When I came gliding back into camp with the truck, I felt like the Grinch coming back with the presents to Whoville. All was well and good. Out at the airport, I decided to scrap much of my plans for the arrangement of our truck and shelter, and simply backed the truck up into the circle of the shelters of our camp, using it as an elevated and shaded room in which we took refuge. It turned out to be a stroke of genius on my part. Withour Iceland flag up there, we were now part of the Eurotrash circle officially.
"It's the closest part of Europe to North America," as I explained to folks.
Life was good, albeit a bit muddy. In due course, during the rest of the day, Camp Eurotrash filled up with the usual suspects from Aspen, minus a few folks, and with the addition of a few more.
A couple marriages had broken up, as it happens, making life a little bit awkward for some of the participants. But we weathered through it, and all of us had a good time.
The next evening we put on our tutus for Tutu Tuesday. On Wednesday night (White night) we did our usual thing of starting the evening off at the Apres Ski Party hosted by a camp from Vancouver that sets up a real snow machine. I managed to use up a good portion of the costumes I had brought, including the fur vest I had ordered at the last minute, and all the "sheik" adornments I had purchased since last year.
Ironically the Sheik persona I had adopted last year turned out to be weirdly prophetic, given the theme of this year's burn (which was about the ancient Silk Road, and which wasn't decided upon until later). As I told my friend Howard, an artist and veteran Burner, the entire scheme that he and I cooked up for a "Psychedelic Casbah" art car project for my camp was essentially everywhere this year.
"It was the Land of 10,000 Sheiks," I told him later in an email. "So weird."
But if I had to pick one fashion trend from this week, it was certainly the explosion in the use of Indian war bonnets. They were everywhere. Part of this was because the ban on feathers on the playa had been lifted (previously they had been deemed to likely to become "Moop" (that is, matter out of place, or in other words, litter).
But partly I thought it was a reaction against the hue and cry of poltical correctness (mostly from white folks) who have decided that wearing such things is "cultural appropriation" and therefore outside acceptable behavior. For the sake of some of my readers, I'm going to withhold my opinion on this, but rest assured that I do indeed have one. You can probably guess what my comments might be.
Red certainly had a great time, as I'd hoped she would. "These people are really professional partiers," she said with awe at one point, looking out over the Aspenites preparing for the evening. Everyone in camp took a liking to here. Like I said, we all had a great time. For me, the best part by far is just getting to see a bunch of folks I've really come to love, none of whom I knew before three years ago. It's funny to think how a shitty software job in Boulder led to all this (that's how I met Okki---we started at the same time).
The whole effort---renting the truck and getting everything out there and back---left me a bit exhausted to be be sure, but there's no way I wouldn't do it again. I'm confident that we represented Iceland well on the playa. Of course we looked for Icelanders there (and I went so far as to mount an Icelandic flag on my bike to attract notice) but found none. Okki got into the spirit of this quite well, and went so far as to call me his "Icelandic brother."
Of course we were absolutely delighted about the bizarre coincidence of the threatened eruption of Bárðarbunga, which Red was following very closely. It had cropped up only in the last few weeks. The first lava actually started spewing out on the Thursday of Burning Man.
If I had to pick one highlight of the week, and I'm sure Red would agree with me on this, I was surely on early Saturday morning. We had gone to bed early and (after what Michele called a "disco nap") we arose under starlight and joined Okki, Stefan, Kevin, Adrian and a few others to head out onto the playa to find the Robot Heart art car, which has in recent years become the focus of the out-on-the-playa dance party in the hours leading up to dawn. Kevin had been doing this for years, so we all followed him out there. It was still dark when we arrived, and we danced there until well past sunrise (there was a great cheer as the sun rose). Red absolutely loved it.
Being that it was quite chilly, I had decided to wear the furry pink rabbit hat that Red had purchased for her garb. This and the other garb I was wearing turned me into a Disco Bunny, as Red called me. I decided that would be by new evolved playa personality, building upon the Sheik from last year.
It turns out that a professional photographer was out there that morning as well, and had stationed himself in the DJ booth of Robot Heart taking pictures of the crowd. He later published his very nice photos (of the entire week) at this site. I recommend them for anyone who wants to see what this year was like (especially the burning of the Embrace sculpture).
But if you look partway down the page, you'll see this photo of the crowd which I've taken the liberty of duplicating here. Perhaps you can locate a small group of figures in the crowd near the top of the photo, just the left of center. There you'll see a guy wearing a bright pink furry hat (that would be Stefan) and just to left of him is a female figure in a white furry hat (that would be Red), and just to the right of him is a guy wearing a big furry pale pink bunny hood. That would of course be the Disco Bunny. See you next year on the playa!
No comments:
Post a Comment