The last meals of the doomed
On grocerylists, the mod, uproar, posted a link to grocerylists.org, a site devoted to grocery lists: found and owned. I'm most impressed that they'll be publishing a whole book of grocery lists. I'm sure there's a market among people, such as myself and other members of grocerylists, who enjoy the voyeuristic thrill of peering into other people's shopping baskets.
There is a Texas death row inmates' last meal requests website, which I found a few years ago when it was still posted on the Texas DOJ site. Now defunct, an explicative and reproductory site at The Memory Hole remains as documentation. I only post about this because it's in the same sort of interest in grocery lists that I was drawn to read this list of last meals. While the site was rightly accused of being tasteless-not to mention a gross violation of privacy-I couldn't help but, having found such a list, read the last meals of the damned.
The information on each prisoner is presented in a table with the date of his death, a link to a sort of dossier describing his crimes (which I only went back and read later, after reading several hundred meals), and what each ordered for his last meal, although the caveat is made explicitly at the top of the page that "[t]he final meal requested may not reflect the actual final meal served."
Dead Man Eating puts the information in a different order, with the meal request followed by the more salacious details of their crimes, in order to render more banal the decedents' meal selections. I argue that the DOJ site, and not DME, is a kind of found art, like found grocery lists. The original DOJ site was a very specifically shaped lens through which to experience the last meal of a man condemned, someone who knows he will die tomorrow.
I work in a nursing home, and people die there almost every day; but nursing home residents neither know when they will die, nor have the strength to indulge their passions in a meal. One might believe that an imprisoned man who knows he is about to die, and is given almost limitless range to experience once more one of the physical pleasures we associate with life-food and sex come most immediately to mind-would tend to reveal something about his nature in his choice of meal.
I found the range of appetites and tastes to be startling. Can at least some of the difference between two people be boiled down to that, faced with such a choice, one chooses tea and cookies, while another eats two chickens and a quart of ice cream? Many choose nothing at all, and one chooses, perhaps in an act of solidarity, to eat what the rest of the prisoners eat.
I've heard and seen the story of the Passion of the Christ many times in the last few years, including the Mel Gibson version, which I saw in a theater in Manhattan on Ash Wednesday, passing countless Catholic New Yorkers in the rain on my way there. I've seen Jesus Christ Superstar staged live and in film, the latter of which my very gay boyfriend is a big fan. Most recently I've sung in two different choral works about the Passion and death of the Christ.
Perhaps consequently, the list of inmates' last meals reminds me of Jesus at the Last Supper. I'm Jewish, and don't customarily say "reminds me of Jesus" about anything. I don't experience the meaning of the story in the same way that Christians do, I'm sure, but I get the basic outline of ths story. The consequences of the story, and the implications for a Jew as myself, complicate my appreciation of the story as art. However, I can appreciate the bitter irony in repeating for the last time the life-affirming ceremony that is having dinner.
In the same spirit, I read the last meals of the inmates who have died on Death Row in Texas. Only, instead of it happening once, the state executions are repeated again and again; instead of one radical martyr, hundreds who did terrible things; while Jesus ate his last meal with the people he was close to, I imagine Death Row inmates eating their last meals alone. Perhaps it is offensive to some people that I would compare a group of people containing many who did vicious, unconscionable things with a person many consider their personal savior. But I can't help but connect with them as people, because I saw something intimate and humanizing about them before I read about their crimes. I saw what they had for dinner.
There is a Texas death row inmates' last meal requests website, which I found a few years ago when it was still posted on the Texas DOJ site. Now defunct, an explicative and reproductory site at The Memory Hole remains as documentation. I only post about this because it's in the same sort of interest in grocery lists that I was drawn to read this list of last meals. While the site was rightly accused of being tasteless-not to mention a gross violation of privacy-I couldn't help but, having found such a list, read the last meals of the damned.
The information on each prisoner is presented in a table with the date of his death, a link to a sort of dossier describing his crimes (which I only went back and read later, after reading several hundred meals), and what each ordered for his last meal, although the caveat is made explicitly at the top of the page that "[t]he final meal requested may not reflect the actual final meal served."
Dead Man Eating puts the information in a different order, with the meal request followed by the more salacious details of their crimes, in order to render more banal the decedents' meal selections. I argue that the DOJ site, and not DME, is a kind of found art, like found grocery lists. The original DOJ site was a very specifically shaped lens through which to experience the last meal of a man condemned, someone who knows he will die tomorrow.
I work in a nursing home, and people die there almost every day; but nursing home residents neither know when they will die, nor have the strength to indulge their passions in a meal. One might believe that an imprisoned man who knows he is about to die, and is given almost limitless range to experience once more one of the physical pleasures we associate with life-food and sex come most immediately to mind-would tend to reveal something about his nature in his choice of meal.
I found the range of appetites and tastes to be startling. Can at least some of the difference between two people be boiled down to that, faced with such a choice, one chooses tea and cookies, while another eats two chickens and a quart of ice cream? Many choose nothing at all, and one chooses, perhaps in an act of solidarity, to eat what the rest of the prisoners eat.
I've heard and seen the story of the Passion of the Christ many times in the last few years, including the Mel Gibson version, which I saw in a theater in Manhattan on Ash Wednesday, passing countless Catholic New Yorkers in the rain on my way there. I've seen Jesus Christ Superstar staged live and in film, the latter of which my very gay boyfriend is a big fan. Most recently I've sung in two different choral works about the Passion and death of the Christ.
Perhaps consequently, the list of inmates' last meals reminds me of Jesus at the Last Supper. I'm Jewish, and don't customarily say "reminds me of Jesus" about anything. I don't experience the meaning of the story in the same way that Christians do, I'm sure, but I get the basic outline of ths story. The consequences of the story, and the implications for a Jew as myself, complicate my appreciation of the story as art. However, I can appreciate the bitter irony in repeating for the last time the life-affirming ceremony that is having dinner.
In the same spirit, I read the last meals of the inmates who have died on Death Row in Texas. Only, instead of it happening once, the state executions are repeated again and again; instead of one radical martyr, hundreds who did terrible things; while Jesus ate his last meal with the people he was close to, I imagine Death Row inmates eating their last meals alone. Perhaps it is offensive to some people that I would compare a group of people containing many who did vicious, unconscionable things with a person many consider their personal savior. But I can't help but connect with them as people, because I saw something intimate and humanizing about them before I read about their crimes. I saw what they had for dinner.