The Second Annual Spigot Holiday Gift Guide
Alison towels, Shimizu trowels, Annie Sprinkle's dissertation, and the Taylor holiday EP. Plus Cotes du Rhone at a five-finger discount
Holiday gift guides are so, “Look at me, I have disposable income!” Since my bid for AirMail sponsorship was usurped yet again, Spigot and Spigot alone brings you the following list of seasonal items that will help you feel unto your loved ones as smug as Magi pulling up barnside.
Linens
Wilder Alison Beach Towel
Lacking a local studio, the peripatetic Wilder Alison has for several weeks been working behind Kaje’s roll-down door in Gowanus. The artist presides over a colorful array of simmering pots, dying swatches of creamy wool as long as a beach towel and half as wide. Alison carefully edges these cloths with rectangles of light green, lavender, canary, reddish pink, and so on, all to create raw materials for the regular yet unpredictable geometric paintings of the artist’s series “slit subjects.” The swatches festooning Kaje will be sliced and stitched in complicated combinations that fulfill the artist’s permutative drive, with the result sort of like Ada Lovelace reading Monique Wittig in postindustrial New England.
Writing, drawing, algorithm, mockup, raw cloth and dye, and the ultimate stretched canvases themselves: every facet of Alison’s project has its own weight and aesthetic valence. At Kaje, the dyed strips become sumptuous quasi-paintings of their own; collectively they form an intricate installation; during a series of performances, they served as a theatrical mise en scene. They dangle from an incidental kinetic sculpture, an ingenious tiered circular drying rack that hangs from the ceiling like an enormous chandelier.
The various tiers of this rack can also be raised or lowered, making, in yet another twist, the swaths of wool akin to performers as Alison and/or some designee(s) hoist and lower them in a semaphoric dance. Are they flags? Sails? Puppets? The bearers of some secret other layer of signification? The show closes December 16, so you only have a couple days to see for yourself.
While you can’t actually buy the swatches Alison is dying and displaying—though, I dunno, make them an offer?— Kaje is selling towels based on the geometric abstractions the artist will eventually create from the raw materials. The towels are made of jacquard-woven terrycloth and are perfect to drape yourself on seductively for the thirst-trap snaps you’ll take on this winter’s snowbird getaway.
Housewares
Nostalgia Three-in-One Breakfast Station
Perfect for a homesick college student’s dorm room or a dreary kitchen nook at PMC Media, this delightful combo griddle/toaster oven/coffee maker is sure to raise anyone’s flagging morale. The scent of bacon wafting past underlings’ cubicles into your C-suite will bring you back to happier days: waking up as a child every Memorial Day weekend to climb into the luxury box and watch Emerson Fittipaldi battle Al Unser Jr. for titles at the Brickyard; waking up in September 2023 when your busted-up jalopy of an art magazine was still classic-car-club material.
Garden
Shimizu Landscaping Equipment Trowel
As an inveterate urbanite, I don’t know what one actually does with a trowel, but it appears to be a miniature shovel of some kind, and since Trevor Shimizu has turned from making hilariously raunchy paintings and skate videos to being our generation’s Monet, I guess he’s gotten into gardening? For some reason this tool available from Apogee Graphics has a ruler engraved on it and comes in an adorable little coffin filled with wood chips, which is how I would like to be buried: aromatically. While Shimizu is not required to paint the lid of my casket, he has painted a different landscape on the top of each of these implements’ boxes, unique for each of the ten editioned versions of the work.
Support Apogee! They also sell Voluntary Human Extinction Movement t-shirts—perfect for a niece or a nephew—and baseball caps with ants that coincidentally look a little like . . .
Rare Books
Documenta 5 First Edition Catalogue
. . . the cover of the 1972 publication for Harald Szeemann’s groundbreaking Documenta 5. When did Gagosian go into the antiquarian business? I don’t know, but the world’s biggest gallery is selling a copy of Szeemann’s opus for, like, a million dollars. The cover was designed by none other than Ed Ruscha, whose show you really should catch at MoMA before it closes in January, or at LACMA beginning in April 2024.
Annie Sprinkle’s PhD Dissertation
Yes, you read that right. The Documenta 14 participant, ecosexual evangelist, and, of course, Hall of Fame porn star got a doctorate from the now-defunct Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco in 2002. A copy of it is available from the amazing people at Fugitive Materials, an NYC-based finder and purveyor of rare archival printed matter. “Providing Educational Opportunities to Sex Workers” was based on a survey of some 150 SWs and used by Sprinkle to develop a multifaceted workshop; a copy was previously shown at this cool-looking queer museum in Berlin.
Spigot: The Magazine, vol. 1
I made this zine initially for the Printed Matter book fair at Brooklyn Museum, then for the lovely Press Play event at Pioneer Works this past weekend—and readers just can’t get enough!
Spigot is proud to offer a holiday edition of its first and possibly only print edition, “The Artforum Debacle,” which compiles two posts written a year apart that trenchantly bookend the dawn of the magazine’s PMC era and its seeming sunset as a relevant institution. Hand-bound in festive red ribbon! Venmo me $6 American or the equivalent in your home currency (that’s a cover price of $5, plus postage), and I’ll send you a copy.
And while you’re mentally browsing the imaginary Spigot shop, why not gift yourself or a loved one or a frenemy whose ignorance you want to subtly mock a paid subscription to Spigot itself—the last outlet for art criticism that truly matters and a powerful new voice in the world of oenophilia? Paying subscribers receive an official Spigot bracelet as a symbol of my genuine gratitude (now in two colorways), plus the occasional members-only post. If you send me enough money, I’m at your disposal as a virtual sommelier.
Music
Among freaks like myself it’s practically conventional wisdom that Taylor Swift’s evermore is a stealth Christmas album (the record’s lovely “’Tis the Damn Season” being only the most straightforward evidence). But no need to go the now-familiar cryptographic route for Swiftian holiday content; the artist released an honest-to-god Xmas album all the way back in 2007. The Target original EP featured four covers and two middling originals, though “Christmas Must Mean Something More” is a tantalizing foreshadowing of the Speak Now Vault track “Electric Touch”—just change “Jesus” to “baby,” as the saying goes. The pubescent Swift’s whiplashing segue from “Santa Baby” to “Silent Night” is a subject for future PhD dissertations, though the latter isn’t bad if you like that sort of thing; they sort of power-rock it. Pretend you’re stoned at a megachurch.
The opener, meanwhile, is a bemusing version of the modern classic “Last Christmas.” Taylor’s take is flirty and naïve compared to Wham’s! breathy, tragic one. You can’t top George Michael, but I would be curious to hear the Swift of today treat it like a track she penned for evermore, all teardrops in a snowy wood. Finally: a song in her oeuvre that deserves a rerecord.
Wine
The most expensive red wine by the glass at Metrograph Commissary (for free)
It was a dark and stormy night—no really, it was—and I was meeting E. for a drink. It’s something that happens about 3.5 times per year: not bad for New York City. We would have martinis and then go to an event for are.na. Both of us were invited but neither of us entirely knew what are.na was, or why the party was happening in two separate basements down the street from each other on the Lower East Side.
The day had been as sunless as the evening was, rain throughout, and I had spent it alternately ghost-writing an architecture book and downloading Russian pornography. At some point in the past year my interest in the latter subject had become increasingly garbled, with a gradual shift of the erotic function from the visual to the archival, to cross-referencing capsule descriptions and log lines and torrent titles, to tracking the careers of obscure performers. It had become a meditative experience during which entire hours could disappear. It was horny, sure, but the action was taking place strictly above the neck. I downloaded files that I would never open, or that I would click on to inspect their image quality and discard if they were too grainy, and otherwise set aside for god knows when. The conflation and confluence of the death drive vis-à-vis utter waste of time, the fear of death displaced onto a cataloging impulse, the fear of death displaced onto a sexual impulse, and eroticism displaced into the compulsion to collect made the behavior the most powerful drug I had ever sampled and the only one whose addictive pull I had ever truly felt.
We couldn’t figure out anywhere fun to meet, so instead we chose Metrograph Commissary, a familiar, indifferent sort of place.
When I arrived, E. had grabbed the far corner of the bar’s ell. It was a perfectly cozy spot for the weather. Sitting before her was a martini—which I was horrified to see had been served in a tiny coupe, a filigree of ripoff retro-ism that had stopped being cute a decade ago. With the charm of crushed gravel, the bartender ignored my request to make my first drink dirty. When I asked for the second dirtier, he made it just the same. The guy clearly didn’t want to be there, which I get; I had been downloading Russian pornography all day instead of working. But when I stopped to work I at least did a good job.
E. and I had procrastinated long enough; it was time to go back out into the elements, to this party for whatever it was. We got our check, tipped responsibly, and then pit-stopped before heading out. The toilets at the Commissary flank the kitchen door in a little nook that also houses the by-the-glass wine cart, open bottles on top and fresh ones resting on the bottom. When E. and I reconnoitered, one of us—and I will allow you, dear reader, to guess who—blurted, “I want to steal one of these bottles of wine.” There was a hem-hawing colloquy, a few furtive glances, and then one of us—OK, this was me—grabbed the classiest-looking bottle and trotted, nay skipped down the back stairs, out the front door and into the night where, miraculously, the rain had stopped.
La Roche Bussière Le Claux is not intended for mushroom quesadillas, which is what we consumed the pilfered bottle with around the corner at El Cabrón Taqueria on Essex Street. You’re supposed to drink it with Metrograph’s desultory bistro fare, roast chicken or steak frites. But it wouldn’t matter much. The wine is clunky and disjoint, sweet and fruity at the front and tannic at the back with a scrubby patch in between: a Côtes du Rhône styled like a mullet.
The Le Claux is not, my friends, worth the $19-a-glass asking price. Metrograph is fine; it just kind of sucks, like a lot of stuff. El Cabrón Taqueria, however, is very charming and offers corkage for the very reasonable fee of $15.