𓈌 Through the Looking Glass at Children's Fairyland (September 16, 2023)

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Some back story ... My formal "media career" ended the winter of 2017, when I was laid off from my contract gig as the night editor at Cosmo.com. I'd inherited the post from Gina, who'd been my editor at my very first "media job," which I'd quit in part because I thought the higher ups in that company were treating her very badly and because I wanted to freelance (lol).

Before taking the Cosmo gig, I'd spent about half a year working at a poké and boba restaurant in Little Tokyo. I once served poké to Poppy (like, that Poppy), whom I later learned had jacked creation direction from a tentative collab with my friend April. Anyway, the best perk of the Little Tokyo job was that my boss would give me bags of salmon trimmings to take home, which I carried, unrefrigerated, on the hour or so bus and train rides back to my apartment in Los Feliz. I was lucky that I never got food poisoning, ha ha!

All of this is to say: the Cosmo gig was my last ditch gasp at media legitimacy. I got a Hearst email and had my stories syndicated across Elle, Marie Claire, Seventeen (lol). I reported on nonsense most of the time but I was also the person on duty when the Ariana Grande concert bombing happened, and the Route 91 Harvest festival mass shooting, and the release of TSwift's Reputation (which, long story short, caused me to miss the last train from New York Penn Station to Newark Airport). I often wrote my requisite blog posts with a glass(es) of wine in hand; typos happened often, and I occasionally got angry emails demanding if I'd ever gone to school, if I even knew how to write, if the garbage I called writing made me ashamed to be alive, etc.

So when I got the news about the layoff, I was resigned to my fate. All those years spent following and unfollowing and following people on Twitter to get their attention, cold pitching editors objectively insane stories, written on the edge of what was probably mania, hoping that someone, somewhere, would bite, hadn't done shit for me. When the same editor who'd let me know about my firing later emailed me half a year later to offer me back that gig, I was relieved to be able to say, actually, I've moved on to something else. Otherwise, I knew there was a part of me that would've sat like a dog and happily eaten those scraps, then begged for more, as I'd always had when it came to the media industry, a meat grinder that largely only rewards writers who are no longer surprised by the taste of shit.

The job I'd escaped into had been posted on Indeed.com. The listing was a photo of a "HELP WANTED" sign. I'm not sure if the text on the sign was written out, or if I'd had to zoom and enhance to make out the email I needed to contact. But one thing led to another and that's how I spent the summer of 2018 working as a summer camp teacher at Children's Fairyland, the proto-Disney theme park from which Walt allegedly poached his Disneyland puppeteers. A Lake Merritt institution and the wonderland that another Oakland institution, the art-rock dreamer SPELLLING, chose as her playground for the day-long festival Through the Looking Glass.

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I hadn't listened to SPELLLING at all until my friend Amar sent me the info about TTLG. One of those musical blind spots that made me realize how seriously I had to get back into my local scene. According to people who are In It, Tia used to be a pre-pandemic fixture at Oakland house parties, which meant that I could've been listening to her sepulchral yet understated, Venetian carnival mask curlicue melodies for years. Like, the first time I heard "Boys at School," something in my brain rewired. The ceaseless shifting, the whisper of doom carried through dramatic, gothic faux curtain calls. Now that's what I call music:

Because I yam who I yam, I immediately thought, Finally, a true and tonally-accurate crown princess in the kingdom of Dame Catherine Bush. The mood SPELLLING codified on her 2021 album The Turning Wheel is indebted to other visions (shades of Cibo Matto, translucent soundscapes like Christine & the Queens), but she acknowledges that as of late, she's been swimming in a current that sprung decades ago from Bush's woodland glade's eternal spring... I don't know, I'm trying for a færie metaphor.

It made eerily perfect sense for someone like her to curate a festival at Fairyland, which 1) is normally inaccessible to child-less adults (as in, adults who aren't accompanying children) and 2) had never, to my knowledge, hosted an event like this before. (While I worked there, I learned that there were Fairyland "after dark" parties [like, mixers?] and of course, you can book the park out for weddings and the like.)

Despite the generally small footprint, there are endless nooks and crannies in Fairyland, as well as an "amphitheater" that, during camp, served as the place we held our Wednesday morning dance parties and was the showcase site where, every week, we'd put on the kids' plays (we put on a play every week) for their families. Even though it'd been five years since I worked there, I remembered everything about Fairyland's grounds. Through the Looking Glass made good use of the space: Fat Tony DJed on the top floor of the double-decker Wild West set; the Emerald City staging area where we'd do morning announcements became a club performance space;

the Chapel was an obvious choice for an intimate set, like that of Zachary James Watkins; even the fairy tunnel, where I used to eat lunch, got turned into a space for the folks at Cone Shape Top to do an installment of "Dream Radio."

Perhaps the most ingenious use of space was the split of the amphitheater. Because it's open air (duh, maybe), if you were near the lakeside half of the park, you could hear any act playing on either side, though you probably would've wanted to be seated on the stage side's Play-Doh seats for Sun Ra Arkestra's legitimately iconic set. (Leader Marshall Allen is 99... what can one even say.) The back half of the amphitheater opened up to the Teddy Bear Picnic meadow, where first the deeply chill Laraaji and then SPELLING and their band set up.

The one catch about staging a music showcase at Fairyland is that it's not wired for Big Music. This was most evident during SASAMI's set: I'd seen her Squeeze-era show a couple of years back as an opening act for Japanese Breakfast, and when she's got metalhead instrumentalists shredding her songs around her as she plays the part of a prowling, snarling, provacatrice, she's on fire. But (regardless of whether it was her choice or the venue's/organizer's) when it's just her singing in front of a muffled track that seemed to come out of one stack, the music doesn't quite hit. (Versus, say, AroMa's largely live set, which played out pretty much as good as it gets.)

Would it have made more sense to go acoustic? Maybe, but SASAMI did her thing the best she could. Sidebar, I should've expected the RenFaire / Fairyland fashion crossover Venn diagram to be a circle.

SPELLLING also ate the cost of doing business a few times, as mics cut out not infrequently. But I can't lie, I got chills when the crowd filled in for her on the songs; an equally moving show of its own, of the devotion that the night's attendees had for the music.

The audio issues settled out by the end of SPELLLING's set—I can't wait to hear the final version of the new song, which sounds like anime opening music. (MEANT WITH EXTREMELY POSITIVE CONNOTATIONS.) A particular highlight was the beat switch at the back half of "Revolution," which was already a banger but sounds, as they say, truly "live" in the live.

Now the elephant in the room: yeah, there's something to be said about going to an event called Through the Looking Glass and fully diving into that Lewis Carroll vibe. Along with the RenFaire crossover, there were a lot of people dressed in lolita / lolita-esque co-ords, since Alice in Wonderland is a popular theme (motif?) in the scene. I haven't seen that many elf ears since I watched BTS footage of the LOTR movies. The all-stars of the evening were definitely the people in Full Puppet Gear; ya dawg below was spotted early on high fiving Fat Tony, a floor (a child-sized floor, but still) above the earth.

Not to get mushy, but there was something really special about returning to Fairyland in this particular manner: nominally reporting, notably lit, steeped in nostalgia. Reflecting on the person who, on their second day of work, had to get to the park by 8am despite the Warriors championship parade making half of the streets around Lake Merritt impassable. Who'd held so many small hands along the park's paths, who'd wiped tears and blood and snot off faces, who'd first imagined a "career" not for themself, but for those kids, and every kid after them, while sitting on the swing across from the puppet theater (which wasn't utilized, probably for the best).

Life comes at you fast. Like: August 2021, I missed Molly Lewis's opening-opening set for Alex G and Caroline Polachek at the Greek Theatre. And then two years later, there she was, cast in neon and whistling, the crowd rapt, as the world came up to the surface again.

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Alright, thanks for "listening." Stay tuned...!

🎶 xoxo Lio

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