Here are a few clips from XyloVan’s final hours on the playa – from just before the burn on Saturday night to just afterwards – and then a bit from Sunday morning before we began packing in earnest.

Seeing all these people play again while I was editing the clips (and I mean play, as curious, rhythmic humans, not as professional musicians) – was deeply satisfying.

I’m in the first clip – and really very joyful, despite the glum exterior. Building this vehicle, bringing it out and igniting people’s passions with it has been simultaneously deeply fulfilling and raw, bareknuckled fun.

The second-to-last clip is one of my favorites, a view of the van from inside our camp, where you can hear – but not see – the people playing Keyboards 2 and 3 on the other side of the vehicle, as it glitters in the dark.

At some point we all seek meaning in our lives.

Some dive into religion headfirst, damning all who fail to follow them and shaming the very values they claim to hold dear. Others plunge themselves into work, drugs, sex, gaming – or even a quiet spirituality that has little to do with god or gods.

But the more we learn, the more obvious it becomes that our time here is limited, so we all run around willy-nilly trying to either ignore death or plug into what we perceive to be immortality.

I guess I’m somewhere between those two camps. Raised Catholic, I walked away from the Church at 20 when I learned how deeply soaked in blood, money, power and misogyny the institution itself really is. I try to keep what really matters from that dogma close – love, respect, charity, empathy – and I do believe the communal energy that humans share is something approaching divine.

But mostly, I think we’re just plain lucky to be alive on this pinprick of light somewhere in the belly of a small galaxy in a massive universe – and we’d better spend our time making the most of it for ourselves and those around us before the light goes out.

That’s why I built this thing – and it has paid me back a hundredfold.

Burning Man – the raw creativity, the debauchery, the noise, the ritual of torching the man on Saturday night – is not a religion. It’s a relentless, if Brigadoon-brief dedication to life and to art and to each other.

If that’s not a crystalline kernel of meaning, a reason for living that’s worth throwing hundreds of hours of your life and thousands of dollars of your hard-earned money at, worth slicing your fingers open, filling your nose with aluminum dust, depriving yourself of sleep, worth stomping through hellacious dust storms and standing close enough to the fire to hurt, well then I’ve probably missed the Entire Point. Let me know what that is, soon as you can figure it out.

Meantime, I always liked Bill Hicks‘ little riff about the purpose of educating each other – “so that we can all learn, evolve and get the fuck off this planet.”

And with that thought close to mind, here are the videos of the Burn. Enjoy:

Soak humans in art and the playa’s environmental extremes (harsh wind, high heat, relentless dust) and you bring out something significant in them: happiness. They’re working their tails off to be here, to create something meaningful (if temporary), and to delight and shock each other.

Black Rock City is populated by some of the most beautiful souls you’ll ever meet. That said, sailor guy here drummed so fiercely on Keyboard 2 that he actually snapped a fiberglass mallet. Ah, well – there are 20 more. That ought to hold us until the next burn.

Rangers stopped by in camp (here) and out on the playa …

Children loved XyloVan – this dude (probably barely 20 months old) banged away on the tubular bells for quite a while … Continue reading Beauty at Burning Man 2010 →

Styles of the sudden xylophonist vary from one to the next, as diverse and rich as the variety of bodies, faces, souls and minds at Burning Man.

This cat was more of a percussionist than a xylophonist …

… but no less brilliant than this guy, who even does a little call-and-response with Hitgirl at the end of the clip: