Nice camera work, though.

And the very act of telling me how I should enjoy Burning Man seems to go against “what Burning Man stands for,” as if that’s a huge, important thing for me.

I don’t know how those sheep do it, all that following. It’s tough to follow blowhards, but, I mean, hats off to those who can. For me, that’s real work.

If you can’t go to Burning Man and have a great time doing whatever you want to do, creating whatever you want to create, then stay home. If “doing whatever you want to do” involves fucking up other people’s property, or maybe punching someone, or shooting off guns, well, then — I don’t really know. They do similar stuff in inner city gangs, maybe you could join one. There’s some performance art for ya, eh? Eh? EH? MEH -heheh??? (Irony)

If “creating whatever you want to create” is telling people how to think and act, it’s, well, I mean, it’s, it’s — YAWN. That act is waay older than vaudeville. It’s been done to death for CENTURIES, it’s happening right now. It’s dull dull DULL.

For those who claim Burning Man Is Dead — english translation: No One Listens to Me, Boo Hoo — then stop going and stop talking about it. C’mon, try and stop talking about it. Give it a shot. Stop — now. Ready – set — stop. No? Can’t do it? Then you’re not really over it , correct? (psych 101, early chapters)

He’s a f*cking moron with little to contribute to the planet. If he really wants to impress everyone, he should set himself on fire.

As we stood at about 3:30 at the illuminated perimeter, looking at this year’s structure, we put arm around each other, glad to be together, and then watched as someone – almost certainly addis, from the reports I’ve been hearing – on the man’s right leg, right at the base. I don’t recall whether he slid down the fabric or used some sort of rappel setup, but he left the area just as flames became visible at the exact location this person had been.

I don’t care about whatever “statements” he thought he was making – of anyplace on the planet, BRC offers the greatest variety of ways to make statements – but I do care about the fact that the efforts of many, many people that were wasted, the money spent by on one man’s actions with the consent of the rest of us, the lives that were put at risk, and the experience people had knowing that this had happened, whether they were witnesses or not.

If, as it appears, addis is guilty of causing this event, then I hope he enjoys his time behind bars. Because that’s all that will come of this silly, tragic, stupid, self-absorbed attempt at garnering attention.

With the exception of shifting my orientation from center to periphery for a few days, the early burn didn’t really affect my experience out there at all. I’m sure the same could be said for many, thus leading to the conclusion that the act of vandalism was a dud- a fruitless affair. But when one considers the event in a mythic and historical perspective, one has to admit that Paul Addis- whether he is in fact the culprit or not- has fundamentally altered the identity of Burning Man.

I love to hear non-burner’s reactions when I tell them that someone set fire to the man early and that he was arrested for arson. They almost always reply with something like, “Arson… out there? Isn’t that why you guys go there?”

The identity of the self is determined when it makes the distinction of other. And by prosecuting and banishing Paul Addis, the identity of Burning Man, as it currently exists, has manifest in contradistinction to Addis’s actions and his identity. The problem is that Paul Addis does represent what Burning Man was in 1997. He helped build the man then, and he even went so far as to put large balls on it. If one listens carefully to his rants with an unbiased ear, then a very interesting sense of irreverence, humor, ambiguity, courage, one-upmanship and even peaceful good-will emerges. That’s what Burning Man was at one point, and every act that the organization takes to distance themselves from Addis articulates the organization as “NOT THAT.”

Since I was not there, I do not know to what extent the actions of the “Black Rock Intelligence Agency,” as Addis refers to the willful culprit, recklessly endangered the lives of others or not. Likewise, I make no claim to whether or not the actions of the “Black Rock Intelligence Agency” were right or wrong. But in the mythological reality of Burning Man, Addis plays the role of Hermes the trickster- that avatar of pranks and tomfoolery that forces what is hidden into the public space. And Jungian psychologists know that when it is the repressed shadow that is exposed, the trickster will always appear as a devil (insert Paul’s mug-shot here).

The scary thing is that Burning Man has really been a celebration of Hermes the trickster all along- a place where the repressed shadows of modern life can come to light in as healthy a manner as we can manage. Cultural historian and philosopher William Irwin Thompson has said that, “Only the complex dynamics of humor can send us from ideology into compassion.” If we lose our sense of humor and are left with no mechanism to dissolve the boundaries between light and dark into a balanced whole, then the remaining fragments of our selves and our culture will fall into rigid literalism that is destined to lead to contradiction and conflict.

So when I read the blog responses to Addis’s interviews and manifesto and see things like “Is this guy for real?” I get a bit concerned. The trickster is always a paradoxical figure- a king dressed in peasant’s clothing. Hero or villain, Paul Addis is a messenger of ambiguity and a mirror for the identity of the organization.

Is it possible that the organization was so upset because they were ‘attached’ to their dream of an ecological world’s fair below the man? Could they have felt beholden to the CEO’s of renewable energy companies who spent big bucks to come out to the middle of nowhere only to have their items inaccessible to view on the first night?

I don’t really know. But if so, then fuck them. The playa belongs to everyone and is participatory- it is beyond anyone’s control and is a place where ’shit happens.’ It is not a place for presentation, ideology, expectation or attachment- even if the values expounded are ‘globally conscious.’ I have no problem with CEO’s coming to Burning Man, there have always been CEO’s at Burning Man. But I certainly don’t owe anyone anything. And if the organization has made that Faustian bargain and sold their identity by making a ‘deal’ in which there was a certain expectation involved in our civic space, then they’ve really lost themselves.

Like the joker in a deck of cards, Paul Addis is looking the organization straight in the eyes- and what he’s saying is “WHO ARE YOU?” Since the organization has done some pretty amazing stuff in the past and since growth is impossible without opportunity, I’m going to leave open the possibility that Burning Man adapts to this challenge and realizes itself in a higher evolutionary order. But we shall see…