Burn Burn
To the casual eye, this blog has been neglected.
It has, but it hasn’t been dormant. I have been quietly updating it from the back, chronologically working forwards. Eventually I will catch up with reality and normal service will resume. By this time LJ will be completely dead and I will have to transfer the whole thing to WordPress. I have no idea how to do this.
I thought I should break my historic languishing to bring you a few photos and some notes.
Those of you with good memories will remember that I went to Burning Man in 2009.
Well, I went again this year, and this post in motivated by the knowledge that the last dusty item is finally clean. Ish.
Before I forget them, here are some notes.
It’s interesting, when you are greeted at the gate, they say ‘welcome home’, and there is a curious truth to this. A trip to the desert is not a holiday in the classical sense, it becomes a home in a way no other holiday dwelling can, not by virtue of form, but by virtue of emotion, home in the way Tom Hodgkinson talks about it. In his book ‘How To Be Idle’, he talks about the freedoms afforded by our homes, and they aren’t the ones you necessarily think of. Freedom might be considered as walking up a mountain and shouting a cliché from the summit, but equally it is sitting on the sofa in your underwear drinking tea and occasionally scratching yourself. The desert affords you both, there is the sense of remoteness, freedom from the Real World, but there is also probably a theme camp dedicated to the aforementioned underwear and tea-drinking antics.
I was concerned that my second trip to the dust wouldn’t be as good as the first, you can only discover something like this once, and the shock of the environment and the atmosphere is something you can prepare for if you have experienced it. I am pleased to say that it was quite as good and also quite different. Last time, it was our RV and we; we were there for the spectacle and the experience. This time we camped with the furries in the fur theme camp, and this changed the dynamic completely, we had a ready-made family of friends we didn’t know yet, and we were able to feed our resources and creativity into a much bigger pot and give more to the city. This was wonderful, I really felt like part of something greater, and it is this feeling of collective that will stay with me, and doubtless draw me back to the dust in future.
Anyway, enough words. Have some pictures!
I took hundreds, and these are some of the better ones for portraying the true madness that is The Burn. Not madness in its pure form, more about the madness resulting from juxtaposition of discordant themes. I choose not to label or explain them. Enjoy!
~T
It has, but it hasn’t been dormant. I have been quietly updating it from the back, chronologically working forwards. Eventually I will catch up with reality and normal service will resume. By this time LJ will be completely dead and I will have to transfer the whole thing to WordPress. I have no idea how to do this.
I thought I should break my historic languishing to bring you a few photos and some notes.
Those of you with good memories will remember that I went to Burning Man in 2009.
Well, I went again this year, and this post in motivated by the knowledge that the last dusty item is finally clean. Ish.
Before I forget them, here are some notes.
It’s interesting, when you are greeted at the gate, they say ‘welcome home’, and there is a curious truth to this. A trip to the desert is not a holiday in the classical sense, it becomes a home in a way no other holiday dwelling can, not by virtue of form, but by virtue of emotion, home in the way Tom Hodgkinson talks about it. In his book ‘How To Be Idle’, he talks about the freedoms afforded by our homes, and they aren’t the ones you necessarily think of. Freedom might be considered as walking up a mountain and shouting a cliché from the summit, but equally it is sitting on the sofa in your underwear drinking tea and occasionally scratching yourself. The desert affords you both, there is the sense of remoteness, freedom from the Real World, but there is also probably a theme camp dedicated to the aforementioned underwear and tea-drinking antics.
I was concerned that my second trip to the dust wouldn’t be as good as the first, you can only discover something like this once, and the shock of the environment and the atmosphere is something you can prepare for if you have experienced it. I am pleased to say that it was quite as good and also quite different. Last time, it was our RV and we; we were there for the spectacle and the experience. This time we camped with the furries in the fur theme camp, and this changed the dynamic completely, we had a ready-made family of friends we didn’t know yet, and we were able to feed our resources and creativity into a much bigger pot and give more to the city. This was wonderful, I really felt like part of something greater, and it is this feeling of collective that will stay with me, and doubtless draw me back to the dust in future.
Anyway, enough words. Have some pictures!
I took hundreds, and these are some of the better ones for portraying the true madness that is The Burn. Not madness in its pure form, more about the madness resulting from juxtaposition of discordant themes. I choose not to label or explain them. Enjoy!
~T