Back in Portland, resuming a normal life again. Right. Homeless and unemployed, very glad to have friends' house to stay at (thanks Babs and Jen a million times over.) On the plus side, last night was the opening of a month-long showing of my art at EveryDay Wine at 1520 NE Alberta Street. Come check it out if you get the chance. I am showing a combination of paintings and painted ceramicware. The painted ceramicware is a new thing for me but i'm enjoying it so far. I actually sold a piece right off the wall last night to a guy from Los Angeles, a graphic designer named Bryan who was visiting Portland. He liked my graphic stylings and also offered constructive criticism.
Another passing, this one a lot closer to home. Bob DeWhitt, the father of Sue DeWhitt (my sister Kathy's life partner and like a sister to me.) Bob was born Bobby Joe DeWhitt in Ponca City, Oklahoma 71 years ago. Growing up he moved numerous times from town to town and even spent 2 years in an orphanage with his brothers. (According to his younger brother Darrell he spent as much time as possible climbing the fence and sneaking off to fish, catch frogs, and generally enjoy the outdoors.)
His Mom moved him and his two brothers to Oregon in 1944 and he lived here ever since, married since 1955 to a wonderful and lively German immigrant named Hilda (who survives him.) They had four kids, of whom Sue is the eldest. He spent most of his working career at Reynolds aluminum in Troutdale but his great love from an early age was the outdoors. He was the kind of person who spent his whole life hunting, fishing, and gathering wild foods, not as a superficial sport but as expression of a deep acquantaince with and love for nature and its processes. He knew what all the trees were, all the animals, birds, and crawling bugs. As one of the speakers at his funeral said today, he was an environmentalist before the term was known, and he spent his life imbuing his family and those around him with that knowledge and values. He kept an enormous garden of every kind of vegetable and berry (as well as honey bees) and never once used chemical fertilizers or pesticides. In retirement he also became an expert amatuer winemaker, and regularly made and bottled up to or over the legal limit (for amatuers) of delicious fruit wines.
He was a soft spoken man but was also known to occasionally sing an old-time song or play a harmonica. Sue's reminiscence of him at the service was of once with the whole family (including the cat) piled into an 11 foot boat on the Yamhill River, fishing for catfish, the river in her memory like her father, gentle and measured but also beautiful and strong, carrying them gently along in the dusk (after their outboard ran out of gas) back to the launch.
He was always healthy as a horse but earlier this week was struck suddenly with a fierce bout of viral pneumonia (possibly exacerbated by underlying factors that had not been detected) and never recovered, passing away tuesday night.
The funeral, though obviously sad, really gave me a chance to see how one person can mean so much to so many people, how it is possible in this life for there to be people whose influence is wholly for the good.
I don't often take much notice when elderly celebrities die, but the passing of Johnny Cash is for me something truly noteworthy. I love lots of different kinds of music and lots of different musicians, but Johnny Cash is probably my single most favorite musician of all time. He was the first big-name musician i ever saw in concert, at the Colorado State Fair when I was 12. I was dimly aware of who he was but my Mom wanted to see him, she knew he was a singular talent. The thing i remember most about that performance of course was his voice. An amazing gift it was, and yet his talent was so much more than just the mechanics of his vocal chords. What he could do with a song was so amazing. His own songs were wonderful enough, but listen to any of his recent four albums and you'll hear versions of other people's songs that are almost invariably better than the originals. Emotive without being saccharin, strong, human, the voice of deep experience. And the only person who can sing equal numbers of songs about love (gone either wrong or good,) murder, and God, and be totally convincing in each mode.
Johnny Cash is like a rock solid core of obsidian in a frivolous world of frothy pumice, a true humanitarian, a voice and a talent unequaled.
Earlier this week (tuesday morning) i had a really intense dream about him performing, when i woke up i immediately thought to myself "i wonder if he died." So maybe it was a precognitive dream, it doesn't matter but i thought it was interesting.
Well, i'm back in Oregon again after a week of fun and dust and wind in
the northern Nevada desert (pictures from the event are now posted
in the photo gallery.) I'm never sure how best to report back on
Burning Man. This was my third time there, each time has been unique (though similiar in many details.)
Describing this event is very hard, but in broadest terms it is a
festival of radical self-expression. However that doesn't mean that plenty of attendees are not basically tourists who came to drink beer and watch wacky artists and naked freaks. But everyone is required (to the extent that there are rules at all) to be a participant. The entire event and the temporary city it takes place in are created by the participant attendees. There is no commercial sponsorship. There is no commerce of any kind allowed inside the event except for coffee and tea at the Center Camp Cafe and ice sales at Camp Arctica. Both areas are run by volunteers and proceeds go to the local community of Gerlach/Empire.
There is a small professional "office" staff and a few paid employees
of the Black Rock City Department of Public Works (which lays out the
streets, puts up the perimeter fence, erects the huge Center Camp
structure, and other essential infrastructure projects.) Even most of the DPW is volunteer, as are the Black Rock Rangers (event security), medical staff, greeters, and of course the thousands of participants and artists who really make the city and the event.
All of which still begs the question, what IS this event? Really it is
a meta-event, encompassing thousands of overlapping and interlocking
smaller events taking place in a sprawling but organized one-week
encampment. Everything from neighborly pancake breakfasts to huge cocktail parties and dances to the burning of the Man. And everywhere you turn, art broadly conceived: sculpture installations, art vehicles of every description (for example a nearly full size, hand built Spanish galleon on wheels, or a space capsule swinging from a rolling crane, and ridiculous party barges), people decked out in all kinds of costumes, painted people, glass blowers, all kinds of flame throwing contraptions, wind bells, butt-cheek art prints, a homemade mini roller coaster, monster karaoke, an automatic spanking machine
(or living people who will gleefully spank you), religous services of
all kinds, Yoga, heavy metal, dixieland, punk, reggae, funk, marching bands, drunken Germans singing Billy Idol covers, lectures on the philosophy of time, a thunderdome where participants beat each other with bats while swinging from harnesses, meditation classes, pig roasts, a Temple of Honor and remembrance, roller Disco, techno music, (too much techno music), Lynrd Skynrd party, Depeche Mode party, aerial rope dancers, naked pole dancers, Celtic dance class, swing dance lessons, Kraftwerk party, a giant chandelier fallen from the sky, Flight to Mars funhouse, a double feature of "Cannibal: the Musical" and "Orgazmo," a people's memorial to canine companions that have passed away, literally thousands of bicycles, annoying motorized scooters, windsail skateboards, Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping (if you ever get a chance, see them, see them, see them!), Rob Breszny and the Church of Wow (biggest bunch of new-agey freaks i've ever seen), Death Guild (creators of the violently un-New Agey Thunderdome), fire dancers (many hundreds of them), Dust and dust and more dust, Wind and billowing clouds of dust. No charge for any of it, besides the ticket to get in.
Everyone doing whatever it is they do just because they want to. No
limits beyond the common sense of the basic social contract.
Do you see why it is hard to describe this event in any simple way?
I've only scratched the surface here, but maybe enough to give an idea.
The main thing is that it is an event that takes place in a space beyond commerce and ordinary fashion. There is a very deliberate emphasis on the "gift economy," meaning if you need something it is given to you. This does not mean barter or exchange. It means there is no necessary immediate connection between giving and receiving, there is no transaction in the usual sense. If someone gives you something you might give them something (besides thanks) in return right then but you might just as well (or better) give to someone else when a different situation arises later, and so on and so on. Everyone just gives whatever it is they have, be it material, talent, muscle power, jokes, or booze.
It is true that everyone bought their supplies in a conventional manner
before the event, but that's one of the paradoxes of it: an event born
in reaction to the mundane economic world, which interacts with and
relies upon it, but which is itself a space that is legitimately beyond the bounds and definitions of what we call civilization. I am not joking or trying to sound corny when i say that there is no place and event anywhere on the planet quite like Burning Man. It is the necessary antithesis of a very sick world.
For all that, it is quite possible to go and have no fun, to spend the
week choking on dust and grousing about all the silly freaks. The first
time i went (in 2000) i was completely burned out by dust and wind and
lack of sleep by the end and doubted whether i'd go again. I went again
in 2002 and got deeply hooked. This year was wonderful too but i may
not go again for a couple years. Its all what you make it. If you do go, decide to interact in ways you wouldn't ordinarily and you will have a very interesting time, i can almost guarantee it.
(Note: i wrote this entry on 8/26 and sent it to my mailinglist but have not been able to get it onto the website until now, back in Oregon.)
Well well, there's a pay phone at the Empire store just south of
Gerlach, NV, thus i can send one lone and final dispatch before summer's end.
I'm on my bike again! Oh my but it feels good, despite the usual
protests from my legs. Hitting the road yesterday morning it almost seemed i
had never been off. Of course i've been traveling like a madman all
summer so its really just another phase-shift. A two day mini tour from
the hamlet of Wadsworth east of Reno northward thru the Pyramid Lake
Indian Reservation and on to Black Rock City, Nevada's fifth largest city
(for one week each year.)
I've driven this route several times so it feels great to do it
"honest", and realize in so doing, as a neverending convoy of playa-bound
vehicles passes me, just what an automotive dependent event Burning Man is.
And yet is also the biggest and most audacious regular experiment in
reinventing the worlds we live in. I could write a small book on all my
observations of what this event is. It is many things, that's what is
most important to understand. I'll write more in my blog about it when i
get back.
Started yesterday about 10 AM, made it into the town of Nixon just in
time for lunch of Indian Taco at a little stand run by several Paiute
women (spanning several generations including the little great-grandson
who was selling lollipops.)
Pyramid Lake and the lower Truckee River is a very interesting place.
The Truckee River flows out of Lake Tahoe, drops down thru Reno and the
desert range and empties into Pyramid Lake, which is a terminal lake
but not as salty as Great Salt Lake. In fact it is the lower end of a
really amazing ecosystem. There are two species of fish, the Lahonton
Cutthroat trout and a mysterious ancient creature called Cui-hui, which
hatch in the upper truckee and then spend their lives in the Lake before
returning like much like Salmon from a turquoise little sea upstream to
spawn and die. At least that's how it worked from time immemorial (both
species being relics of a time when Lake Lahontan spread across
thousands of square miles of pleistocene Great Basin) until the construction
of Derby Dam near Wadsworth in 1903. This little dam (built without a
fishladder) has the distinction of being the very first project of the
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, who would later give us so many more an!
d larger dams and reservoirs. But this one set the pattern from the
get go. The water was (and still is) sent to the Newlands irrigation
district 35 miles away around Fallon, so that Alfalfa and hay (and not much
else) can grow in the high cold/hot/cold desert. The Cui-hui hung on
(barely), the cuthroat were exterminated until reintroduction of stock
from the Walker Lake system (south of Reno) and today exist only because
the tribe runs a fish hatchery. The tribe also gets water from the
project and runs a few cattle on irrigated pasture. Their other main source
of income is catering to people like me who come wandering through. For
5 dollars you can get a camping permit and hang out at the lakeshore
(40 feet lower than it was before diversion), swimming in the deep blue
water and watching pelicans.
Last night slept out next to an outcropping of Tufa rock along hiway
447 by Winnemucca Lake (dry.) Wouldn't you know it there was another
bicyclist napping in the shade when i got there. He was also heading for
Burning Man. We speculated on how many of us (arriving by bike) there
are. Five or six maybe.
Now for one last ice cream sandwich before the playa.