The Impending Return of Our Music Issue; the James Webb Telescope Offers Hope–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: March 21, 2022

Indy Digest: March 21, 2022

On March 7, 2020, we published a piece on PUP, a Toronto-based band that was slated to play at Coachella.

Every year from 2014 through 2019, we’d published a large handful of pieces on some of the bands (in the small-to-medium-sized font on the posters) performing at Coachella and Stagecoach. We compiled those together for our April print edition, which we called our Music Issue.

That PUP piece was the first of our 2020 Music Issue pieces to get posted online. It was also the last. That Music Issue would never come to be, replaced by a 24-page April edition featuring an empty roll of toilet paper on the cover.

All of this is on my mind, because today, we published our first Music Issue piece since that aforementioned PUP article. It’s on Giselle Woo and the Night Owls, the local band that will be performing at the 2022 edition of Coachella.

We’ll start rolling out the rest of our Music Issue 2022 stories next week (which is also when the print version of that issue will start hitting streets). Matt King, our resident music scribe, has been hard at work interviewing bands and writing stories over the last month-plus—and I’m sure you’ll be as impressed with what he’s done as I am.

When I posted that PUP piece back on March 7, 2020, I remember thinking that I was publishing an article on something that may or may not be happening. It was a weird, uneasy feeling. Shortly thereafter, I remember telling Matt to hold off on doing other Coachella and Stagecoach interviews. Instead, he started working on a piece about how musicians were dealing with the pandemic-caused cancellations. That piece would include a quote from Jose Ceja, the drummer for Giselle Woo and the Night Owls. Matt had previously done an interview with the band regarding their announced appearance at Coachella 2020. Turns out that interview was a waste of time.

“It was a shock to us all, but I’m glad that it was postponed rather than canceled,” Ceja told Matt. “We’re all in good spirits. We are excited to play, and now we have more time to prepare a better show. For some of our friends, it has affected their shows, and it has unfortunately canceled a lot of really important events, but our hope is that all safety precautions are being taken, and that it will help prevent the spread of this virus.”

Of course, that Coachella 2020 postponement would eventually become a cancellation. The 2021 festival would become a pandemic casualty, too.

Thankfully, the 2022 festivals are a go (barring something horrifically unimaginable, of course). I am very glad the Music Issue is back—for all sorts of reasons

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• Palm Springs wastewater testing done on March 14 showed that levels of SARS-CoV-2 remained fairly low. (March 15 results weren’t available as of the report posted today.) The report said: “The number of (viral) copies recorded at the city’s wastewater treatment plant has increased, but still like what we have been seeing over the past month. The high in past few weeks was 194,562 copies/L on March 1, 2022, and the low was 44,528 copies/L on March 8, 2022. While the data for March 15, 2022, was not available, the reported 162,755 copies/L measured on March 14, 2022, is still within that range.”

• In disturbingly tangentially related news, in that both stories involve Palm Springs sewage: The Palm Springs Swim Center’s pool is slated to reopen tomorrow (Tuesday, March 22) after being closed over the weekend and today (Monday) due to what the city described as vandalism. Our friends at the Palm Springs Post elaborated on what “vandalism” meant in this case: “Visitors to the facility were frequently frustrated in January when the pool was shut down due to staffing shortages as the Omicron variant of COVID-19 swept the nation. This closure, however, was the work of vandals who reportedly decided to use the pool as a public toilet after hours. ‘This needs to be addressed,’ wrote one resident in an email to the city Monday. ‘The pool is a huge part of the community’s wellness and it’s safeguarding needs to be given some priority.’ The city is making the issue a priority, said Jeannie Kays, who is serving as the interim parks and recreation director, in reply to the resident’s plea to beef up security. ‘We are working hard on a couple of fronts to get this to stop,’ Kays wrote, adding that in the short term, ‘We have filed a police report and I’ve been in contact with the Chief of Police. We’re working with our security guard company to beef up patrols around the pool.’”

• The Los Angeles Times examines the possibility that the omicron subvariant could cause another COVID-19 spike in the state, and learns that there are varied opinions on the subject. Here’s one: “Myoung Cha, chief strategy officer at San Francisco-based Carbon Health and former head of strategic initiatives at Apple Health, warned in a series of tweets Saturday that the ‘BA.2 cycle has already started here and will be in full bloom’ in about two to three weeks, ‘with a much bigger surge than anyone saw coming.’ Potential signs of worry stem from the U.S. having lower vaccination and booster rates than Europe, less testing and a longer period of waning immunity. … Cha noted that Google search trends for cold symptoms ‘seem to be on the rise right now.’”

• It turns out the Johnson and Johnson vaccine may have been getting a bad rap. MedPage Today says: “Vaccine effectiveness with one dose of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine remained remarkably stable for preventing symptomatic disease and hospitalizations, even during times when the Delta variant was predominant in the U.S., researchers found. Vaccine effectiveness was 74% … against symptomatic disease and 81% … against hospitalization in states with high incidence of the Delta variant in June to August 2021, reported Sebastian Schneeweiss, MD, ScD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and colleagues. In addition, effectiveness was stable over 180 days following vaccination, the authors wrote in JAMA Network Open.”

• Our partners at CalMatters round up all the various plans and ideas for a rebate that are rattling around Sacramento. Emily Hoeven writes: “One thing California elected officials agree on: The state should give money back to its residents. The hard part: reaching a consensus on how much money the state should return—and to whom. This week, Gov. Gavin Newsom is set to unveil his proposal for providing financial relief to Californians staggering under soaring gas prices and skyrocketing inflation—at least the fourth such idea to emerge from the state Capitol in the last few weeks as lawmakers gear up for the 2022 election and debate how to handle California’s massive budget surplus.”

• ProPublica looks at the extreme measures St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital takes to cultivate donors to leave substantial amounts to the charity in their wills—and how St. Jude often engages in nasty court fights after said donors die. A taste: “Its bequest operation has a broad reach, with fundraisers based across the nation and a willingness to challenge families in court over the assets their loved ones leave behind. These battles can sometimes be lengthy and costly, spending donor money on litigation and diminishing inheritances. Family attorneys who specialize in such fights say that St. Jude can be especially aggressive, often pursuing cases all the way to state supreme courts. ‘At the end of it, there is very little to hold on to feel good about,’ said Vance Lanier, of Lafayette, Louisiana, who won a years-long legal battle with St. Jude over his father’s estate but not before both sides spent heavily on the case. ‘Think of all the fees for lawyers that didn’t go to St. Jude, not one child, not one cancer patient,’ Lanier said. ‘Where is the sanity in all this?’”

• And finally … there’s been so much awful news as of late that good news is much in need of celebrating—and the potential of the James Webb telescope is definitely good news. Time magazine explains: “(Recently), 2MASS J17554042+6551277 became the most famous star known to science outside of our own sun. That’s because the James Webb Space Telescope—launched from Earth on Christmas Day and now located 1.6 million km (1 million miles) away—chose the ordinary star to take an extraordinary picture: its first image with its 18 hexagonal mirror segments in near-perfect alignment. … Webb captured the star with a red filter to enhance its brightness, and could see not only the stellar target itself but also stars and galaxies in the background… The image of 2MASS J17554042+6551277 was taken when the mirrors had completed what NASA calls the ‘fine-phasing’ stage of their alignment. That is close to the final stage of focusing, but not yet quite there yet.”

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