memory
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I think it was my idea to do a drive-in movie theater on my property. I’m not totally sure. I would bring my video projector, which were kind of rare at the time—back then they were expensive—and John did the programming.
Mungo had a really great video that consisted of Road Runner cartoons that he had taken the characters out of so it was just cartoon images of desert scenes.
Doing the screening in the desert at night was really effective. We rented a generator to run them.
Joel Otterson had the idea of buying haystacks and setting them up like a roman amphitheater which looked great.
There was a perfectly full moon. A friend of mine, a Mexican curator that came out with his wife, had a bottle of mezcal with the worm in it and we sat under a Joshua Tree and drank it. It was amazing.
The movies were playing on a loop. People could trickle in and out.
Then afterward, there was some bar that people went to afterward and we stayed up drinking late.
The next day was Joel’s pig roast.
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I can’t remember exactly who came up with the brilliant idea of screening Mungo Thomson’s The American Desert (For Chuck Jones) in the middle of the desert, however, I did take charge of organizing a larger video program to supplement the screening and added videos by Forcefield and Assume Vivid Astro Focus.
After that evening, curating a video program became an ongoing contribution of mine that I enjoyed in addition to inviting artists to create projects for each new HDTS event. The night with Mungo’s piece was by far the most memorable of the video programs, if not for the excruciating cold, technical hurdles, and trippy context of the videos themselves, then for the sheer newness (and craziness) of what we were doing out there—absurdly out of place, sharing in a great art experience out in the middle of the desert.
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The videos were shown on a screen that our friend Till Lux made for us out of chain link fence and straw bale seating. (Till was in his early 20s, grew up in Pioneertown, and ran the local sign shop. He was somehow also a Canadian citizen and had a maple leaf tattoo on the inside of his lower lip.)
It was a freezing that night up in Pioneertown and everyone was so cold while watching the videos. (We have since learned that the Gamma Gulch site is too cold for nighttime activities in the fall and winter.) Either Andy or John drove down to Palm Springs to rent a Honda 2000 generator. I think they maybe even rented two generators because they were worried that one might fail, which it did.
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The first HDTS was in October, and we set up an outdoor screening room in Pioneertown. I don’t think anyone could have predicted how freezing it would be that night. Those of us from the big city think “desert” means hot. As Mungo Thomson’s Roadrunner-free desert landscapes played on the big screen, I slowly lost all feeling in my feet.