American Vertigo: Swimming through the promised-land in Palm Springs

American Vertigo: Swimming through the promised-land in Palm Springs
Blog: A city of contradictions keeps drawing Hadani Ditmars back.
6 min read
27 Feb, 2017
The Sonoran desert-city of Palm Springs is known for hot springs and stylish hotels [Getty]

There is a vortex in Palm Springs that keeps drawing you back.

Or so I'm told by an Architecture and Design Center employee at a party one night during Modernism Week, an annual festival celebrating the best of mid-century design.

But mysterious Agua Caliente Indian desert ley-lines aside, the city is certainly an interesting vortex of American extremes.

The greater Palm Springs area embodies the purity of the desert and the obscenity of strip malls; gated communities next to homeless encampments; a very Democratic city core surrounded by an aging Republican valley; and the disconnect between modernism as a social project and its current incarnation as a fetishisation of nostalgia and price per square footage.

Oddly enough, during these early days of Trump's presidency, I've been drawn back into its vortex twice in six weeks. Palm Springs - Janus-like in its incarnation of both the American dream and nightmare - has been a slightly surreal lens on the troubled nation via its annual film festival, modernism week, and some unexpected vertigo.

A quick trip to write about the glories of a mid-century hotel renovation was extended due to an inflamed eardrum and a bout of dizziness, making the whole experience even weirder.

This latest trip was preceded by a 12-day cinematic jaunt in January that made me feel rather like Burt Lancaster in the classic 1968 film The Swimmer. As my own looming mid-century moment neatly coincided with a manic seven-hotels-in-less-than-two-weeks odyssey, I swam through the pools of Palm Springs, pondering my own mortality, American virtues and Middle Eastern cinema.

 
Read more: Palm Springs presents cinema a world away from Hollywood


Weeks away from a research trip to Iraq, I reflected on what made America "great again", and the politics of declinism - as only a Canadian could.

My own Lucinda river was a dizzying path through pools at the Hilton, The Albert Frey-designed Monkey Tree, the former Holiday Inn-turned-hipster Saguaro, the elegant l'Horizon (built by the producer of Lassie), the buzzy Chris Pardo-designed Arrive, the Spanish villa-style Triada (Alan Ladd's former enclave), until I finaly collapsed at Jamie Kowal's Amado sanctuary, with the ghosts of old movie stars and mid-century optimists whispering in my ear.

In between packing and checking in, and chatting with the Mexican teenagers who worked at the hotels, I waited in huge queues with largely middle-aged middle-Americans to see a wealth of world cinema, from Saudi Arabia, Israel, Palestine and Norway.

I fearlessly attended cocktail parties, danced with French filmmakers and took in a plethora of ironically mid-century outfits, interiors and attitudes, desperately hoping they would block out the Trump tweets and other horrors on the nightly news. It was a tough assignment, but somebody had to do it.

I am a hotel 
- Leonard Cohen



I watched the premier of Gus Van Sant's LGBT American history series When We Rise at a cinema called Camelot. I asked Cleve Jones - the veteran LGBT activist portrayed in the series who had come of age as a civil rights activist - "At what point exactly did the LGBT movement become corporatised?"

He responded succinctly that it was a Reagan-era phenomenon - it was around the same time that he began arming both sides in the Iran/Iraq war that Pride marches became advertising arenas.

"Americans are very good at commodifying things," he told me. "Whether it's inner-city rap or LGBT lifestyles - that's just what they do."

 
Robert De Niro was in town to talk about
The Comedian [Getty]


I asked Robert De Niro - on the red carpet for a screening of his film The Comedian - whether Hollywood would lead the way in standing up to Trump. "We'll see," is all he would say.

Later, on stage, he seemed tired. Was he morally exhausted or bored with celebrity? Or just remembering the 1970s when American cinema really was great?

Back in the Palm Springs saddle a few weeks later, I swam through the gleaming pool at the new La Serena Villas, and the born-again rat pack Riviera, where the old amphitheatre is now a spa. But like the limping Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer, I was soon felled by gravity.

I awoke one morning at the narcotic-like Parker Palm Springs with a bad case of vertigo and a blocked left ear. I managed to make it to a press conference with the mayor about the recently rescued soon-to-be-installed Albert Frey Alluminaire house, a visit to a newly built incarnation of a late 1960s Al Beadle-designed house, and a meeting with the publisher of Palm Springs Life, before collapsing at Eisenhower Urgent Care.

My swimming days were over - at least until the antibiotics and steroids kicked in - and my new Lucinda River was a sea of surreal navigations through the American medical bureaucracy and Modernism Week events. At night I watched more news about Trump and bombs in Baghdad, silently swallowing horse pill-sized tablets and reflecting on how the stark desert landscape reminded me of my time in the Middle East.

In between bouts of lying down and taking penicillin at classic mid-century abodes like the Orbit In and The Hideaway, I bonded with "ordinary Americans" while waiting to fill my $300 prescriptions at Rite Aid, chatting about their $1500-a-month insurance premiums.

I'm going to swim home, I've got to, don't you see?
- Burt Lancaster as Ned Merill in The Swimmer



I joked with a Home Depot employee about a drive-through hybrid version with a la carte health care. As I traded my urgent care bracelet for a design lecture one, I pondered modernism as the cure, and saw Palm Springs as containing both the promise and the tragedy of America.

I attended an evening of presentations called Modernism With a Twist, including one by a Jewish New Yorker about the journey from immigrant tenement life to brave new suburbia - the early days of which he likened to a kibbutz, complete with coffee klatches and camaraderie.

I wondered what had happened to modernism as a social project, as I gazed down from the gorgeously minimalist, melded to the desert slope of Albert Frey house, at the new multi-story Kimpton hotel and West Elm development below and gated communities beyond.

Author Steven Price, who wrote a book on the famed Trousdale Estates, maintains that modernism became "vulnerable" after the Kennedy assassination, an era when American optimism gave way to xenophobia and paranoia, and more barrier-driven constructs.

I reflected on this while watching a scene from Trump's Mar a Lago fortress on TV.

A futile, vertiginous drive to a hospital in La Quinta to get the signature of a doctor for an insurance form, accompanied by a slightly mad Colombian architect, offered some alternative scenery. A shortcut past the gleaming pools and golf courses and the rumoured soon-to-be-home of the Obamas, revealed another view: a drug rehab centre, a mobile home development and chained, snarling guard dogs.

The night before I left, I sang Besame Mucho at a Mexican eatery, with a manager whose mother was "illegal" and might soon be deported.

I flew home with legendary Canadian landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander, who spoke of needing to work as part of a collaborative community, and dreamed that the ghosts of Albert Frey and Neutra came back and helped her build a playground for children of "illegals", those perhaps at most risk in today's America. 

As the desert landscape turned to light, with a thousand gleaming pools below, I wished that we could all swim home again soon. We've just got to, don't you see?

Follow Hadani Ditmars on Twitter: @HadaniDitmars