Oh yes: It happened

For years I’ve been known among friends as one of the biggest and most vocal of the Burning Man Haters (critics), among folks in our overlapping social circles. Why? Hippies, mostly. Icky naked people, too. Techno. Techno. Techno. Hippies. Janky art. Art-for-art’s-sake… “because it’s the Playa, man, woo-hoo!” Hippies. How many fur-covered motorized sofas can we have racing across the same dried lakebed year after year, until it stops being a novelty and starts becoming it’s own (yawn) paradigm? Hippies.

Then there’s the history of Burning Man- the ‘un-event’ that celebrates anti-commercialism & Radical Self Expression, yet contradicts itself ruthlessly with it’s own enshrinement of it’s own brand, and it’s extended community’s crowd mentality of “personal” identity seeking thru hordes of individuals branding themselves with The Man logo-mark and other guerrilla-branded festival artifacts.

Most of my friends have however, been attending the festival for many years- as general attendees, or as funded artists. Likewise- my fine art of preference is large-scale mechanical art that usually involves either fire, noise, or both- with all of the above usually requiring private-property and permits en-masse… not to mention the bother of producing en entire event, just to show it (or be relegated to showing at one or two other California events per year, and within their set framework).

The festival dubs itself an experiment in temporary community building and a celebration of “Radical Self Expression.” Perhaps in years gone by… but fun-fur outfit after fun-fur outfit, after blinky cowboy-hat, after ShirtCocker, after chick with dreadlocks and studded platform-boots, radical “self” anything x40,000 intoxicated revelers, my ass. Likewise, 20 years after the event’s coronation as an annual gathering of artists around a sacrificial pyre… the tag of ‘experiment’ has to have an expiration date of true-to-form authenticity and opportunities yet left to discover, right? Ask Paul, ask Ringo, ask Trent, ask Perry.

So- well, what with the title- enough prosthelytizing with the criticism- WHAT happened? Well: this year… I finally went.

Burning Man 2009: the theme was Evolution. Driving off of hwy 447 and onto the festival’s entry road, the roadside Burma Shave signs (an annual staple of themed regalia) posted to build excitement among the hundreds of cars slowly inching their way up the entry lines, were aptly adorned with factoids of natural evolution… but all curiously “Male” themed… all about “Man” and His fellow species on Earth. Oh dear, I thought- after all the efforts vested in preparation, is it even possible for me to do this, to engage in the event as fully as possible and not as an outsider rearin’ to dig in and tear it apart? Well- it certainly helped that I made my grande entrance at 4am, mid-week of the festival- so I was all by my lonesome self, just me & my little inner-disciplinarian voice lecturing me to keep an open mind.

The dread-locked gentleman who finally did greet me at the front gate, by sheer coincidence happened to be the prefect sonofabitch to ensure I’d have a grande olde time. An old-school Burner, he was genuinely fithy- and in no way a yuppie on a weekend getaway of shirtcockery and chemical libations. I think my hesitance must have been obvious, and so he tossed a map of Black Rock City (the festival’s structured layout within which all 40,000 attendees, the art, The Man, all live) into my truck and told me to have a “grand fucking time.” I plainly spoke back to him, “thanks, hippie.” He promptly snapped back at me, “I’m not a goddamn hippie, you filthy bitch!!!” And so with eyes wide with excitement and fighting-back huge smiles, we both engaged in a marvelous screaming-match of name-calling, obscenity slinging, quasi-violent body gesturing- and through that exchange I finally did start to open-up to the possibilities that maybe Conformist ‘non-conformist’ asshattery aside, there were opportunities afoot for sincere, spontaneous fun & discovery in this purported experimental context.

My camp, The Empire Of Awesome, was located at 4:15 and Inherit… smack next to a 20+ person sound camp with a rented PA system and bad corporate gansta-rap interspersed with techno, blaring 24/7. Awesome. The first (kind of) night, I couldn’t sleep, and in the morning I awoke with “w’ssup nigg (up-nod)” as the first natural thing to come out of my mouth to greet my camp-mates. My back was aching, in all the dust and heat I absolutely did not feel like preparing food, and my stinging eyes & body were craaaaving sleep.

Between about 11am and 6pm, the heat and sun were too omnipotent to make venturing out from our camp’s shade structure desirable in the slightest- despite the sprawling city abuzz with art cars, huge sculptures, and spectacle of all variety, all right there- right before me- the pot at the end of the months-long rainbow of preparation. I did venture out, 3x during the day… and each time I couldn’t bring enough water with me to sustain more than an hour away from camp. After my third daytime outing the bumpy roads (who’da thunk the roads would be bumpy on a dried lake-bed composed of compacted fine dust?) had wreaked their havoc on my pulled lower-back, and the evening I then spent attempting to nap.

By my second day I’d begun to triangulate the noise of the 3 sound-camps surrounding our little Empire, into a nice, calming oompitty-thoomp hummm of white-noise… I subsequently caught-up on lost sleep… Awesome Eris brought-out the most delicious cucumber/melon cold soup that she’d made dairy-free for me… Awesome Michael started to lecture me about water intake, and I had the pleasure of meeting Gabriel, the 60-something y/o papa-bear of our next-door neighboring sound-camp.

As much as the awful gansta-rap drove me apeshit, a kind of turning point for my experience was realizing that I was smiling and sorta ok with the blaring misogynist anthems as I watched this wrinkly, cute little old man boppin’ around and singin’ along, wearing his orange fun-fur adorned rice-paddy hat, his neck weighted-down RUN-DMC style with Mardi Gras beads, his socks pulled-up smooth over his old-guy bulging blue & purple calf veins, and vesting the utmost care into blinging-out his bike for his night’s adventures. In hindsight and recalling how parched my gut felt and how parched my camp-mates looked, maybe we were all just resigned to the oppressive environmental conditions… but then a water truck passed by with a naked guy riding on the bumper, laughing and splashing up into his face handfuls of water from the spray off the back as he dangled his legs and waved enthusiastically to the folks who cheered or heckled as the truck passed by… and curiously, that didn’t bother me at all, either- and actually seemed kinda funny.

Passing-by art-cars blaring music and filled with dancing people on rooftop stages (there were *many* of those), stopped annoying me with their nill conceptual value and janky decorative assembly… and I started to kinda smile as each one passed. The idiotic and not terribly inspired theme camps also started to go in one input, and not immediately out the nearest output- but for a moment, each contemplated for just the wonderfulness of their absurd, lighthearted and “silly for the sake of silly” presence. When lost trying to navigate my way back to camp late in the afternoon my second day, despite being horribly dehydrated and my lumbar sending shooting-pain up the length of my spine, the experience of passing by not dozens, but scores of these oddball little enclaves of thematic silly, each their unique flavor, each worked-on for weeks by a dedicated group of folks- the sheer volume of it all started to affect me… and not to the pissy extreme I’d predicted.

Of course the experience in it’s entirety wasn’t “transformative” or “life changing” either, and in hindsight perhaps so many people assuring me that this experience would be something of that magnitude has built-up an armor that set an expectation for it to be all-or-nothing. My greatest moment of clarity was a mental pause of sorts, realizing that the sum of my experience was neither, but that it also wasn’t some profound… anything. It just was a big, not to be described in fancy academia-exclusive theoretical babble, gathering of individuals into a planned community… and the glaringly brilliant part of it, was that it did include the assholes and the geniuses, but what stood out weren’t the extremes or the individuals, but the rather mid-range hum of the machine as a whole.

While the layout was planned and Mr. Harvey had his little “theme” (insert big cynical sigh and an eyeroll with snarky air-quotes for good measure), utopian and planned communities in the traditional sense are meticulously planned by a central body… and then bit by bit filled-in with static bodies as the fat on the cow. The magic it seemed here, was that the weeks and months of planning and meticulous scheming of significance vested into this community, was vested by the individuals within the community and not by the central body that had given the community it’s base foundation for life. It truly wasn’t anything comparable to the everyday world of hustle and bustle (and running-water), economic survival and a focus on long-term subsistence & growth, that existed outside the ephemeral utopia of Black Rock City.

It wasn’t about the Titty Totter or the rocketship or Bacon Camp or Pee-Funnel Camp or the one shirtcocker who took too much meth (ok who am I kidding, there were a lot of those) or the irritating hippies or the more irritating furries, but rather it was about the ambiguous standard for milktoasty “normal” that was established from what outside of Burning Man is unequivocally always considered crazy-assed, totally out of place, sometimes illegal, and more frequently frowned-upon behaviors, objects, and forward-postulating contemplations of what “could be,” based on a standard set from what to date “has been.” More potently though, it was an un-precedented celebration of anarchy in it’s truest form: when a population of people can be at peace with expectations of themselves and one-another enough, to where forced governance and laws of conduct are simply not necessary. No “middle ground” mandates existed, no pre-defined penalties and methods for due-process needed- just respect one another, yourselves, the ground you walk on and the air you breathe- and that’s pretty much it. It doesn’t get any simpler, than that: x40,000 humans. It was a truly un-believable feat to bear witness to, and a more un-believable experience to feel myself becoming absorbed by.

I still hate hippies. I also only went for the art, too- but then failed to see much beyond my short field of dust & wind enhanced vision.

Come the day of The Burn, my back had fully had it. My eyes stung and my brain was spazzing that amidst these crazy whiteouts, the white-stuff would fly into my eyes… and not melt away, but would rather just accumulate layer atop abrasive layer while making my eyes sting worse. My body had little respite from the winds, and what little it had was spent in my stuffy, over-heated tent. I wasn’t exactly left ‘unable to breathe’ by the dust flying everywhere, but my chest, my mouth, the tubes connecting it all together- this omnipresent dust, the alkali in the dust that sucked the nectar of life down to the driest point of bone, the heat, the winds, most of the time not being able to see more than 15 feet in front of me, constantly feeling like I was in one big bead-blasting cabinet: my tundra-loving city-spoiled self had just hit redline.

If anything, props to the possibility of an RV to simply give one’s physical senses a break from the non-stop barrage of winds, dust, and heat. I would have given more at that point for a bonafide indoor-space with clear air and a reasonable indoor temperature, than for a shower (and the alkali dust by that point had made my hair one stuck-together glob… so that’s saying a lot).

Awesome David and Awesome Eris started to pack, and I went off on my last run of BRC. Upon returning back to camp, David and Eris had left, and Awesome Michael and I started to strike our shade & shower structures in what had escalated to become a full & potent whiteout. At one point an entire side of one of our two 10′x10′ tarps ripped itself in one, giant chainsaw-shred of a roar, off from it’s grommets and ball-bungees pulling it taut onto the metal frame, just after I’d released “that one last straw” corner bungee which allowed for the rest to violently & sequentially free themselves. The winds were ferocious, Michael and I were both virgins to the whole experience. Beyond scary, the entire pack-up experience was just about as miserable and loathesome as it could possibly be. There was no-end to the Matter Out Of Place pickup (to it’s credit, Burning Man is the world’s largest Leave No Trace event) and it was made no easier by the fact that visibility was minimized to about 5 feet in front of you, with all the dust glommed onto your goggles- inside and out- making what little you could see fuzzy (added to stingy), and the feeling of pained disorientation amplified that extra “it goes to eleven” bit you didn’t think was possible.

After the trucks were packed and we were ready to roll, Michael and I both jumped into my truck and just sat there- both of us re-gaining our wits, and just sitting there in silence. 2 white-dust covered piles of beaten, defeated mush…. we both just sat there to gather ourselves for a few minutes, before I drove him to Camp Narc to go find Tim, for them to witness The Burn.

We got close enough, there was a clear path to exit, and Michael stopped my progress and instructed me to just leave him there- asking me one last time, if I was certain I wanted to leave. My body had so, completely had it, and my stinging eyes and beaten skin were so relieved to be sitting in my truck, ready for the 5 hour adventure ahead. Curiously though, for the first time in my entire time at BRC, I sat there staring through the darkness at the illuminated Man- his arms risen, as they do only on the eve of his burn- and leaving felt wrong, and my heart really didn’t want to do it. My body didn’t give a damn what my heart felt, however, and I left, anyway.

Winding my way around the perimeter road, viewing the hoards of revelers pouring from their camps like an army of ants all tearing on foot and on bike down the main roads to gather around the Esplanade to bear witness to the event’s central point of celebration- it really did feel like I was leaving a place that I had, literally only moments before, finally come to peace with as a place where I felt that sense of neighborhood-like belonging. It was really bitter-sweet leaving before The Burn, though a few other random personal things were also nagging me inside that it was simply time to go.

I was listening to the BRC radio station as I drove down the entry road, then back onto HWY 447… and as the pyrotechnics erupted, the fireworks exploding, I did have the pleasure of seeing the corresponding flashes on the horizon, as I listened to the shrieks and the booms of celebration from the fading radio signal. Shortly thereafter, I came upon Gerlach and the roadside food-stands and shower-rentals, which were quiet as could be. I took my first real shower in days, to the beautiful hum of a few nearby happy crickets, and to the background noise of a soccer game on the vendor-guy’s portable TV set. It was to be another 8 hours before my loaded-truck made it home to San Francisco, just in time for sunrise.

My final memory of the experience, my last “the door is closing but I’m still here” moment, happened as I turned onto Connecticut st. in San Francisco. A small SUV with a janky assortment of bicycles on the back that I had followed out of BRC on my way to 447, flew past me on 16th st. headed towards 3rd. Throughout the entire journey, from my trek around BRC’s perimeter road to San Francisco, it kept re-appearing: after my shower in Gerlach, after I tried getting a room at Motel 6 in Reno and disheartenedly got back onto the freeway upon learning that all area hotels were booked, as I got gas in Auburn, as I left Fairfield, and now as I finally turned onto my own street. It was kinda sweet and serendipitous- and a perfect pre-cursor to finding that parking space smak-dab in front of my house, establishing my purse and my pillow as the only two objects I cared about in that moment and moving forward, engine off, keys in hand, run run run up the stairs, in through the door- oops, close the door, too- tear the carefully taped garbage-baggies off from around the pillow, put on a clean pillow-case, quickly wash the dust off my face, down a glass of juice, quickly relieve myself, wash the hands & arms, slather lotion all over from the elbows-down as I exit the bathroom, slowly stumble into room, face the bed: 1, 2, 3… timmm-ber!!

Note: ratchet-straps with thick-assed nylon-webbing on the straps are thee *best* tweeker deterrents for theft… or so I’m speculating. Best night (morning) of sleep, evar!

anarchy, art, burn, burningman, community, dust, nevada, playa, utopia, utopian, yes