Plasma Pool

After having spent over a year studying the law in Los Angeles, the pop culture capital of the world, I leapt at the opportunity to get a taste of the countercultural at Burning Man. The festival encourages community and “radical self-expression,” culminating in the symbolic burning of a more than 60-foot-tall wooden effigy. Burning Man takes place far out into the Nevadan desert, supposedly away from the routines of participants’ daily lives.

The festival began in 1986, featuring a smaller wooden man burned on a San Francisco beach. Since then, it has swelled from its initial 20 participants to the more than 40,000 residents of “Black Rock City.” Many undertake epic road trips and obsessive preparation to attend. In my case, three friends and I committed to a 12-hour drive, enlivened by a game of “spot the burner.” The giveaways were RVs and SUVs laden with a signature mix of circus costumes and camping gear.

Arriving at camp at dusk, we were met by greeters who asked us to identify the Burning Man “virgins” in the vehicle. At that point, we were forced to sound a gong and enthusiastically hugged by a dredlocked woman and a man wearing nothing but leather pants.

Black Rock City, which spans about five square miles and is created and erased within two weeks, provides a lesson in efficient city planning. “Streets” are arranged in concentric circles, radiating out from the city center, and derive their names from clock hours and the alphabet. I lived in a fantastically assembled hexagonal yurt made from cardboard and duct-tape located at “2:30 and Chaos.” From our home base, I watched Black Rock City rangers patrol and cars approved by the “Department of Mutant Vehicles” rumble through the dust.

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Burning Man, despite its reputation as a drugged-out and oversexed bacchanalia, is a surprisingly well-rounded event. It provides a mix of performance, music, art installations, and of course, good old-fashioned dance parties. I was pleased, too, to see a special part of Black Rock City set aside for a camp area for families with children.

That said, the drink-and-drugs aspect of Burning Man has to be addressed. Opportunities for intoxication were plentiful, but rather beside the point. A friend put it this way: “I could take much better drugs in a less crappy environment back home.”

Her point is well-taken. Indulging to excess is a way of making normal life seem more interesting, to add a touch of the fantastical to the mundane. Any college freshman can trip in a buddy’s room and hallucinate, say, a fire-breathing dragon—at Burning Man, there actually are several life-sized dragons, cobbled together with flame-throwers and LED lights. When your surrounding environment looks like a Salvador Dali painting, from the dust and the heat to the strange creatures and larger-than-life art installations, drugs seem redundant.

The otherworldly spectacle culminates in the burning of the the eponymous “Man.” Surrounded by fire-dancers employing every conceivable implement that could be set on fire—fans, swords, hula hoops, staffs, puppets, etc.—the “pre-show” around the Man was a gorgeous and primal extravaganza of lights. The explosion that set off the burn was a pyrotechnic marvel that would have shamed a Bond movie. The crowd justifiably went wild.

Then ambivalence set in. I could sense the joviality and awe of the crowd giving way to hostility as we waited for the flaming effigy to topple. Given our troubled national history with burning effigies, a symbol that has ranged from radical political dissent to racial hatred, I wondered what “the Man” meant to burners. Who were we burning? Why were we doing it, chanting and running frenzied circles around its embers? Does the exhortation to “damn the Man” still have any real potency to us in 2009?

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The participants of Burning Man are largely characterized by creativity, irreverent humor, and an open-minded adventurousness. On top of it all, burners are wonderfully generous. In one morning, I received a shot of tequila from a couple driving a Mexican-themed golf cart, a mind-blowing pressure-point massage from a fireworks technician, and a portrait of my friends and me from a professional photographer. And of course, I owe one to Burning Man hosts, who let me camp with them and shared their supplies. In the desert, friends mean survival as well as camaraderie.

Burners, in addition to their capacity for revelry, are a remarkably self-reflective bunch. My favorite Burning Man moment was exploring and contributing to “the temple,” a three-story lotus-shaped structure where participants left notes and mementos symbolizing emotional baggage they hoped to leave behind in the dessert. I read everything from send-off’s to exes (“Goodbye Nikki, you never deserved me”) to farewells (“Cancer can’t kill love”) and soul-searching (“My fear and insecurity are no more”). How humbling to walk among so many people’s stories and realize that pain is not unique.

Burners pride themselves on being an extremely inclusive community where all types of weird are represented and celebrated. Given that atmosphere, the lack of racial diversity came as a surprise. Perhaps the subcultures that fuel Burning Man, from ravers to hippies, are predominately white, but that seems to beg the question of inclusivity within those communities as well. Whatever its roots, I couldn’t help but think the event would be enriched by taking a good hard look at what it means to be different and countercultural, and questioning why the faces of “radical” self-expression look so remarkably uniform.

The other disturbing echo of life outside the “playa”—the dried up lake-bed on which Black Rock City sits—was the sometimes predatory gender dynamics. Middle-aged men came out in droves, and many wasted no time latching onto young women under the cover of friendliness and community. Thanks to grabby hands and invasive cameras, women’s ability to explore self-expression veered uncomfortably close to exploitation.

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At its best, Burning Man offers an opportunity for renewal, discovery, and artistry. Part of its beauty is that it deprofessionalizes self-expression. Art isn’t something that artists do, nor is dance for dancers or singing for singers. Rather, everyone is encouraged to contribute to the community however they see fit. From the woman scribbling an impromptu poem in nail-polish on a pirate bar to the man dancing alone at sunrise, art is a democratic force at Burning Man. The festival encourages the armchair and the amateur alike, and reminds us that self-expression doesn’t just need to be limited to a handful of exceptional and paid individuals.

Burners pay 200 to 300 dollars to enter a desert playground largely ruled by a strong sense of community and sharing, a welcome respite from the fierce competitiveness of the workplace. They come, despite cost and inconvenience, because Burning Man offers the opportunity to shed the suit and don fake fur and fishnets, to leave the sensible commuter car parked in the dust and ride the two-story birthday-cake-shaped bus into the sunset.