From Biofreak to Organasm
An eyewitness account by David Brody
[All four parts of this story are available in printed form from Pierogi gallery for $5—ed.]
Medusa Siam was humping the column again. He ("she?" - but that’s not exactly it either) was high on something, maybe even tripping, sure, but it was all part of the act. Was that a real chicken on the floor? None of us watching had cared to investigate closely, but the kosher chicken place was in fact next door. The blood looked real enough. Now Medusa, covered with bloody feathers, perched himself on a recumbent venus-de-milo’d manikin, which he caressed with his huge, glitter-covered hands, and began to lay down a tonguetwisting patter like the guy in the original Fed Ex ads – incredibly, impossibly fast. I couldn’t follow what he was saying at all even though I was pretty high myself, but it had the preternatural continuity of an advertisement.
No local event was quite sanctified without Medusa’s six foot-five, miniskirted, fishnet blessing, and we accepted with philosophic groans his inevitable usurpation of emcee prerogatives and stage time, his untiring hamminess; for if he was a low rent diva, at least he was our diva, dutiful, energetic, and, in his way, generous. Once in a great while he could even be somewhat entertaining, and tonight, with only a small milling audience, alas, he – all right, she – was being really brilliantly mad. This was Medusa Siam at her very best.
Still, it didn’t take long to get one’s fill. I pushed downstairs, pressed against a disturbingly perforated wall by an upward mudslide of hair and sweat. Beer was being sold in the corner but I’d brought my own, a tallboy in each coatpocket. Stupid aggregates of junk rained from the ceiling, and some of it moved a bit, prodded by cannibalized copier motors and loose wires. Water was trickling onto some of these wires. It occurred to me to familiarize myself with the exits.
Despite the crush, nothing much was happening, as usual. I said hello coolly to a few acquaintances, what was there to say? One didn’t want to be rude but one didn’t want to get caught in a chitchat vortex in such a place either. I sat for awhile on a fluorescent bean bag thinking of last night’s multi-camera live mix. If only I’d sprung for the hi-8 tapes for each camera I could have edited my own version later. It was because I knew, I supposed, sinking deeper into the chair, that I’d never find the stomach to edit it – never; the tapes would have rotted first – that I had allowed myself to imagine that the crew from the Farm would be possessed of omniscient precall. I had hopefully believed that, like the geniuses up in the studio booth of a hockey game, they could instantaneously cut together from four angles, including one ceiling-mounted robotic fisheye, a perfect document of our dark mechanism of a performance as it unspooled malevolently before their eyes. There had been gaffers tape and BNC to RCA everywhere, endless set-up problems, and a long exhausting wait for us actors, who had in any case left our best performances back at the finale the previous weekend. Now we were reassembled for the sake of a posterity which nobody really believed in, and minus the smoky, restless audience which had been drawn to the Southside on previous weekends by weird rumors. Minus the terror, in other words, and its tendency to concentrate the mind. That we were taping at all was in any case a fluke, it’s just that word had gotten around (Medusa had even written a "review" for the local cheat sheet which was little more than a slobbering appreciation of our torture victim’s naked torso) and the Farm folks said they’d do it for free. They wanted to test out their Amiga-based on-location live mix editing technique, which, by the way, I sincerely doubt they ever used again. I had managed to watch about five minutes of the resulting tape earlier tonight before fleeing in self-preservation. The commandant that was captured on camera seemed about as evil and obsessed as Colonel Klink, and only half as world weary. On tape my sprawling torture machine lost its mean streetwise aggression and flattened into a silly-looking let’s-put-on-an-S&M-play clubhouse set. Plus, quite predictably, every shot was a reaction shot – a listening, not a talking, head; whenever something dramatic and sudden occurred, the camera invariably caught up somewhat afterward. It was going to be a long hour of cutting to the goalie swiping the puck out of the net several seconds after a score.
Was it the tape, though, or much worse, was it just the way things looked in cold retrospect? Warning: objects in mirror may be less interesting than they seemed at the time. Anyway, I didn’t want to miss The Underground Attic and all that tinfoil, ambient sculpture, heavy techno-drone and beer stench. Just so I could say I was there. And thus I found myself taking deep satisfaction in the laissez-faire video wallpaper before me, or rather beneath me, a tape of a way speeded up football game that was playing on a salvaged Zenith, surrounded by pink fur and packing peanuts looking up from a hole in the concrete slab floor. Its randomness was brilliant, like the bubbles in my second beer. Time to move on.
The Underground Attic was on Wythe – where the Crush Workout Palace is now, believe it or not. We’d all helped cart away tons of asbestos-dusted fabric bolts and rickety machines – potential wardrobes and installations. Eric was the mastermind. He could put together a clubhouse scene with two red light bulbs and a sixpack. But back then deft efficiency of that order wasn’t necessarily called for. A cornucopia of industrial-age debris went begging in the very streets – cast iron lathes, latex molds, safes, oak palettes, refrigerator radiators, mattresses, you name it, even an old locomotive engine believe it or not, all rusting nobly or rotting horrifically, free for the carting. Ernie and Farouk were madmen. They could winch some heavy metal into their pickups and weld and torch until those flywheels from those Dark Satanic Mills were spinning on a dime. Rene once collected a dumpster’s worth of gold lamé trimmings and turned it into a sort of astral pagoda where she told fortunes. She told everyone they were gay. I think that was at Ratfest, which took place in one of the bricked up sheds on the waterfront, where the Con Ed plant is now. What happened to Rene? I heard she hooked up with a sugardaddy she met at a Rainbow gathering, but I also heard she’s squatting in Zurich. Gustave is another story. The guy who published twenty-three issues of Virus clandestinely on an office Xerox machine, the guy who was conducting fax wars with Tokyo and Berlin years before the word dotcom had ever been breathed, he’s now a tenured professor at Urbana. His bitterly cold hovel, where visitors used to cower around an oil drum woodstove, was turned into an impressive looking simulation of a restaurant a few years after he left the hood, which the Polish owner named "Bistro des Artistes" because he thought the artists would flock. I can’t help it, he was a walking Polish joke. If he’d called it something like "Dogmeat Cafe" he’d have had better luck, even, or especially, with his cooking. Ironically, I noticed that the new owners recently took the "Bistro des Artistes" sign down just when, if the prices were tripled, a restaurant by that name would probably fly.
I found out after the fact that it had been Gustave on the roof throwing televisions at that opening on South 11th. It was all done quite professionally, with crowd control clearing an impact zone, etc. I met Carla that night, and we slept together a few times, after which I hoped she would die painfully. The bridge, dripping with graffiti, was hovering over the river in traction; it silhouetted everything like a cathedral in a factory town. I used to actually take my easel up on the walkway to paint from the twisted angles of metal, as inelegant as a slaughterhouse. Gorgeous. Once some kids let go of a bike they were walking so that it picked up steam down the long Brooklyn slope and tenpinned my easel. I lashed out when they approached, causing a breeze with my fists, but after they were gone I packed up and left, wondering if they might come back with one of their momma’s boyfriends or one of their momma’s boyfriend’s guns. I walked Carla home that first night across the bridge. The old plate steel walkway used to bounce like the floorboards on a rusted Studebaker as you hit the middle of a section, and there was no particular reason to believe that it had been recently inspected. The cold river appeared through gaps in the coverage, so far below that its Amazonian tidal current seemed not to be moving at all. But the chief danger in walking across was that you might skid out on a cluster of crack vials and pull a tendon, or step in a pile of human offal. As a matter of fact, a junkie looked at us that night as Carla and I descended the grand riveted staircase to Delancy, but he kept shooting.
Before leaving the Underground Attic I said hey to Eric, who greeted me cordially from behind the turntables, and after wrestling my way outside past all the happylanders trying to get in, ponying up their fivespot and getting their hands stamped, I headed over to Garage-o-mania for the late dinner that Ernesto and his gang were "performing." Lloyd had invited me. It was some kind of occasion, an introduction for some visiting dignitary "to all the interesting people in the neighborhood." I wanted to be sufficiently interesting so I probably smoked another bowl in some dark alcove on the way to Grand St. I found the place, a tinfoiled-over storefront, and tried to enter as if I’d been there before. Fortunately I knew a few people. There was Edith, who was starting some sort of gallery, an ambitious undertaking I was told. Everyone thought she was crazy and scattered, but I liked her enthusiasm. Once she came to look at my work, an hour or two late, as was inevitable with Edith, and had to come back a second time because all we’d done was talk in the kitchen about life. Nowadays who has that sort of time? She had a young daughter who had been fathered, some said, by a famously infamous pseudo-artist. Actually, she said it, and often. We greeted one another warmly, and I settled into a cushion at the cocktail table next to her. I saw Lloyd in the corner, on the make as always either with a girl or a curator or both, and waved. He liked me because I actually took the bit of what he said that made sense seriously enough to disagree. It was relentlessly aggravating poetic gobbledygook interlaced with images from biology, physics, and math, all soft machines and crystal neurons. Sometimes Lloyd got it exactly right, though, like when he came up with a name for Edith’s gallery: Transmitter. Or when he convened the first meeting for Organasm, that’s right, OrganASM, but more of that later. He liked me, as I say, because I actually knew just enough science and media theory and AI to argue with him over his fast and loose metaphors, but then, bless his heart, he liked everyone. Edith and I made light conversation as we both scanned the room, looking for someone else to talk with, which was why we got along so well. Doug passed by with a beer and I asked him where he’d gotten it and he said "Here," giving it to me. "I don’t even think I should be doing this with the Quaaludes. I was feeling tense." Doug had an apartment and hallway full of superdense psychedelic post-painterly pop bombshells that were waiting to be howitzered on the world. They were not so much painted as extruded, like spaghetti. Edith was going to give him his first show in her fabulous California-scaled space, an old coffin factory the conversion of which was being financed by some mysterious oil fortune scion gone bad. Evidently, she’d scattered and crazy-talked her way into it. Her backer was there too but I didn’t want anyone to know I didn’t know who he was so I never scanned him in.
Doug was married back then to a real piece of work. The first time I met them both Lola sized me up for a squishy apolitical type and impressed me with some vile racist opinions - you know, radical realism. I could handle her, but I wouldn’t have bothered except for Doug. Turned out she was half Puerto Rican, her trump card. Doug, for his part, liked anything extreme. He’d been a speed freak in the days of the flower children and now he was an Epicurean in the ghetto. He had shelves of avant-classical noise, he smoked like a chimney, and he cooked with the passion of a medieval alchemist. If he had fifty dollars (and enough paint) he spent it on prosciutto from Balducci’s and invited his friends, who couldn’t necessarily tell it from Boars Head. Didn’t seem to matter. When he got famous he’d trade a painting with the sommelier from Balthusar for a case of French wine and drink half of it the first night. You had to admire this sort of zest for life. Anything but middle class.
Ernesto now came out followed by half a dozen of his people, all of them dressed in silver overalls and carrying silver trays with smoky Lucite lids. They filtered out evenly through the dimly lit room and then struck a pose, one hand ready to uncover whatever was on the tray. Suddenly the lights went out altogether, the ambient groove faded to silence and nobody spoke at all. Except Edith, of course, whose voice ruptured the darkness. "Are we supposed to be quiet? Oops." Somebody laughed. Then Ernesto lifted his lid and the others followed suit, revealing lots of tiny LED lights on fiber optic strands arranged like octopi. As it turned out, they were octopi, sliced into crispy leg sections and reassembled, and the servers began offering these hors d’ouevres about. One simply ate around the wiring. Doug was ecstatic. "Delicious!" he said.
Just then I heard raised voices and by the time I turned to look (not wanting to seem eager), the commotion had been punctuated with a blunt thump — a sound, I reflected, that was definitely out of place. A tall thin angry woman I didn’t know had apparently bashed Edith upside the head with, weirdly, a clipboard. Edith had stood up and was dripping, her drink spilled. "What?" She was in shock. "Christ! Look what you did!" She rubbed her head, possibly feeling for blood. "Jesus! You bitch!" Everyone was looking now, uncommitted, trying not to overreact. The other woman yelled something back, hurled her weapon to the floor, and stormed out the door, in tears. Edith was still standing there. "That bitch! Did you see what she did?" She wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular, and no one immediately went to her aid. Hell, maybe she’d deserved it.
At length it was all smoothed over and chalked up to entertainment. The rumor was that the angry woman was the ex of the oil scion, and had accused Edith of sleeping with him for his backing, which seemed perfectly plausible and so what, but then again it might not have happened at all; it was said the angry woman was nuts. (It was also said she had problems controlling her anger, and that was indisputable.) Anyway, I never saw her again. The dinner guests were cross-legged on the floor now around the long and low table and I had Cody on my right, his girlfriend Fiona on my left. The food was arriving in bursts and lulls, one UFO dish after another. Nothing quite came up to the photo-octopus, but there were plenty of strange colors and tastes, including some delicate Chinese fruit the size of grapes which were stuck onto the ends of toothpicks and arranged like a tinkertoy model of a certain psychoactive molecule: dessert. Cody along with Gustave, the TV hurler, had curated a recent show called Biofreak at various marginal venues in abandoned strorefronts which pretty exhaustively catalogued the electro-mechanical sculptural trends prevalent, if not dominant, in the vicinity. His own work over the years has become more and more perfectionist and precise and simulacral, as anyone who saw his mid-career at the Guggenheim knows – but the other end of the leftover assemblage spectrum, Swiftean and massively funky, had been equally well represented in Biofreak. "I liked your Kafka piece," said Cody. "I thought your sculpture was way more interesting than the play." "I’m sincerely gratified," I responded, and I was, team player that I am. My collaboration with the theater group, a bunch of idealistic youngsters, one or two of them talented enough to be headed, ultimately, for professional careers, the rest serviceable dilettantes, had brought me to the attention of the cognoscenti by focussing an evening’s worth of sturm und drang – an actual spotlight – on my, ahem, Swiftean and massively funky installation. Damn, I thought, I could’ve been in Biofreak if it hadn’t already happened. Always the gentleman, I turned my attention to Fiona, one in a chain of Cody’s flawless Ivory-soap-girls-on-the-lam. She sported a mischievous grin, and I found out she fancied herself a poet. Which was great because back then so did I, on the side. (When Frank became my roommate some years later I was soon confirmed in my suspicion that real poetry was a lifestyle choice all its own. The first time I heard Frank and his gradschool friends read – even the lamest ones, academic and all tipsy over the names of flowers for godsakes, possessed the enviable diffidence of the fulltimer – I cringed at the amateurish ignominy with which I had been reading my half-assed crypto-lyrics at noisy bars, and never so much as thought about doing it again.) While Cody chatted with Doug and Doug’s charming wife to his right, Fiona and I ended up talking about meditation, specifically the successive degrees of abstraction one could savor before dissolving the ego altogether. First you realized you were silently mouthing the mantra, so you tried to sever the act of speaking from the thought of the sound. It couldn’t be done, sound was action, so you tried only to think the mantra — or rather, as the teaching has it, to "let the mantra come of its own accord." Then you realized you were seeing the word spelled in your mind’s eye so you tried to sever the word from the representation of its sound. At last you were left with the word, period, without sound, without meaning, without embodiment of any kind or even the ghost of embodiment, and that was as abstract as you could get, but the fact that I was talking about it meant this was still a step away from pure immateriality. That was when I realized I was nicely toasted. It was kind of a relief that Fiona was with Cody because had there been a chance of inviting her over afterward I’d have been unable to relax and enjoy the rest of the dinner. On the other hand, I’d wasted what surely was a mesmerizing routine, sown my seed to the wind, as it were. Why couldn’t I be more like Lloyd, who had no inhibitions about spinning a weird rap at the drop of a hat with an attractive woman, seemingly for the fun of it, moving on until he found what he wanted? He was a determinedly free spirit, all right, on call 24-7. He was exhausting! When confiding in me about his latest conquest, which he always described as his new love, he would claim, annoyingly, to be shy.
I never did meet the guest of honor, a large man with a
beard, but I think he was a curator from some far flung university gallery,
hot to document the "scene," and everyone was pretending not
to care enough to kiss his ass. I just pretended better than most. Before
I left to stumble home alone, Lloyd and I chatted about the meeting next
night for Organasm. All the Sector Mothers were going to assemble outside
the fence at noon and Lloyd would be letting us in for the first time
to the site that Sharon, the Real Estate Mother, had rooted out like a
smelly truffle. It was an old mustard factory, he said, and there were
still all sorts of gargantuan cedar vats full of mustard seed and other
cool macro playthings throughout the extensive grounds. I said goodnight,
snuck a last look at Fiona’s ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths
percent pure profile, and exited into the charmed quiet of dark buildings
and cracked sidewalks, a no man’s land in which no yuppie or real
estate agent would dare venture. It was dangerous enough, in other words,
to be perfectly safe. I’d lived all over, in Poppa bear’s chair,
and Junior bear’s chair, but this one felt just right. It was magnificently
forgotten, it was tenuous, it was home. At last. A few months later, Ernesto’s
storefront was invaded by kids with Mac-10’s and Halloween masks,
and not long after that he was gone to Argentina or wherever the hell
he was from.
Continue on to part two
t h e q u a r t e r
l y w i l l i
a m s b u r g a
r t s r e v i e w
w b u r g = ( a
r t s + c o n t e x t + l
i s t i n g s )
( w i l l i a m s b u r g . b r o o k l y n )