:: burn out 2009 ::
Thanks to minimal promotion, the event is more like a private party than a tourist attraction. The venue could clearly handle a bigger crowd. As the night wears on, perhaps more will join us [a lot more did].
One of the organizers came up to me saying my daughter had been asking for Kirby at the front gate, but I'm thinking that was probably Laura Cooper of The Good Bye Party, who was standing with Rick when I showed up at the admissions booth.
The sound system is excellent and I'm enjoying the music. Lindsey only gets 45 minutes today and is busy getting set up in the batters' box. She has a prime slot at 7:30 PM on the indoor stage (the various weird bizmos anchor the stages outside).
Lots of crazy costumes, kilts, wigs, clowning.
I'm sporting a low key Dymaxion Clown uniform myself: geek man purse (various company names, including Intel and Microsoft), a Python fleece over an Open Source Lab T-shirt, belt studded with peace symbols purchased at Red Light on Hawthorne yesterday for only $7 (my daughter rolled her eyes when she saw it -- might be a mid life crisis belt?), brown corduroy trousers, very ordinary shoes, wire frame glasses (not the "knows everything" frames -- not sure where those are).
People are being respectful and well behaved. I suppose outsiders imagine all kinds of salacious craziness when they think of "art colonies" but that's just human psychology. Squares project their fantasies on "loose people", not realizing that this lifestyle may also require a lot of self-discipline (way more than many normals would consider reasonable I'm sure).
Yes, I'm sounding like an apologist already, even though I just got here and have never been to Burning Man. I guess I'm just a sucker for people working together to pull off civilian festivals. There's no hate stoking. Quirkiness is not discouraged, on the contrary, we're free to be off beat.
In the Synergeo list, I've been arguing about the "dimension" concept again.
Some of my readers don't want to buy that "4D" could have more than one meaning. If some corpus has built up some inertia, some authority, they just want to leverage that without questioning it, hoping some of that mojo (aka gravitas) will "rub off" on their own presentations.
The fact remains that Fuller was pioneering his own way of thinking in Synergetics, as distinct from Minkowski's or Coxeter's, both of whom had a strong hand in their respective language games. Poker is not Crazy Eights however. Not everyone is playing the same card game, not even within mathematics.
People keep projecting these monolithic authorities where there just aren't any. That's why banks have such heavy columns I guess, such intimidating facades (learned from religions, especially the Roman ones): the weight of their architecture is meant to counterbalance the flimsiness of the thinking within.
Followup: Two YouTubes of Freedom Train @ Cascadia that evening [1][2]
