Historiography

From the Playita Irrational Geographic Radio Hour

Thank you Reverend Billy, always a pleasure. And thank YOU, burners, for tuning into BMIR, Burning Man Information Radio.  Have you lost your friends?  Your bike?  Your mind?  Come find us at Dust Fish Camp and we’ll sort you out. Or at least adopt you.

Did you know where BMIR came from, baby-burners?  We were born out of a federal Bureau of Land Management law requiring that any festival as large as Burning Man have a mass means of broadcasting emergencies.  So with a hell of a lot of air time and not very many emergencies, we have become an awesome radio station playing crunchy playa beats for ya 24/7.

But right now it’s that time of night for THIS DAY IN HISTORY!  It is December 5th 2011, burners!!

Let us wish Happy Birthday to Doctor Dre and Walt Disney and Happy Death day to Claude Monet and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
It is Father’s Day in Thailand, so here is me saying Happy Father’s Day in Thailandish.  LOVE YOU DAD!  Finally, most importantly, on Dec 5th, 1933: PROHIBITION CAME TO AN END.  Welcome to La playita, baby-burners, where just about nothing is prohibited.

Enough about a day, let’s talk a year. An important year.  Like 1996.  1996 was a leap year that started on a Monday.  The year of the Rat.  Bill Clinton won his second presidency, and he probly didn’t give a fucking shit about Burning Man.  But ‘96 was a important one in Burning Man’s existence. Attendance had doubled to eight thousand cuz’ people started looking us up on the world wide web.  The quick upsurge in attendance and popularity created serious growing pains for Burning Man, it became harder and harder to control the finances and liabilities for such a large event. 1996 was also the inaugural year for Burning Man “art themes.”  Seeing as Burning Man’s tremendous growth was really heating things up and creating friction, the theme was “Inferno.”  In an elaborate pageant in which Satan was trying to buy out Burning Man, founder Larry Harvey sublimated the mounting tensions surrounding the commercialization of Burning Man.  C’mon Larry, Satan said, let’s get some corporate backing for Burning Man and really make some money.  But Larry couldn’t be bought out, and the pageant ended ablaze with a big FUCK YOU to Satan, corporations, the Man.  This anti-corporate spirit spread throughout Burning Man 96 and at times was taken too far.  People were taking the fiery theme to heart, torching encampments and generating a hellish mood of the darkly carnivalesque. In 1996, Michael Furey lost his life while setting up for Burning Man.  During the gathering, three people were seriously injured.  All were alcohol and drug related automobile incidents.  In another incident, a man caught himself on fire.  1996 was the last year of the of Burning Man’s adolescent life; it was time to get certain things – like finances, organization, insurance, liabilities – under control.

By 1997 we had expanded out to a regional network of Baby Burning Men.  I guess those would be Burning Boys, or Burning Babies, but anyway, we are still spreading like wild fire.  Our flames have licked the gatherings of Burning Flipside in Austin, Texas, Burning Toast in Phoenix, and Playa-del-Fuego in Baltimore, and Lakes of Fire-Great Lakes Regional Burn.  And now, as you can see, our Playa Traveling Cirkus is reaching out to micro-communities of baby-burners across the country.  To burn is a magnificent experience, whether large or small in scale, so: burn babies burn.

Early History:

Although burning man first held testament on the playa of the Black rock desert in 1990, its formative infancy began in San Fransisco back in 1986.  Larry Harvey, then a landscape gardener a fancy finagler of foliage, built with his friend Jerry James an effigy of scrap wood , of a man, which stood a mere eight feet. The man was offered up on the sandy soils of Baker Beach, at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge, baptized in gasoline, with an audience of around twenty people. in the next years, participation grew and the party at Baker Beach became a rite of its own, often spreading by word of mouth.  With the help of a growing group of merry carpenters the effigy steadily grew taller and taller and taller. year by year.  Eventually he had to be hauled down body part by body part.  When in 1990, the police intervened and the party of some say eight hundred, had to disperse.

Throughout the years Burning Man had been infiltrated by the provocations of the San Fransisco Cacophony Society, “a randomly gathered network of free spirits united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society”  The cacophony society had Laundromat Poetry Readings and transformed the BART train to a Vegas style lounge.  They already had experience in merry mayhem, as they were also founded in 1986. However, their nascent origins were fertilized in the ever so secret circle of the Suicide Club which dates allllll the way back to 1977- fearlessly seeking the extraordinary: “ the bearer has agreed to get all worldly affairs in order, to enter into the world of chaos, cacophony and dark saturnalia, to live each day as if it were their last, is a member in good standing of the suicide club.....”  "you may already be a member.”  They conducted covert missions of infiltration, inside the Nazi party, the Moonies, and the National Speliological Society...oh how we all do love a good spelunk.   The well thrown seeds of the suicide society have been fertilizing San Fransisco with the bastard children of disruption for many years.  After the incident at Baker beach, about eighty people headed out for the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.  Enter: Zone Trip  Welcome to the vacant heart of the wild west. Warning, you are temporary.


(((((Slow Down ...hypnotic Voice)))))

The Commerce of Burning Man:

And now it’s time for the COMMERCE portion of today’s broadcast.  That’s right, Burners, we’re talkin’ money, moolah, dough, dollars, cents, and CHANGE.  We don’t like to see art branded with logos from AT&T, American Express, Coca-Cola and other corporations.  So, Burning Man Organization does not accept any corporate sponsorship.  We encourage the citizens of the counter-Empire to practice radical self-reliance, and as to not be hypocrites, we take this advice to heart.  And soul, and body, and hand, and eyeball!

As Black Rock City simulates a real city with street signs, theme camps, art villages, interactive art installations, a temple, art cars, a post office, a daily newspaper, an airport, and hundreds of spontaneous and planned performances, we have to make the green somehow.  BMO does not apply for any grants or outside funding.  The entire Other Empire event is generated by ticket sales marketed through the word-of-mouth and viral marketing by the carnivalesquian creatures that love it so much.  That’s right baby burners, it’s all possible (and nothing’s impossible) because of YOU!  You, the dreamer, lover, artist, desert nomad, pilgrim, flaneur, and energetic empire engineer make Burning Man happen!
$1,108,000 to rent Black Rock Desert, $329,000 on local agencies such as law enforcement & highway patrol, $231,737 on liability insurance & workman’s comp, $771,000 on portable toilets, $337,000 on taxes, $631,000 on assets such as heavy machinery, furniture, computers, robots, portable buildings, and trailers, $3,134,000 on payroll (more robots to do our work).  Needless to say, shit adds up!
But you, the burner, make it all possible!  So keep imagining, traveling, writing, satisfying, philosophizing, and anthropomorphizing! Cause we love you and need you and always will.