The Sober Lush by Amanda Eyre Ward & Jardine Libaire

Author:Amanda Eyre Ward & Jardine Libaire [Eyre Ward, Amanda & Libaire, Jardine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

GLITTERING FERRIS WHEEL

We whiz past the carnival on our way to other (more serious! more responsible!) things; we look in our rearview mirror at a Ferris wheel glittering, Tilt-A-Whirl rides filled with screaming teens, crowds milling through the rusty, spindly, rickety, magical place, eating cotton candy and funnel cakes. (Or in Texas: perfectly fried . . . butter?!)

Dear friends, it’s time to take a U-turn.

We are drawn to the music. We wait on line for rides that make our stomachs shiver. We let dusk wash over us, and wander from the Tunnel of Love to a fried Oreo to custom airbrushed T-shirts.

The carnival is such an American dream, sweet as a Kiwi Snow Cone, greasy and delicious like a giant pretzel in the sun, loud and proud, with mechanized melodies playing from every angle, flares and bulbs and beads of light swirling, rides that leave you breathless, games to bet on—and right when you’re about to give up, you win the pink teddy bear that barely fits in the trunk of the car.

Carnivals also have that life-in-the-shadows element, the hawkers shouting in an unrelenting voice, the carnival workers staring at you with bloodshot eyes or too much merriment or pure malice. The fair can be an enthrallingly strange place.

Another modern playground is escape rooms. Amanda and her kids tried one: it was a re-creation of the apartment of a 1950s-era spy, complete with mid-century furniture and Russian books. As the clock ticked (the fictional spy would be home in an hour!), they read maps, decoded documents, gasped as walls revealed hidden rooms. Now they seek out escape rooms wherever they go, even bringing boxed “Escape Games” to family gatherings.

We start out life in a sandbox, or on a swing set, and eventually find our way to Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, New Mexico—a twenty-thousand-square-foot complex of dreams, an interactive network of rooms. Being in each chamber is like standing in someone’s brain. Jardine was reading a note on the refrigerator in a makeshift kitchen there when suddenly the door opened and a little kid walked out, and she almost fainted. It turns out the fridge is a tunnel to another chamber, and that’s the nature of the place. Unexpected worlds lie behind the door of something you think you understand.

At Meow Wolf, she could feel the artist coming up with the idea, because she was inside the idea. She wasn’t just looking at it or hearing it. She was immersed in it.

Pop-up installations are spreading like a fever. During the holidays, even the lightscapes made in public parks are a portal to a visionary world. In Marfa, Texas, an art destination at the border of Mexico and Texas, Amanda was gobsmacked by two art installations: Ballroom Marfa’s “Hello Meth Lab in the Sun,” an installation she walked through (it was built to look like a motel where meth was cooked); and Ilya Kabakov’s Russian schoolhouse, which had the air of a place abandoned quickly and fearfully.

Jardine

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