No need to wait three months to dive into the art of Burning Man! Burning Man Regional Groups in more than 120 regions spanning over 20 countries are developing ways to engage local communities around the creative spirit, year-round.

Firefly Arts Collective lights up Somerville Open Studios (Photo Credit: Jonathan Macleod)

Earlier this month, Firefly Arts Collective  – who organize the official New England Burning Man regional event Firefly – took part in Somerville Open Studios, one of the largest weekend-long open studio events in the United States.

Home to many Firefly artists and a growing arts community, Somerville is located just north of Boston. Read more »

Photo by Marcus Obal

For the past few weeks I’ve been struggling with something Chip Conley said at Burning Man’s Global Leadership Conference.  (You can read my thoughts about his entire presentation here.)

“The more digital we get,” he said, “the more ritual we need.”

I jumped those words.  My heart pounded.  “Yeah!” I remember thinking, with an exclamation point and everything.  I wrote it down in my notebook and put a little star next to it – my shorthand for “this is worth a whole article on its own.”

Larry Harvey has been talking about just this kind of thing for years.  He even insisted that the following line be inserted in to Burning Man’s charter:  the organization places “embodied ritual before symbolism.”

Which is awesome, to the extent it makes any sense at all.

But getting excited by something like that is a lot easier than explaining what it means, or why it’s true.

Or if it’s true.

The most prominent counter-argument against what Conley and Harvey may be getting at was probably written by … well … me, in a 2011 post called “Burning Man Doesn’t Do ‘Ritual,’ and probably never will.”

So obviously I might not be 100 percent on board with this concept that so excites me.

I stand by what I wrote in that post.  But I also think Conley has hit on something vitally important, that needs to be explored – and that Burning Man may be the most advanced form of that “something important” we have. Read more »

Looking for a different way to celebrate Cinco de Mayo this weekend? Join Burning Man Project for Cinco De Make-O, a free day of maker workshops on Saturday, May 4th from 1 – 3 p.m. here at Burning Man headquarters in San Francisco.

(Photo by Candice Nyando)

Want to learn how to create your own solar power system? Or make musical instruments with found objects? Or both? We got you covered.

At 1:00pm, Small Scale Solar 101 will present an overview of small and portable solar technology, including solar terminology, how it can be used for art, tricks to limit power usage and more. It will be followed by Small Scale Solar 102 at 2:00pm with a hands-on opportunity to put a small system together. These workshops will be led by Chaz Pelling.

(Photo by Waldemar Horwat)

At 1:30pm, you’ve got two instrument-making workshops to choose from. In the first one, “Making Music with Found Objects”, Lydia of the musical group GamelanX will guide participants in creating musical instruments out of found objects (participants should bring discarded metal objects such as cans, pipes, car parts, kitchen utensils, etc.). The second workshop will be led by members of the Exploratorium’s “Explorables” group, demonstrating how to make several easy instruments out of drinking straws — all materials will be provided for this one. Both workshops conclude at 2:45pm, when everyone will convene for a music jam!

Please RSVP for the workshop(s) you would like to attend.

Burning Man Project is part of a network of non-profit and volunteer groups working to grow the Burning Man cultural movement by circulating the Burning Man ethos globally. For more information on Burning Man Project, please visit their website.

AfrikaBurn greeters bell (photo by BettieJune)

AfrikaBurn 2013 — Burning Man’s official African regional Burn — is underway in Tankwa, South Africa. Now in its seventh year, AfrikaBurn is rightfully touted as “the spectacular result of the creative expression of a community of volunteers who, once a year, gather in the Tankwa Karoo to create a temporary city of art, theme camps, costume, music and performance!”

The event takes place May 1-6 on an expanse of remote desert in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa akin to the Black Rock Desert of Nevada (albeit a little more rocky), and its population has steadily grown since its inception … they’re expecting 8,000 participants this year. Read more »

City Lights Bookstore SF, where modern American literature was born, announces:

Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society LAUNCH PARTY !
Thursday, May 16, 2013, 7:00 P.M., City Lights Boosktore, San Francisco, California

“An evening of irreverent antics

with Kevin Evans, Carrie Galbraith, John Law and friends

celebrating the release of

Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society
Edited by Kevin Evans, Carrie Galbraith and John Law

published by Last Gasp Books

Come one, come all…..at your own risk.

A template for pranksters, artists, adventurers and anyone interested in rampant creativity, Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society is the history of the most influential underground cabal you’ve never heard of. Rising from the ashes of the mysterious and legendary Suicide Club, the Cacophony Society, at its zenith, hosted chapters in over a dozen major cities, and influenced much of what was once called the underground. The Cacophony Society’s epic exploits radically changed the way people live and play in the world. The group inspired Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Burning Man and helped start pop culture trends including flash mobs, urban exploration, and culture jamming.”

What has been said about Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society:
Read more »

If he could describe it, he wouldn’t have to paint it.

“We created The Burning Man Project,” founding board member Harley DuBois told 200 of Burning Man’s regional representatives and community leaders.  “And now we’re figuring out what it is.”

This was the common refrain among the main speakers from the Burning Man organization at the Global Leadership Conference.  After 25 years we’ve gotten “here” – and perhaps from this vantage point we can figure out where “here” is.

“What if we were able to take the network you have (as regionals) and the network BRAF has, and the network that BwB has, and connect them in three dimensions?” asked founding board member Marian Goodell.  “What would that look like?  What would that be?  How would that work?”

She didn’t have answers:  she was asking.

More personally, “The six founders are figuring out how we fit in,” DuBois said.  “You’re trying to figure out how you fit in.” Read more »

Humility isn’t a principle, but it’s still a virtue.

The session on “outreach to subcultures” at the Global Leadership Conference was winding down when the Kid-Who-Cares-More-Than-You in the front row raised his hand to ask the panelists a question.

It went something like this (I’m paraphrasing from memory):

“We’re hearing about all these really successful regional groups that are doing amazing community work, but I’m worried because I know that they’re also being approached to partner by corporate groups and religious groups that don’t live by our values, who are way off politically, and I’m wondering what we do to protect ourselves – to create a firewall that makes it clear that we’re not open to these partnerships.  What do we do?”

I generally don’t get angry in discussions about Burning Man, even if we’re arguing.  The worst that usually happens is I’ll mutter “fucking burners” under my breath, or tell one of my friends at Media Mecca how I hate us all because … well, I mean, look at us.  Bunch of freaks.  But that’s it.  Otherwise not worth getting mad over.  Not when there’s a friendly bunch of freaks to play with.

But that?  What the kid-who-cares-more-than-you asked?  I spent the next 10 minutes trying to find a dueling pistol.  Because that?  That thing he said?  THAT pisses me off something fierce.

I didn’t get to do anything about it.  I wasn’t wearing my rapier that day and the session ended two minutes later, before I got a chance to respond.  But as the crowd was filing out of the room the lovely regional leader sitting next to me, who just happened to be a clinical psychologist, told me “Go ahead and say it.  Whatever it is, you really need to get it out.”

She’s right.  I do.  Because while ranting may be the lowest form of radical self-expression, sometimes you just gotta slum.

So let me ask His Dreadlocked Majesty, King of White Activists:  where exactly do burners get off looking down our pierced noses at people who want to help?  What exactly makes us so much better than people who take a shower before they gift? Read more »

Larry Harvey and hat (photo by Jim Urquhart, courtesy of Reuters)

This may not seem like much, but for those of us who were there it was electric.

“I wore my hat,” Larry Harvey said as he took the stage for the keynote address at the Global Leadership Conference.  They were practically the first words out of his mouth.

I will dwell on the substance of Harvey’s keynote later – for now, it suffices to say that he opened with a little history about his hat.  About how he wore it, and it became iconic, and soon everywhere he went people were asking him:  “can I try on your hat?”

He always let them, and the hat must have had magical powers, because it always looked good on them.  Gradually he stopped wearing the hat, except for ceremonial occasions.

Then he gave his talk – a talk about how the Burning Man Project is being designed to support the Regionals;  about how there are hundreds of people now across the world beginning the very same journey that he and the other Burning Man founders made.

When he concluded his speech, a half hour later, he said that everything is changing, but his hat still looks best on other people.

Then he tossed it into the crowd. Read more »