A few nice VW Van desert images I found:
my golden ticket 2007
Image by molitov
Photo_082807_001.jpg So here goes my little assessment of where Burning Man is now. This was my 12th year, I’ve been going since 1995 and missed 1 year in 2003.
The Monday night /Tues early morning early burning of the man was one of my favorite events to happen during my tenure at burning man. So poetic, loved that it was during the full lunar eclipse. When I first went in 1995, there were about 2,000 people, I believe tickets were something like . There was a mass of tents and rv’s scattered loosely about all over the place, in a big glob and you were lucky to find your tent again late at night if there was a dust storm earlier and the handy neon martini glass beacon of Polkacide got blown over and destroyed. I think I walked around for 45 minutes before I found my tent that night. I think that was the day of the double rainbow and huge thunder storm that was magnificent and everyone would check in with each other and ask “where were you during the storm” and “could you believe that rainbow?”
Things were chaotic, unpredictable, a bit crazy and miraculous. We were at the edge of civilization and building something out of nothing. Manifest that. No, problem. Anything went, from Disgruntled Postal Workers with sawed-off shotguns who refused to give over a Black Rock Gazette to anyone who asked nicely, to Chicken talking everyone into burning the central message board after the man late one night, to riding around the edges of the huge playa then everyone getting out of the car and letting it just go by itself. My first year of Burning Man I had recently learned how to spit fire with a group of friends from Tucson. Jesse, an active Earth First-er had been up in the NW earlier that summer and learned it from someone up there and was thrilled to teach the rest of us. In Tucson a group of us were doing ritualistic site-specific theatre events and enmeshed in the underground art and music scene. My friend Jeff Thomas (gone too early now), gave me the nickname Molitov after a night spent at my friends’ cafe Luna Loca spitting what seemed like gallons of lamp oil over torches and feeling pretty excited about our new mad cirkus skills. A group of us: Jesse, Jeff, Matt Cotton (who went on to found Tucson Puppet Works–still going strong!, Lily (an art student from Spain who was dating Matt at the time) all piled into my old ’84 Volvo wagon and a bunch of masks and stuff and headed out to the desert. I ended up covering the event for a magazine that was just starting up and shot photos and this became the cover story of the inaugural issue.
I’ll post that article after this.
Somehow Jesse met up with Crimson Rose and a bunch of us with our newly minted fire breathing skills became part of the inner circle of the burning of the man–what a way to begin. I remember seeing Stephanie and Keith performing in the center stage with their sexy pyro-duo act, which I’m spacing on the name of at the moment–the next year they went on to found the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus which I was a part of on and off for a few years. I hung out with Michael Gump in his fantastic art car The Host which looked like a spider from mars had decided to eat a big vw? van. Gump gave out stickers saying “Frozen Bugs! Not Recommended.” and then had candy machines that gave out plastic bugs frozen into large ice cubes.
It was glorious, we had found our tribe out there in the middle of Nevada, it was probably one of the many reasons I ended up moving to SF at the next summer. I ended up helping Scott Beale out with coordinating/curating the art gallery for his huge post-playa party over at cell (now called cellspace) where I had become a collective member and met a huge amount of folks including a very enthusiastic Maid Marion who had made some large scale collages on fabric covered with photo emulsion. I welcomed her into the community and helped her feel at home.
I would go to the post-playa parties at Miss P’s and pre-event meetings at Will and Crimson’s. I remember a certain party at Miss P’s where Hernan Cortez was going up to every woman who was single at the party (including me) and dragging them up to or Larry Harvey over to them and introducing us to each other. When he dragged Marion over to Larry they were still talking 3 hours later or so when I left.
ok, gotta stop this–this is a novella. skip to this year.
The burning man org (borg) and a population of close to/over 45k people is a huge shift from the original event–an anarchist gathering in the desert. There is an active police presence, roads, utilities, more stuff than I could ever hope to see in a week and a ticket price that hovers between 5-350. This year there was some fantastic art, less than last year, so much less out in the deep playa where I like to explore at night. The punk/anarchist/prankster culture that I cherished at Bman is faded into tiny pockets or barely visible at all. So much media has saturated people’s expectations of the event, that it has fed upon itself to create this expectation of a person called a burner. A woman at my camp this year criticized my hair being worn in braids, calling it not very playa. Where are the space cowgirls with their fashion police tickets and megaphones when you need them to defend you? (though I had one of the early megaphones at the event–I believe Hernan had one of the first–he and I had a megaphone duel in the center of camp in ’96). The idea of some sort of playa fashion conformity makes me feel like the shark-jumping has indeed happened for burning man. When my campmates attacked folks for wearing khaki shorts (in 2001 or 2?) I cheered them on and applauded the great khaki short burning we had that year at our camp CrossDressforLess. Years later, I worry at the creeping conformity to be radically different that seems very much the same in some weird way.
Paul’s burning of the man early was a shake-up that was a bit overdue. The event is becoming too staid, too big, too regulated–it began as an anarchist event, the fact that there is an LLC running it has never sat right with me. The event never should belong to anyone, it grew out of a large group of people and was bigger than the sum of its parts. When I read somewhere today about the borg saying something about how people become very attached to the festival and think of it as theirs–it is theirs–the festival wouldn’t be anything without the huge amount of people spending incredible amounts of of their own money to drag a bunch of crazy crap out into the gorgeous and inhospitable black rock desert and mostly have it be destroyed. It was pretty random who became part of the LLC and who didn’t. It is so strange to think of this event being beholden to this one particular group of people. It needs to return to its more anarchistic roots, be a bit dangerous, be a bit rowdy. be unpredictable. it needs to belong to the people who attend it and create it as their own temporary autonomous zone each time. It shouldn’t belong to an organization. Now what was such an underground gathering is part of the mainstream consciousness with expectations, a majority of dance music devotees with their music thundering across the playa, circus has barely a presence there anymore, when it seemed to be the annual gathering for anyone who was doing underground circus. But that was the late-ish 90’s thing of the underground. Now the event is a bit too expensive to have much of the underground be able to afford it. The DPW ranks are filled with a large group of wild, somewhat gutterpunk aesthetic’d folk who sneer at the tribal-trustafundian hippies and add to the dwindling mad max chaos and antipathy on the playa. They live in the desert and help lay the roads, install the trash fence and pick up the burned bits and feel holier than thou rv’r dotcommers and tribal hippy trustafundians and put a bit of the fear back into the event, luckily. but it’s so silly as well. so random, who is dpw, who came out and realized their vision and created some amazing art in that wonderfully muted canvas, who by fire, who by candlelight…ooh, tired to finish this now. will come back later…
but one more little tidbit before I retire: the event has gone from being a small group of semi-like-minded fringe folks flying their freak flags high and all over the place to a large group of spectators/tourists there for their and the small original folks are being hired i.e. funded to bring their art out and perform for the tourists. The old guard is performing a version of the burningman experience for pay.