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 »

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 böhringer friedrich

Something about the bright lights of the Christmas season always pushes Burning Man right out of my head. In a bad way.

Something about the way America celebrates Christmas and Thanksgiving – as holidays in which we are told to be thankful for what we have and then commanded to but more stuff – has always contradicted Burning Man’s spirit of non-commodification. Even the act of “giving presents” for the Christman/Hannukah season, at least in my life, has nothing in common with the kind of “gifting” done at Burning Man.

Most years, it’s like the existence of one pushes the other right out of my head. My brain isn’t big enough for both of them.

Not this year, though.

This season Burning Man is very much on all of our minds, and we wonder what Santa and his little elves are turning it into. There’s a new non-profit organization, a new ticketing system, and an as-yet-undisclosed mystery theme. Where in years past it seemed safe to put Burning Man out of our minds for a little while, confident that it would still be there when we got back, this year many of us are refusing to let it out of our sights … constantly checking in to make sure nothing else has changed. Read more »