Burning Man:  more than just a dusty dogpile of drug-addled polyamorous zombies, dreadlocked retards, socially-inept dotcom casualties desperately seeking meaning in psychedelics and dance music culture, survivalist fuckups who couldn’t make it in the mainstream art scene, weekend swingers in RVs, and sunburned tourists in cargo shorts?
Interesting question.  I’ll have to get back to you on that.

Well, if you throw in the whiskey-swilling gutter punks who actually make it run, and a smattering of mad scientists, sex magicians, middle-aged ayahuasca shamanesses, and general unclassifiable freaks, that IS a fairly comprehensive list of the dramatis personae.  And yes, the fashion crimes are heinous and ubiquitous; though after 3 or 4 days the whole post-apocalyptic drag queen thing does start to make a little more sense.  But I’m not sure if that excuses it or not.
And yes, before I ever went I found burners mostly distasteful and slightly intriguing, and I still feel basically the same way; other than the people I camp with (spoiler alert:  in the future, this will include you), I avoid talking to burners in the default world.
Plus, now the word on the street is that Burning Man has ruined dubstep — Fuck!  We’re sorry.  We didn’t mean to.  We were just out there in the middle of the desert, naked except for some feathers & mascara & sequins, a little too stoned and sun-damaged and sleep-deprived to really be able to stomach anything with higher BPMs, and now our friend has a scrip for adderall, so we no longer require psytrance to stay awake…  Whatever we broke about dubstep, we’ll fix it.  Our other friend has a blowtorch!

But then, there’s this other thing about it — that it is, actually, the only important social movement of our generation, for one.  That it is a gateway into a perpetual state of prophetic dream, for another — a giant shared dreamtime where, through sleep-deprivation, heat, dust, sound, light, and the music of your neighbors’ stoned lovemaking it becomes possible for 30,000 people to remain in contact with their own unconsciouses long enough to experience transformative explosions of radical intimacy.  That it’s a feminized space in which women and men actively experiment with new ways of interacting, beyond the gender / power structures that we all grew up in and learned to take for granted.  That it’s a practice utopia mingled with a practice apocalypse — the only realistic way of learning how to cope with social collapse, which is to say with life itself.  A feast of fools, a temporary autonomous zone, a pirate kingdom, where slaves are freed and the king within is decapitated.  That it recaptures the primordial role of art, its capacity for evoking genuine wonder — that it embodies Beuys’ dictum that everyone must become an artist in order for our species to survive, and does so by punching back through the millennia to a time before the distinctions between art, religion, magic, and science were drawn — so out there, the shamanesses, mad scientists, survivalists and magicians are often the same people.  Which is all of us.

Worthwhile for a moment to remember that Thomasso Campanella’s magical description of alchemic utopia was called “Heliopolis,” “La Citta del Sole” in the words of renaissance magus Giordano Bruno; City of the Sun.  Giordano Bruno — I think they burned him…  His drawings of a many-centered solar system look strangely like a place I’ve been, a place I’ll go again.

A city so strange, so huge, surreal, and intense, that it seems it could only exist in the mind.  But its physicality is genuine, visceral, dusty, hot, loud and insane.  Nobody could think of a thing like that.  I can hardly even remember it without mingled fear and love threatening to push my eyes back into my head.

Uh, yeah, anyway.  Maybe that’s enough on that topic.

Draw a line and cross it.  On the other side everything is going to be different.

Touch Moonflower, 8 May 10, Berkeley. Photos in this post by me (or anyway found on my camera!)

Soundtrack to this post:  Ana Sia live.

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Dubstep not dead; it just got eaten alive by left coast glitchstep acid crunk, where it lives on in the belly, morphing perpetually in the moist darkness.

Also — Steve Dye suggests some ways of repairing dubstep:

Thanks, Steve!

A couple months ago I attended a memorial for a well-known architect in Marin, one of whose posthumous landscape plans I now have the honor of realizing. The sermon moved me a lot, mainly because the minister spoke openly about this man’s alcoholism, which had grown somewhat crippling (I guess) towards the end of his life.
But another element of the memorial was the repeated reciting of a quote, which had apparently been inspiring to this man, and (evidently) also to various members of his family and the officiating minister (who had been this man’s client, and currently lives in a house he designed):

Make no small plans, for they have no power to stir men’s blood, and probably will not themselves be realized

This quote turns out to be attributed to an urban planner called Daniel Burnham which… well it isn’t really fair to hold his occupation, or his pot belly, against him. But over the weeks since then, I’ve been thinking about it–
And it starts to seem to me that, inspiring as this statement may be, sometimes, I am not at all sure I agree. In fact, it occurs to me that small plans are exactly what we as a species could use more of. I mean, I don’t know about you, or Daniel Burnham, but I honestly would really, really feel good if I could just make the world around me — say, an area 30 feet in circumference — a little more beautiful, a little more whole. I would feel a sense of accomplishment if I could make just one or two people feel a little more hopeful, a little calmer. Maybe if I could be nice to my girlfriend for a couple weeks solid, let’s say. That would be an accomplishment.
I don’t know, I don’t mean to sound flippant, or (god forbid) unambitious. In a way, also, it seems to me that big plans are all too often a kind of poison. That, behind the cover of their “stirring men’s souls,” they are really just a way of camouflaging the same old selfish little plots, the same self-aggrandizement.
Also, I’m not convinced at all that big plans are how you get at big results. I mean, for one thing, the reality in which we are immersed is a tangled mass of contingencies, random factors impinging on one another endlessly, non-linearly, in ways which our limited minds are simply not adapted to make sense out of. It seems to me there’s something to be said of human-scale planning.
But I think what I’m really getting at is, that since everything is connected — since that’s the actual nature of the reality we find ourselves immersed in — small changes have significant, and often unforeseen, consequences. If one person takes responsibility for an area 30 feet in circumference, and attends to it thoroughly, mindfully, lovingly… I’m just not convinced that’s not the biggest, most ambitious plan anybody ever thought of. And I think part of its magic is precisely that it doesn’t “stir mens’ souls” — that it’s beneath the radar, invisible, subversive. And, I say, you know for sure that it’s going to be realized, because you realize it, starting now, with your own breath and blood; and it only grows as you grow.
It all put me in mind of another quote, this one from Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, which I kept over my desk years ago, next to a photograph I found in the street of waterbirds taking off in flight, partly obscured by the photographer’s thumb:

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.

Inside this chicken suit is a boy who sings for no reason.

Last week I went to see China Miéville read from his new book, a young adults book called Un Lun Dun, which he wrote and illustrated following in the footsteps of his mentor, Mervyn Peake. I’m not going to explain who those people are, except to say that Miéville still looks about like he did in this picture from 1999:

He appeared to be wearing newly purchased tennis shoes, and has really amazing lips.

The new book involves two girls who go through some kind of portal and have all kinds of adventures in a transformed London. This is a kind of idée fixé for Miéville; again and again in his books and stories, London, or a fantastic version thereof, is invaded or transfigured or both. Feral streets appear briefly and then are gone again; reflections transgress the mirrors; a war of some kind is going on under everybody’s noses; the city has become strange, unpredictable and dangerous. I see this as deeply political and childlike. Like madness in Lovecraft, this invasion of strangeness is never truly unwelcome in Miéville; his protagonists are those who somehow manage to function in this transfigured city, or are fascinated by it, tracking its moves, like the mysterious brotherhood in Reports of Certain Events in London. In this, Miéville harkens back to both the Surrealist desire for an insurrection of the imagination, and the Situationist awakening to the strangeness of the quotidian urban situation (and its power relations; this is how I interpret Miéville’s repeated hunger to bring the war home, a theme which also occurs in the perhaps too-simply allegorical Iraqi corpses whispering from the basements of American homes in the short story “Foundation.”)

Anyway, Miéville’s question and answer session was delightful. Much as I love his writing, I had expected him to show the inarticulateness about his own work characteristic of most great artists; or, worse, to be a post-theoretical Trotskyite smartypants. In fact, his persona is an extremely delicate balance of a very smart person who is aware of his own intelligence and careful to tone it down, and a vulnerable and geeky outsider who is confident enough to let others see him as he is.

I think I see Miéville as a kind of prophet of urbanism because I discovered him simultaneously with “anarchitect” Lebbeus Woods, whose fantastic and grotesque hybrids of destroyed and uncontrollably proliferating urban environments single-handedly made me fall in love with cities again. Cool as Miéville’s own illustrations are, for me his books are always illustrated by Woods. I include a few below.

I saw Craig Brown for the first time in years.

Even when we lived in a group house together, over 15 years ago, Craig had been through some stuff and was one of the more outrageous and genuinely different people I knew. Since then he’s been through some more stuff, and, as he wrote in an email recently,

It took me many years to realize that I am OK with some levels of ambiguity in the nature of reality that just aren’t good for most people to be exposed to.

His eyes are obsidian funnels that it is difficult to look into for very long.

Anyway, we got to talking about the Yezidi, the gnostic Zoroastrian sect that many people refer to as devil-worshippers. They are ethnically Kurdish, and live wherever Kurdish people live, most in Iraq but also in Turkey, Syria, Iran and Armenia. Yezidis have a tradition of secretiveness about their religious beliefs, which is probably a sensible tradition to have when you worship a being all the people around you consider to be Satan. Craig said, “I, and the other people I know who are into the Yezidi…” Then he interrupted himself — “Well, not any more. I don’t know any of those people any more. Anyway, we came to the conclusion that the reason for the endless attempts at exterminating the Kurdish people are actually attemts to wipe out the Yezidi, who are the last surviving gnostic religion; because even though most Kurds aren’t Yezidi, it’s impossible to tell them apart.” This interested me, because I have often wondered why the Armenian, Turkish and Iraqi governments have all been guilty of attempted genocide of the Kurds, and why the British carved up their territory like that.

I probed a little deeper, and Craig summed up the Valentinian gnostic worldview: “This God, that you want us to worship and submit to, is not nice, and the only thing protecting us from his cruelty is this fallen angel, who dared to stand up to the false creator.”

Yezidi philosophy also turns out to have to do with free will. They believe, as did the Valentinians, Cathars, and Bogomils, that good and evil are the products of human choices, and they emulate the Peacock Angel, who Christians and Muslims refer to as the devil, who was ordered by God to bow down and chose not to.

The Yezidi have a website.

Here is the Wikipedia entry. (Perhaps composed by some of those people Craig “no longer knows?”)

Michael Yon is a loose and jingoistic cannon, but not only did he interview Yezidi in Iraq, he also wrote this fantastic article for Vice about an American dropout who is a practicing Aghori Tantrik. Aghoris aren’t Satanists or gnostics, they’re Antinomians, which means “lawless.” The Antinomian strain in world religion is something that’s extremely interesting to me, from Indian Tantra to the Brethren of the Free Spirit via the Millenarian cult of the bipolar god-man Sabbatai Sevi, and it’s one of those things I’ll probably never connect the dots on — but maybe you can.