En Transit / Unoff. Burning Man List Network Admin posted a photo:

Good for formatting text on Flickr.

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

A useful graphic.

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Slightly adobed to compensate for washout of colors, with mixed success. The redness of the second building from the left has been exaggerated (unintentionally), but the buildings on the end look as I remember them.

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Photo of permit inside the door of the Scottish Rite Cathedral, Chicago.

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Would you say this looks a little like a demolition?

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

... of the Scottish Cathedral near the site of the old "Bughouse Square", by the Newberry Library.



See: Scottish Rite Cathedral

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

From the White Dove of the Desert mission church near Tucson, Arizona. I seem to recall that that this piece was something called a "monstrance", whose significance might be explained here. Disclaimer: Not being a Christian, myself, I bring something less than total expertise to my choice of references on this subject.



Note the use of Tohono O’Odham (Papago) basketwork in the decoration of the item, and in the vessel to the right. This was a recurring them in the small museum found within this mission, the pre-Christian artistic tradition of the Native people finding expression in the ceremonial objects.



See: the introductory page for my Southwestern Photo gallery.

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

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Picture is my Tribe icon, which I assembled on the South Park Studios site. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ... I know ... prepackaged software ...







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Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Are they kidding? This is what we've been waiting for?

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

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Relates to a site review on The Abyss (my Stumbleupon blog). Menu of posts on said blog can be found on this page.





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Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Photomanipulation of an image I took of this structure during the summer of 2008, at a time when a vaguely worded demolition notice had been posted, and I feared the worst. The good news, at present, is that scaffolding is up, and what is going on appears to be repair work.



See: this discussion on Chicago Photography

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

One of the first photos I ever posted online, this appears on a photographic walking tour through the Gold Coast neighborhood on Chicago's Near North Side I set up and with which I have experienced some productive frustration. Being much too poor to afford my own dark room, I found myself at the mercy of Osco and ended up with, in most cases, truly horrible machine done developing jobs that forced me to explore the possibilities of surrealism in photo manipulation.



This photo, taken on Astor just north of Division, was one of the exceptions, appearing on the screen very much like the scene appeared before my eyes, at least on my screen. It serves as the graphic for the Unofficial, Alternative Burning Man Chicago group on Google.













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Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Used in the code fragment for my homegroup.

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

For one of my homerings, the one my flickr profile belongs to.

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

This is the same building seen in Say Goodbye, viewed from a different angle. You may have seen a photoshopped version of this on my homepage. As this is intended for documentary purposes, as unhappy as I am with the developing job I got out of Osco, I'm presenting this image to you unaltered by Adobe in any way, aside from it being resized.



What's interesting about this photo is that it's a picture of an illegal demolition. I had noticed this building for years, in part because of the unbelievable neglect of its owner. A piece of the frieze on the north (left) wing of the building had come loose during the mid 1990s, and some years later, still hung there. One morning, the dangling ornamentation, clearly a danger to people on the ground, was gone, having either been removed or having fallen off during the night, but a few years into the 21st century, still had not been replaced, leaving the underside of the cornice to the tender mercy of the elements in Chicago. Then one day, much to the surprise of many, demolition began on this vintage structure in a historic neighborhood. As somebody elsewhere called it, "demolition by neglect", or in this case, "demolition rationalised by neglect"; what does one expect to see happen when one lets the freeze thaw cycle do its work on damaged masonry?



When I first snapped and posted this unphotoshopped version of this picture to my Geocities page, I offered a little snark about the absence of a publicly visible demolition permit and hinted at a suspicion that money had changed hands, and what do you know? A few days later, a stop work order was slapped on the front of the site. It seems that no permit had been granted for demolition; the developer had applied for permission to do some repairs on the very building he was now destroying, and the city didn't want to seem amused by this. "Seemed" is the key word in this case, as Burton Natarus, the alderman for the area at the time, was well known for his anti-architectural preservation views, but this made his office look bad. Being bad is just fine in Chicago, but looking bad sometimes isn't, and so the work stoppage began, and somebody got to go in for a hearing. For now, the building was saved, sort of.



Only sort of, as there is no such thing as a lasting victory when dealing with developers in any place as casually corrupt as Chicago. About a week later, one could hear loud banging coming from inside the work site, the one where under court order nobody was supposed to be, as if somebody were taking a sledgehammer to a support and wonder of wonders, after a few days of late night pounding, one of the sides of the building collapsed, resulting in the developer's previously blocked demolition suddenly being green lighted. Even at that, supposedly he was only supposed to demolish those portions of the building that had truly become unsound. How much could that be?







Next Image

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

If you wish you can take a look at my current photoshopped version of this image, which is due for replacement; I am not at all happy with it, but my best suggestion as of today is to head straight back to Brazen Disregard and that discussion of the demolition.

Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

We approach the structure on Dearborn from the South, coming up from Shiller. Remember that supposedly, the developer is only rehabilitating and restoring this structure, not demolishing it. He has already been subjected to a stop work order, one which as has been mentioned, he had his men ignore, but be that as it may, this is what the permit says he is supposed to be doing.



Let's see what he does, instead.











Next Image



First Image

 

 

Why would I want to write about an event and a community that has come to disappoint me so greatly? Because no matter what Burning Man has become today and seems likely to become in the near future, its past remains, and some of that was worth remembering. The "finite and easily exhaustible" material of which I spoke in my previous post are the project ideas from before 2008, camp ideas from before 2004 and Larry Harvey's writings before today.

The writings, I'll subject to philosophical criticism, speculating on how the choices that Harvey et al. made helped create the Burning Man of today - but not doing so very often. My primary interest will be in taking some of the project ideas, and building on them. Do what you know - I have some knowledge of chemistry, which is needed in Solid State work, but I'm not a chemist, so I'll shy away from projects heavily dependent on that subject. I am a Mathematician with a Physics background who branched into Electrical Engineering, so projects involving Electronics are ones in which I'll take great interest. My main hobbies are cooking - which I've pursued since I was a small child - photography and theatre, so you're probably see some references to performance, which might sometimes draw on the theme camp ideas, some two dimensional art done by photographic printing, and some relatively easy recipes which can be done outside, requiring a minimum of clean up. Maybe. No promises.

There are some things, however, that I can guarantee will be missing. No fire - it's not safe in my area, and the city government of Chicago seems to take the subject of fire somewhat personally, anyway, for some reason. No high priced project ideas - none of that business of buying $2000 worth of lumber to build something that will be incinerated at the end of the week. No meat - the recipes will be vegetarian ones. Nothing appealing to "prurient interests". No announcements of upcoming events - even if I end up holding those, I will only announce them offline, but in fact, probably won't announce them, at all.

The kind of event I'd like to see is a gathering of some friends who invite their friends, who can do the same, everybody bringing something on which they've enjoyed working; one that never gets too big. If it grows to more than a few hundred people, one splits it in two, with each half going its own way, so it never grows so large that it needs to be anything more than an informal gathering. One would run out of room at any location we're likely to reach otherwise, anyway; there are no great wildernesses for hundred of miles as one goes away from Chicago, just small forests and parks. How much promotion does a small private party need?

For now, but not indefinitely I hope, much of this will have to stay on the theoretical level, proposals, not prototypes, because my budget is very limited, and I have no place to display work, anyway. If you see an idea you like, and would like to embellish on it further, please feel free, as long as you show me the same courtesy I show to those from whom I borrow, giving me credit for that I did and linking back to the page on which it was done. The point of this isn't to get somebody else's ideas or my ideas to go viral, but to learn from some creative work that was done in the past, and get back to the idea of culture being something that ought to be a cumulative thing, even in an ephermal city.

 

Reference: this post

 

 

 

 

 

Every blog, one expects, will eventually close, usually because of the authors get tired of them, so when I tell you that this blog will eventually close, I'm not telling you much. What is different about this blog, as I start it, is that I've begun with the intention of closing it, and some vague sense of when I'm going to do so. Not today, probably not even in the next two years, but almost certainly not as much as ten years from now, because the basic material I'm working with is finite and easily exhaustible.

Burning Man has evolved over the years into something that I am no longer willing to recommend to anybody, especially not to those who would enjoy it, because one might very well need a kind of sickness to find pleasure in what the Burning Man community has become, and I don't believe that one should help reinforce such things. Somebody that I once listed as one of my friends, tried to rationalise the frequently and notoriously unwarranted hostility to be found on ePlaya (Burning Man's official Bulletin Board) in this post, writing

 

 

"The thing that you don't see is, well not the love, but the affection that us long timers have for each other. And we can come down hard on the newbs, not always justly, and we also can give them a lot of rope to hang themselves first.



Think of it as a bunch of baby wolves really, pouncing, playing, biting, rolling, growling--and at teh end of the day sleeping in a nice big warm pile of wolf pups."

 

 

 

She was promptly called on this by a user calling himself "spectabillis", who responded with these remarks, writing

 

 

"oh come on, its only like that to the small wolf pack. to everyone else its agressively hostile, openly plain and simple."

 

 

to which somebody, in her next post in the thread, responded

 

 

 

"Maybe. It can certainly look that way. For the most part, I belive that if you just hang around for a few nasty comments, then you "pass the initiation" and get to play with the rest of us. I don't have any specific evidence at hand to prove this. But I do thry and say it with some frequency, in the hope that people will sit it out for the uncomfortable day."

 

 

 

Oh, my, yes, who would want that pesky self-respect thing to get in the way of having a good time? Maybe "Spectabillis" who, to his credit, wrote this as his response - profanity softened by me, not him:

 

 

 

"and just who in the f**k says its worth the effort!?



its obvious the quality is low - if measured by the total number of posts its almost non-existent. people have to want to be part of it for your initiation ritual to work fishy, there has to be some compelling reason its worth it. its not, and that makes it rather pathetic.



you're mistaking not being able to take it with not wanting to be around loosers and a**holes."

 

 

 

Who is this whiny malcontent "Spectabillis", who obviously is acting out of malice toward Burning Man and must have been out to get Bmorg from Day One, you ask? One of the former moderators of ePlaya, itself, as we see in this note of congratulation, posted May 25, 2005. Think of what the biases of such a party would likely be, and see what he says, anyway. Do you find youself still wanting to be part of a community like that? One in which you very self-respect will be seen as a vice that you need to get over? Does this begin to sound a little cultish?

This is not just some board on which Burning Man is discussed. This is, as I said, the official board for the event, and one on which a number of the members of the small group that run Burning Man are active and enthusiastic regulars. What we are seeing put on display are the attitudes of the Burning Man organization. A basic truth of life - while a good management may be failed by those who work with them, a bad one can't help but succeed in giving its character to everything it touches, in time. The Burning Man LLC might be small, and the event it manages huge, slowing the progression of this progress, but in time the inevitable will come.

Over the years, as I've checked in from time to time, hoping that the community would turn itself around, what I've seen, instead, is what had been a widespread annoyance become an almost universal one, as the community I was watching turned sociopathic. Some would seek any excuse to attack, while others settled for enabling those who did the damage, but almost never would I see actions that showed any sign of empathy, of the action of conscience, of the willingness to engage in a little self-restraint. Instead, I would read or hear of tales of artists finding that others had set their work on fire, of people being beaten up by DPW workers who wanted some small and inconsequential piece of property like a flag - dragging one burner down the Esplanade behind their truck when he refused to let go of it, or of this delightful anecdote from ePlaya, slightly cleaned up for quotation on this blog

 

 

 

"No, but you basically had to have sex in on the ground in front of them to get into the "Carn'Evil", except that when you completed everything you were told that it wasn't open yet, you had to put your name on a list, and come back later. When you came back later, it still wasn't opened. When you came back even later, the whole works was shut down.

* ship *



A female friend of ours performed [specifics about sexual acts deleted], in front of a bunch of men and a handful of (appreciative) couples, trying to get in. While she appeared to enjoy the acts initially, she -still- couldn't get into the back although her mate got on the list as easily as I did. After awhile she said she wasn't going to sacrifice her Burn so that a theme camp could gawk at and grope her. (Having to crawl under the craps table and grope somebody's [private body part], after doing the above, was the last straw.)



Later that night we were talking about it at the Playa-Go-Round and an eavesdropper claimed to have snipped the zipties and slipped into the Carn'Evil, stating that there was nothing at all back there but a maze of tarps...no decorations or anything except a zombie mask he claimed to have stolen.

*snip *

None of the members of my camp who completed the tasks returned to participate in the back because it was never open. At one point we went by to see if it was open and all we heard were a bunch of people in the darkened tents yelling at each other, clearly audible on the esplanade."

 

 

 

Sound like fun? Does it seem sensible to empty one's bank account and travel cross country, merely to spend one's time on an opportunity to be degraded in exchange for the chance to be included in something that turned out to be a hoax? Those who ask one to give up one's self-respect for the sake of "friendship", most assuredly aren't going to give back that which one has so foolishly tossed aside.

Where does this take us? In one post to Tribe, which seems to have since been deleted, one would read of somebody's hike down a darkened Esplanade in 2008, the year of the American Dream, like the author above, being greeted by nothing but the sound of screaming matches coming from inside the tents - this in the very heart of the event! Real friendships begin with a respect out of each, not just for the other but for himself as well, a respect that demands reciprocation if it is not to be withdrawn, and one can only fool oneself for so long. When the friendships are gone, so is the community, as is the purpose of what is, after all, a recreational event.

Burning Man, the commercial enterprise, would seem to be alive and well, for the moment, but I would maintain that Burning Man, the cultural movement, if not dead, is certainly on life support, waiting for the plug to be pulled.

 

continued

 

 

 

 

 

At this point, I hold no illusions about the likelihood of ever being allowed a fair chance at entering the full time job market. Near the beginning of my search, I'd already heard the incredible assertion that a 3.7 average (on a 4.0 scale) from a top 20 school, a master's in mathematics with the coursework for a PhD complete (ABD status, with most of the thesis written), and a bachelor's in Physics was not enough to qualify me for an entry level job in Chicago. "We expect at least a 3.9". "And for you to not notice that despite what the demographics look like in every graduate and professional school you've ever encountered, we've managed to assemble an all-Anglo-Saxon staff that's a whole lot less ambiguous in its caucasianness than you, you adorable little halfbreed, and not one of whose members is disabled, unless you count that functional illiteracy you might have picked up on when you tutored one of our vice presidents and a few of our execs last week", would be the next line one might expect at that point. I went back to school and branched out into Electrical Engineering - only to find that with the enthusiastic encouragement of our ex-frat boy C average president, that rug had been yanked out from under me and much of the profession by outsourcing.



Right now, I'm rereading my old books to refresh knowledge that has started to fade from disuse, and am wondering why I bother to do so, given the fact that all I get from Human Resources is a good stonewalling - they don't even bother to send out form rejection letters any more. Aside from the almost infinite amusement I get from encountering willfully clueless neocons who seriously believe that as somebody with cerebral palsy, I'm thrown to the head of the line by affirmative action - you'd think an under 30% employment rate among the disabled would lay that myth to rest - I've had the absolute delight of encountering the supposed advocates for the disabled, who have swallowed the Bush line that training is the cure for all ills. The word seems to be that what we, as handicapped individuals, need to do is get off the drugs and get an education. "Ummm ... you do know that I've been to graduate school, right? In multiple fields? That in fact I was the grader for one of the graduate level courses myself? And that I've actually written computer programs before? So what exactly is a ten week 'training program' that will teach me what  'CPU' means going to do for me, that the earlier preparation hasn't?"



It's like telling an unemployed college graduate to finish Junior High School, but that's how it is - discrimination issues will continue to be "addressed" with retraining. If you wonder how that's supposed to get you past some bratty little bubble gum snapping 19 year old secretary who shreds your resume before your very eyes or a stubborn refusal on management's part to hire the long term unemployed - even those who were rendered long term unemployed by a previous management fad of stubbornly refusing to hire anybody with less than 2-5 years of "relevant work experience" which was followed by the amazing discovery that there was now a shortage of junior professionals - but still no willingness to budge on the "we don't hire the long term unemployed" thing - well, then, that's just unamerican! You're supposed to be a good sport and agree that other people's decisions are your responsibility, and be properly apologetic for having dared to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.



Absolutely absurd, but it's reality, and so I have no choice but to build it into my plans. The question is, how do I do that?











Poverty, despite the impression that the movies may leave one with, is a socially isolating experience, being disabled makes it more so, and a climate that rules out spending much time outdoors during most of the year really doesn't help. Most hobbies are priced far out of your range, most events are held in out of the way locations you can't afford to travel to, and no matter how tidy and well behaved you may be, as people notice the thrift store ensemble that is your wardrobe, you will encounter social attitudes that will be something out of another century. Consider yourself fortunate if anybody deigns to speak to you, and truly blessed if they manage to keep the condescension subtle.



What do you do? The meeting part, I'm still working on, and I am feeling more than a little thwarted by my circumstances.

... "At this point", as I wrote my post, Tribe (where the first few posts on this blog were originally hosted) went down for a few days, so this post did not get finished. I'll pick it up, later ...

If you've read my Burning Man pages, you've seen a camp proposal  I made back in 2002, a links page from that era that I badly need to update, and heard my side of a few flamewars that some of the mouthier and better connected trolls had been spreading some disinformation about starting in 2001, and then time sort of seems to stop. It's 2008, hasn't anything happened since?



Yes and no. In terms of family, a lot has happened. In 2001, my oldest nephew was only a few months old. He's a little more articulate, now, and has been followed by a small flood of cousins, which is one reason why you see time stopping on some of those pages. As I looked at the large amount of backbiting that was taking place over nonissues like whether or not holding a meeting one block from Cabrini Green late at night was a good idea and listened to the little ones utter their first words, I was reminded that when I heard the crazies screaming over somebody's refusal to pack gas cans inside his RV or denial that aliens had made crop circles, that I had better places to be. I also had very young relatives who I did not want to see grow up remembering their Uncle Joseph's eternally foul mood, and so I walked out, to the immediate benefit of my spirits and in the long run, as they became older, of  that of my nieces and nephews as well.



Typical of the experiences on the much mythologized old ePlaya that drove off some of us came when a handful of burners made a valiant, but futile attempt to get things going on the silent Midwestern regional board by raising a number of topics of discussion, hoping that others would then reply. The old management and regulars responded by attacking them. "Look, practically every post there is from just a few people"; as if that weren't a halfway decent description of ePlaya in general at the time.  "Could that be because they're the only ones willing to take the time to contribute, and that maybe they ought to be thanked for that?" No, "they're obviously driving everybody else off" ... all of those people who had never taken the time to post previously, right? Some of us who were among the targets of choice that day wondered out loud why these people were acting this way, until one of us asked the rest two simple, leading questions.

1. What had we seen a few of the in-kids consuming in bulk, when we encountered them in person? Really, so compulsively that they literally did haul out their stash and smoke it out on a real street, right as a few patrol cars were approaching, putting all present at risk for arrest and prison time?
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

   ... and ...

   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. What were the long term effects of heavy marijuana use?
   
   
   
   
   
              pennmedicine.org/encyclopedia/em_DisplayArticle.aspx?gcid=000952&ptid=1
   
   
   
   
   
   "These side effects include dry mouth, red eyes, impaired perception and motor skills, decreased short-term memory, paranoia, mood swings, and hallucinations."

Elsewhere, one could find cognitive impairment and other problems mentioned as well. It explained a lot. We cleared out, as did others a short while later, leaving the old regulars close to being alone. The old party line had been that said place would have been just flooding over with fascinating discussions if it weren't for those evil "trolls" - meaning anybody who the regulars were ganging up on - and now came their chance to prove it.



What resulted, in the short run, was as delightfully exciting as a watered down bowl of farina. The regulars had nothing to say. After what seemed like an eternity, the inevitable occured. With nobody else around to hate, the old regulars broke the tedium by turning on each other. The illusion they had hoped to create was now shattered in the eyes of all but the most willfully gullible lurkers, which was for the best. The regulars had been right when they suggested that we were part of the problem, not the solution, but not for the reasons they gave. We had served as a buffer between naturally abrasive individuals, allowing them to temporarily coexist peacefully enough for them to band together, and contributed content that helped make the forum interesting enough to read, giving an audience to those who would otherwise be far less visible.



Sometimes what one needs to do is nothing. One can't keep a community like the one we found ourselves in from going into decline, but one can slow the process - and that can be a bad thing, a very bad thing when that which was good in it is already almost entirely lost. There is such a thing as creative destruction; by standing back and not interfering as the old community self-destructs, one hastens the time when a new community will have a chance to arise. Having lurked there, I won't deny that the new ePlaya has its flaws, but it is a dramatic improvement over the old, which has been safely and (for some) conveniently obscured from public view, albeit with a few of its more memorable threads preserved on my hard drive, just in case they're needed.



I'm hoping they won't be,  having far more pleasurable ideas of how to use my time than documenting the community's more absurd moments, but if certain members of the community wish to continue working the rumor mill, sooner or later I might have to respond.

There were local difficulties as well, both online and off, and still are to this day. The Burning Man LLC entered the Chicago area with no understanding of or respect for the locals and their culture, and that is one failure that is almost guaranteed to backfire eventually, no matter where one goes. The previous regional contact's stream of consciousness rambles were a bit of a problem for the local image of Burning Man, but his successor, if anything, has been worse. Elsewhere, some of us mention the World Nude Bike Ride. Picture being in a street cafe along Rush street, located on one of those narrow little sidewalks a city has to have, where it has been growing upward and its local population density has hit Manhattan like levels. Picture having tried to explain the concept of Burning Man to a very skeptical local population, as one looks down the street, and suddenly sees a group of burners riding up the street, hooting and hollering and as naked as the day they were born, one of them in particular of them visibly enjoying the ride a little too much, much more so than can be explained by lake breezes, the summer air in Chicago tending to be as still as it is. Picture one or more of those clever souls riding past, yelling in a manner that cries out "look at me, look at me", as he pumps out the love in abundance.



What are you going to say on behalf of the event at that point that is likely to be taken seriously, especially when one is hardly seeing any support from those on whose behalf one speaks? Strangely enough, however the San Franciscans may feel about these culinary matters, very few Chicagoans of either sex really like the idea of somebody spraying his special sauce onto their risottos, as rich and creamy as it may well be, and when Mr.Foamy is all of three feet away from the plate - and raised well above the low wall seperating the cafe from the street - that becomes a real issue.



So do the local mores. Chicago may not be part of the Bible belt; going out in beach like attire on a hot summer day offends very few locals - but it's not the Bay Area, either. Nudity in a private setting may be accepted with a wink and a smile, but out in public where it is literally being thrown in the faces of those who've had no reason to expect it, it is not considered socially acceptable. As the Chicago police came up to the parade from behind - there's just no way to avoid a double entendre on that one, is there - those present applauded, and I could only sit silently, having no argument to offer against their expression of scorn for the riders. In their own home, the locals found that their sensibilities had been shown no respect.













This outcome could have been avoided.



Back during the late 1990s, when I was first introduced to Burning Man by seeing a pair of films made by Joe Winston at Around the Coyote, the locals were extremely receptive to the idea of Burning. It was something utterly unlike anything that they had ever experienced, the police presence in Chicago being as heavy handed as it has been, and open spaces as scarce. The spontaneity and the sense of community seemed to appeal to a lot of people, and the joyful eccentricity found an appreciative audience, but about a decade later, people aren't as receptive to the name as they formerly were, which under the circumstances, is not surprising. Picture the most recent appointee to the role of local coordinator, yet another recent transplant who had no knowledge of the area selected without anybody in Chicago being consuted, responding to the news that the last event had gravely offended the locals by saying that maybe they needed to be offended. What would one then expect the response of the locals to be? What should it be? If you read my previous post, you've probably guessed what it has been, leaving us with a "Chicago community" almost devoid of actual Chicagoans, consisting almost entirely of recent arrivals from the coasts and visitors from other cities.



Which, in however incomplete a fashion, brings us to today.

 

I started to post to a thread on a group that is described as being "a listserv for everyone and anyone who wants to participate in building the infrastructure of Chicago's burning community and to assist with various creative burner endeavors and projects", entitled "who is not headed to the burn?", inviting people to come and help plan for the joint Chicago - Detroit Decompression.

Yes, you read that correctly. Take a look at the map. Chicago and Detroit aren't really very close to each other, and the decompression was going to be held in Grand Junction, Michigan - which may sound like a short hop from Grant Park to a Californian, but poses a real problem for some of us who live here.

I started to craft a response explaining why I would not attend a planning meeting for a decompression that would, once again, be held in a place to which I couldn't possibly get ....

---

On Aug 23, 10:54 am, Devin Breen wrote:



Hey!

 

> Who's not going to the burn and will be

> attending decomp and wants to do

> DPW-related awesomeness?

I'm not going to the burn, but I can think of at least a few reasons to not sign up for the DPW awesomeness, one of them being that as a person who can't drive, I'd have no way of getting to the decompression. I'm thinking that what would be really awesome would be if some day, a Chicago event actually took place in Chicago - not Kentucky, not Wisconsin, not Wyoming or Patagonia or wherever else the 2009 decompression will happen, but actually in Chicago. Just to be totally different.



You guys do know that a lot of actual Chicagoans - and if you live in Michigan, you do not qualify, despite what a few people over on Yahoogroups seem to think - live in neighborhoods where a parking space costs as much as a small apartment, meaning that driving is not something that poor people get to do and middle class people have to think twice about, especially given the street parking situation? How many people do you know of who have so much money to toss around, that they'll get the equivalent of a second small home just to avoid taking the bus?



Is Burning just for well-to-do hipsters of the correct political orientation, or should it be a little bit more inclusive than that?

---

but I thought better of it. In part because I knew to expect a good trolling if I did post, the "local" Burning Man community having long been anything but inclusive or really local, for that matter, and let's face it - isolating and excluding the disabled (a mild case of cerebral palsy keeps me out of the driver's seat) is a grand American tradition, as I well should know. Which is what is happening when every single "local" event that gets held that is anything more than "let's go get some beer" gets held in another state. Wondering if the good folks in North Beach who appointed the local Chicago coordinator, as usual without asking any Chicagoans what they thought about the matter, know that Chicago is in Illinois, not Michigan?

Sigh. Oh, well. If you were surprised to notice that, after over more years have passed since I wrote about circumstances in the local community, a city several times the size of San Francisco has to pool its resources with another city much larger than the homebase of Burning Man just to scrape together a decompression, this is one of the reasons why that would be the case.

Originally posted to my blog at Tribe.net on August 25, 2008

This year's theme at Burning Man is "The American Dream", and on brief inspection, I'm finding that it seems to less than completely popular. Not that I'm surprised. Consider these passages out of a post entitled "[expletitive deleted] this theme" (profanity softened by me, not by the original author), penned on Thursday, November 1, 2007 at 11:01 am by a one post author calling himself "TheGreenMan", who doesn't seem to note the internal contradiction in his complaint. One the one hand, he writes

"I celebrate moments when I am able to meet with conservatives and bush-supporters on a human level. Sometimes you have to avoid overtly political discussions to bond in this way. It is even worthy to try to build upon shared values which bridge the philosophies of Americans living in Red and Blue states ..."

but then goes on to write

"So I think I understand what you guys were aspiring to with this year's theme. But I think it is wholly misguided.



In fact, this bit from your theme page is deeply patronizing:

'Leave ideology at home; forget the blue states and the red; let parties, factions and the issues that divide us fall away.'

I will forget nothing.



In fact, I think it is criminal to forget dark path that our government has lead us down. ..."

So, in other words, when he "avoids overtly political discussions" to "build upon shared values" with those red state people, that's "necessary", but when the LLC suggests that burners do the exact same thing at this year's Burning Man, that's "criminal"? Let's take a look at the passage that our anonymous author quotes from, out of context:

"In 2008, leave narrow and exclusive ideologies at home; forget the blue states and the red; let parties, factions and divisive issues fall away, and carefully consider your immediate experience. What has America achieved that you admire? What has it done or failed to do that fills you with dismay? What is laudable? What is ludicrous? Put blame aside, let humor thrive, and dare to contemplate a larger question: What can America, this stumbling, roused, half-conscious giant, still contribute to the world?"

Which is to say, the Burning Man LLC has most certainly not, as the author implies, told people to abandon their consciences or political convictions. They've merely asked the participants to make this event something other than a week long screaming match. One could, with grossly exaggerated cynicism, offer this as an example of Bmorg's focus on the bottom line, because one might have real difficulty picturing people paying $250 for a week of rage and hatred and coming back for more the next year, but let's - as unfashionable as this is - be reasonable. Ever seen opposing bands of protesters meet, out in the street, where everybody is well fed, well rested, well hydrated, and meeting in a relatively mild climate? Gets kind of intense, doesn't it? Now picture moving that clash to a location where the police would not come close to having the numbers needed to contain a riot, toss the already maddened rioters out in the sun, let them get really dehydrated, toss some narcotics and a whole lot of booze to the mix, and what do you get? A real mess, a terrible time, and the unanswered question of what it was that the misery was supposed to accomplish, aside from filling the med tent with the injured and getting people to despise those they disagreed with even more than they did before.



Think about the complaint heard in many cities about the permits given for political demonstrations. The protesters, some say, have confined to narrow areas away from the normal flow of traffic, allowed to speak freely only where they are unlikely to be heard. Yet this clash would occur, not a few miles from the Democratic convention in Chicago, say, but two hours out into the desert from Reno. In terms of visibility, how would that be a step upward? More and more unpleasantness, with less consciousness raising to serve as its justification, at an event which the participants aren't going to in order to be preached at, anyway - and preached at by those of only one political persuasion, if our friend has anything to say about it, it would seem:

"One of the best pieces of art I've seen at burning man was in, I think, 2002. When I was biking out on the playa, I saw in the distance a circle of ten American flags.



I was horrified and afraid, but I biked towards the installation with my heart in my throat. As an activist who had been sacrificing my livelihood and sanity to try to stop an unjust war, I was horrified. Was this what my beloved city had come to? Had the plague of flag-waving nationalism infected Burning Man, the refuge of my soul?"

Well ... what if it had? What if some neoconservative had set up a rah-rah "[vulgarity removed] France, G-d bless America and let's implement the draft so that we can REALLY step up the surge and invade everybody else" installation? As a Centrist, I might feel a little uncomfortable with some of what he had to say and I'm assuming that our friend would feel a lot uncomfortable, but wasn't Burning Man supposed to be radically inclusive? Just how radically inclusive are we being if the rules change depending on the political leanings of those who are called on to respect them - because take due note, as we soon see, our friend isn't objecting to overtly political art. Just overtly political art with whose politics he disagrees. He writes

"I flew into the midst of flew flags on my wheels and the vision changed. These were not ordinary American flags, they were the Corporate Flags that are sold by Adbusters. In place of white stars, in the blue field they carried corporate logos: the Playboy Bunny, the Nike Swoosh, ABCNBCCBS, Microsoft Windows, Pepsi, Coke, et cetera. Standing in the center of the flags was George W. Bush holding the earth in his hands, and on it were spray-painted the words "For Sale."



I cried. This art opened up bottled feelings which I felt afraid to share or express, and thus even to feel."

Not that I disagree with that view of the Bush administration, at least as far as its economic policies go - I'm not onboard with the "Second Gulf War was set up by the Oil Companies" conspiracy theory that I've heard floating around and I think that you can guess what I think of the Israel bashing that has become oh so fashionable - but listen to what he has just said and not just the spin with which he follows it.

"It gave me great relief to be able to see the truth there in front of me, without censorship."

Excuse me, but "without censorship" does not mean "my side speaks loudly and yours learns to be quiet, because we're right and you need to accept that"; it means that there is an even rhetorical playing field, and that all sides have a real chance to be heard. His concern was that at one installation, at one single installation at an event at which Liberalism has not exactly been driven underground, that a single voice of dissent with the prevailing political ideology might have be heard as more than a faint whisper. He likes seeing overly political art at Burning Man just fine, as long as it is all politics of a single flavor - his own - and then has the nerve to pose as a champion of free speech as he expresses his relief at the discovery that dissent with the local orthodoxy had remained muffled.



Again, picture being stuck out in the middle of a desert, where your survival is dependent on the concern of your fellow travellers, being preached at about this cause or that, with all of the preaching coming from one side of the poltical fence - which is what our friend seems to want to see Burning Man become this year. Doesn't that begin to sound a little cultish? Should we really get that upset with the LLC for not nudging Burning Man further in that direction?





He then tries to backpedal, as if to shield the idea he has just advanced from criticism by later pretending that he had never raised it.

"When I look at the graphic of the Burning Man's head together with the swish of the American flag, I cannot help but feel ill.



I love America. I am an American."

So much so that he feels ill at the sight of its flag.

"But the theme of this year's event needs to change.



If you want, have a camp dedicated to the theme. I think it could be constructive."

Though having an installation dedicated to it would apparently be intolerable.

"But you have no right to put this unwelcome umbrella over the whole event. It is oppressive. It is counter to the spirit of Burning Man. It is not constructive, it is divisive. It is ugly.



If Burning Man's organizers want to hold true to the ideals of America, it will be democratic about this. If (as seems to be the case from reading eplaya) a majority of concerned burners don't want this theme, then it should be changed. If the organizers are dismissive of the popular will, then they are being autocratic, and the American Dream theme they are forcing on us will become most ironic."

Except that what he's describing isn't democracy, it's socialism of a sort extreme enough, that I suspect that most socialists would back away from it. Note that the organizers don't force anybody to adopt the theme for their own work, they merely offer a suggestion, which participants are free to embrace or ignore. Some of these suggestions may be brilliant, or stupid, or somewhere in between, but they're just that - suggestions - and if those suggestions have to be withdrawn in response to a majority vote, then the members of the LLC itself will have been denied their freedom of speech, and the free use of their own property (namely, their website, where the theme is announced).

"I used to read how Mr. Larry would evade questions about who the Man is or what, specifically the event was about. Yes, there was a lot of talk about community, but there also seemed to be a general open-mindedness that didn't want to force Burning Man to be one thing. Why are you going back on this now?"

Which they did, of course, by not making Burning Man 2008 into an exclusively radically liberal political rally? Let's take a look at this passage from the theme announcement:

"Today, Americans appear to live amid the tarnished squalor of a second Gilded Age. By nearly every measure, America has become a more unequal society. A mere one percent of the population now controls a third of the nation's wealth. Education, health care and home ownership – these now escape the reach of those who thought they were the middle class. Forty years of heedless mass-consumption have turned dreams into delusions. America's awash in debt. Embroiled in a wayward war, its citizens are told to shop.



Many feel that the United States is now adrift. Its allies, once so numerous, begin to fall away and chart an independent course. Its citizens, more tellingly, have lost their faith in progress. Polls indicate they now believe their children can't expect a better future. They distrust the institutions of government, of finance, and the corrupting power of large corporations. And yet, the native traits of any culture are deep-rooted. Freedom, opportunity, inventiveness, the power to transform oneself: these values and a love of self-expression still endure.



Perhaps it's time Americans began to face themselves. Maybe it's also time that they began to listen to other countries of the world."

Not exactly the Republican party platform, now is it? What we're left with is the LLC saying, "let's talk instead of screaming" and somebody, hiding behind the mask of anonymity, complaining that this call for more openness in the dialogue is "divisive" - and night is day, and water is dry, and 2 and 2 make 7. One should at least have a little difficulty believing what one is reading.

"Please change the theme."

I'll admit that I've had some reservations about the theme as well, which I wrote about elsewhere, back in January, with some limits on my passion set by the fact that I won't be attending Burning Man this year, but soon saw possibilities in it that I had overlooked the night before, as did Stagger, over on ePlaya on Sunday November 18, 2007 at 1:36 am

"Yes, American Institutions have done horrible things....



... so turn that into art...



Day 1: Dress up as Native Americans... walk out onto the playa.. have white men slaughter you... then wrap a rope around the dead and call it a reservation. Open a casino.



Day 2: Dress up as slaves. walk out on the playa.. have white men whip you. Try to convince people that this is not a BDSM camp. Play jazz music.



Day 3: Dress up as Japanes American citizens. .. walk out on the playa. Have white men round you up and put you in a concentration camp. Explain to Thunderdoom that you confiscated their doom to house enemies of the state.



Day 4: Dress up as Hippies. walk out on the playa.. have white men shoot at you. Let 4 of you lay there and put a sign that says Kent State. See if anyone knows what the hell Kent State is...



Day 5: Dress up as soldiers.. walk out on the playa.. Attack and take the man... then retreat... then attack and take the man again... then retreat... attack and take the man again... then retreat... each time leave more bodies behind. Call it Vietnam. Don't bother with the defoliant.. you won't need it there.



Day 6: Dress up as Congress man... walk out on the Playa.. Tell everyone you meet that you are covered for life for medical expenses. Tell them they are f***ed.



Day 7: Dress up as Burners... walk out on the Playa... Enjoy the freaking burn... Pick up some moop. Smile at a stranger. Go home.



Sounds like fun to me.."

Me too. Sort of funny, even if it does play up the caucasian bashing a little more than I'd like - and Stagger makes a good point. There are over 200 years of history, very rich for satire, for the participants to play around with, if we don't get lost in our tunnel vision. I had become too focused on the visual aspects of a very narrowly defined subculture in America - the so-called mainstream - leaving me wondering out loud just how much artistic play one could get out of Formica and Plywood and that whole 1950s suburban look (gag, vomit, puke) - as if no other subculture had ever existed in the United States. Sometimes one does wonder if others know and accept that others have and have a right to do so - America is also the Cajuns and Creoles, the Ojibwa and the Hopi, the Gullah Islanders and so many others, and for once, Bmorg seems to know and respect this fact.

"Anyone embarking on this path will encounter hundreds of fellow participants – many of whom come to Black Rock City from around the world. Indeed, in order to discover the flag of any particular county amid this welter of imagery, it will be necessary to inspect the flags of many other nations. Each of these may be imagined as a dream no less radiant or precious than the rest. Each country is a source of culture and identity; yet each may also be regarded as a glimmering illusion: a sovereign artifact, an arbitrary puzzle piece, an isolated fragment on a map."

Which really gives the lie to TheGreenMan's implication that the 2008 theme is about flag waving jingoist right wing extremism, which historically preaches contempt for other cultures. It comes across as an invitation to learn more about those cultures, and to approach them with respect and open mindedness, which would be a nice change of pace, judging from a few of the discussions I've been lurking in over the last few years. Most shockingly, it invites us to consider the possibility that America is not supposed to be an exclusively Anglo-Saxon affair, with the rest of us invited to fake it as well as we can in the name of the assimilationist "melting pot", but maybe someplace a little more meaningfully diverse.



Not inclusive enough? They've never been more inclusive than they were in that statement and, I might add, a lot more inclusive than was at least one of their critics. It's an interesting theme, more so than I initially gave it credit for being, and a topic that I think I'll return to, in a bit for a few reasons, not the least of which is that our good friend TheGreenMan slipped an assumption into the discussion which really should not be left unchallenged.

 

 

If you entered my sites and groups from a webring via En Transit, its homepage at Fizwig.com or the associated Tribe.net profile, you should see a navbar for your ring below. If you don’t, that’s probably because either Webring.com has merged some more rings or because you entered my sites somewhere else; in either case, just go to the ring return page for this site.

[No ring memberships, yet. More later, when there is enough content present to justify a ring application]

 

A few comments from a user who had been considering installing Disqus on one of his blogs, until recently - and I think you'll find that I speak for many who stay quiet because they don't want to be bothered with the usual flamewars that arise when fanboys hear what they don't want to hear ...



1. I notice that the link to my homepage has vanished from my Disqus profile. Is this a change in Disqus policy, or just a temporary malfunction? If we're looking at the former, and Disqus isn't going to be providing commenters with the chance to get that homepage link, then I would consider this to be a deal breaker.



As a commenter, I am not going to agree to link to a service that isn't willing to link back to me, nor am I going to spend my time writing comments for a blog configured to force me to use such a service. As a blogger, I'm not going to ask my visitors to make use of such a service, themselves. I appreciate the time and trouble that goes into crafting a well thought out response, some of which (on some blogs) have almost become posts in their own right, and see the link I give back to somebody who has positively contributed to the content on my blog as being the very least that I should even think of offering in return.





2. I notice that the buttons have failed to work in some places in our account managers, including, in an almost amusing way, the button on the form for contacting support. Trying to report a problem, and finding oneself stopped by yet another problem, is not an experience that is going to build much confidence in the service.





So far, so bad. I think the staff is slowly destroying what was once an excellent service offering intriguing possibilities, under what I take to be the theory that any attempt to combat spam is, by definition, good, whether it works or not, and whether or not the collateral damage it causes could have been reasonably avoided. I think we've all seen spammers continue to post urls where homepage links have been absent; this isn't going to slow them down one bit. But the honest site owner who wants to build up a web presence by doing exactly what he's supposed to be doing - by posting content that others want to see - stands to get really hurt by this nonsense, and I see little evidence that Disqus cares about that problem at all.

They fly into O'Hare instead of Midway at midweek, and we're supposed to believe that they're intelligent?

Addis clearly needs to be put away. The criminal code hands us two obvious charges:



The premature burning of the man - reckless endangerment. What if somebody had been in the base of the man when it was set on fire?



The rifle incident - assault (a man in the clerk's position could be put in reasonable fear of imminent bodily harm)



I'm sure that there are more, but given that he has threatened to put bullets in the backs of the heads of the students at that school, I would think that one has the basis for a psychiatric commitment: "poses a threat to himself or others". Of course, the local authorities can always wait until he actually shoots up a school, and then try to explain to the national media why they ignored the danger signs.



Yes, that would do wonderful things for San Francisco's reputation.

"Hopefully it won’t be neccesary. Its fairly ridiculous that Paul would be charged with felony arson for burning “property” that was intended to be burnt anyway, albeit a few days later."



When those who came to see that fire and had helped bankroll it through their ticket purchases would know to be there; igniting it early cheated them out of the enjoyment of their purchase. Another point that you seem to be missing is that the Man does not exist in isolation. There were booths at the pedestal and, I am told, damage to the exhibits there. Those exhibits has not been intended for the fire. By acting as he did, Addis deprived the exhibitors of the opportunity to move their items out of harm's way before the (very premature) burn.



Worst of all, though, with Addis' unsanctioned burning of that which did not belong to him, is the issue of what happens if somebody is inside the Man when some yahoo decides to reschedule the Burn in that way. One should know not to be inside the Man on the night of the burn, but for some time now, the base of the Man has been a structure intended for entry by visitors, who would have no reason to expect that it might become a flaming death trap so many days before the scheduled burn. Addis ran the risk of roasting one or more of his fellow burners alive, and then snickered about it on tape.



To call him a "selfish asshole" would be to praise him too highly. He's a sociopath and needs to be put where society will be kept safe from him, albeit not for as long as one might sensibly wish.

To read this, one would think that nobody had ever tried to start up an alternative Burning Man forum until recently.



I took a look at the site and saw what I expected - just a small handful of posts, no real energy. Chicken and egg - nobody's posting, so the place feels dead, so nobody feels like posting.

I don't know ... the waffle looks interesting, I can't deny that, BUT ... am I the only one who sees an unhappy irony in the fact that the most iconic image to come out of a supposedly noncommercial event is a $400,000 corporate sponsored timber burn that I'm now hearing was used in a TV commercial?



Doesn't this kind of thing tend to move those who aren't in a position to hook up to that kind of cash more back in the direction of becoming spectators? If the residents of a community gather around while a commercial is being shot, does the fact that they gathered transform the shooting into folk art, or does it just remain a spectacle that distracts the man on the street without really engaging him?

"wow. this is fucking HIGH-LARIOUS. high comedy from the inestimable mike tattoo. your impression, whether you know it as an impression or not, of a sanctimonious douchenozzle is top ‘o the pops. bravo."





Oh, yes, I've heard from our Mike Bolger before and he can be a very *ahem* interesting person. However, on this one he has you nailed dead to rights.





"but, you know, even if you make it, art is not yours. the only way to control your “art” is to keep it in your basement and never show it to anyone, ever. once you make it in any way public, it belongs to the world, to reinterpret, to malign, to praise, and to destroy. "





Really. To destroy? Try walking into a gallery when security is on duty and acting on that belief and see what happens. This is bizarre, maybe even beyond satire.

How much of that were we expected to keep a straight face through?



OK, let's cut straight to the point. Let's say that a large bonfire was being set up for an event. Let's say that somebody torched it in advance. This would be punished as vandalism, at the very least, even though the wood was going to be burned eventually, because in triggering an early fire, the person burning it would deny the owner of the wood the full use and enjoyment of his own property. If we were to accept Addis' argument, we would be left with the absurdity of having to legalize the act of sneaking into a restaurant kitchen and gulping food down on the sly, because what one ate would have been eaten and digested eventually, even were one to have not acted.



Yes, it would have been, but not by the intruder. The same concept applies here - a fire that is set off while one is away, and has no reason to expect that one shouldn't be away, is a fire that one doesn't get to enjoy, just as the meal our hypothetical restaurant thief gulped down is a meal that those who owned the food or those who would have purchased it wouldn't get to eat. Property, in being ephermal, does not cease to be property.



As for the comments about the war, this is the most transparent attempt to change the subject imaginable. While I'm no fan of BMORG, on this I'd have to go along with them - throw the book at this creep. He has acted lawlessly and with something so far from remorse as to render forgiveness a bad joke.

That's just wrong. Redoing a Beatles movie when two of them aren't around to give input, and one of the...