There’s an electricity in the air as we bounce and sway with hundreds, maybe thousands, of dancers at The Deep End. And I don’t simply mean that metaphorically; the air feels strangely charged, like there’s something brewing with the weather, but nobody seems to care, not when the music is so good on this playful afternoon.
“I’ve got beats, deep in my soul,” sings the song as DJ Clarkie pumps his fist behind the decks, a sea of smiling, scantily-clad souls on the stage and down in the dust just losing their minds. “I’ve got love, making me whole. Since you opened up your heart and shined on me.”
Several of my Ku De Ta campmates are dancing in my orbit, or occasionally walking over to the crowded bar to refill their drinks, and we’re all in great spirits, feeling buoyant after some minor conflicts and difficulties in setting up a new theme camp of just 16 people from scratch.
When the chorus starts to come around again, Rosie, Smoove, Splinter, and I exchange knowing smiles and belt out our inside joke modified lyrics: “I’ve got meat, deep in my hole.” Pure silliness and frivolity, but the sky has started to darken with dust as the wind begins to blow from the west, opposite of its usual direction.
The goggles and dust masks start coming out, but the dance floor stays full and the beats keep pumping, even as the wind starts flapping some parachutes and tarps that had been battened down against easterly winds. I love these weird playa moments, when groups of people are transformed into swarms of insects, goggled eyes peering out from faces shrouded in scarves or masks.
Burners learn to just take moments like this in stride, howling with glee as the sudden dust storms hit their peaks and shrink visibility down to their immediate surroundings, empowered by our preparation and knowledge that this will pass and we’ll all be okay.
But as the air begins to thicken and bikes and structures can be heard crashing to the ground and into each other, the dance floor starts to empty out as people deal with their shit or seek shelter from what’s beginning to feel like an unusually powerful storm. “Let’s go back to Blue’s bus,” I suggest to my nearby friends, referring to a Deep Ender friend’s home for the week, where I was hanging out doing Whip-Its and getting high yesterday.
There’s a fairly crowded party in the full-sized, camping-modified bus once we finally find it in this disorienting environment, but Blue warmly welcomes our group of a half-dozen and offers us margaritas. I recognize maybe half the crowd, which is chatting in groups, puttering with drinks or supplies, or flopped all over each other in the huge bed in the back of the bus.
That’s where I head after getting my drink, greeting friends and strangers on my way back and filling in a freshly vacated spot on the bed between two cute girls that I vaguely recognize but can’t really place. “Whip-it?” offers my friend Mack, who is fiddling with the whipped cream cracker and balloons as he chats up the girls.
“Love one,” I answer, and he introduces me to the girls, whose names I promptly forget. He hands me a balloon filled with laughing gas and I lay back, breathing in the nitrous oxide, respirating it between the balloon and my lungs until I disassociate from my surroundings and hear the familiar “wah, wah, wah” in my head, mixed with the distant thump of Deep End’s bass. The girls stroke my hair and stomach and I feel a moment of perfect bliss before reality returns.
“Mmm, this is nice. Thanks,” I say, handing Mack back the empty balloon. And it goes like that for an hour or so — it’s hard to be sure, really — just absorbing this warm and tactile environment as the wind outside wreaks havoc on Black Rock City. Finally, Rosie says the wind is dying down, and Dash offers, “Dude, I wonder how our camp is doing.”
Good question, good enough for us to leave the party and head back outside, where everything and everyone is coated with a thin layer of fine dust. We head back over to the dance floor, remembering that Syd Gris is supposed to be spinning the set after Clarkie’s. Several of our Ku De Ta crew — me, Rosie, Dash, Captain Bastard, Donnie, Carla, and Smoove — were defectors from Opulent Temple, and as much as we couldn’t do another year with the massive dance camp, we were still all close to Syd.
The sun reemerges, brightening a dance floor that’s starting to fill up again, but as we climb onto the stage and peek into the DJ booth, we learn that Syd hadn’t arrived yet, apparently unable to cross the playa from Opulent Temple during the storm, but Clarkie is still rocking strong.
We decide to head back to camp and assess the damage, mounting our bikes for the journey across the playa as the sky turns a brilliant blue and the heat of the day returns. The wind seems to have cleansed the playa, leaving it feeling fresh and restored, but dotted with MOOP that we occasionally stop to pick up. It’s a straight shot from The Deep End on 9 o’clock past the Man and over to Ku De Ta, which was assigned some amazing real estate at 3 o’clock and Anxious, just a block back from the open playa on an extra wide avenue.
On the way, we veer to the right to do a fly-by on the Flaming Lotus Girls’ amazing Serpent Mother project, a huge flaming snake with animatronic head that we can see clearly from the couches or scaffolding in our camp. After the success of Angel of the Apocalypse, the FLGs went even bigger this year, fueled by lots of new members and an even larger art grant from the Borg.
I don’t see any familiar faces, so we ride back toward camp and as we approach the Esplanade, what’s left of Ku De Ta comes into focus. The three-story scaffolding that marked the front wall of our camp is mostly bare, the muslin fabric on which we’d painted our camp name in large letters shredded by the reversed winds, the remaining pieces hanging tattered from single points, flapping in the now-gentle breeze.
Scott, Julio, and Mary had arrived back at camp shortly before us, walking out to greet us as we pull up, and we all share a laugh at our fucked up camp’s expense. Even before this, we had to scale back our ambitious plans for our revolutionary compound concept, abandoning plans for a maze that had to be overcome to gain entrance and elaborate façade with the heads of Bush Administration war criminals stuck on pikes.
It turns out that small camps are even more work than big ones. A few of us ended up carrying most of the burden, while others weren’t fully engaged with the project. Rosie, for example, is in the middle of a difficult political campaign, running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors as the first candidate to overtly identify herself with the Burning Man world. And Smoove is a prima donna DJ, and we had a bunch of newbies, and our renegade dance party fundraiser was more fun than lucrative, so, well, we fell a bit short of our goals.
We did manage to rent and erect the scaffolding, topped by a pair of fire poofers that Dash and I built at the Box Shop with help from Pouneh and some Flaming Lotus Girls supplies. And we had the requisite shade structure filled with couches and old carpets, and a loosely covered geodesic dome, but it was nothing like the description that we’d promised to rate such a great address.
After we finish laughing at how our ridiculous camp is now in tatters, we fan out to collect the various pieces of our massive muslin sign and pound the dust out of our couches. Pretty soon, the ragtag army of Ku De Ta settles into the chill area to lick our wounds and rest up before dinner and the big night ahead.
But I decide not to be so easily defeated in a camp that I conceived, so I gather some rope, bungee cords, and zip ties into my kilt pockets, grab the pile of sign pieces, climb the scaffolding, and start putting Ku De Ta back together, Frankenstein-style. “Way to go, Scribe,” Mary says, as my campmates rise to help.
Going Green
With great weather, solid community intention, a Black Rock City population that reached 40,000, and mind-blowing art — from the FLG’s Serpent Mother to a massive, gravity-defying wooden structure on the deep playa named Uchronia (affectionately nicknamed the Belgian Waffle after the nationality of its builders) — 2006 was universally considered another of Burning Man’s best years ever.
Without a doubt, Burning Man had become the best party on the planet, in a temporary city with a vibrant, well-developed communal culture. But that wasn’t enough for Larry Harvey, who was still trying to elevate the event into something more, an intention that had caused him to pick an art theme for 2006 with a strongly sociopolitical character: “The Future: Hope and Fear.”
It was a new direction for Burning Man that Larry continued with the announcement at the 2006 event of the next year’s theme, “Green Man,” which he intended to have a stronger impact on Black Rock City and its community than his past art themes, which didn’t really alter the basic character of an event that had an inertia that was tough to change.
“It’s the first theme that has any kind of practical, political character,” Larry told me in early 2007, noting that “Green Man” was sparking big changes in how the event would be staged, a campaign to improve burners’ environmental practices, and a new way of relating to the outside world.
Larry said he was inspired by the amount of good that Burners Without Borders did in Mississippi and that started him thinking about the green theme and the idea that Burning Man needed to start turning its energies outward at a time when global warming and other environmental problems were growing public concerns.
“We’re working our way back into the world. Maybe not the mainstream but certainly onto Main Street,” Larry said. “There’s a lot out there that needs reform. The time of the reformer is at hand, I believe.”
And to propel those reforms, Larry tapped Tom Price, giving him a full-time job as Burning Man’s first environmental director and turning him loose on ramping up the organization’s sociopolitical relevance and environmental responsibility.
“We’re looking at every aspect of the event: solid waste, energy, and materials,” Tom told me for an article on the theme that I wrote in January of 2007.
Two years later, with more time to reflect, he put it this way: “Coming back, I got hired to be the environmental manager for the Green Man theme and the idea was, let’s create a space where we can share the best practices and ideas about how to interact with the world in a way that is completely decommodified. Let’s take these 10 Principles and apply them to a particular topic, the environment. Well, we then took the next step and said let’s take that topic, the environment, and let’s take these 10 Principles, and then let’s take it outside the event. And what we learned is if you are open to the idea of focusing on the social rather than financial bottom line, and you’re interested in helping a community and protecting the environment in leaving no trace, you can do tremendous things outside the event as well.”
That would eventually lead Tom and his allies to take Burners Without Borders into other countries and to create new enterprises such as Black Rock Solar. But in early 2007, he was focused on Green Man, developing his romantic relationship with Andie Grace, and pursuing projects in his new hometown of San Francisco.
And that meant working with some familiar Burning Man names, like Jim Mason and Chicken John, the main instigators of the Borg2 rebellion. Mason had developed a gasification system that turned waste products like coffee grounds and walnut shells into usable fuel, which would power the art car slug that he was creating, a project he called Mechabolic. And to demonstrate it, he converted Chicken’s pickup truck to run on walnut shells.
“So I’m proposing drag racing to a more responsible environmental future. As usual, the ravers are not going to save the world. But at least they can power their indulgent disasters with the fuel the local gearheads turned reluctant environmentalists have made for them,” Jim told me, once again getting in a gratuitous dig at the longstanding target of his ire.
Tom said he was excited by the implications of Jim’s project, noting that it simultaneously addresses energy issues and waste disposal. At the time, Jim was talking about using the coffee grounds from Center Camp to power his vehicle, although that didn’t really materialize.
“If he can do this, he will have solved two problems,” Tom said. “Our relationship to nature on the playa is very intimate. Just being at the event, we’ve learned in a way those in the city haven’t what it means to deal with your garbage and to provide your energy.”
It was a point that resonates with anyone who had been to Burning Man, where attendees are responsible for dealing with their own trash and providing their own power, giving each burner a practical understanding of the notion of conservation. Larry said he wanted the theme to be a turning point.
“In some ways, we hope this year will be an environmental and alternative energy expo,” he said, although he expects it to penetrate to an even deeper level that participants will carry back into their communities. “It’s a much broader thing than environmental politics. It’s about our relationship to nature.”
Tom worked on expanding the already large recycling effort at the event (including the Burners Without Borders lumber recycling camp that debuted in 2006), finding ways to use more solar panels and fewer generators, coordinating theme camps to share power sources, using an anonymous donation of $350,000 worth of solar panels to power the Man, purchasing of emissions credits to partially offset the greenhouse gases created by the event, and creating incentives for art projects to use alternative fuels.
“The whole process is being driven by the community,” Tom said.
Ramping up Burning Man’s environmental activism and commitment had been the goal of several movements within the larger event, such as Cooling Man and Greening the Burn, as well as being a priority for many Black Rock City LLC employees, such as technology dominatrix Heather Gallagher, a.k.a. Camera Girl, and facilities manager Paul Schreer, a.k.a. Mr. Blue.
“We’ve been hippie busybodies pushing for this on the inside,” Heather told me. “And when (Larry) announced the theme, I was, like, ‘Yesss!’ “
“What’s exciting about the Green Man theme and this year’s event is it’s a perfect illustration of the power of community,” Tom said, noting that networking and experimentation have always been hallmarks of the event. “Going back 10 years, Burning Man has been a place for early adopters who are on the cutting edges of a lot of disciplines.”
That makes it a good place to experiment with new technologies and evangelize those that work well. “I’ve always believed Burning Man would eventually partner in some way with the environmental movement,” Larry said. “It’s almost a historic inevitability.”
A Burning Man Mystery
Even as the Burning Man world was becoming more intriguing, so was the San Francisco political scene and covering it was my main job at the Bay Guardian. Mayor Gavin Newsom had made international headlines with his unilateral decision to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, but had then largely withdrawn from local politics to play the ambitious celebrity.
Progressives on the Board of Supervisors, leftists who were Newsom’s main political opponents, had filled the void and taken control of the city agenda, often beating Newsom’s downtown allies. But after a sordid sex scandal, when Newsom was revealed to have been sleeping with his campaign manager’s wife, and with his reelection approaching, the mayor reengaged and the political battles were fierce.
So there was plenty for me to focus on without Burning Man, particularly as my resources were limited by layoffs and cutbacks at the Guardian. But when I was approached by members of one of the Burning Man world’s most storied and fascinating tribes, about a big news event that had a strong air of mystery about it, with great characters in both the Bay Area and Nevada — well, it was just irresistible.
After digging into it with some investigative reporting that I married with Burning Man cultural coverage, I wrote the following cover story for the Bay Guardian that ran on January 7, 2007:
The Mystery of La Contessa
A galleon destroyed by fire. A priceless missing statue. Welcome to one of the great mysteries of the San Francisco underground.
La Contessa was a Spanish galleon, amazingly authentic and true to 16th-century design standards in all but a couple respects. It was half the size of the ships that carried colonizers to this continent and pirates through the Caribbean. And it was built around a school bus, designed to trawl the Burning Man festival and the Black Rock Desert environs, where it became perhaps the most iconic and surreal art piece in the event’s history.
The landcraft — perhaps like the sailing ships of yore — wasn’t easy to navigate. It was heavy and turned slowly. The person driving the school bus couldn’t actually see much, so a navigator sitting on the bow needed to communicate to the driver by radio. Those sitting in the crow’s nest felt the vessel gently sway as if it were rocking on waves.
Inside, it was a picture of luxury: opulent, with a fancy bar, gilded frames, velvet trim — a cross between a fancy bordello and a captain’s stateroom. And adorning its bow was a priceless work of art, a figure of a woman by San Francisco sculptor Monica Maduro.
The ship and its captains and crew — most of whom are members of San Francisco’s wild and popular Extra Action Marching Band — hit more than their share of storms in the desert, developing a storied outlaw reputation that eventually got them banned from Burning Man.
By 2005 much of the galleon’s crew was dispirited and unsure if they’d ever return. The ship was no longer welcome at the Ranch staging area run by the event’s organizers and unable to legally navigate the highways without being dismantled. So it returned to its berth on Grant Ranch, on the edge of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, where Joan Grant had welcomed La Contessa and two other large artworks since 2003.
Then, late last summer someone looted the ship, stealing Maduro’s work, which was stored in a special box and hidden deep within the ship’s hold. Maduro and others have kept the theft a secret until now in the hope that they might find it, fearing that publicity and police involvement might drive the piece further underground, particularly after the reported sighting of a photo of the figurehead on Tribe.net, with a caption indicating it was the latest addition to someone’s living room.
And in early December, apparently without warning, prominent local landowner Mike Stewart set La Contessa on fire and had her charred remains hauled away.
It was a sad and unceremonious ending for La Contessa, a subject of ongoing legal actions, and an illustration of what an explosion of creativity leaves in its wake — a challenge that Burning Man faces as it seeks to become more environmentally responsible as it grows exponentially.
It was also a sign of the lingering tension between the giant countercultural festival and the residents of Hualapai Valley, who endure the annual onslaught of tens of thousands of visitors to their remote and sparsely populated region, along with the cultural and economic offerings they bring.
Grant had recently sold her 3,000-acre spread (although she retained a lifelong lease of her ranch home) to her neighbor, Mike Stewart, a landlord who didn’t share Grant’s love for the annual Burning Man event and its colorful denizens. In fact, Stewart led a legal and regulatory battle against Burning Man in 2003, trying unsuccessfully to shut down the Ranch and thus kill the event.
“I’ve been with them since they started out there, when they were just little bitty kids.... I adopted them, and they’ve always been supergood to me,” Grant told me. Although she owned the Black Rock Salloon (which she spelled “like a drunk would say it” and later sold it to the Black Rock City LLC), Grant said she was initially ostracized by many of the locals for supporting the event.
While La Contessa’s creator, Simon Cheffins (who also founded Extra Action), fruitlessly looked for land that might permanently house the galleon, it sat at the ranch, battened down against the elements and interlopers. When a grease fire destroyed Grant’s ranch house last year, sending her into the nearby town of Gerlach, La Contessa had nobody to watch over her.
A Question of Intent
Stewart is one of the biggest property owners in the region. In addition to possessing land and water rights that would be lucrative in any development project, he owns Orient Farms, Empire Farms, and a four-megawatt geothermal power plant.
He leased Grant Ranch (also known as Lawson Ranch) for five years before buying it in October 2005; in that transaction he gave Grant a lifelong lease of her house, a provision she believed also applied to the art pieces she stored within sight of her home. That was before the fire, which police say Stewart set December 5, 2006, around noon.
“My understanding was it was okay to park it there. But I guess he had it burned down,” Grant told me. “As far as I’m concerned, it was arson.”
Washoe County sheriff’s deputy Tracy Bloom also told me that he considers the fire to be third-degree arson, which is punishable by one to six years in prison under Nevada law. Yet Bloom said he believes Stewart thought he had a right to burn and remove the seemingly abandoned vehicle and therefore lacks the criminal intent needed to have charges brought against him.
“According to him, they had attempted to contact the owner to no avail, so he decided to set it on fire,” Bloom told us.
He wrote in his police report, “I asked Stewart if he was the one that set the La Contessa on fire and he said, ‘YES, I DID.’ I asked him why he decided to burn it. Stewart said, ‘Because the property was abandoned and left there and I was forced to clean it up.’ “
The report indicates that Bloom, who lives in Gerlach, helped organize a community cleanup at that time, in which a scrap dealer named Stan Leavers was removing old cars and other junk. “Stewart said that was the biggest reason for burning the La Contessa so that it could be removed by Leavers,” Bloom wrote. Nonetheless, Bloom confirmed to me that didn’t give Stewart the right to burn the artwork.
“I told him, ‘You can’t just do that, and if I found any intent or malice on this, you’re going to jail,’ “ Bloom told me. “But I don’t believe there was any malicious intent. If I felt like there was any malicious intent, I would have arrested him right there. I thought that boat was really cool. It was one of the coolest things out there.”
Many burners who live in Gerlach — a town with a population of a few hundred people that happens to be the nearest civilization to Burning Man’s site — have a hard time believing Stewart made an innocent mistake. “I think it was a malicious arson,” Caleb Schaber, also known as Shooter, told me. “He’s the guy who tried to shut down Burning Man, and he associated La Contessa with Burning Man.”
Stewart refused to comment for this story, referring questions to his lawyers at the Reno firm of Robison, Belaustegi, Sharp, and Low. Dearmond Sharp, a partner in the firm, belittled the value of the piece and implied Stewart was within his rights as a property owner to burn it.
“What would you do if someone left some junk on your property?” he asked me.
Nevada law calls for property owners to notify vehicle owners “by registered or certified mail that the vehicle has been removed and will be junked or dismantled or otherwise disposed of unless the registered owner or the person having a security interest in the vehicle responds and pays the costs of removal.”
“What he should have done is get letters out and make a good-faith effort to find a (vehicle license number) or see who the owner is, little things like that,” Bloom told me. Nonetheless, after talking with the prosecutor, Bloom said criminal charges are unlikely. He said, “Chances are this is something they will pursue civilly.”
(Three years after this article came out, the crew sued Stewart for $900,000 under the federal Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, which makes it illegal to destroy artwork even if it is no longer in the artist’s possession. That suit was still pending as this book went to press.)
Also destroyed in the fire, according to Schaber, was an International Scout truck with a new motor and a MIG welder inside, owned by Dogg Erickson, which he said he parked alongside La Contessa so it would be partly protected from sandstorms.
“Everything was toast,” Erickson said. “I was pretty pissed, both about my truck and La Contessa. It floors me, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
Cheffins, mechanical design engineer Greg Jones, and others associated with La Contessa and Burning Man all say they never received any message from Stewart asking for La Contessa to be removed. And Cheffins said he believed he had the implied consent of Stewart to store the ship where it was.
Jones and Cheffins said that while they were securing La Contessa for the winter of 2004–5, Stewart drove by and talked to them but said nothing about removing the ship. “We talked to him about all kinds of stuff, and we were impressed by him,” Jones said.
La Contessa caretaker Mike Snook also said that he met Stewart in 2005 while he was with the ship and that Stewart didn’t express a desire to have the piece off the property. Jones said there were plenty of people in town connected to Burning Man through whom Stewart could have communicated: “It’s a visible enough art piece that if he really wanted to get it off his property, someone would have known where we are,” Jones said.
Burning Man spokesperson Marian Goodell told me Stewart never contacted the organization and that if he had, it would have facilitated the piece’s removal from the property. “We were surprised to hear about the fire, absolutely shocked,” she said. “It was a very iconic piece, and a lot of people are going to miss La Contessa.”
According to Bloom, Stewart also claims to have contacted Grant about removing La Contessa and other items from the property. “He contacted her and said, ‘What are you going to do with it,’ and she said, ‘Do what you want with it,’ “ Bloom told us. But Grant (whom Bloom did not interview for his report) told me, “That’s not truthful,” adding that she hasn’t spoken with Stewart in a very long time and wouldn’t have given him permission to destroy the artwork.
Sharp did not directly answer my questions about what specific actions Stewart took to contact the galleon’s owners, but he did tell me, “He didn’t know the owners, and they weren’t identified...The vehicle wasn’t licensed and had no registration and wasn’t legal to drive on the road. It wasn’t a vehicle.”
Whether or not it was a vehicle is what triggers the notification provisions under Nevada law: the section on abandoned vehicles prohibits leaving them on someone’s property “without the express or implied consent of the owner.”
“It was dumped there, and there is no written consent or implied consent,” Sharp told me, responding to a question about implied consent. “In our eyes, it was a piece of junk.”
But Ragi Dindial, an attorney working with the La Contessa crew, said that this “junk” was actually a valuable artwork and that he is working on filing a claim with Stewart’s insurance company, alleging the fire was a result of Stewart’s negligence. If that doesn’t work, he may file a civil lawsuit.
And then there’s the lingering question of the sculpture, which survived the fire because of the theft — but still hasn’t seen the light of day. “It’s one of the greatest mysteries in the San Francisco underground,” longtime Burning Man artist Flash Hopkins said. “Where is the figurehead?”
Building a Galleon
La Contessa’s massive scale has created problems since the beginning, when Cheffins had the idea in 2002 of rejuvenating Burning Man and his own enthusiasm for it by building a Spanish galleon. The project was a huge undertaking that created logistical nightmares.
“It was such an ambitious and, I think, exciting idea.... I wanted to do something fairly splashy, and the idea of a ship had always been powerful,” Cheffins told me. “I was strong on the fantasy-imagination side of things and stupid enough to want to do it. Luckily, my ass was saved by Greg Jones.”
Jones, a mechanical design engineer, had been playing trumpet in Extra Action for a few months when Cheffins pitched the La Contessa project at one of the band’s rehearsals.
“I said, ‘Who’s going to design it?’ “ Jones told me, describing the moment when he took on the project of a lifetime. “That first night I had in my mind a way to do it.... For me, it was a challenge of how do you make it and how do you get it out there.”
Hopkins said there should have been another consideration: “You have to build something that you can take apart. Sadly, that was part of its demise.”
But that doesn’t take away from what he said was one of the best art projects in the event’s history: “What those guys did when they built that ship was incredible because of the detail of it. It was an incredible feat.”
The idea of a ship fit in beautifully with Burning Man’s theme that year, the “Floating World,” so Black Rock City LLC awarded Cheffins, Jones, and their crew a $15,000 grant, which would ultimately cover about half the project’s costs, even with the hundreds of volunteer person-hours that would be poured into it.
Cheffins researched galleons, learned to do riggings as a volunteer at the San Francisco Maritime Museum, directed the project, and insisted on materials and details that would make La Contessa authentic. Jones translated that vision into reality by creating computer-aided architectural designs for the ship’s steel skeleton, a hull that would hang from that skeleton and be supported by an axle and hidden wheels separate from those of the bus, and the decks that would support dozens of passengers and hide the bus and frame — all with modular designs that could be broken down for transport to Nevada on two flatbed trucks.
“In the beginning I thought they were crazy,” said Snook, an artist and Burning Man employee who worked on the project and later took control of La Contessa after the Extra Action folks ran afoul of festival organizers in 2003 for repeatedly driving too fast and breaking other rules.
The ship was built mostly at the Monkey Ranch art space in Oakland and a nearby lot the crew leased for three months. “My mom even helped,” Jones said; she joined nearly 100 volunteers who pitched in, many of whom brought key skills and expertise that helped bring the project to fruition.
“The idea of the ship is it was a lady that you end up serving, and she took on a life of her own,” Cheffins said. “We all came to feel like servants at some point.”
Meanwhile, Cheffins commissioned Extra Action dancer, event producer, and sculptor Maduro to build a figurehead that would be the most visible and defining artistic detail on the galleon. Cheffins conveyed his vision — including the need for it to be removable so a live model could sit in her place — and Maduro added her own research and artistic touches.
“We wanted her to be beautiful, sexy, strong, and also unique,” Maduro told us.
All the ship figureheads that she researched had open eyes, except one that had one eye closed, purportedly the same eye in which the ship’s captain was blind. That gave Maduro the idea of a figurehead with closed eyes.
“The figurehead is supposed to guide you through the night and see you to safety,” she said. “We liked the idea that our figurehead would guide us blindly.”
Maduro worked for six months in relative isolation from the ship site in Xian, artist Michael Christian’s Oakland studio. The face was designed from a mold of their friend: model and actress Jessa Brie Berkner. The armature was wood and metal, covered in carved foam coated in fiberglass veils dipped in marine epoxy, with sculpting epoxy over that, and wearing a real fabric skirt dipped in epoxy. The idea was to make it strong enough to stand being dropped by people and battered by the elements.
“This is one of the most emotional projects I’ve ever been a part of,” said Maduro, who spent six years creating lifelike exhibits for natural history museums across the country, among other projects. “It was a magical mix of all these individuals that made it happen.”
Yet there wasn’t enough magic to allow the shipbuilders to meet their schedule. They weren’t where they’d hoped to be when the trucks arrived to haul La Contessa to the playa, requiring a final push on location under sometimes harsh conditions.
“The intention was to build the whole deck and reassemble it,” Jones said. “But we ran out of time.”
Instead, the crew spent the final weeks before Burning Man — and most of their time at the event — frantically trying to finish the project, completing it on a Friday night just a couple days before the event ended. Jones recalled, “We stained it Friday afternoon during a sandstorm.”
Ah, but once it was finished, it was an amazing thing to behold, made all the more whimsical by the large whale on a school bus that Hopkins built that year. La Contessa’s crew loved to “go whaling” that first year.
“The ship and the whale were the right size, and so it was like Moby Dick and the Pequod,” Hopkins said.
Those who sailed on La Contessa insist it had a feel that was unique among the many art cars in Burning Man history. People were transported to another place, and many reported feeling like they were actually cutting through the high seas.
“It was about creation. It was about inspiration,” Cheffins said. “The whole thing was a gift.”
“That’s what we heard a lot after the arson,” Jones said. “This was the thing that inspired (people) to come out to Burning Man.”
Stormy Seas
A lore quickly grew around La Contessa — and the ship and crew developed something of an outlaw reputation. There were the repeated violations of the 5 mph speed limit and what looked to some like reckless driving as they pursued Hopkins’s white whale. There were people doing security that Cheffins says “were overzealous and got very rude.”
Some thought the La Contessa crew members were elitists for excluding some people from the limited-capacity vessel and for making others remove their blinky lights while onboard.
There were minor violations that first year because, as Jones said, “we didn’t have time to read the rules for art cars.” And there were stories that La Contessa’s crew insists never happened or were blown way out of proportion. But it was enough to convince Burning Man officials to tell the crew at the end of the 2003 event that it wasn’t welcome to return.
“They thought we were fucking terrorists,” Cheffins said.
Goodell insists that the organization’s problems with La Contessa have also been blown out of proportion. “I don’t think we consider our relationship to be tumultuous,” she said. “They were banned because they broke the rules on driving privileges.... Following driving rules can be a life or death situation out there.”
La Contessa remained at Grant Ranch during the 2004 event, which the Extra Action Marching Band skipped to tour Europe. Snook negotiated with Burning Man officials to allow La Contessa to return in 2005 as long as he retained control and did not let Cheffins, Jones, or their cohorts drive.
The fact that there were inexperienced drivers at the wheel was likely a factor in what happened the Tuesday night of Burning Man 2005.
The crew had made arrangements to take a cruise outside the event’s perimeter and within 15 minutes crashed into a dune that had formed around some object, tearing a big gash in the hull and bending a wheel. The crew was instructed by Burning Man officials to leave it until the following day, and when its members returned, the sound system, tools, a telescope, and other items had been stolen.
It was a dispiriting blow for Extra Action and the rest of the La Contessa crew, one that played a role in the decision not to try to bring La Contessa back to the event. “Last year (2006) we didn’t take her out because of a lack of enthusiasm on our parts,” Jones said.
Yet they checked on La Contessa on their way to Burning Man and discovered that it had been looted again and the figurehead was gone.
Insult to Injury
As mad as she was about the theft of the figurehead and as sad as she was about the fire, Maduro said she feels a sort of gratitude toward the thief. “Assuming we get it back and it wasn’t the person who burned the ship down, then I actually owe this person a debt of gratitude.”
Particularly since the fire, Maduro just wants the figurehead back, no questions asked. At her request the Guardian has agreed to serve as a neutral site where someone can drop it off without fear of prosecution; we will return the figurehead to its owners.
“I was really sad, and it surprised me how sad I was because it doesn’t belong to me personally,” Maduro said. “I just always thought we would have her.”
The mystery surrounding the figurehead grew after Burning Man employee Dave Pedroli, a.k.a. Super Dave, found a photo of it in someone’s living room on Tribe.net — before he knew about the fire and the theft.
“Right after the fire was reported, within a day, I put two and two together and talked with Snook,” Pedroli told me, referring to his realization that the photo depicted the stolen figurehead. “Right after that I started to look for it.”
But it was gone and hasn’t been seen since. “I couldn’t imagine someone walked into that space looking at all the time and attention that went into every detail and wanting to defile it,” Maduro said.
But in the world of Burning Man, where most art is temporal and eventually consumed by fire, it wasn’t the fact that La Contessa burned that bugs its creators and fans. It’s the fact that Stewart burned it.
“He still looked at La Contessa as a symbol of Burning Man, and he didn’t know it wasn’t really wanted at Burning Man anymore,” said Hopkins, who has heard around Gerlach that Stewart has been boasting of torching La Contessa.
“If it had burned with all of us around it, as a ceremony, it would have been okay,” Hopkins said.
That was a sentiment voiced by many who knew La Contessa. Jones said this was the ultimate insult. “If someone was going to burn it down, I wish it could be us.”
Private funeral services for La Contessa were planned for February 2.
P.S. While the figurehead was never returned or found, the crew did get a chance to burn La Contessa, at least in effigy. The artists built a small-scale replica of the ship and then gathered around it for funeral services on February 2, 2007, on an isolated section of bayfront property on Hunter’s Point in San Francisco.
Attendees placed their offerings on the ship as we partied around her for a few hours. Then she was carried to the water’s edge and secured on a small barge and set on fire, towed by a rowboat as she burned and as the Extra Action Marching Band walked up and down the waterfront, watching and playing a slow funeral dirge.
The Return of John Law
Another ghost from Burning Man past returned to haunt Larry Harvey and Black Rock City LLC at the beginning of 2007, a specter that had been quietly watching from the shadows as the event hit its renaissance period. And he brought with him a credible threat to destroy Larry’s big plans.
“Burning Man belongs to everyone. Burning Man is the sum of the efforts of the tens of thousands of people who have contributed to making Burning Man what it is. The name Burning Man and all attendant trademarks, logos, and trade dress do not belong to Larry Harvey alone or to Black Rock City LLC. If they don’t belong to anyone, they belong to the public domain,” was how John Law began a January 9, 2007 blog post announcing his intentions.
This was more than a rant from a bitter old-timer or the bold bluster of artists who believed they had more power than they really did. Because when John Law said the Burning Man name and logos didn’t belong to Larry alone, he was right — they also belonged to John, and now he was back, making public a legal fight that had been simmering in private for much of the previous year.
Larry Harvey started Burning Man on Baker Beach in 1986 (with help from carpenter Jerry James), but it was John Law, Michael Mikel, and their Cacophony Society cohorts who in 1990 brought the countercultural gathering and its iconic central symbol out to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, where it grew into a beloved and unique event attended by 40,000 people in 2006 (a population that grew to 50,000 in coming years).
John hadn’t wanted anything to do with Burning Man since he left the event in 1996 — until January 2007, when he filed a lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court seeking money for his share of the Burning Man brand. Even more troubling to Larry and a corporation that has aggressively protected the event from commercial exploitation, John threatened to move the trademarks into the public domain.
The suit roiled and divided the Bay Area’s large community of burners. Some supported John and his declaration that “Burning Man belongs to everyone,” hoping to break the tight control that Larry and Black Rock City LLC have exerted over their event and its icons, images, and various trademarks.
“If it’s a real fucking movement, they can give up control of the name,” John told me in the first newspaper interview he had given about Burning Man in years. “If it’s going to be a movement, great. Or if it’s going to be a business, then it can be a business. But I own a part of that.”
Yet those who control the business, as well as many attendees who support it, fear what will happen if anyone can use the Burning Man name. They envision MTV coverage, a burner clothing line from the Gap, Girls Gone Wild at Burning Man, billboards with Hummers driving past the Man, and other co-optations by corporations looking for a little countercultural cachet.
“We’ve been fighting attempts by corporations to exploit the Burning Man name since the beginning,” BRC communications director Marian Goodell wrote on the Burning Man Web site in response to the lawsuit. “Making Burning Man freely available would go against everything all of us have worked for over the years. We will not let that happen.”
Larry, John, and Michael became known as the Temple of Three Guys as they led the transformation of the event from a strange camping trip of less than 100 people in 1990 to a temporary city of burners experimenting with new forms of art and commerce-free community. By 1996 it had grown to about 8,000 people.
“Plaintiff is recognized as the one individual without whose leadership and ability the event would not have been planned or produced,” the lawsuit alleged. “Plaintiff alone became recognized as the ‘face’ of the event to local residents and authorities, and was the event’s facilitator, technical director and supervisor.”
John’s central role in the event was also spelled out in Brian Doherty’s 2004 book, This Is Burning Man, and in my interviews over the years with many of the original attendees. As John told me, “I put everything I had into it.”
Michael, also known as Danger Ranger or M2, played a key role as the event’s bookkeeper and the founder of the Black Rock Rangers, who oversee safety and security and serve as the liaison between attendees and outside authorities.
The lawsuit minimized Larry’s role in the 1990 event, even drawing on Burning Man’s spectator-participant paradigm to call him out: “Harvey, however, did not participate at all other than to arrive at the event as a spectator after it was completely set up.... the 1990 event on the playa motivated Harvey to take a more active role the next year, so he adopted the role of artistic director thereafter.” The three men then entered into a legal partnership to run the event.
Yet Larry was always the one with the vision for growing the event into what it has become today — a structured, inclusive gathering based on certain egalitarian and artistic principles — while Law preferred smaller-scale anarchy and tweaks on the central icon.
“That was really the underlying conflict, but it got charged with emotion because 1996 was a harrowing year,” Larry told me, one of the few comments he would make on the record at the time because of legal concerns.
That was the year in which Law’s close friend Michael Furey was killed in a motorcycle accident on the playa as they were setting up for the event. And on the last night, attendees sleeping in a tent were accidentally run over by a car and seriously injured, prompting the creation of a civic infrastructure and restrictions on driving in future years.
John had a falling-out with Larry and no longer wanted anything to do with the event, while Michael opted to remain; today he and Larry serve on BRC’s six-member board of directors. But John didn’t want to completely give up his stake in Burning Man, in case it was sold at some point.
So the three men agreed to create Paper Man, a limited liability corporation whose only assets would be the Burning Man name and associated trademarks, which the entity would license for use by the BRC every year for a nominal fee, considering that all proceeds from the event get put right back into it.
Larry has always seen that licensing as a mere formality, particularly since the terms of the agreement dealing with participant noninvolvement have caused John’s share to sink to 10 percent. In the meantime, however, tensions have risen in recent years between Larry and Michael, who has been given fewer tasks and even joined the board of the dissident Borg2 burner group.
Larry didn’t pay Paper Man’s corporate fees in 2003, but the corporation was reconstituted by Michael, who was apparently concerned about losing his stake in Burning Man (Michael wouldn’t comment on the dispute at that time, but he stuck with the Borg and resolved his differences with Larry and the Borg). Larry resisted formal written arrangements with Paper Man in subsequent years, but Michael insisted.
Finally, on August 6, 2006, Larry drew up a 10-year licensing agreement and signed for Paper Man, while business manager Harley Dubois signed for the BRC. Michael responded with a lawsuit that he filed in San Francisco Superior Court on August 23rd, seeking to protect his interests in Paper Man. That suit later went into arbitration, which was suspended by both sides when John filed his suit. John said he was prompted by the earlier lawsuit.
“I didn’t start this particular battle,” John told me. “My options were to sign over all my rights to those guys and let them duke it out or do this.”
Most burners have seen Larry as a responsible steward of the Burning Man brand, with criticisms mainly aimed at the BRC’s aggressiveness in defending it via threats of litigation. But John still believes Larry intends to cash in at some point, telling me, “I don’t trust Larry at all. I don’t trust his intentions.”
John was skeptical of Larry’s claims to altruism and even saw the Green Man theme — which includes a commitment of additional resources to make the event more environmentally friendly — as partly a marketing ploy.
“If they’re going to get money for it, then I should get some to do my own public events,” John said. “And if they don’t want to do that, then it should be in the public domain.”
Yet as Burning Man spokesperson Andie Grace wrote in response to online discussions of the conflict, “Our heartfelt belief in the core principles of Burning Man has always compelled us to work earnestly to protect it from commodification. That resolve will never change. We are confident that our culture, our gathering in the desert, and our movement will endure.”
And it did, without losing control of the Burning Man trademarks. John eventually dropped the lawsuit after reaching a confidential settlement with the Borg, the terms of which remain secret, but which knowledgeable sources tell me was a monetary payout to John Law.
Stoking the Fire
While the ghosts of its past were coming back to haunt Burning Man, its off-playa future was being charted by the growing number of do-gooders who wanted the culture to be about more than the annual event.
Carmen Mauk really wanted Burners Without Borders to become a hub for facilitating good deeds, not simply an organization for responding to natural disasters. She wanted to help channel all that wondrous burner energy that she’d been observing since 1999.
“We tried to get enough projects going in enough places that we could say, don’t look to (Hurricane) Katrina to understand what Burners Without Borders was. That was sort of a space in time thing. Look to what your community is doing and how they are making an impact everyday on things they care about,” Carmen said.
And fire was one of those things they cared about. The National Parks Service was proposing banning bonfires on Ocean Beach in San Francisco in 2007, its final solution to a long simmering concern about the debris left on the beach by impromptu bonfires. For Carmen, it seemed like just the kind of problem that burners could solve.
After thousands of people complained — many of them prompted by a notice sent out on the Burning Man online lists — the NPS delayed the announced ban and took groups that included the Surfrider Foundation and BWB up on their offer to help develop an alternative solution limiting where fires could be lit.
The initial proposal called for standard concrete fire rings that Surfrider volunteers would help maintain, but Burners Without Borders got involved and sponsored a design competition, putting out the call to the vast community of Burning Man artists.
“If there’s any two things we know about, it’s fire and not leaving a mess,” Tom Price told me in January of 2007 as I wrote about the resolution of a conflict that I’d been covering for my newspaper since before BWB got involved. “The beach will be safer, cleaner, and more beautiful.”
BWB and NPS selected the designs on January 17, 2007 including a beach primrose flower ring by Rebecca Anders and Yasmin Mawaz-Khan of the Flaming Lotus Girls, and a starfish design by Box Shop owner and FLG Charlie Gadeken. They were separate proposals, but both were built at the Box Shop with volunteer help from its many associated minions.
Rebecca later told me that Burning Man inspires people toward art and creativity, but that it is the act — that proactive gesture to do something big or impactful, something that elevates the culture — that was the essence of what burners started to become during those years.
“The fire blooms on the beach was a prime example of that because a creative solution came from outside the Parks Service, which is not in the business of administering public art and all the bureaucracy inherent if you were to do it the way the city does it,” Rebecca said.
NPS spokesperson Rudy Evenson told me that he and others in the agency were happy about the compromise: “ It has a lot of potential to be a win-win situation.” And it was, one that endures to this day, with beachgoers enjoying some low-tech Burning Man fire art on weekend night bonfires that have become more popular than ever. To Tom and Carmen, it was an example of what’s possible within the ethos and spirit that Burning Man cultivates.
“Because Burners Without Borders-like things were happening before the name came about, it just became a convenient name and thing for people to point to and for people to be like, wow, this is something I want to be a part of. I want to be a part of something larger than Burning Man because it’s only one week a year,” Carmen said.
Rebecca also said she that it was during this period that she was starting to see the formation of a renaissance within Burning Man. “It is spreading and the seeds of it are going and becoming new things and different things,” Rebecca told me. “Multiple strands of the ethics that have grown out of the Burning Man culture are spreading in really good ways.”
For Carmen, it was about extending the wild visions that burners would pursue with art projects and theme camps, and applying it to, well, just about anything: “It might be a stupid, crazy idea, but a good burner will say, ‘You know what, that sounds crazy, but there’s something there so let’s keep talking about it.’ Not ever shutting someone down.”
Like Burning Man itself, Burners Without Borders was beginning to evolve. And for Tom, who was becoming more deeply involved with both the event and his adopted city of San Francisco, the relationship between the two seemed telling.
“Burning Man is this graduate study program in reinventing yourself. It’s an immersion language program in the language of self. And for tens of thousands of people, it has become this annual ritual where they go out there and reinvent themselves, or they manifest a self they can’t be the rest of the time,” Tom told me later. “I often come back to something Larry Harvey told the Wall Street Journal once. He said, the thing about San Francisco is it tends to attract people who are looking to find themselves, and the ones who do, tend to stay. Well, Burning Man is the same way, a place where people who go looking to find a new self, and they try on this and they try on that, so on and so forth, and the ones who find themselves in that, many come back every year because they need that reboot. Others, on the other hand, go, find themselves, and realize they can live in that self all year long and they don’t really need to go back. But it has created this culture where people understand they have permission to architect the universe pretty much whichever way they want to. And so San Francisco is this ongoing experiment in mashing people up and seeing what happens.”
It is indeed tough to predict the future, or where its events will lead. Andie and Tom had their baby, Juniper Pearlington Grace, on August 5, 2007. Ten days later, a massive earthquake hit Pisco, Peru, and Burners Without Borders responded with its biggest cleanup and rebuilding effort since Hurricane Katrina.
A Threat to Burner Workspaces
Renegade artist Jim Mason heeded Green Man’s call in his typically exuberant fashion, developing an innovative gasification system that turns biomass waste products into a usable fuel similar to natural gas. Collaborating with fellow artists and engineers in The Shipyard space that he created in Berkeley, Mason was doing groundbreaking work with interesting environmental implications.
The group converted Chicken John’s 1975 pickup truck to run on substances like wood chips and coffee grounds, and Jim and Chicken have been working principally with artists Michael Christian and Dann Davis to develop a fire-spewing, waste-eating, carbon-neutral slug called Mechabolic for Burning Man.
“Chicken’s shitty truck is going to be sitting in front of the Silicon Valley’s big alternative-energy conference for venture capitalists,” Jim told me on May 22 as he headed to the Clean Technology 2007 confab, an illustration of the place little innovators were starting to find amid the big.
The New York Times featured Mechabolic in a technology article it ran earlier in May about the Green Man theme, and the project was a centerpiece of Tom Price’s green evangelizing, much of which centered on the big potential of small innovators like Jim Mason.
“It’s the Internet versus the big three networks” was how Tom compared the big and small approaches to environmental solutions. “The goal is to show how easy and do-it-yourself profound solutions can be.”
Jim would eventually perfect his technology and later push the project to the point of marketing his Gasifier Experimenter Kits to hobbyists, burners, university researchers, and industrial engineers, selling hundreds of the kits for $2,695 each through his “Gek Gasifier” website with the help of his then-girlfriend, Flaming Lotus Girl Jessica Hobbs.
“Through gasification, we can convert nearly any solid dry organic matter into a clean burning, carbon neutral, gaseous fuel. Whether starting with wood chips or walnut shells, construction debris or agricultural waste, the end product is a flexible gaseous fuel you can burn in your internal combustion engine, cooking stove, furnace or flamethrower,” advertised his website.
But first, Jim had to fight a battle against the Man on behalf of quasi-legal burner workspaces like The Shipyard throughout the region. Ragtag approaches like Mason’s don’t fit well into institutional assumptions about art and technology, as he discovered May 11th when Berkeley city officials ordered him to shut down The Shipyard or bring it into immediate compliance with various municipal codes.
“They need to temporarily leave while they seek the permits that ensure it’s safe to be there,” Berkeley Planning Director Dan Marks told me. He criticized The Shipyard for using massive steel shipping containers as a building material, doing electrical work without permits, and not being responsive to city requests.
The conflict illustrated a larger struggle that Burning Man artists and builders were starting to face at a time when their numbers and ambitions were increasing. They were becoming victims of their own success, unable to keep flying under the radar. The Box Shop suddenly faced inspections from fire and building officials in San Francisco after my article on the Flaming Lotus Girls came out, and Oakland officials would later threaten both the American Steel and NIMBY warehouses with closure for various code violations, both of which took burner community mobilizations to counter.
Berkeley’s move stopped work on gasification and other projects as The Shipyard crew scrambled to satisfy bureaucratic demands — but it also prompted a letter-writing campaign and offers of outside help and collaboration that convinced Mayor Tom Bates and City Council member Darryl Moore to meet with Jim on May 21st and agree to help The Shipyard stay in business.
Berkeley Fire Chief David Orth and other officials fighting The Shipyard said that Bates asked for their cooperation. “A request has been made to see what can be done to keep the facility there but bring it into compliance,” Orth told me.
All involved say The Shipyard had a long way to go before it was legal and accepted by the city, but they eventually prevailed. Among other things, Mason had to prove that the old, recycled oceangoing shipping containers (which form the walls that enclose the Shipyard and other Bay Area artists’ collectives) are safe.
Stanford-educated Jim Mason thought the whole episode was ridiculous, and the fight left him embittered with how mainstream authorities quash small innovators for what he considered spurious reasons. In 2009, Jim helped lead the fundraising drive to help Mike Snook (La Contessa’s former captain) and NIMBY Warehouse make expensive improvements to their isolated Oakland warehouse to satisfy city regulators, personally contributing at least $1,000 to the cause.
“Each of us has been here. Each of us is really still here in some manner. And each of us will most likely continue to be here in some manner or other forever,” Jim wrote in a fundraising appeal. “I don’t really think these institutions are beatable. I’ve lost my idealism on this one. The best we can hope for is management of a chronic problem to a state of tolerable pain. And the next project we do, the creatives vs. standards enforcement dance will start again, with blood soon flowing across the dance floor.”
Burning Man started as an underground happening, but within just a few years, it needed to negotiate with the cops and other authorities to survive. As it grew, those challenges became all the more difficult and expensive (the Borg paid $1.3 million in fees to various government agencies to stage Burning Man in 2009). Yet burners believed deeply in the do-it-yourself ethos, seeing it as the key to salvation and innovation.
“Places like The Shipyard, which is a cauldron of ideas, don’t fit into the traditional model of how a city should work,” Tom told me at the time. “The fringes, where the rules are a little fuzzy, is where surprisingly creative things happen.”
Corporate Barbarians at the Gates
Rather than small artists and innovators, it was Burning Man’s relationship with corporations that had started to become a simmering concern as the 2007 event neared, particularly after a long article about Burning Man appeared in the magazine Business 2.0, “Burning Man Grows Up,” about corporations involved with the Green Man theme.
As the article said, “The event is supposed to run on what participants call a ‘gift economy.’ They have no truck with U.S. currency once inside the event’s trash fence. Even bartering is frowned upon. The fact that the organization sells coffee and ice is controversial enough. Imagine the reaction, then, when Burning Man makes the riskiest business move in its history: It’s going to allow companies to exhibit products at the 2007 event.”
The article talked about Burning Man’s close relationship with Google, whose founders are regular attendees and who were creating an application called “Burning Man Earth” that would be on display that year, along with other corporate intrusions.
“A venture capitalist is bringing a vast solar-power array. Four wind-power companies will be placing turbines around the Man. PR maven Melody Haller of the Antenna Group will be bringing a camp full of her clean-tech CEOs. ‘We’re inviting the Greeks into the heart of Troy,’ says Tom Price, Burning Man’s new environmental director. ‘Burning Man may have to destroy itself to save the planet.’ Destroy itself? Well, possibly. Those 40,000 attendees are Burning Man’s only tangible asset,” read the article.
R.U. Sirius, the author of Counterculture through the Ages who appeared with Larry at the Commonwealth Club event at the end of 2004, raised the issue on his popular “10 Zen Monkeys” blog with an article entitled, “Has ‘The Man’ Infiltrated Burning Man.” I also mentioned the controversy on the Guardian blog and Scott Beale did the same on Laughing Squid, a blog popular with burners, highlighting this quote from the article: “America’s biggest counterculture jamboree is also a $10 million business. Now it’s trying to leverage its brand — and save the planet — by (gasp!) inviting corporate participants.”
Online message boards were filled with the comments of burners angry that the event was opening itself to corporate intrusion. Much of the Business 2.0 article seemed to equate growing up with becoming more businesslike, and it raised fears that Burning Man wasn’t just going green, it was going mainstream and looking for corporate partnerships and synergies and other MBA lingo. But Larry insisted that just isn’t the case, and that the 30 small environmental entrepreneurs that will fill the green pavilion is not the opening of Pandora’s Box.
“It all started with the Business 2.0 article. That’s what ginned it up. We had announced our plans in detail months before and no one said anything. And with the Business 2.0 article, I believe, people are responding to the writer’s attempt to translate what we were saying into business-speak,” Larry said in July on the R.U. Sirius radio show. “And then they got the idea that we were opening our gates to big corporations.”
Which Larry said wasn’t true. Any big corporations that had expressed interest in setting up shop in the green pavilion were driven away by the Burning Man rules, and the principle of “decommodification,” which states, “In order to preserve the spirit of giving, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation.”
With the John Law conflict over Burning Man’s trademarks still fresh and unresolved, the process of creating a “green pavilion” around the base of the Man created concerns that corporate America had finally found a wedge into the Burning Man world, sneaking around the edicts against advertising, commodification, or other commercial intrusions by bearing green gizmos.
“In some ways, we hope this year will be an environmental and alternative energy expo,” Larry had told me in January, using language more reminiscent of a Las Vegas trade show than the middle-of-nowhere freakfest he fathered.
Larry, Tom, and company are very aware of the dangers of letting the business people ply their wares on the playa, and they made clear that all the rules against logos, advertising materials, or other forms of overt marketing applied in the green pavilion. But it was a tough balancing act that had hit some early rough spots — such as what kinds of donations that could be accepted from questionable companies trying to greenwash their image — and the jury was still out about how it would all play on the playa.
Burners by the Bay
The Burning Man scene was thriving in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2007 as many of the camps prepared to go big, which meant that there were fundraiser dance parties pretty much every weekend. And more than ever, the Burning Man parties took on a certain unmistakable style.
The culture’s regular flair for costuming was still there, but it had also spawned burner-inspired fashions by designers such as Tamo, Silver Lucy, Anastasia, and Miranda Caroligne, imbuing the party scene with unique sartorial styles, from the feather and leather tribal look popularized by El Circo to the retro-futurism look of the steampunks from Kinetic Steam Works to an infinite variety of sexy and colorful fashion mash-ups.
Burning Man performance arts, from burlesque to circus acts to unusual dance troupes, were also bringing a creative element into the parties, something I planned to explore more by delving into the indie circus tribes that were collaborating on creating the Red Nose District at Burning Man in 2007.
The most ambitious art installations that Black Rock City LLC funded in 2007 were also being built in the Bay Area by huge volunteer crews. Peter Hudson — an artist whose specialty was stroboscopic zoetropes, which used motion and strobe lights to bring figures to life — had dozens of volunteer workers cycling through his San Francisco workspace to build “Homouroboros,” and all were sworn to secrecy about what it actually was.
In Berkeley, Jim Mason and company were working on Mechabolic and Michael Christian and his crew were just down the street building his massive Koilos sculpture — both of them funded projects. But the real action was in nearby West Oakland, where a collective of burner artists had opened and occupied the old American Steel warehouse.
Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito, whose Passage sculpture from Burning Man 2005 was still perched outside the San Francisco Ferry Building, occupied a large section of American Steel to work on their most ambitious creation to date: Crude Awakening, which was a series of massive human figures made of steel gathering around a tall wooden oil derrick.
One afternoon, I arrived at massive warehouse on my newly refurbished burner bicycle — furry basket on the back, custom-welded handlebars, covered in a thick red paint that looked like stucco — and pedaled through an indoor neighborhood divided up into streets, each street containing several camps of burner artists at work, maybe 20 camps in all. It was like riding through Burning Man, in miniature and indoors. Dan and Karen’s huge human sculptures dominated their section of the shop and guarded the entrance outdoors.
But it was the smaller projects that filled out this workspace, the biggest of its kind in the Bay Area. I had gotten the call from my old camp, Opulent Temple, that they needed some extra minions so I agreed to help out with their impossibly ambitious project: a massive 10-foot tall steel “star” stage (which is actually five stages, all cut and welded from scratch) and a huge open air bamboo dome.
I’d already put in a few recent work days on the stage at the Box Shop and I wanted to see and help with the bamboo dome, Rich’s grand dream from the beginning of his relationship with Syd and Opulent Temple. “The culture of Burning Man is to reinvent yourself and do something better than the year before, so inevitably that usually involves getting bigger. And we’ve gotten caught up in that,” Syd told me later, after a bit of reflection.
I found OT’s dome crew on the last street, just down from Neverwas, a steam-powered Victorian house on wheels that also got funding that year, and I truly got a sense of how overly ambitious Syd and his crew had become. They were bolting, cinching, and constructing 20 sections of the dome, each one 50-foot long arcs that they had painstakingly engineered over the last couple months.
They were putting in long hours every night in a race against the clock to get it all done — and then just hoping that it would all go up on the playa as planned. “We bit off more than we could chew… If we’d had a couple more cool heads, we might have listened that that was a bad idea,” Syd would later tell me. “Rich is a crazy artist, and that should be taken literally. Talented, smart, capable, but you should not follow them down every path they want to go. And we did, and we paid for it.”
Sound and Fury
One key difference between ambitious projects like Crude Awakening and the Opulent Temple’s effort was that the latter project wasn’t qualified to receive any money from Black Rock City LLC because it was a sound camp, and sound camps — no matter how artistic or expensive — weren’t considered art projects.
Yet it was the DJs associated with these camps that were the prime draw to the dance party fundraisers that were the main source of revenue to Burning Man camps, and where the DJs would usually spin for free to support their community. “The greatness of the event relies on the ability of these people to creatively fundraise,” Syd said. “It’s the dance culture that gives them the resources to throw the kind of party they want, as well as the kind of party we want.”
Yet Burning Man’s leaders hadn’t recognized that contribution. Larry had certainly defended the sound camps against the attacks by Borg2. “The perception that the ravers have taken over was a myth to begin with. It’s bosh,” Larry told me at the time. “They are attracting people who love the event and like to dance to that music. That’s okay. It’s a big playa.”
But Larry also told me and others, including Syd, that he didn’t personally like the big sound camps and had never even visited one to see what that scene was like. “It’s still a head scratcher that Larry has never been to the Opulent Temple. He’s never seen it in action. And in that sense, he has no idea what goes on out there,” Syd said of a camp that was the most popular spot on the playa some nights.
To Syd, that showed a real disregard for his contribution to Burning Man, an event whose attendees were rapidly growing at least in part because of nightlife that Opulent Temple helped create. “Even just being honored and respected is motivating to people, and not getting that is discouraging,” Syd said.
Syd and Laird Archer, another DJ who had long supported the Burning Man scene, had talked about making an issue of it in 2005, but decided to back off when the Borg2 standoff erupted. But after El Circo left Burning Man in frustration with the lack of support and other camps burned out on the cost and difficulty of staging sound camps, they appealed to Black Rock City LLC for some support, such as free tickets (which many artists received), logistical help on the playa from Art Support Services, a common generator, something.
Syd and others — including Matty Dowlen with El Circo and Manny Alferez from Green Gorilla Lounge — appealed to Burning Man brass for help. After a meeting and correspondence, the Burning Man board discussed the issue and the Borg’s Business Manager Harley Dubois delivered the response to Syd. “In so many words,” he said, “they said we can take you or leave you.”
“They said, no, we don’t really consider music art,” Manny told me. “I remember being in the meeting, with them saying, ‘We don’t care.’…I think they’re still in disbelief that people come for the music.”
Tom Price and other Borg employees who appreciated the sound camps tried to soften the blow, and there where back channel discussions about allowing the camps to use cranes and other resources available to artists. But officially, the sounds camps were on their own. “Even when we approached it the right way,” Syd said, “the response was still no to everything.”
Why does he think some burners are resentful of the ravers?
“That’s a complicated answer,” he told me. “It goes back to the history of conflict between artists and ravers and their perception that what we’re doing has nothing to do with what they want the event to be in terms of showcasing art. To them, speakers and a DJ, that’s not art. And I get that perspective, in a way, but at the same time, I have to ask whether they’ve seen what some of the camps do, which is way beyond speakers and a DJ,” Syd said, adding, “People like to say what is and is not Burning Man.”
“If it wasn’t for the people, there wouldn’t be Burning Man,” Manny said, noting that Black Rock City became an amazing place, “but I don’t think it was because of the help of Burning Man Inc. or anything Larry Harvey does. It was just a bunch of people putting in their hard work to create this.”
So, like El Circo, Manny decided to stop going to Burning Man, instead putting the time and effort he used to create Green Gorilla Lounge on the playa into opening up Triple Crown, a club on Market Street in San Francisco popular with the Burning Man community. “I said, that’s it, I’m done. Music is my life and when they said music isn’t art, well,” Manny said. “I’m definitely supportive of the people who go build the camps, but I’m not supportive of Burning Man Inc.”
Syd was also disillusioned with the conflict and down on the Borg, but he had his hands full with Opulent Temple’s ambitious project for 2007: the star stages being built at the Box Shop and bamboo dome they were building at American Steel. The dome proved especially problematic on the playa that year.
After a frustrating first weekend of trying to get the dome up, on the Monday before a much-anticipated lunar eclipse that night, Opulent Temple made one final stab at it after somehow securing the use of the biggest cranes on the playa. In that final effort, one of the sections broke, meaning the dome would never go up, instead stacked in a pile on the playa throughout the event.
“The bamboo project was one of the great failed projects in Burning Man history, just in terms of the money and effort that went into it,” Syd later told me, totaling up the costs from that year: about a $80,000 budget, including $20,000 for dome supplies that was “down the toilet,” leaving the camp more than $30,000 in debt.
Opulent Temple seemed fucked, but Syd said he didn’t lose hope: “I knew we had a community.”
The Man is on Fire
The Man is built to burn, but not on a Monday and not by the hand of an outsider. Yet that’s how it burned in 2007, lighting up a playa darkened by a full lunar eclipse and illuminating the widening divide between Burning Man’s anarchic past and its well-ordered present.
Black Rock City was truly alive that night. Maybe it was people arriving early for the long, slow eclipse of the moon that occurred on the first day of the event, but I’d never seen so many people there on a Monday. There was a palpable energy in the air, an electric anticipation.
But Syd was feeling something closer to real despair by the night of the lunar eclipse, when he had been booked to DJ on the dance floor art car of Garage Mahal — his old camp and my new one — as we threw a party in the deep playa, near the trash fence at the city’s edge, where we could get freaky in the dark and watch the eclipse.
With the failure of Opulent Temple’s broken dome still so fresh and his fatigue deep, Syd seemed to be barely hanging on, moving between completely blank and close to tears. “I was more exhausted than I’ve ever been at Burning Man. I was totally tapped out. And the only reason I played was Garage Mahal was my original camp and Tamo asked me to play for this very special occasion, the lunar eclipse. The night was very fuzzy. One of my only memories was Joe West telling me the Man was on fire and I didn’t believe him.”
I also didn’t believe it at first, thinking that someone was messing with us, maybe with some bright lights to simulate a fake burn. But it was enough for us to take the party mobile and check it out, joining a wave of art cars rolling in from the deep playa. I still thought it was a prank or piece of theater until we rolled up next to the darkened Man and sniffed the distinct smell of the recent burn. The area around the man was cordoned off when we rolled up, with Black Rock Rangers and members of the crew that built the man keeping people out.
Nobody knew much about what happened, other than it was an apparent act of sabotage, the early arson that had long been a threat of disgruntled old burners who longed for a return of the chaos, and everyone on the perimeter was somber and dejected. They’d been busting their asses for weeks to get things ready and were looking forward to a little recreation time, but now this.
For all of the writing about Burning Man that I have done for the Guardian, I didn’t work as a journalist at the event, which was my vacation. But that changed in 2007. For the first time, I brought my laptop computer with me so I could do a reaction piece to the Green Man theme for the Guardian.
And as we sat silently watching the burned Man, the sky starting to lighten with the approaching dawn, I was struck by a powerful thought: “Shit, now I have to work tomorrow.” This was big news, coming at the end of a big night. We boarded Garage Mahal and headed back to camp to sort it out.
As the night moved toward dawn and the moon emerged from the eclipse, bits and pieces of information began to trickle in. Witnesses saw someone scale the man using rope and set off some incendiary device and he was arrested while making his getaway. But it was hard to put stock in playa rumors, which continued to come into our camp as the moon set and the sun rose in perfect synchronicity.
After a few hours sleep, I grabbed my notebook and set to work, first finding a campmate with a satellite phone. I called my editor to see what the outside world knew about what happened and learned that only the basic details had gotten out. Internet connections on the playa are spotty at best.
Next I called the Pershing County Sheriff’s Department, who told me the suspect is Paul Addis, 35, of San Francisco, and that he was being held on charges of arson, possession of illegal fireworks, and resisting arrest. Now, the main question was, “Why?” which I hoped to answer by heading into Media Mecca, the press camp next to Center Camp, where I could also pick up an Internet connection to post a report.
“We have the means and the will. The event continues on schedule, and the Man will burn on Saturday night,” Burning Man communications director Andie Grace said during a press conference on the playa that day.
Chicken had even more for me when I found him tinkering with his gasifier-fueled truck. He’d known Addis since 1995 when they attended Burning Man together, and he said that he 86ed Addis from his old Odeon Bar maybe a dozen times. They ran in the same social circles, both tied closely to estranged Burning Man founder John Law and the Cacophony Society.
“Paul Addis was a Cacophonist. If there was any one flag he saluted, that’s the one,” Chicken told me. “He was a contrarian fighting the world.”
Chicken, Law, and many of their cohorts who helped run the event in the early days have long talked about burning the man early. In fact, Chicken said founder Larry Harvey clashed with Law in 1995 — the beginning of their falling out — when Law wanted to burn the man early and had to be talked out of the idea by his friends.
“Everybody talks about it every year,” Peter Hudson — creator of Homouroboros, perhaps the best interactive art piece on the playa that year — told me on the playa as the Man was still down. “We talk about, ‘Let’s burn it down on a Monday.”
Yet arson is still arson, even in Black Rock City. And if Larry and the other leaders of Black Rock City LLC appreciated the art and irony of an old-school burner with a painted face and manic intentions rappelling off of a prematurely burning 40-foot wooden man at 4 a.m. like some kind of demented superhero, they didn’t show it.
“He’s a hero. He did the thing that we’ve been talking about doing for a decade,” Chicken told me on the playa. “No matter how misguided he was, his intention was to facilitate art.” But if there was a teachable moment or opportunity for community building here, the Borg didn’t appreciate it.
“I think this was an excellent opportunity to have some democracy,” Chicken told me, noting that the burner community should be able to weigh in on whether Black Rock City LLC presses charges or pushes for leniency, or even whether and how the Man should be rebuilt. “The reaction has been very top down.”
Years later, then I discussed the criticism with Larry, he denied that the LLC had simply ordered a new Man built, saying the crew just did it themselves without consulting Larry or the Borg: “The builders just did it. That’s the culture. There was no order.”
Addis on American Dream on Acid
Not everyone took the early burn so lightly. Many online commenters to my Guardian post and others were outraged by the arson and noted that someone could have gotten killed. And many of those who worked for Burning Man, particularly those who needed to frantically rebuild the Man, were outraged.
Years later, longtime Black Rock City Department of Public Works employee Bruiser boiled over with anger when I downplayed Addis’s act, showing me an expensive knife that he said Addis had dropped on the playa during his arrest. With menace in his eyes, Bruiser told me, “When he gets out of prison, he can come and get it from me.”
I wrote a couple articles about the early burn from the playa, but Chicken warned me on the playa to be careful what I wrote about Addis, because he was potentially dangerous. When I got back to the Guardian office the next week, Addis had left a note and his business card in my mailbox, saying he wanted to talk to me about the things I’d been writing.
In the meantime, Addis had posted a comment on the Guardian website, addressing his critics. “This is the *alleged* arsonist/douchebag/attention whore himself,” he began, going on to cast the arson as a well-planned operation by a group he called Black Rock Intelligence. “We could give a fuck less what you all think of us for doing this. Most of you are newbies who have been drawn in by the semi-religious nature of the event, or maybe just the easy drugs and easier sex. You have nothing to offer the event other than your fucking money and obedience.”
Despite the tacit support in my Burning Man coverage for Larry’s efforts to push the event toward greater sociopolitical relevance, particularly as we approached the end of President Bush’s disastrous reign, I was disgusted and dismayed that week when Larry announced the 2008 art theme: “American Dream.” So were most of the people I talked to, who were vocal in publicly criticizing it.
Larry may be trying to reclaim America from the red state yahoos, which is a fine goal, but to overtly make this countercultural event about American patriotism seemed to me to be an unforgivable mistake and severe misreading of the sensibilities of his core audience.
Personally, I tend toward Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s view that patriotism is a vice that implies racism and causes warfare, and the sooner we can recognize it for the evil it is, the sooner we evolve. So when I called Addis, I was surprised to learn that he was an unlikely supporter of Larry’s new theme.
In a long and rambling telephone conversation, Addis generally reinforced his disgust with the state of Burning Man and American society in general. But when I asked about the theme, he said that he thinks nationalism and patriotism are good things worth celebrating: “People have a right to be proud of where they’re from.”
Addis told me he considers himself a Scottish nationalist, among other things. Despite his comments in messages to the Guardian, Laughing Squid, and other media outlets (which he didn’t deny writing), in which Addis talks about being part of the plot to burn the man early, he told me, “I didn’t burn shit.”
Asked about the witnesses who say they saw him do it and who subsequently detained him, he told me, “Maybe there were a bunch of dopplegangers out there....It could have been any one of them.” But he said he definitely applauds the gesture: “Like so many other people, I thought it was a great prank. Monday is the new Saturday.”
Throughout the conversation, Addis seemed to be channeling Hunter S. Thompson, who he played at the time in a one-man show he created, and whose “B. Duke” moniker he adopted. Maybe his erratic diatribes were exacerbated by the fact that he had just dropped acid a few hours earlier, or so he told me. But he wasn’t happy when I noted his gonzo schtick, telling me, “Some of us don’t have to channel anything, we just happen to have a certain mindset. It’s possible that we were both just born this way.”
Addis seems to believe that big gestures like torching the man can prompt people to rally for change. “In any situation, it only takes one person to make a difference. I firmly believe that.” Beyond just taking back Burning Man, Addis wanted to reclaim the country from the screwheads and war mongers, to end the Iraq War, and help “rehumanize” the returning soldiers.
As he announced grandly, “We’re taking it back, that hulking retard known as America.”
Burning the Man
Years later, after Addis was released from the two-year prison stint that he got for burning the Man, I finally got a chance to hear how things went down that night from his perspective, when he was allowed to freely discuss it without fear of criminal sanction.
Addis can be very grandiose and self-important, prone to presenting himself in heroic terms or as the innocent victim of other people’s conspiracies, such as the police in two West Coast cities who arrested him in a pair of bizarre incidents within weeks of his arrest at Burning Man.
Addis was arrested in Seattle for carrying a bag of guns in public, which he says were props for the one-man play about outlaw journalist Hunter S. Thompson he was doing at the time, following a conflict with a hotel clerk about problems with his credit card. Then, a week later, he got busted for possession of fireworks and an air gun near Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, a high-profile incident that police said at the time was a plot to burn down the church, a widely reported notion that Addis calls preposterous.
“It’s a stone building and I’ve got a fistful of firecrackers,” said Addis, who served more than five months in jail for the Grace Cathedral incident, which was magnified in the media and people’s minds by his pattern of arrests and bizarre behavior during that period.
Addis has innocent narratives for each incident, blaming others for overreacting, and going so far as to blame police for trying to silence him after he used his Man-burner notoriety to speak against the Iraq War and the docility of consumer culture, saying they saw his as “someone up and coming as a potential leader.”
John Law celebrated the attack, writing on the Laughing Squid blog after his sentencing in 2008: “Paul Addis’ early burning of the corporate logo of the Burning Man event last year was the single most pure act of ‘radical self expression’ to occur at this massive hipster tail-gate party in over a decade.”
But it was only Addis and a small circle of Burning Man malcontents that really wanted to elevate him and his act. Although he had grabbed the Holy Grail of disgruntled old cacaphonists, burning the man early, most burners and the general public didn’t appreciate the meaning of the arson attack.
“The act itself was like the performance art I do: I don’t tell people what to think about it,” Addis told me when I asked him to relate the message his attack conveyed.
Among the group of Burning Man haters and malcontents that gained a few new members with each passing year, a faction that included both self-imposed exiles like John Law and provocateur attendees like Chicken John, there was always talk about burning the Man early as the ultimate strike against how ordered the event had become.
“Everyone knew it needed to be done for lots of reasons,” Addis said of his arson attack.
So, after following from the outside an event he attended from 1996 to 1998, Addis returned to Burning Man in 2007 with the sole purpose of torching the Man in order to “bring back that level of unpredictable excitement, that verve, that ‘what’s going to happen next?’ feeling, because it had gotten orchestrated and scripted.”
Addis said members of his group had hatched plans for burning the man early starting in 2004, but nobody actually summoned the will to do it. Finally, Addis said he realized that he was the one person who could safely execute the plan and decided to do it.
“Obviously a gesture like burning down Burning Man is very dangerous and very provocative. From my perspective, the number one concern was safety. No one could get hurt unless it was me,” Addis said.
Critics of the arson attack often note how dangerous it was, pointing out that there were a dozen or so people under the Man when it caught fire, included one man who needed to be awakened. But Addis said that he was on site for at least 30 minutes beforehand, encouraging people to move back with mixed results, shirtless and wearing the red, black, and white face paint that would later make for such an iconic mug shot.
As a full lunar eclipse overhead darkened the playa and set the stage for his act, Addis waited for his cue: someone, who Addis won’t identify, was going to cut the lights that illuminated the Man and give him at least 15 minutes to do his deed in darkness.
“I didn’t do this alone,” Addis said. “The lights were cut by someone else…The lights were cut to camouflage my ascent.”
Unfortunately for Addis, the operation didn’t go as smoothly as he’d hoped. He misestimated the tension in a guide-wire that he planned to climb and the difficulty in using the zip-ties that attached a tent flap to it as steps, slowly pulling himself up the wire, “hand over hand.”
Once he reached the platform at the bottom of one leg, “I reached for this bottle of homemade napalm that I made for an igniter and it’s gone,” dropped during his ascent. And his backup plan of using burlap and lighter fluid took a long time when he couldn’t get his Bic lighter to work under the 15-mph wind.
Then, the lights came back on. “And now I know I’m exposed. Because the whole thing was not to get famous for doing this. It was to get away and have it be a mystery. That was the goal,” Addis said.
But then, Addis got the fire going and it quickly spread up the Man’s leg, and Addis used nylon safety cables to slide down the guide-wire like a zip-line. “I landed perfectly right in front of two Black Rock Rangers who watched me come down,” Addis said. “And I turned to them and said, ‘Your man is on fire.’”
Addis said he was “furious” to see about nine people still under the burning structure, blaming the rangers and yelling at the people to clear the area before declaring, “This is radical free speech at Burning Man” and taking off running. Addis said he stopped at the Steam Punk Treehouse art exhibit, hoping to get lost in the crowd, but headlights converged on his location.
He ran again, with a ranger close behind, and was finally caught, arrested, and taken to Pershing County Jail. The rest — from a controversial sentencing hearing a year later, in which he blames the Borg for intentionally sending him to prison, to his release back onto the streets and stages of San Francisco — would later become the source of Burning Man controversy and lore.
But at the end of Burning Man 2007, there were other signs of Burning Man’s evolution, including Chicken John’s strange and quixotic entry into the mainstream politics of San Francisco, his “city of art and innovation.”
Chicken for Mayor
When I reentered real life back in San Francisco, I was surprised to discover that the only San Francisco mayoral candidate who was poised to qualify for public matching funds was “Chicken” John Rinaldi, a political neophyte who made his name in the Burning Man world.
Chicken knew he couldn’t win against incumbent Mayor Gavin Newsom, who had millions in the bank and high poll numbers, but he wanted to make a statement about life in San Francisco, which he often called the “city of art and innovation.”
It was a lark as much as anything. Chicken told me that he’d never even voted before and didn’t really believe in electoral politics. So when I washed off the dust and returned to the Guardian offices, it seemed strange that he was the only Newsom challenger organized enough to seek public funds.
So I called him up and set up an interview at his home and performance space on César Chávez Street. Someone else let me in to wait because Chicken was at the Ethics Commission office, trying to become the first and only mayoral candidate to qualify for public matching funds, a goal that requires raising at least $25,000 from among 250 city residents — and having the paperwork to prove it, which was proving the hard part for someone traditionally more focused on big ideas than small details.
Chicken said he’d raised about $32,000 since getting into the race the previous month, including $26,700 from city residents, $12,000 of which came in on the deadline date, August 28th. It was an impressive feat that could transform this marginalized, improbable candidate into one of the leading challengers, despite his enigmatic persona, maddeningly elusive platform, and admission that he can’t possibly win.
Chicken wasn’t your typical politician, as his history and home demonstrated. The high ceilings held rigging and pulleys for the regular performances he hosts, although his bar and a pair of church pews were pushed back against one wall this day to make more space for campaign activities. Dammit the Wonder Dog, one of many characters Chicken has promoted over the years, slept on a deflated air mattress still dusty from Burning Man.
The red brick walls of his main room looked like an art gallery, with paintings hanging on one wall selling for up to $2,000. On another wall hung the massive sign for the Odeon Bar — which Rinaldi owned from 2000 to 2005 — with Odeon spelled diagonally from right to left.
In the kitchen area, just inside the front door, the walls held framed posters from many of his projects — the Life-Sized Game of Mousetrap, Circus Ridickuless (the poster for which, at its center, has Rinaldi’s face and the label “Chicken John, Ringmonster”), the Church of the Subgenius (in which Rinaldi’s eponymous partner on The Ask Dr. Hal Show is some kind of high priest), and “The Cacophony Society Presents Klown Krucifixation” — as well as a framed poster of Pippi Longstocking.
Suddenly, Rinaldi blew in the front door, apologized for his tardiness, and declared, “The fucking Ethics Commission. I’m in so much trouble. I’ve probably already racked up $5,000 in fines.”
Chicken’s focus and rhetoric from when I first met him in 2004 during his Borg2 rebellion — arguing for a “radical democratization” of the art-grant selection process and the creation of a more inclusive discussion of the direction and future of both Black Rock City and San Francisco — were echoed in his mayoral campaign.
“What I’m talking about now is the same thing I was talking about with Borg2. It’s the same thing,” Chicken told me.
It’s about inspiration and participation, he said, about coming up with some kind of vehicle through which to facilitate a public discussion about what San Francisco is, what it ought to be, and the role that can be played by all the Chickens out there, all the people who help make this an interesting city but aren’t usually drawn into political campaigns or other conventional institutions.
“The number one qualification for mayor is you have to be passionate about the city you’re running,” Chicken said. “The left of San Francisco can’t agree on anything except the idea of San Francisco.”
And it is Chicken’s San Francisco that helped him transform his pickup truck into a “café racer” that runs on coffee grounds and walnut shells, an alt-fuel project inspired partly by the Green Man theme of this year’s Burning Man. It is the San Francisco that supports his myriad projects — from wacky trips aboard the bus he owns to offbeat performances at his place — and asks for his support with others.
“This is part of the innovation thing,” Chicken said of his candidacy. “Take a mayoral campaign and turn it into an artwork project that raises interesting questions and ideas.”
But should that be funded by taxpayers? Mayor Gavin Newsom’s campaign manager Eric Jaye said he had concerns about Chicken getting money from that source. “It would be interesting to see public money go to someone’s art project,” Jaye said. “This is not the intent. The intent was for this to go to a legitimate candidate.”
Yet how did Chicken raise $12,000 in one day? “I sent out one e-mail,” he said. “At one time there were 12 people outside my door, sliding checks through the slot.”
Again: How? Why? Chicken responded by quoting Albert Einstein, “’There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.’” But when you try to pin down Chicken on what that idea is, why his candidacy seems to have resonated with the underground artists and anarchists and geeks of San Francisco, the answer isn’t entirely clear. And he disputes the idea that this is about him or his connections.
“These aren’t fans,” Chicken said of his contributors. “They are equals in a city of art and innovation. It’s just my time.... I asked for something, and they gave it to me.... People don’t necessarily support me, my ideas, or my platform.”
But in the city of Burning Man’s birth, at a time when the culture was expanding and exploding in fascinating and myriad ways, San Francisco was beginning to open up to the idea that the burners were coming home with new ideas and energies that they wanted to put to use in places other than the playa.
In the end, Chicken never did get the public financing that he sought because the Ethics Commission said he was never able to properly document the source and residency status of enough contributors. And despite receiving the Guardian’s third place endorsement in this ranked-choice election, he finished in sixth place.
“More than half of what I do is a dismal failure,” Chicken admitted. “But failure is how we learn.”
San Francisco and Black Rock City were also learning from Chicken’s high-profile failures. His campaign garnered more local media attention than any of Newsom’s other challengers, raising the profile of San Francisco’s well-established Burning Man community, which was beginning to spread its influence and ethos into new realms. 
Courtesy of Pershing
County Sheriff Dept.
Paul Addis (left, in his memorable mug shot) burned The Man early in 2007 and served two years in prison for it.~ Photo by Pilar Woodman
Homouroboros by Peter Hudson brought a monkey and apple-wielding snake to life. ~ Photo by Dave Le (Splat)
Crude Awakening by Karen Cusolito and Dan Das Mann paid homage to Americans’ relationship to oil. ~ Photo by Jake Balakochi
La Contessa by Simon Cheffins and Greg Jones was an iconic art car destroyed by arson, but its maidenhead sculpture by Monica Maduro remains missing. ~ Photo by Marcy Mendelson
Photo by Waldemar
Ocean Beach Fire Blooms by Rebecca Anders and Yasmin Mawaz-Khan and Burners Without Borders helped campfires remain in San Francisco. ~ Photo by Yasmin Mawaz-Khan
Chicken John ran for mayor in 2007.
~ Poster by Kevin Evans
The Man meets Rosie the Riveter in this Burners Without Borders logo. ~ Logo by Scott Borchardt.