In the late 90s, a woman moves from New York to LA to teach part time at an art school. She finds the landscape lonely and empty. She rejoices that it's her first time with a stable enough income to have a place of her own, since she first became single and broke. She dreams about being a writer, and spends a lot of time masturbating and calling sex lines. She begins to regularly see a dominant male lover. She is unimpressed by the LA art world. She thinks, "Unlike NYC, no one in the LA art world struck her as especially admirable or smart. There was just one game in town, and that was neocorporate, neoformalist conceptualism." She learns how to make connections to philosophy—though she feels unqualified to make them—and to adopt the airs of an art critic at the school where she teaches, where the goal is to erase identity from art. She comes to think of S/M as a utopian ideal of role-playing and theater, as it lacks the embarrassing sentimentality of "theatrical" theater. She rents out a room to an aspiring singer/songwriter and they produce a "philosophy rave" together in the desert to huge publicity and acclaim. The art teacher is amused at how easy it was. Then, the singer/songwriter gives up on her dreams and the woman eventually kicks her out for not paying rent. The art teacher muses on the director Jerzy Grotowski's ideas about acting and emotion and on Foucault's ideas about "technologies of the self" and their connections to S/M. She remembers the first time she met her dominant partner and muses on the submissive writing of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva in exile. She thinks about how S/M can provide true connection and preempt radical love, even be the practice of it.