BURNING MAN 2000

By Howard Hallis

Can’t think of how to begin this thing. You try to think of some clever line or hook to start off your article to get people intrigued with what you experienced. Try to make it a little different. A lot of Burning Man articles I’ve read have been from the perspective of middle-aged journalists who mix a dash of Jack Kerouac narrative with a bit of history of the event, describing Larry Harvey’s inspiration for setting big effigies on fire in the paragraph after they describe their "transcendental journey into the barren salt-flats of Nevada, through clouds of dust and painted tribal bodies, ready to become one with the ritual of flame" or some shit like that. Hey, this is tried and true road trip reporting. It worked in Creative Writing class in high school. So why not use it again for the newspaper, magazine or web site that shelled out big bucks for your ticket, your rental car and your provisions?

This year no one funded my trip. The motor home, tickets, costumes, food and drinks came out of my own wallet, and it was really expensive. Tickets rose in price steadily throughout the year, peaking at around $200 the week before the event. Being an old fart, I bitched about it but ended up balking and ordering them anyway. The Burning Man people blame federal land management for the rise in the cost of tickets. They wanted more than half a million dollars for permission to set shit on fire in the barren desert this year. Those c#&*suckers should be cutting the Burning Man promoters the best deal they could for all the money the event brings Reno, Gerlach and all the surrounding communities during the week of the festival. Still, that’s government in action for you.

Random Burning Man thoughts: This is going to be the longest 3 and a quarter miles EVER! Don’t trust a guy in a thong. The JPEGs would be a good name for a band.

We left LA at 3:45 on Friday afternoon for Black Rock. Most of our friends were already there and the ones that stayed at home were giving us shit about leaving so late. This was my 9th year going to the Burning Man festival, so they can kiss my ass. I’ve had years there spending a week out on the Playa building various art installations in the scorching heat and other years where it would be dust storm after dust storm for days on end. We were going to stay Saturday and Sunday night, and we were going to have a good time. Quality over quantity, you bastards! Honestly, now that my girlfriend and I have real jobs, it was the only time we could both get away from our cubicles. Sad, but true.

I rented a 25 foot motor home which ran on regular Unleaded which is the best size to get. Big enough to sleep at least 4 people comfortably, easy to drive (like a U-Haul), and reliable even with the Firestone tires. Still, with gas prices being $2 and even higher all the way up to Nevada, each fill-up cost around $60-$70. This whole thing was gonna make us all broke by the time the weekend was over!

Our little group consisted of me, my girlfriend Sara and my best friend Erik. I got Erik’s ticket on the condition that he would drive, which he did most of the way until he wussed out and got too tired around Bishop and had me take over. By that time I was nicely stoned, and I just obeyed all the speed laws and remembered the British scientific study that claimed marijuana actually improved driving ability by making people more acutely aware of the road. We had mix tapes full of great bands: Lumirova, The Dragons, stuff from the unreleased Tom Waits CD "Alice", Johnny Cash, Nick Cave, Dead Can Dance, Billie Holiday, Os Mutantes, and a bunch of other stuff to make the journey enjoyable. It was a nice trip up. Sara slept most of the way. Erik kept talking as usual. We stopped by Wall Mart in Palmdale to get a few more provisions and I picked up a pair of Olsen Twins dolls. I’ll bet I was the only one at Burning Man with a set of Mary Kate and Ashley figures! We ruled!

When we got to Black Rock around 4 in the morning on Saturday, it had been raining all night. The Playa was a muddy mess, and they made us park in the holding area just outside of the main camp. We didn’t care. By that time we were all exhausted, and after Erik was as passed out as he was going to get, Sara and I warmed ourselves under the covers by doing what most couples do to stay warm and passed out ourselves an hour later.

Random Burning Man thoughts: Pac-Man clouds. The new drug craze of the 0’s is going to be Viagra mixed with Prozac and Black Mystery Color Mr. Squeeze.

We got up at around 10AM no worse for wear and drove into the Playa. All our friends were over at the Black Light District, which we found in about 30 minutes. Everyone that slept in a tent had a miserable night and were all muddy and wet from the rain. Good thing I paid the H.A.R.P. Project (the government’s weather control thru upper-atmosphere ion charging base in Alaska) to make sure it wouldn’t rain anymore over the weekend. It cost $52,000 for them to control the weather for 3 days and 2 nights, but it was worth it. Soon it will be much cheaper, but there’s still a few nay-sayers that whine about the bad effects weather control will have on the environment and all that crap. Makes it expensive. But the good folks at H.A.R.P. and the red-blooded American Capitalists like you and me were willing to take the environmental risk for a price. $52,000 seemed like a good deal. It never rained again while we were there, so it must have worked.

In the afternoon we sipped on Johnny Walker Blue with our friends Buck and Yuki and rode bikes around to look at this year’s sculptures and installations. The motorized couch was back, as was the coffee house, Michael Gump’s Bug Van, Bianca’s Smut Shack, Thunderdome, and the animated neon bikes. Missing in action were Wood Pussy and their pyrotechnic show, most of LA Cacophony, the bone tree, the lighthouse car, McSatans, the Zardoz head, Cirkus Redickuless, The Bindlestiff Circus, Bike Camp, The Seemen, the shark car, the giant block of ice, and the naked gun range (which wasn’t there since 1993, but I had to mention it because it was so weird to see naked people firing automatic weapons. Too bad no guns are allowed at Burning Man anymore. Actually, with all the asshole frat boys, that might be a good thing...)

There were a few nice installations/sculptures out there this year, like the 3 Headed God, the giant man made out of books and the dragon car, but 1999 blew this year away. Perhaps all the money it was costing everyone just to get up to the event this time may have affected some of the artist’s budgets. Not everyone is an internet millionaire intent on making strange structures at an alterna-hippie festival. (What’s an alterna-hippie you ask? Simple, a hippie with piercings and more Jane’s Addiction bootlegs than Grateful Dead tapes).

Random Burning Man thoughts: How long does it take to get to Mars? I’ll only go once they’ve perfected teleportation. My slate is blank. Sara stuck her finger in the pickle jar. If Nazi Skins and KKK wanted to go to Burning Man, would they allow them to set up theme camps? Would they be tolerant of intolerance?

There were more cops at Burning Man this year than a free donut night at Krispy Kreeme. Not just cops but full-fledged D.E.A., riding around on their little golf carts looking for alterna-hippies unlucky enough to be caught in mid-bong suck. Despite all this, drugs were easier to come by this year than they were for me in 1999, and the Ecstasy we did was fantastic.

We dropped for the burn and got dressed up. My costume this year was an air conditioned space helmet, laser beam gloves, a silver cape and an electronic chest piece that blinked hypnotic patterns. My girlfriend had a blue and red super hero suit and my friend Erik had his classic desert explorer outfit ready to go. We teamed up with my friend Amber (a first timer), who had spiky blue hair and a red fluffy overcoat, as well as our pals Buck and Yuki and watched them burn it all down.

The Black Rock Rangers told Erik the next day that the man burning was a disappointment. Some explosions didn’t go off as planned and they were all bummed, but I thought it was a great burn this year. The fucker wouldn’t fall down for a good 10 minutes (at least it SEEMED like 10 minutes)!

Afterward we made the trek from bonfire to bonfire trying to keep warm (it was really cold this year at night) and ended up going to some raves, some clubs, hearing some bands and meeting lots of nice folks.

Sara and I passed out at about 3:30 in the morning, warm in the motor home bed. RV’s are the only way to do Burning Man. Avoid dust storms, heat and any other environmental problem except for tornadoes, and I haven’t seen one of those yet out at Black Rock.

Random Burning Man thoughts: The L.E.D. clothing this year was amazing. Best I’ve seen yet. Some people actually sewed hundreds of lights into their fun-first sweaters. It won’t be long before people are sending DVD signals through fibre optic fabric and playing cartoons on their pants.

Sunday: Woke up at noon. Performance artist Kari French led us over to the Absinthe bar, where I traded some cool Pez dispensers for some home-made Absinthe that tasted like bug spray mixed with Robitussen. Sara and I headed back to the RV for a little intimacy after that and when we came back out to roast some chicken dogs we found out that someone had stolen Amber’s bike when she went to use the Port-A-Johns. This especially sucked, because the last thing you want to realize after you get out of one of those stinky toilets is that someone shit on you even worse than you expected. I felt bad for Amber, but worse for Sara, who refused to use the turd-chambers even after they were freshly cleaned.

You might be thinking, hey... We had an RV... Why not use the toilet in there? Well, from my experience with the motor home we got in 1998, I knew that doing #2 in our camper was OUT OF THE QUESTION. Sure enough, our shower was clogged. Can you imagine what it would have been like if... I don’t even want to think about it.

Being a veteran of Burning Man toilet situations, I knew this drill, and newbies should pay attention: 1. Wait for the waste disposal trucks to clean out your neighborhood port-a-potty and go right after they leave. 2. Bring Baby Wipes to clean the seat. 3. Bring your own toilet paper to avoid wet, soggy, urine filled paper that sometimes greets you in the stalls.

4. Bring a lighted stick of incense to kill the smell.

One more poop reference and then I’ll stop. We decided to take E again when we went out around the Playa Sunday night. Erik had to go to the bathroom really bad and described coming on to the drug as he was taking a shit:

"There I was, almost doubled over from pain and I knew that I had to go really bad. We found some Port-A-Potties and I prayed they were clean. When I got in, I found them to be in perfect condition and proceeded dropping logs. As the moonlight shined down on the stench-filled latrine, I had a moment of pure bliss... it was such an amazing feeling. Like a spiritual awakening as I sat there, and I knew I was coming on. It was the most incredible bowel movement I ever had."

As that thought settles in your head, we’ll move on...

Random Burning Man thoughts: Someone put something in the something. Lee Marvin would have loved it out here. Time is irrelevant. Some people are too fat to walk around naked.

We wandered around again in a dazed state of happy euphoria and watched the Tesla Coil guy shoot giant volts of electricity out of his body. Some guy at one of the dance clubs hit on Sara and used the line "Wanna make out?" Another guy tried to slime on her by saying he was a lawyer. I was in my air-conditioned space helmet, so I was fairly oblivious to all of this, but noted to myself afterward that as an event gets bigger, the amount of assholes who end up hearing about it and ruining it grows as well. They couldn’t ruin our evening though, which ended up being a very nice one despite their attempts at sabotage.

We left the next morning at 8AM and it only took us 10 minutes to leave. Amazing, considering it took us 8 hours to get off the playa last year. Glad they got the "Exodus" figured out this time. We had Kari French and my old friend Jennifer with us for the ride home. They agreed to help us with the awful gas prices, and we all dropped by The Peppermill Casino in Reno for our annual tradition of eating the buffet there after Burning Man. It’s great to eat a really good meal for the first time in a few days. They completely remodeled the buffet at Peppermill last December, and now it’s twice as big with fake thunderstorms and waterfalls.

The trip home was long thanks to an overturned Frito Lay truck and the holday traffic, and the roach coach we stopped at for dinner near Fresno was the most disgusting food I have ever eaten. The cheese was bad and looked like it was rancid, and all the other customers there were missing a limb or an eye. Erik, Kari and Jennifer loved it though. Sara and I vowed we would never eat roach coach food again.

But would we do Burning Man again? Probably, it’s still one of the biggest parties around. Lots of folks claim it has sold itself out and gone corporate, but those people are usually the ones that have never even been there. I’ll say this much... There were no Coca-Cola or Pepsi stands, Starbucks trailers, cigarette machines, VISA logos, expensive t-shirt vendors or any merchandise booths of any kind other than the coffee stand in center camp. No other event in the world of that size can claim they are free of any of those things anymore. Sure Burning Man isn’t perfect and may not be what it used to be when I first started going to it in 1992 and there was only 1000 there. Things have to change as they evolve. It’s the nature of the beast. I’ve had good years and bad years out at old Black Rock and I’d say in summation that this time was a lot of fun. If you’ve never been, you should try to check it out, because there still isn’t anything else like it.

To read other work by Howard Hallis, click here.