- tokin opposition
- Apr 8, 2021
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I don't jailbreak the androids, I set them free.
WATCH MARS EXPRESS (2023)
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the only thing I know about burning man is that my favorite author when I was 13 wrote about it:
quote:Attending Burning Man made me simultaneously one of the most photographed people on the planet and one of the least surveilled humans in the modern world.
I adjusted my burnoose, covering up my nose and mouth and tucking its edge into place under the lower rim of my big, scratched goggles. The sun was high, the temperature well over a hundred degrees, and breathing through the embroidered cotton scarf made it even more stifling. But the wind had just kicked up, and there was a lot of playa dust -- fine gypsum sand, deceptively soft and powdery, but alkali enough to make your eyes burn and your skin crack -- and after two days in the desert, I had learned that it was better to be hot than to choke.
Pretty much everyone was holding a camera of some kind -- mostly phones, of course, but also big SLRs and even old-fashioned film cameras, including a genuine antique plate camera whose operator hid out from the dust under a huge black cloth that made me hot just to look at it. Everything was ruggedized for the fine, blowing dust, mostly through the simple expedient of sticking it in a zip-lock bag, which is what I'd done with my phone. I turned around slowly to get a panorama and saw that the man walking past me was holding the string for a gigantic helium balloon a hundred yards overhead, from which dangled a digital video camera. Also, the man holding the balloon was naked.
Well, not entirely. He was wearing shoes. I understood that: playa dust is hard on your feet. They call it playa-foot, when the alkali dust dries out your skin so much that it starts to crack and peel. Everyone agrees that playa-foot sucks.
Burning Man is a festival held every Labor Day weekend in the middle of Nevada's Black Rock desert. Fifty thousand people show up in this incredibly harsh, hot, dusty environment, and build a huge city -- Black Rock City -- and participate. "Spectator" is a vicious insult in Black Rock City. Everyone's supposed to be doing stuff and yeah, also admiring everyone else's stuff (hence all the cameras). At Burning Man, everyone is the show.
I wasn't naked, but the parts of me that were showing were decorated with elaborate mandalas laid on with colored zinc. A lady as old as my mother, wearing a tie-dyed wedding dress, had offered to paint me that morning, and she'd done a great job. That's another thing about Burning Man: it runs on a gift economy, which means that you generally go around offering nice things to strangers a lot, which makes for a surprisingly pleasant environment. The designs the painter had laid down made me look amazing, and there were plenty of cameras aiming my way as I ambled across the open desert toward Nine O'Clock.
Black Rock City is a pretty modern city: it has public sanitation (portable chem-toilets decorated with raunchy poems reminding you not to put anything but toilet paper in them), electricity and Internet service (at Six O'Clock, the main plaza in the middle of the ring-shaped city), something like a government (the nonprofit that runs Burning Man), several local newspapers (all of them doing better than the newspapers in the real world!), a dozen radio stations, an all-volunteer police force (the Black Rock Rangers, who patrolled wearing tutus or parts of chicken suits or glitter paint), and many other amenities associated with the modern world.
But BRC has no official surveillance. There are no CCTVs, no checkpoints -- at least not after the main gate, where tickets are collected -- no ID checks at all, no bag-searches, no RFID sniffers, no mobile phone companies logging your movements. There was also no mobile phone service. No one drives -- except for the weird art cars registered with the Department of Mutant Vehicles -- so there were no license plate cameras and no sniffers for your E-Z Passes. The WiFi was open and unlogged. Attendees at Burning Man agreed not to use their photos commercially without permission, and it was generally considered polite to ask people before taking their portraits.
So there I was, having my picture taken through the blowing dust as I gulped down water from the water-jug I kept clipped to my belt at all times, sucking at the stubby built-in straw under cover of the blue-and-silver burnoose, simultaneously observed and observer, simultaneously observed and unsurveilled, and it was glorious.
"Wahoo!" I shouted to the dust and the art cars and the naked people and the enormous wooden splay-armed effigy perched atop a pyramid straight ahead of me in the middle of the desert. This was The Man, and we'd burn him in three nights, and that's why it was called Burning Man. I couldn't wait.
"You're in a good mood," a jawa said from behind me. Even with the tone-shifter built into its dust-mask, the cloaked sand-person had an awfully familiar voice.
"Ange?" I said. We'd been missing each other all that day, ever since I'd woken up an hour before her and snuck out of the tent to catch the sunrise (which was awesome), and we'd been leaving each other notes back at camp all day about where we were heading next. Ange had spent the summer spinning up the jawa robes, working with cooling towels that trapped sweat as it evaporated, channeling it back over her skin for extra evaporative cooling. She'd hand-dyed it a mottled brown, tailored it into the characteristic monkish robe shape, and added crossed bandoliers. These exaggerated her breasts, which made the whole thing entirely and totally warsome. She hadn't worn it out in public yet, and now, in the dust and the glare, she was undoubtedly the greatest sand-person I'd ever met. I hugged her and she hugged me back so hard it knocked the wind out of me, one of her trademarked wrestling-hold cuddles.
"I smudged your paint," she said through the voice-shifter after we unclinched.
"I got zinc on your robes," I said.
She shrugged. "Like it matters! We both look fabulous. Now, what have you seen and what have you done and where have you been, young man?"
"Where to start?" I said. I'd been wandering up and down the radial avenues that cut through the city, lined with big camps sporting odd exhibits -- one camp where a line of people were efficiently making snow cones for anyone who wanted them, working with huge blocks of ice and a vicious ice-shaver. Then a camp where someone had set up a tall, linoleum-covered slide that you could toboggan down on a plastic magic carpet, after first dumping a gallon of waste water over the lino to make it plenty slippery. It was a very clever way to get rid of grey water (that's water that you've showered in, or used to wash your dishes or hands -- black water being water that's got poo or pee in it). One of the other Burning Man rules was "leave no trace" -- when we left, we'd take every scrap of Black Rock City with us, and that included all the grey water. But the slide made for a great grey water evaporator, and every drop of liquid that the sliders helped turn into vapor was a drop of liquid the camp wouldn't have to pack all the way back to Reno.
There'd been pervy camps where they were teaching couples to tie each other up; a "junk food glory hole" that you put your mouth over in order to receive a mysterious and unhealthy treat (I'd gotten a mouthful of some kind of super-sugary breakfast cereal studded with coconut "marshmallows" shaped like astrological symbols); a camp where they were offering free service for playa bikes (beater bikes caked with playa dust and decorated with glitter and fun fur and weird fetishes and bells); a tea-house camp where I'd been given a very precisely made cup of some kind of Japanese tea I'd never heard of that was delicious and sharp; camps full of whimsy; camps full of physics; camps full of optical illusions; camps full of men and women; a kids' camp full of screaming kids running around playing some kind of semi-supervised outdoor game -- things I'd never suspected existed.
And I'd only seen a tiny slice of Black Rock City.
I told Ange about as much as I could remember and she nodded or said "ooh," or "aah," or demanded to know where I'd seen things. Then she told me about the stuff she'd seen -- a camp where topless women were painting one others' breasts, a camp where an entire brass band was performing, a camp where they'd built a medieval trebuchet that fired ancient, broken-down pianos down a firing range, the audience holding its breath in total silence while they waited for the glorious crash each piano made when it exploded into flinders on the hardpack desert.
"Can you believe this place?" Ange said, jumping up and down on the spot in excitement, making her bandoliers jingle.
"I know -- can you believe we almost didn't make it?"
I'd always sort of planned on going out to see The Man burn -- after all, I grew up in San Francisco, the place with the largest concentration of burners in the world. But it took a lot of work to participate in Burning Man. First, there was the matter of packing for a camping trip in the middle of the desert where you had to pack in everything -- including water -- and then pack it all out again, everything you didn't leave behind in the porta-potties. And there were very strict rules about what could go in those. Then there was the gift economy: figuring out what I could bring to the desert that someone else might want. Plus the matter of costumes, cool art and inventions to show off... Every time I started to think about it, I just about had a nervous breakdown.
But this year, of all years, I'd made it. This was the year both my parents lost their jobs. The year I'd dropped out of college rather than take on any more student debt. The year I'd spent knocking on every door I could find, looking for paid work -- anything! -- without getting even a nibble.
"Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is cash-poor and time-rich," Ange said solemnly, pulling down her face mask with one hand and yanking me down to kiss me with the other.
"That's catchy," I said. "You should print T-shirts."
"Oh," she said. "That reminds me. I got a T-shirt!"
She threw open her robe to reveal a proud red tee that read MAKE BEAUTIFUL ART AND SET IT ON FIRE, laid out like those British "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters, with the Burning Man logo where the crown should be.
"Just in time, too," I said, holding my nose. I was only partly kidding. At the last minute, we'd both decided to ditch half the clothes we'd planned on bringing so that we could fit more parts for Secret Project X-1 into our backpacks. Between that and taking "bits and pits" baths by rubbing the worst of the dried sweat, body paint, sunscreen, and miscellaneous fluids off with baby wipes once a day, neither of us smelled very nice.
She shrugged. "The playa provides." It was one of the Burning Man mottoes we'd picked up on the first day, when we both realized that we thought the other one had brought the sunscreen, and just as we were about to get into an argument about it, we stumbled on Sunscreen Camp, where some nice people had slathered us all over with SPF 50 and given us some baggies to take with. "The playa provides!" they'd said, and wished us well.
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Aug 28, 2023 03:04
