Gar! It seems like it was just yesterday that SMRL was
throwing a Giant Head of Spock into the fiery inferno that
is the Burning Man. And now it's time for the whole shit
shebang to happen again. But this time, EVEN CRAZIER!
August is the time of year when people crank their Burning Man efforts into HIGH
GEAR. It's DEAD WEEK for Burning Man. It's CRAZY. Take, for example, Spock
Mountain Research Labs: we're practicing our hog calls, desert-training the
robot dogs, and brewing up VATS and VATS of hyperwhiskey for all our friends on
the Playa! Not to mention the work that goes into disassembling our sekrit
mountain labs to take to Black Rock City for a week. Jesus, that's HARD. But
Beaujolais!
If you don't know what Burning Man is, well, HELL BOY, you're really lame and I
can't really help you out on that point. Maybe you should check out our
world-famous 1997 Burning Man coverage. Or
you could look at this here Burning Man
official page or even that crazy Saran Warp lady's ideas for
this year's BURN.
Except for OUR coverage, though, you're gonna have a bit of trouble coming up
with good writing about Burning Man on the Web. In general, the coverage falls
into three categories:
Stupid CNN shallow soft pieces, where the camera crew gets a shot of
the Man, a couple of pictures of ladies in body paint, they write out
"technopagan" on their notes a couple of times, and then skeedaddles for the
safety and AC of the blackjack table in Reno.
Pages and pages of burbling
dimestore philosophy about what Burning Man is All About from first-year
attendees who wouldn't know what Burning Man was All About if it humped them on
the leg. Blech.
Corpo dreck from the Burning Man LLC itself.
[One thing that always bugs me is that people always talk about how much great
stuff there is to SEE. This is patently untrue. Looked at from a purely
entertainment level, Burning Man is really kinda lame. Sure, a 30-foot
gold-lame tower with lasers and burning naked ladies is kinda cool to see. But
a broken-in-half dusty tower lying on the ground with a lot of smelly naked
ladies picking their nose and trying to keep it from blowing away is NOT.
There's a good reason BM has a "No Spectators" rule -- being a spectator is
boring. Seriously! Your better entertainment value is the floor show at Circus
Circus.]
[Lemme tell you, that first year at Burning Man we did was the SUCK -- mostly
because we just walked around seeing other people's stuff instead of doing our
own. Yeah, it's fun the first time in some ways, but our more recent trip, in
our persona of Spock
Mountain Research Labs, was much, much, much, a thousand times much
better.]
[Although it was a fuckload of work, too. Sometimes I wish I'd just painted my
ass green and put a feather up my nose, because that's way easier than building
a cyberbilly science lab in the middle of the fucking Black Rock Desert.
Jesus.]
[More on that later.]
Anyways, there are some exceptional pieces out there, of course. Joab Jackson's
great piece on Burning Man
is fabuloso cool. But this is one of our "link" articles, here, and the link
that I'm referring to in this article is REAL REAL good, at
the end of this thing where it says "Check it out yerself." Do that! Check it
out,
because it's real good. Participant point of view, good writing, low on
burbleage. I liked it, go crazy.
