B u r n l o g

Michael Mccarthy of the Vancouver Courier has an in-depth article on the notion of “celebration arts”, or community participation arts in a party or entertainment scene, ala Burning Man style:

Burning Passion

“Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic,” says the festival’s official statement on its website. “We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve through doing. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.”

I’m overjoyed to note that our own progressive town of Santa Rosa, and the Northbay Burner community of Sonoma County in general, has been leading the charge of dragging “art” from the conventional hallowed halls of museums and galleries and out into the streets for all to play with. I’m coining the new term du jour: “Play-ticipation“.

One such upcoming event is “The Great West End & Railroad Square Handcar Regatta & Exposition of Mechanical & Artistic Wonders” or, for short:

“The Handcar Regatta”

As the lengthy title suggests, on Sunday September 28, 2008, we’re bringing a DIY arts and mechanical invention street party to Rail Road Square as an old-timey railcar race with music and refreshment for all. Attendees are encouraged to participate in costume and other forms of creative revelry.

The Arts District of Downtown Santa Rosa, along with other forward-thinking local organizations, are supporting this cause to bring a large dose of “celebratory arts” to a new wave of joining and doing with creativity and fun amongst like-minded folks.

Huzzah!

ITEM! See our railcar crew, Krank-Boom-Clank, hard at work on our 4-man, big wheels, hand-built, recycled, kinetic sculpture thingy-mobile, YEAH! More crews and their picts sure to come!

Along with this concept of creative celebration among peers, play and fun are inherent. I attended the explosion of DIY art at Maker Faire 2008 this weekend. If tens of thousands of ravenous participants are any sign, the wave of doer-hacker-artist movement is well into its lofty crest.

We Make Money Not Art folks, in tandem, recently posted an interesting article highlighting these ideas of play in contemporary society:

The human being used to be regarded as a Homo faber (man the smith or man the maker in latin) for the control they could exert on the environment through tools.

In 1938, however, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga introduced the idea that man is also an Homo Ludens (a “playing man”), a man for whom amusements, humour and leisure played an important role in both culture and society. Philosopher Vilém Flusser went further. For him, we are living in a society which, instead of working, generates information by playing with a technical apparatus, implying a transition from the myth of the creator towards a player. Playing can therefore be regarded as an act of emancipation.

I love the interwebs for all that sex it constantly parades about. I’m not even talking about bad porn. I mean the openness of discussion that often surfaces. Since sex scandals and other morbid topics of abuse are flying around the news of late, I found this poetic probing (probetic ?) at the downy underbelly of sexual taboo in society and found some compelling, if distant, parallels to life on the Playa.

The writer is Paolo Coelho and the blog I found the excerpt on was Sexoteric:

Why has sex become a taboo? Because it is a process of alchemy: it transforms a vast manifestation of spiritual energy, which is love, into a physical gesture.

It is imposible to understand sex as we see it nowadays - a mere response to a few physical stimuli. In reality, it is far more than that, and carries with it man’s and humanity’s entire cultural burden. Each time we face a new experience, we bring with us all past experiences - both good and bad - as well as those concepts which civilization has made into rules.

This is not right, and we must recondition the brain so that each sexual experience is unique, just as each loving experience is unique.

Very difficult… But one must try, because almost all human beings need to keep this energy in movement. So, the first thing one must understand is that it is made up of two extremes, which walk side-by-side during the entire act: relaxation and tension.

How can one set these opposite states in harmony? There is only one way: through giving oneself completely. How does one give oneself? By forgetting the traumas of the past, and by not forming expectations about the future - in other words, the orgasm. How can one do this? Very simply: by not being afraid to err.

In reality, what usually happens is that we begin a sexual relationship thinking that everything might go wrong. But even if it did, what importance would that have? One must merely be conscious of the fact that one must give one’s best, and any wrongs immediately are put right.

Once the search for pleasure is being carried out by giving oneself, with sincerity, one senses the body becoming tense, like the string of an archer’s bow, while the mind becomes more and more relaxed, like the arrow being made ready to be fired. The brain no longer governs the process, which begins to be guided by the heart. And the heart uses the five senses to show itself to the other… Read more

What struck me about this excerpt is the Playa-ness of its meaning. Notions of freely giving oneself in order to release oneself for sincerity and giving, the idea of transformation and shedding cultural burdens, the opposites are one concept of coupled relaxation and tension simultaneously, forgetting traumas and living now, in short, the grasping of wide and manifold influences and movement into a creative cumulated whole, are these ideas not the Burn encapsulated?

Would that there was more tempered abandon, sexual or otherwise, in our often repressed default world! …Or at least a wish for more drug-addled blow-out parties with E-tards and neked people running about creating things and themselves with dust in all the wrong places.

photo from loupiote (Old Skool)

The saucy Violet Blue over at tiny nibbles posted this insightful article from Lauren Berlant called Against Sexual Scandal.

I could not agree more with the notion that our society is rabid with the self-righteous and self-fearful, liberally pointing fingers at one another while hiding behind their own denial of sex. I am tired of living among powerful children who would judge all by blind status quo double standards for no more reason really than fear or self loathing (or, more likely, to turn a buck in network ratings or votes in some campaign).

I have written a bit about Burning Man influences in the default world in the past on this blog. I’d like to add a vehement wish to invite just a touch of the open and trusting creative and sexual environment of the Playa into our often soul crushing society of self fear and hatred, not to mention the value of basic human needs like play and having fun.

In other words, I hope we can be more healthy as humans in body, mind, and spirit both on and off the Playa.

‘Torch with a Twist’ pays tribute to vaudeville

Detroit, 43, quickly assembled performers she knew from Detroit’s Theatre Bizarre performance space and the Burning Man arts festival in Nevada. Though many performers were part of the local leather and fetish party scene, their goal for this show was to create something less risqué and more innocent.

A recent Fox News article highlights the largely Northern California and Portland, Oregon circus revival movement.

Acrobats, Fire Dancers Fuel Circus Craze

With Burning Man’s “Red Nose District” and the many attendees in general working in daring performance arts of various sorts, there seems to be an obvious cross-seeding between what’s happening playa-side and under the big (small…?) tops up and down the west coast.

Let’s hope its momentum keeps building!

I’ve lately been tracking Kinetic Sculpture Racing (KSR) and the derby-like DIY race events it fosters around the country. This struck me as an interesting mutual influence scenario with artists’ kinetic sculptures off the Playa influencing art at the Burn and vice versa.

Wikipedia has an entry describing the advent of KSR:

The Kinetic Sculpture Race has been an annual event in Ferndale, California since 1969. It began when local sculptor Hobart Brown “improved” the appearance of his son’s tricycle, and was challenged to a race down Main Street by Jack Mays. Soon, another twelve machines entered to inaugurate the first race. Neither Hobart nor Jack won; instead, the first winner of the Kinetic Sculpture Race was Bob Brown of Eureka, California whose sculpture was a smoke-emitting Turtle that laid eggs.

Today, KSR is usually about a hearty race over pavement, water, sand, dirt, and even mud. More general info about KSR can be found at Kinetic Kingdom which also features the Kinetic Grand Championship race.

Here are a few links to sites and galleries of these amazing projects. Go out to a race near you and bring a bit of the Burn to the “default world” and support your local kinetic sculpture racers! Better, yet, build your own.

• ePlaya’s Kinetic Sculpture Racing Camp, BRC: “Only once did we lose a Kontraption in 2007, and we found it near The Man within hours. The dust storm was no doubt a factor, which we understand. But do try your very best to bring the silly thing back, and if you cannot, PLEASE tell us where it is — absolutely no hard feelings.”
• Laughing Squid’s tracking of Bernal Heights Hill Soap Box Derby 2007 Photos and Bike Kill V, Chaotic Bicycle Olympics in Brooklyn
• da Vinci Days Kinetic Challenge, Oregon: “…get ready for our human-powered, all-terrain competition with road-worthy, mud-sloshing, water-slogging kinetic sculptures!”
• Kinetic Universe, Inc., Arcata, California: sports the motto “Adults having fun so children desire to grow older”.
• Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race, Maryland: “The eight-hour race covers 15 miles–mostly on pavement, but also including a trip into the Chesapeake Bay and through mud and sand.”
• Prescott Valley Kinetic Sculpture Race, Arizona: “…while the judges cast a critical eye on all entries for any infractions. Bribes were generously doled out and readily accepted.”
• Klamath Kinetic Challenge, Washington: “If you missed the 2007 Klamath Kinetic Challenge you must be kicking yourself. It was great.”
• Port Townsend Kinetic Skulpture Race, Oregon: Celebrating its 25th year of races!
• 10th Annual Kinetic Sculpture Race, Ventura, California: “Where Art and Engineering Collide”

Part 4 of the Burning Man Movement Series addresses the pespective of traditional religion on Burning Man and how an important cultural revival of “festivity” is embodied in the Burn today.

To shorten this rather broad subject, I’ll focus down to two items that helped me arrive at the idea that Burning Man is a place of play, satire, dress-up, and, of course, good old-fashioned partying and Xtreme revelry (See below to read my own essay):

1. One misguided person’s ridiculously paranoid rant about Burning Man 2000 and the “Helco” installation as the portal from which Satan’s actual “hoardes” have arrived: The Burning Man, by Thomas Horn
2. A thoughtful essay from a theology scholar on the value of “festivity” in contemporary society and how festivals like Burning Man can be viewed as a renewal of ancient religious customs: Festivals and Festivity, by John Morehead

1. HELP! The Sky is Burning!

When I found Horn’s hysterical article, I pounced on the opportunity to needle this silly man and the “Worthy News – Christian Magazine” (now affiliated with RaidersNewsUpdate.com) Web site editors who published it. I actually did write up a fairly in depth (and at least partially inflamitory) essay and sent it to the editors. Alas, no response. See below to read my essay.

Horn’s article is intelligently titled “The Burning Man” in bold flaming letters(!). It’s a classic brain-dead insanity rant from an overwrought “christian”, complete with sky-is-falling sentiment about “Scottish Rite Freemasonry” combined with White House level global conspiracies (and so much more!). All that and Burning Man too! If only the Burn WAS that cool…

Witness these bizarre and wondrous highlights:

• Finally! The definitive word on what Burning Man is: “The Burning Man is a no-holds-barred New Age ‘Woodstock’ style festival, where neo-pagans, wiccans, transvestitie entertainers, and back-slidden Christians go to trance, perform rituals, burn sacrifices to pagan gods and goddesses, dance in the nude, engage in sex, and otherwise ‘express’ themselves and become one with Gaia.”
  I love the term “back-slidden” as it implies christians are helplessly sliding into their faith.
• More hell in a hand basket: “The wives of two U.S. Presidents, Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton, were subject to public examination after it was discovered they consulted with astrologers and psychics. Hillary Clinton went so far as to channel ‘conversations’ with the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt.”
  … um… Whut?!
• We’re DOOOOOMED!!: “Why is the Burning Man growing in popularity? There is an ominous answer. Billy Graham declares, ‘Lucifer, our archenemy, controls one of the most powerful and well-oiled war machines in the universe. He controls principalities, powers, and dominions. Every nation, city, village, and individual has felt the hot breath of his evil power. He is already gathering the nations of the world for the last great battle in the war against Christ—Armageddon.’”

This, I thought, was a perfect opportunity to poke at contemporary and cliché religious zealotry. I had particular fun with this passage to illustrate the stupidity of Horn’s hysteria and the spirit of Burning Man to tear such foolishness down:

“To illustrate the absurdity, I would say that burners would actually be interested in Hell if there was some home grown, duct-tape and EL wire way to build a solar powered megaphone directly to Satan’s bathroom. Then, while allowing users to taunt Satan with rude comments or heinous trance music on his potty, the apparatus also erupts in balls of flame to the sky when viewers pet a furry control interface while viewing computer-generated devil-fractals through techno-caveman googles. Sadly, since there is no Satan or Hell to actually contact, such an interesting BM art project won’t happen.”

Grab the PDF of my response to the absent folks at worthynews.com.

More importantly, I wanted to explore why I care about Burning Man and what it really means to me.

Why the Burn Matters

My solution was to try and explain how Burning Man is about play and burning down such lofty notions of various “isms”. It’s about revelry to the highest degree and about the fun of breaking with the dull norm. I tried to explain the value of these festival rituals in today’s world by comparing Burning Man to time-honored Carnivals of old, while doing my best not to “poison the well” with insulting dismissal of the stupidity of “Satan hoards” actually arriving through the activities at Burning Man (I hope I didn’t succeed too well with this last part ;-).

I’m suspicious that no one replied. They must be faking their interest in their own content. Kind of like porn industry producers who don’t really have an interest in porn. It’s all about big money. In fact, the more they work with it the less they enjoy porn. I’ve heard it called a “Busdriver’s Holiday”. It’s a bit sad to think this christian news site doesn’t even care about what they’re doing. Maybe they’re just in it for the money-grab business of pushing religious smut upon delusional seekers.

2. Festivity and the role of Burning Man in society

Today I was surprised to find an interesting article by John Morehead called “Festivals and Festivity” that touched on the key subject of saving ritual festivities that I wrote about in my response. A clip from his article:

“Here we might note the connection of the festive and ritual expression of acts of social inversion to Burning Man. First, individuals come to the festival in order to carve out their own place in space and time which includes acts of creativity as well as social inversion. Second, the activities of social inversion at Burning Man exactly parallel those expressed in carnival and festival in early modern Europe, including costuming, cross-dressing, sexual activity, weddings, and mock weddings. Thus, the activities at Burning Man may be understood as a contemporary expression of festival with historical and cross-cultural precedents.“

Mr. Morehead goes on to talk more of the value of learning from the social and cultural needs festivals like Burning Man fulfills in people today.

Our pal M sent a link about one of the many recycling projects from Burning Man waste, primarily associated with Burners Without Borders:

RGJ.com: Burners build houses in Stead

The article explains how post burn refuse is repurposed for homes in Nevada through the Truckee Meadows Habitat For Humanity organization.

This reuse mentality strikes me as atypical to much of our world (with so much consumer programming for disposable everything), yet so typical to the spirit of Burning Man. Just look at the “Leave No Trace” intention and the general willingness to help others both in and outside the event.

As Lance explains in his Movement #1 piece, Burning Man, for many attendees, is a sort of experimental social template for a new way of behaving in a changing world. One that encourages less selfish independence of each person as an island of consumption for greater consideration and responsibility toward the environment and each other.

Now if we could only leave less of a trace on those damned Porta-Potties everyone seems so bent on trashing!

More Info

Burners Without Borders
See the many important current and past projects.

Recycle Camp
Their goal in 2005 was “collecting aluminum cans and educating Black Rock City citizens.” They managed to gather “250 burlap bags filled with crushed cans [and] donated over 100,000 cans to the Gerlach High School at the close of the event - approximately 3,500 pounds of aluminum that fetched about $800 for the school.”

Burning Man Earth Guardians
Their weighty task is to be “committed to working year-round to ensure the conservation of the Black Rock Desert’s unique resources - biological, cultural, and historical.” This includes education of burners, organizing teams of volunteers, massive clean-up efforts, and partnerships with the BLM and other outside groups.

Dustfish
Last but not least in the recycling and responsibility arena at Burning Man, I present Dustfish at Green Man 2007 — “WE BURN PLASTIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

The SFGate ran this article in 2005 which looks largely at the notion of enclaves or regional burns as an evolution of Burning Man and as a logical extension of its community and DIY creativity ideals:

Out to change the world / BURNING MAN AT 20: Burners take creative approach to building sense of community

With attendance topping 40,000, it’s hard not to see Burning Man needing to evolve into something else and perhaps smaller in scope, more manageable. Moreover, once a year is just not enough to keep the fun alive!

More importantly, however, is the idea of community and greater outreach embodied by separate regional burns. Burning Man has always been about communal ideals: “Watching out for others is more important than getting ahead. And if people work together, the world can be a better place.” Regional burns seem to be an ideal way to maintain the focus of burner community in smaller numbers tailored to the local scene or group interests in that area.

Again, it allows for more burns throughout the year as well! More events in the year eventually reaches more people, thereby advancing the movement to more people in more places.

Larry Harvey is quoted in the article:

“We’re trying with our regional movement to ultimately change the world itself so people can live in a community full-time that affirms their identity,” said Larry Harvey, the 57-year-old who started it all. “We want them to start conceiving how to do something on Main Street. … That is the heart of what we have been preaching all along.”

While I’m not sure “Main Street” America is ready for burners nor that it’s necessary to court the powers that be there for permission to create, I believe there’s a place for it. If it enhances the region and forwards the open creativity and help-your-neighbor spirit of Burning Man in civic, business, and personal ways, then I’m all for it.

Every year, the Burning Man Organization announces a theme meant to inform and inspire the art for each year. Anxiously awaited every January, when it is finally put forth, it sets in motion a fount of creative energy and activity. The theme of Burning Man in 2006 was Hope and Fear: The Future. It was in my opinion one of the most provocative themes of recent years. We stand at an incredible tilting point in history and never before could these possibilities tilt one way of the other so drastically.

But this theme also in some way struck me as somewhat ironic: to me Burning Man expresses this theme on virtually every level already. I have mused for years, and told newbies that Burning Man is in so many ways a boot camp for the future. This future could hold both extraordinary joy and prosperity, but also unimaginable hardship. While my immediate experience of Burning Man is unfolding inexorably in the present, I see the evidence everywhere of a world to come with its hopes and fears for humanity reflected and refracted in this microcosm we create each August in the desert.

We as Americans live in relative abundance compared with about 90% of the planet, with more opportunity than many could ever dream of. Simply the opportunity to be at Burning Man is a sign of this privilege. Our technology and supply of cheap energy has made us, in material and technological terms, as rich as kings and queens of 300 years before. We can circle the globe in aircraft, access the world’s knowledge from our desktops, and cure diseases that killed even those in our parents’ generation.

At the same moment, we are at war for access to the last of the globe’s cheap energy. The American Empire seems on the decline on the world stage. Comparisons to Rome, or even Babylon, are thrown about with abandon. Meanwhile, the ecosystem of our planet is close to unraveling. The specter of man-made Climate Change has been growing for decades, if not centuries, while naysayers kept action at bay. We are now perhaps beyond the point of no return.

The playa is itself like a caricature of this world of extreme climate: arid, hot, with sudden wind, and even rain storms that can sweep over in a moment’s notice and send everyone scurrying for cover. It is a tabula rasa for creativity, but its desolation is also a place where only our ingenuity allows us to survive.

With all of our RV’s, water, tents, food and the cases of Gatorade and Corona, we are hardly in immediate jeopardy. But we are all aware of all the creature comforts we must port along to fill in where nature provides nothing but dust. Every participant (at least those who don’t end up in the med tent from dehydration) is acutely conscious of the need for, and scarcity of, water for existence: a condition most of the people on planet Earth now face, and more so every day under even more dire circumstances. You can’t just switch on the lights either. Securing energy to make everything work is a special and painstaking effort. We see and even put in the fuel that makes it all go.

But even this rather safe survival game we play also (re) teaches us the skills of community and sharing. What seems on the face of it a condition of sometimes life-threatening scarcity can be transformed through sharing into a feeling of boundless abundance. As we form alliances and spontaneously give our gifts to others, a new form of society takes shape, one both completely new to us and profoundly as old as culture itself.  A strange thing happens for people who are normally individualistic and dependent on money for everything; this sharing places everything that is needed in our reach when we open ourselves to it.

Spontaneously self-organizing systems, generating order out of chaos, spring up everywhere in small groups, camps, pods, and ad hoc villages that fill the mandala of Black Rock City. We pull together and help one another. Within a few days of arriving, the city itself springs from the dust into a city of 40,000 souls complete with art cars, theme camps and art installations, post offices and beauty parlors, coffee shops and kissing booths, a vast and rich world that even all these people could only create through profound multiplication of their creativity and intention.

When all this miraculous World is humming along in its full glory and I am immersed in it, I have the strange feeling that we are experimenting in our parallel world with a reality we are preparing to manifest (albeit significantly modified) into the “Default World”: a reality of creativity, innovation, sharing, play and intention. Against the backdrop of a barren seemingly “god-forsaken” place, this spirit is everywhere. It teaches me again and again each year that the impossible is possible, and while I might be surrounded with challenge or difficulty, this energy can be transformed into a gift, that magic and beauty can sprout up anywhere, like the lotus emerges from the muck.

In the Default World, with all of its unconsciousness and insanity, an eternal debate rages within me — is there some order to the universe, or is it a meaningless series of happenings and coincidence? Each year at Burning Man I find myself again falling on the side of order, intention and magic. Being there, I feel like I am riding a waves of delirious synchronicity moment to moment: meeting just the right person, finding just that correct size of bolt I need from my neighbor to finish my shade structure, or seeing that man in the bunny suit at just the moment I am thinking of Alice in Wonderland. I feel this being in flow is as close to an experience of magic as I have ever felt. Perhaps the idea of “the field of infinite possibility” espoused by gurus such as Deepak Chopra or popularized by the movie “What the Bleep?” is not so far fetched. It is my failing, or my fears, but I find it hard to practice, or even trust, this consciousness when I am back in the default world. When I am on the Playa, I find it inescapable.

In the world we are facing, one on the edge of civilization’s and Nature’s potential collapse, this strikes me as one of the most powerful lessons we can learn for the future. As we probe deeper into the strange order of the universe: energy, matter, and time, physicists sound increasingly like mystics. But we are finding them to be correct, and not just on the level of scientific theory — the implication is that there is even a way to live within and affect one’s reality with this new perspective.

As the World teeters on the brink, I hope that enough of us can start learning to manifest reality from this place, because we may need to do this to survive. Creativity, ingenuity, play, community, and intention in service of reinventing of the whole system is not just a more entertaining way to live — It may be the “ace in the hole” that allows us to make it through the dark bottleneck to a more sustainable civilization.

Make no mistake, there are few who take such a charitable view of what we do on the Playa each August. To many of the Default Worldlings, it is a “druggie fest”, “godless”, and at the best a silly and uncomfortable waste of time. The very same BLM that would probably be happy to see a coal fired power plant built at Playa’s edge, and casually tolerates trash and bonfires from the average American visitor, treats the Burning Man Organization to Orwellian drug surveillance and a white glove test of our Herculean clean up efforts year after year. Certainly there are also burners in our midst, including ourselves, who are taking it down a darker path. There are constant ideological struggles over the “spirit of Burning Man”, the encroaching commercialism, the breakdown of sharing, and the increasing number of non-participant gawkers. What we have is precious, and we owe it to ourselves to really grok what is most powerful within it.

All of us understand that someday this must all come to an end, and we will perhaps describe in wistful terms to children and grandchildren the magic we created here. As the man burns each year, I say goodbye to part of myself: the part that clings to material things, to the fear of failure, to people who may no longer be living or part of my life. On some level I experience this ritual as accepting the imminent collapse of the entire civilization (the Death Guild seems pretty stoked about it anyway), but for me there is more hope than fear in the letting go of this. This world must change, one way or another, there is no way it can continue as it is, even another 20 years. It may be overly optimistic, but I feel we are all here beneath the fun and frolic, secretly dreaming, inventing, and learning how to create and live in this new world to come— whatever it turns out to be. Hopefully we will have learned what needed to be learned, as we spread what is good and powerful about it throughout the culture, before that last man burns to ashes.