Airlifting in the Challah

Our compendium of Cargo Cult cyberspace coverage begins with this gem from Bloomberg – who seem to be having a bit of a love affair with Burning Man at the moment. Maybe last year’s Burn Wall Street really did help get Wall Street’s attention?

“We’re airlifting in the challah again,” said Steven Gluckstern, as he stood chatting recently with a few people. “Enough for 2,500 people,” he added casually, taking a sip of his cocktail.

A siege on the Upper West Side?

Burning Man, actually. It was to be the fifth year at the festival in the Nevada desert for Gluckstern, a venture capitalist and chairman of Mortgage Resolution Partners, and his wife, Judy. Every August, about 40,000 people pay $380 to attend the weeklong celebration of countercultural art, music, sexuality and lifestyles. The festival operates on a barter system, and each camp is expected to offer entertainment, food or some other service. The Glucksterns’ camp, now numbering a little more than 90 people, offers French toast. Hence the challah.

…Reached for further comment a few days later at his house in San Francisco, Gluckstern, 62, explains how he came to be an impassioned ringmaster for what the Burning Man crowd calls French Toast Thursdays. From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., the line to the Glucksterns’ tent is long enough that it can be seen from space. Last year, a satellite photograph of the festival showed a thousand people lined up for breakfast. 

When they say “seen from space”, I’m pretty sure they’re talking about high resolution satellite imagery, not an astronaut peering out the window of the Space Station…or my former guest Sir Richard Branson (White Kinght Too, Space Ship 2, Eve)’s or Burner Elon Musk (Grasshopper and Dragon) ‘s latest Spaceships . From space these days, they can probably see exactly what strain of weed that is you’re smoking while you wait in the massive line.

1000 people in line for French Toast? What is this, England? Mecca? Miami? In San Francisco, you can’t even get 1000 homeless to line up for the soup kitchen. At least in Vegas, you can comp your way past the line. I mean, I love French Toast, but I’m not standing in line behind 1000 people for anything at Burning Man. Well, except maybe the gate. This year Camp Hot Mayo threw an Irish Car Bomb party at 4:20 (location: 9:15 & Holy), it was well attended and had deep lines for the cocktails. Too much for me and my neighboring Fucken Prawn Distrikt 9 camp-mates, who preferred to help themselves to cold beers from the fridge and watch the line from air-conditioned comfort (Burner-than-thous, let the bashing commence!)
Anyway, we’re small time. Air conditioning and refrigerated beers, woo. We obviously can’t be Burners. But what about these guys?

The couple’s involvement began four and a half years ago, when they were invited by their daughter to take part in her honeymoon, which was held at Burning Man. “We rolled in that first year with a camp of about 20 people,” says Gluckstern. “We decided we would purchase a simple set of things to make a misting tent, which wasn’t very successful.”

OK, so, weddings at Burning Man, I kinda get it. Like, for Rockstar Librarian, that’s dope. If I were ever to get married, it’s about the only way I could think of where I could get most of my Burner friends in a single hyper-focused place at one time, and also most of my family and last remaining hold-out friends and Juno Reactor and Jamé Forbes and Subsqwad to be there at Burning Man at the same time.

But, isn’t a honeymoon supposed to be a romantic one on one with the newlyweds? Not, Orgy Camp and Comfort and Joy and Critical Tits? To each their own. For this particular VC, his daughter’s honeymoon, inspired him to take the SACRED PRINCIPLE OF GIFTING to another level. French Toast? How can that be Commodification? It’s just feeding the hipsters… (BTW, of all Larry’s 2004 “ten principles to rule them all”, Gifting has been the least popular in our Burner poll, neck and neck to be Biggest Loser with Civic Reponsibility…)

As he wandered the festival, Gluckstern noticed lots of camps serving pancakes. The old analytic skills kicked in. “That was too easy,” he recalls. “It’s a mix, and you add water.” Sensing an opportunity, Gluckstern decided to raise the stakes. “It would be much more of a challenge to do French toast,” he says. “You need fresh milk, fresh half and half, fresh eggs… “

A challenge it was. “The first thing is you have to find 100 loaves of challah,” he says. “We have to commission to have them made from a place in Berkeley. One of our colleagues has his own small private plane, so we organized a challah airlift.”

Then, as they say, if you want to feed a hipster, you have to pre-break a few eggs. “Two thousand pieces of French toast is around 1,000 eggs,” Gluckstern says. “How are you going to bring in 1,000 eggs without breaking them?” He spoke to a friend in the catering business, who recommended that he buy the eggs pre-broken, and managed to find a dairy in Reno that would sell him 72 quarts of pre- broken eggs and 32 quarts of half and half.

“Then we also figured, ‘Well, hey. We’d better use real maple syrup, too,” says Gluckstern. “So we had our airlift pilot track down five-gallon buckets of grade A maple syrup.” Other ingredients, like cinnamon and butter, don’t need to be purchased on such a massive scale. 

Using private planes to fly in maple syrup? Now that’s extravagant. Extravagant enough to get Bloomberg to cover your VC firm, using Burning Man as the hook to differentiate you from the thousands of other VC firms out there – some of whom also have representatives at Burning Man looking to cut deals (I know this for a fact including having watched a $15 million one go down right outside my RV a couple of years ago, as well as having met others of these Burner VCs).

The quality of these privately-airlifted French Toast ingredients is so amazing, that everyone will line up? Or maybe Burners are just hungry and can’t be fucked cooking.

Perhaps this is the reason for thousands of people to wait in line:

“The reason everyone says this is the best French toast they ever had is that for most of the people who’ve come in, they’ve generally eaten no dairy and no sugar by the end of the week. Their bodies just condition themselves to granola,” he says. “Then all of a sudden you’ve got a piece of French toast and it’s hot and it’s full of butter and eggs and your body releases endorphins. People literally become ecstatic.”

It seems that French toast is the new drug recycling. Expensive food logistics for them, greater bang for the buck for Burners.

Gluckerstern sounds interested in other French techniques beyond the toasting…

he likes the challenge, yes. And he likes the change of scene.

“We have five doctors in our camp, four of whom are ER doctors and the other’s a psychiatrist,” Gluckstern says. “As a coincidence, they all happen to be extremely handsome young gay men. Hanging out with these people is not what a 60-year-old businessman gets to do every day.”

“Now we’re making a separate foray into the world of ice cream. We’re building a vehicle … one of my responsibilities is the electrical system on it,” Gluckstern says, with the relish one might take in plotting a bond trade. “Last year we went out into the desert with ice cream sandwiches. They were incredibly successful but they ran out quickly. What we needed to do was have a much larger system, so we essentially built a covered wagon with freezers built in.”

So, who is this guy, winning over the hearts and minds of Burners with exotic breakfast foods, desserts, and handsome gay doctors?

Oh, no-one special, just another Burner: albeit one accused of having a bad reputation, who likes to hang out with young San Francisco hipsters in the Mission, and is using the controversial “Eminent Domain” laws to underwrite struggling cities to seize peoples’ homes for real estate developers.

“The broad category of property that we are taking about here is intangible property, and there has never been any question that intangible property can be taken,” Hockett explains. He cites examples of eminent domain being used to seize railroad stock and municipal revenue bonds. Of course, cities must demonstrate that taking private property accomplishes a public good, and the benefits of seizing underwater mortgages are somewhat speculative. But so was the public benefit of seizing homes in New London, Connecticut, to make way for a Pfizer research facility—a use of eminent domain that the Supreme Court approved in its controversial 2005 Kelo v. New London ruling.

According to the Chronicle, these people are protesting in support of Gluckstern’s plan  (photo: SF Chronicle)

Gluckstern wants to win so much, to him it’s war. Just like beating pancakes with French Toast.

We are not going to stop fighting. In a real war you get killed, but in this war, my partners and I believe this is the right thing for people and we will fight to the finish, whatever that means.”

His war sees him taking on the Rockefellers, the Mellons, and PIMCO, the world’s largest bond fund:

Trustees Pacific Investment Management, known as Pimco, BlackRock and Bank of New York Mellon are seeking a court order blocking Richmond and Mortgage Resolution Partners of San Francisco from using eminent domain to purchase mortgages of homeowners whose properties are underwater.

The city’s plan is unconstitutional, according to complaints filed by mortgage-bond trustees in federal court in San Francisco. The trustees, including Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank, were directed to take the action by investors in the debt, said John Ertman, a partner at Ropes & Gray.

“Mortgage Resolution Partners is threatening to seriously harm average Americans, including public pension members, other retirees and individual savers, through a brazen scheme to abuse government powers for its own profit,”

Former SF Mayor and current California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, believed to be a Burner and known to be a champion of the homeless and disadvantaged, is not a fan:

“I know what threats are. I know what bullying looks like. And I didn’t like it coming from the folks that I helped bail out,” Newsom tells me at the Balboa Café, his white tablecloth restaurant in San Francisco’s Marina District. He goes on to convey his feelings towards Wall Street with an expletive, adding, “You can quote me on that.” Then he changes his mind and asks that I not. He ribs his press aide for not reining him in. “But I feel that way,” he adds. “I have a visceral reaction.”

When you’re chomping down on that ecstatic French Toast, standing in line admiring the hunky gay doctors on call to prescribe whatever pharmaceuticals are needed to accompany your Playa pancakes…think about all that went into that. To pay private planes to fly around getting maple syrup for you.