BRAVE NEW WORLD - Burning Man 1998
I wrote the long tract below in a feverish rush during the seven days that followed the '98 Fest (My second Burning Man experience -- the first was back in '96). No one asked me to, I just did it. And I couldn't stop. I could barely think or talk about anything else. And though I had some half-assed ideas about possibly selling the finished article to some local alternative paper (I tried and failed), my real motivation was just to get it out there, to try to come to terms with what I'd just been though, and to try to explain to those who had no concept of the event or its implications just what it is about the Burning Man Festival that makes it so special and strange.
Talk to other Burning Man vets and you'll find they've all felt the urge -- nay, the *need* -- to scribe sometimes book-length tomes about their experiences. A computer-programmer friend of mine started out writing a note to a friend about the Fest, and ended up with a 20-page essay.
Lucky for you, I managed to keep the article below down to about half that length. But my personal journal entries on the '98 Fest took up 40 pages of hand-scrawled text. And I only managed to write about the stuff that happened in the first two days.
---
BRAVE NEW WORLD by Rico Gagliano
The Burning Man Festival takes place every year in Nevada's Black Rock desert, a dry lake bed (or "playa") two hours north of Reno and smack dab in the middle of nowhere. This used to be marshy canyonland, but millions of years of climactic changes have transmogrified the landscape into its present condition: miles of alkalai flats ringed with craggy mountains and hot springs. It's the only environment where an event like Burning Man could happen.
The most obvious reason is Black Rock's remoteness, its total removal from anything resembling civilization. Burning Man is an experiment in alternative community, wherein participants attempt to spontaneously fuse all the disparate elements of art, survivalism, popular culture and ritual into something familiar and universal. The process is not unlike a delicate chemical reaction, and a chemist will tell you such things are best conducted in a vaccum.
But more importantly, the desert is empty. It's primitive. It doesn't care about impeachment proceedings. The Y2K bug will not crash it. Let Mark McGwire slam all the homeruns he wants; the desert will still be hot, and the sandstorms that blow across it like packs of enraged demons will still bury whatever lies in their paths beneath a fine layer of fragrant grey dust. Black Rock is a blank slate, indifferent to the machinations of humanity, and therefore the perfect place to fill with all manner of dreams.
What's strange about the Burning Man experience is how quickly the dreams become concrete. After all, it's easy to see how America itself might have been seen as a blank slate by the Pilgrims, and maybe even the Native Americans before that. Many of those who don't fully understand Burning Man see it as some sort of "escape" into a fantasy world. But if you spend enough time there, and if things go just right for you, it really becomes less of an escape, and more of a hint at the direction in which society might be headed: towards a brave new world where the only culture is pop, and the only religion is performance.
***
It wasn't always this complicated a thing. The very first Burning Man festival consisted of a bunch of Bay Area pals heading down to the beach to torch one of artist Larry Harvey's humanoid creations in honor of a breakup with his girlfriend.
But enough folks now flock to each year's gathering to rightly call Burning Man's temporary encampment a "City." And Black Rock City '98 was the biggest yet, populated by 15 thousand people representing just about every imaginable subculture: Ravers, punks, goths, hippies, nudists, pranksters, gearheads, neopagans, cybergeeks and closet bohemians. The graduated entrance fee (between $65-$100, depending on how early you get your ticket) bought them a week's worth of the rudimentary public services you'd expect from a city -- bathroom facilities, groundskeepers, sanitation trucks, a medical staff, a police force of bicycle-riding "Black Rock Rangers" -- and the right to entertain and be entertained by their fellow Burners. As the event has evolved, so has its scope, so that now spending a week at Burning Man involves a process of enculturation not unlike what you'd experience if establishing residence in a foreign country.
If you're wise, you arrive at Black Rock just after sundown, sparing yourself the unpleasant experience of setting up camp in the 100+ degree heat of an August desert day. It's difficult enough setting up at night -- plan on distractions as those who've already arrived emerge from their tents and shade structures for a night of revelry. Many of them will be naked, and those who aren't will likely be dressed as devils, or angels, or robots, or jawas. Don't worry about the occasional deafening BANG that sounds like something huge exploding. It probably *is* something huge exploding, but it's exploding out on the playa, not within "city limits," where fire is, for the most part, prohibited.
Your tent staked, you'll need to get situated geographically. Black Rock City '98 was designed in a broad "C" shape about five miles across, with a North and South wing joined in the middle by a circular center camp. The North was the "loud" wing, where massive, apocalyptic theme camps like "Drano -- Biggest Little Shitty in the World" and "DistURbia" blasted out overamplified punk, garage, industrial and techno music -- both live and recorded -- until the wee hours of the morning. The South was supposedly the "quiet" wing, despite the fact that it, too, boasted at least one all-night rave dome and a braying two story tall Tesla Coil. Volume is relative at Burning Man, and sleep is frowned upon. The only sure way to get a good night's rest is to bring earplugs.
The "C" design was an improvement over previous years, when Black Rock City formed almost a complete circle and thus became difficult to navigate, especially at night, and especially while under the influence of drugs. Still, some disorientation is inevitable. The nighttime desert plays tricks on the eye. Lights that seem very large and in the distance can suddenly reveal themselves to be small and just a few feet away. Guy wires holding up tents and installations cut at your legs and trip up your feet. Tents that look like the ones surrounding your own campsite turn out, upon closer inspection, to be the temporary dwellings of strangers.
The best way to find your way around Black Rock, then, is to look to The Man.
The Man is the, well, manlike effigy that stands guard over Black Rock City for most of the festival's seven days. Forty feet tall, made of sleek skeletal wooden slabs lined with multi-colored neon stripes, the Man straddles a ziggurat of hay bales about a mile and a half away from center camp, way out in the middle of the desert, easily seen from almost any point in Black Rock City. From Monday through Saturday, he provides an easy reference point for wigged out partygoers lost in the darkness.
On Sunday night, before the entire assembled population of Black Rock City, the Man is wired with explosives and burned to cinders.
But that's for later. Now it's time to venture out into nighttime Black Rock. You won't see everything there is to see, so don't bother trying; Burning Man '98 featured no less than 400 theme camps, ranging from the silly (Kama Sutra Beanie Babies) to the sexy (the infamous Bianca's Smut Shack) to the stupefying (that Tesla Coil really does shoot out some motherfucking big lightning bolts). Add to this the dozens of art installations that pockmark the no-man's land surrounding The Man, not to mention participants' glowstick-festooned costumes, and it makes for an overwhelming first impression. There's a saying here -- "Keeping up with the Harveys" -- describing veteran particpants' urge to top the complexity of the previous year's creations. Some 1998 participants either have some seriously deep pockets or spent the whole year saving to build this stuff -- art on this grand a scale does not come cheap.
In any case, right about now, in the midst of that first stroll through Black Rock, is when the typical novice hits the most difficult level of enculturation -- the shocking realization that he or she is a tourist. Indeed, the festival's slogan is "no spectators," but after about an hour of gawking at the sights, there's no denying that a spectator is exactly what you are. Which places you almost at the bottom of the unofficial Burning Man pecking order, ranking just slightly above journalists, who are identified with numbered eyeball stickers and only barely tolerated.
This can be a tough time of newbies, because most people who are drawn to Burning Man tend to think of themselves, on some deep-rooted level, as freaks. But unless you make a living as a dominatrix or perhaps hail from another planet, your scene is *square* compared to what's going on here.
This is therefore the point at which Burning Man becomes anthropologically most interesting. Because the question arises: Do I want to become a part of this madness? And if the answer is yes, the next question is, how do I become a part of this madness?
Bill Buford, in his novel *Among the Thugs*, tries to explain the euphoria experienced by British football supporters when in full, violent riot mode. He describes it as a suspended moment in which the rioter is able to stop thinking about the past that led him to the present. In which he can stop worrying about the unknown future. The moment of riot grounds the rioter firmly in the moment, and Buford describes the sensation as a kind of glorious weightlessness.
Despite all the random explosions, Black Rock City is a surprisingly aggressionless environment. But Buford's principal applies here, too. To be fully immersed in Burning Man, there comes a moment where the past and the future get set aside, and Here And Now swallows you whole.
This is where drugs, sex and general debauchery often come into play. But sometimes a newbie will make the leap sober, like the photojournalist at this year's festival who, in the midst of shooting a wedding (yes, a real live wedding, right there on the playa) took the opportunity to drop his camera and regale the assembled with some impromptu beat poetry. Or sometimes a kind-hearted freak will take pity on a novice and force them out of spectatorship: Bermuda-shorts-wearing gawkers have been known to be literally abducted by roving bands of playa-dwellers, then stripped and painted with glitter before being released back into the desert, transformed.
In any case, once that threshold's been crossed, there's no turning back. Regardless of what it says on your driver's license, you are now officially a citizen of Black Rock City.
***
Despite the daytime heat and the stink that eventually starts wafting out of the port-a-potties, it's a good place to be. Festival organizers have, over the years, come up with a set of rules that seem to maximize the feeling of community here, and minimize the problems you'd expect among 15 thousand people forced to live together under extreme conditions for seven long days.
The "no spectators" rule is brilliant, clearly borne of a generation who've finally realized that rock concerts are only as fun as the audience. In Black Rock City, what you've got is all the fixings of a weeklong rock festival -- light shows, music, intoxicants and crowds -- with only the infrequent appearance of an actual band. The audience has to entertain itself, and guess what? It blows your average stadium gig out of the water. Pink Floyd only wishes they could tour a show like this.
Allowing participants to largely dictate the parameters of the experience also proves an interesting point: When the environment is as communal (and self-effacing) as this, human beings -- even in the midst of surrendering a good deal of self-control to various modes of bliss -- can still regulate their interactions with one other. There is surprisingly little conflict in Black Rock. When someone violates even an unofficial rule -- for instance, driving too fast into and out of camp (it leaves a dust cloud that can linger for minutes) -- you can be sure a gaggle of folks will descend upon the perpetrator, berating or embarassing him into order. People who step grossly out of line rarely do it twice.
Of course, Burning Man's community is somewhat homogenous, hailing mostly from the young, educated white middle classes, so a certain element of prejudice and distrust gets immediately ruled out of the communal equation. Even so, people don't necessarily meet eye-to-eye here. Evidence: in the last few years, Burning Man's daily newspaper, the Black Rock Gazette, has had unexpected competition from an alternative biweekly called Piss Clear, the first '98 issue of which boasted a host of articles questioning the basic validity of the entire Burning Man experience. This is approximately the Black Rock equivalent of a group of Muslims suddenly declaring the Koran to be nothing more than a fluff novel. Yet no holy wars erupt.
A more obviously political move is the organizers' long-standing "no vending" rule. Unlike, say Grateful Dead shows, which boasted a similarly outlandish display of fan creativity but which (especially in later years) devolved into a commercialized valholla for merchandisers, almost no money changes hands within Black Rock City. Except at a cafe in center camp that dispenses ice and coffee for the standard US dollar, the only accepted currency is barter. And this being the kind of place it is, the most common economic transaction thus becomes a kind of performance art, an ongoing burlesque on the themes of consumer culture and the concept of "value." This year, the creators of "Barzilla," a truck-sized cocktail hour on wheels, dispensed A-bomb strength beverages in exchange for a dance or a striptease. Over at the "B-HOP" camp, a package of glittery band-aids and the promise of a massage could buy you a stack of home-made pancakes. And at one point there appeared on the Playa a cape-wearing "Prince of Pizza," handing out coveted slices of pie for the price of a song. Literally. Black Rock citizens are only as poor as their imaginations allow.
Even the oppressive environment can contribute to the good communal vibes. Black Rock citizens treat the endless baking days as an excuse to blast friends and neighbors with supersoakers, or squeeze in among crowds of naked bodies beneath mass showers. And when a sandstorm blows through town -- as happened twice during this year's festival -- the whole city unites in a kind of large-scale Outward Bound experience. Friends and neighbors help each other batten down the hatches. Black Rock Rangers struggle through gale force winds and blinding clouds of sand to hand out dust filters for breathing. And it's really something, as the storm rips down shelters and topples artworks, to hear 15,000 people screaming their lungs out, not in anger or fear, but with exhileration. They know that for seven days, Black Rock City will survive. No matter what.
***
But only for seven days. Because despite all its wonders, the Burning Man festival is not utopia. If the weather temporarily unites Burners, it ultimately becomes too much to bear. Toes and feet form tender blisters. Strange rashes break out in places you never had rashes before. Your lips crack and peel. Constipation is almost inevitable. And in a climate where severe sunburn, dehydration and heatstroke are a constant threat, even the best-prepared camper will eventually run out of sunblock and water.
It's at that moment -- when you're down to your last bottle of crystal geyser, the hamburger's gone bad in your food cooler, and even the cafe in center camp is out of ice -- that one possible significance of the Man becomes clear. Black Rock City isn't self-sustaining, and never could be. As beautiful and as full of import as it seems to be, it can't possibly last. The city has to come down. And The Man has to burn.
When he does, it's an awesome sight. As Black Rock's population screams, Forty feet worth of wood, neon, phoshorous and gunpowder explodes outward like the clifftop mansion at the end of *Zabriskie Point*. Then it burns, sending a noxious cloud of smoke high into the sky. For the rest of Sunday night, people will dance around the embers, torch any artworks or camp apparatus that will burn, and generally abandon themselves one last time to the pleasures of living Here and Now. But as the morning pushes closer, and the drugs wear off, and ecstasy gives way to exhaustion, Black Rock citizens realize the Man is gone, their compass point is gone, and they're lost in the dark again.
***
To understand what can be a truly terrible post-Burn emotional crash, look no further than Burning Man's official web site, where participants are encouraged to post recollections of their experience. A good portion of these are poignant confessions from Burners forced to return to the Real World too soon.
Twan: "Oh, how I miss the playa...why is it that after-burn sets in so completely...yesterday I felt like crying all day long, in fact I did cry on a few occasions. Deep sobs directly from the soul..."
Elwing: "After last year, I thought I could never again feel the complete dismissal of all things mundane and stressful. But this year proved me wrong. I felt it again...unfortunately I'm feeling it now as I struggle up the same old stairs to the same old cubicle to listen to the same old telephones and the same old co-workers without a single clue among them..."
Kat: "After leaving on Monday we raced to the nearest food place, ended up at McDonald's. I stared down at the overpriced cardboard passing itself off as food and found myself not wanting to eat, as though in some sense I would be acknowledging my return..."
This writer knows the feeling. If there's a place that is the antithesis of Black Rock City, it sometimes seems that place is Los Angeles. The smog that sets in a few hours north of the city is my only advance warning. Then I'm immersed in the tangle of asphalt and machinery on the freeways, the people running and frowning and begging, the noise. The radio voices loudly fill me in on what civilization has wrought in my absence -- the Starr report, stock market crashes, terrorist bombings.
The urge is to pull a fast U-turn and floor it, make a break for the border, back to Nevada, back to the desert. Burning Man cleaning crews remain at Black Rock City for weeks after the festival, sweeping up the piles of trash some of its less conscientious citizens leave behind. I could help them, I think. They're always asking for volunteers.
But then something appears out of the yellow murk that makes everything okay, at least to my mind. It's Randy's donut shop. That unlikely little corner store, selling its humble snacks, almost visibly sagging under the weight of the ridiculously huge donut on the roof. It's big and garish and stupid and beautiful, and it would be a welcome addition to the playa.
Right then, I'm reminded that L.A., like Black Rock City, is built atop a desert. We're all free to fill it with dreams. •••
