Wall Street Journal article

[fromMA]

Here's the WSJ take on BM.....not very positive, knowledgeable or introspective but what would you expect:


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122058209244302597.html

[gyre]

Very funny stuff.
I want to behave recklessly.

[Steven bradford]

I have to wonder, has this guy been on a typical american vacation that (involves long distance travel and isn't camping in a nearby park) lasts a week? I think not, if he thinks spending $1000 is expensive.

I just talked to a friend who leaves with his bf for a week in Vegas today. They'll be spending a lot more than we did at Burningman. And we have an RV.

[CapSmashy]

Fuck... you mean I missed the wicker man burn night?

Dammit. I always miss the good stuff.

[ZaphodBurner]

Yaaay! Burning Man sucks. It's filled with rich white drug-addict assholes and sex-loving hypocrites. Don't go. Wall Street types should STAY THE FUCK HOME 'cause they've never blow money out their ass, abused drugs and alcohol or had sex. Uh huh.

"Finally, the place is utterly saturated with drugs. Everything is available,"
Now, that's funny. I know people from three different camps that were looking for various substances and almost all struck out, gave up or just didn't really care if they didn't find anything. I saw a drug dealer, though.
So it's kinda like a rock concert, a park, the mall, or Amsterdam... The world is saturated with drugs. Everything is available. (2C-I what?!)

This is a great article because it means a lot of assholes won't go. Unfortunately, all it's going to do is bring out the radical drug-experimenting sex-addicts and fire-junkies... *looks around*

-c

[oheric!]

We have already cleared it with accounts payable. We are bringing the whole office out there next year so as to "unwind" and have team building exercises.

[Apollonaris Zeus]

Here's the WSJ take on BM.....not very positive, knowledgeable or introspective but what would you expect:


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122058209244302597.html

It's all a lie! I didn't see anything like that at all at this years BM!

Though, I did like the coordinated costumes that the Bmorg had every one wear at the burn




AIIZ

[robbidobbs]

Ok, so he didn't have a good time. He came with his wsj values and used his pundit to bag on people he can't hope to understand.

Next.

[gyre]

He had time to go back to entheon?
He wasn't even trying.

[Bandit]

Dear WSJ Editors...

Myself and my camp were mentioned by name in the below linked article on the Burning Man Festival, and I'd like to submit this response letter.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1220582 ... lenews_wsj

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Charles Shaw
Entheon Village

#######


To Whom it may Concern...

This letter is in response to Travis Kavulla's "Desert Wanderers Find Their Promised Land," an ostensible review of the Burning Man festival published September 5th, 2008.

Being a newcomer to the Festival, as well as the culture of Burning Man, it is not at all surprising that Mr. Kavulla, a conservative evangelical fellow from the Phillips Foundation, would see Burning Man in terms of affluence, conspicuous consumption, decadence, and hedonism, for Burning Man does indeed, unapologetically, contain all of those things. But had Mr. Kavulla probed just a little bit deeper than the surface of things--had he, for example, taken just a few more steps around Entheon Village and asked just a few questions--he would have seen and understood that there is so much more going on at Burning Man than "just a party."

Mr. Kavulla makes the powerful statement, "This was not a festival about deeper understanding or spiritual hokum" and characterized our camp, Entheon Village, as a "klatch of latter-day hippies and New Agers." We at Entheon Village challenge that characterization. Our Village this year contained over 500 people and provided food, water, and power services to over 700. The logistics of accomplishing this rival anything done by the Army Corps of Engineers, yet our efforts are led by committed volunteers working who believe in the mission of Entheon Village. The centerpieces of our Village this year were the Container Project and the Pantheogenesis Temple. Both of these projects were explicitly designed as vehicles for creating sustainable communities and taking the Burner ethos off the Playa and applying it to real-life situations. We also, for the fourth straight year, offered the M.A.P.S. Lecture Series, showcasing some of the most cutting-edge government-sanctioned research into healing treatments using psychoactive substances.

With our Container Project, we took a series of 20' and 48' shipping containers and built them out into a permanent camp infrastructure with a kitchen, showers, toilets, and residences. During the other 49 weeks of the year that the Festival is not taking place, these containers were specifically designed for use in disaster relief efforts anywhere in the world, so that first responders and relief workers have a ready-made base camp from which to operate.

This project is a collaborative extension of the work that was begun by Burners Without Borders, a social-change movement that was born in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when a group of committed Burners left the 2005 Festival mid-stream and spent the next 6 months in Pearlington, Mississippi clearing debris and helping the townspeople rebuild their homes and their lives. These efforts parlayed in a nationwide network of Burners Without Borders groups offering social services in situations where Government completely fails its citizens, as in the case of Katrina. In the Fall of 2007, Burners Without Borders sent a team to Peru after a devastating earthquake to help with relief efforts. And just this week, we at Entheon received a call from the Louisiana Governor's office asking for our kitchen to be sent down to Baton Rouge to help feed some 100,000 people displaced by the recent flooding.

With our Pantheogenesis Temple, we continued to build on the overall mission of Entheon Village, which by definition means "to find the spirit within." Building a sustainable community also means providing a space for spiritual growth, so that we become stronger both within ourselves and with each other. The Temple was built to honor the non-sectarian spiritual and Divine in all its manifestations, both masculine and feminine, corporeal and energetic. We feel it's also important to mention that there was no "inflatable Buddhist temple" anywhere in our camp, and there were no "erotic massages" being offered in the God/Goddess Temple. These are categorical misrepresentations of our Village.

Lastly, Mr. Kavulla characterized my M.A.P.S. lecture series presentation on "The Secret History of the War on Drugs" as a "series of witless one-liners" and "a preposterous conspiracy theory that blamed every evil on, and attributed every power to, the American government." This is another categorical misrepresentation of the truth. My presentation was based upon the impeccable research of Professors Alfred P. McCoy (The Politics of Heroin) and Peter Dale Scott (Cocaine Politics; Oil, Drugs, and War), Gary Webb's, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press, Former DEA Agents Celereino Castillo (Powderburns) and Michael Levine (The Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack Epidemic), the extensive investigative work of Michael Ruppert and From The Wilderness, independent journalist Daniel Hopsicker, PBS' FRONTLINE, Dateline NBC, and A Tangled Web: A History of CIA Complicity in International Drug Trafficking, from the DC-Based Institute for Policy Studies, among many many others. These sources were provided at my presentation for anyone interested in learning more.

Yes, Burning Man tends to skew affluent because of the sheer cost of getting and staying there. But this is not to say that Burning Man is categorically an elite or affluent festival. There are many levels to Burning Man, and it takes many years to successfully grasp and navigate them in their entirety. Within and amongst the miasma of hedonism Mr. Kavulla chronicled are a committed core of individuals and tribes building the foundations for the communities of tomorrow, evolving our purpose to meet the demands of a changing, resource-challenged world. When the Burning Man festival is long laid to rest in the annals of history, that ethos borne out of it will still thrive in the lives and hearts of those who were forever touched by this most extraordinary of human inventions.

We hope you send Mr. Kavulla back next year for a follow-up piece. He is welcome to camp with Entheon Village, and maybe this way, he'll see that it is so much more than "just a party."

Yours,

Charles Shaw
Entheon Village

[littleflower]

as someone with extensive experience in business/christian environments, i'm not at all surprised at this article ... any attempt to liven things up, so to speak, generally met with charges of being on drugs, or just "weird". any bit of nudity and they think "orgy". i can't even show many of them my paintings of nude models.

that doesn't make them evil or stupid, however. i think it's human nature to attack what you don't understand, and i see a lot of attacks going both ways. i think mr. shaw's letter is excellent, he explains a lot in a way that doesn't attack anyone, and i hope it helps.

[fromMA]

Wonderful response Charles....too bad it will fall on deaf ears (sorry to be pessimistic. To me BM is what you want it to be....which changes literally minute to minute. Given all that is available for an attendee, from the sublime to the ridiculous and everything in between, the author chose to be cynical and pretentious, not even making an attempt to see the event through someone else's eyes let alone leaving his preconceived notions at the gate. He's a journalist in name only.