Fucking Adjust: Visiting Burning Man, a "temporary autonomous zone" in the desert.

Originally published as a nightly feature in Dutch by daily evening newspaper NRC Handelsblad as part of the Out of Control culture column.

by Sandra Küpfer

1
"Even eleven years ago they wanted to know what it meant."

In San Francisco at the end of August everyone wants to go to Nevada with ten thousand stoned people to burn a wooden statue and roll naked through the mud.

2
Sean Kirkpatrick (31), former drummer of the band Swell and art director for a snowboarding company, talked to us about Burning Man last year. Sitting on at the edge of the swimming pool in his apartment complex in the heart of Silicon Valley, fifteen kilometers from San Francisco he talked about the absolute nothing of the desert. The white, cracked sand face in all directions. It is "as if you were standing on the moon."

You could jump in a car, put a rock on the gas pedal, lock the steering wheel in a 360-degree arch, lie on the roof, and drive in loops while you look at the stars. "There is really nothing there man, it's not like you can hit something."

Big fires, whirlwinds everywhere with desert dust, the sound of pistols in the night. Two people were killed.

3
www.burningman.com [1997 archive]: A giant beehive of bulletin boards, meeting places, photo articles from newspapers and webzines, links to the underground of San Francisco, desert survival info, and the Burning Man mailing list: "for everyone who can handle the traffic"

4
A t-shirt reads: Burning Man 1996, Woodstock or Altamont - You decide!

5
In 1986, the first Man went wild. Larry Harvey burned him with eleven friends on San Francisco beach. For the sake of fun. In order not to get in trouble with the police, they had smuggled the thing into the rocks at night.

Larry Harvey from Wired on the 1990 gathering at Baker Beach: ”We needed forty people to drag the body parts around in rotating teams. It is difficult to keep a low profile with a four-story giant. And wonderfully absurd. … Even then, people wanted to know what it meant. We just did it. Once the thing was up, it really didn't have to mean anything.”

6
>Date: Sat, 23 Aug 1997 01:35:12 +0000
>From: Sandra Kupfer
>To: press@burningman.com
>Subject: a little info about me

Hey there, I write a series of reports for a Dutch newspaper under the title OUT OF CONTROL. It's about chaos in pop culture at the end of the millennium. From the loose design of Ray Gun via the violence in LA to the chaotic world of the net. Chaos brings new possibilities, new liberties. We also get OUT OF CONTROL in that sense: pop culture is increasingly shrinking from mainstream, state, media and marketing control. Burning Man seems to be the embodiment of those trends. To participate, but by documenting without prejudice what happens. Respect,
Sandra

>Subject: Re: a little info about me
>Date: Sun, 24 Aug 1997 16:42:57 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Maid Marian
>To: Sandra Kupfer

Sandra,
We are interested in your article, and in you. COME FIND ME, please!!!
Marian Goodell (aka: Maid Marian)
Manager of Communications

7
Every few minutes the envelope blinks on my screen: mail from the BM-list: Tent construction in the desert. How Burning Man is progressing with its BLM permit (it’s not). Soil conditions. And again, in the Nevada Black Rock Desert, desert resistance of pets (none). GET ME OFF THIS CRAZY THING ... WILMA!!!!

Desire for the playa: I CAN'T FUCKING WAIT

8
Giant Naked Twister in CYBERBUSS Camp

9
Dutch is the tenth nationality aboard the CYBERBUSS:
American
Canadian
Brazilian
English
Swiss
German
Italian
French
Venezuelan

10
CybersAM (29), an online marketer and web designer from San Francisco, points to the old school bus.

”This was the first one we saw. I wanted to look further, but Yanick said: buy. No discussion possible. He has paid one half, all of us the other.”

Yanick (27), Canadian, nods.

Together they worked for months to make it into CYBERBUSS. Now they are on report for CYBERSPACE. Sam makes digital photos, which he sends to the world from the desert with a laptop and satellite phone www.cyberbuss.com:

Join the CYBERBUSS
on a VIRTUAL TRIP to Burning Man!

They arrived days ago. The content of the BUSS - wood, plastic, glitter, pieces of dust, stars, water guns, benches, tables, silver paint, drinks, drugs, food and friends - is scattered over CYBERBUSS CAMP.

Cyberbuss Camp.

Sam, bare-chested and wearing big black glasses on his shaved silver-painted head, speaks Portuguese with Baucho and Monica from Brazil, once stopped by and lingered.

Cathy (26) from San Francisco, long wavy copper blond hair, freckles, sparkling gaze, in black patent boots and a purple bra, paints silver stripes on Anton's face, a diplomat son raised in England with a boarding school accent and long dark hair. 

Kurt (28), Swiss, is a researcher for a web video company in SF. He plays in a woolly crawler suit and a hat with fur ears on a multicolored home-made piano. 

Yanick and Carlos from Venezuela, in shrieking dresses and pointed hats, exchange obscenities about attractive boys while Cody, a four-star chef in leather pants, bakes pizzas to eat later.

Sam:
We all work. But this - he points to the chaos around us - is what we live for


11
Money is useless in Black Rock City
You bring everything yourself. Pancakes are bartered in exchange for a dance, bicycles for chocolate, beer for a joke.

There are no ties with the business world, the official art world or the authorities. There are no subsidies, sponsors, cola or hamburgers. Burning Man is run non-commercially from ten living rooms.

It organizes itself. Via the site you arrange travel, camp, food and entertainment.

We ourselves are the biggest attraction


12
In the Blue Light District, after the nocturnal color fades, more email-names get faces. There are many theme camps from the BBS system the BM Org hosts. There are daily cocktail parties at Country Club Camp. Drinks are not for sale, but everyone hoists absinthe and tequila because the only house rule is DRINK OR MOVE ON!

Geekboy, a 28-year-old hacker, computer programmer and postmaster of the list, is talking to John, the Black Rock Desert Radio Pastor, who later will get married that week in Black Rock City - twice, because the in-laws get lost in the desert. The SPACE COW GIRLS of the SPACE COW GIRL CAMP further down stomp into cowboy pants of long-haired blue and orange fur that reveal their buttocks in shiny lycra, Stetsons on their Betty Page hairstyles, the lush necklines pressed into small lace tops. As a Black Rock City Fashion Patrol, they tirelessly pursue FASHION PERPETRATORS. I get a compliment for THE LARGEST HAIR PIN ON THE PLAYA

We walk among the freaks on the cracked playa where in a pile of hay the sound of a generator sounds like a house: someone builds a huge statue of ice in the middle of the desert.

13
Pink Barbie Wedding

14
It's just like Beavis and Butthead. Massive MEDIA SMARTNESS. 

Everything is second hand under the motto better stolen well than badly conceived. Everything is taken for granted. Everyone has taken books, music, lyrics, letters, photos, television, film, news, animation, the web and advertising out of context and put them on the playa. We laugh all day long. The bright desert light makes all those media fragments just as meaningless as you often experience them yourself. Everyone here looks through your eyes.

15
The writer Douglas Rushkoff (Cyberia) mentions the Droste effect in his book Children of Chaos: that typical, distant view of media-wise young people.

Douglas Rushkoff, October 9:
Mirroring or repeating contains something on a new level. You get that with the mirrors of self-parables like Beavis and Butthead in front of the TV mirroring the experience of the person watching - it's just like a Shakespearean game-in-a-game. Mirrored insight is thinking: aha!


16
The sun disappears behind the mountains, the sky turns bright red. Cheering sounds from all over Black Rock City.

17
We see the procession of monks with lanterns moving through the streets to the double row of lights that stretches through desert to the purple and green skeleton of the Man. In Center Camp, dark under the clear sky, he stands out against the fires that flare up everywhere groups of people bask in the glow.

We stand on top of the CYBERBUSS to see the crowd proceed into the desert, their silhouettes black against the piles of fire in the distance around the Man. Jim Mason from San Francisco makes our silver-painted cheeks flicker in a meter-long blue fire tongue from the rusty barrel of the Veggiematic, a monstrous flame-thrower on man-sized wheels.

I run into the playa to take pictures. The colorful tribe travels through the flickering light to the grand arena on the playa, glittering waders and soft smooth boy faces, aliens, a snorkeler and girls in pink, shivering in the desert chill, to the arena with the towering Man, surrounded by naked bodies dancing around it in an ingenious choreography.

People jump back when a human torch pops out of the dark, the heaps of hay jumps around the Man and runs around the pedestal, arms, legs, head burning and waving in the dark, while the hay swells in bright flames that rise past the Man shoot into the sky.

When the Man catches fire the neon explodes and fire shoots in all directions. The dancers put their fists in the air. People push towards the fire and the circle starts to move around the Man,
We walk in a large circle around the man
Faster
and
Closer, while the dancers flee the inner ring,
Increasingly smaller,
Hotter and hotter

The Man howls and we plunge into the scorching heat
boys run laps as fast as they can in the hellish glow of the Man
girls throw their clothes off
while everyone sings and shouts and dances to the sound of percussion everywhere.
A hippie is wearing a marquee on his head
BURN
BURN
BURN
and on the couch of the mobile living room a young couple makes love.


18
The first Man burned to forget a failed love. Larry Harvey: “If we had set fire to a wooden statue in a museum or gallery, it would have been a one-time thing. Then you repeat yourself and everyone thinks: you did it again, with that thing. But on the beach there were three times as many people around it than could have been in a gallery. Burning something together does something to you. That's why we still do it.”

At the last Burn on the beach a frightening herd of drunken pyromaniacs faced off with the police, with Harvey in between. So the event moved to the desert in Nevada, half a day's drive from San Francisco. “Now that it became difficult to get there, people had to work together, survive together. Everyone who made it automatically became a participant.”

The fire festival has grown in eleven years from a large campfire to an outrageous spectacle with ten thousand actors. According to Harvey, the party runs on "radical free expression" in addition to surviving together. It is a drama with ten thousand storylines, and even the catharsis is interactive.

Although he now finds the broken heart story somewhat embarrassing, he says in the Wired book: It is striking how many people you meet here are at a crossroads in their lives: either they are just alone again, or they are making a crisis by whether they are in love again. Nobody leaves as he arrived.

Someone said:
Burning Man is an ideal opportunity to try out a new personality.

19
At four o'clock the playa is quiet except for some scattered techno parties and the Dead Kennedys in Pedal Camp, the Blade Runner-like camp of a circus of stray kids. Sam passes a joint. I lie in a chair in a bright pink lycra dress, gold foil from Cody's kitchen with silver tape from wrist to shoulder wrapped around my arms against the chilly desert air, black body painting, silver smudges on my face and chest. Baucho is sleeping on the couch.

Someone said Jim is going to burn the ice statue with the Veggiematic, Sam says: Is that possible? I say yes and Sam takes a sip and grins.
He made it himself.
Kurt shouts… He sees Jim.
We run through the darkness, jump over tent lines, evade parts of artwork, past the luxury bus where Larry and Marian are sleeping, shouting at Pedal Camp.
JIM'S BURNING THE ICE SCULPTURE and the stony punks immediately jump up to the edge of the playa where the spiny silhouettes of the hard core stand out against the monstrous beam of fire.
Jim sits on top of the Veggiematic.

the grand Ice statue orange blue
in the sea of ​​flames
BURN THE FUCKER
shouting bright blonde kids in Carhartts
BURN THE BITCH
and pierced girls grinning.
A blond girl in a pink slip dress and someone in a rabbit suit stand mesmerized.
A huge drill in front of the Veggiematic starts turning and creaking Jim pulls and
slams
the untouched Ice Statute
kids screaming
GET THE BITCH

Bunnie scurries towards Blondie, who is laughing with a smile. They exchange a first glance, grin, stand hand in hand. He takes her in his arms, they hug, kiss, cling to each other, breathe and kiss.

Broadway eat your heart out, someone says, teeth shimmering in the glow of the maniacal fire and Blondie and Bunnie look at each other and walk
ecstatic glances over their shoulders into
the desert.

20
People are fucking in the desert.

Geezers drive their hormonal shit to the limit and just don't fall dead. Girls are grinning at it. The girls are noisy, lush and in charge. No one is going to fuck with THEM. They walk half naked without bullshit. Boys burn the whole thing down without anyone nagging. The sexes get along well in the Black Rock Desert.

21
There is no Greenpeace. There is an Environmental Disaster Camp, a nuclear power plant run by guys in cool radiation suits.
And the Authentic Meat Eaters Association.
Shots are being fired.
Big Rig Industries hands out badges:

EAT
FUCK
KILL

22
Little Burning Man: "screw up with that giant"
PISS CLEAR: rebel-zine against the official Black Rock Gazette.
Anti Burning Man Camp: FUCK BURNING MAN

23
Glen Ricci (27), a web designer from Capitol Hill in the Washington Post : It rises above the hippie idea of ​​peace, love and understanding.
That is too simple.
The point is that you realize that everyone is different, and that you find a place for all those differences. There is even room for hatred and destruction as long as you participate in the community and you follow a few simple rules. To me, that is more concrete than such an elusive concept as "peace."

24
Larry Harvey:
"Burning Man says nothing ABOUT society. IT IS a society."

25
Brad Wieners, editor of WIRED, refers in Burning Man to Hakim Bey's concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone
Bey: A Temporary Autonomous Zone is a revolt without direct confrontation with the State, a guerrilla operation covering an area (in country, time, or the imagination) and then dissolve itself again before the State can do its destructive work, to unfold somewhere else a little later. "

26
At dawn I walk through the motionless city to the edge of the playa. Public Enemy sounds from Pedal Camp.

WELCOME TO THE TERRORDOME

I walk between the rusty wheels, saws, bars, chains, gas cylinders and metallic residues to the corrugated iron roof where punks get Pedal Camp bikes apart
drinking beer and the components welded together.
The bikes are scattered on the sand like metal tramps in the pale pink morning light, some two or three storeys high, with twin or set saddles, and I find one that rides.
If you have anything from a collateral, it's really cool, says a girl with a big tattoo.
I take off my sweater and am in a purple slip dress in the pink-white morning.
The girl says whatever.
I take it off and put the sweater back on.
I drive out of Pedal Camp into the desert.
The ground is cracked into chunks that crackle under the tires. I drive into the void.
The soft sun warms my face.
After a while I step barefoot on the crackled salt bed of the playa, a prehistoric lake bottom, and I notice my feet sinking through the salty crust into a soft clay layer.
I start running, plodding through the mud, to a shimmering lake on the horizon.
For a while I run as fast as I can, pulling a wavy trail through nothing
Then I walk slower and take off my clothes and stand still in the chilly desert air, the mirrored water is just as far away only in the void silence
the rising sun on my stomach, legs and chest.

27
In Pedal Camp I put the bike back and the girl takes off the purple slip dress.

28
This year, for the first time, camera teams from CNN and NBC are taking over the playa.
The media reception at Black Rock Gazette Camp is a busy gathering with its own tribal marks: pens, aftershave, watches. CNN cameramen and journalists in polo shirts are drinking green glass absinthe with plastic press cards around their necks:

THIS PASS GIVES RIGHT TO NOTHING IN PARTICULAR

Masked rebels shoot the press with water guns. A man with a beard paints a glittering rainbow in my neckline with purple and pink while a woman named Rainbow holds up his palette and smiles.

29
The highly educated people in their twenties and thirties, marketing statistics from birth, do not trust the media for a cent. They think the press is coming to look for monkeys, looking for sensational stories on behalf of the advertisers.

31
Anti-Burning Man column in PISS CLEAR:
Burning Man is bigger than ever this year. There are cameras and press and lots of people we have never seen before. And there are farmers who only come for fun, and day-trippers, who will never understand.

32
What We Hate - A Summary
1) The Media, in general, because you can't trust them to show us our best side
2) Photographers, because they shoot our tits without asking
3) Pet-Brothers, because we said NO DOGS
4) Yahoo's, whatever that is, because they are stupid and indifferent and only want to party

33
In Black Rock City you laugh at politics. But whoever comes to the city comes to you. The whatever shruggers get excited about one thing: their own autonomy.

34
Not that it should be ideal immediately. Ideals are a waste of time.
PISS CLEAR:
No, it's not like five years ago when we were only a few hundred. And it will never be like that again.

SO FUCKING ADJUST

35
All of Black Rock City is a work of art.
Although the camp seems null and void in the immensity of the desert, the main street is a mile-long boulevard along more than two hundred theme camps - something in between architecture, installation, performance, theater, sculpture, opium kit, camping site and caravan camp.
There are no limitations in form, material or disciplines, and the entire population is an artist. There is no difference between daily life and performance.  It is a mass creation of individuals who, while inventing an ideal city, an ideal art form and an ideal community, reinvent themselves.

36
Burning Man has as many meanings as visitors. And that is no wonder, because in the end it is a product of their imagination. If, like the writer William Gibson, you believe that we dream the whole reality together, you can see in Burning Man a good example of a virtual community that becomes reality, a society with its own model of reality.
If you, like the highly-educated web twenties in Burning Man, believe that you
can re-imagine yourself, create a community out of the blue, dream a city together, generate massive involvement in the survival of that city, adapt to reality such as who is able to make contact with like-minded souls around the world can work and live where you want

Are you are free to do what you want

37
Burning Man is bankrupt
Harvey:
The police left yesterday with more than $120,000.
The permit came one day before the event’s start. 

Last-minute condition: transfer the entire cash register for use by the police and fire brigade.
The bill has not yet been specified.
The debt is now around $60,000. How legal that is will be the judge. There were enough lawyers in Black Rock City.

38
Harvey:
Everyone was wondering if we could continue to grow at this pace - passive spectators would smother creativity, restrict new rules of freedom, or everything would be disastrous.
Of course there has been no fire, aggression or vandalism. In six days, two people have been arrested in a population of 10,000 - a possible low crime record for all of Nevada.
This was the most vibrant, creative, connected Burning Man ever. Our website is red hot, money appears in the mailbox and people I have never seen spontaneously collect. Apparently everyone wants it to go on. We are not only going to pay off our debts, but build a fund for the future.
If you think about it properly, the problem is only money.

And as important as it sometimes seems, money is ultimately our least valuable resource.

39
San Francisco, a restless colony of gold diggers, the last frontier on the west coast, the most densely populated place on earth, continues to expand. Thirty years after the Summer of Love, a new generation of flower children in Black Rock City dreams of having their own domain in MARKETING HELL.

40
The art itself. You must be able to laugh about it, participate in it, you must be able to dance to it or have sex with it and it must be able to break.

41
The first day in the desert you are miserable, the second even worse: headache, nausea, dehydration. After three bone-dry days and sleepless nights, your body will get the message. You fucking adjust.

The day after the burn, the desert is a horizonless chill out zone. Black Rock City is already fading in the wind. The organization is drinking with the fire brigade in Larry's camp. They will return next year, but then as a participant.

The street punks of Pedal Camp, across the dusty main street, are under the corrugated iron roof of food and drink. They stay a week to clean the grounds. "We do it every year," says an eighteen-year-old boy. We don't care. We received food, drinks and dope from everyone before they left. Tonight we will cook a six-course dinner. What ever.

The organization's inventory mail is also full of given away bags, tins and boxes of food. We pick out vegetables for Cody who wants to bake the pizzas as a gift for the wedding reception of Reverend John, Black Rock City radio minister. Back in CYBERBUSS CAMP we all eat bagels, muffins, blue corn chips at the big table in Cody's bar.

I fall down and grin when I think of the corporate credit card in my pocket and the anarchist energy on the playa.