Burning Man was a big event for me in 1999. In fact I found myself writing stories about it for a week for my newsgroup. This is a collection of those emails.

Tian Harter 9/7/2001

Burning Man Overview (Sent out 9/7/1999)

Burning Man, an annual intentional community that celebrates freedom of expression in the Nevada Desert was held last weekend. We (the TransDimensionalMystic's crew) got there fairly early Friday. I had heard about it from many friends, but did not know until I got there how big and weird the event really is. The place is laid out as 9 concentric horse shoe shaped roads, named after planets, with Mercury being the inner one and Pluto being the outer one, with radial streets every thirty yards or so from inner to outer edges, named after times from 1:00 to 12:00. We pulled in and set up camp at 3:30 Neptune, the spot we had planned to ISH from.

The first thing I did was wander around and check out the neighborhood. It was hard to look in any direction without seeing lots of really strange, interesting stuff. It seemed that at least a third of the population had nothing on. Many of the campsites were designed around themes, many with much effort put into making them work. My first memorable event was watching the guy that had tried to swan dive off of the 30 foot sculpture tower get hauled off to the hospital. The permissive culture was probably just too little structure for him.

The event was deliberately set up to allow experimentation. The main rule was NO SPECTATORS, which meant that those present were the action. The other rule was NO COMMERCIAL VENDING, which meant that barter was the medium of exchange, except for one tent where you could buy coffee or smoothies. Some camps held scheduled events, but most of them had a theme that would sort of work as a basis of conversation, and you were invited to drop in if your eye was caught by the theme.

One camp had astral hair washing, where you could get your head shampooed. Another was a garden of clay flowers. One place they had a "barter bin," full of stuff you could trade for. I traded a 555 floral print shirt price tag for a green coin with two hearts on it. Many camps were basically a nice shady spot with some friends hanging out on a couch or some beach chairs, with some sort of funky sculpture out front as eye candy for the tourists going by. Each campsite was big enough to be quite comfortable, and most were probably for something like a dozen people. With 21,000 plus participants, you can see that it was not really possible to touch every one of the possible experiences. It was really easy to endlessly wander around meeting people and sharing moments with them.

I found it to be very much like walking around inside a Salvador Dali painting, where all of the rules seem to have been curved just a little bit. The incredibly bright sun, beating down on the very flat, dry lake bed where the event was held accentuated the surreal effect of the art by giving it crisp, deep shadows. Aside from the things at people's homes, there was a huge assortment of theme pieces in the center of the inner horseshoe, including the Burning Man himself, a hefty piece of lumber about 40 feet tall on top of a big pyramid of hay.

One of the more interesting events was waking up on Saturday morning at 8:00 to participate in an art photo shoot. The photographer (I think he's famous, but I forgot his name) needed thousands of people to pose nude for his work. We went out on the Playa and got naked, and then lined up like sardines, with our heads away from the camera, hundreds of square feet of people in the middle of a big desert with mountains in the distance. After that picture he split us into two groups, and had us walk to another spot, where we were to collapse when he said "die!" I ended up in the group farther from the camera, not real far to the right of a guy in green body paint from head to foot. The experience was quite exotic.

Not knowing what I was in for, I hadn't prepared a good "thing." However, it wasn't long after I got there that I was itching to do something. I ended up doing my little speech, and people were quite encouraging. By the end of the event I had been given a very nice strand of shell beads from Hawaii, a NEVADANS FOR BURNING MAN sticker, a Burning Man Talisman, a rainbow marble, and many water donations by people that had liked my work. It was the water that kept me on the road, because without it the hot dry days could easily have hurt me terribly. I was quite surprised by how many people told me that they didn't own cars, maybe as many as 10 or 20 percent of those I talked to. It has been many years since I have enjoyed precinct walking that much.

Tian Harter

Money Stories from Burning Man (sent out 9/8/1999)

I first realized that the Playa was a good place to work on your relationship with god when I met a guy who was aligning a light sculpture. It consisted of an odd little plastic receptor and something like 100 bricks arranged in four concentric semi circles, each with a reflective colored tile on it. Behind the guy was a sign that said CAUTION: HIGH ENERGY CHAKRAS. He was setting it up so at each point in the day about 10 of the bricks would be reflecting on the plastic reflector, giving it a magic glow. He explained that where he came from some people take this work very seriously. I found myself explaining that for me "negotiating with god" is putting a dime and a red cent on the table and contemplating the symbolism of the arrangement.

Not much later I met a guy that is the Mayor of some town about 100 miles from the Black Rock Desert, I think still in Nevada. I gave him my sticker speech, and then we started talking about breaking the law. I gave him a penny and challenged him to break the law of gravity with it. He threw it up into the air and we started waiting. We waited a considerable length of time before the "ting" of a coin landing came from the other side of the street. I told him "our god is the same god." We parted on good terms.

Later that night I found myself talking about the credibility of the institutions of Government with a guy in his mid twenties who thought the whole structure was seriously fucked up. I pulled out a nickel and explained that a nickel in your hand is the image of personal responsibility. The first reason is that Jefferson, the guy that wrote the Declaration of Independence, is on that coin. There is A LOT of personal responsibility in that document. The second reason is that Personal Responsibility is all about staying out of situations where you need the fifth amendment, symbolized by the five fingers. I ended up trading the nickel for the idea of a nickels worth of charge, the kind of thing that can get a state of the art electric bike 30 miles down the road at 30 miles per hour.

The next day I gave my speech to a young woman in black leather with spikes sticking out of it. When I was done she started telling me that I was god. Apparently the old one had quit last night because he was tired of the hours. I figured the time had come to duck, quick, so I gave her my god. It was a generic eagle quarter, the only one I had in my pocket. Her boyfriend seemed happy that it wasn't even one of the new State quarters, and said that he had seen "Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey." I told them it was the same for me.

Sunday morning I woke up some time before the dawn and went down to the center of the camp, where all the action had been the night before. I sat in this white chair beside a white table and watched the light start getting bright. Then I put my last coin, a 1997 cent, on the table and started wandering around. I have vivid memories of seeing a human lower jaw made of metal with a propane canister feeding into it, obviously empty. There were nozzles in each tooth. It must have been a sight in the middle of the night. A few hundred yards away there was a wooden pyramid burning. There weren't many people around, but every here and there I would find another intense morning person, or maybe someone that had been up all night, involved in some interesting situation.

With the long shadows and intense vibe, it was the perfect place to be money free among people. I came to where the burning man had been the night before, and there was only a pile of ash about eight feet high, maybe 20 feet across. There were a few people huddled around the embers for warmth. I stood and listened for a while, hearing one guy tell another about how while the bonfire was still raging, when the people where gathered around dancing very close together, and when more people on the outer edge were pushing to get closer, they had driven the bone crusher truck into the crowd. There was literally no place to go. It had been a very intense experience. The guy had the look on his face of "I have seen god and passed the test."

I had the feeling that a rite of passage had been enacted here.

Tian Harter.

The graffiti I used all weekend was "SMALL CHANGE," with a box around the ALL.

Traveling Light at Burning Man. (Sent out 9/8/1999)

Burning Man at night is truly an incredible sight. The first night I was there, Friday night, there was lots of light from all sorts of sources, and the net effect was truly remarkable. There were green lasers that bobbed and bounced to some mysterious rhythm shinning from one side of the camp across the sky onto the Mountains that surrounded the Playa. Many campsites had lighting schemes that very effectively accentuated their themes.

One of the most ambitious was the L2K project. This was a round tent with 2000 yellow LEDs in a row around the inside, blinking in a sequential pattern that traveled from left to right. In talking to the guy running the show, he explained that each LED had a switch associated with it, and pushing the switch changed the on/off pattern so that a pulse of energy was added to the stream. To add impact, after a pulse travels around the tent, the same chain goes around 2000 very bright LEDs in globes that circle the Burning Man, meaning that those button pushes cause light patterns to touch the eyes of people across the playa from where we were. I had fun adding my patterns to the stream.

There were some camps that only "worked" at night. A particularly remarkable one was the Eye Doctor's tent. This was a lighted tunnel, with things like Christmas ornaments decorating the way. At the entrance they gave you a pair of glasses to wear while walking down the path. Putting them on caused every light source to break into a rainbow pattern. The effect of going down the path was something like being tickled in the soul. It only added something that when he let me in, the gatekeeper told the people in line "this guy is on his own."

At the beginning of the event the TransDimensionalMystic had given me a key chain fob from Tandberg Data that had a button activated bright red LED at one end and a whistle at the other end. For a while during the evening I would "share photons" with people that liked my little speech. I did this by shining the light on their faces in two short pulses. It tickles my fancy that somewhere out there, there are something like a few dozen people that I have "shared photons" with.

Saturday night it was much darker. The stars were bright above the green bouncing laser light. The only big visual was the Burning Man burning. Apparently before they lit the guy they filled him up with fireworks, so the sight was quite spectacular. The 40 foot man had his bulk extended by a third by the flames that engulfed him. Shoots of bright sparkler dust would extend double the distance occasionally in different directions, first to the left, then the right, then above. Every now and then a geyser of flame would erupt from some mysterious source 10 yards to the left or right. The crowd was cheering wildly, and the effect was incredible.

Tian Harter

When we were ISHing at the campsite one time, the TDM said "God will punISH you for your puns."

Mellowing out of Burning Man. (Sent out 9/10/1999)

The last day of Burning Man I wanted to try a new form of activism. What I did was I went from campsite to campsite, getting people to read my T shirt. It said, in green ink on black, "They will teach us to quarrel about Grandfather as they do. We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on earth, but we never quarrel about the Great Spirit. We do not want to learn that." - Chief Joseph (Nez Perce). I had some interesting conversations with people that saw it, some worth sharing.

There was a group of guys on Harley's getting ready to head out, and I got one of them to read my shirt. After reading it he told me some joke, the gist of which was that "we had to toss out the Native Americans, they weren't paying the rent." I told him the one about how it only takes one gorilla to change a light bulb, but it takes lots of light bulbs. Then I asked if he knew that Cadillac was taking the ducks off their logo. He didn't. I told him "I believe there has to be at least one duck in the game. I'm a duck." He started wondering what the meaning of Cadillac's impending duck-ectomy could be, and then his troupe headed out.

Another time I met a guy that said he was a real Nez Perce, from Chief Joseph's Band (there were quite a few Native Americans at Burning Man). I told him that when I was at AOL my favorite Chief Joseph quote to work with was "It doesn't take long to tell a true story." We chewed on that for a while, and then I told him I had given my father a book containing the speeches of Chief Seattle, Chief Joseph, and Chief Red Jacket. It was a great book that could be read in an hour.

Many, many times I had my shirt read by people with pierced noses. Sometimes I would tell them "If they were handing out names now they way they were handing out names then, you would be the Nez Perce of your generation." Sometimes I just said "You are the Nez Perce of our generation, by virtue of your pierced nose and the meaning of the words." It was my way of giving some texture to the old saying "All men are brothers."

Tian Harter

One time I got back to the campsite, where the ISHing never stopped, and Judy told me "I have changed my name to Judy ISH."