Joshua Tree is a tiny town between Yucca Valley and Twentynine Palms, on a dusty strip of highway about two hours outside of Los Angeles. The gateway to the Mojave Desert. Our lodgings for the night was the Harmony Motel, famous for housing the band U2 when they recorded their album, Joshua Tree. Strangely, the motel wasn't using this fact as a promotional scheme, except a blurb or two on their website. We found the place to be shabby but friendly. A pleasant night's sleep.The tone of our trip changed dramatically the next morning. For some reason, I developed an intense headache, nausea, and a general sick feeling that I later decided may have been a touch of altitude sickness - we had spent the day rising and falling on our trip through the hills.
We met briefly with Andrea Zittel at her High Desert Test Sites headquarters in Joshua Tree, where we were debriefed about the Mojave area, our forthcoming journey to Death Valley, and the vandalism that plagues the projects installed for the annual HDTS event. Apparently doors, windows, and building materials of all kinds are in high demand. This new information is shifting our thinking about our proposal...our new train of thought involves a project in which pilfering and plundering is expected, indeed required, to complete the piece in some way...
