Palm Springs Paradise

Go ahead and blame me because it's all my fault. I moved to San Francisco's Hayes Valley in the early 1990s and it has since become ridiculously gentrified. We bought a condo in sleepy Palm Springs 12 years ago and the small city has gradually become the subject of a trend piece in every travel publication in the world.

What those articles don't mention is that the main reason Palm Springs is so vibrant these days is because just about every interesting old gay man in the country who didn't die of AIDS has moved to town during the last three years.

The migration has also shifted the political makeup of Riverside County which was always staunchly conservative Republican, and now looks set to elect Joy Silver above to the California State Senate.

Thankfully, the town has not turned into a complete gay ghetto, as evidenced by my hetero friends Heidi from Santa Barbara and Corey from British Columbia above...

...which makes for some entertainingly odd juxtapositions at VillageFest where the main drag of Palm Canyon Drive downtown is closed for a pedestrian street fair every Thursday evening.

During VillageFest, the astonishingly good Palm Springs Art Museum offers free admission.

A group of us attended the final week of an Andy Warhol print exhibition that had been collected by Jordan D. Schnitzer, a Portland, Oregon real estate heir.

I am not a big Warhol fan and the prints felt like a lazy collection...

...but the museum's installation was characteristically creative and beautiful...

...and it was fun posing handsome Canadian hetero dudes...

...in front of all the iconic characters...

...and taking photos of a tired museumgoer who looked like a Duane Hanson sculpture.

Palm Springs Villagefest 1

Every Thursday evening of the year in Palm Springs from 6 to 10 PM...



...the main drag downtown, Palm Canyon Drive, is closed to vehicular traffic...



...for something called Villagefest for the last 16 years...



...where 200 booths sell "handcrafted" articles...



...including glass fireplace treatments that are "more exciting than a log"...



...along with handmade soaps...



...jewelry...



...and psychedelic bathing salts.



The best part of course, is the serious people watching.

Palm Springs Villagefest 2

There are a few booths offering local foods at Villagefest...



...and lots of outdoor dining offering everything from tamales to hot dogs...



...as you watch the local wildlife walking by.



If it all becomes too much, you can get a hippie massage...



...before looking at the bad art everywhere.



Laguna Beach has always been a soul sister city to Palm Springs...



...both in their "arty" reputations...



...and their large gay populations that seem to move back and forth between ocean and desert.

Palm Springs Villagefest 3

"New age" musical artists are peppered throughout the six-block fair...



...selling CDs of their swoony stylings...



...while using their pooch as a fabulous prop.



There are also various nonprofits represented, from cute Search and Rescue teams...



...to Shriners...



...to a portable Rabbi...



...and "Stonewall Democrats for Edwards."



My favorite group was The Republican Women, whose usual terrifying members seemed to be on vacation while being spelled by a few gay male friends.



As my neighbor Richard said, the gay dudes posing as Republican women pretty much sums up Palm Springs.

Palm Springs Art Museum 1: Sculptures Staring Back

The Palm Springs Art Museum opens the doors to the public for free every Thursday from four to eight in the evening during the weekly Villagefest street fair a block away.



It's a populist gesture that is paying dividends because the museum seems to be thriving, with new donations of both money and extraordinary family collections increasing every year. (Above is "Shovel Man," a 1974 piece by James Surls.)



The core of the major modern sculptural collection that is being amassed at the museum comes from Gwendolyn Weiner, the heiress to a Texas oil fortune. She's donated and lent a number of Henry Moore sculptures, such as the 1939 "Stringed Instrument" above...



...along with dozens of other 20th century masterpieces, including the 1962 William Turnbull mixed media piece above.



The museum also rotates the displays of their sculptures from inside the four-story building to outside sculpture gardens where they tend to look completely different. Above is another Weiner donation, the 1955 "Woman of Herero Tribe" by Gerhard Marcks.



A Robert Arneson piece that seemed a bit aggressive inside looks happy standing in the garden...



...and so does the Betty Gold 1982 "Monumental Holistic XIV" above.



Some of the hypperreal sculptures were unsettling, such as the 1990 John De Andrea piece above.



A very funny Duane Hanson sculpture above of two middle-aged American tourists sitting on a bench in shorts has been installed in different locations around the museum over the years.



Last Thursday the piece was stationed in the entrance lobby of the museum, and it was more amusing than usual watching tourists who looked exactly like the sculptured figures standing in front of them, wondering if they should be offended.

Nature and Light

The Palm Springs Art Museum offers free admission every Thursday evening when the town is filled with visitors for the weekly Villagefest street fair.



For the summer, there is an exhibit called "Impressionist and Modern Masters: Nature and Light" which involves about a dozen extremely valuable paintings by Impressionists Van Gogh, Renoir, Matisse, and Manet and the modernists de Kooning, Thiebaud, Joan Mitchell, and Rothko.



The paintings are on loan from an "Anonymous Donor" in Palm Desert, where the super rich such as Bill Gates have homes in gated communities.



The exhibit is fluffed out by complementary works from the permanent collection at the museum but they tend to suffer in comparison to Anonymous Rich Dude's paintings.



I didn't stay long because Nature and Light in the real world were calling...



...with palm fronds and colored clouds.