Monday, Aug. 18.

The wind arrived last night, and it didn’t stop all night, or all the next day. And with it came the dust.

It’s been curious to be so relatively windstorm-free for what, 11 days? (counting the off-playa hiatus). Every other time I’ve come out here, there’s always been a whiteout as I was arriving. The first time, I’ve got to tell you, it was pretty unsettling. But it was also one of those moments you don’t ever forget; you don’t forget who you were with, or what you were wearing, or what music was playing, or exactly how you felt.

So coming in and out of Gate road now that the wind is here puts the community imperative on you. Yes, you want to get where you’re going. And you probably want to get there faster than 5 miles an hour. But if you do, you kick up the dust. And the wind carries the dust across the whole camp. So you don’t go faster than 5 miles an hour, and if you DO see someone going faster, you give them the palms up sign out the window, or you hear them get scolded on the radio.

(A little word about the radio. The radio is the only way of communicating out here, other than talking face to face. There are no phones; don’t be silly. So there’s no texting, either, can you imagine? And no IM. But there are radios. Quite a few of them. And there are trunks and channels to route all the conversations. I’ve been on DPW Site channel 4 until today. It’s a great channel. Busy. Important. Vital to the building of the city. But I switched over to Media Mecca today, because that’s more where I belong, really. So goodbye to HazMatt and Playground and Reyposado and Sleep Dep and Big Stick and dozens and dozens of other voices, and hello to Meow Meow and Action Girl and Kid Hack and all the new crew. Nice to be here!)

Every day things happen and you can’t keep up. They put the triangular top of the obelisk up on the Man base today, and I wasn’t there. Last night, they dropped the spiral staircase in the middle of the Temple, and I wasn’t there. Crap. … It’s just like the event week, really. You check out the What Where When booklet and mark it all up with the great things you’re going to do — oh yeah, I DO want frozen eclairs and champagne at 3:30 on Wednesday. Elk dinner? Yes please. Oh, and I really want to go down to that camp where they’re making the cool necklaces.

And then stuff happens and you get distracted and maybe there’s a windstorm, so you duck into a cool-looking dome and there’s a nice crowd at the bar and they’re serving icy margaritas and what the hell, let’s just hang out here for awhile. That’s just how it goes.

So when I went out to the Temple today, there was the staircase, all in place. Brandon, the guy who built it, was there, too, but he had a migraine, and he probably wasn’t enjoying the moment as much as he might have wanted. What, the heat and the dust and wind and the stress, that doesn’t help a migraine? No, he said, laughing a little. So I suggested a Coca Cola, which I’d heard somewhere was good for a migraine. I hope it helped.

Because Brandon’s been working every weekend for months and months, and every waking moment for the past two weeks, to see his staircase finally dangling on the end of a crane and being lowered into place in the Temple. “We know it weighs 5,001 pounds now,” Brandon said, because a gauge on the crane tells you how heavy the load is.

Shrine was walking around the Temple, too, giving out hits of his very delicious iced tea. “Lots of good stuff in there, too,” he said. Shrine is the artist behind the Temple (but not, he is quick to tell you, the engineer or the architect. “I’m not a math guy,” he said. But he wasn’t being dismissive in the slightest. Just the opposite. He seemed profoundly grateful that there were people around like Tucker, the project director, who could understand his vision and then actually make it happen.

Shrine’s done this kind of thing before. He did the tea house at last year’s Burn, the Tasseograph, and he does lots of other large works. He had a piece at the Glade festival, and the Boom festival in Portugal, and even the House of Blues in Chicago. (”Four months of Chicago winter,” he said. “That was tough.”) But this is the biggest thing, at least in physical dimension, that he’s ever done. Lady Bee called him over the winter and asked if he wanted to take the torch from Peter Best, and now here is is. Twenty two years without a day job, and still busy as hell.

He’s had a work schedule like Brandon’s lately. Like, 11 hours a day for two months straight as he’s come down the stretch. And there’s still tons more to do. In the big geodesic dome that I mistakenly took for a chill space the first time I was out there, half a dozen people are zip-tying crushed aluminum cans together, and painting elaborate patterns on wood, and generally getting ready for the transformation.

Everything you’ll see on the Temple is recovered material. By that I mean, it’s stuff that other people have thrown away, or has washed up on the shore. The only exception is the lumber for the poles, and they were harvested in sustainable fashion. But mostly, it’s stuff other people don’t want any more. The discards. The Baksurra Sagrada, the sacred trash.

“It’s transforming,” Shrine said. “You’re taking what other people have no use for and giving it new life.” Shrine knows the power that the Temple can have. People take things out there all week, things they’d like to put behind them, maybe, or mourn, or try to forget. “There have been women who’ve taken the dress they were raped in and put it out here (to watch it burn),” he said. “They have intentions for a new life.

“The toughest times are when you have to let things go, but it can transform you.”

I have a few things for the Temple this year, too, including a couple of photos of my dog, Gracie, a chocolate lab who died in February. The Temple burn is one of the few remaining days of ritual in my life, and I know I’m not alone (not in the belief, and not on that day.)

In other news, the Center Cafe continues to rise. In fact, there’s a bit of a changing of the guard going on there now. I was going to say that most of the heavy lifting is finished, what with all the holes dug and the poles placed and the cables strung and the screens hung, and all of it holding rock solid in the steady wind. But that would diminish the work of the Decor people, who’re starting to become the center of all the energy now. But still, you understand how he feels when one of the old crew talks about what’s going to happen next and he says, “You know, all the art shit.”

All the art shit. That and more, brother, that and more.

Feeling bookish? You want coffee and wifi with that? That spells Berkelouw’s on 19 Oxford Street, Paddington. It’s open 7 days a week, 9.00AM until late (around 11.00pm or midnight) . There are three storeys of books - second hand ones on the top floor and new, rare and antiquarian books for all tastes. It [...]

The Man burned last night. Three of them, in fact. And I feel like I’ve been to Burning Man, circa 1993.

Here’s what happened:

It was another brutally hot day of building and pounding and digging and trenching and setting up shade and erecting posts and laying out flags and getting camps squared away.

It is really goddamn hot. But maybe it’s just me. No one mentions it, or not much, anyway. It’s not like when there’s a little heat wave in SF, and everybody can’t stop talking about the weather. Here, not so much. It’s hot. Yeah, so? You were expecting something else in the Nevada desert in the middle of August? Grab some shade if you have to, but bring me a hammer on your way back.

Meanwhile, everything continues to expand, the desert sprouting new encampments the way cells split in a science movie. Where there were two, now there are four. Where there was nothing, now there’s a trailer. Or six.

Still, there is still an immense feeling of limitless space. There is plenty of room for everybody. And the real shape of the camping area hasn’t really emerged yet. There are street signs going up everywhere, and I find myself looking for the lamp posts that line 6:00 to help negotiate a path over to the Depot. But there’s nothing that looks like a real Esplanade yet, and there aren’t any giant sound systems pounding music into the day and night.

But the city is growing. And there are more people arriving every day. And hundreds, maybe thousands, more will come in on Monday when the art camps and other big enterprises get access to the playa. So everything is going to ramp up again.

Last night, as the sun went down and the full moon came up (”Hey you hippies, check out the moon!” the radio crackled), people started asking each other when they were “heading over,” kind of like the way you talk on Burn night when you are deciding what time to head out to the Man.

I’m a rookie. I didn’t know what they were talking about. But it turns out that there’s a pre-Burn, or little Burn, or Little Man Burn, or whatever you want to call it, in the last days of the week before the numbers in the city really start to swell.

When night finally fell, they torched two men and a woman (Lady Liberty), plus a pyramid. (But there were no glowies or blinkies or el-wire, and only a handful of LED headlamps.) It was a Burn without all the trappings of a rave.

It was different. It was as if we all had gone back in time. I’m making this up, but it felt like what I imagined it might have been like back in ‘91 or ‘92 when the gathering first moved to the desert. Or maybe that this was some regional Burn in an area that hadn’t really caught the fever yet. The scale of it all was decidedly human.

You ran into people you’d met over the past week and just stood and talked and laughed. It seemed like you knew half the people there, or they knew you. And they were friendly and chatty and didn’t once mention that it was hot in the daytime. Everything was smaller and more intimate.

And there were the happy coincidences and synchronicities that are so very much a part of what happens at Burning Man. You need something? It appears. You’re feeling a little tired and stressed and thirsty? Oh, here’s a beer. And a shot of Irish whiskey. Down the hatch. And here’s someone who sits down next to you in the dust and talks about the real Man burning early last year.

Jackrabbit had had dinner in town, and she struck up a conversation with a couple there and invited them back out to the playa for the evening’s festivities. I’d say they were in their late 50s or early 60s, and they’d never been near Burning Man before.

As they stood there in the darkness and the light from the fires played across their faces, I said, “Kind of romantic, huh?” They leaned into each other a little bit, and Walt said, “I want to come here for the whole week now.”

See you when you get here.

As you walk around Sydney, it pays to be alert to the amazing art works that you can encounter. Here are three of them that I found yesterday, just by walking around. Brett Whiteley’s matches - titled “Almost Once” - This sculptural work can be found at the Domain. While Whiteley is known more for his [...]

So I thought it would be a good time to take a look at how things are shaping up so far. First up is Center Camp. The shade screens are still going up (which involves the tedious and difficult task of attaching ties to each and every grommet that attaches to the cables), but already the shade is significant.

Do me a favor: When you get here, lavish the work crew with every gift and kindness that’s in your power to provide.

And on Day Nine (counting forward from Fence Day), the work went on …

Thursday night was ladies’ night at the Commisary.

Men had to dress like women to get into the party. There was an inspection at the door. If you didn’t look feminine enough, you didn’t get in, simple as that. Your correspondent barely passed the test; he had borrowed a skirt that was semi-flattering because it covered up a lot, but he only had a man’s white formal shirt for a top. Once Lexy tied it up around his sternum, thus exposing plenty of midsection flesh, he could take his place inside.

I’m told that the Ladies night used to be just that — just for ladies. But some years ago, Coyote and some co-conspirators crashed the bash by dressing up as women. So that started the practice of requiring the DPW crew and others out here early to get their fem on to party.

Here’s a sampling of some snappies from the party last night. More to come.

First, an admission.

I was off the playa for most of two days. The details are boring; just mark it down to the demands of the default world.

Still, you can tell the people who’ve been out of the dust and the sun for even a little while. Their eyes aren’t as red, their clothes aren’t as dirty and their mental state isn’t quite as blasted as those who’ve been out in it each and every day.

So I’ve become one of “those” people now, and it’s not a happy thing.

Everything got bigger when I was away. Three of the platforms for The Man were constructed, and one of them was even hoisted on top of another one, creating a second level. Eventually, there will be three levels, each of them 16 feet high. And there’ll be spiral staircases inside that you’ll be able to walk up  when the the construction is finished.

“It’s like an obelisk,” said Brian as he squinted into the sun and worked to make the fittings just right. “You know, like the Washington Monument. Or a big prick.”

Oh yes. A mighty big prick.

Center Camp is also taking shape fast. The headers are in place, and the crew even finished the cabling by Wednesday. By Thursday, the netting was going up for shade. Believe me, you will appreciate the shade. And you simply have to marvel at the work ethic of the Center Camp crew. They are just unstoppable. “Everyone on the crew is trying to impress me,” Joe the Builder said. Whatever the reason, things are  ahead of schedule.

Out a little further at the Temple, more of the pieces have arrived. Huge wooden poles will support giant walkways are lying prone in the dust, waiting for a three-crane lift later in the week. There will also be a “double-helix” circular staircase in the middle, the handiwork of Brandon, who’s got years of experience building stairways and took a lot of that knowledge with him out to the desert.

ALL the crews are working hard so that 40-some thousand people will have a safe and sane place to play when they get to Black Rock. Sure, there’s a lot of history behind taking the Burn to these proportions, and you have to wonder how long it can continue to grow. But for now, we’ll stay in the present and what’s going on out here right now. And we’re amazed.

And just so you know, we’re writing to you from a corner table in Bruno’s. My little patch  of Gerlach lost its wifi signal a couple of days ago, and that, combined with my off-playa time, have slowed down the posts. I’m sorry about that!  I should be moved out to the playa in the next couple of days, and the outages should be minimized. But I just want you to know how much I appreciate the thoughtful comments and attaboys left here. And I’ll see you when you get here.

And one final note for now; a couple of you have asked about the state of the playa this year. I’ve seen some reports that it’s the worse it’s ever been, but that hasn’t been my impression. True, some of the dunes are doozies, and they’re going to test your skill on a bicycle. But mainly, I’ve been astonished at the LACK of dust this year. (And yes, I am jinxing things by commenting on it.)

But still, the air was so still the other night as I came off the playa that dust trails left by a barreling big rig just hung in the air like low-lying fog. In five years out here, I’d never seen anything like it. And I’ll tell you what, the scene made me long for some of that beautiful cooling fog near the coast back home in Pacifica. It has been really really hot during the day. I mean, really hot. Did I mention hot?

But the nights? Oh, god, so beautiful.