thesameguy
September 3rd, 2014, 10:57 AM
So.... Burning Man.
I've got a lot of friends that have spent a lot of time on the playa and I need to admit I had pretty strong notions about how it was going to be. I was wrong - not horribly wrong, but wrong. While there one of our campmates commented that "Burning Man is like sex - you can describe it, but you can't really know it until you've had it and everyone's experience is different." That is totally true. There was also an article I read before going that commented that with so many attendees, anything you'd find in the the default world you'll find at Burning Man. That's totally true as well. You can work hard, you can party hard, you can experience amazing art, you can reconnect with old friends. It's a fully functioning city, and you can do as much or as little of it as you like. We tried to experience a good mix of its attributes and I feel like we did a pretty good job - but we saw just a fraction of it. Our ten days isn't even remotely enough to do or see everything. Admittedly, I couldn't escape a video game like approach to it - I really wanted to clear its levels, but that's not really a tenable approach to it. ;)
I took about 100 pictures, but most of them are useless. I'm not a good enough photographer, I didn't carry my camera very often, and so much of the experience is in the motion of it still photos don't help much. Here are a few of them that I can talk about to give a little sense of the playa.
First up, here's our home last week - a dusty old motorhome. BRC is a circle, with streets running inside to outside like the hours of a clock - named as such as well. Essentially, the streets between 2 and 10 are the city where all the camps are, the streets from 10 to 2 are the open playa where the big art installations are. Running concentrically around the city are letter streets started with Esplanade (inner) and then running from A to K. Each year the names of the letter streets change, but they're always letter streets.
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/home.JPG
Our home was at roughly 5:45 and A, but because our camp is so big and so old, we have our own service road that ran between Esplanade and A. The photo was taken on one of the dustier days - most of the time we were there the weather was excellent!
Our next door neighbor was an old Sportcoach, a four (I think) year veteran of the playa named Brenda.
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/brenda.JPG
Brenda's owner was a great friend and superbly helpful in helping us not make asses of ourselves. ;)
Our camp was (is?) the Lamplighters. The Lamplighters are almost as old as Burning Man itself, with a history reaching back over 20 years. Every night, the Lamplighters assemble an army of camp members and volunteers to march kerosene lanterns out onto the main roads to mark them and help keep people aware of intersections. It's billed as a performance art piece, and I gotta say it lives up to its billing:
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/lamplighting.JPG
It takes about 150 people every night from 5pm to about 8pm to light the city, with around 100 people carrying racks of lanterns and the remainder lifting the lanterns onto tall spires and providing support and guidance. We carried four of the ten nights - it's difficult work, but incredibly rewarding. It's a big photo opportunity for attendees and journalists and during the hourlong walk (carrying 40lbs of lanterns) people are constantly saying "thank you." At night when you're able to see road intersections and find your way around the playa it's an amazing sense of accomplishment. We could not have asked for a better camp, truly.
Burning Man is made up of a lot of different things. Some people bring food, some people bring art, some people bring activities, some people bring transportation, and some people bring dance clubs ("sound camps"). The 2:00 and 10:00 streets are where many of the big sound camps are, but some of them are so big they get installed way out in deep playa, far beyond the city. We spent one night at Root Society, as a big DJ group from SF was playing:
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/rootsociety.JPG
The picture is shitty, but hopefully you can get a sense of the scale of the thing. The photo was taken from the upper deck of Lucy, the Lamplighter's work vehicle (a '69 F500). Lucy is used, among other things, in the mornings to retrieve the hundreds of lamps placed the night before. Out in the distance you can see the midnight horizon of the playa - it looks (and feels and acts) like a carnival!
(I thought I took pictures of Lucy, but I guess not - here's what she looks like: http://www.lincolnnewsmessenger.com/sites/default/files/styles/story_bg/public/Misc.%20Media/1254960685_af61.jpg )
Another sound camp is Boring. Boring is kinda special, because Boring is on wheels. They drive it around and set up a temporary dance club wherever they go.
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/boring.JPG
There is, not surprisingly, a lot of EDM out on the playa, so when Root Society is playing mashups and Boring is playing remixed '80s and '90s music, it's win. ;)
Art cars and sound cars keep increasing in number. Some spend most of their time in camps just being awesome:
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/bug1.JPG
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/bug2.JPG
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/thing.JPG
(And I took these specifically for George - they are giant, scaled up VW products :) )
But most of them spend the week cruising around the playa, acting as mobile dance clubs or playa limos.
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/bus.JPG
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/scorpion.JPG
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/shark.JPG
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/yatcht.JPG
Some of them look great day or night, but some of them only take shape at night when their lights define them. The shark was particularly awesome as its profile lights up red at night, and it looks like a giant neon predator swimming around the desert. It's huge (built on a bus), so you can see it from just about anywhere at night. The yatcht, as I recall, is built on a scissor lift, so the whole thing can stretch up about 30'. It's NUTS.
Along with lights, another huge component of both art cars and camps is fire. I have no idea how much propane is used during Burning Man, but EVERYTHING shoots fire. This isn't even remotely the best example, but it's one I managed to grab a photo of.
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/fire.JPG
Some of these things put off so much heat you can feel them from 200' away. At night, when art cars get into fire battles, they can warm up huge swaths of desert - you can tell where they've been!
I think something must have gone wrong with my camera because there are dozens of pictures I know I took, but cannot find. Lame. I did have pictures of Embrace, which was a huge art installation. It's built to the scale of the Statue of Liberty - HUGE.
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/embrace1.JPG
As with much of the art, Embrace was fully climbable, with staircases on the inside leading you to the couples' heads. They gave an amazing view of BRC, and a rather solemn place to spend a little time.
On Friday morning, they burned Embrace to the ground.
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/embrace2.JPG
One thing I am sure I took pictures of but can't find was the Alien Siege Machine:
http://darkroom-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/08/burning-man-nevada-574.jpg
It really didn't make much sense, being Alien-esque but mechanical, but who cares, it was huge and scalable on the outside. :) On Friday night, they burned it to the ground too in an epic, choreographed battle scene. Art cars circled it and shot fireworks at it, then it shot fireworks back, then firework "explosions" and more art cars circling it and shooting flamethrowers at it. It was like watching a movie without special effects. After 30 minutes or so of the battle, it lit up and burned down.
I've got a lot of friends that have spent a lot of time on the playa and I need to admit I had pretty strong notions about how it was going to be. I was wrong - not horribly wrong, but wrong. While there one of our campmates commented that "Burning Man is like sex - you can describe it, but you can't really know it until you've had it and everyone's experience is different." That is totally true. There was also an article I read before going that commented that with so many attendees, anything you'd find in the the default world you'll find at Burning Man. That's totally true as well. You can work hard, you can party hard, you can experience amazing art, you can reconnect with old friends. It's a fully functioning city, and you can do as much or as little of it as you like. We tried to experience a good mix of its attributes and I feel like we did a pretty good job - but we saw just a fraction of it. Our ten days isn't even remotely enough to do or see everything. Admittedly, I couldn't escape a video game like approach to it - I really wanted to clear its levels, but that's not really a tenable approach to it. ;)
I took about 100 pictures, but most of them are useless. I'm not a good enough photographer, I didn't carry my camera very often, and so much of the experience is in the motion of it still photos don't help much. Here are a few of them that I can talk about to give a little sense of the playa.
First up, here's our home last week - a dusty old motorhome. BRC is a circle, with streets running inside to outside like the hours of a clock - named as such as well. Essentially, the streets between 2 and 10 are the city where all the camps are, the streets from 10 to 2 are the open playa where the big art installations are. Running concentrically around the city are letter streets started with Esplanade (inner) and then running from A to K. Each year the names of the letter streets change, but they're always letter streets.
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/home.JPG
Our home was at roughly 5:45 and A, but because our camp is so big and so old, we have our own service road that ran between Esplanade and A. The photo was taken on one of the dustier days - most of the time we were there the weather was excellent!
Our next door neighbor was an old Sportcoach, a four (I think) year veteran of the playa named Brenda.
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/brenda.JPG
Brenda's owner was a great friend and superbly helpful in helping us not make asses of ourselves. ;)
Our camp was (is?) the Lamplighters. The Lamplighters are almost as old as Burning Man itself, with a history reaching back over 20 years. Every night, the Lamplighters assemble an army of camp members and volunteers to march kerosene lanterns out onto the main roads to mark them and help keep people aware of intersections. It's billed as a performance art piece, and I gotta say it lives up to its billing:
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/lamplighting.JPG
It takes about 150 people every night from 5pm to about 8pm to light the city, with around 100 people carrying racks of lanterns and the remainder lifting the lanterns onto tall spires and providing support and guidance. We carried four of the ten nights - it's difficult work, but incredibly rewarding. It's a big photo opportunity for attendees and journalists and during the hourlong walk (carrying 40lbs of lanterns) people are constantly saying "thank you." At night when you're able to see road intersections and find your way around the playa it's an amazing sense of accomplishment. We could not have asked for a better camp, truly.
Burning Man is made up of a lot of different things. Some people bring food, some people bring art, some people bring activities, some people bring transportation, and some people bring dance clubs ("sound camps"). The 2:00 and 10:00 streets are where many of the big sound camps are, but some of them are so big they get installed way out in deep playa, far beyond the city. We spent one night at Root Society, as a big DJ group from SF was playing:
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/rootsociety.JPG
The picture is shitty, but hopefully you can get a sense of the scale of the thing. The photo was taken from the upper deck of Lucy, the Lamplighter's work vehicle (a '69 F500). Lucy is used, among other things, in the mornings to retrieve the hundreds of lamps placed the night before. Out in the distance you can see the midnight horizon of the playa - it looks (and feels and acts) like a carnival!
(I thought I took pictures of Lucy, but I guess not - here's what she looks like: http://www.lincolnnewsmessenger.com/sites/default/files/styles/story_bg/public/Misc.%20Media/1254960685_af61.jpg )
Another sound camp is Boring. Boring is kinda special, because Boring is on wheels. They drive it around and set up a temporary dance club wherever they go.
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/boring.JPG
There is, not surprisingly, a lot of EDM out on the playa, so when Root Society is playing mashups and Boring is playing remixed '80s and '90s music, it's win. ;)
Art cars and sound cars keep increasing in number. Some spend most of their time in camps just being awesome:
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/bug1.JPG
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/bug2.JPG
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/thing.JPG
(And I took these specifically for George - they are giant, scaled up VW products :) )
But most of them spend the week cruising around the playa, acting as mobile dance clubs or playa limos.
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/bus.JPG
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/scorpion.JPG
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/shark.JPG
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/yatcht.JPG
Some of them look great day or night, but some of them only take shape at night when their lights define them. The shark was particularly awesome as its profile lights up red at night, and it looks like a giant neon predator swimming around the desert. It's huge (built on a bus), so you can see it from just about anywhere at night. The yatcht, as I recall, is built on a scissor lift, so the whole thing can stretch up about 30'. It's NUTS.
Along with lights, another huge component of both art cars and camps is fire. I have no idea how much propane is used during Burning Man, but EVERYTHING shoots fire. This isn't even remotely the best example, but it's one I managed to grab a photo of.
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/fire.JPG
Some of these things put off so much heat you can feel them from 200' away. At night, when art cars get into fire battles, they can warm up huge swaths of desert - you can tell where they've been!
I think something must have gone wrong with my camera because there are dozens of pictures I know I took, but cannot find. Lame. I did have pictures of Embrace, which was a huge art installation. It's built to the scale of the Statue of Liberty - HUGE.
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/embrace1.JPG
As with much of the art, Embrace was fully climbable, with staircases on the inside leading you to the couples' heads. They gave an amazing view of BRC, and a rather solemn place to spend a little time.
On Friday morning, they burned Embrace to the ground.
http://www.sacsaabs.org/sacsaabs.org/bm14/embrace2.JPG
One thing I am sure I took pictures of but can't find was the Alien Siege Machine:
http://darkroom-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/08/burning-man-nevada-574.jpg
It really didn't make much sense, being Alien-esque but mechanical, but who cares, it was huge and scalable on the outside. :) On Friday night, they burned it to the ground too in an epic, choreographed battle scene. Art cars circled it and shot fireworks at it, then it shot fireworks back, then firework "explosions" and more art cars circling it and shooting flamethrowers at it. It was like watching a movie without special effects. After 30 minutes or so of the battle, it lit up and burned down.