Friday, September 23, 2011

Last Post for Burning Man



I spent the rest of the trip with the Brits and Italians.  The Italians were cooking lots of great food all the time and the Brits kept having me stay in their RV since they had extra room and too much food.  Even with my help, they still had too much food.  As soon as the sun went down each night, we would get on our bicycles and turn on whatever lights we had (I strapped two solar garden lights to my handlebars) and heading off into "the playa."  The artwork in the central plaza was incredible at night.  I found a really good video on youtube of one of my favorite art cars at night.  This one is called “Steampunk Octopus” and it would actually shoot out fire while driven around the camp.  It appeared to be made out of scrap metal found in the junkyard: old trash cans, metal venting, corrugated metal, and so on.  Someone had some good video of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMfzFIERJIg

I took some video of another installation that was really impressive.  The lights cast from the orb at the top of the structure shed light on the ground up to a couple hundred feet away from it.  At night, if you focused on the lights on the ground it would give you that same sensation that you can get at IMAX films where you feel like you are moving.  While I was there, two guys were each driving around some kind of dragon vehicles make out of internally illuminated plastic barrels on wheels.



There was a vehicle that looked like a large shopping cart and I laughed every time I saw it.  It’s surreal and hilarious to watch someone cruising around a desert in what when lit up looks like a 15 ft tall shopping cart.  I saw someone driving around an island with palm trees, a large fur covered polar bear, and a huge green boom box.  As I've said before, some pretty creative people show up to this.  There was one installation that was a Tesla coil being played as a musical instrument…



While the artcars were typically whimsical, much of the art kept with this year's theme of "Rites of Passage."  A significant number of art pieces focused on big events in life and in death.  The wheel with the skeletons was derived from Greek mythology where the dead had to pay the boatman to take them across the river to the afterlife.  The wheel was amazing at night.  It looked like the skeleton boatman was rowing in the strobe light and as if hands were reaching out of the water:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk7mfamY5lg&feature=relmfu

The Temple of Transition, Trojan Horse, and the Burning Man became testimonials to the major life events that people faced, and for some, the structures were confessionals as they poured their most profound thoughts and reflections on life.



Nighttime was surreal.  If you stopped out in the middle of the art plaza and looked around you, you could see thousands of lights decorating bicycles, art cars, and camps. You realize that none of this is plugged into the grid and is all independently powered.  Unfortunately, most of it is powered by gas or diesel generators so its not very sustainable.  However, nearly everyone is travelling by bicycle.  There were dance clubs all over the place and you could here at least 20 or 30 sources of music all at once.  On Thursday night, we saw some performers known as “fire-spinners.”  These people were incredible and we watched them for a long time.

Attendees definitely have a good sense of humor.  As a lover of puns and plays on words, I loved the tent that was filled with lots of chairs and couches.  That camp was called "A Shack of Sit."  Be careful when you say that one in polite company.  At another camp, someone had setup a stage with a large high-backed and comfortable-looking chair on it and a canopy above it.  Lights were pointed at the chair and a big sign hung above it with and arrow pointing down and the phrase "you can be the center of attention!"  My guess is that it was a camp of psychiatrists.  I saw that one while I was walking around with two of the Brits.  Shortly after we saw that, we saw a glow stick lying in the road.  Since the policy is that we need to "leave no trace," we bent over to pick it up and found that someone was fishing for people.  Once they started to reel it in, they called out to us to come over for a drink.  We spent about fifteen minutes talking to a group of middle-aged couples, jumped on their trampoline, had a drink, and then went off to find a place to dance.

Friday was the best day of the event for me.  I spent a lot of time looking at the art and talking to people.  It felt like the day lasted forever.  That night at midnight, the Trojan horse was burnt with tens of thousands surrounding it and watching.  It began with a lot of fireworks and very quickly the giant wooden structure was engulfed in flames.  Soon it looked like it was made of flame and not wood.  I had never seen anything quite like it.


While we were standing a couple hundred feet away, you could feel the heat from the fire.  Eventually, the whole crowd was cheering and dancing.  Some of the art cars started to leave so three of us jumped on the three-masted sailing ship with full rigging and rode around on it for around 90 minutes.  It was relaxing and it took us back to our part of the City.  Black Rock City, as it is called, is all arranged around the large plaza encircled by a street called "Esplanade."  Other streets encircle Esplanade in concentric rings that start with an "A" and increase alphabetically.  This year, the names reflected life events so that the "A" street was "Anniversary," B was "Birthday," Divorce, and so on.  Cross-streets came out and were named for times.  So the city started at 2 o'clock and circulated around to 10 o'clock.  I was near 7:00 on "Journey" and so I told people that my camp was at 7:05 and Journey.  This street naming system was very intuitive and so it was easy to find where you were going and tell people where something was despite all the distractions and irregularities in how people setup.

About midday on Sunday, Jaime and I decided to leave a little early.  The last event at Burning Man was burning of the Temple of Transition but we had heard that traffic would be really bad getting out after that as in 8 to 10 hours to just get to the two lane highway. Traffic is going to occur when you have 54,000 people trying to cram onto a two-lane highway.  I left the good company of the Brits and Italians and we went back to our camp to pack it up.  We had everything in the car by 3pm and drove through camp.  Of course, the continuation of giving continued as we gave away an unopened pack of cigarettes (neither of us smoke) and further along someone gave us Otterpops.  By 6pm, we were going through the In N Out drive-thru in Reno.  We took I-80 west to I-5 south and made it to a Motel 6 in the Central Valley.  It was nice to take that first shower and get as clean as I could.  I had Jaime back to Santa Monica by 1pm the next day and I was at my Dad’s in Encinitas by 5pm.  It was strange to be back in the real world after getting used to the alternate reality at Burning Man.  I would say this to people who think they would like to go to Burning Man: bring an RV to keep the dust out, come with an open mind that is ready to see the unexpected, and leave the real world behind and temporarily forget about all the related stresses.  There’s no need to email, carry money, or worry about bills and your normal obligations.  By the time you come back, you will feel very relaxed.  Burning Man is definitely not for everyone and I know quite a few people who would have been bored, annoyed by a lot of the lights and loud music, or freaked out by some of the people there.  For me, it was a great experience and someday I will go again.

Now it’s time to focus on Germany.  This is going to be a completely different kind of trip and I’m looking forward to it.  Thanks for reading!

No comments:

Post a Comment