En Transit / Burning Man

 

 

Why would I want to write about an event and a community that has come to disappoint me so greatly? Because no matter what Burning Man has become today and seems likely to become in the near future, its past remains, and some of that was worth remembering. The "finite and easily exhaustible" material of which I spoke in my previous post are the project ideas from before 2008, camp ideas from before 2004 and Larry Harvey's writings before today.

The writings, I'll subject to philosophical criticism, speculating on how the choices that Harvey et al. made helped create the Burning Man of today - but not doing so very often. My primary interest will be in taking some of the project ideas, and building on them. Do what you know - I have some knowledge of chemistry, which is needed in Solid State work, but I'm not a chemist, so I'll shy away from projects heavily dependent on that subject. I am a Mathematician with a Physics background who branched into Electrical Engineering, so projects involving Electronics are ones in which I'll take great interest. My main hobbies are cooking - which I've pursued since I was a small child - photography and theatre, so you're probably see some references to performance, which might sometimes draw on the theme camp ideas, some two dimensional art done by photographic printing, and some relatively easy recipes which can be done outside, requiring a minimum of clean up. Maybe. No promises.

There are some things, however, that I can guarantee will be missing. No fire - it's not safe in my area, and the city government of Chicago seems to take the subject of fire somewhat personally, anyway, for some reason. No high priced project ideas - none of that business of buying $2000 worth of lumber to build something that will be incinerated at the end of the week. No meat - the recipes will be vegetarian ones. Nothing appealing to "prurient interests". No announcements of upcoming events - even if I end up holding those, I will only announce them offline, but in fact, probably won't announce them, at all.

The kind of event I'd like to see is a gathering of some friends who invite their friends, who can do the same, everybody bringing something on which they've enjoyed working; one that never gets too big. If it grows to more than a few hundred people, one splits it in two, with each half going its own way, so it never grows so large that it needs to be anything more than an informal gathering. One would run out of room at any location we're likely to reach otherwise, anyway; there are no great wildernesses for hundred of miles as one goes away from Chicago, just small forests and parks. How much promotion does a small private party need?

For now, but not indefinitely I hope, much of this will have to stay on the theoretical level, proposals, not prototypes, because my budget is very limited, and I have no place to display work, anyway. If you see an idea you like, and would like to embellish on it further, please feel free, as long as you show me the same courtesy I show to those from whom I borrow, giving me credit for that I did and linking back to the page on which it was done. The point of this isn't to get somebody else's ideas or my ideas to go viral, but to learn from some creative work that was done in the past, and get back to the idea of culture being something that ought to be a cumulative thing, even in an ephermal city.

 

Reference: this post

 

 

 

 

 

Every blog, one expects, will eventually close, usually because of the authors get tired of them, so when I tell you that this blog will eventually close, I'm not telling you much. What is different about this blog, as I start it, is that I've begun with the intention of closing it, and some vague sense of when I'm going to do so. Not today, probably not even in the next two years, but almost certainly not as much as ten years from now, because the basic material I'm working with is finite and easily exhaustible.

Burning Man has evolved over the years into something that I am no longer willing to recommend to anybody, especially not to those who would enjoy it, because one might very well need a kind of sickness to find pleasure in what the Burning Man community has become, and I don't believe that one should help reinforce such things. Somebody that I once listed as one of my friends, tried to rationalise the frequently and notoriously unwarranted hostility to be found on ePlaya (Burning Man's official Bulletin Board) in this post, writing

 

 

"The thing that you don't see is, well not the love, but the affection that us long timers have for each other. And we can come down hard on the newbs, not always justly, and we also can give them a lot of rope to hang themselves first.

Think of it as a bunch of baby wolves really, pouncing, playing, biting, rolling, growling--and at teh end of the day sleeping in a nice big warm pile of wolf pups."

 

 

 

She was promptly called on this by a user calling himself "spectabillis", who responded with these remarks, writing

 

 

"oh come on, its only like that to the small wolf pack. to everyone else its agressively hostile, openly plain and simple."

 

 

to which somebody, in her next post in the thread, responded

 

 

 

"Maybe. It can certainly look that way. For the most part, I belive that if you just hang around for a few nasty comments, then you "pass the initiation" and get to play with the rest of us. I don't have any specific evidence at hand to prove this. But I do thry and say it with some frequency, in the hope that people will sit it out for the uncomfortable day."

 

 

 

Oh, my, yes, who would want that pesky self-respect thing to get in the way of having a good time? Maybe "Spectabillis" who, to his credit, wrote this as his response - profanity softened by me, not him:

 

 

 

"and just who in the f**k says its worth the effort!?

its obvious the quality is low - if measured by the total number of posts its almost non-existent. people have to want to be part of it for your initiation ritual to work fishy, there has to be some compelling reason its worth it. its not, and that makes it rather pathetic.

you're mistaking not being able to take it with not wanting to be around loosers and a**holes."

 

 

 

Who is this whiny malcontent "Spectabillis", who obviously is acting out of malice toward Burning Man and must have been out to get Bmorg from Day One, you ask? One of the former moderators of ePlaya, itself, as we see in this note of congratulation, posted May 25, 2005. Think of what the biases of such a party would likely be, and see what he says, anyway. Do you find youself still wanting to be part of a community like that? One in which you very self-respect will be seen as a vice that you need to get over? Does this begin to sound a little cultish?

This is not just some board on which Burning Man is discussed. This is, as I said, the official board for the event, and one on which a number of the members of the small group that run Burning Man are active and enthusiastic regulars. What we are seeing put on display are the attitudes of the Burning Man organization. A basic truth of life - while a good management may be failed by those who work with them, a bad one can't help but succeed in giving its character to everything it touches, in time. The Burning Man LLC might be small, and the event it manages huge, slowing the progression of this progress, but in time the inevitable will come.

Over the years, as I've checked in from time to time, hoping that the community would turn itself around, what I've seen, instead, is what had been a widespread annoyance become an almost universal one, as the community I was watching turned sociopathic. Some would seek any excuse to attack, while others settled for enabling those who did the damage, but almost never would I see actions that showed any sign of empathy, of the action of conscience, of the willingness to engage in a little self-restraint. Instead, I would read or hear of tales of artists finding that others had set their work on fire, of people being beaten up by DPW workers who wanted some small and inconsequential piece of property like a flag - dragging one burner down the Esplanade behind their truck when he refused to let go of it, or of this delightful anecdote from ePlaya, slightly cleaned up for quotation on this blog

 

 

 

"No, but you basically had to have sex in on the ground in front of them to get into the "Carn'Evil", except that when you completed everything you were told that it wasn't open yet, you had to put your name on a list, and come back later. When you came back later, it still wasn't opened. When you came back even later, the whole works was shut down.

* ship *

A female friend of ours performed [specifics about sexual acts deleted], in front of a bunch of men and a handful of (appreciative) couples, trying to get in. While she appeared to enjoy the acts initially, she -still- couldn't get into the back although her mate got on the list as easily as I did. After awhile she said she wasn't going to sacrifice her Burn so that a theme camp could gawk at and grope her. (Having to crawl under the craps table and grope somebody's [private body part], after doing the above, was the last straw.)

Later that night we were talking about it at the Playa-Go-Round and an eavesdropper claimed to have snipped the zipties and slipped into the Carn'Evil, stating that there was nothing at all back there but a maze of tarps...no decorations or anything except a zombie mask he claimed to have stolen.

*snip *

None of the members of my camp who completed the tasks returned to participate in the back because it was never open. At one point we went by to see if it was open and all we heard were a bunch of people in the darkened tents yelling at each other, clearly audible on the esplanade."

 

 

 

Sound like fun? Does it seem sensible to empty one's bank account and travel cross country, merely to spend one's time on an opportunity to be degraded in exchange for the chance to be included in something that turned out to be a hoax? Those who ask one to give up one's self-respect for the sake of "friendship", most assuredly aren't going to give back that which one has so foolishly tossed aside.

Where does this take us? In one post to Tribe, which seems to have since been deleted, one would read of somebody's hike down a darkened Esplanade in 2008, the year of the American Dream, like the author above, being greeted by nothing but the sound of screaming matches coming from inside the tents - this in the very heart of the event! Real friendships begin with a respect out of each, not just for the other but for himself as well, a respect that demands reciprocation if it is not to be withdrawn, and one can only fool oneself for so long. When the friendships are gone, so is the community, as is the purpose of what is, after all, a recreational event.

Burning Man, the commercial enterprise, would seem to be alive and well, for the moment, but I would maintain that Burning Man, the cultural movement, if not dead, is certainly on life support, waiting for the plug to be pulled.

 

continued

 

 

 

 

 

At this point, I hold no illusions about the likelihood of ever being allowed a fair chance at entering the full time job market. Near the beginning of my search, I'd already heard the incredible assertion that a 3.7 average (on a 4.0 scale) from a top 20 school, a master's in mathematics with the coursework for a PhD complete (ABD status, with most of the thesis written), and a bachelor's in Physics was not enough to qualify me for an entry level job in Chicago. "We expect at least a 3.9". "And for you to not notice that despite what the demographics look like in every graduate and professional school you've ever encountered, we've managed to assemble an all-Anglo-Saxon staff that's a whole lot less ambiguous in its caucasianness than you, you adorable little halfbreed, and not one of whose members is disabled, unless you count that functional illiteracy you might have picked up on when you tutored one of our vice presidents and a few of our execs last week", would be the next line one might expect at that point. I went back to school and branched out into Electrical Engineering - only to find that with the enthusiastic encouragement of our ex-frat boy C average president, that rug had been yanked out from under me and much of the profession by outsourcing.

Right now, I'm rereading my old books to refresh knowledge that has started to fade from disuse, and am wondering why I bother to do so, given the fact that all I get from Human Resources is a good stonewalling - they don't even bother to send out form rejection letters any more. Aside from the almost infinite amusement I get from encountering willfully clueless neocons who seriously believe that as somebody with cerebral palsy, I'm thrown to the head of the line by affirmative action - you'd think an under 30% employment rate among the disabled would lay that myth to rest - I've had the absolute delight of encountering the supposed advocates for the disabled, who have swallowed the Bush line that training is the cure for all ills. The word seems to be that what we, as handicapped individuals, need to do is get off the drugs and get an education. "Ummm ... you do know that I've been to graduate school, right? In multiple fields? That in fact I was the grader for one of the graduate level courses myself? And that I've actually written computer programs before? So what exactly is a ten week 'training program' that will teach me what  'CPU' means going to do for me, that the earlier preparation hasn't?"

It's like telling an unemployed college graduate to finish Junior High School, but that's how it is - discrimination issues will continue to be "addressed" with retraining. If you wonder how that's supposed to get you past some bratty little bubble gum snapping 19 year old secretary who shreds your resume before your very eyes or a stubborn refusal on management's part to hire the long term unemployed - even those who were rendered long term unemployed by a previous management fad of stubbornly refusing to hire anybody with less than 2-5 years of "relevant work experience" which was followed by the amazing discovery that there was now a shortage of junior professionals - but still no willingness to budge on the "we don't hire the long term unemployed" thing - well, then, that's just unamerican! You're supposed to be a good sport and agree that other people's decisions are your responsibility, and be properly apologetic for having dared to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Absolutely absurd, but it's reality, and so I have no choice but to build it into my plans. The question is, how do I do that?





Poverty, despite the impression that the movies may leave one with, is a socially isolating experience, being disabled makes it more so, and a climate that rules out spending much time outdoors during most of the year really doesn't help. Most hobbies are priced far out of your range, most events are held in out of the way locations you can't afford to travel to, and no matter how tidy and well behaved you may be, as people notice the thrift store ensemble that is your wardrobe, you will encounter social attitudes that will be something out of another century. Consider yourself fortunate if anybody deigns to speak to you, and truly blessed if they manage to keep the condescension subtle.

What do you do? The meeting part, I'm still working on, and I am feeling more than a little thwarted by my circumstances.

... "At this point", as I wrote my post, Tribe (where the first few posts on this blog were originally hosted) went down for a few days, so this post did not get finished. I'll pick it up, later ...

If you've read my Burning Man pages, you've seen a camp proposal  I made back in 2002, a links page from that era that I badly need to update, and heard my side of a few flamewars that some of the mouthier and better connected trolls had been spreading some disinformation about starting in 2001, and then time sort of seems to stop. It's 2008, hasn't anything happened since?

Yes and no. In terms of family, a lot has happened. In 2001, my oldest nephew was only a few months old. He's a little more articulate, now, and has been followed by a small flood of cousins, which is one reason why you see time stopping on some of those pages. As I looked at the large amount of backbiting that was taking place over nonissues like whether or not holding a meeting one block from Cabrini Green late at night was a good idea and listened to the little ones utter their first words, I was reminded that when I heard the crazies screaming over somebody's refusal to pack gas cans inside his RV or denial that aliens had made crop circles, that I had better places to be. I also had very young relatives who I did not want to see grow up remembering their Uncle Joseph's eternally foul mood, and so I walked out, to the immediate benefit of my spirits and in the long run, as they became older, of  that of my nieces and nephews as well.

Typical of the experiences on the much mythologized old ePlaya that drove off some of us came when a handful of burners made a valiant, but futile attempt to get things going on the silent Midwestern regional board by raising a number of topics of discussion, hoping that others would then reply. The old management and regulars responded by attacking them. "Look, practically every post there is from just a few people"; as if that weren't a halfway decent description of ePlaya in general at the time.  "Could that be because they're the only ones willing to take the time to contribute, and that maybe they ought to be thanked for that?" No, "they're obviously driving everybody else off" ... all of those people who had never taken the time to post previously, right? Some of us who were among the targets of choice that day wondered out loud why these people were acting this way, until one of us asked the rest two simple, leading questions.

1. What had we seen a few of the in-kids consuming in bulk, when we encountered them in person? Really, so compulsively that they literally did haul out their stash and smoke it out on a real street, right as a few patrol cars were approaching, putting all present at risk for arrest and prison time?
   
   
   
   
   

   ... and ...

   
   
   
   
   
   
2. What were the long term effects of heavy marijuana use?
   
   
              pennmedicine.org/encyclopedia/em_DisplayArticle.aspx?gcid=000952&ptid=1
   
   
   "These side effects include dry mouth, red eyes, impaired perception and motor skills, decreased short-term memory, paranoia, mood swings, and hallucinations."

Elsewhere, one could find cognitive impairment and other problems mentioned as well. It explained a lot. We cleared out, as did others a short while later, leaving the old regulars close to being alone. The old party line had been that said place would have been just flooding over with fascinating discussions if it weren't for those evil "trolls" - meaning anybody who the regulars were ganging up on - and now came their chance to prove it.

What resulted, in the short run, was as delightfully exciting as a watered down bowl of farina. The regulars had nothing to say. After what seemed like an eternity, the inevitable occured. With nobody else around to hate, the old regulars broke the tedium by turning on each other. The illusion they had hoped to create was now shattered in the eyes of all but the most willfully gullible lurkers, which was for the best. The regulars had been right when they suggested that we were part of the problem, not the solution, but not for the reasons they gave. We had served as a buffer between naturally abrasive individuals, allowing them to temporarily coexist peacefully enough for them to band together, and contributed content that helped make the forum interesting enough to read, giving an audience to those who would otherwise be far less visible.

Sometimes what one needs to do is nothing. One can't keep a community like the one we found ourselves in from going into decline, but one can slow the process - and that can be a bad thing, a very bad thing when that which was good in it is already almost entirely lost. There is such a thing as creative destruction; by standing back and not interfering as the old community self-destructs, one hastens the time when a new community will have a chance to arise. Having lurked there, I won't deny that the new ePlaya has its flaws, but it is a dramatic improvement over the old, which has been safely and (for some) conveniently obscured from public view, albeit with a few of its more memorable threads preserved on my hard drive, just in case they're needed.

I'm hoping they won't be,  having far more pleasurable ideas of how to use my time than documenting the community's more absurd moments, but if certain members of the community wish to continue working the rumor mill, sooner or later I might have to respond.

There were local difficulties as well, both online and off, and still are to this day. The Burning Man LLC entered the Chicago area with no understanding of or respect for the locals and their culture, and that is one failure that is almost guaranteed to backfire eventually, no matter where one goes. The previous regional contact's stream of consciousness rambles were a bit of a problem for the local image of Burning Man, but his successor, if anything, has been worse. Elsewhere, some of us mention the World Nude Bike Ride. Picture being in a street cafe along Rush street, located on one of those narrow little sidewalks a city has to have, where it has been growing upward and its local population density has hit Manhattan like levels. Picture having tried to explain the concept of Burning Man to a very skeptical local population, as one looks down the street, and suddenly sees a group of burners riding up the street, hooting and hollering and as naked as the day they were born, one of them in particular of them visibly enjoying the ride a little too much, much more so than can be explained by lake breezes, the summer air in Chicago tending to be as still as it is. Picture one or more of those clever souls riding past, yelling in a manner that cries out "look at me, look at me", as he pumps out the love in abundance.

What are you going to say on behalf of the event at that point that is likely to be taken seriously, especially when one is hardly seeing any support from those on whose behalf one speaks? Strangely enough, however the San Franciscans may feel about these culinary matters, very few Chicagoans of either sex really like the idea of somebody spraying his special sauce onto their risottos, as rich and creamy as it may well be, and when Mr.Foamy is all of three feet away from the plate - and raised well above the low wall seperating the cafe from the street - that becomes a real issue.

So do the local mores. Chicago may not be part of the Bible belt; going out in beach like attire on a hot summer day offends very few locals - but it's not the Bay Area, either. Nudity in a private setting may be accepted with a wink and a smile, but out in public where it is literally being thrown in the faces of those who've had no reason to expect it, it is not considered socially acceptable. As the Chicago police came up to the parade from behind - there's just no way to avoid a double entendre on that one, is there - those present applauded, and I could only sit silently, having no argument to offer against their expression of scorn for the riders. In their own home, the locals found that their sensibilities had been shown no respect.






This outcome could have been avoided.

Back during the late 1990s, when I was first introduced to Burning Man by seeing a pair of films made by Joe Winston at Around the Coyote, the locals were extremely receptive to the idea of Burning. It was something utterly unlike anything that they had ever experienced, the police presence in Chicago being as heavy handed as it has been, and open spaces as scarce. The spontaneity and the sense of community seemed to appeal to a lot of people, and the joyful eccentricity found an appreciative audience, but about a decade later, people aren't as receptive to the name as they formerly were, which under the circumstances, is not surprising. Picture the most recent appointee to the role of local coordinator, yet another recent transplant who had no knowledge of the area selected without anybody in Chicago being consuted, responding to the news that the last event had gravely offended the locals by saying that maybe they needed to be offended. What would one then expect the response of the locals to be? What should it be? If you read my previous post, you've probably guessed what it has been, leaving us with a "Chicago community" almost devoid of actual Chicagoans, consisting almost entirely of recent arrivals from the coasts and visitors from other cities.

Which, in however incomplete a fashion, brings us to today.

 

I started to post to a thread on a group that is described as being "a listserv for everyone and anyone who wants to participate in building the infrastructure of Chicago's burning community and to assist with various creative burner endeavors and projects", entitled "who is not headed to the burn?", inviting people to come and help plan for the joint Chicago - Detroit Decompression.

Yes, you read that correctly. Take a look at the map. Chicago and Detroit aren't really very close to each other, and the decompression was going to be held in Grand Junction, Michigan - which may sound like a short hop from Grant Park to a Californian, but poses a real problem for some of us who live here.

I started to craft a response explaining why I would not attend a planning meeting for a decompression that would, once again, be held in a place to which I couldn't possibly get ....

---

On Aug 23, 10:54 am, Devin Breen wrote:

Hey!
 
> Who's not going to the burn and will be
> attending decomp and wants to do
> DPW-related awesomeness?

I'm not going to the burn, but I can think of at least a few reasons to not sign up for the DPW awesomeness, one of them being that as a person who can't drive, I'd have no way of getting to the decompression. I'm thinking that what would be really awesome would be if some day, a Chicago event actually took place in Chicago - not Kentucky, not Wisconsin, not Wyoming or Patagonia or wherever else the 2009 decompression will happen, but actually in Chicago. Just to be totally different.

You guys do know that a lot of actual Chicagoans - and if you live in Michigan, you do not qualify, despite what a few people over on Yahoogroups seem to think - live in neighborhoods where a parking space costs as much as a small apartment, meaning that driving is not something that poor people get to do and middle class people have to think twice about, especially given the street parking situation? How many people do you know of who have so much money to toss around, that they'll get the equivalent of a second small home just to avoid taking the bus?

Is Burning just for well-to-do hipsters of the correct political orientation, or should it be a little bit more inclusive than that?

---

but I thought better of it. In part because I knew to expect a good trolling if I did post, the "local" Burning Man community having long been anything but inclusive or really local, for that matter, and let's face it - isolating and excluding the disabled (a mild case of cerebral palsy keeps me out of the driver's seat) is a grand American tradition, as I well should know. Which is what is happening when every single "local" event that gets held that is anything more than "let's go get some beer" gets held in another state. Wondering if the good folks in North Beach who appointed the local Chicago coordinator, as usual without asking any Chicagoans what they thought about the matter, know that Chicago is in Illinois, not Michigan?

Sigh. Oh, well. If you were surprised to notice that, after over more years have passed since I wrote about circumstances in the local community, a city several times the size of San Francisco has to pool its resources with another city much larger than the homebase of Burning Man just to scrape together a decompression, this is one of the reasons why that would be the case.

Originally posted to my blog at Tribe.net on August 25, 2008