If you’re into Burning Man culture and its place in the global community — and you live in the Bay Area — you’ll want to attend this great event on March 5th, including a thought-provoking talk by Larry Harvey.  Don’t worry if you can’t make it, plans are in the works to make the video of the speech available on the Burning Man website afterwards.

UPDATE: This event is now at capacity, and we’re no longer accepting RSVPs. Thank you!

Larry Harvey, photo by Scott London

Free Talk by Larry Harvey
and
The Convectional Caucus

This is a free, private event.  If you wish to attend, you must RSVP to: caucus-rsvp [Email address: caucus-rsvp #AT# burningman.com - replace #AT# with @ ]

Join us for this very special event!  This social mixer is a rare opportunity to meet the visiting 100+ Regional Contacts and community leaders from all over the world! They will be in town to participate in the 4th Annual Regional Leadership Summit. Designed to strengthen and spread Burning Man’s culture, the Summit is an opportunity for the visiting Regionals to learn from one another and to be inspired by the Bay Area Burning Man community.

On display will be a cross-section of our cultural fabric from around the Bay Area. Community organizations, Burning Man departments, related non-profits, and art groups will be on hand to share their missions and goals for the future. They will be displaying materials expressive of their methodology for both Regionals and you to absorb and take home, inspiring growth in world-wide Burner culture and events.

At approximately 6:30pm, Larry Harvey will speak, addressing these issues as well as the future of Burning Man’s culture and community in this ever-changing world.  This is his first talk in the Bay Area in several years and is not to be missed.

We hope you’ll join us on the 5th to learn and share what you know. Help us take a monumental step into the future of our global culture!

This is a free and private event.

I had this exact same conversation except I had LD’s argument. What is with people and eternity? Is this lifetime not enough?

So I always thought that Mardi Gras equaled Girls Gone Wild. Period.

I was so, so wrong.

I would get mad, working at the Burning Man festival, when others more wet behind the ears than I and my dusty cranky faction would say, “Yeah, Burning Man’s great! It reminds me of Mardi Gras!”

You don’t know what you’re talking about, my subconscious would scream. Have you any idea what it takes to live in a van for 2 months out of the year, in one of the harshest environments on Earth, laboring like a hard-time prisoner and eating nothing but Pabst Blue Ribbon and bacon? … Do you have any inkling as to the effort involved in building a fantastical city out of THIN AIR for FIFTY THOUSAND PEOPLE, and that we have to TEAR IT ALL BACK DOWN TO NOTHING?

(The subconscious, you see, can become quite the Bill Hicks-level righteous aggravationist when faced with 10-hour days under the hot sun in hangovery dust storms.)

But you know what? On Friday and Saturday nights? When we’ve built the city infrastructure and every-thousand ticketholders have come and added the bells and whistles and finally put down the tools to suit up in their finery and go out on the town and look at what other people have been working on all year in their spare time? It DOES remind me of Mardi Gras. Now that I’ve been to Mardi Gras as a New Orleans resident, I get it.

dear Pan, please bless the proceedings and continue scaring the little children. Amen

My first parade ever was Muses, on Friday night. They’re the only all-woman Krewe which marches after nightfall, and I heard it was the best one, with the best throws, so we braved traffic and crippling cold weather to post up in front of the corn dog stand on St. Charles and watch the art cars — er, Mardi Gras parade floats — do their thing.

Krewe d'Etat king for a day. Sorry for the grainy cameraphone pix but you see just what i saw

Before Muses, which had moved from the Thurdsay due to rain, we saw the Mystic Krewe of Hermes, Le Krewe d’Etat, and the Krewe of Morpheus parades, all on the same route. If you don’t know what any of that means, then you’re up to the speed I was at a month ago, so do your own research. Mardi Gras is a fascinating, culture-rich, old-world-taken-from, across-all-barriers holiday that (this sounds corny but) makes me proud to be an American.

soldiers, marching bands, dancing girls, fire-bearers, creepy hooded men on horseback, punishing sound systems ... yep, all things i like

And just like at the Burning Dude, on the weekend anyway, attendees revel in distributing and/or collecting useless crap that, for one night only, seems like treasure. MOOP! I gave in though: Two boxes of Mardi Gras beads, all colors and sizes, somehow made their way back to my house. Right now they sit in my closet, waiting for the day when I till the weeds out of my back yard. Then I can throw the beads up in the tree, and if they fall out, they won’t mess up the rental gardening equipment.

all their floats had themes about how to please a woman. this one was the cutest

Indeed, the Mystic Krewe of Muses did bust out some good throws. I caught a reusable grocery bag, a stuffed-animal toy for the dog, and a necklace and matching bracelet made of high-heeled Barbie shoes. The Muses’ grand prize throw — the object of the game, if you’re that serious about throw-collecting at parades — is a custom-decorated real shoe, gaudied up with glitter and tassels and puffy paint. Talk about useless. But like I said, for one night, it’s gold.

The actual point of the parades, of course, is not to throw and/or collect beads … really, the whole City of New Orleans agrees to come out to party at the same time, to lay down their weapons and insecurities, and to make eye contact with — and mutually celebrate — the rest of their hometown. Each bead-throw is a person-to-person gift exchange (“Throw me something, Mister!”) … a way for those riding on the floats to make people happy, and for those on the street, a way to reinforce the sometimes-shaky notion that most people, given normal circumstances, are really really nice.

The tourists? They’re on Bourbon Street. The rest of Mardi Gras is for us.

“INFJs you slowly learn to resent, INFPs you quickly learn to forget.”

So true. Resentment is like a slow poison that takes time to become toxic. INFP’s are BORING, sickly sweet and I always want to make them blush or cringe, push them past the pretty wrapping paper of their novel reality and embrace the dark side. bwuhahaha. Doesn’t really ever happen and so they aren’t that memorable except for being annoying and childish.
- token thought – “wow… your that nice guy that just has no fizzle… I have no room in my life for nice guys, I’m here to conquer the insufferable ego maniacs and battle with the know it all’s, no time for fairy tales and moonbeams.” That’s not to say that some people don’t need or deserve to have a sullen,sweet,safe and preoccupied significant other in their life, it’s just not me.

“INFJs love to energetically argue, and usually can’t stop, even when they’re getting the crap kicked out of them”

Oh yes. I love a good argument I can feel passionately about. Puts the meaning into life, because if you don’t feel passionately about something, anything, are you really living?