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Burning Man
Rating Details »
7 reviews for Burning Man
There is something about being out there in the desert that opens people, I always feel somehow more alive, my senses heightened, entirely possessed by the playful spirit.
Trying to articulate the experience is difficult, the threads of memory conspire to knit themselves into a intricate patterns that are hard to tease out into any formal shape.
I remember riding down Jupiter no hands, giant green glasses on, small children jumping on a trampoline waving, stopping to take Persian lime tea, sweet sour and dark all at once from a tiny glass cup. Riding through the full heat of the day, the playa eerily silent as I sped through a dust storm to visit with friends. Storm over, we head to centercamp and I find myself spanking a 6-ft tall blond woman in shiny red shorts, it's my birthday she said.
Like I said, it's hard to describe.
I think, Everyone should go at least once.
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**** WARNING - ATTEMPT AT HUMOR FOLLOWS **** This is just an attempt at humor based on a possible opinion and therefore not subject to lawsuits.
My first Burning Man was at least 15 years ago.... the last good one was probably 1994. Used to be you could drive your car right onto the desert, and drive into Gerlach to avoid the midday sun (for those of us with delicate constitutions) and enjoy a beer and a game of pool during the midday hours... then drive back at 100 mph back to camp, kicking up dust ... stopping by the Drive By Shooting Range to take a few shots with a gun from your own moving vehicle at stuffed animals planted on wooden stakes at the edge of the desert (Barney was the most hit of all)... and meeting the rocket guys and the gun camps and actually making friends with other camps and having people offer you some of their water or shade, looking out for each other....
Haven't been back lately. It was soooo incredible in the beginning and til the mid 90s, but in my opinion it took such a dark turn down into becoming exactly what it supposedly stood against - corporate culture governed by a ruling elite who decides how much you have to pay, where you can park, whose ass you have to kiss.... a place where no one cares about anyone else, except insofar as they can be amused or financially/materially enriched by them.
Or maybe I just got old and bitter.... but.... if I want to be around a crowd of stinky, dusty stoners in drag, and pay to park my car, I can just go to Reno and pretend they are not Republicans....
I would have given it 5 stars 10 years ago; now, sadly, I think burning man should be left in his own ashes, at least as far as my participation is concerned....
NOTE: After talking to some of the Burning man 'crew,' who told me that this year's burning man allegedly recaptured some of the original spirit, I will amend the review to say -- check it out for yourself if you are prepared for the brutal heat and crowds.
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The range of ratings for this event is perfectly indicative of the event itself, it is a totally different experience for each and every individual involved. There is no way to predict your neighbors, your attitude, your bed-mate's frame of mind, the art car that will or will not pick you up, the strangers you will love and the moochers you will hate. That for me is what's so great about the experience. My first year I had, literally, the best time of my life with the best camp, the best friends and the best location, ever. This year, the camp was next to a blaring day long dance party, there was a crazy moocher guy named Bailey who would show up naked and eat all of our food, and by the last day everyone was bickering. C'est la vie, literally. Go and see for yourself, ratings are nothing here.....
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burning man has become burnt up man and burnt up womini., i.e. too many trendies finishing up summer labors. went way back in the 90s and it was still relatively manageable with port-0-lets that didn't get overflowing till Sunday afternoon. Fascinating art happenings that time with some guy that had planted about 50 small stones with flashing red led lights in his "Future garden", then of course the art cars, the Fat Chance style belly dancing, huge line at the espresso bar Sunday morning. Lollapollaza.
For me, right on the verge. I sought to create a gap between the mental constraints and the perceptual rawness, which is usually so subjugated by the mind. The mental structures are usually superimposed on reality so perfectly that they are confused with it. Two ways to escape: purposefully alter your brain functionality or remove all the habitual environmental anchors. At Burning Man, people do both at once. There were whimsical and touching experiences - telling a fortune-teller his fortune, watching the faces of old and young watching the burn, floating in the night, encircled by a school of luminous fish and wandering 6 ft tall eyeballs - but the general feel was disappointing. I witnessed the huge straining to be an individual at all costs, where everybody feels that expression equals experience and often replaces it. Where the need to be accepted is all-consuming and indiscriminate in its hunger, where the vulgar and the mediocre is embraced along with the mesmerizing and the sublime. I was reading Saul Below's "Mr Sammler's Planet" at the time, so his tour de force definitely affected the contours of my blending into the BM phantasmagoria. And as this review shows, I was a bit highminded about the whole experience and kept stitching a line between Stellah's play[a]fulness and Kevin's disappointment. Perhaps, because I didn't want to alter the brain but only the environment. Perhaps, because I stayed for only four days. Perhaps, because previous attempts at gift economy turned kind of ugly (curiously, their obsession was similarity, not difference). Maybe I will be back but not this year.
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There were some cool art installations when I attended in 2000, but overall I found the spirit of Burning Man was about as deep and penetrating as a bad spray-on tan. It's funny to watch people building a non-commercial society who have driven there in a rented 30 foot motor home. I saw a lot of bad karma being accrued and a lot of bad attitude being doled out. Then again, maybe it was just the bad karma of the height of the dot-com bubble. My friends and I brought all sorts of things, both physical and metaphysical, with us to share, and had arranged to camp next to some old friends of one member of our group. I got soured on the whole week when I saw how much people were taking and how little they were giving back, in terms of sharing and being considerate. To top it off, we agreed to rotate hosting dinners, and our night came the night of the burn. Our neighbors showed up so late and were so self-involved and kind of piggy that we all missed the burn. Sort of encapsulated the whole experience for me. The highlight of my Burning Man experience was spending time with my four friends on the drive, and the moment we stopped and bought "Indian tacos" from a lovely old woman from the local reservation. Much better than the dinner we had at Boulevard back in the city that night, or any of the supposedly empowering experiences at Black Rock City. I am glad to read in Stellah's review that my experience is at least not universal, and probably not typical.
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