mar 21, 1999

burning man

the fire circus

by Geoffrey Notkin

german version

photos by Baccuss, Green Zipper & Geoffrey Notkin

(surf to: http://www.burningman.com for more informations !)

August 6, 1998
My green and purple ticket for Burning Man 1998 arrives in the mail. It carries this message in large letters: "you voluntarily assume the risk of serious injury oder death by attending". And under that, in much smaller letters: You must bring enough food, water, shelter, and first aid to survive one week in a harsh desert environment...this is not a consumer event. Leave nothing behind when you leave...It is not quite as dangerous as they make it sound. But it is the desert, the real desert, and you have to be prepared. Some people forget to bring enough water, or leave their can openers or sunscreens at home, and that can be a big problem. But its the sentence near the end that is most important: this is not a consumer event, it says. I have never seen a sentence like it here in America, my home, the land of commercialism and mass-produced everything. That sentence alone is enough to tell you that you are entering another world.

September 3, 1998
Thousands of years ago, there was a lake here. Now it is a hard, dry desert floor, like a white plastic table top a hundred miles long. It is called the playa, a Spanish word that means beach. In English it means dry basin or lake bed. Over there are orange mountains. Boulders have rolled down the sides, but they have not reached the lake bed. It is flat, and hot. There are no plants. If I turn around and walk four or five miles, I will come to a small town called Gerlach. There is a telephone there. If I get in my car and drive for two hours, I will come to the highway that leads to the city of Reno, Nevada, and civilization. This is the Black Rock Desert. It will reach 104 degrees this afternoon, and tonight it will be cold enough to climb into a sleeping bag. They say there are scorpions and snakes, but I have not seen any. But the sun is dangerous enough on its own. This is a harsh place, the kind of place where you come to find silence and solitude -- to get away from people. I look again at the bright, empty mountains, and turn around slowly to look at the city that shouldn't be there. I am not alone out here in the wilderness. Behind me, getting ready for the night which is coming quickly -- starting fires, making cocktails, smoking, laughing, playing music, dressing themselves in paint and metal foil, helmets, lights, masks, and neon -- are 14,500 people like me. People who come once a year to build a home in the desert, and then burn it. This is Black Rock City.

September 17, 1998
Burning Man, she says, looking down at the floor. You went last year too, didn't you? We are standing in my kitchen, just outside of New York City, more than 2,000 miles from the tracks and tents of Burning Man. Tracks and tents, and fires and ashes, that have completely disappeared. Until next year. I am still a little sunburned. She looks through the pile of photographs on my table. I am sorting them, deciding which to use for the Burning Man web site I am constructing. She looks at one picture for a long time, a silhouette of a man standing in front of a tremendous fiery explosion. The man is holding a long stick that looks like a ramrod -- those poles used to jam cannon balls into the barrels of artillery pieces. It is a colorful but disturbing image. She looks up at me, the picture still in between her fingers, puzzled, trying to understand something that probably cannot be understood. But what is it? What is Burning Man? I think for a minute, trying to come up with something profound, or funny, or clever that would explain this unexplainable thing. While I'm waiting for inspiration, I catch myself staring at the calendar on my wall. It says, September 17, Citizenship Day. Maybe that's the answer I'm looking for. The story is well known by those who go. Larry Harvey, disgruntled San Francisco resident builds a wooden statue symbolizing the man his old girlfriend is seeing. He burns this wooden man on Baker Beach in 1986. Twenty or so people watch. Something about the event must have stayed with Harvey, because he does the same thing the following year, and the year after that. By 1990, the annual ritual has become a real event, and is banned by the police. Larry Harvey and about ninety people move their fire circus to a remote corner of the Nevada desert. Each year, there are approximately twice as many participants as the year before. There is no advertising or commercialism. Interest in Burning Man spreads by word of mouth, and on the net. Later versions will claim that the burn is intended to honor the Summer Solstice, but some part of the original burn seems rooted in revenge, and there is revenge in eyes of many of the brilliant and strange misfits who make the journey each year. They take revenge on responsibility by wearing bizarre clothing, or no clothing at all; revenge on ordinary society by building a beautiful and nearly utopian city in the middle of nowhere, and then destroying it; revenge on computers, and musical instruments, and furniture by pouring gasoline over them; and revenge on ordinary life by consuming hallucinogens and playing in the magical illuminated nighttime playground of Black Rock City.

In the blinding daylight there is little movement. We are resting, waiting for the night. I hide under my sunshade like a frail lizard. My skin burns easily, but I travel the camp each day for an hour or two taking photographs. All around me are tents, thousands of them. Tents of all kinds and colors, and parachutes, camping vans, weird structures, flags, kites and bicycles. Black Rock City is huge, about two miles across. Bring bicycles, the information packet said. You also get a Survival Guide, and one of the conditions of attending is that you read it. And pay attention, please, because you can drop dead out here. Piss Clear, Burning Man's alternative paper (yes, we have an official daily paper -- The Black Rock Gazette -- five radio stations, a communal shower, and many bars, including one that drives around under its own power) has an entertaining and slightly worrying list of The Top Ten Ways to Die at Burning Man. They also publish a Drug Guide to the Playa, which is more useful for many of us, especially after dark. It seems impossible to describe Burning Man without using lists of words: tribal, techno, communal, anarchic, serene, chaotic, hallucinatory, reassuring, challenging. Many of these words contradict each other. No single word is good enough. It's an orderly anarchic society. Anything goes, but we still have portable toilets. As the sun begins to set behind the mountain tops, you can feel the excitement wash over our camp like a solid thing. A gasoline gun is fired, and it sends a thick black mushroom cloud of smoke into the darkening sky. Someone shouts or howls, and then someone else, and soon we are allcheering and yelling like wolves. Night is coming. The change is stunning as the city comes alive. Thousands of people are out on foot or bicycle, illuminated with glowing tubes, flashing lights, neon, of every color, and all of it moving. There are at least ten sound stages in operation, sending throbbing trance and techno music in all directions. Our city is the shape of half a circle, and I ride out into the center, where it is dark. All along the horizon there are lights and there is music. The big camps are arranged along the inside of the circle, and many have their own generators. Bands are playing; a bizarre circus group is on stage; naked glittering people covered in tiny pieces of metal and paint dance in the sparkling lights. I see machines spitting fire, a group of live camels, a rave party inside a model of a flying saucer crashed in the desert. A procession walks by hauling a giant goat made of wood and straw. They set it on fire, and it explodes in a shower of sparks. It was full of fireworks. Green lasers start shooting across the sky, and new music seduces me, pulling me back in to the vibrating city. I leave my bicycle on the ground, and sit for while in a great white dome floating with trance music and a light show on the ceiling. Visitors are welcomed into every camp. We are offered water. Everyone carries water with them, even at night, as the dry desert air pulls the moisture quickly from your body.

September 5, 1998
All week the party continues. Every night is different, and every night we try to do more and see more, and get higher than the night before. I dress my bicycle with colored lights, and find new places to visit: a sound stage made of hay bales far out in the desert, covered with black light posters, and blasting a hypnotic beat into the darkness beyond; a garden of statues lit from beneath with tiny fires; a band of drummers playing on burning oil drums.

September 6, 1998
All week the man stands over us, forty feet tall, his body covered with white and purple neon lights like a lighthouse, always telling us where we are. On the last night, the man is burned, and I am at his feet playing with a furious crowd of drummers, dancers and fire eaters. It is the culmination of the event, but it is not the show. There is no single show. "No Spectators" is one of the slogans of Burning Man. Everyone is the show. Everyone who makes the journey into the wild desert becomes part of the show.

Geoffrey Notkin