Why burning man is bullshit

I won't even say that psychadelics aren't real spiritual techniques. Maybe they can be. But you can't really go deep spiritually with naked centaurs and dinopeople distracting you. Just call it what it is; am excuse to blow off and do drugs in the desert for a week. Nothing more, nothing less. Pretty much everything that annoys me is summed up in this clip:. And for those that need an animated explanation of blazing guy:.

Every year the week before Burning Man all of the burners flood into Reno to buy groceries Nora Atkinson, the curator of No Spectators , experienced the power of the temple firsthand when she attended Burning Man in and commissioned Best to make one for the exhibition.

Doing so is a small but meaningful act, and the beauty of the space amplifies the feelings of sanctity and reverence. Six more sculptures are installed outside, on surrounding neighborhood streets.

Atkinson wants to replicate this in the Smithsonian—an ambitious goal at a time when museumgoers are prone to treat art as a backdrop for selfies. At Burning Man, by contrast, you can use the art.

You can volunteer to help build it. You park a few art cars around them and have a rave. This does not serve some of the work well.

Over a span of five years, Marco Cochrane built three giant sculptures of nude women on the playa for his Bliss Project. They were, like a lot of Burning Man art, technically impressive: made from welded steel rods and balls, covered in a stainless steel mesh skin some even contained programmable LED lighting , and ranging from 40 to 55 feet tall. In the museum, where one of the women has been replicated at a smaller size, you can see the flaws in the form up close; they become cracks in a foundation built on simplistic idealism.

We black Burners hailed from several countries and included virgins and veterans. Below are excerpts from our conversations, as we chatted about white hippies, the great outdoors, the problems of black hair and skin in the unforgiving desert and everything in between.

I had to think about the dust in my hair! I think we need to acknowledge that white people have culture too. I love Burning Man! My family saw a picture of me dressed up out here wearing a tutu, and had an intervention when I got home because they thought I was gay: I just loved dressing up! Back home, I was probably one of the most conservative, stick-up-the-ass people you could have known. If I can generalize, black people do not gravitate towards things that make them uncomfortable. My dad took us camping as a family, from coast to coast in Canada.

There are massive amounts of white folks. This is an extreme experience! I first went to Burning Man in I was afraid when I saw them burning down this man. I thought they were going to throw me on the fire! The white people were going so crazy.

Someone held an American flag over the ruins, and the heat just incinerated it. And the problem is that fun and leisure have become the domain of white people. It disconnects ourselves from our bodies, so that we grow to believe we are only here to be productive citizens. Nicholas Powers. We have to ask: Am I betraying my people if I have pleasure with white people here? Interracial sex or even just a pleasurable conversation?

The McKinney pool incident this summer reminded us of the danger which lurks when white and black people try to share a common medium, like water, for fun.

The medium here is dust, not water, but it still connects people in pleasure. I opened up for Eddie Murphy in with my puppet act. I got a free ticket, and I was able to bring my art to the playa to share. It does have the feeling that I am infiltrating white people at play.

I live in Seattle, so I live in a white world. But my family comes from the Bahamas, where they have the Junkanoo festival. On Boxing Day at 4am there are people out in fabulous costumes and bands. I would love to have a Junkanoo parade right here in the middle of Black Rock City. The majority of black people generally tend to stick to their own, as do white people.

Some of my most memorable experiences in life have been created from being explorative, curious and naive. Burning Man resonates with me because of that. Problem is that many of these same snooty, hardcore Burners are also complete and total yahoos.

There are other types of yahoos roaming the streets of BRC. Come talk to me. At which point I had to make the decision: Do I help this person, or do I mess with their heads and ensure that they have a horrific trip? No matter how positive you are, no matter how great your experience, one thing is virtually undebatable: Dust storms at Burning Man suck. Who the hell still listens to this techno crap? It has nothing to do with the human body.

In fact, I would rather listen to an entire album of cats walking on pianos than hear another second of the awful dance music they play in BRC all night long. Rave culture is for losers and idiots. Why the heck would you chose to do it in Center Camp?

The event is a notorious relationship killer. The Exodus Not too much to say about this other than it sucks. Nothing caps a great adventure like spending a few hours trapped in a traffic quagmire.

I left Sunday midday this year, and it was a lot better than leaving Monday morning last year. However, last year, the traffic was moving so slow that it worked like this: Drive two car spaces, stop, get out, hang out with your neighbors for 20 minutes, drive two more car spaces. It ended up being fun, and the best community bonding of the trip. This year, it was such a constant stop-and-go that there were no opportunities to get out and meet your Exodus neighbors.

Of course, this is probably different depending on which day and at what time you leave. The only guarantee is that it will suck. The art Burning Man is, in a way, the largest art exhibition in the world. And most of the art is awful. But I will say that anything involving a bunch of random mannequin limbs and painted Barbie dolls strewn about is worthless.

Everything else I saw was retarded.