8: Spare Room

The first month I was in London I rented a room from a person I met on Spareroom.co.uk. She had a few other tenants and one in particular was from Italy and was having a tough time surviving in the city. I realized pretty quickly my landlord and I had differing political views and soon every meal time began to feel like a chamber opera. I decided to write a libretto and then when I was having a tea in the grand cafe at the V&A found myself enraptured by the piano player who was improvising on some familiar french classical themes. A tenor rose from a nearby table and launched into a Mozart aria and afterwards I approached him to see if he would sing the parts of my libretto. I learned Carlo met Antimo when they were both doing cruise ships and he was open to collaborating with me on my project. We recorded his parts a week later at his friends home and then had Antimo join us at Goldsmiths with a mezzo-soprano I met in a Nunhead boutique. We snuck into the side of the building so as not to cross the picket line, and after some pleading with the administration got into a big hall with a grand piano, and recorded another of the parts as well as some of Antimo’s improvisations. Antimo was playing on the Costa Concordia while it ran aground. I realized, as usual, my pretenses about art are less interesting than the lives and experiences of the subjects that figure in the work. Ian Marshall, the instructor in the Graphics and Time-based Media department has been helping me build characters in a video game engine called Unreal that he described an ‘infinite horizon of false promise.’ At this juncture I plan to bring in the different vocal parts and have the characters perform them in a digital world, maybe a combination of the V&A Cafe and the Costa Concordia.

Spare Room Libretto

Genteel Rentier: My family owned land and I went to fine schools

Franchie: I came here on a temporary visa to work in the service industry

Genteel Rentier: I write reviews for a respectable culture journal

Francie: I couldn’t work because of the pandemic and if I returned I would lose my visa

Genteel Rentier: I’m also working on a screenplay

Franchie: I’ve spent most of my savings on rent over the last year

Genteel Rentier: I need to find another renter for my other property on Spareroom.co.uk

Franchie: I’m so stressed I have a herpe in my nose

Ambivalent Artist: Spareroom.co.uk is an absolute nightmare. It fills me with abyssal depression.

Franchie: They asked me to wear high heels at work and take off my heart necklace, they don’t even know that it is Tiffany’s!

Genteel Rentier: How unsophisticated! (lots of coloratura)

Ambivalent Artist: What does a life with dignity look like?

Franchie: No one is nice to me at work except Farouk in room service

Ambivalent Artist: I think people should not be expected to work more than 15 hours a week

Genteel Rentier: You better not give any people hand-outs because they will not work!

Ambivalent Artist: All of this constant moving around and making things to sell is literally killing everything on the planet

Genteel Rentier: I’m working on a screenplay about misguided activists in their youth

Ambivalent Artist: How do you change these deeply ingrained axioms?

Genteel Rentier: Why do all these woke people want to take down statues and erase history?

Franchie: I can’t find any radicchio here, at home there are so many kinds of radicchio

Ambivalent Artist: I’ll try to find some radicchio

Frachie: Facebook told me this day 10 years ago I was in the Maldives.

Ambivalent Artist: the coral reefs are dying, the islands are disappearing under rising tides and one of the islands is entirely covered with trash

Frachie: I don’t even have energy to do pilates

Character Test