AUGUST ENCORE: HOW BURNING MAN GOT SO HOT

   SAN FRANCISCO, JUNE 1986 — As the sun sets over the Pacific on the longest day of the year, a dozen revelers on a windy Pacific beach prop up a wooden man.  The first Man.  

   The Golden Gate Bridge looms in the distance, but the Sixties cast a longer shadow.  By 1986, the rest of America is consumed with shopping channels and strip malls. The revelers on Baker Beach feel like “remainders on the shelf in Reagan’s America.”  One breaks out some gasoline.  Another has some matches. The first burn begins.

   Larry Harvey, who suggested that first burn, remembered, “It was just a crude thing stuck in the sand. “ The wooden man has wild hair, spindly legs, burlap skin.  At the touch of a match, “it practically blew up.”  And as the Man blazes on, strangers wander over.  People hold hands.  One sings.  The primal fascination with fire takes hold and. . .

   Four decades and forty festivals later, Burning Man is burning again. Starting today , a dry lakebed beneath scorching skies will become Nevada’s eighth largest city.  Come the day after Labor Day, Black Rock City will be gone.  In between, 75,000 people will celebrate America’s wildest outbreak of joy — Burning Man.  

   Describing Burning Man is like trying to describe the kaleidoscope of childhood.  The hope.  The fun.  The fascination with light, with dance, with possibility.  “Burning Man,” said one Burner, “is about ‘why not’ overwhelming ‘why'.”  Burning Man is Halloween crossbred with the annual binge-fest that the Romans called Saturnalia.  It's the Silicon Valley wired to the Id. It’s the Sixties “long, strange trip” compacted into a single week.  And it’s the reason 75,000 people are hunkered down all this week in the Nevada desert.

  Once you’ve paid for a nine-day pass -- now $1,300 -- Burning Man runs on a “gift economy,” cashless and commodity free.  But one concept is pitched non-stop — wonder. 

Wonder at the beauty of some installations, the strangeness of others.  Wonder who these people are back home? Wonder where the electricity comes from?  The water?  Wonder whether you’ll see any of these people again?  Wonder if you’d want to?  And while you’re wondering, just how did Burning Man get so hot?

  Following that first burn in 1986, Larry Harvey and friends gathered the following June to do it again.  And again on the next summer solstice.  The Man grew from 8-feet to 15, the crowd from a dozen to 800.  But police soon got word, and in 1990, the annual torchlit “rave” moved to Nevada.  By then, Burning Man had met the Cacophony Society.  

   A pure product of Sixties zen and madness, The Cacophony Society described itself as “a randomly gathered network of free spirits united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society.” Among the group’s “urban adventures” were:  a naked cable car ride, mad climbs on the Golden Gate Bridge, and games played in sewers and city streets.  When the Society teamed with Burning Man, it turned out that a few Cacophonists knew how to build.  Others worked with neon or performance art.  Several dated each other.  Why not?

   Throughout the early 1990s, operating well beneath the pop culture radar, Burning Man grew.  Crowds soon swelled into the thousands and the man torched at the close of each gathering grew to 40 feet.  Artists, dancers, musicians, and assorted zanies joined in.  Groups gathered around themes.  Then the festival added its own annual themes — Good and Evil, Inferno, Wheel of Time.  And like something out of Star Wars, temples rose from the sand.  The Temple of Mind, Tears, Joy, Stars, Dreams. . .

   By 2000, crowds of 25,000 “burners” needed rules.  No dogs.  No guns.  No fireworks.   But the festival also had ten guiding principles.  Among them: radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, civic responsibility, and leaving no trace.  The latter requires Burners to clean up the entire city using buckets labeled MOOP (Mutant Object Out of Place).

   After the festival was televised in 2006, critics accused Burning Man of being too crowded, too expensive, too wasteful.  Cops and the Bureau of Land Management began issuing hundreds of citations each year.  The nearby town of Gerlach (pop. 130) fostered a love-hate relationship, resenting the crowds but making a bundle.  

And the Burners kept coming.  Attendance was capped at 50,000, then 70,000, then more.  The man grew to 100 feet.  In 2014, the Burning Man corporation, with 50 staff and 4,000 volunteers, became a non-profit, awarding $500,000 in artists grants each year.

   Along with documentaries, novels, and TV shows, Burning Man has inspired dozens of spinoffs.  Burning Flipside in Texas, Kiwiburn in New Zealand, Midburn in Israel. . .   As Barbara Ehrenreich noted in Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, “The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.” 

   Larry Harvey died in 2018 at age 70, but The Man lives on.  This year’s theme, Tomorrow Today, will draw another horde of Burners.  Some will ride mountain bikes through the makeshift urban grid.  Others will drive Mutant Vehicles — giant snails or dragons or cupcakes on wheels.  A handful will walk around naked.  There will be costumes, torch dancing, acrobats, soaring statues, and shameless exhibitionism.  Why not?

   “There ought to be Burning Man festivals held downtown once a year in every major city in America,” Wired wrote.  “It would be good for us. We need it. In fact, until we can just relax every once in a while and learn how to do this properly, we're probably never gonna get well.”