The King is Dead

 
Bruno Selmi 1923-2017

Bruno’s County Club was the most notable building in Gerlach when Burning Man first arrived there in 1990. Constructed in a style typical of frontier architecture, the front wall extends above the roof to create a more impressive façade. Over the years, we would come to know Bruno himself as an impressive character, even larger in life.

Giovanni “Bruno” Selmi arrived in the United States from Lucca, Italy, on 18 November 1946 at the age of 23. His brother, Giuseppa “Joe” Selmi, had ranch in Dayton, Nevada and put him to work as a cook.

Joe Lucchesi & Bruno Selmi- about 1950 (Photo from the collection of Jody Fritzpatrick)

It was Joe Lucchesi’s mother, Lena, who encouraged Bruno to move to America. Bruno later found a job in Empire at the gypsum plant where a few fellow Italians were being hired because they didn’t need to know a lot of English. At night, he would tend bar and deal 21 at a local bar-casino in Empire. In 1952, he purchased the Longhorn Bar in Gerlach for $6,500 and renamed it Bruno’s Country Club.

Bruno bar tending in the original Country Club -about 1958

The Selmi family: Frances, Skeekie, and Bruno – about 1955

The original Country Club burned down in 1983 and a larger Country Club was rebuilt.

(Photo by Wally Glenn)

I met Bruno after our second Burn at Black Rock. We, the organizers, had just finished cleanup and rolled into Gerlach for dinner at the “Country Club”. There were about ten of us. After dinner, the waitress placed the tab on the table, then Bruno came over, picked up the tab, slipped it into his pocket, and said: “I buy you dinner.”

He had an Italian accent and a direct, efficient way of speaking English that focused on getting his message across. Even then, he knew that Burning Man was going to be good for business, and he had spent most of his life making Gerlach his business. By 1990, Bruno owned the Country Club bar-restaurant, the motel, the gas station, several houses, a trailer park on the west side, and a nearby ranch.

When Bruno arrived in 1946, highway 447 was still a gravel road all the way from Gerlach to Pyramid Lake. During the 1950s and ’60s, cattle ranching was a big business in northern Nevada. Rodeos were popular events, and you can still find remnants of the corrals south of town out past the railroad tracks. Bruno’s Country Club was just one of several bars that catered to the local cowboys, but he was a no-nonsense bartender who, on more than one occasion, showed a drunk cowboy the way out of his bar.

Bruno on horseback, about 1955.

Over the years, Bruno developed an understanding of the local business ecology and slowly built an empire at the end of the road. After he opened the restaurant, his ranch produced much of the food, which augmented supplies the train brought in. The restaurant served his famous ravioli, which was based on his mother’s recipe.

He was a tough, independent character, but he always had a capacity for kindness. If someone came into town destitute and hungry, he would feed them. But if they asked to see the menu, he would throw them out.

Bruno hosted an annual BBQ, where he invited local ranch owners, Reno businessmen, politicians, law officials and judges. Eventually the founders of Burning Man qualified for his guest list.

Gerlach was our last stop before heading out to the playa for the long Labor Day weekend, and we developed an arrival ritual. Our first stop was Bruno’s gas station (it was a Texaco back then), where Bill Stapleton would top off our gas tank and fill us in on all the latest news and gossip around town, and tell us what the conditions were out on the playa. After that, we’d stop in at Bruno’s bar for a cold beer before heading out to Black Rock to camp out on the playa and burn a giant wooden man.

(Photo by John Story)

Bruno was a powerful figure, and among ourselves, we took to calling him King Bruno, a term that had already been carved on a rock by Doobie Williams, who created the nearby Guru Lane folk art site in the 1980s. In the restaurant, there was always a vacant chair at the end of the counter. We quickly learned that it was Bruno’s chair, and nobody else sat there.

Bruno was never politically correct and always expressed his opinions without reservation. One of the opinions he had in common with the local ranchers was a dislike of wild horses, because they competed with cattle for forage on the open range. One time the Bureau of Land Management was rounding up wild horses in the Black Rock, and a bunch of protesters came up from Reno. That evening they were having dinner at Bruno’s Country Club. One of the young ladies having the ravioli exclaimed; “This is great, what’s in it?” Bruno quickly replied; “Horse meat”

In time, the event grew and the crowds came. During Burning Man, the restaurant was packed. At night the bar was crowded, the motel was full, and the gas station sometimes ran out of gas.

Bruno and Cowboy Carl (Photo by SF Slim)

I always gave Bruno a couple of tickets to Burning Man, but he never went. He would pass the tickets on to his friends in high places. He said, “I got no interest in going to Burning Man. It’s not my thing, but if each person going wants to come and spend $1, that’s all right.”

(Photo by Brian Kelly)

Bruno slowed down in his later years, spending less and less time behind the bar. During his last few years, he would take a morning walk thru his town. The route was always the same, starting at his house behind the motel, then west down Main Street, then back on Sunset. Near the end of his 94 years, he would shuffle into the restaurant for breakfast, which consisted of a glass of orange juice and a bowl of cereal or hot oatmeal.

I fondly remember his last words to me, as I was having breakfast one morning. He stopped at my table, put his hand lightly on my shoulder and said: “I need a coupla tickets.”

His chair at the end of the counter is still vacant. It will take awhile for us to get used to sitting there.

The Future is now, at the Salton Sea

On Easter weekend, 2017, several hundred participants converged on a post-apocalyptic landscape, 244 feet below sea level, for a top-secret weekend of art, music, lectures and performance. The event included more than 100 artists and performers, who were on hand to interpret the theme: “The Way the Future Used to Be”- No tickets, no permits, and everything was free.

• Beginnings- The Salton Sea

“For thousands of years, Desert Cahuilla Indians lived here, watching the water come and go, and farming on these banks. But the Salton Sea’s current incarnation began as a mistake. In 1905, the Colorado River, which had been diverted to irrigate local agriculture, overcame its banks and poured full-bore into the desert for two years, until engineers from the Southern Pacific Railroad finally blocked it with tons of riprap. The Alamo and New Rivers continue to drain into the Salton Sea, as does agricultural runoff from the Imperial Valley. Since 1909, the Torres Martinez band of Desert Cahuilla has held the title to ten thousand acres of land that lies on the bottom of the Sea.” -Joni Tevis

• Beach Resort

After World War II, speculators promoted the Salton Sea as a resort destination. At just sixty miles south of Palm Springs it seemed like a sure bet. Agents brought investors by the busload from Los Angeles to put their money down on tidy lots. Boomtowns like Salton City Beach, Desert Shores, and Bombay Beach grew up along the water’s edge.

• The Decline

But over the next couple of decades, the boom faded, and then the storms hit. Tropical Storm Kathleen in 1976, and then Doreen in 1977, which was the second “hundred-year storm” in two years’ time. This was followed by seven years of heavy rains, which raised the level of the Salton Sea and flooded beach-front property with salty water. Over time, beach-front houses and trailers were reduced to rusted support beams and twists of insulation. Since then, much of the water has evaporated and at the same time, runoff from farms in the Imperial Valley has created a polluted time bomb, which explodes from time to time, as toxic blooms turn the water into the color of beef broth, resulting in massive fish die-offs.

Even birds are not immune, the worst one occurring in 1996, when park rangers worked day and night for a full week, collecting dead pelicans and stuffing them into incinerators. It’s been years since the last die off, but the beach is still littered with mummified fish remains and much of the time, the smell is still in the air.

Today, the town of Bombay Beach is mostly dilapidated doublewides, nine blocks deep and five blocks wide. There are just over a hundred full-time residents, and two bars.

• The Return

“The festival’s aim is to both take down the art world a notch and take Bombay Beach up a notch.” -Tao Ruspoli

For weeks, the internet was abuzz with rumors of an underground event in SoCal on Easter weekend, which was the same weekend as the nearby Coachella Music Festival. Information about the event was held behind a secret password-protected website. On April 14, 2017, we converged on a place/event called Bombay Beach Biennale. Upon arrival, we procured a hand-drawn map, which detailed events and art which could be experienced over the course of the weekend.

What is not shown on this map is the 15′ high earthen berm that separates the town of Bombay from it’s Beach. This dike was built a while back, to keep the unpredictable Salton Sea on the side of town that’s already been completely destroyed.

Parking as close as I could to the beach, I got out and approached the berm. Protruding behind it was the tip of a large and colorful sail.

When I clambered over the berm, I discovered this 30′ high mast sticking out from the rusted hulk of a flat-bottomed boat. Soft, dreamy music emanated from speakers hidden inside. This was the “Swedish Pavilion”, one of 38 “International Art Pavilions” set up throughout the town.

The second “art installation” I encountered was this massive, 6-wheel drive military truck, recently mired in the beach. FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH RV RESORT was stenciled on the side of the doors.  This vehicle seemed more fitting for a scene from Mad Max, than a resort spa.

It was eventually pulled out by connecting a long chain to a heavy-duty forklift sitting far behind it on more solid ground.

Continuing on to the waters edge, I came upon a small tide-pool filled with sharks.

On a dryer part of the beach was the “Bombay Beach Intergalactic Space Station” made from a salvaged airport control tower.

Resting on 4 legs made of 3/4″ thick steel plate, this interactive work of art was made by artist Randy Polumbo at his studio in Joshua Tree, transported to the Biennale, and then erected with heavy equipment.

(photo by Jane Maru)

Having had some advance notice that this was an art event, and in true Cacophony tradition, I put up my own temporary art installation- a curated group of tee-shirts, which tell the story of a Hero’s Journey.

(photo by Jane Maru)

(photo by Steven Biller)

Once again, it’s a story about a journey and a desert.

Another installation called “La Piscina” by Marco Walker, featured large image cut-outs.

(photo by Jane Maru)

And there were couches and a fire barrel on the beach near the DJ station.

A wall of hay bales had been erected between the sound system and the town.

As the day progressed, more and more people showed up. The day was punctuated by the occasional sound of large explosions coming from the military base a few miles away.

Hearing a familiar hum above me, I looked up to see a camera drone flying overhead with a formation of Pelicans high above it. The surreal juxtaposition of these things captured my attention until the drone veered off towards one of the art works further down on the beach.

This years festival was completely free and self-funded. This meant free cocktails, meals and oysters for hundreds. The only money exchanged went to a local BBQ trailer and the Ski Inn, the bar that somehow accommodated everyone, with a local or two helping behind the counter.

Leaving the beach for a stroll thru town.

I grabbed my umbrella and strolled thru town with Brian Doherty, a long time Cacophonist and writer for Reason magazine. Passing golf carts and guys with radios on their belts were indications that we were in the midst of a full-scale event production. We were also passed by decorated bicycles and a guy on motorcycle that looked like a giant stuffed tiger.

(photo by Jane Maru)

The signs of decay were everywhere.

And yet, works of art are flowering in this wasteland.

As I came around a corner, I discovered an installation on a chain link fence, decorated with 1,000 pocket watches- and they are ticking!

This piece was called “Tempus Mortem”, made by Alexander Rose… who is both an artist and the Executive Director of the Long Now Foundation.

In one of the abandoned buildings, stood a red piano, decorated with candles. Jane Maru sat down and played a beautiful piece.

One of the nicest reconstructions, was the Bombay Beach Opera House, designed by artist James Ostrer. Completely refurbished and painted, the walls and ceiling were covered with hundreds of flip-flops, which appear to have been collected from the beach. Trash becomes art.

We were treated to a performance by two members of the San Francisco Ballet Company.  The music track was provided by a live violin player.

(photo by J Wiley & F Martinez)

The Hermitage Museum, designed by artist Greg Haberny, was another major abandoned house restoration. Once inside, I felt like it could be in downtown Los Angeles or New York City.  (photo by Valentina Ganeva)

X marks the spot of the RGX medical station. I noted that one of my Rangers from the playa was now an EMT for this event.

Groups of well-dressed young people were an indication of this event’s connection with, and proximity to, Los Angeles. And yet, the principle of radical inclusion was clearly illustrated here, as thin fashion models wearing evening gowns and high heels mingled with local retirees and a frumpy old woman with 5 little dogs at her feet.

“While its next-door neighbor Coachella has come to be defined by branding, hashtags and which indigenous headdress one might appropriate, the Bombay Beach Biennale is an experiment in civic engagement.” -LA Weekly

I also also encountered people from Italy, South Africa and a group of Asian tourists with cameras around their necks.

On one of the vacant lots in town, dozens of interesting old cars were hauled in to create the Bombay Beach Drive-In theater.

Preparing for evening, I made a costume change and headed back to the “Bombay Beach Beach Club”- (The Department of Redundancy Department is just down the street.)

(photo by Jane Maru)

The Beach Beach Club

A scantily clad bartender at the Beach Club. Kalvin Kline seemed to be the underware of choice for all the buff guys from LA.

Later on, several movies were shown at the Drive-In on Saturday night, along with all the free popcorn you could eat.

And then, at 3am, they played the Russian movie “Stalker”, which I’m sure was a nod to the historical significance of the Cacophony Zone Trip that brought Burning Man to the desert in 1990.

Exploring Bombay Beach Biennale at night was a delight.

Out behind the Opera House, a golden boat sits in the middle of a yard covered with decorative rock.

It was like being in another world. Or perhaps a similar world that we know well. At one point during the night, Miss Dusty and I set up an impromptu bar in the street and handed out cocktails till we ran out of cups.

Intergalactic Space Station at night. (photo by Red Hez)

On Sunday morning, a lone Benz rests in the shade of an abandoned house.

I found that gifting, decommodification, radical inclusion, civic responsibility and participation were all a part of this years Bombay Beach Biennale.

Leave No Trace is a relative term in this decayed wasteland of rusting cars, trash-filled yards and burned-out buildings. What BBB has left behind is several repainted abandoned houses, many works of art and new hope for a community.

2001 – a Black Rock Odyssey

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Black Rock

15 years ago, on January 1st, 2001, I stood on the Black Rock Playa and watched the sun rise.

BurningMan is an event which often induces visions, creates expanded consciousness and provides life-changing experiences. At BurningMan ’94, I had a vision of a futuristic tribe of primitives that lived on the Black Rock Desert. They existed almost invisibly in the twilight of time after the TechnoRapture, when accelerating computer intelligence reached self-consciousness. In an attempt to recapture the feeling of that vision, I decided to spend the last night of the year 2000 out on the Black Rock playa in the dead of winter, under the stars, naked but wrapped in a blanket of dead animal skins.

Surviving a winter night in Northern Nevada is challenging enough with modern gear, but I wanted to do it in the Buffalo-robed style of Native American heritage. Real fur would be the only material which has the insulating and ascetic quality for this vision quest. How does one get fur in this age of PETA? My solution was thrift store mink coats, cut up and sewn together for a blanket.

I arrived in Gerlach a few days before New Years Eve to prepare for the experience, which included time for contemplation, reading and visiting with BurningMan staffers and some of the locals. The winter rains had not yet arrived to erase the footprints of our Y2K burn, so the playa was still drivable.

Helen Thrasher Memorial Library.

I spent some time at the Helen Thrasher Memorial Library, a warm, cozy place, filled with books, historical objects and Internet access. At that time there was a sign on the door which read “No Dogs, No Smoking & No Sex Beyond This Point.” I’ve spent many evenings here, quietly reading or sometimes engaged in lively discussion about the meaning of all things. The place was named after Helen Thrasher, who was one of the pioneer women who helped create the community of Gerlach and one of the few people to live in three centuries. At that time, she was 106 and living in Portola, California. I intended to visit her sometime, but she died the next year.

The town of Gerlach has always had an interesting mix of characters. I wondered if it’s an effect of the tiny trace of radioactivity in the drinking water that comes down from the Granite range. It was a couple years later that the US government made the town install an expensive filtering system to remove the tiny trace of radioactive element. The cost of water for the town quadrupled.

The last days of 2000 were spent with trips around the local area. I drove by the gravel pit on Hwy 34, just past the 12-mile access and noticed some cattle trucks and a temporary corral filled with horses. The BLM was engaged in a wild horse roundup to reduce the local population. A private contractor with a helicopter and bunch of cowboys had been hired to do the job. Two weeks prior, they had rounded up over 800 wild horses in the Black Rock area. They were getting paid $230 per horse. And those horses were only worth about $50 each on the open market. The federal government now runs a giant horse prison out near Pyramid Lake.

Had lunch with DPW’s Mr. Metric out at the Fly Hot Springs and then took a quick dip into the sacred waters where my goddess amulet slithered to the muddy bottom in ’97. It was in one of the Fly pools that the Water Woman sculpture stood for a couple of years. I found and retrieved the last remnant, a 3-foot long wooden lock of hair, which hung down her back.

Bill Stapleton, RIP

On New Years Eve, I stopped at the Gerlach gas station, which was then a Texaco and run by Bill Stapleton. Both Texaco and Bill Stapleton are now long gone. Bill told me that conditions on the Playa were favorable. The surface was spongy, but dry and passable. That evening, I loaded the fur blanket, some water, two burn-barrels and some firewood into my old yellow pickup truck and drove north on the Playa. “Bring everything you need to survive” echoed through my brain. Navigating by the outline of the mountains at night, I headed towards Double Hot Springs for a midnight rendezvous with DPW’s Bill Carson and Ranger FearlessOne.

Bill Carson

Ranger FearlessOne.

Arriving at Double Hot just minutes before midnight, I was handed a glass of champagne. After a suitable toast, I elected not to get wet in an environment where the air temperature was rapidly declining towards zero. After bidding goodnight, I drove back onto the flat of the Playa. The sky was full of stars as I steered towards the constellation Orion. Feeling the changes in the Playa under my tires, I pulled up to a spot that seemed right.

Dueling Burn Barrels.

Primitives Camp was located at N 40° 54.194, W 119° 05.062, altitude 3,887 feet, one mile east of the BurningMan ’96 site. I set up the two barrels about 10 feet apart. My nest was between these two fires. The air temperature was 3 degrees Fahrenheit.

 

What is it like to be in 3 degrees?
— At 3 degrees, your breath looks like a steam locomotive.
— At 3 degrees, your 2 gallons of drinking water is a block of ice.
— At 3 degrees, your CD player will not play CDs.
— At 3 degrees, the 6-pack of beer you brought is slush.
— At 3 degrees, the LCD screen on your laptop displays alien hieroglyphics.
— At 3 degrees, you pour water into a coffee pot, and watch in amazement as a layer of ice crystallizes on the surface before you can get it over the fire.

Wrapped in Mink- 1 Jan 2001

 

It’s damn cold at 3 degrees. My mind recalled the story of a local rancher who got stuck in the mud out on the Playa one cold January night in 1922. He died of exposure inside the cab of his Model T. Personal survival is an option in the Black Rock Desert. Danger can survive this, I thought to myself, and besides, the goddess is here. After firing up the barrels, I curled under the fur blanket for a while to warm up and then strip down. It seemed warm enough. I drifted off to a night of broken sleep, rolling over from time to time and moving my head as the frost formed on the blanket just below my nose. The hours passed.

Finally, I awoke with my head and face a numbing cold. The fires were down to a few live embers in the bottom of the barrels. The rest of my body was still fairly warm under the blanket of mink. I said a prayer of thank you to the furry little critters. The moisture in my breath created a semi-circle of frost on the top of the blanket. I discovered that shivering, a muscle spasm reaction of the body to cold, uses a lot of energy.

The sky was just starting to lighten above the mountains to the east. Still under the blanket, I pulled on some clothes and then threw off the blanket, jumped up and madly tossed more wood into the barrels.

The sun began to lift above the mountains and the entire panorama changed from a black line of playa and into the mountain outline that which we are so familiar with. I had survived. Sleep deprivation and the magic of this place finally set in. With the sun completely up, I closed my eyes once more and the vision came… an orange-red playa surface seemed to flow towards me. I set the brain on record as I flew through Playa Space. Soon enough, I opened my eyes. The memory lingers to this day.

 

Is our experience on this desert plain teaching us to be the surviving primitives in a cybernetic future?

 

The Santa Claus Infection

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Cacophony

Esalen Is Burning

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Tesla

B&W photo posted inside the Esalen kitchen.

The 2015 BurningMan Summit was held at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. I’ve never been to Esalen before, but the list of leaders, teachers and writers that passed thru Esalen is like a who’s who of influencers for my generation: Aldous Huxley, Buckminster Fuller, Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, Abraham Maslow, Ray Bradbury, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, etc. Even Hunter S Thompson had a brief stay there.

I am surrounded by lunatics here, people screeching every time I pull a trigger… a landlady who’s writing a novel on butcher paper, wild boar in the hills and queers on the road, vats of homemade beer in the closet… the jabbering of Buddhists in the trees, whores in the canyon, christ only knows if I can last it out… -Hunter S Thompson, The Proud Highway

The name Esalen is derived from the Esselen Indians, the Native American people whose homeland once encompassed about 750 square miles of the Ventana Wilderness, including the land that the Esalen Institute now sits upon. They were known as the “people of the rock”. The Esselen word for the hot springs was believed to mean “the god in the waters“. In 1602, the Spanish sea captain Sebastian Vizcaino sailed into Monterey Bay and he wrote of the Esselen Indians: “They seem to be gentle and peaceful people…” According to Fray Antonio de la Ascencion, who accompanied Vizcaino: “The port is all surrounded with…affable Indians, good natives and well-disposed, who like to give what they have…They go naked at this port.”

The Esselen lived in perfect harmony with their environment

…until the missionaries came.

The Esalen Institute is perched on a narrow piece of land with cliffs at the oceans edge on one side and the steep Santa Lucia mountains on the other side. Gushing mineral hot springs supply the nude baths and massage center.

Michael Murphy & Richard Price

Esalen was founded by Michael Murphy and Richard Price in 1962, and became the center of practices and beliefs that make up the New Age movement; from Eastern spirituality to Gestalt Psychotherapy. Thousands of seekers came to Esalen for workshops in avant-garde psychology, massage, mysticism and other techniques that promised to raise consciousness, and to fulfill untapped human potential.

“Esalen played a pioneering role in popularizing quests for self-transformation and personalized spirituality. Esalen paved the way for them to explore spirituality without affiliating with established denominations” -The American Soul Rush, 2012

Esalen is the religion of no religion.

Gestalt therapy was one of the major psychotherapy techniques that were developed at Esalen. Gestalt is an existential therapy that emphasizes personal responsibility and focuses upon the individual’s experience in the present, the environmental and social contexts of a person’s life, and the adjustments that people make as a result of their overall situation. The Gestalt techniques that were pioneered and developed there led to dramatic breakthroughs in psychotherapy. During the 1960s, Gestalt was combined with group therapy, pyschosynthesis, bioenergetics, and psychodrama into what became known as the encounter group, which later spread and flourished outside of Esalen as the new age Encounter Movement. However, the dark side of the encounter group was it’s confrontational approach, which could result in mental and/or physical damage to individuals going thru the process. Encounter leader John Heider wrote in his 1970s journal: “Too much suicide.” Encounter offerings at Esalen were ended by Murphy and Price in the early 1970s as being too dangerous.

The other orange fence.

Esalen was where all the wonderful lifestyle innovations of the 1960s bubbled up. -The Economist 2007

In 1980, Esalen began a Soviet-American Exchange Program to foster citizen-to-citizen relationships between Russians and Americans. In 1989 Boris Yeltsin came to Esalen for his first visit to the United States. It was a few weeks later that the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Soviet-American Exchange Program was the last big thing that I can recall coming out of Esalen. That was 20 years ago.

By the 1990s, it was all getting a bit stale. -Don Lattin, SF Chronicle, 2002

“Esalen was resting on its laurels, and backsliding” “There were always a lot of people down here just trying to hang out and get laid and get stoned.” -David Price, operations manager at Esalen and son of the late Richard Price.

This is nothing but sand, man. They ain’t gonna make it, man. They ain’t gonna grow anything here. -Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider

In 1998, the winter storms of El Nino destroyed the old bath house. Coastal landslides cut off Highway 1 to the north and south for three months, putting Esalen into a financial crisis. Coming out of that crisis, Esalen began to re-invent itself as a much more organized and responsible educational institution. New rules were put in place. Staff members were required to carry ID badges. The paying customers had to show their meal tickets before eating in the Lodge.

In 2002, a new stone-and-concrete bathhouse was built on 34 concrete piers, which required horizontal anchors sunk into 25 feet of rock. The new structure, which could accommodate 60 bathers, was built at a cost of $6 million dollars.

Over the last 20 years, Esalen has traded it’s risky edge for safety and security. The old home-built buildings have been replaced with a new Japanese aesthetic designed by a professional architecture firm. A week at Esalen now costs more than a week at BurningMan (but you do get running water and flush toilets).

It seems that Esalen has become a day spa. The parking lot is usually spotted with BMW, Mercedes and Lexus.

Esalen is a place where people hug each other relentlessly and justify their material indulgences, like Porches, as balm for their past emotional wounds. -The American Soul Rush, 2012

There are Tesla charging stations here. The Hippies have gone electric.

Esalen is on the bucket list for well-healed matrons who want to ‘cleanse the body of poisons’. Young men with ambition to be the next pop guru of spiritual materialism come here to sift thru the cauldron of new age stew.

“To fall for the baths at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, you don’t need to know that Joseph Campbell, Hunter S Thompson, Linus Pauling, Timothy Leary, Joan Baez, Ansel Adams and Henry Miller all loved the place.” -LA Times, November 2015

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Stacking rocks seems to be the new meditation practice. I saw them everywhere.

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And the weekend tourists from LA wear bathing suits in the baths.

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Then, for 5 days in October, BurningMan invaded Esalen.
The usual workshops on spiritual studies, vision seeking, healing, empowerment and yoga, gave way to BurningMan workshops on the 2016 art theme, decommodification, culture, ethnic diversity, social change (and yoga). The expensive cars of the plug-and-play customers were replaced by burner vehicles more suited to maker culture. There was the smell of bacon during breakfast at the Lodge. BurningMans presence might seem to be a setback for Esalen, but it was more like the completion of a Yin and Yang circle. Esalen has a year-round staff of more than 70, who maintain the facilities, tend the garden and grounds, do the housekeeping and cook the meals for workshop attendees and staff, but for those 5 days, the usual workshop attendees were replaced by BurningMan staff members. We were different, not like their usual clients. We were playful, we wore silly costumes. We sat down and talked and ate with them. There was a tribal kinship.

During my stay, I thought about the opposites and the similarities of Esalen and BurningMan. The physical environments could not be more different. Esalen is water and earth, BurningMan is fire and air. Both have transformational qualities and both are spiritual, but not religious. Both experiences produce an attachment to place. Having experienced heaven, how can you return to the hell of the default world?

BurningMan and Esalen are adept at stripping away the veil of maya. They both share a common transformation mechanism which breaks apart the mental reality construct; but whereas Esalen breaks thru the reality of self-identity, BurningMan breaks thru the reality of world view. Esalen blissfully disarms its graduates, but the BurningMan school sends out self-actualized warriors. That may be why BurningMan is able to replicate itself in other locations, but all attempts to replicate Esalen in the past have failed. Esalen remains firmly rooted in its birthplace. But I do I think that the convergence of Esalen and BurningMan at this time in history marks a significant point which will affect the future of both. And the baths are nice; It’s been 20 years since I lost my goddess amulet in a hot springs in Nevada, a mystic experience that bonded me to the hot water of a fertile earth.

Discarded bra hanging in the laundry window.

In spite of Esalens drift into complacent spirituality, the tantric energy at Esalen is still very palatable. I felt it everywhere. I wonder if the daily bathing allowed the subtly of pheromones to reach the surface of consciousness. In the garden, I found hidden pathways leading to small clearings wide enough for two. Then one day at lunch, I was talking to a handsome, young, guitar-carrying Esalen staff member, whom I had seen go through several stylish clothing changes during the week, when another staff member, attractive in her own right, leaned over and whispered into my ear; “He gets more pussy than a toilet seat.”

Compared to the default world, BurningMan and Esalen are very safe environments for women to express their sensuality. Someone told me that the hookup scene at Esalen is like a meat market. But if Esalen is a meat market, then BurningMan is pure porn. Both are zones where sex is decommodified.

They were all young, beautiful and wild. -Esalen and the Rise of Spiritual Privilege

I had some amusing moments during my week in paradise. One afternoon, I was strolling across the grassy park, when I came upon a chain-smoking psychic from San Diego who called herself ‘Miss Fortune’. The wrinkles on her face and the grey roots of her red hair gave the appearance of a gypsy flower child, long past the age of Aquarius. Her conversation spilled forth like a gushing reservoir of new-age buzzwords and esoteric mystic knowledge. It felt like one of those BurningMan encounters at 3am out in deep-playa. She certainly fit the character of the fairy godmother in Finnegans Wake.

Our third night at Esalen seemed like a Bohemian Grove parody, when, much to the delight of everyone in attendance, a humorous pageant was organized and performed by a few BurningMan staff members. It was an irreverent event, which probably decreased the spirituality index of Esalen by several notches. At the end of the performance, it was announced that one of the props, a drawing of the Man, would later be burned in the campfire outside the Lodge. We began to call it the Big Sur Regional burn.

As the time drew near for this symbolic burning, I enacted the ‘Oracle of Star-Glo’ in a dark passageway near the Lodge. On a small table I set up an altar using a piece of rotted tree stump and shiny bits of abalone shell, which I’m sure had been carried up from the beach by native peoples hundreds of years ago.

Esselen Indian grinding rock.

The rich soil of the Esalen garden sits upon a 4000-year-old Esselen shell mound. A shamans tools can always found in the local environment for those who have the vision.

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“Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.” -Carl Jung

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Using a sheet for a cape and draping a towel on my head, I did my best impersonation of Arthur Frayn, or perhaps I was channeling Lady Freyja… I certainly have a kinship with her beast. Using a small flashlight to illuminate the deck of Beyond Belief cards (playa relics from a future past) which I had fanned out on the table, I invited passers by to choose and keep the one that speaks to them personally. With each card drawn, I was pouring fuel into the synchronicity engine.

The source of all light is in the eye. -Alan W. Watts

The fact that BurningMan has been allowed to displace Esalens’ high-paying customers for a week told me that they want to get back to the business of changing entire social systems rather than simply changing one human at a time. On my last night at Esalen, I spent some time in the bath with a group of young millennials. They were a combination of fire and water, all excitedly yearning to move Esalen and BurningMan into the future. I felt that Esalen and BurningMan are poised at the edge of the next generation of leadership.

BurningMan has come to Esalen:

We have arrived like spiritual barbarians at heavens’ gate.

Early Burn!

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early burn

Burning Man has many traditions that have grown from a single event. Early Burn began in 1999, when Peter Mars constructed a 15′ tall stick figure that was used as a central survey marker to layout Black Rock City. The last ring road was 2400′ from the center, so they needed something more visible than a single spike in the ground.

1999 EarlyMan built by Peter Mars

After the city layout was complete, the stick figure needed to be removed and the Man built in its place, so it was decided to burn the figure. For the next couple of years, the process was repeated and the early burn became a celebratory event for the crew to mark the construction progress of city infrastructure.

“Burleyman” 2001 built by Rave Boy Walter

Over time, the size and scale of the Man and the City has increased, but the tradition of building a figure from leftover scrap wood and burning it one week before the Gate opens has become an established tradition. The number of impromptu figures has also increased over the years as various departments added their own contributions. Recent events that occur while the crew is working, have also become the subject matter of artistic expression, some of them quite elaborate. In previous years, the fire crew burned a giant fire extinguisher, the communications crew; a giant radio, the office staff; a larger-than-life desk, complete with actual paperwork and office supplies.

Early Burn 2015 was the largest ever, with more that two dozen burning figures, including a giant bug with flaming flyswatter, a 1/4th size wooden shipping container, a wooden golf cart, and three versions of ChocoTaco, one of them built by the BLM in a fit of participatory humor.

Monkeys & Skulls in a boat -by Mike Garlington.

Green couch, yellow bikes.

Someone brought 100 ChocoTacos in a cooler to hand out, and 300 people lit sparklers in a moment of silence for Spoono, a beloved crew member who passed away in his sleep the week before.

Spoono’s art car was given a place of honor at the burn.

Early Burn is reminiscent of Burning Mans early years. There are no Rangers ringed around this burn. The crew is quite aware that the intensity of the fire will create its own perimeter and the fireworks will explode directly overhead. You assume the risk…

That first Gold Spike in the ground has also become a ceremonial tradition of its own.

Seven Years

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Time Travel

Seven years ago, I made this blog. It’s one of many seeds I’ve planted during my life, which will lie dormant until my future self can reach back in time and bring them into being. That’s a long interval between the “create” button, and the “edit first post” button, but I’ve been distracted by creating the future. That is where the FaceThing took my writing and hid it “below the fold.” Now the words bubble back to the surface…