A Visit to Star Garden
Supporting union strippers and repudiating airplane wine. Plus big Spigot news!
Announcement
Rejoice: Spigot is taking to the airwaves.
Thanks to the brilliant characters at Montez Press Radio, whom you may have read about in major media outlets and esteemed art publications alike, I’ll soon be hosting a monthly program that reprises the format of this screed sheet you have grown to know and love in real time. There will be art. There will be wine. There will be bitchy asides. Beyond that it’s anybody’s guess.
There will also definitely be guests. If you have any ideas about people you’d like me to interview, harry, or vibe with, send them my way. Spigot is here to serve you.
The first broadcast of The Spigot Radio Hour is scheduled for Wednesday, April 24, at 6 pm. More details forthcoming. And like Spigot, Montez relies on the support of subscribers like yourself.
Wine
Caelus Vino Bianco. In my recent travels I took a couple of Alaska Airlines flights. It was the best deal—who can say why?—and I only had to ride one 737 Max 9 in the bargain.
Somewhere between Dallas and Burbank, toward the end of a long day of travel (which involved me dropping my phone on the subway tracks at Myrtle-Wyckoff, but that’s another story), I decided to sample Alaska’s inflight wares. It’s a theoretically oeno-conscious airline; they’ll haul your case of Oregon pinot for free along their West Coast routes. For less than the price of a drink at Star Garden—see below)—I thus procured a tiny bottle of a white wine called Caelus.
Unfortunately the marketing gimmick means little for Alaska’s wine savvy. Caelus is from the Italian Piedmont, half Chardonnay, half Cortese, and all terrible. The notes I produced over Nevada neatly characterize the experience. Feel free to imagine it as a poem you came across in Heavy Traffic.
I do not recommend drinking Caelus. On the bright side, I’m not sure you could find it if you wanted to. And it’s really not much worse than the wine you get on any domestic flight.
If you’re curious about what to drink in coach, SF Gate published a solid story on the subject a few years ago. If you’re more of a business-class type—or just a voyeur—Singapore Airlines seems to have the best high-end wine program. Unsurprisingly US airlines suck across the board.
Performance
One last story from Los Angeles.
In North Hollywood there is a strip club; you may have heard of it, it’s called Star Garden. In May of last year, after disputes over performer safety and other issues, it became only the second such establishment in the US to unionize, the first being San Francisco’s Lusty Lady way back in 1996. With the club reopening last August after some months shuttered, it was a feel-good tale broadcast on NPR, enthused over in your preferred outlet for the Associated Press, and even memorialized in Jacobin. (If you’d like to support the dancers of Star Garden, you can visit their web shop.)
During my week in LA for Frieze and Felix, Friday was my night off. An old friend and I would go for dinner an Italian place in the Valley he had been curious about, Little Tony’s. It was unspectacular but homey and proximal to our ultimate desination. After our penne, to support organized labor, to #supportwomen, we would take a trip to Star Garden.
Friday was also the day of the steadiest, hardest rain I had ever seen in Los Angeles. It caught me and seemingly everyone else by surprise. First mist, then drizzle. When we got to Star Garden at the relatively early hour of ten, we realized that it would not be stopping, would only get steadier and heavier as the hours ticked on. The rivulets that had begun sweeping the gutters gave the night a desolate cast. Which was perfect: desolate is the best way to feel when visiting a strip club.
At the entrance to Star Garden a bearded man in a black windbreaker blazoned SECURITY huddled unhappily under an awning. Ushering us into the vestibule, he gave us a familiar if overly formal preamble: no touching, no photography, one drink minimum, blah blah blah. The cover was $25—a bit steep, but a small price to pay to be an #ally.
Drawing back a heavy old curtain, we entered the show floor. There was not a soul in sight. No customers, no dancers, just a thin stage with a thin pole, tables pocking the room toward the back around a pool table, and a deserted bar. It was dim but also too bright, the lumen level of a questionable dentist’s office.
A troll-like man in a gray hoodie lurked at our elbow behind a plexi-topped lectern, collecting the cover charge. In a concerted mumble he delivered the same speech we’d just heard from the security guard. The repetition was a workplace inefficiency, it seemed to me, but I’m no businessman. Cover, photos, no touching, blah blah blah.
In a twist, however, the man in the hoodie punctuated his stipulation of the one-drink minimum by leveling a finger at my friend.
You look visibly intoxicated, he told him. The accusation was laughable, given that we had each exactly one glass of wine with dinner and my associate outweighs me by thirty pounds.
Do I look visibly intoxicated? I asked. Are you telling us to leave?
No, you’re fine, the man in the hoodie said. His tone shifted: I can sell him a drink. But just one.
Visiting Los Angeles, you sometimes get overcome by a sense of artifice; every “nice” house you walk into looks like a VRBO rental. Now the evening’s creeping weirdness turned Star Garden’s bar into a set, the fulsome array of liquor bottles props. Everything had a strange name like Gemstone Gin or Turkey’s Nest Whisky. Like the rest of the club, it was deserted, with no one to serve us our one drink.
The man in the gray hoodie shuffled over. Voilà: the bartender.
Just so you know, he said, our liquor is all wine-based.
I asked for two Modelos, which I assumed he would pull from the row of a dozen taps that separated us. Instead he produced two stubby bottles from under the counter and grudgingly popped the tops. Sixteen dollars apiece, he announced, payable only by credit card.
I tend to be the kind of person who goes with the flow, but even by the standards of a strip club, this was an exorbitant sum. As is ever the problem with activism, solidarity was turning out to be a lot less erotic than I had expected.