So what else was there to see at Burning Man besides Beyond Beauty Camp, you wonder quietly to yourself. Well, frankly I don’t know. I was busy scrubbing feet, okay? Here’s a little taste for you…these pictures only make me wish I’d been able to see and do more while I was there, I tell you. There was so much going on.
But let’s take a little tour anyway, okay? Wait, are you hungry? Could you do with some breakfast?
Picture by Chrysa Rose
This here is Pancake Camp. Their sole purpose is to make pancakes and distribute them to one and all. Their other sole purpose is to play cheesy music, and let me tell you something about Neil Diamond. If you have never heard “Sweet Caroline” in the company of twenty or so folks covered in glitter and joyfully consuming some righteous chocolate-peach pancakes? You have never really heard it. And when I say “heard” I really mean “Belted out at the top of your lungs” because it’s one of those weird facts of life that while no one really likes Neil Diamond, everyone knows the words to “Sweet Caroline.” Or most of them. Most of the chorus, anyway. You know: “SWEEEEEET CAR-O-LINE! Dun dun dun! Good times never felt so GOOOOOD!” Everyone knows that part at least.
We at Beyond Beauty became friends with many of the lovely Pancake staffers, several of whom would come to the salon to ease their weary pancake-making selves in the afternoons. We were careful to keep on their good sides. This is always a good idea when dealing with people who make pancakes.
This is just someone’s bike, which I think is very cute.
Let’s continue on to Center Camp, which is, predictably, pretty much in the center of the neighborhoods. You have the part of Burning Man that’s the deep playa, which is where all the big crazy art is and where the Man is, and then you have the part (shaped like a big crescent) where people live. This year, thanks to the ever-assiduous Dawn, we were pretty near Center Camp, as opposed to out in the burbs the way we were the first year I came. Last time I spent quite a while at Center Camp…it’s mainly a lot of couches and cushions and rugs and benches and people just sit around and talk and hang out and drink coffee. No vending at Burning Man, absolutely no buying or selling…except for coffee drinks. Hmm. Oh well. Anyway, there is usually some sort of performance going on, some sort of laughably awful spoken word or a cellist or someone playing classical guitar, or something. I didn’t spend as much time there this year as I did in years past because, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, I was very into my camp and hanging out with my campmates.
This is the center of Center Camp, if you will, and these folks are doing capoeira and yoga and aikido and all sorts of stuff. Some people walked the labyrinth as well…Carl said he saw a bunch of people do it on stilts. Crazy, yes?
Every year Burning Man has some sort of theme. The first year I was there the theme was The Body, and all the streets were called things like Gut Avenue and Feet Street. A lot of the art was body themed too. This year the theme was “Beyond Belief” and it was supposed to be something religious or spiritual or something. Here’s what the official blurb was:
“Beyond belief, beyond the dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical ideas of religion, there is immediate experience. It is from this primal world that living faith arises. The intention of Beyond Belief is to explore this mystery. In 2003, we will invite participants to create interactive rites, ritual processions, elaborate images, shrines, icons, temples, and visions. Our theme will occupy that ambiguous territory that lies between reverence and ridicule, faith and belief, the absurd and the stunningly sublime. The human urge to make events, objects, actions, and personalities sacred is protean. It can fix on and inhabit anyone or anything. This year our art theme will release that spirit in the Black Rock Desert.”
I don’t get it either. I don’t think it worked very well, myself. An exception, of course, would be a very nice shrine like this. But let’s continue on.
This is the one and only La Contessa. It is, as you can see, a huuuuuge pirate ship, and this year was one of the things that everyone was talking about. It was just the best, especially when there were people up in the riggins playing music and singing. La Contessa was really too big to tool around the neighborhoods like some of the other art cars, so it was mainly out in the deep playa or at its home camp. Just gorgeous.
Here is another art car, Playa Air. Here you see it stopped in front of our camp, waiting to take some Beyond Beauticians on a flight. Carl got to know the captain of this plane pretty well and he tells me that last year, when Playa Air debuted, the plane would actually rise up about eight feet on scissors jacks,which I think were out of order this year. It was a lot of fun anyway.
Several beauticians putting up their tray tables and getting their seats into an upright position.
Wonderful picture of Dawn and Paul.
Picture by Chrysa Rose
Here, on the way out to the deep playa, is a game of Connect Four. I think this is very silly and very cool. I really liked that so much of the Burning Man art is so interactive like this. I also love it that some folks were sitting around one day and were like, “Hey, you know what would be cool? A giant Connect Four board.”
And here is the town of Dismal, just like the sign says. It’s a theme camp, and the folks who did it really went all out, carting in their own tumbleweeds and everything. They had gravestones and a railroad and a lot of other funny Wild West stuff. You have the big scale installations out on the playa and then you have stuff like this in the residential areas…it’s very well done, but it sort of sneaks up on you. You’d never go looking for Dismal, you just have to come across it on your own. Burning Man is cool that way.
Finally out in the deep playa. This was an installation called Greyman, or something like that. This also gives you an idea of what it’s like to just be walking along and all of a sudden come up on these art things, right on the desert floor.
The Chandelier! Everyone loved the chandelier. As you can sort of see, it is absolutely huge (if you were to stand next to it, your head would come up to about that curlicueo on the right, the one nearest the floor) and absolutely beautiful. Again, the incongruity of seeing this enormously delicate thing settled on the playa floor was really interesting and weird. This is another one of the installations everyone was talking about.
The Temple of Honor. I’m not exactly sure how this works, but the guy who made this makes a big crazy temple every year, and every year he burns it on Sunday night, the night after the burning of the Man. This picture really does no justice to how gorgeous this temple was…it was made of wood and a special kind of paper that burns really quickly, covered with all these black and white patterns and designs. People wrote stuff on it and made smaller shrines and things, stuff about people they’d lost and wishes they had, that were all supposed to be burned with the temple. Really amazing. I’m pretty glad we came home Sunday afternoon for the most part but I do wish I’d stayed to see this go. I’m sure it was stunning.
I don’t know if you can see it, but there’s a person wearing a wedding dress and veil sitting on the ground in front of the temple…sort of to the left. It’s really hard to see. Anyway, I was biking around and noticed that this woman was sobbing, like open-mouthed, grimacing, the whole thing. Just staring at the temple and bawling. I also noticed that some people were taking pictures of her as she did this, and I thought it was the most insensitive thing. I got off my bike and went up to her and asked how she was doing, and she said…I still get embarrassed thinking of this…”I’m fine, sweetie, I’m just doing a performance.” Ah. Hence the cameras. My bad.
The Man the night of the burn. This is the big playa event, for which everyone gets super dressed up and excited. You stand there for about an hour watching all the fire dancers and fire spinners and, in our case, Campmate Paul juggling with fire. We even saw a little tiny kid, couldn’t have been more than seven, spinning fire. I wonder how he learned to do that, like are his parents fire spinners or something and they just wanted him to take up the family hobby? Has he rebelled against the family tradition of macram