What is Burning Man?
a
few perspectives
San Francisco Gate's 2009
report:
"As
I've been lured back to the sweltering, dusty sexed-up madness that
is Burning Man again this year -- my sixth time -- by a gaggle of
delicious friends, I am hereby reminded of a few hundred truths,
half-truths, outright lies and astonishing epiphanies offered up by
the world-famous, Christian-feared, beautifully debauched, sensory
overloaded, impossible-to-describe art-survivalist-camping-rave
megaspectacle now underway in the remote Nevada desert. If you've
ever wondered at the appeal, the urge, the drive to attend such a
thing, if you've heard wisps of the mythology and the mystery and
the epic weirdness or even seen a few pictures and wondered, you
know, WTF, maybe these tidbits can help."
Ramona Mayhem's 2007 report:
"Bike
out to the deep playa and apply these words. Spend considerable
quality time counting stars and kissing your new BFF. Bike to the
other side of the playa where the blinky lights beckon. Then throw
yourself with joy and ecstasy into a throng of several thousand
people wearing glo-fur grooving to deep bass funk beats and dirty
disco.
How does it feel? What bliss are you transmitting
now?"
Moontroll's 2007 report:
"When
you have 40,000+ people all shooting for the moon together, trying
to get to that place of deep cosmic inspiration, true magic is
possible. All week long, we called our dreams in to reality. It was
quite simple, really -- ask for it, and it will come. I don’t mean
to get all “Fields of Dreams” on you, but it really
worked."
Hekter's 2007 report:
"Sleep deprivation is
driving this caboose, been fucking with my mind ever since I fell
in love with sunrises, when the morning orb of precision pinkcidity
is friendly and translucent; the playa itself is taking a nap from
it’s dirty business."
Guardian UK's 2007
report:
"It
would be all to easy to write off Burning Man as a desert rave, an
escape valve for overstressed executives, a 21st-century update on
Woodstock. But more than any of those things, Burning Man is a
philosophy, an attempt to reinvent the parameters and constraints
of society...Burning Man seems to effect a spiritual magnetism on
those who attend. With its fire worship, close connection to
nature, and emphasis on participation, Burning Man offers a
transcendent experience to all comers."
Hekter's 2006
report:
"To
hear and see photos of the infamous BM dust storms can't relay the
minute stinging of the playa particles bombarding all open skin,
the painfully slow resination of the lungs with an Elmer's Glue
type substance, the cough that makes your belly button sneeze, the
stinging of the eyes as somehow the particles groove their way
through your "bombproof" goggles and get to work on brewing
tomorrow morning's eye boogers, a complete white out of any sense
of place or being."
Geoff Dyer's 2005 report:
"But, in every way, the
festival encourages people to give expression to their wildest
dreams. The first half of Burning Man's famed rubric - "radical
self-expression" - is balanced by the other, equally important
half: "radical self-reliance". The latter anchors the former.
Burning Man gives you unequalled freedom on strict condition that
you be absolutely responsible."
Moontroll's 2004
report:
"Burning Man is an
uber-summit of every American subculture, sub-sect of subculture
and heretical offshoot of sub-sect of subculture, non-dogmatic and
fun-loving all, drawn here to this collective energy by some
voiceless calling. It is a pageantry that revives ancient
traditions while charting the way forward into the space-age
future."
Troy McFadden's 2003 report:
"Largely naked or else
adorned in the most fantastic expressions that textiles have had
the pleasure to be associated with, we honored each other’s beauty
and magnificence openly and fully, those of us who have worked
enough on the conscious amplification of our evolution to be
willing and able to do so. We dropped the charades, the masks, the
walls and shields that we have been encultured and encrusted with
for far too many eons and raged, raged against the dying of the
light."
Wired Magazine's 1996
report:
"Black
Rock City" has no power system, so at night it's all lanterns and
chugging generators and tiki torches and lots of chemglow. Colored
strings of chemglow out in the desert, woven through the spokes of
bicycles and mysteriously revolving. Looming figures in costume.
Huge dramatic bowl of desert stars overhead. Fireworks and flying
flares casting a lurid trench-warfare glow above the massive
camp."