We returned to the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood for a screening of the new cut of “Journey to the Flames, ” a travelogue/chronicle of one camp’s 11-year citizenship in Black Rock City.
As usual, XyloVan attracted some wonderful music: Here’s a member of the Dirty Beetles art car crew just pouring himself into Keyboard 1:
Here’s a more experimental/contemplative approach …
And here’s how fabulous some of you all looked before, during and after the newbie orientation and playa fashion show. See you in BRC in a couple months!
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.
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 … More
Here’s a hodgepodge of images from Tuesday – art so thick you could barely see the playa – Black Rock City’s population was 51,000-plus this year, and it showed.
There were brilliant art cars, and an excellent installation called Tinytropolis, which consisted of internally-lit dioramas that 100 artists had stuffed into otherwise identical, solar-powered cardboard boxes.
This gorgeous globe of woven, welded steel spun just 50 yards away from our site, which made it a) easy to find at night and b) somewhat sickening. Biomass (my son’s playa name as of this year) got physically ill looking at it and had to be led away clutching my arm, while Hitgirl (yes, my daughter’s playa name, and more accurate than you would guess) spun herself happily around it like a glittery, giggling moon.
Extra bonus – here’s a video of my favorite art car at the entire event, the Maria Del Camino. Though I didn’t get to witness it, the car apparently lifts its body up to reveal the image of the False Maria robot from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, rendered in tens of thousands of holes drilled into her body:
Tuesday began with the lowering of Keyboard 1, information pills which is truly a six-hand job – one roof-monkey to loose the straps and push it off, approved two adults on the ground to catch it and install the support stanchions (and one mischievous camera-girl to record it all. Never entrust videography to a 9-year-old if you want any kind of serious documentation.)
With the crew enjoying the view from the roof, I cruised down 5:30 to cross the Esplanade and head towards The ARTery to get our driving permit and site assignment.
Heady. That’s the only word I can muster for the sensation of ending eight months of building and preparing an elaborate art car by driving the goddamn thing out onto the open playa, where thousands can see and play it … More
That wicked line buzz is gone. It turns out I needed to ground the mixer to the chassis, link which involved tearing apart and then sewing up the 20-foot umbilical. That took a little while.
Pay no attention to my banging. I’m just banging. But it’s sounding pretty lush. And I”m excited to show it off. Thanks to everyone who pulled up and talked to us this afternoon. It’s all good.
Thanks to Michael Greiner and Doeri Welch for inviting us and XyloVan to meet Michael’s marimba orchestra last night. We had an awesome time banging on each other’s instruments.
Here are Michael and a couple of his students working out “Silver Bells” with the loud mallets.
So, we probably fit in with the circuit-bending loop/fizzbit laptop-jazz at Crash Space about as well as well as rubber boots at a tap-dance show, but hey, that was huge fun.
Thanks to everyone who (like these two) found their own sound tonight with fiberglass sticks and aluminum bar stock, somewhere between themselves and the van. I really enjoyed talking with you and hearing you play.
Tomorrow’s all about figuring out that line buzz thing.
(video lost when we quit Facebook) I cut a lot of metal. I’m still cutting. It sounds like this. It’s a little loud but the earplugs and dual-can respirator mask keep it from killing me.
You toddled up and whacked away with sticks, silly grins on your 2-year-old faces. You strode up as if approaching the concert vibraphone you played in band, delicately picking out notes to tunes you haven’t played in 20 years. You hammered and drummed, pulling rhythmic tribal fugues out of the raw metal. You wheeled your disabled son up to Keyboard 1, watched his face light up, helped him hold a mallet and tap out a tune.
You played, in every sense of the word.
Thanks so much to all the folks at Maker Faire who enjoyed the van. You really touched us and showed us more joy than you can imagine.
We wanted to give a huge shout-out here to all the good people who helped us bring this project together:
To Robbie for wrenching and sweating par excellence to restore the damaged door, and for all the cheerful banter on the rainiest, slimiest junkyard crawl ever.
To Brian for acoustic advice, hardware assistance and spiritual support in the “man, that’s a wacky idea, but it should be cool when it’s done” vein.
To Steve and Beth for helping us mount the xylophones (man, was that just last week?)
To Rogan for engineering advice on mounting the keyboards, and to him, his lovely wife Susan and son, Asa for crewing our Maker Faire demo. We had an awesome weekend with you, and thanks to you freeing us up to see the other great creations there.
And finally, to my ever-patient, enthusiastic and non-stop gung-ho wife, Kristina, for helping to make all of this happen. Can’t wait to travel to Topanga Days Parade, Burning Man and all places in between where people love making sound.
If you enjoyed the van, drop a comment below – if you have photos or more/better video, add some links!
(videos here were lost when we quit Facebook – photos below!) Hey! The Maker Faire crowd gave the van a good wringing (ringing?) out all day long,and the gear all held up (mostly) great.
Welcome to all the Maker Faire folks who came by and banged on the van today. What a fabulous noise you all made!
Waves of people washed up against the side of the van all day long – it was so great seeing the variety of ways people interacted with the van …
Here’s video (videos lost when we quit Facebook) of @alienrobot and me mounting Keyboard 2 which is the lower-octave and rear-most of the two keyboards I built for the passenger side of the van:
And here’s what Keyboard 1 looked like as friend Steve Finkel and I mounted it on the driver’s side …
(video lost when we quit Facebook) Once the keys are cut and rough-tuned, they must be mounted.
Step one is finding the “nodes,” or the dead spots at either end of the key where the metal doesn’t vibrate. This is where I’ll drill holes for mounting.
To do this, you park the key atop two pairs of balled-up socks so it vibrates when struck. Then sprinkle a little salt near either end of the key and whack it repeatedly. The resonating metal bounces the salt away from the most-vibrating part into the nodes, the deadest spot in each key …
I mark each key, then put it on the drillpress and drill a 3/8-inch-diameter hole through each key’s nodes.
Drilling one of the two keyboards (about 30 keys) took the better part of an hour and resulted in several pounds of this fantastic aluminum chaff.
Here’s the first set of tubular bells, untuned. Tuning them is a pain in the ass: Unlike the keys, these cannot be made flatter by hollowing out the middle, between the nodes.
Instead, you can only sharp them by carving slices off the ends. Luckily, I wound up creating a sort of Middle-Eastern koto-sounding thang, that kind of works. I hope these don’t dull down too much when I mount them.
Miking and amplifying will be a challenge – I’ll need to figure out a resonator or some sort of sound funnel feeding a mike at one end of the tubes. But they resonate deeply, and they’ll look pretty wikkid bolted to the side of the van.
I took a little time tonight to lay out a near-full keyboard on some telephone wire just to see how the 2-½-octave range sounded:
(video lost when we quit Facebook)
The keys don’t ring yet because there are no insulators under them, no holes drilled, no resonators to catch the sound yet, and it still needs a final tuning. But everything sounds solid so far.
Looks like I need to finish it up with a D at the high end. I’ll probably cut some more for the low end just because they sound so rich and I think I can keep going down before the metal’s native harmonics overwhelm each key’s primary tone.
