Clip Show Anniversary Episode

Celebrating Spigot's first anniversary! Plus the perfect summer cocktail in a can

Friends! Spigot is a year old.

Thank you to everyone who has read, who has offered a kind word, who has told me about a show I should see or a book I should read, who’s sat around yakking with me in a bar or café. In particular, thank you to the paid subscribers who make my life a little ea$ier and give me a little more time to write. I’m truly touched that anyone cares enough to open their wallet or cares to read at all.

Because it’s mid-August, I’m going to take the classically lazy year-in-review tack of rehashing the last twelve months’ highlights rather than writing anything new. I kicked things off a year with a dismantling of a bloated hype-fest. Last week I penned an exegesis of the intoxicating yet maddening musical act Salem. In between, an atlas of art and a Baedeker of booze, with music, books, and movies strewn along the way.

One thing I’ve learned over the past year: people really do love it when you say something sucks. The best-read column in Spigot’s brief history is from earlier this summer, when I discovered that the Gadsby Picasso show at the Brooklyn Museum was beyond redemption, despite my fervent desire to be the one contrarian shrewd enough find some good in it. And who could forget the witless spectacle of Buck Ellison at Luhring Augustine?

The eyeballs you get for carving something up is a little depressing, of course, since I really like to write about things I love and shouting out people who deserve it. I saw some great shows this year: Na Mira at Company, Raphael Montañez-Ortiz at El Museo del Barrio, too many to name. Readers like raves too (especially the artists and their galleries), but it’s hard to snare a broad audience with plaudits. I’m still hoping to figure out how to do that without succumbing to hyperbole or lobotomized positivity.

Happily, people did respond well to what was probably Spigot’s most substantial piece of criticism thus far—my two-part grappling with Amalia Ulman’s show of scenester caricatures at Jenny’s, which pitched itself on a terra infirma I find myself criss-crossing endlessly, the shifting boundary between the lowlands of complicity and the kingdom of critique.

Me surveying Spigot’s vast readership

So far, Spigot has a pretty good record of talent spotting. To pick just a couple timely examples, Jasmine Gregory, whose King’s Leap show I wrote about last October, has two solo shows coming up this fall, at Martina Simeti in Milan and at the CAPC Bordeaux. Drake Carr, whose work I praised in a post for premium subscribers only, will be doing live portraits for Artists Space at the Armory Show in just a few weeks.

I can only really think when I bounce ideas around with other people. For a long time I viewed this as a failing, an intellectual weakness. Eventually, though, I accepted that I had to shuck off monadic ideas about being a “real” intellectual and operate in dialogue with the people around me. Spigot is an extension of that process. It’s been genuinely meaningful in a way I never would have expected.

I hope you’ll stick with me for another year, dear reader. Tell your friends to take a look. Send me some spare change if you can. And drop me a line; I love to hear from you.

Music

I don’t know about you all, but my favorite song of Spigot’s inaugural year is Flannery Silva’s “Passions,” which I described a few months ago as “a bouncy karaoke song about degradation.” (You can read more about Silva’s art there too.) The song’s mood of “blankly participatory eroticism” extends to the video, where a topless Silva, clad in a perversely chaste head kerchief and white stilettos, vamps it up on some dusty trailer-ish terrain, with animated blue butterflies flapping about to cover her exposed parts to keep things safe for YouTube. The music meanwhile is purely candy, with a strange aftertaste. 

News: Silva put out a new track a few months ago that taps deeper into the weirdo-religious side of Laurel Canyon iconography, titled “I’m Growing a Cross Around My Neck.” I’m eagerly awaiting an album and tour.

Summer Drinking

Cutwater Long Island Iced Tea at the movies, August 2023

Wine deserves its own entire year-in-review column—maybe for paying subscribers?—so instead I’ll highlight the perfect thing to drink as the summer winds down: Long Island Iced Tea in a can.

The proliferation of cocktails in a can is one of the stranger developments of late, given how a scant time ago people lost their minds if a bartender struck a match and singed some orange peel to rub on the rim of your glass. Remember absurdly large cubes of ice? Remember “shrub”?

That degree of fussiness was doomed when Americans started drinking hard seltzer, a rebarbative lite beer for pseudo-sophisticates. White Claw was just the tip of the spear: now liquor store shelves are stocked with canned margarita, canned rum and coke, canned gin and tonic, ad nauseum.

Recently, however, I realized that canned cocktails are good for one thing: sneaking alcohol into movies. In the Spigot cinematic universe, Long Island Iced Tea is the perennial sip of the summer. It’s perfect for drinking dockside or in a darkened cinema frigid with AC, both for the same reason: you get the most bang for your buck. Given legal restrictions, the canned version is only 15%, essentially that of your average zinfandel and the max you can sell in a lot of places without a special license.

Ennervated by the Gerwig-Nolan forcefeed of the past several weeks, I went rogue for my annual trip to a summer blockbuster. Mission Impossible—no discourse required. I purchased two cans of Cutwater brand LIT and met a friend at the time-honored Regal Cinema at Union Square.

Cracking the drink open during a trailer for Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, I was pleasantly surprised. The alcohol flavor wasn’t too acrid, nor did it taste too much like metal. A real Long Island Iced Tea is a little more cola forward; Cutwater must have been deemed that emphasis trashy, because the flavor skewed toward a Manhattan. I missed the sugar rush; I missed the vanilla.

As time went on, I caught pleasing notes of cherry and, strangely, banana, though I’m not sure if that development was due to the metamorphosing magic of oxidization or to fact that in lieu of popcorn my date had been feeding me psilocybin mushrooms. I lost track of the drink’s taste as I became engrossed in the hilarious plot, which features, yes, a superintelligent AI bent on world domination. I got the sense there were some heavy last-minute expository reshoots once ChatGPT hit the market.

The rest of the evening took exciting turns involving, variously, gladhanding by a sloshed candidate for Brooklyn District 14 school board and my accidental implication in what turned out to be a lover’s quarrel between two finance bros because of my devotion of Taylor Swift. Thank you, Cutwater Long Island Iced Tea. Two thumbs up!