Burning Man

I have several friends who were and still are evangelical about Burning Man, but they mostly went there in the 90s/00s and they've all gotten older now

One of my best friends stayed with me this summer from the east coast on his way up to the Bohemian Grove. He's been a member for many years as part of the talent (the performers). I've grilled him about what his experience there is like, but still don't have a complete picture. It sounds to me like a glorified boy scout camp for old republican men, be he assures me that's not the full story

okay, so please shut the fuck up about it?

a fake TAZ— a concept invented by a pedophile, mind you

an ecological disaster in a fragile environment

a collection of some of the most annoying, rich, and overprivileged people on the planet being “served”
by fellow “attendees” who are mostly spun wooks or alcoholic former punks— the “diversity” is absolute fucking false, there’s a class system, otherwise people i know wouldn’t be bartending or driving huge fucking ice trucks to the middle of the goddamn desert so some assholes can have ice cold drinks

some of the most godawful “art” i’ve ever seen, spectacle over nuance every time

overwhelmingly terrible music. Tycho is ambient for people who can afford Aesop skin creme.

good post!

okay, so please shut the fuck up about it?

this is the Burning Man thread

the “diversity” is absolute fucking false, there’s a class system, otherwise people i know wouldn’t be bartending or driving huge fucking ice trucks to the middle of the goddamn desert so some assholes can have ice cold drinks

it's true, only 1,000 people at Burning Man have fun, the other 69,000 are lowly peons.

yeah, this is the appropriate venue to discuss Burning Man

the funniest thing that’s happened in this thread is octobeard comparing Burning Man to cities that have been around for literal millennia. talk
about hubris.

one of the biggest DUDs of all time. I should note that I haven't been, but every thing I've ever heard about it makes me cringe.

― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Monday, August 11, 2003 10:14 AM (twenty years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Spencer set the tone twenty years ago, we're just sticking to it

burning man and gathering of the jugglos should merge

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/49/1e/07/491e074cfe06fd4e65b92355bd02c96f--burning-man-clowns.jpg

fuckin' magnates, how do they work?

the one person who really tried to sell me on burning man irl kept using the term "radical self expression" and like you gotta know your audience lol that doesnt sounds too good to me, also everything is so dusty

having said that i bet its probably fun to go and maybe even cool, a big party if youre into that sort of thing, but a lot of the shit you see from afar is pretty dopey and maybe even indicative of having a bad world view, i suspect the tech overlord aspect is overplayed tho, its not really their party theyre just there to soak in the vibes

its kind of gen x carnival coded alt clowns burlesque and so forth being a dilettante for pagan shit

I suspect it was good but is now "over"

ah well whatre you gonna do, time to launch the drones

getting like really really angry about it seems about as forced as evangelising it tbh the correct distance is poking fun at it in a disaster year and thinking "lame" once in any other year

let me be clear -- i hate this thing only to the extent that it's cool

the funniest thing that’s happened in this thread is octobeard comparing Burning Man to cities that have been around for literal millennia

No - that was an absurdist and caricaturist response to the initial argument that Black Rock City is "hubris". Like - No. Fucking. Shit. Because everything we do is wrt to basic civilization is environmentally altering hubris. Burning Man is minuscule and pointless in comparison. That entire argument was stupid and still is; the fact mine comes across as absurd was intentional because the original argument is essentially pointless and exposed more bias and emotional rage than any constructive debate.

Your points are literally unhinged subjective biases (the music and art sucks boo!) and reductive exaggerations of a minority of some of the most annoying attendees. Why don't you just leave this thread if you want to stop engaging with the discussion of BM in the thread for it here? You sound like some Fox News watcher complaining about liberals in SF, honestly.

“(i.e. see literally any aggressively child-free Facebook group...)”

wth is this

i hate it so much it goes way past cool but then my hatred becomes so powerful that you start to think hey yeah maybe hes right we should start a rival festival... on fire guy

I’ve been to Autonomous Mutant Festival— one of the original splinters of OG Burning Man—- DEMF (aka Movement), Honcho, and a few others. I think all of those are pretty wasteful, too, fwiw, tho none are at the scale of Burning Man. I wouldn’t go to a music festival again, mostly because large crowds and/or camping around thousands of people just isn’t very me any longer.

my main problem with Burning Man, in my heart of hearts, is that its aspirations and intentions seem completely contradicted by its reality. it makes me recall the song “Halloween” by the Dead Kennedys.

Your points are literally unhinged subjective biases (the music and art sucks boo!)

― octobeard, Wednesday, September 6, 2023 8:53 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

honestly the best argument against it tbf

true hubris is believing that one can and should replace all technology with steam technology. But I don't think anyone at burning man believes this.

It really is a trash event now (from 2019)

An individual Burner’s footprint is about two-thirds of a ton for the week, twice that of an average American. But Burners aren’t average, and they’re becoming less average every year. The median personal income of attendees went from $51,100 in 2013 to $71,500 in 2019.

Burners are famously good at leaving little to no trash on the playa (principle number eight: “Leave no trace”), but that’s cracking under the stress too. This year, the team that sweeps the playa to ensure it’s truly clean before inspection by the Bureau of Land Management was shocked by the amount of trash it found, attributing the mess partly to punishing winds and dust storms, but also excessive heat and fatigue. It’s telling that the thing they found the most of was tent stakes. Tent campers were just done.

You might be wondering why we should care about an 80,000-person totally optional festival and its first-world problems, when the ancestral homes of millions of people are fast becoming unlivable due to climate change. People without access to air-conditioning die every year in Pakistan, but there was only one death at Burning Man in 2022—a middle-aged man had a heart attack. But if a collection of some of the most capitalized, connected, and tech-forward people on the planet can’t figure this out, what hope is there for the rest of us?

i went to a country fair last year and they had a exhibition of all these early machines with the old guys whos hobby it was to restore them, it was pretty cool they should get that at burning man

at that tho i’ve unbookmarked this thread— i can’t apologize for my bile because i’m not sorry for it, but as some have pointed out, better to just put it out of my head after a hearty chuckle

I suspect it was good but is now "over"

Just unfashionable. Like living in SF. Or having nuanced discussions online that don't involve snap judgements on wholesale groups of people over the actions of a few.

I will also openly confess I haven't been since 2015. But was building an immersive sound sculpture to bring out in 2020 that was derailed by the pandemic and still haven't been back. I just really dislike a pile-on on something that really isn't the "cause of our ills". It's like y'all are taking the bait.

they wanted to clear up all the trash after 2019 but the stakes were too high

if the burning man thread can't handle a few punks blowing off steam

https://i.imgur.com/yynT4rU.png

lol goddamnit

I love you all. I've probably consumed too much acid over the years.

;)

you what I'm at a Melvins show right now and Buzz is basically a Republican so who am I to judge

octobeard itt is like me if there was a thread where people said what they think about community theater

MAYBE COMING DOWN FROM THE TREES WAS EXCRUCIATING AND CRINGE YOU EVER THINK OF THAT

MAYBE ALL OF SOCIETY IS AN "UNWANTED OBLIGATION"

you what I'm at a Melvins show right now and Buzz is basically a Republican so who am I to judge

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, September 6, 2023 9:56 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

ive def had deep burning man type experiences at melvins shows

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F5GTnj5boAAJITh?format=jpg&name=large

have we obama's (acting) solicitor general's attendance

I went to Crash Worship shows when Burning Man was still being held in the city at Ocean Beach... and then SRL's Crime Wave in the mid-90s, in my mind those were perhaps a purer expression/root of what the BM experience was targeting, at least initially.

I saw one of the Burning Man organizers on a panel at a U.S. Conference of Mayors thing, and tbh he was pretty interesting. Mostly talking about the logistics of putting it on, all the problems they had to learn how to solve over the years.

For me, the Desolation Center shows were always the ideal version of this but it just seems incompatible with always-online influencer culture and crowds greater than 200.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDSJ-Aj43oE

My first impressions with the event back in 2011 made me feel it was closer to something like Pride in that it allowed a safe space for people to celebrate and explore their personal identities and express themselves in ways regular society wouldn't normally allow.

well, Pride did eventually turn into a self emasculated self congratulatory corporate jerk circle, but it still provides a safe space for people - but mostly because a lot of us still carry the spirit of what it’s supposed to be.

For me, a big part of the attraction of being in the desert is being away from other people.

When I was growing up in the desert we had our own version of Burning Man called Getting High in a Wash.

Is there a lot of crossover between BM and all those Survival Research Labs / Re/Search San Francisco types from the 80s? Seems like the one could have grown out of the other to some extent but I don't know if any of the same people have been involved.

xp Yeah, one of my closest friends grew up in Palos Verdes, they used to go out to Joshua Tree and do shrooms.

xp yes

"the high desert"

Most of my distaste for BM comes from

1) having to work on an Art of Burning Man museum show. The art was terrible and most of the artists were incredibly disrespectful assholes high on their own supply. I realize this is a common criticism of artists but ime it's usually around 30%, not the 95% that the burners were and the art is rarely so empty as theirs.

2) maybe social media posts aren't representative of the BM "culture" as a whole but I've seen so much gross cultural appropriation in burner fashion (white dreads, warbonnets, etc) and events (white people leading a kecak dance) that are enough to put me off the event entirely.

That said, I know a few perfectly nice people who go regularly and don't pull that shit.

Octo, I'd love to check out your sound installations if they ever happen somewhere other than the playa! An old coworker of mine used to throw a desert sound art festival down near Joshua Tree, though not sure if he's brought it back since COVID hit.

Whoa that's cool! - I'm currently working on some synesthetic stuff with LEDs but I'm actually getting paid for it, so won't be out on the playa or at an art exhibit per se, but next time I get some more time for personal projects I would love to revisit the ideas I had pre-pandemic or expand on them in a different way using more creative visualizations.