“I like to think we’re space farmers, milking the udders of time,” my brother says. He’s sat on a bench toward the back of a school bus with Madrone and me.
Most yellow school buses exist parallel to the ground on their longest side, but this one prefers a perpendicular approach, the driver's seat and door 15ft above our heads. Where the sky should be, the windshield does its best early 2000s screensaver impression. The clunky wooden bench we’re sitting on is tilted at a 45° angle, inviting our eyes skyward to the projected visualization of ever-evolving psychedelic hues spanning the RGB spectrum.
We’re sat scrunched shoulder to shoulder, Ben is to my right, and Madrone to my left. In front of us is a crude control panel. It has a chain-link steering wheel, five small blue flashing buttons on the right side, and five up-down switches of the classic silver variety you’d expect to find in an antique cockpit or the set design of a low-budget space exploration movie. There are two bigger buttons on either side, both of which are the current focus of that human impulse nobody ever outgrows: MUST-PUSH-BUTTON. Ben is spamming the right one, and Madrone is reaching across me to hammer the left.
With each push or flick, the school bus windshield/screensaver transfigures in color and shape as if subjected to some wave of cosmic distortion. Onomatopoeic sound effects of BOING or ZOIP or WAH reverberate through the cavernous bus with each interaction. In quick layered succession, I heard the strange cosmic squelching that must have inspired Ben’s imaginings of space cows and the udders lactating time itself.
This school bus is one of the dozens of interactive spaces in Meow Wolf’s “House of Eternal Return” in Santa Fe. Any explanation of Meow Wolf’s first major success sounds like an acid trip: it’s an immersive art exhibition based on the expansive narrative of an inter-dimensional family and the portals they opened through space, time, and Lewis-Carrol-esque logic.
Seven years on from its opening to the public in 2016, the school bus’ wooden control panel seems quaint relative to the more elaborate interactions of the exhibit such as the playable laser light harp, the touch-reactive soundscapes of the Mastodon cave, or the Portals Bermuda passageways. Compared to the scale and tech-enabled interactions of the Las Vegas or Denver exhibits, The House of Eternal Return can feel like a collection of first attempts. That said, I prefer the original one here in Santa Fe. The charm of it, for me, is the memories I’ve made here. They’re much of why I keep returning.
Seven years ago, Madrone, Ben, and I were sat on this same bench, fiddling with these exact buttons and switches, though all of them worked back then. My mother’s parents were still alive, and they were with us that day. Oupi and Granny might have even clambered down onto that school bus bench with us, fiddling with psychedelic sound effect knobs, milking the udders of time.
At the time, Meow Wolf was a ragtag group of artists in the first few weeks and months after opening their most ambitious effort to date. They’d been given a million dollars of funding sourced from several Santa Fe art patrons (George R.R. Martin among them) to build this immersive art exhibit. Nowadays they’re a multi-million dollar business with multiple locations around the US, on course to become the immersive art industry equivalent of Disney. I suppose Ben, Madrone and I have grown up too, in our ways.
“Fire on udder one!” Ben interrupts my narrative exposition. “Take that you Klingon scum!”
A fresh bout of tongue-swallowing, body-rocking laughter erupts from Madrone and me. Madrone’s laughter is a gift to those around her. It consumes the whole of her being at even the slightest hint of humor. Her face scrunches around her turquoise medusa piercing, her eyes smiling between smile lines. Without fail, the arc of Madrone’s laughter is only complete once her right hand comes up to cushion the rolling laugh that rises and falls in a cadence I swear I recognize from the bumpy drive up the dirt road that leads to her family’s land in Taos. It takes time till the laughter between us dies down. The onomatopoeic controls seem tired, so we slowly pull ourselves up off the bench, and out into the confusion of neon lights and glowing walls.
Before Meow Wolf, the “house” was a bowling alley. Above the stage, a bowling pin has been covered in mirror shards and fashioned into a disco ball. I believe it’s one of the only remnants of the space’s former incarnation. Among the LED-stripped, blacklight reactive, projection-mapped windows and doors evoking images of a neon-surrealist village, the disco bowling pin sits at the visual epicenter. It is the subtle sparkling heart of maximal multi-verse decor in the concert venue space known affectionately to Meow Wolf staff as Fancy Town.
My best guess is Fancy Town fits maybe 150 to 200 people. At capacity, visitors to the multiverse dance as one mass atop the black and white floor corralled between the glowing walls of the saloon and the lighthouse. From the second-floor banister, the balance of attendees look down on the stage and dancefloor like sheriff deputies of the multiverse, waiting on the Big Bad to ride into Fancy Town. Instead of rifles, they’re armed with Meow-Wolf-branded chromadepth glasses, and the Big Bad is one of any number of incredible musical acts such as Dr. Dog, 070 Shake, Kurt Vile, and Khruangbin who, despite the intimate crowd size (or perhaps because of it) prioritize a stop in Santa Fe when touring the Southwest.
There’s no other venue in the world like it.
Over the years I’ve seen about half a dozen shows here. Many of those feel like bucket list shows in retrospect. A few felt truly transcendent. And there’s one I’d like to forget about.
The seeds of my longest relationship were sewn on that black-and-white floor, dancing our inhibitions away to Houndmouth’s singalong storytelling, the sort that you don’t realize you know every word to until you’re scream-singing them. At the Duckwrth show, I (and everyone else in attendance) had a sexual awakening watching the performances of Duckwrth and his two dancers synced to the swagger-soaked lyrical soundscapes and switch-ups; I imagine it’s the closest I’ve come to understanding what it would have been like to see Michael Jackson perform back in the king of pop’s heyday. The Son Lux performance came right as the furor of Everything Everywhere All At Once – which they helped score – was climbing to its Oscar-sweeping peak. I felt my body – eyes closed – forgotten far behind me as each fifteen-minute-long song guided me and every other audience member to a place impossible to locate on a map for it is at once deep below and above and within; a place to which only the compass of music can lead the mind. The Thundercat show was a highlight in a weekend full of highlights as my time in New Mexico came to an end, and the Dan Deacon Halloween show sucked.
This time it was a Youth Lagoon concert, which would surely be a surreal journey back to the world I knew at fifteen or sixteen, my brother at thirteen or fourteen; when the band’s debut album The Year of Hibernation stirred a sense of wide-eyed wanderlust in our impressionable, restless adolescence spent by the lake.
Shongum Lake would bloom with weeds in the deep summer. In the sunlight of the year’s longest days, its color would vary from deep green to tannin brown. Its shores were a mix of tall trees with crowded leaves of vibrant photosynthesizing foliage, lawns stretching into tall reeds, and an occasional dock or jetty jutting out from some of the lake-front properties. At the far end, a river fed the lake. At the opposite end, a dam kept the water level high enough for the beachfront to be officially open for swimming from Memorial Day to Labor Day, staffed with local teenagers working as lifeguards, swinging whistles on their fingers, watching over the roped-off swim area in red and white uniforms. Across from the beachfront, two docks reached out into the lake with a floating jetty positioned perpendicular to create a fourth wall. Each spring, eight lanes were strung up between the docks, buoyant turn-boards slotted in at either side, and the Shongum Lake Swim Team’s home turf was made ready for practice and meets. Tethered to the outside of the docks were motorless boats, mostly canoes, kayaks, a few paddleboards, and rowboats, but no sailboats that I can remember – there wasn’t often a strong wind. As a family, we had a British racing green three-seater canoe and a plastic yellow and red kayak stacked on the rack beside the storage shed next to the docks.
For my brother and I, the lake was the cornerstone of our teenage years in Randolph New Jersey. The beach was our town square and cafe. The floating dock was our gossip spot until we were old enough to work as lifeguards, then it became the guard hut and the picnic table. The swimming lanes were our sandlot, the boats and bikes were our cars before anyone had a license to drive (and for some time after), and the island was our beating heart, reserved for a special few.
Those special few were Dan, Christian, Ben, and I. The occasional guest stars and/or inheritors of whatever legacy we might have imagined included in various iterations and arrays of Seth, Shakur, Gerrard, Charlie, Ragava, and the rest who followed Ben after I’d left Randolph. There was also Emma, Chris, Carina, Gio, the Everetts, the Jones’, and all of the other houses of Shongum Lake nobility, but those friendships represented the swim team and lifeguarding aspects of our lives; the island was for f68 only.
Dan was of average height and had an alternative music taste from which Ben and I learned more than I cared to admit at the time. He was uninvolved in high school sports as a principle of self-preservation and was clever, cheeky, and funny in ways that most of his peers didn’t understand. In the right company, Dan was the center of the action, unapologetically and uncompromising himself. He was to thank for many of our misadventures which Youth Lagoon’s songs scored, and the creation of the rogue and exclusive photo group known as f68.
Our high school photo teacher was a tall, blue button-up tucked into blue jeans wearing, curmudgeonly character named Mr. King. Encouragements and affirmations from Mr. King came once every ten comments, those comments usually taking the shape of “Well, have you thought about this potential problem?” or “Are you sure that’s going to work?” and often, “I don’t think that’s going to work.” For Dan, the encouragement to interrogation ratio was probably more like one to one hundred. In the midst of one such interrogation, Dan met Mr. King’s doubt about his plans for an upcoming project with an attempt at a historical tie-in.
“... and I’m referencing the f68 group, shooting at the smallest possible aperture and keeping everything in focus –”
“f68?” Mr. King stood over Dan’s shoulder switching his gaze from Dan’s photo on the Mac desktop to Dan, Mr. King’s fluffy white eyebrows raised high and questioning. His student had made a fatal flaw; aperture math is a funny system, and seasoned camera nerds will know that f68 doesn’t exist. Mr. King had given a presentation on Ansel Adams the week prior, mentioning f64.
“Yeah, f68, the photography group,” Dan’s voice was taking a defensive tone, detecting the incoming challenge.
“I think you mean f64.” Mr. King’s face had shifted to smugness.
“No, it’s f68.” I got the impression that Dan had often felt others were getting their way with him as he’d grown up, that he was usually the rug that characters of undeserved self-assurance would choose to walk over in pompous saunter to whatever it was they wanted. In High School, he’d begun choosing moments to stand his ground. When you first start to stand your ground though, you’re not just standing up to the person in front of you, you’re standing up to everyone who has ever walked over, past, or around you.
“f68 as an aperture doesn’t exist, and the group you’re citing was called f64.”
“Yeah you know, I think it was f68.” Christian to the rescue. Dan’s long-time friend, tall and skinny, known to most teachers and peers as softspoken and often shy, was known to those paying attention as the kindest among us. In the walls of the Maclab, the photo studio, the darkroom, and in the woods on adventures we took in f68’s name, that quiet hero often found his voice.
Mr. King leaned back against the wall, a smile spreading across his face that, on a worse day, could have been an annoyed storming off, or words that came out as shouts. “I think you guys are just pulling my leg.”
“It’s definitely f68, Mr. King,” Camila, our Colombiana classmate, chimes in. Her hair was short and black, and her dark brown eyes occupied the majority of her face’s real estate. Her English was accented and charming, her conversational contributions were direct, and her contributions to the music we’d play via YouTube were often MGMT-esque in sound but blurred by the obscurity of Spanish band names. Camila could be counted on to keep Mr. King in a light mood, without compromising her or her classmates' right to the occasional artistic or adolescent revolt.
The back and forth went around in circles until Mr. King eventually walked off to disagree with another student on the other side of his photography classroom where he would again be one-to-one instead of one-to-a-very-stubborn-several at this point.
From his inspired stand bolstered by the camaraderie of his peers, Dan had built a new button in his teacher’s mind that, when pushed, was just enough of a nuisance for our defacto authority figure to feel like rebellion without sparking any retaliation. It didn't take much for Dan to convince Christian and me to partake in the pushing of that button at every opportunity. As our photographs were matted, framed, titled, and submitted to regional student photo shows, we attributed them to f68. On our Instagrams, we’d share photos with #livef68, a rip off of the #livauthentic wave of woodsy hipster aesthetics dominating early Instagram aesthetics. There’s a tree stump at the top of the Delaware River Water Gap trailhead with f68 carved into it. Fireworks would be set off under the powerlines in the woods behind our houses late at night in the name of creating photos at the imagined alter of f68. Our classmates would ask us what it meant and we’d give them as close to zero insight as possible. The crowning achievement though, and the common purpose we uncovered through this pretended identity, were the nights spent camping out on the island in the middle of Shongum Lake. Dan would wade off the island’s edge and fish, we’d string up our ENO hammocks, cook bacon and eggs on the firepit we’d fashioned in the clearing at the island’s center, and air our teenage tribulations under the New Jersey night sky.
After Dan Christian and I graduated, we passed the baton of f68 on to Ben in a cult-like ceremony of tree branch percussion and a plagiarized amalgam of Frost and Whitman around the fire. Ben and a second generation of Randolph High School photography students would carry the touch, before passing it on again upon their graduation. The last I saw of a #livef68 tag was in 2017.
Into those humid hazy summer days draped in the guise of harmless rebellion through which we were coming of age, the lyrics of Youth Lagoon’s 17 echoed like hymns in a cathedral:
Roaming the campground up by the lake where we swam
We were hunting for snakes
But we couldn't find them
Surrounded by nothing, but the nothing's surrounded by us
But it's just me in my room
With my eyes shut
Oh, when I was seventeen
My mother said to me
"Don't stop imagining, the day that you do is the day that you die"
Now I pull a one-ton carriage
Instead of the horses grazing the lawn
And I was having fun
We were all having fun
At an Urban Outfitters in Manhattan we purchased a copy of The Year of Hibernation for our brown leather encased Crosby record player, the one that every aspiring Brooklyn hipster in the early 2010s had. At the first sight of this purchase, our Dad lamented having sold off all his old records and the stereo system he remembered as “epic” when it seemed CDs were here to stay with iTunes fast on the way. How we could be returning to vinyl in the age of Spotify confused him. I couldn’t have explained it then, but it felt good to have a physical representation of the music soundtracking those years which, especially at the time, seemed so formative.
The Year of Hibernation’s album cover features a photo of what I think is the Nā Pali Coast in Kauai and the letters “YL” illustrated over top. The greens and pinks of that grainy film cover photo stacked alongside other classics of that era in the budding record collection Ben and I shared: Ben Howard’s Every Kingdom, The Lumineers’ self-titled debut album, Childish Gambino’s Because The Internet, Passion Pit’s Manners, Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and Vampire Weekend’s Vampires of the Modern City, to name a few. We were a one-hour train ride away from Manhattan’s emanating cultural influence, but home was still the forest and strip mall-studded suburban sprawl removed from Manhattan’s reality checks. If our record collection suggests we were products of our time and place, it’s because, in many ways, we were. Amongst ourselves though, like the teenagers we were, we more often felt like outsiders, and comfort came from being outsiders together.
In my memories, I see those records stacked side by side on a white IKEA shelf downstairs at 19 Radtke Road. It was a smaller house on the same road we’d been calling home since we’d moved from England seven years earlier. I was beginning my gap year. Dad had started a job in Nashville that meant he’d be there during the week and back on weekends. Ben was finishing high school. Mom was thinking about the inevitable move to Nashville after Ben graduated so that she and Dad didn’t have to do what we’d probably call a hybrid model marriage these days. I’m happy to say they’ve been back in person full-time for several years now.
The stairs that led down to what must have been a former basement at 19 Radtke Road opened up to a low-ceilinged living space complete with a bedroom, living room, and a long thin bathroom. The room became Ben’s room, and the downstairs became Benlandia.
There were built-in bookcases that he filled with whatever overflowed from our collective family library alongside artifacts of youth such as penny boards, skateboard trucks, Tintin comics, Asterix & Obelix comics, Wes Anderson DVDs. Cubbies and tops of drawers and dressers donned other artifacts of supposed authenticity; old lanterns, camp stoves, pipes, pocket knives, multiple bows and quivers of arrows, even a brand new machete which Dan gifted Ben one Christmas. Dad said Ben wasn’t to use the machete unsupervised, but I have plenty of memories of slicing through trees in the woods with it whenever we needed to exercise our teenage angst. On the walls hung pinned posters Dan was making at The New School, Fujifilm Instax mini and Instax wide polaroids, and various other gifts borne from Ben’s friendships, including two Benlandia custom-made wooden signs.
Considering these memories as Trevor Powers a.k.a. Youth Lagoon began his set, I realized Benlandia paralleled Fancy Town. Densely decorated. Cavernous. A destination for dancing and laughing and late nights scored by records and illuminated by Christmas lights. Lower-tech perhaps, but to us, it was a venue for friendship and music all the same.
The piano gave way to drums, and Trevor brought the song titled Posters, the opening track off Year of Hibernation, to its ephemeral climax. My eyes closed as my body followed the transcending tune, and I walked down the stairs of my memory, back into Benlandia.
Meow Wolf had come to mean many things to me since Madrone first brought me there seven years ago. In those early years, it was the setting for some of the most inspiring artistic experiences I’d had since my last Burning Man attendance at seventeen. I remember Madrone excitedly shepherding me from room to room, waiting for me to discover all of the secrets each space hid, pointing out every aspect that could be contributing to the interwoven story tying the space together – the letter in the mailbox, the newspaper describing the family that had gone missing, the journal that hid the code to the safe which held further clues to the mysterious “Charter”, and of course the “portals” behind the fridge door, in the coat closet, through the fireplace, and in the washing machine. Her friend had been a contributing artist in the installation’s construction, so she had all the inside information on the elaborate narrative. When friends and family came to visit New Mexico, Meow Wolf was an essential stop. One of the last in-person experiences I shared with Oupi, our mother’s father, was hearing the clop-clop of his walking stick navigate the Meow Wolf’s multiverse. Back then I dreamed often of creating something of similar scale and ambition with friends. I still do.
As I headed into my fourth year of university, I was set to graduate a semester early. This was thanks in large part to the guidance of my academic advisor, Lukas Cash, an outlier against the archetype of academic advisors modeled by almost every other member of the UNM faculty and staff. He grew up in eastern New Mexico, and his life story is vastly different from my own, but in my brother and I, he invested a tremendous kindness. The spring before my graduation, our regular check-in would be divided into two major pull quotes: “You’re all set to graduate early,” and “I’m leaving UNM to join a start-up that’s going to build New Mexico a professional soccer team, and you should join me.” I don’t think I said it, but I sure as hell thought that was a bad idea. Bound to fail. Those sorts of projects always do in New Mexico.
Less than six months later I was sitting down with Lukas and the CEO/Owner of this supposedly foolish endeavor, being told that Meow Wolf was to be the front-of-jersey partner. I was in. Everything else about what was to become New Mexico United was a bonus.
After we’d built the brand and launched the logo, sometime before the first Black & Yellow Bash, I was given the responsibility of designing United’s jerseys for the inaugural season. To call it Designing might be a stretch. This was in October of 2018. We’d be kicking a ball competitively in March of 2019. I had the Adidas team builder .com or whatever it was to work with; little more than some templates and limited colorway options; it’s all we had with such a short window of time. But limitations can be gifts. That simple yet special black Adidas silhouette, the yellow three stripes down either side of the midriff, the yellow v-neck and pinstripe, the strength of that United shield opposite the yellow Adidas, and of course, that 4 colored MEOW WOLF logo I’d come to worship, emblazoned front and center. It was an instant classic.
In two separate visits to The House of Eternal Return, we photographed and filmed the unveiling of that inaugural jersey. For the sake of secrecy, we could only be shooting in the space while it was closed. The photo shoot happened on a Tuesday – back then they’d close one day a week for cleaning, though nowadays the cleaning crew works through the night – and the video shoot happened from 10 p.m. on a Thursday to 3 a.m. on a Friday. I still owe Austin, Sam, Justin, and Rashid a debt of gratitude for sticking that one out, they had to run the beep test at training the next day on 5 hours of sleep.
On both occasions, we were completely alone in this place I (and everyone else) had been obsessing over. By January of 2019, Meow Wolf had been the subject of every major spotlight in the arts and entertainment business, with viral videos from everyday visitors matched step for step by the publicity of CNN, the Travel Channel, and so on. To be alone in the exhibit was unheard of, and I relished it almost as much as I did bringing the work to life on such hallowed ground.
In the four years that followed, I’d be back at The House of Eternal Return on several more shoots, almost always at odd hours, accompanied by players sporting the latest collaboration between the two brands, and a growing team of creative collaborators armed with an expanding repertoire of expertise and gear. I treasured the work we did with Meow Wolf, and it’s one of the aspects of the job I left one year ago that I’d gladly step back into.
A year on from leaving United and New Mexico, with a second language added to my toolbelt, and a laundry list of experiences (that I perhaps ought to be writing about instead of wallowing in the memories of old work, old albums, and old memories), and a recent “Hey, I’m #OpenToWork again!” LinkedIn post, Meow Wolf remains one of the threads that still nags at my mind, like there’s more to be done there. When I saw a Creative Director position posted on LinkedIn several weeks ago, I applied. I didn’t get it.
It was probably best to get the No I cared the most about out of the way early. The road back from open-ended travel was always going to be littered with No and variations on the “Although your background is impressive, we regret to inform you that we have decided to pursue other candidates for the position at this time.” I assume everyone has an impressive background. The real work of this last year has been learning by living each experience fully, with a presence in the present that’s rarely allowed the space for saying yes to occasional contracts, let alone full-time employment. The working world doesn’t know what to make of that sort of self-chartered course.
I remember UNM being the only university that had accepted me and was willing to defer my scholarship as I did a bit of “independently organized experiential education” (Read: Gap Year) before starting university the following August. Meanwhile, all my peers were heading straight into their respective institutions of higher learning.
I’m not implying any of this had to do with me not getting the Meow Wolf job, of course. It’s an internationally recognized standard-setting company in the immersive art space. I’m sure there were stronger applicants. The rejection is bound to be a positive in the end. It helped me to say OK, I’m ready to be doing this for real – going all in on killing my own dinner as a creative professional and/or getting a full-time job again. That and/or will come with time, for now, it’s enough to be moving forward.
So there I was, fresh off the rejection from the company to which I’d given $30 for a ticket to this show. A kaleidoscope of memories was swimming around my mind; my grandfather playing with the sound-reactive mushrooms Madrone’s friend had fabricated; falling for a friend all those years ago as I danced a few steps from where I currently stood; the times I’d been in this same space as a leader, instructing and delegating and creating meaning from imagination where before there had been nothing.
Then Trevor Powers struck the chords on his synth-processed keyboard. Ben put his arm around me, and I put mine around him.
With that haunting voice, Trevor quoted his mother.
He told us not to stop imagining, and that the day that we did would be the day that we’d die.
Waves of nostalgia coursed through me. Memories of the lake, of f68, and of Benlandia cut in and out like Super-8 film spliced together. They mixed with and aggrandized the sentiments inspired by the magical nonsense of this former bowling alley. Long blurring and swirling, at last, my imagination settled.
At the docks where my memories lap against the present moment, three old friends meet. The first was melancholic ennui for who I was then, and who I am now. The second was a soft-smiling joy for all this life has been. And the third, a gratitude-soaked optimism for what may yet be. The three of them stepped into a canoe, pushed off from the shoreline, set their oars into motion, and paddled across what was left of my youth lagoon.
The latest in Josh’s sharing of stuff he’s making: I’ve started a TikTok series telling the story of one photo a day each day until I run out of photos.
Prompted by a conversation with my pottery teacher about the importance of consistency in any practice (“people show up for people who show up consistently,” he said) and a fresh batch of film scans from the last couple of months, each day I pick a photo from my archive and talk about how where when and why I made it! If you’re on the clock app as well and would enjoy the occasional 60-second slice of storytelling, I’d love for you to join in here.
December 30, 2023
Reflections on a year of globetrotting and learning, some of the music and art I've most enjoyed, and a few other things worth sharing in this overdue edition of the Family Dinner Newsletter.
November 6, 2023
A not so short short story meandering through memories, the multiverse, and what the future may hold, plus some lovely ideas from others.
October 26, 2023
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A poem about Rain, a Sunday morning spent in pursuit of pastries means overlapping with all walks of life, Works I Love & Why but make it a workout, and more!
October 19, 2023
The first iteration of the Newsletter features a short story on Works I Love & Why, delving into one of my favorite reads of 2023 and its inextricable link to one of my best friends.
October 13, 2023
Hi, welcome to the Family Dinner newsletter! The name “Family Dinner” is a nod to the magic I most often encounter around the dinner table. This first entry is an exploration of the idea from which this project will grow. Thanks for being here, I hope you enjoy it.
