Underemployed Partially Disabled Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer who has become disenchanted with Burning Man, but remains interested in some of the concepts and experiences its participants have offered.
Hoping that this site isn't going to vanish, but I'm linking to the archived copy of it, just in case it does.
Photographic coverage of the artist's work in new media, including this piece she did with "neon, birefringent film, metal, microcontroller" ... yeah, yeah, I know, that makes it sound about as artistic as a RadioShack outlet. Keep an open mind, the images are nice eye candy and this is certainly different.
A very interesting page about a gathering that can be quite challenging, in both a good and a bad way ...
I'm decidely ambivalent about Burning Man, as an event, though less so about Burning Man as a cultural phenomenon. When somebody writes in a review of my Green Tortoise journal (old location) that
"From his description one could conclude that GT is run by sociopaths and BM is run by people who enable sociopaths."
that's a very accurate summary. In my experience, while a lot of very nice people went to Burning Man, the organizers themselves are a nasty bunch, which I suspect may be one of the reasons for the event's long, slow and sad decline, as good people were driven off. But there were some very interesting ideas that got explored along the way, and some beautiful sites created, ideas that deserve to be studied and maybe revisited.
Interactive Art is something that I think that we could use more of in American society, in which going on and "doing something" on the weekend has had a way of really meaning "going out and passively looking at something", and not noticing that along the way, not a single lasting memory has been made. Burning, when it has worked, has been a remedy for that. It has been far from being a perfect remedy for a number of reasons, the nearly ubiquitous drug use being one obvious reason, and an even more basic one being the failure, as a return of the notion of folk art has been encouraged, to foster the most fundamental driving force behind real, traditional folk art: the incremental accumulation of tradition that occurs as each builds on what others have created before him, until the once seemingly ordinary takes on mythic force. But one need not emulate the failures of a would-be subculture to learn from the creations of that would-be subculture, and this, perhaps, is the thought one should keep in mind as one visits the Burning Man site.
Backbiting politics from the sort of people who seriously ask whether or not it is possible to enjoy an interactive arts festival without the use of narcotics, and not much else. Lurking, I've never seen these people have a pleasant moment among themselves, except maybe on that wormhole thread of theirs, and slapping down spammers is such a feel good activity that something like that would almost have to bring people together. Even here, though, the good spirits seem strained.
How very delightful. For those who thought that I was exaggerating when I starting writing the Ninnies on Parade section of Bad Times on the Green Tortoise, that burners couldn't really be like that, watch and enjoy. (There is a small amount of profanity on the video).
What you see above was first posted on another of my blogs on July 30, 2007 at 2:17 pm, being moved here after I reorganized my pages, roughly by topic. Though I never met Mr. Schaber, as far as I can recall, it is a sad post to look back on, now, knowing that the man you see in the video went on to commit suicide, less than two years later.
Originally posted to Livejournal, November 23, 2010, 05:33
Epic fail: Livejournal's system kept stripping away the code for the Youtube video I embedded, even though I used the embed medium form they provide, so I had to relocate this post over to Wordpress. You can find it here. I'm very disappointed in Livejournal's performance, this morning. I really wanted to post that article on this blog, and I should have been able to do so.
Comment added, December 7 at 2:37: Livejournal wasn't alone in this failure. Youtube has changed its code, as one could see by visiting the page on Youtube where this video is found, earlier today: iframes were being used in the code. Livejournal stripped them away. Cutting and pasting into some of the older Youtube code, and putting that on my livejournal as is, working in HTML, I got something that worked.
Whether providers should react phobically to the presence of iframes is something that I have neither the knowledge nor the desire to address. What I do know, as a user, is that I've seen services publicly announce that they wouldn't allow the use of iframes because of perceived security risks - yahoogroups is the one that comes readily to mind. Those responsible for writing that code should have kept that in mind. As I guess they started doing, a few hours ago.
I wish people that would talk to each other, more. This was annoying. If Youtube should switch back to the iframes code, this might help:
w is the width of the video given in Youtube's current code, and h is the height. Youtube seems to get a fair amount of traffic from embedded videos, so I'm guessing that the old code will continue to work, Youtube not wanting to throw away that traffic. I used the code, imputing it into the box while using the "embed media" option, and then, going back into the HTML editor, put the center tages around the <lj embed> tags that surrounded the Youtube code. As you can see, everything worked out, just not as easily as it should have.
This will be a comment blog. I've set up a livejournal membership, so that when I read posts on livejournals of possible interest to readers of my main Burning Man blog, I can post comments. Discussions follow, and I discuss those and some of the blogs I've found on Livejournal, here. Everything gets interlinked, and fun and traffic follow, or something like that.
For now, I'm shutting off comments on my own livejournal, at least until a few cyberstalkers get tired of trolling me, and decide to go troll somebody else. I hope that I'll be able to change this setting in the near future, but I can't offer any promises about the progress of somebody else's dementia. The primary - indeed, almost the exclusive - focus of this blog will be on the art and ideas one can get from it, so if you're hear wondering "what went down in this camp last week" ... you're in the wrong place. I don't know, and I don't want to know. I just want to do my little scribbles and a little soldering, maybe a few amateur theatre projects, and otherwise just be left alone.
