Last Dance at the Q School Tournament

The last day of the last Professional Golfers Association Qualifying School Tournament in its current form was on Monday in La Quinta, California.



As you can see, the day was warm and strikingly beautiful.



Even though the tournament is free to attend, the two eighteen-hole golf courses at PGA West were nearly empty of spectators.



This allowed for an informality between the professional athletes such as Billy Horschel above right and their fans which felt rare at this level of professional sports.



The Qualifying School Tournament comes at the end of each year and is held either in the Coachella Valley or in Florida.



There are four levels of feeder tournaments throughout the country in order to arrive at this grueling six-day finale, and for years the top 25 cumulative scores secured a playing card for the PGA Tour for the following year, which is an extremely difficult item to obtain.



The rules are being changed after this year's event so that nobody like Dong-hwan Lee below right will be able to obtain their card direct from this tournament anymore.



Instead, winners will be fed into the minor league Web.com tour, which seems to have a new sponsor name every three years.



So congratulations to the four Cinderfellas who progressed through all the feeder tournaments and scored in the top 25, winning them a PGA tour card, including the 22-year-old Derek Ernst above left. (Click here for a short bio list of all 26 who graduated to the big show from the tournament.) More in the next post.

A Bougainvillea Holiday

Palm Springs has been so warm and beautiful it will be difficult to return to San Francisco later this month.



The place is also blessedly empty because most people don't travel in the United States between Thanksgiving and Christmas.



In fact, every other person on the street seems to be a polite Canadian.



Even the fake twirling Christmas tree at Frances Stevens Park is delightful, though the towering palms behind make it look a bit absurd.

Festival of Lights Parade 2012

The 21st annual Festival of Lights parade took place on a balmy Saturday evening in Palm Springs, with "Best Band" winners from the Palm Springs High School helping to lead things off.



The free Desert Post Weekly previewed the parade with the following hilarious description:

"If you're over the age of 30 you might remember Hasbro's Lite-Brite -- a toy that allowed kids to create an illuminated picture of their own design. The Festival of Lights Parade could be described as Lite-Brite on steroids (or acid, depending on your experiences.)"

The inspiration seems to be less Lite-Brite and more Disneyland Electronic Parade, but the Palm Springs version is delightfully homespun, as the sanitation truck ringed with lights above demonstrates.



There was even a float above that was advertising Cash for Your Used Appliances with broken-down refrigerators and ovens decorated with dollar signs and ringed with lights.



There's no War on Christmas in the Coachella Valley, so religious groups such as the Desert Chapel above were welcome to illuminate our lives...



...along with a bilingual Jews for Jesus float complete with menorah above.



The sheer surrealism of the parade is hard to beat...



...and when Santa and Mrs. Claus drove by on a float that was supposed to be a midcentury modern rooftop to mark the end of the parade, we cheered deliriously.

Palm Springs Artists Council

The Palm Springs Art Museum has an extraordinary auxiliary fundraising group called the Artists Council who are not collectors but artists themselves. Once a year the museum hosts a juried exhibition and all the pieces are for sale, with some of the money going to the museum and some to the individual artist. Most of the work isn't much more than mediocre, but there are always standouts such as Fragments #1 by La Quinta based Sylvia Torres above and Dream #14 by Philippe Chambon below.



The program feels like a healthy inclusion of the local artistic community, and I wish something similar existed at SFMOMA.



Though the first two paintings in this post won prizes, The Other Side of Paris did not but should have.



Happily, the artist Bret Philpot above was there manning an information table, and consented to pose with his painting. Congratulations to all the Artists Council exhibitors.