Discovering My Inner Village Idiot | Burning Man 1997
September 5, 1997
By Malcolm Maclachlan, TechWire
I saw the best minds of my generation. Their bodies were painted. They were burning stuff. At least some of the best minds. If history hasn't taught us that the best minds need to get out more, it should.
The main rule for the press at the Burning Man festival was that they had to participate, just like anyone else. No free press passes. No special privileges. None of the perks we have come to expect as part of our job.
Which is exactly how it should be. I went to Burning Man expecting to have a good time but be unmoved. I am 26 years old, after all, and therefore cynical as hell.
Yet I discovered something there. Perhaps not my inner child. More like my inner village idiot. Like many people my age, I have spent my recent years being far too serious. I went to good schools. I got involved in technology. I slowly turned what intelligence I possess from a plaything into a tool. I became, successfully, an adult. Perhaps I didn't lose the ability to have fun, but I lost the ability to lose myself.
Then I met the insulting man, who hurled abuse at passersby, using long-lost words like putrescence. I met the two naked Dave's, who stuck their penises out of their clothes when it got too cold at night to be naked; one of them tried to have sex with a 30-foot inflatable sculpture of a woman. I saw cowgirls brutally whip an anorexic cherub because of the only thing he was wearing besides his wings: Birkenstocks.
I met a noise band who said "It's all about the chicken" in answer to every one of my questions. I met a 17-year-old artist who created a huge Venus of Willendorf without knowing that's what it was called. I met some 13-year-olds for whom Burning Man was essentially an annual boy scouting trip. I harassed other reporters for interviews about what the hell they were doing out here.
I met a guy who had flown out alone from New Jersey, knowing no one, just to be here because it sounded so amazing. And it was. There is a cumulative effect to all this craziness.
Was it sometimes stupid? Yes. It is intentionally inane and idiotic. Was there great art? Very little. Will it change the world? Probably not in any direct way. Yet I have never seen so many brilliant people being so absurd without losing their brilliance.
Yet all through this, I was working. Trying to force other people's experiences into my words. I was, as Joan Didion said, a confidence artist, a professional betrayer of trusts.
People said to visit the Cyberbuss, a San Francisco-based group of technology evangelists and educators who travel in a silver school bus. Yet my first two attempts to "get on the bus" were ham-handed failures. I'm a journalist, I said. Who can I talk to? I was in a hurry. I got blown off, and I deserved to.
Later, someone gave me some of the best advice I have gotten in a long time. Don't say you're a journalist, she told me. Say you write for a Web site. One is cool. Fairly or not, the other is a dirty word.
I met someone who knew the Cyberbuss crew, chatted with him for a while and told him I worked for a Web site. In five minutes I was on the Buss, talking to C y b e r sAM, the founder.
That night a friend and I dressed in Tyvex clean-room suits, like the ones used at Intel, minus the hoods. We let people decorate us in glow in the dark paint. I let a pretty girl paint my chest. Not in body paint. In Sherman-Williams; my red and blue torso would be good for ten years. I went dancing with a red and black rubber snake hanging out of my pants, a horned Viking hat on my head. A man from a French magazine took my picture. The press had been pressed by the press. I had let go.
I visited the Cyberbuss and said hi to a Dutch journalist I had met named Sandra. She was having her face painted silver by C y b e r sAM. He looked up and filled in the unpainted parts of my torso with silver. I had entered the Cyberbuss.
Yet, as it tends to do, human ugliness found a way. I met someone. Later, in the light of the Burning Man, her stalker ex-boyfriend found me. He had recording equipment. He implied that she was after my money, or if I had none, that she would drop me. He said this in a place where money was nearly useless.
"Are you a rich man, Malcolm?" he asked.
I am well paid for a journalist, but that means little in the technology circles I travel. Why would I tell him anything? I shrugged and walked away.
Later I met a retired programmer, two decades my senior who asked me about what I did. "That is so cool," he said as we stood near the edge of the camp, watching the last vestiges of the Burning Man smolder.
And I realized it was. My job is to talk to people. My personality, flawed as it is, is my instrument. I walk into people's lives, learn things, attempt to draw out their experiences. People are shitty, smelly, arrogant, murderous, and sometimes they can be pretty wonderful. They're my job. And I realized I was getting paid to participate in one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
So, to my second-hand stalker, if you're reading, thank you for your concern. To answer your question, yes I am a rich man.
