The Burning man music fest in Nevada, It seems like a good time, I'm thinking about it. Anyone else want to go?





Burning Man's warm welcome
Free spirits create community each year in the Nevada desert
Last Updated: July 12, 2003

Burning Man Festival

Story and photos
by Gary Porter

Art is everywhere at the Burning Man festival. The wooden Temple of Joy is dedicated to loved ones lost. Visitors write messages for them on pieces of wood. The temple is burned at the end of the festival.



An art car with jellyfish, tied to "The Floating World" theme, looks surreal as it moves through a dust storm. Fireworks (above)and fire dancing lead up to the burning of the "Man" on Saturday night.



As the Burning Man crashes to the ground, swirling dust devils erupt from the desert floor. The burning of the 70-foot statue is the culmination of the annual weeklong festival.



Performers do their thing on a giant pirate ship art car. The art cars are the only cars sanctioned for transportation during the festival.



Fireworks and fire dancing lead up to the burning of the "Man" on Saturday night.



Fanciful hats are popular at Burning Man, even as the dust whips across the Nevada desert.



The slimy mud men go on the prowl at Burning Man. The idea behind the festival is that everyone is a participant in the show.



Daily life in the desert of northwestern Nevada during the Burning Man festival often includes travel by bicycle. Because only art cars are allowed to drive around on the playa during the festival, visitors will see their share of strange-looking contraptions.



An ecstatic drumbeat gets dancers into a frenzy at Center Camp during a whiteout dust storm.



Revelers dance to the drumbeat at Center Camp during a dust storm. A 38,000-square-foot tent offers some protection from the harsh elements.


If You Go

What: Burning Man.
When: Aug. 25-Sept. 1.
What it costs: Tickets are $225, online or mail order, until Aug. 22. Online orders after July 31 will be held at will-call. Tickets are available at the gate starting the first day at $250 and will go up each day until Aug. 28 at 11 p.m. No tickets will be available after that.
Local connection: The Burning Man experience has offshoots nationwide. In Milwaukee there is the BurningSNOW Center for Experimental Arts, 2578 N. Weil St. Eric G. is the Wisconsin regional contact and can be reached at eric@clevian.com for camping spots at Burning Man or for information about the local activities.
More information: Although Burning Man has a spontaneous air, the official Web site suggests a much more organized event. The site, www.burningman.com, has a wealth of information and suggestions on how to plan for the trip, discussions of how the event is policed, and rights of "citizens."

Burning Man Festival



Flying into Reno, I got a little worried when the guy next to me began playing a game with his friends. They were trying to pick out people on the flight who were going to Burning Man.

"He's definitely going," they said, pointing at a guy with red-spiked hair and piercings everywhere. "She's going," about a young hippie chick a few rows up. They all appeared to be in their early 20s, and some were from as far away as New York.

"I'm going," I sheepishly volunteered, drawing a slow up and down appraisal from him as he stared at my middle-aged, non-pierced, non-punked out, and otherwise unfashionably adorned self.

"NO WAY!!"

"Way."

He spent the rest of the flight cautioning me about dehydration in the desert and clothes to help me "fit in." When he found out I was with the media, he gave me a lecture about being obtrusive, ruining the spontaneity of the event for others, blah, blah, blah.

Back to beginnings
Burning Man began as Larry Harvey, the mastermind behind the festival, and a few friends burned a wicker effigy of a man on a San Francisco beach in the mid-1980s. As the event grew, the local authorities became less and less comfortable with the crowds and fireworks, until one year Larry and his friends got the boot. They ended up in the middle of the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, where Burning Man has been growing ever since.

Each year the festival revolves around a different theme. When I attended last year, it was "The Floating World." For this year's event, Aug. 25 to Sept. 1, it will be "Beyond Belief."

Previous participants in Burning Man say it's like the Internet - you can go there and pretty much find what you want to find.

At its heart, the event is about self-expression, community, art, imagination - and having a good time.

At Burning Man, streets full of "theme camps" revolve on a semicircular grid around the open playa,with the "Man" in the center - a giant wooden figure nearly 70 feet tall. Cross streets shoot off from the center at 10-degree intervals. Last year's event drew nearly 30,000 people, very few of whom who weren't thoroughly enjoying themselves.

But Burning Man is definitely not for everyone.

If you go, be prepared to bring in enough supplies to survive for a week, and be ready for the potential for harsh weather. The days can reach up well past 100 degrees and the nights can dip down to the 40s. Fierce dust storms can whip up out of nowhere, and there is always a chance for rain. Playa dust may permeate every inch of your tent, your supplies, not to mention orifices of your body.

It's also not for the shy or closed-minded. You may witness anything and everything. But from what I saw, it's also less of a drug fest than your average Midwestern rock concert. I didn't see any illegal drug activity.

Unpleasant surprise
When I got to Reno, I was already uneasy about what I might be getting into when I learned that all the camping gear I had shipped from Milwaukee - what I'd rely on for my survival in the desert - had mysteriously disappeared. I frantically raced around town trying to find replacement supplies. My idea to do a photographic story on Burning Man was beginning to seem like a bad one.

The next day I packed my rental Ford Explorer with a week's worth of supplies and headed for "Black Rock City," the name given to the Burning Man site. Nothing is for sale at Burning Man. All food, water, whatever, must be brought in. Everything except ice, which is available at a special tent - it's trucked in every day, and all proceeds go to local charities.

I drove 100 miles or so into the austere, high Black Rock Desert of Nevada. A place that resembles the surface of the moon for as far as you can see. A place that is totally flat, where nothing thrives: not a cactus, not a bug, not anything. It's here that for the week before Labor Day, Black Rock City becomes what is said to be the fourth-largest city in Nevada, emerging in all its splendor and then disappearing without a trace.

As I inched my way along the road toward camp, I passed rows of Burma-Shave-like signs, one proclaiming, "It was better last year." My insecurities began to fall away. A smile emerged as I saw the array of strange vehicles holding even stranger-looking people, all heading toward camp.

At the entrance a very pleasant greeter asked if this was my first time to Burning Man, which I confessed it was.

"Well, welcome home," she exclaimed.

"Now, get out of your car, walk over here and sit on the throne (which was an old toilet seat a couple of feet up on a small stage), ring the bell and yell to all the people in line 'I'M NOT A VIRGIN ANY MORE,' and then wait for your spanking."

Setting up camp
I had arrived at Snowflake Village, the theme camp where I'd be staying, mostly made up of Midwesterners.

I spent the rest of the afternoon pounding foot-long tent stakes deep into the playa, or dry lakebed, something the Burning Man survival guide told me was necessary to keep my tent from blowing 20 miles away if the fierce desert winds kicked up. Friendly neighbors stopped by, offering lukewarm beer. One group from Detroit extended an invitation to a potluck dinner taking place that evening at two fingers (a term that was used a lot, meaning the time when the sun was two fingers away from the mountains on the horizon).

Not many people wore watches at Burning Man. Some people, I noticed, didn't wear much of anything.

After camp was made, I surveyed the surrounding clutter of Black Rock City. Tents and RVs were interspersedbetween fabulous structures of strange shapes and sizes. A skull and crossbones flew from a pirate ship nearby. In front of me the people from Detroit were making final adjustments to a 30-foot roller coaster they'd trucked all the way from home. The sound of drums was coming from Center Camp, a huge tent a few blocks away.

Warm sun, clear air
I remember taking a deep breath and sighing with a real sense of relief. The late afternoon sun felt warm on my back. The air was clear. Sounds emanated from all directions, and movement was everywhere: people walking, a giant shark floating by on wheels, then a jellyfish. Life felt good; after all, I was home.

After dinner, I decided to look around some more. It was nearly dark, and Black Rock City was transforming into a strange tribal village. I could hear drums, and people were milling around wearing bizarre costumes. A row of kerosene lamps lighted the esplanade, and glowing things hung from bicycles, from people, from everywhere.

I decided to stop in at the Red party, being held in a makeshift lounge nearby, where anyone wearing red could get a free drink. Unfortunately I wasn't wearing red, but told them my hair used to be red, so they begrudgingly slipped me one.

An old school bus blasting techno music stopped out front. People were hanging from the windows and a deck that had been built on top. It reminded me of the buses from a trip long ago to Bangladesh and Nepal. This appeared to be a bus stop, so I climbed up top. As the bus crawled along, people climbed on and jumped off at various camps. Applause rang out as the driver of an 8-foot neon head on a weird motorcycle circled the bus.

Endless activity
I stayed with the night tour on the bus for a while and then bailed at an outdoor dance club, where strobe lights were flashing and people were dancing. Neon - very popular at Burning Man - swirled from their bodies as they whirled trance-like in the night.

From there I moved on down the playa toward loud cheers and applause coming from a geodesic dome frame, covered with hundreds of people standing all the way to the top on the metal triangles that made up the structure. Nudging my way closer, I saw two people suspended from what appeared to be giant rubber bands. They were swinging back and forth, jousting with large padded sticks, and each time they smacked each other the crowd went crazy. It was like a scene out of the post-end-of-civilization movie "Mad Max."

And the night continued from one theme camp to another, until I was so tired I walked back to my camp, crawled into my one-man tent and promptly fell asleep on the hard desert floor, where the warm sun would wake me the next morning.

Each theme camp has its own events scheduled throughout the week, and from the hundreds of camps there was a lot to choose from. A brochure handed out to visitors describes some of them:

Alice in Wunderlounge was fantasy world, where everyone smiles and exclaims, "We are all MAD here."
The Astral Headwash advertises bringing your dusty playa head and leaving refreshed and rejuvenated.
The Barbershop Roulette camp schedule read: "Take a chance on a new look. Spinning the wheel determines your style of haircut, by our professional barber," cautioning "not for the faint of heart."
The Big Puffy Yellow camp wanted me to come and relive the yellow and puffy side of life and experience all that is big, puffy and yellow.
Snowflake Village hosted acts called Fire Fabulon and BurningMime, just after dark. There were fire performances, circus acts, glass walking, a bed of nails, feats of human endurance, odd body-part tricks. The list goes on and on, and everything was just a bike ride away.

Out on the playa surrounding the 70-foot effigy of the Man were surreal works of art, some exceptional enough to have attracted the attention of art museum curators. Climb on a sea monster or spin the breaststroke-swimmer mobile.

Sense of community
Days and nights at Burning Man run together like a flock of crazed gulls.

It is totally free-form, but with an enlightened approach to creating a community in the midst of some of the harshest possible surroundings.

The culmination of the weeklong activities is the magnificent spectacle leading up to the burning of the Man. At about two fingers, the camps begin to assemble and slowly walk the cross streets that are the wheel spokes leading toward center camp. The tribal sound of drums is everywhere and, as the sky darkens, fire begins to whirl all around.

Everyone descends to the periphery of the circle around the Man, which is about a mile in diameter. The circle becomes alive with fire dancers and the sounds of drums. A parade of vehicles and fire dancers heads toward their station inside the circle where fire will finally be launched toward the focus of everyone's attention, the huge neon-lit wood-frame statue of a Man.

Fireworks go off everywhere and finally the statue begins to burn. As the burn accelerates, I feel the energy coming to a frenzy all around. The only way I can describe this feeling is to say it is so primal, it reaches back to somewhere in my deepest memory, maybe to an experience stored somewhere in the collective memory of all our DNA, a memory from when we used to dance around fires and live in caves.

As the Burning Man crashes to the ground, little tornadoes - dust devils - swirl up across the playa, created by intense heat from the collapse of the Man. Thousands of revelers storm around the fiery center of what's left of the Man. The frenzy moves in a counter-clockwise direction, everyone ecstatically celebrating.

Gradually the crowd breaks up, and people head back to all the various theme camps for more partying, and some, like myself, back to the comfort of their sleeping bags.

When the event ends, the cleanup begins. All revelers are responsible for removing every bit of trash - no matter how small, taking it with them when they leave. To ensure the desert is left in the same state it was in before Burning Man started, crews of volunteers comb every inch of ground for weeks afterward, making sure nothing was left behind.

To me the real beauty of Burning Man is in the freedom, the sense of community, and just plain old fun and craziness that the participants take back with them when they return to their old lives.

sinisterpentatonic said:

Sorry, no.

That may be a good excuse to get away! Unfortunately, I have no money

Next Year ?

This is mos def a wild artistic experience. I have a photographer friend who chronicles this event. Amazing.