Breaking Open the Head by Daniel Pinchbeck

Author:Daniel Pinchbeck [Pinchbeck, Daniel]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007149612
Publisher: Flamingo
Published: 2004-02-01T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

DOCTOR MEGAVOLT

Burning Man is more decadent than Warhol’s Factory, more glamorous than Berlin in the 1920s, more ludicrous than the most lavish Busby Berkeley musical, more of a love-fest than Pepperland, more anarchic than Groucho Marx’s Freedonia, more implausible than any mirage.

The festival rewires your sense of what is possible now.

But perhaps the most intoxicating aspect of Burning Man, as Walter Benjamin might have put it, is thinking about Burning Man. Also dreaming about it—many visitors dream through the year of returning to the playa. In dreams of my own, Burning Man takes place in an abandoned factory building in Queens, now overrun with glittering hipsters; or it has “sold out” and become a sad carnival in a seaside town; or it is the last euphoric gathering of humanity in a radioactive wasteland; or I am waiting, alone, for dawn to rise over the desert’s lunar surface. Almost every night for months after my visits, the festival turns up in some form in my interior theater.

A few Burners never return to the mainstream. In New York, I met J., formerly the advertising director of a major business magazine. After he went to Burning Man, he aborted his career and morphed into a mad-eyed avatar of outdoor parties and trance music, living on the bohemian margin of New York—a thin margin these days. He christened himself “Machine Elf,” dressing as a sci-fi warlock with horns and cape at all-night outlaw parties he orchestrated under the city’s bridges.

Burning Man started in 1986, when Larry Harvey, a barely employed landscape architect and overaged bike messenger, built an eight-foot-tall wooden effigy of a man after a painful break-up, then torched it on Baker Beach in San Francisco. It felt so good that he returned the next year with more of his friends to do it again. As it grew, the event was listed in the newsletter of the Cacophony Society, a loosely knit Bay Area group of “culture jammers,” pranksters who distort the messages of the corporate media. The Cacophony Society had developed out of the collapse of an earlier and more insular group, The Suicide Club, a prepunk, posthippie underground network formed in the 1970s.

Harvey intended the Man as a free-floating symbol: an image of transience or spiritual regeneration, a signaling beacon for a new posthumanism, or a reigniting point for the spent energies of a suppressed and depressed counterculture at the end of the Reagan eighties. In 1990, the burn was too big for the beach and they relocated to the barren wastes of the Nevada desert.

“As soon as we stepped onto this desert, I knew this had tremendous potential for growth,” Harvey says. “The playa was like an enormous blank canvas.”

Harvey is the founder and a beloved figure in Burning Man’s self-perpetuating mythology. A gruff chainsmoker in a cowboy hat, he runs the event with a full-time year-round staff of twelve. They pay the Bureau of Land Management about $500,000 to use the site each year. Ticket sales, starting at

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