If we’d stopped to take more photos, we wouldn’t have had near as enjoyable a time chatting with everyone. If you spot yourself, drop a line in the comments and say hey!
Sweet Decom
You all are really the most superb humans. Thank you for today. Er, yesterday. More and better pictures and video tomorrow night, er, tonight. No, wait a minute …
Xylovan at L.A. Burning Man Decompression Arts Festival
We’ll be there – come by and say hi (hi!), bang on the van, rock out. You and yours (alllll ages) deserve a tasty slab of dust-free Burning Man culture – Decom runs all day today, noon to midnight. And a huuuge amount of art, music, playa couture, activities for all ages … It’s a …
Packing up – and heading home
Sunday started out nicely enough – then quickly deteriorated to a headlong death march as the wind picked up over 25 mph and brought half the playa with it in dust-cloud form. Biomass was a tremendous help playing roof-monkey – we pulled in all the rigging and began loading up the bikes and lashing them …
Post-burn chilldown
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 …
XyloVan on Burn night – a blessing of flame and ashes, or What’s It All For?
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. …
Snapshots – happy Burn Day
Snapshots – Climbing exercises, killer art cars, mucking about on the playa
After listening to this guy play a while, we motored out beyond the vortex to visit a couple of installations even more remote than the van. We really liked 11:11, a monument of four towering boxes made of plate steel and etched with symbols of the four elements. We clambered all over an excellent jungle …
How to not get killed at Burning Man
First of all, walk/bike onto the open playa in the dark and rising wind to retrieve your art car. Next, stop halfway out and just stand there (with the wind still rising) taking pictures of the Man like an idiot tourist because he looks cool in the dust storm … … pausing only to close …
Paging Nurse Chuckles
Hubba hubba.
Snapshots – achievements, laurels and honors of others
Morning greeted us with a visit from Barry (Beary?) who was celebrating his 60th birthday. We sited the van early, then set out across the playa for a busy bike around. Biomass got to run the flaming eyes on the Golden Mean (thanks to the captain!), pill we played with the luscious Syzgryd‘s luscious flame/sound/color …
Repair time in Kidsville
Quick – run out and publish this bumper sticker: “AN ART CAR IS A HOLE IN THE DESERT INTO WHICH YOU POUR MONEY” I moved the van into Kidsville Thursday morning to repair a melted circuit. A staple had cut through a lead, shorting out the entire port strobe circuit – and basically melting the …
Snapshots
Because, ed hey, it was our family vacation, too.
Beauty at Burning Man 2010
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 …
Two flavors of xylophonist – loud and brilliant
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 …
Art cars, Tinytropolis and spinning till you get sick
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 …
Bells, keys and chords in the night
Our official site turned out to be pretty remote since we were assigned to it late (out near the Temple), but we still had visitors: That evening, we took a circuitous route back to camp, stopping here and there to let people play:
Burning Man 2010 – XyloVan’s first drive on the playa
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 …
Arrival at Black Rock City for Burning Man 2010
After driving all night from Los Angeles with the kids sacked out in back, there we arrived at the gates to Black Rock City around 9:30 a.m. Monday – and immediately hit traffic. It took a good three hours to wade through it. After a quick greeting at the gate (and the customary warnings about …
Well and truly burnt
I don’t think I ever could have imagined the response to debuting an art car. But what a rush. We just got back a few hours ago, illness full of the glow of meeting hundreds of cool people who found themselves sudden, happy xylophonists in the wastes of the playa. We’re also short on sleep, …