"How To With John Wilson" was my favorite TV show, and now it's over, after 3 seasons. Earlier this season, there was an episode — "How to Find a Public Restroom" — where he traveled to Burning Man but then he couldn't use any of the footage he shot. It was the devastating dust storm year. This year, of course, we're seeing it's the devastating rainstorm year.
September 3, 2023
"Because for the Burning Man episode we spent so much money, so much time out there. And we can’t use any frame of it."
"And that was just, like, so annoying. But I felt like we still needed to include it, because it ultimately made the episodes stronger that we couldn’t get access to Burning Man because the whole episode is kind of about gatekeeping.... I didn’t know how abnormal it was to have such a devastating dust storm and the heat and all that stuff. Like, I could barely do anything during the day because of how fucked up it was outside.... [F]or the most part, I was shadowing the sewage-treatment people. So I was just in these porta potties that were 115 degrees, studying the infrastructure of Burning Man, in a way—like, the lost and found and all this other stuff...."
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I attended Burning Man in 2010. I know how sand playas with clay underneath turn into sticky, gooey, gumbo very fast in heavy rain. I am sorry the weather is turning camps into a mess, usually fierce duststorms are the worst climate event. I'm not sure, this rain stoppage could be a first. I am sure most participants will make the best of it. Almost all people who go there have a beautiful sense of community. in. )(
On your recommendation, I'm going to watch How to with John Wilson. I watch one or two shows at a time. It works best if the show has finished it's run so I'm not left waiting for the next season to drop. I just finished Louis Theroux: Weird Weekends and really enjoyed it. This sounds like it's along the same line.
A festival held in a desert during the summer, with limited resources available to visitors, and minimal access to and egress from the site. Who ever even could have imagined that there would be issues?
Russ Roberts has an excellent 2018 EconTalk podcast episode where he interviews the CEO of Burning Man, Marian Goodell. They discuss the economics of the project and the inter-camp economic system. It’s fascinating. She’s still the CEO. Perhaps he’ll do a follow-up episode on the system during a disaster.
My favourite Burning Man joke is: I’d pay good money to round up these people and put them in the desert but they do it themselves for free!
Couldn’t happen to a better group of people.
Burning Man is a business... a racket. Got that?
I went to Burning Man in 1999. I had clothes on the whole time and didn't do any drugs - like lots of the attendees. There were of course naked people and drug users there - BFD. It was a wonderful, amazing, joyful festival of wild art, bizarre performances, interesting people, banned commercial activity, and lots of fun. You can't go back, judging by the more recent abomination mutations of it that I've read about.
I discovered "How To With John Wilson" here and watched it for a bit. It was unusual, interesting, and mildly amusing. But after about the fourth episode the guy's schtick and locutionary affectation had become monotonous and I couldn't get interested in continuing to watch.
Take enough LSD and it will be a beautiful day on the beach.
At Point San Pablo in Richmond, CA, there's a small community of houseboats mostly occupied by Burners. On the grounds are several immense sculptures (sea creatures, etc) that they haul to the desert each year. Neato.
I had a good friend from college who went to Burning Man in the 1990s when it was mostly by word of mouth and not commercialized. He said it was a life changing event for him.
I saw enough of this claptrap and its inevitably messy denouement at New College in 1984. It's not climate, Rich: it's just desert weather. Even the Rainbow People have the common sense to gather in temperate forests -- after stealing food from surrounding communities, refusing to pay park fees, and placing a huge strain on police and medical rescue in small towns. Plus leaving literal tons of human feces behind for other people to clean up.
We have many institutions that pursue transcendence, share resources, and tend to the actually needy without gratuitous nudity and hippy funk. They're called churches and synagogues.
In contrast, Burning Man is just another music festival that depends heavily on local taxpayer rescue services, blue-collar sanitation workers, police, and festival profiteers. It's an expensive playpen for cos-playing Peter Pans with asses full of sand. If that's your thing, go for it. But can you really find meaning through Ticketron?
As usual, Tina Trent summarizes things very nicely. You are a first rate commenter.
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