Freezer Burnt #1: ‘Managing your meat’: Burger King’s homoerotic, Soviet-inspired corporate art confounds and delights

The girlhood bloggings of a 103 year old woman: 5-27-2013

This is the first installment of Freezer Burnt, a series of posts from my past.

I’ve been writing online since I was in college, and lot of my old posts and articles were for sites that no longer exist, mostly an arts and culture blog called Dangerous Minds that specialized in cool-kid esoterica and cult favorite deep dives for a general “subculture” crowd. Luckily, I’ve alway kept records of my work (and you should too! Don’t trust the internet to keep your stuff safe!). But from the start, I knew my writing was going to change over time, and I wasn’t sure if I would even want my old posts to see the light of day in ten years (which made writing even scarier, because sweeping your embarrassing early work under the rug is a lot harder on the Internet than it is with print). However, after review, I decided some of them are definitely interesting enough to republish, both as snapshots of an earlier Internet, and just as fun things to read. ¹

I’m looking at a lot of these for the first time since I wrote them, and before I started digging through my “archives,” I steeled myself for the sort of incredibly cringe, “bloggy” writing the Internet favored at the time. But I was surprised at how fun and, I daresay, good—if not particularly “sophisticated”—a lot of it was.

Most of the things in Freezer Burnt will be from DM, which was my first actual paying gig. I started out my “career” the way I think many, if not most, young writers do; you’re trying to fit into a “house style,” while simultaneously trying to distinguish yourself with a “unique voice.” It’s a pretty good way to learn, or at least it was for me, largely because I worked (remotely) with a good group of people, and I had good editor.²

Some of these old posts hold up. Some of them… aren’t great. And some of them I would actually be happy with if I wrote them now. Regardless, I hope that more writers (hell, more everyone) start to make their older work available, even if it’s something they’d shudder at today. What’s the worst that could happen? People are going to laugh at the 21 year old you used to be?

Don’t worry, she can’t hear them.

So without further ado:

‘Managing your meat’: Burger King’s homoerotic, Soviet-inspired corporate art confounds and delights

MAY 27, 2013

Okay, first of all, let’s get this out of the way: big, burly men declaring that they’re “managing your meat everyday” is quite possibly the best imaginable homoerotic theme for a fast food advertisement. So let’s just have ourselves a giggle. Go ahead. Someone clearly meant for you to laugh, because there is no way that wasn’t intentional.

But moving on…

If you don’t follow labor news (not that it’s easy, since the largest media outlets tend to ignore it), you may not be aware that New York has had a recent upswing in strike activity, particularly among the notoriously difficult to organize service sector. Since November, coalitions of unions, community organizations, and labor rights groups have been endorsing fast food workers in their fight for a living wage and a union.

Since Burger King is one of the targets of these protests, it was particularly dizzying to see this corporate art decorating the wall of one of their locations in Tribeca, in Lower Manhattan. The aesthetic appeal of a “Stacker’s Union” might’ve seemed “cute” to the marketing execs, a nostalgic reference to a time when unionized industrial labor held the promise of a good life for a working class family. I doubt, however, that any of Burger King’s employees (or the workers who pick their tomatoes) would find it so cute.

It even has a little fake union logo, to represent the fake solidarity of the union workers that don’t actually exist!

What’s even weirder is the style of the art. At first glance, it appears to be referencing the public art of the Work’s Progress Administration, the New Deal program that put so many Americans to work during The Great Depression.

Hmmmm… close, but not quite.

However, upon further inspection, this poster is so Soviet-inspired you can practically taste the corn syrup-suffused borscht (made with real beet extract):

Bingo!

I’m not sure what to make of it, honestly. On the one hand, I find it completely believable that a giant union-busting corporation would intentionally appropriate the title and aesthetics of labor to seem warm and fuzzy. On the other hand, I could also believe they’re all clueless idiots who just hired someone (who is apparently a droll comedic genius) to make them a cool-looking poster.

Marie Antoinette used to dress as a milkmaid for kicks. At the time, the bucolic peasantry was a signifier of idyllic, simple beauty. While it seems absurd to us now, the habit of the powerful to emulate an idealized working class persists today. We see designer jeans for hundreds of dollars, intentionally distressed so as to appear rugged, aged in the nobility of hard work. Folks mount their expensive, high-tech electronics on “rustic” stands. These are microcosms of the tendency, for sure, but Burger King playing “dress-up” with unions isn’t really too far off from Marie A playing dress-up as a farm girl.

Then again, we all know what happened to her.

1. Some Freezer Burnt republications may be very slightly abridged for length and edited or footnoted for specific references.

2. I cannot stress the importance of a good editor, one who gets you, who you trust, and whose own writing you really like. It is the best way to improve as a writer, and you get to watch your progress, as the drafts they send back to you become less and less bloody over time.