Go Fun Burn Man
What happens when the artistically inclined build a
temporary city in the desert? You get 14 radio stations,
two newspapers, and not enough water.
Baltimore City Paper, September 23, 1998
(original print version)
Drawings by Tim Kreider
Photos by Michelle Gienow
Text by Joab Jackson
Wednesday, Sept. 2: "So basically, they're fucked."
The DJ's pronouncement is the first sign we're closing in on Burning Man 1998. It's 6 P.M. and we're five miles out of Black Rock City, the name given the community set up by and for this ad hoc assemblage of artists, thrill seekers, and various unclassifiable Pagan types. All we see is the endless Nevada desert rolling by.
The "fucked," the DJ explains, are a couple who had bicycled the 130 miles to the Burning Man festival from Reno, Nev., carrying with them only basic on-the-road supplies. They made it OK, but the car that was to follow with their food, water, and sun block for the festival broke down. They need anything and everything, the DJ says.
The Black Rock desert is no place to hang without water. The closest major city, Reno, is over an hour and a half drive away. The Burning Man Web site urges festivalgoers to bring one or two gallons per person per day. And the festival site is no vacation park with water sources and convenience stores. The thousands who come (the anticipated '98 crowd turned out to be 15,000) are expected to bring everything they need, including entertainment. At Burning Man, according to the Black Rock Gazette, the festival's daily news sheet, "survival is an option."
We pay our entry fee ($100 apiece for myself, City Paper contributing photographer Michelle Gienow, her husband Dave Israel, and City Paper cartoonist Tim Kreider) and enter the Black Rock realm. We are part of the evil media, the people Burning Man's organizers are always complaining about. The press, the Burning people contend, misses the point of the festival, coverage of which usually consists of reporters and photographers parachuting in, grabbing a few freak shots, and taking off. "A lot of what passes for journalistic objectivity," festival cofounder Larry Harvey says in the Burning Man press kit, "is actually professional alienation."
Perhaps. Then again, maybe there isn't a point to miss. Maybe the TV glare just lays bare the pretensions of grown adults escaping adulthood for a few days. But how could we tell? Harvey urges reporters to arrive early, "to immerse themselves in the story." This was precisely our plan.
Black Rock City is laid out in a semicircle, complete with streets and street signs. In the middle is a space that is largely unoccupied, save for the Burning Man himself--a 50-foot wooden effigy atop a U-shaped support, which will be ritualistically set ablaze at festival's end. The whole setup is wedged in a valley, with mountains reaching up on both sides.
The greeter at the gate tells us the neighborhood to the right is fairly quiet; the one to the left is a bit closer to the action. We go left, staking out a spot on Third Street and Atlantic Avenue. The cracked earth is arid and flat, with nary a plant anywhere. We're on a former lake bed, called "the Playa." And there is dust, a gritty dust that seeps into everything.
We pull in next to a camp which is behind a Ryder truck. Its occupants, Dave and Randy, welcome us to the neighborhood. We jokingly ask about the school system. "Well, we're not crazy about the local education system," Dave says. "But you will get schooled here!"
We set up our camp until it is too dark to continue, and then begin to explore. By day Black Rock City looks like some sort of refugee village, all windblown tents and scattered possessions, but at night the blemishes are hidden. There are 423 registered camps this year and scads of unregistered ones, each with a different theme. In a 1996 Wired magazine article ( "Greetings From Burning Man!"), writer Bruce Sterling described the festival as the Internet made physical. Walking around at night, I get what he means. Each of these camps is like a Web page, each with a different underlying concept or way of luring you in. (Also like the Internet, getting from one place to another proves to be a difficult, time-consuming task-we are always sidelined by one diversion or another.)
We start on the main road down the north side of Black Rock and encounter the Chapel of the Burning Book--one of the more elaborate exhibits, a towering temple of glass, illuminated so it can be seen from the entire Playa. A few feet down we walk through the Human Wash, a tactile walk-through structure that resembles a car wash but is person-sized (designed by Anthony Bondi, as I later found out). We brush through swatches of fur, rubber balls, and paint brushes. It is quite the sensual experience-so much so that the guy watching over it won't answer any questions, but simply pushes people through and, I suppose, lets the contraption do the talking. "Is it better if I take off my shirt?" Push. "Do we go in sideways?" Push. "What's the name of this?" Push. We also stop by the Mir space-station camp and get free samples of vodka and Tang.
Literally every few yards we encounter something new. A man walks around, naked except for a feather sticking out of his rear. Another man rolls around on a motorized crucifix.
We see a guy in a red sequined dress and a woman with breasts painted as headlights. Neither seems out of place. Someone walks by pulling a wagon fitted with a homemade boombox blaring a loop of someone singing part of the song "Moving Around" over and over again. "I'm trying to put people in a trance," he says. We stop by a pavilion set up like a bar where, the barkeep tells us, everything is bartered. And he does promise everything--alcohol, drugs, sex.
"It's like if society were run by artists," Dave Israel observes. "Everything would be great for a week or so, then we'd all die from lack of food and water."
Maybe. But looking over the rugged construction of the Taj Mahal and some of the other camps, it's clear these aren't effete New York artists out here, but the more rugged San Francisco stock. These are artists who sculpt their visions with blow torches.
Thursday, Sept. 3: It's hot. The morning chill around here burns off by 9 A.M.
You're left with 90-degree mornings and 100-plus afternoons. Playa heat is not like
humid, in-your-face Baltimore heat. It's dry heat, which makes it seem more bearable.
But is perhaps more insidious because it zaps your energy. The Burning Man Web site's
"Survival Guide" advises drinking at least a gallon of water a day.
That afternoon Michelle and I venture over to the Black Rock Gazette. If we're to immerse ourselves in Burning Man, to actually participate, we figure, we could best participate by volunteering our skills in journalism. Well, that's not entirely true. I just want e-mail access, and Michelle needs to recharge her camera batteries--and we figure both can be had over at the Gazette trailer, which has electricity. Publisher Stewart Mangrum, desperate for copy and sensing fresh blood, hands us assignments due that afternoon.
My assignment for the day is to report on the tiki-torch controversy. Earlier in the week the Black Rock Rangers--Burning Man's cadre of security and medical volunteers--banned the use of tiki torches, which are popular on the Playa, after one camp caught fire from a tiki flame and burned down. There was a fair amount of resistance; a Tiki Liberation Front had formed and sent a proclamation to the Gazette. I am to tour the camp to get the freak-on-the-street response.
It's funny, I muse to Mangrum when I return to the trailer to file my story. Here I am, in a place where I can do virtually anything I want, reinvent myself in any way I wish, let my alter-ego go free, and what do I do? The same thing I do at home--write stories.
I return to camp about 8 P.M., utterly exhausted. Walking around in the afternoon heat has just drained me, and by nightfall I am nearly comatose. But it's more than just the heat. The second day here, I already feel a little burned out on Burning Man. Today, Black Rock City seems somewhat like a Busch Gardens-style theme park: The first day is wonderful, but the longer you stay, the more everything sours.
(I was not the only one in our camp who experienced disguntlement. Two nights later, when a storm hit and we couldn't escape the water's downpour even inside our tent, Michelle told the rest of us, "Years from now when I'm talking about how wonderful Burning Man was, someone remind me what a miserable time that I was having tonight.")
After dinner (Chef Boyardee cooked over sterno), we cruise the playa again. The circus atmosphere remains, though the circus has grown. We pass the carnival tent, where two jugglers toss around brown balls they claim are feces, inspiring clever audience responses: "Oh shit!" "That's some good shit!" And so on. A few doors down, a photographer is shooting someone with a bowling ball on her head. We tour Bianca's Smut Shack , which is notorious from its Web site; in the flesh, it strikes me as a typical nightclub, albeit one offering toasted-cheese sandwiches, Altoids, and live soft-core sex scenes (two men straddling a woman and licking her neck in front of about 30 onlookers). I'm beginning to suspect that Burning Man's chief product is bad performance art.
Elsewhere there is a cylindrical, pulsating light machine, standing about 10 feet tall. Housed under a canopy at the city's south end, the machine resembles something out of Tron and attracts a gaggle of young hippies, who stare zombie-like into its strobing center.
Observing the circle of blank-faced attendees, Tim recalls a comment Stanley Kubrick made about psychedelic drugs. "One of the things that's turned me against LSD," Kubrick once said, "is that all the people I know who use it have a peculiar inability to distinguish between things that are really interesting and stimulating and things that appear so in the state of universal bliss the drug indices on a 'good' trip."
"Perhaps when everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful," Kubrick said.
Friday, Sept. 4: While we were sleeping, an RV hauling a trailer brimming with sound
equipment parks in what was our front yard. I think: Just what we need next door, an all-night rave. My head hurts.
This is not the first threat of neighborhood noise. Yesterday afternoon some guy, camping in a black Chevy van down the road, decided to share his budding electric-guitar skills with the whole block, via a portable amp. The sound of bar-chords filled the day. There is a mantra of Burning Man we hear from people again and again, a rule that ensures a quality experience for all: Don't interfere with anyone else's "experience," Give everyone the space to enjoy themselves in whatever off-the-wall way that they see fit. I understand this precept, but I still was sorely tempted to interfere with his.
In the afternoon, Tim and I decide to test the barter system. No commercial booths are allowed at Burning Man (with the exception of ice sales and the festival's own coffee bar). Michelle gives us a list of sundries to fetch: a lemon, glue, some other stuff.
Whatever his talents as a cartoonist, Tim is a mite rusty as a pitchman. Not that I'm much help. Riding around on bikes, we stop at a camp dedicated to great Finks in history ("Like Barton?" Tim asks. No, like Richard Nixon and Linda Tripp), a couple of S&M camps, and the Piata Fuckers Camp, the Web site for which brazenly promised piata-human interaction but, disappointingly, which offers piata-to-piata couplings.
Tim's approach to this whole bartering thing is simple. He offers chapbooks of his comic strip The Pain-When Will It End? for free. That is his entire approach. Understandably most people as yet unfamiliar with his comedic talents are reluctant to part with any valuables in return. While we are tanked on the psychic joy of spreading laughter across the Playa, we don't reap much in return--a few stickers, an application of suntan lotion on our backs, a beer or two at a place that is giving beer away anyway.
At night we go foraging again. At one spot in Black Rock's "neighBARhood" district, Tim asks for a beer and is asked in return, "What do you have to barter?" They are short on the usuals: cigarettes, water, ice (water value-added).
Tim self-effacingly replies that he has some humorous drawings in his satchel. The bartender is studying a Pain book with a sort of frownish expression. I finally get fed up and jump in into the transaction. You see, I work at an office where I tend to overhear a lot of sales talk and, for better or worse, I've become familiar with "the hard sell."
"These aren't merely any drawings," I pipe up. "My friend here is modest. They are quite good. In fact, they are printed in a newspaper back east, and most certainly will provide you with many hours of fun."
"Well worth the price of beer," Tim adds.
Caught up in the enthusiasm of our pitch--or just wanting us to shut up--the barkeeps not only give us each a beer but provide refills.
Two lessons here: Even in a communal culture, it is the capitalistic tools that garner the frothy cool ones. And in more than one society, it's the content providers who get the short end of the bartering stick. We got what we wanted, but it took a lot of work.
Friday evening, Sept. 4
That evening, we were invited to a chili dinner at Spock Mountain Research Labs. I've been trading e-mails with members of this particular clan for awhile, but had never met face-to-face before. It was at an post-dinner jam that I learn perhaps the coolest thing about Burning Man: Its not the exhibits that make this event.
Its the interactions between people. The often-spontaneous, frequently strange interactions that just could not happen anywhere else on the planet.
Spock Mountain Research Labs, which is a few blocks east of own camp, is run by members of a San Francisco-based 'zine/mailing list called Pigdog. The wood facade, tin overhang, and front porch of this structure looks just like some shack you might imagine lost in the West Virginia mountains. But it is no mere hillbilly shack, they tell me, but a research lab as well. I never quite get why they would build a hillbilly shack research lab, even after listening to the audiotape tour they provide me. The Pigdoggers are of little help; they keep saying it has something to do with "beverage science and leisure technology." When we show up, theyre mostly wearing white lab coats emblazoned with an image of Mr. Spock's head over the three-ring biochemical-hazard symbol.
Dave brought his guitar, figuring to provide entertainment as a sort of repayment for all this good chili. After dinner is finished and the whiskey is passed around, Pigdogger David Cassel pulls out his Casio keyboard, and he and our Dave plays "Honky Tonk Women." People start singing along. Then the two play "The Weight." Soon all of us on the Spock Mountain porch are singing so loudly, so boisterously and so damn drunkenly ("Take a weight off Mamaaaaa!!"), that passers-by are now stopping to view the spectacle.
Dave slides into a lively bluegrass instrumental, and a guy no one here knows, but who is wearing his own raggedy hillbilly-like hat, jumps on the porch and yells, "That sounds like jigging music!" and commences to jig. I watch in amazement, digging the thematic coincidence, not suspecting it could get any weirder. It does. Dave stops playing for a second and slams his bottle of Jack Daniels on the wood floor. "Anyone who jigs must drink from the bottle," he demands. A cadre of cross-dressers come walking down the dusty road, glittered out to the hilt. When they get to the porch they assemble together and start line-dancing.
This bizarre mix goes on for awhile, and at the exact point when the combined excitement of hillbilly jamming, jigging strangers, and synchronized cross-dressers ebbs, a funk wagon--I swear theres no other way to describe this thing--comes bouncing out from the darkness. It's a gigantic moving ghetto blaster, complete with booming speakers. As it is pulled along by two minions, a DJ sits at the helm, spinning irrestible dance music. A little disco ball, hanging from the cart, spins away. (We find out later funk wagon attendees were our neighbors--the one with the RV.) The cart pauses in front of the shack and almost everyone here hillbillies, cross-dressers, Spock Mountaineers, shake our booties in mad abandon.
Saturday, Sept. 5: On an afternoon photographic mission, Michelle is issued a
citation by the fashion police for wearing Tevas. I, with my T-shirt bearing the name of
an international banking firm and my sideways I'LL PUSH MY FORD BEFORE I DRIVE A CHEVY cap,
am beyond the law. Anything goes here, but you must be stylish in your madness.
Sunday, Sept. 6: This afternoon I am dead. I sit beneath our tarp to cool off,
too tired to move but too hot to sleep. I am sure I've suffered some kind of heat stroke
but am too beat down to make it to the medical center. Finally I decide to strike out and
seek water of some sort.
Sunday night, Sept. 6: As night falls--the final night--
we feel it's come none too soon. Michelle says she can't
take another day, and I can't either. My thighs are chapped. My feet are covered in blisters. I am hungry.
I stink like I have never stunk before. I am in dire need of a long, long, sleep.
Monday, Sept.7: 6 A.M. I'm leaving the Playa early to catch a flight home.
The festival volunteers have their work cut out for them cleaning up the mess left
behind in what would turn out to be
