You can check my full BM photos album here
I just came back from Burning Man, a movement/festival in the middle of the Nevada desert. I knew little about Burning Man beforehand. I first heard about it when I arrived in the Bay Area 10 years ago: my skip manager suggested we all go to the festival but my direct manager and others thought it wasn’t a good idea.
Over the years in the Bay, I met people who went there almost every year. I heard all sort of stories about it: bartering happening, camps that require elaborate applications to be part of them, and wonderful moments people had in the “playa”: the central area of the desert where there are no camps and instead is populated with art pieces and a wooden structure of a man, alongside a temple where people go to meditate, and create small altars for their beloved ones (it reminded me of Day of the Death altars). Both the temple and the man sculpture are burned in the last two days of the festival.
Black Rock City (BRC) is the pop-up place that hosts the roughly 70 thousand people that come here. It is a pop up city that is re-built every year. There is a notion that a lot of tech-people from San Francisco come to BRC. While that might be true (e.g., me), in my experience, I didn’t meet an overwhelming number of people from San Francisco: there were people from all walks of life and from all over the world. Most people stay in a tent or an RV. BRC has roads that are centered on the man and expand axially from it and go from 2 to 10. In the tangential direction, the roads are concentric circles that are named after a letter. Our camp was located at 7:00 and D.
We drove Sunday night from San Francisco through the Sierras into Nevada, past Reno and into the Black Rock desert. We had to park at a gas station near Reno Monday morning. BRC had received some rain the day before and the roads were impassable, hence no one was able to come in or out. We made it to the gravel road leading to BRC around 12 pm, and only made it through the gate after 5 pm.
At the entrance, you are given a small book outlining all activities happening during the week. It is impossible to go through all of it. The sheer amount of things happening is mind-blowing: yoga, meditation, street tacos, DJ Lessons, ecstatic dancing, morning tea, ballet for beginners, massage, latin dance bash, piano bar, you name it.
During our first night we did some night exploration. The roads out of our camp were terrible: the soil felt like cracked concrete that had bumps everywhere and made it very uncomfortable to ride. Things were different as soon as you hit the Playa: the sand was softer, although there were small dunes that made it hard to bike through. On the third day my friend Matt lent me his electric bike, and biking in the playa was smoother, like sailing on a quiet lake.
The Playa at night is perhaps the most amazing place/part of Burning Man. Walk through the Playa during the day and you will see a vast sand (salt?) plateau surrounded by mountains. Walk at night and you will be walking in outer space: the soil is completely dark, there are no reference points except for lights all around you. Trying to find something is like trying to orient yourself in space: find the light you’re looking for, and head straight into it, beware of all of the people going in every other direction seeking other lights. You will find yourself in the playa at 1 am with no way of knowing it is that late: life overflows and buzzes in every direction.
It is hard to overstate how magical this is: imagine the most desolate place on earth, bereft of life, suddenly bursting with lights, music, people, bikes, mutant cars rolling along: it is the most magically surrealist thing I’ve ever experienced.
On our third night as we were riding in the Playa between two points we spotted a paddle boat. Everything was so dark around it that it looked like the boat was sailing in the ocean. In reality, this was a mutant car: cars that are modified to look like something else. This one was expertly done: from a distance it looked like a real boat. We stopped and climbed to the top floor, and being on top of it gave me goosebumps: I was looking around at the horizon, the immediate proximity was dark, making one feel in the dark ocean, but further afar we were circled by lights, some of them moving, some brighter than the rest: a sea of lights in technicolor. A DJ was playing live alongside a singer and a guitarist. Where were we? Was this the Mississippi river? Was this what space looked like? Was this an intimate serenade? Who were these musicians?
The BM experience is powerful/unique because there are no straight answers to these questions. BM is a random combination of sensory inputs that mixed together defy any accepted definition. There is also no other human experience that comes close to BM. BM is unique in part because there is no central organization: no one decided (centrally) that this boat should be built, or that it should drive a particular route in the Playa, or that we would encounter it at midnight.
Our encounter with the boat was entirely random, and everything that happens in BM feels random, governed by a random God and powered by 70 thousand humans making cacophonous decisions every millisecond. That entire night was magical: one surprise followed another until sunrise. We danced all night long, meeting other people on the same wavelength, and at around 5: 30 am, the celestial vault started illuminating itself, little by little specks of color started dotting the black cathedral surrounding us, until in the distance the sun broke the horizon in halves.
Our friend’s bike chain snapped, so we were walking back to our RV when we stumbled upon a French-looking couple making fresh omelettes topped with caviar in the middle of the Playa (!!!). We thought it was a prank, but they had indeed brought a giant tin of caviar and were making fresh omelettes. It is impossible to convey how delicious they were (not even Air France’s La Premiére comes close), and how magical it was to have a direct line of sight to the sunrise while two people were cooking a delicious omelette for us (we would have never found this omelette if it wasn’t for the random event leading to it).
The art at Burning Man is something that I can’t leave out. I have never seen so much art in one place, not in the Met, or MoMA, or any museum. BRC is a city that is surrounded by art everywhere and this is incredibly special. I felt like I was interacting with the art all the time, and as a corollary, I felt I was part of the art. All of this art wouldn’t make sense without everyone interacting with it. The amazing thing about all of these interactions is that art doesn’t feel stale, boring. I dislike the somber, sterile feeling of a museum. It hinders the ability to establish a two-way dialogue with the art pieces. At BM I got a special sensation of having a conversation with all of these cacophonous pieces that popped out at random places. It also felt like the art was infinite. I always found new art pieces that I didn’t know existed. BM is a seven day art playground where art boundaries are constantly being pushed and expanded.
Music is one of the reasons I came to BM. I love dancing, especially when the crowd is a participant more than a spectator. My best party/dance experiences have been in Europe. Everytime I attend an event in the US, it feels very much a see/be-seen/I-was-there scene. Burning Man is mostly different. On Wednesday I was walking back to my RV from the temple and I stumbled upon a Playa party. It was one of the best dancing parties ever: overflowing in ecstatic energy and happiness. The DJ was blasting some amazing Afro-house, and the energy in the tent was unbelievable! No one was just standing there, everyone was dancing, jumping, waving their arms: a musical spell devolving into a bacchanal of ecstasies. Every minute in that music tent was magical.
We also attended a concert by the BRC orchestra: an impromptu get-together of BRC citizens. I was shocked at how well attended it was. Their last song was Queen’s bohemian rhapsody which was sang along by everyone in the audience. As soon as this finished, a mutant car started playing a live DJ set with a live saxophonist+base players and the energy went off the charts. It felt so random: a few minutes ago we were listening to Mozart’s requiem, and now we were all dancing house music as the sun was bathing us in orange sunset light.
The flipside of my music experience, was Rüfüs du Sol sunrise set. The night before the Playa was humming with expectation and gossip: was Rüfüs really going to play? Where? Theories galore rode through the Playa. My friend Matt asked a stranger while we were waiting for the porta potty and he told us to find a train (?). We were slightly dumbfounded by this: what does a train in the Playa look like? Nevertheless as sunrise approached we embarked on a mission to listen to Rüfüs’ set, and we found it!
It was crowded! No other DJ set had so many people. However, it was the most disappointing set of all. People were just standing, fighting for inches of space. No one was really connecting with the music, it felt like Coachella. The music itself was okay, nothing remarkable. Matt and I left after a few minutes.
One last word on music: the incredible thing about BM is that you can find any genre of music you like. It is not only an Electronic Music festival place: I saw Disco, Latin, and other genres while there.
I would be lying if I said it was all great. It is definitely tough to be in a place with so much dust for so long, using porta potties for so many days, and showering using baby wipes. Eating frozen food and surviving on a waterfall of snacks, sweating during the day and freezing at night. At some point the conveniences of our modern life become a mirage.
We were also hit by terrible weather. Our entry was delayed because of rain. On Tuesday it poured and the roads became impassable: desert soil can’t absorb water so it stays on the surface until the sun dries it. You can’t walk with your boots on the resulting mud. A lot of people in tents had a hard time. The desert can be moody and hard to cope with. On the positive side, we had two days without dust, and the Playa was extremely crisp and clear. Sometimes we would see rain curtains in the distance, mixing up with the mountains or engulfing the man.
The one thing that I feel conflicted about BM is the waste of money and resources. On Saturday night, the giant wooden structure of the Man is burned in a firework spectacle. As I was watching it, I kept thinking about the cost of this structure, how it had only really existed for a few days, and it was now being burned to ashes. I felt that BM embodies the worst excesses of consumerist society and takes them to the extreme by celebrating and glorifying them with fireworks and music. This feels ironic given the counterculture nature of the movement, and the language that has been developed to differentiate itself: the regular world is called the default world. Leaving the festival is known as: Exodus.
Nevertheless, there is a tension here. All of those elaborate mutant cars cost a lot of money to build, yet, people put so much time and effort into it, that when you step into one of them, or you stare at the art, you really feel surrounded by this bubble of love that was put into building them. Walking by BM feels like walking through a landscape that blooms in the love that everyone puts into making it a unique seven-day experience.
P. S. None of this would have been possible without Ed’s tireless work, and Matt’s dot connecting skills. I am very thankful to both of you for taking me along and opening my mind and soul to the Playa