By Scribe
These are frantic days for many Burning Man artists, a stressful race to the finish line that is next week’s departure for Black Rock City. I got the call from my old camp, Opulent Temple, that they needed some extra minions so I agreed to help out with their impossibly ambitious project: a massive 10-foot tall steel “star” stage (which is actually five stages, all cut and welded from scratch) and a huge open air bamboo dome. I’d already put in a few recent work days on the stage at the Box Shop on Hunter’s Point (where I’d spent more than nine months reporting this story a couple years ago), so I opted to head out to the West Oakland Warehouse (WOW) to do some dome work and peak in on some other projects, particularly “Crude Awakening” by Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito, who are most widely known around SF as the sculptors of Passage, which now resides near the Ferry Building.
It was like stepping into another world.
