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More Photo Galleries and Videos

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We’ve got some more videos and links to Burning Man 2012 Photo Collections for you.

ePlaya is discussing “top asshat of 2012″…I can think of a few.

There’s also a great collection of videos and “overheard on the Playa” stories at Elephant Journal.

The Burn in one minute:

…or, if you have a little more time, here’s an hour and 20 minutes of “Playa Cast” video from  BMIR.

Some people have expressed surprise that Burning Man was being streamed live on the Internet - unwarranted surveillance, perhaps? Burner Sarah says:

From what I understand there were a few cameras, the one at center camp being the most powerful in turns of zoom and viewer control. As a viewer you could jump from camera to camera and give them commands on where to turn.

My email list is blowing up with a bunch of people freaking out about what’s online and what isn’t.

Live streaming has been going on since 2008, but for the first time this year, home viewers could control the cameras and zoom in. If you don’t know where the cameras are, you probably don’t know what you might have been doing on camera, who you might have been seen with, and who might have seen you. This seems significantly more intrusive than smart phones and GoPros.

Fire Tornadoes created by the Burn:

Anubis Burn:

Photo Montage set to the Crystal Method:

110 photos of art cars from the Collectors Museum

50 Photos from Reuters (Yahoo News)

 

35 Photos from Phoenix Artists

46 Photos in Orange County Weekly

And here’s some more links, as seen in the Jack Rabbit Speaks :

Photo Gallery from The Atlantic:

http://bit.ly/NOOTao

The Atlantic also highlighted some of the best Craigslist Missed Connections.

The Guardian UK Photo Gallery:
http://bit.ly/OZWKyI

Watching the Burn: photo by Galen Oakes

Photo Gallery from the Sacramento Bee:
http://sacb.ee/OZWwHU

Telegraph UK Photo Gallery:
http://bit.ly/OZWxvs

Crowd-sourced Burner photogasm! All Instagram photos tagged “burningman2012″:
http://bit.ly/OZWAYj

This shot of the Temple by Trey Ratcliff could wel be this year’s winner:
http://bit.ly/OZWDn1

A striking Flickr set from Christopher Michel:
http://bit.ly/OZWEHA

Great gallery from Nick Bilton, currently making rounds on the social networks:
http://bit.ly/ShZtII

Beautiful Women of the Playa (done right, finally!):
http://bit.ly/OZWJuO


Filed under: Burner Stories Tagged: 2012, photos, press

Seeking Divine Truth at Burning Man

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“Even if you are in a minority of one, the Truth is still the Truth” – Ghandi

Welcome to another one of those long posts, that half my friends tell me I shouldn’t do because they can’t be fucked reading all the way to the end. Well skip it if you want, Ritalin kids! You might find the Happy Saturday video a bit more your speed. The rest of you, burn one down, kick back and contemplate my musings…

Many Burners tell me that to them, Burning Man is more than just a dance party. It’s not just a rave in the desert, where nudity is permissible and you have to bring your own drinks.

Robot Heart, photo by Peter Ruprecht

And I agree with them. See, I love to dance, I love electronic music, I’m pretty comfortable with nudity, and the more lasers and bass the better. It’s all part of radical self-expression and radical inclusion. It means, like it or not, you have to have ravers there at your party too…and since EDC eats Burning Man for breakfast, I’m hardly in a minority with this viewpoint. Hippies will love to read 5 Things an EDM Diva can learn from Burning Man, recently posted in OC Weekly. The ravers are coming there, all the way from Newport Beach, dude! And they’re learning our culture, and stuff. The hippies perhaps have a bit more time to slag me off on this blog than the (usually silent, rarely verbose) ravers. They’re too busy recovering from the weekend (or still on it).

You give me my right to enjoy my doof (even if there’s no psytrance) – and I will give you your right to enjoy the yoga, the sitar singalongs, the ultramarathons, the art, the free cuisine, the waterboarding at Camp Guantanamo, or whatever else it is about Burning Man that floats your boat. Just like San Francisco, there’s something in our city for everyone.

Do I see a deeper side of Burning Man? Hell, yes! Not only do I see those sides, but I explore them, in depth, in this blog. This is post #333#, which means we’ve been producing more than one post a day since we started in February this year. If you find an aspect of Burning Man that you feel Burners.Me *hasn’t* covered yet, please let us know, we’ll see if we can fill in the blanks. Naturally we default to writing about the parts of Burner culture that are most interesting to us.

One big aspect of Burning Man, for many participants, is spirituality.

Just look at us; everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religions destroy spirituality” – Michael Ellner.

Some of our previous posts on this topic:

Finding Jesus at Burning Man - a Christian perspective

“Theater in a Crowded Fire” – Spirituality, Burning Man, and the Apocalypse - Neo-Paganism

Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow – Paganism, Wicca, Druids, Lucifer

Exploring the Other (Part III – the Sacrifice of a Ritual) – we speculate on the Occult Symbology behind “Fertility 2.0″, the ticket crisis, changing of the guard at Burning Man, and the intersection between Burners and the Occupy movement

Ghost Trancing on Sacred Lands - Native American

Burner Principles vs the 10 Native American Commandments - Native American

Burner Fundamentalism - Burning Man’s own religion

Looking for the Next Evolutionary Step - Buddhism and consciousness

I understand why some people dismiss me when I say “Burning Man is the world’s best party”. Because they don’t value that aspect, and value others more highly, they think that by making such a statement I am somehow undervaluing the other aspects. But I’m not. It’s great that Burning Man means a lot of special things to a lot of special people.

So what about when I say “Burning Man is the world’s biggest occult ritual“? Outside of organized religion, who have a couple of thousand years head start on their parties.

This year word has it a lot of people left our party early, whether through disappointment or boredom, or not being prepared for the dust despite as many warnings as the Burner community could get to them. But still, estimates are around 40,000 people were still there for the annual ritual of the Man Burning. We also had spin-off occult rituals in the burning of a 50-ft tall high Anubis the Jackal (Egyptian death cult symbolism), the Temple of Juno (Graeco-Roman pantheon) and Burn Wall Street (directing the pent-up rage of the Occupy Movement and the Tea Party into a voodoo Kolossos-effigy burn).

Did all this fire magic work? Did it achieve anything? Well, some folks out there certainly believe so.

The alert went out on Christwire, courtesy of Reverend Clyde Higgins, that Burning Man caused 70 earthquakes in California AND a Category 1 Hurricane on the East Coast.

Holy twisters, batman, that’s quite some power! I mean, I know the bass on Robot Heart is pretty bad ass, and there probably are more than enough subwoofers in total at Burning Man to create a few earthquakes, however it would be hard to get them all playing the same note at the exact same time. Perhaps the FM transmission from the Disorient Art Car Armada could be used to test this? Not that I would really want to make an earthquake or anything. But, as the song says, I’m totally addicted to bass. More so than Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Karma Sutra, Nihil, or whoever your one is that you like. Enjoy some classic beats from the Puretones while you read the Reverend’s true story:

File:BurningMan-picture.jpg

Image Credit:  Wikipedia – Burning Man, 2012

Heathen children utter the written lyrics from post-modern Satan-worship bands the The Atheist Phish, Snoop Lion and DJ Kalafi, until sweat drips down their brow and they summon The Burning Man himself, Satan. 

Every year, pagan anarchists gather in the Black Rock Desert area of nothern Nevada to do the unthinkable.  Equipped with ancient knowledge passed down from the times of Vlad Tepes, The Church of the Devil’s modern followers mix ancient, dark rites with modern electronica music, lurid drugs and wanton carnality, calling the festival The Burning Man.  At the end of their ceremonies, beyond the hazy musk of unwed baby creation and armpits devoid deodarant, smolders a tall, imposing figure.  It is Satan, called to Earth to celebrate ‘his chosen birthday’ if the festival has met his approval.  And since 1989, is has.

Historians report that the reemergence of the Burning Man cult started in Malibu, California, during the summer of 1989.  Several friends from Brentwood were diving off the coast and came across a decrepit old chest that had stone-engraved tablets within.  The tablets were written in ancient Romanian, with close inspection of the artifacts revealing human bone fragments were likely done to do the engraving.

After getting the tablets translated, the friends performed the rituals as demanded — playing songs by Chris DeBurgh and Sinead O’Connor while doing flesh touching ritual with each other – – and to their shock, Satan appeared before them and applauded.  Several of the friends thought perhaps it was all the copious amounts of drugs the ritual demanded to be consumed, but a VHS tape confirmed the impossible:  written on their tablets were instructions on how to call Satan to Earth, on the scientific day of his birth:  the Summer Solstice.


Evil Satan drums and keeps cadence. When not summoning Satan, it is not uncommon for parishioners of unholy ceremonies to dress the part and welcome their Dark Lord to party with them. Here we see the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s David Grohl causing the crowd’s heart to beat to the foottaps of Satan at Burning Man 2011. David Grohl personally caused the real Satan to appear only 4 hours later.

It’s estimated that by week’s end, over 70,000 people will descend into the depths of this madness at Black Rock Desert and allow themselves to be taken over by all the demonic ritual that takes place. The event is equally dangerous for men and women, girls and boys. All in attendance have a key, evil role to play in summoning the Burning Man, Satan.

Men: Married men are required to throw their wedding bands into a giant smeltering pot, so that their symbols of vows can be melted down and reformed into false idols that resemble Emmy awards. After ‘throwing off the shackles of marriage’, married men are allowed to join up with single men in Viagral lines, where they are given handfuls of the medicine along with potently addictive mind altering drugs like Cannabis.

Women: Women at Burning Man are not allowed to wear clothing. If you have a girlfriend or daughter who is just ‘spending a fun weekend at with friends’, congratulations, you’ve got a Satanic harlot in your life. After she is pumped full of Quaaludes and Uncle Tweety’s liquid Flipper LSD, her mind will be just a pliable, loose and willing as her body. She won’t remember a thing and remember, every single man has permastiff within his pants. Add the thrusting, bumping beats of all the musicians in attendance and the women’s timing method will be just right for a Satanic explosion of illicit impregnation and disease propogation.

It’s estimated that after Burning Man, STD rates for America suddenly jump by 9% and unplanned pregnancy by 24%.

Children: Children whose parents are rotten enough to bring them to Burning Man are forced into hard labor. Cleaning the spots of sin, fetching water for the bands and purportedly, but not confirmed, one must be thrown into Satan’s burning arms when he appears.

With all this evil taking place in the Nevada desert, it’s no wonder God is so angry that he’s giving us clear signs that we should be intervening and making this festival come to an end.

To the West, where Burning Man was first created, God has repeatedly banged his hands on his desk and caused 70 earthquakes in one day. To the East, God has postponed the GOP convention because there are more pressing matters. God has grabbed our attention with Hurricane Isaac and letting us know he has the power to ‘drench out’ any Burning Man, no matter the size.

Tropical Storm Isaac is seen in this August 26, 2012 NASA handout satellite image as it approaches the Florida Keys. (Reuters)

Taking place in the mysterious Black Rock Desert of Las Vegas, Burning Man is considered one of the greatest mysteries of modern times.  Hurricane Isaac is proof that God can drown any Burning Man, including Satan himself.

A Category One – not so bad. God warning us of his displeasure – perhaps we didn’t take enough notice when Satan appeared to applaud Chris DeBurgh and Sinead O’Connor?

Did Burners really cause Hurricane Isaac, as a lesson from God for our sins? I doubt it. He would have taken care of Las Vegas long ago, if he was really that upset by all the shenanigans going on in Nevada. If I were omnipotent, I would find a better way for Burners to get the message. Like, the Call of Cthulhu

I was at Burning Man that other time, when Burners exited Exodus and hit the Default World to find that Hurricane Katrina had just about wiped out New Orleans. The haters will be pleased to know that it wasn’t a
surprise to me because I had CNN out there. Following Reverend Clyde’s knowledge, we must have done some really bad things at that 2005 Burn for God to want to punish us so much more severely that time.

This “warning from the Gods” comes at the same time that a couple of quite scholarly papers about Burning Man and Spirituality have been published. Both are from a Christian perspective, one is quite anti-Burning Man and the other is more supportive.

First, cult analyst (means: he writes about cults) Steve Matthews has written a long essay about Burning Man over at The Worldview Center. What is the Worldview Center?

We are a group of experts on a variety of worldviews and who are all concerned about one thing – TRUTH.  In a postmodern age where pluralists and relativists are teaching our generation that there are many truths and that opposing truth claims can both be correct at the same time, we proclaim that truth is narrow, absolute, and exclusive by definition.

 Our website is a continuing work in progress where we will host cutting-edge content in the form of articles, videos, printable resources, and downloadable audio.  Our vision is huge and such an undertaking is vast, but our team is working hard to bring you everything you need to learn about and evaluate today’s worldviews, world religions, the occult, and cults and new religious movements.

I’m sure Burners who read that far will enjoy the neutral perspective TWC brings to the topic of Burning Man. Steve starts by name dropping some celebrity Burners:

Sting (solo artist formerly of the band The Police), Adam Lambert (American Idol runner-up), Perry Farrell (founder of the annual Lollapalooza music festival and vocalist for band Jane’s Addiction), Joan Baez, Michael Franti, Todd Rungren (solo artist and member of band Utopia), actors Robin Williams, Rosario Dawson and Amy Smart, as well as a number of others.  Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are said to be such enthusiastic “burners” that they reportedly chose Eric Schmidt to become the CEO of Google based on his involvement in Burning Man[i].  Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon

Then he starts baring his fangs and getting stuck into us. First, he challenges the generally accepted creation myth. What is truth, what is fiction, and what is blurred beyond all recognition by decades of Playa sand?

A study of the true origins of Burning Man show that the official story of its beginnings are nothing more than a mere creation myth.  Executive Director Larry Harvey is generally portrayed as the sole creative mind behind Burning Man, but history shows that he was influenced by a number of people and groups most of whom he has never given credit or whom he has completely written out of the history of the movement.

 The influence of the Cacophony Society has already been noted, but a summary of some of the other sources are:


Burning art on Baker Beach           –     San Francisco artist Mary Grauberger

Burning a human figure                  -     The Golden Bough book & The Wicker Man movie
Moving the event to the Playa      -    The Cacophony Society
Zone Trips                                           –    The Cacophonists & author Hakim Bey
The “Leave No Trace” principle       –    The Suicide Club (forerunner to Cacophony)
Temporary Community                    -    William Benzin & Desert Siteworks
Art exhibits                                         –    William Benzin & Desert Siteworks

Furthermore, according to Michael “Flash” Hopkins the very foundations of the Burning Man movement are based upon a lie.  Hopkins worked with Harvey, lived with him as a roommate, and helped to build the first Man.  According to Hopkins,

“Larry and Jerry and I built the first one…It’s not a man, it’s a woman and her name is Patricia.  And Larry was upset that she wasn’t letting him see his child…He was really upset with it, so he decided to build an effigy of Pat and burn her, and we decided it wouldn’t be good to do it out in front of her house.  We decided it would be better if we brought it down to the beach and did it down at the beach.  So we burned her, because Mary Grauberger at the time was down there doing this sort of witchy-poo kind of rituals down there, sort of a Wicker Man style spring thing there, and so we decided to bring it down there and burn it down there.  And it’s never been a man, it’s always been a woman.  And you can just look at the shape of it and you’ll notice that it’s has, like, really shapely hips.  It’s always been a secret joke with us, because it’s never been a man, it was always a woman.  But, you know, we realized though that if we ever said it was a Burning Woman…you’d never have any women out there…they’d think that we were just, you know, he-man women haters.  And so by calling it Burning Man, I mean, girls were definitely into that.  They were, like…“Oh yeah, burn the Man!”  As long as the Man isn’t named, you know, Matthew or something, you know, it’s like…“Hey, I don’t care who it is, burn him!”…It was a kind of a funny way to do it… calling it a Burning Man…It was much more sociably acceptable, especially in San Francisco.  So, it was kind of a joke, and it was a joke to begin with…In one respect it wasn’t the sacredness of it all, or the spiritualness of it all…We weren’t on a journey to the sacred, he was just a little upset with Patricia and decided that he should, you know, burn her and this would get it out of his soul or whatever…another way of venting his anger, so we built Patricia…in my mother in law’s basement, and took it out to the beach and burnt it where Mary was burning her stuff…It didn’t even look like the Wicker Man.  Mary was building something that looked like the Wicker Man, but we built something that looked like Pat. ”

According to Hopkins who continues to be friends with Harvey’s ex-wife Pat, Larry has allegedly made her sign a paper promising that she would not speak about this to the media.

Burning Man Festival: a Life-Enhancing, Post Christendom “Middle Way” by John Morehead

He doesn’t quite go so far (yet) as to name Burning Man as a Pagan festival, but he doesn’t think it’s very friendly towards monotheism:

Burning Man spirituality although generally Eastern and pantheistic, is very diverse and tolerant of just about anything but monotheism and Christianity.

I’d be interested to know if there are many Muslims there. I’ve certainly never heard a muezzin.

It’s not a cult, but there are lots of cult-like behaviors going on there:

While many of the events and workshops are centered around a very outrageous and extreme sexual deviancy, many deal with spiritual topics.  Favorite spiritual themes among these workshops tend to be yoga, tantra, shamanism, and meditation.  Examples of workshops from the 2011 lineup included:

On Attaining Buddhahood in this Lifetime.  The potential for Buddhahood exists within everyone.  Come join us for a discussion about a Buddhist practice that opens this door for all persons .

Losing My Religion.  Religious dogma can serve to uplift and inspire or separate and control.  This ritual will help you to strip away the confining, controlling aspects .

Atheist/Agnostic Soiree at Uli Babas.  We invite all hedonists, heretics, infidels and cosmically confused to a holy communion of His Noodly Body and savory blood of blended herbs .

Channeling Voices from Other Dimensions.  Hear, feel, experience other dimensions, learn to channel from different sources.  Contact spirits for healings .

Analyzing the events and workshops and the spirituality associated with the Temple, we find the spirituality of Burning Man generally to be cultic, occultic, hedonistic, or steeped in Eastern mysticism.

Before he said Burning Man was Eastern and polytheistic, now to Matthews that means OK, let’s face it, actually they are really Pagans…

Not all burners would identify themselves as being Pagans (even though huge numbers of Pagans and Neopagan Wiccans do attend), but the spirituality of Burning Man tends to be that of a general Paganism (as opposed to the more specific Pagan traditions of Neopaganism, Shamanism, or Druidism).  Paganism is pantheistic (and usually polytheistic) and is about the worship of nature.  The divine is often expressed as feminine and Pagans concern themselves with the seasons, fertility, and relating with the interconnectedness of all living things within nature.  God is not over and apart from creation, but is to be identified with nature itself.

It’s going to be hard to argue that Burners aren’t concerned with Fertility or polytheism, given what just happened.

In conclusion, Burners are doomed to hell…

and therefore bash-able (gotta love that Christian charity – “turn the other cheek…so I can spank it!”):

Burning Man is certainly not for everyone, and especially not for children.  Apart from the difficulty and unpleasantness of surviving in the desert for a week without easy access to electricity, water, telephones, the Internet, and other comforts, the “radical self-expression” on the playa leads to a lot of nudity, profanity, sacrilege, irreverence, partying, drugs, alcohol, perversion, deviancy, and other things which will offend all but the most desensitized moral relativist.  Black Rock City is clearly the most pagan (in the common sense of the word) place on Earth.  There are rapes, fights, cars and tents broken into, drug overdoses, occultism, sexual promiscuity and reckless living.

Overkill Girl, 2010 – photo by Tomas Loewy

…and that’s just at Overkill! LOL just kidding…mostly…  ;-)

Anyway, luckily, and perhaps inevitably with an essay like this, there is one way, ONLY one way, to discover truth.

Only the God of the Bible as one who is both immanent and transcendent can satisfactorily explain the role of the Divine in our world and in our lives.  A transcendent deity can answer how He can be over all creation and able to judge all moral actions which occur within cultures and individuals.  He is separate from mankind as the Creator, and is providential and sovereign over that creation.  His immanence and transcendence allow Him to hear our cries and then intervene in our lives.  His immanence allows Him to be involved in the affairs of men.  The God who is described in the Bible is clearly the most rational explanation of the Divine, as the one which best fits the facts in both our experience and in our minds.

Clearly! I’m reminded of the stand-up comedian’s joke (warning: vulgar!), “if God’s so fucking smart, how come he can’t teach his people how to make money”.

John Morehead has written an essay in response, published at Religion Dispatches, entitled Burning Man: Fear of an Alternative Pagan Social Order.

the gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert is considered by many to be a deviant event, and a harbinger of spiritual and societal decay

Love it! That’s one extra reason to go, on top of the raves. But, hate to break it to you, “harbinger” means “someone who brings a warning” – we don’t need a warning that society is decaying, we’re in the middle of the worst Depression this country has ever experienced.

Matthews also portrays Burning Man participants as marginalized individuals with “countercultural leanings,” including “adherents of the New Age and Paganism, along with scores of partiers, nudists, and those who like to ‘get high.’” The presence of this kind of reveler can’t be denied, but Matthews’ stereotype neglects the depth of the festival’s demographics. This includes not just those outside the cultural mainstream, but also a number of professionals connected to the social movement called the Cultural Creatives, discussed by Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, which includes “writers, artists, musicians, psychotherapists, environmentalists, feminists, alternative health care providers, and other professionals.

Pros? Feminists? That’s the least of our worries at Burning Man. Whatever our religion might be. What about frat boys and Jersey Shores? That’s the real threat to the culture.

Morehead critiques Matthews further:

Matthews draws upon an evangelical counter-cult methodology that views most spiritual alternatives as heretical and deviant. Douglas Cowan has described this apologetic framework as a form of reality construction and boundary maintenance. The use of this approach often leads to a misunderstanding of a given religion (usually various new religious movements) and we see a good example of these failings in Matthews’ interpretations of Burning Man spirituality—as well as his representation of Paganism. This includes his confused distinction between various forms of Paganism, and his faulty critique of Paganism, claiming that it “denies the dignity of man,” “leads to hedonism and self-indulgence,” and “ignores the problem of evil,” to name a few.

This methodology is called on this blog, “Burner than thou”. For example, “I’m more of a Burner than you because you’re a raver”, or “you’re not a real Burner because you stay in an RV”, or “you’re not a real Burner because you typed ‘steampunk goggles’ into the Internet and bought those from a web site, you didn’t travel back in time to the 1800′s and personally enlist a team of Dwarvish craftsmen to create them from recycled components as a gift”.

Morehead feels that Christianity has much in common with Burning Man, and much to learn from it:

early Christianity—a movement that arose as a counterculture in the desert long ago, was viewed by the dominant culture as deviant, and engaged in a variety of bizarre beliefs and rituals—might learn from another desert counterculture.

…Christianity in America has much to learn from Burning Man, including the need to rediscover its own countercultural origins and the practice of speaking truth to power, concepts of self and community in postmodernity, the significance of play as a possible “signal of transcendence,” the importance of festivals with their rituals of inversion and the critique of society, and utopian considerations.

Peggy Fletcher Stack, writing in the Salt Lake City Tribune, published an article titled “The Church of Burning Man”, which backs up Morehead like a wingwoman.

Many see Burning Man as a drug-filled haze of hedonism — long on self-expression and exhibitionism, short on morals and restraint. Some Christian pastors have condemned it as a “tool of Satan.”

Indeed, satanic revelry may be the appeal for some devotees, but others go there looking for their better natures. Either way, the gathering has tapped into a need and continues to swell.

Either way? I’m pointing out some of the occult, ritualistic elements of Burning Man, as well as it’s broad spiritual appeal to people of any or no religion. But even I’m not going so far as to postulate that there are devotees going there for Satanic revelry. Wicca yes, but even that is in a tiny minority – at least in terms of conscious practice.
Morehead shares the opinion of Burning Man’s founders, that it is not a Pagan event.

it is certainly a mistake to characterize Burning Man and its adherents in general as Pagan. The festival invokes a multiplicity of spiritual perspectives—including the New Spirituality and Paganism—but it is by no means a Pagan event. 

Although that statement is hard to refute, it doesn’t directly address the occult ritual elements of the event – the major elements, being the Burn, the Layout, and the date. We’re all entranced participants in someone else’s giant occult rituals. So, why not bring your own? Take your power back, cast your magic with love and light. Seek the divine in whatever way connects you to it. Experiment with new pathways, substances, movements, paradigms. The main point of Burning Man to me is throwing all negativity out, Burning it, getting rid of it. Coming out the other side covered in dust, barely functioning, but cleansed and better than ever.

Does all the arguing about “whose God is right”, really get us any closer to the truth – or a good Burn? Burning Man has taught me to embrace everyone, no matter how freaky they might be, or how strange I find their behavior. “Radical Inclusion” could be the greatest Divine Truth of all – we are all God’s creatures, or the Universe’s, or we all came from nothing and will return there. Believe what you want, let me believe what I want, and let’s party!

 


Filed under: General Tagged: 2012, city, complaints, news, press, spirituality, stories

What Burning Man has in common with a deployment to Afghanistan

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The Denver Post has a great story from Burner Frances (originally written for the LA Times),  a member of the Council on Foreign Relations who went to her first Burn direct from a stint as a civilian at Kandahar, NATO’s main airbase in Afghanistan.

Two years ago, I made my first-time Burning Man pilgrimage. To my relief then, I realized I already had most of the answers. I was a civilian working at Kandahar Airfield, NATO’s largest base in southern Afghanistan. The parallels hit me sometime after procuring ice from a friendly guy in a penguin suit, and before hopping onto a Psychic Taxi (“Random Service”) to explore. The surreal scene was eerily reminiscent of my surreal job, and not just because of the dust and heat.

For both places, these were the transferable rules:

• Accept over-familiarity with neighbors’ personal lives. Donald Rumsfeld — the man who helped to bring us Baghdad and Kandahar — once observed that you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had. The unspoken corollary is that once at war, many will go to bed with the bedmate they have, not the bedmate they wish they had. Pressure and proximity do strange things, at Kandahar as at Burning Man. And in both cases, soundproofing is scarce. Get used to it.

Forget capitalism. Despite my good free-market upbringing, I quickly came to appreciate that Kandahar’s policies verge toward “to each according to his need.” With meals, office supplies and gym access all provided free, I stayed weeks on the airfield without spending a dollar. I hit up the free videos. When malaria season arrived, I rejoiced in the free clinic and its socialist medicine. Meanwhile, among Burning Man’s 10 guiding principles is “decommodification,” which translated as a passerby in a Catholic priest costume handing me a Bloody Mary in exchange for “confessing a sin.” Who needs currency when you have “radical gifting”?

Respect the porta-latrines. At Burning Man, they’re the site of brilliant potty poetry. At Kandahar, they’re a semi-poetic reminder that you’d rather briefly be there than permanently bunking next to the “poo pond.”

 • Always wear sunscreen. And something that glows in the dark. Sunscreen needs no explanation. But those are some dark desert nights. At Kandahar, wear your over-the-shoulder reflective strips after dark or face military discipline. At Burning Man, wear whatever form of glow stick you can best weave into your pirate costume. It’ll save you from being run over by, respectively, a Humvee or an ornate 60-foot yacht on wheels blasting electronica.

• Celebrate the “entertainment.” At Burning Man, the participants are the performance; they don’t disappoint. At Kandahar, it’s C-list celebrities interested in Supporting Our Troops and, well, sometimes they do. Nonetheless — even if it’s Christmas Eve 2009, your entertainment is Anna Kournikova, and you’re unclear how her tennis career translates into a stand-up routine — go, enjoy and maintain your morale.

Read more:Brown: The rules of Burning Man, Kandahar – The Denver Posthttp://www.denverpost.com/brown/ci_21485083/rules-burning-man-kandahar#ixzz261xXp1MG
Read The Denver Post’s Terms of Use of its content: http://www.denverpost.com/termsofuse


Filed under: Burner Stories Tagged: 2012, city, commerce, press, stories

Smart Phones on the Playa?

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Jon Mitchell, who also writes for the official Burning Man blog, has published a piece titled The Social Network is All Around You -A Lesson from Burning Man. He raises an interesting issue:

Every year at Burning Man, I have the same argument. Someone plays the role of the starry-eyed futurist, someone else is the grizzly survivalist. The futurist says, “If only we had map and chat apps out here, we could meet everyone and see everything! It would be a utopia!” The survivalist says “Hell no. We come out here to get away from all that.” At Burning Man, as in everyday urban life, the answer lies somewhere in between.

I think what scares the grizzly survivalist (which was me this year) is the notion of burners walking around Black Rock City peering down their arms at the glow of a smartphone instead of looking around at the people and the spectacle. It’s already happening to some extent. Now that smartphones are many people’s primary camera, people have them out even without a data connection.

That’s bad enough. On Saturday night, when the Man burns, it’s hard to see the real thing through the forest of arms holding up phones and cameras in front of you. I understand why people want a document of this mind-blowing event, but how many (thousand) copies do we need? The grizzly survivalist worries about the spirit of those spectators who watch life through the screens rather than connecting directly through their optic nerves.

There are Burning Man-specific apps, like iBurn, but I have never seen the thing in use. Frankly, I hope I never do. Black Rock City is designed to be dead easy to navigate, and Burning Man is the best place in the world to ask for directions. It doesn’t even matter where somebody sends you; you’re going to like it.

[...read the rest of Jon's article]

The original Wicker Man might be associated with the Luddite movement, but it goes way earlier than that. There’s no way we are going to be able to keep technology out of Burning Man. Our better hope is for Burning Man to inspire the technologies – seems like that is happening with Google Goggles, Sergei stopped by IDEATE wearing them.

Personally we think it’s great that Rockstar Librarian had an app this year, we used it all the time on the iPad to see who was on, where and when. And the BurnerMap is invaluable.

Will wearable personal tech like Google Goggles transform Burning Man?


Filed under: General Tagged: 2012, city, complaints, cops, environment, future, press, rules, stories

More Playa Love: Dusty Hippy Sex Diary from NY Magazine

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New York magazine has published this entertaining account from a 37-year old anonymous and “monogamish” woman. It’s an interesting insight into the trials and tribulations of attending Burning Man with a partner. It’s not all roses and hand jobs!

photo by Tomas Loewy

3:30 p.m. Yippee! YAY! Purr! Meow! My boyfriend came back from his shift tired, so he grabbed a quick nap. Then he eats me while I fantasize that he’s eating someone else while I kiss her or go down on him. That’s always a fun fantasy. Afterward, we have sex, me on top, the only way we’ve had sex since we got here. I’m looking forward to some good old-fashioned missionary-position sex next time. Is that wrong?

11 p.m. We’re tired and dusty, and we’ve had yet another argument. I know, and he knows, that Burning Man is truly trying on relationships. They say if you make it through the burn, then you can make it through anything. I’m not sure we can. I’m emotionally drained. We are now fighting over little things because we’re not listening to each other. I want to go down on him because I remember my friend’s advice that “a blow job makes everything better.” I put him in my mouth and pump a few times. We fall asleep.

 

 

 


Filed under: Burner Stories Tagged: 2012, funny, playa love, press, stories

“The World’s Biggest Party”– 15 minute TV news story from Australia

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Burning Man is famous the world over, with Burners coming from all corners of the globe to check out the party. Last year one rumor was that Ashram Galactica, a turnkey camp modelled after a 5-star hotel with its own concierge, had been booked out by 200 Australians. We’re not sure if that actually happened – their web site says they only have 4 suites, and doesn’t mention anything about 2012 – but the dingo contingent was definitely on the Playa this year, in full force.

And they brought a TV crew with them. This 15-minute mini-documentary on Burning Man was just aired on national television in Australia. It’s mostly positive, although they do highlight sexual assault as an issue there.

Yahoo/Channel 7 Story


Filed under: Burner Stories Tagged: 2012, city, press, stories, videos

Is Burning Man Art Legit? 8 million reasons why

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[Update: this story is on the San Francisco TV news tonight, KTVU and CBS covered it at lunch time. Here's the ABC story: "soon what some consider an architectural gem will actually be a work of art"]

Congratulations to our friend and Disorient master electro-artist, Leo Villareal. A couple of years ago he was the first Burning Man artist to have an exhibition of 20 of his works in a major Museum, at the San Jose Museum of Art.

Now, Leo has won what must be the biggest commission ever for a Burning Man artist, $8 million for the Bay Lights, a temporary installation of 25,000 LED lights on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. It is actually the largest light installation ever, anywhere in the world. It also may be the largest ever commission for an “interactive“, “electronic”, or “multimedia” artist, as ground-breaking today as Damian Hirst’s $8 million formaldahyde shark was in it’s day, (according to Wikipedia, the iconic work of British art in the 1990′s) or graffiti artist Banksy, who for all the hype, only recently had his first million-plus sale – ironically (iconically) enough, a piece defacing Hirst.

Leo’s previous (and famous) temporary installation, the Rockefeller-backed Multiverse, is a tunnel of 41,000 LED lights at the National Gallery in Washington. It has been seen by more than 20 million people, and has now been made permanent.

We first brought you news of the Bay Lights installation in March, and spoke to Mayor Ed Lee about it later in May. Now we’re pleased to report that the project is now official; although there are still funds to be raised, the permits have been issued by Caltrans after 3 years of negotiations, the city is backing it, and the America’s Cup and Bay Bridge Extension opening will be amping up the hype. In other words: it’s on. The lights will add to a whole bunch of new LEDs going in with the new bridge span.

Villareal, a New York artist, describes the piece as a light sculpture, as opposed to a light show or light treatment. As such, there will be no blinking and no discernible message or image in the lights.

“What you will see are sequences that are orchestrated but will never repeat,” he says. “It will be very subtle and elegant. You could think of it almost as music, but mapped to the visual sense.”

Here’s a sampling of what it will look like:

This is no easy feat – people have to hang off the Bay Bridge on cables, installing the lights.

one of the Bay Lights prototypes, using a 3D-printed model of the steel cable

Over the next several months, electricians in harnesses will be climbing the suspension cables during the midnight hours to affix the LED lights to the vertical suspender cables that connect to the bridge deck. Each bulb will be adjusted to a level of brightness ranging from zero to 255.

Villareal, 45, will direct the installation via laptop, while stationed on a boat, on Treasure Island or on the second-floor deck of Waterbar restaurant on the Embarcadero.

“I’m using software as a primary material,” he says. “There’s a long process of trying things, and there is a lot of randomness and discovery in that process, as I come to resolution on what the piece will be.”

Here’s an interview with Leo on the project:

photo by Liz Hafalia, SF Chronicle

This is very exciting for San Francisco, especially residents with views of the North side of the Bay Bridge, the span from Treasure Island to the city. The lights will run from midnight until 2am every day.

“Bay Lights” will be visible only from the waterfront north of the bridge, or from a boat on the bay. It will operate between dusk and 2 a.m. nightly and will not be visible from the bridge deck, so as not to distract motorists.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Bay-Bridge-to-beam-vivid-light-sculpture-3872898.php#ixzz26qCjREcC


Filed under: News Tagged: 2012, alternatives, art projects, disorient, news, press

Robot Heart goes to Space!

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Wow, two of my favorite things, together: Space Ibiza, my favorite club in the world, has published an editorial in their magazine about Robot Heart, my favorite sound system on the Playa, home of more than a few happy sunrises for my crew this (and every) year.

I couldn’t get the link to the music they mention to work, try this one instead.

Here’s some Robot Heart tunes for you from Soundcloud.

Here’s what the Robot Heart crew have to say about where they’re at with their setup, after 5 years and at least $1 million…

After a year of preparation, two weeks in the desert and a week of epic music over seven sunrises… the Robot Heart crew is now off the playa. Our goal is to bring the best mobile sound system and DJ lineup to Burning Man and five years into that journey we have finally achieved our vision. We want to thank everyone for helping turn our dreams into realities. — with Jordan LoveOtto Vladimir and Kai Ingwerse


Filed under: General Tagged: 2012, art cars, press, sound, space, stories

The Dark Side of Burning Man – Rape on the Playa (updates)

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We brought this issue to your attention a couple of weeks back, it’s a serious one and needs to be addressed by the community – especially as the event gets bigger and intends to fertilize its seed around the world. Tackling a large social problem like this, that can’t easily be solved by any one institution in the Default world Meatspace, sounds like a great job for the Burning Man Project. Not sure what else they’re really doing, and it certainly seems to be beyond the capabilities of BMOrg to address it in any meaningful way. Encouraging to see it getting some mainstream media attention, at last; maybe that’s what we need to move this from the “too hard” basket to the “to do” list:

Whenever you hear about Burning Man, it’s often about the art, the peace, the spiritual enlightenment, and, most importantly, the freedom. Some burners, as the attendees like to be called, even feel as if that is their home and they can’t wait to get back to it every year.

This year, however, in addition to all the posts about how 2012 was the best burn ever, there was also a very different post entitled “Serial Rapist on the Playa.” It details the story of a 19-year-old girl who was strangled, drugged, and raped one night. According to the blog, which was written by the victim’s mother, who was also at Burning Man, she was found face down behind Emerald City. The people who found her assumed she had overdosed and took her to the medical tent. After being attached to an IV all night, they released her. Upon returning to her tent, the bruises that appeared made it clear she had been strangled and raped.

Crime is rarely mentioned in conjunction with Burning Man, and neither is rape or assault. When the victim reported the assault on the playa, she was informed that Burning Man is not equipped with rape kits. If you are assaulted while at Burning Man and you want a rape kit, you have to travel to Reno. Joseph Pred, Burning Man’s Emergency Services Operations Chief confirmed, “Rape kits do not exist in Black Rock City. Forensic exams are incredibly complex issues that have to do with the court system and are not something that is really easily taken on. In Northern Nevada, there is only one facility that does that type of exam.”

I found this curious, so I contacted a hospital in Northern Nevada and asked if rape kits were only done in specific facilities. A charge nurse in the ER said that when a person is brought in for rape, they are instructed by law enforcement to conduct a special exam and it can be done in any hospital in Northern Nevada.

This is not the first, nor will this be the last sexual assault that occurs on the playa. Burning Man is a city, and in keeping with that belief, it has a responsibility to provide rape kits for its attendees, as well as a better way of handling a situation like this.

Megan Miller, Burning Man’s Public Relations Manager, explained that if an attendee is sexually assaulted and they want to go to the hospital, then they drive the person to the facility and bring them back to the burn, if they so choose. So, they do offer transportation, but how much evidence do they lose along that drive? As equipped as Black Rock City claims to be, clearly this a situation that calls for better planning and sensitivity. Burning Man needs to find a better way to keep victims from being further traumatized after something like this occurs, in the form of rape crisis counseling, better medical aid, increased awareness, and support.

via The Dark Side of Burning Man: Rape on the Playa – San Francisco – Arts – The Exhibitionist.

The issue is not as simple as “get rape kits on the Playa”. The kits themselves are only $15 or so. Despite what the unnamed nurse says in this story, our information (now confirmed by BMOrg) is that there are only 3 facilities in the whole state that can process this properly (a medical issue, not LEO) and there’s a massive backlog of unprocessed rape kits delaying prosecutions. The medical side requires specialized training, and there are important issues with data storage and security, preserving the chain of evidence, as well as Doctor/Patient confidentiality through the whole legal process that happens afterwards.

Burner Omgrey shares from her own painful experiences:

this is harder to write than any of you can imagine, even if she had a rape kit done, even if they could find the guy, even if they had enough evidence to move forward with a criminal investigation and it made it to trial (only 14% of reported cases do), then there is a 3% chance he’d be convicted.

That’s right. 97% of rapists walk free.
Every rapist will rape 6 to 10 different women.

I was as naive as some of the comments I see here when it comes to thinking that the police can do anything. They really can’t. It comes down to he said, she said, and with “reasonable doubt,” the rapists walks free 97% of the time.

All he has to say is “it was consensual.” Quick presto, reasonable doubt. Especially at a place like BM.

This is why it’s not a private issue. It’s a cultural one.
Burning Man is a wonderful place to start addressing this seriously and finding ways to identify and prosecute (if possible), ostracize if not.

Burner Kittyrodriguez gets to the crux of the matter:

I think many are misunderstanding the major issue here. It is not a matter of the ability to collect the evidence. It is a matter of the viability of such collection in court. Even in the default world, a rape examination cannot be performed at any medical facility by any medical professional. There are specific, licensed centers that use approved labs. Even in major cities with excellent facilities that have spotless records, evidence collected can, and is, disputed and thrown out. It is unreasonable to think that a facility, no matter how state of the art, that is only operational for one or two weeks a year, in a location that is volatile and misunderstood by the general population, would be accepted as an acceptable forensics laboratory.

We are completely against sexual assault or violence of any kind. However, Burning Man is a unique environment. Like, people whose camp is a bicycle powered dildo unique environment. Or, people who want to be tied up and punished. Not just one or two of them, either! Unfortunately, in a city of 61,000, there are even registered sex offenders – yep, they show up and check in with the LEOs. Think about that next time you want to bring your kids to the middle of nowhere.

This year at Burning Man, a half naked girl got on our art car. She seemed cute and fun and super-friendly, and was talking to one of my buddies. Then she started taking more of her clothes off, and we realized how wasted she was. So we found out where she was camped, then drove her back to the camp and left her with her friends. Lucky for her she got on the right Art Car, with the good guys – you can see how easily these things could go the other way. The victim might not even fully remember what happened. No means no, absolutely, but what if someone is saying “yes” – maybe because they took too many drugs? I’m not saying that it would be that girl’s responsibility if she had been sexually assaulted – quite the opposite – but she and her friends do have a responsibility of radical self-reliance to not get so fucked up that they put themselves in dangerous situations, where they are not fully aware of their words and actions. Education about this is needed in the community too.

The cries of “kill the rapist” are a knee-jerk reaction, and will solve nothing. We need to maintain the system of justice, and not let it devolve into lynch mob anarchy. It’s the 21st Century now, we have evolved past that. This is a community issue which needs awareness, collaboration, as well as technical problem solving and disruptive innovation that is well suited to the diverse experience and skillset of Burners.

The official Burning Man blog mentions the issue…sort of. You have to watch half an hour of Halcyon before he gets into it, describing in a rambling way the story of someone being arrested in handcuffs at his camp as a “beautiful thing”. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the hippy way is going to convince the rapists to change.

[Update 9/23/12] – there’s quite a bit of discussion on this topic over at Free Thought Blog.

BMOrg has now issued a belated and wishy-washy response on this topic. Moderator trilobyte has now shut down the ePlaya thread, perhaps because Burning Man wants to take the ostrich approach; anyone interested should read the excellent response from Jason the Mayor of the accused’s camp. It sets a standard for other camps to follow in how to respond to these types of issues in the community. This is the type of leadership that is needed to pass the mantle of Burning Man on towards younger generations. Other types of crime are less serious, many of the ones the cops are out there busting people for are even victimless; this one is extremely serious. And best dealt with as a community issue, not only a legal and medical one. Also, Anile from the Bureau of Erotic Discourse has highlighted that they are working on building community awareness via their Theme Camp Challenge

The girl’s mother has written a heart-wrenching blog post. Unfortunately, it degenerates into threats of violence in the comments. Violence begetting more violence, is not the solution. Her daughter is managing OK and seeing a counsellor. She asks for us all to send loving thoughts towards her daughter.


Filed under: News Tagged: 2012, city, complaints, cops, press, scandal

Burners Invade Downtown Las Vegas

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Tony Hsieh is the founder of online commerce mega-site Zappo’s. He’s also a Burner, and he’s been working with Marion Goodell and the Burning Man Project to bring Burning Man Art to Downtown Vegas. Here’s the latest story from the Las Vegas Review Journal:

If you love radical self-expression and huge, outlandish sculptures but hate getting dirty in hard-to-reach places, you’re in luck.

The Downtown Project, brainchild of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, recently signed a deal to bring elaborate sculptures and other artwork from Northern Nevada’s Burning Man festival for display in Las Vegas.

It’s an attempt to infuse Hsieh’s community-building project with the artistic sensibility of Burning Man, an annual event that draws as many as 60,000 people to a dry lake bed in the Black Rock Desert.

“Tony asked them to submit anything from small projects to large projects, but he likes fire,” said Mimi Pham, a Downtown Project contractor who has worked with Hsieh on personal projects for eight years.

At first glance the partnership between Burning Man, which is best known for bending virtually all conventions, seems incongruous with Las Vegas, a place most often known for artistic sensibilities that start with a sharply dressed Frank Sinatra and end at fat Elvis.

But people with a bead on Las Vegas culture say the city is more avant-garde than it gets credit for. Just look a few miles south of downtown, past the city limits at the Strip, where a replica medieval castle, reproductions of the New York skyline and Venice’s Piazza San Marco and a fire-spitting imitation volcano greet tens of millions of visitors annually. Those projects are audacious in their own right.

No one is allowed to call any idea stupid in Las Vegas,” said Dayvid Figler, a longtime Las Vegas lawyer, poet, cultural observer and frequenter of downtown. “We built this city on stupid and it is the smartest thing we ever did.

Leslie Bocskor, chairman of the Society of Experimental Arts and Learning, a group that supports collaborative community arts projects and oversaw a Burning Man inspired event downtown in March, said playa-inspired sculpture has surface similarities to ambitious Las Vegas attractions such as the Mirage volcano, but connects with people on a deeper level.

“Although on its surface it is spectacle, underneath it serves to bring people together,” he said discussing the blending of Las Vegas and Burning Man cultures.

Putting more Burning Man in Las Vegas is a move whose time has come, said artist Kirk Jellum of Salt Lake City.

He has shared his own work at Burning Man, including a fire-spewing praying mantis that can rise to 55-feet-tall and is now in Las Vegas. It’s set to be installed at a retail and night life center made from shipping containers planned for a vacant spot near Fremont and 7th streets downtown.

“Whether people know it or not, Burning Man has been penetrating mainstream culture for years,” Jellum said. “Lady Gaga, she wouldn’t get a second look on the playa.”

The agreement between the Downtown Project and Burning Man Project is for six months, although both sides expect to extend it, and contains several provisions.

Burning Man organizers will compile works of art for the Downtown Project to review for potential installation in Las Vegas, hire a liaison to live and work in Las Vegas and consult with First Friday Las Vegas on ways to enhance event participation.

“You will never re-create what they have done up there (at Burning Man), and that is not the intent,” said First Friday organizer Joey Vanas, who took oversight of First Friday events last year at Hsieh’s behest. “It is just to take some of the principles and some of the inspiration.”

The Downtown Project has agreed to explore ways to store and display hundreds of mutant vehicles, which are artistically modified cars that are popular attractions at Burning Man but impractical, to say the least, to drive on public roads.

“Whether we have to build a warehouse and store the art cars, these are just ideas,” Pham said. “We don’t really know how realistic this is.”

It’s also a chance for Burning Man organizers to share their values with a broader audience. Burning Man, founded at Baker Beach in San Francisco in 1986, is formed around a community that builds, populates and departs within a few weeks.

The temporary community was little more than a small encampment during the event’s early days in Northern California. Since moving to Nevada in 1991 it has grown to an outpost with tens of thousands of residents, complete with streets, neighborhoods, zoning, an airport and law enforcement, all of which is built and then dismantled by participants, leaving little or no trace in the desert.

By establishing the agreement with the Downtown Project, Burning Man can use Las Vegas as a platform for art and ideas, and to share its 10 principles, which include radical self-expression, decommodification and civic responsibility.

While Burning Man does have hundreds of regional ambassadors around the world, the Downtown Project agreement is a first, said Marian Goodell, director of business and communications for the Burning Man Project.

“It is pretty common that people go to Burning Man and want to manifest the culture outside of Black Rock City,” Goodell said. “It is not common that someone in an urban redevelopment endeavor contacts us to bring us into that endeavor.”

Las Vegas is already home to regional representatives, and in March the Society for Experimental Arts and Learning hosted a burn of its own when artists ignited a 20-foot wooden sculpture of a showgirl called Lucky Lady Lucy.

The event attracted tens of thousands of people to First Friday, showing the burner culture can be a big draw downtown.

“There is a strong community of them; it is getting stronger and stronger,” Vanas said.

By strengthening the connection, Hsieh says Las Vegas can add another layer of culture to the tech startups, small businesses, new residents and nightlife the Downtown Project seeks to cultivate.

“It is not about, ‘Let’s try to make downtown Vegas a mini Burning Man,’ ” Hsieh said. “It is really about combining all these different perspectives and so on that can help build a unique community for downtown Las Vegas.”

It’s not just Tony who wants to bring Burning Man to Vegas. Joey Vanas from First Friday, is determined to inflict further economic damage on already struggling Reno, to make Vegas the Nevada hub for Burners.

It’s not a publicity stunt. Burning the statue has a symbolic meaning for downtown Vegas.

“It’s the element of change. It’s the element of transition. I think it’s important that people understand it’s not a bunch of pyros, not a bunch of grownups playing with matches,” said Joey Vanas, the managing partner of First Friday Las Vegas.

The change he’s referring to is the evolution ofdowntown Vegas. Over the past 10 years the area has gone from being thought of as the “forgotten stepchild” to being recognized as a place with more than just the typical Vegas offerings. That effort was pioneered by the former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar B. Goodman, but downtown Vegas isn’t yet the butterfly that Vanas envisions.

“I’d like to see more creative people moving here for starters. We need to increase the population density. More people living in closer quarters bumping into each other all day, means more exchange of ideas and facilitates more action and more things happening,” said Vanas.

Flames of Change and Vanas’ goal for First Friday was spawned by Burning Man, a week-long event that takes place once a year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Every year Burning Man attracts thousands of participants who congregate to build a temporary city founded on art, self expression, self-reliance and community. Vanas attended the event for the first time in 2011. He saw strangers helping strangers and realized that everything the event stood for was exactly what he wanted to see happen in downtown Vegas.

No matter who you are, where you come from, what language you speak or what you believe in, you can find like-minded people there (at Burning Man), and you can be accepted for who you are. That’s a huge thing,” said Vanas.

The experience was life changing and inspired him to take his current position as a managing partner for First Friday. He was first approached about the position by his friend and Zappos CEO and co-founder Tony Hsieh. Vanas had also previously worked with Hsieh.

Vanas’ experience at Burning Man made such a big impact on him that he wanted to get people in the Vegas community to create something that could be shared at Burning Man 2012. What he didn’t know was that there was already a team of Burning Man participants building a sculpture that could be presented and burned here in Vegas, the Lucky Lady Lucy Team. This is the second time the team has built a wooden showgirl. The first one was created for Burning Man in 2011.

Once Vanas realized the Lucky Lady Lucy effort was already underway, it was just a matter of First Friday teaming up to help support and market the event.

Not only does Vanas want downtown to embrace the principles of Burning Man, he also wants Vegas to become a new hub for the event during the 358 days a year when the festival isn’t taking place. Right now Reno is where many of the art pieces from the event are stored when not in use at Burning Man. One of Vanas’ goals for downtown is to find a space where those pieces can be on display for people to enjoy who don’t make it to festival in northern Nevada.

[Update 10/1/12. Thanks to Toburn for letting us know about some further coverage in the Deseret News of Tony Hsieh's purchase of the Preying Mantis]

 


Filed under: News Tagged: 2012, alternatives, city, news, press, regionals

Geeks Electrifying Burning Man

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At Burners.Me, we like to bring you commentary, facts, stories, and opinions about Burner culture from a variety of different perspectives. And one of those is the nerds. Or in some cases, über-nerds. Because these are the ones who came to rock it on the Playa.

Dr North, keynote speaker at the IEEE Global Technology Conference; how technology can help all of humanity

The IEEE, which is the world’s largest professional association for the advancement of technology, was well represented this year, with the keynote speaker from their annual conference Dr Mike North’s Reallocate camp IDEATE, and now, as we hear from IEEE Spectrum, a whole camp dedicated to electrical ninjaengineers.

Burning Man is a weeklong end-of-summer bacchanalian arts festival that promotes radical self-expression and experimental community building, held annually on the playa of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. This year’s festival took place between 27 August and 3 September, and amid the 60 000 revelers was the Alternative Energy Zone (AEZ)—an oasis of nearly 500 engineers and engineering-minded campers.

The AEZ made its first appearance at the 2000 festival, as 50 people camping without generators. The group has grown to delight in building ecological living structures powered by sustainable energy devices. This year’s AEZ was composed of 90-plus distinct subcamps, without a fossil-fuel generator in sight. Instead the zone was awash in homemade “evapotrons” (wind- or solar-powered devices that evaporate wastewater, important in the crowded drainage-free conditions), swamp coolers (which provide air conditioning through water evaporation), heat-deflecting yurts, and wind- and solar-powered electrical microgrids. Daily tours showcased these wonders and taught people how to do for themselves.

“This is a village of doers who bring extra parts and fittings with them in case someone needs repairs,” says outgoing AEZ leader “Jolly” Roger Wilson, creative director for the Willits Kinetic Carnivale, an annual steampunk festival in Willits, Calif., who started out as an architect-turned-film industry computer modeler; he worked on such films as 1982’s Tron. “They’re good at making stuff that works. There is some very elaborate engineering here,” Wilson says. Past whimsies include a timed laser that indicated the location of a passing satellite every night, solar-powered racing vehicles, and a solar hot-dog cooker fashioned from an abandoned satellite dish.

Such undertakings let engineers stretch their knowledge, teach nonengineers basic skills, and get festival attendees thinking about their energy consumption year-round.

“It’s an entire village of power nerds—everyone has an interesting project or fascinating background,” says Shawn Brenneman, a Google software engineer in Mountain View, Calif., who turns “impractical tensegrity structures”—made of cables and struts that rely on tensile forces to stay up—into artistic living spaces in his camp, Tensile Town. “Even people who aren’t engineers by trade here build hard things as hobbies. It’s a way to try something new in a space of people who are all into that.”

Take the Cult of Levitating Plywood, a time-honored AEZ camp so named for suspending a 14-square-meter plywood second story inside a 7.3-meter-diameter geodesic dome—a project that evolved over several years from computer models made during the creators’ MIT undergrad days. The camp also boasts a 400-watt solar-power grid that charges batteries and also powers a snow-cone machine, a rice cooker, a refrigerator, several homemade swamp coolers, and decorative blinking LED lights.

“They may not all be engineers by profession, but pretty much everyone in AEZ is an engineer by mind-set,” says Christine Robson, who just completed a computer science doctorate at University of California, Berkeley. She and fiancé Josh Weaver, a Google electrical engineer and computer scientist, are among the Cult of Levitating Plywood’s founding members. “A lot of engineers end up working in just one field, so this is a way to stretch our engineering breadth and do projects outside of our comfort zones,” Robson says.

The impact can extend far beyond the festival itself. Involvement in the AEZ prompted Geoff Horne, a Silicon Valley computer scientist and a former leader of the AEZ, to rewire his home for solar energy. David “Keyman” Kulka, an audio engineer who’s president of Studio Electronics in Burbank, Calif., and helped construct the AEZ’s 0.125-W FM radio station, says the experience has led him to embrace teamwork. “I tend to take care of myself, not offer or ask for help with things, and sort of live in a bubble,” he says. “This sort of attitude is not ideal on the playa, so I’ve learned to open up, ask for and offer help.”

Even nonengineers get into the spirit. Wilson’s best friend, Richard “Cousin Dickey” Weinkle, a retired insurance agent, learned how to wire his trailer for solar energy after Wilson caught him with a generator. “I’m the poster child for a nonengineer being able to learn this stuff,” Weinkle says. “Most engineers aren’t people persons. The folks at AEZ are effusive, and they try to help you with your projects. Being here made me pay attention to how I was living my life. My home now has solar power, water collection, and a vegetable garden.”

Weinkle and Wilson are going so far as to begin planning a self-sustaining community in Willits that will be engaged in building, electronics, farming, and the arts. “I want to take some of the qualities that I find at AEZ and Burning Man and have them year-round,” says Wilson.

via Electrifying Burning Man – IEEE Spectrum.


Filed under: Burner Stories Tagged: 2012, city, press, stories

Burning Man Project to Fuel Community+Creativity in West Oakland

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PRWeb reports that the Burning Man Project has announced something they are doing to show how Burning Man culture can transform a community. It highlights a difference between Burner thinking, and Burning Man thinking. Burning Man thinking is temporary: “we’ll build it and get rid of it a few months later. In that short time, it will transform everyone’s lives”. Burner thinking is practical: “we’ll build it with whatever resources and tools we have at hand, we’ll re-use it in the future, and over time we’ll add to it and fix it and improve it. We don’t care so much if it changes others’ lives, as long as we think it’s cool we hope some others appreciate it too”. We will get to see the effectiveness of Burning Man thinking in transforming part of West Oakland into a flourishing, creative community space. Can Burning Man turn the Ghetto into the Place to Be?

For three months this fall, a 24,000 square-foot vacant lot at the intersection of Mandela Parkway, West Grand Avenue and Peralta Street in West Oakland will be transformed into a creative community space filled with art and commerce. Each weekend from October 4 to December 15, the Peralta Junction Project will harness the strong local presence of the industrial arts and artists to create rich social and economic opportunities for an often-challenged neighborhood.

With the help of scores of participating artists and volunteers, the project team has begun to clean up and rejuvenate the space, which until recently was full of weeds. Talented local mural artists have transformed the long fence facing Mandela Parkway into a vibrant, interactive perimeter. Soon tents will rise, art projects will be installed, carnival lights will be illuminated and the space will come alive with art installations, creative workshops, performances, micro-retail shops featuring local artisans, Oakland-based food trucks, a tented gathering place, and pumpkins.

“We hope to create an economically sustainable, communal creative space for people who live and work in our neighborhood,” said Leslie Pritchett of Commonplace Productions, one of the project’s organizers. “We invite anyone and everyone to help shape and share in this evolving social project.”

Key features of the project will include:

  • A series of three highly-interactive, large-scale art installations, beginning with M.T. Pocket’s Traveling Midway of Curiosities and Delights
  • A Pumpkin Patch, with artist-led pumpkin carving programs
  • Food Trucks, featuring some of Oakland’s finest mobile purveyors
  • A Pop-Up Market, featuring the wares of local artisans
  • D.I.Y. workshops and demonstrations with local arts organizations such as The Crucible
  • Community Movie Night on Thursdays
  • An artist-built stage featuring local performing artists

Marcus Guillard, a founder of the One Hat One Hand design-build collective and Leslie Pritchett, Director of Commonplace Productions will lend their experience as artists, administrators, and change agents in leading this group effort. A strong list of key collaborators includes The Crucible, American Steel Studios, Stageworks Productions and The Burning Man Project.

The project team is busily preparing for the Grand Opening Weekend, October 6 and 7, when Peralta Junction will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and will feature performances, pumpkins and pumpkin carving, workshops, live painting demonstrations, face painting, clowns, carnies, food trucks, vendors and more!

If this pilot project is demonstrated to be viable, the project team hopes to move forward with a longer-term, five-year program at the site that includes arts-based programming, community space, and micro-retail shops and restaurants housed in artist-designed and converted shipping containers.

via Peralta Junction Project to Fuel Community & Creativity in West Oakland.

We will be watching with interest to see the effects this project has on West Oakland. Will 3 months of a pumpkin patch, be enough to gentrify a ghetto? It’s much easier to park a few taco trucks in Oakland and paint a fence, than it is to do something truly useful like addressing sexual assault in our community. So we hope the Burning Man Project delivers something positive and tangible, and shows us all the potential that Burning Man has to make a difference in Meatspace.


Filed under: Alternatives to Burning Man, News Tagged: 2012, alternatives, news, press

Burning Man and the 4 Functions of Mythology

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After Whatsblemthepro’s amusing take on magical thinking, and our own recent look at seeking Divine Truth at Burning Man, we now have the always entertaining Caveat Magister musing on religion over at the official Burning Man blog.

Could a temporary city full of bunny costumes and hula hoops really be a supplement – or a replacement – for traditional religion?

It’s an absurd question on its face, but from panicked Christians to optimistic new age shamans, people are asking it.

The fact of they’re asking it, though, has only a little to do with Burning Man. Western culture has been moving away from institutionalized forms of religion since the Enlightenment … or even the pre-Renaissance: if you want to argue that Petrarch prefigured Montaigne in crucial respects, I’ll respect you in the morning. But the watershed moment was when Nietzsche’s mad prophet declared “God is dead.”

For most atheists, that was a triumphant call – but they forget that for Nietzsche’s prophet it was also a harbinger of doom. For all our technical advances, there is still a god shaped hole in our culture. The western psyche has been in such a spiritual crisis that it’s latched on to everything from UFOs to anti-depressants and asked “are you my savior?”

His Magistery refers to a recent story in the Huffington Post, which wonders if Burning Man is not already a major religion.

I’d like to use Joseph Campbell’s four functions of a mythology to show how beyond a party and getting f’d up in the desert, Burning Man is a mythology in the making, creating a social order relevant to our time, right now, 2012 America.

The Mystical Function

Campbell’s first requirement was that mythology must inspire awe in the universe. Modern America was built on biblical desert mythologies, even if most Americans would want to do anything but live in such an environment today. Standing in the middle of the Playa — the art-driven center of the camp — at 2 a.m., whipping yourself around to find a perfect circumference of lights, mutant vehicles and sound systems the size of midtown Manhattan clubs is, to say the least, awe-inspiring. All mythologies were created by humans; I hope we’re evolved enough to understand that no god rushed down from wherever to “give” a human some special message. Therefore, what really matters is imagination. Burning Man is a safe space to fully explore and share your creative edge. Seeing what 60,000 humans can create in the span of a week, only to be destroyed (explained later), is more mystical to the human mind than reading stories of a man who might have done this or that thousands of years ago.

The Cosmological Function

Campbell’s second function was that a mythology had to explain the shape of the universe. Obviously, we’ve had many different shapes offered to us. The shape of Burning Man is impermanence, a principle deeply entwined with Buddhism. While the entire gathering has been written off as wasteful — it is not cheap to attend; I spent $1,200 for six days — the festival is a living example of what art and life can be when we move beyond the bottom line. Think about this: In the span of two weeks (including build and breakdown), a city is constructed, celebrated and deconstructed. This is the exact representation of the triune deities of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva in Indian mythology. Creation, destruction and, yes, sustainability; the ritual occurs yearly as an annual reminder of the transience of life, much like the Mexican myths of the corn goddess or the eternal return of Osiris. Theology teaches us the importance of the afterlife, which often serves as a way of not taking responsibility for the life we are living now; think of the anti-global warming furor of the GOP, for one example. When the man burns on Saturday evening, we are reminded not only of very old fire mythologies, designed to represent the impermanence of nature, but that we are part of an extremely long process that did not begin nor end with us. Celebrating the process for what it is defines our cosmological outlook.

The Sociological Function

Once we understand that nothing in nature lasts, we are free to design our own social order in accordance with that process. The sociological function validates this. This year I camped at Fractal Nation, where the mayor, Charles Shaw, believes that Burning Man is “post-apocalyptic training.” He went on to state that it’s not some biblical apocalypse he’s invoking, but rather the process of watching what’s going on around us: a crumbling economy, a split government and a cultural anxiety unseen in American history, save maybe when we began stealing this land from its former inhabitants. Survival skills are necessary in such an imagined society. No one sees the physical Burning Man as a sustainable culture — it’s an inspirational, creative tool to use when you return to “life,” much like any mythology we’ve invented. The importance lies in not seeing the gathering as a dogma, instead treating it as an ever-evolving culture that, by definition, demands “radical inclusiveness.” Forget the 99%/1% battle, and imagine a culture where everyone’s voice is honored, everyone’s art at the very least seen.

The Pedagogical Function

The fourth is most interesting in terms of Burning Man: how to live under any circumstances. This function carries humans through all stages of life, from birth and childhood to adulthood and beyond. Most importantly, it deals with teaching us how live with integrity. The function is designed to teach people how to realize themselves. Burning Man is a valuable container for such exploration. In my yoga classes, I often remind people that they are in a safe space to explore their psychological and emotional processes. Yet, inhibitions remain — it is a local studio, and mores exist. Those are thrown off the building at Burning Man. The two times in which I attended, 2007 and 2012, I was in very different states of mind. Both times I was able to process and, more importantly, integrate what I had experienced with support and encouragement.

During his talk at Fractal Nation, author Daniel Pinchbeck invited audience members to share their feelings on how the evolution of consciousness is taking place. His one requirement was that no one spoke of it in negative terms, and he cut off any speaker who launched into what reality isn’t. While there’s nothing wrong with criticism, being able to define how consciousness is evolving, which will inherently be how your consciousness is evolving, in purely positive terms allows you to imagine a reality you want to create, that you are excited about taking part in. What a beautiful process.

As one teacher of mine always remarks, how we do anything is how we do everything. Having a community support our progress and creativity on such a scale is unlike anything America is experiencing. Ritual is a human function; it will appear whether or not we consciously create it. To be involved in actively engaging with a festival devoted to impermanence is more valuable than grappling with a theology that demands a sacrifice of integrity in submission of false ideas. The only idea that matters is the one we create and live with our fullest and most uninhibited expression. This is how the mythologies we invent define us, and how we live our mythology without fear.

We respect the right of everyone to get out of Burning Man whatever it is they seek. To us, the magic is in the music. Everything else is a bonus.

 


Filed under: General Tagged: 2012, city, press

The Hand of Man Smashes Down Again

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Good news! One of my all time favorite Burning Man art pieces, the Hand of Man, is alive and well and crushing cop cars for CNet. In Taos, New Mexico.

Last weekend in Taos, N.M., I watched a young girl pulverize a police car with just her right hand.

Of course, she had a little help from the 7-ton hydraulic mechanical hand that she was controlling through a sort of glove apparatus mounted to a raised control chair. The mechanical working structure is a creation of local artist Christian Ristow, who first designed the “Hand of Man” for the Burning Man festival a few years ago.

Ouch. 

The sculpture was on display for the public to operate as part of ISEA 2012, an international electronic-art festival held in New Mexico this year.

In the great steampunk tradition, the hand is completely analog. No circuit boards or software, just a collection of valves and switches controlling a system of hydraulic finger and wrist joints that work pretty much the same way as that meaty thing on the end of your arm.

Ristow told me he got the idea for the “Hand of Man” after spending part of his twenties staging robotic performances.

“I was having all the fun because I was getting to run the machines,” he said. “At a certain point I came up with this idea that I wanted to build something that was intuitive enough and bullet-proof enough to allow anybody to run it.”

no, not this one

Ristow initially spent four months building the sculpture in 2008 with a small team, but it broke down frequently and over the next few years he worked to continually strengthen the hand’s weak points and improve the design.

On the day I visited in Taos, the “Hand of Man” was up and running for several hours on an old tennis court in the back of Kit Carson park.

The hand is powered by a used 4-cylinder Perkins diesel engine mounted to a hydraulic pump that was originally part of a military cargo plane loader. Ristow added a 10-circuit hydraulic system running 1500 psi with a flow of 15-18 gallons per minute. The whole sculpture weighs 14,000 pounds, not including a handful of full water barrels that are used as ballast to keep it from bouncing around.

To hear Ristow explain the inspiration behind the “Hand of Man,” and watch it mercilessly toss around a squad car donated by the Taos Police Department, watch our video below.

via Mechanical hand lets public smash cop cars | Crave – CNET.

 

and some soundtrack for this post…


Filed under: Alternatives to Burning Man, Art Tagged: 2012, alternatives, art projects, press

Salon Proclaims: “Burning Man on its last legs”

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Has Burning Man jumped the shark? Attendance was down on last year, despite a 20% increase in population size and the organizers’ claims that it was a sold out event. Major sound camp Opulent Temple are  not coming back next year – or, maybe, ever. Meanwhile rumor has it the BMOrg plan on implementing the disastrous ticket lottery system again next year, or even worse, “curating the audience” – an extension of the “world’s biggest guest list” approach they tried this year.

In the context of all this, it seems like the knives are coming out for Burning Man. Recently San Francisco magazine proclaimed “RIP Burning Man“. Now online opinion  site Salon.com has taken up the BM bashing stick:

So what is Burning Man like? It’s not special. It’s simply what happens when gearhead artists, new agers, and frat types get together to build resilience tech in the desert together. Badly. It is easy enough to describe in principle, but harder in practice.

The experience of going to Burning Man is summed in either the ease or the difficulty of figuring out how to talk about whatever the hell it was that happened to you there. It would be easiest to talk about if you died on the playa. Your Burner epitaph would tell the entire story: “Fell off an art car, broke spine.” That narrative would be the easiest to read. Second easiest would be by those who claim a spiritual transformation. “I injected DMT into all my chakra points, and discovered an art car that vibrated at the same basic frequency as the entire Enochian Key.” Gotcha. But for those of us unlucky enough to make it back to society without a punctured kidney or a journey via sky chariots have a harder time in finding the archetype that explains that week. You have been staring into the sun for over a week, and now you look down and try to explain to the purple splotches exactly why. Asceticism topped off by a cold cooler of PBR, and a entire rented box truck full of Schedule 40 metal pipe. There is little revelatory or concluding text to be found here.

The best way I can think to describe the experience is that people who went to Burning Man changed color. You can see them, crawling back over the nation’s roadways on Labor Day weekend. It is not the vehicles that they drive or the things strapped on the roof, but the univocal shade of muted grey. There are no real generalities that can be made about a group of 50,000 people that are not tautologies. To say that Burning Man is for the rich, or for the privileged, or for those with free time, is all about as meaningful as to say that 50,000 automobile owners can afford gasoline. But the one meaningful thing that we could really say about Burners is that they all come back grey. When we get into the shower, finally back at home, the water all runs the same opaque color into the drain.

via Burning Man on its last legs – Salon.com.

The author, Adam Rothstein, claims to love Burning Man, but he is not backwards in being forward when it comes to his (well-written) criticism:

This sort of DIY zen is by no means natural to the playa, and while we might have our own drama more or less rigged well, we’re pretty lucky in that regard. You hear stories on the playa, of grudges, of politicking by the Org and by artists and groups of artists, of threats made and carried out. The Burn Wall Street art piece, for example, had some pretty wild stories attached to it. I can’t verify any of this, and so it is only rumor. But disputes about the construction quality and schedule allegedly caused the leader of the project (who as far as I can tell, had nothing to do with Occupy) to be fired from the task by the Org. This was the culmination of a longer dispute involving the previous year’s temple crew, a project that apparently violated design parameters. Burn Wall Street still ended up built and burnt, but after hearing some wacky tales about the designer’s love of guns and his habit of blowing up piles of propane tanks with rifle fire, there was speculation that the burn might not go off without a hitch. And yet, it did. You can never really tell about rumors. Drama on the playa, at Occupy, or at any intense build project is by definition just as real as it sounds. And yet, most drama, like the Burn Wall Street city, is really just an empty shell. So you never know.

Burn Wall Street ended up covered in graffiti of all kinds before it burned, and I couldn’t help but wonder about that paint-soaked empty shell. It was only a few months ago that I watched police officers punch and club the heads of my friends in the streets of major US cities. Trauma feels different than drama. The banks built on the playa were hollow, and so was the gesture, and so was the anarchist graffiti on the outside. Burning Man is often called a Temporary Autonomous Zone, but the bureaucracy behind the building of a monument to an anarchist movement is altogether so far from anarchism that it mostly makes me confused. It’s not that I can’t take criticisms, parodies, or copycats, it’s that it just seemed so obvious. A “Bank of Un-America,” spraypainted with the phrase “Let’s Burn the Real One.” Like learning history through a shoebox diorama

Why is Burning Man over? Because he heard so from some hippies on the Playa…

Every year there are rumors that this will be the last year. The reasons I heard this year that sounded reasonable included: conflicts with the BLM over the costs of those coming early to set up (the BLM wants $10 per person per day); the fact that the Org has burned through every porta-pottie company in existence as they each in turn decide that dealing with the plumbing problems from trash in the pots is simply not worth the contract; and that the influx of newbies not picking up their trash will finally reach a tipping point, and that will end the BLM’s approval of the event.

I think we’re still a long way from the death of Burning Man. But, the event faces some real challenges, as the new non-profit “volunteer” BMorg takes over from the old “founder” BMorg. Will the hippies win the day, squeeze all the rich people out, and leave us with an event with very limited art cars, art projects, or DJs? Will the kids take over, forcing out the nudity and drugs? Will the ravers take over with ever-louder sound systems? Will bureaucracy ineptocracy take over, and overwhelm the thing with rules? Or, will the experienced crowd of veteran Burners choose to go to other events like Lightning in a Bottle, Free Form Festival, or Tomorrowland – instead of joining the Jersey Shore mooping wannabe newbies in this increasingly-mainstream event?

We eagerly await the presence of some leadership, to take Burning Man and the Burner community through this time of transition and lead us into a glowing, golden, Burning future.


Filed under: News Tagged: 2012, bmorg, city, complaints, press

Monday is the New Saturday

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I have been meaning to sit down and write an article about pranks at Burning Man and how large they loom in our history, but someone whom I would have featured in that article decided to die this week.  Paul David Addis, the man who burned the Man, committed suicide Saturday by jumping in front of a BART train at Embarcadero Station in San Francisco.

Whatever else anyone might say about him, can we all agree on “rest in peace,” please?
Addis was an old-school burner and part of the crew that built the Blue Light District, Burning Man’s first theme camp and the model for the tradition of theme camps to come.  He studied Law, became a patent attorney, and eventually resigned the California Bar over what he considered a matter of principle.

In June of 2008, he pleaded guilty in a Lovelock, Nevada courtroom to felony charges of damaging property.  He was sentenced to 12 to 48 months in prison and ordered to pay $25,000 in restitution.  The property he damaged?  In 2007, Paul Addis set fire to the Man almost five days early.

 A lot has been said and written about Addis burning the Man.  Any casual observer would find it easy to very quickly conclude that Addis was seriously disturbed, deeply criminal at the very least, and possibly even criminally insane.  Certainly his actions generated a huge amount of rancor, but to what extent was his early burn a product of criminality and madness, and to what extent was it a coherent social and/or artistic statement. . . and was it relevant?  More to the point, did Addis get what he deserved?

When the subject of Paul Addis comes up in conversation among burners, someone almost invariably brings up another incident that took place shortly after the ’07 burn, in which Addis was arrested in San Francisco.  I have heard many minor variations on this story, but it usually rears its head as “I heard he got arrested for burning down a church.”  This is typically greeted with knowing nods of understanding, as if it both confirms and explains everything.

What actually happened on October 28th, 2007, though, only clouds the waters rather than clarifying them.  The ‘church’ was Grace Cathedral, the Episcopal Cathedral of the Diocese of California, and a San Francisco landmark.  It wasn’t burned down, or even set on fire.  According to the SF Chronicle:

 Paul David Addis, 35, was arrested on the cathedral steps at 11:40 PM Sunday after officers were tipped off that someone intended to set fire to the Episcopal church, police spokesman Sgt. Steve Mannina said.

Addis was wearing an old ammunition belt that carried small explosives, Mannina said. He was booked on suspicion of attempted arson, possession of an incendiary substance, possession of explosives and possession of explosives with intent to terrorize a church.

 A bomb dog was brought in to search the area and found no other explosives at the California Street cathedral.

Deputy Chief Morris Tabak said Addis had only a small amount of explosives.

“Did he have the capability to do substantial damage? Absolutely not,” Tabak said.

Tabak said police didn’t know Addis’ motive. “He said something about it was his religious right,” Tabak said.

According to friends of Paul Addis, Grace Cathedral was an important place to him, a place he liked to go, all on his own, perhaps in search of a sense of spiritual catharsis.  The building itself is fairly magnificent; a perfect spot to feel the San Francisco wind in your teeth, maybe set off a few leftover fireworks to light up the night and stir your soul.

The police were called in because Addis reportedly said to a neighbor that the cathedral “isn’t going to be there anymore.”  Pretty ambiguous as a threat, but the neighbor undoubtedly heard it in the context of Paul being embroiled in a court case in which he was being accused of arson.

It seems likely that Paul Addis might have said something about a “religious rite” to the police, not his “religious right.”  We’ll never know what his intentions were, though. . . and we’ll never know how much of what he said to his neighbor and to the police were just a flippant put-on, and how much was serious.  What we do know is that if he was serious, the police considered him woefully under-equipped for the job at hand, which seems uncharacteristic both for a seasoned burner of his vintage, and for a previously successful arsonist.  If he was trying to burn down the monumental pile of flame-proof stone that is Grace Cathedral, then Paul with his meager backpack of fireworks was like a mad-brained gnat trying to knock over a bull elephant.

The police were called because Addis had a reputation as an arsonist, thanks to what he did at Burning Man, and they arrested him for the same reason. . . yet it is the knowledge of his arrest at the cathedral that, more than anything, seems to cement the idea in peoples’ minds that when he lit the Man up early in ’07 he was behaving as nothing more than an arsonist, a criminal, and possibly insane, when he has always claimed to be simply a passionate burner making a rather powerful and coherent statement about the event and the Org.  The story of the one incident has fed into the other for years now, a self-fulfilling prophecy damaging Addis’ reputation and damning him in the minds of burners everywhere – perhaps unfairly – with abundant hearsay and scarce facts; an endless ugly loop of miscarried soundbite justice.

In the end, he pleaded no contest to fireworks possession and was ordered to undergo counseling and to stay away from the cathedral. . . but for Paul Addis, getting arrested at Grace Cathedral on trumped-up charges was just the beginning of the aftermath of the ’07 burn.

To this day, a lot of people – some of them very prominent in old-school burner circles – think that the punishment meted out to Addis for burning the Man was too harsh.  Rumor has it that this is true even at the highest level of the Org; Wired Magazine reported that Larry Harvey’s reaction when he realized that his Man was on fire. . . was laughter.

 The early burn, [Larry Harvey] said, will help show that the Man itself is “nothing but a wooden doll,” and that the event is really about the joint effort of attendees to create it.  It will turn this year’s Burning Man into a “narrative of community and redemption” as the attendees get to see or assist in the public rebuilding of the statue, he said.

And yet, Addis has made statements numerous times to the effect that Marian Goodell, Burning Man’s Director of Business and Communications, colluded with Will Roger and others in the Org to both maximize his sentence, and to publicly misrepresent their own role in sending him to prison, which Addis says was far more significant than they are willing to admit.

In the film “Dust & Illusions,” Goodell states unequivocally that the sentencing was beyond their control.  Since then, she has steadfastly refused to talk about Paul Addis’ sentencing.  “It doesn’t do us or him any good to open that wound again,” she told the San Francisco Guardian in an interview.  “We’re not going to discuss it.”  But did the Org have a say in Addis’ sentencing?

When Laughing Squid published an account of Addis’ sentencing on June 25th, 2008, Don McCasland posted a long and scathing comment to the article three days later.  McCasland opened fire with this volley of eye-opening information:

photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid

I was there in Lovelock last Tuesday to show support for Paul during the restitution and sentencing hearings.  I was among the handful of people who were aware of the deal made between the DA and Paul’s public defender that if the amount of damage found in the restitution hearing was low enough, Paul’s charges would be reduced to a misdemeanor.  Also among that handful were most of the BMOrg.  Discussions were had with Marian, Andy, Harley, and others, letting them know that the power to send Paul to jail was, in fact, in their hands.  They have been saying all along that they could not drop the charges, that this was entirely in the DA’s hands, but that was not so.  They very much could have gone to court and had Paul’s sentence drastically reduced, not sent him to prison, and not made him a felon.

But no, come Tuesday Will Roger showed up in court with a stack of invoices.  He and the DA went over them in the DA’s office before the hearing, and when they were finally presented in court, they totaled 30,000 dollars.  The DA asked Will to go over them with him.  Will stammered a lot, unsure of some of the items, unsure of why some of the numbers for the neon were on an invoice with gas, food, and lodging for volunteers, and some of the numbers for the neon were on other pages.  When cross-examined by the public defender, he was entirely flummoxed about several items that were purchased on 08/17 or 08/22, both dates that were well before Paul burned the Man.  But despite the defenders best efforts, knocking off the price of food, lodging, gas for volunteers, knocking off the price of a water pump, the judge stopped him and said “Well, counsel, I still don’t think you’re going to get it under five thousand dollars,” and cut short his efforts.  And so they went into a hasty little sentencing hearing.  Paul got to speak a few words and that was it.

Besides being sad and concerned for my friend, who needs help that he simply will not get in jail, I feel betrayed.  Another close friend went to Marion last week before the hearing to plead that the Org help keep Paul out of jail.  The discussion went here and there, but Marion said in no uncertain terms, “We do not want to send Paul to jail.” “We do not want to send Paul to jail. . .” really?  Well, I have to ask then, why did the Org pad the invoices with items that could not be part of restitution, the food, the gas, the lodging, other durable goods, to the tune of thirty thousand dollars???  We were let know through a back channel that the Org was planning, in fact, to come with invoices around only 10k.  This didn’t happen.  Instead, after speaking with us about a compassionate course, they turned around and sent Will in to burn Paul as hard as they could.

To this day, Andie Grace’s official afterburn report for 2007 (http://blog.burningman.com/2008/06/news/after-the-07-burn-and-afterburn-07-news-from-bmhq/) glosses over the part the Org played in maximizing Paul Addis’ comeuppance:

In other post-2007 news, we’ve heard a report from Pershing County, where Paul Addis’s restitution hearing and sentencing were held yesterday afternoon.  Addis recently pled guilty to charges related to setting fire to the Burning Man figure days early at last year’s event.  At yesterday’s hearing, the judge found evidence beyond a reasonable doubt showing the damages were in excess of $5,000 and thus Addis was convicted of a felony arson charge.  After hearing Addis speak on his own behalf, the judge sentenced him to 12-48 months in prison and ordered him to pay $25,000 in restitution.

I spoke with several people who knew Paul Addis about him, his suicide, and his history.  One of them was Sean Kelly, Addis’ long-time friend and schoolmate.

* * * * * * * * * *

  WHATSBLEM THE PRO:

You went to school with Paul Addis?

  SEAN KELLY:

  Yes, I met Paul in college in 1988.  He lived a couple of doors down from the Op Ed of the college paper.  I wrote for the paper.  I inevitably met Paul because it’s college and you tend to hang out with people two doors down from your op-ed.

  He was really smart, so we got along very well.  We enjoyed a love of the baby that was the Industrial scene, punk, driving around aimlessly in South Florida and of course football.  We both loved (and still do love) the Miami Hurricanes.

  Even then Paul was Paul.  He’d walk around campus with a fake pistol in a shoulder holster.  As a Miami native I pulled him aside several times and directly suggested he not carry around a fake gun because Miami is a crazy place and cops and crazy people would see that gun, fake or not, and escalate.

WTP:

You’ve characterized Paul as suffering from PTSD.  Can you explain?

SK:

  Hurricane Andrew.   Three people in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew were raped and killed by a psycho National Guardsman who was supposed to be in Miami helping.  Paul’s friends, my friends: Ronnie, Gina and Andrew offered Steven Coleman a ride home from a bar as a favor because he was helping out Miami. . . and Steven Coleman killed all three of them, and raped two of them.

If you have ever flippantly stated Paul Addis should just get his shit together, know this: it’s hard to get your shit together when your friends get raped and murdered.  Compassion is paramount for anyone with PTSD.

Few people know this about Paul.  Flippant exclamations by people who have played it safe do not understand what pain he went through.  He’s not some pampered idiot.  Our world fell apart.  Dead best friends.  Funerals.  Guilt.  East Coast parenting “just suck it up” shit.

WTP:

Sounds like a tight-knit group of kids.

SK:

  Yeah.  This broke everyone in our crew.  It broke me.  When I do crazy shit, this is why.  When Paul did crazy shit, this was why.  Our friends at nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, our classmates, our bandmates, our PEOPLE were killed, and that fucks you up. . . BAD.  It didn’t stop there, but the major damage was done.

  Ronnie was the drummer in the first band I was in.  Andrew was a UM Patio mainstay.  Paul and I had classes together with Andrew; we shared notes.  We studied TOGETHER.  We partied TOGETHER.  We’re talking about a community of maybe two hundred people in Miami and we lost three in a day.

WTP:

What do you think was in Paul’s head the day he died?

SK:

  I strongly suspect he was bipolar and terrified of the effects the drugs would have on him. . . so he may have felt like he’d run out of options.  The American ‘justice’ system doesn’t give a shit about rehabilitation; prima facie it is just plain revenge for fucking up.  Until he wore that felony jacket he could have re-applied for the California Bar or at least worked as a legal researcher for good money. 

WTP:
Something to fall back on.

SK:

Paul thought working in the legal profession was repugnant and I can understand why.  We had a conversation about this maybe two months ago.  But without that conviction, working Law was still an avenue out of being totally fucked.  The felony conviction ended that.

Let’s not be naive.  He didn’t want to do it.  But it was a thing.

WTP:

I see.  The felony convictions banned him forever from the thing he could fall back on, and being on parole made it tough for him to get other kinds of work too, even at minimum wage.

Is there anything else you’d like people to know about Paul Addis?

  SK:

in an earlier prank, Addis hung some balls on the Man

  After the ’07 burn, I’m rolling into Gerlach and I see Paul in front of a bar.  We hug.  He tells me he did it.  I say ‘what?’  He says he set the Man on fire early.  I congratulate him.  He tells me he just got bailed out of jail; I give him some clothes and money.  We have some cocktails; I get him lunch.  He’s psyched.  He fucking burned you, whoever holds the sacred sacred, which wasn’t intended to be sacred anyway.

When you meet the Buddha, you must kill the Buddha.  No matter what.

When you build the glass house.  Stones will be thrown.  Duh.

I loved this man and feel big pain.  I am furious that I cannot direct hatred upon those without a sense of humor.  You.  Just.  Suck.  No matter how hard I wish for a painful death for you, one that matches what is now on your conscience, I do NOT wish the pain of your death on the ones who love you.  So, you are spared my wrath but not my hatred.  From Hell’s heart I stab at thee.

Paul’s death is on the conscience of others.  Period.  At worst, Paul should have done six months of counseling and paid restitution plus a little more for the egos that were injured.  Let us remember the context of his controversial act and the absurd retaliation in the context of suicide.  Simply stated: suspended misdemeanors would have allowed him to join the ranks of Bay Area patent attorneys as a last resort, as opposed to working at oil-change shops or running a cash register.

  No one will argue this: he was a genius.  What do you do with that when society, even your community, doesn’t want you?  The streets of San Francisco are full of savants who have made mistakes.  So, what do I think motivated him to end it?  Loneliness and hopelessness.  No one could hear him anymore.

  For Paul, being ignored paired with hopelessness was probably equal to no more reason to live.  It would be for me, too.

  Many of his friends just couldn’t handle him. . . and life is complicated; the person putting you up may be in a custody battle, or on the brink of a layoff.

  I think he saw a dead end.

* * * * * * * * * *

I checked Sean’s story.  The Orlando Sentinel reports that Steven Coleman, a forklift driver in the National Guard, stabbed Ronny Quisbert, 20, a former student at Miami-Dade Community College; his roommate, Andrew McGinnis, 21, a communications major at the University of Miami; and Regina Rodriguez of Miami Beach, who was a week away from her 16th birthday.  Rodriguez and McGinnis were raped.  All three died of the wounds that Coleman inflicted on them.

http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1992-10-01/news/9210010538_1_coleman-homicide-detectives-soldier/2

Sean Kelly also indicated that he and Paul lost two more old friends from Miami in the three or four weeks leading up to Addis’ untimely death, one of them in a nationally-televised workplace shooting.

Patrice Mackey, another friend of Paul Addis’, also agreed to talk with me.
* * * * * * * * * *

WHATSBLEM THE PRO:

Tell me about Paul.  How did you know him?

 PATRICE MACKEY:
 He was a part of my extended burner family, the folks who started the Blue Light District in ’97.

For those who don’t know Paul beyond the 2007 event. . . he was one of those people who would probably be characterized as brilliant, but troubled.  Lately the ‘troubled’ was more and more outweighing the ‘brilliant’ and finally got the last word in (which was often hard to do with Paul).

 An interesting observation about the early burn of 2007.  After it happened, I asked a lot of folks at the event how they felt about it. . . the main divide among people I asked was that folks who had only been attending for a short time (six or fewer years) were incensed. . . first- and second-timers seemed REALLY pissed off.  Folks who had been attending for a long time (crusty old burners of seven years or more) thought it was funny or made comments to the effect of “somebody FINALLY did it. . . been waiting for that to happen.”  Not sure what that all means, but there you have it.

 Paul was a bit of an agent provocateur – he loved pushing buttons – sometimes going what most people would consider too far.

 He was creative, inventive, inspiring, frustrating, annoying, caring, uncaring, and dangerous. . . sometimes all at the same time.

WTP:

It makes me wonder. . . sometimes, when you are good at pushing peoples’ buttons and do it for art or fun or anything except profit and sex, really, some of them have a strong tendency to label you as mentally diseased.

And I wonder, too, to what extent Paul’s problems were a product of the two years he spent in prison.  A bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe?

But then I didn’t know him.  How ill do you think he was, really?  And did prison change him?

PM:

Well, this was a very well-documented illness that was present well before both the 2007 incident and his incarceration.  That being said, his incarceration did not help in any way, shape or form.  Interestingly, back in 1999, Paul argued against the idea of Burning the Man early.  Look at this e-mail:

From: CyberSatan [paddis@sirius.com] (Paul Addis)

Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 1999 10:42 PM

To: xxxxxx@xxxxx.com

Subject: Re: premature burning

I love the idea of kidnapping the Man.  Premature burning is a little

harsh–especially for all the newbie trippers out there who wanna see

the pretty thing on *Sunday* (or *Saturday*, as the Project sees fit).

Kidnapping, on the other hand. . .

Make no mistake, Paul was mentally ill.  This was clear to his family, friends and local law enforcement (to name a few).  As I said, prison didn’t help.  From all indications from those closest to him, his illness manifested itself in cycles and over the last year the cycles became more and more severe. . . a number of close friends had closed off their relationship with him because of it, not because they didn’t want to help, but because they had done what they felt they could, and now were either afraid for their safety or didn’t want to be emotionally hurt by Paul when he was in a bad space.

  As one friend put it:

  “. . .one of the aspects that frustrated me so much with (Paul) was that there was a good chunk of time when I couldn’t discern when he was just in his gonzo persona and when he was really ill.  It caused me to basically sever ties with him just because it all made me so uncomfortable.”

Paul was definitely struggling with mental illness. This had been going on for some time with, from some reports from friends closer to him than me, his cycles of highs and lows spiraling downward.

No one can know what was going through his head at the moment he decided to jump.

Paul, like all of us, did not fit neatly into any easily digestible soundbite. He was fascinating, engaging, challenging, smart, stupid, wonderful, horrible, cruel and kind. . . sometimes all at once.  Always full bore.

* * * * * * * * * *

Like Sean Kelly, Patrice Mackey made me wonder: what was really going through Paul Addis’ mind when he decided to hurl his body into the path of a speeding BART train?

As I ruminated, I read. . . and I discovered that Addis was a huge Hunter S. Thompson fan, and the author and star of Gonzo: A Brutal Chrysalis, a one-man show about Thompson.  When the news broke of Thompson’s suicide at his home in Colorado, Paul made an entry in a blog he maintained:

I could sit here and wax maudlin about Dr. Thompson and his self-inflicted removal from our every day reality.  Fuck that.  There’s already enough dopey-eyed drivel out there of that nature, and it’s the last thing that he would want.  What we had in Thompson was a man who realized that death should be greeted with celebration rather than weeping and wailing, mainly because no one wants to hear that shit on their way into their new life.  I mean, seriously, aren’t tears at a wedding or entry into a first-purchase home those of joy rather than sorrow (assuming the spouse and address are correct)?

To anyone familiar with Hunter S. Thompson’s mode d’emploi for leaving this Earth in February of 2005 (he shot himself in the head, like his hero Ernest Hemingway), this would seem to indicate that Paul Addis considered suicide a reasonable and viable option – a sane option – in the face of a life no longer worth living.

Amber King, another of Addis’ friends, helped me to explore that question further:

* * * * * * * * * *
WHATSBLEM THE PRO:

Did you know Paul Addis?

AMBER KING:
Sort of.  After the burn in 2007 I joined a support group he was in that consisted of real-life and long-time friends.  We talked a lot on the phone and via letters when he was in prison.  We all tried to make incarceration a little bit easier for Paul with gifts and money sent, and we all kept in touch with each other the whole time, too.  I had little contact with Paul after prison, but phone calls and letters every now and then.

WTP:
So what, according to Amber King, is the truth about Paul Addis?

AK:
Oh, the truth is exactly what it is.  The rambos who are insane about the ‘arson’ and ‘mental illness’ are stuck on their thing and that’s fine, except that nothing is ever that black-and-white. . . and the Man burning early was awesome.

WTP:
Yes, I see what you mean.  It’s too easy to just say that he was mentally ill and then attribute everything he did that we’ve heard about to that.  It’s certainly possible that he was mentally ill and did the things he did that we’ve heard about for sound reasons. . . and even that he committed suicide as a calmly considered decision.

Where were you when the Man burned early?

AK:
  I was there, actually walking with my friends close to the Man, we were taking a shortcut to 2 o’clock to boogie a bit maybe.  It was the eclipse and dark and lovely.  My best friend Karpo smelled the fire first and we all made jokes about Monday being the best day to burn your art. . . and then we saw it was the Man and no one was there yet and one of my favorite BM moments ever was standing there next to the burning Man (with a ranger who was crying – seriously?) and turning to see the entire city coming towards us.  On bikes and cars and on foot – it was really amazing (apparently folks stay home mostly on Monday?) – tons of bouncing lights and fire trucks as well.  It was surreal and awesome and I remember being shocked, actually shocked at the pain and anger that was expressed.  People were crying about the Man burning, a lot of them, it felt insane.  As the crowd got bigger we eventually wormed our way out.  The fire trucks got to the man ahead of the rest and the show was amazing.  I’ve Ranger friends who were at 9:00 when Paul was ‘caught;’ he wasn’t going anywhere.  The rage and pain that came from the Burning Man Org people and participants was entirely bizarre to me and many others.  That night and that week it was so weird; I talked to people who were so furious and sobbing and it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

 I knew and loved Paul for what he did at my silly festival and also for who he was.  I happen to be a psych nurse and if I were armchair diagnosing I’d vote that Paul was bipolar and had PTSD. . . but I wouldn’t diagnose and have enough years of experience and pain with mental illness to not have pat answers about any of it.

 I spent many of the years since 2007 focused on Paul and I guess that I am still, strangely, shocked that folks are outraged about the early burn :)

So it goes.

* * * * * * * * * *

Nothing whatsoever about the strange case of Paul Addis seems cut-and-dried, when you look at it.  Every answer opens a spate of new questions; every bit of spin and every opinion opens up a new controversy.  Maybe Paul wanted it that way.

Quite a lot of what we might think of Addis hinges on whether or not he negligently endangered others when he burned the Man.  Cacophony-style pranking has a clear ethic that presupposes that the prankster will only endanger him or herself, and Paul did claim that mantle at times when explaining himself and his artistic arson.

There were no injuries reported that were a direct result of Paul torching the Man, but at least one person, Detour Ginger, was injured as an indirect result of the arson.  “I would have been safe and cozy in the DPW dispatch office that night if the Man hadn’t burned early,” she says.  “As it was, it was all hands on deck, and I tore the ACL in one of my knees hopping up and down to get safety cones off of a flatbed trailer.  That night changed my life forever, and not for better.”

Detour stops short of actually blaming Paul Addis for her injured knee, but still doesn’t feel comfortable with what he did or with the consequences for her personally.  “Hey, the Playa is a dangerous place,” she wisely points out.  “Read the back of your ticket.  I know all that. . . but even so, don’t ask me to say that what Paul Addis did was OK with me.”

Did Addis put others in danger as a direct result of his actions?  On September 1st, 2007, the San Francisco Chronicle had this to report:

  Addis said his group of “operatives,” as he referred to his co-conspirators in Tuesday’s Man-burn, planned the event well in advance, and made efforts to shoo people away from the scene beforehand to ensure their safety.  No injuries were reported – except for those to the Man.

Around the same time, a San Francisco Bay Guardian article quoted Addis on his response to those who say his early burn was reprehensible because it endangered others:

  “Obviously a gesture like burning down Burning Man is very dangerous and very provocative.  From my perspective, the No. 1 concern was safety.  No one could get hurt unless it was me,” Addis said.  Critics of the arson attack often note how dangerous it was, pointing out that there were a dozen or so people under the Man when it caught fire.  But Addis said that he was on site for at least 30 minutes beforehand, encouraging people to move back with mixed results, shirtless and wearing the red, black, and white face paint that would later make for such an iconic mug shot.

Yesterday I spoke with a worker who was present at the scene just before the Man unexpectedly went up in flames back in 2007; he asked to remain anonymous, but I can tell you that he is not employed by the Org.  What he told me is not conclusive in the least, but it does seem to conflict with Addis’ account:

“I was in the Man base just before it went up, and there were about forty people in there.  About a dozen of them were sleeping.  There was no effort being made by anyone to get people out.  I left, jumped into the truck, and by the time we got two or three hundred yards out, there were flames visible near the Man’s knee.  There was about a twenty-minute gap between what I saw in the base and when I first noticed the fire, so it’s possible that there was someone trying to get people out in that time, but I didn’t see any evidence of that.  That’s what I saw with my own eyes; I assume there was a Ranger presence there, because according to legend, the Rangers spotted Addis leaving the scene and tackled him before he could get away.”

Once again, the truth is elusive, and nothing is cut-and-dried.  I have no real conclusions for you; only feelings and opinions and unanswered questions.

I do not think that Paul Addis, though certainly troubled and atypical in his mental hygiene, was too deranged to control himself or to thoroughly understand the implications and possible consequences of his actions.  I don’t think he meant to get caught setting the Man on fire prematurely, and I don’t think he was seeking attention.  I think he genuinely recognized and objected to the displacement of the Cacophony-style pranksterism in burner culture by a much safer, more Establishment-oriented status quo headed up by people more interested in making money and safeguarding the existence of their organization than in preserving the wilder, freer, more anarchic spirit of Burning Man as it was in days gone by. . . and I think he has a point, no matter how you feel about how he went about making that point.

Did he have mental health issues?  Yes, I’m sure he did. . . but that’s pretty common among people who are brilliant, and it isn’t a catch-all to explain every single thing a person does or says or thinks.  I don’t think Paul Addis’ mental health issues had a great deal to do with him burning the Man early, and may not even have had much to do with his suicide.

I could go on, but it’s not my place to opine too much, and anyway I’d rather simply let Paul Addis have his say.  What follows are quotes culled from various interviews with Addis, in which he attempted to explain himself.  For those of you who do not understand, I highly recommend that you make a point of watching IN THE ZONE: THE STORY OF THE CACOPHONY SOCIETY when it is released in the US next month.

Paul Addis speaks:

I decided after 1998 it wasn’t worth it.  Burning Man was only advocating social impact and responsibility in the name of its own self-preservation, survival and expansion, and I was not willing to be a part of that.

Burning Man in the period of 1996-1997 was the right place at the right time with the right minds.  We had a great opportunity to put all of our hands on the wheel and really affect social evolution. We had a bunch of gifted people who had the chance to break the mold on a lot of things.

A lot of people were very interested in making sure the future of America was better than the past.  We had lived through the Reagan years and the Cold War.  We already knew what we didn’t want and had the opportunity to build a better place for ourselves and the future generations to come.

Burning Man was the perfect place but once it made the decision that its own survival was more important than its content or style, everything was lost.

Burning Man was losing money hand over fist through a series of bad decisions and a real lack of business acumen.  They took a hit in 1997 that was almost fatal.  That really cost the organization in terms of its fiscal stability and steady accounting and in that regard they had to do a mass appeal.  And by doing that, they sacrificed everything.  They took the edges off and they became the Alterna-Disney.  You have a lot of people singing, “It’s a Small World After All” but just to a different mouse.

Burning Man has been nothing about the Burning Man anymore except for burning the Man.  It has more to do with raising money than spreading the theory of community so we can all live together.  The only reason the organization has reached out to the environmentalists is they were courting public opinion on the lawsuit filed against them, and they reached out to the most easily manipulated population they could control.  That’s what Green Man is all about.  Green Man is all about Burning Man getting the most green in their pockets.

Burning Man doesn’t accomplish anything anymore.  What do we get out of Burning Man?  Nothing.  Do we get any leaders?  We’re down to one Ramone and two Vitos and no one from Burning Man is stepping out.  There’s no good music and only a precious few writers.  These fourth and fifth generations of happy-go-lucky birds, what are they doing when they come back to the cities?  Nothing.  They go blow their wads for seven days at Burning Man and then go back to their jobs.  They don’t do anything else for the rest of the year.

One, [burning the Man early] was a reality check.  Two, it was a history lesson.  It was, “This is why this started.  Why are you here?”

A very good friend of mine, Chris Radcliffe, who was part of starting Burning Man, went four years ago.  I called him when he came back and he said, “Paul, everyone keeps waiting for something to happen and it never does.”  I think that is symbolic and really emblematic of Burning Man’s suburbanization of the underground and homogenization of the underground.

There have been people talking about pulling this prank for years.  There was a person last year who told people to bring barrels of gasoline to pour on the Man.  But there could have been people having their first LSD orgasm and they’d just be reaching climax when everything blew up around them. 

I wrote an e-mail to the guy saying it was stupid, reckless and that someone was going to get killed. And then they ended up not doing it.

This could have been all for nothing.  It could have made people think.  I hope it has.  That’s all the Black Rock Intelligence has wanted is for people to think for themselves, whether they’re in the streets, at Burning Man or in the ballot box.  They don’t have to like us; the only thing the Black Rock Intelligence has ever wanted was for people to think about what they are doing.  If they come back to the same place as where they started, that’s fine, at least they thought about it.  But every once and a while you can break people out and there’s another free mind out there with a Socratic operating system in it.

We’re being programmed on every level: TV, radio, internet, advertising.  It’s everywhere.  We believe in the true promise of the American Dream and that should be for everyone no matter what.  We’re jamming the program and allowing people the freedom of their minds rather than the programming someone else is trying to sell them.

That’s the most important thing.  We’re not telling people what to think or how to think, just presenting alternatives and facts and everything else.  Humor, that’s the best way to do things.  We’re not out here to be preachers.  But Burning Man has become just as nefarious a cultural programmer as General Electric or Disney.

You only need to look as far as Burning Man’s media team to see it’s like the Bush media team except with a different purpose.  They exercise the same tactics to achieve the same results: to portray themselves in the best lights and to avoid negative media attention.

[People who are upset by the early burn] are entitled to their opinions.  I can certainly understand their feelings on it, but at the same time, the newbies who go along aren’t from that same pranksterism and one-upmanship that used to be done at Burning Man.

So to them, the entire experience of Burning Man is a passive spectacle.  To people who would say they are pissed off because the Man got torched, I say, “Why are you really out there?”  If the burning of the Man means something, if it brings them some sort of cathartic connection, then build your own thing and burn it down.  Don’t be a passive audience member.  Cross the line.

This was not an act of vengeance, it was one of love.  A love of the ethos that is fading at Burning Man.  There’s no sense of spontaneity.  No sense of “Fuck it. Let’s burn this down.”

The edges were coming off.  It was apparent.

I’m not trying to reinvent the Man, or the event itself.  I’m just reminding people of where it came from because there’s not a lot of talk about that these days. . . and everybody ought to have the opportunity to be a hooligan.

Rest in Peace.


Filed under: General Tagged: 2007, 2012, city, press, rules, scandal, stories

We Are Not Men. We are Devo(lution)

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Is the Counter Culture Fest Evolving or Devolving? Thus asketh the Huffington Post in a just published critique of Burning Man.

An interesting question – firstly for the implicit idea that Burning Man as it is in 2012 is actually “counter” to any particular culture. But also because it evokes ideas of the Theory of Human Devolution – a counterpoint to the ideas of Darwinism that are challenged by some. Devolution is something that is buried almost subconsciously into J R R Tolkein’s Middle Earth pantheon. Once there were wizards, now there are only a few wizards here and there and the elves fucked off, leaving the humans and Hobbits to fend for themselves with the Orcs.

Back here on this planet, where Lord of the Rings was filmed in a country whose main city is called “Orc-Land”, we have signs all around us of devolution. Whoever built the pyramids, and the many other ancient monuments we keep finding, had knowledge and powers that we lack today. Tales tell of ancestors who lived hundreds or even thousands of years. Now we descend into poverty and chaos, as a small technocratic elite strive to rise above us to rule us as our gods.

Or something.

This orgiastic cultural shindig has been written about so many times, from so many angles that one almost hates to add to the pile (there’s even a boom in Burning Man scholarship in the academy). In one form or another, the festival has been around since the mid-’80s, and in the Black Rock Desert for more than two decades now. It is either a running cultural joke or a holy pilgrimage, depending on your point of view.

Both impressions have to do with the evangelical zeal of serious Burners. People really believe in Burning Man. When you roll up along the long, dusty desert trail to the official entrance, a team is on hand to meet you at the gates. Returning Burners are greeted with the words, “Welcome Home.” First-timers (aka “Burgins”) are made to get down on their knees and hug the ground, baptizing themselves in the alkaline desert dust.

Indoctrination, anyone? Into our Cargo Cult? The Greeters are wonderful and all, it’s always awesome to have to voluntarily agree to your home being searched by a half naked dusty hippy, just to get to a dance party.

We-send-them-signs-they-name-it-dubstep_o_129927There are 10 Core Principles of Burning Man…But over the course of the week, as more and more revelers pack into the camps, as the fever pitch of swarming parties grows ever more intense, it often really feels as if there are just three: Sex, Drugs, and Dubstep. Burning Man is one part social experiment, one part garden-variety rave. It is also big business. This organization which celebrates decommodified living is now a $23-million concern.

If it’s garden-variety, then let’s at least let it be Secret Garden variety.

Skimming through,

Are there any generalizations you can make when it comes to the Burning Man aesthetic? The art is wonderful, at times wondrous. It combines a groovy ’60s sensibility with a knack for high-tech gimcrackery, as befits its Bay Area origins. The typical work of Burning Man art is a big, tactile thing meant to be touched and climbed on, or marveled at. The aesthetic is distinguished by almost pure, dewy-eyed positivity; challenging or troubling themes are avoided.

The exception that proved the rule this year was artist Otto von Danger’s “Burn Wall Street,” a cluster of five full-scale buildings meant to represent the nation’s nefarious financial institutions: “Bank of UnAmerica,” “Chaos Manhattan,” and so on. They were burned to their foundations on Saturday night to the approval of cheering throngs. Anarchist-leaning campers attacked the work with graffiti early in the week, accusing it of being politically disingenuous. And indeed, for a political artwork, the piece’s self-description in the official guide toiled comically hard to depoliticize its message, declaring, “We are not one-percenters or ninety-percenters [sic], we are all Americans that need to fix this” — a disavowal of class antagonism that rings fundamentally hollow coming from someone blowing a reported $100,000 to pull off a bit of pyrotechnic theater in the desert.

..[.so it's not just me, then]…

Burning Man’s leitmotif of “Immediacy” may seem obvious enough in an environment so laser-focused on hedonism. But it also reminds you of the deep social purpose that this event serves: obsessive calculation, emo-scene-hipster-this-is-why-people-like-dubstep1constant competition, and ruthless abstract thinking are not necessarily the keys to a happy personal life, but they are the characteristics of the successful personality in our particular society. No surprise, then, that many people come to view their own personality as an enemy, as something to be vanquished in order to feel fully human. Certainly, Burners can seem self-indulgent to a comical degree. But the fact that a place exists where people can go to be gods and goddesses, nymphs and satyrs, astronauts and perverts — to escape their own heads for a brief, sun-kissed holiday — should be considered basically a good thing.

Some of us libertines would consider Hedonism to be the pinnacle of human evolution, rather than decadence being a sign of decay. This author is more on the side of decadence though:

Burning Man can be a cathartic experience. For true believers, however, it is more than that; it is also something like a movement. That is how Larry Harvey speaks about it today, and the organization has just recast itself as the Burning Man Project, a non-profit that will focus on spreading its gospel through supporting pocket utopias throughout the world. Its native politics seem to range left, from entrepreneurial libertarianism to dubstep printersturdy liberalism to anarchism to — leaving the left-wing galaxy for a minute — the guy who explained to me that we were all aliens “trapped behind enemy lines” in human bodies. You can’t deny that Burning Man has inspired some worthy projects, from various environmental initiatives to various forms of volunteerism. Still, when people start talking about Burning Man as a cause, I get suspicious.

Much sincere and worthy attention is paid to promoting sustainability. “Leave No Trace, Make Your Mark” is the mantra. But you cannot convince me that throwing a massive outdoor party with hundreds of machines that shoot fire into the sky is a model of sustainability. It is a model of decadence. More importantly, it ought to be a rule that any community that is as un-diverse as the Burning Man community be prohibited from styling itself as a reasonable facsimile of a workable alternative model for society. If you want exposure to diverse communities, try the subway or bus. Skip Burning Man. (Can you imagine if there was an event that attracted predominantly people of color to swap illegal substances and burn symbols of civilization? It wouldn’t last a month.)

There is a politics of hedonism — or “Radical Self-expression,” or whatever you care to call it — but it is a contested politics. New Orleans’s Mardi Gras, with much deeper roots in a broad and diverse urban culture, began dubstep-djas a masked bacchanalia whose specter of cross-class and cross-race fraternization alarmed Louisiana elites; post-Civil War, the city’s elites reclaimed it making it over as something more genteel, as a vehicle to lure visitors back to the South and to reassert their cultural authority. In modern times, Mardi Gras has become a thoroughly mainstream spectacle of commercialized exhibitionism, though it continues to nurture various alternative currents and its Krewes form a vital organ of community life. So the question should be, how is Burning Man evolving? What ideological pressures are shaping it?

Every year, people come to Burning Man and re-find their sexuality, or experiment with something new. Yet you can’t really, today, believe that promiscuity is some wild alternative value; it is a quite commodified value, and one that fully appeals to a crowd with no interest in Burning Man’s more idealistic side at all. In the Black Rock Weekly, Burning Man’s pop-up paper, the increasingly omnipresent “Frat Boy” is #1 archetype on its “Ladies Guide to the Creeps of Burning Man.”

Some very good points made here, and this is why Burners need to always be sure to not take themselves very seriously. It’s a freaking party in the middle of nowhere, not a Utopian model for sustainable society. It’s a long, long way from that.

Ben Davis wraps it up very poignantly, I like this guy.

One night in camp, as a joint was being passed around, people began to discuss what it all meant. “Why can’t it always be like this?” someone said. “I mean, look around — this is the way it should be. This is people helping people. This is what we are capable of. If the government could only pay attention, look out at all this creativity, all this building, there wouldn’t be any recession. You could put everybody to work.” He drew in on the joint.

And you just want to yell: Yes and no! (Admittedly not a great thing to yell.) Yes: It’s an amazing experience. Yes: The creativity on view is mind-expanding, the climate of generosity inspiring, the de-commodified vibe enlivening. And yes: At its best moments, which are many, Burning Man feels charged with wholesome utopian energy. In its pagaentry, you see men and women grasping for the kind of meaningful experience that they — tapping away their waking lives in soul-killing cubicles, with only the rewards of a shrill and disposable commercial culture to comfort them — have been deprived.

But also, no. No: It can’t “always be like this,” because the whole thing is an extremely privileged experience that costs thousands of dollars and a week of your life. No: It does not show you “what we are capable of.” It offers a rather partial picture of human potential, desperately insistent on positivity and transcendence on account of its own condensed and fleeting nature. Without confronting the more sinister aspects of our experience, those aspects can only grow, unchecked. And no: If the powers-that-be could “just see,” that would change nothing — the world is messed up because it is profitable for very powerful people that it stay that way, not because powerful people are confused.

It seems that some of the powerful people at Burning Man are quite confused. And Burning Man is very profitable for some of them.

Whether it devolves from here, or evolves to something increasingly greater, is up to us Burners. Bureaucracy, stay out of our way!


Filed under: General Tagged: 2012, city, complaints, press

The King, the Chimp, and the Playa

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obama_burningThose of you lucky enough to get more than just basic cable might be familiar with RT – Russia Today. Kind of like an alternative media Fox News, they feature well respected online journalists like finance expert Max Keiser and security specialist Gordon Duff. This is the station that is not afraid to show footage of people protesting in Egypt, or air NSA whistleblowers, or mention that the government’s current attempt to portray Assad having WMDs in Syria is eerily similar to their previous bleating that Saddam had WMDs in Iraq. Sounds a bit too political to have anything to do with Burning Man, right?

Wrong. RT has just shown a 30 minute documentary about Burning Man. Here it is for you:


Filed under: Art Cars Tagged: 2012, art cars, press, stories, videos

The Future of Burning Man – Millenial Ideates

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Whether it’s pronounced “Idea-ate” or “I-de-ate” or “I-di-ot”, it seems like this camp, new to Burning Man in 2012 and predominantly made up of people who’d never even been to Burning Man before, is now to be the shining model for Burning Man in the future. According to the Peninsula Press:

Bear Kittay, a 27-year-old entrepreneur and musician, has taken the lead in organizing meetings for up-and-coming Bay Area start-up types with Larry Harvey, the founder and director of Burning Man, and Goodell. Kittay is also helping figure out how to spread the project’s 10 principles to other parts of the world.

bearGoodell calls Kittay their “hyper-connector.” His resume includes being the co-founder of a company called Organizer, which created a clipboard-like mobile platform for use during political campaigns, and a partner (and designated “social alchemist”) in the Avalon Hot Springs eco-resort north of Napa Valley.

Over Memorial Day weekend, Kittay organized a retreat at Avalon. He invited Harvey, Goodell and about a dozen others, including Luke Nosek, one of the founders of PayPal, and Evan Steiner, program manager of the collaboration facilitator Hub Bay Area. As Kittay put it, the retreat “set off epiphanies for many of us.”

Others prominent in discussions about the project’s future include James Hanusa, CEO of Urban Innovation Exchange in San Francisco, and Edward Zaydelman, co-founder of Puerta a la Vida, a wellness resort in Costa Rica.

There are longstanding cultural ties between Burning Man and Silicon Valley. It is no secret that Google’s founders are avid “burners,” with entire walls at the company’s Mountain View campus covered in photos from the festival. And the computer and technology industries are often the most represented among the professions of festival participants, according to the Black Rock City Census, which conducts an annual survey at Burning Man.

But the Avalon retreat initiated an active conversation between the two cultures and two generations of burners — baby boomers and millennials.

Just what we need – a bunch of crusty old hippies, teaming up with bright shiny dewey eyed millenials who don’t know the first thing about desert survival. And ganging up on the ravers, no doubt.

When I first went to Burning Man, the idea of “theme camps” was to be friendly to other Burners, invite the neighbors  over to your place and meet them. Gift them stuff, free drinks, food, smokes, whatever. Ideate provided a wall of RVs, a private chef, and an area for workshops buried between shipping containers that was not particularly welcoming or visible to the public. The workshops were not promoted in the Burning Man guide, so unless you were actually in the camp, you probably didn’t realize they were going on. The shipping container/3d scanner/drone experiment from Reallocate was cool to see, but only a very, very few people actually got scanned. And most of them had to pay for the privilege, via the project’s Kickstarter page. Apparently Sergey Brin from Google did swing past at one point, showing off his new Google Goggles. But it’s not exactly a contribution to the party on the level of a Trojan Horse or exploding Oil Platform or Opulent Temple.

To describe Ideate as an “Innovation Camp”, would suggest that some form of innovation came out of it. It’s all very vague on the details though, of what exactly were the ideas that were discussed and how the BMOrg and their new boss intend to implement them in 2013 and beyond.

Those talks continued and led to the formation of the IDEATE innovation camp, which participated in this summer’s festival. Each camp has a different focus, such as dance, meditation and clothing swaps. IDEATE differed from typical camps, as it operated with an unprecedented mission: to be “an [ideas] incubator in the center of Burning Man,” according to Kittay.

Kittay said IDEATE brought together bright minds to figure out how to offer the tools of Burning Man culture, including collaboration, sustainability and inclusion, to start-up projects around the world.

Burning Man founders paid special attention to IDEATE, which was given a block of tickets even though the idea emerged long after tickets were sold out. Goodell placed the camp close to First Camp, where the founders make their desert home each year.

Goodell said her thought was, “We should take all this brain power around us in San Francisco—dot-com and entrepreneurs…[who] care about Burning Man, and let’s get them all together…and see whether anything could come of it.” 

OK…so what are these great ideas then? Is it to put ticket prices up to $650? Or maybe to go back and count the gate again? Perhaps all these entrepreneurs have been to Burning Man before, so that their opinions would be somewhat relevant? Alas, no…

The majority of the 210 people who camped at IDEATE were new to Burning Man and were young entrepreneurs from companies such as TED, a nonprofit committed to spreading worthwhile ideas; Summit, which hosts an annual four-day event for 1,000 of the world’s leading change makers; and Singularity University, which seeks to educate a new generation of leaders in technologies that will exponentially advance human capability in years to come.

Three salons were held throughout the week to formally discuss the future of Burning Man, and many of IDEATE’s members attended. But Tim West, a chef/entrepreneur who cooked meals for IDEATE during the festival, said it wasn’t just a lot of talk. “IDEATE, first and foremost, was to create that space to have those conversations, but secondly, to create systems that help people take ideas to reality,” he said.

Although the chef says it wasn’t all talk, Maid Marian has some reservations.

Goodell issued a caveat concerning IDEATE and the millennial entrepreneurs as a group: They will be given more influence in the organization only if they do something with all their ideas. They need to maintain momentum and prove themselves as able to make it happen, rather than just talk about it, she said.

Bear, who in one article manages the amazing feat of having at least 6 different jobs within the Burning Man sphere – Social Alchemist, Entrepreneur, Musician, Hyper-Connector, Pied Piper, and API – gets to enjoy cultural trips to Turkey with Larry and Marian, but isn’t actually on the payroll

Larry Harvey is in his sixties; Goodell just turned 50. She said the founders should look to hire young people, and young people should step up and “infiltrate the organization and be ready to take things over…and change the world.”

Goodell described Kittay as “not unlike Larry.” She called them both “pied pipers,” saying that, although neither is likely to be “the first one to hammer up a tent stake,” they both “can get really enthusiastic around ideas, and then people want to gather around and help.” Kittay called himself an “API” for Burning Man: an application programming interface, or an application that helps data communicate across different software. Currently, he is a volunteer for the organization, but Goodell expressed her desire to compensate him if he keeps up all the work.

…After the desert festival, which is held from late August to early September, Kittay traveled with Harvey and Goodell to Turkey, where they considered ancient history and its ties to modern life and talked about ways to make global expansion a reality.

There are two kinds of people in this world. People who Get Shit Done, and everybody else. History can be the guide as to what, if anything, gets done as a result of this “Ideas Incubator”. I haven’t met too many Millenials yet that can GSD – an essential skill for Burners.

Meanwhile, Burning Man’s founders have their eyes on a new prize – $7 million to purchase some land in the desert with a man-made geyser on it. After purchasing the land, they will then raise further funds to develop it along “Burning Man Principles”. During this year’s Burn, they took many of the entrepreneurs from Ideate and First Camp, out from Burning Man on bus excursions to the site to get naked in the hot springs and consider their pitch. It’s not clear yet how gifting, decommodification and real estate development will all combine into a magical new thing that generates payback for investors, but a more permanent Burning Man site – perhaps with less significant security requirements – would be welcome.

Will Roger, one of the six Burning Man Project owners, is heading up the development of a new property called Fly Ranch, which is designed to serve as an art park and idea incubator, particularly for the development of green technology.

Fly Ranch is a 4,000-acre site with natural geysers about 10 miles from the spot in the Black Rock Desert where the festival is held each year. Plans for the property include a conference center, a camping ground and the largest open-air art gallery and sculpture park in the world. Roger called it a model for cultural centers of the future “that we could use to have more of an influence in the culture of the world.

A Nevada family currently owns the Fly Ranch property, and the Burning Man organization is trying to raise the $7 million needed to purchase it. They are close to reaching their goal, Roger said.

The Fly Ranch property represents another shift in Burning Man as the world knows it. Traditionally the project has been “below the radar,” said Kittay. But now is the time that Burning Man is ready to reveal itself as more than just “electronic, dubstep, naked—whatever associations that people have had superficially with it, and move into much more the space of what it truly is at its core,” he said. That core, according to Kittay, is built around “the philosophical principles of collaboration and of incubating human culture and community and experience.

Gerlach, Nevada…the center of the cultural world? If you build it, they will come…


Filed under: Burner Stories Tagged: 2012, alternatives, bmorg, city, commerce, environment, future, ideas, kickstarter, press, scandal, stories

Slouching Towards Burning Man

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Red Wedge, an online art magazine, has a lengthy story on Burning Man that is worth a read. The conclusion:

umbrella menThe society we live in tends not to let little islands of happiness exist. It corrupts them. Hiding them in the desert stalls this process but does not stop it. Burning Man’s 10 Principles are a great basis for a festival, but they aren’t tough enough to stand as a basis for changing the world. They can’t even stop the world from changing it.

Burning Man will likely continue to grow. It will likely even get more spectacular, as more money and interest flows in. But it is, indeed, that thing – the thing that makes Burning Man something that people believe in as a cause, not just a kind of turbo-charged spring break — that’s in play. That thing may prove to have been precious exactly because it could only last a while, like the Man itself. Or like one of the dust devils that rises periodically from the Black Rock Desert, kicking up a towering funnel of sand, only to dissolve into the atmosphere on contact with anything solid.


Filed under: General Tagged: 2013, city, press, stories
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