Posted on 08/31/2007 8:02:25 AM PDT by SmithL
SAN FRANCISCO, (AP) -- After the signature effigy of the Burning Man festival went up in flames four days ahead of schedule, festival-goers vowed to rebuild the 40-foot icon by Saturday's planned climax.
But not everyone was disappointed by Tuesday's incineration.
The alleged torching of the wood-and-neon figure by a San Francisco performance artist has cast light on the disillusionment of many who feel the annual celebration of radical self-expression has lost touch with its spontaneous, subversive roots.
"People have been trying to set that thing on fire for years," said Hugh D'Andrade, a San Francisco artist who attended the festival for many years. "This is not a new phenomenon."
Organizers trace the first Burning Man back to a 1986 party on a San Francisco beach where Larry Harvey, who still runs the festival, set ablaze a crude 8-foot wooden figure.
Since then, the event has evolved into a weeklong gathering of nearly 40,000 people who descend on the Black Rock Desert in northwestern Nevada around Labor Day each year to celebrate countercultural creativity.
In San Francisco, especially, Burning Man has emerged as a kind of underground high holiday as legions of so-called Burners devote the rest of the year to choreographing fire dances, decorating art cars and building elaborate interactive sculptures.
The event has become such a mainstay of the city's cultural calendar that Burner parents in 2005 unsuccessfully urged the San Francisco school board to postpone the first day of school so their children could attend.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Anarchist Bums
hmmmm. Sounds so...mainstream.
What Burning Man is all about: snobby bohemians have decided that getting drunk, stoned and laid at a “countercultural arts festival” in the desert at the end of the summer is somehow different from and superior to “bourgeois” people getting drunk, stoned and laid during “spring break” on the beach.
These bozos see themselves as unique and individual and creative. In reality, they are just a part of a 40,000-person herd.
Pitty when the buzz wears off early.
You do have to get up awful early in the morning to be on the cutting edge of conformity.
Of course it was going to get spoiled once people learned that you can find drugs and naked women there! There's nothing surprising here.
Once a cultural happening becomes mainstream, the original supporters feel like their little secret is out of the bag. It isn't fun or "special" anymore.
If you can not trust a San Francisco performance artist, who can you trust? I have lost all belief in man and America!
Why not? They could make up the days by having school on Christmas.
Anarchists HATE to be knocked off schedule.
Almost as much as having to ask their Mom’s to drive them to the revolution.
Self induced misery of anarchy frustrated by anarchists who can’t plan ahead and keep to the plan....
Burning man festival? What a bunch of heathens
That is true, but there is also a mini-backlash against all the disillusionment: i.e., the Burn is what it is. There are some artists who have been in it from the beginning, and there are more and more newcomers, but so what? Of course it has changed, since it’s not centrally, bureaucratically, rigidly controlled. Those who don’t enjoy themselves any more will decide not to return.
Just not all that creative or inspirational anymore. They should give it up.
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