BM and Orange in the WSJ
from today’s wall street journal:
“Desert Wanderers Find Their Promised Land” (oh how cliché)
choice excerpts:
Burning Man lures some very strange types to its brand of escapism, but they are strange affluent types.
At the beginning of its 22-year history, Burning Man was a small and informal affair featuring self-described “redneck” libertines. Now it is an intricately planned 168-hour-long rave…
It is a society that prides itself on a back-to-nature freedom, but it caters to people who will go back to the office when the festival is over.
and most importantly:
I exited, but not without a sense of revelation, one that was confirmed in a visit to the Relaxomatic Plushitorium — a camp filled with recliners and settees, all of them crowded with bodies. There was also, when I went, a generous supply of In-and-Out burgers brought in from Reno for the occasion. On one side of me sat Dan, a Manhattan hedge-fund analyst and self-described conservative; on the other, a girl who gave her name as Orange, a California-based environmental consultant. These two — one would think them diametrically opposed — had nonetheless come together in the spirit of getting away from it all. Reluctant to discuss the outside world, they both seemed to find pleasure in the do-what-you-like libertinism of Burning Man and its separation from the outside world. Dan even noted with obvious pride that, three years ago, when Hurricane Katrina struck, few Burning Man revelers learned about the disaster unfolding on the Gulf until they left the desert.
(here’s a photo of us @ the relaxomatic plushatorium that night; if i wouldn’ve known orange was sitting over there talking to a WSJ reporter, i might’ve gone over and given him a piece of my mind.)
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