Author, screenwriter, and former BoingBoing guestblogger John Shirley has returned from Black Rock City. He posts this “dissenter’s” report from Burning Man.
This year there were 35,000 people at this arts festival in the desrt, a giant refugee camp but where the strangely upscale refugees had carried their liquor out with them–sometimes in place of their clothes. Always an observer more than a belonger,I inevitably had mixed feelings, especially when it’s gotten big enough to include a significant percentage of knuckleheads, dopeheads, philistines, and “tour-or-rists” as the Burning Man’s temporary radio station called them. Most Burning Man self expression, though pretty at night with its fluorescent trimmings, is sheer kitsch. It’s about on the level of high school students planning decorations for their prom. Much of Black Rock City, nowadays, has a spring-break, frat-party feel to it. Much else is just rave culture spillover, replete, I’m sorry to say, with MDMA aka X, that Stealth Brain-Damage Drug. There is a constant white nose from ‘drum circles’, and thudding obnoxious party music from “party vehicles” like parade floats who’ve lost their parades, drifting about the gigantic horseshoe-shape of the festival playing dance music, and even Van Halen, waving margarita glasses and going ‘woo! Woo!’ and shaking bodyparts. That’s some pretty inspiring art there, boy. On the other hand there are the Mutaytors, doing athletic punk rock fire art; there is the burning of the Temple, a beautiful many-stories-high Asianesque temple, of components that vary with the year–this year strange shapes from the frames that held bones of dinosaur-bones-kits, so you have negative-dinosaur and mammoth bones-shapes wrought into an intricate temple, an Eiffelish design but more art-decoish…Some beautifully designed party vehicles (one that was of four Egyptian gods carrying an artfully detailed ancient-Egyptian palanquin filled with people dressed as courtiers, seemed to have been made by a professional prop outfit–I suspect hip millionaires rub elbows with street people here), there’s the grand convocation of 800 art cars converging like animals coming to a nighted waterhole for the Burning of the Man, the giant statue consumed first in fireworks and then fire, flames that go forest-fire sized.
Link to complete entry, link to John Shirley’s website.