Not really awesome.

 In the gloom of a January evening near Wall Street, dim golden arches are suspended above a brilliantly illuminated poster advertising McDonald's McRib sandwich.

Is it just me, or does this promotional campaign for the McRib sandwich imply that at other times, and in other sandwiches, the pork hasn't been real, (but rather unreal)? Is anyone else detecting an implicit: "Now, with real meat...!"? Perhaps it's the retro, 1950's font, suggesting that we have finally arrived back in some fictitious but glorious past when actual pork was used in confecting the mighty McRib. I'm certain I'm making too much of it, but my, oh my does that sandwich look revolting, oozing its glistening brown sauce out onto a Fulton streetcorner.

A Pig's Tale, in all its glory!

VIEW "A PIG'S TALE" on Vimeo by clicking HERE.

My dear friend Leah Gordon was the co-directrix on this fascinating deconstruction of how United States pork industry paranoia and our Caribee-colonialist foreign policy devastated rural Haiti's economy in the early 1980s.

 I'm proud to have worked as the soundperson on this, all the way back in 1997. It remains the single best pre-production job I've ever seen implemented: Leah and Anne Parisio had made multiple trips into the hinterlands to interview villagers who remembered the orchestrated massacre of the kreyol pig breed, and they knew exactly what stories they wanted to capture on every foot of their precious 16mm film when we went back. Relocating the best informants from those pre-interviews was an epic feat in itself. All this in the days before the cell phone.

This is also the film that took me to the single most horrific location I have ever filmed in, and I've shot in all manner of vulture pits, brothels, garbage transfer stations, crematoriums and God-forsaken wastelands, on every continent. None of them have been anything near as revolting as the outdoor amateur-hour abattoir we visited on a vacant lot in Port-au-Prince, a muddy, offal-strewn blood-puddle that still gives me nightmares.

The film is well worth 50 minutes of your time, and you should be able to watch it right here on antarcticiana, above. Just in case anything should go wrong with the embed, the vimeo link is here.