When you think about it, there are few places as aesthetically imbalanced as an art gallery. You have a large assortment of wildly varying artistic works thrown up on the walls with no regard for whether they clash with one another or the overall style of the room itself. It’s a visual sampler plate, where you can feast your eyes on one part, and if it upsets your stomach, you’re only a few short steps away from something completely different. Just don’t take too many steps back. A wider view will yield a jumbled mess.
Standing across the street from the Aruba Hotel, my first impression is jumbled mess. With its green and purple hues, the hotel looks like the kind of place the Joker from the ’60s Batman TV show would stay, along with his identically dressed henchmen. The color scheme doesn’t quite fit the straw-covered awnings. That would be more suitable for a tiki hut, but then a tiki hut wouldn’t have bronze sculptures of toga-clad, lamp-toting women illuminating the doorways.
I’m here for Noise, the Thunderbird Lounge’s whole arts chautauqua, which has drawn a big enough crowd to pack the Aruba’s parking lot with cars and force me to park across the street at the adult bookstore, where I’m told I have to either pay a $5 parking fee or purchase a pornographic movie. On this particular First Friday, I’m not really in the mood for performance art, so I pay my five bucks and head across the street.
The lounge itself, like the neon sign buzzing noticeably above the doorway, is pure old-school Vegas. It’s dark and divey—in a cozy, neighborhood-bar sort of way—with vintage black and white photos on the walls, displaying the likes of Abbott and Costello and Orville Redenbacher. There are pool tables on one end, and on the other, an outdoor patio with stools painted to look like eight-balls. It’s the kind of place you can imagine the Rat Pack hanging out in … except for the shiny disco ball in the center of the dance floor and the glowstick-twirling dancers under it. Huh.
Moving on toward the center of artsy activities in the back club, I pass through what I’d imagine is Salvador Dali’s favorite room. A scattering of small tables are surrounded by silver, metallic chairs sculpted to look like massive human palms mounted on slightly smaller ankles and feet. Is it weird that I kind of want one?
Entering the final room in this odd little night gallery, I’m overcome with the scent of patchouli combined with body odor. Above the packed room, fiber-optic light fixtures dance around erratically, looking like a swarm of iridescent gnats. The event is like some sort of hippie rave—Woodstock with glowsticks.
Pushing my way between the second bar counter and the hordes of band-watchers, I find one of the many painters who are hard at work in every corner of the room. With broad strokes, the artist fills her canvas with the stylized outline of a woman’s face. Across from her, another artist intricately details an abstract, fractal image in shades of green. A shaggy, bearded onlooker observes in a daze, slowly swaying back and forth. Either he’s under the influence of some really powerful chemicals, or he just does an uncanny impression of The Dude from The Big Lebowski.
Careful not to disturb his trancelike state, I squeeze past him to a staircase shrouded in paint-spattered plastic wrap. The colorful biohazard canopy leads upstairs to a balcony, where the featured artist’s sci-fi paintings are on display. I pause for a moment to admire an image of a quaint fisherman sitting beside a lake with massive orbital cities and planetoids hovering over the horizon. But I’m in the mood to see something really weird, so I look back down on the crowd below the balcony.
More than a dozen drums have appeared out of nowhere, and the drummers have formed circles around a few women who writhe rhythmically to the tribal beat. For more than 15 minutes, the entire room is focused on the drumming, as the drummers quickly adapt to one another’s changes in speed and volume. It’s downright hypnotic. I don’t know if it’s art, but I like it.
After the last bang of the bongos, I call it a night. On my way out, I see ads for beer-pong tournaments and swing-dancing lessons—two more vastly differing activities that take place in the Thunderbird Lounge. It seems you can find something for just about anyone’s tastes if you look in the right corner of the Aruba. And if you’d prefer to take in the whole jumbled mess, and perhaps a porno or two, just be sure to park across the street.