This is the Om Flambe Mothership in action. I've said it before, this was the most beautiful shelter at Burning Man. I'm going to do some other nice videos where you can see the canopy better. This one's just for arty effect.

The Mothership in the Evening :2 seconds or download 260 kb

Juniper trees. Florida street.

This is a stupid little rant about dressing up in costumes. The gist of it is: costumes bore me. The fascination that my city and my peers have with dressing up in costumes is inordinate. It wasn't very intriguing before coming here in my early twenties but living in San Francisco has aggravated my disinterest into rebelliousness. The Number One Holiday in San Francisco is Halloween. Nothing else comes close. They make a big deal about Christmas on TV but that's only for the advertising. Halloween is the explosion of all the extrovert tendencies that plague most of the citizens here.

Oh sure, I reap the benefits from it -- freakwatching is one of my favorite sports and there's a pretty reliable supply of street fashion to be had. You could say that any of the other 364 days in San Francisco would rival the One Hallowed Eve of many other towns in America for weirdness. I love the diversity. But nobody seems to notice the point where our diversity turns into orthodoxy.

I think I finally witnessed my share of costumery at Burning Man. I went for the first time this year and was surprised at the focus being so much on putting on funny clothes and taking X and going dancing in the dirt. A costume rave? This was what was supposed to change your life? It seemed especially ironic to me when I realized that the people who where there were already so weird and the situation was so extreme. I mean, goddamn it, we were doin' it. It's enough to be out there. Dressing up was just providing a little extra eye candy for the folks. No need to feel selfish if you weren't doing it. You didn't build a gigantic sectional bus that looked like a dragon and had a DJ in the tail either. And besides, who you tryin to impress by wearing a feather boa in the desert?

Was the dress-up just following? I couldn't tell but I had a hunch that some of the old-school "core" BM people had indirectly, coercively, in a high-schoolish kind of way, imposed their specific brand of freakiness on the whole thing. I think I know who they are and I can see their trademark. This is getting off the subject of costumes a little bit, but I took issue with the whole "burning man aesthetic". (I later found out from a woman I met named Maya (a bitchin graffiti artist) that her art (big donuts with pink paint-icing dripping down) had been censored by the curators committee because it didn't conform to this aesthetic.)

I was an instant critic. It wasn't a whole new unique world to me. It was a transplant of every art-futuro-punk party I've ever been to in SF. I've been to a lot of those because I like them. I like the spectacle, I like the cybergeek smashup derby carnival a lot. But at Burning Man, the whole "there are no spectators" nazi crap makes everyone nervously strap on a dildo or put on a cowboy hat so they won't look like spectators. "Oh no, we're not RV spectator trash tryin to peep some titties, we're real burners, dude." Ok, so it started to look conformist instead of expressive to me. That's what bugged me. Burning Man is essentially the same thing as Halloween: both big parties with San Francisco-style dress codes.

So with so many people dressing up for Halloween (and the adults here only get dressed up to go to parties) I feel like saying "Fuck that. I'm wearing what I usually wear to parties. If I feel like dressing up, I'll have plenty of chances to do it at one of the other 50 parties I go to in a year." Better to wait till you have a real costume idea and some real spunk to make it work than force yourself to half-ass some "well, at least I didn't come in my street clothes" excuse for a costume. I mean, come on.

Sounds like sour grapes, right? Like I'd be telling all the little kiddies about Santa Clause if I had the chance, right? Like I'm just complaining because I didn't have any good (realizable) costume ideas this year. Fuckit. I like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. Halloween is just on the other side of the calendar from St. Patrick's day. It's amateur night. Get on the fake trolley, get belligerent, try to get laid with your (cat suit if you're a girl) (vampire getup if you're a guy) boring costume and go back to your office job. I hate you.

This is a log crane on highway 120 in the Sierra foothills. I was eating my Sourdough Jack™ on the way up to Yosemite and when I saw this beast I laid down on the roadway and handheld a 4 second exposure. I kind of like all the noise that my digital camera generated. It aint tryin to be somethin it's not!

Spent all day trying to learn Avid Xpress DV and looking around heavy.com. I'm listening to the Electroclash NYC Compilation. Look at me, I've been reduced to putting in bland diary entries ala "had 3 bowls of bite-size frosted miniwheats and half a bag of nacho cheese doritos for breakfast". I've hit rock bottom. I kinda wish I could just take a big bongrip and start editing but I twiddle and noodle and suck the fuzz off my teeth.

Here's a vid of Marcie grabbing the cable. I thought the last part of the climb would be a piece of cake but I guess this late in the season they take down the poles that hold up the cables and remove the 2x4 steps from the rocks. Nothing but bare cable laying against the rock and they were heavy to lift. You had to slide your knuckles under them most of the time.

This is 8,900 feet in the air. You get pretty squirrelly when you exert yourself at that altitude. Marcie was scared shitless but she'd probably get upset with me if I said that on my website. Still, she powered up it and we were the only ones at the top as the sun went behind some clouds on the horizon. Sunset was 10 minutes away and as I look back, it was pretty stupid of us to try for the top because if our flashlights hadn't worked we'd be stuck 3 miles from camp with a big black moonless forest to crawl through. It woulda got ugly I'm sure.

Grabbing the Cable :52 seconds or download 3.7megs

Ok, the shit is up. It's runnin and dare I say runnin like a charm. I had to go to Fry's today. Reminded me of the bad old days. In a number of ways. Like the Oregon Expressway. At least I know how to navigate it, having hammered the details of the freeway exit into my hippocampus. This blog is being written on my brand new, built from scratch, Windows XP laptop. It's 6:51am and I'm drowsy and ready to flop. I didn't get the thing reformatted until 1am so 6 hours to build my environment isn't bad I guess. It's slick stuff and I was needin' a house cleanin' so even though it took me all weekend and I didn't have much fun, I think it was worth it. I love ClearType, the new font anti-aliasing technology that XP uses for LCD displays. It's way-plush.

No pics or vids. Man's gotta have his tools ya know. I worked this hard so you will have the vids soon.

Oh, shit. I gotta move my car. Fuck.

I visited Eben in Oakland today (hmm, that's funny, 'cause he lives in Seattle) and rode the BART home.

I saw the most beautiful thing I'd seen all week last night driving home from Yosemite. I'd climbed Half-Dome and gazed upon a sky-filling sunset at the top, but fuck that shit. I was driving north on some stretch of 880 or something and a BART train came up on the right at about 60mph lit up and looking like a space station cornering on a ribbon of concrete. As I was watching, awestruck, it moved toward the highway indicating that it was going to cross above me toward the west. I sensed the point that we would meet and I would go under but then another train came and swallowed it whole going 60mph in the other direction. You remember that ride at the carnival that was second only to the Zipper in its ability to make you puke that had two pods that twisted and swung around on arms pendulum-style? That's the way it looked. That was causing my balls to shoot up into my neck but I held the wheel steady and looked behind me to see the train again moving toward the west and then the eastbound train shot out of its ass and darkness spread.

I made videos out the window of the train going through West Oakland in the late evening sun in commemoration of last night. I have to go to an art opening of some Polaroid artists right now but I'll work on the vids and post them.

This little gizmo will make for you. If you buy their software I get 20%. I'm not telling you to....I just like the gizmo.

((((deleted because (i'm guessing) they shut off my access))))

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