One of her first innovations on the job was to come up with a way of identifying the precise moment when the public phase of each Burning Man’s life cycle had really begun. On the team, Burkes eventually settled into the role of dispatcher-“the MC of everyone’s radio traffic, the all-seeing eye,” as she puts it. They’re the crew responsible for building up, and then tearing down, the event’s physical infrastructure each year, so for them, some of the most meaningful parts of Burning Man take place when the desert is mostly empty. She was a music and nightlife writer for the SF Bay Guardian at the time after reporting a story about Burning Man’s Department of Public Works, she immediately joined it. “We drew a line in the dirt and stepped across it, and it was entirely transformational,” Law recounts in Spark, one of many Burning Man documentaries.īurkes started going to Burning Man in 1998, back when there were no LEDs and everything looked just a little grungier, a little more Arrakeen.
The year was 1990, the beginning of Burning Man proper. So Harvey called up Law, whose punkish, sci-fi-obsessed prankster buddies at the Cacophony Society had an idea: Let’s take it to the desert. Then the year after that, and the next, until the party got so rowdy the police shut them down. set fire to an 8-foot-tall wooden doll on San Francisco’s Baker Beach and made such memorable merriment that they were compelled to do it all over again the next year. And it was, very crucially and in a way that has never been properly acknowledged, Dune.īut Burning Man began on a beach, you say. “In reality,” he says, “pop culture was a much larger influence.” Though almost nobody talks about it, the origin of Burning Man was Mad Max. He’s a little peeved, because the bigger Burning Man gets, the more its most ardent devotees seem to misrepresent its geeky beginnings. “A load of hogwash,” says John Law, one of its founders. Over the years, the event-expected to return to the desert in 2022 after a two-year Covid hiatus-has come to represent a kind of countercultural city on a hill, founded on druggy West Coast woozeries and lovey-dovey principles of living, a radical weeklong social experiment bolstered by a gift economy.
Is that what Burning Man is all about? Role-playing scenes from your favorite fantasies, with a frightening dash of Herbertian horror? You’d be forgiven for thinking not.
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