September 14, 2009
Burning Man 2009 - What it was like (Part 2)
Night at Burning Man is when life is good. Where we were camped, near the outer edge of the "city", it was quiet at night. But in the inner zone, things were utterly strange, wonderful and magical at night. During the day the inner zone is a harsh wasteland of flat, empty, dry mud, dotted with people on bikes. At night however, it becomes a place filled with colorful shapes of all sizes and designs. Giant "floats" drive slowly by, all lit up with colored wires and lights; most playing their own music with people dancing on the floats.
The people are usually lit as well, with glowing phosphorescent rings or their own personal El-wire sets. Wearing every odd costume or no costume. The lights from the cars and people and the art installations provide the only illumination, except for the moon and the stars.
The night air is warm, the ground is now soft and flat. You can wander off or bike in any direction you feel - towards some giant Rubic's Cube or a perhaps a huge music camp which is alive with a throbbing beat and lights and lasers. The music is is never-ending, without cues to signal the start or stop of songs, just an ever changing pattern of rythmic tonalities.
There is really nothing like night in the center at Burning Man, it is a unique experience, scary, strange, an endless visual and aural feast.
Posted by rakhier at 02:06 PM | Comments (0)
September 07, 2009
Burning Man 2009 - What it was like (Part 1)
Burning Man - I attended the event from 8/31/09 to 9/6/09.
The following is my experience at Burning Man.
Imagine if you would, the biggest campground on the surface of the Earth. The average campground in the U.S. has space for 50 to 250 camp sites. Burning Man has some 50,000 people attending, resulting in about 10,000 camps. So its big. So big you can't see it all without spending days traveling about the site on bike. The camps as modest as one man in the back of his pick-up truck to camps of 30 Indian wigwams holding more than 100 people along with associated geodesic domes, trucks, power-generators, and very odd vehicles.
Unlike the normal campground, located in a scenic spot, near running water or a lake, Burning Man is located in one of the harshest places you can visit in the United States. The terrain is dead flat and utterly dry. The ground is completely covered in a fine dry white clay which instantly turns to sticky gray mud with a small application of water.
Let me repeat again: there is no water. None. There is no vegetation. There is essentially nothing living in the Burning Man camp zone. This is so strange that it is very hard to wrap your head around it. Every place that humans have ever settled has water, without exception. A place without water is only a place humans traveled across, never a place that they stopped at, unless bitter necessity forced such a stop. To voluntarily live in a place without water is profoundly unsettling. It feels unnatural, as indeed it is. At times, in the middle of the day, as the sun beat down on the cloth tarp spread over my mattress I felt desperate to escape - to leave Burning Man as fast as I could and find a lake to throw myself in. But I stayed. Just like nearly everyone stays.
At the outer edges of the Burning Man camp, the tents are usually quite normal and - except for the crowding - you would not think twice about what you saw. People sitting on camp chairs, in the shade they created with their own plastic cloths stretched over tent poles. Eating, talking, snoozing in the heat of the day. Occasionally you would see a bigger tent, or one built on the location in the shape of a geodesic half-dome made out of metal tubes and covered with a parachute, flapping in the wind.
Go further in, towards the center, and you see more unusual structures. Some tents in the middle zone are huge, the size of circus tents, sheltering 10 or 20 smaller tents underneath. Some camps are very odd indeed, decorated with a design motif, accessorized by the addition of statues, flags, or random bits of junk. Some camps offer things to passers-by such as: a chance to jump on their trampoline, a phone call to the outside world, a quick shower of water from their huge drum, a pancake, a melted cheese sandwich, a hug, a complement, a home-made drink, and so forth.
All of this is free as one of the few rules of Burning Man is that nothing can be sold or bought (there are two exceptions, you can buy ice and coffee at the center of the campground). If you offer something, you can not ask for money in return.
The inner ring of the camp is where the most unusual things are to be found. This is where you find groups (collectives? tribes? guilds? associations?) of people who have joined together to create places/things/art just because they feel like it. There is really nothing like these organizations outside Burning Man. The short description might be "a group of people that want to impress the other people at Burning Man with their created space".
One group collects costumes (discarded cloths as well as items they buy) and then encourages people to come and pick a costume and wear it. Another group built a giant video screen and invited people to come to a central booth to play Tetris against other random people. Another group gave away free watermelon pieces, still another group gave out free ice-cream. (I suppose if you really wanted to spend all your time mooching you could bring no food at all to Burning Man and still survive, though your diet would hardly be balanced).
By far the most common inner core structures are bars such as The Golden Cafe) or the Ashram Galactica. The groups that run these bars spend thousands of dollars to set up and run super-tents where people can come in, sit down and be served alcoholic drinks and food. They build structures that are decorated around a theme and they are typically open 24 hours a day for the duration of the event. Some 125 people set up and run the Ashram Galactica, an operation that requires major logistical and planning effort. Why anyone would do this is - at this time - unfathomable to me. I must suppose that it starts small, and just snowballs year after year.
The other major type of camp are the music camps, such as Opulent Temple, Root Society, and The Hookahdome. These camps a the biggest structures/places in the whole of Burning Man and they are filled with huge speakers, powered by fleets of generators, and blasting out very odd music from nightfall till dawn. Opulent Temple had lasers, two huge projection screens, and even a flame thrower all to add to the musical effect. Going to the Opulent Temple at night was better than going to the best dance clubs in San Francisco and, again, there was no charge. As for me, musically I don't particularly enjoy the music they played but I was truly impressed by the shows. How these huge music camps collect enough money to operate at Burning Man is beyond my understanding.
Driving around streets of the Burning Man camp are tanker trucks filled with water that spray the streets, temporarily turning the dusty roads to mud paths that are best not stepped on. Also there are sewage tankers that pump out the human waste from the many Port-A-Potties that are located around the grounds.
By far the most interesting vehicles are the Art Cars, the bizarrely decorated cars (and more rarely, bikes) that show off the creativity of the builders. Some of the art cars I saw were giant snails, an "eel" at least 75 feet long, a huge double-decker bus covered on one side with loudspeakers with a DJ on the top, and a huge glowing heart shape above him. There were so many art cars that I could not count them all, I lost track at 150. Cat cars, fish cars, sailboat cars, a car shaped like a sandworm from Dune, a dragon that could breath fire and more, and more again.
Nearly all the art cars are designed to be viewed at night and so they are decorated with lights. Formerly this was done with neon lights but now EL-wire is the new thing and few cars did not make use of the amazing properties of this new light source.
...(more later)...
Posted by rakhier at 03:16 PM | Comments (0)