California has music festivals, and lots of them, from Coachella to Outside Lands to last week FYF fest, and Nevada has Burning Man, a different beast held in the Black Rock Desert this Labor Day weekend. It goes way beyond a music festival and is described as an ‘experiment in community, art, self-expression and self-reliance’.
And it looks really crazy according to ‘Spark’, a new documentary selected for the 2013 SXSW Film Festival. In the middle of nowhere, thousands of people gather in a sort of dusty camp city, play MacGyver and build artsy stuff just to be able to see it disappear in flames. It looks like a gigantesque rave party going Mad Max, a gathering of lunatics taking too much ecstasy, or a huge orgy of 60,000 people dreaming about utopia. The trailer is spectacular but I can’t imagine myself volunteering for such mayhem. All this may look visually good but the reality is not about these costume parades, circus acts and fireworks, I can’t imagine all the struggles, the challenges and I don’t understand this ‘burning’ desire to belong to a desert community, or a community period. Are they the new hippies, the hipster hippies?
In an interview with the LA Weekly, Steve Brown, the film’s co-director and producer, explained the big impact the festival has on people’s lives: ‘Burning Man chucks traditional values out the window and says ‘We don’t care about money and power and status. We care about self expression, creative collaboration and art.’ When people leave the old world behind and spend time in this other value system, it has a big impact. That story had never been told.’
Nevertheless, everybody in the world (but me) wanted to go apparently, and since it was impossible to welcome the whole world in Nevada’s desert, they replaced their first-come-first-served online ticket sales with a lottery system, which caused big problems.
But the documentary reveals an unique aspect of the festival organizers: Larry Harvey, the founder, is described as a philosopher, organizers are not interested by money – as the matter of fact Burning Man has been converted into a non-profit organization – and the board had meetings around the existential question ‘how can we judge if someone can get in or not?’ because the demand was still way over the offer.
The movie follows a lot of people who participate in 2012 Burning Man, as they breathed, ate and spit the dust at 100ºF to follow this insane dream. For me, it just sounds like a delusional desire to go back to fake and fantasy primitive times (yes it’s fake because food, booze and modern drugs abound). I just wonder how they can supply so many people with everything in the middle of the desert, and I don’t even want to know about their carbon footprint with all that burning going on,… Anyway, what a waste of resources for rich people who think they do something important for a fake community when they just please themselves! But who am I to criticize something I have never been to?
And because it has a vague connection with music (I bet a lot of DJs go there to entertain at night) Rudimental, Cazzette, Missy Higgins, Michael Franti, Tycho, Coastal Breaks, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes and Infected Mushroom feature on the soundtrack of the movie.