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So come all ye rolling minstrels, and together we will try...
Fairport Convention
I awoke Saturday morning to a girl’s delicate voice slowly singing in the distance. “Happy Burn Day to you. Happy Burn Day to you. Happy Burn Day everybody. Happy Burn Day to you.” It filled me with warmth as I realized that I was at Burning Man and it was the day of the actual burn. That said, I was glad that she finally shut up as I had just gone to sleep!
So what is Burning Man? Hmm... Well for one its formal name is the Burning Man Project. It is commonly referred to as an Art Festival or a Party on the Playa, but it is so much more! Burning Man is an experiment in creative cohabitation. It is a place where your inner most thoughts may be spilled before others who welcome them with an opening of theirs. It is an energy that draws its strength from interactive creativity. It’s a place where you become someone you are not and along the way realize a little more about who you really are. It’s an experiment in communal living, 40,000 strong. It is basically your polar opposite of daily existence.
Money has no use on the Playa. You bring extra things to give away to others. For example, I shared spaghetti, tomato salad and coffee with my neighbors. They shared with me their large, shaded shelter when my tarp was killed by a particularly bad dust storm, as well as breakfast, good conversation and a card that one of them made. It’s not exactly like bartering though. I just assume that people have given even if it wasn’t to me. I always carried Emergen-C with me to give away to new friends. Emerge-C is one of those over-priced hippy supplements with way more vitamins and minerals than you could possibly need or use… except on the playa. When it is all said and done, there is no trace of Black Rock City having ever existed.
The Playa
By definition a playa is a dry lake bed. This one was a bowl shape with a flat bottom surrounded by mountains. The silt forms a hard flat surface. The uppermost layer is easily transformed into a fine powder by wind, tires or any other disturbance. With the hot Nevada sun and white-out dust storms it is a harsh environment. Add plenty of alcohol (which we all did), and dehydration can be a real problem. If the playa gets wet it turns into a sticky goo. Therefore, used or “gray” water is also packed out. Dust storms are frequent.
Everyone camps in a portion of a circle from 2:00 to 10:00. The streets are actually named 7:00, 7:30, 8:00 etc. The cross streets have names that change every year. Because this year the general theme for Burning Man was “Psyche” they had names like Bipolar, Catharsis, Delirium, etc. I camped at 9:00 and Fetish.
In the middle of the circle they build a 2-story temple. This temple changes yearly as well. This year it was a fun house. There were sometimes empty rooms with multiple doors, sometimes just a set of safe deposit boxes with random things in them. When you get to the end there were stairs leading up to the base of the 3-story Man who is erected on top. I was greeted at the top by a six ft. chicken investigating my camera.
While we all camp on the playa, the area that is usually referred to as “The Playa” is the empty space between 10:00 and 2:00. There you will find random works of art. For example, way out at the end of the playa was the “Sunrise Saloon.” It had a door frame with saloon doors, a bar and a table with chairs. As with most saloons you pass like this, it had bad whisky and a broken chair.
There was the Berating Chair. It was simply a chair out in the middle of the playa with as set of head phones. You sit in this chair and listen to somebody say things like “You suck at everything you do! Nobody likes you!” I didn’t get it at first. But then I realized how quickly a mood can change. Sitting out there all alone with a voice telling me I have no friends… it really did manipulate the psyche. For that, I appreciate it as art. However, I didn’t really grasp that until I stood up and looked at this chair again. Though nobody was around to hear it, I felt empowered and happy again by saying “F*@! you chair.” It wasn’t about the chair. The experience made me affirm that I’m in control of my own mind.
There was also a working clock tower. As with most artwork on the playa, it was interactive. People power made the clock work. It was a three story-ish structure with a clock tower, weather vanes and very nice attention to detail. It took the creator two and a half years to construct it. He built it with one purpose in mind, to bring it to the playa and torch it. When someone asked him how he could do that his reply was simply, “That’s why I built it.”
The Man is not the only thing that burns at Burning Man. Most of the artwork on the playa goes up in flames. There was a 108 ft ladder that went straight up. They allowed people to climb it for a couple of days, but at the first sign of wear they sided with safety.
There were art cars that roamed the playa. One was a huge pirate ship. One was a 15 ft butterfly that operated from a crane. Some shot fire from cannon like things. One had flaming organ pipes that shot flames high into the air when the note was struck by a woman playing a keyboard rigged to it.
I played croquet on an over-sized field with 6 ft mallets and 3 ft balls. Roaming the neighborhoods I received a Snoopy Snow Cone, a pendent, a hat and many drinks among other things. I played an oversized game of Operation just like the original but with a Burning Man in his brain and a shock if you screw up. There is just too much to even absorb let alone describe. Please see some of the pictures in the Burning Man Photo Album link above.
The Tomato
The text on the Tomato reads as follows:
“What’s Your Big Tomato?
Tiffany is just a girl with a dream… and one big ass tomato. Two people, a man and a woman, came to Tiffany in a dream. Realizing that she was in search of answers, they instructed her to build a tomato… a very big tomato. They admitted that it sounded ridiculous but if she built it she would find her answers.
Perhaps you hold a key! Tiffany would like to know: How do you search for life’s answers? In other words, “What is your Big Tomato?”
Feel free to sign the log!”
Tiffany is Tara’s roommate. She made this Tomato out of paper machete and chicken wire. Then she didn’t know what to do with it, so I brought it to Burning Man with me. I set it by the road in front of my camp and some people gravitated toward it. People would sign her book with wise statements or simply sign the tomato itself. On Saturday I rigged it up on a seed spreader (or something) and pushed it out to the playa for a while. I almost didn’t make it that far though. The people of Pamper Camp all came out to sign it, somebody gave me a banana pancake and a girl came running up to me to tell me that her nickname was “Big Tomato.”
I almost torched it before I left because… well, that’s what you do. I knew that Tiffany would understand. In fact I think that she would have appreciated it, but so many people had signed it I had to bring it back to her. It sounds like she is going to burn it at the end of the season in Yosemite anyway.
The Burn
I walked to the Promenade about 45 minutes early to get a seat up front. There is a ring of volunteers at the perimeter. They ask everybody six row back to sit on the playa so the rows in back can see. I found a spot in the second row behind the Man (at about 11:30 if the streets kept going). I met an old(er) bearded man named Purple who was with a young bubbly woman with a name far too long to remember. As I glanced around, I simply could not gauge the diameter of the circle. It was a huge! It was a circle of 35 to 45 thousand people, maybe 12 or 15 rows deep. In the center was the Man, brilliantly lit in neon lights and packed from head to toe with pyrotechnics. Beyond the volunteers were the silhouettes of many performers milling around. I sat and waited while the dancers got in a last minute practice. I knew that whatever happened in front of me was going to happen around the entire circle. Then it started.
First the Man’s arms began to rise. The crowd burst out in a deafening cheer. With his hands high in the air he creates the image that has become the logo for Burning Man.
Next what looked like barrels were lit on fire. There were groups of five or six barrels, side by side. Each group was spaced about 50 ft apart. Each barrel had two people behind it facing the crowd. The first row at the barrels lit fire dancing sticks and stepped back while the others came forward to light theirs. While one set of performers was fire dancing, the others began to drum. Those were not barrels they were flaming drums played with flaming sticks.
Men with lit torches approached the crowd (again about 50 ft apart). They simply stood there with an out stretched arm lighting the torches as fire dancers ran past them. If you have never seen fire dancing, you really should. To over simplify it, it’s as if they have half of an over-sized Q-tip in each hand with flaming alcohol soaked tips. They twirl, swing and dance with them with the back drop of tribal drumming. It really is a beautiful art.
Anyway, as they fire danced, a woman behind me started singing The Lion Sleeps Tonight. The whole area joined in and with such a good mixture of men and women singing different parts, it actually sounded pretty good. As they ran back, more fire dancers filed in without lit torches. They stood arms stretched out torch to torch. Soon a fire dancer on stilts came out and lit the end person’s torch. With only one person’s arm in motion at any one time they passed the flame down the row. They performed a different, but just as impressive routine. The people on stilts kept walking around and other oddities began to appear. There were dancers with longer sticks that were flaming on both ends. There were people with two flaming sticks in their head dresses blowing fire. At one point a large, apparently accidental, fire rose up behind them all. We all gasped for a second. Then a dozen or so dancers ran to the flame and picked up their sticks. When they dispersed the large fire no longer existed. Each dancer in each hand held a fan shaped stick with five flames and they began to dance.
When they finished their dances, the drumming stopped. The crowd began to yell “Burn the Man!” Every now and then you would hear somebody shout out “No, he’s innocent.” Then an even louder “Burn the Man!!” came from the rest of the crowd. A guy behind me, who under any other circumstance would have been very annoying, kept yelling “Burn” in a deep voice. Sometimes he would chant “Burn.” I found that he actually added to the… um… ambiance of the event. The bubbly girl started singing “Happy Burn Day” and again the whole area joined in. Purple was hugging, kissing or patting the shoulders everybody near him. There was a man known as Tribal Man a few feet from me. He had a huge suit made mainly of feathers and bones. All of the fire dancers knew him and kept coming to get their pictures taken with him.
Finally, in one huge flash the entire structure was engulfed in flames. The show is not over really until the man falls into his own flames though. We watched it burn for about ten minutes. People began to yell “Fall damn it!” He fell and the crowd surged to the fire. It reminded me of the general admission concerts where people used to get trampled. That was too much for me. After I got out of that mess, I poured myself another drink and started walking back to a party that I was invited to.
The next day I woke up, packed up and received a zucchini from a woman in a camp of organic farmers from California. She was camped with a girl I met days before in a different area of the playa. I never expected to run into that girl again so I was really glad I got a chance to say goodbye to her. It’s so funny that she was camped about a block away. As I said goodbye to my neighbors they gave me a new 5 gallon Igloo cooler because they were flying back to North Carolina and didn’t know what to do with it.
What a great time! Random… crazy… just plain bizarre. Burning Man is a must do… at least once in your life!
