How Coachella Froze Over

Report

High-level insider spills some Coca tea

How the best live music festival in America became a desert freakshow of cringe content from Elon Musk’s baby mamas

Y’all can blame Frank Ocean

For almost two decades, I have joined the pilgrimage of devoted patrons convening in the heart of the California desert. While the faithful are drawn for a weekend of music, hedonism, and flaunting their indulgences (at least as of late), I make the annual trek for a month of pay and an increased chance of skin cancer. Like a master mason of a Gothic cathedral, I have physically built the worship site per the specs of its corporate master’s divine plan. Officially named the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, colloquially “Coachella,” a Freudian slip of my fingers on the keyboard reveals an apt name for the Faustian bargain of attendance — Coca hell. The event began as a few days of music for alternatively attuned audiophiles, being far enough away from the City of Angels to be considered an “escape.” Early on, its promoter Goldenvoice didn’t have enough coin in the coffers to compete with its more established competitors, who could offer the cash guarantees needed for booking …

When Animals Attack

Cicadas

Frenzied masses of insects, noisily spawning as they feed, evoke primitive Biblical punishments

In fact, they are altruistic, sacrificing themselves for the collective and for the benefit of predators alike in an explosion of pure eros

Will we be here to greet them next time?

By Walter Kirn

Welcome, bug friends! Welcome back! After lengthy underground gestations of 13 and 17 years, two distinct groups of cicadas numbering in the trillions are emerging in tandem across parts of America this spring, from the balmy peach orchards of Georgia to the breezy corn fields of Illinois. Quickened by the warming of the soil and summoned by an ancient inner call of irresistible, clockwork regularity, the famously loud and prolific flying insects, who live but a single month after they hatch, are filling the air in great dark buzzing clouds and settling in swarms on bushes and in trees. It’s a spectacle for the ages, truly wondrous, and worthy of celebration, we believe, by all who inhabit our precious, fragile planet. But sadly, not everyone will take this view. Such is the power of superstition, ignorance, and lingering inter-species rivalry, that some will regard the coming of the cicadas as bothersome and repulsive, even ominous. To these unevolved thinkers, masses of frenzied …

How Coachella Froze Over

Cicadas

Critic's Corner