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For any Burning Man person who is wondering ... yes, I'm that Joseph Dunphy, and no, I'm not going to apologize to you for that fact. Anybody else who is wondering what that was all about can drop by Embers

burningman.artshost.com/

where all will be explained. As I am not one of those people who believes that one has a first amendment right to troll in the location of one's choice, this was going to be a moderated tribe, before I decided to make it into something more like a blog. A tribe for what? Let's say that I knew you from elsewhere online, and you wanted like to bring a few friends and publicly chat. Here would have been a place where one could do that, and maybe there I will set up such a tribe, eventually.

Let's just not chat about Burning Man, though, on that other tribe, because the topic is beginning to get a little tiresome for me

burningman.artshost.com/Green_...se.html

Burning Man offered me maybe a few hours of surrealistic fun in exchange for a few years of being harassed and defamed by drug addled psychopaths. I can already hear somebody telling me that times have changed (haven't they always), the old people have moved on, and the new people are awesome. Maybe they are. But memories of incidents such as the one in which a member of BMORG, on hearing about my mother's death from cancer, "joked" about me keeping her decomposing body in my attic, and then getting supported by the regulars on ePlaya as he did so, just won't go away. That's there, it's part of history for me, and so any experiences I would have at BRC henceforth would be soured for me in advance.

One question that never gets offered a real answer by the true believers is "exactly what does one get for one's $250". "No expectations, dude" ... what a ripe load of fertilizer. Some of us have to work for our money, some of us very hard, and do have the crazy idea that before they spend a lot of it, they might want to have a reason to do so. The spectacle is, by all accounts, greatly diminished. Where the art cars were once giant mechanical flaming dragons and the like, now they are go-carts wrapped with christmas tree lights. The community aspect was, while I was there, greatly overstated, the fuss made over it elsewhere a tribute to what urban life had become for many - a bland greyness in which having somebody say "good morning" to one was a major life event, instead of something more or less taken for granted. But times changed, the 90s ended, and the world got friendlier - note that I didn't say friendly. Just friendlier. The fuss is no longer made, and the question presents itself - what would one be spending one's money for, if one went out?

If you calculate the actual population density of BRC, there is not the space for the mega-projects once daydreamed about, and hardly anybody has the money for them any more, not even in the once cocky Bay Area, now brought low by the same forces of downsizing and outsourcing that have long been the blight of the economic lives of so many of us living further to the east. Yes, the nekkid grrrls were very nice to look at a few years back. One of them in particular, a psychology major from Oregon, sticks in my mind to this day. But one can only stay as fascinated by the body as one can become by the spirit inhabiting it, and in most cases, the drug use had left a blankness where the soul should have been found; there was nobody there to connect to, no thoughts to share, and little feeling other than a rage at anybody who, however unintentionally, would reveal the emptiness to be found within a beautiful shell. Not very satisfying, and courtesy of Voyeur Video, one apparently doesn't even have that any more, though one does get to deal with hordes of frustrated male adolescents, whose sole interest seems to be in scoping out the naked female flesh that their dating lives will never offer them, for a variety of excellent reasons.

Which is why, if one does the interactive art thing elsewhere, the non-clothing optional thing could be seen as being a positive thing; one loses the element of sexual opportunism that drives so much of the really unpleasant activity at events like Burning Man. Which, I admit, could be seen as having a "let them eat cake" tone from the point of view of those coming of age now, who never had an opportunity to have that sort of experience, but I'm not talking about what they should be doing, I'm talking about what I want to be doing and why. As far as I'm concerned, the kind of little, local arts events which one can set up in a city park or forest preserve with a few friends more than meets those desires of mine which Burning Man addressed, to the extent that they could be by the event itself, in a much friendlier setting, at far less expense.

Consider, for example, one of the incidents involving one of the MANY burners accused of being me, that helped bring me notoriety for years. Camp JiffyLube had been forced to take down its sign by an allegedly homophobic sheriff (I'm inclined to side with the camp in this), and somebody had suggested a way of getting around this by restructuring camp layouts; later on one of my own lists, I pointed out how that suggestion, with a few modifications, could help reduce the long complained about theft problem. Even this mild effort at problem solving brought howls of outrage. Once, the stay in the desert was reportedly a chance to exercise one's ingenuity, but within the current cultural constraints, all that remains is a week long exercise in masochism. No thanks.

That having been said, once one takes out aspects of burning which really aren't a good idea in Chicago (eg. the creation of giant burning effigies) and has whittled it down to a small quiet arts gathering in the woods, what one has really isn't much like Burning Man at all, and to refer to it as "burning" is to attract the very element some of us would like to get away from. I am not unaware of the presence and attitudes of the burningman tribe, so no such events will be announced here. Nor will I ever post anything here which would ever help anybody find me in real life. What then, will I do here?

I don't know. Let me think about that.


Oh, one thing I should make clear:

I refrained from setting up a guestbook for my homepage for a reason. I write about the crazies, and then it's over. I will, therefore, very much not be amused if somebody signs up for one of my tribes and wants to have a discussion with me about one of the pages on that site.

The tribes I create are for the discussion of hobbies and interests. Leave the drama outside.


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