Updated April 1, 2010 ... You could read the name of this site in a snarky way, if you wished. You could see it as a comment that Burning Man is burning out and fading away. Or, if you prefer, you could see it as an observation about the nature of Burning, the way in which the best moments can be the ones that escape the notice of many, because they don't seem as dramatic, on the surface. Consider the moment that comes when the fires at a burn stop leaping. Some will walk away, thinking that the burn is over, but it's not. People will linger there, some for hours, and in the quiet moments that follow, begin to talk. As the heat turns to mere warmth, welcome to some on a chilly desert night, community happens. This can be the best part of a burn.

This site will be written from the point of view of the kind of participant who, having gladly spent time on the Esplanade, found many of his favorite moments on the back streets, softly speaking with those who wishes that he would meet again, as the zombies raced past. Surrealism, still, but surrealism of a gentler sort, that doesn't crowd out the spirit of those participating. At the moment, I'm in the process of slowly relocating my Burning Man pages from another site, doing so slowly enough that the spiders can keep up. The first page here is Bad Times on the Green Tortoise. Not everything will be as critical as that piece, but criticism does have its place.

"Tara Ball, Drugs and You", a rebuttal to some online rumor mongering, is even more critical and probably a lot less enjoyable to read. It's really just about getting to watch people act like crazy jerks on the Internet, so if you know better than to take online rumors seriously, you're probably better off skipping the piece altogether. If not, then consider this part of your ongoing education.

"Burning Businesses in Chicago", a listing of venues and online resources that might be of some interest to burners, is in bad need of an update and a renaming. I'll be working on that in the months to come. If you'd like to be told when those updates occur, and be pointed to them, then I'd recommend that you visit the blog that comes with this site, and think about subscribing to it to save yourself a little time, because I don't update every day. New pages here will be mentioned and discussed there.

That leaves us with the question of what is to be done with the rest of this account which, if I understand correctly, comes with an allocation of diskspace and bandwidth that will more than meet the needs of any reasonable individual usage. Perhaps it is best to start with what it mostly won't be going for, probably - drama. My greatest flaw, in the past, has been that I've been far too patient with people, calmly discussing matters with people who've shown that they've had no desire to be reasonable, people who went on to lie about the discussions that we had, creating the need for rebuttal pages.

The amount of work needed to debunk the rumor mongering seems to go up exponentially as a function of the length of the discussion being misrepresented, so the best solution seems to be to err on the side of giving up on people too quickly, in online discussions, and really, why not? The headaches the Internet can generate are very real, but the friendships usually aren't, and how remarkable an event, when those friendships are real. A few cursors on a screen, like a few words whispered behind somebody's back, are easily enough to defame somebody, but friendship usually calls for the sharing of a richer experience, one that's very difficult to achieve when one's friends aren't physically in one's presence. When the costs and benefits shift, our responses to them should shift as well, and eventually, mine did. What damage is done remains done, and has to be dealt with, but I have cut down on the need to write further debunkings, and given myself a little more time in my day to find a better class of friends, in the process.

Having said what I won't do, then, I'm left with the question of what I will do. The answer is to be found in noting what Freewebsites (my host) offers - vast amounts of space (within reason), and minimal censorship. I can't upload anything that could be considered to be even soft porn, not because our provider is being judgemental about that, but because our sysop has expressed a very reasonable concern that the demand for such material would cause the bandwidth consumption of a site carrying such material so high, as to do harm to the company and undermine its ability to serve its other users. Fair enough. You won't see any nudes on my pages on Artshost - any unclad individual I see in frame will be digitally blurred before posting.

What I imagine I'll be focusing on, will be installation art at Burning Man, maybe, and at regional and backyard burns, certainly, along with some ideas about installation art of my own that I'd like to do at these events. The amateur theatrical material will mostly, but not entirely, be elsewhere, some of the edgier material perhaps finding its way here because of Freewebsite's well known strong, anti-censorship stance. What you will see here will tend to focus more strongly on ... everything else? I'd like to say, on visual art, but visual art costs really money to make, and I remain poor, seemingly inescapably so, having encountered nothing from human resources but the good, hard stonewalling given to those of us without personal connections in the job market. I want to play with some of those "new materials" one hears about, and explore the boundaries between physics, engineering, and art, but I don't know if I'll ever really be allowed the freedom to do so.

But at least I do have the freedom to go out hiking for an hour or two, on this bright and lovely day,and so I will do so. If you'd like to return to your ring, at this time, you can do so here; aside from the pages already mentioned, there is nothing more to be seen on this site, yet.