B u r n l o g

Coilhouse has a critical post about Hollis Hawthorne, a bicycle dance troupe member of The Derailleurs (which is related to The Sprockettes I happened to see last year).

Please visit Friends of Hollis to read more and help.

Hollis suffered a serious hit-and-run accident in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, India. Luckily, she was riding a scooter slowly and wearing a helmet at the time but has suffered critical injury to the stem of her brain.

The current hospital in India is inadequate and she needs sophisticated help AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!

The good news is there’s an avenue of help for anyone who cares, but it must be now! Stanford Medical has offered to help free of charge. However, Hollis’ family and friends must raise the sum for medical transport from India to California.

Like so many of us, she is without health insurance. We can get her to Stanford for the critical help she needs now.

Please visit Friends of Hollis to read more and click the Donate button in the right sidebar.

Please give anything you can. The friends and family of Hollis are so close to getting her home and to the medical help she needs. Any help is essential.

My good pal Mark Nichols (who is an amazing musician and composer heard lately with Choklit’s band Baby Seal Club) is co-producing with Erik Davis a live theater production of their insane “A Burning Opera — How to Survive the Apocalypse“!

Here’s a juicy 15 minute sample featuring a number of musicians including the infamous Mark Growden:

Come experience “How to Survive the Apocalypse” - Premiering Jan. 16 & 17 at Stage Werx (533 Sutter, San Francisco.) Shows Fri 1/16 @ 8:00pm and 10:30 pm; Sat. 1/17 @ 8:00 pm. Tickets are $15 in advance from Brown Paper tickets beginning 12/15; $20 at the door. The event is all-volunteer. All proceeds for the event will be donated to Intersection for the Arts.

“How to Survive the Apocalypse” is a Burning Man-inspired theatrical freak-out that combines rock opera, vaudeville, and a Dionysian revival show that is just as inspired and terrified by current events as you are. Part mutant mystery play, part crash-course in proactive future culture, the evening combines millennialist rants and sexy burlesque with select scenes and songs from the “Burning Opera,” an ambitious and ferociously inventive rock musical scored by Mark Nichols, with libretto by counterculture writer Erik Davis.

Yet more from reliable Laughing Squid today:

Paul Addis Pleads Guilty To Burning Man 2007 Arson Charges

Yesterday in a Lovelock, Nevada court Paul Addis plead guilty to felony arson charges for burning the Burning Man sculpture prematurely at last year’s Burning Man event. He was sentenced to 12-48 months in prison and ordered to pay $25,000 in restitution.

Read the comments at Laughing Squid. There’s a lively discussion largely from Chicken John concerning our penal system and responsibilities both he and society plays in this situation.

An article on Slate states that Google’s innovative logo that changes often began as an insider joke when the founders left for Burning Man in ‘98:

It all started with Burning Man. In 1998, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin took time off from coding search algorithms to jump in a car, drive to Nevada, and bake in the desert with circus performers and ecstasy-addled freaks. On a lark, the two men tweaked Google’s logo to tip off hipsters that they were out of the office, planting a Burning Man image inside one of Google’s letters. “They wanted to communicate with the users, in a fun, lighthearted way, that they were going to be away,” says Dennis Hwang, Google’s Web-master manager. “Anyone in the know would know where they were.”

Mercury News relays this story that “Homouroboros” by Peter Hudson has landed in San Jose for the 01SJ: “a global festival of art on the edge”.

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.

This deep article highlights Jim Mason of the Berkeley Shipyard, the upcoming Escape from Berkeley race, and the Mechabolic fame and how regulatory and electrical power disputes with city officials has led to all kinds of innovations including gasification cars, high-capacity and portable combined heat and power (CHP) and solar power in shipping containers, and other intriguing green ideas.

Power From the People by Brian Doherty

[Jim Mason:] “I wanted to take up power not from a Luddite ‘the world is being destroyed’ mentality that we should all do nothing, sit in a corner, and not consume at all, or since we can’t, just do a little and feel guilty anyway,” Mason says. “I wanted to take it up as a culture of potential abundance, of doing and engagement.”

So he and some of his pals experimented with living large off the grid. Tea, shmea; they needed to operate three-phase industrial power tools. So they scrounged transformers and off-the-shelf generators from junkyards, bought inverter arrays on eBay, assembled solar panels and switching stations. It took them many months and many failures along the way, but they ended up cobbling together a system that successfully supplied their workshop with electricity, controlled by a snazzy computer program that made it possible to trace all operations online. Though it tended to trip out at least once a day, Mason hopes eventually to offer a version of the power system bundled together in one shipping container as a “powertainer” for off-grid use in the Third World and elsewhere.

Tom Price (Environmental Manager of Burning Man and Director and founder of Black Rock Solar) is interviewed by Robert Knox at Environmental Graffiti.

Price, the “environmental hero” (PEOPLE magazine), had this to say:

“Solar costs on average $10 per watt to install, and the rebates were $5. But about half the cost is profit and labor, and we realized that if we weren’t interested in making money, and could get volunteers from Burning Man to help build and install it for not very much wages, then we could build it pretty much for free–which is exactly what we did. The great thing about the environment and community of Burning Man is that it’s very much a do-ochracy, so when someone has a good idea there are very few impediments to making it happen.”

If you’re down south a bit and like all things fire, drop by and visit PyroSpin

Also, check out a profile article in a local rag: Santa Barbara’s PyroSpin

Firestarter by Joel McConvey.

“JEJU-DO, SOUTH KOREA—Every year on Jeju-do, a small island off the southwest coast of South Korea, thousands of people get together and set a mountain on fire. That’s the point of the Jeju Jeongwol Daeboreum Fire Festival, which this year fell on March 1. The idea is to celebrate the first full moon of the lunar new year (the Korean word “Daeboreum” translates as “Great Full Moon”), and to recreate the traditional annual burning of harvest grasses to exterminate harmful insects and ensure a frutiful year.

“That’s the official line, anyways. The truth is that it’s a great excuse to stage a spectacle that brings hundreds of tourists to Jeju from the Korean mainland, and to ratchet up the media attention for Korea’s tourist industry (which, while nowhere near as muscular as those of China or Southeast Asia, does a decent business among Asian travellers). And, you know, to set stuff on fire.”