HOLY CHRIST ON A GLOW STICK!
Damn that headline is funny, courtesy of Mark Morford, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and fellow Burner who, in the article that follows, really puts into perspective the necessity of frivolity and celebration of the human spirit, such as with a huge, orgiastic, art-sex-party such as Burning Man, in the tragic wake of Hurricane Katrina.
It was a very strange feeling, finding out about Katrina's devistation while I was out on the Playa. When my friend & I left for Burning Man, Katrina had been downgraded to a tropical storm... although in retrospect, I remember seeing a now-eeirie, rather prophetic TV news report showing the levies around the city, accompanied by the simple fact that New Orleans and the surrounding areas were below sea level. My friend and I actually laughed, saying "who would build a city below sea level?!"
I felt especially ashamed at scoffing at this one guy one night after he came running up to me & my friend, screaming "New Orleans is gone! The whole city is gone! It's completely under water! Thousands of people are dead." We were like "Yeah, right, dude." Everyone was on some sort of hallucenogenic substance or whacked on some smokey joe or drunk on mighty strong libations or all of the above, so we attributed his delcaration to that. That is, until we learned otherwise as the volunteers at the Center Camp Cafe put out huge water cooler jugs for donations to help those effected by Katrina. Those jugs filled up over and over again each time we stood in line to get our daily fix of mocha laced caffeine.
Burning Man Defies Katrina?
In the wake of epic tragedy, how can a massive, feral party in the desert possibly matter?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, September 7, 2005
Sometimes there is just no way to know. Sometimes you are just handed a slab of raw perspective, a shocking dose of irony, and you have to do with it what you can.
Some readers wrote me e-mails when I was out scorching my nether parts in the remote Nevada desert at Burning Man 2005, half naked and beglittered and intensely hung over and posting daily blog entries that read more like postcards from my moaning id than rational semicoherent slivers of BM reality.
And these e-mails, with more than a little bitter condescension or holier-than-thou snicker, asked me this: "How the hell could you be out there dancing and reveling and drinking badly mixed margaritas and eating camp-stove-cooked gourmet food and imbibing all those unholy joys when the worst natural disaster in recent U.S. history just hammered Louisiana like a Republican hammers welfare?"
This is what they argued. Doesn't it make Burning Man seem completely trite and superfluous and overindulgent? Don't you feel more than a little, you know, silly, trying to write about your childish little otherworldly sexed-up art-rave survivalist-camping thing with even the slightest hint of seriousness in the aftermath of this horrible tragedy and loss of life and the fact that we have a grossly inept president who sits around the ranch smoking stogies with his oil cronies and chuckling while the corpses of thousands of poor mostly black Americans bobble around Louisiana and Mississippi?
And of course my reply is, well, hell yes, of course Burning Man is utterly gratuitous, and excessive, and more than a little ridiculous, especially in the wake of Katrina -- just as, say, NFL football has become suddenly pointless, and also the auto industry, and celebrity, and organic dog food and ornithology and Destiny's Child or the fact that the ultraviolent cheese of "Transporter II" took in $20 mil over this past tragedy-thick weekend, enough to repair at least a few schools and roadways in Biloxi. You have a point?
These are, after all, the weird swipes of the universe, the jarring simultaneous juxtapositions we cannot control, a wild sybaritic celebration contrasted with an epic heartbreaking disaster and you cannot, as a BM participant, escape the painful and weirdly fascinating irony of it all. We all feel small and heartbroken.
But here's the thing: While the circumstances and the remoteness of the event meant most Burning Man participants had little or no idea of the extent of Katrina's wrath, as soon as news did begin to trickle in, the call went out and Burners immediately rallied and funds were immediately raised across the camp, and word has it that the money gathered reached into the tens of thousands within two or three days, with zero PR or advertising or formal pleas from Angelina Jolie or the Red Cross and sans any blank-eyed stares from our useless president.
Hell, on one level, everything becomes moot and hollow in the wake of epic death tolls and a massive karmic shock. Everything seems trite and pointless and more than a little insulting to your deeper consciousness. Sept. 11 was the death of irony and humor and pop culture for a good six months. Horrific events like Katrina inject a temporary numbness into all sense of play. Death and inexpressible loss trump all cultural protests. Same as it ever was.
But there's another angle, too. Let us argue the obvious but necessary flip-side notion that, in the wake of any national disaster or mounting death toll, it is exactly those things that celebrate life that we turn to because they offer salve and balm and resurrection of spirit.
In other words, in the aftermath of hurricanes and national tragedies and in the face of the most ham-fisted and heartless and freedom-stabbing administration in recent American history, we need this sort of "trifling" Burning Man fluff more than ever, to act as spark, as beacon, as counterbalance. I know, it's not a perfect idea. It solves no ecological woes. It saves no lives from the floodwaters. But it's all we've got.
And holy Christ on a glow stick, Burning Man is nothing if not all about the celebration of life, the illumination of spirit and the glittery determination of the human soul to find raw joy in the world no matter what, to redefine community and break out of normal modes of thought and to openly thwart the demons of uptight neo-conservative sexless dogma, with drinks. To not only survive, but to survive with humor and style and joy and dust and many open-mouthed screams of dangerous bliss, with fire.
And in BM's case, this celebration takes place in the very face of death, flaunts it, defies it, pokes it with a Bloody Mary swizzle stick chased by two hits of top-quality Ecstasy as all participants read the plain bold letters printed on the back of every Burning Man ticket: "By attending this event, you voluntarily assume the risk of serious injury or death." Period. No BS. You could have the most incredible experience imaginable. Or you could die. You know, just like life.
Indeed, it's a bizarre condition of the human animal that we actively seek out extreme conditions to test our mettle and take us to the limits of our consciousness, to see what we're made of, to prove that we can survive in the face of intense odds and brutal heat and a massive display of exposed painted nipples (the famed Critical Tits all-female all-topless all-painted-nipple bike brigade, 3,000 pairs strong and growing and who, pray who, will save the children?).
And what's more, we do it all when there is absolutely zero shortage of earthbound terrors right at our front door, all manner of tsunami and hurricane and earthquake all just waiting to gnaw our heads off and requiring no desert travel and no $250 ticket and no body paint whatsoever, and while it is indeed a bit surreal to be out in the desert putting your skin through the sun-humped wringer and your lungs through alkali-choked hell while Mother Nature just hurled one of her nastiest megaton spitballs at New Orleans, it is also, in some odd way, exactly the place you want to be when the heavens appear to fall.
See, Burning Man is, after all, the place where perspective is most fluxive and liquid. It is the place, maybe, where you can best try to understand the place of the human animal in the grand scheme. It is where you can have the most intense shift in awareness, the place where you can inch a bit closer to the demons of the world and stare them down and realize both our amazing strength and resolve, and our breathtaking fragility. Again, not a perfect idea. But it will have to do.
Meanwhile, Burning Man '05 went off without a hitch. It was, as usual, an orgiastic and dangerous and obnoxious and exhausting and wonderful mix of indescribable sounds and smells and flesh and moneyless community, and you can describe it to death and even come reasonably close to getting a sense of it, but what you will never get is the epic scale, the sheer overwhelming Otherness.
Hell, even this very paper, even the goodly Chronicle finally covered the event like never before and wrote dozens of stories and added video clips and snapped countless Faces of Burning Man and even then you miss out because, well, this is the thing about raw death-defying events, with cocktails: They like to whip your perspective. They like to mangle expectation. They like to hurl you straight out of yourself. So much so that the only way to truly understand is to go and find out for yourself. This is why we love them so.
Look at it this way: Katrina slammed us all in one direction, toward pathos and melancholy and emptiness, the sense that we are but fragile and unbalanced things, ever teetering on the edge of the abyss, confused and scared and not nearly as secure or socially healthy as we like to think. And then we have events like Burning Man to help, in some small way, to slam us right back, toward heat and celebration and energy, toward survival, toward frustration and laughter and raw bleating life. What value, that?
Wow. I could not have put it better myself.
And for those of you new to me - which is pretty much everyone here - you can read some of my OWN work through links on my website: http://lalindaloca.com
That is all. End transmission... *cick*
Damn that headline is funny, courtesy of Mark Morford, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and fellow Burner who, in the article that follows, really puts into perspective the necessity of frivolity and celebration of the human spirit, such as with a huge, orgiastic, art-sex-party such as Burning Man, in the tragic wake of Hurricane Katrina.
It was a very strange feeling, finding out about Katrina's devistation while I was out on the Playa. When my friend & I left for Burning Man, Katrina had been downgraded to a tropical storm... although in retrospect, I remember seeing a now-eeirie, rather prophetic TV news report showing the levies around the city, accompanied by the simple fact that New Orleans and the surrounding areas were below sea level. My friend and I actually laughed, saying "who would build a city below sea level?!"
I felt especially ashamed at scoffing at this one guy one night after he came running up to me & my friend, screaming "New Orleans is gone! The whole city is gone! It's completely under water! Thousands of people are dead." We were like "Yeah, right, dude." Everyone was on some sort of hallucenogenic substance or whacked on some smokey joe or drunk on mighty strong libations or all of the above, so we attributed his delcaration to that. That is, until we learned otherwise as the volunteers at the Center Camp Cafe put out huge water cooler jugs for donations to help those effected by Katrina. Those jugs filled up over and over again each time we stood in line to get our daily fix of mocha laced caffeine.
Burning Man Defies Katrina?
In the wake of epic tragedy, how can a massive, feral party in the desert possibly matter?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, September 7, 2005
Sometimes there is just no way to know. Sometimes you are just handed a slab of raw perspective, a shocking dose of irony, and you have to do with it what you can.
Some readers wrote me e-mails when I was out scorching my nether parts in the remote Nevada desert at Burning Man 2005, half naked and beglittered and intensely hung over and posting daily blog entries that read more like postcards from my moaning id than rational semicoherent slivers of BM reality.
And these e-mails, with more than a little bitter condescension or holier-than-thou snicker, asked me this: "How the hell could you be out there dancing and reveling and drinking badly mixed margaritas and eating camp-stove-cooked gourmet food and imbibing all those unholy joys when the worst natural disaster in recent U.S. history just hammered Louisiana like a Republican hammers welfare?"
This is what they argued. Doesn't it make Burning Man seem completely trite and superfluous and overindulgent? Don't you feel more than a little, you know, silly, trying to write about your childish little otherworldly sexed-up art-rave survivalist-camping thing with even the slightest hint of seriousness in the aftermath of this horrible tragedy and loss of life and the fact that we have a grossly inept president who sits around the ranch smoking stogies with his oil cronies and chuckling while the corpses of thousands of poor mostly black Americans bobble around Louisiana and Mississippi?
And of course my reply is, well, hell yes, of course Burning Man is utterly gratuitous, and excessive, and more than a little ridiculous, especially in the wake of Katrina -- just as, say, NFL football has become suddenly pointless, and also the auto industry, and celebrity, and organic dog food and ornithology and Destiny's Child or the fact that the ultraviolent cheese of "Transporter II" took in $20 mil over this past tragedy-thick weekend, enough to repair at least a few schools and roadways in Biloxi. You have a point?
These are, after all, the weird swipes of the universe, the jarring simultaneous juxtapositions we cannot control, a wild sybaritic celebration contrasted with an epic heartbreaking disaster and you cannot, as a BM participant, escape the painful and weirdly fascinating irony of it all. We all feel small and heartbroken.
But here's the thing: While the circumstances and the remoteness of the event meant most Burning Man participants had little or no idea of the extent of Katrina's wrath, as soon as news did begin to trickle in, the call went out and Burners immediately rallied and funds were immediately raised across the camp, and word has it that the money gathered reached into the tens of thousands within two or three days, with zero PR or advertising or formal pleas from Angelina Jolie or the Red Cross and sans any blank-eyed stares from our useless president.
Hell, on one level, everything becomes moot and hollow in the wake of epic death tolls and a massive karmic shock. Everything seems trite and pointless and more than a little insulting to your deeper consciousness. Sept. 11 was the death of irony and humor and pop culture for a good six months. Horrific events like Katrina inject a temporary numbness into all sense of play. Death and inexpressible loss trump all cultural protests. Same as it ever was.
But there's another angle, too. Let us argue the obvious but necessary flip-side notion that, in the wake of any national disaster or mounting death toll, it is exactly those things that celebrate life that we turn to because they offer salve and balm and resurrection of spirit.
In other words, in the aftermath of hurricanes and national tragedies and in the face of the most ham-fisted and heartless and freedom-stabbing administration in recent American history, we need this sort of "trifling" Burning Man fluff more than ever, to act as spark, as beacon, as counterbalance. I know, it's not a perfect idea. It solves no ecological woes. It saves no lives from the floodwaters. But it's all we've got.
And holy Christ on a glow stick, Burning Man is nothing if not all about the celebration of life, the illumination of spirit and the glittery determination of the human soul to find raw joy in the world no matter what, to redefine community and break out of normal modes of thought and to openly thwart the demons of uptight neo-conservative sexless dogma, with drinks. To not only survive, but to survive with humor and style and joy and dust and many open-mouthed screams of dangerous bliss, with fire.
And in BM's case, this celebration takes place in the very face of death, flaunts it, defies it, pokes it with a Bloody Mary swizzle stick chased by two hits of top-quality Ecstasy as all participants read the plain bold letters printed on the back of every Burning Man ticket: "By attending this event, you voluntarily assume the risk of serious injury or death." Period. No BS. You could have the most incredible experience imaginable. Or you could die. You know, just like life.
Indeed, it's a bizarre condition of the human animal that we actively seek out extreme conditions to test our mettle and take us to the limits of our consciousness, to see what we're made of, to prove that we can survive in the face of intense odds and brutal heat and a massive display of exposed painted nipples (the famed Critical Tits all-female all-topless all-painted-nipple bike brigade, 3,000 pairs strong and growing and who, pray who, will save the children?).
And what's more, we do it all when there is absolutely zero shortage of earthbound terrors right at our front door, all manner of tsunami and hurricane and earthquake all just waiting to gnaw our heads off and requiring no desert travel and no $250 ticket and no body paint whatsoever, and while it is indeed a bit surreal to be out in the desert putting your skin through the sun-humped wringer and your lungs through alkali-choked hell while Mother Nature just hurled one of her nastiest megaton spitballs at New Orleans, it is also, in some odd way, exactly the place you want to be when the heavens appear to fall.
See, Burning Man is, after all, the place where perspective is most fluxive and liquid. It is the place, maybe, where you can best try to understand the place of the human animal in the grand scheme. It is where you can have the most intense shift in awareness, the place where you can inch a bit closer to the demons of the world and stare them down and realize both our amazing strength and resolve, and our breathtaking fragility. Again, not a perfect idea. But it will have to do.
Meanwhile, Burning Man '05 went off without a hitch. It was, as usual, an orgiastic and dangerous and obnoxious and exhausting and wonderful mix of indescribable sounds and smells and flesh and moneyless community, and you can describe it to death and even come reasonably close to getting a sense of it, but what you will never get is the epic scale, the sheer overwhelming Otherness.
Hell, even this very paper, even the goodly Chronicle finally covered the event like never before and wrote dozens of stories and added video clips and snapped countless Faces of Burning Man and even then you miss out because, well, this is the thing about raw death-defying events, with cocktails: They like to whip your perspective. They like to mangle expectation. They like to hurl you straight out of yourself. So much so that the only way to truly understand is to go and find out for yourself. This is why we love them so.
Look at it this way: Katrina slammed us all in one direction, toward pathos and melancholy and emptiness, the sense that we are but fragile and unbalanced things, ever teetering on the edge of the abyss, confused and scared and not nearly as secure or socially healthy as we like to think. And then we have events like Burning Man to help, in some small way, to slam us right back, toward heat and celebration and energy, toward survival, toward frustration and laughter and raw bleating life. What value, that?
Wow. I could not have put it better myself.
And for those of you new to me - which is pretty much everyone here - you can read some of my OWN work through links on my website: http://lalindaloca.com
That is all. End transmission... *cick*
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
Nothing mean spirited was meant by that comment. We were both unaware of this fact and were in shock - it was an exlamation of shock - not a taunt. My goodness NO!
If you want to get misty-eyed, especially since it was your favorite place, rent "Down By Law," a b/w film by Jim Jarmusch (starring Tom Waits and Roberto Benini, in his first - I believe - English-speaking film). It was filmed in and around New Orleans and all along the bayou. It made me so sad to see all the shanties which are now gone forever. Even though the French Quarter remains, all the small places with character are completely wiped out.