God dammit, I promised myself I wasn't going to rant...
(This isn't necessarily directed at the OP. It's just a haphazard rant.)
cinnamontwist wrote:The gist seemed to be, it's in danger of simply becoming too predictable, too routine, as a whole.
Predictable and routine to whom, exactly? The only way it's predictable is if *you* do the same damn things every year.
Four years ago I was getting bored with Burning Man. So I started a theme camp, which ended up having absolutely nothing to do with our theme (teaching people the primitive art of making fire) and everything to do with filling blow-up sex toy dolls with oxygen and acetylene and making them explode with a 12' tall Tesla coil.
This year I was getting bored with the whole up-all-night thing, so I woke up at dawn, went out during the day, explored different parts of the city, and actually got to meet a hell of a lot of people. We still ran our bar in the afternoons, got people drunk, etc, and spanked a hell of a lot of people with the custom-made, engraved paddle our neighbors gave us. Ho-hum, same old shit, I guess.
I'm sorry, but this whole "Burning Man is too predictable" thing sounds like so much veteran burner complaining over nothing. I hardly see Burning Man as being at a critical juncture. If anything the *structure* of the event is stable and not under constant threat of eradication, for once. And just because the event isn't going off in some wild tangent from what it was doesn't mean it's going to be stale. What goes into that structure is entirely up to
people. It amazes me how many people go there with the expectation that someone else is supposed to entertain you. We do different things every year, and nothing ever goes according to plan. The only predictable thing at Burning Man, in my opinion, is unpredictability. And people bitching about loud rave camps.
There are enough new people coming in with new ideas every year that you'll never see the same thing twice, unless all you do is hang out in Center Camp and ride around the playa, and even then you'd have to try hard not to encounter things that are wildly different than anything you've seen before. My neighbors this year are a perfect example. Almost all of them were virgins, and I fully expect that they'll be back next year, with their fire-breathing beer launcher. If such a thing is routine, I'd hate to see what out-of-the-ordinary is supposed to be like.
