Blogging Burning Man 2011: A Swahili Perspective

Burning Man, Day 1:

Uncle Jimmy, new friends Dan and Esther from Las Vegas, and I, drove into a fog of dust 3pm, Monday. As we exited the paved, two-lane highway north of Gerlach, NV, we joined a caravan of thousands of vehicles from thousands of cities.
As pavement gave way to seven loosely marked lanes of white, alkaline, “caulk” surface, the impending spectacle of Burning Man took on an unmistakably immediate presence. The months, years of planning, waffling on whether or not I could go, and speculation about what Burning Man is, were over.
A series of signs that gradually read the lyrics of ‘Amazing Grace’ appeared to our right. Miles of white desert to our left, and to our right. Traffic stopped, then inched along in 5-40 minute intervals for the next six hours. Nairobi, Kenya and Kampala, Uganda aside, this was the thickest gridlock I’d ever seen. And all around us, people were having the time of their lives.
As we took turns leaving our rig to walk up and down the jam, we found dance parties near speakers playing the full spectrum of party music. Friends toasted, made plans for the week, theorized life plans. We owned up to rhetoric that instructs one to live in the moment. By 5pm Monday, we exuded patience, exchanging contented laughter and stuff to cover our faces from dust clouds. The mood could not be further from a Monday afternoon ‘rush hour’ jam in Any City, USA.
After dark, we graduated from the line, surrendered the stubs of our tickets, thanked the Greeters, and broke camp. After midnight, my uncle and I biked to the center of camp: the Esplanade. The setting made me feel like a child. As far as I could see, indescribably striking art filled the space. Sound came from every direction and pitch. People walked as art. Boats floated on the desert, coming and going from an ocean-sized pier. I had never seen art before. Every person we found was the ‘chill’ person at a house party that you wish everyone could be like, that you wish you could be more like.

Reenactment of the Lousiana Purchase Through Interpretive Dance:

The “Yum” camp brought together 25 odd dancer-historians, including myself, for a performance that began each time the narrator, dressed only in crotch-revealing tights patterned after the American flag, said into a megaphone: “The year is 1803, the City is New Orleans—a site of intense political maneuvering between the French, Spanish, and Americans—and a hotbed of fornication” [cue boom box].
I arrived late the to the pre-enactment briefing, even by Burning Man standards, and was originally assigned no role outside of that of the dancing chorus. Fortunately, my uncle gifted a bunch of Mardi Gras beads around my neck just beforehand. After the narrator’s opening line, I kicked up a dust cloud with tiny, furiously fast steps, continuing the rapid energy up my body, crashing the beads against each other and off of my chest. Fellow re-enactors began to notice and appreciate the gesture, adding their own interpretative reactions to my action as the play’s run wore on. In our one hour season, we did seven shows, each at a different venue, each to the surprise of adoring audiences.
My providing of the New Orleans-themed prop sparked behind-the-back criticism of Greg, the narrator, among a fraction of the cast. “Couldn’t he have gotten some props? How hard is it to get a wig?” “It’s a stretch to cast Napolean, Jefferson, and the leaders of the Haitian Revolution all as flaming homosexuals.”
When asked by them what I would do to improve the interpretation, I suggested we do a reenactment of the forming of the reenactment of the Lousisiana Purchase.
That would confuse the hell of the audience, they said. But we’d make a sound theoretical point on their asses, I said. Ah, you’re an appreciator of historiography, they said. I hugged them, elated that they knew about historiography.
The next day, the same group shocked audiences by napping as a flash mob. I refrained, taking a pre-announced, solitary nap inside our tent with my uncle.

What is Burning Man?

Burning Man is the biggest, baddest, most epic camping trip, art show, freak show, music festival, dance party, and a host of other event genres assigned to large, annual, voluntary gatherings.
It’s for people that GET the value of hanging out, that know how to party.
When you show up a house party, club, bar outside Burning Man, you find many people unsuited for an enjoyable, enriching, or empowering bout of partying. This probably happens for a ton of reasons, many of which the unsuited partiers can hardly be blamed for falling victim to.
The following characteristics are frequently displayed by people outside Burning Man:
- Stiffness. At base, an unwillingness to loosen oneself. The mind remains inflexible, rendering speech that leads conversation toward predictable, ignorant, unoriginal, dismissive dead ends. The body refuses to move in ways beyond those required for formal greetings and entirely practical, utilitarian tasks.
- Being overly judgemental. People do like I just wrote in the above section addressing stiffness, but to a greater, ingratiatingly unceasing degree. You show up to a party hoping to catch wind of some uplifting piece of mind, bust some jokes, get hip to new, fresh jive, and instead end up listening to a bunch of people putting other people down. Particularly disheartening is when they express outrage or snooty, feaux-astonishment at people drinking, taking other drugs, at parties.
- Wasted belligerence. Despite being judged harshly for it, or because of such judging, people tend to get too drunk, high, stoned, blitzed, soused, crocked, etc., at parties. You often can’t endorse any perceivable merits of a party without being chastised or guilted for maintaining an eloquent, sober-sounding coherence. Too many people equate a high drug intake with having a good time. Either that or you end up unable to shake off someone(s) who tries to warn you against the perils the drugs, all the while giving you, by their current, inebriated existence, an ample demonstration of alcoholism’s (or less popular narcotics’) downsides. Particularly in many areas within the U.S. the same problem with drugs has applied to eating unhealthy food in recent years.
- Obsession with networking and money. When you finally run across some people with a proper attitude toward drugs, they prefer to spend their time away from work and managing finances to discuss, exclusively, work and the management of finances.
- Obsession with sex, ‘hookups,’ and dating. People instantly express extreme disinterest in a party if they fell their chances of getting with someone else are minimal. If they chilled out, perhaps they would find it easier not to feel so lonely, sexually frustrated, or whatever else is bringing out too much of their predatorial side. Granted, A certain amount of sleazy folk are perhaps unavoidable. The most intelligent, talented historians have been unable to find an era in which raging parties did not feature at least some of them. 21st Century Portlanders often term them “sketchers” and “skeezers.”
- Intimacy with phones. You find those who spend the entire party calling, answering, texting, surfing the web, and taking photos that have already been taken millions of times.

I know I’ve been as guilty as anyone, at one time or another, of all the aforementioned habits that debilitate partying. But I also know there are a few, and occasionally more than a few, people who GET the party. I’ve been blessed to meet them at parties and am proud to call some of them friends. They exude the coolness, the chill resonance, the admirable compassion, the inspiring creativity, or however else you define the stuff that makes you happy to be around.
The people who get partying might take a little drugs, or more than a little. Or they won’t. Either way, their choices clear, rather than clutter, the mood of the party. They dance, or move, hug, in ways that show a warmth all humans are capable of and responsible for sharing. They take an interest in what others are doing, unafraid to engage in self-deprecation or the playful mocking of others.
They are mainly into two things: Enjoying the moment, relaxing themselves, and/or trying to inspire the same in others. They’re not averse to strangers, to supposedly “awkward” moments, to being close to another person they haven’t already met or think they have entirely figured out.
Burning Man is a huge swath of parties, organized as a one, week-long party, in which the Vast Majority of people are segment of cool people you find at parties across the world. Many tell me that Burning Man, to them, is something that somehow transforms them. This resonates, since it implies that the event turns you into the chill partier. It scrubs off the parts of you that constrain partying.

How I’ve Grown To Further Appreciate House, Techno, Trance, and Dub Step

Electronic music makes sense in the times we live in. We work with computers, we struggle with them, we depend upon them, we love them, we hate them. Most us of us hear phones, generators, combustible engines, planes—most of which now heavily involve computers—all day long. At night, when we can find some free time, it then follows that we try to manipulate the noises of the computers for our own enjoyment. Computers annoy us for hours when we work. They can entertain us too, but in ways that television and books do. Unless they are used as instruments. Once we are able to compose with computers, we use computers like blues players use guitars and vocals. They make us dance, love, freak out, black out, contemplate, and feel belonging to an intimate collectivity of humanity. DJs—Electronic Performers—are the current vanguard of the computer music movement, one whose precise origins must be found in the nebulous that conceived the DNA of Kraftwerk and Hendrix. Computers portray both the raw, primal, grinding of powerful, amped-up folk traditions, and mathematically precise, technical wizardry. The genre’s reliance on expensive equipment (which has grown cheaper over time) is evocative of classical music movements that reached their zeniths in pre-Industrial Revolution European scenes. But electronic music, for the most part, dispenses with elitist pretense. In the electronic music scene, it isn’t frowned upon to leave during the middle of a really long song.
I have grown to dig electronic music over time, and have embraced it far more reluctantly than genres like rock, hip-hop, reggae, disco, drumming, and others. I have joined those who critique the music as being robotic; lifeless in that it lacks the performative panache of awesome vocal or guitar-driven bands. But DJs can perform too, and, as the Infected Mushroom concert at Burning Man demonstrated, can kill the mike like a talented, Luddite lounge singer.
Human passion is so unmistakably evident when people seen are on stage or heard on record as living, playing proof of why music makes life worth living. I’ve realized that perhaps we’ve left computers to manage life to such a degree that to exclude them from playing a more integral role in music is to engage in antiquated music.
No other festival, to my knowledge, is as big as Burning Man in terms of duration, volume, and originality. Electronic music overwhelmingly dominates the Burning Man soundscape. No other musical movement can claim such a motherboard of shows, huge crowds, and ‘big name’ acts. It operates largely without hierarchy and is explicitly free of corporate sponsorship. In terms of organic authenticacy, Burning Man strikes me as an annual gathering on par with the Woodstock/Altamont/Festival Express history. But unlike sound of that era—English language rock and roll—electronic music is far less constrained by language barriers.

An Example of Originality at Burning Man 2011: The Redneck Posse of Flamedancers

At the entrance to a bar-themed camp emphasizing its old-timey, Western Cowboy tendencies, I stumbled across a man twirling and tossing two sticks with fires on their ends. Around him, two other men, also shirtless with carhart jeans, cowboy boots and hats, stared out at the crowd, periodically taking emphatic, small steps and blasting torches that one uses during ‘initial attack,’ wildland firefighting. On four sides of them, mounted speakers blasted country music so that the constant droning of electronic music and night wailing could scarcely be heard when standing close to them. But nobody was standing too close to them, because half a dozen signs saying things along the lines of NO TRESPASSING, DO NOT STEP PAST HERE, TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED also adorned the area. The country music was not of the Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash variety. It was of the “I get off on 57 Chevys / she thinks my tractor’s sexy / I hunt with dogs” variety. Cotemporary FM country. The redneck doing the firetossing mouthed the words to the songs as he focused on completing his firedances, ones rich in upper body movement. Hundreds of other firedancers performed at Burning Man. They tended to wear tie-die, or nothing, and wouldn’t dare put of a sign that didn’t frame its message in positive language. But none of them I saw tossed fire with quite the same chainsaw-revving zeal that this guy did.

Waiting for the Friday Burn:

I have waited more than two hours to be in the front row for the burning of a mansion-sized, glow-in-the-dark Trojan horse. About 30-50 yds between the horse and encircling crowd iarea few chaperones in fire suits, many volunteering to promote fire safety. They sport a variety of soldier/guard outfis: gay cop, Mrs. Officer, Spartan warrior, etc. It is easy to walk into this inner circle, but common sense prevented the vast majority of us from doing so. Occasionaly, someone went in, but they were in no condition to run, or walk, wihotut the aid of another’s arms or shoulders after a few paces.
After about 5-10 rows of people waiting for the burn is a ring of desert ships—motor vehicles decorated as boats, spaceships, playgrounds, other imaginable and unimaginable “rites of passage” carriers—parked almost wall to wall. They resemble the circling of wagons. Most blast speakers, with a squishy mob of dancers tailgating in front. It’s a campfire gathering that doubles as downtown Black Rock City on Friday Night. Each car contributes to the variety of colors and types of music—Heart Deco, Discoland, Disorient (which has a megaphone instructing people to climb on board and taxi to the gigantic electronic music club with the same name after the burn). One could poke their way through the assortment of clubs, sample of scores of nightlife, and be back standing where they were 30 minutes ago. City planning at its fleetingly finest. Not the time or place for drum circles.


The Friday Burn:

The hottest, brightest, most spectacular display of fire I’ve seen—this includes movies, the only medium that can remotely capture such flammability. This includes entire full grown trees catching on fire, witnessed when controlled doing controlled burns as a firefighter.
The burn was a feat of engineering. Fireworks shot out of it. Sparks flew in every direction, but from very high in the air. Less flammable wood pillars preserved a skeleton of a horse after siding boards lit, crashed and smoldered on the ground / slabs of exterior grew to coals in a mound / roasting the faces of those all around. When the foundations finally did fall, the horse’s ass and hind legs fell into its body and were instantly propped up by a single stick of wood that originally fastening the head. The stick did not look much thicker than a 2 X4, yet it held nearly half the horse for several minutes. It fell at an angle just before the ass did, braced in a pile of fresher coals. Eventually, it all collapsed into a single bonfire. The art and music boats set sail, and drum circles crept near the flames.