Burning Man 1998 - People and Vehicles

Part 1 -- Introduction and The Camps	Part 2 -- The Art	Part 3 -- The People
Part 4 -- Events and the Desert	Part 5 -- The Man and the Burn	Part 6 -- Exodus
Brad Templeton Home	98 Burning Man Panorama Intro Page	Notes on viewing the photos
1999	2000	Panoramas 2000
Photography Page	Panoramic Photography Page	BM Panoramas Page

The People

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Many of the more interesting things are also interactive or animated -- or human, as they should be. The use of fire is commonplace. I particularly enjoyed a crashed rocketship, buried nose-down in the sand with a blowtorch of flame shooting out its tail. And there are the people, who are of course a spectacle in and of themselves. Here's a seemingly spontaneous gathering out in the desert to make rythymic music with anything that came to hand. You also see people wandering around near the Man in a chariot.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the BM community is that people express their individuality individually. Often one sees counterculture communities that have a "uniform" be it black robes or goth makeup or a hippie bandana. Express your individuality by being like everybody else. Somehow Burning Man escapes that. While some large groups of friends see one another all year, most people meet the others of BM only at Black Rock City, and there is less opportunity for conformist non-conformism to develop.

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Much of the art also moves. There are many "art cars" -- decorated vehicles, as well as motorized living rooms, sofas, bars and even a canoe. It's become a challenge to put something interesting on wheels.

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One interesting item I didn't see but which was described to me involved a table on wheels (obviously under remote control) with a simple telephone on top. The teller reported it wheeled up to him out of nowhere, stopped, and the phone rang. He picked it up, had a conversation with the person on the other end, and then hung up. The table then turned and sped away into the crowd.

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Some people doug holes and filled them with water to form baths of playa mud. This had been even more popular the year before where a different site had a natural mudbath. The mud is not that comfortable, but it was still common every day to see mud-covered naked people wandering the desert. It did provide a good sunscreen, I guess.

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Here you see some people dashing naked after a truck laying down water to keep the dust down in the streets. Reports were the water wasn't fresh but people were desperate anyway. On the right you see the one scene able to shock even the more jaded participants -- a man so into piercing he is hanging from hooks stuck in his skin. Be warned not to click on this, it is not for the faint of heart.

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To the left are some people riding camels they brought. Though on desert this flat, wheels do pretty well. To the right is a bus that had an internet connection, for the truly connect-addicted. Satellite connections will however become commonplace in just a few years.

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Piano Bar

One of my more enjoyable experiences took place when I rode out to visit the Piano Bar camp. A longtime BM group, they were building a giant piano bar in the form of a ship in the desert, to be burned Monday night.

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Along with this they had taken an old piano and mounted it on a frame with six bicycles welded together. At first I rode along with them and sung. Later I got to get on one of the bikes and peddle the piano and its nude pianist through the desert.

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One fairly surreal experience was peddling the piano through the crowd, running into a parade of 200 topless women on bicycles (The "critical tits" parade, named after a San Francisco bicycle ritual called critical mass). We blew the air horn that had been mounted on the piano, and because we were not very agile, shouted that a piano has the right of way.