ISO- New BFF. Mine is broken. Looking for someone with a rational concrete thought process, witty sense of humor, knows how to tell time and perhaps wears a watch, has a vague idea of reality, is a liberal, and has little to no children.
Oh…and can roll with my punches of truthiness.
Robots need not apply. I already pissed off the one I have.
Wed. May 27, 2009
New Orleans, LA
(the backbone of middle Amerika; the soggy bottom of Old Man River)
Hi. I’m Summer Burkes. I just moved from the crispy Bay Area to the sweet warm fog of New Orleans and as a DPW/Gate desert rat, I experience a swampy deja vu on the daily. Here are the top ten similarities between Burning Man and New Orleans I’ve noticed so far.
1. You can walk down the street with booze in your hand, all the time.
2. You encounter random parades, second-line marching bands thrumming with brass and drums to hoardes of ass-shakers, and sexy “pony” girls pulling a modified shopping cart chariot with a man dressed as a flamingo.
ya heard?
3. Sometimes it smells. And you love it.
4. Everybody parties, including the teetotalers, because they know that death is certain - but life is not.
5. Large groups of dirtbags hang out on the sidewalk — messy dreadlocks, facial tattoos, Carhartts held together with leather patches and dental floss, hand-studded denim jackets with the sleeves cut off displaying various clubs and allegiances, tallbikes sprawled out on the ground, dogs running everywhere, and other folks yelling at them to put their dogs on leashes. (DPW)
6. Reconstructed, deconstructed, renovated, half-falling-down structures intermingle with awesomely beautiful hand-crafted buildings — because it’s all pretty and who gives a crap about material possessions and symmetry anyway.
looks like a job for the DPW
7. Poverty, and/or comfort in squalor, and/or the realization of how things should be in America dictate that a good portion of the population mines “obtainium” — the detritus others throw out.
8. Some people complain about the heat, while the hard-heads truly married to the city simply mention it as a point of fact.
9. After the tourist season, the city empties out, the hard-heads hunker down, the storms arrive to whip everything to pieces, things get weird, and everybody left gets to know each other WAY better. (Cleanup / Playa Restoration)
10. Nothing makes people want to serve humanity and live in the moment more than the constant knowledge that at any time, if we don’t look out for each other, we could all be swept away.
…It is this last point that gets me all choked up and makes my throat wring itself. The outpouring of love, service, volunteerism, and community action I’ve seen in the Crescent City is truly mind-boggling. In my next posts, I hope to profile a few of the badass organizations here which, while not created by the Burning Community, remind me an awful lot of our shared philosophies.
There are myriad ways to take what you’ve learned in the desert and apply it to your hometown. Hopefully the detailing of some of these organizations will serve as a model for what you can do to occupy yourself in the months away from home — and to carry on to others about a Better Way To Be.
Stay tuned…
My favorite playa projects were all started around this time of year. There is just enough time to visualize, begin work, screw up, fix it and complete it. I’ve pulled off things that were beyond my skill set, that took twice as long as I’d hoped, that were my most rewarding creations.
Here are some of my playa pro-tips:
If you’ve got a flicker of an idea, head to the supply store now. Walk the aisles. Let the materials come to you. Fabric stores are a lightning field of inspiration for me. Bonus: buying supplies now will help offset the costs that accrue in the lead-up to the playa.
Simple, cheap and clever: I swiped this mantra from a friend who is a real do-er. Good stuff.
Schedule project time during the week and not just big weekend pushes. An hour here and there really adds up. If you’re able to cut and measure in one night, you’re that much closer to being finished. Chipping away at the steps makes projects more approachable and less tiring.
Double the amount of time you think the project will take. I have a bad habit of convincing myself that because I’ve done something before, I can do it in half the time now. This is magical thinking.
One project at a time! If you work on one thing at a time, you are more likely to have a finished project instead of a pile of junk and two half-dones that you’ll “finish on the playa.” In my experience, finishing things on the playa does not work out because I’d rather be riding my bike checking out your art than sitting in camp finishing mine.
If you start now you may just pull off that giant scented candle/DJ booth/dancefloor/actual working candle.
Cheers to finishing early.
In a manner quite fitting to our year of Evolution, the Burning Blog team is happy to share some very exciting news, just in time for the hot summer planning season for Burners everywhere (100 days today - yep, check your calendar, it’s true!). The Burning Blog is evolving again - this time, with a chorus of new voices we hope you’ll enjoy more than ever.
image by Ron Halbert
The Burning Blog has its roots in 2001 when Danger Ranger’s Silver Seed Tour , and Feeding Tofu To Cowboys (reports from the DPW fray during setup) showed the world our first crack at this thing called “blogging” on Burningman.com. Since then, we’ve continued to nurture the blog concept and developed this space — a blogger was part of the setup crew for many years, and in 2007, we jumped in with both feet, creating four different content areas under one blog “roof” - still covering “Building Black Rock City”, but also documenting the Environmental efforts of the Green Man theme, sharing stories from “Black Rock City Yearround”, and reporting on the extensive activity around the Burning Man network as covered by our roving staff member, Bex, in the Regionals Blog. In 2008, talented writer/photographer John Curley told the story of Building BRC in glorious photos and words; that year the blog received more hits and comments than any year to date. (We still like to go back and look at that one.)
But as successful as this blog project has been, we still entered 2009 feeling like there was room to evolve. The Burning Man Project certainly has plenty of outlets for the information that participants need to know to attend the event - the Jack Rabbit Speaks distribution is closing in on 100,000 (!), the website is over a thousand pages deep, and we serve hundreds of mailing lists sorted by location (regional announce lists), topic (announce lists for artists, theme campers, staff, volunteer teams, RC enthusiasts, etc.) — not to mention our printed publications like the Survival Guide and Tip Sheet, etc. Having recently started our Facebook and Twitter presences, our internal “PR” mechanisms are quite well developed - it’s not like we’re lacking outlets for official information, and that kind of use alone wouldn’t really be putting a tool like a blog to its best use anyway.
We’ve long wanted the Burning Blog to grow into a rich, vibrant source of thought-provoking writing for and about Burning Man the culture — but more than that, we thought, this space could also be used to reflect how that culture perceives and interacts with the world around it, and to nurture that school of thought as a public conversation. We know that Burning Man the event has inspired many people, because they contact us every day to tell us so — and when they do, they’re often asking questions or sharing information about the impact of that experience and how it is translating into the rest of their lives.
These folks contact us not just with their thoughts about Burning Man, but with philosophical musings, ideas for projects or collaborations off the playa, stories about interacting with other Burners in the “wild” (the rest of the year), cultural observations, metaphysical questions…and of course, our staff love hearing from everyone about what their experience means to them, but until now, there wasn’t really a visible home for that conversation to reflect back outward again, beyond the one-on-one.
image by Lady Bee
We wanted to change that, so in the spring of 2009, we gathered up our blog team and set about making this dream come true. We brainstormed a list of some of the best and brightest writers and experienced bloggers we knew of in the Burner community, hoping to entice them to join our experiment…and to our delight, they jumped on board. After several months of technical rejiggering and getting the new authors suited up and in the pool, we’re terrifically honored to welcome them now and announce this next phase of the Burning Blog to you, our readers.
The posts from this new team have already begun to trickle in, and we’re tickled pink to invite you to hop in the pool with them and join the conversation. They’ll be bringing us Burner’s-eye-view posts on art, culture, spirituality, technology, and other musings about subjects beyond the playa (and certainly, a fair sprinkling of Black Rock City-related posts, too — it is, after all, the central place in time where our culture manifests for that week in the desert, and we’re well aware that Burners still have plenty to say about Burning Man the event, too). We’re excited to hear from voices that aren’t members of our staff, with opinions we may not even agree with, on subjects we might not have thought of — and we’re really excited to see how our readers will interact with it all.
We hope you’ll take a minute to check out this all-star list of blog contributors, add the Burning Blog to your RSS feed, returning often to comment and join the conversation with thoughts of your own. Sure, the bloggers on our staff (including yours truly) will still be here, sharing views from the Building of Black Rock City, stories from BMHQ, and occasional sprinklings of official stuff or musings of our own…but the real voice of the Burning Blog is about to get a whole lot more vibrant and diverse, like our community is — the way it ought to be, and the subject matter that’s covered is really about to expand blossom catch fire.
We really hope you will enjoy this evolution and join us in welcoming these fantastic writers. In a way, this could herald a new era for the culture of Burning Man, reflecting more accurately the many faces of participants everywhere who believe that Burning Man is a way of looking at life and ourselves — we know that it’s a lot more than a week in the desert, and we hope you’ll enjoy reading and talking about everything else it has come to mean to us as a culture and a community.
Please come back often and let us know what you think.
This is so freaking hilarious.
Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause Of Dorm Fire
Imagine starting or ending your day like this. It was extremely relaxing just watching this. Going to call my massage therapist right now. Also try to educate myself more on the practice and techniques of massage therapy, yoga and reiki. Needing to get back to the center and focus with grounding calm energy.
I would imagine this practice would be a very powerful tool for couples.
Also going to somehow pipe in this music at work and see if people notice and the difference it makes in the overall mood.
“We spend a third of our life sleeping. No matter what we do, however virtuous or non-virtuous our activities, whether we are murderers or saints, monks or libertines, every day ends the same. We shut our eyes and dissolve into darkness,. We do so fearlessly, even as everything we know as “me” disappears. After a brief period, images arise and our sense of self arises with them. We exist again in the apparently limitless world of dream. Every night we participate in these most profound mysteries, moving from one dimension of experience to another, losing our sense of self and finding it again, and yet we take it all for granted. We wake in the morning and continue in “real” life, but in a sense we are still asleep and dreaming. The teachings tell us that we can continue in this deluded, dreamy state, day and night, or wake up to the truth.”