All the Beauty and the Spigot

Robbery at the Oscars! Plus EMA, a 9/11 art conspiracy?, and the latest in branded water

Author portrait

Much love to the anonymous Spigot fan who contributed the above piece of art. By chance it arrived not long before my birthday, an event that naturally puts one in mind of one’s impending demise. Distracting! Apologies, thus, for a longer-than-typical silence.

Film (and Art)

Still from Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, 2022. At right: possibly the author and RAS

Far be it from Spigot to comment upon anything as coarse as “popular culture,” but a word on the Oscars: terrible! Apparently that’s the norm, but in this case I was actually watching the ceremony, rooting as I was for our hometown heroes Nan Goldin, Laura Poitras, a certain Executive Producer, and the rest of the team behind All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, who were robbed in the contest for Best Feature Documentary.

Navalny? I genuinely thought that by now Hollywood would have forgotten that the war in Ukraine was a thing. As for Navalny himself, he’s said some pretty dubious things in the past—Neon should’ve Swift Boated his ass. How could you, members of the Academy, in good conscience vote for a man who quoted Rick Sanchez in court?

Moreover All the Beauty and the Bloodshed deserved to win because it’s a fantastic movie. Admittedly I am not a neutral observer: I was at the Met five years ago, on March 10, 2018, when Goldin hoarsely called out “Mic check” in the front of the Temple of Dendur and a couple dozen activists tossed fake Oxy bottles into its reflecting pool. I was not, to be clear, a member of the protest (to my discredit), just an informed onlooker there to make some sympathetic social media posts and offer my applause.

If you haven’t seen All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, you should. It may very well make you cry. Both the AIDS epidemic and opioid crisis are presented in brutal emotional detail, perhaps not what you’d expect from the maker of Citizenfour. Of course Goldin herself has seen a lot of shit, which we see as well, via the trove of arresting, joyous, and harsh images that she has produced while photographing her life over the years.

Still from Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, 2022

The movie is cannily structured, toggling fluidly between the past and present, framed by the story of Goldin’s family and a quiet interrogation of the weight of repression—a transposition, in a way, of the theme SILENCE=DEATH. While it’s a rough movie, it paints an exultant picture of the 1980s in New York (among other archival prizes, there’s terrific footage that captures the charisma of David Wojnarowicz). And it does have a rare real-world happy ending, essentially, despite the Sacklers’ ultimate penalty being kind of a drop in the bucket. Plus you get some gallows laughs. While labeling prop pill bottles on a bus to Cambridge, MA—where Harvard still has not taken down the Sackler name from their Arthur A. Sackler Museum—Goldin quips: “I love working in a material I know—blue Valium bottles.”

Books

When I finish learning the federal rules of evidence, it’s over for you hoes.

The Internet
A Gelatin follow-up: did they do 9/11?

guantanamo bey @lakefieldmoscow

there’s a dot-com millionaire at the center of thomas pynchon’s 9/11 novel, “bleeding edge.” have a feeling he’s based on josh harris, /the/ '90s dot-com millionaire. harris funded the gelatin art collective that built an illegal balcony off the north tower in 2000. 🪡

Beverages (Alcoholic)

Dassai 45. Kids, drinking isn’t always glamorous. Sometimes you do it when you have to work well into the evening; sometimes you need false courage to write. In such scenarios, my go-to beverage is sake.

For whatever strange metabolic reason, I find rice win invigorating. In an ideal universe I’d drink the offerings at the East Village’s Sakaya, a refined little store in the East Village, but sometimes you’re stuck in Queens and are low on cash and what’s available in the local outlets will have to do. Dassai 45 is higher-end low-end, running in the mid-twenty-buck range. It’s not bone dry, which is preferable if you’re not particularly interested in food, but I wouldn’t call it sumptuous either. The texture is deceptively rounded to start but collapses quickly into the sublimating burn of grain alcohol. The flavor starts out with bubblegum and ends with anise, with a plausibly deniable taste of seawater in the middle.

My recommendation: If you’re going low, go all the way to the bottom. You’re better off with a classic eight-dollar green bottle of Gekkeikan.

Beverages (Non-Alcoholic)

Chase water. Your bank? Collapsing. Mine? Offering its customers delicious room-temperature cans of branded water. In a few short years these will be our real currency.

Music

I didn’t mean for this birthday issue of Spigot to circle around addiction and death, but here we are.

Lately I find myself listening a lot to the brooding, loosely structured, annihilation-obsessed Past Life Martyred Saints, an album by EMA from 2011. The artist behind the acronym, Erika M. Anderson, isn’t exactly obscure; I just never caught on to her (or her previous act, Gowns) back in the day. Here, she sounds like a descendent of Chan Marshall but in love with country and eerie folk more than blues, a little more linear and haunted by the emptiness of the Great Plains.

Past Life Martyred Saints looks obsessively backwards, picking at old wounds and lingering, unhealed ones. Its milieu is plagued by drugs and self-mutilation, in both emotional and literal senses—not so different from All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, really. In the song “California,” Anderson sings:

You never seen the ocean
You never been on a plane . . . .
Wasted away alone on the plains
What's it like to be small-town and gay?
Fuck it baby, I know you'll never change

Whereas Laura Poitras was making a documentary, however, EMA made a horror movie. The album is full of ghosts. Siroccos can drive one made; so can the wind across the prairie, carrying on it both lullabies and dirges.

Maybe it’s not the best song on the album, but I can’t get the chorus to “Anteroom” out of my head:

If this time through
We don’t get it right
I’ll come back to you
In another life.

It echoes a song penned a few years before Past Life Martyred Saints, by the British artist Ben Wallers, aka the Rebel. Cheer up, folks. Life isn’t a poor player fretting for an hour; we’re just doing a run-through. Let’s try that scene again, from the top.