Black Rock Flambé: A proto-apocalypic Labor Day barbecue
Precooked, they’ve come, roasted by society, soul-seared, half-baked, and hard-boiled; sun-dried, heat-blasted, and cheese-fried to a crackly crisp, they’ve come over the mountains and into the desert to smolder as one at the feet of the great symbol of their own relentless combustion. They have come to see the Burning Man.
Greetings from the Burning Man Project, the posthippie, neopagan, proto-apocalypic art ritual set in the Black Rock Desert, a hundred miles north of Reno. Here, in the middle of a 400-square0-mile expanse of Nevadan desolation, some 500 pilgrims have built their camp. A sprawling city of rip-stop nylon and fossil-fueled vehicles, it sits like a mirage on one of the flattest, emptiest places on earth. Over the course of a Labor Day weekend they will raise a four-story architectonic replica of one of their species, and before all the expressing and identifying and relating is through, they will torch it as the finale of a mad annual festival.
Neon-pagan Icon: spontaneous unity or endemic weirdness?
That such an event has its roots in San Francisco should surprise no one. The City by the Bay has long been a beacon for visionaries and pilgrims, and it is from this pool of talent that Burning Man draws much of its constituency. To this day you will find in San Francisco an army of hipsters well-read enough to know that they’re alienated, a cyberfed underground too jaded or too damaged to participate in the mainstream, ready to try something funky at the drop of a latte.
For Larry Harvey, however, this is not some kind of tractor-pull for the cultural elite. As the founder and grand imperial fritter of the Burning Man Project, his expectations run high. “What we’re trying to do is reinvent civilization out here. We’re trying to find out how we can do that in a very short period of time.: Such a statement begs for explanation. When I fist meet Harvey, it’s clear that this will not be a problem. He used to work as a landscape architect, but then he hurt his back and was out on disability for a few years, so now Burning Man has pretty much taken over his life. His discourse on the subject expands to fill whatever time his listener can devote. Bleary-eyed and hard-smoking, he looks like he’s paid for every one of his 45 years. But there is nothing disheveled about his thinking, and something lovable about his self-effacing sense of humor, a crucial attribute for someone in his line of work.
In 1986, bored with his state of the world and despondent over his corner of it, Harvey decided to liven up his solstice with a little fire. He and a buddy built an eight-foot anthropoid out of scrap and dragged it down to the beach. Something happened when they burned it. Harvey knew not why, but he found his entrails stirred in a way they’d never been before. Harvey made it an annual habit, and by 1990 Burning Man was an underground hit. The sculpture had grown to 40 feet, and the crowd had swelled to nearly a thousand. Catching on, the San Francisco Police sent a squad down to stop the celebration. To avoid a riot it was agreed that the Man could stand but couldn’t burn. Unburing Man sat is storage until someone came up with the idea of carting the pieces 330 miles northeast to the Black Rock Desert to meet the blowtorch of destiny, and it is to this high desert that devotees have been flocking.
As the Man has grown in stature, so has he grown in significance in the mind of his creator. Over the years Harvey has had the chance to ponder every psychological and sociological nuance of his pet project. Give him enough time and a big-enough ashtray, and he can tie Burning Man to the post-Freudian identity theories of Heinz Kohut, contrast it with the rise of fascism, or use it as a lens through which to view the death of indigenous cultures. But it is things at home that trouble Harvey the most. “We have no real culture in this country. All we have is merchandising that prey on culture.” We have identity problems, he says, and we’ve lost access to that feeling of awe that regions used to provide. Early in the history of Burning Man, Harvey noticed the spontaneous unity that emerged among those involved with its construction and destruction. In the crowds he saw the potential for expansion, and from this emerged his vision of the future. He would grow a micro-community in the desert laboratory… he would get people to work and play together intensely for a few days. He would tap into the awe in their souls with a giant pyre that reminded them of their own mortality and hope that some of it struck with them when they returned home. “We want to do nothing less than change the world,” Harvey says. “I think we can do a better job than the hippies did.”
sound squall in the center of camp. Serena de la Hay, a willow sculptress from England, is helping people weave their own private effigies. By the end of the day the family flambé will be extended with the burning child, the burning goat, the burning crow, and what looks to be the burning prawn.
It probably would take a team of pop sociologist all weekend to find enough pigeonholes for all the participants. There are a coven of witches from Texas and a posse of architects from San Francisco, a couple of Guns n’ Roses casualties in tight black pants and leather jackets, a handful of head-shorn envoys from the nose-ring underground, along with a healthy sprinkle of hippies, both neo and original recipe. A professor of something called hazardous materials technology camps between a warehouse manager and a couple of computer techies. A man pads naked across the playa; another man, dressed onl in cutoff fatigues and smeared with gray mud, trips through camp like Sam Bottoms in Apocalypse Now. A lawyer from Oregon who flew his own two-seat Bellanca Scout down just for the festival shares his impression of the camp from above. “It looks like a Kmart parking lot without the Kmart."