Just when you think the stories about Commodification Camp Caravancicle couldn’t get any worse, we get this leak from the Facebook group Sherpa Liberation Front. It seems $13,000 can buy you a room in a canvas cube, but it can’t make you cool.
Caravancicle, The Lost Hotel
MOOP #fail
is that decoration on a yellow bike (L)?
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what happened to radical inclusion? All this hate toward these people but how may of you have actually been damaged by them, of was your experience at BM worse because of them? This is just hate talk that makes the people that actually built this amazing structure feel like shit and absolutely doesn’t change anything to the plugnpayers that are not even on this blog. Cut the crap and realize that BM is not you own personal playground and it doesn’t play by your rules, no matter how ‘en-lighted’ you feel they are. The Playa takes care of everybody, exactly in the way that they need to be taken care of. I don;t give a shit about the entitled, precisely because I have no desire of experiencing BM in that way, so who cares what they do. And for the sherpas I want to say: you went to BM to make money? You should have expected that things could go very wrong, keep the bitching between u and your employer and leave the artists that build this beautiful structure alone.
What structure? The hotel?
Radical inclusion? So that trumps Participation, Self-Reliance, Decommodification, Inclusion, Self-Reliance, Giving, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, and LNT? There was this guy they caught at one burn who was systematically stealing things from camps, assisted by his cute GF. Should he be radically included? Or maybe you only want just that one of the Tin Principles(TM)?
As for me, I won’t give up all the others for the one, because once you radically include the default world, the playa becomes the default world.
This camp turned into a joke. What started as “we’ll build you a camp and then we’ll take the extra $ and bulks ourselves one….” Turned into an obnoxious client named Ari who brought hookers and other crap as he sold it upstream for more.
Yeah, some decent people involved, they’ve been around, but they made a bad decision. They need to own it now. Scumbags like Ari would never make it to burningman if they weren’t enabled by these “good burners” with no cmon sense. All of you, please take your all expense junkets trips to the Kentucky Derby next year and leave BRC in the rest view window.
And wondering what board member sponsored them? I put money in the guy from SF (Bman general counsel?) who was involved with last year’s temple …..
Jim Tananbaum was the director. He registered the Caravancicle.com domain name, so it seems fair to say it is his camp.
He is an M & A/investment banking guy. He was appointed to the board quietly, just a few weeks before Burning Man. At the same time, Chris Weitz who invented the Ashram Galactica (ironic) hotel stepped down, but left his wife Mercedes Martinez there. At the same time Matt Goldberg, former CEO of Lonely Planet and now a SVP at QVC, joined the Board as a Director.
Burning Man staffer Bear Kittay was on the camp’s guest list.
Those are just infuriating facts. Can’t someone offer some unsubstantiated speculation that will make this all seem like a total fabrication or misunderstanding by the “haters?” Anyone?….
or at least criticize the grammar and spelling!
A solution to the PnP fracas. Prank update the Bingo with “_____ Find someone with a DPW patch and tell them how hard your default world job is but the money is good, so, you know, it works out. Then hug them.”
The people involved in building and designing The Lost Hotel are long time burners who were part of the Temple build crew last year and have been involved in bringing art to the playa for year. So maybe everyone should stop the judgement and get off all your high horses and take your negative energy somewhere else. It’s sad that a bunch of people that are so concerned with protecting the sanctity of Burning Man are so clueless. Notice in one of the pictures has a structure from Otic Oasis??? Do you even know how hard people work to make this happen???
which picture? If Lost Hotel want to publicly distance themselves from Caravancicle (which they built at their camp) then they should make a statement to that effect.
I’m sure it’s not easy building an entire hotel from scratch, particularly one of a $13,000 standard.
So just how do we balance the Tin Principles. Since they are so malleable, is there a standard weighting …at least before money changes hands? Can we “radically include” people who come with the intent of stealing things from others who come? How much of the default world values do we include? The Ten Commandments? How much self-expression do you have to do to abandon civic responsibility and LNT? Is there like a points system? And can I use HHonors points to balance things out, or is money the only default world commodification allowed?
If they are malleable, then they are not really principles and should be called something esle, since a principle by definition is “a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning”.
In the launch of the Philosophical Center of the Burning Man Project, Chief Philosophy Officer Larry Harvey has gone into further detail on the Principles in a series of posts at burningman.com. We are told that their ambiguity and hypocrisy is what makes them great – it’s the dynamic tension between the principles that lets us define the cult-ure. Believe that if you’re a true believer, or make up your own mind if you’re a sane person in full control of their faculties.
Phooey. Unfortunately you have NO clue. No real Burner would COMMODIFY this city. PERIOD. You don’t get it and that makes me sad.
We camped at 808 & K and have been super saddened to see K Street emerge as the poster child for Plug & Play camps–our block was super fun & friendly DIY burners! Every time we biked by this place we thought, “Wow, look at those cubes. I love seeing big camps that want to be placed way out in the suburbs, it’s like finding a dance party at the trash fence. They built something really impressive, I wonder if it’s a dance party some of the time. We should check it out sometime.” But then it never really looked hoppin’ enough to drop in. Those uniformly black, big-tired bikes & rows of identical hexayurts looked suspiciously military.
The one time I went out and biked around in that neighborhood, it came across as cold, sterile, and lifeless.
The Board member who is in bed with this Commodification Camp, placed them at the back of the city to keep them off the beaten track (and to keep their precious money makers away from all the noise… notice though they are on a prime corner with a direct shot to the playa.
There is no “I” in Bingo.
First Camp the Original plug and play camp. Built by volunteers for peeps with money.
While I thought the of of written “game” was kinda sad, upon reading, I have to credit the authors with at least attempting to get the reader to step out and participate.
It could have contained warnings about dust, germs, free-loaders and other things to watch out for.
I don’t really get the upset. The Burn was not sold out. These rich folks deprived no one of a ticket. If the camp abused employees/sherpas, those people could have walked.
While I don’t think someone at Caravancicle would have the slightest idea what I love about the event or had an “authentic” Burning Man experience… who cares?
Maybe some of them will return, start a camp, fund some art or in some other way be transformed over time.
If all the energy that people put into worrying and bitching about these high-end camps were put into making better art for next year, we’d all be better served and happier in the end.
I’m really intrigued by what you mean by “The Burn was not sold out.” because it certainly was officially, sure there may have been some last minute tickets available to buy after people picked up tickets from Will call but a. that was being heavily discouraged by both the BMOrg and local authorities and b. having to take a chance like that is a big ask for people who don’t (or can’t) camp with an all-inclusive camp like this. The fact is there is a population cap on the city and tickets are hard to get, if a person group of people require more tickets for their paid support staff that means less tickets are available for everyone else.
they announced this year’s peak population as 65,000 – even though 70,000 is permissible, which we might expect if the event was sold out. Sold out=the venue was at capacity. The capacity of this venue is 70,000 but officially they only sold 63,000 tickets.
All the tickets were sold though, just because some people who had tickets didn’t turn up or the BMOrg was conservative with their estimations of how many non-ticketed people would be on site or whatever that doesn’t mean other people who wanted to go but didn’t have a ticket were able to buy one.
Teegan –
Without knowing whether or not the event was an official “sell out”, nobody I knew was denied a ticket if they hunted, even a little. I just don’t think these P&P use up so many tickets that a shortage of tickets is the big argument against them.
Heck, they’ve provided more entertainment than most camps if you count all the uproar and discussion they’ve created. Haven’t seen discussion like this since the man was set on fire early.
I don’t know. I just don’t get all the fuss. There were several square miles of Burning Man without rich people and sherpa’s. You had to go to 9&K to see these camps, which I did… Isn’t there room for everyone to have the experience they want?
The official sales all sold out. There were people BEGGING to buy aftermarket tickets all over ePlaya and Facebook right up to the event. Anyone who bought a ticket for an employee rather than a participant in any of the sales did so at the expense of a participant who then had to take a chance of getting scammed in the aftermarket or perhaps give up on coming.
If attending the burn requires flights to be booked you can’t afford to wait to the last minute to make those plans while you hunt for a ticket you may not find in the after market. Likewise it would be a big ask to expect someone to book flights hoping they could find an aftermarket ticket and the flights wouldn’t be a waste.
Buying tickets in the after market is a risk, there are plenty of stories doing the rounds of dodgy sellers selling voided or fake tickets or selling a single ticket to multiple people. Not everyone can afford to take the risk that when they get to the gate, after all their prep and travel, they won’t be allowed in.
The other option is of course paying through the nose for a scalped ticket, that is not only unaffordable for a lot of people it is officially against the BMOrg’s own rules.
And before you bring up the “get involved in your local burner community” not everyone lives in a big city that has a “local burner community” so the possibility of buying from a trusted friend of a friend is just not a possibility for a lot of people.
There were no tickets left to buy through official avenues, that is the very definition of “sold out” the fact that the people you know happened to be able to get tickets doesn’t change the fact that the tickets were all sold. Some of them were sold to employees who were not able to participate fully. That is not cool.
My issue here isn’t whether or not the way they burned is acceptable, it is that it required more than one ticket per participant for them to do so and as a result other participants missed out.
Gawd, the “guided” playa visit game. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything more revolting or pathetic – ever – and I’ve witnessed two mass-murder trials, two exorcisms, two autopsies and two children going through toilet training. True story. Ick.
Stealing from Sleep No More, here is something they could have done: have them line up and give them playing cards. Then split them up into random groups determined by the playing cards – grouped with people they don’t know as much as possible. Use their mutant vehicle to drop these new groups off at desperate locations on the playa and BRC. Then… experience.
much cooler than “get someone to witness you picking up MOOP” or “hug a stranger and tell them you were instructed to”
You know, I really doubt many of these folks demanded a silly bingo game as a condition of their contract. If you have an issue with this, it’s with the person who thought their customers would need it.
At least they’re trying to acculturate their “guests.” It could be worse.
A game of Twister would have been more appropriate, clothing optional.
Bureaucrats and their agendas!
I actually think this is a great idea. Many of these people are coming to their first burns without any idea of how to be open to new experiences in this fashion. Any number of these items could cause the person trying to put a check mark on their page to have a genuine and moving experience that will shape the rest of their burn. Its a jumping off point. With only a few exceptions (I.e., water truck) these are mostlygood ideas. I’m really tired of the safari camp griping. And thus is coming from someone whose year of living-space expenses could be paid with the cost if admission they pay for a week. Making a fuss over this sheet is truly crying over nothing.
Fuck them all.
My fingers are too wide, I keep saying I like shit I don’t.
Anyone would think I live in LA.
Presuming you have actually been to BRC, how would your first experience be colored if these crib notes were your introduction? …And that’s not considering that you did not work for the experience like 99% of the burners did. All I can say is the my first Burning Man experience would have been entirely different if someone had handed this to me. (In fact, I might have left immediately!) Big time fail, and proof that these are nothing more than corporate retreats in a novelty setting.
The Lost Hotel has a picture of their de-mooped site on their Facebook page ( https://www.facebook.com/TheLostHotel ) … They’re confused why they got a red mark, although admitted leaving behind some cigarette butts. The red marks were meant for jugs and larger items. Someone there suggests Caravancicle may have dumped moop on their site after Lost Hotel left.
Haha their facebook pic was a key?! Enough said right there.
Since when is life on the playa meant to be a game. At worst this is offensive; at best its sad and pathetic.
Reposted from the Sherpa Liberation front: What a bunch of corporate twat waffles, this is a sad state of affairs when your camp “guru” or “life coach” has to devise things straight out of a corporate retreat handbook to make you feel like you are having a burner experience. Worse yet, they have to have someone witness this and check it off so they can win a prize??? How about this for a new novel idea, find yourself! Give someone a hug because you want to, not because it is on the list. Hug everyone you pass all day because it makes you feel good. Make someone else feel good because it is the right thing to do, not because it is on a scavenger hunt dare list. Be fucking genuine! How about that for a daring thing to check off your list.. Don’t ask stupid ass contrived questions like “what does your alter ego do for a living” Ask something with thought and meaning especially for that person. Live for the moment and in the moment. Maybe you will come away a better human being
Or alternatively, walk around all week only wearing your wife beater.
Everyone loves that.
Especially if you sit on their sofa.
Or borrow their bike without asking and return it when you’ve obviously just cycled for miles.
Or take an open mouthed shower in the road sprinkler trucks spray.
Why don’t they give the butt plug and playa camps PROPER advice?
Oh wait, the asshats had the water truck…
OK, go get your genitals photographed at Spank the Monkey and email the tumblr page to your staff upon return to default world, prizes who can guess your cock!
Note: those you’ve already sexually harassed can’t participate