Got your New Years plans locked in? It looks like New Bohemia NYE at the Armory is where Bay Area Burners will be gathering to see in 2016. Production crews Opel & Vau de Vire are bringing out a combination of the best Burning Man talent to support like Opulent Temple, Distrikt, Dusty Rhino + Flaming Lotus Girls, Michael Christian, Kinetic Steamworks, the Scumfrog and Stanton Warriors.
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There is no dress code—the sky’s the limit on your creativity. That being said, New Bohemia is a themed NYE party where participants are encouraged to snazz up and get in the spirit of the cross section of worlds we are creating and bringing together inside The Armory. Not a hippy-paisley Bohemia mind you, but more along the lines of the Burning Man playa meets Moulin Rouge. A kinky, naughty twist is A-OK and encouraged, but, as much as we hate to say it, no outright nudity.
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Sorry, shirt-cockersporky piggers. This is not the party for you.
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If you haven’t seen a Vau de Vire Society show before, you’ve been missing out. This is from last year:
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Here’s what the promoters have to say on Facebook:
New Bohemia NYE 2016 is the 3rd Annual NYE’s event at the iconic Armory. It is, and has always been designed to be a special and co-created destination, bringing together the best of the avant garde and underground creative worlds of the Bay Area. A world like no other. You’re invited to part the velvet red curtains to find an SF twist on those timeless bohemian values of Truth, Beauty, Love and Freedom. Deeper, and higher into this castle find cutting edge sounds, SF’s most dynamic music collectives and the synergy of intentional revelry on the precipice of a new year.
Poets and performers, aerialists and DJ’s, burlesque dancers and live painters, acrobats and absinthe hawkers, Art Cars and visual treats, crimson busts and decadent costumes; are all to be found in different markets, plazas, private upstairs chambers and titillating dark corners and streets inside New Bohemia NYE.
We have amazing music, but we don’t go ‘mega headliners’, because we’re much more interested in creating a community based spectacle of art and talents amongst friends and the amazing people of our circle of friends. And – we wanted to keep the ticket prices accessible for a party this big and offering so much on NYE. . The curtain is raising again on the show worth getting excited about New Years Eve. Let’s ring it in together.
YES – we’re totally aware of of some of the previous venue kinks (pun intended) around lines, seating options, bathrooms, and security. Trust us that we care A LOT about making sure that even the things we don’t have total control over is 100% right for you on NYE. Our goal is to get you inside as fast as possible and enjoy an evening with friends in a World Like No Other and that everything clicks at a high standard all night. It’s a huge priority and you’ll be able to tell.
One of the VIP packages lets you take advantage of the Armory’s dual role as head (cough) quarters for kink.com, with your own film set to do with as you see fit…
What’s a Burner party like without Burning Man? Come along and find out…
(This week, I’m truly honored to have spoken to two East Coast Burners that are truly larger than life. If you’ve partied in NYC in any significant fashion you’ve probably seen them out, dressed to the nines. They’re four time Burners with a unique perspective that we’d all do well to learn from. Diva PsychicStar (Patricia) repurposes furs & The Geniuz (Jeremiah) commands broadcasts. This is a deep dive folks, so turn on one of their favorite sets from playa, from White Ocean, Robot Heart, Pink Mammoth & Distrikt, while you read!)1. How was Burning Man 2015?! How did this all start for you two? Burning Man 2015 was challenging! It was our fourth Burn with each one being different and each one offering a new experience and takeaway. It takes a lot of money/effort to trek across the continent from New York to join the tens of thousands of Burners for an event culminating months of regional festivals and camp fundraisers. Our style is to mitigate as much of the dry, dusty Playa harshness as possible by bringing as many creature comforts and tried and true costumes as we can. We have always been RV campers, which gives us a leg up when it comes to daytime sleeping and shelter from the dust storms. Continue reading →
Burning Man have changed their privacy policy, and are asking Burners to create Burner Profiles in order to apply for tickets. The data is owned by the multi-entity hydra which is the various Burning Man for-profit and non-profit organizations, and it is shared amongst any of their “affiliates”; if they suspect you of violating any of their many legal contracts or other things, they can sell your information to anyone they like. Oh, and if someone takes over Burning Man, the policy could be changed at any time. At least that’s how I read the contract – I call on any legal eagles out there to correct me.
Although this news is a couple of weeks old now, I missed it while on vacation at the beach. I think they’re going in the wrong direction – this is a 1990’s Internet approach, not a 2013 one. A quarter of the world are on Facebook now, more than a third on the Internet: 2.4 billion people, up 566% since the year 2000; 4 billion email clients. 634 million websites, increasing at 51 million per year. More than 5 billion people with mobile phones, more than 1.1 billion on the Internet with smart phones; more than a billion people a month using Facebook. Facebook processes 2.7 billion Likes per day. People are sharing data, not trying to own the content created by others.
Think about this.
Burners.Me is just one of 60 million WordPress blogs. A few times, we’ve made the Top 100 WordPress sites in the world. Right now, our Alexa ranking is consistently in the top million websites in the world – ie the top 0.15%. Here’s how we stack up versus the official sites, funded from the $24 million a year at the gate, the $12 million a year non-party budget, etc.:
Burners.Me – # 145, 865 in the US; #924,682 in the world; 87 sites linking in – we’re top million, have been almost top half million at our peak
Burningman.com #15,665 in the US; #59,555 in the world; 5,552 sites linking in
Burningmanproject.org too small for US data; #3,455,512 in the world; 60 sites linking in
Blackrockarts.org too small for US data; #1,431,325 in the world; 293 sites linking in
And we’re not doing anything to make money from this. Just sharing our opinions, about a culture we love, and feel like we’ve been a part of for many years. You don’t have to agree with us, we welcome for you to comment here and disagree and share your own thoughts. We respect freedom of speech more than anything, definitely more than Burning Man’s 10 Principles.
I would really love for any readers of this blog to be able to post their own videos, photos, and stories. Some of the more adventurous Burners have been doing this anyway, and have been rewarded by the promotion of their project to tens of thousands of people per week. We promoted at least a dozen kickstarter projects last year, for example.
I use wordpress.com and I haven’t found an easy way to integrate the ability for anyone to upload their own photos and videos yet.
So today I’m trying a new additional platform where you can start your own discussion topics and share your own content, burners.ning.com. It’s rough and it looks like crap right now – that’s why we need Alpha Testers. Help us with ideas about how it can look and work better. Do you have any photos or music mixes from your times at Burning Man, that you’d like to share? Burning Man related stuff you’ve posted to YouTube? Post ’em, tag ’em. The ones on Flickr are too hard to find and discuss, in my opinion. Tribe had a moment of blossoming but died some years ago. Anything on ePlaya is clearly owned by BMOrg. And Reddit – who served 37 billion page views in 2012 – has now seemingly been Tar’get’d by the Cop-y-Right Wing.
Let’s make this an online community for Burner content, that is more in line with the free and open spirit of the Internet. We ask anyone who is interested to please help us out, create yourself a free profile at burners.ning.com. Share as little or as much data as you want, hell make up a fake name, we don’t care – it’s the Interwebz! Upload some of your Burning Man photos, share some of your stories and music. We will use the Creative Commons Attribution License – the content you choose as shareable can be used by other Burners for whatever they want, as long as they’re not profiting from it without acknowledging your ownership. The license does not erode your copyright ownership over your own digital information, it just describes a way that others can share your stuff on the Internet if they like it – without everything being red tape and a huge pain in the ass.
Whether this idea works or not is up to you, Burners. There’s nothing in this for us, in fact it’s only going to take more precious time and effort to administer; but it seems to me like the right thing to do. Or at least, to try…”there is no try, only do” – Yoda.
Information wants to be free! The world has benefitted so much from Open Source licenses and the philosophy of sharing and mutual benefit that underpins it. Not so much so from the Patent Trolls, suppressing brain-children because they want to own everything. These digital robber barons want to retain exclusive use of the invention, and restrict others from using it; this is the philosophy that led the world’s greatest scientist Nikola Tesla to die penniless, and is the opposite from that espoused by the Pirate Party about our obligation to share our culture heritage with others (for example).
Bruce Sterling? Now that’s a Burner from WAAAAAAY back. Is it a coincidence that Burning Man has eerie similarities to the sorts of things going on in the second video above – while it is being discussed as one of the similar events to the Davos World Economic Forum?
this infographic is from Russia…not sure what it all means!
We search images.google.com for photos related to “Burning Man”, we share them under the Fair Use provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. We’re allowed to do this, because we’re discussing an event in popular culture. Wherever possible, I attribute photos, and always if we get requested to by the photographer. Sometimes we have taken photos down – being polite will get you further than threats for this one. But that’s for this blog, burners.me – me and some of my friends commenting and sharing our opinions about Burning Man.
burners.ning.com is for everyone – please post everything, share everything, let’s have a Burner repository independent of the BMOrg…because we all have no idea who is going to be running the BMOrg in 5 years. Criticize us all you want, open dialog with a view to progressing to better solutions is what’s going to make this community better – but don’t be hurt if we defend ourselves from your barbs.
If any Burners have graphic skills and an inclination to make this easier for the whole community to use, please help us make it look nicer. And anyone with Burning Man related mixes, please post it in Music, let us know what year and camp it’s from as well as the DJ name if possible.
If it’s meant to fizzle and fails, then it fails… no skin off our nose, at least we tried something; but if you can help all of us by using your graphics, Internet and Social media skills to help build the global community of Burners: join our free alpha trial and share your ideas about how we can make the Burner world a better place. And please post all your Kickstarter projects there.
