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Desert modern
The sights and songs of Palm Springs

BY JOSH KUN

If you want to know the truth about Palm Springs, visit one of its golf courses in the middle of the summer, when temperatures reach 120 degrees. The desert sun turns all natural moisture into cruel mirages that flicker on burning pavement. What is verdant and lush in the spring and fall is a vacant plot of scorched earth in July. My grandparents live on the eighth fairway of a country-club course out there, at the baked foot of the San Jacinto mountains, and the first time I visited them in the summer months, it was like visiting a studio backlot. I saw Palm Springs for what it is, a community constructed with hydroelectric power, imported water, and cycles of massive refertilization — a city grafted onto a landscape to which it will never fully belong.

You can see the extent of the desert façade in a panoramic photograph of a golf-course-to-be that’s part of Rudy VanderLans’s book Palm Desert (Emigre Press), in which a dozen sprinklers spray water on acres of cooking dirt and an army of baby palm trees are scattered amid boulders and bulldozers — miniature blueprints for future icons of recreation. Palm Desert is two towns over from Palm Springs, a 20-minute drive down Highway 111, but it feels a world away — gated enclaves and nouveau riche tract condos, tennis courts and designer boutiques. Palm Desert barely shows you any of that, though, just ghostly expanses of single-story homes and undeveloped desert populated by flowering bundles of brittle brush, all set against blankets of electric blue sky and inflamed white clouds.

The Palm Desert it shows is the Palm Desert of “Palm Desert,” a song written by Van Dyke Parks in 1968 for his classic album of Southern California surrealism, Song Cycle (Warner Bros.). VanderLans fills his book with photographs and writings inspired by Parks’s swirling funhouse ode to the desert city where “springs often run dry.” Parks wishes he could stay in Palm Desert, where things fade away, where sages and date palms are converted into real estate, but he has to return to Hollywood instead, a “never-never land” on the “banks of toxicity” where most of Song Cycle unfolds. The album’s portrait of Southern California — its Laurel Canyon daydreams, its Alabama-in-Silver-Lake hallucinations — was painted from the desert’s point of view. As Parks told Barney Hoskyns in Hoskyns’s Brian Wilson bio Waiting for the Sun, he put Song Cycle together while living in Palm Desert, “just me and a piano in a house on the edge of a tract development.”

Palm Desert comes with a CD that includes Parks’s song and three cover versions, none of which feels organic to the desert the way Parks’s does. In the language of the modernist architecture that’s spotlighted in another new desert book, Alan Hess and Andrew Danish’s glistening Palm Springs Weekend (Chronicle Books), the covers of “Palm Desert” are more like a Neutra house than a Frey house. Where Richard Neutra’s famous Kaufmann house is like “an observatory, in the desert, but not of it,” Albert Frey’s buildings and Parks’s song try to speak the language of the desert, “to draw out the deep secrets of the rocks, the heat, the tamarisk trees, and collect them in a conscious design.”

Just as Parks’s album reimagined LA as a satellite of a desert center, Palm Springs Weekend imagines European modernism in the shadows of concrete and steel cliff homes that tame a wilderness of tumbleweed and jimsonweed with domestic machines of simplicity. Hess and Danish chronicle Palm Springs, originally Agua Caliente Indian land, in terms of its development by moneyed outsiders as a refuge of rest or a Hollywood playground. “Baby get your luggage packed, meet you by the railroad track,” Slim and Slam sang in 1942, “Everybody’s jumpin’ down to Palm Springs.” Indeed, what Hess and Danish gloss over is the “everybody” that Palm Springs modernism jumps over. Some of desert modernism’s greatest triumphs, including the newly revamped Spa Hotel, were built on land once zoned as Section 14, a square mile of Indian land used as a post-WW2 African-American and Latino reservation until the city bulldozed it in 1966.

My grandparents are part of this history of desert settlement. They moved there in the ’60s, first as temporary visitors and later as permanent bridge-playing residents who, year after year, would watch more of their friends die in air-conditioned bedrooms. If you look closely at a small photograph in Palm Springs Weekend you can see their house: a flat, one-story modernist block with concrete sunscreens in front of their windows and green pebbles playing the part of green grass.

Of course, what goes on inside these modern homes is not modern at all but the traditional rituals of aging: learning to see with one eye, learning to change your own catheter bag, learning to accept the hospital as your second home. As the song says, in the desert, springs often run dry, and nothing anyone builds is ever going to change that.

Issue Date: April 12 - 19, 2001