Only Two Questions?!

Where are the pictures? – Arleen

My camera’s a face mask. Yeah, it’s also a recording device and a medium for artistic expression. But when I wear my camera I observe my environment more than I interact with it. I walk fast and when my mental image-capturing system sees something cool, I capture an angle and move on. Now that the view has been filed away for enjoyment later, I spend no real time appreciating the view. Later I look at hundreds of pictures taken on a quick stroll through some strange city and for lack of many real-time memories, sometimes wonder if I was ever really there.

This was a problem going to Burning Man. It is defined as an interactive experience. Every moment taking pictures is a moment not interacting and may even be a moment of theft, stealing someone’s spontaneity by freezing it into an image for posterity. I’m naturally self-conscious enough and didn’t want to be regarded as some picture-taking non-interactive merely-observant lowlife. Yet I knew if I took a good camera, that’s what I would become. So I split the difference and only took my little pocket camera, the one that takes good pics despite the tiny lens, and fits into a pocket.

It also fits into the side pocket of our truck’s front door and that’s where it was Tuesday morning when the drain cock broke off one of our ice chests and drained out onto the carpet and the desert floor and filled all the driver’s side door pockets with water. The camera never worked again and when I determined that it was gone forever to the great camera shop in the sky, I was not disappointed at all. I felt a sort of relief. Rather than have to pick some days as camera days and some as no-camera days, I was now free of any such concern and could carry on like all those relatively normal people who don’t take any pictures at all. In other words:

I HAVE NO PICTURES! MWA HA HA HA HAAH!

There will be plenty online though. Not just at the main website but in countless Flickr accounts. Just none of me that I know of. No pictures of me in ridiculous outfits of questionable taste and tasteless exposure that I made or modified on the spot. I don’t regret this.

(Burning Man fashion tip: Take old clothes and spare fabric and a good pair of scissors.)

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Didn't you feel like a Republican Dian Fossey watching "Hippies in the Mist?" – Joe the Troll

When my inner anthropologist simply would not be suppressed I did rather enjoy watching the hippies and their suburban wanna-be hangers-on cavort and interact and pretend to be weird in the omnipresent dust, and I am indeed thankful for the most part that I did not have a camera to encourage and amplify this unfortunate tendency of mine. But since I’m not a Republican (really!) the sense of disconnection that I read into the question never really occurred to me. What did occur to me was that there was a fair dollop of hypocrisy in evidence not merely because the DJ at Opulent Palace kept reminding people to vote for Empty Suit Number One (aka BHO) as if he will actually make a significant difference but because at Center Camp I found free copies of a rag put out by the Revolutionary Communist Party.

What’s so hypocritical about a ragtag community of idealists with strings tied into their hair pushing the RCP, you ask? Well, nothing. But idealists with strings tied into their hair who go to Burning Man are a different matter: they have the money to go. And they are far outnumbered by tens of thousands of other people who like to have a good unfettered time and not only have the money to go to this event, they can take a week or two off work to do so and bring large trailers and RVs and thousands of dollars’ worth of booze and food and costumery and props and sets and bicycles and, in the case of hundreds more, modified vehicles (“art cars”) representing investments of tens of thousands of dollars. What the RCP people trying to push their stupid ideology at Burning Man don’t get or choose to ignore is this:

The Burning Man event can not exist without a large and wealthy middle class.

It’s probable that most of them don’t vote Republican, but it’s certain that the general wealth that enables their participation was made possible by Republican and centrist Democrat principles. No country that limits personal economic expression through the application of socialist law could possibly maintain a large population of citizens with the means to waste so much alcohol, clothing, machinery, gasoline, propane, and time as the does the fine citizenry of Black Rock City in the pursuit of nothing more than a very generalized idea of “art” and a fucking good time. Oh my gawd.

(I wasn’t “watching” anyway. I dance! Fuckin A.)