Dispatch From Black Rock: Highlights from Burning Man!
BLACK ROCK CITY, NV -- Every year, tens of thousands of smelly hippies with dirty feet and fanny packs crammed with peyote and LSD descend on the playa of the Black Rock Desert for a week of body painting, yoga, drum circles and naked hula-hooping. Welcome to Burning Man. By the time the enormous effigy is set alight at the festival's climax, billions of brain cells have died and just as many crab lice have found new homes in the musky crotches of thousands of faux-dredlocked Starbucks employees.
This year's event (attended by 46,000 artists/beat poets/trust fund bohemians who once read a Carlos Castaneda book), has been particularly eventful. First, a San Franciscan ne'er-do-well by the name of Paul Addis rudely set fire to The Man four days prematurely, causing "wicked downer vibes" and "karmic upheaval on the astral plane" according to participant Summer Catharsis, a half-Cherokee bisexual grandmother who manages an "I Can't Believe it's Tofu Paste" franchise in Sedona, Arizona. Ms. Catharsis is also a part time artiste whose macrame sculpture of a vulva is prominently featured on the main drag of the temporary hippy-opolis.
Another pall was cast over the organic merriment when one artist's rendition of his rarely-done "Hang Myself in a Tent 'til I'm Dead" conceptual performance piece was greeted at first with total indifference. However, once it was discovered that the artist took the title quite literally, it was widely regarded as "a major buzzkill" and "a brilliant commentary on our transient existence but totally creepy and gross" according to art school freshman and Domino's delivery specialist Rain Abramowitz of Taluca Lake.
So far this year, the most intriguing sights/attractions have been:
- The Menstruating Lesbian Street Theatre's production of Lysistrata using only semaphore and limericks written in Esperanto and shouted through megaphones
- A two-story tall sculpture of the Ra the sun-god constructed entirely of toothpaste and boxes of Cap'n Crunch
- Ennui Froglegs, the juggling mime, and his ten-hour organic performance piece "Three Invisible Balls"
- The Naked Fat Guy All-Lute Orchestra's tribute to Ravi Shankar
- The bong parade
- The Om-in, a massive yoga-thon for the differently-bodied, featuring the Sign Language Choir's radical deconstruction of Helen Reddy's greatest hits
ENJOY YOUR LABOR DAY BITCHES! COWA WILL BE BACK ON TUES.
XOX
WAM























