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CineSource Collective Narrative
Burning Man: What Story Should Be Told? The end of August is when the Bay Area media and arts community divides into three: those bereft because their buddies all left for Burning Man, the art/lifestyle festival held annually in the Nevada desert, those who wouldn’t go if you paid them, and the majority – those going to Burning Man!
We at CineSource, in the first category, would be totally jealous of our friends Rob Nilsson and Laurent Le Gall, in the third, except that they’re going to shoot a feature and that is one tough gig. In addition to the extreme heat and dust, how do you properly portray Burning Man’s experiment in organized anarchy?
That’s what confronted Dana Harrison, an ex-BM organizer and ex-corporate banker turned artist housing and opera empresario, when she joined with composer Mark Nichols and librettist Erik Davis three years ago. “Do we tell the story of how much fun it is, or how difficult, or its internal conflicts, or its possible meaning to a the wider world?” wondered Harrison, also a close personal friend, also going to BM, her thirteenth – lucky her!
In the end, “How to Survive the Apocalypse,” the opera, deftly dovetails all four themes in a striking collection of songs and stories, the central drama hinging between those wanting to keep BM small and edgy and those wanting to open it up to the world. I saw its impressive preview last year and the full spectacle is going up in October, at Teatro ZinZanni, on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, October 5 - 7 and 12 - 14. See A Burning Opera – but soon, it’s selling out.
A bunch of burning movies have been made, even though some “burners” prefer not to have their frolics filmed. Professionals must get official permission and anyone shooting anything must get personal permission from those whose light they’ve captured. Indeed, one of the few rules on the “playa,” as burners fondly call their desolate stretch of Nevada desert, is “Ask first.”
One of the best films is Laurent Le Gall’s documentary "Burning Man: Voyage in Utopia.” It tells two tales: the festival’s history, which started with a small man burn on a San Francisco beach 23 years ago by Marin sculptor David Best, who is interviewed extensively and built many of BM’s most beautiful temples, and Laurent’s. A garrulous French immigrant, he was surprised to find out about BM – “Why were they hiding this,” he asks, in his self-reflective doc – and even more so when he got to Black Rock City, another name for the festival, which becomes the third biggest town in Nevada for a week.
That Laurent is now filming his second BM feature, with Rob Nilsson, is something CS can claim a small part in. After we covered his film “Voyage" in our Aug 08 article, “Hot Docs,” he attended CineSource’s annual November party, where he met Rob Nilsson, an old friend of CS, who occasionally writes for, or is covered by, the mag. Since Rob is the uncontested indie master, it was a match made in heaven, not only for Laurent, who wanted to move from doc to narrative, but for his preferred subject, BM – one vast improvisation.
Nilsson’s film journey, also detailed in Aug08 CS, “ Independent Master,” went from winning Cannes with a traditional narrative, “Northern Lights,” in 1979, to developing a sophisticated system for making largely improvised features, a craft he teaches at his film workshops in Berkeley, see Direct Action Workshops or 510 527-7217.
Now 69, but fit as a fiddle, he’s had over forty years experience working with collectives and alternative films, where the balance between “letting’er rip” and stepping in, like typical film director, is the difference between indulgent garbage and jazz-like, free-blowing brilliance. We don’t know what angle they’ll take – “We’ll tell you when we get back,” Laurent retorted – but tune in to the October CS to find out.
In his new film “Taking Woodstock,” Ang Lee, who has tackled many extreme realities, from being a gay cowboy in Utah to undercover sex work in WWII, decided to observe the oversized event from the sidelines. This is understandable, since watching others have extreme fun can be annoying, if you don't know why, and art about the hippie experience has been dogged by camp, romantic panegyrics or dystopian nightmares. Some reviewers take Ang to task for dodging the full monty of mud, acid, and music, but others, like the East Bay Express’s Kelly Vance, praise “Taking Woodstock” highly. But have things changed from Woodstock to Western Nevada or is there nothing new under the sun, no matter how boiling?
“Radical self-reliance and radical self-expression,” is what characterize BM, according to Will Roger, a BM organizer as well as CineSource West Oakland neighbor, who split for the desert around seven weeks ago to get it all going. (Will kindly comped me a ticket when I finally went for the first time three years ago.) While Woodstock’s self-reliance meant making it happen, with out money or anyone getting killed, and the environmental pressure was the rain, at BM you have to bring your own shelter, food, water – a stupendous 1.5 gallons to drink daily – and the environment spits out vicious dust storms as well as blistering heat.
BM also has good live music, with appearances by the Mermen, Albino and other regular, wild-enough, bands, and it is know for its trance sound, with well-known rave-DJs sometimes flying in from London (literally, they have an airstrip, often with over 100 planes and Will himself is a pilot). BM's principle art, however, is sculpture. Last year, the New York Times finally recognized it as the West Coast’s best sculpture garden, with a front page color photo and article. Indeed, the mile-wide central playa-plaza had dozens of lovely multi-ton pieces, from Dan Dos Mann’s oversized praying people to a nine-story I-beamed-building, called “Babylon,” and various temples, included the two-story center piece of recycled filigrees and dangly bits, eventually covered with confessional notes and pictures of loved ones.
Another obvious BM theme is the performance and lifestyle art, which highlights humanity’s gallop into an uncertain tech, gender and relationship future. This can include dressing up or living naked, doing theater, dance, or swinging your fist, as long as it stops short of your neighbor’s nose. Unless, of course, they’re S&Mers, of which there are plenty at BM, and you ask first. The latter express themselves, rather spectacularly, at the Thunderdome, beating each other with foam bats while hanging from bungies – some on hooks into their flesh!
A lot of BM has to be seen to be believed, as I can attest. I lived among burners for years in West Oakland but preferred camping by cool sierra streams; and why art only about fire (I'm a watercolorist); or what about Burning Woman? When I finally attended, three years ago, I found that fire is not a negligible metaphor for human evolution and that women do emerge, rather empowered, and that the adverse environment is a powerful statement, in and of itself. When you’re caught on the playa in a pea-soup dust storm, that could choke you if you didn’t have your number one piece of equipment – a painter’s mask or respirator, you are highly likely to conclude: “Damn, this desert could kill me!”
While dust storms hit you physically, it is the fire theme that pulls Burning Man together, symbolically. At first, the pyromania seemed largely about Buddhist impermanence but the implications kept coming. The sculpture of the man, often over 100 feet high, is incinerated in a wild party atmosphere on Saturday night but the central temple is torched, in quiet meditative way, on Sunday night. Evidently, we’ll re-invent religion even when ostentatiously free and even demon worshipping. Moreover, in addition to the objects being burnt, there’s the liquid gasoline.
Perhaps this is why the New York Times was so slow to recognize BM: New Yorkers often don’t drive, work on cars or know that the West was won by eight cylinders not six shooters. Celebrating the internal combustion engine might seem strange when we are trying to flee fossil fuels as fast as we can and, of course, BM is well-represented with photo voltaics, water recyclers and other green ideas, enthusiasts and industry reps – all of whom drove up there. But, as Marcel Duchamp pointed out, when he hung a urinal in a New York gallery in 1917, different contexts help us make sense of things.
A radical new perspective is what I found on my first stroll across the playa, with its friendly and festively dressed/undressed people, large sculptures and many “Art Cars” – all the more spectacular, as well as comfortable, by night. Riding around on an art car one night, standing on its second story, listening to a kid from Peoria (literally, his brother sent him a ticket) tell me, “This was the best day of my life,” and surveying the vast expanse of Black Rock City, speckled with a thousand flames, neon lights and video screens, I had an epiphany about the evolution of fire.
Some Art Cars are funky little VWs covered with geegaws, a la Harrod Blank’s collection (son of Berkeley filmmaker, Les Blank). Others are eighteen wheelers tricked out like pirate ships or silver sphinxes, rigged with sound systems and wet bars, and carrying a conspicuous elite, often ruled by women who like to strut around, sometimes naked, playing mind games but also making the whole thing run, “a clean ride." Indeed, that was the explanation Mistress M of Santa Monica gave me, as she booted me off, right after my fire vision, which I am glad I didn't tell her about.
BM is radically egalitarian, as well as self-reliant and self-expressive, but only on the public playa. Inside art cars, as well as compounds and trailers, it’s utterly private and elitist, like any hipster scene. This is an odd, considering the anarchic cri de coeur, alas inevitable, given the universal “Man’s Home is his Castle” rule and the tendency, among folks to follow leaders or rock stars. In any event, someone must step up and help us control the elements as well as our lesser selves and brethren.
A daring fire master, Prometheus, must have been how we harnessed fire some million years ago – a full nine hundred thousand years before grammatical language – and why it is so imbedded biologically – we can stare at it for hours (the first TV)? Only at Burning Man can you easily observe fire’s evolution from cook fires to car culture and, of late, the video pixels firing in the increasingly frequent and large screens burners are bringing up.
Speaking of evolution, Darwin’s theory is the theme of this year’s BM, honoring the 200th year of his birth and 150th of the “Origin of the Species through Natural Selection.” But burners focus not into the survival of the fittest expounded in that book, as much as the communication, cooperation and sex of Darwin’s second, lesser known, theory: sexual selection. This is not because they were taught sexual selection’s radical take – indeed it’s uncommon even in scientific circles, and there are lots of scientists at BM, including a contingent that comes annually from Antarctica (speaking of scientific evolution, this year BM has cell phone and wireless service). Rather, burners practice sexual selection simply because that is how life evolved and functional anarchy inevitably brings us back to the basic tao of life.
Another basic life force is gift giving, which emerges at Black Rock City since since there's no money use allowed inside, except at the central café. BM gift culture ranges from folks instantly offering a helping hand or plate of food to setting up full nightclubs, roller skating rinks or iced frappuccino stands in the middle of the steaming desert – totally free.
There's also a the sexual giving, with BJs much in vogue, as well as pole dancing as women take off politically correctness as well as clothes and indulge inevitable fantasies, as well as trade for services barter system. When some strong men are needed to stake down the tent in gale-force winds or build shade structures or haul water, women are archetypally inspired to reciprocate.
OK, so BM is a fantastic event everyone should have the honor of enjoying at least once, if not ten times, in a lifetime. After about ten trips to Black Rock, it seems, all but the most hardcore find they have learned enough, but BM is not dying out. Au contraire, it's flourishing, over 50,000 participants, up from 5,000 in the 90s, with burners flocking from across the globe, including many from New York City.
BM is also expanding its scope, exporting art and ideas, notably its massive public sculpture, through its Black Rock Foundation, a non-profit run in part by Crimson Rose, another CS friend from West Oakland, who is doing a fantastic job apportioning an annual purse that now tops ten million. Not only do they fund projects on the playa but public art all over the States and now overseas (where small burns are emerging).
But, aside from pure art of the sculptures, performances and music, and the obvious Woodstock message – have fun, sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and enlightenment – what are the deeper stories we can communicate or learn through the Burning Man experience?
We have enumerated a few here – nature bats last, gender relations are evolving rapidly, freedom breeds generosity and religion. Hopefully, the Le Gall-Nilsson team will uncover a few more, which we'll report in Oct CS, and you can view an excellent operatic summary if you go see, “How to Survive the Apocalypse,” at the Teatro ZinZanni in October.
Either way, we have to harness the fire of narrative, in order to enjoy BM, not just for decisive moment but eternity of culture. After all, from the invention of fire on, which was used to illuminate caves for paintings or clan gatherings for storytelling, that’s what humans do.