Tag Archives: Party

Sep 9 2014

It’s the Art, Stupid

It seems that, behind every weary merchant visiting the oasis with a caravan of treasures to gift, is a team of Sherpas to wipe their ass. According to the New York Times, the rich people of Burning Man try to “one up” each other with the lavishness of their camps. Whether it’s prototype inflatable dhomes or stackable cubes or 5-star teepees, just having an RV is no longer enough.

neighboorsTeepeeMany Burners have expressed outrage at this behavior, believing that “Radical Self-Reliance” is at odds with “getting others to do your shit for you”. Personally, I think a designated driver is a major safety issue. It sucks to be that person at Burning Man, so if a few people can chip in and pay a driver, Burning Man will survive. I can’t cook, so I don’t mind if someone else cooks for me. If I have to buy that person a ticket, and give them a place in my RV, that’s fine. “Oh you can’t come to Burning Man, you can’t cook”.

I think the deeper shame in this is that the Super-Sherpa-Burners have lost the point. If you want to one-up other rich people at Burning Man, don’t do it on the level of creature comforts and luxury goods that you airlift in with private planes.

OUT-DO EACH OTHER WITH THE ART

Perhaps one way to facilitate this would be promoting a closer link between Big Art and Art Cars, and the Theme Camps behind them. As in, “we’re Thunderdome Camp, and our Art Contribution is Thunderdome”. Or, “we’re Star Star and our Art Contribution is Daily Circus performances”. Right now, shit is going on everywhere, there’s cool shit everywhere to look at, but it’s all pretty anonymous.

burning_man_girls_robert_scalesBurning Man has been called the Special Olympics of Art – just getting there is good enough. The all-inclusive nature of the art means that there is no requirement for talent, nor indeed any form of reward. There is no real after-market for art of this type, and whatever there is has been cobbled together by Burners. Logistics are left up to the creative types, who each have to figure it out for themselves. BMOrg seem more interested in the artists working at their event(s), than getting their art into the broader community independently of their tentacles. And their answer to “people tagging the art” is not “promote the art as sacred”, it’s “more rules”.

Burners pay inflated ticket prices, and only a tiny amount of that goes to the artists – and gets split over just 63 projects. It’s about $12 per ticket – less than the ticket processing fee, or the government cut for all the LEOs.

Many of the artists who are awarded Art Honorarium grants are wealthy in their own right. Why award the project to them, and not to the starving artists who can’t produce a piece without money to buy the materials? The answer lies in politics as much as merit or reason or justice. There are no guidelines for art grants, it’s at the whim of BMOrg, and if they prefer to favor their friends when they come to dispensing our money, who’s stopping them?

If the rich people were to direct the focus of Burner attention away from their own personal comforts and vanities, and towards the contributions they make to this awesome party, I’m sure that would ease the ire of many in the community who feel passionately upset by gentrification.

Will Smith chose not to take one of his fleet of these to Burning Man this year

Will Smith chose not to take one of his fleet of these to Burning Man this year

I’m on your side, rich people! I need A/C too. It’s the desert, FFS. I was using an RV at Burning Man before there even was “radical self-reliance”. I didn’t stop being a Burner just because Larry wrote a page of words one day, 20 years into the event. “Oh, Larry wrote words! Better disable the generator!” Lecture me with the Tin Principles all you want, it doesn’t make you a Burner or take my 11 burns away from me.

To me, going to Burning Man automatically makes you rich – but I accept that many Burners are seriously rich. I know that rich people give SO much to Burning Man, that there wouldn’t be a Burning Man without them. The whole event is based on the premise of ridiculous destruction of wealth for the purposes of temporary entertainment. It’s like people lighting cigars with flaming hundred dollar bills – times a billion.

The Burnier-Than-Thous have it wrong, saying that rich people don’t get it. It seems to me that they are being radically self-reliant if they are smart enough to want privacy in their camps, and playful social interactions with randoms on the Playa. Part of self-reliance is being able to defend yourself and your tribe from dicks. The number of dicks is skyrocketing, and now they are publicly advocating their dickish actions. It’s not the fault of people who can afford to rent RVs that privacy is required; and just because they sleep comfortably doesn’t mean it’s impossible for them to “get Burning Man”.

cops gunsMore than anything else, I think it is the government infiltration of Burning Man – both overt and covert – that is driving the walled off RV compounds. You used to welcome any random into your camp, and the first thing you’d offer them would be a beer. If you were passing a joint round – which people did, since it was hundreds of miles away from anywhere, in the middle of the remote desert, at a festival – then you would take a hit and pass it on to someone next to you, even if they were a stranger. Puff puff pass, just likes kids have been doing at festivals since the Sixties.

Then, the cops started doing “stings”. Dressing officers up as Burners – “off duty clothing” – and trying to entrap them into breaking the law in front of them. They’re looking for drugs, for people serving alcohol to anyone underage, for people sharing food, public displays of lewdness, and anything else that could be banned and ticketed. Give them an excuse, and they’ll come to your camp with sniffer dogs. Meaning that one random wandering into your camp and lighting a joint, could spoil it for everyone.

This year, it sounds like the cops were much better – chilled, enjoying the party, taking pictures with Burners. But it’s too late – the trust has been destroyed. This is no longer a city of friends. The trust hasn’t been destroyed by rich people; it’s by all these spies trying to bust innocent Burners, while letting the thieves and vandals run rampant. What Burners want to do is illegal, despite being harmless – from smoking a joint to driving at 6mph in a 5mph zone to shirt-cocking. Rich people didn’t make those rules – alright, technically, at the top pulling the puppet strings of government are the Uber-rich who do make the rules, and yes many Bohemian Grovers go to Burning Man – but most of the rules that have led to these RV compounds and private entrances were made by BMOrg in co-operation with Federal and State authorities.

No-one is affecting your enjoyment Burning Man if they got a free ticket, or didn’t have to pay for their flight. How is getting $400 cash different from getting a free ticket? For many who aren’t rich, getting casual employment for a few shifts at Burning Man is the only way they can attend. Crack down on Sherpas, the rich will still be rich and do whatever they want, but now these poor Sherpas – willing to work for their ticket, instead of being Sparkle Ponies – won’t be able to go.

The answer to this is not “ban Sherpas”. How could you possibly police that, if you can’t stop bike or sign theft? It has been going on for years, and fighting against it now is pointless, in my opinion. The horse bolted a long time ago. You might as well ban planes, RVs, delivery trucks, dance music, cars newer than 2010, and so on. Stealing signs will change nothing, and may lead to violence as people try to defend their property against drug-fuelled vandals with political grudges.

The answer is to change the focus.

earth harp temple of transition

Let people do whatever they want in their camps. That’s their private area, where they and their tribe of friends and family and fellow travellers make their “home within a home” for a week. If they want randoms in their camp, let them make clearly marked “random zones”, where you can come and hang out and get to meet them. Don’t just assume “I’m at Burning Man, and Radical Inclusion says I’m entitled to fall asleep in the middle of your camp”. Usually these “party roadkill” people pass out on the most comfortable spaces, preventing other, awake people from using those.

Burning Man is not about invading your neighbor’s space, in the name of some misguided class war protest.

It’s about the art.

cargo cult painting

BMOrg make the rules, but Burners make the city.  There is something we can do, if enough readers want to help.

Together, we can try to re-direct the focus to the art. Camps should be proud of which art pieces they are bringing to share with the rest of us. If rich people want to sponsor art anonymously, Burning Man lets them hide anonymously within a Theme Camp, and even more anonymously behind a Playa name. Larry Harvey likes to say “no artist at Burning Man ever signed their art”, but let’s change that. Let’s promote the amazing artists behind the event a bit more.

How Will We Do This?

Starting today, we are going to have a competition. “Best of Burning Man”. And it’s going to be as crowd-sourced as we can practically make it, at short notice and with the limited resources of a Gifted blog.

You guys submit here, in the comments on the Web or Facebook, your nominations for best art piece. We will collect the nominations, then present the most popular finalists for a vote. Everyone votes, and we declare a winner.

What does this mean for the artists? Even if they don’t win, they can get a sense of how their piece was perceived by the community. If they would like to participate with the rest of the community, they might want to share something about themselves and their art, and the meaning of the piece.

This is the direct opposite of the way Burning Man does it – receive thousands of applications, and pick a few winners arbitrarily. Every artist can be included in this, and to win, you have to be the best in the eyes of the people. Even to be in the final 20, you will have to have pleased a lot of people.

 

Categories are:

Best Art

Best Art Car

Best Camp

Best Music (camp or Art Car)

Best Music (artist)

Best Photo

Worst of Burning Man – could be Will Crawl, Exodus, rain, bike theft, David Kiss’s performance art piece, anything.

Over to you, Burners. Nominate away! I’m interested to see how this turns out.

Sep 8 2014

Dark Arps Reports

A guest post here by Burner Dark Arps:

 

At the risk of sounding like one of those insufferable bores who bangs on about Burning Man, I’m just going to go ahead and say this: everything you’ve ever heard about Burning Man, good or bad, is probably true. You can stop reading there if you want.

This was my first year, and I’d been avoiding it for a while. Too expensive. Not a big fan of the extreme heat, or camping in it. The dust penetrates everything. Too much hype, which automatically makes me suspicious of any event. But, enough people whose opinions I trust assured me this would be the festival to end all festivals, and with an open mind, and the opportunity to connect with some old friends on the playa, I made a commitment to go.

Burning Man and the culture it purportedly represents is one giant contradiction, and every Burner knows it. The notion of an anti-capitalist event which requires thousands of dollars of investment to adequately prepare for, is patently absurd. I have never spent so much money at so many major shopping outlets (Walmart, Costco etc); the idea of purchasing the necessary provisions at indie vendors is almost laughable when you consider the sheer amount of stuff you need to be comfortably self-sustaining for a week in the desert. Then there is the unfathomable amount of propane, gasoline and other carbon-based fuels which are burned in the process of transporting and entertaining 66,000 people in the desert, as inefficient, highly polluting 60 kilowatt generators drive state-of-the-art mobile soundsystems, military-grade spotlights and lasers, and an enormous mechanical octopus which spews fire from its eight tentacles, high into the sky. This is not an environmentally sensitive, or sustainable event, regardless of what you might have heard.

2014 unicorn playa veronicah cohenIt goes without saying that the desert is an inhospitable place. You face dehydration and exhaustion during the day, and the nights are cold enough to induce hypothermia for the inebriated and ill-prepared. Black Rock City is *dangerous*, and yet mercifully devoid of health and safety officials getting in the way of your fun. It’s a very adult party, but kids are allowed. If you take the time to read the disclaimer on the back of your ticket, the over-arching message is that you are responsible for taking care of your own shit, and if you don’t, you might die… and sadly, people do. Certainly, injuries abound as you drunkenly careen around thousands of peacocking ravers or climb 70 feet to the top of an Alien-styled Trojan horse to watch the sun rise, back-lighting an uncompromisingly beautiful landscape adorned with impossibly grandiose man-made art.

The third night is when the sheer scale and scope of the event hit me, and it hit home hard. A wave of freak lightning storms on Monday caused a 24h delay in getting a good portion of attendees on to the playa… so by Wednesday night most had arrived and set up, and the party was just getting started. Standing atop one of the roaming art cars in the middle of the playa (Tree House, from Victoria, which had previously been struck by said lightning storm), I was treated to a 360 degree panoramic and witnessed the most incomprehensible, densely-packed melee of countless brightly-lit mutant-vehicles, towering LED art installations, enormous sound-stages, and tens of thousands of ravers on creatively illuminated bikes, all criss-crossing and interacting, as the din of a thousand bass-bins massaged the orifices on either side of my disbelieving little brain. The comical outline of a life-sized basking shark eating an enormous psychedelic carafe as a giant, mechanised scorpion mashes its pincers and spews fire from its stinger, is a sight difficult to process the first time around.

“They” say a bunch of things at Burning Man. “You don’t know until you go” is one of them, but I’m doing my best to describe it anyway… not that I would want my best description to be an adequate substitute for anyone’s attendance. They also say, when you arrive at BRC, “Welcome Home”. At first, I wasn’t sure what that really meant, but I think I know now: If you’ve made it there, you are welcome everywhere you go, as if every stranger you encounter is a friend or acquaintance you’ve known for years. Human-to-human interactions flow with a joyous ease which is difficult to fathom when compared with the insular, distanced relationships we typically endure in a 21st century urban environment. All it takes is a smile and a “hey, how’s it going?”, and you might find yourself deep in stimulating conversation for the rest of the day. The inhabitants of this temporary city are some of the happiest and funniest and most beautiful people I have ever encountered and it is that, more than the perfectly-teched soundsystems, 20w lasers, elaborate staging, and the world’s best DJs and performers, that makes a great party.

I laughed so hard, I cried, and I cried so hard, I laughed. I get it now, Burning Man is the greatest party on earth, it’s in a desert, and I am coming back.

thanks to Parker for this photo

thanks to Parker for this photo

Sep 6 2014

(Kiss) (ASS) It’s A Big Farce

clown burning manIt occurred to me that this sign-stealing incident, publicized by its author on various Burning Man facebook groups, happened after BMOrg announced before the Burn that because sign theft was so prevalent, Burners should treat signs as art and decorate them to jazz up their neighborhoods.

The name of the sign stealing-tackling project? ASS

The name of the now-famous tackled sign stealing prankster? David KISS

Kiss-Ass. On K Street.

Get it? Surely that’s way too much of a coincidence to be totally unrelated. Project ASS, my ass.

or, perhaps, God is a Burner, and this is His way of responding to those premature rumors about His death that were posted at burningman.com…

On 8/8/14 BMOrg spokeperson Will Chase said:

8thAndHeartSometimes, when the citizens of Black Rock City are confronted with a challenge, they turn it into an art project. This, ladies and gentlemen, is one of those times.

The street signs that adorn every corner of BRC are not only beautiful, they’re functional. Not only are they functional, they are critical to public safety. When that ambulance is looking to find YOU, they need to know what street they’re on. SO DON’T REMOVE STREET SIGNS!

Now, despite what we say, we know it’ll happen anyway. So let’s solve this with an art project! Here’s how …

Adopt a street corner in your neighborhood, and augment the street sign with aesthetically pleasing, informative signs of your own making!

We’re calling this the Adopt a Street Sign (ASS) project, because we’re 12-years old.

Radical Self-Expression, meet Communal Effort. BOOM. Make babies.

Of course, no-one could have anticipated that if you tell 70,000 anarchists “DON’T REMOVE STREET SIGNS”, that some of them would disobey.

Right?

another thief bragging on social media stole this

another thief bragging on social media stole this. Coming soon? Bike theft selfies

photo: david-kiss.com

photo: david-kiss.com

The cross-referencing aspiring DJ is happy to promote his upcoming gigs with Christ at david-kiss.com. I mean, really? Another coincidence? I would dismiss this as being not a real figure, except there is a David Kiss on our Facebook group trying to defend his sign-adopting actions by attacking us and dismissing the economic value of the sign.

The street prank has been publicly endorsed by “Founder” Peter Hirshberg as a “Cacophony-like prank” that I just didn’t get. It seems I’m far from the only one who doesn’t find theft from fellow Burners funny, whether it’s signs, bikes, or a beer from a cooler.

The self-publicization of this act by the prankster at this time is a convenient distraction away from the connection between plug-n-play camping and the non-profit Burning Man Project’s Board of Directors, some of whom appear to have financial interests in these types of camps. The story broke when Kiss published his Project ASS art piece antics on Facebook on Friday 9/5/14 at 2:02pm. The story about Jim Tananbaum broke on Facebook the night before, at 6:17pm in a smaller group and then was repeated at 7:37pm on the Burning Man unofficial group.

The choice of Star Star is interesting, since they seem to have had a lot to offer the Playa in comparison to others. There are rumors going on about an A-list hollywood actor being the money behind the camp, a gift to his campmates because he picked up the tab. I see nothing wrong with anything Star Star did in this story.

In a way, isn’t this whole “incident”  serving the purposes to promote star-star as the model for others to follow, and continue the discussion about Plug-n-Play camps which is proving so popular in the mainstream media? When we investigate this plug-n-play camp, we find performances being gifted and Burnerly behavior of discussion with the marauding vandal over Principles  – there are good guidelines in the story for how plug-n-players should behave when confronted with louts like this.

It promotes pranking and it promotes plug-n-play – while pretending to protest against it, it’s really just continuing the conversation about it. That’s the way it works with these pranks, irony or not, your attention is directed to a particular issue of the prankster’s choice. It encourages Burners to take out any frustrations they have with the governance of the city on each other, not BMOrg. It downplays the growing problem of theft as just another type of  art. Kiss’s actions and ASS’s purpose appear to be the same. Kiss-ASS united.

Where do you draw the line between prank, irony, satire, snark…and civilized behavior? BMOrg, it seems, is happy to say “stealing is going to happen, adopt your own, let’s turn it into art”.

For some time, I have been considering another potential motive behind the OMGSTEP and all the other seemingly bizarre decisions BMOrg makes with the ticketing and treatment of Veterans. Something more than just money.

What if this is all a prank to them? One big farce? With us as the patsies, set up in the petri dish for their amusement? “Let’s come up with a new rule, and see how they respond! It’s art! It’s pranking! We never said don’t be evil, in fact we launched this thing with Hellco and bought souls with contracts!” The more shit they can put on the community to make their burn worse, the more complaining there is about it on social media, the more suffering they can create – the more amusing it is to the Creators with the Power To Make Suffering. They sit in First Camp and network with 1%ers who paid $650 for tickets on the sly, who flew in on private planes and scooted over on Segways. They laugh at the unconnected Burners who spent the year in the STEP queue hoping for a chance to go, only to have tickets yanked out from the queue at the last minute for no apparent reason. They laugh at the Burnier-Than-Thous who refuse to buy tickets on the aftermarket and lecture others about it, out of some misguided sense of loyalty. “Ha ha, look at these Burners on Facebook trying to stop scalping, when we the borg are sending out emails trying to sell tickets above face value! In the name of charity, of course.”

In 2014 it was Sherpa Camps, for 2015 it looks like the next target may be Sound Camps – who according to BRC Weekly are going to be banned from posting DJ lineups.