Right off the bat I should establish that I did not go to Burning Man. I never would want to. I should also establish what Burning Man is, in case you don't know. It's a weeklong festival that takes place in the dessert, and has been going on for about ten years. Loosely speaking, it is an arts festival, though that isn't really accurate. But I think that is sort of a baseline.

Since I have been in San Francisco no fewer than twenty people have told me I have to go to Burning Man and it comes up in conversation constantly. My friend Saul went there three years ago, got hooked, went last year with his girl Ani and this year decided to make a big sculpture out there for this year's Burning Man. The sculpture is a model of a urinal, which is a reference to Marcel Duchamp's ready made urinal. Notwithstanding that the art prankster statement that a urinal made in Duchamps time as a slap at the arts and culture meant something kind of different, a lot of people seemed to think this was a good idea for Saul to do. So Burning Man gave him a grant of 17,000 and he put up 12,000 of his own money, and got a crew of about 8 guys to work on it for no pay all year and come spend a month building it for Burning Man.

Burning Man takes place on the alkalai salt flats called the Playa, outside the town of Gerlach, Nevada, which is a desert wasteland area. Gerlach has about twenty buildings, and at one point was a railroad town, but they took away the railroad and now hardly anyone remains. The salt flats look like surface of the moon, just miles of flat white, bordered by mountains on each side. The weather is really harsh, often over 100 degrees during the day and below freezing at night, with unpredictable hail storms, dust storms, rain etc, and even walking barefoot will make your feet crack and blister.

So, kind of for no reason, I decided to go out and visit Saul this weekend. Well not for no reason. I wanted to get a sense of Burning Man for myself, and see it, without paying 250 dollars, which is the admission price and I thought it might be amusing.

The drive out is unremarkable for the first two hours, just the horror of Sacramento, strip sprawl by the highway, stretches of yellow dead grass. Then you get to some hills, which eventually takes you up toward Donner Pass. Donner Pass is where the Donner Party, coming west, wound up eating one another and eventually all dying. Now there is big lake, Donner Lake, and a park. The road goes up to 7,000 feet of elevation to get across and takes almost an hour, which, even in an air conditioned car with cruise control made me hungry to eat someone. So I can understand what they went through.

Anyway, you go through some really high mountains, and it's very scenic for a while. Then you come out and an hour or so later, you enter Nevada, which is more strip sprawl and highway for a good 60 miles, through some awful towns with casinos. Then you get off the main highway and suddenly you are in a much different America, with two old Indian ladies in a gas station with nothing for 93 miles. It is all dessert, only with some giant rocks and stuff. No one lives there, I think it may be some kind of government owned land that you can't tresspass. There is a lake, shockingly, in the dessert, called Pyramid Lake but no people anywhere, which lead me to believe it is radioactive or something. So you go another 80 miles or so and there is nothing, no people no buildings, just sand and rocks and the occasional cow grazing on what look like some very slim pickins. It is open grazing land, and this caused me to almost hit a cow with the car when it came in the road as I approached at 75 mph. Near miss.

There were also no other cars on the road with me, which I imagine changes dramatically next week when Burning Man begins for real. But eventually, I get to the Playa, and drive out on it. It is pretty flat and drivable, though it makes a huge plume of dust to drive on it. Eventually I find Saul and his urinal, along with his crew who all live under their Playa names, which are nicknames you get at Burning Man. So me and Pheonix, Splinter, Caution Mike and some other idiots, are all there in the tent, where they are discussing the rules and how toxic it is to burn Tyvec, which, to summarize, is very toxic to burn. There is kind of an environmental angle to Burning Man, which doesn't really make sense. I mean, it's good not to litter, but nothing lives on the Playa, and if a cow or rabbit were to wander on, it would die. But Burning Man, which burns everything for a big finale, doesn't want you to leave ashes, so you have to build a burn platform out of sand and mortar board underlayment over plastic, which is pretty stupid if you ask me. Which no one did. Actually, there is a documentary crew making a documentary about the urinal and they asked me, on camera.

But there is a tent, full of food and some dirty dishwater, and about ten people, all exhausted. Of them, the most interesting is Pheonix, who, in addition to being a really good craftsman, is also out of his mind. He is a metal worker, who lives in Brooklyn in his work space. Since that violates his lease, he lives in fear of being kicked out, even though he sleeps in box under a band saw. He also documents his life, pausing every fifteen minutes to write down what just happened in the past fifteen minutes. There is time for writing, then he times another fifteen minutes. He also has a kind of abbacus of rods and colored rings of various shapes that he uses to mark time and progress. When I got there, he had lost his watch when he was drunk the night before and was in an existential freefall, since he couldn't tell time and all his obsessions were stalled. I offered my Timex but he refused.

Another big part of Burning Man is the nudity, drugs and music, since it is basically a party, formed by community of about 30,000 people for a week. So at any moment some people are partially or fully nude, partially or fully on drugs and music is playing. There is also the sound of generators which are like lawn mowers with no mufflers. Plus there are souped up cars and dune buggies. Plus fireworks. The end result is a kind of roar of noise which goes on around the clock, matched by the wind, which blows caustic white dust non stop.

At the end of Burning Man, they burn a giant effigy, a wooden man about a hundred feet high. While I was there they burned Girly Man, which sort of marks the official beginning of things. It was a wooden woman about thirty feet high, mounted in a box of wood the size of a one room schoolhouse. They burned it with a military flame thrower, after pouring gas all over it, with a lot of screaming. Watching the curl of fire with the black smoke coil off into the night sky didn't feel very environmentally friendly, and the roaring engines felt more like a Hell's Angels ralley than a utopian art community. The art comes from sculputures like that which get burned, plus art cars, which are modified to look like anything from the bat mobile to a big whale. Which is probably the most interesting stuff there, since it hybridizes Mad Max grim futurism, Tom Waits proletariat art and tremendous engineering commitment. I am just guessing about that last one, but some of this stuff, like a three masted ship, built actual size, that drove around was a staggering piece of work and I have no idea how they built it or got it there.

There are cranes and hydraulic cherry pickers and all kinds of stuff such as water trucks, and they build roads marked by lamps and lay out the whole city in concentric circles, complete with street names. Plus they have a DPW, a DMV and rangers, who are kind of like cops.

I would say I came away with a better understanding of what its like there, to sit and hear some lost youth argue about how great anarchy, feel a part of something big, like art, only its Art, to be a part of a community. I think that last issue is really the big one, that they want to feel a part of a community and belong. Which I understand. As for my feelings on the urninal, you'll have to wait for the documentary to get done, but to give you a preview of my thoughts, I admire the fact that Saul has made it happen and I generally think it is hard to make things happen, but I can't get past the feeling that is a pretty stupid thing to make happen.