Beware the Wily Playa Badger!
Burners: Beware the badger - and airborne badger fecal material.
Warn the kids - constantly, and especially just before bedtime - do not snuggle the honey bear badgers!

An old campmate sent me a notice about this harkening-back-to-playa-operas thingy.
Someone else sent me their Tips for Burn Virgins:

Steve's Recommendations for the Playa:
1. Skip Pepe's goddamn opera. Sorry if this sounds negative, but the opera is the biggest waste of playa space ever. On the bright side, it's not usually three hours long anymore, but it has been in the past. And it could not be any more pretentious. And it often starts four or five hours late. Obviously this is a personal gripe of mine, but expecting everybody in the City to spend four hours waiting for a troupe of half-assed, unrehearsed butoh dancers to get started worshiping a giant phallus is just frickin' lame. And egomaniacal. Skip it.

2. Take side streets. Everybody walks on the Esplanade. Ofttimes there are cool projects all the way back on the back streets.

3. Don't bring as many clothes as you think you need. You won't change all that much.

4. Do bring your own single-ply toilet paper.

5. Don't be disappointed if nothing is the way you thought it would be. Last year EVERYBODY's projects got destroyed by the windstorms. This meant the art/themes/wonder of it all was fairly muted. It was still way more fun than anything else you could do that week.

6. Don't go expecting too much. It's just a big damn camping trip with your friends. Promises of life-changing experiences can be exaggerated. (It might change your life, but try not to expect it to. It might suck.)

7. It's not about peace and love, it's about guns, fire, and blowing shit up. But you assign your own meaning to things.

8. You cannot possibly see it all, so don't worry about it. You'll see everything you need to.

One thing I missed in '96 was this: several pieces of crap and one big asshole.

Last Year's BM,LLC related posts:

Burning Man goes up in smoke
Reno Gazette-Journal
Monday September 3rd, 2001
The Reno Gazette-Journal archives are lacking, but it seems that the Gerlach County Sherriff's dept is Larry Harvey's Daddy, and they say there will be no gay art on their playa. Jiffy Lube had a big sign for their camp, depicting boys being boys, and some presumably closeted cops took offense. Censorship at Burning Man - and barely anyone cared.

Blue Ribbon Burning Man Rant
Half the planet has taken up the "bitter pessimistic Burning Man veteran (and virgin! ) rants banner.

Ridiculing Burning Man is the new Not Going To Burning Man.
Oh no! That means I won't have the city all to myself this weekend. Anyway, this is by far my favorite anti-BM, LLC rant in recent memory.

Chillin' Woman - brilliant Burning Man parody - complete with its own Daddy figure!

...

radical conformity.
You know Burning Man is dead(tm) when:
-It has a $4M+ budget
-Official irony: "a sign at the entrance to the event site: BURNING MAN WAS BETTER LAST YEAR. "

"It does seem like we're starting to attract the white-shoe Republican crowd," says the 53-year-old Harvey, "It replaces the traditions that tell you who and what and where you are," he said.
Yeah! Don't let the man tell you how to dress, how to think, how to live; let the Man!

...

...

I got 183 referrals from Doctor Cliff's site yesterday.
The web must be rife with playa fever, and with burnout.

...

Dickface.net: what a great idea! I hope they get lots of great pictures. Maybe they could make stickers so people could show they'd contributed. I hope it becomes the big Thing To Do at Burning Man this year, supplanting the 1999 trend of scrotal adornment with shiny ribbons.

We're abstaining this year, 2000, and starting a new, action packed adventure series of our own.

Here's why. I just don't have the patience for 28,000 nouveaux riche kids treating it like a random bacchanal or networking retreat. Irresponsible behavior was the death of the original event long ago, and that is practically encouraged this year. I indulged last year in nostalgia, saw intimate friends who I only ever meet in the desert. Some (who have much more patience than I) are returning; most of them are abstaining.

Other perspectives:
"Ritual Without Dogma": Liberating, Purifying, and Primalizing Consumption At The Burning Man Project
(really good anthropology - you can't tell he's a regular Burner)
Whip It goes to Burning Man (1998)
Pigdog's Burning Man Nonsense
Wrybread's Burning Man pages
First Church of Larry
M*A*S*Hcara Camp
Spark Media
Fandango!
Piss Clear