Archive for category Burning Man

An Ode To Burners

Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Burning Man on August 24th, 2010

We will always burn the man. Burning is a collective experience, shared with and mediated between a community of people that forms around the central act of Burning. Although burning is a collective experience, it is expressed uniquely by each individual. There is no one to whom we can abdicate the responsibility of practicing this ritual, to perform it on our behalf.

We will always burn the man. The act of burning springs from within each of us. The right to burn is not granted to us by anyone else. The capability to burn is ours, although we each express that capability in different ways. There is no one to whom we grant the authority to prevent us from practicing this ritual, in some form or another. Not a board of directors or a planning committee; certainly not Larry Fucking Harvey; and least of all, not the idea of our own lack of ability.

We will always burn the man. In a culture that fears and reviles death, intentional, personal, ritualistic destruction is a powerful spiritual act. We claim destruction as our own right, as free people, not solely to be authorized by the government or some other authority figure. We claim destruction as a natural part of the cycle of life, not something to be feared and reviled.

We will always burn the man. In testament to the truth of these ideas, we offer up that which we value most, knowing that its destruction is inevitable, choosing to be the instrument of that destruction, and secure that we can create something like it again when the need exists.

WE WILL ALWAYS BURN THE MAN.

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Inherently Impermanent

Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Burning Man, Homesteading on June 15th, 2010

Gardening is filled with such extremes of emotion for me. Successes really fill me with joy…

First batch of cucumber pickles is sitting in the fridge…

Yellow squash and zucchini are producing really a ridiculous amount of fruit. Say what you will, you can always rely on squash to outgrow your garden beds and outproduce everything else on the planet. It’s too bad that, somehow, I ended up with about four yellow squash plants to every one zucchini. Zucchini is really much more delicious IMO, especially breaded and fried.

The butternuts are starting to set fruit. It’ll be a loooong time before they’re ready to harvest, but it’s still nice to see.

But then the setbacks just crush me. We had a big windstorm roll through yesterday and then again today. Just amazing gusts of wind knocking tree limbs down and damn near capsizing our baby walnut tree.

The corn got mowed down. I’m leaving it along to see if it manages to recover. The roots seem to be mostly intact and the stalks, for the most part, don’t seem to be broken, but it’s just heartbreaking.

And then there’s some kind of fungal disease or another eating at and rotting away at least some of damn near all my plants. I swear, sometimes I want a do-over so bad. As if next time I’ll get it exactly right. But of course, that’s not how it’ll go. Next time there’ll be some other problem to solve.

A lot of energy in modern life is spent trying to get rid of undesirable outcomes. Really, most of you readers, and myself of course, live in an extravagantly refined environment that nearly-instantly caters to our every whim. Temperature and humidity are controlled. Food of any sort is at our reach, whether it’s a frozen treat, a cold glass of milk, a bowl of cereal, or a tropical fruit. Want to see a movie or talk to a friend? Television, cell phones, home entertainment systems, and the Internet are here to serve. From this perspective, the unpredictably catastrophic nature of farming is completely alien—which is not to say that the same, “cater-to-your-whim,” attitude doesn’t exist in agriculture. For every fungus or insect you don’t like, there’s a chemical from Dow or Monsanto to treat it, but in trying to garden simply and organically, I’ve decided to try other approaches first.

And so I accept that, maybe, despite my best efforts, I’m going to lose every stick of corn I planted to a wind-storm. Maybe that harvest of beans was the last one before fungus turns the plants to mush and I have to pull them out of the beds and burn them to keep the spores from propagating in the compost heap. Maybe I won’t get a single tomato because they’ll all get blossom end rot or early blight or who-the-hell-knows-what other of the thousands of maladies that can afflict a tomato plant. And you know what else? Maybe my house doesn’t have to be 72 degrees 24-hours a day (well, it’s not, because we’ve decided not to use central air).

This outlook seems very consistent with my participation in burns. We build an enormous effigy every year only to light it on fire and burn it to the ground, and I see that as an incredibly subversive act in a world that attempts to preserve everything—youth, money, status, posessions—indefinitely. It’s not wanton destruction to me. It’s a statement that nothing in the world is permanent, and the things that we value most can be taken away by sheer chance, without our consent or participation or culpability, and that’s okay. It has to be okay, because it IS. And acting as if what IS is not is a sure way to bad outcomes.

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Building a 4v EMT Geodesic Dome – Part 2

Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Burning Man on May 26th, 2010

Day 2 of the dome fabrication weekend started with the construction of a jig for drilling the 2nd hole in each strut.

The distance between the bolt-holes in the ends of the struts is the most critical part of the project. The vertices of a geodesic dome must be of relatively precise length for the dome to properly approximate a sphere. If the vertices aren’t drilled correctly, not only does the dome look all wobbly, it loses the magical strength that geodesic domes are known for.

Following the instructions on desertdomes.com, I cut a V-notch in a length of 2×4 and then inserted a 7/16″ lag bolt near one end. Actually, the hardware store didn’t have 7/16″ lag bolts, so we bought a section of 7/16″ all-thread and cut it to length. This turned out to be quite fortuitous. Even though the hole in the wood was drilled to be tight, the all-thread still had perhaps 1/8″ of wobble, which would have ruined the precision we were going for. I clamped two pieces of scrap wood tightly around the extra length sticking out the bottom and screwed them down. Read the rest of this entry »

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Building a 4v EMT Geodesic Dome

Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Burning Man on May 22nd, 2010

Issa and I are building a 32′ diameter, 16′ tall geodesic dome. We’re using the instructions on desertdomes.com. This weekend, we made a big chunk of progress, so it’s as good a time as any to post an update.

Above, you can see some of the poles that have already been cut and marked. We’re using colored duck tape instead of paint, because a friend told us that paint just flaked off and wasn’t a good choice. The pre-torn pieces of yellow tape are stuck to the edge of the table saw.

Here are some more cut poles. The dome we’re building, a 4v frequency, has six different lengths of pole. Other designs have fewer pole lengths, which simplifies construction and building, but the trade-off is that it requires longer poles to get the same size dome. By building a 4v dome, we keep our longest poles down to about 5′, a manageable length. If we were to build a 2V dome of the same size, there would only be two pole lengths, but they would be about 8′ and 9′ long. The shorter strut lengths also mean that each individual strut can be made from thinner tubing, since it’s shorter and less likely to bend. We’re using 3/4″ tubing, which is expected to provide enough strength to climb on the dome and hang from it, as long as you only put weight on the vertices where the struts come together, and not on the middle of the struts. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Safe” vs. “Dangerous” Environments

Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Burning Man on December 16th, 2009

There’s a school of thought in road design that goes something like this: designing “safe” roads and cars actually makes them more dangerous because drivers are encouraged not to pay attention. This article makes the point very eloquently.

Vanderbilt describes driving along a narrow, twisting road in Spain, where he navigated hairpin turns with few guardrails or warning signs over steep drop-offs. The result: “I drove as if my life depended on it.” But when he reached a four-lane highway with gentle curves, good visibility and little traffic, “I just about fell asleep and ran off the road … Lulled by safety, I’d acted more dangerously.”

I had an experience that reminded me of this today, while boarding the plane. I was reading a web page on my phone as I passed through the gate. I expected to enter the jetway, which is such a well-contained environment that I just kept reading. But because this was a regional shuttle jet, there was just a set of stairs down to a cordoned-off walkway. I had to stop reading and pay attention.

And of course, the whole thing made me think of Burning Man, which is the epitome of environments where you have to pay attention. “Safe” environments usually result in people to turning their attention inwards, which means that we not only fail to see our environment, we fail to see each other. This is one reason why I resist efforts to make the environment at burns safer. When the environment is known to be moderately dangerous, not only are people actually safer, they are more extroverted as well.

Drivers in traffic circles … communicate more with hand signals and eye contact. As Vanderbilt notes, when a traditional four-way intersection with lights was turned into a traffic square, “The responsibility for getting through the intersection was now up to the users, and they responded by communicating among themselves. The result was that the system was safer, even though the majority of users, polled in local surveys, felt that the system was more dangerous!”

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