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Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Mud
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The elements clashed at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. Richard Von Busack was there.
To some who had previously attended the Burning Man festival in
Nevada's Black Rock Desert--a dried lake some 100 long miles from
Reno--this year's event was a watershed. The question was whether the
annual Labor Day Weekend encampment, centered around the ritual burning
of a four-story-tall wood and neon sculpture, was going to be the next
Lollapalooza. The quiet paganism of previous years has become a roaring
party, 4,000 people strong, covered by the New York Times, CNN
and Spin magazine.
This combination art camp and survivalist expedition was larger and
posher than last year, and had electricity to burn. A ten-foot tall
portable generator, humming malevolently like the mechanical alien in
1957's Kronos , supplied a genuine power grid. It wired up a huge
public address system, a thirty-foot radio tower, blender drinks, and
an impressive zoetropic neon sculpture by San Jose's Dennis
Borawski.
But electricity can be a mixed blessing, and a flat, dried mudflat
carries soundwaves well--if the band sucked, or if the ravesters played
their anxiety-attack provoking music until 5 in the a.m--there was no
way to escape the din short of tunneling into the lakebed until mud
stopped your ears. The best musical moment was San Francisco's
Polkacide show Saturday night. God must not like single-entendre songs
such as Polkacide's "Wiener Dog Polka" ("such a spunky little pet"),
because the 12-piece band ended up opening for a vicious thunderstorm.
This almost Venusian lightning show was one of several meteorological
events, along with gale-force winds and Oklahoma-quality duststorms,
that reminded the partyers that nature was boss of the Playa. Mud
surrounded three sides of the camp, the results of record rainfall, and
organizers went without sleep pulling the cars of idiots out of the
muck, despite numerous warnings of the road conditions.
None of the above convinced the more foolhardy Burning Man attendees
who mounted a scaffold to awwwright! the lighting. "Why not just give
them a Kaiser Wilhelm helmet and a pair of rubber boots and be done
with it." one observer grumbled, but none were immolated, strangely
enough; maybe lightning is saved for the divinely inspired.
Once the Black Rock Desert had weathered its little tantrum, it was
clean, clear and ravishing again.
It was practically Sunday in the
park to check out the crowd at McSatan's burger stand and Art Car Camp;
not only filmmaker Herrold Blank's "Oh My God, a VW rigged out with
all-weather plastic daisies, an illuminated globe and a portrait of Che
Guevara. (Blank's car is so distinctive that he was once, he claimed,
requested to leave a Southern town before sundown by a representative
of the KKK.) Another highlight of the camp was "Love 23" a station
wagon bristling with hundreds of plastic toys affixed to the chassis
with marine-grade silicone glue.
And on Friday night there was an
even more memorable sight: a string of toy chemical lights attached to
a kite and sent aloft to sway a hundred feet above the desert. When I
went over to look at it, the somber tones of Dead Can Dance was playing
softly on a portable tape player, and a woman was pointing out the
constellation Andromeda to a pair of children.
The Burning Man tradition began several years back as a solstice ritual
on San Francisco's Ocean Beach, and later relocated to the desert for
more space and less police interference. Despite the legion of
spectators attending a fest whose original motto was "No Spectators"
the event will possibly never become overrun; it's remote, dangerous
and weird in a world where people prefer the convenient, safe and
predictable. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Burn Daze:
I hate to grouse
like the sour fan whose favorite cult rock band has "sold out," but I
did leave the Black Rock Desert this week feeling that the big
burn had been overrun. As one equally dispeptic attendee crabbed while
staff volunteers attempted to reposition 4,000 surly spectators to a
safe remove before the Man went up in smoke, "What is this,
Disneyland?"
The difference between this year's throng and last year's group of
about 1,500 burn-goers was like the difference between a small club
performance and a stadium concert. The weirdest thing about Burning Man
has always been the trancelike state that a giant ritual bonfire can
induce--even among cynical unhippies like me.
Trouble was that this year, you couldn't get close enough to or
intimate enough with the action to feel the sense of, well, mob
unity that Birkenstocks-wearing folk like to call "tribalism."
Instead, you became a spectator in the worst sense of the word--merely
watching the spectacle at a safe remove, like you would a big-screen TV
event.
But the festival wasn't entirely a wash--the Man burned, and after the
planned spontaneity of the combustion (TV crews had to get their
requisite pictures of the increasingly irritable crowd), more than few
transcendent loons dashed through the smoldering embers like dervishes.
And then the hordes of frat boys who made this their first trip to the
annual party, jug wine in tow, began to pass out.
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