MOOP - it's not just a band on South Park

jonnie — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:29:35 GMT

At this halfway point between burns is good to reflect on the "leave no trace" ethos of burning man. We bourgeois bohemians are clean, brave and (ir)reverent, and we want our environmental hygiene to show it, even out in the middle of the North Nevada desert.

Thus: the subject of this post: Matter Out Of Place, or MOOP. We have all sinned against the "leave no trace ethos" at one time or another. Some of the general offenses include

1. cigarette filters
2. feathers (from wind-shredded boas)
3. bottle caps
4. glowsticks
5. grey water sludge

Of course, this creates a MAJOR pain in the ass for the people who have to pick up after us in the weeks and months after we have gone home to our boboesque enclaves (Berkeley, Sedona, Taos, etc.)

Many of us bobos are obsessed with typical bourgeois matters: keeping up appearances, competing with our neighbors, buying fancy new gadgets. Being bohemians at the same time, we also feel guilty about such obsessions. Chill bobos, it's "all good." In this case, these so-called "bourgeois" obsessions can bring "progressive" & socially responsible results!

1. No one wants to be a slob. Just think the last time you drove by a swap meet. Think of your neighbors who don't mow their lawn. The bourgeois in you says "low-class." The bohemian in you says "maybe the grass just wants to grow." But keeping your camp tidy means less MOOP in general. Don't feel like you're a "Sell-out" just because you're keeping your camp nice and clean!

2. Be "Greener-than-thou". Competition is such a "bourgeois" trip, especially where it comes to establishment values, like making more money or getting your kids into an Ivy League school. But what if you're competing to be the "greenest" camp? if you're going to look down at your neighbors, let it be for something justifiable, like them generating too much MOOP! Use the handy map from the BRC website to determine where you stand: http://www.burningman.com/environment/playa_restoration/2006_moop_map.html

3. Feel guilty for always trading in for a new car, for changing your computer every few weeks? The cycle of planned obselence is a vicious one, and if you're a bobo, chances are you've fallen right into it. But sometimes newer IS better. In the coming weeks, check this space to find out the tools you need to be the greenest, most functional, MOOP-free camp ever!

Suggestions for how to cut down on MOOP would be most welcome. Regards, HJ

posted in bobo burners - 2 replies

What is a bobo, and why are they "burners"

jonnie — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:01:19 GMT

The Burning Man festival is one of the largest countercultural festivals in the world. Every Labor Day weekend close to 40,000 people go to the Nevada desert to take off their clothes, dance to techno music, and blow shit up. From its inception on a beach near San Francisco 20 or so years ago, "burners" have practiced "radical self-expression," and a "gift economy," creating an alternative to the market-driven, media spectator values of a dominant society. Rebels with a cause, burners are obviously individuals dedicated to "fight the power" at every opportunity, a thorn in the side of mainstream America.

Or are they? I noticed a conundrum when I first attended the festival in 2001. The tech bubble of the 90s was beginning to deflate even then, weeks before the terrorist attacks of 9/11. But still, as I walked along the "playa" (burner speak for the desert environment where the festival takes place) I noticed many extravagant pieces of art on the scope of the Medici or Versailles, camps ringed by massive recreational vehicles, and gigantic art cars (more like art buses), moving tapestries that are some of the most spectacular sites of the festival, that could not have existed without being backed by some extreme market capitalization. By the time I scammed my way into a Silicon Valley sponsored dinner of lobster risotto, prepared by one of the most famous chefs in San Francisco, in a tent that could have housed an arena football game, I knew there was something more here than a bunch of pierced anarchists throwing M-80s around.

In fact, I've come to realize that the Burning Man Festival represents the epitome of a new cultural attitude that New York Times columnist David Brooks examined in his book, also released in 2001, "Bobos in Paradise":

“Throughout the twentieth century it’s been pretty easy to distinguish between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture. The bourgeoisie were the square, practical ones. They defended tradition and middle-class morality. They worked for corporations, lived in suburbs, and went to church. Meanwhile, bohemians were the free spirits who flouted convention. They were the artists and the intellectuals - the hippies and the Beats. In the old schema the bohemians championed the values of the radical 1960s and the bourgeois were the enterprising yuppies of the 1980s.”

But according to Brooks, it’s “now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping baker . . . I found that if you investigated peoples attitudes toward sex, morality, leisure time, and work, it was getting harder and harder to separate the antiestablishment renegade from the pro-establishment company man. Most people, at least among the college-educated set, seemed to have rebel attitudes and social –climbing attitudes mixed together. Defying expectations and maybe logic, people seems to have combined the countercultural sixties and the achieving eighties into one social ethos.”

While Brooks is critical of the bobo phenomenon, I think there is something to be said for them. Marrying social status with social consciousness, and idealism with the pragmatic means to achieve those ideals, can be a powerful thing. So, in identifying Burning Man as the ultimate "bobo" phenomenon is not a put-down. In fact, I offer this tribe as a place where "bobo burners" can come out the closet filled with their Birkenstocks and Armani suits, put on some goggles and hot pants, and get on their dusty tricked out single gear bikes and ride in all of their glory. Bobo burners, the world is yours!

posted in bobo burners - 12 replies

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MOOP - it's not just a band on South Park

What is a bobo, and why are they "burners"