We drove up to Truckee yesterday and I80 was peppered with Burners, artsy types in interesting vehicles headed up to to Burning Man. Funky modified school busses, trucks towing strange shapes, spare tires turned into sculptures. Interesting prople in Safeway, too.
It's best to avoid the returning crowd. They tend to smell bad.
That's become some serious money, 70K people at circa $1000 per ticket.
$1000 is a mere bag of shells, it appears. I doubt all will "smell bad", either. A $10K tent should at least have running water and a shower.
Like so many "underground" events of that nature, over time it eventually became gentrified, commercialized, and mainstream. Absurd ticket prices and investment requirements (as you note) to have something resembling a good time pushed the majority of the real artists, survivalists, off-grid enthusiasts and genuinely interesting people out and replaced them with drug-addled affluent college kids and jet-set tech dudez from Silicon Valley.
Most of what now passes for the "art" involving vehicles, etc. there is just its own display of ostentatious anti-ostentatiousness; anyone with enough scratch can throw money at the problem until they have something someone will consider cool. Without the influence of psychedelics a lot of it that I've seen is, frankly, ugly as s*it.
I remember seeing an article about some guy who was planning on buying a
747-200 hulk from the boneyard for ~100k and converting it into a towable techno music dance venue waxing philosophical about how it was a social commentary on...something...and I realized that whatever this thing once was, it's pretty much done.I think it may have "jumped the shark" around the time they set up a landing strip for the event, so tech dudez could swoop in on their private aircraft to party for a few days.
How can they stop people from crashing it?
As someone who works tangential to a "creative industry" (audio), the unfortunate truth is that many people in that field are generally insufferable. If that's where they all are at the moment, I ain't want to be there.
Many Massachusetts liberals don't seem to get along particularly well with those Hollywood/Bay liberals. Then again, we don't get along particularly well with anyone.
That could make a really nice house.
If there are that many *people* there, I ain't want to be there. That many Loonytoon lefties? Fergetaboudit!
Not unusual. The old rich have never liked the nouveau riche.
Not with loony lefties, that's for sure. ;-)
Kinda like for a President, or sumpin'.
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