October 24, 2011
Welcome to Draka Arts / A Site Review
 A pleasant site about a topic I like (an art car named Draka), not a bad place at all, but one which does not live up to its full potential, I think. At least not yet. |
| Re: The Draka Arts Site , which is archived here ... One of life's frustrating truths, which one learns very quickly when one tries to write about anything: that which is unpleasant is so much easier to explain or bring alive for the reader than that which is pleasant. Hence, perhaps, our love as a species for souvenirs, keepsakes, photos ... what is a memory but a story one's earlier self tries to tell one's later self, as that later self itself strains to find the references it needs to connect the story that the earlier self is telling it?  That frustration comes very fully into play when one tries to answer the seemingly easy question "why did you go to Burning Man". The physical hardships of the desert, some of the political ugliness - these are easy things to understand, so easy that some will seriously ask "so it's all one big exercise in Masochism". As, indeed, it sometimes is, and say hello to the good people over at the House of Atonement, if that's the way your personal brand of kinkiness goes. But usually it isn't, or at least it didn't used to be.  Usually, the concept was that one would see the harshness of the desert as a challenge, achieving a pleasant comfort in spite of the desert, and the vastness of the desert as an opportunity. The desert was seen as a blank slate, not in the sense that there wasn't anything of value already out there, but rather in the sense that the works of man already present were few and far between, and likely to remain so for a good long while to come, leaving one free to try things that one couldn't at home, because almost all of the land was owned and one didn't have the space in which to do them. The desert offered an eternal fresh beginning to the temporary society gathering in it, in which the realities of property ownership and loitering ordinances need not get in the way of one's fleeting daydreams as they took tangible form.  Thus the frustration for one telling such a story - that sort of freedom, that of just being able to lay claim to a bare patch of ground and see what one can do with it with a little hard work and imagination, has not been part of life in places like Illinois since the frontier left them behind in the mid 19th century, leaving social engineering to begin to slowly take over where freedom left off, after its relatively brief stay. This site, the homepage of Draka, the dragon car sometimes seen at Burning Man, allows one to see one of those fleeting daydreams that took form, as somebody took advantage of the novel freedoms offered by the emptiness of Northern Nevada. Whether the reader will understand why somebody might want to do so is a question I have to ask myself as I write this piece, but the site I'm reviewing offers some help in this, and I'll try to offer some more. |
Draka is a bus. Oh, wow, that sounded exciting. OK, fine. Draka is a bus made, train style, with connecting cars, built in the form of a fire breathing dragon. No, now I just sound like I was partaking of the "refreshments" being given out in the maze a little too much ... at least until one sees that this is an accurate description.  Just a bus? No, once one boarded, one found oneself inside a "chill space", a sort of lounge inside this very, very long bus. Those who rode Draka in earlier years may remember a more enclosed look than the one we currently see, as I seemed to, as this image on the artist's site taken would seem to suggest. We are, to an extent, looking at a new dragon, the old wood and metal structure having been thoroughly damaged by fire as a result of a welding accident on May 14, 2002 as we see in images at the top of this page. Lisa Nigro, the artist running for the project seems to have opted for a less fireprone design for Draka's "facelift", more than understandable under the circumstances, but still a cause for a little regret.  Part of the magic of the old Draka was the fact that it created a space of its own, one open to its surroundings, which one could take in comfort through broad windows cut into its sides, without the interior one found oneself in losing that feeling of being an interior, and losing its own sense of place. As one entered and saw that there was a small bar present, one wasn't surprised. I seem to recall a soft bluish light coming out from inside the bar, gently illuminating the interior at night, which was a nice touch, drawing attention inward to a place where meeting one's fellow passengers was inevitable, making the experience of interacting with these strangers from elsewhere a less isolating experience than it would otherwise have been. I was surprised at how effectively the sound of the pounding of the wheels on the desert hardpan was muffled, thinking that this would be a nice place to hold a fiction reading event. |
With an obviously much different image in mind, a happily soused couple late on Sunday that same week decided that it would be the perfect place to hold their wedding party with their equally drunk friends, and it was all good. Draka, as it travelled through "Black Rock City", the collective encampment that was everybody and everything at Burning Man 2001, became a natural meeting place. "So did and does Center Camp", somebody is likely to say. In a sense, perhaps, but more toward the beginning of the week, I found, and in a very low key kind of way.  People brought their fatigue and mild disorientation into Center Camp, sat down and exchanged a few niceties with strangers, but for the most part, the company they enjoyed was the company they brought into the wide side offered by the Camp and as simple a thing as bringing one's own refreshments has reportedly been enough to get one thrown out of this central meeting place, which seems to function more as a very large coffeehouse than anything else. Draka represented raw spontaneity. It was there when it chose to be there, you were never quite sure when that would be, and so you had to break out of your routine to experience it; you couldn't work it into that routine. That made for a higher energy experience and a qualitatively different kind of meeting place, one that perhaps invited the short term traveler to ask himself why such wandering meeting places don't exist at home. "Aside from the fact that we really wouldn't want people doing this on the front of a CTA bus, Joe?", you ask.  Yes, aside from that. Life is not an all or nothing affair. Other places can have people ride public transportation in less than a fearful churchlike silence without arrests following and have public spaces look less than utterly corporate without the body count rising; the eternal unasked question is why so many places in America (the alleged home of the supposedly free and occasionally brave) can't bring themselves to do the same. By reminding what had been absent in his daily commute, and that there was nothing inevitable about that absence, maybe this experience could get him to question that a little bit more of that blankness and blandness of contemporary American life to which he had become accustomed in the long run, if he were to drop the postmodernist blinders and accept the notion that the status quo was a thing that the individual could legitimately question. More immediately, by pleasantly jarring the unexpected traveler out of his comfort zone, the experience knocked him out of the ingrained patterns of behavior that promoted his self-reinforcing isolation, to leave him pleasantly foundering around in the company of his equally pleasantly disordered fellow travelers, to whom he would reach out before he regained his composure and realised what he was doing, leaving spontaneity to ensue and take hold as the new reality, however briefly. |
That's what Burning Man was about for a lot of us - that spontaneity, and spontaneity is a difficult thing to show, one of those pleasant things that I spoke of at the beginning that is so difficult to bring alive through any noninteractive medium. The written word is what it is, yielding in no way to the reader's actions, leaving him to wander a conceptual landscape defined by an absolute determinism; the world of a story, true or fictional, is set in stone, a reality that the author will try to mask through a series of artfully conceived illusions - or perhaps not so artfully conceived - as he tries to get the reader to imagine that he has lived through choices he hasn't been able to make, bringing us to one point on which I am dissatisfied with this site.  While we are offered some nice photographs, the eye candy on this site is static. No footage, no recordings, no real time exposure to the social experience of the dragon. Not even stories from those who were in it. Just stills, and business oriented pages like this one about future plans on something that, while certainly an attractive and well layed out site, seems more a scrapbook of memories for those who were there than an explanation for those who weren't, and the memories reserved are wholly visual ones. The experience was so much more than just that; Ms.Nigro and her associates should give themselves more credit, and maybe if those who rode the Dragon would send in a few accounts for them to publish, they would? But for now, they haven't. |
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