Burning Man 2004
Part 4: The Dessert Cart at the End of the Universe
Some random snapshots:
Alyssa found a giant zoetrope on the playa. For you non-officionados, a zoetrope is an early animation device using small drawings that spin on a carousel. When viewed through the spinning slits, the drawings appear to move. This one used life-size mannequins and a strobe light.
At the theme camp Bop, people duel with stuffed animals on long poles. Another theme camp had two combatants with boffer-swords under a Thunderdome, complete with bungee harnesses. I wanted in, but there was always a line and too much to see elsewhere.
One theme camp looks like it was placed there by the devil himself. The main attraction is a crude roller coaster in the shape of a U. It's surrounded by gouts of flame, half-nude people dancing in cages, and terrifying hillbilly barkers.
At night Black Rock City roars. Techno music blares everywhere, and rock, and folk, and just plain noise. One windy night we came to the Bunny Hop camp which was playing music out of cartoons from the 40s, so we danced like 40s cartoon characters in our dust masks and goggles.
Out on the playa the noise dies down. One night we visited a monolith that drowned out all other sound when you got near it. Alyssa said it sounded like a giant cat purring, which it did, although the sound never wavered or stopped. We took turns lying in the hole, looking out at the lights of theme camps and art cars and being dwarfed by the sound.
Art cars. Some are small, one or two-man affairs, some are built around golf carts, some are big as busses. I heard that last year there was a dragon vehicle so big, its segments had to trucked in and assembled on site. People drive around in human heads, a Gonzo head, giant animals, giant bugs, a scorpion with a flaming sting, parties on wheels, a pool party on wheels, a motorized couch, a hammock and palm trees...if there's room you can always hop on.
Riding my bike one day in 3:00 plaza, near the traffic cone sculptures, a guy with a traffic cone for a head and a crossing guard vest motions for me to stop. With his two ping-pong paddles he silently waves a tiny invisible procession along the ground in front of me. Then he motions for me to carry on.
Walking around with Troy, the grim reaper passes on the other side of the road. "Hi, Death!" Troy calls out. Death responds with a guttural "Heya!"
Remember the old vector graphics video games? Someone built the tanks from Battlezone out of PVC pipe around these pedal-powered rigs, and lined the pipes with green EL wire. Occasionally we'd see Battlezone tanks gliding around in the distance, looking exactly like they did in the video game. When we found the camp, we took them for a spin.
The first night, we walked out to the Man, then back along the road between the Man and center camp. A little ways off the road was a crew of people setting up a sculpture representing the sun. They told us that it was part of a set of sculptures representing all the planets, which would be spread around the playa in a scale model of the solar system. When we came back in the daylight, the three innermost planets were within sight of the sun. Each sculpture hung inside a pyramid framework. On the ground below was a triangular plaque with a map of the whole project. Each planet had its own shape, its own materials, its own selection of music and sounds playing quietly. I found the whole thing beautiful and fascinating.
One day Troy borrowed a bike and the two of us rode out to the far side of the playa, and we happened across the Uranus sculpture. We decided to try to find Neptune. Most of the territory out there was empty space, and flat. We figured as long as we headed in the right general direction, we would spot it. There were some other sculptures using pyramid frames that fooled us, but eventually we found Neptune near a lunar landing module. Other than that, we seemed to have left most of the playa art behind. Black Rock City looked impossibly distant. It was also mired in dust storms, but we had clear, still air. The music coming from the city was audible, but faint. We decided that after coming this far, we ought to go find Pluto. We consulted the map on the ground under Neptune and headed out.
Surprisingly, there was still a long distance between us and the orange plastic trash fence, and Pluto was practically right up against it. They say Jericho was the first city built by humans. Sometimes I try to imagine what it was like living in the world's first city, with nothing but wilderness beyond those rough stone walls. How would it feel to stand on that border of fledgling civilization and gaze into unfeeling chaos? Or to cross over into the void, and see how far you dared to go? That's sort of how I felt going out to the trash fence, with humanity on one side and miles of wasteland on the other. The noise of Black Rock City faded away completely. A familiar pyramid framework appeared ahead of us. I anticipated glorious desolation, mystical emptiness out here with our solar system's most remote island. I did not anticipate frosty chocolate drinks.
The Pluto sculpture was all rawhide and sinew. Coarse and eccentric, content as the planetary black sheep. But I couldn't really hear the music for Pluto, because this guy was there with his dessert cart, asking us if we wanted a chocolate drink. He opened his little cabinet doors with a doctored Starbucks logo reading "Crappuccino," pulled out a blender, and poured us each a cup. It's a Douglas Adams universe after all.
