I started this on a whim ten years ago. On the beach, on the solstice. It seemed a good
idea to go down at sundown and light a man on fire. It was no more meditated than that.
I was scrapping around San Francisco as a landscaper who had no particular liking for
plants. I liked hardscape. I liked lattices, pergolas, that kind of thing. We ended up
building a man that's essentially a glorified pergola. You could put a vine up into effect
and he got way out of hand. He's four stories tall.
Well, let's see. I was sleeping in Golden Gate Park in 1976 after hitchhiking here with
a rest warrant out for myself in some unnamed central state. Then I met all these weird
people and it's been ongoing ever since then. I ran into somebody and started doing events
with the Cacophony Society a while back, actually at its inception, I think. Then we ran into
the Burning Man crew, Larry Harvey and Jerry James and their associates back in 1989 or
1990. The first year we did the event was kind of a conjoined Cacophony Society Burning
Man event out to the desert and it's grown since then.
Howdy. Howdy. How you doing? Pretty good. How about you? Good. What's your name? My
name is J.D. Bogman. What are you doing out here? I'm in charge of the gate. Keeper of
the gate for the weekend. Yeah. This is a religious experience for me because all of
my life I have wanted to be first in the port-a-potty and now I've had that chance. Really? Now I
can die in peace. What were your instructions? My instructions? I give the instructions.
Stop everyone that comes by. Demand money from them. Extort as much as possible so that
we can try and pay for what we've put out on this adventure so far. So what's your function
here at Burning Man? Well, I have many functions. I just exhibit one of my functions right there,
actually. Quite a bit of construction beforehand? Yeah, quite a bit of construction went into
a lot of planning. A lot of the construction has to go on on site because you can't prefab
a lot and get it out here. Eyeglasses. See, I tried to burn cork under the eyes and stuff
like that and it didn't work. Doesn't do it. No. The glare is pretty phenomenal after a
while. It gives you quite a headache. Is the man up already? Yeah, the man is up. He went
up last night. They had him lit last night. Yeah. I noticed you have that loaded. Sure.
It's just a stick if it's not loaded. Don't be absurd. Do you expect any trouble out here?
Is that for this? Guns are fun. I don't see what the big deal is. But you know, there's
not going to be any trouble because despite the fact that there's probably over a thousand
dollars in cash here, between the two of us we have enough guns to start World War III.
Right. Yeah.
Burning Man is a community, much like an early frontier town.
It's located in the middle of nowhere. It's a wilderness, it's a desert, and much
like a small growing community on the frontier, there are those who step
forward and take responsibility for many of its characteristics looking after the
community. We send a survival guide out and it tells people that everyone has to
bring at least one gallon of water or two gallons of water per person per day.
We tell them, you know, how to deal with a dust storm if it comes up, what kind of
food they should bring. I mean, you know, nothing is out there. You've got to bring
it all. It's been an amazing procedure, an amazing thing, just trying to keep, I
mean, it's grown way past what I expected it was going to be at any given time. I
mean, I guess I've tried not to have any expectations and that served me
quite well. Oh, we've got everyone from ranch hands to rocket scientists. We've
got, you know, it's really funny out there in the Playa, the
categories that divide us from other people just simply fall away.
It won't fall over while it's firing. Yeah. What was this? This was a coffee
made container full of old gasoline. This thing itself was an oxygen tank. What the
hell's that? Oh, that was some coffee made with gasoline. Was that part of the shock
wave? Yeah, if you got your cameras out, I'll do another shot. Oh, sure. I'd love to see
what are you gonna do? I'll do another gas bomb. I got a bunch of that stuff
available. It's a short fuse. Actually, it burns pretty slow. It's got coffee made
with gasoline all over it. Coffee made with gasoline. Coffee made is very flammable.
Oh, joy, that is precious. This stuff is so horrible. It's like gas is like coffee. Ancient
gasoline. That's about as much as I'd want to put that in. Things are quite exciting
now. Okay, well, this is gonna be a good one. This is a variety. This is a variety. Okay,
gasoline. The most common dish served in all cafeterias across the country is meatloaf.
Yes, that's right. Meatloaf. You take that word and hold it to a mirror. It spells the
word F-A-O-L-T-A-E-M, which I believe is an abbreviation for freaks, atheists, occultists,
lowlifes, and stupid agnostics eradicating most of America. Thank you, teenage America,
for making me what I am today. Oh, what do you have here? Well, we've been working around
the clock, working around the clock to get men and women, both of them, to come together
and just join hands in learning how to square dance. This is a square dancing survival guide.
And if you look and you read over it, the hieroglyphics represent the fall of the Romans
and the rise of the Trojans. And that's how you square dance when you put your left hand
forward. Absolutely. So, what does the Burning Man mean to you? Mud and sun. Mud and sun.
Mud, sun, and sun. Thank you. Hello, everybody. Can I see it through there? Sure. Look at
her, babe. Wow-wee-zow-wee. You don't have much latitude. Hey, how you doing? We're filming.
My question is, how do you know what to put on and where? Well, you just find stuff and
you put glue on its feet and you just go, ah, and that's how you know. What kind of
glue? I use a marine grade adhesive called Goop. My personal Goop. I like to say that
it's a continuum that leads from the odd to the strange, to the weird, to the holy other.
And it's a process whereby you take things out of context. If something is weird, it's
something that doesn't fit in. If something is strange, it's unexplainable. If something
is weird, its very existence is unexplainable. There's nothing around it to define it. If
we go a little further, we go from the odd to the strange to the weird to the holy other.
When something is holy other, it can't be compared with any other thing. Its very identity
seems to just shine out of it. It's called the camera obscura and the idea
was captured by Chris de Monterey who built the pyramid on top of the original camera
obscura that this was copied from at San Francisco behind the cliff house called the Giant Camera.
It's been there for 40 years. This one took three years to develop and two years ago they
decided to bring it up here so it was refabricated and brought up here in pieces and built here
and it shows the whole area magnified on the giant screen. It rotates in a circle and gives
you a beautiful view. Oh I got to go in there. Go ahead. Hey Eric, you swabbing the deck?
Oh yeah, you know it's like a real damn boat. You take your friends on a cruise and get
back to the port. They all disappear, damn it. Why don't I eat junk food? Well that's
what the aliens from outer space eat. You can tell who the aliens are by the junk food
that they eat with all the chemicals and stuff. That's alien food, man. I hunt aliens, man.
That's not an inflated woman you have up there, is it? Oh no, we wouldn't have an inflated
woman up there. Okay, just wanted to make sure we were just checking to make sure. It'd
be sexist. Brots don't like it when you get sexist. When are you setting sail? When there's
enough wind to move the beast. Cook four whole turkeys in this thing, man. Wow. Yeah, on
the barbecue. Where are you guys from? Reno. So this is a PVC can. Yeah. Are there instructions
available for this? For sale or anything? No, it's made hero from the hardware store.
Potato. Potato. Kids, try this at home. I think these are going to be on the list of
deadly weapons in California pretty soon. Can you imagine a president assassinated with
a potato? This is regular propane, you just give it a little squirt. You put a potato
through a half inch piece of wood? Okay. Is there a big call for that? Wow. Does this
work with all ammo or just Miller beer? You have to pick a true favorite. We're going
to show you the igniter that's inside the beer can in here. Here we go. This could be
a handy. Whoa. Hit them. Hit them right here. Hit them. Hit them right here. Hit them. Hit
them. Hit them. Hit me. Hit me. Hit me. Hit me. Hit me. Hit me. Hot damn. No amount of
sound of explosion
music
There were things called mystery cults, they were essentially all grafted onto prehistoric
fertility cults from the ancient agrarian times.
They were party religions, Mardi Gras and carnival have come down to us through that
lineage.
What we do is actually pretty parallel to what they did.
They were essentially, Aristotle wrote about them, he said that they weren't about a teaching
so much as an experience.
This is going to be a human spontaneous combustion theater, sort of subhuman, we've got colored
lamps, lots of firecrackers, it was the same when I was a kid, we always considered it
a waste to just light fireworks in the street and let them go, we felt like you had to sacrifice
those models on your shelf or a toy or something, they had to do something.
Out in the wild, wild, wild west, what are you running on, solar power?
Solar power, cable power, and battery power, and firework power, the power of the desert.
Buddy, ring my bell.
We're off to the desert right now.
What does Burning Man mean to me?
Yes.
This.
This right here.
This is what Burning Man is all about.
Community helping each other out and giving a spontaneous hair washing when needed or
anything else that needs to be done.
Excellent.
I agree.
The art car mechanic, St. James, when something breaks, I'm there, right?
My face is in the exhaust pipe, my hands are in the carburetor, I'm all around that manifold.
I'm right there.
There's no battery.
You can't battery without my battery.
I mean, I mean, you know, boom, there I am.
On our interactions with the local folks, once they could see the whites of our eyes,
and that had a lot to do with the fact that a large number of the folks in our contingent
are recreational shooters, and that was something that many of the people in this area of Nevada
can relate very strongly to.
So initially, they see this group of really strange weirdos coming out from San Francisco.
Then they see that we've got a fairly healthy contingent of sharp shooters with bolt action
rifles who can hit moving targets at 200 yards, and that was something that I think a lot
of the folks out there related to and broke the ice, so to speak, and a lot of the folks
who come out to our drive-by shooting range and the golf skeet range and participate in
those particular events, and it gave them a way of relating to this really huge group
of people who, you know, were extremely strange, but really when you look at it, not much stranger
than the people out in northern Nevada either, a lot more in common than any of us might
have thought at the outset.
Good, shooting through the passenger window of my Pacer, I was able to bag the targets
more than half the time.
What?
Through the glass?
No, no.
Through the glass.
Oh, while driving?
While driving with a black powder revolver.
Yeah, if you can keep all the windows down and, yeah, well Pacer's got a lot of glass,
that'd be a good one to drive by out of.
Well, you see, the idea is, you know, the way things are going, this is urban self-defense.
We've got to learn how to defend ourselves by being able to reach out.
Oh, you can't ride shotgun on this range?
Oh, sure, you go over there, I mean, show up, somebody will hand you a gun.
Oh, fuck, I've got so many guns, the point is this, oh, we're going to fuck them up
tomorrow, man.
I'll see you there.
We've got room for two in the back of this truck here.
We can go as is without cutting the tarblers.
So where are we heading?
We're heading out to the drive-by shooting range, where we're going to drive by things
and shoot them.
Excellent.
As you might well expect.
This is a.357 Magnum, blow your head clean off.
We're out in the area where there's absolutely nobody, and we've been doing this for several
years.
So this is a totally safe thing, but don't try this at home.
No, don't try this at home, no, the neighbors won't like it.
Everybody is after Barney, I mean, Barney is the one that's going to get zapped.
Safety's off, and it's a drive-by shooting, ladies and gentlemen.
Let's check it out.
Exit wound, man.
Exit wound.
That's skeet.
That's your smaller load.
These grazing things come from your rifles.
We blew an eye off.
There's some more bird shot in there.
We have a complete eye loss.
Ripped it clean off.
Hey, blew it out the back of his head.
There's your entry, there's your exit.
There's a hole right through the pole.
See, the problem with these plush toys is they kind of heal, you know?
It's kind of hard to track your mark on the thing unless it's already completely penetrated.
Well, they do have to last all weekend, so it is important that they have lasting ability.
I think he only got hit like once or twice, maybe.
I don't see any real serious injury going on there.
Let's give it to him right now.
Let's blast him.
Fuck it up at point blank.
All right, close range, Barney Dab.
Here, let me get you on this one.
Dr. Quincy reports death by multiple gunshot wounds, I think.
What would you tell the average person out there who wants to buy a firearm today, today's
world?
You need some stuffed animals to shoot.
Hurry.
You really do.
If you don't have any stuffed animals, you're really out of luck.
What is good in death?
We don't really have much crime at all, and that's a function of the fact that A, people
are free to be entirely themselves, and secondly, that they look around them and regard their
fellow humans in this lunar landscape, where suddenly being a living bag of water seems
like a very precious and important thing, and you feel a lot in common with your fellow
human beings.
It's, no, we're morally benign.
We don't do bad things.
We don't like the devil.
The devil could come out.
The devil could come out, in fact.
We've never excluded anybody from the playa.
We're completely inclusive.
So the devil would be welcome.
He'd have to behave himself while he was there, you know, but perhaps we learned something
about him in the process, and that might be good for us.
Hi, what does Burning Man mean to you?
Burning Man, Burning Man, Burning Man is what it means.
Where is enigma in the commercialism of next year's Burning Man?
That's what Burning Man means to me.
Say it to your brothers.
Asshole, asshole.
Sing it to someone you love.
Asshole, asshole.
One more.
Asshole, asshole.
Look at the person next to you.
Asshole, asshole.
He had another place, but I didn't think it would work.
I'm Dale Scott.
Dale, you were one of the firefighters then we saw last time.
I was the firefighter.
You were the firefighter.
Okay, you're the only firefighter.
That's correct.
I had the impression there were like five or six.
Maybe you were just...
There were other people in costume, but I was the only one in the unofficial capacity,
shall we say.
But the safety of all these people is in your hands in many ways.
Well, as best as I can do, you know, given the circumstances and the help of other people.
Well, last night...
People were very cooperative.
Yeah.
You were very cool and calm and mannerly.
It wasn't like riot control.
No, no.
Thanks.
It's a thin line.
I'm not sure.
Tell us a little bit about the building from scratch.
Okay, well, we started out prefabricating it in South San Francisco.
It's in five main pieces, the head, the torso, the arms and the legs, and we disassemble
it.
I mean, we assemble the modules, then we bring it out, and then we reassemble the modules
and put the knee on.
We know that we had it erected and put in a gallery in San Francisco off of Market Street
called SOMAR, and it was a pretty awesome sight to see this thing inside a building.
Well, the situation that we're trying to achieve here is just having a temporary community
that has such an amount of freedom for people, it's very difficult to explain.
I mean, I suppose you've been taking a lot of footage out here, seeing people do things
you wouldn't normally see them do anywhere else, with the exception generally of destructive
or violent things, although we get our violent activity out on inanimate objects, as you'll
see tonight.
I see this as a project where a team comes together and we've worked on this since January.
We build it, we go through all the heartaches and the blood, sweat and tears of getting
this out here, creating it, and then we let it go.
It's been an organic progression, I mean, we didn't really plan to do this at the outset,
but it sort of happened that way.
One of the reasons the event is still occurring is because people come here and see that they
can really do something interesting or creative or really outrageous.
Since we're becoming a little bit commercial, maybe, we have a barcode now.
Oh really?
Yeah, we have an official Burning Man barcode, and just for safety reasons, we have a smoke
detector.
What is Yoyotai Scatter?
That's just from the Buckaroo Banzai movie.
That was the Society of Alien Engineers.
So Buckaroo Banzai is really your hero then?
Yeah, he's one of my fictional heroes.
It's silly, but there's a lot of parallel.
So my band is called Rocket Science, that's what I'm doing these days.
I just finished a record, and John and I live in San Francisco, we've got about a 7,000
square foot place in the South of Market.
Let's try it.
Okay, take your motorcycle out there, will you?
Okay, let me get in.
It's not enough to be weird anymore.
Hey, can I get in?
Yeah.
All right.
Eric, let's stop and watch.
We're going to stop and watch the fashion show.
Yes, and then we'll be back out.
OK.
Hi.
No more.
Ah, they're shy.
I just, I love children.
That was hard learning.
Wow.
Yeah, she's getting scared.
So I'm going to tell you that.
Yeah.
The county's got a gator.
Gator.
Tea for two.
Two for tea.
I haven't seen this though.
Have you ever seen anything like this before?
Never in my life have I seen anything like this.
You're out there on the Playa, and everyone, what everyone is inherently in themselves
seems to be just radiating out of them, because there isn't any context around them to limit
or jack it or make them less than what they simply and innately are.
And the man at the end is a vision of that, is this giant figure suffused in flames,
the pure and simple evidence of his own being, unmediated and undefined.
You, pussies.
Back up, back up.
Light it up.
It's cool.
We had corn on the cob, we had little marbles of clay, they were pretty good with the white
sauce, and melted glass with hollandaise, it's a French kind of thing.
God bless us, one and all.
Are you members of the band?
Yeah, hi, we're Sharkbait.
Hi.
Really?
We're Sharkbait.
Hi.
We're Sharkbait.
Hi.
We're Sharkbait.
Hi.