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Creative Combustion at 20: Burning Man '05 Photos and Notes*
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Karl Marx was wrong about religion. Art is really the opiate of the masses.
I'm just back from the Burning Man Festival to tell you that no needle, bottle or pipe will deliver a stronger buzz than hanging out with 35,566 other souls addicted to the thrill of raw creativity. PHOTOS BELOW
On a nod like that, it's easy to forget that I was living in a hot, shitty, sun-hammered wasteland, bathed in corrosive alkali dust storms, cooking in my car trunk and appreciating little perks like a clean Port-a-Potty. Call it idiotic joy: Somebody gave me a root beer Popsicle yesterday, and somebody else constructed a massive set of steel fangs that shoot gouts of flame 15 feet high as you sprint through them ...
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Twenty years after Larry Harvey torched an effigy on a San Francisco beach - and nine years after I first wrote about it, the temporary fool's paradise at Black Rock City has evolved into something that really makes sense to me: a hermetic culture of generosity and good will coupled with a 24/7 kick-out-the-jams party to honor the Muse.
I'll post a few more thoughts on it in the morning when I'm a little more coherent (and less hung over) but for now, h
Here are some images from the playa. You'll notice I shot a lot of artwork, but not many people - it's considered rude to shoot folks without permission, and I was there more as a participant than a journalist, so these are snapshots. Better photos of participants (including quite a few Angelenos) can be found at SFGate.com, and you'll find more MSM coverage here and a growing archive of 2005 Burning Man photos here.
Notes are sketchy on the proper names of some of these installations, so if I've got it wrong, please add a comment below to let me know.
And hey - if you were on the playa this year from Los Angeles and shot video, wrote music, made a film or created any other work for or from Burning Man 2005, you're welcome to post it here.Burning Man sprawls across several square miles of the flattest, harshest environment on the planet.
By day, weird sculptures sprout from the hard-packed mud of the playa, trucked in by the semi-load and erected by artists, engineers and volunteer builders from wood, rebar, canvas, fiberglass - anything that can withstand 50-mph gusts of wind carrying tons of powder-fine alkali dust and the occasional downpour.
It's brutally hot most of the time, but this year the temps stuck to the balmy mid-90s and rain never fell.
It's a rough, yet perfect canvas framed by jagged brown mountains.
Art has always been the soul of Burning Man, but this year I was struck by how rich and matured the culture has become since the first year or even the n third year I visited.
In 1996, the festival took place waaay out in the center of the 20x80-mile Black Rock Desert. Once you turned off the road from Gerlach, the instructions were unnervingly vague: "Drive due northeast for 10 miles (use a compass! Just one or two degrees off and you could wind up stuck in the mud miles from help!) then turn left and drive 2 miles until you run into the camp."
The Man stood downwind on a simple platform, and the city lay splattered around the safety perimeter at his feet, a mish-mash of tents, structures and vehicles with no discernible sense of order.
Finding your way to the art was easy. Finding your way back to your campsite was tricky - a combination of compass work, dead reckoning and desperate hope that you'd remember exactly where your little makeshift hovel lay in relation to the one or two tall antenna masts or geodesic domes topped with military parachutes.
During the day, you'd hop into the car and go blasting off into the wastelands at 60 miles per hour, raising huge clouds of dust and drinking at the wheel.
People died. One motorcyclist rammed the back of a van in the blinding dust while another motorist ran over several tents, seriously injuring people asleep inside.
The BRC organization had just outlawed firearms - no more Drive-By Shooting Range - but fireworks were still the norm.
Events were scheduled by word of mouth - Bindlestiff Family Cirkus (so very family-unfriendly) was performing their debauched sideshow every night at 9:30 or so, Pepe Orzun's grandiose opera took place Friday night at midnight (usually more like 2 a.m. by the time they got all the dancers assembled and the fires lit in the enormous playa-mud chimney).
People treated each other kindly and lent a hand in the spirit of communal survival more than anything else, but the whole thing felt ragged, unhinged.
This year, greeters at the gate near the main road handed you a 22-page guide to events and installations, and pointed you to camp just a few hundred yards away, where sites were ranged along plainly-marked streets - boulevards along the points of a clock and avenues ringing the Esplanade and Center Camp in alphabetic order - Amnesia, Bipolar, Catharsis, Delirium, Ego, Fetish, Gestalt and Hysteria.
In Kidsville, we all helped each other erect sun shelters against the pounding winds, and lent and borrowed casually - tools, fuel, paper towels, food, medicine and so on. It took all of 15 minutes for the kids to find friends, and the parents to start socializing in each other's camps as though the boundaries among us were no more serious than a quick introduction and a few anecdotes about past burns.
As you cycled around camp, people waved with easy smiles, hugged long-lost friends, complimented each other's costumes.
Our kids were a natural attractant for gifts: people gave them blinking lights, stuffed toys, beautifully worked little Burning Man medallions of Plexiglas and metal. One man handed out tiny bicycles fashioned from sheets of stainless steel with a high-pressure water cutter.
In another camp, a pretty lady airbrushed temporary tattoos onto the kids' chests - a butterfly for my 4-year-old daughter, a BM logo for my almost-6 son.
Grubby-faced, tickled and charmed, they beamed.
I marveled at one man's gilded, mirror-balled push-cart as we struggled home against the dust one evening. He asked if I had kids, I said two. He reached inside and pulled out two sets of deely-bobbers adorned with red plastic figures of the Man. As I thanked him profusely, he shrugged: "It's a gift economy," he said as we shook hands and went our separate ways.
We hopped a ride one afternoon with the kids on a mechanical dragon, and later on an art car towing an enormous whale (a photo's below) and the drivers let the kid work the whale's mouth and tail.
When the ride dropped us many blocks from our bikes and our camp, we trudged back to the tents until we were buttonholed by two grizzled old guys who handed out delicious popsicles for everyone and hand-cut copper medallions for my wife and Rogan's wife, Susan.
The next afternoon, we boarded La Contessa, a pirate ship that sailed lazily among the sculptures to a treasure spot marked with a huge black X - a chest packed with toys and candy. The kids goggled and gorged as a lithe acrobat performed flips and tricks on a trapeze strung between the masts
One of our fondest moments came Saturday morning when we took shelter for lunch in an enormous party dome: We were doling out a package of Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans to the kids (Grass, Lemon, Tutti-Frutti and Dirt were favorites) when a blissed-out raver strolled over and flopped in front of them to chat. They offered him the unwanted flavors - Vomit, Earthworm, Booger - which he popped into his mouth and then gamely chewed for them, grinning and groaning, "Awww, that's disgusting!" They roared with laughter and fed him more.
The kids had a blast once we got them to understand that the only way to stop feeling awful was to drink water constantly and keep their hats, glasses and dust masks in place. They were mesmerized by the art cars - the brain, the cupcakes, the psychedelic purple-spiked rat - and sucked up the costumes with an unbridled joy. The sight of hundreds of naked people amid the feathers and furs and leather made no impression - just another kind of costume, they figured.
Getting them to sleep at night was no trouble - they were completely exhausted, slept straight through, and woke the next morning excited to see what was next.
The playa is a constant show: fireworkers spinning torches, art car parades, a mass bike ride and Critical Tits - the topless group hike.
There's also an air of mischief. Sitting in a Port-a-Potty while strong winds buffeted the door, I heard someone drive past and yell very seriously through a megaphone, "ATTENTION! PLEASE EXIT THE PORT-A-POTTIES IMMEDIATELY! THEY WILL TIP OVER IN HEAVY WIND, AND THEY TEND TO LAND WITH THE DOOR DOWN. YOU DON'T WANT TO BE IN THERE. PLEASE EXIT THE PORT-A-POTTIES IMMEDIATELY!" I think I heard one person curse, and at least three doors slam.
For me, the greatest pleasure was hopping on my bike and cruising out deep into the playa at night. It was a new moon, the Milky Way splashed across the sky in the fathomless darkness. Riding the smooth surface was like sailing. Ships passed, bathed in colored lights, draped with revelers and throbbing with music as strong and weird as Arabian tea.
Which way to go - forward into the unknown, or back toward the glittering coast of theme camps along the esplanade?
As you shuffle around camp on the final morning, you're equally torn.
You're sunburnt, parched, coated in gnarly dust that turns your hands to cracked claws, your skin to parchment. You desperately need a shower, a real bed, a check on the news. (The word out of New Orleans via Burning Man Radio was especially grim, a sharp smack reminding you of reality beyond this weird, insular little fairyland. Volunteers collected cash donations from the hundreds of cars streaming out of camp.
On the other hand, you think - why can't people treat each other this way, always. The rules are simple: Pick up your trash, do what you will, and hurt no one else.
The real world, of course, is much more serious. And much less beautiful. Perhaps it's best that Black Rock City disappears for 51 weeks of the year. | | The Man at rest. The basic design hasn't changed much in 10 years - a plywood skeleton shot through with neon veins. But they've added an old-fashioned fun-house maze leading to an observation platform up top. |  | | Skull car. One of dozens registered by the Black Rock City Department of Mutant Vehicles |  | | Dragon from Houston. The operator's set up in a hydraulic chair with joysticks that run the dragon's head, neck and wings, and triggers that control propane burner blasts from its horns. |  | | Kids love shiny, dangerous monsters |  | | Dust devil. Playa dust gets into everything - hair, skin, sinuses, food, water, clothing - even past tent zippers and closed car doors. Lotion is essential. Oh, and leave the finicky electronics at home. |  | | Clockworks |  | | The Machine: People on the ground push capstans driving belts that spin the mechanical gears and slowly change the machine's shape. A kid fell off of it on Wednesday, busted his arm, enjoyed a medevac chopper ride to Reno, and returned to Kidsville the same day to continue playing in a wrist-to-shoulder cast like nothing had happened. |  | | Dicky Box: Christian "Dicky" Davies spent the entire week in a plexiglas box supplied with enough food and water to survive. Every time we went by the box, he was inside - writing in a journal with an iPod beside him, chatting through the talk-hole with burners, or exchanging tokens and gifts via a little slide-drawer near the floor. We never saw him sleep. |  | | Rumor had it that Dicky was severely agoraphobic, and that he contrived this radical act of self-expression to force himself to interact with people. That was the rumor, anyway. You never know exactly what to believe. One year we heard that Princess Di had been killed in a paparazzi car chase. |  | | Burning woman? This sculpture - roughly human-sized - stood alongside the main avenue between the Man and Center Camp. |  | | Kids chasing two of the 10 or so electric-powered cupcake cars that roamed the playa in a pack. |  | | Rogan wears the brand of a first-timer. |  | | Rogan monkeys around with Colossus. Even with two guys hauling on each of the three ropes and running as fast as possible, the machine never quite spun fast enough to function like the design plans said it would. It weighed 50,000 pounds. |  | | Temples of Dreams: Inspired by Asian ancestral shrines, this became a place of spiritual graffiti: People wrote messages to dead loved ones all over the weathered red wood and white canvas screens. It didn't seem right to take any closeups, but not one of these that I read was anything less than moving. Fathers, mothers, lovers, children, Iraq war casualties. The whole place was torched Sunday night to honor the dead. |  | | The temples at night. |  | | Unicorn - made of rebar, chicken wire and playa mud, with stained-glass eyes and horn. |  | | At night, the unicorn's eyes and horn glowed from within. |  | | Headspace: The playa is so vast, and the number of attractions so large that you could spend a week and still miss major installations. We never got to hear this thing fired up. |  | | I love this. I have no idea what it is. |  | | Robotic giraffe walker. This device had a pretty good gait for a machine. It moved slowly enough that in order to steer it, the operator would climb down and haul on ropes attached to its legs while it was still running to pull it into the direction he wanted to travel, then climb back up to resume his slow, stately ride. |  | | Giraffe walker by night - nicely tricked out with high-lumen colored LEDs. |  | | Yes, that is a radio-controlled penis. It was pretty zippy, too. My young son says, "Dad, that's a weird foot, it's only got two toes." Ah, kids. |  | | Weee alll liiive in a ... |  | | A humpback grapples with a giant squid. Towed behind a huge double-decker sound truck, this was operated by three people - one of whom ran the mouth, one the tail and one the megaphone from which personal remarks and other entreaties were shouted. They all ate a lot of dust. |  | | As the sun set, two things would happen whenever the wind died a bit. Parachutists would zoom down onto the playa on brightly-colored airfoils, and some camp would set off huge, roiling smoke rings. You'd hear this WHOOOMPF of some massive propane device being ignited, and a few seconds later a ring would rise lazily hundreds of feet into the sky. |  | | The Disgusting Spectacle: A 20-foot-tall sculpture of a man picking his nose. Humans climb into an enormous hamster wheel at the figure's elbow and run. The wheel powers the hand, shoving it up into the nose, where a hidden woman deposits things onto it - green scarves mostly, followed sometimes by old shoes and boots. The hamster wheel's a good workout (I speak from experience) and the facial modeling reminds me of Lee Bontecou's earlier work. |  | | Immense inspirational coffee cup of welded iron. |  | | Bed in Your Head looked comfortable, but was usually crowded when I cruised past. |  | | One of Bed in Your Head's video sceens. |  | | Part of the notorious Project X. Rumor was that four or five camps were building parts of a massive, mind-buggering project in secret, unaware of what each other team was doing, and that it would be assembled on the playa at the last minute. This is the prank result. Picture Charleton Heston pounding the playa with his fists and bellowing, "Goddamn you all ta hell!" |  | | Rolling vineyard. |  | | Ingenious trompe l'oeil - viewed from the top, the piece would look like triangles, but head-on, it appears to be three 3-D doorways opening onto a luminescent playa. |  | | Passage: I stumbled across these immense footprints like bathtubs made of playa mud. Burning fuel filled them with flames. |  | | I followed them for a while, and reached these two enormous figures, a mother and child. |  | | Water and flames erupted from their hands. The lore around the playa is that this is the rest of the Man's family, looking toward the future. |  | | Unidentified tube sculpture - a computer controlled servomotors that swung the huge fluorescent tubes around in synchronized arcs. |  | | I saw a lot of this luminescent wire in use at Burning Man this year. These people made very good use of it by mounting stick-figure outlines on otherwise black suits. They danced like cartoons. |  | | More luminescent tubing put to good use on this Tron duo. |  | | A mutant motor vehicle that belonged to <span class="strike"a Road Warrioresque camp that I never caught the name of the SF-based Death Guild (thanks, Kathryn!). They also ran a life-size version fo the Thunder Dome gladiator arena. Rogan and I watched two guys mounted in the bungee slings pummel the crap out of each other with padded cudgels until one was bleeding from the forehead. The fight was called after about 10 minutes by dome organizers, who didn't like the looks of the loser's cuts. |  | | Space pod. A low humming noise. Slowly oscillating lights. Spoooky. |  | | Mystery cable. From almost half a mile away, this installation looked like lazy lightning crawling up through the air. As we got closer, we realized that someone had tied about 300 feet of oscillating fiber-optic lights to the tether of a weather balloon. Blissed out burners lay beneath it, around the cable's anchor point, shaking it every now and then just to see the lights dance. |  | | Fire Pod: The official, airy-fairy description of this project doesn't begin to convey how totallywickedcool it is ... |  | | A wooden corral stands surrounded by a dozen or so of these steel-sheathed teeth, which are fitted with massive propane burners ... |  | | Any time someone on the corral pushes one of the triggers mounted on the wooden rails, one of the feeth vomits up a burst of flames - just high enough above people's heads to bathe them in almost unbearable heat, but not quite close enough to set them on fire or injure them ... |  | | Eyeball bikes. Muslin pulled over unbrella-like ribs made fairings on the bike that were then lit from behind. |  | | A man performed the traditional Japanese tea ceremony for anyone who cared to step up. Almost as impressive was the line of people standing outside the shoji screens waiting their turn - each of whom seemed to know the proper (elaborate) behavior expected of the person being served. (Sorry for the low-light blur. A flash would have been intrusive) |  | | One of the most striking mutant vehicles - this was a massive industrial cherry-picker that cruised the playa, opening and closing its blossom. Vegetation hid a beefy sound system at its base, which pumped out lush dance tracks while the arm slowly raised and lowered the bloom, bathing it in colored lights. It also appears in the photo at the top of this table. |  | | Stop making sense. |  | | ... because if you're going to build yourself a 30-foot-high articulated robot, it had damn well better be equipped with a flamethrower. |  | | One of many chill pads that beckoned after a long night on the playa. |  | | Saturday night's burn began with a procession of fire artists ringing the Man. |  | | This was a fast burn - from ignition to collapse, less than 20 minutes, it seemed, much quicker than the hourlong bonfires I remember from '96, '97 and '98. |  | | Fireworks erupt around the statue, igniting some extremely flammable stuff in the platforms beneath. |  | | He's now "fully involved," as the firefighters say. |  | | The man toppled moments after this. The next morning, people picked through the still-hot rubble, looking for fused-glass souvenirs from the neon tubes. |  | | Center Camp - heavy engineering makes a safe haven from the wind and dust, but an arena still open to the sky. At all hours, burners stop in to grab a latte or chai and chill while watching jugglers, acrobats, musicians, poets, puppeteers and other performers. |  | Playa name: factoid.
Occasionally I looked something like this. Most of the time I looked a helluva lot worse. |  |
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Technorati tags: [burning man][burningman][playa][black rock city]
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| Posted by: Mack_Reed on Tuesday, September 06, 2005 - 01:02 AM
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