Cyclorama – the Shape of Things, a Video in 7 Parts, 2021, in the background. All photography by Domenick Ammirati.
For this very special, un-paywalled edition of the Critics’ Table, writer and critic Domenick Ammirati of the newsletter Spigot recounts his kaleidoscopic Tuesday—including a marathon reading featuring bold-type name authors at Gladstone Gallery, a party at publicist Kaitlin Phillips’s apartment, and a glimpse of the edgelords on the Lower East Side. Ammirati narrates an evening of anxiety and hope—and its dismal conclusion. Next week: Pamela Sneed on Kara Walker’s new show, Whitney Mallett on Bad Girls, and much more. Subscribe to the Critics’ Table now.
In November 2016 I was in Greece. Athens.
A woman I was in love with came to visit from New York. On election night we attended a talk by Terre Thaemlitz, a contrarian DJ and musician who switches pronouns and genders with a kind of aggression. It’s genuinely prescient, in retrospect, the emphasis on trans issues that Documenta 14—full disclosure: I was working there—had woven in, largely at the impetus of Paul B. Preciado. American politics have now grimly cemented his intellectual legacy. Didn’t you catch the ad? He’s for you, she’s for they/them.
The performance artist Georgia Sagri had planned to have people over to her space to watch the returns but changed her mind at the last minute. Thus, after the lecture we appropriated the projector from my office and lay on the floor in my small, awkward living room nibbling on meat and nuts, drinking wine, while everything revealed itself to be not what it had seemed.
Let no one say I am a bad employee: The next day, after I had woken up R. to affirm the truth of the results we had witnessed, I went to work. It was muggy. The office was deserted. My boss, the writer Quinn Latimer, materialized briefly and disappeared.
I had nowhere to go. Home? R. was crying at the temple of Artemis. I sat looking past my computer screen out the window. It does not rain much in Athens (you may recall the last few years’ terrible fires in Attica). That day, however, the sky darkened unexpectedly, swiftly; clouds gathered like in time-lapse stock footage. And then dimes of ice began falling from the sky, nickels, quarters pelting the pavement, a rattlesnake din growing louder and louder.
The aftermath of the election of 2024 has so far seen no Jovian declarations; the sick warmth we’re experiencing in New York this week feels all too petty, too human. Election night was not surprising, but it was disorienting. I had guaranteed that it would be that way for me, one way or another, when I volunteered to write a column about it for a magazine. It was a cope: I would flit from place to place, roam the streets. By focusing on the social, I could avoid staring into the political abyss, regardless of what was staring back.
Around 6 p.m., I went to Gladstone Gallery, which had decided to host an extravaganza of readings and music inside Carrie Mae Weems’s video installation on 21st Street. The resistance-lib redolence of the event made me queasy. Rirkrit Tiravanija was slinging wok, Modelos sat ready for the popping, and an all-star lineup had been performing since mid-afternoon. Inside the blue-curtained cyclorama, like a geode with Weems’s shifting images glinting around its interior, Lynne Tillman was on the mic explaining why she prefers to French exit a party, which had something to do with her toilet training. After her, Anne Waldman, with her charismatic jet-black hair and Ginsbergian sprechstimme.
Then, via video, Eileen Myles, delivering an absolutely scorching poem about Gaza. It stripped off the veneer of pretense that this country is anything other than horrid to the core, no matter what happened in the electoral college.
Around 7:30 pm, I arrived at the domicile of one Kaitlin Phillips. You may have heard of her. The party was stacked with typologies forged in a bygone Manhattan: the regnant literary critic, the refined painter, the critically acclaimed novelist, the well-bred magazine editor, the manic publicist. For a brief interval I was optimistic and very happy to be there. Bartenders from the River, a downtown hangout of the last few years, served custom cocktails. They had in their catering forged a rich sign—KFC dumped from its striped paper cartons into metal wine buckets.
The returns streamed on a laptop, David Muir’s lantern mug floating in the corner by the couch. A politics writer I know was sitting close enough to rattle its keys. Instead he was engrossed in his phone, hopping up occasionally to smoke on the fire escape. We kept putting him on the spot: How’s it looking, haha. His halting replies were inevitably interrupted by texting, tweeting, the flick of a cigarette lighter. Someone cursed West Virginia. I had to move on soon, before the literary critic started doing coke. I gnawed a breast from under a heat lamp and took a sip from one of the River’s chartreuse cocktails—Kamala is brat?? No, Jill Stein! It was tart, bracing, with a Luxardo cherry sunk to the bottom.
A place called CX on Crosby Street was hosting a watch party thrown by Gen X relic and persistent sideways-hat-wearer Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky. His “town hall” at a members-only social club was offering the services of a pop philosopher and a reiki master. But the woo-woo Hamptons aspirational vapidity that had seemed comical when I RSVPed by this point no longer seemed funny. We instead opted for the edgelord lite of Earth, a l’art pour l’art institution that murkily mobs together creditable literary magazine launches and lectures on architectural theory with appearances by the fluoride-loathing Tao Lin and the next White House press secretary, Dasha Nekrasova. A crowd had gathered inside and out, skewing 20-something and early 30s, with a surprising number of people planted in folding chairs to gape at a four-panel Red Zone of election results. It was unclear whether the multichannel stream was meant to demonstrate that we’re all victims of information overload or to effectuate it.
A popcorn machine pumped out fluffy kernels by the bowlful, a cooler full of Cokes and Diet Cokes sat ready for the sipping, liquor was hard to come by. The racket of the crowd drowned out the broadcasts. Everyone was talking, no one listening; each this-is-fine conversation about personal life or career, Halloween costumes or method acting contained within it a shard of dismay. Like ants feeding each other, we ingested and regurgitated the nectar of bad news. I spotted an honest-to-god Harris-Walz camo cap worn in earnest and my heart sank.
In line for the bathroom, I talked to a young guy sporting a thrift-store prize: a white sweatshirt that read BIDEN à la the Seinfeld logo. He was with a tidy, tatted-up, dirty blonde woman in chunky glasses and an immaculate truck-stop red-white-and-blue tee with a realistic eagle and script proclaiming America. The duo were as stylized as punctuation marks.
He had considered stopping by Sovereign House, he said, nodding to yet another of the city’s blight of clubhouses but for proud and legitimate creeps on the Thiel axis. “To see what the rightwing was up to,” he added hastily, to locate himself on the blue-red-gray-black-pilled spectrum. He had heard the vibe was bad, however, all incel zoomers, but could not produce a clear explanation about how that differed from the norm.
When I returned to my seat between a painter and a conceptual artist, I found it occupied by one of the founders of Baggu. Alas, even she could not save us. At the popcorn machine I ran into a friend who runs a small online media outfit. A kid had given him a couple flyers to the Sovereign House event, which bore straight-up QAnon memes: Are you enjoying the show? one asked. You’ll love this next part. I lacked either stomach or balls to drop by. (I switched from real journalism to art crit for a reason.) The next day my friend sent me photos of greasy white males in what looked like a KA house, a Remilia flag pinned up in lieu of a Confederate one.
The thing that had been was driving me slowly crazy over the last few months was the paradox that I couldn’t say what my experience was even as I was living it. Eyes to see and ears to hear, I wouldn’t know what was happening around me until a future event that would define all that had come before it. Well, Nov. 5 has come and gone, and now I know.
