The Giraffe!
I went to Burning Man! It was a 32 hour drive out there. Very long, but not as long as you might think. Expectation has a lot to do with whether or not a long road trip is soul crushing. I personally like driving, especially when I have someone neat to do it with, and Ian is a great travel companion. He's cheerful, agreeable, will listen to a lot of my music, and rolls the window down when he farts. I will preface this post with a warning that it contains full nudity, but probably not the amount or type that you're hoping for.
When asked to describe Burning Man in a sentence, I would say "It's like camping on Mars with a bunch half naked people constantly on psychedelic drugs."
I was sincerely nervous about taking pictures of people or even asking to take pictures of people after reading a thread on the BM website about people being pissed off at tourists and frat boys who go to Burning Man to take pictures of boobs. I also didn't get as many photos as I had hoped because of this, and the overwhelming sand storms and heat which both greatly hindered leaving the tent and the use of my camera in general.
This ball tree is one of the only exciting things in Utah on I-80. It was on the salt flats. The salt flats are exactly what you'd think they would be, flat expanses of land covered in salt. There were salt mines along this stretch of I-80 that had mounds of salt taller than buildings. I'm pretty sure my blood pressure went up just from looking at them. Also, on the white salty ground, people stop and use little rocks to write things like "Jesus <3 you" or "L <3 M" or outlines of of gargantuan phalluses. These go on for miles and miles.
This was the road into Gerlach, the closest "city" to Burning Man's Black Rock City.
I didn't get nearly enough pictures of the art bikes once into camp. They were everywhere all the time.
This line took about 3 hours to get through. Many people wanted to get to Burning Man at the same time we did.
A sand storm also wanted to get to burning man the same time we did. This was the visibility of the car 6 inches in front of us.
Three feet?
It was a shitty night in which we drove around for hours trying to find a place to camp. The place you camp is very important because you spend a week hearing these people, be it techno disco or just whether or not they're gassy. Also, camp neighbors are important when Ian runs out of duct tape, I burn myself with hot oil and need neosporin, or just want someone to chat with. Ian chose, then we spent a few hours trying to put up our shade structure in the middle of the above sand storm. It was frustrating and dirtying and we ended up giving up and just putting up the tent next to his car and passing out. I washed the next morning and thought I would never be that dirty again. (pause for laughter)
Here are some of the neighbors we met throughout the week:
Josh is a base jumper who owns his own collection agency. Fun!
This was one of my absolute favorite people that I met. He's a doctor. He and one of his friends lent us various things and provided great company.
There were a lot of people at Burning Man who were "talkers" as in you meet them and they immediately tell you their personal philosophy of how to reach enlightenment and the truth about sacred geometry or what have you, and never have time to ask how you are, what you think, or act like normal, fun human beings. He was a sun beam of not-crazy.
Also, his boyfriend had the same shoe size as me and let me try all of his boots on . Also, fatastic batman undies.
One of the views from camp.
This adjacent camp was inhabited primarily with Facebook employees. They had a large tepee that played house music and had spinny lights.
This gentlemen is a film editor and had spent the last six months backpacking around India and then Europe. He's covered in green glitter and holding a peanut butter sandwich filled with Psilocybin mushrooms, which he proceeded to eat shortly after this picture was taken.
This is our neighbor Mirra, of Chris and Mirra, painted like an alien. She gave me hard boiled eggs and borrowed my lotion.
The second day we went out and met up with Ian's friends Jazz and Camo. They had a lovely geodesic dome made and brought by their camp-mate Eddie. It was covered in beautiful fabric, drop cloths on the ground and big fuzzy pillows to lounge about on. Terrible jealousy.
I was not jealous of the fact that they camped across from the White Trash Superstar camp. Although the white trash lemonade lady had some knockers on her, and the stripper pole was better than TV.
There are a lot more children at Burning Man than I imagined there would be. This was Kid's Camp taking a ride on a jumbo bunny car.
This was at Center Camp. Burning Man is a gifting society, but evidently selling coffee and bags of ice are the exceptions to that rule. I wouldn't feel as complainy about it if a 12 ounce chai made by people who yell at you wasn't 4 dollars.
Center camp hippie corral with contact dancing. Note the pillow made of pooh bears.
I decided my Burning Man theme would be pajamas. Just because they're comfy and they're what I would wear if I were on vacation at my own house. I also decided it was time to wear shorts for the first time in 7 years. What a feeling! Being's believin'!
I will title these two photos "The proud owner of pasty white thighs, 1 and 2."
This is the inside of our monkey hut. Everything looked blue for a week. It functioned quite well as a wind/sand block, but unfortunately also baked us like flan. Next time, breathable fabric instead of tarp? Anyway, Ian did well with it. I wouldn't have survived without the monkey hut. I almost didn't survive with the monkey hut.
One of the first and only other camps that I spent a great deal of time in was the Darwin Fish Tank camp. They had a water misting system set up so you could sit on plastic furniture and be moistened for hours. This is Kevin the bartender sporting the camp logo in his chest hair.
They had an art area and I made a puff paint tank top to look like I was contributing something to their experience other than just sucking up their moisture.
Amos the smiling Israeli was obsessed with painting penises. He had just finished his mandatory time in the Israeli army and is now working with an installation artist/sculptor. I hope the installation art involves penises, because that would obviously bring him joy.
This is one of Amos's creations, a jar of pickled penises. Modeled by Mindy, a girl I met while buying my 4 dollar chai.
Mindy with Mendhi. Amos is in the background painting more dicks.
This is Cameron, a deep sea diver who is ready for true love. Isn't that what we all want? We talked quite a bit. He was crabby at first, but once the drinking truly commenced, he was quite pleasant company.
People!
Onto the art!
I got up early one morning and biked around the playa taking pictures of sculptures and various art installations. It was really nice to be out while the sun wasn't trying to kill me.
Hi Mom!
At night, this gnome shot alternately pink and green flames about 50 feet in the air.
Giant dendrite!
Giant dedrite on fire at night!
Pretty mirror wall and matching silver laden Englishman.
I'm vi-king of the world! Hardy har har!
I really liked this piece. I think it lit on fire at night too. Pretty much everything was lit on fire at night from what I could tell.
Pajamas!
My first up close view of the Man.
The temple sits further out on the playa. The carved wood panels are really beautiful.
People write thoughts, wishes, prayers on the temple. They burn with it at the end of Burning Man on Sunday.
This guy walked around all morning. He was the first stranger I actually took a picture of. Working up the courage to ask him took years off of my life. I think he's beautiful, and this is probably my favorite picture from the entire trip.
This picture shows the distance between the Temple and the Man. It was quite a trek between things. I suppose when it's a city of 50,000 people mixed with a bunch of things you plan to set on fire you'd have to leave a lot of room.
I wish I had found this sliding hill of astro-turf after I gave up on even trying to remain clean for any period of time. It looked like a lot of fun.
Daylight art car!
This tree/nest was really neat. It had a platform on top that played forest and bird sounds when people stood on it.
Inner squirrel art. Hi Dad!
A view of the desert out to the trash fence from the nest.
I loved this thing. Hippies were using it as a couch.
Hippies cuddling in the lap of a collosal bunny.
A collosal zen bunny.
Purdy.
This was probably my favorite large sculpture.
So pretty.
Another nest!
I'm slightly glad that I never saw this in motion. It's scary enough in one spot. I imagine it was driven by a drunken pirate.
random
The couple who built this got married in it on Thursday. I imagine that when artists love each other something deeply wonderful or deeply destructive is born. Or maybe both. I wonder if they burned it down afterwards?
The art cars were fantastic!
MOAR ART CARS
Piggy eyelashes.
I loved this kitty.
A triple decker bus on crack.
Space car! I think it's built onto a mororized wheelchair frame?
Two VW vans welded together?
So there's really not much else to be said about the art cars. They are to be looked at and ridden on, and you only have one option at the time, so you should look. While you're looking I'll tell you a story.
One night at this fantastical journey called Burning Man, I ingested something that disagreed with me, to say the least. It is legal in the United States, was taken in the spirit of good fun and with the assurance of my loving boyfriend that he wasn't aware of it ever having any negative effects. Au contraire!
One of the results of this choice was explosive vomiting. I have a sensitive stomach and once I start I just keep going. Much to my dismay, I spent 5 hours hurling uncontrollably. Ian, the facilitator of the ingestion had to tend to me, my deep distress, and my 2 hefty bags full of vomit.
While the fun seemed like it would never end, it had to when at 6 in the morning I was still unable sit up on my own or to suck on an ice cube without immediate dry heaves. I sent Ian to make good use of the exhorbitant ticket prices and fetch me an ambulance.
I was rolled to the medical tent where I was then pumped full of 3 liters of saline and two shots of anti-emetic to cease-and-desist the puke fest, then 4 more hours of laying in a cot, hooked up to bags of fluid while Ian sat next to me holding my hand and feeling guilty.
At one point in the evening, they brought in a raving young naked man who was tripping on LSD and completely unable to modulate the level of his voice. Imagine "LOUD NOISES!" from Anchorman.
He sat wrapped in a blanket screaming the same sets of words over and over again, as though each phrase was an individual word and he could only think of one word at a time to respond to any question or explain how he was feeling.
"I DIED AT BURNING MAN. I DIED AT BURNING MAN? I ATE GLOWSTICK AND DIED AT BURNING MAN. SHELTER! SAFETY! WATERWATERWATERWATER! STICK IT IN MY FACE. PUT IT IN MY MOUTH. WATERWATERWATERWATER. FUCK! THIS IS SO EMBARASSING! I ATE GLOWSTICK AND DIED AT BURNING MAN. I'M THE FIRST PERSON TO DIE AT BURNING MAN." He didn't really sound as distressed about these things, but as if he was excited to be sharing. It was unbelievably hilarious.
We got out of the medical tent after dawn on Thursday morning and Ian shuffled me back to camp like a little old lady, where I promptly fell asleep in the car with the A/C on, listening to Haley Bonar. I didn't feel even semi-human again until Friday, but was glad to eat goldfish, drape myself in a wet towel and read. Yay for survival!
It was really hard for me to go out in the daytime heat, so I read three entire books while we were there, Great Expectations, The Tao of Pooh, and The Slaughterhouse Five. The Slaughterhouse Five was my favorite. Kurt Vonnegut is a magnificent story teller and makes me feel so deeply for every person in his stories, even the bad guys. I highly suggest that book to anyone who hasn't read it. The Tao of Pooh helped me calm down a bit and made me happier, so I'm glad I brought it. Great Expectations wasn't as good as the movie with Gwenyth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke and all of the Francesco Clemente paintings.
Back to the pictures. This Pooh wasn't very Tao.
This is the Cubetron, a grid of ping pong ball size lights that change color in patterns and in response to music. This year they evidently built a place for all of the tripping hippies to lay underneath and watch, because they were doing it anyway before.
The Thunderdome! I never actually got to see a battle here, but this is where they harness people at the end of bungee cords and then throw them at each other and see who breaks a rib. Rob did this with a lady when he was last at Burning Man and then promptly had sex with her. Hopefully in the privacy of his own trailer. I never got to see a match but it was pretty cool to look at anyway.
This was a theme/party camp that had absolutely no party going on when we got inside, but you know how much I love Christmas lights without Christmas.
Stick your square peg into the square hole and receive words of wisdom from the Ichthytude camp.
I never went inside, but the sea of big white balloons floating in the wind like jellyfish were beautiful.
Jellyfish!
As previously discussed, I didn't get nearly as many pictures of the participants at BM because I was terribly nervous about asking to photograph people, but there were a LOT of glowing people everywhere.
Cardboard Robots! There were some Cardboard Robot haters heckling the cardboard robots, warning them that being cardboard robots probably wouldn't get them laid. Ian said "Are you kidding? It's Burning Man. Of course it will get them laid."
Hug Deli!
Carousel!
The full moon was beautiful, but successfully prevented any real star gazing.
The BRC Post Office! Sadly, I never used this. What?! I was busy! Just remember, there's no Team in Fuck You.
Veg Camp! I was pleased to bring this photo home to Chrissy and Tony. The vegan is IN!
There was a great deal of art at Burning Man. I focused a lot on the sculpture because it's giant, it's everywhere and it's hard not to focus on it, but the paintings that were around were really cool too.
Down with Shirtcocking! Evidently it's for frat boys, and highly mocked/discouraged.
Random Aerialist.
This is called WDYDWYD, which stands for "Why do you do what you do?" It's a sprawling project wherein people create postcards or hold up signs for the photographer that say...why they do what they do. :)
http://www.wdydwyd.com/
We found Surdo!
These were biofeedback chairs. You put your hands on a pad that monitored your pulse, and they gave a vibration, played the sound and pulsed a warm light on you with every one of your heartbeats. This was far out into the playa, so I'm glad we didn't miss them.
Pretty much everything at Burning Man is set on fire at one point or another, it seems.
There were multiple, sprawling stages from which fire spouted and people spun fire poi, staffs, fans, and anything else you could burn and wave around.
Post apocalyptic!
This was a really good fire show, and this girl was amazing and had great shoes.
This area was a little scary.
Love this one.
Hookahdome may or may not have had hookahs. We never went inside. Ian danced though.
A fire woman made of chains.
Ian providing scale.
This was while we were waiting for the rocket ship sculpture to "launch". It was delayed by the terrible fucking dust storm for like 2 hours. I got really sick of it and went back to camp to go to sleep, then Ian saw the 4 minutes of fireworks that everyone had waited for hours to see. I have no regrets.
That was how I looked for a lot of this trip, considering the weather. I was masked and goggled and dirty as all hell.
Ian was the same but was always much more cheerful about it.
The last couple of days I sort of actually got into the swing of things when I wasn't being choked by sand. This was a pancake breakfast line in which I tried to swing poi and this lovely man sang to us while we waited.
We spent some of the last day at Center Camp, where they sell the coffee and where hippies gather to roll around and listen to music and cuddle with each other. It was whiteout sandstorming but most people don't seem to mind that much.
I joined the hula hooping briefly, with my wedgie and strange butt stain.
There was a lot of Contact Dancing at Center Camp.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_improvisation
It really and truly took until the last day for me to get enough courage to ask people to take their picture. Anyway, this girl was wonderful.
This naked blue man enjoyed thrusting his eye-stalks at me.
This guy was so bad-ass. His beard and eyebrows and eyelashes were full of sand.
Everyone was pretty friendly for the most part, and I enjoyed meeting many of the people that we talked to.
I was trying to explain to my mom how the nudity at Burning Man is not necessarily sexual by nature. To me, the girls who had club/stripper outfits were much more provocative than regular naked people, for the most part.
This guy on stilts was really neat, and was joined by many many more people on stilts in one place than I have previously experienced. We saw a lot of these jumping stilts, which I hadn't really seen before.
These ladies had double tall stilts!
This woman, was extremely kind to me. I tried talking to her and other people on the last day about what Burning Man has that makes them want to be there despite the incredibly shitty environmental conditions. Ian doesn't always have words to explain how he feels that I understand or relate to, but Sachi really helped. She was like "Yes the weather sucks balls. We keep coming back because of the people and the costuming and the vibe and the fun. Here are ways to deal with the sucky weather, "a" "b" "c" and then a lot of acceptance.
Acceptance was really difficult for me on this trip because I was trying really hard to like Burning Man and it didn't come easy. I was overheated, always dirty, always physically uncomfortable, scorched by the sun, choked by the sand, and any time that I can't run my fingers through my hair, I'm on the verge of a panic attack. The alkaline sand makes your hair feel like straw, and at the same time glues it in whatever position it is, so it was really difficult for me. I don't really have a problem with being dirty as much as I have a problem with feeling dirty and knowing that I'm not able to get clean any time soon, if that makes sense. I bathed a few times but the clean lasts about an hour or until the next sand storm. It was an exercise in patience and calm and I failed the exercise a lot of the time.
The Temple at night, taken by Ian and the small camera, since it was always fricking dust storming.
The Man at night.
Here's us waiting for the Man to burn. Because of the weather, we actually got front row seats, which was pretty awesome and unprecedented in Ian's prior years without camping out on the playa and saving spots for hours.
Before they burn the Man, there are almost a thousand fire spinners, grouped by troupe around the man who perform. It was a spectacle to say the least. I didn't get fantastic video, just a couple of short, out of focus ones, but that was good because I was watching. One of my favorite things that I hadn't seen before was the fire whips/ropes these guys were using.
The beautiful fireworks before the man.
On fire!
Really on fire!
The heat from the Man was sending off smoke/dust funnels that were passing through the crowd. It was pretty amazing.
Here are a couple of short videos of the Man burning that are worth watching because I edited out all of the boring stuff.
Here I am, post burn, in all of my glory, and still with a giant poop-like stain on my shorts. As we were driving out after the man burn, they had a long series of Burma-Shave-esque signs talking about the extinction of animals/plant life that we're in right now, and how this is the fastest extinction in the history of the planet and the last sign said there's only one animal to blame. After that someone had put up a little piece of paper on a stick that said "The Giraffe". It was good to leave camp laughing.
Ian was dirty!
Look at my disgusting hair!
We stopped at a truck stop in Fernly and paid 10 dollars a piece for the hottest shower ever with the strongest water pressure that I've experienced in this life time.
We weren't perfectly clean afterwards, but I felt a million times better and ready for 35 hours in the car.
Some highlights of the trip:
-Finally using the giant pink robe that Grammy gave me.
-Twice (TWICE!) I stepped into a port-o-potty directly after it was cleaned.
-The grilled cheese sandwich our neighbors gave me with heirloom tomatoes and balsamic vinegar.
The drive home was long but nice. We held hands, replaced Ian's newly broken car CD player in Salt Lake City Utah, ate at a disgusting Asian Buffet called "Crazy Jim's" (WE OPEN LABOR DAY!), sang along to Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog CD, and formed a band called Lactose Intolerance with a number one hit called "I Hate Cheese". I'm out of pictures. I missed you guys.
When asked to describe Burning Man in a sentence, I would say "It's like camping on Mars with a bunch half naked people constantly on psychedelic drugs."
I was sincerely nervous about taking pictures of people or even asking to take pictures of people after reading a thread on the BM website about people being pissed off at tourists and frat boys who go to Burning Man to take pictures of boobs. I also didn't get as many photos as I had hoped because of this, and the overwhelming sand storms and heat which both greatly hindered leaving the tent and the use of my camera in general.
This ball tree is one of the only exciting things in Utah on I-80. It was on the salt flats. The salt flats are exactly what you'd think they would be, flat expanses of land covered in salt. There were salt mines along this stretch of I-80 that had mounds of salt taller than buildings. I'm pretty sure my blood pressure went up just from looking at them. Also, on the white salty ground, people stop and use little rocks to write things like "Jesus <3 you" or "L <3 M" or outlines of of gargantuan phalluses. These go on for miles and miles.
This was the road into Gerlach, the closest "city" to Burning Man's Black Rock City.
I didn't get nearly enough pictures of the art bikes once into camp. They were everywhere all the time.
This line took about 3 hours to get through. Many people wanted to get to Burning Man at the same time we did.
A sand storm also wanted to get to burning man the same time we did. This was the visibility of the car 6 inches in front of us.
Three feet?
It was a shitty night in which we drove around for hours trying to find a place to camp. The place you camp is very important because you spend a week hearing these people, be it techno disco or just whether or not they're gassy. Also, camp neighbors are important when Ian runs out of duct tape, I burn myself with hot oil and need neosporin, or just want someone to chat with. Ian chose, then we spent a few hours trying to put up our shade structure in the middle of the above sand storm. It was frustrating and dirtying and we ended up giving up and just putting up the tent next to his car and passing out. I washed the next morning and thought I would never be that dirty again. (pause for laughter)
Here are some of the neighbors we met throughout the week:
Josh is a base jumper who owns his own collection agency. Fun!
This was one of my absolute favorite people that I met. He's a doctor. He and one of his friends lent us various things and provided great company.
There were a lot of people at Burning Man who were "talkers" as in you meet them and they immediately tell you their personal philosophy of how to reach enlightenment and the truth about sacred geometry or what have you, and never have time to ask how you are, what you think, or act like normal, fun human beings. He was a sun beam of not-crazy.
Also, his boyfriend had the same shoe size as me and let me try all of his boots on . Also, fatastic batman undies.
One of the views from camp.
This adjacent camp was inhabited primarily with Facebook employees. They had a large tepee that played house music and had spinny lights.
This gentlemen is a film editor and had spent the last six months backpacking around India and then Europe. He's covered in green glitter and holding a peanut butter sandwich filled with Psilocybin mushrooms, which he proceeded to eat shortly after this picture was taken.
This is our neighbor Mirra, of Chris and Mirra, painted like an alien. She gave me hard boiled eggs and borrowed my lotion.
The second day we went out and met up with Ian's friends Jazz and Camo. They had a lovely geodesic dome made and brought by their camp-mate Eddie. It was covered in beautiful fabric, drop cloths on the ground and big fuzzy pillows to lounge about on. Terrible jealousy.
I was not jealous of the fact that they camped across from the White Trash Superstar camp. Although the white trash lemonade lady had some knockers on her, and the stripper pole was better than TV.
There are a lot more children at Burning Man than I imagined there would be. This was Kid's Camp taking a ride on a jumbo bunny car.
This was at Center Camp. Burning Man is a gifting society, but evidently selling coffee and bags of ice are the exceptions to that rule. I wouldn't feel as complainy about it if a 12 ounce chai made by people who yell at you wasn't 4 dollars.
Center camp hippie corral with contact dancing. Note the pillow made of pooh bears.
I decided my Burning Man theme would be pajamas. Just because they're comfy and they're what I would wear if I were on vacation at my own house. I also decided it was time to wear shorts for the first time in 7 years. What a feeling! Being's believin'!
I will title these two photos "The proud owner of pasty white thighs, 1 and 2."
This is the inside of our monkey hut. Everything looked blue for a week. It functioned quite well as a wind/sand block, but unfortunately also baked us like flan. Next time, breathable fabric instead of tarp? Anyway, Ian did well with it. I wouldn't have survived without the monkey hut. I almost didn't survive with the monkey hut.
One of the first and only other camps that I spent a great deal of time in was the Darwin Fish Tank camp. They had a water misting system set up so you could sit on plastic furniture and be moistened for hours. This is Kevin the bartender sporting the camp logo in his chest hair.
They had an art area and I made a puff paint tank top to look like I was contributing something to their experience other than just sucking up their moisture.
Amos the smiling Israeli was obsessed with painting penises. He had just finished his mandatory time in the Israeli army and is now working with an installation artist/sculptor. I hope the installation art involves penises, because that would obviously bring him joy.
This is one of Amos's creations, a jar of pickled penises. Modeled by Mindy, a girl I met while buying my 4 dollar chai.
Mindy with Mendhi. Amos is in the background painting more dicks.
This is Cameron, a deep sea diver who is ready for true love. Isn't that what we all want? We talked quite a bit. He was crabby at first, but once the drinking truly commenced, he was quite pleasant company.
People!
Onto the art!
I got up early one morning and biked around the playa taking pictures of sculptures and various art installations. It was really nice to be out while the sun wasn't trying to kill me.
Hi Mom!
At night, this gnome shot alternately pink and green flames about 50 feet in the air.
Giant dendrite!
Giant dedrite on fire at night!
Pretty mirror wall and matching silver laden Englishman.
I'm vi-king of the world! Hardy har har!
I really liked this piece. I think it lit on fire at night too. Pretty much everything was lit on fire at night from what I could tell.
Pajamas!
My first up close view of the Man.
The temple sits further out on the playa. The carved wood panels are really beautiful.
People write thoughts, wishes, prayers on the temple. They burn with it at the end of Burning Man on Sunday.
This guy walked around all morning. He was the first stranger I actually took a picture of. Working up the courage to ask him took years off of my life. I think he's beautiful, and this is probably my favorite picture from the entire trip.
This picture shows the distance between the Temple and the Man. It was quite a trek between things. I suppose when it's a city of 50,000 people mixed with a bunch of things you plan to set on fire you'd have to leave a lot of room.
I wish I had found this sliding hill of astro-turf after I gave up on even trying to remain clean for any period of time. It looked like a lot of fun.
Daylight art car!
This tree/nest was really neat. It had a platform on top that played forest and bird sounds when people stood on it.
Inner squirrel art. Hi Dad!
A view of the desert out to the trash fence from the nest.
I loved this thing. Hippies were using it as a couch.
Hippies cuddling in the lap of a collosal bunny.
A collosal zen bunny.
Purdy.
This was probably my favorite large sculpture.
So pretty.
Another nest!
I'm slightly glad that I never saw this in motion. It's scary enough in one spot. I imagine it was driven by a drunken pirate.
random
The couple who built this got married in it on Thursday. I imagine that when artists love each other something deeply wonderful or deeply destructive is born. Or maybe both. I wonder if they burned it down afterwards?
The art cars were fantastic!
MOAR ART CARS
Piggy eyelashes.
I loved this kitty.
A triple decker bus on crack.
Space car! I think it's built onto a mororized wheelchair frame?
Two VW vans welded together?
So there's really not much else to be said about the art cars. They are to be looked at and ridden on, and you only have one option at the time, so you should look. While you're looking I'll tell you a story.
One night at this fantastical journey called Burning Man, I ingested something that disagreed with me, to say the least. It is legal in the United States, was taken in the spirit of good fun and with the assurance of my loving boyfriend that he wasn't aware of it ever having any negative effects. Au contraire!
One of the results of this choice was explosive vomiting. I have a sensitive stomach and once I start I just keep going. Much to my dismay, I spent 5 hours hurling uncontrollably. Ian, the facilitator of the ingestion had to tend to me, my deep distress, and my 2 hefty bags full of vomit.
While the fun seemed like it would never end, it had to when at 6 in the morning I was still unable sit up on my own or to suck on an ice cube without immediate dry heaves. I sent Ian to make good use of the exhorbitant ticket prices and fetch me an ambulance.
I was rolled to the medical tent where I was then pumped full of 3 liters of saline and two shots of anti-emetic to cease-and-desist the puke fest, then 4 more hours of laying in a cot, hooked up to bags of fluid while Ian sat next to me holding my hand and feeling guilty.
At one point in the evening, they brought in a raving young naked man who was tripping on LSD and completely unable to modulate the level of his voice. Imagine "LOUD NOISES!" from Anchorman.
He sat wrapped in a blanket screaming the same sets of words over and over again, as though each phrase was an individual word and he could only think of one word at a time to respond to any question or explain how he was feeling.
"I DIED AT BURNING MAN. I DIED AT BURNING MAN? I ATE GLOWSTICK AND DIED AT BURNING MAN. SHELTER! SAFETY! WATERWATERWATERWATER! STICK IT IN MY FACE. PUT IT IN MY MOUTH. WATERWATERWATERWATER. FUCK! THIS IS SO EMBARASSING! I ATE GLOWSTICK AND DIED AT BURNING MAN. I'M THE FIRST PERSON TO DIE AT BURNING MAN." He didn't really sound as distressed about these things, but as if he was excited to be sharing. It was unbelievably hilarious.
We got out of the medical tent after dawn on Thursday morning and Ian shuffled me back to camp like a little old lady, where I promptly fell asleep in the car with the A/C on, listening to Haley Bonar. I didn't feel even semi-human again until Friday, but was glad to eat goldfish, drape myself in a wet towel and read. Yay for survival!
It was really hard for me to go out in the daytime heat, so I read three entire books while we were there, Great Expectations, The Tao of Pooh, and The Slaughterhouse Five. The Slaughterhouse Five was my favorite. Kurt Vonnegut is a magnificent story teller and makes me feel so deeply for every person in his stories, even the bad guys. I highly suggest that book to anyone who hasn't read it. The Tao of Pooh helped me calm down a bit and made me happier, so I'm glad I brought it. Great Expectations wasn't as good as the movie with Gwenyth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke and all of the Francesco Clemente paintings.
Back to the pictures. This Pooh wasn't very Tao.
This is the Cubetron, a grid of ping pong ball size lights that change color in patterns and in response to music. This year they evidently built a place for all of the tripping hippies to lay underneath and watch, because they were doing it anyway before.
The Thunderdome! I never actually got to see a battle here, but this is where they harness people at the end of bungee cords and then throw them at each other and see who breaks a rib. Rob did this with a lady when he was last at Burning Man and then promptly had sex with her. Hopefully in the privacy of his own trailer. I never got to see a match but it was pretty cool to look at anyway.
This was a theme/party camp that had absolutely no party going on when we got inside, but you know how much I love Christmas lights without Christmas.
Stick your square peg into the square hole and receive words of wisdom from the Ichthytude camp.
I never went inside, but the sea of big white balloons floating in the wind like jellyfish were beautiful.
Jellyfish!
As previously discussed, I didn't get nearly as many pictures of the participants at BM because I was terribly nervous about asking to photograph people, but there were a LOT of glowing people everywhere.
Cardboard Robots! There were some Cardboard Robot haters heckling the cardboard robots, warning them that being cardboard robots probably wouldn't get them laid. Ian said "Are you kidding? It's Burning Man. Of course it will get them laid."
Hug Deli!
Carousel!
The full moon was beautiful, but successfully prevented any real star gazing.
The BRC Post Office! Sadly, I never used this. What?! I was busy! Just remember, there's no Team in Fuck You.
Veg Camp! I was pleased to bring this photo home to Chrissy and Tony. The vegan is IN!
There was a great deal of art at Burning Man. I focused a lot on the sculpture because it's giant, it's everywhere and it's hard not to focus on it, but the paintings that were around were really cool too.
Down with Shirtcocking! Evidently it's for frat boys, and highly mocked/discouraged.
Random Aerialist.
This is called WDYDWYD, which stands for "Why do you do what you do?" It's a sprawling project wherein people create postcards or hold up signs for the photographer that say...why they do what they do. :)
http://www.wdydwyd.com/
We found Surdo!
These were biofeedback chairs. You put your hands on a pad that monitored your pulse, and they gave a vibration, played the sound and pulsed a warm light on you with every one of your heartbeats. This was far out into the playa, so I'm glad we didn't miss them.
Pretty much everything at Burning Man is set on fire at one point or another, it seems.
There were multiple, sprawling stages from which fire spouted and people spun fire poi, staffs, fans, and anything else you could burn and wave around.
Post apocalyptic!
This was a really good fire show, and this girl was amazing and had great shoes.
This area was a little scary.
Love this one.
Hookahdome may or may not have had hookahs. We never went inside. Ian danced though.
A fire woman made of chains.
Ian providing scale.
This was while we were waiting for the rocket ship sculpture to "launch". It was delayed by the terrible fucking dust storm for like 2 hours. I got really sick of it and went back to camp to go to sleep, then Ian saw the 4 minutes of fireworks that everyone had waited for hours to see. I have no regrets.
That was how I looked for a lot of this trip, considering the weather. I was masked and goggled and dirty as all hell.
Ian was the same but was always much more cheerful about it.
The last couple of days I sort of actually got into the swing of things when I wasn't being choked by sand. This was a pancake breakfast line in which I tried to swing poi and this lovely man sang to us while we waited.
We spent some of the last day at Center Camp, where they sell the coffee and where hippies gather to roll around and listen to music and cuddle with each other. It was whiteout sandstorming but most people don't seem to mind that much.
I joined the hula hooping briefly, with my wedgie and strange butt stain.
There was a lot of Contact Dancing at Center Camp.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_improvisation
It really and truly took until the last day for me to get enough courage to ask people to take their picture. Anyway, this girl was wonderful.
This naked blue man enjoyed thrusting his eye-stalks at me.
This guy was so bad-ass. His beard and eyebrows and eyelashes were full of sand.
Everyone was pretty friendly for the most part, and I enjoyed meeting many of the people that we talked to.
I was trying to explain to my mom how the nudity at Burning Man is not necessarily sexual by nature. To me, the girls who had club/stripper outfits were much more provocative than regular naked people, for the most part.
This guy on stilts was really neat, and was joined by many many more people on stilts in one place than I have previously experienced. We saw a lot of these jumping stilts, which I hadn't really seen before.
These ladies had double tall stilts!
This woman, was extremely kind to me. I tried talking to her and other people on the last day about what Burning Man has that makes them want to be there despite the incredibly shitty environmental conditions. Ian doesn't always have words to explain how he feels that I understand or relate to, but Sachi really helped. She was like "Yes the weather sucks balls. We keep coming back because of the people and the costuming and the vibe and the fun. Here are ways to deal with the sucky weather, "a" "b" "c" and then a lot of acceptance.
Acceptance was really difficult for me on this trip because I was trying really hard to like Burning Man and it didn't come easy. I was overheated, always dirty, always physically uncomfortable, scorched by the sun, choked by the sand, and any time that I can't run my fingers through my hair, I'm on the verge of a panic attack. The alkaline sand makes your hair feel like straw, and at the same time glues it in whatever position it is, so it was really difficult for me. I don't really have a problem with being dirty as much as I have a problem with feeling dirty and knowing that I'm not able to get clean any time soon, if that makes sense. I bathed a few times but the clean lasts about an hour or until the next sand storm. It was an exercise in patience and calm and I failed the exercise a lot of the time.
The Temple at night, taken by Ian and the small camera, since it was always fricking dust storming.
The Man at night.
Here's us waiting for the Man to burn. Because of the weather, we actually got front row seats, which was pretty awesome and unprecedented in Ian's prior years without camping out on the playa and saving spots for hours.
Before they burn the Man, there are almost a thousand fire spinners, grouped by troupe around the man who perform. It was a spectacle to say the least. I didn't get fantastic video, just a couple of short, out of focus ones, but that was good because I was watching. One of my favorite things that I hadn't seen before was the fire whips/ropes these guys were using.
The beautiful fireworks before the man.
On fire!
Really on fire!
The heat from the Man was sending off smoke/dust funnels that were passing through the crowd. It was pretty amazing.
Here are a couple of short videos of the Man burning that are worth watching because I edited out all of the boring stuff.
Here I am, post burn, in all of my glory, and still with a giant poop-like stain on my shorts. As we were driving out after the man burn, they had a long series of Burma-Shave-esque signs talking about the extinction of animals/plant life that we're in right now, and how this is the fastest extinction in the history of the planet and the last sign said there's only one animal to blame. After that someone had put up a little piece of paper on a stick that said "The Giraffe". It was good to leave camp laughing.
Ian was dirty!
Look at my disgusting hair!
We stopped at a truck stop in Fernly and paid 10 dollars a piece for the hottest shower ever with the strongest water pressure that I've experienced in this life time.
We weren't perfectly clean afterwards, but I felt a million times better and ready for 35 hours in the car.
Some highlights of the trip:
-Finally using the giant pink robe that Grammy gave me.
-Twice (TWICE!) I stepped into a port-o-potty directly after it was cleaned.
-The grilled cheese sandwich our neighbors gave me with heirloom tomatoes and balsamic vinegar.
The drive home was long but nice. We held hands, replaced Ian's newly broken car CD player in Salt Lake City Utah, ate at a disgusting Asian Buffet called "Crazy Jim's" (WE OPEN LABOR DAY!), sang along to Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog CD, and formed a band called Lactose Intolerance with a number one hit called "I Hate Cheese". I'm out of pictures. I missed you guys.