(RM) The Man burns at LuiKotal

The Man burns at LuiKotal

Saturday, 1 September 2007

The past week has been a tough one for me. I've had the Burning Man blues. The Burning Man festival took place from Monday the 27th of August, ending on Monday, the 3rd of September. A community of over 30,000 like-minded souls created an ephemeral metropolis in the heart of the Nevadan desert - the playa - making Black Rock City their Home for the week. I, however, have spent the week in a little clearing in the middle of the jungle: I didn't get to go Home this year!!!

For the uninitiated, you probably have little notion as to what exactly the fuss is about. "So what, you can go next year, can't you?" Yeah, yeah - no problem. I will undoubtedly be there next year. But I missed it this year, dammit! And for that I'm disappointed.

On the other hand, it's partly because of my experience with Burning Man that I find myself currently living at LuiKotal Camp: both require enormous amounts of planning, organisation, patience, and just general wherewithal, and that's simply in order to survive. Anything beyond mere survival calls for even more creativity, both for increased comfort and to have more fun at it. Fortunately, I've still been able to (ok, forced to) rely on these attributes on a regular basis here. I think the BM buzzword of "extreme self-reliance" captures this philosophy well: be responsible for yourself, use the resources at hand to address challenges, get creative...

I wrote a good example of this a couple of months ago in an unposted entry, describing how I repaired our camp's mortar: it's made of a log standing on end, about two feet high, hollowed out at the top to give the basin of the mortar for preparing various local dishes. The wood's been through a lot, and about a month ago a chunk of the side of the mortar broke off. The basin has been very inconvenient to use since then, but I've asked our cooks to prepare meals that require its use nearly every day. Ordering a new one from the village has proved entirely ineffective, as have been the cooks' complaints, until today. I repaired it using an empty can of Nesquik, a pair of garden snips, some pliers, a file, and some metal wire. Of that, the Congolese guys actually seemed genuinely impressed. Bonne idee! [Note: we have since gotten a new mortar, imported from Kinshasa, that is much bigger and stronger than the original. My Nesquik-repaired one, however, is still used periodically for preparing smaller things like chili-pepper salt!]

This is the sort of improvisation that's necessary here. LuiKotal camp is, in the relative sense, well-endowed with Useful Stuff to accomplish things, as compared with the rest of the region the Congolese guys know. We have the logistical wherewithal to procure things we need from elsewhere in the world, and to store and maintain them for use when the need arises. But at any given moment, camp's supplies are definitely finite. So although I might know that a given task might be accomplished better or more easily using some familiar tool or ingredient, there's literally no option to do so. It's necessary to simply make do with what's here, and devise some other solution. The national slogan of the Congolese is basically "se debrouiller", which translates roughly to "make do" or "get by" with what you've got. My mantra has basically been "we do what we can here", and indeed we do.

One of the things I do have here is an mp3 player with a bunch of burncasts on it. These are individual broadcasts that I downloaded from the internet in Arizona, each touching on a different theme relating to BM culture. I've listened to many of them on a couple of occasions, hearing, among other things, an interactive fire pendulum in action, some "sweet jumps" over flames by bikes and go-peds, various artists describing their installations, the cheering crowd around the "Burninator", the "Cloud Nine" art car creator discussing his project, an analysis of burner fashion (tutus, prom dresses, electroluminscent-wire cowboy hats, etc), and even Arizona's own Ranger Blank explaining how he got his playa name. Yeah, although I'm not there, I can still sort of participate in the overall community.

Although the weeklong event in northwest Nevada comprises the main international gathering of the world's burners, there are actually smaller regional events put on by local communities throughout the rest of the year. (South Africa hosts the only regional burn on the continent.) Last year I participated in two regional burns, in Arizona and in Utah. Arizona's was in the spring - the first of several long weekends on which I used my precious vacation days from work for festival fun. My proudest moments there were sometime in the middle of the first night, as I mixed music on my CD turntables for chilled out burners in the hangar, and again approaching dawn when I spun another set before finally stopping for my first sleep time of the weekend. I enjoyed helping Blaze set up the fire cannons, I let loose dancing to Nuttea on the rooftop platform of Mr God's Caddywhack, and I zoned out at sunrise at the base of the Toaster entranced in the tones of J's crystal bowls - the Toaster being a 12-foot steel fire sculpture built with love by countless Arizona burners.

For last year's burn in Nevada, I wrangled up four close friends to create a camp with. We assembled in Arizona, where the others all met for the first time, and we spent an amazing week together living in our humble "Campus Minimus" in the 9:15 and Destiny neighbourhood of Black Rock City. Jeff was the first to arrive in AZ, spending over a month of his year-long road trip at my house so we could work on preparations together. In the week before we hit the road, Lisa flew in from Montreal, and Steve flew in from Brooklyn (his girlfriend Ellie met up with us mid-week). Although Marco was ostensibly living in Arizona at the time, he was the last to join our posse, flying in from Bangkok the night before we left. To add to the madness, my little sister, my mother, and my grandmother also all came for an Arizona visit that same pre-playa week, bearing witness to the hilarity of all the costumes, food, bicycles, flashy-blinkies, and so on that littered the entire house. Marco and I had built a huge Adirondack chair as our camp's main art piece, while Jeff and I built a big dome tent (actually, it was a hexayurt) that served as our group's chill-out space for the week. At around midnight the night before our departure, we bought an RV that took us and all of our gear to BM and back (my grandmother was too freaked out that we'd be cruising a few thousand miles in it to even see us off the next day).

Needless to say, the week we actually spent at the festival was quite an experience, in addition to all of the effort involved both before and after the event itself. So, needless to say, I've really been missing all of that this year!

The culmination of the weeklong Burning Man festival is on Saturday evening, when The Man burns. The Man is the centrepiece of Black Rock City, serving as an icon of the community as well as a landmark for getting one's bearings. It's over 60-feet high, built of wood and standing on a massive base, all decked out in art and flashy lights and what-not. By Saturday evening, the City's population swells to over 40,000 people, nearly all of whom surround The Man to watch the mothafucka burn. BURN! It's filled with fireworks and other flashy sparkly effects, but mostly just huge-ass flames. Damn. We watch, we yell, we cheer, and once The Man topples, we rush the pyre and revel in the climax of another year's successful burn. And no, The Man doesn't have some assigned significance - take it to symbolise whatever you want it to.

Anyway (in case I didn't mention it already) I missed that again this year, since I currently live in one of the most-remote places on the planet. For me, Saturday saw the climax of my Burning Man blues, as I shuffled around camp trying to explain the significance of the day to my campmates... when I decided to try hosting a burn here!

I spent about four hours on my creation, with my only tool being a pair of old metal scissors. I didn't have to cut down any trees, because some furniture had been repaired recently and the old sticks had been discarded at the edge of camp. Several of the longer sticks had been part of a bench, while some of the shorter ones were part of a collapsed chair. The chair had been lashed together with plenty of good lianas, which I used to lash the various sticks together in their new-and-improved configuration. The Man eventually stood strong at about eight feet high. For flammable material, I used some extra roofing materials that were never needed - a pile of frond-like leaves called ndua that are generally placed along the apex of a roof for rainproofing. I wove them into the body, head, and legs of the Man, and held them in place with more lianas, while I wrapped some bundles onto the arms.

I did all this in a small clearing (the forest office) just adjacent to the main camp, with just enough space to spread The Man on the ground. I carried it carefully into camp shortly after dark, to the surprise of our four local workers and our Kinshasan campmate (the two other Western researchers had been visiting me in the forest office to monitor my progress). I set it up in a good spot, away from the palm-frond-roofs and the solar panels. With a bit of help, we I stabilised the legs, added some final ndua (tinder), and deemed it complete. To get in the spirit, I had been wearing devil ears for most of the day, so at that point I got out a couple of other costumes: glittery goggles and a furry dog hat (see professionalnomad.com for my self-portrait in that hat). Then I doused The Man with a bit of gasoline and set it aflame!

My Burning Man blues were cured that night. I got to watch and yell and cheer, and I got to wear a silly hat. Sure, the actual flames didn't last long, and none of The Man's structure even burned through, but the spirit was here in force. The workers may have been puzzled, but they also appreciated "la ceremonie", while my colleagues got a better understanding of what I'd been going on about over the previous days. And we even get to keep The (charred) Man as an enduring art piece to decorate our camp.

The first LuiKotal regional burn was a success!


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