Brian.Indrelunas.com

on hipness

So I wrote this last Thursday and meant to post it Friday, but my pre-weekend plans got in the way, so now here are my much-delayed thoughts on hipness:

Part I: Coachella

Photo by Caesar Sebastian

When this year's Coachella lineup was announced last last week, I was rather impressed that I had heard of (and in some cases, straight-up heard) many of the artists who'll be playing in Indio come April.

You know, back in high school, I only had this vague idea of what Coachella was and probably knew 0.3 of the bands that played the festival... and now all these years later, I live in the Coachella Valley and kind of maybe want to go to Coachella — assuming, of course, that there are enough bands I want to see that won't be playing while I'm at work Saturday night.

Part II: KWXwhY?

This past past Saturday, I was listening to KDES (Tempe translation: KOOL) because, you know, I'm all 65 years old and whatnot. And I heard the DJ say that KDES' long-anticipated move from 104.7 FM to 98.5 FM is was coming up on Feb. 2.

That means the station that's now was on 98.5, KWXY is leaving FM forever!* I heard earlier this last week that the beautiful music station is moving to its old AM frequency, but things still won't be the same. Lots of markets have older-than-oldies on AM, but ever since forever, we here in Palm Springs have had classy old jams on the FM... along with all the cuteness of a station by senior citizens for senior citizens. This is the station that calls itself "the valley's 24/7 news source" because they have their DJs read national wire stories at all hours of the day and night. Srsly. I think I've heard more local news about Canadian cities on KWXY than I have about Coachella Valley cities. Also, some of the DJs go all out during news time and tell you that the temperature is, say, "65 KWXY degrees" before consulting "Doppler 98-5."

But even though I like to poke fun, when KWXY moves moved back into the static-y, mono world of amplitude modulation, my life is gonna get got a lot less classy... or I'll just have to get used to the much more low-fi version of Sinatra and company.

The possible silver lining to all this change on the airwaves is the hope that someone, somewhere will deem the soon-to-be-wide-open 104.7 frequency a proper place for a much-needed alternative station for the Coachella Valley.

Ah, but who am I kidding? The powers that be will probably turn 104.7 into the valley's fifth-or-sixth-ish classic rock station. Srsly. We already have two that bill themselves as classic rock stations (KMRJ and KDGL), a Jack FM (KAJR) that plays classic rock a majority of the time, a hard rock station (KCLB) that revisits the '70s and '80s way too often and a healthy helping of classic-ish rock on KDES.

Actually, since I wrote this on Thursday, I found out from my colleagues' reports in Sunday's paper that 104.7 is now licensed to Redlands, and 95.9 switched formats on Monday to what was billed as a kind-of KWXY replacement but has so far sounded like a slower and sappier version of the old Jack FM playlist.

* I can't actually guarantee that it'll be forever. What do I look like? A magician? No. I'm Ginger Jeffries, your First Alert forecaster. Duh.

Part III: Draw the Circle Wide

Speaking of local radio, I should add that KCLB does play quite a bit of new rock amid the oldies. Lately, they've been really big into Skillet's "Monster," which cracks me up to no end because I remember back in high school when:

• I was one of relatively few people in this country who had actually heard of Skillet, then an obscure Christian rock band
• Priya always used to call them Saucepan
• and I totally went to go see a Skillet show at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix.

When I first started getting into Christian pop and rock way back in 2001 or so, it seemed the conventional wisdom was that the Christian music scene was always a few months or years behind mainstream music. As I recall, Britney and Christina preceded the likes of Stacie Orrico. Likewise, *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys begat Plus One.

But ever since I left the all-Christian-music-all-the-time scene in '04, I've kept hearing a whole bunch of singers, bands and groups that at one time only came on Air 1 and The Effect.

My all-time favorite band, Switchfoot, is all over the place — movie soundtracks, commercials, the radio, ESPN college football intros (and events)... and they also randomly show up in Palm Desert when I go out of town.

I've heard Skillet on the radio and on NBC football promos this past fall, and at one point back in AZ, I even heard Thousand Foot Krutch on a real rock station.

Hell, even sweet li'l Katy Hudson was resurrected as girl-kissin' Katy Perry.

All of these instances and various other "This sounds familiar" moments always make me smile and/or laugh.

Who knew that so many of my '01 jams would be tied to such '10 hipness?

I mean, none of my old Jesus jams are getting played on KWXY. The only songs from the past two decades I ever heard on 98.5 before the big switch were some Michael Bublé track and Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's 1993 Hawaiian-style cover of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "What A Wonderful World."

But one of those old Air 1 bands, MUTEMATH is scheduled to play a Sunday set at this year's Coachella festival.

And thus, the hipness comes full circle, y'all.

2 comments | 2/02/2010 08:41:00 PM

writer's block

Well, as it turns out, three out of the four topics I was writing about here fit pretty well together thematically, and some of them got rather lengthy... so all that copy will be forthcoming tomorrow after I spruce it up with some file photos so it's not just an endless span of text. While you're waiting for my epic post "on hipness," here's a little nugget about bad, bad movies:

#PSBFF

Right in the middle of a very legit and (mostly) classy film fest, I hosted the 2010 Palm Springs Bad Film Festival at my apartment, featuring Glitter, Snakes on a Train and The Room.

It was a great success, and it involved a humongous bag of popcorn that I'm now nearing the end of thanks to lots of popcorn munching while watching TV... and not blogging.

0 comments | 1/28/2010 09:48:00 PM

Go, Storm Team, go!

I'll admit that I wasn't all that excited about starting work an hour early today to cover Part III of the Coachella Valley's rainy week.

It's not that I don't like weather. I took (and loved) Intro to Meteorology in college, and you know I like to do a First Alert Forecast every now and again.

It's just that so many people had talked up this third storm as having the potential to be one for the ages, but most of the meteorologists I had talked to earlier in the week didn't seem ready to call this set of storms something that hadn't been seen in decades.

Well, Wednesday's and Thursday's rainfall totals both set records across the Coachella Valley and although the conditions out there were somewhat less than apocalyptic, I was impressed with just how much storm news really was out there to chase today and grateful that TDS had assembled a whole Storm Team of sorts to try to tackle as much of it as we could.

I spent the early morning hours trying to keep up with an ever-growing list of road closures from the office. Oh, and I also busted out my Ginger-imitating skills and did a quick standup for mydesert.com:

But my day got a whole lot more exciting when we heard about a roof collapse over the scanner and I headed out to the Ross Dress for Less at the Palm Springs Mall, where built up rainwater had caused a 20-foot-by-30-foot section of the store's roof to collapse.

Being the desert dweller that I am, I left my jacket in the office and didn't think to get my umbrella out of my car when I got to the mall, so after a bunch of tromping around in the rain whilst reporting and e-mailing quotes back to the newsroom, I realized that not only were my feet and ankles wet from walking amid puddles, but the rest of me was pretty soaked too.

That situation required a lunchtime wardrobe change, but soon I was relatively dry and back in the newsroom. Then, I ran out to a reported water rescue — with my jacket on and umbrella at the ready — that ended up being less catastrophic than it sounded. But the amount of water on Ramon Road east of Varner Road was still pretty freakin' impressive. On my way back, I lost the road closure game and got to see even more of the street flooding across the western part of the valley.

Those afternoon experiences got me thinking about just how crazy things get out on the roads when it rains here. I mean, a few times over the years that I lived in Arizona, things got rather wet and/or wild, and apparently the conditions are rather intense there tonight. But back in the Valley of the Sun, I never saw anything like the widespread road closures that pop up across the Coachella Valley when it rains — especially when it rains as much as it has lately.

I suppose that's partially because of when I lived in Arizona. By the time I moved there, almost every major road that crossed the Salt River did so via a bridge, unlike back when roads like Rural and Alma School crossed the riverbed and then during the big rains of 19-something-or-other, traffic backed up beyond belief on Mill Avenue because it was one of very few bridges crossing the no-longer-dry Salt River. Back then, perhaps the Valley of the Sun wasn't so different from the Coachella Valley, where a number of major roads cross the Whitewater Wash at ground level.

But anyway, like I said, I found today's weather-related news all rather exciting. And you can see a few scenes from across the valley overlaid on my second attempt at beating Ginger at her own game:

0 comments | 1/21/2010 09:39:00 PM

News sucks when it happens to your friends...

My friend Aldrich's ceiling caved in during this week's rain, and tonight some Palm Springs firefighters took down much of the ceiling and put up this tarp to divert the rainwater coming through out to the patio. Yikes.

And sadly, this is the kind of stuff I'll be looking for starting tomorrow morning at 5 o'clock, which is an hour earlier than I usually start work... not that I'm going to bed early or anything. This is gonna hurt.

0 comments | 1/20/2010 09:42:00 PM

It's (beyond) official: I love Hungarian movies.

Tonight, I walked up the street to see Kaméleon (and hear from its director, Krisztina Goda) at the Annenberg Theater in the Palm Springs Art Museum. Whilst buying film fest tickets on Sunday, I chose this movie for two closely related reasons: a) it looked totally bad ass, and b) it was Hungarian.

Yeah, I've got a thing for Hungarian movies, and it's not because of Vascora, a "comedy" that I saw at ShortFest earlier this year. (Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed Vascora... but it was kind of odd and not all that funny.)

Rather, my first true Hungarian cinematic love was the 2003 film Kontroll, a dark thriller that takes place in the Budapest subway system that each Flinn class gets to know so well.

Ironically, though, I was actually quite far away from the familiar da-da-DA-duh of the BP metro when I first heard about Kontroll.

I was actually in the city of Pécs in southern Hungary, where we had a pretty epic homestay. For this part of the trip, I was paired up with my Flinn classmate Wayne and we were hosted by the wonderful Ági, who introduced us to her family, took us on our very first Tesco shopping experience, showed us the sights and also took us to a street race — not to be confused with the later experience in Romania when I almost died in a Dacia.

Anyway, I believe it was toward the end of this eventful stay that the three of us were walking down a street in Péecs, and Wayne (who was and is a film buff) started chatting up Ági about Hungarian movies: Are a lot of movies made in Hungary? What types of films are popular? et cetera, et cetera.

And I remember him asking Ági something along the lines of "If I could only see one Hungarian movie, what's the best one?"

Her answer: Kontroll. It was very popular, a box-office success in Hungary and very well done, I think she said of the film as she described the basic setting and plot outline.

Well, though I'm no film buff by any stretch of the imagination, I committed that title to memory and did some Googling once I got back to the states. And luckily enough, by June 2005, this '03 film had finally and miraculously made its way not only into American distribution but also secured a spot in our very own hometown Valley Art theater in Tempe.

A delegation of us '04 Flinns went to see it, reminisce about Eastern Europe and also arm wrestle at Taco Bell, apparently.

Soon afterward (or was it before?) I ordered the DVD from Amazon.com, and Kontroll has been one of those movies that I make my friends watch ever since.

And to think that I might have never seen one of my favorite movies and would've likely passed up a great one tonight had it not been for Wayne's questioning and Ági's answering. So to both of you, I raise a metaphorical shot glass of pálinka or ţuică or whatever it was that Ági offered Wayne from her fridge in Pécs almost five years ago.

1 comments | 1/12/2010 10:13:00 PM

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