Monday:

From the instant I woke up today I felt a thousand times better.   Hardly felt the shock of the desert at all.  Yesterday I was as crippled as if I had a broken bone or a severe fever, but today I feel nearly fabulous.  I suppose part of it is that I've figured out how to drink water:  treat it like a smoker treats cigarettes, as an accessory, crutch, and constant companion.  Whenever I hit a moment of boredom or inactivity, I treat myself to a swig.  But also I think it's simply that my body is getting used to the conditions.  I suppose before modern transportation it was impossible to be in a nice cool moist environment like San Francisco one day and under one of the most brutal suns in the world the next. 

So now I can look around a bit, and feel around a bit, and take in some of the legendary vibe that is Burning Mann.  My current impression is that it's a culture where creation is king, where you're expected to unleash your whole creative and productive capacity on this empty desert landscape and see what comes out.   So I can run all over the place getting goofy things done and fit right in.  I just launched Radio Free Wrybread ("in conjunction with Radio Free CyberBuss"), 20 watts of pirate radio power filling the playa with its nasty seed at 88.3 fm.  I mounted the antenna on the roof of the CyberBuss, a good 30 feet up, and the range is line of sight, which is miles and miles on this flat desert.  If all goes well soon we'll have call-ins on CB channel 14. 

We're making no attempt to imitate commercial radio.   It's ours ours ours, whatever we feel like doing.  I just finished blending the booty from a dictaphone I'd left on the "coffee table" with some of my own music, and at this moment Cyber Sam is giving the Dust Report, which, by the way, is severe.  I'll post everything in RealAudio here once I get back to the land of wall phones. 

I have the transmitter set up in the primary CyberBuss shade structure, so all day we've been putting on music, especially music made by someone present in the camp or at least on the playa, and we pass the mic around and people take turns DJing.  I've created a monster in Lieutenant Gespacho, who has instantly become one of the best DJs I've ever heard, with patter that is both professional, hysterical, and unpolished in just the right way.  He's been issuing the Gespacho Piss Report, wherein he describes his water in- and outtake.  By the end of the week he'll be a star.

The temptation is to treat the other 12 (!) pirate radio stations as competition, but we're talking about everybody else's projects so people will know exactly what else is going on.  One of the things I like most about this scene is it's deliberate and hard won departure from regular old commercialism.  Nothing's for sale here, including people's labor.  Everything is done in the best and purest spirit of the underground:  for love and satisfaction.  And it's not even built to last, as it'll all burn soon. 

The scene is shaping up.  The city is still sparsely populated, though all estimates are that "this will be a crazy burn".   Things are expected to get dense.  Our camp is shaping up by the hour if not by the minute, and is starting to look like more than merely protection from the sun.  And little "smutty" things are starting to happen, like people tasting each other's skin to determine the playa to salt ratio, and there have been incidents of people eating hershey's kisses from one another's crotches, or something like that.

I'd say the vibe is getting going.  I can feel the momentum in the air.  Zero to sixty in a week.

-Hugh Mann
Monday August 31, 3:36pm playa time    

 

next day

 

Send Hugh a comment

Get me out of here