So I'm borrowing one of the editing stations from Current TV / TV Free Burning Man (as it's being branded here in Black Rock) so I'll make this quick-ish and unfortunately no photos yet.
Caught the red eye out of SF Wednesday night to Reno to catch up with the Current TV folks. They are letting me mooch off of them a bit and sleep in their RVs, use their showers and gave me a pass to the Burning Man commissary. Sounds like a great deal. Haven't had to do any work yet but we'll see by the time this is over what happens.
We all took the rented van from the Peppermill Hotel (where I mooched a room from Current TV - I just have to keep pointing that out I guess) in Reno out to Black Rock City. Middle of nowhere and I guess that's the point. Got caught up in the howling dust storms on the way in. Total white out. We eventually made our way to camp, right in the damn center of this whole thing. For those of you in the know, right on the Esplanade at 6:30. I tell you it was a bit weird and I hadn't thought of it at the time but I had just said goodbye to all these folks and here I am again. I just keep showing up.
So two things struck me right away. Oddly that I brought the perfect book with me. “Bobos in Paradise” and the how decadent it is here. The book perfectly captured what at first glance seems to be the crowd here. Bourgeois Bohemians, aka "bobos". The new wave of yuppies that have the resources to build an entire city for 45,000 people in one week (miles of RVs, trailers, tons of food, water, booze….) coupled with the Bohemian counter culture values. The book puts it rather snarky and I don't mean it that way exactly. I just think of the opportunity and resources that all these people must have to be able to do this. It is NOT cheap to come here. You are spending some considerable amount of time, money and personal energy to drag a city into the dry lake bed in the middle of Nevada. This doesn’t happen by accident. I keep thinking that this is a Bobo Shanty Town
All that said, it is an amazing place. Phenomenal and surreal.
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