Burning Man, rightfully, I doff my cap to it, it wants to become modern and respect the change of society. But I don’t think it translates. And I don’t think that Burning Man will find a way to become infused with what is going on in society. Its vitality is that it is this sort of relic of a time when experiencing things that have no meaning are incredibly meaningful. How it gets weird again is, for me, finding these moments of meaning.

STUART:  

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Burning Man LIVE. I’m Stuart Mangrum and I’m here again with my friend Actiongirl, Andie Grace. And today we are going to talk to a long long-time Burner, who’s also a well-known standup comedian and the author of a terrific new book, Counterculture Vulture that includes a…

MOSHE: 

Subculture Vulture

ANDIE: 

Subculture

MOSHE: 

Subculture Vulture

ANDIE: 

Subculture Vulture

STUART: 

Count-fru-fru-sub Vulture. Anyway, he’s got this cool new book.

MOSHE: 

Oh, we’re not going to take it again. I like this even better. Yeah. Fuck it. 

STUART: 

It has a chapter about our thing in the desert. Who knew that this fellow was also a Burner, among other things? And I’m pretty sure, this is a first for this program, but Moshe is a recovering alcoholic hearing child of deaf Jewish parents. Welcome, Moshe Kasher.

MOSHE: 

It would be wild if it was not a first for this program. I’m a, I think, the first guest on your show that is a 24-time Burner, used to work here, hearing child of deaf adults, one of whom became a born again Hasidic Jew (and I had to pretend I knew how to do that every summer vacation), turned standup comedian, and then was also a rave promoter, a rave DJ, a clean and sober ecstasy dealer. Am I missing anything? Sign Language Interp… It’s gotta be a first, right? It must be.

ANDIE: 

Well, there was that one guy that one time.

MOSHE: 

Oh yeah. That one guy.

STUART: 

Yeah. Identity is such a complicated thing, isn’t it? And thank you for writing a book about six different identities from the six subcultures that perhaps you had to foot it. I want to talk about the one that we all have a foot or a toe or a head in. Let’s start with Burning Man. The beginning of your Burning Man experience was way back in 1996. A 16 year old rave kid; how the hell did you get there? And what happened when Moshe met Burning Man?

MOSHE: 

Well, you know, I got onto Michael Mikel’s weird Cacophony miscellanea mailing list, at some point in my life. 

ANDIE: 

The Rough Draft.

MOSHE: 

Yeah. I just sometimes will receive these like packages of insane fliers and weirdness and just stuff that he’s pulled out of a trunk, I assume, covered in dust with gems inside of it. And he sent me one of my prized possessions, which is a ticket to Burning Man 1996, which is now prominently displayed in my office. And that was the year of insanity, and the first year that I went. 

I was like a 16 year old, clean and sober rave dirtbag, and I heard “There’s a rave in the desert…” That’s it! That’s what I heard. And that was enough at the time for me to pack up a 1991 Ford Escort with five other dirtbags from the rave scene. And we drove in, and we bought, you know, way too little water. And I remember we drove up, and the security apparatus, the gate at Burning Man was just a man and a canned ham trailer with a gun, I think. And he walked up and he must have been high because he goes, “Okay, there’s four of you. That’ll be blank.” I remember it was $65 at the door. “Folks. Think about this. $65, endless tickets available to you at the Gate.”

STUART: 

But that was in 1996 dollars, so I don’t know what inflation has done to that.

MOSHE: 

That’s right. So in 1996, for the listeners, $65 was $65,000. You could buy a house in Vacaville.

ANDIE: 

That’s basically the math. Yeah, that’s it.

MOSHE: 

And I remember he looked in the car and he goes, “Okay, there’s four of you. That’ll be…” (however much that is), and I was like this little rave kid, but I was also like in AA, and had just like adopted this, I was 16 years old and sober about a year, and I just adopted this very annoying moral code that I had learned about in AA.

So I go, “Actually, sir, there’s five of us,” and all of the raver kids who were not in AA looked at me like, “You fucking narc! What are you doing? This guy missed a whole raver!” But we paid our $65 apiece, and we go, “What do we do now?” And he said, “Reset your trip-o-meter and drive straight for eight miles. And at the eight mile mark, turn right. You’ll see.” And that’s all we did. 

We reset the trip-o-meter and drove straight into a dust storm, and it was like the world behind us melted away. And at eight miles, we nervously turned right, and about two miles later, we encountered, what I very quickly realized, I didn’t know what it was, but it was definitely not a rave in the desert. It was some other thing that I had absolutely no context for. And it was a life changing archway that I walked through.

STUART: 

‘96, Yeah, that was the year everything kind of went to shit, wasn’t it?

MOSHE: 

Literally.

STUART: 

And part of that was because someone had decided that the rave camp was too loud and we put it, what, a mile or two miles away from the rest of the camp, so you were actually in a rave camp Burning Man, not in the other Burning Man.

MOSHE: 

Actually, I think I was camped in the city, and I think that it was a mile away. We called it the techno ghetto. And, you could drive. If you can believe this fair listener: I believe there were three rave camps, it might be four, but there was no more than four, and they were all facing each other. It was in a circle and all the sound systems were facing each other. 

So if you stood directly in the center of the four camps you would hear this just cacophonous nightmare of jungle coming from one camp, a camp called Spaz; psychedelic trance coming from another camp, that was Goa Gil and his psychedelic trance denizens. If you’ve ever been to a psychedelic trance party outdoors, it looks as though the participants have not arrived at the party, but have rather emerged from the ground underneath the party, like from below.

ANDIE: 

Sprouting like mushrooms.

MOSHE: 

Like the mushrooms that they are on.

ANDIE: 

That they are eating. Yes.

MOSHE: 

And then Wicked, the Wicked soundsystem, the kind of famous house music crew in San Francisco. And that was Jeno and Garth and Marky and Thomas and superstar DJ Dmitry from Deee-Lite. That was where the techno was. That’s where the dance music was. And it’s because the crusty old Burning Man Cacophony Society dinosaurs had begrudgingly sneered at these ravers that were infiltrating their cool culture-jamming fuck-fest in the desert, and were like, “You can come, but you will not be fully welcomed. You can be sequestered outside of the city.” And that turned out to be a major disaster that first year that I went.

STUART: 

It was a disaster either way you’ve sliced it. But it’s interesting that you made your own Cacophony out there of some big sound camps.

MOSHE: 

That’s right. We had our own Cacophony Society. It didn’t comport to the one that we had entered into.

STUART: 

Screw you guys. You wanted Cacophony. We got Cacophony.

ANDIE: 

We made a literal cacophony for you. Stand right there.

STUART: 

I love the research that you did for this book, Moshe. I actually learned a lot about things I didn’t know much about, or thought I knew about, like Hasidic Judaism. And I also loved the Cacophony event that stood out to you out of the Rough Draft was the same one that got me up off the couch and turned me into a Cacophonist. It was the clowns on a bus, right?

MOSHE: 

That’s right. It’s the most succinct way to understand what the Cacophony Society was trying to do. They set up clowns at all of these bus stops along one bus route in San Francisco, and you would be just a random commuter on your way to work, and all of a sudden a clown climbs on your bus commute to work, and you go, “Oh. Hey, look at that clown. How funny. That’s so sad that he can’t afford a tiny car to get to work. But he’s just like us. He’s taking the bus to work.”

Then you get to the next stop and another clown gets on, and then you get to the next stop, and another clown gets on. And by the time you’re close to work, there’s a whole freakin’ cadre of clowns and you’re sitting there, you square San Francisco resident, are sitting there thinking, “What am I looking at? What is this thing?” 

To me, that is the feeling that Cacophony Society and that Burning Man at its best moments is trying to engender, that kind of jaw drop without explanation, and without a need for explanation. Random, my life has been disrupted in a way that feels both meaningless and incredibly meaningful at the same time.

STUART: 

And these clowns pretend to not know each other. It’s wonderful. 

Now, in the book you refer to your first Burning Man back when it was still very much a Cacophony event in 1996 as being a “waterboard of wonder.” But then, you know, you also write that Burning Man is moved, I love this, from a place where weirdos came to feel normal, into a place normal people came to feel weird.

Does that mean you and I are normal now, or is there still some weird out there that you can perceive?

MOSHE: 

No. See, that’s the cool thing about being old school. You can affect an air of detached “You don’t get it, man.” That’s the whole point of this thing. 

I was doing an event the other day and Nick Kroll, who came to Burning Man with me one year, was saying, “You know, I got there and I realized that dressing normal wasn’t cool here.” And then I said, “Yes, that’s true, except there’s a third level, which is where you start dressing normal again because you’re so cool, that even, you can’t even be bothered. You can’t be bothered to dress up like a Burner. You’ve spent a decade dressing up like a Burner. So now you’re sitting in your regular, your default world clothes looking at everybody else going, “I remember when I wore costumes too!”

But I don’t, I think that – to answer your question sincerely about being normal, I think I finally understand the mission of the Burning Man Project. Burning Man is not a real possibility. You cannot utopitize the world. It’s not possible. Burning Man cannot make the world Burning Man. You know, I was talking to Nick about the same thing that he came up his first Burn this thought that we all have. He was like, “What if this could be life?” And I go, “We would start to kill each other on week two, DAY ONE, week two.”

Burning Man is not a real utopia. It is an experiment, and I think it’s what they meant by that ‘temporary autonomous zone,’ it’s an experiment in temporary false utopia, that hopefully you get a kernel of, that when you go home, you’re not living in utopia, but your soul has been shifted into the utopic zone. You’re different. 

It’s a lot like taking psychedelics, you know. There’s this famous idea that my friend Duncan Trussell was talking about, all the early psychonauts, Ram Dass and company, they had this quote, like, “When you come down, who does the dishes?” Okay, we just traveled the astral plane with Mother Ayahuasca, but now we’re back in our apartment. Who does the fucking dishes? You have to come back to the real world, but you’ll hopefully come back to the real world, having been shoved to the left a little bit. And that’s what happened to me the first time I went to Burning Man. It’s not that life became Burning Man, it’s that I took a little spark of that thing and brought it back home with me and became a different guy.

ANDIE: 

Going further into that, you didn’t just go, and take that experience, though, you started volunteering. You started getting involved with it. How come? Why? Why did you pick the Gate?

MOSHE: 

There’s a few ways to answer that. Every world that I traveled in, each of the segments in my book is like one part history of that world and one part memoir of my time in that world. Every time I went into one of these worlds and they changed me in this profound and permanent way, my next reaction was like, I want to own this world. I want superpowers. I don’t want to be just some guy walking around. I want superpowers. 

And so that’s one way to answer it. When Burning Man changed me and this really big and profound and permanent way – and I think this is a manifestation of ego to some degree – I didn’t just want to be a Burner. I wanted to like drink Burning Man and become, make manifest the thing in my own body. 

But the other answer is really simple. I was actually for a long time content to just party, but my friends one by one started to get picked off by Burning Man work. All of a sudden I had no friends. Everybody was working at the Gate and I was like, I don’t wanna, why would I wanna work? I want to go rave and party and hang out and flirt with people and… 

Then when I got to the Gate, what I realized was there — and I think this is what people that complain about the Gate and they maybe don’t understand — it was the most distilled leftover for me — I mean Gigsville has some of this and other crews have some of this, but to me, it was the most distilled vestigial leftovers of that original Cacophony Society culture-jamming energy. It was the funniest place I’d ever encountered, and it was funny enough and weird enough to spend 15 years up there.

ANDIE: 

You must have some stories about what kept you coming back to be a mile away. I hear you saying the camaraderie and the chaos and the energy of it was compelling and funny. Tell me why.

MOSHE: 

The book is about my life as like a world straddler, and the Gate is, to me, the straddling of two worlds, and that’s part of what I really love about it. The Gate is not Burning Man, but it’s also not the default world. It’s this kind of liminal, and I know that people don’t experience it this way because they’ve been in a 16 hour traffic jam and they dropped acid at the top of the road thinking that the party had started, and only to realize that the traffic jam had started. But for me, the space in between this bizarro, fractal-ated, mind-fuck, Mad Max-ian, Ishtar art fest, whatever it is that’s happening at Burning Man, and the trappings of the real world, the way that the Gate is in between those two things is the way that I got to be this sort of psychedelic TSA agent. I loved that shift. I loved watching people transform. 

The Greeter. That’s Burning Man. You’re in Burning Man, But the Gate is a netherworld. And I think that the energy of the people that work there reflects that netherworld energy. And I think the frustrations that people have at the Gate reflect that netherworld energy. I, controversially I think it’s cool that people are often really pissed off at the Gate because it’s like this birth pang. It’s like this final cramp where the tongs of Doctor Man are coming in and pulling your little head out of the womb, and you’re about to be reborn.

ANDIE: 

Oh, God, it’s true!

STUART: 

I agree that that spirit has been consistent. You know, I think back at the guys who founded the Gate crew, people like Boggman and Abernathy.

ANDIE: 

The guy with the gun.

STUART: 

Yes. Two guys with guns in a ‘canned ham trailer.’ They kind of looked at themselves as like Charon on the River Styx.  

MOSHE: 

Yes!

STUART: 

But they weren’t going to row you across. They were just going to point you, and maybe give you a compass point to follow.

MOSHE: 

1,000%. And I have seen… What I loved about raves, and what I needed about raves, was it was this just love fest. And at the time in my life, in my personal development, that’s what I needed. Raves are actually a caricature of love because everybody literally ingests a drug that makes them feel like they’ve experienced love for the first time. I was clean and sober, but I was as high as anybody in that scene. And I needed this caricature of love to like   pull me out of the kind of depths of darkness that my life had been before that. 

But then when I got to Burning Man, it was this combination of love and comedy that really is who I am. It’s not just good vibes and hugs and beauty. It’s also like terror and ridiculousness and danger. Some of the things I saw at the Gate were the funniest things that I’ve seen at Burning Man ever. And they are memories that I love so much. 

There was a desperation of people who had come from so far away, having done so little research. You know, they would show up without tickets. When we ran out of tickets, things got a little darker up at the Gate. It used to be fun. When there were unlimited tickets, there was a game that the Gate would play. We would search in a vehicle, and if we stuck our hands into a fold up couch and felt like a dreadlock, we’d be like, “Ah ha! Got one,” and like pop a hippie out of a couch. And we woul d play this game where, depending on how cool whoever it was that we found was, we would sell them a ticket at the Box Office. We called it the asshole tax.

If you were like, “Dude, you got me. I don’t know what I was thinking. I just really feel the call,” then we would go, “Okay, face value. Tell your friends in the didgeridoo community that we will catch them if they try the same thing.” But if they came out and they were like, “Fuck you, man. You’re just a cop. It’s wrong of you to be charging me at all,” then there would be a commensurate tax that would get added with each snarky remark until finally the tickets became exorbitant.

And that was fun, you know, and sometimes we would even see people that had made it in and we go, “I remember catching you and I don’t remember you buying a ticket, but now you’re in the event, and maybe you won the game. It’s not my business you’re inside.” 

But now that tickets have begun to sell out, the game goes away and it becomes a kind of a sadder experience. Most of the people we interacted with up there had been scammed or had just decided to, like, drive 10 hours without reading a website and see what the ticket situation was.

And I remember one time these kids came from, I think it was Oklahoma. And they showed up. They’d driven all the way in like the Buick LeSabre, and they were just like, “We don’t have tickets, but we’re here for a miracle!” And I’m like, “We ran out of miracles five years ago. There’s no miracles available.” And they were like, “Please, we got to get in. We feel the call!” And we were like, “We can’t help you. There’s nothing we can do.” And they’re like, “We’ll give you our car,” and we go, “WHAT?” And they’re like, “We’ll give you THIS car. We have the pink slip. We’ll sign it over to you right now!”

Within 20 minutes they were walking their bags into Burning Man and the Gate had a brand new art car. And I would say within 20 minutes of that, that Buick was literally, I’m not joking, upside down in the dirt at the Gate party, crushed on open playa. It was the quintessential ‘This is why we can’t have nice things’ moment, and the Gate crew spent the next five days picking up broken glass out of the Gate. But we had a new art car. It was called “The Hella Awesome” and we drove that thing for years.

ANDIE: 

Oh, my goodness.

STUART: 

Yeah. Those stories do get sadder these days. You know, a couple of years ago, there was a whole planeload of folks from China, I believe, who showed up. They thought they had tickets. They were counterfeit tickets. So their trip to Burning Man, yeah, ended at the liminal space called the airport and they were turned around. But, yeah, they never crossed that line.

ANDIE: 

Rough.

MOSHE: 

The River Styx has run dry, my friends. Sorry. You’re going to have to spend the weekend in Reno. By the way, it wasn’t always people desperate to get in. One of my other favorite stories up at the Gate was a guy showed up from I think North Carolina, in a big, beautiful bus. And there was about 16 people on the bus. They all had tickets. Everybody had tickets, including the driver. This guy had a pine tree, a living pine tree, in the back of the bus. All 16 people got out. We processed their tickets. But the leave no trace rules at the Gate were ‘no live plants.’

So I said to the guy, I go, “I’m so sorry, but you can’t bring live plants in here. The people that run this event are afraid that the detritus will fall off and change the ecosystem, or whatever it is.” And he goes, “Well, I got to bring her in.” I go, “Well, okay, well, I can’t let her in. I’m not allowed to let her in. I suggest perhaps driving back to Reno and getting a hotel room and you could put her in there.” And he goes, “Are you kidding? I can’t leave her alone for a week! That’s why I brought her here!” And I go. “Okay, well, look, dude, I can’t let you in with this tree. That’s just my job. I don’t know what to tell you. You can either do what I just said or you can, I guess, drive back to North Carolina.” And he goes, “Okay, well, I’m driving back to North Carolina.” And he starts up his bus and he does a U-turn and begins to drive back. And as he drove away, I go — I couldn’t help it — I go, “You know, man, I think you really need to reexamine your relationship with this tree.” And he yelled back, “You know, I think that’s not any of your business.” And I realized, you know what? He’s right. It really isn’t my business. Whatever him and that tree are up to, God bless them.

I just really admired… To me, you know, that weirdos go to feel normal, normal people go to feel weird? To me there’s a level of weird that’s like way beyond where we’re operating at. We think we’re weird, and then you meet Tree Guy and you go, “Respect, brother.” Whatever that is, you don’t need Burning Man, Burning Man needs you!

ANDIE: 

Aspirational.

Well, so you volunteered at the Gate for 15 years? And then you stopped volunteering. But you continue to go to Burning Man, is that correct?

MOSHE: 

Well, this is what happened for me in world after world. And this is something that I think happens to a lot of people that decide to volunteer at Burning Man, and that just decide in general to make that shift over that invisible line from participant to professional.

It’s a really natural thing that happens when you go into a world that changes you and makes you feel like alive in this different way, where you wanna, sure you want to own it and have power and social status, and that’s real, and that’s normal and it’s human. There’s also a beautiful part of it, which is like you want to give back to this thing that gave so much to you. You want to be a part of the infrastructure because you want to pour something into the river and not just drink from it. The sad thing about that is the moment you cross that invisible line, you start to see some of the uglier parts. It becomes more of a job. And the magic almost immediately – I mean, magic goes away no matter what. If you stay a participant forever, it’s still never going to be as magical. 

There’s a sad feeling you get when you see like a fire dancer, a contact acrobat doing like a four story fall on some aerial silks while his head is on fire, and then he lands, and you go “Ugh, this again?!?!” You should never have that feeling. But you can definitely have that feeling if you go to Burning Man long enough.

STUART: 

That is the ‘jaded fuck’ feeling.

ANDIE: 

Yes, it is a mixed feeling indeed. 

STUART: 

We’re familiar with that. Yes.

MOSHE: 

I’m sure you are. 

So that happened on a deeper level by working at Burning Man. For me. Maybe this doesn’t happen for everybody. But I think the running out of tickets thing really added to it. I remember this moment where I caught this old school kind of like festival hippie. He had been waiting for a dust storm, and the dust storm came and he ran full speed with his gray ponytail flopping behind him, and his hemp sandals on his feet.

And I saw him and I started running after him. So we’re running. We’re kind of neck and neck in this dust storm, looking over. And I go, “Stop! Stop!” And I stopped the guy, and we went and we sat down and he’s begging me, “Please, man, just look the other way. Let me in.” And I was like, “I can’t do that.” And then I just realized I don’t care; I just don’t care about this guy not getting into Burning Man or stopping this process. I started to realize the work wasn’t fulfilling for me, the volunteering wasn’t fulfilling for me. And I started to feel like a bit of the thing that the hippie had been yelling at me. I started to feel a little bit like a cop. Somebody needs to do the job at the Gate. And I don’t think people should be allowed to sneak in. But I also just didn’t want to be the guy stopping people anymore. I didn’t want to be stopping a grandfather, busting him and making him feel pathetic. It just didn’t feel righteous to me. 

So I was faced with this dilemma because I’d already walked 15 years into this like ‘how the sausage is stuffed.’ How do I go backwards? How can I un-evolve myself? How can I pretend that I don’t know what I know on this side of the line? 

I started this experiment, which is I want to like jump back into the experience of Burning Man from a… I’ll never be the kid that was laying down on open playa feeling like the energy of the earth vibrating in from the beats of DJ Dmitri and the stuff that I’d just seen. That’ll never happen for me again. But I did this really, for me, cool experiment of forcing myself into the position of participant. I put my radio up, and all of the things that I used to, like, get from feeling like “The Man” at Burning Man and I started inviting people who had never been before and following them, like a big rig trucker drafting on the truck in front of them. I would try to like get some of the like, fumes of that person’s experience. 

It hasn’t worked totally, but it’s worked enough that it’s kept me going. And so now I am just Burner #64,573 and damn it, I like it this way.

STUART: 

Well, even if you never go back to being the rave kid, might you go back to being the young man who did a reverse robbery of the Center Camp Café?

MOSHE: 

That was early days. That was my second Burn. Yeah, We all ran in ‘Pulp Fiction’ style with ski masks on. I don’t know if this would go over as well in the era of mass shootings.

STUART: 

Well, we don’t have a café anymore. But still, go on. Ski masks. And you’re all calling each other Honey Bunny…

MOSHE: 

What I would do these days, is I would run in with guns and a ski mask and put the infrastructure of the café back into Center Camp. I would do a reverse robbery of the actual coffee shop because I miss the coffee, damn it.

STUART: 

Bringing in a giant espresso machine.

MOSHE: 

That’s right. Yeah. We would just back one in. 

ANDIE: 

I’m with you on this one. I’m in. Let’s do it.

MOSHE: 

Yeah, we ran in and we did a reverse robbery. We were throwing money at people and gems. We jumped on the counter and we’re like very Pulp Fiction style. And then we ran out and took our masks off and then jumped back in line and we’re like, “Hey, what just happened?”

I feel like the question, “What just happened?,” that is the most quintessential Burning Man question. That is what you’re hoping for. It’s not “I raved last night and that DJ was sick,” although that’s great too. It’s that feeling of like, “What did I just witness? What thing just occurred?”

ANDIE: 

Yeah. It’s an eight day sustained course of “And then I’m like, ‘Wait, what’s that?’”

MOSHE: 

“Wait, what’s that?” will give you an adventure. Every year, guys, I’m sure you relate to this, every year is the year that I’m going to look at The What Where When Guide. I’m going to make a schedule. I’m going to go to a workshop. I’m going to do some holotropic breathing. I’m going to learn how to do puppet making. I’m going to do it!

ANDIE: 

The eye-gazing workshop.

MOSHE: 

Yes, I’m going to do the eye-gazing workshop. I’m going to find my orgasmic bliss… and never… I never can do it. It’s always about walking down the street and going, “Wait, what’s that?” following it for a little while, then going, “What’s that?” and then following it for a little while. That’s the experience that I have to surrender to myself. I’m never going to plan. I’m always just going to see what awaits me.

ANDIE: 

Well, there’s one thing you don’t do out there, though, and sober Burners don’t get a lot of airplay. I want to talk about that because I am too an ex AA and I had a departure from it that was not nearly as grand as yours, but not dissimilar either. So I want to talk about your experience as a sober Burner and a fresh one at that. How did you maintain your resolve? Did you find other sober Burners at first? How did that work for you?

MOSHE:

Well, first, I should say that all of my experiences in the psychedelic world, in the rave world and Burning Man, pretty much every sexual experience I’ve ever had, pretty much every healthy social experience I’ve ever had, has been sober. I got sober at 15, so I don’t have a context. I feel like I’m lucky in that I don’t have a context of being in these spaces and going, “God, this was, I remember when…” You know, “I remember when this experience was this plus molly.” I just don’t have that. And so I think it’s been a little easier for me. 

But I also feel like Burning Man seems like a great place to do drugs. But it’s also a pretty great place to be sober. I’ve never felt this experience of “God, this isn’t weird enough. I wish it could be just a tad bit weirder.” I’ve always felt satisfied with the weird level that I’ve gotten there. 

I do remember my first burn as a, I think, I was maybe a year sober and the Man in ‘96, it was just on a pyramid of hay bales, and there was a bulletin board in front of the Man — I think it was in front of the Man. This was back when a bulletin board was actually functional, could be functional. There were only 8000 people there. 

And by the way, there were 8000 people there, and all the real jaded fucks who’d been there already for a decade were going “8000? This is unsustainable!” And to be fair, that year it definitely was. 

But there was a sign on there that said “Friends of Bill: Meet at the Man at 6.” And I did. And I remember the guy, I think his name is Chris, he was a friend from Oakland AA. I actually knew the guy. And that meeting that year was just me and Chris sitting there on the Man base, which was hay, and saying, 

How are you? 

    How are you? 

You can do it. 

    You can do it, too. 

And then walking our separate ways. 

And then came Anonymous Camp. And then came every good AA meeting, or every good offshoot of that. And now I think there’s eight or nine different clean and sober camps. 

And it’s just like anything else, you know, it’s just like any other subculture, or any other world: it’s grown and become vibrant. I remember the first time I did Shabbat at a camp at Burning Man, it was 50 people and just some rabbi from Chicago who had decided to try to do Shabbat. And last year I went, and if you go there, I mean, it looks like Moses is climbing up Mount Sinai. There’s 2000 people there. There’s Jewish priestesses in all white doing like an incantation and pretending they know American Sign Language to do the prayers. Everything has grown, and so, part of what I try to examine was not just the “Oh God, this thing has changed in this bad way,” but it’s also changed in a really cool way.

The scale of Burning Man has grown in this really profound way, and sobriety is included in that and everything else. And there’s a beauty to the scale. Even as it becomes more like, “Oh God, what is this? This looks like it costs $60,000 to build.” It’s also, “Oh God, what is this? I can’t believe what I’m looking at.”

ANDIE: 

And you can find a meeting in any, like, 24 hours a day out there practically at this point.

MOSHE: 

Absolutely. And like I said, I wouldn’t recommend Burning Man to a person with 30 days sober, but I would definitely recommend Burning Man to anybody with 30 years sober, because it has changed the way that I view sobriety, too. 

All of these worlds that I operated in are interconnected and interrelated. You were saying like these, Stuart, these sort of disparate worlds that I stepped into. But what I’ve come to realize examining my life is that they’re all like a puzzle piece that creates the man that is me, and I wouldn’t be me without all of these different pieces.

STUART: 

And if they’re going to come together anywhere, it’s probably in Black Rock City where, as the saying goes, “There’s a camp for that,” For just about everything.

MOSHE: 

Well, that’s right. If you can think of it, there’s a camp about it. Burning Man in particular is the one place in my life where all of the subcultures that I’ve occupied can exist in the same city, in the same space, at the same time. Burning Man is at Burning Man. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but raves are Burning Man, and they’ve even bigger than four camps these days. There’s deaf camps and sign language interpreting camps. I can do a Shabbat dinner. There was a comedy club there last year. I can literally, in one night at Burning Man, do all six of these universes. And that to me, that kind of waterboard of wonder. That’s what it’s about. It’s like this gavage of experiences.

STUART: 

I had to go to the dictionary and look that one up. Gavage.

MOSHE: 

Gavage. That’s what they do to the ducks for foie gras. 

STUART: 

It sounds so much classier in French than force feeding, but everything sounds classier in French.

MOSHE: 

By the way, if you really want to get gavaged, you can get gavaged all night long. There’s a camp for that.

ANDIE: 

There’s a camp for that.

STUART: 

So, you know, you mentioned the ASL interpreter camp, and by the way, I think they’re still looking for more volunteers, so if you were ever into another volunteer role that might be a good one. I’ve got a deaf photographer on the Documentation Team who always needs somebody to pair up with him and he’s fun.

MOSHE: 

That’s a good suggestion, actually, because how do you go backwards in volunteering too? I mean, that would be the next sort of iteration. Okay, I’m still a Burner. I’m not going anywhere. Could I give back to the community because my ‘give back to the community’ feels so identitarian and connected to being a Gate volunteer. Maybe this is the year that I draft on the experience of a different version of volunteering. I like it, Stuart. I like what you’re talking about.

STUART: 

They say ‘once you take the black, you can never look back,’ but that’s just a saying. That’s not true.

MOSHE: 

That’s right.

STUART: 

Hey, one of the things that you write in the book, you had a long, I think, page and a half description of all the things Burning Man is and isn’t which reminded me very much of the Burning Man Buzz Phrase Generator that we came up with back in 1996 to confound the media. One of the things you say it’s a new kind of religion, which I just wanted you to think about that, since you are experienced in quite a few religions. What do you mean when you say that it’s a religion?

MOSHE: 

I think that it’s pretty obviously become the core kind of moral framework for a group of people. Moral is maybe the wrong word, maybe it’s immoral or amoral framework. I have a degree in religion and I was raised in an incredibly religious milieu in a very strange way, in that my dad was like a born again Hasidic Jew, and I was a pretty much secular kid from Oakland who would, when my dad won visitation rights, fly back to Brooklyn and essentially cosplay as Tevye of the Milkman for six weeks a year.

STUART: 

So you would ‘take the black’ every summer!

MOSHE: 

I ‘took the black’ very early on!

I volunteered there as well. 

But you know, one of the things that I think the American… Okay, we’re about to get philosophical. You guys ready? You guys ready? Buckle up!

ANDIE: 

Born for it.

MOSHE: 

I think that one of the things that the American experiment really failed at, was in our desire to chip away difference. That was a real desire at the turn of the century. And it’s connected actually to my the chapter on deafness. A big reason that American Sign Language was stamped out in the deaf education modality for 100 years was because of oppression definitely, but that oppression was filtered through this desire to end the immigrant difference that was occurring in American society. You had all these immigrant groups, Italian-Americans, Polish Americans, Chinese-Americans, and they all were sequestered in cultural, kind of, zones. You know, you had Chinese newspapers and Italian-speaking community centers, and there was a movement in America that said, “No, we don’t do that. This is the melting pot. Get rid of these differences. Everybody’s the same. Everybody’s American.” 

Now, one of the byproducts of that experiment was that all of the rituals and all of the customs — not so much the religion, but the religion of the Americas became kind of like homogenized and Americanized — that these rituals and customs got lost over the years.

You know, you go to Europe and you see like these weird Burning Man-esque things occurring in the streets, but it’s a part of the culture. And so the hippies, and by extension the Cacophony Society and the Suicide Club and our early progenitors, they recreated — and you see this in hippie culture, they’re recreating this kind of homebrew of improvisational religious ritual. “Oh, we’ll do a didgeridoo and we’ll light nag champa, and we’ll have a Buddha, but we’ll also have Hindu imagery, and we’ll take acid and…

STUART: 

And do hot yoga.

MOSHE: 

Yeah, hot yoga. Yeah. It always ends in hot yoga. 

And so that’s what the Cacophony Society I think was trying to do, was trying to recreate this feeling of wonder that had been stripped away by this American experiment of functionality. And so Burning Man is the iteration that it ended in. 

And people worship Burning Man in a way that is not even close to dissimilar to the way people ritualize a kind of traditional religion. They believe in it. We have a moral core. We have these principles that we live by. We have these customs. We have lore and mythology. We have prophets. We have Michael Mikel and Marian and Larry Harvey, who’s gone now, but we see his imagery. We have an idol that we worship!

Is it a religion in that people all believe the same thing? To some extent, yes. Is it a traditional religion? No, but I don’t really see the difference in a person that says “I am a Burner. I live according to the 10 Principles. This is who I am.” So in that way, yeah, I think it is an American religion, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

STUART: 

Well, you know, I asked Larry Harvey that question once on a stage and his answer, I’ll never forget, he said, “Burning Man is exactly like a religion, except with no higher power.” It is very much a secular humanist religion if it is a religion at all, right?

MOSHE: 

You’re telling me God himself said that?!?!

STUART: 

You mean our Ramada Ding Dong? Yeah.

MOSHE: 

Our fearless leader? One of my favorite stories is about the time we fucked Larry’s burn. It was about the Inner Circle Pass.

ANDIE: 

I really wonder how close I was standing to you on that particular night.

MOSHE: 

I’m sure you were right there. You seem like the type that might have enjoyed it. Or maybe not. I don’t even know. I remember. There’s this perk that some of the staff gets; I don’t know if this is a deep, dark secret, but people see you in there. It’s called the Inner Circle Pass. It allows you access to get really up close to the burn.

It’s a really cool experience, and I’ve earned it over the years, two or three times, and I’m always really honored when I got that. And that is one of the sacrifices that I made when I stopped volunteering there. I don’t think I’ll ever get an Inner Circle Pass again, but I also hustled for it. 

I got in illicitly three times. The third time, the funnest time, certainly, it was a group of some of the terrible people at the Gate. This was in the early years of the Inner Circle Pass, and they didn’t have a holographic imagery, it was just like a picture of the Man. 

They had a laser printer brought in from Reno, and they printed out copies of the Inner Circle Pass. So many of them. Too many of them. And they were just handing it out to people. By the way, the Gate would never do anything like this these days. The infrastructure at the Gate is very responsible and very respectful of the process. 

ANDIE: 

Plus there’s a hologram on it these days, and that’s really harder to print.

MOSHE: 

Plus there’s a hologram! 

So they’re passing these Inner Circle Passes out that had been like hand-laminated by like lighter. I mean, they just put like a lamination page on top of it were just like burning…it was awful. But it worked. We all got in, but there was like 100 people inside the inner circle that didn’t belong there. 

And then they would do this trick, which is a classic trick: you take the pass of the friend that had already gotten in and then walk out and walk another person in. And eventually it was just like, people were just going out into the crowd and getting like a random cute raver, and just going like, “Hey, you want to see something cool?” and then bringing them in. So there’s this gigantic group of people that do not belong in the closest thing to box seats that Burning Man has.

And we’re just in there, we’re these clowns from the Gate. We don’t belong there. And all of a sudden the Man lights on fire and Larry Harvey stands up, he always did this, he would stand up when the Man would was light on fire, and like light a cigar and his, like, silhouette is like this perfect Marlboro Man silhouette with this hat, you know, smoking a cigar like “This is my thing.” And it looked pretty dramatic. 

And all of a sudden this group of just assholes start going, “Hey, man, sit down old guy. Sit down. Down in front, Swordfish…” That was his radio handle. They go “Swordfish down in front. This isn’t Coachella. You don’t have VIP seats.” And he’s looking back like, “Who the fuck is telling me to sit down at my event?” 

I’m sure he was very annoyed, but to me that was the essence of culture jamming. We had fucked his Burn. How do you fuck Larry Harvey’s Burn? To me, that’s the most Burning Man story that there is, even though it was very rude and annoying. Somehow at the very sphincter of the entire event, these little jerks had found a way to annoy Larry Harvey’s Burn during the apex of the entire event. That is a moment that I will never forget.

STUART: 

It is a proud, old, Cacophonist tradition, ask me one of these days about Smiley, the neon smiley face.

MOSHE: 

I remember that face.

STUART: 

If you blinked, you missed it. But Larry didn’t miss it. He actually threw his hat down on the playa and started stomping on it. He was that pissed off.

MOSHE: 

We’re in a rare group, Stuart: People that have made Larry Harvey really, really mad.

STUART: 

I can’t begin to tell you the number of times I have. He was telling a long, rambling joke at a function of ours and I stepped on his punch line. I didn’t want to hear this joke anymore. It went on for about seriously, like five minutes.

ANDIE: 

As a Larry story will do.

MOSHE: 

I can tell you, I realized as a standup comedian, which is how I pay the bills, I tried for many years to bring my art to Burning Man, cause I thought that’s what you do. You know, when you’re an artist out in the world, you bring the thing that you do into this world and you offer it. 

For years I grinded against… It is the worst environment for telling standup jokes in the world. Everybody’s high. Everybody’s a heckler. Nobody wants to hear what you’re doing, they want to participate. And I think it was the moment that there was a naked woman – I was trying to do standup at Center Camp, something that I had done for years. I tried to do… a naked woman crawling on my leg, rubbing on me, screaming “I’m a Dadaist” while I was trying to perform stand up, when I thought “I don’t think all art belongs here. I think I’ll just keep stand up for the default world.”

STUART: 

Well, heckling has been elevated to a higher or sent to a lower art form there. I’m not sure what.

ANDIE: 

And we don’t do grants for it yet, but we could.

MOSHE: 

Heckling Grant. That’s a great idea. 

STUART: 

I love it. I love it.

MOSHE: 

I think she was right. This is her world, you know? It’s not my world. You’re not supposed to sit here and listen to me craft my jokes. You’re supposed to rub on my leg and scream “I’m a Dadaist.” That’s more Burning Man than what I was doing.

ANDIE: 

Well, so you have been doing a lot of podcasts recently, and I noticed that when Burning Man comes up, people are always shocked, and you get all kinds of responses. Where do you shower? You know, how do you do this? What’s the biggest misconception about Burning Man, the one that annoys you the most?

MOSHE: 

What annoys me the most is people that have decided how lame Burning Man is now, and have never, were never there then, and have never been. It’s like,”Oh yeah, I would love to go, but I know it’s bad now.” You weren’t there when it wasn’t bad and you’re not there when it is bad. You don’t know what you’re talking about. That bugs me. 

But I would say that the most powerful misconception from this year, and I thought it was a really powerful moment, this year I was up there and the rains came. What happened when the rains came? I remember I was getting all of these messages from people back home going, Are you okay, what’s going on? 

And then I read a headline on CNN that said, “President Biden has been briefed on the rain situation at Burning Man.” And I go, “Okay, I think we’re living in a fake news story. We’re inside of one. I’m in one.” And I got a comment when I posted a picture of me in the mud. I was describing the reaction to the rains of Burning Man this year as “God-level schadenfreude.” It was an ejaculation of joy that finally the Burners were suffering. 

ANDIE: 

They’ve just been waiting and waiting for their moment to shine. Yeah.

STUART: 

For that other shoe to drop and get stuck in the mud.

MOSHE: 

And this woman in the comments goes “It’s so good to see the suffering of rich people who are cosplaying as poor people.” And I thought that’s funny. That’s a good roast. But it was wrong. Burners are not rich people cosplaying as poor people. They are weak people cosplaying as survivalists.

And so for me, and for the Burning Man community I saw, this was like this was the ultimate opportunity: a minor weather event to prove to ourselves that these two decades of pretending to be survivalists actually had some function in the real world! 

I saw this year as an absolute joy, and not only was it joy, I don’t know if you guys experienced this, it felt like time travel. It felt like all of a sudden this event that I had watched shift and change and become more infrastructure based and more tech savvy and WiFi and driving around – it was traveling back in time from a digital festival to an analog one. All of a sudden I had this experience this year, like, this is what it was like in ‘96. Yeah, it’s a little different, but I’m getting to know the people in my neighborhood, and there’s this joy at just being here. 

I hate to break it to the haters because I want them to be able to have this anger and schadenfreude. But what I saw was people enjoying Burning Man in a way they hadn’t in decades, because it was different. It wasn’t the silks guy falling going “This again?” It was, “Wow, this again!” This feels different and it feels familiar and nostalgic at the same time. So I loved it. And I’m sure you guys did too.

ANDIE: 

Yeah, hard agree. Definitely. I remember Brian Doherty was camping with me, and he was using a cane to get around. He wasn’t walking all that well, but during the storm, he found this bar of people that he just really liked talking to. There was nothing different happening there than was happening in our camp. I’m going to try not to take it personally that he didn’t want to just hang out with me, but he walked back to camp to get another layer and walked all the way through the mud back across town to just hang out with the most interesting people that he found.

MOSHE: 

Well, that’s what Burning Man was for me at the beginning. Yes. It’s spectacle and wonder. Definitely. Yes it’s a complete mind busting sort of experience of being shifted into this different dimension. But it’s also, especially when it was ‘the weirdos come to feel normal,’ it was this annual gathering of the most interesting people from around the world. And you would go, “What are you about?” And it wasn’t, “Oh, I’m a programmer.” 

And by the way, I’m not anti tech. I think Brian Doherty makes the case and I try to make it in my book too, that tech has always been there. It’s not that tech has changed Burning Man, it’s that tech itself has changed. And tech used to be one of these subcultures where weirdos came from, and then they took over the world and they became these kind of sort of normies. That’s what happened. It’s not that tech arrived and poisoned the well. It’s that tech poisoned its own well. 

But it used to be this experience where every person I met was like the weirdo from their community. These people, beyond the things that I saw there, these people that I met were the weirdest, coolest, strangest… They more than they more than the art installations fucked my burn in the most beautiful way.

STUART: 

So how do we make it freaky again? How do we make it safer for weirdos?

MOSHE: 

You know, I kind of think that shaking your fist at bygone eras is a fruitless endeavor. This is what happens. This is what happens to every subculture, every scene; it happened to punk, it happened to the raves, it was inevitable and bound to happen. For me, you know Gigsville is still there, and I love that about them. I try to squeeze what I can as an old jaded fuck. I don’t want to be jaded. 

I can tell you something I hate. On staff there is a vibe of like, “I hate Burning Man, I’m here to work. This is my Burning Man.” I fucking hate that. What, you like labor? That’s what this is? You could have done this job at a literal mall. You’re a psychedelic mall cop. You could have just stayed there. I don’t want to be so jaded that I pretend that I hate the whole thing. I want to find the wonder that’s still out there.

You know, there’s this Hasidic idea, which is that the job of the human being is to find these hidden points of light that are kind of obfuscated by the ugliness of the world, but your job on Earth is to go pining for these little mystical points of light. And that is the work that we’re supposed to do on Earth. I’m not a particularly mystical guy, but I think that’s my job at Burning Man, is to like find the wonder that’s still there. 

Will it ever be what it is? I don’t think that’s possible. Is there still stuff that’s hidden Black Rock City that will blow my mind and make me feel that feeling of wonder on a small level that I felt when I was 16? I think so. If I ever feel like those points of light are gone, I don’t know why I would still go. 

Another thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about: Burning Man is this creature from a different era. I have noticed that it’s trying, the infrastructure is trying to become this modern experience of a counterculture thing. But contemporary counterculture is about collective society in this way that Burning Man, I just don’t think it translates. Burning Man is about this experience of meaninglessness having great meaning. And society now, young people now, are all about systemic problems and the interrelatedness of all sort of societal forces.

And Burning Man, rightfully, I doff my cap to it, it wants to become modern and respect the change of society. But I don’t think it translates. And I don’t think that Burning Man will find a way to, like, become infused with what is going on in society. Its vitality is that it is this sort of relic of a time when experiencing things that have no meaning are incredibly meaningful. That for me is how it gets weird again is, for me, finding these moments of meaning.

STUART: 

That and making connections with other human beings that aren’t based on seven second videos. It’s finding the other weirdos, right? That’s why I keep going back every year no matter… I mean, you’re right. It’s so different every year. There’s no way to compare my Burning Man of the 90s to my Burning Mans of last year. But every year something happens that blows my mind. Every year I meet one person whose mind was blown. As long as that keeps happening, I’m in it to win it.

MOSHE: 

And every year I experience something that makes me say again, “What just happened?” 

STUART: 

Right.

MOSHE: 

That still is there. I just have to look a little bit harder, and it’s worth the work. And Burning Man is not what it was, but it’s still the craziest thing I do all year. 

STUART: 

You might want to come this year, Moshe. Our theme, you know, is all about wonder and try to freak people out. It’s “Curiouser and Curiouser.” You going to come on out?

MOSHE: 

Of course I’m going to come. I mean, listen, the other reason I keep going is it’s much like a tween on Snapchat. When you have a streak, it reminds you. It goes, “Hey, man, it’s been seven days. Don’t forget to post tomorrow. You want to keep your streak going.” A big part of the fact that I keep going to Burning Man is if I don’t go to Burning Man, I will have stopped my streak. I don’t consider the pandemic years to be streak breaking. So I’m at 24 in a row. I can’t not go. I got to get to 25 and 26 and beyond. And someday I’ll convince my wife to let me bring my daughter, and then she’ll keep the streak going and I’ll be able to draft on her experience.

STUART: 

So your Burning Man, we’ll have a 25 year diamond anniversary.

MOSHE: 

That’s right. Do I get to watch?

STUART: 

Sure. 

ANDIE: 

I think you do.

STUART: 

You get to watch.

MOSHE: 

There’s a camp for that. Go watch!

ANDIE: 

You can watch others get, what is it, force-fed? 

MOSHE: 

Gavage 

STUART: 

Gavage Camp. I’m sure there’s. I’m going to look through the What Where When, and sure there’s going to be a Gavage Camp.

ANDIE: 

I don’t recommend it. I really don’t. I mean, no, of course.

MOSHE: 

If it doesn’t exist, let’s start it. We could start Gavage Camp. 

ANDIE: 

You know, it’s always about finding new ways to appreciate and understand the culture. And I think you’re onto something there.

MOSHE: 

And by the way, that’s life, too. You know, it’s not just Burning Man that gets rote and feels like it’s changed. It’s everything. Every single society, every single culture, every single thing has great ugliness, great, boringness, great change that you don’t like. It’s very easy to shake your fist at life and go, “Everything’s changed. This sucks.” I mean, look around. Have you read the news? Things aren’t great. But there’s always those little points of wonder and joy that are out there if you go looking for them hard enough. And I think more than anything, Burning Man has taught me that. A quarter century at Burning Man has taught me that wonder exists and it’s worth the work to go find it.

ANDIE: 

Well, and I bet if there is something better, it’s probably still going to be found in Black Rock City.

MOSHE: 

That’s right.

STUART: 

That’s a great place to go out, Moshe. But there’s one paragraph or so out of the book that I love so much, I’d love to have you read it. You have a copy of the book handy?

MOSHE: 

Yeah. Hold on. Boom.

STUART: 

Read us the ending to the Burning Man chapter: We are impermanent.

MOSHE: 

Oh, I love that one, too. Yeah. Well, because I’ve thought a lot over the years. You asked about religion earlier. I think one of the interesting things about the Man Burn or about Burning Man in general, but about the Man Burn, and more more broadly about the religion, quote unquote, that is Burning Man, is that it doesn’t have inherent meaning. In real religion, the meaning is broadcast to you. This is the meaning, you know. Christianity is THIS. Islam is THIS. Burning Man, it means as many things to as many people as experience it. 

And I wondered, what does Burning Man actually, if anything, mean to me? And what does the Man Burn, if anything? Our central ritual, our central iconography, is to gather around… I mean, it is called Burning Man. And what does the Man Burn mean to me? And it does mean something I’ve realized over the years. This is what the end of the Burning Man chapter says about that: 

“On Saturday night, every participant in the city gathers around the Man to watch him immolate. The burn itself is wild and savage. His arms, which have been at his sides all week long, are raised in a dual salute to the city that has formed around him. Fire dancers flame at his feet, a thousand of them. 

And then suddenly from inside his body, a bright orange flame. It builds and licks his body, growing, fireworks shooting from every part of him, a display more dizzying and pyrotechnically overwhelming than you’ll ever see on the 4th of July. Then massive gas bombs explode again and again, engulfing his body in black and orange fire as everyone, all 70,000 of us, scream in a frenzy.

Then, quiet. The show is over and now it’s time to watch our North Star disappear. A hush takes over the crowd as we wait for him to fall, that Man on fire.

Guy Lombardo sang ‘Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.’ We are impermanent. We die. We immolate. All of us is a person about to catch fire. Before the flames come we try to live a comfortable life. But with that comfort, it’s easy to miss doing much of anything. Life promises nothing but death. While we are here, I want to live a life that’s filled with oddness and wonder. I want to see things that make me feel excited and scared. I want to meet people that do things differently. I want to stare at the lights. I want to participate.”

STUART: 

Thank you, Moshe Kasher.

MOSHE: 

Thank you for having me. And I will see you guys at the Burn!

ANDIE: 

See you there.

And that is all the time we have for today on Burning Man LIVE. Thanks to our guest Moshe Kasher and his book Subculture Vulture, A Memoir in Six Scenes. Thanks so much to my co-host Stuart Mangrum, the rest of our team, Vav, Tyler, Molly V., kbot, and Allie. 

Thank you so much for bringing Burning Man Live to the people free from interruptions and advertising because this is Burning Man. If you’d like to support Burning Man and creativity and culture around the world, you can do so by visiting donate.burningman.org. I’m Andie Grace. Thank you for listening. 

I always had a love for art and was always thinking up things to do in the studio and just smaller projects. But I must say, nothing really to the effect of the mammoth. As soon as the idea came into my head, it was done. I was completely taken. And nobody could convince me that it wasn’t going to happen.

STUART: 

Hi, Tahoe.

TAHOE: 

Hi, Stuart.

STUART: 

Hey, everybody. We’re back with another episode of Burning Man LIVE. I’m Stuart Magnum, and my guest today is the artist Tahoe Mack, whose honorary piece for Black Rock City 2019 — you may have seen it, The Monumental Mammoth — is now going to be a permanent installation at the Tule Springs National Monument in Las Vegas. Thanks for coming on the program, Tahoe.

TAHOE: 

It’s my pleasure. I’m really happy to be here.

STUART: 

Yay. You know, we had your friend and mine, Dana Albany, on the program a few episodes back and she mentioned a little bit about working with you on the Mammoth. But why don’t you just start for our listeners who have zero idea what we’re talking about here. Can you just describe the piece to us? 

TAHOE: 

Of course. 

STUART: 

Set the mood.

TAHOE: 

Yeah. Set the mood. So when I was 15 years old, I heard a presentation from Tule Springs National Monument. And at the time I was a Girl Scout, and I was finishing up my Scouting. And there’s this project called the Gold Award, the final Golden Star of scouting. And once you complete this award, you’ve completed Girl Scouts. It’s a huge project. When I heard this presentation from Tule Springs, I was immediately, completely enraptured in the story.

Tule Springs is a National Monument in Las Vegas, the first of its kind. But I don’t think there’s any other State Parks in Las Vegas, and there are huge amount of fossils out in the Vegas desert of monumental mammals, sabertooth cats and all these animals from the Pleistocene Era. 

When I heard about this park, I was just absolutely taken by it. So excited by the possibility and the potential of what it would bring. And so drawn to the story. It was a group of eight women who came together after hearing that this land was going to be completely destroyed, and for eight years they fought the government and ended up getting this land saved.

And now there’s a State Park. And there’s a whole facility there where they’re going to start to do excavations, they’re slowly going to start to open the park up to more and more visitors. But, it inspired the mammoth, because there is a huge dumping problem there. So it was a really cool way to bring the community together, to collect all this trash and to be able to work with Luis Varelo-Rico and Dana Albany, who created so many amazing connections and communities.

And it was truly an incredible project. And it visited Black Rock Desert. We received an Honorarium grant for 2019 and it was just to be able to share it with the world was truly amazing, and Burning Man is so fun! And, I had a blast. And I also just love what it’s all about.

STUART: 

Well, we’re definitely going to talk some more about that. I want to know, what does it look like? If I had never seen this thing, and I’m just listening to, I don’t know, a podcast, how would you describe its appearance, size, texture, all that? What’s it made out of?

TAHOE: 

So the Monumental Mammoth is a 40 foot sculpture of a Columbian mammoth. She is massive and bold and beautiful, completely covered in recycled metal. So the interior structure is a skeleton, almost rendered kind of like a puzzle piece would be. 

STUART: 

Right. 

TAHOE: 

That structure was created by Luis Varela-Rico, and he’s very prevalent in Las Vegas. He’s done a lot of public work here, and it’s just an incredible piece of sculpture in itself.

And then that in combination with Dana Albany’s work, which is this beautiful collage of all these recycled materials that come together to create an outer skin of a mammoth. And there’s gaps left, so you can still see this skeleton structure within the mammoth sculpture to kind of give people that full story of what the Monumental Mammoth is inspired by Tule Springs National Monument, this whole story of the past, the present and the future.

So the past being, these amazing megafauna that used to roam the Vegas desert. The skeletons that are being found now and all the trash that was left behind by people, and now just this kind of like imaginative space, where you get to see and feel the presence of an amazing, gigantic creature.

STUART: 

So, okay, so let me get this straight. You were inspired by the story of these women who saved this property from developers. And you got it in your head, to – how did that turn into an art project in your young… I believe you were 15 years old at the time?  

TAHOE: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

Well, that seems a little audacious. How did that idea come to you?

TAHOE: 

I have a very busy mind. So, as I’m listening to this presentation, and they said there was a dumping problem. There’s so many artists that I’ve been inspired by and I’ve always been into art, it’s always been my like, hobby, and so I’ve just was exposed to all of these inspirations throughout my childhood, of all these incredible artists that work with recycled metal.

So it was a no-brainer, when I heard that the park was completely littered with trash to make a sculpture out of it, it just kind of was like, Oh, of course. So I was just sitting there listening to it, and it just popped in my head. I’m like, “Oh my gosh. We have the potential to really tell this story, and communicate to anyone that comes to see the park about what’s here with the sculpture.

STUART: 

So many representations of mammoths that I’ve seen – I grew up in Los Angeles and we have the La Brea Tar Pits. The closest you’re going to get to a representation of the mammoth is its actual skeleton, which really doesn’t tell you what the animal looked like that much at all. 

Why a mammoth?

TAHOE: 

I was thinking after hearing the presentation: What’s the biggest thing out there? This story is massive. All these women that came together to protect this land, and the importance of protecting treasures is so great. We’ve got to have something that represents this fully, and I feel like a mammoth does that perfectly. It’s a massive creature. It’s hard to imagine anything that big ever walked the earth. And also, elephants are so wise. They’re full of wisdom and empathy. The whole idea of an elephant tells the story of longevity and meaningfulness well.

STUART:

Well, So this prehistoric pachyderm… Let’s see, is a mammoth and a mastodon the same thing? Did you learn a little bit about this particular species, the Columbian Mammoth, and where it fits in that whole evolutionary jumble?

TAHOE:

Yes. So Columbian mammoths are from the Pleistocene Era. They actually aren’t wooly, so they don’t have any hair. They look a lot like an elephant. They’re the biggest mammoths. They’re massive, huge. Our mammoth is actually to scale to a large big boy. But she’s a lady. Don’t forget she’s a lady mammoth!

STUART:

How tall is she at the shoulder?

TAHOE:

I think she’s 18 feet tall. 

STUART:

18 feet with her proboscis in the air, right, her legs in the air.

TAHOE:

Yeah!

STUART:

They’re substantially bigger than even the biggest African elephants that are alive today. Right. Which I think are like ten feet or so at the shoulder. 

TAHOE:

Yeah, they’re huge.

STUART:

There’s something about the elephant that spoke to you more than, say, I mean, this site must have had all kinds of remains in it, saber tooth tigers and whatnot, but it was the mammoths that won the day for you.

TAHOE:

Absolutely. Just the most majestic creatures.

STUART: 

Yeah, that’s amazing. I like the inside peek, and being able to see that crazy – It does look like one of those wooden puzzles, the way that Luis put the interior skeleton together. 

Tell us about working with Luis. How did you make that connection and what was he like?

TAHOE: 

I was connected through Pam Stuckey, who’s a Las Vegas native, and she has lots of relationships with different artists. She heard about the project. I was telling her, “Oh, I need to find someone to work with.” I had no metalworking experience at all, never knew how to work with metal or anything large. And she was like, “Okay!”

She set me up on a meeting with five or six other artists. Lu was the first artist we met with, my mom and I, and instantly it was just like: DONE. He was like, “We can do this.” We both love Volkswagens, little Volkswagen Beetles, and we just instantly connected and gelled well., and he taught me how to weld.

He is the most incredible steel worker, so talented, so precise and on it, like thinking through all of the pieces. I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to metalworking. He truly fostered my love for metalworking. And he’s incredibly humble and kind and amazing.

STUART: 

That’s great. Dana Albany is, of course, no stranger to metalwork. What was it like working with my friend Dana?

TAHOE: 

It was the best. I still have a close relationship with Lu, but I also have a very close relationship with Dana as well. We’re in constant contact still. I feel like a soul connection to her, truly. I think we see similarly when it comes to how we perceive the work, which is really nice. We’re constantly cheering each other on, and she definitely helped me instill that confidence in my vision and on my creation, which is just so invaluable.

She was definitely just the most incredible mentor and teacher and still continues to be that for me. And she’s always making cool, fun projects, and any time I have the opportunity to come and help her, I’m always there. It’s so fun! And working with Flash too. It’s just the best. Dana’s a really special person and her and Lu still have a relationship as well, and they’ve worked on a couple of projects together to this day, which is just like, so special for me to think that they work, they just worked so well together and they still inspire each other. Yeah, Dana’s a really special person, and just incredible artist.

STUART: 

Now, you mentioned Luis and Dana as catalysts for helping bring this idea to life, but I’m sure there are others before and after them, Girl Scout leader, parents? How did the people around you support and help mentor you in this process?

TAHOE: 

Oh wow, there’s so many people to thank. My mom was the Girl Scout leader, so she was like that… Girl Scouts is a huge part of my childhood. And we had a huge group too. We had 16 other Girl Scouts in our troop that were also doing billboard projects. And my mom was… I could not have done it without her. Being 15 years old, this was not something I could have accomplished on my own. But with her help and her guidance, and also Sherri Grotheer who is our partner with Protector, she was a huge help and doing all the reading documents, and like all the nitty gritty things, it was truly a team effort.

STUART: 

Protectors is the nonprofit that is ministering the land now, right? Protectors of Tule Springs. Is that correct?

TAHOE: 

So they have a plot of land, so Protectors has a protected area, but the mammoth is actually at a state park called Ice Age Fossil State Park. I When it comes to installing things on national land rather than state land, it’s a little bit different. The state park offered to take her and the timing just ended up lining up perfectly, and it was a great fit.

STUART: 

And the Protectors is a 501c3 nonprofit that’s helping you raise some money for this, too, right?

TAHOE: 

Absolutely. Yeah. We worked with them to raise money. I was also connected with lots of people and presented this project hundreds of times to fundraise and get donations, get people excited about it. 

And donations were not just monetary. We had a, XL Steel was a steel company in Las Vegas. They donated space to build this mammoth for five months in their warehouse. Not only that, they had the most incredible staff there that were so helpful and kind, and really became like the heart of that project. 

As it was being created we had volunteers coming out. We were teaching people to weld on the mammoth. We’re teaching them to grind. We were teaching them how to participate. So, it was a learning experience for a lot of people and also just sparked so many people’s hobbies. There’s lots of people that learned too weld on the project that are still making art today, which is really amazing. 

And we had volunteers that came out of town from San Francisco and stayed with us too. So it was definitely – there were lots of hands that came together to help create her.

STUART: 

So you learned how to weld during this process. Clearly, you learned how to do the big work of art, which is fundraising, right? What else did you learn with your hands on the project that you didn’t learn in art school? And by the way, those of you don’t know, Tahoe is a recent graduate of art school. What else might you have learned along this process that isn’t necessarily a part of the art school curriculum?

TAHOE: 

So I just graduated from the University of Oregon. I studied sculpture there, so I did similar kinds of, I was so inspired by the mammoth, I just wanted to continue my practice. At school I learned definitely what it takes to be an independent creator. On the mammoth it’s a collaborative event. So many people are coming in with their own creative vision.

But, what was so amazing, that I recognize now, after coming out, is how successful the mammoth really was. We have so many peoples’ visions that all came together into this piece and they were able to express themselves in a way that was true to them, and was not like overburdened by other people’s opinions or feelings. It was truly, magical, a magical collaboration.

The biggest thing I learned from working on the mammoth was definitely trusting in my creative vision and also working with people with true love and excitement that drew people in and made people feel excited about what we were all making.

STUART: 

Let’s talk about Burning Man. This was your first time in Black Rock City. How was that?

TAHOE: 

Oh my gosh, it was so fun. The mammoth was so well received. We got so much love from all the people that came up, and we got to speak with people every day. We had people at the Mammoth 24/7 from our camp because she wasn’t a climbable piece, like a lot of other Burning Man pieces are, so we were protecting her. We were the Mammoth Protectors. Because it’s not just like dangerous for the mammoth, obviously, she’s fragile. It’s very, it would be dangerous for anyone to climb her. So we had people out there 24/7 watching her. We also had presentations. I was there talking to people, understanding what the project was about, if they were curious.

I was just absolutely mind-blown. I truly think that it shaped how I imagine the future of art looking like. Gallery work and prolific artists in the past, compared to like the capacity that we have to share and create massive things now, it’s just absolutely mind-blowing and special to be able to share art in such an intimate way. Obviously Black Rock City isn’t accessible for anyone, but it does create a way for people to be able to experience art in a very intimate and close setting.

STUART: 

So was the piece completely built and then transported to the desert? Or was it in pieces? Or did you do finish work out there? 

TAHOE: 

Oh my God, it was crazy. She’s in pieces, so her head’s detachable, the tusks and the trunk are all detachable. And rigging her is just insane. It’s a project, for sure. But watching her on a flatbed truck completely wrapped with plastic, flying down the freeway was just unreal looking. It was insane.

And then once she arrived to playa, we had to assemble her, and with help from all the staff. Oh, my gosh. The people that choreographed all of the artwork coming to playa and like, all the assistance.

STUART: 

Our ARTery volunteers, yeah.

TAHOE: 

They’re incredible. They’re always, they’re on it; so helpful, so knowledgeable. They were a blast to work with. Really friendly. Yeah. So we put her together and took her apart all in that two week period. But also, the artists around us were all incredibly helpful, and open like and willing to lend a hand as well as we were open and willing to lend a hand for their pieces as well, so… 

Build Week is a really special time. It really set the tone.

STUART: 

So have you been back to Black Rock City or are you planning to return? What’s ahead for you in the desert? Was it one-and-done or?

TAHOE: 

Hopefully so many more times. I was just back this last summer. It was so fun to just go there as a visitor and not to be bringing something, just for that experience. And also so special to celebrate all of the artwork that was out there this year. There were some really incredible pieces that I had the opportunity of just experiencing, and congratulating the artists on their hard work this year.

STUART: 

The community that came together to work on this was family and friends and volunteers who just responded to calls for work. Dana told us a really moving story about a Vietnam vet who is involved in the construction of the project.

TAHOE: 

Was it Dav?

STUART: 

We can actually, we could probably play a little clip of her episode in here when she talks about it.

TAHOE: 

Okay. Yeah.

DANA ALBANY: 

And the same with the mammoth, it was just a phenomenal experience. 

The different walk of life that we had there. I had a lot of people from San Francisco come out and help on it. Wonderful people. We had a Vietnam vet that came by. And we found a lot of discarded bullet shells. The site where the mammoth is, it used to be a shooting range, illegal shooting range. And so, we went out with the Girl Scouts and collected a lot of these bullet casings. They line the tusks of the mammoth, similar in the fashion of elephant tusks, that, the bullet casings, they line that. And they’re also underneath the feet that the mammoth treads on, and they’re smashed and banged and, Tahoe’s brothers created this crazy little design in there and so did this Vietnam vet. 

One day I look over at him, and he’s this big guy with his long beard, and he’s just got tears streaming down his face. I’m like, “Dav, what’s wrong?” and he says, “I never imagined that I would use bullet casings for something, to create something.” And he had been deep in the trenches and was a sniper, and he, and never in his lifetime did he ever think that he would be able to make art out of something that, you know, his familiarity was war. 

There were times I would see him, this Vietnam vet just sort of walking around, you know, doing stuff. And then we got Tahoe, the Girl Scout, who is really the genius behind this project and brought all these people together. We had a beautiful woman named Roxy, a transgender, phenomenal photographer who offered to photograph while we were working, and just these relationships across a lot of different people, and bonds started to build, that still once again, continue to this day. 

I was just out there right before Burning Man, I went out. It’s finally now at the head of this State Park. Lu camped at our camp this year. Tahoe was there as well. I talk to her quite often. She just graduated from college and she’s turned out to be the most magnificent woman that I have had the pleasure to work with, and an honor to work with; very smart, very creative and just wonderful. So it definitely was, you know, just a phenomenal bond that grew out of that project.

STUART: 

Apparently this place was a shooting range, among other things, before it was rescued, and there’s a lot of spent brass that you used in the construction, right?

TAHOE: 

Yeah. The land was being misused severely. Not only, I mean, it was an illegal shooting range. You’re not allowed to shoot out in the desert. It’s extremely dangerous. But there was a lot of construction debris: mattresses, cars, tons of bullets. People were going out in their four wheelers, any kind of like outdoorsy cars. And the fossils were projecting out of the ground. That’s how fossil rich it is out there. There were mammoth tusks coming out of the ground, and they told us that they like to run them over because they created this like really cool puff of smoke, but they didn’t know what they were doing. But these skeletons were getting crushed out there from the misuse of the land.

STUART: 

Wow.

TAHOE: 

Crazy.

STUART:

So tell us a little bit more about the whole preservation effort, because that’s the story that’s been going along in parallel with the creation of your art.

TAHOE:

When I was introduced to the park, it was a year after it had been created as a national monument, and that was years after lobbying the government to protect the land, to stop any kind of infrastructure or development, to be built on the property, to protect the fossils. It was a huge effort. I think that’s what drew me to the idea of creating the sculpture the most is you go to these state parks and you don’t, you enjoy the beauty, but you don’t realize what it takes to protect land and how much land you can’t even imagine that is lost. It’s hard to imagine — it’s sad to imagine — what we have lost. Because if not for the big dig that happened out on that land, we wouldn’t have known that there were so many fossils out in the desert. So there’s a pretty significant find.

STUART:

Are there any theories as to why there are so many concentrated in this area?

TAHOE:

Yes. So a lot of people, the first thing they think of when they think of finding fossils out somewhere is the La Brea Tar Pits. What’s amazing about La Brea is it’s just like a jumble of all of these different animals that kind of fell into this tar and it was able to protect the bones very well.

The thing about Tule Springs is that it’s an even larger fossil bed and you’re also finding full fossils. You’re not finding jumbled bones and having a hard time distinguishing things. They’re full fossils of mammoths and all these animals. Las Vegas was a wetland before this, so all these animals that we’re finding are dying from natural causes as well, so you get a better idea of what life was like so many years ago.

STUART:

And then, though, suddenly 10,000 years ago: big extinction event.

TAHOE:

Yeah. The way that the land was preserved out in the desert is very pristine. So we’re hoping that over time when we start excavating the site, there’s going to be some really key pieces to understand what the change was, and different things that affected what happened then to like what’s happening now.

STUART:

Yeah, I think it’s really important to note that this is a creature that lived for millions and millions of years and went extinct within human memory. So as we get to the end of the Anthropocene Era here, I think the fact that it was a big extinction event speaks to all of us, too. 

So how did you get introduced to the Burning Man world? When this project first came to you, had you even heard of Burning Man? How did you get into that track of applying for a Burning Man honorarium grant?

TAHOE:

Oh my gosh. Best day of my life. I was a festival girl. I remember the first time I went to music festivals in Vegas in 2015 and I had the time of my life. I absolutely love music. I love the scene of everyone coming together to celebrate art, and the magic. It’s just, oh, the best feeling on earth.

And as I was building the sculpture, I didn’t have any ideas of anything like Burning Man or anything like that in my mind. But when I was introduced to Dana Albany, I remember having a phone call with her and her saying, “Oh yeah, we should take a Burning Man and music festivals.” I was in tears, overjoyed with the possibility of that, because as a young girl getting to see the art that would come to these festivals is what made those experiences really special.

The art that’s in downtown Vegas, a lot of it is from Burning Man, and as a young person, I didn’t really know how big of an impact Burning Man made on my childhood until, of course, going, but significant impact on my life. As soon as I did my own research and looked into it, I was absolutely captivated and so excited. 

All thanks to Dana, really, just explaining what it is and encouraging me to apply for the grant and getting to meet the community of people that make it happen. It’s just like the best.

STUART:

Even though it’s not a festival!

TAHOE:

It’s not. And I don’t mean to compare. What similarities they have, a bunch of people coming together to celebrate art and music and life.

STUART:

Right! And the art. And that’s interesting in that you grew up in the shadow of actually some very epic, monumental Burning Man art. I’m thinking of Big Rig Jig is in downtown.

TAHOE:

Oh, yeah. And I was a Banksy fan, die hard fan. There were some great Banksy pieces that were at Life is Beautiful Festival. But the Big Rig Jig was at Dismaland, which was in Paris. And I remember being a kid looking at Disneyland and being like, “Okay, how much is a flight to Paris? I gotta go.” And then getting to see it at Burning Man, my mind was blown. It was awesome.

STUART:

Yes. Mike Ross. Actually, Banksy famously said that that sculpture by Mike Ross was the most significant and important piece of sculpture so far of the 21st century. That’s a pretty big deal.

TAHOE:

That’s amazing. That’s a huge deal. Oh, I’m learning something. And I mean, I can’t say that I find that untrue. There’s something truly, it’s just a captivating piece, and I just want to try to imagine like how they built it. It’s kind of mind boggling.

STUART:

If you’ve never seen it, folks, this is two oil tankers suspended in an unearthly dance, creating a large letter S into the sky. It’s pretty amazing. 

So, okay, you look at something like that and say, “I could do that.” But I know that in your process of becoming an artist, to do this project, you had to learn a lot of things. You had to learn how to. Well, let’s talk about raising money, because when you first thought of this, did you have any idea that it was going to end up with the kind of budget that it had? It would be easy to be discouraged when you toted up the price tag of something like that. How did you go about raising the money for it? 

TAHOE:

As a 15 year old, you don’t really have a concept of money very much. At least I did it.

STUART:

Did you still have an allowance at that point?

TAHOE:

So I’ve always been very business oriented. So I actually started my first business when I was like 12. I sold stuff on Etsy. So I didn’t have an allowance. I actually did pretty well on Etsy, I must say. I had a blast and I learned a lot from it. 

So I guess when it came to fundraising, I just had the idea that if it was significant enough that asking people to donate to it. I didn’t find it to feel like I was asking too much, if that makes sense. I had something beautiful that I wanted people to be a part of, and that’s kind of where the vision kind of blossomed. 

But the budget turned out to be $250,000, and that’s including in-kind donations. We had a steel yard donate their space for four months to build this piece, which is just you can’t even put a dollar amount to that, on top of just their love and care to help bring it together.

And I was pitching hundreds of presentations to people all across Nevada, just sharing with them the project. And there were lots of people that said no, there are lots of people where nonprofit organizations that it didn’t fit in with. But at the end of the day, like, even though we get a no, they would say, “Oh, here’s one other person to talk to,” or “Hey, come back to us when this is at the state. We would love to get involved with getting kids out here and like fundraising in other ways.” So it definitely was a huge part of this project. 

And not to mention all the volunteers and the time people put in to make this happen, which isn’t included in that budget at all. How can you even fathom how much that would be?

STUART:

Yeah, it’s a fun thought exercise. If you total up all of the volunteer hours that go into making Burning Man happen, all of the theme camps, all the art projects, all the mutant vehicles, would it be comparable, you think, to building a pyramid or putting a person on the moon? or putting a pyramid on the moon? I think it’s putting a pyramid on the moon!

TAHOE:

I think it might be!

STUART:

But so $250,000, that’s that’s a little daunting, right? Was there a crowdfunding element to that and foundation money and individual donors? What did the mix turn out to be of where the where the dollars came from?

TAHOE:

Most of them were in-kind kind of what I was saying along the lines of people giving.

STUART:

The steel and the space and…

TAHOE:

Yes, and we also people in the community where we were buying our steel, too, were giving us really great deals, and were very willing to help in any way that they could. We did have a lot of donors that gave significant amounts of money and which of course helped a lot. And of course Burning Man gave us a grant, so we were able to take it out to playa. We would never have been able to take it out to Burning Man without that. So it was truly a gift. And we’re so grateful to have had the opportunity to do that.

STUART: 

So as a kid growing up, did you imagine.. Did you always have big dreams of monumental projects? What did you dream up before you brought the mammoth to life?

TAHOE: 

I always had a love for art and was always thinking up things to do in the studio and just smaller projects. I worked primarily in ceramics before. I absolutely love ceramics. But I must say, like, nothing really to the effect of the mammoth. As soon as the idea came into my head, it was done. I was completely taken. And nobody could convince me that it wasn’t going to happen.

STUART: 

That’s a required mindset, I think, for making a big crazy art project happen. So in art school, did you primarily work in ceramics? What other fun things did you do in art school?

TAHOE: 

It was definitely difficult to choose a particular focus, so that’s why I chose sculpture, because you really can do anything. You can paint, you can sew, you can work with ceramics, you can work with metal, you can work with wood. I experimented a lot with more found objects, things that were a little less stable, like metal is stable outside. I was working with fabric, I was working with plastic. I was working with baseballs, weirdly.

STUART: 

Baseballs? Okay.

TAHOE: 

Yeah, I played a lot with baseballs, and like stuffed animals and fur and things like that. Just playing, honestly, just creating interesting forms, and also like, drawing new inspiration, I think, was the biggest takeaway. I learned a lot about the art that’s out there, and it’s honestly so overwhelming. There’s so much amazing work out there.

And I got more comfortable with metalworking and I still have a well of curiosity when it comes to making. I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of what I want to discover and make. Honestly, I feel like my four years flew by and I am like, “Okay, wait. This isn’t enough.”

STUART: 

Well working in found objects is always a gas. And it sounds like you had a pretty rich storehouse of flotsam and jetsam to apply to the surface. Do you have any favorites, anything in particular, that was a detail that might not be eye catching at first, but that you felt some special love for?

TAHOE: 

So many, actually. Just today, a friend of mine mentioned that she gave a doorknob that’s on the mammoth, and I didn’t even realize that it was hers. That was kind of cool. 

But on another note, on the very front chest of the mammoth there is a heart, it’s a clock part that’s in the shape of a heart, that I bent spoons over and created an orchid on. The spoons are Sherri Grotheer’s silver spoons, and then my mom’s favorite flower is an orchid, so I put those in the piece. 

But during our time at XL Steel, one of the – I’m not exactly sure what his title was — but he was an amazing contributor to the project and absolutely fell in love with it. His daughter passed away a couple of years before the project was started and he knew that she would have loved the piece. And her ashes are actually in the heart, that heart of the mammoth. So she’s always going to be a part of that project.

STUART: 

Wow, that’s beautiful.

TAHOE: 

So it’s a really special piece.

The mammoth is truly like a Vegas, Las Vegas’s community. She’s ours. Like, she’s… she’s home. It’s amazing that she’s been installed for a little less than a year, but the park is now open and so we’re having people at the park and being able to interact with her, and it’s so touching. Every time I’m there, I’m crying because it’s just kids running around and experiencing the magic of what was there. And, you know, if I was a little girl, I would have absolutely loved the park. There’s this beautiful trail that has other metal cutouts of different creatures from the Pleistocene Era, so they can like learn about it. And it’s just the sweetest thing. 

STUART: 

So it’s installed in place, open for business. And how do you keep people climbing on it when it’s not at Burning Man? You don’t have a bunch of protectors around it.

TAHOE: 

We do have the State Park staff and they’re amazing. Also, there’s great infrastructure around her. She’s on an elevated platform. There’s signage all around her so you can learn the story of the project, and the significance of the piece, and she looks like she’s home. And the mountains behind her completely, there will be no construction back there. It’ll always have this gorgeous natural scene of the deserts. It’s so beautiful.

STUART: 

I’m interested in technical details. When you install a piece out in the elements like that, was there any sort of treatment you had to do to keep the metal from corroding, or any of that?

TAHOE: 

Absolutely. So actually, right before Burning Man, the mammoth was covered in dust and we called it like ‘Cheeto dust’ because it was bright orange.

STUART: 

So this is not Burning Man dust. This is Las Vegas dust.

TAHOE: 

This is Las Vegas dust.

STUART: 

Okay.

TAHOE: 

So we spent probably a full week with little dremels and grinders grinding off all of the rust, and then we sprayed her with a clear coat to just secure it. But she’s going to rust. She’s not going to be this perfectly chromatic piece, but I think that’s beautiful.

And the way that those colors look in the setting, as she ages it’ll just compliment itself and it’ll be what it is. And we’ll probably go back and keep grinding and clear coating and making sure she’s in tip top condition. But if you are familiar with Richard Serra’s work, he just does these massive metal sculptures. They look gorgeous when they age. And that’s what I hope for the mammoth as well, just to let her, let the elements take her.

STUART: 

Ah, that’s a beautiful thought. Set me back a little bit: How does it feel at this point to look back on the last eight years and to see that it’s actually happened? 

TAHOE: 

It’s really weird. I think it’s really strange. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I’m like, “Whoa, I really did that.” It’s kind of crazy to imagine that me at 15 years old was so sure of herself, considering I knew absolutely nothing about what it would take. But I do reminisce on the days of the blissful ignorance and the absolute utter excitement of every day learning something new. It was truly magical. Blissful ignorance.

STUART:

What advice would you give to any, let’s just say, new artist, somebody who’s got a big dream, has never built a big project before, wants to take it out to Burning Man or somewhere out in the world. What advice would you give to that younger you?

TAHOE:

If you really want to make something real, you can, but you have to give it your 100%. Absolutely. And I think it’s about enjoying the process. I really like have the time of my life doing this. It was a joy. I think eight years sounds daunting in the budget sounds daunting, but it was, the four best years of my life was making this piece and getting to experience it.

And I just would share, like if you have something to bring to life, I don’t think you should be held back by the fear of the work, because if it’s meant to be, it’s going to be beautiful, like the whole thing, all the ups and downs. So I guess that’s what I would say.

STUART: 

So any projects on the burner for you? What’s next?

TAHOE: 

Gosh, I’m not sure. It’s very strange. I think what I gathered after finishing school was, I don’t know if I’m cut out for just my own private practice consistently, if that makes sense. What it takes to make it in the art world, It’s just so – it just seems impossible in some regards.

But I absolutely love working with people, bringing big ideas to life. All my artist friends, I’m always like around and I absolutely love joining in on a project and being able to help execute just for fun. It’s just a blast. And hopefully in the next couple of years I come up with a project of my own. Hopefully it takes a little less than eight years, but even if it does, I’ll get through it, and it’ll be awesome, and fun. I’ll just always be making things and just kind of figuring it out. 

It’s also one of those vocations, I guess, if that’s a good word to call it, where every artist has a different path, it’s not like any kind of streamlined thing. I think I’m still trying to figure out what mine, what it will look like.

STUART: 

Is it a vocation or a calling? I don’t know. It is notoriously hard to make a living at it.

TAHOE: 

Yeah, I feel that the pressure of that might be crippling. I worry that if I put that kind of pressure on my own creative practice, also to the wants and needs of what other people want out of what I want to make, is a little bit difficult to imagine. 

But I love being involved in public work. The beauty of being able to share work with the community, where they feel that they’re a part of it, makes the work really strong and also meaningful.

STUART: 

Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?

TAHOE: 

I just want to thank everyone. I think Burning Man is just this amazing community of people that come together to celebrate life, truly. And you feel that when you’re in the temple, that feeling. And so anyone who’s listening to this podcast, I’m sure, is either a supporter of Burning Man or a Burner themselves, so I’m grateful for all of your support in the arts. It really, Burning Man is the most magical place for art, and I’m just grateful to have been a part of it.

STUART: 

Well, I’m grateful to you for joining me today, Tahoe, Thank you.

TAHOE: 

Thank you so much. This was so fun.

STUART: 

Yeah. 

Burning Man LIVE is a fully de-commodified production of the philosophical Center of Burning Man project brought to you by the generous donations of listeners. Well, like you. And you. And you and yeah, you. I see you over there. We do our best to drop an episode every other Wednesday. You can get, as you probably figured out by now at all your usual favorite places to get podcasts.

And also if you listen to Shouting Fire Radio, you might hear us there. And if you are lucky enough to be one of the privileged few who get to see Gerlach, Nevada, at this time of year, you can dial us up on KFBR. I think we’re a late night treat. Well, because of all the F-bombs. 

I’m Stuart Mangrum. I love my job mostly because of the amazing people I get to work with. Thank you so much Vav-Michael-Vav, Kbot, Actiongirl, DJ Toil, Allie, Tyler, you’re the best. And thanks, Larry. He’s the guy who dragged me into this thing in the first place, this silly, silly thing. See you next time.

Wow, the playa is just the perfect place for sound, and especially at Burning Man, the deep playa, where you could go out and ideally drive a bus, in this case and have no one around you except for sand and art and eventually, as we’ve become known for, our “sunrises,” so to have music throughout the night and in particular at sunrise, where you could experience in the deep playa, how great to experience sound out there especially during the magical moments of sunrise when you’re with others and you’re looking at the art.

The bus in and of itself we think of as an instrument, actually. And all the time and effort and energy that goes into this beautiful 52 year old bus, is basically a platform for other people to share their talent and gifts and music and that type of thing, on playa and off. 

STUART: 

Hey, welcome back, everybody to Burning Man LIVE. I’m Stuart Mangrum, and I am here today to have a conversation about one of the longest running and best known sound camps in Black Rock City. Renowned for their sunrise sets, for their all star DJs, for their beautiful, heart shaped sunglasses, you probably know them as Robot Heart. I’ve got several of those folks with me today, some of their leadership circle. I’ve got Gary Mueller. I’ve got Justin Shaffer. I’ve got Clare Laverty. Hey, everybody. Welcome. Thanks for coming on the program.

GARY: 

Thanks for having us.

CLARE: 

Thank you.

JUSTIN: 

It’s a pleasure to be here.

CLARE: 

Yeah. Thank you so much.

STUART: 

Robot Heart is one of the camps that has evolved past the point of just being a camp at Black Rock City, and it’s now doing some amazing things out in the world. 

Now, you guys have always done stuff out in the world. Actually, fun story. My colleague Dominique Debucquoy-Dodley, who runs our Communications team, he told me the other day that he grew up in Manhattan and he said that he’d heard of Robot Heart before he heard of Burning Man. So there’s a long history of community work and taking parties out into the people. 

But lately, what’s been happening is actually on the other coast out in Oakland, California, Robot Heart has been running a residency program. Justin Shaefer, why don’t you sort of paint that scene for us and let us know what that experience has been like for people?

JUSTIN: 

Yeah. Happy to. We’ve been experimenting for a long time, trying to connect the dots between the values that we all hold dearly as Burners and really want to support. And when we thought, what were we going to do this year, and where could we do it? Oakland actually just seemed somehow really obvious.

And it surprised some people, but what we thought would be interesting would be to take the Robot Heart energy, really our kind of in a sense, our sort of platform for creative expression, and go and build in community in a place that we thought could benefit the most from lots of positive energy coming together. And we found this space called The Loom over a year ago now and just started dreaming about it. 

It was a pretty organic process coming together. And what we ended up producing was a month-long series of events. Music is obviously a huge part of everything that we do, but the residency itself is so much more. We had kids coming in learning about DJing and lighting and sound design and production design. We did a speaker, a free speaker series, nearly every night we were open. Some folks from the Burning Man organization came and spoke, and just a broad representation of the community. We invited artists that we love and respect to come in and help us all learn together about music.

And the idea for the residency was actually that it’s the Robot Heart sound system itself that was in residency in the space. So if you think about what a residency normally means from the perspective of creative expression, you know, a venue can invite an artist and say, “Come here, perform repeatedly to a sort of intimate audience, and really express yourself.” Particularly at Burning Man, we have this experience where lots of artists want to perform and we do our best to make that possible. But we thought, what would it look like and feel like if we allowed for more focused performance over an extended period of time, and something that can really evolve? 

And so while it was a month-long series of events, there was also five weeks of build before that where we were able to start really from scratch with some of our crew, and were just overwhelmed with positivity, the community support for the project. We ended up going from about three people to 180 people volunteering and working on this. And honestly, it felt a lot like Burning Man, going out there and building in the desert. It was a really neat experience for all of us.

STUART: 

Except in a large, very large industrial space, instead of out under the playa, right?

JUSTIN: 

Well, yeah, we certainly weren’t on the playa, but it was an indoor/outdoor space. We worked with at least ten other Burning Man camps. The Temple crew was really involved. We were, we kind of shared the space with them, and frankly too many people to name right now because I will miss a few.

STUART: 

All right. Well, let’s get back into the mechanics. First of all, though, to set the scene for – maybe, it’s possible there’s a listener out there who’s never heard of Robot Heart before. So Gary Mueller, take us all the way back. What’s Robot Heart’s Burning Man origin story and how has the group evolved over the years?

GARY: 

Well, let me go all the way back to my brother, my, sadly, my late brother, who as many of you know, passed away in 2021. He was always into music, and he was into art and he loved creative expression. Going way back to the mid 2000s, he was creating a digital lighting company and was introduced to Burning Man by a couple of other Burners and one Robot Hearter named Walt Smith.

They went out to Burning Man, and as happens to a lot of people, my brother was completely blown away. I mean, here’s someone who loves self-expression, loves at it’s core, the Burning Man principles that even before I think he knew about the Burning Man principles, and went out there and was just amazed and said, “Wow, this is something I want to be part of.”

He camped together with Walt and a couple of others at Disorient with Leo Villarreal and that crew, and then had the idea of buying an English double decker bus. For those who don’t know, it’s a 1972 Leland English double decker bus, that he decided to buy and then convert into the Robot Heart bus. 

The first year that Robot Heart was camped on Playa was 2008. There was a great core crew that joined George, people like Rob Scott and Kim Tran, Michael Calabrese, and some others, and started Robot Heart. 

The idea from the beginning was to create a mobile sound system. George loved sound, but he went to Burning Man, and one of the things he noticed was that a lot of the sound camps were next to each other. Obviously, they were stationary. He said, “My God, this is in addition to being an amazing place with all the principles and the art and the people,” he said, “Wow, the playa is just the perfect place for sound,” and especially a Burning Man the deep playa, where you could go out and ideally drive a bus in this case and have no one around you except for sand and art and eventually, as we’ve become known for, our “sunrises.” 

So to have music throughout the night and in particular at sunrise where you could experience it in the deep playa. So that’s where the idea came from. He, in addition to buying the bus, created the sound system. Originally, he purchased the sound system, but then with others, wanted to create custom speakers and a basically bespoke sound system for the playa.

STUART: 

Oh, wow.

GARY: 

The idea was, hey, out in the deep playa, how great to experience sound out there, especially during the magical moments of sunrise when you’re in the deep playa and you are with others and you’re looking at the art. So that’s where it all started.

STUART: 

These days tell me about what size is the camp. How many campers you got in your group?

GARY: 

When we’re on Playa, we tend to be about 90 to 100. And we keep it at that level because, historically we’ve believed that on playa, for us at least, once you go beyond 100 people, it’s hard for everyone to stay in our focused community and do what we need to do. It works. Once you get bigger than that… What most people don’t realize is that most of Robot Heart has been there many years, a lot of Robot Heart. And we tend to take on very few new people, partly because we just, we say to ourselves, if everyone at Robot Heart invited their best friend, the camp size would double and it would be hard to integrate that. So we try to keep it fairly tight because it’s actually a lot of work to do what we do on playa, and you need a group that really can come together and execute. So we keep 90 to 100 on playa.

STUART: 

I’ve heard that number before in other conversations. We just had Level Placer on a couple of episodes ago talking about it. Some people have smaller numbers from their experience than my own, but it’s the friends-of-friends thing. It’s when the camp does double and everybody invites their friend, and all those friends invite their friends, you look around and, “Who are these people?” Right?

That ‘72 Leland, is that still running? Is that still the same bus?

GARY: 

It’s still the 1972…

STUART: 

Oh, my God.

GARY: 

Double decker English bus.

STUART: 

I have a friend who had one of those and I know it’s, let’s just say quirky, mechanically. Does it have like an oak wood frame, parts that should be steel or made out of wood underneath it? 

GARY: 

It has all kinds of quirks. We could go into long stories and maybe…

STUART: 

Positive earth. I know, I remember the electrical system was kind of backwards, right?

GARY: 

Boy, you know this well. So people who know the bus, and Justin and I can share a couple of stories on this one… We were in the DMV line, Stuart. This was 2019, I believe. And we’re inching along and waiting to get our Burning Man mutant vehicle passes. And as one does, you wait in the DMV line, and every now and then you inch forward. And we had it in Park, and we were maybe midstream in the line, maybe we had waited like two three hours. And I got to go try to move the bus again, and the bus just wouldn’t move. It was locked. And it’s because we couldn’t get enough pressure in the pneumatic system, the air system. And you need to get the pressure above 80 psi for the air brakes to release. So the system was at under 80, and we were basically frozen there cause the air brakes wouldn’t release.

And Justin, and I, and my brother, we have quite the story on that one.

JUSTIN: 

It was an interesting day of playa engineering involving lots of things, but fortunately not the originally desired angle grinders.

GARY: 

Yes.

STUART: 

Actually angle grinders do solve a lot of problems. That’s true.

JUSTIN: 

Yeah, we were that was the theoretical last resort. And it ended up being that we were able to plug the hole in the valve with a dime that allowed us to put pressure together, then move. And we rolled around for the rest of that burn with a dime blocking one of the outputs of the pneumatic system.

STUART: 

A dime, or – it accepted American money? You didn’t have to put a ten pence piece in there?

GARY: 

Brought by some of the guys from the Mayan Camp, by the way.It was a beautiful act, you know, as hard as it was, and my brother said it was probably his, one of his two hardest points on playa because we were literally sitting there for maybe 18 hours. We thought we were going to have to tow the bus, and that that was, we were not going to have a Burning Man that year. It was one of those beautiful Burning Man moments, though. The amount of help we got from other camps, remember Justin, the Cali-oop guys, the Mayans. 

JUSTIN: 

Camp Walter crew was amazing as well. And the Mayans. 

STUART: 

The Mayans? You mean the Mayan Warrior sound camp people, not The Mayans, the motorcycle gang. Just to be clear.

JUSTIN: 

Yes, exactly. 

STUART: 

I want to get back to some playa stories. But first, I want to learn a little bit more about Robot Heart’s work out in the world. I understand you’ve actually created a foundation, a 501c3 and Clare Laverty, you’re a board member of that organization. Tell us a little bit about that story and what the intentions and objectives of the nonprofit are.

CLARE: 

Sure. Well, we’d always been fully committed about bringing about meaningful change, you know, in the world through music and art and community, and community was incredibly important to us, you know, on playa and at our Halloween parties in New York, etc., that we had been doing for an incredibly long time. But we felt that there was more that we could do. And that the formation of a foundation would give us the opportunity to amplify why what we were doing, kind of further out into the world.

So we set about to organize and set up the foundation to support artists in the arts and to advance public appreciation for both. So we wanted to also not only amplify giving a stage to the arts and artists, but also to be in a position that we could kind of support our own projects, and other people’s projects, to really bring about change through those.

So, since we launched the foundation, we have in fact actually succeeded in all of those missions. We’ve done self created projects, which was something like Fare Forward in New York. We did funded projects which included this Miami Art Basel project. And we did the Oakland residency project. And we have gifted grants to artists as well. So, we have actually succeeded in our mission to date, to kind of tick those three boxes that we set about to do. 

But we know that there’s just, like the limits of what we can do here with this foundation, with the community that we have, with the history that we have, and I think the support that we have — and Justin can speak to this more, but the volunteers that showed up in Oakland was phenomenal. And I think the support that we got at our fundraising dinner in New York, pre Fare Forward, is also immense. And we have a really, truly fantastic community that loves and supports what we do and wants to I think hopefully see more of that.

STUART: 

Can you talk a little bit more about the art grants that you’ve been able to give out so far?

CLARE: 

Yeah, sure. Well, we’ve given art grants to artists both on playa, for on-playa work, and we’ve also given out art grants and kind of city grants. We gave a donation to Central Park’s project as well, and we gave a significant grant to Brandt Brauer Frick for Art Basel, Miami, which was really the beginning of that project for them because they have gone on to do that project on a larger scale since we gave them the first grant to set that project in motion as an arts project.

STUART: 

I’m not familiar with that project. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

CLARE: 

So essentially, the Multi-Faith Prayer Room from Brandt Brauer Frick wasn’t so much necessarily about traditional faith as they see it, but off the back of COVID and the pandemic, one day one of the gentleman from Brandt Brauer Frick was traveling through the airport and started to think about how people were foreseeing the future, when we were perhaps in a space where people weren’t clear on what that future looked like, and perhaps what future rituals we had, and did people lack faith for the future in the world.

And what they started to do was to record people of every kind of nationality; gender, age, etc. They put together a series of recordings and statements into a room, and it encompassed therefore sounds and light and projection, and music, to create this space within darkness that would then play these voiceovers and these thoughts and hopes and dreams of people. And there was kind of this interplay that was going on between very private thoughts of where people were at, but then they encompass very powerful messages around humanity, and connection. 

It was an extremely immersive artistic experience. And I think, you know, what we were really proud to do was to be able to give them the opportunity to kickstart this project that they’d had the vision for, that they needed to get funding.

We kind of we referred to it at the time as like, creating a minimum viable product for them as artists, and to be able to give them a stage and a platform that perhaps they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to have with that initial grant and donation, that I know that they’re enormously grateful for today because it gave them the opportunity to move something along.

GARY: 

And to chime in, the New York grant went to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. We made that grant right at the end of when COVID was happening, and that was something that was important to us. We have a lot of folks within Robot Heart who come from New York. Just like we’re doing the residency in Oakland, that’s one of our spots where we have a lot of people. And we felt that the Parks and Recreation group was a source of a lot of inspiration, especially during a time like COVID. 

I just want to say two of my personal favorites, too, that we’ve done, if you don’t mind. 

One is Autumn Spire which was an art piece on the playa by someone who’s affiliated with Robot Heart, Zack Caruso and his partner Eric Coolidge. And they did this great gothic inspired steel tower on the playa, which we were delighted to help. I think we were the first significant grant to kick that off so that they could do it.

And then importantly, there was something on the playa, another great piece called Jay’s Suitcase. There was a Robot Hearter who also tragically passed, and this was by Michael White and Tawny Koslowsky, who created something called Jay’s Suitcase that was another piece of art on the playa that was, I thought, really inspiring. And then a piece that they ended up burning to commemorate Jay’s life.

JUSTIN: 

We think about the grant process, the artists that we want to impact and affect and help, in kind of three categories. 

1. The first is in essence sort of generative from scratch, where there’s somebody who wants to work on a project, or somebody that we know and respect or are curious about, and we just say, hey, maybe some resources could help this move along, where it might not have otherwise. We’re just kind of starting from scratch. And in some sense, some of the stuff for the residency falls under that category. 

2. And then the other two are this idea where we’re co-producing something with another group, where we’re bringing Robot Heart resources to bear or maybe creatively our team wants to work on something, and there’s another team that we want to work together with. The build of the BitCube at the residency is a really good example of this. 

STUART: 

Okay. Yeah, I saw that and I didn’t see it. What is the BitCube and tell us about that piece’s trajectory? 

JUSTIN: 

So BitCube was built by a camp called crime.wav on playa last year, and it’s actually, they did something really wonderful, which is they like upcycled IBC totes, which are 275 gallon water containers. And they actually found a bunch of water containers that hadn’t stored water. They’d been used to store chemicals in the Tesla manufacturing process, and they were just sitting in Tracy, and they didn’t have a home. 

They realized that they could treat each one as kind of an individual pixel and light them. They built an eight by eight by eight cube out of them. And each one has four feet of dimension. So it’s, you know, roughly 32 feet by 32 feet, just massive. 

We found it a particularly impactful piece because of the way it worked with recycled material, and was just sort of like totally unexpected. And Walt actually had the original idea for this. He was just like, “You know those BitCube guys? Maybe we could get BitCube to come to the residency and we could actually enclose a bit the outdoor space to create a bit more of a container.” And that took us from working in a roughly 3,500 square foot room to like an almost 12,000 square foot site, and was a wonderful collaboration. And so we made an art grant to the BitCube team and just said, “Hey guys, how can we support you getting this here?” They brought their crew in and we actually just all worked together to build it. That’s a really good example of the second category. 

3. And then the third is really what Clare should talk about, which is where there’s a group like Brandt Brauer Frick, really wonderful musicians that have a vision, that had some momentum behind it already and we want to work to support it more broadly. 

STUART: 

I want to hear more about The Loom in Oakland. Why again did you choose Oakland? After so long, you know, such deep roots in New York, that’s a pretty large transcontinental move to do a project of this size and scale in Oakland. What was that like? What was the process of working with the City of Oakland instead of the City of New York?

JUSTIN: 

It was an interesting moment, particularly after the Ghost Ship fire, which those who are local here can acknowledge. And it was very hard. It just took a while to get to a place with the city where we could feel confident that the event could be permitted. But we just gave ourselves time. That was a year of work from seeing this site the first time and lots of interactions with the city, and just gently, 20 hours a week of checking in with people and making sure we were going in the right direction and seeing how things felt. The Loom hadn’t been permitted to host large events previously, and when you go into a new space, there’s just no precedent. So it’s like: How does the Fire Marshal feel? How does the city administration feel? 

And in this moment where Oakland was sort of reconsidering how to approach what it means to be an underground event versus an aboveground event and the sort of intersections between these worlds; and Robot Heart because of our scale we need to get things permitted properly. Even though sometimes our events feel more underground, there’s sort of a funny… We bridge those worlds with pretty much everything that we do. And that’s part of what makes it interesting. It’s a space for people from all perspectives to come and gather. 

So the city was actually really, ultimately wonderful to work with. And the team at The Loom, the story there is interesting. The Loom is a massive property, I want to say a few hundred thousand square feet. And there’s a partnership and a group of folks who bought the property, and then COVID happened and they were like, “What are we doing with this? How are we interfacing with the community?” Also, kind of in the wake of American Steel closing, there really wasn’t a place for the artistic community at a larger scale. There are lots of shared workspaces around the area where people are making art, but American Steel was a big loss, and so I think a lot of us in the community were like, “Huh.” These guys have been going to Burning Man for a while. Douglas who’s the kind of primary sponsor and the lead of the team, I think has been to Burning Man for 17 years, and we feel he understands us. And we saw that the temple was being built there and we just said, “Okay, this could make a lot of sense and would be a really interesting opportunity to try to integrate.”

And the other thing that was great is they just gave us access to the space. I mentioned this earlier, but the opportunity to have a five week build is basically just never happens with events that we do. And so we got in there and we started building and we were able to really sort of organically build up the team. This is where we just we get to work with a much broader group of people from outside of the Robot Heart camp. And normally we just have a few days. Everybody knows each other well and we know what we need to do and it’s just kind of a madhouse.

And so having that five weeks to more gently explore what was possible, and literally just wake up every day and go in and say, “Hey, how many people want to work today? And we don’t need anything.” You know, we didn’t express a need. We’re here building. We have food and water and music, and it’s fun, and let’s just hang out and see what’s possible.

Honestly, what got built wildly exceeded any sort of plan we could have made. And it was really all a testament to Burning Man culture coming alive in this moment. We couldn’t have predicted that at all. It was really incredible.

STUART: 

Well, you really did get an all-star team together of art crews. I’m looking at this list, the Temple crew, but also the Folly builders brought some Paradisium trees. 

JUSTIN: 

Yeah. Dave Keane, he and his crew are just incredible. I had probably one of personally my favorite moments ever at the Burn at the lighthouse. And I’ve always really admired their work and hoped to find a moment that we could try to collaborate with them.

And this is another funny coincidence. You may have heard about this Transfix project in Las Vegas sort of getting shut down. It’s probably not my place to comment on exactly what happened, but long story short, there was a lot of Burning Man art that needed to get transported out of there rapidly, and Paradesium was one of these projects. And so we just said, “Hey, maybe we can actually use our grant process to support getting your work back to its home, and also creating an audience for it in this process.” So we were able to write a grant to Paradeisium and to work together, and they just showed up and we built together. It was so much fun. 

We also worked really, really closely with Zulu Heru and Burger Boys, and Zulu built a piece on playa last year called Farmer the Rigger, and we’re excited and proud of that.

STUART: 

Zulu’s piece was pretty massive. That’s an awful lot of steel to move around. So that’s another example of very heavy lifting that seems like maybe a five week build wasn’t enough. I don’t know. How’d you get it done?

JUSTIN: 

We own a variable reach or like a tele-handler, which is like a forklift on a long reach. And we use it for everything we do. We kind of can’t really build the bus without it. And it holds an art piece that some members of our camp made many years ago called Brando up in the air during the party. And so an early decision we made was: Let’s just bring it to Oakland, because lots of stuff will be possible that we can’t anticipate if we have it there. That was one of those things that was like: We have the VR, we can do this, but we never would have taken that on without it. And it was really serendipitous. 

Let’s just say talking to the city of Oakland about a structure at that scale with that amount of weight, we did a lot of structural engineering work on that. We did a lot of structural engineering work on the Paradesium part of the project. And even more we got BitCube approved for permanent installation. I think I can actually announce this. The Loom project actually also jumped in and said, “We’d like to invest in this project and make BitCube a permanent resident at The Loom going forward.”

STUART: 

Sweet.

JUSTIN: 

This community built and community driven space now has sort of taken shape via BitCube and of course we’re excited to do the residency there, here coming up April 25th to May 18th, but we’re also really excited about the legacy of what happens there next. We have a community created space that we’re able to participate in. Hopefully it changes the shape of nightlife and gathering in the Burning Man community in the Bay Area for a long time. We really don’t know what’s going to happen, but we hope that we really has some impact long term.

STUART: 

So Gary, I want to know a little bit more about governance and how you manage the foundation, how you manage the camp. Are the two related? Does one fundraise for the other? How much separation is there between the two outfits, and how much synchronicity is there?

GARY: 

Great question. They’re all under one umbrella, but we keep them separate. We created a 501c3 in 2018, you know, George passed after that, but that was one of the things he wanted to do was to create a platform so that we could continue to do amazing transformational, magical events and work, and foster the arts. 

Now we have a board of 11 people. That board oversees the foundation, and Robot Heart Burning Man camp is one part of Robot Heart. It is a completely self-sustaining entity. Everyone who goes to the playa, and the camp members support our playa activities. So that’s all a self-contained container. Our fundraisers, for example, are not to bring what we do on playa to existence; they’re to do what we are seeing whether it’s, you know, Farmer the Rigger or doing amazing stuff at The Loom in Oakland, and the residency. Or it’s to bring the bus to Central Park and do what we did there, or to make art grants like we’re doing.

So, our view is that — our vision is to — continue to create magical events and transformational experiences out in the world. That’s why we’re doing residency Part 2, because we thought it was such an incredible experience and got such great feedback from the community. And expect us to do more things like that. Like for those who don’t know what we did in Central Park, we created this thing called Fare Forward. That name came because my friend here, Justin on this podcast with us, read the poem Fare Forward to my brother and me at a little event that we did. So we decided to, after my brother passed, bring the Robot Heart bus to Central Park, right to the middle of New York City, and bring Burning Man values and ethos and all that right to the middle of New York City. The foundation is there to continue to do activities like that and support art and the artists.

STUART: 

So, I know other long running camps are starting to consider what their year-round impact is, and some of them are actually taking the same steps of creating an entity. What advice would you give to someone who’s in that situation and thinking about taking their show from just on playa, to maybe having some year round impact, other places in the world?

GARY: 

Well, I think one of the great things is to see all the different activities Burners are doing out in the world. Look at all the other Burns that are now happening. I can’t wait to go to AfrikaBurn. My girlfriend is originally from South Africa, so to be able to go to AfrikaBurn – or I just listened to bits of your podcast about the frozen burn. Maybe we’ll go to that one but…

STUART: 

Frost Burn

GARY: 

Frost Burn

STUART: 

We did a show a while back with Monique Schiess who’s one of the one of the founding figures of AfrikaBurn. So if you want to study up on that trip, check out that episode, please.

GARY: 

I will. And I’ve spoken a bunch to some of the original people who did that. And so I’m looking forward to that. 

And to your question, advice: Look, I think there are a lot of, not only camps but individuals at Burning Man who have a lot of really special gifts. They’re super creative and are very interested in taking what Burning Man’s principles and ethos is all about out into the broader world. And if anything, it feels like the world could use some more of Burning Man’s love, and Burning Man’s ability to build community, and have people come together, and have creative expression and creative solutions to a lot of the things that we’re facing out there. And I think that’s partly what inspires us, and we intend to do more. And I would just encourage others to look at doing the same.

JUSTIN: 

Stuart, you mentioned earlier, you have a colleague who was living in New York and kind of the early days and heard about Robert Heart before hearing about Burning Man. I grew up in New York and went to the first Disorient fundraiser, not knowing that Burning Man existed or that it was a Burning Man camp, but just that it was a fun warehouse with crazy people in Brooklyn. And I was like, “This seems different.” But it then took me probably, gosh, another five, six years to even find the playa.

When the crew doing those early Halloween parties and May parties in New York, what they were doing in some sense was exactly that; they were bringing Burning Man values out into the world. And particularly in this moment, when it seems that sometimes people are trying to bring perspective from out of the world into Burning Man. It seems more important now than ever to really emphasize that. 

And you’re asking what advice could we give. I think one thing we’ve learned a lot about, for better or worse, is just how to interface between the worlds. And it’s just hard, right? Like everything that happens to Burning Man happens because people want it to happen. And they decide to give their time and contribute to projects at all sorts of scales. And that’s really remarkable, but that’s not generally the way things happen in the kind of default world. And, managing energy, managing social capital versus financial capital versus just the energetics of the whole thing between these spaces, is really, it’s just challenging. People, it can get confusing. And so maybe though, to boil it all down, the most important thing I think you could do as you think about doing things between worlds is just to not take people’s time for granted.

You know, that’s good life advice in general, but I think one of the things we’ve had to learn repeatedly is that just how we show up, you know, within our core crew, on playa and off playa, is kind of the same because we just know each other and we love working together. But as it starts to expand, the expectations shift. And every situation is different. Kind of like with the residency specifically, or in New York also, we just, you really know until everybody shows up like how much you can get done. And that’s the beauty of this culture: More is usually possible than you can imagine. But if you make a plan making assumptions about what’s possible, then you can be disappointed also.

It’s just a sort of a winding, we’ve walked a very winding path. We’ve all had our own experiences with it. And Clare, maybe you want to touch on this also.

CLARE: 

Yeah. Thank you. I think we spent a lot of time looking at the classical things that one does when perhaps building, you know, a corporation or a company. And we spent time together talking about our North Star vision. We spent an inordinate amount of time, in all honesty, talking about our mission and our values. And we went around the houses and up and down and they were like, generally, the same, but it’s a real labor of love. There’s a lot of heart and soul that goes into Robot Heart. It’s always been an incredibly soulful place. You know, we talk about it being this collective of doers and dreamers, and then it’s like, well when we take that out into the world and we’re doing a foundation and foundation work, how does that all evolve and what’s that kind of like bigger picture? So we have spent a lot of time doing that. 

You know, we spend a lot of time. We did a three day retreat together just before the residency last year. So you’re also, like Justin alluded to, it’s a lot of human capital, it’s a lot of time and gifting towards this foundation. We all know that Burning Man in and of itself is a year round project and build, really, truly. And then when you start to get into the foundation side of things, it’s even a big, a much bigger responsibility. So, we’ve really spent a lot of time getting together and getting crystal clear on all of these pieces. So I would say it’s just making sure that you’ve got the time to do it.

STUART: 

Good things do take time. It’s true. Some of the lessons we’ve learned over a long time. Is there anything any of you would like to add before we start wrapping this up that you didn’t feel like you’d get a chance to say?

GARY: 

Stuart, one thing I’d like to talk about is, Clare talked about some of our values, and I think a lot of people know Robot Heart, but don’t know about the people or some of the ideas, etc. behind it. And there’s often perception. One of the words for me that I’d love to highlight that is core to Robot Heart, we talk about this word all the time amongst each other, and that’s the word Muditā. It comes from the ancient Sanskrit, and its meaning is, ‘taking pleasure from other people’s pleasure.’ It has a lot to relate to the gifting principle. All the principles are important to us. I wanted to highlight that one because it embodies so much of, I think, what we do and what our spirit is.

The bus in and of itself we think of as an instrument, actually. We often call it our electronic Stradivarius. That might be presumptuous, but that’s how we think of it. And that bus for us is a symbol of all the love, time, effort, and energy that’s gone into creating this, we think, beautiful work of art, or instrument. And all the time and effort and energy that goes into this beautiful 52 year old bus is basically a platform for other people to share their talent and gifts and music and that type of thing, on playa and off.

So for us that word is important and the representation of it out in the world is really important. And that’s why, as Clare said, for a lot of us, that value makes it so that we really find the gifting of what we do to be super important. That ability to gift the magical moments, and the sunrises, and the music, is something that I think for a lot of us is what keeps us coming back again and again to do what we do at Robot Heart and the Burn and the Burning Man community at large. I just wanted to highlight that because I think it dovetails with both Burning Man principles and it shows some of what we’re all about.

JUSTIN: 

Could I add a couple of things vis a vis the bus, which we get asked about a lot. The sound system is actually, it’s an evolving art project in itself. The speakers were all designed, built, crafted, modified, hacked on over the years. One of our core values is this idea that every year we do something to improve it. And so we just keep working on it. One of the neatest things about the playa is that it doesn’t have walls. And so, the Robot Heart sound system pretty uniquely was designed to operate in a space where there’s no reflection from the start. It actually makes things like the residency somehow harder to make it work in a room with lots of reflection.

But when it’s out there on playa just playing as it was intended to, some of our favorite moments are that first moment when we’ve got it all set up after many days of working and we’re ready to listen to some music together. And it’s just great. 

The other thing that’s maybe worth mentioning is: Gary was talking about giving. For me in life, I have always really enjoyed giving, but one of the things I learned at Burning Man was also how to receive. And there’s this beautiful circle that happens. If you can receive, then you have more energy, more love, more to give. I feel like that was one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years, and that’s definitely a part of why, that doesn’t just keep me coming back, but it becomes possible. And when I look around at the Burn, I see a lot of people who’ve learned this lesson, and I think that seems like a throughline culturally with this group.

STUART: 

Yes. Being able to accept a gift is a necessary first step in being a good gifter yourself. Clare, you want to add anything to take us out before we wrap this up?

CLARE: 

I would just say, to that end, as much as we’ve perhaps all contributed and given, I can certainly perhaps only speak for myself here, to Burning Man and to the co-creation at Robot Heart, and to everything that we build and do, I’ve probably received at least ten times back from the playa in terms of life and transformation. And it has actually had a transformative effect on my life. There’s no doubt about it. So, I can’t imagine a world, my world, without Robot Heart and the Robot Heart family. And I certainly can’t imagine my world without Burning Man having been a significant part of it for the last 12 years. So, enormously grateful to Burning Man and the playa for that.

STUART: 

Well, I am enormously grateful to all of you, and particularly to you, Gary, for my word of the day, Muditā, which is pretty much the opposite of schadenfreude, isn’t it? 

GARY: 

Exactly. 

STUART: 

I collect words the way a crow collects shiny things. So thank you very much. And thank you all for being here. Thank you, listeners for listening. You can find out more about Robot Heart by going to robotheart.org. If you don’t see them in one of the residences like in Oakland, California, maybe, maybe, maybe at sunrise out on the playa. Thanks, guys, for showing up.

GARY: 

Thank you, Stuart.

CLARE: 

Thank you.

JUSTIN: 

Thanks for having us.

STUART: 

You’ve been listening to Burning Man LIVE, the one and only official podcast of Burning Man Project, formerly known in some circles as “The Org,” a 501c3 non profit dedicated to fanning the flames of Burning Man culture year round and around the world. 

Thanks to everyone who made this episode happen: the crew from Robot Heart, our managing producer and story editor, Vav-Michael-Vav; Producers Andie Grace, kbot, Allie W; Editor Tyler B, and our administratrix extraordinaire, DJ Toil. Thanks to the Burning Man Communications Department. Thank you Larry, and thank you, gentle listener, for listening, for reviewing, for telling a friend, and for dropping a few dollars in the slot at burningman.org/donate. 

You can send us mail at live@burningman.org or follow us on the socials, or just sit there with the cans on your ears, binge listening from our vast archives at burningman.org/podcast

I’m your invisible friend, Stuart Mangram. Catch you next time.

What exactly was “Tip of the Iceberg”?

MELISSA: 

It was a 30-foot clitoris that was made to look like stone, fabricated in a way that it could be monumentalized like Stonehenge — in fact, my little nickname for it was Clit-Henge — because it is this awakening of this organ and pleasure inequities right now. 

This is a new version of a phallic symbol, basically. We have a birthright, a biological imperative, I believe, to have pleasure. 

STUART: 

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Burning Man LIVE. I’m Stuart Mangrum. I am here with my pal Andie Grace. 

ANDIE: 

Hello, Stuart.

STUART: 

Hello Andie, and we’re talking with Melissa Baron, aka Syn with a Y, S-Y-N

MELISSA: 

Hi you guys!

STUART: 

a Burning Man artist who made quite an impression this year. I’m not sure what the right idiom is there, but had a large and very talked about art piece installation on Playa this year called “Tip of the Iceberg.” I think we should start with that because it was formative for a lot of people. A lot of people came home with that as the one Burning Man art piece that moved them the most. Can you just describe what it looked like? 

MELISSA: 

It was a 30-foot clitoris that was made to look like stone, fabricated in a way that it could be monumentalized like Stonehenge. In fact, my little nickname for it was Clit-Henge.

And I purposely wanted to bring this anatomical structure to the Burning Man community. Number one, I feel very safe there to do something a little bit more edgy, but there’s so much misinformation, and this information was suppressed for hundreds of years, so I felt like her debut could be on Playa. 

ANDIE: 

Tell us about your moment of inspiration? Why this piece?

In 2016, I was at a women’s group and someone handed around this 3D anatomical model that had just been open sourced by a French socio-medical researcher, Odile Fillod. Because she open sourced it, someone had printed it on Etsy or something, and then this sex expert came to this woman’s gathering and she handed it around. There were 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds, 40-year-olds, 50-year-olds, and nobody knew what it was. And this was only in 2017 timeline. 

I got a model and I just showed people, “Hey, do you know what this is?” Nobody knew what it was. They thought it was a wishbone, they thought it was a sea creature, but nobody said “clitoris.” 

I like to say I’m part of the clit-aissance, you know, because it is this awakening of this organ and pleasure inequities right now. So I felt like if anyone might know what it is, it’s the Burning Man community. They’re always very sex positive and more aware and more experimental and more adventurous. I wanted to see, and I was surprised because again a lot of people had no idea what it was. 

STUART:

I’m sorry, how is that possible that people don’t know what it is? And what do you mean when you talk about the knowledge being suppressed? I look at this thing and I see a coat hook. This doesn’t look like any clitoris I’ve ever seen before. What’s the suppression part of that and why didn’t people immediately recognize this for what it was?

MELISSA: 

I mean the nuns taught me sex education in Catholic school so I was definitely not getting out a mirror and checking out my vulva. And there’s just a lot of taboos around sex in our culture, especially in the United States. What happened is it was recognized in cadaver studies in like the 1700s when French doctors were cutting open cadavers and trying to figure out the body. And then in journals in the 1840s you could find a sketch and models of the clitoris. They knew what it was and they knew it created this phenomenon, or what the French would call la petit mort, a little death.

ANDIE: 

It’s always the French, always the French.

MELISSA:

The French, the French get it! Well what happened is women’s sexual health is reduced to the sum of our uterus. Everything’s about reproduction and procreation. It’s the only organ in the human body dedicated to pleasure. The clitoris only does pleasure. 

But as I said in some of the information I put on Playa, and this caused some people to think twice and some people to push back, it’s adjacent to but not integral to reproduction. The clitoris, even though it’s homologous to a penis, I mean, it’s the same embryological material as a penis, it doesn’t have the same biological function, but it gets erect the same way as a penis. And what happens in the formation of a human is, the same structure — I mean it’s got the same names of the part, like crura, the bulb. It’s the same as the penis. 

This is a new version of a phallic symbol, basically. And what I want to do is get the conversation away from reproduction and talk about women as these complex beings and that we have a birthright, a biological imperative, I believe, to have pleasure. 

Orgasm is a gendered word to me. It tends to be something we think of with a male biological event. In other words, there’s a big event that happens with the man when they have an orgasm. But women, it’s more on a spectrum, it’s a little more subtle. We don’t know that much about it because, frankly, if you’re not identifying an organ, you’re not actually caring about orgasms either. 

Most urologists are dedicated historically to men because there’s a lot that goes on with men. One of my favorite books — besides “Sex at Dawn” — was “A Mind of Its Own” and it was just about the male penis. Read it, it’s great. But all the studies, the Viagra studies, everything is geared towards this organ. There weren’t many female urologists. Very few. There wasn’t really a doctor dedicated to a woman’s vulva. And most people call it vagina, but vulva is what it technically is. Vagina is this opening, you know, that things go in to be able to create reproduction.

STUART: 

And then things come out of. Yeah.

MELISSA: 

and things come out of… babies and whatnot. And that leads into, you know, the cervix and the uterus. 

In this vulva area, you’ll find the clitoris, you find the opening for the urethra, and then you have the labia majora and minora. All of those are in some way directly connected to the clitoris, which has these neural networks deep inside women so that they can have pleasure. 

Most people think of the clitoris as that little button at the top of the vulva, but that is like the Tip of the Iceberg. That’s the thing you see. And that is definitely where a lot of the nerve endings terminate, and it’s highly, highly, highly sensitive, and that is where most women will have an orgasm. But many women could have orgasms from vaginal penetration. It’s a lower statistic, but you have to, some way, with some part of sex, whether it’s with your labia lips, whether it’s with your perineum, whether it’s with your vagina, you’re hitting a neural ending connected to this organ, however, your biology is set up. 

When people ask me “What your impetus?” It’s not like I’m some grand sex educator and sex positive person. In fact, everybody thinks I’m Dr. Ruth now. And I don’t know shit, but I do know that I didn’t know this organ and it’s important that it gets out there and it’s important it gets out this year. I wanted it before the election year. 

ANDIE:

It’s interesting because you say a Catholic upbringing. I went to public school and I remember distinctly, and this is just an example of what I’ve seen throughout my life. They took the boys to one class, they took the girls to another. The boys learned about masturbation and ejaculation. The girls learned about our periods. That’s it. That’s all we learned. And not even really that much about how the ejaculation and what the boys were learning had a connection to all of it. It took a long time to come together. And that information is definitely suppressed, and that is in our free country. 

But I wonder, you said ‘phallic symbols’ and that struck a nerve for me because this thing was very in your face and made of stone. I want to hear about your process for why you made it so weighty and in your face and why you made it out of the materials that you did.

MELISSA: 

Yeah, I got a lot of questions about that. When I was turning 60, I kind of went on this roots tour. And when you go to Great Britain, Ireland and Scotland, it’s all about stone circles. All I know is I’ve always had a thing about stones and I’ve done a lot of work on a smaller scale playing around with land art mosaics with stones, that you can create something that is a little bit more ephemeral like Burning Man. And then sometimes I’ll incorporate plant matter into it like you know flowers and things like that; so I’ve always worked with this medium.

Of course you guys know Zach’s work, Zach Coffin’s work, when he did the “Temple of Gravity” in 2004 wasn’t it the first year?

STUART:

Oh, big rocks. Big rocks!

MELISSA: 

Oh my god. Those granite hunks. And I’m like, “If I ever do anything, 100%, I’m gonna be doing something at Burning Man with stone at some point in my life.” 

Well, you said “Why so big?” Well, if you’re having your coming out party, so to speak, you want to go big. It monumentalizes it, it makes it important. It makes it this phallic symbol that you see in the world. We always see the pillars and the Washington Monument and everybody’s like, “Oh, look at that huge penis.” Well, it’s the same embryological material. “She’s as important as a penis” is basically the message, monumentalizing this. And I could just imagine like the sun rising…

Trust me, it was a technical, very difficult project because we had metal, steel metal armature. I ended up galvanizing it so it could be used in public art installations. Then I basically clad it in an inch thick of this vertical mix concrete and we hand embedded river rocks and pyrite in it, so it had a little sparkle. But it was laborious. I have all these cement burns. 

She’s not solid stone, but she still weighs about 11,000 pounds. It is in nine pieces. I’m talking two cranes, you know, to get her up. And everybody’s like, “Why, why, why?” My God, why not? This is her time.

And then also I made this pendant, Andie, that you have.

ANDIE: 

Yeah, tell us about the necklaces, one of my favorite possessions, honestly. 

MELISSA: 

Both my sculpture and this necklace are based on the open source model by that French socio-medical researcher Odile Fillod and I like to credit people, especially women, for their amazing work in the world. So I’m going to honor her. 

Well, this pendant is three inches and it weighs three ounces. This thing is heavy. Lightning, my partner, he’s like, “It’s a little bit heavy. It’s kind of going to hurt people.” I’m like, “Dude, how many penises have I been harmed by in my lifetime? I don’t fucking care if it knocks someone’s eye out dancing.” It could be a weapon or a tool, like most things, you know. A cell phone: It could be a weapon or a tool. A knife: It can be a weapon or a tool. The clitoris: It can be a weapon or a tool.

ANDIE: 

And how many giant penises have we seen in Black Rock City? All over the place, we can handle a couple of clitori here and there.

MELISSA: 

Oh my God. We’ve had vulvas and vaginas. We haven’t had as many clitorises, never anything 30 feet. So it was an intentional thing. 

The reason I wanted to do the three inch version, as an average clitoris is like 3.2 inches, an average flaccid penis is about a little bit bigger, 3.5 inches. So it’s the actual size. So I would tell people: wear this one because then it’s education. You can say this is essentially almost the average size of a clitoris, because that freaks people out because they’re like, where is it? And I’m like, “You only see the little teeny tip.” 

ANDIE: 

The Tip of the Iceberg.

MELISSA: 

The rest is deep inside you. 

Everybody’s like “Oh, feminist art.” I’m like “Whatever.” I love men. I really love men. If men aren’t the biggest ally of the clitoris we’re all in trouble! 

ANDIE: 

Right?

I have a some printouts of the material I had on the educational podiums. So I had these nine podiums with information on it, and you two know how Larry Harvey’s like “Artists aren’t supposed to sign their work at Burning Man. You can’t explain your art!” 

STUART: 

Yeah.

ANDIE: 

Right.

MELISSA: 

I said, “Larry, you probably wouldn’t have known what this is either, even though you know F-ing everything. It’s a missed opportunity for all of these people who want to know.”

So, I struggled with that. In fact, I worked with an amazing, and you know this woman, Arin Fishkin. I came up with the content, what I wanted the printing to be. I wanted original graphic representations with enough information and sort of playful and sort of fun colors. And I picked these up from the printer as I was driving to the playa, because I kept pushing back, like “Maybe I shouldn’t do this. Is this gonna be too pedantic? Is this gonna be too preachy?” 

People were telling me, they read it. First of all, everyone says, “No, everyone’s gonna be too messed up, like too drunk, stoned, whatever. They’re not gonna be able to read it. They’re gonna just have sex on these podiums.” Everybody read it. People took pictures. I was shocked. 

ANDIE: 

And then they had sex on the podiums!

MELISSA: 

And then they had sex, because they found the clitoris!

STUART:

Better informed sex! Yeah.

MELISSA:

The jokes about the clitoris, well that “Hey, I found the clitoris” one got really old the first time somebody in the Heavy Equipment said it during the build like the first minute I was there. But the best was this guy was like “Just drive your art car around in circles and you’ll eventually find it.” So Anyway… 

Three gay men came up to me from Comfort and Joy, one of my favorite camps, and they were like, “Tell us about what’s going on here?” And I was like, “Seriously, are you really, do you want to hear about this woman’s issue?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” And I go, “All right, I’ll just break it down for you in the elevator pitch version of this.” I said, “Okay. Imagine you yourself with your own body, and your sexual partner; Imagine if neither one of you could find your penis in your entire lifetime.” Obviously they were like, “What?” 

I go, “And it’s not just pleasure. It has a biological function.” It releases all these, you know, for women a lot of the oxytocin, a bonding hormone, a very important hormone. Men release it too, but women release it more. We release it during lactation, so we bond to these children who need so much of our attention for so many years. So I guess this is, you have a little bit of good sex and you’re like bonded. So, women, be careful with that! 

So it has all the feel good hormones that are released. It also helps people sleep. You know how men snore right away after they, you know, have this event. 

STUART: 

Nope, I don’t know that. 

MELISSA: 

Okay! It has a lot of benefits. 

STUART: 

There’s definitely a biological plus to pleasure. I mean, there has to be some kind of payoff for all the pain that is involved in giving birth to a child, right?

MELISSA:

You’re right, I think it is a biological imperative. To me, when Burning Man was asking me, how does this fit into our sustainability program? Well, in 2018 that book Project Drawdown, it got a lot of press. Andie, you read it.

STUART: 

Yeah.

ANDIE: 

Yes.

MELISSA: 

When you were saying, Stuart, “Where do you come from?” My undergraduate degree from University of California Davis, which I started in 1975. My degree was environmental planning and management and landscape architecture. So I’ve been in this space saying the same thing for so many years, right? So this sustainability thing has been around for a while, but of course it’s more dire every year. 

So when this report came out, they’re like “The top 10 reasons we can help mitigate climate change.” And of course there’s the obvious ones, like stop using fossil fuels so much. Number five was educating girls and women and number six I think was like birth control, because sometimes people put that together. But educating girls and women, because again we’re not talking just about the United States, we’re looking at the globe. There’s many countries where women have acid poured in their face for going to school. So women are closer to the environment, they’re closer to child rearing, they’re closer to buying things for that family like organic food, etc. They’re just closer to more of those domestic tasks. If they are aware of what’s happening, then the world is aware of what’s happening. Well, if they don’t know about this organ in their body, and they don’t know that they have a birthright to pleasure…

Imagine the pleasure gap. There are these charts out there. This is a chart about the United States. And again, one thing I said about Tip of the Iceberg, I’m giving you Tip of the Iceberg of information, so listeners do your own research. There’s a thing called Google. If you do “pleasure gap” or “pleasure inequity,” you’re gonna find eventually the number one group who has access to orgasms are homosexual men. They’re like 99% have had orgasms in their lifetime. That’s why when I was talking to this group of gay men on Playa, they were like, “Oh my God, my life would be miserable.” And then you go down and it’s sort of the obvious thing. I mean, it’s gay men, straight men, bi-men, gay women, but way, way down on the bottom is straight, cis normative whatever women. About 35% of women in the United States, this is in their lifetime, will never have what this word is, pleasure or orgasm. Now, that’s just the United States. Imagine if we go to the countries in the world where organs are cut off or there’s a cultural taboo. 

So imagine if 50% of the world, and I’m guessing, has never had access or very limited access to this pleasure and the benefits from this pleasure. Is that why we have all of these problems in the world? 

STUART:

Yeah.

MELISSA:

Our masculine and feminine energies, not men and women, this isn’t about bashing men. They are harmed by this as well as women. All of us are harmed by this. If we get away from men, women, and all that, and we just look at energetically, we have way too much male energy. But maybe if we have this collective female release of all this pleasure, maybe we could heal climate change, stop war. Hey, we don’t know, but it’s worth a try. 

ANDIE: 

It may not be the literal lack of orgasms in individual lives, but the information that women are as important and on the same playing field would indicate a lot of other social availability to women that we may not have in our society today.

MELISSA: 

Exactly, Andie. 

ANDIE: 

So you told us about gay men on the playa, their responses and straight men, but what did, what about girls, women, trans women? What did your sisters have to say about the piece?

MELISSA: 

Good question. Across the board, women were, I just felt a lot of gratitude and a little bit of disbelief. Sadness. There was a certain amount of empowerment, like, “Oh, this is something that we can have in our tool chest.” 

I was still surprised how many women were like, “All of this information is the first time I’m seeing it, hearing it.” It really hasn’t been out in general circulation. Like this clit-aissance I was talking about, which has really been going on mostly since about 2016. So I can understand that. 

Our granddaughter, she had just turned 10. I said to her, “Listen, when I was growing up, my parents really emphasized that my teeth were going to be my permanent teeth and with me forever,” and, you know, I needed to take care of them, so brush them, floss them. But no one mentioned so much about all of my other body parts, and definitely not this body part. So let me just keep it simple. “Your teeth are for chewing. Your clitoris is for pleasure. And pleasure can be with sex or not with sex, and it has a lot of different meanings we don’t even know about because it wasn’t studied.” I just kept it simple like that because she is 10. If we start out of the gates with comfortable discussions and just human health conversations more accessible, then it doesn’t have to be this whole huge weird discussion.

Women had a tremendous amount of questions and about their own bodies. And I encouraged everybody to just do their own research. There seems to be a lot of sexual dysfunction between couples, especially heterosexual couples. There are people who make this their life’s vocation. We shouldn’t be embarrassed about these discussions because it’s not always intuitive, especially if you were never exposed to it. 

I did have a lot of women express frustrations. I was shocked at the confessions about how many women still had said, “Oh yeah, I’ve never had an orgasm,” or, “What’s an orgasm like? Maybe I had an orgasm, but I’m not sure.” But it’s changing. And I think it was pretty, pretty fresh. 

What did you think?

ANDIE: 

I studied human sexuality in college and I don’t just mean the way that we all did. That was my major I was pursuing when I dropped out to work for Burning Man, as a matter of fact. And even I came to it with a what did you call it? 

MELISSA: 

Clitaissance?

ANDIE: 

Clitaissance. I feel like that’s true. I feel like the understanding that we’re coming to about its role in the female human experience is still pretty poorly understood. So my experience of seeing it, I wanted to stand by it and see what other people’s experience of it was, especially women and girls and, you know, “What’s that? I have one of those? I don’t see that.” You don’t see it. It’s subversive, it’s mysterious. But I found it affirming and cathartic and beautiful because of the way it was constructed. It was visually an homage and an honoring of this incredible, mysterious thing. But I was very curious about the experience of women as you saw them experiencing it.

MELISSA: 

Well, I like what you said about, I loved being a fly on the wall out there. I would just sit on the little stones and just walk around. Sometimes I was dusting off the podiums and people would be like, are you part of this project? I’m like, yeah, I’m maintaining it. Only if people knew me and knew I was an artist and they said it and someone else came up. But what I liked more was nobody knowing that I was the artist.

Those were my favorite times. At like sunrise, just going out, making sure the lighting or other things are okay. You know, just checking on the piece. We had a team who were the Clit Ambassadors watching out for her because you know, weirdly I was maybe expecting sort of vandalism. I don’t know why, I guess because women are attacked more frequently. I thought maybe someone would be offended and do something. So I was a little bit more vigilant than I have been with other art pieces, just checking in. 

And when I would overhear the conversations, I was crying too, because the discovery. It’s rare nowadays that you can have someone say, “I didn’t know that,” with the internet and with everything right out there. 

I mean, information is so accessible. When I was young, we had to find an encyclopedia or, you know, ask your parents or go to the library, or go to the library and find the librarian and say, “Can you get me a book on sex health?” But then if you read it and the person next to you saw you read it…

ANDIE: 

True. 

MELISSA:

It was hopeful overall. Across however anyone identifies or was born, overall, it was just 100% I felt support. When you said, how did the trans community, how did other communities respond? I did try to take a more inclusive approach with the information working with inclusivity experts. They helped me and guided me because just being inclusive that not all women are born with clitorises and not all people who have clitorises identify as a woman. I think people appreciated that. 

I had one person say that they had a very triggering time with the whole idea of this concept and making an issue so much about sex. And I said, “Well, you know, that’s why I went into the health aspects of it, because there’s a whole community of asexual people out there that don’t necessarily identify with having sex or want it as part of their lives, and they’re not weird for that; that’s just how they are and how they’re born. But it’s a good sleep aid, you know?” 

So there’s other reasons to want to tap into. It’s for mental health, physical health, it doesn’t just always have to be about sexual health. Use it or lose it and we don’t wanna lose it. 

So of all the art pieces that I’ve been part of or helped create. I never had so much interaction. That’s something about Burning Man. The interaction part of it is like, oh, can we get it to do fire and can we get it? No, no, no. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like I rode a bike and she did something. But it was the conversations were of such a level that I have not, and I’ve had a lot of incredible conversations on playa, but they were going at another level that I hadn’t really experienced ever before and that made me really happy.

I was just talking with my friend today about what’s next, and I told you my dream about getting her on the National Mall for the election and I’ve gotta pursue that because I kind of went into hibernation after Burning Man because of the enormity of bringing a piece of Burning Man. And this year, with all of its more complexities around the weather patterns. It was a big thing. It was like giving birth. But I am now ready to get her out there more. 

ANDIE: 

We’ll see what she wants to do next.

MELISSA: 

Yeah, it’s her choice. 

ANDIE: 

It’s her choice. Perfect.

MELISSA: 

Perfect, Andie.

STUART: 

Syn, I want to zoom out a little bit here while we’re talking. 

MELISSA: 

You’re done with the clit? Come on, she needs more attention.

STUART:

No, we’ll come back. We’ll come back. We will always come back to female pleasure. I’m a huge fan. 

Now I want to know more about you because if we flashback 15 or 20 years ago, as I understand it, you were living a nice suburban life in the Oakland Hills with a couple of beautiful children. What’s your path been like? How did you get to Burning Man and turn into a radical feminist artist?

MELISSA: 

Well, I’ve always been this radical feminist. I mean, I started high school in 1971 when radical feminism was, you know. You remember.

STUART: 

Right. I remember. And did we ever pass the E.R.A.? Oh no, never mind. But please, go on.

MELISSA: 

No, it’s still not ratified, which is another thing in this country. Women still are not equal to men. And, you know, the younger kids don’t understand that. I’m so sick of this conversation. We are literally not equal, and we’re humans. 

So anyway, I was always this person because it shaped me. I also walked in the first Earth Day, so that shaped me sort of in this environmental… I’ve always been more predisposed to feminism and also environmentalism. I was just a little too young for the hippie movement, although it did touch on me.

I moved to Oakland because I could afford a house. So I was a single working mom for a decade before I met my partner, Lightning. I met my partner, Lightning, in Casual Carpool in Oakland, driving, commuting, and…

STUART: 

What? Wait a minute. What’s a casual carpool?

ANDIE: 

It’s the cutest meet cute in the whole world!

STUART:

This is before Uber when you would stand around next to a freeway on ramp and say, take me across the bridge? OK.

MELISSA:

Yes. It’s unofficial, but people queue up and the cars queue up and you have to get two people and you cross the bridge you get to go through the diamond lane and in the old days you didn’t pay a toll, but you get to the city faster, San Francisco. I was the breadwinner of my family and I always worked. 

So I meet this magical person named Lightning in 2000 and he’s the lawyer for Burning Man. A couple of years later he asked me “Have you ever wanted to go to Burning Man?” And I’m like, “Yes!” At that time I was the Senior Vice President at a company named salon.com, which was the early days of the internet, you know when content was king. I always wanted to go because my whole tech and prod department would leave and go to Burning Man every year and I couldn’t go. But I thought it was only if you were an artist and you were in tech or whatever you know because at that time I think Google was so small I think they were having like their off sites at Burning Man or something. So he made it very easy for me to go and I went.

I sound like the cliche, but the freedom I felt there, and as a woman, it was the first time I had gone to something where I could just be a woman. Nobody asked me like: What’s your name? What do you do? Where do you live? How much money do you make? Do you have kids? It was so liberating. I was hooked. I was like, “I’m in!” So I really, really just dove deeper into Burning Man. 

Around 2005, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and that’s a whole other story about women’s health because I did 17 years of successive mammograms and it never showed up. So obviously by the time it showed up, it had metastasized and I needed to do surgeries and aggressive chemotherapy. So anyway, I went through a transformation at Burning Man. Then cancer kicked my ass. When everybody talks about ayahuasca ceremonies, my medicine, whatever my teacher, it was F-ing cancer.

I thought about my life. I thought about things that I was doing. I did need to make money, but I was also getting deeper and deeper into my relationship with Lightning and we decided to move in together. 

In 2006, I went to Burning Man and I was totally bald and very sick and I did this art piece called Crowning Glory. I covered an art car with wigs because again I’m bald. I don’t have eyebrows. I look totally different. And Burning Man’s always been a pretty — to me at least, and then this was the olden days — a highly sexualized event, but also there’s a one note about Burner Babes, and I wasn’t fitting it. I used to fit it! Six months earlier I fit it, but when you’re bald and you don’t have breasts, and you look sick, you’re not exactly attracting male attention. So it was a wake-up call for me for the beauty myth and all of that. 

And so I did this performance art piece where I put all these long colorful hair extensions in my very short hair the year after I finished chemo. I shaved it in front of the Temple, gave everybody my hair, burned it in the Temple. And I did a video around that, about how we are not our hair. That sort of opened up this volcano of creativity. 

I had really gotten into meditation and other things when I was trying to heal from cancer because, you know, I was raised Catholic, but when you think you’re dying and you want spirituality, you’re grasping at straws. I was like, what does this mean? What is life? Big questions. And mortality knocking at your door when you’re in your late 40s, you start paying attention. 

STUART: 

And what about the Temple? You were part of the crew for the Temple of Whollyness, which was actually the first Temple I ever saw. I took a lot of years off of Burning Man, and 2013 was kind of my return. And I was knocked out. There were rocks involved in that. Weren’t there some large stones in the center of that? Tell us just a little bit about that project.

MELISSA: 

Larry Harvey really liked this idea of the way Gregg Fleischman’s way, building solutions of interlocking wood and these connector nodes. He really loved…

ANDIE: 

No fasteners, right? No fasteners at all.

MELISSA:

No metal fasteners, no glue, no nails. It’s all router cut to precision.

We were asked to do something in the Man Base, and then, we’re like “Let’s put in for a Temple.” 

STUART: 

Sure!

MELISSA:

Gregg, Lightning and I sat down, and a structure that’s very strong obviously is the pyramid’s shape. We wanted to create sort of a different Temple, still honoring this ascension and still honoring how people would react, interact, but you mentioned the stone center. Of course, I said, “I’d love to do an altar, but I don’t want it interlocking wood. I want something stone.” Stacked rock cairns are the simple — do you know what a cairn is? When you stack rocks up? People will balance… Well that’s been going on since there’ve been humans. And usually it’s a way to either mark a sacred site or mark a trail. I was inspired by the Inuksuk up in Canada, by the Inuits, where they stack them so they look more like human effigies. 

I found a wonderful stone fabricator named J.L. LaFemina, and we just fabricated that. It’s basalt, solid basalt that was hand carved, then sanded. It was hundreds of hours to get it to that highly polished finish. 

STUART: 

Beautiful. Like a giant river rock in the world’s biggest river. 

MELISSA: 

Larry used to always like to say things like the Axis Mundi, the origine du monde, the center of the world. And that really grounded the space because as you all know from the Temple, you’re only really framing the space and grounding a space for people to gather and make it their own, whether they’re celebrating, mourning, or whatnot. We had a colonnade that you could walk around to kind of, if you didn’t feel like going right into the center, you could spend some time on the periphery. 

And it’s funny that year the decomposed granite was really chunky. I don’t know if the listeners know this, but like you have to put a decomposed granite base down so you don’t scar the playa surface with your burn.

STUART: 

It’s a gravel layer to keep the playa from burning. Yes.

MELISSA: 

Our gravel layer had like five-inch pieces of granite in it. So because we had that stacked rock cairn and I had some river rocks around it as well, all the big pieces of the decomposed granite, everybody stacked up all along these shelves. It was so beautiful to see people spontaneously key into that.

STUART: 

Larry, I know, was a big supporter of everything you did. I think everyone was a little surprised that he was in favor of the performance piece that took place in the Temple of the Golden Spike that involved menstruation. Tell me about that piece.

MELISSA:

Oh yeah. Larry was a very interesting man and I was fortunate to have very interesting conversations with him. And he was interested in women and women’s perspective. I mean, he was interested in everything. He was also very interested in the trees. He studied at San Francisco Community College and when he first moved here, gardening and whatnot. 

STUART: 

And he was a landscaper. Yep.

MELISSA: 

I said, “I know you say this Man is all about humanity and it doesn’t represent a man, but he sure looks like that bathroom sign that means MEN. How is he representing woman?” Larry was like, “It’s not the literal, it’s humanity.” And I said, “Well, what if he had his first menstrual cycle? You know, his menarche, his first?” I think one year it looked like the Man with neon looked like he sort of had ovaries. And he’s like, “What? How would you do that?” And I go, “Well, you know, like the aerialists who have that red fabric and maybe someone could come down and they could be born. Wouldn’t that be neat?” And he said, “Yes, do it.” 

The theme that year was Rituals, and I said, “Well, the first ritual we all really have is birth.” And he really just let me do whatever I wanted, but it was only for the opening ceremony. 

So I contacted my friend Bianca Sapetto, who is a famous aerialist. We worked together to collaborate with this choreography and this explosive opening where we had like eight people suspended in these womb-like sacks. And then the Man had this umbilical cord and a womb around him. And then they did this dance. I remember afterwards this man came up to me and he goes, “Can you explain that to me?” And I was like, “No, I can’t. It’s like birth.”

STUART: 

We don’t have docents at Burning Man. Sorry. Figure it out yourself. 

I don’t know if you’re aware that we had an opening and blessing ceremony for the Temple a year or two later. There’s a sentiment among the Numu and they actually put out a request that menstruating women not participate in the blessing ceremony. So there is still a bit of conflict of culture even right close to home over that, right?

MELISSA:

Yes. The clitoris was part of a triptych. The first one to me was the beauty myth. Then it’s like, women are always defined by the sum of their uteruses, whether you have one or not, whether it bleeds, whether it breeds. This one was all about the bleeders, the bleeding. Because I had chemo I stopped all this menstruation stuff and went into early menopause. Thirty-one years of my life I was menstruating. So a woman is only viable when she’s menstruating? It’s just so ridiculous. 

But I think you’re talking about the Paiutes. And in fact, the first Dean Barlese came out, we invited him out in 2013 to do a blessing ceremony for our Temple. We were the first Temple to do that. It’s obviously sacred land for them, the Black Rock High Rock Desert. It was a little bit interesting because they hadn’t done it before. And I was a little bit unsure because it’s sort of like what hubris me saying “Will you bless our Temple on your sacred land?” you know. It felt a little wrong, too. But Dean Barlese wanted to do it, and at the time, the Tribal Chair from the Paiutes came out as well, and it was so beautiful. 

Now the whole blessing ceremony is part of the Temple. It makes me so happy because it’s such a beautiful ceremony. And now they’re blessing the whole event, you know, at the Golden Spike. 

But Dean and I were talking about the clitoris this year. I had asked some of the Paiute elder women to come out. There is something in many cultures, like the Jewish culture, about when you’re bleeding you’re, I don’t want to use the word unclean, but that’s basically the word that keeps coming up. And apparently in some of the Paiute traditions as well, even though they honor it and let the woman sequester themselves away, they’re considered too powerful in that time. That’s what Dean explained to me. 

STUART: 

Yeah.

MELISSA: 

But I’ve been in Chiang Mai and not allowed to go in a temple and I’m out there with the monks saying, “Wait, I’m not menstruating. I’m an older woman. Let me in. I can go with my six-year-old granddaughter. Let me in.” And they’re like, “No.” So it has to be more than just, I don’t even have a womb or ovaries or boobs. I mean, right now I am a “they.” I’m a crone, but I still can’t get into these things because I present as a woman. So I’m not really sure. I think it’s more than just bleeding. Again, we go back to: women are not treated the same as men.

STUART: 

And back to being a crone, I’ve noticed you use the handle ‘Crone of Arc’ occasionally. Now that you’ve completed your triptych, what’s next? Does it perhaps have anything to do with aging?

MELISSA: 

What’s a quadtrich? I think I have a quadtrich in me.

STUART: 

Fair enough.

MELISSA:

I don’t know if that’s a word. 

ANDIE: 

You’re just gonna keep making up new words every year, right?

MELISSA: 

Exactly. When I went through menopause in like 2005, there was no Instagram where everyone was talking about how aging is so beautiful. I had no help trying to figure it out.

I was walking around this lake by my home and out of nowhere, I don’t want to say it’s a download because then we’re getting into woo-woo territory, but you know we all get our own downloads, we all get our own things that come in fully formed and we don’t know why. But “Crone of Arc” just dropped on my lap. 

And I remember Lightning my partner saying “Oh, don’t say crone. It’s like this old hag.” And I go, “No, it doesn’t have to be.” The most powerful time for a woman because if you’re not using all your energy menstruating, which takes a shit ton of energy, and if you’re not using all your energy raising kids, and if you’re finally free, and you’ve lived through all of your lifecycle, and you have some sort of life experience, shouldn’t you be giving back at this time? This is when you are in your most creative and fertile years. 

And so I was like: that’s going to be my handle on Instagram, and so I’m Crone of Arc. Everyone hated it, now everybody loves being old because they’re getting old. You know I’m 66 now. So I am officially old even by Medicare standards. 

Am I thrilled with sort of the aches and the pains and that I don’t look the same? Yeah, I kind of miss some of that, but you know, honestly, this is my super bloom time. This is the time. And if we could harness that energy, just letting women be free and tap into their pleasure, but also not thinking we’re so time-dated. 

I’m going to be out here building art, traveling the world and getting shit done because we need to get shit done. I have stuff to do in this lifetime. I want to be free to be who I am. So that’s the crone part. 

But how is this going to go? I think it is about the life cycle and aging. And it could resonate with some people hopefully like the clitoris did. So stay tuned is all I can say. Stay tuned. 

STUART:

Tell us about Art for Trees.

MELISSA: 

When we were doing interlocking wood pieces that have to fit together, you can’t be using recycled wood because it’s warped or irregular. I’d never burned an art piece before. I told Gregg in Lightning I wouldn’t build it, and burn it unless we did something like putting the exact amount of trees back in the ground. So there was a gentleman on our crew, David Shearer, who many of you are familiar with because he founded Black Rock Labs. I reached out to him and I said, “Do you know anyone who could help me figure out our board feet wood that we’re using for construction and back that into trees?”

And he knew a forester, and he calculated that it was 982 trees that we would need to plant. I was shocked it was that many trees. So we decided to plant 2000 trees and we raised that money and I partnered with a tree planting service in Appalachia and I’ve worked with them now for 10 years because they’re not just throwing trees in the ground. You have to do it with intention and you have to know what you’re doing. 

We’re doing mountaintop remediation mostly in coal country where we’re either saving the watershed, helping migratory birds. There’s people monitoring it. We’re planting actual trees and I wanted our money to go directly to that. So we’ve planted over 110,000 trees. Some of them are 10 feet tall right now, the ones we planted in 2014. And it’s really beautiful to see how the community gets involved. I just do it every year where I’ll design a necklace because Burning Man people love swag, and do a fundraiser and just say, let’s help plant trees.

So here I am, I said this to a little girl at the Smithsonian because some of my necklaces were in that exhibit at the Renwick, No Spectators.

ANDIE: 

No Spectators.

MELISSA:

I was talking to this little girl. Her mom was like, “Oh, look at these pretty necklaces, and she plants trees,” and I gave her one because I was gifting because I wanted to show the people who came how gifting works. She’s like, “Wait, you do this?” And I go “Oh, yeah. You can do this too.” It doesn’t have to be this big, huge, grand thing. All of these millions of acts of kindness put together will amount to something. Yes, we have to work on fossil fuels and other things with our gathering. Yes, we have our Leave No Trace policy. I’m not saying anything against the beautiful ritual of burning that is very important in many cultures around the globe. I’m saying it’s radical reciprocity. 

And instead of getting overwhelmed and crying about it or ranting about it on Instagram, just go plant something, but do it intentionally and with people who know what they’re doing. So, see, I’m just this little old woman planting trees. 

That goes back to the Project Drawdown. Women kind of do stuff like that. It didn’t occur to a lot of people on the crew over, what is this, 11 years ago. People were like, “Look at your ticket lady, it says burning. If you don’t want to burn, leave Burning Man.” And I was like, “Wait, that’s not the point. I love burning. I love Burning Man. Do we have to burn everything? No. Are there key pieces? Yes. And how do we do that consciously? And I realize that’s not most of the carbon footprint at Burning Man, but it’s more than a performative gesture. It’s a real thing. And why not do more real things?

ANDIE: 

What’s going to happen to the piece now?

MELISSA: 

As I said, I wanted her out in the world by the election year, which we’re in right now, like I’m like, I need to drop her right by the Washington Monument on the Mall. How can I do that? I decided sometimes when I try and force the flower to bloom, so I decided like, take a break. It was a big effort to get it to Burning Man. And my contact at Burning Man, Peter, in the art department, Peter Plattzgummer thought that I should try for the Patricia Green Hayes Valley proposal, so I just put that in last week. 

STUART:

Oh, great. 

MELISSA: 

Send it some good juju. I feel like San Francisco, it’s a pretty progressive city…

STUART: 

Let’s hope that it still is.

MELISSA:

Maybe they’d want a 30-foot clitoris. And then the merchant association has to vote on it too. They might not want to sell eyeglasses and clitorises, or maybe it’s a good marketing ploy!

ANDIE:

I appreciate you!

MELISSA: 

I appreciate you so much. Thank you for what you do. 

ANDIE:

Thank you.

That’s all the time we have. Thanks so much Syd Melissa Barron for joining us today. Thank you listeners for your support and for tuning into Burning Man LIVE, which is a production of the non-profit Burning Man Project. It’s a labor of love. We make it for you and it’s available wherever podcasts are found. 

You can get in touch with us with your feedback and ideas and inspirations at LIVE@BURNINGMAN.ORG. Find our back episodes at BURNINGMAN.ORG/PODCASTS. And of course, if you’re feeling generous today, drop over to DONATE.BURNINGMAN.ORG to make your tax deductible donation. 

And I am grateful today for all the people that make Burning Man LIVE go round and round: my co-host Stuart Mangrum, our story editor and senior producer Vav-Michael-Vav, kbot, Ali W, our engineer Tyler B, our administrative magician and resident geologist DJ Toil, the communications team for getting the word out, philanthropic engagement for keeping the lights on… 

And as always, as we say, thanks. Larry.

Burning Man started out of disorganization, and just people showing up to the desert and not needing a street grid, not needing anything, and there’s a beauty to that. 

And as more people show up over time and more, sort of, challenges occur with more people showing up, you start needing to create systems and bureaucracies.

STUART: 

The Burning Man movement has over a hundred official events around the world, all year round. Different parts of the globe. But the original, the mothership, our capital city, if you will, of our strange imaginary nation, is a pop-up city we call BRC, Black Rock City, out in the wilds of the Nevada desert.

While it’s temporary, it is still, in just about every aspect, a real American city. It’s about the same size population-wise as Santa Fe, New Mexico, and it’s got all the things you’d expect to see in a city of that size: a hospital, post office, an airport, a fire department, all that.

And while there’s no Mayor or City Hall, there are of course some of the city’s service functions that any urban dweller would recognize at a glance. We have a DPW, and we have a DMV. And while there’s no office of plans and permits for the tens of thousands of people who live in theme camps, or what we call collectively placed camps, pre-arranged through an application process, for all of those people there is the Placement Team.

I’m Stuart Mangrum, and in this episode we’re gonna shine a little light on what for some people is well a complicated sometimes confusing process of getting placed, as they say in Black Rock City.

My guest today, a conversation I’ve been looking forward to have for a long time, is Burning Man Project’s Associate Director of City Planning, also known as Placement Manager, also known as Level Placerman. Shall I include your government name as well?

LEVEL: 

Yeah, yeah, sure.

STUART: 

And sometimes known as Bryant Tan. Welcome, Level. How you doing?

LEVEL: 

I’m doing great. I’m happy to be here. I always have a lot to say, so looking forward to it. Yeah.

STUART: 

OK, great. My first question, I’m going to ask a silly question: What is it with all the placers having a first name and then Placer? We’ve got Machine Placer, we’ve got Hogwarts Placer. Is it like the Ramones? Did everybody just decide to take Placer as their last name?

LEVEL: 

There’s a whole ritual and initiation to get that last name as Placer that we go through, but it’s just a moniker, and quite frankly, we also try to remain sometimes anonymous in the community because, especially in social media, given the role that we play, we don’t necessarily want people always knowing exactly who we are, and so, yeah. Like Rangers are called, you know, Ranger Saturn or whatever their names are, and so we’re Placer.

STUART: 

I imagine that members of your team have to tell people no on a fairly regular basis, or give people news that they don’t necessarily want to hear. So we’ll go a little bit deeper into that. But first, I just want to talk about urban planning. This was not something we ever imagined that we would need in Black Rock City. In fact, when we first decided to put up a city limit sign, it was half a joke. And now, these, what? 35 years later we have you on our staff who actually has a Master’s in Urban Planning from MIT. 

First question: Is it even really a city? Or are we still just sort of patting ourselves on the back and calling it something it’s not? How is it like or unlike other cities of say, I just looked this up, Camden, New Jersey, it’s about the same size as Black Rock City?

LEVEL: 

Yeah. You know, I think that there are a lot of parallels to what cities have to deal with. Cities are just gatherings of lots of people. They happen to be semi-permanent gatherings, right? Buildings are built for hundreds of years in cities, and in Black Rock City, they’re built for a couple of weeks. Some of the conditions are different, but a lot of the dynamics are the same. 

We’re talking about: How do you bring people together? How do you have them live, and cohabitate together in a manner that they can coexist and respect each other? 

How do we get certain parts of cities to activate at different times of day? 

Most planners are actually dealing with an existing built environment, and trying to figure out what do you do with a parking lot or what do you do with a neighborhood that might be a little bit more disenfranchised? We don’t have to deal with that in Black Rock City, but we do get to deal with a blank slate, which is really, makes the job a lot more interesting in some ways and a lot more challenging in other ways because the temporality of it requires a different way to think about it.

And at the end of the day, I think urban planners have visions for what communities and people and space should look like, but they don’t always get that blank slate to work with, and so, you know, as a planner myself, I feel really lucky to be able to rethink this every year. 

STUART: 

Now let’s be fair, it’s not really a blank slate. I mean, it is, we leave no trace every year, but there’s so much history there, and the expectations of a community, that things will have some sort of continuity, be like they used to be. I remember when the first year we had placement, Harley Dubois, who, she was a firefighter in real life, in her day job, she started the whole process just around the same time that we started laying out the city in an actual city grid and thinking about our relative positions to each other. But how does that history, I mean, there are camps that have been placed for 30 years now. How does that history impact your job?

LEVEL: 

We come at it with a lot of deep respect for what was, and also with a mind towards the future too and how do we both iterate and innovate, respect the people that came before us that are still around, and as well as try new things as things develop both in Black Rock City and in the world. When you think about space, when you think about community, when you think about home, which I think we all do, right? We have feelings about it and associations about it and ideas about it. You know, you walk around or ride your bike around or drive around your own town and you have a sense of like, Hey, that corner could work better if it was this, or I really would love to see some art there. And I’d love to see that shuttered storefront turn into something really wonderful, right? We all experience the city just as people. And so you don’t have to have tons of history with it to have ideas and have perspective. 

I think what’s useful and different about Black Rock City is because we can iterate. My hope is that with camps that have been around for a long time, they are used to the shuffle that Placement puts them through and really take on the idea that they are anchors in this community both as physical spaces and as cultural spaces so that people can turn to them to really understand what does it mean to be a Burner? How do you do it in Black Rock City? How do you leave no trace? And it’s always wonderful when we get long-time camps that are like, “Hey, move me somewhere new because I wanna expose what I know and what I do to a different part of town.” And more often than not, there are many camps that are long-time camps that want to do that.

STUART: 

And people who are surprisingly change-resistant in a world that’s constantly changing and an environment that changes every year. 

Now you mention the Esplanade, and if you’re not familiar with Black Rock City, dear listener, that is the main frontage, it’s our main drag, the frontage road that faces out towards the Man and the artwork. Now placement used to just be about that, really. It was about Center Camp and Esplanade, the rest of it was “go seek your claim,” like the Sooners in their wagons racing across Oklahoma. Nowadays, a very large percentage of the city is actually placed before the gates open. Why so many? And what is that percentage? Is there any free land left anywhere that people can camp in without going through the process of placement?

LEVEL: 

We’re at a crucial point in the city of thinking about how much open camping makes sense, because over the years, we’ve sort of gobbled up more and more space for placed camps, so that you define the boundaries, you get told by Placement where you are. Even when I started volunteering for the team in 2014, we were placing maybe half of the city. This past year, we placed roughly 90 to 92% of the city. 

STUART: 

Wow.

LEVEL: 

That’s the significant portion. And the community feels it, you know, there are still long time Burners that go and say, “Hey, I used to have this spot that I loved and no one ever cared to even state claim on it on G street, and now it’s just all placed theme camps.” There’s some tension there. 

The incentive for people to get placed is that they have access to tickets, they obviously have access to space, access to come to the event early to build their things; and so because of ticket scarcity, it’s caused more and more groups to, even if they were really happy as long-time open campers, they’re realizing that the competition to just get tickets is so strong that bringing a placed camp and a registered camp is the way to do it. 

We’re at a point where we’re saying we want to communicate more with community. We can’t just continue to grow. The last handful of years, we’ve seen anywhere from like 100 and 150 new camps join the fold, without necessarily the same number taking a year off or deciding to retire from the event. 

And so we have had population limits for about a decade now, and now we’re facing also space limitations, and we can’t just keep adding streets. We just can’t keep growing the pot. The pot is full. 

I feel like we’re at this point trying to keep the placed camp margins at about 90%. And we may need to dial it back. Again, I think it’s sort of like recognizing the culture that is brought both by those folks looking for a spot in Oklahoma, like you were mentioning earlier, and want just more of a free ability to do that rather than the constructs of a process: “Fill out these forms. Go through these hoops.” People just want some freedom because that’s kind of the origin of Burning Man.

STUART: 

Yeah, that’s an interesting boomtown dilemma. You gotta make room for the new people. And it’s hard to imagine in that great endless sky, in that vast space, running out of room. But yeah, the permit only covers so much land. You can’t just keep adding streets. It creates logistical nightmares. But how do we keep that door open? I think a lot about succession planning as well. I think about who’s gonna be running the theme camp that I love 10 or 15  years from now, and I imagine it’s not someone who’s doing it right now. So having that door open and the ability to get in is pretty crucial. 

How do we persuade people who are already doing it, or have been doing it a long time, to back off a little bit, pass the reins, do some succession planning? That’s a tough thing. I know that particularly because they’ve gotten used to the steady diet of tickets, and access, and all that, it’s a routine that they don’t want to give up, right? So how do we persuade people to give them ways to make a graceful exit or succession?

LEVEL: 

Yeah, I don’t know that I have the perfect answer for that. There’s this impression from the placed camp community, from theme camps, that they have to go bigger and bigger every year, that placement expects more of them in order for them to just stay afloat. I just wanna say really clearly, that is not true. You know, camps can come back as the same thing, they can come back as smaller things, they can remain a little mom & pop, and we’re happy to see that. We actually love seeing small things, unique things, creative things that a small group of people do. I think that reassurance to people helps give them security to say, okay, actually, yeah, I was under this impression maybe because of the default world and with capitalism and all that, it’s all about more GDP and more growth and all that. We don’t apply that standard in Placement. 

And also helping people understand that you’re not going to be seen as a deserter for taking a year off. We do encourage people to take some time off. I hope that with the pandemic sort of forced time off, that gave people some perspective that it’s okay to take a break. You know, it actually, people can feel refreshed and rejuvenated to come back, maybe even with more creativity and more passion after that break. We have to figure out how to shift the culture to see that, to normalize taking breaks, to normalize downsizing, like, “Hey, actually I’ve been in this line and I recognize that maybe I should step out of the line for a year so that someone else can come in line.”

I think that is the challenge ahead. And I wish I knew the exact answer for that. I wasn’t around during this time, but I think that when the Regional Network grew, it was about recognizing that Black Rock City could not hold all the interest of people that want to do this thing. And so, I wonder if now that we’re also hitting this limit with placement, could people be reinvigorated to have even more Regional Events and Regional things happen, that take the place of their spot in Black Rock City for a year? 

So, I’m excited to see what could happen, but I think part of that for me is about sharing the data, sharing these dynamics, just starting to say, hey, actually there are limits, and what can we do together? We’re open for ideas.

STUART: 

Well, having helped organize quite a few camps myself over the years, I will say there are kind of social limits on how effectively you can get a group of people working together. Certainly, I think when you hit your Dunbar number, which is, as I understand it, the maximum number of people that you can kind of know and remember their names, but which is like 100. I would say personally, it’s more like 40 or 50 with the camps that I’ve been associated with that are the most successful. So what happens if we tell that 500-person camp to become ten 50-person camps?

LEVEL: 

Yeah, I think that’s part of the effort too. Dunbar, Robin Dunbar was a psychologist that studied social relationships. His number was 150, where it was about how many true connections could you have with people to have relationships with? And if you sort of think about your own world and your own life on an everyday basis, if you’ve ever planned a party or a dinner or anything, keeping it small makes it a lot easier, builds stronger connections. And so, our hope is that people can see that and recognize that part of this experiment, I think, of Black Rock City is about community building, relationship building, and not just amassing you know, the biggest camp possible. 

I don’t think we want to force anyone’s hand at this point to say, you are too big and you need to shrink, but to encourage people to realize, hey, actually, what does feel great? And I’ve had camps that, you know, have been a couple hundred people one year and this past year were 20 and they’re like, “Oh my God, for the first time I’ve been able to sleep, and I’ve been able to go to art, and I’ve been able to talk to my neighbors rather than just try to manage a really giant camp.” And so if we can surface more of those stories, I think more people will buy in and say, “Hey, actually, yeah, why don’t I try a smaller year this year? Because I would love to sleep too.”

STUART: 

So from a logistical point of view, from an operations point of view, does having more smaller camps put more of a strain on your team? Because you’re already looking at how many applications? For the 1600 camps to get placed? Run me through the numbers. What does your year look like? You and your volunteers are working on this in some fashion all year round. Walk me through what that process looks like.

LEVEL: 

We start off the year right around December, January to understand tickets, who wants them, who’s interested in them, how many are they looking for, who intends to come back. So we created this Statement of Intent that people have to fill out by January to let us know. 

Then from that point on, we alert people, here’s the number of tickets we think your camp should receive. We’re limited again by the number of tickets to give out, and so the more camps that wanna join the fold, the fewer there is to go around. It’s sort of like, think about pie slices, right? If you have more mouths to feed for a pizza pie, the slices of that pie get smaller, and so part of what we’re doing is assessing that. 

Later on in the year, which is just a couple months later, people have to submit a Placed Camp Questionnaire that lets us know exactly their intentions. You get an initial headcount. There’s some camps out there that bring the same infrastructure and the same interactivity year after year. And then there’s ones that really like to change it up. They change their name, they change their concept, they change their theme, so we try to give the opportunity for them to explain that to us. And over time what used to be just mainly questions about your interactivity and what kind of structures you build, we’ve asked a lot more. We have sustainability goals and so we’re asking more about people’s power infrastructure, what are they doing with their waste, how are they transporting things.

We have more aspects to how the entire event operations run. We have a PETROL program for fuel. We have outside services. We also have the BRC storage program now that many camps have containers with. And so they also need to gather information so we can coordinate logistics with them so that that’s all ready and available when camps arrive.

That questionnaire, it’s a beast, I will admit, but that’s due at the end of March for most people. And then you know we do a lot of back-and-forth communicating with camps between April and June. 

The map itself, I think most people are like, “Why can’t you just figure it out?” It’s truly a living thing until we get to playa because people are adjusting things; they’re adding people, they’re removing people; it’s a dynamic map. That takes the better part of the summer to complete, and we’re doing our best to give back information as much as possible, and so the last couple of years, we’ve told people “Here are your neighbors.” In July, they can start hopefully coordinating and sharing resources, or maybe co-planning events, or making sure they don’t have conflicting events, things like that. And then they go to Black Rock City. 

We do assess with the Playa Restoration Team if people have cleaned up after themselves. We also try to make sure we visit as many camps as possible just to say hello and get a snapshot of what they are. My team, there’s 21 placers and about 30 volunteers altogether that include the placers. It’s not a lot of people to get around to all the camps. There are 1200 theme camps, there’s another 400 mutant vehicle art support camps and sort of volunteer camps. And there’s close to a hundred department camps. In total, we’re talking 1700 to 1800 camps in Black Rock City. The numbers are impossible to meet for us, for every one of my main volunteers to get out there, and so we actually formed a new volunteer group several years ago called PEERS and anyone can really sign up for that. You’re stopping by 10 camps and saying hello on behalf of Placement and taking some pictures of their frontage so that we know what they look like. 

Many people really enjoy that experience because they are visiting camps they would zoom by otherwise. I would say 99% of volunteers come back and they’re like, “We had such an amazing time because we realized kind of some biases that we had, camps that we would not normally go into, we’re realizing are amazing Burners, amazing people, really welcoming and friendly.” 

We want to make sure that the principle of Radical Inclusion is really being honored by folks, that they’re being open and welcome and engaging with people of all backgrounds. 

The year end, after the event, we do ask camps to complete a post-playa report to just let us know how things go or how things went, because the decisions that placement has to make to impact people’s lives we wanna make sure that we have as much information as we can  directly from the camps themselves. 

Camps struggle sometimes and the neighbors talk, but you’ll learn through this self-reported process that people recognize the meltdowns that they have, recognize the struggles they have, and recognize ways they can improve. And I think that’s ultimately, we’re not here to really be judge or jury. We’re just here to understand the situation and give people more chances to come back and do better. And so that is the last part of our process, is the final sort of standings, gathering the information that we can get, and letting folks know if they can return. 

That was again a lot, but it’s a long process. It takes a year. What we do see is folks keep wanting to return. And so to build upon that is requiring more people for me to manage, more camps for my team to manage. But my hope is that we can kind of continue to grow the volunteer team too. We are interested in getting more people. You know, I think the ARTery has a couple hundred ARTerians as volunteers. That could be a future for Placement, but it’s just about finding the ways we can plug people in.

STUART: 

If you said the number of applications, I missed it. How many people get a “no” or “try again next year”?

LEVEL: 

We accept about 90% of camps that apply. The theme camps that apply, is the main part of what we deal with. So there’s about 1300 that applied in 2023, and we accepted about 1200, and that hundred that we didn’t accept, usually it’s camps that, you know, there are some folks that are like, “Hey, I have a hundred people and we’re gonna put on two yoga classes.” And so we’re often thinking about proportionality, “How many people do you have?” not exactly “What are you doing?” We try to stay content neutral, but, you know, how much are you doing? How much can a hundred people reasonably do without burning out? A hundred people can do a lot. And so we sort of see that based on what we see across the city. So we kind of compare all 100-person camps to other 100-person camps. 

We also have five person camps. What’s reasonable for five people to do? And we will place camps with only five people and say, “Hey, actually, you don’t need to be doing everything, something every day. You can be doing something, a couple of things, a couple of times a week.”

STUART:

That’s good. I know some camp organizers who will be really happy to hear that, or at least at that level of detail. I know a lot of people when they’re deep in that extremely detailed questionnaire, let’s not call it an application, they’re like, “What if I do something wrong? Is there a wrong answer somewhere in here that will immediately pop open the escape chute and drop me down into purgatory?” So that’s good. 

So camps who were in good standing from last year are pretty much a shoo-in for getting placement in the year to come. And you try to make room for some additional camps until you absolutely run out of space, which is probably next year. 

LEVEL: 

Yeah. I don’t think I want to see a city where there is no open camping. We don’t want to make everything completely bureaucratic, so I think we’re full. So we’re going to keep trying to figure out what that impact is on the camps that do still want to keep coming back. I think, again, I mentioned this pizza pie analogy. You know, we’re not growing the size of the pie. And so if people can deal with us trimming two, four, 10 spots and tickets from them to still remain, that is one scenario we could maintain. 

It would be interesting to go through an exercise to hear from the community: What do you wanna see more of? What do you wanna see less of? And that could help direct us in making some decisions. And if people wanna see more of a thing, you know, how do we incentivize that thing through the mechanisms that we have? So without a  whole lot of data on that yet, other than just anecdote, we’re still trying to just keep the doors open for everyone to be there.

STUART: 

People do vote with their feet. And, yeah, you mentioned the word bureaucratic, and there are some processes that might be accused of being bureaucratic processes. In a regular city, we call them zoning and code enforcement. 

Now, zoning is real. It’s not like, you know, somebody drew a map and carved it into zones. But over the years, Placement has, I don’t know, has it created neighborhoods like Kidsville and Gayborhood? Or assisted and facilitated in that? Because it looks like, from this distance, there’s some very definite ideas about dividing the land into different areas for different types of use and different times of day. Tell me a little bit about your outlook on our version of zoning.

LEVEL: 

Great question.The only formal zoning that we have in Black Rock City is large-scale sound. That is where, you know, 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock is where people can blast their speakers as loud as they want, as long as they face out to the open playa.

STUART: 

For the new listener, 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock are at the extremities. Think of Burning Man as a clock face, as an old fashioned clock face, you know, the kind your grandpa used to have, with the Man being at the center of the clock, and the streets, the radial streets are numbered like, but not all the way up to midnight. They’re from 10 o’clock on the left side over to 2 o’clock on the right side, and that’s where the big sound camps are these days. 

LEVEL: 

Yeah, I think I’ve talked to Harley, Harley K DuBois, and she has acknowledged that part of the reason Placement even formed in the first place was because they had to push rave camps out on the edges because when they were sort of central to the city, people were complaining and it just was a nightmare for people who wanted to sleep, things like that.

STUART: 

And then the solution was more of a nightmare because the decision was made to place rave camps a full mile away, and people driving back and forth between the main camp and the rave camp, there were some tragic accidents. That kind of led directly to the shutdown of cars, and turning it into a pedestrian city, but also made us have to deal with, you know, we can’t push that sound system a mile downwind. We’ve got to figure out other ways to deal with it. Let the people who love to groove loud, let them groove loud. Maybe the people who like to sleep, let them get a chance to sleep too.

LEVEL: 

I think this point, I’ll go back to your original question in a minute, but I think this point is really fascinating, right? Burning Man started out of disorganization and just people showing up to the desert and not needing a street grid, not needing anything, and there’s a beauty to that. And as more people show up over time and more challenges occur with more people showing up, you start needing to create rules and you start needing to create systems and bureaucracies. And I think that there is this tension in the culture that is about “Why does the org come up with so many new rules?” It’s an interesting space to work in because we do get to think and create what we think makes sense with the least application of rules as possible, but also recognizing that they’re needed when necessary. And that’s kind of where zoning comes in. Zoning is, when cities were originally forming, you had industrial things and highly pollutant things right next door to where people were living and eating and drinking and bathing, and so they had to start thinking, how do we make a safer space? How do we make this work for everyone? That’s sort of the evolution of how it also occurred in Black Rock City, so… 

Our team really wants to maintain some of the lawlessness that is part of the beauty of Burning Man. And so I don’t think we try to zone a lot. We recognize sound is a big thing for people. That’s the only thing we zone. 

You mentioned the Gayborhood, which people also call the Queerborhood. You also mentioned Kidsville. Those are self-organized bodies. And another principle that we apply in placement and mapping the city is honoring where people want to be. Even though Placement will move camps around, we generally try to honor where people want to be and who they want to be around. 

What happened with the case of the Queerbohood is that one queer camp showed up and then another one showed up. They were friends maybe already, or maybe they became friends on the playa and said, “Hey, next year, let’s ask Placement to be right next door to each other.” And there becomes a tipping point where in two camps become four, become eight, become a certain number where it starts feeling like a real neighborhood. Placement isn’t actually defining that, we’re honoring what people want to do. And then we’re also recognizing that, if we apply how we all show up in our regular neighborhoods and lives and in cities that we just navigate throughout the world, culture comes from people and people start embedding themselves in space. As the mappers of the city, we are very careful to honor that as best we can, while still, again, helping people realize that change is something that’s just part of the design process. 

I’ve come across points where it’s like. Like, no one seems to like death metal anymore. I don’t know how many people did in the first place, but there’s a lot less of it on playa. I’m like, do we just need to create a neighborhood around a plaza or something that’s all death metal so people just know you can avoid it, or you can go there depending on what your preference is? Because when we’ve tried to sprinkle them around, it really causes a challenge.

STUART: 

Wow, well I guess that does kind of line up with the sound zoning, which I think everyone could get behind. But there’s a risk of being creepy there, of ghettoizing, right? Of just saying, “Why don’t all you people in the black trench coats, camp over here and listen to your music as loud as you want?” I don’t know. 

LEVEL: 

Yeah, yeah. 100%.

STUART:

I was very glad to hear you talk about the origin of the Queerborhood because, I think that self-organizing is why, Black Rock City is, I think, one of the most queer friendly places on earth because of that, and because it’s a long history of that.

LEVEL: 

There are camps that actually are queer and say, please don’t put me in the Queerborhood. I don’t want to be there. I want to be with everyone else, so, these politics…

STUART: 

Not everyone wants to live in the Castro.

LEVEL: 

Not everyone wants to live in Castro. Right. Exactly.

STUART: 

to make a San Francisco analogy I’m sure everyone will get. 

OK, we talked a little bit about zoning. Let’s talk about code enforcement. You guys do find yourself in the weird position of enforcing rules that aren’t really rules. We’ve had this conversation before. The 10 Principles are not something that can be violated because they are not phrased as commandments, as rules. However, if somebody screws up badly enough, the community doesn’t want them there anymore. So let’s start with when a camp does a bad job, whether they’re poor standing for being too messy, leaving too behind too big of a mess, for being too commodified, whatever. What are the steps you take to help ensure that doesn’t happen again?

LEVEL: 

Our first step is actually just to try to understand the actual situation and try to get as objective a view as possible to say, what was going on here? There’s classic cases, people just pointing at a camp and saying, “Well, they’re a complete plug & play. There’s a bunch of sparkleponies there. Don’t bring them back. Ban them!” 

I don’t think that initial accusation equals the actual final verdict. And so we try to make sure that we are making judgments based on actual information. Oftentimes people see an RV wall and they think that’s a plug & play. And many times that’s actually just a corral of maybe a bunch of staff that are busy being staff and don’t want to put up a bar to engage with people because they’re running something else in the city. Same with, it could be a corral of artists that are just working on their art and don’t necessarily need people coming into their camp because they got to sleep because they have a burn the next morning, you know. So I think that those are things to consider. 

Assuming we found a camp that maybe is not doing everything right, we really try to believe in people having good intent and wanting to do the right thing, and that their failure isn’t just something that the entire camp needs to experience but to sort of reflect on. 

We believe in multiple chances, you know. I think with feedback and with specific feedback that gives people a chance to say, “Hey, oh, I didn’t realize I was being viewed that way. I didn’t realize that wasn’t good enough.” There’s probably somewhere in the middle that we need to meet. We really try to believe in people’s willingness to learn and grow. 

This is the part of our job that we love the least. Even myself, I joined the team not to be a code enforcer. I wanted to do SimCity and just watch what happened. We are on the front lines of people saying, you know, especially around turnkey camping and convenience camping to try to stamp that out. Also there’s sometimes camps we get reports about camps that are really unneighborly and will say mean things to their neighbors and pull pranks that aren’t really funny, but just more annoying than anything. So I think that depending on the thing, we try to show up and say, “What’s really going on here?” Also show up and say, “Hey, can we resolve this in a way that doesn’t feel punitive?” Maybe there just was a misunderstanding. And maybe there could be a better placement in the future. It just happens to be oil and water that didn’t belong together. 

And then when it comes to issues around decommodification, I think that there is a little bit of a harder line there because I think we definitely don’t wanna see pre-packaged Burning Man experiences for $5000, that someone could just sign up for and show up for, and not pull the weight and pull the culture the way we want everyone to. We don’t want this just to be an Instagrammable bucket list thing. It’s a community, it’s an experiment, it’s an experiment in community; we want people to show up a certain way and so I try to just have reasonable conversations with people. Sometimes they haven’t had good guides to help them learn what Burning Man is, and learn how to distribute leadership and responsibility, how to empower people to be their most creative selves, you know So I think that that’s not just placement’s work. I think that’s kind of the work that we’re all trying to do as we’re in our own ways, as we interface with people that show up at Burning Man.

STUART: 

So that tour operator who’s leveraging the Burning Man brand to make a buck off of our back, how do we find out about him?

LEVEL: 

Really I think the eyes and ears are out in the community. I’m not looking for those packages myself. It’s funny. One way that we find out is the AmEx concierge that says, “Hi, my client is looking for an RV and a bike and all these other things and a ticket to Burning Man. What do we do?” And it’s truly just like a concierge company trying to help their client. And then we do rely on just people letting us know, you know. There are unfortunately packaged experiences and branded experiences that are like, “Look at Burning Man!” And this isn’t just in English. We’ve seen this in other languages. 

STUART: 

Oh yeah. 

LEVEL: 

People want to commodify Burning Man. It is an amazing thing. And so I think there are people out there that feel like you can make a lot of money off of it. And so we just need people to help us put their feelers out and let us know once they do see that.

Once we find that we do try to understand who are these people behind this and is this a malintent or is this really just someone that didn’t really know, they are trying to do things within the spirit of the Burn. So it comes from all angles and all places. And where we just sort of catch what we get. And sometimes things get past us and show up in Black Rock City and we hear about it once we get there, or we see it ourselves once we get there. And so we try to address it on the spot as well.

STUART: 

So of the 1200 theme camps that were placed this year, how many of them will not be invited back as a placed camp next year or has to take a year off?

LEVEL:

Before I share those numbers, we do have sort of a scale in which we’ll slap people on the wrist all the way to not inviting people back. We generally are factoring in, do we see a pattern of behavior here? Have we given them years of explanation and chances to improve or not?

STUART: 

Yeah, it wasn’t a newcomer’s mistake. It was more of a bad actor or a habitual behavior. Okay.

LEVEL: 

Yeah. What we’re trying to suss out is, is this group of people or this individual willing to learn? And it’s easy to, you know, I think because we’re a trusting body, we’ll take people at their word. So if they say, “Hey, oh yeah, we’re sorry we messed up. We’ll do better next time,” We’re going to trust them to do that. And then if we see the same behavior come back the following year, we’re like, “Wait a minute, we thought we had this conversation. Why are we seeing the same mistakes?” 

So anyway, in 2023 there are five camps that we have asked to take some time off, anywhere from one to three years. And that’s five out of 1242 theme camps total. 

STUART: 

Wow.

LEVEL: 

In addition to that, there’s like 35 that we’ve given warnings and another 30 that we’ve sort of said, “We’re going to limit your size, or limit your tickets for the following year.” But really the only ones that are forced to take time off are five. And that’s, you know, a tiny fraction of the community. I think that it’s easy to focus on these outliers. But there’s by and large, most camps are doing great.

STUART: 

Yeah, and those people are welcome to go try to set up their camps in open camping or what’s left of it. I just want people to understand, they’re not barring people from the event for these types of behaviors.

LEVEL: 

Correct. Yeah. They can still show up. They can still buy tickets. They can still set up a camp. We’re just not going to give them access to all of that through placement.

STUART: 

Okay, I got a couple of questions, crystal ball questions. I want to look forward, we spent a lot of time looking back. Looking into the future. And once again, you know, a reminder that the annual cycle that we have is an urban planner’s dream, right? that iterative development of the city. What about gentrification? We’ve been going through that in multiple iterations. What else can we do to cut down on the number of people who are living in gated communities in Burning Man?

LEVEL: 

You know, I mean, I don’t think that many people are living in gated communities. It’s interesting. I try to think about my own evolution as a Burner and what I, what kind of like accommodations I had when I first started. I came in a monkey hut and just a Coleman tent and it was pretty basic. And I’ve heard of even more basic situations, people with no shade structures at all.

And people go and they learn, right? It’s not a “keeping up with the Joneses” kind of thing, but I think people realize there’s easier ways to show up, things that are less harsh, things that are easier to clean up after, and things that are more sustainable. And I think that feels like gentrification, and maybe one could argue that it is, but I think over time there’s other people that graduate to trailers, or RVs, because they’ve decided that this is important enough for them to invest in these toys that’ll make their experience better. You can’t blame anyone for that. 

Technologies change. The climate’s gonna change too, so we’re gonna have to adapt to all of that. So I think about it less as gentrification, but how are we adapting to the environment that we’re in and how are we trying to make it both easier for ourselves and more environmentally friendly.

When I look at a crystal ball, it’s not about how do we make sure that everyone still is living in a shanty town sort of environment, but how are we actually helping to, do we really need everyone to bring all the things that they bring? People lean super hard into Radical Self-reliance and that as wonderful as that is, there’s also Toxic Self-reliance where you’re not realizing that…

STUART: 

Oh stop. What you call Toxic Self-reliance, I call bringing enough surplus goods that you can be a gifting maniac. You can be a High Plains Gifter with all that stuff. Radical Self-reliance totally feeds into gifting in my book, if you’re of that mindset.

LEVEL: 

Absolutely. Maybe I’m thinking the margin beyond that, which is: I need to bring two of everything, not to give away, but just as backup.

STUART: 

My motor coach has to have a fireplace for those cold nights!

LEVEL: 

Or that. So, when you start multiplying that by the number of people that go to Black Rock City, I’d love to see the conversation turn into “What can we share? What can we share? What do we not need duplication around? How do we use a resource and share that resource so that we’re not bringing hundreds of plastic water bottles out there, but communalizing that, you know, there are net gains. 

I think there’s an argument to say that. Maybe that requires more money and people of a certain income level can afford to do those things, but I would hope that BRC, Black Rock City, is where we can actually think more creatively about that and try to figure out ways that it’s not just driven by “only the wealthy can have the nice things,” right? – and the environmentally friendly things.

STUART: 

No, sustainability was my next challenge for the future. It’s the old ‘too many generators.’ I understand that your team is making some inroads into helping people organize and to share resources. Tell me a little bit about that.

LEVEL: 

Yeah, we have this thing that we started a couple years ago called Humans United for Better Sustainability. Essentially what we’re trying to prioritize in mapping is groups of people, groups of camps that say, “Hey, rather than five camps bringing five small generators that have to be fueled, we’re going to go in on a cleaner, more efficient generator that’s larger, that we can all share and build a power grid across them.”

It’s not just about generators, you know. If people are communalizing around carpooling even, we wanna hear that, and we wanna honor that, and we also want to physically map that together. And so, HUBS is what the acronym is, we’re encouraging people to hub, to say, “Hey, actually, if you have things that can be shared, create a hub.” And if you don’t know who to share that with, there are lots of different spaces that we wanna help support people going to, both online and in person, where you can network and say, “Hey, actually I have extra storage space in my container in Reno, who wants to share that? We can go in and split the cost together. And then we can actually place it together on Playa with the help of Placement to say, these two camps need to be next door to each other.” 

So we’re trying to figure out more clearly who is sharing what, what are they sharing, putting them in the map first enables the resources to sort of flow a little bit more easily. 

There’s also camps that are part of the fuel program. We’re logistically actually trying to make sure that they’re clustered in a way that gets more efficient for the fuel routes of the PETROL program, as well as BRC storage. You know, everything… To build a city out of scratch takes a lot of power and a lot of fuel. And we’re doing our best through HUBS to minimize the amount of sort of space that they take and ways they need to circulate throughout the city. We’re talking about routes that are miles long. If we can cut down those routes for fuel trucks, like we’re gonna have some net impact on that. So all of that requires spatial planning as well as logistics planning. And that’s what I’m here to do as well. 

STUART: 

Last question about the future. 

I’m getting the sense that we have kind of a blighted downtown with the Center Camp Cafe since we took out the coffee bar. What do you see there? I know there’s a lot of people thinking, coming up with great ideas for that. What would you, what would your solution be?

LEVEL: 

We’re actually gonna be proposing a redesign of the area. Rod’s Ring Road has been a confusing street for a lot of people.

STUART: 

Oh my god. You think it would be impossible to get lost in that town, but yes, that’s the culprit all the time. 

LEVEL: 

Yeah, people get turned around. So I think what we’re planning to do is to reconnect Centre Camp’s physical space with the street grid of the rest of the city to have A Street, B Street, C Street all cut through. So there’s still have Center Camp and the shade structure of that Centre Camp in the middle and a big plaza there. We have an opportunity there by weaving the street grid back into Center Camp to invite people back to go there and check it out.

STUART: 

And if we have another rain year, it will be a waterfront.

LEVEL: 

Right. Yeah. 

STUART: 

It was pretty wet around Center Camp this year.

LEVEL: 

Yeah. What actually happens around the plaza, we’re really looking at, there’s been a lot of department camps where staff is, and I think that an older idea of Center Camp was thinking about it as a civic center and where all the civic services are. We’re saying maybe it doesn’t need to be that because sometimes civic centers shut down, especially at night, and we want to invite people there at night as well. So we’re looking at things like that.

What happens under the big top, I’ll be at the table to help think about. But I wanna think about what’s around there too, you know. I think that there’s an opportunity, we’ve had varying ideas. Some folks have said, “Hey, what if we had all the green theme camps that just surround it? So everyone knew that was the concept. Or what if we had all Regionals, the Regional bodies and camps from different parts of the world, like, it’d sort of be a little Olympic village around Center Count Plaza? 

STUART: 

That’s an exciting idea.

LEVEL: 

Yeah. There’s different ideas about what we can put there. 

The best thing about Black Rock City is we can iterate and try things. And so maybe we’ll try one idea this year and another idea the following until something really sticks.

STUART: 

So why did you go to Burning Man in the first place back in 2009, Bryant?

LEVEL: 

I grew up in San Francisco. I was born and raised in San Francisco, had sort of heard rumblings of it, but didn’t ever know anyone that actually went. And one year, a couple friends of mine said that they were going, and I was like, “Hey, I didn’t know you had any interest. I’ve had this interest, we just haven’t talked about it. Can I just like jump on board with you all?” And so I did.

I think the thing that probably caught me the most was seeing the art and saying, “Wow, the art is so beautiful and interesting. I really want to be there to interact with it.” I came for the art, but I keep going back for the people. It has become so much more than just art. I actually don’t even in my job right now see that much art. I’m in the city, I’m with the people. The culture and the vibe is so palpable. That felt like it hit every string in my body and resonated. And so that’s why I go back. 

STUART: 

Thanks for listening, invisible Friends. Burning Man LIVE is a fully decommodified media artifact hurtling through the invisible interwaves in your direction straight out of the Philosophical Center of Burning Man Project. I’m Stuart Mangrum and I want to express my appreciation to everyone who helped make this episode possible. Level Placerman. Vav Michael Vav, Tyler Burger, the whole production staff, the whole Placement team, to everyone who brings a camp to Black Rock City. Thanks to you all. Thanks to you dear listener, for, well, for listening, for liking, for reviewing, for donating at donate.burningman.org, and for sending us mail at live@burningman.org. 

See you next time. 

Thanks, Larry.

There’s something about removing the spectacle, removing the ability for you to wander off on your own, like you can so easily do at Black Rock City. When the costumes are removed, and it’s really just putting on your favorite comfy pair of snow pants, there is no brain power going into, “Where do I need to go to ensure that I’m not going to miss it?”

Why we do this crazy thing that we do? There’s no end of FrostBurn stories. And to quote a friend, one of the first friends I met at my first FrostBurn, “It is the stupidest thing you will ever do on purpose.”

Stuart:

The way the media has it, people apparently are still stuck in the mud from Burning Man 2023, including a few celebrities. Talk about a story having legs, or fins or whatever it is. This just, it just won’t quit. But if you were there, or you know someone who was there, you know it was a different story.

For so many people, the weather event was actually a good thing, that it brought people together in new old ways and gave them a chance to exercise their self-reliance, their communal effort, all those cultural practices that got us where we are today.

I’m Stuart Mangrum. This is Burning Man LIVE, and I want to talk about the weather because I’m recording this in January of 2024, four months after the so-called debacle. And looking at the weather out there in North America right now, it’s really hard to believe anyone thought that this year’s Burning Man was anything but a little case of the sprinkles. I mean, it’s raining buckets in San Francisco right now where our trusty engineer and story editor Vav-Michael-Vav is I think canoeing into work from Berkeley. There’s a huge cold snap happening back east and the midwest and the south. It’s even unseasonably cold down here in Baja, California.

Anyway, all this winter weather made me wonder: what is the coldest, the most teeth-chattering, frostiest, brrrr-iest of all the over 100 sanctioned Burning Man events around the world? And why would anyone intentionally go to Ice Cube Man or anything that sounds like you could die of exposure just going to the porta-potties at night?

But it turns out there are actually a whole lot of Burners who embrace that sort of, I don’t know, extreme winter sports approach to burning, going for the Radical Self-reliance win in a true survival setting. Now, there have been unofficial winter burns all over the place: Wisconsin, Vermont, Quebec, even allegedly way down under in Antarctica, at the bottom of the planet.

Anyway, going back to the list of official Burning Man regional events, and it’s a long list, there are a few in there that sound pretty frosty indeed. There’s… how about Freezer Burn up in the prairies of Alberta, but it turns out they hold that one in June, so not exactly a Donner Party. New Hampshire Burners used to host a little winter Burn they called Borealis in mid-January, but sadly, 2022 was the last year for that one.

So, through a rigorous scientific process we landed for this show on FrostBurn. It’s a 300-person event held in the wild Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia in, definitely in mid-winter, in February.

Now, I’ll be the first one to admit I’m not the perfect match for this story. I grew up in L.A. I didn’t actually touch snow until I was 16 years old. And other than, you know, Air Force Survival School, I’ve pretty scrupulously avoided any weather that could freeze my beer. So for this one, I turned to Burning Man LIVE’s resident expert in cold weather shenanigans to help me figure this all out: our producer kbot, and she connected us with one of the board members of FrostBurn… Bexx.

I’m here with my friend kbot, in the dead of winter. It’s January in the Northern Hemisphere, January of 2024. The news is all about ice storms and people experiencing terrifying subzero temperatures. Here in my own home in Baja, California, we had a cold snap where definitely daytime highs got below 70 and overnights below 50 Fahrenheit. No, excuse me, below is 60 Fahrenheit.

kbot:

Oh, cry me a river, Stuart!

Stuart:

It never gets below 50 here! But tell it to my neighbors who, you know, it dips below 30 Celsius and they’re all wearing down vests and sweaters. And I’m getting acclimatized to this.

But, weather has been on our minds since Black Rock City, right? People still can’t shut up about how a little bit of rain nearly destroyed some lives, some celebrity lives. We all know that it was just a little rain.

But talking about the rain makes me think about the larger Burning Man world. There are people who put up with so much more than a little rain and they do it on purpose. It’s kind of like the Polar Bear Club, right? these people who love to go diving in subzero waters just to go swimming on Christmas Day. There are some events that intentionally take place in the winter. kbot who are we talking to today?

kbot:

We are talking to Bexx from FrostBurn. It happens in West Virginia. They put on a Regional on top of the snow, in all kinds of weather; it can rain and snow, it can hail, it can probably sunshine – weather mayhem! And being a Canadian myself who has encountered a little bit of weather over my entire lifetime, I’m impressed. I’m very, very impressed that you’re able to do something like this, with several hundred people once a year. So, hello, Bexx.

Bexx:

Hello, kbot and Hi, Stuart, thanks for having me. And it does get pretty cold down there.

Stuart:

Tell us more!

kbot:

How cold?

Stuart:

How cold is it?

Bexx:

You know, I think important to this podcast for me is not scaring too many people off, because we are looking to grow our community down there in West Virginia. And I will say that the coldest FrostBurn I’ve ever experienced was in 2015. We did live through a blizzard. There was about three feet of snow that accumulated during the event, and it was certainly subzero temperatures with a wind chill I think of like -17, with sustained 60 mile per hour winds. That was pretty challenging, as you might imagine.

It was due to be one of the bigger years for us. At that time, it was our first year on a new property down in West Virginia as opposed to in Pennsylvania. And after that experience, with about half of the people who showed up on Thursday having their structures destroyed and blown away by the winds by the following morning on Friday, lots of people did not come back for subsequent years.

But I will say that since then it has been considerably easier. And that was my first FrostBurn, so that kind of set the bar.

kbot:

How did you get involved in this in the first place and how long has FrostBurn been happening?

Bexx:

Frostburn has been happening since 2008. It’s a very long standing official Regional Burning Man event. We are sanctioned by the BORG. It has bounced around to a couple different locations, but did find its home in West Virginia. And as I mentioned, I went for the first time in 2015 for that blizzard year. I had gone to my first Burn, Transformus, the previous summer, and folks there who are still my best friends told me, “You have to go to FrostBurn. It’s so amazing. You’ll meet the best Burners. They’re so extreme.”

So we went, knowing very little, just me and three other friends, baby Burners, and I was completely hooked. After that it was, How can I get involved? I started picking up team leadership opportunities, and joined the board towards the end of 2017 for our first, for my first year on the board, in February of 2018. And I’ve been there ever since.

kbot:

So why does it have to happen in the winter?

Bexx:

Well, that’s what makes FrostBurn FrostBurn.

kbot:

True.

Stuart:

Yeah, but I mean, don’t you have a summer in West Virginia?

Bexx:

We do, actually. Transformus has since moved to the same location on Marvin’s Mountaintop. It is absolutely gorgeous there. We love it. Vast expanses of land as far as the eye can see. However, I will say that the mountain does bring certain challenges. The wind tends to come down from the top of the mountain ,and hits you right on the plateau, right where we’re all placed. And the camps that are on one end of the mountain really bear the brunt of the wind.

kbot:

So you’re saying that you guys deliberately do the most punishing Burn imaginable for fun?

Bexx:

Oh, yes. I mean, have you met Burners?

kbot:

Well, yeah, but I just, I had to ask. You know, maybe there was a special reason why you did that.

Bexx:

To say that we did? Uh, in all seriousness, it presents completely new opportunities and a different set of circumstances than you would get during fair weather. I spoke to you briefly the other day, kbot, and one of the things that became so apparent to me during that call was that FrostBurn has about 5% spectacle, as opposed to the 100% spectacle that is Burning Man.

The spectacle itself is weather. And we’re really there for community engagement and connection, for long term relationship-building with one another. And at this point it is the only event that my theme camp does annually. We all go and spend our time with other theme camps and consider ourselves polycamperous, members of my camp, or go visit other friends during regionals throughout the summer in our own respective vehicles and so on and so forth.

Simply because the friends that you make at FrostBurn are the ones that you want to go visit throughout the rest of the year.

Stuart:

Wow. Shared struggle. You know, in my earliest days out in the Black Rock Desert, it was still very much considered a survival experience. And it sounds like if anybody needs a Survival Guide, FrostBurn participants do. How do you get people ready for this kind of an experience out there? And what kind of advice do you give to newbies who might not know entirely what to expect?

Bexx:

It’s interesting that you would say that, because on the one hand, the answer is yes, of course, people who are going for the first time you’d think that they would need more advice. But at the same time, the kinds of Burners that you’re getting, or just participants, I should say, that are attending this event are coming because they are up for the challenge, and they are very much the antithesis of Sparklepony. Sparkleponies do not survive at FrostBurn. And if someone does show up that is willfully ill-prepared, people will help you, but we will also tell you, like, “Hey, you can actually leave this event and you can go into Morgantown and you can get the gear that you need to come back and do this better.”

In previous years, in the month leading up to FrostBurn, I used to do like a “30 days of FrostBurn” where I would give out winter tips on our FrostBurn page about things like wind, managing wind, managing snow, managing things that freeze. That’s probably the most challenging part: the mud, the wind, and the things that freeze. Things that you don’t expect to freeze, like your contacts, inside their contacts case overnight. So like sleeping with them in your bra or in your sleeping bag with you so that they stay in liquid so you can put them in in the morning, which is dreadfully painful, I might add, being so cold and putting something like that into your eye. It’s really just that the people who are up for the challenge are doing that research on their own. They are like the poster child for Radical Self-reliance.

Stuart:

Okay, so costuming is basically dry suits?

Bexx:

Costuming is… I can demonstrate that actually. Here. Okay, here we go.

Stuart:

Bexx puts on a lovely fur hat.

Bexx:

This is a podcast, so, right, for the people that are listening for audio, I have now donned my warmest jacket. It is very furry. So has kbot. And I am in my ultimate yeti hat and this is about as far as you get with the exception of things like face paint, or some people will try to do makeup, but if it is snowing or sleeting or whatever, it better be waterproof because it will be all over your face and just a few minutes.

kbot:

How much time do you spend outside versus time that you spend inside your warm structures?

Bexx:

I would say that you bounce around to various different people’s warm structures. Anywhere on a given year. We have somewhere between 11 and 25 theme camps, and the goal there is curating warm, inviting spaces for community to gather. This was a challenge during COVID times, obviously for us, but people do hang out outside. Some theme camps spend a lot of energy trying to figure out: How can we create comfortable outdoor spaces for people to gather?

For instance, there’s a camp that always brings ping pong, and they light it up really nice so you can play at any time of the day or night. It gets very competitive around midnight. They also have darts, and a bar that you can easily walk into from the outside ping pong area. Shout out to Burly 10 Pint Men.

There are other camps who will create really beautiful fires with benches to hang out at, and some camps kind of do the opposite. If you were a first time Burner, it might be pretty intimidating for you trying to figure out, “Well, where do I belong here?” because everything is closed off. It is very different than Burning Man, where everything is open, it’s very clear when something is happening inside.

At FrostBurn, we’re weathering against the storm. And so you have massive yurts who are open all at all times of the evening. And there might be an awesome cuddle puddle party going on in there, and it might be so warm. And they’ve spent hours and hours creating these beautiful yurts for you to come inside and experience their art, to be in the warmth. They’ve created coat racks for you, places to put your wet shoes. But you wouldn’t know, if you weren’t in the know, that it’s okay to open up that door and step inside and say, “Is anybody home? Can I come in?”

And then there are the camps that are kind of in the middle, right? You can wear your shoes inside, but it is going to be muddy and it isn’t necessarily as, like, comfortable as that no shoes camp.

kbot:

What about saunas? So you have a sauna?

Bexx:

We do. We actually have one. It lives there permanently. We have a very unique relationship with the land owner down there on Marvin’s Mountaintop, and so a few years ago, one of the board of directors who lives nearby asked permission to build an A-frame steam house sauna thing called Habitat for Insanity. They do go to Burning Man every year. And that lives there permanently. And they do a lot of not only events on the porch outside, like snow cones, funny enough, very popular, but they do lectures inside. Anybody can come in and give like a talk about a topic. And they have a little sign up sheet so you can be in there for the sauna learning about something really cool.

Stuart:

Well, we have a lot of fans of the show in Finland. They’re going to be very excited. You may be deluged with Finns looking for a good sauna.

Bexx:

Come on in. We love it when the Canadians used to come down every year. They used to uh… They didn’t bring any infrastructure, but rather they would build a igloo. And one year they were like, “We can’t come because it didn’t snow.” But I think it was in 2016, they built a massive igloo and they put a fire bar inside!

Stuart:

Okay, I’m having a hard time imagining this, but that sounds great.

Bexx:

It was great.

Stuart:

Okay. So it’s a city of igloos, yurts, insulated tents, a big A-frame sauna and some hearty people standing around outside playing darts.

Bexx:

And geodesic domes, which is my camp. It’s a series of domes.

Stuart:

Tell us about your camp, and your crew.

Bexx:

So my camp’s called PHART Camp, P H A R T, you guys, get your minds out of the gutter. We are Philadelphia Art Camp. We like the arts of any kind; culinary arts, musical arts, visual arts, acting, whatever. Whatever our members that year are interested in showcasing. We build domes and we bring a floor structure, so that our camp is sitting out of the mud in the same shape as the dome. So for those people that do the domes out there at Burning Man, everyone knows they’re usually decagon. So we have decagon floors that fit inside of them. And it kind of looks like a land-bound version of the International Space Station. Everything is interconnected on the inside. So once you’re in and have your shoes off and your coat off, you can kind of go anywhere in between the two domes.

For most of our campers who do not have access to four-season tents, the kind of tents that people like to use at Burning Man, that don’t have any of the openings or mesh, it’s all enclosed canvas, which is very helpful at Burning Man. They’re very heavy. They are hard to maneuver, difficult to store, and a pain in the butt to get dry after these events, but damn do they work. So, they’re expensive. A lot of our members can’t afford them. So what we do is we do communal sleeping, which really adds to that element of camaraderie. And so about half of our camp sleeps together in these like teepee style tents that we keep warm for them. And it’s all intrinsically connected with the geodesic domes.

kbot:

How many nights is the event if you’re all sleeping together in the same nest? I’m just curious.

Bexx:

FrostBurn officially is from, it’s a Thursday to Monday event ,every year over Presidents Day weekend. We never shift the date. That being said, because structures and art can experience challenges going up, because of the weather, some people do show up the weekend prior for pre-builds. That’s the Friday or Saturday prior. Some folks will set their stuff up and if they’re local to Pittsburg they might leave and go home if they trust their structures to stay standing in sustained winds with no one watching. I’m on the board so at that point I’m there for the rest of the week. And so my camp likes to go down the week…some of us go down the weekend before and set up and then actually just stay throughout the week and do placement and various other things to get the event ready.

Stuart:

And how many people are you expecting this year?

Bexx:

Our ticket sales have been up; more presales than ever before at this point, and we’re over 300 now.

Stuart:

Wow.

Bexx:

So about 300 crazy people every year. But they are the best kind of crazy people.

Stuart:

Did you say sleet earlier? So there’s more than just blizzards. What are some of the varieties of strange weather one might get around Presidents Day weekend in the mountains of West Virginia?

Bexx:

Yeah, I think a better name for our event might actually just be Weather Burn. We get all the weather. In a given weekend you might set up in 45 degrees and raining, and it creating 18 inches of mud that you have to slog your way through, only to completely freeze over and have it be a perfectly clear night that’s 17 degrees with a wide open sky, where you can just see forever. As people who are interested in acoustics like I am know that also means that sound carries very much when it is clear and cold and we’re all… Our camps are very close together because people do not want to walk nearly as far as they would during a summer Burn.

But yeah, we get it all. In 2017, it was strangely warm the entire time. Unexpectedly. A lot of people had already packed and had gotten there by the time we realized that it was going to be in the 60s all weekend, and sunny. That was the year that we had a hot air balloon show up, and barely anybody wore their FrostBurn clothes. Most people were running around in boots and underwear.

kbot:

Perfect. It sounds like Black Rock City 2023.

Stuart:

I’m still trying to understand the basics of survival here. What about porta-potties? Because I know you’re talking about things that freeze. I think if I had a pee bottle in my tent, that would be something that froze overnight, right?

Bexx:

Well, the good news about a small burn is that you’re never too far from a porto. And the other good news about it being very cold, is that shit freezes. And we all know that that is the worst part of Black Rock City: it is definitely not frozen, and shit stinks. So we have very beautifully maintained porta potties, and people are wonderful about putting the seat down because there is nothing worse than sitting down on a seat covered in snow. I will say, however, that at one point during most years, at least one porto does get knocked over in the winds. And that is sad.

kbot:

Does the blue liquid in the portos freeze, too? Or is it magically…?

Bexx:

It does not!

Stuart:

Yeah, what is that stuff anyway?

Bexx:

I’m not sure. I’m not an expert on that.

kbot:

Drop an answer in the comments if you know what that blue liquid happens to be, because we are curious.

So, safety must be of concern. I’ve been to a couple of winter events where people are enjoying themselves, and we had someone fall asleep in a car, and we had to go get them, and we had someone get lost, and we had to go find them. It’s fine when you’re in a forest in the middle of summer and someone wanders off, you assume they will wander back. But when it’s this cold, you have to have a buddy system, no? Like, people can’t just walk away.

Bexx:

Absolutely. Yeah. FrostBurners are smart people, generally speaking, um, radically self-reliant to the highest degree and generally speaking not being too risky. And so I’d say it is few and far between that we have any, if at all, incidents at FrostBurn. We have a medical team, we do have Rangers. We have the core teams that you would expect at any regional Burning Man event, to ensure the safety of our participants.

But, it is true. I mean, we do have rules that you cannot sleep in your car with the heat running. It is true that snow can back up in an exhaust, and cause carbon monoxide problems. So that is a number one rule.

We also do put out lots of PSAs that if you are going to be running a camping heater, or any sort of propane related heating apparatus in your personal tent, that you absolutely 100% must have a carbon monoxide fire detector combo in your tent with you at all times. That goes for your kitchen, that goes for your geodesic dome living room space, that goes for your tent. That is absolutely a concern.

Frostbite doesn’t really happen very much, at least not that I’ve heard of. More so it comes from like the mud, and like the years where it actually isn’t that cold. But for whatever reason, your boots get wet, and you’re walking around in those same boots for multiple days and it’s uncomfortable, but it’s not uncomfortable enough that you’re like aware that it’s bad for your toes. And so, in the past there may have been an incident or two of the sort like this, but you’d be surprised. There haven’t been very many issues, if at all. Like I mentioned.

Stuart:

And you have a medical team on board in case they do it, right? So…

Bexx:

We do. Yeah. Every once in a while someone is in an altered state of mind and goes for a walk, it’s a beautiful place, and ends up cold, or maybe falling asleep somewhere they shouldn’t. But the good news is that it is a small event and everybody’s got their eyes out for their neighbor, and nothing of a negative sort has ever occurred when something has happened.

Stuart:

If I were to go into a bar at FrostBurn is there any kind of signature cocktail associated with the event? I mean, like Pickle Backs are in Black Rock City or…? Don’t say Fireball.

Bexx:

No. I think every year someone tries to push Malört on me again. Why?

Stuart:

Oh, Malört. Is there anything more evil in this world passing for an alcoholic beverage? Yeah. Does it taste more like bandaids or more like pencil erasers to you?

Bexx:

Or like that blue stuff in the porta potty.

Stuart:

Which is not Blue Curacao, my friends, this is not a Blue Hawaii.

Bexx:

We were so blessed to have a camp come last year, they changed their theme from year to year, but last year we had Stumbleweed come. They were a Western themed camp. They’ll be back this year. Shout out to you guys. They had Negronis on tap, which were amazing. The word definitely got around about that.

But, I think every camp kind of has their own shtick, much like Burning Man. And they do change. We have some repeat camps that come back year after year and do the same thing as you’d come to expect. But a lot of people do like to switch it up, and so for that reason, I actually don’t think that there is a signature FrostBurn drink.

Stuart:

Fair enough. So, Bexx, I’m curious about you. How did you get involved in the Burning Man world in the first place?

Bexx:

I went to my first Burn in 2014, in July, and I ended up there because I was at a party and I was talking to somebody who was spinning fire at this party.  And was… had never seen that before and was so inquisitive about it. And we got to talking and they turned to me and they said, “You’re such a Burner and you don’t even know it.”

I was like, “I don’t know what that means, but I’m really excited to find out.” And they said, “You have to go to Transformus.” And I looked up everything I absolutely could about this event, and I realized that, oh, this is a Burning Man event. This is this thing that I saw on TV. There was this like HBO special or something that had came out about Black Rock City. And I was like, okay, I absolutely have to get there because years ago when I was a kid, I remember thinking like, “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

So I went, I did not know that you could just go as an individual camper. I thought you had to be part of a theme camp. And so my first Burn I organized a two-person theme camp with my partner and I, that was called PHART Camp. And we went, and met friends who recruited us to FrostBurn. And I’d say the rest is history, except that I don’t think I would be as ingrained in the community if I hadn’t gone to graduate school and ended up writing my Master’s thesis about Burning Man.

Stuart:

Oh, wait, wait, wait. I gotta hear more about that.

Bexx:

If you’re interested in taking a look, it is on the Burning Man Academics page under my official name, Rebecca Rosenblum. Basically the study looked at Regional Burns, and what can we learn about this Burning Man thing by listening to what it sounds like as opposed to what it looks like? This is something that we all know as Burners that sound is such an integral part of your Burning Man experience.

It’s a signifier of where you are in Burning Man at times. It is a placeholder for the calendar for where you are in time. It is a marker of the time of day based on the sounds that you are hearing around you or not hearing around you, and can often tell you where you are. It can tell you about the value systems that are occurring around you, just by listening to the topics of conversation or the way in which people are talking to each other.

I was just fascinated by all of these completely different kinds of noises that I had never heard before, at my first event. And so when I went to graduate school and I learned, oh, you can kind of focus on anything, and I’m a musician, and so it seemed like the thing to focus on for me. And there hadn’t been at that time, very much study done about the acousticamology of festivals or Burning Man events. And so I researched what was going on at that time and built off of another two scholars’ studies, Stephen Moore and Scott Smallwood, and kind of went from there.

Stuart:

So let me get this straight. You’ve been to a number of Regional events. Have you been to the Black Rock City event?

Bexx:

I have. I was so, so lucky to be able to go the last two years. I played with the Black Rock Philharmonic out there, and stayed with a camp called Scrambles who are amazing—definitely a Scram fan at this point. And it was just, it’s just been the best, such a dream, to be able to go to the other side of the country to do that ,when previously all my experience had been on the East.

kbot:

Yeah I hear that the conductor of the Philharmonic goes to FrostBurn. Is that correct? Eric?

Bexx:

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Red Hat and I are, ah, we go back.

Stuart:

What instrument do you play?

Bexx:

I play the cello in the Philharmonic, but I’m also a vocalist, percussionist; I do a variety of different things.

Stuart:

And Red Hat plays… is he the fire tuba?

Bexx:

Yes, that’s actually, we actually met because of my thesis. A picture of him ended up in my thesis as one of the sounds that you might encounter at a Burn. and that’s kind of how we hit it off.

Stuart:

Shout out to Tubatron, if you’re listening. See you’re not the only one. You’ve inspired a movement.

Bexx:

But yeah, we’re really excited. Everyone’s pretty much deep into their own personal planning loops, at this point, you know, checking their hoses to make sure that they’re working okay, that there aren’t any gas leaks going on;

trying to plan their meal plans, what are they going to be serving up? How can they do their infrastructure better this year; taking in all the considerations of everything you learned from last year?

So it’s a busy time for us, but tickets are still available. If people hear this and are interested in coming, I can’t — I’m biased, but I can’t recommend it enough.

kbot:

What are you excited about for this year?

Bexx:

My camp is going to be the largest it’s ever been. That’s presenting some unique challenges for us. We are one of those camps, that is, it is an internal camp. We don’t have that outdoor arrangement, typically. No fires, no fire pit. Because we’ve almost doubled in size, we have to add an additional geodesic dome, an additional internal tent, and just planning for all of that additional infrastructure and trying to ensure that we’re all comfortable. That 20-some people are comfortable hanging out inside these spaces and that all of these spaces are going to be safe and survive in that weather is a unique challenge that I thought might have been exhausting for me after the Burning Man that I just had, but in the last week or so has started to become a very exhilarating idea.

Given the ticket sales that we’ve seen so far, I think a lot of camps are experiencing that similar growth to what my own camp is experiencing, and so my excitement about seeing my own camp grow is intensified. Thinking about the possibilities that this is happening in all of the other camps as well, and getting to meet all of these new people who could potentially become lifelong friends, like the past ten years or so have already done for me.

kbot:

How do you build and burn an effigy in that weather?

Bexx:

One year it didn’t go. One year it didn’t… It wouldn’t catch fire. In 2015 year, it didn’t matter how much fuel you put into that thing, it would not go. So sometimes it does not happen. That isn’t atypical. There are a lot of Regional Burns where there have been fire bans that I’ve been to, and sometimes an effigy isn’t necessarily the thing that makes it special. But, in every other instance, an effigy has happened. The effigy changes from year to year. It’s usually in the theme of a snowman. Sometimes it is vertical and is very much like three stacked neat little spheres as you’d come to expect a little kid would make, but made out of wood instead of snow. Other years, they are very beautifully intricate, these gorgeous geometric patterns that, when they’re lit of flame, open up in three different tiers and then spin around.

And then three years ago, the effigy builders decided to make it look like a pig roasting over a spit. But it was a snowman with a pig nose, and it took somewhere between four and eight people to push it around so that it would actually be a rotisserie snowman over a giant bonfire. That one took quite a long time to burn, as you might imagine, getting that equal amount of beautiful char on every side. But it usually doesn’t explode in the way that Black Rock City has come to expect.

kbot:

So much fun.

Bexx:

There’s something about removing the spectacle, removing the ability for you to wander off on your own and stare at art all night, and not say a single word out loud like you can so easily do at Black Rock City. When the costumes are removed, and it’s really just putting on your favorite comfy pair of boots and the same damn pair of snow pants there’s no brain power going into ‘What do I wear? How do I get ready for the evening?’ There is no brain power put into like where do I need to go to ensure that I’m not going to miss it? And moreso, placed on what are all of the other Principles that get so much less focus at other events? And how does that affect the community that is blossoming there?

I think you just kind of have to experience that to know why we do this crazy thing that we do. But I will say that you have people that either love it or hate it. The people that love it will not miss it. They go back year after year. They really get it and they will try to push it on everybody else that they meet. There’s no end of FrostBurn stories. And to quote a friend, probably the one of the first friends I met at my first FrostBurn, “It is the stupidest thing you will ever do on purpose.”

Stuart:

That sounds like a dare.

kbot:

I bet it shapes your community though. I know we’re winding up, but I just have to ask: When you share an experience that is so focused on, as you say, the rest of the Principles, it must mean that the relationships that are built out of that experience are also unique and evolving in interesting ways.

Bexx:

For sure. I mean, when is the last time you sat down at a burn and talked to the same group of people for more than an hour?

Stuart:

I know the answer to that. 2023. I mean so many people reported out from Black Rock City 2023 that that was the best part about it, that they spent more time with their campmates, with their neighboring camps, just getting deeper in with the people around them.

Bexx:

If you liked that part of Burning Man, come to FrostBurn. You’ll come back every year.

Stuart:

But definitely don’t just wear socks. You’re going to need boots.

Bexx:

Definitely bring all the socks. That is probably the number one thing I will tell you. There are a number of cold weather tips that I would be happy to write up and provide for you all for anybody listening who’s interested in coming for their first time.

Stuart:

Okay, bring all the socks and sleep with your contacts in your bra. It’s a good start. So for those of you who are not scared away by the tales of weather woe, FrostBurn 2024 is happening over Presidents Day Weekend on Marvin’s Mountaintop in West Virginia. Tickets will be available right up until, I believe, up until the middle of February or so at FrostBurn.org.

Bexx:

And you can get them at Gate. We never sell out.

Stuart:

Go figure. That’s FrostBurn.org Our guest has been Bexx Rosenblum. Thank you, Bexx, for joining us now.

Bexx:

You’re so welcome Stuart and kbot. Thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Stuart:

Burning Man LIVE is a 100% nonprofit production of the Not for Profit Burning Man Project, brought to you as a gift from the Philosophical Center. You can download it or stream it for free from all the usual podcast places, now including the YouTubes as well as Apple, Spotify, Google, yada, yada, yada. Or for an even more decommodified experience, you can get it straight from the source at burningman.org/podcast, where you can also find all the show notes, transcripts, all that other good stuff.

And while you’re there, if you’re in the mood, slip over sideways to donate.burningman.org and put a little love into the kitty there to support the show and our other year round cultural work in the Burnerverse.

Thanks to everyone who made this episode possible. That would be kbot, Vav-Michael-Vav, Tyler Burger, and the whole podcast morning zoo crew. I’m your host, host from the most on the Baja coast, Stuart Mangrum.

Thanks Larry, and thanks to all of you.

Hey, everybody, welcome back. It is Burning Man LIVE. I’m Stewart Mangrum and I’m here with our old friend Andie Grace, Actiongrl. What’s up, Andie?

ANDIE GRACE:

I’m so fortunate to be old.

STUART MANGRUM:

I meant seasoned friend. I meant, like, long-time friend. When I’ve introduced you before, I just assumed everybody knew who you were, because, well, because you’re kinda famous at Burning Man, but I just want to take a second here for you to tell us all how you got on this crazy train and got to the place where you are right now.

ANDIE GRACE:

Oh, that’s going to take so long. Let me sum up. I started Burning in 1997, right after I came to San Francisco from the Midwest and heard it on the streets, as one does when you live here long enough. And I began quickly volunteering with the Media Team and later became assistant to Ms. Marian Goodell, and helped her run the Communications Department for many years and helped her grow — and others — grow the Regional Network globally around the world. I served in that role for many, many years. I used to be the person that sent the Jackrabbit speaks to your email every week. Sorry about the spam. You’re welcome.

STUART MANGRUM:

Oh, you are the real jackrabbit!

ANDIE GRACE:

No. No, sir. Marian is the real jackrabbit. But there have been a number of emeriti as well. And I returned to the organization in 2018 after a hiatus of about eight years and have been working in the Philosophical Center here with you and others sharing stories of Burning Man.

STUART MANGRUM:

Yeah, that’s when we started off the podcast together. You’ve been a stalwart supporter ever since. And lately, though, your storytelling and story collection has taken a different turn. The project that you’re working on now, I’m super excited about,  and I’m really, really happy to be able to share it with our listeners. You’re working on an oral history project of Burning Man. Is that how you would describe it?

ANDIE GRACE:

That is correct. We’ve loosely referred to it as the Legacy Oral History Project. We’re trying to collect all the stories of who we are, who was there, what their stories are and, how it all began, and why. No big deal.

STUART MANGRUM:

No, no. Nothing. Nothing huge. Burning Man stories. But sadly, we’ve been doing this long enough now that we’re starting to lose people.

ANDIE GRACE:

That’s exactly right. You know, we have a lot of different media projects in the Journal and all manner of storytelling about the organization so far. But the history of Burning Man is thousands of stories, right? And many of us are losing those memories, forgetting exactly how it went or what year it was, or we’re losing people altogether, every month, it feels like, in such a broad and beautiful community. So with so many tributaries in the story, to get our arms around it all, to hold on to it for future scholars, for anybody who is trying to do things in service of this global cultural movement, as we are, or even just studying it in terms of any individual aspect of it, this is a historical repository to try to offer to the world.

STUART MANGRUM:

Now, you mentioned scholarship, and I know there’s an academic model for collecting oral histories, and then there’s also the more populist model of, say, StoryCorps, right? What background research did you do to come up with your method for how you are talking to people and how you’re collecting these stories?

ANDIE GRACE:

We absolutely, of course, looked at StoryCorps, as well as a lot of storytelling organizations that we are in contact with, such as The Moth, and different action-oriented or activist-oriented organizations who have captured their own oral history. Act Up comes to mind, various art movements and museums, the Black Power Archives. These are all examples of groups that have tried to hold oral histories or get their arms around oral histories, various universities and social and art movements.

And we also consulted with several students whose focus is oral history and other organizations and looked at. oralhistory.org literally has a very detailed how to on how to collect these and preserve them for time.

STUART MANGRUM:

You’re collecting both audio and video, I know. And it’s a mixture of field recordings and remote recordings for the people that we can’t get to. We’re going to be listening to some of the choice audio bits today and I’m hoping this will turn into an ongoing series for the podcast because I know you’re getting a lot. You’ve got a pretty long list. Where do you start? How do you decide where to start with a million stories in the big city?

ANDIE GRACE:

Well, it’s absolutely true. And every time we interview someone, three more names pop to the surface, right? So it’s been a collection from within. You know, what I already knew of the organization, what we already knew, sitting down with those lists of people who began teams back in the day were people who built art back in the day, it’s not just organizationally focused, you know, although it does track. We are trying to get our arms around: How did that team begin? Why did somebody start doing that and how did it turn into what we see today?

But it’s also, you know, those first DJs and those artists that haven’t built anything out there in 25 years, but were there when, and trying to get to the heart of how it became what it is now.

We are collecting it’s audio and video because there are many ways that you can present such an archive. It can be full and videos, it can be clips. Certainly this podcast is going to be a great way that we could share some of these awesome stories.

However, some of the folks that we have sadly already lost, and some casual collection of storytelling that we began before this formalized as a process is also part of this as well. So there are some gems and highlights from people that we just can’t get anymore.

STUART MANGRUM:

Well, I think that’s a great point for us to jump into this. So we picked five clips, is that right?

ANDIE GRACE:

Yeah, five, It was hard. We’ve been back and forth on this for several weeks because there’s a lot of gold in here. And just it includes people who haven’t been back in so long, and even as a person who worked in communications and was supposed to know so much about Burning Man, boy am I learning a lot from all of these people.

STUART MANGRUM:

Well, I actually am, too. This first clip that we’re going to listen to is from an old-time Cacophonist who precedes me by far in the movement, he was a member of the Suicide Club. He was out there for the first Burns and actually started the Lamplighters. His name is Steve Mobia. I love this story you captured about his time with the San Francisco Suicide Club.

STEVE MOBIA:

Well, there was this guy, Gary Warne, and he had a bookstore in the Inner Sunset. I think he was running “Hour of the Wolf” which is a great Ingmar Bergman film. I was a big fan of Bergman. And I struck up a conversation with him and he told me about the commune adversity and the Suicide Club initially was a class in the university and, and I didn’t go to the first event. Chris DeMonterey went to the first event. You should interview him, by the way. But I went to a lot of the early events, and that became my life for quite two or three years.

It seemed like there were events every week. It was interesting, and what appealed to me about it was that it was making the city into a dreamscape. We did things that to me were very dreamlike, and also exploring abandoned buildings, which often I dream about. In fact, I had, for Communiversity, I started these dream exploration groups and I went to a lot of like the Harkness Hospital that the Suicide Club used a lot, at the end of the Panhandle there, near the DMV. It was a hospital and it was abandoned, and they had the operating rooms and everything, you know, everything. But, you know, we’d snuck in and did all kinds of events in there. But the dream excursions, I wanted one person to tell the other person a dream. And then you create a Frankenstein dream in the operating room and everyone would be watching from where the interns were down into the operating theater and then people would enact these dreams that were composed of multiple parts from different people.

I actually did something very similar to that in 2005 for The Psyche theme. That’s a different…

ANDIE GRACE:

The Dreamer, right?

STEVE MOBIA:

The Dreamer, right. Yeah.

I persuaded Larry to finally do a theme based on dreams. So he came up with The Psyche theme and I got Pepé back to Burning Man, actually. I recommended to Larry that Pepé would be great at building a giant head. And anyway, we did an awakening of The Dreamer ritual every as the sun went down and the dream workers would get together and we constructed that Frankenstein dream based on the dreams that were shared in the head that day. And then it was acted out in front of the dreamer. And then the blindfold was pulled off the Dreamer. And we, I got anyone in the crowd there say, “Wake up, wake up!” And then the eyes would start sizzling, you know? And then Pepé started to fire in the middle of The Dreamer head. And then people could go in and play music and such.

So the dream excursion thing was going on parallel with the Suicide Club and, well, there were so many events that I can’t really… I mean, I did some.

ANDIE GRACE:

Tell me about one of your events that you did.

STEVE MOBIA:

Well, the one that John talks about all the time was Decoy Street. And Decoy Street was based on, at that time, which was, I guess, 1977, they had a police program where the police would impersonate street people, and they would look like they’d gotten into a fight or gotten shot or something, and they were lying on the street.

I was coming back. I was living on Minna Street at the time near the old Greyhound station and there was a guy lying on the street and his wallet was almost out on the sidewalk; it was like halfway out of his pocket. I didn’t pick up right away that it was a cop. I just thought “I gotta find some help for this guy.”

I went out to the motel nearby. And, you know, “This guy out there,” I was like, “He’s in bad shape. And they said, “Oh, he’s a policeman. Just leave him alone.” And that really annoyed me that there was someone right outside my apartment that… Oh, yeah, I was told he was doing his job.

So I dressed up, I put on a cape and a skull mask and went out and tried to help him up. And he’d go “Aaaaaah,” you know, he was pretending not to… “Go, go, go away.”

I said, “Where do you live? Do you live around here?” And perhaps just to annoy me or get me to go away, he said “Alaska,” which is a strange thing. So I thought, “Oh, I know what… You’ll feel at home.” And I went to a nearby market and got a bag of crushed ice and came back and poured it on his supposed wound. He had like a cut in his pants and he jumped up right away as soon as the ice hit his skin.

And a woman from across the street who I guess was pretending to be a hooker, ran over and flashed her badge and said, you know, “You get out of here,” you know, “You’re interfering with law enforcement.”

So I had this idea that we should all impersonate street people. And we went to the Tenderloin. We all met. There were, you know, all kinds of exaggerated caricatures of street people. And we all had plaques because someone might mistake us for the real thing. So we all had plaques over around her neck saying we’re decoys, you know, like DECOY PREACHER, and I was I think I was a decoy INNOCENT BYSTANDER. No, no. There was another one. I was the MOLESTED NIGHTCLUB OWNER or something. And I had a fancy kind of glittery jacket thing that I wore.

And anyway, we all kind of were on this one block and would occasionally arrest each other and flash badges at each other. And, you know, people had money to pass it from one to the other. The preacher had had cocaine in his Bible, a little hole in his Bible that he could dispense cocaine from. And at that time, we had a big hearse, an actual hearse that was the Suicide Club car. And in the end, it ended with a hearse coming around and these guys coming out and arresting all of us. And we all got into the hearse and departed. So that was one of those things.

There were so many events, but Gary Warne died premature… I mean, he died at 35, I think, so, it was really early in life. And that’s a whole other story. Everything. There’s so much. But there was a memorial at Fort Funston and the bunkers there. And then Gene Musharraf Ski and Elena Ferrante had an idea for an event to honor Gary Warne. Kirby Cove, is that what it’s called, across the Golden Gate Bridge. They had rented the space for the whole evening. And Elaine was a lawyer, so she had the people who wanted to go to her law office and fill out wills. And even though it seemed like an absurd thing to do, people really got into it and put in what they wanted to be remembered for, what they thought was important in their life, and that sort of thing.

But that was the first kickoff of the event where people are buried alive for 20 minutes. And at the end the people resurrected. We’re supposed to go through this wonderful tunnel. It’s like a cylindrical tunnel that goes out to the beach. And we were going to have a big clown out there, you know, because Gary wrote this story called The Clown at Midnight. So we were going to have the clown appear, but there were logistic things.

So in a lot of these events, there’s always you just can’t cover all the bases. And in this case, the resurrected people had to become pallbearers for the newly dead because coffins are heavy and the original pallbearers got tired of carrying them. You need four people to carry these, you know, even if they’re simple coffins they’re heavy with a body in there. And so it was so I you know, I had to resurrect people and put them to work carrying coffins. But that was the first Cacophony event.

STUART MANGRUM:

That’s a great story. So who’s next? Lexie Tillotson? Who’s Lexie?

ANDIE GRACE:

Well, Lexie is a friend of the community from way, way back. Harley K Dubois is involved in this project and helping us identify who’s who from back then, and she insisted that we have to talk to Lexie, who was one of the early greeters, just a very early, early participant back in the days when you kind of knew everybody that was there, because it wasn’t that many people.

Her partner was a man named Bob Stahl who built a lot of the shade structures out there that in fact, are the ones we still use today for the organization. Those platforms that you see, he designed those. She had a fun and funny time finding Burning Man the first time she came in 1994.

LEXIE TILLOTSON:

And I went the first year, which I’m pretty sure was ‘94, and because my friend Julia said, “I was at a cafe and I got a little tag off a flier and I’ve heard about this thing and it’s in the desert and we should go.” And I said, “I have law school, but if you want to drive my Volvo and I can sleep in the back, let’s go.” She said, “Great.”

We got our stuff and we didn’t really… Well, she’s the only person that had any camping gear and it was from her dad, so it was really old; it was like a little pup tent and stuff that she had, a little army thing. I don’t know how… We cooked ramen. And it was funny, so she was together. I pretty much brought nothing.

It felt like we were there for a week, but I think we went up on Friday before the burning, which would have been on Sunday, I think. Maybe it was on Monday, no Sunday, because then you still have a day to drive home and get your act together.

So she just had these instructions. I guess she had to make phone calls back then because it was the old days. She had to make phone calls and then there would be a message and that would tell you where you had to go next. And we were supposed to meet at Bruno’s because Bruno was going to tell us where to go, which I think is funny now that I think about it, because Bruno hated hippies on drugs. But somehow at Bruno’s, there was going to be somebody there who would then tell you how to get on to the playa. (We didn’t know it was called that then yet.)

So we drove up there. Julia drove. We took my friend Ron, who hates camping. And we drove and drove and drove and then we got to Bruno’s and it was closed because it was two in the morning, probably. Nobody said anything about that. And we we’re in the middle of nowhere and we didn’t know what to do because there were no signs anywhere. And we drove up and down — what’s the road after, what’s the road that you get to the three mile, whatever that road is. 437 I forget. Past Planet X there’s like a gravel pit over there on the left. We kind of drove in there thinking maybe it was there — because all dark and there’s nothing. There’s no lights. Gerlach’s got like three houses and everybody’s asleep.

So we just kept driving up and down the road, tried to figure out what to do. And finally we saw this stick and it had this tiny little black flag. It was like three inches long. It wasn’t like a flag. It was just like this, like a marker, a road marker. I have no idea if that flag actually was put there as a marker for anybody at all. But we decided that that was the marker that we would go on the playa at that point because we’d been driving around for about an hour just trying to figure out what to do.

Another car came, so we just followed that car and that car was going really fast, so it was kicking up all this dust in the middle of the night. And we have no idea because we’re getting there for the first time in the dark. And neither of us, none of us, had been to a playa like that or flat; we’d never… It was new!

So we drive, we follow this guy, we’re driving, driving, driving behind them, trying to keep up, but a little worried. But of course they have to be going to this thing because who else is out in the middle of nowhere? So we just keep following them and there’s all this dust.

And all and then out of the dust comes, there’s two naked guys and like a railroad crossing thing. I think that’s where we were supposed to pay, the naked guys, but we just followed the people, the car, because we thought “We’re never going to get there. We just gotta go. It doesn’t matter. We’re just going to follow because this is our only chance.” So we followed the car. We just drove right past the naked guys and and drove for a while longer, like it was still a few minutes. I don’t know. Those naked guys just standing out there. What the hell? We didn’t see any cars or anything. Now that I think about it, that was kind of strange. I hope those guys had water.

So we followed this car and then the dust sort of opens up, like opening the curtain. And then we see a neon Man and it’s just right in front of us because the Man was on the ground at that time. So we’re just parked right in front of it and we’re like, “Holy crap.” And then it’s like a parking lot sort of. We just see all these other cars that are parked in front of the Man and we just sort of parked there and got out and looked around and thought, “What the fuck do we do now?”

And we probably just started setting up our camp right there, like, to go to sleep or something. But Julia was the only one that knew how to set anything up because I never, I mean, I’ve been camping, but I really don’t know how to do anything at that point. So we… talk about survival. We did bring enough water, though. She had the instructions. Not enough food, but we found friends later, which was great.

When the sun came up, which probably happened 20 minutes later, it was like we woke up on the moon. It was just the most… It was the craziest thing. It was just awe inspiring. That’s all I can say. Everybody just took a big, it was like a deep breath. I don’t know. I did. Wow we’re on a totally another planet and this is in America! I didn’t even know this existed here. What the hell is this place? And that’s when the cracks, like everything, everything that’s so iconic now about it just… It was like being on another planet. It was awe inspiring, but confusing, too, because we’re kind of fish out of water.

STUART MANGRUM:

So our next clip is one that I absolutely insisted that we had to include in this program, because I love this story so much. It is from a fellow who was one of the very earliest participants in Burning Man, a guy who came to us by way of a machine art performance group known as Survival Research Laboratories, and for years was our pyro guy until, well, until he wasn’t.

Kimric Smythe, also known as the guy who designed the Neverwas Haul. Have you ever seen that giant Victorian house on a steam tractor?

ANDIE GRACE:

Love it.

STUART MANGRUM: More Burning Man cred than you can imagine. This story he tells, this is about a year that, until I heard the story, I just referred to that as the year the best burn ever, because there was a moment when it literally turned the night into day. And then when I found out why, I was, “Oh, shit.”

ANDIE GRACE:

Yeah. Kimric was the pyro guy back in the day. That’s the man you want to stand behind when you’re not sure if everything is particularly safe. We had our janky days, didn’t we? I interviewed Kimric first in this project, actually. I went to his shop, his accordion shop, in Petaluma, California. So the sound is a little mucky. There are cars going by, but I couldn’t resist sharing this.

STUART MANGRUM:

You’re that right, folks? His accordion shop.

KIMRIC SMYTHE:

The problem was that nobody was ever letting me know that they completely changed the way the Man had been rigged. So it’s like, “Oh, wait, suddenly it’s on a 20-foot platform? Nobody… So how do we get up there? “Oh, you’re going to have a crane and whatnot and stuff.” So the crane would show up and the guy is like, “Well, I’m only here for an hour?” And I’m like, “No. It’s going to take all afternoon.”

Things like that would happen. I realized I’m not… I’m good at managing my own affairs. And since I had worked the year before, I was just going to do it the same way I’d done it that way. I had my crew, so when people outside would change stuff, it looked like at that point it was a lot of the people that were better at doing professional art things where they literally would write a whole thing, write everything down; there would be meetings… And I hadn’t done things like that and wasn’t even familiar with the idea of that. I knew it’s things that other people did, but it didn’t occur to me that it reflected on what I was doing.

Stuff like that would keep happening. And I didn’t ever go like, you know, “I need to like, sit back and figure out, you know, change my method.” And I never really did it. So I think the event kind of changed. I didn’t change. And I think that started causing just more and more friction.

One of the last straws was when the Man, we were going getting ready to burn it, and that was the year that it literally just blew the fuck up. And that was not my doing!

Chris Kassala had bought a bunch of he would show up because I had no real way of getting fireworks and so he would literally show up the day or the day before and goes, “Okay, I was at Mega Blast (or whatever, some pyro things). I bought whole fuck ton of expired shit for you.” And so the night before we open up and I’d set off some of the stuff to see like what even does this stuff do. And I remember he shows up literally while we’re rigging and he goes, “Dude, I got this Korean War, aerial illumination flare.” This thing is meant to be dropped out of an airplane on a parachute so that a plane can take photographs at night. You would drop it over the battlefield and then fly over real fast and just start snapping photos. It was like a continual flashbulb, just aaahhh, insanely, like the sun coming up. And I’m like, “Oh, man, we’ll put it in the Man’s head. It’ll be super cool. It’ll just be like radiating white light coming out of his head” because he’s like that sort of lantern structure it’s going to look insane. It’s going to be like, you know, it’s literally you’ll see this beam coming up out of his head into the sky. It’ll be very, you know, philosophical!”

Well, we were still rigging and I had my guys still rigging, and that was the second year we had the guy that was going to be on fire. And Crimson kept going like, “What’s the ETA?” And I go, “Dude, it’s going to be done when we’re done.” It’s only like around 8:30. It’s not even 9:00. I go “We’re probably about a half an hour, hour out.” And she kept pushing.

And then finally I’m walking by and they’re suiting up the guy in the fire stuff. And I’m like, “Why are you suiting up? We’re still like an hour or something out.” And they’re like, “Oh, no, it’s just he wants to get ready.”

And so my dad’s up on the platform. I still got guys rigging fireworks down at the base. There’s still vehicles in the perimeter like vans and work vehicles and stuff.

Crimson just says, “Go!”

The guy runs up and… Because before I go “Okay” she always wanted to light the Man, light the fuzes.” So I go, “Okay, you need to light this fuze and this fuze.” And the trick is, the quick match, you use different types of fuze to get things to light at different times. Green fuze burns a foot and a half a minute I think, and the quick match which I had the hand make because it was illegal for me to buy it, so everything was carefully timed with lengths of fuzes. So I go “You need to light this fuze right here. If you light it up here, you light the quick match, you’re going to screw up the delays” because you would see one thing and it would be several fuzes. So like the Man’s head would go, like the flare would go, I had timed it so it would die down, because the guy said, “Oh yeah, it burns for like 30 seconds or something like that.” So it’d be 30 seconds, and then all the fountains and the other things on the Man would go. Everything was sequenced with different lengths of fuze.

So he runs up there and he’s standing there on fire and it lights in multiple spots. You see him literally just run. He’s on fire. He doesn’t even care. He’s running away!

It just goes up, immediately lights the flare, the flares go on, stuff’s shooting. And then the flare just, as far as I can tell, just blows up because I think it had cracks or something in it from being roughly handled. And ah, the man vanishes. I mean, it’s like, I can’t see anything. It’s just this white blob.

If you watch the video, you can see my guys are ignoring this. They’re still rigging, they’re trying to salvage and light the stuff that they have rigged because it was all a color sequence of different things going off. There’s vehicles in a perimeter and there is a photo that I saw and you can see this burning chunk going maybe like a hundred yards out and you can see a person standing right at its trajectory. And then I was at the photo exhibit and you see the guy, I realized that guy was a photographer and he has this photo, and you see this thing that looks like it’s been Photoshopped in like a cartoon meteorite coming at him with the Man in the background.

STUART MANGRUM:

What do we got next, Actiongrl?

ANDIE GRACE:

Well, up next, I spoke with someone again referred by Harley Dubois. This was Denzil Meyers who was there back in the early days. He was a participant who found his way through the Cacophony Society. We talked a lot about those wacky conditions that existed when everybody went to Burning Man in the desert. He helped Chris Campbell build the man he worked on, Pepé Ozan’s operas, which were a phenomenal big gathering during the event back in the late nineties. So Denzil had some fun stories as well.

DENZIL MEYERS:

Oh, the other thing that happened around that time was the first Cheap Suit Santa event.

ANDIE GRACE:

Hmm. Tell me about that.

DENZIL MEYERS:

Yeah, the Santa Con, that was another cacophony thing and said, Hey, or your cheap Santa suits from this address and here’s where we’re going to meet. I mean, that’s all you ever got, no social media or text messaging.

But we also had an Evil Elves workshop, and that was at somebody’s house in Oakland, and they had a bunch of weird toys and stuff that we could cut up and glue gun back together. And we said, “Okay, we’re making toys to hand out.” And somebody had made a bunch of wrapping paper, which is basically like single sheets of paper with a handgun stenciled on them. So, you know, these are the things that would happen.

A lot more people there, Peter and Lizzie and some of the people that you see, like I still know them from that one event. And then that’s it. You’re connected forever. I do have a toy from that day that Jerry James made, and I don’t know why I still have it or why it fascinated me, but basically it is like a G.I. Joe body, a little one, with a moose’s head on top. Somehow the way he glued the head on top, the spine is perfect. You can tell that the articulation of the thing, it’s just right on. And that always pleased me. Yeah, I still have it.

When we went to that event, that first SantaCon, it was crazy; running around downtown, running in and out of restaurants, in and out of bars. 20, 30 Santas all at the same time, you know. And then we heard, “Oh, that group went up into the department store and they went up on the roof and they got kicked out and they wrecked a bunch of stuff coming down.” We’re like, “What?” So you’re just hearing about these things happening while you’re still out in the street.

I do remember, Pine, we were on Pine Street downtown and a taxi stopped at the red light, and three of us just got in. We just got in. And there was a passenger and the driver was our friend Jeff Grove. And we said, “Jeff, what are you doing?” He was like, Whoa!” The guy’s like WTF? And we took off up the street and then we got out of course. And so all that was super hilarious and fun. And I’m not like a big drinker. I’m not usually a big drug person, so it wasn’t like I was wasted during any of these things, but they were still totally crazy.

That night culminated in a negative way. We were all waiting for a Geary bus because it was time for us to go, and there was still a lot of us there. It was a little bit late. And so one of those double length Geary busses come up, and we get on, and we take over most of both ends and it and yeah, once again it was pretty rowdy. For some reason somebody had a gun. I don’t know if it was a real gun, a loaded gun, but they had a gun and that’s obviously not cool. Somebody vomited on the inside of the bar of the bus doors that you know, that thing. And so we were driving up Geary and then we noticed that the driver was not stopping at the stops. And then there’s a cop car behind us, and three cop cars behind us, and there’s five cop cars behind us. And we’re like, “Oh, shit. What the hell is happening?”

So we get out into the avenue somewhere and the bus pulls into a big gas station or something and cops completely surround our bus. And we’re like, “Oh, fuck. Now what?” And they make us get off the bus one at a time. And there’s a guy there, like, I think from the department store because of whatever vandalism stuff they were complaining about. And so we get off the bus and like three cops and this manager of the department store and they say, pull your beard down. You pull your beard down, like, “No, not him.” It goes back out. “Next. Pull your beard down.” And so they’re checking everyone out to see who they’re going to arrest. And a couple of people got arrested. I think Chris Radcliff got arrested. Even though he swore that he was not the one to blame for whatever it was, we said, “Chris, you’re almost always to blame, so, you know, maybe this is fine.”

A couple of people got arrested. And then we’re like 40 Santas hanging around in this gas station. And I said to the cop, “What’s happening? What’s going on? Are we all under arrest?” And he says, “All right, all the rest of you Santas are free to go.” When do you get to hear that? That never you never get to hear people say stuff like that!

That was our last negative action of the evening. We all chance to go over to the Palace of the Legion of Honor, I think, which is out there somewhere. No, it was some other, it was something else, because that’s… Anyway, The San Francisco Chronicle was having a holiday party. And we just walked in. We just walked in and crashed it. And they got super pissed. They were so mad. They had zero patience for like 40 drunken Santas crashing their thing. We thought it might be fun for them. They were not receiving it as an act of service! And so they threatened to call the cops. And so we just all kind of then dispersed off into the ether.

But that moment, that year around that time was really good because I was dating this girl. And right before that, she said, “Oh, it’s Halloween. What are we going to do for Halloween?” I said, Ah, Halloween, Halloween is bullshit. Blah, blah, blah” I had something crabby to say.

She was like “Who says that? What’s wrong with you? How could you hate Halloween? You got some problem.”

And that actually struck me. I was like, “Wait a minute, I think she’s right. Maybe I should check that out.” And I went home and I thought about it for a while. And then I realized that Halloween somewhere for me was not that you put on a disguise, but that when you put on a costume, but actually reveals a part of you that you normally try to keep hidden. That’s what was freaking me out.

And as soon as I brought that to consciousness, I said, “Well, that’s obviously bullshit. That’s no way to live your life.” And right there, the whole thing cracked open and went the other way. So probably that Santa thing, if you want to count that as a costume, that was kind of my first thing.

STUART MANGRUM:

All right. And for this last clip, we went to another O.B., Original Burner, about as original as you can get, this is Larry Harvey’s brother, Stewart, who has so many great stories too. He’s going to in this clip talk about building temples.

ANDIE GRACE:

Stewart Harvey is Larry Harvey’s brother. So he heard a lot of the conversation on the phone when he’d check in with his brother about how things were going. “Oh, that thing you do on the beach, I’ll come down for that.” And he spent a lot of time with this community building the things. And then in the days that transition to the desert, he himself was also a fantastic photographer and he’s been attending for a really long time, so he has a lot of great photos as well. And I talked to him in his Portland photography studio.

STUART MANGRUM:

Yeah. In this clip, he talks about building a Temple with the artist David Best, who, after creating the Temple phenomenon in Black Rock City, has gone on to do them in a number of trouble spots around the world that were in need of some healing. This story is about the temple that was built in Derry, formerly Londonderry, in Northern Ireland.

STEWART HARVEY:

And I love the Temple. David’s a great friend of mine and I got to, I was on a temple project with them in Derry, Ireland in 2015. That was my best Burning Man experience.

ANDIE GRACE:

Tell me why.

STEWART HARVEY:

Well, you know, Derry was kind of ground zero for the Troubles, and there was still a great Catholic / Protestant division. Still exists, still there. I was invited to come. I thought my role was going to be as a photographer, but I landed in Belfast, got to coach over to Derry. I had to take a cab to get across the river. The River Foyle. There’s the city side and the water side, and then north of town there’s what they called the bog side, and that’s where that’s the poor Catholic area. And Waterside is the predominantly Protestant area.

I got in this cab to go over to the place where we were staying at St Collins House. It was a kind of a retreat center. I get in the cab and the guy looks at me and he said, “Oh you’re one of them Yanks.” And I said, “Yeah.” He says, “Well, it was a fine idea, but you built it in the wrong place.” I said, “Well, what do you mean?” He says, “Well, it’s on the side of the river that we’re going to, well, that’s the Protestant side of the river. So the Catholics are not going to come over there. But that piece of property up there on the hill where you’re building that thing, well, that’s owned by an old Catholic Irish family. So the Protestants aren’t going to go up there. Nobody’s going to come.”

And that stayed with me all week long we’re building that thing. “Nobody’s going to come.” The first day that it was opened, you know, it opens on a Saturday and bad and they were, I don’t know, seven or 800 people showed up, but they were mostly people that were connected to the project or city folk, you know, whatever.

And so they didn’t tell me everything I needed to know. And then I met two guys, Donic Ryan, who I’ll see probably out there this year and Dermot on the crew. And Dominic lived in a little town called Glen just down on the Shannon. He and Dermot decided they were going to go down there and visit Donic’s family. And they invited me to go with them. And it was a fabulous trip. I had a great time.

But still it’s: is anything going to happen when we come back? We get back on Friday and I said, “Well, let’s go up on the hill,” but we can’t get up the hill because there’s hundreds of people going up one side of the street, and hundreds of people coming back down. There must have been 30- 40,000 people at the Burn. So it turns out they came after all!

It was a wonderful experience. It was by far my best Burn because it was everything Burning Man was supposed to be about. It was healing this rift between Protestant and Catholic. They were working side by side on the build that we had 40 Irish on the build. There was an enormous amount of community involvement.

I went in town. There was a couple that were there visiting. They’re from England. I’d met them on the playa and they came over to visit. We went into town together and we were visiting the big Episcopal church that was in Derry.

And we went in and introduced ourselves to the priest and the ladies there. And I noticed up on the wall there was a big sign that said “Photography…” There was a fee to do pictures in the church, which they probably done because they were just annoyed by all the photographers and even they had taken us out into the sanctuary to just sort of tell us about this and that.

And I looked up that sign and I said, “Oh, well, you know, when I have a little more time, I’ll have to come over and buy a photo pass and take some pictures.” And he said “Oh, my boy, take as many pictures as you want.” That was the community really embraced us. It was a wonderful experience.

I’ve had others and we were in Parkland, Florida, for that build. I find that the Regional events, — that’s it, the Regionals — in many ways I feel like that’s been the most successful part of Burning Man is that transmitting that culture around the world and, and allowing it to adapt to a variety of cultures.

I haven’t been to AfrikaBurn. I want to go to AfrikaBurn. That would be really wonderful.

ANDIE GRACE:

Have you gotten to attend any?

STEWART HARVEY:

Well, like I said, I did the one in Derry. I’ve been to two or three stateside, like Parkland, Florida was one; special things, not regional so much, but just special kinds of events, mostly around David’s work.

ANDIE GRACE:

How were things received in Parkland?

STEWART HARVEY:

It was similar. And the students, a number of the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas School helped on the build. And that was very interesting because they had been, some of them have been really traumatized. I remember these three young guys, they never left each other’s side. They did everything as this group of three. It had a devastating effect on some of those kids. But the build gave them something that it was not only them, but their parents who were involved.

And the thing about David’s temples is there’s aspects, there’s hammer swinger stuff, you know, guys that can actually do tools. That’s one form. But there’s also all this decorative stuff that he does. He brings all these little pieces, and you take a 4 by 8 piece of plywood and people glue and make a mosaic out of it. And that becomes the floor. So you got 20 or 30 pieces of 4 by 8 plywood that’s all been decorated. The kids can do that. Their parents can do that. It’s a very uniting kind of experience.

I really think that’s the essence of that community participation. It gives somebody something to do. That’s how you get involved. You can’t get involved just watching it. You got to pick up a hammer.

STUART MANGRUM:

What’s next, Andie Grace with this project? Who are you talking to next?

ANDIE GRACE:

Oh, my Goodness.

STUART MANGRUM:

Are you going to talk to Stuart Mangrum? I’ve heard he’s got some stories.

ANDIE GRACE:

I already interviewed Stuart Mangrum.

STUART MANGRUM:

Oh, that’s right. You were talking earlier about forgetting, about remembering differently. I remember that differently. Okay. No, seriously, what’s ahead? Do you have enough people to talk to in the year to come?

ANDIE GRACE:

Up next, I mean, the list is 165 or so people now we’re kind of starting chronologically and are taking opportunities that might be more rare, such as when people are traveling in from out of the country, etc.. We’re doing it digitally where we have to, but I’m trying to be in person if we can. We’re chasing all kinds of departments and threads. There’s mystery folks that we’re trying to figure out where they went. Basically, if you think that you should be on this list and “why isn’t my voice in here?” I’m probably coming for you soon.

It’s hard to imagine, really, as the story gets deeper and more complex down the line, how we would ever stop recording it, really. So the number of departments, teams, all the cultural, the regional events, you could go on forever into the history of Burning Man.

STUART MANGRUM:

And I’ll just point out that over the course of this podcast, over the last couple of years, we have done some oral history episodes. We’ve sat down with some great storytellers who are on this list, and they’re already out there in a back catalog. So if, for instance, you wanted to go to burningman.org/podcasts

• Episode #41, which is my conversation with Michael Mikel / Danger Ranger
• Episode #53, which is a great conversation with Dave X, pyro guy, whose playa name is — whose stripper name, excuse me, is Sweaty Dynamite.
• Episode #58 with Candace / Evil Pippy
• Episode #69 with John Turner

There’s a lot of great history in there already.

I want to thank all of our guests, even though they were interviewed a while back, they’re all here with us right now. And a million appreciations to you, Actiongrl, Andie Grace, for doing this important work.

ANDIE GRACE:

It’s an honor and a privilege.

STUART MANGRUM:

And thanks to all of you who helped keep us on the, can I say, airwaves. We’re not really on the airwaves. What are the podcast airwaves? They’re just the waves!

Burning Man LIVE is a production of the non-profit BMP available free of charge and without commercial interruption wherever fine podcasts are downloaded. If you want to nominate people for the show or get interviewed for that BM oral history project, you significant piece of history, you, drop us a line at live@burningman.org

If you want to cruise some of those back issues I was talking about the URL is burningman.org/podcasts where you can also find full transcripts, show notes, and all kinds of other surprises.

And of course if you’re in a giving mood, drop over to donate.burningman.org and we will be warmly appreciative of your tax deductible donation.

I’m warmly appreciative of all the people that helped put this show, this season, this crazy, crazy wonderful thing together: My Senior Producer and Story Editor Vav-Michael-Vav, our rockstar producers Actiongrl, kbot, Allie W, our Engineer Tyler B, our Administrative Magician and resident geologist DJ Toil.

Thanks to the Comms team for getting the word out. Thanks to the Philanthropic Engagement team for keeping the lights on.

Thanks to Larry Harvey for starting this whole crazy train. Thanks to Michael Mikel for conning me into jumping on board. Thanks to Harley K Dubois, Marian Goodell for hiring me back onto the crazy train 10 years ago.

And thanks to all of you for listening, for telling a friend, for giving us a positive review for subscribing. I promise we’ll give you some more shows coming up real soon. Just stay tuned. Thanks everyone.

MADI: I got nothing to do with that!

TORY: So when we’re at the height of our most important moving song, the sunrise comes up. We see the light hitting all the people and their faces sort of illuminating. 

STUART: Welcome back, my friends, to another episode of Burning Man Live. This is part two of a miniseries about the magic of playa music. We put together over the course of a lot of 2023 this pair of episodes. By we, I should say, kbot, because she did most of the hard work on production. But we managed to interview members of some of these musical groups, and to get live recordings brought back from Black Rock City.

This one is about the Playa Choir, which is a miracle of many human voices working together with no auto-tuning, no special effects; the good old-fashioned power and glory of singing — and a little bit of preaching thrown in on the side, but we’ll see about that. Let’s go ahead and get started.

Could each of you say what your name is and what your role is?

TORY: Hi, I’m Tory. I am a longtime participant and kind of behind-the-scenes coordinator of the Playa Choir.

LEUT: I am Leut. I am the resident preacher.

STUART: Okay, we have to go a little deeper on that, Leut, actually on two things. Is Leut short for lieutenant, and what’s the preaching all about in Playa Choir?

LEUT: Every year I deliver a secular sermon, usually riffing on one of the Ten Principles and bringing in stuff from my life to illustrate those ideas.

As for Leut, that comes from a couple of women I met in my first or second burn who said that we give playa Names to new Burners, decided my name was Eluthra, which happens out of nowhere to be the island out of 700 islands in the Bahamas that my mother’s whole family is from. And to this day, I don’t know how that happened because playa magic. And I shortened it to Leut.

STUART: Thank you for that. We so often just, like, let playa names fly over our heads and never ask for the story. And the story is so often magical. Thank you. Alright. Kbot. Let’s see…

KBOT: It all goes back to 2018 when my camp was across the street from the choir camp and we heard them rehearse. It really became real for me that year as you went through your rehearsal sequence and I met some of the people in the choir. And that’s where my fascination just grew with all of the groups on playa that play real instruments and perform with real voices. And I wanted to meet you and I wanted to hear your backstories. 

What made you decide to start a Playa Choir?

MADI: I’m a choir director by trade. I’ve been in choirs my whole life and my first year kind of at Burning Man didn’t really count. I was a weekend warrior. This is 1999. And then I came back in 2002 and I did nothing but party because that’s what you do when you’re young and foolish like that.

And I just had, I’m like, I need to do something. Like I can’t just come out here and party. It’s cool for a couple of days, but I need to do something. I’ve always loved gospel music. I had an upbringing in church, even though I’m not a practicing like Christian or anything like that. But I just like that, feeling that element. I’m like, “Man, this would be a great place to have a choir that does a Sunday morning thing.” 

So the next year I started one and it started in a really dank, stinky army tent called the Spirit Room. And I made this little altar and somebody painted a sign. And I think we had maybe seven or eight people in the ensemble and like eight people showed up.

And I had an old Rhodes, and somebody came and played percussion and. That’s how it started. I just thought this place needed it and I was so scared. What if this doesn’t happen? It doesn’t have fire. It doesn’t have pyrotechnics. It’s not electronic music. What if nobody likes this project? What if it fails?

But I just kept doing it. 

KBOT: What year was that when you started the choir on playa?

TORY: It was 2003. 

MADI: 2003. Thank you, Tory. It’s a good thing we’re a community, because if I was leading the whole thing, we’d never get off the ground.

KBOT: Tori, what year did you join the choir?

TORY: I first saw the choir in 2009, and it was a life changing experience.

I had been to Burning Man since 2007. And somebody came into my camp and said they were involved in this and I stopped by one of the rehearsals at this point. It was in the Jazz Cafe. So it had grown a little bit in those years. And I wept. I was so moved and here was this group of people singing together and — oh, I’m getting emotional even now just thinking about it — but I just, I, I broke down and I was like, “Oh, my God, I have to do this. I have to be part of this.” 

2011 was my first year in the choir and I’ve been a part ever since and it’s literally is, my life has changed in, in those intervening years because of Madi. Madi is our driving force. Leut is the voice of the playa, but Madi is our inspiration. 

KBOT: Leut, what year did you start singing with the choir?

LEUT: Well, my first burn was 2011. I happened to see a sandwich sign somewhere in the city saying that there was this choir on Sunday morning, and I was like, “Okay, I’ll go check that out. Whatever.” I sat there and was kind of blown away thinking “Who is this woman leading this choir? And why does this choir sound like the black churches I grew up with in Harlem on the playa? Something’s going on here and I should probably be part of it.” 

So I joined the choir the next year and it’s Now just part of the rhythm of my burn.

KBOT: How would someone go about joining the Playa Choir? Can you just wander up and get involved or do you have to audition?

MADI: We welcome everybody all the time.

I spent a lot of time at the Glide Church in San Francisco. I sang in their choir for quite a while. And one thing that really moved me about that place is just their severe commitment to welcoming everybody, everybody in that church. And this is in the Tenderloin, like the gnarliest, seediest, most drug-infested neighborhood. This church sits right in the center of it. 

And so, you know, it really made a strong impression on me, the kind of welcoming attitude. So when I started the choir, like this is how it has to be like, everybody’s welcome to come sing with the choir. We have a solid core of about 40 singers that return every year.

And then it’s the people that walk by that are like, “Wait, what? What is going on in there?” And they will come by and they’re like, “Oh my God, I sang in choir when I was in high school. I would love to do this.” And they become like Mark, they become like Tori, they become like our people. 

STUART: I’m curious about the musical direction. It sounds like you folks stick fairly closely to traditional gospel-y choir music, is that true?

MADI: Actually, the music is really different this year. I need to step out of my comfort zone and do some different things. And so I don’t think there’s a traditional gospel tune in our set. But the lyrics are always… I think when I’m choosing the music, I have the theme in mind, but I’m going for what I think is really going to touch people, what I think is really going to inspire people.

It always has to do with reminding people that they are works of art. That’s always at my core. There’s always a transformational piece, the kind that gets people crying. There’s always a couple pieces that get people dancing. But the lyric is pretty much what always drives my music choices.

STUART: Okay, so I’m not going to hear anything snarky, like an acapella version of Boots and Cats and Boots and Cats and Boots and Cats? Or, I actually, I know a couple of guys who have an acapella didgeridoo band on playa. Have you heard Didgeridon’t?

MADI: No.

KBOT: Didgeridon’t…

STUART: I may connect that with you.

MADI: Oh, that would be so great. Have him come to our service. I always invite other artists to do things like solo. We always have things that augment the service, so have him come see me.

LEUT: It’s interesting you asked about a traditional gospel. When I tell people that we’re non-denominational, the example I give is the year we sang a hymn to the Afro Caribbean ocean goddess Yemọja.

STUART: Yeah. I get it. 

KBOT: Can you hint at what you’re singing this year?

MADI: The first tune is Awake My Soul by Mumford Sons. I have this deep-hearted connection with like Americana roots music. I was seven miles from the closest stoplight when I was raised. I didn’t know what city life is like at all, so I never went to a big gospel church. 

We’re ending with Van Morrison’s Wild Nights, but I changed all the words to Your Wild Life.

Animalia, like wildness. I’m way into that saying by Henry David Thoreau, like, in wildness is the preservation of the world. 

Our tearjerker transformational piece is this piece called Heavy by Birdtalker. And the theme is just leave what’s heavy behind. It’s Sunday. It’s Sunday at Burning Man.

And then I’m doing an original composition called Ona’s Prayer. Ona is my friend David Syre who came to our service in 2009. He is such a special human being. He came to the service, he hated Burning Man. He didn’t want anything to do with it. He was so done. He just wanted to go home. He wound up at my service on Sunday morning and was completely transformed.

And we’ve been really sincere friends ever since. But his whole thing is he started to paint. He’s 70 years old when I met him and he started to paint. You’re talking like business developer, traveled all over the world, owns businesses, companies, all this stuff. And, he just said, I’m going to learn to paint and he’s amazing.

He’s a ridiculously incredible childlike wild painter. So it’s a piece that’s dedicated to him and kind of his philosophy, his life. I wrote this poem for him and then I just said it to music. It’s called Ona’s Prayer. 

TORY: You want to talk about the Finlandia?

MADI: This is the first year we’re collaborating with the Black Rock Philharmonic, which is super exciting.

I’m so excited to do that. That is hush hush, because I think the orchestra doesn’t know that we’re going to sing. It’s a surprise for the orchestra. So Jean Sibelius wrote this beautiful sort of nationalistic piece, Finlandia. It has a choral part at the end. It’s a pretty famous hymn. So, we’re going to collaborate with them.

We may or may not do it for the service. I’m not sure. 

KBOT: I’m curious to hear you explain why you call your performance on playa a service.

MADI: It’s church for people who hate church. It’s church for people who are recovering church folk. There is something about Sunday morning in this world. And also on playa, there’s something that needed to happen on Sunday morning that was cohesive, a special look back on the week, but especially look forward.

So it’s modeled after kind of a traditional church service, but I am so careful. Everybody who speaks and the music we do is non-denominational and non-dogmatic. If church was like this, I would go every Sunday, you know, and that’s so important to me to keep it that way because I don’t want anybody feeling excluded. And the minute you start putting dogma there, people start to get really turned off, including myself.

KBOT: Leut, you give the Sunday sermon at the Temple. Is that correct?

LEUT: A secular sermon. It’s in sermon form in that, you know, I grew up in a church as well, and I’ve seen a lot of great sermons, and I’ve seen a lot of bad ones. I try not to give bad ones. So my topic is never religious, but it’s delivered in a form that’s digestible as a sermon. 

If you think about Sunday on playa, if you think about starting your day with the Playa Choir, and ending your day with the Temple Burn, it is a very spiritual day. After the huge party that is the Man Burn, you have this spiritual day, and then you’re ready to head out.

STUART: You know, Larry Harvey liked to say that Burning Man is exactly like a religion, except with no higher power. 

LEUT: Yes. 

STUART: And I’m wondering if any of you are familiar with the First Church of the Jerk. The Jerk Church?

LEUT: I am very familiar with the Jerks. I’ve done a little bit of singing with the Jerks, but not a lot. And I really loved it when they had their cathedral on playa a few years ago. 

STUART: I think it comes from the same place that you were talking about. People who grew up with church and they love everything about church except the religion part, right? They love the church picnics and they love the choir; they love the service and the fellowship. I think I understand that through that lens.

KBOT: What time and where does the sermon take place?

MADI: We load up at about 4:30 in the morning and drive out to the Temple. We’re right behind the Temple, right between the Temple and the sunrise, and we start it pretty much at sunrise.

Then we roll back to our dome and reset things up, and we do our main service at 11 at our dome. 

TORY: The sunrise service is very different than the dome service in terms of the energy that’s there. The sunrise service, we get a lot of people that have been out all night that are coming from the Temple; They’re very raw.

In general people are at the end of their week. Many have come through a very life changing, you know, I mean, Burning Man is hard, it’s arduous, and people deal with their own inner stuff and relationships and choices. And so we often have a lot of people that we encounter there, their emotions are really on the surface — that energy, people just crying and really caught up in the moment at the sunrise service. 

And, Madi is an artist in that she always times it that at some point, at some perfect moment in a song, the sun rises right behind us, and…

MADI: I got nothing to do with that!

TORY: Oh, but you always start it just exactly at that moment. So when we’re at the height of our, you know, most important moving song, the sunrise comes up right behind us. We see the light hitting all the people and their faces sort of illuminating. 

Then the 11 o’clock service is different. It’s much more family oriented. People are planning on being there. There’s more that goes on, but again, very high energy. That’s where we get really the people up and dancing. And, you know, we have people leaving on exodus, driving right by us and waving goodbye. There’s a lot of people, I mean, Leut talked about staying for the Temple Burn, but a lot of people who leave right after that. Also, we’re often broadcast on BMIR, and so we have people, as part of their exodus, their tradition is to listen to our service on their way out. And that’s our big point, is to get all those feelings from Burning Man to go home with you in the default and to remember that experience.

STUART: Very well said.

MADI: Mmhmm.

KBOT: What does rehearsal look like leading up to Black Rock City when you all are still at home?

MADI: I teach full time, but right when I’m done teaching in June, I take a tiny, tiny break, and then I’m like, “Alright, I gotta get to work.” And then I spend a few weeks choosing, writing and arranging, and then making sheet music, making the music and then putting basically practice tracks online, so that it’s out hopefully by the middle of June — or July, excuse me — so people can get familiar with it ahead of time. 

And then we rehearse Tuesday through Saturday. So sopranos will get together, altos get together, tenors and basses all get together separately. And then the band also, it’s like five different mini rehearsals about the same time.

TORY: ish…

MADI: ish… It’s a huge amount of work to make sure everything works together, to arrange it and/or write it and get it ready for the choir. 

KBOT: What does it feel like when you all arrive on playa at Choir Camp and rehearse together for the first time?

LEUT: First of all, there’s a lot of us who have been singing together for a long time. So there’s a whole lot of welcoming. “Oh my God, you’re back. It’s so great to see you.” Some of us camp together at Playa Choir Camp, but some of us see each other only at rehearsals and the service, and then we don’t see each other for another year. So there’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of getting organized.

I’m kind of the bass section lead and so for the new people there’s a lot of telling them how this thing is going to go, and what they need to pay attention to, and “Get your nose out of the music because you need to watch Madi.” And then I tell them that again, and then I tell them that again.

MADI: Squirrel! Art car! Aerialist! 

TORY: Aerialist! I was just gonna say…

LEUT: And then we get down to work. And you know, there’s a lot of distractions on the playa. There are people wandering in to watch us, there’s an art car booming music going by, and we’ll just stop and dance along for a minute as it passes, and then go back to it. And then as the week goes on, we start to get into the rhythm of it, and we start to feel like a cohesive unit.

TORY: There’s been a big change in our community since the pandemic. It used to always be, just as Leut described, that we would see each other only just once a year. Maybe we would get some emails over the summer about the music, but we would come together on playa and it would be this big reunion. But in 2020, when the world shut down, our choir started zooming. We decided, “Okay, we’re going to get together and we’re going to share creativity.” And we had speakers and music and it very quickly transformed into just a meeting where a group of friends, where we just get together every week and visit and talk and catch up. And we still do it to this day every Sunday. 

And we put on three virtual performances during the pandemic. In 2020 and in 2021, we did a virtual Sunday service on what would have been Burn Sunday. And in 2020 we also did a solstice service in December because we just felt like people needed that inspiration and that connection. There’s members of our group who, we wouldn’t have made it without, without that community. 

KBOT: So many people speak about the pandemic as a very isolating time. And it was! But there were also so many ways that people connected in new and creative ways, and built community that is not always recognized. So I’m fascinated by that.

STUART: I was going to ask Leut if he knows what his sermon is going to be about this year.

LEUT: I do…

TORY: Are you gonna share it?

STUART: Would you care to share it with us, or..?

LEUT: I’d like to save it!

Madi gives me the freedom and the trust to step up their sight unseen and deliver a sermon that’s going to move people. It’s something I really value. It’s a place where I have found a voice that I wasn’t completely sure I had. And so I really enjoy putting that together and surprising and delighting. The choir and the gathered crowd with what I come up with. I try to keep it interesting.

MADI: He’s a great orator. He always has a really talented way of spinning a story and then all of a sudden it comes back and you’re just like, ahhhhh.

STUART: That is also just a classic American style of oratory, right? The Sunday sermon, the preacher’s voice.

KBOT: I feel like we’ve really just scratched the surface of all the incredible experiences and stories. Are there any stories that stand out to you? 

MADI: Stories? Oh, lord. There are so many. 

TORY: Madi, you should talk about our elders.

MADI: We’ve lost a couple of our elders this year. They were the oldest women in the choir, we love them so much. We called them the Mojo. They were so lovely. They rode around in this little cart, a little golf cart, and they came every year. They were in their 80s, and I think by the time Mo was done, she was in her 90s.

TORY: Or 91, I think, at our last Burn, yeah.

MADI: They were exceptional women. Mo was one of the first female physicians. She was a doctor. And Jo, she just had a snap to her. She was so smart and so saucy. She was a whip. She was a preacher’s wife who sang in the choir. Actually, they both knew each other from singing in church in Reno. And they came out every year. Their son and grandson would help them get their RV there and unload the cart, and Jo used to — somebody’s got to do this now — Um, Jo used to bring these cards and when people would come in to sit and listen to rehearsal, Jo would greet them and say, “If you’re interested in singing with us, here’s the music. But if you want to come back next year and you want to stay in touch with us, give us your email and we’ll keep in touch with you.” She had these little cards. 

And I’ll share just a quick story about Mo. So we build a dome. It’s a super gnarly, very dangerous task. We don’t have any assist except for our camp infrastructure lead, Guthrie, created and designed and built these dome jacks. Dome jacks that lift it up as we go. We’re talking about a big, huge dome, like the Thunderdome kind of dome. Heavy, dangerous, intense. 

This was in our first year of building the dome. And so we’re all there early and we got a dome team. They’ve spent all day. They’ve got the first two rungs done. Part of what we do is that once we get to that, we start putting the top on, our canvas shade slats. 

And at one point Tim, the Rev, he’s on the team, he’s sort of leading the team, he walks over to me, and this is probably three in the clock in the afternoon, the heat of the day, and I can see he is not happy. I see the steam coming out of his ears. I see his face just blazing red, and I can just feel his energy and I’m like, “Oh God, what’s happening?”

He comes over to me and he’s almost in tears and he’s like, “We have to start over.” And I’m like, “What, what do you mean you have to start over?” He’s like, “We have to tear it all down and start over.” Almost nine hours of work. He said, “We put the bolts the wrong way! The bolts are heading out. And so there’s absolutely no way that the canvas slats will survive five minutes!” And we’re all just like, “Okay, well, there’s nothing you can do about it. May as well just get started taking it down!” 

So anyway, Mo comes over to me later. She’s shorter than me. She’s 5’2”, 90 years old, the sweetest, loveliest human. She comes over to me, she’s like, “You know, Madi, I was watching them do that, and I was wondering about those bolts, but I didn’t say anything because: what does a little old woman like me know?”

I’m like, “You’re a physician! Of course you know!”

KBOT: I remember those ladies. They were adorable passing by in their little golf cart. 

MADI: The Mojo Cart!

Yeah, they passed away. We’ve had a number of our members pass in the time that we’ve been together. 

LEUT: Can I leave you with a somewhat different story? 

KBOT: Mmmhmm.

LEUT: So, a couple of burns ago, after we were finished the sunrise service, this couple came up to me and said, “Hey, can you marry us?”

And I said, “Well, I’m not legally qualified to do that.” 

They said, “That’s okay. We want to get married. We met on playa this weekend. We want to get married.”

I’m like, “Alright, okay. I’ll just pull a ceremony out of my ass. Sure, let’s do this.” 

And so, I said some traditional things, and then he pulled out a ring. I don’t know where he got a ring. He pulled out a ring, and put it on her finger, and she pulled out a wristband from the Orgy Dome to put on him, because apparently that’s where they had met. And that’s why I love the playa.

KBOT: That is beautiful. One more happy ending thanks to the Orgy Dome.

MADI: If I had known when I started this choir, how beautiful the community would be, and how beautiful this experience would be, I’m not sure I ever would have doubted it. We’ve had some growing pains. We’ve had all sorts of crazy things happen, but I am so proud of this community. I’m proud of this project. I am deeply humbled by this community. Deeply humbled.

It’s the longest ensemble I’ve worked with and it’s been so cool to watch it grow and change. playa magic has just carried us every single year. There’s been such miracles, such miracles that have happened to this choir. So yeah, I feel really spoiled fucking rotten and really blessed beyond measure to have this history.

LEUT: Can I add something? 

TORY: I’d like to add something too.

LEUT: You go, Tory.

TORY: One of the things that’s special about the choir is that it really does embrace radical inclusion. Anybody can come and participate. I think that is especially provided by the soloists every year. There are a number of songs where there are opportunities for people to have a solo.

Sometimes it’s a big solo. Sometimes it’s just a line or two here. And Madi has the amazing talent of finding who needs that opportunity and picking that person, not necessarily who’s the best singer or the greatest performer, but who’s the person who’s going to benefit and grow the most. You talked about growth and change from that opportunity to step out of their comfort zone and sing in front of an audience and try something on.

We don’t pick the soloists until Saturday. Just the day before the performance. So all week long, everyone is practicing and learning. And then we do sort of tryouts on Saturday. Madi always tries to get everyone involved so that people have the opportunity, but I have seen her nurture and help people grow into those roles and then just blossom and shine.

It’s really inspiring to witness. It’s a very special part of the choir.

LEUT: I’d just like to add, so I’ve been singing with the choir since 2012, and I’ve been speaking since ‘15, ‘16? There is not a year that has gone by that ,at the end, people haven’t come up to me, some of them in tears, saying that this is the best part of their burn.

Madi, there’s something you used to say a lot, and I haven’t heard you say it in a while. You would say at the end, “I’m Madi. And this is my art project.” We are psyched to be your canvas. 

MADI: Thanks for doing it. 

STUART: Well, I’m just going to thank you all for your time, and I look forward to hearing some music out there. 

TORY: Yeah, come and see us. Come and sing.

MADI: Yeah, come by.

LEUT: Come join us. 

KBOT: Thank you all. I can’t wait to see you out there.

MADI: Thank you so much for this.

KBOT: Burning Man Live is a 100% nonprofit production of the Philosophical Center of the 100% nonprofit Burning Man Project. Donations certainly help. Wander on over to donate.burningman.org and kick us over a few bucks. It is fun and it feels good. And if you live in the U.S. it’s also tax deductible. Ding!

And while you’re in the neighborhood, check out live.burningman.org. That’s where the podcast lives. There you will find a treasure trove of shows, show notes, transcripts, and who knows what else. 

Thank you so much for listening and thank you for subscribing. You are the reason why we do any of this. And maybe you’re also the reason why we exist at all. 

Thanks to everyone here on this side who made the episode possible: Stuart, Vav, Actiongrl, Allie, Tyler, DJ Toil, the whole Burning Man Project communications team. Thank you to the Playa Choir. And of course, thanks Larry.

STUART: Hey, everybody, welcome back! Your ears do not deceive you. This is in fact, another episode of Burning Man live! This is the first of what’s going to be a two part episode on the musical sounds of Black Rock City. And kbot here actually started planning this long ago, before the mud bath that was Burning Man 2023. What was on your mind back then? 

KBOT: When we talk about the musical sounds of Black Rock City, most of you are thinking boots and cats and the big boom boom. And well that’s really great and we love it. That is not this! 

STUART: Unts, unts, unts, unts, unts, unts, unts, unts. Yeah, there’s no music in Black Rock City. There’s just boots and cats. 

KBOT: You kids call that music? 

STUART: Yeah. Burning Man was… Some of the founders of Burning Man were the Cacophony Society. There used to be — and if you keep your ears tuned, still is — a wide variety of musical styles out there.

KBOT: I heard there were a lot of bongo drums in the early Black Rock City.

STUART: There were drum circles. Yes, this is true. There was a guy, uh…one of the first musical ensembles was one guy with a really big drum kit, and then the guy with the gong. There’s bluegrass and roots music, there’s hip hop music, there’s so many different styles in different parts of the city and on different stages. But is there really orchestral music out there? 

KBOT: There sure is. Black Rock City is a city just like any other city. We have classical musicians who perform multiple times, and they fly from all over the world bringing instruments at considerable risk to bring their music to Black Rock citizens. So we wanted to meet them. What kind of person decides that they want to play in an orchestra that they’ve never met, in front of and in participation with thousands of people? I wanted to know. 

STUART: We’re going to start with talking with a couple of members of the Pops. And it sounds like this. 

If each of you could say your name and tell us what your role is with the Pops. 

BRYAN NIES: My name is Bryan Nies, and I have the honor of being the conductor of the Playa Pops this year. 

PHILIP: I’m Philip Mease, and I have the honor of being a member of the cello section of Playa Pops, and I’ve been doing this since 2014. 

ELLEN O’NEILL: I’m Ellen O’Neill, and I am the director of Playa Pops this year, meaning I do a lot of admin. 

STUART: All right. And the second question is harder. Why, why do you do this? What’s in it for you? 

PHILIP MEASE: I do it because it is one of the most wondrous magical things that I do. And there is not a year that goes by playing in the orchestra where I’m not just weeping with the experience of playing both classical and fun pop music and vocal music in dust storms and in the bright sunshine and there’s nothing like it, to be able to play this kind of music and bring this kind of joy to people on the playa.

BRYAN: Classical music, well, music generally, has been part of my life and soul and heart. So when you go to Burning Man for your first time – I’m going for my fourth this year – the very first thing that you want to do when music is that important to you is you want to share it. Music is always a living, breathing, art form, right? It’s about being in the moment. So, when you have that background and have that love to share, you immediately connect to Burning Man and want to do that as well. 

ELLEN: For me, I saw the Playa Pops play in 2017, which was my first burn, and it brought back memories of playing in my high school group. And I always loved the experience of playing in that group, but I hadn’t played since, and then been in like a 20 year gap, but the founder of the Playa Pops, she welcomed people like me. She would put the music out months ahead of time, so that we had plenty of time to learn it. And so for me, it’s was just a magical experience, but also an accessible one.

KBOT: Amazing. Who here best knows the origin story? How did Playa Pops come to be

PHILIP: I’ve been with Playa Pops the longest of the group here, but even I was not there the first year. Like Ellen, I happened upon it during my 2013 burn and joined the next year. So, I actually don’t know how the very first group came together, but it’s been something that has been a steady force for every year that the burn has occurred.

We’ve had really neat music that we’ve been sharing with people in various venues all around the city, out at the Temple, in Center Camp. My sense is that the audience members have really appreciated having good classical music as well as being able to sing along with Beatles’ songs, John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” “Amazing Grace.”

A favorite is “Happy Birthday.” We invite somebody up from the audience whose birthday it is and they conduct the orchestra, it’s their first time conducting the orchestra, and singing “Happy Birthday” to them. And then, when we play Ode to Joy, and everyone in the audience is tossed a kazoo and we teach the audience how to play kazoo along with Ode to Joy, and it’s truly a joyous experience. 

KBOT: Do any of you remember the first year, even though you maybe weren’t a part of Playa Pops? When did it start?

ELLEN: So it was founded by a woman named Pigtails. She just wanted to get together with some fellow musicians on playa. She also wasn’t a professional musician, and it just grew from her playing with a couple of other strings to a full blown orchestra that we have today, which we have a percussion section, we have woodwinds, we have strings, we have brass. We have a harp! We have a very dedicated member who brings a very expensive and very finicky harp all the way to playa to share it with everyone.

KBOT: How do you rehearse before you get to playa? 

ELLEN: It’s a great question. We put the music out… the goal is six months ahead of time, so people can download their parts and play at home. And we also have audio files, so people can hear the whole arrangement and play along with it at home, so they can see how they fit in with the larger group. And then we meet up on playa, in person. 

That’s where we work out the rest of the kinks, and might make some notes and changes, but we try to keep it as close to the original as possible because you know how it is at Burning Man, sometimes you want to get to a place and can’t get there. So we try not to make it too confusing, but we hear how we sound together and make any adjustments we need to make on playa. And then after those two rehearsals, then we go live with our first performance, and we have four performances scheduled.

KBOT: Can you tell me about those performances?

PHILIP: I’ll jump in with one that I think will be particularly fun. We’ll be playing under the big top at Red Nose District which is known for its circus performers, aerialists, clowns, and so on. They’ll be performing on stage while the orchestra is playing. So the aerialists will be doing their thing with Beethoven, and the clowns will be doing their thing with Die Fledermaus. We even have one of the clowns who I learned yesterday plays recorder through his nose, while singing with his daughter, who’s also singing. So they have a trio. Can you imagine? So that will be quite a special performance, followed by happy hour at the Red Nose District bar. 

And then there are some very special performances including the Temple. Every year that is so emotionally moving to be playing, especially classical music with everyone there at the Temple. A very, very special time.

KBOT: Brian, how did you come into this world? Are you a conductor in your personal life too?

BRYAN: I am a conductor in my personal life. It’s no longer my full time job. But I in fact recently just got a post with the Symphony of the Redwoods, up in Mendocino, a small but incredibly talented and active professional orchestra up there. I see so much of the Burning Man community up there: Lots of artists, lots of scientists, lots of really creative people, so, yes, it is something I do. 

From a conductor’s viewpoint, you get scores or you select music, and a lot of what Ellen says really fits into, I think, how music is chosen, because there is this inclusivity, right? If you haven’t played for years, the music, I found a really interesting flexibility about it, because the way it’s arranged allows for not only different levels of playing, but also allows for the experience of Burning Man to happen, that should someone not be able to make it, or miss the time, as we all know happens at Burning Man, we’re able to get a full sound and have a very successful performance.

But I’ve also found myself in a very interesting way, sort of, prepping for rehearsing, I’d say, more than I normally do. It’s sort of, “Oh look, the rosterer gives me five trombones. How do I make sure all these five trombones don’t come in playing one single part when we have three or four parts? And how can we rally them together?” I’ve done the same with the flutes, as Ellen knows, same with percussion. Can we make sure we have maracas and tambourine and triangle, and do not just bring your glockenspiel, but bring everything in your arsenal to get it together. So there’s a lot of interesting prep work going on, which I think is going to affect the final sound.

I thank Ellen for all of this. One day, I knew I was going to Burning Man this year. Lo and behold, I get an email from Ellen saying, “We’re looking for a conductor. Are you interested?” It was one of those beautiful Burning Man kismet moments. I don’t even know how you found me. I couldn’t believe it. It was one of those “This is exactly what I wanted to do at Burning Man this year” sort of experiences. So, that is how I was found to be part of this group. 

STUART: Does anyone bring a glockenspiel?

BRYAN: Yes, we have two people. There’s a way to sign up and you list your instrument in the Playa Pops’ portal. And you can list glockenspiel separately, and two people have said they specifically specialize in glockenspiel.

I had a long talk with our harpist yesterday, who happens to be in France, which is again part of these rehearsals preparations. She just sent me a video. She has a new, clear harp, that lights up in rainbow changing colors as she plays, just for Playa Pops this year.

STUART: Does it have flame effects like Tubatron? 

BRYAN: She needs to get with a fire camp. Absolutely. 

STUART: That’s really beautiful. I mean, a glockenspiel is gonna hold up pretty well in the desert. Harp, maybe not so much. 

BRYAN: Care and instruments are so hard. The desert is the complete, probably worst place an instrument can survive. We have a tenor sax I’ve been chatting with about repairs because his last time he brought it, the dust and everything caused some damage that he now has to fix. In the same way we all know playa bikes, right? One year you’re midway through the playa and it breaks down. Thankfully you have repair camps. We don’t quite have an instrument repair camp at Burning Man. You have to take extra care, and work on them, and also have it be transportable. Like I’m sure Phillip has a bigger issue, right? carrying a full cello. We have a string bass player. Imagine what that’s like carrying it around the playa. 

STUART: Do you have a piano? 

BRYAN: I don’t think so this year. I mean, if so, it’s one of those you have to bring a keyboard, right? 

STUART: Well, I ask because in my camp bar for years, we had an upright piano. A friend of mine got it for free on eBay, so it was of the quality you would expect for free on eBay. After it sat a year, kind of semi-exposed to the elements, he brought it back the next year. It didn’t sound very good at all. He put up a little cardboard sign and said PIANO TUNER WANTED, he had like three people show up. 

And the next year it was even worse. And he had a guy show up who didn’t have just a little piano tuner kit, he had like a suitcase. He took that thing down to the boards, put it all back together. And this lovely young Russian concert pianist came in, sat down, did a few runs on it and said, “Yeah, this C is a little flat, but I can play it,” and she just rocked out some Rachmaninoff! It was like one of those playa moments. Yeah.

KBOT: It just gets so obscure. You know, it’s like, “Well, what do you do for fun?” 

“Well, I bring my glockenspiel to Burning Man. I tune pianos at Burning Man. I play Rachmaninoff at Burning Man.” That’s super niche. 

PHILIP: That’s right. You’re right, Brian. I have a whole cart arrangement where I have strapped my cello on, and the music stand, and the chair, and then typically I’m also bringing, from members of our camp who are part of the orchestra, I strap their violin on, I’ll strap their flute on; it becomes a whole procession as we’re getting from one concert venue to another.

The big item is the harp. Boy, transporting that around is something, but when you’re in the concert and the harp is playing with the strings playing Amazing Grace, it’s worth every bit of effort that has gone into getting it there. It’s just gorgeous.

ELLEN: I have it really easy. I play the flute!

KBOT: You put that in your backpack. 

STUART: But the playa is hard on brass and winds too. I mean, it’ll eat your gaskets up, right?

ELLEN: Yeah, absolutely. Last year, our last concert, last year our last concert was at Center Camp in the middle of a dust storm. And it was the last show of the year and we persevered and we played, and it was really, really amazing, super high energy show. And then I packed up my flute and we got off, we got out of there. and so when I got home and I unpacked my flute, a pile of playa dust fell out of it. It was a great souvenir. 

PHILIP: That concert was one of my favorites just because the wind was whipping the flags over Center Camp. There’s a blinding sandstorm within Center Camp. But everybody in the audience was just so there, cheering us on as we were battling the elements. My cello was just caked in it after that. 

One of the things that we’ve added last year to the orchestra is a vocalist, a person from our camp named Jane Lee, who sang in Nashville, with a rock band. She now leads the orchestra whenever we play something like “Imagine” or “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” She’ll lead the whole audience in singing those tunes, and it just gets everybody engaged. 

KBOT: And you’re doing a Journey sing along this year? Is that true?

BRYAN: I think everyone knows Journey songs. They’re immediately one of those, like, deep-in-your-soul sort of structural songs for me. It’s so familiar. What else do you want to do but have Burners everywhere who know this music and will put arms around each other and sing together? It’s one of the things I’m looking forward to the most this year. 

KBOT: What else are you playing out there this year? 

BRYAN: A 50-50 mix of what in the orchestra world you consider more classical pops music. Things like the opening to “Capriccio Espagnol,” the Rimsky Korsakov piece that is just about celebration and his version, a Russian’s version, of Spanish music a little bit. So you get those maracas and tambourines and all of the percussive sounds that you know.

A big nod, and a lot of this also I’ll say goes to Ellen. There was so much music programs before I even came in, that it was such a great job that she did, in rounding up really great music for orchestra. A lot of things that relate to our theme, Animalia, this year: The opening of “Swan Lake,” famous melodies that everyone knows. We have “Die Fledermaus” that was mentioned, which is the overture to an opera, Die Fledermaus means “The Bat.” There’s the great finale of “Firebird” as well, more of a fictional animal. These pieces are immediately recognizable, once they’re heard. Firebird, I know, is on the second Fantasia. 

We have Journey’s Greatest Hits, as I mentioned. We’ve got Pink Floyd, “Wish You Were Here.” We have John Lennon’s Imagine, which I think is a fun, beautiful way to end. 

Again, I always think of even classical music as participatory, right? If the audience is not there participating in the creation of music, it’s not part of the artistic experience. And what’s great is with pop music, you get to involve participation at a greater level than just ‘sit and listen.’ We’ve got kazoos, we’ve got sing-along. We want to hear you. We want you to get up and dance. We want you to really involve yourselves in the middle of it, so to speak. 

We even have, I think, a very clever arrangement called “It’s About Time,” which are three pieces that involve time in one way or another. So it starts with a up tempo jazz version of Gershwin’s “Summertime,” goes into, from Casablanca…

PHILIP: “As Time Goes By.”

BRYAN: “As Time Goes By.” And then ends with, “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper. I would have never in my life put those three pieces together, yet I cannot be more excited about it. 

PHILIP: In one of the performances, another camp approached me and asked, “Well, we have a couple that’s getting married. Would you play the wedding march for us?” So we’re going to play Mendelssohn’s Wedding March as this couple announces their marriage, and then walks across the esplanade to go get married.

KBOT: Wow. That’s going to be so magical. What a surprise for everybody. How does it feel the first time you get together to rehearse? You have people who’ve been rehearsing alone, all over the world, and then you’re suddenly all in one place. What’s that like?

ELLEN: It’s one of my favorite parts of preparing for Burning Man. We have the packing and the shopping and the building and the creating, but I love that image of everyone who’s going to be in our orchestra is all over the world, in their homes, practicing all on their own, and preparing to be together.

And then that first rehearsal, there we are! All the preparation has come together. And when we play together for the first time it’s really incredible. And it sounds better than you would think for only rehearsing together a couple of times, because everyone does work so hard on their own. 

We have a lot of new people this year. So it’d be great to meet, especially from my perspective being the admin I have emailed with every single person. But I haven’t met them all yet. So I’m really looking forward to putting faces to the names, and meeting everyone and welcoming them to our group officially as we perform together for the first time.

KBOT: Do many of you camp together?

ELLEN: We do not. The Playa Pops is an art piece, really. Everyone kind of camps on their own and then we come together at all of our host camps that host us for our performance spaces and our rehearsal spaces. And then of course, the Temple is our host for one of our shows, and Center Camp welcomes us for one of our shows.

KBOT: Is there anything else that you want to say, you want to share?

PHILIP: When you experience art that’s in a way out of place; so in the middle of the desert, you come across this wonderful symphony orchestra playing this wonderful music, it is so moving. Again, without any issue I’m always finding myself just bawling with the beauty of creating this music in the middle of the desert.

ELLEN: I want to reiterate how accessible this group is. We purposefully create and purchase pieces that are accessible to someone who hasn’t played in a long time. So, if anyone has an instrument that’s just collecting dust in the back of your closet, please, bring it out, practice on it. You can learn only the songs that we play, and no one will know. You can come join our group and be very, very welcome. 

BRYAN: Off of Ellen’s point you have to think of Playa Pops as an art piece. That immediately hit for me. Something in our professional classical music world we’re always worried that we’re going to lose support, because, in many ways, it feels like an esoteric art form, at least in America. And, at Burning Man, where you have, you know, the Esplanade and sound camps and art cars, all with large speakers and great music… don’t get me wrong, I’m out there all night long watching the sunset, dancing the night away. When you hear acoustic instruments playing melodies you recognize that are immediately accessible to you, it is a profound emotional experience. 

The harpist I was talking to yesterday, we were going through every part, and a lot of this music doesn’t have a harp part, so we have to talk with each other to find out what works best. And she said something I think that applies to all of us: the orchestra, programming, rehearsing, all of it. She said “There are things you want to play, there are things you can play, and there are things that the playa will let you play.”

What I think she meant by that is 1) There’s all these wishes of what we wish you could do. I would love to do some of the great big symphonies of Beethoven or Mahler on the playa, but you’re never going to get a hundred musicians who can bring the instruments that allow you to do those things. The playa won’t allow you because of its other factors.

Yet, at the same time, Phil mentioned this arrangement of Amazing Grace that had been picked out for this year, and she’s like, “Oh, I want to play.” And I go, “I have some ideas for you.” And she wrote, she goes, “I’ve been playing around, and here’s my interpretation of this piece.” I was like, “You know what? The way we’re going to rearrange this is we’re going to start with a harp cadenza first.” She’s gonna play and introduce this piece before the rest of the orchestra even starts. And that led me to being like, “I can use the triangle here, I can use the glock here, I can make suspended cymbal become part of it.” I had the entire orchestra fit into my head how it arranged this piece. 

Those words also apply to how art gets created. All these musicians from all over the world suddenly coming together, who immediately adapt, relate to the conductor, to each other, to how to play together. You’re also relating to the entire experience that is unique for every time the playa and this city comes alive in creating yet a new experience and a completely unique musical concert for everyone. It’s truly special. 

KBOT: I have playa tingles just thinking about that harp Oh, my God. 

PHILIP: Thank you all for doing this. 

KBOT: Thank you all.

STUART: Yeah, thank you. I think it is time to take off our Journey fright wigs… 

KBOT: Mullet?  

STUART: …and switch out of our Journey mullet wigs to our powdered Beethoven early 19th century wigs. 

KBOT: Yeah, we’re flipping the channel from the rock station to the classical station.

STUART: The Philharmonic, as we intimated earlier, plays a different flavor of ensemble music.

What’s their story? 

KBOT: They were interested in playing ensemble music that had a big sound, and with a more classical leaning. 

STUART: Let’s listen in and see what they had to say about their work.

BRIANNA CAMARDA: My name is Brianna Camarda. I am the principal bassoonist with the Black Rock Philharmonic. And this will be I think my fifth year. 

ERIC YTTRI: My name is Eric Yttri. I’m the Musical Director of the Black Rock Philharmonic. In one way or another I’ve been doing this since 2012.

KBOT: Wow. I’m super curious about the history of the Philharmonic. How did it come to be? And who started it? 

ERIC: The Philharmonic spun off of the Playa Pops symphony. Most of the players came from that group, and was arguably a little bit more ambitious and a little bit more classical forward, playing more orchestral repertoire and only, really one pop or rock orchestration, for any given year.

Playa Pops Symphony was first in 2012. I was the director and co-founder of that, with Pigtails. Eventually over time, they split, and Pops is doing lots of Beatles and rock band covers, some orchestral stuff. And we tend to play sort of the flip, mainly orchestral stuff and one or two pop pieces. 

KBOT: So does someone need to audition to play in the philharmonic, or is it open to everybody? 

ERIC: Open to anyone. It tends to be self selecting. The music is a bit more on the challenging side, but no auditions, which can be interesting. We have 14 flutes signed up this year, and only three or four horns in comparison. So, nine percussionists. You never know who’s going to show up on playa, which is one of the fun bits for me. But, it’s open to anyone. 

KBOT: Yeah, that can lead to some very complex musical arrangements, I imagine. What is the most unusual instrument that’s going up this year? 

ERIC: I think it’s Brianna.

BRIANNA: Probably.

KBOT: Amazing.

ERIC: A bassoon is big and unwieldy and the reed is prone to breaking. 

BRIANNA: And if you look at it wrong, it breaks.

STUART: How does it like hot dry weather? 

BRIANNA: It doesn’t. My first year I took my one and only instrument, that was sort of defunct, so I thought, “Well, use it or lose it.” And I now have a separate instrument that I play outside in general, not just with the Black Rock Philharmonic, but like locally. I have local shenanigans that I don’t want to bring a nice instrument into play.

So this year I’m hoping it’ll do better in the hot dry because it’s plastic. And the orchestra is nice enough to provide an air controlled environment, a storage locker, for instrumentalists who are a little bit wary about bringing their baby out. 

KBOT: Oh, that makes a huge difference. I can imagine someone with a string instrument or a bassoon being extremely worried. I’m sure you’ve had a few nos in the past from people who were like, “Well, I’d come, but…”

ERIC: We get that. And even with the precautions, we’ve had bridges break in the middle of shows and all sorts of things go haywire. And that’s part of the magic of it, right? Who would expect a 70-piece symphony orchestra in the middle of a place that’s designed to kill you? It’s just… that juxtaposition is kind of what makes it special.

BRIANNA: Are we 120 something this year, Eric? 

ERIC: We’ll see how many, I mean, that’s the sign ups, but… yeah.

STUART: Aspiration of 120. And you said 20 of those are flutes?

ERIC: 14. Only 14. 

BRIANNA: Only. 

STUART: So, I’m just imagining, what do you do with 14 flutes and a giant percussion section?

Is it some, like, strange arrangement of Flight of the Bumblebee or something? 

ERIC: We’ve never actually had a problem really with balance, so… 

STUART: Just play louder. Um, yeah. 

BRIANNA: Depending on your…

STUART: OK, or play softer. Got it. 

BRIANNA: I will say that the bassoons, we’re saving our wine corks for flute mutes. Don’t tell them. Don’t tell Maestro! It’s a secret. 

KBOT: So, how do you rehearse a hundred and something musicians to get them ready for this? 

ERIC: A lot of it is on the musicians themselves. In late spring, and, at least the concertmaster and I, distribute music, our notes to the musicians. The real challenge comes with, we have two two-hour rehearsals and one extra optional two hour rehearsal. So this year, I think we’re playing 10 pieces, about an hour of music. I’ve got to know every part and go bing, bang, boom, to get it all ready for our first show on Wednesday.

KBOT: So you have, did you say, three rehearsals before your first show on Wednesday? 

ERIC: And only two are required. People are still coming in on Sunday. So it’s hard to make that anything more than optional. But yeah, worst case scenario, I’ve got four hours to rehearse 10 pieces. 

KBOT: And how many times do you perform on playa this year?

BRIANNA: Three, right?

ERIC: Just doing three this year. Last year was so hard we’ve toned it back from our normal four or five. 

KBOT: And where are your shows? 

ERIC: Our shows are Wednesday at Frozen Oasis, and then Friday morning we’ll be doing a special Temple show at nine in the morning. Thursday’s going to be our really big show out, in open playa at Chapel of Babel, which is going to be about a five story tall structure that you can climb in and on. We’ll be in front of that, several art cars out there providing sound.

KBOT: Wow. So many logistics to coordinate. And you have art cars amplifying the show at Chapel of Babel?

ERIC: Correct.

KBOT: Oh, that’s going to sound so incredible. 

ERIC AT BRC: Thank you for coming out to the Black Rock Philharmonic!

KBOT: What are you most excited about this year? What’s the thing that’s getting you really, really hyped to be out there?

ERIC: Just making music with everyone again. Our Thursday show is always the biggest, we do a special encore of Bohemian Rhapsody. The first time it happened, we had no idea what was going on. All of a sudden, 3000 people, I’m told, 3000 people were singing along and then dancing along.

We’re doing Hotel California this year, which will be a beautiful piece that means a lot to people. Also one of The Eagles’ members just passed away. So that’ll be nice to memorialize that. 

Also Finlandia, which is a piece by John Sibelius, which is a tour du force for the whole orchestra, and really shows sort of the maturation of the group. We’re playing the original orchestration, and three years ago, it would have been a pipe dream to be able to play this music, particularly out there, and with only such limited practice time. 

ERIC AT BRC: Thanks very much. This is Finlandia.

KBOT: Brianna, what are you excited about this year?

BRIANNA: Playing music with everybody. The piece I’m excited about I think is Marriage of Figaro. The piece I’m having the most trouble practicing. So, I feel like it’s going to be really rewarding to just get out there and smoke through those runs with the other low end of the orchestra.

I’m excited about reconnecting with the individuals that I’ve met along the way, to see the open playa, and I’d sort of have a bounce back from last year. I think last year was hard for everybody because we hadn’t done it in so long. And then to get out there and be met with what happened was extra brutal. So I feel like the bounce back is going to be: I’m back on my game. So I’m excited to get out there again. 

KBOT: How does it feel when you all get together and rehearse for the first time?

BRIANNA: I’m overwhelmed. Just with gratitude and joy. It’s really been a life changing experience. but I have to stay emotionally regulated throughout, to be able to project that. So it’s an interesting exercise as a musician.

KBOT: I can imagine. Yeah. You’re not the first musician we’ve spoken with who says that they’re moved to tears when they play out there, but you have to stay on track at the same time.

BRIANNA: Yeah. You can’t look directly into that light. You know, it’s there shining on you, but you have to focus. Some conductor along the way, I remember, said it the most succinctly, and it stuck with me throughout the years. He said, “You know, you play music and it sounds and feels like to the audience, like dancing through a field of flowers, like a meadow at sunrise, and it can’t be like that for you as a musician, completely. There’s the logistics of everything you’re doing and staying present enough to not get distracted, and lose track of what’s going on around you.

You have to create the field of flowers while also, you know, “Oh, here’s a, here’s a time signature. Oh, there’s the, there’s the one.” It’s the heightened sort of ability to perceive that’s out there, the sort of same-brain, I don’t know, the openness of connection that is really the magic of Burning Man for me, makes it an extra challenge to stay emotionally regulated as, as a musician when I play. But it’s obviously a dance, I think we all like to do. I’ve joked with Eric before that, orchestra music is, uh, emotional edging. And I stand by that comment!

KBOT: I think we can kind of relate to that (can’t we Stuart?) in the sense that being part of the crew or the organization that helps to produce Black Rock City, it’s kind of similar, right? You have to stay on your game and you have to think about what you have to do every day, but at the same time, there’s this overwhelming thing happening all around you.

STUART: You can’t go to Burning Man.

KBOT: We don’t get to go to Burning Man?

STUART: No, we don’t go to Burning Man. 

ERIC: You go to Working Man? 

BRIANNA: Working Man? Crying Man?

STUART: Well, there’s Spreadsheet Man and Meeting Man all year long. And then there’s Relationship Breakdown Man, when your partner, who loves Burning Man, will say “Can’t you just shut up about what’s wrong with the burn this year? Could you stop talking about the pyro synchronization problems and just let me enjoy the motherfucking burn?” Yeah.

ERIC: Never. 

STUART: You said earlier that the group is pretty much self-selecting because you choose more complex music. Is it more than a half or less than a half professional musicians in the group?

ERIC: Oh, much less than half are professional musicians. Plenty of people who play for fun, you know, in a community group of some sort. But there’s also a good number who, the instrument goes into storage until they start practicing in June and comes back out, and it goes back into storage in September.

On the flip side, there’s several people, and Brianna you might be part of this, that maybe had a more adjacent relationship with music, and then they come out and play. I know one individual in the cello section who had pretty much not played his cello for years. His partner died, tragically due to cancer. He brought a cello out and fell in love with playing again, and now he’s in three or four different ensembles where he lives, and a lot of things have changed for him. So, plenty of people, maybe not that dramatic of a situation, but every year I hear about people who, thankfully this was a wonderful launching off point.

BRIANNA: That totally tracks for me. Like I said, when I brought my bassoon for the first time, I brought it and you guys in the orchestra leadership were like, “Oh my gosh, you’re so brave.” I’m like “Brave? Not really, cause it’s not functional in the real world and I don’t really play it in the real world.” 

It took a few years. For the first, probably a year, maybe two years, I was one of those people who the bassoon came out when I got the sheet music for the Black Rock. And then I found a teacher, started taking lessons. Now I’m in a couple different local groups here. I just went to Italy for an international music academy. I spent two weeks in Northern Italy doing chamber music intensives. And it is directly related to me coming into this orchestra, and rekindling my relationship with music. 

It used to be that the Black Rock Philharmonic was like my only way to connect with this ensemble way of making music. And now, going to Burning Man I have to decline a number of interesting gigs that my other groups get invited to. So, it’s really changed my life. 

ERIC AT BRC: If you can, for the people in the back, take a seat to help more people see this wonderful and shockingly beautiful ensemble, despite all the dust.

Our next piece, the actual words that go along it talk about a troll king nibbling on fingers, biting people in butts, and general forms of torture that you might find at Spankey’s Wine Bar. It’s an all out race to the finish and a fan favorite for many. This is Grieg’s Hall of the Mountain King.

BRIANNA: It’s not just the musicians. I feel like it’s the people who come, our audience. I remember in, ah…what was the orb year?

ERIC: I think that was 2019, big silver orb right off of 7 O’clock.

KBOT: 2018.

BRIANNA: So it was our sunrise concert for the big orb, and I packed up my instrument. I was looking for my friends in the audience, so I’m wandering out into the crowd as it disperses.

And this lady was just standing there like clutching a kazoo, and the tears streaming down her face, and having a moment. And she made eye contact with me and saw my music case or something and was like, “Oh, did you just perform?” I said, “Yes, ya know, how are you doing, buddy? What’s what’s going on?”

And she just gushed, something to the effect of “This is going to seem very basic to you.” She’s shared with me the magic of putting her voice and her breath and her energy through the kazoo, and blending it with everyone else around her. She’s like, “I felt so connected and I can’t believe that I felt that way and I’d never felt that before.” And I was just like, “Yes, that’s, that’s why we’re here.” And we had a hug and it, you know, a simple kazoo, gave her that experience. I could tell she was going to carry that with her. So it’s not just us, that it connects and engages with on that level.

KBOT: Yeah. It enables people to dip their toe into the idea of creating, and who knows where they went after that. That’s so beautiful.

ERIC: Yeah. Roger, who’s one of our organizers…so I’ve already mentioned Elise and then there’s Baby Giraffe or Aaron, who does our communications, but Roger he came up with the idea. This is about the kazoos that we have everyone join us on Ode to Joy, that really embraces almost all the principles: Immediacy and Participation, Expression. That was a great thing, and it surprises people that they can make music. And you never thought you’d hear the terms ‘glorious wall of kazoo sound,’ all put together, one after another, but it’s pretty incredible. And we hand out around a thousand kazoos per show. 

STUART: Didn’t Phil Spector pioneer the “wall of kazoo”?

ERIC: Absolutely. And it’s great that it goes both ways, that sometimes it’s picking up to go there, and then like Brianna said, that sort of rekindling of the spark, they carry it back out for creative endeavors well beyond Burning Man.

STUART: People talk about Burning Man being a transformative experience. It’s a thread that keeps coming up in a lot of conversations lately. I just ask people, “Well, what does that mean? Transformative. What does that mean?” And in practice, it seems like for a lot of people, it means picking up a creative pursuit that they may have put aside. Maybe somebody told them they couldn’t make any money at it, they weren’t any good at it, they needed to, you know, get a day job, quit the band, whatever, right? So it sounds like you guys are seeing that too. That a lot of people pull that dusty old musical instrument out of the attic or out of the garage and pick it up and start playing it again. I think that’s just a beautiful thing.

I have a lot of friends from Finland that I’m looking forward to seeing. We’re going to all get our kookses, our Finish drinking mugs, and come over and listen to Sibelius. You’re not going to be able to keep them away. When they hear that you’re playing Finlandia, you’re going to be besieged by Nordics.

ERIC: I myself am half Norwegian, so, I’m all for it. As long as they bring the mugs, one to share with me, I’m there.

One surprise: So I’ve been a huge fan of Playa Choir for years, and they’re really the OG when it comes to live ensemble music on playa, they’ve been doing it for years, and Madi, the director is absolutely fantastic, as are all their musicians.

We’ve been talking for a while about getting together the two ensembles. Madi came to a show last year and said, “All right, next year, we have to do something. The choir has to get in on this.” And so, as a surprise to the orchestra on our Thursday show, for Finlandia, there’s a choral part there, written in the original part. It’s sort of the Song of Finland. They’ll be up on a balcony above us and, shhhhh, don’t tell the orchestra, but they’re going to be serenading all of us and all of the, hopefully, dozen art cars and several thousand people. So that’ll be something pretty special…

BRIANNA: I did guess right!

ERIC: You did. I tried to hide it, but that’ll be exciting. It’s been several meetings of logistics and how to do this and, and also personalities. It’s kind of fun looking in on their group. Just like ours, we have the planners, and the risk-averse people that keep us all safe, and the people who say, “Oh yeah, let’s try this, this, or that,” that are more explorative and help us push our boundaries; and all these personalities are critical to our success. It doesn’t make life easy, but it’s been kind of fun to work with them a little bit. And I’ll be doing a bit of rehearsal with them out there as well. 

KBOT: Amazing. That is so crazy exciting. I’m especially interested in that Tower of Babel show. That’s where the choir is going to be, right? 

ERIC: As of now. You know, sometimes Burning Man happens, and if that doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. 

KBOT: OK

ERIC Tentatively now, the plan is that both of the ensembles will be together.

BRIANNA: So exciting. That is so exciting.

STUART: Alright. Thanks for taking the time to sit with us today, Brianna and Eric. 

KBOT: Yeah. Thank you so much. 

ERIC AT BRC: I do want to thank all of you, and please give yourselves a round of applause for being part of this Burning Man tradition, part of this symphonic tradition. 

This next song is Finlandia, which was written in 1900 by Sibelius, in order to protest the invasion by Russia of his country. And unfortunately acts like this continue today, and so we send this song out to all those who are affected, in all parts of the world, but particularly in the Ukraine. This is a very special song for us.

You’ll hopefully be able to hear and really see in your mind’s eye the invading army, and the devastation it brings, and the righteous joyful spirit that springs up afterwards. 

There is also one more special thing. We have a surprise for the orchestra. Playa Choir, who has been doing live music on playa since 2003! 2003, Madi and her crew, they have fantastic shows. I know there’s a Sunday one and others. Please go talk to them afterwards. Surprise, orchestra. As a gift to us, they’re going to sing along!

STUART: Burning Man Live is a production of the Philosophical Center of Burning Man Project, produced by a small but determined team of choreographers and maestros of podcastery in the orchestral chambers of our imaginary podcast studio.

I want to thank everyone who helped put this one together. Thanks to you, kbot. Thanks to our on the ground recording crew who braved the elements in Black Rock City to bring back the music, Matthias Lowe and Hank Espresso Buzz of the Burning Man Documentation Team. 

Thanks to all the lovely people who commit themselves year after year as part of the Playa Pops Orchestra and the Black Rock Philharmonic Orchestra, gracing our playa with lovely, lovely music year after year. 

Thanks to tech producer Michael Vav. Thanks to Andie Grace, Molly V. 

If you want to join in the thank you parade and send your appreciations or your notes or whatever, please send us an email. It’s live@burningman.org

And of course, if you find a little extra change between the couch cushions and you don’t know what to do with it, you’re always welcome to donate at donate.burningman.org Slip us a buck or two. Every little bit helps, keeps the lights on, keeps the show rolling, and keeps it to where you don’t have to listen to any nasty commercials. 

Burning Man Project is a non profit, 501c3 public benefit corporation. We do this for love. We love doing it, and we love you. And that’s our show for this time around. 

Thanks, Larry.

ARNO: Don’t look too far. I feel it’s cool to get a vision, but the important things are the small steps. Then things are just slowly taking place. Mistakes are part of it, and I love mistakes because it’s so important in the process. At some point you look back and you say “Oh my gosh, how much energy we’ve been investing in this path.” You would never do this if you had any idea. We did it because we had no idea. We’re not in full control of all the steps and that was okay.

STUART: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Burning Man Live. I’m Stuart Mangrum and my friend Kbot and I are here today with a very interesting character. This gentleman is a Montréal-based Burner who has been bringing the culture of Québec to Burning Man and vice versa for years in some really interesting ways.

He is one of the organizers of Montréal’s Regional Burn, L’Osstidburn, and also a pretty cool new Makerspace in the city called LESPACEMAKER. You guys can beat up my French pronunciation anytime.

ARNO: That’s perfect.

STUART: Okay. And he’s also, if that isn’t enough, he’s also one of the people behind everyone’s favorite food-themed theme camp in Black Rock City. Yeah, I’m talking about Midnight Poutine. Welcome and bienvenue, Arno Robin.

ARNO: C’est un plaisir. My pleasure to be with you.

STUART: Did I say your name right? Let me try that again. Arno Robin.

ARNO: Arno Robin. That’s right on.

STUART: Okay, great. Let’s start with where you are in the world. You are calling in from Québec, and I know a lot of our listeners are not familiar with Québecois culture. Tell us a little bit about what makes it unique and different from just, say, the rest of Canadia, or maybe that other French-speaking country over in Europe.

ARNO: That’s definitely a good question.

I will talk for Montréal, I’ve been living in Montréal for my whole life. I feel there’s something like a mixture of languages and also this warm way of connecting with each other, I don’t know. There’s something warm about Montréal, I feel. There’s also something that has been important for me about being francophone in my different projects.

STUART: Now is the French spoken in Montréal, is that significantly different from the French spoken in Paris? Or is it pretty much everybody can understand everybody just fine?

ARNO: Oh no, you’re right. There’s a big accent in Montréal and Québec and even if it’s easy for us to understand like French from France or Africa, Montréalers are like kind of squeezing the words, compressing everything. There’s definitely a big accent and you can hear it with mine. That’s pretty obvious. Also like in Montréal, that’s something interesting about pretty much all of the city is like English speaking and the other half is French speaking. So there’s also this mixture inside the city that makes it like really kind of embracing each other.

KBOT: But the language of business in Québec and in Montréal is French. That’s the dominant language. If you’re working and living in the city for the most part. So it’s not like just a French flavored environment, it is French. You’re going into another language and another culture when you say cross from Toronto to Montréal. Very different.

STUART: And I imagine it is the language of food culture as well. Let’s talk about poutine.

ARNO: Alright.

STUART: So, I’m a huge fan. I’m a huge fan of your camp. I’ve seen lines there starting around noon for Midnight Poutine and wrapping most of the way around the city. I heard that to get over that, is it true that this year you built a mobile poutine delivery vehicle, on a bicycle? Tell me about that and how that worked out.

ARNO: Yeah. The Flying Fryer. That was a really nice project.

STUART: What’d you call it?

ARNO: It’s the Flying Fryer. So it’s literally like a fryer on the back of a trike with no motor and engine, just the propane fryer that we built by our own with an old keg. So it’s a big keg with three baskets and we’re able to do frying pretty much everywhere.

That’s pretty much like the revolution of Midnight Poutine. If I can come back from the beginning: My first burn was 10 years ago and when I came I was not eating poutine so much, I was not a big fan of poutine. I joined because it was important to me to bring something back out of Burning Man, so I joined Midnight Poutine at that point. And it becomes something really important in my way of burning, just because of the family that was created.

This year instead of people waiting in line for getting served, Flying Fryer is like going somewhere and offering poutine with people that have no idea what it is, and maybe have no idea what it tastes. And then we can just decide, “Hey, you want to just try this new thing?”

That was something really refreshing. So instead of offering gift to the people that were definitely waiting for this gift, just getting a new kind of connection and relation with people. So yeah, we’ve been serving deep playa, some crews, like building art cars; some friends at DPW; right after the Man Burn. Big crowd. Big service. So we did like shit ton of poutine behind, just right after behind the Man.

KBOT: So how many poutines can you serve from the Flying Fryer in one shot?

ARNO: The Man Burn, that was on Monday right, this year. We had some leftover, some Midnight Poutine of pretty much everything. I think we serve like pretty much 300 poutine. And since we had leftovers from the camp, but not enough potatoes, we’d been asking everybody for potatoes all around. So that was a joke. We were just scavenging all the camps for potatoes, going in the bar, like, “Hey, can you ask on the mic if there’s any people with russet potatoes?” We had two potatoes at a time. So that was really intense. Just taking one by one, we’ve been able to serve like 200 poutine, the night of the Man Burn. That was the intense night for sure.

STUART: For anyone listening, by the way, who’s never had the poutine experience, my understanding is that it’s a basic treat with three ingredients, right? French fried potatoes (fried chips), a lovely beef gravy — and a cheese curd, which I’m still not sure exactly what it is. I have some friends from the southern Canadian states like Minnesota and Wisconsin, who make this. They talk about cheese curd. What exactly is a cheese curd and how do you get it in the wilds of Nevada?

ARNO: Yeah. At some point we were like importing the curds because we had no proper supplier, but we found near Yosemite a cheese maker. It’s pretty much like a really really young cheddar that you just cut in the process of aging it. Now we found a place that is doing the right recipe and the right saltiness. We have an agreement with this cheese-making company now.

KBOT: And you drive up to Yosemite to get your cheese, right? Someone has to make that trip or does someone bring it to you? How does that work?

ARNO: Yeah, we do the round trip. But before then it was like in Arizona. Before then it was from like north side, so that was intense. We always had to make a detour to pick up cheese. And that was something huge to keep frozen, keeping the freezing chain proper. That was a huge challenge for a small team, just getting like, “Oh, we need 300 pounds.” So now it’s just saving our time. And going to Yosemite is cool.

But you were skipping like the French potatoes. I really want to insist on that because I feel this is definitely what makes the poutine different. I don’t want to just honor Midnight Poutine over like many other poutine makers, but I feel the recipe we do is like something different. It’s all about the crispiness of the fries. People are just asking why it takes so long just to fry and everything. Yeah,  it’s passionate, for sure. Like, I have a personal relationship with those potatoes.

STUART: Do you double fry them? Do you fry them and then rest them and fry them a second time?

ARNO: Four times!

STUART: Four times? Okay.

KBOT: Four!

ARNO: Just to make it really crispy on the outside. So yeah, this is something special.

KBOT: That’s hardcore.

STUART: Not even the Belgians, who actually invented French Fries, not even the Belgians do that.

ARNO: Yeah, that’s hardcore Belgium. Yes.

KBOT: They do it twice. Yeah.

STUART: So four times crisped up fries (Oh my god, that’s great.), embryonic cheese; it’s kind of like the veal of cheese, right?

ARNO: Exact.

STUART: And the gravy, and the gravy. Yes. Well, cool.

ARNO: And this is the proper recipe from Québec. There was definitely variation but just doing it from stash, it’s the original like OG poutine.

KBOT: You mean that brown powder and you just add water and you whisk it, right?

ARNO: Yeah, the brown powder. So fancy!

KBOT: And I only know that because I went to a Regional with Midnight Poutine and I got to do the gravy. So that’s the real way they do it in Québec?

ARNO: Yes, it is.

KBOT: It’s yummy, it’s salty.

STUART: It’s so delicious. I think about all the time I’ve wasted making gravy from scratch.

ARNO: It’s starch, yeah.

STUART: I think there is something in the packaged gravy aisle called “brown gravy mix” that’s probably pretty much the same thing. What flavor is it? It’s brown flavor!

So, okay, well back up a little bit, Arno. I want to know about how you got to Burning Man in the first place, and how your experience has changed over time.

ARNO: From the beginning, 10 years ago, pretty much. The first year was ‘14, and I do remember a friend just was talking to me about what it was. And like at that point I was doing creative stuff for my own living. So I was an artist, creating art installations, and I was definitely looking for freedom of creation. So that’s how I’ve been like, “Yeah, Burning Man sounds definitely like a place I need to visit.” So, I did.

And just for the context, I was definitely not speaking English. You listen to my accent right now, that was really worse than this. So, yeah, that was my first year, 10 years ago. And I’ve been there with no affiliation. And I was just looking to understand a bit more.

And at that moment I came, of course like everybody knows, you just realize how powerful it is. Just experimenting, like those kind of connections. I did realize that I want to bring something back in Montréal out of this. So that’s how I decided to try to find a camp from Montréal. And I joined — I “joined” — I forced myself into Midnight Poutine that year, convincing them to “Yeah, yeah. You need me with you.”

There’s so many things to learn, so many things, so many humans to connect with. So I was definitely super engaged in the Burner scene. Then few, I’m not saying many, Regional Burns around, doing Regional Burns bring me to co-create a new one in Québec.

At that point, the community in Montréal was really young, not that young, but small, and I was joining something that definitely was looking for a lot of energy and that had a lot of potential. Myself, I’ve been joining people that were doing like the original Decomp. We just talked about doing a Regional burn, so that’s what we did with L’Osstidburn.

We created L’Osstidburn in ‘16. And then it became something small that we really wanted to just take care of really step by step. From my first time I came, to creating a Regional Burn, and we were like 250 the first year and then 300, this is how we’ve been looking at it, just to just go small, and just to learn how this community will take the culture and maybe propose something that is definitely influenced by the Montréal, our way of doing it. So that was really rad, I would say.

Yeah. We were looking for something that is about expressing the best out of the DIY scene, doing a lot with the resources we have, respecting the resources. That’s how we did. That’s the process we had in mind. And now we are doing the seventh edition this year. So that’s going well.

STUART: Can you clarify the name? It sounded a bit to me like “Lusty Burn.”

ARNO: So “Osstid” is a swear word. L’Osstidburn is also a reference to a show that was created by like great artists in the seventies. So that was for us a way to make a shout to another period of time when Montréal was just expanding their opening for West Coast New York and everything. That’s a cultural reference from Québec that is really difficult to pronounce and that was kind of funny for us to listen to this in English.

Can you pronounce it?

KBOT: L’Osstidburn

ARNO: Yeah.

KBOT: Say it again Arno.

ARNO: L’Osstidburn

KBOT: L’Osstidburn

ARNO: It’s just unpronounceable in English.

STUART: L’Osstidburn. Oh yeah, it is lusty!

ARNO: Yeah.

KBOT: So, Arno, tell us, what does Osstid mean? Why is that a swear word? Can you go into that a little bit?

ARNO: I think the second year I was involved with Midnight Poutine we did an open mic and one of the members decided to, “Hey, I’m gonna just teach the swearing in French and in Québecer.”

Osstid is one of those words, but there’s so many swear words in the Québecer culture. So like Osstid is kind of “the fucking burn” or something like that in a like proper way, but like Osstid it’s the Body of the Christ when you go to the church, like it’s just like referring to all…

KBOT: So you call it the host. The host is what the Catholics refer to it in English.

ARNO: Thanks.

STUART: It literally means “sacred cracker,” but in practice it means Fuckin’ 

KBOT: Yeah. Can you give us a bunch..?

STUART: I want to spend the rest of our time together… Teach me more Québecois swear words, please. That’s the most important part of any cultural exchange.

KBOT: Yeah, I want to hear a chain. There’s a way you guys do it that’s like a chain where you start with one swear word, and then you kind of roll into like five or six swear words at once. I want to hear that.

ARNO: Yes, for sure. L’osti de crisse, calisse de tabarnak. It’s like four swear words in a row that means piling up like the expression and exaggerating, like it’s frustration, happiness, it can go like many, many ways. You can put it that way, like it’s going, be really frustrated, l’osti de crisse, calisse de tabarnak. It can be positive also. It refers to so many ways of expressing. It’s like punctuation in Québec for sure.

STUART: That is so interesting.

KBOT: So it goes: Host, Christ, chalice, tabernacle, is the English translation. Say it again in French?

ARNO: L’osti de crisse, calisse de tabarnak. Is it? Thanks, K. I was not even sure about the translation.

STUART: I am learning how to swear in Mexican Spanish right now, and it’s curious how much of that comes from the church also, right? You don’t tell somebody to fuck off, you send them to the devil, right?

I want to hear about this makerspace. I think I can pronounce this, LESPACEMAKER. Is that close enough?

ARNO: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really? LESPACEMAKER? But like, it’s pronounced, like, LESPACEMAKER, The Space Maker, it can be many ways also.

STUART: So you do call it the Space Maker?

ARNO: Yeah.

STUART: This was an idea that came to you after going to Burning Man and I want to know how you did it. That sounds like something really expensive. Do you have a trust fund, Arno? Are you independently wealthy?

ARNO: I’m wealthy? We have, like we had so many people like believing in the project. Myself. Let’s come back from the beginning. You were asking where it’s coming from and that’s definitely something interesting. Since we’re doing a Regional burn, we were connecting with so many new people. At this point Montréal Burners was in a renaissance mode, like so many new person coming in. The place was made of so much people with a lot of energy. And we were looking, yeah, for a way to express Burning Man culture on the east coast in Canada and also maybe to connect with each other, to bond with each other more often.

So it comes to us like, yeah, a workshop. So myself, an example, I had my workshop doing my art installation with like my collective and blah, blah, blah. But that was small and I was definitely digging to just do those creative projects. And maybe I was not doing those creative more than just sufficient projects to make it work.

So of course like when we were looking to create a new place, it was about like materiality. It was really important for us just to be connected to the objects. And also, we were just creating things. We were just building things. So like the best products was to create a workshop.

So we’ve been looking at, yeah, there’s definitely different models. We were like about 30 Burners. Some of them were not Burners, but vibing for something about, “Let’s do this together. Let’s engage ourselves to create a community-oriented makerspace.” Lots of people around have been helping us, learning from others, like from other makerspaces, like Boston have the Artisan’s Asylum. So we learn a lot from that makerspace and we’re like “We can create something like this that’s gonna offer freedom and connections.”

Montréal is another city. This is definitely not Somerville, Boston, and Massachusetts, but we have access to a cheap lease, so we had an old building, and it took us seven months to clean that up, put things in function, and we’re doing it only by our own.

That’s something that was really impressive to me when I first joined the Burner scene so many people had different professional backgrounds. I just felt it was a really great opportunity to put like our expertise in common. So we had a really proper board of members: Architect, engineer, accountant, myself as an entrepreneurial artist. So we were ready to go.

So we rented a place for 20 years and we’ve been renovating. And now, yeah, there’s 250 members. There’s about 12 shops, wood shop, metal shop, lots of communal; some artists, artisans, who have their own private place. And yeah, once a year, we do a big, big, fundraiser event for Halloween, Pandemonium (talking about the devil).

STUART: Yeah. Let’s hear more about that because how you fund these things is a big question for a lot of people. A lot of people just say, “Well, I could never do that because I could never raise the money for it.” Tell us about Pandemonium.

ARNO: Yeah, exactly. That’s the other question we’re asking: How? How to start this? So there’s the money for sure. I talked about the social engagement, participation. That was definitely like a good momentum. And then we had to prove that we were able to ran that space and make something out of it. For the first step, that was, yeah, we have a lot of human resources, human power, let’s clean that place out, and let’s do a huge party that’s gonna be a fundraiser. So Pandemonium 1 was the first event we did in this building. 750 person, about 20,000 of benefit. And right now this year is going to be 1,000 people. We’re aiming for 50,000 of benefit too. 300 volunteers. So this is definitely something that was important to us to take the things by our own, create our own way. And doing this, we had more people joining and willing to help for financial aspects, by example. Some people have been just offering to lend some money, or just to offer some money, to the project just to start.

And we’re starting like really small steps by small steps. And doing everything by our own was also the cheapest way to do, and yeah, maybe the more sustainable way also. And finally, we’re asking for public funding, and this is something important in Québec, Canada, like yeah, for those projects and social economy, there’s like funding that can be accorded to different step of your project. So at that point we had some public funding, private funding, and lots of events, we were doing events as fundraiser. So that was our own way to just to keep the things rolling, do things simple, step by step, and five years after this first beginning, it’s now, like, totally self-autonomous, and we are looking to expand the project for a bigger phase.

And maybe buy the building if we are capable of.

KBOT: But that building, I mean, when you moved in there it was a mess. You and your friends summoned an army of people to rehabilitate that building. I remember the photos of when they poured the concrete floor. And it was just a group of what, like, five or six people leveling out the floor on their own. It’s just incredible.

ARNO: When you put brilliant humans together, I’m not talking about myself, when you put those people together, they are able to fix pretty much everything. For the context at that point, that was pushing ourselves. By example like, I was chatting with Aléric, one of the co-founders, and we were remembering why we did this. For Aléric, that was clear. He was involved in a really big project from Montréal, Fire Tetris, that is an old project that was happening at Burning Man, 20 (I think it was) ‘16. Kirsten, can you help me?

KBOT: I think it was ‘15. It was the year that everything was really, really cold outside.

ARNO: Yes, you’re right. Gosh. That was a huge, huge project for Montréal. And Jody Mac was leading the project and they had no place to build that up. And they were building during the Spring. It was cold outside and the only place they had to build that up was in the parking lot next to Jody’s place. That was making no sense to create a large scale project. And they were definitely looking for other place, other way to do it, but that is huge. So that’s how we decided, “Yeah, we need to do this.”

And Aléric, by example, is an engineer. So: “We have this old building, what should we do? Let’s redo the floor, that’s the best way to do, there’s nothing.” We had an army and, Mat Bas, also part of the Flying Fryer, we had been coordinating the session. So that was always kind of a game. Okay, we have this kind of crazy project, that is not so crazy, that’s renovation. We can ask for somebody to do it or we can do it by our own.

So we did step by step by our own, and that was always so much things to learn. It took us one year just to renovate and be sure the building was like, ready to accept the phase A of LESPACEMAKER. So that was lots of hours.. and pizza!

KBOT: And now the building is half kind of done, and half habitable. And then the other half of the building is kind of derelict, and you have just managed to secure funding and you have a plan and you’re actually going to rehabilitate the second half of the building.

ARNO: Yeah. There’s something important in this way of doing, I feel. We were creating a communal shop for artists and artisans, and we are still. It was important for those artists to, not important, but really beneficial for keeping their expenses low. So my point of view as, like I was doing art for my own living, if you keep it low, maybe you have more freedom of choosing what you’re going to create, what you’re going to do.

For the cultural development, that’s the thing we are proposing. If we are putting more things in common, it will definitely create more affordable spaces for artists, artisans, and also maybe create many other aspects, other impacts about engagement between different field of work, different people from different backgrounds, and engaging ourselves also in the neighborhood we’re living in. So there’s so many aspects we are like experimenting right now. And the next phases are really made of like creating more affordable spaces for artists and artisans. And plus, plus, plus…

STUART: Arno, I’d like to hear more about how you find and work with all these smart people that you’ve found. I mean, are these just people that you knew from Burning Man? Do you meet them through local regional events and groups? And is it very much self organizing or? What’s the style involved in trying to, as we say, herd all those cats — all those smart, smart cats?

ARNO: That’s a good question. All those answers. Yeah, that’s people, we met each other at Burning Man. We met at the a Regional Burns or like events. And then finally, we’ve been like creating a space that is also inviting more people to join.

So the way we do, for managing the space, is really self manage. So there’s a lot of project upcoming: committees, we have opening discussion or working tables, and sometimes it becomes permanent, some other times it’s not. For example, all those shops, the permanent shops, we have committees of volunteers that is organizing the space, keeping the safety proper, be sure that they are offering classes and managing their finances. There’s about 12 committees like this.

Example: There’s a new project upcoming. So we are looking to make a Recupératüm, it’s a repair center for materials. So there’s a new committee that is gonna be built, and we’re gonna look at how we can do it by our own. So that’s really oriented for volunteer-based engagement, and that’s what we did since the beginning. Like at the moment we have an idea that should become real or like that should be discussed. Let’s put it on a table and we see where it goes.

KBOT: I’m not very handy. I always have ideas and you know, sometimes they work out and sometimes they don’t, but I did go to the maker space and I did the basic woodworking course.

As a woman who is a little bit clumsy, this can be very intimidating. And it was very empowering and very refreshing to work with people who were going to work with you at your own level. And that’s something that was quite new to me. And I think, that’s really a powerful thing that makerspaces can do, especially Burner makerspaces where it’s like, “Oh, you have an idea or you want to do a thing? Great. Do it.”

Well, how? A lot of those kinds of projects can be very intimidating: Welding, woodworking, ceramics, all that kind of work. I was just, I was kind of enamored with how the Makerspace community let you in and just let you do your thing without any judgment.

ARNO: It sometimes, by my perspective, feels a bit kind of intimidating. Like you say, like a Makerspace, like a lot of people knows, and it’s really, like, technical oriented. And for us, it was important to keep a fun, funny moment when we can just learn, play and create things. This is easy to say, like many other makerspace are saying the same, but I feel for us that was creating events.

Doing an event is like getting the pressure really lower to create some new things and try some new things.

Last winter we did Insomnia. We never did any overnight event for Nuit Blanche, so it’s a night in Montréal, all the shops — the workshops, the artists — are opening their door to give access and express culture for everybody passing by.

KBOT: Nuit Blanche means ‘white night’. And it means that the entire city, the entire sort of cultural mechanism of the city, opens for the entire night. The museums are open. All the artist studios are open. There are parties and gatherings and Makerspace, LESPACEMAKER, has done that twice now where you participate and you open your doors for the whole night.

ARNO: Thank you so much for the precision. So yeah, last year, it was the first  time we did Insomnia. Insomnia was an event we were creating to propose a place to try to create new things. So, like, Many artists have been invited, and they were like, “Okay, this is an open field. So you do have like all this space.”

So this is a space we are not occupying in the building right now. And we are, we’re just taking and expanding another space. So they just decided like, “Hey, we’re gonna create a labyrinth.” And people will pass by and it’s going to be also an exhibition. So like, so many people have been joining just flowing in and like trying things they will never try and they’re like other context. So that’s important for us to keep that product like that perspective or that moment possible.

I feel events are like just getting the stress lower to try new things and give ourselves the right for failure, that was so important from the beginning and still. That was the case for Insomnia, it was really oriented for like creating new things, but also for Pandemonium, inviting so many artists to join and maybe try some new stuff.

We are together. We are just like between us, yeah, 1000 of us, but like it’s an important moment just to express what we want to do, what we want to be. That’s a freedom gesture of like creation in my perspective.

KBOT: What advice would you give to someone who wanted to start their own community project?

ARNO: Don’t look too far. I feel it’s cool to get objective and like a vision, but the important things are the small steps. Just looking at what you can do to create one step and the other, and then things are just slowly taking place. Mistakes are part of it, for myself, and I love mistakes because it’s so important in the process. It’s really impressive at some point you look back and you say “Oh my gosh how much energy we’ve been investing in this path,” but you would never do this if you had any idea. We did it because we had no idea. We’re not in the full control of all the steps and that was okay; it’s still part of how I like I love to do this.

KBOT: What would you warn them against apart from not looking too far ahead? Are there any other things that you would not want people to repeat? Mistakes that you don’t want people to make? Or are all mistakes valid at this point?

ARNO: I would say something I learned in the beginning was the rhythm. Sometime when you become really impatient, like the excitation, the passion, brings things really, really clear and you want to go fast. But when you’re creating that kind of project, I feel it’s really important for all of us to just understand it’s going to take time, and creating the right rhythm to be sure it’s respectful, sustainable and healthy. This is something that was a really important learning for me in the first year, for myself, for my friends, for many of my friends that I’ve been like close to the burnout or burning out, literally. We need to be careful.

STUART: Arno, whenever I talk with people, who, like yourself, are taking this culture of Burning Man out into the world, I’m always curious to see how it fits or doesn’t fit in different cultures, different languages and all that. I know, linguistically, I’ve seen this before, words like decommodification — that’s not even really a word in English. But, I’m curious what you feel about the 10 Principles in your work, and if there are any that particularly speak to you, or any that you just kind of go, “Eh, whatever.” I think that’s always instructive to all of us to see how the culture is spreading out in the world.

ARNO: Yeah, I love to do this, and go in to other Regionals to understand their perspective and their local understanding of what it can be. For me, the context of the engagement, the participation, that was so impressive to me. So powerful. That’s definitely something that we’ve been embracing since the beginning.

And at the moment, the invitation is open, the transparency is there. There’s so many people that are willing to offer and give so much. This is something definitely so important in my perspective at what Burning Man has been in our project in Montréal, in the Burner city, Montréal. I really see the principles as a balance of things, and perspective about the balance is really important.

So yeah, for me, that was looking to engage myself, creating impacts and maybe bringing back what is a really huge shortcut, to create like a collective bondness that was the best way to do. There are so many recipes. Doing like those fundraisers we do, it’s so inspired by things we saw around the Burning Man culture.

Why? So much people have been trying to create new ideas that of course there’s good ideas in the process. So when we are trying new things, there’s so many things we get inspired by. At the moment you offer a proper way to engage and be collectively associated. People are still really willing to join.

It’s also something missing sometimes in our cities. I will talk with Montréal. I mean, it’s a small city. I think we know each other by two persons or something like that. It’s like a huge village. And even there, we are not so close to each other. We live in our neighborhood without talking to the neighbors. This is something really common, I think in big cities anywhere. And just creating pretext for bonding is really important, that are not intrusive.

So creating a space that is chosen at a specific moment in your living time in your living schedule, and then you can kind of engage yourself and take yourself out of your loneliness. This is also a good and important context to create in the cities. And at the moment you offer this and you offer it to all the people from any scenes, not only the Burner scene, a way to be bigger than themselves, they are so passionate about it. They are so engaged. This is impressive.

KBOT: So you’re talking about the creation of third spaces.

ARNO: Yeah, totally.

KBOT: Creating a third space that’s not your home, that’s not your work, that’s a collective, shared space where people can come together.

ARNO: Exact. And that is not definitely religion, that is like affiliated to some other the values that are maybe more independent, or maybe more locally affiliated. So this is something important. Like those third places, I feel there’s a missing connection there and yeah, a community workshop is one way, but like, there’s so many other circumstances we can create and generate. It’s infinite.

STUART: Yeah, it sounds like, to me, you’re talking about belonging, too, which is definitely in short supply in our world. Even before the pandemic there was a lot of alienation and isolation and so many societal forces driving us apart from each other. I hear you, that having a force in the world that brings us together, to do things together, it’s a pretty powerful thing, right? And there’s not a lot of it, not enough of it in the world.

KBOT: And places where you can both work and play, and they’re kind of intermingled. So yeah, maybe you’re creating something together, maybe you’re building a project or creating an event, but you’re also playing and building social connections that are, you know, curious, and experimental, but also educational.

STUART: Did you just drop, did you just drop the theme there, Kbot? Did you just say Curiouser? No, you just said curious.

KBOT: I might have…

STUART: We’ll come back to that. So, speaking of the future, Arno, what’s next for you? What do you got coming up in the year ahead?

ARNO: That’s a great question. We do have Pandemonium. We haven’t talked about it so much, but, huge event, lots of people, lots of energy.

STUART: Tell us more about Pandemonium. If I go to Pandemonium, what am I going to experience?

ARNO: It’s a big chaotic space, with so many creative humans that are just digging to create something by their own. So it’s like an old garage and then lots of new flavors. There’s a roller disco. There’s many thematic sounds scenic. There’s a performance, vaudeville performance theater. There’s so many things at the same place. So yeah, that’s 20,000 square feet, huge party that is happening only once a year in Montréal.

KBOT: So Stuart, we can’t explain it. It’s just like Burning Man. You have to just go.

STUART: It sounds a lot like Burning Man. I’m just saying. I know it’s not, but it sounds like Burning Man in a warehouse.

ARNO: But you’re right. What’s impressive to me about the Pandemonium? Of course, it’s really like Burning Man flavored. Lots of us are calling ourselves Burners and we are coordinating and doing the organization of the place. This is all about engagement, participation, inclusion, transparency.

What was impressive to me, so many other scenes have been like, yeah, we are digging into this. We do understand and we want to help  creating that space that is like building crazy project, LESPACEMAKER. But also be part of this whole thing together.

So there’s people from Rainbow Gatherings or like, side scenes, like more musical scenes, and many collectives are doing their own projects. So this is something kind of really local, bringing so many other people at the same, so much passion, many ways to do it. And we’re learning how to coexist in this specific event.

STUART: Sounds really great.

KBOT: And it results in amazing cross pollinations, yeah.

STUART: Your community for the space. That’s wonderful.

So. Next year, in Black Rock City, will there be poutine again?

ARNO: Yeah, it’s like this year was kind of funny, that I was kind of looking for my base, and I feel there’s still something I want to come back to. So yeah, next year I bet I’ll be around. Bringing the Flying Fryer was intense, but like so magical connections.

So yeah, the next year will be made of definitely preparing to come back to Burning Man again and also lots of new things. We are looking to buy the building, the makerspace, there’s many challenges with the Regional Burn. And I would love to create a bit more since like I’m more coordinating things right now I would love to go back about creations and doing things, out of my head for the fun of doing it.

And this is something important also, like, Kirsten, you were asking, ways to maybe don’t lose yourself in a way. That’s good. That’s the way I’m looking at it. So, yeah, just… kind of like, still remembering and respecting why you did it in the first place. So that’s what I’m looking for right now, just to be sure I’m like, still having fun and still doing the things that are important about creating, and doing new things. Flying Fryer was a good example at Burning Man, that was nice.

STUART: Next year, maybe put some pontoons on the Flying Fryer. Or make it into an airboat. I want an airboat. Of course, it won’t rain again, but I’ll have an airboat.

ARNO: That’s funny, though.

STUART: The Floating Fryer, I think.

ARNO: That could work. The Floating Fryer, yeah. That would be nice.

KBOT: The Flying Floater.

STUART: Well, Arno, is there anything else you want to tell us?

ARNO: Mmm…

KBOT: No pressure.

ARNO: But that’s an important question. I was trying not to over-prepare for this discussion, but I feel this is something important for me. What’s about Burning Man? I mean, I’ve been investing a lot of my energy in the last nine years learning a lot from Burning Man culture and also trying to engage myself in impacts related to this. And I do feel this is something that is so important in our way of creating great local, like my perspective is just like, I feel local solutions can definitely help finding the right impacts and also like creating engagement.

I really would love to connect this more with BRC that I was like in the five last years. I feel there’s something still so interesting about going at BRC. And I remembered this going back, trying things, and set yourself for like just playing. I love this and I love the way it’s so needed in the Burner scene. You can ask anything, everybody will say yes if there’s fun involved in the process. This is really meshing in the culture, and this is something important to remember. Otherwise, like, you’re gonna lose it.

KBOT: That’s fundamental.

ARNO: That’s my thinking out of my Burning Man this year, yeah.

KBOT: I love that: ask anything and they’ll say yes if there’s fun involved in the process. That kind of sums it up.

ARNO: Yeah.

STUART: We call it the Tom Sawyer approach to organizing here. Would you like to whitewash a fence? Anyway, it’s great talking to you. Our guest is the exceptionally lusty Arno Robbins of Montréal.

Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for coming on the show, my friend.

ARNO: Thank you so much.

STUART: Okay. Consider, I don’t know, I don’t want to mess with the time-tested recipe but a little bit of crumbled bacon on it. Just sayin’. Bacon never made anything worse.

ARNO: Maybe smoked meat is the best addition on it. Yeah, I’ll bring some then. 

STUART: Bacon makes everything better.

ARNO: What was really special about the Flying Fryer, we added some green onions topping on the top. It looks so great, and a little more vegetable.

STUART: Beautiful.

ARNO: Yeah, more healthy.

KBOT: Healthy, exactly.

STUART: Less brown.

ARNO: Yes.

STUART: All right, thanks a lot.

KBOT: Thank you all.

ARNO: My pleasure. Ciao.

KBOT: Bye!

STUART: Bye!

KBOT: And as they say in Québec, merci tout le monde. It’s a wrap.

You have been listening to Burning Man Live, which is, was, and will hopefully always be a non-profit production brought to you commercial-free by Burning Man Project.

Thank you to everyone who listened.

Merci to everyone who tells a friend.

Thanks to all of you who send us email at live@burningman.org.

And thanks to all of you who put a tax-deductible donation, into the coin slot at donate.burningman.org

I want to thank everyone who made this episode possible. Thank you to my friends Vav, Stuart, Rocky, Actiongrl, Tyler, Allie, Deets, Kristy, the entire Communications team at Burning Man.

And, thanks, Larry.