Things I want to remember about Burning Man before I forget, because I am afraid that I will:
I want to remember having to actually prepare for a trip. Buying shorts for the first time in I don’t know how long. Cutting, crimping, and soldering for the first time in years. Buying food, making food, freezing food, packing food. I want to remember chili with butternut squash and chard. Buying water. So much water.
I want to remember driving, up and over mountains, across desert, in the dark and along dusty tiny roads, slowing for little towns, to music, to Neutral Milk Hotel and Jay Electronica and Joy Division and Neon Indian and Led Zeppelin. The lonely echo of Handsome Furs across dark, empty hills.
I want to remember Burning Man. The waiting in line, the setting up of camp, the waking to dubstep art cars rolling by.
I want to remember the heat and the dust and the stiffness of my hair, caked and coated and grey. I want to remember falling asleep in a tent, on a couch lifted up on scaffolding. I want to remember squinting out across at the desert from the top of the man.
I want to remember the playa at night. The land so flat that everything around gets compressed into the horizon line. The visual tricks: whether something is close up or far away, whether something is art or human. The swarming of blinking bikes, blinking art cars, and blinking people across the desert, like some deep underwater scene flattened, then saturated. The flash of fire from the pillars and how it turned the glowing lights to people, the darkness to shadows, thrown long and deep across the dirt.
I want to remember Burning Man as a religion, not of gods but of light and music and fire.
I want to remember the awe at the strobing wheel of skeletons, crawling and rowing up into the sky. I want to remember the cage fights at Thunderdome, climbing up and seeing the mass of people shouting and cheering. I want to remember stumbling across the Dust City Diner and how that hunger swelled up from somewhere deep and forgotten.
I want to remember wandering in deep playa and thinking how this must be what it feels like to be lost in space, if space were dimensionless, flat.
I want to remember staring at my boots, lit by laces of EL wire, watching them turn that pale white. I want remember the contrast between the crowd and the crush and the vast and the quiet. I want to remember that sense of everyone trying desperately to look different, but gathering to be coated and dulled back to the same palette.
And I want to remember that word, gathering, not just as an event, but an action, a way to draw these loose threads up together, a way to try and stretch your arms and wrap them around everything and pull it all back into you.
s
I dreamt so many things last night
We were on a bus, that was rocketing down the street. It was powered by something else, and people that wanted to get off went towards the exit and were slowly sucked out.
I crawled into this round structure, it was like a wireframe of a sphere, and there was a path from one side in to the center and back out the other, looping around on rungs like monkey bars. I sat on one rung and pulled myself forward to the next, on and on until I was 2/3 the way through. There was a dog on the other end, sat on his haunches, and he jumped onto a rung. The whole structure tipped, and it fell into a chasm. I knew I was going to die and woke up.
There were other things too but I’m forgetting them now. I went back to Burning Man. I was wandering through a forest, it was the Berkeley campus. I came across this thing, this giant glittering radial thing. It was lining the sides of this faceted cave, but in a way where from my perspective it looked like a disc hovering in space. It was built like the Zumthor Kunsthaus, all rectangular plates laid over one another, but made out of metal. I remember just standing there and watching it shimmer
The things I want to remember about my trip to Detroit for AAJA:
The dark plane, the monitors glowing in every seat. Reading William Gibson. Sharp, careful, cold, like a scalpel.
The D. Warm, cool air. The cavernous belly of the Marriot. The pixelated Cobo Center. Motown. The broad swaths of road. Motor City. The People Mover. The swarm of Asians, the skirts and makeup, ties and jackets. The chatter of networking, nicetoseeyous, letschatlaters. The receptions and mixers. The broadcast girls. The exchange of business cards, emails, Twitter handles. The surreal experience of being surrounded by ageless, immortal Asian women. Which paper are you with? A house party off East Jefferson. The empty lots surrounding, the lushness of the apartment. An empty jazz club. The beauty of two black women moving with eyes closed. The bouncer telling us his name, where he’s from. He has a cousin from the city one of us is from. Waiting for a cab in the dark.
The casino. The smell of smoke. The rattle and jangle of the machines. The tight grip of old fingers on clay chips. The bright flash of lights, everywhere, pulsing and throbbing to multiple vague rhythms. Leaving the casino to go out alone. The cab driver, Otis. He has lived in Detroit for 62 years. San Francisco, yeah. I been there.
The emptiness of the first club, except for a few breakdancing teens and an exhausted bartender. The familiar thundering boom of bass echoing from a rooftop bar. The sound echoing around buildings, audible for blocks. The feeling of walking around in a deserted city. The way fat black women can dance. The way drunk frat boys can’t. The sad smallness of the guy, Drew, who says he doesn’t know how to recommend anything, anything at all to a Californian. D’Mongos, The Roast. The crowd gathering together to do the hustle. The anthemic intensity of Pursuit of Happiness blaring across the city. Dancing until last call. The girl and her mom, stumbling home. The cinematic timing of a cab pulling up, headlights flashing. Otis, smiling.
The marquees for Kid Rock. Welcome Home Kid. The smiling and hellos of strangers on the street. The walk from Downtown Detroit through Midtown. The big deco buildings, the feeling of Gotham. The buildings suddenly evaporating into empty lots and bare streets. The strangeness of being able to walk out of a city. The buzz of insects in the summer, mixing with Kid Rock’s sound check in the distance. The skeleton of a swing set. The calming realization — looking at all the vines crawling up the empty buildings, pulling off planks of wood, tossing bricks onto the ground — that nature isn’t dead, just patiently waiting for us to leave.
Hitching a ride with a couple to the Heidelberg project. Walking among the houses encrusted with trash, furniture, toys, paint. Random arrangements of stuffed animals. Shopping carts topping the sawn off limbs of trees. Burnt planks of wood, standing in a lawn. A house painted with huge numbers. Meeting a girl named Rita, from Brooklyn. Hitching a ride to the DIA. The strange composition of a piano being tuned. A placard explaining what Pop Art is. Going back to the hotel, then the airport.
The plane rocking, a gentle midwestern sort of turbulence. The feeling of sailing, with the clouds some soft and weightless kind of sea.
s
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