## Metadata - Author: [[Brian Doherty]] - Full Title: This Is Burning Man - Category: #books ## Highlights - In his zine, Twisted Times, Stuart Mangrum, Burning Man’s press relations maven from 1993 to 1996, wrote a very perceptive analysis of the state of the Burning Man Project in the wake of 1996. He wrote this after deciding not to work for Burning Man any longer.   “Many of the misconceptions surrounding the event spring from Larry’s own dueling views about what it really means. On the one hand, he can describe it in highly spiritual terms, likening it to the ancient mystery cults where sensory dislocation and communal exertion bred personal epiphanies and a direct experience of the divine. On the other hand, he takes great pains to point out that Burning Man is not a religion: that it has no priests and no dogma, and that each individual is free to interpret the experience as he or she sees fit. On a third track, he has been known to shelf the spiritual angle entirely and paint the event as strictly an arts festival and an experiment in temporary community. . . . The conflict speaks of an internal struggle he has yet to resolve in his own mind. Larry wants history to remember him, and religions last longer than art festivals; but prophets tend to lead short, nasty lives. The empty-center position, the notion that Burning Man is only as spiritual as you make it, represents an uneasy compromise between the extremes of religion and art: more than a party, less than a faith. It suggests that the event’s organizers are morally superior to showmen, but relieves them of the odious responsibilities of priesthood.” ([Location 2032](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=2032)) - The Empire Store now has a banner proudly proclaiming a slogan Stuart Mangrum invented for Black Rock City: “welcome to NOWHERE.” ([Location 2286](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=2286)) - America’s West has always both attracted and inspired a freewheeling liberty combined with an uncoerced communalism that has people waving at each other as they pass on these lonely, glorious roads, all of them knowing that they will, almost certainly, need their fellow man out here sometime. You’d damn well better be ready to help, because someone will be ready to help you. Black Rock citizens, exiled by choice with nothing but what they’ve brought, dependent on their joint resources to deal with unpredictable natural dangers, need to live by the same code. And with the Empire Store the only shop within hours of driving, Gerlach is living a life nearly as noncommercial as Black Rock City. This combination of self- reliance and community binds the two cities. ([Location 2317](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=2317)) - The most fervent opposition to Burning Man in Gerlach came not from any stone-faced desert hermit or uptight church ladies (there are no churches in Gerlach itself) but — exemplifying Freud’s concept of the narcissism of small differences — from Gerlach’s own local art freak, John Bogard, who operates the Planet X pottery store about ten miles down the road from Gerlach’s Main Street, down the fork that heads away from the playa. ([Location 2323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=2323)) - Note: explore jung's notion of the shadow. is larry the shadow of john law? - To sincerely lament damage to the playa by Burning Man requires an almost mystical belief that there are certain surfaces mankind just should not touch. That same BLM official is impressed that Burning Man actually found a recreational use that delights tens of thousands for a place that had never been of much use to anyone except handfuls of land-speed record seekers, wind sailors, and rocket launchers. ([Location 2338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=2338)) - Note: this ties in to my idea of starting with the sixth extinction. it seems as if humanity is wrecking everything it touches. burning man is just one more attempt to 'start over'. but in the very act of starting over, it is simply proving our species' weedlike ability to spread and take over every habitat. - Humans crave companionship and succor, yes. But it is equally true that people crave enemies and feuds, and secretly treasure the joy of griping about that bastard over there, that sonovabitch in the bar down the street. ([Location 2358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=2358)) - “But when Burning Man started giving money to artists, it changed the event for the bad and for the worse in a lot of ways. And I’m biting my tongue here, because I’ve been the recipient of Burning Man’s money every time I’ve been affiliated with a project, because it takes a lot of money to accomplish anything out there, even if it’s like Pedal Camp, just a bunch of crazy junk bikes. It’s no joke. It’s a real hostile environment. People aren’t supposed to be there. There’s a reason why it’s fiat with no trees and no water. That’s reality, and everything else about Burning Man is not reality. Though that’s what’s kind of cool about it.” Burning Man claims full intellectual property rights over everything that occurs within their fence, and effective ownership over pieces they fund — if the piece is sold, the grant is supposed to be repaid, at least up to the sales price. To Justin, an old L.A. vet, that smells like pay-to-play. “Who provides what to whom, who makes what an event? Burning Man does provide a venue, but ultimately that playa belongs to you and me anyway. It’s public land. For them to say they own the rights to your art [just because they covered some of the cost] is fucking crap. Anyway, I didn’t sign that contract with my real name. I never sign anything with my real name. Jarico Reese, who’s that?” ([Location 2475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=2475)) - “Why are we digging holes? Why are we trenching? Why don’t we call up some solar people and some wind people and subsidize installation of low-voltage light, low-voltage transformers if you need a PA? There are ways to draw huge amounts of energy out there without internal combustion generators, and they didn’t do a goddamn thing about it. “A lot of individuals were bringing solar and bringing turbines and setting up small-scale solar and wind power. And Burning Man was ignoring them in favor of this fucking convoy of generators. This upset me because I dumped all this energy into this with the belief that we were doing something better. I believed to my fucking core that this was bigger and better than anything that had come to date and with the right kind of energy we could set up a large-scale alternative living venue. What it became instead was a giant rave with the same generators, the same blinkie lights, and all that crap.” After nine years, Chris Campbell stopped building the Burning Man. ([Location 2560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=2560)) - Note: the problem with burning man is that everyone has a different version of utopia. for john law, utopia did not involve bureaucracy. for others, it did not involve extensive use of generators. etc etc - pursuit. Brand’s Trips Festival and the Kesey movement from which it arose struck devastating blows that made chinks in consensual reality; Burning Man is now bulldozing boldly and heedlessly through those chinks and building an entire mini- civilization around some of those same impulses that inspired the Kesey scene. ([Location 2604](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=2604)) - Jim Mason is serious about Burning Man because it’s fun. He bandies about the word bullshit to refer to the stunts he and other artists pull off out there, but he doesn’t mean it in a bad way When Larry Harvey announced the art theme for 2001 — the Seven Ages (originally the Seven Ages of Man until feminists in the Burning Man community complained) — Mason bridled at what he saw as an attempt to impose spiritual meaning on the Burning Man experience. The theme became the framework for a game that Burners were supposed to participate in every stage of (though few did). It was vague and encompassing enough to cover almost anything. It was derived from Shakespeare’s famous “All the world’s a stage” speech from As You Like It, about the stages every human life progresses through. Larry’s explanation of the theme said that “the object of this game is the attainment of wisdom. In order to achieve this goal, participants must pass through successive stages of life. The theme of our game is choice, striving, trial, and transformation.” Mason, suspicious of modern spirituality, sniffed a rat. “One thing that’s annoyed me about Burning Man lately is the earnestness that has come into the core, an attempt to forcibly increase its impact and meaning. But the reason Burning Man had meaning to begin with was that it was always deeply comedic — it has always been a spin through jesting and farce and absurdism. I try to imagine my projects as spiritual farces.” ([Location 2802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=2802)) - Mason, again the anthropologist, tells me about the cultural effects of Burning Man. “It’s a radically unusual idea that has overtaken a large group of people in one region. This notion, propagated by Burning Man, that you should create something. That you should notice the world and make a comment on it and express that comment through building something — and that you should do this in a very unusual, very harsh environment, under the worst imaginable conditions. Burning Man has infested the Bay Area with the notion that people should do creative work. And that it’s not just a right but a responsibility, in order to be a living, breathing, valuable human being.” ([Location 2839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=2839)) - I think the main accomplishment of Burning Man is creating a broad sense of participatory, collaborative, creative work. This isn’t a notion that generally exists in most cities, but it uniquely exists in the Bay Area because this is the main center for Burning Man. I constantly get comments from people I know in other cities — ‘What do you mean you can put an idea out on a computer Listserv and people come out and help you build it and you don’t have to pay them an hourly rate?’ People from L.A. particularly get freaked out by this. It’s like Burning Man sent an idea virus around: that you can have a big idea and be confident that the material resources will show up and the people resources will show up to help you build it.” ([Location 2854](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=2854)) - Lots of Burning Man art has that same feel, of amusingly absurd intellectualized nonsense, the kind of ideas that slightly skewed creative people brainstorm about in late nights at cafes and around the hardwood living room floor after the fourth glass of wine or third bowl of pot, but actually executed. ([Location 2878](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=2878)) - One slogan circulating through the community, originally coined as a cynical joke by Chicken John, refers to Burning Man as the “Special Olympics of art — where everyone plays and everyone’s a winner.” ([Location 2881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=2881)) - Every year, more artists take advantage of the world Burning Man creates — and Burning Man takes advantage of human beings by turning them into artists. ([Location 3017](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=3017)) - “I love Burning Man for itself,” says Austin, “for all the things people are doing there. I love to see other people’s creative stuff. I’d never been a popular kid. I was pretty shy and withdrawn, doing my physics and electronics. No one appreciated that. Megavolt allows me to be one of the alpha dogs at Burning Man and do something I really like doing that not many other people can do and become popular in a place where I care about being popular. “Being popular at Burning Man means coming into contact with a lot of fascinating and wonderful people who come seek me out and tell me about what they are doing. They’re not just praising me. I don’t care about being popular in Santa Barbara or Los Angeles, but I do want to be popular at Burning Man. It’s a huge compliment because I respect people with lots of integrity and creativity and I want to be their hero in a way. ([Location 3162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=3162)) - “Some people are always dancing around some cliff edge or running right up to the edge of the railroad track. I think a hundred years ago [his art] might not have been that interesting. Now life has become more passive and white-collar, and most people in America don’t work dangerous jobs that beat you up. You can’t expect people to go from hunters and gatherers for millennia and then for this hundred years, oh, we’re going to be office workers! And everything is going to be all right, and there isn’t going to be anything pent up from that. But there is obviously a lot of pent-up shit. And people need release. And fear is never boring.” ([Location 3230](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=3230)) - “Nothing’s more attractive than somebody having more fun than yourself,” says. Burke. “It doesn’t matter what you’re wearing; if you’re naked having a good time, people assume nudity’s part of that good time so they get naked. . . . People attracted to Burning Man come from really adventurous lives, and why did they end up in Burning Man and not anywhere else? I became supercharged, gassed up, full tank, you know this is original, you didn’t have to fake it, just felt this is beyond anything you thought about before and any other setting you’ve seen. I try to go at Burning Man like an inventor every year. . . . They know you drink Miller in the bottle with no glass, so you gotta come up with a fresh contention, you wanna wow yourself and wow others, same coif maybe but a different cut.” ([Location 3319](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=3319)) - You try to touch as many people with as little as possible, walk over that beach without leaving footprints. It’s not really attractive seeing someone struggle, reloading under pressure with sniper fire all around you, but to walk out in the gunfire and light your smoke and rejoice yourself. . . . You’re out there dealing with the history of art; you’ve gotta know what you are doing, not be redundant. What’s it gonna take to have a good time after you’ve had all the good times? We’re all in the trenches of boredom . . . after touring the world you want to do something else, even at an art freak fest enclave of a scene — I lived in New York, London, Paris; I love art but I really feel bad when it just sits there, doesn’t get out. . . . My influence is in the art-car scene, seeing it converge with Burning Man, seeing what art can do if it moves. ... I like cruising; I wanna see everyone in the petri dish of biological exchange, go to the end of the street and turn back; it’s all about movement, seeing shit go by you and finding a chance happening, and did you see that? “I was just into junk. How can you throw anything away? I wanted to put it back out there; everything’s alive, the cup’s alive, the beer’s alive, the tennis shoe’s alive, not just the culture growing in them; junkyards are astonishing, landfills — this isn’t debris! It all has something left to do. I chose to let those discarded things say something one last time. . . . I’m actually best outfitted to be on a deserted island; everyone should have that mentality, think when you throw shit out, when you give up on that relationship — this has become such a shifty society. You’ve got to pay homage to older things, older people, the old monuments, old gestures, old understanding. ... I chose trash ’cause it was free . . . that resourcefulness comes if you’ve ever been without, had not much to work with, like the Cameroonian people make bikes out of wood. That’s such a polite mentality to have, and Burning Man helps with that resourcefulness. Burning Man actually gets started when it’s over; incredible shit gets built during the last hours of activity when you’re running out of cheese. “If you’re inspired, we could probably do anything. Those who aren’t become very difficult, and it’s company that I can’t keep for long. I always wanna sit in the company of people who are under their own gases — those are people you wanna break down with in the middle of fucking nowhere or have a screaming party with on a deserted island. Versus someone that’s not sure — they haven’t thought about what their soul’s work is. Sure, you’re trapped in a body, it’s nauseating, you get hot flashes and cold calls, but dude, what are you doing? Your soul’s work? Some people don’t even wanna go there. That’s why I traveled for years, looking for that. I hung out with Pepe, he had it, those people I was attracted to. John Law. Larry Harvey. All these people impassioned about their work.” ([Location 3330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=3330)) - Burke conceptualized the notion of the Car Hunt back in the midnineties, executed by him with John Law; Chip Flynn, of the machine-art collective Peoplehater; and various Cacophonists. ([Location 3358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=3358)) - In the midst of a disquisition on the uniquely experimental quality of large installations at Burning Man — experiments driven less by knowledge than by ego and faith — Dan suddenly notes that “there’s always a wreckage of your life on the other side. Burning Man has entirely absorbed all the financial gain I’ve ever made in my life and left me poor and destitute. It’s great to create the pieces, but what is the benefit versus the cost — emotionally, intellectually, financially? So why are we doing all this again? Is it all ego? Because we can? Because we can’t? ([Location 3545](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=3545)) - “As much benefit as I’ve received from Burning Man, it has also destroyed me in a lot of strange ways. Hey, I’m thirty-three. I can start over anyway. But [Burning Man] promotes an unstable lifestyle where you throw everything away for the good time, for the moment, rather than build stability. I see so many people wreck their lives year after year to make the art, make the statement. ([Location 3551](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=3551)) - “But the funny thing is, I can’t imagine life without it. It’s such a gift that we all share. I’ve gotten tons of relationships from it — love, hate, all of it. There’s nothing else I could even imagine that would begin to offer all that, and for that I’m deeply thankful.” ([Location 3555](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=3555)) - Their impromptu Domino Bar became a “fluidly authored group theater piece,” Aaron remembers, as people picked up on the swanky vibe and returned in gowns and tuxedos. “Some priceless things happened, [things that] speak so much of the caliber of imagination of the people at Burning Man: people would walk right up to the bar and say, ‘Give me my usual.’ Perfect. You get it. You’re not a person who walks up and says, What is it? Why? Clearly haven’t been around Burning Man long if you’re asking why So, I’d say, ‘Good to see you again . . . Rick? Steve, sorry, been a few days. Whiskey? Straight or rocks? Oh, I’ll get it right next time.’ You can drink here all night with that attitude.” It got Aaron thinking about consensual reality and the ways our own behavior and attitudes transform physical space into whatever we believe it to be, from a church to a smoky jazz nightclub. “If you get enough people playing along, it stops being make-believe. It becomes in every meaningful sense an actual nightclub, except we don t have a building.” ([Location 3758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=3758)) - Some old-timers, or people just seduced by the myth of the old days, may still harbor old deep-playa-fueled fantasies of an exploding Mad Max wonderland where the blue of authority never mars the playa’s profound blankness. And some cranky old bastards think that just because there are cops around, any implied promise of a liberatory experience at Burning Man is a vicious lie, undoubtedly told to put one more gold bar in Larry Harvey’s hidden vault, somewhere far, far away from his dingy apartment. The freedom at Burning Man is not legal — the laws of the United States and Nevada are enforced. Of course, if your crimes are victim- less, even in cop-ridden Black Rock City, you’ll get away with violating certain laws more often than not. But where you are free is in what I’ve come to understand as social freedom — freedom from the negative judgments of those around you, or at least from your anxieties about same. The social freedom at Burning Man is wide, and it is inspiring. ([Location 3834](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=3834)) - An impression reigns in the city — which the statistics can neither bear out nor disprove because crime stats per se are not kept -— that Black Rock is a uniquely peaceful and crime-free place for a city of thirty-thousand-plus hard partiers. The very fact that most Burners believe in their city’s idyllic nature makes it a far more pleasant place than it would be if we chose to focus on really figuring out exactly how crime-free or safe it is, and wondering if every neighbor is a potential thief or attacker. ([Location 3991](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=3991)) - Humans live only partially in the world of facts; we live even more in the world of our interpretations. It is in the interpretive world that most of the glory of Burning Man lies. Our acts, after all, live only for the moment we live them; the meanings we ascribe to them survive and guide our actions and our souls forever. ([Location 4030](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4030)) - Gerlach’s local judge, Phil Thomas, candidly tells me that in his opinion the feds from BLM often don’t respect citizens’ constitutional rights. Unfortunately, he only gets to adjudicate arrests made by Pershing or Washoe cops. Of those, he tells me, around 10 percent tend to have procedural irregularities such that he’d be apt to throw the case out. “What really scares me,” Judge Phil says, “is that people don’t know that they can’t have [warrantless searches] done to them. We need to get back to teaching our kids the Constitution and Bill of Rights and all that shit. Anybody should be able to say, ‘You can’t do that. Let go of me; you can’t touch me.’ The fact that we as a people don’t know our rights shows that we are fucking stupid.” ([Location 4062](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4062)) - Original Ranger philosopher Michael Michael likes to keep to an old-school Ranger spirit, one that, at its most radical, declares, as he once told me, “You can burn your own car” in Black Rock City as long as you are prepared to clean it up. He always wanted to ensure that Rangers did not instantly think no, but yes — and that any reason they had to say no should be unique and appropriate to Black Rock City, not mindlessly imported from the outside world. ([Location 4127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4127)) - Larry likes to tell a story about how someone once fired off a gun so close to Dan Miller’s ear that he damaged Dan’s hearing — but since they were both insiders in a small community, everyone tolerated an antisocial act for which a stranger would have been strung up. ([Location 4158](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4158)) - Sure, safety first and all. But, as Michael asks, what are the real reasons we seek safety? Why are we so concerned with prolonging our lives? “To what end and for how many years? What about quality of life? What is being alive? What is living? There’s a chance you may die at Burning Man, but you will never be more alive.” ([Location 4213](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4213)) - Wow, this place is great! You do good things around here and you get rewarded for it. But that wasn’t the reason for doing it. It just happened, and you don’t live in a bubble and everything you do creates something. We have an effect on our environment; we create ripples and splashes.” Burning Man, instant Karma machine. ([Location 4310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4310)) - “a badass elitist specially trained lean mean paramilitary homeless machine” ([Location 4437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4437)) - elsewhere. There is no way, truly, to eliminate any trace of our civilization; there is something indulgent in Burning Man’s encouraging the notion that sweeping everything away from this one playa is an ecological triumph. Humans do make a mark on the world; this is our glory. The best we can do is be as conscious and deliberate about that mark as we can — know what we are doing, and why, and mind where the traces land. ([Location 4506](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4506)) - The world of Burning Man has over the years been riven by conflicts and bitterness, and most of them come down not to disagreements over facts but to assumptions about motives. ([Location 4567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4567)) - It’s always a pleasure to bitch about other people’s motives, but charity and reason compel us to remember that when it comes to the secret engines driving another’s soul, we are only interpreting the pings and rumbles — we can’t really get under the hood and take a look-see. ([Location 4576](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4576)) - As to the precise mechanisms by which this Burning Man vibe, spirit, movement, call it what you will, define it as you are able, will grow and conquer, Larry understands it’s too soon to know and in wisdom impossible to predict. “It’s like Black Rock City itself you create just enough of a framework to let things happen. When you cross that line [into overplanning], you destroy the thing you are trying to create. ([Location 4591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4591)) - We all, all of us who have been through it, can agree that the experience has the power, the tendency, the promise to energize and excite and change and improve people like no other mechanism we’ve come across. It sparks the passion that leads some to work for the LLC, some to build the biggest thing they can imagine, me to write a book about the event and what happens there. But no one can agree on what the real secret of the technology is. The people who actually work for the company seem perfectly happy to not have any idea what it is, even as they launch plans to spread it somehow, anyhow. ([Location 4599](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4599)) - I offer up to Larry the notion that it is interesting that he’s planning a social revolutionary movement that is not about fighting authority but is dedicated to working with it. It’s not about fighting the power in bloody hand-to-hand combat but merely about offering up experiments and possibilities for new ways to live. A very Popperian revolution, just plugging ahead and generating conjectures and refutations galore. Can we create a temporary anarchist community in which everyone uses motor vehicles to their heart’s content? That, Larry thinks, has been refuted by experience. Every other change in the constitution of Black Rock City, every new wave of rules that pisses off the anarchists, has similarly been a reaction, in Larry’s mind, to circumstances. He insists they don’t come at things from an ideological direction, that all their ideas arise from their direct experience building the desert civilization. ([Location 4617](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4617)) - Note: strikingly similar to singapore - One night, very, very late, in his kitchen, Larry began to muse, shapelessly, with no specifics, that there must be — mustn’t there?— some political applications, political implications, of this little experiment of his. I can only chuckle nervously. “I hope not, Larry.” Any political value I saw in Burning Man always had to do with its avoidance of politics as I see it — the game of some people telling other people what to do. ([Location 4624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4624)) - Larry doesn’t see what Burning Man is about in such an individualist framework. He tells me about Neolithic times, when, he says, the entire culture seemed united by one central idea. You can tell by their architecture, he insists. He wants to bring back that original vision of human history, to re-create that sense of total community he sees in ancient man. This is radical, in its core meaning of returning to the root. But he wants to combine this ancient vision of community with the individualist glories of the modern West. He sees something that I don’t quite see, yet. No one does, and that is to his advantage. (I don’t think he sees it altogether clearly, but it’s a huge, if dim, shape filling his vision as he gazes toward the future.) ([Location 4635](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4635)) - beginning, Billy thought everything went well and loved getting to do his show at Burning Man. Billy’s wife and stage manager, Savitri Durkee, was less impressed than Billy had been. “I was against coming to begin with,” she told me one typically bright, dry, hot afternoon toward the end of 2003, sitting underneath Billy and his crew’s very sturdily constructed shade canopy. “I had a feeling it wasn’t the most important demographic for us to talk to, that these were people who probably feel that they are liberals, right? I mean that pejoratively. They are pretty sure they are living the right lives and are really the hardest group to change. They think that they are radical if they recycle and vote for the liberal candidate. So it’s a gift economy? People spend a thousand bucks the day before they get here so we get to have the sentimental value of not using money, but people are spending more money, consuming more, than they normally would to come here. It’s just humans once again coming to an environment where there is no place for humans and subverting it into a human place. I resent that as an environmentalist. ([Location 4680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4680)) - “We are beings, created things,” Larry tells me. “We’re the products of genetic mutation, and we’re infinitely variable. The world presents itself to us as an artifact with slots to fill. But everyone’s gifts are unique and not necessarily apparent to the [people themselves] unless some circumstance calls them forth. The whole story of my progress,” he surmises, “might seem blind and hapless. But there was from the beginning a sense of something real in me and the idea that it had to have a home out there somewhere. Intuitively, blindly, as chance allowed, I moved in that direction even if it didn’t make any sense by the world’s standards. The human world is like a flowery meadow, and the individual is like a weed — each one different. A weed is simply an unwanted plant. It’s a human category. There’s no such plant as a weed. But the human world is more and more a monoculture. Farmer Jones wants corn and everything else is a weed, and if you can’t get with the corn program, Buster, then get your thistle ass out of here! That’s the problem everyone faces.” ([Location 4700](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4700)) - Larry likes to link Burning Man to the sacred, though he can’t be any more specific about what that means to him than being. But he’s glad he’s created a forum, finally, where he can publicly play with the idea of the sacred and invite thirty thousand other people to play along. Even in 1990, when Burning Man first moved to the desert, this was his preoccupation, but “there wasn’t one person in the world prepared to walk down this path with me. Nobody. Not my partners. When I gave a lecture about the meaning of Burning Man at the College of Arts and Crafts in town, I talked about the sacred, and John [Law] got disgusted and walked out because he’s allergic to talking about sacred things.” ([Location 4737](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4737)) - Larry has been admirably true to the doctrine of nonexclusion throughout Burning Man’s history, insisting it was about nothing more than coming together to create and share an experience. As a nine-year Burner, I would be remiss in my dedication to the city I love to not announce that taking the gift of Black Rock City and making it into yet another vehicle to tell people where they ought to shop seems like a wrong turn to me. After all, isn’t that what advertising itself is all about? ([Location 4746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4746)) - It’s a mystery to me — I really cannot tell you why this happens, even define what it is — but I’ve seen it. The act of getting together around a piece of human art, and working together to make it do something new, is an experience that many have never had before. It bathes a person — it has bathed me. I’ve seen it bathe others — with something, a radiation beyond heat and light. Admiring other people’s work, becoming part of it, is to see what a human being can do, and to see him doing it with an intensity and certainty that is as unconditional, as Larry might say, as anything in the physical world — that is to see how life can be and should be. ([Location 4775](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=4775)) - But as New York superrich club rats and their imported dates velvet-rope it in their Robot Heart and P. Diddy makes headlines just for showing up, well, that just makes Burning Man bigger and it doesn’t have to ruin your good time, unless you love Burning Man’s reputation more than you love its experience. ([Location 5037](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=5037)) - If you are a “normal attendee”—someone who bought a ticket, doesn’t know the history, doesn’t work for the event, isn’t trying to get a driving pass for a less-than-transformative art car, isn’t a large-scale artist or trying to burn something big or giving out food on a large scale—the experience of Burning Man is just as exciting, strange, revelatory, “free” as it has been, at least since the day that you couldn’t drive or use guns, and have had to camp within a mapped structure someone else had designed for you. ([Location 5073](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=5073)) - As discussed in the book’s chapter 12, I’ve never been sure that there was a need to bring “the Burning Man spirit to the world at large”, that there was something pathetic or lacking if one didn’t. Spaces of pure festivity, pure escape, pure otherness, are necessary and always have been. In that sense, Burning Man is just a fresh space, a fresh business, feeding (or “exploiting”) an ancient human imperative. That’s all it ever had to be. It didn’t have to do anything other than….be. ([Location 5238](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00MVM6JMI&location=5238))