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Daily Blah for... Thursday, September 28, 2006
Happy Young Couples, Unite
The Onion's latest splash headline story, Nation Sickened By Sight Of Happy Young Couple, did make me guffaw -- given that I've just become one of said sickeningly happy couples myself. And speaking as a representative of sickeningly happy couples, let me tell you disillusioned types this: we know we make you sick, and yes, that makes us a little embarrassed at times. But quite frankly, there's so much oxytocin and dopamine flowing around our systems, we just don't care. Vomit away, folks.
The Onion story was forwarded to me by a friend in a similar situation, in the first flush of her own new romance. We're both old, wise and cynical enough to know how these things go, how short the first flush can be, and yet there we are, thrilling to it, feeling invulnerable, ignoring the stares of sour-faced strangers. "We need to form a union," I said. "A Happy Couple's Union. To protect us against reprisals from the broken- and sad-hearted."
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Future Boy Gets His (Tech-Enhanced) Game On
I really should have blogged about the Come Out and Play Festival while it was happening, and merely pointing you to the Future Boy column I just wrote about it is a poor substitute. Bad Future Boy! No biscuit! Suffice to say that I had a very pleasant weekend in New York, thoroughly enjoyed the stares from passers-by, and I won't forget swinging my mini-golf club through the streets around Tompkins Square Park any time soon. I may even post pictures.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, September 14, 2006
Future Boy: Alien-lovin' immigrant
The latest Future Boy is up, on why demographic trends make the whole immigration debate irrelevant. I'd forgotten, but should have remembered well from my Time.com days, how much passion immigration stories inspire. (That's "passion" as in "unrelenting xenophobia.") The following correspondence is fairly typical; it starts out with the diplomatically-worded subject line, "Give us a BREAK from your stupidity PLEASE," and continues in the same vein:
Your article is so ridiculous it is difficult to know where to begin.
There is no way the benefits of illegal invasion overcome the costs.
As an environmentalist I learned long ago that growth costs.
Most importantly, you SHOULD KNOW that the economy is driven by innovation, not by population growth.
And these illegal aliens are going to innovate????????
"Illegal invasion," eh? Leaving aside the lingustic problem of that tautological phrase, I have to wonder if this purported environmentalist ever studied the origins and settlement of the United States itself. Was that an "illegal invasion" of white Europeans? Damn, but those aliens knew how to innovate.
Daily Blah for... Friday, September 08, 2006
Future Boy Types Up a Memo
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Future Boy on the Playa
It seemed only fitting that Future Boy became my playa name this year, the year of the future theme. And that Future Boy should have written this column in advance explaining why companies need to hire the kind of minds you'll find at Burning Man. It was published on Thursday, while I was happily bashing away on my non-Internet connected typewriter, and has done the email rounds so much that a friend of a friend just got sent it by a co-worker who was actually hired after meeting his new company at the Burn.
I'm sure a lot of Burners will think it perverse to even mention such an idea, fearing bastardization of the event and an invasion by an army of headhunters. But it would seem this sort of thing is going on anyway. Besides, at least the headhunters would get the event -- they're interested in people and their potential, after all, as opposed to the frat boy yahoos who invade at the end of the week in search of beer and titties.
Meanwhile, the Burning Man organization has announced its official theme for 2007: The Green Man. Nice and timely, of course, but I have to wonder how much the theme actually matters any more. Outside of a few rocket ship art cars and the Futuredome, very little was done with the future theme this year. (Okay, so I suppose the Waffle counts, but it was an extremely abstract message from the future). When participants did adhere to the official theme, they tended to go for its subhead -- hope and fear.
But for the most part, our 30,000 improv artists gleefully ignored the theme and did whatever they felt like doing. The last theme that had a playa-wide impact was Floating World in 2002, a very appropriate and non-abstract concept that brought us pirate ships and sea anenomes and schools of fish and a giant rubber ducky. What will Green Man inspire, apart from Christmas trees?
Daily Blah for... Monday, September 04, 2006
Back From Extremes
It's the little things, the dumb consumer things, that delight when you get back from the desert. Running water that doesn't involve propane. Couches that aren't covered in dust. Roads on which you're allowed to drive faster than five miles an hour. Drive-thrus and diners. Permanent structures. Impenetrable shelter from the elements. Flush toilets.
And yet when I awoke from my marathon post-drive nap, after that brief moment when the brain tries desperately to make sense where it is, I felt sorely disappointed to be back in my comfortable, classy, cozy San Francisco home. I longed for my dusty little tent, and the dusty tents and domes of the neighborhood that surrounded it. I longed to hear someone calling out the silly playa names of the people who made it home -- Smash and Not That Dave, Doctor Odd and Dixie, D Best and Chad Wow, to name but a few -- and I longed for more time. The Man couldn't have burned already, could he?
"It's only a week in the desert," read a popular button (or badge, in Brit-speak) on the playa this year. (Playa buttons are one of the Burners' favorite ways of poking fun at themselves, alongside the Piss Clear newspaper and random people with megaphones). Yes, it's only a week in the desert. But what a life-changing event that week invariably is. Cracked-out from lack of sleep though I may have been on the eight-hour drive home, my head and heart were bursting with memories of magic. By which I mean the ease and grace of genuine community; the rewards of sweaty survival work and constant Good Samaritanism; the unbreakable bonds forged in a fiery crucible.
After napping for a couple of hours in a coffee-free rest stop by a lake in the low Sierras, I was hailed by a conservative-looking older guy, drawn to the dust on my car and asking if I'd gone to Burning Man. "How did you guess?" I smiled.
"What is it, an art festival?"
"No shit, Sherlock," was the response suggested by the caffeine-deprived part of my brain. But I'd just gone through extensive retraining on the value of talking to strangers. Dutifully I dived into my head in search of lucidity. Anyone of any age, even Mr. Upright Middle America, is a potential Burner. He needed to understand.
Yes, I said, it's an art festival, but it's also an event that takes you out of your safe civilized life and makes you build a new one. It's a ridiculous party in the most extreme of environments, an attempt at decadence in the desert that, more often than not, actually works. He nodded, and asked for the website. Maybe next year he'll show up on Thursday in an RV, decked out in corporate logo-wear. And maybe the penny will drop and he'll show up the year after that, on Monday, wearing a utilikilt stuffed with dome-building tools and a silly grin.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, September 03, 2006
Toasting the Waffle
SUNDAY, 2006
All day the city has been taking itself down. "All right, time to put away your toys," someone walking by the camp said today, and that's what it feels like: the end of a comprehensive playdate. The strain of a week in the desert -- of dehydration, too much sun, a lack of sleep -- is starting to show. The Temple burn tonight brought a lot of tensions to the fore. There were no rules for the crowd to follow, but previous Temple burns have been solemn affairs, as people watch the notes they've written, messages of grief and love and (this year's temple theme) hope, go up in smoke. So those who wanted quiet shushed those who wanted to comment, and those who wanted to sit yelled those who wanted to stand. Eventually the crowd resolved itself peacefully, with mostly quiet and all sitting. One woman in front of us snobbishly refused to sit.
"Why don't you all stand?" she said, seriously, to several hundreds of us. We asked her why, and she responded in a most un-Burning Man-like manner:
"Because I've got a prosthetic limb, asshole."
Then why not move to the back, we replied. We'll make way for you. Don't block the Temple burn for 30 of us. "Well," she said, "you're ruining Burning Man for me."
"Oh good," I said. "I usually just ruin Christmas."
"Crowds: Ruining Burning Man since 2006," said Not That Dave.
We shone flashlights at her feet. They both looked pretty damn real, though it was hard to tell under all the playa dust. They can do good things with prosthetic limbs these days. Her boyfriend looked around sheepishly, apologetically. She stood there defiant as Bodecia while the Temple burned, and the crowd did its best to pretend she wasn't there.
A couple hours later, they burned the Waffle. That's the name the entire city uses for the jaw-dropping, 15 storey-high cavern built by 90 Belgians entirely out of two-by-fours. Lit up in a glowing green, it was by far the most vast and alien-looking thing ever seen on the Playa. The Belgians were annoyed that the city had unanimously dubbed it the waffle -- it smacks of cultural imperialism, they told Doctor Odd: "You only call it a waffle because we are Belgian." Well, possibly, but also because they gave it an entirely forgettable name: Uchronia. Black Rock City is Web 2.0: the content is user-generated and user-named, and you don't get to say what the crowd calls your artwork.
The strain was showing on the Belgians, too. "Let me hear you say 'arson,' they said to the crowd as they introduced the burn, with what appeared to be a hint of mockery.
"They mean 'awesome,'" said Odd. "It's what they think Americans say all the time."
Two of the week's best mobile artworks, a giant venus flytrap and a giant daisy, danced provocatively in front of the waffle as it was lit. The crowd had another brief inner conflict about whether it was okay for some of us to shine laser pointers at the waffle. We decided against.
"Toast the waffle," we shouted. "Bring in the giant vat of maple syrup."
They lit the structure just above the arch of the cavern. It burned away boringly for about 20 minutes. Then, just as we were thinking of leaving, the wisdom of lighting it there became clear: it was a weak spot. As soon as the arch collapsed, the waffle fell in on itself. In one fell whoosh, we had a fire that seemed to be a mile high.
Awesome.
Daily Blah for... Friday, September 01, 2006
Pen vs. Sword: Latest Results
SATURDAY, 2006
All day the newbies have been streaming into the Smoochdome. At the beginning of the week, people would take a number from the Take a Number machine, accept our instructions to wait, and smirk in silent acknowledgment of the joke. The joke, of course, being that this is a city of 30,000 improv artists instantly creating their own absurd reality, and your job is to play along. For example, we have a payphone set up a little ways down the street from the Smoochdome, which, when people pick it up, goes straight through to our phone on one of the tables inside the dome. "Can someone get that?" we yell in a tone of annoyance. It never gets old. Similarly, Jess and I were walking to Costco yesterday, having a theological discussion about God's supposed responsibility for human actions, when we came across a phone that claimed to connect you with God. "Well," I said, "let's ask him." To my great delight, God came down on my side of the debate. "I'm so glad," I said, "that we're wholly at fault for our own screw-ups, instead of blaming it all on some guy with a big white beard."
"Well, actually," said God, "my beard isn't white. I'm not that old. It's a common misconception."
But now the Yahoo invasion is in full effect, and people in baseball caps and T-shirts and shorts and too-clean skin take a number from the Take a Number machine and ask "hey, man, if I take this number, will I get to smooch someone?" And we roll our eyes and can't even begin to tell them how far they are from smooching someone with that attitude. Usually they walk off in disgust when nothing happens, but today we had one particularly persistent newbie who clung to his seat in the hopes of being given someone to smooch. So when a guy came into the dome looking like Conan, with fuzzy boots, leather straps, and a giant sword, we immediately suggested he fight the newbie. But the newbie wasn't biting, and so our minds raced away in search of some other Dadaist prey.
"I know," said Doctor Odd. "Why don't we find out if the pen really is mightier than the sword?"
And so the two writers in the dome, myself and Tinker Bill, were issued with small plastic pens to face the barbarian and his giant sword. The idea was that we would tag-team this one, and Bill was eating, conveniently enough, so I was first in the ring. Of course, this was no real fight, but it still had more than an air of high school to it. For one thing, Jess was watching, and I wanted to impress her. I had to find an intellectually satisfactory, appropriately surreal conclusion to what purported to be a physical clash. I made a big show of warming up by stretching each finger on my pen hand. Then the fight began, and I could barely hold on to my pen as the giant barbaric sword swatted at it. How was I going to get out of this?
"You're a journalist, Chris," shouted Bill from the sidelines. "Aim low."
That was the inspiration I needed. Quickly, I ducked under the sword and grabbed hold of Conan's exposed thigh. "To Be or Not to Be," I scrawled on it, and simultaneously shouted it out.
Uproar. Applause. The fight was declared over. The gods of improv had been satisfied. The pen had taken its rightful place in the mightiness rankings. Jess, smiling, started calling me "Mr. Pen." And the newbie just looked bewildered. Maybe one day he'll think back on what he saw, the penny will drop, and next time he takes a number from a Take a Number machine at Burning Man, he'll decide for himself what it's for.
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