Discovery Channel at BM 2005

[Zulegoona]

Back when I had cable, and granted it was a number of years ago I was a “ subscriber “ to an incredible number of channels I never watched. I was interested in the sci-fi channel and to get it I had to also subscribe to half a dozen sports channels three or four shopping channels and god know what the rest of the crap was. Having x number of subscribers doesn’t mean shit.

[geekster]

I agree with Z, those "subscribers" are people that have cable packages that include DT. Our household hasn't watched but a small fraction of the channels we have available. Same goes for people with satellite packages. Being a subscriber and actually watching it are completely different things. I am unable to delete unwanted channels to reduce my cable bill. I basically have the second tier of a three tier offering from our cable company. Basically I get everything except the "premium" channels. I "subscribe to" over 150 channels of video content and maybe 100 channels of audio content.

If I got the first tier, I would not get some channels such as Nickelodian and Disney that the kids like. In order to get those two channels, I get a lot of shit we don't watch. Discovery Times is one of them. I don't even know which channel it is ... oh, there it is, channel 271, Never watched it before in my life.

[ubu]

We have become a nation of posers. It's not a life that's lived or shared, but an imitation of life, a kind of commercial for self. It's as if we ourselves are now TVs and broadcast images. America is now wealthier than at any other time in its history, yet all around us and within us a feeling of lurking anomie persists. The spread of materialistic values has contributed to a moral coarsening and a growing cynicism in our country. Within a manipulative world all motives seem venal, all efforts illusory. But at a deeper level, it is the commodification of imagination itself, the moral passivity, the social isolation, the angst that is generated by living in a solipsistic world of fraudulent satisfactions that is producing the greatest evil. Critics call for better values. Yet to even entertain a moral value one must first be someone in a world beyond one's self. The vital here and there of spiritual experience is disappearing from our world. The world, in some nauseating fashion, no longer appears to belong to itself."

This quote is really when you think about it, full of a lot of bullshit. So is the quote from Larry about how the first cities were dedicated to some kind new age idea of the sacred, without commerce. Read Lewis Mumford's Myth of the Machine or any history of civilization. The great citiy states of mesopotamia were machines designed to service the will of a great despot, with people as the cogs and gears.

I like Larry, I've had him over for dinner a few times at my place, no big deal. I like his taste in art and his impulses, which are really greater than himself and greater than his rhetoric. His rhetoric needs a little help in my opinion.

The line between bm and the default world is very porous as it should be. We are a part of a larger advanced money economy and no gift economy has ever been pure, not even with the "tribals." and gift economies have their own dark sides and their own problems, and they are all hybrids, mixes, and impure mutts.

We capture our "experiences" in film and photo as they happen, we manufacture emotion for ourselves and call that sacred, we run around manically trying to cram something we hilariously call "change" into a week in the desert. It is absurd and that is part of the humor of it. and that is burning man as much as a "workshop" which burning man is flooded with.
This is no complaint. It was never pure. BM is innovative and new things emerge from it outside of or beneath the threshhold of rhetoric.

All that said, I signed the petition, not because I care what goes on the Disco channel, or that the impurity of burningman will change it, but because I know some of the dynamics of gifting and gift grouping. BM needs more transparency because it does exist on precarious legal fiction and is based heavily on mass contribution. The ip issue is precarious. You don't necessarily sign anything over with the back of your ticket. The org needs you. Better transparency will be good for the org. BM will grow better with transparency.

[PyroChix]

I'm part of the pyro crew that was working on the man, setting up the fireworks for the night of the burn when Mr. LeDuff decided to unleash his artistic impression by throwing eggs at the Man. While seemingly innocuous, he threatened the lives of everyone on that structure. In the intense dryness and static hell that is the Playa, if that egg had knocked into something the wrong way, the explosion you saw during the Burn would've happened that afternoon... taking all of the pyro crew as well as Mr. LeDuff and the Rangers on duty to an explosive death.

By airing this act, Discovery Channel and the LLC not only condone his act of irresponsibility, they also promote future idiots to follow suit. There's a reason we have a safety perimeter on the day of the Burn, yet the LLC and Discovery Channel are representing that they refuse to understand the potential danger involved.

LeDuff has no idea how close he came to dying that day, whether from the potential explosion or the number of us that had to be restrained from kicking the crap out of him for endangering our lives. No where else in America except for Burning Man would Mr. LeDuff get away with a blatant act of potential manslaughter without being thrown into jail for at least a harsh talking to. Instead, he's getting noteriety from it.

Had the explosion occured, anything having to do with Burning Man's fire related activities would instantly be shut down because the pyrotechnician whose license the event depends on would have died. The insurance companies and legal authorities including the BLM would have to shut down the event as well. There would be no Burning Man if Mr. LeDuff's act of "artistic expression" set off an explosion. The chances that his actions could have set off an explosion were high, easily 50%. That Saturday had high levels of static electricity due to several white outs. I'm not speaking as an alarmist, I'm a realist, and I know that I could easily have died that day.

I'll be writing to the LLC and Discovery Channel regarding this act. I'm speaking for myself and not necessarily all the pyro crew members, but I want it to be on record that if anyone in future years pulls a stunt similar, legal repercussions will be sought against the LLC, Discovery Channel, and Mr. LeDuff for their irresponsible validation of hazardous acts. I invite anyone else who plans on writing to the LLC, Discovery Channel, or Charlie LeDuff to make use of my comments here. If you do so, however, I would like to know about it just for reference.

[DaBomb]

Thanks for that statement.

You may find the following link relevant. It's part of SaveBRC.org, but since the domain name is masked to my personal use site with a big ISP corporation that shall not be plugged in a non-commerce bulletin board, here's the direct link:

http://home.earthlink.net/~mybrc/id14.html

[PyroChix]

Thanks for the link. I've just sent emails to Discovery Channel and Marian@bm. Do you have any other email addresses that I should send my concerns to?

[Bob]

I sympathize, really I do, but it's way too late to ticket the guy for nuisance, mischief & reckless endangerment, too late to sugar his crew's generator, too late to wake him up with a bullhorn every morning at four a.m., and too silly to try to remove footage from a video already broadcast, copied and put into illegal distribution by other idiots with no respect for art or artists.

DPW would have taken care of it appropriately, but then I wasn't there last year. Don't think QG was working the snorkelift last year either -- she's a video artist herself -- the kind with a brain -- and would have ripped the guy a new asshole.

Every single year I've attended & worked the event, org-approved photographers and video artists have made asses of themselves, misrepresented my own conception of the event, taken images of people doing incredibly stupid things, and goaded them on.

However, I don't assume the appropriate response is to go all Church Lady after the fact and expect to change an event and culture that, as it's chosen to evolve, thinks nothing of inevitable effects of a few people creating a prefab spectacle for a crowd of 30-40 thousand.

PyroChix, didn't you work last year for people who had their media dept review the film well before Charlie's people broadcast it? I'm pretty certain they wouldn't have given a thought to the egging scene, even if that's what would have jumped out as potentially harmful to people like you and me. I'm pretty sure they would have been looking more for prurient T&A shots, and objected feebly to the drug references, but the risk of the egging business would have whizzed completely over their heads, other than maybe saying, "Ooo, harsh -- he's dissing Larry!".

[PyroChix]

We missed QG on the lift last year... But we were able to give her a ticket to at least get to the event

I'm not against cameras or film crews and I'm not sure where I stand on the making money part of it. What I want is for the Org and any potential future film crews to understand is that they have a responsibility to safety and to portray the event with enough respect that future attendees don't behave so badly as to kill people.

My stance is anti-stupid-death.

And I'm sure, being w/ DPW you've had your share of dealing with potential stupid-death situations. I've heard stories from Hardwood (who we've now stolen for Pyro Crew) and others. Stupid-death is ok if you're only going to hurt yourself. I also believe in Darwinism. But stupid-death when you involve a lot of explosives and a minimum of 15 people as well as potentially shut down the event for 10s of 1000s of people is something we all need to work to avoid.

[MrGod]

I saw the Discovery Times channel’s Only In America episode on Burning Man. I thought it was pretty well balanced for a mainstream cable TV show. It neither promoted the event nor discouraged people from attending. The guy in the show did some lame things (like egging the man) but all of us have our moments. We just hope that our worst ones aren’t filmed. There are several movies on Burning Man and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. They all get some things right and some wrong. This is not any different.

As long as what is filmed is relatively accurate in its representation of the character of Burning Man overall and gives a relatively balanced look at the event, I don’t see much of a problem. There is a fat, blurry line between commercial and non-commercial and maybe no line at all. The problem is how commerce is used as a tool.

There is no way to be free from commerce. Commerce means exchange. It is another word for the movement of stuff and energy between people. When we prepare to go to Burning Man, we become model consumers. We buy tickets, maybe spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on art supplies, purchase all sorts of unnecessary stuff, rent trailers and trucks, buy many gallons of fuel and hundreds of dollars worth of food and drink in preparation for the event. The money we use for this comes from our engagement in the commercial world. The commercial activities of the companies we work for pay us money which we use to go to Burning Man in style.

The Burning Man LLC is halfway in and halfway out of the world of commerce, just as we all are. It takes millions of dollars to put on the event. That money has to come from somewhere. Mostly, it comes from ticket sales. At the same time the BMorg is trying to protect the participants in the event from exploitation, it is also trying to counter-act negative PR in the default world. There are people and organizations that think Burning Man is a threat to decency and the American way. Trying to control what the media says about the event is a big part of keeping the powers that be from shutting it down. That’s why the LLC reserves the right to refuse to allow the commercial use of film at Burning Man. If it is not reasonably representative of the event, they will not allow it to be shown.

If an organization like Discovery Times produces a video that is, indeed, pretty fair in its presentation of the event, and pays something for the privilege, the blurry line between commerce and non-commerce is crossed but, in my opinion, not in a way that compromises the integrity of the event.

However, if Playboy is ever allowed to film “The Babes of Burning Man” or some such exploitative crap, or if corporate sponsorship of the event is ever allowed, I will abandon the Burning Man event to continue locally the experiment in creativity and community started there that has changed most of our lives.

In the meantime, I think we all need to understand that Burning Man can never be a utopian society as long as it has to follow the rules of the United States government and the State of Nevada. We may think it’s a city but, to the more permanent political powers, it’s just an event. As long as capitalism reigns as the dominant economic system in America, Burning Man can never be totally free from the money economy. And as long as we individuals carry within us the cultural programming of the society in which we were raised, it will be very difficult for us to envision or enact wholly other ways of being in the world.

Thankfully, the DiscoveryTimes show did not live down to the worst fears of some who posted to this thread before ever seeing the show.

[MoisturePup]

In the meantime, I think we all need to understand that Burning Man can never be a utopian society as long as it has to follow the rules of the United States government and the State of Nevada. We may think it’s a city but, to the more permanent political powers, it’s just an event. As long as capitalism reigns as the dominant economic system in America, Burning Man can never be totally free from the money economy. And as long as we individuals carry within us the cultural programming of the society in which we were raised, it will be very difficult for us to envision or enact wholly other ways of being in the world.

Burning Man would be impossible without capitilism. No society could live like that without somebody to make the lightbulbs, cut the wood, grow the food, etc... Burning Man is an excess, and only capitilism allows for excesses this great. (After all, if we were to actually feed all our citizens, cloth them, and provide housing, we wouldn't have much left over to play with.)

[TheJudge]

All I learned about watching the show is that the guy throws like a girl.

[Natural Man]

I saw the program and thought it was one of the worst pieces I've ever seen regarding burning man or BRC.

Live and learn I suppose. I would be very surprised if something like this program were allowed again.

[robotland]

I saw the program and thought it was one of the worst pieces I've ever seen regarding burning man or BRC.

Live and learn I suppose. I would be very surprised if something like this program were allowed again.

Remember this: It wasn't made for US. And as for it happening again- It will. Do you think they met with disapproval from the Powers That Be?

[Lassen Forge]

I think it was a rousing success from the viewpoint of the PTB...

Lots of free publicity. Means a bigger gate. means not only bigger profits for the PTB, but the chance to expand.

Plus it showed BRC in a favorable light, one that is kind of left-fieldish from the standpoint of middle amerika, but not so far out there to make it look scary. Which equals good publicity.

Just remember - you buy the ticket to show up. It's not your business - if Burning Man shut down, yeah, you'd be upset, but life would go on - you could find some other occupation for that week. For those who own the thing, work for the thing, and make it their livelihod, if it fails, they lost their business, and quite probably the shirt off their back.

So yeah - I hope it causes our population to swell to 75K. Because that means there's a good chance the business will be around for quite a while. Which means we can keep going for quite a while.

Sidenote - Walked out to the truck, opened it, and got a fresh whiff of you-know-where... Ahhh...

bb

[MoisturePup]

So yeah - I hope it causes our population to swell to 75K. Because that means there's a good chance the business will be around for quite a while. Which means we can keep going for quite a while.

bb

Careful what you wish for. Anybody who lives in San Francisco can tell you what terrible things large crowds have done for the Castro Halloween Festival.

[Chai Guy]

and bigger is always better.

[robotland]

I've been trying to remember how quickly the tickets sold last year- I notice that all of the first, second and third tier tix are gone already, and presumably a few of the two-fifties, so that's 20,000 plus. I'd guess that A FEW new attendees will have been inspired by "Only In America" to attend, but so far I seem to be in a pronounced minority as a Discovery Times-having viewer. We'll very likely surpass the halfway-to-75K at the least. Speaking of THE FUTURE....

American Chopper: The Teutuls, between arguments, create a DPW-themed bike.

Dirty Jobs: Mike spends the day with Johnny On The Spot.

Monster Garage: Jesse and the build team have six days to create a Mutant Vehicle capable of going ONLY 5 MPH.

[Lassen Forge]

So yeah - I hope it causes our population to swell to 75K. Because that means there's a good chance the business will be around for quite a while. Which means we can keep going for quite a while.

bb

Careful what you wish for. Anybody who lives in San Francisco can tell you what terrible things large crowds have done for the Castro Halloween Festival.

I live in Oakland... and lived in the local bay area, on and off, my whole life.. I remember it used to be a small neighorhood thing (In fact, I remember when that neighborhood was residential and known as Eureka Valley - not the Castro - and Noe Valley was more famous >giggles<), then it went tourist and got huge and *everyboody* showed up and it all went to hell, and now in an attempt to control it it's more regulated - which in it's own way is really sad... (Another reason to do away with tourists!!!...)

I think 3 things have a plus at BRC that they don't in SF - one, it is in Nevada (more conservative, less likely to put up with BS), and draws a more diverse crowd, Two, it's in the middle of a nasty desert with a price to get in and a helluva long (and nasty) hike if you get ejected, and three, it has all kinds of humorless (and known humorless and short-fused) law enforcement people there from the local sheriff to the feds.

Oh, unlike haloween, it was fabricated by and is put on by an entity (the llc's), not something that has grown from the grass roots. Remember, Halloween (and Pride, since we're talking the Castro) started out as ad-hoc local gatherings that ballooned to something too damn big.

and bigger is always better.

I agree... um... what is it that we were talking about again?? >grins<

bb

[Lassen Forge]

American Chopper: The Teutuls, between arguments, create a DPW-themed bike.

On the Playa... in 5 days... and on Saturday night, it fires up, catches fire, and burns to the ground.

They could do it, tho. Make it look good. And Senior would make sure there was no moop...

"I want this >beep< playa cleaned up NOW!" (Slams door of rental RV, which promptly falls apart...)

(Flash to shot of "roped off" bikes at their retail store - sitting between the Fire bike and the Black Widow is an urn containing the ashes of the Playa Bike...)

Dirty Jobs: Mike spends the day with Johnny On The Spot.

Mike Meets the Macerator. He gets to unjam it. Oops, who leaned against that "start" button?...

Monster Garage: Jesse and the build team have six days to create a Mutant Vehicle capable of going ONLY 5 MPH.

But gets there in 0.0002 seconds, and uses the following:
one (1) engine out of a DC-10
one (1) 1953 Ford F-6 School Bus
four (4) wheels from a stagecoach
3.8 miles of el-wire...
and a pizza oven.

bb

[Niacin]

American Chopper: The Teutuls, between arguments, create a DPW-themed bike.

PAUL JR: "I was just really inspired by the civic spirit shown by the Cafe, and I wanted to capture some of that in the design of the bike. That's why I made the wheels to look like empty coffee cups, and charging everyone $5 out of the ticket sales, regardless of whether they ride it or not."

[Lassen Forge]

American Chopper: The Teutuls, between arguments, create a DPW-themed bike.

PAUL JR: "I was just really inspired by the civic spirit shown by the Cafe..."

PAUL SR: WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU ONLY GOT THE MAN BUILT HALFWAY? YOU'VE HAD THE WHOLE CREW WORKING ON IT 2 WHOLE DAYS, AND THIS IS AS FAR AS YOU'VE GOTTEN? I OUGHTA PLANT THESE SIZE 12'S IN YOUR A** AND GET YOU MOVING. IF YOU CAN'T GET THE JOB DONE, JUST GO HOME... (walks back to resurrected rv, slams door harder, which now tips the rv onto it's side.) MIKEY, GET IN HERE NOW...

[robotland]

Monster Garage: Jesse and the build team have six days to create a Mutant Vehicle capable of going ONLY 5 MPH.

But gets there in 0.0002 seconds, and uses the following:
one (1) engine out of a DC-10
one (1) 1953 Ford F-6 School Bus
four (4) wheels from a stagecoach
3.8 miles of el-wire...
and a pizza oven.

bb
[/quote]

...and, for some reason, an obnoxious dwarf.

And how could I have forgotten?!?...

MYTHBUSTERS: Jamie and Adam debunk the myth of Pissing Clear.

[The CO]

Survivorman finds it to easy to get free drinks and winds up not getting his own permission to film his own johnson, leading rangers to intervene.