NMScene

Preface

I feel like I must write this edition of From the Front Lines in a slightly different fashion. The direction I’d like to take this writing is in the form of a letter to my younger sister, Candace. Although we are separated by only two years of experience in life, those experiences are quite a bit different. It’s often been hard for me to describe to my family the honest details about my trips to Burning Man, not only because of the adult nature of a lot of what I’ve experienced, but because of the extreme crapyness of the way we were brought up to communicate with each other. This brings a bit of irony due to the fact that I love to write so much.

My sister called me up the other day and asked me, meekly, about my vacation, and how it was, and what did I do. I was somewhat at a loss for words when describing any of my experiences at Burning Man to anyone, let alone to a family member whose life revolves around finishing her masters’ degree in abstract math. Add together her learning disability and my extreme lack of eloquence when it comes to spoken communication and all she knows right now is how I went camping in the desert with some friends.

So here, without much ado, is my heartfelt explanation of what I’ve been up to for the last two weeks and what I’ve sort of done three times prior.

From the Front Lines: Burning Man 2009

Dear Candace,

You called me up yesterday trying to pry some golden bit of information from me in order to see how my vacation went for these last two weeks. Well first and foremost I want you to know that I had, perhaps, one of the best trips I’ve ever had, and I’m someone who has gone on too many trips to count. You once told me that it was sad that the best thing that I’ve ever participated in was my trips to the black rock desert, I hope that this writing will change your mind, as I wasn’t exactly clear on what I experienced.

When people ask me what Burning Man is, I always find myself at a loss for words to explain it properly, because it is so many damn things all at once. I’ve told mom that I was simply going to an art and culture festival out in the desert. This is like saying math consists of counting and numbers. We both know that this is such a broad statement that it is almost false.

To be precise, burning man is what ends a week long experiment in so many different things. An entire city is built and exists, in the Nevada desert, for a week every labor day. This city is affectionately called Black Rock City, after a mountain range near by that is volcanic, and black, in appearance. It’s held at the bottom of a dry lake bed which had, since the last ice age, evaporated, and left an alkaline flat that is the largest, flattest place on the planet, some thirty miles long and at its widest up to ten miles wide. It’s an amazing backdrop to what has become a city I’ve come to call my second home. It is, during this week, the third largest city in Nevada.

The city itself is something of a marvel of what an efficient planed community can become. I’m sure you’ve seen the poster in my apartment that I got in 2007 of the city, a circle ¾’s full. The city holds, at its current size, around 50,000 residents, which fluctuates every year but has floated around there for a while. Burning man, as an event, itself is over twenty years old, moving to the black rock desert, and has been growing every year since.

The burning of the man, which is a 40ish foot structure, is just one event at the end of the week of thousands that occur over the course of the week. The events that do occur are made by the people who come to live in black rock city. This brings me to one of the key, central ideas that burning man has instilled in me and the others who attend; Participation.

Participation, as opposed to spectation, is probably the most central theme to this event. I didn’t really understand this going to the event, the first or second times, but by the third and definitely after this trip, it’s like all the little pieces make sense to me now. It’s hard to translate the concept clearly for someone who hasn’t participated before, but I’ll do my best.

Many people will go to Burning Man a few times, hit the parties that go on there and get bored of it and never return. I feel supremely bad for those that go there, get so fucking close to “IT,” and leave never getting “IT.” Most of the people who are like this are what are lovingly called tourists. They come to see the spectacle of it all, tour the sights, but, like a good, preprogrammed little drone of society, they don’t get it.

When you participate, when you build something with your own two hands, regardless of what it is, you do what few others in this life ever do. You lead. You tell people, hey, I have this zany idea, come check it out. Play with it. Maybe my crazy idea can inspire your crazy ideas and something really good can come out of it.

The first part of participation in Burning Man is survival. As easy as it is for most people to just buy their way into survival, its much less easy for others. There are a lot of people who go to burning man in a large, luxury RV, with satellite TV’s and tons of stupid amenities. While these things are nice, and I’ll probably roll up one day in one myself, those who haven’t gone their first time with nothing but a tent, a cooler, and some instructions on how to survive in the desert have really done themselves a massive disservice. Understanding how difficult it is to survive on your own with a minimum of things put into context how insanely good we have it as Americans. Things like indoor plumbing and refrigeration, not to mention the easy accessibility to goods take on a almost sacred meaning when you’ve been deprived of them for only a week. Its only when scarcity is in abundance that abundance is truly valued.

Radical self reliance, then, is a second key topic when it comes to what Burning Man is. By radically self reliant, its ment that you understand *exactly* what it is and means to rely on yourself for your own survival, and, not only survive, but thrive decently in one of the harshest environments on the planet. The playa, which the desert is called due to its beach like atmosphere, is a bed of highly alkaline dirt left over from the previous lake that used to be there. Nothing can grow in the soil, and there are high winds which gust upwards of 60 on a bad day, dust storms (remember when we went to go see the shuttle land at white sands, and all there was what dirt in the air? It’s like that) which can last all day, and temperatures which I’ve experienced peaking out at 115 degrees. Surviving in this climate takes extra precautions, like learning to keep your camp together when extreme winds hit, how to keep cool, and how to keep our skin from turning to the consistency of paper.

Being radically self reliant isn’t enough, however. Bringing excess, i.e., more than you would need is also a crucial idea when it comes to the event. Being able to provide for your camp isn’t enough; one also needs to be able to help his neighbor in both terms of stupid crap like alcohol, but also in terms of ability. This leads us to another idea which was introduced to both of us at a young age going to catholic school and later to church, that being of giving.

The economy of burning man is a Gifting economy. This is another crucial idea which I didn’t really give a shit about until I came to black rock city. Being able to give to your neighbors *without* the expectation of return, is a key concept that is completely lost in our modern world. We all are told there is no free lunch. I disagree with this. There sometimes is, but we can not expect it, and further, we should be the one’s giving it if its there. Giving with out the expectation of return is a funky idea. It often falls flat on its face; the recipient of the gift will usually not value it, or even worse, take it for granted.

There is a unique synergy that occurs, however, when you combine the scarcity of resources that living in black rock city creates and the idea of a gifting economy. The value of anything given in such a situation increases exponentially to the gift. Simply sharing a drink or a sticker suddenly becomes a very unique experience. I think this is a hard concept for Americans, in particular, to grasp, as we have relatively instant access to most things that we need. Our society is unbelievably wasteful which we just don’t see.

Alright, so, there, we have some core concepts. But just how was my experience? WTF did I do? Well, it’s like this. This has been not just a hard year, but, one of those years in which I’ve personally grown unlike any other in my life. It began with a broken heart and a bit of a crisis inside myself. This took the better part of the year for me to deal with and sort out. You and your husband and mom have been riding my ass about getting back into school, but unfortunately, this last year made me stop and re evaluate where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing. Thank god, I came out on top, stronger than ever. Like, unbelievably solid, better than I’ve ever been in my life. Just as that ended, the situation with mom loosing her house hit, and again, like you, my life was put on hold as I dealt with another crisis.

I mention this on purpose, because Burning Man, and my participation in Black Rock City, is a year long event. My experience with the prior three burns gave me the ability to organize and lead and take care of two people who’ve never been and include two extra camp mates at the last minute. We built a dome (a 20 foot shade structure) in my friend Cetta’s back yard, and I got together my equipment and loaded up the trailer and headed out. Of the three prior burns I’ve gone to, this was decisively my best, funest, and most eye opening. Like every burn, there were the usual indulgences and craziness. There were naked people (gasp) people on drugs, people sober, artists, tourists, first timers who didn’t know what the fuck was up, cranky fucks who complain about the whole thing, art, and, unbelievable moments that really cant even been described.

I have to be honest, however, I wasn’t feeling like going this year but knew once I got out there I’d have a blast. I really only had one thing that I felt like I had to do, and that was to put a picture of me and a certain someone inside the Temple. The temple isn’t a temple, say, to god, or to man, or to some kind of pagan beast. It’s just…a temple. A sacred space. It’s a place that most people end up putting something of significance into because at the end of the week, much like the man, it is burned, and the fire takes away whatever you choose to put into it. This was my favorite temple that I’ve experienced and the hardest for me to deal with.

The temple was built by a group of artists from Austin, Texas this year and was amazing to be inside. People brought art, pictures, and stories of people they loved and lost and needed to let go. I used it for this purpose. I took me four trips to the temple (it was about a mile and a half walk one way to get to it) before I was able to put to rest what I needed to.

After I did so, I felt a strange kind of release. It’s amazing how we hold on to the hard things in life, so often, and allow it to define us, often in the most negative of ways. I feel intensely sad for anyone who can’t let go, and allow a small fire to simmer inside them their entire lives.

Of course, there were a great many things to do out there. So many, in fact, that it would be impossible if I went on ten trips to the same event to experience all of them. There are the more urban things, like bars which will fill your cup for free, to go to, or the stupid things, like the flaming enema (gives you a little flame thrower action when you sit down on a special chair.) there were art installations like “soma” by the flaming lotus girls, a group of women who are welders and sculptors from the bay area. There are the art cars, which are vehicles that have been changed in some way that become a sort of traveling party.

There are tons of workshops out there, on anything from learning to hug yourself better, to adult themed, to how to generate green electricity, to cooking. It’s like finding some of the coolest, most interesting things out there and bringing all the nutty, productive, creative people into a pietre dish and seeing what happens.

I think one of the unexpected and best parts of my experience with the burn is bringing people who wouldn’t have, otherwise, been able to go, out there. This is for two reasons. The first is because I get the opportunity to teach and lead and organize people in a way that I would never get to. It’s kind of selfish but it hass really taught me how to, in a sense, herd cats. I find it to be one of the most important skills I’ve ever been able to develop. I’ve learned more about teamwork and getting things done that I ever could have in some kind of corporate job where people are being paid to do as I say. Getting them to do as I say with out them *having* to do it is something you can never learn in a corporate environment.

Secondly, and most importantly, its opened up these people to something new that I don’t think they would have imagined had they not gone. They get to participate in something that is mind opening and pretty fucking cool at the same time. By mind opening, they get to see what others are capable of doing, and in a sense get to measure themselves against a pretty high bar in some cases that I don’t think they would have known was out there. I know that in my case it has made me want to aim way higher than I thought was possible before. This is very much true for the year ahead of me, as I’ve set some bars that I didn’t think I could hit, but, now I’ve got the gumption to try.

I hope this has given you a taste of my experience this year in black rock city and at burning man. There are a lot of experiences that I had that are too abstract to talk about, like, a conversation I had with the clouds, getting on my knees for a shot at kitty camp, watching a father beat on his daughters boyfriend with a whip, drinking a bit much, the “love seat” which shocks you when you sit on it, and scores of other experiences like cleaning up the moop left behind by camps that were near us. These are secondary to the above things which I think I came to realize solidly this year.

I don’t expect you to ever go, but I hope one day you’ll be open enough to let me take you and your husband there, and experience the unbelievably amazing things I have in the black rock desert.

Your loving brother,

-L.

For me, this has been a year of trying new things, exploring new options and learning to define myself as a person, sharpening that edge. That foggy cloud coalesced more this weekend as I took a trip up to the 2009 Rainbow Gathering in the Santa Fe National Forest, just east of my grandfather’s home town of Cuba, NM. To me, Cuba represents the old country, the place my grandparents met and came out of.

The sleepy town of Cuba, NM has been around for over a hundred years, home to farmers and ranchers who lived a hard but steady life at over 6500 ft at the base of the Jemez Mountains. Situated in far NE New Mexico, it is one of the more isolated and scenic places in the state. The last Rainbow Gathering in New Mexico took place more than ten years ago outside of Taos. I can still remember the news reports and video of what looked like a bunch of dirty, feral, hairy people wandering around the forest. I didn’t understand why they were out there or what they were doing.

I had a lot of options to do some really fun and exciting things this weekend, but I decided to throw caution to the wind and go off that beaten track and onto another. Not just because I wanted to have a new experience, but also because I wanted to understand what these people were all about. I wanted let down my preconceptions from what I’ve experienced before and allow these people to form new ones.

Because my time was limited, my intent with my trip up to the gathering was to stay less than a day, and even less if my experience wasn’t going well. Altogether I ended up spending a solid 12 hours at the gathering, from the time I got into the forest to the time I left it.
I did have the intention of getting to the gathering earlier in the day that we had arrived, having gotten to the area designated as a parking lot at around 7 in the evening, which was late, but still gave us two hours of sunlight to get to the gathering and get to know the place a bit. I had packed a bag with some snacks and drinks for me and the two friends I brought with me, Devon and Cetta.

We were greeted by a friendly guy who was directing traffic and giving out basic info. We were told that the main gate was just a few miles up, and that there was a shuttle service going back and forth giving people a ride. So we went down to the spot where people were being picked up and taken. There were maybe fifty people up there. They were all hanging out taking in their own groups. I have to say, I did feel like I stood out like a sore thumb. I wasn’t dressed like these people and a lot of them didn’t seem too interested in socializing. That’s fine; most people don’t have good people skills and tend to stick with their group. Gauging social proof wasn’t too hard out there and I knew I was going to be judged as a first timer right off the bat at best, and at worst looked at as a undercover cop, which I really didn’t want to go towards, as we had passed between eight and twelve forest service and state cops along with a news van on the way up.

I wanted to go around and just chit chat, but as soon as I was about to, some people we knew pulled up, Brandon, who was with his friend David and three girls. They had come up together in two separate cars. They were all smiles and I told them we should hang out, as none of us knew anyone who was up there. We agreed. After they had lugged all of their gear to the drop of point, one of them suggested that we take one car up there, stuff it full of gear and people, and come back for the rest. We thought it was a great idea so Brandon and David and Brandon’s friend all crammed into one of the cars, went up into the hills, and left two girls with us, Crystal and Tiffany. They were both nice but even more out of their element than I was, and a bit on the young side.

Crystal had enough of waiting, and started walking off with tiffany, and Devon followed. it was getting dark and had been almost an hour at that point of waiting for Brandon to get back, so we started walking up the road to the front gate, which we thought to only be a few miles up. It was about three miles in that someone pulled over and offered to take us up to the gate, which they said was almost another seven or eight miles up the road. Two guy’s from Santa Fe, one worked in Los Alamos and the other up in Espanola, which to me counted as locals even though those cities lie thirty miles away on the other side of the mountain range. They were very friendly and really saved our asses, to be honest. That was an extremely long walk that none of us expected and had an elevation raise at least a thousand feet from the area we had parked in, and even though I’m in good enough shape to do it, I don’t think anyone in the group would have done well with either the elevation or the distance, especially since they were all smokers and were already huffing quite a bit.

We were expecting the car that went up to drop off gear to be spotted but we never did see it. It was too dark to look around at the parking that was full up there, so we found ourselves walking into the gathering just after sunset. The first camp we ran into was A Camp, and some scrappy dude was pretty damn friendly, he said there was elk meat steaks and PBR available to anyone who wanted it. I had been warned that A camp (alcohol camp) was hella sketchy and not to be trusted by a friend who lived for a month at a Montana gathering a few years back, so we decided to move on and see what else was out there. We walked about another mile down the road before coming to the “main” gate which was just a bunch of busses next to a banner. An older guy in his fifties greeted us and knew right away this was our first time. He directed us to go down a hill and that we would find the main meadow where most people were gathering.

Down we went this trail, which was another good half a mile through some pretty damn lush forest. This section of the Jemez is extremely beautiful. We passed a ton of scattered tents and a lot of trash. This pissed me off right away; having been to burning man so many times I have a very strict Leave No Trace Ethic. I hate seeing shit all over the place, and I was seeing it all over this trail. Gloves, boxes, shirts, bits of paper, all pushed here and there in what was pristine land. Basically the mountainside where the event was happening had been molested for several weeks.

We finally made it down that trail and into the meadow, which looked to be a mile long and maybe half a mile wide at the most. We looked around to get our bearings and saw how spread out the gathering was. It would be impossible to find our friends if they had set up anywhere other than right near the main circle. Some people we met from Pennsylvania told us there was an info tent and board we could post messages up on.

The portion of the event that I think I liked the most and had the most connection with was the first hour we were on the meadow. We met some girls from Pennsylvania who had driven down and were splitting with another friend who was going on to Portland. They welcomed us to our first gathering, and I welcomed them to New Mexico, which I don’t think they really recognized as anyone’s home, they just gave a half smile and said nothing.

We went to the soup camp and ended up being fed some “Rainbow Soup” out of a spare pan and bowl they had lying about, it was some vegan concoction of tomato soup, noodles, and spices. It was tasty, and more importantly hot. Kind of sketchy coming out of a 50 gallon barrel but it was so hot I don’t see how it could have had any pathogens in it. We went to the info tent that had a message wall you could leave messages at. I didn’t have too much hope that the small paper Crystal left for Dave or Brandon would be read amongst the mess of other messages left up on the board but it stated that they would be back every hour to look for them.

After leaving the info camp, we tried to find the latrines, otherwise known as “shitters,” which was supposed to be dug up the hill behind kids’ camp. The logic of digging a open trench to defecate into just uphill from a camp for kids kind of defied my sense of logic, as did the fact that they were craping into a open trench, which is pretty damn illegal for a lot of reasons, including sanitation, disease, and just plain nastiness. Of all of the things this gathering does, I think that the open trench solution to disposing of human waste is one of the stupidest things they could do. It’s disrespectful to the land, the people who will be camping here in the future, and is just plain gross.

We wandered over to a large fire and warmed up. We did some exploring of the meadow and camps. One fire had about fifty people in what Cetta called a cuddle puddle around it; each person was massaging the person in front of him/her, then they’d turn around and massage the other person behind. It was kind of cool to see. Right next to that fire/circle was another fire circle where several people were playing drums, a horn, and a flute. it was pretty nice and people were very into the dancing going on around it.

We ended up at the end of the meadow which had several tee pees gathered together. One of the teepees had a line about fifty people deep. We met up with the two guy’s who had given us a ride up, no one knew what was inside the tee pee and no one would say. Of course we all knew there was some kind of drugs going on inside. This was probably the most fun part of the entire night, we all chillaxed and laughed a lot with the people in line around us. We finally did get to the end of the line. Someone was hustling for spare weed for people to smoke inside, and I declined to go in (i don’t smoke and cant be inside a room filled with it due to my asthma).

I told Devon i’d meet them back at the drum circle. I wandered off and hung out near the fire and danced for some time. It was hard for me to let go and dance like I usually do. Maybe I was cold and maybe I just wasn’t feeling the circle, but I was only able to get a bit of dancing in. I think If I had been there by myself that woulda been a slightly different story. Devon and Cetta found me about a half hour later, pissed off at the teepee as the pipe never got passed to them, and some “inner circle” people hogged the shit up.

It didn’t take long for the group to run into someone with the chemicals they were looking for. There was a barter and some mushrooms were consumed. I didn’t want anything that night, I wanted my experience to be clean and sober, not just because that’s the path ive been on for a while now but because I wanted to experience and understand the event for what it was in a clear mind rather than a distorted view of it.
We ended up wandering back towards where we had started. We found another fire to stand next to as it was getting colder and colder. I had put on Cettas skirt earlier over my shorts, which I had worn not expecting to be out there that late at all. Randomly crystal found her boyfriend David, and got super happy knowing that all their gear and equipment was nearby. We all walked up the hill to his car.

We were hoping he’d drive us back down the hill but he refused, which really kind of pissed me off at first, because there was no more shuttle service till morning, and because I had made it a point to keep an eye on his girls till we found him and Brandon. It turns out Brandon, according to him, freaked out, and left, leaving him by himself to find his girls. None of their gear was set up and Devon and Cetta were in a..special place, mentally, and I was cold and sober and really tired of walking. I was pretty pissed at this point, as I was unprepared to camp there, was running out of food, freezing, exhausted, and had to tripped out friends with me. I really didn’t have a choice any more, so I grabbed some gear from his car, and walked the half mile back down to the meadow to set up his camp. Neither Cetta nor Devon could help with the set up. The tent was brand new and no one really knew wtf to do with any of it, so I took charge as much as i could and set the tent up with everyone’s help. They all jumped in right away.

I decided to stay outside as it seemed really crowded. Some dude was going around with what he said was a sheet of acid. Everyone took a square. I took one also but palmed it and put it in my pocket. The guy said some was working and some wasn’t, one of the batches didn’t work out. I really didn’t want drugs in me, and extra didn’t want some from some random guy i just met in the mountains. I was the only one who didn’t eat it.

It was almost 3am. I was freezing and tired. I decided to walk across the meadow to the drum circle which still had a fire going and people around it. Cetta and Devon came too. I decided to stay standing. I really didn’t have much rest the entire trip. I drove the whole way up, and stayed standing the entire time with the exception of the ride up from the two guys who’d picked us up and the half hour or so i sat in the chairs in front of the tent. I could feel some extreme exhaustion coming on but I knew as soon as I stopped standing or walking I was going to get really, really tired. Cetta and Dev went back to the ten and I hung out at the fire.

I listened to some guy with a messed up voice- sounded like someone had punched him at some point in the throat- talk to everyone around the smaller fire. He was kind of funny, and had something that looked like a Celtic tattoo across the bridge of his nose and down his cheeks. I left after he got pissed of and started yelling at some guy next to him, explaining that he was born at the gathering and that this was his home and family.

The drums continued. I wandered back to the drum circle and watched the curious people around the fire. There was father time, who looked like he was 80 years old. He was extremely thin, white hair, beard, and sported a Technicolor raincoat coat that looked as old as he was. He held his right hand up in the air giving the peace sign. He looked like he had no teeth and just stared at the crowd, wild eyed, as if he were casting peace sign in to the minds of everyone around him.

There was a young woman, maybe 24, dancing wildly. She didn’t look like a lot of the other women around, and was really getting into the dance. She ended up topless, sweating before the fire, shaking her perky breasts back and forth next to another topless guy, who may have been her boyfriend, who was over weight, and also had perky breasts, dancing feverously. A black man sporting dreads and a flute, less than a foot long and very thin, played facing the fire. Someone danced in front of him and he quickly shouted “get your fucking ass out of my face!” and the guy, who was hispanic, wearing a fedora, no shirt, and moustache, quickly complied. He was soon replaced by a thin blonde man with a beard, again no shirt, wearing tan shorts. The flute player’s response was the same but the bearded man seemed to be taunting him, continuing to dance right there in front of him. The flute player got pissed and stood, played his flute in front of the fire, and the bearded man began to dance even harder around him, shouting taunts. The two continued this dance for a few minutes. I thought a fight was going to break out so I moved, not wanting to get caught up into it. Finding only smoke I moved back to my original position. The hippy battle had ended; the wild bearded man won, the flute player disappearing along with another tall back dreaded man who sported a dark grey trench coat and beard.
I decided I was done at that point. I walked back to the camp and sat in the chair, putting my feet up crossed legged into the other chair, trying to curl into as comfortable as a ball as I could manage. Dave and Devon tried to invite me into the tent but it really looked crowded, so I opted to stay out so they could rest, but the drugs and alcohol and smoke had them all in a very chatty mood. A lot of shit was talked about everything we had seen today. Most of it was pretty damn funny.

They continued on and didn’t notice that everything in the forest got really quiet. It took me a while to figure this out too but I looked up from my curled up position and realized that everything got super quiet. People were walking about but saying nothing. I looked at my watched and saw that it was around five in the morning, and the sun was going to be up soon. The night sky was brilliant, the moon had just said and the entire Milky Way could be seen through the slight haze from the campfire and through the overhead clouds. Dave, Crystal, and Tiffany
got up to warm themselves next to a fire and I dove into the tent, hoping to warm a bit and lie down so that i could get some kind of rest. They came back and continued to talk loudly, laughing, carrying on.

That’s when we heard the first “shhhhh” from outside. Cetta asked, “wtf did someone just sush us?” everyone laughed in the tent and we all shushed ourselves. Then, again every few minutes we got the same thing. I stayed silent, but everyone continued to talk shit about dirty hippies being quiet. Someone came up to the tent. The voice sounded male to me but I was told later that it was a girl.

“Please, please, please, please be fucking quiet! Please!” she begged, “don’t you know that there is silence from six am till noon on Saturday?” “Fuck you fascist” was Devon’s response. “What the fuck for?” he continued. “You’ll find out tomorrow at noon it’s wonderful, just be quiet!” Everyone in the tent laughed at her and she left. They continued to be loud for a few minutes then began to sush each other and whisper. That’s when the rocks began to be thrown at the tent. One of them hit my back as I lay there, quietly, listening to everyone giggle and snicker in whispers. I had really had enough at this point. I decided i was getting the fuck out of there at seven with or without Devon and Cetta. I tried to fall asleep but the rocks kept falling.

Finally six fifty rolled around. “Cetta,” I said, “Fuck this shit I’m out.” Cetta soundly agreed and we tried to wake Devon. I told Devon that David would take him back if he wanted to sleep. I didn’t ask but Dave said right away he would. Devon passed out and Cetta and I got out of the tent. I looked over and saw a guy, a bit shorter than myself, sporting a beard, giving me the evil eye like no one’s business. This immediately made me irate as hell, as I had been super friendly to everyone around me and hadn’t made a single noise in the last three hours. “This is fucking retarded” I said as Cetta and I began walking. We walked back up the trail we’d gone up before. Dog shit was here and there. The mess in the forest was even more visible to me now, as were the broken branches and tents all over the place.
I just wanted the fuck out.

Cetta and I were slow hiking up to the road. The elevation was a lot to deal with- somewhere around 9200ft and we had to go kind of slow at first on the hike up the ridge to the road. Cetta continued to talk shit about the entire gathering. I kept getting pissed every time I saw another mess around the area. The walk out was quite magical, however, and the forest, though molested, was amazingly beautiful around us. A camp talked some shit to us but it was funny. They had been the most fun to be around the entire time we were up there, and we had spent the least time there, which was too bad. Cetta and I hiked out around seven miles- we walked for an hour and a half, before a guy in his late forties to fifties drove up behind us, honking lightly and quickly, offering us a ride. He was a part of the shuttle service. His name was Gary and he was a Servant of the Lord! (yes, with exclamation point) and said he was doing a ton of the shuttling but his truck had broken down the day before right before we’d gotten there. He was super friendly and started driving us down. We found another guy walking and we gave him a ride also. We dropped him off and then got dropped off ourselves. I wanted to give him some gas money, but didn’t have anything on me. I thanked him profusely, and lead Cetta back to the car.

The funny thing about it all was that the vibe in the parking lot area was ten times better than up at the gathering. It felt more real and honest than the sham up in the hills. I did meet some good people and saw a bunch of oddities of humanity. There were a few things which completely tainted my experience, however. The biggest thing, one which I don’t think I’ll be able to forgive for a long time, was the way that these people disrespected the forest. What a fucking mess. There was no ethic to keep it clean and pristine. It was basically a big shithole for them to go and do whatever the hell they want in. I take a lot of pride in the Jemez. It’s my land. It’s the heart of New Mexico. The fact that it was so severely disrespected really, really tainted my view of “hippies” (which I use the term lightly. My best friends mom is a hippy of the sixties and hates the people who call themselves hippies today- being dirty and having dreads isn’t a qualified to being a hippy, as it seems its become). That forest is going to take a long, long time to recover

The second was the blatant hypocrisy. Hippies are very much about “don’t tell me wtf to do!” ethic. I respect this ethic because it’s at the core of what America is. Don’t tread on me, ect. But at the same time, getting shit thrown at us and yelled at is fucking retarded as hell. There was little to no organization. There wasn’t even basic infrastructure for restrooms- and yet they expect everyone to conform to silence for seven hours? Fuck that. What a crock of shit.

Lastly, what occurred there wasn’t something I saw as being a benefit to anyone, nor existing as something needed for anyone. We can all go camping, and we can all go in varying group sizes whenever we want. It didn’t open my mind, didn’t give me a new view point on anything at all, in fact, it only reinforced some very negative stereotypes of hippies in general. I left the forest pissed and saddened by an event that has passed its time and place in history. If I were into this movement, I would start another one. I’d start from scratch, figuring out how to connect to a relevant future, not some burnt out, wild eyed dream that will never come about.

2. Uncertainty Principle

I had been traveling extensively for the previous six months before my departure to Detroit. I had gone on road trips all over the west; Los Angeles to a warehouse party. Denver three times to Club Beta to hear a variety of DJ’s play. Las Vegas just for some tomfoolery. Indio, CA, to attend the Coachella music festival, and San Fransisco to participate in the Bay to Breakers marathon/march. Any weekend that I thought I could get away from this state, this city, I have. Getting away from this place, and the situations I have found myself in here, has in a lot of ways changed the person who I once was. I would detest coming back to boring old Albuquerque, a small city in a large, empty state, boring, dull on every occasion. This was a mistake by myself that I will not make again.

The Detroit electronic music festival, called DEMF my many of the attendees, has been in operation since may of 2000. The first four years of the festival, held in downtown Detroit’s Hart plaza overlooking the Detroit river and facing southward towards Canada, were free and brought in upwards of 1.7 million people for the first three years of the event. Staffing problems, management changes, and lawsuits, however, led the event off course. In 2003 there was a drop in attendance by more than half down to 630,000 along with a name change to Movement. In 2004, it dropped even further as it was the first year that the event organizers began charging to get into the festival, 25$ for a full day pass. Attendance dropped again to 150,000, and still struggled to break even in costs. 2006 saw the worst attendance numbers of the festival, barley seeing 41,000 people paying to get in. It was estimated that in 2009 upwards of 80,000 people were in attendance but this has not been substantiated yet.

2009 saw 57 acts spread over four stages inside of hart plaza, with the addition of a truck with a small sound system featuring a few drum n’ bass acts that were not advertised. In contrast almost 90 acts played on five stages in 2008, and 48 acts in 2006, which was also the worst year in terms of attendance. Because all four stages run congruently with each other it is quite impossible to hear every act play their live set, and one often has to choose between acts that they love and down time where none of the acts is worth their time. This happened several times during my experience at this years festival, much to my dismay, and to my group’s. Most dj’s sets lasted around an hour and a half to two hours in the early part of the day and up to three hours for headliners on the main stage in the evening.

The main stage (conveniently called the Vitamin Water Main Stage, thanks to vitamin water being a major corporate sponsor of the event along with Red Bull) sat within the large amphitheater built into Hart Plaza, which also sported the best sounding system. This amphitheater gave the event a much needed epic feel to the entire production. There was plenty of space to dance on any tier of the Amphitheater which meant that almost everyone had space to do anything with the exception of peak times in the evening when navigating up and down the stairs did get a bit tricky at times. A large LCD screen just below the DJ booth thankfully gave the name of each dj that was up so that there was no question who was going at any time.

A second stage (the Made in Detroit stage) sat underneath the entrance to the event and to the right of the main stage, which I have to admit gave a very omnious feel that I really did like. Unfortunately the sound from this stage was not nearly as good as any of the other stages and the strange shape to the space and concrete walls only worsened the fact. Getting in and out of this stage required either finding one of the very well hidden routes that fed directly into the space from the periphery of Hart plaza, or going straight down near the main entrance to the main stage.

Two other stages sat to the left and right of the main stage. The Beatport stage sat to the far left and had its sound system turned away from the venue across the river towards Canada. On the second night as we left back to our hotels via the people mover/train Detroit has, I noticed a major street tunnel entrance moved traffic directly under this stage. The engineering must have been really solid because I never once felt or heard traffic flowing below us.

The fourth stage, the Red Bull Music Academy stage, sat a ways away from the other three. It was right next to a step pyramid structure in the plaza that kind of acted as an above ground seating/amphitheater structure which kind of divided itself from the other stages. This would prove to be my favorite venue for the duration of the trip, as all of the acts that I thought stood out and were the best ended up performing at this stage.

Between all of these stages was organized both a food court and the typical festival shopping mall experience. Vendors sold shirts, stickers, countercultralish wares found at most festival venues. Food was a bit pricey considering the price to get in. Cheep beers (bud light) cost 7$, which I thought completely ridiculous especially when better beers at coachella in California were a dollar less and had 30% more for your dollar. Red Bulls were 5$ and mixed drinks at the hard to find bars were 11$. An overall rip off that made us eventually sneak in our own alcohol that we purchased on a venture into downtown on the second day. I bought a 2$ orange on the first day there but that was only because up to that point I had only eaten bloody Mary’s in the airport along with a few nachos. Food ended up being my biggest single expense for this entire trip, which isn’t saying much. The best deals were found outside of the festival in Greek Town and small sandwich shops around town, when you could find them. Overall my experience with keeping myself feed, hydrated, and buzzed was super negative and if i ever go back will have to come up with a solution for. Even renting a car with someone in my group and driving a few miles down the road to a store would have ended up proving a better deal than the prices we ended up paying.

Because I was dealing with a migraine for the first day of the trip and starting to develop some sever jet lag from partying in San Fransisco the weekend before, I did not end up making it to any of the many after parties, which is where a ton of dj’s who weren’t booked for DEMF were playing. From what I could tell from my friends experiences only one or two of the after hours parties ended up being enjoyable for them. Many of the events were not as good as they had hoped, or filled with very weird vibes. The one night i did try to venture out, I ended up walking over to an event that was being held inside a Hotel down the street from ours. As soon as I got there some of the angriest, hardest techno was being belted out at about 4am, and it had the effect of driving me away quickly. I was told later that the vibes inside that venue were extremely sketchy even for a hotel, and i’m glad I listened to my instinct and turned around and left back to the hotel for some much needed rest.

From the Front Lines: The Detroit Electronic Music Festival, pt 1
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
-Willam Butler Yeats

Destinations are often a surprise to the destined.
-Neil Gaiman

From the Front Lines: The Detroit Electronic Music Festival

A tale of two coasts

I have spent my life exploring the western half of the United States. Growing up in New Mexico, and traveling every year across the mountains of Arizona and deserts of California to the west coast, I have never known anything but small rural towns, massive, open spaces, incredible growth, and bustling mega cities that didn’t exist fifty years ago. I am a child of the west. The west always offers a new day, a new hope for something better and bigger, a idealized life that anyone could win through hard work or luck. This is what my country has offered me for my entire life. Purple Mountains, endless beaches, epic skies, safety, security, and hope.

Music, always took up the assumptive cloak of speaking towards that bright future we are all guaranteed, that pursuit of happiness that was laid before us with every desert sunrise, every new toy or idea or beat that accompanied it. Its an inevitable march forward towards the brighter tomorrow, escaping the dark past and the things that haunted it.

Traveling to the eastern half of this country came as both a culture shock and eye opener as to what this entire country is all about. Of course I’d seen it all on TV and in movies about the situation parts of this country has been in for the past thirty or forty years, but you don’t really get to understand it until you’ve actually been there, just how desperate and depressing of a place many of the cities of the east have fallen into. A false bravado, still trying to charm the remaining unlucky and unmotivated fills the air, covers the stink and decay rotting away underneath.

Music, then, became something i could have never realized it was speaking. Techno beats that once were heard by these ears in places dark, middle of the night and shrouded by mist, leading us to somewhere new, somewhere just below the bright level of reality to a slightly skewed version, telling our collective tail of hardship that is the price to pay for our sunny, better tomorrow, became the tail of the collective woe, the realization that we have become dependent on the machine, abdicating our creative rights for a paycheck, sucking the masters dick for just a little bit more money until we have to pay the rent, get our next fix, gamble away our future.

The music wasn’t a tail of joy anymore, rather, its become a tail of woe. Of decay. Of the false face on the rotting interior, the truth that in many places in this country like many places across this planet, people sold their humanity and in return got the fake front of a better tomorrow. Instead of speaking towards a beat that leads us in a new direction, revitalizing the core thing that is within all of us that makes each day better than the last, its speaking the same, tired beat that many musical genres have repeated; the realization that we have conformed to the machine, that we have yielded our hearts to the mechanical dryness because our hearts were to heavy a thing to burden our minds with any more. Instead of embracing the fact that our hearts burn with as much pain as they do with joy, we lobotomized the pain away and told our minds that the joy was in the repetition, the machine.

“A Rat Year is a time of hard work, activity, and renewal. This is a good year to begin a new job, get married, launch a product or make a fresh start. Ventures begun now may not yield fast returns, but opportunities will come for people who are well prepared and resourceful. The best way for you to succeed is to be patient, let things develop slowly, and make the most of every opening you can find.”

Yes, another few months since i’ve had it in me to comment about anything occurring here in the Enchanted Land. For me, and for many of you, too, this really has been a year of Renewal. From the end of long lasting personal relationships to the hard work of meeting new people and forging new relationships, this year has been unique in many ways.

Coachella was the way that i started off my summer. I went alone and had an amazing, almost transformitive experience. It was almost like the kind I had at local outdoor events like Junebug, but in a different way. As the year progressed, it became clear that the way that those of were used to having our social interactions has changed fundamentally. Clubs that had been around for ten years have closed their doors. Outdoor events that were destined to be massive in their scope were closed down a few short hours into them. Production companies have been crushed by the law and now everyone is afraid to go out, especially if the dreaded “under 18″ crowd is present.

Walking down central a few Friday nights ago my friends and i ran into a few of the kids who had just been kicked out of club 7 after APD and Bernalillo county sheriffs officers raided the club in a attempt to find the owners and workers red handed distributing drugs to its patrons. Instead they found a club filled with the almost out of high school crowd half naked and supplying their own drugs. Instead of a bust worthy of re election, an embarrassed Marty chavez and his Party Patrol Goon Fun Breaker Squad wasted hundreds of thousands of tax payer dollars busting their own children in a culture that went from exploring the mind and the meaning of existence to exploring their own hormones. The sad debacle turned into a which hunt which is still going after the owner of the club for “building code violations” and minor liquor license offenses that occurred months prior.

After siting back and watching the drama unfold from the next door Blackbird Beauve, I could only sadly giggle at the situation. Law Enforcement seemed to be just as sadly ignorant as the children dressed in lingerie were. Albuquerque kids, who had been given *something* to do besides the goody goody events that their disconnected adult taskmasters deemed “fun” looked frightened and freaked out. The law enforcers present ejected children who had basicly no clothes on into the street, then proceeded to wreck the interior of club 7 looking for what they thought was some kind of drug production/distribution facility.

Ridiculous and Idiotic dont even begin to describe what both law enforcement thinks going on and reality.

I have to be honest, its hard for me to get too worked up about the entire situation. In a few short days i’ll be heading to Burning Man in northern Nevada. Unfortunately, however, I know that im going to have to come back to reality and watch, sadly, at what Albuquerque is turning into.

There was a point a few years ago when I was happy to be living in this city. It seemed like for the first time that we were on the track to becoming a *real* liveable city like san fransisco or chicago, and not another carbon copy of the Phoenix and Las Vegas suburbs, but clearly this is not the case.

Somewhere along the line this place started to become stunted. Crime is through the roof as transients are allowed to wander the streets, shipped in from other cities and dumped here to panhandle all day long. I was robbed at gunpoint while walking into a pizza place just last november, my ex girlfreind had her car window shot out, and another freind had her car broken into and her brand new radio and ipod ripped out of the dashboard.

Affordable homes are still a dream for anyone who wants to live less than 20 minutes from anything in town, otherwise you’re doomed to a carbon copy home an hour away on the edge of the high desert or doomed to live into an ever expanding ghetto stretching from tramway in the east to coors on the west side.

As sour as the situation in this city sounds, I always believe that there is an opportunity to grow and change the course that we are collectively on. Change is never an easy thing to make happen. Fundamentally, our culture in Albuquerque needs to grow in every way possible: Economically, culturally, socially. We need to start taking action at the polls in local elections: Start voting and think about the kind of person you’re electing. Realistically, who gives a crap if the person you’re electing has the D or R label next to their name? If they act like a facist and are a part of the democrats, do you really want to vote a person who hates fun, and bends over backwards to bust it while the city is awash in crime to be in charge of things?

I sure as hell don’t.

I participate in elections because i believe the people i elect are there to serve me, not to tell me what the fuck I can do on a Saturday night, and where I can do it. Like most of you i am a grown adult and can make my own choices.

Think about this year, this year of renewal, hard work, and activity, and then envision what you want to see Albuquerque look like in the next year, the next five, and the next ten. Think about where things are today and how they got here. It isn’t until you see a vision of what you want, like safe, secure venues where anyone can go to hear the music they enjoy and drink the drinks they want, or see themselves living in a safe and friendly city that has open and progressive values along with solid economic and educational opportunities that we will be able to allow these things to happen.

On Friday I made it out to Hunab Hookah for a little bit to catch some of The Acids and Basses electro jam, with guest F/M from Santa Fe.  Trippy, Ambient and experimental, quite enjoyable to just sit back and listen to.  F/M consisted of two technicians, Martin Back and Frank Rolla, a lute, two macbooks and a contraption which I will name the “random paddle”, a large standing instrument with many wooden paddles jutting from it, and small motors which randomly would cause a hammer mallet to play one of these paddles.  Think Japanese ambient, with some folk rock intertwined.  Acids and Basses, making use of 512 Software’s (located right here in Albuquerque) Audio Sequencing software, Numerology, makes ambient soundscapes great for film or just cooling out to.  It’s that kind of music that you don’t hear in your head until you hear it being played, and then you realize it’s always there, you just might not know how to channel it out.  An enjoyable night, followed by one sad bit of news; it is my understanding that Hunab Hookah will be closing at the end of July.  I never got to spend too much time at Hunab outside of Throwing Spark_Gap there for awhile, but I did enjoy the place when I was there.  It’s very hard to make a Hookah Lounge last in Albuquerque, I would imagine.

Then, last night, I re-opened Spark_Gap at The Agency, with the intention of continuing its tradition of live electronic jamming and IDM.  Well, it was half there.  We opened the night with a set by I Heart Teo ,  A young DJ from L.A. who has made his way out here, who dropped an hour set of heavy electro, and did very litterally blow me away. Myself and Clint had set up our rigs on stage, and were waiting for some of the other players to come, which unfortunately didn’t happen - and so Spark_gap turned essentially into an hour and a half long set from myself with backup by Clint.  It was fun, but it wasn’t what I had planned.  I had to have something to give people who came out (about 11 of them, including the ever vigilant Adric, to whom I am eternally grateful), so I thought that it made the most sense to just throw a set.  There was a little jumping around, which was good, but it certainly wasn’t an improv electro night.

So, what would I do differently?  Well, I think I won’t have a stage next time.  I don’t think it’s fitting for spark_gap to have a tall stage, unless I have some featured artists - which is the other thing I’ll do differently.  I don’t think I can keep the improv jam thing going right now.  If I can’t get a consistent number of players out to play (and I’m totally understanding of that, Saturday is also not a good night for something like this), I can’t really do an open jam.  So, I think I plan to have one DJ, one featured act, and perhaps anyone who wants to jam, in the next Spark_gap, and play it up as a dance party with some improv jamming.  I’ll have to see how it all plays out, I’m still learning with this thing, but I want to keep it going.

I also have to say thanks to Trace for coming out and throwing visuals for the night.  He very literally helped me to make the night 100% better.  Without visuals I really would have felt deeply failed at this outing, but having the bouncing lights on the giant white wall of The Agency really helped out.  Seriously man, thank you.

So, that, as they say, is that.  I wasn’t entirely happy with last night, I will say that, but the moral of the story is to look at what you’re doing and figure out what you need to do differently.  I’m seeing some of that, so I’m going to work on it, and as with anything, I’m going to take whatever help I can get for it, because I simply can’t do all this stuff on my own.

I just got back from the Agency’s Record Swap, and I had a lot of fun at it. It was nice to walk in and see quite a few people at tables with their big boxes and stacks of vinyl set up, as well as record players, books, and various other wares for sale. Raven Chacon of SickSickSick distribution was there, with his mass of noise and experimental music in tow, as well as my friend Adric and his many boxes of vinyl. I walked away with about 15 new records, and I know I need to go down there next time with my own stuff to sell.

Which, speaking of which, this is a great venue for bands to come sell their music. Because it’s not the flea market, people are actively searching for music, so your chances of selling are much better. I encourage musicians to consider coming out for the next swap, which will be the 2nd sunday of every month.