PyroTechmember
8 posts
Location: Norwich, norfolk


Posted:
What is Burning Man all about?????I know its a large meet of spinners, twirlers and other pyromaniacs, but what goes on, what sort of setup is it?------------------Embrace the power of firewith boths arms, then run screaming to the burns unit

Embrace the power of firewith boths arms, then run screaming to the burns unit


AnonymousPLATINUM Member


Posted:
Its your entire imagination mapped out in the desert, except you haven't imagined even half the stuff thats out there...

AnonymousPLATINUM Member


Posted:
Great fun, but not worth going just for the twirling. There is SO much more out there.Josh

Knagimember
397 posts
Location: Brunswick, Ohio


Posted:
wow josh do you always have something negitive to say about stuff?

We are all in the cosmic movie. That means the day you die you watch your whole life repeating for eternity. So you'd better have some good things happen in there and have a fitting climax. --Jim MorrisonIt's going to come from a direction you didn't predict at a moment of chaos which you didn't see coming. -- NYC


AnonymousPLATINUM Member


Posted:
i think that he's being positive. He's saying that you would not get everything you could from the event if you ONLY went to spin. maybe it's negativety from the reader that's shining through... what do they call that? transferrence?

sandmanmember
65 posts
Location: Brighton, England


Posted:
Sounds beautiful from the website! I imagine it as being like Glastonbury with the big music stages and commercial area lopped off, plus more emphasis on getting involved. Cool.(Not that I'm knocking Glasto, Glasto is my FAVOURITE experience in the world, every time!)Wonder if I'll ever make it out there...

AnonymousPLATINUM Member


Posted:
my point is knagi (and I guess you are refering to my previous 3 posts (that accounts for about 0.3% of my online posting record - perhaps you should have a look at the rest of my stuff). Burning Man is a hell of a lot more than a fire twirling meet. sure - there is a lot of fire twirling there, but mostly it seems to be people who arent very serious about twirling, more they just want to contribute to the vibe which IMHO *is* what its all about. I went to burning man a couple of months ago, expecting to see hundreds and hundreds of really amazing twirlers - but in reality? Most of the handful of good twirlers I saw were from HOP! (Nomad, Protie, PJ) and the rest were Pros that you could catch up with in San Fran if you wanted to (Spin Jam)...HOWEVER, Burning Man is the freest do whatever you want environment I've ever been emmersed in..and THATS what I think ppl should be expecting. A totally anything goes place, where you really have to look after yourself smileThis is just an opinion, some ppl were undoubtedly blown away by millions of amazing twirlers who happened to be camping on the otherside of the playa from me, and who I never got to see...which is entirely possible.What I will not do Knagi, is hold my tougne when I have something to say. I utilise my right to speak, just as you do.Josh

vanizeSILVER Member
Carpal \'Tunnel
3,899 posts
Location: Austin, Texas, USA


Posted:
Yes indeed, Burningman is about soooo much more than what you said about fire stuff. To say that it is such is to totally miss the point of it. I spin fire all the friggin time, but only lit up twice out there, and only when people insisted that I do so. Not because I was intimidated - quite the opposite really. Just that there was too much to see and experience out there to bother with what I was already familiar with while I was there. To call it the greatest party the planet has ever seen is to do it a great injustice. It is so much more in that it is simply what you make of it. To me it is a community where I feel completely at home - a home for my heart where I can be completely me.Below is a clip that someone wrote about the one just past (from eplaya). It is a bit long, but well worth reading for anyone who has been there. The author only spent 4 days out there. I spent 8, and thought it was far too short a time. I saw 90% of it go up and come down in that time period. I can't beleive 8 days went so fast. Actually, I can't beleive human beings can be so f**king cool. Burners are another breed unlike any you know, at least while they are there. Only some of them spin fire. Several hundred perhaps out of 25,000.After all was said and done, I have a very hard time placing my memories from Burningman in either space or time. The trip home was more like going through a vortex between dimentions than a 40 hour roadtrip from Black Rock City Nevada to Houston Texas. Don't bother looking for Black Rock City on a map - it ain't there. It only exists 1 week a year. But it is the finest city with the finest citizens you could ever possibly hope to find. And perhaps the only city that will fill your soul with hope for the future.The following is by some guy named Mark:------------------------------Too many options. Too many visions and ethereal moments and luminous images, experiences and connections and fragile sensory remnants to choose from, dust stories and art stories and friendship stories and party stories, beauty and artifice and light and stars and sensuality and dust and music and drugs and camping and travel and detachment and a general sense of otherworldliness. The kind of transcendence you can only find, apparently, by trucking your butt way, way out into the desert and camping under the scorching sun for four days with approximately 22,000 like-minded neo-pagan alt-everything open-hearted nutcases in Black Rock City, Nevada, at Burning Man 2001. It's the feeling of being outside yourself, of knowing and not knowing, a delicious falling away of everything you consider normal and acceptable and safe and replacing it with blazing heat and fierce dust storms and raging fires and dancing and glitter and endless naked skin and a concept of art and interactivity and community and collective energy you have probably never experienced in your lifetime, and may never experience again. Is that an exaggeration? Burning Man was, for me, four straight nights of going to bed at sunrise, getting roughly 3 hours of sleep per, and having everything I own completely and irrevocably covered in gritty chalk-gray playa dust. It was extraordinary. It was insane. It was strange, magical, surreal, dusty, hot, fleshy, pagan, funny, unpretentious, open, communal, dirty, simple, inspiring, funky, forward, and unbelievably beautiful. It was close to what I expected, but bigger and more dazzling and more variegated and more fun. I still haven't removed my silver fingernail and toe polish. Or the glitter. Or the mental images. And I'm sure I never will. I have seen roughly 200 topless women covered in body paint and glitter and dust, riding wildly decorated bicycles around the scorching desert playa en masse, singing and whistling and laughing and wearing hats and flowers and pasties and huge grins and calling themselves Critical Tits, and no one batted an eye. I have seen Mad Max-ish art cars that shoot colossal tongues of flame 300 feet into the ink-black night sky and you can feel the heat and hear the thunder and taste the smoke from a quarter mile away. I have seen enormous human mazes stuck randomly in the middle of the desert, interactive art installations where you touch the "strings" of a light-harp and a hidden organ plays a droning tone, 40-foot high sculptures made of wire mesh and animal bones called the Tree of Life, ethereal laser shows shooting emerald beams against the Nevada mountainside, a pair of 30-foot high glowing red dice just sitting there, surrounded by a vast nothingness, as if flung by God at the craps table of Earth. I have seen dozens of artistically mutated desert vehicles built like giant cockroaches and snails and fish and birds, butterflies and human heads and flying saucers and dystopian nightmares of mangled chainsaws and gears and steel. Semitrucks re-imagined as floating luminescent party wagons, motorized couches on wheels, bizarrely ornamented school buses covered in lights and tinsel and sculptures and messages, blaring electronica and spoken-word poetry and strange vocal music, cruising slowly across the desert at night with small crowds of dancers following, like a hallucination. I have seen men dangling in cylindrical cages being zapped by wicked electrical lightning volts from a Tesla-like coil, called Dr. Megavolt. I have seen voice-controlled spinning lights and whirling geometric shapes and enormous working see-saws one-hundred-feet long, domed hula-hoop rooms and black-light emporiums and surrealist wedding chapels made of found plastic and resin and surrealist wedding chapels made of found plastic and resin and light, a life-size wire-steel buffalo and huge laser pyramids and enormous surrealist humanoid figures with single spotlights for eyes, made of wood and cloth, facing each other and pointing long thin fingers menacingly, strangely, beautifully. I have experienced immersive aural experiences where you're encircled by dozens of small powerful speakers out in the middle of nowhere, stuck like matchsticks in the cracked desert crust, and you lie down and close your eyes and suddenly feel like the ocean waves are crashing at your feet or that you're surrounded by jungle birds or bizarre sound pulses or are being frantically orbited by roaring race cars. I have seen more exposed genitalia of both genders than at your average porn convention but with zero pretentiousness and even less paranoia or gawking or fear. I have seen naked tai chi and naked yoga and naked dancing and naked bike riding and naked meditation circles and naked painting and naked reading and naked laughing and naked walking around, hanging out, doing nothing in particular. By the second day I was wearing nothing but a sarong and dust-goggles and silver nail polish and red body glitter and SPF 30 and nothing else, and I was probably overdressed. I have seen far too many visions and experienced far too many sensory inputs and mental spankings and heartfelt funky communal connections to be able to capture them all in words -- and that, I have realized, is much of the point of Burning Man. It not only defies you to capture its essence, it doesn't care one way or the other, because it's all about being in the moment and letting go and drilling down into what you think you know and realizing you've probably been wrong all along because look over there, isn't that a giant dusty red sailboat on wheels decorated like a giant serpent carrying writhing neo-pagan dancers and a single musician playing an electric cello backed by the beat of tribal drums? Why, yes it is. Isn't that a 75-foot high golden lion being slowly pulled across the playa by 400 participants all sweating and cheering and yelling and laughing? Isn't that a two-story flower stuck in the ground, indicating the presence of a makeshift dance club? Isn't that a full-size horse skeleton half-sunk in the dust as if stranded by nomads, out in the middle of the desert, context-free? Yes. I wore a headlamp at night and you could float a small aircraft carrier on all the water I drank during the week, because after all it is the desert and it was 100 degrees during the day and dehydration is common, and I camped with 15 wonderful and welcoming people who made all the difference in the world, as wonderful and welcoming people always do. You know who you are. Like everyone else I used a bike as primary transport because that's really the only way to see everything, even though I didn't, because there was just so much, endless displays of creativity and inventiveness, everywhere you turned someone imagining something unique and colorful and anti-establishment and random, yet somehow perfect, simple and amazing and generous and rarely stupid or insulting or thuggish, things you'd never imagine yourself but which you take one look at and say yes, yes of course, that's exactly as it should be. There was no violence. There was no drunken grunting frat-boy moronism. There was no caste system or hipster scene or dress code or clique mentality. There was no road rage or fighting or guns. There was no sneering or degradation. There was no meanness. Nearly everyone decorated their tents somehow, even just a little, or put on some sort of show, or held a twisted contest or offered to paint your body or give you a pinwheel or spray you down in red beet juice or serve you a free drink or a free kiss or a free shot of vodka or a free anything, maybe just a free conversation, because at Burning Man there is no commerce, no commercialism whatsoever. Just a loose barter economy, many thousands of people co-mingling in stress-free ways you never really imagined, with a pure and completely open sort of laid-back, effortless, neighborly energy you never thought possible and by the way it's not all potheads and Deadheads and Phish-heads and nouveau hippie New Age goofballs chanting about pot and patchouli and the Mother Goddess because then it would be annoying and reductive and wrong. I'm still re-orienting. Still processing. I stayed an extra night and abused my column deadlines and lengthened my recovery time because I wanted to watch the Mausoleum burn Sunday night, because it was by far the most intensely felt structure, the most beautifully wrought artistic work on the playa, created as it was as a memorial to anyone who succumbed to suicide, and also to children who had died of disease. Just doesn't get much more intense than that. And thousands of BM campers participated in its beauty by inscribing their own highly personal messages of love and sadness and forgiveness on small blocks of wood, which could be placed anywhere in the shrine, or by way of thousands of messages written directly on the inside of its bizarrely, intricately jigsawed walls. The building's torching was the denouement, the quiet and more emotionally wrought apogee to contrast the previous night's celebratory burning of the man. And it burned hot and lucid and exquisite, like poetry. As one camper who rode up to the event with me commented when I told her it was my first time, she exclaimed to me how excited she was for me, for what I was about to see and feel and experience, and shaking her head in awe, struggling to find the right words, she finally said, "There is nothing else like this happening in our lifetime, anywhere on Earth." Which may very well be an exaggeration. But somehow I don't think it is. [This message has been edited by vanize (edited 03 October 2001).]

-v-

Wiederstand ist Zwecklos!



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