by BlisteredWhippet » Tue 19 Jun 2007, 15:07:24
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')This year's theme is "Green Man." I can't wait. This has got to be the ultimate in hypocrisy.
This ridiculous imposition of theme looks to be a futile gesture.
Pigs can't fly either. By all accounts, no one I know is following any "green" plan for getting there or being there.
Its a bacchanalian, neo-pagan festival/orgy and should be preserved as such rather than try couching its nonexistent organizing principles(*) in a pseudoethical purpose.
* "Leave no trace" is not an ethical principle, any more than Exxon Mobil endeavoring to keeps its crude oil in the cargo hold, and not on the beach. Loosing energy by breaking carbon bonds through energetic, uncontrolled oxidation is "leaving no trace" the same way that automobile exhaust byproducts rise with convection currents.
Burning Man is, and should not pretend to not be, an amoral frenzy. To pretend it has a higher moral, philosophical, or ethical purpose is ridiculous and a sure sign that it is dissolving into the larger culture.
Frankly, to someone who saw and participated in Mardi Gras in New Orleans it doesn't sound like much fun.
Spending a week in a brutal desert environment, surrounded by cultural and intellectual midgets, spied upon by tattletale "Rangers" on bicycles and the occasional BLM agent. For this I pay hundreds of dollars? Clever floats? Fireworks? To spy sagging, painted tits on aging industro-punks?
To my mind, Burning Man is simply a daughter artifact of the larger mega-culture. The "burning" of the "man" is simply a hysterical death urge. The whole spectacle of fire and fury is within the idiom of Fire & Brimstone Judeo-Christian theatrics.
"Burners" are really the lost children of American culture. Valueless and rootless they are conspicuously infantile... symptomatic of lives chemically stripped of meaning by the corrosive influences of transcendental religion and consumer culture. Like a stupid, credulous child, it believes it can mash all cultural traditions together to forge new meanings and idioms. All thats left, though, are latent lung poisoning and a pile of ashes, and worse, a bubble-cult belief in some shifty, nihilistic philosophy that has
something to with art, gathering, and expression.
In other words, nothing useful to leave to future generations. No viable moral or ethical precepts. No grand vision, no story. Even Mardi Gras' Dionysian revelry was self-sustaining. BM in contrast is a vacation for Judeo-Christian flagellates looking for the transcendental in art when they should be looking for it in the flesh.
I think there is something distinctly stale, sexless, and unimaginative in this and other artifacts of the post-rave culture. R&B throbs with sex and passion. Post industrial, rave, and punk isi simply neurotic, psychologically damaged emotional minimalism. These are people for whom the disease of individuality has metastasized into defect of personality. "Burning Man" is a literal and figurative reflection of the pointless and self-defeating mechanisms of this worldview.
Indeed, it couldn't be otherwise. Daughter cultures of a dominant culture like ours would naturally resemble its parent and its commutative values would be similar. Blow shit up, act like its a great thing, and then clean up and go home... and do it in a place most resembling Hell you can possibly find.
Compare Carnival in Rio, for instance. A celebration of life, sexuality, passion, expression, etc. How does BM compare? "Bowel Movement" might be a more apt descriptor. A fun-house version of Hell. Carnival takes its cultural cues from a myriad of pagan religious traditions. Its expression dispels fear. BM is unmistakably Christian. It retains all of the worst Xian personality-limiters. Transcendental meaninglessness. It tries to eliminate the passive "spectator" role, but clearly this is impossible; spectators are drawn to its central theme which is monolithic and non-participatory. The hook is its visual strangeness. In Carnival, participation is much more democratic. It erupts throughout the usual, everyday living situations in the city. The qualitative difference is great.
Carnival has existed for decades, and sustains itself. BM seems to be "burning out" quite rapidly, according to many perspectives, since around 2004. Like the hyper-bureaucratic capitalist organism that surrounds it, its creative spark has been systematically strangled. I think its fair to say that BM was once probably quite creative and vital; however, its demise was inevitable given the circumstances. It opened the doors, and invited patronage of some of most culturally parasitic twits in the world: the inhabitants of North America. By inviting these morons to take over as caretakers of theme, it sowed the seeds of its own destruction.
For the flagellates:
Whats that you're breathing?
http://bm.tribe.net/thread/e41af0ad-2bb ... e688c0e41a