Burning Man, 10 Years Ago

I'm flying to Nevada tomorrow, to go to Burning Man.

I've been once before, 10 years ago. When I got back, I wrote a short piece about it on my website.

And I've just recently rediscovered that bit of writing. It makes me cringe in parts, but the opportunity to revisit that perspective ten years later makes it worth keeping.

So, yeah, here it is, if you want to read it. This must have been in 1999 or 2000, and I was a spry 18 years old.

When you get your ticket to Burningman in the mail, and you open up the envelope to read the ticket, after the lengthy release of liability in case you die out there in the desert, is one word: Participate.

That's the real theme to it. Participation. It's hard, after living a life of doing drudgerous work to survive and escaping responsibility whenever possible, to be in a world where you feel like you can't give enough. I was so enraptured by the entire thing, so amazed by how fucking cool so many people there were, that carrying my load, doing work, was nothing like doing work. It was natural. It was fun. stuff like doing people favors and giving them gifts became easy, without second thoughts.

Unfortunately there's people at Burningman who can't let go of their preconceptions, preconceptions that Burningman is something you buy tickets for, attend, are entertained by, then leave behind, like a concert or movie. It's not like that. You are responsible for your part in creating this world outside of "civilization". Frat boys who show up looking for free drugs, sex and weird shit to look at are going to be made to feel unwelcome, if by nothing else, then by people shouting at them, "Spectator!"

You don't want to be a Spectator.

It's very hard for me to describe the Burningman experience now that I'm back in civilization again. I can't get any perspective on it. All I can really say is that it was the most liberating experience of my life. There, in a world created completely by you and the people around you, by artists and geniuses, a world with no money where people you've never met just invite you into their houses and offer you beer, you have a new perspective on civilization.

It's just more (for lack of a better word) real than the real world. There are no cell-phones and no cable, no staff meetings and McDonald's. There you have to take responsibility for your own survival, where one gallon of water you use to wash your dishes is one gallon less you have for drinking, and whether your structure stands up to the elements depends on how well you built it. Your concerns are real and immediate, and can be amply taken care of and satisfied; as opposed to the outside world where your concerns are vague and economically-driven, and where you can't get rid of that deep, nagging, indescribable worry.

Leaving was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.

I was there for seven days. It took me five days to acclimate physically, and all seven to acclimate psychologically, by which time I was pissing clear and never wanted to leave. Unfortunately my ride was leaving late Saturday night (the night of the burn) to beat traffic. I had time to watch the burn and, for about five hours, live in the post-burn chaos of a 30,000 person community screaming with adrenaline, then I had to leave. Me and my girlfriend dropped E for the burn, which was an experience I couldn't begin to describe, and afterwards, huddled under a blanket while the world exploded around us; one man could be heard screaming above the noise,
"No one is a spectator
No one is a spectator
No one is a spectator"

For a more recent piece, there's an SFGate editorial I really liked here: The life lessons of Burning Man.

Quimby the Mouse Short Film

Nothing I'm involved with, but too good not to share. An animated short based on his Quimby the Mouse by the peerless Chris Ware. It was made for This American Life - Live! which will have an encore screening on May 7th.


Looks even better in HD: Quimby The Mouse on Vimeo.

And if you ever get a chance, check out the show — there's nothing else like it on television. Just pull one off iTunes. I like My Way, but every one of them is good.

Edit: Since the Quimby short was taken down from Vimeo, here are some other Chris Ware animations:

Opening short for This American Life TV episode "Every Marriage is a Courthouse": [Streaming] [Hi-Quality MP4]

Opening short for This American Life TV episode "The Cameraman": [Streaming]

Short clip of Quimby, assembled from "frames" printed in one of the Quimby the Mouse collections.

Edit 2: It's back!

The Value And Lessons Brought Paradoxically To Bear By Hindsight When Dealing With Premonitions

My kitchen sink has not been draining for the last four or five days.

Yesterday, finally steeling my resolve to deal with this problem, I got two bottles of some generic Drano. Followed the instructions, poured it down there, let it sit, poured more. Nothing. Still a putrid cesspool. I covered it with a pizza box and cleaned the rest of my house instead.

So then, last night I have this dream where I unclog it using the toilet plunger. This is how fucking boring my dreams are now. Take, for example, a whole dream where I just give people their change and their receipts. The dreams are even boring in the dream. I used to have dreams where I discovered if I got a few feet off the ground, on a chair or something, and jumped off just as a slight gust of wind came through, I could sail on it a short ways, just eight or nine feet up off the ground, where the shackles of gravity could bind me no longer, and I could soar up to the clouds and swoop down to skim the treelines. Now I dream about unclogging my sink with a toilet plunger.

Anyways, this morning, since this is apparently the best inspiration the 'divine' deigns to hand down to me anymore, I decide to try it. Clogged pipe, plunger, seems pretty goddamned straightforward to me.

As foretold, using the plunger does, in fact, drain the sink. Because the drainpipe below the sink explodes almost immediately. The tidy, manageable little cesspool in the sink quickly slides down the drain and pours out over the kitchen floor. Panic. I hastily start building small levees from old t-shirts and sacrificial towels, and within a minute or two the swamp has been contained to one half of my kitchen.

Surveying my shitty new kitchen marshland, Nunk frowns. "This," he says, "is why you should never follow your dreams."

Front Pages of Three Major News Websites on September 11, 2001

It was hard to get information on the morning of September 11, 2001. Radio and television news were announcing anything they had as it came in, and a lot of it was premature, or just wrong.

News websites simply couldn't handle the traffic -- most were down or unusable all morning. Eventually the major sites were taken offline and replaced by stripped-down landing pages, with nothing but the newest headlines related to the attack.

I took these three screenshots just after 11:30 am. I wish I had thought to get one of the BBC, and a couple of other sites as well.







I posted those for no other reason than I just came across them and found them interesting. I wasn't going to say anything else about them.

But now I think I'm going to open my mouth. So feel free to skip this part.

-=-

For starters, on any other day I would have slept through it. I didn't have a TV in my room and I never listened to the radio. I would normally sleep until noon. But I had somehow inadvertently set my alarm clock, which I never used, to turn on NPR at 8 am. So it was by some one-in-a-million chance I was listening from bed as many of the events unfolded and the gravity of the situation revealed itself to the reporters, and to me.

Like I said at the beginning of the post, there was a lot of misleading and wrong information being reported: Palestinian groups claiming responsibility, dancing in the street, whether seven planes had been highjacked, or five, or four. But in context, given the chaos of the day, the availability and accuracy of information by radio and television was actually remarkably good. The internet, on the other hand, proved a really poor medium for the kind of centralized news delivery that radio and television delivered. (However, for decentralized news delivery, as delivered by blogs and social networks, the internet was an incredible tool -- just the metafilter thread on the events, alone, is unbelievable -- but that is a topic for another day and probably for another observer.)

A radio or network television station can more or less scale to as many viewers as necessary; it requires no additional informational transaction with each individual listener or watcher, just that they have the appropriate box of wires to receive the transmission that's already being sent. A news website has a breaking point, though, and that morning every news site broke. And they all deployed the same spontaneous solution; these little "micro-sites".

What makes these examples interesting to me now is how quickly they must have been assembled with no prior planning, and how they reflect slightly different priorities between the different news agencies.



You can see MSNBC's is pretty dramatic -- "DAY OF TERROR" in bold orange over a massive fireball. Only the most basic description of the event appears on the front page, with links to mini-reports on different aspects. I expect Fox News had a similarly bombastic page up, with contrast-enhanced explosion photographs and bold, sensational headlines. MSNBC is also the only one with a link to "Numbers for relatives to call," which was in very high demand that morning.



CBS's is distinct from this -- instead of a handful of links to mini-reports, they opted to make a bullet list of pertinent information as they got it. It looks the most hastily-constructed; you can see they left out the word "attack" in the first sentence. But it's also the least hysterical. They're also drawing a possible connection to Camp David, which many networks would speculate on at one point or another. And their "Day of Infamy" is an interesting choice for a headline, deliberately evoking FDR's "date which will live in infamy" speech.



ABC seems to have the best format: a one-paragraph summary of what happened, as best they understood it, and below that are links to specific stories. You can see that at this point, as evidenced in CBS and ABC's descriptions, nobody seemed to know yet whether four or five planes had been highjacked. Their "America Under Attack" headline seemed to be what several news stations settled on over next few weeks.

News sites are somewhat more nimble nowadays. There's definitely the infrastructure to ramp up bandwidth as necessary -- as for a major news event -- that wasn't there in 2001. And as that is exceeded, you can expect a major site to fail over more quickly and to a much better-planned "mini-site" next time, without the hours of downtime.

That is, if by that point they haven't already been replaced on the internet by a new model of social reporting, some form of "crowd-sourced" news-gathering and news-sharing that circumvents the major news distributors entirely.

-=-

As an aside:

I remember at one point on the morning of the attack, already having watched several hours of news, thinking, it's been a really long time since I've seen an advertisement. Or even a brand name or logo, aside from the logo of the television station. Obviously in the above screenshots you can see the news sites also did not make delivering advertisements a priority on their limited bandwidth.

The first logo I saw was for Verizon, on the sign on the side of their building, as it was reported they had restored limited functionality to their local cell phone network. I don't know what the first commercial on any network was -- there were no commercial breaks on any news channel in the entire time I was watching.

The Problem with MySpace

Here's the thing. It's not that myspace is a hideous (and I fucking mean hideous) blight, painful to the eyes of anyone with even a fleeting sense of design or aesthetics; to say nothing of the often multi-layered auto-starting music on every page. It's not that, at its foundation, it's a volunteer army of young people whose every action on the site floods free demographic research into a right-wing whackjob's media empire.

It's that I'm narcissistic enough already, and to invest any of myself in creating a miniature social federation around buddy lists and animated gifs and favorite TV shows, and to even have a cursory connection to -- or investment in -- this inane, profoundly boring and blindingly self-important new phenomenon of "myspace drama", would likely push me right over the edge, set me fully adrift in the appeal of my own imaginary celebrity.

Do not construe this as a judgement or edict on anyone but myself. I have no problem with you, or your myspace page. But believe me when I tell you I'm self-absorbed enough. I don't need the entire world to bear witness when I say hi to you.

An email will suffice.

How to Write

Drew made this how-to sometime during the drew.corrupt.net days, somewhere between 1998 and 2001 -- long before toothpastefordinner.

So here's a primer on How to Write
by Drew

Holding This Moment

Today I'm driving home, exhausted and pissed off, like I've been after work every day lately. At a stoplight, a single bubble floats in front of my windshield. I'm so out of it that, at first, I don't know what's the hell's going on. Dazed, I look around to see where it could have come from. The light turns green and I start driving. Suddenly there's bubbles everywhere, engulfing my car.

The little girl in the car in front of me, she keeps dipping her bubble wand and holding it out the window of the car, and as her mother accelerates, hundreds of bubbles are pouring out from her little fingers, swirling around my car as I drive through them.

It's wondrous. Divine.

this is what the subway looks like when you are drunk at 3 am

Since sambrown of explodingdog has taken it down from his site, I took it upon myself to re-host the walk, his wonderful photographic tour of New York.

Memento Mori

In 2005 I enlisted Nunk to become Memento's Leonard for halloween. We spent all day with the DVD, carefully copying each different tattoo.



He pulled it off really well; carrying a polaroid camera from party to party, taking pictures of people and writing notes on them with a sharpie.

Album Cover Bingo

Just figure out any five in a row.  Name the artist and the album.

Click for bigger, sorta.

Thirty-Nine Steps

Ten bucks to anyone who can identify this song.  Seriously, ten bucks.  I got it on a mix CD and not knowing what band it is has been driving me crazy for years.

[Edit: Finally found out -- it's an unreleased demo from Fear of Little Men. Song is called "Oregon Grinder". Thanks to Ethan.]

Let's Get Started

Nothing could be plainer

Than the things that have been done

and there can be no mystery to what is yet to come

It's Now that howls at nothing

It's Now that runs and hides

It's Now that winds its spineless coils and slithers out of sight

Your cries above the furrow

Draw my fingers like a plow

Through tattered ends that twist and bend about the Here and Now

The Here is blind and helpless

And strives against the dark

The Now's a well of shadows where the world has come apart