Every time we come here, one thing is certain: we will always make contact with at least one person who has a Boston or Boston area connection. Our first occurred at the rental car office: the guy who rented the car to us was from Andover. On Saturday we went to the gigantic street fair held every Saturday and Sunday at the College of the Desert. It's kind of an outdoor flea market, but most of the stuff for sale is good, not yard sale type items. Many of the people who sell there have stores, as well. We go whenever we're here. There was a new booth this time, one that had hundreds of different kinds of hot sauces, salsas, etc. All the kinds you can find at places like Williams Sonoma, but much more variety. We got to chatting with the owner, and it turns out he's from Boston and his son lives in Andover. That's two people in two days--I'm guessing there will be more.
The General Patton Memorial Museum is in Chiriaco Summit, about an hour's drive through completely undeveloped desert. After a few miles we began a steep, but gradual, ascent. Signs advised us to turn off our air conditioning to avoid overheating; there were a lot of big trucks on the road, and they frequently had to pull off to use the many large barrels of radiator water that the state provides along the side of the road. This desolate (but beautiful) territory makes you appreciate what the early settlers went through.
The museum is quite interesting. Patton's connection to this area was that he located, established and commanded the Desert Training Center in 1942. The Americans would soon be fighting in North Africa and needed to be ready. The Mojave Desert is bleak, inhospitable and remote, with temperatures that range from below freezing to 120 degrees. The Desert Training Center (later called the California-Arizona Maneuver Area) was 350 miles wide, 250 miles deep and consisted of Patton's headquarters at Camp Young (where the museum is located) and 10 other camps. The camps trained over 1 milliion American service men and women before it was closed in 1944. The museum had some very interesting exhibits of items from WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, including a collection of old tanks on display outside.
The big event of the evening was the Palm Springs Film Noir Festival, which began on Thursday and ends on Sunday. We had picked one film we wanted to see, so we had some time to kill before the movie started (we had swung by the theater and purchased our tickets earlier). We went into downtown Palm Springs and decided to check out a gallery we like and where we've bought several items. When we were here last December we were disappointed to walk in and find that the business had been sold to new owners. They were very nice, and the things they carried were good, but it was not the same collection of artists, etc that were there before. This time we walked in and the old owners were back--turned out the people who bought the business were essentially scam artists and had cost the old owners a lot of money. So they took over the business again and are trying to recoup their losses. The former inventory is back in the store, and we had a great time talking with them for a while until it was time to go to the movie. Another (sort of) Boston connection: they had just come back from a two week trip to Boston, so we talked a lot about that.
The film festival draws a big crowd, and the theater was filled. We were there to see "Something Wild," a very obscure film (not available on video or DVD) which is rarely shown anywhere. Foster Hirsch, a Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, gave a very interesting introduction before the film started, explaining the background of the film, why it's hard to classify (some people would argue that it's not completely a noir film, but I think it is), what we were about to see, etc. He knows Carroll Baker and Jack Garfein, the director, very well (Baker and Garfein were married when the movie was made) so his talk was really great. The movie was amazing. I wish more people could see it. Very dark and, and Foster Hirsch said, "challenging." Not an easy film to watch, but so superbly acted I wondered how I would be able to watch lesser movies again. After the movie Carroll Baker and Foster Hirsch had a wonderful interview onstage and took questions from the audience. She looks fantastic. She's about 76 years old and just gorgeous. Very funny and personable. I tried taking some pictures, but we were a little too far back and I don't know how good they'll be.
1 comment:
Interesting to know.
Post a Comment