Silent Barn is a DIY music venue, art space, videogame laboratory, and punk house discreetly tucked away on the border of Bushwick and Ridgewood in New York City. Unsurprisingly, Silent Barn’s bathroom experiences heavy traffic while suffering from the horrifying lack of regular cleanup and maintenance typical to any communal living situation or unorthodox showspace.
The politics of group living make it nearly impossible to impose a regular bathroom cleaning regimen, much less make sense of whose turn it is to buy a can of Clorox and a new sponge, and if your place happens to be a punk house, the argument will quickly turn to the environmental and moral implications of using Clorox in the first place. Before you know it, you’re in a fight with a dreadlocked vegan crusty in which you are helpless to explain that dumpstered butcher paper and a dollop of Whole Foods vinegar is fucking bullshit so far as soap scum is concerned, much less the santorum-like effluence coating the floor in the wake of an all ages show. These types of debate typically end in a wash while the floors and walls remain covered in the makings of the next great public health crisis.
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This is where low-budget videomaking comes in.
Last week I found myself stuck without a location less than twenty-four hours before a music video shoot. We had intended to shoot on a roof, but the weather turned foul. We then relocated to a friend’s bathroom, but it was revealed, the night before shooting, that his residence was without hot water. This revelation did not gel with the fact that our video involved covering a cast of unpaid models in thick green milk-based slime, which they would presumably want to wash off with warm water before going home. We racked our brains trying to come up with an appropriate third way, and were soon calling up our friends at the Silent Barn. Hoping for the best, we asked what we could offer them in exchange for a place to shoot, short of cold hard cash. Without a moment’s hesitation, the reply was “clean our bathroom.”
I agreed with a swiftness that they found alarming. Years of being shipped against my will to cut-rate sleepaway camps where my quiet and chubby nature had relegated me to the position of “latrine swabber” had prepared me well for this moment. There was no toilet I couldn’t clean, no shower I couldn’t make gleam. I would be joined on this mission by my cinematographer, Chris Person, whose working-class New England genetics fairly twitched in anticipation of hands-on dirty work. Here’s how it went down.
