Friday was pretty much a free day for us to spend exploring the wonders of Black Rock City. After having coffee and tea for breakfast, getting to know our neighbors and fellow ARF citizens a little bit and making sure the chores of setting up a camp (which was to double as an art installation) were taken care of we all rambled off.
Just across the promenade from us was the Alien Chess Camp, as well as the desert croquet playfield. I never did take the time to do either, but both looked very inviting. I did end up giving the plastic horseshoes and single wood post to the Lawn Game Society who were hosting the Croquet field though, thinking that they would put it to better use than ARF, which they did.
Further down the way were some of my favorite camps in Black Rock City: The Rent-a-Kiva was still under construction at this point, but the Mercedes troop transport vehicles in Band Camp made quite an impression. Also notable was the Ferny Fern Camp with their misters and tropical jungle ambience; the Alicearium; and at the end of the row, Bianca’s Smut Hut: A tent with a lot of living room couches, coffee tables, and books, magazines, crayons and drawing paper where people were drawing and writing poetry and painting each others bodies and eating and grooving to good tunes. Walking in there the first time I felt the heavy velvet undertones of some very stoned folks greet me as I wondered what to do next. Many people may have been on various and sundry substances at Burning Man but it seemed to me that very few were sharing - or if they were sharing it just wasn’t with me. You had to know someone for that kind of thing or else have brought it yourself. Woodstock this wasn’t. This was the Summer of Lust baby, thirty years after the Summer of Love. We’re in a new time zone, so get with the program. You can’t watch, but you can play: either you participate or this is not going to be what you wanted to see happen. THIS is the true beauty of B-man. That’s why I volunteered to cook on Saturday night - at least that way I’d know that I would get something that was good that I like to eat - so selfish in a way, but it was also an act of giving something that I had to offer to the group. I know that at least a few people enjoyed my cooking, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Walking around some more we discovered yet more cool camps. The place doing butt prints is etched across my mind. They would take a sponge with yellow or green paint depending on your preference, spread it on your butt and have you sit down on the white canvas tarp they had laying on the ground. Then you signed your name next to your butt print and they hosed your butt clean with a hydraulic water sprayer. Fun stuff.
Taking advantage of the mobility the $25 Huffy Mountain bike afforded me I was able to cruise the entire encampment that afternoon. Many camps were still being set up and people were arriving in droves. I rode out onto the playa to check out the many installations out there, with the Man himself standing tallest. Directly in front of our camp was a colorful tent designed by Terry from Seattle called the Monkey Palace with three beds placed in the center for the sole purpose of monkeying around on - no sleeping allowed. At night it was dimly lit with a slowly rotating mirror ball. Not too far away hung a curtain of CD-ROMs glittering away in the sun, lit by amber lights at night. Further away still was an impressive sculpture made of rusting metal of a robot-like man on his knees screaming at the sky with his hard on in his hand. I should have taken a photograph of that one.
One camp had a crash test dummy family sitting on a couch watching TV with the caption "Kill Your Television" prominently displayed. On Saturday night the dummy would launch headlong into their unprecious TV at 9 p.m. (really 10 p.m. so unfortunately I missed it). A lot of other camps were under construction or were meant to be seen at night (or were meant to be seen burning at night, I should say).
One amazing installation, if one considers the scope of the project, meant to be seen at night was a scale model of the solar system we inhabit. The Sun was a large orb not too far off the path to the main stage. A small light a little farther out represented Mercury, 200 yards away was Venus, further out and getting dimmer was Earth, that pinkish dim light even further away was Mars, and way, way out past that was Jupiter. Neptune was as faint as one of the real stars overhead and I don’t think the naked eye could see Pluto. Far out. Literally.