BurningMan Experience: |
Here's my story from my last visit:
Of A Fire in the Desert:
Notes From Burning Man
It was an impulse, really, that took on a life of its own. Let’s go to Burning Man, my brother suggested. Why not? I thought. I was bored. I wanted some fresh experiences. Hell, I just needed to take a chance. I checked out the Burning Man website. Founded in 1986 in San Francisco, it mushroomed from a small, casual gathering of creative noncomformist types to a yearly event of some 26,000+ people. For the brief week of its existence, Black Rock City, home of the Burning Man event, is the fourth largest city in Nevada. Lots of art, lots of music, lots of creative people, lots of booze and drugs, and acres of nude flesh. A brief article from Burning Man’s founder, Larry Harvey describes it as a festival of “radical self-reliance.” Sounds cool, I think. Let’s do it! Yet, when my ticket arrived, I read the warning on the back: “You voluntarily assume the risk of serious injury or death by attending. You must bring enough food, water, shelter and first aid to survive one week in a harsh desert environment…” What was I getting myself into? I shrugged and got on with my preparations, bending rebar for tent stakes, multiple trips to the surplus store, to the supermarket, and camping store. I loot my daughter’s box of dressups for creative outerwear. The day of departure grew closer. We were psyched.
Setting out for the Burning Man festival in a white minivan, I have to laugh, thinking that we’re going on this grand adventure in a soccer mom’s ride. Before leaving Phoenix, we make one final stop, at a trailer park somewhere in eastern Phoenix. Our task, pick up with Matt, a 23-year-old rave boy who needs a last-minute lift to the Burn. Matt is grateful for the lift. We saved Burning Man for him, he tells us, admitting that he failed to get organized ahead of time. He has no ticket but assumes he can get a freebie since he worked for the BM organization last year. This goodwill gesture ensures we start out with good karma. Even before we get there we are obeying one of the central tenets of Burning Man culture: share with others. Besides, Matt has been to three previous burns. He’ll be our guide, and show us what to expect. Ironically, the other three of us are all much older than our guide. Finally, around midnight, we are ready. My brother’s white minivan is absurdly crammed with food: Spam, candy, MREs, plus water (lots of water), beer, Jack Daniel’s, tequila, camping gear, dust masks, toys, weird props, and trade goods for the natives (the gift economy is one of the other central tenets of Burning Man. So much to learn, so little time…) After we cram Matt’s gear into the remaining empty spaces in the van, we head for the highway, for an 18+ hour straight push to Nevada’s high desert. We’ve been assured that Burning Man will be a 21st century arts festival, kick-ass party, and avowedly noncommercial be-in, happening, celebration, what-have-you, an event not to be missed.
As we drive, our spirits are high despite fatigue and the late hour. Nervous, happy, expectant excitement flutters inside each of us. Just for fun, my brother made up big laminated ID badges proclaiming us to be members of the SILN (Search for Intelligent Life in Nevada) Red Team. Mine identifies me as the team Xenobiologist.
Warned by the Burning Man website of dust, heat, high winds and generally harsh conditions on the playa (the dry lake bed where BM is held), I obtained serious survival gear: surplus store desert camo boonie hat, web belt, two canteens, tanker-style military goggles (NSN 8465-01-004-2893; GOGGLES, SUN, WIND AND DUST). While packing the night before, my eight-year-old daughter had found the goggles, proclaimed them to be cool, and immediately donned them. Wrapping herself in a blanket, she stalked through the house shouting lines from Dune: “Where’s Muad Dib? Curse you, Baron Harkonnen!” Still, despite all our preparations, important items were left behind. Paul forgot his sneakers, I forgot sunscreen, and our other traveling companion left behind the stacks of beautiful homemade art stamps he had created to distribute at the Burn.
We drive, and drive, and drive, black night finally giving way to day, after we’ve passed over the Hoover dam, a beautiful white edifice gleaming in the moonlight. There is a heavy police presence en route, local cops, highway patrol, but they seem more interested in hassling the speeding truckers, ignoring our van with “Burn, Baby, Burn!” scrawled on a back window. We pass into Nevada, where gambling is ubiquitous. There’s not a roadside convenience store without its legion of video poker slots. After Vegas, where we stop for breakfast and video poker, we hit the road again, and start seeing ads for brothels, 22 miles to commercial sex. We pass through bleak desert dotted with scrubby creosote bushes, but not a tree in sight. We’re on the highway heading north. Endless stretches of straight road, marching off to the vanishing point. At a roadside eatery, we connect with other Burners and exchange friendly greetings. Our excitement mounts.
We arrive at Burning Man and are welcomed by the greeters who fill us in on the ways of Burning Man, telling us, “Welcome Home.” We find our assigned camping spot, get unpacked and settle in for what is billed as the greatest party on the planet. The human presence creates incredible panoramas of man-made lightning, flamethrowers, and acres of neon and flashing lights, but nature is an undeniable presence. One night as Paul and I stride across the playa, we are trapped in total whiteout as the wind rises on the playa. I can’t see my brother an arm’s length from me, but we are surrounded by multicolored glows on the horizon. We can hear clusters of primal tribal drummers thrumming in the sightless void. The wind dies down, and we can see again. There are no streetlights on the playa, but people glow, clank, honk, sing and preen in the darkness.
Art dominates the Burning Man consciousness, but BM is about more than art. One aspect of the experience is radio. There are two official Burning Man radio stations (99.5 RFBM: Radio Free Burning Man and 105.7 BMIR: Burning Man Information Radio), plus over a dozen low-power radio stations broadcasting during the festival, most of them playing music that is unclassifiable, more sonic collages and percussion medleys than recognizable songs. A lot of it is cutting edge sounds from the edges of somebody’s imagination
All over the surreal landscape, we are greeted with Mad Max vistas, including a real Thunderdome, and Dr. Megavolt’s fiendish compound where a Van der Graaf generator nightly does battle with a giant mechanical claw and cages filled with writhing go-go dancers. Firetown features fire juggling, fire breathing, fire dancing humans, a whole tribe of them, all living, dancing and playing with fire together. They’re playing with fire and it’s okay. While interviewing them about it, one of the fire people asks me if I want to breathe fire. I think about it only for a second, and say Yes. Breathing fire is surprisingly simple, if you don’t mind swallowing a mouthful of nasty tasting paraffin oil. Take a big mouthful, hold your torch a good distance away from your face, make sure nobody is in the path of the flames, and spew the oil at the torch as hard as you can (dribbling is not recommended). Breathing fire is a rush, like no other. I’d do it again. However, I was disappointed that I didn’t find anywhere to walk on fire. You can’t build a fire on the playa, but fire seems to be everywhere on the concourse at night. There are fire dancers, fire breathers, and fire jugglers. And of course, the highlight of the event is burning the man on Saturday night. When the flames reach their highest point, the neon-lit man collapses in a fiery heap sending up a shower of sparks. Eerily, heat-induced whirlwinds danced across the playa from the central bonfire as the crowd rushed in from the edges. From there, it became a frenzied whirlwind of people dancing in thundering, churning, sweaty mass of bodies, a scene at once hellish and ecstatic, worthy of Hieronymous Bosch.
Nightly, banks of green lasers cut coruscating patterns in the omnipresent swirling dust above the camp, or play along the rugged face of the mountains looming above Black Rock City.
Burning Man is a multimedia extravaganza. Bizarre art cars prowl the dusty streets singly and in caravans. Where else in the world are you going to find a golf cart covered in tiny mirrored tiles wits own mirrored disco ball hanging from the ceiling, or a canary yellow Studebaker that’s been modified with a rooftop fin containing a giant eye, complete with long lashes, or an old Ford Econoline van chopped off down to the bottom of the windows so it could be converted into a pirate schooner.
Walking through camp the first night, we are trapped in whiteout when the wind comes up. I can’t see my brother an arm’s length from me, though even through the thickest dust storm, I can see some of the bigger sculptures as dim, multicolored geometric shapes squatting on the horizon. Everywhere you turn at Burning Man, there is an arresting vista, a trio of art cars covered in silver sheet metal and plastic domes resemble nothing so much as flying saucers parked there while their inhabitants enjoy a field trip among Earth’s wildlife. The Barbie Death Camp and Wine Bistro offers this tableaux: two lines of naked Barbies being herded into a child’s plastic yellow and pink oven by a pair of G.I. Joes dressed as Nazi storm troopers. In Jyna Camp, there’s the Jyna tree, a pink tent covered with Polaroids of women showing their vaginas, dotted with a few photos of manginas, and at least one image of “Miss Vagina and Mr. Dick going on a date.” At the climax of the burn, these photos will all be burned, as is so much of the art here, in the big and little bonfires surrounding the Man. One group asks passers-by to tell a joke at their roadside bar. If it makes them laugh, you get a drink. If it tanks, you have to try again, or stumble off into the darkness to see what else the night offers. Burning Man is not about being a spectator, everyone must participate. One spot for that is the stage at the leading edge of the Alien Love Nest, where shockjock Howard Stern has come to roost. (A quick aside; celebrity sightings [both real and imagined] are common. One Burner tells me that Todd Rundgren is making drinks at a Tiki bar, though I run out of time before I can verify this. My hands-down favorite of all rumored celeb sightings is uttered to me with utmost seriousness by a wild-looking sun-baked burnout who swears up and down that he saw missing intern Chandra Levy on the main concourse in the company of Gary Condit and Howard Stern.) However, celebrity is not what Burning Man is about. Here, Stern is just one of the Burners. Sitting in the shade in the midst of the Alien Love Nest, Stern seems relaxed and friendly, far from the driving, obnoxious “King of All Media” personality he presents on TV and radio. After various performers go up on the Love Nest stage and perform, Howard gifts them with a Love Nest medallion for their performance.
One of the tenets of Burning Man is that it is a gift economy. Burners are supposed to bring gifts to give away to those they meet, preferably something homemade, artistic, or otherwise desirable (“Swag” in the vernacular of longtime Burners). Often it does function that way, but in actual practice it’s more often a barter economy. I met one Burner who sported a beautiful jade pendant that he’d just traded his old necklace for. Strangers come up to you with spontaneous gifts. As I walked toward the Central Café, a sunburnt hippie type rode up on a bike and asked, “Do you want a carrot?” And produced a big, freshly scrubbed carrot from the soft ice chest lashed to the back of his bike. On the night of the Big Burn, I pushed through the crowd, wearing a rubber toucan beak. A guy asked me where he could get one like it. “Right here,” I replied, handing it to him. Genuinely touched, his girlfriend immediately tied a day-glo friendship bracelet on my wrist. And so it went, on through the night.
Despite the harsh surroundings, Burning Man is intended to be user-friendly, even kid-friendly, with a special kid zone. However, given what I saw at last year’s burn, I don’t know that I’d bring my kid. Case in point: as we drove into Black Rock City, our greeter (a transvestite with a German accent) cautioned us against doing drugs or fucking in public. It’s not that’s it frowned upon by Burners, it could get you arrested by the omnipresent local cops, state police and BLM cops. Burning Man fosters a free environment where you’re encouraged to express yourself, but it’s not consequence-free. Jiffy Lube, a gay camp housed in a big surplus Army tent, was decorated with two life-size painted cutouts of a pair of gay studs cheerfully indulging in anal intercourse. It decorated the top of the Jiffy Lube camp for most of this year’s burn, but somebody found if offensive and called in the county sheriff, who gave the Jiffy Lube crew until mid-afternoon Friday to take it down. They did take it down, but then put it in the back of a pickup and drove it around the camp in protest of the sheriff’s actions. I didn’t witness anyone having sex, but there was booze everywhere, and you could catch the fragrant smell of expensive pot on the wind. Other substance abuse was harder to detect, but there were messed up folks a plenty anywhere you’d care to look. Another case in point: Seen on the Alien Love Nest stage – a chubby dominatrix dressed only in mesh tights and tall lace-up boots roping up a naked fat man clad only in a cowboy hat and glasses. The fat man’s testicles were bound with a metal strap; a heavy padlock dangled from the tip of his penis, the lock’s thick shackle passing through the hole at the tip of the glans down the urethera and out through another hole pierced further down the bottom of the penis. (Did somebody say ouch?!) Burning Man is all about radical self-expression. Some people just take it further than others. Another thing that might give parents pause is the fact that nudity is ubiquitous. It’s not presented salaciously; it’s more an expression of personal freedom. People feel free to walk around naked, or clad only in a hat and shoes (both are necessities in this hot, arid climate). Some folks even liked to generate their genitals, like one of my neighbors. He spent the entire burn dressed up in a pseudo-Indian costume that included beads glued to his scrotum. One of the camps featured not only a drag queen petting zoo, but also a penis-painting parlor.
For me, the best part of Burning Man was the people: kind, sharing people. The art is great, the music is great, the partying is great, but the very coolest thing is the people. Tammy, a convenience store employee who is here for the third time, told me, “(Burning Man is) not weird; the outside world is. Because here, it’s like it should be.” One concept that seems central to the Burning Man ethos is that it’s about expanding your horizons. The only criterion for creating art seems to be: how can you take an ordinary object, a piece of what the rest of the world sees as trash and make it more beautiful, or different, or striking, or unusual?
As you’ve probably gleaned from this article Burning Man is indescribable. The remote and desolate location ensures privacy for activities the outside world would undoubtedly misinterpret. The singular demands of attending Burning Man also functions as a kind of de facto winnowing-out process. To reach the Black Rock desert, you have to really want to get there. You also must have a strong desire to endure the tough living conditions (daytime heat, nighttime cold, high winds, billowing dust that penetrates everything, and the necessity of packing in every drop of water, every scrap of food, virtually everything you will need.) But, for those hardy and bold and creative enough to try it, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience, even life-changing in some cases. Everyone should do it before they die. However, if you’re a mean, greedy asshole, then please give Burning Man a wide berth.
And if you go to next year’s burn, remember this: it was better last year.
(Note: special thanks to Evil Pippi, Rocketboy and the rest of the gang at Media Mecca for their assistance, and thanks to Paul and Matt for sharing the adventure.)
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