C. California Uber Alles

Blowing through the jasmine in my mind

When I was young there were three prestige T shirts that everybody in my middle school had. One said, “Go Climb A Rock,” to indicate you’d been to Yosemite. One depicted Charlie Brown from Peanuts and it said, “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand,” which is still my motto for life. And the third said, “P.S. I Love You,” which was the town slogan for Palm Springs around the time that it was under the sway of its celebrity mayor, Sonny Bono.

I had the first two but not the third, because my family, despite being inveterate weekend drivers-around greater California, had never dragged us down to the Coachella Valley. Last week though, I rectified that omission by going there with my daughter and my sister. I hardly need to state our motivation. We’ve all been locked down too long. At some point, you have to go somewhere or go crazy. So we went to Palm Springs in order to view Desert X, an art installation thingy that the city put on this year in place of the Palm Springs Biennial. It was a really good, and a COVID-safe, way of exploring the area, since you just tooled around to all these different sites on your own and got out of your car to look at them.

In my daughter’s opinion, the art itself was only OK, but I liked it, because it spurred conversation and was informative about the rich history of that arid area, so evocative of the many westerns made in the 1930s. For example, the first piece you see, as you drive in on Route 111, is called “Never Forget,” by Nicholas Galinin. I found the sight of the enormous word ‘Indian’ immediately off-putting, but it turned out it was intentional; intended as comment on the so-called ownership of the land. This gives you a bit more context:

desert x

Another installation, by Xaviera Simmons, called “Because You Know Ultimately We Will Band A Militia,” consisted of a series of billboards on the Gene Autry Highway that interacted and interfered with the normative billboards there by calling for reparations and redistribution of tangible resources.

Both of those pieces referenced the fact that Palm Springs was originally a haven for movie stars and nearby areas are where many Hollywood Westerns were shot, thus warping America’s view of the west and eliding the real ownership of the land. And that tension — between the land and those who live on it — was the overarching theme of the week for me.  The best example to me was when we went to one of the installations at this place called Sunnylands, the winter home of the Annenbergs, where American presidents go to negotiate with heads of state. The installation itself was pretty feeble, but next to the garden there is a giant golf course which was privately used only by the Annenbergs and their guests, and now is used by essentially no one, and this grotesque misuse of land and water somehow was more thought provoking and germane to us then the most cutting-edge piece by Banksy would have been. To me, that golf course’s very existence was a summation of the waste and the arrogance not just of Palm Springs, Hollywood, and the Annenberg empire, but of America as a concept. It put the dialogue about land use and water rights in California on display far more pungently than the nearby anti-colonial/pro-water conservation piece made by the Ghanaian artist made out of pieces of jerrycans that Ghanaians use to carry water overland…although I liked that one too.   

In sum, despite some shortcomings, tooling up and down the valley, to Desert Hot Springs and Cathedral City, gave us a better understanding of this part of California and its weirdness than just taking that scary aerial tramway would have done.

Possibly the best thing about going to Desert X, though, was that it left us with large amounts of time when we could laze about in the pool. It was 100 degrees out, and we lay on floaties and happily listened to piped in music from the 1970s. Yes, I said happily, because it made me happy. Fleetwood Mac. Boston. The Beach Boys. Boz Skaggs. Chicago. Helen Reddy. And, funnily enough, at least one track was played from everything I’ve written about lately: Abba, The Beach Boys, the Kinks, David Bowie, Pablo Cruise…Stevie Wonder, Billy Preston, Kool and the Gang, Rod Stewart and more. Jeez, I had almost forgotten how much I love early Rod Stewart. ‘I got nothing to do on this hot afternoon then to settle down and write you a line...” You wear it well, indeed.  

Of course some of the music was objectively terrible, as when the system  played songs the Doobie Brothers and the Eagles, and sadly, The Rolling Stones song “Miss You.” Christ, that song is just the worst, equaled only in its hideousity by the title song from “Some Girls,” the record it was on. But hot air and cool water and the proximity of mountains, maybe, hides a multitude of sins. We nearly stayed at the Ace Hotel, where I bet you they had a live d-jay by the pool playing tracks by M-80 and Tame Impala. But for me, this experience was better, because it mimicked exactly the experience of listening to AM radio, and if you’re of a certain age, there is a real peace of mind to be found in that listening exercise. It’s something we boomers know how to do well  – that is, to wait patiently for the next track, thinking and hoping for something you like better. The wait is part of the practice, right? Thinking about what you’d like to hear. Hoping they’d play a track you liked but didn’t own the record of. Being surprised when something different, but special, that you hadn’t remembered you like, comes on. Hearing something new, that you’d then want to run out and buy…or, if you were a child, call up and request, in the hopes of hearing it again.

I used to keep lists of the songs they played, divided into likes and dislikes, with stars next to the ones I wanted to buy the single.

It was all a process that can’t be duplicated by an algorithm for some reason, because the algorithm borrows from your own playlist, and that takes away the element of the other. Also, it may sound weird, but if the Palm Springs resort sound system had started playing Robyn Hitchcock and the Replacements, I’d have been disappointed. I love those artists, but their music did not fit the landscape or the situation. Palm Springs bills itself as a retro mecca, all about  mid-century modernism. Maybe that’s why the idea of grunge was anathema. Much as I love it normally.

Another thing about this soundtrack was that it was globally acceptable. While we were staying at this particular down market condo complex, we noticed a bunch of Russian gangsters at the pool, accompanied weirdly enough, by their moms. One afternoon when the song “Nothing From Nothing” by Billy Preston, came on, everyone sort of started to dance, wherever they were – in the pool, on the side, sitting in the hot tub.  Shimmying our shoulders. Swaying side to side. All of us, in our own little world, nodding our heads to one another, grinning wackily...it was the bomb.

And not just any bomb, either - it was a time bomb, because hearing all those songs took me back to when I first heard many of them: at swim meets, mostly, either on a transistor or in a car on the way to it in some parent’s car, in cities like Santa Rosa and Concord and Susuin and Fresno. At the time I used to bitch about some of the music that came on the radio, to the consternation of my friends who actually liked Loggins and Messina, but now I like hearing it all, every single song, even Seals and Crofts. Even England Dan and John Ford Coley. It is a sonic blanket, a warm embrace, an echo from the past. And if it is also something of an abomination, that is only to be expected.

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We acknowledge the Cahuilla People as the original stewards of the land on which Desert X takes place. We are grateful to have the opportunity to work with the indigenous people in this place. We pay our respect to the Cahuilla People, past, present and emerging, who have been here since time immemorial.