A Letter RE:Burning Man: More Whiskey and Rockets!
If you don't know about the petition and the current controversy around Burning Man now, a good article is atHere's an updated version of a letter I emailed to Jim and Larry and LadyBee after the third or fourth time someone forwarded me the petition. It's amazing how bad my writing gets without spellcheck. I spent way too much time on this, but it matters to me, and hopefully I can have more impact on this issue than I did in spending days to eventually cast my Emergency Federal Write in Absentee Ballot from Cairo. Plus, the view of the mountains is beautiful in this internet cafe whose profits go to educating Tibetan refugees.
---
Namaste from India!
I was tempted to sign on to the new Burning Man petition going around. That is, until I realized it was only about art funding and remembered that I don't give a damn about art funding at BM. I strongly support spending government money on art rather than on missles, but BM is a different story -- there I'd rather fund missles than art!
Wish I had more time and ability to contribute to the conversation, but I'm circumnavigating the world right now. I just spent ten days in a Tibetan Buddhist retreat, having spent the last month in the village of the Dalai Lama.
By the way, I really missed all you guys this year while you were burning -- I was trekking across the saharan dunes of Morocco on a camel, and surviving an overnight sandstorm that rearranged the landscape and covered everything inside the tent. So at least I was in "a" desert even though it wasn't "the" desert. The plaza J'maa F'nal in Marrakech feels something like Burning Man every night (you'll know what I mean if you've been, if not, go). Yeah, they exchange money, but Dirhams are really play-money anyway.
You know, maybe it's just not possible in the USA to have a festival where something dangerous might occur or someone might be offended. Despite the warnings on our tickets, BM makes itself safer and less offensive each year with the implementation of more regulations and requirements.
It's more dangerous for me to ride a bus in India for a couple of hours than it is to spend a week at BM. Hell, it's more dangerous to take a drink of water here than to spend a week at BM.
I certainly see more men here holding their own penises in the streets than I do at Burning Man, not to mention urinating everywhere.
Every night and every morning, there are fires on the streets, in the train stations and everywhere else. All the trash is burned whereever it sits or wherever anyone wants to warm their hands.
Maybe the lesson of BM is exactly that as the group of participants grow, so does the regulation and governance until all the original ideals dissapear and we reflect the larger society we sit within. If that's so, I say we should just hold one last event, rip down the fence, kick out the cops, invite everyone else in and drop all the rules, then go as long as we can before we all go home. But just in case that isn't a necessity...
I like the idea of trying to restore some of the wonder we've lost at Burning Man (I think everyone will agree that is happening to some degree), and to elminate some of the feeling that we're governed by a dictatorship which is sometimes an impossible pain in the ass (I think everyone will agree that feeling exists, whether or not it is an accurate refexion of dealing with the BMorg).
And no, regardless of how bad their opinion of the Borg may be, no one actually thinks that Chicken is less of a pain in the ass than the Borg, just a different pain in the ass.
Unfortunately, I think that focusing on Art is really distracting from the real issue, and may even take us in the wrong direction. It's the wrong discussion because it is only a small part of the bigger issue of increasing rules and beaucracy spoiling free expression.
Similarly, focussing on democracy may be going exactly the wrong way.
Don't get me wrong, I love the art. I spent a couple of afternoons helping you Jim (one of the petition authors) with Temporal Decomposition my first year at Burning Man (when I traveled
out from Philadelphia in 1997), and I've spent days just randomly pitching in to work hard in the heat of the day helping strangers with their art projects every year since, getting to know something about them and their projects, and to have some pride in whatever small contributions I can make outside the constraints of registering as a volunteer or signing on to a project. And I know that the grants have encouraged some artists and groups to reach
amazing potential they might not have been able to otherwise, with some really amazing examples. Hell, last year I got a tattoo of the art being put together with a grant by people I camped with.
The more we fund that art, however, the further we get from the ideas of self-expression, of having every person who walks in the gate find their own inner artist and toward reflecting the values of the outside world where you're only an artist if you can get a
gallery show. Outsiders don't want to be in competition with insiders, they want their own show.
Heck, if any single art project should have been funded, perhaps it really was Jim Mason's 2004 proposal that was rejected as "unsafe." Because then when governement agencies (or whoever) attempts to impose more restrictions and censorship on the event, we are actually in a position to negotiate. We can tell them to fuck off and bring on the army tanks if they like -- we've got Jim's secret project to fight back. Shock and Awe ain't nothin' baby!
But, but... safety is important, right? For Christ's sake, you should see how they celebrate religious holidays in India -- they don't even HAVE little panzy-ass firecrackers, the fireworks stands on the streets sell "bombs" that would blow off your arm. All the little kids have 'em for when they aren't shooting rockets at each other. For days it sounds like I remember BM sounding many years ago. For that matter, I've seen 'em burn a 90 foot high effigy
filled with fireworks, too. Note that they have a Muslim family build that effigy, no Homeland Security here!
I treked up a mountain to about 10,000 feet, and there was a little tent of a chai stand (go figure, some guy has to haul cases of full bottles of coke up and empty bottles down for me). I saw that the
guy had rockets in the corner for Diwalai. When I commented on this, he said in his Indian sing-song "yes, and I be having whiskey, too, tonight is a great festival." Whatever happened to whiskey and rockets at Burning Man? Almost ten years of increasing compromises for lawyers, law enforcement, liability, safety, "improvements" and government regulations, that's what.
Now you have to get a permit to start a fire (and might go to jail for burning a replica of the original Man from Baker Beach), and be a licensed pyrotechnician with a permit for the place and time to light a piss-ant little firecracker. Hell, we have a fire department in a desert where there's nothing to burn but the stuff we want gone at the end of the week anyway.
Being in India makes me think about the seemingly innocuous growth of rules for art cars. I mean, hey, if someone is seriously hurt or killed, we should fix the problem right? Well, here they sure as hell don't. For example, in the whole damn country, they don't make the busses come to a complete stop to pick up or drop off passengers. Sure, loads of people have been hurt doing it. But you don't have to take the bus if you don't want to.
Well, back to our art scene. With the evolution of grants and the increasing number of funded projects we're turning the Playa into a gallery and the BMorg into a patron of the arts, and the participants into spectators.
What we need is not a propogation of more and more projects of a larger scale, where the only way to "compete" is to be part of an enormous project with a year's planning, but a return to a time when people who never considered themselves artists could express themselves with more emphasis on creativity than on planning and managing and politicing.
Of course the paperwork requirements to show that you have a clean up plan, and that your engineering is safe, and all of that other stuff seem really reasonable to the BMorg -- they've spent years evolving all these issues with lawyers and insurance companies and government agencies, and each step seemed reasonable and not a barrier to artists. But taken together, it all adds up to a barrier to the participant who wants to try taking the risk, for the first time in his or her life, of calling him or herself an artist.
Once upon a time, there was no art curation, there was no paperwork, if you wanted to be creative, you just put your piece out for others to admire or play on or whatever, and that was that. It was the whole point of Playa art -- that anyone could (and many did). If your art kinda sucked, that was OK. There
were really no barriers to overcome, and no risk to take in putting something out.
But hey, if you are giving grants to Art, then why not also to Theme Camps? Theme Camps contribute at least as much, if not more, fantastic experiences for the participants. As much as I like the art, I'd happily do a Burning Man which had only the Theme Camps and none of the art. But perhaps Theme Camps don't make quite the PR impression for the media reports and government permits that art does. Regardless, the money and the months of hard work to create some of those camps can far exceed any reasonable expense for most of the art.
For both the Art and the Theme Camps, the small, very genuine things that people do from their own pockets (and hearts) tend to create the most wonderful experiences. They're far more meaningful (if sometimes less family-friendly) than the Disney-Land/Las Vegas that the Esplanade is becoming.
Reality is, we are getting bigger each year. With the growing city and increased congestion on our roads, why hasn't Burning Man yet funded public transportation? Maybe there should be grants for Mutant Buses, or better yet, a Burning Man Subway (complete with muggings and corridors that smell of urine -- that'd even reduce the load on the porta-poties).
OK, we all agree that the funding thing is getting out of hand, but improved governance makes sense, right? I love the ideals of democracy. I've long thought that it was crazy that the governance of an event with the ideals and promise that BM participants hold is both legally and practically a corporate dictatorship. Why can't we be governened by the kind of ideals we come together with? Perhaps having right governance just encourages more governance, and the problem is that we already have far too much. What we really need a minimal benevolent dictatorship who's sole purpose is to get themselves and everyone else out of our way.
Here's another example of well-meaning improvements by the BMorg causing as many problems as they attempt to address (maybe you'd disagree with the particulars of this example, but the point is that rules are being propogated by dictatorship and not everyone agrees with them): I used to have great fun at Burning Man playing ridiculous bartering games (both giving and receiving). The fun was in the bartering, not the objects of exchange (though those were
usually silly and fun too). Heck, half the time when you asked for something, the thing you'd be required to do for it would give you even more than what you asked for (which you were also getting!). And then, Shoplifting Camp was the coolest. But the Org identified a problem of stupid participants not realizing that bartering was just a game, so it was effectively becoming barter commerce.
Rather than finding more ways to educate the ignorant and increase quality of new participants, the Org said "now we're a gift economy." Now my bartering fun is gone. This is like changing the Souks and bazzars around the world to fixed-price rather than teaching the tourists to smile and joke and to get more by far out of a half-hour drinking tea and bartering than the worth of the money or object they will exchange in the end. And what good is shoplifting camp where everything is free?
The list could easily go on, though each participant might have a different list. Which is yet another reason less is more.
So I half-jokingly wrote my own petition to respond to URL going around, and I want to share it with you... I hope that this will become a real competing petition with its own URL and that it will get a lot more votes than the one from the artists, so pass the word (and LadyBee was even kind enough to say it gave her a good laugh and to pass it to the rest of the BM staff):
I am in India, so I'll bring the tea for the party...
We, the people, in order to form a more perfect Burning Man, say fuck the artists and their whiny-ass demands for more funding from BMorg. And while we're at it, fuck the paid members of BMorg, too. And most of all, fuck the continual addition of more services and rules. It was a better party when it was mostly volunteer and all about the sex and the explosions and all the other recently-outlawed shit anyway.
We are tired of taxation without representation, and ever increasing taxation at that. We advocate spending funds only on the minimum necessities to make the event happen, i.e., lobbying for the least government-imposed constraints possible and then meeting those constraints. All other expenditures and rule propogation are to cease.
We are also tired of people who make BM their life telling the rest of us how it should be. 300 people out of then tens of thousands who've participated showed up at the last Town Meeting. Why? Not because no one cares, but because they know that the firmly entrenched politics and bureaucracy and personalities are just about impossible to deal with, so we try to ignore all that shit and just go to the event and hope that we can ignore most of the new rules.
It's time for Burning Man to go from being a fucking bureaucratic welfare state back to being a survival event and an experiment in radical self-expression. The risks and discomfort we once faced there are exactly what made it the most significant and life-changing thing most participants experienced.
We want our Temporary Autonomous Zone back -- we want it to once again BE both temporary and autonomous.
Hopefully change will come before it suffocates under the weight of everything built to make it more comfortable, less offensive and less risky.
Oh, and no more God-damn theme camp fund-raisers either. If you want to raise money for something, give it to the lepers and children I see begging on the street everywhere. Bring to the Playa what you can afford to pay for from the salary you earn at your real job. Just like with the art, it's OK if you can't afford to bring much, it's OK if you suck, we love you anyway!
There, that'll teach you to send me off to a Tibetan Buddhist retreat where I can't talk and have to meditate on relieving the suffering of all beings starting at 6am every day.
Love,
Dale
posted by Dale L. Larson @ 12:25 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home