Burning Man is .... um....

So after CBC I drove straight to Burning Man. Like most people who have been to Burning Man, I struggle when I have to explain Burning Man to those who have never heard of it before. You're talking about Burning Man and somebody says "Wait, what's Burning Man?" and you start to say "Burning Man is ... um ... well, it's this festival... party ... event.... thing.... for a week ... in the desert.... um... Burning Man is like...."

My artist friends had all been telling me it was the most wonderful event they'd ever been to, and kept insisting I had to go, yet seemed incapable of describing what it was exactly. They'd say stuff like "You cannot imagine the things people build for this event. They spend ALL YEAR building stuff just for this one week." I'd say: "What stuff?" and they'd just start babbling. "Oh... thing like.... jeez, my god, the art cars! They're just... and there was this one thing - I can't even describe it - it was like - this giant lizard thing, except, it was a bicycle! No, but it wasn't exactly... And the desert, the dust is... there's this temple thing too, oh, I just can't describe it."

In contrast to those raptured and incoherent comments, other people were telling me it had been nearly the worst experience of their life: "You have NO IDEA what the duststorms are like. Don't bring ANYTHING you care about. Do NOT bring your own car or your own bicycle, they'll NEVER be the same." "The music is SO loud and annoying." "It used to be cool, before it got so popular, but now so many tourists go - tons of all drunk college kids - it's horrible." "Three hundred dollars just to be crowded and exhausted and see a bunch of stupid art cars! Totally not worth it!"

The more I listened, the more I kept hearing echoes of how people used to describe Carnaval to me. In fact, some of the sentences were word-for-word identical to descriptions of the Rio Carnaval that I'd heard long before I ever went to Rio: "You cannot imagine the floats and costumes they build for this event. They spend ALL YEAR building stuff just for this one week!" "The music is SO loud and annoying" ""It used to be cool, before it got so popular, but now so many tourists go - tons of all drunk college kids - it's horrible." "Three hundred dollars just to be crowded and exhausted and see a bunch of stupid floats!"

So.... is Burning Man the North American equivalent of Carnaval? The one crazy, annual, blow-out party to end all parties? The indescribably topsy-turvy event that turns the world inside-out temporarily, in ways that some people adore and others hate? I decided to I had to check it out for myself.

Since this was my first Burning Man, my friend Bola at California Brazil Camp insisted that I needed to "practice" before going. So we inaugurated the First Annual CBC Mini-Burning-Man. "Practice" consisted of getting drunk and stoned and then (once sufficiently drunk and stoned) running after a simulacrum of the Burning Man water truck (aka Bola with a fire hose), dancing around like maniacs in the water, and then burning a tiny little wooden figure (6" tall, made out of twigs) that was pulverized to ashes in about 2 seconds with a blast from Bola's propane torch. Mini Burning Man was a grand success!! Meaning that we (a) had a great time and (b) managed to shock all the hundreds of campers in the entire lunch line into a stunned and puzzled silence. (Many thanks here to my fellow Mini Burners, Golban, Ara and Barbara; and special thanks to Bola for arranging the whole event. I can't wait for the 2nd annual Mini Burning Man! Also thanks to George for the bottle of Bulgarian rakia, which was an essential part of the process.)

Despite the excellent practice, though, I still wasn't quite sure what to expect from the real Burning Man. So now I've been. So here's my try at describing what Burning Man is. Burning Man is 50,000 insane people who build an entire city in the Nevada desert in a couple of days, and live there for a week ... bringing all their food and water with them, living in rows and rows and rows of elaborately constructed camps, in the middle of a razor-flat, barren and empty, duststorm-filled, alkali-flats prehistoric lakebed. There's no bands or stages; it's not a music festival. There's nothing for sale. Actually there are no scheduled acts at all. What happens all week long is up to the 50,000 people who have chosen to come.

But wait, that doesn't really explain it at all. Burning Man is like... um...

Burning Man is like, you know how you were at that wild party that one time, with your three craziest friends, and you all had that ridiculous idea to build a giant gumball machine out of helium balloons, and you all were laughing your asses off about your silly idea?

It's just like that, except, instead of just laughing about the idea, you actually BUILD it, and instead of three crazy friends, you have 50,000 crazy friends, and they've each spent a full year (and tens of thousands of dollars) building their giant helium gumball machine. Or their home-made roller coaster. Or their full-sized disco roller rink (with 100 pairs of roller skates available, and giant sound system blasting out vintages Bee Gees). Or their whatever-it-is. And they actually BUILD it. And everybody can go try out everybody else's insane ideas. For free. All week long. Everything is free.

So that's one difference; instead of escolas building crazy stuff in a slightly organized way, it's random people building crazy stuff in an entirely disorganized way.

Another difference is the drugs. As caipirinhas are to Carnaval, so drugs are to Burning Man. I've never been offered so many drugs of so many kinds so fast! On my first night alone I was offered pot three times, ecstasy once, and mushrooms twice... and that was all in the first half hour, from the same 5 people who were camped right next to me.

But oddly I felt no interest in drugs; because it had instantly became clear that drugs are redundant at Burning Man. What I mean is, suppose you accept the drugs from your campmates. And you get stoned. And you hallucinate that you're riding a clump of fuzzy, ten-foot-high, glowing, pastel-colored mushrooms through a blinding sandstorm ... for hours... sailing through the desert on a pink glowing mushroom... only to reach a miniature, pocket-sized movie theater that is all alone in the middle of the desert! And is only eight feet wide, contains a total of six chairs, and is showing a different triple feature every night. For free! Then your mushrooms get stuck in a sand drift, and you all have to jump off and push the mushrooms.

Or maybe you dream that you're on a functioning fishing purse-seiner boat that is cruising around... IN THE DESERT!! And you have all just spotted a GIANT NEON TUNA FISH that is also cruising along about a mile away, and your fishing-boat turns out to be staffed by real live Alaskan fishermen who simply cannot BELIEVE that there is a GIANT NEON TUNA FISH at Burning Man, and they immediately give chase after the unsuspecting neon tuna fish, in their impossibly fully-functional desert fishing boat, and they ACTUALLY CATCH IT.

Or imagine that you're so deeply lost in a blinding, swirling dust storm, visibility zero, and you think "Hell, I'm so totally lost I might as well just start playing chocalho, just to practice, till the dust storm ends" and there you are covered in dust and playing chocalho at top volume, when out of the dust comes looming... a giant motorized plate of nachos. The giant plate of nachos has heard your chocalho and has come to check you out. The giant plate of nachos does a neat circle around you, and then it heads away and vanishes into the swirling wind.

Or maybe you hallucinate that it's night time and the vast sky is filled with stars, and you're tugging a 1200-foot-long string of hundreds and hundreds of glowing, blue, helium balloons through your hands, against a star-filled sky, looking up at them and getting so dizzy that it seems that you're pulling a string of actual stars through your hands... and three random people converge from all directions, all on bicycles that are lit up like Christmas trees... and when you finally reach the end of the 1200 feet of balloons, you let all the balloons go, and they sail up into space, like a galaxy floating away, and it's THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING YOU'VE EVER SEEN, and you and the three random people on the Christmas-tree bicycles all cheer! And you all hug each other in a spirit of shared camaraderie and triumph like you've just climbed Mount Everest together. Even though you've never met each other before.

Or maybe you hallucinate that you're riding in a parade of 5000 topless women on bicycles, with all your 10,000 breasts painted like flowers, while hundreds of men fling themselves to the ground all around you, crying out "You're all so beautiful!! Thank you! Thank you!!!!", or, you think you're on a homemade Tilt-A-Whirl made of sofas (with a sign reading "Safety Is Rule #3!") ... Or lost in a giant home-made maze made of sheets .... ... Or you dream that the camp organizer who you've been corresponding with over email for months turns out to be a 300-pound nudist who works for a major city ballet company, and who also has a successful side business selling whips, and who, when you arrive, is teaching an incredibly popular class called "Introduction to Flogging And Caning" that is so popular that there are lines of people stretching out the door. And who turns out to be a total sweetheart and becomes a great friend.

How ironic it would be if you thought these were all just drug-fueled hallucinations, when it actually IT WAS ALL REAL.

Like I said, drugs are redundant at Burning Man. The entire thing is a living, breathing, walking hallucination.

And yes, at the end of the week, on Saturday night, they finally burn the big wooden Man, which has been looming over the whole event all week. Tens of thousands of people sit all around the Man, and all the art cars form a gigantic outer ring. You all sit, rapt, watching the Man burn. Until he falls, and then everybody runs around the bonfire like maniacs (until they all get scared by a sudden windstorm of sparks and suddenly everybody flees in all directions). On Sunday night, they burn the eerie gigantic wooden Temple, which people have spent all week covering with thousands, upon thousands, of heartfelt written messages, to everyone from recently dead mothers to traitorous ex-boyfriends. All of it goes up in smoke. The next morning, the 50,000 people disassemble the entire city in a day - giant gumball machines, roller rinks, roller coasters, fire-breathing dragons, and all - and disappear... leaving not a scrap behind.

[cue whistling wind and lonely tumbleweed rolling across the desert]

Yes, it IS the North American Carnaval, I'm convinced. Nowhere else in North American have I felt the Carnaval spirit in such force as Burning Man - that free-wheeling, joie-de-vivre, damn-the-torpedoes, carpe-diem, joy-to-the-world spirit that is the heart of Carnaval. Yeah yeah, so some of the details are different. Yeah, there's a lotta techno music. So if you don't like techno, you camp in Hushville and you bring your earplugs. Yeah, hordes of college students come on the Saturday to watch the Man burn; but really they just swoop in on the Saturday; the rest of the week is great. Yeah, there are the 70mph duststorms, whatever, it's just camping, just dustier than most camping. You just resign yourself to washing all your stuff afterwards, scrub your car down (twice! with q-tips!), give it an oil change and an air filter, and clean the chain on your bike.

If you are the kind of person who loves Carnaval... the kind who loves not just the bateria, but also the floats, the spectacle, the whole crazy annual cycle, the topsy-turvy spirit that is at the heart of Carnaval; if you're the kind of person who would enjoy catching random rides on a mobile Victorian house, or a pirate ship, or a giant fire-breathing dragon, or a moving tiki bar, or an ichthyosaur, or a motorized porch swing; or if you would just like to hold a string of stars in your hand, then maybe you should check out Burning Man.