Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/09/02/i-went-to-burning-man-in-1996.html
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You’re absolutely sure this didn’t occur in your clown roommate’s house after he spiked your food?
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that was 1991.
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In what year do we expect Burning Man will be older that the average Burner?
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That may be a while. I think the attendees are getting older as the event muddles on.
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Contrary to Woodstock, there are chances the world will soon become the dys- err utopia Burning man offers.
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Sounds like you had a blast. Cheers.
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Minus the toilet pumping trucks :-/
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I came here, all the way here, in the comfort of my darkened basement, to the comment section following this particular article on the Boingz to say nothing, nothing at all.
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Muddles larger and larger.
We get it. You’ve never been there.
That description sound pretty accurate. I have a couple friends who were lucky enough to attend during the genuine “anything goes” years. I’ve seen the photos of one friend tripping so hard on mushrooms he couldn’t stand up, and had to lie still in his white boiler suit. Another friend described burn night. “People were just trying to burn anything that would burn, including a tent, and a flatbed truck was slowly rolling through the smoke, covered with a bunch of people fucking, on display.”
I almost went as early as 1995, but my friends never hipped me that Burning Man it was anything more than a faraway camping party for underground types, and the drive didn’t sound worth it. I didn’t catch on until tickets and cops were added.
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That’s a lot of words used to say nothing.
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That’s alright, there’r more where those came from.
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It was better in 1995.
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I saw it in 1992. At the time it consisted of a man made of scrap lumber and about 100 or so art nerds from SF. They were wandering around in this miserable alkaline dry lake bed, drinking cheap beer, getting baked (in various meanings of the term), and looking at each other’s ugly sculptures and “art cars”. After a couple of hours I became fed up with the dust in my mouth/nose/eyes and the pretentious art whores and left in disgust. Didn’t even bother to pull out the camcorder to document it. (There is a video of the 1991 meet on YT, it wasn’t much different.)
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In '96 people were reminiscing about how much better it had been, back when the stuffed animal skeet-shooting was still happening, and what a rip off it seemed like, to pay $75 for a ticket that basically paid for porta potties and that was it.
Five thousand attendees seemed like a lot back then, and the corporate threat of Hellco taking over sponsorship of the event didn’t have to be plausible to get a reaction from the crowd.
The emotional center of the thing was more or less where it is now, it just hadn’t metasticized yet. Next year was better. Next year was always going to be better.
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was that
poetry
?
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I got burnt long before that.
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“You say it best when you say nothing at all.”, as Ronan Keating’s Tax Lawyer told him.
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