Blood Jump #3: Meat Grinder
The Doom Generation. Jamie Loftus’s Raw Dog. Dead and Company’s Last Stand.
Blood Jump is an independent and free publication, but writing has value. Solidarity with the WGA and everyone striking.
Halsted Packing House is a charming butcher shop in Lincoln Park, Chicago, a neighborhood ravaged by sterile upscale storefronts and dogs with a higher net worth than I’ll ever know. It sits at the corner of Halsted and Armitage, where you can spend $12 on a Ted Lasso–themed pint of ice cream on one side of the street and $500 on skin care products on the other. HPH has somehow survived the Allbirds-wearing capitalist dirge that consumed its neighbors, though, and it was one of the first places my girlfriend and I visited when we moved to the city.
Halsted Packing House is the kind of store so magically American that it can make you dangerously nostalgic for a time that never existed. An older man behind the counter let us browse for about thirty seconds before he giddily pointed to the bottom row of a rack of meat, which held a series of beef patties molded into the shape of a human hand. He told us to—sit down—tell him if we needed a hand with anything. I have no idea what you would do with these hand burgers once you take them home, there were no hand-shaped buns.
This was toward the end of 2016, and Halsted Packing House’s refusal to die in a neighborhood lost to the startups that poison your Instagram feed was the perfect introduction both to Chicago and the upcoming administration: a meat-slinging city that won’t give up in a country determined to choke itself to death.
This issue of Blood Jump takes us to the meat grinder: art about survival, legacy, and hot dogs in America. The Doom Generation. Jamie Loftus’s Raw Dog. Dead and Company’s Last Stand. Let’s begin.
Eat My Fuck
The Doom Generation is the kind of movie that’s so cool you feel square for not having seen it sooner, but you likely never had the chance. After a rocky start at Sundance, Gregg Araki’s 1995 flick was picked up and dropped by a series of distributors, drawn in by Araki’s indie cred and then repelled by the movie’s content, before being banished to shelves on a poorly formatted DVD. So it’s a relief that The Doom Generation is now enjoying a 4k restoration: not only for the integrity of the film itself, but because it’s tragically prescient for a generation of kids staring down the barrel of a hopeless future.
Rose McGowan is Amy Blue, a club-goth nihilist with a tooth for crystal meth and Diet Coke. She and her boyfriend, Jordan White (James Duval), pick up an anarchic drifter named Xavier “X” Red (Johnathan Schaech) on the way home from a club. When X accidentally blows the head off a convenience store clerk while trying to diffuse an argument between him and Amy, the three punks plunge into an escape-hatch road trip of sex, drugs, and shoegaze as apocalyptically American as their namesakes.
Araki’s vision of the American wasteland punches at George Miller’s weight and drips with bon mots acidic enough to make Diablo Cody hang up the belt. It’s hard to understate how fun this 83-minute script reads; Amy doesn’t open her mouth without offering a headline-level quip (“fucking chunky pumpkinhead,” “if bullshit were music, you’d be a big brass brand,” and “you’re like a life-support system for a cock” are some personal favs). Almost all of the supporting cast are killer-cool cameos: Skinny Puppy appear as a gang of goons, Parker Posey is Amy’s katana-wielding ex “eternal love slave,” a series of cashiers are played by Margaret Cho, Perry Farrell, and, somehow, high-class escort madam Heidi Fleiss. Its soundtrack kicks off with Nine Inch Nails and stretches across a beautiful blend of industrial and shoegaze acts like Slowdive, Porno for Pyros, and Cocteau Twins. Limbs are dismembered, ejaculate is licked, everything in the movie costs $6.66. This is America, welcome to Hell.
The Doom Generation is billed as “A Heterosexual Movie by Gregg Araki,” a bar the film uses its full runtime to test. As Red, White, and Blue fall further down the spiral on the lam, Amy and Jordan’s relationship bends and opens toward X’s 90’s-fuckboy magnetism (think Brandon Boyd right after he lost the dreads). Jordan begins the movie a virgin, hesitant to sleep with Amy for fear of catching AIDS. It’s telling that his character is defined first by panic around a disease that has been stigmatized and mismanaged as “a problem for the queer community.” Jordan inches closer and closer toward X but is never given the chance to let his sexuality bloom, bound by the real-life mores of the America The Doom Generation turns on its head. For a movie that fantastically depicts dismembered heads flying through the air and regurgitating hot dogs, its biggest menace is the same political dogshit that renders the queer community vulnerable to hate and violence today.
Now that The Doom Generation is restored and widely available (you can stream it on the Criterion Channel), I'm quietly hopeful it will find a new life with Gen Z and young folks. There's something prescient about this brand of Gen-X nihilism; Red, White, and Blue live in a world so politically caustic to their wellbeing that their fuck-it-all raison d'être feels less reactionary and more a means of survival. It's so interesting to watch these characters respond to a world that's failed them in parallel to their own self-discovery, especially as those two threads intertwine and implode. Kids these days don’t have it easy—sometimes, you have to admit that life is lonely, boring, and dumb, and eat a Dorito.
Dogs Across America
Jamie Loftus is a master of the high and low brow. I first saw her around 2017 chugging milk on stage at Helltrap Nightmare, Sarah Squirm’s pre-SNL Chicago body-horror comedy show. She has eaten dog food as part of her act, she’s painted her face with ketchup and mustard, she has butt-chugged a copy of Infinite Jest. She balances the shock and awe of her live shows with a series of thoughtful investigative podcasts; she’s tackled Lolita’s monumental and thorny legacy, she’s breathed new life into the Cathy comics, she qualified for and infiltrated the high-IQ circle-jerking Mensa International society. Loftus’ new book, Raw Dog: The Naked Truth about Hot Dogs, sits somewhere between David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster and an episode of Doughboys.
Yes, it’s a book about hot dogs: during what she calls the Hot Dog Summer of 2021, Loftus took her boyfriend, dog, and cat (how??) on a road trip across America in search of our nation’s greatest tube of meat. She weaves through the Sonoran dogs of Arizona, the baloney dogs of Baltimore (a real thing), she dismantles the myth that the Chicago dog is good (Semper Fi). The book is genuinely funny—Loftus is a comedian first—and she’s as frank (sorry) about the dogs’ exits from her body as their entrances. I have a physical copy of Raw Dog, so I can’t do a search for a word count, but I’d be surprised if “diarrhea” occurs less than two-dozen times.
2021 was also the year of the Delta and Omicron COVID variants, and Loftus’s trip log is distinctly stamped by our government’s failure to control the virus and the politics of our individualistic response to public safety. She is chided for masking up in the South, she is herded maskless at a hot dog eating contest like so much cattle, she is denied entrance into meat processing plants under the guise of employee safety (in all likelihood, a false claim). You can’t cover something as nationalistic as the hot dog without getting political, and Loftus takes great care to detail the unfair labor practices and horrific—and I can’t overstate how horrific—animal treatment that define the meatstick industry. I love a good hot dog more than anybody, but the vegans might be right about this one.
That’s not to say Loftus is here to scold you: she continues to enjoy hot dogs even after unearthing their less-than-delicious history. “I hope that people who read this book, if they're still eating hot dogs at the end—which I very much still am, I can't pass any judgment there—but that they have more context for why the hot dog is considered a national symbol,” Loftus told Ayesha Rascoe for NPR. “… the more I learned about it, I think the most American things about hot dogs are that it's a result of a pretty disingenuous marketing campaign, and it relies on a lot of labor exploitation. And we can still have hot dogs and not have that be true.” Here’s to the dogs of a brighter future.
Johnny Salami’s Uptown Jug Champions
John Mayer doesn’t know why Deadheads call him Johnny Salami, and there’s a good chance the Deadheads don’t know why, either. “I noticed that, in the Dead world, I like giving fans something to make fun of me for,” Mayer tells fellow guitarist Cory Wong. “And they secretly appreciate it. Because it gives them vocabulary. It gives them fodder, it gives them topics to discuss, gives them memes. They call me Johnny Salami and I'm not sure why. And I go 'Yeah, you're welcome.'”
John Mayer felt like a strange choice for Jerry Garcia’s stand-in when Dead and Company formed in 2015. The band, a vehicle for the Grateful Dead’s surviving members and catalogue, came together after the Dead’s Fare Thee Well shows, a series of concerts billed as the Grateful Dead’s last, which put Trey Anastasio in the Jerry slot. The Phish frontman felt like a more natural fit than Mayer’s frat-friendly soft rock, but—like I and every uncle on the planet will tell you—the dude can rip on guitar.
Dead and Company came to Wrigley Field for the last time this past weekend, and Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood was overrun by tie-dyed goofballs. Sleepy boomers hopped out of Ubers, trustafarians hawked bootlegged merch with stolen insignia, a handful of tried-and-true hippies slept on the sidewalk outside of our apartment. The Peace and Love Way is always quick to show its unwashed underbelly—I’ve been ripped off and vomited upon at Dead and Co shows in previous years—but I can’t understate just how good the vibes were this round. D&C’s 2023 tour is billed as their last, and it seemed that the sold-out stadium was determined not to let the Usual Concert Bullshit (did I tell you someone threw up on me?) get in the way. People in the pit were friendly, polite, and quick to help those that had too much too fast; these were the first GA shows I can remember without having to fight to hold onto our spot on the field; an older man hugged me when they played “St. Stephen.” Strangers stopping strangers, just to shake their hands!
I’m not going to waste my time trying to sell you on the Dead; their legacy (and reputation) precedes them at this point, and you either get them or you don’t. I can say that the Dead and Company shows at Wrigley were the best and most lovingly rendered versions of the Grateful Dead catalogue I’ve been able to see live. The setlists were fairly standard: these were my eighth and ninth times seeing the band (rookie numbers to fans, disgusting to normal people), and with the exception of “U.S. Blues,” there wasn’t a song played I hadn’t heard them do before. But what was lacked in variety was compensated with finesse, which is no small feat for a band fronted by a 75-year-old. John Mayer, for all his former antics, has thoroughly proven his salt; you can find dozens of “Mayer is Dead to Me” shirts designed by won-over fans at the shakedowns outside of their shows. And the rest of the band was in top form, pounding through staples like “Truckin’,” “Scarlet Begonias,” and “Franklin’s Tower.”
This is embarrassing to admit, but I’ve already devoted a newsletter to a Grateful Dead cover band, so here we are: I cried like a baby when they played “Brokedown Palace.” It’s a beautiful song, one often given a pass even by Dead-haters, and some of lyricist Robert Hunter’s greatest work. But to hear it sung on Saturday by Bob Weir, a man who made a career as the Dead’s “Other One” and rode its legacy with enough devotion to pack out a baseball stadium in 2023, was a testament to the artistry and power of the Grateful Dead that’s so often lost in conversations of their cultural footprint. There are rumors that some iteration of Dead and Company will live beyond this tour, and I very much hope they do. Until then, Fare Thee Well, Johnny Salami.
Sample Draws
We capped our Dead and Company double-header by spending Sunday night at The Salt Shed with Australian weirdos King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard. Their new album is delicious doom metal at double speed, and it’s a relief to see a band so cool carrying the jam-band torch.
I was excited for Sanctuary, Neon’s new Margaret Qualley–Christopher Abbott double-hander from director Zachary Wigon, but it felt more 50 Shades than Secretary.
The song hardly needs the hype, but it’s a relief to see Kendrick having fun again on “The Hillbillies.” Baby Keem and Kendrick bring out the best in each other, and I hope that the Tyler tease from the video materializes into a feature or two down the road.
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. If you enjoyed this issue, please encourage a friend to subscribe. I will see you again on Monday, June 26, for the next issue.