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Burning Man, meet Drowning Man

Silicon Valley's freak-out meets Katrina, with a bump

Radical Self Obsession

Burning Man is a minor miracle, and is the best and worst of the United States in a microcosm, with the best eclipsing the worst can do. But no attendee can have returned to reality without feeling some sense of unease.

The event's co-founder Larry Harvey, who has steered this marvelous gathering over twenty years occasionally sounds like he's steering a global movement, too. Supporters say it's based on the principles of "Radical Self-Reliance" and "Radical Self-Expression". People who like to speak on behalf of the festival take these principles very seriously indeed. What do we make of these principles now?

Burning Man Art

Harvey likes to talk about the "spirit" of Burning Man spreading across the globe, but without the folk art, and removed from the rigors of life on the harsh desert playa, Burning Man might look a lot like Spring Break. (Veterans complain that it already does look like Spring Break, but these complaints are vastly overstated, and there's nothing that a more rigorous policy of refusing entrance after Monday couldn't fix).

In fact almost every cynical cliche about the event is true. It seems to bring out every New Age fraud, groper and leerer from Northern California and beyond - many of whom seem to volunteer for the Black Rock City Postal Service, it seems. Women found it particularly hard to post a letter without having to show their tits, or kiss the "counter clerk".

You could take refuge and primp your ego with class hosted by Winking Lotus, called I'm Perfect - Self Discovery Through Art, or brush up on Male Tantric Masturbation, which is "a nude solo activity open to all men" ... as if we didn't already know.

But none of the bogosity or self indulgence detracts from the uniqueness and sense of wonder of Burning Man itself, thanks to the creativity, hard work and ready spontaneity of so many Burners. The daytime creeps have gone to bed by the time the city really wakes up, at night - the fondlers retiring to brush up on their Tantric Masturbation techniques, perhaps - and it's then that the city comes alive with thousands of bicycling party people, weaving across the dark playa like shoals of exotic, glowing fish. This is a space like no other.

If you're looking for the "soul" of Burning Man, the sassy, bitchy and righteously hedonistic on-site newspaper Piss Clear holds the torch. This year, as before, the paper spent as much time scorning the pompous Burning Man credo and the "gift economy", which many understand as bartering.

"I really want to give you some free booze," writes Malderor. "I don't want your gift. Please don't give me anything. I don't want your stickers, your flyers - or god forbid - your pipe cleaner sculpture of the Burning Man".

A Burning Man Party BusBurning Man's secret is that it really is an incredible party - the reports that coyly refer to "an arts festival", are really a device to kid the authorities. And perhaps to kid the organizers themselves, who as Stephen T Jones of the San Francisco Bay Guardian reports, did their best to keep sound systems out of the event in the late 1990s. Most of the wonders at Burning Man aren't the gigantic artworks, which receive just $400,000 of the $7m the Burning Man Organization grosses from gate receipts, or the staged spectaculars: they're often the very simple, very inventive art cars or costumes, assembled at the participants' own expense.

The question is what Harvey, or anyone else who wishes to speak for our Burning Man experience, can find to turn into a practical philosophy that reaches out beyond the self-selecting few.

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