Friday, May 10
Thursday 5/9 Phoenix, AZ – Joshua Tree National Park, CA
Dawn brought no fiery rebirth for Phoenix, but the week had cleared the hump, and we had sixish hours of driving to do, so we accepted free kale juice when offered.
Between Arizona and California there is one essential stopping point – the Musical Instrument Museum. Here one can find a super sized stand up bass which plays notes too low frequency for human hearing, a wonderful range of animal carcass bagpipes, and a 1920s mechanical instrument (as in very large music box) which plays the sounds of a full jazz bad (the thing actually pumps air through its saxophones and tubas, bangs on its claves and bass drums, and taps its little fret boards. Buck nutty). The interactive room is full of small people hammering away on gongs, Martins missing strings, and a chance to play a theremin – a pretty wild thing one plays by hovering one’s hands different distances away from x and y axises of capacitors. I wish we’d had more time to stay and play, but the road called us away.
The drive was long, beautiful, and filled by the voice of my spirit animal Cole Kushna, host of the Dissect Podcast, long form musical analysis broken into short digestible segments. We got to Joshua Tree after dark and pitched our tent in the shade of a jumbo rock campground jumbo rock.
Van-ish 