Since the year of 2005, many things have happened to Gabe Heller that made him say "My Brain Hurts!" That is, Gabe has found himself in many rather unenviable situations that have required him to repurpose portions of his brain in order to survive. He has become far more familiar than he would ever have liked to have been with many of the things that can go wrong with cars, furnaces, plumbing, corn stoves, electrical systems, garage roofs, relationships, employment situations, independent theater shows, dishwashers, computers and washing machines. As it turns out he hasn't entirely survived, so it seems like quite a bit of a waste. That is, though he is once again largely free to use his brain as he sees fit, this will only last so long as he remains unemployed, which will only last so long as he can afford to keep looking for a job he actually wants. The reason Gabe mentions this is that he hopes it will explain why large portions of his memory of what actually happened at Burning Man in 2005 seem to be missing at the moment. If only Gabe had known this would happen, he likely would have accepted the various offers of recreational substances that came his way while he was there. As it was, Gabe was hoping to preserve his memory of Burning Man 2005. Perhaps looking at the pictures while he composes the following travelogue will jog his memory. We can only hope. Luckily for Gabe, before he forgot much of what happened on the way to and from Burning Man 2005, he wrote an entry for Car Talk's "Road Trip From Hell," contest. It was weeks too late for the show, but Gabe did submit it to Gather.com's travelogue contest, where it didn't win as it really isn't a travelogue. Surprise. Regardless, that means that while a hard drive disaster wiped out half of his pictures from Burning Man 2004 along with this very travelogue, it is still available online here. Enjoy. Along the way, Gabe took a couple of pictures. Those of you Star Wars fans who have never driven through Nevada may be interested to know of this place, which Gabe didn't visit, but which one wonders if George Lucas did. Upon arrival at burning man, I set about setting up my tent in open camping. Theme camps are great, but they require organisational skills, or money, and at the time I had neither to spare. I think one of the reasons I began attending Burning Man was to recooperate my organisational energies without spending too much money. Those of you who read my "not quite a travelogue" above know I didn't manage on the second count. I don't seem to remember managing on the first count either, though it does seem, from the pictures, that I had a reasonably good time not doing so. If only I could remember it. Apparently while I was struggling with my tent, a bus with this strapped to it drove by. If only I could strap my "shade structure" to my car intact and have it look vaguely like rocket exhaust. After this, at some point (and likely in this order) a bunch of things happened at Burning Man 2005, or at least that is what these photos I most definitely took tend to indicate. First, someone released nearly a hundred large dodgeball-type balls which proceeded to roll with the wind across the desert plain running into tents and knocking over bicycles in a joyful chaotic Burning-Man kind of way. I'm assuming someone chased them all down and picked them up, because that's what Burning Man is all about. Apparently come night someone had some colored lights displaying a plasma effect. On another day, likely the next day, I toured the maze. I remember the maze. I took a lot of pictures in the maze. I think I came back to the maze on some other occasions, possibly even another day. First, there was a card catalog. Every drawer in the card catalog had a card-catalog draw sized diorama in it. One had scrabble letters. Another had a beach shanty. There was a drawing room with drawings and anamorphic projections of Bonnie Prince Charlie in it. There was either another maze or a darker section of the same maze that had these three illustrations. There were also many little holes in the maze through which I could not see, and thought it might be a neat idea to take a picture through so I could see what was there later. Unfortunately, what was there was completely uninteresting. There was sand, and some metal infrastructure, and some people's feet. The various entrances to the maze were flanked by 4'x8' murals, the best of which I thought were Miss Direction and this one. After the maze, the haze returns to my memory. Pictures indicate there was the top of a very large, blue head sticking out of the ground. Apparently, I stopped by the temple, which was a little disappointingly small and more japanese than javanese, but nevertheless wonderous, assuming that it was once again made out of the leavings of some wood factory or other. It was so small in fact that they had a bunch of wood left over after executing the design and they used it to create a mammoth tower which I found slightly annoying in its apparently unplanned stealth fallusness, but nevertheless impressive enough to take a picture of. There was nothing like the space at its base for rememberances there was in previous years. Much more obviously fallic (and also much more fun) was this, which was also not only neat-looking from inside but was also quite climbable and presented an impressive view of the surrounding area. I don't seem to recall looking for a hand, but at some point I found quite a few of them. I also watched some people playing Junga, a large-scale variant of a popular parlor game, except in this case each block is as long as your arm and has sayings from Carl Jung written on it. I also ran across the Great Machine which was designed to be a volunteer powered artwork that would automatically destroy itself given a certain alignment of the noonday sun that would occur on the last day of the festival. Or at least that was what it looked like it should do, but, unfortunately, it largely failed at that. It did succeed in looking quite impressive and attracting volunteers to power it, though. I also came across a cute little geodesic structure made of dixie cups and clothespins. As often at burning man I was completely in awe of crazy smart peoples' ability to do cool things with common everyday items. I also stopped by the recycle camp to marvel at and then power their human-powered can crusher which was cleverly constructed of two veteran lawn-rollers, a bicycle, and a pipesteel frame. This was enormous fun. I think they made me stop because they were afraid I would tire myself out. Not so fun was having to repeat the same instructions to every clueless beer-swilling would-be recylcer who stopped by with a mixture of steel cans, aluminum cans and glass bottles of varying filledness. It took me about 5 seconds to figure out the thing was for aluminum cans only. Oh well. I remember almost nothing about the burn, except the end, which was hard to forget because it took so darn long to end, but I'm getting ahead of myself. First, there were some neat art cycles and a scooter that looked like two eyes and a nose. Then the burn began. I've made a nice movie of it this year. Enjoy. In the last frame, you can see the reason it took so long to end. Someone had the brilliant idea of constructing the man's support system partially out of metal, which you and I both know doesn't actually burn. So, as we were all ready to rush forward and dance aroung the burning pyre, a great big metal structure fell down, and unsurprisingly, the firemen wouldn't let us get close to it until it cooled down, so we stood there, and stood there, and stood there, and eventually we sat there, and waited and waited and waited for at least an hour and a half for the darn thing to cool down so we could rush in and somewhat belatedly and half-heartedly dance around, (more like sit on) what was left of the man's support structure. I hope whoever thought that one up is thoroughly ashamed. Afterward, I noticed a an art boat. I also came across some giant flaming footprints. Along with their giant owners. Not only were they flaming, but the flames rotated among the colors of the rainbow as you can see from the photos. I swear I'm not making this up. There aren't that many things in life that I've seen that I have no clue how they were done. I'm often awed by what someone thought up, but I'm almost never awed that what they thought up is actually possible, not even at the best magic shows. There were the lights at the entrance to Universal Studios in Florida, that seemed to go up many stories, perfectly straight and not moving in the wind so they could not possibly be physical objects and yet stopped considerably below the cloud cover so they could not possibly be lasers, unless you accept the existance of light sabres, which I don't. And then there were these flaming footprints. If they had been some kind of permanent installation, I would have definitely have nominated them for one of the seven wonders of the modern world. I then ran across a man at a typewriter, perhaps musing on how the footprints were done. And a cleverly, if somewhat naughtily modified Budget moving van. I assume other things happened that night. Maybe that was the night I tried burning man speed-dating. Or maybe that was the night before. Or maybe that was 2004. All I remember is that basically all the women rather quickly decided they were interested in the same one guy. It was the same guy who had gotten a date the last time he tried speed-dating, and it wasn't me. For more on my theories of dating check out Or Is He? I know this was the next day because it's light again in the next picture. I even remember what the picture was of. This was a brilliant participatory flywheel consisting of a 50 foot tall structure with three boulders with ropes hanging from them all of which was on a great pivot. With the assistance of one or two other people, it was just possible to get it moving. And it was slightly less possible to get it to speed up to the point where you could climb up the ropes and swing around like on a giant inverted merry-go-round. WHEEEE! THUD! After that, apparently, it was night again. I know because it's dark in the next picture, which, unsurprisingly is of something burning. Also unsurprisingly, I can't remember what this was that was burning. I do remember that at some point that evening (traditionally Sunday, so I guess that must be when it was) the temple burned. Remember this? Of course you don't because I don't have a picture of it. Why? Because I took in in 2004, and I lost most of my photos from 2004. I was going to cleverly link to my 2004 page, but now I can't. In any case, when the temple was almost burned, someone pushed it onto the fire. As cool as the thing itself was, and as much as I enjoyed climing up into it and looking out through the hole, and as long as I waited to take that picture I lost until there was nobody else looking out through the hole, the fact someone shoved it in the fire near the end made the whole burning of the temple thing twice as cool. Later that night (I know it was that night because it was still dark), I ran across some people at a table. I couldn't for the life of me tell what they were doing: eating, playing some kind of game, participating in some kind of artwork? Whatever it was I thought it worth taking a picture of. I then ran into the Clock Tower. Someone told me it would be burning later, either later that evening or maybe the next, so I determined to come back. Then a bus pulled up. This is not uncommon at Burning Man. In fact busses are pulling up all the time at Burning Man, because busses are quite often made into extremely large art-cars for entire theme camps to view the burn from. This was also not an uncommon event in my life at the time, as I rode a bus to and from work in Minnesota 3000 miles away. What completely flabbergasted me, was that the bus that pulled up in front of me at burning man was in fact THE EXACT SAME BUS that I rode to and from work in Minnesota 3000 miles away: Metro Transit route 5. The light board even said "Mall of America" just as it did every day when I got on to go home. I asked the driver where he got it, and he said he bought it on ebay. Yay ebay! At some point they burned the clock tower. Maybe it was later that evening, or perhaps the next evening. It's all pretty hazy, but the presence of the clock tower unexpectedly brings my memory into clearer focus. Let me first say the clock tower was cool. I thought that when I first saw it not even knowing it was going to be burnt. It was designed to look artsy and fairy-tale like and thoroughly out-of-of place in the middle of the desert. It was also designed to look like it worked and possibly it actually worked for a while, which was impressive for something intended to be temporary and artsy and made largely of plywood. The monkey was even a reasonably cool idea if a little old (see the mad monkey construction agency page for evidence that people I know were nearly a decade ahead of the whole monkey trend). It was even a reasonably cool idea that we couldn't see the monkey, but that nevertheless actors in fairy-tale dress were employed to exhort "Save the Monkey," "There is no Monkey" and "Burn the Monkey!" That idea alone would have made the whole idea palatable even if the clock tower had been situated somewhere where it wasn't so completely out-of-place, like Disneyland. The only problem was that, as was the case with many artworks where the artists said, "oh we'll just burn it," and didn't really plan at all, it took a LONG TIME for them to get organised and actually start burning it. And during the hour or so it took them to get their act together, the various exhorting actors got quite hoarse yelling at eachother about the existance and/or flammability of a theoretical monkey. It turns out there was SOMETHING in the clock tower that made a big green flash, but who am I to say whether or not it was in fact a living, breathing monkey. |
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And I don't really remember much else that happened between there and Laramie, Wyoming, where things happened that you can read about in my "not really a travelogue" on gather.com. |
