Coachella Valley

The Postal Service will play its reunion set Saturday at 8:50 p.m. on the Coachella stage, Earl Sweatshirt will hit the Gobi tent Friday just after midnight, Wu Tang Clan is set to take over the Outdoor Theatre at 9:15 p.m. Sunday and Dead Can Dance will deliver the closing set for the first weekend of the 2013 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio at 11 p.m. Sunday on the Mojave Stage. Those are among the highlights of the set times for this year's festival that just went up on Coachella's official website . FULL COVERAGE: Coachella 2013 Nearly 200 acts will play across six stages over each of the two three-day weekends of this year's event commencing Friday.

INDIO -- It didn't take long Friday for Stagecoach -- the three-day country-music jamboree set to run through Sunday night at the Empire Polo Club -- to differentiate itself from the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which took over the same sun-scorched setting for two weekends earlier this month. "I kind of think of this next one as if Rachel Maddow and Ann Coulter went on a blind date -- with an open bar," said Hayes Carll, introducing his song "Another Like You. " The wry Texas-based singer-songwriter was only a few tunes into his early-afternoon set on the Palomino Stage, but already he was injecting a shot of politics that Coachella, with its entitled-hippie vibe, seemed to lack this year.

You never know what surprises you'll find at a farmers market. On Wednesdays in Santa Monica, the fruit of the moment is the mango. "Wow! ... Are these really grown in California?" shoppers ask Bertha Wong as they crowd around her gorgeous Keitt mangoes. Most people think of mangoes as growing in tropical lands such as India and Thailand, but given enough water, mango trees flourish in the dry, scorching Coachella Valley.

Sure, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival offers enough music for every fan -- despite whatever gripes purists have about the year's lineup -- but the festival has become just as good for people-watching. And not just innocuous gaping at the attention-seeking outfits or the gloriously sun-kissed taut bodies wearing next to nothing - the festival grounds is a hotbed for an array of archetypes that are easy to make fun of, especially the folks who, as a reader commented , “go to be seen - to show their friends that they are 'cool' (which they most assuredly are NOT)

THERMAL, Calif. -- A team of state and federal inspectors moved through the hot, narrow alleys of two large trailer parks housing thousands of migrant farmworkers Monday after receiving reports of health and safety violations inside. The parks are on the Torres Martinez reservation, which also houses Desert Mobile Home Park, known as Duroville, which is now being targeted for possible closure. The parks inspected Monday are not yet in the bad shape of Duroville, federal officials said.

I have been a Realtor/broker in the Coachella Valley going on nine years. While I do respect the comments made by Bruce Blomgren ["Vacation Home Sales Sliding," Feb. 11], business in real estate continues to grow. Certain segments of housing such as Mr. Blomgren sells could indeed be down, as his niche is the upscale housing market. Housing in the medium price range is building by leaps and bounds. This is no longer a vacation-home area, in my opinion. People are moving in permanently and living in the valley year-round.

Slot canyons, distinctly colored rock formations, palm oases and ridge tops with far-reaching views are the reasons for a hiking pilgrimage to the Mecca Hills. The hills, southeast of Palm Springs near the northern tip of the Salton Sea, offer textbook displays on geologic faults and the power of earthquakes. Rock dating back 600 million years has been pushed up and overturned.

The first white man born in Palm Springs still lives there. Ted McKinney, age 67, is amazed at what has become of the small Indian village. His favorite era? The 1930s, when Hollywood celebrities began using Palm Springs as a playground. "There were so few people here that the movie stars really stood out," he remembers. The Agua Caliente Indians were the first settlers in the Coachella Valley, drawn to its hot springs more than 400 years ago.

Authorities allowed about 2,000 residents and workers to return to their homes and jobs Thursday after air and ground samples taken in the vicinity of a smoldering pesticide warehouse fire showed no contamination and after complaints from grape growers about potential economic losses. Only an area within a one-mile radius of the fire--mainly barren fields--remained sealed.

When you visit Indio and the Coachella Valley, there are several points of interest. The Coachella Valley Museum & Cultural Center, 82-616 Miles Ave. (at Deglet Noor Street), Indio, (619) 342-6651. Open Tuesday to Saturday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sundays noon to 4 p.m. Admission: $1 adults, 50 cents for children 11 and younger and seniors 60 and older. The museum is housed in a 1926 adobe home that had only two owners: a doctor and a dentist.

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is considered one of the music industry's premier festivals, connecting the dots between musical generations and genres with a diverse lineup that attracts fans from around the globe. But the festival, which cloned itself into two weekends starting last year as a way to deal with its capacity crowds, seemed anything but connected with the rest of the world when it ended its 2013 run Sunday. In the four days between its two-weekend run, two bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring scores more.

After cameras zoomed in on the Boston flag, Celtic punk band the Dropkick Murphys launched into “For Boston,” the band's rowdy, over-before-you-know-it cover of the Boston College fight song. Playing this show at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, said founder Ken Casey, is part of the healing process, The bassist/singer had earlier confessed that the Boston-bred band had considered canceling its Coachella performance after the Boston Marathon bombings left three dead and scores more injured.

English quartet Savages didn't need much time to make an impression at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. The band, in fact, still had more than 15 minutes left on the clock when it strummed its last menacing guitar note during its early set Saturday. There was reason to be concerned. The venomous hard rock band, with three of its four members outfitted in nearly all black, doesn't exactly look like the type that enjoys a good brunchtime concert. Then there's singer Jehnny Beth, who lets her arms do the talking and her voice do the hollering.

This post has been updated. See below for details. One of the best performances Pop & Hiss took in over the first weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was Blur's smart, wide-ranging set last Friday night on the main stage. And one of the worst? The Stone Roses' rambling jam-a-thon, which came directly after Blur's show yet went down in front of a crowd roughly one-fifth the size. Evidently we're not the only ones who noticed that audience migration, either: For the second installment of the festival, which runs Friday to Sunday at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, the two reunited Britpop acts will swap places, according to official set times posted on the Coachella's website.

Sparks, the long-running L.A. pop-dance-rock band consisting of brothers Ron and Russell Mael, has long pushed at the boundaries of pop music. The quirky outfit created humor-laced operatic rock in the early 1970s that influenced Freddie Mercury and Queen, cooked up influential electronic dance music in the late '70s and flirted with pop stardom in the snappy techno-rock of its 1983 hit single "Cool Places. " The Mael brothers have since explored other quirky niches of the pop music world, abandoning the rock band format entirely for a trio of albums built on electronic and orchestral sounds.

Ten minutes into his band's performance Friday night at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, singer Damon Albarn of Blur realized he hadn't introduced himself. So after a hard-driving rendition of Blur's song "There's No Other Way," the frontman took a second to address the tens of thousands of music fans sprawled across the manicured grounds of the Empire Polo Club. "For those of you out there who are unfamiliar with us," he said, "we're from England. " The audience might've guessed.

In proposing desert nature reserves, we should think of small ones as well as large ones. Small reserves to protect a particular landmark or other natural feature can be very satisfying. But large ones are most to be sought, for desert connotes vastness, great sweeps of land untouched by the often grimy hand of man, who is given to taking over the land and cluttering it with his "developments" of roads, subdivisions, etc. --E.

Easing my hooded peregrine onto his perch in the back of the truck, I pretend I don't see the man approaching from the east. He is moving with an intent that makes my palms sweat, despite my focus on tying the falcon's leash, despite the cool morning air. I am on farmland without permission, and the man's brisk chin-up-shoulders-back walk tells me the reservoir from which my falcon had just caught a lesser scaup is his.

There are a lot of people in this world, and it seems as if most of them were at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival last weekend. A logistical puzzle, certainly, and one that requires feedback in order to improve. The festival continues next weekend in Indio, so now's a good time for a mid-festival debriefing. What didn't work? What could be better? What follows are 10 modest proposals for promoter Goldenvoice that could add more sparkle to the festival. Expand the Yuma tent.

INDIO, Calif. - Under Friday night's crescent moon, a giant iridescent snail slowly made its way among thousands of concert revelers at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, causing bafflement and awe in equal measures. Nearly 30 feet tall and stretching out to some 80 feet in length, the silver-skinned creature was in fact a slow-moving sculpture titled "Helix Poeticus" that was custom-commissioned for the festival by its promoter, Goldenvoice. "I don't know if I want to run away screaming or if I want to hug it," said Silvia Ay, 23, of Los Angeles, contemplating the sculpture's eerily rotating illuminated eyes.