ChinaShop

So I don’t mean to get all hocus pocus on your ass, but bad things happen when you travel during Mercury retrograde.  Life just goes awry.  In a big way.  From misscommunications to missed flights, it is a time when ideally you should lay low, revise or edit old projects, & generally not be too ambitious.  But hey!  We’re brave!  We care not for astrology!  WE ARE CHINASHOP!  We’ll give anything a try!  & so, on Saturday morning, Barbie (our editor & multi-tasking prodigy), Seth (taciturn & phenomenally gifted videographer & photographer) & I (insert your own adjectives & nouns here) set off towards the desert in a blue Nissan Altima hybrid.

Okay, maybe that introduction was a little more dramatic than it needed to be, but simply put, we ventured out to the desert to go to a music festival which, it turned out, none of us had tickets for.  Slight hitch.  Not to mention, it was completely sold out.  There were no tickets to be had.  Nada.  Nunca.

You see, this is the thing about being a creative for hire.  No matter the circumstances, you have to whip something up.  I went out there in search of some kind of arid love story, & Seth was quietly grasping this magnificent Leica video camera envisioning glorious vistas, & Barbie had her eyes on the horizon probably thinking about what she could do to stop me from asking incessant questions.

We dropped our suitcases at our hotel (like a fabulous but terrible phantasm of the 1970s, all done in lime green & tropical prints) before hitting the road again to go in search of The Story.

So, what do people do at Coachella when they can’t actually get into Coachella?  We were certainly not the only ones in this situation.  Well, I’ll tell you: they drink.  Copiously.  They throw frisbees.  They eyeball one another from behind identical pairs of Wayfarers.  They wear sequinned dresses to In-N-Out Burger.  (Oh, wait, that was just me.)  We wandered through campsites & drove along roads which stretched out into the nothingness & clambered around mountains at sunrise.

As the weekend wore on, things improved.  While previously the idea of being cockblocked from Coachella had us all grimacing & gritting our teeth, by Sunday afternoon I think we were all filled with a sense of relief.  It really wasn’t all bad.  There had been French toast with bacon for breakfast & plenty of frozen coffee drinks.  There were aquamarine swimming pools & incredible views.  We had danced on the Red Bull bus, scaled waterfalls to grab bottles of vodka (oh, again, that was just me), & eaten incredible steaks at (www.bingcrosbysrestaurant.com) Bing Crosby’s Restaraunt and Piano Lounge (you should go).

& then we realized: we had not been subjected to pressing crowds of 100,000+ hipsters!  We had avoided overzealous rent-a-cops!  We had not stood in lines for hours upon end just to get through a gate!  We had not been deafened by Infected Mushroom, & no one had been vomited on!

If you ask me, it couldn’t have been a more successful trip!

Words by Gala Darling with photos by Seth Johnson

 

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