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My "Blue Man" picture (above) was featured on the Burning Man homepage during spring and summer of 2001!

Note: THESE PAGES CONTAIN IMAGES AND TEXT SUITABLE FOR A MATURE AUDIENCE.

Story of Burning Man 1999

Between August 30th and September 6th 1999 a very weird but very transformative event took place in the Black Rock desert of Northern Nevada. This was Burning Man 99, a kind of a vast community built expression space that can best be described as a bizzare mix of Star Wars and Road Warrior. Laid out in a semicircle on the Black Rock Playa, a dry lakebed near Gerlach Nevada, Black Rock City grew from zero to 25,000 souls in the space of a few weeks in August 1999. At first the site was buffetted by tent-tearing, skin-rasping winds gusting up to 70 mph and baked by temperatures over 100 degrees Farenheit but weather calmed down for the arrival of the participants.

In my view, Burning Man is an expression of the alter ego of our packaged modern society, being all at once personally expressive, permissive, irreverant, non-commercial, non-politically correct and bodily hazardous. In fact, unlike rock festivals and other media-driven events, Burning Man has no center; it is like the Internet itself, a distributed creation of its participants. Can't visualize all this? See our views of Burning Man. A key part of the Burning Man event is the burns, which climax in the torching of a five story high wooden statue of a man. Days of perambulating around the playa get you into contact with the people of Burning Man and their art. For documentation on past and future Burning Mans, see the Burning Man homepage. For my images and some commentary, see the links below. To learn more about my escapades, please visit the Damer homepage.

If you have Burning Man pictures, links or commentary that you would like included in these pages, please feel free to contact me. I was joined on this trip by my darling Galen Brandt. Our caravan was led by Bob Gelman, and included many members of our Northern and Southern California Cybertribe.

For a really insightful story of burning man, see Galen Brandt's recounting.

Burning Man 99 Imagery and Wordery
(click for more images and text)

 

Views of Burning Man 99

Ourselves at Burning Man 99

 

People of Burning Man 99	The Art of Burning Man 99
The Burns!	Our Tribe at Burning Man 99

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Other Burning Man Links

If you have Burning Man pictures, links or commentary that you would like included in these pages, please feel free to contact me.