Media/Diet (February '25)
Unflesh by Gazelle Twin + steaming beets without a steamer
All opinions expressed here are strictly my own. Find me on X, Instagram and BlueSky. I’d also love it if you shared this letter with a friend.
MEDIA/DIET FEBRUARY 2025
Thanks for reading my newsletter! This is a monthly edition of Ultracold where I share informal thoughts on media and food that I have consumed recently. A slightly more polished piece, the annual love letter, will run on the 24th.
MEDIA
“From the stomach churning cry that opens the album to its final stammering squeal, it's a genderless creature we hear contorting itself throughout the album's convoluted, maze-like songs - hacking its own DNA in search of a very personal corporeal truth,”
reads a review of Gazelle Twin’s 20141 record Unflesh on the now defunct webzine Drowned in Sound. I like the invocation of DNA and self-hacking, of looking for something deeply internal that just needs to be remixed, of a drive to reinvent yourself by taking control of your most internal code.2 The record features repeating loops, sounds that may be versions of sounds we’ve heard already, a metallic bubbling of cyborg stomach trying to digest the world. There are beeps that invoke heavy machinery, there are distorted voices that echo with pixelation. It pulses with anger befitting of an angry coming-of-age of a cyborg. But it is hard for me to believe that Elizabeth Bernholz, the musician behind Gazelle Twin, is presenting a project that is fully genderless.
For one, it’s all right there on the record’s cover. Bernholz, whose identity was more secretive when Unflesh was first released, is the sole figure in the cover art and is shown from the waist up but rendered flat, almost like a collage, with a piece of raw meat that resembles something you’d cut out from a grocery store catalog covering her face. Across the music videos for the songs on Unflesh she wears a blue sweatsuit with black sneakers and thick white socks, the hood of her top pulled over her face while a burst of shiny brown hair - clearly a cheap, plasticky wig - spills out of it. In videos, her face is obscured by a mesh mask, invoking a layer of pantyhose that a robber in a schlocky movie may wear to commit crime, with a cutout for her lips. I understood the outfit right away: this is a teenage girl hiding her body, probably in PE class.
Bernholz has said that she came up with the outfit first then realized what it was helping her process: the fear and discomfort of her school’s changing room. I have a version of this memory from my middle school in Croatia. Our uniforms were white t-shirts and blue shorts, and I remember the mix of shame and lust that kept me in a state of deep discomfort in the girls’ locker room. I never hid behind an oversized hoodie because that was not part of the 2000s Croatian teen visual vernacular, but I became more conversant in it after I moved to the US.
Bernholz told Loud and Quiet that this choice of costume represents “a time in her life when, relatably, she felt most “like a freak,”” and she has spoken elsewhere about using the album as a way to avenge that time, or at least fully step into anger in a way that was not accessible to her as a teenager. This also rings familiar: the anger at having to have a body that you cannot control, that is changing in ways that feel alien, and one that is routinely put on display whether you want it or not. It’s a feeling that may transcend gender, and Bernholz has spoken about consciously bringing a more masculine energy to some tracks on Unflesh, but it feels like a staple of growing up in a feminized body.
Despite its title then, and the production effects that make Bernholz’s voice sound robotic, Unflesh is a deeply fleshy record. It features track titles like “GUTS,” “Belly of the Beast,” and “I Feel Blood,” and there is a claustrophobic feel to it, one which she credits to wanting the music to sound like it was coming from inside the body, and which PopMatters described as “tracks that seem more tightly bound, even vacuum-packed.” Vacuum-packed is exactly right - in one of the videos Bernholz plays with the possibility of meats sealed in plastic in the supermarket taking their revenge on shoppers.
Her understanding of flesh, and what flesh can absorb and encode, extends beyond her own trauma (an intense experience of Body Dysmorphic Disorder and an attempt to take her own life as a teen which haunts the record) and encompasses more literal instances of disembodiment that surround us. She says that she hates supermarkets as they are a microcosm of all that is wrong with late stage capitalist life, and the beep of a self-checkout machine is sampled on “Belly of the Beast.” But also: phrases like “just a piece of meat” transcend the supermarket.
Which is not to say that Unflesh is nothing but uncomfortable. Sure, it pulses with beats akin to the sound of your own blood, but those beats also feel shockingly danceable. There are plenty of synths that invoke the 80s and made me visualize not just flashing neon lights in the back of some butcher shop, or a cut scene from Alien (Bernholz’s favorite), but also some animated, psychedelic adventure. I heard echoes of Mort Garson in “Exorcise”, a touch of New Order on “Anti Body,” a little bit of Björk on “I Feel Blood.” Some of the more breathy, almost choral vocals reminded me of the anime classic Akira, an appropriate reference given the sheer amount of flesh-on-machine collision that its characters experience. “Premonition” felt like a lullaby gone wrong, maybe a hallucination of a badly trained domestic robot, maybe just a memory of a small child unsure how to inhabit a body made of soft tissue and run by wetware.
Though Bernholz talks about writing lyrics only after she has identified which syllables mesh best with all the other sounds that she is creating, there is still poignancy in her language. The opening track, which shares the name of the album, is just a relentless metallic whisper of
“It's coming at me\coming at me\Coming at me\coming at me,”
setting up the anxious tone, and an atmosphere of being trapped, except that Bernholz is trapped in her own body. She echoes a similar sentiment in “Still Life” which opens with
“Mind is a symptom\Deep in the marrow,”
or another mechanistic, medicalized take on a sense of self confined by bones and organs.
“Every part of you\There's a way\To resist a cell\Deep inside,”
she sounds nearly-demonic on GUTS, fighting a destructive urge inside herself, one that she (unsuccessfully) gives into in “Anti Body.”
But there is also some catharsis on Unflesh, a softening of sorts, like in the repeating, ethereal refrain of “I feel blood,” which I mistook for “I feel good” when I first heard the track and “I feel God” when I played it a few times more. Unflesh does not necessarily end on a positive note - that heart-like beat never stops making you feel like you’re about to take off running - but its arc leads to if not an exorcism, then at least a remaking, that sense of self-hacking and transformation. When Bernholz menacingly whispers
“Listen, now it's time\Shedding my dead skin,”
I believe her every time.
Just like the image of hiding behind a hoodie but still displaying perfect waves of shiny hair read to me as a staple of a haunted, uncomfortable, dysmorphic girlhood, so the arc of remaking your own flesh read as female to me. Flesh itself, as opposed to the mind, is traditionally associated with the feminine, at least within a patriarchal system of thought. Manipulating the flesh then, or fighting to shed it, does not seem to stand a chance of being gender neutral. Bernholz project has been compared to David Cronenberg, whose films like Crimes of the Future take the remaking of the flesh head on, as something necessary, artistic even, but also disastrous. The body horror of his films is often also tinged with sexuality, carnal in a way that betrays desire, typically between men and women. Can Bernholz then shed some of her gender by pushing the flesh away and assuming a more cyborg-like sound, by digitizing her voice?
Listening to Unflesh through the lens of my own relationship with both gender and spaces like gyms or PE class, made me realize how the two have changed in a parallel way for me. The part of me that is masculine, the part of me that feels like a teenage boy in the weight room and boxing class, does not want to shed their skin, undo their flesh or become a machine. It is maybe the only part of me that is grateful for this body and its ability to grow hard and taut and gain power.3 It makes me think of butch and transmasculine people of the past who could get strong even when they could not get gender affirming care.4 The instinct, the craving even, to be in the gym feels distinct from wanting to radically remake myself or replace my parts with something cold and metal. It feels like growing more of who I am by virtue of growing muscle, of manifesting a part of me that was always within my blueprint. This is a very different relationship with having to be made from flesh, and a very different proposition from wanting to become a cyborg.
The cyborg has been read as female, or feminized, by more than one theorist at this point and, as
wrote last year, digitization can itself be read as a process of feminization. A machine that is hacking into its own functioning is performing a kind of rebellion that puts it in solidarity if not the same category of rebel as a woman. Discussing the anime Serial Experiments Lain, Santiago Cortés writes:“As if, as a woman-in-the-making, she is growing stronger in her ability to connect and move through a digital world,”
and I think this is what I heard the most in Unflesh. It’s not that the sound of the digital, the sound of the machines, make Bernholz’s horror and rage sound less female - it's just that it's a channel that is so well-matched for what she is trying to process. And there is some satisfaction in her metallic heart still pounding by the time the record ends.
DIET
My partner sometimes jokes that in the winter we live like our families may have lived a century ago. He says this because I keep crowding our dinner table with big plates and pots of beets and turnips. This is largely a function of our farmshare which gets us big bags of local produce every other Saturday. Many things can’t grow in New York this time of year, but root vegetables can, so those big bags overflow with purple daikon, golden and red beets, golden and black turnips, red and purple and brown potatoes, carrots, parsnips, celeriac, and bundles of dark green scallions or leeks.
There are traditional Croatian ways of preparing vegetables like turnips, namely “repa i fažol” which is a riff on pasta e fagioli (“pašta i fažol”) with fermented then grated turnips in place of pasta. I’ve certainly also been served a salad of steamed beets, dressed very simply with olive oil, red wine vinegar and salt, more than a few times as a child, but I can’t say that I was always a root vegetable cooking expert. Signing up for the farmshare for the first time last winter then presented me with something of a challenge.
As I wrote in my January essay, however, I am interested in learning how to find pleasure and abundance even when I can’t have everything I want (like produce that is not in season). Years of veganism have made this more accessible to me in the kitchen than anywhere else as choosing to be vegan never felt like closing the door on pleasure for me, just an invitation to be more intentional in how I cultivate and create it. I took the same approach to the radishes, turnips and beets and quickly found that they really can be stars of many wonderful dishes.
A steamed beet dressed with good olive oil, salt and a splash of vinegar can be rich both in soft texture and sweet yet earthy flavor. A thinly sliced radish marinated in rice vinegar, sesame oil and a touch of chili-garlic paste is a perfect topping for a bowl of rice or an entrant into a bits-and-bobs meal that may feature dumplings, spring rolls, and sautéed bok choy or broccoli. Turnips grated alongside carrots and seasoned with apple cider vinegar and plenty of salt make for a good salad or a slaw, and they can also be folded into vegetable pancakes. Grating black turnips into a lentil soup heavy on smoked paprika, garlic and onions and finished with a few tablespoons of apple cider vinegar makes for a very sturdy and nourishing stew. I’ve braised big medallions of parsnips in white wine with lots of parsley, garlic, lemon and miso to balance their sweetness and bring out their more tender qualities. Leek and potato soup, with coconut milk or a handful of cashews, needs no introduction or advertising. Any vegetable stock is better if you add some celeriac, as are many clear-broth-leaning vegetable soups (I am thinking of small pasta with kale and white beans or even miso soup). Winter’s vegetables may hide underground, but once you bring them into kitchen light, they have much to offer.
Below, I have outlined my go-to procedure for steaming beets without using a steamer. It’s a fairly hands off process that allows you to turn on the oven and forget about it for an hour or so. I find this to be really helpful if I am cooking several other things, or if I need to get a start on dinner during a busy work-from-home day.
The images that I have included here show the aftermath of this method where I sliced some steamed golden beets, dressed them lightly and paired them with some other meal components that I reach for when I’m running low on time or energy. To eat the beets with silken tofu and sautéed broccolini I dressed them with rice vinegar and sesame oil (then poured some tamari on the whole thing). To eat them with savory chickpea flour pancakes,5 coconut yogurt labneh,6 ajvar and some garlicky olives, I went with a simple dressing of olive oil and red wine vinegar. In either case salt was also key.
If you’re more organized than me, I’d recommend dressing the beets then letting them sit in the fridge for an hour, or even overnight, as they’re really great at absorbing flavor when steamed. At this stage you may also consider layering them into a sandwich, piling them on top of a bowl of hummus, or mixing them with some beans for a quick salad.
How to:
Preheat the oven to 400F
Wash and dry your beets
Trim each beet: cut off any greens and level off the bottom of the beet or simply tear off any roots
Wrap each beet tightly into a piece of foil, making sure it’s sealed well and no beet bits are exposed
Arrange the wrapped beets on a cookie sheets and bake for an hour to hour and a half - they should have a little give when you touch them
Turn off the oven but leave the beets and the cookie sheet in until the oven has fully cooled down
Once the beets are cool to touch, unwrap them and peel off their skins - you can rub it off with a paper towel or even the foil itself, but if the beets have fully cooked through, your hands will also do the trick, as long as you don’t mind them briefly turning crimson of gold
Yes, this was 11 years ago, but I just got obsessed with this record this past month.
The idea of DNA as a blueprint of the body has, however, recently come into question and may not be the most scientifically accurate metaphor. Here is a good exploration of the issue.
Speaking only of my experience of gender and the kind of masculinity that is currently available to me. There are plenty of cis women who enjoy gyms and find the empowering, and plenty of nonbinary or transmasculine people who do not.
The history of medical transition is complicated and I do not mean to overly center it here.
My shorthand is to use 1:1 ratio of chickpea flour and water with a teaspoon or so of apple cider vinegar and a quarter teaspoon of baking soda (which I do often eyeball) and a good pinch of salt, cumin, turmeric and paprika, each, for 3-4 small pancakes.
I am fond of the Cocojune brand, but it’s undeniable that all their products always taste of coconut and need extra spices to make up for that in savory dishes. The labneh is not an exception and I’ve found that I like the flavored varieties more than the plain.
I always eye beets in the grocery store but am intimidated by them. You've inspired me to try this out though!