The Burning Man burns early

I drafted an entry talking about the Burning Man Festival, which I’ve known about for years now, earlier this year and then decided to hold off posting it until the festival was underway.

Well, the festival is underway. In fact, it’s a bit early.

Burning Man is a lot of crazy people in the dessert. It looks like an indie art show by the pictures, with a prerequisite for attendance of either a) being a nudist or b) having more than 50% of your body covered in tatoos. I can believe that some good things come out of this hot summer hallucination; for instance, this year’s theme is going green. However, I wonder how much change the party really effects in the culture at large.

The culmination of each festival is the burning of a very large wooden sculpture. This year some prankster decided he was in the mood for arson, and set the sculpture ablaze three or four days early. I find humor in this irony, that a man is being charged with arson for burning something that was made to be burned. The arsonist’s mug shot here from CNN’s story:

The guy who set the burning man on fire is a performance artist name Paul Addis. What kind of performance is it to burn something that, um, was intended to burn? Was he questioning the validity of the Burning Man Project? Or did he just want the attention (which, judging by his mug shot, seems likely)?

The Burning Man mission statement says, among a lot of other liberating things, “Burning Man is radically inclusive, and its meaning is potentially accessible to anyone.” One of their Ten Principles is titled “Radical Self-expression.” Does “radically inclusive” include arsonists?

More pictures at Laughing Squid.