I’m not so sure.  Burning Man has a profound psychological, even spiritual, impact on people – but are we really more authentic than anybody else?

I’d be a lot more convinced if so many people at Burning Man didn’t dress so much alike:  as if strapping on a leather harness and glow sticks because it makes you fit in at the sound camp really makes you more authentic than someone who dresses in a gray flannel suit for his job at the accounting firm.

I’d be a lot more convinced if all the music wasn’t so similar – surely all our inner selves can’t be DJs?

I’d be more convinced by claims to authenticity if more people’s “authentic” selves didn’t fit so neatly with ideals that other people thought up. Nobody gets authenticity points for following the 10 commandments:  why should they get them for following the 10 principles?

While there’s certainly a lot of iconoclasm and personal eccentricity at Burning Man … there’s also a hell of a lot of conformity.  Given the chance to go out in the desert and do anything, it’s obvious that many of us decide to imitate each other.  But the rhetoric of authenticity persists.  What causes so many of us to feel authentic while we’re keeping up with the Sparkles? Read more »

Photo by Howard Banwell (Creative Commons License)

This is a slightly fictionalized account of true events

The naked man jumped up and down below us.  “This is undemocratic!” he shouted, spittle flying, “and unfair! And not participatory!  And not communal!”  He pointed.  He was electric, jerky, energy coursing through him, high and tweaking and just getting higher.

From the roof of the station, Christa called down:  “If you don’t let us alone, I’m going to have to make you suffer like you’ve never suffered before in your life.”

She was doing it to protect me.  Something dark had been chasing me all week:  I’d come to Burning Man and couldn’t quite figure out why.  No matter how nice people were,  I just wasn’t fitting.  Less than an hour after my arrival I was being driven around on an art boat at sunset to look at sculpture installations while topless girls danced and I opened bottles of champagne … and I was a square peg in the roundest of holes.

It got worse every day.  I smiled, I laughed, and festered.  I was lonely no matter what the size of the crowd.  Intimate conversations were like eating the flesh of my friends.  My limbs turned into dead skin and I dragged them from party to party.  I told a few people about it, old comrades.  “We’re so glad you’re here,” they said.  “It’ll get better.”  It got worse.

Finally, one day, after the desert and my volunteer position had chewed me up and spit me out, I told just a few friends that I needed them.  I was taking my best booze (I only bring the best) and my finest cigars (why smoke any other kind?) and bringing them to the roof of the BMIR studios.  And I wanted them to come, and be with me, and share what I had, and close in around me because without that circle I could not go on.  Read more »

Is this what Burning Man's like? Maybe on Wednesday?

A close friend of mine was asking me about Burning Man.  She’s a black woman from Brooklyn.  “Nope,” she said eventually, with some frustration.  “I don’t think I’ll be going to Burning Man!”

“Why not?” I asked.  She should.  She’s magnificent.

“It’s a white people thing!”

Whoa.  I asked her to tell me more about that.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard that phrase applied to Burning Man.  My very first burn I was astonished to realize that an event that draws so heavily from the diverse San Francisco Bay would produce a population so colorless.  From camp to camp, end to end, it was a long block of white as far as the eye could see, with only occasional dots of diversity … rare enough to raise comment.  Where were the Asians?  Where were the Hispanics?  Where were the black people?

Shortly after I first asked myself that question I met a black man tending bar at a camp with a slip-n-slide.  I sat down, he gave me a drink, and I said “can I ask you a potentially difficult question?” He said sure.  In hindsight, I’m pretty sure he was expecting me to hit on him.

“I notice there are almost no minorities here,” I told him.  “You’re the first black person I’ve seen.  Any idea why that is?”

The term “white people thing” came up in his answer. Read more »

Photo by Javichu el jefe (creative commons license)

This isn’t about Burning Man. 

I tend to get depressed around the holidays.  Last year, I sent the following message to the Media Mecca email list, in the hope that if someone else was getting depressed around the holidays, it would help.  It was well received. 

So now I’m putting it here, to strike back at a season that demands we smile when our hearts might be breaking.  I hope it’s helpful. 

– Caveat

***

“Happy holidays,” you say?  “Merry Christmas?”  “Have a great New Year?”

Wrong!

You couldn’t be more wrong.

You couldn’t be more wrong if you used creationism as an excuse to deny global warming.  You couldn’t be more wrong if you said the Bush tax cuts would help acai berries cure cancer.  You couldn’t be more wrong if you said the War in Iraq is filled with hot single girls just waiting for your call.

Lies.  All of them.  Lies.

This month’s holidays are not festive, whatever the propaganda machine at the Mall of America tells you.  Don’t listen to CBS!  Do not believe the internet.

Believe your eyes.  Believe your soul.  This is the darkest time of the year.

Literally and figuratively, the darkest time of the year.

I am going to speak up, now, on behalf of those of for whom “holiday” is synonymous with “blues.” Read more »

Photo from MDCarchives; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 05:04, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

After I wrote a blog post called “Is there too much positive energy at Burning Man?” several commenters invited me to come visit their camps and soak up their darkling ambiance.  One of them was Bat Country, a Hunter S. Thompson themed camp.

In fact I actually have visited Bat Country.  Here’s what happened. 

A few years back I was standing in the Will Call line for two hours.  A line like that, you get to know people, and I met a married couple.  The man’s name I can’t remember … it was something playa-generic … but the woman was named “Dirty Sugar.”  You don’t forget a name like that.

They were camping in Bat Country, and invited me over for outdoor movie night on Tuesday:  a double feature of the Johnny Depp version of “Fear and Loathing,” followed by “Gonzo,” a documentary about Thompson’s life and career, would be playing against the wall of an RV.

I said I’d be there.

The night was gorgeous.  I showed up about two thirds of the way through “Fear and Loathing.”  I asked around at the bar, but Dirty Sugar wasn’t there and I didn’t know anybody else.  Suddenly I saw an empty chair sitting just the right distance away from the structure the movie was playing on.

I pounced.  I sat down.  Took a swig of water.  Oh yeah:  this was a great seat.  I’d lucked out.

Ten minutes later, a guy walked out from the structure. He walked over to me.  “Hey,” he said, “would you like some tequila?” Read more »