I borrowed a camera from my friend Jim and set out with my tripod to make a little movie. I had decided to make a short film about a nearby fire hydrant, and I'd spent the last couple nights puzzling out the scenes in my mind. The green hydrant up the street is leaking steadily out from its side caps, and the water drips down on the bed of leaves around the base. It's really rather pretty in sort of a decrepit-city kind of way.

I had a loose mental storyboard for my first movie, but I really had no idea what editing the footage would be like so I took much more than I thought I'd need. Also, I wanted to capture some moments like when cars and people went by, and was obliged to start the tape running when it seemed one of these was about to occur and wait a while to see if it indeed took place. I was on the wet ground next to the hydrant getting a nice close-up of drips when a guy on a bike went by, turned around and came back up the street toward me. He watched me filming for a while without saying anything. I felt kind of special, like a real filmmaker. And this my first film!

"Are you filming that for artistic reasons or are you going to report it to the city?" he finally asked.

I told him I had just got some really great video editing software and I was anxious as anything to try it out. I added that I had intended to report the leaky hydrant but had put it off until I could shoot some video of it.

He said, "So is this a study of the nature of water or a commentary on the city's faltering infrastructure?" He really said this! It took me right back to when I was an art student and all the other art students would present their new work and say things like "This painting is about the difference between the real wisdom we acquire from experience and the wisdom we believe we acquire from experience." Everyone would talk about that. Then the next person would show us their work and say "This is a series of small sculptures exploring the nature of obsession with political difference as both destructive and instructive. It's really my attempt to come to a sense of identity as a second-generation American." We'd all talk about that for a while. And then it would be my turn, and I'd say "This is a glove I made out of human hair and fish bones. When you put it on it looks like you have a big paw."

(It's true.) I knew that there were some deeper issues that might be evoked by the big hairy glove, but I wasn't really thinking much about them when I was making it, and I didn't much feel like talking about them afterwards, either. I just wanted to see if people were as fascinated by the paw as I was. If they were, then everything else would take care of itself. Sometimes I found myself being deliberately dense in our art critiques to avoid having to tear out and examine the theoretical guts of everything I made.

So I just said umm, I just thought it would be neat to make a little film about this fire hydrant.

After a while I had loads of footage and went home to edit it together. Funny, but it's actually rather hard to make films. My movie was almost exactly one minute long, because I wanted to set it to a short tune by Mogwai that comes in at 50-odd seconds. I had about fifteen times this much total footage and barely managed to cobble it together into something amateurishly decent. But I was quite proud of the results. I had the next door neighbors over to watch it, and they said they liked it.