BOOKSHELF

THIS IS BURNING MAN

Brian Doherty

BRIAN DOHERTY, LA TIMES - Twenty years ago, a pair of San Francisco
bohemians, Larry Harvey and Jerry James, burned a handmade wooden effigy
on San Francisco's Baker Beach. That simple gesture, through word of
mouth, attracted more participants in following years, and by 1990 the
crowds pushed it off the beach and out to the Nevada desert. It
developed into a seasonal settlement of 40,000 or so, known as Black
Rock City. For one week each year, Burning Man becomes the most
quintessentially American city in America.

The city, dedicated loosely to art, community and general post-Merry
Prankster high jinks, gets built, lived in, and then disappears the week
before Labor Day in the Black Rock Desert playa, a dry lake bed 100
miles from the nearest "real" city, Reno. The week of fun ends each year
with a giant bonfire of an elaborate, 40-foot-tall wooden man, in a
ceremony that means whatever you want it to.

Over its two decades, the festival has earned a matching set of devotees
and detractors. For the latter, saying you enjoy Burning Man is like
admitting you still like pigging out at Chuck E. Cheese - it's a
confession of childish self-indulgence, with annoying pretension to
boot.

This hostility arises largely because it's hard to describe what
actually goes on there (I spent a whole book trying). Burning Man is
like a theme park, but where the customers build the rides. It's like an
arts festival, but with no plaques telling you what anything is or who
built it. It's like a giant party, but held in a godforsaken wasteland
no rational person would ever otherwise choose to be.

There's no water, no vegetation, hundreds of square miles around you of
high-desert desolation, prone to unpredictable, powerful windstorms that
can destroy any shelter and turn the world into a phantasmagoric,
dust-filled haze where you can't see three inches in front of you. It
can be a scorching 100 degrees in the day and near-freezing at night.

In sum, it's a pretty ridiculous place for a camp-out, or an arts
festival, or a party. The communal self-awareness of this
ridiculousness, and the shared struggle for comfort and survival that
the desert requires, make the experience unique and create powerful
bonds.

Burning Man pushes people to strange experiential edges, creating beauty
and a stage for re-fashioning civilization on the fly in an
anything-goes atmosphere. That makes people want to talk about it, a
lot, which undoubtedly exasperates the naysayers who think ‹ after
hearing Burners rave about all the wonderful things we saw and did ‹
that we have been sucked into a cult.

But because Burning Man demands no belief other than you want to live
through it, that characterization is not quite right. The best way to
understand it is as a city with an expiration date, built for the sheer
fun/hell of it - with emphasis on both "fun" and "hell."

://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-doherty28aug28,1,4641
929.story

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