WAKING DREAM BACKSTORIES

Blue Man Chew

This image is one of the few in Waking Dream in which the year I shot the picture is important to me personally in a documentary sense.

Most of my Burning Man photographs involve metaphor and symbolic associations, and I’m seeking a timeless realm rather than being bound to time. But here, the year was 1990, and this was the first time the Burning Man had been set upon the playa!

This image is thus historic. Larry Harvey and his son have climbed part ways up the right leg, and Dan Miller, the master of the peoples’ rope-raising of the Man, sits astride the Man’s right shoulder. John Law, the logistical wunderkind who made the early years happen at all, is the tall, standing figure with torn jeans behind the guy wire.

The Man is blue in my picture because he had come from Baker Beach, and the sea, where he hadn’t been permitted to burn. After ‘chewing over’ where to burn him, John Law, Kevin Evans and I had all approached Larry to tell him about a marvelous playa in the desert where we thought we could burn the Man with impunity. Where we could fly beneath the radar. No one would know we were there, except – us! (Us being Larry and Jerry James, co-creator of the Man, and their friends, and Michael Mikel and myself and fellow members of the Cacophony Society: "a randomly gathered network of free spirits united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society through subversion, pranks, art…”)

That first year we had 80 or 90 people. That was … it. But we're told that nature abhors a vacuum and the Black Rock Playa (one of the largest alkali flats in the world, essentially lifeless and flat as a pool table, where a 6’ man standing three miles away will disappear due to curvature of earth), is a big vacuum. And thus Burning Man came to fill it.

Blue Man Chew is as close to a documentary image as any in Waking Dream. Formally however, it's not faithful to the literal, to what the colors we see in the medium format film scan were like. In reality, the Man, built of Douglas fir, was a natural wood color, the playa was washed-out silt and the sky a pale, hazy blue with no hints of lavender or purple.

But this was the beginning on the playa. The first step, the birth.

Larry’s foreshortened arm is pointing directly at the camera, as if both to acknowledge my presence and to direct. At Michael Mikel's suggestion, he’s wearing a white hat that became his trademark persona. Colors, chosen for their emotional resonance, are used to dress the documentary image in shades of feeling. After all, this is morning of the first day of a movement that now (2014) attracts 70,000 revelers from around the world in what one might almost call, with tongue in cheek, a global Burning Man-demic. What a transformation! This expansion of great good feeling is hinted in the sweet lavender of the sky-vault, and the sky-high blue of Blue Man Chew.

Alien Declension, Invergence Denied

Titles are important to me. They give clues about ways to enter the picture. Clues to meaning or my intention in making the picture.

This image is an example of what Hollywood called ‘Day for Night,’ where an image shot in broad daylight (in this case, early afternoon, about !:30 pm) is made to look like a moonlit night or, as here, twilight.

The picture shows two prominent sets of 4x4 truck tracks venturing out onto the Hualapai Playa (when BM was at Fly Ranch). One guy, encountering soft mud just under the thin hard, dry crust veered left to escape getting stuck. The other guy, primed on testosterone+ charged ahead until he started getting stuck then, wisely, backed out in his own tracks. Good job! Saved himself a risky tow job.

In a simple graphic earth drawing made by tire tracks, we have a dialectic: two ways of dealing with life’s problems. And both were successful in this case.

The reason for making the image as a day for night is that it amplifies the existential sense that in every moment we make choices, and sometimes they’re very significant.

I let the image float in an atmosphere of ‘timeless’ twilight, where day and night are equally balanced. This is the time of inspiration and deep seeing, when we can look into ourselves and ask the pertinent questions that help us chart our course through the whatever-it-may-be that we face.

But I also have a personal reason for the twilight. My brother Nate and I had an extremely compelling UFO experience at Black Rock Spring one year after the burn. At some point I’ll describe it in stark detail. For now, it happened at this dusk-lit time of day, right when the evening star, Venus I think, was first showing in the sky. The atmosphere was similar to Alien Declension, and the markings the craft made in the sky seemed a kind of geometric light-writing. The tracery in the sky left by the craft seemed like parts of speech and a writing gesture that covered a quadrant of sky. Invergence Denied, we were unable to turn ourselves inside out and have clear trans-world communications...

Aprés Dieux, and for you, Le Deluge

When it occurs (seldom), rain is a break from the often-incessant heat on the playa.

Burnished in Maxfield Parish colors, this moment after a cloudburst was an "epiphany" that sent burners slithering in the newly made mud, slathered like mudfish or mudpuppies.

The playa has little sand. It’s mostly silt, very fine particles that act strangely when wet. With just a little water the playa becomes first gummy, then slippery – and soon, even badass 4x4 trucks get hopelessly mired. That’s when the playa is suitable for humanoid otters or desert pupfish. But changes in the consistency of the silt beneath our feet is so radical, that if a major rainstorm were to occur during the event, no one would be able to leave the playa in a vehicle (hovercrafts excepted).

The brief cloudburst here gave me the opportunity to envision the participants as restored to their common element, almost like star clusters in space – just dust, but with water and the basic ingredients needed to create organic life. Adults responded by cavorting about like children, and tensions of the day were released. What’s not to like?

If a serious rainstorm were to occur during the event, however, it could present an existential challenge – how to pull together and ’shelter in place’ when the common instinct to escape being stranded might trigger dangerous attempts at mass exodus replete with sliding vehicles (kind of like the road warrior in a bog). It would be interesting indeed to challenge the mass mind to a realpolitik of problem-solving when the traction beneath our feet gives way to slippery chaos. But I think it would be a fun ride. I think most folks would figure it out. And those that didn’t would be amusing to watch (assuming it all ended well). Which it probably would.

Probably.

Earth Air Fire & Water at the Winnowed Edge of the World

At dusk I encountered four figures near this zinger of a metal flower, and I asked them to pose as an ensemble.

In my mind, I saw them as representing the four classic elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. And I felt they were ‘grounding’ the space of the event, helping to bring it into balance. Thus each figure stands distinctly in personal space, animating it with her/his intent, intensity, poise and sculptural body. They all relate to the flower and their gestures seem to pass energy to one another. The woman is flowering Earth, the man with the concave mirror is Air, the mariachi-hatted man is Fire, and the blue man is djembe-trancing Water.

Together they represent balance and equanimity of people and place. They’re standing at the end of the world, the end of our default reality and normally conceived thought and action.

These four are keepers of the spirit of Burning Man. Simply and immediately involved, each doing his/her part, with no wasted motion in the desert trance, just keeping the beat and the light going, tending the fire and growing the body of the event.

Silk and Tuner

Silk & Tuner dwells near the "threshold of a dream" as the Moody Blues sang: "Lovely to see you again my friend/Walk along with me to the next bend… Tell us what you’ve seen/In faraway forgotten lands/Where empires have turned back to sand."

This song played in my echo chamber when I witnessed this sunset. As the sunset peaked and folks put their arms in the air I saw the chance for an image about a personal epiphany: when you ‘get it’ and realize the truth or significance of something important that has been elusive or confounding.

As people often comment, the playa seems conducive to such experiences. Silk & Tuner is meant as an analogue for that state of mind when the blinders come off and one recognizes what has been there all along but never before seen.

Right at the turning of the day there’s a moment when one can affirm something important to the self and, so to speak, grasp the brass ring – and fly. Into the threshold of dreams the camp becomes when it lights up at night.

Like a beacon, or lighthouse, or homing signal to travelers on the playa, the tuner is Pepe Ozan’s sculpture, which here pulsates with silky, plasma-emitting, starburst messages.

His and Hearse (Mont St. Michel Meets the Man)

Officially known as the "Carthedral" (sic), this art car by Rebecca Caldwell is a stunner.

I encountered the artist at her camp and asked if she would pose for me with her machine – with one stipulation. We'd have to go out to the Man because I felt such a pairing was a natural. She agreed.

I asked Rebecca to pose with arms upstretched to convey the power I felt she possessed astride her massif. I dubbed her car Mont. St. Michel for the way it rises up with a massing presence that recalls the famous island off the coast of France that has the abbey on top.

This image is dedicated to the vast contributions made by the women of Burning Man. Without them the Man might well collapse into his own shadow…

The deep shadows are turquoise and blue-green against the cranberry mousse of playa silt. This combination creates vibrancy and color adjacency (retinal) effects, helping to tie the playa to the blue of the sky.

Red Shift

The Janus-faced art car pinches a warp in the fabric of space/time on the playa. That’s because, by design, this is one phantom that may stare at you both coming and going. It’s hypnotic to watch.

I chose to deal with this sense of suspended time that Janus created by wrapping the Central Camp in an atmosphere suggestive of altered states of awareness.

It’s often said that the playa is already altered, that we don’t needs substances of any kind. Fair enough. The fact is just walking around with eyes open is sufficient to transport one into an altered state.

I’ve often referred to this as “desert trance." The heat, light, dust, vast space and hive-mind of endless activity and relentless socializing produce altered states naturally. Some things dissolve into insignificance while others coalesce or flame into vivid moments that seem to spin at their own frequencies just outside of the normal sense of clock time.

It’s all subjective, after all, and the playa leaves nothing untouched. Nothing. It permeates our pores and our mindset, moment by moment. This image is about such a desert trance.

The Balling Loon

What was Charlie Gadekin’s playa curtain doing out there stretched across the playa like a drape in your living room the length of a cruise ship? Was it an echo of Christo’s Valley Curtain (Rifle, Colorado, 1972), albeit a quarter of a century later?

If Christo’s Valley Curtain was a vast, expensive feat of engineering, spanning a narrow valley (Rifle Gap), anchored high above our heads onto steep, opposing mountain slopes, Charlie’s playa curtain was a people’s low-rider.

If Christo’s Valley Curtain was monumental, a bright orange nylon spinnaker notched at bottom for highway traffic to pass through, Charlie’s playa curtain was rough cloth, a family affair – painted and stenciled and stretched by hand.

If Christo’s Valley Curtain shrieked ‘look at me’ in universal orange like we see on traffic cones (and which had to be taken down after 28 hours because of an approaching gale-force storm), Charlie’s playa curtain was a durable affair, brought to the desert where it gracefully lived. Perhaps it impeded your passage – yet it delineated a view. It offered itself as a gathering spot with a shadow line.

In The Balling Loon, the playa curtain has its echo cast by the wing-shadow of a powered paraglider, who is attempting take off from the playa’s hard-pan with help from friends. Shaped like an aileron, the curtain also suggests flight and movement. To be on the playa is to feel exhilarated yet constrained by the vastness, the implacable flatness – microbes on a pool table. The curtain bridges the landscape in a sweeping gesture, separating mountains/sky from playa below, yet also defining them as figure-ground (and of course, neither makes sense without the other).

To me, the aviator’s attempt is a distant cousin of the Wright Brothers on the sands at Kitty Hawk. The aviator wants to break the bounds of Earth. Wants to gain perspective. Wants to cop breezes above the "ant"-ics of hive mind as displayed on the playa. Thus, The Balling Loon plays with ‘lift off', which could be the power of imagination, or farseeing, to raise one’s accomplishment. The wing sprouts an atmospheric sack, like a hot air balloon, jellyfish, or thought balloon. Or embryonic sack? For somebody’s birth of flight, certainly. What’s your wish?

A Son Also Rises

"A Son Also Rises" is a modern fantasia based on a theme of the yearly return of the Man.

He is shown literally rising up in this time exposure, surrounded in his glyphic light ‘egg’ against an alabaster sky. He is being pulled up by the line of people hauling a rope (which doesn’t show as it's dark and the rope was in motion).

The sky is like a plasma-filled, stained glass window, a crystalline atmosphere. A toast of the sky to the Man. (I interrupted the exposure when the Man was 3/4 vertical in order to separate his standing form from the rising form.)

The image presents a scene of shared activity, hope and transformation; it’s a glyphic portrayal of altered states of mind where everything somehow is Right with the world, for a moment at least – like in someone’s personal epiphany.

The photograph is an image of quest, and a prompting for self-transformation, a writing-over of the old year by the new.

Cerberus and the Styx Shift

It was deep night and still hot as Hades, the graveyard shift – the Styx shift. And here came a band of brigands driving their deconstructed Chrysler land boat (Charon's boat, I swear) across the wasteland. As a punster once fond of Greek myth, I couldn't resist the unmistakable connection.

I liked their attitude and I asked if they would pose for me. Of course they said yes, and I said please, over there. And I set up my 8'-tall tripod and stepladder, gave them some direction, and went to work.

During the two-minute exposure I ran around making about twelve flash pops with my gelled, hand-held flash unit, moving among and around my merry band of posers. They, meanwhile, patiently and gamely followed my directive to remain motionless "as in a still life" while I drifted about using my best flash-dance moves.

Raking their figures in rays of sidelight bursts, I never paused long enough in this process of sculpting with light to show up in the exposure. Their dog, though, obviously thought "still life" was an oxymoron. He got himself light-clipped three times – three heads. He's gotta be Cerberus, no doubt about it.

Hand Off (In Memorium: Pepe Ozan)

Pepe Ozan was a metal sculptor and videographer, who lived in San Francisco at the artist’s cooperative, Project Artaud. When Judy West and I were organizing the second year of Desert Siteworks in 1993, Pepe joined in the fun and built the first of what he called “Lingams” (chimney-like fire funnels) at the DSW event at Trego Hot Springs. That year I encouraged DSW participants to volunteer at the Burning Man project. (From day one I considered Burning Man and Desert Siteworks to be like brother and sister projects).

Pepe was an indefatigable personality, tireless as an artist and community organizer. The lingams he built were tall, phallic sculptures that he stuffed with cordwood and set afire. He built them using rebar-enforced armatures supporting metal mesh; he coated the surface with mud, which cracked and became an illuminated filigree as fire rushed up the chimney.

Pepe used the lingams as stages for his popular Burning Man Operas that he held for several years on the playa, replete with hundreds of costumed actors and dancers, with original music and choreography.

In Hand Off we see: (1) a rehearsal for the opera; (2) a group of ghostly Sky People clad in dark robes and attire convening a meeting in the clouds and (3) a semi-transparent man (carrying a briefcase?) with a woman and parasol walking through the four-columned space of the lingam.

This is a 'magical realist’ image. By this I mean seemingly unrelated, realistic elements are brought together in a context that, while technically impossible, makes sense within the logical construct and linguistic parsing of the image. People generally don’t float in the sky in our world, but within the charmed language and landscape of metaphor they do.

I had composited the bones of this image before I learned of Pepe’s tragic suicide at his home in Argentina. The original title was Hand Off (a Confederacy of Sky People). I changed it to the current title when I realized this image was a most fitting memorial to his life and work. Incidentally, Pepe appears in this image, shirtless, bowed, turning away, in the left middle distance.

Playing Taps for the Piano Bell

In 1996 Steve Heck delivered 100 spent pianos to the playa. He handed out boxes of sticks. The inevitable result was achieved – a gluttonous cacophony of odd and curious sonorities. Playa carpenter ants went to work banging and clanging on strings that protruded everywhere from the two-story high aggregation of sound boards. Talk about a soundscape of joyful noise! Players of all skill levels were called into action. It was a volksmusik of playa muscle.

I made two images of the Piano Bell: this one, and another done at night. "Playing Taps" is about the community spirit that coalesces around a focal point like the Bell, and jumps in and gets involved. The ebb and flow of sound has its visual echo in the fire-y wraiths and vapors rising from the piano.

I asked myself: How do you convey sound and feelings (not just depictions) of celebration in a still photograph? And I began playing with the idea of synesthesia.

If you stare at a visual representation of sound, can you better imagine the experience of being wrapped in a cacophony of noise with sonorous overtones? Can you better re-create the experience of being warm and happy and grooving in an atmosphere distant from where you are now as you read these words?

If you bring your active imagination to thinking about this image, what then? Go to the kitchen and bang on pots and pans and glasses and dishes? Many drummers started out this way.

The man dressed in white and wearing a straw hat is the focalizer. Visually, he sets the tone and tempo. He’s the turbulator. The lead musician for a group that doesn’t need a lead. It’s really a self-directed free-for-all. It’s a celebration, and it can be whatever thoughts you let fly over the abstract ‘smoke’ that rises from the bell. A smoke of personal alchemy in an image that could be a kind of yantra, an orchestrated image that, despite its cacophonous energy, can transport the viewer into a meditative state.