UFOs, doomed hikers, William Burroughs, singing sand dunes, Elvis, ghosts, roadrunners and rattlesnakes – the Desert Oracle packs a lot of weird, dark matter between its bright yellow covers.
The pocket-sized magazine, which looks like a cross between a guide book and a punk zine, explores the stranger side of desert life. Created in the arid beauty of Joshua Tree in California, it has proven a cult hit devoured by readers from Los Angeles to London.
The Desert Oracle is deliberately old school. The magazine has no meaningful online presence. And its founder, Ken Layne, wouldn’t have it any other way.
Both a would-be desert sage and a savvy critic of today’s media landscape, Layne cuts a singular figure. He has journeyed from the cutting edge of internet journalism and out the other side to create an analog product people can open, touch and get lost in.
Born in New Orleans and raised in Phoenix, Layne carved out an impressive new media career, mastering the vicious internet snark that made Gawker and Wonkette (which he once owned) among the most influential new media businesses of the early naughts.
All too aware he had played no small part in ushering in the last “new wave” of journalism, obsessed with internet celebrity, data and Facebook likes, one day Layne literally turned his back on it all and headed west to do penance in the desert. Never again would he touch a click-baiting website. It was a bold move that has made him something of a cult figure in media circles, where journalists constantly fret about the future of their industry.
This month the magazine makes a step towards the mainstream with the publication of the Desert Oracle’s first compilation of weird tales. A book that Layne hopes will not only entertain – and chill – but also help save the wilderness he loves.
Layne’s desert wanderings have rewarded him too, not just with a new chapter in his career but with some strange encounters of his own, ones that could come straight out of the pages his magazine.
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Last month, I made the pilgrimage to Joshua Tree to meet Layne. Arriving in a car whose license plate read D ORACLE, Layne emerged from the vehicle in a long, black bandanna face mask covering most of his increasingly biblical beard.
A fresh-faced 55, with a black nimbus of hair and glittering eyes, Layne has nailed a “Nick Cave goes hiking” vibe. He needs another decade baking in the sun to go full Simon of the Desert, but he’s on his way.
Layne will have been in Joshua Tree for 13 years in January, but his love of the desert goes back to his childhood in Phoenix. “My dad was not a fan,” he says. His grandfather had been a miner and the dry air was supposed to help with black lung. “If you had money they would send you to Palm Springs or Santa Fe but if you were a coalminer …” His family dreamed of the beach – the desert was something “you suffered through”.
At a desert science camp when he was a kid, he discovered not everybody “suffered” the desert, some people loved it. “That was the first time I had been around people who had affection for the climate, the ecosystem. I had never been around adults who weren’t just bitching about the heat and the scorpions and the black widows.”
As soon as he got his license to drive, he headed for Death Valley, Joshua Tree, into Utah, northern Nevada. In the local Phoenix library, he found a copy of environmentalist and essayist Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, based on Abbey’s activities as a park ranger at what is now Arches national park in Utah. “It was like a light turned on. I thought, ‘My God, there’s some scheme where you can write about the desert and live in the desert. This guy sounds like he figured it out. And then you forget it, like so many things when you are a kid.”
But Abbey’s long desert shadow followed him. Living in Prague and working as a journalist in the early 1990s, he had a lucid dream about living in the Mojave desert. It was a prescient vision of his future. But first he had to make it through the internet.
While he was in eastern Europe, Layne met Nick Denton, then a Financial Times reporter and soon to be a new media mogul. The two met again when Layne left Europe for San Francisco, where he had started an early internet newspaper, tabloid.net. Denton happened to love it.
Denton had moved to cover Silicon Valley and would soon start his trend-setting media outlet Gawker. Layne, who had just become a father, reached out for regular work. It was the start of a long working relationship that ended with Layne moving to (and briefly owning) another Gawker venture, Wonkette, a politics and news site infamous for its merciless coverage of Washington and the media elite.
After seven years, he realized he hated it all – journalism in general, and the internet in particular. “By the time I quit for good, I felt it was the absolute worst place for a writer to be. Nobody reads anything on the internet. You just glance at it to see if you agree or are outraged. I think it’s garbage. It’s no good for any of us,” he says.
To detox, he drove around the desert for months on end. As he did so, his Prague dream came back to him and the idea for Desert Oracle was formed.
Desert Oracle would be a quarterly printed magazine with maybe a radio show to promote it – which he now has. The job is a constant hustle. At one point he was writing most of the Oracle, doing his radio show (and podcast), organizing regular live storytelling appearances and distributing the magazines himself, making endless trips to the post office.
It’s not an easy life, but for Layne it is better than the alternative. “There is a generation of writers who think that it is a perfectly acceptable thing to accumulate a couple of hundred thousand dollars in student loan debt and go write “takes” – contrary opinion on things like ‘Why Dogs Are Actually The Worst Pet.’” None of it is new, he says, “it’s what people were doing when Rome burned.” But it has left us worse off, he says.
“I feel like we are post-language now,” he says. “Things are more symbolic. The relationship between words and facts and objectivity and their impact seems to have separated to the point where most of the writing that I see, especially on something like Twitter, is by people baffled that people don’t get what they are trying to say. It’s depressing.”
That feeling is in part why people have turned to analog media once more, he believes. “You buy vinyl, you put it on and listen to it. No one is going to message you in the middle of it. No one is going to cut you off. These objects that do one thing well are having a moment right now,” he says.
Originally Layne had thought the subscribers would be people who lived in the desert and desert small towns – people who worked in conservation, land management, eccentric old artists.
Instead, the bulk of his readers were in Brooklyn, San Francisco, Los Angeles. People who wanted to add a view of the wide desert skies to their inner-city lives. He now has 3,600 paid subscribers on top of the copies he sells in independent book and coffee shops across the country.
For many, no doubt, a large part of the appeal of Desert Oracle is escapism, especially with so many of us stuck indoors. Sometimes the stories are short sketches of the wild and the natural world. Sometimes they involve local characters like Noah Purifoy, the late African American artist whose Mad Max meets Marcel Duchamp creations can be seen at his Outdoor Desert Art Museum in Joshua Tree. Many are weird tales of eldritch legends or strange encounters that are a millennia-old feature of the desert.
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Layne himself has not been untouched by the mysteries of the Mojave.
Driving along Highway 395 to Tahoe with his then partner in December 2001, Layne saw a bright light on the horizon. It was close to dusk and the road was empty. Suddenly a huge “triangle of light” appeared next to the car, sending down a beam of light. The couple got out of the car and the object settled briefly above them, blocking out the sky. “All the hairs on my body were on end,” he says.
He recalls describing it at a family gathering. “I got halfway through and suddenly I realised I was describing a scene from The Simpsons,” he laughs.
For two or three years he assumed it was some trickery paid for by the Pentagon’s gargantuan budget. Now he is not so sure. “They can’t even build a jet that can take off so psychic messages from a glowing light-speed triangle that hovers over your car?
Psychic message? I ask. After a long pause, he says: “Not like a fortune cookie. I felt like I got a push.” The push was nonverbal and nonspecific but left him with a desire for change, to do something different.
He is not comfortable talking about this. For Layne, “the whole UFO thing” needs reframing. Organized religion is dying – even in the US. Decades of covering politics, which pays lip service to religion, has convinced him that “it’s all performative, nobody believes in any of it.”
As a result, we have “this bargain bin collection of mass media folk beliefs, ghost hunters, New Age stuff, The Secret. QAnon is very much religious. A shoddy, organically formed, mystery religion with prophecies.”
“And yet, everyday around the world, regular people are still having supernatural experiences in the same places they have tended to have them, in the urban-wildlands interface, as the firefighters call it. The edge of the cities where things open up. We don’t know how to process these things so when they happen, we look for a frame of reference to put them into,” he says.
“I spent a long time ignoring it. My journalistic cynicism. I am now at a point where I think these are the same sort of spiritual experiences that people have recorded around the world … Illumination. That’s what we used to call it.” And an illumination is exactly what the UFO experience was to him.
Did his experience give him a sense of a higher purpose? He furrows his brow. If he has one, then it is explicitly stated in Desert Oracle: “I wanted to indirectly evangelize for desert conservation,” he says.
For Layne, the desert has always had a hard time with the tree hugger crowd “because they were hostile to it as an environment. Until relatively recently, it was referred to as wasteland.
“Conservation people leave me cold. I love what they do but they remind me of NPR [National Public Radio] listeners – they are schoolmarmy, don’t make things sound fun or beautiful or romantic. There are so many rules in that world about what you can do and enjoy.
“The most fun I have in the desert is going out with a bunch of friends, get drunk as hell, sit around the fire and lie to each other,” he says. “Those are the trips you come back from saying that was the best fun ever.
“The Romantics very deliberately mixed the excitement of paganism, taboo, spiritualism, romance – the idea that you go out in the wilds not to quietly and respectfully count wrens but to openly seek communion with the world. The weird parts of the desert I try to push and validate as our equivalence of Moses in the Sinai or Paul on the desert road or the Buddha sitting out under a tree hallucinating demons,” he says.
That’s why the desert is as important to the human soul today as it was for Jesus or Georgia O’Keeffe, and why it needs protecting. Look at Jesus, he says: “When things get too heavy, he goes to the desert”
“That is something incredibly relevant to today. The numbing horror of social media and the digital age. To escape it is getting harder and harder.”
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