fuck burning man

Looking for something out of the ordinary to do this Labor Day weekend? Visit Burning Man! It’s the underground event of the year! Just ask Melanie Warner of Fortune magazine, who calls the event “a non-stop carnival” and the “cyber-generation’s answer to Woodstock.” Or ask the pink spandex-clad woman on the cover of August’s National Geographic, who is, as the caption reads,“Celebrating art and anarchy... in the Black Rock Desert.” Find out how Business Week’s Vicky Rubin, while living it up at this “week-long bacchanal,” realized that Chairman Mao was wrong when he said, “Revolution is not an invitation to a party.” Don’t miss Men's Health’s Burning Man fashion tips: “To stay warm on those cold desert nights, we’re wearing our new 'Workrite jacket’ ($180) made of flame- resistant fleece— because one Burning Man is enough!”You can also find articles on the annual “underground” festival of debauchery in Playboy and Hustler. And if that doesn’t convince you to go, look for a blurb on Burning Man in Entertainment Weekly’s 2001 Calendar, sandwiched in between the opening of Jennifer Lopez’s new movie and the Miss Teen USA pageant. You’ve got to go! It’s the thing to do! 

But if you don’t have an extra $250 lying around for a ticket, or you don’t have an RV with unlimited gas, or you can’t get ten days off of work, or if you have kids who are too young to go, or you don’t have a spare Tesla coil to spark up or a spare wooden sculpture you want to burn, or you don’t want to go camping with 25,000 people (who are mostly from the Bay Area anyway) and take large amounts of dehydrating drugs in the middle of the desert, you might have to find something to do right here. 

In search of aliens

After I finished reading “Good Day at Black Rock,” an article on Burning Man featured on the cover of my AAA travel guide Via, I started looking through the events listings to see what else there might be to do. After dismissing a couple of possibilities, I pondered spending Labor Day attending the Ducal Prize, a joint event of the Kingdom Historical Trust and the Society for Creative Anachronism (www.sca.org). For $5, I’d be granted entrance to the three-day festival, five raffle tickets and entry into most of the competitions, which include the curdled-milk cooking contest, the limbo in armor, the two-man-tied-together race and the drag races, where girls dress as boys and vice versa. 

A week later, however, my friend Samantha and I had found the perfect anodyne for Burning Man. We packed up the car for an overnight trip to Bridgeville’s “Bridgefest,” an annual small-town festival that features UFO races off— what else?— the old town bridge. 

During the long drive to Humboldt we gave up trying to find a good radio station and listened to the droning sermons of a Christian broadcast. 

“When I begin to falter,” a deep voice on the radio cried, “and when I begin to be double-minded, my voice ceases, my ears begin to close up. And so Paul declared according to Hebrews that we are to circumcise our ears and to circumcise our hearts!’ Samantha and I looked at each other, aghast. 

“We are to pull away the fleshly skin that has sealed the voice of God,” the plaintive voice of the pastor sobbed as we drove. 

Two years ago my friend Jason Jensen went to Burning Man with two Cornish game hens and a cannon designed to make them fly. “They have wings, they can’t fly, it’s a fucking travesty, a mistake of nature I intended to correct,” he wrote in his annual post- Burning Man e-mail. After days of failed attempts, he finally launched one of the hens some 150 feet into the air. 

“It was still in the packaging, but as it shot from the tube, it shed its corporate- logo-emblazoned plastic skin and flew,” he wrote. It is a rule that nothing (besides entrance tickets) can be bought or sold at Burning Man. This is part of the message: we must circumcise our consumer culture. Let’s all shed our Nike shirts and our Tommy Hilfiger boxer shorts and fly free. 

Home free 

A shallow stream of water ran under the mossy bridge and over the huge boulders in the riverbed. As we approached Bridgeville’s bridge, we could see people running around and laughing. A passing woman asked, “Would you like some raisins?,” and handed us little red boxes. We got a lot of gifts at Bridgefest, even though there were no rules insisting that nothing be sold. At a public health booth prizes were given away for correctly answering health-related questions. I won a yo-yo, Samantha a rubber duckie. They were also giving away condoms—not the cheap kind you usually find at booths but the good ones, like Durex Ultra Sensitive, and Astroglide lube (in keeping with the intergalactic theme, 1 guess). Proceeds from the items that were for sale benefited the community center, where there are family planning services, senior lunches, and a weekly health clinic. 

On the Burning Man website an article states, “Imagine the man, greeting you, neon and benevolence, watching over the community. You’re here to build a community that needs you and relies on you.” Over and over again, articles about Burning Man claim Black Rock City as the writer’s “community,” a “home." In fact, the writers seem almost proud of themselves for being able to survive a week in the desert. That’s great. I’m glad the writers feel like a part of something. But when was the last time you read an article about so many people putting all of their creative energy into San Francisco or Oakland? Maybe we should do something for the place in which we live the other 51 weeks of the year. Maybe we should, as the old blues singers say, “Make this goddamned house a home.” 

My friend Jake, a longtime attendee of Burning Man who served in the Burning Man Department of Public Works, will not be attending the festival this year. He’s got lines tattooed on his face and the Powerpuff Girls tattooed on his stomach (a present to his daughter). He helped to build the tallest bicycle and the longest bicycle in the Guinness Book of World Records. He describes Burning Man as “a giant leech sucking all the creative energy out of every town in this country.” He continues, “I was inspired by Burning Man to do my own thing here [in the Bay Area] and make my own life more interesting. You know, a lot of people, when their house is all messed up, they just go to someone else’s house. I go home and clean my own place up.” 

On the bridge I had the honor of meeting the King and Queen of “Pooperania,” who are known on earth as Larry and Eileen Crain. They are both white-haired, probably in their early 70s. Eileen had two copper coils protruding from her cap; Larry had a television antenna sticking out of his shirt collar. 

“How often do you visit earth?” I asked. 

Larry whispered sadly, “As little as possible.” 

“Mine is computerized!” a starry-eyed redhead shouted at us from across the bridge. 

“Which one is yours?” Samantha asked. 

“Nemrod,” the woman answered proudly. “The one with all the little doodads.” 

I knew which rig she was talking about right away. It was a thin metal pizza tray with a bunch of buttons and felt flowers and shells glued on it. 

“What planet are you from?” I asked. 

“Oh, oh —” she said, bewildered, then blurted, “I-I’m from a star." She grinned hugely, nodding. “I see those things. 1 see them a lot around here. Truthfully. I have seen UFOs.” 

Larry raised an eyebrow. 

“If they're nuclear, they have to cool off once in a while. They’re going to have to land near a body of water.” She pointed to the almost dry riverbed. 

“Is that why we have so little water?” Larry asked. 

“No,” the captain of Nemrod stated definitively. “They haven’t been around for a few years.” 

"Where do you think they’ve been?” I questioned. 

“It’s another dimension,” she confided, throwing her hand far out in front of her, then staring at it wistfully. “They offer us all kinds of advice, but we never take it.” 

A boy ran up and down the bridge holding long peacock feathers and screaming, “Antennas for sale! Antennas for sale!” His mother smiled, saying, “He’s what they call a Humboldt hybrid.” She shook her head. “Half hippie, half logger.” She and her husband were working a booth of chain-saw sculptures. Samantha and I were dumbfounded by a series of sculptures behind them: widely smiling, potbellied wooden aliens waved happily. Carved into wooden signs behind them were the words “howdy” and “ya found us!” 

The husband handed us a card with the words “Art by Joe” and a picture of a chain saw above a phone number. When we started talking about how beautiful it was in Bridgeville, Joe, who lived farther out in the hills, said, “Well, I like my valley better than this over here ... More meadows and a better view. Plus, we can sit on the front porch of the store and smoke pot, and nobody bitches.” 

“Do you think they would here?” I wondered. 

“Probably. Well, Bridgeville, see, is on a major highway. We’re off the road. You want a cop, it’s an hour and a half.” 

“If they ever come at all,” Samantha offered. 

“All you have to do is, you say, “And I hope you get here before I shoot his ass!,” and then they’ll come out. Take ’em a while, though.” 

Breaking the law 

The Burning Man Web site lists a number of common infractions of the law in Black Rock City and warns that law enforcement officials will be on hand with their eyes peeled. These infractions include the unauthorized discharge of fireworks, which is a violation of federal, state, and county laws resulting in fines of up to $650; the possession of illegal drugs; the possession of drug paraphernalia (at least $330 for bail); and violation of the five-mph speed limit on the playa ($250 maximum fine). What is there to do with the perpetrators of all these crimes when the nearest judge and jail are hundreds of miles away? An inside source tells us that the bigwigs at Black Rock, along with law enforcement officials from the Bureau of Land Management and surrounding counties, have come up with a couple of possible ideas. 

One is the construction of an on-site cage, which would house the violators until there were enough people to drive the three hours to the nearest jail. The problem with that plan, aside from its obviously barbaric nature, is that the cage would become like detention hall. If you put all the bad kids in one room, they’re not going to behave. If these hypothetical Burning Man criminals were worth their salt, they’d fight and fuck until the jailer set them free. 

The kinder, gentler option put forth by the muckety-mucks, our source tells us, is to employ an on-site judge to issue tickets right away. The problem with this plan is that an on-site judge would mean on-site search warrants, which would mean that any tent or van emitting a strange smell or sound could hypothetically be searched with “probable cause.” It may be that neither of those two options comes to pass, but the fact that they were even discussed tells us that law enforcement officers have their eyes on the 25,000 participants of Burning Man, and the festival is hardly the free-for-all it claims to be. But if you were to, say, go to some of the top-secret raves in the Bay Area, you’d be a lot less noticeable than a rod of plutonium on a radar screen. Of course, I can’t tell you where these events are, nor can I promise unbridled drug availability, but I can say they won’t be watched by every law enforcement official within a 100-mile radius because it’s the most famous counter-culture drugfest this side of Woodstock. 

Burning the Bay 

My favorite competitor at the UFO races was a guy drinking Old Style beer from a can and wearing a Hang Loose T-shirt and a yellow hard hat. Sticking up out of the top of the hat was a car antenna with a bicycle reflector glued to it. His rig was a hubcap with a small orange man attached to one side, just about the size of a pencil eraser. He didn’t do too well, though. His craft only flew about 75 feet. 

The most impressive costumes were worn by the two inhabitants of “Planet Wild Nurse,’’ who identified themselves to me as copilot Nightingale and Captain Ratched. They ended up winning all three categories: coolest-looking rig, furthest flight, and overall winner. They wore matching Bundt-cake-pan hats, Christmas-light necklaces, thin gold lame shirts, and Britney Spears-style headsets made of copper tubing and Brillo pads. 

“My sixth-grade self has never been happier!” Ratched exclaimed, claiming her trophy: a handblown glass mug with a UFO on it. 

Last year at Burning Man my friend Jason tried to re-create his previous success with the game hen. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get it to fly more than a few feet. “I gave this loud speech over the megaphone,” he said in his report-back, “about the future of evolution and correcting nature’s mistakes, only to have the chicken fly about ten feet and flop to the ground.... [This year’s Burning Man] had its moments of brilliance, but there was a lot of watered-down aimlessness and confusion and I don’t know exactly how to fit it all together.” 

As for Bridgefest, it was a nice vacation, a little break from the daily grind and unpaid bills, but after the races it was time to pack up and leave. We all have to go back to the place where we live our lives— and I love my home. “Black Rock City is you” is a common slogan among Burning Man types. I don’t pretend to know what happens to every person who goes to the Nevada desert, but if it’s so great, bring some of it back here. Give the Bay Area some of all that creative energy and community you muster up each August. This is your home too. ❖ 

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