DAY ONE

After my feeble attempt at sleeping in, which is struggling against a West Coast time zone, Dahli and I head for breakfast and ponder what exactly Palm Desert is all about. Dahli said her cabdriver (she flew into Palm Springs when it was still affordable) described it as a place where people come to wind down their lives. This horrifying thought becomes a catalyst for further discussions throughout the weekend, but the proliferation of old people and East Coast Jews lends some credence to the driver’s insights. If anything Palm Desert is yet another homogenous city indistinguishable from any other in the USA with miles of strip malls and the sort of franchises like Old Navy, Target and Starbucks one need never fear about being too far away from. It’s hot and dry and I like it. I checked the weather report before I left and it was highs of 95 throughout the weekend. It’s desert (self-evident), surrounded by a small mountain range, but reminds me so much of my old Sacramento-Valley college town Chico that I have infrequent attacks of nostalgia. Fearing sunstroke I purchase ugly camo baseball cap for two dollars at drug store that never looks ironic enough to take away the impression that with my short hair cut I look something like a redneck asshole.

Back at the Deluxe suite, we decide to cool off before we head to Coachella for the afternoon. Dahli was quite excited to tell me on my drive over that there was a lap pool right outside our patio, but it’s actually only about 20 yards if that. Swimming a mile, or a half hour, becomes absurd but I’m glad to have been in some kind of water because our trip over to the Coachella Polo fields is so hot that all I can think about is consuming as much water as possible out of fear of having some sort of heat related medical situation later on. With no desire to spend 12 hours at any of the day’s events, Dahli and I have decided that midafternoons are the best arrival times to attempt to avoid the peak heat as much as possible. We park near thousands of others and make a long march to the entrance. The crowd is primarily early to mid 20s, mostly White and Hispanic and from the looks of it either drunk, stoned, or on their way to being one or the other or something else. Every conceivable sort of clothing method has been employed to combat (or not) the temperature and will become commonplace to see women in tiny, dirty bikinis, though some are considerably more attractive and suited for them than others.

We wander around to get our bearings, locating the water-misting locations to cool off and purchasing expensive bottles of Gatorade and water. I’m grateful for my stupid hat but still think it’s stupid. Installation art and small group performance is plentiful with it and the crowd having a general permeating kind of Burning Man vibe that’s nice and easy to be around. Dahli wants to see Silversun Pickups (whom I’ve never heard of) on the main stage, but the speaker system seems to have a hard time with overly amplified distortion. Their set sort of drags on and we split to pee and then come back to watch an excellent performance of the Artic Monkeys whose clean, precise set has a much better time making its way pleasantly into my brain. Night mercifully begins to fall: it has truly been ridiculously hot, and we wonder aloud how people have managed to arrive early and plan on remaining into the night (we find later that many solve this dilemma by simply passing out in heaps though the event). Hungry, we eat some food which is better than the usual festival fare, this meal some sort of Brazilian BBQ. A device sits in the middle of a large fenced-off area near the eating tables, and shoots, sputters and blasts intermittent streams of flamethrower-worthy fire into the night, making the air nearby even warmer. The art begins to illuminate in bulbs and lights and beams of one sort or another, casting a psychedelic, fantastical mood over the proceedings.

Stage banter is always a skill, Arctic Monkeys had it earlier and so does Jarvis Cocker now for the post-dinner entertainment. Self-deprecating, gracious, and beautifully British, he goes on late but crams a full set into a handful of new songs. He’s fucking brilliant.

We’re so far away from Bjork we’re depending on the video screens to help us out with what’s happening on stage, like they’re supposed to, like they were invented to do. Maybe it was her choice, maybe it was amateur hour with whoever was running the camera, but what little we saw of her was quick-edited into tiny scenes wedged into huge sections of visuals featuring nothing but a hand moving sliding dials up and down on some electronic device. It pissed me off so bad I didn’t want much else to do with the show. We wander over to Gogol Bordello’s set but I never see Pedro who I met on the plane. We end up leaving around 11:30 and getting stuck in the parking lot for over an hour until someone opened up an exit out of the back of the lot to let off the pressure. I’m exhausted. Experiences like these take a while to settle in.

Whatever kind of space the mass gathering presented itself as during the day, darkness now reveals to assume an entirely phantasmagorical experience. There are few things in this world simply amazing as the sheer volume of space that thousands of people can occupy at one time. New York is obvious in this regard, but not an obvious situation to witness since people seldom occupy open space anywhere in the city. Here, and particularly at night the bodies in rest and motion take on a bizarre tableau of energy and chaos. Things are surprisingly calm, polite, and respectful. People are like spirits drifting about, and though I’m one who feels more energy lost that gained from a crowd, here I’m in something of awe about what I’m witnessing. I’ve been to plenty of music festivals, but none have trained my eye on the dynamics of form in space quite the way this place has. I can’t say I wanted to drink or get high, not by any means, but I admit I envy the resiliency of the 20s and how brilliantly indestructible youth seems to be.