Monday, 29 September 2008

  • Burning Man and the Last Few Years




    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?


                 http://pennhealth.com/ency/article/000952.htm


      "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.




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