“Let It Go” is nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song. Unfortunately, it’s “Let It Go” from Frozen, not our contender “Let It Go” from Spark: A Burning Man Story.
How confusing!
Ice beats heat – while America is suffering from a record cold snap. Coincidence? If you ask me Michael Franti’s song is way better. Oh well Burning Man, there’s always next year…and the year after…and so on.
Think anti-Burner Judge Jones is bad? The Huffington Post has published a list of “The Twelve Hatiest Haters Who Ever Hated”. My favorites:
1. Bill Murray hired a deaf-mute personal assistant just to piss people off.
Bill Murray was fed up with the studio and director Harold Ramis on the set of “Groundhog Day,” so he went very out of his way to keep them out of his way. After simply not answering phone calls and being late to shoots, they suggested that Murray hire a personal assistant that could serve as a go-between if he wasn’t willing to talk with them himself. Murray ended up agreeing to the suggestion and hired a “deaf-mute who spoke only American Sign Language.” In his explanation, Murray told the studio not to worry because he was going to learn sign language himself.
4. A Michigan brewery hated Nickelback so much that it turned down a lucrative endorsement deal.
A craft beer brewery in Michigan named Dark Horse turned down a huge endorsement deal from the band Nickelback because nobody really liked them. Nickelback wanted to feature a Dark Horse truck dropping off crates of the craft beer to a frat party, but the owner of the brewery said, “I absolutely hate that band.” At the time, the Nickelback-hating brewery employees lamented, “why can’t it be some cool band like Slayer?”
7. The creator of “NBA Jam” got the last laugh at Chicago Bulls fans everywhere.
Mark Turmell, lead designer of the extremely popular 90s video game “NBA Jam,” revealed in 2013 that he had rigged the game so that whenever the Chicago Bulls played the Detroit Pistons, they were at a steep disadvantage. According to Turmell, whenever the two teams would face off, Bulls’ star Scottie Pippen would have his skill ratings decreased to play poorly. If a game was close, almost none of the Bulls’ shots would be allowed to go in. As you may have guessed, Turmell was a huge Pistons fan.
ZDBlue, aka The Dean, has published an interesting blog post called “The Dissolution of Normal”. He says that “normal” is an artificial construct – something I have always agreed with. And being at Burning Man helps you feel that no matter how freaky you are, you’re not the biggest freak out there – I also agree, although living in San Francisco provides this feeling also.
You can read The Dean’s piece in it’s entirety here
…I love Burners on the playa, amazing creatures who exude love and light and snark all at the same time. A glorious cacophony of colorful freaks who will give until it hurts, take care of those who sometimes don’t deserve it and teach virgins the ways of the dust. Burners contain a higher than imaginable number of insane geniuses, spectacular artists, and folks who create and burn in ways I never thought possible nor practicable. A place and a people who can eat the focus of your life so intently for a week that you blissfully forget the other life you had mere days before.
…The thing that I find most amazing about Burning Man however is not the art, the insanity, the relaxation or even thePlaya Magic. No what I love the most is something I call the dissolution of normal. You see I think one of the problems we all face in the default world is that we have been fed the idea that there is something called normal. Given that the actual reality of normal is nothing but an artifice of statistics, we all, in so many ways are not normal. We constantly find ourselves falling above or below the line, not normal and conventional wisdom tells us normal good, not normal freak. This paints freak in a negative connotation which I refuse to accept, some of us have found ways to embrace our inner and outer freaks even in the default world. What did this for me was the dissolution of normal.
At Burning Man, stop wherever you are, slowly rotate 360 degrees, carefully take in the crowd around you and I promise you, within that view, you are not the biggest freak, never. Do it every day, five times a day, you will never be the biggest freak and if you are, find me because I want to know you and I’m sure as hell buying. This realization is incredibly freeing and truly allows you to let your freak flag fly. This is why I love Burning Man because if you embrace it, merge with it, normal dissolves and the real you can emerge, is accepted by the community and if you’re lucky you can carry the real you back into the default world.
And that, my friends, is the whole point of the thing. Rather than “go to Burning Man and be someone else for a week”, you go to Burning Man and find a whole community, a whole city there who will embrace you being yourself. Just don’t wear jeans and a Raiders t-shirt, or you’ll quickly learn the barriers to radical inclusion!