Starr Hagenbring is the owner and proprietor of Art & Eyes, the eyeware fashion boutique in New Orleans on Magazine Street. She’s also a long-time artist, fashion designer and supporter of the arts. Hagenbring—who is also an award-winning textile artist—made a trek to Burning Man this year, the year that Burning Man changed from a mid-desert site in Nevada to a mud-

sucking, up-to-your-calves quagmire, where thousands were not able to leave—the site is that remote.

Here is her account of Burning Man 2023. All photos by Starr Hagenbring, used by permission, unless otherwise credited.

 

I’ve heard it said at least two dozen times—Burning Man is like New Orleans. Only on meth.

If your conception of Burning Man is a bunch of hippies wandering around naked, doing every drug imaginable and bonking everything they see, it’s similar to having the conception that New Orleanians spend most of their time on Bourbon Street showing their tits to get beads to decorate themselves.

Sticks and bones:
Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey has stated the event is guided by 10 principles: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leave no trace, participation and immediacy.

More sticks and bones:
Black Rock City, where the “Man” lives and is celebrated, is rather like a mythical place that pops up once a year, created by artists and art worshipers, and then completely disappears after 10 days of celebration. Rather like Brigadoon (if you’ve never heard of Brigadoon, look it up), and I mean it completely disappears. What you bring in, you must bring out: every toenail, every burnt ash,

every can; the land is meticulously, inspected and completely brought back to its pristine self by the playa restoration team. Normally, this takes about a month after the Burning Man celebration.

The land upon which Black Rock City—the Brigadoon-like gathering that surrounds the Burning Man effigy—is built upon Paiute Indian sacred land. The soil is an alkaline dust that resides at the bottom of the lake, which occasionally appears, at certain times of the year. It is unlike any other substance that is normal humans normally walk around in. Remember this, because it’s going to be important when I tell you about the floods later on. If you try to find a Black Rock City in November, you won’t find it. Not a trace.

The theme this year was “Animalia“. So for my wardrobe, I stopped at two different thrift shops and $100 later I came out with two giant garbage bags full of every conceivable animal print I could find. I located some lovely plastic horns, gold-leafed them, stuck a pair of ram horns on a sun hat and a pair of antelope horns on an adorable wig….boom. You’re ready for action.  If you show up at Burning Man in khaki shorts and a couple of dusty colored T-shirts, with a fanny pack, you’re going to look like you missed the turn to Salt Lake City—rather like if you turn up on Mardi Gras day in the Quarter in the same get-up. Not a good idea.

Burning Man today is giganormous, swelling between 65 and 85,000 people. Meticulously placed in an Atlantis city design (if you don’t know what Atlantis is and what shape that is, look that up, too). Its measurement is approximately three miles in diameter. The art is in the middle of a vast desert plane and extends out in an area of 10 o’clock through 2 o’clock, called the outer playa.

There are hospitals, fire stations and a “City Hall.” It’s a full-service community that has been studied by city planners and it’s functionally excellent. There are no cars. How do you get around? Bicycle or Mutant Vehicle a.k.a. Art Car. In order to ride around in an Art Car you have to pass a series of inspections through the Black Rock City DMV.

Do you feel safe here? Absolutely. Is it kinky? Yes or no. When walking around Black Rock City, there’s pretty much everything you would find in a small town: Nail salons, restaurants that serve one or two things, bike servicing, massage parlors, classes on aerobics, acting, nature in the playa, beadwork, all kinds of arts and crafts. How to play a zither while standing on your head. Now the fun part of all of this—which is where the mainstream goes totally bonkers—is that all of these places have excruciatingly cute, sexy names. Double entendre rules!  Then there are places like the “buffer zone.” You are massaged by those wonderful car wax buffers made to shine up your car. Nice and shiny. Well, let me tell you, I am going home and am totally ready to buy one of those things because it is so good. There’s a grilled cheese emporium that will make your grilled cheese as to the level of spanking you want to get… a pinky touch on your first level. Frankly, I don’t think I’d be happy with the inch and a half thick cheese I would be given on a full-ass butt slap!  Can you find curious sex with a foreign object or a person? Absolutely. Just make sure you’ve got a triple condom.

Yes! There are children and families on the playa. And then there are the bars and nightclubs. There is everything from sake bowling bars to sing-along-with-Sinatra martini bars, to the classic playa punch bar, that’s my personal dis-favorite. Playa punch is usually a Gatorade mixed with the cheapest alcohol one can find in a Costco. Barf. Can you find pretty much any kind of designer drug on the playa? Absolutely. Just make sure you stay hydrated—people have been known to disappear for days! But when you finally do regain five percent of your gray matter, these streets are very well-marked with signs in an alphabetical/numerological configurations so that even the biggest moron can find their way back to their tent.

The Traveler
First of all, let me tell you: I’m not one of those old, crusty, season Burners (this is my second year). However, the event had not escaped my radar. I was invited to go several times in the late 90s by a wonderful group of friends of mine were in the metaphysical business— I was just around the perimeters. They were adamant that I must go. Alas, I was an artist and the largest most prestigious outdoor art festival was the same weekend, so I chose finance over frivolity. I am so sorry about that. I would have loved to have witnessed the playa without LED lights.

The Set-up
There are “theme camps,” which is where all of the “commerce” I mentioned previously resides. And there is standalone camping. If you’re with a theme camp, you have a much better chance of getting a ticket! And there’s a shit-ton of work. It’s a hell of lot easier to get a ticket when you are associated with a theme camp. OK. I have set you up for what Burning Man physically is. Is it

hard? Yes. However, levels of difficulty are dependent on exactly how much you participate in the assemblage of this imaginary world. I suppose I chose a more difficult path. I have been part of the theme camp, which means you provide a service, and our theme camp is a bit of a department store. You could come to our camp and participate in anything from how to make your own voodoo ceremony to a variety of bars. We also have an Art Car, which is an amazing luxury on Black Rock City. In other words, you don’t have to bike all over the place, you can take the art car and be transported magically from on one or display to another! Now if you have anything to do with the design of these features, you are pretty much working for five days straight with a few missed nights of sleep completely and the rest about four to six hours a night sleep. The sacrifice for art is great.

The Experience
You walk out onto the playa with a friend in an amazing costume, not a New Orleans-style costume—a playa costume. Somewhere between steam punk and the theme of the year. There’s a slight peekaboo dust storm brewing in places with small dust devils brewing about; you’ve got the soundtrack of Pink Floyd, “the great gig in the sky “playing and the temple is in the background and it is true blissful magic.

There are well over 300 works of art on the playa. From large temples to medium-sized miniature cities, you could walk through, too tiny little artworks you can hold in your hand on the edge of deep playa. The art is what I personally come for, beautiful, amazing, tearjerking, hilarious, thought-provoking, pieces of sculpture done in every medium against a flat, thought-provoking, ominous desert-like floor.

We had a wedding at our camp. After the ceremony was performed in our communal camp, we all piled onto the Art Car. After running about town and whizzing past the Man, we spotted a caravan of Art Car animals. We decided to join, since after all, we were a turtle with mushrooms, growing off our back. The result was a ring of mutant vehicle animals—from the most humble bunny mounted on a golf cart, to our lovely handmade turtle with mushrooms on top, to a $2 billion extravagant bull that was basically Studio 54 mounted on wheels (complete with laser show), and a full electronic house band and its music. The result was what many myths are made of.

Here we are, out in deep playa, with a multicolored LED light circle of animals, one of which is dumping out the beats of modern techno house music. (Sadly, house music has declined into repetitive, horribly boring, robotic drum beats, that hypnotizes all those born with a cell phone in their hand). If you dance your way into the front line of the worshippers, the good news is you can hear interesting innuendos that you would never hear in the back of dance line groupings. The bad news is you have hundreds of people staring blankly into nothingness, which is rather reminiscent of what happens to humans in sci-fi/ horror classics, like those created by Ray Bradbury, H.G. Wells, Harry Harrison, George Orwell and the like. (if you don’t know these people, look them up!).

This is a far cry from the fire-lit drum circles and acoustic music, from all genres of the world, that played the likes of trans-dance music, when Burning Man first began….

Moving on music-wise, there are all forms and styles of music on the playa, many of which are live. You just have to find them buried under the house music…

Nighttime on the playa takes on a strange look. When you are out on the playa, looking back on the semi-circle where the camps begin… the “Ocean Drive” so to speak, takes on a curious cheesy carnival look. Like someone dropped the Nebraska State Fair midway in the middle of deserted northwest Nevada.  Last year there were far more giant “propane flame geysers.”  They were special!…and indications of what Burning Man was in the past.

The Art Cars have trended similarly. My favorites are the genuinely sweet, homemade cars. You will see some wonderful monsters that look like they’re made out of five different Airstreams, cut up and turned into some mythical figure.  These kinds of things alone are totally worth the price of admission. El Pulpo Mecanico, however, is the godfather. A steam punk octopus made it out of muffin tins and bits and pieces of

scrap metal that wiggles while it moves through the desert shooting out huge propane shots of flame. It’s magnificent, and equally as adorable in the daytime as in the evening. The discos on wheels mentioned above, are curiously phenomenal, but heaven knows they’re tacky and ugly. The most disturbing thing this year was the huge influx of what I like to call “erector-set pontoon-boat Art Cars” that appear to be made from a kit. You get a shit-ton of LED lighting and then when you assemble everything, it’s just as tacky as Christmas decorations you bought at Walmart. I’m sure they’re worth a boatload of money but they’re so not creative and obviously a corporate concept.

The Soul

The Man is the Omni God, the temple is the soul. There’s always a temple. The temple is absolutely beautiful and is different every year. Different architects are selected to build the temple each year and this year—being the 30th anniversary of Burning Man—was the first year they selected a woman to design the temple. The result was an Islamic art origami affair with each piece of wood laser cut with beautiful Taj Mahal-like flowers. People go into the temple to honor those who passed, or to heal. You’re allowed to write dedications, remembrances, Eden, desperate cries for help, on the walls of the temple. I don’t know anyone, even the most shallow, superficial or skeptical human that has walked into the temple, and has walked out without feeling something. Usually your compassion level completely overflows, and you end up standing in your own personal puddle of tears. I have been to many spiritual places in my life, but nothing is like this place. It is here where you realize the forces of humans “mind-building together” can basically move mountains.  The temple is burnt the day after the Man.

The Players

The original people who started Burning Man are artists and art lovers, who truly understood what Larry Harvey was trying to put across in his 10 principles. Burning Man is a challenge. It’s about growing. I believe it’s an experiment to see if you can reach beyond yourself and become a better, more knowledgeable person. I’m sorry to say that I believe many of those concepts are not in vogue right now. And not only that, the “popular people” have moved in. It’s a well-known fact that artists take over, improve, and make delightful an area which is downtrodden…and then the developers move in…And then it’s gone.  The developers move in,

the popular people move in because it’s so, so chic to be in this bohemian area, and then the artists are priced out, and then you get endless chain stores, mall, stores, and Frankenstein parking lots. I’ve personally witnessed this in New York City, South Miami Beach, and New Orleans. I’m afraid it’s happening ever so slowly at Burning Man and Black Rock City. Sometimes the mix of art and developers can have a sweet spot for several years, and the two work quite compatibly together. I suppose it depends on which developers get there first.

The Flood

It was Friday afternoon, and it was starting to spit, and at times, genuinely rain.  In short, it was a pretty unpleasant afternoon, playa-wise.  The event before mine was a gin and tonic party, and a lot of people were stuffed in our shade structure, house music was blaring, and there were no other people to be seen in the streets. My Martini event was about to begin, and there was no way this group is going to be even slightly amused with hanging with Sinatra, so the first thing to go was my psychedelic 1950s, three-tiered, hot pink tutu with a train, and a very long cigarette holder: I said fuck it, I’ll just make martinis. As the event went on, we were pretty happy, dumping water off the shade structure and making little gutters with clips and duct tape. Things were obviously not gonna get very nice out there, so a lot of our camp started returning and settling in the big shade structure, and everybody brought out bags of snacks And mind-altering substances they hadn’t shared yet. So things got a little wild and communal. I would guesstimate that this kind of behavior was happening playa-wide. Let’s just say that to find somebody who was not under the influence of a variety of substances who could tell you exactly how the story went… Frankly, I don’t think there was anybody….

A magnificent double and triple rainbow appeared. People were out of their shade structures, dancing on top of anything that they could, containers, pole-tops, you name it. People were having a hell of a good time in the rain. So I was happily ensconced in this giant communal circle of some of 30 people, eating, drinking, laughing, and occasionally I explained how there were so many different astral planes and, of course, playa was on a special diagonal plane…and as time went on, I found I could isolate different peoples conversations! The funny thing was that all of these conversations were exact quotes and plots from B-movie horror films, some dating all the way back to the 1930s. This just fascinated me and now I realized how every film director and script

writer had come up with his or her ideas, went to an event like Burning Man—and boom, there you are. Plot, script, written!

In the meantime, the rain was revving up, the wind was revving up, and, of course, like they always do, there’s always a couple of people who have to play God-like authority figures, and they were shouting fascinating commands on issues like toilets, food, and how we should stay in this one structure. Somewhere in there I realize that it was very possible that every single person in the tent was not my friend and if I talk to them too closely, I would be completely driven under the mud. (We are getting into biblical concepts here now: we’re in a place that appears for a week once a year, where there’s no rain and no water and all of a sudden we’ve got crazy dredging mud-forming downpours). At one point I had a glimpse of reality, and said to a friend of mine, is the playa sending around instructions on how to deal with floods? She said, no, that’s just ——, ranting away as usual. I realized I was freezing from soaking wet clothing, grabbed a piece of fabric, wrapped around me, threw on my poncho, took off my shoes and tripped out into the dark, hoping to find my tent, plunging my feet through eight inches of sucking-down mud. When the playa gets wet, it forms a clay-like substance that’s somewhere between quicksand and cement. It sticks to everything. And you cannot get it off, unless you add more water, which creates even more of a problem. I got to my tent, took some fabric and got the creepy mud off my feet the best as I could, and fell fast asleep with the rain pounding on my tent. The next morning, I unzipped my tent flap to find out. We were pretty much on our own individual islands.

The playa’s geographical make-up is such that if you depress a hole into it, it will make a little lake, and then it will not dry as fast. So stomping around in the wet ground was totally the wrong thing to do. But—you have a lot of nervous people with a lot of crazy energy, and everyone is marching around, trying to figure out what to do. The answer was actually to chill and do nothing. And wait for the playa to dry itself. I’m not even really sure what these people accomplished, other than making a complete mess of our camp area. There were about a third of us who holed up in our individual tents, read books, found interesting water vessels that we could turn into personal porta-potties, stuff like that.

Things did take a turn for the worst, though, because as far as peoples’ attitudes go, the fact is that as generations have shifted, you’ve got a lot of entitled people on the playa and at Burning Man: it’s gotten popular, for better or worse. There are now a lot of people who come to Burning Man who wouldn’t know one end of a paintbrush from a pastel. Or would not know a drumstick from a trombone for that matter—they’re pretty much there to party and be seen. The fact was that no one was going anywhere. Saturday night came and the Man did not burn. It was just too wet. It was becoming apparent that no one was leaving Black Rock City in the next day or two. A certain kind of people started freaking out: “This can’t happen to me.” “I have to be in wherever by tomorrow!” I actually heard somebody say, “I have to catch a plane! I have a lunch reservation at a Gordon Ramsay restaurant!” I found this rather amusing because the buses weren’t running. The wheels cannot turn on the playa soil/mud. The planes are not taking off, same problem, so I’m not sure who they were going to call and make sure that they did not get stuck. All in all it was extremely immature and pretty ugly. People were taking off in their vehicles and getting stuck messing up the roads, driving across the non-road area and getting stuck, or attempting to walk to the little town of Gerlach, which is a good 18 to 20 miles away. And then hoping to pay some local to take them into Reno. People were leaving their entire campsite for others to clean up. Remember the part of the playa rules that says “Leave no trace….”. And there were magnificent people and magnificent stories, as well as people taking care of people. For whatever the major news media reported, there was a ton of food at Black Rock City. Not to mention a ton of water and a ton of alcohol, and no one was starving.

Burning of the man delayed and finally happens on Monday
There was a beautiful young man in my camp. He was a BM virgin and he was part of an acting troupe in Thailand. I mentioned that I had been in Burma in the mid-80s, working there for around two months. I told him how wondrous Burma was compared to Thailand because of its lack of everything, including gas-powered vehicles, large quantities of electric lights, and Coca-Cola. It was like time traveling back 200 years!  The insects and the animals were phenomenal. The foliage was wondrous. And very, very different from Thailand at that time who did have all of those modern things. He said to me, “Oh yeah, you really should go to Myanmar now, it’s wonderful! They have every kind of food you could possibly want to eat and they have terrific hotels. I looked at him and said, “Well, why would I want to go there then? It’s like every place else.” He had no idea what I was talking about. 

So what is Burning Man about, really?
Protect the special things in life. They are unique and one of a kind, they can easily be trampled.

What does climate change have to do with all this? Burning Man is about the journey. It could be an epiphany in your life. If you fly in to Burning Man, (yes, there is an airport!), you lose a very important portal into the growth process. It’s like a flower without a stem. Burning Man is a lesson and a challenge. I drove to Burning Man this year in a cargo van. I’ve crossed the United States so many times in a vehicle I have lost count, but this trip was a jaw-opener. I had four days of traveling in over 110° temperatures. I saw three 53-foot-long semis engulfed in flames, not because of collisions, but because of self-implosion. I saw numerous active brush fires on the side of the road plus the scorched land of previous fires, and then I went through a hurricane in California. And topped it off with epic floods on the playa. The activity of the oil companies to push for more and more product is nauseating.  Pay attention. Do everything you can to be a good steward of the Earth!