For all those who were there, and those who weren't but wish they could have been, all the Deep End sets from Burning Man 2008 are now online:
http://www.thedeependcamp.com/music/line_up_2008.htm
(well, not all, I notice that Worthy's set, which carried me through Friday morning from a looooong Thursday into Friday, isn't up, unfortunately).
Showing posts with label Burning Man 2008. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Burning Man 2008. Show all posts
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Music on the Playa
If there's one definitive thing I can say about music on the playa this year, it's that I've now heard all the James Brown I need to hear for an entire year. Every day, several times a day, I would hear The Godfather testifying from somewhere, and even saw him being towed in effigy around the Esplanade behind a bicycle one day.
The aural omipresence of James Brown was an indication of what seemed like the general musical mood; breaks and big electronic thumps certainly had their place at 10 O'clock and along the Esplanade, but when you got into the small soundsystems the vibe was much more about easygoing party pop 'n' rock. On Thursday night, trying to find my way among various pathways of the mind, the dance party at a camp down Allante made me think I had stumbled back into Drunk and Horny, while during the day I had happened into a Rolling Stones party at the Solar Snow Cone camp.
There were of course plenty of big whoo-whoo parties with electronic music, but distance and the difficulty of getting around on bikes due to the sand traps kept me from really going out to the big dance camps like Opulent Temple. There's something about the scale of those camps, too, that I find a bit off-putting; if being around a thousand fucked-up people at 1015 seems a little much to deal with, try adding a couple thousand more people to the mix. Just think about the amount of dust generated by all those stomping feet.
My best musical moment came on Friday at the Deep End, where Worthy of Dirty Bird fame had the opening set. I had been up for a pretty intense twenty-four hours at that point, and had become even more doggie than usual, but Worthy's set sparked me back to life for a few more hours. After that, though, I was basically done with dancing at Burning Man; I checked into the Honey Sound System party at Comfort and Joy after midnight that night, deemed it too hot and reeking of sweaty faeries for my physical condition, and soon after was passed out in my tent (J, though, later told me that Pee Play laid out a fun set).
I did play a set at Camp Zoom on Wednesday night, but it was Lord Kook who can lay claim to two truly awesome sets, both at Glitter Camp on the Esplanade. On Tuesday, after struggling through a dust storm on Monday and then spending all day Tuesday working on our camp art project, we were ready to party, and so, it seemed, was everyone else there. LK held that space for a solid two hours that night, drawing in lots of wandering gay boys, including Pee Play, who was drawn in by the whoops that went up when LK dropped Lindstrom's "Another Station." LK returned on Wednesday to play a tag-team with Jovino that lasted a full five hours, until both of them were just too exhausted to play another track.
On the Burning Man census this year there was a section to check off the things that brought you to the playa, and one of them was "the music scene." I ticked this off as one of my attractions, but I really think that the version of the Burning Man music scene that I experience here, through Opulent Temple, Space Cowboys, and the host of fundraisers is a lot more interesting for me than what I've encountered on the playa. In many ways, the sound of the playa has become pretty predictable, and the scale of the event makes it both very difficult to find things that are more off the beaten path, and to get to them when you do find them. I know, though, that all these things move in cycles, and just as breaks superseded trance as the sound of the playa, something else new will eventually come along; I just wish it would hurry up and happen already.
The aural omipresence of James Brown was an indication of what seemed like the general musical mood; breaks and big electronic thumps certainly had their place at 10 O'clock and along the Esplanade, but when you got into the small soundsystems the vibe was much more about easygoing party pop 'n' rock. On Thursday night, trying to find my way among various pathways of the mind, the dance party at a camp down Allante made me think I had stumbled back into Drunk and Horny, while during the day I had happened into a Rolling Stones party at the Solar Snow Cone camp.
There were of course plenty of big whoo-whoo parties with electronic music, but distance and the difficulty of getting around on bikes due to the sand traps kept me from really going out to the big dance camps like Opulent Temple. There's something about the scale of those camps, too, that I find a bit off-putting; if being around a thousand fucked-up people at 1015 seems a little much to deal with, try adding a couple thousand more people to the mix. Just think about the amount of dust generated by all those stomping feet.
My best musical moment came on Friday at the Deep End, where Worthy of Dirty Bird fame had the opening set. I had been up for a pretty intense twenty-four hours at that point, and had become even more doggie than usual, but Worthy's set sparked me back to life for a few more hours. After that, though, I was basically done with dancing at Burning Man; I checked into the Honey Sound System party at Comfort and Joy after midnight that night, deemed it too hot and reeking of sweaty faeries for my physical condition, and soon after was passed out in my tent (J, though, later told me that Pee Play laid out a fun set).
I did play a set at Camp Zoom on Wednesday night, but it was Lord Kook who can lay claim to two truly awesome sets, both at Glitter Camp on the Esplanade. On Tuesday, after struggling through a dust storm on Monday and then spending all day Tuesday working on our camp art project, we were ready to party, and so, it seemed, was everyone else there. LK held that space for a solid two hours that night, drawing in lots of wandering gay boys, including Pee Play, who was drawn in by the whoops that went up when LK dropped Lindstrom's "Another Station." LK returned on Wednesday to play a tag-team with Jovino that lasted a full five hours, until both of them were just too exhausted to play another track.
On the Burning Man census this year there was a section to check off the things that brought you to the playa, and one of them was "the music scene." I ticked this off as one of my attractions, but I really think that the version of the Burning Man music scene that I experience here, through Opulent Temple, Space Cowboys, and the host of fundraisers is a lot more interesting for me than what I've encountered on the playa. In many ways, the sound of the playa has become pretty predictable, and the scale of the event makes it both very difficult to find things that are more off the beaten path, and to get to them when you do find them. I know, though, that all these things move in cycles, and just as breaks superseded trance as the sound of the playa, something else new will eventually come along; I just wish it would hurry up and happen already.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Burning Man Meditation: An Exercise in Solipsism
When I return from the playa I always have this feeling that I’m returning to civilization after several months in the bush; everything is familiar and expected, but I spend a lot of time wondering about why things the way they are, and wondering if they could be different. And, like the explorer who has gone a bit native, I wonder if I’m not more suited to life in the bush than I am life among my civilized peers.
Having made it through my third burn, I’ve given up, in some ways, on thinking of Burning Man as a significant, life-altering, culturally revolutionary event. It is, for me, simply an opportunity to have fun, absolve myself of certain quotidian responsibilities, and experience challenges that are more physical and material than intellectual in nature. For a few days every year I get to swing a sledgehammer and build things with a drill, eat camp-out cuisine and enjoy a beer with my morning eggs without any feelings of guilt. It is ultimately an exercise in solipsistic self-indulgence, and this is the reason why, for me at least, attempting to dress it up with themes and rhetoric that position it as a force of cultural movement ultimately seems hollow.
I think that just about everyone who goes to Burning Man wants to come back to the world feeling that something significant has happened to them, that a question they’ve been asking has been answered, that a new path has opened up before them, and if those things haven’t happened, then the event is a disappointment. I definitely felt that way the first time I went, and to a lesser extent the second time as well. But the problem is that life in the bush can only prove to you something about life in the bush; you can try to bring those ideas and lessons back to civilization with you, but if you try to bring the structures of one paradigm into another, you only generate un-resolvable conflict – I can only be depressed that civilized life isn’t bush life, and, eventually, give up on the civilized world.
Instead of expecting the Burning Man experience to change my life, I’ve come to look at it in the same way as I do New Year’s Eve, as a marker in time that provides an opportunity for rumination and resolution as I try to create change for myself. Having now passed through the portal of a New Burning, I’m ready to act on my resolutions.
This year, I have two things that I’ve been pondering. The first, as you all might expect, is the value of our “scene” and my own role in it. The second, slightly more personal problem, is what I want to be when I grow up.
Regarding the scene, I did have a moment of realization at Burning Man that has helped set my course. Lord Kook was throwing down a great set at Glitter Camp on Tuesday night when I spied PeePlay in the audience and started chatting with him. “Maybe now you can understand why I’m so down on the concept of ‘the scene’” I said to him, to which he replied “The scene is all about money.” Of course this is obvious, but when you’re deep into the scene and the who’s who if it, it’s easy to lose track of this basic idea. So, I realized at that moment that, as much as I enjoy music and DJing and the culture surrounding it, I really don’t like the scene. From this follows my first resolution, to scrap the whole idea of being a scenester, and instead be somebody who champions the things I find really interesting and creative. I had been chewing on this idea well before I left, but it took the experience of trying to be part of the scene, of playing certain games and exploring certain avenues, to make it clear to me (among those certain things, writing for Beatportal demonstrated for me the general emptiness behind so much of what passes for music journalism these days). Burning Man helped put a point on all this for me because, once you’re there, it’s about as anti-scene as you can get.
Regarding the issue of figuring out what I’m going to do with my life, I already had some strong ideas about this before setting off for the Burn, or at least some ways to approach the problem. If anything, Burning Man creates a situation that is much more open than others, one that lets you catch a glimpse of other possibilities, But if I hadn’t already been primed to think about these things, I doubt that Burning Man would have provided me with any kind of crystallizing experience. I went because I already have a dislike of the corporatized, regimented, capitalist world I have to live in on a daily basis, and want to experience something at least a little different for a few days every year; it’s not like going to Burning Man suddenly made me think about things in a way I never had before.
The thing about trips to the bush is that they remove constraints and let things within us come out that are normally hidden or repressed; sometimes those are good things, and sometimes, pretty often in fact, they’re bad. Events like Burning Man don’t change us in any way that wasn’t already potentially there, they just let us get to know ourselves a little better. When the dust has all been washed away, when we’ve settled back into the routine of work, the thing that endures is whatever we’ve learned about ourselves, for good and bad, and maybe the desire to be more of who we are during those few weeks out of every year.
Having made it through my third burn, I’ve given up, in some ways, on thinking of Burning Man as a significant, life-altering, culturally revolutionary event. It is, for me, simply an opportunity to have fun, absolve myself of certain quotidian responsibilities, and experience challenges that are more physical and material than intellectual in nature. For a few days every year I get to swing a sledgehammer and build things with a drill, eat camp-out cuisine and enjoy a beer with my morning eggs without any feelings of guilt. It is ultimately an exercise in solipsistic self-indulgence, and this is the reason why, for me at least, attempting to dress it up with themes and rhetoric that position it as a force of cultural movement ultimately seems hollow.
I think that just about everyone who goes to Burning Man wants to come back to the world feeling that something significant has happened to them, that a question they’ve been asking has been answered, that a new path has opened up before them, and if those things haven’t happened, then the event is a disappointment. I definitely felt that way the first time I went, and to a lesser extent the second time as well. But the problem is that life in the bush can only prove to you something about life in the bush; you can try to bring those ideas and lessons back to civilization with you, but if you try to bring the structures of one paradigm into another, you only generate un-resolvable conflict – I can only be depressed that civilized life isn’t bush life, and, eventually, give up on the civilized world.
Instead of expecting the Burning Man experience to change my life, I’ve come to look at it in the same way as I do New Year’s Eve, as a marker in time that provides an opportunity for rumination and resolution as I try to create change for myself. Having now passed through the portal of a New Burning, I’m ready to act on my resolutions.
This year, I have two things that I’ve been pondering. The first, as you all might expect, is the value of our “scene” and my own role in it. The second, slightly more personal problem, is what I want to be when I grow up.
Regarding the scene, I did have a moment of realization at Burning Man that has helped set my course. Lord Kook was throwing down a great set at Glitter Camp on Tuesday night when I spied PeePlay in the audience and started chatting with him. “Maybe now you can understand why I’m so down on the concept of ‘the scene’” I said to him, to which he replied “The scene is all about money.” Of course this is obvious, but when you’re deep into the scene and the who’s who if it, it’s easy to lose track of this basic idea. So, I realized at that moment that, as much as I enjoy music and DJing and the culture surrounding it, I really don’t like the scene. From this follows my first resolution, to scrap the whole idea of being a scenester, and instead be somebody who champions the things I find really interesting and creative. I had been chewing on this idea well before I left, but it took the experience of trying to be part of the scene, of playing certain games and exploring certain avenues, to make it clear to me (among those certain things, writing for Beatportal demonstrated for me the general emptiness behind so much of what passes for music journalism these days). Burning Man helped put a point on all this for me because, once you’re there, it’s about as anti-scene as you can get.
Regarding the issue of figuring out what I’m going to do with my life, I already had some strong ideas about this before setting off for the Burn, or at least some ways to approach the problem. If anything, Burning Man creates a situation that is much more open than others, one that lets you catch a glimpse of other possibilities, But if I hadn’t already been primed to think about these things, I doubt that Burning Man would have provided me with any kind of crystallizing experience. I went because I already have a dislike of the corporatized, regimented, capitalist world I have to live in on a daily basis, and want to experience something at least a little different for a few days every year; it’s not like going to Burning Man suddenly made me think about things in a way I never had before.
The thing about trips to the bush is that they remove constraints and let things within us come out that are normally hidden or repressed; sometimes those are good things, and sometimes, pretty often in fact, they’re bad. Events like Burning Man don’t change us in any way that wasn’t already potentially there, they just let us get to know ourselves a little better. When the dust has all been washed away, when we’ve settled back into the routine of work, the thing that endures is whatever we’ve learned about ourselves, for good and bad, and maybe the desire to be more of who we are during those few weeks out of every year.
Monday, September 1, 2008
Back from the Playa!
We rolled back into down on Saturday around midnight after leaving the playa at 4.20 in the midst of a crazy dust storm, and are still cleaning the dust out of our bodies and belongings. I'll be weighing in with some deep mediations in the next few days, but in the meantime the boyfriend has posted up some photos and commentary on his Livejournal blog you all might enjoy.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Last FSLD at Deco/Pup and Lord Kook on the Playa
Hi everybody,
breaking radio silence briefly to remind you all that Lord Kook and I will be hosting the last Fuck Shit, Let's Dance (FSLD) at Deco Lounge next Friday, August 22nd, from 9PM - 3AM, and this time it's FREE! It's been a lot of fun, and real learning experience, so we hope you all will come out and party with us at this location one last time. After Burning Man we have some plans in the works to start up another night in a location that's a bit more central and well-known, all of which will be revealed in good time.
Then on Saturday it's off to the Playa! We'll be at 7.30 and Alicante, with the Pixel Zombies camp if anyone wants to stop by and say hi. We're a camp of four people, but you'll be able to find us by the giant television we're setting up. Starting on Tuesday we plan on having a great line-up of programming for anyone who wants to contemplate media and the American Dream. Lord Kook and I will also be doing some DJing. On Monday night Lord Kook will be spinning synthpop at Camp Lustre, and then on Wednesday we'll be running all over the place: from 6-8PM we'll be tag-teaming at Space Elevator, then from midnight to 1AM Lord Kook will be at Lustre again, followed by another tag team matchup from 1-3AM at Camp Zoom, which will be hosting the Homo Depot party. Hope to see you on the dusty dancefloor!
breaking radio silence briefly to remind you all that Lord Kook and I will be hosting the last Fuck Shit, Let's Dance (FSLD) at Deco Lounge next Friday, August 22nd, from 9PM - 3AM, and this time it's FREE! It's been a lot of fun, and real learning experience, so we hope you all will come out and party with us at this location one last time. After Burning Man we have some plans in the works to start up another night in a location that's a bit more central and well-known, all of which will be revealed in good time.
Then on Saturday it's off to the Playa! We'll be at 7.30 and Alicante, with the Pixel Zombies camp if anyone wants to stop by and say hi. We're a camp of four people, but you'll be able to find us by the giant television we're setting up. Starting on Tuesday we plan on having a great line-up of programming for anyone who wants to contemplate media and the American Dream. Lord Kook and I will also be doing some DJing. On Monday night Lord Kook will be spinning synthpop at Camp Lustre, and then on Wednesday we'll be running all over the place: from 6-8PM we'll be tag-teaming at Space Elevator, then from midnight to 1AM Lord Kook will be at Lustre again, followed by another tag team matchup from 1-3AM at Camp Zoom, which will be hosting the Homo Depot party. Hope to see you on the dusty dancefloor!
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