found drama

We call this big brick building home. Situated near the train tracks (the ones near where I grew up), the building is an old warehouse converted to a loft space where we execute our art projects and make our communal home. Living here seems to give us all the right kind of energy; it’s like having the constantly-overflowing-with-ideas excitement of being high school age, the energy and apparently unfettered freedom of being college age, and the wisdom of being an adult. Our work will be utterly brilliant.

Of all the folks living here lately, it’s J.O. that has been the most productive and I’ve latched on to her as a source of personal inspiration. In my own funk, I’ve given myself over to her as an assistant or lackey or minion. I’ll run odd jobs for her, run cable, set up stages, that sort of thing. Once in a while, I have a contribution as well. Her (our?) work is based around some of Vito Acconci’s video pieces from the mid-1970s. In particular, we’re patterning the work as conceptual follow-ups to his series that could basically have predicted modern email spam: machines that desire nothing more than to fulfill all your wildest dreams, insistent machines that will stop at nothing to ensure that you look younger, have the best drugs, can retire earlier and more fabulously, and have the largest cock on the block. She watches the “penis expander tube” sequence over and over again, trying to get her version of it just right: the angle of the tube, the smoky resin that obscures the otherwise clear plexiglass, the Baroque tubes and cables and wires.

The building has been having some problems recently though. A co-worker of mine (J.H.?) shows up (I don’t think that he lives here) and gives me a long litany about steam heating systems and how to fix the one in our old brick monstrosity. Foolishly, he puts me in charge of retrieving the materials from town and getting back in time to fix it. But a pipe bursts (explodes!) and sends us all fleeing in terror before I can get my first foot out the door even.

About Rob Friesel