By Steven T. Jones, aka Scribe
Burning Man is more than an annual event popular with San Franciscans: it is a year-round culture, one that really comes into season right around now as the art projects take shape and the myriad theme camps starting fundraising. And recently, there have been some fun and inspiring manifestations of this festive season.
Opulent Temple, Burning Man’s biggest and most enduring large-scale sound camp (and my former camp), threw a massive March 6 fundraiser in a Treasure Island warehouse, featuring legendary DJ Carl Cox (and a long list of other spinners) and mind-blowing art pieces by the Flaming Lotus Girls and Peter Hudson. The NBC news clip above insightfully focuses on how the Bay Area’s art communities help each other during hard economic times.
Then last week, there was the benefit party for Hollis Hawthorne, a friend of the Guardian and Burning Man families who is in coma. The event at Slim’s turned out a wide range of talented acts and community-minded burners that raised a staggering amount of money for a one-night event to bring Hollis home to the Bay Area.
The Burning Man story itself came to the stage in San Francisco in January as “A Burning Opera: How to Survive the Apocalypse,” and after receiving critical acclaim for this talented production’s limited engagement, the crew will hold two fundraisers this week to stage another run: Wednesday at the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence “Burning Bingo” event and this Saturday evening at Café Flore.
There’s also the release of a film about the event, “Dust & Illusions” (an early version of which I reviewed here) by Oliver Bonin (who was embedded with the Flaming Lotus Girls at the same time I was). Among other showings is one at Chicken John’s place on March 28.
Meanwhile, the company that stages Burning Man, Black Rock LLC, is about to be homeless. That well-entrenched crew is getting bounced out of its Third Street headquarters to make way for a massive new UC hospital on the Mission Bay site. Word is they’re still looking for the right digs and only have until next month to find them.