Burning Man Grows Up

Can the nation's premier underground event survive its success?

Brian Doherty from the February 2000 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

"We are giving people an opportunity to play the role of hero, not the role of policeman," Michael Michael says of his Rangers. "I want them to think whether there's a real reason for telling a person to stop doing something, not just something programmed from outside society. Like if you see someone burning a car...is it their car? Well, you can't burn someone else's car without their permission. But if it is [the person's own car], you need to remind them that they will be responsible for cleaning up the mess. But sure, they can burn their car."

During the required training for the all-volunteer force (160-strong this year), the trainees all must yell en masse, "We are not cops!" And mostly, they don't act like them. They patrol, they help people who ask for help, they talk to each other on radios, and only sometimes do they administer frontier justice. For instance, driving within Black Rock City is prohibited, except for official vehicles and registered "art cars." The art cars are the colorfully decorated vehicles that are small enough in number and rich enough in charm --this year, they included a mobile living room and a car topped with a rebar buffalo sculpture--that they are allowed to move around. When Michael found someone driving illegally, he summarily emptied the car's tires of air, leaving the immobilized vehicle sitting in the middle of nowhere. Michael added a sign to strike fear into others who might think of violating community mores: "Air pressure is a privilege, not a right--Danger Ranger."

This year's biggest confrontation involved an entire group of revelers. Calling themselves Capitalist Pig Camp, they tested the limits of what Larry Harvey calls "the place on earth where the First Amendment is most fully exercised." Doing what they insisted was an art project, the campers shouted racial slurs willy-nilly and sexual come-ons to pre-pubescent girls. They were inspiring fellow campers to potential violence, explains Duane Hoover (a.k.a. "Ranger Big Bear"). By Wednesday morning of the week, they had been ejected.

Given the Rangers' general effectiveness, I ask both Michael Michael and Hoover if Black Rock could survive without the official men with guns. "I wish I could answer this question differently, but no," Hoover says. "If someone's attacking someone with a frying pan [an actual occurrence], I don't want to have to get a bigger frying pan to stop them." When violence erupts, he wants pros with guns behind him. The minuscule number of times the cops have to act isn't necessarily a true indication of their use, he figures. Their very presence is a deterrent.

Michael believes fervently in the power of an internalized community ethos and wishes that the Rangers' usually gentle persuasion and advice would suffice to maintain order. But he too grants that there are some even in Black Rock who just don't understand that they can live and let live in harmony without guns coming into play. For such people, he says, the outside authority of the cops, not the authority of right reason and communal harmony, is all they'll recognize.

With all its ever-increasing rules, Burning Man is not the cacophonous event of years gone by, though representatives of the Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles branches of the Cacophony Society attended in 1999. The L.A. group returned after a two-year absence, bridling at new rules restricting the unsupervised use of pyrotechnics in art projects. The Portland group's anarchic, snarky energy is less suited to the festival than it once was. The real cops quickly put the kibosh on their routine of wandering around in postal uniforms with unloaded, but real, guns as the "Disgruntled Postal Workers."

After that cease-and-desist order, the Portland contingent turned its energy to pranking the festival itself, staging a bogus "Larry Harvey" book signing in center camp. One of their number donned a fedora and stuck a cigarette in his mouth--Harvey's signature accessories--and sat on a couch on the mobile living room art car. Supplicants were forced to kneel at gunpoint before "Larry" as he signed cheap, thrift-store paperbacks with xeroxed cover stickers identifying the book as Mein Camp, by Larry Harvey. "Do not touch Mr. Harvey, do not speak to Mr. Harvey, do not look at Mr. Harvey," a gunman shouted through a megaphone. "Move along."

Are the restrictions to which the dissidents object signs that Black Rock City is becoming too much like the actual hometowns of its citizens? "If it just becomes San Francisco East, why not stay home?" asks co-founder Jerry James, who still attends the event but is not part of the organizing partnership. "It's more like a typical urban experience. It's not the social experiment it used to be. Larry talks about building community--what I see them building is just like the community we live with every day, all these cops and rangers and rules and roads."

Just how much Burning Man can change and still be the vibrant "social experiment" Larry Harvey wants is a question that will be answered over the coming years. The event's evolution takes place via a sort of Lamarckian process. Every year the site is literally wiped clean so that, ideally, no sign of its having been there remains. But each time the city is rebuilt, it seems to have a slightly more complicated set of rules and mores based on some previous experience.

Every step away from pure anarchy is defended by Harvey in sensible terms. Guns were banned, he explains, as a pure matter of public safety. They might be fun among a few dozen friends, but with thousands all around you, there's no safe recreational use for them. Same for cars, he says. Pure survival at stake. Dogs weren't banned, but he decided that if someone thought his dog just had to be there, he should pay full ticket price for it. "We just couldn't handle a thousand dogs with kerchiefs running around being groovy," says Harvey. Building roads and giving campers addresses? Well, emergency services need to know how to find someone. With so many people, "You can't just say, `It's the yellow tent behind the red car behind the giant dog head.'" The tiki torch ban was the result of an incident in which a Burning Man staffer set his camp on fire before the gates opened in 1998. Campfires? Their prohibition is certainly a loss to community--what is more inviting to camaraderie among strangers than a warm fire to circle around on a cold night? But with such a dense population, unrestricted open flames are just not prudent.

Typically, changes and new rules are pragmatic reactions to size, circumstances, and sometimes official demands. This year, for instance, the organizers were being pressured by county health officials to institute daily garbage collection, perhaps the final urban amenity. "You have no idea how fucked up that would be," Goodell, the Burning Man government liaison, moans. "It would no longer be a radical camping experience. We might as well stay home and put the recycling in front. Larry says, `Over my dead body will we do garbage service.'" As a compromise, however, the organizers did place giant dumpsters at the exit for attendees to put garbage in--a turn away from past years' policy that each camper must take responsibility for "leaving no trace." Perhaps daily garbage collection is only a year or so away.

While granting that things have changed, Harvey is weary of talk of the good old days--that the event is too big, that it's no fun any more because of all the rules, that it was better when it was more exclusive and anyone could do anything they wanted. "The exercise of liberty in Black Rock is remarkable, but we don't accept anti-social activity and we never have," he says.

"I do agree with the basic anarchist idea that culture is self-regulating and spontaneously would provide society with useful customs to regulate the relationship of the individual to the collective," Harvey says. "But I don't like nouveau anarchists who are basically selfish hooligans whose creed is, `I do whatever I want, whenever I want, and I don't care, and I hang out with cool people who do anything they want to, and there are only a few of us, and fuck you.' How charming."

"It's a funny thing about small communities," Harvey tells me, mulling over arguments about whether the early days of Burning Man were better. "When it's smaller it's easier to keep order without outside authority, right? Maybe. But I remember one early year a guy shot off his gun without warning right next to [Burning Man's construction supervisor], who then couldn't hear for two days. If a stranger did that, you'd consider stringing him up. But in a small group, it's `one of your own' and you don't do anything. Things fall between the cracks when you rely on coolness and implicit convention."

There is an almost cult-like aspect to Burning Man, though the event's vibe is such an amalgam of earnestness and silliness that it's hard to know how seriously even the seemingly serious ones take it. Inside Burning Man's office in Gerlach--steady, friendly contact with the locals is seen as key to the event's political survival--images of Larry Harvey as the Christian/Darwin fish can be seen. The 23rd Psalm is parodied with Larry as the Lord.