In loving memory of Katherine Lampman
Yes it’s true, our camp had a twin swing trapeze act and I was captain of the truck that hauled it all the way to Burning Man. After almost two weeks of broiling alive in the high desert of Nevada, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that it is nearly impossible to communicate exactly what happens once a year in Black Rock City. Rather than call is something trite like, “The Poor Man’s Bohemian Grove,” I’ll attempt to quote Oscar Wilde’s famous quip about sex:
*"I cannot tell you exactly what sex is,
I can only say that there is nothing else like it."*
So it is with Burning Man, it is an entity unto itself and entirely unlike any other.
Some background; All of this year, people and circumstances have conspired to interfere with my attempts at taking some sort of vaction. Much to my own disappointment, I was obliged to miss both the Portland, Oregon and Georgia SDMB meetings. Having to turn down Quasimodem’s generous offer of real Southern hospitality was a genuine moment of anguish. Missing a chance to meet the gang up in Portland was no fun either.
Throughout all sorts of trials and tribulations these past several months, both here at the boards and in real life, I’ve had the privilige to be part of an underground San Francisco music organization. We’ve produced fundraising parties and a separate benefit auction that helped finance our art installations at Burning Man. The efforts were backbreaking but the results were fantastic. We consistently pulled in between five and ten thousand dollars per party. Our auction featured everything from Samba lessons to botox injections (those by a licensed surgeon) and a private flight into Burning Man. All of our events feature exceptional audio production work by local sound system masters. Other artists also provide real time digital graphics, lighting effects, mobiles, wall art and flower arrangements. The entire crew of our team is composed of truly loving individuals who were always able to set my heart at ease whenever we got together. It recharges your batteries to be around so many transparent, gentle people who are so intensely devoted to art.
Due to my fund raising efforts, camp dues were waived and I finagled transportation to Black Rock by captaining one of four different twenty-five foot trucks. All that remained was buying a ticket less than a week before the event for a price that did not include body parts or an exchange of fluids. Finding one one of the prized ducats for less than $200.[sup]00[/sup] only a day or two before departure was a pleasant surprise, especially as the door charge was nearly $250.[sup]00[/sup]. A few last minute purchases such as a $20.[sup]00[/sup] Goodwill Special™ mountain bike and a similar costing tent were all that remained.
My strategy of going to the hoity-toity upscale Cupertino Goodwill store paid off big. My $20.[sup]00[/sup] playa bicycle was waiting on their doorstep. I had just enough brains to also buy nearly two dozen of the standard stainless steel deep drawn steam table trays that they had. An eight dollar ¼ deep dish was a buck, I bought all of them. Thirty simoleans got nearly three hundred dollars worth of this food service equipment. I then swung by my neighborhood Salvation Army and talked my manager friend into selling me two old 12" cast iron skillets for a five-spot. She didn’t didn’t back down off of twenty frogskins for the three stainless steel cookpots (6, 8, & 10 gallon) but that was better than the as-marked price of thirty bucks for a hundred dollars worth of commercial pots.
And thus our Burning Man camp kitchen was born.
As you might have surmised, I took on the role of camp chef. An old butcher block table from my basement, a cutting board here and professional knife roll there, some more large cast iron pieces, a library of spices plus a sheaf of ladles and spatulas began to flesh things out. Several six pound cans of beans and refritos, a ten pound bag of rice, twenty pound bag of onions and fifty pound sack of potatoes rounded out the bill. Some people only brought foods that did not require cooking. My gorge rises to think of subsisting on power bar(f)s, beef jerky, dried fruit and granola for over a week. *The only substantial problem with cooking food was making any attempt at it before sundown. *
So, here we begin to arrive at Burning Man proper. Absent any artifact of human endeavor, the predominate elements consist of brilliant sunlight, dust, high altitude, dust, blazing heat, gale force winds, dust … oh, did I mention the sun-obscuring alkalai dust storms? The environment is nothing short of grueling. Mechanical objects and material goods physically deteriorate right before your eyes. You, physically deteriorate right before your very eyes. Drinking less than a gallon of water per day may lead to health complications. Dust masks are recommended during storms and your hair sets in place like light cement after 48 hours. Walking barefoot is not recommended as the soles of your feet can split due to the leaching action of alkalai dust. Despite all of these lurid descriptions you are nowhere near the real Burning Man.
Like a dislocated faery circle that sprouts annually, so does Black Rock City exist for a few short weeks each year. In what is literally the middle of flipping nowhere crops up a temporary community (in the finest sense) of 30,000 or more people. Out of nearly nothingness arises not only a city, but what amounts to a super-massive art installation. Only now do we even begin to touch upon what Burning Man really is. Much like with Zen, words automatically disqualify themselves in terms of accurately describing what Burning Man really is. With some sort of Vulcan logic, perhaps I can indentify for you what Burning Man is by indicating what it is not.
Burning Man is not commercial: No sales of goods are allowed by unlicensed parties. There are next to zero licensed sellers. There are no T-shirts being hawked or beer carts driving around selling you teacups of tepid watery brew for $5.[sup]00[/sup] a pull. If you want a beer or something to drink, you must find your way to one of the many open houses like, Pinky’s Pirate Bar. This was just one of many open bars on the playa. Next door to our camp was the Green Gorilla Lounge who continually poured the entire week. I sauntered over and got to know these fine folks. Another visit found me arriving with the wonder of salted snacks plus a gallon of Bloody Mary mix and a little spare vodka to revive flagging spirits on a raw-edged Sunday morning.
There was a cafe in Center Camp that sold coffee and tea drinks for cash to support the Black Rock City budget, but that was one of the few places where money had any value. Instead, all attendees are invited to bring “gifts.” I brought a huge sack of red and black licorice vine candy. I would wander into various camps or board sundry art cars and handed them out like party favors. Nearby our own camp was a small group who, every day when the sun really started taking its toll, started their generator and cranked up their sno-cone machine. Free sno-cones for the taking, your choice of four flavors. Our small line would form and flag down passersby to get one of these scrumptious arctic confections. Some people would actually just coast past without accepting one. I took this as solid proof of how over-exposure to intense sunlight can severely damage the human brain.
I brought over some Rose’s lime juice to make special cones for the crew. Waiting my turn, a lady walks up with a jug of Tequila. Suddenly, Tequila and Rose’s lime juice sno-cones were being handed out in a flurry of imprompteau partying. Another gal waiting in line was wearing a nice Burning Man t-shirt which I openly admired. She flitted off and returned with another one as a gift to me. This is just another glimpse of how the open system of exchange works at Burning Man.
Burning Man is not Satan’s Birthday Party: I cannot recall a single overt death oriented display at the entire show. I’m sure there was one somewhere in between the temple of The Space Virgins and the Illuminaughty camp. I have yet to hear of any violent crime ocurring during the whole event. Sadly, this year saw the death of a young woman, one Katherine Lampman. She accidentally fell under the wheels of an artcar whose crew she was on. The story is in the link at the top of this post. The woman had recently dedicated herself to living each day as one’s last and eagerly anticipated attending Burning Man. Her family has no regrets about her having attended Burning Man. The only other injuries listed so far were two plane crashes at the nearby airstrip but no fatalities arose from either of them.
I cannot imagine many other places on earth where you could gather together 30,000 adherents of any pursuit, serve alcohol continuously and have so little violence or crime. I talked to some of the local police officers at the event personally. They were nearly incredulous at how little (if any) predatory crime was going on at the event. I can also say that I left my alto saxophone, acoustic guitar and flute (along with wallet, toolbox and knife roll) in my tent the entire time and never went through a moment’s paranoia about their safety. Frequently, my cooking knife roll spent the entire day sitting around in the kitchen and no one ever touched it. Our camp had established security details, so that helped a lot but there was still a complete lack of any menace or threat overall.
From all that I can tell, almost by accident I have managed to fall in with some of the most civilized people from San Francisco’s underground music scene. I first met a lot of them at last year’s festival in northern California where I cheffed the main Saturday night feast. From that point on, a mutual friend has encouraged me to take part in their events and I have been continually impressed by the consistently loving and gentle nature of these excellent people. They are all heavily commited to art and music in truly life affirming ways. To be around such kind and decent folk has made it possible for me to relax my own inhibitions and typical social defenses in ways that have really disburdened my soul and psyche.
So it is with Burning Man. I have managed to find an even larger circle of honorable people who all feel this way about art. In this one concept alone stands much of what Burning Man means to me. I am also confident that many others besides myself prize this single element above much else. There is simply no replacement for it and its presence literally supercharges the air with an aura of peacable intent and good will. That so many of these same adherents are all dedicated to art and routinely exhibiting it is a satisfying connection to witness.
I believe that the crime statistics for Burning Man utterly blow away those of any other gathering in its size range in the United States. Some religious gatherings might obtain these numbers but even then, outside predatory criminals could still bump up the numbers a bit. Being located close to the inner ring of nowhere’s midsection, Black Rock City’s environment (along with the high gate fee) tends to weed out the less determined criminal elements. The pervasive Elysian mentality also serves to make any sort of misconduct stand out like a neon sign.
Burning Man is not Hell’s Art Gallery:While many critics and detractors tend to focus on the event’s sybaritic aspects, there is much more to it than the picture most people have of sitting around, getting loaded and hanging out. The large camps have significant art installations requiring days of setup. Many major camps were under construction right up to the final weekend. Our own camp featured several installations like:[ul]The Chakra Wheel: Built of welded tubular steel, this motorized, 30’ in diameter rotating spoked wheel stood in a 23’ high braced A-frame tripod. The entire assembly easily weighed over one thousand pounds. Each of the sixteen spokes terminated at the rim in a lotus finial. Its facing length was covered with a strap onto which were mounted 16 high intensity red LEDs, spaced about one foot apart. The 256 LEDs all flashed in time with the music and computer controls made them blink through various geometric shapes. The wheel was covered in wire mesh cut out in flower petal shaped segments that overlapped to create a nice layered visual effect. Three of the outer rim segments were sealed off into a gas tight manifold. When rotated to the top and pinioned, that part of the wheel’s edge could be pumped full of propane and torched off with an electrical ignitor. Small vent holes drilled into the outer edge permitted us to light off the wheel and have it crested with fire for the night of the big burn. I personally bent nearly every single lead on more than one thousand LEDs, MOSFET control gates and limiter resistors for every LED module of the display array. I also provided harness engineering designs plus my electronics tool kit and loaned hand tools for its assembly. I was also part of the team that did the dry run set up of the wheel in Santa Clara, where it was fabricated.
The DJ Booth: Covered in brightly painted kabbalistic symbols, this twelve foot high pyramid housed our talent center. Numerous well known turntable artists from the San Francisco bay area, plus some specially invited guests like the reknowned Sarah Collins took the helm of our twin platters. The booth fed truck based sound systems requiring a 150,000 Watt electrical generator. The system’s original configuration was an octophonic array surrounding the dance floor in front of the booth. A joystick permitted the DJ to point the music wherever in the crowd they wished. They could pan or rotate the tunes throughout all eight speakers as desired. We were pumping somewhere on the order of 50,000-100,000 Watts of extremely high fidelity sound onto the playa. For the final nights, the set up was reconnected into conventional stereo so as to obtain the correct amount of eardrum bleeding per visitor.
The Sonic Runway: Sixteen tetrahedron frames topped with xenon strobes extended away from our DJ booth one thousand feet into the desert night. The linked photo shows the runway (looking back towards the DJ Booth) with the Chakra wheel edgewise at the right). The stobes were sequenced so that even if you were hundreds of feet away from our speakers, all you had to do was to dance along with the strobes and you were in time with the music. The strobes (much like an airport’s landing approach) were computer controlled to send light pulses in a train down the Sonic Runway at the speed of sound (altitude corrected, of course). At the terminus was a covered chill dome to relax in for the adventurous souls who made it out to the runway’s end. It was more than a little comforting to be able to stand on the Esplanade (center of Burning Man), then look over to our camp and see the Sonic Runway streaking into the night.
The Twin Swing Trapeze: Our camp was elevated to full Three Ring Circus proportions by the addition of a full trapeze act. This five tower (ten pylon) rig permitted two separate performers to do all the traditional handoffs and exchanges. They were also quite competent at suspension tricks and self-levering sort of gymnastics. Set up and maintained by the involved artists and volunteers, it was a sterling addition to our already incredible site. The acrobats would provide fun-only classes during the day for our camp participants to try their skills.
The Observation Deck: A group of house carpenters from our camp, brought and erected a thirteen foot tall observation deck from almost 1,000 board feet of lumber. Members were able to watch the big burn from the convenience of our own camp. A private bar was erected topside to cover all contingencies.
The Private Chill Dome: This was a special refuge for our camp members. Replete with sofas, futons and its own full twin platter DJ station, live music was available to soothe the nerves of our hard working crew as they rested.[/ul]Burning Man is not convenient: As you can see from the above description, hundreds of work hours were put into building our camp’s art installations. Thousands of hours went into their design and preconstruction. We showed up days early, before any opening of the event proper, in order to have these pieces finished on time. We stayed for days afterwards tearing them down and reloading it all into the trucks being driven home. This sort of effort is not for the faint of heart. Neither does the surrounding environment make it so. The aggressive elements make for nearly hideous working conditions and completely exhausting shifts. While it is certain that many people only show up for the fun, there is a nearly equal segment of Burning Man’s population that spend enormous amounts of their time laboring to create this unique and superlative experience.
Burning Man is not some sort of Woodstock: Unlike the talent blessed but infrastructure starved music event, Burning Man is a well organized and heavily supported organization. They have been doing this for many years now. While desert showers may churn the flats into a soup of alkalai mud, there is still fully functional services at all times. People had set up and maintained a complete bicycle repair facility for all comers. Like everywhere, donations of any sort are accepted, but few are turned away without being helped. To help put this into perspective, Burning Man covers several square miles. Just putting up the trash fence takes thousands of poles and miles of netting. This is where the repeated mention of “playa bikes” keeps coming from. Unless you come with some other sort of artcar transportation, you are obliged to bring yourself a bike. You cannot possibly hope to see enough of the event on foot. Attempting to do so only means that you will miss something you wish you hadn’t.
As an example of infrastructure, the Burning Man sculpture itself contained some high power argon lasers. These were precisely aimed down the four Avenues of the Lamps. These four paths radiated from the central location of the burning man and were lined with hundreds of lamp posts, each suspending two standard kerosene lamps above the crowd. Overhead, the laser beams were projected in perfect quadrature to delineate the 3, 6, 9 and 12 o’clock axes throughout the esplanade and playa. This is the sort of attention to detail that convinced me the people involved here weren’t just fooling around. Every one of the streets had sign posts (we were at the intersection of Rational and Vision) and motorized traffic was limited to 5 MPH at all times.
So, there we have it. By limning out the mental locus of Burning Man, perhaps it’s a bit more clear as to exactly what it really is.
