I left for Burning Man much earlier this year, on the Saturday before it started. I drove down I-35 to Des Moines, where I discovered a conveniently located Home Depot/Walmart/Menards/Casey's development right off the interstate. I gassed up here, and purchased much of what I would need for the trip, with the exception of Water, which I purchased later, and a six-pound sledge-hammer. The fours were too wimpy, and the eights too heavy, Home Depot had HAD 6-pound sledges previously, but they were completely sold-out. I wonder if this had anything to do with Burning Man... I decided I would stop at every Home Depot between there and Gerlach, to see if anyone still had a remaining 6-pound sledge. This became my side-mission on the way to Burning Man. Gabe Heller's quest for .... "A six-pound sledge!" Perhaps it was simply that Utah was the state I spent the least amount of time driving through, but I was really very happy with what I found there. First, I found Salt Lake City. In Salt Lake City, I found relatively cheap gas, an auto-parts store that had a cheap replacement speaker for my car stereo where the cashier joked with me that they would accept payment in Credit Card, Cash, Check, Pesos, or Women, and the Best Damn Taqueria I've ever eaten in. It's called "El Rey De Oros" or "the Golden King." On the way to Nevada I ate fried crispy tortillas with REAL crab meat, fresh vegetables, fresh lime, and fresh sliced avacados! On the way back I ate soft-shelled fish tacos with fresh veggies and lime. And they let me have a free soda-cup of "Tamarindo" (I assume tamarind drink) which was exceedingly good. The people were beautiful and genuine, and the food was dirt cheap. I really hope they are still in business next year when I stop. If you ever are in Salt Lake City, you should definitely eat there. It is on 900W just south of North Temple. Take the North Temple exit, go East to 900W and south, and there you are! You may have to know a little Spanish if you care what you're eating, but I wouldn't worry too much. It's all good! Second, I found the Great Salt Lake in the evening, and a nice big pretty island out in it. Third, I found this great long low mountain along the interstate. I haven't yet found decent working panorama software so you'll have to put up with what I could do with Gimp. Fourth, I found this really weird-looking fake tree at twilight. In the dusk it looked as it it had ten or so satellite dishes growing out of it, and there were husks on the ground as if several had gotten 'ripe,' fallen off, and shattered. I didn't manage to take a picture on my way there, and on my way back I realised there were 'no stopping' signs all around, AND it didn't look nearly as neat in the daytime when it became clear they were not so much satellite dishes as very large tennis balls. But, if all goes well, I should be passing that point at about the same time of day next year, so I might just manage to snap a picture out my car window. like I did of this sunset. Finally, I found the salt flats. They are really cool, much neater than they look in any pictures. I'd have to get further away from the lights to be sure, but I could swear they're slightly phosphorescent. And the salt keeps the bugs and the moisture down. I slept outside in the middle of summer on a bench at the salt flats rest stop and wasn't bothered by a single mosquito. What I did not find in Utah, was a 6-pound sledge hammer. So I continued my quest along I-80 and into Nevada. I was welcomed by a casino, expensive gas, and not a whole heck of a lot else. And then I came to Reno. How shall I describe Reno? Reno is like a completely different world. It's clean, and the people are pleasant, the buildings are tall, impressive, interestingly designed and well looked-after. The suburbs are communal and picture-perfect. The university is right in the center of town, a part of the community, as it should be. They even still have 7-Eleven's there. But what pays for all of this? The Casinos. The TV-screen billboards. The pumps at the 7-eleven that SUCK UP ANY EXTRA GAS WHEN THEY'RE DONE PUMPING so you can PUMP FOREVER and PAY FOREVER if you go slow enough. The slot machines inside the 7-Elevens. That is the price of a picture-perfect world. And so I was glad to leave it behind. Besides, what good is a picture-perfect world if you STILL can't get a 6-pound sledge hammer? Oh well. I drove to the north Reno Home Depot and settled for a much more expensive 6.5-pound Maul. Yes, world, be afraid. Gabe now owns a maul. Arriving at Burning Man noonish, I sought out Fleshlab, the camp where my good friend Jesse Morris had installed himself, the fool. Here is the exterior structure of the tent, which Jesse, and his friend Pol, and a couple other Fleshlab people helped me set up. Thanks to their help, and some nice cloth tape and grommits I got at Home Depot, it was much more structurally sound than last year. And thanks to the addition of cheap padlocks to hold the canvas on, a little simpler to set up. However, the steel cable had become much too twisted and unweildy as a result of being tangled and detangled so often that it still took much too much time to construct, and I'm going to have to change the design slighly again for next year. Stay tuned. I meant to take a picture of my car fully laden, but I forgot. Here it is next to the finished tent. From the good side it looks pretty good, doesn't it? You'd never suspect the other side looks like it was crashed into a tree. Later that afternoon, Jesse, Pol, another Jesse, someone else and I went out wandering on the playa. We saw things wonderful to tell. We did NOT see a cow on the roof of a cottonhouse. We DID see Podville with some really neat-lookin' domes made of cardboard. We also saw the Ply-Dome a dome made of slightly bent plywood. You can get pentagonal and triangular windows for it, cover it in cement, and have a house, if you like. We saw the plywood mantis We also saw a dust-devil. Jesse later discovered there was apparently a dust-devil generating machine in center camp that started many devils while we were there, though I never saw such a thing. I suspect it may be a myth. I was then introduced to Stu of the "Feed me Stu" meal plan. Stu fed me and he fed me good, and I think I may owe him some money, though I did give him a copy of my CD. If I do, Stu, let me knu. That evening, Jesse and I went out looking for stuff on the way to a techno dance venue called "Illuminaughty." On the way we stopped at the Pink Lotus which was nice and relaxing, and also at an underwater dome with some nice music and a chromakeyed dance area, so you could dance underwater. But then I managed to lose first my bike-light, and then Jesse, and not find him for quite some time. So, I went to Illuminaughty anway, but I didn't find him there. I did find a neat shadow dance screen. There was a guy there with a starched white bodysuit with stiff flared sleeves, like something an alien might wear in Star Wars. He got up on the shadow screen and made jerky movements like Shields & Yarnell. It was great! I would like a video of that, but I didn't even get a picture. At Illuminaughty and in fact all over the playa, there were many nicely decorated bikes. This one caught my attention, as simple, but interesting. But then I got bored with Illuminaughty, so, I wandered among the various tents where I saw this tent that looks vaguely like a giant purple ATARI symbol. I like things that look like ATARI symbols. Then I went back to my tent. On the way back I took this nice postcard picture of The Man. As last year, I spent much of my time at Center Camp, in the information lounge. They had a nicely painted and well-illustrated map I thought it worth taking a picture of. As in real life I was very disappointed with the poor organisation of the place, the coolness with which people responded to my offers of help, the closeness with which people held information that I already knew, and the extent to which I was not allowed to have enough authority to be useful. I did what I could, rebooted the terminals when they needed it, wrote instructions for how to use them when the mouse gets gummed up by dust, but nevertheless a large number of people did not get any of the information that they wished to get, and hence were unable to locate the people they wished to. Several rather neat events I missed completely because I could simply not find out where they were. Oh well. Perhaps someday someone important will trust me, and the world we be a much better place as a result. Until then, you'll all have to make do. I also spent a lot of time hanging around center camp's main lounge. There was often soft ambient music there, and also some good shows. The canteen there made me iced hot-chocolate, those wonderful people! Twinkie Henge was there again this year, only this time I got a picture of it before it was eaten. An acting group did a live performance of a Twilight Zone episode which was neat. There was a guy there setting up structures with joints that look like this. He had a name for his system, but I don't remember what it was. If you do, let me know. While helping him set up his example structure, I met Jason Asbahr, a guy working on an opensource game engine who was interested in me helping. I also got this nice picture of this person taking a picture of someone else. I like pictures like that. There was the "Midwest Regionals" where they tried to get lots of people from the Midwest to get up on stage. I bet you can guess what heppened. It wasn't really THAT bad. I got up and did Mike Cross's "the Scotsman," and everyone seemed to like that a lot. There was a guy there from Wisconsin who read some really good poetry, and a good guitarist from New Orleans, and later a decent Jazz improv, and another guy who makes his own fiddles and guitars. I should look him up and maybe buy one of his fiddles sometime. The one he let me play was really quite good. We tried some impromptu stuff some of which worked quite well, and some of which was painful. I spent a whole other lot of my time trying to attend events that weren't actually happening for one reason or another, or that I couldn't find. The next day, while looking for the Octopus's Garden and the reading that was going to be going on there, I was distracted by these images taken from the "Yellow Submarine" movie. The Snapping Turks, and the Glove, as well as a nice rendition of the Burning Man logo. The turk is all cloth, while the glove is cloth, flat board, and Stained Glass for the eye/fingernail, teeth and buttons. And the burning man logo is all stained glass. I chatted for a while with the guy there who made them, about his work and my new boring job hauling glass, but it turned out this was not the Octopus's Garden after all. I did find it, but no one was there reading, so I found a couple Shel Silverstien books, read a couple poems from them to people there who weren't really listening, and then continued on my way. I also managed to take part in the giant steam whistle. First I made a whistle out of clay, and then they fired it in their kiln. They then chose a bunch of whistles, and attached them to a conglomeration of pipes, connected to a large tank filled with water, and set a big fire under it. When the fire got hot enough, they began to blow. Wasn't that a dainty dish to.... um.. ahem. Man did they blow. It was a wonderful low eerie sound, and I wish I had had something to sample it with. I suppose I should have waited and got one of those digital cameras that records a 5-second sound-clip with each picture. Although the whistle sounded cool, the people there were a bit rude. First they told me I could play the drums, and then they told me I couldn't yet, and then they told me I couldn't at all. So I left. I still suspect this was their loss. Several evenings after the Illuminaughty night, it rained a little, making for a very impressive sunset which just went on and on. Soon after that, "Feed me Stu" was being helped out by Esther. If I had managed to take this picture about 2 seconds earlier, I think I could have made both of us rich with it. Esther really looked quite amazing at sundown, slightly flushed from cooking in an enclosed van, in semi-skimpy oriental costume holding that giant wok, but I didn't think she would like to be portrayed that way, so I didn't ask her to pose for me. Perhaps I should have. Oh well, such is life. However, I did have her pose for me earlier, when she was wearing a vaguely Yojimbo-esque outfit. She also organised some of the better Fleshlab events, like the Kimono raid (of which my picture seems to have gone missing). Another evening all of Fleshlab went out dressed as nice white doctors in clean white coats and also some escaped patients to fuck with peoples' minds. We pasted biohazard and fleshlab stickers all over everything we encountered, telling everyone to leave the area, as it was contaminated and very dangerous. Then we showed up at Illuminaughty, just stood there for almost a minute, then began dancing frantically and ran off. It would have been twice as much fun if it had worked, but it was still a lot of fun anyway. I didn't get any pictures as my camera was in my other pants. I also managed to lose someone's walkie-talkie. If it was yours, and you want some reimbursement, let me know. I went out for a walk on the playa and to see a large number of kites being launched. Here is one. There was a neat combination cloth and metal mobile out there. I also ran across a far-flung outpost of the ottoman empire. Later I wandered over the Cleopatra's with a friend to get a shirt stamped with the burning man logo. I stopped and took this picture at Despair. Despair was full of images of the deserted west in a very 'Courage the Cowardly Dog' kind of way, and this one seemed particularly poignant to me. We were early at the transfer place, so we wandered around a bit. It is traditional to alter the logos and such on the side of any rental vehicle brought to burning man. This one I found particularly funny. We also ran across the lamplighter procession. I like this picture I took because of the way in which the old technology of the lantern seems in-place compared to the anachronistic technology of a the butane stove-lighter, which hides out of sight. This is a lot of the meaning burning man has to me. On the way back we ran into a guy with a man-powered giant man on a bicycle tricycle. On the day of the Burn, Jesse and I went out for one last look around the playa for neat art installations. We found 'the place where you can ook at your own butt' which had been expanded to this year to 'the place where you can look at your own butt AND look at other people's butts while looking at them look at their own butts.' I do not have pictures of this, but it was nevertheless amusing. We found 'the great cyllinder that's supposed to roll around you while you're inside it but doesn't.' We found 'the thing that looks vaguely like a phone booth, but has some water trapped between two sheets of glass, but is not plugged in so we couldn't tell what it was supposed to do. But, I saved all my pictures for the Temple of Joy. Jesse and I agreed that the "Temple of Joy" was not a very good name for it, but I suppose that people much prefer being wed in the "Temple of Joy" than in the "Mausoleum," which was what it looked like. Yes, that's right, the artist who did the 'indonesian bone temple of plywood' last year came back and did another one this year. And people seemed to be into the 'joy' of it. They left all kind of joyful devotionals there, and meditated and all sorts of cool stuff. Here is a page with all the photos I took of the temple. Ain't it just amazing? Afterwards I also took pictures of nearby mountains and sunsets They seemed to have particularly good light on them at the time. The entrance to the circle of moving lights was 90 degrees left of center, and this was where Fleshlab was aligned as well, so I entered directly there. Someone had set up two flaming braziers of interesting shape and design near the entrance. This is one. This time I easily found a place near the front of the crowd where I could sit and still see. People next to me had large plastic balloons with glow-sticks in them. Someone came by to tell them to reel them in so they wouldn't hit the fire-jugglers on stilts, and some of them did, but luckily not all of them. The pre-burn show was less long or impressive in scope, but was of higher quality. There were fewer fire-jugglers, but the ones that were there were the better ones, and the parade of fire-breathing vehicles was quite impressive. Then the fireworks began. You can see some of those balloons in the firework picture. The rumor was they had gotten the same person who did the fireworks at the olympics. I must admit it was very well-planned and organised, but if they paid that person a whole lot for it, it wasn't worth it. The man went up and came down again in a very safe and planned fashion. There was none of the wonderful chaos of last year that I wish I had pictures of, where the flame set off unfinished fireworks in the man's antenna and arms, and there were great firey dust-devils cascading off his right side at the height of the burn. Compared with that, the well-planned firework display, fake, symmetrical billowing smoke, and controlled start to the burning was considerably lackluster. Though the fireworks were really very well-done. The subsequent rush toward the flame had none of the release or reckless abandon that it had last year when we were all wonderfully full of honest-to-goodness anticipation, and didn't know or care whether we'd just die when we came to the center. Perhaps the crowd was simply much smaller. Who knows? One really cool chaotic thing that DID happen involved those balloons, remember them? When the inferno began, a great in-draught was created by the fire sucking in oxygen and belching out carbon dioxide. One of the balloons was caught in this draught in an entertaining fashion. At the center of the pyre there were a firemen keeping people back. I do not think they were necessary, but they did make for a nice picture. I also snapped this blurry but somewhat apocalyptic picture of the circling dance. I think of all the pictures I took, I was most pleased with this one. It's interesting and also depressing to watch how places that are supposed to be free, open, and easy, become just as controlled, closed, and difficult as the rest of our lives. We all have our addictions, be it drugs, good food, technology, society. As much as we try, we cannot avoid bringing those with us out into the desert. Among other things, they do make us popular, if we are the only one who has them, and the temptation to make ourselves popular is a hard one to resist. And so we bring them out into the desert, and the desert becomes just like where we live anyway. Cluttered, closed and controlled. And in the long run, all we succeed in doing is upping the ante. Regardless, I have never seen the ante upped in such creative fashion before. There were many MANY more things worth seeing and doing at Burning Man than normally exist in most of the rest of the world, and I am glad to have seen them and done them. And one more thing. What the heck is this picture of? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? |