B u r n l o g

The New York Times reports on a most inspirational slide show look at the art, preparation, and many artists and performers dedicating their time and energy to bring us “KKoney Island”:

Art Bound for the Black Rock Desert

LAist: Soulicious Presents Heart Burn

Have you ever wondered about Burning Man? Curious to see if you’d fit in, without actually having to drive all the way to the playa? Or perhaps you just want something new and different in the LA scene. Soulicious presents a night flaming with the joy of thumping beats, scintillating playa performances, brilliant creations of art, and dazzling donations up for silent auction. Love will be in the air, on the dance floor, and in the hearts of all so come join us for a fundraiser that is certain to raise your blood pleasure!

Wear RED to help keep the place RED HOT!

Naughty, deep, elicit and dirty beats all night long by:

-ISAIAH MARTIN (Ultra-Fi / Thump Radio)
-LEE MAYJAHS? (Philadelphia Experiment / Playloop Records)
-JUSTIN PAUL (Philadelphia Experiment / Playloop Records)
-DAVE HUGHES (Philadelphia Experiment / Playloop Records)
-MR. CAPARRO (Funky in the Middle / LA)
-RAFAEL DE LA CRUZ (Crossanova / International DJ Extraordinaire)
-BLAKE LABOUNTY (Wet Grooves / Ultra Music Festivals)
-WISEACRE (Funky in the Middle / LA)

Live painting by Carlos Vera
Performance by Dr. Doug and Jade (FireGroove)
Astra and Kitty from Cirque Berzerk
Body Painting by Kenny Harris
Photobooth by Ryan Jesena
Matchalicious – Auctioning off Soulicious’ most eligible singles.
……..and MUCH MORE!

Saturday Feb. 23 – 9:30pm – 4:30am

LOCATION: 1221 S Hope St., Los Angeles, 90015.

Full cash drink/snack bar. This is a RED party so come in your sexiest red playa gear.

Buy presale and receive 2 drink tickets! Click or copy paste the link below to buy presale. Be sure to print and bring your receipt to get your drink tickets!

I will be there taking the sexiest and most illicit portraits of you and your guest, so come by and say hello to me at the Photobooth.

Patricia Sauthoff from the SF Reporter conducted an interview with Mim Chapman of the well known Vagina Dialogues called “Let’s Talk About Sex“.

I’ve heard much about this performance but have never caught it. Interestingly, it stems from Chapman’s time as a teacher with young kids and the still prevalent hypocrisies and misinformation that is rampant in the public sphere around sex, educational or otherwise.

But I was pleasantly surprised to discover some costume-clad research was conducted at Burning Man!

Did you get your research for the Dialogues from the kids you taught?
You can’t ask kids because of the confidentiality rules, so I thought if I asked adults what they’d like to know about sex I could find out what they didn’t learn as kids. I started out at Burning Man because I wanted to go to a really liberal enlightened group of people. I went in the 6-foot vulva costume and gave away invitations to our camp, where we were giving away free oral sex—as in talking about it. Every afternoon people gathered and filled out my survey, ‘What did you ever want to ask a vagina or a penis?’ basic demographic info and where people learned most of what they knew. I was absolutely shocked at what people didn’t know.

Here’s an interesting little piece about the origin of Flight to Mars at Burning Man 2001-05: Flight to Mars amusement ride was rite of passage | Seattle Times Newspaper by Alex Fryer.

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

In a sense, Burning Man was one enormous circus. 40,000 people from cities all over the world lived together for one week like carnies–camped in trailers and buses and tents in a giant circular arrangement on a vast, flat carpet of dust that covered a lake 120 miles long by 30 miles wide. The carnies wore exotic costumes and rode around in art cars.

Burning Man was a giant circus. And then there was Cirque Bezerk.

I passed it early one morning while I was lazily bicycling around the Esplanade—a giant, one-ring circus tent and with ropes and pulleys dangling from poles planted in the dust out front where trapeze artists would perform. Of course, there was no placard announcing show times. In a community where no money changes hands, the incentive for marketing is missing. Things happen, and you catch them when you can.

There was a schedule, which we were given when we arrived at the gate. I was overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of trying to keep track of so many intriguing performances that were scheduled at all hours of the day and night. But one event was not in the program and word of it spread by rumor. Cirque Bezerk was performing one time only: 11 p.m. on Friday night.

Several Kava mates joined me on this adventure. As a price to be paid for this performance, we had to ride past the metamorphosis of a giant, metal, firebreathing dragon near our camp in order to have any chance of getting into Cirque Bezerk because the two events were scheduled only an hour apart. We passed a crowd of thousands at the dragon as we set out across the playa.

There was a long line outside the circus tent of spectators watching trapeze artists twirling flames as they performed on the wire. We managed to get close to the tent when suddenly the front walls of the tent rolled up. People were already inside seated in the bleachers. In a moment of chaos, people standing in line swarmed into the tent from every direction, and once inside, we were instructed silently with hand gestures to sit down, sit down, sit down until we were squeezed together on the playa dust. There was no carpet or covering of any sort. I was separated from my friends and surrounded entirely by strangers. We sat in very close proximity. I tried to assume half-forgotten yoga poses so that I would take up just enough space for my body and nothing more.

Out walked a tall, goulish figure wearing black and white makeup, an excruciating grin painted on his face. He was a thin man in a derby hat walking on tall stilts, and dangling from his hands was a marionette at the bottom of two long sets of strings. She was a thin woman wearing a tutu who was being jerked around by this jerk. Her face was contorted. She was crazy with rage as she tried to free herself from those flimsy strings. Eventually she broke loose, and danced wildly until she was recaptured and carried offstage by members of her troupe. Maybe she was crazy after all. Rather than feeling sympathy for her, I was conflicted about her fate.

As I squirmed in my tiny space on the dust, I watched one performance after another portray the extremes of psychological perversion. Another woman was yanked into the air on ropes while wearing a straitjacket. She fought viciously to free herself from her constraints. One performance was followed one another in the air as we watched from our cramped positions. Not a word was said. It was a grotesque ballet suspended from ropes and ribbons threaded through pulleys attached to poles at the top of the one-ring circus. A beefy man dressed in black climbed one pole unobtrusively, carrying a rope attached to a performer. Then he jumped to the ground as the performer soared into the air, lifted by the simplest of mechanical contraptions—two human beings joined by a rope and pulley.

Someone sat immediately behind me and from time to time I touched his or her knees. I was never quite able to turn around to see who sat behind me. A man sat to my left. To my right sat a lovely young woman, maybe 20. I squeezed my arms around my legs to hold them close, trying not to touch the woman, who might think me inappropriate if I were to prop my shoulder or leg against her smooth skin. As people came and went, I twisted my body this way and that to gain moments of relief. As long as I kept moving, my body did not become too tense, though I was never comfortable.

And so the circus continued for nearly two hours while the audience squirmed on the floor, prisoners of an unspoken pact of isolation and decorum, contorted by our inability to simply relax and trust one another in the act of watching a whole spectrum of contorted emotions played out by the performers in excruciating detail.

I have watched contortionists other times under the big top, and their emotions always seemed cool and contained while they performed impossible feats with their bodies. It seemed to be part of the act to display no emotion, but here at Cirque Bezerk all of those pent-up feelings of contortionists were played out before us. Nothing was cool or contained about any of the acts. Even the man on stilts, who seemed to be in control of his dancing prisoner, had that fierce grin.

Even in the bizarre context of Burning Man, an immense convention of carnies cavorting in the desert in the middle of the night while fire burned all around, Cirque Bezerk seemed almost too dark. We were all in this together, human beings trapped in our circumstances fighting to remain separate while pressed together, not quite able to free ourselves.

As I look back on that week of stimulation and entertainment, Cirque Bezerk lingers as a crater in my mind. It struck me like a meteor and left a ring of disturbance in the stagnant pools of my consciousness, where I conspire to remain separate. I want to go back to those edges of human expression and emotion, where I can explore the shadows that hide in the city. I want to be in the company of geniuses who have nothing especially significant to say.

Snapshots of memorable bits and odd ends overheard at the Burn (more to come by Kava Island folks… hopefully :-):

• Marcy
• greeting our neighbors as they play horseshoes and drink pbr in the heat of the day…. every day.
• practicing my samba on sunday afternoon before the gates open. i see someone pull up a chair in the next camp and hang out to watch. whatever, thats what the dancing is kinda there for! it turns out its dino from the perimeter/ dpw camp guys next to us. as they were all setting up he tells his friends, ‘hey! look at that! there she goes again! thats like carnival or something!’ his rough tough friends tell him, ‘no man, thats carnaval’
• waking up at dawn to find cliff and amy have arrived
• amy waking me up at dawn to show me howard and julian have arrived
• lee’s killer margheritas
• while working at the cafe a dust storm kicks up and my hat flies away. i chase after it at top speed. i finally get my hat, turn around and promptly get sprayed (camera in hand) by the water truck. i’ve never sworn so much in my life.
• NOT getting the dpw plague
• Stache
• Loving my Baby Seal Mates as we ROKT the Playa and Kava Island! Special shout to the Otter-ettes for turning that sleepy mid Friday Center Café into a whooping dance hall (well, sort of :-)!
• Joey watches happily as the three Otter-ettes (Jan, Stacie, and David) begin practicing their new routines for the Otter Dance. Joey eventually gets dragged in, protesting about poor dance skills, only to school pretty much everyone with his power moves! Awesome gyration Joey!
• Lounging deeply one evening in the large tent and pillows “Hopium Den” at the camp of Souliscious (near the Ashram Galactica), we were approached by a bright fellow in a three piece suit of large pink daisies densely arrayed on a sky blue background, his head capped with a rotund hot pink fur hat. El Fudo, in a fit of rolling laughter, immediately bestows from his pocket a “Third Place” ribbon. Our pink floral friend seemed slightly miffed and wondered aloud while holding the award, “What does it do?” …As we laugh some more.
• Riding back from the spikey bamboo ball as a windblown hat passes me on the ground and then a plastic cup as I finally turn back to see a giant dust storm bearing down like a grainy tidal wave. I’m without a dust mask as the full white-out swallows me on the Playa. I sit down with my bike next to a tall Playa lamp post in effort to increase chances of being seen by an errant art car. I wait it out not knowing that less than 30 feet away is a small pyramid of cover where I could have hung out with other trapped folks.

1. The first night, howling at the setting sun.
2. The tiny symphony created by our bikes’ dingy bells and honker horns as we tried to keep together riding on the dark playa at night.
3. Heard while in the portapotties “Oh no! Lollipop down!”
4. Man with Megaphone at 7am Wednesday morning “Open up your damn bars or I’ll come into your tents!”
5. The cruel joke of someone singing Guns and Roses karaoke at full volume, not realizing the music was not also being amplified.
6. The silence at the Temple Burn.
7. The beautiful girl singing trance in the Skinny Kitty Teahouse at 4 in the morning.
8. Drunk guy on Pirate Ship Cruise in reaction to Baby Seal Club’s music “Whooohooo!!!”
9. Hearing large groups of people cheering in the distance and knowing something exciting was happening out there.
10. The complete cacophany as you stood on the Esplanade - torchy sounds of giant art pieces belching flames, carnival-esque mix of various electronic music DJ’s competing, people yelling.
11. Free Peoples at the Easel Park brunch.
12. Fudo & Mahnkae waking me up at 2 in the morning Monday night shouting outside the van “Choklit! Where are you?”