rezendi

I'm going to outsource the last word on Burning Man to a friend-of-a-friend named Robin. Last year, Robin - a lovely woman, but more of a well-coiffed, Cosmopolitan-quaffing, high-fashion New Yorker than the usual Burning Man demographic - attended the event. And last year was by all accounts a very bad weather year: in addition to the usual deprivations, exhaustions, violent mood swings, radical self-reliance, reality disconnects, odoriferous Porta-Potties, and massive sensory overload, she had to deal with nonstop whiteout dust storms. It was a tough week. But even so, on the night of the Man Burn, as the crowd of thirty thousand seethed within the ring of art cars waiting for conflagration, Robin turned to our mutual friend and murmured:

"We're at the best party in the entire world."

Is there anything more to it than that? Hard to say. Reasonable arguments can be made on both sides. But even if not, there's no shame in it.



Caveat: it's impossible to convey the feel with mere photographs. What's more, the following - pictures of art, mostly - are not particularly good photographs; also, they were taken by day, and Black Rock City really doesn't come to phantasmagorical life until nightfall. That said...

( Burning Pix )


Had I more time, I'd probably go on at some length about Hurricane Katrina and how fear (of one another) is the nation-killer, but I'm flying across the Atlantic tomorrow, and to Africa in a week if Kenya Airways ever gets around to delivering my ticket, so you are saved from this infliction for now.