AMANA SIDE BY SIDE REFRIGERATOR TROUBLESHOOTING

(I think the original article is somewhere in my storage space, so this image will have to suffice for now)

żK? MAGAZINE
September/October 1995

“Lord of the Fires: Burning Man”

For those whose imagination runs towards an epic scale, the Burning Man beckons. Fire, industrial drum circles, massive structures built and destroyed, costumed and naked people, music, dancing and more fire.

Burning Man is a three-day festival held since 1990 in the midst of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. It originated in 1986 when Larry Harvey built an eight-foot effigy of a man with triangle-shaped head to burn to mark the summer solstice at a beach in San Francisco. What began as an event witnessed by twenty is now a Labor Day weekend arts festival/ritual sacrifice/postmodern carnival of the absurd where all of the 2000-plus attendees are required to be participants—not spectators. A vast empty and ancient lakebed is now a community for a few days complete with four FM radio stations, a daily gazette, landmarks and businesses. It is also one apocalypse of a party.

I walk through the city at night trying to find my campsite. Before sunset, I hadn’t imagined how difficult it would be to find it. I learn quickly to recognize the temporary landmarks which help me back. The Burning Man glows brilliantly in red and blue neon to the east, a tall FM antennae has a few large red light on it in the center of the camp near the stage. My address for the weekend is near the brightly lit encampment of the band Polkacide, whose klezmer-playing clarinetist I can sometimes hear.

There is so much to look at, to do and to see. Sleep is very low on my list of priorities. Bands and performers, mostly from the Bay Area, are scheduled at the stage, but they rarely stick to the listed times. A mile south of the main camp a rave rages continuously for the whole weekend. There are three different dance areas complete with their own music genres and decorations. I am amazed by the amount of civilization which my fellow campers have brought with them. Theme camps have been organized by different groups for the weekend. At Camp Chaos, a room complete with disco ball hanging from the ceiling, leather sofa, stereo and oriental rug awaits visitors. A theatre group called Crux Productions from NYC has set up twin forty-foot World Trade Center towers out of scaffolding with a swing hanging in-between. Tiki Camp has a fountain and a large cow-shaped hors d’oeuvre table. Someone has built a huge zoetrope, probably twenty-feet in diameter, with neon figures which animate when it spins. At McSatans, campers can purchase burgers and cigarettes. Inside the pyramid-shaped camera obscura, after one has crawled through it’s spiral labyrinth, the world outside is projected onto a large white table, a little more contained and magical than it is in the windy outdoors.

Tribalists, clowns, naked people, fire spitters, hackers, metal forgers, aliens, ravers, belly dancers, weirdos, freaks. Mass culture-rejecters all to varying extents. Art camp for pyromaniacs. Questioning status-quo reality by building the first space station in cyberspace is one of the ways founder Larry Harvey describes Burning Man. For those who come out to the desert from the crowded metropolis, it is an escape and a rebuilding of a new smaller city. I was surprised by how many technological amenities were transported out to the vast, cracked landscape. Video projectors, neon, laser lights, refrigeration, porta-potties which were never out of toilet paper, radio stations, sound systems—it was like a big three day film shoot in the middle of nowhere—a commercial for immediacy and poetic terrorism.

There was a Man. A Man burned. So did a huge installation called Toyland built by the Los Angeles Cacophony Society. So did an immense organic sculpture known as the Fire Lingam, built by Pepe Ozan out of the actual dust of the playa. San Francisco’s Seemen, a machine arts group, presented “Art of the Ephemeral Spectacle” complete with metal jaws mounted on a golf cart spitting flame and a woman with a metal flame-spitting dildo. The spectators watching this performance got a bit tweaky and started demanding different things to be burnt. First the cry, “Burn the windsock!” was quite popular, and then after the windsock was nicely demolished, the even more popular cry, “Burn the audience!” went up.

For an event which demanded no spectators, there were many: tourists and film crews abounded. It felt almost obscene to see so many people there only to document and not to experience. Many discussed the inevitability of the Lollapaloozation of Burning Man: corporate sponsors running amok, MTV filming Summer Break 1996 there, fast food booths and official Burning Man souvenirs—there already are Burning Man t-shirts, videos and glow-in-the-dark Frisbees for sale. Oh well. Some believe that the challenge of the four-day camping experience on the lifeless plain will keep those evils away.

Two apt quotes from th

Here is part 3. Check out part 1 and 2 as i still need the things from there!

I want alot of treads, 2 brownings, 8 of those small tires, a couple windows, 2 laptops, 2 axes (I also need shovels), alot of the bricks, a couple droids, 2 heavy assault carbines, 4 ARCs, just jonny thunder's torso, like 8 more of them.

I also need brodie helmets and m1 pot helmets that are in part 1 and 2 of my wants list!