Burning Man & The Alterna-Disney
Author: Ockshun Jockson
Not sure if you guys caught word of this, but someone lit up the Burning Man 5 days earlier than scheduled.
Wired has an interview with the man arrested and allegedly responsible for the blaze. He's dropping some knowledge on the festival, and how wayward it has become.
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2007/08/addis
Burning Man was losing money hand over fist through a series of bad decisions and a real lack of business acumen. They took a hit in 1997 that was almost fatal. That really cost the organization in terms of its fiscal stability and steady accounting and in that regard they had to do a mass appeal. And by doing that, they sacrificed everything. They took the edges off and they became the Alterna-Disney. You have a lot of people singing, "It's a Small World After All" but just to a different mouse.
Burning Man is kindof a joke to me now. A decade ago I would have loved to have gone. I walked past a vegan restaurant last week and they were selling, "Burning Man Survival Kits"...That's "gay" even for San Francisco standards.
In any case, read the interview. It's a good read.
Dude, the military surplus shop in the heart of Hollywood, run by the Survivalist Family Robinson had the same frikkin' sign up.
I think at this point, Burning Man hasn't just jumped the shark, it's jumped the whole damn Discovery Channel.
my employers are at burning man as we speak. i might go sometime for the sheer spectacle, the drugs, and the sex... but yes, it actually used to be quite crazy before they banned firearms and organized it into camps so you wouldn't get run over by a wayward car while sleeping off the drugs... now it is like disney, compete with undercover DEA agents in cartoon character suits. and the people i know who are into burning man... yikes.
"Burning Man was the perfect place but once it made the decision that its own survival was more important than its content or style, everything was lost."
sounds like a metaphor for lots of things nowadays.