uh, they want it when we're there doing.
We do the confetti pop off every day at noon, and when we're there they want to make sure they didn't miss it or is it still on schedule?
And and there's a.
There's a there's a there's a crowd every every day of the hot Dog waiting for this little little micro confetti blast that comes out comes out the end of this hot dog.
Uh, they're very pumped up about it.
The social media reaction has been has been huge. I think we've heard like a billion impressions around the.
Around the social media.
One of the things that I've I found I was super happy with is on its face, it was it was it's just a hot dog.
It's just a hot dog.
We we we have we have reasons for it for it being a hot dog that we've we've dropped hints to and and why what we want the sculpture to speak to. But but we didn't push that too hard. And on the surface, it was just a hot dog. But as soon as people started thinking that it's more than a hot dog and then it's really really has a little more a critical uh theory behind it, they they kind of took that and ran with it into exactly the way that I expected them to, in the way I kind.
Of wanted them to walk me through that example.
Yeah. So so for example, the New York Post, they they first announced it awesome, here's a big hot dog story. They announced that once here's a giant hot dog in Times Square. It's gonna be so cool, it's gonna be great, and then like a week later they kind of caught wind of some of the some of the ideas that we that we think the hot Dog represents, which are which are not even that that horrible. It's more of a reflection on the society, for better or worse. You
kind of take it as it is. It is, it is who we are, it is where we came from, it is what we what we look like. They immediately took sides on it, and they immediately uh, I.
Think the headline was apparently the hot Dog is about toxic masculinity or.
Something like that.
Right, They were like jumping to some conclusions and getting their base fired up. And that's when that's when the hate mail came. Was after that article obviously.
Okay, yeah, had you ever been through like a round of uh hate mail reaction to stuff before?
I don't know, so yeah, yeah, well not on this scale by any means.
Yeah, but it was it was just calling us morons and and you know, I mean, nothing too crazy, just I feel like you've gotten so much worse than we have.
Yeah, it's like it's suffer as bad as you think it's going to be. But every once in a while, you're like, Wow, that took a lot of time.
Yeah, it's remarkable the amount of effort that.
You have to go mail address to make a big email address. They find our emails, they like, you know, just to.
Say hot dog equals moron because another publications fill right in line on the other side of the.
New York Times, you know, which is we're careful.
We're careful not to not to necessarily criticize too too hard in our work.
We do believe that we're.
A reflection well, I mean what society is. And if that reflection is bad, that's not that's not our fault. It's it's society's fault. You don't like the reflection that you see what I mean, who's wise? Who's probably whose fault is that? Realizing that the hot dog is a reflection of of of society, then then they immediately took sides and immediately went well, and.
We we said some maybe.
I mean, anytime you talk about America and you're not like saying, yeah, America, this is the best, Like I feel like that's like, yeah, that's like a trigger.
You're going to get a lot of emails calling you moron.
Yeah, And we were sabotage. The hot Dog was sabotage.
Someone at some point in time when went under underneath the hot Dog and just ripped every hose an electrical component and and and broke all the kill switches and the choke candles on the on the both motors that we have underneath there, and unplugged all the hoses and messed with the hydraulics. And it was a violent intentionally, Yeah, it was dismantling of the.
Of the motors that operate the hot dog.
That's pretty again, like talking about how much work it takes us in an email, it takes even more work to go try to physically vandalize hot dog sculpture. Oh, in the day before that, someone called basically a bomb threat on the on the hot Dog. They called the police and said that a suspicious man was underneath the hot dog. Looks like he's planting C four.
Well, where do you go from sixty five foot hot Dog? Because is there anything that you're like, what happens post sixty five foot hot Dog? I trust that you have crazier ideas. We do have crazy idea yes for sure.
Yeah, Like I.
Said, our brainstorming sessions are really like we'll see who will let us do it.
I think that's always the question mark, right, Yeah.
I think from here we definitely go into corporate art.
They're going to love us.
I really can't overstate my debt to Jen and Paul. They were so kind to involve me and many other hot dog heads throughout this process. So throw your impossible dogs on the George foreman as We'll be back in a second. Baby, Welcome back to sixteenth minute. I'm still not vegan somehow, and today we're talking about the sixty five foot hot dog in Times Square, and right now we're going to talk to someone who's very disappointed that
I'm still not vegan somehow. Earlier in this episode, I mentioned that at the hot Dog Academic summit I spoke at, there was a featured talk by a prominent vegan feminist and for many the vegan feminist. And I want to tell you more about her, because not only do I find her to be an incredibly cool person, she also
has unique insight on the Internet. I'm talking about one Carol J. Adams, the author of the now legendary text The Sexual Politics of Meat, a feminist vegetarian critical theory, first published back in nineteen ninety And I know the title sounds a little bit intimidating, but I really recommend it, and I wish i'd known about it when I was writing my book. She talks a lot about the intersection
of animal suffering with how people subjugate each other. And when I saw her speak at the Hot Dog Summit in town Hall, I was truly blown away. In forty five minutes, this extremely funny woman laid bare how meat is marketed to us in America, how we're trained to view it in relation to us, down to the sexualized images of cartoon pigs and cows smiling telling us it's not just okay to eat them, it's what they want
us to do. And where does that sexual visual language come from an advertising the way that we're conditioned to see women be objectified. The cartoon of a sexy pig and a bikini on the side of a food truck carol tize the suffering and murder of animals, to the idea that Westerners are sold that animal meat is inherently masculine,
that consumption is masculine, and objectification is feminine. She's cooking in this book, and the most famous concept from the sexual politics of meat is the concept of the absent reference.
That's defined as behind every meal of meat is an absence, the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The absent reference is that which separates the meat eater from the animal, and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent reference is to keep our meat separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep the moo or cluck or ba away from the meat, to keep something from being
seen as having been some one. Once the existence of meat is disconnected from the existence of an animal who was killed to become that meat, meat becomes unanchored by its original reference, the animal, becoming instead a free, floating image used often to reflect women's status as well as animals. Animals are the absent reference in the act of meat eating. They also become the absent reference in images of women bushered, fragmented, or consumable.
When I started working on this episode, I knew I needed to talk to Carol J. Adams, because not only was I deeply moved and motivated by her talk, it completely took me off guard. I also then had the pleasure of walking with her her son Jen, haul Times Square Arts and the entire audience over to the giant hot dog to watch it explode confetti, and when we arrived, I'll never forget we got to go into the giant hollow hot dog together. It was just one of those
perfect moments. And one of my questions for her was one of the same questions that the New York Post had, Why did you, as a vegan feminist, agreed to talk at a hot dog convention? And her answer was simple. She said that the hot dog in Times Square was a vegan hot dog, and she really enjoyed the vegan hot dogs being served at the event and was just as interested as myself and Jen and Paul were analyzing the hot dog as a food and as a symbol,
but Carol looked at it very optimistically. She looked at it as a symbol that would be able to grow.
And change with us.
She's a fascinating person and it's not shocking that as a feminist and a vegan activist for the last fifty years,
she's been the subject a lot of unwarranted harassment. So I wanted to hear about why she agreed to fly from Texas to New York to celebrate a symbol that felt far afield from her interests, and then we began talking about how these harassment techniques from the right have a volt in her experience, from the right wing radio Rush Limbaugh era to Jordan Peterson sending his audience to harass and threaten her in the middle of his wait for it all meat diet that almost killed him. Carol
has seen it all, and I wanted to hear more. Wait, there's because I've had a carrot dog before, but not in.
Well.
I liked beans and franks growing up, you know, so I do use regular hot dogs.
How long have you noticed this like association with American men and meat?
Oh my god, you're not going to believe it. Fifty yearsty years ago, I became a vegetarian and I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I was studying feminist studies, feminist history, and I started I remember walking towards Harvard Square thinking about all the associations that I thought, Oh my god, there's a connection between med eating and masculinity, and you know, I sort of felt like I'd levitated. And then I started collecting examples and information and as
you know, writing a book. You can't just have good material. You have to know what you're trying to shape and say, and what was my theory about that? So that took fifteen years, and when the sexual politics of meat came out, I thought, oh, well, now I'm done with that. What
else am What am I going to do next? But people started sending me examples, and since nineteen ninety I have gotten examples from around the world that connect meat eating and masculinity, photos, quotes, ads, you know, just the sort of chalk misogyny. If you're walking down in La Street and there's a restaurant and they're selling you know, burgers or something, but the burger has very shapely female legs with high heels underneath it. You know, that's an
example of chalk misogyny. So you know they're here today, gone tomorrow. But there are examples of how it penetrates throughout our culture, this assumption. And you know, then you've got vegan men who have to how do they respond to breaking the stereotype.
Meat is so often sexualized from this very male gaze perspective, publicly presenting the experience.
What was the initial reaction?
Has the reaction changed over time?
There. Perhaps we could say there are three different reactions, predictable reactions. The first reaction is this is an example of whatever the right wing calls liberal principles at that time. So with Rush Limbaugh, this was an example of political correctness gone too far. And now this would be this is wokeness gone too far, or this is the radical
left going too far. Can you believe that this person is saying there's a connection between meat eating and masculinity like this, I call that category loud mouse and blowhearts. But as I discuss in the New Introduction, and as I discussed at the Hot Dog Summit, this got more intensified after Obama was elected president that somehow the idea of an African American man being president just set the right wing into such a tizzy. And how do they
express it. One way they express it white supremacy. It's so fascinating, is claiming of drinking mam million milk and meat that. And so you saw this discourse sort of very non ironic in response. So that's one. The second is say vegan men or liberals, well, yeah, there's a connection, but they don't want to call it the second politics of meat. They don't want to politicize it. It's just
whatever it is. You can look at recent articles about these sort of carnivore diets and they're dripping with testosterone in their discussion of these men. But it's all non politicized, like it has no relationship to the fact that feminists and LGBTQ people have gained a foothold that you know, you've had an African American president. There's no recognition that this could be a reaction to a sort of sense
of insecurity that's occurred, especially with white men. So that's the second, and then the third vegans and animal rights activists when the book came out, they were just so excited because my book made sense of the idea that caring about animals is part of its social justice agenda. It put with it a social justice activism framework, the fact that we can look beyond the human species.
Because you know, the book came out and you came to prominence. Free internet being widely adopted. Has the Internet had a meaningful impact on how your work is received?
Let me first say the Internet had an impact on how I received information from my readers, so that when the book came out, my publisher started receiving packages of things, you know, sexist t shirts about animals. I've got a whole box. It could be a museum exhibit. The turkey hooker, which was is a hook that you hook a dead carcass with to pull it out of the pad that you've cooked it in for Thanksgiving. It's like a joke gift, but it's called the turkey hooker, and it shows a turkey,
you know, seductively raising her leg again. As I said, you know, the only time animals are supposed to have a desire is after their death, when they desire to be consumed. So all of this started coming to my publisher, and then that forwarded to me. Once there was Facebook and Twitter, if they knew I was on there, that hashtag that at me. But they could also just hashtag
sexual politics of meat. So for like ten to twelve years on Twitter, all I had to do was search sexual politics of meet and there were all these examples, so I never had to go trawling through this sexist apparatus that operates as culture because somebody else saw it and they always said, we're so thankful we could send it to someone who could make sense of this. So how it affected me. I mean it also means that people who disagree with me can find me. You can
email me from my website. I participated in an Oxford Union debate in twenty twenty one. Oxford Union sponsors all these debates, and this one was this House must move beyond Meet and there were three of us defending it and three people against that. And one of the people against it was Jordan Peterson's daughter. And Jordan was in
the audience. Jordan Peterson, the Canadian right wing successor to Rush Limbaugh, you know, from Loudmouth to blow Hard, and his daughter came up with the Mikayla I should give her a name, not just associator with her father. Mikayla Peterson came up with the Lion's diet and it is truly just meat. I mean, it's we all ate together.
We were at the head table and I was on the other side of the oxygen did president and I watched him, you know, it was I understand that they ordered a very specific weight exactly how it should be cooked. Apparently could also treat vodka and water, but that's all they had. They had that had that as their appetizer and then they had it as their main course, and they sent half of it back. He sent half of it back. In fact, I took a photo of it because I was so shocked. If you know exactly how
much you're eating, why do you order extra? Anyway, Joe Rogan was Joe Rogan was also foul that. So when Jordan Peterson went on Joe Rogan a couple months after the debate, he could not stop talking about my ludicrous ideas. From his point of view, you know that I connected it to white supremacy and masculinity and how I must not be loved and what a lonely person I was and this so I think this so excited the Oxford Union,
who they'd videoed our conversations. They immediately released them and then they said, as heard about on the Joe Rogan Show. So the minute Peterson had that, he posted that to Twitter, you know, the Left going too far, and that's all he had to do. That set all his followlers in motion. They you know, went to the YouTube website and then they commented, and then they commented. I think there's probably twelve hundred comments at this point, and I started a file of it. Where is it hostility?
Hostility.
Wow, it's amazing that you think you are educated. You either got your diploma from the Internet or you're just stupid. Wikipedia has more correct facts and what you presented. Oh my god, you need a mental health check asap. Your theories are made up and unscientific. Everything you say is designed to draw attention to yourself, et cetera. Please go take a nap somewhere subject f you stupid c. You would not be where you are today if it wasn't for men. Okay, get that. And it's not because we
stole power. It's because that's the way things naturally went down. You get that, you stupid fing c.
Oh my god.
I just wanted to let you know I find you a total and other basque case, a nut job extraordinary. You medam or cancer upon this world. The world needs urgent chemo treatment for mentally disturbed people like you. Anyway, you get the idea. Yeah, And the thing is that Peterson knows what he's doing all he has to do, and so that's the you know, we know how many women have been ducked and all the attention that's that
comes on women who who challenge conventional ideas. I mean, these aren't even you just never can predict who they're going to attack. I kind of wish they could spell and make a syntactical sentence. It would be more interesting. And then you.
Get there's something to engage with at that point.
Yeah, but I don't answer them. So I think also it gives people a chance to find me get more information if they want to know about the reference I've noticed, like when The New York Times discusses my ideas, now there'll be a link to that section of my website. I just heard from someone who could not find my Texas sheet cake recipe and you know, begging me please, I need that Texas Sheetcake recipe, please please. So I never know you know what I'll get in my inbox.
And I love that it's made me available. I've just heard from someone who wants to translate the work into Indonesia. So's it's made contact with like a Serbian women center that wanted to translate it. It's sped up contact. But I think it also created the possibility that you could be in touch with an author who mattered to you, or an author whose work changed your life. But I also learned that courage is simply stepping forward, and the courage you get from the first step gives you the
courage to take the next step. We weren't going to back down, so I just had to find that courage. And you only have to kind of go through that sort of experience once and be on the other side to realize these people don't like my book. Okay, don't like it, but you don't like it, and you've got to talk about it non stop like Russia Limpa did one summer non stop. I mean he could not stand it. I thought, you've got an issue, Gui, and it is so great.
Yeah, you're the one living in his head. Rent Free.
I think I'm an optimist. We're not going to achieve everything. God, I've bet a vegetarian for fifty years at a vegan for you know, thirty five or something. Just keep marching, keep making good vegan meals, keep making care of dogs, keep serving people, keep not calling attention to what they're eating, and let them incubate it later. It's not impractical.
Thank you so much to Carol J.
Adams, who is quickly becoming a hero of mine, and please read The Sexual Politics of Meat and follow her work at Caroljadams dot Com and so sweet listeners wherever you are. I hope you try a plant based hot dog this season, because a hot dog is a symbol, and a symbol should be consumed very carefully. Hell, even Joey Chestnut is sponsored by Impossible Dogs Now, so anyone
can make a change, even me. And if you're interested in more about hot dog lore, you can grab my buck Raw Dog, The Naked Truth about hot Dogs, or watch my favorite piece of hot dog media ever, Rick Seabeck's a hot dog program on PBS, which is celebrating its twenty fifth anniversary this year. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. This is my favorite topic in the entire world, and I'm so thrilled that hot dogs once
more became the main character. And so for a moment of fun today, here's some audio I recorded at the hot Dog in the City closing ceremony on June thirteenth, after we did a comedy roast of the hot dog in the one hundred degree weather and the confetti came for one last time, n you.
Yeah Way. L sixteenth Minute is.
A production of pol Zone Media and iHeart Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me Jamie Lostus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad Third Teamians and pet Shout outs to our dog producer Anderson, my Kat's Flee and Casper, and my pet Rockbird, who will outlive us all Bye.