I don't have a very good opinion of Burning Man. I hate festivals in general, too many drunk/drugged out dipshits in attendance. I don't have any problem with drink/drugs, but I definitely have a problem with dipshits, which is exacerbated by them drinking/doing drugs. Whenever one of my favourite bands is attending a festival out here I groan a little because the chances of them doing a side-show is generally pretty limited and that means that if I want to see them I have to pay something upward of $250 per ticket (because asshole scalpers always buy up all the tickets and resell them at ridiculous prices) and mingle with a throng of drunken fucking redneck bogans who are there more for "the atmosphere" and getting drunk/out of their gourds and behaving like fucking morons together so I can perhaps watch a set by the band that I want to see that will probably be under an hour long.
Going kilometres out into the middle of a desert sounds like a bad idea in the first place. Going out there to hang out with a bunch of drunk/drugged up hippie dipshits makes it sound like one of the most unbearable fucking things I could ever imagine.
The nice thing about Burning Man, or one of the nice things, is that there is a marked absence of lame inebriated dipshits. This seems counterintuitive, I suppose, given that Burning Man is known for inebriation and that tends to attract lame dipshits, but the flip side of Burning Man is that it happens in
the harshest climate in the continental US, and therefore the lame dipshits tend to get chewed up and spat out. Basically, the sun, dust, and dryness, along with the leave-no-trace, clean-up-your-own-shit rule and the fact that you have to bring your own food and more than one layer of shelter (because nobody wants their tent sitting in direct sunlight for any length of time), all combine to create a population that's rather amazingly skewed towards the creative, expressive, and self-aware, because lame dipshits tend to decide that their money and time is better spent somewhere that doesn't challenge them as much. I mean, given what I know about you you'd probably find even a lot of the creative and mentally active people annoying, but at least you'd probably be guaranteed some form of intelligent conversation with the majority of people you met.
Also, the drug use is big, it's true, but so is sobriety ... a lot of difficult work needs to get done and people can't always be fucked up! At all hours of the day and night, throughout the festival, it's basically guaranteed that there's a place where a bunch of pleasant and friendly and sober people are hanging out, and that furthermore, they want you to hang out with them (hospitality is a huge deal at Burning Man, getting invited into strangers' camps is a daily, sometimes hourly, occurrence, and it's usually a good idea). Sometimes at night that can be hard to find, but it's always there if you look. If nothing else, someone out there is just building or fixing something and could use a hand (seriously, always, without fail, you can invariably make yourself useful to someone who will be thankful for it and will find a way to be generous in return).
I think this is a thread for people who WANT to attend Burning Man, not a thread for people to criticise it.
Nah not really. I mean, personally, I think Burning Man currently represents the highest concentration of any single place in the world of everything we'll come to associate with the positive aspects of future of humanity as that future happens, but that is (as Graham put it) a crock of shit to anyone who doesn't have the experience of actually going (and, for that matter, to some people who have gone). It's an easy thing to criticize by reputation and this thread would suck if everyone agreed to pretend otherwise.
I am inherently suspicious of any collection of fringe people that appears to be officially sanctioned or ritualised
There is no "official sanctioning" at Burning Man. There are no corporate sponsors (in fact it is requested that logos appearing on clothing, equipment, or vehicles be removed or covered up, and nobody drives around in any cars that haven't also been turned into works of art), it has never advertised itself in any way other than the word of mouth of participants, and it is encouraged (many would say to a point, while many would not) that any tradition be challenged (you'd be amazed at how many people reacted positively when a guy lit the Man on fire 5 days early in 2007, despite how clearly unsafe and poorly advised of a decision that had been ... a LOT of people were pissed as hell, but a lot of people were saying that it was about time someone did that. A new Man went up within those 5 days and the regularly scheduled burn happened anyway.)
There IS a LOT of ritualization at Burning Man, but it's got such a diverse population that you could literally interpret anything you wanted out of it. The whole week is a ritual for a lot of people (I would consider myself one of them at this point), but at the same time nothing about it is standardized (except maybe the climate). There are a couple festival-wide shared rituals, like the Burning of the Man on Saturday night, and the Temple Burn the following night, and there are also just a few things that happen every year, like the Wednesday night
Temple of the Breaks party. But the whole thing is so freeform from day to day that honestly there's not much to be concerned about.
Honestly I'm just happy this thread is getting replies. I think I started one back in 2007 after I went for the first time and it never broke 10 posts. Actually getting a chance to talk about it is good enough for me.
