News: Too-cool internationalista discovers something besides furry boot covers at Burning Man.
Views: Apparently the urge to rewrite this same effing piece is irresistible to a certain percentage of people who finally get around to attending the damn festival. The Org has people who can redraft its PR backgrounders, if needed, so why-oh-why do these people feel compelled to do it for them??

Some highlights:

>>disappeared just one week 2 months later

Sheesh.

>>a not altogether helpful link titled What Is Burning Man?

I've had that same thought about the site IA. It puzzles the hell outta me, but maybe it suits the core user demographic much better.

>>To understand what the festival is today, you need to understand its origins.

We should keep a counter on the frequency of use of this sentence, followed by the scripted Baker Beach patter. Don't these people read one another's screeds sufficiently to know they're acting like parrots? Does each of them really think he/she's the first to write this article???

>>Everything—cars, tents, RVs, people, absolutely everything—is coated in a fine white dust,
>>which kicks off of the desert in regular wind storms, seeping into your pores and etching
>>itself into your fingerprints.

And into the corners of your eyes, which is the real bitch. And it's grey, not white. Maybe the writer's eyes were damaged too badly to see color with any accuracy.

>>I arrived at the festival with a tent and some toiletries, and might have wilted but for the incredible
>>hospitality of [some camp] who greeted me with a cocktail and kept me fed and showered for the
>>better part of a week.

And you decided you had to pay back for the social drag caused by your miserable deadweight by scribbling this piece. Oh, thanks. The gifting thing reminds me of those people last year walking the block pouring blackberry smoothies, though. Damn that was nice.

>>The organisers of the festival curate and provide funding for many of the art projects on site, but
>>those projects are conceived by independent artists. Meanwhile, the vast majority of things you
>>see (and you never see the same thing twice) are funded by festival participants.

1.  So much for the self-reliance if "many" of the projects are subsidized and curated.
2.  Never the same thing twice?? Puh-leeze. Doc has brought those same dusty barbies back out of storage every year since (at least) 2002, to name just one not unusual example.

I like that some proto-zine from 1945 is still publishing out of some basement office at UMelbourne, though.