What I Found Looking Up in a Palm Springs Diner
I was not going to Palm Springs for Altered Bloom. That was the plan, at least. A weekend off, the kind I do not take often enough, and a place I had already filed away in my head as the wrong register entirely. Mid-century glass and steel. Bright color. Tiki lounges. A town that seemed more modern and polished every time I came back. None of it dark, none of it maximalist, none of it mine.
We went to Elmer's for the German pancakes. The place was busy, so we waited a little for service. I was looking around at the scenery while we waited for the server, and there it was. A brass chandelier with discs instead of globes, stacked and gleaming under the wood ceiling, two tiers of them fanned out from a central column on a long chain. My first thought was that it looked like a spaceship, which struck me as funny in a desert diner. Change the globe to a disc and suddenly it is eccentric. That was the part that made me think 80s postmodern glam. I pointed it out to the person sitting with me. He agreed it was interesting, and then we went back to the menu. But that is when the idea hit me.
I do not like sitting idle, and some part of me is always working out the next angle for Altered Bloom, even from a pool chair. It reminded me of what happens on a shoot when someone wants to be photographed as they see themselves, which is not always how they actually read on camera. You cannot argue them out of it. You build the image they are asking for anyway, inside what is actually true about them. I had decided in advance what Palm Springs was going to give me. Sitting in that diner, my mind was changed. The things I liked had been sitting right in front of me. I had already assumed they would not be there.
After breakfast we walked Indian Canyon, and now I was actually looking. We passed the Plaza Theatre while a crew prepped for that evening's show, and I got my first real look at the recent renovation. A woman at the desk mentioned that the roof beams were not wood at all. Concrete, painted and grained to pass. It was not the detail that stuck with me most from the weekend, but I liked that someone had bothered to grain concrete beams convincingly enough that I had assumed they were wood.
The rest of the afternoon we wandered in and out of shops without much of a plan. One window downtown stopped me cold: a bronze table on a tripod base, greened with age, its legs cast as winged figures standing on clawed feet, a slab of black marble balanced across the top. The card behind the glass said the piece drew on artifacts pulled from the ruins of Pompeii. I stood there a while working out where I would put it, purely as an exercise, before moving on.
The best part of the trip was not planned at all. We wanted dessert on our last night and were hoping for something with a bit of character. I had driven past the Billy Reed's sign every time I came into Palm Springs and never once thought to stop. Looking it up that night, most of what I found were comments about the enormous portions and the 70s decor. I pictured something pieced together by someone who had read about the era rather than lived through it, but we decided to give it a chance anyway. We walked through the doors and my jaw hit the floor. It opened December 7, 1975, and it looks like almost nothing has changed since, in the best possible way. Every corner had something going on: stained glass lamps low over the tables, a tufted green velvet settee against oak paneling like something pulled from a parlor, dark carved wood everywhere I turned. There was absolutely no restraint to it, which was part of why I loved it, and I stood there a minute just taking it in, room to room, before I remembered we had come for pie. We joked with each other that we would eat every meal there next time. We will definitely be going back.
The next afternoon, in an antique store, I found a brass stamp behind glass, the kind that presses a mark into wax or paper. I have one almost exactly like it already, a piece that appears in an earlier essay about a room with no modern world in it. You see these fairly often at antique stores, but it was still nice to run into a cousin of something I already love, three hours from home.
My purpose this weekend was not sourcing, so I came back with very little in the end. A plain wall clock, nothing rare, but with the round face and black bezel of a 1930s schoolhouse clock, meant for the guest bathroom. That bathroom already does the heavy lifting on its own, walls painted somewhere close to black, vintage sheet music and old movie posters crowding the frame, a peacock feather catching what light there is. The clock is a quiet addition to a room that was already finished. I like it that way. For a weekend when I was not supposed to be sourcing anything, the clock was enough. What followed me home was mostly the habit of looking again at rooms I thought I already knew.
The chandelier at Elmer's was the first clue. For more of that high-contrast, slightly eccentric side of Altered Bloom, spend some time with Black Lacquer.
