intellectual properties

Black Rock Arts Foundation Artumnal Gathering

sometimes the themes of the content of posts on this blog makes it seem like all i do is sit around listening to mopey music and reading and kvetching about politics.
not true - that’s just what i do during the day!
i do still know how to have fun (kvetch hard, play hard?).
for example, this was my saturday night:

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webberyBM08

patrick roddie’s 2008 burning man photo gallery is up. as usual, some of the best, and with such a kind eye.

he says it’s a smaller gallery than usual, partly due to the dust storms, but interesting that he does not have even a small “art” gallery (at least not yet). i guess i’m not the only one who wasn’t as impressed with the art this year. or maybe he just decided to really focus on the people.

us@burningman

photos by whit bissell

sunday

i know i still have not yet written up my burning man 08 experience in full detail, and i realize now that i have forgotten a lot of the details already, although in 2005 it was NOVEMBER before i posted it, so hey….. but i will. i just should’ve done it sooner. i would do it right now but i just got kinda drunk at my friend’s BBQ down the street and stabbed myself in the hand with a knife, so i don’t really feel like it.

if you want to watch something about burning man, watch this movie about building the city and the art this year from MAKE magazine. it gives a good glimpse into the intensity and magnitude of what goes on out there, not from the people who roll up labor day weekend and stumble around for a couple of days in intoxicated bliss, but from the people who spend weeks there making it happen. and larry harvey’s right: it’s not really underground anymore. at all.  it’s more “post-burner”, possibly, as someone else has described it to me. the original impetus and value system at burning man has pretty much been lost on all but a few who attend now. that was very obvious this year to me. that’s not necessarily a bad thing;  it just means it’s something else now. culture changes;  so does burning man.

anyway, there’s a lot of other stuff i haven’t written about (yet) either, like how my hair was its natural dark ash blonde color for almost 21 hours earlier this week until i did something else to it, or how i went out dancing last night but had to leave early so i could go home and get good sleep so i could get up and go dancing again this morning.

or i also haven’t done a movie review post in a really long time even though i’ve watched a ton of movies lately.

but right now i just want to curl up on the couch, so all this blogging will have to wait.

notes on democracy

the only piece of mail i got while at burning man this year came from a reader of this here blog, someone i’ve never met, but who sent to me, from somewhere else on the playa, typewritten on a folded white piece of paper watermarked with the ring of a coffee mug, the final stanza of Leonard Cohen’s song/spoken word piece Democracy (listen):

thx, jpx, for sending that little piece of the American Dream.

health, wealth and $inequality$ in the land of opportunity

in addition to going back to work and catching up there, a couple of other things have been on my mind/occupying my time more than thinking about or writing about burning man since we got back, which is why i haven’t yet. well, that and i’m not sure what to say really about my burning man experience this year; it’s still gestating. and maybe not that interesting.

the first thing is that i started not feeling well on the playa around thursday afternoon, but attributed it to the heat and the general physical stress that everyone experiences while out there. a general persistent state of lightheadedness/dizziness combined with little or no appetite. even after we left the playa and i got 2 solid nights sleep and plenty of food and water in reno/tahoe, the state persisted and i have really not feeling been right since returning (still lightheaded/dizzy/head hurts in weird ways/vision is funny. it’s sort of psychedelic, but not in a good way). i have more or less been going straight home from work and lying down (haven’t cleaned the dust off of anything; house is a total mess). recall that i had a similar problem a couple of years ago which the dr. diagnosed as a balance/inner ear problem, and perhaps the elevation changes etc going back and forth over the mountains to burning man/tahoe is the culprit. this feels sort of the same, but slightly different, and i think me worrying about it is also causing anxiety issues. i’ve been experiencing weird physical stuff for a while now and am not really functioning well at the moment. i am feeling slightly better today but have a dr. appt on monday AM, so we’ll see.

more than likely, it is probably that these are symptoms of general physical anxiety due to the fact that my situation at home is more than a little unnerving, and i haven’t been sleeping well and have been spending a lot of time paranoid and freaked out.

recall that the morning we were leaving for burning man, we packed up the car and left it parked outside the backdoor - which is on the street and not inside our gated lot, but is way closer for loading stuff - we left it unguarded for approx 5 minutes while we went inside and went to the bathroom before hitting the road. during that 5 minutes at 9 am in broad daylight someone smashed the window on our rental minivan and stole jay’s laptop and all of his DJ equipment. we ended up just going to burning man with a busted window, our auto insurance will maybe cover getting it fixed, and our renters insurance will theoretically cover the cost to replace most of his stuff, but it put quite the damper on our moods.

so………we figured it was just us being stupid white people leaving a fully loaded car on the street (but still - wow - 9am?), but when we got back we found out that several people in our building had their cars broken into INSIDE our lot, that more than one unit had attempted burglaries (mostly units with doors that open onto the street), and that there had been several other incidents while we were gone, one involving a guy with a knife.

then thursday morning (48 hours ago) at around 2:00am, 2 guys came into the lot and 2 more cars got broken into. it was caught on camera, and to watch them case the parking lot is really creepy. when we heard this when we got home last night we went to take everything out of our cars. while we were doing this, we heard some yelling and saw the guys from the steel mill across the street run out chasing someone down the street with 2×4’s. the guy dropped a duffel bag full of stuff into the middle of the street and ran.

and then, an hour later, while people were in the garden talking about all this with our building manager, some guy came striding through the parking lot making a beeline for the open door (when people are sitting in the garden they usually leave the door open cuz it’s right there), walked past the people in the garden into our hallway, and they all went in to ask what he thought he was doing and he said he “just needed to take a dump” and took off running.

so our building has become a major target and the thieves are bold as hell. we have a gate that opens and closes when cars come in and out, and that’s presumably how they get in and out, although in the video they didn’t follow a car in. there’s a locked door on the gate they were picking; that or they are climbing the fence that we share with the cement company next door, we’re not sure.

i honestly don’t feel safe at home right now and am super paranoid and it totally sucks, and we are probably going to try to move soon, which also sucks, and the stress of even thinking about moving is more than i want to deal with right now.

more globally, this problem also makes me really depressed, and all the way to burning man i couldn’t stop thinking about it. we aren’t the only people living in our neighborhood, and i’m sure that many families, businesses, and residents are also feeling paranoid and on edge, afraid to let their children out, afraid to go about their lives without looking over their shoulders, guarding themselves and their property. we aren’t the only community that is suffering from a crime wave, and that makes me very sad, thinking that so many people are suffering from this right now. at least no one has been shot in my neighborhood — yet.  that is my worst fear.

what is the community discussion on the other end of the spectrum, i wonder?  what do they sit around and talk about after breaking into our cars and homes?  what is their frame of reference? how do they feel about and justify all of this?  is it a Robin Hood mentality, or selfish and drug-fueled? movies like Boyz in the Hood have attempted to portray this mentality in terms that the rest of our culture can understand, but i don’t think we ever really will.

a couple of months ago i had a work meeting at the west oakland library, just a few blocks from my house, about air pollution problems in the neighborhood. the meeting had coffee, tea, cookies and other snack foods for the participants. about halfway through the meeting a young man snuck into the back of the room, and at first i was the only person who saw him, but i didn’t want to get up in the middle of the meeting and make a scene asking him what he was doing. he was just a hungry kid. another woman saw him, sat him down in a chair, gave him an agenda, as if he was there for the meeting, trying to get him involved in this community issue. he sat down next to her, but the whole time he sat there he kept looking over his shoulder at the food table. again and again. she finally encouraged him to get some refreshments, and he filled up his hands with as many cookies and sodas as he could carry and walked out. i felt bad for that kid. i’ve been there.

this idea that even poor americans have it better than, say, poor africans or poor sri lankans and therefore they have no excuses for bad behavior is ludicrous. our consumerist culture has created this problem, and besides, wealth is relative:

Economic libertarians argue that this growing inequality is unimportant: aren’t the poor of 2008 still far better off in terms of real income, health, life expectancy, and material comfort than even the richest citizen in 1900?

The fallacy of this argument is that human beings do not measure their well-being by absolute real income or longevity — but rather in relative terms…

…extreme income and wealth inequality alone may hinder growth. After all “respect for property rights” is really, in most cases, shorthand for “respect by the have-nots for the property rights of the haves.” If those on the bottom rungs do not feel that they are getting a fair shake, the very bedrock of our prosperity crumbles into social and economic apartheid as millions of Americans flee to gated communities, millions more are required to staff the burgeoning private security industry, and yet more millions fill our prisons.
–how big of a deal is income inequality? (freakonomics)

income inequality and the associated classism and division between the “haves” and the “have nots” is a much larger cultural problem than racism at this point, IMO. of course, they feed into eachother, especially in a neighborhood in west oakland, but in a capitalist society, it’s money that solves and creates problems. what matters more is not what color you are, but how rich you are. this has been ingrained in the urban youth of america, and thus, when the acceptable ways of gaining wealth are not accessible to them (for various innumerable reasons) - education and employment - they resort to the other ways to get rich: selling drugs and stealing.

so then i also don’t know how to feel about these thieves who are making my life miserable, these thugs who are living their lives this way, these people who feel pushed to the fringe and have been corrupted by the realities of being poor in a rich man’s world. i’ve been poor, and yes, i have also stolen, and used the same justification for doing so that i assume many of these theives do too: i want what everyone else has, but i can’t afford to buy it, so i’m taking it from someone else who can.

right after our stuff got stolen (which literally brought jay to his knees when it happened, and if there’s anything that will make me angry and defensive it’s seeing someone i love feel totally helpless and violated), i said something to the effect of “they’ll get what’s coming to them. in a year, that guy will be dead, shot in the street” and afterward i felt really bad about saying that. i felt bad about wishing bad karma on someone, wishing they’d “get what’s coming to them”, forgetting that their families probably worry about them day and night and their mothers would cry just as hard if they got shot as mine would. i brooded about that for a while. am i letting fear and anger change my morality? am i a white liberal racist? do i have so much white guilt i won’t allow myself to be as rightfully angry as i should be?

i was thinking about these things a lot while sitting on the playa at burning man, watching the predominantly white crowd of people go by in their silly costumes on their silly bikes having a silly time; people who have the luxury of spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars to take off for the desert for a week creating art and taking pleasure in the drugs that come up through the violent channels that fuel so much of this violence at home and abroad. what part of that is the american dream? the NIMBYism, the escapism, the privileged and sheltered world view? how does the way of life where i live in west oakland fit into the same america as burning man? is the common thread “the land of opportunity” - taking advantage of the opportunity to steal or the opportunity to create? or creating opportunities to meet your wants and needs, whether that means taking free food from a meeting when you’re hungry, breaking into someone’s car when they’re not looking, walking naked through a dusty city, or creating your art in a free-expression forum?

these, combined with tracking all of the GOP convention/election bullshit and the fact that the hurricanes in the southeast are affecting our september meeting schedules and work projects and causing all sorts of logistical problems, are the things i have been occupied with since coming back, so much so that my burning man experience seems rather unimportant to think about right now, but i will get to it eventually, if only for the sake of the record.

right now i could use a real vacation.

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.)

BM08: photos

DSC00414, originally uploaded by obi-J.

our burning man photos are over here…….and i’ve been slowly adding favorites of others over here.

still didn’t remember to take the camera everywhere and take enough photos, dammit.

words still coming later.

prelude

Halo’d Man, originally uploaded by JasonUnbound.

When i was young
It seemed that life was so wonderful
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees
Well they’d be singing so happily
Oh joyfully, oh playfully watching me
But then they sent me away
To teach me how to be sensible
Logical, oh responsible, practical
And they showed me a world
Where i could be so dependable
Oh clinical, oh intellectual, cynical

There are times when all the world’s asleep
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man
Won’t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned
I know it sounds absurd
But please tell me who i am

Now watch what you say
Or they’ll be calling you a radical
A liberal, oh fanatical, criminal
Oh won’t you sign up your name
We’d like to feel you’re
Acceptable, respectable, oh presentable, a vegetable!

At night when all the world’s asleep
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man
Won´t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned
I know it sounds absurd
But please tell me who i am, who i am, who i am.

–Supertramp, the logical song

that’s the jist of it, really. when did i become so logical and responsible? how did i become an “enemy of fun”, as one of my campmates described me? i wish someone would just please tell me who i am, because really - i’m seriously confused.

i had so many moments this past week, seeing myself in 3rd person in the context of burning man, wondering who i am and what the hell i am doing. this was not some sort of metaphysical psychedelic experience, mind you, as outside of a few margaritas and drinks of champagne, i was sober this burn. this was honest, sober contemplation. circles and circles of it.

maybe that’s its job for me, i don’t know. for everyone else, burningman = superhappyfuntimes! for me = confusethefuckoutofyou time! all i know is that burning man makes me one srsly confused human. while everyone else is “finding themselves”, i’m losing it.

but i digress, because if i start rambling about this right now it will be very boring and i might never stop.

anyway, we’re back safe and sound. more later.

delayed

we were ready to walk out the door and hit the road to the playa and the rental van was sitting outside fully packed, and while we were gathering our final things, we were standing by the door, and reagan heard a noise, and i heard the noise, and we ran outside the back door.

someone busted the window and stole jay’s laptop bag which included his laptop and all his DJ equipment and a few other things.

we’re trying to decide what to do and making some phone calls and there’s a lot of “shoulda” (shoulda moved the car inside the gated parking lot, shoulda had someone out there guarding it, shouldn’t be so white and stupid as to pack your car in broad daylight in the middle of the hood and then leave it sitting there unguarded, even if it is 9am in broad daylight on a saturday), but in any case we’ll be delayed in getting to the playa and spending a lot of $$$ getting the window on a brand new rental car fixed.

sigh.

i feel like we are being punished for something.

complacency?

wealth?

the silver linings:

we have renter’s insurance which will hopefully cover the laptop etc. replacement cost

jay had his laptop backed up and has another laptop and is trying to transfer all the files

they didn’t steal anything else that might be less replaceable

they didn’t steal the whole car

we are still going to burning man

…i just wish i could stop thinking about whether this is the worst thing that’s going to happen.

thinkgoodthoughtsthinkgoodthoughtsthinkgoodthoughtsthinkgoodthoughts

———————————————

(12:15 pm) ok i guess we are leaving now. bye again.