Burning Man - A Week of Radical Self Expression

'Burning Man is an Adult Playland', a 29-Hour a day party for a week; A Globally Charged Community in the desert of Northern Nevada.

'You can vacation in say Jamaica and see things that millions have seen before you and millions will see after you...Or you can trek yourself & stuff to BRC and see things that will only be available for one week to see'

2000 > 2001 > 2002 > 2003 > 2004 > 2005 > 2006 > 2007 > 2008 >  
2009 > 2010 > 2011 > 2012 > 2013  >  2014 >  2015 > 2016 > 2017 > 2018

Confessions of a Burning Man - A Burning Man Movie

The movie Confessions of a Burning Man is available via the Burning Man Market Place. Here are my favorite quotes from the film.

	Once a year a city rises and falls; leaving no trace. During its brief existence, 25,000 people gather to celebrate life,  passion & art. A visionary world where no money changes hands.
	The only thing interesting about driving a cab was the people; the first five years I drove a cab, I loved it. After a while, you know all the streets, you know all the restaurants, so thing only thing left that keeps it exciting are the people, cause the people always change. The last five years, the dot.com boom, the dot comers, web scum I used to call them, they were boring, I never saw such self-entitled, self-absorbed egotistical fools who had nothing to offer anybody. I was lucky if I picked up one interesting person out of a hundred. Most people would get in my cab and say wow this must be an interesting job, you must meet some interesting people and my standard response was, no most of them are just like you. So I took a vow to never drive a cab again, but made an exception to drive one-week in Black Rock City, because its one place where I do not think I will be bored.
	Everything changes except The Man, he has remained pretty much the same over the years, we are not changing him anymore, he is like the center, the axle of a wheel, everything whirls around him faster and faster, he remains fixed at the center.
	What happen was were were down at Baker Beach at the intersection of three Law Enforcement Agencies, discretely trying to smuggle a giant down on a public beach in plain view of this pretty privileged neighborhood; the jig was up by 1990, they were not going to let us do it. So the police show up, he was pretty much astonished because it looked like it does today and just aches with craft. He showed courage for a bureaucrat, we could negotiate a deal, you could put it up but don't burn it, and then he ran away. So we looked up and down the coast for a place to burn it, but then someone said I know of an ocean that doesn't move, it became real because we found out you could do what you want. You could construct your reality because there was no other context to contradict it. In this pristine place you could put a mason jar on the ground and the whole world would surround it. Then they started getting creative, so it was more than a man, then it was Theme Camps, then it was Art work, the artist realized the limits were only in their minds.
	If your life is dedicated to a gift, then the whole point is to give it, get it out there. Lamplighters they have 300 people, 750 waiting to do it. They light the lamps, that is there gift; the reason it draws so much resource to it, is because it is a gift, at the center of it is this thing your giving away.
	There is so much emotion that is wrapped up in this place and when you are involved with it, that takes a certain level of personal motivation for that freedom and a lot of people do not want to let go of the precepts they have, it takes a lot courage, and so this dive into illusion, fantasy and play is the best experience about finding out about ones true self.
	Burning Man, Burning Man...The greatest party in all the land.
	Its a unique out picturing of a particular range of sub-culture. You have extremes of weather, extremes of temperature, the intensity of the event, you wake up in the morning and everything is covered in dust, you go to eat and somebody didn't do the dishes in your camp, you know like this sucks, and then seconds later someone will walk in that you have never met with a great story or great information, you make a new friend, and you say this place is great, you love it and hate it at the same time. Just as the Man stands as the heart of the city around which all these activities go on, its like a symbol of a  microcosm within your own soul, your heart or your own center. You go place yourself in proximity to the Man in this community I notice a lot of people I talked to have gotten in touch with their own center because its representative and large.
	That's the liberal conundrum, what are you doing about the racial thing, we have always been word of mouth and people come; one reason people do not leave their neighborhood is they are afraid of what might happen. The other side to it is there are all these white folks coming out here to find community, but if you do not have any money and your in your neighborhood; it will take bites out of you and afflict you, but at the same time if your dependent on finding your own resources and your living with people in some type of relationship, then you have more community then people who could live anywhere and everything is convenient because they have money; they can base their whole world about who they are individually, for the rest of it, they do not belong to anything; so they are willing to go out to a desert in the middle of nothing to get  communal. As soon as you take it and turn it into a product and selling it on a mass scale it does not mean anything  anymore; its just entertainment.
	The big problem with our society is consumerism; its just gobbling up cultures, gobbling it up and spitting it out for money. Its seems to me the only answer to that is something that starts like consumerism does with the individual; but instead of starting with some ideology that's what we believe is why we are all together; just start with you, the immediate and then you discover community and then you discover civics, then I think maybe you can change the world. I do not think you are going to change the world with a bunch of preaching; it won't work, we will just start burning everybody's property. That's the alternative to Burning Man is the Mall riots of the 21st century.