Around this time of year 27 years ago, Bruce Sterling loaded into a 22-foot Ford recreational vehicle alongside his wife and two daughters and barrelled across the West Coast to Nevada's Black Rock Desert, home of the infamous Burning Man Festival. There, ravers, hippies, artists, journalists, and cops (swarms of them, believe it or not) alike were gathered for a weekend of communing with art, nature, and each other. Over the decade since its founding, the event, Sterling writes, had evolved into "something like a physical version of the Internet." It promised to be freaky. Perhaps even fun.
These days, Burning Man has lost quite a bit of the utopic patina Sterling describes. The event is populated by as many Silicon Valley mainstays and celebrities as it is performance artists and eco-freaks (Elon Musk is a big fan). Tickets cost north of $500, without factoring in any of the additional expenses required to get to and camp out in the middle of the desert. And extreme weather has taken a toll. Last year, temperatures rose above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and this year severe tropical storms threatened to derail the festival just a week before it was set to kick off. Forgive the cliché, but nothing stays gold forever.
In his account of his trip, Sterling writes that Burning Man is "big happy crowds of harmless arty people expressing themselves and breaking a few pointless shibboleths that only serve to ulcerate young people anyway," and argues in favor of hosting comparable festivals downtown once a year in every major city in America. That's laughably hard to picture. But what would it look like to foster community and creativity and, frankly, weirdness in the places we already live rather than paying a premium to truck out to the middle of nowhere and do so there? I'd love to hear what you think. Write me a letter or leave a comment with your thoughts.
See you next week!
Eve
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حبيبي ليس يعدله حبيب *** ولا لسواه في قلبي نصيب حبيب غاب عن بصري وسمعي *** ولكن في فؤادي ما يغيب يا حبيب ...
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