Something was waiting for me when I logged in a short while ago,
and reminded me that I've maybe been a little remiss. I wrote
my Burning Man pages back in 2002 and never quite got around
to finishing them or updating them, because I wasn't having
a good time with the material. The Green Tortoise was an
experience that I could write about, and you can see me
playing around with using nonlinear narrative to handle the
multiple plotline problem. There was some payoff for writing
the thing. On the other hand, when I put together something
about the bizarre behavior on the Burning Man lists, there's
not much narrative to work with. On the Tortoise, I was out
there interacting with the real world, for better or worse.
When dealing with the burnies online, it's just me looking
at obnoxious remarks on the screen, while stuck in my
apartment very eager to blow the whole thing off and just
go gallery hopping or something. Other than me being
annoyed, nothing's really happening, and on a narrative
level, what do I do with that? There are ways of dealing
with that, but without any especially colorful characters
to work with, I'm not having fun.

So there I left it, unmodified, and somebody innocently
dropping by might see what I've written as being a qualified
endorsement of the experience, because that's what I was
giving it back in 2002. Times change, and so has that event,
from all I've heard. Ticket prices, already excessive at
$200, have become insane at $250. The economy in the Bay Area
has become reminiscent of the one in Chicago, so those
ambitious artworks of old are now beyond the budget of artists
who, ironically, are being priced out of the very event that
their work provides with its attractions, meaning that
attendees are now paying more to see less. That's reason enough
to stay away, but just now, somebody gave me a much better one.


Take a look at this post:

http://tinyurl.com/3a3sss

which resolves to this url:

http://eplaya.burningman.com/viewtopic.php?p=208057&highlight=#208057

in this thread:

http://eplaya.burningman.com/viewtopic.php?t=12344


Wow. I'll give you the short form. Guy writes in to see if
anybody would be interested in setting up a Muslim prayer
group during Burning Man 2006, and discovers that whether
or not an Anti-Muslim holocaust would be acceptable is
a topic of serious discussion on a board presided over
by the Burning Man LLC itself, which should tell one a lot
about the LLC and that event. Would you want to go out into
the desert with a group of people insane enough to think
that this was an acceptable response to such an inquiry?

Looking back, I did allude to another incident in which
somebody who wanted to set up a movie night in order to
promote their event ended up becoming the target of calls
for his murder and dismemberment because he didn't want
to show the John Waters film "Pink Flamingoes". My
immediate thought was that this was enough to drive the
point home, but looking back, I can see that I left that
notice in a location where relatively few visitors were
likely to see it, so what needed to get done in this
section of the Halls did not completely get done.

A truism, perhaps, but this all has become very, very
strange, when viewed from afar. The thought I had when
I first visited the Bay Area was that what I was having
was something like what I thought a visit to a Parallel
universe would be like, everything so familiar and yet
not. At the time, I meant that in a good way, seeing
tolerance and comfortable acceptance in a Neocon infested
era of smothering cultural conservatism, but now what I'm
seeing is something very different. The road not taken
that I get to see our San Franciscan friends taking is
that America might have headed down, had Gore been elected
and used the Presidential bully pulpit to keep the
Age of Political Correctness going strong into this
decade. Let's note that the self-consciously exaggerated
racial sensitivity of that era never seemed to extend
to Latin or Semitic people. Quite the contrary, and if
anything, the bigoted hysteria seems even shriller there
than it did during the 90s.

This is definitely a traveller's advisory. Do not go to
Burning Man, or to any Burning Man affiliated event, anywhere.
Yes, you can probably see a lot of halfway decent looking
women naked at these events, but who cares about the looks
if the spirit does not intrigue and the mind does not
command one's respect? Every year this arts event and those
who attend only seem to get crazier and more hostile which
is to be expected at any gathering where drugs have come
to play such a major role. If you did go at what you
perceived to be my recommendation, I regret the
misunderstanding and will try to make my prose clearer
on that point, among others. My best advice is keep your
art at home, or at least somewhere in the civilized world.
The 60s are over, and if Burning Man is any guide to what
experiencing that era would have been like, we didn't miss much.



Joseph Dunphy